"Tolstoy - a genius of arithmetic"

Sergey Gandlevsky about Haji Murat, degeneration of imagination and dangerous samizdat

Sergey Gandlevsky is a poet, author of documentary prose and editor of the criticism and journalism department of the magazine “Foreign Literature”. Gorky talked with Gandlevsky about the beloved books of the children of the Soviet intelligentsia, about the risks of reading the “Gulag Archipelago” in the metro and “Lolita” in the museum, about the algebraist Dostoevsky and arithmetic Tolstoy

What do you like more: read or write?

Well ... (laughs) a funny question. Writing, of course: for a person with literary itch, it is precisely to formulate some kind of non-obvious meaning-among the main pleasures of life. But I am lazy, not initiative enough or simply ideas, so I like to write to order. (This, of course, is not about verses, but about all side literature.) And as for reading, I like to re -read.

What do you like to re -read? What you read before a certain age?

When how. Reading your favorite books of youth, we risk being disappointed. For example, it was with the idol of my adolescence and youth Dostoevsky. It is less risky to re -read what I liked already in the mature years. For some reason, I have not read Haji Murat to 30 years old, but 30 years old is a serious age, and since then my tastes have not undergone decisive changes. Here is a book that I can read from any place and find new and new perfection in it!

Have you somehow comprehended this transition from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy?

Yes, and here the wording of Herzen is very instructed: "Youth is inattentively rushing in some algebra of ideas, feelings and aspirations." Dostoevsky, for my taste, a genius for youth: smart youth, he gives this algebra of ideas to such a high degree that you seem to have a new hemisphere of the brain. During the years of my passion for Dostoevsky, I read the words of Vonnegut from “Brotherhood number five”, with whom I was happy to agree: “... absolutely everything you need to know about life is in the book“ The Brothers Karamazovs ”.” And in your youth it is: you get an amazing charge of algebraic information about God, about life, about death from Dostoevsky. But Algebra is too abstract knowledge, and later you pay attention to the fact that life consists of both privacy and Tolstoy - a genius, including “arithmetic”: insightful and thoughtful observations over the everyday life, which we mostly live.

It seems to you that children's and school reading gave you a lot or it was the same as the peers, and you developed later?

The circle of my children's reading was a generally accepted intelligent. Then life was easier to arrange and on a dozen books on the shelf of a teenager could be said from what social environment he is. Walter Scott, Tom Sawyer, Fenimore Cooper - all immigrants from intellectual families read about the same thing, and this probably unified personalities, but brought closer.

Was it a path without surprise?

Why, without surprise? I mastered all this for the first time! Just without impromptu, on a beaten rut. And it did not change for a very long time. For example, Maine Read as a children's writer remembers Nabokov, who was born in 1899, and exactly the same, after 50-60 years, intelligent boys and girls continued to read. Unless, most likely, he read in English, and we-in Russian.

Now, of course, a lot has changed. I do not think that we were very spiritual than the current teenagers, we just had no choice. In order to get a number of our teenage experiences from shots, chases, kisses and other things, we had to spend many hours and read hundreds of pages. But if we had the opportunity, by pressing the button, to experience exactly the same worries in just some minutes, we would have done so, we would also prefer an inclined plane.

But these changes, of course, - and here I do not open any America - can lead to changes even biological, changes in the human race. Because we had to recreate the appearance of d'Artagnan or Anna Karenina from letter symbols. Now, when a person immediately watches the picture on the screen, his imagination is practically inactive, which means that after a certain number of generations it can degenerate and come to naught.

Do you predict this as a pessimist or rather without emotion?

I fantasize without emotion. Since I probably will not see these people. But it is quite possible that if, by some miracle of years, I was brought here in a hundred years, I would not understand what kind of creatures they surround me, and they would be divorced for me.

But something similar has already happened. Remember, in a very boring, as I think now, the book “The Cathedral of the Parisian Mother of God” is a lot of reasoning that literature has squeezed architecture. Once people put their hope and passions in a stone, and then in books. And one of the heroes, Claude Frolo, looking from the book to the flame of Gothic outside the window, says: “This will kill that. The book will kill the building. "

If children's reading was a beaten path, then what was the first gathering from the rut?

Dostoevsky was! This author was not read on the recommendation of his father, for example. And not because my father was not engaged in my upbringing, on the contrary-who will recommend this to the 12-year-old boy! Moreover, Dostoevsky really made a traumatic impression on me.

The next reader's shock was just not fiction. At the age of 25, my brains simply turned upside down when one friend gave me a blind photocopy of the articles of Leo Shestov “speculation and revelation”. Earth swam under my feet - I could not imagine such a course of thoughts. And besides, so brilliantly set out: it is read at the speed of the "three musketeers", but at the same time - the perfect essence of religiosity.

Please tell us how Samizdat and Tamizdat existed in your circle of communication.

They gave you a book and said: keep in mind, this is for two or three nights-and here you had to be precise with a return. Once I gave a “gulag” to my new acquaintance, with whom I got into an expedition. He was an extraordinary man: the son of the “enemy of the people” grew up on “chemistry” with a perfect wolf wolf, he was difficult to speak because of the habit of loneliness. And so he disappeared with the book for a week and a half. When we met and I expressed his displeasure to him, he replied that he did not lose time in vain: he re -thrown the book and threw one copy to the universities, and the second - I already forgot where. Man of business!

There was still a funny incident with the same “guuluga”. I was driving a tipsy, reading the sedition, the last metro train to my southwest and, as it seemed to me, going out on the final one, put the book into the inner breast pocket of the jacket. In the doorway, I was touched from behind me by the shoulder, I turned around - the policeman handed me the “Gulag Archipelago” with the words: “You dropped” ...

The last poetic collection of Sergei Gandlevsky was called
"For 60" and was released in 2014

Photo: Gennady Grachev / cult.mos.ru

Has the reading of samizdat was related to a sense of danger?

How! Moreover, the Reflex remained for a long time, and when years later I saw that someone openly reads something similar in the subway, I took me a hurry. And only then I remembered that in the yard the nineties. For a long time, the word "photocopy" pulled alarming associations.

For you, the Gulag was a confirmation of what you already knew?

No. The news for the whole circle of people was primarily the scale of terror. My deceased friend of the Observance of absent-mindedness once forgot the “gulag” on his desk-in fact, such books were not supposed to be kept in sight. He, like most of us, lived with his parents. His parents were intelligent people, professional chess players. Father saw a forbidden book and read overnight. And Sasha told me that in the morning he entered him with wet eyes and said: “My God, what did they do to us?!”

Do you remember how books came to you that were not in the official press and which stayed with you for a long time? How did you first read Nabokov?

Nabokova - yes, I remember, I even remember what his girlfriend, whom I was very passionate, gave me. Moreover, she personally intertwined the photocopy of Lolita. In such a blue material with yellow flowers.

“Lolita” is mentioned in your verses, was the feeling of danger also connected with her?

Yes, they even wrote a denunciation for me because of the Lolita. I then worked at the Kolomenskoye museum-estate, all employees were pretty people, except for one woman who wrote that I read pornographic literature; I don’t even remember who this denunciation was addressed. I was invited to a conversation by the director Julia Serafimovna Chernyakhovskaya-it was believed that she was in some kind of relationship with General Chernyakhovsky-and showed me this denunciation, asking me to take care of myself and the museum.

Do you advise books to friends? And yourself - accept advice?

I happen to be an exam. When there is a pause in the conversation, I ask who reads what. True, some people are quite painful about this: maybe this is too personal. This is probably why we are nervous when we look into the book over the shoulder in the subway: we have a rather intimate contact with the book and it seems that there is a spy, the third, although no one looks directly into the skull.

As for our current topic, I can boast of pedagogical success. Reluctantly read my son in childhood; Now he is 30 years old and he is a very reading man, but in the adolescence of Grisha read from under the stick. And I began to rack my head: what kind of council should I find on him. I took into account that he is by nature a rationalist, which means that he needs a book, rationally arranged, with a visual mechanism. Contrary to his age, I slipped him a “invitation to execution” - and was right. That algebraic principle, which was so many in the genius of Nabokov, worked, and the son has since been addicted to reading.

The deceased D. A. Prigov found completely amazing flexibility in the same issue: I described it, but ready to tell once again. He was upset that he flatly refused to read Russian poems by his grandson, who lived in England. And at the same time, the boy, like most of the current boys, was passionate about lizards. Please, it is said - it was done: “My pterodactyl of honest rules, when it is not joking in a joke ...” And the case was striking from a dead point. In my opinion, wonderful flexibility and artistry.

Then you take something to read on the advice of your guests? In general, do you read a lot of new things now?

It happens that I take it. For example, on the advice of Grigory Chkhartishvili * recognized by the authorities of the Russian Federation by the foreign agent, I read the memoirs of “campaigns and horses” by Sergey Mamontov, a young officer of the Volunteer Army. A good artless book. It can be seen that, starting like a right -handed thing, the white movement more and more followed the inhuman logic of the war. At first, it was difficult to find people in execution teams, a year or two from those who wanted to kill their own seats was not. And after all, this is not sailor, but once intelligent people! And after this book, I established myself in the assumption that someone’s complete correctness in the war, etc. is possible only at the very beginning. Then before us this was poured from causal relationships and circular guilt-which, in general, is made uncomfortable.

Are you reading something now?

Yes. It turns out that I did not read the "island of Sakhalin." Chekhov in general over the years took a leading place: both as a writer and as a person.

Did it happen that you knew someone only through the texts, and then you met personally? Did you have a shock from the discrepancy between the image in the head and the real person?

No, on the contrary: I appreciate such discrepancies. Including, therefore, I read with interest on occasion and all sorts of ZhZL about people of art. It is believed that memories are usually read to dig into the dirty linen of celebrities. (Pushkin reacted so painfully to this: “He is small, like us, he is sustainable, like us! Lying, scoundrels: he is small and vile - not like you - otherwise.”)

And I read similar memoirs from opposite considerations: the worse the hero behaves, the more admiration of the art leads to me as such; What a wonderful catapult is this, tossing the one up. Actually, I am now awkwardly in my own words I retold the beginning of the Pushkin poem "Poet":

Does not yet require a poet
To the sacred victim Apollo,
In the concerns of vain light
He is cowardly immersed;
His Holy Lira is silent;
The soul tastes a cold sleep
And between children of the insignificant worlds,
Perhaps he is more insignificant.

Veresaev wrote two, as far as I know, biographies: “Pushkin in life” and “Gogol in life”. Pushkin is charming in everything, well, in almost everything, and Gogol, in my opinion, repulses the personality. Nevertheless, both are brilliant writers. So the antics of talented people do not discourage me and do not affect my admiration for their gift.

It also applies to contemporaries too?

Of course, if these arts do not really hurt my loved ones and me.

Honestly, I have not seen you with the reader of Limonov, but since, probably, should you like him?

I am simply not a big fan of his literature. If I liked it more, I would not stop ideological discrepancies with the author.

Do you even need reading to write poetry?

Yes, sure. After all, literature is written as if from itself. However, this was better formulated by Lev Losev: a real writer "is recharged not from the so -called life, but from literature."

If there is a choice to read or take a walk - what will you choose?

Take a walk. And the further - the more decisive. In general, admiration for nature is increasingly crowding my other addictions and affection: reading and music.