About Oleg Kiselev's studio

I was very lucky as a child: my mother sent me to Oleg Kiselev’s theater studio. He now lives in Canada, and then he was an actor in Taganka. I am very grateful to both my mother and fate for this studio. A great company gathered there: children of friends, acquaintances... Zoya Svetova, Masha Velikanova, Zhenya Lungin - people with whom I still communicate. I was in third grade at the time and was the youngest (this is generally karma: in all companies, up to a certain age, I was always the youngest, it really tormented me). So, Oleg did things with us that no one suspected at that time: it was a theater in which everything began with movement. The main words were “freedom”, “emancipation”, “America” and “somersault”. Oleg staged a play with us called “Voices of the Grass,” based on the story by Truman Capote. And this, I think, is the strongest impression from childhood. The main words were “freedom”, “emancipation”, “America” and “somersault”. He staged a play with us called “Voices of the Grass,” based on a story by Truman Capote. And this, I think, is the strongest impression from childhood. And another story by the same Capote, “Children on their Birthday.” I'm still in love with the girl in this story, Miss Bobbitt. This book and this performance are the most important things from childhood, it seems to me.
About companies

I had two parallel lives. On the one hand, Kiselev with his company, the environment. And on the other side there is a courtyard, a completely different world.

I had a friend in the yard, his name was Volodya. He was a simple man, then he became an assistant driver, and then we got along over games. We played the books we read, the cartoons we watched. Naturally, over time, both books and cartoons changed. But the most incredible thing was that we did this until we were fifteen years old. Maybe I'm lying, of course, but it seems so to me. That is, when everyone in the entrance was already drinking port wine and so on, Vova and I played Captain Rip-off. Of course, there was port wine too, but somehow at the same time.

In a sense, I am a defector: there are no friends from childhood who have remained for life. This is a bad quality - from school, from the yard, I was unable to keep friends. Current friends appeared later - at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and so on.

About books

As a child, I read only one book: “Dunno on the Moon.” For a long time there were no other books for me. I loved Dunno so much that I read it probably fifty times and regularly for up to twenty years. I wanted to live on this Moon. I also loved Pippi Longstocking and re-read Captain Rip-off many times. Now, by the way, I can’t re-read books: it’s not interesting.

About family

A Jewish mother is a different story. And my mother is also a special person. She took me to the theater - and never left again: she was next to both Kiselev and Tabakov in the studio, where I ended up as a volunteer at the age of ten. “Tverbul,” my performance with which we traveled all over the world, she later also worked on. And so on. There were positive aspects to this, but also negative ones, of course. Because it is impossible to be in such close proximity with your mother all the time. At the same time, I am not a mama’s boy - rather, my mother has always been a “son’s” mother. On the other hand, she is an incredibly active person, incredibly capable in terms of communication and communication. They love her because she is sincerely interested in people, she is interested in everything. And she did a lot for my theater, she was involved in it seriously. My mother is closely connected with me, and I am with her too. Dad has a sly look, and he looks like a French actor, something between Jean Gabin and Philippe Noiret. Mom and dad separated when I was about seven. Since then we have not been together, we lived completely different lives. He sometimes appeared, sometimes he left, once for a long time, to the North. We rarely see each other, but I love him very much. He has a sly look and looks like a French actor, somewhere between Jean Gabin and Philippe Noiret.

I bear his last name - Kuzmin, although I have been called Paperny since childhood. But I don’t want to change anything: after all, this is my father. Paperny is my mother's last name. Mom’s father and Vadik’s father (writer and cultural critic Vladimir Paperny - BG) are twin brothers. One of them, my grandfather Boris, died in the war, right in 1941, the other, Zinovy, remained alive. Therefore, my mother treated him like a father, and his family was her family. There are many of us Papernys. I really loved my grandmother Mira, my mother’s mother. She read to me “The Queen of Britain is seriously ill...”; when she found out that I smoked, she gave me Cosmos cigarettes and a cigarette case. Shortly before her death, she gave detailed instructions on how she should be buried and what flowers there should be. We sat and discussed all this, and she laughed.

About school

At first I studied at a regular school near my house - No. 315. And when I went to Kiselev, I moved to French school No. 18: our studio was attached to it. I started learning French. I studied until the fifth grade, and then the Tabakov studio appeared. Then I began to think about enrolling in a course with him; I was transferred to an evening school, I began to take something as an external student... In short, I didn’t study at all. I had almost no school life, only up to the sixth grade. I'm a dropout.

About the shameful

My mother took me to Koktebel when I was little. She had a fun party life there, and I was very tormented when they put me to bed; naturally, I also wanted a party, fun and everything else. I pretended to fall asleep - at that time my mother went to hang out: cinema, wine... And then I got up, calmly got dressed and walked around Koktebel, sobbing terribly: my mother left me. In general, he took revenge. She gave me a light slap on the head, but I pretended to fall on the asphalt in a terrible way, and then for three hours I pretended that I couldn’t pronounce half the letters: “Mommy, it’s not like you’re going to say something.” One day (I was eight years old) my mother was going to visit, and I was playing in the yard. I really didn’t want her to leave, and when she left the house I said: “I lost my keys” (for the 128th time, probably). She gave me a light slap on the head, but I pretended to fall terribly onto the asphalt, and then for three hours I pretended that I couldn’t pronounce half the letters: “Mommy, it’s not okay to wag.” Mom was hysterical, she called the doctors, I talked on the phone with some professor, he told my mother that I needed to be taken to the hospital urgently, they dressed me, and already at the door I said: “Mom, I can talk normally.” I got hit in the face, and my mother went to visit.

About sad and joyful

I was wildly surprised when one boy, much older than me, came up to me in the yard and said one word, “Jew!” — he punched me in the gut with all his might in a business-like manner and left. At the time I didn’t understand at all what it was about.
I remember exactly that I never wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot. But driving with a girl with flowing hair - yes. The dream was like this: I was riding a moped, an American Colt in my belt, a girl sitting on the back of the trunk - nothing more was needed. I still like this idea, and little has changed since then. I remember exactly that I never wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot. But driving with a girl with flowing hair - yes.

About dogs, “SoBakovka” and Bakovka

We had dogs. One of them, a mongrel, died, and I suffered terribly, of course.

He said “dog” and remembered “SoBakovka”. This is a magazine that we all made together at the dacha in Bakovka. Children came up with something, adults wrote articles. “SoBakovka” is such a co-creation.

In general, it was always fun in Bakovka: some performances, dances, hikes. We found destroyed churches and spent the night in some barns. We endlessly played with the adults in the burim and composed obscene ditties - the children, I remember, bawled at the top of their lungs. I then started playing guitar and they wrote this about me:

Dogs bark in the morning
Wolves howl in the moonlight
Lech Bach plays for us,
H...m moves along the string.

No one else had such a childhood.

Adults about childhood: Alexey Paperny