Kuritsyn-weekly from December 7, 2000

New advice from the Small Booker, the Anti-Booker jury, reading "Debut", page of the "National Bestseller"

So, we have entered the Big Premium Season. Andrey Bely , Small Booker and Larger Booker have already been awarded. My comment on all three reasons has been here since yesterday, with a scattering of links from Deli Metelkina - here about the Small one, and here about the Bigger one. For links to articles about White , see "Culture".

In news, the composition of the Malo-Booker council (also known as the jury) for next year has been determined. This is Francis Green, Natalya Perova, Alexander Shatalov, Ilya Kukulin, Andrey Zorin and yours. Next December, a translator of English prose - from any era - will receive £4,000. Only the translator himself should be alive.

The jury of the Anti-Booker pool (five awards at once) was officially published in Ex Libris a week ago, but it cannot be found on the newspaper’s website. The special section "Anti-booker" has taken a lot of water in its mouth, but the search returns at best

"NEWS ANTI-BOOKER APPLICATIONS 17:51 Sberbank is considering the possibility of changing interest rates on loans 17:39 Georgian Foreign Ministry: Admission of Armenia and Azerbaijan to the Council of Europe will contribute to the settlement of the Karabakh conflict 17:29 In the Bryansk region with suspected food..."

It would take a long time to reprint 25 names with titles from the newspaper; I will only say that Misha Novikov was among the members of the prose jury (“The Brothers Karamazov”). The jury promises to make their decisions on December 21; there are no shortlists yet.

The mysterious "National Bestseller" now has a website . All the details are there, all questions are for Tatyana Nabatnikova, the organizing secretary.

Around the same days (the exact date is not yet known) everyone will recognize the champions of the first “Debut”. As a member of the jury, in a hurry finishing reading manuscripts, I can reveal one secret: the chances of getting into the final three in the Great Prose category are very high for Kiev resident Anton Fridlyand, whose novel has the magical name “The Smell of Chess.” It’s interesting that first I found Friedland’s page on the Internet, and only then received his manuscript in a cartridge box from debut readers: a pleasant recognition-coincidence. I quote part of the table of contents:

"1. Without skis
2. Cocaine Pie
3. Jellyfish in the snow
4. Aliens
5. The Kiss State
6. Self-portrait with a toothbrush
7. Hunting story
8. Instead of drugs
9. Still life with fruit and game
10. Details
11. New TV
12. Lunch break
13. Suicide as it is
14. Meetings on the track
15. Plein air
16. Hunt for fools
17. Happy dancing
18. Phantoms at the Opera
19. Late morning
20. Clay Prize
21. Indian cigarette
22. Letters from a box"

There is something so koan-like about this... I think it’s very beautiful. The text is also okay, light, nickel, the self-title “suicide novel” is justified. A nice feature - all the characters are named after artists (Dürer, Gauguin). What’s bad: the “emptiness of the canon” of the plot and meaning. It’s not enough to be able to write these days, Anton; many people have learned to write now. You need meat - grape, havy, juicy.

Like, for example, Fanailova

Elena Fanailova's book "With Special Cynicism" was published by the New Literary Review in the Andrei Bely Prize series. The network version is also needed, right?

Neva benefit

" St. Petersburg Literary Guide " by Daria Sukhovey - finally online. Until now, this useful product existed in the form of a newsletter. Here is Darya's autobiographical commentary on how she came to live this way. Congratulations to Dasha, and all literary-loving citizens of the Russian Federation, etc.: when going to St. Petersburg, you can plan an evening in advance to the murmur of rhymes.

They killed Anna, they ran her over for no reason

In the “World of New Russians” (in the branch of the store in “Radisson-Slavyanskaya”) they presented a new feature - a comic book based on “Anna Karenina”. Bai Leo Tolstoy. Read Tuchkov’s detailed review in Vesti, I’m going to speak about the project in Vremya MN, and I’ll only add to Tuchkov that the book is in two languages, that it costs about 600 rubles, that all new Russian publishing projects (this is the fifth), according to the owner of “Mir” Grigory Baltzer, they pay off, and not just for show-off. And I’ll give a link to the text of the “ New Russian Primer ,” the first sign of the series.

"Drum. Bikse on the drum. Tambourine. Empty, like a shaman's tambourine. No watermelon! Snipe without bucks. Or beavers! Borya has a lot of money. Borya is a broker."

"Comments" must be complete

The archive of all issues of the magazine "Comments" is now online. You can fumble for a long time. Pay attention to the issue dedicated to the memory of Sergei Sherstyuk, as well as the issue about the French, in which the lion's share of translations was made by Viktor Lapitsky. This is the activity for which he was awarded the last Andrei Bely.

“And Orpheus’s mistake, it seems, is in the desire that prompts him to see Eurydice, to possess her, while he is destined only to sing of her. He is Orpheus only in his song, a relationship with Eurydice is possible for him only in the hymn, he finds life and truth only after verse and verse, and Eurydice represents nothing more than this magical dependence, turning him outside of singing into a shadow, allowing him to be free, alive, full of power only in a space commensurate with Orpheus,” Lapitsky and Blanchot believe.

In the new "Logos" there is a fuss around Slavic studies

Ivanov and Kuyundzhich declare Slavic studies to be an old goat, Romashko shrugs his shoulders - they say, a goat is like a goat, Nadtochiy clarifies that Russian studies is a goat, and Slavic studies is quite a sheep, Kobrin adds that now the Heavenly Sheep has simply disappeared from it, Nedel sums up that the Heavenly Sheep was simply deconstructed, Grigorieva reminds that the main thing is for people to be good, Malakhov regrets that zoology is poorly developed, and Rudnev gives all the sheep back right on the earrings.

Kuzmin breaks free from the chain to tie Kotomin to the radiator

Dmitry Kuzmin began to destroy his opponents with the fury of Basinsky and Zolotonosov. It’s interesting to read, the rage in a number of places seems quite righteous, one thing is seriously confusing - the breakdown occurred immediately after Dima was not awarded the Small Booker (my speculation as to why he was not given it is here again). Here's the plot in brief: Pirogov , also Pirogov and Kutalov make fun of Kuzmin, Kuzmin despises Kutalov, Kuzmin calls Pirogov a gloomy bastard, Kotomin mocks Kuzmin (at the suggestion of Shulpyakov, who allegedly takes revenge on Kuzmin for not accepting his, Shulpyakov's, poems), Kuzmin reports , that Kotomin needs to be chained to the radiator and fucked into who knows what, and Shulpyakov needs to be castrated. For some reason Danilkin also gets it.

Wonderful!

This is not an advertisement for the Olympic Games

More from reading the Debut nominees . I am copying out two fragments from Kiri Lascari’s manuscript (slightly shortening and editing along the way). Here's an ad for The Hangover.

"The general, in full dress, sits at the table and sleeps, with his head in a plate of salad. There is an empty bottle next to him. His hand squeezes a glass. The general raises his head from the snack and looks tiredly into the distance.
The room through the eyes of an awakened person. Everything floats, spins, triples, quadruples and divides into a spectrum.
GENERAL (amazing at what he saw):
- ABOUT! Kaleidoscope!
Freeze. Announcer's voice:
“Start your Monday with a kaleidoscope!”

Don't think this is an advertisement for a kaleidoscope. But kaleidoscope and hangovers are so for generals. What for respectable gentlemen? Well, that's right, respectable Lord. And what else? Guess what. That's what.

"There is a close-up shot of a girl (face and shoulders). Her eyes are languidly lowered. She raises her large eyelashes, looks coquettishly at the camera, etc...
The frame enlarges, the camera zooms out, and it turns out that a girl in a snow-white tights, with an outline image of an angel on her chest, is standing on top of a huge bungee. With her arms outstretched, she suddenly rushes down.

Freeze. Mirror, pipe, razor, two rulers. Announcer's voice:
- Change the situation dramatically. Angel dust.

It would be best if the video featured a neutral violin solo, followed by some rhythmic music at the moment of the jump."

Well, that won't be a bad thing. And here it would also be appropriate to refer to Kuznetsov’s “UsNet”, where it was proposed to advertise dandelions, modesty and similar non-commercial things. There, in particular, my advertisement for the number 4 is quoted.

I'll die, but the numbers will remain

A friend calls at about four in the morning and offers to dramatically change the situation. I half-awakely think that he will suggest angel dust or at least divine bat dander, but he suggests writing a page of text about death.

- At such a late hour? - I’m surprised.

(Here is a digression. This simple phrase is a quote. When I lived in Sverdlovsk, I was young, and everyone around me was young and lustful. And then my friend the writer - who was then the most fashionable in our company - gets a call at two in the morning from a quite pretty girl and says: “I read your prose, I want to surrender to you!” And the writer is surprised: “At such a late hour?”)

This is what turns out to be true. A friend of mine made a poetic documentary about the fate of a person. Scenes of birth, scenes of childhood, scenes of youth... And so seven times in a row. And now he asks seven Russian writers to write an essay for each fragment. Death fell to me. This is what I wrote.

“I felt it in early autumn, late in the evening in a small German town, the name of which I don’t know and where I ended up completely by accident. We were driving along the highway, turned to the illuminated cathedral. Sunday was ending in the square near the cathedral. The chain carousel was laid on the platform. The garbage was already there. swept up - corn cups and candy bar wrappers were waiting in a tin box for their trip to the trash bin. The shops that sold sausages and candy during the day were closing. A woman in salad-colored rubber gloves was cleaning the counter. In general, the inside of the shops - you know how active and festive the colors of the shops are. ! - was the only spot in the dark square. The spot was disappearing. The shutters were lowering in one shop, another, another...

I felt very good and very sad. I thought that it would be evening when I would see the shops closing for the night for the last time. How the hobbled carousel drives away, how the light dies. Last time. In the morning the sun will rise over the square again. A busy market will unfold - rockets of asparagus, glitter of fish, balls of apples. Teenagers on scooters jump up the steps of the cathedral. The lovers will turn off the highway to admire the cathedral. The Chinese restaurant across the street will serve two hundred servings of soup per day. And the old man who walked here last night will not come to the square again. And it won't come anywhere.

I will probably die in Russia. Motherland, damn it, what can you do? But for some reason I want to die in a cozy place. I want to die in my sleep, so that it doesn’t hurt, so that I don’t disturb anyone, and so that it’s dark around, only maybe a rare drop of water dripping from the tap. To keep the clock ticking. In a cozy place. It is windy and uncomfortable in Russia. The time remaining before death will have to be devoted to arranging the nearest spaces. We need to arrange a worthy deathbed for ourselves."

Am I wrong? Right

Hares attack

It happens like this: sometimes not a single writer writes books about angels, otherwise suddenly everyone will write. I call it the streetcar law. As a child in Novosibirsk, I often had to wait for trams at stops in the cold, and I quickly ceased to be surprised that they lived in periods. Forty minutes of nothing, nothing, and then five in a row.

How many monuments to hares do you think there are in Russia? It seems to me zero. The Pushkins are like uncut dogs, and the hare - which, let me remind you, will soon be written with an "e" - is not represented in any way. And in December, two monuments to hares will appear in the vastness of the Motherland.

One of them will open on Sunday, 12/10/00 at 13:00 in the city of St. Petersburg. Where is clear. On Hare Island (in a clearing on the side of Strelka V.O.). This means where Peter and Paul Fortress is. The motto is “Let’s return the topos to its rightful name.” The motto is illiterate: the topos has a name, but the name has no referent. “There is a word, but there is no ass.” The team of authors - sculptor Petr Reykhet, architect Gennady Peychev and project curator philosopher Valery Savchuk - are planning a soft landing of the planet Mars on the appropriate field, swans in an adequate groove, a good Tsereteli number on each of the lines... And water will be allowed on the Nevsky. And Peter is empty.

But this is all just empty mockery. And I like the project. I was just planning to go to St. Petersburg on Sunday evening, now I’m thinking - maybe I’ll be able to on Saturday.

And another monument to the hare will open on December 24 or 25 in the village of Mikhailovskoye, Pskov region. The curator there is Andrey Bitov. The concept there, to be honest, is much cooler: the monument is supposed to be erected to the hare that crossed Pushkin’s path when he set his skis on Senate Square. Pushkin became superstitious and turned around. Stayed with us. And thank God.

Bitova is being read

"The first Bitov readings will take place on December 11 at 18:00 at the V.V. Mayakovsky Museum (Moscow, Lubyanskaya Square, entrance through the arch on the corner of Myasnitskaya Street). The hosts of the evening are the curator of the Crimean Club Igor Sid and the editor-in-chief of the magazine "Literary Review" Victor Kulle. The materials of the Readings will be used in a special issue of “Litoboz” dedicated to the work of Bitov. The action continues the cycle of the Crimean Club “First Readings”: last year the First Rubinsteinian, Aksenov, Nekrasov, Prigov Readings were successfully held .

Details here .

The virus was stolen

Friends! Anyone who had problems (letters did not arrive, returned, no answers received) with my address slava@russ.ru yesterday and today (December 6 and 7) - do not blame me. I managed to point to the virus, deciding that it was the twelfth chapter of Eugene Onegin. Everything is working now.