Alexander Ageev. Hunger 65

Hunger 65
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: January 24, 2002

... It has not happened for a long time that I read all night long, and that I read relatively voluminous text from a monitor - this simply never happened. I can’t stand this verb – “download” either. From the monitor you can read an article, a poem, a paragraph or two of prose - “take a sample” in order to decide whether it is worth getting it in a paper version, but to swallow a novel without stopping - this is the first time for me.

I'm talking about Gandlevsky , about his novel "<NRZB>" in the first issue of "Znamya". Throughout the fall and early winter, my native magazine mostly irritated me, since it very clearly confirmed the generally accepted opinion about the deplorable fate of “fat people,” and then suddenly an unexpected joy - Gandlevsky and his very legible “<NRZB>”.

January, I must say, in general turned out to be a bad, funereal month for literature: three good writers left one after another - Vladimir Kornilov , Vadim Shefner , Yuri Davydov , and the mood, to be honest, was below average. And then Putin’s Komsomol members - “Walking Together” - used literature for their servile educational purposes: Their stupid farce with the exchange of “harmful” books for “useful” ones only added points to Pelevin, but the quite worthy, not one of the worst, Soviet writer Boris Vasiliev no way to offend. It’s not that it’s absolutely “for nothing” - for the frank didactics of most of his works, but somehow it was done very meanly towards the old man.

Gandlevsky’s novel, in a word, was like a balm for the soul, although the thing, of course, is cruel and poisonous, in some sense even “anti-literary.” In fact, in the sense that the fate of a moderately gifted writer (this is precisely the main character of the novel, Lev Krivorotov) is always a kind of reproach to literature, “literariness,” and, of course, to God: why did you embarrass a weak soul with a modest gift?

But in general, the novel, despite the profession of the main character and most of the other characters, is not about literature at all. It's about love and old age.

More precisely: this is a furious, passionate fight between the main character (and perhaps the author) with an inexorably approaching old age. And love in the novel is described absolutely luxuriously. I must admit, recently, when I came across pages “about love” in prose, I flipped through them, as in childhood, “descriptions of nature”: certainly either boredom, or disgust, or psychopathology. It seemed that this language had also been lost, the way one could write about love in modern prose without falling into either cynicism or sentimentality. But come on, Gandlevsky (even though the hero-narrator is a jerk, a cynic and a self-destructor) managed to write about love purely, lightly and deeply. I understand that the epithets are not from the critical-analytical toolkit, but what came to mind. I hope that reviewers will soon begin to dissect "<NRZB>" with great appetite - and they will hold the cards in their hands.

Another marvelous thing: an essentially monological text, and even with a small number of actual events, turned out to be very elastic and dynamic. This is truly “plot” prose, although the author dispenses with multiple and bizarre movements of the characters’ physical bodies in space (as for some reason many writers began to understand the plot, trying to please the general public).

And - the most amazing thing - with the absolute dominance of ironic pathos in the novel, in the end you experience real catharsis.

I felt this especially sharply because in the first half of January I diligently “read”, as if before an exam, all sorts of Western prose - that which everyone around me talked about with great reverence, but which no one could get around to. long-standing "Professor Criminale" In particular, I read Malcolm Bradbury's , two novels by Haruki Murakami and even Michel Houellebecq's "Elementary Particles" (but I'm lying - I didn't finish reading Houellebecq, being mortally bored). Almost everything seems to be of a decent level, not stupid prose. But every time it seemed that either on the cover or among the output data there would certainly be something soothing the soul of the Western consumer: “ No cholesterol .”

When you read a lot of such literature in a row, this fundamental “low fatness” of it even begins to seem like the norm, but as soon as you immediately read a natural, blood-written text like Gandlevsky’s novel, you instantly “feel the difference.”

So the literary year, despite the funeral, still started successfully. Not only Znamya published a good first issue, but also Novy Mir and Zvezda. I have not yet mastered the prose, except for Gandlevsky, but the poetry in all the issues opening the year is simply excellent - in “Znamya” by Fanailov with Kibirov , in “Zvezda” by Kushner with Kekova , in “New World” by Lisnyanskaya and also Kushner .

What other good news? The Znamya magazine did a good job with its awards: I was especially happy for Leonid Zorin, who was presented with the plumpest envelope, as far as I know: “ For the affirmation of liberal values .” This time, the wording of the award coincided perfectly with the texts, which was not always the case. A faint hope still smolders within me that Zorin will receive one of the “Apollo” prizes, preferably the main one. But the awarding of the Znamensky Prize to Senchin for his “Minus” seriously annoyed me. There is indirect evidence that the matter will not be limited to a magazine prize, and Senchin will be drawn further to the Belkin Prize. In any case, in the pre-New Year questionnaire of Vremya MN, Sergei Ivanovich Chuprinin (one of the most influential members of the jury of the above-mentioned award) called Senchin “ the literary discovery of the year .” Well, the owner is a gentleman, of course, but Pushkin will turn over in his grave if Senchin is crowned. I would come up with another prize for this talented young man - the name Maxim Gorky , or even better - named after the Wanderer , because Alexey Maksimovich was still a man of culture, a builder, collector and defender, and not just a talented tramp, like the Wanderer. But what can you take from the intelligentsia? - don’t feed him bread, but let him caress the “nugget from the bottom”, let him partake of the “truth of life” from his hands. Tradition. If there is a demand for such a “truth of life” as Senchin writes, why shouldn’t a talented prose writer expand its production?

And finally, a few paragraphs on the “topic of the week”. An attentive reader must have noticed that I write about magazines in almost every issue of “Hunger” - I defend them from hasty “gravediggers”, promote them in every possible way, make references, and sometimes even dare to make quite “strategic” recommendations (how not to die at all). Actually, I once expressed the “sum of strategy” on the pages of Znamya, here . He spoke, very clearly understanding that none of this would be done, the process of falling circulation would continue, and the magazines would become more and more similar to each other. Unfortunately, in addition to the objective factors influencing this process, there are also subjective ones that are impossible to combat. Every editorial board is formed as an organism, and in order to radically change the editorial policy (whether economic or aesthetic), this organism must first be slaughtered. In any case, work hard with a scalpel to cut off what is unnecessary, obsolete, and inhibiting. I don’t know a single editor-in-chief who would dare to do this.

Last year, many large publishing houses turned their attention to modern Russian prose, and this means that “thick” magazines will soon completely lose their operational publishing role: “Eksmo” or “Olma” will easily buy the most popular authors from the magazines, and the share "fat people" will remain poetry and all kinds of "unformatted" writings. Meanwhile, the editors are still focused on large-scale, high-quality prose, and the reader, over the long period of dominance of this attitude, has tuned in to it. Including a professional reader, for example, me or Andrei Nemzer : simply, due to a long, long inertia, the issue of the “fat man” without good prose is not pleasant or nice to us, which, of course, is wrong.

Actually, the “journalistic” in a magazine, that which gives it the right to exist in the form of a periodical - journalism, polemics, criticism, bibliography - is not usually valued and is often simply omitted in reviews. But the magazines themselves do not value their “second pagination” before readers.

By the way, the “second pagination”, having become an independent publication, can even now count on relative (that is, not financial) success. An example of this is the St. Petersburg “New Russian Book” , a magazine that occupied a niche that was empty after the modification of the “Literary Review”.

Generally speaking, only such magazine projects - filling cultural voids - can be started now. Of the countless number of magazines and journals that arose throughout the 90s, only these survived, for example, the New Literary Review or, from another area, Arion. But openly “group” projects (from “Postscript” to “Babylon”) either failed completely, or the magazine degenerated into a rarely published almanac.

The magazine form is good for two opposing purposes: for literary struggle (and therefore any era of changing styles gives rise to many magazines) and for maintaining an established cultural tradition. To be honest, I haven’t seen any reasons for a real literary struggle yet, and as for the cultural tradition, there have been several breaks in it over a short period of time, and somehow it’s not entirely clear where to start counting.