Morphology of urban eros

Blessed is the immortal ideal ...

A hundred -sneaky blessed who inspired us

Not many rhymes and a lot of prose.

A. Pushkin

The art of telling stories is one of the oldest. Although, initially, scientists believe, poetry (lyrical songs, historical songs, Sappho-Katull and so on and so on) stood their positions in world literature. Because the prose is already very close to our usual speech, not without reason the Moliere Mr. Jourder admired the discovery that he, it turns out, says prose. And in order to move away from everyday life and find yourself, literature had to invent an artificial language - poetic - and invent the relevant rules for constructing a statement. Therefore, the tradition of scripture of prose in any national literature has developed after and on the basis of poetry. But, presumably, stories were told before they began to speak with poems. No wonder P. Ricker remarked: "... we are not able to imagine a culture where people would no longer know what it means to tell " ("Time and the story." T. 2). Perhaps, according to our love for stories, we approached the ancestors today, even such a science appeared- narratology , describing the rules of the narrative and different relations of those who speak, and those who just write down, or pretending to be a collector and publisher, and he himself is just the real author of composed somewhere and told somewhere and told. By the way, the story is the word cunning: this is a story, something invented, or really former, and history as our past, which, in turn, describes the science "History". Go, figure it out ...

The stories presented in the last section of the books of Natalia Smirnova , who gave the name of her entire book, is “Women's ABC”, this is precisely in its original sense of history (Stories). For they were recorded by her from different women - "funny, young, lucky, educated, married, as well as sad, middle -aged, lonely." Although in some of them the author itself acts as a storyteller, but where, in which it is difficult to understand: the writer hides the "ears", as it should be by tradition. All the stories of Natalia Smirnova have a single writer's handwriting, his own letter; What it consists of, I will try to say later.

In female stories that made up the "ABC", this handwriting is also felt, it represents a woven foundation on which its diverse storytellers embroider their patterns. The impression of a certain two -voice is created, because in conjunction, all the stories, introducing into the book, the writer and all of them have a single tonality - rather cheerful than sad, although not all of them end in good joy; There is a certain acuteness in everyone - the spicy smell of the fight, who is the heroine of Smirnova, by the will of the author, constantly lead with their neighboring and distant, with being and being, because without this duel and life is not sweet. And if you take into account a considerable number of individual "subjects of speech", then it turns out almost polyphony, almost the guide of the scripture of the polyphonic novel a la Bakhtin/Dostoevsky (why "almost"? Yes, because the author did not set such a task for himself - he did not write a textbook on literature, but rather, the memos of life).

How to determine the "alphabet" stories of this book? Other of them, and most of them, are built by the type of jokes, others - short and unexpected in their rapid deployment of short stories, others are added as epic dramas, there are lyrical dramas, there are ties of novels, there are paraditive reasoning, there are fantasia ... Here, for example, a picture in which there will be all of the above and which could compose the beginning of the novel in the spirit of the L. Tettyoye. (" All happy families ... "). This impressive "scream of the soul" is called the "old woman":

Girls bloom, decorate the environment and look for husbands.
Women work, grow children, love men and strengthen the nest.
But what the old women do is incomprehensible.

They are forever at the patch - to stroke the sundress to the granddaughter, prepare lunch with a son -in -law, salt the cucumbers, remove the apartment. From the personal life of the old woman - a series, a garden, and an old, like her, stump. Oh, what to do, Lord?

No wonder Smirnova’s book was published in the New Prose series. Say, in historiography there is simply a story and there is a “ other story” that is interested in reconstructing all the specifics, all the flesh of the past life of people - how they loved, ate, slept, dressed with whom and why they quarreled, what they believed in, saw in dreams. From officialdom - to intimate and particular: such is the turn of the "other" historians of the French school " Annals ".

Literature in a different position - all the last centuries, it lives private, family, family and does not care very much about the reflection of big politics or great historical time. It is difficult to unequivocally determine the novelty of Natalia Smirnova's prose. Perhaps this is its borderline between modernism (including its variety with the prefix of post-) and neorealism, the absorption of all and different genera and genres of literature. This prose makes the impression of an absolutely reliable, emanating from the writer’s personal experience - and at the same time leaving for the line of reality - to the human soul and world, which is one and one and one; It allows people to understand each other, despite the numerous malfunctions in communication, constantly taking place in the world of Smirnova.

The world of her stories is densely populated. All the elements, its components, and all the people inhabiting it are in constant vortex movement: they always strive somewhere, run, love, lose, suffer, cry and rejoice. This is a very emotional, even passionate world of human experiences, involving both trees, and things, and objects created by people.

In the story "Heat" there is an image of the manner of writing an artist - perhaps he is leitmotive for the feeling that arises when reading Smirnova's stories:

" Little by little, everything began to drive away as in my paintings. At first I draw directly, but then there is wind, blizzard, water, rain, heat - and the end ... Everything rummages, rides, blurred in different directions ... I was twisted, like in a funnel ."

This is a world of total communication, even if it did not take place, and communications, tensely spoiling to express itself in speech. In the story of Horge, the main interlocutor and mentor of the girl Sasha, working in a cafe, is the Spaniard Horhe, who literally clung to her during a trip with a loved one to Spain. When his mediation in communication with the world crosses all the borders, Sasha and Dr. Stashevsky are destroyed by Jorge, burning his image in an ashtray. It is clear that everything does not end there - the doctor is now becoming her companion and shadow. (Involuntarily, I want to ask a question of a “naive realist”: what happened to the doctor?) Was twisting, “like in a funnel”, almost all the characters of this “new” prose.

A witness named Jonathan Swift from the story of the same name is a register of witches - a modern version of the ancient genre of His Holiness Inquisition, puts it in a folder, experiences a meeting with living witches on the bus. In the end, the story sounds the question that the hero himself asks himself, from the author of the treatise on witches and the object of the author’s description, which became the chronicler of events taking place with him: “ It is interesting that it will be in the folder - an inserting jaw, vodka, other people's documents ?” The finale is unexpected - like Pointe in the short story, and these are the ends of many works of this book.

In the " Dog Lane " reality is even more floating and shifting: the hero searches for a woman who sewed him from the train, acting with the "exclusion method", excluding anything, and primarily common sense: common sense:

" - Hello. How did you find me? - by exception. There were only three cities on this branch: Kirov, Perm, Yaroslavl, in one of them there is a dog lane. There are seven houses in the dog lane ."

He comes to the house of Alfinur, where, while mom stomps with the old women on the dance floor, a girl with a lifeless voice either a boy or a girl cuts books with large scissors. And on the cover it washes the floor with the first snow that fell from heaven, and sleeps with Alfinur, and in the morning, having arranged her life on some new foundations, leaves, because " what else is a high a man? Throw everything and go out of the threshold ."

Here it is! The world of Smirnova’s prose is the world of Eros, just so, solemnly and highly. He inspire the breath of this ancient evil God, and all her heroes and heroines live, shed by the eternal impulse-Poisk of their present and the most important thing, which in classical times called the ideal. The heroine, "deceiving death", lost him - he died, only an endless body of conversations, belated farewells and clarifications remained who was to blame. A whip of parties that will never end, because even death has gone, taking the most expensive.

" Why do you begin to think from vodka that all the people are brothers? In fact, all the people are sisters, and the brothers are not people. They are thieves and offenders to us ."

This does not mean that a purely female myth is happening in Smirnova’s prose (once Oleg Dark wrote something similar for a long time), but if the men leave, and those who are replaced, “do not pull”, then the sisters remain. Sisters, for the brothers are such - there are always forty thousand of them, but only one is needed!

The world of communication, recreated in Smirnova’s stories, sometimes resembles a giant communal woman; It is clear that the life in it is refueling primarily women around whom children, men, creatures with indistinguishable voices and names (as, for example, the child plut from the story "Cindeer"), even women and men of these women. Their imperceptibly flexMagorically complement the “non -factory characters” - people, cats, dogs, city stairs, walls and landfills, rising from the photographs of Denis Simonov: they are not only decorating the book, but they make up its integral attribute, like matter (we once passed in philosophy), it is necessary to attribute space and time. The book is perceived as a real work - neither take away or add, it is one of those that, reflecting and meaning the culture of the city, it is created, embodied and given to descendants. And they turn the described document into a monument.

More about the language - the manner of Smirnova’s letter, whose specialty was indicated by the publisher of the book by Anna Berdichevskaya. It is the author’s letter of Natalia Smirnova, echoing her manner of telling stories, who collects together the Mammary inhabitants of the communal apartment and gives harmony and harmonious to this strange world, where everyone speaks about their own, but also hears their own, not alien. A letter is a cosmos, so perfect that sometimes you want to scream from powerlessness. Here is the story "Drum skins" - a classic story about childhood, conveying the noise and color of the growing, changing life of a girl who dances:

" The next autumn, the old woman-kostyumersha, unoplined, gave out Ira with a raspberry velvet vest, high boots, a pink skirt with three stocked upsurges and a transparent blouse for a chardash. Ira looked into the boots, crossed out the surname of the owner and inscribed her. The creaks were filled on the general rehearsal, Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ah What was the dance, cool and bitter, like frozen berries, the best, long -awaited, because the last, or the last, because as always, she could not let out the partner’s hand, and for the first time she felt his fingers surprisingly and gently . ”

The author of the author of this prose carefully envelops the object and forms an air cocoon around it, inside which, along with the object, draws the reader's consciousness:

" She read how the moods on his face changed. Now it tensed with care, the mouth was curved by a painful arc, like a fish before death ";

" Red in white peas of strawberries bloomed on the hillocks, and in dark places, like ballerinas among the curtains, the pale legs of the cheese were exposed ";

" The brown-haired dog flirted with a velvet-sagged bitch, and the setter was thinking who to return the stick, not noticing that the hostess was flirty hiding behind the barrel. The earth was the color of the beige. Information that the galaxy of the color of aquamarine with azure was incorrect: the galaxy of the color of the beige, the beige is calm, the pricing of the straw, cereal? She colors, Gada Stella . "

But it’s enough to write about the prose of Natalia Smirnova. We need to read this prose.