Twice in one train – Kommersant

Dmitry Danilov, a poet, prose writer and playwright, winner of theatrical and literary awards (the last one – last year for the novel “Sasha, hello!”) – wrote a book about railroad trips. It’s called Empty Trains 2022. Together with the author, I traveled along the routes of the book Mikhail Prokov.

The man gets on the train. The train is moving. “First, Moscow rushes past for a long time, then Khimki with the Khimki Arena stadium invisible in the dark, then Zelenograd shining with lights, then … the Volga rushes by, then Tvertsa rushes by, then a certain number of stations and settlements rush by, and now Bologoe at first rushes by, and then stops rushing and stands motionless.

A person is carried somewhere along the way, where turns are rare, and the height is unchanged, he does not soar in the clouds and is not swayed by the wind, does not clutch the steering wheel in his hands and does not try to guess the actions of the car ahead, his horizons are limited to one side window, his responsibility for happening is zero. He rides, having every chance to remain internally motionless.

The man’s name is Dmitry Danilov, he is a writer, he travels around Russia, once he leaves its borders – to Abkhazia. There are no descriptions of the Abkhaz beauties that a traveling writer should have in the book. There are kind words about the new station in Adler, actually about Abkhazia – also only about the railway: “The railway line from the Russian-Abkhazian border to Sukhum is very simple. There are several large stations – Tsandrypsh (border), Gagra, Gudauta, Novy Afon, Sukhum … There are small platforms between these stations … After suburban traffic was closed several years ago, these platforms do not work and fall into decay.

About Russian cities and villages, Danilov speaks just as sparingly. At first, this seems like a trick, a kind of game with the reader, but then the author brings conceptual justifications under this ultra-laconic manner. Such, for example: “It would be possible to describe the steppe and driving on it, the sensations that the contemplation of the steppe causes in the contemplator, to describe the beauty and grandeur of the steppe, the shades of its colors, and so on, but, probably, it is not necessary. Many texts about the steppe have already been written, for example, the famous story of the same name by A.P. Chekhov, and why add one more text to them.

Much has been written about train travel, however. Long before Danilov, it was noticed that a lonely house with a luminous window in the fields looks romantic and mysterious from the train window – almost as romantic and mysterious as the luminous windows of a distant train from the window of that house lost in the fields. But the author of “Empty Trains” is not inclined to insist on the value of his observations – moreover, towards the end of the “project”, as he calls his trips and a book about them, he directly says that the main thing in all this is not looking out the window and not looking for interesting objects. What then?

Firstly, the achievement of a certain state – serenity, thoughtlessness, inner silence, that same stillness. And secondly, a return to this (and sometimes much better) kind of state, once achieved earlier (usually in childhood). It so happened that the author was fond of railways from a young age. It so happened that he had to travel a lot on it, usually with his mother. It so happened that the mother of Dmitry Danilov – the book is dedicated to her – died of a post-COVID stroke at the end of January 2022, three weeks after the first trip described in the book.

So all the memories of joint childhood trips acquire a special, unplanned flavor. Observations, both remaining in memory and lost, become valuable not in themselves, but as part of some hard-to-formulate whole. Let’s say that the same Abkhaz trip – from Adler to Sukhum – partially reproduces the trip on the Moscow-Sukhumi train in the mid-1970s, when the seven-year-old author went with his mother to New Athos on vacation. Attempts to restore in memory the details of that trip and that vacation do not bring results. Well, except that one manages to remember how in Gagra they almost fell behind the train, barely caught up. Or the railway, which had to be crossed on the way to the beach. “I still vaguely remember the concrete breakwaters, at equal distances from each other, leaving the rocky shore into the sea. Actually, here they are, these breakwaters. Somewhere here, on this section (where the railway goes directly next to the shore and where there are breakwaters), we then rested. This is a long stretch, it is impossible to determine the exact location. And now there is no one to ask.

“Seven years is not infancy,” the author returns to those unpreserved memories at the end of the chapter, “it would be possible to remember some details of that old vacation in the summer in New Athos. How they drove, where they lived (generally, it was a bit off), what they talked about with their mother, what else was there, besides a long, hours-long floundering in the sea.

Nothing, just running after the train in Gagra, only trains passing by the beach, and gray, gnarled concrete breakwaters, at equal distances from each other, leaving the rocky shore and into the sea. Nothing else”.

In general, one could say that the travelogue is becoming an obituary – but no, it is not. It’s just that trips in empty trains along low-density (such a term) branches acquire some additional meaning.

In literary theory, two concepts of literary genders compete. One separates lyricism and drama into different poles (in one there is only the author’s voice, in the other there is none at all), and the epic tends to be understood as their synthesis. According to another, lyrics are the most subjective, epic is objective, drama is in the middle. The phenomenon of “the prose of a playwright” in its usual sense seems to be the first to pour water on the mill: what kind of lyric is there, when everything that happens is done in the implied lights of a footlight or spotlights, it must move, act, stringing some collisions on other vicissitudes. However, Danilov’s book works in contradiction to this: the author’s voice is constantly heard, but in the absence of declarations and any kind of pedaled emotions, it becomes, as it were, a background that does not drown out other voices – both carriage companions and inanimate objects: stop stations, platforms, buildings of various degree of dilapidation, signboards, inscriptions on fences. There are no conflicts between them, they do not fight, they do not come into conflict. The result is something that is just closest to the lyrics, but the lyrics are choral, polyphonic. Poetry – but without rhyme, with a rhythm that ceases to be felt, as the sound of the sea or the tapping of carriage wheels ceases to be heard over time, with images that are not caught from the waters of life and are not crafted by experienced hands, but arise themselves, almost like Venus from the foam.

Well, or like breakwaters.