Yuri Polyakov spoke about the release of a 12-volume collection of his works

How will the restructuring end?

– Yuri Mikhailovich, the collected works of a living author are a rare event. Tell us how the idea of ​​the meeting came about, is it timed to coincide with any date or event?

– Yes, in fact, even my peers (and we somehow imperceptibly became the older literary generation) with collected works are sparse. In this sense, I am a happy exception. My first three-volume book was published in 1997, in 2001 a four-volume Young Guard saw the light of day, then a five-volume book was released for the 50th anniversary. AST, I have been collaborating with him for more than 10 years, planned ten volumes for my 60th birthday, but we hesitated, but the matter ended in 12 volumes. Such is the story…

– The structure of the collected works of, say, Leo Tolstoy is clear: the first volumes are “War and Peace”, two volumes are the novel “Anna Karenina”, and the last ones are diaries and letters. And how are your decades of creativity divided into volumes? Does the collection contain dramaturgy, film scripts (for the film “Voroshilovsky Shooter”, for example)?

– Actually, Tolstoy in the first and second volumes are “Childhood. Adolescence. Youth”, “Morning of the landowner”, “Sevastopol stories”, “Cossacks”, and only then comes the epic “War and Peace”. We also used the chronological principle with some deviations, which I will talk about later. The first volume opens with early prose: “One hundred days before the order”, “Emergency on a regional scale”, “Working on mistakes” … Let me remind you that your editor-in-chief Pavel Gusev for publishing in “MK” a chapter from “Emergency” (“Meeting at the mayonnaise factory ”) received his first editorial reprimand in 1983. There is no “Voroshilovsky shooter”, since this is a film adaptation of the story “A Woman on Wednesdays” by Viktor Pronin, the scenario structure was built by A. Borodyansky, I wrote the dialogues and came up with the name of the film. But the play “Smotriny”, in the text of which Stanislav Sergeevich Govorukhin, staging the play at the Gorky Moscow Art Theater, actively intervened, of course, there is in the meeting, but in my version. There is also the script “Uncontrollable”, which I wrote in 1986 under the direction of E.I. Gabrilovich. The film was to be directed by Lev Eidlin, and the main role was intended for his wife Irina Muravyova. Alas, it didn’t work out: the tape launched at Mosfilm was closed at the direction of Politburo member Yakovlev as “hostile to perestroika”, although it only predicted how perestroika would end …

The publishing house and I violated the chronology in this way: the 9th volume is journalism for forty years, the 10th volume is dramaturgy for twenty-five years, and the 12th volume is poetry, although I started with it. By the way, the first publication of poems was also in “MK” in 1974 …

Glory of the all-Union scale and Admiral Ryk

– It is difficult for young writers to understand how famous people woke up in the USSR, nevertheless – to what extent did the story “One Hundred Days Before the Order” and “Emergency of District Scale” predetermine and direct your work? Were you an anti-Soviet at the end of perestroika?

– Yes, it is difficult for today’s literary youth to imagine this. They are waiting for recognition from the jury of the Big Book or Yasnaya Polyana. This is a mistake that breaks the creative destiny of many. Real fame can only be given by the interest of readers. A classic is simply a re-read, and therefore a re-published writer. My “Goat in Milk” went through almost 30 editions. All-Union glory was brought to me not by “One Hundred Days”, still banned by that time, but by “Emergency of the District Scale”, published under Chernenko, in January 1985 in “Youth”, which was edited by Andrey Dementiev and whose circulation was three and a half million copies. . In addition, according to statistics, at least 10 people read one issue. Here they are – the origins of Soviet literary glory. I have never been an anti-Soviet: neither “before”, nor “after”, nor now. On the contrary, I am sure that the Soviet project could have been reformed without destroying the country and the economy. I wrote about this both in prose and in journalism. I do not correct my position after the fact, just look at my interviews of the time.

— Do you divide your activities into the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, and where does the border pass, if you do, in 1991 or 1993?

– I share. Such a watershed was 1993, when an anti-democratic coup took place in our country. By the way, my article “The opposition is dead. Long live the opposition!”, published on October 6, 1993 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, was the only protest in the open press, since all opposition organs were suspended. In August 1993, I published the satirical story “Demgorodok” in the Smena magazine, where, by the way, I predicted a conflict between Russia and independent Ukraine, which banned the Russian language even in Odessa. The fictional dictator Admiral Ryk even announced a partial mobilization in Russia. Don’t believe? Check out the second volume. “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, by the way, sharply criticized this story, the review written by my friend Alexander Aronov was called “Castle of Shit”, apparently with a hint of the momentary nature of the text. But “Demgorodok” is still reprinted and read.

What do you consider your main work? And what of the things you recently wrote was not included in the collection?

– The author writes the “main” all his life, hoping to reach the “supertext” in a new thing. But in the end he decides that the writer succeeded “according to the Hamburg account”, only the reader, not even a critic. Today, according to the preferences of readers, my works can be distributed as follows: first place – “Parisian love of Kostya Gumankov” (1991), second (with a slight lag) – “A goat in milk” (1995), third – “I planned an escape …” ( 2000), the fourth – “Merry Life, or Sex in the USSR” (2018), the fifth – “Plaster Trumpeter” (2008-2012). Recently, “Sovdetstvo-1” (2021) and “Sovdetstvo-2” (2022) have been rapidly moving to the first position, but we did not include this cycle in the collected works, since there is still “Sovdetstvo-3” – the final part. I hope that all three parts will be included in the 15-volume edition, which is planned for my 70th birthday. But before him, as they say, we still have to live.

— To what extent is the current 12-volume book a complete set of texts you have created? What was not included at all, not because of novelty, but by personal choice? And who showed the willfulness of the compiler – the editor or you yourself?

– I did not include something due to the literary weakness of the text. For example, the historical story about the civil war “From battle to battle” in 1988. For its time, there was some novelty in showing a fratricidal war … But now the story is outdated, and badly written. I did not, contrary to the current fashion, print my literary and political diary, which I have been keeping since 2006, I have accumulated about 60 author’s sheets – two volumes. The diary is good because you can not choose expressions. If a writer publishes his diary during his lifetime, then there is no more sincerity in it than meat in a sausage. I did not dare to publish my rather frank cycle “Erostyshya”. Somehow later, without me … I myself acted as the compiler of the volumes. The publishers completely trusted me, for which special thanks to them.

“Sovdetstvo” against anti-Soviet fantasy

– In the USSR, the Subscription Editions stores were very popular, there was a phenomenon of painstakingly collecting books on that. Will a dozen books be published all at once or gradually? How wide is the stratum of bibliophiles in our country who are ready to devote a separate shelf in a bookcase to a major collection of one writer?

— The 12-volume edition has been completed. The last, poetic volume came out quite recently. Unfortunately, the tradition of signed collected works has almost disappeared. The famous subscription store on Kuznetsky Most closed more than ten years ago. This is reality. Moreover, booksellers argue that numbered volumes, especially scattered volumes, do not sell well at all. Perhaps so … While conceiving the publication, my publishers and I came up with such an original move. All volumes are decorated in the same style, but in different ways, they also have titles. For example: poetry – “Time does not get tired”, journalism – “Detector of patriotism”, early prose – “One Hundred Days Before the Order”, family prose – “Triangular Life”, etc. Thus, books can be purchased randomly. But there are also signs of a collected work. At the end of the books, comments are placed on each work: when it was written, published, what assessment it received in criticism, by whom it was staged, screened, into which languages ​​it was translated. Included in the volumes are author’s essays on “creative cuisine”: “How I was a poet”, “How I was a shaker of the foundations”, “How I cooked” Goat in milk”, “How I was an enemy of perestroika”, “How I built” Demgorodok ”, etc. Yes, you will not find gilded numbers on the spines, but if you carefully look at the cover, you will notice in the right or left corner, below, a dial the size of a five-ruble coin. The single arrow points to a number indicating the serial number of the volume. This is our shared secret with those readers who like to build good old collected works on their shelves …

– It is impossible to do without pathos questions about the fate of the Motherland. You once said that you agreed that the works should lie on the table for an extra couple of decades, if only not to destroy the USSR and prevent the horrors of the 90s. Today you would not refuse these words?

– No, he didn’t. The fate of millions of fellow citizens and the integrity of the lands acquired by the ancestors are much more important than the author’s pride. By the way, I know what I’m talking about, since I was in the shoes of the author of texts prohibited for publication, while remaining a member of the bureau of the Krasnopresnensky RK Komsomol, which, by the way, was then headed by Pavel Gusev. Of course, there is nothing good in prohibition, but you don’t need to make a universal catastrophe out of this either: it means that you were simply ahead of your time, turned out to be braver than others, and you have to wait, and not curse the “scoop” and all the people with whom you were unlucky. I will say a seditious thought. For example, the delay in publication of Bulgakov’s great novel, in my opinion, even benefited, since in the late 1930s that enlightened mass Soviet reader who fell in love with The Master and Margarita had simply not yet formed … Even Woland was surprised : “About what? About Pontius Pilate? Is it now? I once had an interesting conversation with a peer writer. “Do you know why I don’t like Soviet power? he exclaimed. “I knew that they wouldn’t print sharp things anyway, so I didn’t even write anything …” – “Well, a fool, but I didn’t think about whether they would let it through or not, and I wrote!” was my answer. And I stand on that now … And love for the Motherland is the norm. Dislike for the Fatherland is a disease, unfortunately, contagious and striving to develop into an epidemic, which should not be allowed under any circumstances, and even more so during military events.

– For you, the Soviet Union (in the novel “Sovdetstvo” in the first place) – is it an idyllic space of nostalgia? Or an undisputed place, a country that deserves both criticism and praise?

– “Sovdetstvo” has the subtitle “The Book of a Bright Past.” An appeal to the past is always associated with a certain idealization. As the poet said, “what passes, it will be nice.” Compare the harsh pre-revolutionary prose of Ivan Shmelev with The Summer of the Lord, as if two different writers! And Bunin, Kuprin, Alexei Tolstoy – before and after! And I also don’t like the frank lies that are now being written about the Soviet times, having no idea about them. This is some kind of evil anti-Soviet fantasy! But I am a realist, and the year 1968 in my cycle is depicted quite objectively, which even my close-knit critics are forced to admit. Now I am writing the story “The Prisoner of the Fifth Breakwater” (about the Soviet vacation in the south as savages). According to the plot, by no means fictional, my hero Yura Polyakov gets into such a mess that, I’m afraid, I will get it for denigrating the “great era”, as the late Limonov put it.

– Your creative career began in literary magazines, including “Youth”. Judging by the Journal Hall and the Journal World, you have not been published in thick magazines since 2017. When a writer’s books and collected works are published, is the journal form of existence of texts cancelled? Have you thought about repeating some critical publications 35 years later?

– Yes, today one can only dream of the former “Youth” of the times of Andrei Dementiev! I was lucky: my first five stories came out there. I still collaborate with magazines, but their circulation is meager, generally incomparable with the circulation of my books and the reposts of my telegram channel. In recent years, I most often published new prose and journalism in the Moscow magazine, but the same Journal Hall is highly politicized and does not publish “patriotic” literary and artistic periodicals. If Leskov’s famous “Soboryanye” appeared in Russky Vestnik today, the Journal Hall would pretend that there is neither such an author nor such a publication … And then they run and cackle: “Missed genius, missed genius!” No need to yawn!