| The first book in the Harry Potter series was published in Russian The story of writer Joan Kathleen Rowling is too good to be true. A divorced wife, with a young daughter, without money and work, in short moments of rest sits in a cafe, while the child sleeps in a stroller nearby, and writes a book that is destined to become a bestseller. The fees for which will exceed 35 million dollars, and residents of English-speaking countries, and after them the Germans, and then the French and Spaniards, will neither eat nor sleep, but only stand at night in front of stores for the writer’s new books. In Hollywood, under the direction of Steven Spielberg, they will begin filming a film about Harry Potter. In addition, Rowling, to the delight of publishers, turned out to be so prolific that each of her new books is much longer than the previous ones - the last, the fourth is already completely unimaginable in size. And those same children who, according to adults, have long been hooked solely on visual perception, pore over thousand-page volumes with extraordinary diligence.
In general, most likely, there is no Rowling. There is the Harry Potter project, conceived and implemented by the Bloomsbury publishing house. Calculated by marketers and executed using the latest model computer, into which they stuffed “The Story of Tom Jones, Foundling,” Tolkien’s books, “Timur and His Team,” “Without a Family” by G. Malo, “The Fifteen-Year-Old Captain,” “Conduit and Schwambrania,” “Oliver Twist”, “Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”, “Notes of Sherlock Holmes”, “Three in a Boat and a Dog” and everything else, and then programmed for the arithmetic mean and now all these endless pages of adventures of the little wizard are pulled out of the printer . And Aunt Rowling was hired, under the strictest confidence, to represent the poor Cinderella of literature, and she still takes the child to school and sits in a cafe, glued to the spot, writing something.
That is why critics accuse her of sloppiness in language, lack of independence in plot developments, and lack of original ideas. But original ideas are not at all necessary for mass success; they even get in the way, original ideas, since you have to explain to humanity for a long time and patiently: now, they say, that’s how they wear things. What Harry Potter offers does not need to be explained. This is an analogue of McDonald's - high quality, inexpensive, easily reproducible and, of course, nutritious. Because all politically correct ideas are presented without any postmodernism - honestly and kindly. Snobs and arrogant people are bad, poor but friendly people are good, friendship wins, sneaks are punished, evil is eternal, but good restrains it. And all this is easy, with humor, with cute details, children fly on brooms, play not golf or baseball, but Quidditch (but it is still very prestigious to win school competitions, get a bunch of points and bring your house to first place).
Actually, the Harry Potter project is a symptomatic phenomenon. The era of the author is ending. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether Rowling herself writes and comes up with her cute fairy tales or not - the collective unconscious does it for her anyway, weeding out everything boring, inconvenient, all these cyberpunk things, Beavis and Butthead, returning to simple and healthy, like an apple , mass art.
What awaits Harry Potter in Russia is not yet known. The rights were bought by the Rosman publishing house, as they say, not too expensive. So far, the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, has been published. The cover is so-so - a boy with glasses on a broom. The translation is also not so hot, but not outrageously bad either, apparently just as sloppy as the original, but just as functional. It is unlikely that Rosmen will invest a lot of money in promoting the project in Russia, where can the publishing house get it? Only blockbusters are well advertised here - with money from Western producers. So we can only hope for Harry himself and for the common sense and healthy appetite of Russian children and parents. My own eleven-year-old daughter, who to this day was a fan of the X-files, after reading the first book, said: “The only sequel I want to read is Harry Potter.” I was happy that the child was growing up normally. Alena Solntseva |
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