Translated material
Memory of Yuri Schmidt
In society
Memory of Yuri Schmidt
January 12, 2013 Viktor Shenderovich
You noticed how it became empty?
When people like Yuri Markovich Schmidt go away, the feeling of emptiness, the sparse of the world becomes almost physical. The idea that he was in the world was encouraging almost irrationally. It cannot be that everything was bad if there is Schmidt!
His incredible smile, his warmth, his willingness to help.
There was no bitterness in it at all, adhered teeth, bile, although half a century of unequal litigation with a dimensionless, gloomy, cruel state could seem to have erased this unforgettable smile from his face.
But he smiled! There was not a gram of misanthropy in it. He was happy with friendship, enjoyed poetry with youthful power, was a slight and witty person. He reached for people and believed in people, apparently guided by himself.
Yuri Markovich, of course, was not a lawyer in the "Novorossiysk" meaning of the word. We have lawyers, like dogs-Kucheren, Astakhov, Padva ... We ask for mercy if the Kremlin permits them, and you will have enough grandmas.
Schmidt was a defender!
He was a Don Quixote, but Don Quixote well armed and completely adequate. He was a brilliant professional, but still the main thing in him was precisely this-a feeling of calling, willingness to immediately enter the battle for a person!
A few years ago, I got into his house happy - dinner, friends, a good table, a wonderful company ... He could not talk about anything but Khodorkovsky. The injustice, which he could not prevent, sat in him with a splinter. He really suffered from this - already seriously ill himself, all the time he returned to the damned hammering plot ...
He counted the world from good - this is not uncommon in early youth and a completely unique quality by seventy. Schmidt was unique, and suffered from the mismatch of the world with good.
In the Gospel of Matthew there is a phrase that struck me in my youth: "If the salt loses its strength, what will make it salty?" We see with longing and annoyance, every day, the salt loses its strength, becomes fresh, sluggish, sour-sweet, no ... we see like the peaks that we measured ourselves in our youth lies under new vile times with a dull landscape ...
But, thank God, the reference points remain, and they are in any time.
Yuri Markovich Schmidt was salt, and he did not lose strength.
Now he will remain with us - a name meaning dignity. Just do not hug, do not hear a voice ...
Without it, we will be even more lousy and harder, of course. The landscape still decreased, sagged and sorely. And only Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, as he can, is trying to console on such a day.
"Do not speak with longing: they are not, but with gratitude: they were ..."
Victor Shenderovich