A man with an ax, going to nowhere from nowhere

Says the art historian Zoya Zevina, the owner of the apartment, where in the 1980s Yuri Shevchuk lived and sang

We, like Yura, who came in: I am from Tbilisi, and my husband is from Ufa. He has a dairy brother Niyaz Abdyushev. A wonderful, subtle, amazing poet and musician, was in the first composition of DDT. When we arrived in Ufa in the late seventies and came to visit Niyaz, he said: "I want you to listen: there is one guy, such wonderful songs." And the first song performed by Shevchuk, which I heard - “Pig on the Rainbow”.

In 1980, we moved to Moscow to a communal apartment in Maly Afanasyevsky Lane. They lived on the third floor of a small profitable house, in which since 1905, in my opinion, there has never been a repair. The overlaps of the wooden rotted, stucco with pieces of stucco molding was poured, we wrote some letters endlessly, and once the commission came from the attic to the room. In the kitchen they filled a shield on the ceiling and made columns from unheated boards, nine columns! A huge kitchen with two gas columns, two plates - and such a shield and nine columns.

It so happened that the neighbors were evicted, they were given new housing, but they did not give us a long time, and the apartment was at our disposal.

Somehow we sat in the kitchen, and we had a Shevchuk concert-all the windows were open, and suddenly we find that in the yard people were standing and listening-they came from the Arbat: from the mouth to the mouth came that someone was singing there, but how they sing! And the whole yard was filled with people.

We had a friend, nicknamed the Fan Fan-because he kept sang a fashionable song then, she had such a chorus. He once worked in a typographic machine and brought us different literature. Once he brought Nabokov a “gift” - in rolls, and we sat at night, cut into pages. And he unconditionally fell in love with Yurka.

For the first time, Yurka came to us along the way between Ufa and Cherepovets. He was then squeezed out of Bashkiria, there were publications with crazy headlines: “Vatican Agent”, Brazyatin is complete. And he decided to change his place, and along the way he stopped with us. I remember how I was sitting with the guitar, I played something, sang, and my daughter sat next to the arena and sang along: “Oh-oh!” He says: "Sing, Lyuska, I will make Dzhenis Joplin out of you!"

The fan-fan taught us to the fact that we had an operation “Crystal” and the Operation “Lilac”. "Crystal" is to walk to collect bottles in neighboring yards when it was completely baked. And the Operation "Lilac" - when Arbat Square was not rebuilt yet, we went there to break the lilac. Where the denouement is now, the entrance to the tunnel between the Prague restaurant and the Kinoalater “Artistic” - a lush lilac grew. We were arrested a couple of times, but released.

Once Shevchuk with a fan-fan went to prey ... And at that time a company of soldiers was walking along the Arbat, they went to the bathhouse. These two stopped, looked at all this, and then one of them barked: “Stand! Smiryo! " - The soldiers stopped, began to look who it is there?! And they then fleeed with passage yards. But no, no one was injured!

Once, in the nineties, it was summer, hot. Shevchuk was asleep. Natasha came, my household assistant, a girl from the Tambov province. She removes, and meanwhile, Shevchuk got up. Since summer, hot, he is in shorts, in a T -shirt. Natasha comes to me and asks: “Zoya Matveevna, and who walks there? It seems like Shevchuk looks like! " “Natasha, this is Shevchuk.” - “Wow. Why is he walking in shorts? " “Natasha, well, he feels at home, as he wants, and walks.” Natasha walked away, went, comes again, leans over to me and says in such a hot whisper: “Put your pants on him, well, you can’t, after all, still Shevchuk!” And Shevchuk, meanwhile, walks and sings something. Natasha listened, listened, and said to my daughter: "What is it, Shevchuk sings without money?" And my daughter says: "And my mother does not take money from friends."

Once a magical night was a magic, he arrived when the album “Flood August” was reduced - my most beloved. And there is a song: “Lyudmila’s daughter, where it was worried” - Shevchuk looked at me like that and said: “This is your song.”

He wants to understand and accept everyone. He speaks endlessly at concerts: "Good to you, good!" I recently told him: “It seems to me that because our power does not love you, that at first she believed that you were your own. Songs are simple, about Russian boys - they thought that you are your own, dear, you can tame you. And you turned out to be not even your own, it seemed completely close - but not. ” He said: "Perhaps you are right."

He told how they once drove in a car from one city to another, and the steppe, the flat steppe, is nothing. And suddenly a man with an ax goes along the road. Where does he go, if there is nothing from the other side, and with this? Shevchuk said that this is a symbol of our life.