Petra Aretina. Same with poker

Same with poker
Natalya Galkina "Villa Reno" // Neva, 2003, # 1-3.

Petra Aretina

Publication date: November 27, 2003

One critic I know saw “extraneous” anger in my previous article. In fact, is it really possible to worry so much just because unprofessional texts are included in premium lists? You can only worry when you lose an unloved but well-warmed place under our dim capitalist sun...

But I thought: if people say it, then it is so. Maybe Mamedov and I studied at the same seminar, he shone there, and I cried with envy? Or maybe I published a novel that didn’t make the Booker shortlist? What other kind of extraneous anger could there be... Maybe my tooth hurt when I wrote all this, or I wasn’t fucked enough - Freud can help you. Think what you want about me, readers, it is your inalienable right.

Also, maybe the mask is to blame - in the Renaissance there was a feisty critic Pietro Aretino, who lived on bribes. Writers paid him to keep quiet - he really knew how to do it. I ask you to send bribes to the address of RJ.

And the mask again got a load of novel meat - big and juicy, enough for three magazine books. There is something to be done from - but his colleagues are sluggishly taking him up on it, considering him even unworthy of this: in the discussion that happened here, which we talked about last time, he was beaten up somehow lazily and routinely. One critic said that he almost lost his health when half of the Booker shortlist turned out to be unfamiliar to him - but somehow he didn’t feel his own guilt: if, he says, these things were really what was needed, Rabinovich would have sung. And so - the bird names of two novelists from St. Petersburg mean nothing to him.

I just remember that Chizhova’s novel was heatedly discussed at all critical angles, well, at least it was difficult not to pay attention to it , God knows where the colleague was. This really did not happen with Galkina’s novel - in my opinion, because religious problems worry the active part of our critical elite much more than the problems of the genre. That's how it happened. But Natalia Galkina's book did not go unnoticed . From all that has been said, it follows that if a colleague had at least regularly looked through the review sections of the “thick” magazines, of which he positions himself as an adherent, he would not have fallen out of the process; theoretically, it can be assumed that Zorin and Buida are not the only ones writing novels here... .

I also find my fault in the “unnoticed” “Villa Reno”: I did not have time or was too lazy - I don’t remember - to review this charming novel, not only not devoid of depth and artistic logic - another critic accused him of this, but also endowed with them in full Another critic still considered it necessary to read it - it’s time to say thank you - and retell the plot (saving us from the need to retell it), and then note that all this was written easily and even well in places - “ but it’s not very clear why .”

I was perplexed by this statement from an adept of “literary tasks proper.” Let's remember Kant in unison, “Critique of the ability to judge”, “General note to the 1st section of analytics”: “Taste is the ability to judge an object in relation to the free law of the imagination. <...> Everything is attractive to the imagination, which supports his free play. The variety that his gaze encounters feeds the fantasies that occupy the soul.”

But the critic frowns:

“ All fantastic assumptions are absolutely random, all mysticism is dumped without much meaning and in an arbitrary order. <...> And the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhugging documentary material and science fiction into one novel is difficult to consider successful .”

And it all seemed to me - back then, when the novel had just been published in Neva - to form an extremely elegant whole, which surprised me and prompted me to dig deeper: how? Something, however, distracted me... Fortunately, the opportunity presented itself again.

Phantasmagoria is the border region of no man's land between fantasy and fairy tale. Almost virgin soil. Why?

Firstly, this is the area of ​​plot levity, immanently inherent in a fairy tale, but where can we get it in our difficult times, which plunge us into a “crisis of imagination”? Secondly, this frivolity should be with a pallet: “The fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it <...>” - in fact, this does not allow the genre to be classified as entertaining. Well, and thirdly - despite everything being fairy-tale, this fairy tale must have realistic plasticity, fairy-tale conventions are completely swept aside here. Here are the signs of the genre.

The first sign leads to his violent passion for the set of literature produced by young, dreamy people, not concerned with adult problems, and therefore unselfish. There, in the sea of ​​overflowing failures, even the best examples perish, since this sea overflowed widely - and inevitably became swampy. The second sign sets a bar too high for potential authors, which the above-mentioned age category could theoretically meet - there are child prodigies in the world. And the third sign of the genre requires from the author such artistic talent that it would be a pity to waste it on frivolous things, if it exists. So the niche remains almost empty.

Natalya Galkina combines the antinomies of the genre - lightness and depth - and, thanks to her plastic gift, introduces risky fiction into the realistic world by transference by contiguity: what is not fiction - the reality of the early twenties, when the wounded were shot in Crimean hospitals? Therefore, the gentleman with a cane, Mikhail Mikhailovich, in the home vernacular of Mimi, whose only son dies in this way, sees and hears strange things, being little surprised by them. Passing by the door of the beauty who loves him, he mentally wishes her happiness with someone else, adding: “ The stream is already talking to me, soon the cane will begin to walk from corner to corner .” And he returns from his usual walk in the forest, where he once saw a double rainbow, and another time - the Austerlitz sky; the allusion is introduced elegantly, and the description of this sky is one of the most powerful passages in the novel:

One day he saw small high clouds - cirrus? silver? - theirs, their detailed thin terrible drawing, their floating multi-rib Adam's radiograph - and he averted his eyes for a minute in almost horror (“here it is, the sky of Austerlitz!”), So that, feeling the attraction, again and again peer into the failure of the fine mesh, at an elegantly rendered inhuman nothingness high above ("or the Waterloo sky?"). Your bottom air ocean? Where are we? Top and bottom changed places, a surge of dizziness, he convulsively stared at the issue of a ridiculous old magazine, a picture, sand at his wrist, a thread of a frayed cuff, just so as not to look at the sky .

I saw this net in the sky when I peered there until my eyes went dark, but I don’t remember anyone describing it with all the feelings it evokes. Therefore, dramatic recognition and suffering befell me on this occasion for the first time, which rarely happens to me lately...

Galkina only slightly condenses the fantasy of the real world - which we do not see with ordinary eyes, but once or twice in our lives we come face to face with it and, in general, we know that there are inexplicable things in the world. We are led further through this zone, just a little further - to bookish fantasy, which thickens over the water: the action of the novel takes place in a natural park around a cascade of lakes, the main character is a person? figure? creature? substance! - water. With all its symbolic linings and metaphorical fields - but without the slightest pomposity, without obligatory interpretations, with humor:

- Don't you miss your brothers? You replaced their mother and father, you raised them when you were left orphans. Doesn't it bother you that you don't know anything about them?

“Water knows everything about everyone,” she answered, removing a spark from a strand of hair, “if you don’t know something, drink water - knowledge will come .”

This maxim can be attributed to Heraclitus, or you can simply smile: drink and pop and eat - all our knowledge.

You believe Galkina while you read, thanks to her undoubted artistic talent, which even a critic dissatisfied with the novel had to admit. She uses all the pictorial possibilities of the word, right down to phonetics, sometimes on the verge of phonetic abstruseness, but - this is the secret of elegance - it is always prosaically justified with her, all the clepsydra and corpuscles are in their objective places. The lexical richness of the language creates a feeling of elegance in the described world - and here the motivation is directly in the text, and not in the poetic talent of the author: noble life as an everyday holiday with theaters, walks, love in a picturesque villa, where vacationers were stuck when the Bolsheviks closed the Finnish border; in another time - a film that is filmed in the same place; in the third time - the indescribable life of Wanda Feodorovna, the former manager of a miraculously preserved villa, an ancient old woman who is afraid of Satanists - an unfamiliar tribe that kills just like that and burns old dachas to high bonfires.

Well, the artistic logic here is impeccable. And only this appearance - logic - holds the phantasmagoria over the cliff into fantasy. But visibility must be one hundred percent. Why visibility? Because the most logical people in the world are crazy.

But I still wouldn’t give a Booker to such a novel. In my opinion, the element of destruction of contexts contained in phantasmagoria - the notorious poker in a game with rules, which sometimes falls to you, sometimes not to you - takes "Villa Reno" out of this context - what can you do, a game of water.

There is something to criticize the novel for. Firstly, for excessive multi-figures: in a novel where there are no main characters, where the main character is a fantastic element of the world, it takes a lot of effort to distinguish Vanda from Vanda Fedorovna, to distinguish Savelyev, Urusov and Nechiporenko, Vyshpolsky, Krasnogorsky and Shchepansky - multi-figures require catchy names , and the catchiness of names can be annoying and violate realistic plasticity... The problem is clear, the problem has not been solved.

Secondly, it’s strange to hear from a teenage girl: “ Every movie character makes me sick, but the movie as a whole makes me sick <...> ” - simply because children don’t express themselves like that: “movie character,” “the movie as a whole.” ", "this and that"...

Thirdly... There are also thirds, but somehow the rage doesn’t come - what’s more annoying is the criticism, which point-blank doesn’t see the obvious advantages of a good thing.

So from now on I also take bribes from critics.

And for those of them who suddenly lose a sunspot that accidentally fell on the top of their heads, I can give private interviews about what life is like when you suddenly lose a lot of money earned from what you no longer have (youth). The cat eats capelin, mom drinks tea without figs, able-bodied family members gain economic independence, and you make new bets - suddenly you still have something to bet on. And the amazing thing is: everyone is alive and even sometimes rejoices at something. Something that simply amuses - inexplicable, illogical, hinting at the possibility of freedom from any conditioning.