Translated material
"Echelon for Samarkand" and therapy of Soviet injury
Nikolai Epple - about conciliatory pathos of the third novel Guzel Yakhina
Prose Guzel Yakhina continues to give rise to disputes about what is more in her works dedicated to terrible pages from the history of Russia of the twentieth century - denigrating or imperative of reality. Nikolai Epple, the author of the book “uncomfortable past”, believes that the question itself is raised incorrectly and critics do not notice the main thing: the writer helps readers to work out injuries left in our minds by disasters of the civil war, hunger and dispossession. He wrote about this in the material dedicated to the third novel by Yakhina - "Ahelon on Samarkand."Guzel Yakhin. The train is on Samarkand. M.: AST: editors of Elena Shubina, 2021. Content
The capture of the Soviet past and the need to find out with it remains the most important topic of modern Russian culture. One of the brightest evidence of this is the new novel by Guzel Yakhina , "Ahelon on Samarkand" and a discussion that unfolded around him.
Therapeutic novel
The “Echelon on Samarkand” before the exit from the press became an important participant in the conversation about the attitude to the painful pages of his own past. This conversation by definition is not easy and doomed to excessive emotionality. In this situation, it seems even more important to talk about the novel, having freed itself from emotions and focusing on the analysis of what is in the text.
The action of the novel unfolds in the fall of 1923. By order of the head of the Children's Commission of the All -Russian Central Executive Committee of Dzerzhinsky, echelons were formed in a starving country, transferring children from the hungry regions of the Volga region to a relatively well -fed Central Asia. One of these echelons should transport 500 Golders from a children's receiver in Kazan to Samarkand. For this, the children's commissar Belaya and the head of the echelon Deev are appointed for this. The story about the equipment of the train and its path through the starving country is not so much the history of the tragedy as the parables about the conflict, laid down in the very basis of the country, the heiress of which is modern Russia.
The first thing that catches the eye in the “echelon in Samarkand” is a well -known reader of the first two novels by Yakhina Kinematographicity of her language. Here rain drops are flowing through the faces of the statues taken to the balcony of the Kazan noble assembly, turned into a children's receiver. Here, in the center of the protruding point where the surrounding peasants forcibly pass the food “surpluses”, three huge mountains of grains grow in front of numb heroes in the middle of a gloomy, hungry landscape, and the tormenting flour creates around them like a radiance. Here are the people who once, who had once been in a wagon, the White Blunks serve the liturgy and the candles reflection fall on the harsh faces, the remnants of gold murals, turning the air into a guard-lazel wagon into a thick trembling haze.
However, seeing in the novel simply an overgrown film scene is not possible. Yakhina is not just a briskly and figuratively writing author. No less important components of its texts are the desire to based on documentary facts (even in the fairy -tale insert stories of the novel “My Children”) and the ability to generalize, give the story of a symbolic story, if not mythological significance.
Can we better understand the “echelon” if we define its genre as a historical novel or doCufiction? Yakhina herself seems to give enough grounds for this: the list of sources included in favor of this is evidenced by the list of archival documents and dissertations about the hunger of 1920-1921, and the publication in Novaya Gazeta an expanded historical commentary on the novel. However, documentary is not the main key to the nature of the novel. Being the third romance of the author, in an artistic way, “Echelon on Samarkand,” seems to develop the strengths of the first two.
"Zuleikha opens his eyes" was a completely classic realistic work; If the references of critics to “socialist realism” should be attributed more to emotions, it was impossible to blame it in excessive parables and mysticality. A hint of the possibilities of further development was perhaps the line of Dr. Leibe's insanity, a fantastic “egg”, drawing him into himself in order to hide from terrible surrounding reality. From this egg, the “magical realism” of the novel “My Children” is largely born - by artistic nature to a much more literary fairy tale than a historical novel. The “Echelon on Samarkand” looks like a return to realism, but the return is much more mature, free from blind submission to its laws. The author, who has tried his strength, returns to prose, formally completely documentary, but through which symbolism and parables are directly through. In the "echelon" there is a kind of greetings to the "egg" of Dr. Leibe-the hungry nonsense of Seni-Chuvashin and the internal monologue of the Rubraika, reproducing the internal optics of a person with a disorder of the auto spectrum.
But if the parable and symbolic element is so significant here (many critics directly call the “echelon” of the parables), why then are references to sources and archival research? The author is clearly important that the basis of the told was not fiction, but documentary reality, it is precisely it must be turned into cinema, action and parable.
Trying to understand why documentary reality is so important for Guzel Yakhina, we approach something fundamentally important in the phenomenon of her novels.
In an interview, Yakhin says that he considers his task to help the reader emotionally “defeat” the painfully difficult topic of hunger in the Volga region. So the psychotherapist, working with a psychological trauma, sees his task by all possible ways to help the patient “take” the traumatic event, pull him out of the subconscious into the consciousness and thereby stop his underly destructive action. It is from here that the attentiveness of Yakhina to the real plots from historical sources. “Echelon on Samarkand” is a collection of documentary plots telling the history of the famine of 1921-1922 and imprinting in the minds forever: is it possible to forget stories about eating the earth, fell from the cattlecuffs or their own fingers, paintings of hungry madness, the story of the father, waiting for the death of his wife and children, or mother, singing the “deadly cradle”, and so on, and so on. so on. This cataloging of horrors cannot be explained by the desire to shock the reader, to lure him or to form a disgust for the Bolsheviks from him - all these goals are much more successful by completely different means, which Yakhina also owns perfectly. But attention to the documentary plots is explained precisely the therapeutic task: to create an encyclopedia of hunger in the Volga region, a museum exposition clothed in a novel form, providing it with everything necessary so that the visitor does not leave the museum before the proposed material. The same is the numerous portraits of children and even the listing of their names. From a literary point of view, they are needed in order to turn the train into the image and symbol of the whole country, from the therapeutic one to turn reading into a kind of “return of names”, a ritual that allows you to miss the told through yourself and live an uninhabited society.
Small lyrical digression. It so happened that the author of these lines has its own experience of such therapy. In my book “Unknown past”, initially there was no chapter about the Gulag. I did not want to accommodate such a huge material in a short chapter and stand on someone else's field. But I was convinced that it was impossible to talk about the Hulaga legacy if this phenomenon itself is not at least short of, the story about work with the injury is not full without at least a brief review of the injury itself. And work on this chapter - probably the most difficult and long written part of the book - turned out to be extremely important for me not least psychologically. It turned out that something, and especially concerns the painful, “traumatic” experience, looks indescribable and inexpressible exactly until it remains unpretentized. The description throws into an incomprehensibly terrible categorical grid, outlines its boundaries (chronological, territorial, quantitative), cuts and classifies. I was surprised to notice that, having finished this chapter, I began to react differently to more and more publications on the network about state terror. Previously, each such publication worked almost exclusively emotionally, giving up an exclusively emotional reaction - either “oh, what bastards”, or “eh, nothing can save anything”. But now I perceive such publications differently: yeah, it is clear that this is in such a category, but this is such; Here is a good illustration to such and such an already known topic, but this is worse; This clarifies well -known numbers, but this is a fake and hysteria. Finding the interconnected and told, incomprehensibly terrible, indescribable and inexpressible, is tamed, obeying an understandable extent.
The most important and most interesting in the books of Yakhina and Echelon in particular - describe this therapeutic impulse, bring to the light, make it appropriate and force it to accommodate it. And in the light of such a task, everything else immediately falls into place: both cinematographic technology and the briskness in the development of the plot, which allows the author to call the novel “Red Istra” , and the love line, and the intonation of the entire narrative performed by tenderness. All this is a way to sweeten a pill, and in this case, a beaten metaphor is so useful: all these techniques are designed to help the patient, you and me, make the procedure necessary for recovering as possible.
It was about this, and even using the same metaphor, that Lilianna Lungin spoke in relation to “One Day of Ivan Denisovich” in her famous interview with Oleg Dorman: “The guarantee of the great artistry of Ivan Denisovich in the fact that Solzhenitsyn took a happy day, that’s a good day in conclusion, when everything is formed as well as possible. This creates some opportunity to perceive. After all, a very large number of “chernukha” man cannot perceive. And here, I would say, the pill has very bitterly have a shell in which this can be swallowed. ”
Compared to this main task of the novel, the questions about what the attitude to the Soviet past proposed by the novel fades into the background. The “echelon”, of course, offers such an attitude, and then we will say about it on purpose, but its main task as a therapeutic novel is to prevent the broadcast of the finished ideology, “the exit of the idea from the form”.
The ideas of the novel and the ideas around the novel
It is because the Soviet terror in Russia has not been convicted and not worked out, the writer creating a work of art on this topic is in a difficult situation. He experiences the temptation to make the space of Roman Rupor to express his socio-political position, get on a stool and "speak out on an urgent issue." However, this task is completely separate from the task of artistic, or even directly opposite to it. As his author Viktor Remizov admitted one of the presentations of the novel “Eternal Merzlot” (dedicated to the Gulag theme), during his work he wanted to “express a position” more than once, but in the end he forced himself all this kind of fragments from the text to cross out.
In the “Echelon on Samarkand”, the author also does not allow himself to “get on a stool”; The ideological world of the novel is reconstructed from its artistic fabric. His main feature is the dramatic mercy of crimes and feats, sin and virtue, blood and mercy. The initiator of the launch of echelons is Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the bloody Cheka; The homeless people saved by Soviet power became such in many cases because the Soviet government killed their parents; On the path of the echelon, people help children whose conscience is a lot of blood (Chekists, personnel of the causal point, Cossack robbers, basmachi). The head of the echelon Deev, who killed in civilian, including women and children, and in the first years of hunger served in the producers who ruined the village, risks life over and over again, saving his wards. The White Commissioner, the direct organizer of the salvation of children, whose motives are extremely kind, is embodied by the cruel and rational principle - she coldly calculates the “decline” and without blinking her eyes to her lives in order to save those who can save; She sleeps with Deev to support him on the road and thereby ensure the fulfillment of the task. And only the paramedic Bug and the sisters of mercy, accompanying the train, are deprived of a double bottom, being “simple” with positive characters.
This duality is clearly spoke in the only “conceptual” scene of the book - that is why a somewhat distinguished by its journalism against the rest of the text is in the conversation of paramedic Bug with Deev, which they lead, swarm for the children who died along the road:
“-<...> It seems that you are kind, kinder and it doesn’t happen: you are lying in the mornings in the morning, the fool, a little fellow under the bunk, sheltered, the booze of the homeless in the train, picked up to save from hunger. It would seem that kindness is for three. But hatred in you, granddaughters, is not even for three, but ten with more merciful. <...> Here it turns out: under love - rage; Under youth - old age; Under force and commanding - weakness and spiritual throwing. Some cabbage leaves and have numbers to them. <...>
-What do you think I am with a double bottom? Bad person? <...>
- Don't know. You know better from the inside.
- And what can be seen from the outside?
- It can be seen that he and the commissar from the train would have kicked out and did not blink an eye if they had not allowed you to plant homelessly. What kind of meat at the main point was ready to die. That you will strangle the inspector of any station if it prevents him from Girland to go further. And they do not drive all this, not the idea, not philanthropy, but great despair and a lot of pain. You do not save children in this echelon, but yourself. Children are just at the same time. This is what you can see. <...> And it is also clear that today you will deliver a train with children to Turkestan, and the next day you shoot a Cossack detachment. You save with one hand, kill the second.
- I do not kill, but punish the enemies of the revolution! Today everyone lives like that.
“Many,” Bug agreed. “But not all.” Who lives is about those and I say that crippled. I regret those. "
Yakhina emphasizes this duality and inconsistency of the heroes and situations, refusing to pass the sentence, to derive any “morality” from this complexity. For some reason, many of her critics perceive this refusal as the desire to pole the past, “harmonize” and pour in an oil tragedy and justify the crime with a feat * justice for the sake, Yakhin gives some grounds for such an understanding, but not in the novel, but in a kind of copyright manifesto published in the publication of RBC (a link to it is given below). . (It is worth noting that no less dissatisfied accuses the novel of the opposite, of outlining the past - the alignment itself is quite remarkable.) However, if you carefully look at the text, you can’t find any balancing there. The text leaves no doubt which of the sides of the historical conflict belongs to the sympathy of the author. It is enough to compare two contrasting scenes - a meeting of Deev with Sviyazh Chekists and a gang of Beloksakov near Orenburg. The Chekists in the novel are depicted as a pack of drunken and distraught from power of the thugs (not without some, however, gloomy romanticization: one of them fits into his head and regrets that neither a bullet nor vodka take it). The gang of the Cossack chieftain of the apple tree is portrayed with unconditional sympathy - they pray beautifully, make piercingly beautiful gestures, beautifully go to the sunset, and the chieftain himself is beautifully perishable (taking the Red Army and several random onlookers with them to the next world). And yet, clearly sympathizing with one of the parties, the author refuses to make his novel a verdict - whether the Soviet system or the same Chekists.
It is natural to assume that this is explained not by the desire to defend crimes or to reduce the terrible topic to a lulling fairy tale, but to insist on fundamental duality, the mercy of good and evil as a specific line of the depicted reality. With which persistence, the reviewers try to interpret this duality exclusively in one direction or another, towards justification or denigration-in itself an interesting symptom, evidence of the indifference of the use of such a familiar black and white optics here.
Indeed, the specifics of our situation as the heirs of the Soviet era, that we inherit both crimes and achievements, consists in that. And the very indiscretion of this heritage on “pure” and “unclean” - mold separately, linden honey separately - and there is the main problem of working with it. With a legacy, from which, in all its complexity, first you need to stop turning away. Such a “adoption” of the painful past does not mean its circumail, on the contrary, it turns out to be a condition for its full study and the key to a real conversation about responsibility for it.
If you look for something like a subjective author’s “utterance” in the novel, then the image of Vrryka, the darkest and tragic in the novel is most like it. Вечный ребенок, внутренний мир которого представляет собой неутихающую войну, искореженный пережитыми лишениями, спасенный Деевым и прильнувший к нему с собачьей страстью, он оказывается в конце романа искалечен тем, чьей воле всецело себя предал. На то, что этот образ имеет особое значение для автора, указывает его имя: Яхина признается, что Загреем звали ее деда, спасенного от голода одним из таких эшелонов. Трудно не увидеть в этом образе — не умеющего отличить друга от врага слепого ребенка с вечной войной в голове — рефлексию автора не только о советском человеке, но и о современном. Автора, пишущего уже третий роман, исполненный невероятной нежности и примирительного пафоса, и получающего в ответ потоки изощреннейшей брани со всех возможных сторон.
* * *
Можно по-разному относиться к книгам Яхиной, сколько угодно спорить об их литературных достоинствах, но поставленная ею терапевтическая задача сделать трудное прошлое «одолимым» — безусловно важнейшая для сегодняшнего российского общества. И сама по себе чуткость к этому — черта большого художника, а заодно и признак если не здоровья, то жизнеспособности современной отечественной культуры. Ведь именно культуре — здоровой и настоящей — надлежит брать на себя решение такого рода задач, быть медиатором работы с травмой прошлого, общественной дискуссии о трудных вещах, проговаривать которые больно, а молчать о которых невозможно.
Именно такую задачу в каком-то смысле ставили перед собой Ахматова («а это вы можете описать?») и Солженицын в России, и зарубежные авторы, работавшие с темами американского рабства или Холокоста, вроде Тони Моррисон и Уильяма Стайрона. Не просто прокричать, чтобы немного полегчало, но «описать», чтобы невместимое оказалось вмещено. Описать, чтобы выйти из отношений зависимости и превратиться, как говорит сама Яхина в своем авторском манифесте , из объекта истории своей страны в ее субъекта, из слепо прилепившегося к своему «брату-хозяину» больного и напуганного ребенка в свободную личность.