Alexander Ageev. Hunger 35

Hunger 35
Practical gastroenterology reading

Publication date: May 31, 2001

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Well , I already wrote out how the “National Bestseller” will turn out. By all appearances it turned out that it was Bykov, but then the cunning Slava Kuritsyn intervened , got Krusanov drunk - and the prize went into worthy hands. Slava is right - Yuzefovich is a bright man, and the writer is not one of the last, although it is also true that “The Prince of the Wind” is not his most expressive text. In my opinion, Yuzefovich wrote two of the best stories of the 90s: “Butterfly. 1989.” and "Bell. 1990." Now, if any publisher comes up with the good idea of ​​publishing an anthology of stories from the post-Soviet era, these stories by Yuzefovich should be given a place of honor there. Although, to be honest, it’s hard for me to imagine such a publisher: the novel has become the unit of thinking of today, as if there are no other genres in Russian literature.

For example, the other day I bought the April issue of “October” ( and on the “October” network , as it moved from the category of “digests” to the rank of “online magazine”, it still hangs proudly with only the February issue), and there right away stuck in the work of Dmitry Bobyshev “I am here”, which is only a fragment from the book “Human Text”. Isn't it a claim to the genre?

Bobyshev explains himself to the reader in a very complicated way. First he says: “ This text is not entirely prose, because there is little fiction here, but this is not my life, how it went, was built, wasted, tormented me and enjoyed it .” The version about “memories” is also rejected (“ I remember not so much the events themselves, but my perception of them at that time ”), but in the end something terrifying unfolds:

" Besides, I realize all those incidents and my exclamations, horrors, delights and nonsenses anew, now, trying them out with letters and words, sheet by sheet, turning them into text, into a fusion with myself. Into a mixture of a butterfly and a caterpillar. Into a human text . So where am I - there or here, then or now? Answer: in this text ."

You read this, and you involuntarily begin to handle the coffee table book with care: God forbid, you drop it on the floor and make Bobyshev’s “human text” bo-bo. On the other hand, you’re afraid that some “mixture of a butterfly and a caterpillar” might crawl out of the pages (I don’t like insects).

However, you read the text itself and think: why was it necessary to worry so much, to create repulsive images, to promise an unnatural “fusion” of a person with the text? Normal literary memoirs - the 50s, student poetry, Evgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, "thaw", "Moscow celebrities" - Pasternak , Selvinsky , Lugovskoy .

It’s especially interesting about Rein and Naiman - this St. Petersburg company (Rein, Naiman, Bobyshev, Kushner, to a lesser extent Brodsky) generally writes about each other in the most amusing way: they know the sore spots well, so the noble, carefully disguised causticity is targeted and strikes, as they say, without a miss. That is, this is not some vulgar “poets have such a custom - when they gather in a circle, they spit on each other,” this was done at a decent aesthetic level. Well, at least here’s a portrait of a friend that opens the text:

" Evgeny Rein, with his bright, as if artificially invented name, was remembered like a theater poster. To be called a river, and such a famous one at that, only fits literary or opera characters. But he did not at all resemble Onegin, although his appearance was extraordinary in its own way Huge black eyes with long eyelashes under thick eyebrows gave him the mysterious appearance of an augur and a spellcaster, although not without a slight hint of charlatanism, of course ..."

This “ of course ...” is especially expressively added, but then:

“ This oddity attracted me as a guarantee of the future parody of his behavior and general “frivolous seriousness,” but for others it clearly infuriated him .”

So tell me without thinking: with what feeling for the character was this written? For me, there is a tangle of very diverse feelings here, and friendly ones do not predominate among them.

However, it was not Bobyshev who started all this, and here, by the way, a note to the, alas, non-existent publisher: if we could collect the cross-memoirs of Leningrad friends into one book - it would turn out to be thick (because of Naiman), but very exciting and instructive. In a sense, these people really managed to turn their lives (and their controversial “friendships”) into literature, and in some places even good literature.

Least of all, however, this applies to those places in Bobyshev’s narrative where he considers it necessary to create “images.” “Images,” as a rule, turn out to be unbearably false and, most importantly, completely unnecessary in a dynamic text. Well, for example:

“ The garden tumbled through the open windows, the sky was transparently colored, if not with caramel, then with watercolor: the evening dawns in it were engaged in cool tenderness with their companions leaving for the morning shift .”

This is poorly written, although almost immediately after an interesting passage about Russian literature, where Bobyshev tried to defend “beauty”:

" Arkady, don't talk nicely!" - said Turgenev's Bazarov, freezing the face of Russian literature on half his cheek. However, Balmont, Blok and Bely started talking about the beautiful - sublimely, but the Soviet Mayakovsky stomped on them from Triumphal Square, and everyone felt ashamed. Geniuses, even in photographs, began to stick out their square chins, sloping foreheads, and double-humped profiles like camels. It was added from the West, from the exquisitely ugly Cubists and Mauvists to Salvador Dali, with obvious regret, but still distorting beauty, and even to the impeccable esthete Matisse, who proclaimed in support of his opposition: “Beautiful is no longer beauty! ”

“Frozen by half the face of Russian literature” - this is not a bad thing to say, but it is also quite applicable to Russian life: for many centuries now we have had a permanent overproduction of Bazarovs with a shortage of Arkadievs. And some, by the way, prefer that the clerk in the store (well, the junior manager who jumps around the trading floor) should still be the courteous Arkady, and not a contemptuous nihilist. The other day I was buying RAM for my computer and came across this eternal Russian character. “If,” I thought to myself, “you’re such a big personality, then what the hell are you doing here? You’re a king, live alone, kill frogs, and all I need from you is that you write out a standard DIMM 64 without taking a shit Mb SDRAM-133".

True, while leafing through “October” further, I quickly and gratefully remembered Turgenev’s Bazarov , because I came across Larisa Shulman’s essay “Drafts of the Future. Touches to Life and Literature.” Published in the section "Literary Criticism", and it begins like this:

" The fingers habitually began to click on the keyboard: they say, our literature of the twentieth century ... - but they stumbled, “froze” without processor errors, they themselves subcutaneously and unconsciously transmitted a sad signal - a click - an error in consciousness, its some kind of “failure” (not the notorious " deja vu" from "The Matrix", I hope). The eyelids still shifted and stretched into the distance, back and forth. And it doesn’t matter whether at that moment consciousness trembled, or at another it pulled in a nervously thin stream, but ... something shifted in our perception. And the point here is not at all a matter of a temporary dash: there are, there are some other trends, and for a long time it has been pulling either a cosmic draft or the solar wind ."

Well, don’t you want to turn into Bazarov and utter a sacramental phrase? Four magazine pages in this diligent girlish style with “images” and attempts to verbosely “explain the inexplicable” in order to say sheer nonsense: something new awaits us ahead (what?), human impressionability is inexhaustible (big greetings to D.S. Merezhkovsky , who hoped for the same at the end of the 19th century), knowledge of new things can be carried out outside of logic.

Plus an attack on traditional “upbringing and education” - they are built on dead logic and can prevent a person from remaining a subtle “receiver” of “cosmic drafts” and “solar winds”.

What can I say? - that Larisa Shulman is an optimist and that she clearly doesn’t watch The X-Files on the box. You never know what kind of infection these same “cosmic drafts” can cause. And you see, the “upbringing and education” that is unkind to her heart is shielding the little good students from an unknown nasty thing...

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