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It is difficult to write about Fazil Iskander in quotes. How to split up the living world that he gave us? What to choose when in each of his lines – “appetite for life before the start of life, which is real happiness”?
He was distinguished by courage and nobility, subtle irony and bitterness and crystal honesty. “You need to spare people, but you need to think mercilessly,” he said. “Writing is editing life so that you can live it.” Philosopher, sage, who embodied the spirit of the sixties. We have selected several excerpts from the novel “Sandro from Chegem”, for which Fazil Iskander was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
When an old man dies
When an old person dies, in our area the wake is lively. People drink wine and tell funny stories to each other. The custom does not allow only to get drunk to the point of obscenity and sing songs. Although by mistake someone sometimes drinks a drink, they stop him, and he becomes embarrassedly silent.
When an old person dies, it seems to me that both a cheerful wake and a magnificent ceremony are quite appropriate. A person has completed his human path, and if he died in old age, having lived, as we say, to his term, then it is possible to celebrate the victory of a person over fate alive.
And a magnificent ceremony, if it is not brought to stupidity, also did not arise from scratch. He says: something huge happened – a man died, and if he was a good man, this will be noted and remembered by many.
… And may the earth rest in peace to him, which is probably quite possible, given that he was chosen a good, dry place, which he himself liked to talk about during his lifetime.
And that makes all the difference…
From the veranda comes the rustling of the pods, which Aunt Katya is sorting through, still turning. A swallow flies in through the verandah window, chirping on the fly, and, slashing the space of the room obliquely (she did it faster than I described), flies out through another window. What was the need for her to fly in and out of the veranda? None, pure mischief. But this is a sign of life, its enthusiastic painting in the air, and everything is justified by this.
Let the future think about it
I passionately wanted this summer day, and this apple tree rustling in the breeze, and the voices of my sisters – everything, everything that is around – to remain forever the same. How to do it, I did not know. Looks like it all needs to be redone. I felt it with sweetly predatory fingers.
At the edge of my childhood, I found in many ways the still patriarchal, rural life of Abkhazia and fell in love with it forever. Maybe I idealize the passing life? May be. Man tends to exalt what he loves. Idealizing the way of life that is leaving, perhaps we, without realizing it, present a bill to the future. We kind of say to him: this is what we are losing, and what are you giving us in return?
Let the future think about it, if it can think at all.
Joseph Dzhugashvili, who did not want to become Stalin
He sees a warm autumn day, the day of the grape harvest. He leaves the vineyard on a cart loaded with baskets of grapes. He takes the grapes home to the winepress. The cart creaks, the sun warms. Behind, from the vineyard, voices of households, cries and laughter of children are heard.
“Listen, who is this person? – says the rider, splashing out the rest of the water from the mug and returning it to the owner.
“This is the same Dzhugashvili,” the owner says happily.
– Is it the same one? – the guest from Kakheti is surprised. – I think it looks like it, but it can’t be …
Yes, the owner confirms. the same Dzhugashvili, who did not want to become the ruler of Russia under the name of Stalin.
“I wonder why you didn’t want to?” – the guest from Kakheti is surprised.
– Trouble, he says, a lot, – explains the owner, – and blood, he says, a lot will have to be shed.
– Ho-ho-ho, – the guest from Kakheti clicks, – I cannot refuse one grape root, but he refused Russia.
– And why does he need Russia, – the owner explains, – he has a wonderful economy, a wonderful family, wonderful children …
– What a man! – the guest from Kakheti continues to cackle, looking after the cart, which is now turning towards the house. – I refused the whole country …
“Yes, I refused,” the owner confirms, “because, he says, he feels sorry for the peasants. It would be necessary, he says, to unite everyone. Let them, he says, live on their own, let everyone have their own piece of bread and their own glass of wine…
– God bless him! exclaims the rider. “But how does he know what will happen to the peasants?”
“Such a man foresees everything,” says the owner.
– God bless him, – the guest from Kakheti clatters … – God bless …
Iosif Dzhugashvili, who did not want to become Stalin, rides on his cart, purring a song about a black swallow. The sun warms his face, the cart creaks, he listens with a quiet smile to the naive, but, in essence, true story of a fellow villager.
That’s what the mullah said…
This is what the mullah, a respected Chegemian, said, because under all regimes (tsarist, Menshevik, Bolshevik) he read the same holy book – the Koran, in contrast to the newest literate people, who, under one regime, even manage to change it almost every year. your books.
Hundreds of ridiculous shots were needed …
No matter how you unravel the dream that made a strong impression on us, its true meaning is already in the fact that it, at least for a moment, parted the veil of everyday life before us and made us feel the tragic distance of life. This is its powerful refreshing purpose.
No matter how ridiculous or confusing the plot of a dream, its underlying meaning is never petty.: unconscious or, more often, unrequited love, deceit, fear, shame, mercy, pity, betrayal.
The plot of the dream can be compared to a monkey that, with a movie camera around its neck, ran through the jungle of our subconscious. Or maybe it’s the rubbish of life, carried out by the surf on a deserted shore. And suddenly, among hundreds of meaningless shots, we find a few that reveal the true meaning of what we saw in the coastal rubbish, some worthless piece of dull pain weighed down our sleep, and we, waking up or still in a dream, guess that he reminded us of the dress of a long-beloved woman, and we thought that everything was forgotten …
And here we begin to understand that hundreds of ridiculous shots were needed to make those two or three convincing, which revealed the meaning to us. After all, if all the shots would more or less logically lead us to the meaning, we might suspect that someone slipped us a moralizing fable. The credibility of the find is the more burning, the more authentic the garbage from which we extracted it …
Tali – the miracle of Chegem
… Already in bed, she coughed several more times, and she was finally convinced that now nothing would save her. With a kind of sweet pity she saw herself dying, and even dead, and terribly sorry for her grandfather, and yet, remembering that day and visiting her brother, she felt that even now she did not repent of it at all.
She could not say why, she only knew that it was impossible to leave a person with such grief alone, and this was stronger than any arguments, and here she herself could not explain anything. She vaguely felt that that trust in the world and people, that happy ability to extract constant lightness and joy from the very air of life, was somehow connected with the fact that there was not a single movement behind her soul, smelling, hiding its benefit, its prey.
… In the morning, waking up, she listened to herself and felt with joyful surprise that she was healthy and that nothing could ever happen to her.
Laughing, she jumped out of bed and began to dress, feeling in herself that sweet unsatisfaction on a golden, not yet bitten summer day, that appetite for life before the beginning of life, which is real happiness.
F. Iskander “Sandro from Chegem” (Soviet writer, 1991).