Ship of smarters

Maxim Kantor with Azart is looking for a normal person in a crazy world

I am not a book critic and could not be at least for this reason: if I don’t like the book, I can’t read it. I used to throw it off the balcony and gladly watched its flight. After he began to send an unreadable to a familiar women's prison, where the convicts were leafing through the best of the best. Once I met a poetess there, and lyrical, unclaimed. Subtle was a girl! And I gave her, I remember, a book that I took with me on the road - it was a collection of Brodsky’s interview. The poetess stepped out after and took up the old, well, the finale turned out to be sad. It is now much further from us than even Solovki.

That is, since I read the book, then, therefore, pleased with it. Sometimes something authors are sent to the review, I warn you honestly, and let them not be offended ... I didn’t warn the cantor, I once read his old book with pleasure and approximately already understood what to wait. It was called "drawing lessons", two thick volumes. She entertained me that the author waved to summarize the results of the twentieth century. Familiar publishers and booksellers scolded her, like, not a masterpiece, but I asked them:

- And what, is there better? Who else waved through the entire twentieth century?

“I can't remember,” I had an answer. - So nothing comes to mind at once.

- This is also the answer. And if so, then the cantor won!

Maxim in that book was smashed by contemporary art, especially the section in which the “artist” had a fight with a ferret, a male, by the way, the curators declared this an act of art. Maybe this was such an emblem of the last century?

So in the new book Maxim (Azart. "AST, 2017) that I am pretty, harshly opposing profitable sex with ferrets. The curator - “exhausted by yoga, vegetarian food, black tobacco and light drugs, left -wing Procialla” - asks him:

“ - You, so to speak, hmm ... too ... hmm ... artist? Uh?

“I'm doing painting,” I said. - Yes, I draw with paints.

Oh, it would be better if I say that I am stealing a trifle from the coats of first -graders in a school wardrobe. Priscilla, a cultural entomologist, drew me with cold, sticking a needle into the back of an insect.

- Color?

- Yes, on canvas - with paints, - I myself knew that the case was gystoye, serious people did not do so anymore.

- Abstract painting? - The insect was given the last chance.

- No, figurative.

- It's clear".

The end of the quote.

And now the hero of that book lived in the middle of all this and yet instead of nullifying something to Red Square-he painted the picture in the old fashioned way. In that book, he grew up, grew up, studied, and in the new one, he already learned and recalls his youth.

And so he tells how he was called to the yacht, in a cruise in perestroika. And he paid so that he would draw with paintings on board. He went there to the port of Amsterdam, suddenly with his wife and child, oddly enough. The yacht turned out to be an old steamer, or rather, its ruins, with rusty junk, which has not entered the sea for a hundred years. Because she could not. The owner of the craft, August (Catholic, like Maxim), decided to build a bright future on this ship, for which he gained a more than a strange team. The fat man-poet, the Orthodox, the Frenchwoman in terms of the Council, two Germans (and why two were two Germany for so long), the Englishman-professor Oxford, Russian artist from the Taganka, some left-handed musician playing on canned salmon cans. Two Jews who are not Jews. The Italian Michele, who sells combines from Kazakhstan from Hong Kong, or something. And, here's another thing that is incredibly important: the Russian wife of Augustus, here, she left, got a job - there was such a fashion. A funny quote about us:

““ Curious, ”Adrian inquired, yawning,“ which archetype embodies Slavic culture? ” It seemed to me that the ideal of Slavs is a fair uniform oppression of the whole team. However, the modern passion for profit refutes. ”

In short, in the book - the image of Europe! A rusty garbage dump, who knew the best times.

The plot is developing dynamically, the previous time I was so captured by the book “Blast” by Alexei Ivanov, who is now my favorite. I before I could not read it - and here on you!

I will not drain the denouement here, but there is a conscience. But there, what is Europe without them, refugees from Africa appear there! Yes! If they were not there, they should have come up with. And the book, of course, is filled with debate. The Negroes are fugitive - brothers to us or let them go forest? Wealth and resources, and canned food - equally divide or how? Work - everyone is obliged or not quite? Socialism - darkness or dream, or both in one bottle? Understand the structure of the world and people - is it possible or not? Russia - Europe or not?

And here is another striking thought of the author, well, or the character, what's the difference:

“I used to think: how did the Germans go to the Nazi army in the forty -fifth year, when Germany was already in the ruins? Germany was an aggressor and was to blame, but the boys did not know about the Holocaust. They went to the army because they were around, because their city was bombed, and they stood at the Zeelovsky heights, when everything was already gone. ”

This is again about the Germans on whom Europe rests. There will be no one without them. I myself, as a former Germanist who spent in both Germany (as they wrote - “Doctor of both Sciences”), I often think about this. I ask myself every now and then: once they broke the thread, the second time tore off; Is I ready to give my head to the cut off that it will not tear off for the third time? No, friends, not ready. Better, you are your political correct heads. You would listen to what German left in confidential conversations say. The softest thing is the pain because they cannot hold a referendum on the ban on the minarets after the Swiss: “Why did they allow them, but we don’t?” I asked: why do you need permission, are you unreasonable children? And you are waiting for permission - from whom, from whom? " They looked at me silently in response. Someone holds the Germans by the throat in the midst of an offset democracy ... Well, is it not beauty?

No, well, it’s understandable-a little Germans will go to which nation or faith, they will immediately remember everything. Here are refugees ... What to say about them? From a European point of view? Oriana Falachci is no longer with us and there is no one to expose the barbarism of refugees who flooded the urine center of Florence. She was not afraid of anything, at the age of 15 she went to partisan, but she did not pass on her sword to America and into the coffin, not transferred to anyone. Well, yes, let the Europeans tear the throats for their renovation, we, Scythians and Asians, do not trace into foreign debates.

The book also clings to the fact that the topics are collected here, it seems, all the table conversations. Yes, yes, I have not missed anything, sex there is also available. The Frenchwoman encroaches on the honor of the artist, and the poet herself on her. And these characters debate, exchanging witty remarks. And some perform gross physical work, as a rule, meaningless. Well, what do you want, the society is post-industrial. By the way, real workers are Germans. This is said in the book not by chance, this is the truth. My grandfather (returning from the front by a disabled person) commanded captive Germans when he restored the mine in the Donbass, enthusiastically told how they worked out there, despite the meager rations. Such people are simple. “Your work is stupid. However, like any socialist project. Heavy and unauthorized labor, ”says the character, Oxford professor. (Like Maxim, who is also a socialist.)

I also purely humanly liked Maxim’s suits that then, in his youth, he did not understand one, the other, the third. It is implied - after I understood, I took questions. Maybe he achieved enlightenment, like me, - and why not? Here he is, a fashionable artist, a writer and a professor of Bull Brod, a happy emigrant who, out of the principle of evil from his world, does not stop into the Empire ... I suppose, in his personal life, everything is great. I don’t know details, we are not so familiar - we drank a couple of times in the company. So I am terribly objective. I write what I want! And, as mentioned above, I read what I want, and I will not come down from this place.

Roughly speaking, if I read the book, then this is literature. Here I did not master the "Buddenbrokov" Mann. But he did not throw her out of the window, for she was state -owned, library.

In a word, pleasant and reading to you!

Igor Svinarenko,
Especially for "new"