Who knows what Amalia is thinking about read. Konstantin Speransky "Who knows what Amalia is thinking about?" Novel “Zuleikha opens her eyes”

Konstantin Speransky “Who knows what Amalia is thinking about?”

I won’t beat around the bush, I’ll say right away: I still don’t understand what it is. It doesn't look like a novel, it doesn't look like a diary. I ate and drank, went there, talked to that one, slept with that one. This is not literature. Simply a shorthand account of the events that occurred. And if you consider that under one cover there are two completely unrelated fragments, then there are even more questions. “Who knows what Amalia is thinking?” - is it one whole in two parts or two different texts? Is the hero in both parts the same person or are we facing different people? Again, I didn't understand. But, to be honest, I wasn’t too upset. Is it worth looking into? Is there at least some meaning and intent in the text? The first fragment was probably supposed to be something like a story about first love. But the psychological component remains behind the scenes, and apart from the general feeling that thematically it should be about an irrational, incomprehensible feeling for a certain A. (Amalia?), nothing else remains. Whether this feeling is real, or just a craving and habit for one body and not another, how it is expressed, how much it touches the hero, we will never know, because love remains, in fact, something unconscious, undisclosed , unclear both to himself and to the author.

Not only do we not find out what A., whose name is apparently included in the title, is thinking, the hero himself remains for us something faded and inexpressive. We can talk about what he does, what films he watches, what books he reads, what circles he moves in, how he spends his leisure time and what he does at work. But all this says nothing about the hero essentially. Before us is just a mannequin with certain characteristics. Considering him as a real person writing something like a diary is also not possible. For a novel it is too poorly outlined, for a diary it is not convincing enough, sincere, factual, it has too much regard for the viewer.

In "Who Knows What Amalia Is Thinking?" there is no literature as such. The second fragment of the book only confirms this. If in the first part it was still possible to guess at least some theme, here it is not set at all. It is a vague and incoherent episode from life, an unprocessed pile of material, perhaps of a biographical nature, of interest to the psychologist or sociologist, but not to the critic or reader. This fact in itself best speaks of the inconsistency of Speransky’s text. There is nothing to dissect and analyze in it, there is nothing to argue with or agree with, there are no ideas in it, it does not evoke any emotions. Some words, some information about the boy Kostya, who is enrolling in philology, but in reality he’s just hanging out with his friends. That's all that can be said.

The only positive aspect of Speransky's text is that it gives a reason to talk about what literature is, where it ends and where it begins. Now it is fashionable to talk about documentary prose, autobiography, and the blogger element in prose. But both, and the other, and the third require a certain effort, skill, skill, some kind of ingenuity. All these are made, rationally constructed texts. To sit down and just throw out words, directly collecting impressions from your own not very bright life - this does not mean writing a book.

Yes, it is impossible to write like Tolstoy in our time, but this statement is as obvious as “Horses eat oats.” Rejection of the old form does not mean that all content should be discarded along with it.

Individual experience and simple empirical descriptions of events are not of particular interest to the reader. I don’t know who would need to read endless “I went”, “she went”, and who else would pay for it. The book should contain living people and significant events. Something has to happen in the book. Not in the sense of spatial movement, processes of food absorption and sexual intercourse, but in the sense of movement and development of characters, changes in reality. The emptiness and grayness of the world captured in the text should be the result of creative efforts, and not evidence of the faded and poor perception of the author himself. The book requires a certain maturity and life experience from the author. In "Who Knows What Amalia Is Thinking?" you don't feel it. The text seems to have been written by an overgrown teenager who decided to write down on paper everything he had managed to remember. But from teenage prose you expect at least sincerity and freshness. Here everything is musty, dim and emotionless.

But, most importantly, there is no reason to speak out. The author clearly took on the wrong topic and wrote not what he really wanted. The presentation of the text says that Speransky performs rap. If so, then why not follow the good old advice and make a book about what is really interesting to you. Why not tell the story of a young rapper? There would be more truth, meaning and novelty in this than in repeating literary cliches of cynical prose more than half a century ago.

Full text of the review

Konstantin Speransky "Who knows what Amalia is thinking about?"

The dream is to go to the Foreign Legion in order to “die with dignity.” That is: killing natives in some asshole of the world.

The phrase “I am a mongrel, I have nothing but loneliness.”

Epigraph from Cocteau, and even to “Les Enfants Terribles.”

How old are you, little one?

Thirtieth, says the network.

Amazing.

“I’m lying forgotten with a smoldering cigarette” - how can you write something like that at the age of over twenty?

I, like that saleswoman in the wine shop, would also ask him for his passport. Because such curly, tortuous, thick show-offs - from joints, fucking, their significance, their naiveism, their meager childhood in Kemerovo, their abundant second childhood in Moscow, stuffing someone's face, stuffing someone else's face, reading circle - Forgivable for a fourteen-year-old with glasses. The bespectacled boy will grow up and will not go to the Foreign Legion. Speransky, too, will not go to any Foreign Legion, but he will no longer grow up, but will forever spread his peacock tail in front of the girls - courageously calling them by the initials A., K. and V. and courageously telling the world in what positions he fucked them all - but with thoughts exclusively about A. and love for her alone.

For constancy suits a man.

The circle of reading and quoting also suits him. Celine, Baudelaire, Gumilev, Cocteau, Malaparte, d'Annunzio, Vian, Limonov. Adherents of shocking male brotherhood and wild beauty. From the movies - Almodóvar.

Flirty name.

Long and detailed recipes for making hummus, pumpkin puree soup with coconut milk and ginger, a list of glossy grub - olives, sesame seeds, peppers, wine ("good"!) and passages about how my beloved ordered a chicken Kiev and apologized for the plebeian taste. Our plebeian tastes now include Kiev cutlet, I’ll let you know.

“I don’t recognize tangerines because I don’t agree with the fact that the New Year is coming. My enemies are all those who rejoice when the clock strikes.”

“I decided that if I didn’t see her before leaving for St. Petersburg, I would break the windows of some car.”

“I’m wearing underpants with skulls, tattoos with skulls and sad messages like “Reality is killing me” and “Life is a pigsty!”

“Maybe I’m moody, antisocial, angry.”

Speeches by Holden Caulfield.

And here's another:

“Like in a cheesy movie, I’m torn between a noose and a fancy dress.”

“I want to live in such lifeless, cold interiors, where words hang in the air like pieces of ice.”

"A. like a cat, she speaks the understandable language of her own awesomeness.”

Hello, am I the only one who thinks this was already written by a girl?

The cat has fur.

And how does all this fit in with a rather old, big-nosed fellow, a zealous hand-to-hand fighter and rap declaimer? How?

No answer. This is how it is, new sincerity.

Considering the promiscuity of the audience, literally everything has every chance of becoming a national bestseller. Hopefully, without our help. All by himself, all by himself, by the power of unrecognized talent, naked electricity and disarming sincerity.

Full text of the review

Each of us chooses books according to our needs. Some need to forget, others need to cheer up. Because of this, debates arise about what real literature is. Personally, I share the view of Franz Kafka, who wrote that “we should read only those books that bite and sting us.”

“The Secret Year”, Mikhail Gigolashvili

Publishing house AST

I don’t know what you used to think about Ivan the Terrible from the Rurik family, but now you will have only one image in your head - the image created by Mikhail Gigolashvili. Mentally exhausted, tired of bloodshed and the oprichnina he himself created and ended, the tsar spends day after day in a wild child. Day after day we live side by side not just with a controversial historical character, but with the real universe, which is either being created before our eyes, or dying. One after another, Big Explosions occur, the king either indulges in terrible memories, then mentally goes to distant lands, then dreams of robbery, then uses prohibited psychotropic substances, and in between times commits sublime righteous deeds.

You will find yourself in a stylized and at the same time authentic mansion. And they speak in that mansion like ours, but it seems strange.

And in this mansion it is fragrant and hot. It's already baking. It’s as if we’re not shaking this, but a hellish cauldron, and you and the king are boiling in it. Only, unlike the tsar, you can slam the book and the haze will recede, but even though he is a tsar, he cannot. Even though he is a king, no one will let him out of the cauldron. The novel is about this too. About hell, with which we punish ourselves not after death, but right during life.

"F20", Anna Kozlova

Magazine "Friendship of Peoples", publishing house "RIPOL Classic"

Many call Kozlova’s novel one of the main ones this year. At such moments I rub my hands. After all, it was your humble servant, being the deputy editor-in-chief of the ancient literary magazine “Friendship of Peoples,” who promoted this novel for publication, and it was the publication in the magazine that won the “National Bestseller” award.

Over the long years of the prize's existence, a variety of Russian writers have become its laureates. Each of them has plenty of talent, but not all winning books can boast of matching the title of the award. In this regard, it is especially pleasant to state: “F20” is a 100% bestseller.

An uncompromising, devoid of baby talk, but at the same time full of tenderness, a book about the fate of two sisters suffering from schizophrenia to varying degrees. There is a sharply recognizable urban life of the nineties and 2000s, and teenage dramas, which, despite their traumatic nature, you just want to dive into, there are mystical twists and an instructive story about old age. This book is easy to read and automatically weeds out indecisive and cowardly citizens. Although I personally am surprised that the story of two girls saying hello could scare someone in our time of falling planes, terrorists on trucks and the third season of Twin Peaks.

“Lives of Murdered Artists”, Alexander Brener

Publishing house "Gileya"

Brener is a famous action artist. Perhaps his most famous trick was the improvement of Malevich’s painting “The White Cross”. Entering the Amsterdam museum where the painting is exhibited, Brener painted a dollar sign on it in green paint. The hooligan was sent to prison for six months, the painting was restored.

Brener is the author of wonderful books of prose and even poetry. His latest text at the moment, “The Lives of Murdered Artists,” like others, contains autobiographical motives, discussions about art and, excuse me, existence.

The narration is stunning with its extreme frankness. Only weird children and holy fools allow themselves to do this. This is where it becomes clear why Brener himself categorically refuses to consider himself an actionist. He's a holy fool. A conscious, consistent ascetic who, with his lewdness, shakes up the inhabitants floating in fat. Prose works by artists are often fascinating, but I don’t remember texts as crazy and driving as Brener’s texts.

“Who knows what Amalia is thinking?”, Konstantin Speransky

Publishing house "Il-music"

Speransky is one of two members of the hip-hop group Makulatura. His existential chants attract crowds of young, suffering hipsters across the country. Not only the fans of the group suffer, but also the performers themselves, this is clearly visible in the book that I recommend to you.

This text is reproached for the redundancy of vegan recipes, which indeed fill the pages, and is reproached for the author's narcissism - the narration is in the first person, and Speransky every now and then makes it clear that he is good at martial arts techniques, and he has long turned his own body into a sculpture. Some readers are confused by the excess influence on the author of the works of European intellectuals, while others are confused by explicit scenes of handjobs and sex.

None of this bothers me. I myself am quite well built and don’t envy musclemen, I respect vegans, I almost don’t give a damn about martial arts, the works of European intellectuals are mostly unfamiliar to me, so I don’t see their influence, and handjob and sex, in my opinion, are perhaps the most exciting activities that a person has in this world.

The book tells about the unhappy love of the main character, the author's alter ego, for that same Amalia. A cantankerous, inconsistent, awesome piece of trash who posts her tits on Telegram. The book is not even about love, but about the impossibility of love. Not even about the impossibility of love, but about the fact that it is in impossibility that that very piercing feeling that we call love is born.

My father, who by the way is 82 years old, read it with delight, and that means something.

How not to get confused among modern young Russian writers and choose from the stream exactly those who deserve attention and who will be talked about later? On the one hand, shortlists for literary awards, as a rule, provide the reader with the necessary guidelines. However, not only talented “newcomers” fit into the space of young Russian prose, but also those who are familiar with the text first-hand: the path from infamy to loud discussions in the media can be long. We talk about debutants whose books deserve attention in the first place.

Guzel Yakhina

Novel “Zuleikha opens her eyes”

The first “pancake” is by no means always unsuccessful, and the sensational novel by Guzel Yakhina is a clear confirmation of this: the book about dispossession in the 30s won two literary awards (“Big Book” and “Yasnaya Polyana”) and received many positive reviews from reviewers . The plot of how a Tatar peasant woman is exiled to the banks of the Angara is simple and predictable; nevertheless, the melodious syllable, revealing the feminine essence in the context of Muslim traditions, Stalinism and the Siberian winter, captivates the reader from the very first line of the title.

Alexey Gedeonov

Novel “For a Random Guest”

The debut novel of sociologist Alexei Gedeonov was published by the Kiev publishing house Laurus: in 2016, the book “A Random Guest” went on sale. Despite the fact that the writer’s debut hardly gave the author instant popularity, the text was highly appreciated by literary critic Galina Yuzefovich and translator Anastasia Zavozova. The mysterious story invented by the author does not go beyond the scope of a classic Christmas plot, but the specificity of the place and time of action (multidimensional Soviet comfort in a Ukrainian town) implies that under the layer of familiar reality there is another, no less significant layer, in which there is much less clarity. “The world is not what it seems” - this is the simple formulation that governs Gedeonov’s prose, captivating with its soft language, nostalgic atmosphere, and non-trivial details.

Lyubov Mulmenko

"Funny stories about panic"

A large observational diary text posted on Facebook is a genre loved by many adherents of textual reflection. The first prose book by playwright and screenwriter Lyubov Mulmenko (“Nadezhda Plant”, “What’s My Name”) is the very case when constant recording of thoughts leads to a merging of the personal and the imagined, the seen and the assumed. “Funny Stories” is a fusion of fiction and non-fiction, in which notes about friends and the evening Kama and certain characters experiencing situations at the intersection of mysticism and reality organically coexist. Mulmenko's laconic and sincere stories reproduce ordinary life, known to everyone and everything; however, in every familiar “frame” we immediately discover something else.

Anna Kozlova

"F20"

Prose writer and screenwriter (the provocative series “A Short Course in a Happy Life,” shown on Channel One, is her work) Anna Kozlova is rightfully considered a master in the genre of ruthless realism: her new novel “F20,” dedicated to people with mental disorders, has become “National bestseller” of 2017 and, as a result, one of the main literary sensations in the press. The biting, ironic and straightforward language in “F20” allows you to live the history of the disease from the inside - it is almost impossible to remain at the level of impartial observation. Fearlessly ignoring generally accepted taboo topics, Kozlova reveals schizophrenic reality in all its ambiguity and diversity. This extreme frankness suggests that it is not so easy to make an accurate diagnosis of society: the boundaries of the norm are too blurred, and the absurdity of what is happening has not surprised anyone for a long time.

Evgeny Babushkin

Collection of stories "The Bible of the Poor"

For the journalist, prose writer and musician Evgeny Babushkin, the book “The Bible of the Poor” became a kind of “benefit performance”, an attempt to summarize his literary experience and conduct an audit. Thus, the collection consists of three parts (“Old Testament”, “New Testament” and “Apocrypha”), each of which corresponds to a specific writing activity of the author: witty fairy tales and plays, journalistic materials about the war in Ukraine, Syrian refugees and gypsies, notes about world and Russian history. It is interesting to read Babushkin in any format he chooses, and one is amazed at his erudition, captivating style and breadth of vision.

Anna Starobinets

"Look at him"

A poignant documentary novel by writer and journalist Anna Starobinets, best remembered as the author of books in the horror genre, was published at the beginning of 2017 - from that moment on, Starobinets’ “direct speech” became one of the main subjects of discussion among book reviewers. The text, which tells about the process of terminating an unsuccessful pregnancy, hits the patient and leaves no chance to “turn away.” A traumatic story about Russian perinatology and the attempt to survive after the loss of a child should be read by anyone who seeks to understand reality, both white and black. After all, the truth can not only “put you on your toes,” but also promote insight.

An uninhibited style of storytelling, the pressing theme of globalization and universal loneliness, an interesting interpretation of the concept of a “superman,” a kind of manifesto for the generation of thirty-year-olds - all this characterizes the first literary attempt of Olga Breininger, who, like her main character, was born in Kazakhstan and teaches at Harvard. A dense, captivating, dynamic text (the rhythm, like the main motifs of the book, corresponds to “acceleration”) with a verified author’s position and an experimental plot more than compensates for some of the inconsistencies and roughnesses inherent in any, even the most successful debut.

Andrey Filimonov

"Tadpole and the Saints"

The starting novel of the writer and journalist Andrei Filimonov is a rather rare phenomenon for modern Russian literature. A light book about the everyday life of the village of Bezdorozhnaya, it is full of all kinds of mythological allusions and somewhat “clumsy” but appropriate humor, which is sprinkled by charismatic heroes. Legends, everyday magic, the surreal, trickery and horror - life in godforsaken huts does not subside, despite any trends of the times. Filimonov managed to create an absurd world, stuffed with folklore symbols, which fits perfectly with our ideas about today.

Konstantin Speransky

The story “Who knows what Amalia is thinking?”

A prosaic text from the well-known musician of the group “Makulatura” is a unique presentation of existential hip-hop on paper, an artistic attempt to reflect on all the components of one’s life, be it the current unrequited feeling or the restless Kemerovo past. Such an “everyday” autobiography hardly pursues the goal of reaching the reader - its main property, rather, is a reflection of our consciousness, either withering or flaring up. According to literary critic Elena Makeenko, this story is “a fresh and, in its own way, very valuable example of generational prose, which has become so difficult to reach the reader that it seems to have completely disappeared.<...>It would seem that she can answer the question of what is happening to a person today (even if it’s nothing), and not in the hallucinatory dreams of an alternative history (even if there are wars to redistribute the world).”