Vyacheslav Kuritsyn. Kuritsyn-weekly from January 11, 2002

Kuritsyn-weekly from January 11, 2002
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn

Publication date: January 11, 2002

But his things remain (note by V. Kuritsyn)

What does the legend say?
"Before Eve there was Lilith."
Before Eve there was Lilith -
The one who didn’t pick an apple.
She was not a wife, not a wife, -
Passed by, side by side.
Not from clay, not from ribs -
From pre-dawn silver.
Smiled from the reeds -
And disappeared for all centuries.

has died Vadim Sergeevich Shefner , a man whose books I spent hundreds of hours with, . I read “The Happy Loser” ten times, “The Round Mystery,” which I didn’t like at all, only three times. I kept thinking that someday I would write my love. This is an almost hopeless project: to write a book about children’s reading, combining them with a geographical idea. St. Petersburg Shefner, Lev Quinn from Barnaul (is he alive? Climbed into Rambler: 1922-1996; no texts on the Internet), Novosibirsk resident Nikolai Samokhin (died), Sverdlovsk resident Vladislav Krapivin (long live, thank God). I won't write. And no one will write. I looked about Shefner on the Internet, but there is no literature about him. Here's what it is:

Lit.: Kuzmichev I., Vadim Shefner. Essay on creativity, L., 1968; Reznikov L., Anxious love for a person, "Neva", 1971, # 10; Makedonov A., Vadim Shefner, in the collection: Portraits and Problems, Leningrad, 1977.

I was sure that I would see Shefner . There was also such a “project”: call and see. Shortly before the New Year, I was walking along V.O. (Shefner is always talking about V.O.) and thought: maybe he’s walking along that line?.. You definitely need to call and see, definitely.

And Grishechkina from the Neva publishing house was still going to ask, so, bluntly: why don’t you, fool, publish Shefner? It would be good to go.

I wanted to buy the book at Ozone, but there was only this .

And I didn’t find the poem “Things” on the Internet, although there are quite a lot of different poems (and here are “Things” - Ed. ). And the verse “Things” begins like this:

The owner dies, but his things remain,
They don’t care about things, about other people’s, human misfortunes ...

But here’s what I found on the Internet:

And also a fragment of Zemfira Ramazanova’s statement:

I agree with someone I don’t remember the name that everyone should jump and not fall They fall like fools This reminded me of one story by V. Shefner ...

The link itself did not open.

Severed fingers (note by Vika Prikhodova)

“My entire childhood passed under the sign of second-class literature. The words “adventure” and “fantasy” were holy words for me, as for a believer “God the Father” and “God the Son” in the Creed of the Christian Faith. My hands shook when they contained a small volume from the "Library of Military Adventures" with a slanted stripe on the cover. Any book whose title began with the word "Mystery" was read by me instantly, although it was also instantly forgotten. By the way, this may have been the point The attractive power of literature of this kind is its rapid forgetfulness ... These books are not in libraries, second-hand booksellers practically don’t have them, they are not in demand among modern readers and therefore are not reprinted ... "

The publishing house "Red Sailor" published a book by St. Petersburg prose writer and critic Alexander Etoev, "Murder and Flayer in Children's Literature." The author of historical fiction prose and analytical essays, an editor with many years of experience - in other words, a person who has gone through a rigorous school of the genre, has demonstrated the ability and courage to speak out beyond the usual boundaries of discourse and style. “Murder and Flayer” is conceived as a memorial book, a museum of literature that has sunk into oblivion, ethically curious, aesthetically dubious; a space of quotes linked by bridges of author's comments. Etoev reserves for himself the modest but honorable role of a curator and collector, nostalgically sorting through scraps of horror films that have faded with time - be it spy or cannibal plots, Charskaya, forgotten texts by Kassil, or completely anonymous moralizing poems.

As soon as mom leaves the gate,
And Petya - whoop! And a finger in the mouth.
Crack-crack! Suddenly the door opened
The tailor flew in like a fierce beast;
He ran up to Petrusha, and - chick!
His fingers were cut off in an instant.

True, there is much more “killing” than “murder.” In the Soviet epic, with its one-dimensional characters, the theme of “temptation” is treated as unimportant. A Christian approach to “temptation” as a dramatic and unpredictable process is impossible here: the enemy is always outside, the hero may turn out to be an adversary, but not turn into one. Of course, this is not just a matter of the presence or absence of a soul. Self-mutilation, animal aggressiveness manifested externally, in other words, “killing”, is a much more visual and accessible topic for a child than abstract “murder.” Children's perception of cruelty is fundamentally different from that of adults: a verbal threat is embodied at the level of direct gesture. “Hook”, “prick”, “pry” - “adult” metaphors of verbal aggression - are nothing more than cultivated forms of communication in a yard sandbox or a school locker room. Cruelty and pain, sometimes grotesquely exaggerated, are powerful and irrevocable “codes” of childhood. Looking through the cabinet of curiosities collected by Etoev, the reader will inevitably remember this and experience - along with nostalgia - relief.

Between the contour and the failed meaning of the flower (again a note by V. Kuritsyn)

In the so-called pandan (this word is sometimes heard in newspaper editorial offices), I’ll tell you about two more books: another one - “The Red Sailor” and another one with pictures.

Which is "The Red Sailor" ("About Spies", 2002 indicated) - also with pictures, and with wonderful ones, by Viktor Tikhomirov. But the texts in this book are more unique: a selection of notes about spies from the Red Star in 1938. Here, let's say, a note dated February 10.

For his vigilance, Karunin received gratitude and a reward.

The vigilance of fighter Karunin

CENTRAL ASIAN MILITARY DISTRICT, February 9. (By phone from our correspondent)

Red Army soldier Karunin from the unit commanded by Comrade. Telesnitsky was returning from the garrison shooting range. He walked towards the city across the plain. A ridge of hills rose nearby. Accidentally looking in the direction of one of them, Karunin noticed an unknown man disguised behind stones and looking through binoculars at the courtyard of the garrison commandant’s office.

Karunin found this suspicious. Turning back, he quietly crept up to the stranger, who was carefully examining the territory of the commandant’s office and writing something down in a notebook. A bicycle lay nearby.

Karunin first grabbed the bicycle, then snatched the binoculars from the stranger and ordered him to go forward. The stranger became stubborn. He shouted at the Red Army soldier, demanded that his things be returned, and threatened to report “to the appropriate place” about his “brazen” act.

Seeing that the fighter was inexorable, the stranger began to ask to let him go, offering a bicycle as a reward. This didn't help either. At the commandant's office it turned out that the detainee was a spy.

So it goes. How long, by the way, has social art existed? A good third of a century. It would seem that both Stalin’s bins and the desire to shake them out could be exhausted. But no: the bins are limitless, and the desires do not dry out. And, interestingly, the result is often very nice objects.

The CIS record (not excluding the world record) for trust in bins was set by Alexander Shaburov. The book in question was published last summer, but from the following story you will understand why it would not be too late to review it as a novelty in at least another year.

The story began in 1993, when a group of fairly young (alas, no longer young...) people in Yekaterinburg gathered to publish a decent book by Alexander Eremenko . So that all the poems are included (of which three have been added since 1993, it seems; the King stopped writing), so that the article is solid (they took the poorly readable, but full of quasi-scientific concepts, work by Mark Lipovetsky) and comments (which were compiled by me and Evgeny Kasimov). Well, the design is top-notch. The design was entrusted to the promising young designer Shaburov. This is where it comes from. Shaburov, overcome with unprecedented trust, decided that this book was not Eremenkin’s Opus magnum (that’s what it’s called), but his magnum, Shaburov’s. That all the hundreds and thousands of pictures that Shaburov, with manic persistence, cut out from “The Worker” and “Science and Life” from the age of four, should be published in this volume. As a result, the layout, which was supposed to be ready in September 1993, was completed by December 1996.

By this time, the money available for the project had also run out. They tried, of course, to find a publisher willing to spend money on a difficult-to-produce six-hundred-page work, but personally I didn’t really believe in success. A couple of times publishers were found and then disappeared. One was sure that he would start typing “tomorrow”, but tomorrow turned out to be August 19th. Last summer, by some miracle, the book was published - Podkova and Dekont+ are listed as publishers. But one of them owed a lot of money to the “Ural Worker” (a printing house in Eburg), and the circulation (three thousand!) was seized, and about a hundred copies were recovered. I have one.

This book contains an incalculable number of pictures (I counted how many there are on the first flyleaf: 36 pieces) and scanned texts. Pictures: photos, facsimiles, telegrams, a table of chords, comparative sizes of sharks, images of unusually shaped potatoes, cartoons from "Crocodile" and especially any tasks like "Find 20 words starting with the letter M in this picture." The texts are equally varied (“How much does our first and last name weigh? Each letter written in pencil weighs 0.0000125 ounces...”). I can look at the volume for years: periodically opening it to any page, I hover for an hour over an unprecedented masterpiece.

The evil Shaburov meanly laid out the poems in italics, thanks to which they received the status of quotations inside Shaburov’s book “Ermenko’s Opus Magnum”; Not to mention that poetry cannot be read in italics.

But my and Kasimov’s comments turned out to be funny, occupying no less than 150 pages.

Here is a commentary on the word Jews:

A mythical tribe invented by Egyptian priests in the second millennium BC. to mystify neighbors in the region and strengthen the position of the Ramses state. “Jews” are even credited with some rudiments of statehood (in the area of ​​modern Palestine). According to some legends, Jews are fair-haired, blue-eyed people with incredible physical characteristics (fast - up to 4 m; beauty comparable to the beauty of the moon and the sun), according to others - wrinkled, humpbacked dwarfs who ate exclusively field mice ...

And Eremenko, meanwhile, likes to call himself a sailor: not a red one, really, but a senior one.