Sergey Kostyrko. Review by S.K. #92

Review by S.K. #92
About the novel by Sergei Gandlevsky "<NRZB>" - "Banner", # 1, 2002

Sergey Kostyrko

Publication date: February 12, 2002

Gandlevsky's novel "[ NRZB ]" is one of the most notable January publications in magazines. Most likely, this novel will remain one of the central publications of the year. Gandlevsky wrote about what he knows - about literature and literary life. One could say that this is a kind of continuation of the prose of “Craniotomy,” but let’s not rush into it.

The novel depicts the types, plots and atmosphere of underground literary Moscow in the early seventies, inserted into the framework of today's literary life. Fifty-year-old writer Lev Krivorotov remembers himself at twenty - his first woman, the youthful excitement of versification, his comrades in the literary association, his first love; acquaintance with the disgraced poet Chigrashov, who became Krivorotov’s idol; the story of the amateur almanac, quickly published in the West, and the subsequent measures of the authorities ("preventive conversations" in the KGB, expulsion from institutions, the surrender of a friend as a soldier) and Chigrashov's suicide that coincided with them - all that determined his subsequent fate. Episodes from Krivorotov's youth are woven into the story of him today - a relatively prosperous, "average" writer, tormented by the awareness of his life as a crushing defeat.

This novel should apparently be regarded as a “commentary novel” about the fate of Gandlevsky’s literary generation. Bitter prose, elegiac intonation, even with sparkles of black humor. Written with sincerity. Almost mourning that young, open, impetuous, “in the first breath” broken by unrequited love, “betrayal” friend and the coldish detachment of Chigrashov. I completely agree with the assessments of the level of the novel already given by critics ( Ageev , Nemzer , Uritsky). This is a really good read. My differences with colleagues who wrote about the novel lie in the reading of its contents.

In "[NRZB]" there is a complex psychological picture - the technique of improperly direct speech is used, moving the reader away from the hero-narrator and, as it were, leaving room for the reader to judge the hero. That is, the author does not insist that the reader completely identify himself with the hero. And yet, we learn about everything that happens from the hero, and, accordingly, the narrative, internal reference points, psychological and emotional mood are determined here by the level of understanding and feelings of the hero. So the distance between the reader and the hero (author and hero) here is quite arbitrary.

I would define the tone of the narrative as the tone of elegy with an admixture of the hero’s sorrowful and accusatory bewilderment before time “straightened out” his life. Plus a deeply hidden resentment towards time and fate (here I disagree with Nemzer, who refused to see resentment in the novel, although it is symptomatic that this word nevertheless arose in his analysis). The resentment is already in the very comparison of how Leva’s life began, what she teased, what she promised, and what she led to; in the situation of Krivorotov’s late ambiguous fame as a specialist in Chigrashov’s work - first of all, and secondly - as a poet. With almost masochistic relish, Krivorotov describes his “typical” author’s evening: forty minutes of reading his own poems with polite silence in the hall, and then - the genuine interest of the awakened public in his stories about Chigrashov.

The hero is sure that life is not a success. You can understand why he thinks this way. It's harder to agree.

Krivorotov pronounces his initial idea of ​​the viability of life ironically (“Creativity, love, masterpieces, the period of persecution, gray hair, tailcoat, Stockholm, laureate speech...”), but the irony here does not so much kill the infantilism of dreams as purify its pathos.

Krivorotov’s main pain is his resentment towards Chigrashov, who brushed Krivorotov off the board of poetry like a bishop a pawn (“a boy of good average abilities”) and, as it were, finishing him off now, forcing him to live and “feed” not on his own, but on his, Chigrashov’s, life. Yes, to fail literary is really scary. But - on one condition: if there was something to be realized. However, when reading the novel, there is no feeling that in Krivorotov a certain poetic world is burning out without being embodied. It seems that poetry for the hero was initially a means of self-affirmation (and partly psychotherapy, partly a form of opposition to inertia and immobility), but by no means a point of connection with life. His feverish need to hear “Krivorotov the genius” is more likely from the area of ​​“existential needs.”

In the same vein, I would consider Krivorotov’s loneliness, or more precisely, his isolation from his colleagues: if in his youth a certain internal distance that the hero kept with his friends in the literary association was determined by youthful jealousy and rivalry, but still in those young gatherings there was something special for Krivorotov. poetry, was a reflection of the present, then in the descriptions of current literary “get-togethers” the narrator almost savors the disgusting spectacle of self-satisfied mediocrities, literary swindlers and takers gathered together. Here is the same subconscious infantile orientation in relation to writers as a community of the elite, the very idea of ​​​​which (the community) seems to Krivorotov at first vulgarized in the literary association ("panopticon") by a gathering of notorious graphomaniacs and ignoramuses, and in the present time - by the sight of colleagues drinking greedily, untidy and munching at literary buffets. Of course, literary “parties” of old and today can seem disgusting. Or they may not seem so. This is what eyes to look at. Krivorotov in adulthood could well have seen literary life through the eyes of Chigrashov, who once advised him not to exaggerate society’s attention to poetry and art in general. Poets are doomed to loneliness and the deafness of those around them, and just as once in the seventies lonely graphomaniacs came from all over Moscow and the near Moscow region to meetings of literary studios, like the one described in the novel, to bask next to each other, so for the same thing, in essence, They still gather for their “parties” today. (I would add one more color to these “pathetic” gatherings today - the mocking smile of the time, which has finally opened all the roads in literature to a generation with initially frostbitten feet.)

Another pain of the hero is unrequited love for Anna; Having begun with feverish tossing in his youth, it remained throughout his life as a dull, persistent pain from the feeling of emptiness in the place that Anna should have occupied in his life. At the end of the novel, the hero loses her twice: from a random semi-familiar person he learns about her death. And almost simultaneously Chigrashov’s notes fall into his hands, from which the hero learns that precisely in those days, thirty years ago, when he was going crazy trying to win Anna’s love, she chose Chigrashov over him.

Yes, it’s hard... But life in general is a hard thing. However, a hard life and a failed life are still not the same thing. And maybe we are not dealing with a ruined life, but with a person tormented by this feeling?

Why does the hero - and, it seems, the author follow him - believe that his life has not been a success?

Unhappy unrequited love? Well, what else she should be is in her very nature. By the age of fifty, Krivorotov could have guessed about some of the mechanisms of the completeness of her life.

Despite all the cruelty with which life treated Krivorotov, she was, in her own way, favorable to him. Everything that the hero received from the hands of fate then turned out to be real. And the woman he fell in love with, and his love itself, which was enough for his whole life - this is where Krivorotov just happened to be. And the poems that he loved in his youth and with which, putting everything aside, he studied all his life, were (let’s take his word for it here) real. And the fact that the author of these poems was also a man with all sorts of human properties - both good and bad - is normal; this fact could confuse a young maximalist, but not a gray-haired man who has lived his life. Finally, the story of the almanac and the subsequent punitive measures of the authorities, a story that “shell-shocked” the hero, nevertheless did not deprive him of self-respect - during the “conversation” at the KGB, Krivorotov behaved quite decently.

And the literature that he loved answered him exactly as much as he loved - and the book came out, and the unwritten does not languish, and his contribution as a researcher to the history of modern poetry is undoubted. And all these teenage dreams ("...gray hair, tailcoat, Stockholm, laureate speech...") - are literary regalia really that important when we are talking about life itself in earnest? Doesn’t Krivorotov know what a pitiful sight the laureates are trying to live on interest from their past.

The hero himself seems to understand all this, but cannot do anything about his resentment. His appeal to the past, his toil - from concentration on the question “Why do I need all this?”, but by no means on the question “Why did I need all this?” Perhaps this is why the existential meaning of acquired experience, flickering in the novel, remains artistically unrealized. That is, I repeat, this is more of a “commentary novel” on the history of a generation, rather than a novel itself with its own novelistic thought.

In “[NRZB]” Gandlevsky, in my opinion, is further from himself than in his poems or in “Craniotomy”. In “Trepanation...” there was an attempt (another question is how successful) to continue in prose what Gandlevsky did in verse - to establish, as it were, “directly” connections with the essential, there is the question “Why did all this happen to us?” The author seemed to overcome “literature” with his own difficult life experiences, and this is precisely what made the prose of “Trepanations...” literature. In the new novel, he turned to “literature” itself, to the help of fictional moves and schemes that have their own energy reserve - and the result was fiction. And the author cannot escape comparisons with predecessors who have already loaded these moves with their content - from Cortazar with his “The Pursuer” (in which the figure of the life writer of a brilliant saxophonist is no less important for the author than the figure of the musician himself) to Trifonov with his “Time and Place "(It’s difficult, say, to get rid of the feeling that the image of Arina, who made Leva Krivorotov a man, who opened his eyes to what is authentic in literature, is a copy of the image of Susanna from “Time and Place”; I’m not even talking about the intonational structure of Trifonov’s prose, in much reproduced in "[NRZB]"). And the point is not whether Gandlevsky was consciously guided by these and other texts or not - the point is that these plot archetypes, so to speak, hang in the air; a little more - and they will become common place. Just like the love triangles combined in the novel: Krivorotov-Anna-Chigrashov, Krivorotov-poetry-Chigrashov. The reader, having reached the place where the hero learns from Chigrashov’s notes about who Anna chose after Krivorotov’s escape, does not experience the shock that the hero experiences - the reader, following the development of relationships in this love triangle, played out by the author according to the eternal scheme of Pierrot Harlequin-Columbine knows about the outcome in advance. And he takes for granted some romantic (almost hysterical) melodrama in the development of this plot.

Some cynical bravado in the brutal final scenes - say, taking a photograph together with a former KGB officer, almost fraternizing with him as a colleague; or a scene with a prostitute who looks crazy like Anna, with whom the hero hastily copulates somewhere in a remote Moscow courtyard, reads like the hero’s attempt to finally make some kind of reckoning with the past. A gesture that smacks of the same teenage infantilism, the same desire to hide from damned questions about the essence of life lived into the cozy sweet bitterness of resentment.

...The above is not a complaint against the author and not an attempt at “expert assessment”; these are simply reflections on the novel, written with gratitude to the author - modern prose rarely provides opportunities for conversation on such topics. And yet, whether we like it or not, whether the author set such tasks for himself or not, we are faced with an attempt to paint a portrait of a generation in its strengths and in its weaknesses. Naturally, you cringe as you read it and try it on. And there’s no escape. It seems. And it’s very similar.