Shepelev, Alexey Alexandrovich

Born February 23, 1978 in the village of Sosnovka, Mordovia district, Tambov region. He began to write from the age of seven, before high school he composed stories about cats, but he read little.

He graduated from the philological faculty of Tambov State University. G.R.Derzhavina (1995-2000). At the last courses he was on the verge of expulsion. At the same time, according to the memoirs, he shocked students and teachers with the phrase: “If they do not expel me, I will go to graduate school!”

In 2003, he graduated from the graduate school of the Tambov State Technical University , despite choosing the “inappropriate” topic, defended his thesis “ F. M. Dostoevsky in the art world of V. V. Nabokov . The theme of nympholepsy as a reception of the theme of “Stavrogin sin”. ”

Frustrated “not only in the education system, but also in university science”, he never worked in his specialty: as a teacher at a university, school or college, refused to participate in scientific conferences, etc.

He began to print in 1995. He gained initial fame as an avant-garde poet, participant in the actions of the Zaumi Academy S. E. Biryukov . From the beginning of the 1990s, he wrote both poems and poems, and prose, but in 2007 he stopped writing poetry - “so as not to be repeated ... after which the poetic poetry completely abandoned me” ^[1] .

In 1997, he became the founder and ideologist of the Association "Spectacle Society" (together with classmate O'Frolov), who proclaimed the concept of "art of moronism", "ugribism" or "phenomena" (in the spirit of OBERIU ), and later "radical radicalism". In fact, OZ as a rock band did not give concerts. However, recordings, literary texts, and audio performances were distributed at that time on analogue media, and not only in Tambov. This was followed by publications on the Internet and literary almanacs abroad.

The leaders of the group themselves wandered from one rented “barn type” apartment to another, while the performances “for the elite” (the so-called “Sub-Society”) did not stop, the word-for-word “OZ dialect” formed and “left to the people”. According to the participants, “it was, of course, a pure rush for art and a breakthrough for it, but at the same time it was just a way of survival in unbearable conditions” ^[2] .

In the 2010s, after the fact, they write about the “cult status of the group”, while rightly pointing to its locality and marginally underground character. In the late 1990s and the beginning of the “noughties”, not only OZ products, but also A. Shepelev’s poetry, close in drive and theme to industrial rock music , had a great influence on Tambov “advanced” youth.

In 2013, a CD was released with the album “A Gasoline is Bottom of the Sky” (Vygorod label ) and two bonus tracks: a collection of singles “Shariwari” and an audio performance “Anti-antiseptin, Carrot Day and other adventures of“ saints from Alcoholism ”Undinia and Maximia ”, The group also became a winner of the Nonconformism 2013 prize in the Nonconformism Act nomination ^[3] .

The album received many positive reviews in the music press: Rockcor magazine, Zavtra newspaper ^[4] , Reproducer rock portal ^[5] , Rabkor site ^[6] , Contraband website ^{[7] [8]} , agency “Sky24” and others. The music of “OZ” was played in the program “StereoVoodoo” by A. Troitsky , who compared the album with the work of the group “Sounds Mu” ^[9] . The record was also highly appreciated by the masters of the domestic underground Kuzya UO (K. Ryabinov) and Graf Khortytsa (Garik Osipov). The authorized site of the association Nasos-oz.ru has opened . In fact, the first concert performances took place ^[10] . After which the group, abandoning the path of show business (according to other sources, due to the personal quarrel of the participants), broke up ^[11] .

The first novel, Echo (2000-2002), was shortlisted for the Debut Award and was published in 2003 as a separate book by Amphora Publishing House. It also included five stories, “transferred” from other books planned at the publishing house.

The second novel, "Maxximum exxtremum", was written "in complete isolation in the small homeland" in 2003-2005. Its publication took place only at the beginning of 2011.

In 2005-2006 he lived in the village of Stroitel Tambov region. This period was reflected in the unpublished "film story" Dew with Berkova .

In 2006-2011 he lived in the suburbs. He worked as a correspondent and a publishing editor of an advertising and information newspaper in Bronnitsy , then a correspondent, a publishing editor and chief editor of an advertising and information newspaper in Ramenskoye . The newspaper had a large circulation (140 thousand copies), as well as the unusual, “scandalous” name “Myself and Strongly”, taken from the novel “Dyu with Berkova”. Subsequently, the publication was renamed, and Shepelev was expelled from the editorial office.

In 2009—2011, he was a freelance columnist for the left-wing site Rabkor, published dozens of detailed reviews of fiction books, as well as journalistic articles about films and rock concerts. Remaining unemployed, he wrote the first version of the novel “Snoot, Anyutinka and the Alcoholics”, the final part of the autobiographical novel trilogy.

In 2009, married. Wife - Anna Shepeleva, television and radio journalist, critic, presenter of the author's program “Literary Navigator” on the radio “Vera” .

In 2011-2014 he lived in Moscow. I was looking for “downshifter” work, not related to education and journalism. As a result, he worked very occasionally in different places: on agricultural work, as a radio journalist, book seller, proofreader in publishing houses and magazines, a researcher at the Esenin Moscow Museum, overseer of St. Basil's Cathedral , a studio worker in the group of the main director of one of the central television channels, etc. The last two places the works are reflected in the novel in the essays “Moscow-bad. Notes of the capital downshifter ” ^[12] .

In the summer of 2014, together with his wife, he left for a remote village. Here was created the story "Mir-village and its inhabitants."

In 2016, he moved to Anapa . In April 2017, the author’s program “Prose of Life” was released on local FM radio with reading excerpts from the book “Mir-Selo and Its Inhabitants”.

The works were published in the magazines “Friendship of Peoples” , “New World” , “ Neva ”, “Volga”, “North”, “Day and Night”, “Russian Prose” (issue B, 2012), “Orthodox Book Review”, the anthology “ Non-Capital Literature ”, the anthology “ Draft ” (New Jersey), “Babylon” , “Children of Ra”, “Futurum-ART”, “Reflection” (Chicago), “Pygmalion” (Kustanay, Kazakhstan), “Translit” , “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” , the newspaper “Literary Russia” , the network publications “ TextOnly ”, “ Topos ”, “Literature”, “The Other Hemisphere”, “Orthodoxy.Ru” , “Private correspondent” , “Megalith” and many others. other

The first novel , Echo , despite its shocking aesthetics, gathered a generally very sympathetic press. The newspaper Kommersant wrote about it ^[13] , the sites Weekend.ru and Polit. RU ” ^[14] , ^[15] , the journal“ Fakel ”(No. 1, 2004), etc.

While reviewing the book in the Znamya magazine , Andrei Uritsky notes that Shepelev presented "in some way, the intellectual elite of a marginally bohemian sense." Distinguishing the author of “Echo” from a number of prose writers of his generation, the critic concludes that “Shepelev claims to be a vacant place in Russian prose - a place of radical marginal, and we need aesthetically sane radicals so that the lake does not turn into a swamp and does not drag on duckweed” ^[16] .

The second book, the novel "Maxximum exxtremum" ^[17] , ^[18] , collected about two dozen reviews and many online responses, was included in the list of the most discussed books of the year in the Salt magazine (Perm), in which Shepelev’s language was called a "literary miracle" ^[19] .

Even before the release of the novel, in the preamble of an interview taken from the writer in 2007, Zakhar Prilepin notes:

“Alexey Shepelev is the most extraordinary, most unpredictable and most underrated character of modern young literature” ^[20] ,

and in the quote placed on the cover of "Maxximum Exxtremum", he speaks of him as "about the European writer in Russia . "

However, from that time on, radical (in the broad sense - both in terms of content, and in terms of stylistics and aesthetics) literature became less and less popular. According to V. Leventhal , "this author in young literature is so insignificant that it is difficult for him to publish."

An inconsistency of biographical information about the writer from the rural outskirts was noted in an article on the Peremeny website ^[21] . The reviewer of the Rabkor website considers the novel “ME” in the context of the thrash genre and concludes that “Shepelev does not follow Western standards, but creates a genre uncharacteristic of Russian literature in Russian from scratch.”

A different view is offered by the literary critic E. Boroda, speaking about the proximity of the writer's texts to Russian classics, in particular to the “experience of suffering” expressed in Dostoevsky’s books ^[22] .

According to Zakhar Prilepin , Shepelev in this book “... has one more rare quality: against the background of the brutal seriousness of our contemporaries also working in the genre of“ egorealism ”(a well-defined Shepelevsky definition), everything is wonderful with self-irony” ^[23] .

Shepelev - some kind of plague genius, hatched from earthen Russian civilization, like a French champignon.

Pavel Krusanov

There are also sharply negative responses to “scandalous” novels, in which the writer is called “fashionable prose writer” performing “moral striptease”, and the novel “ME” is called “recyclable material” ^{[24] [25]} .

In 2013, the prose book True Love was published , including the novels True Love / Dirty Carrots and Russian Disneyland. According to the author's dating, these tales, almost without change, were created in the 1990s.

I don’t know how for you, for me, dear readers, Alexey A. Shepelev is a significant person, and on the literary map of Russia there is a separate large point inhabited by curious characters,

- notes in the afterword to this collection Evgeny Popov .

S. Orlova writes about the author of the book as “the discoverer of some psychological states that before him in the literature, in my opinion, have not yet been described, or have been described not so accurately, or did not believe that such states exist” ^[26]

Viktor Ivanov in poetry reviews of the book by A. Shepelev wrote about his “brutal and at the same time mathematically modeled language”, inextricably linked with the content of the works, in which, according to Ivanov, the main thing is “the very principle of the author’s writing, experiencing his own life as a change of scenes " ^{[27] [28]} .

“The World-Village and Its Inhabitants” (2017) - “... adjusted for the modern language, this is real village prose inheriting all Soviet classics from Shukshin to Rasputin” ^[29] . At the same time, “Shepelev does not fall into“ farewell-to-mother ” ^[30] . The book, like the previous one,“ ... is deprived of the indispensable attribute of the prose of “countrymen” - sadness, hopelessness and doomed turmoil ... Shepelev writes about his native environment as free, caring and thinking person ” ^[31] .

“He is a real Russian writer of the branch that Gogol spawned, and continued Dostoevsky, Leonid Andreev, Bulgakov, Mamleev ... Shepelev a sort of avant-garde realist. A rare but very valuable combination. ”

Roman Senchin

“Moscow-bad” is a novel in acutely social essays about the everyday life of the metropolitan city, in fact, non-fiction , written in the “ironic and driving manner of the author.”

In the novel “Snoot, Anyutinka and the Alcows” , a peculiar “existential thriller” reminiscent of the modern “Moscow - Petushki” , representing “alcoholism-marginality as a kind of antinomy to work-“ normal life ””, the main direction of the author’s searches can be defined by the title of one of his interview - “From extreme to Orthodoxy” ^[32] .

The author’s Orthodox view in this novel, and in part in Moscow Bad and Mir Selo, is framed by an artistic rethinking of such ideological trends as escapism , enaphism , downshifting , anti- urbanism , anti- technocratism , etc.

Poetry

The first book of poems “Novokain ovo” was published in 2001 in Tambov with a circulation of 120 copies.

In 2011, the second, Sugar: Sweet Glass, was published , which was composed of the texts of 1997-2007.

In the preface to the collection, S. Biryukov points out that Shepel’s poems contain social lyrics, philosophical, love, and even political science, “but all this is written differently, not even in other words, although in different ones, but in different syntactos syntagmo-paradigmatic means ... ” ^[33] .

Alexey Shepelev is an avant-garde poet who works directly with sound. Phonetics in his book goes beyond its own framework, becomes morphology, transforms not only the sounding world, but also the visible world. Words merge and turn into new essences, this university textbook of linguistics is turned from the root itself, hurts with the tips of the pages, and itself is a continuous wound. Shepelev’s poetry is intellectual, but by no means a highbrow, not lifeless, ^[34]

- Reviewed the collection of Eugene Ritz .

D. Davydov draws a parallel with the texts of Yegor Letov ^[35] .

Shepelev is a person who treats words as if they owe him money, but because of eternal poverty they are forced to pay by performing sophisticated tricks. ^[36]

- notes the reviewer of the album "OZ", analyzing its textual basis.

Poems by A. Shepelev were translated into German and French ^[37] .

• Known as an adversary of social networks. Founder of the AntiVfeisbuke movement. On the main page of the site of the Association “Spectacle Society” there is an inscription: “No FB. NO VK ". From an interview: “... as I used to, for example, fought against tele-debilitation, so now I openly oppose the total enthusiasm for social networks, the thoughtless computerization of society, the brain and everything in general” ^[38] .
• The novel “Snoot, Anyutinka and the Alcohols” was written for 11 years (2008–2019).

• 2000 - long list of the Debut Award in the Small Prose nomination
• 2002 - shortlist of the Debut Prize in the nomination "Big Prose"
• 2003 - Laureate of the International Mark them. D. Burliuk
• 2009 - Laureate of the competition of the North magazine in the Prose nomination
• 2010 - finalist of the Nonconformism Prize
• 2013 - Laureate of the Nonconformism Prize
• 2014 - long list of the poetry prize "Russian Gulliver"
• 2014 - shortlist of the Andrei Bely Prize in the Prose nomination
• 2017 - National Bestseller Award Long List
• 2018 - short list of the International Competition of Small Forms for the Red Nose Theater 2018
• 2018 - Long List of the Isaac Babel Prize
• 2018 - Long-list of Yasnaya Polyana Award

• Novokain ovo: Book of Poems. - Tambov, 2000.
• Echo: Novel, stories. - St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2003.
• Sugar: sweet glass: A book of poems. - M.: Russian Gulliver, 2011.
• Morning Sunset: A Short Story / Anthology of Twenty-Year-Old Prose (issue 4). - St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2011.
• Maxximum Exxtremum: Novel. - M.: Oxygen, 2011.
• True Love: A Tale. - M.: Fund of socio-economic and intellectual programs, 2013.
• World Village and its inhabitants: A Tale. - M .: EKSMO, 2017.
• True Love / Dirty Carrots. - Yekaterinburg: Publishing House "Choice Senchin", 2017.

• Алексей Шепелёв на сайте « Новая карта русской литературы »
• M. Bushueva. Carnival Carnival - where will it take you? Article in NG Ex Libris
• Plato Besedin. Review of the book "Mir-Selo" on the site "Snob"
• "Moscow, which God is looking at" (review) "
• Stanislav Secrets. Review of the book "World Village ..." on the site "It.Book"
• Excerpt from the book "The World-Village and Its Inhabitants" on the site "Reading"
• Excerpt from the book "Moscow-bad" on the site "Private correspondent"
• Fragment of a novel in Nezavisimaya Gazeta
• Interview on the Cultural Evolution website
• Interview in the newspaper "NG-Ex Libris"
• Interview on the Yuga.ru portal