Vladimir Makanin’s works have always caused—and continue to cause—heated debates. The novel “One and One” immediately, right after its appearance, sparked a whole discussion in the press. And no wonder: Makanin “took on” one of the major intellectual myths—the myth of the “sixtiers,” the generation of the 1960s. The novel’s heroes—Gennady Pavlovich and Ninel Nikolaevna—have a typical biography for their generation: university, stormy arguments about “the main thing,” trips and songs by the campfire, the theater “Sovremennik,” and Yevtushenko’s poems—then assignments to the provinces, return to the capital…
Having aged considerably and grown duller, they remain devoted to “their time” and its romantic ideals, not noticing how devastating the result of their lives is: dreams never became a real deed; liberal conversations increasingly turn into ordinary braggadocio and arrogance toward “the uninitiated”; and they themselves—“chicks from the same flock”—never managed to join their fates; they remained “one and one.”