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About Roman Mikhailov’s new book “Wait for the summer and see what happens”

Gorky usually does not write about books that exist only in electronic format, but today is a special case. One of the most extraordinary Russian prose writers, Roman Mikhailov, author of “Ravinagar” and “The Wrong Side of the Rat,” has made his new novel “Wait for Summer and See What Happens” publicly available. Eduard Lukoyanov read this unexpectedly light book and tells why, in his opinion, it is so far the most successful in Mikhailov’s bibliography.

Roman Mikhailov. Wait until summer and see what happens. M.: KROT, 2021

Roman Mikhailov’s new book was published suddenly, without any preliminary announcements, and so far exists only in electronic form on the KROT website . This event is surprising in that, firstly, Mikhailov recently published a collection of stories “Berry” and “Antiravinagar” , formally called a novel; in addition, their author, both last year and this year, was actively and very successfully involved in theater directing - the play “None of This Will Happen” is currently being performed at the Bolshoi Drama Theater, another work by Mikhailov the director and playwright.

Secondly, this time the creator of experimental prose, which defies clear genre definitions, unexpectedly called the new book a love story. And thirdly, the most surprising thing is that this definition perfectly reflects the content of the work: Mikhailov is not going to play any literary games with the reader - he really wrote a traditional novel about love with a verified plot and all the necessary twists and turns. But, of course, not without its own characteristics.

Our guide in the world of the novel “Wait for Summer and See What Happens” is Ruslan, in many ways the alter ego of Mikhailov himself, who partially took over the author’s biography. We meet him at the end of the Soviet era, when everyone’s houses had color TVs and record players, and some even had VCRs, but this only made things more fun in rare moments of nervous fun. Ruslan is an extremely sensitive and self-contained child-synaesthete, as if he came to our world from the otherworldly prose of Andrei Bely. His father, on the contrary, is a dreamy but down-to-earth man; he makes money by cheating and is sent to prison from time to time. The parent’s passion was passed on to Ruslan: cards will not only be a way to make money, but also something like a magical model of the universe that fits in the palm of your hand.

The starting point of the love story was a meeting that happened either in reality or in some kind of confusion. Having seen the bride at a gangster wedding, the boy decides that he is forever in love with her and must live with thoughts only of her. Ruslan’s airy fantasy immediately gives way to a gloomy reality, and the reader, jumping with him through a few years, finds himself in an unnamed and therefore especially recognizable place - a depressive provincial town of the early 1990s, somehow existing on the ruins of yesterday’s empire. The surroundings and its inhabitants are also classic for those times: the teenager Ruslan, half asleep, wanders among aspiring and already established bandits, hangs out in an empty apartment, which gradually becomes a hangout, listens to Prodigy, gets hit in the head at discos and from the police, takes boxing classes with a half-crazed man trainer, goes to shooting range in the forest and so on.

His only real friend becomes a regular at the mental hospital, to whom he gives the unusual name Laszlo - in honor of the hero of a Hungarian fairy tale from a book that lies at Ruslan’s house. In the pictures in two other books from his home library (“Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” and an untitled collection of war stories), he discovers the rest of the heroes of his life: Aladdin is transported to his reality in the form of a young brother whom he met at boxing, his other friends turn out to be heroes of patriotic trench prose, a guy of unknown origin nicknamed Squid is an exact copy of the Genie, and that same bride-lover is the embodiment of Princess Jasmine. And again Mikhailov refuses the usual and rather boring literary games that seem to suggest themselves here: neither “Aladdin”, nor “Jasmine”, nor other heroes of the novel inherit the fate of their prototypes; Ruslan doesn’t even read about them in books - he just looks at the illustrations, as if he were dealt cards.

The reader will become familiar with the further development of the plot without any problems, especially since the novel “Wait for Summer,” as befits a genre work, does not test the reader’s moderate volume and patience. We will turn to Mikhailov’s writing method, which is so attractive to a very diverse audience and manifested itself most clearly in his new work.

The main and most striking property of Mikhailov’s prose is that it is completely devoid of cynicism, which, if it has not yet become synonymous with good taste, is certainly considered comme il faut in modern prose. Describing the darkly remote 1990s, the author refuses straightforward shock content, which has long been worn out by other writers who set themselves completely different tasks. For Mikhailov’s landscape, a few dirty puddles, a drunken worker returning from the factory, shaven-headed citizens in black leatherette are enough - and now the reader is again sitting on the pipes near a broken brick wall and arguing with his comrades who is cooler: “Prodigy” or “Onyx”.

Of course, what was once called Chernukha cannot be found in Mikhailov’s previous books, but in the new novel, the rejection of cynicism turns out to be so declarative for the first time: as soon as Mikhailov brings the reader to a scene, for example, an erotic one, he immediately pulls himself back, declaring , which refuses to talk about it. Stop-remarks like “don’t dwell on this”, “I won’t describe it in detail” run through the entire text as a refrain, immediately taking away from such prose what is commonly considered its flesh, the “truth of life” and other heavy legacy of the old regime school of the so-called literary skill. If in the new book Mikhailov gets closer to one of his predecessors-writers, then the only one that comes to mind is Leonid Dobychin, whose interest in the reading public either awakens or disappears - depending on where the cultural project will take him next “new sincerity”, more and more reminiscent of competitions in artistic folding of figs in one’s pocket.

Mikhailov writes as if the author of “The City of En” was not persecuted and driven to suicide in his time, but was introduced into the pantheon of Russian classics; as if Dobychin did not fall into the category of extremely talented, but blatantly sentimental literature of growing up, but, on the contrary, was recognized as the bearer of an extremely adequate language for describing reality. That is, Mikhailov seems to be stepping back a century in order to continue again from the place where something in our development went wrong - a practice that seems retrograde, but in reality, of course, is completely avant-garde.

A similar thing happens with the psychedelic side of Mikhailovsky’s writing. In this dimension, he is concerned only with the pure, sincere and therefore unique experience of schizophrenia, as opposed to the experience of an artificial change in consciousness, which is easily reproduced and therefore not interesting. When Ruslan, already constantly hallucinating, still uses psychoactive substances, he refuses to describe his sensations in the same way as in the case of erotica: what others consider revelations turns out to be an unpleasant blackout for him, an annoying glitch in an already twitchy work of the schizoid consciousness machine.

When this machine works more or less properly, albeit according to its logic that is not obvious to an outsider, the text of the novel turns into something that one does not want to call a puzzle: rather, it looks like a card trick - another neurosis of a simultaneously absent-minded and extremely focused narrator. And, like any good trick, the book does not become less interesting after its secret has been revealed to you in one casually spoken phrase, which indicates that the key to solving this work has been lying in plain sight all along.

But even without this key, the novel “Wait for Summer and See What Happens” remains a valuable work in its own right, the author of which, on the verge of self-sacrifice, revives the forgotten art of describing feelings and relaying them. This book—Mikhailov’s most accessible and, moreover, seemingly most successful experience in prose to date—gives a second chance to a special layer of literature that seemed hopelessly buried under the rubble of all sorts of confessional nonsense.