God is with Him

The most likely candidate for the "Big Book" of next year has already been decided

Nahum Nim wrote, probably, the best Russian novel of this year - "Lord, do it like this ...". (M., Astrel, Corpus). However, it was difficult to expect a weak book from Nim, the author of the prison stories “Before the Cock Crow” and “The Star of Light and Morning”, which thundered in the 90s, but no one imagined that it would turn out so funny. A man who was forced to deal with very sad things, a Soviet dissident and a prisoner, editor-in-chief of the journals Dossier on Censorship and Captivity (the latter remains the only printed publication in Russia that talks about the penitentiary system, an analogue of the Chronicle of Current Events) ), by definition, could not compose a funny novel, but go ahead. I will say more: this is a fantasy novel, or parable, if you like (but the Strugatskys also spoke in parables - they have not had traditional science fiction since the time of The Snail). And when it comes to next year's ABS Award, a more likely candidate than Nim's compact, smart, and daring novel, I can't imagine.

Here we could make a digression about why a lot of funny books appeared this year, not humorous, not satirical, but ontological, or something. Life has become ridiculous, the brakes have disappeared, the illusions have collapsed - and now, one after another, defiantly politically incorrect, written compositions appear without any regard: here are Weller's "Mishaherazade", and Gubin's "Tax to the Motherland", and Pelevin's "Snuff", about which we hope talk separately; these books have almost nothing in common, except for this liberating, absurd, defiantly cruel laugh without looking back. As for fantasy — or, if you prefer, parable — Nim has been writing parables for a long time, and his story “Viteka said” (it can be read here, it is published under the pseudonym “Sergei Khvoshch”) seems to me an excellent example of capacity and ambiguity. The fantastic construction of the new novel is simple and universal: all of us, if only we have not completely forgotten how to think, are wondering about the logic of God. It seriously diverges from human, earthly logic - there is enough irrational in history, explainable, perhaps, only by a personal impulse. But such impulses - vengeful, loving, sometimes completely childish - the Supreme Mind cannot have. Apparently, he fulfills someone's prayers, not all, of course, but only the prayers of those who have absolutely, absolutely no other consolation. His favorites are not suckers, of course, and not chmoshniki, speaking in army terms, but rather hunted, but strong, wise, but not understood by anyone. He considers them his scouts, or something. And now one of the three friends living in Soviet Belarus, Mishka, nicknamed Sack, is appointed such a scout, because there is no one more righteous than him in the district. His righteousness is expressed in thoroughness, thoughtfulness, slowness, and that innate moral sense, which is rare, but if given, it is not drowned out by anything.

Then the Sack begins to equip the world, wishing only the best, and this is what Nim paradoxically turns out to be: at the first stage, all the good wishes of the Sack turn, as it should be in a religious parable on the topic “It’s hard to be God”, sheer curiosities, and even atrocities . But Nim wouldn't be Nim if he limited himself to this predictable plot move. In sum, all these curiosities lead to a specific shift, line up along an obvious vector, and this vector is humanization, even freedom, in the end, but they are tightly linked with entropy, the growth of chaos. And - a terrible effect, especially noticeable in the final chapter - everyone individually becomes clearly freer, but all together ... Nim caught this trend, described it and tried to conjure it, but God alone knows what will happen. At the end of the novel, in any case, there is a point - after it, the prayer no longer has the opposite effect. And what the hero is praying about - the reader already knows, because it is already happening. You can look at the end, the effect will not suffer.

Nim's novel explains the JFK assassination - and why it will never be solved; gives an elegant and, if you think about it, the only possible explanation for the fact that the system did not dare to imprison Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in the 70s; reveals the secret of the luck of the cosmonaut Bykovsky and the bad luck of the dissident Bukovsky; opens the reader's eyes to the mechanics of the invasion of Afghanistan; gets to the roots of the paganization of all of Russia in the 90s and is crowned with the advent of the Internet, also, of course, called upon by heroes inexhaustible for fiction. But all this well-thought-out fun - as well as unobtrusive journalistic inserts offering a sober and caustic author's look at the inglorious end of the Soviet project - rests on a tightly screwed, neatly constructed plot. Nim is a mathematician by training, like Solzhenitsyn, by the way: in order to achieve something in Russian chaos and not let it swallow you up, you need to think rigorously and act economically.

Each of the ten chapters refers to a classic pattern, a plot archetype - guessing them becomes a separate, very exciting sport for readers. But all these constructive decisions - which are no less important in prose than in mechanical engineering - would remain pure speculation if not for the very fabric of the narrative: Nim's novel is written so expressively, sharply, precisely, the characters speak so individually and briefly, and portraits they are so grotesque and, moreover, reliable that the reader does not get bored on this roller coaster for a single minute. He flies through the novel - and the last fifty years of world history - without having time to think about how famously he is being fooled; and whatever you want - and Sack's reasoning about literature as a way to guide life I consider absolutely fair, although this is the purest subjective idealism. But what's the difference, what kind of idealism? It's just true, and Nim is clearly telling the truth about his own youth - you can't make it up. Means?..

I am very sorry that this really great master so rarely allows himself to do the main thing for which he was born: five novels by the age of sixty, plus a volume of uncollected journalism. Saving people, of course, is necessary and noble, and human rights protection in Russia is always more effective than reformism (reformism is just very similar to Meshk's good wishes), but it would be nice to compose anyway. True, according to rumors, Nim is now working on a novel about dissidence, about the last years of the Soviet intellectual underground. And as if this novel is already half finished.

Lord, do it.