The artistic world of Boris Vian “Foam of days. The artistic world of Boris Vian “Foam of days Boris Vian foam of days description

Rating: 10

A little crazy, undoubtedly visionary and in places a stunningly brilliant thing, revealing an astonishing array of meanings. Vian's slightly surreal style of writing and the incredible richness of the text with colors, images and sounds immediately catches the eye. Perhaps it’s been a long time since I regretted so much that I don’t know French: it seems to me that the puns invented by translators are just the tip of the iceberg, hiding the puzzling linguistic twists of the original. Vian says absolutely crazy things with a hilariously serious face. The author invites us to admire the play of the sun's rays on the stained glass mosaic, taste a cocktail of Duke Ellington's improvisations, and talk with the talking mouse who lives in the hero's bathroom. Around here, a pastoral and touching love story begins, everyone laughs and dances. The reader is captivated, and nothing foreshadows trouble.

And here comes the turning point. The love story turns into a sad tale of death and sacrifice. Happiness, laughter and light flow out of the heroes' lives like air from a punctured balloon. The world shrinks, the colors fade, the sounds of jazz become dull and indistinct. A cute parody of Sartre becomes an evil mockery, a mouse from the bathroom washes the lappi into blood, Chloe falls ill and is about to die. Colorful surrealism develops into the grotesque, mountains of corpses are piled up, duplicity and materialism triumph, cold metal rebels against living human warmth. And with all this, the same seriousness, the same incredible imagery and fantasy, the same ability with a couple of strokes to draw a living, convex image of the tragedy, infinitely far from hackneyed phrases and clichés. The collapse of the heroes' hopes is not inferior in strength and expression to the pictures of their recent happiness, and the most elaborate author's constructions are not able to hide from us the cruel reality of what is happening. Perhaps this is even scarier than Vian’s phantasmagoric horror stories. In short, the book is damn good. I don’t even remember where else the banal horrors of everyday life are shown with such visual power. An amazing novel, so unusual and so alive that you can only sigh in admiration.

Rating: 10

Boris Vian. Jazz critic, musician, poet, science fiction writer. Prone to shocking, notorious writer, who became a classic after his death.

“Foam of Days” is a book in which the incompatible is harmoniously combined in the most paradoxical way: it is both frivolous and deep, sad and life-affirming.

Vian’s favorite technique is the visualization of a worn-out speech cliche, the transfer of phraseological units from the level of language to the level of the artistic reality of the book (“Having brilliantly executed the swallow, she reaped the laurels, and meanwhile the cleaner swept away the laurel leaves scattered in all directions”). However, fate played a cruel joke on Vian, using his own business card as a weapon. The writer, with his death, realized the metaphor of a “killer film adaptation”, dying of a heart attack during the premiere of a film based on his novel “I will come to spit on your graves.” And in general he had no luck in life. His literary hoax turned into a terrible scandal, and the prize for beginning authors, for which “Foam of Days” was written, was unexpectedly awarded to a far from beginning writer.

“Foam of Days” is a sad tale of love. The novel is built on the principle of contrast: the reader can trace how the style of presentation and language changes from chapter to chapter, turning from light, flying to oppressive and gloomy. The bright colors of the first chapters gradually fade, and in the finale a black and white picture appears before the mind's eye. As darkness envelops the characters’ apartment, the space of the book seems to shrink; the floor meets the ceiling, living flowers wither and turn to dust.

Of particular note is Vian’s unique humor. Perhaps you have never read such talented and elegant banter in your life. Vian parodies everything that can turn into a cliché, all the fashionable hobbies of the French youth of the forties: jazz, surrealism, existentialism... Existentialism suffered the most. “The problem of choice for nausea on especially thick toilet paper”, “a volume of “Vomit” bound in the skin of a stink” will be remembered for a long time by a reader familiar with the work of Jean Sol Partre, ugh! Jean Paul Sartre.

Rating: 10

The most real story, wrapped in a cloak of unreality and permeated with true feelings that make you think differently and see things as they really are.

The beginning of the book, permeated with light, music, happiness and the belief that each new day will bring something more good, shrinks to one endlessly pulsating note of despair in the fevered brain of the protagonist at the end of this work.

Very few books make us think about something in this life. This book makes you not only think, but feel every word and every gesture of the characters.

I read “Foam of Days” only once and a very long time ago. I never even tried to read it again precisely because the book is simply indescribable and you realize that it is very difficult to relive all its events again. And you will never feel one moment again - you will not be able to regain your original feeling of joy from discovering and realizing that such a book exists.

Rating: 10

Cinematic novel.

I had been aiming at it for a long time, and only the premiere of the film of the same name by Michel Gondry (himself a rare master: “The Science of Sleep,” “Rewind,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), which collapsed in the summer, forced me to cling to the source of the original text.

The level of visionaryness - now I’ll mix two mutually inappropriate but mutually reinforcing concepts into a piano cocktail: visionaryness and visualization - is simply prohibitive.

Undoubtedly, it is worth adding the deepest kinestheticity (again in two layers: touching and disgusting touch) and lightness. Vian does not write, he smokes and writes out this text with the finest feathers of fragrant tobacco smoke.

It was on the example of this work of the pen that Vianova was able to formulate for himself the difference between fantastic and human literature:

The first one kneels before the idea (the same principle: tear out the root of the phantom assumption, and the whole sprout will wither)

The second one can flirt with unrealistic details as much as it wants, but it tells about a person, feelings and relationships, essentially telling a kind of proto-story, like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden

Rating: 8

Holding a 270-page book in my hands, I couldn’t help but feel upset about the publishers’ hard-earned money, as usual. Imagine my surprise when I came across a story similar to Alice in Wonderland. Here you will not find plot dynamics. Rather, it is a mixture of gourmet food, jazz, blues. There is a place for religion - endlessly ridiculed by Vian. (I only later found out with what contempt the author treats the church).

The six main characters of the book, around whom life, saturated with magic, splashes. I don’t know how to say exactly, but I think this is the same magical realism. Colin is a rich young man who wants to fall in love. Chic is his poor best friend, who fanatically collects things and books by Jean-Sol Partre (the play on words is obvious - Vian creates a parody of Sartre). Beautiful girls Aliza and Isis. Nicolas is a chef from God who works for Colin and is his friend. And finally, the wonderful, dreamy girl Chloe. It is around Chloe that the entire plot will play out. The main musical theme of the book is the blues piece “Chloe”, arranged by Duke Ellington. Chloe and Colin's wedding, their crazy love, her illness.

The atmosphere of this elegant, dark and tragic story captivates and does not let go. Excellent language and style of work.

Rating: 10

A young man named Colin passionately desires to fall in love. And he falls in love - with a girl named Chloe. They get married, but Chloe falls ill, and Colin does everything to help Chloe recover.

The main characters, like the story itself, are superficial. Moreover, they are not at all attractive. Colin, squandering his fortune, an infantile unable to work, Chloe, a typical fairy girl, Colin's servant Nicolas, who does not miss more than one skirt, and apparently suffers from something like a split personality, their comrade Chic, an obsession who spends all his money on books Jean-Sol Partre (a bold allusion to a well-known philosopher), how some modern audiophiles collect releases of their favorite groups, Chic's girlfriend Aliza, who allows Chic to do this and shows unequivocal signs of attention to Colin... so, and someone else from were there any characters in the novel? Oh yes. Mouse. Here she is – the most adequate and pleasant character in the book.

I fully admit that in the original, in French, the novel may turn out to be much more impressive - after all, language games are difficult to translate, but in the form in which the book is presented to the Russian-speaking reader now, it, unfortunately, does not represent anything unusual. Just the story of one failed love with a slight touch of surrealism and a soundtrack by Duke Ellington. Literally a couple of hours after reading, nothing remains in my head - to write this review I even had to pick up the book again and leaf through it. Fortunately, it's quite short.

Rating: 5

Look around and you will notice how life is seething around in all its splendor, foaming and playing. And when you wake up every day, imagine that you have a mouse dancing under the rays of the bright sun, which, if something happens, will give everything just to help at the moment when everything is going to hell. And it’s probably worth listening, then you’ll hear the crackling of foaming life.

Before us is a world of whimsicalities, absurdities and improbabilities, but it frightens us with its reality so much that we want to get lost, like a needle in a haystack. And it smells good, and no one will bother me there. A world of absurdities that would never happen to anyone at the same time shows people like us with the same problems, dreams and aspirations. A world where human warmth is given to the cold metal of weapons, in which young people want love, not work; someone gives their last money to obsession, not noticing and rejecting the most valuable.

The novel, which begins with light and bright colors, ends with dimmed light and hopelessness. All heroes ultimately have tragic fates. In this foam of days around us there are others who, perhaps, lack a little mouse that can change their existence. Or incapable. This is a love story so tragic that no surrealism with its unusual images can weaken the weight of unhappy love that crushed the main characters. Gradually, the rooms become smaller, the windows become overgrown, the tiles turn into wood, and the sun grows dim. What is this? No, it’s something different for everyone.

Everything is over. All destinies unraveled and became clearer. But then that same mouse appears, showing in the last lines the quintessence of all life...

Rating: 9

“Tenderly, gently, subtly, subtly...”

Overall, an unusually graceful and chaste love story: smile: Probably similar to the incredible music of a pianoforte: smile: And yet too frivolous. Later, I came across lines from Beigbeder’s essay “The Best Books of the 20th Century”

“Surely there will be people who don’t like The Foam of Days, who find this book too naive or frivolous, and I want to solemnly announce to them, these people, right here that I feel sorry for them, because they did not understand the most important thing in literature. Want to know what it is? Charm." Brrr - and this is about me:eek: Despite all the admiration for the wonderful imagination, the extraordinary lightness and charm of the narrative... I did not leave, looming in the depths of consciousness, irritation from the complete sloppiness, nihilism, and selfishness of the heroes, the existence of which resembles a well-known fable Krylova

Rating: 3

Absurd as it is. The story is absurd from beginning to end. It’s amazing how the author was able to maintain the overall integrity of the composition and plot in all this gorgeous tangled tangle of semantic improvisations and order of perception.

The great strangeness and originality of "Foam of Days" is that it is not a comedy of the absurd, as it seems at first, but a melodrama of the absurd. Complex and unique genre. Much like a clown in a circus arena, whose actions cause tears rather than laughter. And it doesn’t matter anymore that this is a circus and not a theater. People come to the show to have fun, have fun, admire the tricks and other wow effects, but no one minds crying or asking to stop. And at the end of the stage, the artist leaves to incessant well-deserved applause. A very unusual situation for a circus, wouldn’t you agree?

In “The Foam of Days” by Boris Vian, as it should be in a truly iconic work, various metaphors and a whole bunch of references are widely used (of course, it won’t argue with “Ulysses”, but it will give many an impressive head start). And what can we say about the author’s speech pattern, which so accurately sometimes finds the necessary unusual forms to reflect the atypicality of Vian’s thinking and, accordingly, invite the reader to an internal monologue or simply rational (or not so rational) thinking. And all this is short and right at your feet, as the players say. Here's a great example from the book:

Flower shop windows are never covered with iron curtains. No one would even think of stealing flowers."

And really... Who would even think of stealing flowers? Have you thought about this? Why steal flowers? What to do with them then? You can’t eat them, you can’t put them on yourself, you can’t read them on a park bench, you can’t put them in the hallway for hanging hats. So what to do with flowers? Give a girl stolen goods? But then the meaning of the flower-giving ritual is largely lost. No, you can sell them like old ladies at the subway. But you still can’t carry away many flowers, and the shelf life is very limited. That's how it is!

On the other hand, you can approach this phrase a little differently. If the meaning doesn't change. Perhaps our society has indeed already entered a phase of “bleaching”? Maybe flowers really have ceased to be necessary attributes of social relations and have turned into an impersonal formality, and even then not always observed? Maybe they didn’t mean theft specifically, but the gratuitousness of such a product? This is what is good about “Foam of Days” - it gives the attentive reader more in just fragments than other works of literature offer in an entire chapter, or even a book.

You know, this novel by Boris Vian is not so much a must-read as it is useful. Even for those who are not connoisseurs of intellectual literature. “Foam of Days” allows you to look at the surrounding reality from a different position of perception. Everything is the same, only completely different, completely different, not at all the way we are used to. Non-fiction fantasy in jazz style.

There are only two things in the world worth living for: the love of beautiful girls, whatever it may be, and New Orleans jazz or Duke Ellington.

There is a French writer, long dead, Boris Vian. It could not be published not for political reasons, but for artistic reasons, because of the very method of artistic presentation. And so I decided to really not give up on this task and translated his little novel “Foam of Days.” And at that moment I was asked to conduct a seminar for young translators from French - university and foreign language graduates. I invited Nyomochka Naumov to lead this seminar with me, and the two of us decided - which was completely daring - to give it to our children for translation based on Vian’s story.

In my opinion, there is no more difficult prose writer to translate - it’s like translating poetry. Because Vian is all about wordplay, associations, idioms that cannot be found in the Russian language, since each language has its own idiomatic expressions and the whole game is based on French phraseology. So, what is the task in such cases? In short, you must definitely find your own, completely different idiom or play on words, often ten miles from the French one, but which evokes the same feeling, the same association. This is an extremely difficult task, it’s really like a line of a poem, an image of a poem, it’s not any easier. It took me a long time to translate “Foam of Days.” Six and a half sheets, I probably translated half a page for almost two years, a page a day, and not every day.

In total, Vian’s collection took three years to complete. The editor who ran it, a very nice person, kept telling me: Lilya, just don’t rush, let the director go on vacation, let this one get sick, let him move to another job... Because the volume had to be promoted through the authorities, avoiding possible dangers. Vian writes in the preface that there is nothing in the world worth living for except beautiful girls and jazz music. Well, is it possible to translate and print such a book in the Soviet Union? Unfortunately, this editor himself did not live to see the publication of the collection. And the book, surprisingly, was published. Well, it was a success – that’s not the right word: it seeped into dry sand like a drop of water in an instant.

Boris Vian

Foam days

Colin was finishing his toilet. Coming out of the bath, he wrapped himself in a wide terry sheet, leaving only his legs and torso naked. He took a spray bottle from the glass shelf and sprayed his blond hair with the volatile aromatic oil. An amber comb divided his silky hair into thin orange strands, reminiscent of the furrows that a cheerful plowman makes with a fork on a saucer of apricot jam. Putting the comb aside, Colin armed himself with nail clippers and cut the edges of his matte eyelids at an angle to give his look a mysterious look. He often had to do this - his eyelids grew back quickly. Colin turned on the light bulb of the magnifying mirror and moved closer to it to check the condition of his epidermis. Several eels lurk near the wings of the nose. Strongly enlarged, they were amazed at their ugliness and immediately scurried back under the skin. Colin turned off the light bulb with relief. He unwrapped the sheet that was tight around his thighs and used the tip of it to remove the last drops of water between his toes. His reflection in the mirror seemed surprisingly similar to someone - well, of course, the blond guy who plays the role of Slim in Hollywood Canteen(1). Round head, small ears, straight nose, golden skin. He smiled so often with a baby smile that a dimple could not help but appear on his chin. He was quite tall, slender, long-legged and generally very cute. The name Kolen probably suited him (2). He spoke kindly to the girls and cheerfully to the guys. He was almost always in a good mood, and the rest of the time he slept.

Having pierced the bottom of the bathtub, he released the water from it. The light yellow ceramic tile floor in the bathroom was sloping and water flowed into a gutter just above the desk of the occupant of the apartment below. Recently, without warning Colin, he rearranged his furniture. Now water was pouring onto the sideboard.

Kolen slipped his feet into batskin sandals and put on an elegant lounge suit - bottle-colored corduroy trousers and a pistachio satin jacket. He hung a terry sheet on the drying rack, threw a foot mat over the side of the bathtub and sprinkled it with coarse salt to draw water out of it. The rug was immediately spat on - it was all covered with clusters of soap bubbles.

Leaving the bathroom, Colin moved to the kitchen to personally oversee the final preparations. As always on Mondays, Chic (3), who lived nearby, dined with him. True, today was still Saturday, but Colin was eager to see Chic and treat him to the dishes that his new cook Nicolas had inspiredly prepared. Twenty-two-year-old Chic was the same age as Colin and also a bachelor, and besides, he shared his literary tastes, but he had much less money. Colin, on the other hand, had a fortune sufficient to not work for others and not deny himself anything. But Chic had to run to his uncle’s ministry every week to get some money from him, because his profession as an engineer did not allow him to live at the level of his workers, and commanding people who are dressed better than you and eat better is very difficult. Trying his best to help him, Colin called him to dinner under any pretext. However, Chic's painful pride forced Colin to be constantly on guard - he was afraid that too frequent invitations would betray his intentions.

The corridor, glassed on both sides, leading to the kitchen, was very bright, and the sun was blazing on each side, because Colin loved light. Everywhere you looked, brass faucets gleamed, polished to a shine. The play of sunlight on their sparkling surface produced an enchanting impression. Kitchen mice often danced to the sound of the rays breaking on the taps and chased tiny sunbeams that endlessly crushed and tossed across the floor like yellow mercury balls. Kolen casually stroked one mouse: it had long black mustaches, and the gray fur on its slender body shone miraculously. The cook fed the mice excellently, but did not let them eat away. During the day, the mice behaved as quietly as mice and played only in the corridor.

Colin pushed open the enamel kitchen door. Cook Nicolas kept his eyes on the dashboard. He sat at the control panel, also covered with light yellow enamel, in which the dials of various kitchen appliances that stood along the wall were mounted. The needle on the electric stove, programmed to fry the turkey, quivered between “almost ready” and “done.” The bird was about to be taken out. Nicolas pressed the green switch, which activated a mechanical probe that easily pierced the turkey, and at the same instant the needle froze at the “ready” mark. With a quick movement, Nicolas turned off the power supply to the stove and turned on the plate heater.

But be silent: incomparable right -
Choose your own death.
N.S. Gumilev. Choice

Boris Vian did not die somehow. He died symbolically on June 23, 1959, at the premiere of the film based on his trash thriller “I Will Come to Spit on Your Graves.” Vian only lasted ten minutes of viewing, then rolled his eyes, leaned back in his chair and died without regaining consciousness in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. That is, the last thing he saw in his life was that low-grade pulp fiction, that horror that he himself created...

Vian's number is ten. He was born on March 10, wrote 10 novels, was destined for 10 years of literary creativity, and his heart broke after 10 minutes of watching a film based on his own masterpiece, which began at 10 o'clock in the morning... Stop. Let's, as happens in films based on trash thrillers, let's go back to where it all began and try to figure out why it all ended the way it did.

Good, bad, Negro

So, Vian was born on March 10, 1920 in the tiny town of Ville d'Avray near Paris and received the name Boris, strange for a native Frenchman - in honor of the opera "Boris Godunov", about which his musical mother was crazy... No, not That. Fast forward... There you go! Vian is two years old. He suffered from a severe sore throat with heart complications and developed rheumatism for the rest of his life. Fifteen years. Vian falls ill with typhoid fever. Again consequences on the heart. All! The formation of the mortal body of the future writer is completed: heart disease, aortic insufficiency. Vian chooses his early death by deciding to play the trumpet, which was categorically contraindicated for him, but which, of course, reflected (even then, at the age of fifteen!) his desperate, passionate and philosophical view of life and death at the same time.

And during his lifetime, Carroll had to “conform” and hide his versatile, active and sometimes even stormy life under an impenetrable mask of Victorian respectability. Needless to say, it’s an unpleasant task; for such a principled man as Carroll, this was undoubtedly a heavy burden. And yet, it seems, a deeper, more existential contradiction was hidden in his personality, besides the constant fear for his professorial reputation: “oh, what will Princess Marya Aleksevna say.” Here we come close to the problem of Carroll the Invisible, Carroll the Third, who lives on the dark side of the Moon, in the Sea of Insomnia.

The history of Boris Vian's work is practically the history of his illness. Vian was not a healthy person. As one researcher of the writer’s work wittily noted, “cardiac arrhythmia determined Vian’s characteristic arrhythmia with the mentality of his time.” When all of France was experiencing a total craze for American pop culture against the backdrop of general euphoria from the liberation of Paris by the Allies, Vian spat on everyone from a high bell tower. He played jazz against all odds, playing, as contemporaries noted, out of the corner of his mouth, standing firmly on his legs wide apart. Sweet, romantic, flowery and desperate; played jazz blacker than black. He dared to be himself - a terminally ill pessimist passionately in love with life.

There is a saying (I think it belongs to Osho): the health of all healthy people is the same, but everyone has their own illness. That is, illness determines individuality. In some cosmic sense, individuality itself is something unimaginably sacred in the West! - and there is the most dangerous disease, a kind of runny nose of the soul. In this esoteric sense, Vian, too, I repeat, was not a healthy person.

He was endowed with individuality beyond all measure: at least three individuals coexisted within him: first, an intellectual who graduated from the famous Central School, the brilliant author of “Foam of Days”; secondly, the long-dollar scribbler Vernon Sullivan with a stack of best-selling pulp novels and, finally, a simple white black man who wanted only one thing in life: to play jazz like Bix Beiderbeck (the great American jazz player, 1903-1931). Vian knew that he would die early, and lived three times more greedily than any contemporary French writer, spending his obscenely, Rasputin-like rich vitality right and left. For which he paid.

It's time, it's time, let's rejoice in our lifetime

The entire, in Egorlet’s way, “long happy life” of B. Vian, which began on March 10, 1920 and ended just 40 years later, passed in the shadow of a serious illness. But partly thanks to this divine shadow that fate sent him, Vian was not completely blinded by that sun, which makes the average human plankton mediocrely enjoy life until death. He was a one-eyed king in a land of sun-blinded peace, order and prosperity. He was a terrorist king who undermined the very foundations of peace, order and prosperity. He was the most unpolitical anarchist imaginable. He was, one might say, a second-generation existentialist (like color television instead of black and white), an order of magnitude more existential than existentialism itself. A lonely, lost in time terminator of postmodernism, who came to dig up the living graves of everything that died in good health, and that which still has to die in the interests of humanity.

It is symbolic in this regard that soon after Vian’s death his beautiful, completely Russian face was firmly forgotten, although not for long. Vian was elevated to the prophetic pedestal only two years later. And not because he died scandalously at his premiere: the sixties simply arrived, and the psychedelic writer, rebelling against everything, came to court. The dead Vian was more famous than he had ever been during his lifetime, although all his best works had long been published.

In the animal world

Famous after death - this actually means “forgotten during life.” But Vian could not complain about the lack of attention from fortune. For example, in those same fateful fifteen years, he receives not only a heart defect for life, but also a bachelor's degree in Latin and Greek. Two years later (at seventeen), Vian defended his bachelor’s degree in two more disciplines: philosophy and mathematics! Boris Vian did a lot of things in his life: he wrote prose and poetry (and even operas, which pleased his mother), played the trumpet very well in a jazz orchestra and sang, professionally translated books from English, including detective novels by R. Chandler in noir style.

Vian was a very passionate person, and his main passion was jazz. If we ignore his literary heritage for a moment, we have to admit that he was more of a jazzman than a writer. Just like, for example, Griboedov was actually a diplomat, not a playwright. But descendants certainly don’t care about this.

Chairs in the evening, on the table in the morning

In 1947, an airplane broke the sound barrier for the first time in the United States. In the same year, the ill Boris Vian in France overcame the literary barrier by writing “The Foam of Days.” Albert Camus's contemporary novel The Plague was (much more than the drearily speculative The Plague!) a nice, muscular slap in the face to modern society. It was wonderful: Vian proclaimed a new ideal, a new philosophy of life, proclaimed life. But then he somehow managed to step on the throat of his own song and silence his own cry from the soul.

Vian was not a good PR manager for himself. As I already said, he tried to sit on three chairs, one of which was jazz, the second was his real “shednerv” (Vian neologism) - the famous novel “Foam of Days” (1946), which during the writer’s lifetime went catastrophically unnoticed, and his second-rate (if not third-rate!) pulp novels, stylized as noir a la Raymond Chandler, whom Vian translated, these demon novels of his, published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan: “I’ll Come to Spit on Your Graves” (1946), “All the Dead the same color" (1947), "Let's destroy all the freaks" (1948) and "Women Can't Understand" (1950). As is already clear from the titles of the works of the noir cycle, they are complete obscenity, unworthy of reading, and upon reading one cannot help but be convinced of this.

These books were written for money, and not for inspiration (like “Foam ...”), and they really brought Vian a lot of money (along with fame), and also hopelessly undermined his reputation. They also served as the reason for one real murder: under the influence of the novel “I’ll Come to Spit...”, sales clerk Edmond Rouget strangled his girlfriend and decorated the corpse with a volume of Sullivan, opened at the murder scene. And finally, with a high degree of probability it can be assumed that the ill-fated novels were the cause of Vian’s own sudden and ambiguous death. Having published his disgusting black bestsellers splashing with blood (and sperm), Vian, this refined, exalted personality, this “enthusiastic bison,” as his friends called him, successfully crossed out the “Foam of Days” and became famous throughout the country as a scandalous tabloid scribbler, and not like the genius who created “Foam of Days”, which is now part of the school curriculum! Written as a mockery of society, the novels “laughed” at Vian himself. No one realized that this was just a bad joke (least of all Edmond Rouget, poor fellow!), and Vian choked in his own bloody “foam of days.” And probably his sick heart whispered to him: “Boris, you’re wrong, don’t write a bestseller.” But Boris didn't listen...

We're all sick

In our country, which adds humor to the current unfunny situation, Vian’s dark novels are not as famous as “Foam of Days.” And it’s very funny to watch how, in the refraction of criticism (as if by turning his name inside out), Boris Vian for some reason imperceptibly (smoke into the house, the lady into the mother) turns into “naive syrup.” The words “prolonged childhood”, “escapism”, “superficiality”, “puppet heroes”, etc. are heard. So much has already been said about the “sensory space” of “Foam of Days”! Critics see word creation and rose-colored glasses, but do not see the violent destruction of the world. But the hero of “Natural Born Killers” also wore rose-colored glasses! At best, Vian is compared to Kharms. Of course, they are both extraordinary gentlemen. But they are different, like Jekyll and Hyde! Where Kharms’s laughter stops, maddening chaos immediately falls, “then - silence.” And “Foam of Days” is a sad “spring song” full of faith in a better tomorrow.

Like the characters in K. Graham's classic tale "The Wind in the Willows" in the chapter Piper at the Gates of Dawn (famous for Pink Floyd's debut album), the characters in "Foam..." seem to have heard a transcendental, divine melody. And when she fell silent, they continue to live, but on a different level, in a different capacity. Like Neo, who has been in the matrix and beyond. No matter how tragic the story told in “Foam of Days” is, this sadness, like Pushkin’s, is light. Colin and Chloe are like Romeo and Juliet. Born for each other, who found their love. They can die without regret, as befits true karma guerrillas. Kharms is Russian hopelessness, Mozart's Requiem on the drainpipe flute, Vian is the new hope of the galaxy, black jazz out of the corner of his mouth. Kharms - Game over, Vian - Mission Complete.

Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is named after one of the chapters in the fairy tale The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. In this chapter, the heroes of the fairy tale, the Mole and the Otter, spend the night by the river in search of the lost Otter cub. Quote: “Perhaps he would not have dared to raise his head, but, although the music had already died down, the call still sounded powerfully within him. He could not help but look, even if death itself had instantly and rightly struck him for looking with mortal eyes at the hidden, which should remain secret. He obeyed and raised his head, and then in the pure rays of the inevitably approaching dawn, when even Nature itself, painted in an embarrassed pink color, fell silent, holding his breath, he looked into the eyes of his Friend and Helper, the one who played the pipe.

Yes, the happiness of Vian’s heroes, immersed up to their necks in their own “matrix within a matrix” (a sort of bright matryoshka, a cozy pocket in an uncomfortable reality), fleeting. But can contemporary society (and us) with its proven traditional values give a person lasting happiness?! A sick, sensitive heart - his impeccable muse - told Vian that it was not. His doomed heart scribbled in his brain, as if on a typewriter: “No, no, no...” “Not this, and not that, and not even nothing,” - so it scribbled, with every line affirming not death, but life, an endless search for the ideal - freedom...

This is not art for art's sake, this is a declaration of human independence from society! This is a promise of happiness in a single body, and not somewhere out there in a bright future, painted with bright poster colors by propaganda, in a future that never comes. Contrary to narrow-minded criticism (who missed “The Foam of Days” and did not appreciate the comic humor of trash novels!), Vian’s heroes are extremely, physiologically, real, like Tomas from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera, real. And realistic. They just live in the “real present” - the eternal present, in which only youth and life are possible, they do not even live in today, but in the present moment: “don’t think down on the seconds...” Almost like the Taoist sages.

Good morning, last hero

Vian does not see with his eyes, he sees with his third eye some transcendental “ray of light in the dark kingdom”, divided into a whole rainbow of colors, and paints with these colors, although this light comes from a star that went out and cooled a million years ago. And hence the cosmic sadness, as in the poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez, and despair, and even somewhere enlightened cruelty, as in the songs of Tsoi, who foresaw a lot: “My sun, look at me: / My palm has turned into a fist, / And if there is gunpowder, / Give me fire. / Like this". Vian, whose health had been hanging by a thread since adolescence, burned all the gunpowder he had. He played the trumpet in defiance of doctors, loved beautiful women and New Orleans jazz... And he wanted to give a damn about everything he didn’t like.

Vian lived according to the samurai code: admiring the shamelessly blooming cherry blossoms from the balcony of his ivory tower, he, without outside help, remembered that “this too shall pass,” realized and put into practice the inevitability and disgustingness of his own death. For him, death was at arm's length. Hence the strange ruthlessness mixed with dreaminess: like the writer, athlete, samurai, gay Yukio Mishima, who made hara-kiri for himself after a crazy attempt to restore the emperor. Vian also wanted something so transcendental, he wanted a war with everyone and everything. Vian was not a pacifist, as is commonly believed, rather he was a “peanut anarchist”, a partisan of karma with Pelevin’s “clay machine gun” hidden in his sleeve!

This hypothetical machine gun (or, according to Vian, "heartbreaker") in the hole was at the same time his ace in the hole, his only joker that could bring victory to Vian, to him, the doomed core, the doomed loser. Hence his sensitivity to the very prophetic depth, otherwise it would not be worth reading.

P.S. Ay-ay-ay, they killed a black man...

Vian was a real Jedi, although he was in reserve for health reasons. Perhaps it was precisely because of this “in reserve” that he gradually accumulated a critical mass of anger in his soul... Vian’s demons, so cute at the beginning (flashed already in “The Foam of Days” somewhere in the episodes), became mature, grew terrible horns and with Volodar’s laughter tore the withered angels to shreds... Jekyll gave way to Hyde. This is how his life turned out - quickly, like a house of cards folding.

According to Vian, life is a chaos in which it is impossible to survive, you can only enjoy it, no matter what the cost, right now. Death is guaranteed for everyone, life is guaranteed for no one. Enjoyment of life is taken away by compromises, masses, work, regime, oblivion. And about death, what it will be like, one can only guess. Vian partially predicted his own death in the poem “Attempt at Death” (translated by D. Svintsov):

I will die from a ruptured aorta.
It will be a special evening -
Moderately sensual, warm and clear
And terrible.

As we see, even Vian, generously endowed with an unhealthy imagination, could not imagine that he would die not at all in a sensual morning, but on a stomach full after breakfast, and yet his whole sick life hinted at some such indigestible outcome!