Vasily Aksyonov's story "Victory": the experience of semantic organization analysis. Vasily Aksenov's story "Victory": the experience of analyzing the semantic organization Aksenov victory summary

Journal "Literature", 2013, No. 4.
Dmitry Bykov
TWO VICTORIES
Thank God, the teacher is free to choose works for studying in the eleventh grade - Soviet short stories of the sixties and seventies are represented by "one or two texts on the recommendation of the teacher," as it is officially called. I think it makes sense to offer children for comparative analysis - in class or in home writing - two stories written and printed almost simultaneously. These are “Victory” by Vasily Aksyonov, which first appeared in “Youth” (1965), and “Winner” by Yuri Trifonov (“Banner”, 1968).
"Victory" has been analyzed many times and in detail, almost nothing has been written about "Winner" - except that there is an enthusiastic review in a letter from Alexander Gladkov to the author ("a huge heavy subtext... impossible to retell..."). Children react to both texts with great interest - it is clear that the grotesque and surrealistic "Victory" when read aloud is perceived much more vividly, with constant laughter, but it all depends on temperament: there are people who are closer to the melancholic "Winner", since the theme of death is always burningly interesting in adolescence, then brought to the fore. The situation itself is symptomatic, when two giants of urban prose simultaneously write stories about defeat disguised as victory, and about how to live with this defeat now. It is possible to explain in a few words in the lesson the literary situation of the second half of the sixties - the dying thaw, the fate of which became obvious long before August 1968, the depression and split in intellectual circles and circles, the feeling of a historical impasse. No wonder that in both stories we are talking about dubious, quoted winners: the hero of Trifonov, who was the last to run at the Paris Olympics, literally runs the longest and wins such a life as a prize that the other hero of the story - Basil - recoils in horror from this fetid future. The young grandmaster at Aksyonov defeated G.O., but the winner turns out to be precisely the stupid, cruel and deeply unhappy G.O. from childhood. “He did not notice the checkmate to his king.” As a result, he is solemnly awarded a token - "So-and-so won the game from me."
Behind each of these two texts there is a serious literary tradition: Aksyonov - although by this time, according to his own testimony in a conversation with the author of these lines, he had not yet read Luzhin's Defense - continues Nabokov's literary game, blurring the boundaries between real and chess collisions. There is a lot of Nabokov in general in Pobeda - his rapture with the landscape, his eternal sympathy for softness, delicacy, artistry, hatred for stupid rudeness. Trifonov continues a completely different line, and here you can’t disown the source - everyone in Russia read Hemingway, and not just writers, and Hemingway’s method is evident in The Winner: Gladkov is right, little has been said, much has been said, the subtext is deep and branching. There is also a completely Hemingwayian hero in this story, international journalist Basil, whose turbulent life fits in five lines:
“An amazing character is our Basil! At thirty-seven, he had already experienced two heart attacks, one shipwreck, the blockade of Leningrad, the death of his parents, he was almost killed somewhere in Indonesia, he skydived in Africa, he was starving, he was in poverty, he learned French by self-taught, he masterfully swears obscenities, is friends with avant-garde artists and loves fishing in the summer on the Volga more than anything in the world.
True, in this stormy and bravura-living journalist Yulian Semyonov is guessed rather than Hemingway, but the prototype is also visible: all Soviet young prose, not excluding Semyonov, made itself from the Pope.

Trifonov and Aksyonov continue in the sixties the eternal dispute between Nab and Ham - two almost twins, snobs, athletes who have lived almost all their lives outside their homeland, albeit for completely different reasons. Both were born in 1899. Both went through the school of European modernism. Both simultaneously published their main novels - respectively The Gift (1938) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Both disliked (to tell the truth, hated) Germany and adored France. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine more opposite temperaments; it is curious, of course, to dream up how many rounds N. would have survived against H. - both were fond of boxing, Ham was denser, Nab was taller, thinner, but faster. Ham liked to chat with his friends about how many rounds he could take - in a hypothetical literary competition, he just had boxing terminology - against Flaubert, Maupassant ... “Only against Leo Tolstoy I wouldn’t puff a round, oh no. Damn it, I just wouldn’t have entered the ring ”(Of course, he did not read Shklovsky’s “Hamburg Account”). They worshiped Tolstoy in the same way, revered both Chekhov and Joyce, but otherwise ... We practically do not know Ham's reviews of Nab, he did not notice the literary sensation called "Lolita" at all, and he was not up to it; Nabokov said devastatingly funny, insulting and inaccurate about Hemingway. "Hemingway? Is it something about bulls, bells and balls?” — about bulls, bells and eggs! The pun, as often with Nabokov, is excellent - but Hemingway, no matter how much he was excited by the bells and bulls, not to mention the eggs, is still about something else, and the scale of his problems is not inferior to the questions that worried Nabokov; Of course, it’s stupid to draw Nabokov as an aesthete locked in a bone tower—there are few such powerful anti-fascist novels in the world as Bend Sinister—and yet Hemingway’s characters and plots are more diverse, the geography is wider, narcissism is naive and somehow touching, or something . In short, calling him in the afterword to the Russian Lolita a modern substitute for Mine-Reid, Nabokov was expressing feelings not so much for his prose as for his 1954 Nobel Prize.
It is interesting that Hemingway was a rather nice old man, although he did not live to a real old age - but you can imagine him something like the Old Man in his last masterpiece: moderately self-ironic, moderately helpless, moderately invincible. Nabokov, here's the paradox, was a rather nasty old man - arrogant, captious, capricious. Hemingway treats old age with horror and dignity - perhaps such a combination; he is generally very serious when it comes to life and death. For Nabokov, the main tragedy is the incomprehensibility and inexpressibility of the world; real tragedies, he not only neglects, but arrogantly, courageously, stubbornly denies them authenticity. He lived an exceptionally difficult life, he had something to complain about - but we will not find a trace of complaint in his writings; he was in poverty - but he was remembered as a gentleman, he worked with frantic intensity - but he was remembered not as working, but as playing. There is a special elegance in not baring one's head at a funeral - "Let death be the first to take off its hat," as Nabokov's fictional philosopher Pierre Delalande said; but there is also the bitter, simple, American seriousness of life and death as they are, and Hemingway is more touching here, if not deeper. Nabokov has impeccable taste, and Ham has very dubious taste, although his European training has taken away from him the aplomb and toughness of an American reporter; but we know that artistic taste is not necessary for a genius, a genius creates new laws, and by old standards he is almost always a graphomaniac. Both Nabokov and Hemingway love a common through plot, which is generally typical for their generation: "The winner gets nothing." Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, on the eve of the first night with Zina, finds himself at the locked door without a key; having experienced a brilliant insight, Falter cannot tell anyone about it; Humbert pursues Lolita, only to lose her every day and every hour. The winner gets only a moral victory - like an exiled, dismissed, ridiculed Pnin: his consolation is in his own intellectual and creative power, in the fact that he is Pnin and will not become anyone else. The author himself, a triumphant, handsome man, everyone's favorite, formally overcoming him and taking his place, envies him. Perhaps, Pobeda copies (unconsciously, of course) not so much the plot of Luzhin's Defense, with which it has only a chess theme in common, but rather the plot of Pnin, where a meek, loving, dreamy Russian professor turns out to be a delicate grandmaster. And the triumphant vitality that ousts him from the university and from life is personified, sadly, in the narrator, although he does not at all resemble G. O.
Considering the classic "Winner gets nothing" plot, as one of Hemingway's finest collections was called, Ham and Nab approached it differently. The consolation of the loser, according to Nabokov, is that in real game he will always win, and rough earthly chess is just an approximate and boring literalization. The loser is consoled - like Aksyonov's grandmaster - by the fact that "he did not commit any especially major meanness", by the fact that he is honest and clean in front of himself, by the fact that he has Bach's music, a friendly environment and a tie from Dior. According to Hemingway, there are no winners at all. The winner is the one who, regardless of the final result, holds on to the end; the one who brings back from fishing only a huge marlin skeleton, and this skeleton represents everything that the winner gets. It's completely useless, but VERY BIG. And it shows what great prose we would write if, on the way to paper, a great thought did not turn into its own skeleton. According to Hemingway, the main victory of the loser is the very scale of the failure. The one who got lucky is, by definition, chalk. If a hero doesn't die, he's not a hero.
Aksyonov's conflict is precisely Nabokov's: the secret joy of the conqueror lies in the fact that the vanquished is never conscious of his own defeat; that "The winner does not understand anything." Playing in the compartment of a fast train with a self-satisfied idiot who is incapable of appreciating the light, volatile charm of the world—with an idiot whose chess thought does not go beyond the formula “If I am like this, then he makes me like this,” a grandmaster can console himself with the fact that he himself builds a magnificent party, crystal, transparent, infinitely thin, like beaded cunning combinations in Hesse's novel. The defeat inflicted in Russia on freedom, thought, progress, everything good in general, everything that alone makes life life, is not final, if only because G.O. no longer constitutes the vast majority. There are cowboys Billy and beauties Mary, there is the Riga seaside, a country veranda, there is an environment in which the grandmaster is no longer alone. There is also a well-designed ironic self-defense - a golden token that marks not so much surrender as new level mockery of the enemy.
Trifonov puts the question harder and more seriously - and his story appears not in the frivolous "Youth" (besides, in the humorous department), but in the traditionalist "Banner", which was then a stronghold of military prose. The defeat here is not so much historical, social, but ontological (children, as we know, love buzzwords and willingly memorize them). Soviet journalists are sent to the only surviving participant in the second - Paris - Olympics. He ran last then, but calls himself the winner. Why? Because everyone else, having fallen into the monstrous twentieth century, left the race, and he still runs his ultra-marathon. He is lonely, out of his mind, he has a bald head and bald gums, they call him dirty, stinky - the old man has no one, and a nurse goes after him; he remembers nothing and understands almost nothing, but in his eyes a spark of Methuselah pride smolders - he is alive! He sees this sharp star in the window, he smells the burning branches from the garden... And Trifonov sorts things out not so much with Hemingway, but with the heroic generation of his parents (the fate of the repressed parents was for him - as well as for Aksyonov - an eternal trauma). These heroes believed that only a life filled with exploits, in the extreme case with intense work, makes sense. But the generation of sons no longer knows what makes more sense - in self-burning, self-squandering, or survival at any cost; after all, apart from life, there is nothing, and there is no meaning other than to see, hear, absorb, feel - there is none either. Here is Basil, who does not want such tortoise-like immortality, who burns a candle from two ends - and Semyonov actually lived only 61 years, literally burned out, leaving a gigantic legacy, nine-tenths of which has already been forgotten today. And there is an old man who has accomplished absolutely nothing in life - but he is alive, and there will be no other victory. One can argue about the greatness of the feat, about the collective will, about fantastic achievements, but everyone dies alone, as another great prose writer of the 20th century wrote. And aren't all these thoughts about the greatness of one's own business ridiculous in the face of old age and death, if this business itself looks doomed by 1968? And at this time, it must be admitted, there was not a single ideology left in the world with which one could solidarize without a sense of shame: all the recipes for universal happiness once again cracked.
Children are usually happy to discuss "Victory" and almost always claim that the grandmaster won regardless of the author's assessment: checkmate? - enough. G.O. noticed, did not notice - what's the difference? Important result! The sobering remark of the teacher that the result is a golden token flies past the ears. Won - and that's enough, but whether the fools understood their defeat - we should not worry. Children are still small and do not understand that today's G.O., triumphant everywhere, and not only in Russia, also lost a long time ago, back in the Middle Ages, but does not notice this - and rules the world. Probably, this happens because the main value and the main victory is still life - and not, say, truth or creativity. The winner is the one who runs the longest - no matter with what result. And horrified by this, like Aksyonov, in our hearts we are ready to put up with it as soon as possible, like Trifonov. Burnt branches smell very good.

Vasily Aksenov

An exaggerated story

In the compartment of a fast train, the grandmaster was playing chess with a random companion.

This man immediately recognized the grandmaster when he entered the compartment, and immediately burned with an unthinkable desire for an unthinkable victory over the grandmaster. “You never know,” he thought, throwing sly, recognizing glances at the grandmaster, “you never know, you might think, some kind of frail.”

The grandmaster immediately realized that he was recognized, and resigned himself to anguish: at least two games cannot be avoided. He, too, immediately recognized the type of this man. From the windows of the Chess Club on Gogolevsky Boulevard, he sometimes saw the rosy, steep foreheads of such people.

When the train started moving, the grandmaster's companion stretched himself with naive cunning and indifferently asked:

Shall we play chess, comrade?

Yes, perhaps, - the grandmaster muttered. The companion leaned out of the compartment, called the conductor,

chess appeared, he grabbed it too hastily for his indifference, poured it out, took two pawns, clenched them in his fists and showed his fists to the grandmaster. On the bulge between the thumb and forefinger of the left fist, the tattoo indicated: "G.O."

Left, - said the grandmaster and winced a little, imagining the blows of these fists, left or right.

He got the whites.

Time has to be killed, right? On the road, chess is a nice thing, - G.O. said good-naturedly, arranging the pieces.

They quickly played the northern gambit, then everything got confused. The grandmaster looked attentively at the board, making small, insignificant moves. Several times before his eyes the possible mating lines of the queen appeared like lightning, but he extinguished these flashes by slightly lowering his eyelids and obeying a faintly buzzing inside, tedious, compassionate note, similar to the buzzing of a mosquito.

- “Khas-Bulat is daring, your husk is poor ...” - G.O. pulled on the same note.

The grandmaster was the embodiment of neatness, the embodiment of the strictness of dress and manners, so characteristic of people who are unsure of themselves and easily hurt. He was young, dressed in a gray suit, a light-colored shirt, and a simple tie. No one but the grandmaster himself knew that his simple ties were marked with the House of Dior trademark. This little secret always somehow warmed and consoled the young and silent grandmaster. Glasses also quite often helped him out, hiding from strangers the uncertainty and timidity of his gaze. He complained about his lips, which tend to stretch into a pitiful smile or tremble. He would gladly close his lips from prying eyes, but this, unfortunately, has not yet been accepted in society.

Game G.O. amazed and upset the grandmaster. On the left flank, the figures crowded in such a way that a tangle of charlatan Kabbalistic signs formed. The entire left flank smelled of the latrine and bleach, the sour smell of the barracks, wet rags in the kitchen, and castor oil and diarrhea from early childhood.

After all, you are such and such a grandmaster, aren't you? asked G.O.

Yes, the grandmaster confirmed.

Ha ha ha, what a coincidence! - exclaimed G.O.

“What a coincidence? What coincidence is he talking about? This is something unthinkable! Could this happen? I refuse, accept my refusal,” the grandmaster thought quickly in panic, then guessed what was the matter and smiled.

Yes, of course, of course.

Here you are a grandmaster, and I'll put a fork on the queen and rook, - said G.O. He raised his hand. The provocateur horse hung over the board.

“Fork in the ass,” thought the grandmaster. - That's the fork! Grandfather had his own fork, he did not allow anyone to use it. Own. Personal fork, spoon and knife, personal plates and sputum vial. I also remember a “lyre” coat, a heavy coat with “lyre” fur, it hung at the entrance, grandfather almost never went outside. Fork for grandparents. It's a pity to lose old people."

While the knight hung over the board, luminous lines and dots of possible pre-match raids and victims flashed before the grandmaster's eyes again. Alas, the croup of a horse with a lagging dirty-purple bike was so convincing that the grandmaster shrugged his shoulders.

Are you giving up the rook? asked G.O.

What can you do.

Sacrificing a rook for an attack? Guessed? - asked G.O., still not daring to put the knight on the desired field.

I'm just saving the queen," the grandmaster muttered.

You don't catch me? - asked G.O.

No, you are a strong player.

G.O. made his cherished "fork". The grandmaster hid the queen in a secluded corner behind the terrace, behind a dilapidated stone terrace with carved rotten posts, where in autumn there was a sharp smell of rotting maple leaves. Here you can sit in a comfortable position, squatting. It is nice here; in any case, self-esteem does not suffer. Standing up for a second and looking out from behind the terrace, he saw that G.O. removed the rook.

The introduction of the black knight into the senseless crowd on the left flank, its occupation of the b4-square, in any case, was already suggestive. The grandmaster realized that in this variation, on this green spring evening, youthful myths alone would not be enough for him. All this is true, glorious fools roam the world - cabin boys Billy, cowboys Harry, beauties Mary and Nelly, and the brigantine raises the sails, but there comes a moment when you feel the dangerous and real closeness of the black knight on the b4 field. There was a struggle ahead, complex, subtle, fascinating, prudent. There was life ahead.

The grandmaster won a pawn, took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. A few moments in complete solitude, when the lips and nose are hidden by a handkerchief, set him up in a banal philosophical way. “That's how you achieve something,” he thought, “and what's next? All your life you strive for something; victory comes to you, but there is no joy from it. For example, the city of Hong Kong, distant and very mysterious, and I have already been there. I've been everywhere before."

The loss of a pawn did little to upset G.O., for he had just won a rook. He responded to the grandmaster with a queen move, which caused heartburn and a momentary headache.

The grandmaster realized that he still had some joys in store. For example, the joy of long, along the entire diagonal, moves of the bishop. If you drag an elephant a little along the board, then this will to some extent replace the swift gliding on a skiff along the sunny, slightly blooming water of a pond near Moscow, from light into shadow, from shadow into light. The grandmaster felt an irresistible, passionate desire to capture the h8 square, because it was a field of love, a tubercle of love, over which transparent dragonflies hung.

Cleverly you won back the rook from me, and I slammed, - G.O. boomed, only giving out his irritation with the last word.

Excuse me, - said the grandmaster quietly. - Maybe you can return the moves?

No, no, - said G.O., - no concessions, I beg you very much.

“I'll give you a dagger, I'll give you a horse, I'll give you my rifle ...” - he dragged on, plunging into strategic reflections.

Stormy summer holiday love on the field h8 pleased and at the same time disturbed the grandmaster. He felt that soon there would be an accumulation of outwardly logical, but inwardly absurd forces in the center. Again there will be a cacophony and the smell of bleach, as in those distant corridors of damned memory on the left flank.

That's interesting: why are all chess players Jewish? asked G.O.

Why is everything? - said the grandmaster. - Here I am, for example, not a Jew.

Well, here you are, for example, - said the grandmaster, - after all, you are not a Jew.

Where am I! - muttered G.O. and plunged back into his secret plans.

“If I like him like that, then he likes me like that,” thought G.O. - If I shoot here, he will shoot there, then I go here, he answers like this ... Anyway, I'll finish him off, anyway I'll break him. Just think, grandmaster blattmeister, you still have a thin vein against me. I know your championships: you agree in advance. I’ll crush you anyway, even if there’s blood from my nose!”

Yes, I've lost an exchange, - he said to the grandmaster, - but that's okay, it's not evening yet.

He launched an attack in the center, and of course, as expected, the center immediately turned into a field of senseless and terrible actions. It was no-love, no-meeting, no-hope, no-hello, no-life. Flu-like chills and again yellow snow, post-war discomfort, the whole body itches. The black queen in the center croaked like a crow in love, crow love, in addition, the neighbors scraped a pewter bowl with a knife. Nothing so definitely proved the meaninglessness and illusory nature of life as this position in the center. It's time to end the game.

“No,” thought the grandmaster, “there is something else besides this.” He put down a large reel of piano pieces by Bach, soothed his heart with pure and monotonous sounds, like the splashing of waves, then left the dacha and went to the sea. Pine trees rustled above him, and under his bare feet there was a sliding and springy coniferous crust.

Remembering the sea and imitating it, he began to understand the position, to harmonize it. My heart suddenly became clear and bright. It is logical, like Bach's coda, that Black came to checkmate. The matte situation glowed dimly and beautifully, completed like an egg. The Grandmaster looked at G.O. He was silent, puffed up, looking into the deepest rear of the grandmaster. He did not notice mat to his king. The grandmaster was silent, afraid to break the charm of this moment.

Journal "Literature", 2013, No. 4.
Dmitry Bykov
TWO VICTORIES
Thank God, the teacher is free to choose works for studying in the eleventh grade - Soviet short stories of the sixties and seventies are represented by "one or two texts on the recommendation of the teacher," as it is officially called. I think it makes sense to offer children for comparative analysis - in class or in home writing - two stories written and printed almost simultaneously. These are “Victory” by Vasily Aksyonov, which first appeared in “Youth” (1965), and “Winner” by Yuri Trifonov (“Banner”, 1968).
"Victory" has been analyzed many times and in detail, almost nothing has been written about "Winner" - except that there is an enthusiastic review in a letter from Alexander Gladkov to the author ("a huge heavy subtext... impossible to retell..."). Children react to both texts with great interest - it is clear that the grotesque and surrealistic "Victory" when read aloud is perceived much more vividly, with constant laughter, but it all depends on temperament: there are people who are closer to the melancholic "Winner", since the theme of death is always burningly interesting in adolescence, then brought to the fore. The situation itself is symptomatic, when two giants of urban prose simultaneously write stories about defeat disguised as victory, and about how to live with this defeat now. It is possible to explain in a few words in the lesson the literary situation of the second half of the sixties - the dying thaw, the fate of which became obvious long before August 1968, the depression and split in intellectual circles and circles, the feeling of a historical impasse. It is no wonder that in both stories we are talking about dubious, quoted winners: the hero of Trifonov, who was the last to run at the Paris Olympics, literally runs the longest and wins such a life as a prize that the other hero of the story, Basil, recoils in horror from this stinking future. The young grandmaster at Aksyonov defeated G.O., but the winner turns out to be precisely the stupid, cruel and deeply unhappy G.O. from childhood. “He did not notice the checkmate to his king.” As a result, he is solemnly awarded a token - "So-and-so won the game from me."
Behind each of these two texts there is a serious literary tradition: Aksyonov - although by this time, according to his own testimony in a conversation with the author of these lines, he had not yet read Luzhin's Defense - continues Nabokov's literary game, blurring the boundaries between real and chess collisions. There is a lot of Nabokov in general in Pobeda - his rapture with the landscape, his eternal sympathy for softness, delicacy, artistry, hatred for stupid rudeness. Trifonov continues a completely different line, and here you can’t disown the source - everyone in Russia read Hemingway, and not just writers, and Hemingway’s method is evident in The Winner: Gladkov is right, little has been said, much has been said, the subtext is deep and branching. There is also a completely Hemingwayian hero in this story, international journalist Basil, whose turbulent life fits in five lines:
“An amazing character is our Basil! At thirty-seven, he had already experienced two heart attacks, one shipwreck, the blockade of Leningrad, the death of his parents, he was almost killed somewhere in Indonesia, he skydived in Africa, he was starving, he was in poverty, he learned French by self-taught, he masterfully swears obscenities, is friends with avant-garde artists and loves fishing in the summer on the Volga more than anything in the world.
True, in this stormy and bravura-living journalist Yulian Semyonov is guessed rather than Hemingway, but the prototype is also visible: all Soviet young prose, not excluding Semyonov, made itself from the Pope.

Trifonov and Aksyonov continue in the sixties the eternal dispute between Nab and Ham - two almost twins, snobs, athletes who have lived almost all their lives outside their homeland, albeit for completely different reasons. Both were born in 1899. Both went through the school of European modernism. Both simultaneously published their main novels - respectively The Gift (1938) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Both disliked (to tell the truth, hated) Germany and adored France. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine more opposite temperaments; it is curious, of course, to dream up how many rounds N. would have survived against H. - both were fond of boxing, Ham was denser, Nab was taller, thinner, but faster. Ham liked to chat with his friends about how many rounds he could take - in a hypothetical literary competition, he just had boxing terminology - against Flaubert, Maupassant ... “Only against Leo Tolstoy I wouldn’t puff a round, oh no. Damn it, I just wouldn’t have entered the ring ”(Of course, he did not read Shklovsky’s “Hamburg Account”). They worshiped Tolstoy in the same way, revered both Chekhov and Joyce, but otherwise ... We practically do not know Ham's reviews of Nab, he did not notice the literary sensation called "Lolita" at all, and he was not up to it; Nabokov said devastatingly funny, insulting and inaccurate about Hemingway. "Hemingway? Is it something about bulls, bells and balls?” — about bulls, bells and eggs! The pun, as often with Nabokov, is excellent - but Hemingway, no matter how much he was excited by the bells and bulls, not to mention the eggs, is still about something else, and the scale of his problems is not inferior to the questions that worried Nabokov; Of course, it’s stupid to draw Nabokov as an aesthete locked in a bone tower—there are few such powerful anti-fascist novels in the world as Bend Sinister—and yet Hemingway’s characters and plots are more diverse, the geography is wider, narcissism is naive and somehow touching, or something . In short, calling him in the afterword to the Russian Lolita a modern substitute for Mine-Reid, Nabokov was expressing feelings not so much for his prose as for his 1954 Nobel Prize.
It is interesting that Hemingway was a rather nice old man, although he did not live to a real old age - but you can imagine him something like the Old Man in his last masterpiece: moderately self-ironic, moderately helpless, moderately invincible. Nabokov, here's the paradox, was a rather nasty old man - arrogant, captious, capricious. Hemingway treats old age with horror and dignity - perhaps such a combination; he is generally very serious when it comes to life and death. For Nabokov, the main tragedy is the incomprehensibility and inexpressibility of the world; real tragedies, he not only neglects, but arrogantly, courageously, stubbornly denies them authenticity. He lived an exceptionally difficult life, he had something to complain about - but we will not find a trace of complaint in his writings; he was in poverty - but he was remembered as a gentleman, he worked with frantic intensity - but he was remembered not as working, but as playing. There is a special elegance in not baring one's head at a funeral - "Let death be the first to take off its hat," as Nabokov's fictional philosopher Pierre Delalande said; but there is also the bitter, simple, American seriousness of life and death as they are, and Hemingway is more touching here, if not deeper. Nabokov has impeccable taste, and Ham has very dubious taste, although his European training has taken away from him the aplomb and toughness of an American reporter; but we know that artistic taste is not necessary for a genius, a genius creates new laws, and by old standards he is almost always a graphomaniac. Both Nabokov and Hemingway love a common through plot, which is generally typical for their generation: "The winner gets nothing." Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, on the eve of the first night with Zina, finds himself at the locked door without a key; having experienced a brilliant insight, Falter cannot tell anyone about it; Humbert pursues Lolita, only to lose her every day and every hour. The winner gets only a moral victory - like an exiled, dismissed, ridiculed Pnin: his consolation is in his own intellectual and creative power, in the fact that he is Pnin and will not become anyone else. The author himself, a triumphant, handsome man, everyone's favorite, formally overcoming him and taking his place, envies him. Perhaps, Pobeda copies (unconsciously, of course) not so much the plot of Luzhin's Defense, with which it has only a chess theme in common, but rather the plot of Pnin, where a meek, loving, dreamy Russian professor turns out to be a delicate grandmaster. And the triumphant vitality that ousts him from the university and from life is personified, sadly, in the narrator, although he does not at all resemble G. O.
Considering the classic "Winner gets nothing" plot, as one of Hemingway's finest collections was called, Ham and Nab approached it differently. The consolation of the loser, according to Nabokov, is that in a real game he will always win, and rough earthly chess is just an approximate and boring literalization. The loser is consoled - like Aksyonov's grandmaster - by the fact that "he did not commit any especially major meanness", by the fact that he is honest and clean in front of himself, by the fact that he has Bach's music, a friendly environment and a tie from Dior. According to Hemingway, there are no winners at all. The winner is the one who, regardless of the final result, holds on to the end; the one who brings back from fishing only a huge marlin skeleton, and this skeleton represents everything that the winner gets. It's completely useless, but VERY BIG. And it shows what great prose we would write if, on the way to paper, a great thought did not turn into its own skeleton. According to Hemingway, the main victory of the loser is the very scale of the failure. The one who got lucky is, by definition, chalk. If a hero doesn't die, he's not a hero.
Aksyonov's conflict is precisely Nabokov's: the secret joy of the conqueror lies in the fact that the vanquished is never conscious of his own defeat; that "The winner does not understand anything." Playing in the compartment of a fast train with a self-satisfied idiot who is incapable of appreciating the light, volatile charm of the world—with an idiot whose chess thought does not go beyond the formula “If I am like this, then he makes me like this,” a grandmaster can console himself with the fact that he himself builds a magnificent party, crystal, transparent, infinitely thin, like beaded cunning combinations in Hesse's novel. The defeat inflicted in Russia on freedom, thought, progress, everything good in general, everything that alone makes life life, is not final, if only because G.O. no longer constitutes the vast majority. There are cowboys Billy and beauties Mary, there is the Riga seaside, a country veranda, there is an environment in which the grandmaster is no longer alone. There is also a well-designed ironic self-defense - a golden token that marks not so much surrender as a new level of mockery of the enemy.
Trifonov puts the question harder and more seriously - and his story appears not in the frivolous "Youth" (besides, in the humorous department), but in the traditionalist "Banner", which was then a stronghold of military prose. The defeat here is not so much historical, social, but ontological (children, as we know, love buzzwords and willingly memorize them). Soviet journalists are sent to the only surviving participant in the second - Paris - Olympics. He ran last then, but calls himself the winner. Why? Because everyone else, having fallen into the monstrous twentieth century, left the race, and he still runs his ultra-marathon. He is lonely, out of his mind, he has a bald head and bald gums, they call him dirty, stinky - the old man has no one, and a nurse goes after him; he remembers nothing and understands almost nothing, but in his eyes a spark of Methuselah pride smolders - he is alive! He sees this sharp star in the window, he smells the burning branches from the garden... And Trifonov sorts things out not so much with Hemingway, but with the heroic generation of his parents (the fate of the repressed parents was for him - as well as for Aksyonov - an eternal trauma). These heroes believed that only a life filled with exploits, in the extreme case with intense work, makes sense. But the generation of sons no longer knows what makes more sense - in self-burning, self-squandering, or survival at any cost; after all, apart from life, there is nothing, and there is no meaning other than to see, hear, absorb, feel - there is none either. Here is Basil, who does not want such tortoise-like immortality, who burns a candle from two ends - and Semyonov actually lived only 61 years, literally burned out, leaving a gigantic legacy, nine-tenths of which has already been forgotten today. And there is an old man who has accomplished absolutely nothing in life - but he is alive, and there will be no other victory. One can argue about the greatness of the feat, about the collective will, about fantastic achievements, but everyone dies alone, as another great prose writer of the 20th century wrote. And aren't all these thoughts about the greatness of one's own business ridiculous in the face of old age and death, if this business itself looks doomed by 1968? And at this time, it must be admitted, there was not a single ideology left in the world with which one could solidarize without a sense of shame: all the recipes for universal happiness once again cracked.
Children are usually happy to discuss "Victory" and almost always claim that the grandmaster won regardless of the author's assessment: checkmate? - enough. G.O. noticed, did not notice - what's the difference? Important result! The sobering remark of the teacher that the result is a golden token flies past the ears. Won - and that's enough, but whether the fools understood their defeat - we should not worry. Children are still small and do not understand that today's G.O., triumphant everywhere, and not only in Russia, also lost a long time ago, back in the Middle Ages, but does not notice this - and rules the world. Probably, this happens because the main value and the main victory is still life - and not, say, truth or creativity. The winner is the one who runs the longest - no matter with what result. And horrified by this, like Aksyonov, in our hearts we are ready to put up with it as soon as possible, like Trifonov. Burnt branches smell very good.

Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov

Victory
Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov

Vasily Aksenov

An exaggerated story

In the compartment of a fast train, the grandmaster was playing chess with a random companion.

This man immediately recognized the grandmaster when he entered the compartment, and immediately burned with an unthinkable desire for an unthinkable victory over the grandmaster. “You never know,” he thought, casting sly, recognizing glances at the grandmaster, “you never know, you might think, some kind of frail.”

When the train started moving, the grandmaster's companion stretched himself with naive cunning and indifferently asked:

- Shall we play chess, comrade?

“Yes, perhaps,” the grandmaster muttered.

The companion leaned out of the compartment, called the conductor, chess appeared, he grabbed it too hastily for his indifference, poured it out, took two pawns, clenched them in his fists and showed his fists to the grandmaster. On the bulge between the thumb and forefinger of the left fist, the tattoo indicated: "G.O."

“Left,” said the grandmaster, and winced a little, imagining the blows of these fists, left or right. He got the whites.

“You have to kill time, don’t you?” On the road, chess is a nice thing, - G.O. said good-naturedly, arranging the pieces.

“Khas-Bulat is daring, your saklya is poor ...” - G.O. pulled on the same note.

“After all, you are such and such a grandmaster, aren’t you?” asked G.O.

“Yes,” the grandmaster confirmed.

Ha ha ha, what a coincidence! exclaimed G.O.

Essay text:

The story of Aksenov Pobeda was written in the early sixties of the XX century, at the height of the Khrushchev thaw. At this time, society slowly flourished, recovering from thirty years of cruel totalitarianism. In literature, this heyday was marked by the arrival of a new wave of writers and poets who became the masters of the thoughts of the younger generation. Some of them returned from the camps, others got the opportunity to print previously banned works, and still others (including Aksenov) were completely new people in literature. Inspired by the thaw, they created works that were absolutely independent of the party line and nomenclature instructions and expressed all the thoughts and hopes of the youth. Aksyonov became a leader among young prose writers in the 1960s. Victory is one of his first stories. It is quite small, but very interesting. So, in the compartment of a fast train, a young grandmaster meets a random companion. The popuchik, immediately recognizing the grandmaster, is instantly charged with an unthinkable desire to defeat him. Simply because the sight of an awkward, intelligent grandmaster evokes ridicule and contempt in him: ... you never know, just think, some kind of frail / Grandmaster easily agrees to play, and the game begins ... And a very strange thing happens: when it starts, the party takes on an unexpected character. From a simple sports competition, it develops into a merciless struggle between two generations, completely different in spirit and beliefs. On the chessboard not just white and black figures came together, but two lives, two views on life. Conflicting constantly and in real life, they converge openly on the chess field, and the battle begins not for life, but for death. The grandmaster in this battle represents the entire young generation of the 60s. He is neat, well-mannered, correct and, although timid, is ready to fight for his ideals to the last. His mysterious companion acquires frightening and almost mystical features. Its external description is almost absent; his physical appearance is unclear, faceless and humane, only a steep pink forehead and huge fists stand out clearly, one of which (left) has a tattoo of G. O. But this is also a collective character. It contains all the worst traits found in the non-cultural part of modern society: hypocrisy, ignorance, rudeness, hatred of the smart, contempt for the young. Without a shadow of a doubt, he asks the grandmaster: I wonder why all chess players are Jews?.. There is something infinitely vile in this, and the grandmaster calls for help all the bright that is in his soul. The battlefield comes to life for him: a secluded corner appears behind the stone terrace, where you can hide the queen; the h8 square, which is strategically important for the grandmaster, takes the form of a love field. In contrast to the black figures marching under the daring Khas-Bulat, the white ones go into battle to the piano pieces of Bach and the splashing of the sea waves.
The cacophony and confusion in the head and on the field of G.O. is opposed to the clear and clear thoughts of the grandmaster. While the grandmaster is building beautiful and subtle plans of possible moves, the G.O. thinks: If I am his way, then he will be so. If I shoot here, he shoots there, then I go here, he answers like this ... Anyway, I'll finish him off, anyway I'll break him. Just think, grandmaster-choreographer, you still have a thin vein against me. That place on the board, where G.O.'s pieces break through, becomes the center of senseless and terrible actions.
Carried away by a deep offensive, G.O. makes a number of mistakes, and now the grandmaster is close to victory, and the reader who loves justice is looking forward to this victory, when suddenly, quite unexpectedly ... the grandmaster loses. G. O. announces checkmate, and the entire bright disposition of the grandmaster collapses, and he himself sees how black people in overcoats with SS lightnings are leading him to be shot and how I put a smelly bag on his head to the distant sounds of Khas-Bulat ... Well It happened? Is it possible that vulgarity and ignorance have emerged victorious, and are they destined to strangle all bright ideals? In no case. The defeated grandmaster still feels that he is higher than his winner, that he has never committed meanness, and gives the jubilant G.O. a golden token with the inscription: The giver of this won a game of chess from me. Grandmaster like that.
The main thing that expresses this story is the willingness of the younger generation to defend their views and beliefs, to fight for the very right to an independent existence, no matter what force tries to crush and absorb this generation. Although the grandmaster lost the game, he is not morally defeated and is ready for future fights. I conclude the story of his words that he has already ordered a lot of gold tokens for his future winners and will constantly replenish stocks. Ahead of the grandmaster, like all of his generation, long life like a big, fascinating party.

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