Alexander Ageev. Hunger 92

Hunger 92
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: December 4, 2003

I don’t remember which of the classics (or maybe it wasn’t a classic at all) called “Decembrite” the depressed state of mind that many experience at the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. So here it is - “December”. You see just a little white light, there is no desire to move - both physically and intellectually, in the outside world the most vulgar election show continues without any intrigue, and it seems that this vulgarity colors even events that have nothing to do with politics - they are different from the books - fair and literary premium stories. Again, several notable people went to another world - Tatyana Cherednichenko , for example, with whom I once had to strongly argue, but who in recent years has written amazing cultural journalism - knowing full well, by the way, that she is dying. Or Yuri Kuznetsov : once upon a time, in the mid-70s, he showed great hope, although his home-grown demonism quickly fell in price. And all the same - among the boring patriotic poets he looked like a more or less bright bird...

Well, really, what good can happen in November-December?

Even regarding the Nativity of Christ, the churches have differences: the Russian Orthodox postpones the appearance of the Savior until January, when it is a little brighter. No matter how logical...

You can’t escape the low gray sky, and then you want to at least deal with the socio-political hopelessness. For example, Slava Kuritsyn , completely privately, without turning to any organizations for support, on November 22 convened a “round table” in St. Petersburg - so that “intellectuals” could come together and talk about “what to do?”, because there is a sharp change in the political landscape I have once again revived this literary question. I couldn’t go, but I asked Slava to send me the transcript, which I received yesterday. ( It should appear on Polit.Ru). The title is: “ Horses - to gallop, huts - to burn.” The behavior of an intellectual in the era of restoration ."

Various people gathered there: Sekatsky, Toporov, Elena Tregubova (the one who wrote “Tales of a Kremlin Digger”), Nikolai Kononov, St. Petersburg and Moscow journalists.

Reading, frankly speaking, is joyless. Not because the “intellectuals” are in any particular despondency and they don’t produce fresh ideas, but because the whole situation is extremely shitty, and even if you’re a genius, there’s nothing new here that hasn’t yet been tried in Russian political history you'll figure it out.

Slava says, opening the discussion:

"... we are experiencing the beginning of a complete ass, but we are not making the slightest movement... The vast majority of those present here are related to the word... Write an article - is this a thing today? Until recently, it seemed, maybe - even rightly it seemed that our texts, articles published in newspapers, on websites, in magazines somehow influence society. On the social atmosphere, on the inner circle first of all, but somehow also on the distant circle. Now it has become clear that one of the most important addressees was the government. People who are in the immediate vicinity of this power read, roughly speaking, my writings and thereby I influence them, and through them - this very power. And now it became obvious that the authorities do not care to the fact that we say that she doesn’t hear us at all, and maybe she didn’t listen before, but now she definitely doesn’t listen .”

Minor Slava immediately responded to Tregubov, who was passionate and apparently in some euphoria from the success of her book:

“ Within political journalism, within the ideological, censorship framework in which journalism is placed today, I simply physiologically had nothing to say. Under Putin, the framework began to narrow catastrophically. So I came up with this form of breaking these frameworks for myself - to publish a book. That is, In essence, I published my own newspaper, four hundred pages long. A newspaper that irritates a lot of people, which many consider too yellow, too stupid, not to say stupid. But absolutely everyone reads it. Unlike the boring, censored pro-Putin newspapers ."

Then the girl falls into a “let’s throw our hats” mood and informs those present that the authorities do not have any intellectual resource, only morons gathered there, to which she is a witness, and, therefore, it costs us, “intellectuals,” nothing to overthrow such power:

" Here is V.V. Putin, about whom it is written in bold letters on the indecent, wretched Brezhnev advertising poster at the Moscow Hotel opposite the Duma - this Putin in reality does not exist, but you and I do. And if we say to grief - fall into the sea ", she will fall into the sea. To do this, you just need to use your brain a little. This is exactly what the Kremlin, fortunately or unfortunately, does not know how to do - believe me - I worked there for many years and I know ."

It was between Slava’s minor and Tregubov’s major that the entire “round table” hesitated. And if I had been there, I would probably have stayed closer to Slava in the tone of my statements.

No matter what they say in recent years about government pressure on the media, restrictions on freedom of speech and other horrors, I remain convinced that freedom of speech is still depleted in our country. And we use it to the fullest - even from the “box”, which the authorities have firmly taken into their hands, you can hear and see enough to understand how difficult everything is “in the Danish kingdom”. However, freedom of speech is so unnecessary for the population (except for some insignificant percentage of “intellectuals”) that it absolutely does not pose any threat to the authorities. The situation of lack of feedback (why write the truth if no one is scratching about it?) leads to the fact that the media community begins to rot from the inside: cynicism becomes the defining mentality and colors almost any of our “messages”. It is clear that this cynicism is the last defense against the realization of the meaninglessness (at this particular historical moment in this territory) of one of the basic freedoms, but it becomes another barrier between the journalist and the public.

Take the same book by Tregubova, which everyone actually reads: well, yes, it’s an evil little book, and the author, most likely, is not lying. However, the spirit of cynicism there is so strong that a normal person involuntarily shudders: the feeling is that something useful is being taken away from you. The truth here looks like a mockery of the image of the world that every person has in his mind, which “lowers” ​​him. And immediately a psychological defense begins to work, at least the simplest one: a plague on both your houses!

Our political journalism is generally terribly funny - haven’t you noticed? An abyss of humor, irony, and play. Sometimes it seems that the main thing for a journalist is not to present the facts and not to give an explanation for them, but to prove that everything that is happening is, first of all, funny. The steeper and more severe the events, the thicker the banter. What, you think, is this a way to suppress fear? Or, in fact, over fifteen years of freedom of speech, all criteria have been so radically erased that it has become difficult to distinguish a wedding from a funeral?

Here is another recently published book - “ Dictionary of modern jargon of Russian politicians and journalists .” Authors - A.V.Mochenov, S.S.Nikulin, A.G.Niyasov, M.D. Savvaitova, publisher - "OLMA-PRESS". An extremely funny book - you laugh on almost every page. Meanwhile, this is still a “dictionary”, that is, a certain set of meanings, a linguistic trace of ten years of political life. The main source for the compilers was, of course, periodicals, and it turns out that they created - there is no escape - a comic image of time. So try to combine it in your mind: on the one hand, you are absolutely sure that you lived in fateful times, when powerful historical layers were shifting, and on the other hand, the language of your era, given by the media, turned out to be petty-serious, worthy of the “club of 12 chairs” . Not “tongue”, but “tongue”...

In a word, you get a kind of sad laugh, and you put down the “Dictionary...” with a strange feeling - like poisoning, or what?

...However, even against the backdrop of December, one recently purchased book pleased me - a collection of short essays by Asar Eppel "In Telega", published by B.S.G.-press. Eppel is now one of the best Russian short story writers, but he is also an essayist of the highest class. And he writes about what hurts - about the language. I would like to quote almost in a row, but here are just a couple of paragraphs from an essay called “Soap Drama”:

" Well, why use this simplest invention instead of the tracing paper "soap opera"? Alas! Creating naming names in a society with a seriously ill language is a futile matter. Inability to use the resources of speech, metastases of censorship, fanaticism of editors, dictatorship of ignoramuses and correspondence students, pitiful dictionaries, the phraseological apparatus of which regrettable, they are doing their own thing.

The village fenya of dignitaries, the criminal intonations of generals and the Little Russian dialect of politicians also do their thing, and now the radio commentators are saying “pressa”, and now they will soon say “press-conference”, and now from the Great Reformer we have picked up the verb “to decide”, but without a controlled word, and we are “defined” not in space, not in intentions, but because we “exchanged,” because “this is fraught.”

Actually, Eppel writes almost nothing about politics, but by God, his essay is the best political journalism I have recently read. In any case, it is written in a language worthy of freedom. There is enough bile here, but not an ounce of cynicism.