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The tragedy of the Russian people, described in the book "The Gulag Archipelago" is a cure. The tragedy of the Russian people chanted on the Russian March is poison...

I had an old nanny. She was born into a peasant family, dispossessed in the thirties. And while the nanny was alive, I was always amazed how she manages to get up at dawn and work all day, tirelessly. I would die if I worked like this from four in the morning until ten at night, not interrupting for a second. And she's okay, she's used to it.

I saw a similar ability for physical labor from dawn to dusk in the workers who built my dacha. Once they poured the foundation, and I watched with admiration how they knead concrete all day, almost without a break, and drag buckets of concrete. I tried to participate (in the manner of Leo Tolstoy), but on the twentieth bucket my hands began to fall off and my heart began to pound. And they worked and worked, measured and calm, not at all being athletes in appearance.

I'm friends with an army special forces officer. He is a sweet, cheerful person, always coming up with some interesting ideas for children. Only sometimes his military stories pop up in his stories, and I understand - my God, he killed people, and they tried to kill him. If I shot a man, if they shot me, I would go crazy and for the rest of my life I could think of nothing but this. And he's okay - he's used to it, he was taught this.

My friend is a doctor, a children's doctor. Oncologist. He not only has children die every month, but he also has to tell the parents of a child every month that medicine is powerless, and the child will die. If I had to say that, I would go crazy. And he - nothing, used to, saves eighty children out of a hundred.

I also have a profession - I'm a writer. I'm not a very good writer, not like the great ones, but this is my profession. The job is to tell stories. A writer takes a tragedy, digests it in his mind, and turns it into a story, the way pharmacists turn snake venom into medicine. Tragedy can be given to people in the form of history.

A person generally cannot survive a tragedy. A person with whom a tragedy happens commits suicide or begins to kill everyone around. Romeo and Juliet, with whom the tragedy happened, could not stand the tragedy and killed themselves. But Shakespeare turned this tragedy into a beautiful love story, and doctors, soldiers, and sometimes even peasants read this story or watch it in the movies and feel better.

It is impossible to give a person a tragedy in its pure form, just as it is impossible to inject snake venom into a person in its pure form. Tragedy has to be turned into history - by writers, scientists, directors, artists - just as snake venom has to be turned into medicine.

So: the tragedy of the Russian people undoubtedly exists. The Russian people have lost more dead in the last hundred years than any other people. Even more than the Jews. And even more lost unborn. And even more - crippled physically and spiritually. This, of course, is a tragedy.

But this tragedy cannot be dumped on the peasant's head: he will grab his pitchfork, slaughter his cattle and children, burn his barns and hut and go to rob on the roads. Not because he is bad, but because he does not know how to survive the tragedy, just like I do not know how to work from dawn to dusk.

You can not dump this tragedy on the head of the military. He will start shooting. And not because he is a bad person, but because he does not know how to survive a tragedy and turn a tragedy into history, just like I do not know how to storm under bullets.

You can’t dump this tragedy on the doctor’s head: he will forget the Hippocratic oath and begin to divide patients into friends and enemies. Not because the doctor is a bastard, but because he cannot calmly reshape the events of public and private life in such a way that it would be possible not to open up after all this. After all, I also cannot reshape the human heart so that it then works.

It is impossible, in a word, to dump its tragedy on the head of the people without turning this tragedy into history. People will freak out and kill themselves because they don't know how to deal with tragedy.

Jews can experience the Holocaust because they do not experience the Holocaust itself, but stories about the Holocaust told in the novels of Isaac Baschevitz Singer and the films of Steven Spielberg. Russians cannot live through the “genocide of the Russian people”, because they live it directly on the streets and squares, in stadiums and parks, and not behind the books of Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Astafiev or Aksenov.

In a word, here's what. The tragedy of the Russian people, described in the book "The Gulag Archipelago" is a cure. The tragedy of the Russian people, chanted on the Russian March, is poison.

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