Irina Chaikovskaya. Dear Olga, after the publication of my column “Yuri Trifonov. Reflection of a personal drama,” one reader was indignant that I wrote in it that Yuri Trifonov, beloved and revered by me, is “today a half-forgotten writer.” Do you think today's Russian youth knows this name? And the western one? How is the publishing of his books?
Olga Trifonova-Tangyan. You know, Irina, one of my Moscow acquaintances wrote to me that Yuri Trifonov has now become a classic. A classic is an author whose works are held at school, at an institute, whose name is widely known, but who is not necessarily read by young people at their leisure. In this sense, many Russian writers can be considered "half-forgotten". In Germany, where I now live, they also read little of their classics. Goethe and Schiller pass through the school, but young people are fond of other books. At the same time, there are quite a lot of lovers of Russian literature and music in Europe. For example, the famous German politician Matthias Platzeck, in an interview with the Nevskoye Vremya newspaper dated October 3, 2015, speaking about Russian-German relations, confessed his love for the prose of Yuri Trifonov and the music of Dmitry Shostakovich. As for Russian publications, judging by the information on the Internet, Trifonov's books are published quite regularly and sell well.
I. Ch. I want to turn to you and to your destiny. In your very informative and unusually sincere memoirs, "Trials of Yuri Trifonov," it is told about the family tragedy of the writer and his first wife, your mother, singer Nina Nelina. How did your life develop after the early death of your mother? In the year of her death, 1966, you were only 15 years old. Yuri Valentinovich wrote then: "I was left alone with my silent Alya." And with whom did you stay? Judging by the memories, you were "mother's daughter" ...
O. T. The phrase “I was left alone with my silent Alya” is from the story “The smallest city”. The Bulgarian friends of my father, the journalist Vyrban and the writer Bancho Banov, decided to support us after the death of my mother, Nina Nelina, whom they knew very well. They sent us an invitation and arranged for us to come to Bulgaria to celebrate the New Year 1967. My father and I lived in an empty and uncomfortable hotel. On New Year's Eve Bulgarians leave Sofia, the city is empty. Cold and lots of snow. It was not clear what we should do. I was silent, but my father was not particularly talkative either. Most of the time he lay on the bed (he was depressed), and I cut out from the Bulgarian magazines the photos of the artists that I then collected, and from time to time I asked: “Dad, why did we come here?” The father didn't know what to say. Then his friend Vyrban took us in his small car to the "smallest town" in Bulgaria - Melnik, from where the title of the story comes from.
My mother Nina Nelina died on September 26, 1966 at the age of 43. I was then 14 years old. As I understand now, I was in a state of shock. I don't remember well how it all happened. Mom went to Druskininkai for treatment. I accompanied her to the station. On this occasion, she wrote explanatory note for school. I remember how on the day of my mother's death, which I did not yet know about, I began to iron a scarf and burned a large hole with an iron. And a sharp pain pierced me. Perhaps I felt the departure of my mother from life. Then I felt similar at the time of my father's death. Apparently, something is passed on to children. I remember riding with my father in a taxi to the funeral. I looked out the window and saw a poster for the new film On Thin Ice. It seemed to me that this name had something to do with my mother's life. And then I lost my memory, I don't remember anything. I don’t remember the funeral itself, who was present, what they said. I was later told how it all happened. My grandmother Polina made a scene with my father with accusations against him, grabbed the coffin, dragged her away, gave her medicine. But I don't remember anything myself. About a week after the funeral, my grandmother and I began to receive letters from my mother from Druskininkai. She wrote to us that she liked everything there, asked us to take care of ourselves, to do morning exercises.
After the death of my mother, I continued to live with my father on Sandy Street near the Sokol metro station. At first, people came to us endlessly. Basically, my father's friends are Lev Ginzburg, Boris Slutsky, Konstantin Vanshenkin. There was an endless stream of letters and telegrams expressing condolences. Once, the director of the film based on his father's novel Quenching Thirst, Bulat Mansurov, literally broke into the house. He impulsively hugged his father right in the corridor, and so they stood in silence. Vanshenkin later told me that my father was in a desperate state. He visited him almost every day. Sometimes together with his wife Inna Goff. They sat together and hardly spoke. Sometimes my father cried. As soon as Vanshenkin returned to his home on the Universitet metro station, Trifonov called him and asked him to come again. And Vanshenkin again went to see him at the other end of Moscow.
Then I spent all my energy on supporting my father and grandparents, who lived in the neighborhood. This did not work out well, since grandparents were irreconcilable to their father, accusing him of indifference, callousness to his wife. Grandmother only repeated: “Killer! Stole Nelyusya to the next world. It is strange that then I did not think about myself or about my mother, but only about my father and the old people. I tried to help them in some way. Vanshenkin conveyed my then state in his poem "Trifonov's Daughter":
Many did not know yet - to a groan!
There were no regular calls.
Daughter picking up the phone
She told everyone: - Mom died ...
She was fourteen at the time
And it struck me right away that she
Looking for the usual support in the father,
She might have been stronger.
That childish frightening power
Lurking in the depths of nature,
with whom she spoke
Words that seem unthinkable.
Sat in the midst of tobacco fumes,
Sudden tears and trifling phrases
And shuddered, as if from a blow,
Father, hearing it, every time.
My mother, Nina Nelina, my father married very early and hastily. He immediately fell in love, got married, and a few months later I was born. Our family lived for six years with my mother's parents, the artist Amshey Nurenberg and Polina Mamicheva-Nurenberg - my grandparents - in the House of Artists on Upper Maslovka. The Nurembergs gave the young two rooms, while they themselves moved into a large, but cold workshop. Then they completely gave one room to the young, so that Trifonov could rent it to the state and get a separate apartment for himself and our family. The grandparents themselves continued to live with their neighbors. Grandma was difficult person but for the sake of her daughter she was ready to sacrifice everything.
Mom was two years older than father. Trifonov was her second husband. The first time she married at the age of 18 was her classmate in the vocal department at the Gnesinsky School, a very handsome young tenor singer Vladimir Chekalin. My grandmother did not like my mother's husbands, but she put up with Trifonov for my sake. She generally believed that her mother should have been engaged only in her artistic career, and not waste time on trifles, including children. Grandfather Nurenberg was at first glad and proud that his son-in-law - famous writer, laureate of the Stalin Prize. He had endless conversations with him about art and literature. His relationship with his father completely deteriorated after the death of his mother. In the story “A Visit to Marc Chagall”, Trifonov briefly described the attitude of his father-in-law: “at first he loved me, then he hated me.”
It was said that at my mother's funeral, my father promised not to marry until I was an adult. In general, he kept his promise. In 1968, he met Alla Pavlovna Pastukhova, editor of the Fiery Revolutionaries series of Politizdat. They began a close relationship, which they formalized in 1970, but divorced in 1979. They lived in two houses. Her father spent part of the time with her, they went on vacation together. But basically, he still lived with me on Sandy Street near the Sokol metro station. She only came to visit our dacha in Krasnaya Pakhra. The three of us spent the summer - father, Claudia Babaeva and me. (Babaeva was the widow of the executed assistant Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a friend of Trifonov's mother from the camp, who undertook to help her son, spending the summer in the country. I published her diary and my essay about her on the Internet.)
Pastukhova was not only the editor, but also literary critic. She herself wrote well, knew French. She loved Chekhov very much and Baudelaire's poems, which she gave me to read. But most importantly, she was an outstanding editor and managed to attract many talented writers to her editorial office. Voinovich, Aksenov, Iskander, Okudzhava were published in her series. Trifonov published under her editorship the historical novel Impatience, which was highly appreciated by Heinrich Böll.
It seems to me that my father married Pastukhova, tired of a too extravagant wife - a beauty and an opera diva. My mother had an explosive temper, was sharp on the tongue and did not spare pride. This, of course, complicated her work at the Bolshoi Theater, relationships with friends and even with her father. Perhaps the father wanted to find not such a bright creative personality, but a more or less ordinary modest woman. He hoped to find a "quiet haven" and work. But Pastukhova also had her own characteristics. She was offended all the time and also made scenes, although quiet, not as violent as my mother.
Pastukhova respected her father as a writer so much that she always called him "Trifonov" and not "Yuri", which seemed strange to me. He addressed her: "Alla." Once, in response to her criticism, he objected: "Alla, but I'm still Trifonov." Apparently, he adopted her manner. She told me this with a laugh.
To a large extent, Trifonov's second marriage was sealed by working interests. It was a creative union, a real literary duet. This period was the most productive in Trifonov's life. In 1969-1972, he published one after another his "Moscow stories", in 1973 - the novel "Impatience". Everyone noted that in the "Moscow stories" Trifonov was reborn, but they forgot to note that he was reborn under the influence of his second wife, Alla Pastukhova. I think this is highly unfair. She herself told me: “I passed every line of his through myself.” I can testify to their painstaking joint work on manuscripts.
The stunning success of the story "The House on the Embankment" in the first issue of "Friendship of Peoples" for 1976, Trifonov also owes a lot to Alla Pastukhova. Together with her, Trifonov shortened the story three (!) times, making it, on the one hand, more capacious and conceptual, and on the other hand, passable for censorship. The seized passages formed the basis of the unfinished novel The Disappearance, published posthumously.
A year and a half after the publication of "House on the Embankment" and six months after the "Old Man", where Pastukhova's participation was still felt, her father left her, which was a great blow to her. And many of her fellow writers, who used to curry favor with her, seeking publishing contracts, have forgotten her. She fell into a severe depression, which made her almost completely blind. I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t want to change anything in my life. She did not want to hear or talk about Trifonov. Once she told me: "I understand your mother."
After the stormy fame brought to Trifonov by the story "The House on the Embankment" and the production of "The Exchange" at the Taganka Theater in 1977, a crowd of fans fell upon him. He preferred the young, but already famous actress theater and cinema, which all the summer of 1977 went to our country house, arousing the curiosity of the neighbors. For a beautiful lady, this was an interesting but short adventure. She did not want to change anything in her life, and they broke up. The father grieved a little, but soon began to pay attention to the next applicant.
In 1975, I married Andranik Tangyan, and my husband and daughter Katya, who was born, continued to live with my father until the end of 1977 both in Moscow and in the country. In the autumn of 1977, my father gave lectures in America for two months, and on the eve of 1978, at the dacha, he introduced Olga Romanovna Berezko (nee Miroshnichenko), a participant in his seminar at the Literary Institute, to my family, with whom he went to Moscow to meet New Year. I was expecting a second child, my husband and I began to live separately, although we also spent the next summer of 1978 together in the country with my two children. In the summer of 1979, my father built a separate house for me on his plot, in August he married Olga Romanovna, and we did not live together until his death in March 1981. The father became a world celebrity, his social circle has changed a lot, and priorities have changed. He traveled a lot abroad, met with foreign correspondents and publishers. He had less and less time for old friends and my family. We saw each other less and less.
In general, I lived with my father almost twice as long as with my mother. My paternal grandmother, Evgenia Lurie, immediately after the death of my mother defined my role: “the little mistress of the big house.” She herself raised two grandchildren - Masha and Zhenya - the children of Tatyana Trifonova's daughter. She didn't have the strength for me. Things were not going well with my father, there was little money, so there was no question of an assistant in Moscow. The whole household fell on me, although I had to finish school, then study at Moscow State University and take care of my family. So it seems to me that I cannot be called a "mother's" daughter.
I. Ch. What can you say about the family of your maternal grandparents? I know that your grandfather is a famous artist Amshey Markovich Nyurenberg. I looked at his work - what I saw is unusually original, expressive and colorful. Your grandfather died at 91, but during his lifetime he had only two solo exhibitions. Isn't it enough?
O. T.My grandfather Amshey Markovich Nurenberg (1887-1979) had a surprisingly interesting fate, about which he wrote memoirs “Memories, meetings, thoughts about art”, published in part in 1969, and in 2010 - in full under the title “Odessa - Paris - Moscow. This book can also be downloaded from his personal website.
Grandfather was born in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovograd, Ukraine) in a family of a fishmonger with ten children. He became the first artist in his family, but later he had followers: his younger brother David Devinov-Nyurenberg, his nephew, Honored Artist of Russia Vitaly Orlovsky, great-niece Elena Varshavchik. And finally, his two great granddaughters, my daughters. The eldest - Katya Tangyan (b. 1975) - became a teacher, candidate of art criticism, the second - Nina Römer (nee Tangyan, b. 1978) - a professional artist.
By a happy coincidence, the 15-year-old Nuremberg was noticed by the German engineer Berens from Elisavetgrad, who financed his education in Odessa. art school in the class of Kiriak Kostandi. At that time, a group of art innovators began to form in Odessa, which is now called the Ukrainian Avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Many of them - Odessans Isaac Malik, Sandro Fasini (the older brother of the writer Ilf), Theophilus Fraerman and Amshey Nurenberg - went to seek their fortune and study at the Parisian academies. In Paris, Nurenberg shared an atelier with Marc Chagall, with whom he became friends for life, lived in poverty and returned to Odessa in 1913 with suspected tuberculosis. In Odessa, Nurenberg became one of the organizers of the avant-garde group, which is now called the "Odessa Parisians". Artists organized seasonal exhibitions like the Autumn and Spring Salons in Paris. Their works were bought by collectors, they were written about a lot in the press.
In 1915, Nurenberg came to Moscow to visit his friend, the artist Victor Midler. He was friends with his grandmother's sister and introduced Nurenberg to his future wife. Grandfather immediately fell in love and got married. Polina Mamicheva was beautiful. Particular admiration was caused by the color of her eyes - light blue, transparent. Her eyes have not faded in old age. She was very devoted to her loved ones. But her character was difficult, she always fought for the truth and "teared off her masks." A real old lady. At first, Polina Mamicheva dreamed of becoming a ballerina, but under the influence of her husband she began to paint in the Cubist style and exhibit them at Odessa exhibitions. In the Odessa society of "Independent Artists", as they called themselves after the example of the Salon of Independents in Paris, she was the only woman. Her "Still Life with a Green Bottle" (1918) has recently become often referred to as an early example of Russian Cubism.
My grandfather was not a party member, but he believed in the Revolution and immediately took the side of Soviet power. His Jewish origin played an important role in this: under tsarism, Jews were discriminated against, and the Soviet government proclaimed internationalism and equal rights for all nationalities. Immediately after the revolution, Nurenberg was for some time the commissar of arts in Odessa, responsible for the preservation cultural property, and in 1920 he finally moved with his Muscovite wife to Moscow. He worked at Mayakovsky's Windows of GROWTH, taught French art at VKhUTEMAS. Grandfather drew Lenin a lot, once from life, when he organized his visit to VKHUTEMAS. A plaster bust of Lenin stood at his house on the windowsill. And he even named his daughter Ninel, which was read in reverse order as Lenin. After the resumption of diplomatic relations with France in 1926, he was sent by Lunacharsky to Paris as a "cultural ambassador" to lecture on the new Soviet art. Nurenberg went to Paris with his wife Polina and daughter Nelya. He visited Marc Chagall again, so my mother also saw him as a child. Grandmother later said that they did not have to return to Russia. But in Moscow they were waiting for business, big plans, relatives.
It seems to me that most of the life of Nurenberg and Mamicheva in Moscow was overshadowed by fears. They hid from everyone, even from me, the fact that the Odessa collector Yakov Peremen had taken them away. early work in 1919 to Palestine (they were discovered only in 2006 and exhibited in Israel, America and Ukraine). The Nurembergs tried not to mention the name of Chagall when attacks on the avant-garde, French art, and impressionism began in Russia. Then there was the war, after the war, the struggle against the rootless cosmopolitans. All this Nuremberg withstood. The death of his only daughter, Nelechka, was a terrible blow for him. But he survived here, thanks to his work. And after the death of her daughter, my grandmother did not want to live, but she lived to help her grandfather and me. Grandfather then finished his memoirs, I - school.
My grandfather has been doing what he loves all his life. And he was a great optimist, he said at the age of 91: “When I see the sun, I don’t want to die.” Interested in the most different people. I could say to a stranger: “You have a very interesting face. Can I paint your portrait? Few refused such an offer. He has been married to my grandmother for over sixty years. Until the end of her days, she called him: “my boy,” and he called her: “my girl.” It seems to me that my grandfather Nurenberg was a courageous and happy man. Therefore, his paintings often seem to me joyful, festive.
I. Ch. I noticed that a large number of works by Amshey Nurenberg are stored in Nukus, in famous museum seditious artists, collected by Igor Savitsky, away from the all-seeing eye of the capital's political censors from art. There are 60 paintings kept there, and 102 paintings are kept in the museum of Kirovograd, Ukraine. It is clear that, although it is written that many of his works are stored in the Tretyakov Gallery, as well as in the Russian Museum, all of them are in storerooms. I think that in Nukus and Kirovograd they hang, as their author deserves, in the halls.
O. T. As for my contacts with the Nukus Museum (Uzbekistan), it was like this. After Nurenberg's death in 1979, Nurenberg's friends and I organized an exhibition in his memory at the Moscow Union of Artists on Begovaya. Several artists and specialists came there, among whom was Igor Savitsky, who at that time was actively collecting a collection for his museum. We met him, and he came to our house several times to select grandfather's work. I will always remember this wonderful person, ascetic and enthusiast. Despite a serious illness - he traveled everywhere with a drain tube from his stomach - he tirelessly visited the families of artists, saving many works from destruction, and artists from poverty and oblivion. I am very glad that now the Nukus Museum bears the name of its founder. I didn’t see how Nurenberg’s works hang there, but they are definitely not forgotten, and in 1988 some of them were exhibited at the exhibition of the Nukus Museum in the Moscow Museum of the East.
Shortly before his death, Nurenberg himself handed over his works and part of the archive to Kirovograd as his hometown; employees of the city museum came to him in Moscow. Currently, its director is a young and very energetic Tatiana Tkachenko. In 2009, she organized a large personal exhibition of Nuremberg with the invitation of the press and television, and completely devoted one hall of the museum to "countryman artists", where Nurenberg's works hang in a permanent exhibition.
By the way, my grandfather's friend from the age of 16 was a well-known "countryman artist", a member Jack of Diamonds Alexander Osmerkin. They continued to be friends in Moscow. But Osmerkin's paintings are mostly kept in another museum. The house of the artist's uncle, who was famous architect(unlike my grandfather, Osmerkin came from an educated and prosperous family). This house now houses the personal museum of A. Osmerkin. In 2009 I visited Kirovograd and was delighted with this ancient city and its museums.
As you correctly noted, about 70 works by Nurenberg are stored in the storerooms of the Tretyakov Gallery. Other leading museums also have large collections of his work: in the Museum. Pushkin, the Mayakovsky Museum, the Museum of the East. Also in Ukraine - in the Kiev National Museum, in the Odessa Museum and others, and some ended up in the central Russian art repository - ROSIZO. Individual works are scattered throughout the country. For example, Nurenberg’s painting “On the Day of the First Debut” (1955), which depicts the artist’s daughter and my mother Nina Nelina, I donated to the Museum Bolshoi Theater. In all the museums that I visited, I met people who personally knew Nuremberg and told me about him. He was a very sociable person.
Although many of Nurenberg's paintings are kept in storerooms, museums provide them for various exhibitions. In 2010 in the Moscow state gallery"Ark" was arranged a personal exhibition of two brothers-artists - Amshey Nuremberg and David Devinov-Nurenberg from the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum. Pushkin, the Mayakovsky Museum and the Museum of the East. In connection with the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Victory in May of this year, the exhibition "Art in Evacuation" was opened at the Moscow Institute of Russian Realistic Art. It featured four works by Nurenberg from the period of his evacuation to Tashkent from the Oriental Museum. So it cannot be said that Nurenberg's paintings are not available to the public.
I. Ch. Here's the question. Your grandfather was from a Jewish family, your grandmother is an Old Believer. Whose influence have you experienced the most? What about your mom? Who did she think she was? I know that when she entered the Bolshoi Theater, she was forced to change her surname Nurenberg to a Russian-sounding one. And from Ninel Nuremberg she became Nina Nelina. How did she react to this, do you know?
FROM. Even in his youth in Ukraine, my grandfather experienced for himself what it meant to be a Jew: there was a Pale of Settlement, he could not study at the Art Academy, and the assistance of the patron Berens was required. Returning to his native Elisavetgrad in 1919, he learned from his parents about the Jewish pogrom in the city, when many friends were killed and maimed. The pogrom also affected his close friend, who later moved to France and became a well-known animal painter under the name of Jacques Constant (his real name is Joseph Konstantinovsky). In front of Konstantinovsky's eyes, his father and brother were killed, after which he ran away from home. In the same year, he left his homeland forever with his wife.
Jewish motifs occupied far from the last place in the work of grandfather, especially in the graphics of the 1920s and 30s, dedicated to Ukrainian shtetls, Jewish artisans and portraits of old people, for which he was even called the “Moscow Rembrandt”. Nurenberg carefully kept these drawings and at the end of his life he collected them in a folder called "Yudaika". And he was especially proud of the oil painting “The Victim of the Jewish Pogrom”, as it was exhibited at the Autumn Salon in Paris in 1927. Jewish themes were prominently present in his anti-war series of 1941-45, which was exhibited in the Moscow Central House of Writers (CDL) immediately after the war.
My grandmother Polina Mamicheva, the daughter of a Moscow merchant who owned fruit shops on Sretenka, had problems with the origin of the "former" after the revolution. In addition, the family adhered to the Old Believer faith. Until the end of her life, an icon of the Old Believers of the 18th century, received by her as a gift from her mother, hung over her bed. Polina was extravagant. Sometimes she declared with a challenge: "I am a merchant's daughter!". But mostly she had to keep her mouth shut. And in the communal apartment where they lived, she even secretly called out to her husband not “Amshey!”, But “Alexey!”. It always made me laugh. I didn't understand anything then. I did not feel any national and Old Believer influences on myself.
My mother considered herself a half-breed, but this did not make her life much more difficult. And at school, and at the Gnessin School, and at the Bolshoi Theater, she always attracted attention with her beauty, liveliness of character, and beautiful voice. When in 1946 my mother was taken to the Bolshoi Theater, she was told: “We have a Russian theater” and asked to change her last name. It was like a contract. This did not bother her at all, since many artists had pseudonyms.
I.Ch. This question has been bothering me for a long time. Trifonov was also from a mixed family - Jewish and Russian. After his parents were repressed in 1937-1938, he lived with his Jewish grandmother Tatyana Alexandrovna Lurye-Slovatinskaya. With her, he was evacuated in Tashkent. Meanwhile, he does not have a Jewish theme anywhere. Why? Did this question bother him? Or did he understand that works with this theme are impassable? Do you know anything about it?
FROM. When my parents were young, the national question was not so acute. In addition, Trifonov grew up among the Bolsheviks, who considered themselves internationalists. They perceived many things as petty-bourgeois, obsolete. For example, my grandmother Zhenya (Evgenia Lurie) taught me that talking about money is indecent. It was also indecent to talk about nationality. She emphasized this with her example: when in 1957 a world festival young people and students, she approached the participants on the street and shook hands with them as a sign of solidarity, which would now look quite out of place. The belief of the Bolsheviks that children will be brought up not at home, but in communes, seems also absurd now. My mother called all such statements in one word - "prudence", as described by Trifonov in the story "Exchange".
Once I was present at a speech by a friend of grandmother Zhenya, who went through the Gulag with her, an interpreter from Italian Cecilia Keen. And I remember how this fragile old woman suddenly changed and shouted menacingly into the hall: “We are all Marxists here!” I was confused, because I did not consider myself a Marxist at all. The same implacable and inflexible Marxist was my father's grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaya. In fact, her name and surname were made up in the Bolshevik underground. Like Stalin or Molotov. In fact, both her first and last name were Jewish. Once my aunt Tatyana Trifonova asked her grandmother what her real name was. To which she sternly replied that she did not remember and did not want to remember. Another friend of Zhenya's grandmother from the Gulag, Klavdia Babayeva, to whom I was very attached, on the contrary, was an ardent anti-Stalinist. She came to visit Grandmother Zhenya in Serebryany Bor and provoked Slovatinskaya by talking about Stalin being short, covered in smallpox, unsightly. She once met him at the Central Committee sanatorium. Slovatinskaya, whose son-in-law was shot during the period of Stalinist repressions, and her daughter and son served time in the camps, silently left the room in protest and did not speak to her for several days.
Concerning the family and character of my father, I would like to add the following. He treated his grandmother Tatyana Slovatinskaya with restraint. She was not at all like the kind and affectionate grandmother from children's books. She was strict and harsh. But it was impossible to condemn her either, her living conditions hardened her, made her so dry. But she kept the promise she made to her son-in-law and daughter when they were arrested: “I will save the children.” And she kept her word - she saved Yuri and Tatyana, helped them get an education. His father loved his mother very much and was afraid of losing him just as he had lost his father before. He wrote about the possible death of his mother with undisguised fear long before she died. In particular, in the novel "Students" and in the story "Exchange". From his mother, he adopted a lot - intelligence, tact, cultural interests, literary abilities, sense of humor, knowledge of foreign languages. But there was something from the father - the Don Cossack Valentin Trifonov. These are strong-willed qualities, perseverance, stubbornness and even rigidity in decision-making. In his youth, he was physically strong and used his fists more than once. Trifonov was not such a soft-spoken intellectual as many of his heroes. It was a deceptive impression. Otherwise, he could not have been so successful in getting his stuff into print. Boris Slutsky accurately described this quality of his friend as "phlegmatic pressure."
Of course, Trifonov departed very far from the Bolshevik ideas about life, he laughed at them. The title of the novel "Impatience" is consonant with the concept of "intolerance", against which Trifonov always protested. But he could not completely abandon his upbringing, environment, family. After all, it is no coincidence that the theme of the Bolsheviks, their moral superiority over ordinary inhabitants and their petty interests appears in all his books. It would be strange if, with such an attitude to life, he would delve into the topic of nationality.
My father had many Jewish friends. I realized this later, in my youth I simply did not think about their nationality. And yet, it seems to me that Jewish problems were present in Trifonov's works. But, as always, he did not touch her directly, not calling anything by its proper name. In particular, in one of the sports stories, he described how one of the members of the Soviet delegation to Olympic Games began to hum an Odessa song to him: “Solomon Pliar's dance school. School ballroom dancing, they tell you ... ”Was this a hint at his nationality? And what caused Trifonov’s interest in traveling around Germany to the topic of concentration camps and the remaining Nazis, like his friend Lev Gingzburg, the author of the anti-fascist story “Otherworldly Encounters”? But this issue requires a separate study.
I.Ch. Yuri Valentinovich was married three times, his third wife was Olga Miroshnichenko-Berezko, the curator of his museum, a propagandist of his work. What is your relationship with her? Do you communicate with their son, Valentin?
FROM. As I already said, I met my father's third wife, Olga Romanovna Berezko (nee Miroshnichenko, she is also a writer and director of the Museum of the House on the Embankment Olga Trifonova), on the eve of 1978. It was immediately given to me to understand that we would not continue to live with my father. We began to live separately, and there were very few contacts. Olga Romanovna showed outstanding economic abilities, continuous repairs and construction began at the dacha, and in Moscow - the hassle of obtaining new apartment and home improvement. She and her father traveled abroad, went to receptions and met new acquaintances. Fully occupied with this activity, Olga Romanovna showed no interest in my children and did not contribute to them and my communication with Valentin. A blank fence was erected between our houses in the dacha. Having become a widower, Olga Romanovna took upon herself all the troubles associated with her father's literary heritage and began to actively promote his work. Thanks to her, his books were regularly published even in the difficult 1990s. It is not very easy for me to interfere in this well-functioning mechanism from abroad. As computer scientists teach: “Never touch the running system” (“Never touch the running system”).
I.Ch. What are you doing now? Are you still thinking about writing about your father and mother?
Now I live in Düsseldorf with my husband, as our three children have gone to other cities. On a voluntary basis, I work at the Akademie-Galerie - the museum of the Düsseldorf art academy. I like this occupation, because I love art, my grandfather was an artist and both daughters graduated from this academy. Museum workers have privileges - free admission to museums and exhibitions in many countries of the world. And besides, thanks to the museum, I had my own circle of German acquaintances.
Of course, I have a desire to write the story of my parents. Moreover, I often read completely absurd things about them. I continue to study the archives of Nuremberg. My grandmother Polina Mamicheva left a great epistolary legacy, full of unexpected and paradoxical reasoning. She often wrote very sharply, but she had a shrewd mind. I would also like to write about how my husband and three children and I moved around the world. But all this takes a lot of time. Perhaps our children will complete this work. And they, too, will begin to rummage through the archives. While they did not have such a desire, but I did not immediately have it.
I.Ch. How do you feel about film adaptations of your father's novels and performances based on them? "House on the Embankment" was staged by Taganka. Personally, this performance shocked me. In the role of Glebov, I saw Zolotukhin, who turned my ideas about his acting abilities upside down. I can say that Ursulyak's film based on the story "The Long Goodbye" not only shocked me, but also gave impetus to thoughts about the writer's family tragedy, which, it seems, lies at the heart of the story and the film.
FROM. The performances "Exchange" and "House on the Embankment", staged at Taganka by Yuri Lyubimov, were very successful. It must be taken into account that the community of two masters, Trifonov and Lyubimov, played a role. Trifonov himself wrote plays based on his stories, and Lyubimov was famous for his extraordinary stage decisions. It seems to me that Lyubimov's actors were more like extras, spokesmen for the ideas of the playwright and director, than independent individuals. Although, having gone through school in such a theater, many have become excellent performers. For some reason, in the play "Exchange" I remember most of all a secondary character - a broker, very funny played by Semyon Farada. As always, the decorations by artist David Borovsky were very original. Despite the fact that Trifonov's stories are static, there is a lot of dynamics in these performances. A little disturbed by excessive posterity. Trifonov was thinner, he avoided any deliberateness. Lyubimov, on the other hand, was more politicized, which worked very effectively in the Soviet Union.
As for S. Ursulyak's film "Long Farewell", here I have more comments, although the film is made subtly, with great love for Trifonov's work. But the whole scenario is focused on love triangle and the appearance of a fourth influential person. In fact, it turns out something like "Office Romance". I cannot imagine that Trifonov himself could have written such a script, could have narrowed and simplified the content of his story in such a way. After all, the story is not about whether Lyalya cheated on her spouse and with whom, but about how the hero grew up and became a creative person. “Long farewell”, as often with Trifonov, is an ambiguous concept. This is a farewell not only to Lyalya (with his first love), but also to his youth, naivety, unsuitability. This is an autobiographical farewell to oneself. And it's not spelled out in the movie at all.
I would very much like to see a film based on the script written by Trifonov himself called Endless Games. Unfortunately, this film was never made. Apparently, the topic was considered too chamber, everyday. But again, it all depends on how you do it. And I would really like to see my young father in this film with his insane passion for sports and inability to communicate with the woman he loves, hostile relations with his mother-in-law, the House of Artists on Upper Maslovka and the old Dynamo stadium nearby. All this is so familiar to me. And “endless games” in my mind is the inability to stop the running time.
I.Ch. The last question is very delicate. Your mother, it seems, became a victim of the inhuman Stalinist system, when the all-powerful people's commissar, a servant of the chief satrap, could claim any woman he liked. Until now, in Russia, these women, victims of the violence of the voluptuous villain, are spoken about only in a whisper. Why do you think there is no indignation in people, indignation against his crimes? Why, as a rule, the unfortunate victim is blamed for everything and she must remain alone, along with her broken fate?
FROM. When my mother died, I was a teenager, and, as you understand, no one told me about Beria - neither my father, nor my grandparents. However, later I heard a rumor that after the exposure of Stalinism, the Bolshoi Theater received a large list of singers and ballerinas who were brought to Beria's mansion, where my mother was also listed. That's all. Then it got into details. As far as I can tell, this unpleasant story did not break my mother's life and did not affect my relationship with my father. Therefore, it is not worth dramatizing this episode especially.
In fact, the conflicts between the mother and father took place on a completely different basis. The main problem was that both were creative individuals. And both became successful very early on. Immediately after graduating from the Gnessin School, without having a higher musical education, Nelina at the age of 23 was admitted to four opera houses Soviet Union - in Lvov and in Kiev opera in Ukraine, in Musical Theatre named after Stanislavsky and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. She had a bright appearance and a beautiful soprano voice. After working in Kyiv in 1945, she chose to move to the Bolshoi Theater, where she was a soloist for 11 years. Her solo debut as Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, which she prepared under the direction of Valeria Barsova, was brilliant in 1948. A long article about Nelina was published in the Smena magazine under the heading "The Youngest Rozina." Good prospects opened before her.
Trifonov at the age of 25 became the youngest laureate of the State Prize, received by him for the novel "Students". Based on the novel, the play "Young Years" was staged at the Theater. Yermolova. He was invited to countless meetings with readers, he was broadcast on the radio, wrote in the newspapers.
But in the 1960s, both experienced a creative crisis. My father had a 10-year stagnation after the publication of the first novel, he went on business trips to Turkmenistan, collecting material for the novel Quenching Thirst, published sports essays and stories, but by and large he did not write. My mother's voice deteriorated, she moved from the Bolshoi Theater to the Philharmonic. I traveled around the country with concerts, I got tired. Both were nervous and did not spare each other's vanity. The mother-in-law turned her daughter against her husband, the mother-in-law “did not approve” of the daughter-in-law. The father managed to overcome the crisis, found the strength to start all over again. Mom couldn't. She was too expansive, unrestrained. My father had a stronger character stronger nerves. But he realized that he could not support his mother, left her alone with herself, selfishly waving his hand at everything. Why was she alone in Druskininkai? Why didn't he come when she asked him to do so on the phone? His conscience tormented him for a very long time, creating the soil on which his best works grew.
Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov was born August 28, 1925 in Moscow. Father - a Don Cossack by origin, a professional revolutionary, a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1904, a participant in two revolutions, one of the founders of the Petrograd Red Guard, during civil war member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of War, member of the Revolutionary Military Councils of several fronts.
In 1937 Trifonov's parents were repressed. Trifonov and his younger sister were adopted by their grandmother, T.L. Slovatinskaya.
Autumn 1941 together with his family he was evacuated to Tashkent. In 1942 After graduating from school there, he enlisted in a military aircraft factory and returned to Moscow. At the plant he worked as a mechanic, shop manager, technician. In 1944 became the editor of the factory newspaper. In the same year he entered the correspondence department of the Literary Institute. He applied to the faculty of poetry (more than 100 never published poems were preserved in the writer's archive), but was accepted to the prose department. AT 1945 transferred to the full-time department of the Literary Institute, studied in the creative seminars of K.A. Fedin and K.G. Paustovsky. Graduated from the Institute in 1949 .
The first publications were feuilletons from student life, published in the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" in 1947 and 1948(“Wide range” and “Narrow specialists”). His first story "In the Steppe" was published in 1948 in the almanac of young writers "Young Guard".
In 1950 In the "New World" by Tvardovsky, Trifonov's story "Students" appeared. Her success was very great. She received the Stalin Prize, “all sorts of flattering offers rained down,” the writer recalled, “from Mosfilm, from the radio, from the publishing house.” The story was popular. The editors of the magazine received a lot of letters from readers, it was discussed in a variety of audiences. With all the success, the story really only resembled life. Trifonov himself admitted: "If I had the strength, time and, most importantly, desire, I would rewrite this book from the first to the last page." But when the book came out, the success was taken for granted by its author. This is evidenced by the staging of "Students" - "Young Years" - and a play written a year later about the artists "The Key to Success" ( 1951 ), staged at the Theater. M.N. Ermolova A.M. Lobanov. The play was subjected to rather harsh criticism and is now forgotten.
After the resounding success of "Students" for Trifonov, by his own definition, "an exhausting period of some kind of throwing" began. At that time, he began to write about sports. For 18 years, Trifonov was a member of the editorial board of the journal Physical Culture and Sport, a correspondent for this journal and major newspapers at the Olympic Games in Rome, Innsbruck, Grenoble, at several world hockey and volleyball championships. He wrote dozens of stories, articles, reports, notes on sports topics. Many of them were included in the collections "At the end of the season" (1961 ), "Torches on the Flaminio" ( 1965 ), "Games at Twilight" ( 1970 ). In the "sports" works, what would later become one of the main themes of his work was openly manifested - the effort of the spirit to achieve victory, even over oneself.
Since 1952 Trifonov's trips to Turkmenistan began for the construction of the Turkmen, then the Karakum Canal. The trips continued for about eight years. The result of them was a collection of short stories "Under the Sun" ( 1959 ) and the novel Quenching the Thirst, published in 1963 in the Znamya magazine. The novel was reprinted more than once, incl. and in "Roman-gazeta", nominated for the Lenin Prize 1965 , was staged and filmed. True, as Trifonov said, they read the novel, in comparison with "Students", "much more calmly and even, perhaps, sluggishly."
Quenching Thirst turned out to be a typical thaw work, remaining in many respects one of the many "production" novels of those years. However, it already had characters and thoughts that would later be the focus of the writer.
The title of the novel "Quenching Thirst" was deciphered by critics not only as quenching the thirst of the earth waiting for water, but also quenching the human thirst for justice. The desire to restore justice was dictated by the story "Glare of the fire" ( 1965 ) is a documentary story about the writer's father. Late 1960s he starts the cycle of the so-called. Moscow or city stories: "Exchange" ( 1969 ), "Preliminary results" ( 1970 ), "The Long Goodbye" (1971 ), then they were joined by "Another Life" (1975 ) and "House on the embankment" ( 1976 ). The plots of these books, especially the first three, seem to be devoted only to the “details” of the life of a modern city dweller. The everyday life of city dwellers, immediately recognizable by readers, seemed to many critics the only theme of the books.
It took a long time for critics of the 1960s and 70s to understand what was behind the reproduction of everyday life. modern city hidden comprehension of "eternal themes", what constitutes the essence human life. When applied to the work of Trifonov, the words of one of his heroes came true: “A feat is understanding. Understanding the other. My God, how difficult it is!”
The book about the People's Will "Impatience" ( 1973 ) was perceived in contrast to the "urban" stories. Moreover, it appeared after the first three of them, when part of the criticism tried to create Trifonov's reputation as just a modern everyday writer, absorbed in the everyday bustle of the townspeople, busy, according to the writer, with the "great trifles" of life.
"Impatience" is a book about terrorists of the 19th century, impatiently pushing the course of history, preparing an assassination attempt on the king, dying on the scaffold.
The novel "The Old Man" was written about the feeling of the fusion of the past and the present ( 1978 ). In it, in one life, history turned out to be interconnected and, at first glance, seemingly unrelated to it, disappearing without a trace in the bustle of everyday life, absorbed by itself, modernity. "The Old Man" is a novel about departing people and the passing, disappearing, ending time with them. The characters of the novel lose the feeling of being a part of that endless thread that the hero of "Another Life" spoke about. This thread, it turns out, breaks not with the end of life, but with the disappearance of the memory of the past.
After the writer's death in 1980 his novel "Time and Place" and the story in short stories "The Overturned House" were published. In 1987 The magazine "Friendship of Peoples" published the novel "Disappearance", which Trifonov wrote for many years and did not have time to finish.
"Time and Place" begins with the question: "Is it necessary to remember?" Latest works Trifonov were the answer to this question. "Time and Place" the writer defined as "a novel of self-awareness." The latter books have therefore proved to be more autobiographical than those that preceded them. The narrative in them, entering new psychological and moral layers, acquired a freer form.
Starting with stories 1960s- in almost 15 years - Trifonov turned out to be one of the founders of a special area of \u200b\u200bthe latest Russian literature - the so-called. urban prose, in which he created his own world. His books are united not so much by common characters-citizens passing from one to another, but by thoughts and views on the life of both the characters and the author. Trifonov considered the main task of literature to be the reflection of the phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of time in their relationship, expressed in the fate of man.
Years of life: from 08/28/1925 to 03/28/1981
Soviet writer, translator, prose writer, publicist, screenwriter. Is one of the key figures in literature Soviet period. Representative of the existential trend in realism.
Born in Moscow, in a family rich in revolutionary traditions. Father: revolutionary, chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, mother: livestock specialist, engineer-economist. The writer's maternal grandmother and grandfather, as well as his uncle (father's brother), were closely connected with the revolution. Yura's childhood was more or less cloudless, but in 1937 Trifonov's father was arrested (shot in 1938, rehabilitated in 1955), and in 1938 his mother was arrested. Trifonov and his sister remained in the care of their grandmother.
At the beginning of the war, the family was evacuated to Tashkent, where Trifonov graduated from high school. In 1943 he returned to Moscow, worked at an aircraft factory as a mechanic, shop manager, editor of the factory newspaper. In 1944 he entered the correspondence department of the Literary Institute. Gorky. He was transferred to the full-time department in 1947, having worked out the necessary experience at the plant (as a member of the family of an enemy of the people).
In 1949 he graduated from the Literary Institute, defending as thesis story "Students". The story receives the Stalin Prize (1951), and Y. Trifonov suddenly becomes famous. In 1949 he marries the singer Nina Nelina (she died in 1966), in 1951 a daughter is born from this marriage. In 1952, he left for Turkmenistan on the route of the Main Turkmen Canal, and Central Asia entered the life and work of the writer for a long time.
The 50s and 60s are the time of creative search. At this time, the writer publishes a number of stories and the story Quenching Thirst, which (like his first work) remains dissatisfied. In 1968 he marries Alla Pastukhova.
In 1969, with the story "Exchange", a cycle of "Moscow" or "city" stories begins, which also includes "Preliminary results", "Long farewell", "Another life", "House on the embankment". The works of 1969-1981 became the main ones in the creative heritage of the writer.
In 1975, she married for the third time. Wife Olga Romanovna Miroshnichenko (Trifonova). In 1979, a son was born from the marriage.
In 1981, Trifonov was diagnosed with kidney cancer and on March 28, 1981, he died of postoperative complications(embolism).
In 1932-1938, the Trifonov family lived in the famous Government House at Serafimovich Street, 2. The house was intended for the families of the party elite and subsequently became known (thanks to Trifonov's story) as "The House on the Embankment". Now there is a museum in the house, the director of which is the widow of Y. Trifonov, Olga Trifonova.
The novel Quenching Thirst was nominated for the Lenin Prize, but never received the award.
B. Okudzhava dedicated one of his poems to Trifonov (Let's exclaim ...)
Trifonov's widow called the film adaptation of "The Long Goodbye" a film made "very well and very adequately." And she was completely dissatisfied with the film adaptation of "House on the Embankment", saying that "the authors of the script read another book."
Writer's Awards
Third degree for the story "Student" (1951)
Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1980)
Bibliography
Novels and short stories
Students (1950)
Quenching Thirst (1963)
Works included in the cycle "Moscow stories"
Yuri Trifonov was a city dweller, and all the tearful bitterness of the "people's avengers" Fyodor Abramov and Vladimir Tendryakov was inaccessible to him.
He belonged - by class, by birth - not to the victims, the innocent victims of "revolutionary storms", and not even to "fellow travelers", but to the revolutionary nomenklatura, which first made this damn revolution, and then rode on it, admiring and something arguing over trifles, but still more admiring: when on a horse, when under a horse, but still at a gallop, without getting off this Budenov cavalry. “Horses, horses trotted along the untrodden paths, carrying riders to no one knows where.” Ends of this kind were described by Trifonov himself in "The House on the Embankment", in "The Return of Igor" and in the story "Transparent Summer Noon". But the hand does not rise to consider the victims of these horsemen of the Apocalypse, because the victims, by definition, are pedestrians.
The intelligentsia, often indifferent to Fyodor Abramov and Vladimir Tendryakov, cocky and snobby "villagers", revered and dearly loved Yuri Trifonov, for they were always of the same blood and one flesh: humble Moscow ants who lived according to the laws and rules of an anthill, and these rules assumed the presence of both undeniably authoritative queens and anteaters. Bulat Okudzhava, with whom Yuri Trifonov was quite close, understood very well the poor ants who create idols, then ruin anthills and trample ants. “I need someone to pray for. Think, a simple ant suddenly wanted to fall into its legs, to believe in its enchantment! To create a goddess for yourself is sweet and touching. But, as a rule, ants create God for themselves, and from any lamppost that comes to hand. Lenin, Stalin - everything is fine. In the anthill in which Yuri Trifonov grew up, there were just such idols. The mighty talent of Yuri Trifonov rebelled all his life and challenged this ant lot. He was the finest critical realist, merciless to himself, and to the humble Soviet intelligentsia, and to the generation, the “generation of the doomed” (A. Galich). It was embarrassing, but it was true, the same for the average C students - "sharp eaters" (terminology from "House on the Embankment"), and for idealistic excellent students - "octopuses". Before Trifonov, only Chekhov rolled such a deafening slap in the face of the intelligentsia. He and Trifonov were cultivating the same field; True, Chekhov also did not believe in the Narodniks and did not write odes to them, in contrast to Trifonov with his Impatience. Our Moscow ant, however, like Anton Pavlovich, did not try to go beyond the anthill. Chekhov did not look for "rays of light" in the "dark realm". Chekhov knew that twilight was forever, and Trifonov understood that he would never leave the anthill in which he was born in August 1925, lived his 56 years and died in it - in 1981, in March.
He saw proud heads fall
Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov was the grandson and son of revolutionaries: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, fanatical, stubborn, Soviet to the core. However, we have known them for a long time: Yuri Valentinovich did not hide anything from us, Igor, or Gorik from "Disappearance" - this is he, and all his relatives, residents of the House on the Embankment, the Soviet establishment, who did not take bribes (but took for the country, for themselves, for their children, a human, ordinary, delightful, not legendary and not catastrophic life), inhabit this novel and even spill over into The House on the Embankment.
So, family portraits, portraits of the era, among which the smart, sober ideological atheist Yura was so afraid to live. Maternal grandmother, Tatyana Alexandrovna, nee Slovatinskaya, who lived long and passionately, from 1879 right up to 1957, was a professional revolutionary, a good friend of Stalin: she sent him parcels into exile. And Stalin wrote to her: “Darling, dear, how can I thank you?” My grandmother participated in the Civil War (there were, after all, commissars in dusty hats), then she built communism, socialism, totalitarianism, and all with the same enthusiasm, never once doubting the cause of Lenin-Stalin, hesitating along with the party line. Grandfather, Abram Pavlovich Lurie, for the sake of diversity, was a Menshevik underground worker, and a cousin, a Soviet politician A. Solts, according to "Disappearance" - the main party arbiter.
The parents didn't disappoint either. Valentin Andreevich Trifonov, the writer's father, was a revolutionary until 1917 (he was born in 1888 and managed to "participate"), and after that he reached "known degrees" and became chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. Moreover, we have no data that he refused to walk in this team in relation to those who managed to be convicted and shot even before 1937, and yet the processes went in a jamb: the Industrial Party, the Ryutin case, Trotskyists, Zinovievites, millions of peasants, and before that even and red terror. These riders were accommodating guys, and the Chief Jockey did not even have to strain. Yura's mother was, thank God, from a different karass: just an engineer-economist, Evgenia Abramovna Lurie. She lived until 1975, saw Yurina's things in magazines and books, and even managed to become a children's writer herself (E. Tayurina), however, little known.
The writer's father's brother was an army commander. Evgeny Andreevich is also bred in "Disappearance". He was conflicted and unaccommodating, all the time he fought with "scoundrels and bastards", townsfolk and grabbers, so he was constantly dismissed, sculpted party reprimands and "worked out." Brother Valya, the “supreme judge”, defended his older brother all the time, and when it didn’t work out, they went to Solts, and Salts helped out. However, Zhenya rebelled within the limits of the permissible, otherwise he would not have survived until 1937. Zhenya had a son. Zhora (George), later a defector writer Mikhail Demin, is a very atypical phenomenon for this cavalry family. He is the same Mishka from "Disappearance", a bosom friend with whom he and Yura always fought and played naughty. Yura also had a sister, Tanya, Tinga, the same Zhenya from The Disappearance, a crybaby and sneak, who always ate all the best sweets first.
When Yura was six years old, the family moved to the House on the embankment. Happy nomenklatura life: hot water, central heating, concierge from the NKVD, an elevator with a velvet bench, special rations and special distributors. Yura had a happy life: cycling, tennis, Serebryany Bor, special dacha, swimming, noisy name days with their own ice cream, shell-shaped chocolate wafers. good school, good comrades from the same House. And here we will go straight along the canvas of “Houses on the Embankment”: a child prodigy writer (Anton), a poor and envious plebeian from a barracks (Glebov), the son of a big boss (Shulep), a Turgenev girl, an “octopus” (Sonya); park, jokes, dreams of the future, herbarium. But from the House on the embankment it is too close to the Execution Ground.
Mother was taken in 1938, evicted from the House in 1939, two years were left before the war, and he finished school already in the war, in Tashkent. Thank God, he did not go to the front and did not disappear, like Moore (Georgy, the unfortunate son of the unfortunate Marina Tsvetaeva). But not a single university took the “son of an enemy of the people”, he had to work (for the sake of a work card and a good salary) at an aircraft factory - as a dispatcher and a locksmith. Then he managed to get a job as an editor of a factory newspaper. Work experience (a lifesaver for C grade students and illegal immigrants) was recruited, and Yuri Trifonov entered Literary Institute them. M. Gorky, who graduated in 1949.
The first short stories, still weak, he sent to his mother's camp. She approved ... In 1950, the novel "Students" was published, in 1951 he was awarded the Stalin Prize of the third degree. The novel is wretched, but for those times fresh, direct, psychological, although there is an unpleasant, in the spirit of "directive documents", a cross-cutting dialogue between an orthodox professor and a "cosmopolitan" professor.
In 1952, Yuri Trifonov was lucky to get on a business trip to the Karakum. This was enough for a long time. Exotics, Turkmenistan, customs. He developed a style, filled his hand, people ran into stories themselves. Nothing earthly was alien to him, but he took refuge in the desert exotic, as if in a shell.
The burden of human passions
It was easy to hide in a sports theme. Trifonov had great stories about athletes. And in 1955, his father was rehabilitated. Until the 20th Congress, in the forefront, precisely because of his orthodoxy.
Quenching Thirst - all around the canals and irrigation problems of Turkmenistan - comes out in 1963. “The apricot grows under the roar of days, the village trembles in the smoke, and between the ditches and alleys the donkey goes for a walk” - hello to all of us from Ilf and Petrov and the creator of this poetic matrix Ostap Bender. The writer himself knew the value of this waste paper, "Students" and "Thirst Quencher". It was a password to let them live in peace on Soviet territory. And he lived. He married in 1949 the beauty, opera diva and coloratura soprano Nela Nurenberg, daughter of the famous artist Amshey Nurenberg. In 1951, their daughter Olga was born, she now lives in Düsseldorf. But the horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Revolution (however, this is one thing) appeared to Trifonov at night, and in 1965 he wrote his act of rehabilitation of his father - the documentary story “Glare of the Bonfire”. Yes, he was clearly not ready for repentance in the style of Tengiz Abuladze, for throwing his father’s corpse into a landfill. The story is an apology for the bloody events on the Don and, therefore, decossackization. There are no middle and semitones. If Trifonov Sr. was right, if his brother-commander was right, then the Melekhov brothers, the executed Petro and Grishkin's father-in-law, were wrong. The miserable thaw was coming to an end, and yet the story also contains the year 1937, and it barely had time to crawl through the censorship gap. But the thing came out weak. All the burden of Trifonov's human and revolutionary passions fit into the novel "Impatience". This is already a great literature, and not some kind of reflection, but just a volcano, lava, eruption. 1973, the quietest stagnation, frost, timelessness for all time. Could Yuri Trifonov have had enough strength for historical revisionism, for understanding that the Narodnaya Volya were wrong, that they were murderers, that it was with them that the Red Terror, and 1937, and Yurino's bitter adolescence began? It could be enough strength, it would be enough mind. But he didn't want to give it up. The world was mean, prosaic, everyone fought for extra meters, extra rubles, everyone walked along the wall, and the Moscow ant Yuri Trifonov was with them. And it seemed to him that the dashing Narodnaya Volya, who refused all earthly blessings and laid down their lives on the altar of the fatherland, were heroes and role models. And the fact that the Narodnaya Volya petrels sat out the Stalinist falcons - this remained behind the scenes. And it did! Wrong, unreliable, harmful. But more than talented. The curse of the revolutionaries of all times, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks. A curse and a curse. "Fever compressed in decrees, as in the naked premises of theorems." You understand intellectually that Alexander II and Loris-Melikov are right. But our intellectual insides cannot recognize the correctness of the gendarmes and executioners who were in the service of a worthy tsar and a worthy minister. We are still under the spell of Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Kletochnikov and Dvornik. In a word, some worthy people mistakenly killed another worthy person, and he sent them to the scaffold, and all together they killed the country and our future. The fury of Trifonov and his heroes is like that quote about theorems and decrees from Pavel Antokolsky. And Boris Pasternak did not remain indifferent to this magic. His poem is simply an epigraph to Impatience. “But even today reports were written in the proper style, and in ignorance of misfortunes beyond the Neva the cab rumbles. And the September night is suffocating with the secret of the treasure, and dynamite does not let Stepan Khalturin sleep.” Well, what can an honest bourgeois liberal say here? "... the bourgeois began to cry and went to the hayloft, where his Rolls-Royce stood."
Chronicler of the Sinking Submariners
But it was necessary to live, and Trifonov lived, even not bad. Without luxury, and the “son of the enemy of the people” did not have time to get used to it. At least he changed wives, although he did not see goddesses in them. And the shoes were old, the coats were light and the hands were hard-working: after all, the writer earned little, did not beat out vouchers, publications, fees. He was an ascetic and disinterested.
The second time he married in 1968, to a colleague, editor of the series "Fiery Revolutionaries" Alla Pavlovna Pastukhova. She taught him how to manage: buy bread, carry dirty linen to the laundry, run for kefir. The poor writer even went on dates with dirty laundry. And he went on dates to his third wife, the most devoted, most faithful, most unpretentious, to Olga Romanovna Miroshnichenko, a writer (her work, however, her husband did not put in anything).
Their love began in 1975, in 1979 Olga gave birth to a son, Valya (named after his grandfather), and they got married. Both, suffering and tormented, destroyed their families, but still united. Olga removed all worries from the writer - he no longer went for kefir. He handed out money, even the last. Somehow a relative came in, she wanted to go to the vineyards in Spain, earn money for jeans and something else for her son and husband. Trifonov and gave her the first currency earned for the transfer in Germany. Olga did not grumble, she never grumbled, she served her idol - the Russian classic.
And Trifonov begins to write about the humiliated and offended of the twentieth century: about the serving Soviet intelligentsia, whose little life was forever moved by the “black crow”. He also wrote about himself, but he was given the opportunity to spill his anguish, his humiliation onto the pages of books: the undisputed masterpiece "The Exchange", "Preliminary Results" (1970), "The Long Goodbye" (1971) and "Another Life" (1975). In 1976, the great House on the Embankment was published (God bless Sergei Baruzdin, editor of Friendship of Peoples). The revealing "Vanishing" will be released under a new thaw, posthumously, in 1987. Four pearls, four brilliant stories of the 1960s rolled into the collections: “In the Mushroom Autumn”, “It Was a Summer Noon”, “Vera and Zoya”, “Pigeon Death”.
Yuri Trifonov stood up for Novy Mir and for Tvardovsky, who always published it. Did not help. Heinrich Bell proposed his candidacy to the Nobel Committee (oh, our good genius Bell!), and Trifonov was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1980, but did not have time. Didn't manage to do anything. The writer died in 1981. Kidney cancer. Lopatkin performed the operation perfectly, but a blood clot formed. And the means to prevent this were only in the West. Publishers from abroad and friends from there gave money, it was possible to operate there, but they did not give me a foreign passport. They preferred to be buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery. What if Misha Demin remains as a relative? They were afraid of a riot at the funeral, but, as always, there was no riot.
Trifonov's masterpieces are very terrible, the insignificance of the heroes is terrible, all this minuscule! Whipped by colleagues Ganchuk, who himself flogged for dissent, and the drunken cemetery watchman Shulepa, and the insane Sonya. Heroes of the "Exchange", ready to pawn their souls for an extra room. (Although they are nowhere near as criminal as honest fanatics of Impatience.) The hero of Dove Doom, whose neighbor, a quiet librarian, is taken away at night, and his wife, daughter Mariska and grandmother are evicted to the outskirts of the city. And such is this life that the house manager Brykin, having intimidated the hero - a quiet pensioner, forces him to personally kill his beloved pigeons. Both Verka and Zoya from the story of the same name, the great-granddaughters of Akaky Akakievich, do not even dare to dream of an overcoat. And Nadia and her husband Volodya from "Mushroom Autumn" no longer have the strength to go to theaters and concerts: work, children, a one-room apartment (they are with two boys in the room, their mother is in the kitchen, there is nowhere else to sleep). And Olga Robertovna from Riga in "Summer Noon", having served time instead of her revolutionary husband (husband died, son shot himself), endured everything like a draft horse, and did not complain. No wonder the “Exchange” at the Taganka Theater went under Vysotsky: “Save our souls! We are delirious from suffocation. Save our souls! Hurry to us! Hear us on land - our SOS is getting more and more muffled. And horror cuts souls in half.
There was no sushi. Yuri Trifonov broadcast the last call signs of the boats with the Soviet intelligentsia. The boat sank.
”, then “Preliminary results”, “Long farewell”, “Another life”, “House on the embankment” (1970-1976). Unofficially, they were combined into the cycle "Moscow Tales". The Exchange and Preliminaries are set in the late 1960s, The Long Goodbye is set in the early 1950s, and The Other Life and Waterfront House stretch from the 1930s into the 1970s. The stories actually presented the reader with a new Trifonov: wise, sad, vigilantly seeing genuine human dramas in everyday life and the little things of life, able to subtly convey the spirit and trends of the times.
But it was The House on the Embankment that brought the greatest fame to the writer - the story described the life and customs of the inhabitants of the government house of the 1930s, many of whom, having moved into comfortable apartments (at that time, almost all Muscovites lived in communal apartments without amenities, often even without toilets, used a wooden riser in the yard), directly from there they fell into Stalin's camps and were shot. The writer's family also lived in the same house. But there are discrepancies in the exact dates of residence. "AT 1932 the family moved to the famous Government House, which, after more than forty years, became known to the whole world as “The House on the Embankment” (after the title of Trifonov’s story). In his diary entries, Yuri Trifonov repeatedly mentions his childhood friend Lyova Fedotov, who also lived in this famous house.
In 2003, a memorial plaque was installed on the house: “The outstanding writer Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov lived in this house since 1931 to 1939 and wrote the novel House on the Embankment about him.
Trifonov's prose is often autobiographical. Its main theme is the fate of the intelligentsia during the years of Stalin's rule, understanding the consequences of these years for the morality of the nation. Trifonov's stories, speaking almost nothing directly, in plain text, nevertheless, with rare accuracy and skill, reflected the world of the Soviet city dweller of the late 1960s - mid-1970s.
The writer's books, published small by the standards of the 1970s. circulations (30-50 thousand copies), were in high demand, for magazines with publications of his stories, readers signed up in a queue in libraries. Many of Trifonov's books were photocopied and distributed in samizdat. Almost every work of Trifonov was subjected to close censorship and was hardly allowed to be published in 2013.
On the other hand, Trifonov, considered the extreme left flank of Soviet literature, outwardly remained a quite successful officially recognized writer. In his work, he in no way encroached on the foundations of Soviet power. So it would be a mistake to attribute Trifonov to dissidents2013.
Trifonov's writing style is unhurried, reflective, he often uses retrospective and changing perspectives; The main emphasis of the writer is on a person with his shortcomings and doubts, refusing any clearly expressed socio-political assessment.
In 1973, the novel about the People's Will "Impatience" was published, in 1978 - the novel "The Old Man". They can be combined into a conditional trilogy, the beginning of which was laid by the "Bonfire Glow". "The Old Man", whose hero, an old participant in the Civil War, rethinks youth and sums up life, has become one of the most significant works of art Soviet literature about the first post-revolutionary years. As always with Trifonov, history in The Old Man is connected with the present by thousands of invisible threads, the narration imperceptibly and freely “slips” into different time layers.
In 1981, Trifonov completed the complex, multifaceted novel Time and Place, the structure of which was worked out in detail by the writer back in 1974. This book, one of the most autobiographical of the prose writer, received cool reviews from critics of those years: the author was accused of "insufficient artistry", repeating the past. At the same time, "Time and Place" can rightly be called Trifonov's final novel, summing up his work, farewell to youth, a sober look into the face of his own illusions and hopes, tough, sometimes even cruel introspection. The action of the novel takes place over four decades - the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 70s.
In 1987, the novel Disappearance was published posthumously.
Yuri Trifonov died on March 28, 1981 from a pulmonary embolism. He was buried in Moscow at the Kuntsevo cemetery.
The perception of Trifonov's prose in the USSR and Russia changed over time. Since the second half of the 1980s. it was almost forgotten, but in the 2000s. a growing interest in Trifonov's prose, which is now rightfully considered a classic, began.
Awards and prizes
- Stalin Prize of the third degree (1951) - for the story "Students" (1950)
- Order of the Badge of Honor (1975)
- Medal "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic war 1941-1945"
Personal life
The first wife of Yuri Trifonov (1949-1966) - Opera singer(coloratura soprano), soloist of the Bolshoi Theater Nina Nelina (real name - Nelya Amsheevna Nurenberg; 1923-1966), daughter of the famous artist Amshey Nurenberg (1887-1979), niece of the artist David Devinov (real name - David Markovich Nurenberg; 1896-1964) . In 1951, Yuri Trifonov and Nina Nelina had a daughter, Olga - married Olga Yuryevna Tangyan, candidate of philological sciences, now living in Dusseldorf.
The second wife (since 1968) is Alla Pavlovna Pastukhova, editor of the Fiery Revolutionaries series of the Political Literature Publishing House of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
The third wife (since 1975, the actual marriage is the writer Olga Miroshnichenko (born 1938; her first husband is the writer Georgy Berezko). Their son is Valentin Yuryevich Trifonov (born 1979).