Difficult days.

Caesarean month.

August 27, thirty years since Mike Naumenko left - to solve his own problem without a solution.

Leaving us neither a survival textbook, nor a hint - on the last page of a problem book for helluva lot of smart people.

And do we really need that hint - after all, there are texts, and whoever knows how to listen, read - so read and hear.

The story of the leader of the "Zoo", the reddest (and this is not a simulacrum) of all Soviet rockers and the most forgotten of them, is about the general alienation of themselves, their innermost thoughts, insights, their own, suffered and felt by all the skin of following the path.

The story of the betrayal of destiny, and the more bitter it is, the more time passes since August 1991.

August is always terrible with some unknown doom ...

Tanks, yes.

There were tanks in Moscow.

And Swan Lake.

And shaking hands on the blue screen live.

What Mike did in those days, who had long lost interest in both life and music (looking at what was happening), is unknown.

However, we know this: a man without a great voice, a quiet one and a frail intellectual, a boy from the Leningrad family of a LISI teacher (father, Vasily Grigorievich) and a library worker (mother, Galina Florentyevna) all those "marvelous changes" that were flooded and washed away by a tidal wave country, did not accept.

Because he was not expecting such changes and changes.

Not for that "tore your throat." 

“The day you decide that life was in vain,

When paint falls from the paintings on your wall

When your friends leave, never to return, -

Maybe on this day you will come to me. "

This is "That Day" from the 1984 album "White Stripe".

And there is no reason to see in the analysis of the text attempts to pull the world into self-conceit, poets - they are poets for that: to see beforehand, to predict ahead of time, for future use ...

Leningrad photographer Andrei (Willy) Usov (born in 1950 into the family of a naval officer and naval historian V.Yu. Usov) at the very end of the 1970s made a photo of Mike that is absolutely prophetic, archaic, like a window into the past.

In the famous front door with a mantelpiece - Rubinstein Street, 5. 

And in the middle of the baroque stucco molding, in the midst of black and white architectural excesses and splendor, we contemplate the "Dozoo Park" Naumenko, immersed in a stone alcove, in a heavy coarse-knit sweater (a complete illusion of medieval chain mail), with his hands raised deliberately high on the porticoes. .. Each knight is destined to fall one day on the battlefield ... 

This is now Willie Usov - a recognized master.

Photo works in galleries all over the world.

Glory.

Honor.

And then he started.

He was friends with rockers, made covers for albums recorded on his knee.

And, too, he saw the future.

No allusions - reality, or rather, a puncture of reality. 

They said about Mike Naumenko that he lived, how he lived.

I breathed as I breathed.

So he sang.

So he wrote the texts.

Very accurately (albeit unconsciously, from the point of view of a person of Western thinking) understanding the shortness of the time allotted for crazy experiments with the people and with the territory. 

I read what I have written, it turns me over, but I can’t do anything about it either.

Do you understand?

What can be done with the truth so that it does not turn over? 

“When your father drives you out of the door,

When your memoirs fall in value

When you shout "Help!", But no help comes, -

Maybe on this day you will come to me. "

The famous Beatles fan Kolya Vasin (it was teased about him that he was the only person in the USSR who corresponded with John Lennon), an odious and tragic figure at the same time, expressed somehow that, they say, Mike Naumenko did not look for God in his heart - that is why disappeared prematurely.

And Kolya Vasin himself dreamed of building a John Lennon temple in the city on the Neva - no more, no less.

And even a plot was allocated to him by the forces of the compassionate mayor's office, at the mouth of the Smolenka River, on Vasilyevsky Island.

And everything in the deeds and speeches of those would be both neat and good if Kolya Vasin did not fall on August 29, 2018 from the third floor of the shopping complex.

Allegedly (from the words of his friends) he spoke about the impossibility of living in a country where no one needs a temple, well, you already understood who ... 

It turns out that Kolya himself was looking for God in his soul, but he did not find it?

And it turns out that in that "stuffy" old country he breathed oh, how easy it was?

Maybe a temple would have happened there? .. And so - survived Mike for 27 years and two days, but ... Where can we go with such a baggage, but into history?

I am not belittling, I am stating.

And it turns out that Mike Naumenko, who quietly died on August 27, 1991, albeit under strange circumstances (this is not uncommon with people who drink ...), simply stepped aside, without pathos and pomp, letting through the brightly painted (in gouache, before the first rain ) a steam locomotive of "new light times and freedoms", clearly denoting the line of its inner cutoff of reality that is unacceptable to it?

It turns out that this is so.

After all, he saw both "Swan Lake" and hands shaking distinctly and in time ... 

“When your creditors demand payment of a debt,

When you see the enemy on your horse

When you are dressed in sackcloth instead of silk

Maybe, at least on this day, you will come to me ... " 

And the funny thing is: on August 20, 1991, Muammar Gaddafi sent a letter to President Gennady Yanayev, Chairman of the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR, which began with the following words: “We are glad to congratulate you on your courageous historic deed.

It, we hope, will lead the USSR out of the mortal crisis into which it has been plunged as a result of a large-scale imperialist conspiracy directed not only against the Soviet Union, but also against all the peoples of the world ... "

Gaddafi believed in Yanaev, but Yanayev himself did not.

So with the temple you yourself know who you know where.

Naumenko fell under the blows of fate, including because it was his choice.

He fell, but did not bend.

Others just bent over ...

“On the day when the sirens sound in your ears,

When you dream of silence in vain

When you need someone you don't need to talk to -

Maybe on this day you will come back to me. "

Alexander Kushnir, author of the documentary novel “Mike Naumenko.

Escape from the zoo ", quotes the words (from their personal conversation in 1996) of the drummer of the" Zoo "Valery Kirilov:" It was obvious to everyone that other times had come.

They weren't that frightening, they were just different.

The very air in the country had changed, and it was not known how it would end.

I really didn't like it, because I am a conservative by nature.

Mike was also a conservative, and we felt that this was not the change that everyone wanted and expected. "

“I've been waiting for you for so long

But I can wait

And you know, oddly enough, I remember everything

What did you forget to tell me. "

“I’m not a judge, you don’t need to be nice to me,

You can tell me everything.

But, you know, oddly enough, I forgot more

What will you ever know. " 

Yes, at first glance - a conversation with your beloved.

Where have you seen only the first glance in the lyrics of rock?

This is a conversation, or rather - an almost silent monologue with time and a country lost in a general mass madness, this is a mental exchange of thoughts with the ground on which you stand - not with your head, with the ground!

- not with the territory.

To the gallery page

Naumenko's room in a communal apartment, his eternal disorder and the life of a dusty vagant wandering along the roads, who knows how caught in our (once ours) crooked and unsettled time - the best proof of inner non-covetousness - came, left, forgotten, dragged on fiction.

And where and when do good, straight and right times happen for people like Mike? ..

More from the memoirs of Valery Kirilov, from his book “Comrade Head of the Zoo” (Mike spent the last weeks of his life in his apartment, spent the night here, worked, escaping from inescapable loneliness): “Mike began to work hard, day and night.

He lifted me out of bed at night and read what I had just written.

Sometimes I heard in a dream how he tears up poetry;

leaving the bedroom, I saw him burn whole piles of papers in the fireplace.

How much he destroyed then!

“Why burn it, then finish it,” I once remarked to him.

He looked at me in surprise and said sadly: "Then it won't be."

So the lines from the song "Sitting on the White Strip" came in handy ...

“And I'm happy with any weather,

I am happy with the sun, and I am happy with the thunderstorm.

And I live the way I live,

Sitting on a white strip.

All your haste is beyond my reach,

I don't understand your excitement.

I see no reason to fuss.

I don’t know why go crazy

And I hope to live here forever

But no - so rest in the Bose.

- Right here?

Right here!

At this very place -

Sitting on a white strip. "

If you ask me who here in the USSR was the most rocker of the rockers, I will answer that Naumenko.

I don’t know anything else.

Listen to his little Rum and Pepsi-Cola.

Everything is there: the raw hell (only from the fire, you can't hold it in your hands) of the dank, ragged sound of Elvis' return in 1969, the screams of the almost half-witted (by subtle stage calculation) Little Richard, the unpretentious puff of Bill Haley.

And the text is a crazy tea party in a crazy world.

So it goes.

Have you prepared the stones?

Well done.

Throw more boldly, what is already there.

All one thing - miss ...

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.