About the work
(A review for a magazine. 2008.)
Putting personal records on display is a perfectly worthy tradition. Once upon a time, Dostoevsky's "A Writer's Diary" came out as a separate journal, or Rilke's "Florentine Diary," written in one breath. In the era of "live journals," it costs a writer dearly to be lazy. DE I attempts to analyze how and where a writer's real life intersects with blogging.
Media figures — Grishkovets, Lukyanenko, or Erofeev — are slightly off-format material for our review: they no longer have the time to cast pearls of unpaid words. We need someone in a borderline state: read, valued, but not adored.
Let's start with Alexander Ilichevsky, winner of the 2007 Booker for "Matisse" — a theological-epic novel about the lives of the homeless. Alexander's journal is rather tight-fisted, hermetic, as they say, i.e. addressed more to the narrow circle of those interested in Ilichevsky himself. Snobbish LJ users call such creative work "lytdybr." But despite the innocent self-admiration, the Booker laureate occasionally treats the reader to a full-fledged short story or article (apparently previously underrated by publishers and the public). But don't demand too much of the smiling intellectual. Better yet — don't demand anything at all. A quiet kitchen conversation about nothing will suffice, or more precisely about God, Russia, fate, and death. Alexander will inspire you with the very best, the most tender, touching, and ardent in Russian literature: Tolstoy, Bunin, Nabokov, and so on. How did "Matisse" grow out of this? What did it absorb? One wants to say: Sorokin's blue lard, but no… a blue little haze. Incorporeal — as when smoking: you inhale and exhale. In the end, God is a "dead end" (the conclusion from Bunin's "Dark Avenues"), while Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot" is filled with "the flesh of sacred emptiness." The flight of thought is pleasant and relaxed in this atmosphere of rarefied verbal air.
Lev Usyskin's "Bulletin Board" is an example of strict and spare functionality. At a cursory glance, Usyskin comes across as a dry stick and a bore, but with a little more curiosity — and you will learn that Lev Borisovich is the author of a most unusual
Putting personal records on display is a perfectly worthy tradition. Once upon a time, Dostoevsky's "A Writer's Diary" came out as a separate journal, or Rilke's "Florentine Diary," written in one breath. In the era of "live journals," it costs a writer dearly to be lazy. DE I attempts to analyze how and where a writer's real life intersects with blogging.
Media figures — Grishkovets, Lukyanenko, or Erofeev — are slightly off-format material for our review: they no longer have the time to cast pearls of unpaid words. We need someone in a borderline state: read, valued, but not adored.
Let's start with Alexander Ilichevsky, winner of the 2007 Booker for "Matisse" — a theological-epic novel about the lives of the homeless. Alexander's journal is rather tight-fisted, hermetic, as they say, i.e. addressed more to the narrow circle of those interested in Ilichevsky himself. Snobbish LJ users call such creative work "lytdybr." But despite the innocent self-admiration, the Booker laureate occasionally treats the reader to a full-fledged short story or article (apparently previously underrated by publishers and the public). But don't demand too much of the smiling intellectual. Better yet — don't demand anything at all. A quiet kitchen conversation about nothing will suffice, or more precisely about God, Russia, fate, and death. Alexander will inspire you with the very best, the most tender, touching, and ardent in Russian literature: Tolstoy, Bunin, Nabokov, and so on. How did "Matisse" grow out of this? What did it absorb? One wants to say: Sorokin's blue lard, but no… a blue little haze. Incorporeal — as when smoking: you inhale and exhale. In the end, God is a "dead end" (the conclusion from Bunin's "Dark Avenues"), while Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot" is filled with "the flesh of sacred emptiness." The flight of thought is pleasant and relaxed in this atmosphere of rarefied verbal air.
Lev Usyskin's "Bulletin Board" is an example of strict and spare functionality. At a cursory glance, Usyskin comes across as a dry stick and a bore, but with a little more curiosity — and you will learn that Lev Borisovich is the author of a most unusual
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