Where the new “enemies of the people” Zakhar Prilepin and his “group to investigate anti -Russian activity” are looking for and finds the new “enemies of the people”

At the presentation of the city - the so -called “group to investigate anti -Russian activity in the field of culture” - on August 3, Proseik Zakhar Prilepin sat in the central chair at the head of the table. In a close office on the 13th floor of the State Duma, he, convulsively twitching, convicted cultural figures who took the “anti-people's position” on the issue of Crimea in 2014 and did not support them in 2022:

“With such a culture, you will not go far <...> Culture opposes its own people-it means that something is wrong with culture.”

Prilepin offers himself the authorities as a “new Lunacharsky”, according to the political strategist and galleryist Marat Gelman*, recognized in Russia as “ino -agent”. In an interview with another ino-agent, Radio Liberty*, Gelman said that the city is Prilepin’s initiative, and Sergei Mironov, the head of the Fair Russia faction for truth, and the most formally status figure in the group, apparently, “received some kind of nod in the administration [president].”

At the presentation of Grad, Mironov was sitting on his right hand from Prilepin with a stone-brown face. And a week later, it was he who had to disavow the most odious initiative that society connected with the city - the publication of the black list of cultural figures.

"The prisoner is the first whip"

The so-called "list of 142s" appeared on August 5 in many publications. In fact, the surnames are on the list of 140, but the compilers twice, with a clear addiction, entered the famous producers of Sergei Selvanov and Alexander Rodnyansky in it.

In general, negligence, illiteracy and actual inaccuracy of the list struck no less than its denational essence. The protest position (“against”) was attributed to some in general silent on the theme of his, and some verbose network commentators received the marker “silent”.

For a long time, Facebook ** and the media did not boil so amicably, high, foamy - and reasonably. Because the challenge was abandoned by the entire workshop of writers: it was they who prevail in the list - despite the invisible “operative” painted classes and professions (“screenwriter”, “critic”, “writer”, “journalist/ka”, “translator”, “publisher”, “philologist”, “editor”, “literary critic”, etc.) sometimes. Inhaledly decided to “learn the homeland to love” and Dwyenov of the workshop, Jacob Gordin and Sergey Chupinin, people with merits to domestic literature. Having touched them, they touched everyone.

The list also reads the threat. Calculation for the workshop memory of repression.

More than a hundred years, the people of Belle Letr - targets of state terror. And when the patriotic community in telegram channels begins to ulcerate caricature liberals with a Flat White in the hand and on a scooter, she should remember that ours-and her-the workshop predecessors were soared to the Vaninsky port, waved not a coffee glass, but when they were rested, they were likened to “their holy, killed as killed, as if they were killed. Dogs buried so as not to find more ”, according to the poet Olga Sedakova.

It is possible to disagree with each other, but with lists - this instrument of escorts - you can’t play. Here the taboo is absolute.

Among the first reactions was the statement of the writer's association of Pen-Moscow:

“The history of the USSR has decades of totalitarianism with millions of prisoners, including Varlam Shalamov (25 years of camps) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (8 years in prison). Compilation of lists means a mass denunciation and direct provocation.

The initiators of this disgrace in state offices, the main of which is Zakhar Prilepin, confuse a bad literary fantasy with reality. But according to the Russian proverb - the scammer is the first whip. "

It is this proverb that is illustrated by the history of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, Rapp.

Says a historian of literature, writer Natalya Gromova :

-In the 1920s, RAPP watched on behalf of the party for the so-called "fellow travelers"-writers who lived after the revolution with the hope that "everything would soften."

The Rappovtsy did not just follow - they arranged the campaigns of bullying: “The fight against Pilnyakovschina”, “The fight against Bulgakovshchina”. Sometimes they themselves appointed victims, sometimes they “showed them” victims and could suspend on occasion.

For example, Bulgakov was able to defend himself. And they poisoned Mayakovsky perfectly. The “proletarian” writers did not stand at the machine for a day, they were former gymnasium students who staged for propaganda posts. There were very powerful mechanisms to deprive a person of life foundations: after the article by the Rappers in the 1930s, the young Yuri German, who wrote a thing who liked Gorky himself, was deprived of cards and starving. But when Stalin in 1932 decided to build a single union of writers, the Rappers ceased to be necessary, and Rapp was defeated. They still swim, they will be on the White Sea, but in 1937 they will be massively shot and destroyed. It always amazes me: Prilepin, in principle, knows these facts, but he does not know how to try on historical experience.

Gromova believes that “the hand of Prilepin is visible on the list”:

- He “appointed” the jury “Big Book” there.

The same opinion and the literary critic Mikhail Edelstein included in the list.

“The list of enemies began with the jury of the Big Book Prize and the experts of the Film Fund,” Edelstein ironizes in the Belsat column and suggests looking for a motive that after 2014 Prilepin’s books did not receive a large book.

The publisher and enlightener Boris Kupriyanov, included in the list, replied: “I will not leave, this is my country, get out yourself!”

He called the city a cream, "a consortium of embezzlement of administrative money", and the list of 140 - "a certain list of enemies of the people."

In view of such a public reaction, the compilers had no choice but to scream: "A monstrous mistake occurred." And five days later, Sergei Mironov was the first to disavow the list. But in his statement on party and personal sites there are no words that the list is a fake.

The “rude provocation” is called only “the appearance of materials about the black list in the media”.

Not the document itself.

And finally, on August 29, Prilepin-no longer charged with energy, but tactically sculptured-told in his YouTube channel that “someone clicked and immediately dumped the lists of the film experts compiled in the city for some internal calculations and“ reformatting ”plans.

But justifying himself with a tongue twister, he mocked the memory of repression, deliberately activated by the hail: "Our liberal front <...> screamed at all the voices that would now shoot, which, of course, is complete nonsense."

Publisher Boris Kupriyanov named in a conversation with the “New Gazeta” the idea with the list “a test ball, which will be somehow implemented in the future”.

"A group of those who believe that their time has come"

The start was, in Dostoevsky’s language, “somewhat sucked”. The shot by the list - and the hail is clearly named with a hint of the same reactive system of volley fire, beating in the squares - turned out to be a misfire.

But there is a “extremely humane mechanism” that is more effective, which was told by Grad Secretary and State Duma deputy Dmitry Kuznetsov , head of the headquarters of Zakhara Prilepin (the latter has for some time to establish nominal headquarters in the cities of Russia).

“The first topic is the Bolshoi Theater,” Kuznetsov said. - On July 22, the leadership of the Bolshoi Theater announced work plans for the new theater season, among other things, in April there will be the premiere of two performances in the production of director Alexander Molochnikov. Molochnikov publicly spoke out against the [special military] operation, supported the appeal of the artists against his <...> this is an artist - he is simply the one who speaks out for us. The responsible person who stands behind him is, of course, the director of the Bolshoi Theater Vladimir Urin. Therefore, we write a letter here with a request to influence a person, and <...> to influence him so that the milkman went to the Donbass, somehow take a definite position, spoke out in support of the state. If this does not happen, then the contract is to break with him so that there is no production at the Bolshoi Theater, if a person is not ready to repent. And in order to help Vladimir Georgievich [Urin], we still write the Minister of Culture of Lyubimova - let him control the situation:

If Vladimir Georgievich does not succeed, he is not able to cope with Molochnikov, then to dismiss Vladimir Georgievich ( laughter in the room ) from the post of director of the Bolshoi Theater, because, of course, this is a mockery of patriotic civil society, if this happens. ”

Kuznetsov did not say to whom he would convey on the Duma form, if the thrush is not played, Urin will not sacrifice milkman, and Lyubimova - Urin.

But I didn’t have to make so far.

Director of Gabta Vladimir Urin in writing informed deputy Kuznetsov in writing that in the 2022/23 season, the director would not put Molochnikov, as it was planned earlier, two operas on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater.

Although Kuznetsov swore that the city was not against the "artists", in fact, it was to them that he was going to block oxygen with the hands of functionaries from culture. Only these hands will have to be twisted for starters.

Kuznetsov demonstrated such twisting as a moral alternative to the Western “abolition culture”: after all, if the Creator was repented, he visited the Donbass, “supported his” - then put it, Molochonikov A.A., in Gabta and Rachmaninov’s “Francesca da Rimini” and “Florentine tragedy” to the music of Alexander von Ceminsky.

But this is the "Zonovsky ultimatum", as some are expressed behind the Urals. Invasion in the space of personal conscience for talking about spirituality.

It is not difficult to refuse creators to refuse. They have a conscience and reputation-unbearable, but the main production and hem resources. And managers of cultural institutions also have, in the language of Russia of the 21st century, “hostages”: groups, affairs, institutions themselves.

“They [hail] did their job, already scared,” says Natalya Gromova. -

Publishers are panicky, they are connected with money, circulations, they will print some neutral things. The circle is already outlined, the surnames are named, and the list will work.

Such risks went that only people desperate can go to. How many of them do we have?

Boris Kupriyanov puts the fuss of hail not into the tragic context of the history of our literature of the 20th century, but in the eternal mocking Ilf-Petrovsky “literary tram” of the struggle for success.

“To reduce personal scores with the help of a political situation - this is the motive of the city,” says Kupriyanov. - Obviously, they consider themselves offended by the fact that they are not hyperopopular, and they think that the “hand” of another, opposite group is hidden behind this state of things. This is very funny.

A situation arose in the culture when there is a group of persons who believe that their time has come. That now they can behave like that, and everything that was before them must be crumpled, washed away.

People run ahead of the steam locomotive, offend that Vera Polozkov read more than them ... It doesn’t matter that they disaded the list; And it’s not very interesting whether they gave them a hat now or did not give them; And, of course, we are not talking about support or non-support [SO]. People want to achieve love and understanding. If there are no other methods, then at least so. The thirst for glory and recognition is great.

At the same time, Kupriyanov recalls that the writers of the liberal “religion” also sometimes call the state for opponents:

- Liberals also love Kanseling, this is in the Russian tradition. It is enough to recall the “letter of 42” “Remove the reptile” in 1993.

In the Petersburg Winter's memoir book, the poet Georgy Ivanov described the Kenseling technique, which was already ready to pour 21-year-old Sergei Yesenin. In the fall of 1916, he, the soldier-sanitary of the Field of the Tsarskoye Sanitary Military Sanitary train No. 143 of her Imperial Majesty Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, was looking for rapprochement with the royal family, read the poems to the empress and dedicated her a cycle in the book “Goluben”. This "reverently devote ..." survived the parts of printed specimens.

“Do not occur the revolution, the doors of most publishers of Russia, moreover, are the richest and most influential, would be closed forever for Yesenin,” wrote Georgy Ivanov in the 1950s. - such “crimes” as monarchical feelings, the liberal public did not forgive the Russian writer ...

Before the revolution, in order to “drive out of any“ apostate ”from the literature, there were enough two or three papa phone calls to Milyukov who should be from the editorial office of Speech. Further, the “public opinion” machine worked itself - automatically and mercilessly. ”

P.N. Milyukov is the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party and the author of the fatal Duma speech “Stupidity or treason”, which he himself wrote about after the revolution: “History will curse us, which caused a storm.”

The New World War gave George Ivanov itself the real experience of obstruction. Although during his life in the occupied French Biarrice he did not print a line and was not a collaborator, he was accused of Germanophilism (his wife Irina Odoevtseva, nee Iraid Gainik, was the daughter of a Riga German), as well as in mythical communication with the Wehrmacht officers. In fact, Ivanov paid for the progerman, early 1940s, sympathy of part of the emigration. It was not possible to erase the “first poet of emigration”, but, for example, the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in Paris suspended its membership, and the Little Fund in New York actually summoned to the court. Ivanov had to make excuses to the “progressive public” for what he was not to blame for, until his death in 1958.

Later examples of Kanseling in memory and eyes.

However, there is a big "but." The liberals did not look for the sleepy artery on any turn of history from their opponents. The pogrom wave was not raised among their supporters.

And this type of intolerance has a different specialty: it is tireless to equal and drop the overall level. Fuck with a censorship stick protruding over the corn ears.

In the mastic of the 2000s, the tyrannical banality of a part of the progressive public-so limited in every sense that it was called a “party”-brought the literary landscape of Russia to the fact that in the 40th London Book Fair of 2011, where Russia was a special guest, British publishers, critics and litagents simply did not recognize it. They did not agree that the landing, brought by the then head of the presidential administration, Sergei Naryshkin, is Russian literature. "Holy", as Thomas Mann said. "Hummouses", as the prose writer Boris Zaitsev wrote in a private message to a colleague.

Then, in the apogee of Medvedev’s “thaw,” the world did not recognize the heirs of a tradition deeply revered by them in a ten -Soviet prose writer.

One of the then brought to London was Zakhar Prilepin, by the way, in the company with Boris Akunin, whom he now talks about, vibrating from evil pathos.

All subsequent years, Prilepin tries to “rebuild” from his genesis from this bourgeois middle, from an ethical-aesthetic fainting.

The whole post-Soviet Russia is a country of monstrously underestimated literary bar, and the most famous writer of this country, and this is definitely Zakhar Prilepin, the narrator about the life of a Russian person as a funny Pithecanthropus, has neither the right nor the chances of representing himself as the voice of some “new Russia”. The future, in which, as you know, "they will not take everyone." He is all from there, from the past, where he, according to his words, was "everything was always good." And this is the present, 2022 - and there is the final gradient of the "post -Soviet transit" from red to white. The final code.

And those who want everything to be today, according to Boris Kupriyanov, “washed away and crushed”, already in the arms of the storm.

A city is a hysterical clinging so that it does not take away.

"For writers - fate is absolutely terrible"

Literature historian Natalya Gromova sees the near future in gloomy tones:

-Everything should balance ... And until then-someone will “fall asleep”, will sit frozen and not move, wait for the result. We hoped that we would quickly slip this station. But no. The food chain is very small, there is little money, some will eat others, enemies of the people, to proclaim each other with foreign agents. For writers - fate is absolutely terrible.

But Soviet history says that the most terrible fate awaits not those writers who fell silent, was spent or left by the stage, but those who decided to “eat” colleagues.

- If you had at least a share of talent, then such things end in its complete loss. Participation in some lies, joint persecution leads to the fact that talent for some reason disappears. [Soviet prose writer and screenwriter] Pyotr Pavlenko wrote that writers are needed not good, but necessary. And that’s all, he ends on this, zero, there is no such writer Pavlenko, but was! He wrote with Pilnyak. This should not be proved, life has proved everything perfectly.

On August 29, Zakhar Prilepin, dressed in a hipster light cardigan, strangely retreated on his YouTube channel from the city defeat zone:

- Grad - the idea of ​​my single -party people, a group of deputies and senators of the State Duma, who are partly inspired by mine, but not only by mine, performances and posts on social networks about the state of culture - organized a group that would not even want to level, not even minimize the presence of a liberal lobby in culture, but at least lobby of the possibility of real competition among a patriotic orientation artists, musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers - and liberal [orientation].

And the heated audience of the channel in the comments no longer listened to his tone and asked for “37th year”, “Word and deed!”, “To clean up the sphere of culture” and call “all traitors by one”.

And on September 2, poured with new energy and throwing a camouflage-fifth pseudo-carrier, Prilepin already sent to the line of his opponents. And the fans, completely distraught with resentment for Zakharovo powerlessness in the fight against adversaries, sent a signal:

“Not our children's spatula from there to uproot them. Sorry, comrades, for sad news, I am for a real picture. Here she is, I drew her. You can ask another artist to make you beautiful. ”

The answer was the virtual howl:

"Give it in culture!"

"It is necessary to crush the bitch on all fronts))."

"Bayonet or sapper."

"If the enemy does not give up, he is destroyed."

"All Kylo in" teeth "and brush Belomorkanal."

"Prilepin to the ministers of culture!"

* Based on the Ministry of Justice in the register of the media, “foreign agents”.

** The network is recognized as extremist and prohibited in the Russian Federation.