Elena Fanailova: Freedom in the OGI Club. The most reading country in the world. At our table today, sociologist Natalya Zorkaya, senior researcher at the Levada Center’s socio-political research department, Alexander Ivanov, editor-in-chief of the Ad Marginem publishing house, Sergei Parkhomenko, director of the Inostranka and KoLibri publishing houses, Elena Sverdlova, director publishing programs of the publishing house "OGI", journalist and poet Yulia Idlis, and Arsen Revazov, writer, author of the novel "Loneliness 12", which was published by the publishing house "Ad Marginem".
First question, my friends. What are you reading now, what kind of literature? And how have your reading habits changed in recent years?
Sergey Parkhomenko: Of course, I, like, probably, any publisher, read a lot of what I publish myself, sometimes after the fact, sometimes it turns out that while I'm reading, it has already come out, and you can no longer read. And everything that I found there, in this text, will remain in it forever. If, for example, we are talking about translation. And on my own and for my own pleasure, and for the right pastime, I read any non-fiction, I read in French mostly. Because there is no such non-fiction as I like here.
Elena Fanailova: And which one do you like?
Sergey Parkhomenko: Amusing. I love fascinating books to read, written about simple things that are close to us. If someone ever writes in the correct way, in Russian, the history of the glass or the history of the microphone and everything connected with it, I will read such a book with pleasure. But there are no such books yet, they are French - whatever you want, thousands. Here I am reading them.
Elena Fanailova: Sergey, so you read non-fiction. But how long ago?
Sergey Parkhomenko: Long, many years. Actually, since I began to choose what to read myself, not focusing either on school teachers, or on parents, or on important authorities, as is usually the case in childhood, I read this literature mainly.
Elena Fanailova: Elena Sverdlova, please.
I must say that before I treated poetry with great reverence, I always read it all. Now - only classical Russian poetry, and not because modern poetry has become worse, simply because I read it so much, publishing poetry books, that I'm satisfied. I do not read other books, with rare exceptions, from other publishing houses, poetic, contemporary poets.
I can’t say that I love educational literature. As I loved, I still love the classics, preference is Russian classics. To re-read Lev Nikolaevich or Alexander Sergeevich for the 125th time is a great pleasure.
I read, like Seryozha, mostly non-fiction. 90 percent of the books I read are non-fiction. I really liked the text about the history of the microphone, because yesterday I finished reading a book about the history of the gramophone and recording, in Russian, by the way. I read non-fiction books of the widest range - astronomy, biology, philology, history. I buy 20-30 books a week, start reading, stop reading, as a rule, I don’t finish reading it to the end, especially if the book is poorly written, in rare cases I finish it. But it's on my shelf, and I can always refer to it if the occasion arises. It's 90 percent of the time. 10 percent I spend on online literature. That is, I follow some links, read something, it may already be fiction, it may be poetry, it may be non-fiction, it's just some kind of life on the net. I also read the press actually, funny as it is, quite a lot.
Elena Fanailova: There is nothing funny about this.
Julia Idlis: In general, I noticed that as soon as a person begins to engage in literature professionally or semi-professionally, his circle of reading changes dramatically. He begins to read a lot of literature, which of his own free will he would never read. And because of this, in his personal leisure, when he has the opportunity to choose a book just for himself, he most often chooses non-fiction. Because our professional readers read non-fiction mostly. And in this sense, the position of the amateur, the non-professional reader, is much better. Because he has the opportunity to choose something for the soul, and most often his circle of reading - fiction - is much better, brings him much more pleasure than what a professional reader reads. In this sense, I am no exception. But I am not yet a professional reader to such an extent that I start to hate fiction, so I prefer to read it, modern, most often foreign, most often, if it is English-language literature, then in English, because I really don’t like translations. I can say that I have a professional relationship with modern poetry, so here I read a lot of things that do not bring me pleasure, as a simple reader. But it is also, in general, a process of cognition.
Elena Fanailova: Now we will ask professional reader Alexander Ivanov what he reads, and does he think that he reads low-quality literature?
Poor literature?
Elena Fanailova: That a professional, on duty, has to read much more low-quality literature than an ordinary reader.
Yes, I agree that a professional reads... Let's just say that a professional publisher is a person who has a huge difference between his passion as a reader and his passion as a publisher. And the further I get into publishing, the more I understand that this difference is insurmountable. And I, as a reader, read absolutely sublime books. I read, for example, Pulatin's new Russian translation or Prishvin's diaries. I am reading a magnificent novel, which, by the way, was published by my colleagues Sergey Parkhomenko and Varya Gornostaeva, a magnificent novel by Jonathan Franzan "Corrections", which, unfortunately, had almost no press here, although this is a real event. That is, I read a variety of literature, I try to adhere to some level of quality, as I understand it. I need this in order to then boldly publish literature, which is much less, perhaps, of high quality, but much more successful.
Elena Fanailova: The kind of literature for which colleagues in the shop are ready to throw tomatoes at the publisher Ivanov, who started out as a highly intellectual publisher, and then began publishing science fiction of the 30s and 50s.
Yes. The problem is not that someone calls himself an intellectual, I think. And that intellectualism is not a fact, but an act, and one cannot point a finger at an intellectual and say that this is an intellectual publisher. It's kind of a living thing. And God knows, maybe just Arsen Revazov's novel "Loneliness 12" for some audience, for example, 20-year-old managers, is perceived simply as the height of intellectualism, because there is a lot of all sorts of knowledge of history, geography, and so on.
Elena Fanailova: Let's listen to the sociologist Natalia Zorkaya. What are you reading, Natasha?
Natalya Zorkaya: I was brought into sociology quite by accident, I am generally a Germanist by education. And such an active, real, some kind of own reading, along with the advent of fiction, in a sense, with my arrival in sociology, it withered. Maybe it was such a reaction to our literary-centric culture, when everything was hung on literature, and it had to explain, analyze all spheres of life. Therefore, since then, interest in what is called non-fiction here (what I would call special professional literature), it has prevailed in my reading. Then, I read what I translate and what I edit.
Elena Fanailova: We are joined by film critic Konstantin Shavlovsky (Seance magazine) and journalist and poet Grigory Petukhov.
Konstantin Shavlovsky, what are you reading? Your reading circle?
Konstantin Shavlovsky: Since I still have quite a bit to do with poetry, I mainly read modern poetry, I try mainly.
Elena Fanailova: Hi Kostya, great answer. Our program is called "The World's Most Reading Country". It is clear that this is some kind of Soviet myth, which was repeatedly debunked already in the 90s: what this country did not read, and if it read newspapers, then only in order to somehow imitate the process of thinking. (There were psychological works where the authors claimed that Soviet people read newspapers in order not to think for themselves.)
Do you generally agree that our country is the most reading in the world, or is it still such a mythological story? What do publishers, writers, journalists think about it?
Elena Fanailova: Sergei Parkhomenko what do you think about it?
Sergey Parkhomenko: I probably didn’t think anything about it, because I still work not for the people, but for the people, and I can present a list of these people if I wish. It will be very small, I'll probably write it all in an hour. There are, I don't know, 50-70 people, with a very bold estimate, whose opinion interests me. Another thing is that I really hope that these people are so wonderful, smart and diverse, their opinion obviously reflects the opinion of a large number of other people, and if they like it, then many more people will like it. But I still focus on them.
As for some big social and sociological generalizations, it seems to me that the fact that books in Russia cost almost nothing, literally, they cost pennies, and an attempt to make them cost a little more often ends up all unsuccessfully, indicates that our compatriots do not really like this occupation and do not really appreciate this subject. They are not ready to pay for it, they do not want to. Meanwhile, these prices are miserable and, without fear of appearing to Panikovsky, I will say, miserable and insignificant. The same book costs 20 pounds in London, and 150 rubles here.
Elena Fanailova: I allow myself to express some doubts that for a teacher from the provinces who receives 3,000 Russian rubles a month, a 100-ruble book is an item that he will immediately go and buy.
Sergey Parkhomenko: He doesn't go to libraries either, that teacher. Our libraries are empty in the country.
Elena Fanailova: Accepted.
Sergey Parkhomenko: If you have a problem buying a book, go to the library and read there. There are a lot of things there. Libraries even have money lately, they buy quite a significant number of books. Only there is no one there.
Julia Idlis: About libraries. It seems to me that books should be expensive in a country where there is a developed library system, otherwise it does not make sense. Otherwise, the same user, whose financial situation does not allow him to have a personal library, is generally cut off from any library, not being able to freely go to a public library. For example, in London, where books are expensive, there is simply no tradition of buying books at home on an industrial scale. Any person can freely enroll in any public library, and any public library, not even in London, but simply in a small English city, a university one, will be of very good quality.
In our country, if we take Moscow libraries, an ordinary person, in my opinion, can enroll freely only in Inostranka. In all other major libraries, it must be assigned to some educational institution for this, an academic institute, or something.
As for the reading country itself, it seems to me that in general the concept of "the most reading country" has little to do with reading, in fact. This is a kind of social construct that is convenient for us to apply. Because, let's say, it is believed that no one is reading poetry now. At the same time, at every step I meet people of various professions who really do not read poetry at all, but who at the same time say to me: "Do you write, yes?" I say yes". "And what?". I say: "Well, poetry." "Oh, poetry, yes. Well, I used to write poetry too." That is, there is some idea of the sacred meaning of poetry, despite the fact that in fact no one knows anything about it. And also with reading: no one knows anything about reading, but everyone thinks that we are the most reading country.
Elena Fanailova: Let's listen to the sociologist Natalia Zorkaya. What does the science of sociology tell us about what people read and whether they read at all now? Maybe they have already completely gone to the Internet, they watch TV.
Natalya Zorkaya: No, in order to go to the Internet, it is still quite a long way, it may be only about Moscow, it is slowly moving in this direction. Of course, this is a myth, of course, it has already been debunked a hundred times. Recently, I came across data on the reading of Americans, and so the average American constantly reads, about 40 percent constantly read books, while in Russia it is somewhere around 20.
Elena Fanailova: I confirm. I have an illustration. A year after September 11, I arrived in New York, my friends met me, we passed by what was left of the World Trade Center, and there was such a natural bum standing there, and he was reading a book. And my friend, who has lived in New York for 10 years, said: "This is where the most reading country in the world is."
Natalya Zorkaya: In principle, the proportion of people who read more or less constantly has not changed much over the past 10-15 years. So all sorts of sentiments that culture is being destroyed, reading is leaving - this is all a strong exaggeration. Another thing is what people read. And as for the reader's preferences themselves, we can say that if earlier, somewhere in the early 90s, we even in our mass surveys, where, relatively speaking, the reader's elite, the most advanced groups that set the models, do not fall, we however, they caught the next pickup group that accepted these new innovations and spread them further, read, that is, created this active reader environment, but now our surveys show that this environment is gone, it has dissolved, it has fragmented. This readership is completely fragmented.
Elena Fanailova: Can we clarify what people read 10 years ago, is this group of experts?
Natalya Zorkaya: Relatively speaking, there were such important signs - this is the presence at home of a large home book collection, at least a thousand books. This is already a home library, which, most likely, was collected by more than one generation, which would indicate that some kind of value of reading is reproduced within the family. The second factor is higher education. The third factor is living in large cities, where we have everything concentrated, all cultural, social and other resources. Previously, this group stood out significantly. That is, if we take such an important indicator - this is interest in the modern domestic and foreign press, interest in the same poetry - in these groups this interest was much higher, on the one hand. On the other hand, the classics were more read there, although in this, rather, already in the early 90s, such demonstrative features in this behavior, that is, belonging to a certain high culture, were more visible. This applied to the former structure of literary culture, which is now being destroyed before our eyes, massoviziruetsya very strongly.
Elena Fanailova: What are they reading now?
Natalya Zorkaya: And now, in principle, we can say that the same highly educated metropolitan residents who have large book collections read about the same thing as the rest of the masses, only more intensively and more. Maybe they are more selective, so to speak. But basically genre action literature is leading, I don't know, by genre - ironic detective, detective stylization, like Akunin. This is the kind of literature, basically, science fiction, fantasy, mysticism - this is what is in the first positions in all groups, in fact, including the most, relatively speaking, advanced people with what kind of cultural resource.
Elena Fanailova: Let's admit who among those present reads science fiction, mysticism, all this ...
Julia Idlis: I love Akunina very much. I repented.
Sergey Parkhomenko: And how I love him like my own.
Elena Fanailova: Akunin is not science fiction or mysticism, it's still fiction, it seems.
Julia Idlis: Why? He has a fantasy novel.
Elena Fanailova: Let's all the same observe the purity of the task that Natasha has set for us. Fantasy and mysticism.
The only thing I can't understand is, in general, discussions about the value of reading as such. What are we talking about now? The fact that a huge number of the population is able to perceive information, read it from a sheet, or something, printed characters? Well, look at the circulation of newspapers in our country, and we will understand that we are indeed a very reading country. In general, the Spanish writer Juan Goitisolo has a very good story about the Soviet myth that was discussed earlier, that we are a very reading country. When he was here in Central Asia during Soviet times, he had a documentary filmmaker with him and they were making a film. They had a local driver who read Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night between breaks. While the director was looking at porn comics. What the writer blamed him for, said: "Well, how is it? Look, a simple person is reading a book, and you are flipping through porn comics." He says, "Well, you know why he reads a book? Because he doesn't have porn comics." Now everyone has the opportunity to choose - porn comics, Akunin, fantasy. Once upon a time, we actually read more fiction, including poetry and philosophy, if we had the opportunity to get it. Now people read different things, I'm not interested at all. Neither Akunin, I don't know, nor Dan Brown, it all passed me by.
Elena Fanailova: What are you reading, Gregory?
Completely different things. I read modern and classic poetry, I read Russian and foreign literature, mainly what was written 10, 20, 30 years ago. Literary novelties, as such, do not attract me at all. The very fact that the book is new, that it has just come out, that now, at the moment, it is being discussed and the whole thinking reed is making noise about it.
Elena Fanailova: Alexander Ivanov and Elena Sverdlova did not speak out about the most reading country in the world.
First, I treat my compatriots better than some of my colleagues. I believe that in the past the country, perhaps, really was the most reading, but not because it loved the word and literature, but because it was the only form of leisure provided. Now, when there is a choice, these 20 percent, 30 percent, they are more significant. I have a difficult relationship with my country. This is the country where I was born and about to die, with some such gaps in time and space. And it is not given to us to predict how our word will respond. Because when I receive letters from the Far East, where they ask for this or that book, I cannot understand how, firstly, this happens, the mechanism of this is incomprehensible to me. Because obviously there is no Internet, no extra funds, not even knowing how to request a book from the library. Ours is not a very educated country. When you start talking about what we sent to this or that library - and we do it simply from the point of view of our cultural tasks, that is, we don’t burn, we don’t throw away, we don’t sell the rest of the circulations for nothing, we send them to the libraries of distant cities and obviously poor libraries - that's when I say that you need to contact the library, they ask me: "How?". And therefore, I can’t say that they don’t read there, that they didn’t read it or read it, but they were forced to read it. I don't know my compatriots the way I should probably know. But some sociological surveys, which I am basically interested in, and some market researches of the market say that yes, indeed, let's say, 40 percent of the book market is sold out, in demand. I think it's a lot.
I can't say that we read more than in France, in percentage terms. We were at the Paris Salon, where master classes and seminars were held between publishers. It is amazing that they read more and buy less, and much more. Our Gelasimov, which we have been promoting for more than four years, the total circulation of 12 thousand was sold during these four and a half years, in France it was sold 4 thousand in two weeks. But it is indicative. Of course, there it is somehow, from the point of view of the publishing business, more profitable, more correctly formatted. But, given the purchasing power of our population and the level of culture, including book culture, I think that everything is not so bad.
Elena Fanailova: You know, maybe we have some kind of non-reading country, because there are no good writers? No, I'm serious. After all, my main interest as a reader is good Russian prose. This is not even poetry, and not investigative journalism, and not non-fiction. I think that people turned to non-fiction because there was a crisis of fiction. Have we lost writers who can tell stories? Maybe the problem is that the heroism of the writer's profession has been lost? Come on, Arsen, you are the only prose writer at the table. You are welcome.
I absolutely agree with this point of view. Moreover, relying on the same article in Newsweek, I argue that the decline in publishing activity has now come, unlike the rest of the market, where there is growth, in Russia by 3.5 percent, and there is still a decline compared to last year. This is connected, first of all, with the complete absence of products, adequate, normal books, normal prose in Russia for a number of reasons. You can touch them separately. Not written or produced. And this is really a deep crisis, I don't know, of Russian literary thought, Russian literature, whatever.
There can be any number of explanations for this. First of all, uninteresting, unprestigious work, low earnings, mostly graphomaniacs write for the sake of fame, some such mythical one is enough. Serious people prefer, I don't know, to go in for aviation sports or earn money, or go skiing, but they are not eager to become writers at all. From my point of view, this is a serious problem of current Russian literature, not only the absence of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky at the same time, but the degree has been lost by two orders of magnitude.
Elena Fanailova: This was said by the writer Arsen Revazov, these are his words. Yes, there are comments.
Sergey Parkhomenko: I would just be without too much confidence in the figures, in particular the figures published in the repeatedly mentioned article in "Newsweek", simply because the figures are gross. Imagine a highway that once a day is driven by some monster truck, and the rest of the time there are bicycles, but somehow there is nothing in between. If suddenly one day the truck did not pass, it turns out that somehow the traffic has decreased by 90 percent. So here too.
Ivanov, Sverdlova and I can simply jump out of our shorts, be offended and somehow increase our production by five times. But if Dontsova writes one less novel, then the figure will drop overall. Because we live in the same statistics. Here are those unthinkable, gigantic and meaningless figures, and ours. And all this is then mixed into one cauldron in the proportion of one boy - one horse, as you know, and one hazel grouse. Here we can add hazel grouses there, but if they don’t put down their horse, then the numbers will fall. So this decline seems to me very far-fetched. Maybe where some kind of multi-million copies are published something very wasteful, maybe they have some kind of decline. And I have no recession, on the contrary, an exceptional increase in production. And those colleagues whom I observe, too.
Elena Fanailova: I'm not talking about the growth of production, but about the fact that I personally, the reader Elena Fanailova, is very interested in reading Russian prose. And she is not. I only about it.
First, I think it's wrong. The problem is not the lack of good, high-quality writers; by the way, there have always been not so many of them. I think that the level of that flow, that literature that comes to us, has qualitatively changed, and we publish modern Russian literature, I think that it is very ... Well, to say, excellent quality, modesty does not allow. But, nevertheless, the fact that once every two years "OGI" opens the name of a high-quality, good prose writer, this says a lot. Because it is impossible to embrace the immensity in our case. I think that now Zayonchkovsky, for example, is a 100 percent recognized, high-quality, good Russian writer. His first book became a nominee for the Booker, the fact that the second book is also nominated, it is already being translated, and so on and so forth - this is significant. I don't think that Nina Gorlanova, who was published by OGI, is a bad writer. She is a high-quality, excellent Russian writer.
It's one thing to do what you like... There are two worlds, two systems. If, for example, there are reputational institutions in the West, and when some journalist (not some, but the majority of journalists), after reading, recommends a book for reading, the whole country reads it, then after Lev Danilkin’s article, in our country, at best, the intelligentsia reads in Moscow. Moreover, the problem of modern Russian prose is not in the absence of a master, not in the absence of masterful writing, but in the absence of a positive hero, time does not give birth to him. At the beginning it was Sasha Bely, then it will be Igor Cherny. There is no Petrusha Grinev, relatively speaking, in Russian reality. These problems are more political than cultural.
It seems to me that this whole discussion is somewhat business-oriented. We are now talking about a certain crisis in production.
There is no production crisis. I was talking just now not about the circulation policy, not about the huge, insane circulations. I believe that those authors whom I named deserve more circulation. I'm talking about the quality of the word. Have you read Zaionchkovsky?
Elena Fanailova: If possible, I will stop this thread of discussion with my will.
Good. Let me tell you anyway. I would like to say that we still have a golden fund of our literature, which has not yet been properly published. For example, Derzhavin has not been properly published, Vyazemsky has not been published. When was the last time Chaadaev was republished in our country, excuse me? And now we are talking about the fact that, "well, you know, right now, in the last three years, nothing has been written about that hero who would excite the modern reader, who would be ..." Where does such a passion for modernity come from?
Because educated people read Chaadaev in his youth. Nothing to read it a second time.
Moreover, Chaadaev and Derzhavin are published annually in the "School Library" in huge editions. And here the question should be raised not about who to publish, but how to publish, the culture of book publishing.
The culture of book publishing does not suit me to a greater extent, that's exactly what the modern culture of book publishing is, I also wanted to say about this. As for modern literature, the current situation, are we really so worried that now, this year, there was nothing worthy of reading? Me personally, no.
I would like to return to the thesis about the Soviet country as the most reading country in the world and say that this is certainly a myth, but a myth that does not have a sociological character is not a sociological myth. This is a kind of mythological self-determination that existed for many years of Soviet power. And it, like any mythological self-determination, has its own mythological truth. It consisted in the fact that Soviet society, if it is characterized as a whole, was a society that was an order of magnitude more idealistic than the society that we received in the 90s. That is, it is neither bad nor good, it is a certain fact. A huge number of people, reading to the public, lived the world in their imagination, not having, as we now understand, the opportunity to travel, being restricted to travel abroad, for example, or not having any other sources of information.
The second point that characterizes the Soviet myth is that this Soviet society was very delayed in its development and in this sense it was closer to the classical system of cultural values than a society, for example, a parallel, Western society. This means the simple fact that Soviet society did its best to maintain the status of classical, say, Russian literature and classical music, for example, arbitrarily vulgarizing all these classics, but, nevertheless, introducing them into school education, and so on. And in this sense, the status of the writer in Soviet society was, of course, incredibly high. And if a writer appeared here... Imagine that we are sitting in 1982, a writer appears here, Arsen Revazov, for example. Then everyone would have crept up and would have said: "Oh, writer, writer."
Elena Fanailova: Or the writer and artist Pavel Pepperstein, who has just joined us.
And this is generally a man of Quattrocento, this is a writer, an artist, this is just a man of mass talents! That is, a simple thing happened, it must be reckoned with, Karl Genrikhovich Marx mentioned it that capitalism leads to the fact that the sacred halo falls from many types of human activity, and the writer becomes just a hired worker and causes nothing, no special reverence. This is what we have. And in this sense, I can say that our conversations about literature rest on the fact that we live in a very materialistic country, ruled by a very materialistic president, who says that our main goal is competitiveness, this is that everyone is well dressed and ate well. The question is not that we lack the Russian idea. We lack any idea, any.
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Excuse me, but the writer only acquired this halo in the Enlightenment. And before that, during the Renaissance, for example, what kind of halo did Dante have? He was simply thrown out of Florence and sent somewhere to Ravenna.
Elena Fanailova: Now I would like to give the microphone to Pavel Pepperstein, who joined the whole honest company later than everyone else. I want him to comment on my personal feelings.
Pasha, I read The Mythogenic Love of Castes with pleasure, but in general I note the terrible crisis of Russian prose. What do you think about it?
Pavel Pepperstein: In general, of course, the crisis occurs not only in prose, it somehow occurs in culture in general, apparently. And rightly so, Sasha has already kicked capitalism about this. Of course, if you turn your head and look for the cause of this crisis, then it is described by this one simple word - capitalism. The second question is what to do with it. You can, of course, experience some pleasure from this. I must even confess that I myself experienced it for some time.
A culture that, in general, is not only positive, it can be very aggressive, sometimes aggressive in some way. But now this aggressive creature, which for some periods even clattered its fangs and trampled living creatures with its hooves, has already weakened so much and lies half-dead somewhere, that, apparently, our ecological impulses should turn towards some kind of help to this creature, so that it, maybe somewhere, multiplied and did not die out completely. What can be done about this? Apparently, we should try many times to understand what capitalism is and how to get rid of it. In general, nothing else, unfortunately, simply does not remain. Moreover, since the time of Marx, much has become additionally clear, it seems to me, although the genius of Marx has only become stronger with time. And now we understand more and more clearly: what he wrote continues to be very relevant. However, it seems to me that the main reason for the disgust or simply rejection of capitalism in our time lies not only and not so much in the fact that capitalism promotes inequality, and it is a source of very cruel exploitation of some groups of the population by other groups. We see that capitalism is able to create effects that are illusory, or even, one might say, not entirely illusory, effects of equality. It can create the effects of some contentment in society. Nevertheless, the claim that we can present to capitalism, apparently, can be formulated as follows. Capitalism destroys what for a very long time was considered the essence of man, namely, the study of the world in which man finds himself, in which he lives and acts. It was the study of the world that was considered the main essence of man. Capitalism, in general, abolishes this task, it replaces the natural objects with which the world is filled, by the study of which a person must define himself, it replaces artificial objects. Thus, capitalism comes to the conclusion that it is more profitable to create fictitious realities or secondary realities than to study the reality that is given.
We see it everywhere. First of all, capitalism destroys the incomprehensible. In this sense, it contrasts very much with totalitarian systems that destroyed the intelligible. In general, the destruction system was built on understanding. For example, the Bolsheviks destroyed the bourgeoisie because at some point they realized its reactionary role. Or the Nazis destroyed the Jews, because at some point they realized their incompatibility with the Aryans. Or in China, for example, they destroyed sparrows, because it suddenly became clear that they interfere with the development of agriculture.
Capitalism, on the other hand, destroys what it cannot understand. Moreover, it must be said that this incomprehensible is not incomprehensible in principle. In fact, this can be understood, but at the moment there is not enough money or time for this every time, as a rule, both. Therefore, it is more economically profitable for capitalism, it is more expedient to destroy these incomprehensible objects. Then, after the destruction, they can even be surrounded by some sentimental aura, to build some post-romantic images of the destroyed. But the main thing is to destroy very quickly everything that cannot be grasped by understanding immediately. Apparently, it is precisely this deep property of capitalism that is the source of the death of culture, which we observe with mixed emotions, so to speak, this phenomenon is happening before our eyes.
Elena Fanailova: Thanks to Pavel Pepperstein for this well-founded presentation. I will say that I somehow do not care, to be honest, "what, dear, we have a millennium in the yard." And I believe that the liveliness of culture and the liveliness of literature is a personal matter of its bearer. We know that resistance breeds resistance.
Julia Idlis: We are now listening, it seems to me, to what Walter Benjamin formulated more than 50 years ago when he wrote about the work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility. It seems to me that there is nothing wrong with this. To be honest, everything suits me in our cultural life today. Because, as you know, a crisis is not an objective matter, but a subjective one. The crisis does not exist in the world, but in the mind of the consumer. It's just that there is no consumer now who has the ability to survey the entire cultural field as a whole. Therefore, he has no idea about the richness of the opportunities provided to him.
Elena Fanailova: Julia, I think that there are simply no statements of such power, there is no position, that person who would force everyone to listen to himself, so that society would stand up and say, "I will listen to you." I think that this is the main problem, not capitalism, not the consumer, not these market problems, not publishing problems.
I really want to listen to Ivanov with his continued love for Prokhanov. Alexander Ivanov continues to insist that Alexander Prokhanov is a major charismatic personality. I believe that Limonov, whom he publishes, is such a person that Sorokin, whom he publishes, is a major writer. But you won't convince me that Prokhanov is a good writer, Sasha. Tell us about these mechanisms, how do you create his figure?
I just want to say that for me there is no separate history of literature, as well as for Pavel Pepperstein, which I learned from his speech. That is, there is no history of literature that would be separate from the history of everyday life, thousands of all sorts of stories. And in this sense, I'm just interested in big figures, big, large-scale personalities in literature. They look completely different.
Elena Fanailova: Elena Tregubova, for example, is a big personality. (Note: Alexander Ivanov is the publisher of Yelena Tregubova's Tales from the Kremlin Digger.)
Elena Tregubova is obviously not a big personality. But Elena Tregubova, of course, has some absolutely fantastic courage and rollicking in this courage, which, of course, distinguishes her from the general background. In the same way, for me, for example, completely different signs of creators stand out from the general background. For example, Akunin is very interesting to me as a person, much less interesting as a writer, but as a writer he is great for me if only because he invented his hero and made so many people believe in this hero.
As for Prokhanov, for me this is a person who, in a strange way, connected for me my childhood in such an intelligent urban family with a slight dissidence, my radical liberalism of the 90s, and now a failure has formed. Here is the failure, relatively speaking, between parents-kayakers singing Okudzhava, and the culture of Abramovich and Rublyovka. There was some kind of failure. For many years, at the end of the 90s, I tried to fill this failure with something. And in the face of Prokhanov, I found one of these mechanisms. That is, Prokhanov is a bridge that for me connects some part of the culture that goes under water and says that, at least, this is not a shameful story. That is, no matter how ashamed it is to admit that, say, we had such a story. This is how not to stop being ashamed of your relatives from Saratov. Well, yes, they are uneducated, they get bored, they arrive at the wrong time, they make noise, they talk about some canned tomatoes, but you don’t have to be ashamed of them. And this “no need to be shy” is a very important discovery that Prokhanov made for me. That is, Prokhanov showed that the historical line that connects me with my parents, it certainly exists, including cultural ties and some completely psychological ties, and so on. This is a big bridge. That's what interests me.
As regards the abstract quality of literature. I think it just doesn't exist. Because if, for example, Bunin and Joyce, Kafka and Tolstoy are compared, then there is almost nothing in common between them, these are completely different literary worlds. But this literary-political, historical-journalistic world of Prokhanov is interesting to me precisely for its scale, precisely for its ability and pretension to think historically and retain this great historical drama that took place in my country.
Sergey Parkhomenko: It seems to me that capitalism, non-capitalism in the world has recently settled very well, somehow very fair. There are two, three, four places where you can go, see how it is without capitalism. They exist in the world, humanity supports them, pays these people so that they do not have atomic bombs, so that they do not eat grass, and so on. Well, there are special vivariums. Whoever does not like what is happening to capitalism can go to the city of San Francisco, on Columbus Street, in my opinion, go there to the window of the most important bookstore in the 20th century, City Lights, where the beatniks and everything else, and experience about the fact that capitalism is still a terrible thing. A small shop, unwashed windows and, in general, a great culture in this bookstore was born and lives all this time, but capitalism did not allow it to develop, capitalism keeps them in this, as they were tiny, they are. In general, these people have not earned anything in their lives. They did such a thing, but somehow capitalism did not give them anything. Then get on a plane and fly to Cuba, where without capitalism, as you know, everything flourished, everything is fine, culture somehow flows with milk and honey. Few? To North Korea, see how without capitalism. Still a little? To Rwanda. There is no further Rwanda, because there, most likely, at the exit from the airport, a 10-year-old boy will come up, armed with a knife cut out of a tin can, and just rip your belly open, this will end the trip. So it seems to me that it’s not necessary somehow so theoretically, when all this can be practically simply examined, simply examined with your eyes, touched with your hands, kicked with your feet and found out how it actually works. I prefer capitalism in this whole story quite unequivocally. In my opinion, this story convinces me of this.
Pavel Pepperstein: In general, we can say that the voice of a man, a human being, sounded. Indeed, people are satisfied with capitalism, we must admit this fact.
Elena Fanailova: Pasha, I'm sorry, I can't help interrupting. I'm not happy with capitalism.
Pavel Pepperstein: So you're not human, sorry.
Elena Fanailova: Certainly.
Pavel Pepperstein: I am also not a man, so I do not like and never in my life will agree with him.
To the question, who is dissatisfied with capitalism? First of all, not beatniks who sit in some store or some communists who have settled somewhere in Cuba. Capitalism, roughly speaking, is dissatisfied, to create that effect of horror, those who arrange a tsunami and all that. And it is unclear who. First of all, everything that is not people on our planet is dissatisfied with capitalism. It's all growing. Capitalism is now at war, but not with other people, not at war with some dissatisfied or dissenting people or with some kind of opposition, capitalism has entered into a war with the environment. This war is merciless and very powerful, the environment is not sluggishly unwinding, it is trying to swallow it all. It is quite active and, apparently, will soon destroy everyone. This is the result of capitalism.
Elena Fanailova: And what should a writer and a publisher do?
And what, the Tashkent earthquake, it came into conflict with socialism, presumably?
Pavel Pepperstein: In principle, the Soviet system was also fairly capitalistic. But, apparently, what a writer does is a personal matter of the writer himself, of course, he chooses some of his position and not just his position, but also a conductor of what, and a medium of what he wants or wants, or can be. I think that it would be good for at least many writers to give up generic, roughly speaking, selfishness and stop being aware of themselves as people, stop taking the side of people in general. It is clear that people have already shown what they want. But here, as it is said in the book of Job, not only people live. The book of Job is very instructive in this sense. A text where, in response to the complaints of an unjustly punished righteous man, God, roughly speaking, says to him: “I’m actually not only the God of people, I also have hippos, whales, and therefore I also treat you partly like a hippopotamus, like a whale How to demand from me some absolutely anthropomorphic forms of behavior, anthropomorphic understanding of what justice is, is simply stupid.
Therefore, I think that the death of capitalism, which, whatever one may say, will come from this direction. It is from the moment that capitalism can't really be green. His deep program is the destruction of all natural objects, replacing them with artificial objects. But natural objects are not passive beings, they also undertake various activities. I think it's good that writers at least divide into two camps: some are supporters of the human world, others are supporters of the non-human world. For example, I consider myself a rather radical supporter of the inhuman world. It’s not that people seem unsympathetic to me, of course they are terribly sweet and it’s all so pleasant, but it’s clear that it simply can’t continue like this, and nothing will be pleasant for the people themselves as a result of this.
Elena Fanailova: It's time for us to end the program. I want you to briefly formulate the task that Pasha has actually set just now. If you can imagine the perfect book or the perfect story, the perfect genre, what book would you like to read? How do you imagine it?
It seems to me that this endless Russian conversation of ours still rests on some kind of alternative, which I define for myself in this way - either great literature, or normal life. In a sense, the whole country has chosen normal, that is, bourgeois life. She is really normal. But literature in this life is given an appropriate place, in this large and beautiful supermarket there is a corresponding shelf "not the main thing" for literature. The problem is that those images of greatness and images of the spirit that were given to us by non-bourgeois forms of life, what to do with them now? I'm more inclined to choose Pasha here. I think that they remain as some kind of monuments with which we do not know what language to speak. We do not know how to read these products of the spirit today. And therefore, talking about literature today is still making some kind of internal choice, not a choice between subjects, as Sergey Parkhomenko described, not a choice between North Korea and Luxembourg, but a choice between norm or greatness. And we do it every day, every moment. I think that everyone somehow tries to connect these incompatible things.
Elena Fanailova: From myself I can only say that the writers Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky worked in a completely capitalist world and combined the norm, and greatness, and pathology, in general, different things. The ideal model of literature?
Julia Idlis: I don't want an ideal model of literature at all. In my opinion, the existence of an ideal book is simply dangerous for the survival of mankind. After all, culture must be polyphonic, otherwise it will collapse. An ideal book, like having an authoritative poetic language, an authoritative literary language, any kind of authority, is the path to totalitarianism. Cultural totalitarianism leads to the death of culture. I think it's very good that now there is no writer who would be prayed for by everyone, including the Chinese, Koreans, blacks, Europeans, Americans and so on. For example, what do we know about the modern great literature of Hong Kong? Nothing. And what do the Chinese know about modern great English literature? Nothing. And this is good, because each person has his own cultural code in which he exists and within which for this person there is some kind of priority ladder, a hierarchy of cultural values. In this hierarchy, there are absolute heights, there are relative heights, and this is how it works, and how it should be.
Konstantin Shavlovsky: In short, it's hard for me to imagine a perfect book, but I don't think it would be about hippos. It's all.
I am for a lofty language, for truthfulness, for not renouncing one's own history, as Sasha Ivanov spoke about, for high morality and Christianity. For me, this is an ideal text that I would very much like to read, and best of all, publish.
I don't believe in any perfect books, just like I don't believe in perfect coffee or absolutely perfect Pepsi Cola.
Natalya Zorkaya: I don't even know what a perfect book is. I would like event books, breakthrough books, effort books. Just the present, it seems to me, does not give this.
Sergey Parkhomenko: I proceed from the fact that the most valuable thing that every person has, in the intellectual sense, is his own memories, his own reflections. Therefore, the ideal book for me is precisely in order to avoid totalitarianism. Indeed, if everyone reads the same book, thinks the same thing, this is totalitarianism. So the ideal book is a book that awakens in each person his own memories, for each his own. How she does it, I don't know. Maybe it smells of something like that, because the papers were impregnated with something special, or maybe it is some incredible color that gives rise to some special visual images or maybe even hallucinations. I would like such a book, looking into which, everyone would think about his own and each one would remember something special, special for him.
It's hard for me to imagine the perfect book. But, as Natalya Zorkaya said, I would like a certain force field to arise while reading this book, so that a person would want, while reading this book, reading this book, to stand on tiptoe, to become a little better, to overcome a little more, than he thinks. As for this polyphony that exists in the world, this is all up to known limits. Still, I believe that there should be some kind of more or less clear hierarchy in culture.
Dead Head
We lie in a white trench near Moscow,
Karl-Friedrich is still alive, and I am alive.
To us for six months, like a herring in a net, Ivan walked in full,
and now I have boots with a stake on me and an overcoat with a stake.
Even from the field of snowy shroud cuts yes shes
with a fringe of frozen corpses on the parapet along the trenches.
To forget how Europe lay down at our feet,
we include Stalin grinding his organ,
and his chief field marshal is the cannibal Dubak
unleashes his white ferocious dogs on us.
The trench is flooded with gentle light over the waters of the Elbe,
an alley of lindens leads through the field to the manor,
Fenrich von Staden - uniform raskhristan - flies on horseback,
petite is scattered in the creaking blue sky,
but a cloud has already loomed over the forest, threatening to soak.
Liselotte dances at the harvest festival...
... and suddenly he hits her on the lips, there is thunder,
the feather bed bursts, filled with a steel feather,
and they let everyone into the smelter, the furs inflate the heat,
and everyone fled headlong, and I ran
through the field white viscous, like stearin, like fat,
and in the footsteps - a giant spider of bloody veins ...
Crooked huts, earthen floors, lice,
impassable dirt from the borders. Mirrors of the soul
of this wild country reflect what's inside:
"let me devour", it is written in them, "die";
I used to look at them through the scope,
and when I return, what should I do with the price list,
with steam heating, linens? —
because we vomit with blood.
We gnaw ersatz in the trenches and drink ersatz,
we can't see the Ruhr, Mecklenburg, Alsace.
The Bolshevik is heavy, you hear, starts "Klim",
gets to our trenches - rolled into a pancake,
our regimental standard will cut into footcloths.
Us and Zossen wiped already from the current maps.
Pale light smearing on the cheeks,
we prepared to pay the bills -
for him, for the pale unfaithful, for the white light
Ivan will kill us and trample us into the snow.
Puritans
M. Gorfunkel
On stage sullen dudes
they have ruffled collars,
at that time they were a brigade:
all dressed in black, not rich,
speak to each other in bel canto.
“Well, to be honest, I wanted to take her as a wife.
But my father has another, richer son-in-law in mind ... "
The audience does not know the plot well,
still not "Geese-Swans" and not "Turnip",
they only know that Netrebka will suffer.
It's like someone gave a couple -
it is she who rolls out her Krasnodar,
immediately changing the climate on stage,
so killed that they will take her for a patient
and the father, and his sidekick, and the whole city of Plymouth.
“Why is she going broke like that? Fire?"
“I’ll see ... The groom ran away from her
and took the queen with him to the heap ... "
"Here's what I think: it will be better,
if we stock up in the area, we’ll take Dolce and Gucci.”
And while the baritone noble and proud bass
they enchant us sitting in the stalls:
Suoni la tromba - they swear to each other,
when the hour comes - the swords will be drawn -
with the royalists in the battle do not screw up,
worker to worker on the grate:
“I can’t get out of my head
this soprano russo. I'm going in one of these days
in the dressing room, bumping into the mistress,
and from the clothes on her - only bijou,
tette e fica out! Worth it, think
all white, like those marble goddesses! ..
I've got smoke in my pants
Well, I think I'll make a celebrity!
But she looks at me as if she were furniture, and her face has not changed ... "
Gray papier-mâché facade
narrow window into the rainy garden -
so the Italian sees England, where the chimeras
nicknamed "roundheads and cavaliers"
solve questions of faith with knives
and authorities that are not relevant in the Apennines,
like reading the psalter at name days.
Here the singing of the prima donna is much more important,
passion and tenderness kilotons
into the hall of the vomiter—and horns!
Like rapture ripples through the ranks
having never heard of the Puritans!
And just behind the scenes - you can’t say otherwise - a fool
cries, calls his Arturo -
silver coloratura trembles subtly in the air.
Sukhomyatka plot, raw war
not important - at the end of the day, everyone is forgiven.
Singing, as Monteverdi bequeathed,
inserts us worse than love and death.
And, like a bird in its beak, it brings the singing bribe in an envelope.
Because, rather than lowering profits into a glass,
or donate, say, to the Vatican,
or on those who are busy with a “sick issue”,
to give them more worthy of the sweet-voiced,
that feed on our small millet tears,
to make them sing even louder.
That's what we'll do to you, Michele!
* *
*
Two floors charred from the inside.
Trees in terrible blackening windows
stretched branches - into the dead 1st "B",
to the assembly hall, buffet, and locker room,
and recreation.
In heavy shoes
and rough stockings children with bas-relief
(they don't care that death has long been
moved into the school and scattered everywhere
dust, excrement, broken glass -
their belongings), they are striding
rush to their first lesson,
on their concrete pioneer dial
frozen forever 33rd year.
“How terrible and disgusting it is, dad!
How interesting!" my daughter tells me.
She and I got through the hole in the fence
through an empty stinking window
in my elementary school a dead skeleton,
so that she can see: there is no altar,
in which a person would not shit.
This is how the pre-war Uralmash dies,
his constructivism and Bauhaus -
uncomplainingly, resignedly, how he lived ...
Industry violence against people
eventually undermined the industry,
and destroyed people. Their faces
when they buy they go out alcohol,
resemble anything but faces.
The ruin of the gloomy cinema "Temp" -
where between the collapsed burnt floors
my brightest experiences
printed on Svema celluloid,
where in the lobby was "Underwater battle",
in the buffet there was a strong smell of a wet rag -
now stray dogs have chosen.
As if victims of show trials
here with a gathering of people passing by
in the Great Terror, or maybe the executioners
returned here in a new incarnation.
But life is everywhere. Albeit in wild forms.
Khrushchev's houses through the efforts of residents
in termite mounds and swallow nests
turned.
And the greenery in the yards
rampages: the bush besieges
at home and rushing up the walls,
depriving the already half-blind of light,
giant poplar mutants
dilapidated roofs leaned in a businesslike way,
burdock, nettle, human-sized weeds -
where there used to be playgrounds.
Those who watched here on Sundays
"Club of Movie Travelers" themselves
moved into this wonderful world,
procrastination and ambition alien,
and speak to me, a stranger,
in the language of ruins and savagery...
The call for shock work has changed the call
end drug addiction and lice,
lime rats, return a loved one,
pasted on pipes and fences.
Ineffective, apparently.
This is where I grew up, my daughter.
Boulevard r Culture —
the space between the two Palaces of Culture,
one is the Stalin Club, disfigured constructivism,
the second is a typical diplodocus of the 80s,
full face so clean Yeltsin portrait.
He was elected headquarters at the turn of the eras
the confidants of my yard games.
Face and body like cast iron,
they won their first agon:
that fell out of the hands of the state,
tidied up without hesitation;
in blood up to the throat went to an unclear goal,
some bumping into lead, some into plastids ...
Grass now grows through diabase.
The womb that vomited us has dried up.
Who, dear, went beyond the threshold,
where he was happy and unhappy,
will not return - that's all,
What I wanted to say in a poem...
Pharsalia
"Do not throw spears at them, inject them from below in the face,"
so he said to his light infantry,
their meat grinder, their Cisalpine elite,
to his Tenth Legion.
On the hill Magnus spread his cohorts,
Rosy-finger touches their orders,
piercing and cutting in perfect order,
adrenaline floods the aorta.
Against them are the scum of the Republic, commoners,
those who hoisted eagles over Gaul,
and they will not return under the shadow of the she-wolf,
to sit by samovars at the store.
Standing behind the command post of the performance,
seeing as Caesar's veterans
overcame the slope without breaking the system,
Magnus sets his colossus in motion:
he throws cavalry into battle for infantry
(whom the gods are with today, he doesn’t need good luck,
but they are not with Pompey) - horsemen of the Senate troops
Caesar's sharpeners are attacked on the move
and take flight. Like the bees
Julius warriors collect the nectar of victory -
slaughter the soldiers of Pompey with a fierce
echoing with an amplified cry: Venus! Venus!
And the hills of Hellas freeze forever in the pupils.
Judging by the names, Greek women - Arina, Irina,
with evil female faces, but winged,
they are carried in claws through the air towards Rome.
The story of Sergey Parkhomenko's expulsion from the Russian PEN Center and the subsequent mass exodus of writers from this organization attracted wide attention to the writing community last week. Let me remind you that the executive committee of the PEN Center exiled the journalist Parkhomenko for life with the following description: “Blogger Sergei Parkhomenko, who was brought up by the Komsomol and has a reputation in human rights circles as a “provocateur from Bolotnaya Square,” joined our writers’ organization only to destroy it from within, turning , contrary to the Charter and the Statute, into an opposition political party.” Rubbish-man, a provocateur, human rights activists decided.
The author of these lines, by the same decree, was sentenced to suspension of membership for one year for trying to disrupt the meeting and insulting writers, and prose writer Marina Vishnevetskaya was sentenced to a strict warning for tendentious video filming (sic!) and its distribution. Following the adoption of this decision, a long line of writers reached out. Over 50 people, including Svetlana Aleksievich, Vladimir Sorokin, Lev Rubinshtein, left the PEN Center in 3 days, and 50 more people left the St. Petersburg PEN Center by a collective letter declaring their independence from the Moscow headquarters. Russian PEN fell down before our eyes.
To understand the background of this landslide, just look at the website of the Russian PEN Center. Its contents are mainly toasts in honor of anniversaries, stories about presentations, congratulations on awards. It so happened that the writers' "human rights circles", as they call themselves in the protocol, "contrary to the Charter and the Charter", do not bother themselves with human rights activities. It is believed that the founder of PEN, John Galsworthy, bequeathed to fight against censorship, for freedom of speech and conscience. But where is that Galsworthy? Here, for example, is the story of an appeal by 60 members of the Russian PEN to Putin with a request to pardon the Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, which was immediately denounced by the executive committee of the PEN Center: “The initiative comes from a group of “liberal” oppositionists who are trying to conflict with us.”
The general battle of the "liberal" and "conservative" was the reporting and election meeting on December 15, 2016 in the Small Hall of the Central House of Writers. It was there that Marina Vishnevetskaya filmed tendentiously, G. Petukhov tried to disrupt it, and Parkhomenko was completely absent.
I must say that even before the meeting it went off scale. On the eve of the organization, Vladimir Voinovich left the organization, motivating his decision as follows: “Some members of PEN nevertheless noticed me and began to invite me to sign some petitions, which, as a rule, I do not shy away from. But, having joined this group, I noticed that our activity is highly disapproved of by the leadership and the main staff of the PEN Center, who, fearing for their status, prefer to replace real human rights protection with its imitation.” Earlier, Igor Irteniev, Lev Timofeev, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Mirzoev, Irina Surat, Viktor Shenderovich and many others said goodbye to PEN for similar reasons.
But the point of no return, when Russian PEN ceased to be a single organization, a community in which it became not so much senseless as shameful, - this point was passed at the ill-fated December meeting. Many, including me, naively thought that Soviet writers fed on the milk of the Central House of Writers found a new comfort zone in the PEN club, that they were for everything good: for example, for state grants for books about the struggle in the Donbass, but not that do not stand up for the price. Alas, we were wrong.
It was at this meeting that the seizure of power took place. The "elections" were held according to the "new", truncated version of the charter. From it, in particular, the paragraph "power in the PEN center belongs to the general meeting" was cut out. The meeting was chaired by members of the executive committee Marina Kudimova and Boris Evseev, who did not allow those who disagreed to the microphone.
The legitimacy of the existing executive committee was allowed to be secured by voting, no new figures were co-opted - the nomination of candidates was stopped in the bud. Acting was elected to the presidency. President Evgeny Popov or his associate acting. Vice President Boris Evseev. True, most of the more than 400 members of PEN voted in absentia, by e-mail - that is, they voted before the start of the meeting. And "correspondence students" turned out to be three times more "full-time students".
Those who tried to recall something about the original charter from the spot were not given a word. “There will be pre-election debates for you,” Yevseev said irritably. And as a debate, a detailed report by the house manager Demchenkov about the sewerage and the leaking roof was proposed. Finally, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was brought to the microphone. He said that people need a single strong Union of Writers. That he travels a lot around the country, people are nostalgic, they sing Soviet songs. Those who were dissatisfied were driven away from the microphone. “They smell of fumes,” said Yevseev.
Why do I describe in such detail the vicissitudes and curiosities of this seemingly internal affair of the writing community? But after all, more than a hundred people who left the organization “voted with their feet” not only against the expulsion of the oppositionist Parkhomenko, but against the very essence of this organization, which ended up in the hands of manipulators. The split has ceased to be a matter of politics, it has become a matter of human decency. You can’t say better than a living classic: “Today I decided to leave the Russian PEN Center, since our PEN has completely rotted away. Now it is dominated by bark beetles and wood lice, and inside is dust.”
Nevertheless, the new chiefs of PEN continue to diligently insert "human rights", "Charter", "democratic principles" and absolutely comical "precepts of Galsworthy and Rybakov" into their reports. Which does not prevent them from coming out with such, for example, rebuffs to the “schismatics”: “People like Mr. Parkhomenko, who was expelled from our ranks for publicly insulting one of the founders and long-term president of the Russian PEN Center Andrey Bitov. Now living in the USA, Parkhomenko is trying to conduct our national Hillary Clinton Choir from there.”
"Living in the USA," "The Hillary Clinton Choir" is a disgusting denunciation by all criteria. I am against harsh analogies, but Joseph Goebels or Lev Mekhlis also once became what they became. They weren't born monsters. It's just that one day they made a conscious choice to take the side of the lie. That, in essence, is what my colleagues voted against to leave. That is why I and many of my comrades decided that the Russian PEN has lost the meaning of its existence. For it does not function according to democratic principles, but is based on the same dirty corporate etiquette as the current state machine. Namely: closeness to the resource, contempt for the minority and violation of the declared norms by themselves!
Grigory Petukhov became famous in narrow circles 17 years ago, when he had just arrived in Moscow from Yekaterinburg. That is how many years have passed until the publishing house "Voymega" published his first book - "Solo" (M., 2012). In between - studying at the Literary Institute, associated with many scandals, graduate school and teaching in Berlin, numerous publications in thick magazines, participation in the anthology "Nine Dimensions", dozens of performances at Moscow literary venues, work on television, a happy marriage, finally. It is impossible to say that the name of the poet Petukhov did not sound. However, real recognition comes to him only now, when he is under forty. Caustic, critical, proud. Of course - one of the most subtle connoisseurs of Russian poetry. The number of verses that Gregory can recite by heart is amazing.
Evgeny Rein, speaking of Petukhov's poems, notes: “In modern times, I don’t see any parallels to Petukhov, they are not easy to find among his predecessors. Implicitly, tangentially, his poetics reflects what Mandelstam and the late Zabolotsky did. It is felt that the author of "Solo" carefully read our nineteenth century and Brodsky. But in general, all influences down to the smallest particles are dissolved in Petukhov's verse.
Despite all his wit, his caustic mind, Petukhov is not at all cheerful in verse, although he allows a subtle philological game, vivid imagery. The world appears rather gloomy, unfriendly, and there is no getting away from its Ural past, he said in his student youth to the poet and critic Danila Davydov: “Come to us at Uralmash, there you will first break your arm, then your leg. In general, have fun!
The position of the poet, the only one possible for him, is an attempt to combat entropy, an attempt to add at least a little harmony to the world with his own poems. These attempts should be applauded and, of course, listen to how Petukhov reads his poems: his unique voice will forever be remembered.
Evgeny Rein about the book of poems by Grigory Petukhov "Solo".
