/ world today news/ Yury Mihailovich, congratulations on your anniversary. You write a lot about life in the USSR in your novels and plays. Your view of our Soviet past is radically different from what TV, movies and modern liberal theater force us to see. Why are the films we make about the USSR almost an exact copy of the black American spoofs of the 80s, where astronauts in earplugs drink vodka in orbit? In your early novels you criticized the Soviet Union, how does criticism differ from lies?
Thanks. The denigration of Soviet civilization began when it still existed, and few foresaw its tragic collapse. In fact, the contents of ‘samizdat’ and ‘tamizdat’ were largely ‘dirty’. In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that the “thickening” of negativity in such compositions was often a reaction to the violent optimism of official Soviet literature, or rather, mediocre authors ready to fulfill any ideological orders. But the great Soviet masters – Belov, Bondarev, Rasputin, Astafiev, Abramov, Kuvaev, Granin and others – were never accused of “varnishing reality”. On the contrary. By the way, if “forced optimism” was sought in the USSR, then “forced pessimism” was strongly supported by Western publishers and Russianists. It was part of the information war. The very gifted and cunning writer Viktor Sorokin felt this conjuncture very well and successfully integrated himself into it, not a mental deviation, I think is the secret of his compulsive coprophagy.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the deliberate creation of a black myth about the USSR began, first by the momentum of the denial of the overthrown system, on the principle “under damned tsarism”, and then, after the collapse of Gaidar’s reforms and the shelling of the parliament, it was done to distract people from Yeltsin’s wretched reality of the “damned Soviet system”. It is clear that the honest masters of culture did not concern themselves with this, but yesterday the apprentices of socialist realism and selfish publishers readily responded. And untalented people who are not able to create something new are always epigones, and that is why they began to copy Samizdat ink and American cinema-Russophobia. Today, 30-year-old authors who have no idea how they lived in the USSR are already doing this. There were even virtuosos of evil anti-Soviet fantasy. But the elderly uncles also play such games, they play for prizes, such as “The Big Book” and “Clear Meadow”. And what else can be said about Ivanov’s novel “The Food Block”, where vampires are fed in a pioneer camp with children, led by a Civil War hero.
My first novels “One Hundred Days Before the Order”, “State of Emergency on a District Scale”, “Working on Errors” and “Apophegei” were also very critical of Soviet reality, they were not printed for a long time, but this was “critical realism”, directed entirely sincerely against the fact that we were, as we then put it, prevented from living. And when they saw the light, it became a shock to the public consciousness. By the way, in my new novel “Slow Life or Sex in the USSR” I again returned to late Soviet times in 1984 and tried to look at “developed socialism” from the height of my life, social and historical experience …
You recently published a very sharp journalistic book “The Desire to be a Russian”. Which was muted in every way by liberal criticism. The release of the book coincided with your release from the Presidential Council on Culture. Do you connect these two events?
Yes, the book was published by Kniga na Sveta publishing house, which publishes my nonfiction. The essay “Desire to be Russians” is an attempt to analyze why we, Russians, both under the tsars, under the Soviet government, and under the current Kremlin, are perceived not as a valuable people with our own problems and ailments, but as a kind of “bridge” between ethnic groups populating our federation. We take it as a kind of “ethnic ether” which, it seems, does not exist in nature. Note that the Russians do not have their own state institutions, and they agreed to this, but in our government there is not even a “Russian order” that systematically analyzes and solves the problems of the state-forming people. My conclusion is disappointing: further neglect of the Russian people may, under the current version of the Russian state, end up with what ended up the Romanov empire and the USSR. By a strange coincidence, soon after the book came out, I was “kicked out” of the Presidential Council for Culture, several TV channels suddenly cooled to me, which had previously invited me to participate. It is not easy to be a writer in Russia.
My conflict with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, who was trying to make a white-robed prophet out of her late husband, was also an influence, which is very difficult, given his multi-layered biography. By the way, in the book “Yuri Polyakov: text, context and subtext …” the famous literary critic Mikhail Golubkov gives a very interesting comparative analysis of the writer’s positions – mine and Solzhenitsyn’s. The book was published in AST for my 65th birthday.
You’re doing a lot of theater right now. You write new plays, create the National Association of Playwrights, and hold the Showcase Festival. Why theater and not film? In the cinema, the audience is bigger.
In fact, I did not come to the theater, but the theater came to me. From the end of the 1980s, the staging of my early prose began. Stanislav Mitin’s famous play “Working on Mistakes” was performed in the Leningrad Youth Theater. By the way, “Tabakera” also began with the play “Chair” – a stage version of “State of emergency on a regional scale”, which the late Tabakov did not like to remember. And since the end of the 90s, I have been actively working as a playwright. One of the first productions was my play “Views” in the Moscow Art Theater “Gorky” under Tatiana Doronina. It was staged by Stanislav Govorukhin and it was his first work in the theater. The performance is still given at the Moscow Art Theater under the name “Control Shot”, but I do not know what its future fate will be after the removal of Doronina and the arrival of the team of Eduard Boyakov and Zakhar Prilepin. However, Boyakov and I are from different theater planets, and Prilepin, he is more likely a “shuttle”.
Today, my plays tour the whole country and gather full halls to the great indignation of the “Novodrams”, but it is not my fault that they never learned to write high-quality plays. None of the “Durnenkov brothers” (I call the authors of this direction) can boast that his play, say, on the stage of the Satirical Theater was performed almost 400 times. The second theater festival “Smotrini” has recently finished. This is the only author’s festival of a successful playwright in Russia. For 13 days in Moscow, on the stage of the Cherry Orchard, my plays were performed by theaters from different cities – Irkutsk, Samara, Rybinsk, Borisoglebsk, Penza … The audience was delighted.
And we started the National Association of Playwrights, finding that there was not a single professional association of those who wrote plays in the country. It got to the point that not a single playwright was included in the organizing committee of the Theater Year. They forgot. Now, I think, they will not forget. The first thing we did was to organize together with the theater agent the competition “Authors – on stage!” To translate the authors of traditional plays silenced and slandered by the “golden mask party”, or rather professionals. On December 17, we will reveal the Golden Ten for the second time. Each winner, in addition to a diploma, will receive a certificate for half a million rubles – for a play for children in one of the interested theaters.
And I don’t cut ties with the cinema. On my books, 13 tapes were shot. I am negotiating the adaptation of The Plaster Trumpeter, Love in the Age of Change and Briefcase. But, as one of the directors honestly admitted to me: “You are difficult to photograph, the main thing in your novels is the word, and it is the most difficult thing to translate you into film language…”
What awaits Russian theater, cinema and Russian literature in the next 10 years?
If the theater, which has almost ceased to be Russian, remains in the hands of the gold and oil party, if literature remains under the jurisdiction of Rospechat (Ministry of Digital Development) and the Big Book still sets the tone, then I (for literature and theater) set the tone, as Okudzhava sang, “I won’t give a broken guitar.” Alas, today the cinema, the metropolitan theater and literature, with rare exceptions, are engaged in the methodical destruction of the state for cash. The authorities do not understand this, since they do not read novels and do not go to the theater. This does not mean that I agree with everything that happens in the Fatherland, but arguing with the authorities is one thing, and eating like termites the supporting structures of the state is another …
How do you see Russia after Putin? And who do you see instead of GDP?
I don’t see anyone in Putin’s place. There is no comparable figure in the environment. However, this cannot be done with the political system that developed after the shooting in the parliament. After all, the system in our country is not competitive, but rather coordinating, and all coordination is done implicitly. Is it bad? I don’t know, given that our liberal opposition is not even pro-Western, but sub-Western, and the liberal “Susanins” seek to bring the enemy into the Kremlin. But in the end we may find ourselves in a situation where a man who has been coaxed into silence will not be accepted by people who can remain silent, but who can also rage, as in 1917 and 1991. I am very afraid of the turbulent transition of power …
Translation: V.Sergeev
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