Портрет незнакомца

by Boris Vakhtin, Борис Вахтин

В книге представлена художественная проза и публицистика петербургского писателя Бориса Вахтина. Ученый, переводчик, общественный деятель, он не дожил до публикации своих книг; небольшие сборники прозы и публицистики вышли только в конце 1980-х - начале 1990-х годов. Тем не менее Борис Вахтин был заметной фигурой культурной и литературной жизни в 1960-1970-е годы, одним из лидеров молодых ленинградских писателей. Вместе с В.Марамзиным, И.Ефимовым, В.Губиным, позднее - С.Довлатовым создал литературную группу "Горожане". Его повесть "Дубленка" вошла в знаменитый альманах "МетрОполь" (1979). По киносценарию, написанному им в соавторстве с Петром Фоменко, был снят один из самых щемящих фильмов о войне - телефильм "На всю оставшуюся жизнь" (1975). Уже в 1990-е годы повесть "Одна абсолютно счастливая деревня" легла в основу знаменитого спектакля Мастерской Петра Фоменко.

928 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2010

About the author

In his lifetime Boris Vakhtin (1930-1981), son of thewriter Vera Panora, was known in the USSR mainly to an inner circle of writers and literary people in Leningrad. By profession a sinologist and translator of Chinese literature, he was also a member of an unofficial group of writers called “Urbanites” and a great defender of a free Russian literature during a period of oppression. His career as a writer was not untypical for
Soviet literature of the 1960s and 70s – he wrote a lot but was unable to be published except in the underground press where his work circulated widely.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with Sheepskin Coat and An Absolutely Happy Village the anthology The Portrait of a Stranger contains some short stories and two fine novelettes: Nadezhda Platonovna Goryunova – about the beauty of body and soul; the second one, Three Stories with Three Epilogues is about an aviator, thief and archivist living on the fringes of society. This grotesque and flowery tale is in a way similar to Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck but is written in Andrei Platonov’s style.

Folks, in all their entirety, are slumbering behind the extinguished windows of our apartment house.
Tomorrow they will live and fight all together but every one of them in one’s own manner; and now they are all equal in their sleep – they are all the same.

And there is a real outcrop of aphoristic observations in the story: “Politics for nonentities is a form of their existence…” or an outlook on the history: “We all rushed forth and broke our faces on the glass which we confused with distant horizons, and now shards are all here, before you, they are full of pride and fear, and they look blown up with smugness.”
Vanity and commotion substitute life…

Everyone carries along through life one’s own suitcase.
The suitcase is packed with a wife, children, chats and numberless obligations. And everyone puts into one’s swollen suitcase everything one finds on one’s way and one puts in oneself. And when the suitcase is packed to capacity it is the end.

And every person is just a grain of sand in the desert of destiny.