Book: Stone Bridge - Alexander Terekhov. Alexander Terekhov “Stone Bridge Download Stone Bridge by Alexander Terekhov

And the plot and the case itself are very interesting. I bought the novel because several years ago I read about the “case of the wolf cubs” in the press, became interested and scoured the entire Internet about it. Alas, the chronology of events and a few gossips - that’s all that we managed to unearth in open sources, and the fact that in those years the lion’s share of information was classified, or even completely removed from the archives, is not at all surprising. It's no joke: in the midst of the war, in 1943, the children of the Soviet elite, the top officials of the state, read Hitler and Goebbels, called each other Gruppenführer and played the Fourth Reich! And the culmination of this disgrace was the murder on the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge: the son of the People's Commissar for Aviation Shakhurin shot a classmate and shot himself; Mikoyan's eldest son was also present at the murder. They pulled the thread and pulled out something that shocked everyone. Stalin, having found out, abandoned the “wolf cubs”. But in the camps, of course, such children important people you won’t send it, so you’ll be sent to the provinces for a year and given a severe reprimand. This is the state of equal opportunities. In the novel, in fact, the heroes are investigating those events, suspecting that it was not the younger Shakhurin who shot the girl, there is something dark, unsolved. Both the girl’s father and mother tragically died in a plane crash a couple of years later, and many key witnesses disappeared without a trace, and the participants in the events remained silent about them all their lives and either took the secret with them to the grave, or categorically refuse to talk about those events. These lines chilled me, as if a breath of history had breathed into my face, I re-read two pages eight times, and then for several more hours my thoughts did not let me go, I kept returning to these sentences:

"Leaders and iron men- never, since 1917, not one (hundreds, thousands of literate Russian souls who had previously confused handwritten literature and religion) - dared to start or continue a diary. Then, quite quickly, fundamental and essential documents began to disappear, minutes of human discussions at meetings at the dinner table, and, finally, the lead coffin was tightly sealed from the inside - the emperor forbade anyone to write it down. There are still solutions. But the motives disappeared. They were afraid, the cattle said, and - they were silent, afraid of the “Stalinist terror”, slave tribe! What is there - they were trembling that they would kill... Camps, Lubyanka, a bullet, children in orphanages with brands on their foreheads... But the empire of fear would have collapsed at 4 hours 22 minutes on June 22, 1941, even before Molotov, after a tortured pause and a sigh, forced himself say into the radio microphone: “ Soviet government... and its head, Comrade Stalin... instructed me to make the following statement...” Is it really just fear?.. As Army Commander Guy wrote in a letter that seemed to him to be the main thing: “It’s dark in the cell, and tears make it difficult to write...” But the Germans were also afraid of the Gestapo, concentration camps, no one wanted to use butcher’s hooks, or swing on piano strings (like those guys who blew up), or shoot on the family estate under the supervision of an SS general (like the one from the desert), however, on the command “not to be afraid,” they took them out of their field bags diaries of the “eastern campaign”, where under various dates it is written: “the Fuhrer commits madness after madness” and “we are doomed” ... And the Russian princes and warriors, when they were deserted frontal places, “stood dumb,” in agreement, keeping silent through a hundred volumes of memoirs, dictated as before by the Absolute Power, corrected by editors at the officer rank. Where is the evidence? Where are the memories of the iron generation? As reserve major Shilov wrote thirty-four years ago: “Their works are probably read by their wives”... Suffering from the oblivion of their fallen friends, hating Khrushchev for Stalin’s war “across the globe” and Brezhnev’s imaginary military leadership glory, which devalued the orders, not having a shred of faith in heaven-hell, they fell into their graves silently, corresponding to the formula of Lazar Kaganovich “To no one, about nothing, never.” Both the disgraced and the winners were silent. General designers, marshals, people's commissars, secretaries of the Central Committee - no one will know what the iron men saw there, there... beyond the mortal edge - what flickered to them from there, what an merciless hell of ancient times?

However, despite the value of this evidence, personal perceptions were superimposed. I don’t know about anyone, but I don’t really like meticulously washing dirty laundry, and someone else’s. And here in full height I felt as if I was rummaging through it myself. Who slept with whom, who had mistresses, whether the ambassador’s daughter was a virgin or not, and if not, then with whom she lost her virginity and whether she had the same boy, and how they were cunning and mixed up their tracks, in parallel there is also a story with a head over heels in love the hero Alena, who was ready to wash his feet and drink water, and he treated her throughout the book like a piece of cottage cheese, in the end she returned to her husband, and he transferred the same attitude to his secretary Masha, and she demonstrated exactly the same behavior . Disgusting. And I got scared when I read this:

“I love my wife,” Chukharev confidently uttered a spell that began his conversations with himself, the nightly, hot summer deliriums of hiking behind short skirts, behind fat unfamiliar thighs. “I love my wife. She is my life. My beloved. She is the only one.” "I don't need anyone else. I feel good with her. In every way. She gave birth to my daughter - the most the best girl in the world. My wife and my daughter are my family, I don’t need another family. Let us be together here, and if there is something there, let us be there only together. I love my wife. She is the most beautiful. Loves me, no one can love me like that. “All he needed now: keep quiet.” “She is my first, and I am her first.” I was lucky: I received the love I dreamed of. Like my parents. Like all of ours. Love doesn't happen any other way. I'm so happy it's even scary. – That’s all he loaded onto one pan of scales, counted it: everything? Yes, such a small thing, but there is nothing more, and what would you like? – And I’m not young anymore. I've already lived through something. It seems: I lived the best. I won't be young anymore. Carefree. There's a lot of work left to do. Getting old and working hard. Grow old and raise a daughter. Grow old and go to the sea. Growing old and loving your wife. There is nothing left that I don't know in the future. Except for one thing: what will I get sick with and when. I will grow old and get sick. I started to think: how much more is left? Grow old and wait. And so,” he stood on this step, “I began to get bored. By oneself. I understand that some things, even a lot, almost everything, will no longer work out. I'll stay like this. I won't be remembered and I'll just die. I no longer feel drawn to the future. I regret that my youth has passed, and I miss my younger self. It’s as if my youth passed somehow without... I didn’t understand what I needed to take... Now I miss the time when I looked at different girls - they were all so beautiful and fresh. And how many of them are there now? More! I've never met anyone like this before. And so much. When I was young, I tried on each one, and in my imagination I could match each one, and I imagined myself with each one. Every day I chose a new one, in a new place, on every floor, in every city, carriage, auditorium, every day - every minute; absorbed the possibilities - I was overcome with such happy excitement from anticipation alone... As if everyone was ready. And now, when I worked with you, I realized: everyone was really ready and I really could work with everyone then. I had to take it. Come, reach out and take everything every day. Every day new, everyone. And don’t think “who needs me?”, “who would want to be with me?” It became boring, somehow bitter. It is especially noticeable in spring. Because,” he closed his eyes, “I realized: I can do this now.” While I can. Could. But I can not. It is forbidden. But years will pass, and it will simply be impossible, and I won’t be able to. And now everything is nearby, and all that remains is as then: to extend your hand and say a few words. What if I regret it in my old age?! – Chukharev asked me. – If I’m in so much pain now, then how will it be in my old age... That I lived past... Life is gone, and I didn’t have enough. There is no feeling: everything was done, it worked out. When I was young, life felt different. Even then I thought about death, but something still separated us - some upcoming pleasure, and therefore youth is the best ... - he caught himself - but it passed. But - when I see other women, new, possible, unknown, it seems to me: nothing has passed! I'm still young. I can do everything! And death is not here yet. I feel alive. And so – I don’t feel alive. I’m just getting old and waiting for them to come for me and take me to die. It turns out that I can’t live if I don’t want something new. To live is to want. I can’t lie to myself, I only think about this all the time - the street is full of bare legs... Everyone is undressing. City. TV. Internet. Past. Everything is about this, around this... Everyone wants this, but not everyone can, but I can - I can do a lot... Now I told it out loud for the first time and it seems: it wasn’t necessary, everything is not so, not so much. “He looked around in surprise; the waitresses in brown shirts were bored at the counter: how long?” “But when you’re alone, and I’m alone all the time... – every day it burns you like a flame...”

In general, the book makes you think about a lot, but it’s hard to read and I’m unlikely to re-read it. Moreover, it does not provide answers to a single question posed by the author himself. (4-)

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

So, " A stone bridge" Pseudo-documentary narrative, attempt at reconstruction historical events, which culminated in real story 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 shortlisted for 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 is that the notebooks of two completely different people were mistakenly intertwined under one cover. different works- an investigative novel and erotic adventures of a former FSB officer. The first could be put on a shelf, the second could be thrown into the trash without regrets. And the first one is not without complaints. The text is not broken down into smaller chapters. At times, my reading vestibular apparatus refused to orient 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, “Blood of Officers” by Cherkashin, which can be an example of the genre. There are also several storylines, but intertwined so tightly and organically that the absence of any one would greatly harm the book as a whole. Well, God be with him. This is not what I like about Alexander Terekhov’s prose! For me he is a genius of small forms. Therefore, the pleasure comes not so much from the mainstream, the flow of the main plot of the “Stone Bridge”, but from its narrow tributaries, turning into which you can see such breathtaking beauties that every time they force you to return to the main channel and row further along it, sometimes even through force. These supporting pictures and the author’s voiceover are worth a lot. This is not fiction. There is a lot in them that was endured, tortured, and invented by the author themselves. Own life experience, personal impressions, thoughts fertilize, breathe life into printed lines. Not everyone has them so alive. Not everyone has it.

I noticed for myself that most of Terekhov’s works, starting from “On Counting” and ending with “Stone Bridge”, are in one way or another about... Death. For the author, it is always on one side of the scale, 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 can’t balance it, Death and Non-existence will be pulled over. Then you yourself, everything that happened to you, your unique, wonderful, fulfilling life itself - all this will be meaningless. For the future you are NOT. By the way, a very strong catalyst for the creative activity of the writer himself! Terekhov collects into his literary ark events that seem insignificant at first glance, images - a jar washed clean by the rain in a cemetery, squares sunlight on the school floor, a colleague with sharp shoulders from the outback, a large perch on a willow bed, old people living out their days - fragments of the USSR Empire. People who acutely feel the lack of accumulation, the irreversibility of time, have a different scale of vision. The attitude towards the transitory, towards 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 oblivion. “...I’m not a writer” is, of course, coquetry. Having finished reading “The Stone Bridge,” literally the next day I saw the announcement of Terekhov’s new book, “The Germans.” I don’t want to think that Alexander’s next book is compared to his early works will be even weaker than “Stone Bridge”. Given the texture, such a book could be written a large number of modern writers. There is no other story like “About Happiness” except him.

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

Alexander Terekhov

"A stone bridge"

number book

Alexander Terekhov has not published new prose for more than ten years. Autobiographical notes about the university and the legend of the journalism department Eduard Babaev, whose lectures were heard by several generations, do not count: a different genre. After “Rat Slaughter,” Terekhov the prose writer remained silent. The novel “Stone Bridge,” called “Not Long to Remain” in the manuscript, is published by AST publishing house in March of this year. Author's dating: 1997–2008.

Terekhov began not only as a writer, but also as a journalist for the Korotichevo “Ogonyok”. His new thing is not only a historical detective story and psychological novel, but also investigative journalism. It is about the “case of the little wolves,” widely known in narrow circles (among historians, Stalinists and anti-Stalinists), as it was called according to Stalin’s personal definition. Stalin called the two main defendants “wolf cubs”: Nina Umanskaya (the daughter of a diplomat) and Vladimir Shakhurin (the son of the People’s Commissar of the Aviation Industry). Both are high school students, students of the famous 175th school, 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, Nina’s parents died in a plane crash. They were probably the last ones who could shed light on this matter.

Terekhov's reconstruction of this story is not controversial, and that is not the point. I am not going to retell the plot; even without me, there will be many hunters who have seriously investigated the tragedy of 1943, using documents and evidence, to argue with it. I'm talking about something else: Terekhov's novel is serious literary event. Perhaps the first in several years, and certainly the most significant in Last year. The mere sensationalism of the conclusions does not ensure this: before us is a conceptual statement, and the half-forgotten joy of interpreting an ambiguous, deep, large-scale text is finally available to the critic. Both the reader and the future critic can be congratulated on this.

I admit honestly: Terekhov’s early prose (with the exception of the very talented “Memoirs of Military Service” and his debut story “The Fool”) seemed pretentious to me. In the unsuccessful, but very honest essay “Winter Day of the Beginning of a New Life,” the author’s longing for the Great Style, great achievements and significant contexts was felt: like most of the talented last-born of the Empire, Terekhov, who was formed in the years of late stagnation, was conceived as a Great Soviet Writer. There's nothing wrong with that. Judging by some stylistic features of his writing - especially the long, complex phrase and passion for internal monologue, in his youth Yuri Trifonov made an indelible impression on him. “Stone Bridge” is a clear pendant to “House on the Embankment”; moreover, the title itself states a justified claim to build a bridge from Soviet literature to new times, from the Soviet project to today’s timelessness; and this task is completed. In the nineties, Terekhov was not afraid to write an article “In Memory of Stalin,” which for a long time put him at odds with the liberal camp, which had just kindly treated the recent graduate of the journalism department and saw in him the main literary hope; breaking with this environment required serious courage, although Terekhov never joined the opposite - “imperial” - camp, falling out of all paradigms for a long time (the article, however, was, IMHO, bad). This, however, was Trifonov’s fate: he was respected by many, but no one appropriated him. For the sixties, and especially for the dissidents, he was too objective, historical, too faithful to the ideals of the fathers, whom he did not want to spit upon and contrasted in “Exchange” with corrupt conformists. The Pochvenniks did not forgive him for his hatred of the dictatorship, which they considered the basis of the national state, and for his attention to urban life, which they despised. Trifonov was the best - and absolutely alone. Long years he had no successor. I am not convinced that Terekhov copes with the task one hundred percent, but its formulation itself is worthy of all respect.

The point is this: in early prose Terekhov had a lot of narcissism, which is most often bad for literature. The new one has a lot of self-hatred, which is almost always a good thing. The drama of the Terekhov generation is partly that the majority talented people, who are now between 35 and 45, were caught Soviet power and formulated the first life attitudes in its terms, adjusted for its conditions. The Soviet project assumed the niches of a major writer, a ruler of thoughts and a social thinker, engaged in theodicy on a national scale, that is, justifying and explaining to the population the art of power. Most domestic political scientists, alas, were brought up in this paradigm. Most of the writers, Terekhov’s peers, started brightly, but quickly faded away: they saw that their literature was of no use to anyone, and suffocated in an airless space. Terekhov did not suffocate - he accumulated the strength to judge the present time from the standpoint of what is terrible, but also grandiose.

Once upon a time, the art critic Lyudmila Lunina was tried for the fact that she dared to call the singer of heroic death, the painter Vereshchagin, a necrophiliac in Fromm’s sense; there was a whole process. I don’t want to either inspire the process or insult Terekhov, who, in my opinion, wrote very important book, but without necrophilia (in the same philosophical sense) does not work here. The author is in love with a sixteen-year-old dead girl from a Stalinist house, a large and scary constructivist gray house on the embankment, and living girls for him are much more dead and indifferent, 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, about 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 exceptionally intense passions and unprecedented collisions. And then, we are not at a theoretical debate. The artistic result is important to us - and the result is obvious: before us is a work that is fascinating, dynamic, subjective, controversial, but most importantly - 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 very well what monsters lurk there and how meetings with them end.

However, this is not only a matter of 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 matter of a painful, acute interest in boys with their father’s revolvers and girls brought up in the States; Terekhov’s novel is not only and not so much about this, and it is not for the sake of truth (in his case - very dubious) that he conducts his investigation, further investigation 60 years later. The book, in general, is about death, the smell of which is so noticeable in the ruins former country; about how biological horror clings to a person after the loss of all goals and meanings. The investigation that the hero is conducting is filling life, an attempt to give it purpose, taste, tension. Death watches at all corners, and no matter what witness the narrator rushes after, there is also either death, or madness, or, in Trifonov’s terms, “disappearance.” Life slips through your fingers, every second. There is nothing to distract yourself with. The pre-war and war days, the dachas in Serebryany Bor, tennis, falling in love, duels shine all the brighter - this whole holiday, illuminated by horror, because every day someone is taken. Such passion - in every sense - soviet history I didn't know anymore. 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 keen and strict connoisseur, once admitted that he considers “Games at Twilight” to be Trifonov’s highest achievement - and perhaps the best Soviet story, not counting several of Aksenov’s masterpieces. For those who haven't read it, please read it.

Terekhov, to his honor and praise, 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 people have depicted with such strength and completeness. The remake of the Russian Empire was a catastrophic failure - the author reaches this conclusion carefully, but unambiguously; maybe even against your own will.

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