Hole Biography – Weekend
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The publishing house Individuum published a book by the writer and critic Eduard Lukoyanov “Father of the Rods” – a detailed biography of Yuri Mamleev and at the same time a sly deconstruction of the myth surrounding the figure of the famous metaphysician.
Most of the biographies of radical artists have two problems, apparently opposed to each other, but often combined in one book. The first is imposed by the genre of biography – a narrative that traditionally goes from birth to death, from the first experiences to universal recognition. Any arbitrarily furious troublemaker appears in such a narrative as a worthy cultural figure – another bust for a shelf with plaster classics. The second problem is determined, on the contrary, by the character of the characters: the researcher is fascinated by the myths surrounding them, he fails to take an external position – and therefore does not come out to understand anything plainly about his character. Eduard Lukoyanov thinks out how to avoid these vices: to create something, if not congenial, then organic to the main Russian dark classic.
Firstly, this book is deliberately chaotic, jumping from fifth to tenth, not chewing the material for the reader, but confusing him. Fragments that are quite typical for the genre of biography – reconstructions of events, analysis of works, conversations with friends and relatives of the hero – alternate in “Father of the Rods” with phantasmagoric scenes: street hooligans force the future writer to show a pussy (“hero”), and then push the novel, and so they awaken his literary gift, the Mamleev couple visit the exhibition of Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt and come to know with him about the delights of nuclear war, Eduard Limonov arranges a disgusting scandal over borscht visiting an older comrade, a dying classic mocks nurses in the hospital and so on. These grotesque scenes are written as evil parodies of the prose of Mamleev himself. The author of “Shatunov” was not an exquisite master of style, but he had an absolutely recognizable and almost unchanged manner for half a century, so it is quite easy to parody his talk about the beyond, everyday abominations, guttural laughter and unearthly longing. In fact, Lukoyanov is a wonderful prose writer, but the “artistic” fragments of his book are written emphatically clumsily, sometimes almost blatantly bad. This is a manifestation of bilious arrogance, almost contempt for the famous writer.
Here it is necessary to mention the second main feature of the book: Lukoyanov does not love his hero. This attitude oscillates between polite wariness and outright hatred. This, of course, is not at all the affect that usually drives the authors of biographies, but it also allows them to take a critical position in relation to Mamleev, which none of those who seriously wrote about him wanted to get up, to abandon the seductive feeling of being chosen, which arises in any reader. included in the Mamlei world.
Who was Yuri Vitalievich Mamleev? On the one hand – the creator of the most terrible Russian prose of the twentieth century, the explorer of all kinds of abysses, the observer of half-ghouls and chicken corpses lurking in every Soviet inhabitant, the head of the Yuzhinsky circle, famous for delusional orgies and utter outrages, a friend and mentor of other quite terrible personalities (such as the one who sang Reich bard, connoisseur of European decadence and catcher of kikimor Yevgeny Golovin, radical Islamist Geydar Dzhemal and, of course, Alexander Dugin; there is quite a lot about all of them in Lukoyan’s book). On the other hand, Mamleev is an absurd grandfather, who for decades wrote lurid novels that no one but devoted fans picked up, gave boring lectures on Russian sectarianism and Indian mysticism, not particularly understanding either one or the other, singing the praises of his own utter “Eternal Russia” and gladly received awards from the government for his patriotic nonsense, adored by many and not taken seriously by anyone. Was the late Mamleev the thinker a sad profanation of the early Mamleev the transgressor? Or, on the contrary, was this monster from the 1960s the dark secret of a wise old man? Or was there no contradiction between them, and the nightmarish “Shatuny” is in fact a novel about the Russian search for God, leading directly to ascents to the heavenly Rasseyushka (as the author himself tried to imagine in later years)? Another question: is Mamleev responsible for the fact that his seemingly abstract intuitions, his sensitivity to spiritual twist, fueled conservative ideologists like Prokhanov and Dugin? Or was the writer so immersed in metaphysical distances that it is completely meaningless to attribute to him influence on the affairs of this world?
Lukoyanov, one way or another, walks around these questions, discovers a lot of curious nuances and clues, but does not give answers. It does not, it seems, in principle. From the life and work of the Yuzhinsky patriarch, there is simply no point in making an unambiguous story. Both Mamleev himself and all his texts – the best and the worst, perfect and wretched – are not evidence of the truth, no matter how terrible or bright, but of the ridiculous and terrible inconsistency of the universe, “the perforation of the world space”, as Lukoyanov calls it. Therefore, the very story about him should become a manifestation of the world’s incoherence, as far as possible knocking the ground out from under the reader’s feet. In this sense, the “Father of the connecting rods” is luck.
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In everyday life, Mamleiism is a drunken fight in a cemetery (or better, even in a church), soup from a human head in well-fed times, and jumping from a parachute tower without a parachute. Something extremely ordinary, but not amenable to understanding – this is also Mamleiism. In fact, Mamleiism is an awareness of the absolute fragility of the visible shell of the world. In “Shatuny” violence is committed not because the author wants to tickle the nerves of the layman, but because the characters in his novel have ceased to perceive the world as reality.
Edward Lukoyanov. Father of rods. The life of Yuri Mamleev before the grave and after. Moscow: Individual, 2023
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