AND CONTINUE TO LIVE

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“You can’t live like this,” everyone said at all times. And they continued to live. "Etazh ..." Kuchkina's vigilance is amazing: an iron grip, developed in journalism, combined with a purely female psychological instinct, polished in work on ...

“You can’t live like this,” everyone said at all times. And they continued to live.

"Floor..."

Kuchkina's vigilance is amazing: the iron grip she has developed in journalism, combined with a purely female psychological instinct, polished in her work on prose - all this gives the text a special charm, where visual acuity and instant observation work as if in passing, or, better to say, gradually, or from an ambush, and dynamic dialogues (the experience of the playwright O. Pavlova comes into play here) are absorbed into the “stream of consciousness”, into improperly direct speech, into the rhythm of somnambulistic meditation, which “closes” over problems, over things, like water over bottom relief. And the relief suddenly shows through and cripples with blows on the bottom.

We must pay tribute to the relief of the paintings, worthy of being included in the anthology of everyday life of the twenty years that have roared over us (if we count from 1983, when the action of the novel actually begins, and up to our moment, the passions of which this action is permeated).

The sociological procession through the pages is opened by boys of ten or eleven years old, on roller skates, with cigarettes clamped in their teeth. I wonder if they sleep with girls or not yet? And what girls should be, really the same age? The author does not give direct answers to these non-trivial questions, but fixes the erotic vocabulary: "sexual partnership", "lower abdomen" ... Love as a state is not in demand, love as an occupation is in demand: everyone "makes love".

In contrast to this young group, a circle of old farts is found at the other end of society, selflessly playing stoss. The retired general will say that the West has been playing tricks on us, that it wanted to ruin a dangerous and strong opponent; the general’s housekeeper, granddaughter of a kulak who was repressed in the 1930s, she is also the daughter of the chairman of a collective farm repressed in the 1940s, looks into the general’s mouth and echoes him, standing up in defense of the collapsed empire with her chest.

Three thousand miles from the capital (maybe in the very places where the future housekeeper was once orphaned), on the banks of the Yenisei, near the legendary Pillars and the no less legendary hydroelectric station, there is a revelry at the funeral. During the spree, the American idea of ​​the Russian mentality is confirmed: “to drink and cry, sing and fight like a collective farm”, Russian self-knowledge is outlined in the mind of Andrey, a metropolitan journalist from the sixties who arrived in Krasnoyarsk (who, by the way, was stuffed in the face here) in the following wording:

“Such a life as in the depths of Russia, with its amazingly surviving and destroying themselves men and women, old men and old women, nugget children, self-bearing nature, these same men and women are ruined, with their excitement and forgetfulness, their rise to heaven in love , work, theft and drunkenness and hitting the bottom - there was no other life like this anywhere else in the world.

To some extent, this is exactly the case, because from the depths of Russia, or, as they used to say under Soviet rule, from the hinterland (and now they say: from the regions), young jumping rock-biters and rock-climbers rush to the capital - to taste freedom, practice glasnost and rebuild Russia on a new , democratic way.

At the same time, highly advanced guys who have swept abroad and back (run in the West) are rebuilding it in their own way; these jump from commercials to intellectual rails: "We are cynical because we know how much." That is: we are shit, because everything is shit. And the philanthropic sixties? They are shit of a particularly fine sort: "a generation of Moors, Negroes, who did what they were told, henchmen, as Fuhrer Khrushchev called you." Not only was a sixties man stuffed in the face in Krasnoyarsk, but now they also spit into his soul, call him an old goat, they make fun of Sovremennik and Taganka, and they carry Paustovsky in such a way that it’s embarrassing to repeat. <…>

"Etazh" is the center of the social panorama unfolded in Olga Kuchkina's novel, the nerve center of the country, unfolding on intellectual rollers from totalitarianism to democracy. “The whole of Moscow” is talking about this editorial office, “the whole country” is following this newspaper, enthusiastically measuring out what fuse the journalists of the hardened government have inserted and whether the government dared to lay a finger on at least one impudent journalist in response to another fuse. The legendary "floor"! No one says: "in our editorial office", they say: "on our floor." Sometimes: "on the seventh floor - as in seventh heaven" <...>

And if a dashing rock climber, who jumped from the Krasnoyarsk Pillars to the “floor” and became a brilliant confessor of journalistic independence, then jumps into the chair of the editor-in-chief, becomes the shameless mistress of the publication and declares that it doesn’t matter to her what ideas to push onto the pages and into the heads - if only bought - so this is the plot of Olga Kuchkina, the essence of the matter in her novel.

Do you catch the subtle irony in her hymns to the "seventh floor"? They were eager to discover the Big Truth, they relied on Freedom with a capital letter, they stormed the Sky, but in fact they didn’t take the Sky, but the “floor”, they grabbed not God by the beard, but the “bumps in swimming trunks” - for which our free journalist clung to interview a foreign celebrity, and to whom Sonya is indifferent (if these "bumps" are not wallets in other people's pants).

The story of the rise and fall of perestroika euphoria appears in Olga Kuchkina in the filigree figures of Sophia and Andrey, who stormed (and overwhelmed) damned totalitarianism from both sides. These figures deserve to be included in the annals of our wisdom. If, of course, it comes...