Translated material
Again ours didn’t take
To the question why Alexander Ilichevsky’s novel is called “Matisse” (“New World”, No. 2-3), a certain number of answers can be given. For example, simple-mindedly frontal: because Matisse is the favorite artist of the central character . This is stated in the text. True, here the inquisitive bore will come up with new bewilderment: why does this former physicist, who became homeless for high-ideological reasons, find taste in Matisse, and not in some Titian, Renoir or Kabakov? But a long series of questions, none of which can be the last, will arise when putting forward any other - no matter how sophisticated - hypothesis. Ilichevsky's text is fundamentally arbitrary. There are not and cannot be any internal (psychological or symbolic) motivations, except for the irresistible desire of the author to present here and now exactly such a stylistic passage, philosophical concept or plot attraction. It is not because the homeless Vadi (unprincipled, doomed by life to blissful misfortune) turned out to have two biographies (“Moscow” and “southern”), because holy fools, they say, are found outside normal space-time coordinates, but because the author passionately wanted to put into action both "stories". The former physicist was hungry for underground wisdom and “natural” (unnatural!) existence not because the life around him is completely illusory and without quality and - at the same time - cruel and insidious, on the contrary, life is presented this way (obsessively, but with constant contradictions in definitions) for in order to give the hero the opportunity to retire under the shadow of the streams (first into the mythological Moscow dungeons, where the “secret” metro of the Stalin era is highly artistically destroyed; then - into the Russian open spaces with their inherent collective farms and psychiatric hospitals). Poetizing non-existence is an amateur activity (I’m not one of them), but it is by no means identical to exposing the leaden abominations of life. But this is an outdated point of view - in a text without motivation, everything is possible, any tongue-tiedness here passes for "Platonic", any pretentiousness - for "Nabokovian". “While Vadya was just looking closely, secretly respecting his own pity for her, which he humbled with severity and callousness, Korolev tried to do something. It’s impossible to say who was kinder to her, but Vadya, thanks to his flair for life, possessed that complex flexibility of nature, which often turns out to be more successful than a direct inclination towards goodness.” More successful, more successful. What? I don’t ask, because I don’t have the proper “complex flexibility of nature.” And it's unlikely to ever appear. Once upon a time, “Matisse-like” prose (only incomparably better done) seemed interesting to me, but then it irritated me terribly. Now it only causes uncontrollable yawning. As the writer wrote, with an incredible resemblance to whom Ilichevsky for some reason endowed his - unprincipled - homeless Vadya, It’s a disaster... The trouble is that your novel is boring.
I don’t have the energy to write about “Rare Earths” by Vasily Aksenov (“October”, No. 2-3; at the same time, the novel, as usual, was published by Eksmo, and therefore placed in large Moscow stores on privileged racks). I already reported in the previous review that the magnificent Gena Stratofontov, renamed Gena Stratov, went through the late Soviet Komsomol and became our super-billionaire (with all the ensuing sad consequences), and then... Whatever you say will come out askew. Hunters will scold Aksenov even without me. Licking a classic with sad servility - too. It can (should) be stated: the novel is very Aksenov-esque. (But this doesn’t mean anything - for example, the previous, completely disastrous, “wet” opus was very Aksenovsky.) The nobility of a writer who sympathizes with the convicted oligarch and maintains a healthy disgust for the Soviet regime and its descendants is beyond doubt for me. To challenge Aksenov’s ideas about the modern history of Russia in general and the role of the Komsomol in it in particular (for me - disgusting, regardless of whether the last Young Fuhrers loved jazz and jeans and what happened to them later) is absurd: the novel is not a treatise. Clinging to not always successful jokes, flirtatious narcissism and a passion for company clothes is completely idiocy. Aksenov always had this, but it didn’t always make the difference. He doesn’t do it in “Rare Earths” either. There are a ton of fashionable lordly bells and whistles there, but that doesn’t make it any easier for the characters and the author. It all ended badly, albeit on a charming seashore.
“I must admit that I did not expect such a sad ending. Everyone somehow dreamed of some kind of challenge, something like a victory, a meeting not of ghosts, but of the living, a wave of some kind of inveterate heroism, a mixture of soft sadness with harsh irony; like that. Alas, five pages before the end everything turned out differently. This has happened more than once in my practice of writing novels. Not only do the characters show their character, the composition also resists. The romance falls apart and thus ends. “Rare Earths” acquire rhythm and poetic style,” writes Aksenov, who has already killed his favorite heroes. Either mocking himself, or still trying to put on a good face during a dubious game. Whether a “collapsed” novel “comes to fruition” in the transition from uneven prose to inept (perhaps intended to touch with naivety) verse is a moot point. Blessed is he who believes, he is warm in the world... Which does not negate another constantly relevant poetic line - the one in the title. And it relates not only to the plot of “Rare Earths”.