Outside the genre

Recently, a new book by the Kiev writer Alexander Korotko appeared in the bookstores of Ukraine. It is called “Moon Boy”. The preface is entitled not so poetic, but precisely as a matter of fact – “Sleepwalking as a way of preserving oneself”. It was written by the world-famous master of modern prose Andrey Bitov. With separate fragments of this preface we introduce our readers. And also because the book by Alexander Korotko is unusual. It is beyond the genre. So the defined the genre author of the “Lunar Boy” by himself.

“The writer always writes about the past, even if it is the past of the last second, but the” Lunar boy “stands face-to-face with time. It is incredibly difficult, almost impossible, to capture the momentary nature of what is happening on a sheet of paper. Alexander Korotko in “The Lunar Boy” generally neglects many conventions regarding literary devices and rules …

The artistic reality in the “Lunar Boy” is much higher than the material reality. Transformer allows the author and his literary fiction, the lunar boy, who hangs over the abyss of sleep and waits for a saving awakening, to move from beginning to end, without touching the living, sleepless. Undoubtedly, the prose belongs to the poet’s pen …

By the way, man’s prose from a woman’s face is a very rare phenomenon in modern literature and, I must say, curious for the reader. I must say that prose is short and good in words, and in whole phrases, the long breath has not yet completely penetrated, it only lives in the plot, in offscreen meaning, and yet the thing turned out, sleepwalking passed along the edge of the roof and did not fall into the yard. The sexless people in the end gained their outlines and began to speak the language of real heroes, the prefix “sur” disappeared, and reality spilled out – it wanted an experiment on a man.

But it was precisely “sur” that saved, because if the reality is taken seriously, the lunar boy invariably dies in the days of the lunar attraction. He is dissolved in the text, he wanders with his eyes closed, he is a sleepwalker, balancing on the brink of ordered materials, then contract murders, custom-made gifts in the form of deputy editor posts or without ten hundred percent of shares.

The madness of time is transmitted transiently in Korotko’s works, and the mind and consciousness come only through effort on oneself – one must break the dream in order to really wake up. Wake up and stand in front of the Procurator – in front of the editor-in-chief, who personifies destructive and at the same time creative power. And yet it’s scary, when it all depends on you. They rule you, give someone else’s name, bring and take away money, place and position, and only the sleep of the moon saves so much that even the death of a loved one does not shock. And what kind of humanity are we? Madness of the brave we sing a song and die from the fact that we were changed a surname or in the text only one paragraph was removed. In fact, businessmen from the “Lunar Boy”, people in the transition period, want to sleep, love, intrigue, and finally just die, because they all emerged from the sleepy realm of socialism, where they were comfortable, but here it is necessary as a result of long torment, business meetings and “shooters” to sell their business, because the bone is not the same, fragile, with the chrome of stagnation, with the creak of Gogol’s floorboards of old-world landlords, Stolz and Oblomov on the same couch. Money is present in the story as a kind of self-sufficient force, they are the air of those who are successful in business, imposing, intelligent, you do not notice them when they are. But those who do not have them in the subconscious only bear their silence and unpretentiousness. And here they are offered to you. And as if it should be so, because dignity brings money for long-suffering and for what you do from your talent, and not through the efforts of commerce and overwork. The intelligentsia is incapable, and should not play by the rules of those who use it, who wants to privatize her thoughts, feelings, talent, finally – in that case she always loses, her home phones are changed without her knowledge, her job is taken, declare her Bankrupt. As soon as she returns to her social niche and is engaged in her own business, everything immediately becomes in place. Dignity and pride are what we are alive at all times. An intellectual who is successful in dirty commerce is suspicious. In fact, either he is not an intellectual at all, or the businessman of a bad assault has dealt with him in the first fight of conscience with deceit – himself and others. In “The Lunar Boy”, this is perhaps the main thing that in a real work is always on top or inside the context. He is afraid for “human instincts”, which at a certain moment can become more terrible than the animal ones. “We won. We were defeated “- this is the result, the payment for ambitious dreams of a career, so not peculiar to a conscientious individual …

Lately there has been much debate and talk about the loss of literature, about the failure of the modern novel. The works are called commercial, then buker, then written specifically for the format of a thick magazine … All this idle talk. Literature lives by other rules. Freedom and the boundless habitat of a creative person are an indisputable thing. The prose of Alexander Korotko, which is outside the genre, is interesting in this. It refutes all talk about the loss of literature as a civilization, as a culture. “

Author's website Alexander Korotko

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