Kirill Kutalov-Postoll. Confusion instead of a review

Confusion instead of a review
Sometimes it seems like everything is fine. An ideal subject for meditation. The raking hands of Lev Pirogov. Hot Estonian project. Educational program for the gentlemen from Kronos. When it doesn't seem like everything is fine anymore.

Kirill Kutalov-Postoll

Publication date: December 18, 2000

And sometimes you stop, look at the plowed field and think that life is good.

And the people around are good, and the weather is good too, and my back doesn’t hurt anymore.

The texts are even better:

Calling himself a teacher
gives students the words he has accumulated over his life
and feels relief from this.
The disciples who received the product of his thought-making
they bow before the teacher and shove what they receive into themselves.
And they digest it again.

I want it to always be like this . Moreover, New Year is just around the corner.

But it won't work.

Meditations

Dmitry Kuzmin, who promised to meditate on the results of “The Catch” for only two days, did not keep his promise and has been meditating for the fifth day. To understand the reasons for the delay, just look at the results themselves . I’ll tell you straight - you can’t do anything more with them except use them as an object for meditation.

The thing is, The Catch is completely predictable. I don’t know if there is a person who expected other results from “Catch”. “Catch” is like a stone in a Japanese rock garden. When the sun shines, it heats up; when the sun sets, it cools down. "The Catch" teaches us a unique wisdom of enduring values. “The Catch” is something that will stay with us forever, and even when the youngest of us grow old and their teeth fall out, “The Catch” will remain “The Catch.” It's good that we have "The Catch". It is needed at least in order to always know how far we have come. You look in his direction, you only see a landmark and you know: it’s already far away. I understand Dmitry Kuzmin’s protracted meditation very well. I wouldn't mind it myself. But I'm constantly distracted .

Hands

If someone thinks that Lev Pirogov and I are something like Siamese twins or some kind of symbiosis bot, then I am firmly against it. We're not even the same person. Even our wives are different. I generally doubt whether he is my friend or not. Because the friend will not rake in all the heat with his own hands. And Pirogov grabbed it. I responded , you know, on Observer to an article by Dmitry Kuzmin, written, as you might guess, about what criticism is . It turned out that I had almost nothing to add, except for one short “la” about advertising.

“I am not against advertising - in the sense that I do not demand to ban it, and to put all advertisers against the wall (option: to the central heating radiator). But I am against advertising; advertising as a discourse seems to me to be a source of danger for culture. The fundamental idea of ​​advertising - the idea of ​​exclusivity: only our diapers are wonderful, and all the others are so-so, but to tell the truth, they are no good at all ,” -

writes Dmitry Kuzmin in response to my remark that the critic, they say, stands ahead of the book. That is, in other words, if criticism is ahead of the book, it is advertising, not criticism, and if it is behind, then, on the contrary, it is criticism, not advertising. In this regard, I would really like to share one almost intimate memory. Once, having bought some unreasonably expensive household item, I was tormented for a long time by remorse - in the end, quite significant damage was caused to the family budget. My torment ended unexpectedly - the minute I saw an advertisement on TV for the item I had purchased. I saw it for the first time in my life. And I instantly calmed down, because the advertisement helped me understand why I bought this item (that is, it revealed certain deep ontological levels in it that were previously inaccessible to me) and correlated it with a number of other objects (or images, thereby putting it in context: subject, general cultural and social). Then, after quite a long time, I read about the same phenomenon of advertising as an indulgence in an old, old book called “The System of Things.” They also told me then that everyone had read this book. It turns out not all.

Project

The project, which, although it did not surprise me, made me happy (I looked back at the “Catch” and could not even see the landmarks in the morning fog) is located here . It doesn’t look like a rock garden; on the contrary, it pleasantly amuses the eye and generally enlivens and relieves the atmosphere:

“All these dummies will become fluff that we, the New Terrorists, will brush off our boots. Terror means confident, persistent resistance to various nonsense that interferes with the implementation of those insignificant shares of freedom that are allotted to us in this life . ”

Even though quite recently we had the pleasure of observing something not so distant .

Educational program

Let's move on to the educational program. The Kronos almanac, which I and a number of other online observers recently thought was a cult, published an essay by Vladimir Gubailovsky, “The Nobel Prize.” Here are a few snippets:

“We gave Sartre a prize because he was a leftist.”

Sholokhov was given a prize because Soviet literature was not covered (we generally try to ensure that everyone is covered: Arabs, Turks, Latinos, blacks, because we are democrats) and it was necessary to give it to someone.

We awarded Brodsky for his essays written in English. That's who really caved in, that's who was crawling right in front of us like a snake. The Russian poet switched to English prose just to please us . "

The worst thing, of course, is if Vladimir Gubailovsky is sure that everything is exactly like this. However, there is still hope that the author simply does not know what exactly the Nobel Prize is given for (what exactly it is given for and how it happens, you can find out here , although for this you need to know a little English). There is also hope that Vladimir Gubailovsky is so up in arms against the Nobel Committee because he does not know about the existence of other prizes. You can read about them with much less difficulty (since they are in Russian) here and here .

The same almanac "Kronos" unexpectedly changed the title of one of the previously published essays to " Letter from Kirill Kobrin to an anonymous person from Reading Online" (previously, as far as I remember, there was a "response to an anonymous person from RZh"). The Lord is with you, dear ones! Where did you see the anonymous person in “Reading online”? Or does the word “anonymous” have some other semantic connotations for you? Or have you (I’m afraid to pronounce it) expanded “Online Reading” to the size of the entire “Russian Journal”? More care is needed. More carefully.

In a word, the Kronos almanac completely unsettled me. The blissful mood with which this review began dissolved, as if it had never existed. I wish I could cross out the first quote in the review. And write something from here in its place . At the very least, I will be adequate to myself.