Books with Igor Gulin

"Eight"

Zakhar Prilepin

M.: Astrel, 2012

A new collection of stories and short stories by one of the most popular modern Russian writers. There are actually eight texts here. Among them is the title story about how four riot police friends in the dashing 90s destroy two gangster groups at once. A film by Alexei Uchitel will soon be released based on it.

Thanks to this book, the least manifesto in Prilepin’s career, you clearly feel that his path, among other things, is the story of the struggle against the Russian language. Prilepin is not the person who forgot about style for the sake of meaning and decided to write poorly, but the truth. He tries very hard to write well, and sometimes he even succeeds. But as soon as he relaxes, his tongue slips out of his hands with delightful agility. This struggle is much more interesting than his ideological quest. However, it is now clearer than ever that Prilepin is not about ideology: when it appears in his texts, it always looks like a random, inappropriate guest. It's about philosophy. About the fact that there are good people who, in theory, should belong to the world. But he doesn’t belong to them - not even because he was captured by the bad ones, but because he, the world, is a bitch and doesn’t value the good ones. These people are not actors, as Prilepin’s fans usually believe. On the contrary, they are paralyzed by the “will to live” as if by some terrible poison. Sometimes in a paroxysm they use some kind of violence against the rest of the world. This doesn’t change anything, but it does make it a little easier.

The intelligent reader’s love for Prilepin is to some extent explained precisely by the fact that this author gives him the picture that already exists in his mind of a primitive craving for violence, contempt for everything alien. But it gives it with a plus sign, not a minus sign. His key texts are such a false response “from the people” to intellectual phobias: yes, yes, we are exactly what you thought, only good ones. And their main function is not to evoke righteous anger, but, on the contrary, a cozy social calm.

"It won't cost anything"

Ivan Akhmetyev

M.: Samokat, 2011

Ivan Akhmetyev is known as a soulful researcher and publisher of Soviet underground literature, having published books by Yan Satunovsky, Georgy Obolduev, Pavel Ulitin and a number of other excellent authors, but above all he is a poet. This book is a small selection: poems from youth, the late 60s, to recent ones. Akhmetyev writes mostly very tiny texts, similar to microscopic fragments of everyday speech (like “well, don’t cry / he’s wrong”). This is an easily identifiable tradition, coming from the same Satunovsky and senior conceptualist Vsevolod Nekrasov, but Akhmetyev is very different from his teachers. For them, poetry miraculously emerged directly from the fabric of everyday speech, while for Akhmetyev, verse with an amazing effort is kept from falling back into simple speech. This is a different kind of work - not conquering new territory, but holding outposts. The point of confusion between speech and poetry in Akhmetyev is not a semantic catastrophe (the poems of Satunovsky and Nekrasov are almost always a little catastrophic), but a barely noticeable flicker. These are very quiet poems, slightly laughing at themselves, but the irony in them does not become a joke, the paradox is forced not to shine, but to wink (“Swimming is prohibited / but the ducks / do not listen”). Despite their simplicity, these texts require tension from the reader. He needs to know: what he expects from the poem will not happen - because it has just happened imperceptibly: “my poems are designed / for the most sensitive / and most benevolent reader / / they create such a reader.”

"Ashkenazi Brothers"

Yisroel-Yeshua Singer

M.: Text, 2012

Until recently, the famous Yiddish writer Yisroel-Yeshua Singer was present in Russian culture only as a line in the biographies of his younger brother, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis. Meanwhile, the elder Singer is certainly no worse a writer and, perhaps, more important. From the point of view of an eyewitness, he describes the disappearance of that Jewish world, the loss of which Singer Jr. mourns. Two years ago, the Text publishing house began publishing his books in Russian. This fourth is Singer's most famous novel, written in 1936, three years after moving to America, a monumental narrative about the life of two dissimilar twins in the city of Lodz from the mid-19th century to the end of the First World War.

"In the Cheeses"

Eduard Limonov

St. Petersburg: Limbus-press, 2012

"Atillo Longtooth"

Eduard Limonov

St. Petersburg: Ad Marginem Press, 2012

Almost simultaneously, two books by Eduard Limonov appeared at once. The first, “In the Cheese,” is another autobiographical novel, describing a very recent period of life: after leaving prison and until 2008. There is also information about the emergence of “The Other Russia” and about marriage to actress Ekaterina Volkova. For these five years, Limonov lived on Nizhnyaya Syromyatnicheskaya Street - hence the name. The second book, “Atillo the Long-Toothed,” is a new collection of cheerful Limonov poems: “O my dirty whore! / O evil bitch! / Inside you, my snake, / What is dry now? // Another mercilessly tore / You, the dashing one, / And so the flower has dried up, withered... / Give me a kiss!”

"One among the wolves"

Sean Ellis

M.: Corpus, 2011

A book by the unusual practicing zoologist Sean Ellis, a former British Marine who has been studying wolves for 20 years. For two years, Ellis literally lived in a wolf pack, ate raw meat, went hunting and tried his best to become one of the predators. He succeeded, and a little later, no longer in the forest, but in the reserve, Ellis himself raised little wolf cubs, so that he could later release them into the wild ready for life. He talks in more detail about the results of his experiments in other books (a total of five have already been published). This, the first translated, is more of an autobiography, with a personal story and Ellis’s ironically stated views on life, people, animals and the possibilities of dialogue between them.

"America at the School Desk"

Patricia Ahlberg Graham

M.: Higher School of Economics, 2011

The book by the director of the US Institute of Education, Patricia Ahlberg Graham, is a brief history of the American school from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. Graham describes the evolution in the very goals of primary and secondary education (as she herself puts it: from serving the interests of the nation to serving the interests of children), the history of the struggle of the school as a bureaucratic institution and society - including those parts of it that were not initially entitled to education. But this book is more likely not a dry historical monograph, but a search for important answers: how people can influence the education system, what exactly the school changes in the consciousness of society. Given the dismal state of secondary education today, Graham's book may prove essential reading.

Eight – Weekend Ukraine – Kommersant