Ilya Danishevsky: “Inspiration from someone else’s art is a substitute for direct empathy”

material: Alexey Kruchkovsky
illustrations: Sofia Khananashvili

Poet Alexey Kruchkovsky, as part of his series of interviews with emigrated authors, spoke with Ilya Danishevsky, who recently published the books “Damocles Techno” and “The Bear and the Pendulum.” The writer talked about the art of computer games, books, cinema, moving and existing in other languages, inspiration and much more.

The illustration uses a photograph of Sergei Bratkov

— When did you realize yourself as a writer?

— I studied at the Physics and Mathematics Lyceum, the journey there took a lot of time, then I discovered the films of Jan Svankmajer. And as if in response to them, he began to compose some plots, stories, which happened just on the way to the lyceum and back. The stories were multi-part, they added up to something big. I liked it, it was interesting, but the process of recording them on paper seemed very boring to me, so these stories continued to spin and develop in my head. Later, at one of the Gothic parties, all participants were asked to write something for the almanac, and I wrote a text, which the Literary Institute then accepted.

— What inspires you?

— Sex as the main human institution.

— How autobiographical is your letter?

- Much less than most.

— Do you return to what you wrote earlier?

- No, as well as to former lovers.

— Do you have self-censorship and does it happen that some things ultimately remain unpublished?

— Sometimes the excess of body horror in my texts makes them socially unacceptable. Yes, I don’t publish many texts and don’t plan to ever do so.

— Where do you find beauty?

— In the way men accept their aging, in money, in the architecture of Japan and China, in the Arabic language, in the gay aesthetics of the 1970s, in Shar-Peis.

— What films made a strong impression on you? Does cinema inspire you at all?

- I don’t think that cinema inspires me - not in the literal sense, for sure. I have never looked into how to make descriptions or plans, probably because in literature I am least interested in descriptions, less only in direct political statements, although I am extremely interested in color, texture of materials - everything that can become extreme naturalism and references. But at the same time, cinema is important to me as a source of nostalgia. I always remember where and when I saw this or that, and I return to that time and place when I rewatch the film. For example, if I need to remember in detail the arrows behind the garages, Svankmajer is always at hand. Or, for example, “The Hours” is a guide to my very specific days, to specific streets, to the people with whom I walked along these streets, to the conversations of that time. “The Exorcist” is winter sessions, ancient literature, and later world history. “Jaurès” by Dieutra and “Caesar Must Die” by Taviani are my first weeks in publishing. I felt devastatingly sad and would go home and watch 2-3 movies every night. “White Fang” and “Martyrs” are the first experience of living together with a man. The beginning of emigration and work on “Techno” - films by Silke Enders, especially Pia Piano, this was the first time the director invited me to the premiere of his film. And I was afraid that I wouldn’t like it, so I continuously took pictures of her, as if I was trying to disguise my reaction: yes, I looked, great, congratulations, and how cool you are at signing autographs, just look, and also this shot. I told her that it was a complete mess, and she asked if there was anything good in the film.

Author - Ilya Danishevsky

—Have you ever wanted to make a movie yourself or adapt your books into films?

- Not myself. I also don’t want to participate in the film adaptation, but if someone wants to film my book or transfer it to the stage, then I will not have any objections, but I will not participate in this in any way. When Teatr.doc staged a play based on Mannelig in Chains, I just came to the premiere.

—Who is your favorite director?

— Probably, the director I absolutely like is Vincent Dietre. He was the only celebrity I wanted to meet. I had a sore throat when I first watched My Winter's Progress. I liked and still like that Diötre plays himself in all the erotic scenes, each time he reconstructs sex from his past, accompanied by a voice-over commentary. His coldness, detached indifference to both his body and his memory, which he carefully protects, always seemed to me an ideal autofiction; the viewer is obviously inaccessible to the true biography, but he is given the opportunity to touch fragments taken out of context. He is immanently protected from the fact that one of his exes will publish correspondence or share his version of the story - this movie is indifferent to the opinion of others, as well as to any other person’s experience, which is mentioned rather only out of politeness. This is about the question of inspiration - how your own experience can inspire you, how the experience of others talking about their experiences can awaken something in you. I think that being inspired by someone else's art is a substitute for direct empathy and direct contact with others. I think this is of the same nature as the evasion of some artists from politicization and their desire to create something in spite of what is happening around them. I like commercial production, like Netflix, more than participation (even as a viewer) in the creation of something that replaces reality.

— When and why does the transition from poetry to prose occur? What's the difference for you?

— For me there is no obvious difference (as for the reader - yes), some fragments of the plot require language that does not suit others. But I still perceive my books, which contain poems - both “Mannelig” and “The Bear and the Pendulum” - as novels. You can't shuffle chapters without changing the narrative. Since all this is part of a pre-invented book, it could have photographs or videos instead of some words, if this would contribute to a more concise description.

— Is it easier for you to write in exile?

— In emigration, it was important for me how other linguistic personalities manifest themselves. Since there are quite a few Russian speakers in my social circle now, it was interesting for me how relationships are formed through the use of other and non-native languages, often with people for whom these languages ​​are also foreign: with migration experience, and at the same time completely different from mine. The way other languages ​​began to crowd out Russian, the way they mixed, for example, in dreams, also changed the pace at which I interact with writing.

Author - Ilya Danishevsky

— In your books, quite a significant place is devoted to computer games. What do you play yourself?

— One of my strongest childhood artistic influences was the Final Fantasy series. I went through all the parts sequentially, but at that time I did not perceive computer games as art. For a while, games were just fun until I discovered the work of Edmund Macmillan, Hidetaka Miyazaki, and Miro Haverinen. I realized that no novel I had ever read had impressed me as much as their narratives. Miyazaki's magnum opus Elder Ring was released on February 25, 2022, and it is one of the most terrifying statements about war and mortality. Fear and Hunger by Miro Haverinen became for me a portal to the past, for example, to the memory of how the police came to our class at a school near Moscow to instruct us how to behave, because there was a serial killer in our town. I am impressed that Haverinen talks about violence as the most common part of reality. Remembering my childhood, childhood friendships, childhood crushes, I can now agree with him that for many people hunger, fear and violence are a familiar part of life. Including for me.

— How was “Damocles Techno” written?

— I wrote almost the entire book in the residence of Wippersdorf Castle, next to which, literally in the wilderness, there is the house of Little Red Riding Hood described in the book (and this is probably the only thing I needed to borrow from reality). From the very beginning I knew that I would work with the symbolism of Tarot cards, with their categorical ability to interpret the past, with their totality. And it was through the symbolism of the Tarot that I wrote both part of the chapters “Techno” and their poetic reflections, which became part of the book “The Bear and the Pendulum”. The prose part was about what pieces emigration tears off from your inner landscape and what grows through these gaps, and the poetic chapters were about the disconnection with language. Returning to Techno, besides Tarot cards, dark German fairy tales, Red Riding Hoods of zinc, the key to the book is the dialogue with the computer game Fear & Hunger, one of the most brutal artistic expressions in recent times, which had as strong an influence on me as Ito's Spiral or Miura's Berserk. What I like about games is not immersion, but the fact that you control the speed of unfolding of the narrative, how deeply you want to look at certain fragments of it, which allow you to read the novel, deliberately skipping everything in it that concerns, for example, the plot, or ignoring the descriptions, on the other hand, they practically prohibit interpretation, which seems charming to me.

— Do you work with Tarot yourself?

— Yes, this whole Kabbalistic theme and the Qliphot tree, their political dimension were important to me even when I wrote “Tenderness for the Dead.” We did a lot of fortune-telling at the residency, and used the Tarot a lot to mediate dialogues and other things. But Tarot is still not entirely about fortune-telling, it’s definitely not about faith, it’s about delineating space, about describing reality through given symbolism. For this, you can even use Tarot-bot, because in general, whether there is a big difference in who you order the examination from, the main thing remains why and what questions you ask, why they are more important than others.

— How do you imagine your reader?

“I can’t imagine it, it’s somehow stupid, about the same as imagining that your language is somehow so cut off from everyone that you have no one to enter into dialogue with.” I've had amazing encounters with readers, but I'm not sure that when we talk about art as dialogue, we mean such a literal dialogue. It seems strange and perhaps boring to discuss what has been written, if only because an insurmountable distance remains. For the same reason, I don't read poetry out loud. And although I talked about nostalgia, about invocations of memory through films once seen or, for example, music, most often this is not associated with longing, the desire to return, repeat or anything else, it is about the need for the past as a tool for the present or future.

Author - Ilya Danishevsky

— What role does music play in your life? And texts? For example, in the last book you have a lot of references to both Dead Can Dance and Lisa Gerrard. What else are you listening to?

- It's hard to say. I can't remember anything more important to me in music than Anna-Varney Cantodea and her Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows. As for Lisa Gerrard, the only thing that matters to me is her album Twilight Kingdom.

— Has your environment changed in emigration?

— My community has not changed, which is surprising, I lost relatively few people, even the transition to the format of correspondence or calls went quite smoothly, without affecting my connections. With the beginning of the war, I became a more attentive reader, but it seems that a huge number of these books are not worth talking about, since the censorship apparatus somehow [thinks] more and more about “who said it” than “what was said,” and many of these people and books continue to be published in Russia. This state, I think, is quite new for culture ─ when it is not worth talking about those books that have been withdrawn from sale or that cannot be published, but when it is prudent not to talk, being where you are, about what you like from what is still alive. It seems to me that now there is some kind of consensus and everyone is absolutely clear in which direction to look and what to read; this no longer requires media coverage - the situation itself highlights everything so clearly.

— Which contemporary authors can you single out?

— Over the past year, I have been impressed by “The Knife” by Salman Rushdie, “Amalgam” by Katya Morozova, “Chiaroscuro” by Kelman, “My Friends” by Hisham Matar, “Mushroom Places” by Daria Triden, “Dua for the Unfaithful” by Yegana Jabbarova, “The Back of the Hand” by Alena Churbanova, “Moscow Soon” by Anna Shipilova, “Raz boy, two boys" Asya Demishkevich.

— Did you like living in Moscow? And how do you like Germany after Russia?

— Yes, I liked living in Moscow. Or, at least, I perceived it as completely default, not annoying, I was happy with the speed. This is precisely about the external side, from the internal side, obviously - no, I don’t have the feeling that Russia suddenly became somehow different from what I wanted after the invasion of Ukraine. In general, for me it has always been filled with this icy feeling of inertia, cruelty and a certain feeling of “fast forward”, when the frames merge into a mess and it is not always possible to discern whether something extraneous is involved in them. I immediately approached emigration not as a list of what I would lose, but as some new experience. You break your leg, and suddenly you have a choice: you can heal the bones not in one correct way, but choose something completely different. I did not leave from the feeling of danger, this was before mobilization, for me this choice was about something completely different. Therefore, I never had a feeling of emigrant melancholy; I lost no more than the mere movement of time makes you lose.

— What was this choice about for you?

“I’ve been openly gay since I was nineteen, and I wasn’t ready to continue living in a country where my life would inevitably be self-censored.

— How can you generally assess the influence of modern emigration on the current Russian-language literary space?

— The new wave of Russian emigration is only four years old; emigration could not have any radical influence on literature. Yes, emigrant publishing houses have appeared, many authors are published outside of Russia, but they simply moved in space along with their ideological and literary baggage.

— Are you considering the possibility of returning to Russia? Or is that it, have you cut yourself off completely?

— I’m considering everything, but first of all moving to Tokyo to Hideteka Miyazaki.