Anna Berseneva
In the new book, consisting of two stories, "Draftsman" and "Sugar Demon" (M.: Floberium / RUGRAM. 2022), Valery Bochkov retained and even strengthened the main quality of his prose: passion.
The lukewarmness that is deadly for art is definitely not about him. Literally everything is heated in his prose - the characters, the relationship between the characters, the plot.
The plot intensity appears on the very first page of The Draftsman, and the initial dryness of the style only sets it off:
“The revolver was sold to me by Terletsky. Brought in the morning. He didn't take off his clothes and went straight to the kitchen. He also refused tea, saying that he was in a hurry. We sat opposite each other - he in a raincoat, I in a terry dressing gown. Outside the window, the Moscow sky was gray, the middle of July looked like a dead November. Summer ended before it even started.
The plot dynamics grows with each page, but with each page it attracts less and less attention. Because another fire grows and flares up from the plot - sensuality, which permeates the whole story. Assessing what happened to him when he saw his new neighbor Wanda sunbathing naked on the neighboring balcony of an elite Moscow house, the main character, the artist, understands: “For her sake, I could kill a person. Anyone. Without asking or thinking. I understand it sounds trite. It sounds silly and even stupid. I will try to explain, and first of all to myself: my condition can only be classified as insanity. The quintessence of madness was the complete denial of myself not only as a thinking being, but also as an animal - my most rudimentary reflexes atrophied. And first of all, the reflex of self-preservation.
The atrophy of this reflex just leads him into a situation in which he is forced to buy weapons - fortunately, passion overtook him just at the time of gangster initial accumulation, when it became not difficult to get a revolver in Russia. However, the hero in every possible way denies the connection of his personal history with the history of the country. In his opinion, it’s like “studying astronomy from Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and the cartography of hell from Dante’s poems.” But as soon as the reader is ready to agree that the hero’s personal path is above all worldly things, as an honest Amsterdam prostitute demonstrates a completely different view of the crime he committed for the sake of either crazy love or crazy lust: “You can’t even now see what happened in a true, real light! You have a chronic form of narcissistic infantilism!” And this is true, and every act of an artist in love is evidence of this...
But this is not the whole truth. And the key word here: artist. Slowly, at first not clearly, but with each page, the subtle background of what is happening comes through more and more clearly... deeper. This is what the beautiful islander, with whom fate brings him, tells him with lively frankness: “When you draw, Ogu-Sangu looks through your eyes. It penetrates me and makes my blood thick and hot." And then a conjecture arises: perhaps it was not passion - physical, almost animal - that owned the Moscow artist, but he owned it, or rather, created it in the same way as his paintings, being himself part of a much larger plan?
“Life appears to us as a confusion of accidents only because we cannot or do not want to see the logic of events. Or are we afraid? After all, if you look at the symbols and signs, realize the harmony of the intricate patterns of fate, humbly accept the inevitability of the future - not resisting accepting, but with joy - what could be happier and more honorable than to become a particle of the majestic plan of a brilliant creator? Become a fragment of a divine canvas, like that angel inscribed by the young Leonardo in Verrocchio's canvas.
That is why the mysticism that appears in the finale and gives the plot denouement to the “Drafter” surprises just as little as the revolver that appeared at the beginning and gave this story a plot twist.
Mystical phenomena in general are a natural part of Valery Bochkov's texts; they are woven into realistic plots in the same way as realistic details of everyday life. In the story “Sugar Demon”, the hero, having learned about the death of his childhood friend, recalls him, drawing his own psychological portrait: “Now is the main thing. Yes, there was one more nuance. A nuance that I didn’t even want to think about was the realization of my own worthlessness. The illusory nature of success, the imitation of meaning, the simulation of being. Of course, this idea has surfaced before, but I quite successfully managed to convince myself of its nonsense. The existential question was replaced by a far-fetched fact - a broken contract, a financial failure, a scandal, a hangover, or just a bad mood. Dymov's death made the fact of my worthlessness official. I'll try to explain. Dymov was born with trump cards in his hands, and so am I. Only now my suit turned out to be so-so - a trifle, sixes-sevens, Dymov had all aces. With his disappearance, not only future goals lost their meaning, the entire path traveled suddenly turned out to be doubtful: I was going the wrong way, and I was walking the wrong way, and I chose the wrong fellow travelers. The thought took shape and quietly crept into my brain: the loafer and drunkard Dymov lived his life simpler and more honestly - more correctly than me.
This worldly and psychological explanation looks exhaustive until the real explanation is given by an invisible otherworldly interlocutor, whose voice first appears in the smartphone, and in the finale sounds for the hero both outside the gadget and outside of consciousness:
“It is not necessary to understand, but to feel! And you strangled your soul like a canary. She suffocated and died—your poor soul! How can you feel without a soul? No way! How can a deaf person hear the sound of the wind? How can a blind man see clouds? But you learned to touch, you learned to own, but this is the road to nowhere: no matter how much you get, you will not be enough. Few, never enough! You could become a bird, but you became a mole. You have been a corpse for a long time, you hate yourself, you yearn for the end! Waiting for it!
The screaming made my ears ring.
I interrupted her:
- And you?
- And me - I am performing an act of mercy”.
The passion that permeates Bochkov's stories is the very material that holds together all their levels - plot, psychological, existential. That is why the author allows her to rage on every page.