In the country of unlearned vices – Weekend – Kommersant
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In Russian literature, things are difficult with good books. Her great moralists were not good-natured, her great stylists even less so. Sasha Sokolov’s famous novel is an exception in this sense. The emotional content of “School for Fools” is a poignant sympathy for the world. Hence the enchanting effect that Sokolov’s novel has above all on adolescents.
In adolescence, the mind always gets a little ahead of the heart. The mind craves complexity, difficulty, the work of deciphering. Heart – the simplest things: sensual hooks in the opening chaos of the world, always undeserved love. Therefore, the main teenage books – conditional Hesse-Exupery-Salinger-Vonnegut – work according to the formula “quite simple in the frame of a little complex.” The first and most famous novel by Sasha Sokolov fits well into this series.
When you reread School for Fools, having a better idea of the context of Moscow underground prose of the 1960s and 1970s — texts by Pavel Ulitin, Vladimir Kazakov, Yevgeny Kharitonov — it is clear that this is actually not such a radical novel in form. All his quirks – plot twists, sudden exits and returns to abandoned episodes after many pages, random associations and long enumerations that interrupt the narrative, fantastic transformations of characters, their doubling and merging – serve one purpose: to show linear logic as violence, to oppose it with something else. , some effect. The carrier of this affect is a schizophrenic, a person with a split personality, leading an endless dialogue-monologue with himself.
The hero of the “School” is often called a boy, but this does not seem to be the case. Apparently, he is 30 years old – like the author at the time of the end of the novel, in 1973. There were several significant experiences in the life of the character: studying at a special school, friendship with the deceased geography teacher Pavel-Savl Norvegov, undivided love for the biology teacher Veta Akatova, staying in a mental hospital with Dr. , learning to play the accordion from her mother’s lover. All of this could be the basis for an upbringing novel, but the hero is categorically uneducable. He is the worst student of the school, the grief of teachers and parents. Undermining the genre of an educational novel, he does not put the events of his life into a progressive narrative, but gets lost in them, forgets and remembers differently each time, mixes with fantasies and hallucinations. In place of the history of the formation of consciousness comes the chronicle of madness.
Madness, delirium (psychotic, alcoholic, mystical, narcotic, sexual) has always been the most important material for Russian literature, the engine of the plot and the source of style. One can again recall the contemporaries of the author of “School” in the Moscow underground – Yuri Mamleev or Venedikt Erofeev. Against this background, the difference between Sokolov’s letters is clearly visible. All his linguistic lace, witticisms and puns, allusions, stylizations, subtle curtsy – this is not the speech of an obsessed, but, on the contrary, an absolutely healthy person, maybe a little inclined to mannerisms. This is clearly not the speech of the hero of the novel. From some episodes, we understand that his real way of expressing himself is a heart-rending cry. Sokolov, as it were, translates this cry into the language of the most elegant prose, fantasizes about what we could hear in it if we could understand.
According to Sokolov, his weak-minded neighbor, the boy Vitya Plyaskin, to whom the “School for Fools” is dedicated, really existed, but even if he did not exist, it does not change much. In any case, there is a certain ethical ambiguity here – the exoticization of the gaze of the Other, turning it into a literary device. So-and-so Sokolov’s student is something like Voltaire’s Innocent: a noble savage, through whose innocent eyes we see the Soviet world with its coarse habits, boring rituals, plain materiality, hysterical relationships, dark secrets.
It cannot be said that this view reveals the hidden truth of the state of affairs familiar to us: chaos in the place of feigned order, mystery in the place of dull routine. Not that he offers any ethical position either: purity of heart instead of depravity, love instead of indifference. Rather, the look of a sick person, by general standards, reveals the optionality of a ready-made assembly of the world and the plot of life, the possibility of replaying it a little (which does not mean winning). It is this feeling of life, with all its dramas, all the pain, like a charming constructor, an elegant game with rules that are set on the go, that probably responds most of all in Sokolov’s novel of teenage sensitivity. And it is, of course, very far from the actual experience of insanity.
But you can look at it a little from the other side – from the side of kindness. To say that Sokolov is kind to his hero would be inaccurate. Rather, it turns out to be for him a kind of instrument of kindness towards the world. Kindness in good literature is always in short supply. Any writer knows too much about his characters. He can judge or pardon them, but in order to be kind – in prose, as in life – one must renounce this superfluous knowledge, consider it unimportant. The figure of the half-witted narrator, the student who has learned nothing, allows such a renunciation to be made. Lack of understanding of the laws of the world, the inability to grow up and the “selective memory” that the narrator of the “School” constantly reminds himself and us of, all this is the foundation of that impotent tenderness and enthusiastic pity for curiosities and trifles, nymphs and snow butterflies, which fills Sokolov’s novel. Such pity for things and events, the desire not to leave them, to constantly return, is the force that opposes the linear logic of life. This is a special sentimental kindness that prevents time from passing, takes away its inexorable power – at least for the duration of the game.
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