Alexander Ageev. Hunger 68

Hunger 68
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: February 12, 2002

" TO then he doesn’t know Alexander Ageev? It's hard not to know him. He's a fighter. Consequently, he criticizes and hits . Good must be with fists ..."

So epically, in the Gogolian spirit, Maria Remizova begins to destroy me in her Novy Mir article “On the Question of Class Antagonism.”

At first I almost shed a tear (“Do you know the Ukrainian night? No, you don’t know the Ukrainian night! But everyone knows Ageev! Life is good!”), but through my tears I still noticed: the italic “ beats ” refers to “ fighter .” , but what does the italic “ criticizes ” refer to? Now, if it were written “ He is a critic and a fighter ,” then the next phrase would look stylistically balanced. But they decided to exclude me from the “ critics ”, and they forgot about “ critics ”...

This means that Remizova wrote her philippic with soul and emotion, and she had no time for balancing the phrase. My hand trembled at first, but then, “as the text progressed,” it grew stronger and stronger, and the critic sent me to the lackey’s office with a completely confident hand...

Generally speaking, it is an eternal problem - to respond or not to respond to criticism. The first impulse is always to fight back, catch up and add more. Then you cool down somewhat, and for a while it seems that the enemy’s wrongness is obvious and any reasonable reader will understand this. Therefore, it is more expressive to remain silent. A little later you realize that it’s not such a personal matter to answer or remain silent. Anyone who writes publicly, expressing certain thoughts, judgments, assessments, represents on behalf of those who do not write, but think in the same direction.

Having expressed my attitude towards the work of Roman Senchin in the long-ago autumn issue of "Hunger" , I quite unexpectedly provoked a rather heated discussion of the problem in the Russian Journal forum, and besides, I received several letters that convinced me that I was not alone in my feelings. Obviously, some circle of people who think differently also represent Remizov, so clarifying the position once again is not at all harmful.

But first, let’s exclude everything “personal”. Maria Stanislavovna Remizova, who was recently elected academician of the ARSS (beating Alexei Zverev , a much more serious critic, in the second round), is not at all the person with whom I would like to discuss Roman Senchin, or anything else. Quite a long time ago, a year ago, I found an opportunity to express my thoughts about this type of critic in a short opus called “On Class Leadership.” This is what was said there about Remizova:

I have always envied people who know “what’s right.” This cowardly envy, however, did not at all prevent us from experiencing the same bilious irritation regarding the correct actions (=texts) of the same people. At the same time, I remembered one of the class teachers who had the habit of saying “correct speeches” that were decidedly out of place: the correctness of the speeches clearly contrasted with the occasion. The reason was lively, “wrong,” multi-cause and multi-effect, ambiguous, located in a specific context, and the speeches were tablet-like. They were grinding...

The image of this “cool lady” always comes to my mind when I read the strict works of Maria Remizova: whether she is writing about the stories of Yuri Buida, or the novel by Mikhail Shishkin, or trying to put in its place the excessively proud (in her opinion) “non-literature” fiction"...

Maria Stanislavovna must have been offended by the “cool lady”, and this offense was reflected in her explanation to the public: “ We allow ourselves to treat Mr. Ageev so unceremoniously, since he himself never stands on ceremony with those who, for some reason, or is currently undesirable ." “ They ” really treat “ Mr. Ageev ” unceremoniously - they call, one might say, a parvenu, then a lackey (who am I with, I wonder?), they establish the stylistic identity of my sayings with the sayings of Smerdyakov, and so on. . This happens to affected moralists when their “symbol of faith” is attacked.

So, it’s somehow inconvenient for me to scold at this level, and I will try to stay in the realm of the rational, correcting and clarifying Remizova here and there.

The bone of contention between us, in fact, is not even Senchin. The bone of contention is my open contempt for the “people”, for the “ordinary people”. “Ordinary people,” in my opinion, is, on the one hand, an aggressive self-identification of social outsiders who do not want to be responsible for anything, but always lay claim to the biggest piece of the public pie, and on the other hand, a sweet intellectual myth that has miraculously survived 1917 However, it is clear what a miracle - the Soviet government tried very hard, and a certain monstrous hybrid was formed: in the minds of the Soviet intelligentsia, the popular literature of the 19th century was mixed, the creators of which did not know with what voluptuousness the liberated “people” would begin to exterminate the “educated”, and the official Soviet the cult of this "people". It was somehow not customary to remember in what forms the “people” “awakened”. The famous scientist and publicist Andrei Zubov not so long ago very vividly spoke about them on the pages of the same “New World”, which, with the help of Maria Remizova, now counts me among the “lackeys”:

Our people killed God in their hearts, because God was to them, a bully and a greedy reptile, a thorn in the side of their atrocities and robberies .

Not with such expression, but several times I spoke in the same spirit, and even much more extensively than in connection with Senchin. One of my articles even has the subtitle “ Anti-people article ”. There we are talking about today’s “people”, who, whatever one may say, after the revolution received the opportunity to climb the social ladder, but not everyone took advantage of this opportunity, because they realized that remaining in the role of “ordinary people” is easier and more profitable. I don’t like the word “redneck,” but this is “redneck,” and why not despise it?

Well, Remizova says that in Russian literature such an attitude towards the people is “ recorded mainly in the images of lackeys .” He quotes, naturally, Dostoevsky and Nekrasov - from the poem “Who Lives Well in Russia.”

If we talk about the school literature course (and Remizova, judging by her usual critical tools, has a Soviet literature textbook forever imprinted in her head), then this is probably true.

But I honestly want to stand up for the honor of Russian literature, which, unlike Maria Remizova, did not stand still and reacted quite vividly to the events taking place in Russia, changing, among other things, its point of view on the “people”. At school, apparently, they didn’t “go through” either Bunin’s “Village,” or Chekhov’s “Muzhikov,” or Chapygin’s “White Skete,” or Shishkov’s “Taiga,” or, God forbid, “The Tale of the Days of My Life” by Ivan Volnov, or Zamyatin's "Uyezdny", nor the stories of Kasatkin and Podyachev, nor much else written after the first Russian revolution. The “people” had not yet reached their full potential in this revolution, but it was, in general, clear what to expect from them. And honest Russian literature - with fear and confusion - could not help but say about this.

I strongly recommend that Maria Stanislavovna read at least something from my list, so as not to remain in the ridiculous position of the people-loving Vera Figner , when this is a completely different century, and the people managed not only to brilliantly “win”, but also to curse their victory .

And there is also a wonderful book that helps well with the intelligentsia’s “love of the people” - “Cursed Days” by Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. Let me give you a couple of quotes from there. Someone tells Bunin that the Bolsheviks are committing atrocities in Rostov, shooting, in particular, 600 nurses, and Bunin writes:

Well, if not six hundred, then still probably quite a lot. This is not the first time for our Christ-loving peasants, about whom these sisters themselves have spread so many legends, to beat them and rape them .

But Bunin recalls his critics, whom Remizova looks up to:

I often remember the indignation with which my seemingly entirely black images of the Russian people were met. And they are still indignant, and who is it? Those who have been nourished and fed with the very literature that for a hundred years has disgraced literally all classes, that is, the “priest”, the “philistine”, the tradesman, the official, the policeman, the landowner, the wealthy peasant - in a word, everyone and everything, with the exception of some - the “people” - horseless, of course - “youth” and tramps .

There is, of course, an opinion that Bunin was unfair because he was “socially disadvantaged” by the revolution, but then let Astafiev re-read Remizov, “The Sad Detective” at least, or “Lyudochka” - what, will he also send him to the lackey? Astafiev, meanwhile, no longer even has contempt for the type of people portrayed by Roman Senchin - he has a deep hatred for them.

Well, that’s enough education on the subject of Russian literature, “the people” and “servility”, and now about Senchin. Having re-read my “Hunger”, to which Remizova reacted so nervously, I did not feel the desire to say anything more about Senchin. Well, re-read it, or read it for those who haven’t read it.

Senchin is not a mystery. Just when I was reading Remizova’s article, the media were vying with each other to talk about the tragedy in Kolomna: two teenage girls threw themselves from the roof. I felt sorry for the girls exactly until the moment when it turned out that they had left suicide letters in which they named by name those who were responsible for their deaths - teachers and peers. Pity was immediately mixed with a somewhat more tart feeling. This is the type of consciousness that Senchin personifies.

Remizova writes:

Yes, they are weak and weak-willed. Yes, their dreams are in many ways miserable, just as their existence is miserable. But in them lives a longing, expressed only by the narrator, for another existence, the principles of which they will never formulate and, perhaps, will never understand. And this painful gap between man and existence, which forces him to rush about like an animal in a cage and howl at the moon, is described in “Minus” with such disarming frankness, with such pain that you need to have a very specific ear not to notice it .

Why, we also noticed a “ longing for another being ,” but at the same time a powerless hatred of being simply, not “ other .” Senchin, with his “ anguish and pain ,” is very similar to those suicide girls - he writes, one might say, suicide letters and presents them with bills to anyone but himself. Why is it necessary to accept this kind of bestial melancholy as some kind of value? It seems that Remizova unconsciously takes Senchin’s characters for “our little brothers” - the awakening of the spark of God in these very “brothers” should really touch, and you can’t hit them on the head. But we are talking about people, and if they have reduced themselves to a bestial state, then hitting them on the head for this is a holy thing.

Well, God bless her, Remizova. I’d rather take a walk through the pages of “The New World”, which gave her a platform. Here is number 10 for last year, Maya Kucherskaya’s review of Senchin’s book “Athens Nights” . The reviewer conscientiously searches for at least something human in this prose, and no matter how hard she tries, she does not find it. A brief summary of her search:

Let's sum up the disappointing results. Close domestic history? Need not. Far? Especially. As it is said in “Common Day,” history is just “a chain of amusingly bloody tales, which from time to time you can read from the stub of a cigarette before you pass out.” Faith? The temple is closed with a large castle, but no one particularly regrets this. As is popularly explained in the same “Common Day”, in the church there is only a place for “dejected old women” who, in their youth, sinned to their heart’s content, and in their old age decided to atone for the past. Creation? But painting will not provide food, and it is abandoned by the heroes of “The Athenian Nights,” however, the life of Markin, who continues to write prose, is no brighter for this. Friendship? What is friendship? A slight ardor of a hangover... A quarrel on the verge of a bloody fight. Love (well, at least in the most primitive sense of the word)? Again a refusal. Family Children? They just pull down. The wife shows off her “ugly belly” and then forces her to earn money and go out with the child.

Very accurately - this is the whole of Senchin, there is absolutely nothing else in him (except for a small plastic gift - to describe).

But the reviewer can’t stop there! In the Russian tradition, a writer is, by definition, a humanist, a fighter against all kinds of evil and a seeker of the ideal. Russian tradition does not suggest any other writers. Therefore, a 180-degree turn follows and something pathetic is said, since it is not supported by anything:

I declare with Stanislavsky’s senile tenor – I don’t believe it! Before us is only a mask, a pose, a role, which is still not played very convincingly.

Through all these “fuck”, “starry”, despair, cold, cynicism, hopelessness, through the slits of a black stocking pulled over one’s own head, the author’s confused, surprised eyes look at us - is everything really as I wrote? ? Lovelessness, airlessness, emptiness. Is this what people were born for? This simply cannot be. The more terrible the world in "Athens Nights", the stronger the author's almost childlike amazement. Not Stanislavsky, not some Maya Kucherskaya - Roman Senchin does not believe himself. And wonderful. The dive to the bottom has already taken place. Now, according to the laws of common sense and the instinct clearly present in Senchin, the time is approaching to emerge and, hopefully, meet a new hero. His name will be different, but the writer will be no less interested in him than before, no less interested in himself.

"This simply can't happen!" - this is Kucherskaya’s only argument. Well, where is the “meeting with the new hero”? In “Minus” the hero is the same, in the “Periodicals” section of the same issue of “New World”, in which Remizova rebuffs me, Pavel Kryuchkov reacts to Senchin’s next opus this way:

" Roman Senchin. One plus one. - "Friendship of Peoples", 2001, # 10. - The worse, the better ," and Olga Slavnikova in the article "Rendez-vous at the end of the millennium" (still the same issue) about the same thing writes like this:

Two provincials in St. Petersburg, extremely poor not only in money, but also in spirit, looked after each other in a run-of-the-mill cafe. She works here as a waitress, he, a janitor at a nearby market, comes here for lunch. Neither in her nor in him is there a spark of God: they completely merge with that dull, dirty background, which for some reason the author was not bored with describing.

And he has nothing more to describe. And he will not have another hero. And for this he will also try to take revenge - I do not rule out that it is precisely those “literary ladies” whom Remizova is protecting from me.