Bitov Pushkin House creative history

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Andrey Bitov
Pushkin House

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But what will happen is that we won’t exist either.

Pushkin, 1830

(Draft epigraph to “Belkin’s Tales”)

Name of Pushkin House

Academy of Sciences!

The sound is clear and familiar,

Not an empty sound for the heart!..

Blok, 1921

What to do?
Prologue, or Chapter written later than the rest

On the morning of July 11, 1856, the servants of one of the large St. Petersburg hotels near the Moscow Railway station were perplexed, partly even alarmed.

N.G. Chernyshevsky, 1863

Somewhere, closer to the end of the novel, we were already trying to describe that clear window, that icy heavenly gaze that looked point blank and without blinking on the seventh of November at the crowds that took to the streets... Even then it seemed that this clarity was not without reason, that it was almost not forced by special planes, and also in the sense that it will soon have to pay for it.

And indeed, the morning of November 8, 196... more than confirmed such premonitions. It blurred over the extinct city and floated amorphously with the heavy tongues of old St. Petersburg houses, as if these houses were written with diluted ink, fading as the dawn came. And while the morning was finishing writing this letter, once addressed by Peter “to spite an arrogant neighbor,” and now no longer addressed to anyone and not reproaching anyone for anything, not asking for anything, the wind fell on the city. He fell so flat and from above, as if he had rolled down some smooth celestial curvature, accelerating unusually and easily and coming into contact with the ground. It fell like that same plane, having flown... As if that plane had grown, swollen, flying yesterday, devoured all the birds, absorbed all the other squadrons and, fattened with metal and the color of the sky, crashed to the ground, still trying to glide and land, crashed into touch. A flat wind, the colors of an airplane, blew across the city. The children's word "Gastello" is the name of the wind.

It touched the city streets like a landing strip, and also jumped during a collision somewhere on Strelka Vasilyevsky Island and then rushed strong and silently between the damp houses, exactly along the route of yesterday's demonstration. Having thus checked the desertion and emptiness, he rolled into the front square, and, picking up a small and wide puddle on the fly, slammed it into the toy wall of yesterday's stands with a running start, and, pleased with the resulting sound, flew into the revolutionary gateway, and, again taking off from the ground , soared wide and steeply up, up... And if this were a movie, then in the empty square, one of the largest in Europe, yesterday’s lost children’s “scatterer” would still be catching up with it and would crumble, having become completely damp, would burst, revealing as it were the underside of life: its secret and pitiful structure made of sawdust... And the wind straightened out, soaring and triumphant, high above the city it turned back and quickly rushed through freedom to again glide towards the city somewhere on the Strelka, describing something, a Nesterov loop...

So he ironed the city, and after him, through the puddles, a heavy courier rain rushed - along the embankments so famous for the avenues, along the swollen gelatinous Neva with oncoming rippling spots of countercurrents and scattered bridges; then we mean how he rocked dead barges and a certain raft with a piledriver off the coast... The raft rubbed against unfinished piles, soaking the damp wood; opposite stood the house we were interested in, a small palace - now a scientific institution; in that house on the third floor, an open and broken window slammed, and both rain and wind easily flew in...

He flew into the large hall and chased the handwritten and typewritten pages scattered all over the floor - several pages stuck to the puddle under the window... And the whole appearance of it (judging by the glass photographs and texts hung on the walls, and the glass tables with unfolded books) of the museum, exhibition hall presented a picture of an incomprehensible defeat. The tables had been moved from their correct places, suggested by the geometry, and stood here and there, at odd angles, one was even overturned with its legs up, in a scattering of broken glass; The cabinet lay face down, its doors open, and next to it, on the scattered pages, a man lay lifelessly with his arm under him. Body.

He looked about thirty years old, if you can say “in appearance,” because he looked terrible. Pale, like a creature from under a stone - white grass... in confused gray hair and there was blood caked on his temple, mold in the corner of his mouth. IN right hand an old pistol was clutched, the kind that can now only be seen in a museum... another pistol, a double-barreled one, with one hammer lowered and the other cocked, was lying at a distance, about two meters away, and the butt of a Sever cigarette was inserted into the barrel from which they were shooting.

I can’t say why this death makes me laugh... What should I do? Where to apply?..

A new gust of wind slammed the window with force, a sharp shard of glass came off and stuck into the window sill, showering small pieces into the window sill puddle. Having done this, the wind rushed along the embankment. For him, this was neither a serious nor even a noticeable act. He rushed on to flutter banners and flags, rock the piers of river trams, barges, float restaurants and those fussy tugboats, which on this exhausted and dead morning were alone fussing around the legendary cruiser, quietly sighing in its gait.

We have said much more here about the weather than about the interesting incident, for it will take us quite a few pages in the future; the weather is especially important to us and will also play a role in the story, if only because the action takes place in Leningrad...

( Italics are mine. – A.B.)

In this story, under the arches of the Pushkin House, we are inclined to follow the hallowed museum traditions, without fear of roll calls and repetitions - on the contrary, welcoming them in every possible way, as if even rejoicing at our inner lack of independence. For it too, so to speak, is “in the key” and can be interpreted in the sense of those phenomena that served as our theme and material here - namely, phenomena that ultimately do not exist in reality. So the need to use even a container created before us and not by us, also, as if stinging itself, serves our goal.

So, we recreate the modern non-existence of the hero, this elusive ether, which now almost corresponds to the very mystery of matter, the mystery that modern natural science has come up against: when matter, being crushed, divided and reduced to more and more elementary particles, suddenly ceases to exist altogether from an attempt to divide it is further: a particle, a wave, a quantum - both this, and the other, and the third, and none of them, and not all three together... and grandmother’s sweet word “ether” floats out, almost reminding us of what came before us such a secret was known, with the only difference that no one rested on it with the dull surprise of those who consider the world comprehensible, but simply knew that there was a secret here, and believed it to be such.

And we pour this non-existent ether into unpreserved grandmother’s bottles, amazed that then each vinegar had its own non-idle form; we happily wash the word “bottle” in lukewarm water, admiring the idea of the edge, until a ray of childhood sparkles from it, soapy and crystalline, and illuminates a rainbow-colored yellowish tablecloth, knitted in someone’s distant and unimaginable handicraft childhood, anise drops and a thermometer with the ancient color of mercury, which has not changed until now only due to devotion to the table of elements and chemical fidelity... And this rainbow ray will illuminate someone’s thin, wrapped neck, mother’s kiss on the crown and the great novel “The Three Musketeers”.

And how surprised we are at the sudden, unusual slowness and love of our own movements, suggested only by the shape and edge of these bottles, mysteriously breaking through and stopping our vanity...

Roman-museum…

And at the same time, we will try to write in such a way that even a piece of newspaper, since it did not go as intended, could be inserted at any point in the novel, serving as a natural continuation and without disturbing the narrative in any way.

Hoping for such an effect, counting on the inevitable cooperation and co-authorship of time and environment, we, apparently, will not write out much in detail, considering that all these things are mutually known from the experience of the author and the reader.

Section one
Fathers and Sons
Leningrad novel

Supporting each other, they walk with a heavy gait; They will approach the fence, fall down and kneel, and cry long and bitterly, and look long and carefully at the silent stone under which their son lies...

Turgenev, 1862

Father

In the life of Leva Odoevtsev, one of those same Odoevtsevs, there were no special shocks - it basically flowed. Figuratively speaking, the thread of his life flowed steadily from someone’s divine hands, sliding between his fingers. Without excessive rapidity, without breaks or knots, this thread was in an even and gentle tension and only occasionally sagged a little.

Actually, his belonging to the old and glorious Russian family is not very significant. If his parents still had to remember and determine their attitude towards their surname, then this was in those ancient years, when Leva was not yet alive or he was in the womb. But Leva himself, since he could remember himself, no longer had the need for this, and he was more of a namesake than a descendant. He was Leva.

In infancy, however (Leva was conceived in the “fateful” year), some unpleasant movements happened to him, or rather to his parents, towards their wonderful ancestor, so to speak, “into the depths of the Siberian ores.” Leva remembered it dimly: it was cold, his mother traded a kimono (huge silk flowers) for potatoes, and he, Levushka, somehow ran to the pond and found three rubles on the shore - this corner of the water, a corner of a gray solid fence and a pebble, about who was hurt with joy, and he remembered the color of the three-ruble note. He could neither remember nor understand that his father was “lucky”, that such “soft” measures do not exist at all, and that what happened to them was a great success and Lucky case, at least because Levushkin’s grandfather was “taken” back in the year of his parents’ wedding, almost ten years ago, but they were “not touched” all these years. (And the fact that my grandfather was taken even then is that my grandfather was also “lucky”, because - “on time”, later he would have been “treated differently”, and so he migrated from exile to exile, and that’s all...) Otherwise , that there was no news from the grandfather - it could also be as bad as you like, but not for the grandfather - but for them: you never know how he is and what he is there... Not to mention the rest, “abroad” relatives - from there you can any trick was expected. In general, “it could have been worse.” But these positive statements were not available to Leva. He could neither remember nor understand this, and then, when he could, if not understand, then remember, because conversations about his grandfather did not take place in his presence for another ten years, and everything that was personally with him, with Leva, turned into something - thus into the so-called military childhood. Indeed, soon after their deportation, the war began, evacuees appeared in their outback, and there was nothing exceptional in the situation of their family.

In the end, for some reason, hidden from Leva even longer than the existence of the “living” grandfather, everything turned out well, and after the war they returned to hometown as if from evacuation, all three of us, without losses. Dad continued to be an assistant professor at the University, gradually defending his doctorate and occupying the department in which his father had once shone (the only thing Lev knew about his grandfather); Leva himself studied and grew up, gradually finishing school and entering the University with his father; Mom seemed to do nothing and grow old.

Leva grew up in a so-called academic environment and since childhood dreamed of becoming a scientist. But not a philologist, like his father and, it seems, grandfather, not a “humanist,” but rather a biologist... This science seemed to him more “pure,” that’s how it is. He liked how in the evenings his mother brought strong tea to his father’s office. Father walked around the dark room, clanking his glass with a spoon, saying something to mom as quietly as the light burned dimly, snatching out of the darkness only a table with papers and books. When no one was at home, Leva made himself a stronger tea and drank it through a noodle bowl, and it seemed to him then that he was wearing a black academic kamilavka on his head. “Like a father, but bigger than a father...”

It was in this position that he read his first book, and it was “Fathers and Sons.” The subject of his special pride was that the very first book he read turned out to be a thick and serious book. He was a little proud of the fact that he had never read thin children's books, neither Pavok nor Pavlikov (not realizing that his merit was second: these books simply were not in the Odoevtsevs' house: the reason was not announced or clarified - it was fulfilled...). And perhaps what struck him most was that he read this thick book with enthusiasm and even pleasure, that this work of reading thick books, for which, in his opinion, such great honors were due, turned out to be not so difficult, not even boring (the latter, somehow, seemed to be in his childish brain an indispensable condition chosenness). He was also struck by Turgenev’s word “maidens” and that these girls drank “sweetened water” from time to time. Imagining and forgiving Turgenev for this, Leva believed that his time was better than Turgenev’s in that these things were not in it, in that at that time you had to be so great, gray-haired, handsome and bearded in order to write only what in our time is mastered so well by such a small (albeit very capable...) boy as Leva, and his time was even better because he was born now, and not then, because it was in him that Leva, so capable, was born so early understand... Thus, the idea of \u200b\u200bseriousness coincided for a long time in Lev with solidity and representativeness. When he read “all” of Pushkin and gave a report at school on the poet’s hundred and fiftieth birthday, he really didn’t know what else might be required on the path that so easily opened up to him and lay ahead of him: everything had already been achieved, and so much time remained ahead the same as in childhood. To endure this expectation, one needed “willpower,” a magical spiritual category of those years, almost the only one that Leva grasped from outside the family citadel. It was in this deep armchair, in which he sunk so that all he could see was a black kamilavka, that he taught himself the first lessons of courage, because the same willpower that Maresyev had enough for the absence of legs was not enough for Leva to have arms. Did he then declare that the natural sciences attracted him more than the humanities... but that would have been too psychoanalytic. The parents, noting their son’s humanitarian inclinations, did not contradict his natural inclinations...

Leva liked to read obituaries of scientists from newspapers. (He skipped obituaries of political figures, because in the family they never talked about politics - they did not scold, did not praise - and he treated it as something very external and not subject to criticism, not so much even out of caution - this is his They also didn’t seem to be taught, but because it didn’t apply to him in any way, this side of his upbringing, “apoliticality,” should be discussed separately, but for now let’s note.)

In obituaries of scientists, he found an unusually pleasant tone of decency and respect, and then he imagined himself as nothing less than an old man, surrounded by numerous students, a member of numerous learned societies, and own life- some kind of continuous honoring. The obituaries also mentioned tireless work, unbending will and courage - but this somehow went without saying, and little Leva understood that without this very “work” everything was “just empty dreaming,” but the main thing in these dreams remained everything. still strong tea, kamilavka and all the varied idleness that was due to deserving people (or, as they say for some reason, “deserved”), apparently by right.

Their house, built according to the project famous Benoit, with grace and carelessness characteristic of pre-revolutionary modernity; a house where, it seemed, there was not a single identical window, because the apartments were built according to the wishes of the customer, and - who wanted what: some narrow and tall, some - a lantern, and some round - without any symmetry and, however, with some kind of easily given sense of the whole; a house with that obsessive, childhood-like dominance of algae lines of “Liberty” - in the sculpting, in the grilles of balconies and elevators, with in some places surviving World of Art stained glass windows - this sweet house was inhabited by numerous professors: dying out elders and their deaning children and postgraduate grandchildren (albeit and not in all families the succession was so successful) - because three higher educational institutions and several scientific research institutions were located in the neighborhood. The house stood on an empty and beautiful old street, directly opposite the famous Botanical Garden and Institute.

Leva always liked this quiet vale of science. He imagined how selflessly and nobly people worked in this large white-columned building, as well as in the ancient, almost Elizabethan, wooden laboratory houses scattered here and there throughout the beautiful park. Far from the noise, from all this rattling equipment, people are busy with their serious business, with their plants... During the elections to the Soviets, their voting center was located at the Botanical Institute, and Lyova, together with his parents, then climbed the wide carpet stairs and reverently peered at the portraits outstanding bearded men and wearers of pince-nez botanical science. They looked at him dryly and without enthusiasm, as if he were some kind of ciliate, but could they have known that one day they would have to make room and make room for Levi’s portrait?.. Their hearts sank sweetly and sank with delight at their own future.

Since the chapter is called “Father,” this should be said: Levushka thought that he did not love his father. From the time he could remember, he was in love with his mother, and his mother was always and everywhere, and his father appeared for a minute, sat down at the table - an extra without a line, and his face seemed to always be in the shadows. Clumsily, awkwardly, he tried to flirt with Leva, for a long time he chose and shuffled what to say to his son, and finally he said vulgarity - and Leva remembered only the feeling of embarrassment for his father, without remembering either words or gestures, so that over time, every fleeting meeting with his father ( father was always very busy) was expressed only in this feeling of awkwardness, awkwardness in general. That is, as if the father was not even able to properly pat Levushka on the head - Levushka shrank - or sit him on his lap - this would always cause Levushka some kind of physical discomfort - Levushka tensed up and became uncomfortable with himself; Even “hello” and “how are you” didn’t work for my father, and everything was somehow shy and false, so that Lyova would be embarrassed, look down, or be glad that no one was watching. Leva vaguely remembered what his father had once done on one knee: “On a smooth path - along a smooth path, over bumps - over bumps, into a hole - bang!” - I had enough strength... but even then my father never knew how to stop in time, he didn’t get bored (so, was he glad that it worked out?), Levushka had to finish the game first.

So throughout his childhood, seeing his father often and little by little, Lev didn’t even know what kind of face he had: was he smart, kind, beautiful... He saw him for the first time - one day and suddenly. My father had been lecturing at a sponsored institute somewhere in the south for almost three months; my mother decided to wash the windows that day, and Lyova helped her. They washed the window and took on the second... The room was lit in half: by dusty, swirling light and by the open, washed, spring sun - and then, making a wind with his wide scalloped trousers, the father burst in, waving a brand new briefcase with an engraved diamond from the grateful. The sun sparkled in the diamond, and the father stepped with a white shoe into a puddle near the pelvis... He and his mother were standing on the dusty half of the room, and the father, therefore, was on the washed and spring one... He looked like a negative, like a tennis player, like a magazine cover "Health". Overly tanned and gray-haired (he turned grey-haired early), with a youthful, smooth face, big and loud, in a white, like his hair, that set off the apache shirt that already suited him... here it is necessary to describe in the neckline a strong, masculine, desirable neck... we are disgusted, the neck - was. Leva looked too much at his father’s shoe: tooth powder was quickly getting wet on it. Leva imagined his father slobbering on his toothbrush and rubbing his shoe... So he remembered such a father, so that for another ten years he would not notice what he was like Now, but to imagine exactly as I remembered Then: tanned and confident, as if they had parted forever since then. And that’s probably why I remembered that my father was reflected in my mother at that second, reflected in an embarrassment unfamiliar to Leva, a weak smile, how in one second she became younger and older before her eyes, an old girl in a dusty half... and most importantly, Leva in that moment did not exist for her. Leva was jealous and remembered. The window that day remained unwashed... How instantly, however, the life of someone else's, someone else's, secret love is reflected in us, wordlessly and unconsciously - we stumble over our buried one, embarrassed by someone else's brilliance, then we close ourselves off: it's too late, not for us... However, , let’s get ahead of ourselves: this is not for Leva yet, but he could feel it even more so.

And then this story “with the ruble” framed and glazed this random image of the father’s tanned neck, someone, unknown by whom, loved, confident in this love for herself, neck... And the ruble had almost nothing to do with it, but it became for a long time for Leva, a large bill, larger than ten. A neighbor in the yard, a landing, from the fifth floor, an old nag, a bitch sucked dry by three children - and Leva hated her for a long time afterwards for that ruble! - she stopped him, pressed him somewhere in the gateway and, while Leva was ashamed of her, told him (and now she doesn’t remember what word she used to use this...) how they saw his father in the Park of Culture and Recreation, almost in a restaurant with a young lady and the father gave the beggar a whole ruble! The enormity of the ruble was especially hateful, offensive and outrageous to the neighbor... A park, a young beauty, a restaurant on the water, a ruble for a beggar - such a rich amount of other life blinded Leva, and he went home crushed. And that is to say, it was still a difficult time, not much after the war... Oh, how he, Lyova, later, very later, a quarter of a century later, learned that they were all not old then - young! And my father was about forty, and my mother was thirty-five, but the damned neighbor was not thirty. He was silent for three days, did not greet his father, until his mother said: “What’s wrong with you?” He made excuses so that, almost willingly, he would split up for the entire immeasurable ruble. This story probably made a significant impression on my mother, because she immediately pulled herself together. Her face sank and became stern precisely in relation to Lyova, and a reprimand followed, stern and skillful, and this was, as it is now clear, a great relief for her. The impeccability of logic, the regularity of justice, the clear form of accusations were proof of this relief. Both became transparent and tremulously calm, like breathing on a mirror. Then the breath evaporated, the mirror grew darker, everything grew dim.

However, no new image of his father appeared than on that visit, and there was no previous one, except wedding photography, where he loved his mother... mother-swallow, round eyes, not twenty, in some kind of turban on her head... Comparing these two photos, Leva could not help but be surprised by the change: like a handsome calf in a bowler hat and with a cane, with berry corners of his lips, with Yesenin’s purity and doom in his eyes, and this well-fed, tanned big man in scalloped bell-bottoms (“a prominent man”) are one person. It’s as if his father was born in two centuries at once - both in the past and in today’s, as if it is the eras that have a face, but one person does not.

Leva once decided that he was very different from his father. It's not even the opposite - it's not similar. And not only in character, which is already clear, but also in appearance - not at all similar. He had reason to think so based on the actual dissimilarity of features, eyes, hair, ears - here they really had little in common, but the main thing that he wanted (perhaps secretly from himself) to somehow cleverly ignore was not this, the formal , but - a genuine, elusive, truly family resemblance, which is not a similarity of features. His teenage and youthful growing irritation with this or that gesture or intonation of his father, the increasingly frequent rejection of his most innocent and insignificant movements, perhaps meant this developing, inexorable family resemblance, and repulsion from the inevitability of recognizing his father in himself was only a way and through education and character development... Here mother plays a very definite role: constantly irritated with father for the inescapability of his habits, such as eating while standing with a knife or drinking from the spout of a kettle - she almost did not notice if Leva did the same. And here her offended love showed itself, for she loved in her son almost the same thing for which she pretended (and she no longer had to, from years of training, to pretend) that she did not love his father. If Leva caught his father’s movement in himself: say, he drank from a spout in the kitchen, looking around, then this meant that his irritation towards his father grew further in him, and he avoided noting this similarity to himself.

And people, apparently, equally noted Levi’s striking dissimilarity with his father and his striking similarity. But - when it's fifty-fifty, we choose what we want. Leva chose dissimilarity and since then he has only heard from people how different he and his father are.

It got to the point that, being already a student and experiencing his first and ill-fated love, he once caught himself (a case of delayed development) thinking that he was not native son my father. And even, pierced by his own insight, he once guessed who his true, natural father was. Fortunately, he told this secret to only one person, when, completely distorted, turning to the dark window to wipe away an involuntary tear, he tried with this story to force another consent from his cruel love... However, this did not move her much. But we are getting too ahead of ourselves again.

But if we go ahead, we can say with confidence that when life, albeit in purely personal forms of peacetime, also passed through Leva (by the age of thirty), and his father grew old and became transparent, then through this transparency Leva began, with with pity and pain, to discern more and more clearly such an ineradicable, such an essential kinship with his father that at some absurd and petty fatherly gesture or word he had to actually turn to the window to blink away a tear. Sentimentality was also characteristic of both of them...

In general, only to that distant time that brings us closer to the sad end of Levi’s story, only then could Leva understand that his father is his father, that he, Leva, Same I need a father, just as my father once turned out to be needed - his father, Levin's grandfather, father's father. But this important “too” must be discussed separately.

If we set ourselves a more detailed task - to write the famous trilogy “Childhood. Adolescence. Youth" of our hero, then they would have faced a certain kind of difficulty. If Leva remembered something from “Childhood”: the migration of peoples - at the age of five, spying, stealing, starving, fights, several huts, heated cars and landscapes - from all this it would be possible to recreate a certain atmosphere of childhood perception folk drama, even to give this atmosphere density, saturating it with poetic fumes of barefootness, spots of light and smells, herbs and dragonflies (“Daddy, daddy, our nets have brought in a dead man!”); if his “Youth” passed clearly and in detail, already before our eyes, and we will dedicate it to it... then Leva remembered almost nothing about “Adolescence”, in any case, he remembered least of all, and we would have had difficulties, as is now customary say, “with information.” We could only replace these years of his with the historical background, but we will not do this: as much as we need here is already known to everyone. So, Leva did not have an adolescence - he went to school. And he graduated from it.

So, let’s narrow the trousers, thicken the soles, and lengthen the jacket. Let's tie a small tie. Brave young men went to Nevsky to clarify the historical time in detail. Let's be fair to their share. Shares – and shares: shares in common cause– and shares in the common destiny. The first is underestimated, like any historical work, the second never aroused the sympathy or pity it deserved.

One way or another, they “put themselves down”... Best years(the forces) of not the worst part of our youth, susceptible to unfamiliar forms of life, went to narrowing their trousers.

And we owe them not only this (pants), not only, over the years that followed, the free possibility of expanding them (pants), but also the difficult social adaptation to the permissibility another: a different image, a different thought, a different person than you. What they encountered can be called a reaction in the direct sense of the word. Just liberal grins to the right about the frivolity, insignificance and pettiness of this struggle: just think, trousers!.. - and they were frivolous, but the struggle was serious. Even if the “fighters” themselves were not aware of their role: the meaning of the word “role” is that it is already ready, written for you and must be played, fulfilled. That is the meaning of the word “fighters”. Let them just want to please their grouse and pheasant. Who doesn’t want to... But they endured persecution, pickets, expulsions and evictions, so that in two or three years “Moskvoshvey” and “Lenodezhda” would independently switch to twenty-four centimeters instead of forty-four, and on the scale of a state like ours - That's at least a lot of extra trousers...

But we are skewed into cheapness, let’s quickly mention the “second” share, which is only a homonym of the first, not about a share - a part, a piece of a common pie, but about a share - fate, a share-share. You will no longer meet them on Nevsky, those pioneers... They were scattered and scattered, and they grew up. More or less, but they make a contribution to this day in some way. If they appeared now in that heroic form - how pitiful they would be among such and such dignity of import lines, currency, fartsovka, terylene, lavsan! ), one might say, for nothing... And they have the right, as veterans, to beat themselves in the chest with a drunken stump in the sense that they shed blood for Soviet vodka for the Finns and Finnish terylene for the Soviets. And here I again look back from the time I am telling about, to the time in which I am writing...

"From the labyrinth to God's world." (Following the hero of A. Bitov’s novel “Pushkin’s House”)

My house with my head uncovered is empty.

A. Bitov. "Pushkin House".

“If a person has the mind of the heart and wants to tell the world what he has, then he will inevitably be talented in the Word, if only he believes in himself.” This is what Andrei Bitov suggests when discussing the nature and purpose of writing talent. Through the Word, the human artist carries out his prophetic mission. Talent is nothing more than devotion to the Word that found you (or was found by you?). The main thing is not to lie! To be sincere is already to prophesy, because “only frankness is elusive and invisible, it is poetry, non-frankness, the most skillful is visible, this is the seal, the Cain seal of mastery, by the way, close and contemporary to us in spirit.” It seems that Andrei Bitov himself avoids precisely craftsmanship, a pre-thought-out narrative, and the precision of seemingly random strokes. His “Pushkin House” is a fearless confession of another son of his century. The hero of the novel is a man of the “fateful year” of birth, the same age as the author, close to him in the smallest and most important things. So Onegin was close to Pushkin, Pechorin to Lermontov, Pavel Kirsanov to Turgenev. A. Bitov knows well what and who he writes about. He risks prophesying. Any other, more modest goal is not worth such titanic spiritual efforts. However, are there more modest goals for art? There are more convenient ones.
There has been great interest in the Word and its miraculous power lately. Art in all its manifestations - painting, cinema, literature - makes its way into the spiritual, even irrational spheres of existence. Needless to say, just a hint of the theme of the prophet and prophecy in Russian literature gives rise to many associations in the memory. Textbook famous examples They are perplexed either by their obviousness or by their glaring paradox. What is clear from childhood, with mature reflection, becomes doubtful, and what was previously vague takes on the features of a boring axiom. The novel “Pushkin House” is colored with quotes. This is a kind of intellectual labyrinth, once in which you become not more enlightened, but more careful: at every step, what you have already experienced with people awaits you. And through this clever accumulation of other people’s experience, you break through to yourself, to those only thoughts of your own that have not yet become a quotation for anyone, but are vitally necessary, first of all, for you.
Most of all, A. Bitov quotes the nineteenth century. This is natural: the last century excitedly prophesied. The powerful genius of Pushkin, who conducted a conversation on equal terms (as a talented apprentice can be equal to a great Master) with God, anticipated the equality and freedom of high-spirited people. World soul the poet was striving for harmony of mind, feelings and behavior, thirsted for perfection human life on earth as the embodiment of a brilliant divine plan.
Lermontov's spirit absorbed the experience of Pushkin's tragedy. Lermontov knew about the triumph of the stone thrown at the prophet’s back. He prophesies the malice of the mob, the destruction of genius for the sake of mediocre will, the superiority of blasphemy over beauty and truth.
Tyutchev, inheriting the groans and writhing of Russia instead of the feast of the spirit anticipated by Pushkin, declares the soothsayers crazy “with a glassy eye,” and talent as an empty and dangerous gift.
Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev... These three artists will be the subject of a youthful article by the hero of “Pushkin’s House”, capable of causing a scandal in the literary community, extremely subjective, confusing, shocking with its categoricalness. And at the same time, it is also prophetic, forcing the reader to remember (if this has already been forgotten) about the issues of the spirit, its strength and immortality, its irresistible power over everyone, no matter what age and under what system he lives.
The spiritual standards of life are high. Are there criteria for them? Andrei Bitov gives us a guideline, a kind of moral reference point - the life, fate and talent of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. He invites his hero - the young Pushkin scholar Lev Nikolaevich Odoevtsev - to go through the test of truth, to get closer to Pushkin spiritually, that is, to feel within himself the beating of the pulse of a specific minute of a specific historical time. From the confusion of concepts and ideas, Lev Odoevtsev must, by the will of the author (and it is very strong, despite the coquetry that supposedly gives the hero complete freedom), come into a world that is scorching with its novelty and unpredictability. Led by Bitov, the hero will break through to that “smart life”, which differs from the “stupid” one not in the “level of explanations of what is happening,” but in the “unpreparedness” of these explanations in the face of reality. Leva Odoevtsev is destined to walk the path to his “I”. What will it be like? Is it Lermontov's sense - "distressed, resisting itself, struggling in a sudden nook, grabbing and scratching itself and opposing itself to its own shadow"? Is Tyutchev's hidden, not showing himself in fear of being offended and unnoticed? Or will Pushkin’s: “the lofty absence of a personal, private “I”, in the presence of only a higher, universal human... suffering to fulfill his destiny on earth,” attract Odoevtsev? And even if the hero does not reach this radiant limit, success lies in the fact that he learns about it and begins to measure his concrete life, once given to him. Of course, what happened to the hero in the novel can traditionally be called a clash of character with environment. But this does not entirely accurately determine what happened to Leva.
It would be incorrect and too straightforward to judge Andrei Bitov’s novel as a recipe for finding the meaning of life and faith in one’s own talent. It is about the spiritual ordeals of the intelligentsia of the 20th century, who, having gone through many “traps” and “traps” that disoriented her mind and soul, were able (or is this another trap again?) to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, to dare to tell the truth to herself and about to yourself, do not lie at least in the end of your fate, calling the dirty - dirt, and the faceless - emptiness.
At the beginning of his journey, Odoevtsev is not ready to perceive life as it is. Leva is disoriented by his prosperous childhood, easy studies at the institute, and unhindered admission to graduate school. “A very capable boy,” he freely discusses any philological topics, does not think about the vicissitudes of relations between members of his family, famous in the history of Russian culture, in which he, according to the author’s caustic remark, “was more of a namesake than a descendant.” As a schoolboy, Leva made a report in which he covered “the whole of Pushkin” and sincerely did not know what “might still be required on the path that so easily opened up to him and lay ahead of him.” However, it took a lot. Time, life circumstances and fatal accidents plunged Lev Odoevtsev into that rapid cycle of self- and world-knowledge, as a result of which he gained religion, faith, and face. And this happened precisely to him - a descendant of a famous aristocratic family, who grew up on the “trodden soil” of modernity in the late 50s and early 80s of this century.
He starts out like everyone else, like everyone else, like everyone else. The young man Odoevtsev is ready to share the fate of the majority of his generation. Outwardly, he is no different from the idle university youth of the 50s: his trousers are tapered according to fashion, but no larger than the permitted size. “Permission” is one of the key concepts of Beat’s novel. In permissibility, in the zealous assimilation of its scope, in the voluntary assumption of its burden, in the rejoicing over the resolution of what was previously prohibited, millions of people will see both high meaning and the triumph of justice. Lev Odoevtsev’s generation is quite comforted by the freedom of “doing nothing.” “Time chatted, and people floated to the surface of it and happily dangled in it, like in a warm sea, having waited for vacation, - knowing how to lie on the water” [b]. It was not Pushkin’s “free elements” that filled the young souls of the future domestic intelligentsia, but a peaceful paddling pool for half-asleep vacationers in the vicinity of a permitted historical resort. Of these outwardly nice people, in a couple of decades, only “bald, puffy, forty-something” people will remain. A “light aroma of fartsovka” lingers in the air, and “the burn of cognac with lemon from the Soviet Champagne store, which is around the corner,” lingers in your mouth. For A. Bitov, who belongs to these people for the duration of his life, such a result is a humiliation of human dignity, retribution for a childish admiration for what is permitted, which in fact is only a form of infringement and inferiority, absurdly programming a person’s feelings and judgments.

Leva Odoevtsev is not destined to become “bald” and “puffy”. We will say goodbye to him, easily and carelessly running down the stairs of the Pushkin House towards his creator. This will be a person with a face that is “typical” and “atypical” at the same time, with “large, somewhat protruding gray eyes,” with features that are either “strong” or “weak-willed.” At the end of the novel, the face of Lev Odoevtsev, whose presence he will feel piercingly and shamefully in his feverish run across Vasilyevsky Island, is still being sculpted. But this is a face! Leva, prepared by the atmosphere of timelessness for facelessness, will still make her way to him. He will acquire the status of a hero, that is, he will break - even if for a moment, only in the sphere of the spirit and only for himself! - a circle of nothing happening. And for him “at the end a luminous point will appear as a way out of the labyrinth into God’s world, a point of light that may not shine, but at least it will give some strength...” In the novel Leva will go through the path “from the labyrinth to God’s world " He will not die physically, but will experience the shock of the truth revealed to him, which will force him to die spiritually and rise again. After a fatal three-day duty in Pushdom, which chronologically coincided with the largest St. Petersburg flood of 1836 and the capture of the Winter Palace in 1917. Lev Odoevtsev will write his original articles that he needs: “Late Geniuses” and “Pushkin’s “I”. The intuitively begun search for truth in the youthful “Three Prophets” and “The Middle of Contrasts” finds in them new energy and strength. A. Bitov will not cite fragments from these works in his “Appendices”, perhaps considering the novel itself to be an expression of the ideas expressed in them. “Appendices” introduces us to an article by Leva’s grandfather, Modest Odoevtsev, a famous philologist who was repressed during the period of the cult of personality. In it, a quotation from Pushkin attracts attention: “You are a king; live alone. Go along the free path where your free mind leads you.” And the scientist’s comments to it: “After all, it’s not the “road of freedom,” but the road is free! Go on the free road! Go - alone! Walk the road that is always free - walk the free road!”
The grandfather will pass on the idea of this road to his grandson. But this program will not be a ceremonial program. Everything will happen more unexpectedly, sharper, outwardly more absurd than it could have been.
The meeting with his grandfather, like many other things, was given to Lev Odoevtsev for nothing. Being under the influence of too much wine, the grandfather himself called his grandson and made an appointment, which he soon forgot about. But Leva came to the named address and suddenly, completely unexpectedly for himself, acquired someone else’s experience, unknown to him before, a different outlook on life, something unheard of, unlike anything he had experienced before. But at the time of his meeting with his grandfather, Lev Odoevtsev still has neither spiritual hearing nor spiritual vision. The first (and last!) conversation with Modest Odoevtsev gave him almost nothing. Let us remember that after meeting with his grandfather, he only felt strong resentment and physical discomfort. In the evening he “felt that he had become worse that day. He said so himself in a nutshell: “It has become worse...”
The next morning Leva woke up “strangely empty and free,” he had not yet “learned his lesson,” but “something shifted in him.” Maybe this is how he entered the road that ultimately turns out to be “free.” But then he did not understand this yet, and therefore, as A. Bitov writes, “there was no liberation. He didn’t need justice.”
However, the famous grandfather, once expelled, and now mercifully returned to society, managed to say many words that had enormous power of influence. Modest Odoevtsev gave his grandson a brilliant and unique lecture in his own way about what was, is and will be with his compatriots. This “creator of a new branch of science and the founder of an entire scientific school,” with a face distorted by paralysis, anger and alcohol, inspiredly preaches that “humanity has lost its way.”
He predicts that “the inertia of consumption and reproduction will be so great and massive that even after understanding what is happening, one can only consciously observe the moment of the fall, the moment the avalanche breaks away from the crest.”
Modest Odoevtsev is deprived of all possible illusions. He knows that nothing will truly save Russia, because “what is not and will not be is an intelligent, non-consumer attitude to reality.” According to the scientist, one can only “debunk all false concepts, be left with nothing and suddenly comprehend the mystery.”
It is precisely this destiny - “to be left with nothing,” but to “suddenly comprehend the secret” that he, willingly or unwillingly, prophesies to his still stupid grandson. The words of the grandfather, like seeds, will sink into the consciousness of Leva Odoevtsev and, having died in it, will give rise to painful shoots in their growth. And the one who is up to 27 years old (the age when “people die and shadows begin to live”, on the threshold of which “everything is decided, everything further fate souls") knew only how to “tell jokes” and risked turning his life into another joke of primitive content; during three days of duty in the Pushkin House, guided by the prophetic words of his grandfather that sunk into his consciousness, he found his destiny and voice. Or rather, not a voice, but your thought, which you can, if not express, then think to yourself, you can write “on the table”, with or without the hope of being read someday. Being understood is not so important and is not even included in the value system of your favorite Beat characters. After all, one of the main commandments of the grandfather to his grandson and to everyone who ever accidentally or deliberately reads the article “Sphinx”: “The surest way to save yourself is to remain misunderstood.”
So what happened to Lev Odoevtsev during those fateful three days? Insight, actions, humility... And gaining freedom of spirit, allowing you to be with everyone and at the same time above. He understood everything, gave a kind of assessment to his entire past, and at the same time did not prepare for the future at all, but simply resigned himself to the immediacy of existence. He did not become a luminous genius, did not re-educate, did not get rid of bad habits and frivolous attachments, but, on the contrary, established himself in himself, accepted himself as he was - as he was formed, crystallized by the era. Leva completely trusted life and learned not to lie to himself. This is how the grandfather did not lie to himself, shouting in his uncomfortable, fundamentally (or naturally?) uninhabited kitchen: “I do not belong to these insignificant people, without pride, who were first undeservedly imprisoned, and now deservedly released... I considered myself too proud, in order to be broken, I changed myself... You are for, against, between, but only a relative system. You are not tied to any other stake. What kind of freedom are you talking about? Lev Odoevtsev gained the freedom to find out his worth, which is insignificant in some ways and significant in others. And this is Pushkin’s gift to “shed tears bitterly,” but “not to wash away shameful lines.” And they - “shameful” - are and will be...
The life of Lev Odoevtsev until he was 27 years old was a gentle journey with the flow. A. Bitov, at the risk of seeming like an overly tasteful fiction writer, describes the wanderings of his as yet “not a hero” through the pages of his romance novels, stories and anecdotes. Leva leads a very checkered personal life. Although it is not rich in spiritual content, it is sincere in its own way. At the center of the young philologist’s thoughts is Faina (what a wonderful, Blok-like name!). Leva is exhausted from tenderness, then from jealousy towards her, and yet their relationship is still a typical, moderately banal story, not without vulgarity. It involves mutual infidelities, quarrels and travels, during which Leva finds solace in the devoted love of the smart but ugly Albina. Sometimes he drops in for an hour to see the simpleton Lyubasha, and often, and not without pleasure, fools the pretty girls of the institute. There is something in that confused handwriting from Pechorin’s sad amusements: it’s bad in the soul, but life, circumstances and morals have entangled him so much that one cannot avoid the vulgarity in oneself. Leva is tolerant of the vices of his age and for the time being obedient to his advice. But there is something in the relationship between Leva and Faina that makes us think of them as fatal, prescribed for them by fate itself. Odoevtsev loves Faina blindly, but strongly, almost hopelessly. She is his woman, the mother of his son (we learn about this from “Pushkin’s Photograph”), all the worst and most defenseless things in him are connected with her.
It is difficult, however, to imagine where the convulsive curve of his novel would have taken the hero if Lyova had not been tested for three days on duty in the Pushkin House. After all, it was during this, on the morning of the day that was to end in a duel with Mitishatiev, that Odoevtsev saw through the window (he was about to be smashed to pieces) Faina walking along the embankment arm in arm with an ugly, but charming stranger and - which is rare these days! - a curly-haired person. Leva jealously watches them, afraid of being discovered, and suddenly the thought strikes him that Faina is so beautiful at this moment because she is free. Worried, he admits to himself: “Abacus? What kind of scores could they have? … That's what! I just didn't let her love me. Didn't allow it. - I love her, I just love her - that’s all. What do I have to do with it? And she is my wife. So" . Blessing the free choice of his beloved, he experiences an unprecedented attack of nobility that surprises him with its strength and novelty. There is a painful but healing liberation of Odoevtsev from the demands of egoism to think first of all about himself. With him, the words of his grandfather once again come true: “The basis of the mind is ignorance... There is no life where it already was, and there is no need to look for the life that once was or that is somewhere, now and here. Here and now is exactly here and now. There is no other life! It is important to see the world as it is at the moment, and to feel the fullness of closeness to it or rejection from it. To become extremely objectified, while preserving yourself, to begin to see clearly and understand everything - this is the goal, this is freedom! To become spiritually independent means to gain an accurate vision of the world and to know the full range of feelings given to you. Pushkin's ideal lies in uninhibited thought, gesture, and action. A person full of knowledge and rich in emotions acts as he wants! And at the same time the harmony is not disturbed" God's peace”, but is multiplied and ennobled by the intelligent reaction of a free person to life.
The reality of the 70s, in which the events of Bitov’s novel unfold, does not presuppose a free mind and independent behavior in a person. People are offensively dependent on vanity, idleness, and the unspoken law of unbridled consumption. A. Bitov boldly conveys the atmosphere of timelessness, mindlessness, meaninglessness, lack of talent. This is a world without Pushkin, without concepts of beauty and freedom of spirit. A person here moves within the observable parameters of specific, primitive goals imposed on him by the “current”, the “general law”. The absence of a worthy prospect of fate, the narrowness of professional interests, a previously known ritual of a career, a specified and agreed upon framework of plans and experiments, combed-over thoughts, emasculated ideas - this is what led to the “stagnation” of the spirit and gave birth to the monsters of opportunism, conformism, bureaucracy, and infantilism.
Already in the early 70s, A. Bitov felt time as a void “between contrasts,” a zone of cowardly, stupid silence. And in the midst of this soul-wearying eclipse, he is tormented by the premonition of a catastrophically powerful wave in which purification and death will be simultaneous. It is with this intimate knowledge and this spiritual longing that the author gradually bestows upon his hero. But Lev Odoevtsev is not as hopeless as A. Bitov. The writer peers more closely into the face of his time. And while Lev Odoevtsev is trying to edit his convenient dissertation written for all times, A. Bitov describes a festive festivities taking place not far from the Pushkin House and involving the majority of people.
The description of the demonstration was given by A. Bitov deliberately sarcastically. It can painfully touch more than one patriotic heart. But one cannot help but recognize the psychological truth that the writer masterfully reproduces as hard-won, essentially deeply tragic. Perhaps not all, but very many of the intelligent circles of society will recognize their feelings and discover a commonality of thoughts and feelings with the author. Here is how A. Bitov writes: “There would be a Gogol exclamation about “do you know” and “no, you don’t know” what a mass folk festival is. That is, of course, everyone knows everything. Now everyone knows everything. This form is known. We don’t have many forms, and they are all interconnected. Where were you? For a walk. What did you do? I was walking, the form is known, the content is not.” People are faceless, this is the most depressing thing - “We look at the crowd, look into the face, look to find out - there is no face!” The walk was pointless: “Walking, we flock to the same square where we were led, where we were abandoned - we wander senselessly around the place of loss, searching. We'll find an acquaintance, a drinking buddy, a fight; If we don’t find anything, we’ll go to bed...” It’s tongue-tied, recognizable and scary. Only a soul exhausted by nonsense, who knows the value of eternal questions, the search for the meaning of life, an already quite sick soul, extremely dissatisfied with existing things, can feel this way about a holiday. This is the angry protest of a person who hates artificial restrictions on his development, who guesses, like a fatal disease, that nothing may ever happen to him, because he has already “arrived” where he was “led” once and forever.
More than once on the pages of his novel, A. Bitov will ironically complain that he is unable to create a real, full-fledged plot, where the heroes would truly love each other, seriously fight duels, and sincerely keep other people's secrets. In the “Pushkin House”, as in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, no one tells each other the truth, everyone seems to be playing giveaway, presenting what is real as wishful thinking and is secretly indifferent to everything and everyone. The relationship between people, in the figurative expression of the writer, is akin to a molecule, where “not one... represents a chemically independent unit.” A person in such an environment only seems alive, but in fact he is dead. And this suits him quite well. “No” character in “no” circumstances is the formula for that realism when people prefer to appear rather than be. Truly, “not life is a monstrous den. Substitution is an unheard-of den!” (A. Kushner).
It cannot be said, however, that with such an ersatz existence, the word “life” has been removed from the modern vocabulary of intelligent people. Not at all. It is used often, but it means something small, some kind of absurd, vain swarming for dubious purposes - to get, buy, sell, arrange. Reflecting in the womb of the Pushkin House on the fate of her generation, Leva comes to the idea that vitality is embodied today in the most disgusting and “vile forms”, that “running away, betrayal, betrayal are three successive steps, three forms cannot be said - life, but saving it, three ways to ride the horse, win, and remain a winner. This is the course the expression of life took. But the non-vital must die out."
Who is Lev Odoevtsev? Is he vital or non-vital in the conditions of the century given to him?
A. Bitov is far from wanting to portray his hero as an active champion of justice, an establisher of disturbed social harmony. But he gives him a powerful spiritual revolution. In the third part of his novel, A. Bitov creates a conventional picture, extremely concentrated in meaning, where every detail, every seemingly insignificant plot twist, every quotation reproduced from past literature, unexpectedly for the reader, is telling. Here it is appropriate to think about the aesthetic nature of A. Bitov’s novel. Even an inexperienced reader from the first pages of “Pushkin House” understands that this work has several layers of narrative. The writer himself, in his author’s digressions, theorizes a lot about the “plot”, “hero”, “internal lack of independence” of the “novel-museum”, “difficult mechanics of the plot”, about “the container created for us, but used by us for the needs of our time”. A. Bitov creates paintings that are sometimes frankly irrational. Striving for “collaboration and co-authorship of time and environment,” he resorts to numerous images, allusions, repetitions, and associations.
It seems that the writer is striving to create something like a spiritual-aesthetic ether, where “matter, being crushed, divided and reduced to more and more elementary particles, suddenly ceases to exist altogether from an attempt to divide it further.” A. Bitov’s narration is a flow of spirit, where intersections and mutual transformations of images, concepts, and details are possible. This manner of writing contributes to the birth in the mind of the reader (especially the more or less enlightened) of all kinds of symbols, signs, and guesses. And with this opportunity to understand and decipher the Bitovian text, a certain mystery remains, something that will definitely confuse the logic and disrupt the harmony of the obvious conclusions. The spiritual and aesthetic ether is a recognizable culture, against the background of which the everyday behavior of the characters acquires additional meaning, Eternity begins to appear in it. The flair of spirit and culture ennobles reality in its own way, but most importantly, it tragicizes it. The consonance of names, the titles of chapters, epigraphs makes us tense intellectually and mentally, to expect a powerful development of events, the greatness of the ideas expressed in the plot. Or, on the contrary, it belittles what is depicted, creates a shrill and parodic tone, distorts meanings, and distorts centuries-tested theories.
The third part of “The Pushkin House” (“The Poor Horseman”) is accompanied by citations ranging from Baratynsky’s lyrics to Dostoevsky’s “Demons”; the motifs and images of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and the plot moves of “What is to be done?” are easily recognizable in it. Chernyshevsky, techniques of modern cinema, the influence of the poetry of Akhmatova, Pasternak, Kushner.
From reading last chapter“The Pushkin House” leaves a feeling of the future elements, the slurredness of drunken, almost insane speeches, mortal fatigue from the awareness of the futility of all spiritual efforts. “Poor Rider” is a kind of painful resolution from the burden of lies and pretense. Something extraordinary, almost brilliant, must happen to explode this pseudo-connection of people who “live on top of each other, go to the same toilet, eat the same corpse of Russian literature, and eat one set lunch, and on one monthly ticket in one bus to one They drive around the apartment and watch the same TV, drink the same vodka and wrap a single herring in the same newspaper.” This description of the era we are living through does not belong to Leva or the sarcastic author. In a fit of anger (whether it’s sincere or feigned - it’s hard to understand), Mitishatiev, Odoevtsev’s evil genius, shouts it out. He is far from the last person in the development of the plot of the three fateful days of the ill-fated duty in Pushdom. Without an analysis of Mitishatiev’s behavior and speeches, a conversation about the hero’s spiritual crisis will be incomplete. Mitishatiev is a friend-enemy, an eternal tempter, a happy rival, Leva’s mysterious double. Odoevtsev - Mitishatiev are an indivisible literary couple. So there is no Onegin without Lensky, Pechorin without Grushnitsky, Ivan Karamazov without Smerdyakov, Bazarov without Kirsanov, Mozart without Salieri. They are a dialectical unity, two sides in the same duel.
Mitishatiev may be “rewarded” by the reader with the most unflattering epithets. He is low, harmful, dangerous, mediocre, vulgar. Next to him, Lev Odoevtsev should undoubtedly win, highlight his God-given talent, innate aristocracy, tact, and intelligence. However, they shouldn’t be close; these people have more reasons for a break than for an alliance. And yet they are together, their connection is inevitable and irresistible. Why? Maybe because Mitishatiev is Odoevtsev’s second self, his chance and temptation to finally fall under the burden of his time? For Leva, there is always a threat of becoming equal to Mitishatiev in conscious meanness, of standing on the same foot with him in choosing the means and methods of consuming other people’s lives. It must be admitted that A. Bitov paints the image of a worthy double-enemy. Mitishatiev is simultaneously a powerful spiritual force and a pathetic victim of social illusions. He is unsurpassed in his ability to spiritually mimic any everyday circumstances. He doesn't even have a permanent, always recognizable appearance. His face is just a change of faces. The devilish ability of transformation is beyond Mitishatiev’s ability and spirit. This is a man who sat among criminals, a sailor among sailors, and one among veterans, although he did not drink a drop of war due to his age. This person is vague, elusive, invulnerable. And at the same time, he is brutally precise in his attack on the dignity of another person. Its goal is to suppress, destroy, nullify any human individuality. He seeks spiritual superiority over people and in this way is very reminiscent of the heroic theorists of F. M. Dostoevsky. And his stakes are similar to the stakes of Peter Verkhovensky from “Demons”: on human imperfection, a flaw in the soul, weakness of character, meanness of thoughts. The demon of malice, selfishness and envy lives in Mitishatiev. There are moments when he painfully, but at the same time sincerely hates the world and humanity. And then this newly-minted “thinker” considers the scumbag to be the hero of the time, who at that moment when “everyone is so relaxed, spread out” can “at least say a word clearly, at least send obscenities.” Mitishatiev hates people like Odoevtsev more than others. Achieving primacy, Mitishatiev becomes the spiritual seducer of Odoevtsev, a kind of Mephistopheles under the modern Faust. After all, if Leva “falls”, that is, he turns out to be the same bastard as everyone else, then Mitishatiev is the highest spiritual point of the century, and everything is subject to him. But Odoevtsev does not simply submit to Mitishatiev, but behaves somehow unpredictably. He seems to share a meal with him, and go crazy together on the embankment, and allows the poison of speeches to be poured into him, but in the end he does not turn out to be “his own”. Furious, Mitishatiev reproaches: “You’re getting out from under everything. You will explain everything in your own way and calm down. And if you don’t calm down, then you will begin to suffer and suffer, with such a worldly reproach that it seems that he would kill you with his own hands...” Mitishatiev feels that he will not rise to Odoevtsev’s level. Odoevtsev guesses: there is always a chance to stand one step lower, to offer Mitishatiev’s hand as an equal, to shake the outstretched hand with the joy of a slave.
In what way is Odoevtsev superior to his enemy? In what is given to a person for free - in the hereditary aristocracy of the spirit. In him, spattered with the mud of the era, the noble impulse to heights and faith is ineradicable. And the more natural Odoevtsev behaves, the more persistently and harmlessly Mitishatiev tempts him. Fueled by vodka and anger, the former friend sums up: “We can’t live on the same site - that’s what!” Maybe this is a class instinct? Or no, it's probably biology. Do you think I'm not giving you peace? No no! You! I can't while you're here. You are indestructible." Isn’t this Leva’s conversation with his second self, or self-reproaches: “You can’t rebel, you’ve become a slave like me...” Let us remember that it was after these words that the sheets of one’s own and those of others fly into the air dissertations, glass in cabinets breaks, curses are shouted, Pushkin's death mask is broken in a fight between friends and enemies (it seems to them that it is the only and real one, in the morning it turns out that there are many copies in the warehouse). After being accused of slavery, Odoevtsev causes a scandal, a pogrom, a coup. In the scientific halls of the scientific literary institute, some kind of super-movement is happening, among which truth itself is ready to reveal itself. What is she wearing? In refusing to remain silent; Lev Odoevtsev was afraid to admit to himself that, along with the age, he was little by little acquiring the slavish psychology of silence. Intuitively, while still a green graduate student, he felt that evil was precisely in this, Tyutchev’s testament - “hide and be silent,” that is, hide your beautiful world within yourself, and give people only a mask, rewarding them with meager handouts of information from the lordly bounty. Mine! How unusual this stinginess of soul was for Pushkin. His genius is for everyone! Moreover, in one moment - all, to the end (or endlessly?) forever, for nothing.
In his youthful article “Three Prophets,” Lev Odoevtsev portrayed Tyutchev as envious, mentally challenging Pushkin to a duel. But the great poet did not even notice the daring gaze of his fellow writer. Pushkin is beyond the reach of envy; it is simply unknown to him. He is too gifted not to have in his soul what someone else has, even very capable person. Hiding your talent is beneath the dignity of a poet. To wait, to keep a low profile - there is no such law for him. To discover oneself is the primary purpose of talent, its difficult and happy cross.
Salieri, Tyutchev (in the interpretation of Odoevtsev - A. Bitov), Mitishatiev will try not to reveal themselves. Hiding behind tradition, manners, someone else's philosophy - this is their style. Odoevtsev, enlightened at a time of spiritual ignorance by his grandfather: “First of all, we are threatened by what is free, by what is given by God, by what has never cost anything, neither money nor labor, by what has no value, that’s where our destruction comes from: from that which has no price, from that which is priceless!” - and, led by the author on the free path, he will not be able to hide himself. He will discover in himself the strength to resist, albeit absurdly, farcically, fruitlessly in the end, but not to remain silent, not to pretend, not to lie to the face of his offender. A duel between Odoevtsev and Mitishatiev will take place on the notorious, historical (or also already replaced?) dueling pistols. For both, this is a step into... nowhere, reckless, but inevitable. It is the resolution of a tangle of contradictions, the way out of which can only be the destruction of one or another spiritual source - whether Odoevtsev's or Mitishati's.
Both will survive. Mitishatiev will sarcastically disappear, leaving a cigarette “North” at the place of the duel, and Lev Odoevtsev, waking up in the morning Sunday, will be seriously puzzled by the pogrom committed. How similar this is to outright mockery of the author! They showed off, they say, and it will happen. But this time it was not malice that guided A. Bitov. A dull longing for the present, a groan for truth and sincerity breaks through to us from the pages of the outwardly parodic “Duel.”
So Lev Odoevtsev was “left with nothing.” But was the secret revealed to him? Life hasn't changed outwardly. Employees of the Pushkin House, having taken a break from each other during the holiday, filled the offices and museum halls in the morning. No one noticed traces of the pogrom. Leva began his official duties. His childish, naive desire for at least someone - even a supply manager! - became interested in changes, if not in the spiritual climate, then at least in the interior of the Pushkin House, alas, impossible. Everything is outwardly stable, no one suspects possible deformations. Something has changed in Lev himself, but no one cares about that either. And how Leva will behave further depends only on himself. If he starts to be insolent, he will ruin the relationship and will not move up the scientific ladder. He will flatter and deceive - he will recognize the final victory of the Mitishati spirit over himself. However, after everything he has experienced, he has no choice, but only the inevitability of realizing himself to the end. To the extent that age has granted him this, he will retain (maybe enlarge?) the features of the face that has appeared on him. The very appearance by which descendants will unmistakably recognize the second half of the twentieth century.
Lev Odoevtsev is a man who took just a step away from total flow. He was just getting closer to understanding the idea of a “well-lived life.” Is there anything from Pushkin in him? Billionth particle. But the light of genius still reached him and touched his soul and consciousness. This would not have happened without living intermediaries - grandfather, Albina, uncle Dickens, curly-haired chosen one Faina, without a young poet in holey socks who read incomprehensible but powerful poetry in his grandfather’s kitchen; without Mitishatiev, finally, an eternal villain in a world where, out of spite of mediocrity, genius exists. Lev Odoevtsev had just stepped onto the free path and took his first free breath. He still risks suffocating in the stench.
Andrei Bitov breathes greedily, almost convulsively, in the Pushkin House. Unlike his hero, he sees more clearly and clearly begins to distinguish the immortal features of the imperishable in the smog of various impurities of the century. He has already taken on that tone of truth from which it is scary to leave.
Andrei Bitov feels himself on the threshold of a secret, which, having reconciled a person with the present, allows him to speak, write and think in the name of the future. And to draw strength from the centuries gone by.

LITERATURE

1. Bitov A. G. Pushkin House. - M., Sovremennik, 1989. - P. 118.

2. Ibid. - P. 119.

3. Ibid. - P. 230.

4. Ibid. - P. 233.

5. Ibid. - P. 15.

6. Ibid. - P. 26.

7. Ibid. - P. 241.

8. Ibid. - P. 353.

9. Ibid. - P. 85.

10. Ibid. - P. 86.

11. Ibid. - P. 64.

12. Ibid. - P. 65.

13. Ibid. - P. 352.

14. Ibid. - P. 67.

15. Ibid. - pp. 221-222.

16. Ibid. - P. 79.

17. Ibid. - P. 281.

18. Ibid. - P. 282.

19. Ibid. - P. 213 (3).

20. Ibid. - P. 208 (4).

21. Ibid. - P. 7.

22. Ibid. - P. 9.

23. Ibid. - P. 305.

24. Ibid. - P. 303.

25. Ibid. - P. 291.

26. Ibid. - P. 299.

27. Ibid. - P. 305.

Composition

Now it is difficult to understand why “Pushkin House” by Andrei Bitov (born 1937) - an intellectual and cultural novel, and not at all political - was banned for publication in the USSR for almost 20 years, why, published in the American publishing house "Ardis" , it was distributed in samizdat and was classified by the “competent authorities” as an anti-Soviet work discrediting the Soviet system. Published in Novy Mir in the late 1980s, along with other “returned” works, it was also perceived in a purely political context (causing disappointment), and only later did the understanding of the role that this novel played in the history of literature come , looking for a way, different not only from the socialist realist canon, but also from the realistic tradition as a whole.

The transitional position of the novel along this path was quite clearly recorded, although with opposite signs, by critics who wrote about it. Thus, the traditionalist Yuri Karabchievsky, with a generally positive assessment, reproached Bitov for his excessive commitment to the “game” at the expense of life, and the postmodernist Viktor Erofeev, on the contrary, called the novel a “monument to the past” for its traditionalism and excessive authoritarianism of style40.

The heroes of “Pushkin House” are literary critics, and the text of the novel includes entire articles, their projects and fragments that analyze the process itself literary creativity and cultural development. Reflections on literary topics
The author-narrator is constantly betrayed (for example, in the appendix “Achilles and the Tortoise (Relationships between the author and the hero)”). The author-creator finds his counterpart in the narrator-novelist, who constantly complains about the failures of novel-making, changes plans for further storytelling on the fly, and in the end even meets his hero and asks him provocative questions (answers to which he, as a novelist, naturally knows). The spatial-temporal freedom that arises thanks to such poetics easily allows you to unfold versions and variants of the same events, resurrect dead characters when necessary, refer to the end of the novel at the beginning and blur the plot connections as much as possible with all kinds of appendices and comments. In addition, semi-parodic references to Russian play a large role in the novel. classical literature– in chapter titles, epigraphs, etc. Bitova’s novel tries, through quotation, to restore the connection with the modernist tradition destroyed by totalitarian culture: and the echoes of “Pushkin’s House” with the classics of Russian modernism are set by the author, even if they arise by chance.

In the novel, the heroes who have retained an organic connection precisely with the traditions of the culture buried by Soviet civilization look like the only real ones, and in this sense, according to Bitov, they are aristocratic. This is the grandfather of the main character Levushka Odoevtsev, Modest Platonovich Odoevtsev, and Uncle Dickens, a family friend and a “deputy” father for Leva. They are united by the ability to understand unpreparedly, as opposed to ready-made ideas that simulate reality. The freedom of Modest Platonovich and Uncle Dickens has a distinctly modernist character: the equality of the individual with himself is expressed in the creation of his own, incomplete and independent from the prevailing stereotypes of intellectual reality. Apparently, this is the author’s ideal of freedom. At least at the beginning of the novel, where portraits of Dickens’s grandfather and uncle are offered.

What is the opposite of freedom? Not violence, but a simulation of reality - its replacement with ideas, a system of conventional signs, “copies without originals,” to use the expression of Jean Baudrillard, the creator of the theory of simulacrum and simulation. It is simulation in “Pushkin House” that is understood as the most important spiritual mechanism of the entire Soviet era. The episode of Stalin’s death, generally symbolic for many, if not all, of the “sixties” acquires a symbolic role in this regard (it is not difficult to recall similar scenes from Trifonov, Aksenov, Bondarev, Yevtushenko and many others). However, the specificity of Bitov’s perception is that he wrote Stalin’s death not as a moment of liberation from the oppression of a tyrant, but as the apotheosis of simulation. IN in this case– simulation of general grief.

The post-Stalin “thaw” era, according to the author of the novel, not only did not eliminate simulation as a fundamental property of Soviet reality, but also improved it - the simulation acquired a more organic and therefore less obvious character. As a product of this, in a new organic degree of simulation, the “myth of Mitishatiev” appears in the novel. Mitishatiev is not just a degrading double of the main character - no, he is clean sample a new human breed, bred as a result of total simulation. In this sense, it is truly mythological, for it visibly fulfills the Soviet myth of the “new man,” which in turn goes back to the Nietzschean, also mythological, concept of the superman. Mitishatiev’s “superhumanity” lies in the fact that he is a true genius of simulation, simply incapable of any other forms of existence.

In fact, a new level of simulation is being implemented through Mitishatiev. If the “classical” Soviet world is still opposed by people like grandfather Odoevtsev or uncle Dickens - by the very fact of their, genuine, existence, proving the possibility of free reality, despite the power of imaginaries, then Mitishatiev’s simulation excludes any relation to reality and thereby excludes even the potential possibility of reality as such . It is noteworthy that Mitishatiev is the same philologist as Leva Odoevtsev, and through a dual relationship with Leva, he is also drawn into the field of interaction with the classical tradition of Russian culture: it is characteristic, for example, that it is with Mitishatiev that Leva fights a duel. But Mitishatiev in Bitov’s novel is not a subversive of traditions; rather, the very appearance of Mitishatiev is proof of the transformation of all possible cultural orders into. simulation. It is in this sense that he is the tempter of Leva, who is trying to cling to the belief in the inviolability of cultural memory and cultural tradition: even in his mind, “Mitishatiev’s myths have long become more real than the truth itself.”

More complexly, the drama of simulated existence is embodied in psychological world main character - Leva Odoevtsev. There are various critical assessments of this character, but his originality lies precisely in the fact that he does not lend itself to an unambiguous assessment, eludes it42. Leva, unlike other characters in the novel who belong to the same generation as him, sees the simulated nature of reality and understands how dangerous the manifestation of one’s own and authentic is against the backdrop of a general simulation: “The most indecent, the most disastrous and hopeless - to become visible, to give the opportunity for interpretation, to open up (...) Just not to reveal yourself, your own - this is the principle of survival..." - so Leva thought... Invisibility!"

However, is it in principle possible - despite the riskiness of this enterprise - to express oneself in an atmosphere of total simulation? This question can be formulated differently: is it possible to return to the values of modernist culture (to the values of freedom and personal sovereignty) in a situation of the collapse of the social and cultural foundations of Soviet civilization?

At first glance, Leva does not live up to the expectations placed on him: simulation is ingrained in his reflexes, it is not imposed, but absolutely organic. The motifs of secondaryness, immobility, and imitation of imitations are constantly present in the smallest elements of the narrative related to Leva. They permeate everything - from the details of the character’s behavior to the syntax of the author’s remarks. At the same time, in the system of characters in the novel there is a clear polarization, given, on the one hand, by the image of Modest Platonovich (the strength of personality rooted in the past, the embodiment of authenticity, the pathos of modernist values), and on the other, by the image of Mitishatiev (the strength of impersonality, rootedness in the current moment, apotheosis of simulation, parodic “superhumanity”). All other characters are grouped “in pairs” in accordance with this polarity: Uncle Dickens is Leva’s father, Albina is Faina, Blank is Gottikh. Leva is precisely in the “middle of the contrast”: from the point of view of his grandfather, he represents a simulated reality, from the point of view of Mitishatiev, he is defiantly aristocratic in his involvement in the true reality of culture. This double encoding is the secret of Leva’s image. Striving to dissolve in the flow of simulation, he still cannot do this completely - the real gets in the way, sticks out its own. It is no coincidence that Bitov, at the climax, when describing Leva’s condition, deliberately blurs the boundary between Leva and... Pushkin: “And how Leva became visible! So it became impossible not to see him... Just yesterday he was lying in sharp fragments on the floor, his gaze pierced holes in the windows, thousands of pages were lying on the floor that he had written in vain and in vain all his life, his snow-white sideburns had fallen off - he was the most prominent person on the ground. (His anger, his passion, his rebellion and freedom)."

In “Pushkin House” there is another, perhaps the most interesting and most demonstrative level of simulation. Leva’s drama is, as it were, duplicated, playing out in a parallel version and on a different level, in the way the relationship develops between the author and the novel form. Bitov builds his novel as a system of attempts to imitate the classic Russian novel. Hence the epigraphs, quotation chapter titles, the hero’s pedigree, and periphrases of classical motifs. On the other hand, the narrator himself constantly records the failure of these attempts. It is not possible to re-write the famous trilogy “Childhood. Adolescence. Youth”, the “carelessly promised” second version of Leva’s family is not presented (“we, in short, don’t want to present...”); the plot does not move from a dead point - it is constantly “brought back to the beginning of the story”; the second part does not continue , but repeats, from a different point of view, the first. The very flow of self-reflection about the failures of novel construction introduces a clear shade of parody into Beat’s orientation towards classical models. In the finale, this parody develops into outright travesty, which is evident from the chapter titles: “. Copper people", "Poor rider." The denouement, ostentatiously sewn on with white thread, “reveals” the author’s failure as a deliberate “device.”

Just as Leva, who cannot imagine himself outside of immersion in the world of literature, participates in the destruction of the literary museum, so the author, seemingly following the traditions of Russian novel XIX century, no less consciously turns the form of his “novel-museum” into ruins43. But in this case, the novel form is the most important channel of communication between simulated reality and the authenticity of cultural memory and tradition. Twice - at the beginning and at the end of the novel - on behalf of Modest Plato-novich Odoevtsev, a character in highest degree"software" - pronounced
one and the same, essentially paradoxical thought. It sounds most clearly in the fragment that closes the novel, “The Sphinx,” allegedly written in the 1920s:

“Connections are broken, the secret is lost forever... The secret is born! Culture remains only in the form of monuments, the contours of which are destruction. In this sense, I am calm about our culture - it already existed. She's gone. As senseless, it will exist for a long time without me (...) Everything has perished - just now classical Russian culture was born, now forever (...) Russian culture will be the same sphinx for posterity as Pushkin was the sphinx of Russian culture.”

And here, as a general diagnosis, the formula is pronounced: “Unreality is a condition of life.”

The meaning of this formula is obvious: it establishes a connection between the simulated existence of the hero, his “fake time” and the cultural existence of Russian classics. The very reasoning of M. P. Odoevtsev sets ambivalent coordinates for the image of Russian culture: here death turns into preservation, the breakdown of connections gives classical completeness, greatness is predetermined by non-existence... However, in general, culture in this concept acquires the features of closedness, meaninglessness (precisely due to the impossibility of penetration inside); its context is the total destruction of reality, its effect is muteness or misunderstanding. Naturally, the contact that both Leva and the author enter into with the classics is also paradoxical. The demonstrative destruction of the deliberate traditionality of the novel form, already noted above, precisely embodies this internally contradictory connection. Both in the behavior of the hero and in the novel as a whole - firstly, there is a moment of conscious repetition - realized not only through the system of titles, epigraphs, etc., but also through constant, accentuated pairings of the heroes of the novel with stable artistic and behavioral models: " extra person”, “poor Eugene”, “hero of our time”, “petty demon” and “demons”, romantic love and the situation of a “duel”... However, as a result of repetition, the deepest discrepancies and deformations are invariably revealed, erasing the previous meaning: this effect is due to the fact that everything that is genuine within the classical context inevitably turns into a simulation in “modernity”. At the same time, a deep coincidence also arises here: the life that Leva lives and in which the author-narrator is immersed is just as simulative as the body of Russian classics fenced off by oblivion, perceived from the outside, relevant precisely because of its non-existence. Difference here turns into distinction44 - a paradoxical form of connection/repulsion, reproduction/erasure, philosophically described by Jacques Derrida, whose theory of deconstruction became one of the central strategies of postmodern thought (Bitov could not have known about Derrida when he wrote "Pushkin's House" - but the coincidence is all the more important ).

The process of “deconstruction” of cultural tradition unfolds even more demonstratively in the “hero’s chronotope” – Leva Odoevtsev. Levin's relationship with cultural tradition is most clearly formalized in his article “Three Prophets” (forming an appendix to the second chapter of the novel, entitled “The Profession of a Hero”). Here again the moment of repetition is emphasized - for twenty-seven-year-old Leva not only discovers that Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev, each at the age of 27, wrote their own “Prophet”; but he also openly projects himself, his “I”, both onto his heroes and onto the relationships between them. “He deified Pushkin, in Lermontov he saw his own infantilism and treated him condescendingly, in Tyutchev he openly hated someone (we don’t know who).” The repetition is that Leva blames Tyutchev for precisely what he himself suffers from:
“He asserts his opinion about the other, but not himself. He is categorical in his assessments - and does not put anything on the other side of the scale (does not evaluate himself) (...) The plot is an insult. Moreover, it is complex, multifaceted, multi-rotation. The most secret, the deepest, hidden almost from oneself.”

Andrey Bitov

Pushkin House

But what will happen is that we won’t exist either.

Pushkin, 1830(Draft epigraph to “Belkin’s Tales”)

Name of Pushkin House

Academy of Sciences!

The sound is clear and familiar,

Not an empty sound for the heart!..

Blok, 1921

What to do?

Prologue, or Chapter written later than the rest

On the morning of July 11, 1856, the servants of one of the large St. Petersburg hotels near the Moscow Railway station were perplexed, partly even alarmed.

N.G. Chernyshevsky, 1863

It touched down on the streets of the city like a landing strip, bounced again during a collision somewhere on the Spit of Vasilievsky Island, and then rushed strongly and silently between damp houses, exactly along the route of yesterday’s demonstration. Having thus checked the desertion and emptiness, he rolled into the front square, and, picking up a small and wide puddle on the fly, slammed it into the toy wall of yesterday's stands with a running start, and, pleased with the resulting sound, flew into the revolutionary gateway, and, again taking off from the ground , soared wide and steeply up, up... And if this were a movie, then in the empty square, one of the largest in Europe, yesterday’s lost children’s “scatterer” would still be catching up with it and would crumble, having become completely damp, would burst, revealing as it were the underside of life: its secret and pitiful structure made of sawdust... And the wind straightened out, soaring and triumphant, high above the city it turned back and quickly rushed through freedom to again glide towards the city somewhere on the Strelka, describing something, a Nesterov loop...

Either finish quickly, or never make a vow to yourself... (which, incidentally, is also a vow). The author (in this case it was me) from his very first unsteady steps in prose firmly declared to himself that he would never write poetry and about great people - he would never write. I must say that observing this rule did not cost him any effort, for at least ten years. He was just busy enough. But twelve years later, though not the author, but his hero Lev Nikolaevich Odoevtsev, already wrote about Pushkin (the most forbidden of all great people), and a year later, having finished “Pushkin House”, again the author (and not L .N. Odoevtsev) could shyly catch himself writing an acrostic poem dedicated to an Armenian lady. Thank God, the fall did not go any further. Having gotten away with a few dedications in letters and birthdays, the author again found himself quite busy.

More years passed. The author, having successively outlived Lermontov, Pushkin (the excuse is that poets...), also outlived Gogol and Chekhov and reached the Methuselah age in Russian literature at forty-five years old. The historical time around seemed like eternity. And then, in September 1982, the author finds himself in a certain dying northern village, where time died out even earlier than in him and in the world around him. Behind strange occupation he catches himself!..

Sitting mindlessly for several days over a blank page, a sonorous or seemingly sonorous line came to him from somewhere out of nowhere, from the ceiling, say. He also thought about warming up with a poem, but that would have been a failure of will in the face of the publisher’s need to write exactly that white page that was placed in the typewriter, and, gritting his teeth, the author restrained himself. But after a minute he still fell and decided to quickly get rid of the obsessive line. Or maybe I’ll really warm up, warm up, and then the prose will flow, the author thought. But the trouble is, that line never happened! For the rest of the afternoon he tried to remember exactly her. This is the most annoying loss! You could write a book - but this line is the whole point. The day was, as they say, and indeed, approaching sunset. Out of despair, the author grabbed the first line that came his way, which, of course, was in no way equivalent, not equal, and not about that (the author didn’t even remember what it was about, and still doesn’t remember), but it didn’t matter. The line was like this:

Not only not a law, but also no rules at all...

He lived among us...

But it’s not him, that is, I didn’t write it! Pushkin wrote this! And, it seems, not about himself, but about Mickiewicz. A poet, so to speak, about a poet... It turns out that if I introduce the words of Pushkin, then I can justify them only by the fact that they belong to Pushkin?... Moreover, they are addressed to them not to anyone, but also to a poet and a genius. It turns out, continuing Pushkin’s words, I was already writing about Pushkin himself, something that in life I would not have attempted even in fiction, let alone in poetry!..

“He lived among us.” We are not here. He glorified us.

Why “we are not here”? On whose behalf am I speaking? On behalf of his contemporaries? which are definitely not there? There was no way I could risk this - such a move would require too complex a transformation from me. Then, maybe, “between us” in the sense of Russians? Like Mitskevich - a Pole - between us, Russians... But I couldn’t say in any sense that we, Russians, no longer exist? But I myself am German, or what? But I had to write further, and, leaving this slippery question, I rushed further, correcting: “He glorified us.” This was true in any case, both if it related to modern times, in the sense of: he glorified the nation, and in another, already internally fearfully rejected, if it was as if on behalf of his contemporaries. Those who he glorified were them! From what other era do we know the names of censors and secret police chiefs, corrupt journalists and society ladies?

No writer has attached so many stories and names to his name. Of all the eras, including our own, none is as familiar to us as Pushkin’s. Just as special education is an indispensable completeness of information in any field, so we chose a historical period in order to know as much as possible about it, and in this sense, Pushkin turned out to be our universal historical university. Knowing everything about a certain issue, we can more easily navigate an issue about which we know nothing. What is also hypnotizing is the greater clarity of what we know to some extent than what we do not know at all. Plunging into the fog and immediately losing the trail, we try to return and start from the stove. With each return we know it (the stove) more and more. The Pushkin era is precisely attractive (there is, however, an element of charm) for us because we already know part of it, but we know the rest so much worse that it’s scary to touch it. It’s easier to dig up the same bed all the time, which is what we do. We kind of “feel” it, this era. And we really don’t want to get out of it. “He glorified us.” He's flattering to us. Further, still not guided by any meaning, remembering that this is precisely the secret of poetry, which I could never unravel in practice, engaged in constant formulation, it went further, apparently by consonance alone:

Left us...

But if we are no longer there, then what can be left for us?

No, us...

Apparently I really liked this one next to the other: “We Are Not” and “There Are No Us.”

“No, us...” - this, however, had its own sad truth: he not only lost his life, but also left us all, almost as if he abandoned us. What did he leave us? Oh, it's an endless question - what has he left for us? Even more endless than what we took from what was left behind. Here is the “secret that he took with him”, and the fact that he is “our everything”, and the fact that he is “a man who will appear to us in two hundred years” - here is a lot of metaphysics and real meaning, metaphysical, so to speak, reality. How can I express all this in a nutshell? I didn't find anything better than to write:

Plus measurement...

Apparently, they meant something from an area of theoretical physics unknown to me. It was apparently justified immediately by the “poetic device” of the collision of words and concepts from different eras: I continued the poem, which was already modern... So, I wrote (that’s exactly how it was written, which I was not capable of, but as if experimentally I closed my eyes...):

Not only no law, but no rules at all

He lived among us... We are not... He glorified us.

Left us... no, us... plus a dimension...

God! what a mess... But I immediately interpreted it. Marvelous way! Declare what happens as intentional. “Tokmo” seemed to come from the 18th century, which preceded Pushkin. That he is a phenomenon so transcendental, even cosmic, that with our little minds we can’t find any law or rule for him... okay... further from him... then not just awkwardness, but a conscious temptingness, meaning a special difficulty of thought, a lowing substance, the inexpressibility of the attitude towards him, and at the end it’s already a purely 20th century, Einsteinian things, almost “minus space”. To fit three centuries into three lines – you must agree, this is not enough. And I was inspired...

Bitov Pushkin House creative history

Andrey Bitov Pushkin House

What to do? Prologue, or Chapter written later than the rest

Section one Fathers and Sons Leningrad novel

Father

Andrey Bitov
Pushkin House

What to do?
Prologue, or Chapter written later than the rest

Section one
Fathers and Sons
Leningrad novel