Reactor

Writing the other day about Martin Amis’s future appointment as the professor of creative writing in Manchester, The Guardian used phrase ‘Britain’s greatest living author’, which prompted some readers to react. I presume that many of his colleagues reacted as well, but kept it private. His work had been dissected in the recent years, and I cannot help but think that this has to do with the public perception of the person, not the true quality of the writer.

Of course, who is the greatest is a silly question. It belongs more to the sphere of Top 10, something that works primarily for recording industry, not so much for the artists. It is a promotional trick, but the one that can be dangerous if applied to arts. As an avid consumer of all things artistic, I believe that the beauty lies in many different views on the same object, and crowning one artist at the expense of others can narrow that view. These are fast times, and I’ve heard more than once people craving for a definitive guide of what they should read, listen, see. In small cultures such guides often exist: if one particular magazine gains prominence, its readers will be lead to believe that its arts section is the guide. But pay attention to the ’small’ part – such guides tend to make the artistic community a family thing, a closely knit circle of a few recognized artists in any given area, which is the shortest cut to keeping that particular culture small for indefinite time.

Someone’s greatness cannot be judged easily. What makes an author great? His/her themes, approach, readiness for polemics, courage, singularity of vision, bravado with language, an ear for present times, or something else? I would say: all that, and something else, something that we often cannot describe. But, even without being able to catch that particular thing, we do know if someone’s great: we need that person’s work. Simple as that. We keep coming back for more. I must have read Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita some fourteen times, and I believe I will read it many more times in the future. When I am moving, that book is among the first things I pack – and I move a lot. Do I think that Bulgakov is great? I don’t know. All I do know is that I need his work. After several readings, that book made its own world that resides in my head and comes back to life every time I start reading the first page again. That world is comforting and disturbing at the same time, but it evokes passion in me, and that passion creates a need. Once we start sharing a particular world with an author, and once we start carrying that world inside us, we just know that he or she is great.

The Guardian article

Mikhail Bulgakov on Wikipedia