Why is litcritics afraid of terms

Modern domestic literary criticism is in a strange position. Someone denies her all the time. Thin -journalic observers seems that thick -journal criticism is boring and outdated, because no one reads it. Their fat -high colleagues do not remain in debt and, struggling for the purity of the genre, they deprive honorary status of a critic of colleagues from more periodic or less thick editions - for their lightweight and pragmatism. And Internet people are generally sure that criticism in its current form is such an atavism that gradually resolves under the pressure of the review activity of the ordinary reader. Moreover, hundreds of polls show: criticism is by no means decisive for a reader's choice by the authority. Authoritative loved ones, media faces - yes. But not criticism. Whether glossy, whether newspaper newspaper, whether they are fat -high colleagues - here everything is about the same position.

Equally indefinite and incomprehensible. Because if the main function of criticism is to consider the selection of suitable texts and the impact on the opinion of consumers of book products, then in its historically established form this is an excess and, as our officials said, “ineffective”. Why write a long and generally any text, if there is enough indicating gesture performed by a media face-and the book becomes a bestseller?

In order to substantiate the need for criticism in the world of horizontal network ties and the Internet, some other, not quite utilitarian grounds are needed. However, we usually do not talk about the grounds in such disputes. One is enough that they are “status”, the other is that they are “historically rooted”. But those and others, as it seems, do not pronounce the main thing: in the modern information and cultural situation, the institution of literary criticism is needed for another and works differently than they want and seems.

It should be noted that redundancy in relation to any utilitarian definition is generally a fundamental characteristic of cultural institutions. Because the main function of culture is not at all the service of state ideology or consumer market, but the production and turnover of meanings. Banality? Yes, perhaps. But in the circumstances, when the request for “efficiency” is so great, such things seem appropriate again and again - and at every opportunity, to pronounce aloud.

This means that the role of criticism is not at all the growth of sales and not the formation of readership. The reader, oddly enough, has nothing to do with it. Criticism is not a mediator between the author and the reader at all, as for some reason it is still customary to think. Criticism is the phenomenon of intra -literative, wider - internal. Its task is to embed already a conquered and already read in the process of meaning. The book, which everyone bought and read, but about which no one wrote anything, of course, becomes a significant fact, but not significant for literature, but for the book business. To become a “literary fact”, such a book should leave the zone of the non -inspection. It is necessary that the critic comes and verbalize the meanings that she acquires as he appeals in society, or - he endowed it with the meaning, threw it into the internal, intra -literative general conversation, conceptualized, clothed in words.

The texts in which this procedure is carried out is performed, I propose to be considered literary criticism, regardless of the place of their placement. Criticism is a reflective apparatus of literature. And it does not matter how wide the circle of people for whom this reflection is relevant. And it doesn’t matter even whether this or that text was immediately read and how much he collected “likes” on social networks. Such a text works in a completely different way. The foregoing enters the virtual "piggy bank of interpretations" and at some point is updated.

But what about the history of criticism, which is all - from Belinsky to Nemzer, from Field to Danilkin - boils down to the creation and destruction of reputations, to the suggestion of the public of different ideas regarding the significance of the text or, on the contrary, its perfect uselessness? What is it, if not semantic production?

But what about the fact that only the name remains from the critics of the past and - their own is already a reputation, while only experts remember what they wrote there? It would be supposed to be that the critic is firmly connected with the current and “brave”, with the literary momentary, to be a “drive belt” and “consumable material” of the Lit Process. What remains of the critic after his (professional) death? Texts? No, an image (a frantic look, round glasses, debts, scandals, a gray jacket, a thick mustache - or nothing at all). At worst, memoirs. What is a critic - without a public? The critic and reader-they are twin brothers. Isn't it? Yes, it was so.

There are no more literature as something given and definite.

Our old fat-journal school is precisely the “school”, because in addition to the founding fathers, most of whom once entered the Academy of Russian modern literature, there are also successors in the young generation, which can be classified as the whole “ward” (the literary and critical group of Elena Pogorely, Valeria Pustova and Alisa Ganieva.- Ed .),-determines criticism, based on relying on based on relying on. Understanding of the national "cultural unconscious" matrix. The old school “makes life” from Belinsky, understanding by criticism - yes, semantic production, but only a certain type. Representatives of its liberal wing, showing tolerance in terms of ideas (each, of course, has the right to the opinion, no matter how paradoxical it is) turn out to be purists when it comes to the “form” of the expression of these ideas. They fight for the purity of discourse (in brackets I note - both format and genre). And thereby, perhaps, the ardor of the “utilitarists” fuel, because they create a system inside which a certain fundamental contradiction is laid.

Here is a indicative and relatively recent example. Sergei Chuprinin resumed his, which was begun in the late eighties, the project “Criticism is criticism” and wrote several “reputational” essays about the current participants in the literary and critical scene.

In particular, having placed the characters in pairs, he set Lev Danilkin and Ilya Kukulin. He called the essay about Danilkin encouragingly - “thinking unit”, and the essay on Kukulin, on the contrary, derogatoryly “the minority”.

One of the parameters of the opposition was just this stylistic component. So what does not suit the master of our criticism with the "minority" of Kukulin?

Chuprinin writes:

“In comparison with neighbors by profession, Ilya Kukulin writes not so very much: sluggish, heavy, but it happens that it is simply boring. Neither a bright heuristic metaphor, nor games with intonation, nor witty lined up literary and critical plots.

Erste Kolonne Marschiert ... Zweite Kolonne Marschiert ...

It is believed that this is a scientific style, philological, they say, criticism.

Well, I don't know, I don't know ...

We also read philologists for our own, and not only the fathers of the formal method, the texts are brighter.

However, Kukulin, too, seems to be able to be brighter - but only when he acts not as a magazine, but as a network reviewer and observer, columnist. Look, for example, his work in the archive of an immensely deceased electronic resource OpenSpace : here you have a syllable a springist, and a jokes of caustive, and the headlines for a sight for a look: “Sharashkin’s office”, “Follow your hands”, “With a stitched mouth”, “In the depths of secret pockets” ... and in general - we are all responsible for the goat. ”

But he should return to the “paper”, even though to “new literary display”, where it is most often printed, even in “Friendship of the Peoples”, “New World”, “Banner”, where he also begins, as it immediately begins: “The authors tended to solve such problems sought to recreate a changing way of development of the experience of unpredictable and multi -level bonds of the phenomena and events of the world. The appeal to complex and multi -valued connections among the “installation of images” was not for all representatives of this circle ”(“ UFO ”, 2003, No. 59).

UV! .. So they don’t write, perhaps, already in Uryupinsky's scientists, if there is such, a pedagogical university.

And the question arises: why?

For the sake of what purpose the critic with good seems to be the makings of a polemicist, who, when he wants to establish contact with the innocent “wide” reader, turns his magazine articles into something, maybe a sensible, but obviously unreasonable?

For the sake of that, I guess that this is also a deliberately difficult and imposed, defiantly non -artistic syllable - to stand out from a number of status (we will call them thick -journal) critics of modern literature. ”

So, with Chupinin, Kukulin, it seems, is precisely stylistic discrepancies. It is the analytical, unprofitable, terminologically saturated style of the Cukulinsky letter, and not its content annoyed Chupinin, which quotes Cukulin, including on the “banner” in which he is the chief editor. However, trying to explain this, as it seems to him, intentionally, artificially complicated style, Chuprinin changes the cause and investigation. No, Kukulin does not have to specially break himself, his tongue to show his difference with the surrounding speech and ideological environment.

Everything is exactly the opposite. Kukulin writes so not so that, but because. Because the initial for him, but perhaps not yet fully reflected model of literature implies a different task and another device of literary and critical statements than where all that rhetorical surroundings are appropriate, all those bright metaphors, cleverly hidden stories and other “literary” techniques that Chuprinin writes about.

Kukulin himself, first of all, considering the “social” aspect of the generational confrontation (for example, in the article “Synopsis of Critics”, quoted by Chuprinin), believes that the discrepancy passes along the “Soviet-Non-Soviet” line. Chuprinin and Cukulinsky style interprets in the same way: “He specially writes so boring and confusing so as not to write in advance,” so to speak, to rebuild.

I will allow myself to disagree with either one and other opinions. In my opinion, the reason for the discrepancy between Kukulin and Chuprinin is deeper than it seems to them. This “dashing of the style”, which Kukulin refuses to simulate in his “fat -journal”, that is, actually critical, articles and which Chuprinin appreciates so, is not a Soviet heritage at all. These are the reflexes of the venerable “Belinsky” model, which suggests that there is a certain “ reader”, a bearer of public “opinion”, a single book market, a single and only literature that we know exactly what it is, and which is the main and only ideological authority. Hence the “educational attitude”, and the rhetoric of influence, which is considered as a special professional virtue, as not at all a stylistic, but moral category. Such criticism is not that it is afraid of difficulties, longs and darkness, but it feels them as foreign and hostile to its main mission. As a kind of provocation. Intellectual cunning.

This is not “Soviet”, but “classic”. The classic model of literary criticism with literary centrism as its main premise.

Modern criticism rebuilt its boundaries in a situation of sharp marginalization of its subject. What just means that literature has long been the only “agent” of all possible ideological influences, the only “tribune” with which the intelligentsia addresses the “people”, and, firstly, one of the diverse (among other, competing) forms of intellectual leisure, and secondly, one of the ways (for those who prefer this method) of the broadcast of ideas and the broadcast of ideas and the following) ideologies. Nothing sacred, nothing that would automatically put on the criticism of power, it would make the crowds of gratefully listening to him who are looking for “truth” and “enlightenment” of readers - none of this more.

To attract the audience, there are methods much more effective than literary criticism, as already mentioned. In the “classic” model, which follows a thick -winged school, criticism has an unconditional and undeniable, obvious “mission”. The critic builds his own way of speech (discourse), as if “implanting” himself, including the reader’s consciousness, “medium”, “mass”, “simple” and “beloved”. And the point is not that this readership is “primitive” or even more “Soviet”. In the classical model, the critic becomes the bearer of the Husserlian “natural attitude”, according to which everything existing exists outside of us, in itself, naturally. Here is the literature in this view - yes, there is something in advance given and “natural”. We can easily say that there is a “truly” literature, and that is not literature. And there is no need to think how we know this. After all, the “taste” then is something absolute, understandable, essentially defined. You can call the book of critical works “The Case of Taste” (for criticism in the “classical” sense is precisely the “Case of Taste”) and consider that the matter is in the hat, everything is clear. And there is absolutely no need to think about what taste is. Classical criticism is everywhere looking for genuine, essential, that “remains” (as if it “remains” something explains something). She gives things names, she guesses a literary future and broadcasts these guesses, not thinking about who she is, what she is and where she came from. But otherwise it is impossible - a practical life, the life of “readers”, it requires. Natural installation helps to build and live, but very prevents to think. After all, we always think, “going behind”, reflecting the boundaries and conditions of our own thinking.

The reader who is implanted into the classical model of literary criticism is no longer. Because there is no more literature as something given and definite. Opening a new work and starting to think about it, we now have to ask ourselves not “what is it and what I can say about it”, but “how is it possible”, ask us why, for what reasons and how literature exists “here and now”. And it will always be new and re -defined “here and now”.

For such a collecting and deconstruction, an ordinary language is not enough. To do this, you need a device that allows you to go beyond the limits of experience. That is, terms and categories. So they are most afraid of classical criticism. It seems that they are redundant, that they are meaningless - how pointless for a person is everything that destroys the comfort of his familiar world.

It is the attitude to the “natural installation”, and not the place of placement of texts, and not even a generational affiliation determines the demarcation line between directions in modern literary criticism. In this sense, the “glossy” Leo Danilkin is quite a critic of the classical formation, and Igor Gulin, who writes for the “Kommersant”, on the contrary, is absolutely broken off from the “tradition”.

The model of criticism that Ilya Kukulin is developing is customary to call “philological” in the literary press. One can agree with this if philology is understood expandfully, in the spirit of the UFO. But, as it seems to me, we are talking about something more. It should be about a new, “non -classical” model of criticism. As there is a “non -classical” physics or non -classical paradigm in philosophy.

The goal of non -classical criticism is not a broadcast, but analysis, not an impact, but reflection, more precisely, self -reflection, constant collection - every time a rebuild - literature and the search for it new - philosophical (as it is realized in the texts of Mikhail Yampolsky about modern poetry or in the essays of Alexander Skidan), sociological (like Boris Dubin), ontological or, since it is on. That went, philological (the texts of Danila Davydov - a pure example of such philological, classifier criticism) - grounds.

The critic becomes something like a test pilot of the most incredible, most experimental, unprecedented aircraft. Such a pilot knows why and how the car works. This is a pilot engineer, an analyst pilot. He makes turns that are not always clear from the earth. And does not work for the public.