Science of gratitude

In St. Petersburg, a book of memoirs of a philologist, literary critic Tatyana Nikolskaya "Thank you for for being for" you were. "

Memories are a mirror that reflects primarily the recalling. Speaking, he cannot hide the expression of his own eyes from us. It can be flirty, smug or vulgar, and then we look as if through muddy glass. God gave Tatyana Nikolskaya a clear look and transparent speech, so the time poured into her book moves and lives like air in the ray of the sun.

“Thank you for being” - this is not a pose and not a figure of speech, this is an attitude to life as a gift, as a series of gifts: meetings, situations, people. In a sense, the head of the book represents a dry inventory of these gifts, something like a report-these were people, such conversations, such a kitchen, such wine, then received, stored forever.

Everything is subject to the inventory - from a fleeting meeting with Akhmatova, which Tatyana Nikolskaya decided to congratulate the schoolgirl on her birthday, to the team, received by student Tatyana Nikolskaya from the head of the Blokovsky seminar Dmitry Maksimov. Surely, after all, Maksimov praised something Nikolskaya, but she prefers to bring his words “I was about you of the best opinion”, and this in itself is amazing: such a pronounced absence of even a hint of desire to draw, you will not often meet a little better.

The head dedicated to the translator Ivan Likhachev, nicknamed the old man, is similar to the embryo of the story, the strokes collected to the portrait are lovingly turned by the most outlandish side: both the suitcase of the cigarette butts, collected by the former camp Likhachev, and the communal cuisine, called the small hall, and the Saturday techniques, at which the guests were treated to the redbifs from the neighboring one Cooking, and the manner of joke: "The sense of Ivan Alekseevich’s humor was inexhaustible. When everyone asked to give fruits better in the lines for apples and oranges because he takes for a child or patient, Ivan Alekseevich asked to choose" for the puffing health "and always received solid goods."

“He spent 18 years in the camps, was friends with Kuzmin and Vaginov, collected records, arranged a salon on Saturdays,” recalls Tatyana Nikolskaya, “and at the same time he was friends with the disabled when we had no disabled society.” The fact is that his adoptive son Gennady did not have a leg, and he suffered from all sorts of complexes, so Ivan Alekseevich tried to introduce him to the same as him. To do this, at first he himself met them - he came to a prosthetic institute with a kupol orange, gave people oranges and engaged in English for free with those who wanted it. Then they gathered at him, exchanged addresses, drank, of course, helped each other and felt like full members of society. One of them only recently died, Yura Kozyrev, nicknamed Litzik. My husband Lenya Chertkov called him "nominee"-he graduated from some institute and became the seizure of Christmas toys in the Society of the Blind.

Such stories are interspersed with the descriptions of the classes of the intellectual, philologist, translator Ivan Likhachev, his literary preferences, relations with Vaginov and Kuzmin, although this topic is already memories erected to power, since the character of memories recalls.

Whom Tatyana Nikolskaya did not know - and the “last Oberiut” by Vladimir Bakhterev, and Brodsky, and Leo Losev, and Vladimir Ufland, and Bella Ulanovskaya, and Dovlatova, and the famous pianist Maria Yudin, known not only with her game in the piano, but also with a daring trick, when she read poetry in the Philharmonic in the scene from the scene. disgraced Pasternak. And about each - stories, small sketches that constantly give rise to life, but which usually disappear from memory, like dreams - if there is no professional dream catcher nearby, which is without a doubt the author of this book.

Dissants are not her horse. But she writes about the aesthetic confrontation between the Soviet regime with taste and knowledge of the matter, telling, for example, about the “quiet” promotions of the poet Alexander Kondratov, who, when he was not accepted to the university, entered the revenge of the police and then came to the faculty and “defiantly walked along the corridor with one of his friends.” No less eloquent and “quiet” action by the poet Mikhail Eremin, who had been leaving with one of his friends on the sidewalk of Nevsky Prospekt, talking about the stars.

In the book “Thank you for for being” there is a special section - Georgian, because Tatyana Nikolskaya is a specialist in the Russian and Georgian vanguard. These solar pages are devoted to people whose names for many do not seem so bright at all - Meru Kostava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia. If for us Zviad Gamsakhurdia is a politician, then for Nikolskaya is a friend. This is how she describes their visit to the Baku restaurant: “They served us culturally, but for a long time. Zviad took out the Russian subspecies of his poems and began to read them quietly to me, then we ruled the tunnel of the poem written by the poem“ The Committee of the Fucking ”, which spoke about the connection of real time and eternity: the funeral committee, where a wandering skeleton sits, and the wandering skeleton and and and and and I am especially remembered by the expression “owners of grief”, as they call the relatives of the deceased in the Georgian, when we finished work, we were given really freshly prepared hot dishes that we fully enjoyed. ”

In another place, it was described by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, when it came to Rustaveli: “Zviad believed that Rustaveli's worldview was connected with esoteric Christianity. He investigated the image of the Sun in the poem and made the assumption that the author of Vephista Osani had in mind, first of all, the spiritual sun - the Logos and, accordingly, Christ as the Spirit of the Sun. Zviad compared with the concept of Origen and the Georgian medieval philosopher John Petricia. "

What can you say? How pale and worthless politics is compared to the heights of the spirit ...

The friend of Tatyana Nikolskaya closes the Georgian theme, the Georgian poetess Dali Tsava.

- This is my friend, a wonderful poetess, her poems are based on Georgian folklore, a Georgian myth. She has a poem about Medae's “Eksinsky Pont”, she studied the ancient Georgian books on herbs, the heralds - Medea was a famous herb. Dali Tsaava lived in Leningrad for 20 years, first studied at a journalist, then entered the literary institution in absentia, and there she had a conflict with her poetic leader Harold Registan. He told all students to write poetry about the fraternal hydroelectric power station, and Dali said: I will not. To which my dad, a sports journalist, remarked - well, of course, why should she write about the fraternal hydroelectric power station, disgrace - let him write about her Inguri hydroelectric power plants! Registan also scolded her for the fact that her poems were complex, and she answered him: “What, everyone needs to write“ I met a girl, a crescent eyebrow ”? - quoting his poems. So she had to leave with a scandal, and she graduated from the institute as a translator, the thesis was - the translation of the“ poem without a hero ”of Akhmatova, which was then published in Georgia. She translated, but then she went to Georgia and taught Russian language and literature there until the end of the days of April 9, 1989, one of the students said: “I don’t want to learn Russian literature,” and she answered him so emotionally: “ Rustaveli. "

In the head of the “Tail of everything, the head” describes a reckless concert for friends, arranged by the well-known Alexei Khvostenko, where there was a table with tomached bottles of wine right on the stage, which then went through the rows, and everyone fiddlely passed them to each other, since there were no glasses. In the head of the "disrespect", we are faced with an employee of the Pushkin house Larisa Ivanova. Tatyana Nikolskaya lists where and how Larisa helped her-she gave it to read an difficult accessible document, copied something in a foreign archive-all that we are so often accepted for granted and safely forget. Tatyana Nikolskaya did not forget. She did not even forget the 10 dollars that Larisa Ivanova donated to the Georgian Forestry of Iveria, which raised funds for medicines for Abkhaz hospitals. "Of all my more than numerous non -Georgian friends and acquaintances, such a desire, in addition to Larisa, was expressed and implemented only by the poet Vladimir Ufland and his wife Alla. I remember how in Georgian landlord I was surprised to ask what kind of people they were."

"Thank you for being" - an exact name. God retains everything, this is true. Only for this he has special guardians, Tatyana Nikolskaya - one of them.