Translated material
And the drowned man is knocking
“--Paul! - the countess shouted from behind the screens, - send me some new novel, but please, not one of the current ones.
- How is it, grand'maman?
- That is, a novel where the hero does not crush either his father or his mother and where there are no drowned bodies. I'm terribly afraid of drowned people!..
- There are no such novels nowadays. Don't you want Russians?
“Are there really Russian novels?.. They’ve come, father, they’ve come!”
After listening to two pages of a Russian novel delivered from her obedient grandson, the countess called it “nonsense” and ordered it to be sent away with gratitude. It is clear that the old woman was not a big hunter of invented stories (in the few Russian novels of the early 1830s, “drowned bodies” were not observed), but this does not make her complaints about the typical horrors of the then French “frantic” literature completely meaningless. In The Queen of Spades, Pushkin did not fail to ironically touch upon fashionable reading matter once again. When Hermann, who approached the coffin of Countess, thought that “the dead woman looked at him mockingly,” he “stumbled and fell backwards on the ground <...> This episode outraged the solemnity of the gloomy ritual for several minutes. A dull murmur arose among the visitors, and the thin chamberlain, a close relative of the deceased, whispered in the ear of the Englishman standing next to him that the young man was her natural son, to which the Englishman answered coldly: Oh?
Hermann, who actually killed the countess, and who was previously ready to “become ... the lover” of an eighty-seven-year-old old woman for the sake of the secret of three cards, was hardly her illegitimate son. Just as the glorious Chekalinsky, who in Pushkin’s story had the role of an instrument of fate, was not the fruit of another criminal relationship of the countess (and consequently Hermann’s half-brother). Pushkin is ironic about these plot moves, which, however, were “guessed” and further developed in one of the early stage interpretations of “The Queen of Spades.” And no wonder: incest, the murder of a mother, a duel between two brothers - the motives in themselves are impressive and allow you to effectively inflate the secular joke about the three true cards. Pushkin’s interpreters also provided us with a “drowned body”: in the story “Lizaveta Ivanovna married a very kind young man” and took a poor relative into her care - the operatic Liza, having sung a luxurious aria, rushed into the Winter Canal. No matter how much Pushkin sneered at fashionable horror films, no matter how much he grounded the “r-r-r-okay str-r-r-asti,” they still turned out to be in demand.
Just as in the thirties of the last century, a novelist aspiring to success had to kill his parents (children, brothers) with the hands of the hero, present the reader with a drowned man (hanged man, guillotined) and pit incredible luxury against slum disasters, so now a writer paving the way to glory must spice up his story with several visibly erotic scenes (and/or lamentations about specific sexual predilections or phobias), put on stage a homeless person, an oligarch and a shaker of foundations, and somehow attach to the case, if not the supreme power, then some kind of police-judge-prosecutor structure. It doesn’t matter how necessary these “details” are for the author’s thought, whether they give the plot the desired dynamism, or whether they allow the characters to be made more voluminous—a gentleman’s set is always at a premium.
We are not talking about tray products at all. And not about a kind of parodic (excuse the expression - postmodern) play on kitsch, from which kitsch - contrary to the writer's intentions - only flourishes more magnificently. Alas, even very good books encourage grumbling in the spirit of Pushkin’s countess. For example, Boris Minaev’s novel “The Psychologist, or Doctor Levin’s Mistake” (M., “Time”), an essay, in my opinion, is smart, well-written, intelligent in spirit, and in places fascinating.
The matured hero of the stories “Leva’s Childhood” and “The Genius of Judo” became a psychologist specializing in “difficult” children. The mere fact that the protagonist is not a killer or a dealer makes my heart warm. And following the vicissitudes of Leva’s relationship with four ladies - his beloved wife, who has left for the USA, the mothers of two young patients and the girl whom the doctor must help get out of her mental darkness - is quite interesting. Seven pounds of love (earthly and heavenly; plots of varying degrees of intimacy are formed by the doctor with all the heroines, and even the story of the first feeling naturally emerges), a flooded sea of psychology, difficult family conflicts, a tactfully (without caricature or lisp) introduced church theme, subtle reasoning about illness and health (the teenager Leva had to be treated for stuttering in the hospital, which, it seems, predetermined both the choice of profession and the character traits of the future psychologist) - everything is very nice. And the characters don’t drink on every page, and they talk about money without much gusto, and sometimes joke gracefully, and the sex scenes don’t sound vulgar. In general, the same normal book about normal people that I have been missing for a long time. It is very important that not only Dr. Levin, but also the writer Minaev believe: deviations and oddities do not at all remove their bearers from the human community (in my opinion, this view is already worth a lot). I would like to read and rejoice.
I am happy. But I just can’t get rid of Anna Fedotovna syndrome. The fact is that one of Levin’s clients, who wanted to raise a child without a mother, and therefore kicked his wife out of the house (and thus doomed her to friendship with the doctor), is a well-known opposition journalist. And the friend of another Levin client (and mistress) is a high official from the prosecutor's office. And the father of the girl with a curve (whom she at first did not quite love like a daughter, and then set out to kill) is a former party functionary, now, as you might guess, an oligarch. And the object of this very girl’s adoration (so to speak, the father’s substitute), the object of passion, either designed to mask other feelings, or real, due to family disorder, is not anyone, but President (then still acting) Putin. And even the heroine, who was cured by Levin (in a completely predictable, albeit unexpected and undesirable way for both the doctor and the patient; here she is, put in the title of the novel, is an unforgivable “mistake”), lost her innocence, went to America and gave birth to a girl he can’t because of presidentophilia - he passes off his child as Putin’s daughter.
It seems to the writer that by using such characters, he makes the plot more entertaining (Kremlin intrigues, blackmail, threats of a ban on his profession and the collapse of his business), and the text more symbolic. In my opinion, it only weakens interest in truly complex (and cleverly depicted) human characters and real problems. Who would argue, politics influences even the most ordinary people, but it does not determine the pattern of their feelings and thoughts, hopes, illusions and delusions, breakdowns and ups. And if so, then why not leave newspaper and Internet problems to newspapers and their mighty electrical counterpart? Honestly, I’ll find somewhere to read about tycoons, columnists, prosecutors and Putin, if the hunt comes. The same as about “drowned bodies” and Oedipus of the third freshness.