Vladimir Sorokin's new novel: to whom and what a genius owes

Alina Vitukhnovskaya

For a genius writer who has overtaken time both ethically and stylistically, in the richness and concentration of meanings, who has surpassed not all, but a significant part of Russian classics at once, it is quite enough to publish a novel in a few years. Or you may not publish it at all.

People have no idea how torturous, how incredible work, ideas are nurtured. Looking from the outside at a genius, at a great personality, the current layman, at best, will suspect him of procrastination. After all, he prefers speed to meaning, he needs a picture, clip, book, released once a month (year). But greatness doesn't work for rating. Although it can shape it (commercial greatness). Of course, the compiler of the rating in the current social hierarchy is higher than the one who gets into this rating (servants, cultural breaks).

By the way, creativity is the opposite of genius, a kind of publicly approved pseudo-intellectual neurosis. A year for an album - this is to the new Soviet singer Zemfira. Yes, and she is lazy. Geniuses, like “writers in law”, owe nothing to anyone.

It is not at all clear whether such a phenomenon as the Great Russian Novel is possible and whether Her Majesty Russian Literature is still alive? If she is alive, then not as a phenomenon within the framework of the literary process, but only in the person of individuals.

Who is a modern fashion writer? First of all, this is not a catcher of “people”, but of trends. It is in this that Sorokin differs from the current Russian writers and especially poets who are stuck in modernity and socialist realism. With those and not at all sweet. Demonstrative anguish, attempts to pretend to be Tsvetaeva, as one network poet does. It looks monstrously ridiculous, because people do not understand how hopelessly they are outdated. They absolutely do not feel time, falling out of reality almost completely. That is why they so actively get lost in articles, groups, organizations and even parties, literally stealing modernity from us, replacing it with a paid pro-naphthalene statist agenda.

And modern trends are quite eclectic. And the youth reflects them best of all. So, for example, the daughter of Mikhail Efremov, Anna-Maria (her new name is Sergey), decided to monetize her fate, immediately realizing the hypocritical grin of show business. She recently stated:

“At the show, Sobchak leaned over to me and said:“ I understand you and I realize that you are suffering. I treat you like a friend. " But here's what I thought at that moment: “Nothing of the kind! You're trying to make money! You and I will not see each other again after this program. Please get away from me. "

Efremov's daughter is a kind of hysterical half-Hamlet. Where an attempt to change sex means rather asexuality. Demonstrative sexuality is asexuality. Shocking is non-existence. Good revenge on careless irresponsible parents.

A kind of antagonist of Efremov's daughter was the modern pop singer Billie Eilish, who deliberately emphasized not her gender ambiguity, but, on the contrary, fell into excessive femininity. Everyone scolds infantilism, but in vain. Infantilism is eternal youth. Something sad is happening with glamor , and not only with Russian (there is generally hell), but also with the world.

It seems that body positivity and the new socialism undermined his foundations, his self-confidence. On the cover of Billie Eilish's “Vogue,” she was crumbled with lolitism, it was as if she was forcibly dressed up as a woman (stiff, in Russian). Well, deliberate sexuality in our lukewarm times already looks like carnival and even freakishness. What does this cover tell us? Never grow up! The woman is the grave.

If socialist realism and modernity revolved around the "man" as a humanistic fiction, then the darkness of postmodernism produces fuzzy glare and post-information flashes. Therefore, both Anna Maria and Billie Eilish look a little strange, but at the same time they are very similar, because they are in the same mental stream. Sorokin is also located there, having issued a literary-glamorous, fashionable, high-quality text. But his critics, who demand "moral conclusions", imperatives and even a "better novel" than before, are still in the paradigm of the irrelevant. That is, literally, in reality they do not exist.

The pseudo-liberal public here is surprisingly promiscuous. She does not understand boundaries, hierarchies, correspondences, they have completely lost the sense of the actual. Which, in my opinion, is the main political factor. From personal communication to the public sphere.

They, like a small spruce of the family-clan oligarchy, practically completely copying the vertical of power, overgrown with the mycelium of thug servants, existed in symbiosis with the system exactly until it merged them into oblivion. That is, until today. Now this whole environment is showing us depression instead of a political agenda. Because, in essence, they did not have a political agenda. There was only pushing their own people under the stupid brands about nothing - like “Beautiful Russia of the Future”.

Bad taste, omnivorousness and complete misunderstanding of the moment can be judged by the recent birthday of "Rain", from which Pavel Lobkov was expelled shortly before, but Maria Baronova was invited to the holiday!

Zinaida Pronchenko wrote a wonderful post about this event. It contains the entire recent history of Russia in ten sentences:

“After Dolphin, an entertainer started from Dozhd employees of different generations. They said understandable things: women are also people, migrants should be tipped, Russia will be happy. A video with Galina Starovoitova and Elena Bonner and Yulia Navalnaya was shown on the backdrop. They also said understandable things - no need to be afraid, they shot everyone, they won't strangle us, they won't kill us. "

Pushing Yulia Navalnaya like a Sisyphean stone following the victims (!) - for example, Starovoitova, is sadism, vulgarity, and stupidity in one bottle.

I will end my article with one more quote from Zinaida:

“And lie in the grave, preferably in silence, and not to the songs of Dolphin. The grave is not a common one. Not with Tikhon Dzyadko, he is no one to me and not even a matchmaker. It was raining outside, not in the hall. And there is, in principle, nothing romantic about this rain. Will Russia be happy? Will not be? Russia is tired of it. Fuck her. And here are some, even many of us, as if in trouble".