Alexander Ageev. Hunger 71

Hunger 71
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: April 11, 2002

I am forced to ask my readers for forgiveness for my long absence. “Columnist,” generally speaking, is a cruel role that does not recognize any valid reasons for temporary interruptions in communication: either write with “I can’t” or leave. And, to be honest, I was seriously thinking for some time: well, I wrote seven dozen texts for RZh, a quite decent number, and it seems that not everyone managed to get tired of it, so isn’t it time, before it’s too late, before the reader’s interest has completely faded, to evaporate beautifully ?

But three months of sluggish writing and non-writing somehow very clearly proved to me: when you don’t function in a strict mode, you quickly become dull and in your judgments about literature and life you begin to side with someone who is energetic and continues to act, and your own unwritten thoughts are all equally thoughtless - even traces of them evaporate with lightning speed. But I’m not yet ready to always agree with Nemzer (for example) and think in a disinterested-private (asocial, if you like) mode. So I’ll try to somehow tie up the loose ends and get back into the role.

But, to be honest, these months, during which I was absent here, were not a time of wild flowering of Russian literature. After the excellent "<NRZB>" by Sergei Gandlevsky (January "Znamya"), the magazines regaled with some kind of sourness, and the most outstanding example of this sourness - the novel "The Hypnotist's Daughter" by Dmitry Ragozin - immediately after Gandlevsky the same "Znamya" was pressed into two rooms. I remember once upon a time, at the very height of perestroika, when Znamya was, as they say, ahead of the rest in terms of the abundance of sensational republications, suddenly, for no reason at all, they published Vil Lipatov’s completely rotten novel “The Lion on the Lawn.” Looking for at least some meaning in this publication (it was, after all, a time of unexpected discoveries and transformations), I read Lipatov out of pure trust in the editors and still remember the righteous irritation I felt: they cheated me! A full-time working day was stolen! So I spent several hours on Ragozin, full of irritated bewilderment, expecting that not on this, but on the next page, the flat and tedious text, despite its flirtatiousness, would miraculously acquire volume and charm. After all, Ragozin's previous work - the story "Battlefield" ("Banner", 2000, # 9) - was very wow.

No “transformation,” however, happened, and I racked my brains for some time, trying to understand why the magazine took this frankly suicidal action. It is, of course, “how many heads - so many minds,” as S.I. Chuprinin likes to say, but there are cases of absolutely killer unambiguity. Roman Ragozin is just one of them. And since there could be no aesthetic reasons for publishing this rotten stuff, you begin to look for extra-literary reasons, of which the first that comes to mind is the emptiness of the editorial portfolio. And the constant reluctance of Znamya to redistribute magazine space, squeezing out the prose department in favor of the “second pagination” - journalism, criticism, publications. No, there must be “great prose”, even if there is none!

Then I was extremely upset by the shameful - any other word would be inaccurate here - debut of the Belkin Prize . After the Apollo Grigoriev Prize was awarded to Andrei Dmitriev, the only real contender for the Belkin laurels was Olga Slavnikova’s “Immortal.” I don’t want to say anything bad about the other texts on the shortlist, but they were all simply from a different hierarchical row, from “group B” (except perhaps Faina Grimberg ’s “Mavka” - an incomprehensible whim of the award organizers - a thing completely from an extra-literary context) . In short, Slavnikova had no real competitor, and suddenly - such a passage!

I never believed in bonus “conspiracies”, or in the omnipotence of the “party”, or in other near-literary legends, but here the first thing that came to my mind was a conspiracy. Most likely, it was not even formulated by the participants, but formed on a subconscious level - a sort of, in a word, “conspiracy of feelings.” Andrei Nemzer, also taken aback by the decision of the Belkin jury, began, I remember, to think about the possible desire of the jury to act unconventionally, then somewhere I read or heard guesses about a direct “order” from the publishing house “EXMO-Press” (they say, just such fiction - such as the story of the winning Sergei Babayan - this publishing house wants to publish, and therefore it was important for him to award the desired format with a prestigious prize), but all this did not seem to me a serious explanation for the obvious violation of the rules of fair play.

Whatever you want, only one plausible version came to my mind: Sergei Babayan’s ordinary story was given a prize only because they really didn’t want to give it to Slavnikova.

Olga Slavnikova, as far as I know and feel, some part of the Moscow literary “public” is simply “fed up” with her energy and speed of conquering almost all literary “platforms”. I can very well imagine how much a metropolitan literary establishment, somewhat overweight and lazy, can irritate a purposeful provincial woman who takes on any literary work and does it (to the irritation of some observers) almost always well. Slavnikova has been working hard in the capital for two years now, she is helping out the critical departments of several thick magazines for mere pennies, she is carrying (and without any cynicism, as far as I managed to understand) the most idiotic among our awards - “Debut”, and at the same time she has the strength to write such brilliant things as "Immortal." How can we not arouse hostility among some colleagues (to put it mildly). A recent example: a journalist from the “Weekly Magazine” lists the works included in the shortlist of the “National Bestseller”, and only one of the listing items comments: “... the inevitable “Immortal” by Olga Slavnikova, which appeared on the shortlists of all literary awards, but not one of them was ever awarded... ” A quick question: what feelings does the author of the note (Maria Uvarova, unknown to me) have towards Slavnikova and has “Immortal” become worse, having been on the short lists of all the awards? Correct answer: she harbors unimportant feelings, and “Immortal” in her (Uvarova’s) eyes has become much worse, because she is tired and tired. After all, the metaphor of horse racing has long been stuck in the minds of small-time reporters writing about literary awards: a horse that has endured several races in a row, of course, could not help but run out of steam.

If there really was a “conspiracy of feelings” (and I simply don’t find any other plausible versions), then it’s sad. For example, I will think hard about whether to take part in the next “raffle” of the Belkin Prize, since its debut turned into such an indecent farce.

And one more thought came to me after Belkin’s embarrassment: how good and right it is to have another profession and make a living from more than just literature. In a practical, everyday sense, it’s better not to depend on our “literary life” (which was semi-vile under Soviet rule, but now is simply cramped in a few pockets of cultural space, and that’s why I always want to ventilate it). The best thing is to be a sea captain, like Viktor Konetsky, who died the other day, and from the height of the captain’s bridge to sneeze at obscene literary fuss.

What else unpleasantly struck me in the past month was some completely shameless PR campaign to maintain the interest of the enlightened public in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter products. It would be nice if the tabloids and ladies' magazines were zealous - no, seemingly decent people in the so-called "quality press" were engaged in this matter with scope and seriousness. That is, I can assume that half of these unprecedented efforts (that is, half of the journalists and critics) were directly paid for (purchased) by the Rosman publishing house or the distributors of the Hollywood film, but the second half clearly worked without any extraordinary allowances, according to the principle, the formulation which I once heard from the mouth of the head of a department of one serious and respected weekly: “We write either about what everyone writes about, or about what no one writes about.” I remember that I didn’t really like this principle, because, in my opinion, you need to write about what is interesting and significant. And the purely financial nature of “Pottermania” cannot but be transparent to anyone who has read Rowling’s cheap products and has not yet forgotten what real English children’s literature is. I'm not even talking about the masterpieces - "Alice" or Milnov's "Winnie the Pooh", but not even God knows what Tolkien, with whom the Potter series is blatantly compared every now and then, is ten heads taller than this moronic chewing gum.

In this regard, I remember one of the last chapters of Mann’s “Magic Mountain”, which is called “The Demon of Stupidity” - everything is said very well there about such mass “manias”, to the pressure of which even quite healthy people sometimes succumb: “ All the inhabitants of the sanatorium were very busy, indulged in a wide variety of activities, but from time to time one of these activities degenerated, became a fashionable obsession, and everyone began to indulge in it fanatically ." Elsewhere it is said: "... it was a life without time, a life without worries and without hopes, decaying and fussy debauchery, in a word, a dead life ." If we remember that The Magic Mountain ends with a picture of a pan-European catastrophe, which Thomas Mann understood primarily as a cultural catastrophe, the role of “fashionable obsession” in Europe’s slide into chaos is understandable.

Johan Huizinga gave this triumphant and now “demon of stupidity” another name - “puerilism” (from the Latin puer - boy, youth). In his book “In the Shadow of Tomorrow” (the book was published exactly on the eve of the Second World War and, in fact, predicted it), he wrote: “ Puerilism - this is what we will call the position of a society whose behavior does not correspond to the level of rationality and maturity that it has achieved due to its ability to judge things; which, instead of preparing the adolescent for entry into adulthood, adapts its own behavior to that of adolescence... Countless numbers of both educated and uneducated people cultivate an unchanging childish attitude towards life... The masses feel simply remarkable in a state of semi-voluntary stupidity. This state can at any moment become extremely dangerous due to the fact that the brakes of moral convictions no longer operate ."

The complete breakdown of the “brakes of moral convictions” is illustrated by another noisy campaign of recent weeks - the promotion and promotion of Prokhanov’s novel “Mister Hexogen” by the forces of “young intellectuals” (as Prokhanov himself calls them) from the publishing house Ad marginem and Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

But this is a story that requires a separate (and extremely unpleasant) conversation, and I’ll probably move it to next time.

And so as not to end on this gloomy note, I will still say that I also had reading, which redeemed all the sourness of the “literary life” of the last weeks. This is the absolutely magical “Berlin Flute” by Anatoly Gavrilov, which it would never have occurred to me to analyze in the same way that Sergei Kostyrko did it . A flute is a flute.

Then I finally found the time to really read (and even re-read in parts) A. Goldstein’s book “Aspects of Spiritual Marriage.” The book is rare, remarkable, in addition to all sorts of things, for the complete absence of that very “puerilism” that Huizinga spoke about. In fact, adult books written by adults for adults are becoming the greatest rarity in our literary circulation.

And thirdly, Anna Kuznetsova’s article “A Romance with Time Pressure” in the March “Banner”. Also very “grown up”. This article, among other things, convinced me that normal literary criticism is still possible.