Prose flows into the Caspian Sea

Alexander Ilichevsky. Persian. — M.: AST-Astrel, 2010

Velimir Khlebnikov and Thor Heyerdahl, Afanasy Nikitin and Koba Dzhugashvili, Lieutenant Kizhe and Osama bin Laden converge on 650 pages of the book. And the Nobel brothers are looking for the treasure of Stenka Razin. Sur? Not at all. Just the author is detailed and accurate. And this...

Velimir Khlebnikov and Thor Heyerdahl, Afanasy Nikitin and Koba Dzhugashvili, Lieutenant Kizhe and Osama bin Laden converge on 650 pages of the book. And the Nobel brothers are looking for the treasure of Stenka Razin. Sur? Not at all. Just the author is detailed and accurate. And these are style-forming features.

Converge all of the above (and the darkness of unnamed) in a single lens. She is also “the lens, the bottom of the eye of the earth, the eye, the funnel of a colossal abyss of the landscape… the threshold of Persia, the entrance to India.” It is also a shaky feature of the meeting of Christianity and Islam. There their streams mingled, and the border is barely visible. As between fresh and salt water in river deltas, at the confluence of the sea.

This "eye bottom of the earth", the Khvalynsk-Caspian Sea, is the main character of the book. Along with the Absheron peninsula and the city of Baku.

The time of action is the same as in "Matisse", "Booker's", Ilichevsky's novel: a long time after the Big Bang of the empire. But the characters in Matisse are shell-shocked, crushed by this explosion. And the heroes of the "Persian" survived.

And it looks like they survived the old fashioned way. They lay down on the ground.

The narrator of the novel, Ilya, is under forty. He has an ancient occupation: to listen to the earth. In legends, this is the work of prophetic elders, but Ilya is a geologist and geophysicist, a US citizen, a Berkeley graduate. The plot of "The Persian" is blurred. It seems that it is needed only in order for Ilya to return to the Absheron Peninsula. The narrator's family (Russian Baku residents, hereditary oil workers) left there forever in the early 1990s. But apparently, the ebb and flow of peoples to the lenses of empires, to the energies of power and meaning in the depths of the lenses (until the energies are exhausted) is also ruled by some unknown law.

Twenty years later, an emigrant meets an immigrant in Absheron: the family of Hashem, a childhood friend, came to the USSR in the 1970s from Iran - on foot through the mountains. Now Khashem commands the ghostly Apsheron Jaeger Regiment named after Velimir Khlebnikov in the Caspian floodplains. Ilya is nailed to the huntsmen as a loner to a meaningful combat unit in the chaos of a general retreat.

Khashem, of course, does not have the Apsheron Regiment of the Romanovs, but the guards of the reserve. There are almost no ethnic Russians in the regiment - their families left twenty years ago. The play of adult men with half-starved families behind their backs during regimental holidays of the Apsheronians does not signify nostalgia for the empire (except for St. George's trumpets of meaning and service). And yet Russia has forever become a part of this soil. Like a geological formation. However, this is only one of the themes of the Persian.

The physical map of the world, with blue drops in depths and terracotta in heights, with birdlike metatarsals of river deltas, became more important for the heroes of the book than colored patches of a political map. Whoever owns Absheron, it belongs to them. It seems that the more often the flags and standards change over the peninsula, the stronger Hashem clings to it. His citizenship is exactly the knowledge of this piece of land. The half-exterminated species of birds is protected by its rangers like the Belogorsk fortress. They have no other Belogorsk fortress.

And the strength of the novel is in the details, thoroughness, vigilance of prose. Based on the same piece of land. Absheron is so good in the book because it is studied with five senses in great detail. In four dimensions, including history.

In the lens of the text, everything is equal and equal in size: the bustard's flight, the relict pomegranate forest reduced to firewood in the 1990s, the networks of Molokan sectarians in the canals near Lenkoran, the hellish roar of wells, the youth of Alfred Nobel and the fate of engineer Leonid Krasin, the German madman - a resident in Iran at the end of the 19th century, the Russian madman - Heyerdahl's correspondent and the hero of Baku schoolchildren, who disappeared in a solitary circumnavigation of the world ... The heyday of Baku after the discovery of oil in 1849 - and new slums with sheds from the skeletons of the Zhiguli, a falconry fair in Balochistan, the even hum of geophysical instruments — and an even hum of talk about God… You can’t single out the main thing — all this together recreates the lost Absheron from the Cyrillic alphabet.

“The indestructible power of the name is with us. It is unthinkable to fight her. Congratulations, dear comrades! Hooray!" Hashem says to the Chasseurs. Jaegers (in terms of the XIX century) - the prototype of the landing and regimental intelligence. Ilichevsky's novel is like a sortie (not the first in modern prose, but always desperate) from the besieged Belogorsk fortress of meanings. On a sortie to the camp of the occupiers: trends, brands - and exaggerated, like rubber dolls, bestsellers.

And God grant the Khlebnikov Apsheron Regiment more prisoners.