"Stone Bridge" Alexander Terekhov. Alexander Terekhov. "A stone bridge". Ch1 About the book "Stone Bridge" Alexander Terekhov

Alexander Terekhov's new novel was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize. He also got into the list of the Big Book. This is a large 830-page detective story - it intertwines documentary with fiction ...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Who is Alexander Terekhov? Was born on June 1, 1966 in the city of Tula. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. He worked in "Ogonyok", "Top Secret", "Week". He is the author of the novel "The Rat Slayer", the story "Memoirs of conscript service", the collection "Outskirts of the Desert". Then - a long break. And now, in 2009 - a new one - the novel "Stone Bridge".

THE FOUNDATION
“The Great Patriotic War is going on. Stalingrad is already behind, but the Kursk Bulge is still ahead. The diplomat Konstantin Umansky has an amazingly beautiful daughter, Nina, who evokes a supernatural thrill of the soul in everyone who has seen her at least once. And the body. The girl goes to an elite school with the children of the Kremlin leaders. Many fall in love with Nina. Especially Volodya Shakhurin. The boy is also from a noble family - the son of the People's Commissar of the aviation industry. Konstantin Umansky is appointed Ambassador to Mexico. Volodya escorts his beloved home. Apparently asking - thirteen or fourteen years! - do not fly away, I love you very much. The girl probably disagrees. Volodya takes a pistol out of his pocket and shoots Nina Umanskaya in the back of the head. Outright. And then - to my temple ”.
A plot is an investigation. But the investigation is not of what is happening around the hero, but of what happened a long time ago. Sixty years later, Alexander, who traded collectible soldiers at the Izmailovskaya flea market in September 1998, takes into circulation a "huckster" with rude security guards.
“I figured you out,” he says, “the FSB and a criminal group are looking for you, so here's an offer you can't refuse. I know you can. "
On June 3, 1943 on the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge. The hero lives in the meantime, along the way only noticing the present - what is around.
The investigation process was reproduced with care, detailing: real names, addresses, telephones, transcripts of witnesses' monologues, fragments from diaries. It's like watching a movie and sorting out all the actions of people according to their actions.
Physiological details: "Act of June 4, the corpse of a teenage girl, 158 centimeters long, good nutrition, the mammary glands are well developed ..."
“Case p-778, July-October 1943. Military Collegium 4n-012045/55. Pistol "Walter" ... "
Excerpts from the diaries:
“We were evacuated to Kuibyshev. There is an insane asylum here. All its inhabitants believe that they live in Paris. "
“October 12th. “I had a fight with Yura. He says that Moscow will not resist - is this the Russian spirit? "
The story on the Stone Bridge did not end on the day of the murder of Nina Umanskaya and had many consequences. Moreover, it is not known for certain who exactly shot the girl. And for what reason: is it all that simple, is it all about jealousy?

ELITE CHILDREN
It turns out - no. It turns out that Volodya Shakhurin and several of his friends, including Mikoyan's son, created (in 1943!) The organization “Fourth Empire” that worshiped Hitler and intended to stage a coup. Stalin, when he was told, according to legend, said: "Wolf cubs."
In a Soviet country, during the war, read German books and admire German soldiers. I think to myself: was it really possible? But what about patriotism? It was, it was: these fighters seemed heroic - blond, in beautiful uniform. Not that ours are in the mud, the form is so-so ...
The boys have created anti-ideological ideals for themselves. They were allowed a lot: they studied in an elite, 175 school, a school in which teachers were afraid to teach. It was allowed to have a weapon with you. Expensive motorcycles, trips. Opportunities for learning foreign languages.
They were all smart, well-read ... But at the same time they understood that it was almost impossible for them to rise above their fathers. Although they thought of themselves as the future rulers of the earth. But institutes, tutors, good, lucrative jobs were waiting for them ... But still not the authorities.

"My feelings for my father were completely and hopelessly intertwined with money and goods."
“We watched the demonstration from the rostrum of the diplomatic corps of the Mausoleum, and I did not understand why people were choking down below, when there was so much room up there.”
"We were not punished at home."

I feel sorry for the guys. You can talk about their inhumanity, cynicism. But his father sent the same Nina Umanskaya to this school to establish contacts, which, in the end, ended badly. Children are toys in the hands of adults. Not bad, no. They just saw one facet of life - where everything is possible. They were brought up with composure and ignorance. And they did not explain the other.

THE NARRATOR IS NOT LESS Mysterious
- Who you are? For example, I am an empty person.
His life is an investigation. It belongs to some kind of structure. The narrator considers himself and his own people to be representatives of a hidden force, of a certain order of truth, which used to be strong, now - as if underground. “You know our capabilities. Now they are pretty limited. " He rents an office, hires workers. They can mercilessly pester old people ... But the human is not alien to them either. Alena, going to an old woman, thinks that she will come to an elderly person and whether to buy her an electric kettle, otherwise it is inconvenient. For seven years he has been investigating: hunting for old people and archives. From somewhere in the past, people and faces appear, they give testimony ...
He is attractive to women (secretaries, employees, librarians, waitresses, doctors, nurses, carriage drivers ...), they fall in love with him, but ... the feeling that he cannot give reciprocal spiritual love to any of them. But the novel is filled with the physical aspects of love. With dirty words, thoughts, scenes ...
He loves Truth and toy soldiers, of which he is a collector and connoisseur for cover. There is a bit of childishness in this. But again - sad, past, hidden somewhere in the darkness. This haze around the hero. What is happening in the present is hidden in the fog. Sometimes tamagotchi, mobile phones float only in glimpses ... Physically, he is located at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, with his mind and thoughts - in the 30s and 40s of the 20th century.

STYLE
The manner of writing is deliberately out of date. Someone rejects it, someone does not accept it, someone is fascinated by it ... Long, confused sentences. Then once - one harsh word. You try to concentrate, to grasp the chain of events ... At some point you get confused in complex sentences, in the abundance of names and details ...
Also, Terekhov's text is replete with unusual metaphors:
“Several convolutions, traversed by a ball rod to call happiness from the forest”, “fat graduate students, asexual and English” ...
"How disgusting right after ... How instant abomination swirls already at the first convulsion, already at the moment spitting into a sticky hole and swells up completely at the moment of peeling off, falling off, inevitable words and stroking according to the laws of service dog breeding."
The author uses many means to give his text the desired shade:
"Sergei Ivanovich Shakhurin looked like an ideal victim: the youngest in the family (not senile), teaches at the Moscow Aviation Institute (not cattle), lived in the family of the People's Commissar at the time of the tragedy (a witness to everything)." Behind what is in parentheses, one can clearly read the position of the narrator and, possibly, the author himself. Caustic, pompous remarks.
But if the remarks are perceived even with humor, then the abundance of metaphors distracts the reader from the content of the book. It remains to either first admire the style, and then, rereading, ponder the content, or omit the quotes. Which, however, is impossible to do. Terekhov's time "crawls like a snail". The same can be said about the entire text.
And what is it - the author's coup or the lack of the novel - everyone decides for himself.
ABOUT DEATH AND ABOUT GOD
What is this novel about? About death ... After all, the hero delves into the past to establish the causes of death. And he stumbles upon death everywhere, from all sides. Deeper and deeper he gets into other people's secrets ...
“They don’t talk about it, they don’t sing, they don’t teach children - there is no death. The TV does not notice this - there is no death. Youth and fun and new products! Elderly few, there they are on the benches caressing dogs, ruddy and silly targets for ridicule! ugly! - and there are no dead at all. They took it away and buried it. "
"They are in the majority, but they have nothing to say."
“No one hears this underground groan of the great majority: RETURN US! As if the most important human desire, like death, does not exist, as if the only possible meaning does not matter. As if the dead have someone to hope for, except us. "
Prove the truth, find out the secret. Even to the detriment of yourself. Acts on the principle: if not me, then who is it? The narrator seems to hear these voices, that they are calling from the past, that they yearn to know the truth ... And that retribution will be just. To remove the blame from the innocent and at least in the memory of the descendants to punish the guilty.

But at the very beginning of the book there is an exclamation: "I want to return myself ...". Whom does he want to return to himself? The boy who loved soldiers. A person capable of love ...
"God - yes, it's a good idea to calm down<…>; a laborious, non-freaky way out: to defend services, to cleanse by old age, to repent and mortify the flesh, guess familiar words in Church Slavonic and sing along (or maybe they will trust to carry something on Easter) ... donate a chandelier to a monastery in a will, or even get a haircut the day before , brother Seraphim! " - Feels a caustic attitude. To purely external things ... The narrator himself delves into the past, the Soviet past. He cannot find himself. Communicates with people with mostly atheistic views. He doesn't look around - he gets angry, and notices only some negative moments. He laughs, perhaps, at those old people who atone for their sins all their lives ... They hope for something in the next world.
“By the way, I knew only two Orthodox Christians. And both (man and woman) turned out to be complete ... ". What does the hero understand by Orthodox? Maybe just people who sometimes light candles for health or peace. And people, as you know, are different.
He believes that there are saints, that people can help each other, and is convinced of this. And he himself helps. And it seems that he poses problems that worry almost all people ...
"But I'm afraid there is no resurrection from the dead." And, nevertheless, he summons the dead to confrontations, they testify, the ghosts come to life ...
They took care of the death and life of some of them with their colleagues. And what will happen when they themselves leave this light? Nothing or something? Everywhere there is some kind of fear:
“In the future, in short, science will develop and the angels-doctors will return us. But it's hard to believe. What if these freaks will give eternity only to themselves, their relatives, neighbors? "
He gives all of himself to the people who have gone as if free of charge. Own life passes by, in the fog. He doesn't answer the woman who loves him. Even his soldiers are something from the past.
Stylistically, the Novodevichy Convent is very beautifully described. True, with mysticism, which is not typical for Orthodoxy: "When midnight strikes on the bell tower, the stone covering the graves falls to one side and the women rise from the coffins."
“It happens on bright nights, but still not every bright night. I am sure the nuns left their graves more often, when there were not yet three million cars in Moscow, the inhabitants did not meet clot-like aliens from the red planets in the potato fields ... ”.
Romance in the spirit of Byron, Zhukovsky's ballads here goes along with all sorts of Martians. A mix of two worlds - the otherworldly, described in legends, and the fantastically incredible, characteristic of the 21st century.
Terekhov also writes about the similarity of the fate of the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge and the monastery. They say that the birthdays and the heyday coincide with the princess Sophia. Only here the Stone Bridge is regarded as a place of murder. And the monastery is more like a place of eternal rest.

HISTORY
The narrator values ​​the story highly. These are names, surnames, patronymics. These are places, facts, dates. It's just atmosphere. History is everywhere. This is a driving force with secrets and riddles that people are trying to unravel, penetrating into its archives through old documents, people's memories ... Even soldiers are the only hobby - and that is history. And modernity is history in perspective.
And what does the hero call Stalin? Emperor. And the USSR is an Empire. Not just a country, not just a Union. There is bombast in this, it is wrong in format. But it magnifies that time, those figures. This is an original move.

FINAL
And in the final - like a classic, A.P. Chekhov. Shot of a gun. The hero goes to the cemetery, and then goes down to the Leiter river waters. Posters "No Swimming", a barge and a visible ship. Maybe a symbol of hope? These are significant lines, unambiguously:
"The ship was approaching, aiming as if past the pier, an indistinguishable washed-out flag dangled at the stern, sluggishly like a fire that had not yet decided whether it should flare up."

One way or another, I would like to regard this book as something large-scale. Something that has not been in Russian literature for a long time. Various reviews have appeared: from negative reproaches of being out of date to thoughts that this is the greatest novel of recent decades. The fact that there are two such different points of view is even good. The novel is controversial and controversial. And what is not argued about? About one-day novels. About something that does not have a particularly distant future.
All works are tested by time, because not all today recognized poets and writers were recognized as such during their lifetime. Perhaps in the future, when our contemporary literature becomes classics, essays will be written on the "Stone Bridge". Something like The Role of Time and Space, The Image of the Narrator, The Images of Stalin and Roosevelt, The Image of Love in the Novel, The Role of the Last Episode ...
But we cannot know this yet.

A stone bridge Alexander Terekhov

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Name: Stone Bridge

About the book "Stone Bridge" Alexander Terekhov

The talented writer Alexander Terekhov was born on June 1, 1966 in Novomoskovsk. According to the script of the writer, the film "Matilda" was shot, which told about the relationship between Nikolai Romanov and the famous ballerina. The film attracted huge interest and mixed reactions from critics.

Alexander Terekhov loves to write his works in the Mokumentari style, whose homeland is the United States. This term consists of two words, which in translation means "fake" and "documentary". Unlike the usual documentary genre, fictional images are used here, which are depicted against the background of reality.

In 2009, Alexander Terekhov won the second "Big Book" prize for his work, written in the documentary genre, "Stone Bridge". The plot is based on the story of how a small operational investigative group, almost sixty years later, is investigating a high-profile murder that was committed during the Great Patriotic War. The book has an age limit that prohibits persons under eighteen years of age from reading the work.

The writer describes the events of 1943, when the fifteen-year-old son of the Minister of the Aviation Industry Volodya Shakhurin kills his classmate Nina Umanskaya, the daughter of a diplomat, on Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge. After which he shot himself. One of the versions of the reason for the murder was youthful love and unwillingness to part with his beloved. The girl's father was transferred to work in Mexico, where they were to move soon. Was it really that way, or will other facts of this story come to light?

The author surprisingly penetrates the very atmosphere of that time, he kind of brings the reader back to that troubled period of the Stalinist regime, when it was necessary to follow every word spoken and be constantly on the alert. In order to write "Stone Bridge" authentically and truthfully, the writer spent a lot of time in the archives, studied historical documents, read a lot of necessary literature.

Also in the book you can read about completely different characters who are investigating, their thoughts, emotions, experiences. The writer reveals to his reader their specific techniques, methods of fishing out the necessary information, which give special poignancy to the work.

The author's lively, emotional language with intriguing details of a tragic story will not let the most demanding reader get bored. You won't be able to read the book fluently, it makes you think, reflect, philosophize, rethink the information received, draw conclusions, be one of the members of the investigation team, and predict events.

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I could not miss this book for one reason - for more than twenty years I have been keeping a magazine with one of Terekhov's first publications, which shook me to the core. I don’t just store it. I drove him from apartment to apartment, from city to city, every time determining his place at arm's length. Since then I have read all the works of this author that I could find.

So, "Stone Bridge". A pseudo-documentary narration, an attempt to reconstruct historical events, culminating in the real story of 1943, when the fifteen-year-old son of the People's Commissar shot a classmate, the daughter of a Soviet diplomat, and then committed suicide. The book was included in the short-list of the national literary prize "Big Book -2009", receiving second place.

The big drawback was that the novel was published in the author's edition. The impression that notebooks of two completely different works - an investigation novel and the erotic adventures of a former FSB officer - were mixed up under one cover by mistake. The first could be put on the shelf, the second - thrown into the trash can without regret. And the first is not without claims. The breakdown of the text into smaller chapters is missing. Sometimes my reader's vestibular apparatus refused to orientate myself to the place and time of the events described. As an attempt at historical reconstruction and investigation, "Stone Bridge" is very far from, say, "The Blood of Officers" by Cherkashin, which can be an example of the genre. It also has several storylines, but intertwined so tightly and organically that the absence of any one would greatly damage the book as a whole. Well, God bless him. This is not what I like about Alexander Terekhov's prose! For me he is a genius of small forms. Therefore, pleasure is given not so much by the mainstream, the course of the main plot of "Stone Bridge", as by its narrow tributaries, turning into which you can see such breathtaking beauty that every time makes you return to the main channel and paddle along it, sometimes even through force. These scenes of the second plan, the author's voice-overs are expensive. This is not fiction. They contain a lot that is handed down, tortured, invented by the author himself. Own life experience, personal impressions, thoughts fertilize, breathe life into printed lines. Not all of them are so alive. Not all of them.

I noted for myself that most of Terekhov's works, ranging from "About Count" and ending with "Stone Bridge", are about ... Death in one way or another. With the author, it is always on one side of the scales, and your life is subordinated to the search for an answer to the question - how can you balance it? What will you put on the second bowl? If you do not balance - Death, Non-existence will be pulled over. Then you yourself, everything that happened to you, your very unique, wonderful, filled life - all this will be devoid of meaning. For the future, you are NOT. By the way, it is a very strong catalyst for the creative activity of the writer himself! Terekhov collects in his literary ark events that seem insignificant at first glance, images - a jar cleanly washed by rain in the cemetery, squares of sunlight on the school floor, a colleague with sharp shoulders from the hinterland, a large perch on a willow bottom, old people living out their days - fragments of the USSR Empire. People who are acutely aware of incapacity, the irreversibility of time, have a different scale of vision. The attitude to the transient, to the little things is especially reverent. As he admitted in an interview with Ogonyok: “… I'm not a writer. My main goal is to get into the memories of my children. " In other words, again, do not sink into Non-Being. “… I'm not a writer” - of course, flirtation. Having finished reading "Stone Bridge", literally the next day I saw the announcement of Terekhov's new book "The Germans". I do not want to think that the next book by Alexander, in comparison with his early works, will be even weaker than "Stone Bridge". With the texture, such a book could be written by a large number of modern writers. Such a story as "About Happiness" - none, except for him.

I am sure that the power of Alexander Terekhov's talent will help this ark to land on the shore of the future, to avoid Non-existence. You just need to avoid the temptation to think that on the scales of time an 800-page tome weighs more than another short story.

Alexander Terekhov

"A stone bridge"

book numbers

Alexander Terekhov has not published new prose for over ten years. Autobiographical notes about the university and about the legend of journalism faculty Eduard Babayev, whose lectures have been heard for several generations, does not count: another genre. After "Rat Slayer" Terekhov the prose writer was silent. The novel "Stone Bridge", which was called "Not Long Left" in the manuscript, is published by the publishing house "AST" in March this year. Author's dating - 1997-2008.

Terekhov began not only as a writer, but also as a journalist for Korotichev's Ogonyok. His new work is not only a historical detective story and psychological novel, but also a journalistic investigation. It deals with the “wolf case”, widely known in narrow circles (among historians, Stalinists and anti-Stalinists), as it was called according to the personal Stalinist definition. Stalin named the two main defendants as wolves: Nina Umanskaya (daughter of a diplomat) and Vladimir Shakhurin (son of the People's Commissar of the aviation industry). Both are high school students, students of the famous school No. 175, where the children of the party elite studied. According to the official version, Shakhurin was in love with Nina and demanded that she stay with him when her father was sent as ambassador to Mexico. She refused, and the ninth grader shot first at her and then at himself. A year later, Ninina's parents died in a plane crash. They were probably the last ones who could shed light on this case.

Terekhov's reconstruction of this story is controversial, and not the essence of it. I am not going to retell the plot; there are many hunters who were seriously investigating the 1943 tragedy, using documents and evidence, to argue with her without me. I'm talking about something else: the Terekhov novel is a serious literary event. Perhaps the first in several years, and certainly the most significant in the last year. This is not ensured by the sensationalism of the conclusions alone: ​​we are faced with a conceptual statement, and criticism finally has access to a half-forgotten joy from the interpretation of an ambiguous, deep, large-scale conceived text. On this one can congratulate both the reader and the future critic.

To be honest, Terekhov's early prose (excluding the very talented "Memoirs of conscript service" and the debut story "The Fool") seemed pretentious to me. In the unsuccessful, but very honest essay "A Winter Day for the Beginning of a New Life", the author's longing for the Big Style, great accomplishments and significant contexts was felt: like most of the talented remnants of the Empire, Terekhov, who was formed during the years of late stagnation, was conceived as a Great Soviet Writer. There is nothing wrong with that. Judging by some of the stylistic features of his writing - especially by the long, complex phrases and addiction to an internal monologue, in his youth Yuri Trifonov made an indelible impression on him. “Kamenny Most” is a distinct pendant to “House on the Embankment”, moreover, the name itself contains a well-founded claim to build a bridge from Soviet literature to new times, from the Soviet project to today's timelessness; and this task has been accomplished. In the nineties Terekhov was not afraid to write an article "In Memory of Stalin", which for a long time quarreled him with the liberal camp, which had just taken kindly to a recent graduate of the Faculty of Journalism and saw in him the main literary hope; a break with this environment required serious courage, although Terekhov did not stick to the opposite - "imperial" - camp, falling out of all paradigms for a long time (the article, however, was, IMHO, bad). Such, however, was the fate of Trifonov: he was respected by many, but no one appropriated. For the sixties and even more so for the dissidents, he was too objective, historical, too loyal to the ideals of his fathers, whom he did not want to spit on and opposed in "Exchange" to corrupted conformists. The soil people did not forgive him for his hatred of the dictatorship, which was considered the basis of the nation state, and for his attention to urban life, which they despised. Trifonov was the best - and absolutely alone. For many years he had no successor. I am not convinced that Terekhov is one hundred percent coping with the task, but the very statement is worthy of all respect.

The point is this: there was a lot of narcissism in Terekhov's early prose, which is often bad for literature. There is a lot of self-hatred in the new one, which is almost always a good thing. The drama of the Terekhov generation is partly in the fact that the majority of talented people, who are now between 35 and 45, found the Soviet regime and formulated their first life attitudes in its terms, adjusted for its conditions. The Soviet project assumed the niches of a prominent writer, ruler of thoughts and social thinker, engaged in theodicy on a national scale, that is, justifying and explaining the art of power to the population. The majority of Russian political scientists have been brought up, alas, in this paradigm. Most of the writers of Terekhov's peers started out brightly, but quickly deflated: they saw that their literature was absolutely useless, and suffocated in the airless space. Terekhov did not suffocate - he has accumulated the strength to judge the present time from the standpoint of that terrible, but also grandiose.

Once the art critic Lyudmila Lunina was tried for the fact that the singer of heroic death, the painter Vereshchagin, she dared to call a necrophile in Fromm's sense; there was a whole process. I do not want to either inspire the process, or offend Terekhov, who wrote, in my opinion, a very important book, but it cannot do without necrophilia (in the same philosophical sense). The author is in love with a sixteen-year-old dead girl from a Stalinist house, a large and terrible constructivist gray house on the embankment, and living girls are much more dead and indifferent to him, because they have learned to live without air and do not even know what it is like. This is a book about love for the past and disgust for the present, love for scale and disgust for pettiness; there is no Stalinism here, since the Stalinist era is important to Terekhov the prose writer only as a time of extreme passions and unprecedented collisions. And then, we are not on a theoretical debate. The artistic result is important to us, but the result is obvious: we have a fascinating, dynamic, subjective, controversial work before us, but most importantly, it is imbued with serious suffering. “I am a deep-sea fish,” Andrei Tarkovsky said about himself. Terekhov, like all children of stagnation, is also a deep-sea fish. It is not his fault that he is drawn to the depths - although he knows perfectly well what monsters lurk there and how meetings with them end.

However, it is not only a matter of an aesthetic predilection for the imperial era, for the world of the Soviet elite, for strange underground organizations like the "Fourth Empire", it is not a painful, acute interest in boys with paternal revolvers and girls brought up in the States; Terekhov's novel is not only and not so much about this, and not for the sake of the truth (in his case, very dubious), he conducts his investigation, an additional investigation 60 years later. The book, in general, is about death, the smell of which is so perceptible on the ruins of the former country; about how biological horror clings to a person after the loss of all goals and meanings. The investigation led by the hero is a filling of life, an attempt to give it a purpose, taste, tension. Death is on guard at all corners, and for whatever witness the narrator rushes, there is also either death, or madness, or, in Triphonic terms, “disappearance”. Life is slipping through our fingers, every second. There is nothing to be distracted by. The pre-war and war days shine all the brighter, dachas in Serebryany Bor, tennis, falling in love, duels - this whole holiday, highlighted with horror, because every day someone is taken. Such a passion - in every sense - Soviet history no longer knew. The aesthetic development of this phenomenon was postponed for various reasons: at first it was impossible, then there was not enough talent, and Soviet literature knew only one combination of talent with sufficient awareness: Trifonov lived this life, was forever wounded by it and was able to describe it. It is not for nothing that Alexander Zholkovsky, a connoisseur of intent and strict, once admitted that the "Games at Twilight" considered the highest achievement of Trifonov's - or perhaps the best Soviet story, not counting several masterpieces of Aksenov. Who has not read - read it.

Terekhov, honor and praise to him, was able to describe not only the life that he knows from literature, memoirs, documents and his own guesses, but also the current one, which few have portrayed with such power and completeness. The remake of the Russian empire was catastrophically unsuccessful - the author draws this conclusion carefully, but unequivocally; maybe even against their own will.

A complex book of a complex and extraordinary person. There is something to read.