Reading is Power – Weekend
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A film adaptation of the trendy postmodernist pulp fiction from the 2000s, Mikhail Elizarov’s novel The Librarian, is being released on several online platforms at once. The plot focuses on forgotten Soviet books that give their readers in post-Soviet Russia colossal magical power.
Dreaming of an American visa and a Hollywood career, a young unsuccessful actor Alexei Vyazintsev (Nikita Efremov) travels from Moscow in the late 90s to the province to draw up an inheritance – the hated father (Andrey Merzlikin), who left his family for a long time, has died. It is necessary to wrap up the sale of the parent kopeck piece in Khrushchev as soon as possible, this is a chance for the realization of the American dream. But it doesn’t work “quickly”: Alexei gets into a strange business – on the ruins of Soviet civilization, he encounters a real miracle.
It turns out that dad was a “librarian” – a member of the many-sided secret community of admirers of books by the Soviet writer Gromov, the author of socialist realist waste paper with names like “Happiness, fly”, “Quiet herbs”, “Roads of labor”, which can have a striking psychedelic effect on attentive readers – give strength and rage, relieve pain or intoxicate with false memories. Among Gromov’s lovers who gather in libraries and reading rooms all over the country, unpretentious-looking stories are called – the Book of Power, the Book of Fury, the Book of Memory, the Book of Patience, and so on. There are six of these literary monuments, but they say that there is a seventh one – the mysterious Book of Meaning.
Someone, of course, remembers the original source of the series “The Librarian”, the novel of the same name by Mikhail Elizarov, which became a highlight of the distant 2007, while others now, after the release of the film adaptation, will definitely read it. The hodgepodge from Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” and “Club Dumas” by Perez-Reverte, Pelevin and Prokhanov is a solid entertaining read with an interesting concept. And the domestic film industry, which is gaining momentum, has repeatedly tried to take it on. But something didn’t work out. And in the fact that the implementation of long-standing plans has arrived in time only now, I would like to see not carelessness and bad luck (although it would be logical to put Yelizarov right off the wheels, against the backdrop of the success of Sergey Lukyanenko’s Watches), but the plan of higher forces.
Today, when the country is seething with half-forgotten narratives, the Librarian, recollecting the Soviet idyll on the ruins of the empire, seems to be an extremely relevant book. The issues it raises are tangibly modern. Here is an obsession with a dusty, but fabulous past, and restlessness in real life, which pushes sectarian readers to feats of arms and conspiracy theories (of course, the REN TV logo in the list of producers of the series seems symptomatic). And of course, a dramatic discord between form and content. The Librarian talked about a country of broken ties that was waging a latent civil war. One of the main lines of Elizarov’s text was the mutation of words and things: the words printed in the books of the Soviet writer Gromov lost their meaning in the reading rooms of the 90s, acquiring some new meaning that needed to be deciphered, and the professional tools and overalls of readers who left the USSR , turned into weapons and armor needed to defend the sacred books and war with other readers. A construction helmet replaced a medieval helmet, a pickle – an ax, a car tire cut into strips – a cuirass.
These displacements of signifier and signified could become a field of possibilities for fairy tale cinema. They, like the task of presenting in flashbacks the dope inspired by the Book of Memory, are a challenge in themselves. Here, as they say, a “visionary director” was required. Clan battles, described by Elizarov with boyish voluptuousness and haste (in the form of a text, they were rather tiring), on the screen they could take any form – turn into brutal Germanic hyperrealism, which would turn Elizarov into Masodov, and the soviet “Mad Max”, and something innovative, unprecedented – a gathering of amateur, but extremely serious role players armed with combat props.
Alas, as a result, a harmless comic, average cartoon style, nostalgic retro, something in between “Food Block” and “World! Friendship! Gum!”. The idea and the plot, even taking into account the changes made by the screenwriters, are good, but with the form of the serial The Librarian, the problems are exactly the same as the book, which clearly lacked a worthy editor. The situation is saved by the time of the release, which turns the postmodernist giggles inside out, filling Elizarov’s chthonic story with genuine bitterness. It’s not funny to watch how former Soviet people thrown to the sidelines of life crush each other with cleavers and screwdrivers. And the story about a careless young man with a player, who at the turn of the millennium suddenly turns into a bunker Guardian of the Motherland, blinded by power, rage, strength and illusory memories, as they say, leads to gloomy reflections.
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