When Doctor of Philology, laureate of the Big Book and Solzhenitsyn Prize, permanent author of the ZhZL series Alexey Varlamov wrote a novel about the First World War, he did not think that the book would be published exactly on the centenary of the beginning of hostilities and that the political atmosphere by this time would again be pretty will heat up.
The action of "Mental Wolf" begins exactly one hundred years ago and continues for four years. Alexey Varlamov takes on the Silver Age - “a turbid, intense, rich, incredibly exciting time”, analyzes the events of the First World War and the 1917 revolution. What is important for him, first of all, is not “the military component and how ready or unprepared the Russian army was, but the mental state of Russian society, what was going on then in the minds and souls.”
In "Mind Wolf" there are several love triangles, fatal passion and murder. And a large-scale historical background - the military events of the First World War, the life of the Russian village and revolutionary Petrograd. From the very first pages in the novel, turmoil and internal spiritual corruption, which creeps up like an invisible ruthless beast, brews, swells, and then breaks out. This is the same “mental wolf” that Varlamov’s heroes fight, however, without any success.
The main characters, small engineer Vasily Komissarov and writer Pavel Legkobytov, try to survive and even hunt a wolf. Vasily’s sensitive and gentle teenage daughter Ulya and his young wife are seized by a fever of anxiety and strive to escape from the predator. But it is impossible to win or hide: the “mental wolf,” according to Varlamov, is a mental epidemic and a diagnosis of the Silver Age. And the writer leaves no chance to escape to any of the characters in the novel: neither fictional characters, nor completely historical personalities, well known to Varlamov from his own documentary research. These are Prishvin, Rozanov and Grigory Rasputin, a writer who has long attracted attention. His role in Russian history is so complex that Varlamov could not limit himself to a biographical book about Rasputin in the ZhZL series. The image of Grigory Efimovich, whom Varlamov, following Alexei Tolstoy, considers the last defender of the throne, is described most successfully in the novel.
Alexey Varlamov says that the general idea for the novel arose a long time ago: he was tired of documentary prose within the framework of “The Lives of Remarkable People,” and he wanted, in his own words, “to solve the inverse problem.” “Mental Wolf” was written gradually. Everything began to take shape in the summer of 2010, in those sultry, hot months when the sky was clouded with smoke: “The stuffiness that is in the novel echoes the time when I wrote it, and the summer of 1914, with which the novel begins.”
Alexey Varlamov even unravels the historical threads in the novel, but the spiritual background of the main events of the Silver Age occupies him much more than military conflicts and political struggle. The title metaphor of the novel is the mental wolf - the personification of the thought from which every sin begins. An image from ancient Orthodox prayers, where there are mysterious words: “I will be hunted by a mental wolf.” And Varlamov’s heroes, fictional and real, fight this mental wolf that dominates the entire country. They fight fiercely, but in vain.
Natalia Lomykina
Alexey Varlamov
Mental wolf
Part one. Hunter
More than anything else, Ulya loved the night sky and the strong wind in it. In a windy black space she ran in her sleep, easily pushing off the grass with her feet, tirelessly and without losing her breath, but not because she was growing in those minutes - she was short and had a fragile build - but because she knew how to run - something happened to the thin girl’s body, causing it to lift off from the ground, and Ulya physically felt this half-run, half-flight and remembered the transition to it with her skin, when she did not fall from reality into sleep, but accelerated, soared, and the air held her for several moments like water. And she ran until the sleep grew thinner and she was overcome with horror that she would stumble, fall and never be able to run again. The secret fear of losing her legs tormented the girl, breaking into her nightly dreams, and left only in the summer, when Ulya went to the village of Vysokiye Humpbacked on the Shelomi River and walked along the forest and field roads there, burning to blackness and burning in the hot air the gifts and nightmares that tormented her. And she was not afraid of anything else - neither darkness, nor lightning, nor mysterious night flashes, nor large beetles, nor silent birds, nor wasps, nor snakes, nor mice, nor sharp forest sounds similar to the explosion of a broken bowstring. A city dweller, she was indifferent to the bites of mosquitoes and midges, she never caught a cold, no matter how cold the river water she bathed in and no matter how wet she got in the August rains. The hilly terrain with islands of forests among swamps - manes, as they were called here - with forest lakes, streams and water meadows at the same time calmed and excited her, and, if it were up to Uli, she would live and live here, never returning to the damp , dissected by a short wide river and cut by narrow crooked canals, Petersburg with its dirty houses, cabs, horse-drawn horses, shops and the vapors of human bodies. But her father, Vasily Khristoforovich Komissarov, went to Vysokiye Gorbunki only in the summer, because the rest of the time he worked as a mechanic at the Obukhov plant and in the village he missed cars so much that almost all the time he spent repairing simple peasant mechanisms. He did not take money from his owners for his work, but for breakfast he always ate fresh eggs, milk, butter, sour cream and vegetables, which made his sickly, sallow face look younger, shiny, ruddy and even thicker, his strong teeth were cleared of yellow plaque, and Asian eyes narrowed and looked contentedly from under swollen eyelids. This cunning, swollen look had such a mysterious effect on the Gorbunkov peasants that they one by one came to the mechanic to consult about land and farms, but Vasily Khristoforovich could not say about this, but it still seemed to the peasants that the St. Petersburg gentleman knew something, but was hiding , and wondered how to win him over and find out what was unknown to them.
Sometimes, to the displeasure of his young wife, Komissarov went hunting with Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov, an arrogant, nervous gentleman who, with his dark, disheveled hair, looked like either a gypsy or a Jew. Legkobytov was an agronomist by first profession, but he didn’t grow anything in this field, except for a small book about growing garlic, and became first a journalist, and then a small writer, lived in the village all year round, renting hunting grounds from the local landowner Prince Lyupa - the mysterious an old man whom he had never seen, because Lupa was allergic to daylight and human faces, with the exception of one - his manager. They said bad things about the two of them, but Legkobytov did not delve into these rumors, he was a mentally and physically healthy man, he happily hunted in clear pine and dark spruce forests, trained dogs, wrote stories and went to the city only to get assignments for editors manuscripts and receive royalties of twenty kopecks per line. Journals of his works were readily accepted, critics either lazily scolded them or condescendingly praised them, and the mechanic Komissarov loved to listen to his comrade and was Pavel Matveevich’s first reader and admirer. Once he even brought the writer from Germany as a gift a bicycle, on which Legkobytov dashingly rode along local roads, arousing the envy of the boys and the rage of the village dogs. He didn’t pay attention to the first ones, but fought off the second ones with a practiced technique: when the dog intended to grab him by the trouser leg, the cyclist braked sharply, and the animal received a blow with his heel in the lower jaw. But Pavel Matveyevich treated only other people’s dogs so cruelly; he doted on his own hunting dogs, valued them for their intelligence, endurance and viscosity and gave them wonderful names - Yarik, Karai, Flute, Nightingale, Palma, Nerl, and others had two names each: one for hunting, the other for home. One day I bought a hound named Gonchar and renamed it Anchar. He was generally a poetic person, although he seemed rude and harsh.
In the announcement of the issue:
A strong argument in favor of a highly relevant comparison of today's public sentiments with the atmosphere of Russia on the eve of world war and revolution. However, international conflicts and political struggles themselves occupy Alexey Varlamov much less than their spiritual premises.
The title metaphor defines the mystical sound of the novel. “Mental wolf” is an image from a prayer rule, the personification of a thought from which, even involuntary, every sin begins. In Varlamov’s novel, the “mental wolf” is a completely visible character in the super-plot: through his forces, a tangled network of teachings and rumors has been scattered throughout Russia, “hunting” human nature and faith.
The hero of the novel - a small engineer, an unloved husband and a confused father - tries to counter the mood of Russia, which has not yet flown out of orbit, but is diligently and collectively being displaced from it, with inner resilience. While his wife and daughter are seized by the fever of running, the demon of restless aspiration.
The family of the novel's main characters interacts with non-fictional, easily recognizable persons representing two forms of spiritual power in Russia: the church and literature. It is no coincidence that the chosen representatives are heroes who are deliberately lateral, stray - in relation to the church canon and the literary mainstream. Alexey Varlamov explores the sources of Russia's fluidity and strength in the combination of Prishvin's natural philosophy and the mystery of Rasputin - two poles of Russian spiritual history, between which there are outbreaks of heresies and bloody clashes.
The novel is called "Mental Wolf". This phrase goes back to one of the ancient Orthodox prayers, where there are words that are striking in their mystery: “I will be hunted by a mental wolf.” This is the wolf my heroes are running away from and hunting. The novel is quite large in volume, it will be published starting from the April issue in the magazine "October", and a book should be published closer to autumn. This novel is about what happened to Russia exactly one hundred years ago, an attempt to speak about the Silver Age and its characters, but not in the genre of biography, which is what I have been doing in recent years, but in prose, because there are things that can only be conveyed through fiction, through dialogues and internal monologues, through intrigue and landscape, through direct speech and a sharp plot, which, in my opinion, is contraindicated for a documentary biography. But the novel is a more free, flexible, responsive genre, and during this time I have accumulated a lot of things, and, frankly speaking, I miss prose.
| Photo from the Chronos website |
Alexey Varlamov “Mental Wolf”. - M.: Editorial office of Elena Shubina, 2014.
From the publisher:
The action of the new novel by Alexei Varlamov takes place during one of the most acute moments in Russian history - the “abyss on the edge” - from the summer of 1914 to the winter of 1918. In it, characters live and die, in whom sometimes famous personalities are guessed: Grigory Rasputin, Vasily Rozanov, Mikhail Prishvin, the scandalous hieromonk Iliodor and the sectarian Shchetinkin; Real and fictional events get mixed up. The characters of the novel love - very Russian, with a fatal passion, argue and philosophize - about the nature of Russian people, permissiveness, Nietzsche, the future of the country and about ... the mental wolf - a terrible, charming beast that invaded Russia and became the cause of its troubles.. .
Ask in libraries!
More than anything else, Ulya loved the night sky and the strong wind in it. In a windy black space she ran in her sleep, easily pushing off the grass with her feet, tirelessly and without losing her breath, but not because she was growing in those minutes - she was short and had a fragile build - but because she knew how to run - something happened to the thin girl’s body, causing it to lift off from the ground, and Ulya physically felt this half-run, half-flight and remembered the transition to it with her skin, when she did not fall from reality into sleep, but accelerated, soared, and the air held her for several moments like water. And she ran until the sleep grew thinner and she was overcome with horror that she would stumble, fall and never be able to run again. The secret fear of losing her legs tormented the girl, breaking into her nightly dreams, and left only in the summer, when Ulya went to the village of Vysokiye Humpbacked on the Shelomi River and walked along the forest and field roads there, burning to blackness and burning in the hot air the gifts and nightmares that tormented her. And she was not afraid of anything else - neither darkness, nor lightning, nor mysterious night flashes, nor large beetles, nor silent birds, nor wasps, nor snakes, nor mice, nor sharp forest sounds similar to the explosion of a broken bowstring. A city dweller, she was indifferent to the bites of mosquitoes and midges, she never caught a cold, no matter how cold the river water she bathed in and no matter how wet she got in the August rains. The hilly terrain with islands of forests among swamps - manes, as they were called here - with forest lakes, streams and water meadows at the same time calmed and excited her, and, if it were up to Uli, she would live and live here, never returning to the damp , dissected by a short wide river and cut by narrow crooked canals, Petersburg with its dirty houses, cabs, horse-drawn horses, shops and the vapors of human bodies. But her father, Vasily Khristoforovich Komissarov, went to Vysokiye Gorbunki only in the summer, because the rest of the time he worked as a mechanic at the Obukhov plant and in the village he missed cars so much that almost all the time he spent repairing simple peasant mechanisms. He did not take money from his owners for his work, but for breakfast he always ate fresh eggs, milk, butter, sour cream and vegetables, which made his sickly, sallow face look younger, shiny, ruddy and even thicker, his strong teeth were cleared of yellow plaque, and Asian eyes narrowed and looked contentedly from under swollen eyelids. This cunning, swollen look had such a mysterious effect on the Gorbunkov peasants that they one by one came to the mechanic to consult about land and farms, but Vasily Khristoforovich could not say about this, but it still seemed to the peasants that the St. Petersburg gentleman knew something, but was hiding , and wondered how to win him over and find out what was unknown to them.
Sometimes, to the displeasure of his young wife, Komissarov went hunting with Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov, an arrogant, nervous gentleman who, with his dark, disheveled hair, looked like either a gypsy or a Jew. Legkobytov was an agronomist by first profession, but he didn’t grow anything in this field, except for a small book about growing garlic, and became first a journalist, and then a small writer, lived in the village all year round, renting hunting grounds from the local landowner Prince Lyupa - the mysterious an old man whom he had never seen, because Lyupa was allergic to daylight and human faces, with the exception of one - his manager. They said bad things about the two of them, but Legkobytov did not delve into these rumors, he was a mentally and physically healthy man, he happily hunted in clear pine and dark spruce forests, trained dogs, wrote stories and went to the city only to get assignments for editors manuscripts and receive royalties of twenty kopecks per line. Journals of his works were readily accepted, critics either lazily scolded them or condescendingly praised them, and the mechanic Komissarov loved to listen to his comrade and was Pavel Matveevich’s first reader and admirer. Once he even brought the writer from Germany as a gift a bicycle, on which Legkobytov dashingly rode along local roads, arousing the envy of the boys and the rage of the village dogs. He didn’t pay attention to the first ones, but fought off the second ones with a practiced technique: when the dog intended to grab him by the trouser leg, the cyclist braked sharply, and the animal received a blow with his heel in the lower jaw. But Pavel Matveyevich treated only other people’s dogs so cruelly; he doted on his own hunting dogs, valued them for their intelligence, endurance and viscosity and gave them wonderful names - Yarik, Karai, Flute, Nightingale, Palma, Nerl, and others had two names each: one for hunting, the other for home. One day I bought a hound named Gonchar and renamed it Anchar. He was generally a poetic person, although he seemed rude and harsh.
After clashes with ill-mannered village dogs, Legkobytov’s pants turned out to be torn and they were sewn up by the beautiful, portly and strict peasant woman Pelageya, who followed Pavel Matveevich everywhere. In addition to hunting dogs, they had three children: the youngest were common, as gypsy and dense as their father, and the eldest, whitish, thin, blue-eyed, with long girlish eyelashes and plump lips, Alyosha, was Pelagia’s son from another person. Pavel Matveyevich did not favor his stepson too much, and not because Alyosha was a stranger to him by blood, but because he was indifferent to children and did only what he liked in life. And what I didn’t like, I brushed aside and didn’t keep it in my head.
Ulya often played with Alyosha and felt very sorry for him. Because she herself grew up with her stepmother, it always seemed to her that Alyosha was being bullied in the family and that even her mother, who was busy with housework, treated her worse than her younger sons. From childhood, Ulya carried delicacies from home for her friend and, adopting the peasant sadness, watched with all her eyes how Alyosha gobbled up the gifts, although cookies and sweets did not suit him for future use and the bones still protruded from the tanned boy’s body, and his gentle face always remained tragic ready to be offended. One day, Ulya saved up money and bought him a smart shirt, but Alyosha was embarrassed because he had nowhere to put on a new thing, and he didn’t know how to explain to his mother where the shirt came from.
- I do not like? – Ulya interpreted his embarrassment in her own way.
“It’s too big,” he didn’t lie, because Ulya really made a mistake with the size, and he hid the shirt in the barn away from prying eyes, but the sharp-eyed Pelageya found it.
She listened to Alyosha’s confused explanations, but did not scold her son, but grunted somehow strangely, and her usually dry, narrowed eyes grew dim and narrowed, not allowing an outlet for that convulsive motherly love that Pelageya carried within herself, but about which Pavel Matveevich neither , nor Ulya had any idea. Pavel Matveevich was arrogant, and if Ulya believed in anything, there was no way to convince her. And Alyosha did not argue with her, but did everything as she ordered - he swung until he was dizzy on the giant steps arranged by the mechanic, swam on a punt boat, taught his girlfriend to catch fish and crayfish, which they boiled on the fire, and, wide-eyed, - he wanted to sleep, because in the morning it was not dawn to get up, - he listened to Ulya’s tales about three-eyed people who were given a third eye in order not to see the everyday and to see the hidden, and Ulya believed that she had this eye, but still hasn't opened yet.
“And in order for the eye to open,” Ulya said to Alyosha in a strange voice, “you need to do special exercises.” Do you want me to teach you?
“I want to,” Alyosha answered, and Ulya felt a slight chill running down her spine from neck to waist.
She casually touched Alyosha and immediately pulled her hand away:
- Why don’t you go to school?
- Why should I? I already know and know everything I need. I can read, write, and count. Why do I need extra?
