Books by Yevgeny Chizhov “the Dark past of the man of the future”, “the Character without a role” and especially “translation from an interlinear Translation” have attracted the attention of critics who noted the stylistic skill of the author and his original perspective on time. A new novel of the writer “Collector’s Paradise” was a finalist in the “Big book” of 2020. Chizhov told how he was influenced by the work of a lawyer, can the writer resist the system and what is the meaning of life if death is inevitable.
– I read that you tried a variety of jobs: he was a criminal defense attorney, lawyer, layer posters and even an under-gardener, and worked on a construction site. How such diverse experiences influenced your writing?
with Most of the mentioned works I did while living in Germany when my son was born, and it was urgent to make, and no decent work was not. I was forced to take what is offered. Each of these works I lasted from two weeks to a month. They gave me, of course, some insight into the German way of life and my it ineptitude, but to talk about it as a significant life experience it would be an exaggeration.
Another thing – the law practice immediately after University. In Moscow the legal profession, I worked for three years, and I think that they did not pass for me completely. The fact that I have grown quite bookish boys. For twenty years, read almost all of Dostoevsky, the weight of Thomas Mann, and Musil Brocha. To the German-Austrian literature have integrated the philosophy about the same as Russian classics incorporates a religious perspective, I felt a special attraction.
But I have previously had the confidence that something really interesting can only arise from the collision of fantasy with reality. Just loaded reality imagination is capable of opening a new one. And I was interested in the new, not previously written or not understood. Postmodern library seemed dull game, popular while Borges does not suit me, either then or now. This was a lot of youthful maximalism, but was visiting me in the best moments, the feeling that we are little able to understand in yourself and in life, the world is still mysterious, we live on the border with the unknown, and the unexpected discoveries possible at every step.
I understand the vulnerability of this point, but thirty years later, closer to me than the dull pride of imitators Borges, life signed himself in the library, and even to impose that conclusion on others. Here approximately with such views, I got a job in the bar.
I defended the robbers, thieves and murderers. Met with this audience not only on the work they missed around the infamous “Lichs” of the nineties – and realized how difficult people of any abstract ideas of how life is so paradoxical philosophical schemes always explain it only partially. Of course, it affected me as a writer. I ran into such areas of life where srednekaloriynye people prefer not to look. However, immediately to write about it I have gunpowder was not enough. It took another few years of understanding gained experience before, living in Germany, I could start my first novel, “the Dark past of the man of the future”.
This book illustrates the era of the nineties. What were these years?
I did not wanted, as you say, to illustrate the era of the nineties. I wanted to paint a portrait of a paradoxical character, making a failure in everything what touches, tipping the moral values at the same time unusual and recognizable. So I many then said that he saw in him someone I knew.
But it so happens that some of read the novel, for example, the criticism Lev Danilkin or philosopher Mikhail Maccomo, this hero seemed the embodiment of the spirit of the time. That, apparently, is not accidental, since delatnosti violently overturned values, inherited from the Soviet Union, denied the things that seem immutable. Many of the earth was gone from under his feet, and in the eyes of disintegrating reality invaded surreal draft.
I’m not going to justify the extremely troubled time for many proved disastrous, with its dubious freedoms that, as usual, failed to take advantage of the most dishonest, but in this decade came in my youth, and therefore, it does not compare for me with any other. In addition, after the then experience the collapse and frantic reappraisal of the current mess and trying to revaluation do not look very significant. So the nineties was an injection of chaos and vaccination against him with valuable experience of life in the time of troubles.
– did You call your novel “translation from an interlinear Translation” fantastic. However, there is a feeling that we have before us a kind of warning. How fictional country Masterbatin similar to modern Russia, or is this a hint of the past Soviet Stalinist pores?
– You know that a long time ago no need to write the hints. Everything can be said openly that I usually do. But the trouble is that I’m usually not interested in very simple things in the extreme limit clear to me. This is for me the main thrill of writing, to step beyond, into the unknown. While most readers are willing to accept only their usual meanings as in the “translation from an interlinear Translation” are all political allusions.
This book is about the journey to the East – in a world where poetry and politics are the varieties of magic, where reality is fraught miraculously and completely inhuman. This world seems to be very far from us, but it is not so. Masterbatin similar with Russia as much as Russia itself is the East, how its impulses towards Europe is drowning in its Asian territory. I’ll note that I myself love the East, and travel to Oleg Pechegina are, of course, my own journey in those parts.
the Epigraph to the novel you choose the words of Mandelstam “Poetry is power”. After all, he, according to the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, said to Akhmatova in Voronezh exile, already knowing that the end was near and, nevertheless, feeling and recognizing its power, because only in poetry kill. In your opinion, the poet, the writer is able to withstand inhuman system?
‘ of Course not. Although the standoff system elevates the artist in his own eyes, gives to feel more than the artist, the subject of history, lead the masses of the discontented, speaking not only on its own behalf, but on behalf of all the victims of the system. It must be a strong source of inspiration, is like a drug, but for it to have hard to pay.
on the other hand, the government is not interested in destroying the artist. It is much more profitable to attract him to their side, to force him to write odes in his honor, as were forced to write their Mandelstam, A. Zabolotsky, Pasternak, Akhmatova. And the real victory for the system would not work on the od with a stick, and sincere creativity that recognizes in the actions of the authorities of the historical pattern. In General, the attitude of the system with the artist – it’s a game of cat and mouse, from which both parties seek to obtain their benefits, but to win in this game can, of course, only a cat.
In the novel “Collector’s Paradise” you write that “ordinary things outlived its time, was unusual. They already had a strong destiny, who saved them from death at the dump”. And what role do things play in your life, and if there are those who survived their time?
– I’m a writer, my material is words. Things in my life play a much smaller role. I love flea markets because of the jumble of eras and styles, which piled on their shelves, but more likely to buy older books, but if things are guided not so much by their value, as preposterous.
I’ve never been a real collector and not familiar in the real value of things, and I don’t care. But on my bookshelves a lot of strange and amusing figures: dolls, hell, figurines, bought at different flea markets. Some of them moved with me from apartment to apartment and gradually become Tali��manami and secured a steady place in my life.
our eyes, in addition to all the social and political changes was scrapping several styles. The most ordinary things from the Soviet Union and already legendary ‘ 90s look like the wreckage of a vanished civilization, often puzzling, doomed to fruitless attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of people made them. Things I love the most.
unfortunately, I am not alone in my tastes, so their price is growing very rapidly, and cost once mere pennies Soviet trifling little things like some stands for pencils getting is simply not afford. People are willing to pay for them in a materialized memory, for nostalgia, for the illusion of time reversal is reversed, and earns Kirill King – the protagonist of the novel “Collector’s Paradise”.
– the novel is very touching describes the memories of the mother of the hero of his childhood. Then he developed his interest in collecting. What are your most vivid memories of childhood?
I am convinced that man remembers everything ever seen, but the vast majority of these memories are unconscious and inaccessible. Therefore, the value system steeped in the darkness of the unconscious memory return values are in the light, that is the most vivid, immediately remembered quickly erased from use and no particular interest. While some trifle, for the first time in forty years brought to light from the abyss of the forgotten, is able to change consciousness.
Proust, major in European literature specialist on the topic of memory, a collapse of the memories cause such things as the taste of the cookie or shaky under foot rock. But I’m not Proust and not going to impose your reader things that have no value for anybody except myself. Except that a couple of pictures illustrating the difference yesterday, it seemed that the former world in which I was born, what surrounds us today (and showing this my hoary antiquity).
Near the nine-storey building at metro Ryazansky Prospekt, where I lived as a child with his parents, were two-story houses of wood, surrounded by Apple and pear orchards. In fact, it was the remnants of the suburban villages. Almost every day for the 1st Novokuzminskaya street, which took place between our house and the subway, passing harnessed to a cart horse. Often I would Wake up in the morning, from the clatter of hooves on the pavement and ran to the window to look at it.
– One of the Central themes of your books are man’s relationship with time. It is, as you write, is stronger than any totalitarian regimes, and he’s not going anywhere. This raises the eternal question: what is the meaning of life if death is inevitable?
Well, here I am and lived to the age of the person, which seriously asking about the meaning of life. Not NadiaTES, that in my fifty I have in this matter more confidence than you. It just seems that with age grows the confidence. It is actually exactly the opposite. Age is acquired, at best, the ability to mimic and hide insecurities.
the Ancient Greeks believed that the soul of man lives after death as much as I remember of him on the ground. At least those who are seriously engaged in the ancient Greeks, believe that they believed it. I think I read that the philosopher Mircea Eliade. And remember longest those who have discovered something new that becomes associated with his name.
Discover America, and Americans will not forget. However, America was already discovered, and geographical discoveries, probably exhausted, but the possibility of opening in the art will not go away. So the quest for new, undescribed and misunderstood, is reinforced by concern about the posthumous life of the soul, whose existence in the human body I have no doubt. The opening art is not to explain the unknown known, it’s a matter of science, but rather in the expansion of the unknown, the opening of new areas not conquered by the mind.
In General, the meaning of life exactly what is the volume of the unknown, with whom she will allow yourself borders. That’s all I can tell you about the meaning of life, but, of course, is invented by me for personal use only. Whether it is at least some value for you, you decide for yourself. Anyway, to the question about the meaning of life everyone is responsible for their own risk, ready-made recipes here can not be. Most importantly, do not try to avoid fear and risk, not to hide the conventional, to the answers for you other.
– To what extent, in your opinion, the incident pandemic has affected our understanding of time?
– the Pandemic has affected the notion of time in the sense that it is made clear to those who are able to do this, that time could easily come to an end. The prosperity of rich countries is illusory, and disasters that happened in the distant, it would seem that the Third world is the concern of all and able to cover the entire globe, where all is interrelated and interdependent, much more than we would like.
Pandemic produced “stop the world” – a term used to describe mystics spontaneous awakening from mindless, not conscious movement. In my opinion, this movement happened in about and even, most likely, in a disastrous direction. So we experienced the pandemic is very much like a rehearsal of the Apocalypse.
She would not have been in vain if the resulting planetary shock, comparable to the shock that the world experienced, realizing the possibility of total destruction from weapons of mass destruction, would create the same revolutionary 1960s impulse to changes, able to move the world from the established path.
the global attempt of the 1960s largely failed, turning the conservative turn of postmodernism. I am convinced that the world needs to repeat this attempt at a new stage and new forms, but it is not sure that he can. Rather, all just waiting for life to come back without any changes to what it was before the pandemic. But, in the end, everyone is always the possibility of revolution as an individual to overcome himself and step into the unknown. As, however, and a purely personal end of the world is for everyone and no pass.
