to detail something, but in principle a lot has been written, a lot is in the public domain, i just can’t accept people today who are starting to kind of gloss over all this, like, well, it was and was, there’s no need to think about it, it’s necessary, because what to be proud, how uncourageous, how dishonest, that you are talking about this, how not to be proud that people gave their lives for their homeland, in difficult years, in short hours and minutes of rest, the feeling often helped me. i remember this episode: all night we walked to the neighboring part, where we had to dig trenches, dark rain, rockets flare up from time to time, we arrived at the place, exhausted and hungry, a thin major approached our group and asked: did they take the tool, he meant shovels , pickaxes, they took it, cheerfully, i answered for everyone and pulled out a wooden spoon from the top of my boot, that’s it they wanted it, the major did too, our spirits rose, well, this is salvation, you know, absolutely salvation, and how about someone?

farted in the trench, as they all began to laugh, both russians and germans. i'll read it now. an escort car carrying important documents drove along the highway. a group of our scouts attacked the escort. a battle ensued, which ended with ours and the germans ending up in a ditch on opposite sides of the highway. and only one german got confused about where his friends were and where the strangers were and mistakenly jumped to ours. and our scouts wanted the prisoner like a dog with a stick, they threw him out onto the highway by his arms and legs. out of fright, this unfortunate thunder plopped down... a wild laugh was heard from both sides, the germans, ours, were laughing too, suddenly there was a confused silence, people could not shoot at those with whom they had just laughed, there is truth in this, and there is some kind this is the philosophy, of course, young boys didn’t sleep during the war, especially when you don’t sleep, don’t eat enough, you always have this feeling of hunger, i know that when dad returned from the war in peacetime... he had

there was only one requirement that your family always have bread, i ’ll read it out now, but famine soon set in, in our batteries everyone was entitled to 300 g of bread per day, often instead of 150 g of bread they were given one cracker weighing 75 g to another half the ration was bread 150 g, heavy, raw and sticky, like soap, many, when receiving the bread, thought to eat it all at once or divide it, some divided it into pieces, i ate it all at once. the cold came, in the morning, afternoon and evening, at night, even in their sleep, everyone thought and talked about food, and they never said it would be nice to eat a steak or chicken, no, most of all they dreamed, it would be nice to eat a soft loaf for 40 rubles and half a kilo sweets, pillows, well , all the boys are young, with bread, yes, there should always be bread in the house, if the father came from somewhere, he found out that there was no bread, he first, he swore terribly at everyone, then he got into the car, drove, the only

place where he could buy bread at night was the wto restaurant on gorkov street, take a taxi to buy bread, but he himself understood that it was from there from the blockade, he realized that this was kind of psychological, but there should always be enough bread, it’s fortunate that your dad wrote these memoirs, stingy, little, but i’m glad that my eldest son goes to the immortal regiment every may 9 from a photograph of my grandfather and that we came up with the immortal regiment in circus, our circus children come out with photographs of artists who died in the war. thank god, thank you, dad, for this. and if a conversation begins that this is all untrue, in fact, this is generally propaganda. i have one question, then what does it mean for me to cross out my whole life, to understand that my father lied to me, and his friends at the front also lied, so i need to talk about it, of course, of course, i can say, i can say before in front of everyone and clearly, here i am, one of the places where i will never go again is the baltic states as well. first of all, latvia,

no, i won’t go after they demolished the monument to soviet soldiers-liberators, this is a monument to my father, he fought there, he was the one who gave his life there, he gave his life with his comrades, and this is all to the root, no, of course, we don’t listen to anyone, we will talk about it and we will always remember. maxim, i know that you brought letters, living letters, dads, but they were before the war, yes, and they, yes, this is after the finnish war, yeah, ah... read out, yes , of course, this new year’s letter is obvious, says, january 1941 has begun, first of all, thank you very much for this congratulation that you sent me, i received it last night, i hope you received my happy new year greetings, i enclosed photographs in your letter, and also sent photographs of our neighbor, more thank you very much, and so on, here, you see, you can quote all this, you can read it out, and here... no,

not just about the war, it’s not even about the army, you can hold it in your hands, but of course, it’s a copy, well, it doesn’t matter, here they are all with some kind of humor, with warmth, with kindness...

he says, i went to the neighboring house all the time, some people still lived there, everything was near sistaratsky, there was such a dacha zone in leningrad, it had a lot of books, i went there to read with them, i said i went too, he says i took it some book, as i remember now, i remember a gadfly and i’m sitting, reading on the steps there on the stairs, suddenly a fighter is running, he says, nikulin is urgently on alert, but i say, like a bear, i ran, and they announced the alarm.

without reading he said why i need the order, i agree to a medal, that’s what he has for courage, soldier's order, dad got married early right after the war, yes, well, not quite, he came back from the war also grown up and matured, and for some time he already worked in the circus, before the circus he still worked, he entered theater universities, and he didn’t get in, they didn’t accept him, yes, they didn’t accept him, so lanky, although to me, for example, with these black eyes, thin, tall, just like a hero, handsome, a hero.

anyway, invite a clown to play such a tragic-dramatic role, you can imagine how a person should feel, well, this is also talent, it’s also all from god, well, mom, too, she came to work at the circus by chance, they had just gotten married , this is more detailed, it means that your mother was built like a boy, and you had to come up with some kind of act, they needed a boy. because they started rehearsing, they took a boy from the fortieth family, also already a small acrobat, but already prepared, and the boy fell at the first rehearsal and broke his arm, oh my god, and he says , of course, i heard enough from my dad and mom from him, of course

, but we need to rehearse, someone needs to produce the act - then she says - she says take it he chews and cuts his pigtails like a boy. i thought so, why not, i took two weeks off, went to kratovo to visit my aunt, every morning my mother and i went into the forest, my father laid out a 13-meter-long arena from pine cones, they rehearsed there, when something seemed to be working out, they came to they showed moscow, and the director says, well, well, in general, it’s quite possible, it could be, and so mom began to work with dad, so mom, but by this time she was not accepted, she studied at the timeren academy at the faculty of ornamental horticulture, the then minister...

you know, i met one person, he is an artist. what theater is he playing in? he is not performing in a theater, in a circus, he is a clown, there was silence, my family looked at me with pity. as a child, i was in... my aunt began cautiously, i remember how they gave a clown for cracks with a cry of “oh-oh,” he fell face down into the sawdust, a month later i finally persuaded my family to meet yura, he came to our home everything was settled right away, he’s an educated, intelligent person, well, that’s how it’s right and how important it is to listen to yourself, your heart, and how mom wasn’t wrong, tell me please, about friends, dad was friends with front-line soldiers, right? no one lived in moscow, yeah, a lot of

front-line comrades lived in leningrad, they have a very close connection, i know that, it may not be friendship, but it may be even more than friendship, they always honestly met closely, communicated , met, when we worked in leningrad, there when one of his front-line comrades, with whom i was not even friends after the war, and even during the war, well... friends who have nothing to do with the circus or cinema, uh, big, i have in mind

cinema, there were a huge number of colleagues, comrades with whom we had excellent relationships, you could go and receive guests, sit, have a drink, have time to do something, but friendship as such, there were three people, this was his front-line friend, marat vantrao, who was my witness at my wedding, there he met... my sister got married a year later and we began to live together, this is the founder of our soviet documentary filmmaking, ilya semyonovich gutman, a front-line cameraman, an amazingly talented person, and semyon mishin, a photo artist, almost all of nikulin shvedin’s posters are his own, and rostislav plyad, plyad, plyad was a wonderful comrade, a company person, a housemate, sometimes his father came to see him. after work, because they lived on the fourth floor, and we were on the tenth, then we had to get my father out of there, my mother sent me,

she said: go and get nikolin, they’ve been paid off, otherwise they’ll be there until the morning, this is a podcast letter, in my guests, director of the circus on tsvetnoy boulevard, maxim nikolin, and we continue the conversation, you know, one thing i can’t fit into my head, so to speak, in our community, intrigue is our everything, yes, everyone gossips about each other. even in soviet times, before the yellow press appeared, there were all sorts of rumors about the pencil, that he was evil, so-and-so, let’s not say, yes, better than dad and always in superlatives with delight about your dad , with all this popularity, he all the time acted with such exalted beautiful artists and he lived with his mother for 56 years, and yes, and also no rumors, no affairs on the side... how he got married with such loyalty and how it somehow didn’t stick to him

and you know what touched me, that mom and dad never confessed to yours, you know , kisses in public and so on, but for example, dad passing i could have stroked my mother on the head or something like this, you are all constantly touching, of course, i can even read it right now, because well, this is what it brings to tears, i never told him about my feelings, just like he told me in general to the last one. spent little time talking, at least not in topics not related to the circus, but what to talk about after so many years together, i only loved, passing by yura, sitting at some regular solitaire, to kiss his bald head, and he didn’t even raise his head, he just smiled, and that’s all for us it was enough to say without words, we are happy together , we still love each other dearly, you are a happy person, you are a happy person, yes, i agree, you should still be enough for 15 generations of your happiness with this love. his only curse

what if he really wanted to punish me with words, punish me with words, and then he said, what are you doing to me? tell me , did yuri vladimirovich himself grow up to be such an obedient, good boy? no, as i understand it, because he talked about his childhood and his school years there, he couldn’t really be called obedient, he wasn’t a very good student, and his mother stood up for him. yes, he said that yurochka had a bad memory, so she made excuses, speaking in our language, probably yes, but him too, no one really cares about me either forced me, but they scolded me for getting bad marks, of which there were many, they scolded me, well, my mother, naturally for educational purposes, she didn’t, well, what are you doing, it’s hard for you to sit down and learn this, well, it’s difficult, really, well, it’s difficult, and laziness it was, but i really didn’t like it,

i didn’t like it, it was didactics then, in general, in a good way, of course, my grandmother, my mother’s mother maria petrovna, was the teacher. and of course, she took a sip from me, i’m so ashamed now, i was far from the most obedient son and grandson, and their parents weren’t there, they were on tour, they came for a month at most in moscow, then they could be with me, somehow raise me, love me and so on, i toured all the time, too, and my grandfathers are now presenting it to me, of course, here you are always, i i say, where would you live, what would you eat, well , that’s my job, but you have, but you got an education, but i also tell my daughters and my son. this is the kind of work, i also don’t live in boarding schools with my grandmother, so i also say that i am my grandmother’s son, it was an advantage, because if there was no grandmother and no room in moscow, then they would have dragged me along with them to these rented apartments, to dorms there, to rats, and i grew up under a completely different environment, i went with him on visits for almost

the entire 50 years of our marriage, with the exception of perhaps the first years life of my son maxim, i sat for several years. tour in the usa and canada, three-year-old maksyushka greeted us, hello, uncle, yura was terribly upset, he got there, his own son forgot me, they used to say, yes, well, it’s a strange thing, i remember now, i’ve never had such, you know, resentment , here abandoned child syndrome, their love was probably so great, and i felt it, letters were written, they called phones, later even... call abroad, i only understand today what it cost, of course, they were where all the time - next to me, around me, in me, so it was like this, when everyone loves it, when there are bags of letters to your dad, everyone wants to communicate with him, everyone wants his attention, and you are little, and you are a teenager, and dad is so popular, but which does not

fit into the universe at all, so you don’t have there was such boyish jealousy, no, there was no jealousy. the chairman of this executive committee, so he said, the father looked around and said in a whisper, too

, you’re an idiot, the father says yes, no, you understand, it was really good there, i missed it for several years, some, you are some absolutely, wonderful communal apartment, almost everyone was there our relatives, we lived as one big family, we had a sign hanging, two, the collective farm is a giant, yes, three bells, everything is collective, mother’s relatives, that’s all yes, mother’s relatives, father’s a front-line friend who married my mother’s sister, my god, their parents, their children, then, then their grandchildren, well, we are there together, like brother and sister, they are my brother and sister, although...

maxim, here you are, being a very young boy there, we understood that not all people are conscientious, that many people deceive dad, well, in particular, they wrote letters to him with help, and dad helped everyone, and you said, well , they are deceiving you, well, it’s obvious, and dad answered, suddenly no, well, suddenly there really is trouble, well suddenly, and i won’t help, we’re already together in they worked at the circus, when i usually didn’t say, here are the next of these applicants, which means they left happily, so... but everyone has the same thing, there are children ahead of them, there are golden ones , it’s us who stole money from tashkent, lost our passport, well, that’s it there is only one scheme, well, here they are. they took away the happy ones, he and i were left alone, i tell her, listen, it’s not about the money , to hell with them with the money, of course, but now they are walking and thinking to

themselves, how coolly we deceived nikulin, what a nikulin is a sucker, it won’t hurt you, but he had a manner, he loved to sit so much, like this, he sat like that, sat and they said to me, boy, what if it’s true, my dear, i have all my arguments at once, but it’s true that in the nineties, when in general you ate there was nothing for the people, and in the circus these poor animals had nothing to feed, they were starving, your dad came to the chairman of the council of ministers and said that if you don’t allocate money for food for the animals, then i will bring them all here, i have this video , this is his speech in the moscow council at some extraordinary session, when the decision was made to sell meat at commercial prices, including to circuses, and he said that we would die, it wasn’t working yet, but my father went there and he

presented his performance so professionally that no one was ready, he came nikulin, everyone loves him, everyone respects him, man, he came to the podium, told a couple of jokes, as usual he started with this, yes, i haven’t forgotten now, by the way, the child told him, your memory yurka is bad , do you remember the jokes? a buffoon, but not quite, but not quite, but what my father knocked out money for a new circus, when it was just that no one cared about the circus, not about anything, yes, he was a holy man, he was the only one

left, there was an initiative group created that went from room to room until they were there in circles each time they were allowed in, some folk artists dropped out, in the end there was only one non-cult left, who had no other choice, and he went for the last time to the final authority, this is nikolaych roshkov, the prime minister, and so on. who could execute or pardon, and we all sat and waited result in the temporary directorate on petrovsky boulevard, the church was already closed then, nikolen came, sat down, took off his hat, put it down, and we all sat, he took a good pause, even debukhatov’s, larger, then raised his eyes, so he says, well that everything should be silent, he signed, there was general jubilation, they ran to the grocery store, well, dad worked in the circus until the last minutes, yes, of course, he served. worked, church people say, worked, artists say, played, theater people will say, we performed the performance, circus people will say, we performed the performance, nuance small, but quite significant, this

is more, more responsibility, danger , of course, there is a risk, there is a risk, and you hold your partner’s life in your hands, in the saddle, in the shoulders, in the hands, in the castle, anywhere, you are responsible for him , so children in their forties grow up a little different, they grew up earlier, because they acquire this feeling.

because these are different things, this is a circus, this is a job, you became the director of the circus after your dad left, yes, but what about you, in fact , clowns and churches are not very kind people, well, by and large, your father is just some kind of exception, some kind of angel who flew in to show how it can be humane, how you weren’t eaten all these years, i think the instinct of self-preservation worked, because i was offered as a , i had already worked... for 3 years as a managing director and it was easier for me, because i came into my own world, i grew up there, uh, but i came from another world, and i

never lived in this world, actually.

and then i realized, well, yes, he probably meant it, well, you’re just saying this the breed here doesn’t bother anyone, neither your father, nor you, i don’t hope for your children, you are some kind of humanoids, in our country, not so long ago, not long before the start of this covid , a man passed away , our spectator, his guides back in the eighties , our fiction writers, every year on december 31st he came for... to the circus for the evening performance, someone asked from the administration and it turned out that he, being very young, got married on december 31st forty-two , and invited his young wife to the circus, and in the morning he would go to the front near moscow, and he told me, what do you know, if i come back, i promise you that every year on december 31st we will go to the circus, every year they came to

the church, when we found out about this, he and i... talk with our souls about what i need this memory , it’s such a blessing that you keep it so pure, you need to carry it, you need to tell your children and grandchildren about it, so that they never forget, so that they remember, thank you very much.

hello, my name is alexey varlamov, i am a writer and rector of the gorky literary institute, this is the podcast life wonderful, and today we will talk with an excellent writer, prose writer, associate professor of the department of literary excellence at the literary institute, andrey.

on it, could not due to his age, but nevertheless it was very important for him to try to analyze what was happening to the people, and he did not relate to it in any way and did not participate primarily with his country at the time of the great threat, and these dramatic times , of course, will always be of interest to writers, always; another thing is that the view of a contemporary and a participant in events is very different

from the attempt she...

vasiliev plays, it seems to me, on a very important counterpoint, that the battles are of local importance, but there is only one life, these girls and the foreman of the wax are doing the incredible, well, yes, probably the girls could not resist, anti-aircraft gun girls

would not be able to resist carefully trained saboteurs from the ss troops, probably no, yes, as a paratrooper, but this one, yes, it looks implausible, but this is a counterpoint that in incredible circumstances.

but still, this theme of the feat, it really ended up in that literature central, you know, this is connected with the consciousness of the events taking place, with awareness on a personal level, and the authors and heroes of these books, because if we, for example, look

at the book of remarks on the western front without changes, then yes we see one very important detail , there one of the heroes says to the other: but i’m a meaningless soldier, i ’m a nobody at all, i’m just a pair of boots and... a rifle, and if you remember, during the first world war, this is the western front, it was the confrontation with germany and france, for 3 years they really stood on in one place, the front did not move.

soldier, there may have been isolated cases, but in order to say this as a typical thing, no, there was a clear understanding of the enemy, so after this, since there are enemies, it means overcoming the enemy, the enemy must be expelled, he is terrible, terrible, dangerous, i think , this awareness distinguished russian soldiers from the soldiers of the first world war, so we simply could not have the notes of pacifism that exist in the remark, okay, but this is still literature of the 20th century, let’s...

social themes, historical themes, there conversations with or evenings with peter the great, a bison, yes, and timofeevsky, i’m going into a thunderstorm, of course, and somehow i didn’t even keep it in my head that granin actually fought, suddenly at the very end of his life this man writes a novel, even not a novel, a short story about the war, a story called my lieutenant, i ’ll tell you honestly, andrei valerievich, when i read this story, i caught myself thinking, why haven’t you written about this before? daniil alexandrovich, this is much more interesting

than evenings with peter the great, this the book struck me with its freshness, he wrote when he was more than 90 years old, and with his personal view, personal attitude to the war, then this very important topic, about which a lot has also been written, the siege of leningrad, the battle for leningrad, that’s how it is it began, how this blockade was established, all this is so sincerely written in the first person, in my opinion, absolutely wonderful, young, full...

some voices are heard, steps, someone is walking, these people jump up , frightened, the lieutenants come up, he’s not very like them pays attention, which means he simply tells them: they can’t be here, get out of here, faster, and that means some soldiers are running with him, they are already drawing some lines, connections, this junction very much gives rise to such a contrast , yes transition. when the hero still didn’t understand, we said, we were driving back on the train, laughing, people were already talking about

war and i still didn’t understand anything, this wonderful transition was made for me in a very new way, i’ve read a lot of books about the war, granin is here i was really surprised by the freshness of the look, how strange and absurd great things are happening to us that can no longer be changed, this is what he managed to create here as a writer, and this, of course, for the patriarch of literature for ninety years. this is a very young book, it’s true, it’s very, very cool, very human, very like that, it’s personally written, despite the fact that as an author, of course, this is a great achievement, yes, it would have been on an epic scale, unfortunately, it not very big. i say why i feel sorry that he took it up too late, it’s really there, well, let it not be war and peace, but some book in which he could show the penetration of war and peace, these two different states of the then soviet society, but because of what he did, we must say a huge thank you to him, to our viewers, and this the book,

if anyone has not read it, i definitely recommend reading it, a conversation with andrei gelasimov, with you alexey varlamov, writer, rector of the literary institute, podcast life of the remarkable. also, by the way, if we talk specifically about leningrad, i would name the writer a book that, perhaps, does not directly relate to the war, its author is eduard kachergin, a wonderful artist in the large drama theater. by the way, the book is called baptized with crosses, it is his personal story, autobiographical. a book about his childhood, about how he was taken out of besieged leningrad as a child, about his childhood in orphanages, this wartime is described, and what else struck me in this book, by the way, in the play that was staged at the bdt, is the way he describes the summer of 1945, when our soldiers were returning,

our officers, our soldiers are returning home, and how they are greeted, this huge road, transip, at that time he was somewhere in siberia, and he is the opposite. from the orphanage he makes his way in the opposite direction, returns to his home in leningrad, so he sees these people, how they come to these huge stations, junction stations, women come, wives come, someone’s whole husband comes to someone, husbands from someone come to crippled, disabled, this is the bitter side of war, this boy himself, who travels with these soldiers who are there drawing their profile, from wire, he makes a profile of stalin, this is the atmosphere of the time, it’s really before... it’s exactly what was seen through the eyes of a child, seen through the eyes of a teenager, what he remembered, faces, voices, characters, these are these living people who made our victory, no, not monuments, not monuments,

andrei platonov, by the way, has another very important name in russian military prose, because plato’s stories...