Love to death and after: "100 letters to Sergei" by Karina Dobrotvorskaya
Text: Lisa birger
Very beautiful, very successful and she also says - probably the average person reacts to Karina Dobrotvorskaya's sudden literary career - President and editorial director of Brand Development of the publishing house Condé Nast International and the iconic figure of Russian glamor. Such would be to write frivolous books about fashion in the style of Vogue, advice to girls who are only looking for their own style, how to properly wear a tuxedo. But instead, first, Karina Dobrotvorskaya collects in one book the memoirs of Leningrad "blockade girls", building their hunger in parallel with their own bulimia, their own fears and disorders associated with food. And now come out her "Has anyone seen my girl? 100 letters to Serezha" - letters to her deceased husband. This is the ultimate, very sincere and not quite prose, that is, texts that are not quite intended for the reader’s eyes. You can not even say that this book should be read right now. It may not be read at all. That does not detract from its public importance, so to speak.
Sergei Dobrotvorsky - a bright man and an outstanding film critic, the memory of which today holds perhaps only the faithful team of the magazine "Session" - died in 1997. By that time, Karina had already left him for her current husband and was even on the 9th month of pregnancy. He died from an overdose of heroin, friends with whom he was frightened, carried the body outside and put him on a bench in the playground - he, dead, sat there until the middle of the next day. In the preface to the book Dobrotvorskaya writes that his death was the main event of her life. “With him I didn’t like, didn’t finish, didn’t finish, didn’t divide. After his departure, my life fell apart into external and internal. Outwardly I had a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment, wonderful work, a fantastic career and even a small house on the shore of the sea. Inside - frozen pain, withered tears and endless dialogue with a man who was not. "
In your "letters" (the quotes are intentional here - the description of events is too systematic, chronological, rather, these are the letters that you write publicly, like Facebook messages than something really intimate) Dobrotvorskaya consistently recalls the story of the novel, marriage, divorce care Practically - from the first campers, the first sex, the first conversation, the first attempts to arrange a common life, the first trips abroad (in the 90s it still meant eating one banana a day to save for one, but a chic costume from Paris) - to last quarrels A parallel to all of this is modernity, where the heroine has a young lover, and it is he who becomes the catalyst for this sea of letters that have broken through. There is an agonizing shame for wallpaper hung manually, an apartment without a phone, a bathroom plastered with giant red cockroaches, here is life in Paris, where every morning, leaving the house, the heroine admires the Eiffel Tower. There - the goods on the cards, pasta with ketchup, and pancakes, baked from powdered eggs and powdered milk. Here is an endless raid on Michelin restaurants.
This endlessly repeated opposition of yesterday’s poverty with today's chic should not and is not intended to be the main thing here. However, it becomes it. The Dobrotvorsky book has actually one obvious, let's say, a source of inspiration - it is even mentioned briefly in the preface. This book by Joan Didion "The Year of Magical Thinking" - Dobrotvorskaya translates it as "The Year of Magical Thoughts." In her book, Didion tells how she spent the year of her life after her husband, John Dunn, died suddenly in their family room from a heart attack. This piercing, stunning reading is almost the main American book of the last decade. Exposing, it would seem, to the last nerve, recalling the past on repetition and describing her sufferings in the present, Joan Didion for the first time in American culture legitimizes suffering. What is customary to hide - tears, grief, unwillingness to live - becomes for her the main plot.
Dobrotvorskaya also decided to write about that in Russian culture does not pronounce it. About poverty. On the suffering around poverty. On the intimate life of two people, sex, adultery. Add to this that she calls almost all the heroes of her book by name - and you can imagine how many people she absolutely will not like. However, the main thing, clearly borrowed from Didion, is the idea that if you start talking about pain, it will subside. This kind of psychotherapy, the belief that it is enough to talk, and everything will pass. So in the Middle Ages, they were healed by bleeding, believing that the disease goes away with bad blood. A completely mistaken thought, by the way, cost us Robin Hood.
The trouble is that, inspired by Didion, Dobrotvorskaya read it wrong. Joan Didion never promised that the pain would pass, moreover, she repeatedly repeats that nothing passes. But she is a brilliant essayist, the best in her generation, who has trained for years to transform each of her experiences into text. In "The Year of Magical Thinking", she simply turns herself into a test mouse for the lack of other options, pulling away, watching her own suffering. She is there, for example, all the time reading books about the loss and experience of trauma and compares the observations of doctors and psychoanalysts with their own experience. Thus, Didion's confession is addressed to each of us, anyone who has known the bitterness of loss can try on it - that is, we all. Dobrotvorskaya's confession is a personal psychotherapy, where intimacy is even irrelevant and leaves a feeling of some inconvenience, and the author (I wonder, consciously or not) does not cause the slightest sympathy.
That is, as a book about experiencing the loss of a “letter to Serezha”, it is impossible to read. What remains in it? First of all, the story of these 90s, when everything happened: all this hunger, cards, powder pancakes, dreams of etseter abroad, etseter. The desire to ensure that "I had everything," grew out of a time when there was nothing. Honoring Dobrotvorskaya, so it is this “nothing was” and is for her a real trauma. When you fall in love with the costumes of the new designer, but they cost $ 1,000, and you have a salary of 200. When you go to America and save up for a new video player, and they steal it from you on your first day in your homeland - how can you survive this?
Dobrotvorskaya quite frankly describes that she left it for money, that “I wanted change” —this is the Grand Cru that is cooling down in a bucket. And precisely because she is so honest with us, it’s not worth it to crucify her for it. It is impossible not to notice that all this is a confession of a woman who, saying goodbye to her young lover, finally tells him "I will cancel your tickets myself." But in the past, in addition to everyday life, there was also art - Sergei Dobrotvorsky himself and his entire circle were people in love with cinema, books, and old culture. And we must understand that all this glamor was created for us by people who knew Pasolini’s films by heart.
When Dobrotvorskaya writes about modernity, about a young lover swallowing the seasons of TV shows, she, perhaps, unconsciously, contrasts yesterday’s absorption of culture with its current consumption. A modern person knows how to twist gadgets correctly, but is unable to watch the “Autumn Marathon” to the end. And here it is not clear what Dobrotvorskaya complains about - the fact that she herself created this person turns out to be completely outside of this prose.
Photo: "Edited by Elena Shubina", Publisher AST