Alexander Ageev. Hunger 3

Hunger 3
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: December 15, 2000

M New Year's holidays in our God-saved country plunge me personally into deep metaphysical (though also physical) melancholy. “Monstrous, like a battleship in the dock, Russia is resting hard . ” Longing in all members, loss of time, triumph of inert hangover matter. The rhythm of life is disrupted, the wheel stops, the country physically feels old age, infirmity, and burdened with sins and debts.

No matter how you distance yourself from all this, the general atmosphere is oppressive, and you wander restlessly around the apartment, pulling out one book or another from the shelves. But a glance glancing over the roots automatically builds some monstrous rows. The thing is that recently, as many as three libraries were reunited in my apartment - my grandfather’s, my father’s, and my own. God knows what, there are no rarities, but purely physically, volumetrically, there are a lot. And all this is not disassembled and not arranged - it is somehow shoved, which is why some strange books crawl out to the surface (sometimes fall out and even fall on your head), which you never seem to have held in your hands.

Well, for example, I climbed into the second row in a vain search for a book that I definitely have - a collection of VTsIOM studies on the project “The Soviet Ordinary Man” (there is an unforgettable chapter Nomen est omen - an analysis of the ways into the consciousness of the “ordinary Soviet man” penetrated 115 of the most famous names from different fields of activity), and took out a thick volume of Gorky’s readings, published in 1961. Circulation - as it is now: 2700. I don’t remember! I don't remember this book. That’s why I looked through it: exactly a quarter is occupied by the publication of correspondence between Gorky and Bunin, the rest is articles by Soviet literary scholars about the proletarian classics. "Gorky and Pavlenko", for example. Do you know who Pavlenko is? In ten years it will come back into fashion.

And the correspondence is wow, businesslike and quite modern. Bunin to Gorky: “Enlightenment” traded me (forever), gave me 40,000 and 500 per sheet of the future; exhausted by eternal thoughts about tomorrow, I almost gave up." Gorky to Bunin: "The first offer of Enlightenment is offensive, the second is a trap for you... Keep in mind: You are a more profitable commodity in the near future than Andreev is now, yes , Yes!"

He began to stuff the torn books back, but one turned out to be superfluous: it didn’t fit in the row. Vl.Pyast. Modern poetry. Rhythm . Writers' publishing house in Leningrad, 1931. I flip through the pages and just shake my head: there were times when people died for peons! On every page there is a bilious swearing with Bely, Zhirmunsky, Tomashevsky, Shengeli, Yakobson: “While going through the first grade of the gymnasium, Zhirmunsky well mastered the arithmetic course in the scope of this class, which, as is known, according to the previous programs consisted of “named numbers” and “timed problems” ", but did not move further in mathematics, even the most elementary . " Frankly, I was always afraid of poetry critics: they are ruthless people, with a special steely glint in their eyes. “ And there’s a gun in my pocket ,” that is, of course, a calculator...

And then suddenly a book materialized, which I considered stolen three hundred times ("read out"), a book on the cover of which it says "see behind" , and on the back, naturally: Vyacheslav Kuritsyn. A book about postmodernism . (Then someone nervous said: “Kuritsyn sent everyone to hell!”) The title page, in case anyone has forgotten, is like this: “Circulation 300 copies # (I don’t know which one is yours, but mine is 23. - A.A. ) Ekaterinburg 1992" .

I immediately shed a tear, nostalgia struck, and since below the number in Slava’s approximate handwriting it turned out that “To Sasha Ageev, so that he might read this a little ,” I read a little: “The world is no longer isomorphic, a formula is impossible that describes a structure that lives according to the same laws at any point.” , but, on the other hand, this is isomorphism, the world is isomorphic in its non-isomorphism, at any point it encounters non-isomorphism of the same absolute degree. There is no need to count from anything; truth is single, but in its singleness it non-truth, since there is no space of comparable categories in relation to which it can assert and confirm itself; truth is non-truth, there is nothing and nothing to count from . " Cool! They don't write like that now. Even Slava himself .

On the other hand, having looked through this relic, I somehow very clearly understood why Slava so fearlessly fled from paper literature to online literature: if your first book was published on such paper and printed in such a font, you will hate paper in principle and say in your hearts: “ The book is generally made of wood, what should it do if not burn . "

So, over the course of a long constitutional weekend, you will open and close twenty or thirty books, snatching a paragraph or two from each, and you will think some banality about the fact that the world is like a large unassembled library, a disorderly swarm of fragments that fit into any context and provoke cultural violence: some other fictitious classification.

Festive entropy is especially supported by the disappearance these days of decent periodicals (even online ones), which somehow structure the normal week, dragging us into a healthy routine of the process, no matter what dead end it may be heading towards.

Actually, I thought polemically about the dead end, having encountered somewhere another typical attack (since it was typical and even sort of routine - I didn’t record it anywhere) on “thick” magazines that either died, or reached a dead end, or committed something else something reprehensible. Or is it the fault of Dima Olshansky, who sent me a letter admitting that he is not like all young critics, since he treats thick magazines condescendingly?

Nevermind. I remember that only once did I allow myself to compose and publish something nervously pretentious in defense of magazine culture; I will not refuse what was said then and now. But today my thoughts flowed in a different direction, and a funny question appeared. Why have thick magazines been and are being attacked by their “relatives” - that is, by critics firmly integrated into the daily newspaper machine, whose cycle is only twenty times faster than that of monthlies? They must understand that the essence and value of “fat men” (like any other periodical) is not at all in the quality of the prose and poetry published there, but in the coercion of the cycle itself, in soft cultural violence, in drawing the consumer into some continuous process .

Structuring what is already structured is obviously a little more difficult than hunting in a wild book field - you need to think about the principles of primary structuring, and for this, in turn, you need to keep at least several magazine years in mind. No, it's impossible. And most importantly - not free. Therefore, the magazine is considered as a kind of archaic form of book publishing, and the kaleidoscope picture, which has its own logic of construction, is scattered across the glass, and each of them is considered separately. It turns out to be complete nonsense and bewilderment. The latest fashion idea : magazines will be replaced by book series. So-so thought. The carousel machine, of course, evolved from the carousel. But what is the carousel for, and what is the machine for?

On the other hand, why the hell should any book series pay attention to a name that is loud on the Internet, but modest in the wild, for example, Kirill Kutalov ? Is Vagrius or Limbus Press ready to put it into production? Kirill does not fit into that context, but the context of the slow-moving “fat man” will easily digest him .

In a word, I barely waited for the end of the holidays: life began to warm up, Infoart woke up and posted in the Magazine Hall the November “October” and half of the body (the “top”, that is, not the most interesting) of the December “New World”.

Out of hunger, I somehow quickly, right from the monitor, devoured the first part of Anatoly Naiman’s essay “ Sir ” - about Isaiah Berlin. The internal plot there is funny: Naiman, who is not at all charming and has even reflected on his lack of charm , struggles with the secret of the charm of the brilliant talker and amateur Isaiah Berlin. This is when Vagrius is going to publish another book by an “unpleasant person”...

Well, and finally - about the sad. The very first pack of weeklies I bought on the way to work included Ogonyok, about which Adelaide had already reported the whole truth, and FAS , which I picked up for the first time. I heard something, of course, and saw an advertisement about “the best feathers in the country,” but somehow I didn’t have time to look. And then, after the holiday hunger, greed took over. Now that I’m recovering a little after the poisoning, I’ll say a few words, because, in spite of everything, the product is not without a “concept”...