AND CREATED ISLANDS OF ILLUSIONS

Yurka turned 53, but for me he always remained seventeen. This seventeen-year-old, the way he ran, bubbling with bubbling speeches, along the corridors of Komsomolskaya Pravda, always appeared in him: in a gray-haired, very serious and very preoccupied man who was never afraid of anything and was not afraid to answer for everything himself.

It’s hard for me to imagine that Yurka could have enemies. Perhaps because he grew up before my eyes - in Komsomolskaya Pravda, then in Literary, where he was already engaged in very important and dangerous matters - I still saw him as a boy. Eared, choking on words, deeds, work, partying - that strange, cheerful, and dark, and excessive, and in many ways trashy, although beautiful life that surrounded our small archipelago, when each of the islands was young and full of illusions.

And although Yurka Shchekochikhin was a rabid romantic, he had fewer illusions than others. Perhaps because he exhausted them in The Scarlet Sail. His correspondents were his peers, he was their equal, and they wrote him the truth. The truth, unlike many of us, became his profession. Therefore, in those rotten 70s, only Literaturnaya Gazeta, which had reached its peak, was the right fit for him. Now I understand that with his frantic desire to tell the whole truth, it was cramped for him there too - because the time was cramped and deaf when the comrade of my youth, the early gray-haired boy Yura, was gaining the power of truth.

His time began on August 19, 1991. For twenty years he carried out his stubborn subversive work, and this time has come. And Yura realized that he was personally responsible for him. The burden of personal responsibility is a very heavy burden.

...Yurka loved to sing, he sang badly, sincerely, with great feeling. When he sang, it seemed that everything would be good and fun, and we would never die. And we won't even grow old.

Alla BOSSART
"Novaya Gazeta" No. 48, Special issue, 07/07/2003