E.G. Babaev. Memories

SPb.: INAPRESS, 2000

Published in the St. Petersburg publishing house INAPRESS, the volume of “Memoirs” by Eduard Grigorievich Babaev may be accidentally missed by the reader for whom it is intended - the binding does not in any way suggest that this publication should be correlated with the memoirs of E.G., already published here and enjoying a certain popularity . Gershtein and B.S. Cousin. Meanwhile, the memories of E.G. Babaev resonate with them biographically and thematically: the author knew the same people as the mentioned memoirists, and was, like them, an interlocutor and friend of Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam.

But neither belonging to one circle, nor the commonality of literary interests and preferences that fed this environment in any way impoverishes or clouds the individual properties of memory. The ability of people to remember in different ways, in addition to surprise, each time evokes the ingenuous admiration that we experience from contact with the uniqueness, a kind of “piecemealness” of someone else’s world, which has suddenly become partially accessible. You feel this fully when reading the prose of E.G. Babaev, his memories of Anna Akhmatova, Georgy Efron (Moura, the son of Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom the author was friends in Tashkent), essays about his meeting with Boris Pasternak and many others.

It is remarkable that the protagonist of both the main part of the memoirs and the short story at the end of the book is a teenage boy, for whom the world of adults, be they poets or writers, scientists or a military brigade in echelon, is strange and attractive for its aching inevitability, the inevitability of what is happening in there are no events. A story told through the eyes of a teenager is a seemingly not new device, but it is in this book that it essentially ceases to be a literary device. E.G. Babaev was really no more than 15 years old when he met Akhmatova, he was only 17 when the war and evacuation ended, and Tashkent, which for a time became one of the literary capitals, suddenly became empty, turning into a Central Asian city, where, as in a dream, , everything was familiar and recognizable, but no longer the same as before...

Having early become a thinking eyewitness, the author never acquired the capricious fastidiousness of an onlooker, and never got used to being bored with himself, like adults, which is perhaps best confirmed by several short stories by E.G. Babaev and an elegant wreath of sonnets, collected in the last part of this wonderful book.