Leonid Shvab: "The author interferes, he is confused underfoot"

- You and I said so much that the new corps of texts included in the book “Your Nicholas” is not “believe in the botanist”, but the other, a separate, next story. Can you tell about this new building? About the new book as about non-Botany for starters?

- I will try. Firstly, I'm starting to open there. That is, the closed space that was in the "botanist" - it, fortunately or not to happiness, is leaving. And I do not always like it. Not in the sensations, but in the sound I do not always like it. “Nikolai” is the logical conclusion of the “botany”, then without me.

- This is an opening of what? To let in what?

- This, on the contrary, is to release personal passions. Make personal emotions in the texts. This was not before. Rather, it was still, but on some very, very distant fields.

"Botanika" is more honest. "Botanika" is an honest book. And here ... I have quite a lot of doubts. "Botanika" was written without a reader. Those. It was about a sealed cube. Here I still somehow felt the reader behind my back. And this is a completely new feeling for me, very unusual. I am sure that this is also in the texts.

- You are saying now two things that are incompatible in a canonical conversation about poetry. These two things sound like this: “In a new book, I allowed myself to let personal emotions” and “The previous book was more honest.” In a canonical conversation about the poetry “Honest Book” is a book in which the author honestly speaks of himself . For you, the word "honest" clearly means something completely different.

“It’s even strange for me to say this out loud, but I will say: you won’t hide on paper.” It is impossible to hide on paper, you are completely open, literally entirely. You can see you whole. Therefore, when I am talking about tightness, I speak somewhat about something else. This is the tightness of the structure, or something. This ... the smaller the author is visible, the clearer the sound. The author interferes. Again, I say only to myself. The author interferes, he is confused underfoot. As a tourist with a typewriter at the Cohen brothers.

And when the author comes to the fore or changing the distant plan to the neighbor - there is a huge temptation, which is probably very difficult to avoid. Growing on some therapeutic strings. Those. arrange for yourself sessions of therapy using an artistic statement. This is unacceptable in my system. Categorically. I know that others work. I can’t. Because your personal distortions need to be treated in other places. Go to the boulevard, drink Anisova from Efi, go count yellow -poured starlings in the Independence Park, then you will return, and everything will form. But do not open medical institutions within the statement. Once again: I speak only to myself. Those. Open emotions are not me. They have them in my new book and only interfere, in my opinion. Only interfere.

I tried to imagine that there was no new book and there was only one Botanika. And, imagine, with such confidence, I can say to myself that nothing else is needed. Yes, you can’t say anything else. Even if there are new sounds. In principle, you have already shown your spaces, or rather, the planet has already shown. You can constantly take pictures from different angles. But the planet already exists.

- Behind the phrase “you have already shown your planet” there is a certain goal -setting: that was what the goal was, that was exactly what was important. Why?

-This is the only field where I really are responsible for my statement. On this planet, I am responsible for every grass.

- Then, how did these new texts from Nikolai began? Did you need to show another angle of the same planet? Another planet arose?

- There was an illusion that I could move to others. I don't think this happened. I think this is the same firmament. On the other hand, since we are talking about a very small volume - I do not regret what was done after the "nerd". But this is not a new book. This is not to say that this is another “botany”, but, in general, a neighboring garden. This, if simplifying, is a truck with a trailer. This is not another truck.

Maybe it will be appropriate to place a conditional preface from the author, which did not fall into a new book for reasons rather aesthetic.

“Question: who are you and what did you do? Answer: I was alone and did everything I could. Blessed, who can answer this, without taking his eyes off. I can't.

I started in the era of social shocks, today we have come to the times of ethical disasters. It is always difficult to write, the “brothers” did not deceive the “Serapionovs”.

The old Soviet film “Resident’s mistake”, a conversation from a newspaper kiosk:

- Do not give me “truthfulness”?

- And please, three pennies.

Midrash Bereshit-slave, chapter 22: “Do not do good to the villain, and you won’t be angry with you.”

Between the truth is Zadeshevo and today, the distance turned out to be narrow and short.

In the great formula for the life of Venedikt Erofeev (“Everything in the world should occur slowly and incorrectly ...”) The temporary component changed the pole, slowly became quickly, very quickly. Lord, let it be for all your will.

Summer, 2015 ".

- There is a terribly interesting question about the voice that we hear in this book. If the book is “this is not a confession, this is not therapy, this is not a game of sincerity with the reader; I just show my planet, ”who is he - this inhabitant of the planet? Whose voice speaks to us? Is this a demiurge? Is this a lonely resident? Who is this?

- No, hardly demiurge. Maybe an individual resident is not so bad. Rather, still an observer. The older - the better I can do it. Probably an observer.

-A botanist-research?

- Here is a researcher - an even more accurate word. [Stanislav] Lviv once spoke about this in passing, and I thought he was right.

- The researcher has the purpose of the study. What does this researcher examine, what does he show us?

- A very good question, and the answer is literally in one word: to relax. With yellow -soot filter, with a bottle tree, with a bench on a boulevard. With someone alive. These are animated objects and inanimate. With a person. First of all with a person, of course. That is, a sense of kinship is more important than the text.

- There is a feeling that you managed to relax? With strangers - for example, on public readings (you read very rarely, but read)?

- Yes. But very rarely. Very rarely.

- All the time I have the impression that your “related” is not at all the same as “get closer”.

- No, “get closer” - inaccurately, not at all. A related is a delight. This is a natural, chemically pure feeling of delight. When there is a sense of kinship. This is amazing.

- Then is there a saturation of kinship?

- Well, that's just now. Just not saturation, namely completeness.

You can write, but you can add. After I passed the layout of this book-I still have the feeling that I can add something else. I don’t feel that I don’t want to do anything else. But there is a tremendous difference between speaking, and in order to negotiate afterwards. I have this knowledge if we are talking about completeness.

Go to the boulevard, drink Anisova from Efi, go count yellow -poured starlings in the Independence Park, then you will return, and everything will form.

- Is it good?

- It is not alarming. It is calm. It is adult.

- Where the book has published, is it important for this sensation of kinship? I mean a book series as a certain way to outline a circle.

- Yes, yes. Well, this is a critically important circle for me. People whom I usually know and love. For so many years I existed within myself that when my circle appeared, with which I might not see so often, it became infinitely important for me to know that I was not alone.

- What does it mean in this sense “to be more than one”?

- Reconciliation of compass, reconciliation of coordinates. I understood this after one very important conversation for me with Maria Stepanova. Here is the north - this is north, yes. And this is the east, excellent. So, nothing has changed at the platform level. But not only, of course. This is the same kinship to which I am returning all the time. This is the same relationship, without which the existence is so fresh and ... and meaningless, probably.

- What to go for? To check is to try to make sure of something. What? That the world has not broken up? That you haven't gone crazy?

- Not so high. I would answer technically. That at the level of the operating system there were no cardinal changes. That is, applications can simply break up into parts, but the platform is held.

- At the same time, I believe that it is not with all the people with whom kinship is possible at the level of their texts is possible human kinship - and vice versa. What makes a person for you?

- Well, not texts. Although sometimes texts too. Own is the one with whom I can talk and reflect. Because thinking one and thinking in a conversation is completely different distances. Then, I am a reflector, in general, bad, therefore, when you can go into some completely unexpected gardens with your interlocutor, you understand that one cannot walk in such gardens. No way.

- Who in these recent years turned out to be such a person?

-If about the writers-Fedya [Swarovsky], Senya [Rovinsky], you, Masha [Stepanova], [Dmitry] Deutsch, Andrey [Saint-Senkov], Yura [Stanislav Lviv]. I am a trepidation to the concept of "comrade", for me this is a very important word. And I try to arrange readings with comrades. With Masha, Fedya, Deach ...

- What is it for you - to read well, to perform well? You do not read very often and not very many, and your relationship with this genre is not very simple. When you do it all the same, what about what?

- This is about the sound. This is only about the sound. Sometimes a new sound appears that you have not seen on paper. This is an important question, by the way, about reading and sound. On the other hand, nothing can compare with the feeling of "it has finally ended."

-The delight because it ended,-ashamed in public?

“It's a shame that you went out and did badly what you could have done well.” To voice what I composed. And if the sound turned out to be faded and had nothing to do with what you wrote - why then went out?

-By the way, about the word “botany” and a researcher-botanik: I think a lot about how important the mechanic is in your texts. Not in a bad sense of “mechanistic”, but in the sense of close attention to motor skills, to how things work and what makes them work. "Mechanics of the planet" - by analogy with the "mechanics of the spaceship", for example.

- The word "mechanics" here is very to the place. And completely offensive for my coordinates. It is mechanics, not electronics. In the statement, some points of engineering construction are certainly present, and I am not ashamed of them.

- Why suddenly an acquittal of note?

- Well, because ... we are talking about high art, we are talking about an artistic statement. And suddenly an engineer who is trying on the tool.

- All the time it seems to me that your texts and their author are trying to present to us the sequence of events not in order to tell history, but in order to expose the mechanisms that make stories arise on this planet take shape.

- I see nothing wrong with telling the story. We see how Robinson transports the surviving property from a broken ship on a raft. The list of items causes genuine interest, a living person builds the world from scratch, and everything that he has time to transport ashore will form the basis of the universe. Plus, one item is of great value. Fascinating. But in a magical narrative there is what you are talking about. That is, a certain action goes after another action, and the consequences can be completely crazy. Regarding crazy consequences - this is, perhaps, one of the most important points in the texts for me. Say, in case of fatal combination of circumstances, an incorrectly dialed telephone number can lead to launching a spacecraft ...

In the great formula for the life of Venedikt Erofeev (“Everything in the world should occur slowly and incorrectly ...”) The temporary component changed the pole, slowly became quickly, very quickly.

- Your texts make me think about Markov’s chains: each next element completely shifts the reader idea of ​​what is happening. How are they being built - if not too intimate question?

- By sound, as in a dark room, when you go to sound. Not a visual series. All by sound.

- When you say: “This is what I want to voice (or“ show ”), here is a bottle tree, here are the filter yellow, here is a boulevard” - you are talking all the time about the signs of not just peaceful, but crystally serene time. You offer the reader a world in which there is, even a very tense, but iron order, and this returns us to talk about mechanics.

- Absolutely fair, yes. But the iron order is a tactical kind. Complete madness reigns strategically.

- What forces support this order - and what kind of world is this, in which strategically is chaos, and tactically - everything is in its place and every bottle tree stands where it should be?

-In my opinion, this is our world. This order is, in fact, our ability to agree. Freedom is the ability to agree. Even if you are alone in the park or one in the city - you still have to agree with the environment. You must agree with inanimate objects. And when animated ones appear - to agree with them. In order for your space to become possible for living. And the iron order ... Probably, the word "iron" is not quite that immediately Bismarck rises on the horizon, but the order, in any case, is strict. Not sloppy.

- As Mayakovsky wrote - “Everything is terrible”?

-Yes, yes.

- "Who is repairing the clouds?" But this is a monstrously resource -intensive work: a character of your world for a second (even if it is a lonely mechanic) remains at rest. He all the time in interaction with the supposedly calm environment requiring the maintenance of the iron order.

“Do we live differently?” I think not.

- This leads us to a conversation on a painful topic for many of us - remembering that you and I spoke about this more than once. About scripture, reading - well, about thinking of poems during heavy events and large cataclysms, that's how it is now. You once said that you have times when, according to your personal sensation and personally, these classes are “natural”, but they are “unnatural”. Tell me about it, please.

- According to Harms, it is sick or not sick. Probably my nature is convulsive. That is, spasms, convulsions are my vocabulary. And my statement, my text is a kind of cramp, and the nature, the structure of this cramp has no desire to consider. And today my jumps and howls go somewhere in another field. Maybe tomorrow I can do something, I don’t necessarily shut up due to external circumstances-that’s all.

- How is this space busy inside you? What is there?

- Close people, nectaries, boulevard, sometimes books, sometimes the sea.

- Then this is a field that exists in ultramir time. Not just peacetime, but order and peace.

- That's right, yes. Actually, I am saved on this island, because I have no other.

- But - since we are talking about Israel in general and about Jerusalem in particular - that’s where there is no order and peace now.

- It is equally inconceivable to talk about the order and to talk equally unthinkable in Moscow. If there is a law of conservation of information, then it acts everywhere. For example, with anesthesia, pain information is blocked, but probably does not disappear. Whether the information about the pain will return - MB After many years - to the patient? To an anesthetist? Or will it fall like snow on the head of an unsuspecting person?

- Then, returning to your island, - there, in addition to love and will, what else do they feel for peace?

-The routine of daily actions-of course, there is some kind of frightening point in it. But just the real therapeutic principle - it is precisely in this, in repeating actions every day.

- In Routines ?

- Yes. But if the routine does not imply so much of the mentioned related connections today - it is nothing. It makes no sense. Search for the living - here, probably, you can stop. And the living in my understanding is that it is warm, that which can be hugged, that you can lean your shoulder. Living is a delight. And the connection between the search for living people and events and enthusiasm seems completely straightforward to me.

- I suddenly understood what important picture your texts show in my head: “Calmly, but enthusiastically talking about the seasonal color of deer, citizens are heading for a bomb shelter.”

- I told you, remember? During the last war, Skads fell in the area of ​​Jerusalem. Air anxiety siren sounded. I just ate the soup - licked a spoon and went to the bedroom, where the least windows, according to the instructions of the GO. And I sat with this spoon until I heard a distant boom. Then he returned to the kitchen and finished the soup. Here you are about it, as it seems to me. But I can’t understand the spoon, why did I take a spoon with me?

- It seems to me (in relation to the poetry of the poet Schwab), a spoon is that in any situation, including in an absolutely extreme situation of life and death, it retains the connection of characters with that measured being in the midst of chaos, for which they actually fight. And the struggle for which, by and large, is the meaning of their life.

- Always.

Leonid Schwab. Your Nikolai. - M.: New Literary Review, 2015