Translated material
Dmitry Bykov. Bykov-quickly: Look
Dmitry Bykov
Publication date: May 17, 2001
The writer's diary has always seemed to me to be the optimal genre - precisely because of its demonstrative, emphasized subjectivity. A good writer is one who sets things up well. After all, it is not the conclusion that is valuable, but the experience.
The “quickles” will contain reviews, polemics, and new poems. “Quickley” was named so, of course, out of envy of Kuritsyn (I do everything out of envy of this unattainable model - I eat, drink, write, meet women.) A quick spontaneous response, a dangerous thought hastily driven away, a funny and indecent thought that came to mind - this is the special value of any diary. I hope there won’t be any categories in the “quickles”. I promise, at least, that I will try not to limit myself to one genre and not become boring by dwelling on the same topic for too long.
***In general, an interesting paradox arose with Russia; no one else had this (it’s scary to think how many psychologists and philosophers will write dissertations on this over the years): the ideas of so-called liberalism were introduced into the local heads by directives back in the days when the newspaper word something meant. That is, it meant almost everything. Hence - a large number of rabid democrats, very stupid people, often completely crazy and completely totalitarian. (NB: this is the whole phenomenon of the regional committee member Yeltsin, whom the contradiction between the mindset and direction of his mind led to literal physical destruction. The obvious totalitarian loved freedom more than his life and enforced this delicate and fragile thing with truly elephantine delicacy.) In the late eighties, the democrats from the okhlos constituted the majority at any democratic rally. Russia was a unique spectacle: a country in which ninety percent of the working-age population were suddenly, absolutely imperatively, converted to a new faith, of which, in turn, ten to fifteen percent were ready for this - the kitchen intelligentsia, which, however, I couldn’t imagine my own freedom in the new conditions. This grandiose operation could only be compared with the process of the baptism of Rus', which, they say, also took no more than twenty minutes, that is, in terms of duration, it was quite insignificant compared to the historical time that it determined. Journalists have turned into sacred cows, and no amount of dirt that flooded the press, no disappointment in the results of reforms, no leaks and dubious technologies convinced the majority of our fellow citizens (at least the thinking part of them) that there are values higher than freedom of speech. As soon as the main apologist of this freedom, Andrei Cherkizov, during the short period of his public service, this freedom in the Caucasian conditions was slightly limited, the democratic intelligentsia exploded with indignation, and Yunna Moritz burst out with a poem:
... Cherkizov lets journalists suck
Organ of your information: be quiet, don’t bite it off,
He himself wants to pee!
What kind of military secret is there - we don’t have any more military secrets!
At the end of the twentieth century, Russia began to realize with horror that no one cared about democratization, that the entire gigantic propaganda machine of the United States and Europe in the second half of the century did not work at all to ensure that freedom was established in our country.
Today we are faced with an unprecedented task (or is it we who are facing it?): we have to unravel a certain number of seemingly hopelessly compromised concepts. In the mid-eighties, such concepts were: freedom of speech, human rights (although Chernenko wrote a book “The CPSU and Human Rights”, that is, he did not write, of course - this was his only printed work, the authors of which we will now probably never recognize ), God, dissent, market etc. Previously, Iskander once told me, a person at least knew where to expect danger: a single state thorn was aimed at him. Now a person lives, as it were, inside a hedgehog turned inside out: dangers poke at him from all sides, and it is a matter of personal choice, what he likes best. Personal - and only: there is no absolute legitimacy, no one hundred percent impeccability behind the supporters of liberalism. It’s a matter of their taste: to prefer lack of demand to engagement, death from a killer’s bullet to death in totalitarian dungeons... Let’s say my personal taste also leans toward the killer, but this is my personal peculiarity, the problem is purely aesthetic. Lately in Russia, it has occurred to few people that the true struggle for freedom is accessible only to iron-clad people, terribly convinced that they are right. The most obvious example is Solzhenitsyn : at least he achieved something.
But having accepted this simple truth, every consistent thinker inevitably comes to the conclusion that a statist and an anti-statist, diametrically different in goals, in the end completely cease to differ in terms of means and methods - and then the choice between them becomes exclusively a matter of personal taste, and not not innate decency, morality, etc. The cunning technique of identifying every patriot with the Gulag, and every opponent of Gusinsky with Dr. Mengele, has ceased to be universal. The polemics of Westerners and Slavophiles reached the point that both of them degenerated before our eyes and in this degeneration they became almost united: cf. two recent articles about Okudzhava, equally mocking and written from diametrically opposed positions: Levkin’s review of a one-volume book in the Russian Journal and a scathing article by a certain L. Sycheva in Russian Binding . Both the magazine and the binding, even though one is soft and the other hard, are equally incapable of describing the new aesthetic, and even social, reality. Because for this reality, the polemics between archaists and innovators is no longer relevant: the main questions have been reformulated.
It is not surprising that in modern times, as Tsipko rightly noted, opponents of the state are doing much better with PR than its supporters. The name of Max Sokolov, whom they just didn’t pray for in the nineties, is pronounced today by liberal publicists with noble disgust, although Max Sokolov has become neither better nor worse - he hasn’t changed at all for fifteen years. But should anyone try to doubt the moral integrity of Echo of Moscow ! (Here, however, another powerful argument is mixed in: “But these are brilliant professionals!” Sorry, sir, but I strongly suspect that Voloshin and Surkov, also in a sense PR specialists, are no less brilliant professionals in their field.)
I am well aware that in today’s conditions, when we are all slowly floating into very dangerous and at the same time rather boring times, any polemic with Putin’s opponents is extremely dangerous for one’s reputation. But the Russian intelligentsia would now really like some new “Vekhi” , the main pathos of which would be very simple: there are no sacred and taboo concepts for civilized polemics; there are no a priori right and a priori wrong; in a theoretical dispute about history, moral categories, scary to say, are inappropriate, because then from the very first word the church must be held responsible for the fires of the Inquisition, Michelangelo for homosexuality and the alleged crime against the sitter, Pestel and Ryleev for Solovki... Noticed Are you sure that arguing with publicists like Albats, Politkovskaya, Muratov, Cherkizov has long ago become impossible: the arguments have been abolished, there is pure, well-twisted hysteria, the opponent is not refuted, but is branded?.. It only took ten years for us to be convinced: Among the statists there were and are quite decent people, among the democrats there are a lot of people who are not just dishonest, but disgusting. Thieves can be nicer than bloodsuckers only until the shocked observer discovers that they themselves are bloodsuckers no worse than before, that theft is only a less refined (for more primitive, free from any ideological cover) form of bloodsucking. It took, I repeat, ten years to make these simple statements, but how long will it take for us to admit them out loud?
The latest and at times rather weak, but at times very strong, novel by Leonid Leonov “Pyramid” (which, in my opinion, two of the critics read, but there was no talk of the mass reader at all) contained an interesting discussion about two types of civilizations : one, Soviet, is based on strength, the other - on weakness. One constantly rapes a person, pushing him to an unattainable and rather dubious standard, the other indulges him in everything. Many people still cannot admit that both are necessary for a thinking person, that any life with others like themselves is permanent violence and at least inconvenience for a person. A liberal-minded intellectual still cannot admit that the democrats have their own right, and their opponents have their own wrong (for these opponents we don’t even have a suitable word - “conservatives” sounds inaccurate; we are more familiar with the word “satraps”). And the state, with its hopelessly clumsy methods, is doing everything possible to ensure that moral righteousness is always on the side of its opponents - otherwise, gentlemen, Russian history will simply stop, for there will be a chance to put an end to the disgusting alternation of disgusting extremes, chaos and tyranny. But Russia does not want to start another, conscious, normal history - it prefers to destroy itself precisely by this continuous change of extremes, because it has little faith that anything else can be done with it. Yes, and this requires more work, it is much easier to spread rot on one or the other. Just don’t tell me that liberal Russia dealt with its dissidents much more humanely than totalitarian Russia: mentioning Stalin’s repressions does not work here. In Stalin’s times, they imprisoned not opponents of the state, but mainly its supporters, and in general they imprisoned everyone indiscriminately, because to build a so-called paradise, hell was needed, one cannot exist without the other. But liberal censorship was no softer than communist censorship, and the persecution of dissenters flourished in full force. I am convinced that in the responses to this column, should there be any, the killer argument will prevail: Bykov sensed a change in the wind and hurried to sell. So, do you want to argue? Would you like me to recall my own publications from five years ago? Thank you, gentlemen, I will not infringe on your moral rightness. For now, thank God, you have no chance of buying it by death on the scaffold, and you prefer to buy it with labels attached to your opponents; flag in hand, Order of Sutulov on the back, march-march with the right.
I’m not for those and not for those. I am for the conscious part of the population to finally have the opportunity to define themselves in a civilized manner, without becoming murderers or lawyers for murderers. This requires a certain restraint from both the intelligentsia and the authorities. But I’m afraid that this condition is equally impossible for both.
***Like a review. I will probably be the only critic who will warmly and unconditionally praise the film "Sisters" . However, the film turned out excellent, perhaps the best in recent times, - I think, not thanks to, but largely in spite of Sergei Bodrov Jr.
Sergei Bodrov always aroused active rejection in me - both in the thoroughly false, deeply opportunistic “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, and in both “Brothers” (and I liked the cool aestheticism of “Brother-1” a little more than the cooler nationality of “Brother-2” .) I not to mention his work in “Vzglyad” - there the false smile and no more sincere kindness, betraying the tired condescension of a prosperous and arrogant young man, were especially unbearable.
But then he made a movie, which I went to watch with the greatest possible prejudice, and almost immediately I was convinced that Bodrov made a brilliant debut. It is also true that in many ways one can feel the iron paw of Selyanov, a professional of exceptional power; It is also true that the good Soviet screenwriter Sergei Bodrov-per wrote a good Soviet script not without the help of his co-author on “The Sweet Juice Inside the Grass” . It is even true that Sergei Bodrov-fis owes many of the good things in his film to circumstances beyond his control - in particular, the context in which this picture looks especially accurate and generally has a winning look against the backdrop of Sukachev’s monstrous “Holiday”. But be that as it may, Sergei Bodrov Jr. made an excellent movie. Congratulations to him.
The review should be called "Needles". There really is a lot in common with Nugman’s “The Needle” - only instead of Tsoi, the main positive role is played by the same closed, taciturn and asexual girl Sveta. She saves a much sexier girl, even though she is the youngest, whose name, as in Tsoyev’s case, is Dina. Only there they hooked this Dina on a needle, but here they want to kidnap her; the model of their relationship is built in exactly the same way. Tsoi, Bashirov and reprisal migrated from “Needle” (“Some people are sitting on a pipe, and others need money”; “What stinks here? Oh, these are fish... gone bad.”) Of course, Bodrov’s film is simpler than Nugmanov’s old film , and therefore better. Nugman's "Needle" won in terms of aesthetics - the funny Sergei Solovyov aestheticism of the early nineties - and lost greatly in terms of dynamism and intelligibility: without Tsoi and Mamonov, the picture would not have taken place as such.
In general, what we have before us is not so much a new version of “The Needle” as a new version of the old, very good film “Once Upon a Time There Was a Girl.” In both cases, there is a classic couple at the center of the story: an older heroine, who takes responsibility for everything, and a lovely little girl, very sensible and positive. In Eisymont's "Girl" little Natasha Zashchipina sang Silva's aria - in Bodrov Jr. Dina sings "Batyanya-battalion commander" . In old Soviet war films, older children protecting the younger ones cried in the same way when adults came and saved them from the terrible need to kill a person. That is, they killed him themselves.
Whatever you want, children always live according to the laws of war, because childhood is extreme by definition; today it is doubly extreme. What is really wonderful is the similarity of Bodrov's picture (the similarity, of course, is unconscious) with the brilliant Parker parody "Bugsy Malone", where all the roles - gangsters, their lovers, policemen, etc. - were played by children. This analogy comes to mind primarily at the sight of little gypsy beggars and racketeers, whom one of the reviewers has already called persons of Caucasian nationality. There is very little xenophobia in this picture - it is embodied only in the image of an oriental swindler, most likely a Tatar (A. Basharov), who first tries to protect the children, aiming at their opponents shouting “Allahu Akbar”, and then throws a double-barreled gun and breaks into bushes, shouting "Run away!" But he plays a petty scoundrel and a coward, and everyone has petty scoundrels and cowards.
In general, Bodrov used exclusively reliable old Soviet recipes - but it was not Soviet art that invented them, they have always been there! Strong and touching cinema, sentimental and dynamic literature are always in demand and are always beneficial for the viewer’s and reader’s soul. What I also like is the strictly drawn analogy between our time and the war, between sophisticated sadistic Gestapo men and equally sophisticated sadistic bandits. It is high time. Just don’t think that the child in Bodrov’s film is fighting against everyone. He is not against everyone, he is for ours. Again, there is no need to pretend that it is not clear who these “ours” are. One critic has already mocked: “The girl wants to fight in Chechnya for “her own people,” but who are the “strangers” there?” Personally, I know very well who the strangers are. And you know too.
“Ours” is in the film. This is an unfortunate cop with a suddenly awakened conscience, and a grandmother, and a kind, selfless Jew, Klinkin. And in the finale, everything is generally very symbolic - again I recognize Selyanov’s iron hand (and it’s good that it’s not Balabanov: Balabanov is rarely serious and sincere, this spoils everything.) In a square St. Petersburg courtyard-well with an old Art Nouveau vase in the center, two people remain - a girl and grandmother. Two characters from Soviet cinema. The characters of the new Russian cinema - a bandit, his hysterical lover and their advanced daughter - leave in a fancy car for Pulkovo to fly to Austria. It's a pity, of course. But they also left reality, and who they replaced is not yet entirely clear. In any case, I am much more satisfied with the girl Sveta as a national heroine than the boy Danila. Unlike him, she is alive, thinking, and does not enjoy killing people. And the younger sister will definitely come to her senses and return - to marry the captain.