Victor PELEVIN
JOHN FOWLES AND THE TRAGEDY OF RUSSIAN LIBERALISM
Literature of English-speaking countries on Moscow bookstores
represented mainly by the genre that can be called "ersatz video for
the poor." To decent books that risk sticking out from behind Harold's back
Robbins or Jacqueline Susan hips, gotta mimic and disguise
under vulgarity. John Fowles' novel The Collector, recently published on
Russian language, is called in a short preface "an erotic detective story". IN
in a sense, this is a deception of the reader - under the guise of cabbage soup, he
slip turtle soup. This is enough Old book- her first time
published in London in 1963 - but the same could have been written in
today's Moscow. I'll try to explain why.
This is the story of a bank clerk in love with a young artist
Miranda. Having won a lot of money in the sweepstakes, the clerk buys Vacation home,
turns his basement into a prison, kidnaps a girl and locks her in the basement,
where she dies of an illness some time later.
Miranda keeps a diary throughout her imprisonment. First place in
it is not at all her captor, whom she names Caliban in honor of one
from the heroes of Shakespeare, and her former world, from which she was unexpectedly torn
blunt and ruthless force.
Here is what, for example, Miranda writes in her diary:
"I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate this whole class
new people. New class with their cars, with their money, with their
television boxes, with their stupid vulgarity and stupid, servile,
lackey imitation of the bourgeoisie" ... "New people" are the same poor people. This
only new form poverty. Those have no money, and these have no soul... Doctors,
teachers, artists - it cannot be said that among them there are no scoundrels and
apostates, but if there is any hope for the best in the world, then it
connected only with them.
So, reading this diary, I could not get rid of the feeling,
I've seen something similar somewhere before. Finally I figured out where - on the last
page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, where short
essays in which Russian intellectuals share their
thoughts about the present life. These essays are completely different - starting
from a stylistically impeccable account of the last binge to
tragic internal monologue a person who hears in noise
"Mercedes" and "Toyota" is not the path of the Mongol cavalry. Main
the feeling of change is one: despair is not caused by a change in the laws by which
one has to live, but what disappears is the mental space itself, where
life was before. People who have dreamed for years of a sip of fresh
air, suddenly felt like goldfish from a broken aquarium.
Just like Miranda in Fowles' novel, a blunt and incomprehensible force pulled them out of
world, where all the values and meaning were concentrated, and threw it into the cold
emptiness. It turned out that Chekhov The Cherry Orchard mutated, but still
survived behind the Gulag fence, and its branches transplanted into kitchen pots
several pale flowers were produced each spring. And now he's changing
climate. Cherry in Russia, it seems, will no longer grow.
This view of the world from the depths of the Soviet consciousness is occasionally punctuated
view from outside best example what is the article of Alexander Genis
"Scoop". Actually, the heroes of Genns are precisely his neighbors in the rubric
Lifestyle in Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Analyzing the history of formation
the term "scoop" and various levels sense of the word, Genis in passing
touched very interesting topic- the metaphysical aspect of sovietness.
"Freed from the laws of the market," he writes, "the intellectuals lived in
fictional illusory world. External reality, taking shape
sentry, only occasionally wandered into this editorial office, which lived according to the laws of the "Games
into beads." Strange, unsteady, esoteric phenomena were born here, not
having analogues in another, real world".
Alexander Genis often uses expressions such as "genuine
life", "reality", " real world", which makes his reasoning quite
funny. It turns out that from the scoops, described in such detail in his article,
he differs only in the set of hallucinations that he takes for
reality itself.
If you understand the word "scoop" not as social characteristic or
orientation of the soul, then the scoop has always existed. The most typical scoop is
Vasily Lokhankin, especially if you replace the Niva file he keeps with
"The Gulag Archipelago". Classic scoops - Gaev and Ranevskaya from Cherry
garden", which do not withstand, as they say now, a collision with the market.
But what is the market here? Try to guess where the following is from
quote: "Leaving Moscow, passing through it, I felt that
felt for a long time, with particular acuteness: what a different person I am
time and age, how alien I am to all her "navels" and all that new creature,
that flies over it in cars!"
It's not with last page"Independent newspaper". This is from "Non-urgent"
spring of Ivan Bunin", written in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1923. There is even
textual match with Fowles, whose heroine hates the "new class"
namely "with all his cars." Only the hero of Bunin calls this
the new class is a "new creature" and has in mind the red commissars. Another
"scoop" - Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who tortures himself with inarticulate
questions instead of selling bananas with a dazzling smile
some New York subway station. By the way, for some reason he
goes on about cars, talking about "vile types ... who only
know what to brag about how many miles they can do on their stupid
car, using only one gallon of fuel..."
Miranda and her friends from Fowles' novel, scoops by Alexander Genis,
Vasisualy Lokhankin and Holden Caulfield - phenomena of the same nature, but different
quality. The scoop is not a Soviet or post-Soviet phenomenon at all. This
simply a person who does not accept the struggle for money or social
status as the goal of life. He gazes with squeamish distrust at the vanity
lying outside the window of the world, does not want to become a part of it and, no matter how
sounds funny when applied to Vasisualy Lokhankin, lives in the spirit, although
not necessarily true. Such strange mutants have existed in all
times, but were the exception. In Russia, this became the rule for a long time.
Soviet world was so emphatically absurd and deliberately ridiculous that
accepting it as ultimate reality was impossible even for the patient
psychiatric clinic. And it turned out that the inhabitants of Russia, by the way,
not necessarily even intellectuals, automatically - without any of their desire and
participation - an extra, non-functional mental floor arose, then
additional space for awareness of oneself and the world, which in a natural
in a developing society is available only to a few. To live by the laws of the game
beads need Castalia. Russia of the recent past was just a huge
surrealistic monastery, the inhabitants of which faced no problem
social survival, but in the face of the eternal spiritual questions asked in
ugly parodic form. Scoop dragged his days very far from
normal life, but not far from God, whose presence he does not
noticed. Living in the garbage heap closest to Eden, the scoops were poured with port wine
"Kavkaz" their forcibly opened spiritual eyes until they were persecuted
from the cherry orchard, ordering in the sweat of his brow to get his bread.
Now this non-functional appendix of the Soviet soul turned out to be
unaffordable luxury. Miranda went to defend The White house and through
for some time ended up in the hands of the one who removed the Komsomol badge
Caliban, who blocked all her familiar routes with an impenetrable wall
commercial stalls.
In Fowles' novel, Miranda dies, so the parallel is sad.
But the most interesting thing is that Fowles, two years later, returns to the same
allusions from Shakespeare in the novel "The Magician", and there Miranda turns out to be not at all
Miranda, and Caliban is not Caliban at all. And everyone stays alive, everyone
enough space.
Probably, in the same way, in the end, it will be enough in Russia - and for
long-awaited Lopakhin, who, perhaps, will finally be able to bring
by crossing many Lokhankins, and for scoops absorbed
experiencing their secret freedom in dark alleys cherry orchard. Certainly,
the scoop will have to make room, but the whole trouble is that so far in its place
it's not homo faber that comes, but dark criminal navels that can be mistaken for
middle class only after the fifth glass of vodka. In addition, most
the current antagonists of the scoop are in no way able to understand that the petty-bourgeois
- especially enthusiastic - did not become less vulgar due to the collapse of Marxism.
It remains only to hope that it will help them to realize this simple truth.
wonderful English writer John Fowles.
John Fowles and the Tragedy of Russian Liberalism
The literature of the English-speaking countries on Moscow book stalls is mainly represented by a genre that can be called "an ersatz video for the poor." Decent books, risking to stick out from behind Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susan's hip, have to mimic and disguise themselves as vulgarity. John Fowles' novel The Collector, which has recently appeared in Russian, is called an "erotic detective story" in a short preface. In a sense, this is a deception of the reader under the guise of cabbage soup, turtle soup is slipped to him. This is a fairly old book - it was first published in London in 1963 - but the same could have been written in today's Moscow. I'll try to explain why.
This is the story of a bank clerk who is in love with a young artist, Miranda. Having won a lot of money in a tote, the clerk buys a country house, turns its basement into a prison, kidnaps the girl and locks her in the basement, where she dies of illness after a while.
Miranda keeps a diary throughout her imprisonment. In the first place in it is not at all her kidnapper, whom she calls Caliban in honor of one of Shakespeare's heroes, but her former world, from which she was suddenly pulled out by a dull and ruthless force.
Here is what, for example, Miranda writes in her diary:
“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate this whole class of new people. The new class with their cars, with their money, with their television boxes, with their stupid vulgarity and stupid, servile, lackey imitation of the bourgeoisie” “New People” are the same poor people. This is just a new form of poverty. Those have no money, and these have no soul Doctors, teachers, artists it cannot be said that among them there are no scoundrels and apostates, but if there is any hope for the best in the world, then it is connected only with them.
So, reading this diary, I could not get rid of the feeling that I had already seen something similar somewhere. Finally, I understood where is on the last page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, where short essays are printed from issue to issue in which Russian intellectuals share their thoughts about their current life with each other. These essays are completely different ranging from a stylistically impeccable account of the last drinking bout to the tragic inner monologue of a man who hears in the noise of the Mercedes and “stood” the way if not the stomp of the Mongol cavalry. The main feeling of change is the same: despair is caused not by a change in the laws by which one has to live, but by the disappearance of the mental space itself, where life used to flow. People who have been dreaming of a sip for years fresh air, suddenly felt like goldfish from a broken aquarium. Just like Miranda in Fowles' novel, a dull and incomprehensible force tore them out of a world where all values and meaning were concentrated, and threw them into a cold void. It turned out that Chekhov's cherry orchard mutated, but still survived behind the Gulag fence, and its branches transplanted into kitchen pots produced several pale flowers every spring. And now the climate is changing. Cherry in Russia, it seems, will no longer grow.
This view of the world from the depths of the Soviet consciousness is occasionally interspersed with a view from the outside the best example of which is the article by Alexander Genis "Sovok". Actually, the heroes of Genns are precisely his neighbors under the heading "Lifestyle" in the "Nezavisimaya Gazeta". After analyzing the history of the formation of the term "scoop" and the various levels of meaning of this word, Genis touched on a very interesting topic in passing - the metaphysical aspect of sovietness.
“Freed from the laws of the market,” he writes, “intellectuals lived in a fictional, illusory world. External reality, taking on the appearance of a guard, only occasionally wandered into this editorial office, which lived according to the laws of the Glass Bead Game. Strange, unsteady, esoteric phenomena were born here, which have no analogues in another, real world.
Alexander Genis often uses expressions such as "real life", "reality", "real world", which makes his reasoning quite funny. It turns out that he differs from the scoops, so detailed in his article, only in the set of hallucinations that he himself takes for reality.
If we understand the word "scoop" not as a social characteristic or orientation of the soul, then the scoop has always existed. The most typical scoop is Vasily Lokhankin, especially if you replace the Niva file he keeps with the Gulag Archipelago. Classic scoops Gaev and Ranevskaya from The Cherry Orchard, who cannot withstand, as they say now, a collision with the market. But what is the market here? Try to guess where it came from next quote: “Leaving Moscow, driving through it, I felt what I had felt for a long time, with particular acuteness: how much I am a person of a different time and century, how alien I am to all her “navels” and all that new creature that flies across her in cars!”
This is not from the last page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. This is from Ivan Bunin's Non-Urgent Spring, written in the Maritime Alps in 1923. There is even a textual coincidence with Fowles, whose heroine hates the "new class" precisely "with all its cars." Only Bunin's hero calls this new class "the new creature" and has in mind the Red Commissars. Another "scoop" is Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who tortures himself with vague questions instead of selling bananas with a dazzling smile at some New York subway station. By the way, and for some reason he goes on about cars, talking about "nasty types who only know what to brag about how many miles they can make in their stupid car using only one gallon of fuel"
Miranda and her friends from Fowles' novel, Alexander Genis' scoops, Vasisualy Lokhankin and Holden Caulfield are phenomena of the same nature, but of different quality. The scoop is not a Soviet or post-Soviet phenomenon at all. This is simply a person who does not accept the fight for money or social status as the goal of life. He looks with squeamish distrust at the vanity of the world lying outside the window, does not want to become a part of it, and, no matter how ridiculous it sounds when applied to Vasisualy Lokhankin, he lives in the spirit, although not necessarily in truth. Such strange mutants have existed at all times, but were the exception. In Russia, this became the rule for a long time. The Soviet world was so emphatically absurd and deliberately absurd that it was impossible to accept it as the ultimate reality, even for a patient in a psychiatric clinic. And it turned out that among the inhabitants of Russia, by the way, not necessarily even intellectuals, automatically without any of their desire and participation an extra, non-functional mental level arose, that additional space for awareness of oneself and the world, which in a naturally developing society is available only to a few. To live according to the laws of the game of beads, Castalia is needed. Russia of the recent past was just a huge surrealistic monastery, the inhabitants of which were not faced with the problem of social survival, but in the face of eternal spiritual questions, posed in an ugly parodic form. The scoop eked out his days very far from normal life, but not far from God, whose presence he did not notice. Living in the garbage heap closest to Eden, the scoops flooded their forcibly opened spiritual eyes with the Kavkaz port wine until they were driven out of the cherry orchard, ordered to get their bread in the sweat of their brow.
Now this non-functional appendix of the Soviet soul has turned out to be an unaffordable luxury. Miranda went to defend the White House and after a while she found herself in the hands of Caliban, who removed the Komsomol badge, which blocked all her familiar routes with an impenetrable wall of commercial stalls.
In Fowles' novel, Miranda dies, so the parallel is sad. But the most interesting thing is that Fowles, two years later, returns to the same allusion from Shakespeare in the novel The Magician, and there Miranda turns out to be not Miranda at all, and Caliban not Caliban at all. And everyone stays alive, everyone has enough space.
Probably, in the same way, in the end, there will be enough of it in Russia for the long-awaited Lopakhin, who, perhaps, will finally be able to be bred by crossing many Lokhankins, and for the Soviets, absorbed in experiencing their secret freedom in the dark alleys of the cherry orchard. Of course, the scoop will have to make room, but the whole trouble is that so far it is not homo faber that comes to its place, but dark criminal navels, which can be mistaken for the middle class only after the fifth glass of vodka. In addition, most of the current antagonists of the soviet are in no way able to understand that petty-bourgeoisism especially enthusiastic has not become less vulgar due to the collapse of Marxism.
One can only hope that the remarkable English writer John Fowles will help them realize this simple truth.
John Fowles and the Tragedy of Russian Liberalism
Taken: , 1
The literature of the English-speaking countries on Moscow book stalls is mainly represented by a genre that can be called "an ersatz video for the poor." Decent books, risking to stick out from behind Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susan's hip, have to mimic and disguise themselves as vulgarity. John Fowles' novel The Collector, which has recently appeared in Russian, is called an "erotic detective story" in a short preface. In a sense, this is a deception of the reader - under the guise of cabbage soup, turtle soup is slipped to him. This is a rather old book - it was first published in London in 1963 - but the same could have been written in today's Moscow. I'll try to explain why.
This is the story of a bank clerk who is in love with a young artist, Miranda. Having won a lot of money in a tote, the clerk buys a country house, turns its basement into a prison, kidnaps the girl and locks her in the basement, where she dies of illness after a while.
Miranda keeps a diary throughout her imprisonment. In the first place in it is not at all her kidnapper, whom she calls Caliban in honor of one of Shakespeare's heroes, but her former world, from which she was suddenly pulled out by a dull and ruthless force.
Here is what, for example, Miranda writes in her diary:
“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate this whole class of new people. The new class with their automobiles, with their money, with their television boxes, with their stupid vulgarity and stupid, servile, lackey imitation of the bourgeoisie… The “new people” are the same poor people. This is just a new form of poverty. Those don’t have money, but these don’t have a soul… Doctors, teachers, artists – one cannot say that there are no scoundrels and apostates among them, but if there is any hope for the best in the world, then it is connected only with them.”
So, reading this diary, I could not get rid of the feeling that I had already seen something similar somewhere. Finally, I understood where - on the last page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, where short essays are printed from issue to issue in which Russian intellectuals share their thoughts about their current life with each other. These essays are completely different - ranging from a stylistically impeccable account of the last binge to the tragic inner monologue of a man who hears in the noise of Mercedes and "toots" almost the clatter of the Mongol cavalry. The main feeling of change is the same: despair is caused not by a change in the laws by which one has to live, but by the disappearance of the mental space itself, where life used to flow. People who have dreamed for years of a breath of fresh air suddenly feel like goldfish from a broken aquarium. Just like Miranda in Fowles' novel, a dull and incomprehensible force tore them out of a world where all values and meaning were concentrated, and threw them into a cold void. It turned out that Chekhov's cherry orchard mutated, but still survived behind the Gulag fence, and its branches transplanted into kitchen pots produced several pale flowers every spring. And now the climate is changing. Cherry in Russia, it seems, will no longer grow.
This view of the world from the depths of the Soviet consciousness is occasionally interspersed with a view from the outside - the best example of which is the article by Alexander Genis "Sovok". Actually, the heroes of Genis are precisely his neighbors under the heading "Lifestyle" in the "Nezavisimaya Gazeta". After analyzing the history of the formation of the term "scoop" and the various levels of meaning of this word, Genis touched on a very interesting topic in passing - the metaphysical aspect of sovietness.
“Freed from the laws of the market,” he writes, “the intelligentsia lived in a fictional, illusory world. External reality, taking on the appearance of a sentry, only occasionally wandered into this editorial office, which lived according to the laws of the Glass Bead Game. Strange, unsteady, esoteric phenomena were born here, which have no analogues in another, real world.
Alexander Genis often uses expressions such as "real life", "reality", "real world", which makes his reasoning quite funny. It turns out that he differs from the scoops, so detailed in his article, only in the set of hallucinations that he himself takes for reality.
If we understand the word "scoop" not as a social characteristic or orientation of the soul, then the scoop has always existed. The most typical scoop is Vasily Lokhankin, especially if you replace the Niva file he keeps with the Gulag Archipelago. The classic scoops are Gaev and Ranevskaya from The Cherry Orchard, who, as they say now, cannot withstand a collision with the market. But what is the market here? Try to guess where the following quote comes from: “Leaving Moscow, passing through it, I felt what I had felt for a long time, with particular acuteness: how much I am a person of a different time and century, how alien I am to all her “navels” and all that new creature that flies over it in cars!”
This is not from the last page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. This is from Ivan Bunin's Non-Urgent Spring, written in the Maritime Alps in 1923. There is even a textual coincidence with Fowles, whose heroine hates the "new class" precisely "with all its cars." Only Bunin's hero calls this new class "the new creature" and has in mind the Red Commissars. Another "scoop" is Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who tortures himself with vague questions instead of selling bananas with a dazzling smile at some New York subway station. By the way, and for some reason he talks about cars, talking about "nasty types ... who only know what to brag about how many miles they can make in their stupid car, spending only one gallon of fuel ... "
Miranda and her friends from Fowles' novel, Alexander Genis' scoops, Vasisualy Lokhankin and Holden Caulfield are phenomena of the same nature, but of different quality. The scoop is not a Soviet or post-Soviet phenomenon at all. This is simply a person who does not accept the struggle for money or social status as the goal of life. He looks with squeamish distrust at the vanity of the world lying outside the window, does not want to become a part of it, and, no matter how ridiculous it sounds when applied to Vasisualy Lokhankin, he lives in the spirit, although not necessarily in truth. Such strange mutants have existed at all times, but were the exception. In Russia, this became the rule for a long time. The Soviet world was so emphatically absurd and deliberately absurd that it was impossible to accept it as the ultimate reality, even for a patient in a psychiatric clinic. And it turned out that among the inhabitants of Russia, by the way, not necessarily even intellectuals, automatically - without any of their desire and participation - an extra, non-functional mental level arose, that additional space for awareness of oneself and the world, which in a naturally developing society is available only to a few. To live according to the laws of the game of beads, Castalia is needed. Russia of the recent past was just a huge surrealistic monastery, the inhabitants of which were not faced with the problem of social survival, but in the face of eternal spiritual questions, posed in an ugly parodic form. The scoop eked out his days very far from normal life, but not far from God, whose presence he did not notice. Living in the garbage heap closest to Eden, the scoops flooded their forcibly opened spiritual eyes with the Kavkaz port wine until they were driven out of the cherry orchard, ordered to get their bread in the sweat of their brow.
Good books published in Russia often have to mimic and disguise themselves as vulgarity. The novel by John Fowles "The Collector" at the first appearance in Russian was called in the preface an "erotic detective story". In a sense, this was a deception of the reader: under the guise of cabbage soup, they tried to slip him turtle soup. This is a rather old book - it was first published in London in 1963 - but exactly the same could have been written in modern Moscow.
This is the story of a bank clerk who is in love with a young artist, Miranda. Having won a lot of money in a tote, the clerk buys a country house, turns its basement into a prison, kidnaps the girl and locks her in the basement, where she dies of illness after a while.
Miranda keeps a diary throughout her imprisonment. In the first place in it is not at all her kidnapper, whom she calls Caliban in honor of one of Shakespeare's heroes, but her former world, from which she was suddenly pulled out by a dull and ruthless force.
Here is what, for example, Miranda writes in her diary:
“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate this whole class of new people. The new class with their automobiles, with their money, with their television boxes, with their stupid vulgarity and stupid, servile, lackey imitation of the bourgeoisie… The New People are the same poor people. This is just a new form of poverty. Those don’t have money, but these don’t have a soul… Doctors, teachers, artists – one cannot say that there are no scoundrels and apostates among them, but if there is any hope for the best in the world, then it is connected only with them.”
So, reading this diary, I could not get rid of the feeling
...Here is an excerpt from the book.
Only part of the text is open for free reading (restriction of the copyright holder). If you liked the book full text can be obtained from our partner's website.
The essay by Viktor Olegovich Pelevin brought to your attention was written almost a quarter of a century ago, back in 1993. But even now I never tire of being amazed at how accurately he captured the very essence of our Russian “liberals”: “This is just a new form of poverty. Those have no money, and these have no soul ... "
The essay by Viktor Olegovich Pelevin brought to your attention was written almost a quarter of a century ago, back in 1993. But even now I never tire of being amazed at how accurately he captured the very essence of our Russian “liberals”: “This is just a new form of poverty. Those have no money, and these have no soul ... "
In addition, the author, analyzing the common epithet-stamp "scoop", clearly and beautifully exposes its essence, thus removing negative connotations. "Scoop" is Holden Caulfield from "The Catcher in the Rye" (The catcher in the rye), this is Ranevskaya from Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard". This is simply "a person who does not accept the struggle for money or social status as the goal of life." In a word, all those who stand "in the face of eternal spiritual questions", and "if there is any hope for the best in the world, then it is connected only with them."
Another thing is that Pelevin at that time made a disappointing conclusion: "Cherry in Russia, it seems, will no longer grow." But since then the generation has changed, and it is safe to say that, despite the general level of degradation, young people who read and look for answers have not disappeared. Preserved as a small island of this very "cherry orchard" in the middle of darkness. And thanks modern means communication, it is able to unite into communities - and not decompose one by one.
In the final part of the essay, the "liberals" expect another bitter truth: "Petty-bourgeoisism - especially enthusiastic - did not become less vulgar because of the collapse of Marxism."
Vladimir Ponomarev, 03.10.2016
Viktor Pelevin
John Fowles and the Tragedy of Russian Liberalism
The literature of the English-speaking countries on Moscow book stalls is mainly represented by a genre that can be called "an ersatz video for the poor." Decent books, risking to stick out from behind Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susan's hip, have to mimic and disguise themselves as vulgarity. John Fowles' novel The Collector, which has recently appeared in Russian, is called an "erotic detective story" in a short preface. In a sense, this is a deception of the reader - under the guise of cabbage soup, turtle soup is slipped to him. This is a rather old book - it was first published in London in 1963 - but the same could have been written in today's Moscow. I'll try to explain why.
This is the story of a bank clerk who is in love with a young artist, Miranda. Having won a lot of money in a tote, the clerk buys a country house, turns its basement into a prison, kidnaps the girl and locks her in the basement, where she dies of illness after a while.
Miranda keeps a diary throughout her imprisonment. In the first place in it is not at all her kidnapper, whom she calls Caliban in honor of one of Shakespeare's heroes, but her former world, from which she was suddenly pulled out by a dull and ruthless force.
Here is what, for example, Miranda writes in her diary:
“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate this whole class of new people. The new class with their automobiles, with their money, with their television boxes, with their stupid vulgarity and stupid, servile, lackey imitation of the bourgeoisie… The “new people” are the same poor people. This is just a new form of poverty. Those have no money, and these have no soul ... Doctors, teachers, artists - it cannot be said that there are no scoundrels and apostates among them, but if there is any hope for the best in the world, then it is connected only with them.
So, reading this diary, I could not get rid of the feeling that I had already seen something similar somewhere. Finally, I understood where - on the last page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, where short essays are printed from issue to issue in which Russian intellectuals share their thoughts about their current life with each other. These essays are completely different - ranging from a stylistically impeccable account of the last drinking bout to the tragic inner monologue of a person who hears in the noise of Mercedes and almost the clatter of the Mongol cavalry. The main feeling of change is the same: despair is caused not by a change in the laws by which one has to live, but by the disappearance of the mental space itself, where life used to flow. People who have dreamed for years of a breath of fresh air suddenly feel like goldfish from a broken aquarium. Just like Miranda in Fowles' novel, a dull and incomprehensible force tore them out of a world where all values and meaning were concentrated and threw them into a cold void. It turned out that Chekhov's cherry orchard mutated, but still survived behind the Gulag fence, and its branches transplanted into kitchen pots produced several pale flowers every spring. And now the climate is changing. Cherry in Russia, it seems, will no longer grow.
This view of the world from the depths of the Soviet consciousness is occasionally interspersed with a view from the outside - the best example of which is the article by Alexander Genis "Scoop". Actually, the heroes of Genis are precisely his neighbors under the heading "Lifestyle" in the "Nezavisimaya Gazeta". After analyzing the history of the formation of the term "scoop" and the various levels of meaning of this word, Genis touched on a very interesting topic in passing - the metaphysical aspect of sovietness.
“Freed from the laws of the market,” he writes, “the intelligentsia lived in a fictional, illusory world. External reality, taking on the appearance of a sentry, only occasionally wandered into this editorial office, which lived according to the laws of the Glass Bead Game. Strange, unsteady, esoteric phenomena were born here, which have no analogues in another, real world.
Alexander Genis often uses expressions such as "real life", "reality", "real world", which makes his reasoning quite funny. It turns out that he differs from the scoops, so detailed in his article, only in the set of hallucinations that he himself takes for reality.
If we understand the word "scoop" not as a social characteristic or orientation of the soul, then the scoop has always existed. The most typical scoop is Vasily Lokhankin, especially if you replace the Niva file he keeps with the Gulag Archipelago. The classic scoops are Gaev and Ranevskaya from The Cherry Orchard, who cannot stand, as they say now, a collision with the market. But what is the market here? Try to guess where the following quote comes from: “Leaving Moscow, passing through it, I felt what I had felt for a long time, with particular acuteness: how much I am a person of a different time and century, how alien I am to all her “navels” and all that new creature that flies over it in cars!”
This is not from the last page of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. This is from Ivan Bunin's Non-Urgent Spring, written in the Maritime Alps in 1923. There is even a textual coincidence with Fowles, whose heroine hates the "new class" precisely "with all its cars." Only Bunin's hero calls this new class "the new creature" and has in mind the Red Commissars. Another "scoop" is Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who tortures himself with vague questions instead of selling bananas with a dazzling smile at some New York subway station. By the way, and for some reason he talks about cars, talking about "nasty types ... who only know what to brag about how many miles they can make in their stupid car, spending only one gallon of fuel ... "
Miranda and her friends from Fowles' novel, Alexander Genis' scoops, Vasisualy Lokhankin and Holden Caulfield are phenomena of the same nature, but of different quality. The scoop is not a Soviet or post-Soviet phenomenon at all. This is simply a person who does not accept the struggle for money or social status as the goal of life. He looks with squeamish distrust at the vanity of the world lying outside the window, does not want to become a part of it, and, no matter how ridiculous it sounds when applied to Vasisualy Lokhankin, he lives in the spirit, although not necessarily in truth. Such strange mutants have existed at all times, but were the exception. In Russia, this became the rule for a long time. The Soviet world was so emphatically absurd and deliberately absurd that it was impossible to accept it as the ultimate reality, even for a patient in a psychiatric clinic. And it turned out that among the inhabitants of Russia, by the way, not necessarily even intellectuals, automatically - without any of their desire and participation - an extra, non-functional mental level arose, that additional space for awareness of oneself and the world, which in a naturally developing society is available only to a few. To live according to the laws of the game of beads, Castalia is needed. Russia of the recent past was just a huge surrealistic monastery, the inhabitants of which were not faced with the problem of social survival, but in the face of eternal spiritual questions, posed in an ugly parodic form. The scoop eked out his days very far from normal life, but not far from God, whose presence he did not notice. Living in the garbage heap closest to Eden, the scoops flooded their forcibly opened spiritual eyes with the Kavkaz port wine until they were driven out of the cherry orchard, ordered to get their bread in the sweat of their brow.
Now this non-functional appendix of the Soviet soul has turned out to be an unaffordable luxury. Miranda went to defend the White House and after a while she found herself in the hands of Caliban, who removed the Komsomol badge, which blocked all her familiar routes with an impenetrable wall of commercial stalls.
In Fowles' novel, Miranda dies, so the parallel is sad. But the most interesting thing is that Fowles, two years later, returns to the same allusion from Shakespeare in the novel The Magician, and there Miranda turns out to be not Miranda at all, and Caliban is not Caliban at all. And everyone stays alive, everyone has enough space.
Probably, in the same way, in the end, there will be enough of him in Russia - both for the long-awaited Lopakhin, who, perhaps, will finally be bred by crossing many Lokhankins, and for the scoops, absorbed in experiencing their secret freedom in the dark alleys of the cherry orchard. Of course, the scoop will have to make room, but the whole trouble is that so far it is not homo faber that comes to its place, but dark criminal navels, which can be mistaken for the middle class only after the fifth glass of vodka. In addition, most of the current antagonists of the Soviet Union are in no way able to understand that petty-bourgeoisism - especially enthusiastic - has not become less vulgar due to the collapse of Marxism.
One can only hope that the remarkable English writer John Fowles will help them realize this simple truth.
*Extremist and terrorist organizations banned in Russian Federation: Jehovah's Witnesses, National Bolshevik Party, Right Sector, Ukrainian rebel army"(UPA), "Islamic State" (ISIS, ISIS, Daesh), "Jabhat Fatah al-Sham", "Jabhat an-Nusra", "Al-Qaeda", "UNA-UNSO", "Taliban", "Majlis of the Crimean Tatar people”, “Misanthropic Division”, “Brotherhood” by Korchinsky, “Trident im. Stepan Bandera", "Organization Ukrainian nationalists» (OUN)
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