…и не просто книге, а монографии доктора наук, защищавшейся не где-нибудь, а в Кембридже.
Итак, зовут Doctor of Philosophy Таня Захарченко, работа «Where Currents Meet» вышла в Central European University Press, а вот собственно и сабж:
The frontier of reality and imagination is one of the most visited zones of indistinction in Kharkiv’s doubletake texts. The short story “Snegomash” (2009) by Anton Erkhov (b. 1978), for example, also addresses and challenges the boundary between truth and fiction. Written in the familiar form of relatively polished linear first-person narrative, “Snegomash” is punctuated by italicized pieces of discon-nected prose, presumably either read or written by the protagonist in the process of narration. This protagonist, who sells DVDs for a living and spends his time reading books, observes that characters entering his life appear linked to the fiction he reads. A young woman he dubs Sabrina visits his shop regularly while he works through The Unbear-able Lightness of Being, for instance, and vanishes when he is finished. A small private entrepreneur whose stall in a supermarket is sur-rounded by large marketing signs, he trusts his imagination more than the artificial, consumer-oriented façade of his reality.
It is unclear, however, whether the characters he links to each book are indeed mystically connected to it—it is also possible that he picks them out among the visitors and molds them according to impressions from each text. This subjectivity, or even potential author-ship, is reminiscent of Anton’s dilemma with naming the undead. It is eloquently reflected in the narrator’s casual conclusion as he observes a pair of kids: “They’re fifteen, and this means they live in 1993.” [29] Fifteen is the age Erkhov himself would have been in 1993. This assumption serves to highlight the inseparability of one’s experience from one’s perception of the world. Though an exaggeration, it points to the central role of memory in the ways we choose to process things.
Memory frequently surfaces throughout “Snegomash,” each time in fragments and flashes. A package of milk falls in the shop and becomes a picture from a Soviet magazine: “splashes of milk turn into stars and planets.” Words like detstvo, makulatura, antresoli find their way into an otherwise unrelated account through pure association. A contemporary world map looks just like the one from childhood—except there were “slightly fewer countries” back then. Elsewhere, films from one’s youth emerge: “ten or twenty kopeks per showing.” [30] In light of the all-pervasive character of recollections in this story, the nar-rative’s twist is based on a discussion involving clones [31]. The narrator believes that clones always remain identical, because they share “mem- ories, fears and desires,” while his friend spells out a disagreement: the clones are bound to be affected by “cir-cum-stan-ces” that will render them different sooner or later. At the end, the narrator comes upon a man who has collapsed on the street, and who looks exactly like him.
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29 - Anton Erkhov, “Snegomash,” Soiuz Pisateleĭ 12 (2010): 282.
30 - Erkhov, “Snegomash,” 285.
31 - It is unlikely that Erkhov seeks to draw any cinematographic links here, but Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s film 4 (2004), which follows the abstruse story of four cloned sisters, is a possible parallel.
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