Blowing his light fan: a provincial poet in search of his Homeland
The first published novel by Eduard Limonov, the manuscript of which was long considered lost, was written in Paris in 1986 and tells about the initial stage of the conquest of the capital by the poet who moved from Kharkov. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Eduard Limonov
Moscow Mayskaya
M. : Alpina non-fiction, 2025. — 414 p.
In principle, the events of "Moscow in May" allow us to specify even the exact date (May 18-20, 1969). But, of course, the action takes place rather in the inner personal chronotope of an already grown-up and accomplished writer, who looks at himself as a 26-year-old, sometimes with paternal tenderness ("How quickly our hero grows, how briskly he develops"), sometimes with subtle irony ("Our advanced, newly arrived poet from the provinces, as we have already mentioned he sided with the most advanced schools of surrealism and pop art"), but in any case, without false modesty, although on various occasions he repeatedly calls himself an "idiot."
By the way, Limonov quotes a rather large piece from Heinrich Sapgir's poem "Parade of Idiots", which he happened to listen to performed by the author, worrying about his own performance. "Moscow Mayskaya" is generally similar in places to a poetic slam, where the lyrical hero always makes you feel the atmosphere of competition and jealously compares himself with competitors: "He had to read after Genryusha, which did not please him, since the provincial recognized him as a strong and skilled opponent."
Various poetic authorities, from Arseny Tarkovsky to Alexander Galich, pass before the inquisitive gaze of young Ed (he sometimes defines himself as a "young" poet, compared to the mastodons inhabiting Moscow) in order to be bizarrely reflected in his mockingly sparkling glasses, which give the lyrical hero a deceptive appearance: "Since the spring of 1967, the young man has become wearing glasses in public places and on the streets, and glasses gave his appearance a certain harmlessness, which glasses usually convey to a puny young man." There are many such verbal self—portraits in Moscow in May, and they contain a mixture of self-irony and tenderness for himself: "A long-haired pale young man in a shiny black suit at the elbows and knees is a poet in the heroic period of his life." The adult Limonov seems surprised that the beginner Limonov was able to adapt to this life at all, where the individualist faces a difficult task — to preserve "his warm and beautiful self."
This warm Limonov self, which looks like a newborn puppy (and as many as eight such puppies appear in the most sentimental and touching scene of the novel), for all its hatred of the social and collective, nevertheless feels the need to get somewhere, because otherwise it will not survive. That is why the lyrical hero goes to Moscow, fascinated by the illusions that he will be able to find friends and like-minded people among the members of the SMOG literary association: "Seduced by the waves of rumors and legends still rolling across the country, picturesquely telling about thousands of readings by smogists on Mayakovsky Square, in the Lenin library, about their unheard-of audacity, who included them in the a list of literary corpses, even fashionable then among the Soviet intelligentsia of Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, and our provincial came to Moscow."
Limonov mercilessly mocks his youthful weak-willed desire to keep warm in the poetry collective of 1986: "Finally, he will join the most advanced youth of his country. It will finally end up in warm and well-watered soil." But despite the longing for friendly warmth, the poetic helplessness of the famous metropolitan "smogists", corrupted by Pasternak's influence, quickly becomes apparent through provincial lemon glasses. "A large volume of Pasternak's poems in the Poet's Library series was published in 1965. With a preface by Prof. Sinyavsky. In the same year, Prof. Sinyavsky was arrested, and the volume jumped in price. The blue, hard-to-reach volume made a disastrous impression on the soft young souls of the Smogists. Pasternak, with the help of Sinyavsky, seduced their generation. The poems of most smogists resemble a cross between a herbarium determinant of plants in central Russia and a manual on entertaining meteorology. Wax drips profusely from candles, shoes or other ballet paraphernalia endlessly fall under thunderstorms, thunderstorms, downpours, snowstorms, floods and other tear-jerking natural phenomena..."
Students of the Gorky Literary Institute during a break between lectures
This contradictory desire to integrate into some kind of community, in order to immediately decompose it into its components and make sure that it does not suit you, is the emotional and philosophical nerve of the "Moscow of May". It is interesting not only as a portrait of an epoch and a certain literary milieu, but also as the view of an individualist who has climbed into the very heart of his Homeland, Russia, and feels that he is also a stranger here, a "black sheep" (which, however, is only proud of its scab). In the middle of the novel, there is a very cinematic "travelogue" that could become an ornament to a biopic about Limonov, because it vividly conveys not only the lyrical hero's attitude to Moscow and Russia, but also the very quintessence of Limonov's worldview, which loves extreme points: either from the bottom or from a bird's-eye view, but not from the average level of human gaze.
The provincial poet begins his conceptual voyage through Moscow with an argument that mocks the vulgarity of the tourist approach: "He did not feel that Moscow was the capital of our Homeland for quite a long time. I knew it was, but I didn't feel it. From the very first day, he should have gone, as ordinary people do, to visit the Kremlin, get closer to the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell, wander by the rotten Moskva River, go to Zagorsk, look at the faces of icons, and even - why not - go underground to the Mausoleum, look at the embalmed leader the tribe. After all, it is these seemingly vulgar postcard vulgarities that elevate Moscow into the capital of the Union of Soviet States, All Russia."
Further searches for his Homeland lead "Eduard, who does not remember his kinship," to GUM, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Eliseevsky Deli ("where coffee and herring smelled good"), the Central Market on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, where the aesthetically sensitive poet meticulously chooses which of these locations can be recognized as part of his Homeland, and which is not It holds up.
Red Square in the evening of 1986, Moscow
Having found himself at some point in the hilly Kremlin and having examined the "famous bell", which looks "like a Buddhist stupa", as well as the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, which is about to fall like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the impressionable provincial suddenly takes off from Red Square "on an imaginary instantaneous aircraft (something like a helicopter, but moving at the speed of imagination)." and during the battle of the chimes, he manages to fly around the whole of Russia, marveling at its size.: "Big," he thought, —how big!" And he realized that he was thinking about her —the country, but not the Homeland. In the big one, it's uncomfortable, powerful, and scary. If she were small, she would be closer to me. So, what should I do? Live with all of it? It is good and easy for a resident of the principalities of Luxembourg or Andorra. And with this one... Carry around this whole collection of mineralogies, reliefs, and climatology. And there are so many landscapes!"
The last Moscow landscape, presented already in the epilogue, is a television picture: "Moscow? The Kremlin's chocolate cake is still standing in a clearing on the riverbank. The author saw it from tivi," sneers Parisian cosmopolitan Limonov, who in 1986 had not yet foreseen that Moscow would give him the last shelter.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
