A man who fills all space: 110 years since the birth of Victor Dragunsky

— Denis Viktorovich, what do you remember from your early childhood?

— I remember I was very young: three or four years old. We go for a walk, my father has some kind of brown coat and cap – he wore it in the fall, and in the summer it changed to a hat. He holds my hand tightly, we walk along Chistye Ponds – he shows swans swimming there. This is the earliest, and a little later just give the answer to the question of what kind of person he was. But he was not simple, he combined different things. On the one hand, he loved to be the center of attention, like any artist. He knew how to tell stories, anecdotes, and act out different scenes, because he had experience: he worked as an actor and director in a pop theater. It was all terribly funny, because he was a smiling man who filled the entire space.

And at the same time, he remained modest, and if he demanded anything, it was only attention to his creativity – and absolutely nothing in everyday life. We lived, I repeat, extremely modestly – first in a communal apartment with my grandmother, then separately, but also in a communal apartment, three people in a room. Dad worked at the dining table, which was common for all things: for his essays, and for our lunches/dinners/breakfasts, and for my games (and when I went to first grade, also for lessons).

— What about the idea: “The USSR is a paradise of free apartments”?

— When we moved to a large cooperative apartment, for which he and his mother had been saving for a long time, despite three rooms, he again did not have his own: a common living room, where there was a desk leaning against the window; my parents had a common bedroom, and I have my own private one, not a walk-through, but with a door.

Moreover, when we bought a dacha just before my father’s death, there was one more room, but the fourth went to my sister Ksyusha (Ksenia Dragunskaya (1965–2021), playwright, novelist, secretary of the Union of Theater Workers. – I.V.) . And there on the second floor there was a room that served both as a parent’s bedroom and an office: a large bed and a desk.

— What dishes did Viktor Dragunsky like? What habits have you stayed true to throughout your life?

“He was modest when it came to food, like all of us in the Soviet years. Well, what did we eat then: naval pasta, some kind of salad for the holiday, my mother “cut it”.

But at the same time, he dressed beautifully and smartly, and had his suits made by good tailors. One day he sewed himself a new suit, got hold of or made to order fashionable shoes with chopped off duck toes. He put it all on and went to the House of Writers, where he loved to just go have lunch and chat with his comrades – perhaps because there was little space at home.

He liked to say with comic force: “I’m going to the club.” Like an old gentleman, he took his hat and rode – fortunately it was not far, along the Garden Ring (we lived on the corner of Karetny Ryad, and the House of Writers was located on what was then Herzen Street – Bolshaya Nikitskaya).

And so he dressed up, but when he returned, he told his mother: “You know, I met Vasya Aksenov. He praised my suit and what shoes he said, as if nothing else interested him.” Such a paradox: I dressed up specially, but was offended when my interlocutor drew attention to it.

And yes, my father was very sociable. He always had many friends – and here is the moment that I find most touching – the core of his communication was made up of former classmates and childhood friends, although he was over fifty. Having become famous, he did not change his social circle, as happens: he abandoned old friends and joined new ones.

He was friends with the same people, they had a wonderful company: four friends, they went to visit each other. There were also some old, completely unknown artists with whom he often saw.

— An author writing for a young reader must himself have a good understanding of what is canonical detail. In this regard, I ask you: what did your father read and what did your father advise you to read?

— There was a lot of children’s literature in the house. My sister and I learned to read early, we read ourselves, only children’s poems were read aloud to us: Chukovsky and Marshak. “The bears were riding a bicycle” and “Who is knocking on my door…”, and so on.

I mastered all children’s prose, including fairy tales, myself, and here it was all a matter of selection, in what books were offered for reading. Dad insistently gave me, at least, books, to put it briefly, about poor and unfortunate children. The repertoire was as follows: the famous book by Korolenko about the children of the dungeon, from English literature – “The Little Ragged One” by Greenwood, from French – “Without a Family” by Hector Malo, from Russian – “Ryzhik” by Alexei Svirsky and another wonderful book, unfortunately, not so popular writer – “The Life and Adventures of Zamorysh” by Ivan Vasilenko, as well as “The Gutta-Percha Boy” by Grigorovich, “The White Poodle” by Kuprin… In general, everything where the main character was a hungry, unhappy child.

— In Zoshchenko’s semi-autobiographical stories about Lelya and Minka, there is a story when children were seated at the same table with adult guests and they tried to turn attention to themselves, which led to a scandal. Did your parents allow you into the adult social circle at a young age?

– Yes, they sat me at the table, sometimes they kicked me out of the table – not because I was being smart, but there are such conversations when the child is in the way. They told me: “Go for a walk in the boys’ yard,” something like that. But I loved being with adults, I remember country walks in the evenings. I was 12 years old – it seemed like it was time to run around with teenage boys, but I kept going with my mom and dad in the company of neighbor writers, I was terribly interested. And my friends, to whom I eventually moved in when I was 14 years old, were surprised that I was some kind of “abnormal”: everyone races bikes, runs into the forest at night to light a fire, rides on boats on the river, but this one decorously walks with old people. But I adored adult company, I was even allowed to participate in the preparation of feasts: I was trusted to fry meat, imagine.

— Which of the classics came into your home?

— Apart from Yuri Nagibin and Leonid Zorin, no one else. Mikhail Svetlov came to see my dad several times.

— In the USSR, especially in the first half of its existence, there were no good toys, so the acquisition of each one was an event. What stuck in your memory that your father gave you?

— I had almost no toys, except for a doll, a stylish boy in a checkered cap and a red shirt, brought by my mother from a tour in Poland.

Dad gave a construction set and a wonderful educational game “Miracle Light” (an electric quiz game released in 1957 by Rosgizmestoprom, today considered extremely rare, valued by collectors at tens of thousands of rubles. — I.V.). I can talk about it endlessly: it allowed me to guess the names of countries, things, historical events, I simply adored this game. And my father once handed me a soldering iron and a set of radio parts, and I assembled a transistor radio for myself. And I almost forgot the most important gift – a bicycle.

— Parents, in joint activities with their children, can focus on sports and outdoor activities, or they can play chess or sort through coins or postage stamps with them. How was it for you?

— Our joint activities were like this: walks around the city with conversations, that’s it. I remember with regret that I didn’t listen to him so much as I chatted something to him.

Then he read me poems, starting from Pushkin and ending with Akhmadulina, read them and explained why they were good. And about Pushkin he also explained the meaning of outdated words.

And the third was to cut down trees at the dacha: our area was covered with small growth, trees maximum as thick as an arm, or even thinner. Together we uprooted these half-trees, half-bushes. There, at the dacha, my father taught me how to chop wood.

— Viktor Dragunsky passed away when you were a young man, did he push you to choose a profession, what did he see you in the future?

— We discussed the choice of profession, I wanted to become an artist, but then it stopped working out, I wasted my time puffing over my pictures. Dad said: “Don’t torture yourself, I see that you no longer have inspiration.”

Then I decided to enroll in the Faculty of Philology, and my father gave valuable advice, which I am ready to repeat to any person: choose a rare profession and become one of the best specialists in this narrow sector. So I began to study medieval Greek manuscripts; in the Soviet Union there were only four people doing this.

It’s another matter that fate turned in the other direction, but it was useful to me.

Dad supported my choice, encouraged me: “You will be my bookworm” – I joyfully accepted this nickname, I imagined myself in glasses and a jacket with greasy elbows, sitting over ancient manuscripts.

— Memorial interviews for the date of death and the date of birth differ in genre, so I have to ask you what was the last birthday of Viktor Dragunsky.

“Dad felt very bad that day, but friends came to us and even Anna Sokolova, who worked with him at the plant in the 30s, was a good, kind Russian working woman. We celebrated, hoping that the disease would subside, not realizing that this would be the last time. The year on the calendar was 1971.