FOR SEARCHING FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY

AWARD DEPARTMENT

This is the most gentle and thoughtful of all the fighters for political correctness. His novels "Snow", "Black Book", "White Fortress", "My Name is Red" are known in Russia. The tenderness of the prose of the Turkish writer, its visibility, the picturesque flowering of details...

This is the most gentle and thoughtful of all the fighters for political correctness.

His novels "Snow", "Black Book", "White Fortress", "My Name is Red" are known in Russia.

The tenderness of the Turkish writer's prose, its visibility, the picturesque flowering of details (a sure sign of love for life) are especially noticeable against the background of the texts of his direct predecessors: the razor-sharp pianist Elfrida Jelinek (Nobel Prize-2004) and the sarcastic Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize-2005) .

“Pamuk and political correctness” is a well-known story. Recall that in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, Pamuk mentioned the genocide of Armenians and Kurds in 1915. Türkiye initiated a lawsuit against the writer. Pamuk was defended by Günter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago and the Council of Europe. In 2005 the case was closed.

And so, on the one hand, in June 2006 in Moscow, Pamuk answered questions about the process: “For me, this episode of 2005 was, perhaps, an internal affair of Turkey.”

On the other hand, in the new book “Istanbul. City of Memories (Russian translation - M.: Olga Morozova Publishing House, 2006) Pamuk, without raising his voice, told his worldwide reader another story. Less known to the world than the events of 1915.

The plot is as follows: in 1955, in Thessaloniki, a bomb was thrown at the home of Kemal Ataturk. The house of the reformer of the Ottoman Empire was badly damaged. A wave of popular anger arose. It led to a very cruel pogrom of ethnic Greeks, Armenians, Kurds in Istanbul.

And then it came out of the archives: the bomb was thrown by a Turkish intelligence agent. Precisely for the sake of a good, vigorous pogrom of the "minorities". And people didn't disappoint...

This story, so similar to the provocation at the beginning of the Second World War, speaks not so much about the writer Pamuk, but about the fragility of times, about the grimaces of the absurdity of the 20th century.

And for Orkhan Pamuk's prose, three pages of terrible truth are only part of the great, colorful, shining truth of the "city and the world." The same part as the aorta of the Bosphorus and the steamer with the engine of 1913 taken from the pasha's yacht; plum blossoms on the Sultan's tombs; the shop of an old Greek woman on the street of his childhood (a commercial specialty is the darning of nylon stockings); grandmother's armchairs with mother-of-pearl inlay.

The list of "edges of the city and the world" is endless: fruit sellers in the Dardanelles, sailing in boats along the neighborhoods; German engraver Melling - knight and court landscape painter of Istanbul in 1819; touching homage to the American way of drinking tomato juice by the Turkish bourgeoisie of the 1960s (the writer's family also belonged to it), sunsets, coffee houses, small squares, gangsters, acrobats, book dealers...

According to the Nobel Committee, Pamuk received the prize "for discovering new symbols of the collision and interweaving of cultures in the course of the search for the melancholy soul of his hometown."

“Sorrow of Istanbul” is his cross-cutting theme. He even compared the capital of the collapsed empire with the cities about which Claude Levi-Strauss wrote the book "Sad Tropics". But still, Pamuk, a failed artist, retained in his prose the look of a painter. And the property inherent in artists is love for the world. Happiness is just to look at it.

In Moscow in the summer of 2006, the thin, tall, fair-haired and shy Pamuk in horn-rimmed glasses looked like a Swedish professor. He was asked: is he a soil worker or a Westerner, after all? Progressive or traditionalist? Let him say! And you can't really tell from the books.

Pamuk replied: “If I deny one side of my being, the other side will swallow me up. Modernization is part of our experience. The same reality as tradition. Change is a certain constant of all eras. Favorite means of self-expression of life.

He spoke about his love for Chekhov and Nabokov (well, you will definitely understand this from books!). He even boasted: when Dmitry Vladimirovich, the writer's son, arrived in Istanbul, it was he, Pamuk, who showed Nabokov Jr. traces of the "white Constantinople."

However, Pamuk got rid of the press in Moscow politely and quickly. And he went to the Pushkin Museum on Volkhonka: to watch "our" Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse.

He also dreamed of seeing a flea market in Russia. I even heard something at home, in Istanbul, about our marketplace on the Mark platform.

But the publishers who received Pamuk in Moscow decided that this collapse of the combustible, worn-out debris of the USSR was too sad.

Even for a student of the sadness of great cities and former empires.