L. Anninsky admitted that he always felt natural in the center public life, absolutely fitting both in state and behavior into the “social context”, but never fitted in with any “movements” or “parties”. Not excluding the one through which “all paths were opened” before.
Born on April 7, 1934 in Rostov-on-Don. Parents: Alexander Anninsky and Anna Alexandrova. His father is a Cossack by origin from the village of Novo-Anninskaya. Mother is from the city of Lyubech. L. Anninsky's parents had a common road: educational program - education. Having received higher education, both fell into the field of enlightenment. My father went from being a university teacher to becoming a producer at Mosfilm. In 1941 he went missing at the front. My mother remained a chemistry teacher at a technical school for the rest of her life.
As a child, Leva went to kindergarten. His parents were at work or on business trips, and he spent most of his time in kindergarten or in the yard. In his youth, his worldview, by his own admission, was influenced by anyone: myths Ancient Greece, historical novels, remaining on their father’s shelf (Stevenson, Ebers, Antonovskaya, etc.), then Gorky, Tolstoy, Pisarev, Belinsky. Inclined by nature to logic and systematics, in choice life guidelines he relied more on instinct and intuition. Early on he became familiar with the works of philosophers, including Kant and Hegel, and came to the assumption that Marxism is an iron cage in which it is safe and through the bars of which “look wherever you want.” Then the cage ceased to exist: he read Berdyaev, Shestov, Rozanov, Bulgakov, Fedorov, Fedotov.
At Komsomol age, out of mischief and curiosity, he began to look into churches. An incomprehensible, soul-flooding feeling of happiness arose, and in any church: Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant. However, he did not succumb to the epidemic of baptisms and did not become a believer.
Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. There was no choice of profession - there was a choice of specialty, which became Russian literature. Back in the 8th grade, from the first essays, Lev decided to study her and only her. And in any professional capacity. If he had not become a literary critic, he would have become a literature teacher. He was ready to do anything: read, work in a museum, library - just to be in the realm of Russian texts.
Oddly enough, his first own publication was in the genre of caricature. The drawings were published in the university circulation and in the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. The first text to be published appeared in the same university circulation in the fall of 1956. It was a review of the famous publication of that time - the novel by Vladimir Dudintsev “Not by Bread Alone.” What followed was a series of “editorial teams” and an exhausting battle for every word in every publication. Since then, L. Anninsky has published about two dozen books and five thousand (!) articles. However, he considers the thirteen-volume “Genealogy”, compiled for his daughters and not intended for publication, to be the most significant of all that was written.
After graduating from the university, he was assigned to graduate school. He passed the competitive exams, but then he was told that the situation had changed and now graduate school was accepted only from production. This happened in the fall of 1956 - after the events in Hungary, where the “counter-revolution” was started by writers. Therefore, in the USSR it was decided to “improve ideology.” Instead of writing a dissertation, L. Anninsky began to write captions for photographs in the magazine " Soviet Union“, from where six months later he was fired for “unsuitability.” He had, in his words, “to become a laborer,” which determined the rest of his life. creative path future critic.
Try, embrace, connect and reconcile. Understand everyone, maintain inner balance, give " human face"to what fate gave; not to succumb to any poison, darkness, self-deception, to gain secret freedom - such were the tasks L. Anninsky set for himself. His mischief was to be published in parallel in two mutually exclusive magazines of that time: in "October" and "New World" This was only possible once, but he was scolded here and there. Gradually he realized and even got used to the fact that everything is unsolvable, the pain is insatiable, the scores cannot be settled.
L. Anninsky admitted that he always felt naturally at the center of public life, absolutely fitting both in condition and behavior into the “social context,” but never tried to fit in with any “movements” or “parties.” Not excluding the one through which “all paths were opened” before. As a child, I was a happy pioneer. The best experiences of my youth were associated with the Komsomol: student collective farm brigades, propaganda trips, wall printing, sports. But he didn’t want to join the party. And he didn’t join. Then, in 1990, when all those who joined ran away from the party, he said to himself “thank you” that he did not have to run.
Lev Annensky's pen includes the following books: "The Nut Kernel. Critical Essays" (1965), "Engaged with an Idea. ("How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovsky)" (1971), "Vasily Shukshin" (1976), "The Thirties-Seventies; Literary -critical articles" (1977), "The Hunt for the Lion (Leo Tolstoy and Cinema)" (1980, 1998), "Leskov's Necklace" (1982, 1986), "Contacts" (1982), "Mikhail Lukonin" (1982), "The Sun in the Branches (Essays on Lithuanian Photography)" (1984), "Nikolai Gubenko" (1986), "Three Heretics. Stories about Pisemsky, Melnikov-Pechersky, Leskov" (1988), "Culture's tapesty" ("Tapesty of Culture ") (1991), "Elbows and wings. Literature of the 80s: hopes, reality, paradoxes" (1989), "Ticket to Paradise. Reflections at the theater entrances" (1989), "Flying curtain. Literary-critical articles about Georgia" (1990), "The people of the sixties and us. Cinema that became and did not become history" (1991), "Silver and mob. Russian, Soviet, Slavic, world in the poetry of the Silver Age" (1997), "Bards" (1999) and others, as well as series of articles in periodicals, radio programs.
The literary process in Russia is the essence of L. Anninsky’s life, his biography. In turn, this process is inextricably linked with tragic story our country. Lev Aleksandrovich is a literary connoisseur, a recognized critic, studying the process in all its many-sided unity. He believes that great Russian literature arose as a correlate Russian Empire. “First, literature provides a spiritual, “homely” foundation for the fortress of the state (Derzhavin), then there comes a moment of balance between the personal and imperial principles (Pushkin, Tolstoy), then the individual begins to shake the state fortress and prophesies its death (Dostoevsky, Blok). Soviet literature- reaction to this plot: first, the personality is violently erased, dissolves in the state, merges with it; there is something called literature big style. The moment of balance again turns into a violent rebellion of the individual against the suppression of it by the state, and literature of a tragic sound arises (from Mayakovsky to Mandelstam, from Sholokhov to Platonov and to Grossman). Future humanity will alternately remember the heroic and tragic sides of this story, depending on what ails humanity.”
Lives and works in Moscow.
Lev Anninskiy Career: Critic
Birth: Russia" Rostov region" Rostov-on-Don, 7.4.1934
Lev Anninsky is a Soviet and Russian literary critic, writer, publicist, and literary critic. Born on April 7, 1934. Worked in the Soviet Union magazine (1956-1957), in Literary newspaper(1957-1960), in the magazine Znamya (1960-1967), at the Institute of Concrete Sociological Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1968-1972), magazines: Friendship of Peoples (1972-1991 and since 1993, member of the editorial board), Literary Review (1990-1992 ), Rodina (since 1992), for a short time he was also the editor-in-chief of the magazine Time and We (1998).
Born on April 7, 1934 in Rostov-on-Don. Parents: Alexander Anninsky and Anna Alexandrova. His father is a Cossack by origin from the village of Novo-Anninskaya. Mother is from the city of Lyubech. L. Anninsky's parents had a common road: educational program - education. Having received higher education, both entered the field of education. My father went from being a university teacher to becoming a producer at Mosfilm. In 1941 he disappeared without news at the front. My mother remained for the rest of her life as a chemistry teacher at a technical school.
As a child, Leva went to a kindergarten. His parents were at work or on business trips, and he spent most of his time in kindergarten or in the yard. In his youth, his worldview, by his own admission, was influenced by anyone: the myths of Ancient Greece, historical novels left on his father’s shelf (Stevenson, Ebers, Antonovskaya, etc.), after that - Gorky, Tolstoy, Pisarev, Belinsky. Naturally inclined towards logic and systematics, in choosing life guidelines he relied more on instinct and intuition. Early on he became acquainted with the works of philosophers, covering Kant and Hegel, and came to the assumption that Marxism is an iron cage in which it is safe and through the bars of which “look wherever you want.” Then the cage ceased to exist: he read Berdyaev, Shestov, Rozanov, Bulgakov, Fedorov, Fedotov.
At Komsomol age, out of mischief and curiosity, he began to look into churches. An incomprehensible feeling of happiness arose, flooding the soul, and in every church: Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant. However, he did not succumb to the epidemic of baptisms and did not become a believer.
Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. There was no choice of profession - there was a selection of a specialty, which became Russian literature. Back in the 8th grade, from the first essays, Lev decided to study her and only her. And in any professional capacity. If he had not become a literary critic, he would have become a literature teacher. He was ready to do anything: absorb the text, act in a museum, library - just to be in the realm of Russian texts.
Unusually, his first publication was in the genre of caricature. The drawings were published in the university circulation and in the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. The first content to be published appeared in the same university circulation in the fall of 1956. It was a review of the famous publication of that time - the novel by Vladimir Dudintsev “Not by Bread Alone.” What followed was a series of “editorial teams” and an exhausting battle for every word in every publication. Since then, L. Anninsky has published about two dozen books and five thousand (!) articles. However, he considers the thirteen-volume “Genealogy”, compiled for his daughters and not intended for publication, to be the most significant of all that was written.
After graduating from the university, he was assigned to graduate school. He passed the competitive exams, but was then told that the situation had changed and at the moment they were only accepting graduate students from production. This happened in the fall of 1956 - later than the events in Hungary, where the “counter-revolution” was started by writers. Therefore, in the USSR it was decided to “improve ideology.” Instead of writing a dissertation, L. Anninsky began writing captions for photographs in the magazine "Soviet Union", and six months later he was fired for "unsuitability". He had to, as he put it, “go to work as a day laborer,” which determined the entire future creative path of the future critic.
Try, embrace, pair and reconcile. To understand everyone, to preserve inner balance, to give a “human face” to what fate has given; not to succumb to any poison, confusion, self-deception, to acquire secret freedom - these were the tasks L. Anninsky set for himself. His mischief was also to be published in two mutually exclusive magazines of that time: “October” and “New World”. He succeeded only once, but he was scolded both here and there. Gradually he understood, and moreover, got used to the fact that everything is unsolvable, the pain is insatiable, the scores cannot be settled.
L. Anninsky admitted that he invariably felt unconditionally at the center of public life, fitting both his condition and behavior into the “social context,” but under no circumstances did he try to fit in with any “movements” or “parties.” Not excluding the only one through which “all paths were previously opened.” As a child, I was a happy pioneer. The best experiences of my youth were associated with the Komsomol: student collective farm brigades, propaganda trips, wall printing, sports. But he didn’t want to join the party. And he didn’t join. Then, in 1990, when everyone who joined ran away from the party, he said to himself “thank you” that he didn’t have to rush.
Lev Annensky's pen includes the following books: "The Nut Kernel. Critical Essays" (1965), "Engaged with an Idea. ("How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovsky)" (1971), "Vasily Shukshin" (1976), "The Thirties-Seventies; Literary -critical articles" (1977), "The Hunt for the Lion (Leo Tolstoy and Cinema)" (1980, 1998), "Leskov's Necklace" (1982, 1986), "Contacts" (1982), "Mikhail Lukonin" (1982), "The Sun in the Branches (Essays on Lithuanian Photography)" (1984), "Nikolai Gubenko" (1986), "Three Heretics. Stories about Pisemsky, Melnikov-Pechersky, Leskov" (1988), "Culture's tapesty" ("Tapesty of Culture ") (1991), "Elbows and wings. Literature of the 80s: hopes, reality, paradoxes" (1989), "Ticket to Paradise. Reflections at the theater entrances" (1989), "Flying curtain. Literary critical articles about Georgia" (1990), "The Sixties and us. Cinema that became and did not become history" (1991), "Silver and mob. Russian, Soviet, Slavic, world in the poetry of the Silver Age" (1997), "Bards" (1999) and others, as well as series of articles in periodicals, radio programs.
The literary movement in Russia is the essence of L. Anninsky’s life, his biography. In turn, that very move is inextricably linked with the tragic history of our country. Lev Aleksandrovich is a literary connoisseur, a recognized critic, studies the course in all its many-sided unity. He believes that great Russian literature arose as a correlate of the Russian Empire. “First, literature lays a sincere, “homely” foundation under the fortress of the state (Derzhavin), then comes a moment of balance between the personal and imperial principles (Pushkin, Tolstoy), then the person begins to shake the state fortress and prophesies its destruction (Dostoevsky, Blok). Soviet literature - reaction to the same plot: at first the person is violently erased, dissolves in the state, merges with it; what is called literature of great style arises. The moment of balance again turns into a violent rebellion of the individual against the suppression of it by the state, and literature of a tragic sound arises (from. Mayakovsky to Mandelstam, from Sholokhov to Platonov and to Grossman). The future world community will alternately recall the heroic and tragic sides of this story, depending on what ails humanity.”
(Lev Tailor. Count Rostopchin. The story of the extraordinary Governor-General of Moscow. –
M., Boslen, 2017. – 432 pp.)
Count Fyodor Vasilyevich Rostopchin (1765-1826) is a figure so well known in Russian history of modern times - significant, controversial, and at times mysterious - that it is strange that there are no biographies of him in Russian fiction.
Now there is such a biography.
Rostopchin's life was studied and told by Lev Portnoy, the famous author of adventure versions of the Napoleonic invasion.
When his book about Rostopchin is published (and I am sure that it should be published), we will get fascinating and useful reading, and an extraordinary event in our historical journalism.
Lev Portnoy solves the mysteries of the biography of his hero - from the very first. From the last name.
Rostopchin – the current ear is struck by some kind of irrepressible recklessness. The search for the person responsible for the fire of Moscow in 1812 easily ends with the verdict: “Trample on Rostopchin” (a joke, it seems, that belongs to him). Meanwhile, the solution is given already on the first pages. A recent ancestor received a professional nickname: “Rastopcha”, translated from Old Russian as a stoker. That's all. But it is enough for the ancient family name, taken from the Tatar Crimea, to be supplanted and forgotten.
As he grows up and matures, more and more new roll calls begin to hone the character of the hero.
Travel abroad. Contact with Russians station attendants. Roll call with another descendant of the Crimean Tatars who became Russians - with Karamzin. Comparison of two travel diaries. Much is in Karamzin’s favor, if you appreciate the sentimental mood with which the prose of that time was already beginning to breathe. But also in Rostopchin’s favor are those cases when in his style it is not sentimentality that appears, but shrewd causticism.
“The city of Zilinzig is small, ugly and has nothing worthy of note; in it, as in all German small towns, the best buildings are the town hall, the kirk and the postmaster’s house.” These words of Rostopchin still sound modern today. Lev Portnoy compares them with the words of Ilf and Petrov. "IN county town There were so many hairdressing establishments and funeral parlors that it seemed that the inhabitants of the city were born only to shave, cut their hair, freshen their hair with haircut and immediately die.
Sometimes reality itself is just as sarcastic. Due to some official discrepancy, a young courtier is forced to duel. The opponents appear - some with a sword, some without. They made up and ran away. Rostopchin summarizes:
“Two made an appointment with me... The first undressed to fight with swords, and did not fight; the other wanted to shoot himself to death and did not bring pistols.”
On the death of the all-powerful Potemkin (in Iasi, where young Rostopchin was sent to be at the finale of another Turkish war) follows his response: " Great man disappeared, taking with him no one’s regrets, except the disappointment of persons deceived in their hopes, and the tears of the grenadiers of his regiment, who, having lost him, also lost the opportunity to steal with impunity.”
You can get away with such witticisms with impunity if you serve away from the throne. The young courtier would like to be far away, but he wants even more to be closer. Closer, he found himself at the very end of Catherine’s century. The Empress listened to his witticisms and appreciated: “Crazy Fedka.”
This characteristic stuck with him for a long time. Although the young courtier was not crazy at all. I felt very well where, with whom, and how to behave. Moreover, when autocrats change on the throne.
The situation became especially tricky under Paul. But even here one could endure it if one knew the character of Catherine’s son. Who during the day changed his own orders and punishments... either forgot them in the evening, or cooled down...
Under Alexander, the grandson of Catherine II, things did not get any easier. The young liberals did not accept Rostopchin. Just like he did them. But he served honestly.
What is significant in his existence: he served the next sovereign. But deeper: he served the country. Russian politics. Russian culture. And specifically - for the soul - poetry, in which I also tried my hand. And in Russian. And in French...
I would venture to say that in this the latter case Lev Portnoy went a little overboard: he quoted the French poems of his hero. I think it’s in vain: our reader will simply skim through these ten quatrains... If we’re going to shine with sources (and Portnoy can do that!), it’s better to hide it in the appendix... But here... the French quote somewhat interferes with the poetic Russian text...
Poetry in Rostopchin’s biography rests on the feeling of the general atmosphere...
And one more thing: I think that some erotic details from the life of the then monarchs could also be sacrificed. Because Rostopchin, with his “Byzantine resourcefulness,” skillfully distances himself from these intrigues. The poetry of his soul is not built on that... He exists in an atmosphere where everything rhymes figuratively: aspirations and actions, texts and thoughts, diaries and letters... This is a world where everything responds to the spirit...
I give credit to Lev Portnoy: this is a merit. Well, for example... we are told that among Rostopchin’s friends is Natalya Kirillovna, the daughter of Rozum, who became Razumovsky, and lives in Tambov in the house of her husband Nikolai Alexandrovich Zagryazhsky...
Why do we need to know this?
Here's why:
“Here on August 27, 1812, the day after the Battle of Borodino, the future wife of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, Natalya Nikolaevna Goncharova, was born.”
Everything is justified! The world with which Fyodor Rostopchin is surrounded (and by which he was generated) is permeated with the magic of Russian literature. Whatever you touch, it sounds.
The narrative is permeated with another undying melody. For each chapter there is a line of poetic epigraph, as a rule, remotely predicting the content of the chapter. Author: Sophia de Segur. The most popular children's poetess of those decades! And only in the finale do we learn that this is the daughter of Fyodor Rostopchin, who has chosen France as her home...
One of the epigraphs suddenly falls from poetic vastness into the actual earthly flame: “Are you asking me about the causes of the fire? Nobody knows.”
We'll find out soon - we'll get to the point of fire...
And while Bonaparte makes his way from the Arcole Bridge to the Parisian palace, Rostopchin has the opportunity to joke that the First Consul is better for Russia than the Eighteenth Louis.
The year 1812 comes. There is no trace of Louis (for a while), and the consul, who tried on the Emperor’s crown, enters Moscow as a conqueror; he diplomatically waits for the Moscow mayor to come to him to demonstrate loyalty, but the mayor does not come.
This capital's mayor, who is also the commander of the Moscow army, is our Fyodor Rostopchin.
The chapters of his biography related to Napoleonic aggression are written densely, and most importantly - with a feeling of hopeless tragedy: Bonaparte is in Moscow, Moscow is burning...
What makes this biographical page especially poignant is the fact that Rostopchin, as actor ends up in Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. With all its “posters”, described by Tolstoy with hatred and mockery.
What should we do? Tolstoy builds his concept, a very conflicting one - considering that he hides Bonaparte in it as an insignificant passenger in the historical carriage - so it is most reasonable to accept these Tolstoy chapters as they are - they have long and firmly formed the basis of the self-awareness of the Russian people, and never from this basis will not disappear.
There is no point in arguing with Tolstoy or repeating him. The most reasonable thing - in parallel with Tolstoy - is to give a chronicle of the actions of Fyodor Rostopchin in the role that fell on him. Which is what Lev Portnoy does.
He carves out the first plan from the most controversial and painful details of the Rostopchinsky mayor's toilet. Including the extrajudicial execution of Vereshchagin. And the “Three Gorki” mobilized, to which Vereshchagin did not go, realizing that untrained militias against trained French would be doomed. And the Moscow fire, which became legendary...
Tolstoy also did not answer the question of who set the fire; he said that a wooden city abandoned by its inhabitants inevitably catches fire on its own.
The question hung in the smoke: either the Muscovites themselves set the fire in order to smoke out the French conquerors; or haters of Russia - so that it would be more painful for her... And if this was done by the Moscow authorities, who were accumulating incendiary bombs and balloons in anticipation of the invasion - to burn the capital so that: “it would not fall to the villains”?
Rostopchin himself suffered, trying to determine his responsibility. He was close to admitting that Moscow was set on fire with his knowledge, if not on his orders. Then, after the events, he firmly insisted on his innocence in the arson. But this is after the events.
Fate dealt him another decade and a half after them. And it caught Napoleon's finale in 1821. And the conspiracy of the Decembrists, when the son of Ivan Pestel, who was once pushed aside by Rostopchin from the postal department, gave vent to his feelings (he had to illustrate the correspondence himself). And the finale of the Decembrists, to whose speech they reacted with a brilliant formula: “Usually shoemakers make revolutions in order to become masters, but our gentlemen wanted to become shoemakers”...
He himself sat, dismissed from his posts, awaiting awards that he never received.
Died in his bed.
A quiet death crowned a stormy life.
I will not be mistaken if I assume that there is no person in Russia today who has read more than Lev Anninsky. A literary critic has “settled down smartly” in life, which is what he wants for us - his profession completely coincides with his hobby.
Anninsky reads for six to seven hours a day. It happens more. He reads very thoughtfully, with a pencil in his hands, making notes in the margins of the book. And after reading, he writes for another three or four hours. His home library is the envy of fellow writers and famous writers. “Because of books there is nowhere to live,” Anninsky complains. Here he (however, the only time) is inaccurate, because Anninsky and the book live for each other. They are dissolved in each other. They have a single circulatory and nervous system.
– Lev Alexandrovich, are you looking for a book or is a book looking for you?
- The book is looking for me. This is fate. Ostrovsky found me, I didn’t want to read him at all. Since school I was sure that this was official reading. Then the book “How the Steel Was Tempered” found me. And when she found me, I began to look for what gave birth to her. I read more about Nikolai Ostrovsky than he knew about himself. I realized that Nikolai Ostrovsky is the same as my father. Only more literary than my father.
I read Andre Gide in French. It was not easy, because Jew was banned, firstly, and secondly, there was no French in my school. But if you really need to, you’ll learn the language.
In general, I read and listen to what is happening in me. Bezhin once wrote about me as a critic, that I let myself in as a simple-minded reader, like a dog on a string, then I follow as the owner of this dog and listen to what happens to the dog. That is, the most simple-minded reader lives inside me. Most simple-minded.
This double introspection is in my nature. I read the text and realize: I’m bored. Yeah! Either the text is wrong, or I’m not mature enough. The analysis of the situation begins: why is this text boring for me in this situation? Or incredibly interesting? Analyzing: what is exciting? Sometimes the plot. Sometimes the plot is wildly annoying. If I realize that I am being entertained by a plot, I drop it immediately. When I understand that my simple-minded “I” is changing, this is the most wonderful case. Poorly written text can be just as expressive as well-written text. The same Nikolai Ostrovsky, in his poorly written text, expressed more than many brilliant writers who wrote good texts in parallel with him. Because Nikolai Ostrovsky discovered a new reality.
Dostoevsky was once reproached that Crime and Punishment was a yellow police novel with poorly written text. It turned out that Turgenev, who wrote phrases better than Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, did not discover what they discovered.
– The eternal question, Lev Alexandrovich, is the personality of the writer and his work. How do they relate?
– Let’s take, for example, Yevtushenko, whom I re-read not so long ago. You take his text and see a wild number of poems that have been hastily riveted together to take part in some kind of political performance. A lot of rationally calculated. And a lot of irrationally calculated things - he is still an experienced person. This is such a heap of good and bad, this is such a mixture of pretense, sincerity, coquetry... I begin to build a model from poems (both good and bad). To imagine what kind of fate gave birth to them.
I know very well what kind of boy he was from the Zima station. And what kind of traveling salesman of young anger was he then? And what kind of liberal master later became. And what kind of half-emigrant is this now and it’s not clear what. I already know this, and even if I didn’t know this, I would understand it from the poems.
I understand that this person, this boy from Zima station, is the product of incredible mixtures: German blood that passed through Latvia, on the one hand, Ukrainian, on the other. Then everything got mixed up in Siberia - two grandfathers in exile. Everything models the history of the Soviet period so accurately that this creature appears - the boy from Zima station. Young, fragile, fast. And this boy comes and sings: “Citizens, listen to me...”
In 1949, Yevtushenko published his first poems. Imagine. Everyone is bristling with hatred, there has just been a war, they are looking for class enemies. Any attempt to speak kindly to people is a challenge. Breaking taboos. Disarmament before the enemy. Currying favor with the class enemy. Machine guns bristled on both sides, the world war was about to continue, and here comes this holy fool, this boy with a barrel organ: “Citizens, listen to me...” And he loves everyone, and talks to everyone.
Either he writes about Stalin, then about Soviet sports, then about weddings during the war... “I’m scared, I can’t dance, but I can’t help but dance...”
Slave. And this is the same holy fool who is afraid every minute, if not of a shot, then of a slap in the face. And Yevtushenko waited for these slaps... These poems for me are building material his fate, and no longer the fate of the individual. This is the soul. Loving, kind, woven in opposition to everything.
A scion of his time who loves everyone is not expedient. And they started kicking Yevtushenko. And as a result, everyone was left a fool, and he was left smart. And he began to play this role. And all this can be seen in the poems. Getting to know him simply bothered me. The mass of unnecessary rubbish prevented me from seeing the history that I felt in it.
I read every poet this way.
I also read Rozhdestvensky. Also – Vladimir Sokolov, the great Russian poet.
– Lev Alexandrovich, what should you read in your life? to a normal person to feel like one?
– We need to read the Gospel on time. During! I read it very late. I first read a lot about the Gospel when I read Russian philosophers. You should have read the Gospel as a child. I realized that this is a great work of the human spirit.
Behind thousands of years of selected texts there is a reader's myth. You read and think: God, there’s so much stuff in there. But, if you are already prepared, you will isolate for yourself what is close to you. This is a holy, sacred text. These texts are sacred meaning because they are prayed for. When you read them, centuries look at you. And in the Koran there are prayer texts. And I, a Christian, well understand Muslims who are afraid of losing this culture. Great religions must coexist peacefully. God grant that there is no rivalry. Otherwise - a coffin. End. This kind of text should be read on time, and if not on time, it should still be read.
– You can live your whole life and not feel the need to read the Gospel or the Koran...
– You can live and not read a single letter. But we are talking about those who have some kind of vague thirst. A vague thirst for justice, a vague thirst for a presentiment of what is behind these visible things there is something that we cannot understand. You walk down the street and see that asphalt has been paved. It was paved last year. What happened before that? There was a rut. What before that? Someone galloped across the steppe. What before that? Why did this horseman gallop into this steppe? And you will begin to go deeper and see that there is infinity, an abyss... And you will ask yourself: where does it all come from? Sooner or later a person will still come to this text. Or they will help him come to him.
– Then you need to read your national classics. If I feel that I am a person of Russian culture, I am obliged to read my national classics. You need to know this whole red chain, this thread, you need to follow it: Pushkin-Lermontov-Tyutchev-Nekrasov-Fet-Mayakovsky-Pasternak-Akhmatova-Tsvetaeva-Vladimir Sokolov... You can take it more closely - “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” You need to know your national code. We need to know how Anna Karenina died. And know why she died. A great writer can be learned as endlessly as the Gospel.
– Which of your contemporaries is closest to you?
- I have a problem now. I got bored reading fiction. Firstly, because what we call modern postmodern literature is built on a slavish dependence on what postmodernism hates. But he hates socialist realism, he hates classics. Postmodernists are slavishly dependent on this hatred, they destroy it all. I understand how they do it. I understand why – out of despair. These are my children. I love them, I feel sorry for them. But I can't read this forever.
Now in poetry there are many talented people who write the emptiness of reality: the absence of a deity, rage, despair, anger... Provincials are angry with Moscow. Patriots against anti-patriots...
From modern poets I would name Vladimir Sokolov, Yuri Kuznetsov, Oleg Chukhontsev. The same Yevtushenko. Despite the fact that you want to shake off every second verse of it.
- And from prose writers?
– Georgy Vladimov is closest to me, although I argue with him. Russia cannot be sacrificed for anything. Vladimov sacrificed her for the sake of what he considers sacred. What he considers sacred would not have come true without Russia anyway, but he thought it would come true. Makanin is very interesting. There are no amazing discoveries for me now, because I am not included in the update that is being offered to me.
– We expected that perestroika would open the floodgates and everything talented, previously prohibited, would pour in...
“It poured in, but didn’t have the impact we expected. I read everything that poured out long ago in samizdat: Platonov, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Berdyaev... I have them in my fingers, I retyped them at night... Nothing is assimilated as a text reprinted at night.
When everything poured out in thousands of copies, it was pleasant, but there was no fresh feeling. Rybakov was fresh at some point, and I can understand why: he revealed the technology of detection. The psychology of Stalin is well described, there is an element of Shakespearean origin in this...
But this didn’t change anything. I thought: texts will pour in, tongues will loosen, self-regulation will begin. Since I am a person of communist upbringing, I idealize a person. I think that man is actually more of an angel than a demon. And if he is a demon, then he understands it, eradicates the demon from himself. My father died for this.
It is impossible to cope with human nature. You can only soften it.
It turns out that democracy doesn’t smell like cologne either. Nothing in human nature has changed, it has simply turned in different directions. The beast in man has become small, wars have become small, meanness is petty... No one writes a denunciation, and if they write, then no one reads it.
– Lev Alexandrovich, what do you never read?
– I don’t read detective stories, I don’t read entertainment. I rarely watch TV. If I just notice that people are starting to entertain me, I turn it off. I have fun without them. I have no time to have fun. I don’t read Marinina, I don’t watch TV series.
I don't read science fiction either. You see, there is an idea there, but it’s all expressed in such a mass... I haven’t even read all of the Strugatskys, but you actually need to know them. This great literature. But this genre itself is a guess... Same Efremov... It’s not mine.
– What place, in your opinion, is Russian literature now in general, in the world? literary process?
- On the mysterious. Serious literature and the tradition with which it is associated have lost ground. The reader withdrew. The reader is busy with something else. Mass reading has taken the place of this literature. This is also necessary, because a person must learn to navigate this new culture. A person will read Marinina if only to know how he will be killed in two days. She puts it all out in good faith. But what I grew up with is disappearing from under my feet.
– Is Western literature ahead of us?
- No. They don't read much there either. They watch TV there, image is important there. If something serious is written there, then it is studied at universities, it is for eggheads, for a narrow circle of people. They study our literature in the same way. They take Prigov, Zhdanov, Parshchikov... And they study this as purely head speculation.
- And if you take the best in American literature, the best in English, the best in German and the best in Russian, then where are we?
– In the 19th century we were in the first. If you name the highest points in the history of world art, it would be Antiquity, the Renaissance and Russian literature XIX century. God willing, we will return to square one.
The conversation was conducted by Sergei Rykov
Episodes of the program “Fathers and Sons”/ May 23, 2016“If you are a real Cossack, then you will never say “Cossacks,” you will say “Cossacks.” And you will never say “Cossack”, but rather “Cossack”.
Mikhail Kozyrev:Good evening, dear listeners of the Silver Rain radio station, it’s 19.08, it’s Monday evening, which means the next program from the “Fathers and Sons” series is on the air. At the microphone - Fyokla Tolstaya...
Fyokla Tolstaya:... and Mikhail Kozyrev. Good evening, dear friends! I remind you that in this program we invite guests who are interesting to us, guests whom we ask to talk about their parents, about their origins, about their childhood - and then, perhaps, build a bridge to the next generation. And from each story of one family, for us as a whole, the history of our country is formed and, perhaps, some understanding of what comes from where in our modern life. I would like to introduce you to our guest today, and I am very pleased, it is a special joy for me to introduce him both as a friend of the Tolstoy family and an absolutely wonderful writer, literary critic, Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky. Welcome, Lev Alexandrovich!
Lev Anninsky: It's very nice to see you.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Thank you for gracing us with your visit.
Fyokla Tolstaya: There is just one more very important feature here, which we must tell our listeners about simply in the first lines. Our interviews are somewhat similar, because we ask about mom and dad and so on, but! It seems to me that never in the two years of the existence of our program have we had a guest in the studio who would be so carefully engaged in studying the history of his own family. Studying at first just for yourself, without any professional literary ambitions or interests, but now - what, 13 books in your family tree?
Lev Anninsky: 15.
Fyokla Tolstaya: 15! And so, books that were first written to be read by children, relatives, and so on...
Lev Anninsky: Only yours.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Yes, we have never had a person in our program who devoted 15 volumes of his work to the chronicle of his own family!
Fyokla Tolstaya: Therefore, we can talk not only about the Anninsky family! We can also learn from you how to study your family, why, and so on.
Mikhail Kozyrev: I would like to start with this: I read an interesting thesis from you that you are an absolute child of the Soviet system, because never - if Soviet power had not happened - your father would not have met your mother. Tell me why?
Lev Anninsky: I would never have met him, except perhaps if during the pogrom we somehow ended up at the same point. My grandmother was killed by pogromists in Ukraine, and at that time my father was turning red from I don’t know who. That is, you understand: my birth is as truly strange a phenomenon as the revolution itself. Well, this Don Cossack and this Jewish girl would never have seen each other closely if not for the revolution. If, suppose, I grew up in some kind of homogeneous, normal family... Well, from the same Don Cossack Ivan Vasilyevich Ivanov... They are all Ivanovs, Anninskaya is the name of the village where they grew up, my father later took his surname.
Mikhail Kozyrev: It was called Novoanninskaya.
Lev Anninsky: Novoanninskaya.
Fyokla Tolstaya: And just Anninskaya, with an “and”, in contrast to... Lev Anninsky:...unlike all the nobles who use an “e”, Annensky. So, if I grew up in such a homogeneous family, although you know, this homogeneous family was a little crazy.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Good start.
Lev Anninsky: Before his death, my grandfather, Ivan Vasilyevich Ivanov, a village teacher who had been “talked about,” wrote in his failing teacher’s handwriting—he was no longer allowed to teach anything—the history of the Ivanov family. Where, starting from Pugachev’s times, he simply listed: who is from whom, who was born, who, what, how. And he ended it in the 17th year, because then he didn’t want to write a word about his story. But this fact was written! He managed to copy this manuscript for his daughters and two sons in the teacher’s poor handwriting - and then, in 1939, he died - but managed to distribute it. That is, this is my “Cossack”, it was already internally oriented towards some kind of history. Well, of course, if it weren’t for the revolution - well, he wrote this story of the Ivanovs, who would read it? I then read it - my Cossack aunt gave it to me. But, on the other hand, the Jewish mother - wait, what kind of genealogy is there? They weren’t written there, these genealogies - but there were legends, and they knew who the grandfather was and so on...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Who was grandfather?
Lev Anninsky: He grew potatoes, from which they made alcohol, which the Jews used to drink the Russian people - I quote this.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Well, finally – some dots in history have been settled!
Lev Anninsky: No, wait a second more. If I had grown up in these pink ecumenes, I would never have existed in the world. But when it suddenly somehow came together – well, that is, how it came together – I’ll end the introduction here. When the war began, all the Don Cossacks of our kind, who all married Jewish women - there was a revolutionary era, sorry, no one was there - and the Jewish women all married Don Cossacks, our fathers went to the front and died, and Jewish mothers, single, widows raised us. All cousins - because what kind of siblings are there, only cousins, there is a war there, there was no time for that. So I was born into this strange, very strange situation.
Mikhail Kozyrev: How did the meeting take place between mom and dad?
Lev Anninsky: How? Well, after my grandmother was killed by the pogromists...
Fyokla Tolstaya: What year is this?
Lev Anninsky: 21st.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Where was it?
Lev Anninsky: She went from Lyubich to Chernigov, already to her son, she was already fleeing from the pogroms from Lyubich - and then she was intercepted by the so-called “Galakovites”. And Galaka was the leader of the local bandit society who hated Jews, and not only robbed whoever he could. Moreover, at first he was a white officer, young, then he became a Denikinite, then he went over to the Reds - in the end, the Reds killed him. But before they killed him, he managed to walk around Ukraine, destroying Jews. And my grandmother ended up with him... And when they stopped her on the road, she was already leaving, running away from Lyubich - it’s good that she didn’t take her children, but was only carrying things. She tells them: “Have mercy on me, my children are growing up!” “What, little Jews? Come on, run, run, Jew!” She ran and was shot in the back. Well, how was I supposed to feel about all this after that?! My future mother was 16 years old, and she had two more sisters. This girl, my future mother, fled to Moscow from Ukraine. My uncle, her brother, went to work in the NKVD, he got a job in the GPU in Moscow as some kind of major - no, wait, he wasn’t even a captain then, a lieutenant, or something - and settled down to live somewhere. In the so-called YURK - Young Worker Communard - such an ideological community - he received a corner. So, it was his mother who came to him. And in this same YURK, in this ideological temple, everyone who wanted to make money either gave lectures, or just came and played the fool - and among them there was a young Cossack who came from the Don - well, he had his eye on this girl. And the girl, pressing her head into her shoulders, waited for what would happen next. He started courting, the first kiss - well, since you asked how - what kind of holiday is it when everyone kisses? I’m an atheist, I don’t really remember all this, when everyone kisses?
Fyokla Tolstaya: On Easter, they kiss three times.
Lev Anninsky: And he says, well, let's go, now everyone is kissing. And he led her to the temple, which is in the Khamovnichesky temple...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Nikola in Khamovniki.
Lev Anninsky: Nikola in Khamovniki. And there, clinging to the fact that everyone was kissing, he finally kissed her there - and she did not dare turn away. This is how their romance began, as a result of which, after a certain number of years, I was born - from these two unimaginable, incompatible, strange beginnings. If the beginnings were logical, there would be nothing to think about!
Mikhail Kozyrev: Was the father at risk by having an affair with a Jewish woman?
Lev Anninsky: No, my father was already a Komsomol member, he didn’t care about anything!
Fyokla Tolstaya: Nobody looked at nationality.
Lev Anninsky: He didn't ask anyone! He had three more of them, he was such a walker, this Don Cossack!
Fyokla Tolstaya: Three more -...
Mikhail Kozyrev:...wives.
Lev Anninsky: Three more companions - in turn, in turns, not simultaneously - each of whom could claim his full attention. Two of them became the mothers of his children - my sister was born from one of them, from Rachel, I was born from another, from Chana, and there was also one woman, this time Russian, whom I found when I was writing all these volumes. I found the old one and asked her. The main thing is that she told me: “What a fool I am, I should have given birth to Sasha! He would have grown up now... But I gave birth to some Gromov!” – that’s what she told me. And this is how he was in their eyes - such a walker, such an irresistible Cossack guy! Well, a Cossack is like a Cossack, this family of mine also paid for a lot. If you're interested... While my grandfather was a village teacher, that's how he taught, and his four sons and two daughters sat in his class...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Are you talking now about pre-revolutionary times? What year was your father born? I'm just helping our listeners stay on track.
Lev Anninsky: 1904 As soon as this very mess began, not yet a revolution, my grandfather took the one he had time... Of his children, one became the commander of a “white” armored train, another joined the Komsomol, and the third also joined the Komsomol. That is, according to Sholokhov, everything is in one family.
Mikhail Kozyrev: That is, breaks occurred within the family - this is a very Sholokhov story!
Lev Anninsky: Nevertheless, the grandfather decided to rush, and since he was a member of some kind of consumer society, he rushed with this society. And he took with him whoever he could - one of his sons, this was my future father, he was then still 16 years old, my future father. They reached some place somewhere in the Kuban, after which it became clear that the Reds were gaining the upper hand in the Civil War, and my future father told my future grandfather: “Listen, I won’t stay here, I’m going to the village, back, there are already red ones, I want to go to them.” He said - no, how, you will leave me... However, the boy turned and rushed to the village, returned to the village and here he wrote to his White Guard brother, who had already retreated to Bulgaria and was stuck there in Bulgaria...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Is this the 20th year? If your father is from 1904, he is 16...
Lev Anninsky: Well, something like that.
Mikhail Kozyrev: What did he write?
Lev Anninsky: He wrote to his brother, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, the commander of the white armored train, who, together with Frunze’s troops, retreated to Gallipoli, and then to Bulgaria. And then he blushed there, because Tsankov came to power, and this is fascism... Uncle Vanya couldn’t stand this and began to think about returning. And then a letter from the village from his younger brother: “Van, what should I do: should I join the Komsomol?” And then this White Guard answers him: “Come in. This is the future of the whole country." And he joined - on the advice of his White Guard brother!
Mikhail Kozyrev: Amazing.
Lev Anninsky: The brother returned, served his six years, got out, became an accountant and never fought again. All these white exploits of his are a thing of the past. And these Komsomol members - they grew up... Moreover, look: they ask him: “Who is your father?” "Station teacher." “No - he’s not just a village teacher - he sympathized with the whites, he retreated with the whites!” That is, he and his brother, Uncle Misha, a Komsomol member too - they were always trying to kick them out of the Komsomol: firstly, because their father was retreating with the Whites, and secondly, because their brother was a White Guard! Then Uncle Vanya told me: as soon as the purge, they announce: “The former white officer, the former midshipman of the White Guard battleship, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, is being purged.” That is, everyone knows who he is - he has already been working for several years as an accountant for them, and he is calmly being purged. . He says: “Why, when Shurka and Mishka (his two brothers) are cleaned up, are they cleaned out because of me? They don’t touch me, but they are being purged from the Komsomol!” It was necessary to stay in the Komsomol. What saved them is where I will end this sketch. Meanwhile, Comrade Stalin, using letters from Comrade Sholokhov, writes his work “Dizziness from Success.” It is Sholokhov’s merit that there was such a paragraph in this article by Comrade Stalin...
Fyokla Tolstaya: What year is the article?
Lev Anninsky: On the 29th, or something... Grandfather had already left, he had already been dispossessed, dispossessed, he was already working as a cashier in a photo studio, in Novocherkassk with his eldest son, Andrey. An article by Comrade Stalin appears in Pravda, where there is the following paragraph: “In the village of Novoanninskaya they went so far as to de-cossack the former village teacher!”
Mikhail Kozyrev: Does this mean your grandfather specifically? In this article by Stalin?
Lev Anninsky: Exactly. Sholokhov wrote to Stalin.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Did Sholokhov give him examples? Did he know your grandfather?
Lev Anninsky: He knew this story. And so they cut out this article from Pravda, Mishka and Shurka came to their grandfather and pinned this article to the wall of the photo studio so that everyone could see - and circled this paragraph with a red pencil. After that, they stopped chasing my grandfather and finally left him alone. 
Fyokla Tolstaya: Lev Aleksandrovich, I would like to ask you - I don’t know how much you know these details, but maybe you can reconstruct it from the literature - what is “dispossessed” and “dispossessed”? What did this mean practically, step by step?
Lev Anninsky: This practically meant whose side the Cossacks would take. There is a war between red and white; and the Cossacks cannot decide unambiguously: they are all white or they are all red. Why did my uncle Vanya become white, the commander of a white armored train, the devil carried him there! And he studied in Moscow to become a midshipman and received such a naval education, and in the seventeenth year, that means, he sailed around the world - he did everything that was necessary - he was in the tsarist fleet. And then he wanted his mother’s pies - and for pies he had to go to his village - through Ukraine! He was informed that his mother was waiting, baking pies, and at the beginning of the eighteenth year, after leaving the fleet, he went from St. Petersburg to the village. I arrived, ate some pies, everything was great. And the village passed first to the Reds, then to the Whites: behold, the Whites take the village, they come up: mobilization! Mobilize! And he went to the whites - where could he go?
Fyokla Tolstaya: That is, there is no conscious choice or voluntary entry...
Lev Anninsky: Well, I asked him many years later: “Uncle Vanya, how did you end up?” He says: “Well, first of all, I shot well - that’s the only thing I did well.”
Mikhail Kozyrev: I apologize, there’s a wonderful song in “Bumbarash”, “A Crane Flies in the Sky”: “White, green, golden, and they all have the same head, like me,” remember how it is: the chieftain with a gramophone, the red ones are coming on all sides, three different strengths, everything is mixed up...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Well, you need to understand that there was no political meaning in this then, no large-scale ideology, which we now perceive as “white” and “red” - this did not exist then!
Lev Anninsky: Well, look: there were splits in the families between “reds” and “whites” - well, they scattered between reds and whites. What happens next is dispossession, that is, decossackization. Sverdlov says: “The Cossacks are hiding bread from the Soviet regime...”
Fyokla Tolstaya: When is this already?
Lev Anninsky: This is the 23-24th year.
Fyokla Tolstaya: That is, so early, not when collectivization was in the 30s.
Lev Anninsky: And then even more! Then, during the war, it took on a generally creepy character. And they start talking. And when they talk to you about it, what do you do? Either you give in, or you move in the other direction.
Fyokla Tolstaya: So “decossackization” – what is it?
Mikhail Kozyrev: This is the dispossession of the Cossacks.
Lev Anninsky: Absolutely right.
Fyokla Tolstaya: I want to understand what is this?
Lev Anninsky: What they did with fists.
Fyokla Tolstaya: That is, they take away everything you have and evict you from your home...
Lev Anninsky: Walk wherever you want: go to Siberia or somewhere else.
Fyokla Tolstaya: However, you don’t have a passport?
Lev Anninsky: And if there is, it says that you are such and such... As for the passport - all my relatives, then, when everyone began to gather and come together before the war... Everything, then, was aimed at Uncle Vanya still came to visit so that he would not run away from these “red” relatives of mine. And Uncle Vanya began to appear, and I knew that he had served his six years, received personal forgiveness from Comrade Kalinin, personal! Comrade Kalinin is my wife’s future second cousin - well, then no one knew this, neither Comrade Kalinin nor I! So, he received “rehabilitation” from comrade Kalinin - and that’s it, no one touched him as an accountant. But the de-Cossackization took its course, and the Cossack uprising was there, and they were against the Soviet regime - and during the war, Hitler even managed to gather Cossack units so that they would fight on their side.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Well, a lot of Cossacks left when the Germans retreated.
Mikhail Kozyrev: You mean it went to Europe?
Fyokla Tolstaya: Yes.
Lev Anninsky: But it was not only the Cossacks who left. The Cossacks did not leave on purpose. But this happened with the Cossacks, there is a story like this. When the war had just ended, in the city of Leeds the British received from our Soviet victors an offer, that is, an order: from the prisoners of all these former White Guards - and these are all Cossacks, all - to us, here. And here they are given ten years without the right to correspondence - or they are put up against the wall if they prove that they were armed and fought. And what did the British do: without revealing anything to the Cossacks, they simply sent them to march, to drive - and led them to ours, across the bridge over the Leeds River. And the Cossacks, when they began to understand and realize that they were being driven to their death, began to throw themselves from this bridge: women, children, and Cossacks. Well, this is the story, I’m half Cossack, I’m telling you what’s in my blood. This is all in my memory.
Mikhail Kozyrev: And we are just beginning, in our studio Lev Aleksandrovich Anninsky - we have a magnificent hour and a half ahead of us on the radio. Lev Alexandrovich, why, despite the fact that the meeting of your parents took place in Moscow, and Moscow is yours, in fact, hometown, were you born in Rostov?
Lev Anninsky: I'll explain. They met in Moscow, because there was nowhere else for this Jewish girl to hang out. And the Cossack - he just generally walked everywhere, wherever he could. We met in Moscow, we did everything that needed to be done, but where to return? In Rostov, naturally, where he is from, all his relatives are there - and her relatives also fled there from Ukraine. What happens next? Then the following happens: in the year 33 they are preparing to celebrate some kind of holiday - and on this holiday it was necessary for everyone to get together. Therefore, this future mother of mine, already pregnant with me, is going to Rostov, to her older and middle Jewish sisters, to celebrate this day there! I don't remember which one. And somewhere there my future dad teaches at a medical institute. They didn’t sign – I later asked my mother: “Mom, why didn’t you sign with Dad?” He told me to just call me Dad.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Not your father? Father - it was impossible?
Lev Anninsky: The word “dad” was generally prohibited; I called my uncle dad. And dad is just dad. In general, her answer: “What, maybe I should also go to church?” Atheists, they were red atheists!
Fyokla Tolstaya: Well, then very often people did not sign their names, but simply declared themselves husband and wife.
Lev Anninsky: Very often they lived for themselves the way they wanted - he had three women, my dad had three. And so, they are sitting there, drinking, the middle sister already has a four-year-old boy, Vadik - wait, I’ll say a little more about him later - this Vadik is sitting with her, and my future mother is sitting. And my father is walking somewhere - he is somewhere here, in Rostov, but he is walking somewhere. Then the following happens: they say Vadik needs to go to bed already, what time is it. And mine expectant mother, Khasya - well, the Cossacks called her Haska, actually she’s Anna, Hannah - she picked up the four-year-old Vadushka, carried him to the bed, and laid him down. And her water broke instantly when she carried my brother. Then, of course, there was a commotion, a whistle, they got someone who took her to the maternity hospital - and in Rostov she gave birth. Then - if you asked such a question - she gave birth in Rostov, and they bring her this unfinished product - because I was born seven months old - seven months old! Like Churchill, how else there are a lot of people like that. And, generally speaking, I had to die: because they brought some blue one. She, of course, gives, feeds, but the doctors say among themselves: but the guy won’t survive, he’s weak...
Mikhail Kozyrev: There weren’t these cameras at that time, which take two more months to wear...
Lev Anninsky: They say: “How can we make it so that it is not so painful for her if he dies?” And somehow little by little they began to prepare her - so, somehow we just won’t bring her for feeding and that’s it... My mother - she is already a mother - guessed what they were planning, and when there was some kind of symposium and near her bed All these doctors gathered - and my dad came there, she said: “I tell them: “I know what you are planning. If there is the slightest danger to my baby, I will break out the window (first floor) and leave this maternity hospital with him. So watch." Well, that means they exchanged glances with this daddy - and the party sent daddy to suppress peasant sabotage at that time, he didn’t stay here, he went to the Bokovskaya village, and suppressed sabotage there. And here a Jewish family looked after me. They left me because, on the advice of some experts, they turned to Cossack doctors - unprofessional doctors, grandmothers, I don’t know. They showed me to them, they looked at me, at the little blue one, and said: “In cool water. Only in cool water." They began to nurse me, and I gradually began to return.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Douse you with cool water every day? Temper?
Lev Anninsky: I’m still a walrus – they instilled something in me. And so I began to survive there, they let my father know in the village of Bokovskaya that, they say, your son did not die - go ahead, adopt him! And he wrote a paper from there that he was adopting me. That's how I stayed in this world. And Vadochka lived until the year before last and died at the age of 84. My beloved brother, who became my real brother, this Vadochka, Vadim.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Thanks to which you were born when your mother was laying him down...
Lev Anninsky: I was born ahead of my time thanks to him, of course!
Fyokla Tolstaya: Please tell me, Lev Aleksandrovich, did you ever visit Novoanninskaya Stanitsa as a child, where your grandfather lived? Once you came on vacation, and do you remember this pre-war village?
Lev Anninsky: I'll tell you, I'll tell you. So, first of all, my father didn’t bother going there. He grew up, and eventually reached Moscow through Mosfilm. His relatives remained in the village, but he did not want to remain that old-regime Cossack like his father! Do you know what my father called his father, my grandfather? He called him nothing more than “Kazunya” - a contemptuous name for this old-regime Cossack.
Fyokla Tolstaya: What does “old regime” mean, and how did it differ from the new communist Cossack?
Lev Anninsky: He didn’t join the party - he didn’t; and in general, he left to work as a cashier, that is, he did not become that new person. He didn't Soviet man, he became the one who was thrown out from everywhere, and remained there. And his children - one red, one white, another just a very good teacher, and two more sisters, one of whom brought this manuscript to me...
Fyokla Tolstaya: What was life like in the thirties in this village - hard, like in all villages?
Lev Anninsky: Like everyone else, it’s hard, like everyone else who was dispossessed, he made ends meet. Whoever was not touched, so he himself said it there. There, like everywhere else, you can read all this from Sholokhov, not only in “Quiet Don” but also in “Virgin Soil Upturned”, all this is described everywhere, all this was creepy, all this was very difficult. And father, dad, if he visited there, it was for a short time, not so that he could stay for a long time: otherwise, he visited relatives and that’s all - hello. And naturally, no one took me there - they took me to Rostov, where my Jewish mother and two aunts were, and Vadik, my brother, grew up there. By the way, they didn’t just take me to Rostov, they introduced me to my grandfather there and said that when my grandfather saw you, he said “Oooh, what a Cossack!”, and you, supposedly, extended your hands to him - to me was 2 or 3 years old. This is how they took me to Rostov, but not to the village. But then, when I put my mind and pen to work, I found a lot of things - this is a special story about how I did all this - well, of course, I went to the village! I went to the village, I found everyone who was still there...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Is this already the 50s?
Lev Anninsky: This is the early 60s. And my aunt, Masha, went with me, my Cossack aunt, and she showed me: these trees were planted then when Alexander Vasilyevich taught here, but he himself built this hut for the school, and there was his apartment right there... I say: “Well, how did it come to your mind to change your last name?” She says: “Very simple. They, these guys who studied with him, they ran to play billiards, but this is impossible! And in billiards you have to leave your last name. Then your uncle Vanya, the future White Guard, came up with an idea - and instead of Ivanov he began to write “Anninsky”. Go figure it out there! Then, of course, they destroyed him too.” And my future dad remembered that when you write “Anninsky,” it somehow helps out, saves. And when in 1926 my future father went to Moscow - he visited Moscow all the time - he wanted to play for Meyerhold, in general, he wanted to make a career...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Precisely theatrical?
Lev Anninsky: Yes, but at the same time he studied at the second Moscow State University at the public faculty, received a higher education there - and was always eager to play with Meyerhold. And he realized that Ivanovs are a dime a dozen in Moscow, and we need to come up with something plus this - and he added the name of his village to Ivanov, and I received two surnames in my passport and still wear them. How to get money is a double surname: Ivanov-Anninsky.
Mikhail Kozyrev: I have two short questions that I want to ask, stepping back a little in the margins: I’m very interested in your opinion. One question - about Sholokhov, about the absolutely brilliant text of “Quiet Flows the Don” and about conspiracy theories that in fact he did not write this book himself, that a person at such a young age could not write such a large-scale work and such an absolutely epic book. What do you think about these theories that he didn't write it himself?
Lev Anninsky: I’ll answer: the fact that he wrote it himself does not negate the fact that he inserted all sorts of additional stories into it... When you read “Quiet Flows the Don”, it’s clear: this is included, here it’s a little different, here.. Of course, when Solzhenitsyn announces that he did not write this, and others too, it begins to take effect. So, I’m answering your question almost directly: somewhere in the early 60s they began to find out how many hands were involved? Or did someone write it alone? Sweden already had a computer system that determined these things. They launched “Quiet Don” into this Swedish machine, and it answered: “One author.” But who is this author? I later believed in one hypothesis - I can say: he was really young - and how could he survive all this? The question is exactly this: how? Researchers of Sholokhov's biography found out the following: somewhere in the 20s, even a little earlier, in this village of Novoanninskaya there lives such a landowner, not a landowner, a Cossack, not a Cossack, by the name of Sholokhov, who trades, I don’t remember what - well, something... then the Cossack must trade. And his wife is not a wife, a concubine is not a concubine, a housekeeper is not a housekeeper, she lives with him on this small estate, and she gave birth to a son from him. This son grew up there and bore the last name Sholokhov. Then, when the war began, in 1414 everyone began to be drafted, the boy had already reached the age when he was drafted, this boy was mobilized, he went to fight on the Austrian front. Have you read "Quiet Don"? It says there how they are destroying the Austrians - he began to fight and became an officer there quite soon, because he fought well.
Mikhail Kozyrev: The mystery of Mikhail Sholokhov’s writing of the novel “Quiet Don” is now in full swing!
Fyokla Tolstaya: In the version by Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky!
Lev Anninsky: Sasha Sholokhov, the son of this very local village resident Sholokhov - he fights for himself. Meanwhile, his dad changed his wife - she left, another came and gave birth to another son in 1905, his name was Misha. And while Sasha is fighting, Misha goes to St. Petersburg to study and disappears. How Sasha fights: he becomes a liaison officer for the Denikinites, then he is recruited in parallel to the Reds and becomes a liaison officer for both, somehow combining these two things. Finally, he ends up in the file cabinet of Comrade Dzhugashvili, Comrade Stalin, with the inscription “Personally betrayed” - this is his story. And by the end Civil War he is no longer just a person who has seen and knows all this, he has already become thoroughly skilled. And he begins to write these texts, which will later be included in “Quiet Don”! In Moscow he begins to write. The fact is that when it was necessary to somehow publish these texts, the question arose of not being killed by the White Guards in retaliation, because there it was so that they could have been killed - you’ve seen these films... Well, okay . They tell him: “You need to come up with some kind of legend, like all security officers.” And he was a security officer, Sasha. They came up with this legend for him: that he was actually Mikhail Sholokhov, born in 1905. And with this fictitious biography he then went to the village and so on. So Sholokhov wrote this not because he knew more than he could: he should and could have known all this, and this text has been verified in general. And most importantly, I’ll tell you this: I was in love not only with my father, but also with Quiet Flows the Don, which I can’t say about two of Sholokhov’s works, but I really was in love with this one! When I was thinking about all this, I said to myself: maybe it’s possible to clarify who was the author of these Cossack stories? Because those whom Solzhenitsyn called - well, it’s impossible to read them, they’re the wrong hand! But if we talk about who was the author - like who: the Cossack Don was the author - this is for sure, this is unshakable. This is about Sholokhov - I have a big article about him, and they also wrote about this before me, I just picked up other people’s ideas and popularized them a little.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Thank you very much! I want to ask short question and I don’t require in any way a detailed answer, but: “Cossacks” and “Cossack” are now used in the news and in today with some strange and rather ironic connotation. How do you feel about today's definition of Cossacks? 
Lev Anninsky: I always answer this way: if you are a real Cossack, then you will never say “Cossacks”, you will say “Cossacks”. And you will never say “Cossack”, but rather “Cossack”. Russian literature is such that irony changes in every generation, and each time it finds a new object for itself - so what? For me, the Cossacks are a huge people who tragically survived all this - and I have no other opinion. They survived - their fate was absolutely terrible, and they keep the memory. By the way, the magazine "Don", according to them own initiative, took my student diaries, from hikes - I’m a hiker, a sixties person, I walked God knows how long - and printed them! I didn’t even know they published it, they sent me the magazine. So I still have a connection with Don.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky, writer, literary critic is our guest today, and we are studying the wonderful history of Lev Alexandrovich’s family.
Mikhail Kozyrev: To those who have just joined us, I’m telling you: our guest today, in the next program from the “Fathers and Sons” series, is a playwright, literary critic and literary scholar, member of the Union Russian writers, PEN Club member, jury member Literary Prize « Yasnaya Polyana» Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky. In the last hour they told how the story of our hero’s grandfather was influenced by Stalin’s article “Dizziness from Success,” who actually wrote “Quiet Flows the Don,” but I am sure that the next hour will be no less interesting.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Yes, it also seemed to me that it was necessary to tell not only that “ah, everything is gone!!”, we hope that there is still a lot of interesting things ahead. I wanted to ask you about our father. And the way you found out in detail the life of your father, who, unfortunately, died during the war when we were still a boy - and you, as you say, restored your father for yourself. It's on its own amazing story, I hope you will tell us about it today. But – the pre-war period: your father worked at Mosfilm, you grew up as a boy at Mosfilm. What was it all about, what did your father do, what kind of cinema was it from the 30s?
Mikhail Kozyrev: What is ZhurDom at Mosfilm?
Lev Anninsky: I'm answering the question. My father studied at the second Moscow State University and was supposed to teach social studies, which he did in Taganrog for three years; when he graduated from the university, he was assigned to Taganrog and lectured there at the Taganrog Technical School. And with him there was a very big friend there, one man, his last name was Noble. Then they went to Moscow, Velikorodny also went to the front, but managed to get married. And so, Mityai the Velikorodny, Dmitry the Velikorodny, who worked with my father for three years in Taganrog, managed to give birth to a daughter: this daughter is now Natalya Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyna. But that’s all later! And my father was just then, in Taganrog, doing what he was trained for - that is, giving lectures. But he really wanted to go to Moscow, he was “wheezing” to go to Moscow, excuse the expression. And then this same Mityai the Great and some other comrades explained to my father that in order to get a foothold in Moscow, you need to study cinema. Because a huge film studio will be built at Mosfilm.
Fyokla Tolstaya: How did Velikorotny know this, did he already have something to do with it?
Lev Anninsky: They taught together in Taganrog, lived together nearby, were friends, read poetry to each other, these were the years when we were not in the project. How did he start visiting Mosfilm? Yes, they hinted to him that he needed to deal with the Mosfilm people - a huge film studio was being built there, the Germans and Americans were building it, and there he needed to look for some kind of clue. And then he began to give lectures to filmmakers - right here in the State University of Cinematography, where he generally gave lectures. In general, he was supposed to write a dissertation, but since he really wanted to get to Mosfilm, he did not write a dissertation with Strumilin. And he began to give lectures to Mosfilm members. And then Sokolovskaya, general manager“Mosfilm”, having learned that he gives such lectures and, having listened, says to him: “So maybe you will go to work?” “And by whom?” “Well, let’s produce Erom.” My nanny couldn’t pronounce the word “producer”; she said “prosidur”. And so, as a prosidur, he got a job at Mosfilm - but he just wanted to get a room in a communal apartment - because at that moment, not far from Mosfilm, a residential building was being built, which was called: Zhildom. There were 40 communal apartments with 4 rooms each, and everyone received a room. Apart from one, one apartment was, as such, intended for one person - Sergei Eisenstein. He didn’t live there, he lived in the city center, and came here to create. Here. My father got a little room there, in this Residential Building. I was 2-3 years old when all this finally happened, and before that they lived anywhere: with Cossack friends there... And so he got this little room, where I eventually grew up, and where he went to die at the front.
Fyokla Tolstaya: What is a “producer-prosidur” anyway?
Lev Anninsky: A prosidur is a performer of work, for example, a representative of the directorate. When Eisenstein was filming “Alexander Nevsky,” I even have a letter from Eisenstein to my father, in which he writes: “Alexander Ivanovich, lechaim, boyars...” I published it at one time in “The Art of Cinema.” So, there the prosidur is an employee of the directorate who makes sure that everything happens as it should, he is simply present.
Mikhail Kozyrev: So that everything works.
Lev Anninsky: He is a producer of work - prosidur, that is, pro-du-ser. How I wrote this biography of my father - and how many papers remained from it, and notes, and letters! After all, these are his girlfriends - they kept all his letters, I collected everything, I put everything together, I lived this life of his, I knew more about him than he knew about himself! Because I told my mother and her two Jewish Sisters: “Tell me about your life, your biography,” and they told me, but along the way they told me so much about him that he himself had never told anyone! That I intertwined all this, and I did not write for publication, not to sell these books - I wrote for my relatives. And these three stories are about Jews, how they were killed there, in Ukraine in the 20s, how Zalmanovna’s three daughters lived before that - that is, Solomonovna, in Russian, and in general Zalmanovna. And this three-volume story “Zalman’s Three Daughters” was published in an edition of 200 or so copies, but I did not publish it, only for myself. And there was a presentation in Jewish cultural center, and all the copies I had were dismantled. Then my wife says to me: “Who are you writing all this for?” I say: “How - for whom? For our children." She says: “And our children, are they just yours or a little bit of mine too?” I say: “Well, sit down, tell me about your ancestors.” And hers are purely Russian, from Karachev, people from the same palace. And I wrote it down.
Mikhail Kozyrev: What are “odnodvortsy”?
Lev Anninsky: Well, a man has one yard and no more - but he is considered a nobleman. She told me her story, I also published it in the same way, it is called “House in Leontievsky”, because she grew up in Leontievsky Lane, where her father bought an apartment - and he was engaged in shoes. Well, this is her biography. Then he had to give this apartment to the Soviet authorities, and the neighbors moved there, but the house in Leontievsky remained such a symbol of where she grew up - Leontievsky Lane.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Stanislavsky lived next door.
Lev Anninsky: And the ending of my story. When they now asked me “something about the war, about the children of that time,” I found in the diaries of my Shura how on June 22, 1941, Germans were running along Leontyevsky Lane from the German embassy with suitcases. And there she is, a girl standing there, eight years old, she described it in her diary, and I published it all. Well, that's true, by the way.
Mikhail Kozyrev: What memories do you have of your father? We will now move on to the story of his tragic voluntary departure to the front. Those years when you were close and breathed his life?
Lev Anninsky: But I found absolutely everyone I could, in the village I found all his former students and classmates, whom I couldn’t find! And relatives - I have so many records!
Mikhail Kozyrev: What kind of dad was he?
Lev Anninsky: I'll tell you now. Moreover, I found all the old women, my relatives, and just his ex-girlfriends - and they also told me, crying. How did I do all this? When I wrote down these three Jewish confessions, I already knew so much about him that he himself would never have told anyone - and I had already practically compiled his biography. Now, I go back to the moment when he left. You understand, he was such an uplifting Komsomol member, so all red, so all jubilant, he read lectures... That when the war began, he came to a jubilant state: finally we will give it to them!!! And his first telephone conversations such: “In a week I’m leaving for the front and in a week I’ll send a telegram from Berlin.” That's the mood he was in. Of course, I absorbed this mood, and I also walked in delight for 2-3 days, and walked for a week. And a week later, Mosfilm volunteers, all members of the party bureau signed up and went to mobilize, and so did my father. And then all our relatives gathered to see him off, and I walked - and it was all in this spirit: finally, we will give them some!...
Mikhail Kozyrev: And the whole country was in this mood: a week - and we will be in Berlin, now we will give it to them!
Lev Anninsky: So he was in this, and I was in this. In the evening he unexpectedly returned because, he said, something didn’t work out there, tomorrow morning a car would come for me and we’d go. And he returned to my mother for one more night. I was half asleep, I was in the same state, for some reason I remembered something from the conversations that “they are not as weak as we thought, they are much stronger, the Germans, but we will still hit them” and so on. The next morning he got ready, came up to me, extended his hefty Cossack palm to me and said: “Well, hit harder, are you a Cossack or not?!” I hit harder and I remember at that moment my mother fell on his chest with a howl. After that he left. I remained in this mood. After some time, my Jewish uncle, this NKVD officer, finally arranged for us to leave Moscow - because there would be bombings, he knew us better, this Mikhail Solomonovich Alexandrov. He arranged for me and my mother, two aunts and Vadim - that’s where Vadim became my brother when we left - and we left for Sverdlovsk. There they gave us a small room - in general, it was an evacuation, it was something creepy. In Sverdlovsk we received one letter from dad, one from near Velikiye Luki, where it was said: “What good people someone got close to us, we’ll hit them, wait for the letters.” That's it - there were no more letters. And so, three weeks passed, I was listening to Levitan, what they were saying on the radio, I understood, I began to understand what was happening - and suddenly in the middle of the night, when we were sleeping in Sverdlovsk like this, all of us piled up, because there was nowhere else , I suddenly began to realize in the middle of the night that it was all over. And I couldn’t say it out loud, I was afraid of waking someone up, I was internally going through it myself. And I understood: if he didn’t return, what would I do? I didn’t understand, I wouldn’t have a life if he didn’t come back. Then Victory came...
Mikhail Kozyrev: Were you the one who spent 4 years in Sverdlovsk?
Lev Anninsky: We were in Sverdlovsk for two years, at first we lived with relatives, then they gave us a small room. Finally we returned to Moscow, our room was empty, communal. We begin to wait for him. There is only one answer to all the mother’s requests: “Missing” - which means, probably, alive... Already in the fifties, Adenauer came to Moscow, met with Khrushchev, and they established relations and found out that it was possible to exchange the last prisoners. At the words “the last prisoners,” my mother understood: either now or never. And I realized that never. Then, crying, she finally collected his papers from his desk and put them away... The papers still lay on his desk. That's how I realized that my father was gone. And I realized that if I could do something in memory of him, then resurrect him - that’s all that was left of him, resurrect everything. And, in the end... I’ll finish for you then.
Mikhail Kozyrev: No, no, this story is very important to me.
Lev Anninsky: Then very quickly, very quickly. My aunt also came to Moscow from Sverdlovsk and got a job at Mosfilm - head of the agitation and propaganda department at the library. And she, it means, found out something for me there too, Aunt Rose is one of the authors of this Jewish trilogy of mine. I found out that one person from his group returned alive - and you can ask him - she found him for me, and he was already without a leg... The story of this man is this: he really went with the marching company when they all went to the front in 1941 . And my father had a political instructor badge - and political instructors were shot on the spot, he later took it off. And then this story happened to him, this man told me, a Mosfilm member, who ended up in a penal battalion and somehow survived. It was like this: when they mobilized, on June 29, 1941, everyone went in a marching company towards Idritsa, where there were battles at that time. They didn’t get to Idritsa - the Junkers swooped in and destroyed their train. They miraculously jumped out of the train and walked on foot in the direction of Nevel, where the future Marshal Eremenko collected scattered units.
Mikhail Kozyrev: So they went west and then went east?
Lev Anninsky: Well, of course, the Junkers crashed the train, and those who were left went - well, there were still a lot of them left then. This man tells me: they walked a day, then a night, then another day, and for the second, or something, at night, we went on reconnaissance, to see where things were, several people. And your father, he says, stayed where everyone else was. And when we reached the bank of the Ushchi River - a very beautiful bank, by the way - when we got there, we turned around and went back - and we didn’t find anyone. They all disappeared somewhere. Then I found out this story, it was like this: they were walking east, already towards Eremenko, and ended up in a minefield. I say: “What minefield? Where is the war - and where are you? “Our minefield... Classified and ready, against the Germans.” So they ended up in this minefield, and there, he says, your dad hit a mine and was left lying with a broken leg. I didn't see him again. Therefore, when I started looking for traces: I looked in Nevel, and everywhere - I looked for anything: where did they all go? And these letters of mine were broadcast on the radio... And I found out something, I found out the following. They who remained there, lying in the minefield, they lay, and then the local men who were driving past saw that one was lying alive near the crater - it was my dad! They picked him up, maybe they picked up someone else, took him to Polotsk and put him in a hospital there to somehow heal his leg. Then a man appears who tells me further. It still appears in a couple of decades. Suddenly a call - “I need to talk to Alexander Ivanovich. Are you Anninsky? "Yes". “How is your last name spelled, with an “i”?” "Yes". “Sorry, I’ve been writing with an “e” for so many decades, but you actually write with an “i”?!” I say - so what? He told me: “Do you know how your father died?” "No". “So I know.” “So why couldn’t you find me for so many years?!” I, he says, couldn’t find it because I was leaving... He made an appointment with me and told me the following, how he knew my dad, this man. And he was already getting older, he was almost 90 already, he had medals and so on. He was a young photographer who worked with my father at last movie my father - no longer “Alexander Nevsky”, but “Two Commanders” - and this man met my father there: a young photographer with an employee of the directorate, wow. What happened next, he says, there were battles near Idritsa, and I was captured, this man tells me. I was taken prisoner, there I somehow came to my senses, and the Germans began to entrust me with forming concert brigades to take them to Germany. That’s why, he says, I visited the hospital in Polotsk to test the convalescents there to see if anyone wanted to go to these same ones.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Are these our wounded who are in German-occupied territory?
Lev Anninsky: Yes, the Germans are recruiting them in order to buy them up and send them to Germany, and he has to do all this, a former photographer.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Well, to survive?
Lev Anninsky: Well, of course! And then he tells me: in this hospital in Polotsk they held a concert of amateur performances to attract... I remember everyone had already left, it was already a little dark, it was getting dark - a man was sitting in a hat with a goatee. And yet it’s him! I approached and said: “Alexander Ivanovich, is that you?” He says yes. Then, when one front-line soldier read all of my research, he said: “So he disguised himself, he pinned himself down to wait for ours! He grew a beard and put on a hat that he never wore!” I say: how are you here? And I, he says, have settled down here: I’m handing over the overcoats.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Wardrobe attendant?
Lev Anninsky: Wardrobe attendant. He told me what happened next. Next we needed medicine. To whom? To the partisans. There was a powerful partisan movement there, in Polotsk. And it was necessary to get medicine. And my father is a cloakroom attendant at a hospital. And so, through him they began to transfer these medicines to the partisans. Someone reported: it wasn’t even the Germans who found out, it was the police who found out. The policemen there, in Belarus, were all from Ukraine, not Belarusians. And these policemen quickly carried out a criminal trial and, he says, sentenced your father to death. “So?” And he said, he went. Die. And with them walked an old woman who left him - she then went with him to die. And in the hospital she nursed him, some kind of Jewish doctor. And what? He says the orderly saw them being shot. Where is this orderly? Here is his address, he wrote it, but the orderly died long ago. What did he manage to tell you, orderly? And he tells me what the orderly managed to tell him: when, he says, they were taken out, there is such a place not far from the Polota River... The policemen took them out, the ones who are supposed to shoot, they say to your father: they say you can wear a hat pull it over your eyes so you don’t see how they’re going to shoot you. And he said: “Cossacks, when they die, they never cover their faces,” he took off his hat and stood facing them. And then there was a salvo... I went to this place: I took one daughter, I took another daughter, I took my wife and went to Polotsk and found this place where they were shot. There is a sign there: “Here the fascist occupiers shot 20 thousand innocent Soviet citizens” - that’s all that remains for me from my father, except for the last one... How will I end.
Mikhail Kozyrev: We interrupted our guest at a poignant moment: when he finally found out all the circumstances of his father’s death in 1942 during the Great Patriotic War.
Lev Anninsky: When I was looking for the place where he rested, I walked the distance from Idritsa to Nevel, step by step. We went there as tourists, it's wonderful beautiful places: Lake Ushcho, the Ushcha River, the border between Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia - I measured all this distance in steps. And finally I reached the place where they got into the minefield - and I saw this landscape. Amazingly beautiful, with high banks and forests - such a magnificent Russian landscape. And I realized: this is where he called me, when he saw that I had come to this very place. Then he called me, father. That's all I wanted to tell you.
Fyokla Tolstaya: How your daughters reacted, you went with them. How old were they and how did they manage to explain it?
Lev Anninsky: Well, they were already quite old. I can tell you how my daughters perceive all this. My youngest daughter, who is now 40-something, is now raising two sons - she tells me: “You don’t understand: no one will read, but no one will listen - after all, they sit in a traffic jam and listen - come on, read everything to me This". And she has already written down two and a half of the three volumes of her father’s book as I read it - and she has it all. And every day I read to her for half an hour another piece from my search. That's how she treats it.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Why - this is a very banal question, but I think you have a non-banal answer - why does a person need to know well about his family?
Lev Anninsky: I can't answer.
Fyokla Tolstaya: For your daughter, this is grandfather. Maybe it’s also understandable why you need to understand about your father, whom you lost when you were 7 years old. Why do her sons need all this?
Lev Anninsky: I can’t explain to you why this is... But when I realized that I didn’t have a father, and that I would restore him, I realized that I would do everything around him that would help me restore him. This is what I need: everything he touched, everything that was around him, everything that disappeared, but can be restored somehow. I realized that this was the task of my life, I did not ask myself the question: “Do I need to know what my great-great-grandfather did?” I did not ask myself such a question. I just found out all this, and of course, when I found out all this, I got along in my soul with all of them - with the Cossacks, and with the Jews, and with my grandmother, the deceased, who was killed with the cry “Jew!” With all of them.
Mikhail Kozyrev: I wanted to clarify one page of your biography, since I myself come from Sverdlovsk. My mother and father met there, just after being evacuated from Ukraine - both Jews - and this was the place where they met. This is, in fact, how my story began. I read from you that, despite the fact that these were two terrible years in evacuation, the worst, you were still warmly received there, and you remember these two years with some warmth. What is this contradiction?
Lev Anninsky: Yes, they simply saved us in these two years, saved us from death, saved us from horror. We went there because we had a distant relative there, a music school tuner, Efros by name, a distant relative of my mother. And they accepted us at first.
Mikhail Kozyrev: I think that this was the same music school, which later became the First music school named after Tchaikovsky, where my dad taught, violin class.
Lev Anninsky: Here, here, and Efros Mikhail Yakovlevich tuned pianos for them there. So, when we arrived there, it was the summer of 1941. I had to go to school, I was already 6 years old - actually, I should have been 7, and then 8. But there was no one to sit with me, and my aunt went to work, another aunt went to work in the DKA, in the House of the Red Army - and it was necessary to enroll me in school. They gave me an exam to see if I could study in first grade. And we went to the nearest school and started asking questions. They let me read it, it turned out that it was from Gorky, from “Mother”, a piece. I read it, I already knew how to read. They asked me “Who is Kalinin?” I say: “The leader who gives out orders.” “Well, accept it!” - I was accepted into first grade. You probably know this school, not far from the station. I was accepted into the first class, and then it turned out that there would be a hospital there. And we were very quickly asked from this first class. I studied at this school for about a quarter, and it was like this: I was sitting, the girls and I were sitting together, and behind the wall was a hospital ward. And the guys who were lying in the ward, wounded, were talking to us, to the girls - of course, not to me... And the girls told them what problem they were solving, what task they were given, and they told them the answers. This was the first school, then we were transferred to another school, where the director was a woman named Tikholaz, in my opinion. Very famous, and this school was so strong, there was no longer any hospital there. I was in 10th grade “D”, there was a terrible overload there, 10 tenth grades...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Because everyone is evacuated?
Lev Anninsky: Well, of course, and this is the only school in Sverdlovsk that still accepted people. And there, from the first grade, I somehow read, what I had to do... The main thing was to survive during recess: they could have gotten into trouble, there were fights, damn those at recess...
Mikhail Kozyrev: Was this a semi-bandit city?
Lev Anninsky: Yes, in general. Wasn’t it a bandit situation on Potylikha, or what, when I returned to Moscow? Mosfilmovskaya Street was then called Potylikha, I can explain why it was called that... Well, that’s how I was at this school. It took five minutes to survive the change. And I remember: that means I’m walking along the wall so that no one sees me in particular, I’m sitting out this change, I’m stopping. And suddenly two guys walk, older than me, half a head taller each. Two guys are walking and looking straight at me: well, I think I’m about to get screwed. They approach one another: “Well, here he is, ask.” And he asks me: “Did you play in Foundling?” “Yes,” I say. Then one punches the other - they argued - and moved on. This was my fee for “The Foundling.”
Mikhail Kozyrev: Now we will listen to this episode. IN early childhood Lev Aleksandrovich Anninsky, our guest today, starred in cameo role in that same famous “Foundling”, in which...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Where Ranevskaya says: “Mulya, don’t make me nervous!” Lev Alexandrovich, what are your remarks about a border dog? 
Lev Anninsky: I'll tell you now. So, I went to the Mosfilm kindergarten - and what else could I do? They announced that scenes for some film would be filmed in this Mosfilm kindergarten. And they started filming: cameramen came and filmed like this: “All together, all together: where are we running? All together, we’re running somewhere together!” Everyone has their hair raised just a little like this, and I’m the only one with a hairstyle like this. Everyone started running back and forth, and I ran after everyone. And then the filming ended: that’s it, you can go home. I go home, they take me, and then my dad tells me - and this is 1939, he’s still here - you know, he says, they gave you the role. What, I say, did they give me? "Role!" “What is it - a role?” “Wait, when you come to Mosfilm, you’ll find out what a “role” is. He took me to Mosfilm, and going with him to Mosfilm was a holiday for me every time! I’m walking – and a representative of the Mosfilm management is nearby! He brought me to Mosfilm, a huge pavilion, and there, it means, there were flashes of spotlights - they were filming. They say to me: “Can you quickly repeat the lines that we tell you?” And this is easy for me: I already read quite well, and my memory was excellent. Then, he says, listen - and some woman sits down - I later realized that it was Lukashevich, the director. She says: “I’ll tell you a line, and you answer. So, I’ll ask you what you want to become, and you say: I want to be a tanker there. Then I will tell you that you are still small, who else do you want to be? And then you tell me - I want to be a pilot then. I’ll say the same - and again you’re still small. And then I’ll ask you: do you even want to be anyone? You’ll say: border guard, but I’ll tell you, border guard – you’re also a little one. Then tell me: can I be a borderline dog? And I will say – you can be a borderline dog.” And just as she rehearsed all this with me once, I said all these lines to her - in response to her lines - and she filmed it all. And then with Vika Lebedeva, who played the girl, main role there - by the way, she later became a translator, I haven’t seen her since then - they then edited this dialogue between me and her.
Fyokla Tolstaya: So you didn’t meet in the same shot?
Lev Anninsky: No. The fact of the matter is that it was done like this, editing.
Fyokla Tolstaya: Eight taken.
Lev Anninsky: Yes, and this dialogue then appeared on the screens...
Fyokla Tolstaya: Did you enjoy filming?
Lev Anninsky: Yes, I didn’t understand anything! I simply repeated - the main thing for me was that dad was here! Now, then, the father says to the mother: we can watch, I, he says, will bring a small movie camera and we will watch.
Mikhail Kozyrev: With 16mm film like this...
Lev Anninsky: Mother pinned the sheet to the closet and we started the movie. This means that I am moving my lips, but what I am saying is unclear, because nothing has been said yet! In any case, we watched these shots where I – no dialogue, of course, but just me, and that’s all. And for the rest of my life I realized that I played in “Foundling” when they bullied me at school - they say, you played in “Foundling”. And then this episode ends with the following: the film started, “Mulya, don’t make me nervous” - everything happened. In the early 60s they announced that this was a classic of Soviet cinema, and they broadcast this film, “The Foundling,” on television. And my youngest daughter was already how many years old, five or six, Masha. And she had a cousin, Vadim’s daughter. And so we sit and watch this film “Foundling” on television, already in the 60s. And then my niece says: “All the guys are like guys, and you, she says, are the only one strange: you walk behind everyone, you lag behind, and even here a button is undone and your jacket is not hanging the way it should.” Then my wife tells me: “You know, I’ll tell you honestly: when the film came out in 1940,” she says. - “I went to look, looked and thought: all the guys are like guys, but one is so disgusting!”
Mikhail Kozyrev: This was the key to future relationships! We have literally five more minutes left with our guest today, Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky. Lev Alexandrovich, we ask all the guests the same question at the end of the program, or rather, two. When do you think it was easier to grow up: when you were growing up, when your children were growing up, or now when your grandchildren are growing up? And the second part of this question: when was it easier to raise children - then or now?
Lev Anninsky: The question is clear. It is difficult both then and always: raising children is always both difficult and dangerous. If life goes normally, naturally, then some natural contradictions always arise between parents and children, between fathers and children. And if, say, parents wait until their children become older, their children then wait for their children, the same thing arises - if normal life. Of course, if life had been abnormal... In the end, when they started arguing about Stalin, I might have argued with my father - if he had been alive... If life was normal, then it would be difficult, but that’s how it is. But if there is some kind of catastrophe: either a war, or a coup, or a dictatorship, or something, either confrontation or unity arises between fathers and children. And this era, when my childhood coincided with the war that killed my father - and a huge number of people were orphaned, my peers - of course, it was an unusual, abnormal, scary childhood. And, of course, this is childhood, which I will never give up, under any circumstances. Although I understand that later it will be possible to comprehend all this properly - you can comprehend everything, but you cannot replace what happened to you in childhood. This misfortune, this orphanhood, the despair in which my mother was: as long as I remember her, she was in despair. This is my feeling of my childhood.
Lev Anninsky: May 9... It happened then, in 1945, it was like this: we were all waiting, “well, when, when, when, finally, Yuri Levitan will say this!” And in no way, and in no way, I pestered Aunt Rose - she worked at Mosfilm - I said, “Roz, so what?” “She says: “You know, nothing is clear. Michal Ilyich (Romm) and Sergei Mikhailovich (Eisenstein) listen to foreign radio - and they say that everything is already over, that everything is in order. And they tell me,” and she talked to them, my aunt. “And they say that, in general, there is practically no war anymore.” And finally, when Levitan said all this, I realized that - well, finally! Finally - maybe he will return?! That's it - he didn't come back...
Lev Anninsky: For me this is not a holiday, for me it is a grief that we all experienced together. Let there be a holiday, let it be, I not only don’t mind, but I also participate with some part of my soul. But for me, in general, this is a terrible tragedy, this is a universal tragedy, this is a world war. But it hurt us so much that it is impossible to forget or forgive. This is how I experience it: every time it’s grief, it’s misfortune, it’s my pain - and at the same time, of course, it’s a celebration of those who remained victorious.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky was our guest. I want you to give us one public promise: that these records that you make every day for half an hour, so that they see the light not only within your family, but for everyone.
Lev Anninsky: Yes, Nastya, Nastya has it all now!
Mikhail Kozyrev: Here's a message from Minsk: “Amazing!!! I will listen to these recordings! 5 minutes ago I caught myself thinking that I was listening to you, but I felt like I was reading a book!”
Lev Anninsky: Oh, how good, I’ll tell Nastya! Who wrote this?
Fyokla Tolstaya: This is just a listener of Silver Rain, Alexey from Minsk. We thank the writer, literary critic and person who just told us for two hours with such heart about the history of his family - Lev Alexandrovich Anninsky. It was the Fathers and Sons program.
Mikhail Kozyrev: Thank you for listening, we'll be back in a week on Monday. Goodbye.