Cynics summary. Alas, against everyone (About “The Cynics” by A. Mariengof)

In 1918, Vladimir brings his beloved Olga a bouquet of asters. At this time, loved ones are given mainly flour and millet, and the bags, like corpses, lie under beds made of Karelian birch. While tinting her lips with a gold Guerlain pencil, Olga asks her boyfriend if it might happen that it will be impossible to get French lip paint in Moscow. She is perplexed: how then to live?

On Stoleshnikov Lane, confectionery shops are being destroyed, on Kuznetsky Most, signs from “bourgeois” stores are being torn off: they will now issue shag using cards. Olga's parents emigrated, advising their daughter to marry a Bolshevik in order to keep the apartment. Olga is surprised by the strangeness of the revolution: instead of betting on Execution Place guillotine, the Bolsheviks banned the sale of ice cream... She earns money for living by selling her jewelry.

Olga's brother, nineteen-year-old dear young man Goga, leaves for the Don, to white army. He loves his homeland and is happy to give his life for it. Olga explains Gogino’s behavior by saying that he did not graduate from high school.

Vladimir once came to Moscow from Penza. Now, during the revolution, he lives by what he sells rare books from your library. His older brother Sergei is a Bolshevik. He operates a water transport (being an archaeologist) and lives in the Metropolis. He dines on two potatoes, fried in the cook's imagination. Vladimir tells his brother that happy love more important socialist revolution.

Arriving at Olga, Vladimir finds her lying on the sofa. In response to his alarmed questions about her health and his offer to read Petronia’s Satyricon aloud, Olga replies that she is constipated and asks for an enema. Vladimir no longer asks himself whether he loves Olga: he understands that love, which was not suffocated by the rubber intestine from the enema, is immortal. At night he cries with love.

Olga declares that she wants to work for Soviet power. Vladimir brings her to her brother Sergei. Since it turns out that Olga can’t do anything, Sergei arranges for her in a responsible position. Olga forms propaganda trains, she has a personal secretary, Comrade Mamashev. Sergei often comes to Vladimir and Olga: drinks tea, looks at photographs of the White Guard Goga. Brother Sergei, with his kind blue eyes, seems mysterious to Vladimir, like a dark bottle of wine.

One day, coming home from work, Olga casually tells her husband that she cheated on him. It seems to Vladimir that his throat has become a narrow broken straw. However, he calmly asks his wife to take a bath.

Vladimir wants to jump from the seventh floor. But, looking down, he notices that he will fall on a heap of garbage. He becomes disgusted and abandons his intention. He inherited his disgust from his Old Believer grandmother. Olga's lover is Vladimir's brother Sergei. She often goes to see him from work, warning her husband that she is spending the night at the Metropol. Vladimir drinks out of grief, then gets along with his servant Marfusha.

Sergei gives Vladimir a note to Lunacharsky, according to which he is taken back as a private assistant professor. Sergei himself leaves for the front in his own salon carriage from the former royal train. Olga and Vladimir buy him warm socks at Sukharevka. Famine is raging in Russia, and cases of cannibalism are becoming more frequent in villages. In Moscow - NEP. From Sergei's letter, Olga learns that he shot her brother Goga. Soon Sergei returns from the front due to shell shock.

Olga takes on a new lover - a wealthy Nepman Ilya Petrovich Dokuchaev, a former peasant of the village of Tyrkovka. She finds it interesting to give herself to him for fifteen thousand dollars, which she, however, takes to the famine relief committee. In 1917, Dokuchaev speculated in food, diamonds, textiles, and drugs. Now he is a tenant of a textile factory, a supplier to the Red Army, a stockbroker, and the owner of several luxury stores in Moscow. Ilya Petrovich is “quite interested in hunger” as an unusual commercial prospect. His constantly pregnant wife lives in the village. When she arrives, Dokuchaev beats her.

Having become Dokuchaev's mistress, Olga leads a luxurious life. She spends the money that Dokuchaev gives her, without saving for a “rainy day.” Vladimir remains her husband, and Sergei remains her lover. One day Dokuchaev brags to Vladimir about a successful trading fraud. Vladimir tells Sergei about this, he tells him “where to go.” Dokuchaev was arrested. After hearing the news of his arrest, Olga continues to feast on her favorite “drunk cherry” sweets, donated by Dokuchaev.

Sergei is expelled from the party. Olga does not want to see him. She does not read Dokuchaev’s letters from the camp. At night she silently lies on the sofa and smokes. A friend and colleague of Vladimir’s who happened to come to visit says: “You call everything in your own words... the insides are out... and all sorts of other nasty stuff is out... just look, you show your bare asses - but it’s cold! And sadness...” Olga tells Vladimir that she is vain and that she wants to believe in something. Looking into Olga’s empty and sad eyes, Vladimir recalls a story about a seasoned bandit. When asked why he was imprisoned, he answered: because he misunderstood the revolution. Vladimir understands that his love for Olga is worse than madness. He begins to think about Olga's death and becomes frightened by his thoughts.

One day Olga calls Vladimir at the university where he works and says that he will shoot himself in five minutes. Angry, he wishes her a happy journey, and a minute later he rushes in a cab around Moscow, begging time to stop and accusing himself of ruining love with buffoonery. Running into the apartment, Vladimir finds Olga in bed. She eats candy, next to the Browning there is a box of “drunk cherries.” Olga smiles, Vladimir sighs with relief, but immediately sees that the bed is soaked in blood. The bullet got stuck in Olga's spine. The operation is performed without chloroform. Olga’s last words that Vladimir hears: “I’m just a little disgusted to lie with unpainted lips...”

Olga died, but it was as if nothing had happened on earth.

I wish a peaceful revolution.

I would rather simmer the institution of property than give it new strength, organizing St. Bartholomew's night for the owners.

Proudhon

The communist concept of communism is in many ways close to the ideas of anarcho-communism, which is not at all responsible for the fact that the communist statists were defeated on their road to communism.

Shubin

Subjective summary

"1. Under the beds made of Karelian birch, bags lie like corpses.

Isn't this in bad taste?

2. Concentrated soldiers were transporting some people who looked like broken old country furniture.

And what does this hyperbole look like, is it so pretentious?

3. Your face is tattooed with dirt...

4. Maples are like old fashionistas in large straw hats

5. Pillows in snow-white pillowcases are spread across the sky.

6. Olga’s face is smooth and white, like playing card premium quality from a new deck. And the mouth is the ace of hearts.

7. Yellow hair falls from thin round-headed linden trees.

8. A rainbow spread across the city. Cheerful multi-colored suspenders. The wind whistles a familiar melody from a Viennese operetta.

9. head in the gold of melted cream from steppe cows (some quote from Yesenin...)

10. The red sun, like a whirling, cheerful little dog, gets tangled up in his legs.

11. He (he’s talking about his brother) seems shaggy big dog, which one might think consists of friendship even with black cats.

12. Darkness falls in soft gray flakes

13. And te de...

Here... I look through it in a row - and this is just the text of the first two or three pages... I copy in a row the phrases that irritate me.

Sorry, I didn’t search through the whole book, I just don’t have time.

Imagist, what can you get out of him, you think. Beauty, beauty. Sheer artsy beauty. Beautiful...

But when everything continues to be the same, in almost every line of description of “his” life (the hero), they begin to seem like garbage, preventing one from perceiving the essence. How they interfere! For me personally, for example. Are you looking for contradictions? So here’s one thing, but constant: the hero describes the drama of his life.

Even two: internal non-involvement in real life- revolution (due to frivolity or focus on one’s love?), and also a changeable, unfaithful lover, a wife who does not know what fidelity is (and love, in my opinion...).

Emptiness? But I, the narrator, constantly have the strength to think, perceive and depict everything with such beauty.

And therefore suffering looks cartoonish, unreliable, insincere.

The plot is interesting. It could have been written like that! His depiction in this style is simply ugly, it so overwhelms the impression with this horde of picturesque beauties. Admiring. Narcissism.

Doesn't it annoy you? And for me, Mariengof has already mentally turned into a painted clown, depicting “terrible suffering.”

And you know what I liked about this novel? Short interruptions of the plot - messages about everyday and political/military events.

These are the real ones."

From a private letter.

If it is true that the aesthetics of imagism “inspires Mariengof for the rest of his life” (http://lib.rus.ec/b/267652/read#r18), and if we keep in mind that such people had a negative attitude towards imagism famous people, like Blok, Mayakovsky, Tynyanov, then the quoted private letter should be taken seriously.

Reply to resume

I wasn't looking for contradictions here. They enchanted me from the first lines:

It’s very good that you come to me with flowers. All the men, sticking out their tongues, run around Sukharevka and buy flour and millet. They also bring flour and millet to their beloved ones. Under the beds made of Karelian birch, bags lie like corpses.”

What a furious contrast between the spiritual and the physical! During the revolution...

The fact is that I, an adherent of the idea that great styles are repeated over centuries and that they each express an ideal of the same type, have long had the opinion that during revolutions there is an ideal of the high-revival type , which - this is generally accepted - is briefly formulated as follows: harmony of the heavenly and earthly, spiritual and physical, public and personal. Because harmony is that the ideal is achievable. Revolution is a superpower. That is why the ideal is achievable.

And now I find confirmation of all this rather big complexity. On every line!

“Concentrated soldiers were transporting some people who looked like broken old country furniture.”

Spring, they say, is the renewal of nature, people are preparing their dachas for summer, removing rubbish from them... And the revolution is preoccupied with the arrests of its enemies... Terrible is beautiful... Beautiful is terrible...

Works of Leonardo before Vinci

“...in complete ecstasy I swallow book dust...

“Your face is tattooed with dirt.”

A particular contradiction later - I write these first paragraphs almost last in the article - turned out to be that this harmony was a false plot device.

How should people whose ideal is socialism, but “on the axis “moderation - radicalism”” (http://lib.rus.ec/b/262767/read) similar to the Social Revolutionaries, "whose social ideal was based on communal socialism" (Ibid.)? What if they didn’t want to be rebels like the Socialist Revolutionaries? - They were shaken and distorted by every radical act of the Bolsheviks, and the revolution is socialist, and therefore it is impossible to rebel against it... - How should they behave? - To speak and to speak is cynical.

So their speech is distorted in the novel with a title corresponding to such speech - “Cynics”.

“HE” IS AGAINST THE REVOLUTION, THEN FOR; “SHE” - FOR, THEN AGAINST;

It is difficult to find contradictions in other works of art. It’s so difficult that you have to turn to the articles of scientists in the hope of finding a clue there.

This is necessary - to look for contradictions - in order to have hope that you will be enlightened, and from the collision of those counterfeelings - that will be born from the noticed contradictions - in turn, catharsis will be born (birth in the second degree), that for which the author created the work.

Well, you can understand how glad I am if the contradictions lie on the surface.

Denikin took Orel.

Yudenich took Gatchina.

Department fine arts The People's Commissariat for Education announces a competition for the design of a permanent monument in memory of the Seventy-first Paris Commune."

The chapter is called "1919".

Supposedly a diary. Cynic (that’s the name of the novel). Mocking the revolution, the people and the Soviet regime. (A dog barks - the wind blows. From the awareness of oneself as a dog, one mocks everyone.)

I consider the time of composing a work to be an integral part of the work. The time here is 1928. The people, the revolution and the Soviet government defeated Denikin, Yudenich and everyone 10 years ago.

The novel is tragic.

This means victory is an illusion.

We[cynics] looking through the crack of someone else's fence[people, revolution and Soviet power] . We listen with one ear.

But we are incomparably worse than them. When neighbors did stupid things, we rubbed our hands; when tragedy was brewing for them, we giggled; when they got down to business, we got bored.”

What is this?

The Pnevmatika plant produced the first batch of drill hammers.

The State Aviation Plant “Ikar” organized a celebration on the occasion of the first production of powerful engines.”

The Pnevmatika plant is hardly a Nepman plant, and Ikar is directly named state-owned...

That is, the NEP (from Chapter 1922) is working. The “I” narrator is not bored. His wife, Olga, became bored, a repeated traitor, and at the end of the chapter she completely committed suicide.

The “I” narrator, completely mired in lies (like the USSR), is not bored: “Sometimes—though not very often—I even sleep with my wife.”, who became the mistress of her brother, Sergei, a high-ranking Bolshevik (before he was sent to the front), and then the mistress of the prosperous Nepman millionaire Dokuchaev (when Sergei returned from the front shell-shocked, and then he from the party "cleaned out").

They actually purged the leftists, the Trotskyists, first. Left and Olga: “Olga, with slight, unusual excitement, tells[To Sergey] about his desire “to be useful to the world revolution”. But Olga cheated on her lover with her husband before all the misfortunes with Sergei.

However, there is nothing to binge on.

She (in chapter 1918) began “sharply and acutely... feel the aroma of revolution” after the start of the red terror, which began after white terror, but also after a parallel emphasis on culture:

“-...and for each head of our leaders we will take ten of their heads...

Olga is standing four steps away from me. I can hear her heart beating with delight.

The Council of People's Commissars decided to erect monuments:

Spartak

Gracham

Brutus

Babefu

Marx

Engels

Bebel

Lassalle

Zhores

Lafargue

Valianu

Maratu

Robespierre

Danton

Garibaldi

Tolstoy

Dostoevsky

Lermontov

Pushkin

Gogol

Radishchev

Belinsky

Ogarev

Chernyshevsky

Mikhailovsky

Dobrolyubov

Pisarev

Gleb Uspensky

Saltykov-Shchedrin

Nekrasov..."

AND Olga's last(chapter 1919) the act of loyalty to Sergei (buying and sending down feather socks to the front) followed soon after the collapse of the cultural emphasis began:

The monument to Robespierre, erected a few days ago in the Alexander Garden, was destroyed by “unknown criminals”

Sergei, in his own saloon car from the former Tsar’s train, left to “fight.”

Or maybe the idea of Justice in her was shaken by this lounge car and “fight” in quotes.

And that’s why she cheats on her lover with her abandoned husband.

She is also given to Dokuchaev, at least for 15,000 dollars, in order to take them to the needs of the children of the starving Volga region.

It is not known from the novel where and how many times the Soviet government turned off the right road in order to get out of it for Olga "scent of revolution".

Accordingly, it is unknown whether Mariengof was sufficiently aware of this to make a tragedy out of his novel. In life, he tried to cooperate with the Soviet regime, just like the one who accepted it "case"“I” am the narrator. It was Mariengof's son who committed suicide, not him.

However, all this is a pitchfork in the water...

BUT NOT NOW, BUT IN THE SUPERFUTURE.

His narrator self says the following:

“Don’t you think, Olga, that in our country only those who walk on a tightrope across an abyss safely reach their goal. Try to take the highway and you will certainly break your neck. After the fall of Orel and Gatchina, I begin to believe in the strength of the Soviet system. Finally, the thought even flashes through my mind that with the help of lice, hunger and plague rats that have appeared in Astrakhan, they will, of course, build socialism.”

And almost there ends the description of the time of the civil war, which - in the year 28 it is known - was won.

“Almost there”... Sergei returned crippled.

That is, victory is Pyrrhic.

Let's not go "on a tightrope"? And - the well-trodden path of emphasis on the material?

This quote is preceded by a suspicious list:

“- Choose a play that would correspond to our heroic moment.

- I'll try.

I put on my glasses and read:

Bolshoi Theater - "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", Maly - "The Merchant of Venice", Khudozhestvenny - "Tsar Fedor", Korsh - "Gentleman", New Theater- “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, Nikitsky - “Yvette”, Nezlobina - “King of the Jews”... works by Konstantin Romanov, Kamerny - “Salome”...

Did the Soviets make a mistake with the repertoire? Were you not addressing the people? Didn't they give away concerts to the front? Or into the outback? Have you forgotten that the people need not only bread, but also circuses?..

Or, in principle, culture was left out of the main place?

That is, the “I” narrator is aware of everything, and his author, Mariengof, even more so!

And this novel is not a self-expression of the subconscious... the ideal of harmony of body and spirit, which alone could save socialism... which in 28 was only supposedly victorious...

At least, even if not a manifestation of the subconscious, then the elemental, maybe there is a place to be here? Maybe the spontaneous artistry of human nature “knows” that everything needs to be presented in opposites? And, since she is conscious, she strives to press on contradictions?

If you want to discredit the victorious system under the name of “socialism”, do it tragic end a novel about his victory. If you want to glorify the moralism of real socialism, make immoral the one that marks the fate of socialism (from real to false).

Why all these horrors with the country starving? - To show the strength of the victory of the spirit?

We return along the boulevards. The trees rustle with angry, croaking birds. Crows hang on the branches like living black leaves.

I don’t remember in which chronicle I read that before one of the most terrible Moscow fires, “when the fire flowed like a river, the stones disintegrated, the iron glowed as if in a furnace, the copper flowed and the trees turned into coal and the grass into ash” - also heartbreaking Crows croaked over the suburbs, the Kremlin, the districts and the countryside.

Eleven monuments to “great people and revolutionaries” were erected in Moscow.”

That is, you, cynic, croak, croak about the victory of the spirit over the flesh, and the victory will be for socialism, which you so revile, - thinks Mariengof, quite rationally considering real socialism for the harmony of body and spirit. Because he was guided by harmony, he won. And he won illusorily, because he stopped being guided by this harmony. True victory lies in the super-future.

SUBJECTIVE: MY, OSIPOVA, HUTTONEN, -

WITH OBJECTIVITY

That is, this is no longer imagism, if refusal is considered imagism "from any conceptualization" (Huttunen.):

“Notice: how happy we are. We have no philosophy. We do not expose the logic of thoughts. The logic of confidence is strongest"".

Or... if no one, except the imagists, sensed so much that artistry is inconsistency, then... conscious adherence to inconsistency is precisely imagism!

That is, when they say that: “It makes no sense to look for the key idea of this direction” (Ibid.), - then this is simply said from the inability (and Mayakovsky failed!) to synthesize the always unquotable (due to the inconsistency of the text) artistic sense, here, in imagism, there may be a paradox! - because the artistic meaning is more incomprehensible because it is expressed deliberately contradictory. For everyone, the contradictions are not so noticeable, but they imperceptibly provoke catharsis in the end. And from the imagists there is a stupor.

I, however (I admit; why?), cried at the end (I didn’t know what he was like) from the collision of joy that Olga did not shoot herself to death:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I whisper:

- Olga, are you in a lot of pain?.. I’ll call the doctor... he promised to inject morphine.

She raises her eyelids with difficulty. Speaks:

with a cold, scrupulous statement:

Olga died at eight hours and fourteen minutes.

But on earth it was as if nothing had happened.”

And the ideal of harmony of body and spirit remained on earth. Which someday in the super future will only come true.

And I almost suffocated in the first paragraphs:

Kazan was taken by the Czechoslovaks; the British shell Arkhangelsk; cholera in St. Petersburg.

[I knew that in reality this was the end of the peaceful march of the revolution across the country. But still, this was the peak of popular agreement with her. Only foreigners and nature are against it.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Every night, quietly, so as not to wake Olga, I leave the house and wander around the city for hours. I lost sleep from happiness.”

The ideal of harmony of body and spirit according to the high-revival type, I thought about Mariengof imprudently.

But this turned out to be only one of the counterfeelings. Ahead of the plot was heartbreaking in the history of both the country and this love.

It is this quality - heartbreaking - that covers both the title “Cynics” and the entire outwardly cynical and coldly organized text. It is this quality - heartbreaking - that those who consider imagism to be individualism and dandyism do not notice:

“Dandyism, perceived as a kind of pathological otherness, a necessary difference, a rejection of everything around her that she encounters in the past, present and possible future” (Ibid.).

Accordingly, the artist Osipova designed the cover of the book published by Sovremennik in 1990.

These chaotic multi-colored strokes, unworthy of attention, however, with a predominance of gray, sometimes (at the top) with an attempt of white to organize into something straightforward, never formed... And they are contrasted with a two-color black and white on a black background contrasting portrait of the dandy Mariengof with a half-smile turned to at you and all this fuss. No. It's not even black and white. It would be a great honor to give such certainty. And given is whitish and blackish. More like a very dark grey. "The darker grey colour, the greater the preponderance of suffocating hopelessness", - as Kandinsky wrote in his manifesto. And - very thin, finally, straight, but not closed frames.

During their heyday, the Imagists tended to be very loud with their actions and manifestos. So we should probably analyze this as text literary work: Is it possible to make a synthesis? But I won't be distracted by this. Moreover, the novel was written a lot after that noisy time.

Is it true, "anarchist slogan of statelessness", may and should be noted. Perhaps the imaginary victory of the state over enemies, nature and devastation in the novel was that the victory would be clear if statelessness had triumphed. In the first half of the novel they only meet local authorities authorities or spontaneous gatherings:

After a four-day strike, a meeting of workers at the Tula arms and ammunition plant decided:

“...on the first call-up whistle, go to work, because... a strike could only be declared by force temporary insanity workers suffering from general economic devastation."

Volodarsky was buried in St. Petersburg. More than two hundred thousand people followed the coffin in the pouring rain.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Moscow Council issued a decree..."

There is a meeting of communists in Vologda..."

It's in the first chapter. You can also find it in the second one.

In Cherni, Tula province local council decided..."

So imagism has no "anti-ideological", but quite ideological anarchism. And quite conscious. And quite tragic. Even in peacetime, in India, Auroville simply could not withstand the capitalist encirclement. So what could we expect from the time of civil war, foreign intervention, devastation and drought? - Only rallying around the center. - For the anarchist ideal, only such a harmful situation for anarchism is needed as material for a work of art. The path of most resistance. Huttonen was wrong about being anti-ideological simply because anarchism is often confused with chaos. And this “no longer anarchism. Refusal of a constructive program is a path of retreat for anarchists into a marginal subsystem of society. Society allocated this safe corner for them and fenced them off from it” (http://lib.rus.ec/b/262767/read#r159). In fact “There are two socialisms... One wants to achieve happiness for everyone, the other wants to give everyone the opportunity to be happy in their own way” (From the same place. Tucker. State socialism and anarchism).

DETAILS

Fragmentarity. Why is she?

Since socialism-self-government is the same coherent theory as state socialism, then one could expect, it would seem, something coherent in “The Cynics”. But if a society that is collectivist in its aspirations does not care about your other ideological harmony, "highlighted" you "into the marginal subsystem", V "safe corner", and you do not rebel with weapons in your hands, but are friends with the statesmen in both 1918 and 1919... Then your rebellion in art - with a mockery of your opportunism - will be outwardly expressed precisely by fragmentation. You yourself agreed to be considered marginalized? Sami. Did you yourself agree to be considered that you have no theoretical harmony, that you are chaos-anarchy? Sami. - So the Imagists began to look like cynics, against everyone. But still their own. It's like bandits in a warring country. It is not for nothing that in reality the bandits, having robbed Mariengof, but having learned who he was, gave back what they had taken and apologized. Mine. - But they are still bandits. Probably, after all, they could only perceive the surface of Imagist works. And even the mistaken Huttonen writes about depth:

“The composition of “Cynics” is emphatically fragmentary. However, we are inclined to assume that this fragmentation is imaginary, only the surface structure of the work. Behind it lies the deep unity of the principle of construction and organization of the material.”.

Well (so as not to repeat Huttonen’s observations), at least the mentioned movement in chapters from self-government to statehood (rejected by the result of the heroine’s emotional movement: rejection of state socialism - acceptance - again rejection).

“- I have a small request for you, Sergei Vasilich.

Olga, with slight, unusual excitement, talks about her desire “to be useful to the world revolution.”

(Is it really more useful for another socialism to have a world revolution than in one country?.. And Stalin’s choice of the second by 1928 all the more prompted Mariengfa to write his novel-warning...)

Here you go: fragmentation and... what depth. - The path of greatest resistance, characteristic of artistry-contradiction.

Imagism is characterized, Huttonen is right, by catachresis (Greek Κατάχρησις, abuse), logical inconsistency.

“...bags lie like corpses”. These are not bags of poison, but "flour and millet" they contain. The source of life among hunger and... like corpses. The body cannot accept the process of becoming good, socialism, through hunger. But the spirit ultimately wants socialism. The solution is anarchist: self-government (you can’t harm yourself). But what if you're the only one who thinks so? - To mock the accepted social path of “good for all.” Spill out poison. Shock others. The girl's ear will scatter, touched...

Exactly girlish: “Under the beds made of Karelian birch... corpses”. Fi! Girlish dreams are on beds. Wonderful dreams, like the most beautiful cut Karelian birch. A symbol of harmony: both the bed, a material place of erotic pleasures, and the Karelian birch tree are immaterial beauty, but here... "corpses".

So that’s it, it’s not a “fi”, but a “head-on” harmonic hint - “beds made of Karelian birch”. A hint in case the resultant of two forces does not reach the public: one represents "flour and millet", the other is connected "with flowers".

“Much of dandyish behavior is determined by the fear of remaining unnoticed” (Huttonen).

Yes, fear. But not for the sake of empty talk, visibility is needed: the imagist needs today’s at least small trends, so that in the distant future the harmony of socialism will grow from them. We need to shake everyone up today, otherwise in the future they will become "corpses": harmony and socialism. Which is what happened in 1991 and even earlier. That is why the measures taken: a “head-on” hint is a carrot, and catachresis is a stick.

Written in 1928. The end of NEP. The country is choosing a path again. It's time to intervene. But not "t-t-terrible suffering" looking artificial, unreliable, insincere.

- Emptiness?

No. Depth. The suffering is unquote terrible.

But tell me: if you go through all the turns, at least listed in the letter, what annoying, then it is impossible to count them garbage?

No. But there are plenty of annoying turns between those listed. Between pretentiousness “the bags lie like corpses” and pretentiousness “people who look like broken old country furniture”, For example:

“The vase is silver, tall, shaped - female hand with a chopped brush."

What depth is there?

And the same unacceptable bloodiness accepted revolution in the Bolshevik way... Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, about whom it is still unknown whether he ordered the murder of the prince, nevertheless has bloody boys in his eyes, and the imagist who joined the revolution (friendship with the security officers alone is worth something) has the shape of a vase "a woman's hand with a severed hand".

The coolness of the Bolshevik revolution also determines the coolness of those who did not accept it. - Path of greatest resistance to conduction own ideal: self-government.

Here is the striking montage of the novel. This is from a movie of that time. A “in the world film studies literature, the term “Russian montage” has even become widespread (Ioskevich. Struggle of ideologies in world cinema. L., 1971. P. 5). It was opened by Kuleshov to compare two worlds: the everyday lordly former world and the everyday Soviet non-working one, using the lordly mansions. For its viewer, a simple comparison was enough to make an emotional choice of which side to be on. But Eisenstein took the next step. Before him, the installation plans were just taking shape and being put together. And with Eisenstein they collide. Before him, there was only a cause-and-effect relationship between plans. And with Eisenstein, from the collision of two plans, a third is born: “the juxtaposition of two montage pieces is more like a product rather than their sum”. And if such powerful discoveries are aimed at the Soviet successes of a Marxist-understood socialism... Then the militant imagist needs to use them to express the ideal of a non-Marxist-understood socialism.

Or this: why did Mariengof make the “I” narrator a historian (high-ranking Sergei even returned him "as a private assistant professor", quite in the spirit of the cynics, who a real Bolshevik should not have been at all - because in the spirit of the cynics, because this historian is directly some kind of pathological enemy of the Russian people, indeed, of other peoples too)?

For example:

“According to the venerable English diplomat, Ivan the Terrible tried to teach my ancestors to smile. To do this, he ordered, during walks or passages, “to cut off the heads of those who came across him if he did not like their faces.”

But even such drastic measures led to nothing. We still have dark characters.”

“- The strategy of Dmitry Donskoy, Grand Duke of Moscow Vasily, Andrei Kurbsky, Petroveliki upstarts and Catherine’s “eagles” was distinguished by amazing simplicity and greatest wisdom. Intending to give battle, they first of all “relied more on the large number of forces than on the courage of the soldiers and on good device troops"".

It is known that “traditionally, the concept of “land”, which traditionally largely determined and often mythologized the worldview of both the Russian people and the Russian intelligentsia, in its specific meaning in real, and not ideologically fictitious Russian history, could turn out to be a significant socio-psychological stimulus for the “Black Peredel”, proto-communist sentiments of Russian self-awareness "(http://www.rhga.ru/science/conferences/seminar/russm/stenogramms/revolution.php#quot_1).

To be for self-government, for socialism, especially for communalism, in Russia was natural for the majority before October Revolution. So she won. But the Bolsheviks managed to seize the leadership of this revolution from the Socialist Revolutionaries and lead it in a completely different direction.

The Imagists (and Mariengof), who ran ahead of the locomotive of the revolution, quickly realized the Bolshevik maneuver and their idiotic position. But outwardly it turned out that October was the result of tradition and a mythologized worldview, a natural product of history. - Well, it’s so cynical to rebel against history! At least make the “I” narrator look like this.

This mockery of a patriot is also catachresis. In the name of real history and true socialism.

Extremely subtle!

And so you can figure it out ad infinitum.

If I did not suspect Brodsky of anti-Soviet bias (I cannot exclude it from a person forcibly deprived of his homeland), I would say that it is not for nothing that he is a “Cynic” “called the best Russian novel”.

CONCLUSION

Well? We will have to introduce a new definition - “as an exception piece of art" The author is aware of the ideal, not unconscious. But journalistic (a story or an allegory, in both cases with the expression “head-on”, more or less to a lesser extent) this piece does not. Because the third saying, so to speak, was spontaneously applied - artistry. Which gave the work depth (they didn’t even understand it: "V Soviet Russia Mariengof's works were recognized as "anti-social"; or (in the West) they misunderstood: "if life is as it is described<…>then why live at all? It must be said that this question is, in essence, the only serious question that occupies the consciousness of the heroes<…>Without violence against the truth of life, they could commit suicide at any moment. They have nothing to live for and nothing to live for.[In the name of why the writer did this - the question is not even raised] No neither strong feelings, no passions, there are only some traces of feelings, some spiritual cases left over from long-squandered values. Mariengof's book, for all its disgustingness, still has a glimmer of humanity[wow glimpse - the ideal of another socialism] " - http://lib.rus.ec/b/241318/read; Nor can it be considered an understanding that Mariengof is for publishing the novel abroad “During the campaign to expose “counter-revolutionary” actions<…>was counted among the counter-revolutionaries" - http://www.scribd.com/doc/58370598/Drugoe-Polusharie-15-2011, although it is true that the other socialism is evolution, not revolution). That is, I stoop to admit that there are cases of artistry not only for expressing the unconscious.

Anatoly Borisovich Mariengof

"Cynics"

On Stoleshnikov Lane, confectionery shops are being destroyed, on Kuznetsky Most, signs from “bourgeois” stores are being torn off: they will now issue shag using cards. Olga's parents emigrated, advising their daughter to marry a Bolshevik in order to keep the apartment. Olga is surprised by the oddities of the revolution: instead of setting up a guillotine on the Execution Ground, the Bolsheviks banned the sale of ice cream... She earns money for her living by selling her jewelry.

Olga's brother, nineteen-year-old sweet young man Goga, leaves for the Don, to join the White Army. He loves his homeland and is happy to give his life for it. Olga explains Gogino’s behavior by saying that he did not graduate from high school.

Vladimir once came to Moscow from Penza. Now, during the revolution, he lives by selling rare books from his library. His older brother Sergei is a Bolshevik. He operates a water transport (being an archaeologist) and lives in the Metropolis. He dines on two potatoes, fried in the cook's imagination. Vladimir tells his brother that happy love is more important than the socialist revolution.

Olga declares that she wants to work for the Soviet government. Vladimir brings her to her brother Sergei. Since it turns out that Olga can’t do anything, Sergei arranges for her in a responsible position. Olga forms propaganda trains, she has a personal secretary, Comrade Mamashev. Sergei often comes to Vladimir and Olga: drinks tea, looks at photographs of the White Guard Goga. Brother Sergei, with his kind blue eyes, seems mysterious to Vladimir, like a dark bottle of wine.

Sergei is expelled from the party. Olga does not want to see him. She does not read Dokuchaev’s letters from the camp. At night she silently lies on the sofa and smokes. A friend and colleague of Vladimir’s who happened to come to visit says: “You call everything in your own words... the insides are out... and all the other big stuff is out... just look, you show your bare asses - but it’s cold! And sadness...” Olga tells Vladimir that she is vain and that she wants to believe in something. Looking into Olga’s empty and sad eyes, Vladimir recalls a story about a seasoned bandit. When asked why he was imprisoned, he answered: because he misunderstood the revolution. Vladimir understands that his love for Olga is worse than madness. He begins to think about Olga's death and becomes frightened by his thoughts.

Olga died, but it was as if nothing had happened on earth.

1918 Vladimir brought Olga asters. Olga is interested in whether it will happen that there will be no French lip paint. He is perplexed: then how to live? The parents emigrated, giving their daughter advice to marry a Bolshevik so that the apartment would be preserved. She makes a living by selling jewelry. Her brother, 19-year-old Goga, is going to the White Army. He is happy to give his life for his homeland. Olga explains his behavior: he didn’t finish high school.

Vladimir from Penza. He lives by selling his rare books. Brother Sergei is a Bolshevik and manages water transport. Vladimir is sure: happy love is more important than revolution. He proposes to Olga. She agrees and explains: it will be warmer to sleep together. Olga says: she left out of convenience, but it turned out - out of love. Vladimir lost sleep from love for Olga and from happiness. Olga wants to work for the Soviet government. Vladimir takes her to Sergei. She doesn’t know how to do anything, and Sergei gets her a responsible position, forming propaganda trains.

Olga casually tells her husband that she is cheating on him with Sergei. It seems to Vladimir that his throat has become a broken straw. He wants to jump from the 7th floor. But there's a lot of garbage down there. It's disgusting and he didn't jump. Disgusting as an Old Believer grandmother. Now Olga often goes to Sergei. Vladimir drinks and gets along with the servants.

Sergei gives his brother a note, and he is enrolled as a private assistant professor. Sergei is traveling to the front in the saloon carriage of the Tsar's train. Olga and Vladimir buy warm socks for him. Famine, cases of cannibalism. NEP. Sergei writes that he shot her brother Goga. Olga has a new lover - a rich Nepman Ilya Petrovich Dokuchaev. She is interested in giving herself for 15 thousand, which she takes to the committee for the hungry. Dokuchaev is interested in hunger as a commercial prospect. Olga, having become his mistress, leads a luxurious life. Vladimir remains the husband, and Sergei remains the lover. Dokuchaev boasted to Vladimir about one fraud. Vladimir told Sergei, and he reported it “to the right place.” Dokuchaev was arrested. Olga listens to this news while continuing to feast on the “drunk cherry” candies that Dokuchaev gave.

Sergei was expelled from the party. Olga doesn't want to see him. He doesn’t read letters from Dokuchaev from the camp. Lying silently on the sofa, smoking. Vladimir realized that love for Olga is worse than madness. He even thinks about her death, frightening thoughts.

Olga calls Vladimir at work and says that she will shoot herself. He, angry, wishes a happy journey. A minute later he rushes home, begs time to stop, blames himself for ruining love. She lies in bed, eats candy, smiles. He sighs with relief and suddenly sees blood. Bullet in the spine. Operation without chloroform. “I’m just a little disgusted to lie with my lips not lubricated...” - last words Olga. She died - on the ground, as if nothing had happened.

A piercing, desperate text, reading which it is difficult to escape the feeling of deja vu: you have already seen this somewhere. But where? Who? There is no point in maintaining intrigue: only Erich Maria Remarque writes this way. Perhaps I am discovering America, but there is something Remarque-esque in Mariengof’s manner of fitting human relationships into the context of the era, while refraining from pompous rhetoric. I don’t presume to say that Remarque learned to write from Mariengof, but on a par with “ Arc de Triomphe" and "Black Obelisk" for me now stand as "Cynics".

There are no verbal frills in “The Cynics,” but there is imagery and masterful use of the dictionary. No wonder: Mariengof began as a poet, a representative of imagism. In general, welcome to Soviet Russia of 1918. A country increasingly shrouded in Soviet darkness, civil war, the beginning of the New Economic Policy, mass famine, the abomination of desolation and cannibalism in the villages. And in this red universe there are two people trying to understand themselves in a new, Marxist coordinate system, to try it on themselves, which turns out very poorly for them. Oh my God! In Moscow it will soon be impossible to get French lipstick! How to live now? Laughter through tears: after the coup in October 17, we need to learn to exist again.

Mariengof came up with a brilliantly simple way of contextualizing the plot: the author's discourse is interspersed with inserts of newspaper news. In the dry language of the periodical press, we are told that in such and such a province so and so tens of thousands of people are starving, from there wagons with provisions are sent to Moscow, whites are knocked out of such and such settlement. The ideal frame for the narrative outline, not distracting attention from the main thing, from the fate of the heroes, Olga and Vladimir.

At first glance, everything in these destinies is quite simple and sometimes even banal. A positive, intelligent man, a history teacher, falls in love with a frivolous, brutal woman with no specific occupation, marries her and almost immediately encounters her infidelities. This Olga is a bitch, you say? Without going into a retelling of the plot, I would like to show how difficult it is to give a moral assessment to the actions of this couple! And in general, is this moral assessment necessary? Do people even need morality in principle? For example, show me at least one woman who consciously (and without turning it into a PR campaign!) gives the money she receives from a rich sponsor to charity! Mariengof pushes the reader out of the usual moral field into the existential dimension, where the usual morality simply does not work, and where the laws of personal responsibility for one’s actions apply.

For the reading public, brought up on the same Dostoevsky, “The Cynics,” I’m afraid, will become a difficult test. Vladimir does not love his Fatherland; he does not see in his people the bearer of God's spirit. Actually, he doesn’t believe in God either. But he bears the cross of his love for Olga humbly and resignedly, and if Olga was his god, then Vladimir tried to the last to save her from the fate of all gods - death.

Critics and persecutors of Mariengof in 1929, when the Soviet press began to persecute him (and also, by the way, against Zamyatin and his novel “We”), wrote that in “The Cynics” it is difficult to understand where the dividing line between Based on the words of the characters and the position of the author, and therefore Mariengof, it is easy to suspect that he approves of the anti-Soviet sentiments of his heroes. “I began to feel the smell of revolution much better when the sewage system in our house deteriorated,” Vladimir once remarked. It is absolutely obvious: such a text could never have been published in the USSR. The first publication was published only in 1988.

In some ways, the detractors are right: the author tried to eliminate himself from the text of the novel as much as possible and let the characters speak for themselves. Let the viewer judge them, if he wants, if he can... Why should they be judged? For passive civil position? For "couch criticism" of the new political system? May be. However, it seems to me that this is not what Mariengof doesn’t like about his heroes, but something completely different. Vladimir's school friend, Pavel, successful writer, tells him that it has become very difficult to communicate with him and his girlfriend, the cadaverous coldness in the attitude of these people towards each other and towards everything around them is too noticeable. What happened that ordinary people, not monsters and not soulless statues, have turned into cynics? Actually, this main question, which everyone needs to answer.

The novel “Cynics,” the first prose attempt of the imagist Anatoly Mariengof, is certainly shockingly frank and very original in the manner of writing. The storyline is built on the absurd and grotesque, so it is difficult to understand what the author wanted to say by piling up surreal scenery and killer dialogues, molded according to all the canons of desemantization of speech. But we'll try our luck.

The book talks about love relationships timid and sensitive Vladimir and loose, sarcastic Olga. The action takes place in Soviet Russia 1918-1924. Throughout the story, two words constantly echo storylines: the hero’s ardent and devoted love for an unreasonable passion and news items related to the revolutionary and military situation in the country. Mariengof is trying to emphasize the enormity of the events that are taking place, which have a detrimental effect on people, even though they do not participate in civil war and generally stay away from politics. The characters are literally going crazy from the subconscious understanding that there is a bloody mess going on around them, hunger, the destruction of moral, ethical and religious laws on which the world they knew stood. About the new unknown, but certainly scary world announces only the hubbub of shells. Only one barrier protects you from the predatory grin of reality - all-consuming cynicism, thanks to which you no longer take anything seriously. Thus, the main characters experience a punning, eccentric life framed by the events of the chronicle of that time.

How did the revolution and the NEP impact the lives of Olga and Vladimir? Being idle intellectuals, they have difficulty adapting to the new state of affairs. The heroine is worried that it will be impossible to get French lip paint in Moscow. To live tolerably like a bourgeois, you need to take your diamonds to a pawnshop. Meanwhile, “citizens of the fourth category receive: 1/10 of a pound of bread per day and one pound of potatoes per week.” But the woman closes her eyes to the truth and pretends that nothing is happening. Her attitude towards everything dear and close is expressed in caustic statements. For example, she explains her brother’s patriotic impulse to join the ranks of the White Guard by the fact that he did not complete his course at the gymnasium. Vladimir abstracts himself differently, drowning in passion for his wife, who, nevertheless, cheats on him with disarming straightforwardness. He's selling out expensive books, is sad, but does not find the strength to either break up with her or kill himself. The hero is afraid of losing this psychological shelter and follows his wife even when she buys socks for her lover.

It seems that our heroes do not care about the hunger of peasants and workers. Olga and Vladimir come into conflict with the Bolsheviks and communism, ignoring the political communique talking about critical situation in the domestic economy of their newly formed communist state. Equality, brotherhood, sacrifice, hunger, the destruction of the bourgeoisie - these are just a change of scenery to which it is necessary to adapt and with which it is desirable to get along. Otherwise, the “red” director will sweep you off the stage.

Our heroes, unencumbered by conscience and moral canons, live in parallel existing rules And tragic events. Contrast love line Olga and Vladimir and the unfortunate conjuncture of the political and economic situation sets the “tuning fork” of immorality throughout the novel. The revolution seems completely absurd. For example, the Bolsheviks take away Vladimir’s desk in order to fight “bourgeois prejudices” and place the mediocre Olga in a responsible position. All the heroic pathos of the struggle for the interests of the people is reduced to zero when Vladimir compares the aroma of revolution with the smells from the sewer. And, looking at how a drug dealer becomes a prominent industrialist under the new government, the reader understands how aptly the hero put it.

In the finale, Olga dies comically, shooting herself in the spine. She lies covered in blood and eats “drunken cherry” candies, given by her lover. Vladimir at first wishes her a pleasant journey, but later repents and blames himself. At the end of the story, the reader is struck by the feeling that nothing has changed since the death of this woman. An atmosphere of indifference consumed the author himself and his work.

“Cynics” can certainly be called the “north star” of Russian modernism. This novel, striking in its unshakable provocation and outright cynicism, without lies, will excite for centuries to come literary critics and delight readers.

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