Alexander Ageev. Hunger 15

Hunger 15
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: February 13, 2001

For a whole week I was itching in my head: “I need to go to Biblio-Globus.” Usually I go there, like any other bookstore, without any specific purpose - to gawk, leaf through, poke around (this is especially true for Biblio-Globus " refers), but here the goal was, that’s why it was itching, that’s why my legs weren’t moving. Such a ridiculous goal, pure bourgeois materialism-fetishism - to finally buy the last volume of Nabokov’s “symposium” - for the sake of completeness of the collection, so to speak, and not because I absolutely need it for actual reading, and I should also grab “Ada” from the same collection, since this “Ada” is somehow transferable for me: I bought it as a gift, bought it as a gift...

In a word, yesterday I went and bought my Nabokov and five hundred rubles worth of other things, and now the sciatica has cleared up from the heavy bag. All this means that I couldn’t help but buy at the same time in this damned expensive “Biblio-Globus” the latest issue of “Book Review” with a luxurious photograph of Slava Kuritsyn on the entire front page. Therefore, there is a proper, diligent promotion of “Watercolors for Matador”.

“Diligent” - I mean that the caption to the photo is very funny: “An extreme romance of a fashion journalist can turn into a scandal . ” It’s in vain, gentlemen, that you try so hard not to think about the white monkey. To make a scandal out of Slava’s work, the efforts of a dozen more “fashion journalists” are needed, but where can they get them? And there is little scandalous potential in this cute book. Here Slava speaks in an interview about the “main features of a fashionable novel” : “Fashionable is something that tugs at reality’s sick veins. It opens up the possibility for public discussion. Here, in the center of my text, is the topic of drug legalization. A very painful and important topic . ”

Well, we need to come! Not to Russia in 2001, but somewhere there - in Berkeley in 1968, or something. Or a little later - to New York at the end of 1971, when the entire “party” there was very concerned about a “sick and important topic” - the release of John Sinclair, the leader of the White Panther Party, who proclaimed the slogan “Rock and roll, drugs and sex on the streets!". Poor Sinclair received ten years in prison for recklessly selling two joints of marijuana to a disguised drug agent. In Russian, say: for a snuff of tobacco. This was the American Alina Vitukhnovskaya...

And John Lennon - a character no match for our “fashion journalist” - then also really loved to “tug at reality’s sick veins” and composed a touching song John Sinclair - the only success was on the rotten political album Sometime in New York City. And it did help: poor fellow Sinclair was released, replacing ten years in prison with a year. But - alas! - all this did not help Lennon’s failed album, which had a circulation that was completely shameful for the former Beatle. It’s just that the records were bought by slightly different people than the fighters for the legalization of drugs and adherents of all sorts of Flower Power. But Slava speaks soberly about his action movie: “this is not a family read, like Akunin, it will not appeal to housewives who buy the most . ”

No, in order to please both housewives and the “party” and for there to be a scandal, Kuritsyn needs to write something like “The True Life of Viktor Pelevin.” Nobody knows what he actually does there, everyone’s beloved Viktor Olegovich - either he eats fly agaric mushrooms, or he drinks three liters of Californian Paul Maison wine a day, or he produces videos, or he leads the Solntsevo mafia (as in he once told me in all seriousness). That would be a romance and a scandal. Otherwise, drug legalization, a boring human rights issue, no matter what action movie you turn it into...

Generally speaking, legalization in the broad sense (including, for example, “legitimation”) is what Kuritsyn (and not only him) really cares about. It’s worth reading any of his latest articles in “ Emergency Reserve ” - each contains a hint of the specific complex of Tonio Kroeger (or, if you are closer, Harry Haller): the marginalized is drawn to the “mainstream” of life, wants to become bourgeois, to become respectable. He is even ready - if society does not agree, despite passionate persuasion, to “legalize” as a “mainstream” the way of life familiar to the marginalized - to change habits, status, values.

This is a glorious path for many, which at different times was called differently and had different values. Just the other day Yuri Kolker sent me his book of poems “Vetiluya”. So there is a characteristic text on the last page of the cover: “In my literary destiny there was, in fact, only one event: in 1970 I realized that I was a conservative. Novelty, extolled by everyone around me, suddenly lost all value for me, and I decided not to be ashamed of it " . This, so to speak, was a personal revolutionary step, partly contrasting man with his environment. And now the “environment” also seems to be shifting somewhere...

Kuritsyn’s separate specific problem is that, despite the fact that he is a swinging type of person (as they said about London in the late 60s) of Russia in the 90s, he is a very bookish (punctual) romantic, that is, he puts goals like “I’ll quit smoking on Monday,” “on Wednesday I’ll become a law-abiding citizen,” “on Saturday I’ll proclaim a new era in Russian literature.” And he bravely takes on their implementation. The result is such petty-bourgeois, vain romance, which, in general, bears little resemblance to the ideal of the burghers, significant for Tonio Kreger or Harry Haller. It’s not about supporting the government, not paying taxes, not answering the interviewer: “My problem is not what to call it, but how to sell it . ” It's a little more complicated.

Still, I’ll delve into Thomas Mann’s “Lübeck as a Form of Spiritual Life.” Bored a little: “...from our father we also inherited the “severity of honest rules,” an ethical principle that largely coincides with the concept of the burgher, civic. For the ethical, in contrast to the purely aesthetic principle, the intoxication of beauty and bliss, as well as nihilism and philosophy of fleeting pleasure - the ethical is, strictly speaking, burgherism or citizenship in everyday life, the consciousness of life's duties, without which a person has no internal desire for activity, for a creative change in life and for development; the ethical principle does not allow the artist to look at art as to free himself from all human debt, it forces him to create a home, a family, to place his spiritual life, no matter how bizarre and disorderly at times, on a solid, worthy - in a word, a burgher (I can’t find a more precise definition) foundation.” .

This ponderous “ethical” is absolutely impossible to simulate by any “aesthetic” means, although many are now trying to do this - and not even with such cocky attacks as Slava. Does not work. It must be early - for Russia, at least. Meanwhile, without this “ethical” there will be no bourgeois literary “mainstream” (or, if you like, “normal” literature) in Russia. There will be a dull line of Shcherbakova-Varlamov-Otroshenko-Vorfolomeev with a distinctly Soviet tint, and there will be Nosov-Krusanov-Nazarov-Tuchkov (the series called Kuritsyn), who are a little more cheerful and more imported, but who are also far from the proud self-awareness of burgher usefulness. And games - especially extreme ones - are good when you stand on a solid “ethical” foundation of problems solved by your ancestors.

“This is what I think about the mainstream,” as Andrei Vasilevsky likes to say.

Meanwhile, among the books I bought yesterday at Biblio-Globus was the long-desired (and long-published, but somehow the availability of books did not coincide with the availability of money) two-volume work by Astolphe de Custine, “Russia in 1839.” I read this Russophobic work in various abridged and extracted versions, and still something was missing for me to finally formulate my old favorite idea that Russian literature did not come out of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, but from the book of the French Marquis. And not only ideologically, but also stylistically. The Marquis was, after all, a typical “reactionary romantic,” like all the best Russian writers.

In a word, all night I read not Nabokov or Kuritsyn, but an extremely emotional work by de Custine ( "Painful thoughts, the biggest flaw of my style, come from the desire to express the inexpressible: in the pursuit of the impossible my strength melts, words grow dull, feelings and passions are exhausted " , etc. - in many paragraphs), shed tears and noted, among other things, how shamelessly Russian writers stole from Custine.

Here are a few quotes for comparison.

“This piece of land, which seems torn from the ground and trembling on the water, like foam in a flood, these tiny, barely noticeable black dots, scattered haphazardly between the white sky and the white river - is this really the capital of a huge empire or is it all just a mirage, an optical illusion? The background of the picture is a canvas, shadows are moving on it, for a moment they come to life in the light of a magic lantern, giving them a ghostly existence, meanwhile they won’t be leading their silent round dance in the open space for long: soon the lamp will go out and the city will disappear again - the fairy tale will end . "
(Astolphe de Custine. Russia in 1839) “And what if this fog scatters and goes up, won’t this whole rotten, slimy city go with it, rise with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the old Finnish swamp will remain, and in the middle of it, perhaps for beauty’s sake, is a bronze rider on a hot-breathing, driven horse?..”
(F.M. Dostoevsky. Teenager) “Do you also want to be separated from the stone that holds you, as some of your crazy sons were separated from the soil, do you also want to be separated from the stone that holds you and hang in the air without a bridle, in order to fall down after into the water chaos? Or, perhaps, do you want to rush, tearing through the fogs, through the air, in order to perish in the clouds together with your sons? Or, rearing up, you, Russia, pondered for many years before the terrible fate that threw you here, - in the midst of this gloomy north, where even the sunset lasts for many hours, where time itself alternately rushes into the frosty night, then into the daylight?
(Andrey Bely. Petersburg) “Hovering over its own reflection in the countless waters of its rivers and canals, as if by magic suddenly becoming weightless, the entire bulk of the city seems about to sway from a light night breeze that has flown into the stone jungle from a sleeping place on the flat banks the bay, will sway, tremble finely and finely; the faceted features of petrified history will mix, blur, as in an eye clouded by a tear, and everything will melt in the vast space of the sky that has descended to earth... And then, you see, the reeds along the shallow channels will rustle again. .."
(Mikhail Kuraev. Night Watch)