Good luck

No one needs reviews of helpless books, as well as reviews of brilliant texts. If they write about you, it means that you are no longer nobody, but, thank God, not an angel, literature is an earthly destiny, and not the destiny of celestials. The new novel by Zakhara Prilepin “The Abode” is advertised so widely (including the author himself) that the suspicion may be sprinkled: maybe not to read? My task is to warn: of course, read.

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It should be read, if possible, having discarded the love of Prilepin, and his rejection, and any understandable to him. Read without stopping on the first pages: the “monastery” starts with the stylistically completely Prilepinsky and, the right word, ugly author’s introduction. Comes so lumpy: if you want absolute stylistic accuracy, then here you will have where to grimace. The feeling of the language sometimes refuses to everyone-and then you will forgive the author and his misunderstanding that “lies unprecedented”-this is about the deceased, and not about the sleeping child, “Khlebalovo” is a cross between Khlebov and the unauthorized manner about the face, and “strong attitude has been shattered a bit” (of course, this is not a mood, but a comical “sharp colic” somewhere in the copyrighted copyright figures.

There is a lot of this. The Russian novel, whose action takes place in the middle of the Solovetsky special purpose camp in the late 1920s, of course, cannot be written outside the dialogue attempt to be written with Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the second decade of the next century. Games with the language in the nationality, attempts to correct and improve it under the flag of return to the origins for Prilepin were inevitable, alas, a temptation.

For the author’s inevitable temptation, the author and verbal games with the “War and the World” were and verbal games. Well, how not to start a big romance from the French quote? It doesn’t matter that she looks like the French phrases “Boris Godunov”. The reader will see in the text complex flirting with Russian literature: inevitable Pushkin, and avoided Lermontov, and carefully expelled Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, and Astafyev (but not Bondarev), and the idolized Prilepin of Leonov (but also simply loved by him and almost forgotten by all the pale Shishkov), and Dmitry Bykov respected by the author. And traces of two dozen profiles from literary shrines - as playing cards are called on Solovki. Among them in the deck, of course, is Jonathan Littlel. In the first years after reading the “goodwriters” it is really difficult to say something about death, how difficult it was to say something about life after Dante.

Right to the word, to ban writers to read each other! But this is impossible, as it is impossible to make them not look for squabbles with their predecessors. “If Tolstoy himself had read such fairy tales in childhood - Nadson wouldn’t even come out of it,” says one of Prilepin’s heroes contemptuously about Yasnopolian fairy tales for children. Yes, adolescents, even grown up, do not like children's books, and they are indifferent to children - they are competitors for toys and attention. But, although Prilepin’s preface is admitted that he does not see any differences between himself and the fourteen -year -old son (which, we note, is completely obvious in his early texts), the task set in the “monastery” is not for the young man, but for the husband in years.

In any case, in perfect years.

* * *

Leave the ethnication. To explore the concentration camp, the death camp - without moralizing, without an indented conclusion, without tools developed by public morality, by the true method of artistic research, which so often refused both Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, this is the task. And the more difficult it is for Prilepin, the author of ideologized and a hard -faced person. The refusal to move his idea, the refusal to play along with - not often writers in Russia generally took up this: this is too serious self -restraint.

This is self -restraint, which, it seems to me that one should pay attention to the Prilepin text, largely determined its shape. In essence, this is a story.

Does this mean that the task of creating a Russian novel failed? But this story was created by great and more thorough labor than most Russian novels of the last decade. Rather, this is a feature of the plan, perhaps, a consequence of the author’s self -restraint. Pure inspiration, sensations of himself with a brilliant writer (and, I think, Prilepin is characterized by attacks of this self -awareness) in this rather ascetic text. It is apparently more labor, which most readers would consider hard labor. And this work is not in vain.

Kutorg is described - and this hard labor is the punishment on this hard labor as physical hardships, restriction of freedom, almost shackles. The main character, a young man, falls on Solovetskaya hard labor and is preparing for how Solovki will kill him. Him, Artem, the soul and his body.

From what was said, we can already conclude that we are talking about the novel of education. But, surprisingly, it is precisely there is almost no education in the novel - the hero of Prilepin in the movement of the text is more likely to disappear than appears. In the first book, in the exposition, there are still a lot of it. But also stingy, without excess. For example, that Artem, a completely intelligent and thinking young man, fell into Solovki not for free -thinking, but for the murder of his beloved father, from the drunken fists of which he defended a completely Dostoevsky unloved mother from the drunken fists, we will only guess, until we learn about it as a completely unimportant detail. In the second book, the hero will begin to disappear, and in the third (the second half of the second author’s book, technically and plot is a separate third book), in fact, we will only need a source of vision, that is, as an ordinary searning body.

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The theme of the body in the “monastery” is hardly accidental, although the name of the book most likely belongs to the publisher. It sounds too commercial-prutally in relation to the text and too much possible and almost excluded from the Roman of the irony may sound in it. The “monastery” of Prilepin, Solovki, is a place where the work of the Orthodox saints Zosima and Savvatia many centuries ago The body began to part with the soul, and in the 20s all this continued and will continue.

Death on Solovki is as familiar in the 16th century, as in the XX - is it a lot of difference in how and who torments an innocent person, if he does, according to Prilepin, to the same extent a guilty person? Everyone is to blame, for everyone has a body. But, as befits a prison novel, the main character here will not be a soul, but a body. It hurts. It sees a fly in the blue language of the dead in a cart shake on the bumps. It hears how the poet Afanasyev inspirely describes dozens of species of non -harsh sunsets - on Solovki sunset is like a knife, but the body despises metaphors, because it is afraid of a knife. It is covered with goose skin from one type of autumn water, in which you need to climb in order to half death to carry slippery and heavy logs-Balans. It starves and is happy to accept Balanda. It inhales the stench from the black -fingered foxes grown by the rational owner of the death camp for the organization of export supplies of fur - Parisian and Stockholm women will buy fur coats. It rinses someone else's blood from someone else's boot. It is starving. Finally, it kisses a woman - in the existence of a woman, the Chekist Gali, and it should seem to be a plot.

The “monastery” had every chance of becoming a novel about sensuality - but just this is the largest problem of the text. There is so much erotic in the text that the non -existence of a female character in it simply amazes. Nevertheless, Prilepin’s main female figure is essentially absent, it is fragmentary, unobvious, there is no need to understand it and there is no way to understand: Galina’s fictional diary as an application to the text only demonstrates to what extent this is a problem for Prilepin. “Abode” is a predictable novel about men (and about whom there could be a novel whose action takes place mainly in the male barracks of Solovki). But the fact that in the art of Artem’s love there is no second half, there is no specific creature for which the body and soul are one is almost a tragedy. The woman did not save - which means a lot in vain.

Prilepin, in his previous texts, refused impassivity, won a lot. Where in the “monastery” it was possible to approach in the “monastery” - the fabric of the text is predictably dead.

However, there is no camp head of Fedor Eichmanis. Of course, in the text of Eichmanis - the speaker, acting, screaming, even talking with the hero (alas, drunk) - no less than Galina. But this does not give anything. Both are Chekists, that is, people who are almost not pronouncing. The prototype, Eichmans, was once a Latvian shooter, for nothing that the German worked in the printing house and in the universal store Mur and Merilis, fought in Turkestan, then became a counterintelligence-but, increased by only one Russian letter, he will already turn into a busy photograph. At the same time, Eichmanis will only mention the “pirate frigate” in one place, but is this enough to recall Gumilev? On Solovki they do not write poetry. People who kill their own kinds for the sake of quite uncertain goals, not even political (in the “monastery”, as promised, is almost no political in the generally accepted understanding, the true policy is in the understanding of Prilepin, and even more so should be an ethics issue, and this is a strong and important statement) do not have properties. They are almost always absent, because they go somewhere all the time, and they kill between the opening of nephelin ores in the Arctic and the breeding of fur animals on the neighboring island. And when they return and even surrender to the hero, there is nothing to take from them.

This is an honest defeat of the author, and the defeat that makes him the honor, which Prilepin will probably refuse - but in vain. Littlel also did not succeed, and in this majestically unheated there is his own meaning: we cannot and should not understand what moves the killer with his hand, which is happening in the head of the executioner and what is motivated by sending his neighbor to death. There can be no development in the soul of an unusual killer. In the days described in the novel, the theories were still popular in Russia, according to which every killer is insane, is in a state of temporary insanity. In Germany, at the same moment, they were finally replaced by social theories of crime.

Although Zakhara Prilepin would hardly like such a reading, but the souls of both Galina and Eichmanis are really dead - just like the soul of the protagonist of the “beneficiaries” is dead, she is already in Aida, and in evidence, Littlel and wrote hundreds of such terrible and useless pages.

And, like Littlel, in the text, along with people, all the colors disappear: so the nightingales become colorless.

* * *

I don’t know whether it is worth it to attribute to the dignity or failures, but in the “monastery”, which slowly and consistently discussing basically voids, caverns and caches in the souls of her heroes, and in general there is a lot of things. In it, for example, with all the efforts of the author there are no geographical nightingale - the Russian North, which is squeezing the throat to anyone, there are many more people: is it possible to imagine a Russian romance without a convincing landscape? The "abode" is complete. The text has an extremely little spirit of the time of one of the most important periods in the history of the USSR. In the ark of Solovkov, where they collected all creatures in a couple, so as not to save, but drown, Prilepin actually does not have peasants. Maybe they are nominally, as there are Chinese, aristocrats, poets, former Wrangel counterintelligence, foreign diplomats, Indian subjects. All of them say a lot, but they are more likely shadows - shadows in hell.

There is no doubt that the action of the “monastery” takes place in the earthly hell: hell is visible only in contrast, and the contrasting of those who have already dead are already dead, and this is what makes Prilepin's text literature. He looks like Vladyka John, the “lord”, a bishop imprisoned in the Solovetsky Monastery for which the clergy is going to the monastery - to leave the world, and the world that meets there, by virtue of the devilish distortion of reality (the Tolstoye “world” from the “War and Peace”!), Which needs salvation. The forces of an ordinary priest are not enough for this, and there is no God, in essence,. But, being ascended by the will of the devils on the Calvary, to the Sekirnaya Mountain, to the cold temple with plastered frescoes, a person can do a lot. The second book of the “monastery” is one of the most incredible texts in Russian literature, a vision, for the sake of which, perhaps, Zakhar Prilepin was invented. It is only worth reading that you will not forget - and you will not forget it.

It's not about words. The main words are that in hell there were not prisoners on Solovki, but guards, ”says another priest, Father Zinovy. Vladychka John himself speaks with unhealthy accuracy - for example, slyly recalling how he sometimes admired himself: “Ah, what a good pop!” But much better he calls people to repentance - and from the spirit of the music of the bell, which portends the next execution on the sequirium, the music is born, and the pen of Prilepin finally moves the true compassion: believe, I will say this about a few texts in my life, and for the sake of only a few minutes of such movement it is worth writing and it is worth reading - even if this is the pen of the pen is minute, and here it is, alas, alas.

If the whole “monastery” were created so polyphonic, if the author had always been able to forget about himself, if only his heroes were told, I would not have to write this text, but the author’s biography. However, this experience of Zakhar Prilepin is extremely useful. It was hardly possible to prove more clearly that the method of artistic research does not work only through the author’s abandonment of software statements, from a direct demonstration of his own opinion. Perhaps, transparently passing through the text and, the right of the word, the author’s rather absurd idea of ​​the continuation of the bright work of Soviet writers played its bad role here. For the whole cohort of Soviet writers, the inability to abandon the beliefs was simply forced: if you want to write without elastic signs, write to the table. The idea of ​​Solzhenitsyn in the “Gulag Archipelago” was that the truth that you testify does not need to create a language - it itself creates its language from the words of the narrator. But an honest person is impossible - an event recorder, an impassive narrator about the things of unthinkable, on which there are no shackles. Prilepin, in his previous texts, refused impassivity, won a lot. Where in the “monastery” it was possible to approach in the “monastery” - the fabric of the text is predictably dead. Where it failed, where there is Prilepin, who could not play in the detached author, the world is created.

So the failure of the plan becomes a gift to us.

* * *

After the deafening beginning of the second book of the novel, the end of it, in essence, is not so important and even somewhat redundant - although necessary. There the hero, more and more disappearing and less and less necessary, falls into increasingly adventurous and optional adventures of the most terrible and optional property. The durability of the text is increasing, strong and rather symbolic guidelines in it are more and more deliberate - and this is an attempt to escape from Solovki (ending with a refusal even of the indirect murder of innocent), and the solemn departure of the Chekists, with which the hero finds himself in one prison cell, and voluntary readiness to die in the almost ancient decimal terror of the new camp authorities, and reality to accept reality to accept reality the hero as a victim. The heroes of the novel disappear, unable to be more. The cinematography of this part of the book is obvious and sometimes annoying. I, however, see my own logic in it. The hero is no longer there, and that is why more and more powerful events touch him less and less. The novel of education, which could also be the “abode” (and it’s good that it didn’t!), As if it didn’t work out. In the final of the text, the hero is simply moving by the external forces of the puppet - but the puppet is laughing, grinning, triumphant, paying tribute to the forces to its driving forces.

Then, already in the afterword, Artyom’s bare shadow of Artem, who triumph over the body, and who betrayed the body, criminals in the swamp lake will invisibly shake the soul in the northern short summer. And she will not be painful at all: he is not here for a long time. This is, with all the egregious shortcomings of the text of Prilepin, the truth is the narrative: people were killed on solo people, that is, they betrayed non -existence. A demonstration of the futility of any attempts to discuss the justice of these events in the “monastery” is its leitmotif. But the author’s intentions to dwell on this soothing thesis are destroyed by the intervention of the language; Each time it is an apparent impossibility of conclusion - with fire on the wall: there is no and cannot be anything fair in the murder of the soul, his own or a stranger.

Therefore, that with the fact that the “monastery” is not brilliant, but only good and significant, if there is this truth in it? What is the fact that the text of Prilepin is sometimes unexplored, sometimes bored, and sometimes simply absent, if there is definitely what should be written in it? And even more so - what about the fact that the author of the “monastery” probably sees completely different meanings in his text, completely different logic? This novel was needed at least in order to move, intonation, architectonics to proclaim: if God is, then he is the language of description. All the others, everything else is fiction that should be rejected. Бог слова — в буквальной правде, в том, что узнать, как это было , можно, лишь узнав и написав то, что понял: о Соловецком лагере особого назначения и о тех, кто в нем был убит.

И вымысел отвергнут, и в той мере, в какой он был отвергнут, — читайте; смерти вновь нет.

Zakhar Prilepin. Обитель. — М.: АСТ: Редакция Елены Шубиной, 2014. 746 с.