Normal languages ​​in Russia

The publishing house of the European University published the “Anthropological Roman” by Anna Klepikova “Probably I am a fool”. The book, which served as the basis for the candidate dissertation on anthropology, talks about how the author spent several years working, working as a volunteer in children's and adult boarding schools for people with the characteristics of mental and physical development - abbreviated DDI and PNI.

“I must be a fool” is not the first Russian -speaking text on a similar topic. Klepikova herself refers to books such as the “Nespatic World” by Maria Berkovich and the “white on the black” Ruben Galego. But from other works of such topics, Klepikova’s book is distinguished by a combination of scientific and artistic approaches. The form of the “anthropological novel” structurally resembles the texts of such authors as William Styron, Milan Kunder and Julian Barnes, in whom artistic prose intersects with essayism. Klepikova’s book goes beyond the genre of anthropological research and begins to comprehend not only as a scientific and informative text, but also as a plot-linguistic construction. It becomes important not only said, but also as this is said.

Actually, Klepikov is trying to create a new language, with the help of which the issue of developmental deviations in children and adults could be discussed without elaboration, shame and emotionality. Such an attempt is all the more important that in the literature (not only in Russian), mental and physical characteristics often do not go beyond the scope of the art trail. Examples here are extensive. Mental retardation is the plot core of the science fiction novel by Daniel Kiz “Flowers for Elternon”. In the poem of Khodasevich “Ballad”, the lyrical hero says: “I can’t be myself, / I want to go crazy, / when with a pregnant wife / there is a mindless one in Cinema.” Similarly, Dmitry Bykov’s poem was built: “An old woman-mother with an idiot child- / slobbery, long-armed, larger- / go for a walk to the nearest forest park.” In Sasha Sokolov’s novel “School for Fools”, the narrator has a split personality. Klepikova herself mentions the “noise and rage” of William Fulkner and the “life of Vasily Five” Leonid Andreev. These and other texts are read dual: on the one hand, all of them in one way or another strive to convey the tragedy of the position in which people with the features of development appear; On the other hand, a mental or physical deviation in them remains an artistic technique with which the author affects the reader.

Klepikova displays the topic of mental and physical features from the tyranny of the art trail. A description of the life of the orphanage, the behavior of the children themselves and the two “competing communities”-liberal-thinking volunteers from the Alternatives organization and conservative orderlies, obeying the authorities and government officials-all this is deprived of any signs of personal judgment and enters a certain neutral level. Klepikova describes such details that, it would seem, is difficult to perceive without emotions: the injustice and rudeness of the nurses that beat and scold children, the difficult position of the pupils of DDI, the history of volunteers, educators and some kind of kind -hearted orderlies, tied to children and sincerely caring for them. But all this accepts such a linguistic expression in which the emotional function fades into the background, and from this the content and essence of the described are clarified.

Of the various examples of such a language system, the following can be given. Klepikova writes about the boy Savva, who does not know how to walk, but is partially able to move on his knees:

“Savva does not fully control their natural departures, and they try to make it for him: they scream and punish if he did not have time to get to the pot. The staff is convinced that Savva does this to them. Therefore, in the mornings, as a simultaneous punishment and prevention, after breakfast, they are planted on a pot for a long time, and sometimes they put it there before breakfast and fed right on the pot. This is a good example of how a sick body is perceived as a mechanism for processing food into waste. ”

What does the word "mechanism" mean here? This is a metaphor, which in this context is almost completely devoid of its metaphoricality and is close to the direct meaning of the word. The working conditions in the orphanage are such that, with a salary of 8000 per month, the absence of special education and difficult duties, many sanitary ones are so rude that they perceive the pupils of DDI only “mechanisms” - lively adhesions of organs without soul and intelligence.

Is it possible to blame the orderlies for such an attitude? As an anthropologist, Klepikova documents his feelings of anger and resentment, but she also shows that perhaps this is not completely their fault. Perhaps it is a difficult life and the difficult conditions in which they exist made them like that. This is partly explained by the system of institutions for people with developmental features. In this regard, both Klepikov and her supervisor Ilya Ulikhin, who wrote a scientific and theoretical afterword to the book, note that “probably I am a fool” in many ways describes the “deinstation of post-Soviet Russia”. A system in which people with deviations are excluded and isolated from society, gradually replaced by modern models, aimed at integration into the daily life of the “new normal”, as Ilya consolation calls them. (The first part of the book describes the situation almost ten years ago, but, judging by the last chapters, today there is a positive trend.)

The factor of the post -Soviet seems especially important if we take into account that it is described in the texts of other modern writers. Klepikova’s attempt to create a new speaking language about “abnormal” echoes the book by Anna Starobinsky “Look at him”, where she describes total loneliness and public rejection that women who are forced to take abortion in the late gestation for medical indications. They are immediately stigmatized and excluded from the cultural field of healthy pregnant women - the subcultures of the "pregnant women", to which the society has a particularly reverent attitude. The reason for this is partly the same system of Soviet institutions in which pregnancy at a late date can be interrupted only in one or two clinics throughout Moscow. Such a isolation, the exclusion of individuals from a common group forces many to seek comfort on thematic forums on the Internet, where they have the opportunity to speak out. But there is no complete safety: random users, network trolls and religious fanatics come to these forums and call them “killers”, threaten them with “flour in hell”. Starobinets writes: “I have never met a single aggressive idiot with my opinion in the“ Mother Motherland ”genre in any thematic English-language forum. Not because in the USA, Canada or Australia there are no aggressive idiots - there are no less there than here - but because there are rules. ”

Rules are what any grammatical system is, and it is precisely such a grammar of acceptance and understanding that Starobinets and Klepikov are trying to create. Ultimately, such linguistic work is expressed in an increase in knowledge about the essence of the problem. Susan Umbrella in the essay “Disease as a metaphor” wrote that the popularity of metaphors of cancer and tuberculosis in Western culture is not least connected with mystical and fatal halo, which was traditionally attributed to these diseases in works of art and literature. Overcoming the metaphor of cancer, which the umbrella regarding as humiliating for patients, is possibly in the case of increasing scientific knowledge about this disease. This understanding, which the Umbrelor speaks of, is nothing more than the ability to describe phenomena and processes in a complex self -sufficient language dispensing without the help of metaphors.

Roman Jacobson once called the literature "organized violence against the tongue." In this sense, the book of Anna Klepikova is an attempt to free people with physical and mental characteristics from linguistic violence, an attempt to get them out of the dictatorship of an artistic technique. “I must be a fool” seeks to create a new language that would be more effective in intellectually than a simple emotional statement. The device of the book as an anthropological novel located at the intersection of prose and scientific research is suitable for this purpose as well as possible.

Anna Klepikova. I'm probably a fool. - St. Petersburg: Publishing House of the European University, 2018. 432 p.