Alexander Ageev. Hunger 5

Hunger 5
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: December 26, 2000

The New Year's fortnight - both last year and this year - is colored by such violent advertising and consumer hysteria that you want to somehow justify the awkwardness of your own presence at this celebration of life. For example, a fresh thought that the bacchanalia of sales, the promotion of all kinds of illiquid goods, crowds of fellow citizens shopping with a slight madness in their eyes is a farcical version of the tragicomic (in our current opinion) events that shook Christian Europe a thousand years ago. That is, everyone seems to understand that January 1, 2001 will be little different from December 31, 2000, but with full dedication they play in the commercial (since they are weak about rising to religious heights) mystery: this must unite and unite an atomized population is no worse than waiting for the end of the world.

Personally, I just took a vacation at my own expense. For family, spiritual and other somatic reasons. In the hope that this vacation, ending on December 29, will smoothly flow into vacation for another ten days, and I will not notice any fatal turn of the millennium. It is clear, of course, that the “river of times” only in advertising videos is directed towards the drain funnel, but even from this virtual river you want to get out, shake yourself off with disgust and walk freely along the bank.

This, however, is a sad joke - about “freely”. In fact, I created a serious bibliographic rush. Here I was recently wandering around the Internet, came across an unusual list with familiar humanitarian names (Bitov and Baevsky immediately caught my eye), and thought that I wouldn’t mind being on the same list with them - but not in this one . Therefore, we must hurry.

In addition, by the end of the year, I caught myself starting to nervously look into the teeth of both gift and purchased books to determine their age, that is, the hunting instinct of a newspaper reviewer sprouted in me, perceiving a book primarily as “an informational occasion” that must be used immediately, before it is washed off the table by a wave of other similar occasions.

What does it look like now? - A certain book appears, walks in an open field, fresh and fragrant, like a bunny, waiting for an understanding and leisurely reader, and suddenly a pack of reviewer hounds tumbles out from behind the forest, hastily, cruelly and without any appetite, ruffles it, and then quickly rushes off to searching for the next hare, leaving a mutilated and inedible corpse on the field. Next time they will remember about him only during the bonus season, they will quickly revive him and forget about him again.

For three or four years I have been thinking about this matter a heavy and indecisive thought, which can be labeled in Latin Qui prodest (is that right?). And no matter how much I avoid a definite answer, I still know it: it’s beneficial for the publisher. Not to the mythical “cultural publisher”, who barely publishes five to seven “eternal” books a year, but to a real large publisher who has a conveyor belt running, who is interested in quickly updating the “assortment” and knows exactly how much warehousing of copies costs.

At the same time, it seems to me that publishers did not buy critics; against. These critics, even before the publishing business in the new Russia truly developed and became an industry, unanimously fell into this logic in the wake of the “newspaper revolution” of the early 90s.

The imperative of the newspaper is eternal and clear: new ! But critics came to the newspaper from another reality, where time was not marked out by a daily grid, where the concept of “relevance” was not reduced to a line in the output data: “signed for printing” and “put into typesetting.” It was, as I now understand, a kind of betrayal, at first not even a very conscious betrayal of literature. The critic, as it were, became a defender of the consumer (some time was spent blurring the difference between “reader” and “buyer”) and put an invisible “best before...” stamp on each book.

At the same time, the premium marathons that began clearly defined the local time in which literature began to live: the calendar year. A book that was not included in the premium lists seemed to disappear altogether: it could no longer be nominated, there was no point in writing about it in newspapers. And the leisurely magazine “conceptual article”, in which the critic has the right to operate with literature in a significant (historically) chunk of time, has died as a genre. But another genre has appeared, gravitating toward the recommendation list. Or maybe even to the “price list”. Two options immediately come to mind: Nemzerovsky and Eliseevsky . In my opinion, "both are worse." The critic is both outside of literature. Either on the sales floor as a manager on duty, or as a merchandiser in a huge warehouse.

With all this, I really love this genre - reviews and do not like “conceptual articles”, which I have written about many times . But there is some feeling of incompleteness and frivolity of the existing structure of literary communication - the absence of important links in it turns a book into a disposable product. That is, of course, 90% of published books are this very product, but it is stupid to isolate the “long-lasting” 10 from the flow using charts like “intellectual bestsellers of the week.” This expression is a triple oxymoron. Here the word "intellectual" smacks of irony, and it is clearly the "junior member" of the sentence.

Well, okay, I grumbled for some reason. Where can we old men, with our pants pulled up, run after the Komsomol, that is, after “Ex libris”. It’s just that something is clearly missing between the review and the encyclopedia.

Meanwhile, yesterday I had to interrupt my painful vacation thoughts and appear at work in order to prepare the March issue of the Znamensky Observer. As soon as I sat down at the computer, I was immediately thrown away by a wave of time from which I had fallen out: Yulia Rakhaeva burst in, rushed to the free phone and began dictating into her Izvestia the names of the Anti-Booker laureates: Akunin, Kenzheev, some newborn playwright and "Ray of Light" - Evgeny Ermolin. And someone in the military from "The Fourth Prose".

Yeah! - I thought. It's finished! The dream of the progressive reading community has come true, which, despite its progressiveness, advancement and independence, for some reason desperately needed some kind of moral sanction for the love of cool, flat-bottomed reading without a hangover. Akunin stayed on all the “long” lists for two years, but somehow his hand did not rise. Breakthrough!

Here, in fact, is where my personal annoyance lies: I understand and share the reader’s love, but I do not crave recognition of the “legitimacy” behind this love. As a reader, I am not humiliated by any reading, but if I like to read something dietary from time to time, to give myself, so to speak, a fasting day, then this does not entail the need to necessarily find in what is easily consumed something that is not there.

What’s also funny: ten years ago (in the article “Synopsis of the Crisis,” which, alas, cannot be referenced), I argued that “mass” and “high” cultures are not opposed, that “high” could learn something from “mass”, and I was terribly scolded by precisely those representatives of the progressive reading community who accepted Akunin as dear and long-awaited. The idea went to the masses, but somehow very quickly became vulgar as it took off.

It is a consolation, however, that it was Akunin who received the Anti-Booker: a prize that I don’t feel sorry for anyone for reasons that were once expressed openly, but perhaps with unnecessary anger, in the last “Znamensky” issue of “Notaben”.

And I’m happy for Bakhyt Kenzheev and I have nothing against Evgeniy Ermolin, they are all worthy people.

However, there was no anti-booker yesterday: handing in the typed “Observer”, I was familiarized with the “long list” of the Apollo Grigoriev Prize, where I immediately came across SPS Sergei Bolmat and a couple of other outlandish nominations. I somehow forgot whether this list will or will not be published and what I voted for when they debated this issue at the ARS'S assembly. I would hide this particular list like a partisan - out of a perhaps false sense of corporate solidarity. There seems to have been no shortage of decent prose all year, and most of the list is poetry books. Riddle... Let them then give Vera Pavlova ...

As soon as I returned to the phone, Igor Klekh called , who asked if I needed a review for the Observer on a collection of stories by Krusanov , published in Amphora. With a falling voice, I asked: “Will you praise?” Igor, somewhat puzzled by the question, hummed and said: “Probably not...”

And the editorial day ended with me taking the December issue of October, which had not yet been posted online, from the editor-in-chief’s desk. There was also a premium list on the cover of that issue, but the lists were already making me sick. Therefore, I read the ending of Naiman’s “Sir” (which was just awarded), marveled at the placement of Valery Ronshin’s story in the “New Names” section (see, for example, his bad story “Living Life” in the magazine “Znamya”, 1993, # 2) and for a long time thought about Olga Slavnikova’s new essay “A Fly Settled on the Jam, or a Word of Praise to a Literary Editor.”

Slavnikova’s situation is difficult: by the will of fate, she is one in three persons: writer, critic and editor. She deals with the writer/critic opposition quickly and decisively (in favor of the writer), but sings real hosannas to the editor. All this is written in good prose, with “pictures” from rich editorial experience, and it turns out that without an editor, real literature is impossible. And I would have believed Slavnikova if her construction had not been based on the experience of meeting the nth number of “editors from God.” Well, it’s about as if I knew two or three decent schools and on this basis I would consider our entire education system to be excellent. But literary editing is an institution , and as an institution with traditions and customs (laid down, it is known when) it is an absolute evil.

And, however, the article ends with a strange phrase: “Meanwhile, if in modern literature, which prosthetizes its faults with the smooth surface of fiction, it is possible to acquire a new quality, then a breakthrough should be expected from imperfect texts that are not afraid of their own ugliness. To the editor, in contrast to the literary critic who proclaimed independence The writer will have to die a painful death - and he will be rewarded for everything, apparently, in heaven . "

What is this - morituri te salutant? But then why with distinct resentment?