How does Booker choose? Yes, like everyone else: the worst...

In fact, everything is clear, and I would not like to put forward conspiracy theories. Elena Kolyadina with the "Flower Cross" won the next Booker race deservedly and naturally. I will say more: it was Booker that identified the main trend ...

In fact, everything is clear, and I would not like to put forward conspiracy theories. Elena Kolyadina with the "Flower Cross" won the next Booker race deservedly and naturally. I will say more: it was Booker that marked the main trend in Russian history of the last twenty years - that's how it appeared, that's how it immediately marked it. If someone writes that I am indignant, having been passed over by this literary award, I, alas, cannot convince anyone, but read carefully, gentlemen, into what has been written, and you will understand that I cannot, by definition, thirst for Booker, as I cannot demand a wreath from grateful colleagues during my lifetime. Better without a wreath, but alive.

Booker appeared in Russia in 1992 and immediately marked a trend - an amazing ability to choose the worst or, in any case, the least significant out of six novels. Corrections, of course, interfered with this process - sometimes they were awarded for the name (Okudzhava, Makanin, Aksenov), sometimes for the biography (Ruben Gonzalez Gallego). I do not consider "Voltairians and Voltaireans" Aksenov's best novel, and moreover, I consider it the worst, but with more successful things, he steadily flew past the "Booker". “A table with a decanter in the middle” is again not the best work of late Makanin, but Makanin in any case deserves any literary award due to the totality of undeniable merits. Ruben Gonzalez Gallego's book "White on Black" causes me a huge number of questions, claims and purely human disagreements, but the author's biography is such that he has the right to any book, any views and intonations. True, Anton Borisov's "Candidate for Culling" was written no weaker, but arranging a match for the championship in grief, as Lydia Chukovskaya wrote, is generally the last thing. In all other cases, the "Booker" was invariably and strictly awarded for the worst, or at least the most uninteresting work in the six. Actually, after the awarding of a frankly parodic character by the name of Elizarov, one could no longer follow the award. After that, Kolyadina's victory was not only natural, but the only possible one, and almost all my acquaintances accurately predicted it.

Recall 1991: among the applicants for Booker are Petrushevskaya with Night Time, Ivanchenko with Monogram, Sorokin with Hearts of Four, Makanin with Laz, Gorenstein with Mest, and Mark Kharitonov with Milashevich's Chest . I don’t want to say anything bad about Kharitonov, a quite worthy writer, but it is his novel that is the only one of the six that has not become an event in literature at all. That is just absolutely. You can love or not love Sorokin, argue about Petrushevskaya, be indignant at the late Makanin - but you had to be able to choose a book that would turn out to be so useless. I remember that the chairman of the jury, Andrey Sinyavsky, himself told me then that, of course, Petrushevskaya should have been ... but Kharitonov is still a novel, it meets the requirements best of all, and besides, names must be nominated ... That's how they put forward new names and advanced before that they encouraged not just graphomania, it would be God bless him, but the quintessence of unwitty, boring, verbose vulgarity, which now personifies, presumably, Russian literature of 2010.

What to do with it? Do nothing: get used to the fact that in a country built on the principle of negative selection, rewarding the worst is the norm - and, moreover, a mirror. Thanks to "Booker" already for the fact that he brilliantly reveals the trend. Other literary awards have not yet grown up to this - or, out of thoughtlessness, bravely fight against entropy; Booker, from the first day of its existence, barely appearing in the new Russia, followed the political trend exactly. Maybe the best get into power in our country? Maybe the victory of the current ruling clan was not the result of a long screening of all promising, honest and talented people? True, monstrous ones were eliminated, but who is not without sin. In any case, the simultaneous benefit performances of Elena Kolyadina and Dmitry Medvedev - the first with the "Flower Cross", the second with the federal message - clearly demonstrated what the country deserves and where it has come to. Moreover, Medvedev's message, dedicated mainly to children, the flowers of our life, can also be called a fat flower cross on all the hopes associated with his name. I hope this wording, unlike the WikiLeaks documents, will not seem rude or tactless to him. I simply marked the stage of the current development of Russia: the flower cross. That is, a cross entwined for pleasantness with the flowers of eloquence. And I won’t retell both texts - that the message of the president to the Russians, that the message of Kolyadina to the readers - I will not, thank you. In general, they are about the same thing: about how two people, deprived of talents, try to hide this fact with the help of different words and amuse their author's vanity by taking away the reader's time. True, Medvedev never mentions the aphedron. But between the lines he is guessed - where about the current state of affairs with crime, about the village of Kushchevskaya in particular.

I can't help but note one strange coincidence. I am already tired of everyone - and myself - with the cyclical nature of Russian history, but in 1911 Alexander Blok conceived the play "The Rose and the Cross". True, she was good, but that's not the point. Then everyone also understood everything, that's the point. True, the World Cup was not planned for 1918. Only on this championship, understand, all and hope.