Adelaide Metelkina. Twelfth approach

Twelfth approach
Publications about literature in paper and online media

Adelaide Metelkina

Publication date: November 17, 2000

Epigraph

...word composition
turning it inside out and spreading it out.
Maxim Amelin . Unchangeable lyre : A selection of poems (" Kulisa "NG" ")

Scattered

Either I didn’t get enough sleep and I have cotton wool in my brain, eyes and Eustachian tubes, or today is writing a holiday of disobedience.

Covered by the self-critical title “ From the field of mental masturbation ,” Roman Bitiev (Utro.ru) slowly and clumsily gets into the skin of the “typical seventies” Oleg Trudovich Bashmakov, the hero of the new novel by Yuri Polyakov (well done, Adelaide, as many as ten genitive cases are right on cue ). “An enumeration of the twists and turns of fate cannot serve as a springboard for diving into the jungle of the text, but, believe me, Polyakov’s prose knocks you off your feet, uncontrollably dragging you into the mocking depths of a new unbridled paragraph . ” Calm, calm. Enjoy the alliteration and don’t think too much about the meaning; Bitiev is generally a captivating and unbalanced subject. Even the title of Polyakov’s novel almost knocked him to the floor - “difficult, but intriguing” : “I planned an escape...”. Yes, the name is mysterious. Maybe a quote from somewhere? Understand these postmodernists.

On Fridays, the most intellectual of the supplements to "NG" is published - "Figures and Faces" (executive editor Victoria Shokhina ). Nowadays you can eat materials about literature with a spoon; you can’t re-read them all weekend long. So little of this: in the first notebook of "NG" there is an article on literature topics: Andrei Uritsky reviews the "shelf" novel by Gennady Gor (1907-1981) " Cow " ("Star" # 10). “It is dedicated to collectivization and modern knowledge of historical realities, from which the novel is far from, creates a semantic failure . ” I would like to add that it cannot serve as a springboard for diving into the wilds. However, Andreev’s impartial analysis ends on a wise and enlightened note: “Our literature, the literature of past years, was as it was - beautiful, terrible, wild, disgusting, magnificent, with its losses and achievements, heroes and victims, geniuses and mediocrities " . Triumphs and tragedies, Mozarts and Saliers, Jekylls and Hydes, Patas and Patachons, Huanghyas and Yangtzes... Huh? Sorry, I'm not the one for you. I didn't get enough sleep.

And in “Kulis” the same Uritsky, together with Maria Remizova, annotate the contents of the October thick magazines. The aphoristic " Periodicals " by Andrei Vasilevsky is clearly taken as a model, but in terms of style, the mini-reviews of "Backstage" are much more reminiscent of Russian-language instructions attached to goods imported from Hong Kong or Korea. I’ll poke at random: “ The Double with Sad Eyes ” by Roman Solntsev (“New World”). “A story about a strange relationship between a geologist and a KGB worker who is tending him. The geologist does not believe in the latter’s sincerity when he tries to transfer communication to a more informal layer, and for this he is punished by his tricks when he tried to become a deputy during perestroika times . ” Yeah... in the summer, geologists go to the field, and the KGB officers graze them there... they graze and are mischievous...

What-what?.. Oh yes... Creepy... Essay by Alexander Ivanchenko “ Safety II: Fasten your seat belts .” From the series "Theory of Disasters". On the entire 12th page, the font is small, the picture is small... Or not an essay, but a short story... It looks like Central European high-brow prose of average lousiness: a plot with a big nose, phrases for half a mile, existential metaphors, borderline wealthy. It also looks like Updike. For the later one. Before that, there was “Safety I” in “Kulis”. And there will be another III. And for sure - IV. And look - and LCXXXV. He won’t get rusty for Ivanchenko.

Bakhyt Kenzheev praises " The Taking of Ishmael Mikhail Shishkin's " to the skies. The novel is truly outstanding (it was included in the Booker 2000 shortlist), but it is even more difficult to understand than Gorov’s “Cow”. Kenzheev is not embarrassed by this, he retells “The Taking...” in its entirety, not forgetting to fit Mikhail into the broad titanic context:

“Shishkin... sees... deplorable circumstances everywhere. (Here, however, he is not original - I refer readers to the Book of Ecclesiastes.) ...

Shishkin talks about his “collection” of life observations, which gives meaning to existence. Of course, this is a development of Nabokov’s thesis...

Everything in the world is beautiful, Shishkin assures us. However, this idea goes back to Homer..."

What an erudite person Kompot Kenzheev is. And flexible. His eulogy ends as follows: “In conclusion, I can only agree with the review of D.S., unknown to me, posted on the Internet on the page of the literary club “Anti-Teneta” . The following is this short review. A masterful novel, beautiful, powerful and bewitching Well, why didn’t you immediately agree with D.S.? It would have been more economical.

Olga Figurnova - the same one who talked in Monday's "Ogonyok" with relatives and in-laws of Viktor Shklovsky - in "Kulis" she plants another bomb under Emma Gerstein's memoirs about Mandelstam. The daughter of the poetess Marina Petrov, Arina Golovacheva, was chosen to play the role of the detonator. Golovacheva was not personally acquainted with Osip Emilievich - she was born too late, and Gershtein did not read books ” “out of a sense of self-preservation . So Olga retells particularly slanderous parts to her, and Arina Vitalievna screams: “I simply have no words, this simply could not happen!” The argumentation is of the same snorting order as that of V.V. Shklovskaya-Kordi ( “ I don’t know... I don’t know that... ” ). The topics raised by Figurnova are one more questionable than the other: was Maria Sergeevna going to snitch on the author of “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”; who - Gerstein or the Petrovs - tried more effectively to seduce young Lev Gumilyov; did O.E. call? physical disgust in women, and if so, how strong. Shameful conversation, dirty underwear of the dead. But the worst of all is the fragment where various versions of the poem “Master of Guilty Glances...” are discussed. More precisely, variants of the only line that Nadezhda Yakovlevna remembered as follows: “You, Maria, are help to those who are perishing ,” and the Petrovs say: “Our tenderness is help to those who are perishing ,” and whose version, it seems, is more correct. Eh, damn you, little words. Your time is over: I woke up.