What a bug: how the Crimean ground beetle returned to Russia
Popular writer Pavel Krusanov has released a long-awaited collection of new short stories. The book of the week is presented by the critic Lidiya Maslova, especially for Izvestia.
Pavel Krusanov
"To the death of Araucaria"
Moscow : AST Publishing House : Edited by Elena Shubina, 2026. 250 p.
The most philosophical of the nine short stories that made up Pavel Krusanov's new collection is placed at the end and is called "The Third Beetle." In it, the writer talks with hunting passion about his collection of beetles and what it cost him to get three cherished ground beetles — Crimean, shiny and, finally, shagreen, described with special tenderness: "elegant, thin at the waist, matte, with wrinkled wings, really reminiscent of the texture of shagreen." Of course, the ground beetle with shagreen skin immediately evokes associations with Balzac's famous work about the vanity of human desires. Krusanov's reasoning clearly resonates with him, a little saddened that he never managed to catch the brilliant ground beetle with his own hands: "Well, not all of our desires are destined to come true. In this state of affairs, one can also find solace — in the end, fulfilling our desires, we lose them. But happiness, as you know, does not consist in the fulfillment of desires and not in their humility, but in their very presence."
Beetles, these "coleoptera seraphim", generally take Krusanov quite far from purely entomological subjects. For example, the story of the Crimean ground beetle has geopolitical and economic implications when the author complains that there were more than two dozen companies in the Ukrainian Crimea that supplied Crimean ground beetle larvae to restaurants in Paris and the Mediterranean Riviera, thereby endangering the population of one of the largest beetles on the planet: "It was not easy to look at it calmly. opportunities. In the summer of 2005, St. Petersburg fundamentalists, after returning from a trip to Southern Crimea, formed the government of the Crimean ground beetle in exile. <...> Less than ten years later, our work yielded results: the Crimean ground beetle returned to Russia with Crimea, avoiding the risk of extermination and having the opportunity to develop freely and reproduce fearlessly, regardless of gastronomic preferences Of the European Union".
Krusanov recalls his colleague in the St. Petersburg Fundamentalists literary group, the philosopher Alexander Sekatsky, at the beginning of The Third Beetle, referring to his work The Last Round of Progress. Picking up Sekatsky's ideas about the rebirth of man from a transcendent subject into a humaton (a benevolent and serene inhabitant of the social matrix, similar to Forrest Gump), Krusanov states that the process of modern anthropogenesis is associated with an increase in the degree of unsophisticated emotion in people: "... social networks are drowned in a stream of photos and videos of cats, raccoons, puppies and other soft toys, and among the young shoots, ideological veganism and gentle greening of views are gaining momentum from year to year." To this sluggish and lazy herbivorous emotion, Krusanov contrasts the love of a fisherman and a hunter for prey, which ignites the blood and causes a heart flutter, quite "different from the one generated by the video with a cat acting up with horror at the sight of a cucumber — much more thorough and authentic." From the gambling thrusts of hot blood that woodcocks and ducks evoke in the avid hunter Krusanov, he moves on to even more inspiring beetles endowed with "non—human beauty," to which, in his opinion, the key concept of the practitioner and fine art theorist Pavel Filonov is applicable - "a done thing."
There is, of course, a great deal of subjectivity in Krusan's arguments about which of God's creatures can be considered a "made thing" in the Philonian sense, and who is not too worthy of it: "... beetles, wasps, butterflies and snakes are made things, because due to chitin and scales they are beautiful in every detail even through magnifying glasses, but a raccoon or a slobbery mastiff does not. Just like a human being." The writer is absolutely ruthless towards his own biological species: "The details of him, the person, all these pores, hairs and moles, are terrible — a person fails in the details, so it's always a bit embarrassing to look at him thoroughly. That's probably why we rely on some additional inner beauty all the time." In general, we have to admit that a person, developing Philo's terminology, is an unfinished thing, clearly far from the perfection inherent in a beetle or butterfly, so it can be difficult to enjoy meeting him if you still do not learn to see the notorious "inner beauty" in him.
But, strangely enough, there is no misanthropy in such a Crusan approach, because all these slightly Nietzschean observations fall on the reader after eight quite humane, witty and touching stories. Just as Sekatsky in "The Last Round of Progress", mercilessly exposing the soulless humaton, seems to come to terms with him a little by the end, so Krusanov still loves a person in his own way (even as a hunter of prey), despite all his "unfinished work", which is too difficult not to be ironic. In the first, title story, "To the Death of Araucaria," the fanatical attachment of a resident of Gatchina, Valentina Ivanovna, to her cozy old house with a carefully cultivated backyard, which tragically contradicts her husband Nikolai Andreevich's dreams of distant wanderings, may seem comical. He can only console himself by pasting "pictures of extraordinary places" into the album, which he timidly He dreams of seeing it someday. Decorating their house along with many other araucaria plants in a tub, the "coniferous beauty from the celestial Andes", which performs the functions of a Christmas tree on New Year's Eve, becomes a symbol of longing for the impossible, as well as the extremity of all living things. However, for the metaphysician Krusanov, the end of biological existence does not mean the final ending at all, and in the story about araucaria, Nikolai Andreevich gets a very original way to fulfill his dreams, which seemed "crazy" to his wife.
An impossible dream leads the hero of the saddest story, "The Kingdom of God," through life. His character "with special needs", Arkhip, vividly illustrates the idea of human "imperfection", starting from childhood: "... little Arkhip's thoughts were characterized by slowness, his dough-like stomach had loose folds, his movements were slow, like a diver's, his hands looked like half-baked buns, and his fingers were disobedient." Nevertheless, such a creature has an inherent desire for happiness, even if it is fatal, as for a moth flying into the fire, to which Arkhip Krusanov compares: "Arkhip was like a moth. He metamorphosed and came out of the chrysalis with the sole purpose of finding the one he wanted and dancing the crowning dance with her."
Love themes and gender relations somehow run through all the stories in the collection, taking the most humorous turn in the story "Nervous". His hero is a student who has long dreamed of a married first beauty in the course, suddenly spends an evening full of alcoholic adventures with her, turning into a night full of emotional excesses, but only to feel the existential unattainability of dreams and feel like a natural bastard.
Student love takes on a dramatic turn in the story "About Happiness", where the hero and his beloved are ruined, on the contrary, by the inability to become the ultimate bastard in the surrounding evil and bastard world. The theme of desires, their fulfillment and rejection, whether forced or voluntary, which is important for the entire collection, develops here in a drunken, and therefore especially sincere, conversation between the hero and a friend about the inaccessibility of happiness to a person, even when his most cherished desires are fulfilled: "After all, we are banished from there, from the abode of grace, to that world where She's gone. It is not surprising that devastation and longing overwhelm us every time we achieve a goal..." And yet this sad conversation ends with Pascal's comforting idea that "the discrepancy between man's best aspirations and the structure of the world into which he has been cast is the true confirmation of the existence of God," and Krusanov's book ends with a completely optimistic With a fatherly parting words: "Be persistent in your extravagances and persistent in your eccentricities, children, and then perhaps heaven will kiss you for your folly."
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