Song about Holin

1.

The situation in which now the poetry of Igor Kholin is located is created specifically for demonstrating the ancient esoteric maxim - that objects are able to infect owners with their properties and their fate. The poet, in the years of Brezhnev’s stagnation, earned a living by boring and selling antiques, decades later, he himself turned into a kind of semblance - valuable, beautiful, rather weighty, little necessary thing. The dust is washed from it regularly, but they no longer take it to exhibitions. The writers demanded by the public, publicly recognizing the importance of the Kholinsky project - curtsies and praises, oaths and assurances - are trying to escape more likely to promising expanses of conceptualism, metametaphorism, Moscow note, Hudson time, etc. And so on, leaving, in the end, a wedding general with a shaved head lonely broadcast from the reserved Lianozovsky ghetto - boring to the inhabitants of the hut. Boredom, however, has never been an obstacle for an analytical judgment - and from the whole variety of reviews and reviews about Kholin’s work, the best is the most monotonous. This is the long -standing article by Evgeny Lobkova , printed in the magazine Mirror and captivating his congeniality - the same as in Kholinsky verses, radical abandonment of external effects and unjustified generalizations, the same total descriptivism: “Epitaphi - the most gloomy poems, the rare genre in the literature of the twentieth century. Kholin is a master of epitaph. He willingly kills and bury his heroes. ” The problem, however, is that the image of choline reproduced in it (as well as in many other texts) - a tireless specific fighter with “beautifulness”, a peculiar knight of lustration, methodically cleansing the language of vulgar cliches and stamps - is the image of antique, museum, which has little relation to the real state of things. And, perhaps, it is worth asking the question: how productive is the established tradition of reading, which gradually prone to the poetry of Kholin to aphorisms about the impossibility of literature after the tragedies of the twentieth century?

Perhaps, in order not to repeat the meaningless conversations about the Kholin “non -literary”, it is enough to recall the example from the long -standing text of Ilya Kukulin - a poem about pearl barley, written in the form of a classic trilet : “In a diet canteen / they sell cheap soup. / Good to the one who is stingy. / In a diet canteen / Waddled soup, pearl soup, / Select cereals from different cereals. / In a diet canteen / they sell cheap soup. " The expressive means of poetry were not expelled by Kholin, but rather redistributed: metonymy was preferred before the metaphor, restrained instrumentation - before dense alliteration, etc. The installation of the rejection of romantic excesses, for modesty and simplicity was generally the main trend of Soviet post -war poetry in the range from B. Pasternak to M. Isakovsky. Kholin, however, managed to clearly understand the danger that lurking here: the gradual and widespread sliding of this simplicity in the song - the modus, as a rule, sharply limiting the freedom of the author’s statement and replacing it with a number of standard schemes. Actually, the famous fragmentation, fragmentation, laconicism of Choline verses, their rhythmic interruptions and roughness (“I came home to drink. / Gloomy / I wanted to get / from the wardrobe costume”) can be interpreted precisely as a permanent prevention of such an unconscious “sliding”. On the same ways, another poetic achievement of Kholin is found: the first of the domestic authors, he radically rethought refrain. As you know, the refrain is the rudiment of the chorus, and most of the poetic “solid forms” with refrain, such as rondo and trilet, originate in the folk song; Now the repeating line can be loaded with the function of speaking, lamentation, memories, prayers, but, by and large, its main meaning is the relapse of the same song in the text. The refrain (and generally repetitions of words) in Kholin are abruptly out of the framework of this tradition, offering a completely different use of an old technique.

2.

We re -read several excerpts from various Choline things: “Here in the kiosk a fountain pen, / pedestrian! / Here is a cafe, go from the pay, / pedestrian! / Drink vodka, eat sausages, / pedestrian! / Subscription is on the loan, / pedestrian! ”; “Engineers / do not drink raw water / savage / do not drink raw water / shalopai / do not drink raw water / and trams / do not drink raw water”; "Beauty in the world / exists / simplicity in the world / exists / nobility too / exists / and ugliness too / exists." It seems that the obsessive repetition of the lines of the type “Do not drink raw water” no longer resembles the work of a speak or lamentation, but rather a strictly calculated kinematic scheme, an impassive and ruthless return of the elements of the mechanism along a pre -established path. Is it possible to assume that the refrain is interpreted by Kholin as a characteristic signs of the latest time - not a pastoral song, but endless industrial cycles; What is it aware of as a stylistic technique, the most adequate to the era of machine production, factory labor with its monotonous repetitions of operations at the conveyor or machine? It seems that such an understanding of the repetition ripened in the poet’s texts gradually, starting with unpretentious inversions in the “residents of the barrack” (“Smoke curls in the beer and caustic / Mahorka / Mahorka / Mahorka / in the beer on the stool / Sapozhnik Galkin Klim. / In the beer on the stool / fell asleep by the shoemaker Klim. Smoke ”), fully formalized in“ Warrior ”(“ Why do you serve / tell me the fool / and with whom are you friends / tell me the fool / why are you looking for / everywhere a fool / and what are you looking for / in a shit of a fool ”) and totally triumphantly in the famous poem“ The globe died ”(“ To love a woman / you need a pass / to die / need to die / need a pass. Serving God / needs a pass / globe / had a pass ”). Holina cited texts are most similar to machines, cars that perform monotonous, cyclic work of transfer and energy transformation: belt gear, gear wheels, curvature-shawl mechanism.

The interpretation of Kholin seems seductive as a singer of industrial socialist erotica, who managed to ironically describe the Soviet proletarian as an alienated sex machine.

The world of the heavy industry, of course, is manifested by Kholin, not only at the level of poetic technology: it is worth recalling his poems about the life of robots, about industrial accidents, about the meager Baratic life of a working person, and so on. Speaking differently - it is worth recalling the main historical subject of the era: alienated from itself by the proletariat. This subject is drawn by a broad, colorful strokes-in the form of a Bakhtinsky popular body, discovered between the terrible factory slums of the just sunk Stalinism. The fundamental indifference of the proletarian mass, as it seems, finds its expression in a number of features of the poetics of Choline. Constant repetitions (“He had power over his wife”), various inversions (“Autumn, / Summer has flown”), tautological rhymes (“He was sick with cancer. / From pain crawled with cancer”), The indistinguishability of the names (“The beloved was called Rimma, / In love with Sima”), generally the ubiquity of any things and phenomena (“The village of Fenya on the hay of The knees are good at the canopy / only Senya offers the haze for a moment in the canopy. And even a dense series of necrologists (“worked as a driver of the portal crane. / Fell to the bottom of the foundation pit”, “Casually stepped at the end / naked cable”, “He was a stoker. / Falled into a mouth / red -hot boiler. / Burned to the ground”) is here to the place - because each private death only emphasizes the immortality and invincibility of the collective proletarian bodies. It is very characteristic that Kholin (unlike M.M. Bakhtin) is inclined to consider the resulting picture in gloomy colors; Numerous excesses, effects and departure of a popular body are more likely to scare and angry the poet than instill faith in the transformative power of the class. The huge Corpus inhabitants of the barrack, according to Holin, does not change human history, but leads a simple animal: eats, drinks, sleeps, defecates.

3.

And here we again return to the cyclicity of Kholin verses marked above, to the key figure of refrain for them. The industrial world described by the poet conveys its ruthless calculation and repeatability to the biological world: all life and social cycles in it are so monotonous that they involuntarily remind the reader of mechanical production. Rising to work, returning home, an advance, pay, hobby, a hangover, fights, illnesses, death here are totally automated and alienated, and the choline repetitions are methodically hitting the ears (“today Saturday, / today the guys get drunk / in the huts”) additionally emphasize the transformation of a person into a car functioning in a different way to the first heating. However, the cycle, repeat, return is always erotica. A purely mechanical, crooked-shaped connection between the circular (like refrain in Rondo) and the reciprocating (as in sex) kinematics has been installed for a long time; It is enough to recall the textbook: “The two main movements are a rotational and sexual movement, their combination finds its expression in a locomotive consisting of wheels and pistons. These two movements are mutually converted one into another. And then you notice that, rotating, the Earth compel the animals and people and (since the arising is a reason is no less than what causes him) that animals and people, copulating, make the earth rotate. ” Oh, the collective body is constantly full of sexual excesses, saturated with them through (“Rumor in the apartment swept, / as if Firsov goes to Ira”; “The accountant Petrov Nikita / goes to Ninochka openly”; “And the neighbor sits on a chair, / for a reason he came to Julia” - but you need to understand that all this is not biology, but industry. And it seems extremely seductive to the interpretation of Kholin as a singer of industrial socialist erotica, who managed to ironically describe the Soviet proletarian as an alienated sex machine, which produces endless cyclic movements according to the laws of a crooked and triolet.

4.

And now we’ll voice the obviously provocative question: does the image of eroticism, which are imposed on industrial, machine production, do not lead to certain associations? I recall de Garden, who thought of a group orgy as a verified mechanism and dreamed of an ideal, unbearable victim (which, we note, can become not a single, but only a collective body). But in addition to de Sad and Tandem Delez & Guattari of the Anti-Edip era-with machine production of desires, circulation of molecular chains, transcoded everywhere in streams. The interpretation of the poems of I. Kholin as a conglomerate of those who wish cars located on a popular body without organs can be useful if you recall an important difference: the French authors had such a body, while Kholin has real socialism. It is known that the Anti-Edip published in 1972 was regarded by the public as a hastily picked banner of the Parisian Revolution of 1968, as its theoretical apology and the oath of loyalty to its ideals. This is a truly joyful and romantic book, daring about a completely new way of a happy human hostel outside of capitalism. But Kholin writes exactly the same in his poems. What do we see: machine metaphors turn around with exhausting labor, free production of desire - permanent lust, socialist collectivism - mud and horror of barracks, and transcoding of flows occurs mainly in the beer. The change of the basis leads to a terrifying mutation of the superstructure, and now re-reading the “residents of the hut”, I want to ask: did Kholin not manage to create a sarcastic utopia about May of the 68th, about the new life of Paris, in which students and situations won? Do we not deal with a grand anticipation, thanks to which the current choline is also structurally attributed to the movement of the 68th, like J. Orwell-to the totalitarian production of socialism, and O. Huxley-to cynical liberalism?

5.

It is interesting to note that the very word "May", so important for socialist historiography, is quite often located in Kholin in a rhyme position. What is it rhyming with? Here are a number of examples: “This was the case in May. / In the second hut of Paradise / I realized in the barn. / Why? No one knows ... "; “Two argue at the barn, / And one is already climbing into a fight ... / weekend. Beginning of May. / Boring to the inhabitants of the hut ”; “There was a dazzling May in the yard. / The people surrounded the unfortunate shed. " In this sarcastic conjugation of “May” with “Saray” there is, it seems, more than the simple pessimism of choline regarding the socialist project. Perhaps we should talk about the fact that the left political agenda as a whole was very compromised by the practice of Stalinism, or, paraphrasing Andrei Bely: the victory of socialism in Russia led to the disappearance of any socialists in it. In the collective body of the proletarian slums, one could see a promise to the universal apocalyptic strike in the spirit of F. Sorel or at least a joyful hope of overcoming death, like Bakhtin’s, but Kholin’s intention was directed completely differently. The associations of robotic people in Kholin verses are able to produce only quarrels, fights, scandals, crimes and lust. But does such a position reveal a rather right worldview of the poet? Actually, our voluntarist passage about the “residents of the Barack” as a utopia of Paris-68 was designed to demonstrate precisely this measurement of the Choline texts: a conservative ideological message cast in very avant-garde forms. And, it seems, this issue is not only related to Holin. The apolitics of the Soviet underground declared by many hid a wide repertoire of right beliefs, and this constellation largely continues to reproduce in modern Russian literature. Who knows - perhaps, it is the rudiments of reactionary ideologies inherited from the titans of the “second culture” that make up the cause of a clear crisis in which now domestic literature is?