Alexander Ageev. Hunger 9

Hunger 9
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: January 16, 2001

From the beginning - “following the footsteps of our performances.” Not the past , about which I received a lot of admonishing letters (and you, Abram, are right, but Sarah is also good), with which I completely agree (I mean, all this is in vain), but the year before last , where about Igor Gergenroeder.

After reading my philippic, Alexander Tarasov, a well-known researcher of radical political movements in Russia, sent me a letter: Gergenroeder, it turns out, is his “client” (I almost wrote “patient”), and you can read a lot of interesting things about his “life creativity”, for example, here Here .

"Enjoy reading!" - the sarcastic Tarasov finished his letter. Yes, I thought, having familiarized myself, that’s literature... You can repeat after two classics: “Demons have already been written...” But here’s the riddle: this environment is constantly self-reproducing and draws writers there with terrible force - especially those of average talent. They are driven by the great temptation to create not texts, but history, and since we are approaching another turn of the century, that is, the traditional time of rapprochement of “literature and revolution,” we will already read a lot... This, I must admit, seriously worries me , especially when I I hear the most zealous preachers of postmodernism talking about its exhaustion. I want to scream: “Slow down a little, horses!..”, in the sense - we don’t need to get into history again, because in history we always get into the same thing... No, let, let this era of bourgeois tolerance last, so that modern Russian culture accumulates fat, gains extra money, and becomes kinder. So that the “coming Huns” would finally have something to plunder...

In general, the main reading impression of the last few days was Yuri Buida’s book “The Yellow House” . I love Buida like very few modern prose writers, but when reading him, I always experience a kind of fear : the string is too tight, the distance between the text and the author is too small, despite the fact that the author simply whips up fantastic absurdity, sometimes inflates his stories with them, as if " laughing gas." But this literary gas is directly related to Auschwitz, if we consider Auschwitz one of the most characteristic symbols of the past century. Buida's prose is the same "poems after Auschwitz" ...

With this entire ponderous construction of several phrases, I want to say, in fact, only one thing: the joker, fanfare, deceiver and entertainer Buida is extremely serious. Outwardly, he accepted all the rules of the current literary game: he composes funny texts, rebuses and puzzles no worse than some in Buenos Aires or Paris (it’s not for nothing that Gallimard published him before our publishers), but in general he is an archaic figure in terms of the degree of wealth text with its own living blood, and in addition, it is an explosive fusion of a rationalist and a romantic.

That is, he is able to calculate all the options and clearly realize that the most desired is impossible, but at the same time stubbornly and passionately desire. Is it clear what I wanted to say? To be honest, I don’t really understand it myself.

The main thing is that I am afraid that Buida will suddenly abandon all his “artistry”, fantasy and lies, step straight into reality and be painfully broken by its unambiguity. That is, the “physical person” Yuri Vasilyevich Buida did this very thing many times, but at the same time, the “mystical personality” Yuri Vasilyevich Buida, in many of his writings, won brilliant victories over reality, the kind teenagers win in their dreams over all their offenders. There was always a gap, an air cushion, a choice of options.

And when Buida, about a year and a half ago, spoke about the idea of ​​​​"Shchina" (this suffix in the book is used as a genre definition, and under it, as the title, part of the book was published in last year's "Znamya", I said something to him warning like: “You want to write the last volume of your works right away.” In the sense that everything that will be written later will simply fall into this “stuff” and dissolve in it, and this “stuff” is almost life, which, unlike art, is finite and always provokes the waste of the last hour and ruble. “One day, in a moment of insight, Yu We decided to create his own teaching - “schina,” and since then, expanding the meaning of the term, he used to say: “I wrote another shield.” ", "I wrote under the influence of my schina", "If you follow the schina, then..." He admitted in a narrow circle that for him "schina" is something akin to Shchedrin's Ono " ...

It seemed to me, in short, that “shchina” would kill “buida,” which (who? in general, this is a word) Buida translated from one of the Polish dialects as “storyteller, storyteller, liar, dreamer.”

Then I read the proofs of the magazine version as a “fresh head” and must have missed a lot of typos. But, thank God - he breathed a sigh of relief - the border remained not destroyed, and in the book edition the essays successfully balanced, placing the fractional epic on an aesthetic and philosophical foundation.

Still, it's a scary book. “Not long before his suicide, the crazy Russian poet and prose writer Alexei Lyubich-Yarmolovich-Lozina-Lozinsky (1886-1916) managed to write: “... so as not to go crazy, I write...” Knowing in principle what to come up with for Buida In the course of some unknown writer immediately with a biography and a corpus of works - it’s a piece of cake, for some reason you don’t calm down until you find this very Lozin-Lozinsky in a reader or encyclopedia: yes, he really was, he really committed suicide: took morphine and wrote down his impressions while he was dying...

Reading “The Yellow House”, you somehow feel like you are at a feast during the plague, where “Yu We” is trying to speak to this very abyss and the evil spirits that crawl out of it. At the same time, he ingeniously pretends that the abyss is just a labyrinth familiar to twentieth-century art, a cunning system of dead ends where you can hide from the devil for a long time, believing that even the horned one does not have an exact plan for the labyrinth, that is, the game is on equal terms ( “The devil settled in in the empty fifth apartment. He ate raw potatoes, read Dostoevsky and cheered for Spartak ). and she you. If, of course, you have something in you to consume such a book...

In parallel with Buida, in order not to fall into nervous exhaustion, it is good to read something also fragmentary (God forbid - not Rozanov, not Shestov, or even Andrei Sinyavsky!), but inclined more towards donation than to vampirism. For example, I read “Comments” by Georgiy Adamovich , recently published by Aletheia. The book is unobtrusively intelligent, with a certain constant humble questioning that touches you to tears (was there anything and why was it?) and the same humble hope (after all, there were two or three sounds, but this is enough so that it’s not in vain) . Several leitmotifs - the decline of Christianity, Blok, Dostoevsky, the fate of literary emigration. Layer by layer, fragment by fragment - paints and shades are applied, and a very worthy world is slowly being built.

And you think: from Adamovich to Buida there are only some three decades, and how, God forgive me, have we become frenzied in these few years...