Taras Prokhasko: “In such cases, it is best to call me a writer…. Strange Heart Disease translated from Ukrainian by Elena Marinicheva and Zaven Babloyan The Death and Life of Bobby Z

Taras Prokhasko

difficult

Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2009

Taras Prokhasko. Nepro?st?

The first Russian collection by Taras Prokhasko, a prominent representative of the new Ukrainian prose, included three of the most famous books: the novel "Uneasy" (2002), the novels "Several stories could be made out of this" and "How I stopped being a writer." The novel "Uneasy" can be considered Ukrainian magical realism; stories built on the narrator's obsession with his own memories refer to Proust. However, if Prokhasko is to be included in any alien tradition, it is in the Jewish tradition, attentive to the problems of memory and life of the town. Ivano-Frankivsk, where the writer was born, becomes such a "place" for Prokhasko. In "Unsimple" his imaginary story is told, in "Several stories could be made out of this" - real, more precisely, everything that the narrator managed to remember and think out was given out in a single stream. “There are things more important than fate,” the main character of “Uneasy” repeats to himself all the time. “Maybe it’s culture. And culture is a kind, a conscious stay in it.” Apparently, that's why he sleeps with his own daughters. His daughters are difficult, and they are interested in the Unsimple - with a capital letter, "earthly gods", as the narrator certifies them, who hunt for life stories. And "the basis of any private epic is a list of ideas about the places in which the family history".

Like any work built on pure idea It's almost impossible to read the novel. In addition, "Unsimple", which, according to the tradition of magical realism, should be utterly poetic, are written in monstrous, sometimes even clerical language, as if on purpose contrary to this tradition. But together with subsequent stories, the novel develops into a picture of a very meaningful writer's movement - from the epic to the word, to a new language, to re-experiencing one's own history.

Don Winslow

The Death and Life of Bobby Z

M.: Foreigner, 2009

Don Winslow. The Death and Life of Bobby Z

A 1997 novel by American Don Winslow, known to us from two wonderful detective stories "Frankie the Machine's Winter Race" and "The Power of the Dog". Winslow, who gave up his career as a theater actor and manager in 1991 for the sake of detective stories, is today a successful author of more than ten books. Everyone promises to turn "Frankie the Car" into a film with Robert De Niro in the title role, and there is already a movie based on "Bobby Z" with Paul Walker and Laurence Fishburne, which came out with us under the name "Setup". The film is wild, like the book itself, which Winslow wrote in its entirety on the train - without outlines, immediately in a clean copy. That's how it reads, except that the mixture of jargon that Winslow composed for "Bobby Z" disappeared in the Russian translation. However, we have not been surprised at bad translations of detectives for a long time.

So, the Federal Drug Control Service (for Americans it sounds easier - DNA) finds in one of the prisons the loser Marine Tim Kearney, like two peas in a pod, similar to the drug business guru Bobby Zeta, who was supposed to be exchanged for a captured agent. In exchange for freedom, Tim is offered to become Bobby. The hero agrees and, together with the fame of the best drug dealer in California, gets a beauty, a child and a bunch of mafiosi hunting for his head. To survive, to save a child and a couple of Bobby-Zet millions, you have to be a very tough Marine. Like Tim Kearney, not spoiled Bobby Z.

This is not just a good, but also a very timely detective story, because if it had been written five years later, it would have been impossible to read it. But here a Marine is just a Marine, there is no ghost of Iraq behind the stately figure of an American soldier, a beauty is just a beauty, bombs explode and machine guns fire at a speed worthy of a Die Hard, and behind all this there is such an ease typical of the past decade that we does not even warp, which is one of the main actors in a gang shootout becomes a seven-year-old child.

Athletes have such a heart disease - it begins to hurt when physical activity decreases.

It reminds me of my own life, living with the people I love incredibly. I see them, we waste each other's time - we do something, talk, fool around, go somewhere, drink something, life goes on, passes and melts. This is what athletes call "load". It always happens like this… But sometimes these people are not there, they disappear somewhere, and then, without the usual load, the heart starts to hurt. The lungs and all other airways are compressed, there is not enough air. You begin to understand acutely that without a few Yuroks, Olegs, Volodek, Andreev, Ivanov, Romanov, Bogdanov, you will not be able to overcome your own path. You see how you turn into an iceberg without them, attracted to some stupid port to be melted and drunk by strangers and strangers. If I sometimes regret that I am not a woman, it is only because I cannot become everything for a few men who are worthy to lay heaven at their feet. Hell is others,” someone said without thinking. Because others are heaven. Those “others” we are talking about are an arrow in the chest that is tight and haunting, but if you pull it out, you will die.

If it is worth spending your precious life on anything, then it is on this - to see, hear, feel, touch. And let this happen without apparent meaning, without a concrete result - a house will not be built, a garden will not grow, children will not be born. Let only scars remain on the body and on the heart. But by giving these people a part of your own destiny, you will give the future to those children who already exist. They will understand: dad knew what to do.

Your little guerrilla army does not occupy any new territory, but it exists in order to prevent invaders from entering your native land. Because it really is yours. And you, or we, will never be able to make hell on this small patch of firmament. Here, like it or not, only paradise is possible.

2. I knew one turtle

The greatest happiness that a person or any other living being can have is fellowship, communication. No matter what anyone says, but it is to this that all manifestations of life, which are called happiness, are reduced. Without communication, everything loses its meaning, and no amount of enjoyment can bring it back. Therefore, everything related to unsuccessful communication is a drama. And mutual misunderstanding, misunderstanding is a real tragedy. Misunderstandings are different - intentional or involuntary, minute and long, fleeting and endless, radical and allowing for compromise. All of them are tragic. And they consist, first of all, in the opposition of desires and intentions, in their mismatch. This is the first level of misunderstanding. The second level is more difficult - when interests coincide, but ideas about the world and coexistence in it differ. Even higher is the level when everything coincides, except for the understanding of words - their meanings, shades, semantic stresses, origin and synonymic row.

Such tragedies are the most sorrowful, and there is almost nothing to help here. The saddest thing is that it seems to everyone that they have done everything to understand the other and express themselves most accurately. But only sadness, annoyance and distrust remain. I knew one turtle. And he knew her owners. Both the owners and the turtle were very sweet and loved each other, trying to do everything to make everyone happy and joyful. I remember the look of this turtle when it "talked" to its owners. But one day the turtle inadvertently climbed out onto the edge of the balcony and fell helplessly down onto the sidewalk. True, she was immediately found and brought home. It turned out she was alive. The shell was only slightly damaged and a crack appeared on it. The crack was quickly healed, and everything seems to have passed. But something was already wrong - joy disappeared somewhere, at first the turtle became indifferent, and then - already as a result - people.

Contact was lost, mutual understanding and the possibility of communication disappeared. There was sadness, annoyance and distrust. And so they lived. Once I looked into the eyes of a turtle for a long time and understood everything. She became different - falling, the turtle damaged his brain. Besides, it's irreversible. And just went crazy, crazy. We could not know what was in her head now - solid darkness or powerful lights of searchlights-pursuers, maybe she forgot everything, or maybe every night she had an unbearable headache, maybe she was tickled between her skull and brain, or maybe She was unnerved by every sound and smell. We couldn't know. We couldn't understand each other. Couldn't help. They could not save, because they could not fully "talk" - as before. By the way, she had to live with us for another 240 years. With this, but without us.

3. Birds

While still studying at the Faculty of Biology, I discovered that biology is the fundamental basis of education, worldview, understanding of philosophical constructions and logical constructions, and even artistic creativity and metaphors, as fundamental as linguistics. Biology can become the basis for everything that the head needs. But, having met today, after many years, a classmate-biologist who changed his profession, I remembered the whole system of my observations and reflections on the influence of various biological sciences on the psyche.

Entomologists (insectologists) always become collectors. Moreover, they are collectors in fact - they collect everything, even adventures and impressions, and skillfully systematize them. Botanists are all different. Some turn almost into philologists, others become erudite practitioners - gardeners, gardeners, mushroom pickers and flower growers, and still others - experts in all the nooks and crannies of a region, they know exactly where what grows.

A separate category is specialists working with a microscope. Herpetologists, ichthyologists and physiologists develop their oddities. But ornithologists - bird watchers - stand completely apart. In itself, the decision to be an ornithologist is already a sign of an unstable psyche. Ornithologists can be distinguished instantly and unmistakably. They are unique, something separates them from the earth to the sky. Probably, they harness the birds, don’t understand what, and drive around on these teams somewhere. Ornithologists do not see the earth - only the sky, the tops of the trees. These are their roots. Think for yourself - count thousands of moving flocks along their contours, calculate their routes between us and Africa, ring captured birds and receive telegrams from the island of Java if this bird dies there, distinguish twenty shades of pink in plumage on the abdomen. Guess nests, look for eggs of various colors and sizes. Constantly look through binoculars, lorgnettes and spyglasses. Know which train to take in order to catch a migrating flock at a certain station. All this is not conducive to a normal mental state.

I know from my own experience of coexistence with birds: the thrushes ate the berries from the bush, which I picked myself; crows always sat on the house in front of my window; the sparrows kept the swallows out of their own nests on my balcony; the rook drowned himself in my barrel of water; a crow lived with me for a long time; my children found a frozen parrot, which then flew freely around the house; the stork, exhausted by the flight, fell on my post in the army; pigeons, which the neighbors roasted before the Sabbath; the crane that flew to my forest through bombarded Serbia; crows, from which I took nuts in the army ... If plants are concepts, animals are images, then birds are symbols and signs. I was not surprised that an ornithologist I knew became a theologian. Because birds are a bit like angels.

4. Unselected

The possibility of choice, which is considered the highest embodiment of human freedom, is in fact nothing but the highest form of bondage. This is doom. You have to choose, you can't not choose. Because even without choosing, you have already made the choice not to choose. Choice is an obligatory exam that not everyone can pass. This is a special responsibility to relatives and humanity. It is the moves of your choice that are the most valuable thing you can do for humanity. After all, each of your choices, and especially their combination and sequence, testifies to the possibility of the path you have chosen. When you make your own choice, you show the way to someone else.

These are obvious and simple things. But there is one aspect of the problem of choice that few think seriously about. It's a question of the un-chosen. The chosen immediately becomes a reality, which means it acquires a temporary O not a dimension, but what belongs to time will surely end. That is, what we have chosen becomes ours only for a while, and then disappears, passes or evolves into something that very little resembles the original ...

At the same time the chain not chosen, a gigantic enumeration of rejected possibilities, people, relationships, words, places and actions, feelings and experiences, melodies, smells and tastes, touches and touches accumulates in your unreality. All this is unrealized, and therefore it is infinite. This is a graveyard that is always with you. This baggage contains old age and fatigue, but art and literature are unpacked from it, the most beautiful music plays from there, and the most beautiful faces in the world shimmer there. True, some manias, fears and other ugly things begin to writhe and scrape together. In this baggage there is always some old raincoat, in the pocket of which lies a forgotten ticket - a discount ticket to schizophrenia, the most common proof of the existence of the chosen and the unchosen. But in others, strong ones, the unchosen develops what makes mammals human - an inexpressible nostalgia, a sadness that does not destroy, but lifts up, elevates. Some kind of absence of fear, some unbearable lightness of existence…

5. Ginger

I realized a long time ago that when a weapon is aimed at you, it does not mean anything, because if it is aimed for real, there is nothing to do, and when it is half for real, it will not shoot. I've been targeted many times, and it's always worked out. It was only necessary to behave calmly, although at gunpoint they offered me to do stupid things - jump off a rushing train, then from a high bridge, refuse something very important or something else impossible. But these are all fragments that you soon forget. They fired less often and almost always not aiming. They shot at me aimingly only once - then I had to die instead of a friend. But nothing came of it either. I didn't get hit. And that's what gave the friend a little more happy life. I have rarely had such reliable friends. And so perfect. His name was Ryzhik. That's what I called him. Large, wolf-like, but yellow and long-haired dog. With amazing eyes of a tiger or lynx - amber, deep and wise. And eyebrows. Absolutely human brown eyebrows. He was already quite an adult and with a huge experience of all the worst when he nailed to our mountain. Somehow immediately attached to me. At first he could growl from time to time when I caressed him, because tenderness seemed to him something unusual and insidious. But soon got used to it. Only I could caress him as I wanted. Despite the fact that he began to live with us, Ryzhik never entered the house. I suspect he was claustrophobic. He established his own rules in the courtyard - he did not let anyone in except family members, furiously pursued postmen, barked at all the trains. I hated everything that could mean even the smallest change in the rhythm of our lives. In addition, for some reason, he guarded me from several relatives and made sure that I did not meet with them. Sometimes he could get nervous and bite someone. Not to bite, but to chew. After some time, the list of those gnawed was almost identical to the list of everyone who lived near us. And then the adult neighbors decided it was time to get rid of him. One of them had a gun, others just started to track Ryzhik. The dog felt something and stopped walking around the surrounding areas.

I was running along the ravine when buckshot began to whistle over my head. From surprise, I did not fall to the bottom, but looked out of the ravine and heard a few more whistles past my head and saw hunter neighbors who were shooting in my direction. They shot, because only my head protruded from the ravine, which, in color and shaggy, resembled some part of Ryzhikov's body. When the shooters came to their senses, they kissed and hugged me for a long time. And as if someone who returned from the other world was promised never to persecute my friend. Of course, as written in the oldest books, after a while they easily broke their promise. I think that if I had been shot that day, it would have happened even sooner.

6. Until the night came down

Many years ago, I rocked children in my arms at night. It wasn't considered wrong back then. He sang something, trying to make both the voice, and the resonance in the chest, and the motive of the song be sleeping pills. A small hugged body cannot be deceived. In order for it to calm down, you need to be absolutely calm yourself. And the young dad so often wanted his sons to fall asleep, and he could go somewhere in public. The cardiac arrhythmia of this hope woke up the children, tired of daytime impressions, did not give them rest, delayed the moment of falling asleep, adding even more tension to dad's anxiety.

Then I used the last argument. He sang a sad song about how the wind broke a birch tree, how an archer shot a chamois, how a wounded moth flickered, how it was impossible to fight with death, but she fought until the night came down, how every sun in the world has its own, how it shines - and my heart is light, how the sun goes out, how life is not sweet ... I became calm. The children were asleep. I went where it was no longer necessary to go, and I thought that life's desire had not all flown away, and maybe I would have lived, but the sun had set ...

I could not even imagine that life protects itself so strongly, clings so strongly to that beam of sunlight that makes non-existence invisible to the last. I never thought that a memory compress has the same healing ability as dreams, in which it is simply impossible to reach the feeling of death.

After all, why instead of dry lips, rolled eyes, twisted fingers, perspiring faces, clenched jaws, shortness of breath, hot and cold bodies, groans, screams and spoken delirium, instead of convulsions and immobility, tension and weakness of muscles, the abyss of views in which you can to see anything, instead of open bodies, from which liquids and a soul departed, I remember something completely different? Something that was next to the most expensive deaths, but no longer had anything to do with them. Some incomprehensible fragments - some blue September skies, autumn warmth, a lamp on the night porch, someone's ribs under a thin dirty dress, April snow, long white corridors, cold vodka with lemon juice, giant sycamore leaves that have fallen all at once in one hour, daffodil fields, top shelves of overheated common cars, yellow pollen foam in April puddles, a hasty cigarette in a hospital elevator, different teas, different smells, clover and wild rose, shiny and hard leaves in a beech forest, shoulders scratched by blackberries, dried on pear tins (something suspiciously a lot of plant memories) ...

And then the children surprised, making all misunderstandings, reflections, associations, memories and realizations transparent, bittersweet and unrestrained, like a tear. We were driving a random minibus down a terribly difficult road in a misty gorge. There was also a little two-year-old girl in the same car. Then some kind of emergency occurred, in which each passenger sees its slow development over several seconds. And he clearly sees how it will all end. But a miracle happened, one of many. As in a dream that does not allow you to feel the state of dying. And then the children very calmly said - it would be a pity only for a child, she still doesn’t know anything, because we have already lived so much ... One was as many as nine, the youngest was eight more.

7. Sleep

As a child, no one understands this. In childhood, this is perceived as a strange weakness of the parent. The child cannot understand how one can try to stretch the night, because sometimes children cannot wait for tomorrow. Children get up early and want to go to bed as late as possible. The same in early youth. It seems that the medical evidence for the need for sleep is nonsense. But then... Then suddenly there comes a moment when you begin to understand that the only thing you will never miss for the next decades is sleep. You can still work at night, you can still work during the day after sleepless night gather strength and be efficient. You can even, being terribly exhausted, suddenly decide not to go to bed when there is such an opportunity, but to watch a worthwhile movie, read some book, have a drink with friends, make love. However, all this enthusiasm will not last long. After all, when you are old enough, but you are not old yet, a few hours of sleep is your treasure, an extra hour is a luxury, and half a day of sleep is an obsessive dream. After all, only here you can stretch a pause between the attacks of a long list of aggressors. You don't even need dreams that much. Although dreams are the best you can get in this segment of life, the abyss is enough for you. Like an animal surrounded by traps, you slowly make your way to the bed and disappear into the hole. In darkness, depth, density and tightness. You are happy to become a hedgehog, a mole, an amphibian, a larva who do not understand what is happening around. You strive to return to warmth and conciseness, far from even childhood. Where to rest against the walls is tantamount to happiness. Where you can live, exist in the form of a bulb, or a root, or a seed. And then only one thing worries you - that tomorrow will be a day again. That you will be illuminated, watered and warmed up. In the morning you will have a few minutes of the most dreamy joy, you will be in all stages of the explosion - including the moment of silence, including rarefaction and condensation of air. After all, for a few minutes you will know that you are almost not sleeping, but you can still. A few of the most life-filled minutes before your eyes open and you thank God for seeing the light again.

8. Secret map

Many of us have some kind of secret map - it can be a map itself, it can be a freehand drawing, it can be some kind of photograph or illustration in a book, a drawing in an atlas, a diagram in an encyclopedia. Maybe an old picture with strangers or someone else's painting. Sometimes it can even be the image of some author, a monument or even a square. This card can exist in the form of an old sweater, a spoon, a worn knife, or a chipped cup. It can be dissolved in a particular type of wine, or crushed and ground with a special type of coffee. I'm not talking about spices and perfumes, a few words written in a certain font, about herbaria and numismatic or philatelic collections. About attics and cellars, about beds and chests of drawers, about melodies and pianoforte.

It can be in the face of some person, sometimes an unfamiliar one, or it can be an engraved epitaph on someone's tombstone. So this secret map can be encrypted in anything. The only thing that all of these options have in common is that they show you the way to your personal lost paradise. This is the blueprint for your paradise and the way to get there.

I also have this card. I grew up on a balcony. My great aunt made something incredible out of this balcony. It was large and overgrown with grapes. And went out to three sides of the world. And my grandmother was the most amazing flower grower in the world. She never cared about the size of the flower bed, didn't need a lot of flowers. She only wished that there were many kinds of flowers. Hundreds of the most exotic plants grew in several boxes and wire-braided pots. She got at least one seed of an incredibly strange plant from everywhere. She didn't need any more. One seed, one plant. That was the principle. Flower growers from all over the world sent her seeds in letters. The balcony I grew up on looked like a tropical coastline. The only thing missing was the reefs. I bathed in a tub exposed to the sun to warm the water. Then this water, as in the jungle, was used to water plants.

When my grandmother died, I redrawn the diagram of her garden for myself. I wrote down all the names there. This is my map of paradise lost. I warm myself with the thought that someday I will be able to restore all this paradise on another balcony.

difficult

And whoever does not read this essay will have a hard time in life, because their Uneasy will bypass their obvious plots, and maybe even turn off the sound and light.

Yaroslav Dovgan

Sixty-eight random opening phrases

1. In the autumn of 1951, it would not be surprising to move west - then even the east began to gradually move in this direction. However, in November 1951, Sebastian and Anna set off from Wet to the east, which was more numerous then. More precisely - to the east south or southeast.

2. This journey was postponed for so many years not because of the war - the war could change little in their lives. Sebastian himself decided to break the tradition of the family, according to which the children were shown places related to the history of the family at the age of fifteen. Because then, when Anna was fifteen, Sebastian realized that everything was repeating itself, and Anna became for him the only possible woman in the whole world. That he could not only be near her, but could no longer be without her.

3. And in front of the fence - a fragment of a road already laid out with river rounds. The road starts from the bottom in the middle of the card, leads to the upper left corner, bending around a tall rickety cedar pine, and disappears again closer to the middle - naturally, at the top. At the end, the road rises at such an angle that it also serves as a backdrop for the shot. All the time the fence is on the right, and on the left is a narrow canal with empty concrete banks. Even more to the left, already behind the canal, there was only a piece of high boardwalk, on which there are several beach chairs and tubs with slender yalivs.

4. Francis, in a white linen cloak with large buttons, stands at the very canal, on the bank, which is closer to the road. He has clothes thrown over his arm. It's the same color as the cloak, but you can tell it's just a shirt and pants. In the other hand are black shoes. His posture shows that he has just turned his back on the water. And there is the head of a man who floats down the canal.

5. The face is impossible to distinguish, but Sebastian knows that it is him. This happened more than once: they walked around the city - Sebastian calmly sailed through the channels, and Franz walked side by side along the banks.

The canals ran parallel to every street in Yalivets. Thus, the water from the many streams that flowed down the slopes above the city was collected in a pool at its lower boundary. Sebastian could swim for hours in the mountain water, and they talked continuously. Apparently, the photo could have been taken in the late summer of 1914. After all, only once did a young instructor in the art of survival go with them, who was invited to one boarding house - starting in September, to teach at paid courses. In addition to him, an Esperanto teacher and the owner of a hectograph also arrived. But only the instructor asked for a walk around the city.

6. Immediately after swimming and photographing, the instructor suggested going somewhere for gin, but Sebastian and Franz wanted a light fresh wine from hairy gooseberries, and they took the instructor to Bada, to an armored car that stood between two spots - islets of zherep. Bada had been picking different berries all summer, and now inside the armored car there were several ten-liter bottles in which multi-colored berries were fermented, heated by the metal walls of the wagon.

They first tasted a little of each wine, and then drank all the gooseberries. The instructor started talking terribly and began to check how Sebastian can solve simple tasks on the theory of survival. It turned out that he knows almost nothing and can very easily die in the most innocent situation. Although Sebastian imagined what survival is. He represented so well that he stopped caring about him at all. And yet he survived.

7. In Africa, he had many opportunities to die, but it was more important to survive, because I wonder what Africa is. In the end, he, looking at any piece of land - even pissing in the morning - saw that he was on another continent, in an unknown firmament. So he was convinced that Africa exists. For before that, the recalculation of localities, a long series of differences in architecture, the placement of stars, the structure of skulls and customs, were erased by the fundamental immutability of the squares of soil and grass on it.

6. And he first learned about survival when this grass began to burn around him. The wind, which mostly brought only mental disorders, now dispersed the fire in four directions from the place where it fell on the parched earth. And then, ahead of the fire (perhaps he ran just where the wind was blowing him on four sides), Sebastian fell into the middle of the rain that was about to whole year and then flowed over the hardened red soil in many parallel streams, to which man means as little as the smallest sand turtle, and as many as millions, myriads of thirsty seeds for the stream, dropped by dead branches for long months without a single drop.

The instructor was amazed at Sebastian's lack of education. He did not believe that anyone would allow themselves to live in peace, completely unaware of how to avoid daily danger. Then Sebastian decided that he would no longer say a single word about survival.

7. So, the only undated picture was taken on August 28, 1914. It will be necessary to inscribe this date on the back, at least with a hard pencil.

Even if the inscription is erased - and what is written in pencil is necessarily erased, especially when there is no one to clarify at least something - then a relief trace should remain from a hard pencil, embossed in the uppermost layer of paper torn with sharp graphite.

Physiologically

1. Every man needs a teacher.

Men generally need to learn.

Some men are distinguished not only by their ability to learn and learn, but also by the fact that they always know and remember - what they learned from whom, even by accident. And if for women the memory of teachers is a manifestation of goodwill, then for men it is the most necessary component of everything learned.

The most talented men not only study all their lives (learning is to be aware of what is happening), but very soon they themselves become someone's teachers, insisting on awareness of what they have lived. Actually, this is how continuity of learning is created, which, along with the family tree, provides the maximum probability that during your life the world could not change so much that just because of this you completely lose the desire to live.

(Over time, both Francis and Sebastian saw how much some women know without teachers, how wise women become the wisest when they learn to learn, and when the wisest remember those from whom they received experience, involuntarily making it their own, they turn into what something that no man can ever comprehend, if only because no man can learn anything from such women, except that something like this can exist).

2. The schedule that Franz taught learned from Bram. Bram learned from the animals.

For years, the chart told Franz stories about Bram's teachers. For years, Franz looked at animals and drew their habits. Later, it was this adapted zoology that became the basis of his daughter's upbringing. It is clear that he taught Sebastian the same when he stayed forever in Yalivets and began to live in his house. Therefore, the Sebastian children knew these stories just as well.

3. The unsimple ones became interested in the second Anna, in fact, because she was so able to understand animals that she could become the same as them and live with this or that animal without causing him a restless feeling of otherness. As for Sebastian, he liked how every morning, for a tone, Anna turned into a cat or a lemur for a few minutes. And on their nights together, he seemed to have slept with such small creatures as spiders and bark beetles.

4. Francis quickly noticed that he had, in a sense, an extended physiology. It is clear that the physiology of every creature depends on the environment, but in the case of Franz this dependence was manifested excessively. He no doubt felt that part of what should have been happening in his body was carried far beyond the shell. And vice versa - in order to take place, other external things had to partially use its physiological mechanisms.

Franz thought that he was somehow reminiscent of mushrooms mixed up with a tree, or spiders, whose food takes place in the body of a killed victim, or mollusks with an external skeleton - a shell, or fish, the released sperm of which floats freely in the water until it fertilizes something .

He saw how certain thoughts do not have enough space in the head, and they are placed on fragments of the landscape. For it was enough to look at some clearing to read the thought settled there. And in order to remember something, he had to walk through familiar places in his imagination, reviewing and selecting the necessary memories.

And while making love to Anna, he knew exactly how she looked inside, because he was sure: he was all going through her inner path.

5. His own physiology ceased to bother him immediately after the teacher told him that Bram said that dogs have a million times better scent than humans. It was amazing, the imagination could not even come close to it. But Franz, having reduced the order to at least ten, was imbued with how everything that happens outside is exaggeratedly displayed in the dogs' heads, how drafts rush through the corridors of their brain (he also told Sebastian this, and he tried to reckon with pungent odors so that the dogs Sebastian almost cried when - going to the sniper positions - he had to lubricate his boots with a tobacco solution so that the dogs, once inhaled by that smell, would lose their desire and ability to follow his trail). (Franz respected the dogs so much that, having settled in Yalivets, he got himself several very different ones. Out of respect, he never trained them. The dogs lived, were born and died free. It seems, looking at the life of other dogs in the outskirts of Yalivets, they were grateful for this Franz. After all, it was they who were the real intelligentsia of Yalivets.)

6. True, one, perhaps the most intelligent, named Lukacs in honor of the Serb - forester, who taught Nepr O willing to grow trees a little more freely, like wild grapes, and during the war planted Yalivets thickets impassable for the troops, Franz was forced to kill with his own hands.

7. Lukács was bitten by a rabid ermine.

He was very ill, and soon the agony was to begin. As is the case with rabies, the writhing could be aggravated by the sight of water, by a gust of wind in the face, by light, by speaking loudly, by touching the skin and turning the neck.

Lukács lay in the greenhouse, in the shade of a young bergamot. Passionflower flowers were just in bloom with all their crosses, hammers, nails and spears, and Franz had to cover the whole bush with a wet linen piano case so that the tart smell of passions would not tease Lukács (once he loved this odor so much that during flowering whole slept for days under passionflower without leaving the greenhouse).

Bergamot grew at the very end of a long passage. Francis walked towards him with a cleaver in his hand through the entire greenhouse, passing exotics one by one. The dog barely moved his eyes to his face, hand, sword, and with difficulty raised his head, exposing his throat. But Franz did it differently - he hugged Lukacs and pressed his head down so that the vertebrae protruded, and the blow started from the spinal cord, and did not end there.

Despite the speed of the operation, Lukács could smell his own blood, and Franz could clearly feel the tissue creaking through which the blade had pierced. It was as if the sounds were coming to the inner ear from one's own neck (as one sometimes feels one's own voice when one shouts under a waterfall).

8. The murder of Lukacs impressed Franz so much that later it seemed to him more than once that it was Lukacs who was looking at him through the eyes of his children, that Lukacs’s gestures, postures and facial expressions sometimes appear from under the fur of canine grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As if Lukács was immortal.

Franz has simply not lived long enough to see that this is not entirely true. For Sebastian had already experienced countless times how one could enter the same river while living with a wife, a daughter, and a granddaughter.

Sebastian did not find anything strange in the fact that Franz himself died like Lukacs (maybe he only did not smell blood, but he probably heard the sounds of torn tissues inside himself), although they did not kill him so diligently.

9. In the same way, Sebastian did not have any allusions when, twenty years after the death of Franz, a trained military dog ​​rushed at him right in the middle of the bridge over the Tisza. Sebastian only slightly crouched to withstand the accelerated weight, and offered his elbow hidden in the casing to the flying maw. The mouth closed on his left hand tighter than pincers, and Sebastian took a large razor from the pocket of the casing with his right hand and with one effort cut off the dog's head so that it remained clinging to the elbow, and the body fell onto the boards of the bridge.

10. With such an expanded physiology, Francis could not be well anywhere. He dreamed most of all of a place where—as in the case of the placenta and fetus—his physiology would most comfortably germinate.

Beda correctly wrote to Anna - such a botanical geography. Franz found a place that made travel unnecessary.

Before the premiere of one of his films in the cinema Yuniperus, he even told the public from all over Europe - I live like grass or yalivets, so as not to be anywhere else after the seed came to life; waiting for the light that will turn into me; to see it not just from the bottom up, but projected onto the sky, that is, enlarged and distorted enough to be even more interesting; after all, my place will always be at the center of European history, for in these places history is different forms she comes to our yards.

11. In Yalivets, or rather, in a place where there was no Yalivets yet, Franz began to live for real. Even somewhat ashamed of his every minute happiness.

12. On the day when he and the professor stopped between Petros and Sheshul, Franz thought he was traveling through the heavenly islands. Only a few of the highest peaks peeked out above the clouds. The setting sun shone only on them. The red upper side of the clouds overflowed with inlets, lagoons, channels, floodplains, deltas and estuaries. That in the depths, was silent.

Franz found berries on a soft slope. Due to the shortening of the summer day in this high mountain tundra, they ripened at the same time - strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and currants. Franz no longer belonged to himself, he got involved in some kind of cosmic movements, because he could not stop, he ate so many berries that he was forced to lie down, then he felt that he was sinking to the bottom of an unprecedented womb, could not stand it and poured out.

A little higher it was still spring and fluffy primroses were blooming.

Even higher, the snow was slowly melting.

Franz rushed down and ran between the beeches, among which autumn reigned. During this run, a year later, he poured out a second time. The professor, meanwhile, spread out the tent. They ate several Hutsul skates molded from cheese and brewed tea from the leaves of all the berries. Then the night began. From the month everything looked snowy, the Romanian mountains seemed like a distant strip of the coast, and the earth irresistibly left the heat with the smell of vermouth.

Walk, stand, sit, lie down

1. If cities are really the best plots, then the culmination of Yalivets as a city was, of course, the time when Anna, the daughter of Francis, became the city architect.

It is not difficult for children of multipliers who never leave their father to become architects. Especially in the city that dad came up with. According to her first sketch in 1900 (Anna was then seven), a new Yuniperus cinematograph was built in the form of a chest of drawers - especially for showing Frantz animation films.

As a child, Anna designed a pool in the form of a grebe nest that floated in the lake, underground tunnels with exits like moles on different streets of the city, a bar in which the exit was arranged so that, crossing the threshold of the hall, it turned out not to be outside, as it could expect, and in exactly the same room, a four-story cone house and a huge two-story sunflower villa.

2. For Anna thought with the body. She could feel each movement not only as a whole, but also as a sequence of tensions and relaxations of muscle fibers, turns of joints, fading and explosions of blood flow, penetration and extrusion of air flows. Therefore, the expressions of her thinking were spatial constructions. And she saw any structure, bypassing the coating. And, again, as a space in which other moving and semi-moving structures move - fingers, spines, skulls, knees, jaws.

3. However, Franz noticed that at first Anna's fantasy could not go beyond symmetry. He realized for himself that being enchanted by the miracle of natural symmetry is the first step for children to consciously reproduce the beauty of world harmony.

4. Anna was brought up in a rather limited way.

Even when she was called Stephanie, and only her mother was Anna, Franz realized that the main thing in raising children is to be with them as much as possible. Perhaps, perhaps, he was imbued with this too literally, because after the death of his wife for almost twenty years there was not a single minute when he and Anna were apart. Always together. Or in the same room, or together they left the house, or did something in the garden, seeing each other. Even when swimming, Anna never locked the bathroom door. It was important for them to be able to constantly hear what the other was saying. This became the sole principle of Francis's pedagogy. Surprisingly, she liked such a life. When Anna began to seriously study architecture, she simply trembled with joy when they worked at different tables in a large office - she made sketches and drawings, and dad drew his cartoons.

5. All his life, Francis spoke not so much to her as just out loud. Everything that Anna heard, their dogs heard. Anna rarely asked anything, instead she learned to constantly talk about all her feelings, trying to find the most accurate phrases.

Often she interrupted Franz - tell the same thing again, but not so briefly.

Anna did not know how to read and write, but she looked at the pictures every day in Larousse. She heard music only in the performance of the resort choir and also Hutsul floyars, cymbalists, guslars, trembitars. She herself played only the drymba. She drew the circle impeccably, but folded it from two symmetrical halves. In the same way, she knew how to make any ellipse, and the straight line could continue indefinitely, interrupted from time to time for several seconds or months. She knew everything about her mother that a girl should know. She played with dogs and thus was in the circle of her peers.

6. She lived twice as much, living her life and Francis's every day.

7. Unexpectedly for herself, Anna began to draw beans. The movement with which this was done gave her the highest physical pleasure. Thousands of repetitions did not make the pleasure less. Anna began to think about it.

She saw beans everywhere, in river pebbles and in the moon, in curled-up dogs and in the position in which she most often fell asleep, in sheep kidneys, lungs, hearts and cerebral hemispheres, in mounds of sheep cheese and mushroom caps, in bird bodies and in embryos. , in their breasts and in the especially beloved two pelvic bones that stuck out in the lower abdomen, and in the shores of lakes and concentric lines that showed the increase in the height of the mountain on geographical maps. In the end, I decided that nothing more than a bean was the most thoughtful form of extracting a small space from a large one.

8. Anna told old Bada about this when she brought a whole bag of large blue beans to his armored car. They dragged the bag onto the roof of the armored car and poured everything into the top hatch. Anna looked down and froze - inside the armored car was full of beans of different sizes and colors, the top of the pile moved freely, like lava flows in a volcano. Beda collected beans from all over Yalivets to take them to the bazaar in Kosovo.

Apparently, then he said something Nepr O shy, because they came and made sure that the very young Anna was appointed city architect.

9. When Franz chose a place, he wanted it to be good in all four states - walking, standing, sitting and lying, in which a person can stay.

Anna was different. She has lived in this place since the very beginning. After becoming an architect, Anna began to invent something else. She remembered very well what Franz had taught her, and even better what Franz had taught her. But for the first time she did not believe that he had told her everything.

10. You can fall - and trampolines were installed under some houses, on which people jumped straight from the balconies.

You can hang - and ropes were pulled from two mountains, along which, taking hold of special holders (Anna found them among her mother's climbing personal belongings), they gathered right up to the central square, hanging for several minutes above the roofs and not very tall trees.

You can swing - and trapezes were placed on the houses, on which they flew to the opposite side of the street.

And you can also roll, jump, crawl, mess around - this was also taken into account in different ways in the updated Yalivets. There are even more patients at the gin spa. Sebastian was already at war in Africa, and the terrorist Sichynsky escaped from the Stanislav prison.

11. Franz clearly saw that Anna could not come up with anything new, because even during a fall (or, say, a flight - if she even succeeded) a person either stands, or lies, or sits in the air.

But he liked the innovations, and he suggested flooding all the streets with water for the winter. Yalivets became a solid ice rink for several months. Only holding on to the handrails along the streets, one could somehow climb out to the upper part of the city. But Franz knew how to walk on slippery surfaces.

12. Traveling with Francis in the nearby mountains, Anna saw many different Hutsul settlements. Looking closely, she realized what it means to have your own home. Taking care of the house makes the daily search for food meaningful. Having a home is like putting away leftovers or sharing food with someone. Or the time allotted for finding food.

If the body is the gate of the soul, then the house is the porch where the soul is allowed to go.

She saw how for most people the home is the basis of a biography and an expressive result of existence. Also, memory rests there, because with objects it is easiest for her to give herself advice.

She was fascinated by this Hutsul feature - to build her own hut far from others. In a clean place. When the house is built, it becomes wiser than all the prophets and prophets - it will always tell you what to do next.

13. Another quality of beauty. To be accessible, beauty must be formulated in words. And therefore - to be crushed. The house provides this small space in which you can manage to create beauty on your own.

Anna considered space, light, extensions, transitions between the separation of space to be the initial conditions for the beauty of housing. Therefore, she designed several houses as Hutsul huts-citizens. Separate rooms and living quarters went directly to the square courtyard, closed on all sides by these very rooms.

14. The source of all beauty that can be created by people, all aesthetics, is, of course, plants (in the end, food too; here the ideal and the material are united as never before). On the other hand, there is little else such an accurate embodiment of ethics as caring for plants. Not to mention the fact that observing seasonal changes is the easiest way to get into personal philosophy. Therefore, the Serbian forester Lukacs planted the farmsteads of citizens with flowering bushes brought from Macedonia: barberries, camellias, veres, dogwoods, wolfberries, forsythia, hydrangeas, jasmine, magnolias, rhododendrons, clematis.

15. Anna ordered the city itself to be fenced with transparent, zigzag Hutsul fences made of long smerekov armor - thieves. It was necessary to enter the city with real gates, pushing the gates apart.

There was no particular need for this, but Anna wanted to revive as many words as possible, which are necessary when there are such fences - gars, zavorynye, guzhva, byltsya, kechka, spyzh.

Situations in color

1. The main inhabitant of Yalivets was, of course, the Yalivets himself. Franz planned the construction of the city so as not to destroy a single bush on all three sides of the slope. Since there were not enough trees, most of the houses were built from gray slabs of stone ledges, which in some places are called gorgans. Therefore, the main colors of the city were green and gray - even less than on Hutsul ceramics. But if gray was the same everywhere, then green had many shades. Even a little differently - it would be bad to say: green. Better green. In fact, there were so many greens that everything seemed incredibly colored. Not even counting the thousands of really radically different spots of burgundy, red, pink, purple, blue, blue, yellow, orange, white, again green, brown and almost black flowering bushes. By their flowers, little Anna studied colors (Franz often thought of that time as something of the best. Naming colors became for him an obvious embodiment of the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bcreating the world and understanding). If you live carefully, then floriculture in such a city is not necessary. And so it was.

You also need to imagine continuous bands of nearby, distant and most distant mountains that were visible from anywhere in Yalivets.

More skies, winds, suns, moons, snows and rains.

2. So many yalivets grew around this stone settlement that the smell of its heated, soaked, broken, crushed berries, twigs and roots simply grew into a taste.

4. In each case, Sebastian himself said that Franz said that life depends on what you are moving against. But what you're going up against always depends on where you're going. That is, changing it is quite simple. It is more difficult with other defining elements - what you drink and what you breathe.

In Yalivets, everyone breathed the ethereal resins of Yalivets and drank Yalivtsovka, which the Yalivets fell into three times. Because the water, in which the sweet berries roamed, itself overflowed from the sky into the ground for years, washing the yalivets, absorbing it and remembering it, and then also heated up on the fire from the yalivts logs.

5. Yalivtsovka was cooked in every farmstead. Fresh shoots were boiled in cauldrons with alcohol expelled from yalivets berries. Vapors collected on the stones, cooled and dripped with thick gin. It happened that heavy gin clouds hung over the roofs. So when it got cold, the alcohol came out of the sky. On the ground, already pre-chilled, it froze and the streets were covered with thin ice. If you lick this ice, you could get drunk. On such days one had to walk through the streets, sliding. Although in reality the foot does not have time to slip if you walk fast enough - so that the sole rubs against the ice as little as possible.

6. The very first Anna appeared in Yalivets already when the city was becoming a fashionable resort. Shortly before that, she hit hard, falling off a cliff, although she was tied with a string, and for a long time she did not eat anything. Still, I was terribly scared. The next day, however, she went to the mountains and tried to climb. But nothing happened. For the first time, the body refused to be an extension of the stone. Something was stronger there. She came to Yalivets, drank gin, she was going to train, but instead she drank gin. I did not even dare to approach the rocks. And soon met with Francis. He made animated films, for which no less tourists came to Yalivets than for gin.

7. Anna felt like a lichen cut off from the bare shore of the cold sea. I just had to hold on to hold on. Because otherwise there would be no way. She really wanted to not be evil. God! Don't let me offend anyone! she prayed every minute.

For the first time, he and Franz spent the night in a bar, where, accidentally wandering in the evening, they could not stay until dawn. The bartender was so unlike a bartender that they waited quite a long time for someone to turn to. There they gave each other a gin massage, created three gin inhalations, setting fire to gin-pervak ​​on the palms and stomach, drank spilled on the table and from mouth to mouth. Anna had not yet imagined Franz anywhere else.

8. At night, they lay side by side on shifted chairs and understood that, by the coincidence of bones and pulp, they were brother and sister. Or husband and wife. Even if it doesn't happen again, Francis thought, it's still nice to touch. And she thought about various little things and miracles that happen or can happen someday.

While they slept, pressing bones to flesh and bones to bones, and flesh to pulp, their skulls were continuously touched by some irregularities. They turned, pressed, twisted and moved away, and the skulls did not separate for a second. Sometimes the skulls rumbled, caught in particularly expressive humps and hollows, and they often awoke, frightened by the exorbitant closeness created precisely by the heads. Never again did Francis and Anne experience such a shared clarity and insight.

Outside, it began to light up. The main street of the town bypassed closed bars, dark courtyards overgrown with grapes that never ripened, low stone fences, high gates, and went to the foot of a thousand, six hundred, ninety-five-meter mountain, gradually turning into a barely noticeable path, which shone at this time of the day. white.

9. Anna's pregnancy was a period of complete happiness. What can truly be called cohabitation, family.

Evenings start early. We walked in warm autumn raincoats through distant back streets among not yet inhabited villas. They pretended it wasn't their city. He kept her hand in his pocket. They walked, simultaneously taking a step with that foot, to which the leg of the other was pressed so tightly that waves of muscle contractions were felt, and the hip joints rubbed ridiculously. She really liked that everything was so simple. That she loves the one she loves. For the first time she experienced the joy of not having to go away in the morning. She told him something from what happened when he was not there yet, and she loved very much how he told about how he knew her. In the morning they had a long breakfast on the balcony with honey, sour milk, dry pears soaked in wine, fried crackers soaked in milk, various nuts.

10. On the table near the bath was an old typewriter with an unshakable cast-iron stand, and what they did not dare to say to each other, they printed on a long sheet of the best paper invested in Remington. I feel bad with people I don’t know about,” Anna wrote, “is it good for them now, is it good for them with me, is it good for him here. It is bad and hard with those who do not say what they like and what they don't. Francis was printing something completely different: even without doing any harm, bad people do bad things to us - we are forced to take into account their existence. Good people cease to be good when they begin to regret what it is a pity to give, - Anna wrote for some reason. And Franz - meaning and pleasure exist only in details, you need to know these details in order to be able to repeat them.

After the death of Franz, Sebastian found this machine. The paper was still in it. Then he often imagined the real dialogues of living people, built from such sayings.

11. Franz tried to wean Anna from fear. He led her to the rocks from the side where one could go through the thickets of mountain pine, behind. And there he picked up and held over the abyss. Fate is not the most important thing, said Franz. The main thing is not to be afraid of anything. But something about his method was wrong.

He studied her body better than she did. He could take her hand and touch Anna with it in a way that she herself had never done and would not have been able to. He acted with her in such a way that it tickled her veins, vessels, veins. He showed her her beauty for a very long time. From all this, Anna began to realize how beautiful she was. Beautiful not for someone else, but for yourself. And she became even more afraid that all this could collapse, hitting the stones.

I love my life, she asked Franz. This is good, he insisted, because, apart from this, there is nothing else, not to love is to renounce everything.

12. Yet she tried again. When Franz plugged her ears. For he suddenly suspected that Anna was not afraid of heights, but of the sound of silence that accompanies heights.

Hedged in every possible way, with stuffed up ears, the pregnant Anna climbed the stone wall, lost from the fact that she did not know how to press her stomach.

Franz decided to crawl alongside. He outlined on the rock all the contours of the pressed belly. Down they slid down the rope so hastily that they burned their palms. For some reason, often because of such minor burns, it is impossible to fall asleep. The next morning, moving daguerreotypes of silhouettes of the embryo moving along the rock were ready. The film turned out good. No wonder it's short.

13. Francis did not pay attention to time. All his films were several minutes long. He came up with an animation that couldn't be done yet. Enjoyed creating filled minutes that might not exist. If not. If I hadn’t noticed something, if I hadn’t come up with a technique, if I hadn’t adapted it, if I hadn’t distinguished it - if it wasn’t for a lot of things.

Life is so short, said Francis, that time is of no importance. One way or another, it happens completely.

Franz dreamed of something radical. And I came up with the idea that the most radical thing is to wait.

14. After the birth of her daughter, Anna decided to train again. She tried to plug her ears, but something broke again. The inner ear lacked vibration, without which it is difficult to define the boundaries of one's body.

She remembered her father's garden and injected herself with morphine. Vibration appeared immediately.

But strange sounds began to behave. They seem to have lost their dependence on distance. Sounds flew at great speed in whole-wound balls, not dissipating in the air. Sometimes such a ball collided with others, changing the direction of flight quite unexpectedly. From some blows, sound crumbs and dust were upholstered from both balls. They flew independently. Mixing, separating, flying up, sinking or hammering into the ground. Already at the height of her four heights, Anna found herself in opaque clouds of cacophony. When she rose higher, it was unbearable to hear the roar with which tiny grains of sand from under her fingers fell to the bottom of the abyss.

15. Anna didn't climb anymore. But she didn't stop using morphine. For days on end she sat on the veranda and listened to the life of various insects that lived near the house. Not even hearing how hungry Stephanie was crying.

In vain Franz tried to change something. The most he could manage was to squeeze some milk out of Anna's breasts and feed it to her daughter. But opium also liked milk. He managed to drink it first, and Franz kneaded his withered breasts to no avail. Francis went to the witch who was stealing milk from the cows and asked her to take the milk from Anna. The child began to eat. But along with milk, it received opium. Franz thought that the child slept for days on end from satiety. In the end, it was more peaceful that way. But when Anna's milk ran out completely and even the witch didn't extract a drop, Stefania experienced a real morphine withdrawal syndrome. The uneasy ones barely saved her by boiling poppy seeds in milk.

Anna did the same. The girl was asleep, she had wonderful dreams (some of them - and she was barely six months old - she remembered all her life. Although, perhaps, she remembered the feeling that there were such dreams, and the rest came later), and Anna calmly listened to how the worms pushed apart the earth, as spiders scream, indulging in love in stretched nets, as the chest of a beetle clenched in the beak of a wagtail crackles.

16. In mid-December, Franz took Anna to his knees and told her to get out of Yalivets. Anna got up, kissed Franz and went into the room to collect the baby. Then he suggested something else - he challenged his wife to a duel. Because a small child for later life needed one of these parents to be dead.

Anna agreed and chose a weapon - now they will go to the snow-covered weather-beaten rocks and climb up two unmarked routes without any insurance. Whoever comes back will stay with the girl. Despite all the fears, she was sure that only in this way Francis would win (they didn’t think at all that both of them might not return, and they didn’t say anything to anyone, leaving the baby in the cradle).

We barely made it through the snow to the rocks. They took off the casings, drank half a bottle of gin, kissed and climbed.

17. Francis for the first time was to become a real climber (for the first time for me, for the first time, he thought). Therefore, I climbed down from the top for several hours; it turned out that the hardened snow even helped him - he would not have been able to resist on a bare stone. He was terribly bitter, but he was able to bury Anna only in June, when the snow in the gorge melted.

Second old photo - Ardzheludzha, 1892

1. The naked female back ends with a wide lace, below the lace there is only a strip of black fabric. There is a thin thread of rough corals on the strongly bent forward neck. The head is no longer visible. Hands are lowered down, but bent at the elbows. The torso is slightly twisted to the left, so only four fingers are visible, which right hand holding on to the forearm of the left. The back looks almost triangular - the shoulders are so wide and the waist is narrow. Between the upper edge of the belt and the white skin there is a little free space. Expressive shoulder blades and tops of the clavicles. Below the neck are four humps of the vertebrae. Where they end, two bands of swollen muscles begin along the middle of the back. Closer to the waist, the distance between them is the smallest, and the depth of the cavity is the greatest. The keyboard of the ribs shines through only on the left, and then - rather, not on the back itself, but on the side. But where the chest ends, a concave curve of the waist begins, the line of which again extends to the previous level at the beginning of the pelvis.

Judging by the contrast of the white back and the black belt, it is easy to see that the solar illumination is maximum. Although a barely noticeable shadow appeared only between the muscles on the back.

1. Back taken close up. To the right of her, in the depth of the frame, a small horse is visible, which stands much further from the camera. The Hutsulik horse is quite old - there was no better then after the state recruitment of horses to Bosnia - but very cautious. Instead of a saddle - a narrow long coverlet.

2. In their first summer, Franz and Anna went to Kostrych to look at the panorama of Chornogora. The day was sunny, and they saw the entire ridge - Petros, Goverla, Breskul, Pozhyzhevskaya, Dantsysh, Gomul, Turkul, Shpytsi, Rebra, Tomnatyk, Brebeneskul, Menchul, Smotrych, Staiki, a little Svydovets - Blyznytsya and Tatulskaya, then - Bratkivskaya, Dovbushanka , Yavirnyk. Behind were Rotyla, White Mare and Lysina Kosmatskaya.

On the way back, behind Ardzhelyuja, Anna took off her shirt and coats, remained in the same men's gachas.

We went up against the current of the Prut. From time to time they went down to the river to drink water. The river was so shallow that Anna put her hands right on the bottom and so sank to the water, immersing her whole face. The tips of the breasts, although approaching the restless surface, remained unmoistened. Only a heavy, inlaid brass cross with a primitive hint of a crucifix pounded against the stones. At such moments, Franz put a ladybug on Anna's back, the bug ran around the droplets of sweat, tickled her skin, and Anna could not even move her hand.

After the font, they kissed until their lips were completely dry. Because everything that is wet dries up. The skin smelled of cold algae in warm rivers between warm stones under warm winds from under the snowy Goverla. If they could remember this bodily sensation in such a way that they could recall it exactly at any time, then the feeling of happiness would be permanent.

Then they still talked a lot and willingly. Franz thought how everything that is worth looking at changes when there is someone to show it to.

The horse carried only a pear chest with a camera and a maple barrel filled with yalivtsovka, and never once went into the water to get drunk.

3. When Francis returned alone from the rocks in December 1893, before feeding the child, he accidentally stumbled, in search of alcohol, on the same keg. There was about half a liter of Yalivtsovka left, and at the same time he drank the half-drink together. Then he pulled out this photograph, tucked among the larusses, inserted it between two rectangles of glass, throwing out some kind of drawing, and put it forever on his desktop.

Crushed a handful of dried blueberries in a brass mortar, poured warm water with honey and began to feed Stephanie. And in the morning I went to the priest and said to write my daughter in the church books as Anna.

Sebastian decided that it would be right to put the photo to Franz in the coffin (he could not know that there was already someone in the world who would always miss her later). So it probably didn't survive.

Temptations of Saint Anthony

1. Little Anna was given a miniature figurine of St. Anthony by the Uneasy. Anthony in full height, in a monastic cassock, holds lilies on a long stem in one hand, a child in the other. Regardless of size, Antony looked like a real statue when Anna lay down with her head on the floor, and put the figurine a little further away, or - also from the floor - stood on the very edge of the table. Particularly impressive were his impeccably rendered facial features.

Nepr O the ancients said that Anthony was fashioned from melted lead, which had previously been a bullet. The figurine lived in a metal cylinder, in which the soldiers keep tsidulki with their name and the address of their relatives. Anna wore this cartridge on a very long wire chain around her neck. From the constant friction of copper, green spots never left the skin. Francis thought it did no harm. When the weather was especially good, Anna took Antony out for a walk. She took it out of the capsule and aired it somewhere in the grass. When she closed it back, she also put a small flower inside - violet, daisy, plum petals or linden blossom, so that Anthony would have something to breathe.

2. She smelled very good herself. Franz loved most of all when Anna fell asleep on his table. He worked a little longer, looking more at the curled-up sleeping daughter, and then he climbed onto the table, put a book under his head, hugged Anna and breathed for a long time the air she exhaled. He stroked her head, and sometimes Anna woke up in the morning with thick, thin, short scratches on her face—some kind of hardened skin on Francis's fingers scratched her body.

3. Francis was convinced that there could be no more useful occupation than raising a daughter. Every day he saw thousands of impeccable shots, but for some reason he did not dare to use the camera. Therefore, I memorized them with such an effort that sometimes I caught myself thinking - this is no longer possible. For it often happened that in the evening he could not remember what happened in today, except for these imaginary photographs (but when Anna grew up, he could tell her for hours what she was like on any day of childhood).

4. Anna was six years old when she told her father about what she remembers, how she once slept in a large chest, placed on a long cart with eight wheels, under a tree from which a nest hung with a hole at the bottom. The hole was open, and a pomegranate eye of some bird looked at her from the nest. And then clouds of small owls flew from everywhere and sat around that tree in concentric circles on the ground, haystacks, rosehip bushes, a well and a fence. And also - on ropes stretched from pole to pole.

5. Francis decided that such visions are a consequence of morphinism, and called the Uneasy. They talked a little with Anna, and finally the fortune-teller said that the girl had dreamed everything. She warned Franz that the baby would increasingly tell all sorts of wonderful things, would inquire whether this or that had ever happened to her. That she will doubt to death about some things - what happened and what she dreamed, because for her there will be no real and unreal - only different types of reality. But dreams have nothing to do with materialism. They tell how it can be.

6. Franz decided that the daughter should know at least something in the world thoroughly and without doubt. They began to follow Manchil Kvasivsky to Kavalov, which flowed into the Black Yew, and Anna studied all the pebbles on its shore - what it looked like and next to which it lay.

Meanwhile, Nepr O the rest dragged all together through the mountains to Yalivets and stayed in the city intermittently until 1951, when a special detachment of Chekists, disguised as UPA fighters, burned a psychiatric hospital with flamethrowers, where the tracked down and caught Uneasy were locked up in 1947. They had to get closer to Anna.

7. A few years before 1900, Franz completed a very important animated film.

To live is to untie and tie knots, with hands and everything else, Nepr taught him once. O stoy-gader and gave a whole bundle of skins of snakes. Franz had to untie the skin from the skin and weave his weaving. Logic lives in the fingers, its categories foresee only what the fingers succeed in. Like a prayer rosary, he turned the ball day and night. Finally, he untied all the knots, but when he had a chance to tie them in his own way, it turned out that it was terribly hard for his fingers not to follow the already existing form. But Anna wove such knots that Gader led Franz to the bridge, where Nepr O the quiet ones settled.

8. Once upon a time, they wanted to transfer this viaduct from one to another ledge of the ridge, between which Yalivets was located. First build the middle, and then bring it to both sides to the top. Francis imagined that one day such a road would turn the whole way from Sheshul to Petros into a comfortable walk. However, this project turned out to be Yalivets' only unrealizable idea. Three interconnected, but not connected with the firmament arches - much higher than the road bridges in Vorokhta and Delyatyn - hung diagonally over the city, starting and breaking off in a clear sky. At the top there was a fragment of a wide road. The Uncommon lived there.

Franz climbed onto the bridge for a very long time along a hanging ladder, which swayed even more from the fact that the gader climbed ahead. At the top, it seemed that the bridge was too narrow, that it was enough to stagger, and you would fly down: onto small roofs, short streets, narrow canals, foam of trees. But all around lay such beauty, as in someone else's life. Everything was bleached, no other colors existed even in the distant sun.

The snow-covered Uncommons smoked pipes and looked at Farhaul in the Maramaros Alps beyond the valley of the White Tisza. The conversation was simple - when Anna becomes a woman, she will have to become Nepr O stop. For now, they will always be around.

7. So, the film that Franz finished was like a knotted necklace.

It looked like this. A countless number of individual small icons were randomly darting around the entire field of the screen. All these were the elementary symbols that Franz managed to find in the ornaments of pysanky mo in all corners of the Carpathians. Due to the difference in size, configuration, color and speed, the darkness of signs resembled an implausible hodgepodge of different insects. We recognized ladders, wedges, half wedges, triwedges, forty wedges, yellow wedges, teeth, edging, short, endless, semi-infinite, curl, break, cross, dryashpanka, krivulka, stars, stars, the sun warms, half suns, months, crescents, stern, month shines, moonlit streets, rainbow, fashlka, roses, half-roses, acorn, marigolds, chernobrovka, spikelet, smerichki, pine, cucumbers, carnations, periwinkle, braids, ovsik, cuckoo's shoes, bechkovy, plum, red mullet, branches, tumbleweed, skates, lambs, cows, dogs, goats, deer, cockerels, ducks, cuckoos, cranes, whitewings, pstrugi, crow's feet, ram's horns, hare ears, ox's eye, moths, bees, slugs, spiders, golovkate, reel, rake, brushes, scallops, hatchets, shovels, boats, eggplants, lattice, chests, springs, chains, knapsacks, keys, beads, kegs, casings, powder flasks, umbrellas, scapulars, handkerchiefs, laces, bowls, hut, windows, poles, trough, churches, monasteries, belfries, chapels, black sleeves, handwritten sleeves, slash, needles, beak-shaped, cross, toothy, braided, burly, princess, klyuchkova, crimson , vase, process, dragonflies, windmill, sled, hooks, honeypots.

Little by little, the movement of signs gained some orderliness - like one very strong wind overpowers many weak ones. The symbols spun as if a full bath of water was flowing out of a small hole. From there, a chain of badges was already coming out, tied in some places with knots. The chain twisted into a spiral and rotated like a centrifuge. Out of the chaos, free symbols flocked to it and laid out a chain next to it with the same sequence of signs, each time more and more pressed against the first and wrapping around it. Now both spirals were screwed into the void together, approached more and more and turned into a world tree. There was peace. Flowers blossomed on the tree, petals withered, fruits grew from ovaries, puffed up, burst, cracked, and thousands of the same signs freely and evenly fell to the ground, folding into a hill, losing their shape.

8. They waited until Easter 1900 with the premiere. She opened the Yuniperus cinematograph, built according to Anna's sketch, after reading out the archpastoral message of the young Bishop of Stanislav Andrey Sheptytsky to dear Hutsul brothers.

11. Since that time, the Unsimple ones have indeed always been there. It only seems that Chornogora is a desert. In fact, there is even little space in the Carpathians. Therefore, people who live far from each other constantly meet. What can we say about a small town at the intersection of ridges.

For a few Dovbush gold Nepr O The old ones bought a piece of the Market and built a small house. They overlaid it with strangely painted tiles, and it became completely similar to an oven. One word was written on all the windows - notar. But on the windowsills there were rows of bottles of different sizes and shapes, so it could be assumed that NOTAR was the name of another bar. Lukács did something so that in a week the whole roof was overgrown with ivy, and a green curtain hung over the door. Inside it was empty - in front of a small table (with one drawer) on very high legs stood a comfortable chair upholstered in canvas.

The notary himself was sitting in an armchair, smoking large cigarettes one after another, inserted into a silver ring soldered to a tin rod that dropped from the ceiling. Each cigarette was no longer than half the length of an average woman's palm. The notary was busy rolling the next cigarette while smoking the previous one.

Even in his youth, he decided to somehow manage his own death, and not rely entirely on the unknown. Therefore, he wanted to establish, if not the date, then at least the cause of death. He settled on lung cancer and began not to limit himself to smoking in order to be doomed to such a death.

12. But as soon as someone came, the notary took out a cigarette from the ring, seated the visitor in his chair, opened the box, took out two red or two yellow sweet peppers - always fresh and juicy, with one hand opened a large curved knife that dangled on a strap at the knee, cleaned the peppers, putting it on the palm, inquired what to pour - palenka, rakia, plum brandy, becherevka, tsuika, bison, anise, yalivtsovka, boletus, poured full peppers, served one guest, stood at the table, took out a sheet of paper from the drawer , a pointed pencil, raised a scarecrow, said “God forbid,” looking straight into his eyes, drank, ate a piece of pepper, immediately poured a second one, lit a cigarette (he kept the matches in his pants pocket at the very waist, and the grater was glued to one of legs of the table), took it in the same hand as the goblet, and in the left - a pencil, inhaled tightly with smoke and was already ready to listen.

13. The notary was called a French engineer.

Nepr O The poor found him in Rakhiv and offered this particular job, because he looked modest and at the same time heroic. I want to surprise this by telling something unusual from my own life.

And the Difficult ones needed as many of these stories and tales as possible.

In Rakhiv, a French engineer hired people to go to Brazil, writing out real ship tickets from Genoa.

Once he really was a French engineer. Lived twenty years in Indochina, working on drainage systems, studying opium smoking, Thai boxing, butterflies and orchids, Zen. At the same time, he wrote ethnological and geopolitical feuilletons for major European newspapers. Several of his letters were translated by Osip Shpytko. They were published in the "Case", hinting at the origin of the author from the Orlikov family.

The uneasy ones came to Krivorovnia and advised Grushevsky to escort the French engineer to Lvov. Through Manchuria, Turkestan, Persia, Georgia, Odessa, Chernivtsi, Stanislav, Galich, Rogatyn and Vynnyki, he finally arrived and got a job in the ethnographic commission of the NTSH. I received travel allowances that were intended for Shukhevych, and left for the Hutsul region. But the experience of several small wars, in which he fell in the course of his life, did not allow him to betray himself as a folklorist. The French engineer made a detour to Budapest and got all the necessary papers that gave the right to recruit immigrants on the territory of Austria-Hungary.

9. In Yalivets, a French engineer dressed the same every day from 1900 to 1921. and crazy ideas were analyzed Nepr O shy). A wide white flannel suit, sewn without a single button, striped white and light green shirts open at the chest, cork sandals. Only in winter did he wrap himself in a veil, throwing it over his head like a hood. It was the French engineer who taught Sebastian that self-awareness is in the soles, and the perception of oneself can be changed by placing the feet differently or on something else.

10. The idea of ​​a whole direction of new films was thrown to Francis by a French engineer.

A small gallery operated in Yalivets. Its owner, Loci from Beregsasu, knew good artists - Munkachi, Ustyyanovich, Kopystynsky. He brought Romanchuk to Fedkovych, and Vodzytsky (much later, when he returned from Paris from Suloaga) made several photo sketches for The Girl Making Easter Eggs. With Ivan Trush they were close friends. Loci told him a lot about how plants reclaim landscapes that have been mutilated and abandoned by people. He even took him to sketches under Pop Ivan, to the log house. Trush returned to this theme many years later in the wonderful series Stump Life. Finally, it was Loci who first showed someone Dzembronya, which eventually became a favorite place for many artists of the Lviv school. And he regularly sent the found Hutsul rarities to Didushynsky for the museum.

11. Loci himself painted the same thing all his life - wooden stalls - separate for each cow - on the Shesa meadow, the small streets between them and the giant thickets of sorrel, which are gradually eating up their shelter.

And since he was a professional gallery owner, he never exhibited his works. But he often fell in love with strangers. He took his beloved paintings home for a while and lived in their presence, moving with him from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the study, from the study to the gallery, from the gallery to the bathroom.

And Loci's life depended to a large extent on the picture that then lived with him.

12. Unusual things were practiced in the gallery. Every day, Loci reshuffled the paintings, completely changing their dialogues. Often buyers, having chosen a painting once, could not recognize it the next morning. The roof of the gallery was a glass rainwater tank. Loci changed the lighting of the hall by covering this or that part of the tank with spruce branches. But most importantly, paintings could be borrowed, like books in a library. Orders of the most expensive hotel Lotsy completed himself, in accordance with the request.

13. Loci was the only one in Yalivets who ripened varietal grapes. The vineyard grew along the stitch between the house and the gallery. Passing along the stitch, Loci always cut off at least one bunch of grapes. This continued from the moment when the ovary appears, until the last ripening. In September, only a few dozen bunches remained, but they became mature, as in Tokai, fully using the grape forces, which were no longer required by the destroyed bunches.

Although Francis was friends with the gallery owner, even he did not know that Loci was working for Nepr O shut up.

14. One day a French engineer told Franz what he had heard from Loci.

He told how a landowner from Teresva came to the gallery and asked him to draw a picture that would show what was happening behind the frame of the scene of the battle of Khotyn, which he bought here a year ago. The landowner suspected that from there a cannon could strike point-blank at the rearguard of the ulans, and this did not give him rest.

This is exactly what animation is better than painting, said the French engineer.

15. Francis came up with a more precise method. He was filming an enlarged reproduction of some famous painting– it became the second part of every film. For the first and third parts, I completed the frames for fifteen seconds before the one depicted in the picture and the same after. Trush's fresh landscape "Dnepr near Kiev" served as a sample, although Franz thought mainly about Rembrandts' "Night Watch". Then he revived several still lifes of the old Dutch (although he immediately destroyed everything except Jan van de Velde - the one with a deck of cards, a pipe on a long chubuk and hazelnuts) and the famous "Fight" by Adrian van Ostade (some kind of tavern, drunk villagers, women are holding two men with crazy eyes, who are brandishing knives, everything is upside down, someone escapes, and the rest fall to the ground).

Then he took up Mamaev.

Live painting was such a wild success that dozens of spectators from all over Central Europe came to Yalivets for each premiere, metropolitan magazines wrote about them, and Franz could no longer have time to make any more serious films.

16. Even before Nepr O Since Anna's dreams revealed the special properties of Anna's dreams, Francis dreamed of a film that would take place in the landscape of a dream.

He realized that the mechanism of dreams resides in nothing more than in the combination of a well-known according to the principles of an unknown logic - in a way that could not be in one landscape. This means that the key to this logic is the connection of landscapes.

Moreover, the connection sequence is decisive. If you combine such a landscape, then it will populate spontaneously. And then already all the characters will show traits that are not characteristic of them. And - most importantly - the characters will occupy the space very tightly. Irresponsible consistency is dense.

17. And yet, - Franz reasoned, - from a distance, dreams are like good prose with comparisons drawn from different coordinate systems, refined highlighting of individual details in the flow of the panorama, transparent permissiveness, an unforgettable sense of presence, the simultaneity of all tropisms, the irresistibility of the unexpected and the mean rhetoric of containment . And on good grass, which brings nothing of its own, but cuts off what it holds, and transfers the grid of proportions of time and distance from a crystalline state to a gaseous one.

18. However, it was more difficult to decide on such a film than on The Night Watch. So over time, he even stopped saving dreams for later, only enjoying them completely at night.

I'm standing on the flat roof of a two-story longhouse. The house is in the water. Water right up to the top of the first floor. Until the end of its high arches. Three heads float in the water and a heron stands. One head swims under the arch. The other wants to sail away from here. A naked pot-bellied man descends down the stairs from a window on the second floor to the water. A dry hand around the corner tries to stop him. I'm naked too. I'm standing on the edge. Hands are raised up. stacked together. I'm going to jump from a height into the water. Right behind me is a round table. And behind him is a barrel with a jug. A monk and a nun are sitting at the table and drinking something. A tent is stretched on a dry branch over the table, the barrel and the monks. A hemisphere of a dome with a chapel at the top is attached to the side of the house. A fire bursts out of the chimney of the chapel, and a grandmother looks out of the window. She looks at me. Far beyond the dome is a wide river, a green forest and high blue mountains like ours. On the other side of the house is a round tower. There are little people painted on the walls. The little people dance, jump and somersault. One takes a book from the sky. Two people carry a huge raspberry on a stick on their shoulders. The top of the tower is ruined and chipped. Small trees grow between the wreckage and a goat grazes. The water in front of the house ends in a long island. The island is bare, made of red clay. There is a windmill at the end of the island. Behind the island again water. Behind that water is a city. Two towers approach the water itself. Between them is a stone bridge. On the bridge there is a huge crowd of people with spears raised up. Some stand near the railing and look across the water and the island in my direction. On one tower, brushwood is burning. Under the towers (at the foot) some animals swim. A man with a sword and shield fights one of them. Further behind the towers is an empty sandy place. In the middle is a two-wheeled cart. Even further away is the city itself. Houses with sharp roofs, a high cathedral, a wall. And in the distance are high hills, or low green treeless mountains. There is also a large windmill near the horizon. To my right, but behind the water and the island, there are some figures on the shore. Backs to me. Some sit on horses and some incomprehensible beasts. One is in armor and a helmet, and the other has an empty stump on his head. A dry tree grows between them. Half the tree is covered with a red curtain. A naked woman stands in a large crack in the trunk. A woodpecker sits on the upper branch, but very large. A man puts a ladder against a tree. Quite far behind them, a bearded man in a monastic cassock sits on a rock, holding a wand in his hand, examining a book. He looks like my Saint Anthony.

Through the window in the round tower, which I have already mentioned, I see that something important is happening behind the tower. But I can't make out anything, and it's very depressing. But it's still very good that I'm in this movement. I look over my shoulder for a second and see a distant fire. From it it becomes hot to the skin of the back and legs behind. Somehow it becomes clear that from this it is necessary to run into the water. I'm about to jump, but I look down and see a stretched barbed chain. I have no doubt that I can fly over it. But I'm still standing. The hands are already slightly numb, because they have been raised for a long time. Suddenly, a shadow moves over her back, and it gets cooler. I look up. Just above me, a sailboat clad in armor floats in the air. I see its bottom. This is a flying ship. He flies. The shadow is leaving. Starts baking again. Already stronger. I want to take a step. But I see a man with a camera.

He always hid in a dead corner between my house and an attached tower with painted little men and windows. I don't want to be photographed and I yell at him. The man waves his arms in the negative and points to the flying ship. Everything in me agrees that this is really interesting. The man hides the camera in the wall. He goes to the tower and disappears around the corner. I get up on my toes. I swing and jump. I see that chain in front of me. I rise with my whole body. I'm trying to fly it. But the body does not move. I don't fly and I don't fall. I start coughing. Very quickly I fly directly to the chain. I hit it with the fingers of outstretched hands. And with that I woke up.

20. Anna's dream seemed so picturesque to Francis that he immediately tried to sketch it. Anna corrected the drawing along the way. When it came to the people on the shore near the tree and the man with the book behind them, it seemed to Franz that he had already seen it painted somewhere. Only the angle of view was different. But as soon as Anna colored the sketch with colored pencils, Francis recognized Bosch. Without any doubt - "The Temptation of St. Anthony."

In Larousse, Bosch was represented by The Traveler from the collection of the Madrid Escorial. Anna could not see other reproductions, Franz was sure he was always there. No one had ever retold The Temptations in Anna's entire life; Franz certainly hadn't even heard about them even memories or allusions since his studies. This meant that it had become as the fortune-teller said - Anna's dreams show how it could have been.

But Franz did not calm down. He ran to Lozi and asked him to urgently order Bosch's album anywhere. Franz was ready to wait a long time, just to know that something was being done.

Loci promised to order the album tomorrow. And he said that he had Bosch in his library, but only one reproduction - "The Temptations of St. Anthony."

Anna did not hesitate to show her nude figure in the upper right corner of the central part of the picture.

When did they simultaneously learn Nepr O tych in two of the four main figures crossing the bridge on the left wing of the triptych, Francis promised himself to make this film.

21. Worked as hard as ever. Francis was tormented by doubts. He constantly thought about whether he could convey the mood, color, atmosphere, whether he would be able to decipher all the secret meanings, whether it should be shown to someone, whether Bosch looked funny and tasteless, whether it was a sin to redraw any evil spirits and sodomy, whether he would offend Nepr O whether he will bring trouble to Anna, whether he did harm to someone intentionally or unintentionally, is there any sense in art, will he live to see the end of the work, will something bad happen at the show, will his death be painful, will he meet his parents after death, will Anna wait for him there, will his people ever be happy, is there anything more beautiful in the world than our beloved mountains of the Carpathians, is it worth thinking so much, is it necessary to remember everything, well whether it is necessary to tell everyone everything, whether it is necessary to speak beautifully, whether plants think, whether tomorrow exists, whether the end of the world has not happened long ago, how long it will endure without a woman, whether it is under the power of the devil.

22. An exact answer to the last question would be an answer to many others. Despite the fact that Franz was a staunch Greek Catholic, in frequent discussions at the gin resort he always convincingly defeated the Manicheans, Cathars, Albigenses and was not afraid of anything in the world, because he was sure of the correctness of God's plan, the devil during the work on this film was him three times.

23. For the first time he did not show himself, he only very succinctly showed one of his properties. He was like a magnet.

Franz dreamed that he was lying on the floor. Suddenly, without making a single movement, without even straining, he moved across the floor towards the wall. Then - to the other side. Then another and another, intermittently, faster and slower. It is as if he is a metal speck on a sheet of paper, and a magnet is moved under the paper. Once he was even lifted up the wall - still lying down - and delicately lowered to the floor.

After that, the devil asked to carefully monitor what would happen. He pushed Franz into a corner. It turned out that his teacher was sleeping there. Franz was pushed towards the teacher and immediately pulled back. The teacher, without touching Franz's body and without waking up, rode after him. See, said the devil.

24. In the second and third dreams, the devil used variations of the same technique.

The second dream was the shortest. Franz was standing on the street in Yalivets (the place was real, he knew it well). He was waiting for his Anna, who had already appeared at the end of the street. Suddenly, Bada's armored car drove up to him. Bada looked out of the top hatch and said that he had brought someone with whom they would now drink gin. A punk came out of the side door and approached Franz. Anna was getting closer. Panok stood with his back to Anna and the armored car. He took a bottle from his inside pocket, pulled out the cork and handed the bottle to Franz. And then everything happened. In the few seconds that both Anna and Bada approached them, Franz managed to notice the change of several thousand different faces on the punk's head, several hundred vests under an open jacket, several dozen bottle shapes and several dozen shades of the drink. When the punk and Franz were no longer alone, the kaleidoscope stopped. Panok grinned, grinned Beda and Anna. Franz drank first. The taste was reminiscent of renclods. He gave the bottle to Bada, who gave it to the punk (Beda never introduced them). When it was Anna's turn, Franz for some reason shouted out that she didn't drink. No one, except Anna, was surprised and did not beg. And Franz imperceptibly, but very strongly squeezed her finger. He already knew who it was.

25. After the third dream, Francis went to the high bridge and told the Uneasy about Bosch. All the same, in the tower, - said the rider. Franz asked if anyone should show the finished film. It depends only on your desire, answered the Unsimple. Although think about it, maybe you shouldn't show our faces where it seemed to you. Now go home and keep an eye on Anna, we have to wander around the worlds a little, but soon she will become a woman and will know where to find us, said the kettle.

26. At home, Franz burned the drawing, which was a sketch of Anna's dream.

In order to be happy,” he said to Anna, “you need to live without secrets, and know strangers only those that can be told under torture.

He was very afraid that the O sooner or later, those who are still can come for the film, so he commanded Anna never to remember that he existed. But if someone wanted to find out about something by using torture, then they should immediately tell everything they want. Don't try to lie, but tell the truth. So you should know that I destroyed everything.

Franz packed the film in a cap and went outside the city to burn it, throw it into the abyss or drown it in a spring.

On the way, he thought: no matter how Anna was tortured, she would tell the truth - there is no film. Paradoxically, this will be the only truth that the executioners will not believe, and the torture will not stop.

In that case, it's a pity to destroy the film. Maybe he'll come in handy sometime. Let there be someone who will look, analyze, think well and understand - what kind of Difficult ones are and how they turn the world. After all, it always gradually becomes clear how everyone and everything in the world is connected to everything - transitions, of which there are no more than four.

27. Francis entered the beech forest, in which every tree had a hollow under its roots. He threw the hood of a long cloth robe over his eyes so that he could only see where to stand, and began to feel his way through the forest. He ran into trees several times, but nothing, his eyes were protected. He ran up and down the slope until in the middle of the hood all the sounds of the world were replaced by a wheezing from the depths of his lungs. Only then did he stop, without opening his eyes, groped for a tree, found a hollow between the roots, and stuffed the cap with the film into the hole, deeper than a cubit and a half. And he slowly walked out of the forest. In such places it is easy to do without looking. It is necessary to go up, guided by the slope of the earth. At the top, Franz threw off his icy hood and looked out into the woods. All the trees were the same and unfamiliar, endless weaving of footprints curled between them, eyes hurt from the shameless moonlight.

Taras Bogdanovich Prokhasko is a modern Ukrainian writer, journalist, one of the representatives of the Stanislav phenomenon - born May 16, 1968 in Ivano-Frankivsk.

MATY PERAKHASKA - TROURIDNA PELLINNITINGI WHATSNITIESІ ІRINI Vіldі, Yaka Pіdtrimval Tіsnі ZVI "Yazkov z ї и молина то и от и и за и и и илільі діда дід подкоска вітовой ині и під под подши ростовой ивізіїния describing Yernest Gemіnґvey in his autobiographical novel “Farewell, sbroє!” Old man Taras Prokhaska was deported at once from the mother, Prokhaska’s grandmother, from Morshyn to the special settlement near Chit, the stars of the wines turned to Ukraine y 1956, if youmu lashed out 16.

At the Prokhasko school, having a good knowledge of biology, taking part in the All-Ukrainian Olympiad of Ukrainian language, but not in a moment showed himself as a Radian philologist or a journalist, having entered the biological faculty of the Ivan Franko State University of Lviv ( 1992 ). Behind the fah is a botanist. After the completion of the university, you were given a pratsyuvati on the biostationary planted in the mountains, Ale Prokhasko was taken through the native furnishing. Student Rukh participant 1989-1991 years, zokrema taking the fate of the "revolution on the border" in Kiev y 1990.

After completing the university, I started working at the Ivano-Frankivsk Institute of Carpathian Forestry, and then - a teacher at my native city, at 1992-1993 rock I used to be a bartender, then a watchman, a host on the FM Vezha radio, working at an art gallery, in a newspaper, at a TV studio. U 1992-1994 I used to be a “mannerly” editor-in-chief of the magazine “Chetver”, because at that hour I had traveled to Lvov to study at the university. Laureate of the “Smoloskip” vidavnitstva ( 1997 ).

U 1993 Taras Prokhasko, together with Andriy Fedotov and Adam Zevel, starred in the short film "Kviti St. Francis", and y 1996 near the village of Delyatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region, the first international festival of video art in Ukraine took place, the grand prix was held for the first time, having watched the two-film film "Entrance to Egypt" ( 1994 ), de znyavsya Taras Prokhasko, yoga blue and Lesya Savchuk.

U 1998 having worked as a practicing journalist at the Lviv newspaper "Express", writing author's columns for "Express" and "Stupu" for a year. I wrote for an hour before the Internet newspaper Telekritika, and then, if Prokhaska’s friends created a “yogo dream newspaper”, starting to write articles and write an author’s column in the Ivano-Frankivsk regional newspaper “Galician correspondent”.

U 2004 lived for a few months near Krakow, receiving a literary scholarship from the Polish Cultural Foundation "Stowarzyszenie Willa Decjusza - Homines Urbani".

April 2010 Prokhasko first saw the United States, and in the new year there were creative evenings near New York and Washington.

Pratsyuє in the "Galician Correspondent". Friends, I have two blues, one is studying to be a historian at the Ukrainian Catholic University, and the other is studying to be an architect and an alarm clock at the Lviv Polytechnic. Member of the Association of Ukrainian Writers.

Behind the words of Prokhaska, he became a writer, if you made 12 years. At school, I didn’t read radian Ukrainian writers, but only after the army read Vasyl Stus’s poems and began to write myself. Oskіlki biological faculty, on which wines they started, being a non-mystical middle school, Prokhasko took an hour to appreciate that modern Ukrainian literature is not like that. First, create wine by reading less 1990 rock, if you get to know Yurko Izdryk, he will tell you in Ivano-Frankivsk about the creation of the literary and mystical hour painting “Thursday”. First create Prokhaska Izdryk did not accept, but instead Prokhasko wrote his first description “Sleeping Summer”, as if it had been published at the chapel.

Among the writers close to youmu “because of the singing type of light-receiving”, Prokhasko called Bohumil Hrabal, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Vasyl Stefanik, Danilo Kish, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Honore de Balzac, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Sergiy Dovlatov, Lev Rubinshtein , and among the most favorite works - Andrzej Bobkowski's student "War and Peace" (1940-1944) and "Sherlock Holmes".

You can see for an hour that Taras Prokhasko is a very grown-up person and is not only very familiar with his writings, but also commemorates the memory of other Ukrainian prose writers. It is not surprising that the wines are constantly trying to fix the intransigence of the immutability and turn into a turn the controversy of the human soul with the growing light. The rich works of Taras have a presence of biographism, but I don’t want to say anything about prose, but at the same time - to break through the door and bring it closer to intimate speech.

A series of inner-intimate experiences “FM “Galicia”” and “Port Frankivsk” have a little parable character. Written in the form of a student, think on various topics, published in the newspaper "Galician Correspondent" and voiced on the air of the radio FM "Vezha".

Prokhasko takes part in various art performances. U 2009 Vіn, together with other writers (Yurієm Andrukhovych, Yurk Izdryk, Volodymyr Yoshkіlєvim, Sofia Andrukhovich) taking part in the project "Homeless" ("Without Sign of the Mystetsky Life") by Rostyslav Shpuk, previously presented at the Polish International Festival of the Homeless.

Serpni 2010 Prokhasko as part of a musical and literary dialogue, which celebrated the first hour of the Porto-Franco festival, reading a passage from Stanislav Vincenz's novel "On the High Polonina" on the ruins of the Pnivsky Castle. Under the hour of reading French cellist Dominik de Vienkur vikonav suite Bach.

2011 Taras Prokhask's book "Botak" was recognized by the Book of Doom.

2013 The book “BBC Book of Rock” was awarded to the child by Taras Prokhask’s book “Who will make snow”, created at the same time by Mar'yana Prokhasko.

Heaps:

1997 - Laureate of the prize of the visual arts "Smoloskyp".
2006 - first place in the nomination "Belletristika" for the book "Who could have done a little research" (version to the magazine "Correspondent").
2007 - the third place in the nomination "Documentary" for the book "Port Frankivsk" (version of the magazine "Correspondent").
2007 - Laureate of the Joseph Conrad Literary Prize (founded by the Polish Institute near Kiev).
2013 – Prize named after Yuriy Shevelov for the book “One and the same”.

Create T. Prokhaska:

1998 - Annie's Last Days
2001 - "FM Galicia",
2002 - the novel "Not easy"
2005 - "Where can you raise a sprat of denunciation?"
2006 - Port Frankivsk.
2006 - "Ukraina", with Sergiy Zhadan.
2007 - "Galizien-Bukowina-Express", in collaboration with Yurk Prohasko and Madalena Blaschuk.
2010 - "Botak".
2013 - Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. "Who will make snow".
2013 - "One and the same".
2014 - "Signs of maturity".
2014 - Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. "Where the sea came from".
2015 - Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. "How to understand a goat."
2017 - Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. "Life and sleep".

Prokhasko Taras Bogdanovich - Ukrainian prose writer. Born in 1968 in Ivano-Frankivsk (Western Ukraine). Graduated from the Faculty of Biology of Lviv University. Author of a number of short stories and the novel "Neprosti". Winner of the J. Conrad Prize, BBC Book of the Year in the Children's Book nomination. The works translated into Russian were published in the Novy Mir magazine, the Galician Stonehenge anthology, and the Uneasy Ones were published as a separate book. The conversation with Taras Prokhasko took place at the round table of the Moscow festival "Ukrainian Motif" in October 2012. Taras Prokhasko did not speak his native Ukrainian, but Russian. We tried to preserve the flavor of his lively speech, making only minimal edits. Questions were asked by Andrey Pustogarov.

Andrey Pustogarov: Today at our round table is Ivano-Frankivsk prose writer Taras Prokhasko, a guest of the festival. Taras, once again, please introduce yourself - it is always interesting when a person introduces himself.

Taras Prokhasko: I am Taras Prokhasko. It is best to call me a writer in such cases. And it is best to call them “from Ivano-Frankivsk” in such cases. I mean, you got me right. Then everything will appear gradually.

Let's start with the Stanislavsky phenomenon 1 . Recently, I often heard the opinion that this topic is not relevant. Like, when was he? – in the early 90s. And a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and even its participants have not pressed for a long time that they are part of some kind of association. But, in my opinion, it was the rise of Ukrainian literature. On the surface lies the thesis that he was associated with the break of epochs, with the transition from Soviet power to independent Ukraine. And at that time it seemed that all the doors were open, and the very expectation of change gave everything an inner drive. And yet, if not in the works themselves, then in the ideology of the authors, there was a significant element of resistance to the Soviet system. Somewhat exaggerating, we can say that in subsequent years, Ukraine no longer had a coherent ideology. The idea of ​​“joining Europe” was good in the early 90s. Then it turned out that all this is not easy. Maybe the exhaustion of all these ideas led to the fact that now Ukrainian Literature develops mainly in quantitative terms?

It's easy for me to talk about those times because they were very Good times. Because I was young and it was the start of something new. And I perceive all this not as part of the history of literature, but as my life. But on the other hand, it’s hard to formulate something… That is, there are different strategies: someone gets together to create their own path, some kind of ideology based on a common view of the world, but it happens completely differently – that’s exactly what happened with the Stanislavsky phenomenon - we just lived, just did something, and later a definition was found for this.

And we all have become a little victims of the fact that we must now be responsible for how this or that thesis, word, sentence fits into this overall picture. And you were very right when you talked about the feeling of possibility, the possibility of everything. The feeling of the openness of the world - it was the most important. We all grew up in the Soviet Union, we were young... in the early 90s we were all twenty-something, thirty years old... This is, in general, a very important moment in the history of Ukraine - now there are few people left who did not study in the Soviet school . Who knew something other than the Soviet ideological system. As a child, this was a defining thing for me, because most of the older generation studied either under Austria, or Poland, or the Czech Republic.

And these people were the bearers of the alternative, they knew that something could be different... And now I see that there are very few people who did not study in the Soviet school, even in Western Ukraine, and they no longer define anything, and these are already such separate memories ... We are now beginning an era when the generation that passed through the Soviet school, one way or another, is already everywhere ... We also went through the Soviet school. And our protest was aesthetic. None of us thought about becoming a Soviet writer. In the Soviet Union, there were a lot of opportunities to learn something different. We were brought up on all this world literature, including Polish translations. And we were raised by our elders, our grandparents. And all this somehow formed into an aesthetic otherness - a house, books. And suddenly it became possible what you were talking about - the openness of the world. And it turned out that what we did, thinking that this, speaking in the Russian tradition, “in a box” - drawer O wa, Ukrainian shuffle literature, it turned out that it could be shown to someone.

And it was, of course, a big change in consciousness. "Chetver" was the first magazine in our territory that we started doing without asking anyone for permission or help. Of course, before there was a tradition of samizdat, but now it was already a different feeling: you can do it and for it already ... This is no longer such a real war, this is already an aesthetic protest. And it all resulted in the fact that we found each other. Even such an anecdotal example - I came to this magazine "Thursday", which was made by Yurko Izdryk, following an advertisement on the fence.

Among the various “Polish visa”, or “I’ll buy the Order of the Great Patriotic War expensive” - there was also “an apartment for sale in a Polish house”, or “an apartment for sale in an Austrian house”, that is, they used such terminology (I later noticed that in Chernivtsi there were "Austrian houses" and "Romanian", in Uzhgorod - "Austrian" and "Czech") - and among all these announcements was "an invitation to work in an independent uncensored literary magazine." And I read, I came. It was a miracle that this was possible, and it turned out that this was not some kind of wiring, which was a lot in the 90s - and “I sell curare poison, and“ red gyurza poison ”, and“ red mercury ”- and here they offered literary magazine, and it turned out that this is really a literary magazine.

And this feeling - that we, it turns out, can do as we want - it was the strongest. And perhaps then it turned out to be the biggest blow for our generation. Because it turned out - yes, we want a lot, and it seems to us that we can do a lot, it seems to us that we are no worse than Cortazar, and we just need to say - here we are ... the feeling that just declare yourself and that's it they will say - oh, the Ukrainians have finally come to world literature! ..

And then it turns out that a set or stock of these ideas and these opportunities... the world doesn't need us as much as we thought. This was the biggest blow for a large part of my generation. And writers - more or less like that, but I know artists who also thought - now they will find out about this, and the whole world will be here. And it wasn't like that...

Finally, I will just say: it seems to me that the most important thing in the Stanislav phenomenon is that a lot of tiers, a lot of layers have converged in this space. It was this one, as they call it now, family or living history, that is, there was still a tradition of living history - these stories, retellings. It is also very important that this part of Ukraine was minimally Russified, that is, the Ukrainian language lived a full life there, and it was not associated with something artificial or even with something ironic, or forbidden, or with some kind of manifestation of “national self-consciousness" or protest. He was just a living language that spoke about all things - the highest and the lowest.

That is, this language was very popular. It was the language in which they thought. And it is very important that this stratification is historical, connected with family memory - it was not unambiguous. All these memories of different periods, of different destinies, they were so intertwined that it became clear that if, say, one grandfather was in the SS division "Galicia", and the other, say, the director of the plant, and because of this, he had to be a member of the party ... in a word, everything was not so unambiguous - there was no pathos, not only in relation to the Soviet government. There was a lot of understanding. And this is very good for literature - when everything is so complicatedly superimposed on each other. And these are the most important things.

You said that you all studied in the Soviet school. And in Soviet institutions, I would add. But in your books this part of life is missing. It seems that the years spent in the Soviet Union are generally a taboo topic for you.

I will answer in such a way that for me one of the most important, still youthful writing strategies was precisely to transfer experience ... first to transfer the experience received from previous generations. This is what is called living history. I understood that life is finite, and I can leave at any moment. And I understood this as an important task, because it seemed to me that perhaps this is the memory that I have, this family history of mine, of my loved ones - perhaps it is very important. And it seemed to me that this was my mission. And then I'll do my own. And now I’m thinking about writing more… I’m growing up to make sense of my life, my childhood, my youth…

I was once told by Yaroslav Hrytsak 2 ... so I asked him: why is such a rejection among Ukrainians of the memory of 89-91 years - about what was called the "struggle for independence"? And he explained to me what crowding out because there was nothing really heroic about it. That is, in this revolution of 89-91 - well, in Lvov it began in 88 - in fact, no one except the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (which, by the way, was present here on the Arbat in 87-88), no one really did nothing heroic.

But what the parishioners do or faithful for their church, it a priori has a different shade of heroism: they do not talk about any kind of heroism - for them this is normal behavior. Therefore, all these things are forced out of consciousness. But I promise that I will write about it. Because I think a lot - how it was all designed, all that life, and how this acceptance and rejection was intertwined not only in my mind - perhaps even less in mine - but, let's say, in the generation of my parents who passed me rejection of Soviet power, under which they were taken to Siberia. Then they built their lives...

I'm not saying that they were collaborators in the Soviet Union, but they lived quite normally in the Soviet system. And when my younger brother 3 - he was 10 or 12 years old - said that the Soviet Union was doing such stupid things ... He then began to read a lot of these old classics of the world ... He said that what they are doing now is so stupid that it takes a long time will not last, that all this will soon collapse. Because it's simply impossible, it's absurd. And my mom, who was from that solid generation, but who was already a Soviet doctor, she said - well, it’s necessary for another hundred or two hundred years to pass ...

How did it all co-exist? Then, already in some ninety-ninth or even two thousandth year, I thought that in my daily life, street-home, last years Soviet and current years, they are ... nothing has changed. Well, of course, I can say what I want or write, but this is only because I began to write for some reason. If I had not written, I could have said the same thing - because those people who spoke to themselves in the kitchen, they continued to say so .... That is, in fact, it’s all very difficult, and it’s unambiguous to say about some kind of protest ... Well, you can’t constantly fight ... I included fragments of stories about Frankivsk in the 80s and 90s in the story “Several stories can be made from this.”

Now let's finally get to you. As you know, there are logical and historical methods of cognition. I propose to stop at the historical and go from your birth to today. I know that the famous Ukrainian writer Irina Vilde is your aunt. Somewhere you mentioned that your grandfather wrote some literary, let's say, works. What influenced you? Was there any impetus to writing?

There was a very important feature in my family, in my city, in my kind - although it is universal, it does not belong to anyone separately - not alien to writing, literature. The culture of writing is very important in the sense that it is the only way to fix anything. And the presence of writing has always been something natural. You probably understand this sacrament, this awe - the notes of a grandfather or ancestors, or even some incomprehensible accounts - how many pounds of oil are there, something else - it all has great importance. Most importantly, the recording and preservation of these records is something normal, mundane and natural. I came across this so early...

I don’t want to say that my relatives, my grandparents were outstanding writers, but that’s one of the most important things, strange things, that you can feel close, for example, with the same Gogol and not make it what something of the literary school - that I am also the same as him ... But I am also the same ... It is very difficult for me to convey this now, and this is also, probably, a peculiarity of literature, that a writer cannot express his thought exactly, and this is not bad, because it gives you more options...

In the 40s, a lot was lost from various notes, even from letters. Not to mention the fact that all this suffered from various elements, there was also such an important thing as burning - burning documents, burning books. And people themselves burned a lot of books in their homes, so that this would not become an extra reason for claims, for repressions. Maybe even never would, but people did it for their own safety. It's like putting on a seatbelt: you don't know if it will help or not, but it's still considered better. Therefore, there is very little left of this writing. And it always seemed to me that this tradition of writing down something is not so that it would be literature that will shock the world, but so that it does not go away - this is necessary.

With Irena Vilde, this is such a complicated story, because it can be said that she is the most significant writer with whom I came into contact. She was already the eldest at that time, a grandmother, one might say, according to some signs, although she was very young according to other signs. I was still a child, but I understood that I was in contact with the most outstanding writer of those that are now. She, in fact, wrote very well, and Ukrainian literature without Irena Vilde in the 30s would have been completely different - it was something similar to the same Stanislav phenomenon or to "Boo-Ba-Boo" 4 , but only in the 30s.

The 1930s was a difficult time of serious ideological confrontations - both within Western Ukrainian society, and the confrontation of all parts of Western Ukraine with the ideology of the countries to which they belonged. From radicalism, from universal European fascism to nationalism: totalitarian nationalism, integral nationalism, humanitarian nationalism... Not to mention the fact that all this was combined with a great religious revival, and a very good religious revival at that. It was a time when even the bishops of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, who were later considered enemies of the Soviet government and the Ukrainian people, said that this should not be politicized.

That is, the policy of the church was what church policy should be. And everything was intertwined. And then a young girl appeared who began to write absolutely freely about what was happening, about what she was going through, and all this was devoid of an ideological strategy. It was living real literature. Then she ... is also very interesting - this is becoming, this is history ... then she received the Shevchenko Prize - already in the 60s. At one time, she allowed herself, among the few, to write personally to Stalin.

That is, it was accepted by the Soviet government. And even in my family there were different opinions on how to receive her at home: either as a normal aunt, or as one who writes letters to Stalin? Then she edits her wonderful novel, perhaps too long, The Richynsky Sisters, written in the 1920s and 1930s. He edits from the point of view of the new government, so that it all fits in somehow ... And this made the novel completely uninteresting to read ... These are my childhood observations related to Irena Vilde.

And besides, there was also the experience of constantly reading authors who miraculously survived in these home libraries. Well, I had such an oddity - I decided that I would not read Soviet literature from the school curriculum in the 9th - 10th grade. True, I cheated on myself - I read "The Horsemen" by Yuri Yanovsky and - well, he was already out of the program - Mykhail Stelmakh "Geese-swans are flying" - such idyllic stories about childhood.

I thought that I should grow up a little and then it would already be possible to get acquainted with Soviet Ukrainian literature, because it seemed to me - precisely because of this aunt Irena Vilde - that there might be something unsafe for an immature head. But, since with growing up I begin to understand that growing up still does not come, that it’s still early, still early, maybe I’m not ready yet, that’s why I didn’t answer the question: what should Irena Vilde be like in that situation?

I only know a very important thing: her husband - the first, beloved and most important, the father of her children, was shot by the Germans in 43 in Vorokhta 5, and shot because he was a forester. That is, they had their own claims, but there were other claims from the other side, and it is not known which partisans ... and whether he helped any partisans. Now we don't know why...

I realized that people who live close to the forest should always be responsible for the fact that they live close to the forest. Because it is dark in the forest, and for everyone who came from there, the responsibility was always on the forester. And all life in these conditions was connected with the question, what is right? The main question - literature, including - always seemed to me like this: what is more important - to live and live out life or to give life, just because someone told you that it is necessary, or do you feel that you need to give this life? And what about this measure of giving? And who is right? On the one hand, here is Faith, Hope, Love and their mother Sophia. When they were killed in turn by a painful death, my mother could stop everything after the first martyrdom of Vera, they could say that everything, everything, everything, good, good, there is no Christ, and that's it - go for a walk, the whole family will live on.

But they decided, including their mother and sisters among themselves, that Christ is more important. And it's good that they--they are saints. This means that they were somehow special, they did something for this even before they died. And what about people who are not saints, who are people? And how, in the conditions of all these historical, social, social movements and changes, how to make a choice between ethics and procreation?

I want to catch on to your phrase. You wrote somewhere that you wanted to become a forester. Despite the fact that the forester becomes responsible for everything that happens in the forest, and his fate can be tragic, did you still want to become a forester?

I didn't become a forest ranger because of my father who worked in the forest industry. And he knew reality well, and he knew me. He said: You will be very disappointed when you face what is happening. You will either fight with it all your life, or you will simply leave there on your own. He knew my views on ecology, on the conservation of forests, nature, and he knew how it all really was in late Soviet times, not to mention the present. Already in the late Soviet era, everything was rather demoralized. And he advised me not to do it.

I was also a winner of the Republican Olympiad in the Ukrainian language and literature and had the right to enter Kiev University for Ukrainian philology or journalism without exams or with some kind of easier exam. But I no longer wanted this, precisely because I did not want to be a Soviet journalist or a Soviet writer. And so I decided that I love to write and I love nature - I will become a biologist and I will write books about animals. A popular window to the world at the time was Mir Publishing, which began publishing Darrell's books in the 1980s.

You mentioned that both your father and mother were exiled to Siberia. Is it with their parents?

No. The mother was not sent. But I suspect that all this had a very hard effect on her psyche. It would be better if they sent her away. I will now tell you why. My father was a child when he and his mother were sent to Siberia, and the accusations were ridiculous. Of course, they were not in the camps. My other relatives were But it was a special settlement. A month in a calf car, then a dump in the forest and - build yourself new life. Winter is already approaching, Siberia ... But between themselves, my grandmother and father later talked about it like this: “when we were still at the resort.” They already called it a resort after all.

And they regretted why life turns out like this: I would like to go to Baikal myself, but for some reason you never go? You keep postponing, postponing... And suddenly the news comes: tomorrow you are going to Baikal. And you eat. When my grandmother was already old and lay, and already felt weak, and said to herself, “maybe not get up?” and to the exit, ”then there would be strength, she would get up and go. Why am I worse than the NKVD? Why can't I say to myself: "Get up and do what you want."

As for my mother’s family, my grandfather on my mother’s side, when the German fascists came, that is, maybe they were not fascists - the German authorities in Ivano-Frankivsk ... Very often this daily life develops regardless of our desires and principles. For example, Galicia was included in the German state, in the Reich, while Eastern Ukraine was not included in the Reich. From there they were taken to work, they shot on the streets, even OUN members, nationalists, Jews were liquidated there 6 .

But, what is very important, other services, not the occupying troops, were engaged in daily life in Galicia. Just as the Soviet Union later said: that's it, you are our citizens. They came and arrested for treason, and people were never citizens of the Soviet Union. And they - they came, included in the Soviet Union - and oops! betrayal of the motherland. And these German authorities gave the public utilities, let's say, to the local population. And they told the local government: let someone be the director of the power plant. My grandfather studied electrical engineering for 11 years at the University of Vienna. Moreover, he wanted to study more and more. And after all this, he came to Ivano-Frankivsk. And of course he was the most famous electricman in the town. And this Ukrainian delegation came to him and said: well, finally, take care of the power plant.

Well, volens-nolens, he took up this power plant. And then, when the Soviets came a few years later, this was already considered complicity, because instead of blowing up the main generator along with it, it provided the city with electricity. But grandfather managed to leave this job in the very first months, then they moved to another region, and there - the shortcomings of the system - no one thought about it anymore.

Thus, my mother's family was not expelled, but she still had childhood fears - that all this would somehow come up somewhere. They are not connected with ideological things, but just such a threat ... But my father did not have this, because after this happened to him, he freed himself from this ... Such are the different stories in my family.

It seemed to me that I noticed the point of view of a biologist in your words that the NKVD is coming - and a person finds himself in another habitat, in which he would not have ended up of his own free will, but which is now entering his life. But in your works, in particular in the early stories, one can also see an acquaintance with philosophy. In particular, you have clearly read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. That is, biology permeates all your works, but this biology is not the same as Darrell's, which, roughly speaking, tells about the adventures of animals. You've been called the wandering philosopher. I see in your works a kind of biological philosophy. Is it conscious?

Consciously. At the university, I wanted to study zoology. At that time, the science of ethology was just in vogue - such a science of the future, science at the junction - about the psychology of animals, the behavior of animals. But I was enrolled in a group of nerds. I was told - it's nothing, in a year you will be transferred wherever you want. And I started studying botany.

Suddenly I realized that the study of biology - if you do not study some specific reactions - is the same philosophy. I think that similar things can be in other disciplines. In the same electrical engineering or physics. I was wondering how this is all possible. I have always had access to theology. I'm actually very religious, in the sense that I don't question God's act of creation. That is, I do not know how, what, what we can understand, what we cannot understand, but I have no doubt that the world is part of God's plan. When I started to look from the point of view of biology - the same botany, floristry - I, for example, thought: how to explain the existence of plant species? I understand that everything is food for something, but there are still too many of these similar types of plants. It is impossible to rationally explain why this is. And such moments were very important for me and very interesting - as a method, as an instrument of my personal theology.

In your family there were, as they say, urban refined intellectuals, and, on the other hand, in your works, acquaintance with rural life is clearly visible. How does it all fit in your life?

It so happened that after this Siberia ... My grandmother went there as a widow, because my own grandfather died in the first days of the Polish-German war. He was taken into the Polish army and died in September 1939. And my father was born on January 1, 1940. That is, he never saw his father. And I did not see this my grandfather. Then they ended up with their grandmother in Siberia, and there in Siberia they met a man who also had a difficult family history, whose family was taken to Poland, and who served six or seven years in the camps and settled in Siberia.

They were already about 50 years old when they met there, and began to live together. It is difficult to talk about love at first sight, because it seemed natural to be together and - let's overcome it all together. Then it became possible to return - it was the 56th good year - and they immediately decided that we were leaving everything and going here. And they settled with this man - Mykhail - in the Carpathians. I consider him my grandfather as well as the one I have not seen. And he was very important for me, and in all this geography. That's how I ended up in these Ukrainian mountains and in this hut. The house is small, but I grew up there.

And it wasn't country life. It was normal life in the mountains. Of course, there was no daily work with the plow, because everything grows very badly there, except for the forest and apples. But it was part of my life. And it is also very important for me now, as a memory: when they started living together, they were 49 and 51 years old. And it might seem that life has been lived, especially since it was all like that, but they lived together for another 30 years - this is a lot for a life together. And then, when my grandfather died, my grandmother told me that she had never been happier than these last 30 years in her life. And for me it is always a reminder that you can never say: that's it - life has been lived, there will be nothing new, that, as the song says, “I won’t be like this, it’s better for me” 7 .

In fact, "tensha o tempo", as the Portuguese say - "maemo ches", as the Hutsuls say - there is time.

You said that one of the motivations for writing was to preserve the memory of the past. But it's more about your later work. But in the early stories, there seems to be no such intention to fix the history of a kind. On the contrary, in the story “The Feeling of Presence” there is such a phrase: “It seemed to him that, having remembered, he would deprive the world of its last properties, therefore, nothing should be taken away by remembering.” Is it really the same thing or is it some kind of transformation of your views?

When I talked about fixing, I did not mean only recording some events. By the way, only the year before last, during repairs in the basement of our house in Ivano-Frankivsk, a wall was plastered, on which a chronicle from 1939 to 1945 was scratched with a nail: during the bombings, they hid there and wrote down something there - such a laconic story. But I even perceived some of my personal reflections as evidence of history. And this is also important to fix. So you asked about the city, the village. Very often there was a division along this line: there are urban, and there are rural.

"The problem is that Ukrainian literature is very rustic." Or "the problem is that the city is such and such, and the village is such and such." And I somehow managed, thanks to I don’t know what - this is everything that I got, I guess - to synthesize these things. I was interested in putting it all together. I felt at home both in the city and in the village. And I feel at home in different parts of the world. Not that it's all mine, but I could just as naturally be there. And the lessons of history - not only this literal chronicle is important, but historiosophy; how it all plays out.

There is just an exit to your novel "Neprosti". The style of the novel is, of course, the style of an urban man, but this style partly models the thinking of a man of nature who lives, merging with the landscape, This manifests itself in grammar, in the construction of phrases. But I want to ask you the following question. There is incest in the novel. The hero successively marries a woman, then their common daughter, then the daughter of this daughter, that is, his granddaughter. Moreover, every mother dies immediately after the birth of her daughter. How do you say what you wanted to say? Is this an emphasis on the isolation of Galicia, its unwillingness to let a stranger inside?

I will first speak about the language of the novel. I had an internal task to show the Hutsul region, the Carpathians in a way that is rarely used. Because Kotsyubinsky in "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" and many others spoke about "the world of mountains, legends and ancient traditions that has been preserved intact." That these Hutsuls survived because they isolated themselves from the outside world.

I wanted to show the other side. After all, the Carpathians only seem to be a barrier. In fact, they are a bridge. These mountains have always been a motivating motive for crossing them. Meet those who are there, on the other side. It's like a magnet. And that is why the movement, if we speak in slang, along all these paths and beaches, these roads to the ancient Carpathians, was always intense. If you look at history, then, of course, there were not thousands of peoples there, but everything was very connected with everything around. The Hutsuls were the first to go. Back in the 17th or 18th century, they already traveled to Bosnia, or to Russia - to Odessa, or to Bessarabia. Not to mention the fact that they went selling cattle to Silesia. And different people also came to them for something: for salt, for wood. And all this was included in the world process. And I wanted to show this Hutsul region in this way: yes, there was isolation, inaccessible places, but, on the other hand, there was a normal movement. It was a normal part of the world. And settlements... these are settlements that now exist in Germany or Italy. You can't tell if it's a city or a village. Yes, this is a province. But the problem is only in the way of thinking, only in how much you consider yourself to be this province. Moving in the space of one life for people from these places was very big. That's all I wanted to convey.

And if we talk about incest, then, firstly, it’s easier, because you don’t have to figure out where that wife, this wife came from ... Here they are all together and one after another. And, on the other hand, I wanted to convey that what you love can be present in different people, And I also wanted to say about doom, This is a symbol of doom. That, they say, this is how these circumstances beyond the control of a person developed, that you had to stay with this little woman, and when she grew up, and you saw that this was the woman who was the best - because you didn’t see others - well, what kind does it make a difference whether it's a daughter or not? Then I wanted to somehow get out of this confrontation between doom and conscious choice.

And you are often asked this question in Ukraine, is that how I am?

At the very beginning, yes. Now, when 10 years have passed, and a lot of people have already read it, and when it turned out that it was not forgotten, and this novel is being reprinted, this question does not arise so often anymore. But at first they asked: why incest, what did you mean by that? And I always thought that this is how it happened. In this world of mine, that's how it was. And in a different way... There are many explanations. Well, not exactly incest, but, let's say, such a form of cohabitation or community, when nothing arises immediately, but when people somehow live next to each other and begin to understand what is good for them. And as time goes by, they get better and better...

1 The name given to a group of Ukrainian writers - Y. Andrukhovych, V. Eshkilev, Y. Izdryk, T. Prokhasko and others - published in the 90s of the 20th century in the Ivano-Frankivsk magazine "Chetver" ("Thursday"). The Stanislav phenomenon also includes a number of Ivano-Frankivsk poets, artists, photographers, and musicians.

2 Famous Lviv historian.

3 Yurko Prokhasko (born 1970) is a Ukrainian essayist, translator from German.

4 Ukrainian eccentric poetic group of the late 80s - early 90s of the 20th century.

5 Settlement in the Carpathians.

6 In Western Ukraine, during the "German" period, the mass extermination of Jews also took place.

7 It won't be like it was the first time (Polish).