Viktor Toporov - Hard rotation. Victor Toporov What about you, fellow countrymen? The literary community has lost a mirror that could not just hint, but say in plain text that someone “has a crooked face,” according to the well-known saying

- (b. 1946) Born. in Leningrad in the family of a lawyer. Graduated from Philology. ft Leningrad State University (1969). Ch. editor of the Limbus Press publishing house (since 2000). Published as a poet, translator and critic of foreign (since 1972) and contemporary literature. rus. literature (since 1987), as well as... ... Large biographical encyclopedia

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Books

• Everyone kills their loved ones, Victor Leonidovich Toporov. The collection includes selected works by the master of poetic translation Viktor Leonidovich Toporov. Among the poems of English, German, Dutch and American poets, there are those that...
• Hard rotation, Toporov Viktor Leonidovich. The book includes selected articles and feuilletons by Viktor Toporov, a cult author of both capitals, the Russian provinces and foreign countries, for 2003-2006...

Victor Toporov

Looking at the good-natured grandfather with a lush gray beard, one cannot believe that this is the thunderstorm of the literary world, Viktor Toporov, whose pen is not even a bayonet, but a surgical scalpel with which he calmly dissects the literary community. And who will like it when they open it up, pulling out unsightly insides into the light of day, and even accompanying this procedure with caustic witticisms and savory comparisons? Therefore, in the writing workshop, assessments of Toporov’s activities are given very different. Philologist Gleb Morev writes that the articles of the odious critic, “working in our field of primitive provocation,” were initially designed to create a scandal, and the writer, on the contrary, considers Toporov “one of the few critics who justify the existence of this workshop in principle.” Boris Strugatsky said in his heart in 1993: “Our trouble is not that there is such a Toporov, and not even that he writes. The trouble is that there is no other Toporov who would explain that everything Toporov wrote is incorrect.”

But this is the opinion of writers who get a lot from Viktor Leonidovich. And for mere mortals, reading “Belinsky of Our Days” is interesting and informative: the author’s culture, erudition, and irony make him one of the most popular publicists. In political articles, Toporov gives a sharp assessment of Russian reality. His books are a guide to modern literature, in which the accents are clearly placed and labels are mercilessly applied. Unlike most of his colleagues in the writing workshop, Toporov honestly admits that criticism is an extremely subjective activity, and as many critics as there are as many opinions.

“Literary killer” Viktor Toporov was born in Leningrad in 1946, graduated from Leningrad State University with a degree in German philology. Since 1972, his translations of German and English poetry have been published, as well as critical articles about foreign literature. Since 1987 he has been acting as a critic modern literature, since 1990 - as a political commentator. From 2000 to 2005 he headed the Limbus Press publishing house; he was succeeded in this post by the writer.

"The Godfather" of the fashionable literary award "National Bestseller".

Member of the Union of Writers of the USSR and the Union of Writers of St. Petersburg, academician of the Academy of Russian Modern Literature.

“Our literature has not influenced anything for a long time and is of little interest to anyone. Against this background, Viktor Toporov’s fiery philippics give me, perhaps illusory, but important for me, the feeling that something extraordinarily significant is still happening in her, since she is capable of evoking such a strong and genuine passion. Toporov is perhaps the last of the underground fighters who has remained faithful to the precepts of his youth. He does not recognize decency, because in the environment from which he came, it was considered indecent. Yes, he is angry, but without predators, herbivores face extinction. It would be hard to call his court impartial, but his biases are always according to Hamburg. He can be reproached for inappropriate tone, but not for flaws in taste. He does not receive a salary, fortunately he does not serve anywhere, and is not obliged to fit into any format other than his own.” (

On August 9, 2016, V. L. Toporov, a poet, translator, publisher, passionate and biased participant in the Russian literary process, would have turned 70 years old.

Text: Mikhail Vizel/GodLiteratury.RF
Photo from LJ philologist

V. L. Toporov(1946 - 2013) spent his entire life translating prose and poetry from English and German languages. It is not surprising that he also wrote original poetry. Another thing is surprising: that

he categorically refused to print them during his lifetime, although he willingly read them in a friendly circle - and bequeathed this to be done after his death.

Therefore, the introduction to the first book of poems and translations by Viktor Toporov “Long live the world without me!”(the title is borrowed from the last entry left by Toporov on Facebook), written by his daughter, begins with the words: “The later this book appeared, the better it would be.”

But she appeared when she appeared. Sudden death of Viktor Leonidovich August 21 2013 turned out to be a shock not only for his many friends and students (for the sake of simplicity, let’s designate his friends who are old enough to be sons and daughters), but also for the equally numerous ill-wishers (not to say “enemies”) who could not forgive him a categorical, sometimes even deliberate reluctance to comply with generally accepted rules of literary decency, an animal instinct for falsehood and opportunism, draped in the robes of progressiveness and relevance.

The literary community has lost a mirror that could not just hint, but say in plain text that someone “has a crooked face,” as the well-known saying goes.

The “National Bestseller” award, invented by him when he was editor-in-chief of the Limbus-Press publishing house, will remain. Will stay “thousands of lines by Blake and Bredero, German and Austrian expressionists - in a word, just enough to be accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers ten times - approximately the same number of times at the reception he was miserably failed by envious colleagues”, as noted by the leading website “Century of Translation” Evgeniy Vitkovsky. And now the original poems of the poet Viktor Toporov will also come into circulation.

Texts and cover provided by Limbus-Press publishing house

The Horde does not sleep until the khans fall.
After all, the entire Horde is the vanguard.
We guys will be breathless tomorrow.
And now sleep while the khans sleep.

They sat with the princes yesterday.
In six tents, kumiss flowed like a river.
Lamb carcasses, fat shot, were spinning.
And only in the seventh they were sad, locked up.

The night has come - Tatar, dear.
The moon entered her palm like a saber.
Why are you neighing, my horse, not knowing the way?
Not yet blood, not time, not fire.

You, girl, be gentle with me on the road.
This is where we stand, tireless.
There, in Rus', things are not serene again.
Oh, your mother, how we will pacify them!

Let's rush into an open field with an honest geek.
And all we meet is a futile cry.
In Europe they know about the wild Mongol.
Only in Rus' is it known how wild he is.

It is, of course, stone hail.
Vigilantes, spare regiments.
We will cut, chop down, destroy without mercy.
We will burn the country from the Vistula to the Oka.

Don’t ask for earrings from such a thing.
Don't wait for cloth, bitches, or cows.
I'll be back, okay. Look, it's starting to turn red
And the boys jumped up from the carpets.
1981

Georg Heim
(1887–1914)
A CURSE TO BIG CITIES

1
Crowned with a death's head
And the white gates with a black banner
Silently dissolve. Dawn,
The dawn is filled with wretched light,

A terrible picture is visible behind them:
Rain, sewage, stuffiness and mucus,
Gusts of wind and gasoline vapors
They merged in the fumes of silent lightning.

And, flabby, monstrous volumes,
The naked breasts of the city lie
In mealy spots - right up to the window -
And they breathe the rust of the sky and tremble.

And - booths abandoned for the night -
In the rays of the moon they are only more clearly black,
Iron idols froze,
Heading into a senseless escape.

(Along the street in the bald patches of dawn
A swaying woman, touched by ashes,
Walks to the hooting of the clarinet -
It is played by a possessed gnome.

A horde trails behind her like a chain.
Silenced men
And the gnome plays drunkenly and bloodily -
Lame gray-bearded baboon.

Down the river, in the halls and in the snares,
In dens of darkness and in the twilight of caves,
In the dump of streets, in pits and swamps,
Where the night is like day, and the day is gray like midnight, -

Debauchery shines like a golden stream.
The baby, sucking, sinks its teeth into its chest.
The old man, squealing, climbed into the girl’s ass,
Burnt by the desire to fly -

Like a butterfly above a bush. Above the rose.
Blood flows from the womb. Sodom is approaching.
Virginity was killed by an indecent pose,
With an old woman's bloody tongue.

In the delirium of love, in the torture chamber,
Like those whom Hermes called,
They shake, foam flies from their lips -
And the singing reaches the skies, -

And it fills them with shame.
And they soar upward, followed by a corpse.
To the sound of a flute. The pain kills them
Vultures with one movement of the lips.)

VICTOR TOPOROV

1946, Leningrad - 2013, St. Petersburg
By education he is a Germanist. If translators had a traditional division into generations, Toporov would probably have been a “seventieser” - but this word sounds wild and means nothing; in the seventies, only a few were allowed to translate serious poetry, and mainly through the latest anthology volumes of the BVL. Thousands of lines by Blake and Bredero, German and Austrian expressionists - in a word, just enough to be accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers ten times - approximately the same number of times at the reception he was miserably failed by envious colleagues. The fact was that the prolific Toporov was very willingly published in Moscow, and the city of Leningrad did not forgive this. Well, in the post-Soviet era, Toporov published his own books of translations from Gottfried Benn, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Platt - and much more; representatives of the youth do not forgive them now; She is angry, she tries not to know other languages ​​besides English, in a word, everything has always been like this, and will remain so. At the turn of the millennium, Toporov became editor-in-chief of the Limbus publishing house and moved somewhat away from poetic translation.

Source: www.vekperevoda.com

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Victor Toporov

"Hard Rotation"

To the question “What is your profession?” I don't have a clear answer. In any case, just one. German philologist, what does it say on a university diploma? Literary and film critic? TV columnist? Essayist? Columnist? Political journalist? Poet? Prose writer? Translator of poetry and prose? Publisher? Teacher? Founder of literary prizes and public organizations? A gray-haired master or a godfather who does not disdain “wet work”? Master of Thoughts or “Pique Vest”?

Sometimes I am called a professional brawler (in all of the above fields and also in everyday life), but this, of course, is slander. My creative behavior looks scandalous only in the conditions of a universal, to put it mildly, Through the Looking Glass. The definition of “foul-mouthed philosopher” (as Sergei Shnurov called me) is good, especially from his lips, but also inaccurate. They even compared me with Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov and even with Archpriest Avvakum, compared me with Spinoza and Uriel D'Acosta - but let this remain on the conscience of the flatterers of that time. They compared me with Belinsky and (more often) with Burenin; they regularly called me a Pug barking at an Elephant (to the herd of Elephants), and to the extent of multi-stage idiocy, they more than once played up my “talking" surname. They stated (the first, if I’m not mistaken, was Boris Strugatsky): “Toporov is known for the fact that he never said or wrote a single good thing about anyone words".

From the outside, of course, you can see better. Especially if you judge with offense and bias. Therefore, we will stick to strict facts. First of all, I am, as it has recently become common to say, a newspaper writer. At least, it is in this capacity that I appear on the pages of the book offered to your attention. Here are collected (or rather, selected) articles and feuilletons over the past three years, first published in the “Political Journal”, the St. Petersburg magazine “City”, the electronic newspaper “Vzglyad”, the monthly “Petersburg. On Nevsky" and a number of others. In all these publications, I publish articles and columns on a regular basis (some once a week, sometimes less often) from year to year, and I focus on the intended audience of each thematically and, not least, stylistically. When the audience coincides, when it doesn’t, this is how the first intersections arise (but also the first discrepancies), movement arises - both translational and rotational - rotation occurs. But it’s not yet a strict rotation - meanwhile, my book is called that way.

The term that became the name was borrowed from the practice of music television channels. Hard (or, more often, hot) rotation is the regular, annoying inclusion of the same songs and clips in the program. (On television, such rotation, as a rule, is paid for, but in our comparison this is not relevant, because on television everything is paid for.) In this book, the same plots are constantly repeated and echoed, the same names, the same same topics; are repeated from article to article within each of the five sections and from section to section. Key expressions, important images, illustrative examples are repeated. Assessments and thoughts are repeated - however, each time being refined, specified and acquired with new connotations. They are repeated, gradually forming into a general (and, if you like, universal) picture.

In book form, all articles included in the book are published here for the first time. They are printed with minimal discrepancies in comparison with the first publications in periodicals: where a word that was thrown out in the heat of the moment was removed, where, on the contrary, a couple of lines were restored, removed by a reinsured editor, or even a layout designer, where a typo, inaccuracy or stylistic error was corrected. However, all these cases are isolated; there are approximately the same number of footnotes that also appeared in the book for the first time. The texts collected in the book were not subjected to any opportunistic revision or updating - for this I answer with my own heart. In the end, the collection included about a third of what I wrote and published over three years - and articles that, in my opinion today, are outdated, were simply not included in the book.

The material in the book is organized thematically into sections, and within each section the articles are arranged not chronologically (or reverse chronologically) and not thematically, but alphabetical order. Moreover, the sections themselves follow each other in alphabetical order. Such, you know, rigid rotation, such, I beg your pardon, know-how. Of course, organizing the material alphabetically is a purely formal technique, but this is exactly what I needed to emphasize the internal unity of articles that differ chronologically, thematically, and sometimes even in genre. It was needed, not least of all, to emphasize the internal unity of the sections devoted to different aspects of our lives.

“Diagonal of Power” contains articles on, relatively speaking, political topics. The conventionality of the definition itself (ironically fixed already in the title) is explained by the fact that we are talking here not so much about politics - and we don’t have any politics! - how much about the reflection of what, due to a misunderstanding, is considered politics in the philistine (that is, in you and me, reader) consciousness. What has been instilled in us for years or, on the contrary, has been hushed up, is tested here primarily on elementary common sense.

Both in politics and in art, it is now common to think: if you are not in the “box”, then you do not exist in nature. And the second section of the book - television criticism in the broadest sense - is therefore naturally called “The Box Game”. Some of the talking heads move into this section from “The Diagonal of Power,” and many others will pop up more than once, as if on the screen (“Heads pop up on the screen like air bubbles,” the American poet wrote half a century ago) in further sections of the book.

Between (absent) political and virtual television life, on the one hand, and the gardens of belles lettres, on the other, there is a certain Twilight Zone, the extremely diverse inhabitants of which do not lend themselves to a single definition, even theoretically, because they are united only by a categorical reluctance to accept strict forms and at least to some extent defined contours; in my book they (and the section dedicated to them) are called “Unnaturals”. Realizing that this name is somewhat risky, I will clarify in advance that we are not talking here only about “people of the moonlight,” and the author of this formula (the same Rozanov) called “people of the moonlight” not only adherents of same-sex love, although, of course, and them too.

Non-straight people (although, of course, they are not alone) often write poetry and prose. The main Writer of the Russian Land, in fact, is a certain Pupkin (more precisely, the collective Pupkin), who traditionally wins not by skill, but by number. The section “Praise to Pupkin” includes articles about current Russian literature. Pupkin has been reading me with particular interest and bias for fifteen years now and is offended by me more often, and most importantly, most strongly. And one day he even threw a lovingly looped rope into my mailbox. And only occasionally - in a clumsy attempt to get rid of the insult - he sighs sadly: “What can you do about it! Toporov is a forest orderly!” But our literature is not a forest, but a jungle - and “The Jungle Orderly” is the title of the final section of the book, which is primarily devoted to polemics.

As a high school student, I regularly received school essay double grade 1/5 - “one” in literature and “five” in Russian writing. This was called, respectively, “content” and “literacy.”
Until I once received 1/1 ratings for another “magnum opus” the size of Vzglyadov’s column…

Inna Gavrilovna! – I was indignant. – As for the “content”, everything is clear to me. But what’s wrong with my “literacy”? Do I make mistakes?

“You really don’t make mistakes, Vitya,” the teacher answered me judiciously. – But here I thought: with such hooligan “content” as every time in your works, what kind of “literacy” can we even talk about?

Inna Gavrilovna was, of course, right - if not as a teacher of Russian language and literature, then as a teacher wise from life in Soviet society.
And then practically nothing changed in this regard.
Because subsequently - strictly speaking, throughout my entire life - things were exactly and only this way: at first they gave me a wisely balanced rating of 1/5, and starting from a certain moment (when I was especially “annoyed”) they were off by a few absurd 1/1.

And on another question: “Do I make mistakes?” Every time they answered me with imperturbable impudence: “You really don’t make mistakes, but nevertheless”...

And this “nevertheless” inevitably makes us remember another story - not forty-five years ago, but thirty-five years ago.

I then decided to join the trade union committee of writers, but my senior colleagues from the writers' union, whose work I had already not so much criticized as ridiculed (in orally; I was, naturally, not published as a critic back then), they were firmly determined to deny me even such pitiful professional recognition.

But to do this directly was, of course, a bit embarrassing, because I was already widely – and loudly – ​​published as a poet-translator.

You see, Viktor Leonidovich,” the chairman of this little-reputable organization explained to me, “we had a check here, and it turned out that average age members of the trade union committee - sixty-two years. So they recommended that we dramatically rejuvenate the staff. Therefore, we cannot accept you in any way.

That's why?.. But I'm twenty-seven!

Nevertheless…

Well, but now I’m just these sacramental sixty-two years old - and nothing has changed since then: I still don’t make mistakes, but with such “hooligan content” there’s no talk of any “literacy”, as usual, it doesn’t work.

Except that, having become completely insolent over the years, my opponents now sometimes talk about my “illiteracy.”

But these are pipes!

My trouble is not the scandalous content of my publications: most often it is not they that are scandalous, but the events and literary works, the assessment and analysis of which I am engaged in, literary morals themselves are scandalous.

My problem is not the supposedly unacceptable harshness of the tone: a gentleman, you know, never offends anyone unintentionally.

Women in Russia, as you know, do not give, but “sorry.” But a literary critic cannot “pity” anyone – unless, of course, he is a woman.

And the point is not that you will be sorry, but you are not (this is precisely not the case - and the method of mutual pity, it is cross-pollination, has blossomed everywhere).

The point is that you will regret it, and another critic will regret it, and a third, and only the reader will not regret it.

Or rather, he will regret that, like the last fool, he listened to your obviously dishonest recommendation.

By feeling sorry for the writer, you become dishonest with the reader.

And the same with the writer you felt sorry for.

Well, and, of course, with his fellow writers, whom for some reason you didn’t feel sorry for.

A literary critic's loyalty must be to the reader, not to the writer.

A literary critic, faithful to the writer, is not a critic, but a literary servant.

Although, of course, I cannot help but admit: much of what I do - and do honestly - is done with aggravation.

Or, rather, with anticipation, perceived by many as aggravation and even abuse (the latter, however, is nothing more than slander).

My trouble lies in the nature of my abilities in the field of literary criticism, which has become for me a partial vocation.

In literature, I am not Doctor Zhivago. And certainly not good doctor Aibolit. I'm Dr. House.

My specialty is early diagnosis.

Advanced diagnostics.

And if only for this reason, the diagnosis is objectively outrageous.

This or that branch (or person) of Russian literature seems to be blooming, but I say: “To the morgue!”

It’s even possible that sometimes I still make mistakes. But this is just unlikely.
Of course, they don't agree with me. They're offended at me. They hate me.

But if the doctor said: “To the morgue!”, that means to the morgue.