Brief description: the story of how to turn a little man into a little man.
Whenever a non-Russian-language author writes a novel about Russia, you involuntarily get closer. If the author is good and beloved, but in the middle of the novel suddenly ferments lonely balalaika, which is played by Thomas Kinyaev, is always done somehow awkwardly: well, like you reach out to a man's hand, but he responds to you with a song headache.
With Barnes, who wrote a novel about Dmitry Shostakovich, everything is more complicated. Barnes is not just a favorite writer, Barnes is a universally beloved writer, who has tried on and lived out different voices and genres all his creative career, often fitting them with a scalpel on the reader literally alive, but every time doing it somehow technically rounded and flawlessly. That's why, on the one hand, it was possible not to worry too much about Shostakovich and Shostakovich - it was clear that Barnes, who has been listening and loving both Russian and Shostakovich for 50 years, would not have any character named Ana Kuya (real, sorry, chance) in the book, but still it was somehow difficult to hope for a complete writer's hit in Soviet Russia: Though it was the size of an elephant, but as we remember, it was shaking all the time.
And all the more so, we couldn't expect Barnes to write a truly Russian novel. But he wrote it.
Plot.
The novel, or rather the literary biography of Shostakovich, consists of three parts. Each one resembles a huge mental replica bubble, which Barnes screws to Shostakovich in three different periods of his life. In 1936, Shostakovich stands at night at the elevator and waits to be picked up. In 1949, Shostakovich flies from New York, where he had to endure four days in the role of Celebrity. In 1960, Shostakovich joined the party with a snorting sound. At the elevator, in the plane, in the car with the driver stands, flies and rides Shostakovich, dragging his luggage memory and embarrassing thoughts about whether he did not chicken out, survived.
Heroism ancowardice.
The hero, says Barnes of Shostakovich's glass bubble, only needs to be a hero once - and often not for long. Heroes don't live long. But is it possible to call a coward a man whose heroism will lead not only to his death - it would be too easy, but also to the death of all his friends and relatives, or, perhaps worse, to sending them to the camps. Therefore, Shostakovich cowards and lives, does not argue with the authorities, reads speeches and signs papers, rides, flies and waits for death.
"No one is guilty of this and there is nothing to be ashamed of here. You can't be ashamed of the fur of your skin. The night has brought him down. In winter, he was wearing it”.
We all understand, Dmitry Dmitrievich. This is a very simple story, but, as we again understand, it is these stories that are the most difficult to tell: in one fear of a little big man, who by the will of fate survives in uninhabitable circumstances in Barnes's life not only the whole of Soviet Russia in the infirmity of totalitarianism, but also somehow suddenly all that he had previously written - a scalpel - in his other novels. Here, the echo from The Sense of an Ending again resurfaces the disruption and frailty of memory, false memories (whether it was gold love in the pre-revolutionary gold Crimea or it's just a rosemary ersatz remembrance - take it, buddy, and remember), and preparing for the death of a lonely man who hasn't had time to die, and now stands by the elevator and waits to be picked up.
The Sense of an Ending.
It's a good - lived and finished - book, in some places it's even an ideally great book - and I won't touch the reality and accuracy of the events, the compatibility of the text with the true, inner, biography of Shostakovich and Russia, which, however, is sensationally conveyed to the pedantic carefully, without astringent cranberry flavor. But this is, first of all, also a new Barnes, who allowed himself to write a very elaborate, very refined and very personal final novel - without irony, with the smallest amount of literature and on the topic of interest to him. Here Gogol's heroic, all the most uninteresting shades of grey, and the noise of someone else's time, and music, and one story by Maupassant, and a few symphonies and Russian proverbs, and even Shakespearean villains, which fleetingly appear in the novel, and those somehow fade against the background of the article in "The Truth". This is, in general, another not very English novel by Barnes, but there is no Gaulish fever, no ironic boycott "Dicobraza" - this is the novel, which is written in anticipation of the elevator, when of the important things you still have pajamas, tooth powder and memories.
The Noise of Time Barnes dedicated it to his wife.
“And, it turns out, in the end, they won over him. Instead of killing him, they let him live, and leaving him alive, they killed him. Here she is, the final, indestructible irony of his life - leaving him alive, they killed him”.