Chapaev and Emptiness. Literary and medical analysis

Dmitry Bykov “Escape to Mongolia”

Having written this first sentence, you think for a long time, because this is the only undoubted fact in the entire review. I want to immediately question everything else in full accordance with the charming sophistry that flows out of Chapaev’s mouth throughout the book. Where is the Znamya magazine located? On Nikolskaya. And Nikolskaya? In Moscow, and that one in Russia, and that one on Earth, and that one in the Universe, and that one in my mind. Consequently, Pelevin’s novel is in my mind, and that’s for sure, since this book has settled there for a long time and reliably.

The novel does not and cannot have a plot in the usual sense. The madman Peter Pustota, who imagined himself as a decadent poet of the turn of the century, is languishing in a psychiatric hospital. This “false personality” dominates his consciousness. Peter Pustota lives in 1919, meets Chapaev, who looks like a kind of guru to Pelevin, a teacher of spiritual liberation, falls in love with Anka, masters the cart (touch Anka, he deciphers its name for himself), almost dies in battle at the Lozovaya station (where , by the way, his psychiatric hospital is also located), and at the same time he listens to the ravings of his comrades in the ward. These nonsense form four inserted short stories, the best of which, in my opinion, is Japanese, about Serdyuk and Kawabata, and the worst is about simply Maria. From this digest, the reader sees that it is useless to retell the novel; it is preferable to familiarize yourself with it, because Pelevin writes fascinatingly and funnyly.

The easiest way would be to get away with the phrase that Pelevin plays computer games of a rather high order. This, fortunately, is not the case. Before us is a serious novel for repeated re-reading. At first, an analogy with a tangled knot suggests itself: untying it is a rather hopeless task, cutting it is unconstructive, but as soon as you pull the string, the knot destroys itself, unraveling like a bow on a shoe. The reader-interpreter is left with a bare rope, that is, alone with that very emptiness that is the scene of action and at the same time the main character of the work.

The idea, or the technique, underlying Pelevin’s creativity is quite simple, but very timely. This is a religious idea and remarkably convenient for plot construction. Our existence takes place not in one, but at least in two worlds: while going to work, we cross abysses, go down an escalator, overcome a difficult stage of some kind of total computer game, and when visiting a public toilet, we mysteriously influence the fate of the world. In other words, Pelevin looks for a metaphysical explanation for all the most everyday actions and incidents, building a set of parallel worlds and spaces living, however, according to the same law. This trait was most clearly manifested in that chapter of “Omona Ra”, where memories of his past lives are extracted from the hero’s subconscious - different in surroundings, but identical in that social role, which this hero plays in different costumes. The underrated “Yellow Arrow” is constructed in exactly the same way, where Pelevin wittily plays with the metaphor of life as a train, as ancient as the train itself; The brightest story of the early Pelevin “The Recluse and the Six-Fingered” and his darkest (but also funniest) fantasy “The Prince from the State Planning Committee” rest on this same technique. Pelevin's world is an endless series of cells built into each other, and the transition from one cell to another does not mean liberation, but only a higher level of comprehension of reality (which has never brought relief to anyone). It seems to me that Vyacheslav Rybakov, whom I respect, is not entirely right when he asserts in the recent “Literature” that all Pelevin’s heroes exist in a totalitarian society: according to Pelevin, every society is totalitarian, and this is not quite the right word. Liberation is possible only in consciousness, which is what our author’s most piercing and poetic story “Ontology of Childhood” was written about. Naturally, in a world of complete unfreedom, the main concern of the hero is liberation at any cost. In “The Recluse and the Six-Fingered” it was presented rather naively: it was enough to break through from one coordinate system to another, break the incubator window and thus break through the vicious circle of “feeding troughs” and “decisive stages”. Sasha Prince from the State Planning Commission already clearly understands that the Prince cannot jump out of the display. Lyrical hero“Ontologies of Childhood” begins to seriously think about the metaphysics of escape, which becomes a key concept in Pelevin’s prose, but escape here clearly smacks of death (which also does not free one from anything, see “News from Nepal”).

Hence, it is quite natural that the action of Pelevin’s next texts takes place mainly in the consciousness (of the author or the hero – it doesn’t matter: they have already merged in “The Prince”), and “Chapaev and Emptiness” is the most “decisive stage” on this path.

At one time, when Pelevin was just beginning to “rise,” readers and critics argued a lot about who influenced him more: the computer or Buddhism. Now, it seems, it is already clear that he was influenced most by Wittgenstein (the influence of philosophy on literature is generally a phenomenon of the twentieth century, and usually this does not lead to anything good; it is enough to read V. Sharov, but Wittgenstein, after all, dealt with philosophy language, so that its influence does not at all take prose away from life, but leads it to some final truth). Not without an ironic show-off, having referred to Wittgenstein back in “The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna,” Pelevin never once mentions his leader and teacher in the new novel (and how would a decadent poet of the beginning of the century know Wittgenstein), but the ideas that Wittgenstein was obsessed with after “ Treatise” find their fullest expression in “Chapaev”. Our lack of freedom is due to the lack of freedom from a language doomed to inaccuracy, from stereotypes or, if you like, archetypes of consciousness (Pelevin mentions Jung, having made an extremely characteristic hybrid of Baron von Jungern out of him and Baron Ungern; it is difficult to more succinctly hint that all our religious and mystical ideas are rooted exclusively in consciousness, and are not inspired or supported by any higher reality). But liberation from consciousness means what? It means emptiness, reader! However, this is a very tricky void. Through the mouth of one semi-criminal character, Pelevin gave a remarkable definition of freedom (in full accordance with his favorite idea that everyone interprets spiritual reality in those terms that are accessible to him): “Imagine that your internal prosecutor arrested you, all your internal lawyers screwed up, and you sat down in your own internal garbage. So imagine that at the same time there is someone fourth, whom no one is dragging anywhere, who cannot be called either a prosecutor, or the one for whom he sews the case, or a lawyer. And not an idiot, and not a man, and not garbage. So this fourth one is the one who is enjoying the eternal high.”

Should I say that there is no fourth one? But each of us feels it within ourselves every second. As I, a younger contemporary of Pelevin, said on behalf of my many:

But in this damned life we ​​sometimes hope that some fiftieth, or maybe one hundred and second, whom we have seen out of the corner of our eyes a couple of times, whom we do not know, who does not know us, is subject to the highest care, and hears angelic laughter, and therefore will remain forever after all.

It may indeed be impossible to break through to this last and final Self. But the main authenticity is the search for authenticity. Liberation can be achieved at least by abandoning the established rules of the game (“To start moving, you have to get off the train” is the refrain of “Yellow Arrow”). All the heroes of the mature Pelevin (it is clearly premature to talk about the later ones) are most concerned with how to jump off the train, and therefore the escape crowns Chapaev and Emptiness, appearing as main topic in the hero’s final poetic monologue:

“A madman named Void is escaping from the seventeenth model psychiatric hospital. There is no time to escape, and he knows it. Moreover, there is nowhere to run, and there is no way into it. But all this is nothing compared to the fact that the one who runs away is nowhere and in no way possible to be found.”

Here, here, here it is, a saying! For the current Pelevin, there are no results - only a process. You can find someone who has escaped, but someone who is running away! That’s why in the most erotic, ideal, perfectly written scene of the hero’s intercourse with his beloved (again, either in reality, or in a dream, or in glitches), Bernstein’s name appears and literally a minute before orgasm, Peter whispers in Anna’s ear: “Movement everything, the final goal nothing” (not forgetting to ask: “Move, move!”). Escape becomes the main and most worthy state of mind. Where is the hero running? To Inner Mongolia, to Kafka-Yurt. Inner Mongolia, as you might guess, is the Mongolia that is inside.

Not God knows what a fresh conclusion, but it seems to be the only possible one. And the fact that Pelevin leads the reader to this conclusion, going with him along the entire difficult path to the elementary truth, is in itself worth a lot. Having walked through the labyrinths of the Pelevin node, we are still not left with emptiness, but with a gigantic baggage of what we have seen and changed our minds - an educational book, there is nothing to say.

But every normal reader here has the right to ask: where, exactly, is literature? After all, it is not the “Logical-Philosophical Treatise” that we are examining, in the end, nor a collection of Zen tales, nor a university textbook on dialogue, although in in a certain sense Pelevin's prose stands precisely on these three pillars. “As for literature, things are not sour with it,” as his peer Mikhail Shcherbakov, who is extremely close to Pelevin, sings. Pelevin's new novel is written, to my taste, much better than his previous books. It contains more realities, details, recognizable signs, and although these are most often not signs of reality, but only the most general clichés, that is, reality in a very mediated form, ideas about ideas, Pelevin works with them with a bang. Whether he writes about the Silver Age and the era of collapse that replaced it, everything is in place: cocaine, and Baltic sailors, and interest in the occult, and the wizened Bryusov with unsuccessful puns, and other cliches, and the charming irony about these cliches. But how else can he see silver age a hero who does not exist in a specific time, but only in his own mind? Of course, Pelevin’s revolutionary times are presented in an extremely bookish way, but where, if not from books, could Peter the Void learn something about his favorite era? This paradox was noted by Lem in Solaris, if we were to look for some kind of fantastic “tradition” for Pelevin: there, if you remember, all the phantoms created by the ocean were distinguished by a strange constraint, some kind of incompleteness in comparison with the originals This happened because our memory, our consciousness inevitably impoverish the world. Solaris created those whom the heroes remembered, but they remembered much less than It was. Pelevin’s Silver Age is also impoverished and unambiguous in its own way, but such bookishness is included in the conditions of the game: the hero has nowhere to take the living, the real, what, say, “The Crazy Ship” or “The Cynics” breathe. But Pelevin presented psychiatric hospitals, kiosks, television series, offices, metro with such hyper-realistic precision, with such hatred of despair (carefully packaged in icy irony) that none of his previous works can compare with Chapaev and Emptiness. Plasticity here has been taken to a new level - all this should have been very annoying.

But emotionally, it must be admitted, this thing is much richer: here there is not only the despair of a creature struggling in a cage, but also the happiness of a breakthrough, and the joy-suffering of eternally unrealized and eternally tormenting love (the first, by the way, is Pelevin’s book, where the theme of love is present in in its true form, and not in an ironically reduced version like the romance of a fly with a mosquito or the intellectual flirtation of a chicken with a rat). There is the delight of Eternal Non-Return here - this is how Pelevin defines the state of permanent escape to which his hero ultimately breaks through. Pelevin's new novel is much less schematic and rational than his previous works, and there is much more of that unbearable sadness that only happens in a hospital or barracks in the terrible blue hour between day and evening.

However, with joy, everything is also in order, and a rare reader will close Pelevin’s novel without a feeling of vague triumph - the author’s victory over the material and the joint author-reader victory over the world, which is trying to impose its rules of the game on us. The battle at Lozovaya station was successfully won, despite the fact that Lozovaya station exists only in our minds, on the very border of Inner Mongolia.

Pavel Basinsky. From the life of domestic cacti

SOME stupid foreigner probably still believes that Russian prose is birch, winter oats and three hundred kilograms of selected spirituality. He's wrong, poor thing! Modern Russian prose is about breeding cacti. But not in the Mexican fields, but naturally: in city apartments, on the windowsill and in pots. Those magazines that have not yet mastered the new science have long been sitting in the rear guard and planting potatoes according to the method of Captain Khabarov from “The State Fairy Tale” by the young prose writer Oleg Pavlov. They planted it, dug it up, ate it. I can’t wait for the harvest, I really want to eat. Hence such a spasm in magazines of the “ideological”, traditional direction. When the space of literature narrows to the size of a windowsill, sowing “reasonable, good, eternal” on it can, of course, be fun and original, but counting on shoots and “thank you from the heart” is at least naive. Another thing is to grow cacti. After all, that’s what they were created for: to boast of the individualism of form.

Very rare, you know, cactus. Bred in 1973 by Swedish fancier Johan Johansson. He devoted twenty years of his life to this work. See, it's blue, not green see? It was very difficult to achieve! Once every two years it blooms for half an hour. You need to put a tsetse fly and one nutmeg in the flower; the flower will close, the cactus will tremble and remain motionless for another two years. And it needs to be watered…

Come on! What will they come up with!

Yes, you come tomorrow with the whole family. It will bloom at night.

This image arose naturally when reading D. Bykov’s review, where new novel Victor Pelevin at the very beginning without unnecessary words called "long-awaited". It’s not entirely clear to me who exactly and why he waited for a long time, but the general situation around the figure of Pelevin is very clear. This is one of Znamya’s signature cacti, the breeding of which is rightfully proud of this magazine, which is the most dexterous in the breeding of exotic plants. In the “Znamya” laboratory, someone certainly received a prize for a cactus named “Pelevin”: there is no such marvel in any publication; and that says it all. And ask questions: why a cactus, why this particular cactus, and what should we ultimately do with this cactus? there is the greatest immodesty, almost rudeness, a violation of privacy, a gross invasion in the boots of imperial ideology into the intimate world of a private laboratory, where enthusiasts conduct most interesting experiments over think and laugh fiction, air, just simply Russian literature. Again: there is war in Chechnya, and the communists are on the horizon, and who cares about some alchemists, even touching ones in their desire to give the country an unusual and unlike anything cactus every year and certainly a new color: blue, red, mother-of-pearl…

Yes, this is culture! Letters, letters, letters Vyach. Kuritsyn does not forget to repeat to us, the cactus of whose name is no worse than the others, except for its increased prickliness. But Andrei Nemzer, a very strict and undoubtedly professional expert on Russian cacti, for some reason rejected Pelevin (Segodnya, May 13). Not the same, you see, the matte shine, the needles are a bit short and in general: where do you get a tsetse fly every time? No problem, we'll get it! From Africa we will deliver by barter for tanks, planes and white beauties. You give a lot of cacti, good and different! Each Russian has one work, unlike the others! Who is whining about the fatigue of culture, about its uselessness and meaninglessness, about its daily shameful flight from life into coral grottoes made of papier-mâché? Alarmists! Saboteurs! They can’t grow a decent cactus, but here we go!

And really, how simple it is! You take “letters, letters, letters”, irradiate them with an unknown ray, the decay product of who knows what, and who knows what grows under the name, say, “Chapaev and Emptiness” (or: “Stolypin and Firmament”). There are few fools in Russia now, Pelevin will be carefully read by Bykov, Nemzer and Basinsky, because they have nothing else to do and because the Soviet philological departments and literary institutes have finished on their own heads; another dozen or three people will “hear” about Pelevin and lazily scratch the back of their heads (“where can we get magazines now? Don’t subscribe to them”). Next year the Booker “long” and “short” sheets will be printed. Pelevin, of course, will be on the long list; It's a big novel, it's hard not to notice. He won’t be in the “shorts”, because not a single chairman of the jury, without being a complete idiot, will be able to explain to those gathered what to eat at the gala dinner literary people, why a thing consisting of cheap puns (cart touch Anka: well, at least Bykov could tell what’s so wonderful about this?), average language and metaphysical mischief was included in the serious list (I didn’t understand from Bykov’s review: this is a novel “mystical” or “religious” are actually quite different things).

It will also be very difficult to explain to good people who drink good vodka well, why the premium list included a work full of stupid, and most importantly, completely unmotivated nasty things about the civil war and the Silver Age, where Chapaev in a tailcoat drinks champagne and discusses topics of oriental mysticism, Kotovsky sniffs cocaine, Petka and Anka argue about Schopenhauer during sexual intercourse (a scene that shocked Bykov’s aesthetic sense), supposedly decadents and supposedly decadent women express themselves in the “cultured” language of sex workers and prostitutes:

I am very touched by your concern but if it is sincere, then you will have to keep me company.

Very nice, Peter. But I want to ask you a favor right away. For God's sake, don't start courting me again. The novel's perspective And so on.

And why explain? That’s not why it was written, that’s not why it was printed.

And for what?

And this is where the fun begins. Pelevin himself has a penniless inventive talent, with strained “inventions” like the real amputation of the legs of cadets at the Maresyev School (the story “Omon Ra”) and other, excuse the repetition, artistic filth, which makes us sick and the delights of which we will leave for conscience of those for whom neatness and dignity literary word“the sound is empty”, not worth a broken egg. It costs just enough to be revered by “every Slavist here” and regularly steamed by Nemzer, who undoubtedly has literary taste. What is interesting is not his prose, but the cultural will that it expresses. This will consists in a mixture of everything and everyone, in some kind of childish (not to say idiotic) curiosity for everything that does not strain the soul, memory and conscience, no matter what: some kind of civil war of some wild Russians or a mysterious Eastern esotericism. A cultured Japanese would be horrified to read Pelevin's vulgarities about the Eastern culture of receiving a guest; the white and red officers would have turned over in their graves when Pelevin’s “version” of the civil war in Russia reached them. And so on, so on. Military men, cosmonauts, Russians, Mongols, Chinese each person who distinguishes and respects his national, professional, that is, ultimately cultural, person cannot perceive Pelevin’s prose as anything other than a boorish violation of unshakable privacy, some unwritten law: do not touch with cold hands that it is warmed by other hands, that it is fun for you, and torment and joy for others.

In some ways, Victor Pelevin resembles Vladimir Sorokin. For this, it also doesn’t matter what to write about: about the “liquid mother” or the Mother of God. One style, one voice: cold, arrogant, inhuman. But if Sorokin really blasphemes, perhaps realizing that he will someday have to answer for his words (I want to believe that he understands), then the metaphysical degree of Pelevin’s prose is absolutely zero. That’s why our cactus growers like it so much, because there are needles, but they don’t prick, the smell is poisonous, but it doesn’t knock you down. Sorokin is not and will not be in “The Banner,” because he demands too decisive recognition of the complete divorce of life and art. One way or another, a position that is personally unacceptable to me, but in its extreme consistency, in any case, is recognized. Cactus-growing logic will never go to these limits.

Still, it’s a plant. Still, there is beauty in the house. Aura and stuff.

I hate cacti!

May 29, 1996. Copyright "Literary Newspaper", 1996.

Critics consider this novel an example of postmodernist aesthetics. The chaos, unknowability, and multidimensionality of the boundless world are most adequately expressed in this text. Calling himself a “turbo-realist,” V. Pelevin assesses the modern world as an explosive mixture of technogenic thinking, Eastern philosophy, computer technology, rock music and “dope” (drugs, poisonous mushrooms, etc.). At the same time, humanity tirelessly struggles with eternal questions about the meaning of what is lived and experienced. The split consciousness of modern man, however, is not able to understand the world. Pelevin suggests not hitting the wall, but loving and accepting it - and then the wall will become permeable. On the cover of the book there is an author's comment: “This is the first novel in world literature, the action of which takes place in absolute emptiness.” Hence the principle of operation of a clay machine gun and the three famous Chapaev strikes already in the text:

1. Where? - Nowhere.

2. When? - Never.

3. Who? - Don't know.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, the problem of space, time, and hero is removed and the author’s idea about the fundamental impossibility of “true teaching” is realized. “There is only one freedom, when you are free from everything that the mind constructs. This freedom is called “I don’t know.”

Postmodern writers have a special relationship with History. For them it is a subject of subjective philosophical rethinking. An ordinary person is characterized by a fear of infinity and a feeling of completeness of what has been experienced in the past. V. Pelevin argues that the multidimensional and infinite world is the simultaneous existence of many worlds, and the boundary between them is relative and determined only by our consciousness. For the most part, we think primitively, so we perceive as real only one of the worlds where we physically exist. In fact, everyone is real.

The action of the novel develops in two space-time planes: in Chapaev’s division (1919) and in a madhouse (90s). They are united by the image of Peter the Void, commissar, poet, schizophrenic. He has had a crazy psyche since childhood, and the works of Hume, Berkeley, and Heidegger he voraciously read in his youth completed the process of a split personality. He imagines himself either as a poet - a decadent of the beginning of the century, or in a morbid imagination he shoots the Universe with clay machine guns. This is how the keyword appears in the text for the first time emptiness, the relativity of all things is affirmed. “Every form is emptiness... Emptiness is every form.” Being is equal to thinking, and the world around us is only our idea of ​​it.

The fragmented consciousness of modern man perceives the world as a series of fragments with their own signs and cliches. Pelevin debunked the myth of the heroism of the civil war; he subjected everything to parody and rethinking. Revolutionary sailors drink “Baltic tea” with cocaine and wear machine gun belts as bras. Ilyich is a senile person, Kotovsky is a cocaine addict, Anka is a decadent - an emancipe in a velvet evening dress. The author calls the haylofts sung by Bunin gonzo, Christ in Blok’s poem limply trails behind the patrol, and the main character Chapaev is a mystic, occultist, guru for his student Petka, to whom he inspires innermost thoughts about the world and man. If Being is equal to the thought of it, then consciousness is the project of the world, and we ourselves create it. “You are absolutely everything there can be, and everyone has the power to create their own universe.” According to Pelevin, due to the illusory nature of the very concepts of “Space” and “Time”, a person does not have a residence permit in one of the worlds. Within one sentence, the author combines directly opposite concepts and advice (needed - but must be gotten rid of; use - to free yourself), which is a sign of postmodernism, as well as the bringing together of eras and the erasing of their boundaries within the boundaries of one artistic text.

The characters easily move from one world to another, from the era of the civil war to modern reality. Pelevin’s signs of the 90s are “scattered” throughout the novel: a drunken president, the Belovezhskaya Agreement, Philip Kirkorov as an example of ersatz culture, the shooting of the White House. G. Ishimbaeva believes that Pelevin correctly diagnosed his ex to the Soviet man, the entire generation that was programmed to live in one socio-cultural paradigm, but found itself in a completely different one - schizophrenia due to a split false personality.

Citizens of the “new democratic state” who went crazy and became patients in Timur Timurovich’s clinic are also a sign of the times that does not require decoding. A director, busy writing a dissertation, oversees four wards, each of whom is a generalized expression of a separate social stratum of Russian society.

Pyotr Pustota (PP) represents the creative intellectual bohemia, Vladimir Volodin (VV) represents the “new Russians” with a criminal roof, Semyon Serdyuk (SS) represents the drunken intelligentsia. An 18-year-old boy named Maria stands apart from them and therefore deserves special attention. Called “advanced parents” after the semi-banned Remarque during the Soviet era, it represents a bizarre mishmash of eras and cultures. He calls himself “Simply Maria,” raves about her stormy romance with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and considers the reason for his stay in the clinic to be the impact on the Ostankino TV tower. This is Pelevin’s spiritual portrait of the young generation, intoxicated by low-quality media, whose consciousness is based on a mixture of Mexican-Brazilian “soap operas”, Hollywood action films and a complete lack of individuality. Well, the name is a sign of modern courageous women, weak-willed men, transvestites and same-sex love that have become fashionable. He, however, is the most normal of all the patients and the first to be discharged from the hospital, that is, the author does not deprive young people of the opportunity for spiritual recovery.

The craving of “just Maria” for Arnie the Terminator, and Serdyuk for the Japanese Kawa-Bata-san is an echo of Pelevin’s innermost idea about the alchemical marriage of Russia with the East and the West, the special path of Russia. This is the development of R. Kipling’s thought about the merger of the West and the East on the Day of Judgment. Our modern world, according to the author, is absurd and anomalous. The current culture is in its death throes, its eclecticism does not surprise anyone, so Pelevin’s female pop group “Inflammation of the Appendages” performs Mozart, and the Mongolian akyn performs a melody “from Kafka” to the Russian accordion; under Deineka’s painting “Future Pilots” there is the inscription “Future raiders." Classical philosophy has degenerated into shameless speculation and intellectual debauchery: the novel mentions the “genital” Leibniz and the “decadent” Swedenborg, Aristotle is called the “ideological great-grandfather of Bolshevism.” At the same time, Pelevin does not see a significant difference between the state of the world and society at the beginning and at the end of the last century. Peter Pustota does not distinguish between the visitors of the literary cafe “Musical Snuffbox” in 1919 and the newfangled tavern “Ivan Byk” in 1990, opened in the same building.

The philosophical core of the novel is the intimate conversations of the Buddhist guru Chapaev with his adjutant, who has telling surname Emptiness, which projects the main idea of ​​the text: The world is an Illusion, Life is a Dream and a Mirage, everything in the world is relative, only emptiness is absolute. Everything that is connected with Man and humanity arises from “nothing” and returns to “nothing” according to the formula: Birth - Being (as thoughts about it, and consciousness is only our project of the world) - Death - Memory as, again, something immaterial, that is, Emptiness. Modern world in this context, the author evaluates it as an anecdote told by God.

And yet the heroes of the novel persistently search for a certain ideal, a moment of “golden luck.” For Baron Jungern, this is “Inner Mongolia” - not as a geographical place, but as a kind of spiritual oasis among the deadening emptiness, and Chapaev in the finale disappears into the rainbow stream of the URAL - the Universal River of Absolute Love. Thus, to the postmodern absolute of Emptiness is added the ideal of Love from the category of irrevocable human values. Criticism considers “Chapaev and Emptiness” a parody of traditional heroic prose, and Victor Pelevin as the creator of the postmodernist face of his era, which he sees as “the result of the psychological exercise of a cretin” (G. Ishimbaeva).

Illustration by D. Kozlov

The story is told on behalf of one of the famous poets Petersburg Peter the Void.

First part

Winter 1918. In the center of post-revolutionary Moscow, Peter came across a former classmate and poet von Ernen. He now served in the Cheka and invited his old friend to his huge apartment, which had been confiscated from someone.

Peter admitted that three days ago in St. Petersburg people from the Cheka wanted to take him for an abstract poem, but he ran away from them, firing back. Von Ernen, who promised to help, decided to arrest him. At the point of a Mauser, Peter went out into the hallway, where he unexpectedly threw his coat over the scoundrel and strangled him.

Peter put on the security officer's leather jacket, reloaded the pistol and was about to leave. Suddenly a couple of sailors in pea coats burst into the apartment. Mistaking Peter for von Ernen, they gave him the order to “draw our line” in a literary cabaret, drank vodka with cocaine with him and went there together.

In the dimly lit cabaret hall, Peter met the gaze of a strange man with a strong-willed, calm face and a mustache curled upward.

I suddenly somehow realized that he knew everything about the death of von Ernen - and what’s more, he knew much more serious things about me.

Peter went up to the stage, read the verse he had just written, and after the line “we will answer the white bastard with revolutionary terror!” shot at the chandelier. The sailors accompanying him took up the shooting. People in the hall were shouting and hiding behind the columns, and only that mustachioed man sat calmly at his table.

Having stopped firing, the sailors and Peter went out through the back door and got into the car. On the way, Peter fell asleep.

Second part

Peter woke up in the mid-1990s in a psychiatric hospital.

Her head physician treated “false personality disorder” using his own method: a group of patients were immersed in the false reality of one of them, and at the end of the session they all returned to their usual manias.

And at this second the patient himself can feel the relativity of his painful ideas and stop identifying with them. And from this to recovery it is already very close.

Peter was injected with the drug and entered into a group hallucinatory session. He finds himself in the reality of a patient who believes he is simply Maria from a Mexican soap opera.

On the smoky embankment, Maria met her betrothed, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He took her to a vacant lot, to a military fighter, where their “alchemical marriage” was to take place. Having placed Maria on the fuselage, Arnold took off. The plane tilted, Maria rolled along the wing and caught her hood on the rocket. She shouted that she didn’t want to do this and was in pain. Schwarzenegger fired a rocket, and Maria flew into the Ostankino TV tower with it. There was no merger between Russia and the West.

Having emerged from “not the most interesting vision in his life,” Peter fell asleep.

Third part

1918 Von Ernen's apartment. Peter woke up to music coming from the next room. This mustachioed man, whom he had seen in a cabaret, played the piano excellently.

“My last name is Chapaev,” the stranger introduced himself. He said that he was impressed by Peter’s campaigning and found him to invite him to be a commissar in his cavalry division. Peter agreed. They went out onto the frosty street, got into a long gray-green armored car and left for the station.

Behind the armored headquarters carriage, in which Peter and Chapaev were located, were attached carriages with a “red soldier” and a regiment of weaving workers.

The man is somewhat similar to this train. He is just as doomed to forever drag behind him from the past a chain of dark, terrible carriages inherited from no one knows who.

In the evening, over a light dinner with champagne, Chapaev introduced Peter to Anna, a beautiful, short-haired machine gunner. “By the way,” she said, “we completely forgot about the weavers.” Together they walked to the end of the moving train, and on Chapaev’s instructions, his assistant uncoupled the cars with the weavers. As if nothing had happened, Chapaev and Anna returned to the table.

Peter entered his compartment and collapsed on the bed.

Part four

He woke up in a tiled hospital room, in a cast-iron bathtub with cool water. In the adjacent baths lay other patients from his room - Volodin, Serdyuk and the muscular young man Maria.

During a quiet hour, Peter secretly entered the head doctor’s office and found a thick folder with the history of his illness. His pathological deviations began at the age of fourteen: he moved away from family and friends, his performance at school decreased, and he began to intensively read philosophical literature about emptiness and nothingness.

He considers himself the only heir to the great philosophers of the past. He is not bothered by being placed in a psychiatric hospital, since he is confident that his “self-development” will go the “right way” regardless of where he lives.

After a quiet hour, a quarrel occurred between Serdyuk and Maria. Peter tried to separate them and was hit on the head with a plaster bust of Aristotle.

Fifth part

Peter woke up in the summer in an unfamiliar room. Anna was sitting by his bed. She talked about the battle, during which Peter commanded a squadron, was shell-shocked and spent several months in a coma.

Without listening to any objections, Peter got up and decided to take a walk around the city. Anna took him to a restaurant, where she told him that Peter had become very close to Chapaev.

Chapaev is one of the most profound mystics I have ever known. I believe that in you he has found a grateful listener and, perhaps, a student.

Having learned that Chapaev is Anna's uncle, Peter tried to flirt with her. He decided that the girl was not indifferent to him, since she was on duty at his bed. To this Anna objected that she came to Peter’s room to listen to his picturesque nonsense. Peter was offended and quarreled with her.

White officers sitting at a nearby table intervened in the quarrel. The conflict grew, but then a man with a shaved head and two revolvers suddenly appeared in the restaurant and drove them away. He introduced himself as Kotovsky and took Anna, whom he had known for a long time, away in his wheelchair.

Peter thought that he had nothing that could attract a woman like Anna, and felt disgusted with himself.

Peter found Chapaev in an old bathhouse in the backyard of the estate. He was upset to learn that Peter had really forgotten everything he had managed to understand, and tried to explain to him that the entire surrounding reality was in his consciousness, and he himself was in emptiness. Chapaev flavored his explanations with generous portions of moonshine, and soon Peter was too drunk to understand anything.

Having reached his room, Peter fell asleep. He was woken up by Kotovsky, who came to talk about Russia and get some cocaine. Peter exchanged half of the jar, inherited from the murdered von Ernen, from Kotovsky for horses and a carriage, which he rode with Anna.

Sixth part

Peter found himself in Serdyuk’s reality, in Moscow in the 1990s. He was on the subway. At his neighbor’s shop, Serdyuk noticed a brochure “Japanese Militarism” and thought that the Japanese remember their duty, that’s why they live normally.

Coming out of the metro, Serdyuk got very drunk out of boredom. On the newspaper in which the snack was wrapped, he saw an advertisement - the Moscow branch of a Japanese company was recruiting employees. He called.

The next day, together with the head of the branch, Kawabata, following centuries-old Japanese traditions, Serdyuk drank sake, talked poetically about life and had fun with Russian girls dressed as geishas.

This is how the “alchemical marriage of Russia and the East” took place, where Kawabata personified the East. Kawabata said that their company was more like a clan, and initiated Serdyuk into the samurai of this clan.

... and he sadly thought that Russia, in essence, is also the land of the rising sun - if only because it never truly rose over it.

Soon Serdyuk learned that the enemy clan had bought a controlling stake in their company, and now all samurai of the clan must commit seppuku. Serdyuk failed to escape. He remembered the previous night and realized that, unlike the world outside the office door, it was real. He didn’t want to betray all this, took a sword and ripped open his stomach. The alliance between Russia and the East did not last long.

Serdyuk woke up in a mental hospital. “That’s how they found you at the heater, with a rose in your hand. Who did you actually drink with, remember?” - asked the head physician.

Seventh part

Peter woke up in the headquarters room, where the day before he had traded cocaine for horses with Kotovsky.

Chapaev, wanting to demonstrate to Peter what mind, death and immortality are, took him to a meeting with the Black Baron, whom many considered the incarnation of the god of war. He transferred Peter to his mystical “camp” - the place where all warriors go after death. Countless fires burned in the thick darkness, each of which had vague silhouettes of people visible.

Then they heard a scream and approached the fire, where four people were sitting. Having removed the ring from the lemon, the Baron threw it into the fire, and everything disappeared - both the fire and the four people. They were “a hooligan who ate shamanic mushrooms” and got here by mistake; they just needed to be “brought to their senses.”

The Baron explained to Peter that both the dream about the mental hospital and the reality with Chapaev are equivalent. He compared the world to a crowded room in which everyone is trying to win a chair. Outside the world, a throne of “endless freedom and happiness” awaits every person, which rightfully belongs to him, but it is impossible to ascend to it, since the throne stands in a place that does not exist. To find yourself in this emptiness, you need to realize that all worlds are equally illusory.

The Baron returned Peter to the steppe, where his dead fellow soldiers were sitting around the usual fire. The Baron taught them to see emptiness. Anyone who reached the goal immediately received a personal elephant and departed for Inner Mongolia - the place where the person who ascended the throne ends up.

Inner Mongolia is not called that because it is inside Mongolia. It is inside the one who sees emptiness.

Peter suddenly found himself back at headquarters, as if he had never gone anywhere with Chapaev and he had not introduced him to the Black Baron. Arriving at his room, the stunned Peter lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

Eighth part

This time Peter found himself in the reality of Volodin, the “new Russian”. He, along with two bandits - his “roof” - arrived in a jeep in the forest. The companions lit a fire in the clearing, ate psychogenic mushrooms and waited for the arrival.

Volodin explained to his nearby companions that “all the buzz in the world” is inside a person. It is locked, like in a safe, and in order to get the key to this safe, you have to give up everything. This is what they do in monasteries, where monks “worry” around the clock from the feeling of world love.

Here - once it gets in, it will never let go. And there won’t be any need for a woman, there won’t be any hooking. There will be no withdrawal, no withdrawal symptoms. Just keep praying for it to be better and better.

One of the friends was inspired by the idea of ​​an eternal high, but Volodin disappointed him: “if it were so easy to get into it, now half of Moscow would be drinking for free.” Inside a person there are full of all sorts of hypostases: a defendant, a prosecutor, and a lawyer. But in order to catch the “worldwide buzz”, you need to “wipe away this whole line” and become a nobody.

The conversations were interrupted by a column of light that descended onto the fire and enveloped those sitting around. They saw the emptiness and tasted the eternal buzz. The two “poor in spirit” began to scream and shout. “Okay, let’s do the legs. Fast!" - Volodin said, seeing the Black Baron in the void, and the friends fled in all directions.

Having come to their senses, everyone gathered near Volodin’s jeep. On the way, he explained that they got into an eternal high illegally, and for this they could get tied up there. On the physical level they are taken to the madhouse, but where on the “subtle” level is a mystery. If his companions had not made a fuss, everything would have turned out fine.

Ninth part

Peter wrote down this strange dream and showed the manuscript to Chapaev. He, like the Black Baron, metaphorically advised him to “check out of the hospital,” meaning by this institution our mortal world.

Going down the street, Peter came across Anna in a black velvet dress, absurdly tried to confess his feelings to her and invited her to ride out of town on trotters in the evening. “What vulgarity!” - she said and walked past.

In the evening, the weavers gave a concert with incredibly obscene numbers. Peter went on stage and read his new proletarian verse, into which he wove a princess in a black dress and her naked friend. The hall exploded with applause, and Anna, who was sitting in the back row, walked away.

Peter returned to his room and lay down. Meanwhile, the weavers' concert "turned into complete disgrace" - shots were heard from the yard, drunken cackling and the sounds of a "languid fight."

Kotovsky came to Peter to say goodbye. He was going to disappear before the drunken weavers burned everything here, and advised Peter to do the same. He did not hope that Chapaev would restore order.

After seeing Kotovsky off, Peter went to Chapaev’s bathhouse, where he, habitually drinking moonshine, tried to make him understand that man is not a form, but a spirit.

It cannot be said about the soul that it is different for everyone, it cannot be said that it is the same for everyone. If you can say anything about her, it’s that she doesn’t exist either.

The rebellious weavers had already set fire to the estate and were walking toward the bathhouse, firing shots. Chapaev opened a hatch in the floor and, together with Peter, made his way through an underground passage to an armored car hidden in a haystack.

Chapaev started the engine, and Anna took her place in the machine-gun turret. The weavers surrounded the armored car. Chapaev ordered the clay machine gun to be uncovered. Anna silently circled the weapon, and all sounds disappeared.

Chapaev said that there once lived a Buddha who was so wise that things disappeared when he pointed at them with his little finger. Buddha pointed his little finger at himself and disappeared, but his finger remained. Wrapped in clay, it became a terrible weapon. Chapaev found it in a Mongolian monastery, attached a butt and turned it into a machine gun.

Coming out of the armored car, Peter found himself on a round patch of earth, surrounded by an endless sparkling stream.

This rainbow stream was everything that I could only think or experience, everything that could be or not be.

Chapaev called the stream the Conditional River of Absolute Love, or Ural for short. People merge with it before taking any form. Anna and Chapaev rushed to the Urals and disappeared. Peter followed their example, saw the beginning of the stream and swam towards it. Peter's movement slowed down, the radiance of the Urals faded, and he woke up in the hospital. “Complete catharsis,” said the head physician. - Congratulations".

Tenth part

Peter was discharged and returned to the city. Sitting on the bench, Peter pondered what to do next. Then he remembered the literary cabaret and immediately knew what to do.

In the new reality, the cabaret has become a pub, but little has changed inside. Peter decided to repeat the actions that started it all: he sat down at a table, ordered a cocktail of vodka and ecstasy, and took out a pen he had stolen from the orderly before being discharged to write a poem. The pen turned out to be a miniature weapon with one bullet. Peter composed a poem, read it and shot at the chandelier. The lights in the hall went out, a shootout began, and Peter groped out of the pub through the back door.

Chapaev was waiting for Peter on the street in his armored car.

Chapaev has not changed at all, only his left hand hung on a black linen ribbon. The hand was bandaged, and in the place of the little finger, under layers of gauze, emptiness could be discerned.

The armored car set off, and “soon the sands were rustling all around and the waterfalls were rustling” in Inner Mongolia.

Composition

Victor Pelevin is one of the most complex, mysterious and truly “unread” writers of recent times, whose work does not fit into the usual framework of reader perception, causes fierce controversy among critics, but invariably finds a warm response from both.

You are holding in your hands the second novel by this author, a novel, after the publication of which real fame came to the writer, making the word “cult” that is fashionable today applicable to him, and the circulation of his works into the thousands.
The main action of the book takes place in the era Civil War and is based on a fictional biography of national heroes of that time - Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, Petka (in the novel - Pyotr Pustota), Anka the machine gunner.
At the same time, in the novel you will meet colorful characters modern reality- bandits and “new Russians”, actors and movie characters (for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Just Maria).
It would seem that in this regard Pelevin is not original. New reading of events national history, in particular, facts about Chapaev, can be observed with interest in the example of such authors as V. Aksenov, V. Sharov, V. Zolotukha, M. Sukhotin, etc. But Pelevin’s novel is a special book that claims to be the “greatness of the plan” like himself famous work Soviet literature about Chapaev - the story of Dmitry Furmanov.
In the novel “Chapaev and Emptiness” Pelevin in artistic form reveals and popularizes the ideas of solipsism - a philosophical concept according to which the world around us exists only as our illusion, the fruit of consciousness, its product. From here follows the idea of ​​illusoryness, the untruth of individual human existence.
“Everything we see is in our consciousness, Petka... We are nowhere simply because there is no place about which we could say that we are in it. That's why we're nowhere. Do you remember? - this is how the legendary division commander tries to explain to the main character the basic essence of this philosophy.
Therefore, it is suggested to simply remember it...
As a result of communicating with Chapaev and applying his advice “in practice,” Peter Pustota comes to the conclusion that “no matter where he goes, in fact he moves only through one space, and this space is himself.”
In the process of reading this work, the reader’s traditional ideas about the world and man should be destroyed. “Imagine an unventilated room filled with an awful lot of people... This is the world you live in,” says one of the novel’s characters. Therefore, the only correct decision that should be made with such a view of the surrounding reality lies in the advice that Chapaev gives to Petka, and at the same time to the reader: “Wherever you find yourself, live according to the laws of the world in which you find yourself, and use it yourself these laws in order to free ourselves from them.”
In addition, this is a hoax novel, which means a book with its own genre laws: a puzzle novel, a game novel, confusing the inexperienced reader, starting with the preface of the mysterious Urgan Jambon Tulku VII.
V. Pelevin's book suggests many different readings. “Until you understand what he means, you will tear down the tower,” these words of one of the heroes of the novel can easily be attributed to the author himself! This is where the idea of ​​virtuality arises in the novel - the recognition of the simultaneous existence of many realities, among which there is no “true” one.
Thus, “Chapaev and Emptiness” is also an interactive novel, allowing the reader, together with numerous narrators, to control the narrative. For example, you can speculate and change the course of events together with psychiatrist Timur Timurovich, change your point of view on what is happening together with Vasily Chapaev, move from the present to the past together with Peter the Void.
In this whirlwind of impressions, you will even forget about such an achievement of scientific and technological progress as a television, which one of Pelevin’s heroes calls “just a small transparent window in the pipe of a spiritual garbage chute.” This idea is developed in the next novel by V. Pelevin “Generation “P”.
However, while showing many options for understanding the essence of man, Pelevin does not try to answer insoluble questions about the meaning of life and takes the position of an experimenter and observer. Because “all that is required of someone who has picked up a pen and bent over a sheet of paper is to line up the many keyholes scattered throughout the soul in one line, so that a ray of sunlight suddenly falls through them onto the paper.” The author of “Chapaev and Emptiness” completely succeeded!
But Pelevin does not stop there - he sneers at the very system and terminology of traditional philosophies and religions. This is manifested, for example, in the following dialogue between a security guard at a Japanese company and a mental hospital patient, Serdyuk:
“- I believe that there is no substantial door, but there is a collection of elements of perception that are empty in nature.
- Exactly! - Serdyuk said joyfully...
“But I won’t unlock this collection before eight,” said the guard...
- Why? - Serdyuk asked...
- For you karma, for me dharma, but in fact
really one hell of a thing. Emptiness. And in fact, she doesn’t exist.”
The novel is addressed to himself to a wide circle readers.
Some will find it simply fascinating descriptions of the events of the Civil War era. Another will discover serious philosophical implications, echoes of the ideas of Buddhism, solipsism and other worldview concepts. The third will simply accept the rules of Pelevin’s game and enthusiastically begin to search in the text hidden meaning, complex associations.
And the author will help the most devoted and attentive reader “to part with the dark gang of false selves” and give “golden luck” when “a special rise of free thought makes it possible to see the beauty of life...”.

The title of the novel is akin to a human name and, according to Fr. Florensky,
can either elevate in its essence, or, in the case of a gap between
given and realized meaning, becomes the cause of duality.
The title of V. Pelevin's novel is conceptual. It names what is happening
action, and as such is included in a number of “conceptual”
titles: “Fathers and Sons”, “Crime and Punishment”, “War and
world". The difference is that instead of common nouns, Pelevin uses
proper names, thereby integrating their heroes into a different series:
"Taras Bulba", "Oblomov", "Anna Karenina". This is already evident
quite Buddhist logic: “A is not A. This is what they call A.” Chapaev
there is a surname (singular) and at the same time there is a concept (general):
“Chapaev is a personality and Chapaev is a myth.” Hence: there is a personality
a myth, but since a myth is not a personality, then “Chapaev is not Chapaev.
This is what they call Chapaev.” Emptiness is a surname (personality of the poet-commissar)
- and emptiness is a concept, hence: a surname is a concept; from here:
the surname is a designation of the general (according to J. Derrida, the name of the historical
the actor can “act as a metonymy” of logocentric concepts),
hence: the general (in our case – Emptiness) is a designation of personality,
those. personality is emptiness, i.e. “Personality is not personality. This
and is called a person.”

Thus, the names of the heroes acquire a metaphysical status: they
mean more than they signify. Here is a striking example of a general trend
in modern prose - depersonalization of heroes. They become heroes
certain rational/irrational clumps of the author's will
(this is why appeals to Nietzsche, Freud, Jung are so frequent not only
in Pelevin’s novel, but also in other modern “texts”). Modern
a hero is an escape from a hero, hence such a vivid depersonalization
- the characters of modern prose resemble, at best, wax characters
doubles of “real” ones characters XIX century. If V. Rozanov has already
N. Gogol calls heroes wax figures, then today we have before us
Plato's squared metaphor unfolds: shadows
on the walls of the cave cast shadows on the consciousness of those who sleep in
cave. The familiar hero of the Russian novel - with a clearly described
physical shell, personal set of movements and gestures and individual
inner life (in the limit raised by M. Bakhtin to incarnate
into the bodies of Dostoevsky's heroes ideas) - dissolves in space
extra- and impersonal world. If the hero of the past is intentional
compactness in the sphere of the author’s ideal idea of ​​himself
himself, then the current hero is a fugitive from his I to another, where
the other is not necessarily a personality. It could be something like
action-state (“automatic writing” of the surrealists or “metaphysics”
moments" by G. Bachelard), and reflection-game (rational constructs
H. Borges, irrational – H. Cortazar, or multi-level
symbolism of life-as-game in the novels of U. Eco and M. Pavic).

It is no coincidence that Pelevin’s hero, Peter the Void, confesses to his doctor
doctor: “My story since childhood is a story about how
I'm running away from people." It is no coincidence that life for him is a “mediocre performance”
and his " main problem– how to get rid of all these thoughts and
feelings yourself, leaving your so-called inner world on some
trash heap." And this is not a product of "fashionable in recent years critical
solipsism,” which he honestly warns about in opening remarks
Urgan Jumbo Tulku VII is one of the author’s masks. Similar character
draws us into the atmosphere of the performance (the stage is present
in the first and last chapters novel), especially since already in the first
paragraph Urgan Tulku warns about missing genre definition
- “a special rise of free thought.” The warning is false: "genre
definition" appears in the text of the novel twice more - in history
disease of P. Emptiness, where it is attributed to the patient himself, and in
Void's dialogue with Baron Jungern (the baron is a modern colleague
Wolanda, head of “one of the branches of the afterlife”).

By playing with well-known cultural themes in the novel, Pelevin creates
their rather witty versions: the famous dream of Chuang Tzu in a retelling
Chapaeva sounds something like this - to the Chinese communist Jie Zhuang
dreams that he is a butterfly engaged in revolutionary work, behind
that he/she is caught in Mongolia and put against the wall. Successful in the mouth
Chapaeva’s interpretation of Kant’s aphorism: “What has always amazed me,
<...>so this is the starry sky underfoot and Immanuel Kant inside
us".

Other people's ideas, techniques, topics become unique intellectual
crutches - without them the main idea of ​​the novel turns into a description
how the Artist (=poet Peter the Void) is dissatisfied with the world around him
(= “New Russian period” of modern national life) and runs
from the phantom of the primitive accumulation of capital into the one created by one’s own
imaginary world (= "Inner Mongolia", which, by definition
Baron Jungern, the chief specialist in otherworldly affairs, means
“the place where help comes from” and, at the same time, the place “inside
the one who sees emptiness,” i.e. enlightened).

Emptiness (Sanskrit sunyata) is one of the basic concepts of Buddhism.
The most ancient commentator on the Buddha's sermons, Nagarjuna, interpreting
the famous “Diamond Sutra” (“Vajrachchedika-Prajnaparamita-sutra”)
cites “18 ways to describe emptiness.” Modern Buddhist scholar
D. Dandaron reduces them to 4 main “shunyatas”. Chapaev's armored car,
on which the Void escapes into the void, it is no coincidence that it has
slits resembling “the half-closed eyes of Buddha.” And there is escape itself
variations on the theme of Buddhist “liberation” from the world of suffering.
Only by abandoning your “illusory” self and belief in reality
surrounding world, through “enlightenment” as “awareness of the absence
thoughts”, one can achieve “Buddhahood”, i.e. nirvana.

Nirvana is Nothing, Nobody, Nowhere. Chapaev, Bodhisattva Teacher
for Petka, Anka and G. Kotovsky, rejoices when he hears from the student
(Petka – “shravaka”, “one who achieves enlightenment with the help of
Teachers") the answer to the question: “Who are you?” - "Don't know"; "Where are we?" –
“Nowhere”, etc. Awareness of oneself and the world as Emptiness is the last
stage on the way to Nirvana, there is Nirvana itself, which has already been described
it is forbidden. Emptiness is the leitmotif of the book, the key word that Pelevin
plays in all sorts of ways. Emptiness is not a cross-cutting theme,
uniting different motives (this is how Wagner’s operas are structured”),
rather, it is the growth of a single motive.

The main character suffers from a “split false personality”, and the false one is
from the point of view of a doctor, a person is a true person from the point of view
the view of Chapaev and the Void itself. The split allows the hero to be
alternately as a patient in a mental hospital in Moscow in the 90s,
then a poet and commissar during the Civil War. Chapaev - “one
one of the deepest mystics" - takes Petka out of the world of imperfection
reality, where roommates remain with their visions
– Volodin, Serdyuk and just Maria. The composition of the novel represents
an orderly change between the “visions” of each patient of the madhouse and “reality”,
presented by both psychiatrist Timur Timurovich and
Chapaev, Kotovsky, Anka, Baron Yungern. Second reality
opposed to the first. Petka's cure corresponds to the episode
“death” of Chapai in the Ural waves. In the finale, Chapaev is forever alive
takes the Emptiness out of modern Moscow in an armored car on another beret
– to “Inner Mongolia”.

If the Buddhist note, for example, in the novels of G. Gazdanov, is spontaneous,
is not connected with reality and does not refer to related cultural
realities, then the “spontaneity” of Pelevin’s heroes is highly cultivated,
rationalized. Pelevin, apparently, as a great connoisseur of the East,
very skillfully uses one of the common techniques of Japanese
Zen Buddhist poetry - honkadori, which means inclusion in one's
the text of someone else's text or certain fragments (here, alas, the primacy
does not belong to home-grown postmodernists or even Lautréamont).

By means elite culture the realities of mass consciousness are expressed.
Tynianov’s theory of archaists and innovators works with the opposite sign:
a new technique, parodying itself, immediately turns into archaic,
which serves to re-parody him. This circle is endless
or rather, beginningless. Both heroes and techniques move in a closed
circle, like Lemov’s cosmonauts reappearing in a time loop
Quiet. If Nabokov's prose exploits two techniques (the technique of open
type that creates new meanings, and a closed type technique used
as a decoration closed to itself), then Pelevin encounters a third
type of technique – self-destructive. The game loses game functions because
You can't play at death.

They die for real.

If we list at least partially a set of cultural realities
novel, you get a neo-Dal transcription of Ellochka the cannibal, or
dictionary of the same Ellochka to the power of n, where n is the number of heard
books. Here are some; names: “strength, hope, Grail, egregor,
// eternity, radiance, lunar phases...", Jung, Nietzsche, Schwarzenegger,
Om, Berkeley, Heidegger" (reading circle of Emptiness), Berdyaev, Bryusov,
L. Tolstoy, B. Grebenshchikov, mantra, etc. All this pseudo-pneumatosphere
expressed by the author with genuine irony, which is some
a counterbalance to Pelevin’s pathos in the presentation of spiritual truths.
The truths themselves can only affect the reader, for whom what
Buddha, Chapaev, Brezhnev are characters from folk tales.

In early Buddhism there was a genre of Jataka - accessible to the general public.
masses of legends (fairy tales or fables) about the previous rebirths of the Buddha.
In Soviet times, it corresponded to the genre of anecdote, one of the constant
whose heroes were just Chapai. So Pelevin’s novel is
an example of Soviet God-seeking. Its heroes express “the only
the correct" ideological line, only instead of the Marxist-Leninist
they voice the line of the now so popular socialist
occultism. If earlier Chapaev expounded the ideas of the leaders of the International,
now he quotes new Teachers. “Eh, Petka,” said Chapaev,
- I explain to you, I explain. Any form is emptiness. - But
what does it mean? “And that means that emptiness is any form.”
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” - these are the words of the bodhisattva
Avalokitesvara from the Hridaya Sutra. Compare and enlighten yourself!

In Buddhism, the achievement of Nirvana is associated with overcoming the river. For
to designate “crossing to Nirvana” a special term is used
“paramita” (“that which transports to the other shore”); in Chinese
this sounds even clearer: “reaching the other shore,” where the other
the shore is a metaphor for Nirvana. Chapaev deciphers the word Ural as
The conditional River of Absolute Love - thus, his death in the Ural
the waves are just a transition to nirvana. Therefore, at the end of the novel
Chapaev and Anka are alive again. It is important that Chapaev lacks
left little finger. It was previously used by Anka as a "clay machine gun"
those. the little finger of Anagama Buddha, which, when pointing at something, destroys
is something (nirvana is absolute entropy, that is, complete
absence) and with the help of which Anka sprayed drunken weavers
led by Furmanov, who wanted to kill Chapai. This is the absence of a little finger
indicates that Chapai himself is a Buddha.

This indirect explanation of the actual course of things works
in the novel's only love scene. Peter seeks Anna's love,
and after reading his poems, she herself comes to him. During
a date smoothly turning into an intimate act, Anka and Petka lead
philosophical dialogue. Peter compares beauty to a “golden label”
on an empty bottle." Waking up, he realizes that there is nothing wrong with Anka
it wasn’t - it was all a dream. But in the finale Chapaev hands Petka
“an empty bottle with a gold label”, which I received from an unlucky
Anka's mistresses.

Giving Anka the order to shoot from the “clay machine gun,” Chapaev shouts:
"Fire! Water! Earth! Space! Air! ”, which in Hinduism, in
Sankhya teachings, corresponds to the five physical elements: “ether,
air, fire, water and earth" (in the Upanishads these elements lie
in the “ground of all things”).

The motive for crossing the river appears at the very beginning of the novel, when,
moving through cold revolutionary Moscow, Emptiness ponders
that “Russian souls are destined to cross the Styx when it
freezes, and it is not the ferryman who receives the coin (the ferry is “paramita”.
- A.Z.), and someone in gray, renting a pair of skates.” Unfortunately,
the real main character of the novel is “Someone in Gray”, define
which there is no difficulty in his relation to Christ. Such
you won’t find the amount of exposing anti-Christian rhetoric
even in textbooks of scientific atheism. Khodasevich wrote that immersion
into the world of Yesenin’s “Inonia” is impossible for a Christian without a diver
suit. To immerse yourself in Pelevin’s world, you already need a bathyscaphe.

Here are some examples of Pelevin’s understanding of Christian subjects.
Using numerous Gospel comparisons of Christ with the Bridegroom,
the author describes the delusional visions of the sick “Maria”: “Mary with joyful
With a sinking heart I recognized Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Groom... –
“Oh, Virgin Mary,” Schwarzenegger said quietly... “No, honey,” she said
Maria, smiling mysteriously and raising her folded hands to her chest, -
just Maria." During a straightforward pun occurs immediately
two blasphemous identifications. Another patient, Volodin, reinterprets
story of the Transfiguration. The uncreated light that descended in the Gospels on
He associates Christ from heaven with himself (“I am him”).
We are talking about a drawing by Volodin, which depicts “condescension
heavenly light" on his two criminal assistants (Volodin himself
from the “new Russians”), whom he calls “scavengers of reality.”
In the Gospel, the apostles become witnesses of the Transfiguration...

Describing the flight of a patient who identifies himself with “just Mary,”
the author achieves “high” metaphorical insights: “Everywhere they sparkled
domes of churches, and because of this the city seemed like a huge leather jacket,
densely strewn with meaningless rivets." For Serdyuk, third
Void's roommate in the ward, the “main spiritual tradition” of the Russians
- “Godlessness implicated in alcoholism.” His delirium companion
– Kawabata (“not the writer Kawabata, but a pretty good” businessman
Kawabata – a trace of Gogol) – offers the public “Russian
conceptual icon" by David Burliuk: the word GOD, printed
"through the stencil" The comments are: "It's hard to believe that someone
it may occur to you that this three-letter word is the source
eternal love and mercy..." According to the Japanese, "stripes of emptiness,
remaining from the stencil”, “they place it (the icon. - A.Z.) ... higher
"Trinity" by Rublev.

New Russian criminals also differ in discussing spiritual topics,
Volodin's friends in vision. Shurik “sees the light” like this: “...maybe
It’s not because our God is like a boss with flashing lights, because we live in a zone,
but on the contrary - because we live in the zone because we have chosen God for ourselves
godfather with a siren." Kolyan, Shurik’s sidekick, replies: “Maybe where
people do less shit, and God is kinder. Like in the States or there
in Japan." The author got used to someone else's consciousness, got used to it. Volodin, commenting
This dialogue demonstrates intelligent modern pluralism:
“...who was this fourth? ... Maybe it was the devil...
Maybe it was God who, as they say, after the famous
prefers to appear incognito..."

However, the comments, it turns out, belong to the pen of Void, who,
according to his own description, “deep down... was not in
sufficiently Christian." Here it is, the “almost Christian” formula:
“Maybe the devil, maybe God, maybe someone else.” “Who else” - they know
two “enlightened”, that is, enlightened characters - Chapaev and
Baron Jungern. According to Jungern, Christmas is not at all the holiday that
celebrated “by Catholics... in December, by Orthodox in January”
and - “in fact, everything happened in October”, when Gautama “was sitting under
crown of a tree" on the night of his epiphany. All the “revelations” of the heroes
Pelevin follow from the aphorism of the heroic division commander: “All this
the world is a joke that the Lord God told himself.
And the Lord God himself is the same.” "Enlightened" Chapaev says
here is quite in the spirit of Chapaev the Bolshevik.

If we trace the history of cult intellectual books, then
“Chapaev and Emptiness” will fit into a certain series: “Judas Iscariot”
L. Andreeva, “Julio Jurenito” by I. Ehrenburg, “The Master and Margarita”
M. Bulgakova, “Violist Danilov” by V. Orlov. All these books have in common
what G. Florovsky called “mystical irresponsibility.”
An “educated” reader, or rather, according to A. Solzhenitsyn, an educated reader,
attract research in the field of “spirituality”. At the same time, completely
It doesn’t matter what thoughts the heroes of popular literature voice:
“the special rise of free thought” does not distinguish between
God and the Devil, Good and Evil. The main thing: certain spiritual
marks, unclear esotericism, play with meanings - a kind of substitute
intense spiritual life, painful search for the True God,
or at least the pain of being in a world forsaken by God. Popularity
the novel is clear. Pelevin skillfully shows the way to the loss of a gift,
that same evangelical talent which was not increased by the slave.
Instead of real Love, the novel offers to dissolve in Conditional Love
Absolute Love. Everything in the world is conditional – and Love is conditional. Which means
You don’t have to suffer, don’t suffer, don’t get sick. So, escape from
in reality, so dear to our lost generation, -
the path to salvation. An escape, not a transformation of reality.

If the names listed at the beginning suggest opposition pairs,
giving freedom of choice (war-peace, crime-punishment), then
Pelevin's name is spiritual bluff. "Chapaev" and "Emptiness" are
the same thing. There is nothing but Emptiness, and to oppose it
Pelevin cannot do anything. And he doesn’t want to.

However, “shunyata” (“emptiness”) in Chinese sounds like “kun”. Can
expect a continuation, for example, “Stirlitz and Bela Kun”. There is a method.
Once upon a time at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics we came up with mathematics in which everything was divided
to 0. The result was infinity. We argued which
Is infinity greater: 1/0 or 1000000/0? So divide by infinity.
The result will be the desired Emptiness - Zero.