Andrey Levkin. Papier-mâché pleroma

“All aesthetes are homosexuals,” argued the historiographer Vodicka. In the same discourse, but with greater proximity to the truth, I will report that all intellectuals are Gnostics. Like Yegor Gaidar, for example, who, coming to the podium at the moment of his confirmation as prime minister, answered a question from the audience about his religious affiliation that he was rather a Gnostic. Borges is also a Gnostic. Let's prove it.

It’s strange, but the previous books from the “Borges Library” did not evoke a desire to speculate about the motives of their compiler. In relation to "Apocrypha" it is. This is not strange, other books are just books, but this one was also compiled by him. There are a lot of apocrypha, they need to be selected. They were chosen disgustingly, more on that later.

Here, of course, one can lyrically say that this book is like a seed, a crystal, the code of his entire “Library” - a series, I mean. There is nothing mystical in this statement - the series must have a code, and here it is. Not very handsome, sugary.

And so, the humanly magnificent Gnostic Apocrypha of John (translation taken from the collection “Apocrypha of Ancient Christians” by M.K. Trofimova, 1989, in her own translation) gets bogged down in the nonsense of the Epistle of the Essenes, just translated by Chernyshevsky (published in “Life” and the death of Jesus on the cross" in the journal "Bulletin of Knowledge", 1918, issue 1, translated by who knows who). Well, how can you put it next to each other?

"And they brought him (Adam) to the shadow

death, in order to mold it again from earth, water, fire and spirit, which from substance - that is, ignorance of darkness, and desire, and their deceptive spirit - is

the grave of the newly molded body with which the robbers dressed the man, the shackles of oblivion; and he became a mortal man. This is the first one to descend, and the first separation."

- and these Essenes, translated from French:

“The elders and physicians began to care for Jesus. They tried in every possible way to give Him rest and gave him medicines prepared from various plants . ”

Of course, the lack of taste here is clearly evident in the Russian translation. That is, we can say that the difference here is not in translations, but in the sound structure of life, where all the same apocrypha, and other texts, mean something completely different than in our area. There is a difference in the sound of Borges's opening sentence

"Reading this book, we miraculously return to the first centuries of our era, when religion embodied passion"

- and:

Reading this book by miracle we return to the first centuries of our time when religion embodied passion...

How to evaluate Borges' desire to piece together the apocrypha? Of course, this is a certain amount of disciplining; in general, the “Borges Library” itself communicates the desire to create a shell for oneself: either a hut, or a website, a pillowcase with phrases on scraps of paper. Personal space contained in a knapsack. That is, personal pleroma. Otherwise he is not a Gnostic.

The chaste salivation that makes up Borges's preface is not exactly old-fashioned, but it fits into the scheme of Hesse's laments: "the age of journalism" and so on. similar. Yes, Borges was the hero of one of Hesse’s texts: a little of Steppenwolf, more of “The Glass Bead Game.”

What happens when a literary hero begins to compose his life from the books that are most important to him? Well, not Pinocchio, but a paper Golem. He eats letters.

In general, this is also a matter of tradition. With Russians it’s usually like this: you’re traveling on a train and you see someone reading the Gospel (now, in any case, the Gospel will be in a flexible green plastic cover), and it’s clear that the person reading it is certainly a Baptist. Pentecost, etc. Orthodox people read those prayer books.

But this is already the everyday use of texts that does not affect Borges’s compilation: he did not fold the book while traveling in a reserved seat. Borges composed something impeccably painfully cozy. Usually - manifesting itself in a critical, elegiac-critical, essayistic version. A little - for smoothness - a changed word order, blah-blah-blah-rhythm, a couple of quotes, gravitating towards maxims like “The rose blooms without any reason” - quoted, of course, in the preface of the Silesian Angel, one of those who searched for the Blue Flower.

Here, in fact, is the main story: the horror of the Gnostics at the realization of the gap that lies between divinely inspired things and their, the Gnostics’, explanations. The story of the main Gnostic mystery, the essence of which is simply that a person must do everything wrong and take on impossible responsibility - so that in the resulting mistake he sees his own wrong.

Well, this homemade Pleroma of the Borges Library is made from chewed book paper, it makes this horror visual.

The Gnostics have one problem: they are good for everyone, but they lived in too warm a climate. This applies even more so to Borges. In November, the Gnostics are a good read: they did not describe God and the world, but how winter comes to earth.