McCarthy

It's a nice story Branki Bogavac once told Galina Vishnevska, opera diva and life companion Mstislav Rostropovich. (And Branka to the readers Arta.)

She was young when the genius died on March 5, 1953 Sergei Prokofiev. She remembers that she could not put a single flower on the grave of the great composer. Prokofiev died on the same day as i Stalin. And all the flowers, not only of Moscow, but probably of the whole and greater Russia, were at the funeral of the Kremlin monster. (Such a mass migration of flowers towards one dictator must never have been recorded.)

So there was no flower for Sergej Sergeevich - in all of Moscow.

By the way, Galina made a charming remark at the end of the story. She was sorry, she says, that Prokofiev died before he heard that Stalin had died.

Far from some serious analogy, more like a postmodern echo of this story, suitable for the media civilization we live in (and which was created by one of the characters from this text), I have been following these days how much public space death has received Silvio Berlusconi, and how probably the greatest writer of our time, Cormac McCarthy. (Us Thomas Pynchon, of course.) How does a writer in the media fare (today) if he happens to die at the same time as a media magnate and an ordinary political spider...

Berlusconi is at the head of that series, that political genealogy that ends (yes, that's right) or peaks in appearance Donald Trump as the American president.

It was not easy to foresee such implications at the beginning of Berlusconi's political career - then he looked like a charlatan, but a charlatan whose rise was a slap to the classical political establishment, based on the seriousness of the Cold War context, but also the responsibility of old capitalism. That slap was something that many people from different political and class backgrounds suddenly wanted to sign... Being the first to see the possibilities of this kind of political equation, he shaped the current form of political populism.

That's why he was funny to all dictators, even when he was doing stupid things. In the affirmative attitude towards him among the majority of autocrats, it seems that there was also an (implicit, pseudo-critical, ironic) subtext - this is what democracy leads to.

Another member of the current equation of death is Cormac McCarthy, a master like few.

He is a writer who consistently (not like TP, admittedly) avoided media attention, that is, he dosed in a way that is simply incomprehensible to today's "consumers" of culture.

He found his ancient stage in the reduced and vivid world of the American South, the marvelous microcosm of the Frontier. There is no author whose violence is so convincing and devoid of the pseudo-glamour that violence is sometimes given by the logic of the genre.

In his prose, the blood is more real than in any film.

In addition to the magnificent "Bloody Meridian", a true masterpiece - albeit in a slightly different way - is the novel "The Road". A fascinating novel of language - the most devastating layer of the novel is the result created by such use of language. The reduced post-apocalyptic reality as much as life suffocates and destroys language itself. What happens to language when the reality to which language refers by its nature is radically annulled? The way the writer has framed and presented that problem offers some of the most important possible insights into man.

And, in the end, certain - he was one of those who clearly saw the vanity and senselessness of the culture brought to us by Silvio B, and everyone following him. And everything following them.

That's why I decided to immediately answer anyone who "informs" me that Berlusconi has died these days - Did you hear that Cormac McCarthy died...

In the specific case, you have to say the name as well - namely, a young friend was saddened by the information that McCarthy had died Sir Paul (the last name is not the same, but it is similar) and started playing his songs...