Read the stone bridge. Book: Stone Bridge - Alexander Terekhov

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Terekhov A. A stone bridge.- M.:: AST: “Astrel”, 2009. - 832 p. 5000 copies

Science has not found conscience and soul,
and the Russian people were unable to prove their existence experimentally.
Alexander Terekhov

A spectacular failure. However, in this shapeless block, the color of December slush on the Kuznetsky Bridge (where the backs of the gloomy Lubyanka buildings face), something alive is still visible. This living thing is a story about death. A tale of a strange murder Nina Umanskaya in 1943. She was shot by a classmate Volodya Shakhurin- yes, right on the Kamenny Bridge in Moscow, opposite Houses on the embankment, which the old-timers know exclusively as the “Government House”. He shot him and immediately committed suicide. The thing is that Umanskaya and Shakhurin were not ordinary schoolchildren, but Narokomv children. Konstantin Umansky is a prominent diplomat, Alexey Shakhurin is the People's Commissar of the aviation industry. Historical figures awarded a place in encyclopedias. And the tragedy that happened to their children is the absolute truth. The reader will find a summary of this story on the website Novodevichy Cemetery:

Nina lived in the famous “House on the Embankment” and studied in the 9th grade at a school for children of the highest nomenklatura. Volodya Shakhurin, the son of People's Commissar of the Aviation Industry A.Ya., studied at the same school, also in the 9th grade. Shakhurina. There was a romantic relationship between Volodya and Nina. In May 1943, Nina's father received a new assignment - envoy to Mexico, and was supposed to travel to this country with his family. When Nina told Volodya about this, he took the news as a personal tragedy; for several days he tried to persuade her to stay, but, apparently, this was simply impossible. On the eve of the Umanskys' departure, he arranged a farewell meeting for Nina on the Big Stone Bridge. It is unlikely that anyone was present during their conversation, but one can guess what was discussed and how tense the situation had reached if Volodya pulled out a pistol, shot first at his beloved, and then at himself. Nina died on the spot, Volodya died two days later. N. Umanskaya was buried in Moscow, in the columbarium of the Novodevichy cemetery (1st site), her burial is very close to Volodya’s grave. A year and seven months after Nina’s death, her parents died in a plane crash, the plane on which they were flying to Costa Rica caught fire immediately after takeoff and crashed to the ground.

Unfortunately (although much further!) the matter does not boil down to yet another saddest story in the world - it turned out that the death of Volodya and Nina led the investigation to a very unsightly story, which later became known as the “case of the wolf cubs” (they say that Stalin, having become acquainted with facts, he only said gloomily: “Wolf cubs!”), in which teenagers appeared - children of high-ranking Soviet officials. Terekhov presented it in his book in all the details that he could get to - but these details are not so many. Simply put, while the war was going on - or rather, during the years of the strongest onslaught of Hitler’s military machine on the USSR - the children played the “Fourth Empire” - based on “Mein Kampf”, which Volodya Shakhurin read in the original, discussing the topic “when we we will come to power" and admiring Nazi aesthetics... There were rumors that behind the murder of Nina Umanskaya, who occupied a prominent position in the hierarchy of the "Fourth Empire", there were not only romantic feelings...

However, Terekhov is by no means a pioneer - a brief summary of these events (in the interpretation of Mikoyan’s descendants) can be found, for example, in the book Larisa Vasilyeva "Children of the Kremlin". Several teenagers were arrested in the case, all of them escaped with a slight fright at that time - several months in pre-trial prison and exile - such a lenient attitude is explained by the situation of their parents. At first impression, Terekhov’s novel is something like a historical thriller, in the spirit of, say, "Autocrat of the Desert" by Leonid Yuzefovich. Long and thorough archival research, a search for unknown details, reflections on the people of that era... And all this is in the book. The thing is that there is more to it than that. There is also a hero on whose behalf the story is told (and this is a hero - not the author), there are a lot of other characters who, for reasons that are not entirely clear to the reader, are investigating this dark and long-standing case. Of course, they all have some connection with the special services - although here the author is all trembling and doubling. In general, no matter how clearly and almost documented (although we must not forget for a minute that this is a fictional version) the events associated with the murder of Umanskaya are reproduced, the present day is so unsteadily and unclearly written. Here and now - trouble and bad dream, through which - or rather, from which - we see, albeit gloomy, but clear and distinct pictures of the past.

If it had been specially planned this way, it would have been brilliant, but it turned out that way because modernity is extremely poorly written. History is saved by facts and a detective plot; again, Kremlin secrets are a good bait even for a sophisticated reader. Modernity, as if copied from television series, does not save anything; the plot disappears and fails, leaving only the journalistic monologues of the main character (and in them he clearly mixes with the author) and obsessively frequent erotic scenes.

At first, it’s not entirely clear why there is so much boring and dull sex - which one of the protagonist’s random partners characterizes simply:
- How they slaughtered a pig.
Their intrusiveness and frequency, however, clearly bear a trace of the author's intention - Terekhov is trying to tell us something, but any eroticism in contemporary literature is extremely boring - we have all already seen it all many, many times, and sex is such a thing when you experience It’s more interesting to see on yourself than to look at, and to look at is more interesting than to read. And since in the novel all eroticism is consciously reduced to businesslike copulations, the descriptions of which resemble protocols (or testimonies of victims?), somewhere after the third or fourth erotic scene you begin to leaf through them. There is a lot of scrolling, and the message that the author intended to convey through these episodes turns out to be unread.

The second reason why you start flipping through a book without really reading it is the banality of the images and monotony of speech. The banality of images - yes, here you go, about the second half of life, one of the key and important motives for the author, because it is repeated more than once with variations:

"In your youth, the unknown land lay as a safety cushion ahead of you, “You’re still young.” In childhood, life seemed like a desert, a dense forest, but now the forest has become thinner, and between the trunks it began to appear... you climbed the next mountain and suddenly saw a black sea ahead ; no, over there, ahead, there are still smaller mountains, but they will never cover the sea to which you are going."

Beautiful, just like a picture from those sold on the Krymskaya embankment or in Izmailovo to inexperienced lovers of the elegant. And we’ve already read this somewhere, right?

The monotony is immediately apparent. In fact, throughout the entire book, Terekhov uses the same writing technique - enumeration (I think it has some kind of beautiful Greek name, but I’m not sophisticated in theory). The reception is strong, and even though you can’t outdo Rabelais, and everyone remembers the “Sheksninsky golden sterlet”, but Terekhov’s command of it, I must admit, is great - here, for example, is how he writes about the Stone Bridge:

"Eight-bay, arched, made of white stone. Seventy fathoms long. Engravings by Picart (houses are visible - mills or baths?), lithographs by Datsiaro (piles are already filled under the spans, a couple of onlookers and a predictable shuttle - a passenger in a hat is being walked with one oar by a warmly dressed gondolier) and lithographs by Martynov (already farewell, with the double-towered entrance gate demolished long before publication), capturing the Kremlin, at the same time they captured the bridge, its first hundred and fifty years: flour mills with dams and drains, drinking establishments, chapels, oak cages lined with a “savage” on the site of two collapsed supports, the chambers of Prince Menshikov, crowds of admirers ice drift, triumphal gates in honor of Peter's Azov victory; a sleigh drawn by a couple pulls a high platform with two passengers - a priest and the fast-eyed Pugachev, chained in chains (beard and dark muzzle), who killed seven hundred people (he shouted left and right to the silent crowd, I assume: “Forgive me, Orthodox!”); chambers of the Predtechensky Monastery, inevitable suicide flights into the water, spring floods, Italian organ grinders with learned dogs; “Dark personalities were hiding in dry arches under the bridge, threatening passers-by and visitors,” my colleague added, distracted by dipping a pen into an inkwell.”

Cool, yeah. But this is how the entire book is written - with the exception of the “erotic” scenes and parts rewritten from television series... Here in a completely different place and about something else:

“Everyone must be resurrected or at least somehow justify each grave... something that always happens at the end of time, which made Ivan the Terrible sit down and have a hard time remembering by name those strangled, strangled, drowned, impaled, buried alive, poisoned, chopped into small pieces, beaten with iron sticks, hunted by dogs, blown up with gunpowder, fried in a frying pan, shot, boiled in boiling water, cut alive into pieces - to nameless babies pushed under the ice ... "

In the historical part, the enumeration is supplemented by fictionalized biographical information:

"Rozalia, nicknamed Bosyachka, with a ruined fate: she fought in the Civil War as a nurse, married a telegraph operator, gave birth to twins - the twins died, so she took us, put beds in her gut room twelve meters long, where her schizophrenic husband sat by the window and repeated: "Quiet... do you hear? They're coming for me!" "Mom grew up in the camp to become the head of the planning department and fought to increase the productivity of prisoners, passed on an intelligent complaint to the top through an auditor surprised by her successes and found herself in a thin wave of pre-war rehabilitations. But first, at the end of the thirty-ninth, after two heart attacks, my father returned, and then my mother." .

This Rosalia is an episodic character, but Terekhov writes like this about everyone, except perhaps about the figures more significant for the narrative - in more detail. Involuntarily you begin to think - what could be cut out? Details of life around the Kremlin are consistently added to the basket. Haunting erotic scenes. Journalistic and historiosophical digressions in the spirit of:

“The seventeenth century was very similar to the twentieth. It began with turmoil and ended with turmoil: Civil War, uprisings of peasants and Cossacks, campaigns in the Crimea; the rebels “cut into small pieces” the boyars, doctors under torture admitted to poisoning the kings, and in Bloody April they burned the Old Believers. The Russians suddenly looked back with insane attention at their past, at their own “now” and with bitterness rushed to rewrite “notebooks” on historical plagues: the schism, the Streltsy riots, the place of our land on the globe that had just been brought to Russia - children and children argued about politics women! Suddenly the common people realized: we too, we are participating, we are witnesses, and how sweet it is to say: “I.” Something happened that made the BIG HISTORY OF MONASTERIES wheeze and die, and someone said over the heads of the black earth: WE NEED YOUR MEMORY, everything you want will remain, we need your truth."

Finally, the hero’s no less obsessive reasoning about the frailty of life (yes, he is 38 years old, he is clearly having a midlife crisis): “Any joy began to be pierced by death, eternal non-existence” Remember this descent to the unknown sea from a mountain pass? Down, down - to disappearance.

So, is this another book about the horror of non-existence? About how “The River of Times in its rush / Carries away all the affairs of people / And drowns peoples, kingdoms and kings in the abyss of oblivion...”? It doesn’t seem like the author is so naive, he knows that Gavrila Romanovich has already said everything. It was hardly worth more than a decade of labor and such careful work. Let's look more closely - and we see the main thing that unites all the characters in the book, from its main characters to the randomly mentioned drivers and taxi drivers. This is unfreedom. Everyone is shackled - by service, duty, family, business, authorities, bandits - everyone is woven into a single fabric, linked to it and to each other with thousands of visible and invisible hooks - even main character, seemingly a completely free person, turns out to be a slave to his sexual habits and attachment to the special services (it is not clear whether he has an official relationship with them - or simply tenderly and reverently loves, as we are accustomed to love these organs - with bated breath and delight: in give, you bastards! The only ones to whom the author leaves a modicum of freedom are Stalin, whom he now and then, as if ironically, calls the emperor,

There is also a bit of freedom young heroes- the one that we all suddenly feel at the age of 14-15, and immediately understand that it will never come - that unhappy teenage freedom, which only the generation of 1968 managed to extend for several years - and even then we don’t know yet, in what price will it cost? But the nomenklatura children of the 1943 model did not have any reserve of time, and Terekhov writes about this completely mercilessly:

“The posterity was not left with a better future - there is nowhere better, everything they had was given by the emperor and the fathers; but the emperor will go to the ground, the fathers will go to a personal pension of union significance and will remain silent, not complaining about the meager rations, thanking the party for not killed while signing memoirs; dachas, cars, deposits, diamond stones in the ears will be cautiously passed on by inheritance, but not fame, not power, not citizenship Absolute Power... The future of the students of the 175th, motorcycle racers, boyfriends and dacha shooters, was seen even from the seventh grade: to eat sweetly, to ride in captured foreign cars, to marry marshal’s daughters and - to become an alcoholic and grind into insignificance by the finality and perfection of actions not their own, not to get out out of the shadow of their fathers and become someone “yourself”, and not “the son of the People’s Commissar”, having the only merit of the surname, relationship, and wither, placing the grandchildren somewhere closer to the diplomatic service, to the damned dollars, and bothering the neighbors in the country...
And if Shakhurin Volodya wanted a different fate, he had to gather a flock of the faithful and gnaw out his century - take power, learn to command the ashes, a human homogeneous mass in general, rise on an idea - like Hitler - witchcraft, and the boy read carefully - that he could you read? - “Mein Kampf” and “Hitler Speaks” by Rauschning; Perhaps the witnesses are not lying and the boy knew German brilliantly, but these books are avidly... not only seventh graders."

What is surprising if the way out of this unfreedom is only in another unfreedom - you can move from cell to cell, even, contrary to all the rules, punch a hole in there - but the prison will remain a prison. We are closed in our time and space - and this seems to oppress the main character of the book, who is thoroughly unraveling the circumstances of that long-standing case, most of all. Yes, it was the temptation that was thrown at him - even if not to own it, but at least to look around all the kingdoms at all moments of time - and he failed. It’s wonderful and phantasmagorical for him and his colleagues to dive into the past - this is how, for example, they end up in Mexico in the late forties in order to interview witnesses to the plane crash in which Konstantin Umansky and his wife died:

"...it turned out to be an antediluvian leaky roof of the elevator cabin, it grew, straightened out and stopped with a roar. The lattice door (I always remember the black round handle), the wooden doors - running, as if in a game, and you have to be the first to be in time, as if he might leave, and Borya , holding his side with his hand, and Goltsman - into the illuminated cramped box, onto the trampled linoleum.
- You can dig us up there, if anything happens! - Borya shouted with childish embarrassment from his insolence to the duty officer and, apologizing, blinked at me: come on...
- Go. — The wooden doors came together in the middle, a barred door, and, looking somewhere upward, as if looking for a team in the sky, the duty officer pressed... and I closed my eyes, as if we were going to fall and fall, having flown for a long and terrible time in the void. The human morning light flickered briefly and disappeared, without delay we descended into the earth in an unsteady handful of trembling electric radiance, blinking evenly, measuring time or depth.

And here’s another thing: Terekhov doesn’t like people. At first it seems as if his hero sees only whores, bandits and bribe-takers in the world (and bandits and bribe-takers are the same whores, because they can be bought). Then you realize that this is how the author himself views the world. He has no sympathy either for the “witnesses” - old people who have outlived their generation and are still able to remember something, nor for contemporaries, nor for the dead. Here he writes about Mikhail Koltsov:

“When they showed him someone, KOLTSOV came up with a fault for everyone, sewed them like a dress from his own material, but according to the figure, composed, but the truth. The conversation was about real, still living people with working circulatory system, and for the sake of credibility he tore the meat from them, creating guilt in the swampy area..."

Is this really the case? Is this from the case file? Or is it a fiction that we know is more reliable than any truth? But the impression is unambiguous - Koltsov is a bastard. Only neither we nor Terehv have personally experienced the methods of investigator Shvartsman - but who knows, maybe we are the same bastards as Koltsov under investigation... And, by the way, how to evaluate it then a transparent hint that Mikoyan’s son shot at Nina Umanskaya? Is this fiction or is there some material?..

People in this book are presented only as servants, building material - yes, bricks, they are also chips - and as neutral or varying degrees of aggressiveness external environment, in which both the characters of the book and the author exist. Terekhov looks at the world with melancholy and disgusting aggressiveness, the gaze of a passenger on a crowded train, forced to travel to Moscow every day, to humiliate himself before his superiors, believing himself to be a prince, but realizing that he no longer has anything in sight except a hateful “kopeck piece” in the Khrushchev-era apartment building of Noginsk or Aprelevka, boring married life, evenings in front of the television screen, and the eternal daily life of the passenger, “Fat Komsomol girl”... This look, associated with obvious or secret grumbling - they say, they didn’t give it, it wasn’t us who broke off the piece, today it is more than familiar - the look of an embittered and the humiliated everyman. It is Terekhov who plays on the dark strings of his soul - although, perhaps, without wanting it himself. These people will read his book as the story of the jaded barchuks - and will tear their shirts on their chests in righteous anger: yes, at that hour when the entire Soviet people! they froze in the trenches, worked until they dropped in the rear! this scum! Having read Hitler! but they had everything! what was missing! - all the righteous hysteria in terms of “got it - didn’t get it, got it - didn’t get it.” In this sense, the accusers - which, undoubtedly, includes the main character of the novel - and the accused are tightly chained to each other, they look into each other - and are not even horrified, because if they see something, it is only themselves. Total lack of freedom plunges you blind and leaves no hope.

It’s just boring to read about this for some reason. It must be because the list of fragments mentally cut out due to pallor, rhetoric or secondary nature is constantly replenished - and if they are removed, then instead of a novel about total unfreedom leading to disappearance from time - and "The Stone Bridge" could well be such a novel - we get tragic story Nina Umanskaya and Volodya Shakhurin and “the work of the wolves” - for only there is living life beating.

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Alexander Terekhov’s novel “Stone Bridge” has been nominated for the “Big Book” award. And this is very correct, because it is, in fact, large - 830 pages. Previously, he was presented at the Russian Booker, but he failed there. It will fly here too, but still the thing is quite curious.

Alexander Terekhov was born in 1966, a journalist, worked in the perestroika “Ogonyok” and in “Top Secret”. According to him, he has been writing this novel for the last 10 years. I don’t understand what prompted Terekhov to write specifically about the tragic events that occurred in 1943. There is a certain version in the novel, but it is very strange. However, the book outlines the history of the amateur investigation undertaken by Terekhov to clarify the circumstances of the murder and suicide of 15-year-old teenagers that happened on the Stone Bridge, opposite the House on the Embankment. Not only is this the very center of Moscow, but the event took place in the middle broad daylight, and these were also teenagers and children famous people. Girl - Nina, daughter of Konstantin Umansky, former ambassador in the USA and then in Mexico. The boy is Volodya, the son of People's Commissar Shakhurin. And today such a case would attract attention, and even then... According to the official version, Volodya met with Nina, she was supposed to go with her father to Mexico, but he did not let her in. There was an argument between them, he shot her in the back of the head and shot himself. When Stalin was informed about this, he said in his hearts: “Wolf cubs!”, so the case was dubbed “the case of the wolf cubs.”

Terekhov met with classmates of Volodya and Nina, with their relatives, tried to get permission to read the criminal case, all this took 10 years. He never officially received the file, but says that they showed it to him just like that. Shakhurin’s classmates were involved in the case, and in order to read the materials, it was necessary to obtain permission either from them or from all the relatives of the defendant if he died. As far as I understand, Terekhov dreamed of discovering some kind of sensation, so he grabbed at any thread that took him quite far from the essence of the matter. So much space in the novel is occupied by the story of Konstantin Umansky’s mistress, Anastasia Petrova. We learn about her first and second husbands - the sons of the legendary Leninist People's Commissar Tsuryupa (in the novel - Tsurko), and about her children and granddaughter, and about the sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren of Tsuryupa. Why was all this necessary? After all, the only thing that connected Petrova with the main events of the book was that someone saw on the bridge in the crowd of onlookers that had formed near the dead bodies a woman who was crying and saying “Poor Kostya!” Allegedly, the hero of the novel, a detective, expected that Petrova, who had long since died, could tell something to her children or granddaughter. In addition, Petrova was also the mistress of People's Commissar Litvinov. In this regard, a lot has been written about Litvinov, his wife, and daughter. The author (who is also, in part, the main character of the novel) met with Tatyana Litvinova, who lives in England, to ask her the same question about the case of the wolf cubs and receive the same answer that she had nothing to say except what everyone knew. It is from the description of these travels, meetings with older people, that half of the novel consists. The other half is a description of the complex nature of the main character. Here, of course, it would be interesting to know how identical the hero is to the author, since in the novel he leads the investigation.

Main character
His name is Alexander. He has an impressive appearance: tall, prominent, gray hair (that's really good). He worked for the FSB (and was not at all a journalist, like the author). One day he took up a noble cause: together with several other people, his employees, he rescued young people from totalitarian sects at the request of their parents. But the sects and their voluntary victims took up arms against him and filed statements with the prosecutor’s office that he kidnapped, tortured and held them against their will. As a result, he was taken from the organs. They put him on the wanted list. Since then he has gone illegal. He lives according to someone else’s documents, continues to run some strange office where his like-minded people work. This is Borya, who knows how to take people by surprise, put pressure on them and force them to do what he needs, Goltsman is very old man with extensive experience working in the authorities, Alena is the hero’s mistress. There is also a secretary. On weekends, Alexander sells toy soldiers at Vernissage in Izmailovo, which he has collected since childhood. There a strange man runs into him and demands that he take up the case of the wolf cubs, threatening to expose him. Subsequently, it turns out that he himself was engaged in similar research, and this case was ordered to him by one woman, a relative of Shakhurin. The Shakhurins never believed that their Volodya committed such an act - murder and suicide. They believed that someone else had killed the children. The detective realized that this case was too tough for him, but he knew about Alexander and decided to force him to do it instead of himself. Alexander quite soon got rid of the rude man, because he himself got into trouble due to an overdue loan, but for some reason he did not give up the investigation.

For 7 years of the novel's time, he, Borya, Alena, Goltsman did just that. They even helped the unlucky blackmailer get rid of his creditors (they paid them half the required amount) and hired him. Excuse me, but why did they need this investigation? What did they live on all this time? How much money did they use to travel around the world in search of witnesses? This moment is the biggest mystery of the novel.

There is an explanation why the prototype of the hero, the writer, was doing this: he was collecting material for a book. But the hero doesn't write books. It turns out that he did it just for fun. Let's say. What about his employees? Out of respect for him? This is all somehow strange.

The hero is an unhealthy person. He suffers from several phobias. Alexander experiences a constant fear of death. He doesn’t even sleep at night, imagining that he might die and being afraid of the creeping old woman with a scythe. The fear of death led him to the fact that he is afraid of strong ties with people, afraid of attachments. As he himself explains, love is a rehearsal for death, because it leaves. The hero sees a way out in not loving anyone. He is married, has a daughter, but does not communicate with his wife and daughter, although they used to live together. Alena loves him madly. She even left her husband and abandoned her son. Throughout the novel, Alexander deceives the poor woman, cheating on her with everyone. He hopes that she will leave him, and in the end his hopes come true. There are many erotic scenes in the book; one even gets the impression that the hero is a sexual maniac. But if you spread the number of women described over seven years, you won’t get that many. The point here is not that there are many women, but how he treats them. He despises them and almost hates them. He tells them the required words, but he thinks to himself only one thing: “Creature, creature.” In his eyes, all these women are ugly. They have fat butts, saggy breasts, disheveled hair, cellulite everywhere, they stink, but the most disgusting thing is their genitals. Below the belly - this disgusting moss, oily labia, mucus. He wants one thing from them - without any preludes or words, to fulfill his needs as quickly as possible, preferably without touching them too much, and leave. It seemed that he would go to prostitutes. But is there no money? I would buy an artificial vagina... Maybe he needs real women so that he can laugh at them later, remembering them?

The funniest thing is if they ask if he loves them when they meet again. Some have funny habits. For example, one director music school crawled on the floor, pretending to be a tigress, and then inserted a vibrator into herself, whose batteries had died (it had been lying in the stash for a long time). Alexander had to take out the batteries from the alarm clock. The book is full of such stories. The hero does not think well about not only women, not even a single person. Everywhere he sees one abomination, one stupidity, one selfish motive. The question is, can one trust the opinion of such a person when he talks about other people or an entire era? And he talks about both.

Alexander Terekhov’s new novel was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize. It was also included in the Big Book list. This is a large 830-page detective story - in it documentary is intertwined with fiction...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Who is Alexander Terekhov? Born on June 1, 1966 in Tula. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. Worked in Ogonyok, Sovershenno Sekretno, Nedelya. Author of the novel “Rat Slayer”, the story “Memoirs” conscript service", the collection "The Outskirts of the Desert". Then - a long break. And now, in 2009 - a new one - the novel “Stone Bridge”.

THE BASIS
"The Great One is Coming" Patriotic War. Stalingrad is already behind us, but the Kursk Bulge is still ahead. The diplomat Konstantin Umansky has amazing beautiful daughter Nina, who evokes a supernatural thrill of the soul in everyone who has seen her at least once. And bodies. The girl studies at elite school together with the children of the Kremlin leaders. Many people fall in love with Nina. Especially Volodya Shakhurin. The boy is also from a noble family - the son of the People's Commissar of the Aviation Industry. Konstantin Umansky is appointed ambassador to Mexico. Volodya escorts his beloved home. Apparently, he's asking for thirteen to fourteen years! - don’t fly away, I love you very much. The girl probably doesn't agree. Volodya takes a pistol out of his pocket and shoots Nina Umanskaya in the back of the head. On the spot. And then - to your temple.”
The plot is an investigation. But the investigation is not about what is happening around the hero, but about what happened a long time ago. Sixty years later, Alexandra, who was selling collectible soldiers at the Izmailovskaya flea market in September 1998, is taken into circulation by a “huckster” with rude guards.
“I have identified you,” he says, “the FSB and a criminal group are looking for you, so here is an offer that you cannot refuse. I know you can."
On June 3, 1943 on the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge. The hero lives in the meantime, simultaneously only noticing the present - what is around.
The investigation process is reproduced with care and detail: real names, addresses, telephone numbers, transcripts of monologues of witnesses, fragments from diaries. It’s like watching a movie and sorting out all the people’s actions based on their actions.
Physiological details: “Act of June 4, the corpse of a teenage girl, 158 centimeters long, good nutrition, mammary glands well developed...”
“Case R-778, July-October 1943. Military Collegium 4n-012045/55. Pistol "Walter"..."
Excerpts from the diaries:
“We evacuated to Kuibyshev. There is a madhouse here. All its inhabitants believe that they live in Paris.”
“October 12. “I got into a fight with Yura. He says that Moscow will not stand - is this the Russian spirit?”
The story on the Stone Bridge did not end on the day of the murder of Nina Umanskaya and had many consequences. Moreover, it is not known for certain who exactly shot the girl. And for what reason: is it all that simple, is it all about jealousy?

CHILDREN OF THE ELITE
It turns out - no. It turns out that Volodya Shakhurin and several of his friends, including Mikoyan’s son, created (in 1943!) the Hitler-worshipping organization “Fourth Empire” and intended to stage a coup. Stalin, when they reported to him, according to legend, said: “Wolf cubs.”
In a Soviet country, during the war, read German books and admire German soldiers. I think to myself: could this really be possible? What about patriotism? It was, it was: these fighters seemed heroic - blond, in beautiful uniform. It’s not like ours are covered in mud, their uniform is so-so...
The boys created anti-ideological ideals for themselves. They were allowed a lot: they studied in an elite school, 175, a school where teachers were afraid to teach. You were allowed to have weapons with you. Expensive motorcycles, trips. Opportunities for learning foreign languages.
They were all smart, well-read... But at the same time they understood that it was almost impossible for them to rise above their fathers. Although they thought of themselves as future rulers of the earth. But institutes, tutors, good, profitable jobs were waiting for them... But still not power.

“My feelings for my father are completely and hopelessly intertwined with money and benefits.”
“We watched the demonstration from the podium of the diplomatic building of the Mausoleum, and I didn’t understand why people were crowding downstairs when there was so much space up here.”
“We weren’t punished at home.”

I feel sorry for the guys. We can talk about their inhumanity and cynicism. But her father sent the same Nina Umanskaya to this school to establish connections, which, in the end, ended badly. Children are toys in the hands of adults. Not bad, no. They just saw one side of life - where everything is possible. They were brought up to be cold-blooded and ignorant. And they didn’t explain otherwise.

THE NARRATOR IS AN NO LESS MYSTERIOUS PERSONALITY
- Who you are? For example, I am an empty person.
His life is an investigation. He belongs to some structure. The narrator considers himself and his friends to be representatives of a hidden force, a certain order of truth, which was once strong, but is now, as it were, underground. “You know our capabilities. They're pretty limited now." He rents an office and hires workers. They can mercilessly torture old people... But humanity is not alien to them. Alena, going to see an old woman, thinks about how she will come to an elderly man and whether she should buy her an electric kettle, otherwise it would be inconvenient. For seven years he has been conducting an investigation: hunting for old people and archives. People and faces appear from somewhere in the past, they give evidence...
He is attractive to women (secretaries, employees, librarians, waitresses, doctors, nurses, train drivers...), they fall in love with him, but... there is a feeling that he cannot give reciprocal spiritual love to any of them. But the novel is filled with the physical aspects of love. Dirty words, thoughts, scenes...
He loves Truth and toy soldiers, of which he is a collector and connoisseur for cover. There's a bit of something childish about it. But again - sad, past, hidden somewhere in the darkness. This darkness is around the hero. What is happening in the present is hidden in the fog. Sometimes only glimpses of Tamagotchis emerge, Cell phones... Physically he is at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, but mentally and thoughts are in the 30s and 40s of the 20th century.

STYLE
The style of writing is deliberately out of date. Some are rejected by this, some do not accept it, some are fascinated by it... Long, confusing sentences. Then once - one harsh word. You try to concentrate, catch the chain of events... At some point you get confused in complex sentences, in the abundance of names and details...
Also, Terekhov’s text is replete with unusual metaphors:
“Several convolutions traversed by a ball-point rod to summon happiness from the forest”, “fat graduate students, sexless and English”...
“How disgusting immediately after... How an instant abomination will swirl at the first convulsion, already in the moment of spitting in a sticky hole and will swell completely in the minute of unsticking, falling off, inevitable words and stroking according to the laws of service dog breeding.”
The author uses many means to give his text the desired shade:
“Sergei Ivanovich Shakhurin looked like an ideal victim: the youngest in the family (not senile), teaches at the Moscow Aviation Institute (not a redneck), lived in the family of the People’s Commissar at the time of the tragedy (witness to everything).” Behind what is in parentheses, the position of the narrator and, possibly, the author himself can be clearly read. The remarks are caustic and pompous.
But if the remarks are perceived even with humor, then the abundance of metaphors distracts the reader from the content of the book. You can either first admire the style, and then, re-reading, think about the content, or omit the quotes. Which, however, is impossible to do. Time crawls at a snail's pace for Terekhov. This can be said about the entire text.
And what is this - a successful move by the author or a flaw in the novel - everyone decides for himself.
ABOUT DEATH AND ABOUT GOD
What is this novel about? About death... After all, the hero delves into the past to establish the causes of death. And he stumbles upon death everywhere, from all sides. He delves deeper and deeper into other people's secrets...
“They don’t talk about it, they don’t sing about it, they don’t teach children - there is no death. The TV does not notice this - there is no death. Youth and fun and new products! There are a few elderly people, there they are on benches petting dogs, ruddy and stupid targets for ridicule! ugly! - and there are no dead people at all. They took it away and buried it."
“They are the majority, but they have nothing to say.”
“No one hears this underground groan of the great majority: Bring us back! As if the most important human desire, like death, does not exist, as if the only possible meaning does not matter. It’s as if the dead have someone to hope for except us.”
Prove the truth, find out the secret. Even to the detriment of yourself. It operates on the principle: if not me, then who? The narrator seems to hear these voices that are calling from the past, that they are eager to know the truth... And that retribution will be fair. Remove the guilt from the innocent and, at least in the memory of posterity, punish the guilty.

But at the very beginning of the book there is an exclamation: “I want to return myself...”. Who does he want to bring back? The boy who loved soldiers. A person capable of love...
"God - yes, good idea to calm down<…>; a hard-working, non-free way out: defend the services, cleanse yourself in old age, repent and mortify the flesh, guess familiar words in Church Slavonic and sing along (and maybe they’ll entrust you with carrying something for Easter)... donate a chandelier to a monastery in your will, or even take a haircut the day before , brother Seraphim! - There is a caustic attitude. To purely external things... The narrator himself delves into the past, the Soviet past. He can't find himself. Communicates with people of mainly atheistic views. He doesn’t look around – he gets angry and only notices some negative aspects. Laughs, perhaps, at those old people who atone for their sins all their lives... They hope for something in the next world.
“By the way, I only knew two Orthodox Christians. And both (man and woman) turned out to be finished...” What does the hero understand by Orthodox? Maybe just people who sometimes light candles for health or peace. And people, as you know, are different.
He believes that there are saints, that people can help each other, and he is convinced of this. And he helps. And it seems to pose problems that concern almost all people...
“But there is no resurrection from the dead, I’m afraid.” And, nevertheless, he calls the dead to confrontations, they testify, the ghosts come to life...
He and his colleagues became preoccupied with the death and life of some. What will happen when they themselves leave this world? Nothing or something? There is some kind of fear everywhere:
“In the future, in short, science will develop and angel doctors will return us. But it’s hard to believe. What if these freaks give eternity only to themselves, their relatives, their neighbors?”
He gives all of himself to the people who have left, as if for free. Own life passes by in the fog. He doesn't answer the woman who loves him. Even his soldiers are something from the past.
The Novodevichy Convent is described stylistically very beautifully. True, with mysticism, which is not typical for Orthodoxy: “When midnight strikes in the bell tower, the stone covering the graves falls to one side and the women rise from the coffins.”
“This happens on bright nights, but still not every bright night. I’m sure nuns came out of their graves more often when there were not yet three million cars in Moscow, when residents did not meet clot-shaped aliens from the red planets in potato fields...”
Romance in the spirit of Byron and Zhukovsky's ballads goes hand in hand with all sorts of Martians. A mix of two worlds - the otherworldly, described in legends, and the fantastically incredible, characteristic of the 21st century.
Terekhov also writes about the similarity of the fates of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge and the monastery. Like, the birthdays and heyday under Princess Sophia coincide. Only the Stone Bridge is regarded as a murder site. And the monastery is more like a place of eternal peace.

STORY
The narrator places a high value on the story. These are first names, last names, patronymics. These are places, facts, dates. It's just the atmosphere. History is everywhere. This driving force with secrets and riddles that a person is trying to solve by penetrating into its archives through old documents, people’s memories... Even toy soldiers are the only hobby - and that’s history. And modernity is history in perspective.
What does the hero call Stalin? Emperor. And the USSR is an Empire. Not just a country, not just a Union. There is pomposity in this, it is incorrect in format. But this exalts that time, those figures. This is an original move.

ABOUT THE FINAL
And in the finale - like the classic, A.P. Chekhov. Shot of a gun. The hero goes to the cemetery, and then goes down to the Leiter waters of the river. “No Swimming” posters, a barge and a visible ship. Perhaps a symbol of hope? These are symbolic lines, clearly:
“The ship was approaching, aiming as if past the pier, an indistinguishable, faded flag dangled at the stern, sluggishly, like a fire that had not yet decided whether to flare up.”

One way or another, I would like to regard this book as something large-scale. Something that has not been in Russian literature for a long time. Various reviews appeared: from negative reproaches for being out of date to thoughts that this is the most great novel last decades. The fact that there are two such different points of view is even good. The novel is ambiguous and causes controversy. What don't they argue about? About one-day novels. About something that doesn’t have a particularly distant future.
All works are tested by time, because not all recognized poets and writers today were recognized as such during their lifetime. Maybe in the future, when contemporary literature becomes a classic, essays will be written on the “Stone Bridge”. Something like “The role of time and space”, “The image of the narrator”, “Images of Stalin and Roosevelt”, “The image of love in the novel”, “The role of the last episode”...
But we cannot know this yet.

Rated the book

Where to begin? Let's start with questions. Why do we give the “Big Book” award in our country? I HAVE A GUESS. Everything is like the old days good times– whoever has more wins. The work of Alexander Terekhov “Stone Bridge” is a hyperbole, an Arabian skyscraper, six triple whiskeys, it is, after all, a huge book oversaturated with everything possible. If you declare in general outline– a very educated man, for about 6 thousand pages, waves his intellect like a naked saber. And the text is like a kebab with veins: some pieces cannot be chewed, you can only, excuse me, swallow with difficulty. It’s Ulysses’ size and can’t be chewed – 850 pages (or still 6 thousand) of constant abuse, molecular gastronomy, gynandrium and zooeratia.

If you get a little upset (this is post-traumatic, sorry), then everything is not so bad. That is, everything is bad, but not that bad, follow the thought. We have great story, taken as a basis. In 1943, the son of the People's Commissar of the Aviation Industry, Volodya Shakhurin, for not very clear reasons, hit the daughter of a prominent ambassador, Nina Umanskaya, in the head, after which he committed seppuku in the same way. This is not the “doctors’ case” that cumulatively burned my armor during the 10th grade exam. Here we have a murder, a MYSTERY, a DRAMA (!!!). Actually, this story of unhappy love over time has become overgrown with guesses and various rumors - conditionally, this is what the book is about - a company of interesting gentlemen is investigating this crime 60 years later. This is how the pieces stand on the board. It's not my fault anymore. Still, everything is very bad.

When you're halfway through the difficult trek to the top of Aconcagua (even a little more), another strange and incomprehensible thing happens (which is equivalent to meeting naked Danish students on the highest batholith). Terekhov either became bored or had a stomach ache - the fact remains that the novelist went to great lengths. And no positive connotations - instead of gracefully ending the novel with a clear and beautiful endgame (and I was still thinking, because it seems story line towards the end, what is there, so many author's thanks at the end?), the author, heart-rendingly rolling his eyeballs, dives into the abyss, where only Kafkas do not drown. Terekhov, it seems, also swims, but you know how? I understand that you don't understand what I mean. But everything is strange there, I’ll hint - if in Prishvin’s works all the animals began to talk and travel in time. I wrote it and seriously thought about whether Prishvin’s animals spoke?

Also in this book there is love line. And here you can’t do without a culinary metaphor (in vain, perhaps, did you come up with it?). Imagine that you book an expensive hotel in the center of Copenhagen three months in advance, take with you beautiful woman, and, on top of everything else, through long evenings and a hefty long-distance bill, you get a table in the best restaurant in the world, Noma. But when you solemnly arrive, it turns out that the chef is unable to cook because he watched Titanic and got upset, and his assistant got seasick on the ferry from Oslo. And on such an important day, instead of high gastronomy, you get fried eggs. You know, the one with the eyes lined with tomatoes and the mouth lined with sausage. With Terekhov it’s almost the same - with his very strange style of writing it was possible to somehow serve love in a more delicious way. But no. Fried egg with bread. Very ugly. And instead of thick, rancid, stinking garlic sauce, there are descriptions of sex (I’ve never read anything worse in my life). Everything is very bad here too.

I destroyed the book, what's left? If our people knew how, wanted and, at least a little could, then a good Russian (that’s right) analogue of “True Detective” would come out (even the name “Stone Bridge” sounds good) - with its eight-minute scenes without a single cut, it’s sickening naturalistic sex and CARCOSA THE YELLOW KING with a wonderful plot twist in the endgame. But ours don’t know how yet, or they know how, but very poorly. Actually, this is why God gives us the second season of “True Detective”. Nobody is upset. Although, oddly enough, I would watch the series.

And finally. There is some feeling that if someone wrote a similar book in the West, everyone would go crazy with delight, shower it with tax dollars and put it on the cover of Time. But it's there. And, in general, this is just my thought. The truth is that if, in a fit of righteous curiosity, you type “Alexander Terekhov” into one well-known search engine, you can only find out what kind of shoes people are wearing socialites, and not who killed a fifteen-year-old girl on the Stone Bridge.

But everything is very simple. The shoes are better.

Your CoffeeT

Rated the book

This book took second place in the final of the national literary award "Big Book" for 2009. Received first place (and at the same time the audience award) " Cranes and dwarfs“I’ve already read Leonid Yuzefovich - the books are quite equal. Except that Yuzefovich’s language is a little easier. But in terms of the impact of the books, the books are quite comparable, they are about the same level. And with all that, both of these books have something in common in a strange way, or rather a parable from Yuzefovich fully applicable to Terekhov’s detective story.

With the plot, everything is extremely simple - a certain private, non-governmental and non-profit structure as part of a small group of interested comrades is trying to investigate a high-profile murder that took place in the very center, in the very heart of Moscow, on the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge on June 3, 1943. The killer is a fifteen-year-old schoolboy Volodya, the son of the Minister of Aircraft Manufacturing (it is probably difficult to exaggerate and overestimate the importance and importance of this industry during the critical war years and, accordingly, the minister himself, Comrade Shakhurin). The deceased is the killer’s classmate, his friend and “lady of his heart” Nina, the daughter of the Soviet diplomat Umansky. Official version - love story, youthful romanticism and schizophrenic maximalism, reluctance to part with his beloved (the Umanskys must leave for Mexico, where their father has been appointed ambassador). They say that the emperor, having learned the circumstances of the case, named these children " wolf cubs"...
However, there are doubts that everything was exactly as officially announced by the authorities and investigative bodies. Moreover, even then, in hot pursuit, there were those who believed that the real killer had gone unpunished. And therefore - an investigation.

By the way, it is not clear where the interest in the case of the participants in this " investigative"groups? Of course, some kind of introduction to the topic is written at the very beginning, but almost immediately everything there turned out to be a dummy and a bluff...
Likewise, the source of income of the members of the operational-investigative group is unclear - it seems like no one is doing anything else, but hundred-dollar bills and five-euro euro bills flash periodically in the text, and simply moving members of the group around the country and abroad is not cheap.
It is not entirely clear who ordered this investigation. Moreover, there is still no clear and unambiguous answer to the questions posed at the beginning of the investigation; there are only newly discovered evidence and circumstances, and different interpretations of them. And much is squeezed out, what is called “indirect”, and therefore ambiguous and vague. Although all the same, the line of investigation, the line of detective, is important and interesting even in itself, without connection and dependence with all other semantic and value lines.

But perhaps what is important in the book is not the investigation itself. Rather, what is important is immersion in the very political and social atmosphere of that time, and precisely in these strata of society. And the layers are already the highest, almost the third, counting from the very top of the pyramid of power. At the top is Emperor Joseph the Only, just below Molotov, Voroshilov - those who are with the emperor on " You" And " Koba", and then there is another famous family " trifle" - The Litvinovs and Gromyks, the Berias and Malenkovs, the Sheinins and the Mikoyans - these are the circles in which the investigation leads us, this is where we find ourselves as a result of this very good and almost at the end of the investigation, a step-by-step reconstruction of the events of sixty years ago. And all these details and trifles of political and power cuisine, as well as the nuances of everyday life and relationships, all these hidden passions and vices, all this not shown ordinary people The dynamics of power and relationships are of particular interest. Because in this book Terekhov managed to make a kind of History Clock in a transparent case, where all the spinning gears and spinning wheels are visible, making their historical “tick-tock”.

The figures of our operatives are extremely interesting. Starting with the main character Alexander Vasilyevich, former officer KGB-FSB, including his colleagues, masters of detective and investigation - Alexander Naumovich Goltsman, Boris Mirgorodsky, Alena Sergeevna - and ending with the last secretary Maria. All these are far from unambiguous personalities, the most colorful figures, characteristic and special, with all the secretly obvious tossing and passions, hobbies and vices, loves and their painful surrogates, with sour-milk fermentations in different layers of the Moscow social biscuit... And even taking into account that that all this happens back in the nineties with the transition to the beginning of the third millennium.
However, all the other active and inactive, villainous and malicious characters in the book are also colorful and material. Somehow Terekhov is very good at even sketching out characters; somehow he skillfully arranges and connects a few but precise words-characteristics.

Some of the inner workings of the investigation are shown and told, some sometimes very rare and even unique specific techniques and methods of conducting the investigation, as well as ways of putting pressure on various kinds of objects-subjects of the investigation for squeezing out information of interest adds interest and spice to the series of events. And Terekhov’s special, masterful and signature language will not let the reader get bored anywhere in the eight-hundred-plus page book.

The author's style of writing is not at all simple and unsuitable for fluent reading. Terekhov makes full use of understatements and hints, the method of analogies and hyperboles, forcing the reader to think out and understand a lot on his own, without the help of the Author or book characters. Some points remained unclear for me personally, some nuances I still didn’t understand, like (relatively speaking) "where did grandma come from" or here is the name of one of important characters Xxxxxxxxxx- who was hiding behind all these slanting crosses that turned into zeros for me? But these difficult passages only add excitement and mobilize the reader, forcing him to focus on the nuances of the story with greater attention.