This is criticism

This is criticism
Issue 23


Publication date: February 12, 2004

We continue to publish conversations with literary critics. Today the “guest” of the column is Mark Lipovetsky .

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Russian Magazine: Mark Naumovich, why such a by definition “free” literary movement as postmodernism flourished in the totalitarian 70s, but in the liberal 90s, having conquered all newspaper and magazine platforms, created practically nothing equal to “School for Fools” " or "Pushkin House"?

Mark Lipovetsky: But this is natural! Where is the voltage higher - in a closed or open space? The underground was such a closed system where creative energy accumulated (and often burned out). And in the 90s, the system opened up, and the intensity could not help but decrease.

In addition, what we consider underground classics have been accumulating there since the 60s. At least 25-30 years! And during this era, 10-15 high-profile names have crystallized that everyone knows.

But, in my opinion, it’s a sin to complain about the 90s. The best poetic compositions of Lev Rubinstein were written in the 90s. His essays, without any exaggeration, are brilliant too. And the best novels by Victor Pelevin - I mean "Omon Ra", "The Life of Insects" and "Chapaev"? What about “Hearts of Four”, “Norma”, “Roman”, all the plays and film scripts by Vladimir Sorokin ? And “Fakir” and “Peters” by Tatyana Tolstoy , and “Kys” too - if it’s a failure, then an honest one, which is more expensive than many calculated successes? And B. Akunin ?

What else? Lyrics by Vera Pavlova . The best stories and "Golem" by Andrei Levkin . "Incident with the classic" by Igor Klekh . "Yu" and "Tanya-Tanya" by Olga Mukhina . Essays by Mikhail Epstein , "Dovlatov" by Alexander Genis , "Genius of the Locus" by Pyotr Weil . The quasi-histories of Vladimir Sharov , Leonid Girshovich , Mikhail Berg, although they grow from " Palisandria ", but grow in different directions and are undoubtedly interesting and important in themselves. You can also add texts clearly impressed by postmodernism - “Time is Night” and “Never” by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya , “Prisoner of the Caucasus” and “Underground” by Vladimir Makanin , theater by Evgeny Grishkovets , poetry and prose by Sergei Gandlevsky , and finally, “The Taking of Izmail” by Mikhail Shishkin .

No, postmodernism in the 90s produced texts that we can be proud of. And to be honest, “Norma” is not inferior in complexity to “School for Fools,” and “The Taking of Ishmael,” for my taste, is better than “Pushkin House.” They are different, naturally. But who needs the same?

What remains truly unsurpassed are “ Moscow-Petushki ” and “Between a Dog and a Wolf”. Amazingly, all attempts to somehow develop what is contained in these texts end in nothing.

RJ: There is a widespread idea that Russian postmodernism, unlike Western, strives not for dialogue with chaos and not for the dissolution of reality in cultural signs, but for overcoming chaos, for the search for meaning or even Meaning, that it preserves the idea characteristic of Russian culture about the ultimate task of art. That is, the concepts of “Russian” and “postmodernism” are in an inevitably conflicting relationship (“Where it is truly postmodernism, it is not quite Russian... and where it is classified as Russian, then it is not quite postmodernism” - I. Turbanov). How can you comment on this point of view?

M.L.: If we take this “common idea” to its end, then there was no Russian postmodernism. Kuritsyn and I came up with it in the hero city of Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg). Remember Pelevin: “the art of Soviet watchmen... They were bored sitting at their post, so they came up with it.” What happened? But it was, at best, a regurgitation of modernism, say supporters of this opinion.

It is understandably difficult for me to agree with this. Both Russian romanticism, and so-called realism, and Russian symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, as well as “high modernism” were so unlike Western models that they often even adopted false self-names. Let's say, what is futurism, if not expressionism, and what is OBERIU , if not surrealism? (I would expand here, but this is a different matter.)

The experience of Russian postmodernism quite clearly shows how not universal is another “common idea” - already Western: that postmodernism is sharply opposed to modernism. Russian postmodernism directly continues the modernist dynamics, only modernist revelations are accepted here as the status quo. And the “Russianness”, that is, in other words, the non-canonical nature of our postmodernism, in fact, makes it a significant phenomenon in the global context. Who would be interested in student copies of recognized masters?

RJ: Where then does the cliché come from that “Russian postmodernism” is an oxymoron?

M.L.: Postmodernism in our country has largely turned out to be a victim of two false ideas. On the one hand, many of our colleagues judge literature and culture as if the twentieth century did not exist at all, and modernism ended in 1917. Russian romanticism, especially if we understand it broadly, including in this context Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the Symbolists, was, needless to say, a wonderful, rich and complex phenomenon. But if you turn it into a golden standard and measure all modern art by it, then you will notice nothing but ugliness and nonsense (not out of malice, but out of principle, one of our best critics nailed Prigov as “the grandfather of Russian idle talk”).

On the other hand, many domestic postmodernism enthusiasts understood postmodernism in a purely avant-garde (or rather, surrealist) way - as the art of breaking taboos, leading to a space of utopian freedom. Remember how the St. Petersburg postmodernists demanded the right to call “a Negrito a Negrito, and a fag a fag”? They saw in the modest norms of intellectual decency another taboo, this time imposed by the West. How dare they encroach on the absolute freedom of their, no doubt, deep and original thoughts about “negritos” and “faggots”!

In my understanding, postmodernism is in no way opposed to the search for meaning (but not Meaning!) and certainly not utopian. And it doesn’t come down to a set of stylistic baubles, which, of course, cannot help but become boring and have already become boring. It is worth talking about postmodernism as a special - paralogical - logic. To greatly simplify, we can say that this logic presupposes, firstly, the absence or at least a radical problematization of the transcendental dimension - Myth, God, Meaning, Utopia, Ideal, Metanarrative, etc.: all that without which classical culture ( and many believe that culture in general) does not exist. And secondly, there is no postmodernism without the point of view of the Other - which, in fact, replaces this very lost transcendence. In most texts of Russian postmodernism, the Other is such a metaphor for one’s loved one, it is a flirtatious form of presentation of one’s own uniqueness, and not going beyond or even problematizing one’s own cultural, national, social, gender and any other identity. That is why the search for meaning outside of transcendence turns into a new, and more often than not, an old, disguised, mythological Meaning. (By the way, Akunin, in my opinion, succeeds best in representing another consciousness precisely as an Other, and not as an “I” in disguise.)

Therefore, the current turn of many patented postmodernists to Meaning can be explained simply: they were not concerned with the search for unstable, illusory and obviously doomed meanings . In their postmodernism, in the words of the same hero Pelevin, “there was nothing but dicks and triangles.” Young postmodernists overthrew taboos when it was fashionable (by the way, writers who matured in the underground turned out to be much more resistant to these trends).

Now the fashion is over. Why? I have a hypothesis about this about the second post-revolutionary decade, when, after chaos and overthrows, everyone really wants stability, clarity and certainty. This is how it was in the late 20s. One can, however, assume that the aggression diffused in Soviet and post-Soviet sociality is to blame for everything; it is this that turns any innovation into the “most progressive method”, defended by appropriate means.

RJ: But modern sociality itself, not only post-Soviet, is increasingly defined as postmodern...

M.L.: I have a bad attitude towards all this talk that we all live in a postmodernist situation and therefore are all postmodernists willy-nilly. It is not clear to me what is meant by a postmodern situation. If postmodernity is a type of civilization, then the events of September 11 showed that postmodernity is, as they say, skin deep - not deeper than the skin - both in America and even in Europe. There is no need to talk about Russia in this context. If we mean the logic that I tried to outline, then its assimilation and especially following it - without dogmatism and utopianism - requires serious internal efforts. After all, it, this logic and the system of principles associated with it, doom the writer to an extremely uncomfortable existence in a world of obviously illusory and unstable meanings, which are impossible to cling to and which, it seems, do not necessarily need to be multiplied.

In addition, postmodernism in this understanding presupposes strict internal discipline that keeps one from absolutizing one’s own discourse. This is simply beyond the power of many: it is much easier to join some nice “imaginary community”, united by some charming and no doubt objective Meaning, or rather, a myth. “Postmodernism” is expressed only in the fact that today there are much more of these myths than two or three (official, liberal, nationalist), as there were in Soviet times, and for each myth there is a counter-myth, however, not inferior to the opponent in authoritarianism.

RJ: At one time you spoke quite critically about Pelevin’s “Generation P” and - to some extent - about Sorokin’s “Blue Lard”. Since then, “Numbers” and “Ice” have been released, respectively. Are the latest things Pelevin and Sorokin did to overcome the crisis or deepen it?

M.L.: Unfortunately, I did not notice any overcoming of the crisis in these books. “Unfortunately,” because I love these writers very much, I consider them the most significant authors of our generation and, accordingly, I expect a lot. True, the reasons for failure are different.

I suspect that Pelevin was writing a self-parody, but either did not find the exact intonation, or was afraid to risk his existing status as a “cult author” - and rudely broke the neck of the plan, producing a predictable set of Pelevin’s clichés (no wonder you and Roman Arbitman buried the poor fellow !). But “Yellow Arrow” - a thing no stronger than “Numbers” - did not promise anything to “Chapaev”. True, Pelevin was not yet a “cult” person.

Sorokin, on the contrary, sharply abandoned his signature stylistic complexity and composed something faceless to the point of folklore - which could support his newfound popularity among the masses. The result was “Gaydar for bandits,” as one of our colleagues accurately said.

True, in both cases, fashion not only played a bad joke on the authors, but itself turned out to be the central character of their works - which Alla Latynina accurately (and unexpectedly!) spoke about in connection with Pelevin. Walter Benjamin wrote somewhere that fashion eroticizes the inanimate (ice, Vagrius's donkey, Pokemon) and de-eroticizes the living. The latter effect is responsible for the failure of Ice and Numbers. But as Benjamin believes, fashion is the opposite of history: it is designed to mask the absence of time (always discontinuous and catastrophic by definition) with a multitude of external changes that replace each other.

In fact, each of the novels materialized the desire to stop time in order to forever secure the author’s position at the peak of fashion. And this, oddly enough, happened: both novels turned out to be monuments to a stopped history. If Sorokin and Pelevin had realized and reflected on this dimension of their own prose, then there would have been a way out of the crisis. But to do this they would have to risk their popularity.

RJ: In one of your articles, you complained about the inertia of the consciousness of writers who are not ready to “recognize even Sorokin or Pelevin as a status other than that of... at best, creators of funny texts for skits, and at worst, mocking anti-cultural saboteurs.” . Since “funny texts for skits” are exactly about my impressions, I can’t help but ask: how is it possible, within the framework of postmodernism, to distinguish fiction from “serious” literature? If such an operation is impossible in principle, then what prevents us from recognizing the greatest postmodernist, say, Daria Dontsova, who works so skillfully with cultural and mental stereotypes that each of her books becomes a bestseller?

M.L.: Firstly, one should not confuse the exploitation of stereotypes with their problematization. These are opposite things. Dontsova, Marinina, etc. they only exploit stereotypes and, in essence, multiply them (see, for example, Lena Baraban’s article on homophobia in “female” detective stories). Akunin, on the other hand, plays with stereotypes in order to manipulate the reader’s expectations, but in the end he always problematizes them (by the way, this “double coding” failed Arbitman at one time). This happens in any worthy postmodern text - the unproblematic mechanical reproduction of stereotypes has nothing to do with pomo: it is simply a principle of mass culture.

Secondly, the criterion is simple - multi-layered text. In my opinion, the most obvious difference between literature and fiction is that literature is interesting to reread. It’s even interesting to reread Sorokin, although it’s probably hard to believe - in fact, you can only reread him. And don't tell me that a detective or adventure text can only be read once. How many times have you reread Sherlock Holmes or The Three Musketeers? Try re-reading Alexey Slapovsky ? Or Viktor Erofeev?

However, “Ice”, and “Numbers”, and many other bestsellers also do not stand up to this test. But there are also works that are impossible to finish reading even the first time. Moreover, the length of the text is not so significant: death from Irina Denezhkina is in no way preferable to death from Andrei Basharimov or Yegor Radov. Ephemera, in my opinion, are still better than pretentious or “realistic” torment (of the reader). And analyzing ephemera - precisely from the point of view of the stereotypes that unfolded in them - is much more interesting than “beautiful prose.”

RJ: And the recently popular conversations about the “end of postmodernism”, “post-postmodernism”, etc. Do they have any basis?

M.L.: In my perhaps insufficiently informed opinion, the patient is more likely alive than dead. There is a crisis of postmodernism - natural and even necessary. But to talk about the exhaustion of postmodernism, in my opinion, is premature. Because the problems of postmodernism - first of all, the problem of the Other - are more acute than ever. The crisis is connected with what I spoke about above: the stylistic novelty of postmodernism has become familiar, and the ideology of breaking taboos has become boring and has given rise to its own taboos. A way out of this crisis is possible: it’s time to stop playing with glass beads; postmodernism must, as Lotman would say, be filled with “the blood of real interests.”

I understand how vulgar this may sound. But this is not about abandoning postmodernist discourse, but about its reorientation from purely aesthetic and philosophical interests to what was usually rejected as too social. Turning away from sociality, postmodernism cedes this most important field without a fight not only to modern, but also to pre-modern, aggressive-archaic ideologies. It is significant, by the way, that despite the declared asociality and apoliticality of the underground, the best, if not all, postmodern things of the 70s and 80s inevitably, by default, acquired a social and political dimension, which, oddly enough, remained forever in their fabric.

In other words, the postmodern vision of the world, postmodern consciousness (and not just a set of easily reproduced techniques) must turn to the social, historical, political, economic, gender, psychological - what else? - specifics. Moreover, I believe that it is the postmodern approach to the social and political environment, the identities formed by them, the discourses that give rise to what is then considered reality, that will renew today's literature as a whole.

In essence, a similar process took place at the beginning of the twentieth century: what is called the Silver Age was, in essence, a laboratory of modernism, where the language of a new consciousness was developed (and the crisis in this laboratory was felt already in the 1910s). But only after the revolution, in the 20s and especially in the 30s, when conceptual models were filled with blood in the texts of the mature Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, Vaginov and Kharms, Nabokov, Poplavsky, Vvedensky, Babel, Bulgakov, Olesha, Zamyatin, Pilnyak and, of course, Platonov, - Russian modernism is becoming a fact of world literature.

I see symptoms of a turn from postmodernism as a style to postmodernism as a thinking focused on history (whether past or contemporary), in Akunin’s novels, and in Levkin’s “Golem,” and in the poems of Vera Pavlova and Elena Fanailova, and even in “Spelling” "Dmitry Bykov (although the novel, in my opinion, did not work out precisely because of the inconsistency of the postmodernist vision). As you can see, I'm quite omnivorous. I even like the Internet “Vladimir VladimirovichTM” as an experience of postmodern political chronicle.

RG: But these are all authors more or less known, more or less promoted. And some new names with which you associate serious hopes in Russian postmodernism (wider - in Russian literature) have recently appeared?

ML: In poetry, it seems to me the most promising thing that happens inside, relatively speaking, the post -conceptualist circle - here I am especially interesting to Mikhail Gronas , Psa Korolenko , Kirill Medvedev and Andrei Saint -Senkov . In prose, my unconditional favorite is Denis Osokin , who created a new, postmodern version of the tale (again, hello 20!).

But the greatest hopes are caused by today's drama. After all, for the past two or three years, a natural dramatic boom has been going on, stronger than what happened in the early 80s and was associated with the "Posmpilians". It is amazing that colleagues of the Litcritics looked at this explosion - dozens of names, hundreds of plays and performances. Drama is generally the most adequate for the new development of sociality. Of course, there is still a lot of inertia, coming from the black naturalism of the late 80s. But, for example, the Presnyakov brothers plays are an excellent example of what I talked about: postmodern consciousness working with today's discourses of sociality and through them gaining historical and political dimension.

RG: What role does such a knowingly postmodern environment play in Russian postmodernism as the Internet?

Ml.: But he does not play any role. I thought so before and never associated the Internet of hopes for new literature. The Internet, of course, accelerated and facilitated communication. Utility is, of course, a revolution: we are conducting this dialogue between Ivanovo and Bolder. (Although keep in mind that such a festival of abdomen, as in Runet, where entire books, novels, magazine numbers hang - which I, of course, are incredibly happy - is not anywhere else: the animal laws of capitalism sacredly honor the copy of the copy, and, I suspect, this Lafa in Russia will soon end, as it has already ended in the USA.)

RG: And why, at that time, in the offline culture, the game of virtuality takes an increasing place, the network genres themselves (dynamic literature, etc.) practically do not develop, and the temperature generally experiences a deep crisis?

ML: The Internet has created some new sociality - all these personal pages and libraries, and especially chats, forums, living magazines, interest clubs consisting of people living in different parts of the world. Suppose this new sociality corresponds to the conditions of postmodor, and it is precisely why it is so often used in the form of a metaphor or a fashionable (social or linguistic) convention. Moreover, this sociality should be especially interesting for postmodern analysis as a fresh, not yet frozen story (by the way, the “crystal coffin” Sergei Kuznetsov, it seems, claimed this task, in my opinion, could not cope with it).

But the Internet, of course, did not change, and could not change the nature of reading : even a text consisting of continuous hyperlinks, you will still read as a normal book - the chapter behind the chapter. Therefore, it does not matter where this text appears - on the page or on the screen. Accordingly, no such "secreture" could even theoretically arise - which, by the way, had just recognized such an Internet enthusiast as Sergey Kostyko . The Internet, I believe, will remain a kind of Lito, a platform for the debutants, and in the case of a clamp, the field of samizdat. Somehow, indirectly, this can affect literature - as, for example, the serialization of novels in the newspapers for the poetics of Dumas and his followers influenced. But nothing more.

If you seek new forms of art, then, probably, it is worth taking a closer look at computer and Internet games, especially role -playing, which evolve according to the laws of the history of literature (from myths to heroic epics, now, it seems, the phase of the rogue novel is ahead of the psychological), they are absorbed Cinema elements, but most importantly - add the effect of interactivity to literature and visuality, which really promises and already brings new aesthetic effects.

RG: You are building your critical work as a “moving philology”, approaching current literature with literary instrumentation. You believe that such an approach can coexist in Russian criticism with other traditions - essay, preaching, socially oriented, etc. “Or does he replace them?”

ML: Thank you for the "moving philology" - this is really close to me. It is, in fact, about a bilateral process: literary tools are able to reveal in the current literature no less than current literature can bring to literary criticism. It must be admitted that colleagues-critics (boring) are not very fond of this approach, and do not respect the literary critic colleagues (lightweight).

As for me, I am curious about other traditions of Russian criticism, although many of them consider it unproductive - say, essayic impressionism, as well as a religious or moralistic sermon under the guise of criticism,, frankly, they have not been inspired for a long time (they have not been inspired ( But they once inspired, what to lie). To say that they are replaced by a “moving philology” means to be either very blind or very optimistic. They were already replaced by the newspaper region, more precisely, journalistic criticism, in which the method is replaced by the fashion. The newspaper format forces to rush - only the first reading is evaluated by the critic, and it was already a deceptive criterion in the twentieth century - real literature does not necessarily amaze the first time. In addition, you need to give a retelling and an assessment, and better both in one bottle. There is no longer a place or desire for analysis. There are, of course, exceptions - but we are talking about the rules ...

Hence my curiosity to the critical discourses you have named - these are fragments of that literary criticism that lived in thick magazines and in them formed its tone and its guidelines. As a historian of literature, of course, it is interesting to me whether these relics will survive, whether pronounced offspring will give - or will turn out to be an aging family. I am curious and in my personal, so to speak, considerations: I myself am from this incubator.

RSH: How true is it to mean such philological criticism by the English -language term "Criticism"?

ML: Clear business, in the English -speaking tradition of Literary Criticism , is literary criticism itself. But recently, the American Criticism has been greatly evaded how literary criticism is represented by us: first a wave of poststructuralist theory, and then Cultural Studies (having very little in common with what is called "cultural studies") deprived the Criticism of academicism and, in my opinion , they went to him, turning into an open, although methodologically rather strict genre of intellectual prose. So, by and large, you are right: criticism - especially in the Russian context - differs from criticism and literary criticism and, most likely, approaches the "moving philology."

RG: How does modern American criticism differ from Russian?

ML: It is precisely the fact that in America there is no literary criticism in the Russian understanding. That is, there is no something that would be a little literature, a little (or a lot) journalism and a little (or minus) philology. There is literary criticism that is engaged in everything, including - and very intensively - current literature. And there is a journal and gas criticism, which is quite different in tone and selection of material, depending on the orientation of the publication to a wide or more specialized audience. The only thing is that in the “cultural” publications, such as “New Yorker” or “Times of the Litera Sauldentari,” mostly university people write criticism, and therefore they have no contempt for literary science that distinguishes many of our newspapers writers.

RG: The recently released ARSS-OV Booklet contains several characteristics of your activity given by colleagues. The image of the intermediary between the "Western theoretical thought" and the "new Russian literature" (A. Genis) emerges. Do you feel like such an intermediary between the West and the East?

ML: I generally believe that the position of the mediator in modern culture is the most advantageous, not without reason all the heroes of modern cultural myths are mediators. As far as I correspond, it is not for me to judge, but I honestly try. I would only like to clarify that mediation is not operations with export/import. I do not believe in universal theories, it is important for me to adapt the Western theory to Russian experience, which most often involves the formation of new - specifically Russian - theoretical models. Attempts to adjust literature to the forces of theoretical schemes, and even worse, to illustrate the philosophical constructions of poststructuralism (see monographs by I. Kskoropanova or N. Mankovskaya) with literary texts. Still, I begin from literature, from enjoyment of text, and I will not exchange these “subtle influential connections” for philosophical or theoretical abstractions for any rugs.

RG: Do you consider yourself as a criticism of a Wester, more precisely, a “west -oriented” author?

ML: Probably, yes, Westerner. Well, not Slavophile. Although, frankly, the desire to be a mediator does not mean, and moreover, it excludes frenzied Westernism. Still, living in America, I teach Russian literature, I constantly read Russian literature and write about Russian literature and culture. In addition, life in America, especially after September 11, eliminates many Westernic illusions. Even the news I watch those and others, and I prefer Russians - not for linguistic reasons, but simply they are better, more fully, more dynamic.

RG: And in Russian criticism there is some tradition that you consider "your"?

Ml. Although not necessarily formalistic in the method. This is also done by my father, Naum Leiderman, whose student I consider myself.

For our generation, this tradition was restored by Mikhail Epstein, but there are such “criticists” as Dmitry Bak , Eliot Borenstein, Alexander Genis, Elena Zhevonosov, Mikhail Zolotonosov, Andrei Zorin , Dragan Kuyunzhich, Ilya Kukulin , Boris Paramonov , Irina, Irina, Irina, Irina, Irina, Irina, Irina Sandomirskaya , Sven Spick, Mikhail Yampolsky , few others. Although they themselves are likely to not agree with me.

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PS (Mikhail Edelshtein)

The most famous researcher of Russian postmodernism - Mark Lipovetsky, like his object, turned out to be locked between two extreme performances. For those whom the critic himself once defined as “ fighters for Christian realism ,” for people who “perceive postmodernism as the current name of the devil,” he remains the sedenter of these small ones. For those who appreciate a riddle in postmodern, a void without signs of meaning, “chaosmos” and “post -altarism” of Lipovetsky is a confession in fear of going to the end, an attempt to compromise, a view of postmodernism from the inside of modern aesthetics.

Without sharing any of these radical opinions, I nevertheless see two points in Lipovetsky’s position - one purely literary, the other is more likely sociocultural - disagreing me. Since both of them seem fundamental to me, I will stop at them now.

In the published interview, Lipovetsky essentially offers its version of the "wonderful decade." This version causes me not much more confidence than Nemzerovskaya, albeit for other reasons.

The postmodernism of the 90s differs from the classic samples of Russian postmodernism, first of all, total dehumanization. On the way from Venedikt Erofeev to Vladimir Sorokin, a man disappeared from literature. The deconstruction of authoritative discourses, philosophical schemes, language games remained - longing, pain, love have gone. Where they appear, the “Izmail”, “spelling”, “NRZB” arise (it is significant that the prose of Gandlevsky and Shishkin Lipovetsky does not refer to postmodernism, but to “texts clearly impressed by them, and Bykov reproaches precisely for“ inconsistency postmodern vision "). Where they disappear, the works of Prigov and Sharov.

Lipovetsky calls "enjoyment of text" the starting point of any conversation about literature. It is unlikely that anyone will argue with this, but the problem is that the reader and philologist understand this pleasure in different ways. The first knows that the text can be tried on yourself, enter it, become part of it or, on the contrary, appropriate, feel part of yourself. The second rejoices that he comprehended the device of a complex designer, collected the Rubik's cube - that he finally guessed how this overcoat was made, from which she was sewn, where she has shoovchiki.

In my opinion, the first reading has never been a “deceptive criterion”, as Lipovetsky claims, the scale of the thing always sets off right away, intuitively, and repeated reading only deepens our understanding, but does not change the assessment (“Poetry or something tells you with it with The first time, or does not say anything, ”said Professor Luri from Kutzeevsky's“ dishonor ”). And in books that cannot be read, but you can only re -read, I do not believe (and even more so I doubt that Bonmo Nabokov is applied to Sorokinsky novels). And by the way: if “Russian postmodernism directly continues the modernist dynamics”, and the “divorce” of Sorokin with modernism turns out to be a pure declaration of intent ”, then why can a person of a romantic paradigm see nothing but ugliness and nonsense”?

But even with all my doubts and mistrust, I understand why Lipovetsky insists on these things. Without them, the philological version of pleasure from the text is impossible: the pleasure of a literary critic is just the pleasure of a person re -read, and not reading. At the first reading, the professional has no advantages over Profan, rather the opposite: philology is a dangerous thing. And the difference between living and dead in the literature in the literature is a normal average reader often feels better than a professional. Therefore, he is quite capable of perceiving the “Moscow-Peter” and refuses to digest “Marina's thirtieth love”, reads Pelevin and is not interested in Elizarov.

All of the above, of course, does not mean at all that Prigova and Sorokin do not need to be explored. It is necessary, of course. And Lipovetsky, for my taste, it succeeds better than the rest. So here my disagreement applies only to assessments and does not apply to the analysis itself.

The second of the doubts that I mentioned at the beginning concerns the general foundations of postmodern philosophy. The need for "turning ... to postmodernism as a thinking addressed to history", Lipovetsky also speaks in today's interview, but he stops in detail on this topic in the "Znamenskaya" article of 2002 " PMS (postmodernism today) ", listing a number of differences in the Russian The option of postmodernism from the Western and stating that in Russian culture there were no discourses oriented towards penetrating the consciousness of another and, accordingly, on serious doubt in the basics of their own identity. Simply put, Russian postmodernism rejected political correctness. Moreover, the domestic mass culture, having barely mastered the language of postmodern, began to use it to propagate antipostomodern ideology - nationalist, primarily ("Brother -2", the novels of Pavel Krusanov, etc.).

There, Lipovetsky sympathetically quotes an article by Alexander Timofeevsky , who protects political correctness and leads it out of the tradition of secular etiquette, who is trained in the presence of black behavior like black, and in the Papuans society there are hands. A very successful formulation, only, in my opinion, the problem looks somewhat different, namely: how much do you need to live among the Papuans to completely take care of using a knife and a fork? I think not so long.

I am quite disgusting to the near -Emphor party, requiring the right to call "Negro - Negro, and fag - fag." But I am sincerely glad that neither repressive feminism, nor the defeatical postcolonial discourse have taken root in Russia (is it not the fault of such a sluggish reaction of Europe, say, to the situation in Zimbabwe, where former fighters with colonialism under conversations about the restoration of historical justice, on which Europeans react, like a rabbit to the boa, take land from white farmers?).

I did not sympathize with the American operation in Iraq before the anti -war demonstrations did not begin to show on TV - millionth crowds in kufi, with Palestinian flags and with portraits of Saddam on the streets of European capitals. More postmodern and at the same time - I have not seen a more disgusting spectacle in my life. These fiery wrestlers for equality of vegetarians with cannibals pre -issued Bush Indulgence for everything, showing where genuine danger comes from and who poses a real threat to Europe in the modern world.

So in today's world, political correctness is perhaps more dangerous than its opposite. "Reading someone else as his own, the transformation of a stranger into his", which is offered by Lipovetsky, in practice, selects the consciousness of his own rightness from the European, deprives him of the concept of norm - and thereby deprives a person of the rule of law to identity. Политкорректность в ее господствующей версии приводит к тому, что мужчина должен смотреть на себя глазами женщины, белый - глазами цветного, натурал - глазами гея. И не дай бог наоборот.