Alexander Ageev. Hunger 31

Hunger 31
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: May 17, 2001

The bottom of my deep literary impressions of the last week turned out to be partly related to cinema. Nikita Mikhalkov , all of his steamy summer self, somewhere in deep Cannes (or “in deep Cannes ” - I keep forgetting which is correct) said weightily about his creative plans: “Maybe “State Councilor” based on Akunin . Or maybe - "Burnt by the Sun-2".

I don’t even know how to verbalize that “feeling of deep satisfaction” that I experienced. This bliss comes over me every time when “ends meet” in a culture, when the logic of the “creative path” is impeccable, when vague premonitions and seemingly unfounded guesses come true one hundred percent. In everyday life this is usually expressed with the vulgar “What did I say?!”

Well, God had mercy - if I said anything about Akunin, it was extremely fluent and never about “texts”, but only about the “phenomenon” (and this is everything that is around, about, etc., in a word - “social consequences.") And what, exactly, could be said about the texts? Is it just joyful to be excited (about your reading and erudition), accurately guessing hidden quotes, allusions and paraphrases?

But this is too modest (for me) the happiness of crossword puzzle lovers, which I hated since childhood (along with school “olympiads” and quizzes). Then he was simply unmotivatedly irritated, but now he is ready, with a little self-importance, to demonstrate the strength of his hindsight: apparently, he early began to feel the charm of systematicity and meaningfulness of even the amount of knowledge that he then possessed. Pulling out individual bricks from a proportional (and functional) building in order to lay out some completely meaningless mosaic without any “message” - what a strange activity? One of the wildest phrases I know: “gymnastics for the mind” (just today I saw it on the cover of the magazine “Relax!” from my neighbor on the subway.)

To be honest, I don’t even know how to relate to a writer who in advance and on principle refuses to put into his novels at least some kind of “message” to me, the reader, but instead puts into them a huge number of friendly philological winks (like “well, you “Of course, you remember, old man, where is Leskov’s ” ( Goncharov , Dostoevsky, etc.)) “Winking” (“well, of course, I remember, old man!”) and nurturing a sense of corporate solidarity gets boring pretty quickly, and a purely technological task that seems whatever the author decides (to create high-quality “reading” for the average but ambitious intelligentsia), captivates only until the experimental model is put into mass production. The task is funny, but it’s purely applied and of a very average level, and you really have to really fool yourself with “strategies” and “positioning” in order to rush around with reading material (even if it’s not bad) like a handbag.

I remember very well how and when I first heard about Akunin and read his first novels (I think Azazel and The Turkish Gambit ). It was the end of 98 - the beginning of 99, I was elected chairman of the jury of the Apollo Grigoriev Prize, and Slava Kuritsyn (even then a passionate propagandist of Akunin) nominated these novels for the prize. I had to read it. I thought then, I remember, only one thing: “Much more literate than Marinina ” (she was still the subject of excited discussions and the forefront of the “acceptability/unacceptability” of mass culture for literary people oriented towards “high” culture), and that’s all.

The row was immediately determined, but higher/lower in the same row (the cheapest of the expensive or the most expensive of the cheap) is not a fundamental problem. The question of awarding the prize did not even arise (let me remind you that these novels were then “naked” - without a widely known “legend” and without powerful PR support for the next two years), although at the only meeting of the jury there was a flying discussion between Irina Bentsionovna Rodnyanskaya and Roman Arbitman.

When the conversation turned to Akunin, an expression of defenseless girlish daydreaming suddenly appeared on the face of Irina Bentsionovna, this staunch literary fighter and determined opponent of “bookish” literature (see, for example, her last article, “The Hamburg Hedgehog in the Fog” ), and she began to say something incoherently. enthusiastic, from which one could understand that with her mind she clearly realized that there could be no talk of a prize, but with her feelings she was all with Akunin, since she experienced real pleasure while reading him. Well, in a word, you had to see it - Rodnyanskaya in a state of “mind and heart are not in harmony.”

But Roman Arbitman, as soon as he heard the name “Akunin,” became extremely excited and rolled a large thundering barrel at the poor novelist, accusing him of no less than xenophobia and even latent anti-Semitism. All those present looked at Arbitman with great interest, because somehow it was immediately clear that Akunin was not an ideologist, and what kind of scenery he used to organize the space of his philological games was the tenth thing. Some people probably thought that Arbitman simply sensed in Akunin a serious competitor to his own homunculus - the great and terrible Lev Gursky .

Here a purely journalistic interest arose in me (well, it’s funny - one hoaxer about another!), and immediately after the jury meeting I suggested that Arbitman write a review of Akunin, which Roman carefully and quickly did. We pressed the review , and it was, I would say, prematurely harsh. First, Roman said absolutely fair words about the current state of “enlightened” minds and about one of the persistent directions of “cultural search”:

“Unfortunately, our general cultural space today is not the alluring labyrinth of the Babylonian library imagined by Borges, but just a boring honeycomb of a giant Lost and Found Office. Ordinary citizens are periodically dragged here from the street and stealthily handed to them something that they have never lost. And the most often returned the loss (a colorful bag with sparkles of fake gilding, from which a mile away the cloying smell of candy-lambs and a bell ding-dong mixed with gypsy guitar strumming) is, naturally, Russia.

Yes, yes, the same one. Which we accidentally lost and which, thank God, someone found to now return to us for a solid price. reward Or at least just for a reward. Or even for free. If only we could take it."

And then he said something about Akunin that no one had thought then, and no one thinks now, since the “scenery” in which Akunin places his plots, everyone seemed to immediately agree to consider conditional, and the plot (its first plan) - not subject to direct analysis. But Arbitman decided to read Akunin “straightly,” that is, the way a reader with little experience in literary games reads him, who does not notice friendly winks and does not react to the ironic “unprintable symbols” placed everywhere. Arbitman analyzed precisely the “scenery” and the plot. The picture turned out expressive:

" Akunin's first novel became a kind of tuning fork, setting up the patriotic myth and all subsequent works of the author. In Azazel, the Russian Empire flourished under the paternal hand of the monarch. The state mechanism, reasonably arranged for the general benefit of the subjects of His Imperial Majesty, was fine-tuned to a cog. Favorite Akunin's character, police detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin, considered it an honor to be one of the cogs: to catch individual swindlers (atypical), hairy nihilists (stupid), saboteurs (foreign) and steadily rise in ranks in accordance with the Table of Ranks. All good heroes "Azazel" wisely rejected new-fangled European trends. The only Westerner in the novel, the meticulous Ivan Frantsevich Brilling, an orphan and a self-made man, arrogantly related to imperial traditions (like the cute bureaucratic Judeophobia), upon closer examination turned out to be a member of an underground international organization that extracted means of robberies and murders ".

Try to prove that all this is not in Akunin’s novels - very much so, but the inertia of the primary critical reaction to them was completely different: “Ah, the mastery of stylization!”, “Ah, the ingenuity of plotting!” and other “aahs”, and just a feeling of forgotten comfort: we read without straining, but without losing our cultural status (since Akunin’s novels also created the illusion of an entertaining cultural study.) And then, our “educated community” has for some time now shunned any politicization , ideological and biased, and from this point of view Arbitman fell into bad form.

The first to be offended by his review was B. Akunin himself (then still deeply undercover), who sent an expressive fax to Znamya . It’s a pity that I didn’t save it (just when I was collecting things in “Znamya”, I sent it to the basket), but the meaning was this: “What are you guys doing, “not knowing your own”? I’m also the author of “Znamya” “and even a winner of the Znamensky Prize (which is true), and my novels are pure literary games, which cannot be approached with such serious demands as Arbitman approaches.”

Then Slava Kuritsyn got excited in the Weekly, who put hot words in the subtitle: “Znamya” published a denunciation of B. Akunin,” and addressed Arbitman admonishingly: “ Roman, precious, come to your senses!” "The magazine also got it from Slava:

“ It is doubly sad that the denunciation of Akunin appeared in Znamya. The myth of Znamya also has such a component - the anti-liberal public believes this magazine to be a nest of world Zionism, a deeply anti-Russian project. This is also nonsense, of course. But Arbitman’s publication, like this not regrettable, it gives the supporters of this crazy idea a good trump card . "

To be honest, “Znamya” wanted to sneeze at “supporters of a crazy idea,” and I personally found Slava’s overly politically correct concern for the reactions of the “illiberal public” strange, but oh well.

And now - what, in fact, I was leading to all this time: the great classic of Russian cinema and the great patriot of “The Russia We Lost” turned his favorable attention to the work of B. Akunin. And something tells me that the reason for this is not the philological brilliance of the novels of Grigory Shavlovich Chkhartishvili (how, in fact, can Nikita Sergeevich convey this whole game of quotes?), but rather the “foreground”, the conventional imperial scenery. After all, Mikhalkov himself is a great decorator, and so he appreciated Akunin, recognized him as a colleague with whom he wanted to do business.

The humor of the situation is that I, for example, do not rule out that Akunin even partially parodied in his novels the Mikhalkov style of the era of The Barber of Siberia , but the parody, apparently, turned out to be too subtle.

And you re-read that old review by Arbitman, and you think: “If “novels” are replaced with “films” in it, then it will be quite suitable for Mikhalkov”:

“The author himself, like a cheater, replaces the country where fools and roads have always been considered the main troubles with a gingerbread power, the threat of which comes exclusively from outside. As we read the novels, a seemingly logical, but in fact absolutely fantastic picture of Russian reality in the last quarter of the 19th century clearly crystallizes, from where Almost all of the “internal Turks” were prudently removed - careerists and embezzlers, obscurantists and holdouts, bureaucratic idiots and political mediocrities... - in a word, all those who, by their actions or inactions, led the real (not gingerbread!) country first to 1905- mu, and later by 1917. However, in the coordinate system of Akunin’s novels, both Russian revolutions can also be explained by regular foreign conspiracies. But we have already gone through this . "

Here's the story. Yes, I forgot to say - naturally, Menshikov is planned for the role of Fandorin ...