Svetlana Pavlova, "Screenwriter." Moscow: AST, 2024.
Twenty years ago, everyone in Russia was writing about office managers. About their vanity and lack of spirituality (they even coined a special term: "duhless"). However, it was usually office managers who wrote all this – not entirely devoid of vanity and not overly spiritual.
Now they are writing about screenwriters. With a nod to the gender revolution that has occurred in Russian prose – about female screenwriters.
Happiness, Where Are You?
The heroes of managerial literature characterized themselves as successful, accomplished, independent, and terribly busy. The female screenwriters from today’s novels characterize themselves in exactly the same way. The lives of both groups, on one hand, are enviable (career, prestigious housing, trendy restaurants, etc.), and on the other hand, they are hard. After all, society is absurd and ugly, and you are surrounded either by uncouth half-wits or self-absorbed jerks, and you won’t find happiness with anyone. It is recommended to add some fashionable illness, like bipolar disorder or bulimia – to make the dissatisfied expression of a successful face look more convincing.
Yes, I forgot to add a key toponym. Wealthy and busy heroes of business and creative work, as well as the authors of novels about them, always live in Moscow. Because what success is there beyond the MKAD?
Back then and now, books of this ilk were and are published by Elena Shubina’s Editorial.
In general, the discussion is actually about one and the same easily recognizable social group, which was once called office plankton, then the creative class, and what they are called now is unknown. Let’s call them female screenwriters.
And Remembered Those She Cried For
By the way, the main character of the second novel by the trendy thirty-year-old Moscow writer and screenwriter (the second – at least in terms of collective definition; although which successful Moscow intellectual today doesn’t write scripts?..) Pavlova, a thirty-year-old successful Moscow woman named Zoya, traded banking management for screenwriting. She moved from the office to the author’s room.
The lucky heroine of Pavlova’s first novel with the Hamsun-esque title "Hunger" suffered from bulimia. The lucky heroine of the second suffers from the suspicion that she has HIV. While waiting for the test results, she remembers those from whom she could have contracted it – the portraits of Zoya’s former partners make up the bulk of the novel. They are, as you can imagine, either uncouth half-wits or self-absorbed hereditary Moscow aristocrats (Zoya herself is a self-made woman from the limits, which raises the degree of bitterness), or snobs-pseudo-intellectuals with their own Telegram channels.
What Moscow idlers have always excelled at – is to be sarcastic about other Moscow idlers.
