2022-10-20 22:43:48
With such data it is necessary to perform in the circus. Chagin spoke. On stage. To the applause of the public, he reproduced any sequence of numbers up to banknote numbers. No deception, everything is real – Chagin never forgot anything at all. That’s why he suffered. His gift has always been his curse. At one time, understandable authorities became interested in the student’s talents and decided to use the mnemonist as a living voice recorder. Thaw after thaw, and these intellectuals need an eye and an eye.
True, their own conscience turned out to be worse than the special officers. Times change, folders in special departments are lost, and Chagin remembered all his mistakes, losses, insults as if they had just happened. All people, like people, train their memory in order to remember important things. Chagin spent his whole life learning to forget. He obviously got his last name from a mushroom that grows on birch trees. For a tree, this is a kind of tumor, and at the same time, it is believed that chaga cures human cancer (as Solzhenitsyn wrote about in Cancer Ward). So is Chagin’s absolute memory. When is the cure, and when is the trouble.
Evgeny Vodolazkin is constantly changing genres and eras. The last novel, The Justification of the Island, was in places a dystopian Time.news. Only the writer’s interest in unique characters and the problems of memory remains unchanged. A huge success, as well as the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana awards, was brought to Vodolazkin by the book Laurus, the life of a medieval herbalist who, after the death of his beloved woman, feels guilty and lives to atone for sins. In “Chagin” the collision in general terms seems to be similar. There is lost love, there is sin and there is redemption, only the time of action is our recent past (last events dated spring 2018).
This time, Vodolazkin partly shared his profession with the main character. He himself is a leading researcher at the Pushkin House. And Chagin, having finished his career as a pop mnemonist, began working in an unnamed St. Petersburg archive. The archivist spends half of his life in the reading room for documents – a less adventurous profession still needs to be looked for. But even this stage of the Chagin biography Vodolazkin described surprisingly vividly, with appropriate drama (and the “archival subculture”, let’s say, rarely gets into the pages of fiction). Genuine intelligent (and intelligent) prose – the amusement of the text is provided not so much by attractions as by soft humor, the accuracy of characters, the accuracy of the phrase.
Book cover /Publishing house AST
Romanesque architecture resembles a cathedral. Light, directed upwards, with internal rhymes and rows of repeating arches. Evgeny Vodolazkin does not hide the fact that he is a believer, but he does not emphasize this once again. So it is in Chagin – they don’t talk about religious topics, they don’t remember God once again, but the cunning plot construction itself transparently hints at some higher plan, not quite clear to the characters at first.
Fate constantly confronts Chagin with the legacy of Heinrich Schliemann, the famous discoverer of Troy – the legendary city, which in ancient times was besieged by the Achaean men. It was in the Schlimann’s circle of intellectuals that the special officers sent Chagin – like a Trojan horse. And it was in that circle that he found his love – not Elena, but Vera. And later, it was Schliemann’s correspondence that Chagin was allowed to process in the archive – the German had a business in Tsarist Russia and, in general, our country is not a completely alien character.
It is Schliemann who acts as the antipode of Chagin – as a role model, whom a modest mnemonist-archivist would like to be like. And not because Schliemann, unlike the armchair scientist, lived an active, truly adventurous life. And not because he lied with inspiration, embellishing reality, at every opportunity. The self-taught archaeologist became the object of Chagin envy for the simple reason that he lived a dream. After all, he found that very Troy by the most anti-scientific method, ignoring the ridicule of real scientists. Namely, he took the legend brought to us by Homer as a description of real events. A childhood dream made him dig where no one thought to look for treasure.
Vodolazkin is an authoritative scientist and, logically, should be a champion of facts and strict scientific methods. But the novel shows that some kind of youthful romance in the spirit of Greene is no less characteristic of him. It is significant that it is generally difficult to find “real”, real facts in the text. The personality of Chagin (a living voice recorder!) is revealed following the example of Citizen Kane – through the subjective stories of his acquaintances. Yes, the title character kept a very detailed diary, but that was stolen, and we get only a retelling. Again – in someone else’s performance. Chagin’s direct speech will sound only closer to the finale, and then in the form of a poem, written, of course, in hexameter in the spirit of Homer. Paradoxically, Vodolazkin argues, dreams and fantasies say more about a person than his actions.
The author of “Chagin” is professionally engaged in ancient Russian chronicles, but does not aspire to chronicler writers – it is no coincidence that the action ends before the pandemic and all subsequent fateful events. And this should be appreciated – in Russia, it seems, there are almost no popular writers left who so unobtrusively offer to think about the enduring.
#Chagin #memory #love