Alexander Ageev. Hunger 7

Hunger 7
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: January 9, 2001

1. On the problem of the coveted text

Well, as I said , the third millennium is absolutely no different from the second: you still want to “read something” and are still tormented by the feeling that, in essence, you don’t want to read anything.

That is, of course, you sluggishly rake the rolling waves of the literary ocean, you can’t imagine another habitat, you remain in lasting amazement and delight at its power and vastness, but you just can’t spot the object of real desire in its convincing expanses, so that you can say , indecently excited: I dream of reading this !

You begin, by the way, to fantasize about this topic and construct a certain model of the text that you passionately yearn to read. I will omit the description of the modeling process - too many parameters are set, too many epochs, names, styles are sorted through. As a result of a long game, a certain cloud swells up: the image of the desired text.

If you play this game honestly, with full dedication, discarding the prejudices of time, place and passing literary fashion, then the result is what?

I don’t even know how to say it. Maybe I'm the only one who's crazy?

The result is a thick, detailed epic novel about me and my life , written by someone who: a) is smarter than me; b) more talented than me; c) as befits a novelist, “knows everything”; d) “knowing everything”, he doesn’t consider me the last bastard...

All this means, in essence, only one thing: I want to read a novel about me, written by God. Therefore, let’s close the topic and move on to other imperatives and motivations that organize normal daily reading.

...Remembering, however, what the feeling of constant reading hunger, the eternal reading search, heartburn from forcedly consumed surrogates is actually connected with...

2. Under the roar of cannonade (Debts)

Long holidays were a good time to repay reading debts, that is, to read books bought, donated, or sent (sometimes from afar) that were absolutely not available in the last millennium.

I read about ten (sounds like “ten thousand”, right?) books, while outside the windows they were shooting, landmines were exploding, fireworks were being set off, and in general, carefree contemporaries were loudly enjoying life. I live, you see, in a new, rich and stupid area, the population had enough ammunition for a week, if you translate the cannonade into money, then the monthly budget of some Murom or Kineshma would go into the sky.

And the first book I picked up (about the war, or something, they reminded me while shooting) was a book sent from Germany, quite a long time ago: Igor Gergenreder. Gemini in fleetingness. Stories and novel. Verlag Thomas Beckman. Berlin-Brandenburg, 1999 .

I didn’t completely forget about it because the letter attached to the weighty volume then unpleasantly struck me with the affectionate impudence with which the author solicited a review. One of the most compelling arguments (and reproaches for the inattentive “Znamya”) was a reference to Basinsky and Vasilevsky, who favorably noted Gergenroeder’s previous book. Basinsky praised her twice: here and here . The plump packet of advertising leaflets and review clippings, pinned to the letter, had been selected with love and care. Well, for example, it was impossible to believe Basinsky, who sang this song in “New World”: “... I read the beautifully and nobly written stories of Igor Gergenreder, many times I admired his ability to “hold” intonation, to grasp and convey through visible gestures and details, instant changes in the soul and psyche (to be honest, I haven’t read such delicious and “material” prose for a long time!)..."

In a word, by sending this parcel to Russia, the author performed a classic action for a Westerner, such as sending out a resume, where you have to cheerfully say all the good things about yourself and don’t forget to indicate where and how many good things others said about you. “Other leading publications have published rave reviews about it. For example, the Frankfurt Buchjournal called the novel a “literary jewel,” and the Berlin literary magazine Berliner LeseZeichen compared me to Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo (publication attached).” And it was still included.

What was actually surprising here? This is by no means the writer’s narcissism (all writers are painfully proud). It was surprising how quickly (he had not yet lived in Germany for ten years) Gergenröder forgot that in Russia the most fundamental tradition prescribes only “secret pride” for a writer. Only marginalized originals here still dare to say to themselves “I am a genius” (and even then, as if with irony), and building “promotion” on this is a pure loss.

Suspecting a writer of outright stupidity is somehow not in my rules, and I thought, I remember, that in this action there was some shade of contempt for the literary mores and traditions of the country from which the ethnic German Gergenröder emigrated. And he didn’t give this book any “promotion”. But something has been nagging me all year: I need to read it, what if I was wrong in trusting my intuition? And then I read...

Honestly speaking, with disgust. Almost immediately I forgot what it was about : frank journalism of stories, crude pornography, and most importantly - monstrous language. I remember the language. Its closest analogue is the language of translations of Nietzsche made by the temperamental eastern man Karen Svasyan. It sounds something like this (in Gergenroeder, not in Svasyan): “I am all a premonition of some kind of bright triumph; exploding with excitement, I stand in front of the insinuatingly swaying curtain: now I will rip it off - and in happiness I will scream to the whole world! I stretch, I stretch slowly, to prolong the anticipation... but it’s time to rush - and my hands fall; I raise my hands - and again they hang powerless” - etc. Emphatic, in a word, prose, which I personally have long perceived as violence against my reader’s will.

The little afterword “The author about himself” touched me all the more. Here, narcissism (funny, but, in general, harmless) is mixed with one very serious ingredient: hatred.

Hatred of “Bolshevik power” (I can’t stand this exaggerated “ts”!), motivated by a detailed enumeration of material wealth that the Bolsheviks took from Hergenroeder’s ancestors: “My maternal great-grandfather founded the company “Weber and Sons”, near the village of Ust-Medveditskaya (now Serafimovich) at the beginning of the twentieth century owned five thousand acres of land; the company owned a stud farm, steam mills, apartment buildings in different cities: including two in Moscow. My mother, who was born on my father’s estate, Goly Karamysh, had to move along. inherited a two-story stone house in Kamyshin,” etc.

Hatred for the “Bolshevik power” smoothly flows into hatred for the country in which the author was unlucky to be born in 1952: “What should I do if I have such an unsightly lot? Develop observation, memory, accumulate impressions, and then creatively embody them. Father told me as a teenager: you are actually an intelligence officer in this terribly dangerous, cruel and deceitful country. Your task is to collect as much accurate information as possible in order to create reliable, intelligent, deep works that will capture the essence of the country and reveal everything that it would like to hide." .

Meanwhile, the afterword begins idyllically, with pictures of returning to my historical homeland: “I am entirely indebted to Germany, my historical homeland, for the fact that I write and publish freely. When my wife and daughter and I set foot on German soil at the airport in Frankfurt am Main - immediately felt warmth and kinship."

Well, you think, that’s great! What kind of need is there to continue the connection with the stepmother homeland, to use an alien language, to draw stories from Soviet journalistic practice, to insistently demand the attention of the local reader?

After all this tearfully cruel hysteria, a copper-powder taste remained in my mouth. I was looking for a long time for something to “get” him, to interrupt him (and for some reason I wanted it to be “direct speech”), and, thank God, I came across a calm, dignified and serious interview with Sergei Gandlevsky in the January issue that was just posted online. number "Ural".

Essentially, Gandlevsky doesn’t say anything special there, he’s rather dry and laconic, but for some reason I love reading such interviews. Regardless of the content, they give a sense of the existence of some very important literary constants. There is, you know, this anthropological type - a Russian writer, and thank God. This in no way interferes with the existence and circulation in literature of other types, and it happens that these others create more interesting literature, but at the same time Gandlevsky must publish three or four of his poems a year, of which one is boring, one is neither fish nor fowl, but one thing is excellent.

Having taken a break with Gandlevsky, I again fell into painful reading - I decided to read the “Memoirs” of Carl Gustav Mannerheim (M.: Vagrius, 2000), another enemy of Russia, a Swedish nobleman, a Russian colonel, Marshal of Finland, her savior (destroyer) and national hero. Partly reminiscent of the products of our lithographers, who during the Brezhnev years created a long, boring series of memoirs of Soviet military leaders: “The supply of weapons and, above all, ammunition, despite their enormous consumption in February and March, has improved somewhat... The winner of the battles near Suomussalmi, Major General Siilasvuo, received the task defeat the 54th division. His troops were united into the 9th division, which was not fully equipped..." You read and think: they are also arguing about the worldwide significance of the October Revolution! How many provincial (in every sense) colonels, who gave competent orders on time, became marshals and national heroes thanks to him! And so they would trade horses, hunt, in a word, they would live their petty noble life...

Bored with flat Mannerheim, I took up the long-gifted two-volume set of “Diaries” by Zinaida Gippius (M.: NPK “Intelvac”, 1999). My hands had never gotten around to it before for two reasons: firstly, I read most of these texts (the best, included in the “Literary Diary” - where they were published, that is, in “The New Path”, “The Golden Fleece” , "Libra"); secondly, because of the indecent, depraved “gift” of this two-volume work. Such books should be published for philology students, cheaply and cheerfully (as the Munich Otto Sagner publishes his philological series), because they are, first of all, a source , and not “a book is the best gift.” And here - super glossy, expensive paper, typographic flourishes, appropriate price. A sign that the circulation was sold incorrectly and the books did not go to those who needed them.

Reading Gippius always leaves me somewhat bewildered: an intelligent man, a magnificent critic with a style that is still modern, and stupid, as if laboriously composed “diaries”, where there is more “ideology” than in criticism. Usually it is the other way around: “public” texts are “composed,” that is, dependent on the specific “language of the era,” but in diaries and notebooks a person writes in the language of the next era. Mystery...

However, the holidays were long, and telling a long story does not mean organizing a holiday for the reader. Therefore, I say goodbye until Friday.