Modifications of the novel form in the prose of the West in the second half of the 20th century. Roman Essay Rich from the High Road

Ekaterina Dyes

Not the "Rose of the World", but the worlds of Rosin.

Rain over the lake means for the fish

Only road to heaven

Y. Izdryk

Where to start the story about your impressions of two methodological novels by Vadim Rozin? From titles. The first book is “Philosophy, life and destiny” and the second book is “Penetration into thinking. The history of one study by Mark Vadimov. The hero of both books, the alter ego of the author, is an established scientist Mark Vadimov, in whose circle of acquaintances one can easily recognize a choir of people - leading scientists in Russia and the former USSR, who surround the author of the book in life. Piama Gaidenko, Merab Mamardashivili, Sergey Zenkin, and most importantly - G. Shchedrovitsky himself - a teacher and magician, a Russian Steiner, whose student was Vadim Markovich Rozin, and with whom he does not stop discussing until now. There has already been a similar example in the history of philosophy. But, due to his obvious divergence, we will not give this story, especially since it is enough to look at the cover of Rozin's book to understand who we had in mind. This cover is for the second book. Unfortunately, the first one has long ended in stores, and in libraries it is simply “read out” (probably by students of Vadim Rozin), so the author kindly provided us with an electronic version for analysis, which made it easier to work on the text, but made citing more difficult. We apologize in advance for the fact that quotations from the first book will be given without reference to the printed edition.

The methodology that we applied to the analysis of these novels is based on the concept of large and small traditions of European culture, proposed by the culturologist I.G. Yakovenko.

A small tradition is understood as a subdominant paradigm within the framework of the European cultural cosmos, taken as a whole, which developed in the 3rd-4th centuries. AD from the elements discarded during the formation of the Christian cosmos, which constituted a great cultural tradition. The dialectics of two streams of culture - dominant (great tradition) and subdominant (small tradition) for centuries constituted the nerve of European culture, understood broadly. Europe here is the maternal space from which the Christian world as a whole grows. The demarcation of an established Christianity from the culture of a pagan past and competing religious alternatives was a watershed in cultural history. This process divided the cultural cosmos of late Rome into two continents: the victorious Christian orthodoxy, which constituted the great tradition, and the unorthodox cultural space, which constituted the small tradition.

The process of unfolding the dialectics of large and small traditions goes on from the moment of separation of these cultural flows. The winning tradition set the ways to comprehend reality, leveling the significance of the subdominant in culture. In turn, the minor tradition chose the strategy of mimicry for a long time.

It is often possible to isolate a small tradition by the Gnostic-Manichaean worldview, characteristic of the subdominant. Other signs of the small tradition are esoteric, syncretic inseparability of the basic topoi, when in the texts of the adherents of the small tradition "The Ark of the Covenant - the Grail - the Golden Fleece - the Philosopher's Stone are combined in some over-rational identity …»

In the integrity of the minor tradition coexist Kabbalah, Gnosticism, magic, occultism, esoteric practices like alchemy, and initiatory cults. A special place is occupied by order structures (Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, etc.) I. G. Yakovenko draws attention to the fact that such basic phenomena for modernity as the science of the New Age, secular consciousness, liberal philosophy, the ideology of progress, the market economy, were formed by the joint efforts of adherents of large and small traditions. Moreover, in relation to this list, the role of people and ideas given by a small tradition often turns out to be leading. A small tradition in the literary process deserves a special study. At present, the small tradition is asserting itself more and more loudly, emerging from the shadow of the big tradition. Many cult works of the 20th century are better read if they are considered to belong to a minor tradition.

Representatives of this trend in literature are characterized by a special irony, associated both with the constant need to hide something extremely important from the uninitiated and reveal to adherents something extremely important, and with a stable complex of the persecuted - the fear of "exposure", betrayal, deceit on the part of representatives of the victorious orthodoxy.

Rozin's novels are a vivid example of how in the head of a person who is forced to professionally stay within the framework of the type of rationality imposed by a great tradition, an underlying desire to harmonize the picture of the world matures, resulting in a balancing of traditions large and small.

The hero of Rozin is the scientist Mark Vadimov, who inherited from the author a patronymic, which became the name Mark and a first name, which turned into the surname Vadimov. In fact, this is Rozin's inner father, his inner shepherd, teacher. The figure of the teacher, extremely important for the small tradition (in which it acquires a metaphysical dimension), is presented in the texts of Rozin. Here, take a look at Mark's first teacher. This is a literature teacher. Which is very true. Mystics and culturologists, Rosicrucians and psychics went to teachers of literature when they were forced to hide from the Soviet authorities. In literature lessons, you can tell a lot of things that cannot be told anywhere else. And those children who are able to perceive this will understand, and the rest, yawning, will not notice. The teacher told his student, who was proud of the trust, about his searches in the field of ... theoretical physics and philosophy. The sea, we note, little Mark understood mystically: “The sea reminded Mark of a living mysterious creature, it stretched to the horizon, breathed, involuntarily inspired lofty thoughts. Mark almost physically felt the sea. After reading Stanislav Lem's novel "Solaris" a few years later, Vadimov finally established himself in an esoteric attitude to the sea ... "and this is also due to the name of the hero. His name is Mark, the Latin word for sea is mare. One-named element, one-natural substance. But in the name of Mark there is also an opportunity - in Russian, turning into darkness, in the surname Vadimov one hears “to hell”. The infernal component of the hero's essence is already evident in the first lines of the novel, when "In the modest apartment of Professor Mark Vadimov, well-known in the philosophical and humanitarian circles of Moscow, the telephone rang muffledly." It was Rogov who commissioned a series of publications from Vadimov for his almanac. Later, a book grows out of this cycle. Rogov also comes to Vadimov's apartment to interview him. Comes in the ninth chapter with inevitable inevitability, on Sunday. It is characteristic that it was Rogov who came, and not Krylyshkin, and Kopytov could also have come. The infernal symbolism here is transparent in a Gogolian way and, undoubtedly, refers to the most significant work of European literature written on the theme of "The Scientist and the Devil" - "Faust" by Goethe.

Six months ago, when I saw Vadim Rozin in reality, I exclaimed in surprise: “Oh, how you look like Fowles!” "Thank you. And where did you get it from? “How from where, excuse me, I saw his photographs. And now I see you. Indeed, you are similar. “Amazing, where did you get the photos of F…?” "On the Internet, they hang on all sites dedicated to his work."

Later it turned out that Rozin heard: “How much you look like Faust,” which was very flattering. It surprised me. But now, reading this book about modern Faust, written with the skill of Fowles, I begin to understand something.

And, above all, in the novel, the unity of the magical world experience, characteristic of modern man, is striking. Let us explain what is meant here. Rozin describes the ritual practices that his hero, Mark, constructs together with his friend and another girl, Ada, an Armenian. First of all, about the girl. It is characteristic that the name Hell in the context of magical practices experienced by a love triangle (where love is not so much physical as metaphysical) is also used by the cult Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych in the novel Perversion, and, apparently, absolutely independently of Rozin. In Perversion, Ada is a Ukrainian woman, the wife of a proctologist, for whom the protagonist has no less tender feelings than for the heroine. The final scene captures the mystical sexual act performed by all participants in the "triple union", as a result of which the hero dissolves, disappears into the waters of the Venetian Grand Canal, swims away like a fish. The ritual practices of Mark, Ada and Zun in Rozin's novel end tragically. Zun dies, commits suicide. By the way, a similar version is put forward about Stakh Perfetsky, the hero of Andrukhovych.

So what are the things Rozin's heroes practice? This is holding the hand over the fire, passing through the walls, and classic flights. But let's make a reservation. All this is done in a dream. And here we allow ourselves not to believe the author of the novel, which builds a kind of mirror worlds. The world that is presented in the novel as real, in our world, sensually given in sensations, can be understood as the world of dreams and daydreams. Accordingly, the world of dreams can be interpreted as the real world. Why this warning? The fact is that when the author of these lines was no more than fourteen years old, experiments with hands and burning candles, and attempts to fly and pass through walls were made in reality. In addition, one should also point out an attempt to reproduce ritual dances, which is apparently characteristic of females. All this happened by no means in dreams, but in reality, but, undoubtedly, under the influence of a special mystical state, if you like, a trance. However, attempts to take off, persistent and stubborn, were made by the author of these lines, within the framework of a small tradition, which in Soviet times was broadcast to a large extent through films. Flights dating back to the key figures of the minor tradition - the master Daedalus and, especially, Simon Magus (whose example is probably the most typical due to two circumstances: the lack of a technical means of flight and a sharp confrontation with the apostles, which led to the death of a mythical character), were sufficient least reflected in Soviet films. Passing through a wall, even with some technical details, was beautifully shown in the film "Magicians" - about a Soviet research institute, for some reason dealing with the problems of using magic items.

The essence of the matter lies in the fact that at all times there are people who are drawn by an unknown force to do certain things: walk on water, fly through the air, pass through walls, not burn in fire, not feel pain when it objectively could be, heal people with themselves, think about your destiny, compose texts, give out concepts, understand the world. All these seemingly unrelated things lie within the framework of a certain personality typology, which is precisely represented in the hero of the novel Rozin.

An important role for the formation of this type of person is played by the experience of the death of a loved one as a lesson, and the feeling of guilt for the impossibility of saving him. So, as a little boy, Mark is faced with the death of a friend with whom he sat at the same desk. He is run over by a car and, although the boy is still alive, Mark watches as death takes hold of him. I remember experiencing the same feeling at the age of 8, when my grandmother, whom I loved, was dying of cancer. She didn’t let me in, although I really wanted to communicate with her. And so, one day they told me that I could spend three days in the apartment opposite, with my neighbors. How happy I was. I slept on a bed that was completely immeasurable as a sea, I was presented with a real sea shell (I chose the smallest of the seven, although, of course, I wanted the largest) and wonderful films were shown. When these magical days were over, I entered the apartment and said something to my mother. To which my grandmother’s sister angrily replied, “How dare you, what an evil child! Your mother is in grief - her mother died, and you ... ”They didn’t show my grandmother, they were afraid that this would have a bad effect on my psyche. But worst of all, I suspect, it affected her that I could not say goodbye to my grandmother, and that on the day of her death I was so happy.

Mystical experiences in a child may be associated with the inability to help the dying, with blaming oneself for his death. It is this feeling that the hero Rozina experiences in relation to Viktor Zun, a friend since his institute days. I also had a similar experience at a similar age. One girl who wanted to make love to me, and repeatedly offered to do this, moreover, her interests included not only me, but also my young man, whom I sincerely and dearly loved, suddenly died. And it happened strangely and absurdly. The daughter of wealthy parents who were able to send her to study in Cyprus, where she almost crashed on a motorcycle, in the Golden Youth campaign, was stabbed to death and, before that, raped by a driver who threw her up while hitchhiking to our sacred now Peter. Shortly before that, moreover, she removed the cast, which fixed the broken one as a result of an unsuccessful landing on a hang glider. They didn't tell me she was dead either. It happened at Christmas. I only found out in March. It was about ten years ago, but I still remember how she actually flew to me after her death, as if she wanted to say something: either to ask for forgiveness, or to forgive herself, to free herself. This went on for a year. I prayed for the salvation of her soul, and everything seemed to calm down. But what I want to say is the following: in the texts of writers belonging to a small tradition, there is a common plot Hero-mage involuntarily, or rather, without the use of technical means, by one force of thought, kills a close friend or lover, after which he suffers all his life . This plot - the death of a comrade or wife can be traced in Nabokov and in Fowles, and in the Marquis de Sade.

The death here is of the person who is close, and the hero feels guilty for her. Although not subject to legal procedures, since the murder is committed in another world. So Rogaty, excuse me, Rogov, is interested in Vadimov: “You uttered the phrase “the desire to die with dignity.” Is it true that even at the university, you, together with Viktor Zun, experimented with your dreams. And is it true that Zoon committed suicide in front of your eyes?” the hero replies: “I think if you asked about Viktor Zun, you received information from someone and you know that there was no one at his death. Although indeed, in his departure from life there is a lot of incomprehensible. But I am not involved in this, in recent years, Victor and I have met quite rarely. The key word here is not implicated. The devil accuses, and the scientist justifies himself. He understands that the death of a friend is blamed on him already because he is a magician and acts within a certain - magical space of the formation of meanings, where the magician is always to blame for the death of a friend.

In connection with Zun's death, one episode comes to mind - a purely culturological one. The fact is that among the elderly peasants at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a belief that if you back to the locomotive and look at it through your legs, you can see the souls of the dead pulling the locomotive. What the Peizans saw there is unknown, but Rosin's hero clearly recalls the devil running next to the locomotive in a vision (which looked absolutely real) from his young years. Vadimov's friend, Viktor Zun, dies trying to run across in front of the train in order to experience the thrill. Victor had suicidal tendencies from the very beginning. As an afterword by Anna Karenina, he dies from the train, unable to endure the tension of friendship with the magician. It is no coincidence that they have a mutual friend - "A close friend of Vadimov, who unsuccessfully sought his love for a long time, in the last two years of her life, Zuna changed her affection and became Victor's mistress." The magician, his friend and woman - the embodiment of the gnostic Sophia and the mystical Persephone - this is what is needed to kindle a spark of esoteric fire.

Once the author of these lines had a very difficult period in his life, which lasted about nine months, and did not end in any way. But once in a dream, the Teacher appeared, and, as Rozin writes: “the events in the dream seemed so natural, to the touch denser than the surrounding world,” and said a strange phrase to me: “Katyusha, let's calculate what level you are.” Then came the calculations, which led to a high figure. “Look, if people like you want to die, then what will happen to the world?” I woke up from a dream in a full sense of the reality of what was happening and even greater than the reality of the empirical world given to us in sensations. This feeling that a dream can be more real than reality is an important experience that Vadim Rozin is trying to convey to his readers. In general, his novels are an attempt to break into the transcendent, an attempt to penetrate into another reality, traveled and traveled by shamans, mystics, mystagogues, Rosicrucians, Templars and esotericists of all times and peoples.

Reality far and near, inner, secret. I think he made it.

It is generally recognized that the novel of the 20th century is modified in many ways under the powerful influence, moreover, due to the introduction of essays into its artistic world. At the same time, those phenomena that are called “novel-essays” or “novel essays” in literary criticism are not analytically comprehended, but, in fact, are only ascertained. And even more so when it comes to the novel form. After all, it is obvious that to understand and feel the nature of the artistic form of such works as, say, in the classical heritage of the 20th century, R. Musil's "The Man without Qualities", A. Gide's "The Counterfeiters", "Joseph and His Brothers" and "Doctor Faustus" T. Mann, and in the literature of recent decades - "The Woman of the French Lieutenant" by J. Fowles, "The Mystery of Prometheus" by L. Meshterhazy, "The Name of the Rose" by W. Eco, "Pushkin's House" by A. Bitov, "The Endless Dead End" by D. Galkovsky , is impossible without understanding the significance of essayism in them.

Therefore, it seems that it is not the general calculations that reveal the essayism of the modern novel, but the unity of the specific analysis of the work and the artistic generalizations that arise in its process - in this bidirectionality, the poetics of the essayistic novel is revealed.

Due to a certain extraordinary complexity, the novel Immortality (1990) by Milan Kundera, one of the leading prose writers of our time, a Czech emigrant living in France and writing in French in recent years, makes critics of this writer look for a special approach to this work. Moreover, it is constantly emphasized that the traditional idea of ​​the novel (when the plot structure and the human character or the idea of ​​lifelikeness are recognized as the initial ones) does not lead to any results either in understanding Kundera's work or in his study. However, the approach seems to be obvious. Constantly stating the presence of the essayistic in "Immortality", critics seem to lose sight of the special (if not the highest) significance of the essayistic principle for this writer and his "Immortality" at different levels of the novel.

Almost at the beginning of Immortality, the author’s unexpectedly sounded confession stops my attention: “There is no novelist who would be dearer to me than Robert Musil” (27). It is no coincidence that the name of Musil, who "belongs to the credit for coining the word itself and the concept of" essayism ", which he considers as an experimental way of existence, as a special kind of exploration of reality, equivalent to science and poetry, and even as a utopia, designed to embrace the unity of the existent and the possible" . This recognition of kinship with “the writer I idolize (Kundera notes with a hint of irony)” (27), “who formulated the idea of ​​essayism not only as the most productive principle of the artistic exploration of reality, but also as the basis for constructing a new morality, a new person,” refers to the novel Essayism "Immortality".

For Musil, as he wrote in his essay "Black Magic", "thinking, along with other goals, has the goal of creating a spiritual order. And also destroy it." And that is why an essay for Musil is “a unique and unchanging shape that takes on the inner life of a person in some decisive thought.” This is possible due to the fact that “the essay, in a series of its sections, takes the subject from many sides, without completely covering it, because the subject, fully covered, suddenly loses its volume and decreases into a concept.” In this property, the essay is a guarantee of its eternal mobility, the ability to embrace being in multiple manifestations, to capture life as a process; its openness to all phenomena of human culture and the synthesis of these phenomena, as well as the inexhaustibility of the changing form. It is in this direction of thought that M.N. Epstein, coming to the conclusion that “indeterminacy enters into the very essence of the essayistic genre (if you don’t call it too grandiloquently - “super-genre”, “synthetic form of consciousness”, etc.), which most closely and most directly reveals the self-determining activity of the human spirit " . And at the same time M.N. Epstein notes the genre specificity of the essay, the essence of which is in the "dynamic alternation and paradoxical combination of different ways of understanding the world."

Such open, “Muzil” type works represent one of the trends in the extremely heterogeneous essayism of the 20th century and belong to artists who think, relatively speaking, culturally: at the junction and in the interweaving of cultures. Among them, H.L. Borges ("History of Eternity", "Shame of History"), O. Paz ("Dynamics of Loneliness", "Table and Bed"), I. Brodsky ("Trophy", "In Memory of Marcus Aurelius"). Kundera also belongs to these writers, whose "Muzilian" essayistic gift is revealed in the book "Betrayed Testaments". Therefore, it is quite logical that Musil's essayistic ideas correspond to Kundera's understanding of the modern novel, about which he wrote: “The spirit of the novel is the spirit of complexity. Every novel tells the reader, "Things are much more complicated than you think." In these words is the eternal truth of the novel, but less and less heeded amid the noise of those unequivocal answers that usually precede questions and even do not allow them.

Kundera's way of conveying the "spirit of complexity" opens up in the immanent essay of constant change. Not by “imposing” essayistic techniques (this is not about mechanical transfer), but in his own novelistic world of “Immortality”, thinking essayistically, synthesizing the essayistic and the novel-artistic, but with the prevalence of the former. Continuing the tradition of R. Musil and T. Mann, thanks to "A Man Without Qualities" and "Magic Mountain" which "a new genre of gigantic intellectual essays entered the art, saturated with reflections on the human condition and oriented not so much to the heart as to the reader's thoughts", Kundera, but as a person of the "post-modern era", wonders about the possibilities that the essay opens up for the novel. And he answers with his "Immortality", but, of course, not in sententious calculations, but in the creative embodiment of these possibilities.

In this sense, "Immortality" is a novel-self-knowledge: its nature, its capabilities, its form. In his review of the newly published novel by Kundera, D. Salnav highlights as one of the main properties of this work that it "reveals the inner mechanism of thinking", being the embodiment of the author's views on the novel. “By its principle, method and theme,” writes D. Salnav, “the novel, according to Kundera, is what Descartes in his Second Meditation called a thing that thinks and doubts.” "This thing understands, conceives, affirms, wills and does not wish, and also imagines and feels." “Immortality”, D. Salnav believes, is that “way of thinking” acquired by a modern novel and those “ways of expressing thoughts”, “when it is no longer the author who thinks, but the work of art itself through its special techniques and means of expression: the narrator and the characters, the plot ".

Creating "Immortality" as a novel (which Musil aspired to when working on "A Man without Qualities"), "possessing intelligence", Kundera develops the form of an essay novel. Kundera talks a lot in his latest novels (not only in Immortality, but also in The Unbearable Lightness of Being) about his writing work, about how he “makes” a novel, or more precisely, how a novel arises. Sometimes the nakedness of the techniques in the text of the work is obvious. But to see in this only a demonstration of the "technique of the novel" characteristic of the avant-garde is to simplify it as an artist. Perceiving his creativity as dictated by the "spirit of the novel", Kundera does not invent a form, but masters it in the process of creativity, the creation of a novel.

In the afterword to the first edition of "Immortality" in the homeland of the writer Kundera, it is recognized that "the idea of ​​​​the integral form of the novel" ("protoform") is always part of his intention. And with his constant focus on the art of music in writing, he writes about the significance of form: “The magic of art is the beauty of form, and form is not an illusionist’s trick, but transparency and clarity, even in such complex forms as the music of Olivier Messiaen, dodecaphony Arnold Schoenberg or compositions by Georgie Enescu. Music is the enjoyment of form ... and in this sense it is a paradigm, a model for all arts. And at the same time, the emergence of form in the author of Immortality, like a casting, hardening in a locally and only possible device or type of verbal expression is a process that, as form formation, is imprinted, reproduced by Kundera.

“Immortality”, in fact, is a detailed essay, because the structure of this book by Kundera, the external and internal organization of the material, the novel text and the word, is based on the one-time association characteristic of essayistics, the combination of two opposite ways of understanding the world and writing - dismantling and editing. Their synchronous interaction can be conditionally referred to as rewiring, which for Kundera is an act of creativity. Introducing the essayistic into the novel, subordinating its genre-formed form to the essayistic dynamics of changes, mutual transformations and semantic switching, Kundera re-creates the novel and thus creates, “according to the unanimous opinion of its researchers, a new, original type of novel.”

With the general mental coverage of "Immortality" as an integral, independent and graphically complete text, a purely novel layer of Kundera's work is easily visible: the story of Agnes. The stable position of a modern independent and business woman in the service and in the family is the first cut in this story. Isolation and tracing of several lines in the author's story about Agnes, primarily in her relationship with her father, sister Laura and husband Paul. With a clear connection with the image of Agnes, each of these lines acquires, as the novel plot unfolds, the independence of the life story of each of the characters. And after the death of Agnes and the marriage of Paul to Laura, whose life is actively intertwined with the previously outlined line of the daughter of Paul and Agnes Brigitte, a trivial novel situation of relationships (with love, rivalry and scandals) in the triangle "husband - wife - stepdaughter" is outlined.

As is typical of the classical model of the novel, where the external event action organically interacts in cause-and-effect conditionality with the internal, since the novel is focused "on the fate of an individual, on the process of formation and development of his character and self-consciousness", the pictorial and expressive plan of "Immortality" is turned to imprinting the inner world of the characters. In double reflection (self-understanding of the hero through the author's analysis of his state and behavior) and with psychological accuracy, the confused world of the soul is revealed - incidents, illusions, games - Laura, Paul and especially, of course, Agnes.

Agnes' life situation is a situation of alienation, which develops into Agnes's desire to escape from her usual and seemingly happy and prosperous way of life, and then from life in general, which is realized in her accidental tragic death. This situation is not psychologically traceable, but outlined in dotted lines; in a psychologically concentrated form, the author's analysis deepens the image of Agnes' condition.

The first part of the novel - "The Face", in which Agnes is given close-up (the time frame of the one day of her life described here, in fact, contains all the decades she lived), ends with a chapter that, in a laconic-concentrated manner characteristic of Kundera, introduces Agnes into a state of alienation and, one might say, psychologically exhausts it. Varying her techniques, Kundera notes, first of all, through a non-proprietary speech, that Agnès, who was riding along with Paul through Paris at night, suddenly had “a strange powerful feeling that seized her more and more often: she has nothing in common with these creatures with two legs, with a head on the neck and a mouth on the face” (23). And although Agnes resists this feeling, “knowing that it is absurd and immoral,” in the author’s analytical word, into which improperly direct speech flows, the psychological paradox of Agnes’s state is revealed. The manifestation of mercy towards the poor, as the author comprehends it, is unconscious (unconscious), but effective, contrary to the thoughts and actions of Agnes, removal: “Her generosity towards the poor was of the nature of denial: she gave them gifts not because the poor also belonged to humanity, but because they did not belong to it, that they were torn out of it and, probably, as removed from humanity as she was ”(23). The paroxysm of this “strange and powerful feeling” of life is the absolutization of alienation as a life position, affirmed in a non-authorial speech: “Removal from humanity is her position” (23).

And the dead-end hopelessness of detachment, which manifests itself in people and humanity, lies for Agnes in her attitude towards a specific close person - her husband. Although she admits, “that behind her love for Paul is nothing but a single desire: a single desire to love him; the only desire to be with him in a happy marriage” (23-24), however, the “desire” repeated three times speaks of what is “necessary”, “what I would like”: there is a “desire to love”, but not love.

And alienation is brought to its logical conclusion in the fantastic picture of the arrival of a guest from “another, very distant planet that occupies an important place in the universe” that arises in Agnes’s imagination (as a projection into the future and at the same time into the other world) (24). The conscious-unconscious, unresolved for Agnes, experienced by her both as a “desire to love” and as a “removal”, materializes in the question of a “guest”: “... in a future life do you want to stay together (with Paul. - V.P.) or Would you rather not meet again?" (24). And after an honest admission to himself that their life together with Paul “is based on the illusion of love, an illusion that both carefully nurture and protect,” Agnes firmly answers, gathering all his inner strength: “We prefer not to meet again” (25).

It would seem that there are traditional novelistic forms of artistic depiction through the plot and human character. But already in the first part, the most novel and focused on the image of Agnes, the novelistic-essayistic duality of Kundera's work is set. The beginning is entirely essayistic, embodying the emergence of the idea of ​​the novel. The gesture of a sixty-year-old lady who was accidentally seen in a sports club that struck the author - the enchanting lightness of a hand thrown up - gives rise to the image of his heroine. And at the same time, in this idea emanating from reality, Kundera emphasizes the “outside”, as if inspired by the “spirit of the novel”, but implemented in his mind: “And the word “Agnès” surfaced in my memory. Agnes. I have never known a single woman with that name” (6).

Gesture - “the first idea of ​​the concept”, repeating in different contexts and in different embodied forms (either conceptually, then figuratively, then synthesizing the artistic and theoretical) as a leitmotif, creates a montage rhythm in which the pictorial and essayistic layers of Kundera’s book are combined, switch from one in another. The same rhythmic repetition of the “gesture” connects, according to the principle of associative contiguity and metaphorical similarity, which, according to A. Bergson, “underlie the laws of association”, many heterogeneous and independent fragments within each (of these two) stylistic layers.

Starting the story of Agnes, Kundera immediately in the author's reflection gives a "philosophy of gesture", acting as an attempt to comprehend the accidental. For Kundera, as well as for every great artist, the singular (by which art lives entirely), elevated to the category of "accidental", which is always relative, has an existential, philosophical or artistic value. On all these three levels, one can say the same about Kundera that M. Ryklin about J. Deleuze: "To build a system on the linkage of chances - that was the motto of Deleuze's entire philosophy." And "Immortality" - from the moment of occurrence to the development of events, including the complex associative logic of the author's thought - is an artistic whole created in the course of conjugation of accidents, which (looking ahead, it should be said) are one of the aspects of Kundera's theme of immortality. For the writer is convinced that “every event, even the most inconspicuous one, contains a hidden possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus turning into a story, an adventure” (144).

The logic of essayistic reflection on the "gesture" in form is the movement of the author's thought from questions and assumptions to conclusions. They do not so much reveal the final meaning of the subject, as versatile - to the point of paradoxicality - highlight it. The question that arises puts the reader before the obvious multiplicity of meanings of the “gesture”, before its “mystical” property to form a unity of heterogeneous principles, real and virtual: “Is it possible then that the gesture that I noticed in one person, associated with him, characteristic of him, expressing his peculiar charm, at the same time brought out the essence of the other person and my fantasies about him? (7). And a new round of thought in the same outlined circle “gesture - individual” is a “shocking conclusion” in the spirit of the modern idea of ​​impersonality: “a gesture is more individual than an individual”. Kundera logically argues this paradox in his own way: “... a gesture cannot be considered either an expression of an individual, or his invention (because no person is able to invent his completely original and unique gesture), or even his instrument.” But, as it turns out, this is a shock jump of thought. Its paradoxicality is not removed even by the alleged “rather” introduced into the phrase, but at the junction with the affirmative “opposite”: “... on the contrary, it is rather gestures that use us as their tools, carriers, their embodiment” (7).

Switching the gesture motif into a novelistic narrative, Kundera delivers it in a series of repetitions. Agnes saw this gesture at the secretary of the faculty when they said goodbye to her father. This gesture, "like an imprint of lightning", remained in her memory. And she repeated it at parting with a timid classmate, “this gesture came to life in her and said for her what she was unable to express” (22). Imitating her older sister in everything, Laura, once seeing this light and smooth movement of Agnes, adopted it, made it her own for life.

This novel story of gesture, as if confirming the author's philosophy of “gesture” in semantic roll, is artistically significant. It reveals both the relationship of the characters and the essence of their individual characters. Through the gesture of a forty-year-old lady who waved to her father, and through her gesture, which repeated the first and expressed twenty-five years later that beautiful thing that her father wanted to say goodbye, but which cannot be expressed in words, Agnes realized that in her father's life there was love only for two, perhaps the only one, women. To the secretary of the faculty and to her, his eldest daughter.

The gesture of Agnes copied by Laura and the refusal of the older sister from this gesture after she saw it in the younger one - in this, as Kundera writes, “we can see the mechanism to which the relations of both sisters were subordinated: the younger imitated the older, extended her hands to her, but Agnes always slipped away at the last moment” (46).

And again, the novel leitmotif of the gesture appears in the final scene in the gymnasium, where the author-hero, his constant interlocutor Professor Avenarius, Paul and his second wife Laura met. Saying goodbye to the men, Laura “threw her hand into the air with such a light, so charming, such a smooth movement that it seemed to us as if a golden ball bounced up from her fingers and remained hanging over the doors” (160). In this gesture, there is the same plurality of the individual as in the author's initial interpretation: "It was not an automated gesture of everyday farewell, it was an exceptional gesture and full of meaning" (160). It exists in different individual perceptions. The intoxicated Paul sees in him the call of a woman addressed to him, a woman who cherishes “an unfounded hope in herself” and calls to a “doubtful future” (161). In the understanding of the “author”, this gesture is addressed to Avenarius, to whom Laura wanted to make it clear through the gesture that she was here for him. For the author-character personally, this gesture, repeated, but now for him, a minute later, at parting at the car, is the “magic gesture” with which Laura charmed him. He repeats it at home in front of a mirror thirty or fifty times: "I was at the same time Laura, greeting me, and myself, watching Laura greet me" (160). However, this gesture resists him; in this movement, the author, by his own ironic admission, looks "incorrigibly clumsy and ridiculous" (160). The self-irony of the “author” also shines through in the purposefully euphemistically expressed result of imitation - “an amazing thing: this gesture did not suit me” (160); and only this irony is uniquely determined in the indefiniteness of the meaning of the depicted episode, multiplying the associative assumptions. Perhaps this is the impracticability of the desire to approach the most charming woman through an imitation of a gesture? Or the choice of a metaphysical gesture that did not choose the author as the bearer of this gesture? Or perhaps the thought of the futility of striving to master a gesture, striving that turns into self-parody?

Gesture fixation also appears in Kundera's novel as an author's technique that conveys the momentary state of the character. Thus, Avenarius spreads his hands "with a gesture expressing complete innocence" (125) in the scene of accusing him of rape. Or he “broadly gestures” (156) points Paul to Kundera, presenting him as the author of the novel Life Elsewhere. At the same time, expanding the temporal space of the “gesture” and the multiplicity of its meanings as a single one, Kundera introduces the motif of the “gesture seeking immortality” into the essayistic “novel within a novel” about Goethe and Bettina von Arnim, nee Brentano.

This private and insignificant episode from Goethe's life, having become a part of Kundera's novel narrative, actually turns into the story of Bettina, striving through Goethe's immortal greatness to gain her own immortality. And this secret desire, purposeful and strong-willed, is revealed by Kundera through her “gesture of love”: “... she put the fingers of both hands to her chest, and in such a way that the middle fingers touched the point between the breasts. Then she slightly threw back her head, lit up her face with a smile, and quickly but gracefully threw her hands forward. In this movement, the fingers first touched each other, and in the end the hands diverged, pointing the palms forward ”(82). But this is not love, but immortality, for, in the interpretation of Kundera, Bettina, “putting her fingers to the point between the breasts, as if she wanted to point to the very center of what we call our “I”” (103). “Then she threw her hands forward, as if this “I” tried to send somewhere far away, to the horizon, to infinity.” And in the author's analytical commentary, stating that "this gesture has nothing to do with love," Kundera summarizes: "A gesture that seeks immortality knows only two places in space: "I" here and the horizon there, far away; only two concepts: the absolute, which is the “I”, and the absolute of the world” (103).

Combining two layers of novels, modern and Goethe's times, Kundera unites them with a motive of gesture: he connects one to the other, introduces one into the other. The same - Bettinino - a double movement in Laura's desire to "give meaning to an indefinite word" (82), claiming "only a small immortality", she wants to "surpass herself", "do" something "to remain in the memory of those who knew her" (83). Consistent in his philosophy of the “gesture”, but at the same time emphasizing the unconscious impulse in which the true essence of Laura manifested itself, Kundera immediately commented on the suddenness of Laura’s behavior: “This gesture seemed to have its own will: he led her, and she only followed him » (82). As the generality of the special, revealing itself at the level of thought (the author's theme of the novel), translating into the plot and character of the characters, the leitmotif of the gesture connects the real and the virtual, reveals the secret and the subconscious, embodies the "ineffable". As a technique and one of the elements of the novel form, the leitmotif of gesture balances on the borderline of two principles: essayistic and novelistic.

The coexistence in Immortality of the essayistic and the novel-pictorial is consistent with the writer's statement that his novels are constructed on two levels. “At the first level, the novel story unfolds, and above it, the themes that arise in the novel story itself and thanks to it develop.” And the theme is understood by Kundera as a question of an existential order that the author asks. It is obvious that this "theme" is determined by the title of the novel, and stated in an essayistic conceptual way. And in general, it must be said that the changing poetics of the titles of Kundera's novels reflects his growing inclination towards the essayistic: if the titles of the first novels - "The Joke", "Life Elsewhere" and in particular "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" - are figurative and metaphorical, then the last Kundera's works - not only "Immortality", but also "Slowness" of 1995 - are defined in the title as existential problems of artistic and essayistic reflections.

Agnès Kundera begins her "Immortality" with a novel story, the main theme of which is given by it. But it is given as "death", experienced and comprehended by the heroine of Kundera in her singularity (after all, only art truly penetrates into the special, elevating it to the universal), is the death of Agnes's father. And Kundera goes to the theme of immortality from its source, thinking (really, philosophically, artistically, verbally) within the limits of their indissoluble unity. “Death and immortality are like an inseparable pair of lovers,” says Kundera, for immortality is comprehended only through death, and only “the one whose face merges with the faces of the dead in us is immortal already during life” (27).

However, the triune line that forms the figurative-narrative layer, including the life stories of Laura and Paul, woven into the fate of Agnes, is itself one of the variants (but in three variations) of the theme of "Immortality". "The novel is not an author's creed," Kundera argues in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, "but an exploration of what human life is in the trap that the world has become." Laura, Paul, Agnes are typical Kundera heroes, whose images are not reduced to imitation of a living person, but, being fictional creatures, are research correlated with immortality. And each of the three - in the differentiating interpretation of Kundera - with a "small" immortality: "the memory of a person in the thoughts of those who knew him" (27). Laura, in a desperate desire to do “something” so that they remember, do not forget, plays no less desperate games, either undertaking to collect alms for African lepers, or, according to all the rules, staging suicide.

Paul's quest for immortality is no less than a game, which is defined for him as "being modern." The vital game mask of Paul is thrown off him by two authorial phrases about Paul's attitude to his “favorite poet” Rimbaud: “What did Rimbaud's verses actually bring to Paul? Only a sense of pride that he belongs to those who love Rimbaud's poetry" (71). With age, Paul's idols change, but his human essence does not change. The game of modernity turns into flirting with young people, whose "great collective wisdom" is embodied for him in his daughter Brigitte. That is why Paul, having decided for himself that “to be absolutely modern in this case means to be absolutely identified with his daughter” (70), not only is he interested in “her opinion about all his problems”, but refers to her as a “soothsayer” (71 ). Paul's desire-calculation is read contextually and subtext - in a combination of the author's analytical assessments and Paul's thoughts-desires-inferences: to remain in the memory of the generation behind whom the future belongs. Paul is smart and self-critical enough not to understand (albeit once and by chance) that "some container of wisdom" of youth refers to him as a crossed-out anachronism. He is able to derive a "definition" of his position: "To be absolutely modern is to be an ally of one's gravediggers." But Paul's speculative mind - due to the inertia of the game, which has become a property of his nature - gives rise to a way out: "why should a person not be an ally of his gravediggers?" (71).

A paradoxical variation of the theme of "small immortality" considers the line of Agnes I. Bernstein, the author of the first Russian review of the novel by Milan Kundera. And not without reason: Agnes's situation is the desire to escape from immortality, to do everything in order not to be preserved in the memory of "others". A situation of thirst for absolute oblivion. And the psychologically accurate elaboration of the logic of Agnes's character, her state of alienation from people, humanity, life does not even allow for doubt that is Agnes's striving in this way to find her lasting place in the memory of others?

The paradox, as it has developed in modern consciousness - everyday and everyday, historical and social, philosophical and artistic, is the search for and approximation to the true. It is one of the three leading paradigms of the “logic of culture” on the eve of the 21st century, because the understanding of culture is in the “idea of ​​a work”, as V.S. Bibler, means in this third general sense "the actualization of philosophical logic as the logic of paradox". A paradox is also that form of detachment, thanks to which (through which) the essential-being is revealed not in its final truths, but in its problematic nature, moreover, at the moment of the highest intellectual, emotional stress and "the maximum concentration of creative efforts." In "Immortality" the paradoxical situation of Agnes, in addition to the embodiment of one of the aspects of the theme of immortality - the possibility of its denial, also concerns other existential entities.

Experiencing and comprehending both her extreme alienation and her relationship to her father (his human form and life), Agnes matures in her decision to leave life without leaving a trace, like her father, who, as she eventually realizes, "was her only love" (120). Natural for Agnes, the rejection of her future in the memory of “others” is also her desire to find what she considers the basis of the foundations of “to be” - to merge with the “original being”, “to turn into a reservoir, into a stone pool, into which the universe falls like rain” ( 124). Prefers absolute non-existence - other existence? - which is higher, outside the existential "to live" - ​​"to carry your sick "I" to the world" (124). And as the completion of the "logic of paradox" - her "strange smile", which Paul sees on the face of the recently deceased Agnes: "this unfamiliar smile on her face with closed eyelids did not belong to him, she belonged to someone he did not know, and spoke about something he didn't understand" (128).

“The novelist of our century,” writes Kundera, comprehending the history of the novel from Cervantes to the present and his writing, “looking longingly at the art of the old masters of the novel, unable to resume the interrupted thread of the narrative; he is not allowed to consign to oblivion the colossal experience of the nineteenth century; wishing to find the unconstrained freedom of Rabelais or Stren, he must reconcile it with the demands of composition. It would be naive to believe that in "Immortality" this "reconciliation" is carried out exclusively by the coexistence in Kundera's book of the novel layer and the essayistic one, each of which embodies one of the principles: the first is the need to observe the established rules of the narrative genre; the second is copyright freedom. Although in part the inclination of each of the plans to one of the principles is obvious, the main thing is that each of them, independently of each other (we note their obviously conditional, but in this case necessary autonomy), without mutual influence combines the freedom of creativity and the need to be oriented towards norms. Of course, first of all, this refers to the novel layer, which cannot be realized without the traditional experience of plot construction, composition, and methods of depicting characters. But here, too, the author's freedom in dealing with proven techniques is clear.

Genre synthesis of a novel of psychological, philosophical and elements of fantastic prose (for example, the psychological refraction of the existential problem of alienation into the story of Agnes, her imaginary meetings with a “guest” from a distant planet, or the eternal problem of “fathers” and “children”, revealed in the traditions of analytical psychologism in Paul's relationship with his daughter) is carried out by Kundera exclusively at the level of novel possibilities. The author as a hero, meeting and talking with his fictional characters on the pages of his novel, is a running, one might say, literary device in the 20th century, starting with “Love and Pedagogy” (1902), “Fog” (1914) by M. de Unamuno to , for example, “Pushkin House” (1971) by A. Bitov. It can be said that it is consecrated by the novel tradition and unchanged in modern prose "the novel in the novel" - the story of Rubens in the sixth part of "Immortality" - a kind of "plug-in genres" that equally change the structure of the novel, whether it be "Don Quixote" by M. de Cervantes, "Love Swann" in the first volume of "In Search of Lost Time" by M. Proust or "Gift" by V. Nabokov. All these techniques are from the sphere of artistic and fiction "writing technique". And the same can be said about the simplification of the plot, the author’s ignoring moments of intrigue, when even a winning “fact”, like Agnes’s love affair with Rubens, the secret of the personal life of Kundera’s heroine, appears in the narrative unexpectedly, but as if by the way. And in the author's explanation, which he spoke about in a conversation with D. Salnav, "the impoverishment of the plot" "frees up new spaces, makes the novel freer."

Philippe Solers, in his article on "Immortality", published in the "Nouvelle Observator" in January 1990, calling this work a "masterpiece", argued that "without a doubt, this is the most thoughtful and most audacious novel of Milan Kundera." This high appraisal was all the more important for the writer because he considered Sollers to be the closest artist to himself, to a greater extent than T. Mann and R. Musil, whom he revered. And it was Sollers who, in this review, was one of the first to point out the main property of Immortality - the unity of the novel-pictorial and essayistic. “Kundera's art,” Sollers writes, “it seems to me that it combines two main features. On the one hand, M. Kundera intersperses a number of large stories with small ones (European events of the last two centuries and everyday life in modern Paris) - and highlights one another. On the other hand, with unusual naturalness, a provocative thought arises from a specific scene ... or vice versa, an unexpected scene arises from philosophical reflection. Both his novels, and this one in particular, resemble towels that can be spread out on both sides, or as illustrations for a course in "existential mathematics."

In the same aspect of the dual unity of the novel and the essay, the poetics of "Immortality" is comprehended by the author of the only scientific article in our country on the work of Kundera S.A. Sherlaimova: “Recognizing the presence of essayism in the novel, it would be inaccurate to say that there are philosophical or aesthetic-theoretical digressions in it. All parts of the novel are organized by the movement of thought, but this is precisely the "novel thought": the development of the plot and its comprehension are equally important and cannot be separated.

And indeed, Kundera’s novel achieves true creative freedom, “wisdom of doubt” and “experimental thought” not in a renewed self-development of literary devices, but in a synthesis of the essayistic with the novel, embracing the entire work and every element of its artistic structure. The novel and the essay are similar in freedom of form, incompleteness, openness and variability, but the first one is at the level of creative and creative imagination, the essay is at the level of thought. Perhaps that is why the essay easily perceives verbal and artistic, because their synthesis in artistic prose is so organic. And it is the essay that makes it possible for Kundera to fulfill her writing aspirations in overcoming artistic one-dimensionality and one-linearity. And above all in the sphere of form.

The means of synthesizing the essayistic and the novel, as already noted, is Kundera's rewiring, which involves both dismantling and editing. In the 1970s and 1980s, modifications of cinematographic and at the same time literary montage were inseparable from the general context of "deconstructivism" (often used as a synonym for poststructuralism), the fundamental concept of which - "deconstruction" - is elevated to the universal status of the essence of being, the philosophical worldview, the methodology of cognition in all spheres, the main principle of artistic creativity. “Having changed the paradigm of critical thinking of the modern science of literature and introduced a new practice of analyzing a literary text, deconstructivism (already as an international phenomenon) began to be rethought as a way of a new perception of the world, as a way of thinking and attitude of a new cultural era, a new stage in the development of European civilization - the time of "postmodern "".

Despite the many deconstructivist points of view that do not come together (say, J. Derrida, who was recognized as the “key figure” of this concept and developed its principles back in the 60s, or the most authoritative representative of American deconstructivism of the Yale School, Paul de Man), the paradigmatic principle of this trend is deconstruction, in the commonly used sense as "destruction of the structure".

The truth of P. de Man's statement that "deconstruction is by no means a whim of the researcher" is obvious, "it is immanent in language and speech." Moreover, it is a property of creativity, work, art form, culture. But in "post-structuralist thinking" deconstruction is absolutized, becomes self-valuable and self-sufficient. In deconstructivism, Yu.N. Davydov, “skepticism” and “paradoxization” of our knowledge about the world turns into “deconstruction of all supporting structures” of knowledge. That is why deconstructivism reveals (and, in fact, asserts) the relativity and illusory nature of any fact, reality itself, tradition, stereotypes of thought, language, creativity, the entire “cultural intertext”, and even deconstructivist analysis itself.

Although, retrospectively, from the 90s, the rise of deconstructivist practice in the 80s was objectively assessed as nihilistic criticism without positive and constructive answers, poststructuralism gives art an unlimited possibility of dismantling and, as a result, continuation in the individual, creative and creating, consciousness - an updated montage . Deconstructivism (and in this continuing structuralism), legitimizing the aesthetic status of shaping, the "made" of montage, causes a renewal of the synchronism of dismantling and montage itself, which is, according to J. Deleuze (who fully accepts the statement of S. Eisenstein that "montage is a film as whole"), "the definition of the whole ... by fitting, cutting and new artificial fitting" (4, 139). Montage not only stores the memory of dismantling, but arises on its basis, includes it, exists in the presence of dismantling. The deformation of techniques in the frame, their redistribution, the change in the ratio of parameters and within the subject between its elements are the unconscious “shortcomings” of photography, which, referring to V. Shklovsky, Y. Tynyanov considers “starting qualities, strongholds of cinema”. This is nothing but dismantling in montage - the unity revealed by Vyach. Sun. Ivanov: "The montage chooses only a few of all the pieces of the primary material, cutting an endless tape and gluing its parts together."

At present, montage "practically covers all areas of culture", because "everywhere where it is a question of the fundamental discreteness of parts within the whole, the category of montage arises." Therefore, the cinematic ideas of J. Deleuze acquire an increased philosophical, cultural and art history significance.

J. Deleuze is convinced, like Y. Tynyanov, that montage has passed "the path of transition of technical means into the means of art", and on the other hand, he believes that "great film directors are comparable not only with artists, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. Simply, instead of concepts, they think with the help of images-in-motion and images-in-time” (4, 138). Therefore, Deleuze comprehends montage as a particular phenomenon of cinema technique, artistic technique and the property of form in its universality at the same time at the level of general artistic and general philosophical. Through montage he creates a "philosophy of art". “Montage,” writes Deleuze, “is an operation that is actually applied to images-in-motion in order to extract from them a whole, an idea, or, what is the same, an image of a specific time”, which “is of necessity mediated, because it is derived from images-in-motion and their relations” (4, 139). The image-in-motion, the essence of which was developed by A. Bergson in the 1896 book “Matter and Memory”, for Deleuze is the unity of “movement as a physical reality in the external world” and “image as a mental reality in consciousness” (4, 138) . Movement, having two facets - "on the one hand, it is carried out between objects and their parts, on the other hand, it expresses duration or the whole" (4, 139), - is self-fulfilled in these properties in images-in-motion. And if the first of them is turned to physical reality, then the second is “spiritual reality, which is constantly changing in accordance with its own relations” (4, 139).

Therefore, montage, as artistic and philosophical creativity, representing "a composition, an arrangement of images-in-motion as forming an indirect image of time" (4, 139), embodies the essence of creativity, which is determined by the complexly changing interaction of the real ("actual" in the terminology Deleuze) and virtual. He comprehends this essence in additions to his "Dialogues", on which he worked before his death, publishing them in "Caye du cinema".

This complex process is also manifested in the fact that "the actual surrounds itself with other, more and more developed, distant and diverse virtualities." But the main thing in the coexistence of the "real object" and the "virtual image" is the "exchange" between them: "the actual and the virtual coexist, enter into a close circulation, constantly leading us from one to the other." Using the metaphor of narrowing circles that convey this exchange, Deleuze develops it to a "state of indistinguishability" - "an object that has become virtual and an image that has become actual." And at the same time "object" and "image" are distinguishable. In its exchange movement, crystallizing into the Whole - Time, mediating it, the actual and virtual are similar to it as a single one in the present and the past. But in distinction, they correspond to "the most fundamental division of Time, which moves forward, dividing itself along two main axes: one seeks to make the present flow, the other to preserve the past."

Translated into the language of these fundamental categories - the actual object and the virtual image, the particular and its multitude, movement and time, the whole in its variability - Deleuze's montage acquires a philosophical meaning, which determines its new - general aesthetic - status. Being a concrete-individual embodiment of creative aspirations, say, in D.U. Griffith, S. Eisenstein, A. Hans or F.V. Murnau (the features of whose art are considered by Deleuze), montage is self-regulating at the general artistic and philosophical level of image creation.

At the same time, montage, according to Deleuze, simultaneously embraces the entire sphere of creativity and "being" of the created and created work - from the origin of the idea of ​​the film to its development by critics and the audience. “It precedes the shooting,” writes Deleuze, “in the form of selecting the material of the parts of matter that are to come into interaction, sometimes very far apart from each other (life as it is). The montage is also contained in the filming itself, in the intervals filled by the eye-camera (the camera that follows, runs, enters, exits - in short, in the life of the film). After shooting, in the editing room, where the part that is included in the film is separated from all the material, editing is also carried out; the audience also resorts to it when they compare life in the film with life as it is” (4, 147).

There are no grounds for excessive comparisons, for revealing the direct impact of deconstructivism and Deleuze's ideas on the work of Kundera and his Immortality. However, the context of the epoch, the “roll call of texts” of culture is important. It is no coincidence that the 1980s (the time of the rise and all-penetrating influence of poststructuralism, the time of Deleuze's active and, in many respects, the final work of the philosopher, the period of the creation of his cinematic dilogy) was the time of Kundera's intense artistic searches, theoretically captured in the book "The Art of the Novel", reflected already in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and predetermined the creation of "Immortality". Especially since it is clearly common, but not similar in the philosophical and aesthetic aspirations of Deleuze and Kundera. One of them (which is equally manifested by both Deleuze and Kundera) is the artistic and philosophical duality of montage as a structure-forming and form-creating principle, but in the individual-authorial uniqueness of Immortality.

Back in the 1920s, B.A. Griftsov, anticipating the deconstructivist studies of the last third of the century, wrote about the property of the novel genre in general, and of the modern genre in particular, about the “structural beginning”, which “at the same time turns out to be a destructive beginning”. Solving this problem of novel form in his own way, Kundera constructs his novel in a coordinated confrontation between dismantling and montage. Believing that “constructive consciousness” is not only not “anti-artistic,” but even a necessary property of the creative process, because “the more complex the calculation mechanism (of the writer. - V.P.), the more alive and natural the characters look,” Kundera creates an intellectual montage . It is based on the rational design of the material.

The first level of rewiring, creating a structure is the disintegration by editing of the course of novel events connected with the line of Agnes, Laura, Paul. This line itself is mounted abruptly, with often abrupt switching from one frame from the life of heroes to another. This space-time switch also corresponds to a change in the “general plan” (the chapter “A woman is older than a man, a man is younger than a woman” - Paul, Agnes, Laura in a restaurant; or the scene of a conversation between Laura and Agnes in the chapter “Body”, when the younger one declares to her older sister about her intention to commit suicide because of her broken relationship with Bernard) "close-up" (say, Paul in the chapter "Being completely modern").

A sharp montage fragmentation determines the nature of the form of the entire work. "Insert genres" are introduced: a novel-essay about Goethe and Bettina; "a novel in a novel" - the story of Rubens; scenes of otherworldly walks of Goethe and Hemingway, talking about earthly life. The "plug-in genres" include independent author's essays "The Eleventh Commandment", "Imagology" unexpectedly included in the work.

Kundera uses the method of authorial digressions, traditionally legalized in novel prose, interrupting the narration of the course of events (as in the form of an authorial address to the reader, G. Fielding in "The Story of Tom Jones the Foundling" gives his judgment about "true wisdom" in connection with a similar act of Mr. Allworthy , as well as L. Tolstoy's philosophical reflection on the role of the individual in history, interrupting the story about the course of the Battle of Borodino, in "War and Peace"). In this manner, the author of "Immortality" freely introduces separate essay-reflections into the story about the hero, perceived as contrasting with the narrative-pictorial layer of the chapter or novel part. Outwardly connected to the events described in the chapter, these essays are in fact mediated by the author's comments-comprehension of the novel's theme of immortality, which is revealed through the gradual multiple coverage of all-being: in the past and present, random and natural, small, private and large, universal. Thus, the subtly ironic essayistic passage about "Homo Sentimentalis" - not just about a person "experiencing feelings", but about "raising his feelings to dignity" (95) - is included in one of the episodes of the relationship between Goethe and Bettina, but subtextually establishes association between immortality and human nature. And connected to Rubens' "life" novel, the essay on the Horoscope-dial - "a metaphor for life, which contains great wisdom" (95) - defines the movement of events in this "novel within a novel" as "the dial of Rubens' life" (131) and at the same time highlights thematic aspect of immortality and human destiny.

According to the external editing logic of the mechanical connection, approximately from the middle of the work, “frames” of meetings-conversations between Kundera the author and Professor Avenarius are introduced. They are mounted either in the history of Agnes and Laura, or in the essayistic line of Goethe and Bettina. And although Avenarius has his own “romantic appearance” and his own “novel history” (especially since, as it turns out, in the past Avenarius and Laura had a love affair), the scenes of meetings between the “author” and the hero gradually become essayistic dialogues about literature, about writing , about the novel that Kundera is working on and its characters, about the modern world as a Deviliad, and about a person in this world.

Comprehending "the most favorite literary genre" M. de Unamuno - an essay, I.A. Terteryan writes about the author’s ability in the essay to “release his “I” at will”, to reveal, without schematizing and ordering, his spiritual states, struggles of feelings and thoughts, which does not at all mean “spontaneous immediacy of expression”. In accordance with essayistic freedom and exact adherence to the “theme”, the idea and embodiment of which “as if” arises at the given moment of creativity, a montage synthesis of the essay and the novel “Immortality” is revealed. As in the essay, in Kundera's book the freedom of thought, its flow and development, the author's liberty does not turn into the author's arbitrariness, subjective spontaneity. On the contrary, objects, phenomena, images (their aspects), turns of thought in unexpectedness, liberties, paradoxicality of their primary and external perception are strictly subject to the exact creative setting - to consider the “theme” in a multilateral way in the ongoing (and long-term by the author) change of aspects, in their roll call and possible combination of heterogeneous - not systemically, but in total. That is why the montage of the essayistic and the novel forms in Kundera a network of external links and internal correspondences, which are marked in Immortality (I think purposefully, “constructivistly”) by the montage contraction. Throughout the book there are from time to time "frames" in which (as given by the author's thought) the heterogeneous lines of the novel are combined. According to the principle of parallel-comparative montage, the lines of Laura and Bettina, similar in their thirst for "small immortality", are connected in the chapter "Gesture Seeking Immortality" from the third part of the novel. And the pointe connection of the lines of Agnes and Rubens in the scene when he learns by phone about the death of Agnes, and the reader - about the love affair of the heroine Kundera with the episodic (but narratively expanded) hero from the "novel within the novel" (part six "Dial").

The same moment is the "strong position" of the novel text - the final scene, covering the entire seventh part of the work ("Triumph"). Here Professor Avenarius, Paul, Laura and the author-hero Kundera, a character among (created by him) characters, meet in a sports club on the same level of the novel's conception. After all, there is no doubt the artistic detachment of Kundera and his mirror double in the novel. He, as the author of Immortality, begins a conversation with the reader about the origin of the idea and leads this conversation, remaining an active narrator until the end of the work. Suddenly, he no longer becomes an omnipresent storyteller, but the author of insert essays (say, called "Imagology"), and just as unexpectedly, changing "roles", but not changing in his intellectual and spiritual essence, he suddenly appears as a hero-author.

Kundera, the author of Immortality, nowhere in the text of the novel speaks of himself appearing as the author-hero in the literary space of the novel. The novelistic appearance of identifying “one” and “the other” is preserved and even emphasized by the facts of the creative biography of Kundera the writer, entrusted to Kundera, a friend of Avenarius, throughout the entire work. And at the same time, the non-identity of the author of "Immortality" to the hero-writer of the same name is obvious. It can be defined by A. Zhitinsky’s thoughts about himself, who has become a character, in his “Journey of a Rock Amateur”: “... on the one hand, he is the author of this work and at the same time has long since separated from it, has become an independent character of life, having your image, your likes and dislikes, your way of expressing yourself.”

The essay, which captures not the results and results of the life of the consciousness of the “I”, but the very process of this life, the “eternal present”, which is open in all directions, is “an unceasing process of genre formation - not only a statement is born, but also its very type: scientific or artistic, diary or preaching. This procedural duality is realized in such a genre dominant of essay poetics, which M. Epstein defines as “the energy of mutual transitions, instantaneous switching from figurative to conceptual, from abstract to everyday”.

The essayistic principle of switching embraces "Immortality" entirely. Referring to this novel in the essay “When Panurge ceases to be funny”, Kundera writes about the depiction in it of “the clash of different historical eras”. This is the writer's principle of selecting material, but also the form of the image - mixing and abrupt switching. Goethe and Hemingway, talking in the other world, "our days" in the modern layer of the novel and the 18th century. Suddenly reviving the 19th century, either in the “world of Rimbaud’s poems”, “the poet of nature”, the road, vagrancy, with his bold call “changer la vie, change life”, then in the “hypertrophy of the soul” of Prince Myshkin, a new variety of “homo sentimentalis” of the past centuries. Rolland, Rilke, interpreting the story of Goethe and Bettina. And one can compile a voluminous catalog of Immortality's proper names, a cursory listing of which, in their artistic role in the novel, conveys one of the models of the form of Kundera's book, where (to use his words about Carlos Fuentes' "Terra nostra") "numerous historical epochs merge into a kind of ghostly poetic metahistory. Prophet Moses, Mahler, Aristotle, Mitterrand, Hitler, Stalin, Monet, Dali, Lenin, Robespierre, Picasso, Napoleon, Beethoven, Solzhenitsyn, Descartes, Wagner, Nezval, Blessed Augustine, Cervantes.

Not only the interpenetration of the narrative-pictorial, figurative, on the one hand, and the conceptual, reflective, essayistic, on the other, but also the varieties of the novel in their confusion overcome genre one-dimensionality. Layers of psychological and chamber novel, satirical dialogue, elements of socio-political prose (with "actions" of protest and charity by Avenarius and Laura), parody novel (erotic prose and history of Rubens), documentary fragments of radio information - the interpenetration of these heterogeneous properties, in fact, the problem The Immortality genre is reduced to genre syncretism, which Kundera considers a "revolutionary innovation" in the development of literature.

The essayistic "energy of development" is, in fact, the energy of form. The material changes the point of view on immortality: the story of Agnes, Paul, Laura, the situation of Rubens, Goethe and Bettina, the conversations of Goethe and Hemingway, the author’s seemingly “superfluous” essayistic meditations on chance, on modernity through “imagology”, on creativity in conversations with Avenarius. Diverse material changes the perspective and expands the "semantic field" of the novel's theme of immortality. However, the constant changeability of techniques, their repetition in a new form, then a smooth (softened or even veiled) transition of a technique into a technique, or the exposure of their “junctions” - all this creates a form that is ahead of the changing meaning, sets the course of thought and its unexpected turns.

Each new fragment of the novel - different in form - multiplies variability as a property of the form of "Immortality". In the multiplying variability of techniques, the form acquires independence, relative intrinsic value. The author's reflection is not revealed as an end in itself, but only in correlation with the self-reflection of the form. Along with the plot level (in the broad sense) and the level of the "theme" of the work, the third level dominates - the level of form. Here "the art form is given without any motivation, just as such." It is at this level of a work of art that the artistic law really manifests itself, defined by V. Shklovsky by the formula: "The content ... of a literary work is equal to the sum of its stylistic devices."

"As such" the form of montage organizes the material of the fifth part of the novel ("Accident"). In terms of the nature of the montage, Kundera here is close to, say, not D.W. Griffith with his, in the words of J. Deleuze, “parallel alternating montage”, when the image of one part follows the image of another in a certain rhythm”, and to S. Eisenstein, for whom the essence of montage lies in “collision”, but not in “coupling” frames. Since "the essence of cinema must be sought not in frames, but in the relationships of frames."

And in the literary work of recent decades, this technique was developed by M. Vargas Llosa, who called this principle of mounting "reception of communicating vessels." The Latin American novelist, who uses this technique in both Green House (1966) and Doomsday War (1981), "cuts the episode into fragments, and then mounts them with fragments of other scenes with completely different characters" . In Vargas Llosa, spasmodically alternating "frames", "lagging behind each other in time and space", each bring their own - as Vargas Llosa writes, explaining this technique - "tension, their own emotional climate, their own image of reality." And "merging into a single narrative reality", these situations-fragments give a "new image of reality".

For Kundera, montage is more formalized, because in his perception, the formal principle of the montage organization of the material is primary. The spasmodic collision of fragments is given as a mechanical connection, characteristic of both modernist and postmodernist novel poetics (whether it be the articulation of heterogeneous scenes, situations or thoughts in a “stream of consciousness”). From beginning to end of this chapter, Kundera provides footage of Agnes' final hours, from her departure from her hotel in the Alps to her car crash and death in the hospital. Unexpectedly mixing these fragments with the episode of the meeting of the hero Kundera with Avenarius broken into frames, the author expands the narrative space: from time to time he introduces frames with the girl who caused the catastrophe. And then it includes chapters-fragments about Paul, who learns about the tragedy with Agnes and arrives at the hospital late. And they alternate with fragments of an episode of Avenarius' strange-leftist struggle, who, maintaining in himself the "internal necessity of rebellion" (110), as a sign of "protest" punctures the tires of cars at night and is caught at the scene of the crime.

With each unexpected switch from frame to frame, their junction intensifies, accentuates the feeling of a random appearance of a new frame and frame interruption. “Randomness”, declared by the author in the title of this part of the novel, realized by the form of montage, is also revealed in the comparison of shots that echo the motive of chance. Accidental death of Agnes. By chance, a girl who wanted her own death becomes the culprit of a car accident and the death of Agnes. By chance, Avenarius ends up in the hands of the police. By chance, Paul is late for the dying Agnes.

But the title of the chapter, and "accident" as a form of montage, and the leitmotif of contingency in the novel lines of Agnès, the Girl, Avenarius, and Paul, coupled with montage, are only the multiplying reality of chance. The given form and manifesting itself in it "as such", "without motivation", "accident" - an irrational property that became the cause of the emerging novel text, the principle of combining particulars into a whole. Chance is revealed in its existential significance, and in the human desire to comprehend its essence, it is reduced at all levels to the question that arises in the conversation between Kundera and Avenarius and states: “What can we say reliably about chance in life without mathematical research? Unfortunately, however, there is no existential mathematics” (109). And to the paradoxical-metaphorical, playful conclusion of Avenarius: "... non-existent existential mathematics would probably put forward the following equation: the price of chance is equal to the degree of its improbability" (109).

In a different manner than the novel-essay "Immortality", Kundera wrote an essay "novel in a novel" about Goethe and Bettina, but, equally, with the energy of form inherent in the essay. It is difficult to agree with I. Bernshtein, who called this "plug-in genre" a "historical short story." Although, indeed, the episode from the life of Goethe and Bettina included in Immortality is historical in terms of its material, the essayistic beginning can be seen in its presentation by Kundera at different levels.

Creating a multi-style, switching from reception to reception is carried out within the limits of the general stylistic property of this plug-in novel - interpretation. As you know, any work (from the high prose of M. Proust and the paintings of R. Magritte to the mass fiction of S. Sheldon and the theater of wax figures), and even more high art, is an interpretation. For it is one of the forms of understanding (knowledge) through artistic interpretation. In this sense - without exaggeration and absolutization - indeed, one can recognize the validity of F. Nietzsche's statement: "There are no facts, there are only interpretations." And it is natural in the same sense that the revival in the 20th century of the category of “interpretation” that arose in ancient philosophy, which became the basis of philosophical hermeneutics by F. Schleiermacher, W. Dilthey, G. Gadamer. How natural is the acquisition of a methodological status by "interpretation" in art and literary criticism.

The interpretive beginning in the essay reflects the general property of the human ability (possibility) to understand and cognize. “Truth is an interpretative phenomenon,” M. Mamardashvili asserts with vital and philosophical justification. The essay puts an increased emphasis on interpretation, and this creates, as a result, experimentalism and emphasized literary character of the interpreted material or problem, whether it is L. Aragon's novel-essay "Death Seriously" or "Endless Dead End" by D. Galkovsky. In Kundera's creative searches, the essayistic constant of interpretation manifested itself to the greatest extent in his last novel, Slowness, the form of which, in fact, is determined by the interpretation of the 18th-century novel No Tomorrow, attributed to Vivan Denon. In the same (but invariant) property, the interpretation creates the unity of the essayistic form in the main inserted novel, Immortality.

The story of Goethe and Bettina initially appears as a scrupulous, accurate reproduction and comprehension of every fact, but an interpreted narrative. This is the second part of the same name with the novel, with the exception of an unexpected turn in the final - the meeting of Goethe and Hemingway and their conversation in another world. Gradually, as the theme of immortality develops in Kundera's novel, this story, losing its narrative value in itself, fits into the author's novel-essay reflections. The image of Bettina comes to the fore in this novel line. The question of Goethe's great immortality is, in fact, defined and fixed in the cultural consciousness of mankind, although here, too, Kundera's sophisticated and paradoxical mind highlights unexpected angles, like, say, three periods in Goethe's personal history of immortality: from taking care of him, managing him to "pure freedom" from the obsession with immortality. The story about Bettina is built as a revelation of her secret desire to gain her own, small immortality through communion with Goethe's great immortality.

Kundera's interpretation is rationalistic, a property that manifests itself in the selection of the facts of the history of Goethe and Bettina, in the changing perspective of their coverage and in the logic of connection, in the correlation of the course of comprehension and its results. Kundera then includes this line of the past in the modern layer of the novel, revealing the common essence of the small immortality of Bettina and Laura; then essayistically illuminates the history of Goethe and Bettina, presenting "at the eternal court" the evidence of Rilke, Rolland, Eluard.

The "Romance" of Goethe and Bettina in the architectonics of "Immortality" appears as an independent, private whole. Kundera emphasizes this, of course, relative isolation with the compositional device of framing. The beginning of this story in the second part, the author ends with the scene of the meeting between Goethe and Hemingway, and in the fourth part, completing this plug-in novel, the author again gives a similar scene of Goethe and Hemingway, although now - their eternal separation. But the story of Goethe and Bettina is inscribed as a private part of the whole of Kundera's novel. Just as in a film frame - "its unity redistributes the semantic meaning of all things, and each thing becomes correlated with others and with the whole frame", - Bettina's private history interacts with other "particulars" of Immortality. Not only in the marked linkage of the line of Bettina and Laura. And also in the sixth part - the second "novel in the novel" about Rubens - the author, discussing the role of "an accidental episode" in life, will once again talk about "the triumph of Bettina, who became one of the stories of Goethe's life after his death" (144).

Such a correlation of particulars, on the one hand, and the private and the whole, on the other, is also a property of Immortality as a novel-essay that gives an interpretation of facts, thoughts, “obtained by the personal experience” of the author. After all, the essay, I.A. Terteryan rightly asserts, “offers us not so much a system of ideas as an artistic image of a specific human consciousness, an image of the subjective perception of the world.”

Composition

By studying our ancestors, we recognize ourselves; without knowledge of history, we must recognize ourselves as accidents, not knowing how and why we came into the world, how and why we live, how and what we should strive for. V. Klyuchevsky
Whether we like it or not, our present is inseparable from the past, which constantly reminds us of itself. “The whole thing went to the grandfather,” the people around say about the baby, who is a week without a year. Old Pskov frescoes, letters scratched on Novgorod birch bark, sounds of a shepherd's horn, legends of "long gone days", outlines of temples - all this stirred up past makes us think that the past has not gone away.
History is a formidable weapon! Isn't it obvious that the "evil empire" began to fall apart under the powerful blows of writers who turned to our past! Among them are V. Chivilikhin, A. Solzhenitsyn, Ch. Aitmatov, V. Shalamov. The literature of the 1880s turned the consciousness of the people to its historical past, told it that it was by no means the same age as October, that its roots go back centuries.
The novel-essay by Vladimir Chivilikhin "Memory" was published in 1982. The writer is trying to "embrace the immensity" and remember all of our historical past. "... Memory is an irreplaceable daily bread, today's, without which children will grow up as weak ignoramuses, unable to adequately, courageously meet the future."
There is no way to even briefly retell "Memory". In the center of the work is the Russian heroic Middle Ages, when foreign invasions from the East and West were resisted. This is an immortal history lesson, which is unacceptable to forget.
The writer invites us to touch things that remember the looks and hands of those who disappeared long ago. Examining a rough stone cross, reminiscent of a man with outstretched arms, Chivilikhin tells how the predatory army of the steppes came to the city of the forest Seversk land: “I am not standing in front of a stone, but in front of a deep centuries-old mystery! The victorious steppe army was bound by an iron chain of organization and obedience, skillfully used siege equipment, and had vast experience in storming the most impregnable strongholds of that time. It was headed by commanders-in-chief who had turned gray in fierce battles. For forty-nine days the steppe army stormed the wooden forest town, for seven weeks they could not take Kozelsk! In fairness, Kozelsk should have entered the annals of history along with such giants as Troy and Verdun, Smolensk and Sevastopol, Brest and Stalingrad.”
Following the story of the heroic ancient Kozelsk - a short story about a partisan newspaper printed in August 1943 on birch bark:
Bizarre, unpredictable twists in the narrative of this unusual novel. And how many new names Vladimir Chivilikhin discovered to the inquisitive reader: the Decembrist Nikolai Mozgalevsky, the elemental philosopher Pavel Duntsev-Vygodsky, the poet Vladimir Sokolovsky, the tyrannical thinker Mikhail Lunin, the prisoner of the solitary cell Nikolai Morozov.
The anthem of the writer of the talent of our people cannot leave anyone indifferent. Chivilikhin introduces us to the great but little-known scientist - Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky, the founder of the New Science of Heliobiology. The author lists the works of a world-famous scientist. And again the reader is burned by the thought: “... how wasteful we are, how forgetful, how lazy and incurious...”
Suddenly, the story of the complex relationship between the genius of Russian literature, Gogol, and the former maid of honor, Empress Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, a beauty and clever girl, sung by Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, begins to unfold before us. Or suddenly we find ourselves together with the author in ancient Chernihiv, a city where an architectural masterpiece of world significance has been preserved - the Church of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa.
A special side of the book "Memory" is made up of various disputes that take place in the course of the story. So, for example, the question is raised, why did the steppe dwellers choose this path, and not another? The question is not idle, because behind it are the key problems of national history, shedding light on the legality of the ownership of certain lands. “The answer to this question would help to dispel a lot of historical misunderstandings, to see the confusion5 of different interpretations and errors in countless descriptions of the old hard times, to part with some naive ideas that have stuck in our memory from a young, as they say, nails.”
The writer also pays tribute to those who contributed to the comprehension of their native history. Thus, in the course of the story, a touching and beautiful portrait of Pyotr Dmitrievich Baranovsky, the famous Moscow architect-restorer, whose deeds and life the capital should be proud of, is recreated.
The October Revolution of 1917 set the fashion for freely dealing with history; in socialist society, it was assigned not an objective, but a subjective and subordinate role to the state.
However, even Pushkin noted that "disrespect for history and ancestors is the first sign of savagery and immorality." And the great historian N.M. Karamzin in “History of the Russian State” wrote: “History ... expands the limits of its own being; By its creative power we live with people of all times, we see and hear them, we love and hate them...”.

LINKING EVERYTHING TO EVERYTHING…

Notes on the novel - essay by Vladimir Chivilikhin "Memory"

There is a way to be happy in life: to be useful to the world and especially to the Fatherland.

N. M. Karamzin

It seems that only in our days such an unusual book in all respects as "Memory" could be born. In the years when the people are looking intently into their past, recent and distant, trying to comprehend, understand what gave them the strength to make a revolution unprecedented in the world, to create an unprecedented state of workers and peasants, to endure and win in the most bloody war known to history. In the years when more and more Soviet people began to realize what great wealth we are the heirs of, the heirs of what a culture that goes back centuries!

Books like "Memory" serve as a catalyst, noticeably increase interest in history, they answer many questions and raise new ones, opening up exciting routes for future researchers ... They are a powerful charge of both soul-elevating emotions and memory-enriching knowledge.

Not every book is destined to give rise to as many contradictory rumors as the amount of which has already fallen to the lot of "Memory". Is the writer right in defending his assumptions about the route of the Batu hordes during the invasion of Russia in 1237-1238, about their numbers, about the exact date of the battle on the City, about the reasons for the invaders to turn away from Novgorod, about the circumstances of the death of the heroic defenders of impregnable Kozelsk, named by the Tatars “an evil city”, about the quality of the weapons of the Russian troops in the battle on the Kulikovo field, about the linguistic origins of the word “Vyatichi”, etc. Other questions arose. What was Rus' in those distant times? What was the significance of that invasion and the then so-called Tatar-Mongol yoke for its historical destinies? Did Rus' have its own Middle Ages, or did its “antiquity” drag on almost until the times of Peter the Great, when bourgeois revolutions were already ripening in the West? And about the most important thing - were our ancestors really incapable of putting things in order in their house, as the supporters of the Norman theory of calling the Varangians to Rus' or their "opponents" - "Eurasians" who disagreed with the Normans, argued, perhaps only in the fact that the order of Rus' as if it was brought ... from the East? And are there peoples at all endowed with a special “passionarity”, that is, a certain “human energy present in the Universe”, not connected with “dependence on ethical standards”, and peoples ... inferior, or something, with “zero passionarity”, deprived of nature in a direct and figuratively. The latter sounds almost blasphemous, reminiscent of the delusional racist theories of the German fascists.

Vladimir Chivilikhin in "Memory" revealed the hidden meaning of the latest attempts to revise the history of the Middle Ages of our Motherland, openly went out to fight for the truth, came out fully armed with facts and scientific data. And his book became a majestic anthem to the peoples - creators, whose historical meaning of existence is not living at the expense of less "passionate" neighbors, but the development of their own economy, culture, and the development of natural resources.

This development is impossible without fundamental and comprehensive knowledge, knowledge in an almost inexhaustible volume, and such that relate to the deep essence of man himself as a being not only biological, but also social. Creators cannot do without historical memory. “... Long gone people with their passions, thoughts and deeds, the movements and movements of peoples, kingdoms and idols, the great works of millions, the seas of their blood and tears, destructive and creative, motley facts, broad generalizations, contradictory conclusions - in this abyss of the past so it’s easy and simple to get lost, to dissolve oneself in what was and will never be again, and therefore it’s as if it’s so easy and simple to do without all this, to live the remaining time today, finding joy in honestly earning a piece of bread for your children, - writes Vladimir Chivilikhin. “However, memory is an irreplaceable daily bread, today’s, without which children will grow up as weak know-nothings, unable to adequately and courageously meet the future.”

The novel-essay "Memory" is good because it opens wide and deep, because there is a huge amount of knowledge behind it, not just translated by the author into a language accessible to non-specialists, but truly mastered, that is, taken critically, deeply and comprehensively meaningful, disputed when necessary, but again - with the involvement of new facts, arguments, logical conclusions.

In breadth - because, having set out to explore history through the ages, the history that passed through it, "namely, the family of the Decembrist Nikolai Osipovich Mozgalevsky, the author soon came out on the downright - still boundless sea of ​​\u200b\u200blife - people, after all, in their actions and their destinies are connected with each other the other is much closer than it is usually thought.And now, under the writer's pen, more and more new names come to life, loud and not very famous, well-known or little-known, sometimes opened from a completely unexpected side, and behind them are the most diverse layers of human activity. to understand the heroes not only in history and geography, but also in ... metallurgy, since it comes to the famous Russian metallurgist V. E. Grum - Grzhimailo and his son, who followed in the footsteps of his father; to understand chemistry - without this it is impossible to talk about the great D I. Mendeleev, who was connected by family ties with the descendants of the Decembrists, and with the poet Alexander Blok; to understand architecture - how else can you tell about P. D. Ba Ranovsky or K. I. Blank; to understand construction, when the side paths of the narrative lead not anywhere, but to the great Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Mainline, in the creation or research of the routes of which both the Decembrist Gavriil Batenkov, and the grandsons of the Decembrists Nikolai Mozgalevsky, Vasily Ivashev took part; understand agriculture, because without this one cannot understand the feat of V. A. Mozgalevsky, the grandson of the Decembrist, a nobleman who became one of the first Russian settlers in Tuva. However, all the areas of knowledge that the author had to delve into to a certain extent (and into which he persistently involves his inquisitive reader) are even difficult to enumerate ...

Most of those whom Vladimir Chivilikhin talks about and whose works are based on (due to the very theme and specifics of the novel - essay) are either travelers, ethnographers, orientalists, like G. E. Grumm-Grzhimailo, N. N. Miklukho - Maclay , N. Ya. Bichurn, G. N. Potanin, N. M. Yadrintsev, or historians - from N. M. Karamzin, V. N. Tatishchev, S. M. Solovyov, V. O. Klyuchevsky, N. And Veselovsky to M. N. Tikhomirov, B. A. Rybakov, E. A. Rydzevskaya ... Especially sinks into the soul is the fact repeatedly emphasized by the author that many Decembrists were quite professionally fond of the “science of sciences” - there are fifty-five historians among them! And the Decembrist Alexander Kornilbvich was the founder of the first historical almanac in Russia, Russian Antiquity.

With great warmth, sincere deep respect, the author writes about archaeologists - ascetics, such as A. V. Artsikhovsky, who found the first Novgorod birch bark letter and thereby laid the foundation for the discovery of the amazing world of almost universal literacy of the ancient, as they would say before, but now, probably , following Vladimir Chivilikhin, they will say - medieval Rus'; like T. N. Nikolskaya, whose discoveries during excavations near Kozelsk brilliantly confirm the information about the high level of economic and cultural development of pre-Mongol Rus.

And what pride for the true patriots of their Motherland and its ancient history sounds in the lines of the writer about the simplest Russian people, by no means world-famous scientists, but who nevertheless made a significant contribution to science and culture! For example, about Dmitry Samokvasov, who, back in tsarist times, in defiance of state professors who denied the very possibility of developing a rich culture on the territory of Ancient Rus', began excavations of the Black Grave in the Chernihiv region, now famous throughout the enlightened world, with his own money. Or - about Nikolai Yadrintsev, a revolutionary and tireless researcher of the natural and cultural riches of Siberia, the initiator of the establishment of the first Tomsk University in these parts, the man who discovered Orkhono - Enpsei letters with a parallel text in Chinese, which is quite comparable with the famous discovery by the French scientist Champollion of parallel Greek text to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Or - about the school history teacher F.I. Kirillov, who was the first to draw attention to the traces of ancient civilization on Bely Iyus, but, unfortunately, could not reach out to the dormant professional conscience of the then chief archaeologist of Krasnoyarsk. Or - about the local historian from Kozelsk VN Sorokin and others. One feels like exclaiming after the writer: “Glory to local historians!”

Opened "Memory" and deep into. First of all, in the depths of time. If we talk about the origins of ancient Slavic culture, then - in the third and second millennia before your era1 Closer milestones - the 9th century with the foundation of a mighty state - Kievan Rus; XII century with an unsuccessful, but by no means useless, as the author suggests, the campaign of the Russians against the Polovtsians, sung in the immortal "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", a poem so beloved by the author and often quoted on the pages of the novel - an essay; XIII century with the immense tragedy of the Tatar-Monyul invasion; XIV century with the battle on the Kulikovo field; 19th century with the Decembrist movement; finally, the very recent days of the Great Patriotic War and our days - the 70s - 80s ... But if we recall the "Slavicisms" deeply and fascinatingly analyzed by the author in the ancient Indian hymns of the "Rigveda" and in the sacred book of the ancient Persians "Avesta", or rather, about the inherent relationship of many root words in the languages ​​of these peoples, or to recall the finds in the White Iyus, then the temporal boundaries of "Memory" are pushed even further.

What attracts this complex, difficult-to-perceive work to a wide circle of readers? (But it attracts! What else can hundreds of letters to the author, showered immediately after the journal publication, testify to?) First of all, probably, by the fact that the writer from the very first lines does not hide his biased attitude towards a person whose fate he was afraid to follow through the ages. And this is not some fictional Jura, in which you can believe or not believe, depending on the skill of the writer. No, this is a man who lived, left a distinct mark on the earth, continued by his many - one hundred and fifty people in a century and a half! - descendants. A man who fought alongside his comrades. (By the way, Vladimir Chivilikhin fascinatingly showed how this beautiful word was born and took root in the public consciousness in the distant past, now, in Soviet conditions, which has become a familiar address.) Moreover, he and his fellow Decembrists fought in incredibly difficult conditions, when even the biggest optimists not so much counted on the success of the uprising, but on the strength of their moral sacrificial example for posterity. This man, the Decembrist Nikolai Mozgalevsky, is doubly dear to the Soviet writer Vladimir Chivilikhin - both as a true citizen of his Fatherland, and as a direct ancestor of the people closest to him - his wife and daughters. But this personal is essentially inextricably linked with the public. We, the Soviet people, need to know what happened long before us, how on an incredibly long, sometimes unbearably terrible, bloody path, the sprouts of humanism, dreams of a free and righteous life, truly worthy of a person, made their way and all grew stronger. We need a deep understanding of the fact that the Big History is made up of millions and millions of short in time, but by no means "small" stories of specific people, living, flesh and blood, with unique personal traits inherent only to them, with their personal thoughts, actions , acts that acquired a particularly great public resonance when they were turned not inward, not only for themselves, but for the good of the Fatherland, since it was in this that they saw "the way to be happy in life."

The fate of Nikolai Mozgalevsky, closely intertwined with the fate of his comrades, leads the author, like the thread of Ariadne, into the depths of the labyrinth of the past. And more and more new branches are opening up, new human stories, and they are inextricably linked with the history of the country. The history of mankind.

It is amazing how much the Decembrists managed to do even before their creative activity was forcibly suppressed or limited - by imprisonment, hard labor, exile, and even after ... What a deep moral mark in the history of Russia, and especially Siberia, they left! Speaking about the fact that the memory of the Decembrists is an integral, holy particle of our spiritual life, Vladimir Chivilikhin cites an excerpt from a letter from A.F. Golikov from the city of Plavsk, Tula Region - a response to a magazine publication: “Decembristism should be regarded as a phenomenon of human civilization, the birthplace of which Russia... The second part of the Decembrist revolution took place throughout Russia until the 90s - in Siberia, the Urals, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldova, Central Asia, and in many other places, including abroad. Decembrism is not only and not so much an uprising on Senate Square, it is a half-century ascetic and extremely active at that time activity of defeated, unbroken revolutionaries. Their revolution was also in the fact that they left us literary, philosophical, political, natural science works, as milestones to bright knowledge, our freedom and happiness ... "

Chivilikha's "Memory" in this sense provides new food for thought. In particular, correcting historians, in such recent publications about the Decembrists who write that by the amnesty of 1856 in different places in Siberia there were only 19 of them, of which 16 returned to Russia, and three died in exile, the author talks about five who remained in Siberia . Among them, the poet Vladimir Raevsky survived the date of the uprising by almost half a century. Exactly 56 years later "- on December 14, 1881 - the only peasant, the Decembrist Pavel Duntsov - Vygodsky, was buried in Irkutsk. Alexander Lutsky lived ten months longer than him, who died in 1882 in a settlement near the Nerchinsk mining plants. The same Alexander Lutsky, grandson which, the red commander Alexei Lutsky, was burned by the Japanese in a locomotive firebox together with Sergei Lazo ...

But Lutsky was not only one of the youngest Decembrists, but also the poorest health. The only one of the Decembrists - northerners "he was sent along the stage with a party of criminals and stayed on the road for a total of about a year, the only one of the Decembrist nobles was punished with rods. So what an indestructible flame of life burned in this extraordinary man, who also ventured for two escape, who had been in hard labor longer than all his comrades and yet survived them!

Among the Decembrists were, writes Vladimir Chivilikhin, "first-class poets and prose writers, passionate publicists, talented translators, philosophers, philologists, lawyers, geographers, botanists, travelers - discoverers of new lands, engineers - inventors, architects, builders, composers and musicians, folk figures education, educators of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, valiant warriors, pioneers - the initiators of good new deeds, and just citizens with high intellectual and moral qualities.

Of course, they constituted a whole epoch in Russian history and were its creators themselves, representing a promising socio-social vector."

So in "Memory" he acts as a passionate defender ... What? Our very great history and culture! A defender, because even this spiritual wealth, our holy of holies, is subject to continuous attacks, open or hypocritically disguised, all the more intolerable in the current conditions of the intensified ideological confrontation between the two systems of social development.

So, passion, open interest, that tendentiousness, which V. Belinsky once spoke about and without which nothing truly great can be born, leads Vladimir Chivilikhin into the depths of the past. And “under the ashes of antiquity” there is so much light! The inextinguishable spiritual light kindled by our predecessors. The light of love and loyalty to one's people, and therefore to humanism in general, to all mankind. The author of "Memory" generously cites more and more clearest evidence of such a truly humanistic love of Russian people for the Fatherland, sometimes simply amazing. Such, for example, are lines from rough sketches by N. N. Miklukho-Maclay, recently found in Australia among his descendants.

"Memory" is not the cold-blooded study of a scientist who doesn't care what he investigates. "Memory" is an excited and exciting word of a citizen, a patriot of our Soviet Motherland, and in particular of that part of it, which "has rallied the indestructible union of free republics forever." This is the word of an internationalist to the core. "Memory" is the word of a communist writer.

The author's partiality, sometimes breaking through in direct lyrical digressions, and implicitly penetrating the whole work, as if dissolving in its fabric, does not contradict another important quality of "Memory": the book's solidity and evidence.

Not in any doctoral monograph you will find so many ideas that open the way for researchers who follow, give scope for the development of scientific research. "Memory" was highly appreciated in the press by scientists - philologists and historians, many well-known critics, literary critics, prose writers, and publicists. But most importantly, referring to the book, anyone can check the author's proposals and calculations for himself, turn, if he is not convinced by the author's commentary, to the primary sources, to which Vladimir Chivilikhin refers with generosity, although not permissible in a "purely" work of art, but quite appropriate here in such an innovative novel both in form and content.

The amount of knowledge attracted and processed by the writer is colossal. Dozens, maybe hundreds of sources! This is, unfortunately, a rarity in the artistic and journalistic work. And as always, when there is a basic idea, in this case, the greatness and enormous historical depth of the culture of our Motherland, around it and as proof of it, the author immediately masters and draws on the latest material. One can agree with the historian V.V. Kargalov, who noted that many, probably only from the “Memory”, learned in detail about the discovery by Soviet historians in Siberia, on the White Iyus, of drawings of ancient hunters. One might add: wasn’t it the same way that the general readership learned about the research of the Ukrainian mathematician A.S. Bugai on the Serpentine Walls, gigantic fortifications of a defensive nature, which could only be erected by a large and well-organized ancient state federation? (But they are dated with the help of radiocarbon analysis of charcoal of fired trunks laid inside the shafts, 270 AD, and one of them - even 150 BC "- G.Ch.) Or - about the long-term, truly patriotic works of the architect - restorer P. D. Baranovsky? Or - not only about the enormous scale and volume of research by G. E. Grumm-Grzhimailo, but also about his very ascetic life? And about many, many other things ...

And this is what is extremely important in this deeply scientific book: it was written by a real great writer, not a popular writer, no, a master publicist and prose writer. Artistically convincing, for example, is the image of Subudai - not just a cruel warrior, but also an old man who loves his sons, understands the complexity of his own and their position, if he does not save Chingizids and booty in this difficult campaign ... In "Memory" - a wonderful fusion of high artistry with authentic documentation. Genuine! This is not a game of "document" just because the modern reader sometimes values ​​documentary literature almost more than ordinary prose. The author emphasizes the severity of his attitude to the factual basis: "I use the writer's privilege to invent small details, not having the right to compose facts that distort the great historical truth." It is curious that life, the latest data of scientific research, more than once confirmed the hypotheses put forward in "Memory" and artistically substantiated (for example, that the defenders of Kozelsk had iron masks that made them invulnerable to Tatar arrows, etc.). Elsewhere, discussing the difference between a professional scientist and a writer who has taken up a historical topic, Vladimir Chivilikhin writes: “The task of the historian is to objectively reveal what, how and why everything happened in the past; the writer is obliged to rely on the achievements of historical science and, having considered the years and events through the prism of his worldview, illuminate them with a personal lantern and, perhaps, bring into them today's meaning, in accordance with the main vectors of social development ... "

With the Decembrists, Vladimir Chivilikhin only began his journey into the past - as a great moral example, expressing the spiritual essence of his people. And in principle, the people are the main or even the only hero of his book. First of all, the Russian people. This is natural, since the author himself is flesh from the flesh and blood from the blood of this people. Vladimir Chivilikhin is dear to both his Ryazan roots near Pronsk, and the spiritual roots of our culture, going deep beyond the Russian Middle Ages, during pagan times, when the language of the people was taking shape, and, perhaps, not so much philosophical as poetic Understanding of his life by him , and its way of life ... Who cares and is close to Siberia, which "the power of Russia will grow," as M. V. Lomonosov prophesied, - and grows faster and faster before our eyes! Siberia, in which Vladimir Chivilikhin was born (in Mariinsk, in 1928), spent his childhood and youth, through which he paved his innumerable journalistic and literary paths in his mature years. The Russian people are dear to him as a spokesman for the creative principle, first of all as a plowman and builder, and then a warrior.

Vladimir Chivilikhin vividly showed the tragedy of the situation of the Russian land, which was barely beginning to take shape in a single whole, in the 12th century. On the one hand, the German "dogs - knights" fell upon it, completely exterminating the Slavic tribes of the Bodrichs, Lyutichs, Ruyans, Baltic-speaking Prussians and non-stop pushing the rest of the peoples inhabiting the Baltic to the east, "dogs - knights", picking up the keys to Pskov and Novgorod, until our ancestors did not stop them with their unparalleled courage; on the other hand, obsessed with the idea of ​​world domination, the desire to “reach the last sea”, the Genghisides gathered into tumens soldered by fear and thirst for profit, motley hordes from the peoples they defeated, lovers of easy money of those times, pointing out to them, among other things, the rich lands of the Uruses ...

There are many bitter and lofty pages in "Memory" about the latest times, when the peaceful, creative work of the Soviet people was interrupted by the Nazi invasion. The barbaric actions of the invaders on Soviet soil were aimed not only at stopping the economic and cultural development of the country for a long time, but also at destroying as much as possible the historical memory of the people.

The Russian people, peace-loving, but courageous, great in their patriotism, rise to their full height in "Memory": the unknown author of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", who for the first time in literature said "Rusichi", and Evpatia Kolovrat, the first Russian partisan in one of the first our national, domestic wars; nameless participants in the heroic seminal defense of Kozelsk, the defense of Ryazan, Vladimir, Moscow, Torzhok, and those who, on the Kulikovo field, a century and a half later, crushed the predatory horde; the Decembrists, who by their example not only lit the way for the revolutionaries of Russia, but also had a beneficial effect on the fate of hundreds and thousands of their compatriots, primarily the inhabitants of Siberia, and, finally, our contemporaries, the Soviet people, who won the bloody war, creating the happiest on earth society. All the vast content of the book, all its orientation clearly reveal the defining vector of development of our society, our ancient statehood and culture - creation, peaceful construction and the predominantly defensive nature of hostilities, if you really had to participate in them.

However, the hero of "Memory" is not only Russian people. With lively interest, the author tells, for example, about the people of di, or diplins, known since the 3rd millennium BC, who once mastered "all of China, giving it the Zhou dynasty."

What kind of people were they? Scholars have been arguing about this. G. E. Grumm-Grzhimailo did not doubt that the Dinlins belonged to the Caucasoid race, which is confirmed by anthropological data. “And if the Dinlins were indeed Indo-Iranian-speaking Scythians,” Vladimir Chivilikhin reflects, “then one can only marvel at the strength and numbers of this people, who in ancient times inhabited the entire Eurasian Great Steppe - from the Black Sea to the Yellow Sea, and left wonderful examples of applied art.”

The author also tells about the Jurchen people, who managed to develop a rich culture and even technology in the Middle Ages, but who were extremely unlucky with their neighbors. This people melted away in battles with the hordes of Chngnz - Khan. Finally, the author also traces how tragically the policy of this cunning, ruthless, unprincipled ruler affected the fate of the Mongolian people themselves, in whose name Genghis Khan acted. The wars of conquest, which squandered its strength, then for a long time eliminated the Mongolian people from the arena of world history. And only the socialist system helped Mongolia to take its rightful place in the brotherhood of peoples.

A significant place in "Memory" is occupied by the author's polemic with two seemingly opposite, but, like any extremes, converging in their essence directions in science. We are talking about Normanists and "Eurasians".

Vladimir Chivilikhin does not leave a stone unturned on the theory of the Normanists and their modern followers, who prove the alleged inability of the Slavs in general, and Russians in particular, to put things in order in their own house. The entire content of "Memory" convinces of the opposite. The people who created such a great culture and such a powerful state as they appear on the pages of the book do not need outside mentors. The author draws on more and more scientific sources, both ours and foreign ones, which overthrow this false and harmful theory in the bud.

The "opponents" of the Normanists were the "Eurasians". The essence of their innovations, in principle, does not differ in many respects from the Normanists - order was brought to Rus' - more “passionate” newcomers, only not from the West, but from the East.

Vladimir Chivilikhin cites convincing, logical objections based on rigorous scientific data to the most active and prominent spokesman for the ideas of the "Eurasians", Doctor of Historical Sciences L. N. Gumilyov. He opposes downplaying the damage inflicted on Rus' by the invasion, against the attempt to portray the three-century yoke, which has delayed its development for a long time, as a kind of "union of Great Russia with the Golden Horde", "a close symbiosis of Rus' and the Horde."

He shows how the Horde people crushed and plundered Rus', how many bloody raids they still made, until they stopped them, forever on the Ugra, how they mocked the Russian people and their princes.

But of course, the pathos of "Memory" is not in polemics with supporters of erroneous views. "Memory" is strong in its, as already noted, openness to further research offered to the inquisitive reader, strong anti-militarist spirit, the pathos of true internationalism, creation.

It gives rise to legitimate pride in our great nation, in its great and ancient history. It helps to bring up the sense of historical memory that is so necessary for every citizen, patriot, "connecting everything with everything."

Valentin Svininnikov

I was born exactly one year later, on the same date in December, after his Lolita died somewhere in Nabokov's Gray Star. I was brought in a captured German car to a Russian barracks, where at each door stood buckets with iridescent from the steps of passing
past the slops, and the staircase to the attic was covered with a layer of cat
shit is so thick that even hardworking Soviet women can't
I was able to wash it off. The barrack was two-story and was located on
territory of the former Russian ghetto, we call it
concentration camp set up by the Finns during the occupation.
"So Filura swam out of the black waters into the green waters ..."

Apparently, we have been silent for about two minutes. It's getting
indecent. I am a student, and you are a teacher, and this one is yours
unconscious impulse at the moment of my entry into an audience full of
thirsty for consultation wards, you left two, so far
girlfriends outraged by you, at the farthest table, just to
come up to me, say hello and then ... be silent
You were the first man who knew how to be silent with me like this,
not paying attention to this whole ever-protesting world.
Now I understand - I really write something. But I don't have
accept not a single plot. My story is myself, alone with our
silence flowing into the Ocean... which suddenly turned blue.

My five year life in the barracks until my father finished
university, I have not studied at all - it is one of the white spots
on the map of my country. Only the feeling of the lake - it was not far away,
it, apparently, then replaced the ocean for me, I was under it
protection and patronage.
Since then, I have constantly made attempts to catch, note this
unsteady, painfully airless, but also joyful infinity
human existence - Ocean.
And there were aunts, my two personal, native aunts, my father's sisters. IN
jackets, with voluminous knitted in the form of grape brushes
patterns, in chintz dresses, in white socks and tightly
lace-up heels. Out of duty,
my aunts constantly fought with my young mother, after all
bringing her to neurasthenia. Despite their horrendous
non-photogenic, they were very fond of being photographed, especially in
parks, especially against the background of white, obviously gypsum concrete
frolicking cubs or deer, covered, obviously from
considerations of national hygiene, lime.
The ancient titan of the Ocean had fifty daughters, my father,
son of a missing World War II soldier - only
one - a thin and completely blond daughter and her name was not
Filura.

"Tekhnikum campus", the wings of the spring coat are here
lift me up to a flock of doves gleaming in the sky, still alive
dovecotes in old courtyards. You can no longer turn away - I
had time to notice - you were looking in my direction, you are another
embodiment of my Ocean. You have incredibly elegant hands when
they wander with a pencil in the wilds of my architectural delirium,
each of their throws to the next section of the sheet - as if
the unpretentious touch of the warm wave of the Ocean on my skin.
You were so convincingly charming that all modern
architecture of the West, presented to us with the help of numerous
magazines, still awakens in me not only aesthetic
Feel. Or maybe even in the basis of human perception
beauty lies the bodily love of the soul, despised by us. Or love
soul to body?

We often played with him in the yard of our barracks,
ran around the sheds and once fell from the second floor of one
of them, leaning on the rotten railing at once, got off really
happily - broken noses. And then, one day, he brought me to
his room, where there was a metal, decorated with white,
knitted suspension, high parental bed. I remember - we stood with him at the window, and he somehow strangely pressed himself against my stomach, and strangely looked at me with his huge green eyes.
How far are the mountains of Magnesia, how far are the shores of Pelion...
Listen, love, listen. Writing a novel is like acting
pebbles on the ocean. The ocean and those who swim in it,
declassified by the sun that has gone below the horizon, space is all that
I have. Here, being a human being especially
sublime and implausible, but that is why
Maybe.

Ocean, my sun rises from you and sets into you.
The brown ant on your sand has risen to its very
hind legs and peers at you. Even he needs you.
I can't live without you for a second, I can't without a second
your mighty movement in the space of my life, the smell
your underwater flowers. And everything in me exists and moves in
the rhythm of your surf. And I myself am your ebb and flow.

I do not agree with you and (even!) Academician Likhachev that
history, nature and art are the three most powerful educational
strength in our society. Forgive me, our highly educated ones.
The most powerful educational force is the Ocean from which we
didn't go anywhere. In addition, for me it is doubtful not only
the possibility of the presence of "powerful forces" in this process, but also the presence
this process in general. You caress me and punish me, ocean
but where you're taking me I don't know. Only one thing is certain -
a man can be taught to wash his hands... even before killing.
When the wind from
Ladogi - it seemed to me that she was beginning to think like me.
Who has not heard the bathing suits sing, with solar lights
wandering through the June forests in the secret light of the white Karelian
night - that I do not understand. Bathing suits sing - it reminds of
my Ocean - I'm here, I'm with you, I'm in you.
And human history can only reproduce, for the time being,
as fast as a Drosophila fly - a lot of beautiful souls
prostitutes, the same tyrant pharaohs, enthusiastic slaves, murderers
for some reason liberators and for some reason liberators of murderers and among everything
this people is also the artist of our complex heroic era, the iron
and tearful at the same time. And nature has nothing to do with it at all.
She does not educate anyone - she only gives birth to us and mortifies us.
The pale face of Nikolsky Skete is concentrated on its top
the golden dome gleams - the tip, waiting for someone
sign to pierce the spirit, the very essence of the cosmos, and finally,
the white skete slowly rises and goes there to my Ocean, where
pours, falling on him the foliage of my hair ... Take me,
favorite - I have everything - and the Dead Sea and the mountains of Magnesia
and such a narrow path of affectionate and incoherent whispers -
straight from the depths - straight into your heart.

Women's quarrels constantly broke out in the long corridor of the barracks,
sometimes because of cats, sometimes because of suspicion of assassination attempts on husbands or
food stored in wooden boxes nailed to the walls
every door, then because of the fight or quarreled children.
On the first floor, right below our room, with pleasure
was engaged in beating his wife, someone is "semi-kainen", bitter
Ingrian drunkard, whose arrival and terrible
litigation with me scared me if I raised a roar
due to non-performance by the servants, represented by parents and aunts,
any passionate desire of mine.
When I was two years old, they tried to give me to one
from the so-called Soviet "preschool children's
institutions", simply - in a nursery. My first nursery day was
held by me on the floor in the room of educators, and, for a short
a lull between one kind of roar, interrupted by an even more terrible
variety. The next day I just ran away while walking
- home, unnoticed by anyone. But to
open the gate, we had to wait a very long time when a large
the person called the educator will finally turn away.
Recently, at the very beginning of winter, I visited the place where
this unfortunate orphanage stood for the first five years of my life. Gone
It's been more than three years since he was killed by a bulldozer.
The remains of the foundation, powdered with the first snow, with protruding
crystal-iced turrets of thistles raised in the ocean
some excitement, then everything calmed down and on a pile of garbage, somewhere
approximately in the place of the "semi-kainen" room, a crow sat down - I think
it was his soul, she complained loudly to me about something and
flew away.

My first course project is Villa "Mummo" which means -
"Grandmother"
- a typical Western - European dream of a Soviet citizen.
Basically - Scandinavian national romanticism, with
Russian understanding of family happiness. hewn stone, wood,
high chimney, several round windows ... I loved before
I still like to wander around this once existed on
whatman paper, as if in eternal winter, at home, presenting you in his
spacious attic, watching through a large round window
light overhead snowfall of my imagination. It is here and
There was a dress rehearsal for our meeting.

We're leaving town. Father graduated from the university, received a diploma
logging process engineer and we are going to these very
logging, to the south of Karelia, to the forest village of Kinelahtu.
Kinelahta. Blue, very blue place, for some reason always for me
April, with noise after a long winter silence
young pines, they are everywhere here - under the windows of the house, along
road, the sandy shoulders of which are like sugared honey, beyond
round small mirror lambushki in the valley. This is where mine was born
The ocean, here I first heard its unique, roaring and
gentle voice. I'm still five years old.
There were two Kinelaht - one - a village, so simple and
benevolent, with big-eyed young houses, with a new
club, dining room, near which, inhaling the unearthly smells of fried
cutlets were always kept by huge village dogs and always
there were several timber trucks, their drivers there, in the dining room
enjoyed the most delicious dish in the world - cutlets with mashed potatoes,
drenched in orange gravy. And then they came out
lit up the Belomorkanal, climbed on the high steps of their
cars and drove away, or, rattling an empty trailer, to the side
plots, or, sweeping the primer with some especially long
whip towards the warehouse.
Many years later, not far from the holiday village, seeing
a freshly cut section of our beloved forest, fallen
pines and birches, their mixed, not yet had time to wither needles and
leaves, for the most part not too thick, but quite useful
on firewood of golden and whitish trunks left behind
useless, my father will stop, cast a sad look
massacre and say: "But I spent my whole life on this
crime" A year later he will die of a heart attack in a dilapidated hospital
the same as Kinelahta, a loggers' village, now
old, like her, forgotten by everyone, due to the destruction
nearby forests. And typical panel houses are still standing
sides of the highway like stray old dogs, with bowed
radiculite backs of roofs ...

Second Kinelahta is an old Karelian village. Black big
at home, black can be seen because at the moment when the ocean is mine
swallowed them up and mixed his deep waters with witchcraft, evil,
Karelian, distrustful and adamant, walked, for many days
dull autumn rain and it smelled, so it smelled of the insides of hot
large-mouthed northern furnaces, and everything that was still in these
impregnable houses - and clean Karelian old women, and
milk of their black and white cows, and soaked cloudberries in pantries and
fishmongers, flowing juice, vendace immured in them.
That same autumn, a terrible story happened in one of the villages.
A huge Karelian guy, lumberjack feller, head of
whom my father worked, hacked to death with an ax a Ukrainian who arrived
recruiting to Karelia for work, as young as he
himself, a timber truck driver. He hacked to death unexpectedly, for some stupid
joke, hacked to death in the house and in front of the Karelian old man and old woman,
at tea, at the table straight and hacked when the driver leaned over,
to pick up the clock that fell to the floor.
My father and the local policeman who arrived in passing cars
they didn’t get a word from the witnesses, and the killer had already gone into the forest
to the plot where his team worked.
And still, thank God, they howl in this mutilated,
almost devastated, impoverished, but in such an incomprehensible land of wolves, beyond
that lamp, behind those rocks - sorceresses, in that spruce creepy
forest.
They went to them, with axes, the whole brigade, every single one,
it seemed not to persuade - they would not understand, but simply did not
hear...
They went to them like wolves to rangers, hopelessly, but in a single
animal impulse of ancient instinct - our land, our right
kill someone else... I don't know how they managed to stop,
what my father and the district police officer told them in those terrible for themselves
minutes.

Today it is very quiet, somewhere in me it is inaudible, apparently in a whisper,
the surf goes over, sorts the grains of sand, and I don’t know which one
should I swim or just wander along the already forgotten coast and
wait for a sign to meet - a ribbon, a fragment of a cup, a shred
or just a shadow from a tree and then - what a bright crown will decorate
The sun peaks of the long-awaited mountains of Magnesia, as in a warm wind
rustle, tremble my green hair-leaves.

And ... it's you, the very first disappointment, the most severe, unprecedented
until then by me villainy. And it all happened at the same time
when freshly redeemed, dressed in a completely lulling
me in a flannel robe, kissed by my mother, I sat with my father on
knees and enjoyed it, daddy's smell, mom, by the way,
never smelled so delicious - and under this smell of a loved one and
loving man, I was waiting for a New Year's gift to be brought to me
"from my father's work," as they said then.
I dreamed how, having opened it, I would bury my nose in a transparent bag and
everything, all at once: both an apple and a small chocolate bar, with a red
kitten on a green wrapper, and sweets with pink, sour
called "Radium" and a packet of cookies and a cheerful orange
a tangerine and a lozenge, and a white pot-bellied marshmallow and
something ... about which I joyfully and pointlessly dreamed - the smell
all of this, mixed with the smell of slightly moist lozenges
cellophane - will finally dispel all my suspicions of
the injustices of this world, which sometimes assailed me in
connection with the thrashing received from mom the other day because of a whole pile
children's books, given to me on "credit" by the saleswoman of the village
grocery store.
There was a knock on the door, as they always write in such cases, on the threshold,
which is also very characteristic - you can’t say it better, there were two very
happy loggers with surprisingly ruddy faces,
wadded trousers and unbuttoned jerseys. The adults greeted
hands, I was also offered a large cold palm - and I
she put her tender, pink and white paw into it.
And then they handed it to me. This - was a gray package, with bad
a printed image of some kind of circle with protrusions and
steam locomotive running out of it. Inside this nightmare, instead
chocolates and lozenges, instead of a cheerful tangerine and sweets
"Radium", instead of a pot-bellied marshmallow, there was something - a lump
bluish-yellow in the middle of winter
melted and completely lost the shape of "pillows" and
several granite pink gingerbread cookies. This unrealizable
the dream of the "children of war" only brought tears to my eyes
I shook everything out of the bag onto the table - there was not a single thing in it.
one, not even one at all, even the last candy wrapper
caramel "fruit and berry bouquet"
It turns out that the money allocated for gifts was innocently
spent on vodka, which was also innocently drunk
men responsible for buying gifts, but some money
they left, just enough to last for an unfulfilled
dream of their military childhood.

For me - one of the most sincere writers -
Nabokov. Sincerity is openness to one's own feelings
life. Reality is not in what we see, but in
what we feel. No, it doesn't seem to be about feelings, no
about feelings at all. Perhaps he was declared the Great
hoaxer for: multi-storey meanings, the significance of the insignificant
for others, bizarre designs are sometimes too rare and
seems unnatural circumstances, watercolor human
images, the otherworldly extreme of the development of events, and more I
I won’t say anything, because I don’t want to give away our secret with him
those who do not have unusual and close friends with Vladimir Vladimirovich
relations. And for the rest - let him remain the Great
hoaxer until they figure it out
their own myth.
Your warmth flows into my palm, flows unanswered,
because in fact you are not with me - in front of me
morning tree, barely green poplar, almost its entire
its height against a pink background, as if eternally illuminated by the sun and for a long time
tired of this college wall that borders my yard with
southeast, and at the top it touches a grayish-white high-rise
clouds, with a round blue hole approximately at the level of the third
floors.
And I stealthily took this from Vladimir Vladimirovich. I know - he
won't get angry - I'm fifty-three years younger than him.
"Beauty is the memory of love disguised as sky, poplar,
wind, even a park bench and a stray dog..."
So know - no matter what I write about - I write only about you and me.

Day after day, hour after hour - and all the minutes, seconds I turn
you into the loose, seething body of my story. Each of your eyelashes
into a letter, a glance into a small, innocent metaphor. gesture - in dialogue
I want to leave you here - in this part - of everything - nervous,
thin, changing in a fraction of a second like the evening sun playing
hide-and-seek with the inhabitants of the Earth, everything - crafty, cunning
swindler of my love - every cell of which, I, never
touched you - I know how my ...

"Felt hat wings, with blue flowers - a tear
The wanderer of the distant past hid his eyes in flowers"

The trunks of the wet May poplars gleamed and, like peaks, pierced
memories of our only evening, not a night, but an evening,
evening of two seventeen-year-old virgins...
This will be incomprehensible to many, but now, after life, yes, already
after life - I must confess that the most serious and
constant, happy and tragic, joyful and infinite
sad, like the sky that flows over my eternal land - I
owes this neurotic, frighteningly inexplicable - love.
Or maybe not so it is necessary to call the desire to make you immortal
Now you are already eternal, you have already been transformed by the work of my soul, by the sound
my eager voice into spiritual substance, separated from
lined with miserable furniture made from dead trees,
rooms - lifted up and left in a sphere much more
unimaginable than the eternal and infinite emptiness of the Universe -
in poetry. And it doesn't matter if she comes to the so-called
"artistic value", and no matter where it is
was born into the world - whether in poetry, prose, just thoughts about you,
a flower planted by me, or even ordinary melancholy - she always
will validate you. Only in this way, asserting the other by ourselves
yourself, but most likely - yourself - to others, and maybe
man exist.

Already the Moonlight Sonata lay in a friendly narrow strip on
the calm surface of my Ocean in these moments. Already
your fingers appeared on the keys, but it's still vague,
unstable face. The ocean goes over his expressions
timidly, he hesitates ... But here are the last silvery splashes
You get up from the piano - tea with strawberry jam is on the table
There is no one in the apartment except us - your parents live in
Germany. I have a very long skirt, such skirts have just
began to displace the Soviet "mini" - their first wave, which
flooded in the late sixties, at least in our city.
At our institute, I was the only one who wore a long skirt. On me
looked upon as transgressing all existing rules of propriety and
I liked it! It's always like this with people - it's not ashamed only for what
they get used to what the majority professes, even if it is
killing angels.
Actually, I'm the bride of your friend, who fell "victim of passion" to
me. For the numerous absenteeism that he committed in order to
enjoy my company, he was expelled from the university and
he had to become the Defender of our Great Fatherland.
Moralists will immediately realize that I do not share their point of view.
regarding sacred fidelity, but their judgments will be as
always, ignored by me.
You are talking about Sholom Aleichem - I have not read it and therefore
diligently trying to portray what it was not possible to portray
necessary, because it actually existed, namely
"charming female stupidity", and I said that I did not like
thick books
I am passionate about you, or maybe just myself in you, I have soft
long hair - they flow down from the shoulders in light honey jets
right into your palms. The volume of Sholom Aleichem is defiantly loud
falls off the shelf.
No, you don't have to wait for erotic scenes. We just lay hugging
each other. We were unable to even move. After,
opening my eyes, I saw your face - it was pale, almost
white as a lake lily...

"My husband, but in fact - the rider of the mountain blizzards
where spruces creep out, stand on the road suddenly ... "

These are my poems from there - from our evening.

Everything is the same as twenty years ago - the foliage shines after
rain, huge cumulus, many times traveled far and wide
mountains-clouds, white, green, blue - bird cherry, blooming nearby
with the sky, but where is the time - I notice only the seasons. No it's
It's not time that passes, it's we who pass through time. Someone is coming
quickly, someone taking his time, admiring his wonders. Pass the
through time - maybe this is the purpose of our life?
Let's not rush through time...

Theater of the Young Spectator - a small room behind the stage, behind a small
stage, a small auditorium of the Palace of Pioneers, which is on
shore of Lake Onega, in a small mansion with columns,
built for some Soviet nobleman back in the days
Karelian-Finnish Republic.
World War II, Poland, Warsaw, ghetto, Janos Korczak, doomed
Jewish kids. "Homecoming" - so speaks of death
Hermann Hesse, yes, our planet has not yet become home to
person. The performance "Warsaw alarm"
The auditorium never existed for me, if there was
dark - there the Ocean whispered and gently rumbled. Here and now - white
the birds of the Oginsky polonaise flutter over its surf. Poland,
Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto, Janusz Korczak... and for some reason a polonaise
Oginsky...

To think is to break away from your desires and indulge
insensibility. It seems to me that to combine these two processes
impossible. Increasingly, I begin to look at everything from
puffy, high-living cloud, as if from its own
non-existence... Perhaps this is what they call meditation. In its own way
the will to tear yourself away from yourself and your most defenseless half
throw high, high - into space, where only our
shared illusions, and then, feeling the hunger and pain of the half left
on Earth, reunite them - and have a good lunch!

Today I saw my guardian angel crying...
I know why he cried - he is no longer able to protect me from
me.

I still remember my dead sister, only a second cousin, but with
her, from early childhood, carried away by ballet, very happy,
despite its "illegitimacy", round-the-clock kindergarten
and poverty, I have always been "on my own"
The unconditional value of a husband is the eternal complex of Russian women, and
put her, still only thirty years old, in a coffin, sloppily sheathed
gauze-like Russian kumach. ... You are wearing a thick knitted
a jacket worn by a mother so that it does not freeze there (in hell, heaven or under
thick layer of Besovets stony soil?), on the head, on
thinned from an unimaginably tragic fate, hair, gas
kerchief, one of those worn in the sixties barmaids
station buffets and work canteens - (white small
apron, earrings in the ears, brightly painted lips, next to a large
red barrel of beer, on the shelves with elegant paper
lace - unattainable for you and me - sweets in large,
decorated with nuts, fruits and squirrels, boxes.) And now,
this kerchief is from the past, a kerchief that has not been worn for a long time
"self-respecting ladies", hides traces of trepanation of your unlucky
head, so many times beaten by her husband against the walls, against the headboard.
The sacred bonds of marriage - they turn out to be more sacred than human
life, a sacred duty to his state - is also sacred to her ...

When I came out to you, in white ocean foam, or rather wet from
amniotic fluid - what did you think when you saw me that
felt? Why did I leave? Why do you need me? Why am I to myself? My
hair - green foliage, merged with the green grass of your meadows and
I have already run to your forests, to your passions, to your love and
your death...

The rainbow that lives in pearl beads - how cheerful she is today,
by the light of a three-arm chandelier blazing over the party
We dance to the songs of Vysotsky ... I don’t want to describe what
is on the table, because every "scoop" knows it and this
always the same - vodka, Olivier salad, cheese, sausage, pies,
apples, sweets... There is a lot of vodka, but there is also wine - for "ladies"
The party is purely family - every man is someone's husband, and each
a woman, not excluding me, is somebody's wife. Almost everyone is already
visiting your subconscious, and the illusion of the reality of the earthly
existence is constantly shaken by public opinion at the table
from one extreme to the other. It's only the seventies... Sometimes
little children run up to their mothers for some kind of permission,
for example, take the fiftieth candy, or: "Can we
let's go for a walk with Lesha in the corridor? "
Unexpectedly, the "wind of freedom" burst through the open door
loggias and uplifted to the ceiling tulle curtains overturns
a vase with napkins, which, in turn, is somewhat filled
glass glasses sitting next to the affected area
tables rush to help, and therefore everything ends with a convergence
into a salad bowl an avalanche of Jonathan apples from an overflowing
crystal vase.
Then the children disappeared somewhere - they were put to bed by someone somewhere,
they started smoking at the table - cigarette butts appeared in salad bowls, with
yellow filter - with traces of lipstick - ladies, without - all
the rest. The young wife of the artist has already begun to collect them
with a fork and put it in your mouth - it was a spectacle not for
nervous and attention urgently switched to the puppet actor
theater, with the rapture of a true artist telling an anecdote about
an unfortunate firefly who mistakenly put his penis in a cigarette.
Then some completely unheard-of toast was shouted out,
the second phase of excitation began, ending at that
times by voluntary stripping to the underwear of almost all women (
of course, except for me, because all my attempts to break into my own
subconscious with the help of vodka ended in failure) Then they were the same
performed a dance supposedly capable of lighting a fire in the loins
present. It is difficult to say about the results, because some
of those to whom this cry of the body was addressed for a long time periodically
went to the toilet and nausea became their only
all-consuming feeling.

You were my go-between, you were the silver chain that binds
me with my soul, but not at all because I wanted it and did not
because you had some special gift - just
This is what the Ocean wanted from me. We communicated with you in the language of views
and dance.
"Parisian tango" - we were alone on the pavements shining from the rain
Paris - we were Paris, well, how else can you become it? Our bodies
caught even the vague intentions of each other, mine asked a question
- yours answered, and the gesture - it was completely general, and therefore such
alienated from this table, these faces and even music, he behaved
as if we were no longer alive ...
It seems to me now that the word exists solely for
lies. If you could tell, then you've already lied. Speaking is
expulsion of lies from the soul, however, alas, for the first time she said this,
as you know, not me.
For me there have always been two truths - the truth of my Ocean and
the truth of this hard, cruel land, which appeared for no reason
from the waves...
And around - mares, but not in leafy, densely green
clothes, but in silk combinations, with predatory, thick lace
around slender and not so necks.

Hot summer on Krasnaya street - I am a nineteen-year-old married woman
lady, I water wild daisies from the balcony of the third floor, dying
on the lawn. Pass us with daisies evenly often, without giving
no respite for ears, lungs, or soul, trucks are coming and
daisies and I hold on to each other like straws. Only
to live until the evening, get comfortable in silence and sail along
ocean waves, touching them gratefully and happily.

The door of the adjacent, very close hanging balcony opened and to
we got a thin one, no, rather a thin one, ... an artist. It was
precisely the artist, the man whom God conceived to be an artist and
created in full accordance with his plan. In general, he would
like a bird - a vulture, always transcendent, always either very
deceased, or striving, flying through a city or corridor
communal apartment with a flying gray strand of his
hairstyles, slightly wavy overgrown "square", dark blond with
graying color.
And the White Horse from one of his paintings is destined to the end of my days
look at me and see me the way I used to be
he saw. Bird - the artist died, never even a tip
familiar wings spread before takeoff among the crowd, in crowded
not to see our state, not to guess the meeting at the crossroads
day and evening. He only screamed, and then whispered ... and his
watercolors returned to the air of this city. And I love to breathe
their little rainbow droplets.

There was a bizarre August rain. Diving with a high gray
clouds into the still warm chestnut water of the Chalna River, sifted through
a fine sieve of road dust and everything asked me to go to the attic, everything
tapped in the rain and shimmered with displeased grumbling from
barrel standing under the drain. The cloud was small and plump,
the rain was short and unserious, and I had a dream ... And in this dream
I met your mother and in this dream I kissed her hand
- like the warm wing of a small bird - that's what her hand was like.
The artist is a bird, your mother's hand is a bird's wing, like me
tired of the attraction of the Earth, the most joyful for me - the flight.
In flight, you cool down from all other desires - this is their goal.
execution. Forgotten hands, feet, digestive organs do not disturb -
everyone is happy, everyone is full - we fly!

A man lives in my workshop, in the House of Officers. His name is
Captain Titz. His intelligent eyes, his barely perceptible smile...
Captain Tietz is a slightly retouched male portrait,
remaining after the removal of some long-standing Hall of Fame "the best
military personnel" I found this "La Gioconda" under the table.
looked at me well for it and fell in love... To date
this is the only man who truly loves me.

Captain Tietz was sitting on the stage at the piano. Captain, black piano
a mouse scratching somewhere behind a dirty "back" and the Moonlight Sonata,
and even a lonely, with a faded light, a small spotlight under
ceiling - that's all the inhabitants of the scene in the cold January
auditorium. The hall is also empty, like an abandoned city, worn out,
with three stripes, one wide red, two narrow green
edge, the carpet in the aisle sleeps sweetly, she alone is here
just not cold.
And these, there, on the stage, as if in a small clearing in the middle
spruce forest, with the cold evening sun pushing everything apart
branches and still unable to get here completely, seem
with all his smooth round face. And the auditorium, as if black
a high rock on the fourth side of the clearing.
Captain in a camouflage suit, in a gray soldier's earflap,
sadly lowered ears, judging by the pretty tattered strings,
annoyingly old. It's minus thirty-five outside today, the hall of the former
The spiritual consistory barely maintains a positive temperature.
Tomorrow the captain leaves for Kandalaksha.
"Lord, let me know your will in my name, in birth
mine. Or let my name disappear in your silence, my
soul and your silence..."

Half an hour ago it was noisy here, as in the square on May Day.
Sunday. First, the musicians of the garrison brass band
gathered for a rehearsal, rattled the stage with boots,
sat down, cursed, remembering some domestic troubles,
at last their little conductor took power into his own hands and
surprisingly from "what rubbish" grows this boldly exciting
you and uplifting and then throwing quite suddenly the play of the wind
orchestra, this battle of shiny pipes and unbridled tight
drums, now advancing, then retreating alternately ...
And then gently, gently, then it will become so easy and reckless for you
in the high blue sky.

On the very surface of the Ocean, on its transparent palm
for the youngest daughter - a tassel of bird-cherry inflorescence ... Green
wooden fence of the city dance floor, fifties, mine
seventeen-year-old mother climbing over this fence with her friend
to dances, a bird cherry tassel that fell out of her light blond hair.
I climbed over ... and immediately into the Ocean, it circles you, circles, it
mixes our lives with you ... And I am born, and you know that
it's me and even more uncontrollably spinning in a waltz.

Man was created in order to convert the energy of the sun into
love energy...
She, this energy is needed to create the Universe, dead,
stone universe to reach its infinity forever,
bring with you the seeds of trees and grasses, birds arranged by us
so that they could live and sing there, waking up with the local
Sun.