Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 1, 2009
SUBKHAT AFLATUNI. Beauty Competition. A novel.
“The way from Phidias to midias (mussels) is easy”, — once told Novella Matveeva. And what about the way from a primitive creature to a wise man? Is it necessary (and how?) to undergo the accelerated evolution fish-ape-homo sapience as Subkhat Aflatuni suggests in his new novel? And will the newly-made homo sapience get… the passport? What if the new Plato turns out to be a simple gastarbeiter? The author again gladdens us with unpredictable irony, freshness and originality.
ELCHIN GUSEINBEILY. A Fish-Man. A long short story.
The nearly detective plot of Elchin Guseinbeily’s story takes the reader away from our brutal reality. Where to? To the sea bottom. It surely reminds of the Amphibian-Man and Captain Nemo — of all those books known from our childhood when today’s national borders didn’t exist. The complicated, conflicting time — and deliberately simple, unsophisticated narration full of bitterness and sad irony.
ALEXEI USTIMENKO. The Chimkent Line.
Russian writer living in Uzbekistan is meditating upon the lot of the Russian culture in the countries of the so called “neighbouring abroad”: will Russians become the new “neighbor-emigrants” in the ex-soviet countries? Will Russia rush some day to gather the culture of the new dispersion? If certainly this new culture springs up.
CRITICS ABOUT LITERARY EVENTS AND TRENDS OF 2008.
This is a kind of a colloquium by correspondence. And here are some quotations.
“If they are telling us lies why can’t we at least tell stories. Nobody may be trusted for hundred percent…” — “One must be either fantastically brave or excessively vain to publish anything in this year which looks like the point of bifurcation…” — “The past year will last as the year of general imitations…” — “After the long period of ladies’ detective and Brazilian esoteric novel being in the lead the home prose at last occupies the upper lines in the ratings…” — “As if the return journey is ahead: not from the world to the word but from the word to the world…”.