[Евгений]

Say about "Spring", this book is good or bad, does not work. Moreover, it is surprisingly neither good nor bad book. This collection of short stories is an example of an ideal straight-away balance between interesting and pointless, intelligent and flat, exciting and boring. There are texts of important, but they somehow jams, blunted by some really quite worthless, which render the construction of relief. As a result, landscape "Spring" recalls the landscape of his beloved author of the Moscow region - train takes us from Peredelkino (where the action unfolds the story "Egg" - the first full text of the book) to Nikolina Gora (in the final collection of short stories "May" is where the decisive events occur in life of the heroine), glimpses of fences, buildings and woods, but catch the eye for something difficult.

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This visible copyright arrogance: something like - since I wrote, so they just something amiss. So the "Spring" - a book that requires us not only the ability to read, but also the ability to pass. Continuing the metaphor of the railway, for example, that go into this train should be on regular stations, and, finally moving to the compliment, we estimate the elegance of the route.

Points of departure (Peredelkino) and destination (Nikolina Gora), selected with pleasing precision. The composition moves from the Soviet space forces in the new place of power (regardless of the venerable age Nikologorsky cottages, a truly iconic status, the village acquired it in the post-Soviet years). Of the places namolennogo, even sacred, which stores the memory of another title inhabitants - "war veterans and Soviet writers, with arms to defend their country and its literature, the place is indestructible vulgar, definitively occupied by those who want" all cut off, dismember .. . all reduced to a solid BBQ.

About writers veterans who knew that the "strong man who knows where the Power," in Pepperstein obtained especially tender. And even though the field of Soviet myth - one of the most cultivated in the present national literature (author of "Spring" also had to work hard in this field of), but there are not many texts, which would have cost him with such grace. Perhaps Pepperstein it turns out, precisely because of his writings, he has clearly applies to the chatter (for symmetry want to say - to chatting with fellow travelers in the same train from Peredelkino on Nikolina Gora). Well, talk about the Soviet and anti-Soviet, then about sex twins Chupi and Chups (non-incendiary), and then about the New Bulgarian Comedy (an excellent story "Humor"), then about the "man of pleasure" (as the text - just really kind of nonsense a). And maybe, just such an optional rhythm idle conversation and makes it possible to speak in to say something truly unexpected, deducing banality of piercing, as in the passage of the 1990's from the story "A Conversation with wine windows.

"That period is now made to remember with horror and disgust, as the time of the collapse, chaos and banditry, but the time was also the time for this crazy freedom. In the present time, something inhuman, it is too harsh and tactless uncovered those forbidden levels of being, which normally remain hidden. It offended many people who consider themselves part of the collapsed system, and those that were ready for a system to replace - they would like to pay business activity, and prevented them from chaos. " And now the main thing: "But we human beings do not consider myself, not interested in commerce, anything not human compassion and were happy." "Persons do not consider myself" - for this and Chupi from Chups is quite possible to forgive.

MA: Ad Marginem, 2010
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