“Rose” by Vasyakina, “Valsarb” by Pobyarzhina and “Fireworks on the Other Side” by Shalashova

Three works by young writers reached the finals of the Big Book: “Rose” by Oksana Vasyakina, “Valsarb” by Helena Pobyarzhina and “Fireworks on the Other Side” by Alexandra Shalashova. Written in different genres, from memoirs with elements of pathological anatomy to fiction with elements of horror, they are similar to each other in their sad outlook on life and the high proportion of characters who are more or less dead. Was it worth disturbing the peace of the deceased in each of the three cases for the sake of literary success? I took the liberty of deciding Mikhail Prorokov.

Oksana Vasyakina, debuted two years ago with the novel “The Wound”, now the author of three books. “Wound”, who did Vasyakin, winner of the “Nose” prize, was a story about his mother, “Steppe” was a book about his father. The third is called “Rose” and tells about an aunt, her mother’s sister named Svetlana. “Sometimes I ask myself why I need an outside figure to write: mother, father, Svetlana. Why can’t I write about myself? Because I am the basis of the reflective surface of the mirror. Metallic coating,” writes the narrator (who is also the author) in “Rose.”

Undoubtedly, this is not entirely true: the “metallic coating” can be biographers like Eckerman or Valentin Bulgakov, whose task is to remove themselves from the text as much as possible. It is difficult to remove oneself from a text about a father or mother, and Oksana Vasyakina did not strive for this at all. Moreover: while sorting out the relationship with a loved one after his death, she tried and is trying to understand both him and, first of all, herself. And from the point of view of self-knowledge, an attempt to talk about a person less close than his mother and father, about someone with whom you feel a kinship more spiritual than physical, was self-explanatory.

“…I understand that I am most like Svetlana. Next to her, I felt total recognition and a deep fear of the emptiness that united us. This is probably why at times I felt hatred towards her, mixed with envy. It seemed to me that she handled her darkness much more freely…” These words seem to promise a figure no less large and gloomy than the hero of “The Steppe,” the “brother,” the rapist and drug addict.

But the expectations do not come true: Svetlana shows her dark side only in the fact that, instead of playgrounds, she drags Oksana, a preschooler, around the entrances, where she drinks, smokes and makes out with guys.

Having left care of her niece, she does not change her habits: she sits on the neck of her mother (Oksana’s grandmother), drinks, walks, and has abortions. During her ninth pregnancy, she changes her mind about miscarriage and gives birth to a girl. Neither the reasons for changing her mind (was she finally afraid of the consequences? did she want variety? was there a desire to continue the relationship with the child’s father? By the way, there is nothing about men in the book at all, even the narrator’s father hardly appears on its pages), nor how and what changed in the heroine later motherhood cannot be found in a book. Moreover, the author’s memory is tenacious and merciless, and those couple of scenes with the participation of Svetlana and her daughter, which she snatches from the past, are etched into the reader’s memory, whether he wants it or not.

Like many other details: “Before her death, Svetlana’s insides almost completely rotted. Flesh affected by tuberculosis turns into a cloudy black-gray abyss. Svetlana could no longer speak for several days. A voice requires lungs and a diaphragm, Sveta no longer had them, she only breathed in small bursts.”

But the narrator’s gaze at the heroine becomes blurred and loses focus when it comes to ordinary human manifestations. “…How much effort she made to not become what her grandmother and mother became. She loved both of them devotedly. Unlike her, I despised my grandmother and mother… Svetlana felt a bitter hatred for her grandmother and felt her domestication with the same intensity” – did she “love” or “experience hatred”? Apparently, she “loved” so that the narrator could emphasize her difference from the heroine, and hated in order to once again remind that in this family it was customary to hate each other.

As a result, the role of the mirror has to be played not by Oksana, but by Svetlana, but the reader does not get a good look at either one or the other: Svetlana slips away, and the narrator… it is known that the more we strain, trying to admire ourselves in the mirror, the less similar we become on your real selves.

If in the heroine of “Rose” the dark has to be looked for with an X-ray, then in “Fireworks on the Other Side” by Alexandra Shalashova it is presented in abundance.

The novel begins with a scene of teenage boys bullying younger girls, continues with the attempt of one of the teenagers, who did not participate in the bullying, to stand up for the honor of the girls with a knife, the wounding of the culprit and the trial of the one who stood up. Moreover, a court organized, again, by teenagers: as events unfold, the last adults disappear from the sanatorium for visually impaired children, which serves as the main location for “Salyuts…”. Someone escapes, someone dies, someone commits suicide. Food supplies are drying up, the children also want to escape, but they have nowhere to run: on this shore there is only a sanatorium and a suburb abandoned by residents with a couple of shops, from which everything edible has already been raked out. The city is across the river, you have to cross the bridge there, but the bridge is under fire, and so is the city. While the children postpone their escape, adults reappear in the sanatorium – those who died. However, not everyone sees them.

“Salyuts…” has eleven chapters and eleven narrators. Psychologically, they are well individualized, but the language solutions leave much to be desired, especially when it comes to narrators with weakened mental abilities (there are two of the eleven). Well, the main question for the second novel of the young writer is – knowing well how scary it can be for children left without adults, and how scary the children themselves can be, and being quite good at portraying this, why was it necessary to add a war to this (it’s not clear with whom, it’s not clear with whom) , marauders, the living dead and the evil spirit from children’s horror stories? These horrors, like waves, cancel each other out, as a result, the reader’s emotional involvement weakens, giving way to simple curiosity.

The heroine of “Valsarba” by debutante Helena Pobyarzhina lives with her mother, grandfather and grandmother, she has complete mutual understanding with her grandmother, her grandfather adores her, she idolizes him.

This does not at all prevent her from being unhappy and lonely, worrying about her mother’s inattention and the unfriendliness of her classmates. At some point, an element of chosenness is mixed into her restlessness: the ghosts of the dead begin to communicate with her, she hears the voices of those who lay down in the land of Valsarba (Braslav) during the Second World War – Jews shot here and soldiers killed nearby and buried here, including including Georgy Efron, the son of Marina Tsvetaeva.

The heroine herself is passionate about poetry, as she herself says, at birth, instead of a set of letters and a set of numbers, she received a double set of letters, her favorite pastime is “folding in a column,” rhyming and turning words over (“delight is a grotto of owls, a curl is a cat and a vase , the park is speckled, the great one is like a lion”), coming to visit, she freezes in fascination at the bookshelves. Combined with daydreaming, criticality, observation and vulnerability – more than enough reason for the “difficult age” to make it as difficult as possible, no ghosts needed.

At the same time, communication with “ex” does not distract the heroine from her troubles, but rather strengthens her consciousness of her “wrongness”. While the dead complain to her, she sometimes seems to be waiting her turn – and her complaints turn out to be much more convincing and, if I may say so, livelier. Once again, there is a contradiction between the desire to assign yourself the humble role of “the basis of the mirror” and the need for others to reflect you.

Oksana Vasyakina. Rose.— M.: UFO2023.

Alexandra Shalashova. Fireworks on the other side.— M.: Alpina non-fiction2023.

Helena Pobyarzhina. Valsarb.— M.: Alpina non-fiction2023.