Dmitry Bykov was here

Photo: Olga Weiner

We have been waiting for a visit of a writer, poet and journalist to Texas for a long time. And then, finally, it happened! At the creative evening of Dmitry Bykov there were no random people, only his fans, who read his works and listen to him on the radio. They even came to the meeting from Dallas! Viewers brought their books to the signature of their favorite author and asked many questions. We hope that Bykov in "Our Texas" liked it, and he will come to us again. Firstly, because a purchased guitar is waiting for him here, and secondly, because there are still a lot of things that have not been covered. After all, Bykov is a very keen person. For example, we remember with what enthusiasm he rode roller skates in the parking lot of a sports shop.

You travel around the world, meet with your readers. Is the public different in Russia and abroad?

Absolutely the same audience goes to me everywhere, and it is completely impossible to understand. In Peru, in the city of Lima, the same people came to me. I did not know that there are so many of us. And in general, I am absolutely sure that if I come to Antarctica, penguins will come to me with absolutely the same views and questions.

Did you perform in Peru? What other exotic places have you performed? Maybe in New Zealand, Australia?

No, I have no exotics. I am a terribly boring person, with very predictable thoughts. And I have been dreaming to go to Australia all my life, because wombats live there. But the wombat, after all, lives in San Diego. I saw it and even scratched it.

He is fat, thoughtful and very intelligent. He knows eight sexy poses and sometimes runs at terrible speed.

Does knowing the eight sexual poses somehow help him in his personal life?

It rather prevents him, because this animal has such a complicated ritual of courtship, that sometimes it simply does not have time to multiply. He takes care of very long and talented. The ritual is more complex than the process, and so the wombat is an almost endangered species.

Are you so interested in wombat relationships, and are you interested in relationships with people?

I have few relationships with people, I don’t relate to people at all. They have their own life, I have my own. I have many friends, but these are not the people with whom I often communicate. Rather, these are the people with whom we exchange our texts, and rarely meet. Unfortunately, I don’t drink at all, but this is a communicative thing that helps to communicate. To communicate with me is completely uninteresting, because I do not drink. In my personal life I am rather trivial, I have no exotic addictions, I have been married for a very long time.

I work or teach, which, in essence, is not a job, but such an extreme sport. Therefore, my life is not romantic.

Do you call teaching extreme sports?

Teaching cannot be called work, pedagogy is not a science.

It's hard work…

This is nonsense that teachers came up with in order to look respectable. In fact, if teaching is hard work for a teacher (it’s really physically difficult to teach five lessons in a row), if you don’t like interacting with children, you shouldn’t do it. There are professions that completely exclude hostility towards oneself. You can be a journalist and feel disgusted by this work, because it has a serious bonus - you travel around the world, communicate with people... You can be a diplomat without loving the profession. But you can be a teacher only if you cannot live without it. This is such an extreme sport. If I don't go to school for a long time, I feel physically unwell. I am not one of those teachers who go to children for the sake of self-affirmation, who like to be such a leader of a small totalitarian sect. At the same time, I do not believe that a teacher should love children. Learning should not become a relationship, it is a process.

Photo: Olga Weiner

Should there be some distance?

I have no distance, I just don’t confuse communication with the process of learning and cognition. Until you tell someone else, you won’t understand. I have the kind of thinking that Lydia Ginzburg called “articulatory thinking.” When I speak, the thought develops and becomes clear to me. There are people like Gogol, who think by hand: he had to sign it. But I need to say something in order to understand. Therefore, I spend quite a lot of time in direct communication with my students. Most of my—perhaps false, or perhaps quite fair—ideas were formulated in class.

I use children as opponents. Sometimes I can give a child some topic so that he develops it and helps me with it. That is, this is my philological toolkit. I have absolutely no such pose that I am a noble enlightener. I am absolutely not an educator, I solve my problems at school.

But communication with children is always very ionizing. You go to the class of the patient, and you leave completely healthy. From them comes a young vitality, some kind of energy. With them, in general, is ridiculous. They have rather unusual views on literature. For example, one girl told me that the main problem of Anna Akhmatova is her desire to receive from the man the same pleasure that she received from poetry, which, in principle, is impossible. This is a rather deep thought, because, indeed, you feel better with the muse.

How old are your students?

I always work with those who are from 14 to 20 years. I teach in the Moscow school of the Golden Section, and now I was unexpectedly called to the St. Petersburg 225 school, where I got a rather complicated class. But there is a challenge. These children do not respect adults. It will be easy to interest them, it will be difficult not to let them sit on their heads. I had such a class, and I know about how to work with them, we will try. It is interesting with them, because these are children with a very high IQ and at the same time are unmanageable.

You have to put them in a situation when they find it difficult. Only on a very intense overcoming can they do something. The best child is a difficult child, whose literature is not just a whim, sat down and read, but this is the “pharmacy” with which he overcomes his problems. He learns, like Bazarov, to communicate with people, like Pierre, humbles his anger, he learns, like Pechorin, to build his relationships with women, not just use them, that is, he needs a child for whom it is vital.

Such children are not healthy. Russian literature from happiness is not written, it is written from problems. In order for a child to be to a certain degree neurotic, he must be ambitious, he must want to be first, to put everyone in his belt. I can not work with horoshisty because horoshist interested EG. I am interested in a child who wants to turn the world around. With this child I can talk - I myself was like that.

My task: to facilitate what was painful for me, because all the time I was cutting off my side. I want them not to rip the sides, to grow free people, that's what we do.

You are a hereditary teacher, you have a mom teacher ...

She teaches so far! But how old she is — it doesn't matter. This is the age of a woman! I remember that I congratulated Novye Matveev on the 80 anniversary, and she was indignant: what is it, I am a woman, you could just write that Novela Matveeva has a round date.

Are there any pedagogical principles that you borrowed from her?

This is not borrowed. The horror is that it is impossible to teach. Mother is a very good teacher, I really like the way she teaches. I do a lot on her notes. But we have quite serious methodological differences. To her always a terrible number of children ran with their problems. Houses are always a club, they consult with her. Not in literature, but in personal life, mostly. I am not at all convinced that I can and that my empathy will be enough for this. I am much more self-centered.

So I think that my mother is in the top five Russian writers, and I hardly enter the top twenty. Now in Moscow there are very good teachers, and we all run to each other for lessons. If some new method appears, then I will immediately find out about it at the Open Education Institute. This institute is such a mysterious institution in the center of Moscow, in which the Methodists sit, going on complex cases to various schools. For example, in a class there was a persecution of someone, or in a class there is a sect wielding children to suicide. This is the pedagogy of rapid response. No one knows about her work, and if I ever write an action novel, it will be about them. I have watched many times how a person comes to class and resolves the situation in a week. This is work on the verge of special forces.

Many representatives of the Russian-speaking diaspora abroad consider it important to teach their children the Russian language. For example, the Houston Independent School District offers to open a full-time school with the study of the Russian language. Similar language schools already exist in our city with the study of French, Arabic, Chinese. Do you think it is important to preserve Russian culture and language among the children of immigrants?

I do not have an answer to this question. I am always for assimilation. I believe that second-generation children should already be Americans and there is no need to preserve Russian culture. America is such an absolutely cosmopolitan world. Is it necessary in this cosmopolitan world to preserve these islets, these ghettos of national culture? On the one hand, probably, it is necessary, the Chinese are saving. And on the other hand, it really slows down the embedding here. The Chinese, perhaps, will slow down less, and the Russians are very slow. If Russian communicates only in the emigre circle, he is all bad. And since the Russian people are generally so absorbent and absorbable, very contact, then the best Americans come out of the Russians. Therefore, I do not think that it is necessary to save.

Photo: Olga Weiner

Why not? In Europe, they speak several languages. A Belgian, for example, speaks French, German and English.

You see, what a thing ... If we are fabulously lucky, and Russia will soon be able to transform itself into another country, into a more open one, then the preservation of its culture will make sense. And if Russia will live under Putin for another ten to twenty years, and maybe more, and maybe he will live forever, then Russia simply will not be any. There is such an option, and I do not exclude it, it is unpleasant to me, but I do not exclude it.

Our culture in general is quantitatively very small: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mechnikov ... Well, Dyagilev, Aivazovsky, Repin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Shalyapin. There is nothing more to talk about. This is an "export option." Even Pushkin and Lermontov are not exported, they are not mastered by the West. Russia will become such a relic, a miracle of the 19 century, because the 20 century in the West can no longer be read, and "Silent Don" is not needed for anyone.

In general, there is an option in which this inhuman new formation, this strange substance generated by Russian history, is “gray goo” (the name of Alexander’s novel Garroas and Alexey Evdokimova) another ten years will cover Russia. And then the country will simply not be on the map: neither cultural nor scientific, and maybe even geographic.

It’s just that everyone is led to die with the country, and our self-preservation instinct is very weak. There is a chance that Russia will simply disperse, and how light breathing will dissolve in this cold wind, like in Bunin. And what remains will be uncompetitive.

In one interview you said that Russia is moving in cycles.

This circle has two options: either everything just stops, or the trajectory changes. Because it’s impossible to run around forever in a circle, this locomotive is losing wagons, and the locomotive is not traveling. If the instinct of self-preservation is activated, then there will be no Putin in 2018, and if not, then it is to blame ... Each nation has its own time, so we have lived our time very quickly. And then it will not be necessary to preserve Russian culture, then it will be a late Byzantium. Who is reading Byzantine prose now?

But there is an option in which Russia will make a breakthrough. If Russia proves that it is viable, then it will need to be promoted, and she will propagate herself. We will experience a fabulous cultural takeoff, and it seems to me that this will happen. There will again be a colossal fashion for us, everyone will read us.

I see now a brilliant generation of children, but this brilliant generation of children, I'm sorry, it is very easy to cut off the head. Just tear, exterminate, and I do not know what will come of them. All my best students have serious problems with employment. The more talented the student, the harder it is to get a job.

Are you helping them?

Of course I help. Someone can attach to the newspaper, someone to school, someone can be printed. To some I can give an idea, and they will write a novel. But I can help ten, twenty, thirty people, and in Russia now there are, I think, a million talented young people. This million can either suffocate or pull the country to a new level. Or maybe it’s really bad - a new war can begin, then everyone will simply be killed. How was the brilliant 1924 generation of the year, and every 4 survived from it. It was enough for the “thaw”, but it was no longer for “perestroika”.

If many years later you have the opportunity to describe this historical era in which we live, in what genre would you write the work?

It has long been written. The first part of the tetralogy "Zero", which is called "Written offHas already been published. Three others - "The killers","Kamsk"And" American "- lie in the table and will lie until I consider it necessary to publish them. In the first letters of the name of the books in this tetralogy, quite against my will, a very good abbreviation is obtained, but I did not mean anything. This is a novel about one person who finds himself in different situations. “The murderers” is the story of Alexandra Ivannikova and the affair of Antonina Fedorova. These two court cases were very relevant in the zero years. The third part of Kamsk is the story of a flood in Lensk, but told a little differently. “American” is the story of emigration and the return to “post-Putin” Russia, such a futuristic novel. I do not consider all books to be necessary to print, because “Written off” is, and let the rest vylazhivaetsya.

We hope that you print them anyway.

It will not be soon. The point is not that I am afraid of censorship or any conditions. First, I need to add a few things, for me more fundamental, and then, roughly speaking, I want this book to come out on time, and its time has not come. Today, it will not be perceived ... Well, “Written Off”, unfortunately, I printed it too early, in 2008, and no one understood it. Five years passed, and everyone began to ask: “How did you know?”. I want, finally, all the books to fire at one gulp and on time. Remember, as Chernyshevsky said: "I hope to wait for this pretty soon."

Published with permission from the publication "Our Texas".

On Amazon.com you can buy books about D. Bykov and his copyright publications:

Vladimir Kolganov DB Phenomenon Dmitry Bykov and his Twins

Dmitry Bykov. true

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