- First of all, I would like to understand how you yourself characterize "Sovdetstvo". Is it a novel, a story, a collection of stories?
- This is a collection of prose, which includes the big story "Shifts" and the story "Ptsyrokh", which is perceived as a kind of introduction, a prologue to the topic.
And “Sovdetstvo” is the name of the whole cycle, which I hope to continue and am already doing.
- The plot of the book is obviously based on the events of your childhood. Is there a place for fiction in "Sovdetstvo", or are you only describing what actually happened?
- “For real” is the prerogative of politicians.
Any writer, if he is not crazy, bases his work on real events in which he himself participated, which he witnessed, which he heard about from others.
Every fantasy is firmly attached to life, like a kite to the earth.
There is no other way even with visionaries.
I have formulated for myself the principle of "fictional truth" long ago.
The bottom line: this was not, but it could well be.
Actually, this is the good old realism, but enriched with the discoveries of modernity and postmodernism.
By the way, I came out with the manifesto of “new realism” back in 1995 in the preface to the almanac “Realist”.
Unfortunately, my followers are forgetful and tend to quote without quotation marks ...
- Why was it important for you to tell about this period - Soviet childhood?
- For three reasons.
Firstly, my hero in August 1968 is almost 13 years old and he already understands something even in adulthood.
Secondly, those years were the peak of socialism, the peak of Soviet civilization, therefore, the more noticeable not only “our achievements”, but also the “bottlenecks” that ultimately destroyed the USSR.
Thirdly, 1968 became a kind of Cain seal of the Soviet Union, although the introduction of Warsaw Pact troops into the allied Czechoslovakia at the request of the local leadership was much more logical and logical than, say, the bombing and dismemberment of Yugoslavia by NATO forces.
But we still repent, and they do not even think to admit their guilt.
Interesting, right?
- Speaking about childhood during the years of the USSR, what do you remember first of all? What characterizes those times for you?
- First of all, I remember my feeling from that time, and it, this feeling, is joyful.
This is followed by the details, which, as it turned out in the process of work, the memory retained a great many.
I remember people who died long ago, but in my memory they are alive and speak to me as they once did.
They smile.
They're joking.
Get angry.
Sometimes it seems to me that the river of the current day flows into a kind of underground lake of the past, where everything is preserved - even the flight of the lemongrass butterfly, which you did not catch at the age of five because of the leaky net.
With the help of memory, you can dive into this underground lake and swim there with your eyes open.
- How, in your opinion, the childhood of Russian preschoolers and schoolchildren is especially different today from what it was in the years described in the book?
- There are external, conspicuous differences. For example, gadgets ... The gadgets of my childhood were plastic transparent boxes, where tiny balls rolled, which, turning the box at different angles, had to be rolled into the holes ... And now! Wow! I describe Children's World as a land of magical abundance of toys. But the current assortment of the most ordinary shopping center is incomparably richer in this respect. However, for the attitude of a 1960s child to the surrounding reality, this did not matter, he did not even suspect that there were game consoles, and that, having inserted a toffee-sized flash drive into a computer, you could watch cartoons without stopping until retirement ... In our childhood the state was much more active, it intervened in the educational process, trying to raise "Soviet people". In part, he succeeded.Is it good or bad? Do not know. I can only assume that the complete withdrawal of the state from the sphere of education leads to disaster.
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- What do you think, what idea of Soviet childhood will millennials and even younger readers have after reading your book?
- Hopefully positive. However, "we are not given to predict how our word will respond." And there is no need to predict. As soon as the writer begins to do this, he becomes a slave to the scheme. I am sure that the authors of the books that served me as models (I. Shmelev - "The Lord's Summer", A. Tolstoy - "Nikita's Childhood", L. Kassil - "Conduit and Schwambrania") did not set any specific educational tasks for themselves, they simply revived cute past with a word. But Maxim Gorky set ideological tasks in his "Childhood", emphasizing the "leaden abominations of tsarism." And it is felt. I once visited the House of Kashirin, the writer's grandfather, in Nizhny Novgorod, and the guide, almost crying, assured us that in fact the early years of the writer, spent under this roof, were not at all so nightmarish ... But this is already a question of the author's optics.
- Obviously, over the past decades, the attitude towards raising children has also changed. Maybe there is something in modern approaches to education you absolutely dislike?
- It seems to me that having turned into a fetish "freedom of the child's personality", in the spirit of our hedonistic era, adults have simply dumped a lot of worries and responsibilities.
Freedom, we confess, is just an acceptable degree of coercion.
Entering life, a small person from the very beginning, from the cradle, is not free.
Personality, no matter how challenging it sounds today, is also formed with the help of restrictions, prohibitions, rewards and punishments.
When once again we are amazed at where the new snotty shooter came from, who came to school or university with a shotgun, we somehow forget: the criminal intent and the crime itself are nothing more than a perversely understood freedom of the individual ...
- I got the impression that you tried to create in the book a prosperous image of Soviet childhood and that time in general. In the process of working on it, you did not indulge in nostalgia, did it fascinate you?
- I will say this: 1960-1970 for Soviet society was in fact an era of prosperity, prosperity, and, in fact, for all strata.
My illiterate grandmother, receiving a meager pension, did not need anything.
However, it did not occur to her to buy a mink coat or go to Karlovy Vary either.
Stability and stagnation are essentially synonymous. At that time, homeless people and pensioners rummaging in garbage cans, I do not remember. By the way, the Russian village in those years, for the first time in centuries, healed quite well. I am not even talking about the outskirts of the empire; there, with rare exceptions, the standard of living was two to three times higher than in the so-called “Non-Black Earth Region”. Talk to a simple elderly Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian about Soviet times, and you will hear such a nostalgic longing about the times of "Egyptian captivity" that you will want to cry. Was I nostalgic when I wrote this book? Of course ... Only artificial intelligence is not sad about the lost time. I am a human being and I am immensely sad ...
- Is there something in the atmosphere, behavior of others, everyday life and events to which you changed your attitude, plunging into these memories at your current age, in comparison with how it looked in childhood perception?
- Of course, I look at many things differently now.
For example, at the age of 12, the idea of a communist society promised in 1980 seemed quite feasible to me.
However, I had some questions.
In particular, if taxis become free, then who would want to ride the tram?
At that time, the queues for food, things, cars seemed to me a normal part of life, those difficulties that you overcome, almost not noticing.
Once I asked my wise uncle Yura Baturin, is it possible to make the queues disappear?
Of course, he replied, salaries must be cut in half.
"How much did I promise to give you for your birthday?"
- "Five rubles."
“I'll give you two and a half and there won't be any queues.
Want?"
- "I do not want…".
Now there are almost no queues.
Are you happier about this?
Me not.
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- Who is the book intended for - for your peers, who can compare memories and, perhaps, experience nostalgic feelings, or for younger readers who did not find those times, and now have the opportunity to learn more about them?
- "Sovdetstvo" is intended, of course, primarily for readers of the older generation who still remember Soviet times.
But, I think, my new thing will interest that part of the youth who really wants to understand the present day, and without knowing the past it is impossible to understand the present.
For example, I can say that in my class, in an ordinary school, the son of a deputy minister studied - I don't remember what.
Today such a boy would study at Eton and then invest the money stolen by his father into the economy of England in order to receive the knighthood from the hands of the queen.
In our time, even the snide science fiction writers Strugatsky would not have thought of this.
- Have your grandchildren read the book? What are their impressions?
- No, they didn’t read it, because it hasn’t come out yet, and I don’t give them the manuscript.
I hope they will read it with interest and benefit.
Grandson Egor is 18 years old, granddaughter Lyuba is 16. It's time!
- The prologue to Sovdetstvo speaks of your rather negative attitude towards the works of other authors about Soviet childhood. Nevertheless, probably, someone remembered those years just like that. What do you think is connected with different environmental conditions or with the personal attitude of the authors?
- The question is not simple, and it is only partly connected with literature. Among the human types there is one that I call for myself "obscurantists." Their outlook on life almost does not depend on the conditions of existence, security. Such a biochemistry of the brain. They always first of all see only the bad around them, and they associate their failures with anything - with the social system, climate, Masonic conspiracy, but not with their modest talents and low efficiency. They even perceive good luck as a sophisticated form of mockery of the cursed reality of an unhappy individual. I believe that in paradise they will suffer from the absence of dirty sorting - a symbol of the ugly world order.
According to a strange tradition, it is the "obscurantists" who most often go to literature. And despite the fact that they mostly grew up in families that were well-off by Soviet standards, studied more often in special schools, graduated from prestigious universities, had interesting jobs, they are not doing well ...
In the pioneer camp, the satraps were forced to walk in formation, at the institute - to go for potatoes ... What a country!
For the summer they were not allowed to visit my grandmother in Haifa.
They are convinced that the Iron Curtain was lowered solely to annoy them.
During the covid isolation, no one was allowed anywhere.
And what now, to curse "this country" "from the southern mountains to the northern seas"?
One word: "obscurantists."
But it is precisely such gloomy, even pathological fantasy on the themes of a terrible Soviet childhood that are now being promoted in every possible way, translated into languages, encouraged with prizes, and at the expense of the treasury.
What for?
After all, according to my observations, those who hate the Soviet past cannot stand the present, Putin's Russia.
Such an interesting pattern comes out.
- Are there any other books in which, in your opinion, about childhood at that time is told objectively?
- Of course.
There are many of them.
Let me name at least a book about Dimka Bobrikov by the prose writer Sergei Chuev.
But, oddly enough, it is precisely such positive works that biased criticism stubbornly does not notice, the award jury does not pay attention to them.
One gets the impression that readers are being deliberately taken aside.
What for?
Honestly, the cultural policy of our state sometimes reminds me of the game "Guess the melody"!
- If you imagine that after a few more decades you will be writing about the 2010s, what will you definitely mention? What phenomena are necessary for future generations to understand the present time?
- The Soviet project is an attempt to achieve social justice at the expense of freedom.
The current project (if any) is the achievement of freedom at the expense of social injustice.
And the modern child is very sensitive to class inequality.
But it is not customary for us to write about this yet ...