Strange heart disease translated from Ukrainian by Elena Marinicheva and Zaven Babloyan. Taras Prokhasko - Uneasy (collection) Death and life of Bobby Z

NOT SIMPLE

And whoever does not read this essay will have a difficult time in life, since their Difficulties will bypass them with their obvious plots, and maybe even turn off the sound and lights.

Sixty-eight random first phrases

1. In the fall of 1951, it would not have been surprising to move west - then even the east began to gradually move in that direction. However, Sebastian and Anna in November 1951 went from Mokra to the east, which was still more numerous at that time. More precisely, to the eastern south or southeast.

2. This trip 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 family tradition, according to which children were shown places associated with the history of the family at the age of fifteen. Because then, when Anna turned fifteen, Sebastian realized that everything was repeating itself, and Anna became for him the only possible woman in the whole world. That he not only can only be near her, but can no longer be without her.

3. And in front of the fence is a fragment of a road already lined with river roundels. The road starts at the bottom in the middle of the card, leads to the upper left corner, going around a tall, leaning 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 the backdrop of the photo. All the time there is a fence on the right, and on the left there is a narrow canal with empty concrete banks. Even further to the left, already behind the canal, there is only a piece of high boardwalk, on which there are several beach chairs and tubs with slender Yalivians.

4. Francis in a white linen cloak with large buttons stands near the canal, on the bank, which is closer to the road. He has clothes thrown over his arm. It is the same color as the cloak, but you can make out that there is only a shirt and pants. In the other hand are black shoes. From his pose it is clear that he has just turned away from the water. And there is the head of a man floating 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 canals, and Franz walked alongside along the banks.

The canals ran parallel to every street in Yalivets. Thus, water from the many streams that flowed down the slopes above the city was collected in a basin at its lower border. Sebastian could swim in the mountain water for hours, and they talked continuously. Apparently, the photograph 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 paid courses. Besides him, an Esperanto teacher and the owner of a hectograph also arrived. But only the instructor asked to go 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 made from hairy gooseberries, and they took the instructor to Bade, to the armored car that stood between two spots - the islands of zherep. Beda had been collecting 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 cart.

They first tasted a little of each wine, and then drank all the gooseberry wine. The instructor started talking terribly and began testing Sebastian’s ability to solve simple problems based on the theory of survival. It turned out that he knew almost nothing and could very easily die in the most innocent situation. Although Sebastian had an idea of ​​what survival was. He imagined it so well that he stopped caring about him altogether. And yet he survived.

7. In Africa he had many opportunities to die, but surviving was more important, because he wondered what Africa was. In the end, he, looking at any piece of land - even peeing in the morning - saw that he was on another continent, on an unknown expanse. This is how he became convinced that Africa existed. For before that, the recalculation of areas, a long series of differences in architecture, the placement of stars, the structure of skulls and customs were erased by the fundamental immutability of 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 mainly brought only mental disorders, now dispersed the fire in four directions from the place where it fell on the dried ground. And then, outpacing the fire (perhaps he ran right to where the wind was driving him in four directions), Sebastian found himself in the middle of the rain that had been gathering for a whole year and then flowed along the hardened red soil in many parallel streams, for which man means so little , like the smallest sand turtle, and as many as millions, myriads of thirsting for a stream of seeds, dropped by dead branches for many 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, not knowing at all how to avoid daily danger. Then Sebastian decided that he would not say a single word about survival anymore.

7. So, the only undated photograph was taken on August 28, 1914. It will be necessary to write this date on the back with at least 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 anything - then the hard pencil should leave a relief trace, embossed in the topmost layer of paper, cut with sharp graphite.

Physiologically

1. Every man needs a teacher.

Men generally need to study.

Some men are distinguished not only by their ability to learn and be taught, 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 throughout their lives (to learn 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, ensures the maximum probability that during your life the world could not change so much that only 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 graph that Franz taught learned from Bram. Bram learned from the animals.

For years, the graphic told Franz various 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 for the upbringing of his daughter. It is clear that he taught Sebastian the same thing when he stayed in Yalivets forever and began living in his house. Therefore, Sebastian’s children knew these stories just as well.

3. The Difficulties 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 an uneasy feeling of otherness. As for Sebastian, he liked how every morning, to tone up, Anna turned into a cat or a lemur for a few minutes. And on their nights together, he seemed to sleep with such small creatures as spiders and bark beetles.

4. Francis quickly noticed that he had, in a sense, an expanded physiology. It is clear that the physiology of every creature depends on the environment, but in the case of Franz this dependence was excessively manifested. He felt without a doubt how part of what should be 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 his physiological mechanisms.

Franz thought that he was somewhat reminiscent of mushrooms confused with a tree, or spiders, whose feeding occurs 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 did not have enough space in the head, and they were 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 with Anna, he knew exactly what she looked like inside, because he was sure: he was following her inner path.

5. He stopped worrying about his own physiology immediately after the teacher told him that Bram said that dogs have a sense of smell a million times better than people. It was amazing, the imagination couldn't even come close to it. But Franz, having reduced the order to at least ten, became imbued with how everything that happens outside is exaggeratedly reflected in the dogs’ heads, how drafts rush through the corridors of their brains (he also told this to Sebastian, and he tried to take into account the pungent odors so that the dogs did not tease something from which it is impossible to escape. 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 the 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 lives of other dogs in the outskirts of Yalivets, they were grateful for this Franz. After all, they were the real intelligentsia of Yalivets.)

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

7. Lukács was bitten by a rabid stoat.

He was very ill, and the agony was soon to begin. As happens with rabies, the writhing could be intensified by the sight of water, a gust of wind in the face, light, loud conversation, touching the skin and turning the neck.

Lukács lay in the greenhouse, in the shade of a young bergamot. The passionflower flowers had just bloomed with all their crosses, hammers, nails and spears, and Franz had to cover the entire bush with a wet linen piano cover so that the tart smell of passions would not tease Lukács (he once loved this aroma so much that during flowering the whole spent days sleeping 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 after another. The dog barely moved his eyes to the face, hand, sword and with difficulty raised his head, exposing his throat. But Franz did it differently - he hugged Lukács and pressed his head down so that the vertebrae protruded, and the blow began from the spinal cord, and did not end with it.

Despite the speed of the operation, Lukács could still smell his own blood, and Franz clearly felt the creaking of the tissue through which the blade was breaking. It was as if the sounds were coming into the inner ear from my own neck (as you sometimes feel your voice when you scream under a waterfall).

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

Franz simply lived too little to see that this was not entirely true. For Sebastian had already experienced countless times how it was possible to enter the same river while living with his wife, his daughter, and his granddaughter.

Sebastian did not find anything strange in the fact that Franz himself died like Lukács (maybe he just didn’t smell blood, but he probably heard the sounds of torn tissue inside himself), although they did not kill him so diligently.

9. Similarly, 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 Tisa. Sebastian only crouched down slightly to support the accelerated weight, and offered his elbow, hidden in the casing, to the flying mouth. The mouth closed on his left hand tighter than pincers, and Sebastian took a large razor from his casing pocket with his right 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 happy anywhere. He dreamed most of all of the place in which - as in the case of the placenta and the fetus - his physiology would be most comfortable to 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 at the Yuniperus cinema, he even told audiences from all over Europe - I live like grass or a Yalivian, so as not to be anywhere else after the seed has come to life; waiting for the light to turn around me; to see it not just from bottom to top, but projected onto the sky, that is, enlarged and distorted enough to be even more interesting; in the end, my place will always be at the center of European history, because in these places history in various forms itself comes to our backyards.

11. In Yalivets, or rather, in a place where Yalivets had not yet existed, Franz began to truly live. Even somewhat ashamed of his moment-to-moment happiness.

12. On the day when he and the professor stopped between Patros and Sheshul, Franz thought that he was traveling through the celestial islands. Only a few of the highest peaks peeked above the clouds. The setting sun was shining only on them. The red upper side of the clouds spilled over into creeks, lagoons, channels, floodplains, deltas and estuaries. What was in the depths was kept silent.

On a soft slope, Franz found berries. Due to the shortening of the summer days in this high-altitude tundra, they ripened at the same time - strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and currants. Franz no longer belonged to himself, he became 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, he could not stand it and poured out.

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

Even higher up, the snow was slowly melting.

Franz rushed down and ran between the beech trees, among which autumn reigned. During this run through the year, it poured out a second time. Meanwhile, the professor pitched the tent. They ate several Hutsul skates made from cheese and made tea from the leaves of all the berries. Then the night began. From month to month, everything looked snow-covered, the Romanian mountains seemed like a distant strip of coast, and the warmth and the smell of vermouth uncontrollably left the earth.

Walk, stand, sit, lie down

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

It is not difficult for the children of animators, who never leave their father’s side, to become architects. Especially in the city that dad invented. Based on her first sketch, in 1900 (Anna was seven at the time), a new cinematograph, Yuniperus, was built in the form of a chest of drawers - especially for showing French animated films.

As a child, Anna designed a swimming pool in the shape of a great grebe’s nest that swam in the lake, underground tunnels with exits like moles in different streets of the city, a bar in which the exit was arranged in such a way that, upon crossing the threshold of the hall, it was not outside, as it could have been count, and in exactly the same room, a four-story big house and a huge two-story sunflower villa.

2. For Anna thought with her body. She could feel each movement not only holistically, but also as a sequence of tensions and relaxations of muscle fibers, rotations of joints, freezing and explosions of blood flow, penetration and squeezing of air currents. Therefore, the expressions of her thinking were spatial structures. And she saw any structure, bypassing the covering. And, again, as a space in which movements of other moving and semi-moving structures occur - fingers, ridges, skulls, knees, jaws.

3. However, Franz noticed that at first Anna’s fantasy could not go beyond the limits of symmetry. He realized for himself that fascination with the miracle of natural symmetry is the first childish step towards consciously reproducing the beauty of world harmony.

4. Anna had a rather limited upbringing.

Even when she was called Stefania, and Anna was only her mother, Franz realized that the main thing in raising children was to be with them as much as possible. Perhaps, perhaps, he took this too literally, because after the death of his wife, for almost twenty years there was not a single moment when he and Anna were apart. Always together. Either in the same room, or leaving the house together, or doing something in the garden, seeing each other. Even while bathing, 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 only principle of Francis pedagogy. Surprisingly, she liked this 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 simply out loud. Everything that Anna heard, their dogs also heard. Anna rarely asked anything; instead, she learned to constantly talk about all her feelings, trying to find the most precise phrases.

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

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

6. She lived twice as long, 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 brain hemispheres, in piles of sheep cheese and mushroom caps, in the bodies of birds and in embryos , in their breasts and in their especially favorite two pelvic bones, which protruded from 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 Bad about this when she brought a whole bag of big 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 all over Yalivets to take them to the market in Kosovo.

Apparently, then he said something to Nepr O sty, 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 be.

With Anna it was different. She lived in such a place from the very beginning. Having become an architect, Anna began to invent something else. She remembered very well what Franz taught her, and even better - what Franz taught. But for the first time, she didn’t believe that he told her everything.

10. You can fall - and under some houses they installed trampolines, onto which people could jump directly from the balconies.

You can hang - and ropes were pulled from two mountains, along which, holding special holders (Anna found them among her mother’s climbing belongings), she descended all the way to the central square, hanging for several minutes above the roofs and not very tall trees.

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

You can also roll, jump, crawl, fumble - this was also taken into account in different ways in the updated Yalivets. There are even more patients at the gin resort. Sebastian had already fought 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 had even succeeded in that) a person either stands, lies, or sits in the air.

But he liked the innovations, and he proposed filling all the streets with water for the winter. Yalivets became a continuous skating rink for several months. Only by holding on to the handrails along the streets was it possible to somehow climb out to the upper part of the city. But Franz knew how to walk on slippery surfaces.

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

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

She saw how, for most people, home is the basis of their biography and the expressive result of their existence. And this is also where the memory rests, because with objects it is easiest for it to give itself advice.

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

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

Anna considered space, light, extent, and transitions between the divisions 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 opened directly onto a square courtyard, closed on all sides by these very rooms.

14. The source of all the 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 that embodies ethics as accurately as caring for plants. Not to mention the fact that observing seasonal changes is the simplest way into personal philosophy. Therefore, the Serbian forester Lukacs planted the towns' farmsteads with flowering bushes brought from Macedonia: barberries, camellias, heather, dogwoods, wolfberries, forsythia, hydrangeas, jasmine, magnolias, rhododendrons, clematis.

15. Anna ordered the city itself to be fenced off with transparent, zigzag Hutsul fences made of long smerek armor - voryn. You had to enter the city with real rozlog gates, pushing apart the collars.

There was no particular need for this, but Anna wanted to revive as many words as possible, which are necessary when such fences exist - gary, zavorynye, guzhva, byltsa, 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 few trees, most houses were built from gray slabs of stone projections, 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 was so much green that everything seemed incredibly colorful. Not even counting the thousands of truly radically different specks of burgundy, red, pink, purple, blue, light blue, yellow, orange, white, green, brown and almost black flowering bushes. From their flowers, little Anna studied colors (Franz often thought of that time as something better. Naming colors became for him an obvious embodiment of the idea of ​​​​creation of 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 the continuous stripes of the near, distant and most distant mountains that were visible from anywhere in Yalivets.

More skies, winds, suns, moons, snow and rain.

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

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

In Yalivts, everyone breathed the essential resins of the Yalivets and drank Yalivtsovka, which the Yalivets fell into three times. Because the water in which the sweet berries fermented first poured from the sky into the ground for years, washing the Yalivtsy, becoming imbued with it and remembering it, and then it was also heated on a fire from Yalivtsy logs.

5. Yalivtsovka was cooked at every farmstead. Fresh shoots were boiled in cauldrons with alcohol distilled from Yalivets berries. Evaporation collected on the stones, which cooled and was sprinkled with thick gin. It happened that heavy gin clouds hovered over the roofs. So, when it was freezing, alcohol burst from the sky. On the ground, already pre-cooled, it froze, and the streets were covered with thin ice. If you licked this ice, you could get drunk. On such days you had to walk along 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. Not long before, she suffered a terrible fall from a cliff, although she was tied with a cord, and had not eaten anything for a long time. Still, I was terribly scared. The next day she nevertheless went to the mountains and tried to climb. But nothing came of it. For the first time, the body refused to be an extension of the stone. Something there turned out to be stronger. She came to Yalivets, drank gin, was going to train, but instead drank gin. I didn’t even dare to approach the rocks. And soon I met Francis. He made animated films, for which no less tourists came to Yalivets than for gin.

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

For the first time, she and Franz spent the night in a bar, where, having accidentally wandered in in the evening, they could not help but 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 the first gin on their palms and stomachs, and drank it spilled on the table and from mouth to mouth. Anna had not yet imagined Franz in any other place.

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

While they slept, pressing bones to pulp and bones to bones, and pulp to pulp, their skulls were constantly touching some kind of irregularities. They turned, pressed, twisted and moved away, but the skulls did not separate for a second. Sometimes the skulls rumbled, getting caught in especially expressive humps and depressions, and they often woke up, frightened by the excessive proximity created by the heads. Never again did Francis and Anna experience such shared clarity and insight.

It was starting to get light outside. 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 that glowed at this time of day white.

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

They started their evenings early. We walked in warm autumn raincoats through distant nooks and crannies among yet uninhabited villas. They pretended that this was not their city. He kept her hand in his pocket. They walked, simultaneously taking a step with that leg, to which the other’s leg was pressed so tightly that waves of muscle contractions were felt, and the hip joints rubbed funny. She really liked that everything was so simple. That she is loved by the one she loves. For the first time, she experienced the joy of not having to leave in the morning. She told him something of what happened when he was not yet there, and she loved how he talked 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, toasted crackers soaked in milk, and various nuts.

10. On the table near the bathtub stood an old typewriter with an immovable cast-iron stand, and what they did not dare say to each other, they typed on a long sheet of the best paper included in the Remington. “I feel bad with people about whom I don’t know,” wrote Anna, “whether they feel good now, whether they feel good with me, whether he feels good here. It’s bad and difficult with those who don’t say what they like and what they don’t. Francis printed something completely different: without doing any evil, bad people do bad things to us - we are forced to take their existence into account. Good people stop being good when they begin to regret what it is a pity to give away,” 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 Franz's death, Sebastian found this machine. The paper was still in it. Then he often imagined real dialogues between living people, built from similar sayings.

11. Franz tried to wean Anna from fear. He led her onto the rocks from the side where it was possible to get out through the thickets of mountain pine, from behind. And there he picked him up and held him 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 could not have done. He treated her in such a way that it tickled her veins. For a very long time I showed her her beauty. From all this, Anna began to understand how beautiful she was. Beautiful not for someone else, but for yourself. And she became even more afraid that all this could be crushed, 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 means to renounce everything.

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

Secured in every possible way, with her ears plugged, pregnant Anna climbed the stone wall, lost because she did not know how to press her stomach.

Franz decided to crawl next to him. He outlined all the contours of his pressed belly along the rock. They slid down the rope so quickly that they burned their palms. For some reason, it is often impossible to fall asleep due to such minor burns. The next morning, the moving daguerreotypes of the silhouettes of the embryo moving along the rock were already ready. The film turned out good. It's a shame it's short.

13. Francis did not pay attention to the time. All his films lasted a few minutes. He came up with an animation that couldn't exist yet. I took pleasure in creating filled minutes that might not have existed. 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 hadn’t been for a lot of things.

Life is so short, Francis said, that time has no meaning. 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 cover her ears, but something was wrong 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. The vibration appeared immediately.

But the sounds began to behave strangely. They seemed to have lost their dependence on distance. The sounds flew at great speed in solid balls, without dissipating in the air. Sometimes such a ball collided with others, changing its flight direction completely unexpectedly. From some blows, sound crumbs and dust fell from both balls. They flew independently. Mixing, separating, flying up, sinking or burying itself in the ground. Already at the height of four of her 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 fell from under her fingers to the bottom of the abyss.

15. Anna didn’t climb anymore. But she didn’t stop using morphine. All day long I sat on the veranda and listened to the life of various insects that lived near the house. Without even hearing how hungry Stefania was crying.

In vain Franz tried to change something. The most he could manage was to squeeze some milk from Anna's breasts and feed it to his daughter. But opium also loved milk. He managed to drink it first, and Franz uselessly kneaded his dry breasts. Francis went to the witch who was stealing milk from cows and asked her to take the milk from Anna. The child began to eat. But along with the milk it received opium. Franz thought that the child slept all day long from satiety. In the end, it was calmer this way. But when Anna ran out of milk completely and even the witch did not express a drop, Stefania experienced real morphine withdrawal syndrome. The difficult ones barely saved her by boiling poppy seeds in milk.

Anna began to do the same. The girl was sleeping, she was dreaming wonderful dreams (she remembered some of them - and she was barely six months old - all her life. Although, perhaps, she remembered the feeling that such dreams had happened, and the rest came later), and Anna calmly listened to how the worms were moving apart the ground, how spiders scream, indulging in love in stretched nets, how the chest of a beetle cracks, squeezed by the beak of a wagtail.

16. In mid-December, Franz took Anna on his lap and told her to get out of Yalivets. Anna stood up, kissed Franz and went into the room to collect the child. Then he suggested something else - he challenged his wife to a duel. Because a small child needed one of these parents to be dead in order to continue living.

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 returns will stay with the girl. Despite all her fears, she was sure that this was the only way she would win against Francis (they didn’t think at all that they might not both 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 covers, drank half a bottle of gin, kissed and climbed.

17. For the first time, Francis had to become a real climber (this is the first time for me, 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 stand on a bare stone. He was terribly sad, but he was able to bury Anna only in June, when the snow in the gorge melted.

Second old photograph – Ardzhelyuja, 1892

1. The naked female back ends in a wide stripe, below the stripe there is only a strip of black fabric. On the neck, strongly bent forward, is a thin thread of coarse coral. The head is no longer visible. The arms are lowered down, but bent at the elbows. The torso is slightly twisted to the left, so that only four fingers are visible, with which the right hand holds the forearm of the left. The back looks almost triangular - the shoulders are so wide and the waist is narrow. There is a little free space between the upper edge of the belt and the white skin. Expressive shoulder blades and tops of collarbones. Four humps of vertebrae protrude below the neck. Where they end, two stripes of swollen muscle begin along the middle of the back. Closer to the waist, the distance between them is smallest, and the depth of the cavity is greatest. The keyboard of the ribs is visible only on the left, and then rather not on the back itself, but on the side. But where the rib cage ends, the 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 black belt, it is easy to see that the sunlight is maximum. Although a barely noticeable shadow appeared only between the muscles on the back.

1. The back was shot close up. To her right, in the depths 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 one left after the state recruitment of horses to Bosnia - but very careful. Instead of a saddle there is a long narrow blanket.

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

On the way back, behind Ardzhelyudzha, Anna took off her shirt and posts, and remained in only the men's gachas.

We walked up against the current of the Prut. From time to time we went down to the river to drink water. The river was so shallow that Anna put her hands directly on the bottom and sank down to the water, plunging her entire face. Although the tips of the breasts were approaching the unquiet surface, they remained unwetted. 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, but Anna couldn’t even move her hand.

After the bath they kissed until their lips were completely dry. Because everything wet dries. The skin smelled of cold algae in warm rivers between warm stones under warm winds from under the snow-covered Goverla. If they managed to remember this bodily sensation so that they could remember it accurately at any time, then the feeling of happiness would be constant.

Then they talked a lot and willingly. Franz thought how everything 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 went into the water to drink.

3. When Francis returned from the rocks alone in December 1893, before feeding the child, he accidentally stumbled upon that same barrel while looking for alcohol. Yalivtsovka had about half a liter left, and at the same time he drank what he had not drunk together. Then he pulled out this photograph, shoved among the larousse, inserted it between two rectangles of glass, throwing out some kind of drawing, and placed it forever on his desktop.

I crushed a handful of dried blueberries in a brass mortar, poured warm water with honey and started feeding Stefania. And in the morning he went to the priest and told him to write down his daughter in the church books as Anna.

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

Temptations of Saint Anthony

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

Nepr O Some people said that Anthony was sculpted from melted lead, which had previously been a bullet. The figurine lived in a metal cylinder, the kind in which soldiers keep little boxes with their name and relatives’ address. Anna wore this cartridge on a very long wire chain around her neck. The constant rubbing of copper never left the skin with green spots. Francis believed that this would do no harm. When the weather was particularly good, Anna would take Anthony 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 - a violet, daisy, plum petals or linden blossom, so that Anthony would have something to breathe.

2. She herself smelled very good. Most of all, Franz loved it when Anna fell asleep on his table. He worked a little more, looking more at his sleeping, curled-up daughter, and then climbed onto the table, put a book under his head, hugged Anna and breathed the air she exhaled for a long time. He stroked her head, and sometimes in the morning Anna woke up with thick, thin and 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 activity than raising his daughter. Every day he saw thousands of flawless frames, but for some reason he did not dare to use the camera. Therefore, I remembered them with such effort that sometimes I caught myself thinking: I can’t go on like this. For it often happened that in the evening he could not remember what happened in that day, except for these imaginary photographs (but when Anna grew up, he could tell her for hours what she was like on any day of her childhood).

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

5. Francis decided that such visions were a consequence of morphine addiction, and called the Uneasy. They talked a little with Anna, and finally the soothsayer said that the girl had dreamed everything. She warned Franz that the little girl would increasingly tell all sorts of wonderful things, and would ask whether this or that had once 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 prophecy. 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 Kwasivsky to Kavelov, which flowed into the Black Tisa, and Anna studied all the pebbles on its bank - what it looked like and what it was lying near.

Meanwhile Nepr O The hard ones all dragged themselves together through the mountains to Yalivets and stayed in the city intermittently until 1951, when a special detachment of security officers, disguised as UPA fighters, burned down the psychiatric hospital with flamethrowers, where the tracked and captured Difficulties 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 your hands and everything else, Nepr once taught him O sty-gader and gave a whole bunch of snake skins. Franz had to untie the skin from the skin and weave his weave. Logic lives in the fingers; its categories foresee only what the fingers can do. Like prayer beads, he spun the ball day and night. Finally, he untied all the knots, but when he had a chance to tie it in his own way, it turned out that it was terribly difficult for his fingers not to follow the already existing shape. But Anna wove such knots that the gader led Franz to the bridge where Nepr O the stout ones settled.

8. Once upon a time they wanted to throw this viaduct from one protrusion of the ridge to another, between which Yalivets was located. First build the middle, and then bring it in both directions to the top. Francis imagined that one day such a road would turn the entire path from Sheshul to Patros into a comfortable walk. However, this project turned out to be the only unrealizable idea of ​​Yalivets. Three arches connected to each other, but not connected to the firmament - much higher than the road bridges in Vorokhta and Delyatyn - hung diagonally over the city, starting and ending in the clear sky. At the top there was a fragment of a wide road. The Uneasy Ones lived there.

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

The snow-covered Difficulties smoked pipes and looked at Farhaul in the Maramaros Alps beyond the White Tisza valley. The conversation was simple - when Anna becomes a woman, she will have to become Nepr O wait. In the meantime, they will always be nearby.

7. So, the film that Franz finished resembled a necklace made of knots.

It looked like this. Countless individual small icons fluttered randomly across the screen. All these were those elementary symbols that Franz managed to find in the patterns of Easter eggs in all corners of the Carpathians. Due to the difference in size, configuration, color and speed, the darkness of the signs resembled an improbable hodgepodge of different insects. Recognized were ladders, wedges, half wedges, tricledges, forty wedges, yellow wedges, teeth, edging, short, endless, semi-infinite, curl, break, cross, rubbish, crooked, stars, stars, the sun warms, half-suns, months, crescents, stern, month shining, lunar streets, rainbow, fashlka, roses, half roses, acorn, marigolds, blackbrows, spikelet, smerichki, pine, cucumbers, carnations, periwinkle, braids, oatmeal, cuckoo's shoes, twine, plum, red mullet, branches, tumbleweeds, skates, lambs, cows, dogs, goats, deer, cockerels, ducks, cuckoos, cranes, whitewings, plows, crow's feet, ram's horns, hare's ears, ox's eye, moths, bees, slugs, spiders, golovkat, reel, rake, brushes, combs, hatchets, shovels, boats, eggplants, grates, chests, cinches, chains, knapsacks, keys, beads, barrels, casings, powder flasks, umbrellas, icons, handkerchiefs, laces, bowls, hut, windows, pillars, trough, churches, monasteries, belfries, chapels, twisted sleeves, written sleeves, oblique lines, needles, beak-shaped, cross-shaped, toothy, wicker, rustic, princess, key, crooked, dots, torn, winged, bespectacled, spider, chichkovaya, glukovaya, lumerovaya , flask, secret, cherry, raspberry, flowerpot, shoot, dragonflies, windmill, sled, hooks, honey pots.

Little by little, the movement of the signs gained some order - like one very strong wind overpowering many weak ones. The symbols were spinning somehow as if a full bath of water was flowing out through a small hole. A chain of badges, tied in knots here and there, was already emerging from there. The chain twisted into a spiral and rotated like a centrifuge. From the chaos, free symbols flew to her and laid out next to her a chain with the same sequence of symbols, each time more and more pressed against the first one and wrapped around it. Now both spirals were screwed into the void together, came closer and closer and turned into a world tree. Peace came. Flowers bloomed on the tree, petals withered, fruits grew from the ovaries, inflated, burst, cracked, and thousands of the same signs freely and evenly fell to the ground, folding into a hill, losing their shape.

8. The premiere was waited until Easter 1900. She opened the cinematograph Yuniperus, built according to Anna’s sketch, after reading out the archpastoral message of the young Stanislav Bishop Andrei Sheptytsky to his dear Hutsul brothers.

11. From that time on, the Difficulties were indeed always there. It only seems that Chornohora is a desert. In fact, there is not even enough 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 covered it with strangely painted tiles, and it looked completely like a stove. On all the windows they wrote one word - notar. But on the windowsills there were whole rows of bottles of different sizes and shapes, so one could assume that “NOTAR” was the name of another bar. Lukács somehow made it so that within a week the entire roof was overgrown with ivy, and a green curtain hung over the door. It was empty inside - opposite a small table (with one drawer) on very high legs stood a comfortable chair upholstered in canvas.

The notary himself sat in the chair, smoking large cigarettes one after another, inserted into a silver ring soldered to a tin rod that lowered 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, I wanted to establish, if not the date, then at least the cause of death. I settled on lung cancer and began not to limit myself in smoking in order to be doomed to such a death.

12. But as soon as someone came, the notary took a cigarette out of the ring, seated the visitor in his chair, opened a drawer, took out two red or two yellow sweet peppers - always fresh and juicy, with one hand he opened a large curved knife that was hanging on a strap at the knee, peeled the peppers, placing them on the palm of his hand, inquired what to pour - palenka, rakia, slivovitz, becherevka, tsuika, zubrovka, anisovka, yalivtsovka, boletus, poured full peppers, served one to the guest, stood at the table, took out a sheet of paper from the drawer , a sharpened pencil, raised the cigarette, said “God willing,” 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 the table legs), took it in the same hand as the goblet, and a pencil in the left, took a deep drag of the smoke and was ready to listen.

13. The notary was called a French engineer.

Nepr O The faithful found him in Rakhiv and offered him this particular job, because he looked modest and at the same time heroic. You want to surprise someone like that by telling something unusual from your own life.

And the Difficulties needed as many such stories and tales as possible.

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

Once upon a time he really was a French engineer. Lived twenty years in Indochina, working on drainage systems, studying opium smoking, Muay Thai, butterflies and orchids, and Zen. And 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 Delo, hinting at the origin of the author from the Orlik family.

The difficult ones came to Krivorivnya 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 NTS. 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 found himself throughout his life did not allow him to betray himself as a folklorist. The French engineer made a detour to Budapest and obtained all the necessary papers that gave him the right to recruit immigrants on the territory of Austria-Hungary.

9. In Yalivets, the French engineer dressed the same every day from 1900 to 1921 (Even after 1914, the French engineer sat in his office, listening and writing down everything that different people came to tell. The storytellers received a decent fee, and records with stories and dreams, insights and crazy ideas were analyzed Nepr O sty). A wide white flannel suit, sewn without a single button, striped white and lime shirts, open at the chest, cork sandals. Only in winter did he wrap himself in a blanket, throwing it over his head like a hood. It was the French engineer who taught Sebastian that self-awareness is in the soles of the feet, and the perception of oneself can be changed by placing the feet differently or on something different.

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

There was a small gallery in Yalivets. Its owner, Lotsi from Baregsasu, knew good artists - Munkacsi, Ustyanovych, Kopystynsky. He brought Romanchuk to Fedkovych, and Vodzytsky (much later, when he returned from Paris from Zuloaga) made several photographic sketches for “Girls Making Easter Eggs.” They were close friends with Ivan Trush. Lozi told him a lot about how plants reclaim landscapes that had been disfigured and abandoned by people. I even took him to sketches of Pop Ivan, to the log house. Many years later, Trush returned to this topic in the wonderful series “The Life of Stumps.” Finally, it was Lotsi who first showed someone Dzembronya, which over time became a favorite place for many artists of the Lviv school. And he regularly sent found Hutsul rarities to the Didushynskys for the museum.

11. All his life, Lotsi himself painted the same thing - wooden stalls - separate for each cow - on the Shes meadow, boardwalk streets between them and giant thickets of sorrel that 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, carrying them with him from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the office, from the office to the gallery, from the gallery to the bathroom.

And Lozi’s life largely depended on the painting that was then in his possession.

12. Unusual things were practiced in the gallery. Every day, Lotsi re-hung the paintings, completely changing their dialogue. Often buyers, having chosen a painting one day, could not recognize it the next morning. The roof of the gallery was a glass tank filled with rainwater. Lotsi changed the lighting of the hall by covering one or another part of the tank with spruce branches. But the most important thing is that paintings could be borrowed, like books in a library. Lotsi completed the orders of the most expensive hotel himself, in accordance with the request.

13. Lotsi was the only one in Yalivets who ripened varietal grapes. The vineyard grew along the line between the house and the gallery. While walking along the stitch, Lotsi always broke off at least one bunch of grapes. This continued from the moment the ovary appears until the last ripening. In September, only a few dozen clusters remained, but they became ripe, as in Tokaj, fully using the grape forces that the destroyed bunches no longer required.

Although Francis was friends with the gallery owner, even he had no idea that Lotsi was working for Nepr O cool.

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

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 purchased here a year ago. The landowner suspected that from there the cannon could hit the lancers' rearguard point-blank, and this did not give him peace.

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

15. Francis came up with a more accurate method. He shot an enlarged reproduction of some famous painting - this became the second part of each film. For the first and third parts, I added frames fifteen seconds before what was shown in the picture and the same thing after. Trush's fresh landscape “The Dnieper near Kiev” served as a test, although Franz was thinking mainly about Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”. Then he revived several still lifes of old Dutchmen (although he immediately destroyed everything except Jan van de Velde - the one with a deck of cards, a pipe on a long stem and hazelnuts) and the famous “Fight” by Adrian van Ostade (some kind of tavern, drunk villagers and women are holding two men with crazy looks, who are waving knives, everything is upside down, someone is running away, and the rest fell to the ground).

Then he took on 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 keep up with making any more serious films.

16. Even before Nepr O As they 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 lies in nothing other than the combination of what is well known according to the principles of unknown logic - in a way that could not exist in one landscape. This means that the key to this logic is the connection of landscapes.

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

17. And,” Franz reasoned, “at a distance, dreams are like good prose with comparisons drawn from different coordinate systems, subtle highlights of individual details in the flow of the panorama, transparent permissiveness, an unforgettable sense of presence, the simultaneity of all tropisms, the uncontrollability of the unexpected and the meager rhetoric of containment.” . And on good grass, which does not bring anything of its own, but breaks off what it holds, and transfers the lattice 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 “Night Watch”. So over time, he even stopped saving dreams for later, only enjoying them completely at night.

I am standing on the flat roof of a two-story long house. The house is in the water. Water right up to the top of the first floor. To the end of its high arches. Three heads are floating in the water and a heron is standing. One head swims under the arch. The other one wants to sail away from here. A naked, pot-bellied man descends down the stairs from a second-floor window to the water. A withered hand from around the corner tries to stop him. I'm naked too. I'm standing on the very edge. Hands raised up. Stacked together. I'm going to jump from a height into the water. There is a round table right behind me. And behind him is a barrel with a jug. A monk and a nun are sitting at a table and drinking something. Above the table, barrel and monks there is a tent stretched on a dry branch. Attached to the side of the house is a dome hemisphere with a chapel on top. 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 there is a wide river, a green forest and high blue mountains, like ours. A round tower is attached to the other side of the house. There are little people painted on its walls. The little people dance, jump and tumble. 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 destroyed and chipped. Small trees grow between the rubble 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 there is water again. Beyond that water is a city. Two towers approach the water itself. There is a stone bridge between them. On the bridge there is a huge crowd of people with spears raised up. Some are standing near the railing and looking across the water and the island in my direction. On one tower brushwood is burning. Some animals are swimming under the towers (at the foot). A man with a sword and shield fights one of them. Further behind the towers is an empty sandy place. In the middle there 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 there 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 standing on the shore. With their backs to me. Some are sitting on horses and some strange animals. One is wearing 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. There is a naked woman standing in a large crack in the trunk. There is a woodpecker sitting on the top branch, but it is very large. A man places a ladder against a tree. Quite far behind them, a bearded man in a monastic robe sits on a stone with a stick in his hand and examines 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 among this movement. I look over my shoulder for a second and see a fire in the distance. It makes the skin of the back and the back of the legs feel hot. Somehow it becomes clear that this requires running 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. My hands are already slightly numb because they have been raised for a long time. Suddenly a shadow moves onto your back and it becomes cooler. I look up. A sailboat covered in armor floats in the air just above me. I can see the bottom. This is a flying ship. He flies by. The shadow leaves. It starts baking again. Already stronger. I want to take a step. But I see a man with a camera.

He was always hiding in a remote corner between my house and the attached tower with painted men and windows. I don't want to be photographed and I yell at him. The man waves his hands negatively and points to the flying ship. Everything in me agrees that this is really interesting. A man hides a camera in the wall. He goes to the tower and disappears around the bend. I stand 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 over it. But the body does not move. I don't fly or fall. I start coughing. Very quickly I fly straight towards the chain. I hit it with the fingers of my outstretched arms. And with this 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 drawn 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 Temptations of St. Anthony”.

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

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

Lozi 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 naked figure in the upper right corner of the central part of the painting.

When did they simultaneously recognize Nepr O In the two main figures of the four 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 he should show this to someone, whether Bosch looked funny and tasteless, whether it was a sin to redraw all evil spirits and sodomy, whether he would offend Nepr O stykh, will Anna bring trouble, has he done harm to anyone intentionally or unintentionally, is there any meaning in art, will he live to see the completion 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 Carpathian mountains, is it worth thinking so much, is it necessary to remember everything, okay whether to tell everyone everything, whether it is necessary to speak beautifully, whether plants think, whether tomorrow exists, whether the end of the world happened a long time ago, how long he can endure without a woman, whether he is under the power of the devil.

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

23. 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 along the floor towards the wall. Then - in the other direction. Then again and again, with breaks, faster and slower. It’s as if he is a metal speck on a piece of paper, and under the paper they move a magnet. Once he was even lifted up the wall - still lying down - and delicately lowered to the floor.

After this, the devil asked to carefully monitor what would happen. He pushed Franz into the 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, went 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, Beda'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. Some punk came out of the side door and approached Franz. Anna was getting closer. The punk stood with his back to Anna and the armored car. He took a bottle from his inner pocket, pulled out the cap and handed the bottle to Franz. And then everything happened. In those few seconds, while both Anna and Beda approached them, Franz managed to notice the change of several thousand different faces on the punk’s head, several hundred vests under his 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. Punk grinned, Beda and Anna grinned. Franz drank first. The taste was reminiscent of renkloda. He handed the bottle to Beda, and he 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 or begged. And Franz imperceptibly but very tightly 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. Still in the tower,” said the horseman. Franz asked if he should show the finished film to anyone. It depends only on your desire, the Difficult Ones answered. Although think about it, maybe you shouldn’t show our faces where you imagined. 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 bailnik.

26. At home, Franz burned a drawing that contained a sketch of Anna’s dream.

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

He was very afraid that Nepr O The faithful may sooner or later come for the film, so he commanded Anna never to remember that it existed. But if someone wanted to find out about something using torture, then they should immediately tell everything they want. Don't try to deceive, but tell the truth. So you should know that I destroyed everything.

Franz packed the film in a capshuk 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 much Anna is tortured, she will tell the truth - there is no film. Paradoxically, this will be the only truth that the executioners will not believe in, and the torture will not stop.

In that case, it would be a shame to destroy the film. Maybe it will come in handy someday. Let there be someone who will look, analyze, think carefully and understand what kind of Difficult Ones they are and how they move the world. After all, it always gradually becomes clear how everything and everyone in the world is connected to everything - by transitions, of which there are no more than four.

27. Francis entered a beech forest, in which every tree had a hollow under its roots. He threw the hood of his long cloth robe over his eyes so that he could see only where to stand, and began to run by touch through the forest. I ran into trees several times, but nothing, my 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 wheeze from the depths of his lungs. Only then did he stop, without opening his eyes, groped for the tree, found a hollow between the roots and pushed the capshuk with the film into the hole, deeper than one and a half cubits. And he slowly walked out of the forest. In such places it is easy to do this without looking. You need to go up, guided by the slope of the earth. At the top, Franz took off his icy hood and looked at the forest. All the trees were identical and unfamiliar, endless interweaving of tracks curled between them, and the eyes hurt from the shameless moonlight.

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

Mother Prokhaska is the third niece of the scribe Irina Vilde, who maintained close ties with the language from their homeland and often visited them from Lvov. Prokhaska’s grandfather on her mother’s side during the First World War during the war, serving in the Austro-Ugric division, which stood opposite the unit at the front, as described by Ernest Geminwey in the autobiographical novel “Farewell, dear!” Taras Prokhaska’s father was deported from his mother 10 years ago, Prokhaska’s grandmother was deported from Morshyn to a special settlement near Chita, and his family returned to Ukraine. well at 1956, if youmu got 16.

At school, Prokhasko had a good knowledge of biology, having taken part in the All-Ukrainian Olympiad in Ukrainian language, but could not find himself as a local philologist or journalist, so he entered the biology department of the Lviv State University named after Ivan Frank ( 1992 ). Behind the fag is a botanist. After completing university, he was encouraged to work in the biostationary planted in the mountains, and Prokhasko was encouraged to work through his home environment. Participant of the student movement 1989-1991 rocks, while taking part in the “revolution on the granite” in Kiev at 1990.

After graduating from university, he initially worked at the Ivano-Frankivsk Institute of Carpathian Forestry, and then taught in the local area, 1992-1993 rocks being a bartender, then a watchman, a presenter at the FM radio “Vezha”, working at an art gallery, in a newspaper, at a television studio. U 1992-1994 I was a “mandarin” editorial editor for the magazine “Chetver”, because at that time I was constantly traveling to Lvov, where I started at the university. Laureate of the "Smoloskip" ( 1997 ).

U 1993 Taras Prokhasko co-starred with Andriy Fedotov and Adam Zevel in the short film “The Houses of St. Francis,” and y 1996 near the village of Delyatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region, the first international video art festival in Ukraine was held, the grand prize for which was the production of the two-part film “The Flow into Egypt” ( 1994 ), de znyavsya Taras Prokhasko, yogo blue ta Lesya Savchuk.

U 1998 Having started working as a journalist for the Lviv newspaper “Expres”, for a year he wrote author’s columns for “Expres” and “Postup”. I wrote for an hour before the online newspaper “Telekritika”, and then, when Prokhaska’s friends created the “newspaper of your death”, they began to write articles and conduct an author’s column in the Ivano-Frankivsk regional newspaper “Galician Correspondent”.

U 2004 Having lived for several months in Krakow, he received a literary scholarship from the Polish cultural foundation “Stowarzyszenie Willa Decjusza - Homines Urbani”.

At the beginning of 2010 Prokhasko first visited the United States, and then had creative evenings in New York and Washington.

Pratsyue in “Galitsky correspondent”. Friends, there are two brothers, one starts as a historian at the Ukrainian Catholic University, and the other starts as an architect and a civil servant at the Lviv Polytechnic. Member of the Association of Ukrainian Writers.

Behind the words of Prokhaska, he became a writer when he received 12 fates. At school, I didn’t read the Radyan’s Ukrainian writings, but only after the army, I read the works of Vasyl Stus and started writing myself. The fragments of the Faculty of Biology, where he began, as a non-mysterious middle ground, Prokhasko, for a long time, took into account that the current Ukrainian literature does not exist like this. The first thing you can do is read more 1990 Roku, having become acquainted with Yurk Izdrik, there was a stir in Ivano-Frankivsk about the creation of the literary-mysterious hour-painting “Fours”. The first works of Prokhaska Izdrik were not accepted, but then Prokhasko wrote his first account “The Burnt Summer”, which was published by the chapel.

Among the writers close to the “singing type of light perception”, Prokhasko names Bohumil Hrabal, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Vasyl Stefanik, Danilo Kisha, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Honore de Balzac, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Serg Iya Dovlatova, Leva Rubinshteina , and among his favorite works is Andrzej Bobkowski’s work “War and Peace” (1940-1944) and “Sherlock Holmes”.

From time to time it becomes clear that Taras Prokhasko is a tall man through and through, and yet he is strongly felt in his writings, and he clearly reinforces him from other Ukrainian prose writers. It is not surprising that we are constantly trying to capture the fluidity of immutability and create an external rivalry between the human soul and the growing light. Many of Taras’s works have an inherent biographical quality, but his prose is unmistakable, and yet it comes close to an intimate conversation.

The series of internal and intimate experiences “FM “Galicia”” and “Port Frankivsk” seem to have a parable character. Written in the form of a drawing, based on different themes, recently published in the newspaper “Galician Correspondent” and voiced on the air of FM radio “Vezha”.

Prokhasko takes part in various mystical performances. U 2009 together with other writers (Yuri Andrukhovich, Yurk Izdrik, Volodymyr Yeshkilev, Sofia Andrukhovich) taking part in the project “Homeless” (“Without the Sign of Mysterious Life”) by Rostislav Shpuk, later presented in Polish at the International Festival of Homeless Mystery.

At sickle 2010 Prokhasko, as part of a musical-literary dialogue, attended the Porto Franco festival by reading a lesson from Stanislav Vinzenz’s novel “On the High Plain” on the ruins of the Pnivsky Castle. During the reading hour, the French cellist Dominique de Viencourt performed a Bach suite.

2011 Taras Prokhaska’s book “Botak” was recognized by the Book of Fate.

2013 Rock The BBC Book of Rock Award went to Taras Prokhasko’s children’s book “Who Makes Snow,” written together with Marya Prokhasko.

Nagorodi:

1997 - laureate of the Smoloskip award.
2006 – first place in the “Fiction” nomination for the book “Who could have earned a lot of evidence” (version for the magazine “Corespondent”).
2007 – third place in the “Documentary” nomination for the book “Port of Frankivsk” (version for the magazine “Corespondent”).
2007 – laureate of the Joseph Conrad Literary Prize (founded by the Polish Institute in Kiev).
2013 – Prize named after Yuri Shevelov for the book “The One and the Same.”

Create T. Prokhaska:

1998 – “Annie’s Other Days”
2001 – “FM Galicia”,
2002 – novel “Uneasy”
2005 – “For whom it would be possible to get a lot of evidence.”
2006 – “Port Frankivsk”.
2006 – “Ukraina”, together with Serhiy Zhadan.
2007 – “Galizien-Bukowina-Express”, together with Yurko Prokhasko and Madalena Blashchuk.
2010 – “Botak”.
2013 – Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. “Who makes snow.”
2013 – “One and the same.”
2014 – “Signs of Maturity.”
2014 – Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. “Where the sea has fallen.”
2015 – Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. “How to understand a goat.”
2017 – Prokhasko T., Prokhasko M. “Life and Snow.”

Taras Prokhasko

NOT SIMPLE

NOT SIMPLE

And whoever does not read this essay will have a difficult time in life, since their Difficulties will bypass them with their obvious plots, and maybe even turn off the sound and lights.

Yaroslav Dovgan

Sixty-eight random first phrases

1. In the fall of 1951, it would not have been surprising to move west - then even the east began to gradually move in that direction. However, Sebastian and Anna in November 1951 went from Mokra to the east, which was still more numerous at that time. More precisely, to the eastern south or southeast.

2. This trip 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 family tradition, according to which children were shown places associated with the history of the family at the age of fifteen. Because then, when Anna turned fifteen, Sebastian realized that everything was repeating itself, and Anna became for him the only possible woman in the whole world. That he not only can only be near her, but can no longer be without her.

Meanwhile, in Yalivets - the family nest where Anna should have been taken - the Difficult Ones were waiting for her. And Sebastian knew that they would very easily convince their daughter to stay with them.

In the end, the fact that Anna would also become Difficult was foreseen by them even when she was born.

3. In April fifty-one, Anna felt that Papa Sebastian was her only possible husband, and they became close.

That spring, many wandered along unheard-of routes and spread incredible rumors. This is how Sebastian found out that Nepr O The stale disappeared from Yalivets. Since then, no one has heard anything about them.

For a whole summer, Sebastian and Anna fell in love unconditionally, and several different armies passed by them. Nothing prevented us from going east, south, or southwest. When it got really cold and the roads squeezed tighter into their ruts, they finally left Mokra and in a few days could be in Yalivets.

The journey was postponed for three years. But Sebastian was not afraid of anything - he had a real wife again. The same breed as always.

4. He couldn’t imagine how he could show his daughter all the places in the mountains from Mokraya to Yalivets for real. Instead of four days, the journey should last four seasons. Only this way, and also during the day, at night, in the morning and in the evening, could Anna see how different this road looks at the same time. He looked at the map, read the names out loud and became happy just from this.

He wasn't even upset that the card didn't tell Anna anything.

To tell the truth, he was a little worried about the trees that he had not seen for so many years. Their growth is the most common reason that places suddenly become unrecognizable. And the most important proof of the need to never leave nearby trees unattended.

As for the transition itself, not a single journey knows what can happen to it, cannot know its true causes and consequences.

5. Franz once told Sebastian that there are things in the world that are much more important than what is called fate. Franz had the place in mind above all. If it exists, there will be history (if history exists, then there must be a corresponding place). Find a place - start a story. Come up with a place - find a plot. And plots, in the end, are also more important than fates. There are places where it is impossible to tell anything, and sometimes it is worth speaking with just the names in the correct sequence in order to forever master the most interesting story that will hold you stronger than a biography. Toponymy can be tempting, but it can be completely avoided.

6. And something similar happened to Sebastian. He found Yalivets, invented by Franz. He was fascinated by linguistics. Toponymy captivated him, and he wasn’t just captivated by the mesmerizing beauty of names.

Plaska, Opresa, Tempa, Apeska, Pidpula, Sebastian. Shesa, Sheshul, Menchul, Bilyn, Dumen, Patros, Sebastian.

When no mountains yet existed, the names were already prepared. The same as with his wives - they were not yet in the world when his blood began to mix with the one that was supposed to become their blood.

From then on, all he could do was stick to this limited toponymy and this shortened genetics.

7. Francis met Sebastian on the rock behind Yalivets. Sebastian was returning from Africa and shooting birds. The sniper rifle did not let me feel the kill. Through optics everything is seen as if in a movie. The shot doesn’t just interrupt the film, but introduces some new scene into the script. Thus, he shot quite a lot of different small birds flying over Yalivets just to Africa.

Winter was about to begin. She must change something. Winter gives purpose - this is its main quality. It closes the openness of summer, and this should already result in something.

Francis was looking for something that could be used to make his next animated film. And suddenly - before winter, a rock above the city, in the middle of the city, a flock of birds above the mountain that fly to Africa, Asia Minor, where there are fields with saffron, aloe and hibiscus between giant rosehip bushes almost in front of the long Nile, many killed in the eye multi-colored birds, stacked one on top of the other, making the different colors even more different, in each right eye there is a reflection of an intercontinental route, in each left eye there is a purple spot, and not a single feather is damaged, and a gentle breeze throws the fluff of one weightless body onto the ghostly fluff of another, and the shooter's eye in the reverse refraction of optics. And a shooter. Red white African.

8. Sebastian’s hands are frozen. He froze them in the night Sahara. Since then, my hands have not tolerated mittens. Sebastian said to Franz - what should pianists do when it gets so cold?

They looked in all directions, and everything was good. Because it was autumn, and autumn was flowing into winter. Franz named different mountains without even showing which was which. Then he invited Sebastian to his place. He had not had guests for a long time; he had not met anyone unfamiliar on the rocks for a long time. This was probably the first time they drank coffee with grapefruit juice. When Anna brought them a jug to the glassed-in gallery, where the copper stove was heated with cuttings of vines, Sebastian asked her to linger a little and show what was visible through this window. Anna listed - Pleska, Opresa, Tempu, Pidpula, Shesu, Sheshul, Menchul, Bilyn, Dumen, Petros.

It was late autumn of 1913. Franz said that there are things much more important than what is called fate. And he suggested that Sebastian try to live in Yalivets. It was getting dark, and Anna, before bringing another jug ​​- almost just juice, only a few drops of coffee - went to make his bed, since she would not yet be able to do it by touch.

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

It reminds me of my own life, lived with 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 away. This is what athletes call “load.” This always happens... But sometimes these people are not there, they disappear somewhere, and then, without the usual load, the heart begins to ache. The lungs and all other airways are compressed, there is not enough air. You begin to acutely understand that without several Yuroks, Olegs, Volodeks, Andreevs, Ivanovs, Romanovs, Bogdanovs, you will not be able to overcome your own path. You see how without them you turn into an iceberg, drawn 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 of bowing the sky at their feet. “Hell is others,” someone said without thinking. Because others are heaven. Those “others” in question are an arrow in the chest that presses and does not give rest, but if you pull it out, you will die.

If there is anything worth spending your precious life on, it is on this - seeing, hearing, feeling, touching. And let this happen without any 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 heart. But by giving these people a part of your own destiny, you will give a future to those children who already exist. They will understand: dad knew what to do.

Your small partisan army does not occupy any new territory, but it exists in order to prevent the invaders from entering your native land. Because she is truly yours. And you, or we, will never be able to create hell on this small piece of firmament. Here, like it or not, only heaven is possible.

2. I knew a turtle

The greatest happiness that a person or any other living creature can have is companionship and communication. No matter what anyone says, this is precisely what all manifestations of life, which are called happiness, come down to. Without communication, everything loses its meaning, and no amount of pleasure can bring it back. Therefore, everything connected with unsuccessful communication is drama. And mutual misunderstandings and misunderstandings are a real tragedy. Misunderstandings can be different - intentional or involuntary, momentary and long-term, fleeting and endless, radical and allowing for compromise. They are all tragic. And they consist, first of all, in the opposition of desires and intentions, in their discrepancy. 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 the understanding of words - their meanings, shades, semantic stresses, origin and synonymic series.

Such tragedies are the most sad, and there is almost nothing that can be done to help. The saddest thing is that everyone seems to have done everything to understand the other and express themselves as accurately as possible. But all that remains is sadness, frustration and distrust. I knew one turtle. And he knew its owners. Both the owners and the turtle were very sweet and loved each other, trying to do everything to make everyone happy and happy. I remember the look on this turtle's face when it "talked" to its owners. But one day a turtle carelessly climbed 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 seemed to go away. But something was no longer right - the joy had disappeared somewhere, first the turtle became indifferent, and then - as a consequence - the people.

Contact was lost, mutual understanding and the possibility of communication disappeared. Sadness, frustration and distrust remained. That's how they lived. Once I peered into the eyes of a turtle for a long time and understood everything. She became different - falling, the turtle damaged its brain. Moreover, it is irreversible. And she just became crazy, crazy. We couldn’t know what was in her head now - complete darkness or the powerful lights of pursuing searchlights, maybe she forgot everything, or maybe she had an unbearable headache every night, maybe she was ticklish between her skull and brain, or maybe , every sound and smell unnerved her. We couldn't know this. We couldn't understand each other. They couldn't help. They couldn’t save us because they couldn’t fully “talk” like before. By the way, she had another 240 years left to live with us. With this, but without us.

3. Birds

While still a biology student, I discovered that biology is the fundamental basis of education, worldview, understanding of philosophies and logical constructs, 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, many years later, a fellow biology student who had changed his profession, I remembered the entire system of my observations and thoughts about the influence of various biological sciences on the psyche.

Entomologists (insect specialists) always become collectors. Moreover, they are essentially collectors - 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 become experts in all the nooks and crannies of a region, they know exactly where everything grows.

A separate category are specialists working with a microscope. Herpetologists, ichthyologists and physiologists develop their own oddities. But ornithologists—bird watchers—stand completely apart. The decision to be an ornithologist in itself is already a sign of an unstable psyche. Birdwatchers can be identified instantly and unmistakably. They are unique, something lifts them from the earth to the sky. They probably harness the birds to who knows what and ride around somewhere on these sleds. Ornithologists do not see the ground - 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, band captured birds and receive telegrams from the island of Java if this bird dies there, distinguish twenty shades of pink in the plumage on the abdomen. Guess nests, look for eggs of various colors and sizes. Constantly look through binoculars, lorgnettes and telescopes. 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: blackbirds ate the berries from the bush that I picked myself; crows always sat on the house in front of my window; the sparrows did not allow the swallows into their own nests on my balcony; the rook drowned himself in my barrel of water; I had a crow for a long time; my children found a frozen parrot, which then flew freely throughout the house; a stork, exhausted from the flight, fell on my post in the army; pigeons that neighbors roasted before the Sabbath; the crane that flew to my forest through bombed Serbia; the crows from whom 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 somewhat similar to angels.

4. Unselected

The possibility of choice, which is considered the highest embodiment of human freedom, is in fact nothing more than the highest form of bondage. This is doom. You are forced to choose, you cannot help but choose. Because even without choosing, you have already made the choice not to choose. Choice is a mandatory exam that not everyone can pass. This is a special responsibility to loved ones 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 totality and sequence, testifies to the possibility of the path you have chosen. By making your own choice, you are showing the way for someone else.

These are obvious and simple things. But there is one aspect of the problem of choice that few people think about seriously. This is a question of the un-chosen. What is chosen immediately becomes reality, which means it acquires temporary O e dimension, and what belongs to time will definitely end. That is, what we have chosen only becomes ours for a while, and then disappears, passes away, or evolves into something that bears very little resemblance to 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 endless. 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 twinkle there. True, some people begin to writhe and scratch themselves with manias, fears and other ugly things. In this luggage there is always some old raincoat, in the pocket of which lies a forgotten ticket - a preferential ticket to schizophrenia, the most common proof of the existence of the chosen and the unchosen. But for others, the strong, the unchosen develops what makes mammals human - an inexpressible nostalgia, a sadness that does not destroy, but throws up, lifts up. Some kind of absence of fear, some unbearable lightness of existence...

5. Ryzhik

I realized a long time ago that when a weapon is aimed at you, it doesn’t mean anything, because if it’s really aimed, there’s nothing to do, and when it’s half-real, it won’t fire. They aimed at me many times, and everything always worked out. I just had to behave calmly, although at gunpoint I was asked to do stupid things - jump off a rushing train, or from a tall bridge, give up something very important, or something else impossible. But these are all fragments that you soon forget about. They shot less often and almost always without aim. They shot at me only once - then I should have died instead of my friend. But nothing came of this either. They didn't hit me. And this is precisely what provided the friend with 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. A large, wolf-like, but yellow and long-haired dog. With the amazing eyes of a tiger or lynx - amber, deep and wise. And eyebrows. Absolutely human brown eyebrows. He was already quite an adult and had vast experience of all the worst things when he came to our mountain. Somehow he immediately became 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 I soon got used to it. Only I could caress him as I wanted. Even though he started living with us, Ryzhik never came into the house. I suspect he was claustrophobic. He established his own rules in the yard - he did not allow anyone except family members, furiously pursued postmen, barked at all the trains. I hated everything that could mean even the tiniest change in the rhythm of our lives. In addition, for some reason he protected me from several relatives and made sure that I did not meet with them. Sometimes he could get nervous and chew someone. Not to bite, but to gnaw. After some time, the list of those chewed up was almost identical to the list of everyone who lived near us. And then the adult neighbors decided that it was time to get rid of him. One of them had a gun, the others simply began to hunt down Ryzhik. The dog felt something and stopped walking in the surrounding areas.

I was running along the ravine when buckshot began whistling overhead. Out of surprise, I did not fall to the bottom, but looked out of the ravine and heard several more whistles past my head and saw neighboring hunters who were shooting in my direction. They shot because only my head protruded from the ravine, which in color and shaggyness 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 it is 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. Before the night falls

Many years ago I rocked my children to sleep in my arms. At that time it was not yet considered wrong. He sang something, trying to make his voice, the resonance in his chest, and the motive of the song soporific. A small hugged body cannot be deceived. 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 the day's impressions, did not give them rest, delayed the moment of falling asleep, adding further tension to the 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 was in awe, how it was impossible to fight death, but she fought until the night fell, how in the world everyone has their own sun, how it shines - and my heart is as light as that sun goes out, as life is not sweet... I became calm. The children were sleeping. I walked where it was no longer necessary to go, and thought that the desire for life had not all flown away, and maybe I would have lived, but the sun had set...

I could not even imagine that life so protects itself, so tightly clings 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, curled fingers, sweaty faces, clenched jaws, ragged breathing, heat and cold bodies, moans, screams and spoken delirium, instead of convulsions and immobility, tension and weakness of muscles, an abyss of glances in which you can to see anything, instead of open bodies from which fluids and souls were leaving, I remember something completely different? Something that was next to the dearest deaths, but no longer had anything in common with them. Some incomprehensible fragments - some blue September skies, autumn warmth, a lamp on the porch at night, someone's ribs under a thin dirty dress, April snow, long white corridors, cold vodka with lemon juice, the leaves of a giant sycamore falling all at once in one hour, daffodil fields, the top shelves of overheated general carriages, yellow foam of pollen on April puddles, a hasty cigarette in a hospital elevator, different teas, different smells, clover and rose hips, shiny and hard leaves in a beech forest, shoulders scratched by blackberries, dried on tin pears (suspiciously a lot of plant memories)…

And then the children surprised, making all the misunderstandings, thoughts, associations, memories and realizations transparent, bittersweet and uncontrollable, like a tear. We were driving a random minibus along a terribly difficult road in a foggy gorge. There was also a little two-year-old girl in the same car. Then some kind of emergency situation arose in which every passenger sees its slow development over the course of several seconds. And he clearly sees how it will all end. But a miracle happened, one of many. Like 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 the child, she still doesn’t know anything, because we have already lived so much... One was nine, the youngest was still eight.

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 out the night, because children sometimes cannot wait for tomorrow. Children get up early and want to go to bed as late as possible. The same thing happens in early youth. It seems that the medical evidence for the need for sleep is nonsense. But then... Then suddenly a moment comes 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 gather your strength during the day after a sleepless night and be productive. You can even, being terribly exhausted, suddenly decide not to go to bed when there is such an opportunity, but watch a good movie, read some book, drink with friends, make love. However, all this enthusiasm will not last long. After all, when you are old enough, but not yet old, 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 can you pause between the attacks of a long list of aggressors. You don't even need dreams that much. Although dreams turn out to be the best you can get in this part 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 cramped space. You happily become a hedgehog, a mole, an amphibian, a larva, who do not understand what is happening around. You strive to return to the warmth and tightness, far removed even from childhood. Where hitting the walls equals 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 day again. That you will be illuminated, irrigated 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 the rarefaction and condensation of the air. After all, for a few minutes you will know that you are hardly sleeping anymore, but you can still do it. A few of the most life-filling minutes before your eyes open and you thank God for seeing the light again.

8. Secret card

Many of us have some kind of secret map - it can be the map itself, it can be a hand drawing, it can be some kind of photograph or illustration in a book, a drawing in an atlas, a diagram in an encyclopedia. Could be an old photo of strangers or someone's painting. Sometimes it can even be an image of an author, a monument or even a public garden. 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 certain type of wine or crushed and ground with a special type of coffee. I'm not even talking about spices and perfumes, a few words written in a certain font, about herbariums and numismatic or philatelic collections. About attics and basements, about beds and chests of drawers, about melodies and pianos.

It can be in the face of some person, sometimes a stranger, or it can be an embossed epitaph on someone’s tombstone. This means that this secret card can be encrypted in anything. The only thing that all these options have in common is that they show you the way to your personal lost paradise. This is the blueprint for your heaven and the way to get there.

I also have such a 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 garden; she didn’t need a lot of flowers. All she wanted was for there to be flowers of many kinds. Several boxes and wire-wrapped pots contained hundreds of the most exotic plants. 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 was like a tropical beach. 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 the plants.

When my grandmother died, I redrew the diagram of her garden. 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.

Prokhasko Taras Bogdanovich is a 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 stories and the novel “Unprosti”. Winner of the J. Conrad Award, BBC Book of the Year in the Children's Book category. Works translated into Russian were published in the magazine “New World”, the anthology “Galician Stonehenge”, and were published as a separate book “Difficult”. The conversation with Taras Prokhasko took place at the round table of the Moscow festival “Ukrainian Motif” in October 2012. Taras Prokhasko spoke not 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 we have at our round table a guest of the festival, Ivano-Frankivsk prose writer Taras Prokhasko. Taras, once again, please introduce yourself - it’s 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 it “from Ivano-Frankivsk” in such cases. That is, you introduced me absolutely correctly. Then everything will appear gradually.

Let's start, perhaps, with the Stanislavsky phenomenon 1 . Lately I have often heard the opinion that this topic is not relevant. Like, when was he there? - in the early 90s. And a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and even its participants have long stopped pressing the fact that they are part of some kind of association. But, in my opinion, this was the rise of Ukrainian literature. On the surface lies the thesis that it was associated with the break of eras, with the transition from Soviet power to independent Ukraine. And at that time it seemed that all the doors were wide open, and the very expectation of change gave everything an internal 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. To exaggerate somewhat, we can say that in subsequent years Ukraine no longer had a clear ideology. The idea of ​​“entering Europe” was good in the early 90s. Then it turned out that all this was not easy. Perhaps the exhaustion of all these ideas has led to the fact that Ukrainian literature is now developing mainly in quantitative terms?

It's easy for me to talk about these times because they were very good times. Because I was young and this 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 - this is exactly what happened with the Stanislavsky phenomenon – we just lived, just did something, and only later a definition was found for this.

And we have all 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 openness of the world was the most important thing. 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 a Soviet school . Who knew something different than the Soviet ideological system. As a child, this was a defining thing for me, because most people of the older generation studied either under Austria, or under Poland, or under the Czech Republic.

And these people were bearers of an alternative, they knew that something could be different... And now I see that there are very few people left who did not study in a Soviet school, even in Western Ukraine, and they no longer define anything, and these are already such individual memories... We are now beginning an era when the generation that went 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 many opportunities to still 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 added up to aesthetic otherness - the house, the 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 it was, speaking in the Russian tradition, “in the box” - shuflyad O va, literature of shuflyada in Ukrainian, it turned out that it could be shown to someone.

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

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

And this feeling - precisely that we, it turns out, can do as we want - it was the most powerful. And perhaps later this 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 the set or stock of these ideas and these opportunities... the world does not need us as much as we thought. This was the biggest blow for a significant part of my generation. And writers - that’s still the case, more or less, but I know artists who also thought - now they’ll find out about it, and the whole world will be here. But it wasn’t like that...

In conclusion, I’ll just say: it seems to me that the most important thing in the Stanislavsky phenomenon is that in this space a lot of tiers, a lot of layers came together. There was precisely this, 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-awareness" or protest. It was simply alive, in which they talked about all things - the highest and the lowest.

That is, this language was very much in use. This was the language in which people thought. And it is very important that this layering is historical, associated 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 a plant and because of this he had to be a member of the party... in a word, everything was not so clear - there was no pathos not only in relation to the Soviet regime. There was a lot of understanding. And this is very good for literature - when everything overlaps each other in such a complex way. And these are the most important things.

You said that you all studied in a 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 this way: for me, one of the most important writing strategies in my youth was to convey experience... first, to convey the experience received from previous generations. This is what is called living history. I understood that life was finite and I could leave at any moment. And I understood this as an important task, because it seemed to me that perhaps this 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 thing. And now I’m thinking about writing more... I’m growing to understand my life, my childhood, my youth...

Yaroslav Gritsak 2 once told me ... so I asked him: why is there 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 it was 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 Arbat in 87 - 88), no one really I didn’t do anything heroic.

But what the parishioners do or faithful for their church, it a priori has a different connotation of heroism: they do not talk about some kind of heroism - for them this is normal behavior. Therefore, all these things are repressed from consciousness. But I promise that I will write about it. Because I think a lot - how it was all constructed, all that life, and how this acceptance and rejection was intertwined not only in my mind - perhaps even less in mine - but, say, in the generation of my parents, who passed on to me rejection of the Soviet regime, 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 completely normally in the Soviet system. And when my youngest 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 the world's ancient classics... He said that what they were doing now was so stupid that it would take a long time will not last, that all this will soon collapse. Because it's simply impossible, it's absurd. And my mother, who was from that solid generation, but who was already a Soviet doctor, she said - well, it still takes a hundred or two hundred years...

This is how it all coexisted? Then, already in some ninety-nine or even two thousand, I thought that in my daily, street-home life, the last Soviet years and the present years, they... nothing has changed. Well, of course, I can say what I want or write, but this is only because for some reason I began to write. If I had not written, I could have said the same thing - because those people who said to themselves in the kitchen, they continued to say so... That is, in fact, it’s all very difficult, and to say unambiguously about some kind of protest... Well, you can’t constantly fight... Fragments of stories about Frankovsk in the 80s and 90s were included in the story “Several stories can be made from this.”

Now let's finally move on to you yourself. As you know, there are logical and historical methods of knowledge. I propose to stop at the historical and go from your birth to the present day. I know that the famous Ukrainian writer Irina Vilde is your aunt. Somewhere you mentioned that your grandfather wrote some kind of literary, let’s say, works. What influenced you? Was there any impetus to write?

There was a very important feature in my family, in my city, in my family - although it is universal, it does not belong to anyone separately - it is not alien to writing, literature. The culture of writing is very important in the sense that it is the only way to record anything. And the presence of writing has always been something natural. You probably understand this mystery, this awe - notes from your grandfather or ancestors, or even some incomprehensible bills - how many pounds of butter there are, something else - all this is of great importance. The most important thing is that writing and saving these records is something normal, ordinary and natural. I came across this so early...

I don’t want to say that my relatives, my grandmothers, grandfathers were outstanding writers, but this is one of the most important things, strange things, that you can feel close, for example, to the same Gogol and not make something out of it -that 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 feature of literature, that a writer cannot accurately express his thought, and this is not bad, because it gives some broader opportunities...

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 another reason for complaints and repression. Maybe it never would have happened, but people did it for their own safety. It's like fastening a seat belt: you don't know whether it will help or not, but it's still considered better. Therefore, very little of this writing remains. And it always seemed to me that this tradition of writing something down - not so that it is literature that will shake the world, but so that it does not go away - it is necessary.

With Irena Vilde, this is a complex story, because this, one might say, is the most significant writer with whom I came into contact. She was already the eldest at that time, a grandmother, one might say, by some signs, although she was very young by other signs. I was still a child, but I understood that this was me coming into contact with the most outstanding writer that exists now. She, in fact, wrote very well, and Ukrainian literature without Irena Wilde in the 30s would have been completely different - it was something similar to the same Stanislavsky phenomenon or to “Boo-Ba-Boo” 4, but only in the 30s.

The 30s were 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. This 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 there was no need to politicize this.

That is, the policy of the church was the way 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 experiencing, and it was all devoid of an ideological strategy. It was living, real literature. Then she... also very interesting - this is formation, this is history... then she received the Shevchenko Prize - already in the 60s. At one time, she allowed herself to be one of 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 accept her at home: either as a normal aunt, or as one who writes letters to Stalin? Then she edits her wonderful, perhaps too long novel, “The Richynski Sisters,” written in the 20s and 30s. 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 were miraculously preserved in these home libraries. Well, I had this strange thing - 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 “Riders” by Yuri Yanovsky and - well, he was already out of the program - Mykhail Stelmakh’s “Swan Geese Are Flying” - such idyllic stories about childhood.

I believed that I had to grow up a little and then it would 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 as I grow older, I begin to understand that growing up still doesn’t come, that it’s still early, it’s still early, maybe I’m not ready yet, so I still haven’t answered the question: what should Irena Vilde have been 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 1943 in Vorokhta 5, and shot because he was a forester. That is, they had their own claims, but there were other claims on the other side, and it is unknown which partisans... and whether he helped any partisans. Now it is unknown 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 the forest is dark, and the forester was always responsible for everyone who came from there. And all life under these conditions was connected with the question, what is right? The main question - literature, including - has always seemed to me to be this: what is more important - to live and live out your life, or to give your life, just because someone told you that it is necessary, or do you feel that you have to give this life? And what about this measure of giving? And who is right? On the one hand, here are Faith, Hope, Love and their mother Sophia. When they were killed in turn with a painful death, mom could have stopped everything after the first martyrdom of Vera, they could have said that everything is all right, 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 was 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. What should people do who are not saints, who are people? And how, in the face of all these historical, social, public movements and changes, can one make a choice between ethics and procreation?

I want to cling 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 forestry 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 this all your life, or you will simply leave it on your own. He knew my views on ecology, on the preservation of forests, nature, and knew how it all really was in late Soviet times, not to mention the present. Already in the late Soviet period everything was quite demoralized. And he advised me not to do this.

I was also a prize-winner of the Republican Olympiad in Ukrainian language and literature and had the right to enter Kiev University for Ukrainian philology or journalism without exams or with some 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 writing and I love nature - I will become a biologist and write books about animals. A popular window to the world at that time was the Mir publishing house, which began publishing Darrell’s books in the 80s.

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

No. The mother was not expelled. But I suspect that all this took a very heavy toll on her psyche. It would be better if they sent her away. I'll tell you why now. My father was a child when he and his mother were deported to Siberia, and the accusations were ridiculous. Of course, they were not in the camps. My other relatives were there. But this was a special settlement. A month in a calf carriage, then thrown out in the forest and - build yourself a new life. Winter is already approaching, Siberia... But among themselves, grandmother and father later talked about it like this: “when we were still at the resort.” They ended up calling it a resort.

And they regretted why life turned out this way: I would like to go to Baikal myself, but for some reason you never go? You keep putting it off and putting it off... And suddenly the news comes: tomorrow you are going to Baikal. And you go. When my grandmother was already old and laying down, and already felt weak, and said to herself “maybe I shouldn’t get up?”, then, according to her, she kept thinking: what if the door was knocked down now, people in black came and said “get up?” and on the way out,” then if I could find the strength, I would get up and go. Why am I worse than the NKVD? Why can’t I tell 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 government 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, but Eastern Ukraine was not included in the Reich. From there they were taken to work, there they shot on the streets, even members of the OUN, nationalists, there they liquidated Jews 6 .

But, what is very important, in Galicia other services, not the occupying troops, were involved in daily life. Just as the Soviet Union later said: that’s it, you are our citizens. They came and arrested for treason, but the people were never citizens of the Soviet Union. And they came, were included in the Soviet Union - and voila! treason to the Motherland. And these German authorities gave 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 at the university in Vienna for 11 years. 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 electrician in the city. 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 with them, they provided the city with electricity. But my grandfather managed to leave this job in the 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 deported, but she still had her childhood fears – that all this would somehow come out somewhere. They are not connected with ideological things, but simply such a threat... But my father did not have this, because after this happened to him, he freed himself from it... These are the different stories in my family.

It seemed to me that I noticed the biologist’s point of view in your words that the NKVD comes - and a person finds himself in another habitat, in which he would not have ended up by his own free will, but which now enters his life. But in your works, in particular in your early stories, you can also see your familiarity with philosophy. In particular, you obviously 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 little animals. You have been called a wandering philosopher. I see in your works a kind of biological philosophy. Is this conscious?

Consciously. At university I wanted to study zoology. At that time, the science of ethology was in vogue - a science of the future, a science at the intersection - about animal psychology, animal behavior. But I was enrolled in the group of nerds. They told me it’s okay, in a year you’ll transfer to wherever you want. And I began to study botany.

Suddenly I realized that the study of biology - if you do not study any specific reactions - is the same philosophy. I think that similar things can happen in other disciplines. In the same electrical engineering or physics. I was interested in how all this was possible. I always had another outlet in theology. I am, in fact, very religious, in the sense that I do not doubt God's act of Creation. That is, I don’t 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 began 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 plant species. 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, your familiarity with rural life is clearly visible in your works. How does this all fit together in your life?

It so happened that after this Siberia... My grandmother went there as a widow, because my 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 didn’t see this grandfather of mine. Then they ended up with their grandmother in Siberia, and there in Siberia they met a man who also had a complicated 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’s difficult to talk about love at first sight, because being together seemed natural and - let’s overcome all this together. Then it became possible to return - it was the 56th good year - and they immediately decided that we would leave everything and go here. And they settled with this man - Mykhail - in the Carpathians. I consider him my grandfather just like the one I never met. 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 house. The house is small, but I grew up there.

And this was not country life. It was normal life in the mountains. Of course, there was no daily work with the plow, because everything grows very poorly there, except for forest and apples. But it was part of my life. And it’s also very important to me now, as a memory: when they started living together, they were 49 and 51 years old. And it might seem that life was lived, especially since everything was 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 these last 30 years in her life were never happier. And for me, this is always a reminder that you should never say: that’s all - life is lived, nothing new will happen, that, as the song says, “I won’t be like that anymore, I’ll never be the same again” 7 .

In fact, “tensha o tempo”, as the Portuguese say – “mayo ches”, as the Hutsuls say – is time.

You said that one of your motivations for writing was the desire to preserve the memory of the past. But this rather refers to your later work. But in the early stories there seems to be no intention to record the history of a kind. On the contrary, in the story “The Feeling of Presence” there is the following phrase: “It seemed to him that by remembering, he would deprive the world of its last properties, so one should not take away anything by remembering.” Is this, in fact, the same thing or is it some kind of transformation of your views?

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

“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 everything I received, I guess—to synthesize these things. I was interested in combining it all. I felt like I belonged both in the city and in the village. And I feel like I belong in different parts of the world. It’s 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 later.

This is exactly where you can find access to your novel “Not Easy.” The style of the novel is, of course, the style of a city man, but this style partly models the thinking of a man of nature, who lives merging with the landscape. This is manifested 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 this daughter’s daughter, that is, his granddaughter. Moreover, every mother dies immediately after the birth of her daughter. As they say, what did you mean by this? Is this emphasizing the isolation of Galicia, its reluctance to let strangers in?

First, I will still talk about the language of the novel. I had an internal task to show the Hutsul region, the Carpathians in a way that is rarely addressed. Because Kotsyubinsky in “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” and many others spoke about “the world of mountains, legends and ancient traditions 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 an incentive to cross them. Meet those who are there, on the other side. It's like a magnet. And therefore, the movement, if we speak in slang, along all these paths and playas, these roads of the ancient Carpathians, was always intense. If you look at history, then, of course, there were not thousands of peoples, 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 region, or to Bessarabia. Not to mention the fact that they went to sell cattle in Silesia. And different people also came to them for something: for salt, for wood. And all this was included in the global 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 normal movement. It was a normal part of the world. And the settlements... these are the kind of settlements that now exist in Germany or Italy. It is impossible to say whether it is a city or a village. Yes, this is a province. But the problem is only in the way of thinking, only in how much of this province you consider yourself to be. The movement in the space of one life for people from these places was very large. This is 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 came from, that wife... Here they are all together and one after the other. And, on the other hand, I wanted to convey that what you love can be present in different people, And I also wanted to talk about doom, This is a symbol of doom. That, they say, this is how these circumstances independent of a person developed, that you had to stay small with this woman, and when she grew up, and you saw that this is the woman who is the best - because you haven’t seen others - well, what a does it make any difference whether it is a daughter or not? Then I wanted to somehow get out of this confrontation between doom and conscious choice.

Do you often get asked this question in Ukraine, like me?

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 republished, this question no longer arises so often. But at first they asked: why incest, what did you want to say? And I always thought that this is how it turned out. In this world of mine, this is how it was. And in another way... There are many explanations. Well, not exactly incest, but, say, this 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 over time they get better and more interesting...

1 The name given to a group of Ukrainian writers – Y. Andrukhovich, V. Eshkilev, Y. Izdryk, T. Prokhasko and others – who published in the 90s of the 20th century in the Ivano-Frankivsk magazine “Chetver” (“Thursday”). A number of Ivano-Frankivsk poets, artists, photographers, and musicians also belong to the Stanislavsky phenomenon.

2 Famous Lviv historian.

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

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

5 A settlement in the Carpathians.

6 In Western Ukraine, during the “German” period, there was also a mass extermination of Jews.

7 It won’t be the same as it was the first time (Polish).