Modern parents have an idea that Soviet literature for children and teenagers is all about “guys about animals” and uplifting stories about pioneer heroes. Those who think so are mistaken. Since the 1950s, books have been published in the Soviet Union in huge numbers, in which the divorce of their parents, the first loves and languor of the flesh, illnesses and deaths of loved ones, difficult relationships with peers fell on young heroes. About the Soviet children's literature, which many have forgotten, "Lente.ru" was told by the publisher, compiler of the series "Ruslit", "Native speech" and "How it was" Ilya Bernstein.
Lenta.ru: When we say "Soviet children's literature" now, what do we mean? Can we operate with this concept or is it some kind of “average temperature in the hospital”?
Of course, clarifications are required: a huge country, a long period of time, 70 years, a lot has changed. I chose for my research a rather local area - the literature of the thaw, and even the flood of the capital. I know something about what happened in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1960s and 70s. But even this period is difficult to comb under one brush. There were many different books published at that time. But there I can at least single out certain areas.
Nevertheless, many parents see this conditional Soviet children's literature as a single whole, and their attitude towards it is ambivalent. Some believe that modern children need to read only what they themselves read in childhood. Others - that these books are hopelessly outdated. And what do you think?
I think that there is no outdated literature. She is either initially unfit, dead at the time of her birth, so she cannot become obsolete. Or a good one, which also does not become obsolete.
Both Sergei Mikhalkov and Agniya Barto wrote many real lines. If we consider all the work of Mikhalkov, then there is a decent and bad one, but not because something has changed and these lines are outdated, but because they were originally stillborn. Although he was a talented person. I like his Uncle Styopa. I really think that:
"After tea, come in -
I'll tell you a hundred stories!
About the war and about the bombing,
About the big battleship "Marat",
How I was hurt a little,
Defending Leningrad" -
quite good lines, even good ones. The same - Agnia Lvovna. Even more so than Mikhalkov. In this sense, I have more complaints about Sapgir. He is definitely included in the clip of the intelligentsia myth. Although he wrote such verses. Read about the queen of the fields, corn.
And how do you feel about Vladislav Krapivin, who gave rise to the myth that a pioneer is a new musketeer?
I don't think he's a very strong writer. Moreover, for sure, a good person doing an important big thing. Talent nurturer - he has a bonus. As a person, a person, I have unconditional respect for him. But as a writer, I would not put him above Mikhalkov or Barto.
It just seems to me that this good prose. Everything, except for the book "The Secret of the Abandoned Castle", which is not even quite Volkov's anymore (the illustrator of all Volkov's books, Leonid Vladimirsky, said that the text of the "Castle" was added and rewritten by the editor after the author's death). And it's definitely better than Baum. Not even The Wizard of Oz, which is essentially a loose retelling of The Wizard of Oz. And the original Volkov, starting with Urfin Deuce, is just real literature. No wonder Miron Petrovsky dedicated a large book to him, quite panegyric.
After all, we generally imagine Soviet children's literature poorly. The country was huge. In it there was not only the publishing house "Children's Literature", but also fifty other publishing houses. And what they released, we do not know at all. For example, I, however, already in adulthood, was shocked by the book of the Voronezh writer Evgenia Dubrovina "Waiting for the goat". He was then the editor-in-chief of the Crocodile magazine. The book was published by the Central Black Earth Publishing House. Unbelievable in its literary merit. Now it has been republished by the Rech publishing house with original illustrations.
The book is pretty scary. It is about the first post-war years, mortally hungry in those parts. About how a father returned home from the war and found his grown sons completely strangers. It is difficult for them to understand each other and get along. About how parents go in search of food. It is literally scary to turn every page, everything is so nervous, tough. The parents went after the goat, but disappeared along the way. The book is really terrible, I did not dare to republish it. But perhaps the best one I've ever read.
There is one more important point. Modern young parents have a false idea that Soviet children's literature may have been good, but due to ideological oppression, due to the fact that society did not raise and decide whole line important issues, the problems of the child were not reflected in the literature. Teenager for sure. And the important things that need to be discussed with a modern teenager - the divorce of parents, the betrayal of friends, the girl's falling in love with an adult man, an oncological disease in the family, disability, etc. - are completely absent from her. Therefore, we are so grateful to the Scandinavian authors for raising these topics. But it is not so.
But if the books of European authors are removed from the modern bookstore, then only Mikhalkov, Barto and Uspensky will remain of ours.
I'm not saying that those Soviet teenage books can now be bought. I say that they were written by Soviet authors and published in the Soviet Union in large numbers. But since then it hasn't really been republished.
So Atlantis sank?
This is the basis of my activity - to find and republish such books. And this has its advantages: you get to know your country better, the child has a common cultural field with grandparents. On all the topics that I have just listed, I can name more than one notable book.
Name!
What have we recently been the most scandalous? Orphanage? Pedophilia? There is a good book Yuri Slepukhin "Cimmerian Summer", teen romance. The plot is this: the father returns home from the front and becomes a big Soviet boss. While dad was at the front, mom got pregnant by no one knows who gave birth and raised a boy to the age of 3. At the same time, the family already had a child - the eldest girl. But not the main character - she was born later. Dad said that he was ready to make peace with his wife if they handed over this boy to an orphanage. Mom agreed, and the older sister did not mind. It became a secret in the family. main character, who was born later, accidentally learns this secret. She is outraged and runs away from her comfortable home in Moscow. And the boy grew up in an orphanage and became an excavator somewhere, conditionally - at the Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power station. She is leaving for this brother of hers. He persuades her not to fool around and return to her parents. She returns. This one story line. Second: after the 9th grade, the heroine goes to rest in the Crimea and ends up at the excavations. There she falls in love with a 35-year-old St. Petersburg assistant professor, who, in turn, is in love with archeology. They develop love. Absolutely carnal, in the 10th grade, she moves to live with him. The book was published by a major publishing house and is very typical for its time. This is the 1970s.
What else? Oncology? Here is a book by a good writer Sergei Ivanov, author of the script for the cartoon "Last year's snow was falling." "Former Bulka and his daughter" called. It is about childhood betrayal: how one girl betrays another. But in parallel, another topic is developing - dad is diagnosed with cancer. "Former Bulka" is just dad. He ends up in the hospital. And although he himself recovers, his roommates die. This is a teen book.
"Let it not agree with the answer" by Max Bremener. This is a book that came out before the thaw. It describes a school in which high school students take money from kids. They are covered by the school administration. A young man rebels against this and is threatened with expulsion on a false pretext. He is opposed by his parents, who were frightened by the school administration. The only one who helps him is the head teacher, who has just returned from the camp. Unrehabilitated old teacher. The book, by the way, is based on real events.
Or a story Frolova "What's what?" which I republished. Better than Salinger. There is a strong Soviet family: dad is a war hero, mom is an actress. Mom runs away with the actor, dad takes a drink. No one explains anything to a 15-year-old boy. And he has a busy life. There is a girl classmate with whom he is in love. There is a girl who is in love with him. And there is an older sister of a classmate who strokes his foot under the table. Or in tights becomes in doorway for light to fall on it. And the hero forgets about his first love, because here the magnet is stronger. He fights terribly with a classmate who spoke vilely about his mother, and runs away from home to find his mother. This story is from 1962.
And such books were more of a tradition than an exception.
When and by whom was this tradition started?
It seems to me that this is what happened in the late 1950s. A generation of young people came to literature who had no Stalinist experience in education. Conditionally, the circle of Dovlatov - Brodsky. They did not have to overcome anything in themselves after the 20th Congress. They were a dissident circle, with their parents who had served their time. If we talk about teenage literature, these are Valery Popov, Igor Efimov, Sergey Volf, Andrey Bitov, Inga Petkevich and others. They rejected previous experience. Remember how in The Steep Route, Evgenia Ginzburg looks at her son Vasily Aksenov, who came to her in Magadan in some terribly colorful jacket, and says to him: “Let's go buy you something decent, and we will sew a little coat out of this Tonya” . The son replies: "Only over my dead body." And she suddenly realizes that her son rejects her experience, not only political, but also aesthetic.
So these authors could not exist in adult literature for censorship reasons, but they did not have the education that saved the previous generation that found themselves in their position. Bitov told me: “Do you understand why we all came there? We did not know languages. We couldn't do translations like Akhmatova and Pasternak." There were the same editors, aesthetic dissidents, at the Bonfire, at the Leningrad Department of Children's Literature. Pioneer didn't have them. Or look at the composition of the authors in the series "Fiery Revolutionaries": Raisa Orlova, Lev Kopelev, Trifonov, Okudzhava. They published books about revolutionaries. And who were the revolutionaries? Sergey Muravyov-Apostol and others. The history of publishing and editorial activity and thought in this country is a separate issue.
Young writers were uncompromising people. Everything they did was without a fig in their pocket, absolutely honestly. Someone with children's literature did not succeed, like Bitov, who nevertheless has two children's books - "Journey to a Childhood Friend" and "Another Country". And what these authors wrote was not the legacy of the writers of the 1920s and 30s. These were conditional Hemingway and Remarque. At this point, Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye had no less influence on children's literature than the emergence of Carlson and Moomin Troll. They showed what an adult writer can do in teen literature. These books ended up in libraries.
But still they were not reprinted en masse?
It's not about that. Then even what is now an absolute classic was not massively reprinted. For decades, "Republic of Shkid" or "Konduit and Shvambrania" fell out of publishing plans. This is another important point: during the thaw, books about childhood were republished in the 1930s, which before that could not be released for censorship reasons.
There were whole trends in children's literature that are now almost forgotten. For example, the tradition of historical novels for children, unusually meticulously made. My favorite writers Samuella Fingaret or Alexander Nemirovsky worked in this genre. These people did not follow a simple path - say, take stories from Plutarch and make a story out of them. They, using this as a background, wrote original works from ancient Greek, ancient Phoenician or ancient Chinese history. For example, at Fingaret there is a book "Great Benin". It is about the kingdom of Benin, which existed before the arrival of the Portuguese in Africa. They discovered the secret of tin casting, and their sculptures, the heads of their ancestors, are still kept in museums.
Or is there Sergey Grigoriev, Volga writer. He has a great book. "Berka the Cantonist" about a Jewish boy given to the cantonists. The Jews had a large recruiting rate. Since they were cunning - they married their children early so that they would not be taken into the army - a whole system of cantonist schools was invented, that is, children's military schools, where children were recruited from the age of 10. They did it by force. When a person reached the age of 18, he was sent to the army, where he had to serve for another 25 years. And now Burke is handed over to the cantonists. All this is written with such knowledge of details, with so many not even Yiddish quotes, which are in bulk, but all the features of learning in the heder, topics that were discussed in religious education, are spelled out. Moreover, Sergei Grigoriev is not a pseudonym. He is a real Russian man.
Or was there another writer Emelyan Yarmagaev. The book is called "The Adventures of Peter Joyce". It's about the first settlers to America, like the Mayflower. I once learned from there, for example, that the first slaves were whites, that the first settlers on the Mayflower were all slaves. They sold themselves for 10 years to pay for the road to America. These were not even Quakers, but such religious “ultras”, for whom religious freedom, independent reading and the study of scripture were so important that in England at that time they were persecuted. This book by Emelyan Yarmagaev describes the details of their Quaker theological disputes. And the book, by the way, is for 10-year-olds.
All this is certainly a complete Atlantis - sunk and not reprinted.
At the non/fiction intellectual literature fair held at the end of November independent publisher Ilya Bernstein celebrated a kind of anniversary: he prepared and published fifty books. Why not talk?
Xenia Moldavskaya → Can we meet on Friday?
Ilya Bernstein ← Just come in the morning: Shabbat is early today.
KM→ What is Shabbat observance to you? A question of faith? Self-awareness? Anything else that I can't articulate?
IS← Well, faith, probably, and self-consciousness, and something that you can’t formulate, too.
I have a sister who is eleven years older than me. In the mid-seventies, at the time of the "religious revival of students of math schools," she became an observant Jewess and, in general, still remains one. My sister was an authority for me in every sense - both morally and intellectually. Therefore, from childhood I was very sympathetic to her beliefs and went to the synagogue at a tender age. At first, “technically”, because I found even elderly relatives who needed, for example, help to buy matzah. Then he began to go on holidays, but not inside yet, but just hang out on the street. Gradual drift, quite natural: first without pork, then without non-kosher meat, and so on. I don’t think I will ever come to the “Datish” version, but I go to the synagogue and keep the Sabbath.
KM→ But you still don't wear a kippah.
IS← There is no such commandment to always wear a kippah. In the everyday life of an Orthodox Jew, there is something that is “according to the Torah”, but there is something “according to the wise men”. The latter is important and interesting to me, but not strictly necessary. But, in general, I often wear a kippah at home.
KM→ By the way, about the wise men. When we met, you worked at the smart publishing house "Terevinf" ...
IS← No. I collaborated with them, both as a freelancer and as a fan and friend. Terevinf was originally the editorial and publishing department of the Center for Curative Pedagogics, and until now its main direction is books about children with developmental disabilities. When I decided in 2009 to start my own publishing business, I suggested that they expand their range. This is how the series of books “For Children and Adults” appeared, and “Terevinf” and I became partners.
I have been editing books for money for many years. Started in the mid-nineties, self-taught as a book designer and book editor. I did the text, and design, and layout. I wanted to become a publisher, but at the same time I was aware of my intellectual ceiling. Complex adult books are difficult for me to read, and even more so - to understand at such a level that I can comment on them and understand the intention as well as the author. Here are children's, teenage - I understand this enough: I can evaluate how it is done, see the strengths and weaknesses, I can certainly comment. In general, I have a desire to explain, tell, “introduce into a cultural and historical context” - such tediousness. When we sit down to watch a movie, children say to me: “Only in no case do not press pause to explain.” The fact that I love to explain, and that I clearly understand my capabilities, led me to choose children's literature as a professional and business field.
KM→ Your “Terevinthian” books are clearly from your childhood. Now it is clear that your choice is based on something else besides personal reading experience.
IS← I started to make a series of books “How it was” with “Scooter”, because the history of the war became part of the ideological struggle, began to be privatized by the “opposing sides”. And I tried to achieve objectivity - I began to publish autobiographical military prose, commented on by modern historians. When I made the first four books, it became clear that this was, in general, a move, and now I position this series as "The Russian Twentieth Century in Autobiographical Fiction and Commentary by Historians." I now began to do around artwork a big product with media content - video commentaries, a book commentary site - all this in search of ways to "explain".
KM→ Commentary on "Conduit and Shvambrania" was written to you by Oleg Lekmanov, and now the reader is shivering from how tragic Kassil's book is. As a child, there was no such feeling, although it was clear that the last roll call was a harbinger of tragedy.
IS← Well, it's hard to speak objectively here, because we know how it all ended for these people - literary heroes and their real prototypes. And about Oska, who, in fact, is the main character, emotionally for sure, we know that at first he became an orthodox Marxist, and then he was shot. This so strongly emotionally colors the text that it is impossible to perceive it in abstraction. But the book does not seem tragic to me. It is reliable, tells about a terrible time, and our knowledge of this gives the depth of tragedy that you felt. The main difference between my publication and the usual ones is not in tragedy, but, above all, in the national theme. The scene of action is Pokrovsk, the future capital of the Republic of the Volga Germans, and then the center of the colonial lands. In 1914, anti-German sentiments were very strong in Russia and there were German pogroms, and the whole book is permeated with anti-xenophobic pathos. The hero sympathizes with the offended Germans, and in 1941 this text became completely unprintable. Entire chapters had to be removed, and the remaining German heroes had to be renamed.
Quite a lot of Jewish was also seized. The episode about “our cat, who is also Jewish” is the only one left. The original edition says a lot about anti-Semitism. Kassil had an anti-Semitic bonne, he was insulted in the classroom... When preparing the edition of the forty-eighth year, this, of course, was also removed.
Interestingly, in the process of preparing comments, I learned that Leo Kassil's grandfather Gershon Mendelevich was a Hasidic rabbi from Panevezys, which is already non-trivial, he headed the Hasidic community of Kazan.
KM→ According to the book, one gets the impression that the family was progressive, if not atheistic…
IS← Well, I suspect that's not entirely true, just like Brushtein's. I doubt that this is directly atheistic ... The Cassilis chose a secular life, but it is unlikely that they abandoned their Jewishness. Probably, medical education shifts thinking in a conditionally “positivist” direction, but that he would directly start eating ham is highly doubtful. Although, of course, everyone has their own story. But Anna Iosifovna, her mother, was from a traditional Jewish family, and her father Abram Grigorievich was an obstetrician, which is also the traditional (and partly forced) choice of a Jewish doctor. And my grandfather was a Hasid. But this still needs to be investigated.
KM→ Will you?
IS← I am not. During my work, I come across a lot of interesting, not yet explored things. But I'm not a philologist or a historian. With the “Republic of ShKID”, we generally found a topic that can turn everything upside down, but no one has dealt with it yet. There is such a story, "The Last Gymnasium", written by other Shkidites, Olkhovsky and Evstafiev, respected people and friends of Panteleev from Belykh. It describes a very different reality, much scarier, much more similar to that reflected in the pages of pamphlets of the 1920s, like "On Cocainism in Children" and "The Sexual Life of Street Children." The children, the teachers, and the director Vikniksor do not fit into the images created by Belykh and Panteleev, they are even less like the heroes of the film adaptation by Gennady Poloka.
KM→ Will you publish?
IS← No, she is artistically untenable. This is Rappov's kind of non-literary literature. Instead, I am doing Kostya Ryabtsev's Diary, with a story about pedagogical experiments in the 1920s: about pedology, about the Dalton plan, about complex and brigade teaching methods, and other non-trivial ideas. This is my personal story. My grandmother was a pedologist, Raisa Naumovna Hoffman. She graduated from the pedological faculty of the 2nd Moscow State University, studied, probably, with Vygotsky and Elkonin. And in the Terevinf edition of Kostya Ryabtsev's Diary, I placed a photograph of my grandmother at work.
‒ Ilya, in your interviews you often talk about your activities as a “publisher-editor”. Is this your special personal position in the publishing world, or can you learn it somewhere, make it your profession?
I'll try to answer. There have been several civilizational trends in history. For example, industrial. This is the era of standard products that are mass-produced. This is the era of the assembly line. The design of the product should be carried out accordingly, the way the product should be promoted after release should be the same. And such an industrial way - it was a very important thing in its time. This is a whole civilizational stage. But he's not the only one.
There is also non-industrial production. Someone brews craft beer, someone sews trousers, someone makes furniture. Today it is an increasingly common activity, at least in the world of metropolitan areas. And I am a representative of just such a world of non-industrial activity. And since this business is underdeveloped and new, then everything has to be built from the very beginning: from the system for training specialists to the system for distributing finished books. Our publications are not even sold in the same way as other books: they do not fall into the usual consumer niches. The merchandiser of the store, having received them, finds himself in a difficult situation. He does not know where to define such a book: for a child it is too adult, for an adult it is too childish. This means that it must be some other way of presenting, selling and promoting. And so it is with every aspect of this business.
But, of course, this is not a combination of some unique individual qualities of one person. This is normal activity. She just needs to learn differently, to deal with it differently.
- So what is it - back to the Middle Ages, to workshops working to order? To the system of masters and apprentices?
We really called it at some point a "shop" structure. And I really teach, I have a workshop. And in it we really use for simplicity such terms as apprentice, apprentice.
It is assumed that someday an apprentice should become a master, defending some of his master's ambition before other masters, and get the right, the opportunity to open his own workshop. And other masters will help him in this.
This is how it should have been - the way it used to be: a shop, with a shop banner. I'm not sure if I have followers in this. But I try to build it in this form. And I don't see any problem with that.
Problems elsewhere. We have everything sharpened from school so that (slightly exaggerating) a person either draws or writes. And if he draws, then he usually writes with errors. And if he writes, then he does not know how to hold a pencil in his hand. This is just one of the examples. Although relatively recently it was completely natural for a guards officer to easily write poetry in the album of a county young lady or draw quite decent graphics in the margins. Only a hundred - one hundred and fifty years ago!
‒ There is also an economic component to the question of your profession. You said in one of your interviews that industrial civilization creates a mass of cheap goods that are available to people. And what you are doing is some rather expensive, “niche”, as they say now, product. Right?
If I were Henry Ford, I would compete with the entire automotive world for millions of consumers. If I do something completely atypical, not mass-produced, in my workshop, naturally, I don’t have many consumers. Although not so little. I believe that any most exotic product can be sold today. For me, it is still quite understandable ... But then I don’t have competition and all its costs. There is no fear that my product will be stolen from me. No one will make a book like me anyway! In general, by and large, nothing can be taken away from me. You can’t even take away the business from me, because it’s all in my head. Yes, let's say they arrest my circulation, in the worst case. So I will do the following. But, in any case, 90% of the cost of the goods is always with me. And I can't be kicked out of my firm. No one will be able to make the Ruslit-2 series, for example. That is, he can publish something, but it will be a completely different product. It's like the mark of a master. People go to a particular master, and they are not at all interested in another workshop. This is not their interest.
‒ Do they want a different relationship model?
Of course!
And the relationship with the students in the workshop other than with employees in the company. I am not afraid that my employees will be lured away for a higher salary, or that an employee will leave and take some “customer base” with him. Fortunately, we have also been spared all these business ulcers.
‒ With the organization of work, everything is more or less clear. Is the very idea of commented publications your own idea or the result of some kind of polls, contacts with readers?
Here again: the industrial method involves some special technologies and professions: marketing, market research, conducting surveys, identifying target groups. Individual production initially assumes that you are doing, in general, for yourself, in the way that interests and pleases you; you do for people like you. Therefore, many issues that are traditional, mandatory for ordinary business, simply do not arise. Who is your target audience? Don't know! I do what I see fit; things that I like; what I can do, not what they buy. Well, maybe not quite so radically... Of course, I think about who might need it. But to a large extent, in such a business, demand is formed by supply, and not vice versa. That is, people did not know that such books exist. It never occurred to them that they needed "Captain Vrungel" with a two-hundred-page commentary.
‒ What happened next seems clear: they saw such a book, looked at it, were surprised at first, then they liked it...
And when such an offer has arisen, they will already look for it, they will look for just such publications. Moreover, it is already incomprehensible and strange that this was not the case before.
‒ You think comments in the book are necessary. Why? And what do you think, can comments harm the perception of the text as artistic?
I don't think they are necessary. And yes, I think they can hurt. So I breed them - there are no page-by-page comments in my books. I believe that a page-by-page comment, even seemingly as innocent as an explanation of an incomprehensible word, can really destroy the artistic fabric of the narrative.
I don't think comments are necessary at all. I even had such an agreement at home with my children: if we watch a movie together, don’t give dad a remote control. This meant that I did not have the right to stop the action at some important, from my point of view, moments in order to explain what the children (again from my point of view) did not understand. Because I have - and I'm not the only one, unfortunately - such a stupid habit.
But for those who are interested, it should be “explainable”: separate, differently designed, clearly separated.
‒ Both from your comments and from the selection of works for publication, it is clear that the topic of war is, on the one hand, relevant to you, and on the other, you have a special attitude towards it. For example, in one of your interviews you said that you cannot win a war at all. This does not quite correspond to the current state trends. Do you think it is possible to find a balance between respect for the ancestors and turning the war itself into a cult?
I would say that this is generally a matter of respect for the person. It's not about ancestors. After all, what is a great power? If a great power is a country whose citizens live well, where the efforts of the state are aimed at ensuring that the old people have a good pension, everyone has good medicine, the young have a good education, that there is no corruption, that there are good roads, then these questions don't even come up. These questions, in my opinion, are the result of a different idea of greatness, which absolutely does not correspond with me. And this is usually a derivative of national inferiority. BUT feeling of inferiority Unfortunately, in our country - source of national idea. A kind of inferiority complex. And therefore our answer to everyone is always the same: “But we defeated you. We can do it again."
‒ To the question of literature and the state. Tell me, were Soviet teenage books heavily censored or were they already written within certain limits?
Both. And they were further censored by editors, including after the death of the author. I have a separate article about this in the edition of "Deniska's Stories" - about how they censored and edited, how "Deniska's Stories" were shortened - although, it would seem, what is there to censor? And it is considered there on a large number of examples.
‒ One of your publications is “Konduit and Shvambrania” by Lev Kassil. You write that the original author's version was very different from the current well-known text. Why couldn't they just publish it instead of comments?
- “Konduit and Shvambraniya” I released in the original version. This is what Leo Kassil wrote and published for the first time. These are two separate stories, very different from the existing late author's combined version. For example, because the place of action is the lands where the Volga Germans lived compactly. This is the city of Pokrovsk, the future capital of the first autonomy in our country, the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans. Since the action of "Konduit" and "Schvambrania" takes place during the First World War, this is the time of anti-German sentiments, anti-German pogroms in cities. All this was in Pokrovsk. Kassil wrote quite a lot about this, he wrote with great sympathy for his German friends and classmates. There was also a considerable Jewish theme in the text. Naturally, all this was not included in the later version. And here we can already talk about censorship, about a combination of internal and external censorship. Such historical circumstances just require commentary.
‒ You publish a lot of relatively old books, 1920s-1970s. What can you say about modern teenage literature?
I think she's on the rise right now. And I expect that she is about to come out on a completely new level, at some peak, both in the 20s and in the 60s. Literature is generally not spread evenly over time. There was a Golden Age, there was a Silver Age. I think that even now the heyday is close, because a lot has already been accumulated. A lot of authors work, a lot of decent, even very decent books have been written, wonderful books are about to appear.
‒ And what would you name as outstanding contemporary teenage books? Or at least cute to you personally?
No, I'm not ready for this. First, I read relatively little now, to be honest. I'm actually not one of those adults who like to read children's books. I don't read children's books for myself. And secondly, it so happened that I know the people who write books much better than their works.
‒ What do you attribute such a rise to now? Does it have some external causes or are they just internal processes in literature itself?
I don't know, it's a complicated thing, you can't explain it that way. I think it's all there in the complex. After all, what is the Golden Age of Pushkin or the Silver Age of Russian poetry connected with? Probably, there are special studies, but I can only state this.
This is exactly what I really want. I don’t want to, on the contrary, just continue to do what is already good. Something new has become interesting, but you don’t do it because your previous business is doing well. I don't work like that.
‒ Thank you very much for the interview.
Interviewed by Evgeny Zherbin
Photo by Galina Solovieva
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Evgeny Zherbin, holder of the diploma "Book expert of the XXI century", member of the children's editorial board of "Papmambuka", 14 years old, St. Petersburg
Books of the Ruslit series
Ilya Bernstein
Everyone's Personal Business publishes an article by Ilya Bernstein, an independent publisher specializing in children's and teenage literature of the Soviet period, about the writer Leonid Solovyov, who was repressed for "anti-Soviet agitation and terrorist statements" and rehabilitated before the end of his sentence. For the first time, the article was published among additional materials to the novel by Leonid Solovyov "The Enchanted Prince" (a continuation of "Troublemaker" about the adventures of Khoja Nasreddin), published by the author of the article. By the way, the story "The Enchanted Prince" was entirely written by the author in the camp, where Solovyov was officially "permitted to write literary work" - which is surprising in itself. In his article, Ilya Bernstein analyzes the investigation case of Leonid Solovyov and comes to unexpected conclusions - the writer's behavior during the investigation reminds him of a "picaresque" novel.
About how the future author of The Enchanted Prince became “a prisoner Leonid Solovyov, a writer kept at the 14 l / o Dubravlag, art. 58 p. 10 part 2 and 17-58 p. 8, the term is 10 years ”(this is how the statement was signed to the head of the Dubravlag department), we know from two documents: his investigation file and a petition for rehabilitation sent to the USSR Prosecutor General in 1956 . The first one is not fully available to us - some pages (about 15 percent of their total number) are hidden, "sewn up" in sealed envelopes: they are opened in the FSB archive only at the request of close relatives, whom Solovyov did not have left. From the petition to the Prosecutor General, we know that during the investigation there were no face-to-face confrontations with witnesses for the prosecution - we know their testimony only in a summary of the investigator. This is also a very significant gap, which does not allow, for example, to assess the role that Viktor Vitkovich played in the arrest and conviction of the writer, Solovyov's co-author on the scripts for the films Nasreddin in Bukhara and Nasreddin's Adventures. They wrote the scripts together in 1938 and 1944, respectively, and, according to Vitkovich, Solovyov included plot moves and dialogues invented by the co-author in his stories: “I literally begged him to take all the best from the script. He went for it not without internal resistance. This strengthened our friendship... I read on the title page that our common scenario was the basis, and I resolutely rebelled again... Was it politeness; I blotted out the footnote with my own hand” (V. Vitkovich, Circles of Life, Moscow, 1983, pp. 65–67). Solovyov's version is unknown to us, but a lot of space is given to Vitkovich (who was not arrested) in the protocols of interrogations. However, Solovyov later wrote about him in a petition, and we will return to this later. From the "camp" memoirs we know how the interrogations were conducted and how the interrogated behaved. The usually unsubstantiated absurdity of accusations under "political" articles and the falsity of the protocols are also known. And we read Solovyov's "case" from this angle. What false evidence of imaginary crimes did the investigator present? What line of defense did the defendant choose? He held himself with dignity, rejecting the slightest slander, or quickly "broke"? Did he tell anyone? Solovyov's behavior during the investigation in many respects does not correspond to the usual ideas. The reason for this is the personality and fate of Leonid Vasilyevich, as well as circumstances unknown to us (maybe something will change when the above-mentioned envelopes with seals are opened).
So, "The investigation file on the charge of Solovyov Leonid Vasilyevich, number R-6235, year of production 1946, 1947." It opens with a “Decree for Arrest” drawn up by Major Kutyrev (I remind you that the ranks of state security officers were two steps higher than the combined arms ones, that is, the MGB major corresponded to an army colonel). The date of compilation is September 4, 1946, despite the fact that the testimony incriminating the writer was obtained in January. In general, the case turned out to be serious - it was prepared for a long time, and was conducted by high ranks - the second signature on the Resolution belongs to “Beginning. department 2-3 2 Main. Ex. MGB USSR" to Lieutenant Colonel F.G. Shubnyakov, a prominent person in the history of Soviet repressive organs. The 2nd Main Directorate - counterintelligence, Fedor Grigorievich later became both the head of this department and a resident in Austria (in the mid-1950s), but he is best known for his personal participation in the murder of Mikhoels. What was Solovyov charged with?
“Arrested by the Ministry of State Security of the USSR in 1944, members of the anti-Soviet group - writers Ulin L.N., Bondarin S.A. and Gekht A.G. showed that Solovyov L.V. is their like-minded person and in conversations with them spoke about the need to change the existing system in the Soviet Union on a bourgeois-democratic basis. From Solovyov L.V. manifestations of terrorist sentiments against the head of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government were repeatedly noted. The presence of terrorist sentiments in Solovyov L.V. confirmed arrested in January 1945 Fastenko A.I. On January 12, 1945, Fastenko testified: “... Solovyov expressed terrorist intentions towards the party around February 1944, stating: “In order to change the existing situation in the country, it is necessary to remove the leader of the party,” and later stated that he was personally ready commit a terrorist act against the leader of the party, accompanying this with insulting expressions. “Soloviev L.V. exerts an anti-Soviet influence on politically unstable persons from among his entourage.
Terrorism is a firing squad; in the more severe thirties, Solovyov would have had little chance of saving his life. But anti-Soviet agitation, on the contrary, is an on-duty accusation, the main means of fulfilling the plan to supply the Gulag system with free and disenfranchised labor. That is, the pragmatic (it won’t work to get an acquittal anyway) task of the person under investigation is to try to convince the investigator to reclassify the case, to present it in such a way that the main thing there is chatter that is relatively safe for the country, mixing a terrorist note. Apparently, Solovyov succeeded in this (or the writer was just lucky), in any case, the sentence - ten years in labor camps - was relatively mild.
The investigation went on for six months: the first of 15 interrogations took place on September 5, 1946, the last on February 28, 1947. There was no trial, the verdict was passed by the OSO, moreover, three months later, on June 9; in total Solovyov spent ten months in prison. The first protocols fit quite well into the scheme familiar to us: many hours of night interrogations - for example, from 10.30 p.m. to 03.20 a.m. - following one after another. (We remember that during the day the beds in the cell are raised and fastened to the walls: “It was allowed to lower them from eleven to six in the morning on a special signal. At six, you get up, and you can’t lie down until eleven. Only stand or sit on stools,” - Evgenia Ginzburg , “A steep route.”) These days, Solovyov, exhausted by interrogation, was given two and a half hours to sleep.
But that was only at the beginning. Already from October 12, from the eighth interrogation, everything is simplified, and in the end it becomes completely formal: the investigator kept within one and a half to two hours and tried to manage until the end of the working day laid down by the Labor Code. The reason, apparently, is that Solovyov did not become a tough nut to crack for the investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Rublev (who, by the way, shortly before, in June 1945, drew up the indictment in the Solzhenitsyn case). Here is what Leonid Vasilyevich himself wrote in a petition for rehabilitation ten years later:
“Rublev tirelessly inspired me: “They don’t go free from here. Your fate is predetermined. Now everything depends on my investigatory characteristics - both the term of punishment and the camp where you will be sent. There are camps from where no one returns, but there are easier ones. Choose. Remember that your recognition or non-recognition does not matter, it is just a form "...
I only thought about how to quickly escape from the remand prison somewhere - at least to the camp. It made no sense to resist in such conditions, especially since the investigator told me: “There will be no trial of you, do not hope. We will let your case go through the Special Conference.” In addition, with my confessions, I often paid off the investigator, as it were, from his insistent demands to give accusatory evidence against my acquaintances - writers and poets, among whom I did not know the criminals. The investigator told me more than once: “Here you block everyone with your broad back, but they don’t really block you.”
All the methods of investigation described by Leonid Solovyov are well known and developed long before 1946. (Several years later, already in the camp, Solovyov will include in the story “The Enchanted Prince” the scene of Hodja’s interrogation. Those who are familiar with the writer’s personal experience read it with a special feeling) , didn’t let you sleep, but didn’t beat you)? It is possible that his behavior during the investigation was thoughtful: Solovyov decided to get out of the rut by presenting himself in a not very typical “enemy of the people”, but an image that arouses understanding and even sympathy in the investigator (which fits well into archetypal ideas, and into his , Solovyova, real circumstances).
« question What was your irresponsibility?
answer First, I separated from my wife because of my drinking and infidelities and was left alone. I loved my wife very much, and breaking up with her was a disaster for me. Secondly, my drunkenness increased. My sober working periods were getting shorter, I felt that a little more, and my literary activity will be completely impossible, and I as a writer will be finished. All this contributed to my most gloomy pessimism. Life seemed to me devalued, hopeless, the world - a meaningless and cruel chaos. I saw everything around in a dark, joyless, heavy light. I began to shun people, I lost my earlier inherent cheerfulness and cheerfulness. It was precisely at the time of the greatest aggravation of my spiritual crisis that the greatest aggravation of my anti-Soviet sentiments (1944-1946) dates back. I myself was sick, and the whole world seemed to me sick too.
(Interrogation protocols are quoted with minor cuts.)
« question Why do you call yourself single, since you were married and also had friends?
answer My drunkenness, disorderly life, connection with tramps and vagabonds from the Arbat pubs, whom I brought in whole groups to visit me at home, led to the fact that my wife and I had a final break. Early in the morning she went to work, returning only late in the evening, she went to bed right there, I was alone all day long. Before me was the question of the complete impossibility of continuing such a life and the need for some way out.
question Where did you start looking for a way out?
answer I seriously thought about suicide, but I was stopped by the fact that I would die all dirty. I began to think about outside interference in my destiny and most often thought about the organs of the NKVD, believing that the task of the NKVD included not only purely punitive, but also punitive and corrective functions.
At the beginning of 1945, after several hallucinations, I realized that my mental sphere was completely upset and the hour had come for a decisive act. I went to the first art cinema on Arbat Square, where I found out the number of the switchboard from the NKVD theater duty officer, began to call and ask to connect me to the NKVD literary hotel.
question What for?
answer I wanted to say that I am standing on the edge of the abyss, that I ask you to isolate me, let me come to my senses, then listen like a human being and put me in tight blinkers for the period that is necessary to shake out all the moral dirt.
question Did you get through to the NKVD?
answer I got through to the duty officer, told him where I was calling from and who I was, and waited for an answer. At this time, the director of the cinema, having sympathetically questioned me and seeing my difficult mental state, connected me with Bakovikov, an employee of the editorial office of the Krasny Fleet newspaper, where I worked before demobilization, I told Bakovikov about my serious condition, asked him for some any help.
question What help did you get?
answer Bakovikov succeeded in placing me in a neuro-psychiatric hospital for invalids of the Patriotic War, where I stayed for 2 months. I left in a more or less calm state, but with the same feeling of heaviness in my soul.
I will not argue that Solovyov played the investigator (who, for example, could easily verify the authenticity of the story with a call to the NKVD), but the benefits of such a strategy of behavior during the investigation are obvious, especially for a person accused of terrorism: what danger can a degraded drunkard pose for the country? And how can one seriously consider him as an anti-Soviet agitator? It's clear - the green serpent beguiled. “I find it difficult to give the exact wording of my statements when drunk, because, having sobered up, I don’t remember anything decisively and I learn about what happened only from the words of other people.”
But this applies only to “terrorist” statements. The writer retells his other speeches to the investigator readily, in great detail. It could be assumed that this is the work of Rublev, which Solovyov agreed to attribute to himself under fear of falling into the camp, "from where they do not return." But when getting acquainted with the confession of the writer, doubts arise in this: the lieutenant colonel could not come up with such a thing. Everything is very thoughtful, literary polished and polemically pointed. Solovyov seems to be setting out a program for reforming the country, relating to all sectors of its economy and all areas of social and cultural life. As if he had been working on it alone for a long time and now presents his results to the judgment of a small but competent audience.
Politic system."The statehood of the USSR is devoid of flexibility - it does not give people the opportunity to grow and fully realize their intellectual and spiritual powers, which threatens to ossify and die in the event of war."
Industry.“Full stateization and centralization of industry lead to extraordinary cumbersomeness, does not stimulate labor productivity, and therefore the state is forced to resort to coercive measures, since wages are very low and cannot serve as an incentive to increase labor productivity and to retain personnel in the enterprise.” “Workers are now essentially fixed in enterprises, and in this sense we have made a leap back, returning to the long past times of forced labor, always unproductive.” "I also spoke about the need to relieve the state of the production of small consumer goods, transferring their production to handicraftsmen and artels."
Agriculture.“On the question of collective farms, I said that this form did not justify itself, that the cost of workdays on most collective farms is so low that it does not stimulate the work of collective farmers at all, and part of the collective farmers, being grain producers, themselves sit without bread, because the entire crop goes to the state.” “After the end of the war, upon the return of the demobilized, who saw with their own eyes the situation of the peasantry in the West, the political situation in our countryside will become very aggravated; there is only one way to improve the health of the collective farms - it is a serious and immediate restructuring of them on new principles. “Collective farms should be given a different form, leaving only the grain wedge in collective use - the basis, and leaving everything else to the collective farmers themselves, significantly expanding household plots for this purpose.”
International trade."The USSR must establish brisk commercial relations with America, establish a golden ruble rate and decisively raise wages."
Literature."The unification of literature, the absence of literary groups and the struggle between them have led to an incredible decrease in the literary level of the country, and the government does not see this, being concerned with only one thing - the protection of the existing order." “Our literature is like a race of runners with tied legs, writers only think about how not to say something superfluous. Therefore, it is degrading and today has nothing in common with the great literature that brought Russia worldwide fame. The nationalization of literature is a destructive absurdity, it needs free breathing, the absence of fear and a constant desire to please the authorities, otherwise it perishes, which we see. The Union of Soviet Writers is a state department, disunity reigns among writers, they do not feel literature is a vital matter and work, as it were, for the owner, trying to please him.
Public relations.“The intelligentsia does not take the place that belongs to it by right, it plays the role of a servant, while it should be a leading force. Dogmatism reigns supreme. The Soviet government keeps the intelligentsia in a black body, in the position of a teacher or student in the home of a wealthy merchant or retired general. Courage and daring are demanded of it in the field of scientific thought, but it is constrained in every possible way in the field of scientific and political thought, and intellectual progress is a single, complex phenomenon. In the USSR, the intelligentsia is in the position of a man who is required to have both the valor of a lion and the timidity of a hare. They shout about creative daring and bold innovation - and are afraid of every fresh word. The result of this situation is the stagnation of creative thought, our backwardness in the field of science (the atomic bomb, penicillin). For the fruitful work of people, an appropriate material environment and moral atmosphere are needed, which are not in the USSR. (Indirect evidence of Lieutenant Colonel Rublev's non-participation in the compilation of Solovyov's "program" is lexical: wherever the writer speaks of daring, the investigator writes down "tormenting" in the protocol.)
In my opinion, this is a completely outstanding text, amazing not only because of the discrepancy between time and circumstances. In later and more “vegetarian” times, under Khrushchev and, even more so, under Brezhnev, after the 20th and 22nd party congresses, a dissident movement arose in the country, a discussion began (even if only in samizdat or in intellectual kitchens) about the fate of the country and ways to reform it. But even then, it was mainly conducted from the standpoint of socialist, “true” Marxism-Leninism, cleansed of Stalinism.
Solovyov in his testimony appears as a supporter of another, "liberal soil" ideology. Here again a parallel arises with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who, almost thirty years later, will set out very similar theses: “Woe to the nation whose literature is interrupted by the intervention of force: this is not just a violation of “freedom of the press”, this is the closing of the national heart, the excision of the national memory” (Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1972). "Our 'ideological' Agriculture has already become a laughing stock for the whole world ... because we do not want to admit our collective farm mistake. There is only one way out for us to be a well-fed country: to abandon forced collective farms ... The primitive economic theory, which declared that only the worker gives rise to values, and did not see the contribution of either the organizers or engineers ... The Advanced Teaching. And collectivization. And the nationalization of small crafts and services (which made the life of ordinary citizens unbearable)” (“Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union”, 1973).
In Solovyov's testimony, the form is no less surprising than the content. He does not use the words "slander", "betrayal", "fake" and the like. This vocabulary of investigative questions, but not the answers of the person under investigation. Solovyov willingly and in detail sets out his views, without giving them an assessment and without demonstrating remorse. The answers are calm, filled with respect for the topic and the very procedure for exchanging views with the lieutenant colonel.
« question What motives prompted you to embark on such an anti-Soviet path?
answer I must say that I have never been a completely Soviet person, that for me the concept of “Russian” has always overshadowed the concept of “Soviet”.
All this is reminiscent, in today's language, "subtle trolling" of the opponent. He is trained to unearth deeply hidden (and often completely absent) sedition in the testimony, casuistic methods of “catching” - Solovyov’s testimony is so redundant that Rublev is often stumped by them and does not undertake to spin the flywheel of accusations further. Many lines of inquiry are cut off by him - he stops inquiries "at the most interesting place." Here is another passage, again referring to the late Solzhenitsyn:
« answer I put forward the wording that there are Russian writers, and there are writers in Russian.
question Decipher the meaning of these words of yours.
answer By Russian writers, I included writers whose lives are inextricably linked with the historical destinies, joys and sorrows of Russia, with its historical significance in the world. As for the writers in Russian, I included the “southwestern school”, inspired by V. Kataev, Yu. Olesha and others. Most representatives of this group, like, for example, the poet Kirsanov, in my opinion, do not care what to write about. For them, literature is only an arena for verbal juggling and verbal balancing act.
(It is interesting that Solovyov does not divide into “Russians” and “Russian-speaking” at all on a national basis, referring, in particular, to the latter Kataev and Olesha.)
How does the testimony of witnesses for the prosecution fit into this situation (the “investigator-defendant” relationship, Solovyov’s self-accusation) (the investigation and the court did not turn to witnesses for the defense in those years)? What did Leonid Vasilievich himself say about them, who did he “point to”? In general, his line of behavior can be described as follows: "compromising - only about those already convicted, all others - and above all, those arrested - to the best of their ability to shield."
“Sedykh never supported me, upset me; her political views were stable”; “Rusin, Vitkovich, Kovalenkov told me more than once that I should stop drinking and chattering, meaning by this anti-Soviet conversations”; “I don’t remember the names of the writers named by Ulin”; “Rusin said that I put him in a false position and that henceforth in conversations on political topics I have to take care of myself, otherwise he will have to inform the appropriate authorities about my anti-Soviet attacks.
And vice versa: “Egorashvili inspired me with the idea that it is necessary to distinguish the real goals of the state from its declarations, slogans and promises, that all promises, manifestos, declarations are nothing more than scraps of paper”; “Nasedkin said: collective farms are a dogmatic, invented form of rural life, if the peasants drag on their existence somehow, it is only at the expense of the fat layer accumulated during the years of the NEP”; “Makarov declared that the liquidation of the kulaks is essentially the decapitation of the village, the elimination of the most healthy, hardworking and initiative element from it” (writer Ivan Makarov was shot in 1937, literary critic David Egorashvili and poet Vasily Nasedkin - in 1938).
This situation, apparently, suited the investigator. He was not particularly zealous, satisfied with detailed confessions; Rublev did not set himself the task of creating a large “resonant” case with many accused.
Apparently, therefore, other defendants in his case did not share the fate of Solovyov. And above all - Viktor Vitkovich, who was with him in "friendly and business relationships." It's hard for us to imagine what it's like: long years be close comrades and co-authors, and then give accusatory evidence against each other (“I argued that the collective farms are unprofitable, and the collective farmers, due to the low cost of the workday, have no incentive to work. Vitkovich agreed with me on this ... Viktor basically shared my anti-Soviet views on questions of literature” – of all the witnesses for the prosecution, Solovyov said this only about Vitkovich). There are no testimonies from Vitkovich in the open part of the case, but this is what Solovyov writes in the petition: “I saw Vitkovich upon my return from the camps, and he told me that he gave his testimony against me under incredible pressure, under all sorts of threats. However, his testimony was restrained; As far as I remember, the heaviest accusation that came from him was as follows: “Soloviev said that Stalin would not share the glory of the great commander and winner in the Patriotic War with anyone, and therefore he would try to push marshals Zhukov and Rokossovsky into the shadows.”
A photograph testifies to the meeting “upon returning”: two middle-aged people are sitting on a bench. One will live another quarter of a century, the other will die in 1962. But their best books have already been written: Vitkovich's fairy tales ("The Day of Miracles. Funny Tales", co-authored with Grigory Yagdfeld) and the dilogy about Khoja Nasreddin. The one about which Leonid Vasilievich reported during interrogation:
« question What statements and petitions do you have to the prosecutor during the investigation of your case?
answer During the course of the investigation, I have no petitions or statements. I would ask the investigation and the prosecutor's office to send me to serve my sentence in prison, and not in a camp, after the end of my case. In prison I could have written the second volume of my Nasreddin in Bukhara.
Ilya Bernstein - about adult themes of children's literature, the era of the thaw and the book tastes of different generations
Philologists have recently realized that Russian children's literature, especially at the time of its heyday - the era of the thaw in the USSR, tells about its time and people no less deeply than adult literature. One of the first to open this treasure was Ilya Bernshtein, an independent publisher. He began publishing children's books with several hundred pages of commentary. And they diverge, becoming popular reading among adults who once grew up on "Deniska's stories" or "Dunno on the Moon." The publisher spoke in more detail about his projects, personal path and children's literature in general in an interview with Realnoe Vremya.
“The time was like this: youth, impudence, hatred and extremely low professional requirements”
Ilya, your path to the book and publishing world was not easy and long. Can you tell us what you had to go through before becoming what is known as an "independent craft publisher"?
When I had to choose a future profession, it was 1984, and my ideas about the possibilities were very narrow. The previous two generations of my "ancestors" went the same way, in general: in the company that met in my parents' house, all the men were candidates of technical sciences and lab heads. I had neither the ability nor the interest to do so. But others were skeptical about any other specialty for a man.
I took the path of least resistance, trained as a software engineer, and even worked in my field for a while. Luckily for me, the 1990s soon came, when a choice arose - either to leave the country, as the absolute majority in my circle did, or to stay and live in a new situation, when all niches opened up and you could do anything.
I have loved books since childhood. Just as an object - I liked a lot about them besides the text and illustrations. I read the output, memorized the names of typefaces (fonts), I was worried. If the books were commentary, I often read them before the text. Growing up, I became a book collector. Every day, returning from work, I made a transfer at the Kuznetsky Most, where a speculative book market functioned for many years. In the darkness (especially in winter) silent people walked or stood, approached each other, exchanged conspiratorial phrases, stepped aside and exchanged books for money. I spent almost an hour there almost every day and spent all the money that I earned as a “young specialist”.
But I didn't buy books to read them. From my large library I have read units of percent. At that time, the book was a rarity, an object of hunting. I had a sports interest. And I did not understand what to do with this interest. The first thing that came to mind was collecting. Literary monuments, Academia, Akvilon - the standard way. And if they asked me how I see my future, I would answer (maybe I answered) that I would be a salesman in a second-hand bookstore, but not in Russia, but next to some Western university. But all this was speculative, and then I was not going to do anything for this.
Then I caught such a fish in troubled waters: many, having earned their first money, decided that the next thing they would do was to publish a newspaper. And I became the editor of such newspapers. These editions rarely survived to the second or third issue, although they began stormily. So in a couple of years I edited half a dozen different newspapers and magazines on a variety of topics, even religious ones. The time was like this: youth, adventurism, impudence, hatred and extremely low professional requirements, and moral ones too - everyone deceived each other in some way, and it’s embarrassing to remember much that I did then.
Then, as a result of all this, an editorial team was formed - a photographer, designer, proofreader, editor. And we decided not to look for the next customer, but to create an advertising agency. And I was the person in it who was responsible to the customer. Those were the terrible times of night vigils in the printing house. And all this resulted in the fact that for five years I had my own small printing house.
“I have loved books since childhood. Just as an object - I liked a lot about them besides the text and illustrations. I read the output, memorized the names of typefaces (fonts), I was worried about it. Photo philologist.livejournal.com
- How did the regular economic crises in the country affect you?
I am literally their child. They made a big difference. I had a printing house, a design department, and I was proud to say that all my employees had higher art education. And then the crisis began, I had to fire people and become a designer myself, make various booklets, brochures, exhibition catalogs, albums.
But all this time I wanted to make books. I remembered this and easily parted with my comparatively successful and financial occupations, if it seemed to me that the door to a more bookish world was opening. So from a manufacturer of advertising printing, I became a designer, then - a book designer. Life sent me teachers, for example, Vladimir Krichevsky, an outstanding designer. In the course of, in general, a casual acquaintance, I offered him to work for him for free, if only he would teach me. And it seems to have given me more than any other teaching (and certainly more than regular "high school").
When I became a designer, it turned out that in small publishing houses there is a need for total editing. That is, it would be nice if the designer could work with both illustrations and text, be able to both add and cut. And I became such a versatile editor who does literary, artistic and technical editing himself. And so far I remain so.
And 10 years ago, when there was another crisis and many publishing houses left the market, and the rest reduced the volume of their output, I decided to make books, as I already knew how: all by myself. And I started with my favorite children's books - those that, as I thought, undeservedly fell out of cultural use. In 2009, my first book was published - "A Dog's Life" by Ludwik Ashkenazi with illustrations by Tim Yarzombek, I not only prepared it, but also financed the publication. The publishing house, listed on the title page, was engaged in sales. I made a dozen (or a little more) books, was noticed by colleagues, other publishers offered to cooperate with them. First "Scooter", then "White Crow". Then there was just a boom of small children's publishing houses.
Accidents have always played an important role in my life. I discussed with colleagues the publication of books with large complex commentaries. While they were thinking whether to agree to this (I needed partners, because the projects promised to be expensive), everything was already “building” in my mind, so when everyone refused, I had to open my own publishing house for this. It's called The A&B Publishing Project, and the last two dozen books have come out under that name.
- How is the work of your publishing house or, as it is also called, a workshop?
This is largely dictated by the economic situation. I don't have the money to hire qualified employees, but somehow I have to attract people so that they want to work for me. And I propose to recreate some kind of pre-industrial production and education. This is now in use all over the world. This is not a conveyor production of a book, when it has many performers and each is responsible for his own section.
I am creating, as it were, a medieval workshop: a person comes, he does not know how, he is a student, he is taught on the basis of working material, he is given work in accordance with his qualifications, and this is not a schoolboy problem, but a real book. I pay him not a scholarship, but a small salary, which is less than what I would pay a ready-made specialist, but he gets an education and practice. And if my student wants to open his workshop, I will help, I can even donate the idea of the first book or bring it together with publishers who will agree to publish his book.
I have never worked with publishers as a hired hand, only as a companion. The book legally belongs to me, the copyright is registered with me. The publishing house does not pay me a fee, but shares with me the proceeds. Of course, the publishing house does not like this situation, it is ready to go for it only if it understands that it will not be able to make such a book on its own, or if it will be too expensive. You must be able to make such books, for the sake of which the publishing house will agree to accept your conditions.
I don't do things that I'm not interested in, but supposedly successful. This has not happened in my practice yet, although it would be time already. Rather, an idea arises, and I implement it. I always start a series, this is right from a marketing point of view: people get used to the design and buy a book without even knowing the author, due to the reputation of the series. But when mass production is established, five or ten such books are made, it ceases to be interesting to me, and the next idea appears.
Now we are releasing the Ruslit series. At first it was conceived as "Lit. monuments", but with reservations: books written in the 20th century for teenagers, provided with comments, but not academic, but entertaining, multidisciplinary, not only historical and philological, but also socio-anthropological, etc. P.
“I have never worked with publishers as an employee, only as a companion. The book legally belongs to me, the copyright is registered with me. The publishing house does not pay me a fee, but shares the proceeds with me. Photo papmambook.ru
“We are like pioneers who just staked out plots and move on”
How did you come to write big, serious commentaries on children's books?
I also made comments in other series, it was always interesting to me. I am such a bore who can easily, reading a book to a child or watching a movie together, suddenly stop and ask: “Do you understand what I mean?”
I was lucky, I found colleagues who are professional philologists and at the same time cheerful people, for whom the framework of the traditional philological commentary is too narrow. Oleg Lekmanov, Roman Leibov, Denis Dragunsky ... I won't list them all - suddenly I forget someone. We have published 12 Ruslit books. There are plans for the next year or two.
It so happened that these books with comments suddenly shot. Previously, if such a request existed, it was in a latent, hidden form, there was nothing of the kind, it never occurred to anyone. But now that we have it, it seems self-evident that it is possible to publish "Deniska's Stories" with a two-hundred-page scientific apparatus.
Who needs it? Well, for example, grown-up readers of these books, those who loved these books and want to understand what the secret was, to check their impressions. On the other hand, the children's literature that we choose gives us the opportunity to try out a new genre - these are not comments in the generally accepted sense of the word (explanation of incomprehensible words and realities, bio-bibliographic references), but a story about the place and time of the action, which is based on the text .
We explain many points that do not require explanation, but we have something to tell about this. Sometimes it's just our childhood, with which we are closely connected and we know a lot that you can't read in books. This even applies to the Dragoon. We are younger than Deniska, but then the reality changed slowly, and it is not difficult for us to imagine what happened ten years earlier.
- Previously, no one was engaged in commenting on children's literature?
Children's literature was not considered by serious philologists until recently as a field of professional activity. Whether it's the Silver Age! And some Dunno - it's not serious. And we just ended up in the Klondike - this is a huge number of discoveries, we do not have time to process them. We are like pioneers who just staked out plots and move on: it’s so interesting what’s next that there is no time and desire to develop an open plot. This is unknown. And any touch to it and going to the archive opens the abyss. And the novelty of our “adult about childish” approach also allows us to use interesting research optics. It turned out that it is very "channel".
- And who buys?
Humanitarian-oriented people buy. Those who buy any intellectual adult literature. It becomes a kind of intellectual literature for adults. Despite the fact that there is always the actual work made for children, large-scaled, with "children's" pictures. And the comment is removed to the end, it does not interfere with getting an immediate impression. You can read a book and stop there. Although the presence of a voluminous commentary, of course, makes the book more expensive.
“They could write for children without lowering the demands on themselves, without kneeling either literally or figuratively”
It is clear that the situation with literature is not constant. One would assume that at any time there are great, good, average and bad writers, the percentage of them is approximately comparable. And at any time outstanding works are created. But it is not so. There was a Golden Age, a Silver Age, and between them - not so dense. And during the years of the thaw, many good children's writers appeared, not just because freedom came (albeit very limited). There are many factors here. A lot depends on circumstances, on individuals.
Thaw is the pinnacle of Russian children's literature, then many bright and free talented people. The thaw did not abolish censorship, but gave birth to a desire to try to "get around the slingshots." Writers still could not publish their bold “adult” texts. And children's literature, in which there was much less censorship, allowed those who, in a situation of free choice, would most likely not have chosen children's literature to realize themselves.
There was also, so to speak, a "business approach". If you read what Dovlatov published in the Koster magazine, it will become embarrassing - this is an outright opportunistic hack-work. But there were many "adult" writers who were disgusted by such things even in detlit.
Informal literary groups were formed. I have a series of "Native speech" in the publishing house "Scooter" - this is the Leningrad literature of the thaw. When I started publishing this, I did not even imagine that such a phenomenon existed. But according to the results of the “field research”, it became clear that these books and these authors have a lot in common. Victor Golyavkin, Sergey Volf, Igor Efimov, Andrey Bitov, many of the living and writing, for example, Vladimir Voskoboynikov, Valery Popov. The circle, which is usually defined through the names of Dovlatov and Brodsky, is people of approximately the same time of birth (pre-war or war years), children of repressed (or miraculously non-) parents, brought up outside the Stalinist paradigm, to whom, relatively speaking, the 20th Congress of the CPSU did not to which he did not open his eyes.
And they could write for children without lowering the demands on themselves, without kneeling either literally or figuratively. Not only did they not abandon the ideas and tasks of their adult prose, not only did they not put up with the oppression of censorship, but even in children's literature they were not guided by the considerations "Will the little reader understand this?" This is also one of the important gains of the thaw - then not only books ceased to be instructive, didactic and ideologically loaded, the general tone changed.
Previously, in children's literature, a hierarchy was clearly built. There is a small child, there is an adult. The adult is smart, the child is stupid. The child makes mistakes, and the adult helps him correct himself. And here, time after time, the child turns out to be deeper, thinner, smarter than an adult. And the adult is shocked.
For example, in the story "The Girl on the Ball": Deniska learns that "she" has left - the artist Tanechka Vorontsova, whom he saw only in the arena and still in his dreams. How does dad react? "Come on, let's go to a cafe, eat ice cream and drink soda." And the child? Or in another story: “How did you decide to give up a dump truck for this worm?” “How can you not understand?! After all, he is alive! And it glows!
“Dragunsky is a skilled fighter of the censorship front, he was not a dissident - a man from the world of variety, successful, and one cannot imagine him as a writer “from the underground” and a victim of censorship. It would be more correct to speak of censoring his stories after his death. It's a nasty thing, and it's all over the place." Photo donna-benta.livejournal.com
On the other hand, in pedagogy, the role of an adult, looking down from above, has undergone a noticeable revision in the thaw, and this has benefited literature.
A lot has changed in terms of aesthetics. Those who came to children's literature, the conditional circle of Dovlatov, tried to patch up, to connect the broken connection of times - after all, it was still possible to find those who caught and remembered the Silver Age, for example. After all, young people, in their own words, according to Brodsky, came to literature "from cultural non-existence." Bitov told me: the previous generation was decently educated, knew languages, and when writers could not publish, they had other opportunities - literary translation, academic career. "And we, yesterday's engineers, had no other option than to go into children's literature." On the one hand, they were brought up on the newly arrived European modernism: Hemingway, writers of the "lost generation", Remarque. And with that, they came into children's literature. Children's literature then drew from various sources.
- You said that there was some kind of censorship in children's literature. What exactly was censored?
Dragunsky is a skilled fighter of the censorship front, he was not a dissident - a man from the world of variety, successful, and one cannot imagine him as a writer "from the underground" and a victim of censorship. It would be more correct to speak of censoring his stories after his death. It's a nasty thing, and it's all over the place. A simple comparison between the lifetime edition and the posthumous edition reveals hundreds of changes. They can be reduced to several categories: for example, it is decency. For example, in the story “The wheels of tra-ta-ta are singing,” Deniska rides a train with her dad, they spend the night on the same shelf. And dad asks: “Where are you going to lie down? At the wall? And Deniska says: “On the edge. After all, I drank two glasses of tea, I will have to get up at night. In the thaw times, not so sanctimonious, there was no crime in this. But in modern editions no tea.
Another, more complex and paradoxical, type of editing. Literary editing presupposes the existence of norms and rules, which the editor is trained in, and he can help the inept author to correct obvious flaws. Often this is necessary. But in the case of a truly artistic text, any editorial smooth writing is worse than the author's roughness.
When I was working with Golyavkin's story "My Good Dad", I got a royal gift - his own correction: before his death, he was preparing a reprint, took his book from the shelf and straightened it by hand (I assume that he restored what he once came with to the editor). Imagine two dialogue options: in one, “said”, “said”, and in the other - “flashed”, “grunted” and “hissed”. The second option is an editorial correction: the basics of the profession - you can’t put cognate words side by side. But “said, said, said” is better: this is how the child’s speech, his character and manners are conveyed, it is he who tells, and not an adult. And deliberate correctness betrays the censor.
Dragunsky was a spontaneous modernist, many of his tricks are straight out of a textbook on the history of literature of the 20th century. Let's say stream of consciousness. A long period without dots, with endless repetitions, as if Deniska is excitedly talking, waving his hands: “And he told me, and I told him ...” This was under Dragunsky, but in existing publications the text is cut into neat phrases, cleaned up, repetitions removed, cognate words nearby, everything is clean (we restored the old version in our edition).
Dragunsky is very sensitive to the word, he wrote "crumb" and not "crumb", but the editor corrected it. A book like "Deniska's Stories", an undoubted literary achievement (that is, first of all, not "what", but "how"), is a text where all words are in their place, and one cannot be replaced by another without significant losses. Not all children's writers make similar stylistic requirements, but he has everything exactly, subtly, a lot of necessary little things. For example, the story "Top down diagonally" (about the house painters who left their inventory and the children messed up). In the commentary, we write that the painter was not accidentally called Sanka, Raechka and Nelly, this is an obvious social cross-section: the limiter Sanka, the fashionista Nelly and Raechka are mother's daughter, did not go to college the first time, earns seniority. Dragunsky, of course, is playing an adult game, this is read by his circle, but this is also a feature of children's Russian literature of the thaw: it fundamentally does not have a clear age orientation and a lot is embedded in it. These are not figs in your pocket, but rather landmarks "for your own."
“Books about the Great Patriotic War, despite the powerful patriotic trend, parents are in no hurry to buy”
- What children's books struck you as an adult? For example, I recently read the story "Sugar Child", we had an interview with its author Olga Gromova.
- “Sugar Child” is a brilliant book (by the way, I published a book about the same thing - both repressed parents and life in evacuation in Uzbekistan - “The Girl in Front of the Door”, written on the table in censored times and published only in samizdat. Very I recommend it. And a child of 7-10 years old will be quite tough).
The USSR is a huge country, the literary word was very significant, many people wrote and a lot of things were written. We have touched only the very tops. If someone just undertook to read a half-century selection of some regional magazine like Siberian Lights or Ural Pathfinder, they would surely find so many treasures there that no one knew about.
I don't have time to publish all the books I want. This trend, in the creation of which I played an important role - the reissue of the Soviet - is already somewhat limiting me. And I postpone or even cancel the planned. For example, I was thinking about publishing books by Sergei Ivanov. He is known as the author of the script for the cartoon "Last Year's Snow Was Falling", but besides "Snow", he wrote a lot of good things. “Olga Yakovleva”, “Former Bulka and his daughter” (there, by the way, they seriously talk about death, part of the action takes place in an oncological hospital - this topic, according to popular belief, was not touched upon in Soviet children). But my main shock from acquaintance with not read in childhood is “Waiting for the Goat” by Evgeny Dubrovin. The book is so tense, so terrible, that I did not dare to take it. This is about the post-war famine, the late 1940s. And then Rech republished it - well, in such a kind of "exactly" way.
“I don’t have time to publish all the books I want. This trend, in the creation of which I played an important role - the reissue of the Soviet one - already limits me somewhat. And I postpone or even cancel the planned. Photo jewish.ru
Many children's writers we spoke to say that in Russia, children's literature that deals with controversial topics (such as suicide, incest, homosexuality) is not accepted by parents, although in the West such books are received calmly. How do you feel about it?
In the West, probably, it is considered: if something exists and a child can face it, literature should not pass by. Therefore, incest and pedophilia are quite a “topic”. But in fact, our parent community has about the same rejection of traditional, completely open topics. I am based on personal experience- many times traded at book fairs in different cities. And I talked a lot with my parents.
Books about the Great Patriotic War, despite the powerful patriotic trend and the great efforts of the state, parents are in no hurry to buy. “It’s hard, why is this, don’t you have anything more fun?” The fact that the lack of empathy, the ability to empathize, the lack of a special attitude towards the development of empathy is one of the main features of the Russian modern society. You can see it from here, on the other side of the bookshelf.
People don't want to buy a book about a disabled child or an incurable disease, or about death in general, because it's "indecent" or conflicts with their pedagogical attitudes. It’s hard - “he will grow up and find out himself, but for now it’s not necessary.” That is, the problem is not at all in the promotion of texts about incest, heavy drama books are sold poorly and bought, parents themselves do not want to read it. Well, not all, but most of them.
- What do you think about modern teenage literature in Russia?
I'm not doing it as a publisher yet, but this year I hope to publish the first modern book written now about the 90s. It seems to me that in order to flourish, you need to professionalize the environment. In order for 10 outstanding books to appear, you need to write and publish 100 just good ones. To learn how to tell stories well. And this, in my opinion, has already been achieved. I'm not sure that 10 outstanding books have been written, but that 25 or even 50 good ones have been written, I vouch. New children's writers are now writing in such a way that it's hard for the book award's expert board to pick winners.
Natalia Fedorova
Reference
Ilya Bernstein- independent editor, commentator and publisher, winner of the Marshak Prize in the "Project of the Decade" nomination, is engaged in the reprinting of Soviet children's classics and works from the "thaw" with comments and additional materials. Publisher ("Publishing project A and B"), editor, commentator, compiler of the series "Ruslit" ("A and B"), "Native speech" and "How it was" (together with the Samokat publishing house) and other publications.
