Alexander Ageev. Hunger 32

Hunger 32
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: May 21, 2001

Book sentiments on free bread

I must tell you, gentlemen, that freedom is a truly great thing. Even in our gastroenterology business. All feelings are heightened, including titular hunger (book hunger, of course), and most importantly, a real appetite for acquiring a variety of books appears (or rather, is restored after many tasteless years).

In fact, six years in charge of a bibliography in a thick magazine is no joke, you are surrounded with free books from all sides, to the point of satiety, and rare trips to bookstores turn into a continuation of the service, but once upon a time it was a real hungry hunt - more than anything else bondage

In a word, for almost two months now I have not been going to the presence, but I go to the center either for some kind of fee, or - on purpose, not on the run! - to bookstores. And they even began to develop some routes for leisurely book walks. You get out of the metro, for example, at Pushkinskaya, go to Moskva, get hold of something there, then turn to Kamergersky - to the Pushkinskaya Shop (and there is some loot there), and then Kamergersky flows into Kuznetsky Most, which also has places to go. And from Kuznetsky it’s equally close to the “Book Shop” (academic) in Bolshoi Cherkassky and to the “Biblio-Globus”, but the bag, as a rule, already greatly pulls on the shoulder - just next time you can walk the other way around - get out of the metro on Kuznetsky Most and walk to Pushkinskaya...

I haven’t seriously thought about the meaning of general and specific life for a long time, but in recent weeks I’ve been thinking more and more often: maybe I studied for seventeen years, and then worked hard for fifteen only so that now, having gone free to earn bread, I can collect book harvests - yes not in empty stores, as in the years of Soviet youth, but in today’s ones, where you take it - you don’t want it. For complete happiness, the only thing missing is free book furniture and a large manor house, where I could occupy at least a floor with this furniture. Someday you need to arrange your books in a human way - in one row, and according to some reasonable principle. And - to finally compile a useful catalog...

Such patriarchal dreams suddenly appeared in freedom. And since I, like any bookish person, have an unpleasant habit of looking after myself and mercilessly identifying the motives of my own actions, without disdaining to look into the subconscious, I immediately calculated: compensation .

Compensation for a youth poor on your own books, for endless student and postgraduate sitting in cold state libraries, where servants look at you as if you were an intruder, for copying by hand and retyping on a typewriter everything that has now become a slow-moving commodity and is called a disparaging railway abbreviation "SV" ( "Silver Age" ).

Well, for example, what did I bring from my last trip to “Moscow”? How is “Moscow” structured? If you enter the left door, you first find yourself in a cramped department where they sell all sorts of non-fiction - from philosophy to cooking, and there I usually land at the philosophical shelves. This time I spent a long time turning in my hands a thick volume by Fyodor Stepun, where all the most delicious things are - “Meetings”, and “Thoughts about Russia”, and much more. I had the usual doubts - I already have half of all this in other publications, and the price of this volume is well over three hundred. There’s stupid arithmetic in my head (it’s not the money I’m sorry for, it’s the variety of the loot): should I buy one book for three hundred or three for a hundred each? As a result, last time I took off from the same shelves the two volumes of Rozanov’s collected works that Nikolyukin was making at the Respublika publishing house. Oleg Dark is right - it’s strange how they publish collected works now: you can’t always find the volume number, but the title is printed on the spine and cover. It’s like a separate book - and the series is not tormented by empty spaces, if the volumes are not all. So if you see on the cover and spine of volume 9 of the collection. op. V.V. Rozanov’s title “Saharna” (M.: Respublika, 2001) - don’t quite believe your eyes. That is, “Saharna” is, of course, present there, but besides it there is something else: “The Olfactory and Tactile Attitude of Jews to Blood,” a collection that is highly iconic and even legendary. Here, one might say, Russian anti-Semitism reached its highest aesthetic and philosophical point. Anyone who has read this book and (even despite his love for Rozanov) has not been imbued with a destructive passion will find it simply boring to read the stupid products of today’s anti-Semites from “Zavtra” , “Den” and “Our Contemporary” .

Well, I also bought the 11th volume (released, out of sequence, last year) - it includes “ The Last Leaves ” and the patriotic collection “ The War of 1914 and the Russian Revival ”. It seems that Berdyaev wrote his famous article “ On the eternally feminine in the Russian soul ” about this collection (I could be wrong, but I can’t check - someone stole Berdyaev’s book with articles about Russia from me). However, I’m unlikely to be mistaken. Just now I looked through it and immediately found this place where Rozanov describes how a cavalry regiment walked past him and how he felt:

"Slender, persistent, huge, ugly ...

When I suddenly began to feel that I was not only “afraid” (this was a definite feeling), but also enchanted by them, enchanted by a strange charm that I had only experienced once - this one - in my life. A strange phenomenon occurred: the exaggerated masculinity of what was in front of me seemed to change the structure of my organization and threw it away, overturned this organization into a female one.

I felt extraordinary tenderness, languor and drowsiness throughout my being... My heart sank within me - with love ... I would like them to be even larger, to have even more of them ... "

That’s what I thought right away: how times change. At the beginning of the century, Berdyaev spoke about the “eternally feminine” in his soul, but now, if some normal publicist dared to write something like that, he would immediately be identified as homoerotic and seriously advised to change his sex.

Yes, and I have memories of a copyist associated with “The Last Leaves” - in the wretched magazine “Book Corner”, published in the early 20s, I - it was still a deeply Soviet era - found some of the “Last Leaves” and rewrote with pleasure . But those, probably, were included in “Apocalypse of Our Time” (“There is” and “no”, where a fantastically sophisticated - intonation - text was built on these two words and the leitmotif “ I’m coughing! ”).

And, by the way, the young Eikhenbaum was published in the Book Corner, from which I wrote down an idea that struck me at the time - about the connection between symbolism and world war:

“ My friend once told me - a man whose every nerve is made by our era - said that our world war is a product of symbolism: people stopped feeling the world, people, things. If they did , they wouldn’t be able to fight. And in some ways - then he is right. Probably more right than a rally speaker who shouts about capitalism and does not see the people ."

Something similar was discussed later during the Gulf War , clarifying the morality/immorality of “high-precision weapons.” On the display of the on-board computer - be it a Stealth or a simple attack aircraft - after all, there are symbols...

Yes, and the next hall of “Moscow” is the one dearest to the heart: the second-hand book department, near which there are always crowds of pensioners dreaming of handing over collected works of Soviet times. But buying meetings is somehow stupid and inconvenient. I’ve long wanted, for example, to buy a thirty-volume academic edition of Chekhov, but how can I imagine: carrying thirty volumes across all of Moscow on my own! - so I immediately put this thought aside, and here I am hunting (I noticed it quite quickly) for those books that I wanted, but could not buy in my youth. Here, such books jump out at you in droves: not virgin freshness, of course, after all, we lived our lives with other people, but I’m not a boy either - I lived with other books, without, however, forgetting about these.

Then I immediately grabbed the three-volume “Diary” of A.V. Nikitenko , the great censor of Russian literature, a great liberal and a universal acquaintance. Once upon a time I read all this from someone else’s hands - well, it was impossible to study the history of Russian literature without Nikitenkov’s “Diary”, and only now it came into my possession: it’s the same age, published in 1956, the paper has turned yellow, it’s super discreetly glued, but - alive! And as soon as you start reading the third volume, for example (late 1860s - 1870s), you will feel completely at home: in Russia there are eternal reforms, the government is stupid, the free press is impudent, there are few serious people, it is difficult for a thoughtful liberal.

It’s funny: no matter what page you open, you’ll find a current story. Well, at least about literary awards:

" 1866. September. 9. Friday. Meeting at the Academy of Sciences of the commission for awarding Uvarov Prizes for drama. I read my review of Count A.K. Tolstoy’s tragedy “The Death of Ivan the Terrible.” I demanded that the author be awarded the full prize. There were seven of us: K.S. Veselovsky as chairman, Ustryalov, Grot, Sreznevsky, Pekarsky, Kunik and me, four votes were in favor of the award, that is, the votes of Veselovsky, mine, Ustryalov and Grot, the rest were against. So, the tragedy was not crowned. and funny. The greatest ignoramuses in the matter of fine literature prevented the award, for according to the regulations a two-thirds vote is required ."

Just imagine - one hundred and thirty-five years ago a Russian liberal wrote in his diary: “ The Russian land is being rebuilt, and in some respects even being built. That’s why there is an abyss of all kinds of material piled up in a heap, and all this has not yet been finished, not adjusted. Who is the architect? There are a lot of architects, but only God and the people's spirit are real ." But he hoped more for the Emperor and jaded about the “registration”:

“ Our government scamps have come up with a funny new prank: to exile the hotel keepers in Moscow to the internal provinces, and immediately close the hotels themselves administratively, if they do not report to the police and do not register the appearance of anyone staying with them for at least a few hours. This is always the case. and was done by hotels, but the police always refused to register the species delivered to them ."

Read this and think: Russia is indeed a great power - at least, an extremely stable one. You will wake up here in a hundred and fifty years and write in your diary: “ Meanwhile, they say, public opinion abroad is becoming more and more opposed to Russia. Our funds have fallen terribly everywhere; credit has been completely undermined; transactions in railway affairs have taken the most unfavorable turn. The Times, in an editorial, directly states regarding our zemstvo institutions that in Russia everything is so unreliable and vague that it is impossible to enter into any transactions with it ."

I think that even then - in a hundred and fifty years - there will be a Russian Journal in one form or another, and its readers will fill the forum “On attitudes towards Russia in Europe” with passionate letters.

In a word, a wonderful (with emphasis on the “y”) reading that reconciles with life...

The second book, which I immediately, without hesitation, put aside, was the volume “ Konstantin Andreevich Somov. Letters. Diaries. Judgments of Contemporaries ,” published by “Art” in the series “The World of the Artist” back in 1979, when I was studying at 4- In my course, I wrote my first article about criticism in the magazine "Apollo" and I desperately needed this book. Now - well, the book is still good, even despite the very Soviet sign {...} at every step. Again, Kuzmin’s article about Somov: a so-so article, but for 1979 it was something.

And - finally - I couldn’t resist A.P. Chudakov’s book “Chekhov’s World. Emergence and Establishment,” which, although it was published in 1986, when I was already a candidate of sciences and had some book sources in Ivanovo, for some reason it flashed by and, again, I had to use other people’s copies. And this book, meanwhile (together with “ Chekhov’s Poetics ,” which was published in 1971 and which I also didn’t have my own), is the best thing that has been written about Chekhov in our country. Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov wrote a nice novel , but I think he will still go down in the history of Russian literature as the best interpreter of Chekhov.

Well, in a word, these seven volumes (and Nikitenko is thick, and Somov is weighty) my bag was so bursting that I didn’t go to the next department of “Moscow”, where modern “hudlo”, as they say on the Observer . And what didn’t I see there? Daria Dontsova? Or the eleventh reissue of B. Akunin ?

Business, of course, takes time, but you also need an hour for fun...