Another surprise

On October 9, the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy announced the name of the Laureate of the Nobel Prize in literature for 2014. He was 69-year-old French writer Patrick Modiano. Monetary equivalent of the award - 10,000,000 Swedish crowns. That in terms of the more familiar to the Russian citizen of Dennuta is approximately 1,500,000 American dollars.

Sometimes, when you try to analyze the logic of the behavior of these people - what they are guided by, making this or that choice every year - it remains only to spread with your hands. Or shook with your shoulders. Or bulging your eyes. Presenting one single mimic reactions with all these mimic reactions-a huge size “I don’t understand!”. All the awards of literary Nobel in recent years had this. It is received by some unknown Chinese in Europe, then-as last year-a funny Canadian old woman.

The trend of recent years has led to the fact that they almost waved his hand to Nobel in literature. Well, in fact - you never know what they, these high -button academicians, will once again get into my head. Moreover, no one has never managed to predict the name of the one who will receive this prize with accuracy in advance.

So it was this time. In the latter before the announcement of the name of the lucky days, the ubiquitous bookmakers compiled their own Short List potential laureates and took bets based on them with one of the led probability coefficients. Who was not on this list. The first number was Japanese Haruki Murakami. Which is absolutely not surprising, since he does not come out of this list from year to year. Also mentioned such bison of elegant literature as the Franco-Chesh writer Milan Kunder and Italian Umberto Eco. From the number of writers in Russian somewhere in the middle of the list, the name of Svetlana Aleksievich flashed. This is a tradition, this cannot be avoided.

But yesterday showed that the bookmakers again screwed up.

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To argue that the name of the laureate just declared - the Frenchman Patrick Modiano - the domestic (his) reader is unknown if it would be rudeness beyond the line of idiocy. In his homeland, he is known to everyone who knows how to read. Since it has been working in the literature for almost half a century and is the author of more than two dozen books and a laureate of a good dozen of all kinds of awards, including the most prestigious - Goncurovskaya in France. Which was awarded in 1978 for his most perhaps the well -known novel in the world - “Dark Stove Street”.

The writer, who received the gonguru, is automatically ranked in France to the category of living classics - regardless of the age at the time he was at the time of award. Modiano in 1978 was thirty-three.

Having published in 1968 his first novel “The Square of the Star” (which brought him the Roger Nimier Award), Modiano has since regularly pleases her readers with new books. One after another, the “Night Guard” (1969), “District Boulevards” (1972), “Lakomb Lucien” (1974), “Villa“ sadness ”” (1975), “Family certificate” (1977) and others are released.

The writer, who received the gonguru, is automatically ranked in France to the category of living classics - regardless of the age at the time he was at the time of award. Modiano in 1978 was thirty-three. Did he suggest that after thirty -six years he would be overtaken by the most prestigious world award - Nobel? It is unlikely. Since he always considered himself a writer, first of all, not for everyone, but for those who need him.

Enterprises from among notebooks accuse Modiano of writing the same book all his life, which is published over and over over and over the chapters under different names. And all that he writes is spinning around the same topic-the psychoanalytic torment of the boy (young man, young man, mature man) from a mixed Belgian-Italian-Jewish family. Whose parents, having produced him immediately after the end of World War II, in which they were lucky to survive, actually abandoned him to their fate and not only did not engage in his upbringing, but not at all particularly puzzled by the very fact that they have a child. And now the child grew up, became a writer - and did not come up with anything more original than for decades to delve into his own subconscious, drinking the smell of memory burns and not paying any attention to what is happening around him in the surrounding reality. Moreover, the effect of many of his books takes place in France during the years of the Nazi occupation and collaborationist regime - that is, at a time when Modiano himself did not exist in the project either. A sort of reflecting intelligence, converted to a thought.

Literary critics, as you know, will never please. And there is no such writer to whom they could not attach the very imaginary cannet can on a virtual tail. But in one they are completely right: writers like Patrick Modiano exist really primarily for those who need it. Others can consume Welbek. Or, let's say, a Begbeder.

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The Russian reader also cannot complain that Patrick Modiano is unknown to him. Since his first translations into Russian appeared a quarter of a century ago, in communist times. In 1987, the Moscow publishing house Izvestia published the first Modiano book in the USSR, the mini-roman “Dark Street Street”, the same one for which the writer received the Goncurovsky Prize. The translation was completed by Maria Zonina, the book was published in the series "Library of the Foreign Literature magazine". " Two years later, the Rainbow publishing house issued a collection of four works of Modiano under the heading of the Tale, which, in addition to the “street ...” also included the “Lost World”, “August Sunday” and “Sitting the sentence”. Both books were published very moderate for the then circles - 50,000 copies each.

Then followed a large temporary failure. Only in 1997, the Publishing House "Triad" published the book of Modiano "From the depths of oblivion", and in 1998, at that time, the still flourishing Vagrius was given to the collection of his mini-facilities called "Lost World" (which, in addition to the previously already published in Russian "Street ..." and "Lost World", included the first translated "wedding trip" and "Villy "Sadness""). In 1999, Roman Modiano “Dora Bruder” was published in the publishing house “Text” translated by Nina Khotinskaya. Thirteen years later, in the same “text”, the last one in Russia was released today - and the eighth in Russian - the book of Modiano “Horizon” translated by Ekaterina Kozhevnikova. The circulations in the 2000s, of course, became meager, but also readers who could perceive such a prose as Modiano, for money, also significantly diminished. Everything flows, as Vasily Grossman used to say, albeit for another reason.

The very fact of the award of the Nobel Prize in literature Patrick Modiano will almost certainly cause a surge in interest in his work by publishers. So follow the novelties of the book market. They will certainly follow.