Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 11, 2008
DMITRIY BIKOV. Phenomenon of Okudzava.
“Some other personage wouldn’t probably provoke such controversy, but Okudzava is a special phenomenon: everybody takes him for personal property. Using complicated, purely individual methods which we are trying to interpret in this book, he was constructing virtual frames which everyone could put oneself and one’s life within, everyone could saturate Okudzava’s poems, songs and even prose with one’s own biographical stuff. And everyone was sure that Okudzava was singing personally for and about him or her. Everyone but those who nursed irrational and excessive grievance against him – they felt him like devils feel incense”, — Dmitriy Bikov says in his new book some chapters of which we present in this and the next issues.
In one of his poems presented here NAUM BASOVSKIY says that those who are writing novels are always interpreters of true stories, but poets are interpreters of dreams. Along with N. Basovsky in this issue are presented poets EFIM BERSHIN, LIDIYA GRIGORYEVA, ANATOLIY GRECHANIKOV and GRIGORIY MARK. It’s significant that some of them have also tried themselves as novelists.
SHORT STORIES OF ARMENIAN WRITERS
Among the authors of this collection there are both well-known and new for the Russian readers names. Different voices, different styles, different attitudes towards human being and analysis of the life. But altogether they constitute a fragment of the panorama of today’s Armenian prose and present-day reality – dramatic, disputed, controversial and unique in a way, having nevertheless something in common with the Russian public moods.
In 2004 we have issued a special edition of “DN” dedicated to modern Armenian literature. Now it’s the continuation of the acquaintance.
OLGA LEBEDUSHKINA. Gothic Forever.
You might think that the Gothic (“black”) novel, “thriller-novel” so to say, belongs exclusively to the epoch of Romanticism. But the literary critic Olga Lebedushkina is sure: modern writers, who have gone through the fire of “critical realism” and the water of postmodernism are creating Gotic novels as well and today’s pragmatic readers enjoy reading them.