Victor Topaller: The author has nothing to fear ...

Alexander Galich. Photo: odessa-memory.info

Today Alexander Galich would have turned ninety-nine years old. Maybe he would have lived to such an old age if the KGB had not killed him in 1977 in Paris. I'm sure they killed him. Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU intelligence officer who fled to the West, the author of the sensational “Aquarium” and “Icebreaker,” told me in front of a television camera: “If thousands of people weren’t looking at us now, I would allow myself to firmly say that Galich was killed.” I have no reason not to believe.

In the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, on a bas-relief it is written: “Blessed is the expulsion of truth.” Alexander Galich is in good company - Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan Bunin, Rudolf Nureyev, Alexander Ginzburg...

Successful “drama-making”, the author of the scenarios of the film “True Friends”, “Taimyr Calls You”, “On Seven Winds” rushes headlong into battle with the guitar against the system, turns into “a renegade and a traitor”, starting with his expression, “serve civil sorrows to the table. " Naturally, he was kicked out of the Writers 'and Cinematographers' Union, poisoned, forced to leave, and then destroyed.

A whole generation of true Russian intelligentsia has grown up on Galic's ballad songs. Let the cowardly, let him put his ear to the dynamics of the Yauza tape recorder, but the intelligentsia. Swallowed the truth of the ear, once the mouth did not work ...

What about today?

Galich and after the collapse of the "evil empire" remained for Russia an outcast, a "stranger", a "spiteful hacker". The worst thing is that his songs every year become more and more relevant.

Time sows winds, fires lightning,

Creates tips and commissions,

Every day - fanfare silence

Glorifies thoughtless thoughtlessness.

Once again: "fanfare silence glorifies thoughtless thoughtlessness." When were these lines written? Half a century ago? Yesterday? Today? Of course, they continue to hate him with fierce hatred .. Because all this repainted bastard (“dirt is dirt, whatever color you have in its beauty”) recognizes itself in its songs:

Not enough, that, the press theirs weaves

Everything that is done in our house.

Say, the Pentagon is dozing? No, does not sleep!

He does not sleep, his mother, he is on the lookout!

And these cheap people are “cultural figures” who supported the invasion and occupation of an independent state, licking all the places of the little Gestapo man? “Oh, how present you are, dear ones, stuffing your cookies into your pockets!”... “Non-resistance of conscience is the most convenient of eccentricities...”

And a huge part of the people. Seduced, zombied and deeply drunk (“he will call for an answer as soon as he sleeps!”, “And that I am the most heroic hero of the program I will listen with pleasure ...”) bears over a poster with the whiskered face of the bloody monster of world history ... Galich foresaw this in the "Oath of the Leader":

In the world there is no blasphemer,

To raise a spear on me

If I die, what could happen?

My kingdom will be eternal!

It seems so. The kingdom will be eternal. To shame and regret. Probably it does not make sense to continue to recall the songs of Galich and to compare his images and observations with what is happening in Russia today: paradoxically, everything is alive. Wherever you stick. Well, offhand ...

“Without us, the end of history, without us the world would be weakened!”

“The women around are completely social, raising their forks like peaks, chopping vodka for soup, champagne for keels...”

"Neither anger, nor blame for a long time, we do not rattle, say hello to scoundrels, bow down to the policeman."

"The Israeli military is known throughout the world as a mother and as a woman demanding their responsibility!"

But Galich did not hate. I loved. Like Sasha Cherny, who wrote that “insulted love breathes under hatred”. And Galich so:

I love you - your eyes, lips and hair,

You, tired, that have become before the time old,

You poor, whose newspaper pages

Every day, they shamelessly praise them with fanfare ...

Reciprocity did not wait. Yes, and did not wait, I guess. We hoped. By naivety. The people are somehow closer, clearer, dearer than the hari leader, deputies, ministers, propagandons ... Let hari lie without ceasing, let them rob. Native Hari. Their.

In the morning, when they get tired

Love, and sadness, and envy,

And the guests get drunk

And drink ice water,

Say hostess - you want

Listen to an old recording? -

And my deaf voice

Will enter an unfamiliar house.

And ice cubes in a glass

Quickly and easily broken,

And a strange pattern on the tablecloth

Start drawing hand

And the guitar will sound,

And the film will spin,

And on a long journey to Abakan

Clouds will set off ...

And a guest will say:

- These jokes make me feel chilly,

And the author thinks in vain

That the devil himself is not a brother!

- Well, what are you, Ivan Petrovich, -

The hostess will answer him, -

There is nothing to fear the author

He died a hundred years ago ...

How I looked into the water... The attitude towards Galich is the clearest illustration of the collapse of hopes for the salvation of Russia, for its transformation into a civilized state. I’m not even talking about the repentance of the bloody “authorities”, which were supposed to publicly show how exactly and who exactly destroyed one of the most glorious citizens of the country. It's ridiculous to hope for that. Russia is not Germany, and it will never treat its Gestapo the way it deserves. What repentance?! Former employees of the terrible “Kontora” can be seen much more often on Russian television than the author of the lines “executioners are also scared, people have pity on the executioners...”.

Honestly, it would be better if he remained forbidden! After all, then there was a great hope: “And yet in this century, here it is this book! Removes her boy from the shelf in the library ... ". Well, there is a book. Yes, not one. Even in that century, although I could not believe it. So what? Do not remove it from the shelf ... And no longer removed. From the shelves scatters glamorous waste paper. Galich is not needed. Galich remained a stranger.

The short period of modern Russian history has ended, when it seemed that Komsomolsky Avenue would be named after Zoshchenko, and Marx Square would be named after Shalamov. Poets have the gift of foresight: “And therefore this street, or rather this pit, is called by the name of this Mandelstam.” Neither Galich, nor Sakharov, nor Grigorenko, nor Bukovsky are destined to become national heroes of Russia. Although they fully deserve it. As it turned out, Russia does not deserve this... The attempt to save the country was unsuccessful. The attempt to put everything back on its feet failed. She continues to stand on her head, declaring that she could not be brought to her knees... Maybe that’s why Russia cannot be understood intellectually? What can you understand when blood rushes to the brain?

Everything returned to normal - “looters stood over the coffin.” At some point it seemed that the song in which guests listen to an old tape and the hostess reassures them that “the author has nothing to be afraid of - he died a hundred years ago” was outdated. It just seemed like it. And now Julius Kim is writing a song for Galich’s ninetieth birthday, in which Russia says to its “prodigal son”:

Neither hug nor accept nor warm you ...

Already I feel ashamed of myself!

Come on, come for the centenary -

I'm on the approaches to meet you!

Galich has a very famous poem "When I return." Will not come back. Despite all the notorious relevance (or rather, thanks to her), Galich forever leaves Russia.

His daughter Alena Galich-Arkhangelskaya once said: “A foreign land became the last refuge for my father. But I would like to hope that his words - “And if I’m dead, I’ll definitely return to Russia” - will come true. And he will return with his poems and songs to his homeland, which he loved, never betrayed, with which he never broke ties.”

Will not come back. And Galich himself in his soul, probably understood. In his poem “Kadish”, dedicated to Janusz Korczak and the Jewish orphan home, destroyed in gas chambers, Galich says scary words, which were also written as if yesterday and addressed to the author himself:

Clowns homunculi, heroic faces pointers

Eager for unclean power

Do not return to Warsaw, I beg you, Mr. Korczak,

You will be a stranger in your native Warsaw!

Do not return to Moscow, Alexander Arkadyevich ...

Original article published on Victor Topaller's Facebook page and reprinted with permission of the author.

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