Sergey Kostyrko. Simple Reading (7)

Simple Reading (7)
(Marginalia S.K.)

Sergey Kostyrko

Date of publication: October 7, 2003

With Sergei Chuprinin “ Free Radicals ” (“Banner” #9) - an article presenting and analyzing our left and other radicals in literature as a phenomenon. In terms of breadth of coverage and elaboration of facts, the article is fundamental. Its polemical tone provokes continuation of the conversation - clarification, prescribing, reformulation, challenging certain provisions. What, with gratitude to my colleague for the opportunity, will I do in this and the next edition of my “readings”.

Chuprinin:

“Here you go: there is no order in Russia yet, no satiety, but young rebels, subverters of the bourgeois order, bourgeois satiety, have already been born.

Moreover, as has been our custom since ancient times, the people, thank God, are silent, and the intelligentsia is muddying the waters. First of all, the so-called creative... <...>

She suddenly became bored. She needed shocks again. Or at least a shake-up."

“I have to admit, I have little faith that the project to radicalize Russian public opinion will succeed . ”

Chuprinin proceeds from the fact that our literary radicals are trying to resist not only liberal humanists, but also, as it were, current public tastes and public opinion.

That is, they are terribly far from the people. “What a slap in the face to public taste they don’t...”

By the way, they seem to think so to themselves. And therefore they take on proud poses of confrontation.

But I, for example, am intrigued by some oddities in this position.

What exactly are our radicals trying to resist society with?

The fight for the right to use swear words? But it’s hard for me to imagine that this could scare our society.

Calls for a “sexual revolution”? That is, (in our version) to the maximum simplification, relief of everyone and everything in this area: fucking is fucking, why bother? Why and who should we call here?.. “Come on,” says the American woman, whom, having just met, is thrown into bed by Danila, the charming bandit from the film by the esthete Balabanov, a cult figure for today’s Russians, united in worship everyone - from the brothers to “Walking Together”, who put the murderer Danila in their “top three” next to Putin and Plisetskaya).

Or the demand, expressed in the corresponding manifesto by St. Petersburg aesthetes, to call a Negrito a Negrito (which naturally also implies returning the right of citizenship in our public speech to the word “Jew” and giving such right to the words “chock” and “black-ass”)? Who could argue? A sociological survey conducted after the Tsaritsyn pogrom in Moscow showed sympathy for the pogromists among the overwhelming majority of respondents. Even real blood didn't stop it.

Or does anyone think that it is possible to seriously shock current society by cursing Yeltsin and Chubais, and calling the 90s a “shameful decade”? Or is it possible to scare the country with portraits of Lenin-Stalin-Beria, Lukashenko or Hitler?

What else do they have there? “Killing is sweet,” from the “esklibrists” and “Yes, death!” - from the National Bolsheviks? Is this something to scare society (see listed above)?

Well, what about the confrontation pose? Confrontation not with a handful of liberal humanists, even among humanities intellectuals who have become black sheep (the new intellectual fashion for slight fascistism is observed today even in the most respectable publications), but with society as a whole?

I see the proud pose of the opponents. I don't see any opposition.

I see - no, not rebels, where are such rebels? I see people rushing to fulfill the outlined social order.

People who translate into de jure what already exists de facto.

And at the same time, for some reason they are very cutesy and take heroic poses.

And I would not put the names of Olshansky , Pirogov , Toporov , etc. in the same row. with the names of “gloomy thinkers” from the “Russian Special Forces” - K. Krylov , for example, or E. Kholmogorov , or M. Remizov . These are serious people, they do not play, they do not assert themselves, like the first, against the backdrop of “cowardly inhabitants” and “relays of universal human values” - they do serious work: they develop an ideology for the coming Power. They cleanse the public consciousness of the garbage of universal human values. Well, let's say, from the concepts of the pre-revolutionary and partly Soviet - at least at the level of declarations - code of honor of the Russian officer or from the concepts of collective responsibility, national morality ( "The vile idea of ​​\u200b\u200b"national repentance", which paralyzed the minds of the best Russian people and cost us ... shame , humiliation, ridicule and mockery of all peoples, was invented precisely by Solzhenitsyn" , - Krylov). They offer their own image of Russia, to which all this universal, universal humane is contraindicated. They are consistent; they know that their cause is just and they will win - various kinds of behavioral and other taboos that culture imposes on society can be burdensome, and liberation from these taboos is always accepted with gratitude by the majority.

The juxtaposition on the pages of one publication ("Conservator") of "gloomy thinkers" - "special forces" and our radical gamers looked unusually expressive. Read at least the above-mentioned rebuke of Krylov to Solzhenitsyn and his nonsense about national repentance, published on one newspaper page (#18 (34), 2003), and then read the tortuously, talkatively, with glances and curtsies written afterword-commentary to this article by Olshansky , and you will feel who has the position and who has the positioning. Who acts as part of the coming Power, and who is its servant. Who is preparing the ground for a “new strong opposition leader”, who should replace the current ones, “nice” but “worthless”, and who is getting under their feet with their itch of literary self-affirmation.

(Ends next issue)