Hello, Lyubov Mikhailovna! Please check my essay. Thank you very much in advance

About the writer's courage

I sat at the top of this trampled, prosperous, filled with various sailors and expeditions, grimy, beautiful Arkhangelsk hotel (in its old wing), in our room, among torn backpacks, scattered things, among all these boots, packs of cigarettes, razors, guns, cartridges and everything else, after a heavy, unnecessary argument about literature, I sat near the window, sadly propped myself up, and it was already late, once again the humble white night came and poured into me like poison, calling me even further, and although I was angry, but on the other hand, it felt good and cheerful to think that tomorrow we needed to get a job on a hunting schooner in order to then go to Novaya Zemlya and even further, somewhere into the Kara Sea.

And I kept looking out of the window into the distance, over the roofs, at the bright horizon with light pink clouds. On the Dvina, glimmering here and there between the roofs, huge timber carriers stood black in the roadstead, their tone lights flickering weakly, sometimes steam hissed, the working propellers muttered dully, the tall sirens of the tugboats yelped like dogs, and farewell whistles hummed powerfully and sadly.

Below, sparse cars rustled, trams rumbled even more rarely. Downstairs the restaurant was noisy, humming at that hour, playing, singing and pounding an orchestra (at that time some pensions played there in the evenings), and I could hear it well, even though the restaurant windows looked out into the courtyard. Downstairs, the irreplaceable, eternal Uncle Vasya did not allow various scoundrels into the restaurant who were hungry for a luxurious life, and at that hour my happy friend and friend was sitting in the restaurant with the Romanian circus performers, speaking to them in Spanish and Eskimo, and I was alone, that’s all I remembered how we had just argued downstairs about literature with a local expert, and thought about the courage of the writer.

A writer must be courageous, I thought, because his life is hard. When he is alone with a blank sheet of paper, everything is decidedly against him. There are millions of previously written books against him - it’s simply scary to think about - and thoughts about why else write when all this has already happened. Against him are headaches and self-doubt on different days, and different people who call or come to him at that moment, and all sorts of worries, troubles, things that seem important, although for him there is no matter at this hour more important than that which he has to. The sun is against him, when he wants to leave the house, go somewhere, see something, experience some kind of happiness. And the rain is against it, when your soul is heavy, cloudy and you don’t want to work.

Everywhere around him the whole world lives, moves, spins, goes somewhere. And he, already from birth, is captured by this world and must live with everyone, while he should be alone at this moment. Because at this moment there should be no one near him - neither his beloved, nor his mother, nor his wife, nor his children, but only his heroes, one of his words, one passion to which he devoted himself should be with him.

When a writer sits down to write a blank white sheet of paper, so many things immediately take up arms against him, so many unbearably so, everything calls to him, reminds him of himself, and he must live in some kind of life of his own, invented by him. Some people whom no one has ever seen, but they still seem to be alive, and he should think of them as his loved ones. And he sits, looks somewhere outside the window or at the wall, sees nothing, but sees only an endless series of days and pages behind and ahead, his failures and retreats - those that will happen - and he feels bad and bitter. And no one can help him, because he is alone.

That's the whole point: no one will ever help him, won't take a pen or typewriter, won't write for him, won't show him how to write. He must do this himself. And if he himself cannot, then everything is lost - he is not a writer. No one cares whether you are sick or healthy, whether you have taken up your work, whether you have patience - this is the highest courage. If you write poorly, neither titles, nor awards, nor past successes will save you. Titles will sometimes help you publish your bad work, your friends will rush to praise it, and you will receive money for it; but still you are not a writer...

You have to hold on, you have to be courageous to start over. You need to be courageous to endure and wait if your talent suddenly leaves you and you feel disgust at the mere thought of sitting down at the table. Talent sometimes goes away for a long time, but it always comes back if you are courageous.

A real writer works ten hours a day. Often he gets stuck, and then a day passes, and another day, and many more days, but he cannot quit, cannot write further, and with fury, almost with tears, he feels how the days pass, of which he has so little and is wasted.

Finally he puts an end to it. Now he is empty, so empty that he will never write a word again, as it seems to him. Well, he might say, but I did my job, and here it lies on my desk, a stack of written paper. And nothing like this had happened before me. Let Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote before me, but I wrote this. This is different. And even if it’s worse for me, I’m still healthy, and nothing is known yet whether it’s worse or not worse. Let someone try it like me!

When the work is done, the writer may think so. He put an end to it and, therefore, defeated himself, such a short joyful day! Moreover, he will soon start a new thing, and now he needs joy. It's so short.

Because he suddenly sees that, say, spring has passed, that a huge amount of time has flown over him since the moment when, at the beginning of April, at night, black clouds gathered in the west, and from this blackness a warm wind blew tirelessly, evenly and powerfully, and the snow began to thicken. The ice drift passed, the draft passed, the streams died down, the first greenery died down, and the ear became full and yellowed - a whole century passed, and he missed it, did not see any of this. How much happened in the world during this time, how many events happened to all the people, and he just worked, just put more and more white sheets of paper in front of him, and only saw the light in his heroes. No one will return this time to him; it has passed for him forever.

Then the writer gives his piece to the magazine. Let's take the best case, suppose that the thing is taken immediately, with joy. The writer gets a call or a telegram. Congratulations to him. They show off his item to other magazines. The writer goes to the editorial office, enters freely, noisily. Everyone is happy to see him, and he is happy, they are all such nice people. "Expensive! - they tell him. - We give! We give! We’ll put it in number twelve!” And number twelve is December. Winter. And now it's summer...

And everyone cheerfully looks at the writer, smiles, shakes his hand, pats him on the shoulder. Everyone is somehow sure that the writer has five hundred years of life ahead of him. And that waiting six months is like six days for him.

A strange, painful time begins for the writer. He's rushing for time. Hurry, hurry up and let the summer pass. And autumn, damn autumn! December is what he needs. The writer is exhausted in anticipation of December.

And now he’s working again, and again he either succeeds or doesn’t, a year has passed, the wheel has turned for the umpteenth time, and April is dying again, and criticism has come into play—payback for the old thing.

Writers read criticism of themselves. It is not true that some writers are not interested in what is written about them. And that's when they need all their courage. So as not to be offended by criticism and injustice. So as not to get embittered. So as not to quit work when they scold you too much. And so as not to believe praise, if they praise. Praise is terrible; it teaches a writer to think of himself better than he really is. Then he begins to teach others instead of learning himself. No matter how well he writes his next piece, he can do even better, he just has to be courageous and learn.

But the worst thing is not praise or criticism. The worst thing is when they are silent about you. When you have books coming out and you know that they are real books, but they don’t remember them, that’s when you have to be strong!

Literary truth always comes from the truth of life, and to the actual literary courage, a Soviet writer must add the courage of pilots, sailors, workers - those people who, by the sweat of their brow, change life on earth, those about whom he writes. After all, he writes, if possible, about the most diverse people, about all people, and he must see them all himself and live with them. For some time he must become, like them, a geologist, a lumberjack, a worker, a hunter, a tractor driver. And the writer sits in the cabin of a seiner with sailors, or walks with a party through the taiga, or flies with polar aviation pilots, or guides ships along the Great Northern Route.

The Soviet writer must also remember that evil exists on earth, that physical extermination, deprivation of basic freedoms, violence, destruction, hunger, fanaticism and stupidity, war and fascism exist. He must protest against all this to the best of his ability, and his voice, raised against lies, pharisaism and crimes, is courage of a special kind.

The writer, finally, must become a soldier, if necessary, he must have enough courage for this, so that later, if he remains alive, he can sit down at the table again and again find himself face to face with a blank sheet of paper.

The courage of a writer must be of the first grade. It must be with him constantly, because what he does, he does not for a day, not two, but for his whole life. And he knows that every time it will start all over again and it will be even more difficult.

If a writer lacks courage, he is lost. He was lost, even if he had talent. He will become envious, he will begin to vilify his fellow men. Cold with anger, he will think that he was not mentioned here and there, that he was not given a prize... And then he will never know true happiness as a writer. But the writer has happiness.

Still, there are moments in his work when everything goes well, and what didn’t work out yesterday turns out today without any effort. When the typewriter crackles like a machine gun, and blank sheets are inserted one after another, like clips. When the work is easy and reckless, when the writer feels powerful and honest.

When he suddenly remembers, having written a particularly powerful page, that in the beginning there was the Word and the Word was God! This happens rarely even among geniuses, but it always happens only among the courageous; the reward for all the work and days, for dissatisfaction, for despair is this sudden divinity of the word. And, having written this page, the writer knows that later it will remain. There won't be anything else left, but this page will remain.

When he understands that he must write the truth, that only in the truth is his salvation. Just don’t think that your truth will be accepted immediately and unconditionally. But you still have to write with the countless unknown people in mind for whom you end up writing. After all, you are not writing for an editor, not for a critic, not for money, although you, like everyone else, need money, but ultimately you are not writing for it. You can earn money in any way you like, and not necessarily by writing. And you write, remembering the divinity of the word and the truth. You write and think that literature is the self-consciousness of humanity, the self-expression of humanity in your face. You should always remember this and be happy and proud that you have had such an honor.

When you suddenly look at the clock and see that it’s already two or three, it’s night all over the earth, and in vast areas people are sleeping or loving each other and don’t want to know anything except their love, or killing each other, and planes with bombs are flying , and somewhere else they dance, and announcers of all kinds of radio stations use electricity for lies, reassurance, anxiety, fun, for disappointments and hopes. And you, so weak and lonely at this hour, do not sleep and think about the whole world, you painfully want all people on earth to finally become happy and free, so that inequality, wars, racism, and poverty disappear, so that labor has become necessary for everyone, just as air is necessary.

But the most important happiness is that you are not the only one who is awake this late at night. Other writers, your brothers in words, do not sleep with you. And all together you want one thing - for the world to become a better place, and for people to become more humane.

You don't have the power to remake the world the way you want. But you have your truth and your word. And you must be thrice courageous so that, despite your misfortunes, failures and breakdowns, you still bring joy to people and say endlessly that life should be better.

Solovetsky dreams

It’s finally twelve o’clock at night, and we are sitting in the monastery cell on Solovki, the light streams through two windows, one of which looks west, towards the sea, the other looks south, along the wall. This cell is beautiful, which was given to us by Sasha, the senior instructor of the camp site, I would give a lot to live in it if I were a monk!

There is now silence everywhere - both on the sea, and in the courtyard of the monastery, and inside the “brotherly cells on three floors, and below them there are storage rooms” - as this building in which the tourist center is located is indicated on the ancient plan.

The drunks have calmed down, they are no longer selling beer in the courtyard of the monastery, the vodka store has closed and the water supply in the restroom and washbasin has been turned off at night, so that some tourist, God forbid, might decide to drink some water at night or something else like that... It’s not allowed . Lights out. Everything sleeps on the island, everything is turned off, locked, one white night is not turned off - it shines. The sky is pink in the northwest, the heavy outlines of distant clouds rising over the horizon are dark purple, and the highest scales of light clouds overhead are silvery and pearly.

I lay down, then got into a conversation with a friend, got up again, heated it on the stove, and drank strong tea. A breeze, a faint sigh from the sea, will suddenly enter the window and spread throughout the cell with the spicy smell of algae. Everything has passed, everything is somewhere far away, one night remains and continues.

No, it’s a pity to fall asleep, it’s a pity to miss such a night. Looking out the windows again, we get dressed and quietly leave. In the courtyard in the freshness of the night it smells of stone, dust, garbage... Outside the gate we turn right, walk first along the Holy Lake, then through the village, then through the forest - to the sea. The forest sweetly showers us with moss, peat, pine needles, and in this infusion there is a subtle sound of warm stone.

The sea is like glass. And the cranberry strip on the horizon, and the clouds, and the black carbass on the anchors, and the wet black stones - everything is reflected in its mirror image. The tide is coming. On the sandy bottom between the stones, streams fill the holes and traces of seagulls. You will be distracted by something, then you will look at the water: the stone that just stuck out high and black from the water is now almost hidden, only the wet bald spot turns pink, reflecting the heavenly light, and the water near this bald spot - gurgle, gurgle! Smack, smack!

Seagulls not far away, like unmelted pieces of ice, blue and white, sleep on the water, tails raised upright. Silently, black sea ducks quickly sweep along the shore. There are logs floating here and there in the bay, brought here from the Dvina or Onega. The seal leaned out, saw us, disappeared, then appeared near the log, put its flippers on the log, stretched its muzzle high and looked at us for a long time. It was so quiet that the sound of his breathing could be heard across the water. Having looked enough, he grunted, splashed, the back flashed like a wheel in a rounded movement, and disappeared... Now there are few seals.

I sat down on a warm stone, lit a cigarette, looked around, and I felt so good that I didn’t want to think about tomorrow. And tomorrow a beautiful and bitter day awaited me - and I knew it! Wonderful because I’m back on Solovki, I finally got there again, I was honored. And the bitterest...

I first visited here ten years ago, in September, having previously walked, traveled on horseback and on various carbas and dorks quite a long distance along the Summer Coast - from Perto-Minsk to Zhizhgina Island. I was lonely then, because I was the first tourist, the first writer in many years, and in all the villages they greeted me with suspicion and apprehension.

And I got to Solovki from Zhizhgin on a schooner, landed on the opposite side of the island and, while walking to the Solovetsky Kremlin, I didn’t meet a soul on the countless lakes around, on the beautiful road with striped milestones.

It was a wonderful day then, a rare warm day in the fall, and the monastery was destroyed, ulcerated, stripped, and therefore terrible. And for a long time, in confusion, in sorrowful bewilderment, in anger, I walked around the monastery, and he humbly showed me the shabby walls of churches, some holes, crumbling plaster, as if after enemy shelling, like wounds - these were wounds, but they were made were “sons of the fatherland”, which will be discussed later.

And I was also the first tourist on Solovki, and again my curiosity seemed suspicious.

Ten years have passed, and Solovki has “become fashionable,” as the editor of “Sailor of the North” told me with a laugh in Arkhangelsk, although there is still no reason for either fashion or laughter. However, we will also talk about newspapermen later.

So, the coming day was bitter for me, and I didn’t want to think about it, just as I don’t want to think about the upcoming funeral, because I had to start my walks around the Holy Island in the morning, and today, even if only briefly, I already saw something . I saw the devastation.

“Caring for monuments and relics associated with the history of our Motherland, respect for them has become a glorious tradition of the Soviet people, an indicator of their true culture. In the treasury of cultural heritage of the Arkhangelsk region, many architectural and historical monuments amaze with their grandeur and beauty. These include the Solovetsky Monastery , founded in the 15th century... In recent years, much has been done and is being done in order to restore proper order and ensure the safety of cultural monuments... Much attention is paid to the organization of conservation and restoration work, which constitute the main link in the protection of monuments." This to the speeches of V. A. Puzanov (Arkhangelsk Regional Executive Committee) at the conference “Monuments of Culture of the Russian North”, held in Arkhangelsk in July of this year.

And here is what is said in the decision of the Arkhangelsk Regional Executive Committee, adopted after the publication in Izvestia No. 147 of 1965 of the article by V. Bezugloy and V. Shmyganovsky “Oasis at the Arctic Circle” - an article, by the way, quite soft, exhorting:

“Repair and restoration work in the Solovetsky Kremlin is being carried out extremely slowly, and religious, civil and industrial and economic buildings located on the islands of B. Solovetsky, B. Muksolomsky, B. Zayatsky and Anzersky are being destroyed and are not being restored by anyone.

The roads are not owned by anyone and are not maintained by anyone, with the exception of a small section that is slightly maintained by an agar plant.

Ancient canals connecting a large number of lakes are not cleared, no one monitors their condition, and no measures are taken to preserve them

The fish resources of the lakes of the Solovetsky archipelago are not used to provide fish for local people and those arriving on the island. Solovki population. The collection and processing of wild plants is not organized.

Tourist base on the island. Solovki does not satisfy the needs of tourists. It can only accommodate 100 people and is poorly equipped. Food for tourists is poorly organized and there is no transport.

The departments and departments of the regional executive committee do not show proper initiative and persistence in carrying out repairs and restoration of architectural monuments and civil buildings of the Solovetsky Islands archipelago, adapting them for the needs of the national economy and workers' recreation, and do not use the richest opportunities of the island.

The Executive Committee of the island Council of Workers' Deputies (Comrade Taranov) puts up with the neglect of the economy of the Solovki Island, and has reduced the demands placed on the heads of enterprises and organizations located on the Solovetsky Islands archipelago for the maintenance of buildings and structures transferred to them.”

Where is the “careful attitude” that V. A. Puzanov spoke about? And where are the “glorious traditions”? The Solovetsky Monastery really amazes, but not with its “greatness and beauty,” as Puzanov assures, but with the terrifying state in which it has been reduced. And nothing has been done there “in recent years,” except for the roofs of two towers. More scaffolding was erected near the building of the former prison, but during the three days I spent on Solovki, I did not see any workers on these scaffolding.

It's scary to walk around the monastery. All the stairs and floors have rotted, the plaster has fallen off, and the rest is barely holding together. All iconostasis, frescoes were destroyed, wooden galleries were broken. The domes of almost all the churches have been destroyed, the roofs are leaking, the glass in the churches has been broken, the frames have been damaged. The beautiful and varied chapels, of which there were many near and inside the monastery, are now gone.

In the courtyard of the monastery, two surviving monastery bells hang on a wooden crossbar. One of them is completely beaten up by bullets. Some “son of the fatherland” was having fun, shooting at the bell with a rifle - probably the ringing was good!

Near the Transfiguration Cathedral there was the tomb of Abraham Palitsyn, an associate of Minin and Pozharsky. The tomb was destroyed, but the granite tombstone in the form of a sarcophagus survived.

Here is the inscription on it:

“In the troubled time of the interregnum, when Russia was threatened by foreign rule, you courageously took up arms for the freedom of the fatherland and showed an unprecedented feat in the life of Russian monasticism as a humble monk. On a silent path you reached the limit of life and went to your grave not crowned with victorious laurels. Your crown is in heaven, your memory is unforgettable in the hearts of the grateful sons of the fatherland you liberated with Minin and Pozharsky.”

And right there, the name of the “son of the fatherland” is engraved on the granite - “Sidorenko V.P.” This son was not too lazy, he signed it, although it was probably difficult to chisel with a piece of iron - granite, after all! And right next to it there is a smaller inscription: “This Belov” was modest and did not put out his initials.

In general, all the walls are covered with writing, writing wherever possible and even where it is completely impossible at first glance. But they still manage to climb on each other’s shoulders.

How many monasteries there were on Solovki, how many chapels, cells, hotels, gazebos, workshops, vegetable gardens and orchards - and all of this is now destroyed. One inevitably comes to the conclusion that someone’s evil will is to blame for these destructions, dooming this beautiful land to oblivion. And are you trying to comprehend what motivated people in their hatred of the Solovetsky archipelago, what benefit was there for them, what benefit was there for the state (in their opinion) in such a purposeful, consistent destruction of architectural and historical values? And you can’t comprehend... These people could still be understood if industry would develop on Solovki - to the detriment of architectural monuments, but even this is not the case, and if it weren’t for the agar factory that now processes algae, then I I don’t even know what the local population would do here and, in general, why people would need to live here.

A whole year has passed since the decision of the regional executive committee on Solovki, and so what? Never mind. I saw a working copy of this decision from the Chairman of the Island Council Taranov. Against almost every point ordering this and that to be done, Taranov has notes in the margins: “No”, “Not delivered”, “Not done”... And it’s not the decision, and not the year that has passed after the decision. Because if they wanted to turn Solovki into a museum-reserve, into the pride of not only Arkhangelsk, but our entire country, they would have done it long ago, without waiting for statements in the central press. After all, twenty years have passed since the war! And not only has nothing been restored on Solovki, but even more has been destroyed - only the walls stand, strong walls, you could tear them down with explosives, but can you take them with your bare hands?

Taranov did not want to let us go to Anzersky Island.

- There's a nature reserve there.

- That's fine! - we said. - Let's go, have a look, talk with scientists - it's interesting!

Taranov was somewhat embarrassed. It turned out that there are no people there, and there is no reserve, and there is nothing at all, just an island - and that’s all...

“I’ll give you a pass,” Taranov finally said. - I’ll just write you down in the notebook.

Recorded it. Then he asked me to list all my books to him. And I wrote down the books.

And the next day we went to Rebolda - from there we went to Anzer karbas.

The karbas takes about forty minutes to cross the strait. Then the deserted shore, the barn, the carbass turns back, and we are left alone. There are traces of tourist wit on the barn: “Hotel White Horse”. From the barn there is a barely noticeable road through the moss, up into the forest.

We are alone on Anzer! It’s not that there’s no one here at all: collective farmers come from the Summer Coast to make hay, Moscow students do internships here, tourists also come in, of course, without any passes... But now, at this hour, we’re the only ones here, and you won’t understand, joyfully or it makes my soul sad.

We walked for two kilometers through forests and swamps, and even though they told us that the island was full of deer, hares, and all kinds of game, we never came across anyone, and as we walked back, we also saw and heard nothing. Everything on that island was silent.

The road goes up and up. The trees will part a little ahead, you wait with excitement - you are about to see something, some kind of mysterious monastery. No, again the crowns close overhead, again there are deserted lakes on the sides, again you walk through the swamp, then again the road, on the sides in places there are beds of boulders - the road was once good. And the heart already somehow aches, we increase our pace - what is this, is loneliness oppressing us? - I really want to get to my home as soon as possible.

But then the trees parted again, this time for real, a large meadow opened up, a long gentle slope down, a sea bay appeared on the left, a dark lake to the right, and on the isthmus - the whitest building of two-story cells with two church bell towers! Then the eye greedily found several more wooden houses on the sides, and all of this lay at the bottom of the valley, in the blue of a light cloudy day, on the shore of a remote bay in high banks covered with sharp teeth of fir trees. The monastery sounded - distant and dull - with its pinkish whiteness, the bluishness of the wooden houses, the red iron roof on everything dark green.

After standing for a while, we began to descend towards this miracle, we began to come closer and closer, and finally we arrived - and we felt terrified.

Weeds, fireweed, some umbrella herbs - all this was up to our shoulders, the houses stood without glass, with black eye sockets, the cells nearby were oozing red brick blood (that's where that pinkishness came from from afar!), the churches were broken, mangled, on one bell tower there is a watchtower with railings instead of a dome, the windows on the second floor are cells with thick bars. The floors inside the cells were broken, the stairs to the second floor were collapsed, we never entered the church - we were afraid.

Everything was - as after the war, as after the invasion of the Martians - dead, empty, not a soul around, only disgusting traces of desolation and some kind of perverted destruction. Just like on Solovki, there are inscriptions everywhere, the plaster is chipped off, the wallpaper is torn off, the window sills are broken (this is in wooden houses, of which there are several around stone cells and churches). Everywhere there are traces of people's sloppy short stay.

On the way to the monastery we were still talking, but here we could no longer talk, and we didn’t want to be here for a long time - with such pain, with such helplessness, the dying houses looked at us from all sides.

How many centuries has life glimmered here, the ringing of bells floated over the sea and lakes every evening, how many winters this monastery has survived, raising wisps of smoke to the sky, how many springs and white nights! And now the end and death? Who needed this death, for whom did it make life easier, what regional figure fulfilled his regional duty, signed a paper that doomed everything that was created here by human labor?

Wandering between the houses, getting bogged down in the weeds, we suddenly noticed a rather fresh inscription on the plywood: “Reserve. Hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms is prohibited!” That’s how it is: destroying history is allowed, but picking berries and mushrooms is prohibited. Let, let those who invented the reserve here calm down, and those who wrote the inscription, they are not collecting anything here. No one.

When we were leaving, we climbed up the meadow and stopped, looked back before entering the forest and before the monastery disappeared from us forever - again it sounded, yearned below, so far away in the silence and desert, and again from afar it was wonderful, like a pink pearl between the planes of mirror waters, in the dense greenery of the forest.

The editor of “Sailor of the North” was right: Solovki is now in fashion among newspapermen. But nothing good will come from such fashion for Solovki. Photo sketches and short reports about Solovki appear in almost every magazine and dozens of newspapers. Reports, as a rule, consist of stock phrases about the beauty of white nights and the like. Booklets and postcards are published in which the Kremlin is photographed only from the outside and always from a distance, across the Holy Lake, because it is not interesting to take pictures up close. And in all correspondence, with rare exceptions, nothing is said about the outrages happening on Solovki.

V. Lapin, head of the Arkhangelsk Special Scientific and Restoration Workshop, the same V. Lapin who said at the conference that the workshop “does not have the ability to conduct research work” (I wonder what kind of research workshop it is that cannot conduct scientific works?), hastily scribbled a guide to Solovki, where there are “gray-haired legends” and “bright events”, and again, not a word or a sound was said about the state of Solovki. Who needs this deception?

Thousands of deceived people from all over the country go to Solovki - and what do they find there? Beautiful nature, beautiful ruins and a camp site where only 150-200 people can stay. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners last for long hours, because there is only one dining room on the island. And one store, and in the store there are no products (there is no refrigerator on the island), except for canned food and vodka. There is a great variety of fish in the sea and on the lakes - from salmon to the famous Solovetsky herring, and local residents are happy if they get salted cod, which was caught on the opposite end of the earth, off Newfoundland, five years ago!

I came across cheerful articles about Solovki, where the chairman of the island Council, Comrade. Taranov is called a Solovki enthusiast. I boldly assert that Taranov is not an enthusiast at all and is a very bad owner. Because no improvements have occurred on Solovki in ten years.

It would be ridiculous, of course, to hold Taranov responsible for the restoration of Solovki. The means are not the same, the opportunities are not the same. But it was possible to save at least what was left. It was possible to have at least a small staff of guards, entrusting them with the protection of the most valuable architectural monuments. It would be possible to at least put milestones on the roads, the length of which, by the way, is not very long. It was possible, keeping in mind the ever-increasing flow of tourists, to open two or three summer cafes on the island. It was possible to open several hotels in former cells scattered throughout the island. Lay new floors, install glass in windows, repair roofs - and not much money is needed for this. It was possible to organize at least one single fishing artel to supply the island with fresh fish. But you never know what could have been done over all these years, at least in small things... And nothing has been done!

It is necessary to remember that on Solovki there were once not only churches, chapels and cells - on Solovki there was a diversified, very profitable economy. The monks had vegetable gardens and orchards, dairy production, forges, fishing and hunting cooperatives. There were carpentry and painting workshops, a pottery factory, a sawmill and a hydroelectric power station, a ship repair dock, salon melters, biological, zoological and meteorological stations, excellent transport, many hotels and shops. The most interesting selection work was carried out by the monastery in the botanical garden. Finally, the monastery had a uniquely valuable library and a collection of ancient Russian paintings. Yes, the monastery was not only a hostel for monks and a place of pilgrimage - it was, one might say, a kind of cultural center of the North.

Why was it necessary to take revenge on stones and walls, why was it necessary to exclude the richest, economically developed region from the economy of the region and the country? Is it really just because these walls were lined by monks? Are they the only ones made by monks? No, within these walls is the labor of hundreds of thousands of Pomors who came for different periods of time “on promise” - for hundreds of years...

Nightingales need to be saved! Because Soviet people need history. We simply need to constantly have before our eyes the deeds of our ancestors, distant and close, because without pride in their fathers, people cannot build a new life. Sons of the Fatherland is a great title, and we need to always remember this!

Before leaving, I again wandered around the monastery, and I thought that someday a golden age would come for Solovki. That Solovki will be restored in all its original glory. That frescoes will shine again in the vast premises of the monastery. That Kazan, Moscow and Leningrad will return at least part of its library to the monastery-museum. That bio- and weather stations will begin to work again, that the roads here will be fixed, that boarding houses, hotels, and restaurants will open in numerous now empty cells, that there will be taxis and buses on the island, that farms will turn white in the meadows and there will be a lot of their own milk and butter, that they will free the currently occupied berths near the monastery and ships from Arkhangelsk and Kem will enter directly into the Harbor of Prosperity, and not stand for days on end in the roadstead, that electricity will be installed wherever there is housing, that boats will ply between all the islands of the archipelago, that there will be nature reserves here , and an underwater scientific station following the example of Cousteau...

In general, it was a rather modest dream, but it also made me feel kind of hot in my soul, because the tattered historical walls were constantly in front of me.

Isn't that enough?

Speaking about today's lyrical prose, we need to remember how courageous she had to be in order to defend herself. Lyrical prose was quilted by all and sundry. Sometimes a small story provoked such an angry reaction from critics that the amount written about this story was a hundred times greater than the volume of the story itself.

We have not yet become so impoverished in memory that we have forgotten the miles of elaborative articles that accompanied lyrical prose for many years. What kind of labels were put on her! “Slander” and “slander” were not yet the strongest literary terms. It got to the point that feuilleton articles even appeared in Krokodil, complemented by feuilletons about swindlers and grabbers. Some recent articles have long discouraged authors from working in the field of lyrical prose, and editors from dealing with it.

And yet lyrical prose survived and flourished. This happened because lyrical prose replaced the flow of conflict-free, oleographic crafts and brought a fairly strong stream of fresh air to modern literature. She could not help but provoke the bitterness of a certain part of the critics, because at first timidly, and then more and more boldly, she began to break the established canons both in prose itself and in criticism. Yes, and in criticism, because it was no longer possible to write about lyrical prose with a set of cliches and newspaper copybooks that made up the lexicon of reviews of “production” novels; it was necessary to catch up to the level of a new writer.

If sensitivity, deep and at the same time chaste nostalgia for the fleeting time, musicality testifying to deep mastery, miraculous transformation of the ordinary, keen attention to nature, the subtlest sense of proportion and subtext, the gift of cold observation and the ability to show the inner world of a person, - if these advantages inherent in lyrical prose are not noticed, then what is there to notice?

Of course, literature does not live on kindness alone, but are kindness, conscientiousness, cordiality, tenderness so bad in today's times? And a sigh can pierce...

What next, and then something will happen, there will be regrets and joy, there will be poetry, and I have not heard that poetry was ever in danger of overproduction. And then, why, in fact, does V. Kamyanov ask modern writers about this? With this question it would be necessary to turn to Turgenev and Chekhov, to Prishvin, to Tolstoy, finally, for what is it if not the lyrical prose of his “Childhood”, “Adolescence” and “Youth”?

Denying the importance of lyrical prose in general, V. Kamyanov for some reason considers only works about the village (Shurtakov went even further and devoted his entire speech to village prose). Let us therefore agree on terminology—village prose is not yet lyrical prose. It is obvious that lyrical prose includes Likhonosov’s Relatives, V. Osipov’s Unsent Letter, and the works of V. Konetsky, G. Semenov, Yu. Smuul...

Lyrical prose writers brought to our literature not only sigh and elegy, as V. Kamyanov claims, they also brought truthfulness, talent, and close attention to the movements of the souls of their heroes. They gave us, if not broad in each individual case, then numerous pictures of the life of our society, pictures that were poetic and true.

Isn’t it enough to demand from lyrical prose what is not characteristic of it, and isn’t it time, on the contrary, to notice its merits? Standing up for deep epic literature, is it necessary to humiliate lyrical prose and enter into a “principled dispute” with it, as V. Kamyanov does?

While not agreeing with V. Kamyanov in his assessment of the possibilities of lyrical prose, nevertheless, if we move on to literature in general, we will all have to pose one single main question: what should we write about, what should our heroes talk and think about?

To answer this question means to create a great work. And only strong and courageous talent can solve this problem in the highest sense.

The active hero that V. Kamyanov offers us is not a solution. And what is an active hero? If the hero lives in a work, it means that he is active, since life itself is active. Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei are such different images, but aren’t they both active?

Russian literature has always been famous for the fact that, like no other literature in the world, it dealt with moral issues, questions about the meaning of life and death, and posed the highest problems. It didn’t solve problems—history solved them, but literature was always a little ahead of history.

That’s why we constantly look back at our great predecessors because we don’t have contemporary writers of such caliber, or, more precisely, almost none. That is why we peer at them with such insatiability because they are great not only because they wrote beautifully, but also because they wrote about the most important thing, which is the essence of the life of society.

Much of what worried them is now not significant for us and will not worry us now, but the criterion with which real literature should be approached is important for us, but moral problems are also problems for us, we will not escape from this .

Our literature is developing interestingly. At the very least, we have all done a lot, and therefore we can look forward with optimism in anticipation of works that are deeper and more important than those that we now have.

Of course, it’s easy to say: let’s rise to the heights of literature! Who will refuse... Who will say: I don’t want to? But we all stretch our legs over clothes, so should we bother especially? Aren't all our calls for improvement an empty sound and hot air?

I won’t write better than I can, of course, but faith in the higher purpose of the writer, posing important questions, taking the tasks of literature very seriously, even with little talent, will help me become a real writer. So it’s never a bad idea to remind each other about responsibility to talent and to one’s word.

V. Kamyanov wants to see our contemporary in literature as a “spiritually significant personality.” Me too. I think that the writers mentioned in the article “Not by kindness alone...” want the same thing.

What is stopping us? Our shyness? Time? Lack of spiritual experience or insufficient talent? Or, in fact, the dominance of poor lyrical prose?

This question is as difficult to answer as the question why Tolstoy was an epic writer and Chekhov a lyrical one.

So, let's wait and be patient. In the meantime, let's fundamentally respect lyrical prose!

The only native word

Interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta correspondents M. Stakhanova and E. Yakovich. The interview is printed in abbreviation - the interviewers' remarks are shortened

...—My mother, although she lived her life in the city, comes from a village. And when her brothers were still alive and all gathered together here in Moscow, village words and expressions immediately began to slip into their conversations. Later, every summer, I went to the village, to the Gorky or Yaroslavl region, and constantly caught myself thinking that I had already seen all this: I forgot, but then I remembered.

I was once into Dahlem. My God, I thought how many words had been forgotten! And you will find yourself, as we say, in the outback, there is not only Dal... It’s not for nothing that our folklorists still travel “for the word.”

And now I’m in the North. Plunging into the flow of real, living speech, I felt that I was born a second time. For God's sake, don't take this as prettiness. There is a moment in every person's life when he begins to be serious. For me, this happened on the shore of the White Sea, which was tart with algae and with a sharp, unusual, unique sea smell. In these parts, every word has been inhabited for centuries.

Look how exactly (Yuri Pavlovich leafs through the “Northern Diary”):

“The first seal that was born, baby, fits on your palm - that’s green for you... And then it turns white, the skin turns white, and then it’s called white...

Then the tags walk along it, along the tuleshka, and this is our serka, serochka...

And the next year, a seal, big-big-oh-oh... And it’s called a serun... And in its third year, a real coward. Do you understand? Not serun lysu-un! He’s a coot, and the female is a wuss.”

Green is not a color, but a sign, there is nothing else to say, just affectionately designate green, and age - chick. And then the squirrel is like a fry. And now: serka, serochka - her own, dear, bending in her hands. Already a personality, but matured - and a bald man. Not just any male seal. But the female is more tender, more defenseless...

Here they say about the weather - “gives away”. This is concrete: he forgives, as he forgives sins, and you can go again: to the sea, along the shore - for prey. And we're talking about dunes. “eels”, “up-mountains”, almost mountains... But it’s interesting: in the Novgorod region, the ancestral home of the current northern language, they now speak completely differently, more in the all-Russian language, so to speak.

— And in your urban stories the flow of speech is more Novgorod than White Sea.

- It seems inevitable. The islands that have preserved an adapted language for us are remote, hard-to-reach villages with their various dialects, from soft southern to harsh Siberian. And “urban Esperanto,” in which everyone can communicate with everyone, is a symbol of the industrial city. Of course, no one argues that such a language is more convenient, more economical... Without extra costs. But they were the main thing in communication.

However, language lives according to the laws of time. And there is some truth to the fact that it has become automated. Even though it's a shame. Judge for yourself: here is a man walking through the city, walking down his own street, opening the door with his own key... and ending up in someone else’s apartment. “The irony of fate...”, isn’t it? Now imagine a telephone conversation: the voice seems familiar, the words are ordinary, and the meaning is as always. We talked, and then it turns out that the person did not call you. Here is the plot for a short story, a little fantastic, really...

And yet, what is separated in life - the language of the city and the language of the countryside - can be synthesized in literature. I don’t feel a sharp linguistic difference between my village and city stories, because their source is the same: feeling, mood, impression. And the word, as a certain volume, must contain smell, color, movement.

- Yuri Pavlovich, on the islands of unadapted language you mentioned, a whole literature has grown - “village prose”. And, seeing her birth, they immediately started talking about the fact that our current everyday language is still expressive and diverse, still individual. Otherwise, where would such linguistic wealth come from?

- No, for me modern language is definitely average. And the stylistic diversity comes from the writer’s skill, from his great ability to bring the word to life. But only a real writer. Dozens of books were written as if with one hand - in a leveled language and according to its rules: convenient, economical, without unnecessary costs. The same thing happens on the basis of the local original language, when it is artificially played out.

— Don’t you think that the language of “village prose” is tightly tied to a certain locality, even when it is not contrived and the writer feels in this language? Doesn't the local language condemn the writer to provincialism?

- Well, this is not about real talent. Six pages of Likhonosov's new story are mature prose. People started talking about Rasputin with his first major work. And I can’t imagine any other language than the village one. Or Bunin. After all, he wrote about the Oryol province, where he spent his childhood. And the cruelty of his prose stems from the special, cruel poverty of the Oryol region. And the Bunin village is from it. Although, seen through his eyes, it became a symbol of all the villages of Russia.

- Yes, but the language of the Oryol province was reflected in the language of Bunin’s heroes; the author’s speech (what you once called “remarks”) is constructed according to different laws. And cannot be tied to any area.

- You are right about this, of course. Still, a good story is like theater: even without stage directions it should be clear who is speaking, what and why at the moment. And then just add “text from the author”, the entire visual side of the plot. There is a proven literary language for this. However, why not allow the possibility of stylization, when the mixing of the speech of the author and the character is set by a specific goal, a creative “super task”? For works based on irony and sarcasm, stylization is necessary. And Zoshchenko without his “clumsiness” is not Zoshchenko. But he was an excellent stylist. At one time I tried to write another story by Belkin. Imagine, he wrote: he accurately reproduced Pushkin’s style, a certain mystery of the plot... Or Rasputin’s stylization, you listen (Yuri Pavlovich takes a blue volume from the shelf - and at random from “Live and Remember?”):

“Every caught spruce, gudgeon, and, what’s more, grayling was immediately, still alive, delivered to the tables and jumped on them, either jumping into cups or falling to the floor. The windows were thrown open, on the windowsill he was playing loudly on the Ivanovo gramophone...”

You see, this is a frame. In one breath, in one gulp! Not a word from anyone else. And the gramophone “plays”, because he can’t “play”, because it’s a hut, and in it there are hot, full shoulders, and cut glasses, and - joy. Real, unartificial. And the word, one for the narrator and the hero, breathing in unison, is understandable and justified for me.

— Doesn’t the rural theme limit you, doesn’t it lead you into the past, doesn’t it push you towards simple writing about everyday life?

— Bread and land are not only images—the specifics of philosophical thinking. Therefore, in my opinion, a village cannot become a passing thing for a talented writer. After all, what happens is not a description, but a cognition of the fundamentals, awareness.

- But the “late” Kazakov is primarily urban stories?

— Writers don’t often turn to the new era. If I returned to the city and my new stories are not the stories of a “hillbilly”, then my city is not very urban.

— Yuri Pavlovich, why is the story dear to you?

- The story disciplines with its brevity, teaches you to see impressionistically - instantly and accurately. This is probably why I can’t escape the story. Whether it’s trouble or happiness: a stroke - and the moment is likened to eternity, equated to life. And the word is different every time.

In “Blue and Green,” for example, the word is light, colorful, the clarity of the world, seen for the first time through the eyes of a teenager, and in “Ugly” there is constant hopelessness, the word is clutched in the throat with a hand. Each plot corresponds to a certain style key. Just recently I finished a story that was somewhat unexpected. It grew out of a trip to a friend, from an incident on the road. I found myself in a fog, and fog always gave me a feeling of being lost. But never before such a complete illusion of immobility. I understood that the car was moving, but I could not take my eyes off the arrow showing that there was zero gas. And then a plot arose: someone is driving, sees a house on the road behind a strangely continuous fence, enters - and thus miracles begin. This story, since it is somewhat fantastic, is written in an ironic manner that is completely unusual for me. And the words seemed to become different. Obviously, style in a story is not just a person, but also the current state of your perception, and what exactly you are writing now. A film script is a completely different job, and you feel different in it.

— This is not the first time you have turned to cinema. There was a film adaptation of “Blue and Green”... So, the movie is not a random episode?

— If there was no story, I would say that the script is the best way of expression for me. Close-up, additional emphasis on details... This is an impulse, a gallery of moments. But, I must admit, the script is a thankless job: there are too many people above you, too many corrections, and you can’t refuse, since other people already depend on you, and what comes out to the viewer in the end is not what you first wrote. But I’m still failing with the novel. Probably, a novel, which, due to its genre, is not written as sparingly and densely as a story, but much more fluidly, is not for me. At one time, I took on the task of translating a large novel in the hope that I myself would be inspired to write a novel. Yes, apparently, the storyteller is destined to die. By the way, where artificial language comes in is in our historical novels.

- You also turned to history - in “The Ring of Breguet” - a story about Lermontov, about his failed meeting with Pushkin.

(Yuri Pavlovich shrugs: what to do?)

“We have already developed certain obligatory attributes of the past. Let us at least remember the film “The Noble Nest”: marble columns, mirrored floors, sophisticated expressions... All this was there, but only for a few families in Russia. But in general, they lived and thought simpler, more crudely. And I, with my “Breguet” paid tribute to artificiality, although he worked on the language for a long time. Or rather, not on the language, that’s the point, but on the details of the language: how to describe a hussar’s uniform, what a “piping” is, how to call a reckless driver. I made a special trip to Leningrad, to see which way Lermontov could have gone to the house on the Moika... He seemed to have mastered the details, but my characters speak tensely and too elegantly... And the story came out the most elaborate of all.

This once again proves that you need to have a taste for speech, to find the word by instinct. And the trouble is when the writer does not see the hidden light of the word, does not feel its muffled smell, when the word does not act out in the palms of his hands, does not begin to breathe, to live. Then the matter is completely hopeless. This means that you yourself do not have that original, only native and true word.

What is literature for and what am I myself for?

(The conversation was conducted by T. Beck and O. Salynsky.)

— Yuri Pavlovich, let’s start the conversation with a question, as they say, “head-on”: what is a good writer?

— It seems to me that a good writer is, first of all, a writer who thinks about important issues. Talent is talent, but even if it is written with talent, for example, about how a young guy, unexpectedly for those around him, became a milkmaid, and how the milkmaid girls laughed at him, and how he challenged one of them to a competition and defeated her... Although no - talent will not allow its owner to engage in such nonsense. A good writer always has a sense of something else beyond what he writes about. It’s like in sound: there is a main tone and there are overtones, and the more overtones, the richer the sound.

So the seriousness of the thoughts that the story evokes is the main thing in determining talent. Then comes the ability to arrange words so that they form the most harmonious phrase. A writer must have absolute inner hearing. Here you need memory for speech, for the way people speak. So that the author's remark - who says: colonel, merchant, peasant, doctor - could always be omitted. A writer who does not possess this quality writes as if he were deaf and dumb. He knows what the hero should say at the moment, but does not feel the words - he takes the first ones he comes across, erased, official ones.

How harmonious and precise the phrase is in the Russian classics of the 19th century!

— Probably, the writer’s attention to the classics also gives rise to his desire to see the world with his own eyes, to embody it in his word.

In the preface to the collected works of Bunin, A. Tvardovsky wrote about his creative experience, which “was not in vain for many of our masters, marked - each in their own way - by their loyalty to the classical traditions of Russian realism.” “The same,” A. Tvardovsky further noted, “can be said about the younger generation of Soviet writers, primarily about Yu. Kazakov, whose stories were influenced by Bunin’s writing, perhaps to the most obvious extent.”

Do you agree with this remark by A. Tvardovsky?

— After a long break, Bunin was published here in 1956. That's when I read it for the first time. Perhaps there would not have been such a shock if ten years earlier I had not visited a village in the north of the Kirov region in the summer, where I fell in love with these ancient huts. At that time I was a twenty-year-old musician and was drawn there, overwhelmed by a hunting passion. I remember how I walked and wandered there alone with a gun - naive, young, timid. There was no disbelief in me then, there was only a bright youthful faith in the future (a little later, on behalf of that Arbat boy, I wrote the story “Blue and Green”).

I remember how I saw a man walking along the arable land - with a box on his left side, with a belt over his right shoulder - who was throwing grain so that it hit the edge of the box and scattered like a fan. He walked steadily, and as he walked, whack, whack, grain flew... On the radio, in films then everyone sang about combines, equipment, and so on. And here comes a man in trousers and barefoot (after all, it seems like it was 1947).

I didn’t think about the economic problems of agriculture at that time. Moreover, I didn’t think that I would become a writer. But I wanted to take a closer look at the man with the box. And when ten years later I began to read Bunin, I kept seeing this barefoot man, gray huts, and heard the taste of bread and chaff.

Yes, when Bunin attacked me with his hawkish vision of man and nature, I was simply scared. And there was something to be afraid of! He and what I thought so much about during my sleepless college nights magically coincided. Here are the origins of this influence.

— You are talking about Bunin’s “vision” that influenced you. At one time, criticism found the influence of Chekhov in your works. But did the power of love for teachers hinder you? Didn’t there sometimes arise a desire, on the contrary, to push away from them in some way?

— Chekhov never “interfered.” He came into my life, as they say, from a young age, along with Tolstoy. Getting to know them, when I was not yet thinking about writing, was smooth and, as it were, not obligatory... When I began to grow into a writer, I had just spread my wings, and Bunin hit me. Sharply, suddenly, unnaturally strong. It was not for nothing that at that time Kataev spoke in amazement at how many young, timid talents Bunin had ruined: when they began to write under him, they never got out later.

Of course, I was subject to the most obvious influence, and several of my stories - well, for example, “Old Men” - were clearly written in Bunin’s manner. But here’s what offends me: when I got out from under Bunin, became myself (after all, my subsequent works were written generally outside of this influence), my critics continued to repeat as usual - Bunin, Bunin, Bunin... Well, maybe “Autumn” in oak forests" - Bunin?

— In the works of any modern writer one can find the influence of one or another tradition, no matter how unconventional it may seem. But, probably, it is impossible to see modern life strictly in Bunin’s, Chekhov’s, and so on, without falling into contradiction with life itself, which offers the writer an endless number of topics that require new understanding. If we talk about such a quality of a work as “modernity,” then what role, in your opinion, does the modernity of the topic itself play here?

— The artist always writes about the main things in a person’s life. When a writer says: I am writing about the construction of a water pumping station, I feel sorry for both him and the reader. This is, after all, the task primarily of a newspaper reporter, a feature writer. If a writer focuses only on the topic, on the material, the book quickly becomes outdated. There was a very famous writer at one time, she mastered the topic and didn’t mess around. But each time her goal was to “get to the point,” to choose a relevant topic. The reader’s reaction was immediately violent, but as soon as the life situation changed, things became uninteresting to read. Others became collective farmers, different life problems, different economic conditions. It's boring to read: MTS has been gone for a long time, and the problem is gone. Now you will object to me, what about Ovechkin?

He is, of course, a true writer. But re-read his essays - how much has changed since then! Ovechkin’s merit, first of all, is that he was the first to write honestly, sharply, and problematically about the state of agriculture, but his criticism itself, it seems to me, is no longer of particular interest...

I think that the task of literature is to depict precisely the mental movements of a person, the main ones, and not the petty ones. That is why Leo Tolstoy is still the main figure in our literature. The nobility, landowners, serfdom - all this is gone, but you read with the same pleasure as a hundred years ago. Without leaving the movements of the soul he described. Tolstoy is modern.

“We are talking about topics that are truly important, understood in a non-opportunistic way and resolved artistically and expressively. In such cases, the acutely relevant and the long-term are inseparable... Well, who is especially interesting among our modern writers?

- It's difficult to answer. I've fallen somewhat behind the magazine literature in recent years and haven't read many new books. It so happened that 340 days a year I live at the dacha in Abramtsevo, as an anchorite. It's sad, but I find joy in solitude. Loneliness is hard when there is nothing to think about. If there is something to talk about, then it only helps.

I remember my youth and our endless conversations in the House of Writers. They talked and argued, but how little was left in memory! The main thing that remains is how the poems were read. I received from this not only mental, but also auditory pleasure. Beautiful voices of the readers, a wealth of shades and timbres - from a whisper to a hum. I have a half-story, half-essay - I myself consider it a story, although I wrote it as an essay - “Long Screams” (Yevtushenko also has a poem of the same name), about how on the northern transport we shouted in turns so that we were heard.

— Is this a continuation of the classic theme of metropolitan ornateness and silence in the depths of Russia?

- No, in this case I mean the power of the voice. And how I now remember our youth.

Of course, our disputes were not idle. In my youth I also had wonderful meetings when I was silent and listened admiringly. I will remember my conversations with Tvardovsky for the rest of my life; he spoke about literature in a folk way, striking with sudden turns of phrase and comparisons. I happened to know Svetlov. I also found Yuri Olesha.

Then his book “Not a Day Without a Line” came out, and, to be honest, it was painful for me to read it. You can see how the artist desperately wants to write just a story, just a story, but is forced to write down images, metaphors...

This poet can write even at a table in a cafe. Vinokurov told me that he needed a desk to write down a poem, but he composed it while walking. And the prose writer sits down at the table and the longer he sits, the more and better he writes.

- Necessarily? Have you really never written in one gulp?

— Perhaps rarely, but it happened. So I wrote half of the story “Separation of Souls” - a story about a boy who survived the war, the bombing, 1941. I wrote it in love, while apart, in Crimea. I wrote for six days, then gave up, went to Moscow, and never finished... The action takes place in Krakow and Zakopane. In 1963, when I was in Warsaw, I was told about some kind of theological “prediction” that, supposedly, we should wait for the end of the world on February 13, 1963. In my story, I used this as a conventional device, transferring that atmosphere into it - the hero sums up his life on a sleepless night.

- Yes, I won’t finish it. In general, it is with some fear that I tear away written things from myself. They often call me from one magazine or another. “No, I think it’s too early to give it away, let it rest.”

— I never create new editions, versions of what has already been published, because there will never be an end to it anyway. I’ll bring it, as it seems to me, to a shine, and in a year or two it will catch my eye - and again I’ll decide that I need to rewrite it. But still don’t rule for the rest of your life!

- The story appeared... And ratings, opinions, comments, probably, and advice began to pour in - from friends, editors, critics, how do you feel about all this?

- Friends... Judging by the inscriptions they write for me on their books, they really like my stories. Editors? If the item is accepted, no comments are made. And the critics, although they rarely write about me now, have also changed their anger to mercy, so it’s a sin to complain.

— And yet: what do you expect from criticism?

- Who knows what to expect from her? This is where the critic comes in. This is the first thing. And secondly, as a rule, if a critic is limited by space, then it is difficult for him to turn around, you will inevitably crumple it, perhaps you will interest the reader, but you will not reveal anything to the author.

In general, in my opinion, such criticism is most fruitful when a work is considered as a part of social life, as an expression of the consciousness of society, and not simply - whether it is well written, whether it is poorly written, whether the image is a success, or not...

— Do you imagine your reader?

- I can’t imagine. I have never seen anyone on the train, or in the reading rooms, reading my books. And in general, something strange is happening with my books, it’s as if they never existed.

I participated in several literary decades, and, as a rule, book bazaars and sales. They come up to my colleagues for autographs, even crowd around, but I am alone, like a finger, as if everything that has been published a lot is falling through somewhere.

— You talked about companies of past years. Something probably united your peers...

— The climate was general.

I was studying at the Literary Institute then. I came there as a person, frankly speaking, illiterate. These were the living conditions then - war and post-war difficulties, worries about bread and clothing. The interests rested on this: whether such and such coupons would be exchanged for such and such products. Second: when I was interested in music, the main thing I considered was not the culture of the musician, but the technique, that is, the better you play, the higher your price. And to play well, you need to practice 6-8 hours. That's why many wonderful musicians are childish, to say the least...

In a word, my music studies also played such a role: I entered the Literary Institute, knowing fiction at a completely philistine level.

In my youth I loved hanging around Arbat. We didn’t gather at each other’s houses then, as we do now: there were no separate apartments or dachas. Communal apartments, where there is a family per room. So we wandered...

We thought we were the best guys in the world! They were born not only in Moscow, in the capital of our Motherland, but also in the “capital of Moscow” - on Arbat. We called each other countrymen.

There used to be a whole concept of “yard”, but now it doesn’t exist. My ten-year-old son, who lives in a tall new house, doesn’t know anyone in his yard.

— When you hear the words “Arbat”, “yard” you immediately remember the songs of Bulat Okudzhava. Many of them are about these vanishing concepts of our yard, our street. They once said that Bulat Okudzhava’s songs were ephemeral. And you argued in our conversation that if the phenomenon underlying a literary work is transitory, it becomes boring to read over time.

What do you think: is Okudzhava’s poetry durable? Or not?

- Durable, because behind these bygone realities Okudzhava always stands for something more. The fate of a generation... And there are a lot of courtyards in Moscow. Well, is that really the point?..

I remember how Okudzhava was just starting out.

Here is a person who was one of the first to hear his very first song, “The Girl is Crying...”. I remember how I accidentally met Voznesensky, and he, knowing that I was a former musician, told me: “An amazing singer has appeared. It's a pity, I have no hearing, I would sing to you..."

I remember a little later, a big house on the Garden Ring, late company, Okudzhava took a guitar...

Then we wandered the streets and Arbat alleys all night. A wonderful huge moon, we are young, and how much was revealed before us then... 1959...

Lord, how I love Arbat!

When I moved from my communal apartment to Beskudnikovo, I realized that Arbat was like a special city, even the population was different.

You have probably seen my house on Arbat more than once, where the “Pet Shop” is. I am now amazed at the patience of my neighbors: every single day I played the double bass. Fortunately, this is not a violin, the sound is dull - and there were no complaints. They understood that a person “learns music.” By the way, Richter lived in our yard with his wife Nina Dorliak. And when in the summer, with the windows open, he played the piano and she sang, I dropped everything and listened. True, then I did not yet know that he was Richter.

— But still: what pushed you to write? Was your desire for literature a desire to express something specific, or was it a passion to write “in general”?

- If you are very interested, I’ll tell you. I became a writer because I was a stutterer.

I stuttered very badly and was even more embarrassed and suffered wildly. And that’s why I especially wanted to express on paper everything that had accumulated.

— It’s interesting: your favorite atmosphere is Arbat. And you have too many stories about her. Critics tend to even classify you as “villagers”: the wanderer, Manka, old woman Martha...

“But I’m starting to write about the city now.” And then everything turned out in contrast.

It so happened that as a child I never went far; we lived poorly and difficultly. Then the war - there was no time for travel. Then I studied and studied. No time to drive around...

During my student holidays, in 1956, I went to the North. And it was a huge impression for me. Before that, I submitted my stories to the Znamya magazine for a very long time, receiving refusal after refusal. No, it’s not that the stories were bad (all of them were later published), but, you know, “the mood is not right” and so on. And so they were tired of me, and it probably became inconvenient that, as if in the form of “compensation” from the magazine, they decided to send me on a business trip in order, as they say, “to bring me closer to life.” They suggested choosing any region of the Soviet Union. And I already have this somewhat speculative scheme. On the one hand, I’ve long wanted to write an essay, on the other, at that time I was very interested in Prishvin, in particular, one of his best works, “Behind the Magic Kolobok.” And so, I think, I’ll follow in the footsteps of Mikhail Mikhailovich and see what remains, what has changed. It’s interesting: he traveled there in 1906, and I exactly fifty years later.

Well, I waved there.

— Is this how the “Northern Diary” was born?

- No, that’s later, later. I decided to write the “Northern Diary” in 1960. And the first stories about the North were, it seems, “Nikishka’s Secrets”, “Manka”...

As a Muscovite who had never traveled anywhere, the North simply captivated me. White Sea. These villages are unlike any village in the world. People here lived well. I introduced economic data into the “Northern Diary” (maybe even to the detriment of artistry, but it’s still interesting for a future historian): who earns how much, and so on. Most of our collective farmers in the fifties received workdays. And here is money, and good money. They caught fish and handed them over to the state...

What else struck you? Life is extraordinary. The huts are two-story. Imagine, there were no locks there at all. If someone went to sea, he did not lock the hut. If you put a stick against the door, it means that the owners are not at home, and no one came in. I remember I had to get from the village of Zimnyaya Zolotitsa to Arkhangelsk by shore. Talking to one old woman, I asked her: “How can I get there alone? Is it safe? She answers me: “I have been living in the North for eighty years, and there has not been a single case where something was taken away from anyone...” Life is patriarchal - but not in the bad, but in the good sense of the word. I often spent the night there in huts, and if I reached into my pocket, how much did it cost me? - They were very surprised and offended.

It seemed to me that I was perhaps the first wandering person on the White Sea. It has now become fashionable to travel... I didn’t meet a single visitor there for a month and a half.

In one hut I—and again to the old woman—said that I was a writer (it was awkward to use the word “writer” in relation to myself). And she tells me: “I was alone here, I also studied literature.” My heart sank, I thought someone jumped me! It turned out that it was the explorer of the North Ozarovskaya and we were talking about 1924.

I was struck by the northern nature, climate, white nights and very special silvery clouds, the highest, glowing with pearly light. You know, white nights, they even change a person’s psyche. There, small children run around the streets until one or two in the morning.

In general, I fell in love with the North and began to travel there often.

— How do you explain the love of wanderings, trips, and trips that flared up in those years among your literary peers? It must be not only fashion?

— At that time, construction sites began to be built, the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, and virgin soil was being raised. All my friends went there. Great construction projects were truly the spirit of the times. And one more reason: at that time Hemingway was held in high esteem among us, who, as we know, often wrote in the first person: he was a traveler, a hunter, a fisherman, and a correspondent. “Geographically” rich person. And this Hemingway spirit (“infection” is a harsh word) gave tone to many of our writers who were under his influence, and in general a lot of good things. Our country is so huge: here you have exoticism and socialist construction, and everyone ran : the further, the better. So I ran...

— You remembered Hemingway. Now that the craze for this writer has passed, some critics are inclined to reduce his significance only to what fashion brought and took away. That is, to the manner: dialogue with subtext, chopped phrases, cultivation of “Hemingway” personality qualities. What is fruitful for you in his work even now?

- Subtext and so on (“The old man dreamed of lions” - like a password!) - this is for our brother the writer. But the fashion for Hemingway was rooted in something else, both for us and for the reader in general. Hemingway was and remains an anti-fascist, a man who hated war, a writer , who gave us all unforgettable pictures of war and post-war Europe, Republican Spain. He was a writer who not only wrote well, but lived well.

— In recent articles, criticism almost unanimously ranks you among the founders of village prose. Agree, it’s a rather paradoxical path: to the village - through Arbat and Hemingway!

“Hemingway didn’t influence me stylistically—he influenced me morally.” His honesty, his truthfulness, sometimes reaching the point of rudeness (as it should be!) in his depiction of war, love, drinking, food, death - this is what was infinitely dear to me in Hemingway’s work.

- How would you explain your attachment to old men and women? These are now favorite images in our prose.

— Old people are something that also amazed me in the North.

Keep in mind that twenty years ago these were different old people than they are now. The current ones are already “younger”. And then I had the opportunity to talk with people who were born in the 70-80s of the last century. That is, they lived half their lives before the revolution.

How well they remembered both songs and fairy tales! They remembered a time that was legendary for us. I look at your tape recorder now, and my heart flows with tears: if only I had it in those years! I wish I could write down so many records for these old people! And then I would have processed the best, and my “Northern Diary” would have been much more detailed and more attentive. After all, when you talk to a person, it’s not always convenient to write down in a notebook, and you won’t have time. Everyone has their own way of speaking. If only there was a tape recorder”... In general, a lot was missed.

— Apparently, many of the characters in “Northern Diary” are real people whom you recorded?

— No, as a rule, they are “invented.” That is, I have, of course, met somewhat similar types - I took one, another, a third and molded them in my mind... In general, a writer never invents anything: in any plan, living life is transformed in one way or another.

— That is, first the essay “Northern Diary” appeared, and then you often used only the essay form, wrote stories that only imitated the notes of an eyewitness, a traveler. Did you follow any genre patterns when creating The Northern Diary? Why did you feel it necessary to write it all in the first person?

- Well, isn’t it possible to write about your travels in the third person? Imagine: “A young, tall, handsome man with a backpack and wearing a “Friendship” raincoat came out of the carbass. “Hello,” he says..."

— The connection between your stories and the Russian classical genre tradition, noted by critics, do you feel it yourself? What do you think about the role of plot in a character story, a mood story (as distinguished from a foreign plot novel)?

— Fabulousness and entertainment, in my opinion, are alien to Russian short stories (with the exception, perhaps, of “Belkin’s Tales”), try to retell, for example, the content of “The House with a Mezzanine.” Well, as for the plot - how can there be no plot! As a rule, he leaves the pages of the story different, changed compared to how he appeared. In general, coming up with a plot is always much more difficult for me than writing.

— There is usually a sense of unity within each of your collections. The stories seem to form a cycle. Take, for example, your latest book, “In Your Dreams You Cried Bitterly.” Obviously, there are some conscious principles behind this construction?

- Well, in my opinion, there is no unity at all. What unity when I tried to write this way and that for two decades. “Nikishka’s secrets” is something fantastic, in almost every phrase of inversion; “Blue and Green” is the confession of an infantile city youth; , “Ugly” is a “cruel” story, and “In a dream you cried bitterly” was written in a completely new way.

— Yuri Pavlovich, how do you come up with the idea for this or that story?

- Do you want me to be specific? Let's take the book “In a Dream You Wept Bitterly” and look directly at the table of contents.

“At the stop.” This story arose from a memory of a tiny, abandoned station in the north of the Kirov region, which I remembered from the time when, as a student at the Gnessin School, I stocked up on music paper and went to record songs. The story “There’s a dog running!” began with the title. A long time ago, standing at the window with an acquaintance, I heard his simple phrase: “There’s a dog running.” There was some kind of rhythm in it that stuck in me and only after a while emerged and pulled out the idea behind it. And one more thing: I was traveling by bus to Pskov, I rode all night, I was in great pain, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stretch my legs. Well, then the torment was forgotten, but the happiness of the night road remained.

The history of the Cabias is more complex. In 1954, I first came to my mother’s homeland. This is where the memory of the war was terribly preserved - villages that were burned and completely wiped off the face of the earth. The place where I lived was fifteen kilometers from Sychevka, where I received poste restante correspondence. And I often took such walks: I went to the post office, received letters, answered them there, and back. One day I was returning very late along a barely white path, and I was suddenly overcome by an inexplicable fear. Moreover, suddenly, across the plowed field, a dark spot began to move across the plowed field in the starlight - either a person or an animal. I remember this feeling. Plus: I knew one self-confident boy, the head of the club, whom I took to Kabiasy. And one more thing: as a child, my mother often told me about the cabias - the most terrible fairy tale I ever knew.

-What kind of fairy tale is this?

- Don't you know? The cabias came out to the edge of the forest and sang. “Let’s go into the hut and eat the old woman.” The dog heard this and barked. The Cabias ran away. The old man and the old woman went out onto the porch, looked, there was no one there, which means the dog was barking in vain. And they cut off his paw. When the next day everything happened again, the dog drove the cabias away again, and the old man and the old woman cut off his tail. The third time, they cut off his head. And then the cabias came running again and sang their terrible song. They burst into the hut - the dog was no longer alive - and ate the old man and woman. (The only thing even scarier is the tale of a bear walking around a hut, and an old man and an old woman boiling his paw in a pot.)

That's how the idea came together from three different memories.

— What is the origin of the word “cabias”?

- I do not know for sure. In general, my mother told me a lot of fairy tales when I was a child. My language comes mostly from my mother. Although my father is also from the village (they are both from the Smolensk region, and by the way, I also have an unpublished story about how they met), but having arrived in the city before the revolution, he somehow very quickly “proletarianized” . And my mother’s speech is completely peasant, with original turns of phrase.

By the way, I consider dialecticisms in works written about the village to be an absolutely natural phenomenon: how can you do without them if you want to describe the speech of men? Another thing is the author’s speech, stage directions. Here the language should be purely literary (in my opinion, this rule was violated, for example, by V. Shishkov). Dialecticalism in creating a character’s image is necessary, but it’s better not to fall into it yourself. My only reproach for Astafiev’s “The Fish Tsar,” which I consider a magnificent book, is the abuse of dialectisms in the author’s speech...

But back to our topic, what other stories would you like to hear about?

- About “Trali-vali”.

— When I traveled along the Oka River with my grandson Polenov, we often spent the night with the buoy workers, whose acquaintance formed the basis for creating the image of Yegor. When I sat down to write this story, for some reason I kept playing Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” record while working on it...

— Did you remember Turgenev’s “Singers” when you wrote this story?

- No, I don’t see a direct relationship here. I'm talking about something else. And yet, in the story “Trali-vali” I made an attempt to describe the song professionally - as a musician (usually you come across cliches here - I say this again as a former musician - like: “The song soared up ...", etc. ...)...

A curious story preceded the story "The Wanderer". I was a student in practice in Rostov. By the way, - again, I’ll digress a little to the side - the practice was led by Efim Dorosh, a wonderful writer, whom I somehow didn’t appreciate at the time: a long-nosed, dark-eyed, rather gloomy man, at that time he seemed to me almost an old man. And he was only forty . That is, now I am much older than him. By the way, it was he who really advised me to write essays (he himself was then working on the “Village Diary”).

I could have gone anywhere, even to Kamchatka, but I believed that my job was to study Russia. And here we are - in Rostov.

My comrade - he wrote poetry - wrote (after all, practice) a poem about the excavations that were carried out in the vicinity of Rostov. I also had to report. I went to the local newspaper. “Where does your soul lie?” - they asked me there. For some reason I answered: “To the feuilleton.” Then the newspaper sent me to the city court, from there they sent me to the police, where I could choose from murder, robbery, or arson. But this is not a topic for a feuilleton. And then I came across this case: someone was arrested, under the guise of a wanderer, walking around cities and villages. As they say, I became familiar with the facts: this bloke with a beard (and bearded specimens were still rare in Russia at that time) came to church, where, falling to the floor, he prayed earnestly (for the salvation of Russia). An old woman approached him and, having learned that he was a pilgrim of God, provided him with lodging for the night. There was nothing to take from the old woman, but she was renting out a corner to some newlyweds, whose meager belongings he appropriated. They caught him at the market, where he, already drunk, was selling stolen goods.

Well, he had a biography! At first he studied to be an artist, and then he robbed churches, became a vagabond... I wrote a short feuilleton about him, which a small regional newspaper gladly published...

And when I returned to Moscow, I suddenly seemed to me to have something more in the figure of the wanderer than a simple petty swindler - probably some vague thought was drawing him into the distance. And I wrote a story.

— When “The Wanderer” and some of your other stories populated by similar types came out, some critics reproached you for admiring the irrational, dark sides of the human soul. But here’s what’s interesting: the wanderer is an empty, unkind, thieving guy, and it is through his perception that the mystery of the fields, these birch trees running up to the road, and in general the beauty of the world is revealed to us. And we see her through the eyes of a swindler.

By the way, many of your heroes (remember Yegor from “Trali Val”) have a vague attraction to the road. So in “The Northern Diary” there is a hymn to the road, and it is you who pronounce it... Why do you love wanderers so much? close to you?

- No, I don’t have all the stories about wanderers. If we talk about the meaning of the road, of wandering, then there is nothing better for a writer. A lot of new impressions, you look at everything greedily, remember it vividly, you meet such characters that you can even tell it now! You just have to go alone, and if there are three or four, nothing will work out - you will arrive God knows where, sit down with your friends at the samovar, and again the Moscow conversations will begin, as if you had never left. But one is bored when alone, drawn to people, wants to talk, find out how they live - after all, every person is so deep, so interesting.

To tell the truth, I’m only now starting to write city stories, but before: I went to the Volga, to Gorodets - I wrote two stories, I went to the Smolensk region, I went to the Oka - two, and so on.

I love my house in Abramtsevo, but I also regret it, I regret that I bought it once, the house is holding up very well - all sorts of repairs - the former ease was no longer there when I got ready in half a day - and that was it!

I want to go to Valdai! I want to become a tramp again, I think all the time how I once traveled alone, unknown to anyone, loved by no one... What is not life?

I want to go by boat. You can wander around the deck at night. Talk to the sailors on watch, listen to the car. You can wake up at dawn from the silence - because you are standing near the pier near some village - and eagerly see and take with you some nice detail. To remember later.

I remember how once we, young writers, went to visit Ilya Grigorievich Erenburg, who was then writing “People, Years, Life.” It was a most interesting meeting. He had my first, and then only, collection “At the Stop Station”. I no longer remember that I wrote on it to Ehrenburg, and in response he wrote to me on his book: “We all live at a stop.” That is, on the way...

— You also write children's stories and are even a member of the editorial board of the Murzilka magazine. Once on the pages of this magazine you performed in a very unusual genre - you wrote an article for the little ones about Lermontov. And now your new stories “Candle” and “In a Dream You Wept Bitterly” came out, built in the form of an address to your little son. Children interest you as interlocutors, whom you feel a special need to address. Is it so?

- Stories about children are one thing, and stories for children are another. You mentioned Murzilka. So, if we keep in mind the youngest reader, then the story for him should be extremely simple, concise, interesting and instructive. (This, by the way, is a great art; there are writers who have devoted their lives to this.) A story about a child, written for adults, can be as complex as you like. In any case, I would never dare to offer my stories about my little son (“The Candle” and “In Your Dreams You Wept Bitterly”) to a little reader.

— Yuri Pavlovich, in one of your essays written more than ten years ago, you said that the courage of a writer is a special kind of courage. How could you now develop this idea?

“I remember very vividly my last name under my first story - not only did I feel happiness, but in the depths of my soul I thought: “Someone will read it, and my story will have an effect on him - and this person will become different!” I'm not even talking about that vulgarizing criticism, the echoes of which I still saw and according to which it turned out like this: you just have to write a positive hero - and immediately, immediately the whole people will follow in his footsteps. And a negative hero will certainly demoralize society. If a writer portrayed a negative hero, he thus “provided a platform for the enemy.” That's what we agreed on!

But, as I became acquainted with the greatest examples of literature, as I myself wrote more and more, and as I looked back at our contemporary life, my faith in the power of words began to melt. It got to the point that I began to underwrite my stories, leaving them in drafts, thinking: “Well, if I write a few dozen more works, what will change in the world? And what is literature for? And why then am I myself?"

What is the use of my writings, if even all the passionate, thunderous preaching of Tolstoy taught no one anything? When they talk about Tolstoy the moralist, about Tolstoy as our moral conscience, they mean first of all his ethical and religious works, his journalism, his “What is my faith?”, his “I Can’t Be Silent.” But aren’t his artistic works (to some extent - not from a religious point of view) the same teaching - all these descriptions of countless states of the human soul, the whole world that appears before us on the pages of fiction, doesn’t this elevate us, not teaches us good, does not tell us infinitely convincingly that we should not sin, should not kill, but should endlessly love the world with its clouds and waters, forests and mountains, with its sky and the person under this sky?

With what bitterness Lenin wrote about the negligible circle of Tolstoy’s readers in illiterate Russia! Abroad, during his lifetime, Tolstoy, I mean the general reader, was not known enough. And yet, Tolstoy almost became the founder of a new religion! In any case, if he was not compared with Christ, then he was compared with Buddha.

Since then, it seems, there has not been a single truly literate person in the world who has not read Tolstoy, who has not thought about him and his teaching. Well! It would seem that words so convincing, so reasonable should have reborn us, and we, in the words of Pushkin, should, forgetting our differences, unite for the common well-being...

Meanwhile, with an interval of thirty years, we survived two terrible wars. Moreover, if now there is no war on earth, world, global, then small wars do not stop for a minute, and who has counted, and has anyone counted, how many hundreds of thousands or how many millions of people died in different parts of the globe for all the “peaceful” years after the world war? Not a day goes by without newspapers and radio bringing us terrible news about the latest atrocities of racism and fascism of various stripes in Asia, Africa, South America... Lord, yes Sakhalin from the time of Chekhov, the Stolypin reaction seems like children's toys compared to mass destruction people in the 20th century!

I talked about Tolstoy. Was it only Tolstoy who called people to goodness? No, there is absolutely not a single writer, great or small, who would not raise his voice against evil. Do all current politicians, presidents, prime ministers, admirals and generals, all those who give orders to go and kill, read these writers? Now they probably don’t read, now they don’t have time, but they did read. We read it when we were students - and they all definitely were! - all kinds of Sorbonnes, Oxfords and Harvards. Did you read it and nothing moved in their souls? I'm not even talking about the performers...

And so, for a writer who takes his work seriously, a question arises, a disastrous question: to whom am I writing? For what? and what is the point if my books are translated into dozens of languages ​​and published in hundreds of thousands of copies?

Dejection then seizes the writer, despondency for a long time: what can we say about me, if such rulers of thoughts have not moved humanity forward one iota, if their Word is not at all obligatory for people, but only the words of orders are obligatory: “Attack!”, “Fire! "

So, should I give up everything? Or don’t give a damn about everything and write for money, for “fame” (what glory there is!) or “for posterity”...

But why then do we keep writing and writing?

Yes, because a drop chisels a stone! Because it is still unknown what would have happened to all of us if there were no literature, no Word! And if there are in a person, in his soul, such concepts as conscience, duty, morality, truth and beauty - if even to a small extent there are - then isn’t this primarily a merit of great literature?

We are not great writers, but if we take our work seriously, then our word, perhaps, will make someone think, at least for an hour, at least for a day, about the meaning of life.

- Last question. Once upon a time you were part of the “cage” of young writers, and for a long time critics could not get over it. You were praised, scolded, and educated, all while continuing to address you as a young person. Now is your time to give advice. What would you say to today's young people?

— Under no circumstances should you send your works to venerable writers for review. There is no need to trump - so and so liked it... Let them go to the editorial offices themselves: the legs feed the wolf. That's exactly what I tried to do. This makes the writer seasoned and independent.

« Questions of literature", 1979, No. 2

Let's go to Lopshenga

Re-reading Paustovsky’s books, remembering conversations with him, I now think that his passion for literary work struggled with his passion for travel all his life.

Here are some excerpts from his book “The Golden Rose” alone.

“Even as a child, I developed a passion for geographical maps. I could sit over them for several hours, as if reading a fascinating book.

I studied the flows of unknown rivers, the whimsical sea coasts, penetrated into the depths of the taiga, where small circles marked nameless trading posts, repeated, like poetry, sonorous names - the Ugra Shar and the Hebrides, Guadarrama and Inverness, Onega and the Cordillera.

Gradually, all these places came to life in my imagination with such clarity that, it seems, I could write (and wrote a lot! - Yu.K.) fictitious travel diaries across different continents and countries.”

“I was returning by boat along the Pripyat from the town of Chernobyl to Kyiv.”

“Once I sailed in winter on a completely empty ship from Batum to Odessa.”

“The old steamer left the pier in Voznesenye and went out into Lake Onega.

The white night spread all around. For the first time I saw this night not over the Neva and the palaces of Leningrad, but among the northern wooded spaces and lakes.

A pale moon hung low in the east. She gave no light. The waves from the steamer silently ran away into the distance, shaking pieces of pine bark.”

The knowledge that he was going somewhere always shocked Paustovsky. He has an essay that he called “Wind of Wandering.” Without this wind it would be difficult for him to live and write. Almost all the happy moments in his life are associated with travel.

As he drove, he thought about the moment when he would finally sit down at the table to write about everything he saw and thought about on the road.

When he was working, sitting somewhere in a village or in an abandoned dacha, the new road was already calling to him and giving him no rest.

“The train rumbled, thundered, in steam, in smoke. The candles in the rattling lanterns burned, burning out. Outside the windows, crimson sparks flew along a trajectory. The locomotive shouted jubilantly, intoxicated by its own rapid progress.

I was sure that the train was rushing me to happiness. The idea for a new book was already born in my head. I believed in writing it."

He later wrote his famous book “Kara-Bugaz”.

And - like a moment of greatest happiness:

“I wrote in the cabin, sometimes I got up, went to the porthole, looked at the shores. Mighty machines sang quietly in the iron womb of the ship. The seagulls were squeaking. It was easy to write...

And the awareness of movement in space, the vague expectation of port cities where we had to go, perhaps for some tireless and short meetings, also helped a lot.

The motor ship cut the pale winter water with its steel stem, and it seemed to me that it was carrying me to inevitable happiness. It seemed so to me, obviously, because the story was a success.”

There are hundreds of such memories about the happiness of the road in his books.

One autumn day I was sitting in Paustovsky’s warm Tarusa house. As always, they talked about which of their mutual acquaintances was writing what, where they had gone or where they had returned from...

- Yes, Yura! — K.G. suddenly said animatedly. “I didn’t show you the spyglass?” No?

And he hurriedly stood up, went to the shelf and handed me a worn telescope.

- Look! Wonderful thing. And do you know where she is from? From the frigate "Pallada"!

Then he sat down at the table again and began to look out the window.

- Do you know which writer I envy most? Bunin! And not his talent at all. Genius, of course, is always enviable, but I’m not talking about that now... Just imagine where he hasn’t been! What countries did you see when you were young? Palestine, Judea, Egypt, Istanbul... What else is there? Yes! Indian Ocean, Ceylon... Happy man! You know what?.. Let's go to the North next year. How is it going there? Lopshenga... Shall we go to Lopshenga?

“Tatyana Alekseevna won’t let me in,” I said.

“He won’t let me in...” he agreed and sighed.

I met Paustovsky in Dubulti in the spring of 1957... So, fourteen years have passed since then, and that spring, like any other spring that happened earlier or later, will continue to move away from us until it stumbles over our coffin lid ... It’s strange, if you think about it, the relationship between the time of history and the personal time of each of us.

In the spring of 1967, I was sitting in Paris visiting B. Zaitsev, and he told me about I. Bunin. And he began his story like this:

- I met Ivan... ha... I met Ivan Bunin in 1902...

I even shuddered from some kind of fear - Chekhov was still alive then! It was still eight years before Tolstoy’s death, Kuprin, Bunin were young, almost aspiring writers, and my father had not yet been born! How many great and terrible events have happened since then all over the world, what eras have passed, and B. Zaitsev’s own life, perhaps, does not seem so long. I'm even sure of this!

This means that fourteen years have passed since that spring when I first saw Paustovsky and heard his voice. I was in love with him then. He didn’t love, but he was in love. So much so that I even remember what kind of coat he had then, ratite, with a fastening lining, quilted with diamonds, and a fawn hat.

In general, an atmosphere of love and some trepidation associated with it surrounded Paustovsky in his last years.

In 1963, at the very height of E. Yevtushenko’s fame, I went with him to the North and I can testify: there was no end to his fans. But that was a qualitatively different glory. The attitude towards Paustovsky was, how shall I put it... Well, here’s an example. In the fall of 1960, Fyodor Polenov, the artist’s grandson and director of the museum, and I gathered to visit Paustovsky. We reached the gate, and then Polenov even became childishly afraid and refused to go further. I went alone.

“Konstantin Georgievich,” I say, “there’s another guest outside the gate.”

- Why outside the gate?

- He's embarrassed by you.

To tell the truth, I was also embarrassed every time I visited Paustovsky.

I don’t know exactly when Paustovsky fell ill with asthma. But even then, in Dubulti, the illness took a strong hold of him, he kept changing rooms, could not get comfortable so that it would be warm and sunny. Sometimes on fine days he wandered alone along the sand dunes, photographed something, looked at the squirrels, went out to the sea, but not for long - a damp wind was blowing from the sea, fast ice was piled up almost to the horizon, and there was a smell of snow.

I haven’t been to Dubulti in summer or autumn, but it’s beautiful there in spring! For some reason, there is a lot of sun, light sea air, boarded-up dachas, holiday homes are closed, there are no people around, and there are usually about fifteen people in the House of Creativity. It works well there in early spring. They say that Paustovsky wrote almost the entire “Golden Rose” in Dubulti.

But during that month when I saw him every day, in my opinion, he hardly worked - he walked a lot, read something. He was rarely alone, more often he was surrounded by interlocutors, laughing and talking, saying in his weak, hoarse voice - most often something funny. He loved to tell and listen to good jokes. In general, humor and irony were inherent in him to the highest degree.

That’s how I remember him then - stooped, small, wearing glasses - and there were always three or four people around him to talk to.

He was somehow embarrassed by his glasses, I can’t find a better expression. In any case, I almost never took pictures with glasses, I was in a hurry to take them off.

He then read my first stories and with his enthusiastic assessment confused me so much that for several days I was embarrassed to approach him. He selected three stories and wrote a letter to give to E. Kazakevich.

Interesting detail! In the letter, at the end, it seems, he wrote about spring and that at dawn the cries of geese could be heard from the sea... So, it was the beginning of March, fast ice stretched out into the sea in a wide strip - and it was still early for the geese. But it was a sunny spring, the sunsets were green for a long time over the sea, bright Venus appeared - the geese were supposed to fly. They immediately arrived in the imagination of Konstantin Georgievich.

The next time I saw him was exactly a year later, also in the spring. Then for the first time I came to the Oka River, to Polenovo. It was mid-April, the snow was still white in the ravines. The Oka stood high, flooded all the meadows around, heaps of last year's leaves rustled through the forests, the sunsets were wide, green and yellow, and in the evenings the Oka shone long and prominently with reflected light among the dark banks.

Before I had time to arrive in Polenovo, I found out that Paustovsky was in Tarusa, and two days later I went to see him.

And in Tarusa it was steamy, dirty, everything was running, gurgling, pouring. The Oka lay below as a muddy, vast sea, there were blue gaps in the clouds, then pillars of light fell on the surrounding hills and transparent steam became visible above the bare black earth, above the fallow lands.

Paustovsky, with a ruffled face, sat in his garden over the flooded Taruska, and I even felt scared - he was so thin, so pale, his eyes sunk so deeply and he looked so longingly into the distance, beyond the Oka.

- Ah, Yura! “he said hoarsely, offering a weak hand. “Did the Czechs ask you for stories?” I praised you... It's time to transfer you... You are from Moscow now, right? Do you know Sergei Nikitin? Very talented...

He spoke as if only yesterday we had seen each other, but he spoke difficultly, abruptly, weakly, he breathed so greedily, nervously, often that his shoulders shook.

- Asthma... It's suffocating...

And he smiled shyly, as if apologizing, and again started talking about literature, about new names, about spring, about Bulgaria... Tatyana Alekseevna, who was working in the garden, came up and drove us into the house.

I don’t know exactly when Konstantin Georgievich settled in Tarusa. He first bought half a house with a veranda, then added a decent log room, made a dining room out of the veranda, and downstairs, as if in a semi-basement (like almost all Tarusans), a kitchen and an extension to the kitchen, something like a barn, through which there was an entrance .

While cleaning the dirt from my boots near the barn, I managed to tell K.G. that I was going to the North, to the White Sea in the summer, and began to talk about the Pomors. And, as soon as he entered the warm log room, he immediately climbed onto the shelf, took out a geographical atlas, took off his glasses and, bringing the atlas close to his eyes, began to look for the places where I was going to go.

“Yarenga... Lopshenga...” he muttered. - What names! Yura, take me! Will you take it? I'll get better... The doctors will let you in - will you take it?

And he looked longingly out the window, at the water meadows, at the Oka.

For all the time - from that now distant spring in Dubulti until the fateful July day of 1968 - I visited Paustovsky and spoke with him twenty times, no more. Still, I was embarrassed by him every time, almost as at the beginning of our acquaintance, I was afraid to disturb him, to tire him, to arrive at the wrong time, although, probably, I was making all this up and K.G. would have been glad of my every visit... After all, he asked questions Everyone has it about me, where I am, what I write. And a writer cannot be all alone. It’s good to work alone, but you can’t work all twenty-four hours. A writer needs people, news, all sorts of trifles, you never know. I remember how surprised I was by Kataev’s pressure.

- Come, come! - he called V. Roslyakov and me. - I don’t yawn in the morning, I don’t yawn during the day, I work during the day, and come in the evening! Let's talk...

And in recent years it was almost impossible for me to see Paustovsky: either he was in the hospital with another heart attack, then he lived in Yalta or in some sanatorium near Moscow, then, I heard, he went to France, to Italy...

So we had few meetings with him, and it would therefore be unforgivably self-confident on my part to say that I know him well as a person.

And yet I want to note that Paustovsky the man surprisingly corresponded to Paustovsky the writer. There are, and not so rarely, wonderful writers and bad people... Paustovsky was a good person, it was good to be with him. He almost did not talk about his illnesses, and his life, frankly speaking, was painful in his old age. You must have great strength of spirit in order to lie in hospitals for months, and if you add it all up, even for years, and not lose yourself as a person, not waste the humanity in yourself.

He wrote a lot in recent years, was published widely, not only was he published, but he was republished, he was reread, and this, according to Leo Tolstoy, is the first thing when he is reread. I couldn’t subscribe to his collected works in Moscow, but I signed up in Leningrad and bought a line from a dealer for one hundred and fifty rubles in old money. And my wife’s brother, a physics student, was on duty all night taking turns with a friend in Minsk to subscribe to the latest collected works.

In this sense, Paustovsky was happy, of course - you never know, even very talented writers end their lives in our country unread by anyone.

But I almost never heard him talk about his books, about his work; once he only said that he wanted to compile a book from readers’ letters with comments.

Every now and then you would hear from him:

— Do you know Voznesensky? Is he a good person? Is it true, the wonderful poetess Akhmadulina? Have you seen Yura Vasiliev's paintings? What do you think of Konetsky? Do you like Okudzhava?

He loved literature passionately and could talk about it endlessly. And he never enjoyed, did not love alone - he was in a hurry to involve everyone in his love. “Yura, do you know Platonov? - he asked and immediately begins to worry just at the thought of Platonov. - No? Be sure to get it! This is a brilliant writer! Just wait, I have it in Moscow, I’ll give it to you, you come. What a writer this is - the best Soviet stylist! How come you didn’t read this?”

He was dark-skinned, with a good forehead with receding hairlines, his ears were large, his cheeks were drawn in from illness, and this made his cheekbones more distinct and firmer, his humped nose thinner and larger, and the wrinkles that cut his face from the wings of his nose sharper.

He was descended from a Turkish grandmother on one side, he had Polish blood, and there was also Zaporozhye blood. He spoke about his ancestors, always laughing and coughing, but it was clear that he was pleased to feel like a son of the East and the Zaporozhye freemen, and he returned to this topic more than once.

He most often sat slouched, and this made him seem even smaller and drier, he always kept his dark hands on the table, he touched everything, turned it around during a conversation, looked at the table or out the window. Sometimes he will suddenly look up, immediately capture you entirely with his intelligent dark eyes and immediately turn away.

He laughed charmingly, shyly, rather hollowly, fans of wrinkles immediately gathered near his eyes - these were precisely wrinkles of laughter, his eyes sparkled, in general his whole face was transformed - for a minute the fatigue and pain went away from him, and I more than once caught myself wanting to make him laugh, to tell him something funny. I noticed the same desire in almost all of Paustovsky’s interlocutors.

It is difficult to imagine a more delicate person, so to speak, in the hostel. If illness did not put him to bed, he always went out into the garden to meet the guest and talked for an hour or two and always accompanied him to the gate. And if the guest was not unpleasant to him, he will certainly say something very affectionate at parting. “I love you very much!” Or: “You know, I know everything about you, I ask everyone all the time!”

One day in October I was making my way to the village of Marfino, about fifteen kilometers from Tarusa, along the Oka River. I had just published a book in Italy, and, of course, I couldn’t resist stopping by on the way to Paustovsky to brag. He was alone, apparently bored and very happy. He took the book hastily, almost grabbed it, took off his glasses, as usual, squinting myopically, began looking at the cover, turning over the pages and was so happy as if these were not my stories, but his, for the first time ever published in Italian. And the rest of the time, while I was sitting with him, saying how beautiful it was in Marfina, and how it was to work there, and what a wonderful autumn it was in general, he kept looking sideways, glancing at the book (it was lying on the table), he kept taking it and starting leafed through it again, looked at it, and again and again chuckled dully that on the cover there was a market picture with swans, which we painted at that time on the back of oilcloth.

Paustovsky was a kind and trusting person. Unfortunately, sometimes he is too kind and trusting. He often extended his good opinion of a person to his writings. But how many truly talented writers did he help, accompanying their first books with kind words, tirelessly repeating their names in many of his interviews, both here and in the West.

I was not a student of Paustovsky in the literal sense of the word, that is, I did not study with him in a seminar at the Literary Institute, and, in my opinion, I am not close to him literary. But he spoke about me so often with correspondents and writers from different countries that in many articles Paustovsky was called my teacher.

In the highest sense this is true - he is our common teacher, and I do not know a writer, old or young, who would not honor him in his heart.

As I already said, Paustovsky was very trusting. There lived in Tarusa a wonderful old doctor and a wonderful person, Mikhail Mikhailovich Melentyev. Once Paustovsky visited him with his illnesses, and Melentyev suddenly suggested that he quit smoking.

“You know, Yura,” Paustovsky told me with some amazement, “Melentyev is a secret hypnotist.” He suggested that I quit smoking... Well, then they started talking, and I forgot about his words about smoking. I go out into the street, out of habit, I take out a cigarette - I feel it, I don’t want it, it disgusts me... So I threw it away!

I then pestered Melentyev to hypnotize me too.

- You won't succeed! - Mikhail Mikhailovich laughed. - I'm a therapist! And Konstantin Georgievich decided that I was also into hypnosis, became convinced of this idea and quit smoking...

I once wrote about Paustovsky that “what he loves will someday be loved by everyone, just as we now love Levitan’s, Polenov’s and other places.” This was written in 1962, and five years later I went to Bulgaria, got to the old seaside town of Sozopol, something happened there, many poets and prose writers persuaded me to spend the night, and so I spent the night in the same house where Paustovsky spent the night, sat in the old courtyard where Paustovsky sat, drank wine, which Paustovsky liked... Gleb Goryshin was in Bulgaria three years before me, and in his travel essay he also has the idea that we should try to become the kind of person who leaves behind a wonderful trail - Goryshin in Bulgaria was also haunted by the memory of Paustovsky.

By the way, Paustovsky’s trips abroad in the last years of his life brought a lot of human joy. From his youth, he read books about European civilizations, and his imagination ran wild to the point that he wrote foreign stories in abundance. And Andersen was traveling through Italy, Grieg was walking through the wooded fiords of Norway, ships were sailing from Marseille to Liverpool, a Parisian scavenger was sowing gold from the dust... Paustovsky's heroes lived in almost all countries of the world, while the author saw these countries only in pictures. And only in old age did Paustovsky manage to see those countries about which he once wrote. He took a boat trip around Europe, visited Bulgaria, Poland, France, England, and Italy. These trips, I think, strengthened his love for Tarusa, for the Oka, for his homeland. Paustovsky wrote this after visiting Italy: “I would not exchange all the beauty of the Bay of Naples for a willow bush sprinkled with dew.” Isn't that too nicely said? — I once thought. And now I know: not too much! Because I myself experienced a similar feeling when, in April in Paris, I suddenly imagined our spring, with the thunder of streams along the ravines, with steam, with mud, with ice drift and flooding on the Oka.

The summer of 1961 was happy for Paustovsky. The disease somehow receded, rarely reminded of itself, the weather was good and hot all the time, and Paustovsky gave up on the regime, on his position as a patient, began smoking, went fishing every day, was always in public, was constantly cheerful and worked well in the morning.

And a great many people visited him that summer: authors came, brought poems, stories, a trip to Italy was started, then postponed, to the congress of the European Society of Writers, journalists constantly came, everyone had to be received and talked to everyone.

At such a time, fishing became simply a necessary rest for Paustovsky. At about two o'clock the writer Boris Balter and I usually met on the shore, pulled out the engine from the buoy's guardhouse, and installed it on the boat. Kolya, the beaconman, was carrying gasoline. About five minutes later Paustovsky approached. Shortness of breath tormented him. He would sit down somewhere right there, bashfully take out a glass thing with a rubber bulb and breathe in some kind of composition for a few seconds. Having caught his breath, he approached the boat, and a conversation began about the motor. The beacon keeper Kolya had a mystical attitude towards the engine.

- This is not something for you, Konstantin Georgievich! - he shouted, stuttering. “This is a motor for you, right?” Unit. So? You need to understand him, and not just pull him, sit down and not go...

After deep conversations about the motor, we climb into the boat. Kolya from the shore once again swears that the engine is like a clock!

We usually go towards Egnyshevka, Marfina - in case it would be easier to row downstream later when the engine breaks down. Paustovsky with fishing rods, in simple trousers, sandals, tanned - infinitely pleased. Balter gives him his place on the steering wheel. Paustovsky accelerates, squinting from the wind. He sees poorly, and Balter shouts to him from time to time:

- The buoy is right on the nose! More to the right! To the left!

Carrying out commands is a pleasure for Konstantin Georgievich. The cauldron boat is moving quickly, the wind is warm, the sun is shining strongly, the river is sparkling, and rare clouds are scattered high in the sky. The Oka is charming in these places, charming are its soft reaches, soft hills all around, forests approaching the water itself, lush green banks, and bronze pine trunks, and constantly opening new and new distances.

Somewhere between Velegozh and Yegnyshevka the engine usually stalls, and we land on the shore. Balter, swearing, is fiddling with the engine, I am swimming, Paustovsky is fishing on the side. Then we row down. I'm at the oars - the oars are iron, short, uncomfortable, the motor at the stern is raised and silent. Paustovsky and Balter are sunbathing. Sometimes Paustovsky embarrassedly suggests: Come on, Yura, I’ll bury...

At Velegozh, Paustovsky and I get off and go to the pier to wait for a passing boat. Balter remains with the boat. Around him, several specialists are already fiercely discussing the motor.

And so almost every day.

One day, the three of us - Paustovsky, Balter and I - met on the square in Tarusa to go fishing, and were just about to go ashore, to the beacon keeper's hut, when a gray car overtook us.

“There’s Richter’s car,” Balter said immediately.

- Yes? - Paustovsky squinted myopically after the car and suddenly laughed quietly, lowering his eyes and coughing. - Do you know, Yura, that Richter is building a house for himself here, with us? Lock! And I specifically bought a car in America to go there...

“All-terrain vehicle,” Balter clarified.

- And what! — Paustovsky became unusually animated. - What do you think! You can only go there with an all-terrain vehicle, otherwise you won’t be able to get through. You know, he first brought the piano to the beacon's hut, and that's how he lived - the piano and nothing else...

And he laughed again. It was clear that he really liked this kind of life in the lodge and the idea that Richter decided to settle and was then building on the Oka River near Tarusa.

Places between Tarusa and Aleksin have been open for a long time. At different times, Chekhov and Pasternak, Zabolotsky and Balmont, A. Tolstoy lived here, Igumnov played, dozens of artists came to sketch, Polenov’s family staged performances in Tarusa. Irakli Andronikov lived, transported things from Serpukhov on a cart and lost Pushkin’s cane. I wanted to show off in Tarusa and almost went crazy. Then they found the cane...

I also found a dying generation of old intellectuals, faithful to Tarusa for decades, faithful to the grave - Tsvetaeva died, Nadezhda Vasilievna Krandievskaya died, her son, the sculptor Faydysh-Krandievsky died, the doctor Melentyev, who had music in his house for twenty years in a row, died .

But if earlier Tarusa was known and loved by hundreds of people, then Paustovsky created all-Union glory for Tarusa, and Tarusa elected him as its honorary citizen.

I heard with my own ears how a drunken Tarusan was ranting on the bus, which was shaking on the potholes in the asphalt highway.

- Wow! Have you seen it? - he said, collapsing on someone after another push. Paustovsky donated two million for the trip, right? They built a highway. And now? Just pits... Then, that means two million, come on!

No, Konstantin Georgievich did not give millions for the journey. But Tarusa began to improve after Paustovsky’s articles.

The popularity of Tarusyan Paustovsky was great. They even tried to take him on excursions. Vladimir Koblikov, a Kaluga writer, said that one day Konstantin Georgievich came out of the bathhouse, walked quietly with a suitcase, suddenly visiting people, who did not look particularly educated, turned to him and asked: “Tell me, where is Paustovsky’s grave?” And that Konstantin Georgievich seemed to really like this question and he later loved to talk about this incident.

Paustovsky's grave is now really in Tarusa. Above the Taruska River. Not far from the Ilyinsky whirlpool.

Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov (1927-1982) was born and lived in Moscow. He graduated from the Gnessin Music College (1952) and the Literary Institute (1958). A short story writer whose works have been translated into many languages ​​of the world. In 1970, he was awarded the Dante Medal and Prize in Italy. He was a master of the story, chivalrously devoted to this genre, where, as he said, “a moment is likened to eternity, equated to life.” His work is inextricably linked with travels around Russia: he loved the North, the White Sea, Solovki, walked dozens of miles along the deserted seashore from village to village, sailed on fishing boats, went hunting in the Kara Sea, visited Valdai, lived for a long time on the Oka, traveled to the Smolensk region - the homeland of his ancestors... Fascinated by the eternal beauty of Russian nature, never ceasing to be amazed at the “great, incomprehensible multitude of destinies, grief and happiness, and love, and everything that we call life,” he created the unique world of his stories. And they rightfully entered the golden fund of Russian classics.

About the writer's courage

Published by: Yu. Kazakov. Evening call, evening Bell. In 3 vols. Publishing house "Russian World"

I sat at the top of this trampled, well-to-do, filled with various sailors and expeditions, grimy, beautiful Arkhangelsk hotel (in its old wing), in our room, among torn backpacks, scattered things, among all these boots, packs of cigarettes, razors, guns, cartridges and everything else, after a heavy, unnecessary argument about literature, I sat near the window, leaned sadly, and it was already late, once again the humble white night came and poured into me like poison, calling me even further, and although I was angry, but on the other hand, it felt good and cheerful to think that tomorrow we needed to get a job on a hunting schooner in order to then go to Novaya Zemlya and even further, somewhere into the Kara Sea.

And I kept looking out of the window into the distance, over the roofs, at the bright horizon with light pink clouds. On the Dvina, glimmering here and there between the roofs, huge timber carriers stood black in the roadstead, their masthead lights were faintly blinking, steam was sometimes hissing, the working propellers were muttering dully, the tall sirens of the tugboats were yapping like dogs, and farewell whistles were blaring powerfully and sadly.

Below, sparse cars rustled, trams rumbled even more rarely. Downstairs the restaurant was noisy, humming at that hour, playing, singing and pounding an orchestra (at that time some pensions played there in the evenings), and I could hear it well, even though the restaurant windows looked out into the courtyard. Downstairs, the irreplaceable, eternal Uncle Vasya did not allow various scoundrels into the restaurant who were hungry for a luxurious life, and at that hour my happy friend and friend was sitting in the restaurant with Romanian circus performers, speaking to them in Spanish and Eskimo, and I was alone, that’s all I remembered how we had just argued downstairs about literature with a local expert, and thought about the courage of the writer.

A writer must be courageous, I thought, because his life is hard. When he is alone with a blank sheet of paper, everything is decidedly against him. There are millions of previously written books against him - it’s just scary to think about - and thoughts about why else write when all this has already happened. Against him are headaches and self-doubt on different days, and different people who call or come to him at that moment, and all sorts of worries, troubles, things that seem important, although for him there is no matter at this hour more important than that which he has to. The sun is against him, when he wants to leave the house, go somewhere, see something, experience some kind of happiness. And the rain is against it, when your soul is heavy, cloudy and you don’t want to work.

Everywhere around him the whole world lives, moves, spins, and goes somewhere. And he, already from birth, is captured by this world and must live with everyone, while he should be alone at this moment. Because at this moment there should be no one near him - neither his beloved, nor his mother, nor his wife, nor his children, but only his heroes, one of his words, one passion to which he devoted himself should be with him.

When a writer sits down to write a blank white sheet of paper, so many things immediately take up arms against him, so many unbearably so, everything calls to him, reminds him of himself, and he must live in some kind of life of his own, invented by him. Some people whom no one has ever seen, but they still seem to be alive, and he should think of them as his loved ones. And he sits, looks somewhere outside the window or at the wall, sees nothing, but sees only an endless series of days and pages behind and ahead, his failures and retreats - those that will happen - and he feels bad and bitter. And no one can help him, because he is alone.

That's the whole point: no one will ever help him, won't take a pen or typewriter, won't write for him, won't show him how to write. He must do this himself. And if he himself cannot, then everything is lost - he is not a writer. No one cares whether you are sick or healthy, whether you have taken up your work, whether you have patience - this is the highest courage. If you write poorly, neither titles, nor awards, nor past successes will save you. Titles will sometimes help you publish your bad thing, your friends will rush to praise it, and you will receive money for it; but still you are not a writer...

You have to hold on, you have to be courageous to start over. You need to be courageous to endure and wait if your talent suddenly leaves you and you feel disgust at the mere thought of sitting down at the table. Talent sometimes goes away for a long time, but it always comes back if you are courageous.

A real writer works ten hours a day. Often he gets stuck, and then a day passes, and another day, and many more days, but he cannot quit, cannot write further, and with fury, almost with tears, he feels how the days, of which he has so few, are passing. wasted.

Finally he puts an end to it. Now he is empty, so empty that he will never write a word again, as it seems to him. Well, he might say, but I did my job, and here it lies on my desk, a stack of written paper. And nothing like this had happened before me. Let Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote before me, but I wrote this. This is different. And even if it’s worse for me, it’s still great for me, and nothing is known yet whether it’s worse or not worse. Let someone try it like me!

When the work is done, the writer may think so. He put an end to it and, therefore, defeated himself, such a short joyful day! Moreover, he will soon start a new thing, and now he needs joy. It's so short.

Because he suddenly sees that, say, spring has passed, that a great deal of time has passed over him since the moment when, at the beginning of April, at night, black clouds gathered in the west, and from this blackness a warm wind blew tirelessly, evenly and powerfully, and the snow began to thicken. The ice drift passed, the draft passed, the streams died down, the first greenery died down, and the ear became full and yellowed - a whole century passed, and he missed it, did not see any of this. How much happened in the world during this time, how many events happened to all the people, and he just worked, just put more and more white sheets of paper in front of him, and only saw the light in his heroes. No one will return this time to him; it has passed for him forever.

Then the writer gives his piece to the magazine. Let's take the best case, suppose that the thing is taken immediately, with joy. The writer gets a call or a telegram. Congratulations to him. They show off his item to other magazines. The writer goes to the editorial office, enters freely, noisily. Everyone is happy to see him, and he is happy, they are all such nice people. "Expensive! - they tell him. - We give! Let's do it! We’ll put it in number twelve!” And number twelve is December. Winter. And now it's summer...

And everyone cheerfully looks at the writer, smiles, shakes his hand, pats him on the shoulder. Everyone is somehow sure that the writer has five hundred years of life ahead of him. And that waiting six months is like six days for him.

A strange, painful time begins for the writer. He's rushing for time. Hurry, hurry up and let the summer pass. And autumn, damn autumn! December is what he needs. The writer is exhausted in anticipation of December.

And now he’s working again, and again he either succeeds or doesn’t, a year has passed, the wheel has turned for the umpteenth time, and April is dying again, and criticism has come into play - retribution for the old thing.

Writers read criticism of themselves. It is not true that some writers are not interested in what is written about them. And that's when they need all their courage. So as not to be offended by criticism and injustice. So as not to get embittered. So as not to quit work when they scold you too much. And so as not to believe praise, if they praise. Praise is terrible; it teaches a writer to think of himself better than he really is. Then he begins to teach others instead of learning himself. No matter how well he writes his next piece, he can do even better, he just has to be courageous and learn.

But the worst thing is not praise or criticism. The worst thing is when they are silent about you. When you have books coming out and you know that they are real books, but people don’t remember them, that’s when you have to be strong!

Literary truth always comes from the truth of life, and to the actual literary courage, a Soviet writer must add the courage of pilots, sailors, workers - those people who, by the sweat of their brow, change life on Earth, those about whom he writes. After all, he writes, if possible, about the most diverse people, about all people, and he must see them all himself and live with them. For some time he must become, like them, a geologist, a lumberjack, a worker, a hunter, a tractor driver. And the writer sits in the cabin of a seiner with sailors, or walks with a party through the taiga, or flies with polar aviation pilots, or guides ships along the Great Northern Route.

The Soviet writer must also remember that evil exists on Earth, that physical extermination, deprivation of basic freedoms, violence, destruction, hunger, fanaticism and stupidity, war and fascism exist. He must protest against all this to the best of his ability, and his voice, raised against lies, pharisaism and crimes, is courage of a special kind.

The writer, finally, must become a soldier, if necessary, he must have enough courage for this, so that later, if he survives, he can sit down at the table again and again find himself face to face with a blank sheet of paper.

The courage of a writer must be of the first grade. It must be with him constantly, because what he does, he does not for a day, not two, but for his whole life. And he knows that every time it will start all over again and it will be even more difficult.

If a writer lacks courage, he is lost. He was lost, even if he had talent. He will become envious, he will begin to vilify his fellow men. Cold with anger, he will think that he was not mentioned here and there, that he was not given a prize... And then he will never know true happiness as a writer. But the writer has happiness.

There are still moments in his work when everything goes well, and what didn’t work out yesterday can be achieved today without any effort. When the typewriter crackles like a machine gun, and blank sheets are laid one after another, like clips. When the work is easy and reckless, when the writer feels powerful and honest.

When he suddenly remembers, having written a particularly powerful page, that in the beginning there was the Word and the Word was God! This happens rarely even among geniuses, but it always happens only among the courageous; the reward for all the work and days, for dissatisfaction, for despair is this sudden divinity of the word. And, having written this page, the writer knows that later it will remain. There won't be anything else left, but this page will remain.

When he understands that he must write the truth, that only in the truth is his salvation. Just don’t think that your truth will be accepted immediately and unconditionally. But you still have to write, thinking about the countless unknown people for whom you end up writing. After all, you are not writing for an editor, not for a critic, not for money, although you, like everyone else, need money, but ultimately you are not writing for it. You can earn money in any way you want, and not necessarily by writing. And you write, remembering the divinity of the word and the truth. You write and think that literature is the self-consciousness of humanity, the self-expression of humanity in your face. You should always remember this and be happy and proud that you have had such an honor.

When you suddenly look at the clock and see that it’s already two or three, it’s night all over the Earth, and in vast spaces people are sleeping or loving each other and don’t want to know anything except their love, or killing each other, and planes with bombs are flying , and somewhere else they dance, and announcers of all kinds of radio stations use electricity for lies, reassurance, anxiety, fun, for disappointments and hopes. And you, so weak and lonely at this hour, do not sleep and think about the whole world, you painfully want all people on Earth to finally become happy and free, so that inequality, wars, racism, and poverty disappear, so that work becomes necessary everyone needs air.

But the most important happiness is that you are not the only one who is awake this late at night. Other writers, your brothers in words, do not sleep with you. And all together you want one thing - for the world to become a better place, and for people to become more humane.

You don't have the power to remake the world the way you want. But you have your truth and your word. And you must be thrice courageous so that, despite your misfortunes, failures and breakdowns, you still bring joy to people and say endlessly that life should be better.

1966

Kazakov Yuri Pavlovich

Kazakov Yuri Pavlovich

Literary notes

Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov

LITERARY NOTES

About the writer's courage

Solovetsky dreams

Isn't that enough?

The only native word

What is literature for and what am I myself for?

Let's go to Lopshenga

ABOUT THE COURAGE OF A WRITER

I sat at the top of this trampled, prosperous, filled with various sailors and expeditions, grimy, beautiful Arkhangelsk hotel (in its old wing), in our room, among torn backpacks, scattered things, among all these boots, packs of cigarettes, razors, guns , cartridges and everything else, after a heavy, unnecessary argument about literature, I sat near the window, sadly propped myself up, and it was already late, once again the humble white night came and poured into me like poison, calling me even further, and although I was angry it was, but it was good, it was fun to think that tomorrow we needed to get a job on a hunting schooner in order to go later to Novaya Zemlya and even further, somewhere into the Kara Sea.

And I kept looking out of the window into the distance, over the roofs, at the bright horizon with light pink clouds. On the Dvina, glimmering here and there between the roofs, huge timber carriers stood black in the roadstead, their tone lights flickering weakly, sometimes steam hissed, the working propellers muttered dully, the tall sirens of the tugboats yelped like dogs, and farewell whistles hummed powerfully and sadly.

Below, sparse cars rustled, trams rumbled even more rarely. Downstairs the restaurant was noisy, humming at that hour, playing, singing and pounding an orchestra (at that time some pensions played there in the evenings), and I could hear it well, even though the restaurant windows looked out into the courtyard. Downstairs, the irreplaceable, eternal Uncle Vasya did not allow various scoundrels into the restaurant who were hungry for a luxurious life, and at that hour my happy friend and friend was sitting in the restaurant with the Romanian circus performers, speaking to them in Spanish and Eskimo, and I was alone, that’s all I remembered how we had just argued downstairs about literature with a local expert, and thought about the courage of the writer.

A writer must be courageous, I thought, because his life is hard. When he is alone with a blank sheet of paper, everything is decidedly against him. There are millions of previously written books against him - it’s just scary to think about - and thoughts about why else write when all this has already happened. Against him are headaches and self-doubt on different days, and different people who call or come to him at that moment, and all sorts of worries, troubles, things that seem important, although for him there is no matter at this hour more important than that which he has to. The sun is against him, when he wants to leave the house, go somewhere, see something, experience some kind of happiness. And the rain is against it, when your soul is heavy, cloudy and you don’t want to work.

Everywhere around him the whole world lives, moves, spins, goes somewhere. And he, already from birth, is captured by this world and must live with everyone, while he should be alone at this moment. Because at this moment there should be no one near him - neither his beloved, nor his mother, nor his wife, nor his children, but only his heroes should be with him, one of his words, one passion to which he devoted himself.

When a writer sits down to write a blank white sheet of paper, so many things immediately take up arms against him, so many unbearably so, everything calls to him, reminds him of himself, and he must live in some kind of life of his own, invented by him. Some people whom no one has ever seen, but they still seem to be alive, and he should think of them as his loved ones. And he sits, looks somewhere outside the window or at the wall, sees nothing, but sees only an endless series of days and pages behind and ahead, his failures and retreats - those that will happen - and he feels bad and bitter. And no one can help him, because he is alone.

That's the whole point: no one will ever help him, won't take a pen or typewriter, won't write for him, won't show him how to write. He must do this himself. And if he himself cannot, then everything is lost - he is not a writer. No one cares whether you are sick or healthy, whether you have taken up your work, whether you have patience - this is the highest courage. If you write poorly, neither titles, nor awards, nor past successes will save you. Titles will sometimes help you publish your bad work, your friends will rush to praise it, and you will receive money for it; but still you are not a writer...

You have to hold on, you have to be courageous to start over. You need to be courageous to endure and wait if your talent suddenly leaves you and you feel disgust at the mere thought of sitting down at the table. Talent sometimes goes away for a long time, but it always comes back if you are courageous.

A real writer works ten hours a day. Often he gets stuck, and then a day passes, and another day, and many more days, but he cannot quit, cannot write further, and with fury, almost with tears, he feels how the days pass, of which he has so little and is wasted.

Finally he puts an end to it. Now he is empty, so empty that he will never write a word again, as it seems to him. Well, he might say, but I did my job, and here it lies on my desk, a stack of written paper. And nothing like this had happened before me. Let Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote before me, but I wrote this. This is different. And even if it’s worse for me, I’m still healthy, and nothing is known yet whether it’s worse or not worse. Let someone try it like me!

When the work is done, the writer may think so. He put an end to it and, therefore, defeated himself, such a short joyful day! Moreover, he will soon start a new thing, and now he needs joy. It's so short.

Because he suddenly sees that, say, spring has passed, that a huge amount of time has flown over him since the moment when, at the beginning of April, at night, black clouds gathered in the west, and from this blackness a warm wind blew tirelessly, evenly and powerfully, and the snow began to thicken. The ice drift passed, the draft passed, the streams died down, the first greenery died down, and the ear became full and yellowed - a whole century passed, and he missed it, did not see any of this. How much happened in the world during this time, how many events happened to all the people, and he just worked, just put more and more white sheets of paper in front of him, and only saw the light in his heroes. No one will return this time to him; it has passed for him forever.

Then the writer gives his piece to the magazine. Let's take the best case, suppose that the thing is taken immediately, with joy. The writer gets a call or a telegram. Congratulations to him. They show off his item to other magazines. The writer goes to the editorial office, enters freely, noisily. Everyone is happy to see him, and he is happy, they are all such nice people. “Dear!” they tell him. “We’ll give it! We’ll give it! We’ll put it in number twelve!” And the twelfth issue is December. Winter. And now it's summer...

And everyone cheerfully looks at the writer, smiles, shakes his hand, pats him on the shoulder. Everyone is somehow sure that the writer has five hundred years of life ahead of him. And that waiting six months is like six days for him.

A strange, painful time begins for the writer. He's rushing for time. Hurry, hurry up and let the summer pass. And autumn, damn autumn! December is what he needs. The writer is exhausted in anticipation of December.

And now he’s working again, and again he either succeeds or doesn’t, a year has passed, the wheel has turned for the umpteenth time, and April is dying again, and criticism has come into play - retribution for the old thing.

Writers read criticism of themselves. It is not true that some writers are not interested in what is written about them. And that's when they need all their courage. So as not to be offended by criticism and injustice. So as not to get embittered. So as not to quit work when they scold you too much. And so as not to believe praise, if they praise. Praise is terrible; it teaches a writer to think of himself better than he really is. Then he begins to teach others instead of learning himself. No matter how well he writes his next piece, he can do even better, he just has to be courageous and learn.

But the worst thing is not praise or criticism. The worst thing is when they are silent about you. When you have books coming out and you know that they are real books, but they don’t remember them, that’s when you have to be strong!

Literary truth always comes from the truth of life, and to the actual literary courage, a Soviet writer must add the courage of pilots, sailors, workers - those people who, by the sweat of their brow, change life on earth, those about whom he writes. After all, he writes, if possible, about the most diverse people, about all people, and he must see them all himself and live with them. For some time he must become, like them, a geologist, a lumberjack, a worker, a hunter, a tractor driver. And the writer sits in the cabin of a seiner with sailors, or walks with a party through the taiga, or flies with polar aviation pilots, or guides ships along the Great Northern Route.

The Soviet writer must also remember that evil exists on earth, that physical extermination, deprivation of basic freedoms, violence, destruction, hunger, fanaticism and stupidity, war and fascism exist. He must protest against all this to the best of his ability, and his voice, raised against lies, pharisaism and crimes, is courage of a special kind.

The writer, finally, must become a soldier, if necessary, he must have enough courage for this, so that later, if he remains alive, he can sit down at the table again and again find himself face to face with a blank sheet of paper.

The courage of a writer must be of the first grade. It must be with him constantly, because what he does, he does not for a day, not two, but for his whole life. And he knows that every time it will start all over again and it will be even more difficult.

If a writer lacks courage, he is lost. He was lost, even if he had talent. He will become envious, he will begin to vilify his fellow men. Cold with anger, he will think that he was not mentioned here and there, that he was not given a bonus...

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Original text:

(I) I was sitting in a room filled with various sailors and expeditions in an Arkhangelsk hotel among torn backpacks and scattered things after a difficult, unnecessary argument about literature. (2) I sat near the window, resting my head on my fists, and my soul felt good from the thought that tomorrow we needed to get settled on a hunting schooner in order to then go to Novaya Zemlya and even further, somewhere into the Kara Sea.
(3) I was alone, kept remembering how we had just argued downstairs about literature with a local expert, and thought about the courage of the writer.
(4) A writer must be courageous, I thought.
(5) When he starts work, everything is decidedly against him. (b) Against him are millions of previously written books and thoughts about why else write when all this has already happened. (7) He has headaches and self-doubt on different days, and different people who call him at that moment, and all sorts of worries, troubles, things that seem important, although for him at this hour there is no matter more important than that which he has to. (8) The sun is against him, when he is tempted to leave the house, generally go somewhere, see something, experience some kind of happiness. (9) And the rain is against him, when the soul is heavy, cloudy and you don’t want to work. (10) But a real writer works ten hours a day.
(II) Finally he puts an end to it. (12) Now he is empty, so empty that he will never write a word again, as it seems to him. (13) Well, he may say, but I did my job, and here it is on my table. (14) And nothing like this happened before me. (15) Even though Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote before me, I wrote this. (16) This is different.
(17) He suddenly sees that, say, spring has passed, that a huge amount of time has flown over him from the moment he began working on his work. (18) The ice drift passed, the streams died down, the first greenery died down, and the ear of corn became full and yellowed - a whole century passed, but he missed it, did not see any of this. (19) How much happened in the world during this time, how many events happened to all the people, but he only worked, and only saw the light in his heroes. (20) No one will return this time to him; it has passed for him forever.
(21) But literary truth always comes from the truth of life, and to the actual literary courage, the writer must add the courage of those people who, by the sweat of their brow, change life on earth, those about whom he writes. (22) After all, he writes, if possible, about the most different people, about all people, and he must see them all himself and live with them. (23) For some time he must become, like them, a geologist, engineer, lumberjack, worker, hunter, tractor driver. (24) And the writer sits in the cabin of the seiner with the sailors, or goes with the party through the taiga, or flies with polar aviation pilots, or guides ships along the Great Northern Route.
(25) The writer must also remember that evil exists on earth: wars, physical destruction, violence, hunger, fanaticism and stupidity... (26) He must, to the best of his ability, protest against all this, and his voice is raised against lies , pharisaism and crimes, there is a special kind of courage.
(27) There are still moments in his work when everything goes well, and what didn’t work out yesterday, today works out without any effort. (28) When the work is easy and reckless, when the writer feels powerful and honest. (29) When he understands that he must write the truth, that only in the truth is his salvation. (Z0) Just don’t think that your truth will be accepted immediately and unconditionally. (31) But you still have to write, thinking about the countless people unknown to you, for whom you ultimately write. (32) After all, you are not writing for an editor, not for a critic, not for making money. (33) And you write because you remember the high purpose of the word and the truth. (34) You write and think that literature is the self-consciousness of humanity, the self-expression of humanity in your person. (35)06 You must always remember this and feel happiness and pride that you have had such an honor.
(36) When you suddenly look at the clock and see that it’s already two or three, and you, so weak and lonely at this hour, are awake and thinking about the whole world, you painfully want all the people on earth to be happy and free We want wars and poverty to disappear forever, so that work becomes necessary for everyone, just as air is necessary.
(37) But the most important happiness is that you are not the only one who does not sleep this late at night. (38) Other writers, your brothers in word, do not sleep with you. (39) And all together you want one thing: for the world to become better, and for people to become more humane.
(40) You do not have the power to rebuild the world as you want. (41) But you have your truth and your word. (42) And you must be three times courageous so that, despite your misfortunes, failures and breakdowns, you still bring people joy and say endlessly that life should be better.
(According to Yu. Kazakov*)
*Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov (1927-1982) - Russian writer, one of the largest representatives of Soviet short stories.

Can writing be considered hard work? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
The author is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” to write any work. When starting work, the author must understand that “everything is absolutely against him” and he will need to work for a very long time to convey all the thoughts that are in his head to people.
The author's position is quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult and takes a lot of time.
I completely share the author's opinion. Indeed, writing requires a lot of patience and for this you need to be a good psychologist so that the written work is appreciated by society. Let me give you a few examples from fiction.
So in the work “The Master and Margarita” the main character was really a real writer, understanding life and all its manifestations, that he even “was able to guess” what happened two thousand years ago with Pontius Pilate.
Russian writers were real workers who created unique literature, one of them was Dostoevsky. He understood life like no one else, was a psychologist, a philosopher, and only a real writer like him could write works known to the whole world: “Crime and Punishment”, “The Idiot” and others.
So, writing is worthy of respect. It is in books that we find answers to life’s questions, thanks to them we do not make the mistakes of others, so we should value book work.

Answers (13)

• Answer accepted

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  Can writing be considered hard work? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov. (There is no such problem! K1-K4=0) WHY NOT TAKE THE PROBLEM “[b]A writer must be courageous?”
  The author is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” to write any work. When starting work, the author must understand that “everything is absolutely against him” and he will need to work for a very long time to convey all the thoughts that are in his head to people. (The comment proves that there is no such problem!)
  Position author quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult and it takes a lot time(L).
  I completely agree author. Really, writing requires a lot of patience (Sign?) and for this you need to be a good psychologist so that the written work is appreciated by society. Let me give you a few examples from fiction.
  So in the work “The Master and Margarita” the main character really was a real writer, analyzing THEM in life and in all its manifestations, What I even “was able to guess”, What happened two thousand years ago with Pontius Pilate ( Only with Pontius Pilate? L.).
  Russian writers were real workers who created unique literature, one of them was Dostoevsky. He understood life like no one else, was a psychologist, a philosopher, and only a real writer like him could write works known throughout the world: “Crime and Punishment”, “The Idiot” and others.( Where in the argument is “The severity of labor”? This is from Mayakovsky: “You exhaust a single word for the sake of a thousand tons of verbal ore”)
  So, writing is worthy of respect. It is in books that we find answers to life’s questions, thanks to them we do not make the mistakes of others, so we should value book work. (ALL IS NOT THE PROBLEM!)
  K1-0 K2-0 K3-0 K4-0 K5-0 K6-1 K7-3 K8-1 K9-2 K10-1 K11-1 K12-1=9 points

  Girls, there are 3 months left before the exam, and you all have such problems with your essays. You can still learn to write it. How many guys have gone through my VIP section and received the highest score for their essay!)

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  The author is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” to write any work. When starting work, the author must understand that “everything is decidedly against him.” This is what proves how courageous they are and how willing they are to sacrifice their time and patience for people.
  
  I completely share the author's opinion. Indeed, writers are outstanding people. In order to write a good book, you need to be prepared that society may not accept this work and fully appreciate it. Even despite all the difficulties ahead, the authors write. In my opinion, this requires courage and resilience. To prove this, I will give several examples from fiction.
  Let us recall M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. In the thirties of the twentieth century in Moscow, in the era of totalitarianism and official atheism, a master, a former museum worker, who unexpectedly won a large sum of money in the lottery, rents a room in a basement on Arbat and begins to write a novel about Pontius Pilate. It takes great courage to turn to the gospel theme, when MASSOLIT writers are just fulfilling a “social order” in order to enjoy the benefits intended for members of the Writers' Union. The hero of the master Yeshua Ha - Nozri proclaims one truth: all people are good, there are no evil people. It takes great courage to express such humanistic ideas in a society of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gripped by spy mania and suspicion.
  Let us give one more literary argument. In K. G. Paustovsky’s book “The Golden Rose,” which is entirely devoted to the problem of writing, there is a chapter “Inscription on a boulder.” This chapter tells about Latvian fishermen who go to sea every day and do not always return from there. But despite the risk and danger, brave fishermen do not abandon their fishery. Likewise, a writer, despite failures, doubts, uncertainty, defeats, must fulfill his professional duty, and this requires courage.
  In conclusion, I would like to say that writers are truly persistent, courageous people. Their work requires a lot of effort. A writer must have the courage to remain true to the truth of life and to enlighten other people.

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  Can a writer be considered a courageous person? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
  Author I am convinced that the writer must be courageous" to write some work. Getting Started , the author must understand that “everything is decidedly against him.” (Add a little here!) This is what proves how courageous they are and how willing they are to sacrifice their time and patience for people. WHAT IS THIS ABOUT?
  Position author
  I completely agree author. Indeed, writers (sign?) outstanding people. In order to write a good book, you need to be prepared that society may not accept this work and fully appreciate E R.. Even despite all the difficulties ahead, the authors write. In my opinion, this requires courage and perseverance. To prove this, I will give several examples from fiction.
  Let us recall M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. In the thirties of the twentieth century in Moscow, in the era of totalitarianism and official atheism, a master, a former museum worker, unexpectedly won gone a large sum of money into the lottery, removes TIME room in a basement on Arbat and begins a novel about Pontius Pilate. It takes a lot of courage,( WHAT DOES IT CONSISTE?) to turn to the gospel theme, when MASSOLIT writers are just fulfilling a “social order” in order to enjoy the benefits intended for members of the Writers' Union. The hero of the master Yeshua Ha - Nozri proclaims one truth: all people are good, there are no evil people. It takes great courage to express such humanistic ideas in a society of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gripped by spy mania and suspicion.
  Let's give another literary argument: THROW OUT! In K. G. Paustovsky’s book “The Golden Rose,” which is entirely devoted to the problem of writing, there is chapter"Inscription on a boulder." In this chapter tells about Latvian fishermen who go to sea every day and do not always return from there. But despite the risk and danger, brave fishermen do not abandon their fishery. Likewise, a writer, despite failures, doubts, uncertainty, defeats, must fulfill his professional duty, and this requires courage.
  In conclusion, I would like to say that writers are truly persistent, courageous people. Their work requires a lot of effort. A writer must have the courage to remain true to the truth of life and to enlighten other people. (Very big conclusion!)

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  Can a writer be considered a courageous person? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
  Author of this text I am convinced that “a writer must be courageous” in order to write a good, instructive work. When starting work, a real writer must understand that “everything is absolutely against him,” even nature. While working, he forgets everything and completely “gets lost in the book.” Even after finishing his work, the writer does not feel happy, since society did not appreciate his work. This is what proves how courageous they are and how willing they are to sacrifice their time and patience for people.
  Position author quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult.
  I completely agree author. Indeed, writers are outstanding people. In order to write a good book, you need to be prepared that society may not accept this work and fully appreciate it. Even despite all the difficulties ahead authors write. In my opinion, this requires courage and resilience. To prove this, I will give several examples from fiction.
  
  Let us give one more literary argument. In K. G. Paustovsky’s book “The Golden Rose,” which is entirely devoted to the problem of writing, there is a chapter “Inscription on a boulder.” This chapter tells about Latvian fishermen who go to sea every day and do not always return from there. But despite the risk and danger, brave fishermen do not abandon their fishery. Likewise, a writer, despite failures, doubts, uncertainty, defeats, must fulfill his professional duty, and this requires courage.
  

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• Answer accepted

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  Can a writer be considered a courageous person? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
  The author of this text is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” in order to write a good, instructive work. When starting work, a real writer must understand that “everything is absolutely against him,” even nature. While working, he forgets everything and completely “gets lost in the book.” Even after finishing his work, the writer does not feel happy, since society did not appreciate his work. This is what proves how courageous they are and how willing they are to sacrifice their time and patience for people.
  The author's position is quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult.
  
  Let us recall M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. In the thirties of the twentieth century in Moscow, in the era of totalitarianism and official atheism, a master, a former museum worker, who unexpectedly won a large sum of money in the lottery, rents a room in a basement on Arbat and begins to write a novel about Pontius Pilate. It takes great courage to turn to the gospel theme, when MASSOLIT writers are just fulfilling a “social order” in order to enjoy the benefits intended for members of the Writers' Union. The hero of the master Yeshua Ha - Nozri proclaims one truth: all people are good, there are no evil people. It takes great courage to express such humanistic ideas in a society of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gripped by spy mania and suspicion.
  In conclusion, I would like to say that writers are truly persistent, courageous people. Their work requires a lot of effort. A writer must have the courage to remain true to the truth of life and to enlighten other people.

• Answer accepted

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  Katya, who will correct these mistakes?
  1"sacrifice your time and patience for people...
  2. “You need to have great courage to turn to the gospel theme, when MASSOLIT writers are just fulfilling a “social order” in order to enjoy the benefits intended for members of the Writers' Union.”
  3. “In conclusion, I would like to say that writers are truly persistent, courageous people. Their work requires great effort. A writer must be courageous in order to remain true to the truth of life and enlighten other people.”

• Answer accepted

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  Can a writer be considered a courageous person? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
  The author of this text is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” in order to write a good, instructive work. When starting work, a real writer must understand that “everything is absolutely against him,” even nature. While working, he forgets everything and completely “gets lost in the book.” Even after finishing his work, the writer does not feel happy, since society did not appreciate his work. This is what proves how courageous and diligent they are.
  The author's position is quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult.
  I completely share the opinion of Yu.P. Kazakov. Indeed, writers are outstanding people. In order to write a good book, you need to be prepared that society may not accept this work and fully appreciate it. Even despite all the difficulties ahead, writers write. In my opinion, this requires courage and resilience. To prove this, I will give several examples from fiction.
  Let us recall M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. In the thirties of the twentieth century in Moscow, in the era of totalitarianism and official atheism, a master, a former museum worker, who unexpectedly won a large sum of money in the lottery, rents a room in a basement on Arbat and begins to write a novel about Pontius Pilate. It takes great courage to turn to the gospel when other writers are writing only what the public wants from them. The hero of the master Yeshua Ha - Nozri proclaims one truth: all people are good, there are no evil people. It takes great courage to express such humanistic ideas in a society of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gripped by spy mania and suspicion.
  In K. G. Paustovsky’s book “The Golden Rose,” which is entirely devoted to the problem of writing, there is a chapter “Inscription on a boulder.” This part tells about Latvian fishermen who go to sea every day and do not always return from there. But despite the risk and danger, brave fishermen do not abandon their fishery. Likewise, a writer, despite failures, doubts, uncertainty, defeats, must fulfill his professional duty, and this requires courage.
  It can be concluded that a writer must be courageous in order to remain true to the truth of life and educate other people.

• Answer accepted

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  Can a writer be considered a courageous person? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
  The author of this text is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” in order to write a good, instructive work. Getting started work, a real writer must understand that “everything is absolutely against him,” even nature. During work he forgets everything, completely “gets lost in the book.” Even after finishing my work, the writer does not ALWAYS feel happy, since society did not appreciate his work. This is what proves (SIGN) how courageous and diligent they are. (Who are they?)
  The author's position is quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult.
  I completely share the opinion of Yu.P. Kazakov. Indeed, a writer and (SIGN?) outstanding people. In order to write a good book, you need to be prepared that society may not accept this work and fully appreciate it. Even despite all the difficulties ahead, writers write. In my opinion, this requires courage and resilience. To prove this, I will give several examples from fiction.
  Let us recall M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. In the thirties of the twentieth century in Moscow, in the era of totalitarianism and official atheism, a master, a former museum worker, who unexpectedly won a large sum of money in the lottery, rents a room in a basement on Arbat and begins to write a novel about Pontius Pilate. It WAS necessary to have great courage to turn to the gospel theme when other writers wrote only what what the public wants from them. The hero of the master Yeshua Ha - Nozri proclaims one truth: all people are good, there are no evil people. It WOULD have taken a lot of courage to express such humanistic ideas in a society gripped by spy mania and suspicion.
  We can conclude that a writer must be courageous in order to remain true to the truth of life and educate other people.

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  Can a writer be considered a courageous person? This is precisely the problem posed by Yu.P. Kazakov.
  The author of this text is convinced that “a writer must be courageous” in order to write a good, instructive work. When starting to write a work, a real writer must understand that “everything is decidedly against him,” even nature. While working, he forgets everything and completely “gets lost in the book.” Even after finishing his work, the writer does not always feel happy, since society did not appreciate his work. This is what proves how courageous and zealous writers they are.
  The author's position is quite clearly expressed. Yu.P. Kazakov is convinced that being a writer is very difficult.
  I completely share the opinion of Yu.P. Kazakov. Indeed, writers are outstanding people. In order to write a good book, you need to be prepared that society may not accept this work and fully appreciate it. Even despite all the difficulties ahead, writers write. In my opinion, this requires courage and resilience. To prove this, I will give several examples from fiction.
  Let us recall M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. In the thirties of the twentieth century in Moscow, in the era of totalitarianism and official atheism, a master, a former museum worker, who unexpectedly won a large sum of money in the lottery, rents a room in a basement on Arbat and begins to write a novel about Pontius Pilate. It DID take a lot of courage to approach the gospel when other writers were writing what they didn't want to write. The hero of the master Yeshua Ha - Nozri proclaims one truth: all people are good, there are no evil people. It WOULD have taken a lot of courage to express such humanistic ideas in a society gripped by spy mania and suspicion.
  In K. G. Paustovsky’s book “The Golden Rose,” which is entirely devoted to the problem of writing, there is a chapter “Inscription on a boulder.” This part tells about Latvian fishermen who go to sea every day and do not always return from there. But, despite the risk and danger, brave fishermen do not abandon their fishery. Likewise, a writer, despite failures, doubts, uncertainty, defeats, must fulfill his professional duty, and this requires courage.
  We can conclude that a writer must be courageous in order to remain true to the truth of life.

(published according to the publication: Yu. Kazakov Evening Bells. In 3 vols. Russkiy Mir Publishing House)

I sat at the top of this trampled, well-to-do, filled with various sailors and expeditions, grimy, beautiful Arkhangelsk hotel (in its old wing), in our room, among torn backpacks, scattered things, among all these boots, packs of cigarettes, razors, guns, cartridges and everything else, after a heavy, unnecessary argument about literature, I sat near the window, leaned sadly, and it was already late, once again the humble white night came and poured into me like poison, calling me even further, and although I was angry, but on the other hand, it felt good and cheerful to think that tomorrow we needed to get a job on a hunting schooner in order to then go to Novaya Zemlya and even further, somewhere into the Kara Sea.

And I kept looking out of the window into the distance, over the roofs, at the bright horizon with light pink clouds. On the Dvina, glimmering here and there between the roofs, huge timber carriers stood black in the roadstead, their masthead lights were faintly blinking, steam was sometimes hissing, the working propellers were muttering dully, the tall sirens of the tugboats were yapping like dogs, and farewell whistles were blaring powerfully and sadly.

Below, sparse cars rustled, trams rumbled even more rarely. Downstairs the restaurant was noisy, humming at that hour, playing, singing and pounding an orchestra (at that time some pensions played there in the evenings), and I could hear it well, even though the restaurant windows looked out into the courtyard. Downstairs, the irreplaceable, eternal Uncle Vasya did not allow various scoundrels into the restaurant who were hungry for a luxurious life, and at that hour my happy friend and friend was sitting in the restaurant with Romanian circus performers, speaking to them in Spanish and Eskimo, and I was alone, that’s all I remembered how we had just argued downstairs about literature with a local expert, and thought about the courage of the writer.

A writer must be courageous, I thought, because his life is hard. When he is alone with a blank sheet of paper, everything is decidedly against him. There are millions of previously written books against him - it’s just scary to think about - and thoughts about why else write when all this has already happened. Against him are headaches and self-doubt on different days, and different people who call or come to him at that moment, and all sorts of worries, troubles, things that seem important, although for him there is no matter at this hour more important than that which he has to. The sun is against him, when he wants to leave the house, go somewhere, see something, experience some kind of happiness. And the rain is against it, when your soul is heavy, cloudy and you don’t want to work.

Everywhere around him the whole world lives, moves, spins, and goes somewhere. And he, already from birth, is captured by this world and must live with everyone, while he should be alone at this moment. Because at this moment there should be no one near him - neither his beloved, nor his mother, nor his wife, nor his children, but only his heroes, one of his words, one passion to which he devoted himself should be with him.

When a writer sits down to write a blank white sheet of paper, so many things immediately take up arms against him, so many unbearably so, everything calls to him, reminds him of himself, and he must live in some kind of life of his own, invented by him. Some people whom no one has ever seen, but they still seem to be alive, and he should think of them as his loved ones. And he sits, looks somewhere outside the window or at the wall, sees nothing, but sees only an endless series of days and pages behind and ahead, his failures and retreats - those that will happen - and he feels bad and bitter. And no one can help him, because he is alone.

That's the whole point: no one will ever help him, won't take a pen or typewriter, won't write for him, won't show him how to write. He must do this himself. And if he himself cannot, then everything is lost - he is not a writer. No one cares whether you are sick or healthy, whether you have taken up your work, whether you have patience - this is the highest courage. If you write poorly, neither titles, nor awards, nor past successes will save you. Titles will sometimes help you publish your bad thing, your friends will rush to praise it, and you will receive money for it; but still you are not a writer...

You have to hold on, you have to be courageous to start over. You need to be courageous to endure and wait if your talent suddenly leaves you and you feel disgust at the mere thought of sitting down at the table. Talent sometimes goes away for a long time, but it always comes back if you are courageous.

A real writer works ten hours a day. Often he gets stuck, and then a day passes, and another day, and many more days, but he cannot quit, cannot write further, and with fury, almost with tears, he feels how the days, of which he has so few, are passing. wasted.

Finally he puts an end to it. Now he is empty, so empty that he will never write a word again, as it seems to him. Well, he might say, but I did my job, and here it lies on my desk, a stack of written paper. And nothing like this had happened before me. Let Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote before me, but I wrote this. This is different. And even if it’s worse for me, it’s still great for me, and nothing is known yet whether it’s worse or not worse. Let someone try it like me!

When the work is done, the writer may think so. He put an end to it and, therefore, defeated himself, such a short joyful day! Moreover, he will soon start a new thing, and now he needs joy. It's so short.

Because he suddenly sees that, say, spring has passed, that a great deal of time has passed over him since the moment when, at the beginning of April, at night, black clouds gathered in the west, and from this blackness a warm wind blew tirelessly, evenly and powerfully, and the snow began to thicken. The ice drift passed, the draft passed, the streams died down, the first greenery died down, and the ear became full and yellowed - a whole century passed, and he missed it, did not see any of this. How much happened in the world during this time, how many events happened to all the people, and he just worked, just put more and more white sheets of paper in front of him, and only saw the light in his heroes. No one will return this time to him; it has passed for him forever.

Then the writer gives his piece to the magazine. Let's take the best case, suppose that the thing is taken immediately, with joy. The writer gets a call or a telegram. Congratulations to him. They show off his item to other magazines. The writer goes to the editorial office, enters freely, noisily. Everyone is happy to see him, and he is happy, they are all such nice people. "Expensive! - they tell him. - We give! Let's do it! We’ll put it in number twelve!” And number twelve is December. Winter. And now it's summer...

And everyone cheerfully looks at the writer, smiles, shakes his hand, pats him on the shoulder. Everyone is somehow sure that the writer has five hundred years of life ahead of him. And that waiting six months is like six days for him.

A strange, painful time begins for the writer. He's rushing for time. Hurry, hurry up and let the summer pass. And autumn, damn autumn! December is what he needs. The writer is exhausted in anticipation of December.

And now he’s working again, and again he either succeeds or doesn’t, a year has passed, the wheel has turned for the umpteenth time, and April is dying again, and criticism has come into play - retribution for the old thing.

Writers read criticism of themselves. It is not true that some writers are not interested in what is written about them. And that's when they need all their courage. So as not to be offended by criticism and injustice. So as not to get embittered. So as not to quit work when they scold you too much. And so as not to believe praise, if they praise. Praise is terrible; it teaches a writer to think of himself better than he really is. Then he begins to teach others instead of learning himself. No matter how well he writes his next piece, he can do even better, he just has to be courageous and learn.

But the worst thing is not praise or criticism. The worst thing is when they are silent about you. When you have books coming out and you know that they are real books, but people don’t remember them, that’s when you have to be strong!

Literary truth always comes from the truth of life, and to the actual literary courage, a Soviet writer must add the courage of pilots, sailors, workers - those people who, by the sweat of their brow, change life on Earth, those about whom he writes. After all, he writes, if possible, about the most diverse people, about all people, and he must see them all himself and live with them. For some time he must become, like them, a geologist, a lumberjack, a worker, a hunter, a tractor driver. And the writer sits in the cabin of a seiner with sailors, or walks with a party through the taiga, or flies with polar aviation pilots, or guides ships along the Great Northern Route.

The Soviet writer must also remember that evil exists on Earth, that physical extermination, deprivation of basic freedoms, violence, destruction, hunger, fanaticism and stupidity, war and fascism exist. He must protest against all this to the best of his ability, and his voice, raised against lies, pharisaism and crimes, is courage of a special kind.

The writer, finally, must become a soldier, if necessary, he must have enough courage for this, so that later, if he survives, he can sit down at the table again and again find himself face to face with a blank sheet of paper.

The courage of a writer must be of the first grade. It must be with him constantly, because what he does, he does not for a day, not two, but for his whole life. And he knows that every time it will start all over again and it will be even more difficult.

If a writer lacks courage, he is lost. He was lost, even if he had talent. He will become envious, he will begin to vilify his fellow men. Cold with anger, he will think that he was not mentioned here and there, that he was not given a prize... And then he will never know true happiness as a writer. But the writer has happiness.

There are still moments in his work when everything goes well, and what didn’t work out yesterday can be achieved today without any effort. When the typewriter crackles like a machine gun, and blank sheets are laid one after another, like clips. When the work is easy and reckless, when the writer feels powerful and honest.

When he suddenly remembers, having written a particularly powerful page, that in the beginning there was the Word and the Word was God! This happens rarely even among geniuses, but it always happens only among the courageous; the reward for all the work and days, for dissatisfaction, for despair is this sudden divinity of the word. And, having written this page, the writer knows that later it will remain. There won't be anything else left, but this page will remain.

When he understands that he must write the truth, that only in the truth is his salvation. Just don’t think that your truth will be accepted immediately and unconditionally. But you still have to write, thinking about the countless unknown people for whom you end up writing. After all, you are not writing for an editor, not for a critic, not for money, although you, like everyone else, need money, but ultimately you are not writing for it. You can earn money in any way you want, and not necessarily by writing. And you write, remembering the divinity of the word and the truth. You write and think that literature is the self-consciousness of humanity, the self-expression of humanity in your face. You should always remember this and be happy and proud that you have had such an honor.

When you suddenly look at the clock and see that it’s already two or three, it’s night all over the Earth, and in vast spaces people are sleeping or loving each other and don’t want to know anything except their love, or killing each other, and planes with bombs are flying , and somewhere else they dance, and announcers of all kinds of radio stations use electricity for lies, reassurance, anxiety, fun, for disappointments and hopes. And you, so weak and lonely at this hour, do not sleep and think about the whole world, you painfully want all people on Earth to finally become happy and free, so that inequality, wars, racism, and poverty disappear, so that work becomes necessary everyone needs air.

But the most important happiness is that you are not the only one who is awake this late at night. Other writers, your brothers in words, do not sleep with you. And all together you want one thing - for the world to become a better place, and for people to become more humane.

You don't have the power to remake the world the way you want. But you have your truth and your word. And you must be thrice courageous so that, despite your misfortunes, failures and breakdowns, you still bring joy to people and say endlessly that life should be better.

1966