His novel «House of Twins» is about the meaning of life, but there is no love line in it. But many of us see the meaning of our lives in love. Writer Anatoly Korolev explains why this happened and reflects on what love was like at the beginning of the last century and how our view of it has changed since then.
When I started the novel, I imagined a love story in which my hero, a private detective, falls into. For the main role in this collision, I outlined three figures: two twin girls and the female spirit of the book about the mandrake. But as the work progressed, all love lines were cut off.
Love is inscribed in the context of time
My hero moves from our time to the conditional year 1924. Scrupulously recreating the flesh of that time, I discovered a colossal ebb of all romance. The era was already preparing for a new world war, and love was temporarily replaced by eroticism. Moreover, erotica took an aggressive form of denial of femininity.
Recall the fashion of the 20s, especially the German one: the French style of languid bliss replaced the style of a motorcycle. A pilot girl — a helmet instead of a hat, trousers instead of a skirt, alpine skiing instead of a swimsuit, the rejection of waists and busts. …
By dressing my twins in the proto-militarist fashion, I suddenly robbed them of all desirability for a hero of our time. My detective simply could not fall in love with such wasps, and no one expected any feelings from him. If they were waiting, only sex.
And the novel of the reader (as the hero becomes as the plot develops) with the spirit of the book turned out to be too ephemeral. And the rigidity of the historical context did not allow it to take place.
Love is inscribed in the tectonic activity of time: before a tsunami strikes (and war is always a boil of all kinds of feelings, including love, especially acute against the backdrop of rampant death), the coast is empty, the beach is exposed, dry land reigns. I fell into this dry land.
Today love has become more intense
Our time — the beginning of the XNUMXst century — is quite suitable for love, but there are several features here …
In my opinion, love has become more intense: feelings start almost from the climax, from love at first sight, but the distance has shortened sharply. In principle, you can lose your head in the morning, and in the evening begin to feel disgust for the object of love. Of course, I’m exaggerating, but the idea is clear …
And today’s fashion, unlike what it was a hundred years ago, has moved from things — from the bodice and straps, from the height of the heel or the type of hairstyle — to the way of life. That is, it is not the form that is in fashion, but the content. A lifestyle that is taken as a model. The lifestyle of Marlene Dietrich caused more shock among contemporaries than a desire to imitate, this was clearly a risk. But the way of life of Lady Diana, who before her death became the idol of mankind, in my opinion, introduced the fashion for freedom from marriage.
And here’s the paradox — today love itself, as such, in its purest form, has gone out of fashion. All modern feelings of affection, falling in love, passion, love, finally go against the current. The aura of flirting, eroticism and amorous friendship rather reigns in the public consciousness.
The meaning of love in our time is the creation of a capsule, inside which two beings ignore the outside world.
Love friendship is a novelty in the relationship between a man and a woman: a hundred years ago, friendship categorically did not rhyme with sex, but today it is perhaps the norm. There are hundreds of couples in this phase, and even the birth of children does not affect this style of relationship.
Marriage in its classical form often turns into pure convention. Look at Hollywood couples: many of them live for many years in fact as lovers. They delay the formalities as long as possible, ignoring even the marriages of their grown-up children.
But with the meaning inside love, the situation is much more complicated. For the previous two millennia, people believed that its meaning was the creation of a family. Today, if we limit the circle of reflections to the territory of Europe and Russia, the situation has changed. The meaning of love in our time is the creation of a special kind of monad, a unity of closeness, a capsule within which two beings ignore the outside world.
This is such selfishness for two, the planet Earth has a capacity of two people. Lovers live in the voluntary captivity of their good or bad moods, like children without parental care. And other meanings here will only be a hindrance.