Description: War Thunder is a next generation military MMO game dedicated to...
Vladimir Sorokin
"Marina's Thirtieth Love"
Behind the high, luxuriously upholstered door, hurried, shuffling steps were finally heard.
Marina sighed, shifting the sleeve of her cloak, looked at her watch. The golden arrows converged on twelve.
The locks crunched on the door for a long time and dully, it opened just enough to let Marina through:
- I'm sorry, kitty. I beg.
Marina entered, the door slammed shut with a slight thud, revealing Valentine's massive figure. Smiling guiltily and condescendingly, he turned the silver head of the lock and pulled Marina towards him with his huge white hands:
- Mille pardons, ma cherie ...
Judging by how long he did not open it and by the faint smell of feces stored in the folds of his dark cherry velvet dressing gown, Marinin's call found him in the dressing room.
They kissed.
- With relief, - Marina grinned, moving away from his broad, thoroughbred face and carefully running her fingernail along the scar on his carefully shaven chin.
“You're just an illegitimate daughter of Pinkerton,” he smiled wider, carefully and authoritatively taking her face into his soft warm hands.
- How did you get there? How is the weather? How do you breathe?
Smiling and looking at him, Marina was silent.
She got there quickly - in a leisurely afternoon, smelling of gasoline and a taxi driver, the weather was March, and it was always hard to breathe in this big dusty apartment.
“You look at me with the eyes of a novice portrait painter,” Valentine said, gently squeezing her cheeks with his huge palms, “Kitty, it’s too late for you to change your profession. Your duty is to identify talents and raise the general musical level of the workers of the famous factory, and not to study the features of the disintegration of the physiognomy of an aging noble offspring.
He approached, shading his face against the false-Empire interior of the hallway, and kissed her again.
He had sensual soft lips, which, combined with extraordinarily skillful hands and a phenomenal penis, turned into a murderous triad based on a white, ageless body, massive and calm, like a block of Carrara marble.
“I wonder if you are ever sad?” Marina asked, placing her bag on the telephone table and unbuttoning her raincoat.
- Only when Menuhin offers me a joint tour.
- What do you dislike so much?
- Vice versa. I regret that my innate egocentrism does not allow me to work in an ensemble.
As soon as Marina coped with the buttons and belt, powerful hands easily took off her cloak.
- And you performed with Rustrap.
- I did not perform, but rehearsed. Worked.
- And they told me - he performed ...
He laughed richly as he hung his cloak on a massive altar-like hanger.
- Nonsense of the Philharmonic riff-raff. If I had agreed to speak then, now I would have a slightly different expression on my face.
- What is it? Marina chuckled, looking into the mirror, green with age.
- There would be fewer longitudinal wrinkles and more transverse ones. Having conquered my self-centeredness, I would look less like a senator exhausted by fear from the days of Caligula. My face would have been dominated by features of Socratic calm and Platonic wisdom.
Marina kicked off her boots and straightened her hair that had fallen over her shoulders in front of the mirror:
“God, so many extra words…
Valentin hugged her from behind, carefully covering her breasts, beautifully outlined under the sweater, with the shovel of his palms:
- Well, it's understandable, it's understandable. Silentium. Didn't you, Apsara, whisper this pearl to the decrepit Tyutchev?
- What? Marina grimaced, smiling.
– Thought spoken is a lie.
“Maybe,” she sighed, placing her seemingly tiny palms on his, “Listen, how tall are you?”
- And what? He shifted his gaze into the mirror.
He was two heads taller than her.
- Just.
“A ruble ninety-three, my love,” Valentine kissed her on the neck and she saw his balding head.
Turning to him, Marina held out her hands. They kissed.
Valentine drew her to him, hugged her and lifted her up like a feather:
- Feed you, kitten?
“After…” she muttered, feeling the intoxicating power of his hands.
He picked her up and carried her down the long corridor to the bedroom.
Hugging his neck, Marina looked up.
A monstrous hybrid of darkened bronze and crystal floated overhead, almost hitting it, a white ceiling stretched out, then bamboo curtains crackled, hiding the twilight.
Valentine carefully lowered Marina onto the dismantled double bed.
- Kitten...
The dull green curtains were lowered, and the pale March light filtered into the bedroom through a narrow gap.
Lying on her back and unzipping her trousers, Marina looked at another copper-crystal monster looming menacingly over the bed. It was smaller, but more impressive than the first.
Valentine sat down next to her, helping her take off her pants:
- Adriatic lizard. Weren't you petrified then under the schizoid gaze of the Gorgon?
Marina smiled silently. She didn't know how to joke in the bedroom.
Huge hands ripped off her sweater and tights with panties in an instant.
Valentin got up, his dressing gown parted, covering half the room, and silently fell down onto the thick Persian carpet.
The bed creaked painfully, white arms wrapped around Marina's swarthy body.
Valentin had a broad, hairless chest with large, almost feminine nipples, with a two-kopeck mole near his barely visible left collarbone.
- Kitten...
His lips, predatory parting his hair, slowly absorbed Marina's earlobe, the powerful hand of the sculptor passed over his chest, stomach and covered his groin.
Her knees trembled and parted, missing this hand, exuding power and bliss.
A minute later, Valentin was already lying on his back, and Marina, standing on all fours, slowly sat down on his cock, hard, long and thick, like a souvenir Estonian candle for three ninety.
“Venus Swaying… charm… it was you who tempted St. Anthony…”
He joked, trying to smile, but from that moment on his face began to disastrously lose its thoroughbredness.
Marina looked at him eagerly. Shaded by the twilight of the bedroom, it blurred, rounded, spreading out on the fresh Arabian sheet.
When Marina sank down and their pubic bones met, an expression of complete helplessness descended on Valentine’s face, sensual lips became simply puffy, his eyes became round, his blue-shaven cheeks turned red, and a fat boy, the same one that hangs in a cracked wooden frame in the living room, looked at Marina trustingly over a huge concert grand piano.
After waiting a moment, Marina began to move, resting her hands on her swarthy thighs.
Vladimir Sorokin
Marina's thirtieth love
...for Love, my friend,Like the Holy Spirit
Lives and breathes where he wants.
Michel Montaigne, from a private conversation
Behind the high, luxuriously upholstered door, hurried, shuffling steps were finally heard.
Marina sighed, shifting the sleeve of her cloak, looked at her watch. The golden arrows converged on twelve.
The locks crunched on the door for a long time and dully, it opened just enough to let Marina through:
- I'm sorry, kitty. I beg.
Marina entered, the door slammed shut with a slight thud, revealing Valentine's massive figure. Smiling guiltily and condescendingly, he turned the silver head of the lock and pulled Marina towards him with his huge white hands:
- Mille pardons, ma cherie ...
Judging by how long he did not open it and by the faint smell of feces stored in the folds of his dark cherry velvet dressing gown, Marinin's call found him in the dressing room.
They kissed.
- With relief, - Marina grinned, pulling away from his broad thoroughbred face and carefully running her fingernail along the scar on his carefully shaven chin.
"You're just an illegitimate daughter of Pinkerton," he smiled wider, carefully and authoritatively taking her face into his soft warm palms.
- How did you get there? How is the weather? How do you breathe?
Smiling and looking at him, Marina was silent.
She got there quickly - in a leisurely afternoon, smelling of gasoline and a taxi driver, the weather was March, and it was always hard to breathe in this big dusty apartment.
- You look at me with the eyes of a beginner portraitist, - Valentine said, gently squeezing her cheeks with his huge palms, - Kotik, it's too late for you to change your profession. Your duty is to identify talents and raise the general musical level of the workers of the famous factory, and not to study the features of the disintegration of the physiognomy of an aging noble offspring.
He approached, shading his face against the false-Empire interior of the hallway, and kissed her again.
He had sensual soft lips, which, combined with extraordinarily skillful hands and a phenomenal penis, turned into a murderous triad based on a white, ageless body, massive and calm, like a block of Carrara marble.
- I wonder if you are ever sad? Marina asked, placing her bag on the telephone table and unbuttoning her raincoat.
- Only when Menuhin offers me a joint tour.
- What do you dislike so much?
- Vice versa. I regret that my innate egocentrism does not allow me to work in an ensemble.
As soon as Marina coped with the buttons and belt, powerful hands easily took off her cloak.
- And you performed with Rustrap.
- I did not perform, but rehearsed. Worked.
- And they told me - performed ...
He laughed richly as he hung his cloak on a massive altar-like hanger.
- Nonsense of the Philharmonic riff-raff. If I had agreed to speak then, now I would have a slightly different expression on my face.
- What is it? - Marina chuckled, looking into the mirror, green with age.
- There would be fewer longitudinal wrinkles and more transverse ones. Having conquered my self-centeredness, I would look less like a senator exhausted by fear from the time of Caligula. My face would have been dominated by features of Socratic calm and Platonic wisdom.
Marina kicked off her boots and straightened her hair that had fallen over her shoulders in front of the mirror:
- Lord, so many extra words...
Valentin hugged her from behind, carefully covering her breasts, beautifully outlined under the sweater, with the shovel of his palms:
- Well, it's understandable, it's understandable. Silentium. Didn't you, Apsara, whisper this pearl to the decrepit Tyutchev?
- What? Marina grimaced, smiling.
- Thought spoken is a lie.
“Maybe,” she sighed, placing her seemingly tiny palms on his, “Listen, how tall are you?”
- And what? He shifted his gaze into the mirror.
He was two heads taller than her.
- Just.
- Ruble ninety-three, my love, - Valentine kissed her on the neck and she saw his balding head.
Turning to him, Marina held out her hands. They kissed.
Valentine drew her to him, hugged her and lifted her up like a feather:
- Feed you, kitten?
- After ... - she muttered, feeling the intoxicating power of his hands.
He picked her up and carried her down the long corridor to the bedroom.
Hugging his neck, Marina looked up.
A monstrous hybrid of darkened bronze and crystal floated overhead, almost hitting it, a white ceiling stretched out, then bamboo curtains crackled, hiding the twilight.
Valentine carefully lowered Marina onto the dismantled double bed.
- Kitten...
The dull green curtains were lowered, and the pale March light filtered into the bedroom through a narrow gap.
Lying on her back and unzipping her trousers, Marina looked at another copper-crystal monster looming menacingly over the bed. It was smaller, but more impressive than the first.
Valentine sat down next to her, helping her take off her pants:
- Adriatic lizard. Weren't you petrified then under the schizoid gaze of the Gorgon?
Marina smiled silently. She didn't know how to joke in the bedroom.
Huge hands ripped off her sweater and tights with panties in an instant.
Valentin got up, his dressing gown parted, covering half the room, and silently fell down onto the thick Persian carpet.
The bed creaked painfully, white arms wrapped around Marina's swarthy body.
Valentin had a broad, hairless chest with large, almost feminine nipples, with a two-kopeck mole near his barely visible left collarbone.
- Kitten...
His lips, predatory parting his hair, slowly absorbed Marina's earlobe, the powerful hand of the sculptor passed over his chest, stomach and covered his groin.
Her knees trembled and parted, missing this hand, exuding power and bliss.
A minute later, Valentin was already lying on his back, and Marina, standing on all fours, slowly sat down on his cock, hard, long and thick, like a souvenir Estonian candle for three ninety.
- Venus Swaying ... charm ... it was you who tempted St. Anthony ...
He joked, trying to smile, but from that moment on his face began to disastrously lose its thoroughbredness.
Marina looked at him eagerly. Shaded by the twilight of the bedroom, it blurred, rounded, spreading out on the fresh Arabian sheet.
When Marina sank down and their pubic bones met, an expression of complete helplessness descended on Valentine’s face, sensual lips became simply puffy, his eyes became round, his blue-shaven cheeks turned red, and a fat boy, the same one that hangs in a cracked wooden frame in the living room, looked at Marina trustingly over a huge concert grand piano.
After waiting a moment, Marina began to move, resting her hands on her swarthy thighs.
Valentin lay silently, wandering over her with an insane gaze, his arms stretched out along his body, moving helplessly.
Directly above the bed, against the greenish-gold background of antique wallpaper, which kept a vague erotic overtone in its bucolic patterns, hung in a deep gray frame a study of a late Falk model. A faceless woman, skilfully sculpted in a gray-blue background, sat on something pale brown and soft, straightening her thick hair with her fingerless hands.
Moving rhythmically, Marina looked from her smooth figure to Valentine's sprawling body, for the hundredth time making sure of the amazing similarity of lines.
Both of them were helpless - a woman in front of the master's brush, a man
- in front of a swarthy moving body, which so easily and gracefully sways above him in the semi-darkness of the bedroom.
Marina impetuously hugged him, pressing her lips to the brown nipple and began to move more sharply.
Valentine groaned, hugged her head.
- My charm ... sweetness ... girl ...
His face was completely rounded, his eyes half closed, he was breathing heavily.
Marina liked to kiss and nibble on his nipples, feeling the helpless pink lump shudder under her.
Marina's soft rounded breasts touched his belly, she felt how much cooler they were than Valentine's body.
His hands suddenly came to life, closed behind her back. He groaned, making an awkward attempt to help her move, but no amount of force seemed to be able to tear this colossus from the bed. Realizing his desire. Marina began to move faster.
The clock in the living room resoundingly struck half past one.
In the heavy breathing of Valentine, a trembling more clearly appeared, he groaned, muttering something, clutching Marina to him.
It was more difficult to move in his Herculean embrace, his breasts flattened, his lips covered smooth skin with impetuous kisses, chestnut hair curled into rings trembled on swarthy shoulders.
He squeezed her tighter.
It became difficult for her to breathe.
- Honey ... do not crush me ..., - she whispered into a round, overgrown with barely noticeable hairs nipple.
He unclenched his hands, but they no longer lay on the sheet - they began convulsively touching two mated bodies, stroking Marina's hair, touching her knees.
His breathing became disordered, hoarse, he shuddered at every movement of Marina.
Soon the trembling completely took possession of him. Marina watched his face intently.
Suddenly it turned white, merging with the sheet. Marina quickly got up, disengaging, which made her vagina juicy smack. Jumping off Valentine and leaning over, she squeezed his huge cock with her hand, catching the burgundy head with her lips.
- Ahhh…. - Valentine, frozen for a moment, groaned, his pillar-like legs painfully bent at the knees.
Marina barely had time to squeeze one of the ostrich eggs of a huge scrotum, which had grown limp and crept up, when thick sperm pushed into her mouth.
Rhythmically squeezing the cock, Marina dug her lips into the head, greedily swallowing the arriving tasty liquid.
Deathly pale, Valentine thrashed languidly on the sheet, silently opening his mouth like a sea animal thrown ashore.
- Aaaaa ... my death ... Marinochka ... odalisochka ... stronger ... stronger ...
She squeezed the springing hot wand, feeling how it pulsed, releasing sacral portions.
- Oooooh... deathlike... death... you are lovely... kitty...
After a moment, he raised himself on his elbows, and Marina, having licked the last cloudy drops from the burgundy lemon, blissfully stretched out on a cool sheet.
- Stunning ... - Valentine muttered, looking at his penis lying on his stomach and reaching to the navel.
- Satisfied ... - Marina asked in the affirmative, kissing him on an absolutely gray temple.
“You are a professional hetaira, I already said that,” he breathed out wearily and, leaning back, covered her with a heavy hand, “Beati possidentes…
His face turned pink, his lips again became haughty and sensual.
Marina lay pressed against his heaving chest, watching the dark red flower wither on his marble belly.
"Roland's sword," Valentine chuckled, noticing where she was looking. - And you are my faithful scabbard. Marina absentmindedly stroked his hand.
- I'm not alone. He must have had hundreds of scabbards.
-Il est possible. On ne peux passe passer de cela…
Still, he's huge...
- Je remercie dieu...
- You didn't measure it tense?
-Il ya longtemps. Au temps de ma jeunesse folle…
- Listen, speak Russian!
- Twenty-eight centimeters.
- Amazing...
Marina touched the wet, shiny tip with her little finger, removing a sticky transparent drop from it.
Somewhere in the depths Valentine came to life on a short time muted oboe. Valentine loudly let out gases:
- Pardon...
- Ham ... - Marina laughed softly, moving a strand that had fallen on her face.
- L "homme est faible ...
- It's not clear who you're talking about?
- For history.
Marina got up with a sigh and stretched:
Let me eat something...
- Wait a minute. Lie down.
He slapped her softly on the back.
Marina went to bed.
Valentine stroked her hair and kissed her swarthy shoulder with a speck of grafting:
- Tired, my angel?
- From your stupid French.
- Stupid - in the sense of bad?
- The fact is that I do not know any - neither good nor bad. You know this very well. What kind of snobbery is this...
He laughed softly, leaning over her on his elbow.
- So I am an old, not finished off snob in time!
Marina touched the scar on his chin again.
- An incorrigible person.
- Absolutely.
He stroked her hair. For several minutes they lay in silence. Then Valentine sat down, held out his hand, groped for cigarettes on a short Indian bedside table:
- Kitten, have you really never had an orgasm with a man?
- Never.
He nodded, screwing a cigarette into a white bone holder.
- And he forgot about me, - Marina said quietly, playing something with her fingers on his shoulder.
- Pardon, honey. Bachelor habits... please...
Bumping, cigarettes climbed out of the pack.
Marina pulled one out. The gas lighter clicked, throwing out an excessively long blue tongue. Lighted up.
Marina got up, puffing greedily, walked across the carpet and looked at the picture again. The blurry woman was still fixing her hair.
Sitting, Valentin picked up his dressing gown, put it on and with difficulty pulled himself away from the bed.
- A cozy corner, - Marina shrugged her shoulders in a chilly way.
- Honey, right? muttered Valentine, clenching the mouthpiece between his teeth and tying a silk belt with tassels.
- Yes…
She bent down and began to collect her scattered linen.
Valentine gently touched her shoulder and, exhaling copious amounts of smoke, floated out of the bedroom:
- Let's go to dinner.
Shaking off a grayish cylinder of ash into the mother-of-pearl shell, Marina pulled on her sweater, squinting at herself in the oblong dressing table, and began to pull on her panties.
In the spacious kitchen Valentine was heard singing Delilah's aria.
Marina took her hair out of the wide collar of her sweater and ran barefoot into the kitchen.
In the hallway, she kicked up her slightly mud-splattered boot:
- Hey-ho!
Valentine, digging in the bowels of the two-story Rosenlef, looked around:
- Charming ... you know ..., - he took out a mouthpiece for a minute and spoke quickly, with his other hand pressing a bunch of taken out products to his velvet chest,
- You now look like a Roman from the time of the fall of the empire. Her family was slaughtered, her house was destroyed. I lived with a hairy barbarian for a week. He gave her his goat's jacket. So she ran in it over the shattered slabs of the Eternal City. How, huh?
- Quite. It's time for you to go to Tacitus.
- Yah. I don't want to go to Tacitus. I would go to Suetonia, let them teach me ...
With small steps, he reached the wide table and leaned sharply. Products fell dully on the table. The bone mouthpiece rattled against the teeth again.
- Suetonii is more accurate than all of them. Nowhere does life create two better seggetaga. Or wow. Sit down.
Marina sank into a creaky Viennese chair, unwrapped a yellow pyramid of cheese, and began cutting it with a heavy silver knife.
Having finished smoking, Valentin threw the cigarette into the sink, blew the mouthpiece with a whistle and put it into the pocket of his dressing gown:
- It would be necessary to corrugate it, in a good way ...
- You'll get over. Cut the sausage better.
- Well, cherie, what a jargon ...
- What knives are good.
- Still would. My dead grandfather.
What, they shot him?
- Yes. At twenty-six.
- Poor thing.
Marina laid out the leaves of cheese on a plate.
Valentin cracked the skin off the sausage and began skillfully plaiting it into thin slices.
- The chef of the Metropol will envy you, - Marina grinned, opening the rosette with caviar, - Still single life teaches a lot.
- Of course, - oblong ovals laid down on the plank.
- Listen, why doesn't your housekeeper cook for you?
Why isn't he cooking? Trains.
- And now?
“It’s not every day that she hangs around here ...
- When does she come?
- In the evening.
- Well, of course you already have it, right?
- It was the case, kitten, it was ...
- Well?
- Not interested. Notorious Soviet individual.
- Frigidna, or what?
- No, that's not the point. She squealed with delight. She fought like a beluga under me. I'm talking about something else.
- Wild?
- Absolutely. About the blowjob for the first time heard from me. Forty-eight years old woman.
- Well, you could enlighten me.
- Bunny, I don't know how to be a mentor. Nothing.
- I know…
Marina helped him place the sausage on a plate.
Valentin lit the burner, put a tall saucepan on it with a roar:
- Borscht, however, cooks brilliantly. This is what I keep.
Was she really good with you?
- With me? Kitty, only you have a pathological muzhefobka. By the way, that's why I like you.
- Yes, who do you, pray tell, do not like?! Ready from the first meeting.
- Correctly. I, dear, like my friend Karamazov. A woman is worthy of passion just because she is a woman.
How many more do you have...
- We'll try.
- Me too...
- Listen, cherie, some bacilli of aggressiveness are felt in you today. Is this the influence of your exalted mistress?
- Who do you mean?
- Well, this one ... which neither plays nor sings and does not lead with a black-voiced bow.
“We broke up with her a long time ago,” Marina muttered, chewing on a piece of sausage.
- That's how. And who do you have now?
- What about you...
- Well, kitty, calm down.
- And I'm calm ...
Valentin opened the refrigerator again, took out the opened bottle of champagne, took the glasses from the shelf:
- For lack of Aya.
- I haven't drank champagne for a hundred years.
- Here. Have a drink and calm down.
Weakly foaming, the wine poured into the glasses.
Marina took hers, looked at the bubbles flowing from the bottom:
- I, Valechka, now have love. Huge.
- This is wonderful, - Valentine said seriously, sipping wine.
- Yes. It's fine.
Marina drank.
- And who is she?
- Young woman.
- Younger than you?
- For five years.
“Wonderful.” With graceful silence, he set down the empty glass, removed the lid from the crystal rosette full of black caviar, and with a wide knife picked up a third of the contents.
- Yes. This is amazing, - Marina whispered, running her fingernail over the tablecloth.
Valentin placed caviar in a thick layer on a slice of bread:
- Good-looking?
- Charm.
- Character?
- Impulsive.
- Sanguine?
-Yes.
- Do you tend to meditate?
-Yes.
- Sensual?
- Highly.
- Wounded?
- Like a child.
- Likes hot?
- Like fire.
How is it with our brother?
- Hates.
- Wait, but it's your copy!
- And there is. For the first time I saw myself in her.
Valentin nodded, bit off half of the sandwich and filled the glasses.
Marina absentmindedly licked the caviar off the bread, staring at the golden bubbles.
- I envy you, baby, - he muttered, chewing and raising his glass, - Cheers. Champagne has already reeked of warmth and laziness in the Marina. She took a sip, raised the glass to her eyes and looked through the iridescent golden hues of the wine at the calmly drinking Valentine.
- All my life I dreamed of falling in love with someone, - he muttered, drinking a destroyed sandwich, - Madly in love. To suffer, to cry from passion, to turn gray from jealousy.
- And what?
- As you see. I can’t understand one thing: either we can’t realize this feeling in our Soviet conditions, or simply I didn’t meet the person I needed.
- Or maybe you just sprayed on many and that's it?
- Not sure. Right here, - he gently touched his chest with his fingertips, - There is something untouched. Nobody has ever touched this. Taboo zone for vulgarity and debauchery. And the charge is powerful. But not discrete. Immediately consumed, like ball lightning.
- God bless you to meet this woman.
- Come on, Chance.
- God bless.
- For you - God, for me - Chance.
- Your business. Borscht is in full swing...
- Ahhh… yes, yes…
He shifted, trying to get up, but then changed his mind:
- Kitten, spill it. You're doing better.
Marina padded over to the stove, took two deep plates out of the dryer and began pouring steaming borscht into them.
- And you understand what, in fact, the whole crime - I can not fall in love, no matter how hard I try. And I sincerely want to.
- So you don't want to.
- I want it, I definitely want it! You will say - love is a sacrifice first of all, and this old snob is not capable of sacrifice. Capable! I'm ready to give everything, squander and burn everything, just to love someone for real! That's why I envy you so much. I sincerely envy!
Marina put a full plate in front of him.
Valentine removed the lid from the white jar, scooped up sour cream with a spoon:
- But you were born on Sunday.
- Yes. On Sunday, - Marina carefully carried her plate.
- Exactly…
His spoon began to evenly mix sour cream with borscht. Marina sat down, crossed herself, broke off some bread and greedily pounced on the borscht.
- Put sour cream, kitten, - Valentine said quietly and bent over the plate for a long time.
Borscht was eaten in silence. Valentine lazily pushed his empty plate away. His square face turned very pink, as if a piece of borscht had entered under the well-groomed skin:
- And there is nothing more ... hmm ...
- I think it's enough, - Marina answered, hanging a dill stalk on the edge of the plate.
- Well, it's wonderful, - he nodded, taking a mouthpiece from his robe.
- For this borscht, your woman can be forgiven for not knowing a blowjob ...
- Definitely...
Soon they moved into a spacious living room.
Marina climbed with her feet into a huge leather armchair, Valentine sank heavily onto the sofa.
“Now you’re a spitting image of an odalisque,” he muttered, letting out a short puff of smoke through his lips, “Matisse painted like that.” True, she was in striped shalwars. And the top is bare. And you have the opposite.
Marina nodded, dragging on her cigarette.
He looked at her intently, running his tongue over her gums, which made his lips bulge in a flickering mound:
It's strange though...
- What's strange?
- Lesbian passion. Astonishing... something of the madness of poor Narcissus. After all, in principle, you do not love someone else's body, but your own in someone else's ...
- Not true.
- Why?
- You will not understand anyway. A woman will never get tired of a woman like a man. We wake up in the morning even more sensual than in the evening. And your brother looks like an unnecessary bedding, although in the evening he moaned with passion ...
Valentin paused, nervously biting the mouthpiece, then, stretching lazily, cracked his fingers loudly:
- Well. Maybe…
The ash fell into one of the folds of his robe. Marina looked at the fat boy in the cracked frame. Smiling shyly, he gave her an innocent look. A huge bow under a plump chin has spread into a beautiful blot. The gray pre-war air thickened in the dimples on his cheeks.
“Valya, play something,” Marina said softly.
- What? He looked inquiringly and wearily.
“Well… what are you working on?”
- Over Cage. "Prepared piano".
- Don't be a fool.
- You better play.
- I'm unprofessional.
- Well, play without octaves. So that your fragmented fifth does not suffer.
- Yes, what do I ... it makes no sense ...
Play it, play it I want to listen.
- Well, if only by the notes ...
- Find it there.
Marina got down from her chair and went over to a huge, wall-to-wall closet. Its bottom was filled with notes.
- And where is Chopin with you?
- There somewhere on the left ... What do you need?
- Nocturnes.
- Exactly. Play nocturnes.
Marina with difficulty pulled out a tattered yellow notebook and went over to the piano. Valentin quickly got up, opened the lid and secured it with a prop. Sinking down on a shabby plush chair, Marina raised the music stand, opened the sheet music, and flipped through:
- So…
Touching her bare foot to the cold pedal, she sighed, freeing her shoulders from stiffness and lowered her hand to the keyboard. The black, polish-smelling Bluthner responded softly and attentively. In obedience to the habitual pliability of the yellowed keys, Marina played the two measures of the introduction a little impetuously and loudly, forcing Valentine to sigh voluminously.
There was a bright, dreary melody on the right, and the bass obediently moved back, sounded more velvety.
Yesterday she played this nocturne on the monstrous piano of the factory recreation center, a miserable short stump with a brass LYRA plaque, an incredibly tight pedal and desperately rattling keys. This crazy bottled Chopin still sounded in her head, intertwined with the new - pure, strict and lively.
Valentin listened, biting the mouthpiece, his eyes peering attentively through the piano. The repetitive arpeggio of the bass began to rise and soon merged with the painfully fluttering theme, octaves began, and the stiff fifth finger gave way to the fourth.
Valentine silently nodded his head. Crescendo turned into an impetuous forte, Marina's nails scratched the keys almost audibly.
Valentin got up and gracefully turned the page, tattered like the wing of a lemongrass exhausted by a child.
The nocturne began to fade away, Marina slightly touched the left pedal, lost her way, groaned, winced, and nervously finished.
Gently placing his hand on her shoulder, Valentine took the mouthpiece out of his mouth:
- Pretty, pretty, honey.
She laughed, shaking her hair and sighed sadly, lowering her head.
- No seriously. - he turned, threw an unextinguished cigarette butt into the ashtray, - you feel Chopin's nerve acutely. Feel.
- Thanks.
“Just don’t fall from feelings into sensitivity, always know the edge for sure. Now most don't know. Either academicism, dry typing, or snot and slur. Chopin, dear Marina, is above all a salon person. You have to play it smartly. Horowitz said that when playing Chopin, he always feels his hands in the cuffs of that time. Do you know what cuffs were then?
Behind the high, luxuriously upholstered door, hurried, shuffling steps were finally heard.
Marina sighed, shifting the sleeve of her cloak, looked at her watch. The golden arrows converged on twelve.
The locks crunched on the door for a long time and dully, it opened just enough to let Marina through:
Sorry kitty. I beg.
Marina entered, the door slammed shut with a slight thud, revealing Valentine's massive figure. Smiling guiltily and condescendingly, he turned the silver head of the lock and pulled Marina towards him with his huge white hands:
Mille pardons, ma cherie…
Judging by how long he did not open it and by the faint smell of feces stored in the folds of his dark cherry velvet dressing gown, Marinin's call found him in the dressing room.
They kissed.
With relief for you, - Marina grinned, moving away from his broad thoroughbred face and carefully running her fingernail along the scar on his carefully shaven chin.
You're just an illegitimate daughter of Pinkerton, - he smiled wider, carefully and authoritatively taking her face into his soft warm palms.
How did you get there? How is the weather? How do you breathe?
Smiling and looking at him, Marina was silent.
She got there quickly - in a leisurely afternoon, smelling of gasoline and a taxi driver, the weather was March, and it was always hard to breathe in this big dusty apartment.
You look at me with the eyes of a beginner portrait painter, - Valentine said, gently squeezing her cheeks with his huge palms, - Kotik, it's too late for you to change your profession. Your duty is to identify talents and raise the general musical level of the workers of the famous factory, and not to study the features of the disintegration of the physiognomy of an aging noble offspring.
He approached, shading his face against the false-Empire interior of the hallway, and kissed her again.
He had sensual soft lips, which, combined with extraordinarily skillful hands and a phenomenal penis, turned into a murderous triad based on a white, ageless body, massive and calm, like a block of Carrara marble.
I wonder if you are ever sad? Marina asked, placing her bag on the telephone table and unbuttoning her raincoat.
Only when Menuhin offers me a joint tour.
What do you dislike so much?
Vice versa. I regret that my innate egocentrism does not allow me to work in an ensemble.
As soon as Marina coped with the buttons and belt, powerful hands easily took off her cloak.
And you performed with Rustrap.
Not performing, but rehearsing. Worked.
And they told me - performed ...
He laughed richly as he hung his cloak on a massive altar-like hanger.
The nonsense of the Philharmonic riff-raff. If I had agreed to speak then, now I would have a slightly different expression on my face.
What is it? - Marina chuckled, looking into the mirror, green with age.
There would be fewer longitudinal wrinkles and more transverse ones. Having conquered my self-centeredness, I would look less like a senator exhausted by fear from the days of Caligula. My face would have been dominated by features of Socratic calm and Platonic wisdom.
Marina kicked off her boots and straightened her hair that had fallen over her shoulders in front of the mirror:
God, so many extra words...
Valentin hugged her from behind, carefully covering her breasts, beautifully outlined under the sweater, with the shovel of his palms:
Well, it's understandable, it's understandable. Silentium. Didn't you, Apsara, whisper this pearl to the decrepit Tyutchev?
What? Marina grimaced, smiling.
Thought spoken is a lie.
And yet, I give a rating of 10, although when I started reading this novel, I thought that the rating would be much lower. Now I will try to explain why there was such a jump.
Quite familiar are works and plots in which a member of the Komsomol (or a communist) suddenly regained his sight and became a dissident - a human rights activist - a hippie, etc. Here it's the other way around. A lesbian, a lover of drinking and smoking, a woman who keeps forbidden literature at home, a woman who makes acquaintances with dissident foreigners and informals, suddenly suddenly begins to see clearly. All old acquaintances are sent to hell, dissident literature flies into the fire, and the “seeing sight” lady ends up at the factory. Now she is not a music teacher, not a "rotten intelligentsia." Now it is the hegemon, the proletariat. Immediately, she becomes a leader....
At first glance, it's a superb work. But this is only at first glance. Soon the reader sees that Marina's entire environment is cardboard and artificial. That they all talk not like people, but like news releases and Pravda editorials. And because of this, the improbability of such a transformation immediately becomes clear, all the falsity of the environment of the heroine of the novel is immediately visible.
Sorokin managed to create a very anti-Soviet work that has the form of a pro-Soviet one. What an incredible thing he did. Such is the "turnover". The result is 10 points.
Score: 10
I was warned that in this novel I would see all the taboo topics laid out in plain text, so I knew what I was getting into. I was promised a shock, a break in the template, and, in general, the devil in a mortar. There is nothing like it, there are miserable attempts at outrageousness, which thirty years ago, perhaps, shocked someone, but today cause only a feeling of slight disgust. First scene with detailed description one-to-one copulation is reminiscent of porn movies that were only available to underground party-goers in the mid-eighties. Mr. Sorokin has seen enough of the forbidden and diligently describes, not noticing that his attempts are very reminiscent of the writings that could sometimes be seen on the walls of public toilets. Nowadays, rock literature is a thing of the past and completely forgotten. I suppose the same is true for Sorokin's writings.
But enough about pornography. Highbrow criticism of the times of unbridled perestroika characterized Sorokin as a brilliant stylist who said a new word in Russian literature. I already had to analyze Sorokin's pathetic writings in The Day of the Oprichnik, but there the author tried to play on a foreign field and showed himself completely helpless. But here he is in his element, and, it seems, he must show the qualities of an unsurpassed stylist. However, we see sad tracing papers from English, although the first thing to do is to cross out possessive pronouns in any literary courses. The text swells due to a huge number of infinitely long dialogues, consisting mainly of monosyllabic words that do not carry any information. They do not work either for the plot, or for the entourage, or for the image of the characters, but simply wind up the volume. The movement of the plot also goes in the most bastard way. So, when Marina was seven or eight years old, her father took her virginity. So, what is next? Then he needs to either somehow make amends for his act, or start cohabiting with a young daughter. Both require a fair amount of dexterity from the writer when describing, since it will always be unreliable. But Sorokin chooses the most graphomaniac solution: if you don't know what to do with an inconvenient character, kill him. Papanya immediately drowns, and the plot continues to wind up in the direction pleasing to the graphomaniac author.
We are given the story of Marina's pedophilia, lesbianism and prostitution, serving high-ranking old men. So it seems like Sorokin sits and thinks hard about what else to do with his heroine. And he finds: "More than anything in the world, Marina hated Soviet power." Is this also a sexual perversion? Not all of the dissidents were lesbians, and vice versa. However, here, too, Sorokin failed to say anything sensible, except that he gave out a wonderful phrase that the cops "shot at Lincoln, burned Copernicus, hanged Pestel." Lincoln was indeed shot, Pestel hanged, but what does Copernicus do in this series, whose life path was extremely successful? If Sorokin wanted to make fun of Marina's illiteracy, he could do it many times in the vastness of the novel, but everywhere and everywhere Marina is shown as an intelligent girl and a good specialist. So, personally Sorokinsky's blunder.
Marinino's dissidence was limited to chatter and forbidden literature. And who at that time did not chat and did not keep forbidden things at home? I, over there, retyped “Ugly Swans” on a state-owned typewriter, but I wasn’t a dissident. In this part of the novel, the volume is also wound up with abrupt dialogues about nothing. It is not surprising that dissidence is very quickly replaced by sadomasochic copulations. In these descriptions, Mr. Sorokin in all its glory demonstrates another graphomaniac trick: meaningful words write in capital letters, or even in large text. Perhaps the pure genius of Sorokin lies in the fact that he alternately demonstrates all types of graphomania?
What else did not look like? Oh yes, currency prostitution. But this is long outdated, no one is interested and no one shocks.
And, finally, the anecdotal ending, which could cause only one reaction in the then reader: is he a fool, or what? The modern reader, who knows nothing about those times, may take the last chapters for especially refined banter. I have the impression that the entire presented text is addressed to the Western reader: they say, look, and we are not alien to outrageousness, but this is how those who, due to a misunderstanding, are considered people, live here. This is not even an anti-Soviet craft, or rather, a craft and even anti-Soviet, but not Russian. A little foam and mediocre agitation. Even the dissident movement, which had many worthy people, Sorokin managed to crap. In principle, a similar attitude to everything in the world, in line with the emerging postmodernism at that time. But after all, postmodernism must be written with talent.
Now the question arises: how to evaluate this opus, what mark to give it? It would seem that an undoubted unit, but the fact is that Mr. Sorokin expected that he would be assessed extremely negatively, he would only be happy with a unit (unless, of course, he pays attention to my review). Well, I'll close my eyes to the porn and put up an offensive five. Dullness is dullness and it should be assessed mediocrely.
Score: 5
1983, snow-covered Moscow, where thirty-year-old Marina runs, wanders and dissects on bombillas, a handsome teacher of phono from the Palace of Culture, a lucky loser and a sexual stakhanovka with psychotrauma all over her body. She hates the Soviet government, from which she squeamishly accepts gifts and orders with sausage, does not like men whom she pleases as best she can (purely out of respect), beats the faces of girls whom she seems to sincerely love, and at times breaks into hysterics, binge and brawl from understanding that life seems to have passed, and true love so it won't. But love comes - from the most hated lair. And the sun rises, blazing with kumach and labor corns.
I didn’t read Sorokin from the word “in general” and would not have read further - at one time I poked my head into Blue Fat and immediately ran away without intending to return. But personal necessity forced me to hit the study of the domestic hoodlit, describing the years 1983-84. The need, fortunately, quickly disappeared, but I did read one book - this one.
The annotation states that "Marina's Thirtieth Love" is one of the author's first texts, published a quarter of a century after it was written. early birth explains a lot. The story is divided into three parts (more precisely, into four, but this cannot be explained without a spoiler, so I will not). The first and second parts look like a not very diligent translation of a very diligent English text about life, hell and lead abominations of a distant scoop. In the vocabulary, there are too many “took with my own hands” and other Germanic cripples, and the plot, characters and degree of understanding of reality are monstrously reminiscent of books about the USSR written by non-Soviet people - the Moscow chapters of Le Carré's Russia House, for example.
The third part is designed in the style of an extremely mocking Sotsart, which, as I understand it, glorified the author - although I was more reminded of a ponderous to boring imitation of the early Pelevin. I understand that Sorokin was before, I pay tribute to his wit, fearlessness and ability not to complete a cleverly stuck-on code, turning it from a cute trifle into a monster in itself (the value of the feat is added by the inaccessibility of copy-paste during the described period). And I liked the story in general.
Score: 7
Vladimir Sorokin has an impeccable ear for music. Sorokin hears exactly what sounds, and reproduces what he hears in an extremely adequate form.
I read this novel when it was published, in 1995, but the music of 1983 sounds with phonographic accuracy from its pages. That's how they talked, lied, joked, walked, ate, fought that way back then, in the early 80s. And on top of real reality, Sorokin throws a literary veil: such stories with continuation were published in 1983 by the magazines Moscow, Our Contemporary, Ogonyok, Rabotnitsa and Kolkhoz Woman. Even the clumsy pornographic descriptions from the first chapters - you know what that is? - a parody of the corresponding episodes of the novels by Vilya Lipatov and Anatoly Kalinin. Here is this obliteration, the clumsiness of pseudo-Nabokov's pompous periods - from late Soviet, very, very Soviet literature.
The exquisite combination of reality (in replicas) and literary (in characters and situations) warps like precious brocade. Throughout the novel, all reality, without a trace, is devoured by literature, which, in turn, gives way to a faceless newspaper text that tells no one about anything.
Score: 9
Creepy, bewitching with its horror thing.
A terrible, bewitching heroine - up to her ears in mud, in nihilism, spiritualized and immoral at the same time.
A series of lovers and mistresses - in fact, Marina goes to bed with all the then society.
An alcoholic without five minutes, a psychopath without five minutes, she is beaten by life so much that she takes another disappointment and fiasco for granted. And even what is clean, which sometimes turns out to be next to her, is habitually perceived as dirt. And she finds dirt - she creates it herself and multiplies it.
At the moment of the climax, the heroine is actually on the verge - her spirituality is broken by a cynical and disgusting life, from hatred for the system that broke her, Marina passes to universal hatred, turns into an evil and hysterical bitch.
Terrible hopeless and hopeless life. And at this moment she meets a hero. His antipode - a class enemy, a stupid, fanatical, super-loyal and super-correct party member. And this person breaks it completely - rearranges Marinin's world upside down and immediately changes the ideals that have suffered, stained in the dirt, for others - his own. For official.
Marina suddenly finds happiness. And this happiness of hers is a hundred times worse than the terrible dirt and hopelessness in which she has been hitherto.
Marina's personality begins to fade. Living like everything turns out to be extremely simple. Marina loses her individuality, every day she loses a part of herself, then she loses her name, and then her human essence. Absolutely happy, she becomes a sheep in the herd. She is no more, the heroine dies spiritually and thus dies in general. The novel ends with a terrible stationery gibberish - a meaningless set of Soviet stamps. In fact, this is an epitaph for the dead Marina, dissolved in vulgarity and lack of spirituality.
The strongest thing.
Score: 10
One of Sorokin's masterpieces, where the main metaphor of his work is perfectly realized - literature, reflecting life, easily dies under the mechanical onslaught of language constructing a new reality on its corpse. Marina, although a dissident and an “extra person”, lives in the first 3 quarters of the book in a space constructed from the clichés of the Soviet novel, so banal and boring to everyone that the reader does not even immediately notice the presence of his influence as a fact. And then, at the apogee, the party organizer enters and at his end brings into this musty temple ... no, of course, not the language of Platonov or Zoshchenko - but the language of even more banal Soviet newspapers (after all, he is the party organizer, after all). And under this influence, the thoroughly literary Marina is pouring in, turning into a labor collective, into Comrade Yu.V. Because Sorokin has no heroes and their problems, but only discourses that interpenetrate each other and at the same time destroy the world of heroes who continue to live according to the concepts of the former discourse and have no idea that the old world is no more.
Score: 10
“Even rustles are not heard in the garden,
Everything here was frozen until the morning.”
M. Isakovsky "Moscow Evenings" (music by Solovyov-Sedoy)
Professional painters have long known that different art critics can express completely different, sometimes mutually exclusive opinions about the same picture, and sometimes they invent something that is impossible to find in the picture with all the desire. But it is really difficult to talk competently and intelligibly about painting or drawing, you have to explain the images in words. It would seem that literature should lend itself more easily to verbal analysis, but this can not be said about every work. In this sense, Sorokin is one of the most paradoxical authors - his things are easy to read, especially if the reader is not too squeamish and knows how to restrain vomiting, but their understanding often requires not only considerable mental effort, but also a rather broad literary and philosophical outlook. The last statement is supported by the fact that in critical works on Sorokin's work there are often references to Heidegger, a philosopher whose work is well known only to a narrow circle of specialists.*
How difficult it is for Sorokin to be perceived, I will show with examples taken from the article by A. Leitner “The overthrow into happiness: “Marina's thirtieth love”. Quote one: "Sorokin's characters do not come into conflict either with themselves or with the world, they are captured by the texts available in the world ...". Quote two: "In the thirtieth year of her life, Marina turns into an exemplary Soviet person." Indeed, as it is easy to see, Marina is often captured by various texts. After reading the thoroughly forgotten “Rose of the World” for a bit, Marina beats the face of a man (this type is an obvious parody of rock musicians), whom she just kissed for a good (so it seemed to her) performance of the song. And the collective performance of “Moscow Evenings” acts on her like a codon **, turning her ... well, of course, not into an exemplary, as Leitner believes, Soviet man (the exemplary one in the novel is Rumyantsev), but into a robot who, like a parrot, is expressed exclusively in the language of the central Soviet newspapers. Having made a correct remark about the influence of texts on Marina, Leitner in the same phrase asserts something exactly the opposite about Sorokin's heroes, since Marina (and Leitner writes about her) now and then comes into conflict with herself and is constantly in conflict with the outside world. The latter happens every time she steals groceries from stores to support poor old people she doesn't know. Only 72 packs of oil were stolen, and Marina is by no means a thief, and each such expropriation in favor of the working people is given to her at the cost of a large expenditure of adrenaline. A very serious discord with herself, leading to drinking, happens to Marina when she kicks out her 29th mistress, treating her extremely unfairly and rudely. Marina's burning of her small collection of selected anti-Soviet literature is also an act of her exit from both a deep internal conflict and an equally deep external one. And what is especially paradoxical and unexpected here is that a man with the appearance of Isaich, to the sound of the anthem of the Soviet Union, has just turned Marina into normal woman(everything is over with lesbianism, the photo album also flew into the fire), and among other books, the Gulag Archipelago is sent to the fire, and even along with a photograph of its author hanging on the wall. So, freeing herself from the captivity of some texts ***, Marina falls (this will happen very soon) into captivity to others that have a completely opposite meaning.
So what kind of phenomenon is Marina? Our entire country from time to time is captured by various kinds of texts, of course, if there is a force capable of cutting down with an ax what is written with a pen. It began with the fact that "the Decembrists woke up Herzen", he "turned on" the bell and the process began. The path that Russia has taken even to this day makes us remember Brueghel's painting "Blind Men", however, judging by the reaction of the collective West, the direction chosen is more or less correct, and among the texts that determined this choice there are a considerable number of Solzhenitsyn's ... which and brings us back to Sorokin and his Marina, which is nothing but a symbol of our long-suffering and beautiful country, but not of its earthly incarnation, but of Heavenly Russia ****, the one about which Daniil Andreev wrote. Marina is kind to ordinary people (it’s hard to say such a thing about earthly Russia), but helping them is completely inefficient and stupid, she endures a lot of trash around her, the bad is mixed with the good, but the good is much more. Marina is very patient, while her kindness is reinforced by strong fists... What am I getting at? And there is one fundamental hitch that refutes the ending of the novel. A person capable of crying while listening to a good performance of Chopin's 13th nocturne (and she herself is a music teacher), capable of reciting a prayer no worse than a graduate of the Theological Academy, a person familiar with the most diverse phenomena of world culture from Euripides to John Cage's "Dissected Piano" .. A person with such cultural baggage cannot be turned into a robot. It can't be because it can never be. This is beyond the power of either the monotonous labor rhythm (although the work of a turner is not entirely devoid of a creative component), or the collective singing of any kind of songs (with some stretch, one can imagine that the all-Russian “landscape” of that time is reflected in the “Moscow Nights”). So, a huge ending of the novel, where the members of the brigade speak newspaper language (in fact, just reading the editorials) at first in turn, and after a few pages it is no longer possible to distinguish who is speaking, because it becomes indifferent to the Author ..., this ending does not fulfill its purpose destination. So easily, so primitively, it will not work to knock Russia “up to the hub into the mud”. Quantity does not turn into quality here, and no matter how much the supporters of the opposite point of view call on Heidegger to help themselves, all this pile of quotations from Pravda remains nothing more than empty chatter to increase the fee, and Marina does not produce the symbol of earthly Russia desired by the Author of the fullness .
Such criticism came out strange at first glance. I attributed a certain concept to the Author and proved it wrong (well, I hope I did). But there is nothing strange here, this is a normal reception. If the Author wanted to say this and that, he made a mistake there and there. After all, the author is far from simple, go understand what he really wanted to say ...
But, whatever he wants to say there, the floor is now left to me (it does not matter what I myself), and in conclusion I will say that, as a warning, "The Thirtieth Love ..." is a very useful novel. Something like - people, I love you, be vigilant, beware of dullness and vulgarity, and in order to accurately separate flies from cutlets, steadily increase your cultural level. Something like this, in the spirit of the final pages of the novel.
*) For me, reading Heidegger turned out to be a task comparable in difficulty to reading Hegel, i.e., almost unbearable. I am sure that this recognition will not come as a surprise to people with a philosophical education.
**) A codon is an information package that penetrates into a person's brain and radically changes his perception of himself and the world around him (see "Soldiers of Babylon" by Lazarchuk). Why is this song so special? Obviously, for the huge popularity and symbolic meaning. As a soft symbol Soviet image life, this song is very suitable for Marina, a girl with angelic appearance, but in the first place, of course, was and remains the "Song of the Motherland" ("Wide is my native land", lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach, music by Dunaevsky), which fully corresponds to the image of the party organizer with the face of Solzhenitsyn. This is a symbol without halftones, more rigid, visually comparable to the coat of arms of the Soviet Union.
***) It’s good that Sasha Sokolov’s wonderful book “Between a dog and a wolf” was not burned, Marina took it out of her bag, leafed through and threw it, but did not put it on the table. Sorokin does not remember this book anymore.
****) It seems to me that Sorokin thinks so :). To those who run into me for a lesbian - a symbol of Heavenly Russia, I will answer that the main thing is to give love, but how is the tenth thing. Marina does this, but the fact that the men do not know how to handle her is a separate problem; Well, we have such men, but if they weren’t like that, it would greatly bring earthly Russia closer to its heavenly image.
Dirt and nonsense in everything: in how the author and his characters see and perceive the environment, in the text from the author, in the speeches of the characters themselves. In the sexual adventures of the heroine there are no emotions, no passions, no feelings, only lust as such, lust for the sake of lust itself, not even for pleasure (well, she didn’t get pleasure with men, but still fucked with them, with different ones, several times per day!)
Delirium is how the heroine moves from part one to part two.
Spoiler (plot reveal) (click on it to see)
First, a dream that tells her that she lived wrong, and she really begins to hate her whole past life, then an orgasm in a half-sleep (not because the man is so wonderful, but because she was sleeping!), Then her delight because of new work at the factory. Well, a person who has never worked, but only burned his life, will not be able to work a whole shift at a factory, and at the same time enjoy it. Physically can't!
Dirt and delirium, smoothly growing into each other. Completely implausible and impossible actions and emotions of the heroine, and the plot twists that followed. It looks like it was written by a man. And not just a man, but a man who claims that his creation is brilliant. And in the pursuit of genius, he makes such plot twists for his characters that a person himself, not in a book that claims to be genius, would never have done. He has no idea either about the female soul, or about female love, or about the nature of sexuality and homosexuality. And as a result, I do not believe! The result was not a person, but an empty vessel filled with the author's perverted understanding of his own genius.
What is this book about? About how not very positive, but still having a personality, Marina turns into a very positive, but faceless Alekseeva? How does the intoxication with dissidence flow into the intoxication with Soviet propaganda? Well, yes, to our liberal human rights activists, the idea may seem relevant, but why so much nonsense and dirt? It seems to me that Tolstoy was excommunicated for less, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country for less, and the Marquis de Sade was sentenced to death for less.
Rating: 1
The book is awesome!!! One of his best works!!! True, the last 20 pages of the text are not very clear, in fact, what are they for? A sort of flashback of those events apparently? No complaints - everything is great!
