Book of September: memoirs of Karina Dobrotvorskaya. Love before death and after: “100 letters to Seryozha” by Karina Dobrotvorskaya Has anyone seen my girl read online
Loving hurts. As if she gave permission
flay yourself, knowing that the other one
can disappear from your skin at any moment.
Susan Sontag. “Diaries”
When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the wife
She even shouted: “Let me go to him!”
but she didn’t follow her husband to the grave...
A.P. Chekhov. "Speaker"
hundred 1997, Sergei Dobrotvor died
skiy. By that time we had already been two months
were divorced. So I didn't
his widow and was not even present at
funeral.
We lived with him for six years. Crazy, happy
rainy, easy, unbearable years. It so happened that these
years turned out to be the most important in my life. Love
for him, which I cut off - with the strongest love.
And his death is also my death, no matter how pathetic it may be
During these seventeen years there was not a single day when I was with him
didn't talk. The first year passed in semi-consciousness
nom condition. Joan Didion in her book “The Year of Magic”
thoughts” described the impossibility of breaking ties with a dead
our loved ones, their physically tangible presence
near. She - like my mother after my father's death -
couldn’t give my dead husband’s shoes: well, how could he?
after all, there will be nothing to wear if he returns - and he
will definitely return.
Gradually the acute pain subsided - or did I just
I learned to live with it. The pain went away, and he stayed with me.
I discussed new and old films with him, asked
asked him questions about work, boasted about her career,
gossiped about friends and strangers, told
about her travels, resurrected him in repeating
I didn’t fall in love with him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish
trill, did not divide. After he left, my life changed
fell into external and internal. Outwardly I have
there was a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment
great job, fantastic career
and even a small house on the seashore. Inside -
frozen pain, dried tears and endless dia-
log with a person who was no longer there.
I'm so used to this macabre connection, this
Hiroshima, my love, with a life in which
the past is more important than the present, which I almost didn’t think about
that life could be completely different. And what
I can be alive again. And - scary to think -
happy.
And then I fell in love. It started out easy
enthusiasm. Nothing serious, just pure joy.
But in a strange way it's a weightless feeling, no matter what
in my soul, which has no pretense, suddenly opened in it
some kind of sluices from which poured out what had been accumulating for years -
mi. Tears flowed, unexpectedly hot. It poured
happiness mixed with unhappiness. And it’s quiet inside me, like
mouse, the thought scratched: what if he, dead, me
will he let you go? What if it allows you to live in the present?
For years I talked to him. Now I started writing to him
letters. Again, step by step, living ours with him
life that holds me so tightly.
We lived on Pravda Street. Our truth with him.
These letters make no pretense of being objective.
portrait of Dobrotvorsky. This is not a biography, not a memoir.
ry, not documentary evidence. This is an attempt
literature, where much is distorted by memory or created
imagination. Surely many knew and loved
Serezha is completely different. But this is my Seryozha Dobrotvor-
skiy - and my truth.
Quotes from articles and lectures by Sergei Dobrotvorsky
January 2013
Hello! Why don't I have your letters left?
Only a few sheets of your funny books have survived.
poems written and drawn by hand
creative printed font. A few notes too
written in large semi-printed letters.
Now I understand that I hardly remember yours
handwriting There were no emails, no SMS - there was nothing then.
No mobile phones. There was even a pager
an attribute of importance and wealth. And we transferred the articles
Vali typed - the first (286th) computer appeared in our country only two years after
how we started living together. Then into our lives
Square floppy disks also came in, which seemed somehow alien.
planetary. We often transferred them to the Moscow
“Kommersant” with a train.
Why didn't we write letters to each other? Just
because they were always together? One day you left
to England - this happened probably in a month or
two after we got married. You were not there
Not for long - maximum two weeks. I don’t remember how we communicated then. Have you called home? (We
I'm waiting for my voice to come back. The words will probably come back with him. Or maybe not. Maybe you will have to be silent for a while and cry. Cry and remain silent. A person uses words to cover up embarrassment, to plug up the black hole of fear, as if this were possible. My friend wrote a book and I just read it. Tomorrow (today) I have to submit the script, and I recklessly dived into Karina’s manuscript. I emerge in the morning - dumbfounded, speechless, helpless. There is no one to help me. Seryozha is dead, Karina... What time is it in Paris? Minus two. No, it's early, she's sleeping. And I don’t want to talk. Impossible to talk. My friend wrote a book. And all I can do now is describe my crying. An ancient woman's cry.
Karina and I had a short but incredibly acute “attack of friendship.” As if our friendship at that time was some kind of exotic disease, which our healthy and young organisms later coped with. They managed to cope, they even developed a strong antigen, but later it turned out that each of us carries the virus of attachment within us - for life. Many things happened to us at the same time, in parallel. We trained our love muscles often on the same objects, we suffered like children from the same diseases, including jaundice (at the same time) and appendicitis (within a week of each other). And after thirty years of dating, we wrote a book. I - a little earlier, my “Wax” was already published. Both books are about death and love and about the only possible sign of equality between them. “I wrote it a little earlier” - this means: I screamed a little earlier from the horror that was revealed in myself, from the inability to hold back the scream. She screamed earlier, like a twin born ten minutes early.
Karina's book concerns me in exactly the same way as her life concerns me. Like the life of Seryozha, Sergei Nikolaevich Dobrotvorsky, like his death, concern me and many others. “Touches” is not only “has a relation,” it means “touches” and with its touch causes pain, almost voluptuous, erotic, equal to pleasure. After all, you have to be able to write like this, discarding any hint of stylistic prettiness or cleverness! And in order to have the right to write like this about the main event of your life, about the main sin for which you punished yourself for years, you need to live the life of Karina Dobrotvorskaya, which is impossible for an outsider. And my night cry, the cry of the first morning after reading “Letters to Seryozha” was: “My poor one! What have you done with your life?!”
They were together, she left, he died a year later - the bare facts."Has anyone seen my girl?" This courageous girl? This bitch? This angel?
One day, a mutual friend of Karina and I, listening to another exciting story about our early love escapades, suddenly asked: “I don’t understand. Here too (he studied at some technical university), girls fall in love, and go to parties, and suffer, and talk about it. But why does it come out so beautifully for you, but usually for them?!” The question was rhetorical, but it caused cheerful laughter and youthful pride. Yes, we are!
In this logic, the meeting of Karina and Seryozha, romance, marriage, partnership were as if predetermined. No, this was not engraved in imperishable gold letters on some cosmic tablets. “We should have met” - this, in my understanding, is pure logic. After all, “that’s who we are!”, everything should be the best for us, and I don’t remember anyone better than Seryozha at that time. The sacred berry of eros within these relationships remained uncrushed, unrotted until the very end. Between these people lived something that cannot be profaned. And he still lives.
And it was also not surprising that they broke up. It was a pity, it was painful, as if it was happening to me (I was talking about parallels: on those same days I was experiencing my own painful breakup), but not surprising. Love is full of pain. This is among other things.
Hey, somebody! Has anyone seen this steely woman with the eyes of a frightened teenage deer? She executed herself all her life - effectively, terribly, burning out feelings in herself, like some mystical vivisector from a horror movie about the Alien - with fire, napalm. And every line of the book is the chronicle of a survivor in the desert. And then the execution suddenly became public. And saving. Speak, people, rage, get angry, condemn, but she did it - she wrote about him, about herself and about eternal love.
The point is not in the documentary (although the book is documentary) or even in the veracity (factual and emotional) of the memories. The point is the impossibility of losing them and the impossibility of storing them. And another thing is that the deceased Seryozha did not die. He is the only reality in which Karina is confident, in which and in which she lives.
I noticed: people are horrified by the truth, any hint of it. Despite the plebeian cult of “sincerity,” the truth—the transparent, visible and inextricable connection between a phenomenon and the word by which the phenomenon is called—is frightening. People, good, caring people, begin to look for the reasons for the emergence of a truthful statement. And they are found, of course, most often in negative space. “What kind of dancing on bones?!”, “She’s doing this for self-PR!”, “I should think about my husband and children!” This is the little I heard when Karina's book came out. And the people are all wonderful, but they are very caring. As a rule, they did not read the book itself, limiting itself to the summary. But everything is already clear to everyone. Everyone already has ready-made answers. But I know: words grow like a palisade, fencing off from meaning, from authenticity, from human sovereignty. Otherwise, you need to confront yourself with the obviousness of a disappointing fact: everything is not so simple, and life is blood and tears, and love is pain and chaos.
In his last spring, we met on the set of a small film that my classmate was filming. Seryozha agreed to appear in a cameo. Between shots, between shots of his whiskey, he suddenly asked: “How are you?” - "Fine". He twisted his mouth in disgust: “Yes, I was told that you are holding on.” He was referring to my own breakup and my laments about it. I was surprised. Who did you hear it from? And if this is called “holding on,” then I’m already losing the meaning of the words. But I answered, proud of myself: “Yes, I’m holding on.” - “But I’m not.” All. Dot. He doesn't.
Has anyone seen a girl with a stone in her palm? With the stone she kills herself with every day, trying to reach her own heart? Calling a spade a spade is a thankless and cruel undertaking. Truth - this means to bypass, stop lengthy explanations, motivation and review of long-term goals. There is only the past, perhaps the present, and, strangely enough, there is probably a future. The connection between them is not obvious, although it is often equated to an axiom. Only one thing can connect them, passing through the past, present and illusory future, something unique, something unique, each with their own - hope, for example. Blessed is he who believes... For Karina, this is pain, the utter pain of enduring love. Has anyone seen a beautiful girl without illusions and hope? She is here, she stands and waits for the pain to subside.
Karina Dobrotvorskaya. “Has anyone seen my girl? One hundred letters to Seryozha."
Publishing house "Editing Elena Shubina"
Loving hurts. As if she gave permission
flay yourself, knowing that the other one
can disappear from your skin at any moment.
Susan Sontag. “Diaries”
When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the wife
She even shouted: “Let me go to him!”
but she didn’t follow her husband to the grave...
A.P. Chekhov. "Speaker"
hundred 1997, Sergei Dobrotvor died
skiy. By that time we had already been two months
were divorced. So I didn't
his widow and was not even present at
funeral.
We lived with him for six years. Crazy, happy
rainy, easy, unbearable years. It so happened that these
years turned out to be the most important in my life. Love
for him, which I cut off - with the strongest love.
And his death is also my death, no matter how pathetic it may be
During these seventeen years there was not a single day when I was with him
didn't talk. The first year passed in semi-consciousness
nom condition. Joan Didion in her book “The Year of Magic”
thoughts” described the impossibility of breaking ties with a dead
our loved ones, their physically tangible presence
near. She - like my mother after my father's death -
couldn’t give my dead husband’s shoes: well, how could he?
after all, there will be nothing to wear if he returns - and he
will definitely return.
Gradually the acute pain subsided - or did I just
I learned to live with it. The pain went away, and he stayed with me.
I discussed new and old films with him, asked
asked him questions about work, boasted about her career,
gossiped about friends and strangers, told
about her travels, resurrected him in repeating
I didn’t fall in love with him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish
trill, did not divide. After he left, my life changed
fell into external and internal. Outwardly I have
there was a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment
great job, fantastic career
and even a small house on the seashore. Inside -
frozen pain, dried tears and endless dia-
log with a person who was no longer there.
I'm so used to this macabre connection, this
Hiroshima, my love, with a life in which
the past is more important than the present, which I almost didn’t think about
that life could be completely different. And what
I can be alive again. And - scary to think -
happy.
And then I fell in love. It started out easy
enthusiasm. Nothing serious, just pure joy.
But in a strange way it's a weightless feeling, no matter what
in my soul, which has no pretense, suddenly opened in it
some kind of sluices from which poured out what had been accumulating for years -
mi. Tears flowed, unexpectedly hot. It poured
happiness mixed with unhappiness. And it’s quiet inside me, like
mouse, the thought scratched: what if he, dead, me
will he let you go? What if it allows you to live in the present?
For years I talked to him. Now I started writing to him
letters. Again, step by step, living ours with him
life that holds me so tightly.
We lived on Pravda Street. Our truth with him.
These letters make no pretense of being objective.
portrait of Dobrotvorsky. This is not a biography, not a memoir.
ry, not documentary evidence. This is an attempt
literature, where much is distorted by memory or created
imagination. Surely many knew and loved
Serezha is completely different. But this is my Seryozha Dobrotvor-
skiy - and my truth.
Quotes from articles and lectures by Sergei Dobrotvorsky
January 2013
Hello! Why don't I have your letters left?
Only a few sheets of your funny books have survived.
poems written and drawn by hand
creative printed font. A few notes too
written in large semi-printed letters.
Now I understand that I hardly remember yours
handwriting There were no emails, no SMS - there was nothing then.
No mobile phones. There was even a pager
an attribute of importance and wealth. And we transferred the articles
Vali typed - the first (286th) computer appeared in our country only two years after
how we started living together. Then into our lives
Square floppy disks also came in, which seemed somehow alien.
planetary. We often transferred them to the Moscow
“Kommersant” with a train.
Why didn't we write letters to each other? Just
because they were always together? One day you left
to England - this happened probably in a month or
two after we got married. You were not there
Not for long - maximum two weeks. I don’t remember how we communicated then. Have you called home? (We
We then lived in a large apartment on 2nd Sovetskaya, which we rented from the playwright Oleg Yuryev.) And also
you were without me in America for a long time, almost two months.
Then I came to you, but this is how we kept in touch
all this time? Or maybe it wasn't so crazy after all
needs? Separation was an inevitable reality, and people, even those impatiently in love, knew how to wait.
Your longest letter took up the maximum
half a page. You wrote it in the Kuibyshev hospital -
hospital, where I was taken by ambulance with blood
course and where the diagnosis of “frozen” was made
pregnancy". The letter disappeared during my travels, but I remembered one line: “We hold everything for you.”
fists - both mommies and me.”
Life with you was not virtual. We were sitting
in the kitchen, drinking black tea from huge mugs or
sour instant coffee with milk and talked
until four in the morning, unable to tear ourselves away from each other.
I don’t remember these conversations being interspersed with kisses.
Luyami. I don’t remember much of our kisses at all. Electric
quality flowed between us, without turning off for a second, but it was not only sensual, but also intellectual
al charge. But what's the difference?
I liked looking at your slightly arrogant
moving face, I liked your jerky
affected laughter, your rock and roll plasticity, your very light eyes. (You wrote about James Dean, whom, of course, you looked like: “neurasthenic actor
with a capricious child's mouth and sad senile
eyes”*.) When you left our home
space, then the disproportion became obvious
the awareness of your beauty to the outside world, which needs
* All quotes without references that appear in the text are taken
you are from the articles and lectures of Sergei Dobrotvorsky. - Note. auto
there was always something to prove, and above all -
own wealth. The world was big - you
was small. You must have suffered from this inconsistency
dimensions. You were interested in the phenomenon of hypnotic
influence on people that makes them forget
about short stature: “Little Tsakhes”, “Perfumer”,
"Dead zone". You also knew how to bewitch. I loved
surround yourself with those who admire you. I loved it when they called you a teacher. Adored lovers
students into you. Many of your friends have contacted
to you as “you” (you to them too). Many called by
patronymic.
I never told you this, but you seemed
very beautiful to me. Especially at home where you were
proportionate to space.
And in bed there was no difference between us at all
I remember so clearly the first time I saw you.
This scene is forever stuck in my head - like
a still from a new wave film, from some “Jules”
and Jim."
I, a student at the theater institute, stand with
with their fellow students at the crossing near the embankment
Fontanka, near the park on Belinsky Street. Against
me, on the other side of the road - a short blonde -
Dean in a blue denim suit. I have hair
to the shoulders. It looks like yours is quite long too.
Green light - we are starting to move towards
each other. A boyish, thin figure. Springy
gait. You are hardly alone - around you on Mokhovaya
There was always someone messing around. I only see you. Like a woman
finely carved face and blue (jean-like) eyes.
Your sharp gaze cut me sharply. I stopped-
I’m standing on the roadway, looking around:
Who is this?
What are you doing? This is Sergei Dobrotvorsky!
A, Sergei Dobrotvorsky. The same one.
Well, yes, I've heard a lot about you. Brilliant
critic, the most gifted graduate student, golden boy, favorite of Nina Alexandrovna Rabinyants, my
and your teacher, whom you adored for
Akhmatova's beauty and for his skill the most confused thoughts
lead to a simple formula. To you with enthusiasm
aspiratedly called a genius. You're wildly smart. You
wrote a thesis on the disgraced Wajda and Polish cinema.
You are the director of your own theater studio, which is called “On the Windowsill”. There, in this
studio on Mokhovaya, a stone's throw from Teatralny
Institute (as it says on the ticket), they are studying
several of my friends - classmate Lenya Popov, friend Anush Vardanyan, university prodigy
Misha Trofimenkov. Timur Novikov, Vladimir Rekshan, the long-haired bard Frank look in there,
Maxim Pezhem, still very young, plays the guitar
skiy. My future fierce enemy and yours are hanging around there.
close friend, poet Lesha Feokt...
" This is the first book in the memoir series “Breathless,” conceived by Elena Shubina. The book will be on sale soon. Critic Nina Agisheva wrote about “The Girl,” its author and main character for “Snob.”
Karina, dear, I remember how my Seryozha sent me your text by email with the words: “Look, you might be interested.” I was in no hurry to watch: I don’t like women’s prose and call it “snot with ice cream.” After all, Marina, whom we both adored, was not a woman - she was a genius. And the most interesting - and the most creative - people are those in whom both principles are intricately mixed. But in the evening I sat down at the computer and... woke up in the middle of the night. I haven’t read anything like the power of emotional expression, desperate fearlessness and unvulgar frankness for many years. And in general, all this was not about you, not even about us - about me.
Although I saw the hero of the book - the legendary St. Petersburg critic and your ex-husband Seryozha Dobrotvorsky - only twice in my life. Once in Moscow at the “Faces of Love” festival, where he received a prize for his articles about cinema, and I, wanting to say something nice to him, said socially: “You have a very pretty wife, Seryozha.” The answer was not entirely secular - he looked at me very angrily and said: “No, you are wrong. She's not pretty, she's beautiful." And the second time, years later, when you had already left him and lived with Lesha Tarkhanov, at Lenfilm, where I whiled away the time in the buffet, waiting for the next interview. Seryozha sat down at my table with a bottle of cognac in his hands - and, although we were not closely acquainted, he just unleashed a stream of revelations on me. Not a word was said about you: he had just returned from either Prague or Warsaw and was describing in many words how brilliantly this trip had been, and how happy, incredibly happy he was, how good everything was in his life... Less than he died a month ago. I remember then I looked at him with pity and thought: how he suffers, poor thing. This is love. Now I understand that his behavior was inappropriate, and I know why.
Just one post on my FB speaks about who Dobrotvorsky was and remains for the St. Petersburg intellectual get-together. A student writes: oh, read everything, a book is coming out about the famous Dobrotvorsky - you know, he died the year we entered LGITMIK. So, Karina, all your experiences, for the sake of which you started this book, have faded into the shadows - what remains is the portrait of Seryozha. And he is beautiful, just like his photograph on the cover of the book of his brilliant articles, lovingly published by Luba Arcus. I like it so much that I put this book on the shelf with the cover facing out - and when you and Lesha first came to me, he was just opposite, and Seryozha looked at him bitterly and ironically all evening. He really looked like James Dean. And David Bowie. And in general, what could be more erotic than intelligence? I completely agree with you.
You knew Seryozha closely, very closely, you remembered many of his assessments and aphorisms, phenomenal in accuracy and elegance, which are scattered in the text like a handful of expensive stones - now they don’t write or speak like that! - and at the same time, you are still tormented by his under-incarnation. Yes, articles, yes, paintings, even in the Russian Museum! Yes, scripts, but who remembers these films?! You write: “How to convey a gift that has not been embodied? Talent to live? Artistry mixed with despair?.. Those whom you burned, irradiated - they remember it. But there won't be any. And you won't be there." Karina, there are many such destinies around... I remember my shock at the early films of Oleg Kovalov, at his talent - where is he now, what is he? And those who wrote like gods - what are they doing now?! When was the last time you wrote about the theater? And where are your studies about Isadora Duncan? So what? The main thing is not to take a breath, as your Seryozha wrote in an article about his beloved Godard. Live. And rejoice at the “new manifestos of freedom, permissiveness and love.”
By the way, about permissiveness. I don’t know many authors who are capable of writing so harshly, ironically and frankly about the morals of bohemian St. Petersburg in the eighties and nineties. As, by the way, women who publicly declare that they do not have a waist and that they do not know how to dress. I never expected such “immensity in the world of measures” from the coldly sleek boss of Condenast. It's like a volcano inside an iceberg. And a simple explanation, as eternal as the world, is love. She either exists or she doesn't. And if it is there, it doesn’t go anywhere. Forever with you, until your last breath - and no book can get rid of it. But this is so, a lyrical digression. Let's get back to drinking. Our generation not only paid tribute to him, but also aestheticized it as best it could. It is no coincidence that Dobrotvorsky said about the unforgettable Venichka Erofeev that he “preserved the tradition of conscience in a clot of hangover shame.” Or was this how weakness of will was justified? You write with such pain about those moments when “Mr. Hyde” woke up in Seryozha that it’s impossible not to believe you. And it’s not for us to judge. We will all die next to those with whom we “have something to drink.” But there is a line beyond which it is better not to look. Feeling it, you left - and survived. I thought about this while watching Guy Germanika’s film “Yes and Yes.” Of course, his heroine is no match for you in terms of intelligence and brilliance, but she also loved and was also saved. I don’t understand at all how the numerous detractors of this picture did not consider or hear the main thing: the story of pure and devoted love. And the surroundings - well, excuse me, what they are. Moreover, Germanika does not try to justify it or embellish it, stylize it as something - no, horror is horror. We must run. And all of us, even those who now criticize the film for nothing, somehow escaped. How can one not remember that morality awakens precisely when... And another theme arises in your book and in “women’s” cinema today (I remember Angelina Nikonova and Olga Dykhovichnaya with their stunning “Portrait at Twilight”, Svetlana Proskurina, Natalya Meshchaninova - the list is easy to continue): it is women who disagree again and again, rebel and run away from “doll” houses, although these houses today look more like “dead”. This is exactly what, by the way, Yana Troyanova plays in Sigarev’s play. In general, only girls will survive. While the boys sit on Facebook and self-destruct.
Your book is generally like a movie in which all the pictures of our common life replace one another. Here are BG and Tsoi. Kuryokhin. Here is a stupid parallel cinema in today's opinion - I didn’t like it either, although I once even supervised a dissertation about it at the journalism department. Here's Lynch's Blue Velvet - for some reason it was iconic and special for me. First Paris. First America. An opportunity to earn money, and a lot of it. It was you who wrote: “The desire for money began to eat away at the soul.” Not Seryozha’s, of course: his soul remained free, which is why it still won’t let you go.
And one last thing. I can imagine what an anthill you have stirred up with your book. And how much negativity will be shed - from acquaintances, of course, because strangers will most likely perceive the text simply as an artifact; whether they like it or not is another question. So, don't worry. Seryozha didn’t make his own film, but it’s as if you did it for him. She told about herself, about him, about all the boys and girls of the Russian transitional time. It is over, gone forever. And everyone will leave - but we will remain.
Nina Agisheva
Loving hurts. As if she gave permission
flay yourself, knowing that the other one
can disappear from your skin at any moment.
Susan Sontag. “Diaries”
When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the wife
She even shouted: “Let me go to him!”
but she didn’t follow her husband to the grave...
A.P. Chekhov. "Speaker"
hundred 1997, Sergei Dobrotvor died
skiy. By that time we had already been two months
were divorced. So I didn't
his widow and was not even present at
funeral.
We lived with him for six years. Crazy, happy
rainy, easy, unbearable years. It so happened that these
years turned out to be the most important in my life. Love
for him, which I cut off - with the strongest love.
And his death is also my death, no matter how pathetic it may be
During these seventeen years there was not a single day when I was with him
didn't talk. The first year passed in semi-consciousness
nom condition. Joan Didion in her book “The Year of Magic”
thoughts” described the impossibility of breaking ties with a dead
our loved ones, their physically tangible presence
near. She - like my mother after my father's death -
couldn’t give my dead husband’s shoes: well, how could he?
after all, there will be nothing to wear if he returns - and he
will definitely return.
Gradually the acute pain subsided - or did I just
I learned to live with it. The pain went away, and he stayed with me.
I discussed new and old films with him, asked
asked him questions about work, boasted about her career,
gossiped about friends and strangers, told
about her travels, resurrected him in repeating
I didn’t fall in love with him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish
trill, did not divide. After he left, my life changed
fell into external and internal. Outwardly I have
there was a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment
great job, fantastic career
and even a small house on the seashore. Inside -
frozen pain, dried tears and endless dia-
log with a person who was no longer there.
I'm so used to this macabre connection, this
Hiroshima, my love, with a life in which
the past is more important than the present, which I almost didn’t think about
that life could be completely different. And what
I can be alive again. And - scary to think -
happy.
And then I fell in love. It started out easy
enthusiasm. Nothing serious, just pure joy.
But in a strange way it's a weightless feeling, no matter what
in my soul, which has no pretense, suddenly opened in it
some kind of sluices from which poured out what had been accumulating for years -
mi. Tears flowed, unexpectedly hot. It poured
happiness mixed with unhappiness. And it’s quiet inside me, like
mouse, the thought scratched: what if he, dead, me
will he let you go? What if it allows you to live in the present?
For years I talked to him. Now I started writing to him
letters. Again, step by step, living ours with him
life that holds me so tightly.
We lived on Pravda Street. Our truth with him.
These letters make no pretense of being objective.
portrait of Dobrotvorsky. This is not a biography, not a memoir.
ry, not documentary evidence. This is an attempt
literature, where much is distorted by memory or created
imagination. Surely many knew and loved
Serezha is completely different. But this is my Seryozha Dobrotvor-
skiy - and my truth.
Quotes from articles and lectures by Sergei Dobrotvorsky
January 2013
Hello! Why don't I have your letters left?
Only a few sheets of your funny books have survived.
poems written and drawn by hand
creative printed font. A few notes too
written in large semi-printed letters.
Now I understand that I hardly remember yours
handwriting There were no emails, no SMS - there was nothing then.
No mobile phones. There was even a pager
an attribute of importance and wealth. And we transferred the articles
Vali typed - the first (286th) computer appeared in our country only two years after
how we started living together. Then into our lives
Square floppy disks also came in, which seemed somehow alien.
planetary. We often transferred them to the Moscow
“Kommersant” with a train.
