The lonely voice of a person

In the three -volume “Dead Shadow Valley”, writer Anatoly Postalkin views the results of the work of the Commission on Clonde

This, especially this one ... Further, an obscenely rewritten, but easily recognizable surname of Posnavkina should be followed.

Both the “criminal fiction” of Dotsenko, and the multiple statements of the Generals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, prosecutors, politicians in favor of the most cruel judicial reprisal will accumulate the general mood. The Book of Postakin is addressed to Chitata Liu, who, for the most part, lobbies the toughening of punishment for crimes, welcomes the legalized murder of criminals and loves films and books about lynching. Protekin understands this. Therefore, to the detriment of literary quality, he precedes or frames almost every episode of the book with a description of his own emotions about what is happening, multiplies epithets, exclaims sorrowfully or indignantly - in violation of the well -known poetic law, according to which emotion and reflective comments, say, horror, they thin the horror and make it not so terrible.

Protekin is not concerned about the reader “spoiled” with horrors is certainly horrified, but first of all, so that he correctly understands the position of the author, correctly caught the vector of his thoughts. And for starters, the reader must understand that the author and the commission so unloved by the people are not supporters of criminals and not lovers of crimes at all. The commission, as can be seen from the book, recommends that far from all and not for any petition of the suicide bomber about preserving his life responded favorably. Protekin, like his commission, is paying about mercy and the softening of morals in an extremely fierce society, where criminals, the state and inhabitants compete in cruelty. Where the murderer, who tortured his victim, is not much different from the investigator who tries to the murderer in jail. Moreover, dozens and hundreds of innocent are waiting in the overcrowded chambers of their turn for interrogation to this investigator.

The effort of Zetavkina to turn the mass reader, that is, an ordinary person, in something opposite can be considered heroic. It could be considered doomed, if not for two circumstances. First: Protekin believes the fate of criminals and their victims with the experience of his hungry, homeless, thieves, orphanage childhood. He constantly checks his minimum, almost illusory children's chances to survive and at the same time not to brutage with the chances of the anti -heroes of the book: why didn’t I miss, and they missed, disappeared? Here is the grain of the author’s moral position and the most convincing (not only in the Freudian sense) and the general moment in the whole book. Here is the most necessary and intelligible answer to the philistine question: what should I do? Give your children other chances, the Book of Postakina answers. Do not take your childhood from people, and then they may not take anything from anyone. Love children - and they may not hate anyone ...

And the second circumstance, thanks to which the voice of Poshtavkin, calling for mercy and tolerance, can be heard: our general fear of the general future. In order to stop the wave of unconscious “household” murders, which the bailiff Kin rightly qualifies as a crime of the people, in order to expel the conscious killer from the human community and not to leave him any loopholes to justify, it is necessary to take a legal murder from life, which is the death penalty. If the state has the right, there is a person who does not agree that the same right cannot belong to him. If the state kills and finds an excuse within the framework of the procedure, a person kills and justifies the murder, not postponing himself with the procedure. In the end, people have not succeeded in anything as in the art of self -justification: the book of Postakin is full of examples of this art.

Entering the Commission, obviously, was a serious shock for Postakin. He constantly wonders if he did correctly. He now and then is sad about the house on Seliger, where he could be himself: to write prose alone and in the wild. This is more than clear to me. However, the reflection of the writer, who finds himself in an unusual, alien environment, in the face of unusual responsibility, is not the most interesting in the book. Prekavkin does not need to make excuses to himself and others: he did what others are not capable of - and enough.

And yet. Against the background of the abyss, in which we look with the author, the story of the customs of the Soviet and post -Soviet bureaucracy looks sluggish and inappropriate. Perhaps Prosnovkin intended to push two layers of life in the narrative, shade the tragedy of the country by Fars. I don't think it worked. The closed life of a bureaucratic corporation does not directly hurt the reader, since he does not knowingly contacts his life. Whereas from prison, from Sumy, grief and violence, no one is safe.

And the last thing I am ready to blame the author. One of the leitmotifs of the book selected from various sources of evidence and statements that the tendency of the Russian people to cruelty, violence and theft is the heritage of all its history. Protekin now and then is trying to find the roots of crime in our national character. I won’t argue in detail. I can only say that not only the Jewish Kotoshikhin (as well as Smomyalovsky, also Gorky, Chekhov), but also Dickens wrote about cruelty and bodily punishment. By reading Dickens, it is generally impossible to believe that England can ever become different ...

The concept of “national character” is extremely unreliable as a support for serious judgments, you can’t draw anything clear from such a muddy source. A certain and recognizable national character- this is the verification of just a set of terrible and funny features that have become cliche. As Schopenhauer used to say, "every nation laughs at the other, and all of them are right in this." Add: when we are also right above ourselves. But, assuming the historical predetermination of our troubles, the immanence of the criminal beginning to our national character, Protekin involuntarily removes responsibility for the present and leaves no hope for the future. Thank God, I, reader, did not believe him. I just remembered the recent television: in the USA there was a photo exhibition dedicated to Lynch ships only thirty years ago: gallows, bodies burned on the crosses, - the photo was taken by the executioner, an active participant in the self -offosis. It’s not that the Americans have been shocked just recently, but the way they changed in only thirty years because they wanted to and decided to change.

We also have a chance. But this is if the Book of Postavkina finds his reader not only among those who are already convinced: the moral and legal revolution in Russia has risen, but also among those for whom the inertia of suicidal existence is still the highest law.