Alexander Ageev. Hunger 97

Hunger 97
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: February 27, 2004

I am returning, as promised, to the shortlist for the Ivan Petrovich Belkin Prize.

Of the entire list, I still haven’t read only Vladimir Kurnosenko’s story “ Beautiful are the faces of those sleeping ” (“Friendship of Peoples”, 2003, # 2). I had to read it, but really, I wish I hadn’t. I confess that I did not follow the work of the Pskov (and before that Chelyabinsk) prose writer, whom Dmitry Bavilsky once called “ Ulysses from Yaminsk ”: magazines published him extremely rarely, books were published mainly in the provinces, but the name is well known for some reason it was. Perhaps I remember that “Friendship of Peoples” awarded him its prize in the late 90s.

I don’t know whether Kurnosenko experienced “the pangs of creativity” while working on the story, but the pangs of perception are guaranteed for anyone who dares to read this muddy text. It’s not that it was completely mediocre, no, wonderful phrases happen (alas, just phrases), but the whole suggests the writer’s hatred of language - otherwise why would he rape it so gloomily and, most importantly, senselessly? You completely forget about plot, characters and timid attempts at religious philosophizing when you read something like this:

“ Rejected works, both in scientific and other journals, lay on the table until his death, without ever causing him any objections to this circumstance, vocally expressed dissatisfaction, public attacks or humanly understandable self-pity. ” .

This, unfortunately, is not primitive tongue-tiedness; these are traces of persistent and purposeful “work on the language.” Matches were invented a long time ago, and a lighter is always in your pocket, but you want to get fire by friction (the friction of words and syntactic structures with each other) or, at worst, with the help of a flint. Every now and then some pretty spark is struck:

" Due to his reluctance to influence the free will of his students, as well as the geographical distance of the university from the centers that exude a way of understanding things, graduate students, and later (in part) doctoral students, palpably bent their hearts on their father, and such and such a trifle, if not given the world noticeable literary studies discoveries, did more - saved them all the air to breathe..."

We are talking about the heroine’s father (an image that, of course, refers to the fate of Yu.M. Lotman), and here the “centers” that “ exude a way of understanding things ”, for some reason I like, although this is not God knows how cunning Platonov is. But more often you come across something else, like this:

“ It was too tempting to get lost and get lost, getting stuck in the honey of the “pleasure of the process .”

A.I. Solzhenitsyn would probably have appreciated this “ tempting ”, but it makes my hair stand on end and, I’m afraid, it was precisely for the sake of such a reader reaction that the author tried.

These types of texts, willy-nilly, invoke the ghost of the old man Romualdych, bewitched over his footcloth. This footcloth seems to be imperishable: more and more generations of creative intelligentsia buy into its scent. The remark, of course, is directed towards the jury, which included Kurnosenko’s story on the shortlist. It feels like its members are full of the mythical “mainstream” or detective stories written in “no” language, and the vivisection that the prose writer deals with seemed to them a “struggle for style” (from time to time a strange column with this name appears in the “New World”) .

What is touching, however, is the provincial coquetry with which the author provides each chapter with an unnamed epigraph, and then modestly states in a footnote:

" The epigraphs use the works of Du Fu, Sophocles, "Songs of the Kingdom of Wei", Andrei Platonov, the opera "Carmen", St. Augustine, J. Conrad, Van Gogh, John the Evangelist (John 16, 13-23), Bass, Blaise Pascal , Gen. Shpalikov, Hosea (Os. 5.4), Gottfried Benn, Old Russian lament ."

Such a nice company.

Andrei Dmitriev also wrote his story “ The Phantom of the Theater ” (“Banner”, 2003, # 6) “not in simplicity,” but his iambic pentameters do not interfere with reading the text as prose. Rhythm here plays the role of an enzyme that facilitates the digestion of meanings. And also a turbine that draws you into the text and doesn’t let you relax. In a word, the “technique” here is not meaningless, like Kurnosenko’s, but serves as a source of additional drive.

Dmitriev's story is the best on the list, but it is unlikely that he will get the prize.

The situation is this: two “standard”, so to speak, things (stories by Dmitriev and Povolotskaya), two marginal, on the border of art and graphomania (Kurnosenko and Tarkovsky), and one “unformatted”, because “ The Third Wind ” (" New World", 2003, ## 5, 6) Valeria Popova - of course, not a “story” at all, even in terms of volume. It’s either a “chronicle” or a “confession”.

So, according to my bad feeling, the prize will be given to someone from the margins. Because in Rus' they still love the poor.

Or Valery Popov, for the courage with which he breaks down the barriers between art and life. And what? Written with pain, passion, inspiration, and the reader cannot help but respond to the sincerity with an oncoming emotion. But, on the other hand, you clearly understand: this is impossible. Popov's frank autobiography is not a "technique" (as, for example, with his namesake Evgeniy Popov), but a refusal to fulfill his professional duty - that is, transforming life into art. This can be done in the consciousness of one's strength, but here it is done, it seems, in the consciousness of one's weakness. And therefore, confession smacks of extortion - that very counter-emotion of the reader. Confession in general is violence, and in art, which is impossible without convention (we are talking about convention), in addition, violence is treacherous.

A very elegant piece “ St. George’s Day ” by Irina Povolotskaya (“New World”, 2003, # 12). But I don’t agree with Mikhail Edelshtein , who writes:

" Yuriev's Day" is structured as a stylized story, veering either into a fairy tale or into a romance, about several generations of servants living in one Moscow family. As a result, this whole mosaic, the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of faces, names and details, develops into a complete picture, which turns into a kind of “historical history” - a justification of history .”

“This whole mosaic” does not “fit together” into a “complete picture,” and a “narrative” as such does not work out. For Povolotskaya, time does not have a vector in this story - either this is intended, or this is a purely “technological” mistake - and therefore it is somewhat strange to hear about “justifying history”. I would rather talk about the denial of history: “generations of servants” do not change each other, but coexist, as it were, in one (indefinite) time of the text. And in general, the feeling is that “Yuryev’s Day” is an excerpt from some great epic, where there is history, and “narration,” and “integrity,” but this epic was hidden from us, so we have to mentally restore it. The work is rewarding in its own way, but doubts immediately arise: is this a story before us? However, in the case of Povolotskaya, I don’t want to be a pedant - this is good Russian prose, and in Russia it has always been difficult with the purity of genres. Povolotskaya herself, by the way, does not designate her text as a “story,” but invents a genre unknown to literary theory: “ Remembrance .”

Generally speaking, there is something bureaucratic in our “genre” awards (Booker for a novel, Kazakov for a short story, Belkin for a story). Sometimes they feel like a tool of literary administration. And a kind of “corruption” is taking place at the same time: “through connections” texts of a completely different genre nature are being pushed into “novels”, “novels” and “stories”. But this is such a law: there is bureaucracy, which means there is corruption. But Anna Berdichevskaya wrote some very nice text (“Yakubova’s Suitcase”, “Znamya”, 2003, # 11), labeled it “Almost a Tale”, and fell out of all the premium stories. And there are many such texts.