The twentieth century bleeds in the book of confessions of Igor Svinarenko

Anna Berseneva, writer

In the annotation, this property of her is accurately called brutality, but it would be more correct to say that it is a reflection of the monstrous cruelty and roughness of life.

Reflection ... This word defines it very precisely. Only it should be further clarified: the mirror in which Russian life is reflected - both its modernity and history - is the author himself, Igor Svinarenko, who spent his childhood and adolescence in the Donbass, graduated from school with a medal, became a Germanist, translator, journalist - and never outlived in oneself that perception of life, in which everything that is rough, cruel, gloomy and terrible in it comes to the fore. Why is this so, why is he like this - this is exactly what Svinarenko is trying to figure out for almost five hundred pages. And none of the modern books, whether fictional or written in the genre of auto-fiction, has such a ruthless self-preparation. Since his relatives are naturally involved in this process, the author's clarification: “Everyone has already died, so you can talk about it,” does not look superfluous.

The idea that the sins of fathers influence the fate of children is, frankly, not new; it can be traced both in fictional sagas and in social studies. But for the first time it was said like this, on the forehead: look, all the mental deformities and vices that I find in myself, all the monstrous things that I did in my life, literally genetically follow from what the twentieth century, with its unredeemed crimes, did not turn abstract "fathers and grandfathers", and my own beloved grandfather, my father, my mother.

From the story of the life of his grandfather, who became a Chekist after the October Revolution and served in a special detachment, blood runs cold. It is the scenes of the KGB massacres with a detailed description of how exactly the “enemies” were executed that cause the greatest desire to close and forget this book. Is it any wonder that the descriptions of drunken orgies by the author-grandson are full of that very brutality, which, in fact, should be called harsher!

And the mother?

“Education, diplomas, careers - nothing could erase her worker-peasant nature from her mother. Which I also inherited. "

And what about the father who ended up in the occupied territory as a child of eight?

“Here is a hungry child. And dirty. He does not know how the war will end - and whether it will ever end at all. Where are Stalin, Lenin, the red banners and the invincible Red Army? Everything collapsed, as there was nothing. Deception, then, was all around! Now the main ones are the Germans. And ours with them are some pitiful beggars, right? Who are tolerated out of pity. With all due disgust. The father of this child is at the front. And people are being killed there! If I had been alive, I would have come and stood up for my own people. Yes, at least I would have fed. Oh, how many stories I have heard from mine about the return of my grandfather! Where is Odyssey going. "

The odyssey of my grandfather, despite the reservation of a person who had escaped from evacuation to the army, began with the fact that “before being sent to the front, the division was taken to tactical exercises. Frost 30 degrees. Several fighters fell behind and froze to death. The regiment commander remembered them before the formation:

- It's OK! This is just a screening out, at the expense of the weak. There won't be any sense from such at the front ...

The recruits listened to it in silence, they just thought about it, and that's it. What could they say?

Those who did not freeze went to the West to beat the German. "

The fact that his killer grandfather, just like Yegor Gaidar's grandfather, was eager to go to the front, of course, does not seem accidental to Igor Svinarenko:

“At some point it seemed to me that both grandfathers went to war to wash off the guilt from themselves. For that old blood of their own, which they shed in the 20s. The one that flowed out of the bodies of unarmed people shot by the Chekists. They, I suppose, wanted to justify themselves, in front of themselves - so no one touched them, did not blame them for it. Well, they killed, and okay, "it was such a time." But, you see, something gnawed at them from the inside. Both wanted to finally fight for real. Like a man. As warriors, not as punishers. Maybe that was why they were rushing to the front with such stubbornness? I think my grandfather was happy when he hit the German infantry with a machine gun. There is no place for doubts, remorse - everything is clear, direct and pure. Everything - according to the highest concepts. According to the Hamburg account. "

However, the author, with his usual ruthlessness, states: nothing was redeemed, the deeds of his grandfather live in his own genes. He feels and knows that he himself could shoot enemies. That he himself walks along a thin line separating health from insanity, into the abyss of which his brother fell.

“Maybe I was also mentally damaged, but in some mild form, hidden not only from people, but even - until a certain moment - from myself. And yes, if a person is completely moved, but does not show it - how does he differ from "normal"? Once I suddenly saw: many, but almost all strange acts, murders, betrayals, betrayals - are explained not by some mysterious reasons, but by ordinary mental illness. It was understood and described best of all by a person with a serious diagnosis - Dostoevsky. And, of course, in second place is Gogol".

Igor Svinarenko, of course, is not the first one who realized this terrible connection, and not his first "our dead seized and did not let to the living". Of the closest in essence and in time - Boris Ryzhiy, who is not in love with anyone and loved by no one (the nauseating sex in The Secret of Confession is immediately remembered) thinks at the grave of his Stalinist grandfather: “Long live life and boredom. Damn this happiness. Let the gait of the grandson be easier than that of the grandfather".

Ruthlessness towards himself allows Igor Svinarenko and no less merciless directness towards others. To Gorbachev, for example. When the author was serenely fishing near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, the secretary general was already aware of the radiation release that had caused many people to die of acute leukemia. From the very illness that later, without any visible connection with radiation, killed Raisa Maksimovna... It becomes uncomfortable from such directness.

But this book is generally written in such a way that it makes you feel very uncomfortable. The darkest side of life, its seamy side, its bottom appear on the pages. We are somehow used to referring the words "written in blood" to books that are inspiredly beautiful. Igor Svinarenko's "The Secret of Confession" bleeds like a piece of raw meat. Like the entire twentieth century, which the author managed to pass through himself in the literal sense of the word.