An excellent opportunity to remember those who had an enormous influence on all world literature of the 20th and early 21st centuries, including Russian literature.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Latin American “magic realism” on Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, and this influence once again confirms Fyodor Dostoevsky’s thesis about our “world-responsiveness.” We will find traces of the Colombian classic Gabriel Marquez even in the prose of our “villagers,” not to mention Anatoly Kim with his “Squirrel” and Vladimir Orlov with his “Violist Danilov.” Without Cortázar, it is difficult to imagine the phenomenon of “Russian postmodernism” of the 1990s with its “hopscotch” (“Hopscotch” is Cortázar’s best novel), and without Borges’ philological prose, Andrei Bitov, Victor Pelevin and Evgeniy Vodolazkina would perhaps not have existed. However, this does not in the least diminish their importance as writers, because Dostoevsky discovered “world-responsiveness” in our main national genius – Pushkin.
Jorge Luis Borges was born into a bilingual family who spoke Spanish and English. His father was a lawyer and a psychology professor, but he dreamed of becoming a writer, which was prevented by a genetic disease – progressive blindness, which also overtook his son, who went blind at the age of fifty-six, when, ironically, he was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina. The family had no doubt that in the future it would be he who would become a famous writer, and Borges later recalled that “such a conviction is much stronger than simple expressed wishes.” He composed his first story, “The Fatal Visor,” under the influence of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” at the age of seven, and already blind for thirty years, he wrote and published ten collections of poems and three books of short stories. In addition, Borges was a polyglot. In addition to Spanish and English, he spoke German, French, Italian, also knew Latin, and at the end of his life he studied Arabic.
Tons of dissertations have been written about Borges’ literary legacy; his work is a treasure for philologists. At the same time, it is curious that he never wrote novels and, in general, did not write texts longer than 14 pages, considering five-hundred-page books to be “tedious madness.” Indeed, why take so much time to describe the main idea that can be presented orally in five minutes? By the way, this conviction of Borges is an excellent recommendation for modern prose writers and authors of the most boring scientific monographs.
But this desire for a lapidary presentation of basic ideas played a strange joke on Borges himself. Of his work, in the memory of even educated readers who are versed in philology, only two main ideas (which are actually many, because most writers do not have just one) remain: these are set forth in his essay “Four Cycles” and the story “The Babylonian Library.”
The first is that all the plots of world literature in its past, present and future are reduced to only four: “The siege of the city,” “The return home,” “The search,” and “The suicide of God.” The first plot is present in Homer’s Iliad, the second in his Odyssey. God sacrifices himself in the Gospel, and the search (for something external or for oneself) is present in any adventure or psychological novel. And you can argue all you want with this discovery of the blind librarian, but in the end he is right. And then, from the point of view of the plot, there is no fundamental difference between Homer’s “Odyssey” and, for example, Rasputin’s “Live and Remember,” because in both cases the hero returns home. There is no difference in the plot between the epic of how the Greeks besieged Troy and any novel in which the hero achieves the love of the lady of his heart; in both there is a brutal siege of the fortress.
Borges’ second idea is a cyclopean library, where so many books are collected that their volume exceeds the volume of the observable Universe by an incomprehensible number of times. Most of these books are absolutely meaningless, since they differ only in a different, but arbitrary set of letters. Borges has 25 of them (in the Latin alphabet – 26, in the Russian alphabet – 33). The idea of the “library” is extremely simple: “If you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, one of them will surely write War and Peace or the works of Shakespeare.”
It’s also a good warning to modern writers. Like the first one: no matter what you write, all the plots have long since been exhausted.
Borges’s student Julio Cortázar’s main novel, Hopscotch, written in 1963, is still considered an unsurpassed example of postmodern literary play. It reminds us that writing “like that” is no longer possible today, or at least is extremely archaic. Cortázar proposed a novel that involves two reading techniques: the conventional and the playful. The first two parts, From the Other Side and This Side, have a complete plot and are conducive to ordinary reading. The third part, From Different Sides, should be read according to the scheme proposed by the author, with a certain alternation of chapters.
Julio Cortazar. Photo: article.mercadolibre.com.ar
Let me remind you that the “hopscotch game” is an old children’s game (even from our Soviet times), in which children on chalk-covered asphalt, hopping on one leg, push a jar of shoe polish. Cortázar’s novel should be read in the same way.
Or don’t read it.
Why, if all the plots were sold out a long time ago?
