Dmitry Bavilsky. Gypsy novel

Gypsy novel
Catachresis - 24: Vyacheslav Kuritsyn "7 prose". Collection of prose. "Amphora". 2002.

Dmitry Bavilsky

Publication date: December 24, 2002

The author, solving two conceptual problems -
model prose that responds
modern rhythms (rigid rotation on
radio and flashing banner on the screen
computer), and find the artistic formula
literature suitable for glossy
magazines, - produces fiction
units that surprise the author himself
with its isolation and energy.

V. Kuritsyn "Quick prose".

1.

Vyacheslav Kuritsyn presented at O.G.I. his new book - 396 pages of bare existence. The chairs were placed in a small hall, where there is usually no service, where there are no waiters. At first there were few people, Kur was nervous, but he didn’t show it, he delayed the start. The people lazily sipped their beer. Then they started, Kur immediately said that he would not give the book to anyone, but anyone could buy it right there, for 127 rubles. There were no takers. Kur continued to worry, but did not show it, although his hands were shaking. Perhaps because the author of the book being presented quit drinking and smoking. Even smoking.

Kuritsyn's texts were read by Kuritsyn's friends - artist Boris Berger and film critic Veronika Khlebnikova. They read amusingly, sometimes avidly, sometimes soulfully, sometimes alternately, and so people began to flow from neighboring halls here. They read so enthusiastically and funny that Kuritsyn wanted to read himself, he took the just published book from his friends and began to read it himself. About Borges, who blinded himself, about Castaneda, who dreamed of Don Juan, about Leo Tolstoy, giving a blackbird to Lev Pirogov.

Then we read it again and again, and simply couldn’t stop. The questions ended, but the people did not want to leave at all. The appetite came during the game. Everyone was so captivated by the texts that it became easy and free. No vodka. No grass. Kur sang a phrase from a Soviet opera, then offered to dance, but did not dance. Mitya Kuzmin asked the obligatory question. Oleg Dark sat with a stony face. Vadim Mesyats suggested singing a Russian romance. Kuritsyn's secret admirer, LJ user Erofan, who specially came to the presentation from Novosibirsk, asked for an autograph.

All the books were sold out. Even I, having overcome professional snobbery, bought it - and bought it. Here it is, the highest professionalism (I thought), to sell a book to a critic, and now the critic sits and writes about the book he bought with his own money.

Finally, the writer was surrounded by grateful admirers, all of whom received a drawing of Brother Fox as an autograph. Life may not have been successful, but it certainly got better.

2.

Vyacheslav Kuritsyn’s book has seven sections reflecting different types of writing, from “infantile prose” of the late 80s, through “biographical” and “ideological” of the early 90s, to the glossy and “quick” prose of the turn of the millennium. What came out was a classic selection, a retrospective, a representative selection, packed into a neat amphora coffin.

Kuritsyn is known primarily as a critic, interpreter, and interpreter. Preacher and conductor of postmodernism. The latter in his work consisted of mixing a variety of genres; Kuritsyn managed to create a dizzying mix of analytics mixed with personal and life circumstances. This was one of Kuritsyn’s main artistic discoveries - to talk about the facts of literature and art from within oneself. Not as events of a cultural context, but as facts of personal life.

For criticism and journalism of the last quarter of the twentieth century, this mixing was a demonstration of the serious and responsible position of a person representing only his own opinion. Previously, a critic had to be a party member (Soviet or anti-Soviet); before, a critic noted how much a work of art corresponded to or how much it deviated from the general line. Now everyone is his own boss, there is no party, no parties, only narrow departmental interests remain.

And how should an honest critic behave in such a situation? And it’s very simple - he must rely only on his own feelings and impressions, only on them. There are no more criteria and cannot be. And Kuritsyn, demonstrating deliberate looseness and freedom, was one of the first who began to assert this only honest position in Russian cultural journalism.

Its apotheosis was Kuritsyn’s weekly reviews in RJ, the number of which until recently was close to two hundred. And I hope that someday Kur will resume this project. In one form or another.

3.

However, in his new book (tenth) there is no criticism or journalism, just pure fiction. Although, in fairness, we note that for Kuritsyn there is not much difference between this and that. Never existed.

Because the main character of his poetry and prose was always himself, Vyach. Nick. Kuritsyn, thinking and suffering in one form or another, genre, discourse, subdued, rebuilt, reshaped, remade to suit the needs of a particular moment. His texts are physiological. And not at all because they contain urine, poop and sperm. Kuritsyn's texts are physiological because they are the only way for the author to survive a particular day and hour, because they are analyzes of real life situations. And how many red blood cells, leukocytes, salt and sugar are there in them? Well, yes, a typical sowing tank.

I write, therefore I exist; I write, which means I spend my time in the only possible, only productive way. Writing is not only a way of interaction, relationship with the world, but also with oneself; outside the letter, outside the textual tension, Kuritsyn seems to not exist at all, well, a tired man walks, toils, shakes his hair, drinks bitters, sits dullly with dull eyes in the corner. But in the world of letters, everything turns out to be completely different: it’s as if you stepped on stage and your soul rushed to heaven. The world flares up with a million lights, lights up, lights up, beats the tambourine, sings and dances, leads round dances, so cheerfully, so cleverly that no vodka is needed. Or herbs.

All this was demonstrated by the presentation, which began heavily, slowly swaying in clouds of cigarette smoke (oh, how disgustingly they smoke a lot in O.G.I.!). And only when the texts began to sound, everything rolled off like a lump from a mountain, our souls opened and began to communicate.

Alexander Shaburov has a short story called “Why do we love Kuritsyn?” For letters, definitely. It will be much more difficult to love Kuritsyn as a person; he can often be difficult and unbearable. But in the texts he is so young, so handsome...

4.

I’ll put forward a hypothesis: “7 proses” is, in fact, a seven-part novel, a traditional educational novel, a classic career novel, a saga about spiritual and moral quests. Extremely responsive to innovations and trends, Kur passes them through himself, dissolves in the new, each time sincerely trying to become someone else. In short, he's playing. Now - into a Russian writer, now - into an academic scientist, now into a fashionable critic, and even into a binge drunkard. And this is where the art ends. For the sake of your belly. For the sake of a possible text, into which all life is gradually turning.

But at some stage, Kuritsyn understands that a game is just a game, that a gesture is just a gesture, not sparing yourself, your mother and father for the sake of such cultural gestures is not very productive for you, as for a living and warm-blooded person.

This is exactly how the series of novels about “Matador” arises. Kitsch, trash, camp, comic book novel, the cornerstone of which is a fast-moving plot, a wildly expanding convention. Of course, the novels about "Matador" can also be understood as another game - at being a trash writer. However, such a game is too small for Kuritsyn - there is little existence or existential risk in it. That is why there are only two “Matadors”, and not twenty-two.

I get tired of playing. The years lead to harsh prose. Harsh years. This is why Kur collects this collection, uniting disparate texts with one single character - himself.

5.

The different parts of “7 Prose” are connected by the author’s comments, which create a sense of unity within the collection. Thus, characterizing his opuses of 1990, Kuritsyn writes: “ The author notes that the process of acquiring historical memory and cultural identity, marked by a meaningful and mutually polite discussion between the magazines Ogonyok and Our Contemporary, has reached a dead end: the values ​​of both camps turned out to be exaggerated. The author himself has to dive into the dust of the archives in order to find moral and aesthetic points of support in history ." Reminds me of common subtitles of adventure novels, doesn’t it?! A trifle, however, it gives the collection another dimension.

Despite the fact that these texts are blatantly different in style. It happened once before. Andrey Bitov also collects his novels from various novels and short stories. Then he calls his books, for example, “dotted-line novels.” Let's remember.

It happened once before. And even the publishing house "Amphora" published a book of prose by one writer (who greatly influenced Kuritsyn's work), combining a handful of disparate texts into the semblance of a single text. Of course, I'm talking about Andrei Levkin's collection, published a year and a half ago under the title "Gypsy Novel."

So we can say that such a technique of combining the incompatible is a manifestation of the peculiarities of the new St. Petersburg school. It is not for nothing that in recent years Kuritsyn has been living for a long time in the city of three revolutions and, according to rumors, is going to write a novel about the Leningrad siege.

6.

Although, in fact, the cross-cutting plot of “7 Prose” is the liberation of Kuritsyn from the shackles of not the St. Petersburg, but the Yekaterinburg school of writing - overly detailed, overly folded, graphomaniacally abundant. There is, there is such a trend in the Urals: such prose usually starts tricks with the plot in order to abandon it in the middle, getting bogged down in metaphors and descriptions. Alexander Vernikov, Valery Iskhakov, Olga Slavnikova, Alexander Krasheninnikov, someone else...

The cultural layer of provincial life is shallow and random; recreating the context requires painstaking and tedious textual work, not intensive, but extensive. Therefore, Ural prose writers are forced to work for themselves, and for that guy, and for their entire mineral-rich region. There is not and cannot be a purity of presentation of the plot here - too many circumstances need to be introduced in order to.

Kuritsyn's early prose grows from here - a thick everyday mess, multiplied by the metaphysically rich tongue-tiedness of work in the spirit of Andrei Levkin. Lyrical digressions and ideological statements, abstract observations and rhetorical figures are more important here than the feelings of the characters and their sparse, deliberately unnatural dialogues. This is the dotted plot in the story “The Love of a Postmodernist”, these are the endless paper illusions in “Dry Thunderstorms: Flickering Zones”.

And there would be no happiness, but day labor helped. Journalism saves Kuritsyn from unnecessary details, pretentiousness and barracks-baroque inventiveness. A new life begins.

7.

By the way, about postmodernism. Strangely, in Kuritsyn’s version, presented in “7 proses,” he turns out to be hostile to lightness and entertainment. Because all these texts that accompanied critical statements and declarations turn out to be overloaded with allusions and reminiscences, quotes and outright mockery. But not with an explicit, sane plot: “ the author masters the modern and accessible to him (not all issues of Rodnik, Mitya Magazine and Sine Phantom reach Sverdlovsk) literary avant-garde. Having read Andrei Levkin, the St. Petersburg underground and magical criticism, the author Inspiredly kneads the meat of the text at night, surrendering to grape metaphors, muddy imagery and sadistic syntax ."

It would seem that everything should have been arranged in exactly the opposite way: after all, postmodernity implies playfulness, a lack of depth, and blatant entertainment. But, strangely, the dehumanized fiction to which Kur devoted so much effort was converted in Russia not into elite prose (as happened in the West), but into the low genres of pulp fiction.

Kuritsyn's case demonstrates a strange, aesthetic paradox: the indissolubility of the personal and creative interferes with free plot construction, nailing the author to the once chosen method with seven nails. Thus, practice blatantly diverges from theory, and life once again triumphs over art.

The primordial postmodernism of "7 Pros" turns out to be defeated in the author's most postmodern texts - in the novels about "Matador". For Bogov - God's, for the bear - a den, for Kuritsyn - a calm and quiet life - but already beyond the circulation of 3000 copies. and the sudden death of postmodernism.

Well, long, long summer!..