The novel’s path to truth turned into a vulgar search for omnipotence (Nikita Efremov as Alexei Vyazintsev). Photo by: NMG Studio
If Elizarov’s prose is judged by its adaptation (and in our illiterate age it will be), then it will be enough for the author to compose a bawdy, obscene three-string ballad about Tverdokhlebov, as he already did with the writer Bykov, having previously given it in the eye. You see, the spectacular matyuki with their powerful verbal power will end the bad energy of the series.
Elizarov, the red punk of Russian literature, composed the Big Book on the power of the word over mortals. He (as, indeed, the author of the text) idolizes the great Arkady Gaidar, who once wrote that he only pretended to be a children’s writer, when in reality he was preparing a powerful Red Star guard for the country. The guardians of Elizarov’s new-old faith will be the lower layers of outsiders: Zon criminals, half-witted old women, lumpen intellectuals and hard-drinking workers, the class base of socialism. In different ways they penetrated the secret of the socialist realist Gromov, whose graphomania, subject to uninterrupted reading, will turn into books of Strength, Power, Fury and Patience, giving the reader light and immunity to pain.
The reprints lack magical power; therefore, for rare copies of old Soviet publications, there is a deadly battle between regional sects of initiates (here the author not only reproduces the feudal struggle at the time of the birth of spiritual literature, but also overturns modern reprints of the classics with its cartoons and screenshots on the cover, which of course are silly compared to Detgiz’s well-worn roots).
Contractual blows, as in the old days, are carried out exclusively with edged weapons: chains, pikes, axes and flails, the death of which is easier to pass off as an accident. Thus, the Soviet myth is clearly inscribed in the long Russian history with the pre-Bolshevik deification of orphans and the poor, against the will of the Zoils, to make socialism a black pause in the progressive development of the nation. All this secret of the tired ethnos is revealed to some random neophyte, Alexei Vyazintsev, who is included in the circle chosen by kinship with the district leader in the highest rank of Librarian of the sect. Through battle and sword, captivity and initiation, he will assume the role of a reclusive chronicler who prevents the Homeland from being captured and decadent.
Never, under any circumstances, would the merry producers dare push such an anti-bourgeois sedition! Not your scale. Bolshevism, of course, was a full-fledged religion with its heresies, inquisition, councils, and grace, born of universal sacrificial faith. The fusion of this faith has shattered the system; however, the current explosion of passion literally inherits the Soviet cosmogony that cements the nation, scaring and outraging the businessmen of the transition period from one Force to another.
It is they who transform the path to truth in the search for the most vulgar and accessible omnipotence for the poor mind. Instead of humiliated and offended books in the series, the heroes of the 90s are looking furiously (bandits, skinheads, “Afghans” and whores) and only the Vyazintsev clan fights for democracy, fair elections and the distribution of the truth to town.
The saturation of Soviet Orthodoxy with libertarian meanings is not possible even on a stage like Ilya Tilkin’s: the seams of opposing ideologies stick out from everywhere. New Democrats, out of inertia, read penny socialist realist crap and refer to each other as “comrades.” The sword-wielding assassins are shocked by the liquidation of a gang of kidnappers and rapists (how horrible). A fencer who pierced his opponents with a rapier reads Aseev’s poems about non-violence to schoolchildren. The relocated coward Vyazintsev raises his comrades-in-arms to rebellion. All this is reminiscent of Elizarov’s marginal philosophy of a humanistic condom. The heroes are changing color before our very eyes, if only to avoid the vapid praise of socialism for its uplifting utopian delusion.
In the end, Tilkin embroiders inconsistencies with a Napoleonic gesture: after reading the book “The Meaning”, Vyazintsev turns into our Jesus Christ and reads the Sermon on the Mount to his comrades-in-arms (yes, the one who hit his first with a counterfeit book on the head to death). From such cosmic shamelessness, even Elizarov’s hands fall, and he allows himself to be filmed in the military council extras at the beginning of the sixth season.
However, the author of the words “Do you remember, brother, how they crushed the scum of the elves?” He will no doubt come to his senses, receive a flail and show the neophyte Tilkienists who the old believers of the left are.
The truth is behind him. There will be no liberal revenge.
The book works.
The movie is not.
“LIBRARIAN”
2023
Dir. Igor Tverdokhlebov. according to the novel
Mikhail Elizarov.
More.tv, Wink, Kinopoisk, REN TV.
