Meetings

New head of the memoirs of Marina Efimova

Marina Efimova: In 1982–83, we began to “take the Blagod” of the Hermitage Publishing House, whose creator was my husband Igor Efimov, and the only regular employee was me. We started (mistakenly) with different meetings of Russian immigrants, where people converged to listen to the lectures of former dissidents and writers' performances. Igor often either performed there, or listened to the other speakers, and then I was one tried to sell books laid out on a tent of a folding table somewhere in the lobby.

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On top of the barriers with Ivan Tolstoy. Marina Efimova. Meetings

True, I had a young Sonechka assistant, with a quiet voice and intelligent manners - also a recent immigrant. Miniature, big -eyed, she reminded me of the heroine "Songs of Songs."

At conferences on advice, some mossy Trotskyist appeared, then the warlike like-minded people of Ogurtsov and his Vuphon, then a defiant old-fashioned monarchist ...

The immigrants who came to the educational gatherings were, as a rule, the elderly people - the owners of saving, but humiliating manuals for the poor, the parents of real immigrants, that is, those who left thoughtfully and determined. Usually, most of these elderly people, especially men, had acidic, displeased, offended faces. Dear posts in the past - from store directors to the administrators of theaters - they felt in emigration involuntary petitioners, and most importantly - people who are deprived of well -deserved respect and attention. And then suddenly-we, with our books, are inept merchants, who finally need something from them! They are free to give or not give us their $ 8, they can demonstrate to us their real status, their true significance. Talking with them was often conducted, as if on a stencil. The man spoke with compassionate contempt:

- I hurt you painfully for your books. And you have the authors ... you are not published by Tolstoy ... Well, who will read them, your authors? Some kind of Averintsev ...

The wife said hesitantly:

-Here are Aksyonov ... look, Boris (already in American with an emphasis on "o").

The husband irritatedly raised his voice:

- So what? .. What did we, Aksyonov in the Union did not read? Found than surprise! In general, let's go from here.

And he moved away from the table and intercepted a friend who was going to look at the books along the way, warning loudly:

-No, do not go, there is complete junk! .. Some kind of amateur performances ...

Once I went to the car for another stack of books and left Sonya at the table. When I returned, the next exposure was menacingly hanging over her - in appearance, not alien to the trade world. I hurried:

-Are you interested in anything?

He said with obvious pleasure, confident, instructive tone:

- Interested. Why can't your saleswoman answer elementary questions about the products that it sells?

I said with pressure:

- This is me - the saleswoman and will answer all your questions.

But the immigrant was sorry to lose a reason for sarcasm, and he asked, laughing:

- Who is she? Senior assistant to the younger seller?

I said:

- And she - knocked out!

Catalog of the publishing house "Hermitage"

The situation changed when we began to ride conferences on advice and Slavicism, where we (like other publishers) put our books on specially prepared tables on conferences - and on sale, and, most importantly, for the information of university professors and librarians. These trips were immediately successful: all Russian -speaking conferences gathered at our tables, left orders or bought it right there. Some knew Igor from his books, others willingly met and came to chat in between reports. They talked about our publishing house to others, and people always swiring around our tables. Sometimes at one such conference we earned more than a month of sales by mail.

At first we went to close conferences, then, by bucus, we increased the distance of trips from our headquarters (which was first in Michigan, then in New Jersey) and even reached wanderings to the Wild West. These consumer trips were great pleasure for me. In addition to the trip itself, there were a lot of unexpected or, conversely, ahead of time planned and long -awaited meetings, many new acquaintances, dozens of strange, amazing, bright, interesting or just colorful characters appeared and disappeared from our horizon. There were meetings with people with a great gift, whom we knew before only on their scientific work or art works, sometimes only by rumors. And meetings with old acquaintances were a real holiday - even with those with whom at home, before emigration, they talked little. The immigrant contingent was terribly colorful, mixed, sometimes unthinkable from the point of view of my circle in Leningrad. At conferences on advice, some mossy Trotskyist appeared, then the warlike like-minded people of Ogurtsov and his Vlobs, then a defiant old-fashioned monarchist ... Either the American liberal with a weak Russian language will suddenly come up to you on the sidelines-the propagandist of a fairly common idea of equal Stalinism and McCartism in America. He will look at you at your indignant disagreement with a childish look and ask in penetratively: "Well, would you like your dad to lose their jobs because of his views?" You tell him: "My dad spent 7 years in a polar concentration camp as a joke." But you see that the liberal no longer listens or does not understand you well, pats the hand convincingly, leads his bright look and will go further ... And then suddenly a furious anti -communist will appear, so unlucky that all recent immigrants consider it infected with corrugated ideas and therefore unworthy of communication with people, unfinished communism. These were most often met in the second emigration, tapal (according to the third) possible cooperation with the Nazis. There was such a character from the second wave: he came up with one of the acquaintances (the Russian squint was open on his chest, there is a large cross there), shook me in a strong handshake so that my head twitched and minted: "Rurik Dudin! Vlasovets!" In all this unusual okroshka, every Leningrad or Moscow acquaintance was worth its weight in gold - here at least it was possible to count on the same coordinate system.

"Russian artists live in New York?!" The professor did not know a single name, even Shemyakin

However, one of the first emigrant acquaintances to have turned into a long friendship was not to get acquainted with Leningrad, and not with the Muscovite, but with the Kievan. Even when both Igor and I worked in the Ardis publishing house, the year 79-80, the professional showers showed us the picture of the artist-immigrant David Miraitsky recently bought. The picture was large, written in oil, and in it was my favorite combination of slightly distorted, slightly caricatured modernist forms with a thorough, classic picturesque technique. In the picture of a deaf olive tone, a company of courtyard drinks-squat shapes, cunning, rude faces-a symbolic genre scene of Russian backyards of the late 20th century was depicted. Igor, looking at her, said: "Directly a new Bruegel. Kyiv." And when in Ann-Arbor, at the University of Michigan, a conference of Russian emigrant art was held, to which he was invited among others and Miraitsky, we called him to us for lunch-along with Sergey Dovlatov (also a participant in the conference), with whom we were close friends in Leningrad. The appearance of David was not Brueghelevskaya, but the Mannerist-El-Greek character. But he was not a cheerful character in El-Greek-in a kind of noisy and straightforward. Our acquaintance began with this lunch.

By the way, a small retreat of the second Gost at that dinner - Dovlatov. The fact that Sergei was a man of great charm is now known to everyone - it has been testified by many. Moreover, in his character there were two rarely combined properties: the omnivorous communication - as befits the writer of his genre - with almost capricious selectivity. The good nature and openness of his manners deceived many, but he himself knew this property very well. Once, when Igor and I already lived in New Jersey, we, together with Sergey, were on some gathering where we met Valentin Turchin-a famous Moscow physicist and mathematician, the creator of the new programming language-Refal. For us, it was especially attractive that Turchin showed himself as a fearless human rights activist-he created and headed the Soviet section of the International Amnesty in the 60s. In addition, he was a cheerful person, a lover of jokes and puns. He released a book in Moscow in 1966 in 1966, physicists joke, and when he took the laboratory and squeezed out in 1974 in emigration, the duck was launched about him that he was publishing the book "Physicists were in a cold." Both Turchins-Valya and his wife Tanya-were open in Moscow for communication, friendly, cordially invited to visit and we all liked it. But when we returned home with Sergey, he said some phrase that began with the words:

Valentin Turchin

- When you are friends with the Turchins ...

I laughed:

“Will you be friends with them?”

And Sergey said, hesitation:

- No, do not think, I really liked them. I just know myself ...

And the Turchins and I were friends for many years, and in their wonderful, grown by Tanya, many funny, crowded and gluttony weekends were carried out. Valya Turchin sacredly believed in science, and his faith sometimes reached the boundaries of imagination. For example, he called in New York a very representative symposium, which was called, it seems, like this: "Scientific justifications of the possibility of immortality." After that, Igor and I gave him a T -shirt with the inscription “Immorality Today, Immortaly Tomorrow.”

"In America, only a person who is already famous can become famous"

The real acquaintance began with the artist David Miraitsky in 1985, when we settled in New Jersey and turned out to be almost neighbors: the Miraitsky lived in the New York district of Washington Hights, and only Hudson, which we crossed the bridge of George Washington from each other. Their "microdistrict" was, if you use artistic comparisons, Shagalovsky - winding, sometimes cool, from a hill to the hill of the street. There lived a lot of orthodox Jews, who slowly wandered through the streets and added similarities with the Shagal. I remember our first visit. The day was sunny, and perhaps because of this, the apartment of David and Lina Miraitsky seemed small and dark. And the dark -time hallway was literally illuminated by a large picture - the turn of women in the bakery - women, undoubtedly, Soviet, dressed tasteless in terms of fashion, but with delightful, bold picturesqueness. Again, I did not come to mind, but a noticeable and exciting connection with Bruegel. David put on a chair before us one after another picture - mainly genre scenes (including miniature oil) that fascinated me - and slightly grotesque, written with good -natured mockery of characters and, most importantly, a bright, unexpected, risky combination of colors. I fell in love with his work. By the way, it was the grotesque in the image of "Soviet reality" that brought Miratsky in the early 70s to the Kyiv prison. And in 1975, he and his family had to immigrate. David, apparently afraid of the simplified, too satirical interpretation of his paintings, immediately told us with the undoubted sincerity that he terribly loves his characters, especially women: "I grew up in a circle where femininity certainly demanded brightly painted lips and nails covered with red varnish. And I still like it."

David understood the psychology of an excited viewer well. I was leading me on our first visit in an apartment, hung with his work, he led me to the bedroom of his eight -year -old daughter, where a large picture hung over the bed, and quickly said:

- Do not make mistakes - this is the work of my daughter.

Mercifully did not want to put me in an awkward position-apparently, one of the visitors was already caught.

The artists are generous to those who sincerely love them, and on the walls of our house there are two beautiful drawings of Miraitsky presented to us, two of his sketches made near our new house in Pennsylvania, and several good reproductions: from one big picture ("Dancing in the restaurant") and with several delightful miniatures. In these works, as well as in most of his later paintings, immigrants have already become the characters - the inhabitants of Brighton Beach, the regulars of Russian restaurants.

In 2012, an article appeared on the Internet about Mirutsk young American artist Emil Robinson. Of course, he notices the satire in David’s painting, but feels perfectly her secondaryness and with sincere admiration describes the features of his picturesque style. And not only the picturesque - the American penetratively noticed one (lost) psychological peculiarity of Miraitsky genre. He writes, for example:

David Miraitsky

"In his works, women always reign (Steal the Show). When he writes women, he is the most daring and sensitive. But having taken a closer look, you begin to pay attention to men written by more muted colors, always in the role of accompanying, but with slightly detached faces-as if internally they are occupied by something else. Men in Miraitsky’s paintings, no matter how caricature are-they were-they were-they were- The hypostasis of the artist, a person in love with women, but a leading life full of thoughts. "

This wonderful article of the fate of the artist has not changed. While we lived in New Jersey, we went to David’s exhibitions every year-to the small galleries of Manhattan. His paintings were bought or not, and each time we hoped that his work would finally notice and appreciate. Back in Michigan, in 1982, we published a little book of Igor Guberman "Guberman Bomerang" with drawings by Miraitsky. There were no big response to the drawings, only the printing workers who printed the book said that the book was lovely: "Its Really Cute."

In 1992, a noisy scandalous exhibition of young artists and sculptors, brought from London and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art, was held in New York. I remember a real pig at the exhibition - in the longitudinal section; A bust of a person made of frozen blood; The statue of the Madonna, performed by the African sculptor from the dried out of the buffalo. There is nothing more left in memory. I made a program for this exhibition for the radio and interviewed one of the museum curators - a professor of art history at the University of NYU. He defended from my skepticism the artistic value of the works presented at the exhibition, but without much enthusiasm, resting more on the originality of the plans and youth of the performers. And at the end of the interview I asked:

- So you have arranged an exhibition in the museum, which people are mainly driven by the curiosity of visitors to the Kuntsmar, amazed not by beauty and skill, but rather the physiological strangeness of the fantasy of the authors. Meanwhile, in New York and the surroundings lives and works no less than a dozen interesting Russian artists of my generation. Why not arrange their exhibition?

The professor asked with a sincere amazement:

-Russian artists live in New York?!

It was my turn to be amazed. I have listed everyone I remembered. The professor did not know a single name, even Shemyakin (!). Well, of course, - neither Tulipanov, nor Galanin, nor Miraitsky. The professor was familiar with the collection of Norton Dodge at the Museum of the New Jersey University of Ratgers, which presented works (1956–1991) of many non-conformist artists. But of the artists now living in New York, he knew only one name-the conceptual artist Grigory Bruskin.

On the Internet “Wikipedia”, Bruskin (Grisha Bruskin) is called "one of the few Russian artists who became successful in the West." (Let me remind you: the phenomenon of Bruskin is that in 1988, at the only auction of the company “Sotbis”, a painting by Bruskin “Fundamental Lexicon” was exhibited-the endless rows of men, as if made of light metal; demonstrative uniformity in the spirit of a Warhol. Each of these men and women-holds some kind of somewhat in their hands. A symbol of Sovietness: the Metropolitan letter “M”, the figure of 85%, a portrait of Stalin, a defiantly bold picture used such a frantic success from foreign buyers that the director Milos Forman who bought it paid an amount of $ 930 thousand. Here, the remark of the pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazi in his (published by the Hermitage) book “Overcoming the Borders” that struck me at one time comes to memory: “In America,” writes Ashkenazi, “only a person who is already famous can become famous.”

Returning to the first travels of our publishing house, trips to California are especially memorable. My acquaintance with this country (otherwise this state cannot be called) began with the regions surrounding San Francisco. We arrived in the evening in a small town, where we stopped at a friend of youth. He has already become an American engineer - in a specialty quite remote from his real (in America, many of our engineers were saved by breadth and a strong theoretical base of Soviet technical education). We arrived on New Year's Eve - December 30. The next morning I went out into the street, where the room temperature and the greens of the subtropics turned out to be. Я пошла по узкому проулку, стараясь запоминать дорогу. Из-за поворота слышался звук пилы, явно ручной, я повернула и увидела на крыше сарайчика молодую женщину, которая пилила нависшую над проулком толстую ветку лимонного дерева. Лимоны с глухим стуком падали на плоские камни дорожки. На следующей улице какие-то деревья были покрыты мелкими белыми цветами и сладко пахли. Предновогодний Сан-Франциско был увит малиновыми бугенвиллиями. Вот что такое Калифорния (если кто не видел) – она цветёт и плодоносит в одно и то же время. Зимы нет, лета нет, только ослепляюще яркая весна и монументальная осень, и бурный, холодный, Тихий в кавычках океан, рассчитанный не на купальщиков, а на морских львов и экстремалов.

В тот первый раз на калифорнийской конференции Игорь ушел послушать какой-то интересный доклад, поэтому я одна дежурила у книг в опустевшем зале, где располагались издатели. И ко мне подошли два веселых молодых человека без бирок с именами, какие были у всех участников, – видимо, просто местные иммигранты, заглянувшие на конференцию из любопытства. Они поздоровались, посмотрели книги, расспросили меня о них, а потом мы просто начали болтать. Они смешили меня своими шутками (довольно простыми, но милыми). Вообще по манере они очень напомнили мне людей из моей молодости, каких-нибудь аспирантов-технарей – та же смесь чуть показной, каникулярной бесшабашности с заметной серьёзностью и деловитостью. Я болтала с ними с удовольствием, а когда доклад кончился и в зал начали выходить из аудитории слушатели, мои молодые люди стали прощаться. И я сказала им:

– Вы знаете, я весь этот час играла сама с собой в профессора Генри Хиггинса и старалась угадать, из какого вы города. У вас обоих чувствуется лёгкий южный акцент, но не украинский, а какой-то другой. Скажите, откуда вы родом?

Не могу описать реакцию молодых людей на мои слова. Они раскраснелись, начали смеяться, пожимать друг другу руки, хлопать по спинам и даже приплясывать. А потом представились: это были два американца. Я не поверила. Тогда они показали мне свои водительские права, а потом вынули из карманов и прикрепили на пиджаки бирки участников конференции, которые они спрятали перед тем, как устроить себе проверку – разговор со мной. Я была потрясена и спросила, где они учились русскому языку – оказалось, что тут, в Калифорнии, в Монтерейском институте международных отношений, который славился своей школой переводчиков. Мне стало не по себе – два моих весёлых собеседника могли быть будущими шпионами – скорее, чем дипломатами (в Ленинграде я была знакома с одним американским дипломатом – он совсем не знал русского языка в отличие от жены-домохозяйки, которая выучила его на необходимом бытовом уровне). Я утешила себя тем, что парнишки из Монтерея вполне могут стать просто классными переводчиками на международных правительственных переговорах.

Не помню, в первый или в следующий приезд в Калифорнию мы с Игорем отправились в этот самый Институт международных отношений в Монтерее, на кафедру русского языка, куда Игоря пригласили сделать доклад о литературе нашего поколения и привезти новые "эрмитажные" книги. Совесть опять кольнула меня – не хотелось приближаться к шпионским делам. Но я так устала от нашего нонконформизма в России, что возвращаться к противостоянию и тут, в Америке, не было пока сил. Да и опасность замешаться в шпионский бизнес была так неочевидна, что я понадеялась на наш русский (но не изменяющий нам с переменой мест проживания) авось.