How to fight off from evil

Dmitry Glukhovsky again replaced the genre

After the novel “Text” (2017) about modern life, Dmitry Glukhovsky made an audio agency about death - the death of the country that succumbed to Satan, “released poison into the world, spin out evil into it”. It seems that over the fourteen years that have passed after the publication of his first novel (Metro 2033), the general foreboding of the global catastrophe and the sparkling of post -apocalyptic aesthetics rose to the height of the nuclear mushroom. The unprecedented success of the American series “Chernobyl”, which you look, falling into confusion, then into anger, then into sympathy and pity, is probably ensured - in addition to excellent quality - a spill in the world of this ominous energy. It is no coincidence that the “post” is an international project: the soundtrack wrote the rapper Tim of the Belarusian (Kaufman Label), the text was translated into English, Polish, German, Swedish and voiced in all countries where the service of the Storytel audiobook, for which the “post” was written. In Russian, the author himself voiced it; This is another genre mastered by the writer, for whom the risk is the key to movement.

The pledged land and poisoned air - the atmosphere of the narrative, which now draws you like a funnel, then sucks like a swamp. And you want to get out of this horror, you can't. The story begins, like that of solid realists, from the landscape:

“The fog cannot be dispersed, because it rises from the river. Fog is the breath of the river itself: slow, foam - a patient. The rivers from the shore are also not visible-the concrete bulls of the bridge go into it somewhere already in the darkness. But it is heard well and through the fog - her champing, squish, rumbling. It seems to be alive, but it only seems. There is nothing alive there, below. And nothing alive, getting there, cannot survive there. ”

What is happening on the shore can not be called life either. Events unfold in the garrison, which is ordered to guard the eastern approaches of Muscovy, and the garrison will guard the bridge. A few inhabitants drink, scandal, curse fate:

“Empty houses, empty streets. Empty tin of abandoned cars. The bones are no - both separately, and in embrace. Wild dogs. There are few living places. Unless people sit in the posts, in stations-fortifications, clinging, clinging to the railway-and bristling. ”

The characters are written out by the author so vividly and carefully that this dull space boils with passions. The main character, the seventeen -year -old Yegor, half a gypsy, is unknown to the other who is unknown to the other (only the fact that he was a idle is a idle), there are two of them: to bring his stepfather, commandant Polkan, to a white heat and compose songs on the guitar. And one love: a neighbor Michelle, wandering in Moscow, where she bathed in parental love in the house on the Patriarchs. Returning to the capital is the purpose of her life, and the love of her Yegor is the engine of the story; She turns Yegor on the bridge, forcing to break the unspoken agreement: we do not touch him, and he does not touch us.

Yegor’s mother, Tamara Gypsy, is convinced that the evil that only awaits him to be woken up. She sees the future, the movement towards this future is the inner spring of the novel. On his way: the appearance of some kind of deaf father Daniel from behind the bridge. The inexplicable extinction of the Chinese state farm, where the garrison, weak from hunger, arrived at the provisions. The looting output became the point with which the narrative will rush, and before that the short phrases designed to read will become even shorter and tougher.

Riddles begin to multiply, plunging the reader into a state that would be called in the cinema.

The arrival of the expeditionary corps under the leadership of the chieftain of the sovereign emperor of the Cossack troops Alexander Evgenievich Kragov accelerates the movement of the plot. Strong fellows with all the settings laid - shouts of “love”, toasts for “great and indivisible”, fall into fear more than the last weakling. Kragov’s fleeting novel with Michelle, burdened with her pregnancy, directs the plot to the denouement. A woman in love, in search of a narrowed one who went beyond the bridge to collect lands for the revival of Russia, opened the Pandora box, releasing obsessed from the train. Pictures of this obsession are from the very workshops in the novel. And terrible: they are being taken to

“They gobbled up this Moscow. So that there is no more Moscow. Like a fiery sulfur, which spilled on Sodom and Gomorrah for the great sins of these cities. Kara for this damned city for all the evil that he sowed in the world. "

Egor is inquired by Polkan when the era of prosperity and justice that he read in the textbooks was covered with a copper basin, but Polkan’s explanations rest against the traitors who pulled the country to pieces and bleed the capital, depriving it of strength to hold the falling lands: “Russia was Muscovy.” And her border became the poisonous, poisoned Volga. And this border is a rude, nearby commandant of the post with the fury of the heroes of all domestic wars.

Decay, empire, catastrophe, enemies, saviors, Cossacks, the language of enmity, which has become the usual way of communication, hatred of the newcomers - the political sound of this prose is as obvious as its skill. And “post” is primarily excellent prose, which, I hope, will become a book. And also a movie, a play, a series: a sophisticated author introduced many opportunities into one text. I would like to think that among them there is an opportunity to make sure that the future laid down in our present does not occur.