A hunch of war or a time of painful choice Automatic translate

MOSCOW. The publishing house AST has released a new book by Dmitry Bykov “June”.

The epigraph to Dmitry Bykov’s new book could be Gorky’s words about the impossibility of understanding the meaning of the present without knowing the past. The heroes of “June” come from the troubled years that preceded the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. But to the readers of the present day their thoughts and anxieties are understandable and frighteningly close. To a greater extent than we would like.

The parallels that arise in the assessment of the two shifting epochs spaced in time were also discussed in Bykov’s conversation with the observer of the BBC Russian Service back in 2015. On the need, resorting in part to the language of Aesop, recall the tragic lessons of history, its cyclical nature. About the atmosphere in which military rhetoric is more attractive than the natural desire for a decent life.

All conditions have been created for choosing the first option; it is not difficult to choose it. Believe in your own infallibility and the existence of a certain convincing “but” that takes away freedom and crosses out the biography of other people. A similar approach was "diligently raised in the last five years - and educated."

The second option requires considerable courage and many years of incredible creative effort. Practically “Sisyphus labor”. Without guarantees and hopes to take advantage of its fruits. Bykov considers literature a panacea that allows suffering to be experienced only in theory, cured of the justification and deification of war. The only, in his opinion, enlightenment available at the moment that can withstand ignorance and obscurantism is enlightenment.

The heroes of each of the three parts of the novel live in an atmosphere of constantly impending war. They frighten her, dedicate plays and songs to her, "all this Big Day." Someone as IFLI student Misha (poet David Samoilov became his prototype), to whom the first part is devoted, they try to speak on this subject with irony. Or to be silent at all, remembering the materiality of the uttered thoughts that can bring the bottomless zero closer.

For others, this time is doubly dramatic. The emotional crisis of the hero of the second part - the journalist Boris Gordon - is caused by the feeling of impending disaster, and the collapse of hopes in a country immersed in a quagmire of repression and denunciations, painful collisions in his personal life. The image of his beloved is inspired in many ways by the tragic story of Ariadne Efron.

In the writer Krastyshevsky, who dreams of preventing a war and compiles coded reports for Stalin, the discerning reader will recognize the writer, playwright, philosopher Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky. He is called the “missed genius,” whose works were hardly published during his lifetime.

The novel "June" is also about the great generation, which included Samoilov, and Narovchatov, and Kogan, and Trifonov, and Okudzhava. Generation "beaten with iron" and revived the country in peacetime.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru