Alexander Vampilov: Unwritten novel

On August 19, 2017, it turned 80 to Alexander Vampilov, who made an inconspicuous but important revolution in the Soviet theater. Starting from the usual set of conflicts and comic situations, vampils in the last plays wrote about a person’s conflict with his life itself, about the loneliness and search for a way out of the impasse, which was felt only by his hero, and no more around him. The Irkutsk journalist Vladimir Demchikov recalls who was for his generation of vampires for his generation .

On August 19, 1937, the future playwright was born in Cheremkhov, and on August 17, 1972 (two days before his 35th birthday) he drowned in Lake Baikal, at the source of the Angara. We sailed behind the vodka from the port of Baikal to Listvyanka, and the boat turned over by the Listvyansky coast, clinging to the swamp. The stubborn vampils, instead of holding on to the boat, like his comrade, swam to the shore - and quite a bit short, the heart stopped by the very shore.

Of course, Vampilov in Irkutsk is forgotten, of course, to say. There is a monument next to the Drama Theater, and the books were published and went out, and in Cheremkhov there is a monument (to him, Mikhail Vorfolomeev and Vladimir Gurkin, the Treas of the Cheremkhovsky playwrights), and a monument in Kutulik. There is a vampilov cultural center in Irkutsk, commemorative boards on the buildings where he was born (in Cheremkhov) and lived (in Irkutsk), a museum in Kutulika, streets and libraries of his name.

Vampilov is probably one of the two most famous Irkutski in the world, along with Valentin Rasputin. Moreover, Rasputin pushed vampilov to the writings. Rasputin himself told about this in one of his last television interview. Vampilov, who already wrote stories, invited young writers in Chita in 1965 in 1965. And Rasputin did not have prose, there were only essays. And Vampilov told him: "And you do something!" Rasputin “made”, and he was also invited to that seminar with you-Pilov. With this, their professional writing began.

Nevertheless, the attitude towards Vampilov in Irkutsk today is already different than it was once. Now he is already a classic from the past, his plays are put more like ritual texts (it is supposed to be in the repertoire), and performances on them no longer cause strong emotions. Too frequent mention of Vampilov in some even causes bewilderment: how much can you already about this vampilov?

And once Vampilov was in Irkutsk something like Gagarin. Flew into the dense layers of the Soviet ice atmosphere from somewhere directly from the sky by the semi-angel with a charming smile, mysteriously drowned in Lake Baikal two days before his 35th birthday. Five years after his death, when we entered the same Philfak ISU, which he finished in 1960, all this was very felt. Vampilov’s “posthumous recognition machine”, which dispersed five years after his death, wound the wide masses of Irkutsk culture workers on her wheels, and not only in Irkutsk.

The complex of guilt before an unrecognized genius from Irkutsk was so strong that, for example, two of my university friends could come to the Moscow Art Theater, say on the watch that “they are from Irkutsk, journalists, to Oleg Nikolaevich”-and they were immediately accepted by Efremov himself in his office. He disposed of about tea, other drinks and snacks, asked, “how Baikal is there,” the inquisitive gaze of a large and contradictory Soviet artist was guilty of their young, arrogant physiognomies - just not to be raped and inadvertently not to leave the threshold of another genius, which, not even an hour, will drown again in Lake Baikal. Having drunk tea and huddled for pleasure, General Vampilov’s children served in Irkutsk, where they then told everyone with pleasure how cordially was accepted by Efremov himself.

Even Vampilov’s death was immediately rethought. The fact that they and writer Gleb Pakulov sailed into a foliage from the port of Baikal for vodka, if they remembered, then deafly. At the same time, it somehow reasoned that the surviving paces was to blame for something. And it was considered the norm to mock the inconsolable Pakulov exclusively in the condemning tone (“It would be better if he drowned than vampils!”; “Ah, this is the packages that Vampilov drowned!”, Etc.).

At the same time, however, the cause of the death of such a talent could not, of course, be a banal accident. Vampilov drowned for a reason: he was “taken by Baikal” - so our local spiritually thinking writers wrote in every way. He took for our sins and to our edification. Vampilov’s death looked in many articles and memories as something like a punishment to us who remained to live, and Baikal acted as the top of some important trial over the crushing humanity. Vampilov’s death was a punishment for “our” inattention to talent, for “our” callousness, ineinability, stupidity, grinding and oblivion of something important and spiritual.

Many in those years were slightly bruised by acquaintance with him and urgently tried to rethink their impressions. Some teachers who once taught him remembered him at each second lecture. His classmates who worked at the university and in the newspapers (they were then forty and small) with each anniversary of his anniversary, became the heroes of numerous newspaper publications, restored and retouched joint photographs from home archives, wrote memories of how he was a guy. " In these recollections of vampils, most often, of course, was “not like anyone”, turned out to be “the most talented student”, “sang and played” on all musical instruments and “has always been the soul of the company”. At the same time, he all the time struggled with something muddy, heavy and uncertain, preventing his plays from being set and printed (it was significantly implied here that the bearers of this muddy and bad beginning were some special “inert people” without faces, names and positions that interfered with all the good and strangled talents). It turned out that the death of Vampilov had three causes at the same time. In it, an absurd accident (in the person of an unfairly surviving comrade) and at the same time a logical oppressive atmosphere, hostile to talent and vilely strangled the playwright, was equally sent. The highest intervention, which sent us the death of Vampilov as a punishment, was added to this combination of ridiculous and naturally. In some heads later, a fruitful unification of all these explanations of the death of the playwright, accompanied by his inevitable canonization, occurred.

However, it is enough to read about the finale of his life to see that all the last years of vampils, in fact, was slowly dying. During these years, he lived painfully, as if even with some crash (Rasputin was already talking about this in the interview), he was burdened by Irkutsk, wanted to move to Moscow and was very worried that Moscow theaters did not take his plays.

And, as the normal man was supposed to, of course, drank. He finished his penultimate large work - the play “Duck Hunt” four years before his death. After the “duck hunt”, he wrote only “last summer in Chulimsk” and an unfinished play “Incomparable Tips” in four years. That is, he wrote his main thing when he was thirty years old - and after it he wrote quite a bit.

With the "duck hunt" vampilov sipped in full. First, the play rejected the magazine "New World" ("We do not print plays"). Then, in 1970, it was printed by the Irkutsk almanac "Angara". Editor Mark Sergeyev put the play in the room when the censor went on vacation (to get around censorship), but he also made a censorship in the text. As a result of vampils with a pen, he entered the author’s copies of the almanac completely innocent by the editor from the play by a piece. Below it is highlighted by corner brackets <...>, evaluate for yourself:

“Valeria. Crab? .. Beauty! Luxury!
SASH. Indeed, crabs are now very rare.
<Vera. And I don't like them.
Zilov. This is because you have never tried them.
SASH. But a curious thing. Fifteen years ago, all regiments were scored in crab stores. Imagine no one took.
Valeria. They did not understand.
Sayapin. Then they did not understand much. Lived like Papuans.
Zilov. Well now?
Sayapin. What now? Now another thing. We learned that how much, they figured it out.
Zilov. Don't say. Now all the fools have become smart.
SASH. Mm ... friends, why is this conversation?
Sayapin. Yes, let's not go into politics. Who needs it?>
Irina appears ... "

But even the exit in the almanac did not help the “duck hunt” to get on the stage, although by that time the vampilo plays were already gradually starting to put in the theaters of the Union: in Riga, in Klaipeda, in Irkutsk, even in Leningrad (but still not in Moscow).

After the publication of the Duck Hunting, Vampilov was written in the Central Committee of the CPSU by the employees of BTI Irkutsk, accusing him of slandering the “BTI team” (in the play Zilov works in the Central Bank). In full accordance with the rule, “there is no prophet in his fatherland,” “duck hunting” rejected the art council of the Irkutsk Drama Theater, in which since 1969 his “eldest son” successfully has been successful. The annoyed vampils at the discussion of “duck hunting” sharply performed: “ The play was condemned by obsolete people who do not understand and do not know the youth. And we are like that! I understand that?! Foreign writers wrote about the “lost generation”. Didn't you have losses? "(This quote was brought in her book" Masters "Nadezhda Tendel, who taught Vampilov and Rasputin at the University.)

“Duck hunting” was set four years after the death of Vampilov, in 1976, in Moldova. In Moldavian. Then in 1977 in Riga - in Russian. But even after the death of Vampilov, the play did not give rest to the right people: in 1978, a contemporary theater was urgently staged a play by a freshman of the Literary Institute of Malyagin “UFO”, in the text and plot of which “duck hunting” clearly shone through - with the only difference being that the main hero of Mazov, unlike Vampilovsky Zilov, “found light at the end at the end tunnel ". The play was given a green light, it, as they say, thundered in those years (still - here it is, “our answer” is not too much for our Zilov). True, now it is already difficult to find her text on the Internet - the play has gone into oblivion.

A wonderful portrait of Vampilov of the last Irkutsk years was given by Rasputin in the already mentioned television interview: a 30-year-old already tired person walking along the street in an eternally open coat with a stubborn head, looking into the ground in front of him, immersed in something, not noticed anything around and, according to Rasputin, with all his appearance, as if looking for from this position and from this position-and not seen this-not seen this. output. His death was ridiculous and terrible - but no more terrible than his life in recent years, when nothing happened, was “wrapped” the best play in the native Irkutsk theater and did not accept in any theater of the country, and in Moscow they did not take a single play at all.

But the breakdown of the last Vampilov years, of course, is already of little interest to anyone today. Today in Irkutsk you can even hear simple -minded replicas like: "It was necessary to drink less!" And in the memoirs, he still most often looks like a complacency classic who smoothly aged with 80-year-old keepers of memory of himself.

However, according to the scraps of some memoirs and in his letters, it is nevertheless shows that Vampilov was not only a brave harmonist, optimist and joker. His life looked like a real novel. He was a powerful and passionate guy, a real artist, artistic, sharp, quite difficult and probably not too pleasant (and for loved ones - sometimes unbearable) a person who has lived and conflictly lived, even risky in recent years. It was the life of a living and large person. Even after forty-five years, this life still appears through the already currently boring official canon-like something not fully read. His life deserves a powerful biographical novel, which, apparently, will no longer be.

And for some reason, still does not come out of his head, this is his open coat.

Vladimir Demchikov