Alexander Ageev. Hunger 24

Hunger 24
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: April 3, 2001

The story was somewhat complex: Moscow, train, province, Moscow again. Well, the reading was also as if from different shelves - it’s crazy to read Isaiah Berlin’s “Philosophy of Freedom” with the sound of wheels and the chatter of drunken peasants in the vestibule, but you need to read something, because sleeping on a night train, even after a very hard day, I can't. Strange, by the way, these current trains: from Moscow to Ivanovo you travel together in a four-seater compartment, as if in a SV, and when you return with the same train, the train is packed to capacity. It’s as if Moscow works like some kind of pump or black hole: people come and go here every day, and barely half return. Where the rest disappear is a mystery. A reason for constructing a fantasy novel.

In short, I started thinking about carriage reading even when I bought Bykov’s “Justification” in Biblio-Globus. On the same shelf, cover to cover, published in the same series, stood the long-standing (and to me, actually, it didn’t matter) novel by Andrei Lazarchuk “Everyone capable of holding a weapon...” . Well, he grabbed it - without any associations, by pure spatial contiguity.

Frankly speaking, I received little joy, but I was blocked by a gray cover from my neighbor in the compartment, who was tormented by the bottle of vodka he had taken with him on the road. I somehow immediately lost the plot, but I didn’t get nervous either: turning page after page, I remembered glorious names and terms, dispersed the swelling clouds of associations - in a word, automatic classification work was going on in my head. If you can’t relax and have fun, at least take advantage of it and stretch your brain.

So, reading Lazarchuk, I thought that Vasily Aksenov was once a very good writer - it’s not for nothing that almost all writers of Russian “alternative history” fall into the style of Aksenov’s long-standing novel “The Island of Crimea”. But all of them somehow fatally lack Aksenov’s humor. But Aksenov’s specific “materialism” is readily picked up: well, Vasily Pavlovich was a dandy in his youth, he loved to list and describe good “capitalist” things - clothes, booze, cigarettes. All this was very little in Soviet reality, but I really wanted it - and it turned out delicious, with soul.

Lazarchuk has a different point - weapons. He should live somewhere in Tula (or where are our gunsmith designers hiding there these days?), closer to the coveted guns. At the most acute turn of the plot, where the plot shocks are measured by a stopwatch, he can abandon the narrative and insert a real poem about some pistol:

“I went almost lightly: with an old Berezin. For some reason, over so many years of service, having tried several hundred types of weapons, I returned to this one, a seemingly quite ordinary pistol produced in 1966. It was not distinguished by either super-accuracy or special rate of fire due to strong recoil - the use of a very powerful Mauser cartridge affected it. In addition, it is large and heavy. Here, however, it’s like in that joke: if your hands are so weak, then why did you marry? some elusive harmonies “Berezin” is not felt at all in the hand like a foreign object and somehow always manages to point its short trunk at the target before this target begins to react effectively. It’s a pity that someone in the treasury came up with the idea. to save on gunpowder, and Mauser cartridges "9/25.5" (the bullet of which pierced through any body armor, and if it did not pierce, then sent the wearer of the impenetrable vest into such a knockout, after which a conscientious referee would sweat, counting) were replaced in production with " 9/19", maiden name was Parabellum... and "Dragunov" entered the army in droves - also a good weapon in its own way, but a little different."

No, it’s wonderful: “according to the laws of some elusive harmonies” ... Not every human hero is awarded such a reverent, warm “psychological portrait” in a novel. Well, Lazarchuk cannot throw away irresponsibly: “pistol” or “automatic machine” - always with a name and at least minimal technical characteristics.

However, even a repeating shotgun without a name can evoke a sob of meaningful poetry, almost in an oriental style:

“When he was returning from the cellar once again, I noticed a repeating shotgun leaning against the counter. Mr. Khachik followed my gaze. “I’m eighty-six years old,” he said quietly, “but I remember what my mother said: my father cursed himself before his death.” only because I didn’t buy a gun. I was six years old when she also died. I don’t remember her face well, but I remember these words. So today I took it out and cleaned it. " .

You even remember something from forgotten university linguistics - about the “actual division of a sentence” - and you think that we are probably reading the title of the novel incorrectly. The main word there is “weapon”, and “everyone capable of holding” is miscalculated, from which all further troubles of our civilization will flow (as, in fact, from the plot). The “tempo migrants” of the novels do nothing but maintain the necessary degree of belligerence in people - so that at the critical moment, when hordes of bloodthirsty Mayan Indians pour into peaceful cities, everyone picks up their favorite “Berezin” (“Dragunov”, “Rheinmetall”, "Baryshev", "MP-39", etc.). Old people, however, can surprise: “Grandfather is parchment brown, his eyes glow like a cat’s, he leans on a light machine gun of a system unknown to me: he probably dug it up in his fields.” You mechanically suggest to the author: “It must be “Degtyarev” ...”, but you realize: what if it’s “Lewis” after all? Or "Goryunov" model 1943? That one, however, was an easel...

Well, yes, and when these very plot-shaping “tempo migrants” finally appear, you naturally remember Isaac Asimov, who you read in childhood, and “The End of Eternity” - somehow, over time, it was twisted both simpler and deeper. One might say, more humanely, without popular geopolitics and commercial mathematics.

And yet - neither to the village nor to the city - I remembered how young Korney Chukovsky dissected the venerable Merezhkovsky in 1908: “Merezhkovsky... in himself is not at all interested in a person, much more interesting for him is the culture in the depths of which a person has to live. And since every culture - its style, its spirit - is reflected in things, the novelist compiles such detailed lists of various things that embody this or that culture."

The central thing of the “culture” that Andrei Lazarchuk creates in his novel is the trunk. The Gun.

I even switched to English because I remembered John Lennon, who was innocently killed by Mark Chapman with a short-barreled five-shot Charter Arms 38 caliber. How did Lennon sing this when he was still alive? -

Happiness is a warm gun
Happiness is a warm gun
When I hold you in my arms
And I feel my finger on your trigger
I know no one can do me no harm
Because happiness is a warm gun
- Yes it is.

You can, of course, read Lennon according to Freud (and it will be even more adequate), but if you start Lazarchuk like according to Freud, you will die laughing: “it doesn’t feel like a foreign object in your hand at all.” Fie on you, sneers!

The moral that comes out of all this is thin: hide matches from children! I mean, trunks, of course... I can’t, a liberal to the core, say: hide Lazarchuk’s books with their warm, everyday, sincere militarism from children.

But here’s the thing: I went to check Chukovsky’s quote and got engrossed. He was a good critic, even though he worked in the “yellow press” (at that time these newspapers were still called “Monday” newspapers).

I read and feel a distinct deja vu: “Books occupy the most noticeable place in the pile of things with which Merezhkovsky clutters his characters. Hence the strange habit of these strange people to remember dozens of quotes from the books they read. I don’t know of other novels where people in conversations and in their thoughts they would use so many quotes. Some of these people appear in Merezhkovsky specifically in order to quote some book - and immediately leave the stage." Why is this Merezhkovsky not a “postmodernist”?

But where did I just read something like that? Well, of course - in the latest “New World” , in Irina Rodnyanskaya’s programmatic article “The Hamburg Hedgehog in the Fog”. This is what the Novomirovsky critic writes, speaking extensively and responsibly about the situation in prose of the very, very recent:

"...the general coefficient of completely different plots proposed by authors with completely different personalities turns out to be a BOOK. “I fell into a book,” the exclamation of a character from “The Snake in the Mirror” could become a chorus cry of all the brightly fashionable feathers. If “early "Postmodernism assured that life is a text, then at the next stage - the text is life, its DNA."

Wow, how I love arguing with Rodnyanskaya! And, most importantly, there is something to argue with, and she can withstand any blow, and learns the lessons of all disputes, and you always feel the true passion behind her every line. This passion makes her forget about self-defense, expose her flanks - in a word, an abyss of temptation for a polemicist.

But about Rodnyanskaya - in the next issue. It’s impossible to bring up a conversation about it with the gunsmith Lazarchuk, and I also want to finish reading Isaiah Berlin in order to internally strengthen myself in my liberal religion. This is not superfluous when you read the prophetic Irina Bentsionovna as a youth.