Northern Chronicles

A week ago, in the OGI Street club on Petrovka, which opened after renovation, a presentation of the Polar Anthology, published by the Paulsen publishing house, took place. In fact, the publishing house specializes in good, serious books about the Arctic and, in the future, Antarctica. Such as, for example, the polar diaries of V.G. Volovich or the re-release of the famous “ Seas of the Russian Arctic ” by Vladimir Wiese.

However, in Russia there is such a special air that publishers of any profile are inevitably diverted towards fiction - just as Captain Hatteras was diverted to the north. The consequence of this remarkable anomaly was the “Polar Anthology”, which collected under its cover, as the abstract says, “works of a very wide range of authors - from venerable representatives of Soviet (Gennady Prashkevich) and Soviet-era uncensored literature (Alexey Tsvetkov) to relatively young authors , only recently who began their creative careers (Pavel Goldin, Lev Oborin)...".

Since I know these authors, and the rest of the participants in the anthology (Danila Davydov, Andrei Rodionov, Fyodor Swarovsky, Vladimir Berezin and others), even before reading it, I had a definite - and confirmed - idea about its semantic content.

The compiler of the anthology and the author of the preface, Dmitry Kuzmin, however, said this earlier and better than I - the North, in his words, is “the last habitat of the transcendental, common to the entire planet,” and for the authors of the anthology, the region of the Pole is the area of ​​​​action Mytha. Moreover, the myth is “ancient and primordial”, where “miracles are possible and dreams come true and are broken.”

Indeed, the North in individual and mass consciousness is perceived as a kind of chthonic, unreal region, open to terrible miracles (those who have read Dan Simmons’ novel “The Terror” know what I mean). Edgar Poe settled a terrible ice giant at the pole, well, according to his staff. But even the sober Jules Verne could not resist sad mystical poetics in the finale of his Hatteras.

In Russia, everything, as always, is even more complicated. For us, the Arctic Circle brings together universal human mythology, deadly geography, Soviet literature averse to mysticism, the memory of the Gulag and the Russian imperial vector.

With universal human mythology (Hyperborea, where ghosts and shadows of the dead, people with dog heads and ice giants have long lived), everything is more or less clear. In the preface, Dmitry Kuzmin speaks of the “withering away of the modern myth,” citing as an example the story of Vladimir Berezin, where “through the ruins of a technogenic civilization something primordial and chthonic grows,” however, real geography here again and again collapses into myth, into esotericism.

With the memory of the Gulag, the same “Paulsen” published a book by Sergei Larkov and Fyodor Romanenko “Enemies of the People in the Arctic Circle.”

With mysticism it is more difficult. It would seem that what could be more sober than all sorts of Soviet notes from polar explorers, the Ice Book by Juhan Smuul and the nuclear icebreaker Lenin? However, here it is...

Why do people go to the North at all?

Almost all expeditions to the North carry not only a pragmatic, but also a mystical, symbolic meaning, writes Mikhail Butov in his essay, even the recent dive “to the bottom of the ocean right at the North Pole with the participation of deputies from the party in power.”

“They were looking more and more in the North for something mystical and foggy: Hyperborea, green alchemical Greenland, the ghostly Land of Sannikov, certain kingdoms of the spirit, or places suitable for awakening the spirit in oneself. The latter, perhaps, was successful - through constant being eye to eye with death" (Mikhail Butov, " Eternal Ice ").

Whether the reason for this is the indescribable “emptiness of existence” about which polar explorer Frederick Albert Cook writes in his diaries (ibid.), or some strange uncertainty of this “border strip between being and non-being” (father Konstantin Kravtsov), however, reality here bends, giving way place of opportunity.

Hence the peculiar specificity of literature about the North, archetypes that reproduce themselves over and over again.

The North gives rise to very specific forms of literature - letters, chronicles, diary entries. But if these are letters, then they are letters of the dead, if they are chronicles, then they are chronicles of madness. Kaverinsky captain Tatarinov, another captain - Hatteras, who was invariably diverted to the North, the nameless polar explorer Brodsky, covering his sister’s photograph with calculations of latitude and longitude...

So the new Hatteras, the polar explorer dad from Fyodor Swarovsky’s poem “Aurora Borealis,” also could not resist the ominous effect of the northern lights and for thirty years he has been “walking / on the ice of the Arctic Ocean / feeding on bears, seals / without any meaning / without a thought in his eyes "

Madness either generates shifts in reality, or forces a person to imagine them - as in Maria Stepanova’s already textbook poem “ Fish ”. Perhaps the polar explorers actually fished out an ideal woman/talking mermaid with a seine with scars on her stomach after a caesarean section (and if you think about it, how can they, mermaids, give birth otherwise?). Either the polar explorer doctor has gone crazy and divided into me/not me (the person fixing/breaking the walkie-talkie), and again he writes, writes home – to his distant beloved/she is the fish woman materialized in his visions.

Space collapses, even the north and south poles coincide, as in Vadim Kalinin’s ironic stylization, where a polar traveler writes letters to his beloved, sitting on the skin of a polar bear, and a faithful penguin stands guard at his tent, and in the end everything and everywhere becomes the North - as in the story of Danila Davydov.

The Russian imperial vector also looks strange and symbolic here (remember the already mentioned dive to the polar bottom). This is not an expansion of living space, as is the case with other cardinal points, it is something else.

This “kingdom of emptiness, dominion over which gives a pure sense of power, almost unrelated to power over conquered peoples,” as Kirill Kobrin writes in his essay “Nordialism.” With the same success, one can strive to own the Moon - it is not for nothing that Kobrin compares the conquest of the North with the conquest of space, where domestic imperialism finds its purest, most refined, non-mercantile embodiment (oil actually has nothing to do with it, or very remotely to do with it). We are talking about a different, symbolic content.

If you build a geopoetic (not geopolitical) system (Igor Sid talks a lot about this), you will get a kind of confrontation between the mystical East and North and the pragmatic West and South, between which Russia has settled.

If we take into account that the South and the West are firmly and densely populated, and the East itself has a tendency towards expansion, at least culturally, then the North in this sense is that ideal white canvas on which you can write anything you want. They write more about life and death, presented here in their pristine purity and nakedness. Russia, in essence, has nowhere to expand except into metaphysics, into the void, into myth.

And how to understand the symbolic North Pole - as an axis, the mast of an “ice country-boat” (Andrei Rodionov), or as a “middle finger pointing tenderly somewhere” (aka) is up to the reader.