He spent his childhood and adolescence in the village of Lakedemonovka in a peasant family.

Career. Beginning (1987-1995)

He studied at the Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​(French) at the Taganrog State Pedagogical Institute. He arrived in Moscow in the summer of 1987 and entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations as a full-time student at the Faculty of International Relations (specialization - Thailand and Thai language).

As a student and a member of the institute’s Komsomol committee, he organized concerts of semi-legal Soviet groups. Bravo, Brigada S, Igor Talkov, Sergei Penkin performed for the first time on the stage of the MGIMO Assembly Hall. There he met Zhanna Aguzarova, who helped him enter the circle of show business at that time.

Since 1988, he began to combine his studies with work as concert director of Irina Ponarovskaya.

In 1991, he left his studies at MGIMO and work in show business for the sake of journalism.

His ascent in journalism began in September 1991 with the publication in the newspaper “Krestyanskie Vedomosti” of an article about actress Tatyana Samoilova, who by that time was in complete oblivion.

The article had a wide resonance, after which Igor accepted an offer from the weekly Argumenty i Fakty to take the position of editor of the culture department.

As an editor, Grigoriev published incisive interviews and covered the new alternative culture emerging in the country.

In 1993, he met show businessman Boris Zosimov, with whom he published Russia’s first thick glossy magazine, Imperial. The magazine served as the starting point for the era of glossy journalism in the country.

After several issues were published, he left Imperial and in 1994 headed Russia’s first glossy magazine for men, Amadeus.

Career. OM Magazine (1995-1998)

In May 1995, he began working on the OM magazine. The publication of the magazine in November 1995 became an event in the Russian periodical press market. For five years in a row, the magazine was awarded the title of the best magazine of the year as assessed by fellow journalists (Professional Music Media Award “Quality Mark”). In 1997, the magazine was awarded the National Ovation Award in the category “Best Magazine of the Year”.

In November 1998, Grigoriev resigned as editor-in-chief of the magazine, explaining the reasons for his departure in his last editorial letter. His planned departure from the magazine in the spring coincided with the severe economic crisis that broke out in the country.

The Russian press commented on Igor Grigoriev’s departure from OM magazine:

Career. Various (1998-2008)

Policy

In December 1998 he founded the All-Russian public political movement “Generation of Freedom”. At the Founding Congress he was elected Chairman of the Movement Council. The Movement considered the main goal of its activities to be working with young people and promoting democratic and liberal values, as well as the non-political, worldview association of the new generation on the principles of perceiving freedom as the highest value. The movement united both young politicians who previously belonged to different political blocs, and young cultural figures showing interest in social and political activities. In December 1999, the Movement became part of the “Bear” association; three candidates from the Movement were elected deputies of the State Duma of the third convocation. Igor Grigoriev himself leaves the movement due to a conflict within the management elite.

In May 1999, Igor Grigoriev settled in the city of Prague. He was a co-owner of a small cafe in the city center, which became a place of informal meetings for employees of Radio Liberty.

TV and cinema

In 1999, he returned to Moscow at the invitation of the general producer of the TV-6 channel, Ivan Demidov.

I am, of course, no professional in gay culture...and in general, my opinion, I think, is completely useless for humanity as a whole on this matter.

I’m not a culturologist, I don’t even understand the essence of orientations in principle. Laughs Laughs Laughs but... as the group Alisa sang:

“Unfortunately, I am weak, just like the eyewitness to the events on Bald Mountain is weak.”

In general, I have one value.
I lived and knew how to consume information at a time when, 10-20 years late, a wave of sexual revolution and liberalism washed over Russia. Gay had not yet become a dirty word, requiring mandatory self-determination, humanity still believed in the existence of bisexuals, and it was fun for a boy and a girl of heterosexual orientation to go to a gay club on a date, because they showed both female and male striptease, there were a lot of students and young people, because booze was cheap, and admission was also inexpensive)))

And there were no other clubs (c) A. Wilder

Actually they were. But if I had come there, I would have come to rent. Because I never practiced prostitution, and was not interested in dating for financial gain. And the pathos, in principle, is not very clear to me - of course there was no choice.

And young people also had 2 youth magazines:

Om and Ptyuch

No, there were no women's magazines, nor men's magazines. It was common.

It so happened that both Om and Ptyuch were owned by fairly well-known figures of the gay subculture. And in the wake of all the literary garbage (and not only) pouring into the post-Soviet space from everything previously prohibited, it was on the pages of these magazines that I met most of the figures of this same gay subculture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Actually, I want to start my story by talking about the magazine "Om".

In this regard, I will quote excerpts from Wikipedia, because I agree with the assessment of this magazine 100 percent. Indeed, this was exactly the case for me too.

“OM” is a Russian youth magazine, which was called “party magazine”.

In May 1995, Igor Grigoriev, who had previously edited the Imperial and Amadeus magazines, began a new project - OM.

The publication of the magazine in November 1995 became an event in the Russian periodical press market. The press called the magazine the “bible” of a new generation of Russian youth, who were gradually turning their attention to Western liberal values ​​and accepting the Western way of life.

In a short time, OM magazine has become the most successful monthly in Russia, addressed to generation X - the first generation of the post-Soviet era. “The magazine for those who want to know more and be better” instantly gained enormous popularity. The influence of “OM” was so great that such terms as “OM-like”, “OM-forming”, “OM-like”, etc. appeared in the Russian press. An entire generation, whose formation fell in the mid-90s, considered the magazine a beacon, according to to which they compared their lives - listened to music, watched films, read books, wore clothes that the magazine wrote about

The magazine was the discoverer of many Russian pop stars - from Ilya Lagutenko to Zemfira.

The magazine was annually awarded the title of best magazine of the year as assessed by fellow journalists (professional music media award “Quality Mark”).

In November 1998, Grigoriev resigned as editor-in-chief of the magazine, explaining the reasons for his unexpected departure in his last editorial letter:

I dare to state that all this time our magazine has formed and supported a culture in which there is now a place for the heroes of their Generation. Recently, in an interview with one of the capital’s radio stations, when asked by a DJ “What is the secret of the magazine’s success?”, I answered literally the following: “I am not interested in the process of creating a printed product itself, but in the formation of the atmosphere around it, its legend, myth, if you like. First of all, these are people - the heroes of the magazine and its readers - those who agreed with this legend, accepted it and play life with us according to the same rules." Over the three years of publication, OM painted a portrait of a generation that chose a slightly different path than its parents. I would call it the Generation of Freedom (I would call myself that too - approx. Ankh Smile). I am sure that the modern history of our country will be studied using OM.

The Russian press commented on Igor Grigoriev’s departure from OM magazine:

He was one of the first to express his era. Apparently, Grigoriev himself felt so strongly his insecurity in front of the modern world that he began to create a magazine that would help first of all himself, and then us, to understand this world a little, to at least somehow formalize his knowledge about it... Grigoriev simply wanted understand the essence, and it was possible to understand it only by fighting with himself - with his snobbery, hypocrisy and, finally, fear... He seemed to be fighting, exposing his body to the blows of reality. For 3 years he was the editor-in-chief of the most provocative and tough publication on the Russian market. Apparently, he suddenly realized that he was tired and exhausted..."
- Arguments and Facts, September 1999

1999 - 4th, final, collection (on CD) of the best music of the magazine “OM”: Zemfira, Mumiy Troll, Obermaneken, Megapolis, Tequilajazzz, BI-2, Spleen, Masha and the Bears, Dances Minus, Lika.

(Yes, yes, all these groups - their popularity and cult status - many do not know, but the credit goes to this magazine) In addition, Agatha Christie, for example... and such artists as Renata Litvinova and Ivan Urgant. They all come from there. So Igor was right, in fact, it is quite possible to analyze the era using the example of the Om magazine - because it really was an intellectual and stylistic center. In fact, I think that even the style and genre of presentation of the material, and conversations on ankh.ru, too (although I’m certainly not a journalist, and I’m not trying to show off), but they grew up on the same material.

In 2004, I. Grigoriev made an attempt to revive the OM magazine and returned to the chair of editor-in-chief. This attempt was unsuccessful - the magazine “OM” finally ended its existence in 2006.

Yes, in principle, somewhere at this time Freedom had already ended and the valve was turned off - my note Smile Smile Smile

14 years after the publication of the magazine, writer Sergei Minaev writes:

To say that OM, culturally, has done more for my generation than any other media would be quite trivial, but it is true. It was the only magazine that instilled a taste for proper music, cinema, literature and so on... They talked to you leisurely, as if making it clear, “yes, dude, at first we also didn’t understand what kind of “portishead” this is, and why Thom Yorke should become an icon. But then we figured it out, and we really liked it. Try it - we’re sure you will too.” In 1995-1997, this was, perhaps, the only outlet for 20-year-old boys and girls, those same “depressive-progressive youth” (c), who had the misfortune of believing that there could be slightly different guidelines in life than crimson jackets, “Behi the sevens”, “graze the commerce” and “drive to the Broom”.
OM was a kind of common kitchen for those who “got it.” Air conditioned, in a stuffy burning country. A country consisting of the crimson chime of the “Vladimir Central” in karaoke, the jingling of gold chains on the beer necks of authorities, endless “who are you standing under” and the rustle of bills counted at the cash desk of the Rosentol casino by taciturn Georgians.

Om magazine website with a wonderful slogan for modern times: Om - unit of resistance

Grigoriev: I have a question for you right away - how is such a seasoned poet like Derbenev (Leonid Derbenev. - Esquire), could he have made such a devastating mistake in Panama?

Chernavsky: Are you talking about “dressed and put on” or what? Now I remember all this canoe... To be honest, they really were grown-up guys... Derbenev generally wrote competently, he knew the language. We recorded “Panama” under light doping, at my home on Baumanskaya. How it was there... In general, Alla (Pugacheva) and I Esquire) came to write another song... And the day before Lenya dropped by. He says something like, “Yuran, do you need money?” I told him: “Do you have a lot?” He says: “Fuck off.” And throws a piece of paper with this “Panama”. And before that I had already recorded a sketch of a song with my rusty voice in abracadabra. Alla listened and said: “Let me try.” She climbed behind the screen, turned on the microphone, and she said this!.. We were in the mood for some serious music, and she: “White Panama-ah.” She said it like that in a rustic way. In general, we already had such a state there, we were choking with laughter... I think it was purely out of stupidity.

Grigoriev: Listen, what kind of doping did you use back then in 1984? Well, there were definitely no drugs back then. Did you lean on the blue?

Chernavsky: There were definitely no hard drugs. Marijuana, yes, there was, it is forever young. Cocaine appeared somewhere in the late 1990s, I haven’t caught it yet. But somehow it didn’t stick to me and my friends at all. A couple of lessons ended with a headache and a return to our standards: cognac is always cognac.

Grigoriev: I thought so. I just showed my 25-year-old friends “Banana Islands”, and they asked me: “What were they smoking there?” I say: “They didn’t smoke anything.” You see, today's young people need to smoke something to come up with such a cool *bat.

Chernavsky: We were all into the music, old man. The same “Bananas”... There’s not even a narrative style there: “I left”, “you came”, “love has passed”. I didn't use those words at all. I made sure to run the meaning through my chips, you know? Even in “Panama” the meaning is infected with such jokes. We painted like impressionists. Here's your nose, here's your ear. And a big flight for imagination (laughs).

We were all into the music. We painted like impressionists. Here's your nose, here's your ear.

Grigoriev: Tell me, how did it happen that almost your entire golden song reserve fit into two films? Bang! And in the same year, “Season of Miracles” and “Above the Rainbow” are released by the same director with a dozen songs by the same composer, and for centuries.

Chernavsky: There was such a team there... Everything is always done in good company, right? When you start working, you always feel that you are in some kind of imaginary party, in music that you listen to constantly and get a buzz from it. After “Bananas,” which were closer to rock and roll, it was difficult to enter pop music. I didn’t write songs for anyone to order. But somehow everything just came together in my head. One question remained open: how much dynamite should we put in all this, guys? (laughs)

Grigoriev: My favorite song is “Reflection in the Water.”

Chernavsky: Maybe now it all sounds kind of stupid, but then we all went to first grade for the first time. We didn’t look at the notes, but at the color of the music, at its smell, you know? At that time it was not Soviet music at all. “Reflection in Water”, like “White Door”, are such dashing flowers from “Abba’s” front garden. Frida (Anni-Frid Lyngstad, lead singer of ABBA. - Esquire) my phone was cut off when Alla sang “The White Door”. He and Phil Collins wanted me to be on their album. But they turned me away from my visa and took away my passport. They took it as if for testing, and that was it.

Grigoriev: And you threw it all to hell and emigrated in 1991, right?

Chernavsky: I didn’t leave anywhere at all, I’m still a citizen of Russia, so you understand. In general, I went to travel. I lived in Italy for a couple of months, then met some German guys. And it so happened that in Germany I found myself in a crowd, and somehow we all quickly became very friends.

Grigoriev: You went to hang out, but your ambitions haven’t gone away? You left as an accomplished and wealthy person. It’s clear that you didn’t just go to hang out.

Chernavsky: You see, old man, it’s as if everything had already happened by that time. Everything that was planned was done. When the country had no time for music, when all sorts of punks came from all sides, and when I was invited to Germany, I left without hesitation. We sold everything we had and made a base in Berlin. They built a decent studio for a quarter of a million bucks. We created a company with Bruce Hammond and we had this guy Mark"Oh...

Grigoriev: And you wrote him some songs, and the songs hit the charts.

Chernavsky: Wow, “on the charts.” Billboard! Number one! Dance chart! And at this time, when it was unwinding, I ended up in America. You see, when your team is number one on Billboard, you can meet whoever you want.

Grigoriev:I am sincerely concerned with the question - why didn’t all these acquaintances of yours result in something grandiose? You probably wanted this, especially after your success with Mark O?

Chernavsky: I had a different goal. My boy grew up, Dimka, he was 16 years old. We stopped in Hollywood, I immediately made a bunch of friends, many of them worked in cinema, in computer graphics. And I began to spend ninety percent of my time on Dimka. Not without a second thought, of course, knowing that it would be useful to me too. I produced my boy in what's called CGI-FX. A year after his arrival he received MTV Video Music Award per clip Backstreet Boys. Then immediately Timberlake came running with his N'Sync, we made a video for them too, and again Award. Get Down(song Backstreet Boys. — Esquire) And I Want You Back(song N'Sync. — Esquire) made entirely on Dimka's graphics. Then there was Rod Stewart, Tupac, cinema, advertising...

Grigoriev: Let's go back to the 1980s. The album “Disks Are Spinning”, recorded non-stop, like a ready-made DJ set for discotheques. I’m 14 years old, I come to my village club and am blown away by the music I’ve never heard before. I recently re-listened to it. With clear tolerances on recording quality, something like this could now sound like Jamiroquai.

Chernavsky: Let me tell you, until the late 1970s there was no such thing as European disco. There was American funk with trumpets... And in 1977, Frank Farian in Frankfurt recruited Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans from emigrants and came up with such a mixture of South American rhythms and simple Slavic melodies and put it on a deadly kick drum on the first beat. At first there were Boney M, Then Modern Talking. A terrible tsunami swept through Europe. America was barely affected, but the whole of Europe was left indifferent - what were they doing to the halls! “Disks” were made around this wave.

Grigoriev: Is it true that this was a government order for the Olympics to surprise foreign guests?

Chernavsky: Yes, it was the idea of ​​the communists: everyone here makes stools, and you guys will make varnished stools, with all these bourgeois tricks of yours, so that there is an export product.

Grigoriev: So you were invited to the Central Committee and decided to write a cool disco record?

Chernavsky: Well, yes, such greyhounds, drunken Tsek faces, sat and gave me advice on what kind of music to write. (laughs) In general, they gave us “Melody” (the only state recording studio in the USSR. - Esquire) for a month and said: do what you want there - drink, walk, but so that in a month there will be a record. We had girls recording there for a month, and not only from the vocal group, the locals ran for cognac ten times a day. Everyone had their own limit on alcohol, the main thing was that no one fell in the studio and everyone felt good. In those days, it was like this in our country - since 1970, I worked in serious jazz groups, where discipline was in the first place. Everyone was kind of a slob, but no one went out to play drunk, because everyone knew that the next day I would turn the whole of Moscow upside down and find a replacement for him.

Grigoriev: In general, the first dance record in the USSR was released by “Veselye Rebyat” in 1970. I was a complete goldfinch then and it somehow passed me by. But then they recorded Pugacheva’s “Harlequin”, and I was shocked again when I heard it. And then I was blown away again when I found out that “Jolly Guys” recorded your “Banana Islands”.

Chernavsky: You see, at Pasha’s (Pavel Slobodkin, head of “Jolly Guys.” - Esquire) had a pedigree, his dad was some famous cellist. He had the best orders, the best venues, the best musicians. When I came to his group as a music director, I immediately brought with me two of my friends, drummer Kitaev and bassist Ryzhov, who followed me from “Dynamic” from the crazy Kuzi (Vladimir Kuzmin, frontman of the “Dynamic” group. - Esquire), whose tower was torn down from success. In short, we got everyone “happy” with our idea and recorded “Bananas”. As a result, Slobodkin at the artistic council called it the delirium of a madman, the album was banned, and I was ordered to take up “serious Soviet music.” It was then, five years later, that Pasha beat himself in the chest: “It’s me, I came up with everything!” We are Fun Guys! (laughs)

Grigoriev:Have you been ordered to take up “serious Soviet music”? What does it mean?

Chernavsky: You remember what kind of music dominated the Soviet Union at that time, no? I hated that music fiercely. Although now everything is the same, chansons and “cords”.

Grigoriev: Now about the “cords”. How do you feel about “cords”?

Chernavsky: I don’t think so, I just don’t care! All I hear there is “fuck you” with a lot of show-off. It's not about the music, old man. But there is no trick against crowbar, you understand? If a person comes out and yells “Fuck you” to the entire stadium, then all these shantrapas who have spoken this language since childhood immediately come running, and there is nothing sweeter for him to see the cops on the balcony stomping their boots and yelling along with him “fuck you!” It seems to them all, damn it, at this moment that they are in a feeling of complete invincible freedom.

Grigoriev: There’s one thing I can’t understand: how did it all happen? Ditties in a packed stadium...

Chernavsky: You understand, it is beneficial for people to give up on good music in general, because good music makes the brain move in addition to the body. Do you naively think that the authorities need this? And then someone there decided that the main Russian music now would be this: “Fuck you.” This will be our star. What is he singing there, obscenities? Yes, let him sing with whatever he wants. If, for example, it occurred to him to walk and wave his dick around the stage, no one would even pay attention, everyone would say: “Oh, damn, how original!” Why fool around here, old man? What are you asking me about? What does this have to do with music in general?

It is beneficial for the authorities that people generally give up on good music, because good music makes people use their brains. Someone there decided that the main Russian music now would be this: “Fuck you.

Grigoriev: Have you ever thought that your old friend Pugacheva could have turned the country’s taste in a different direction in her time? She had such power and influence that she could point with her hand where, and the whole country would march forward and sing there. Look... Sometimes I turn on the Nostalgia channel, and they show, for example, Tukhmanov’s author’s evening in 1986. And what do I see? Three-thousand-seat Rossiya Hall, packed. On the carousel it’s still the same - Dolina, Leontiev and others, but they sing songs that they would never ride now, because they’re fucking complicated. So, it turns out that in 1986 the public was more advanced than it is now? I can’t understand where, when and why it all broke off?

Chernavsky: I'll tell you... No matter how sophisticated Tukhman's music was, no matter how good Pugacheva was, there were no artists of the level of the international mainstream in the Soviet Union. And in general there were few artists. This time. If now there are tens of thousands of them traveling around the country, then there were about ten people then. And you've already named half of them. Second. What they sang was still music sucked from the finger of a member of the Communist Party.

Grigoriev: You do not hear me. I say that Pugacheva alone, who was not afraid of anything, was enough to convince the country otherwise without any rebellion. But she chose “Christmas Meetings” with “Lube” and Natasha Koroleva.

Chernavsky: And I answer you: there was no one to perform cool music. Music makes an impression when it brings the quality out of you. When you sit, listen, stomp your feet, clap your hands. You can’t even tell the editors of Channel One to clap if they don’t clap. Besides being editors, they are also people. Take some Peter Gabriel, who is a bit complicated for the average Western listener, but his music has so much groove inside, such a train rolls towards you, that it is impossible to listen to it indifferently. And what was in the scoop was the “Extraordinary Concert” of the Obraztsov Theater.

Grigoriev: Listen, in the mid-nineties, when I was making the magazine, I had absolute confidence that we were building a garden country. Okay, garden city. The people had an absolute need for something new, and then we all rode this wave. What happened next is a mystery to me. This garden was uprooted and fucked into a landfill.

Chernavsky: I was in Germany in the 90s and was also sure that something would begin now. But then it quickly became clear that this was a temporary interest, and it had no continuation, because firstly, these were still fakes for someone else. And secondly, it was not the music that everyone lived by. Look, eighty percent of the country is still singing blatnyak. How would you rate this?

Grigoriev: Don't know. How?

Chernavsky: The country is run by thieves' money. And whoever pays dances. People who do something real do not depend on money, especially money from thieves. Believe me, you won’t become richer than Kirkorov, because you simply don’t have enough saliva to lick him like that. But this “fuck you” guy has everything in his hands, because his whole idea is criminal. Criminals are not necessarily the ones who are in prison. They wear ties and different uniforms... When has there ever been such a demand for crooks? I will not be surprised that this Cord will receive a committee colonel in a year. They are all colonels there. They don't give majors, they give colonels right away.

Eighty percent of the country still sings blatnyak.

Grigoriev: Do you know what’s going on with music in Russia now?

Chernavsky: Well, something is getting to me, yes. I'm not very interested in this, old man.

Grigoriev: Haven't you watched rap battles? Oksimiron, Gnoyny, Rapper Syava... 30 million views each on YouTube. The press writes this: “A historic battle took place between rappers Syava and Kh**va.” The word “historical” is written without quotation marks.

Chernavsky: The fact that you now connected this with music even surprised me. What the fuck is music? I went to concerts as a kid in 1968, and we had an entertainer who said from the stage: “Give me a theme.” To him from the audience: “Let’s talk about Vasya, who fucked Dusya, and then about the tractor driver Kolya, who started drinking.” And he spit out rhymes like a machine gun. What fucking music are you asking me about?

Grigoriev: Well, by the way, this also came to us from America. From the American 80s.

Chernavsky: Firstly, in America it was the protest voice of the streets. All these blacks who were left out of Reaganomics came to the Bronx and started speaking out like this. This is the tradition of black neighborhoods. Secondly, in America, rap began with music. It was brought here by Jamaican DJs. I have a lot of rapper friends here, they all play music, they are singing guys. Each of them R'n'B he fucks so hard that no one could even dream of it.

Grigoriev: Let's get started with a master class from Chernavsky. I am sure that young musicians will read this conversation. And each of them desires to write his own “zurbagan” so that it will penetrate everyone, immediately and forever. What will you tell them?

Chernavsky: Are you asking me how to come up with a brilliant song? (Laughs)

Grigoriev: That's exactly what it's about.

Chernavsky: No way. You can make 4-5 songs of very good quality, and if they are performed together, then perhaps one of them will become a hit. The quality of selection is important here. You make a hundred sketches and then put them together into a patchwork. You sit with your whiskey drinker and listen. Bang, something caught on. Stop! What is it? Well, let's listen again. Maybe this is a cool singer, or maybe this is a chorus ( chorus, from English - chorus. — Esquire) can be crazy. Something like this.

Grigoriev: Do you think one hit is enough to become a star?

Chernavsky: It’s not about the hit at all. Britney Spears once walked into Universal, dad gave money for the recording, she sang Hit Me Baby One More Time and everyone thought - great, one hit and she became a superstar. This doesn't happen, old man. She's right on my tail right before my eyes N'Sync And Backstreet Boys hanging out, hanging out with professional young people since I was 14 years old. She flew after them all over the country, sang behind the scenes, catching their every note, every movement... And only then they gave her a microphone in her hands, when they realized that she was already rushing out of herself... It is unrealistic to achieve great mental success right away like that. There is no such success in the world! At first, for 10-15 years you give a damn about yourself, rummage through the garbage, looking for a diamond there. And if God wants, he will throw it there for you.

** Igor Grigoriev has been making music since 2008 and lives permanently in Moscow. Yuri Chernavsky is a composer, producer, author of “Banana Islands”, “Zurbagan”, “Siren” and “Robinson”. Since 1995, he has lived permanently in Los Angeles. The time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles is 10 hours.

A couple of weeks after the premiere of Igor Grigoriev’s video for the song “Dreams of My Spring,” the editors of Afisha finally recovered from the shock - and found out from the musician himself what it all meant.

- The song “Dreams of My Spring” - where did it come from?

I wrote it one of the first. For the last two years I sang other people's songs and made money from it, but I realized that I couldn't do it anymore. I ran out of everything - strength, energy, desires. By March I was dead. And then there was a plane that was supposed to fall. I was sure that I was being removed, but when the plane landed, I realized that this was not the end. And after I was crucified, music began to come to me, a lot of music - I kept a voice recorder under my pillow, because I could wake up at night and hum something into it.

- What is the meaning of your music playing?

I want to finish off our stage. Well, that is, I don’t care about it, but since I started making pop music, it should be such that it cancels out all the crap that is around. Everyone still does not fully understand that the global paradigm has changed, and with it the time of fakes and lies has gone. Parfenov, WikiLeaks and my “Dreams” are events of the same order, coming from different fields. Parfenov says what journalism should be like, WikiLeaks - what the structure of the world is like, my modest “Dreams” have all the components of proper pop music - a good song, a beautiful and funny video, high-quality sound, a charismatic artist. True, perhaps I went too far - I pressed all the keys at once and at the same time showed how not to.

- So are you serious about this?

Well, what do you think? Do you also think that I am Verka Serduchka? No. I'm not crazy. That is, he came down, but not that much. Although people will most likely take everything at face value. The people are a very stupid substance, a herd of sheep.

- What is the ultimate goal of all this?

Earn money and escape to your Brazilian hacienda by completing the mission. Next year I will release three more videos and an album. Although, in principle, I don’t really need money - I have a producer who maintains my well-being in the amount I need.

- You are returning on the wave of the current protest mood, will you somehow get involved in this?

My return is not my choice. My choice was different - to sit quietly on the seashore and sip coconut milk, but time recruited me for service.

- Well, are any social movements important to you at all? Would you go to a rally in support of Kashin, for example?

No, because Kashin is a pawn in a big game. I understand the motives behind all the events on a deeper level, and Kashin has nothing to do with it. All the Rubicons in the world, in the Universe, have been crossed. Everything is changing before our eyes, new heroes are coming. The old hero looked like this: you approach him on the street and ask for a cigarette, he has a full pack in his pocket, but he tells you that he has no cigarettes. The new hero looks like this: he also has a full pack in his pocket, but he says, “I won’t give you a cigarette because I don’t like you.” Kashin does not fit into this arrangement at all, sorry. He is not a hero, but a soldier, so he did not, does not and will not have cigarettes. We just need events and sacrifices to shake people by the chest, so that sobering comes, so that it can be seen where the good music is, where the bad is, who is real, who is fake. Do you believe Parfenov’s trembling voice behind the podium? It’s funny to me, because all this is the mise-en-scène of a big performance.

Denis Boyarinov

I have known Igor Grigoriev since my school years. Also, of course, in absentia: first, according to the magazine “OM”, which pulled the rug out from under its feet, the first star of which was, of course, Grigoriev, the editor-in-chief, to whom Pugacheva admitted that she was collecting his magazines in a binder. Then on the video with Lika Star, where he has the best supporting role - better than Kutsenko and Bondarchuk. There were some other TV shows, including his own on TV-6, leaving OM, some kind of youth political movement... Or first a movement, then leaving and a TV show. I didn’t even think that I would have the opportunity to meet Igor personally, much less work with him on the relaunch of “OM” (not a very successful story, which, however, ended with a spectacular ending - the last issue of the once cult magazine was decorated with the bloody face of Philip Kirkorov with the removal of “ We will all die one day") and after all this remain friends - those who worked with Grigoriev know what I mean.

Both in my school years and during our work together, I was amazed by the reckless courage and scope of ambitions of Igor Grigoriev, his trickster abilities for deception and scams in the cultural field - a McLaren type of personality. Therefore, I was not surprised when several years ago I learned that Igor Grigoriev, who had tried himself in politics and film directing, began to sing and assembled his own orchestra. I was not surprised when, less than six months later, I saw his cabaret on the program of a respected club Moscow jazz festival. I was not surprised when I soon learned that he disbanded his cover band, which made good money at corporate events, and was already writing new songs himself. In a conversation with him, he made it clear that over the next few years he wants to change Russian pop music, which over the past twelve years has turned into a swamp. Plus, he has a new strategy for promoting his music in the current dead-end conditions, when music TV, radio and magazines have already died, and what has been born in its place is still completely unclear. All this looks very bold. That’s why I suggested that Igor Grigoriev take one more step, which requires considerable determination - to bring the behind-the-scenes processes of creating his ambitious project to public view and discussion in “OPEN SPACE” on OPENSPACE.RU.

It didn't surprise me that he agreed.

Game conditions

Igor Grigoriev

A few basic principles at first.

1. Of course, I would like you to like me. Like any artist, I want to be liked. In this sense, artists are not only not men, but not people at all. These are flowers, delicate and fragile, no matter what thorns they grow over. Every rose prefers to be reverently smelled rather than swinely crunched. The spikes are, of course, for protection against pigs. So, the artist is essentially tender and fragile, and for the sake of jokes he is constantly in a pose. You know that there was and is no such artist who doesn’t give a damn, you probably know. In short, I don’t care what you think and say about me here. Although I will still look indifferent to you.

2. Everything that will be proposed here cannot be fit into any concept, no matter how familiar it may seem to you. No artist is an island. An artist is born from the blood and ashes of other artists, living and dead, with whom he is in eternal ethereal kinship. The laboratory of a good artist is like a perfume factory, where thousands of familiar smells are combined into one new one, no longer similar to the others. That is, he is terribly similar to the others, but, damn it, this has never happened before. In this sense, I am a good artist.

3. I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow. My character, violent and unpredictable, has played a black comedy with me more than once. But my current, third life, which is just beginning, has already been given to music. Forever. More precisely, for the next eighteen years. My voyage will be long and traditionally restless. These waters are known, they are good only for white rafting and there are no others. Every stone and crater here is not an obstacle, but a challenge. But I'm not afraid, because I'm free. This is my advantage over you.

4.Points 1, 2, and 3 are inconsistent with each other in some aspects. Therefore, they should only be taken seriously individually. These are the terms of the game.

I started my music career two years ago. In August 2008, I returned from my many years of downshifting and thought about what to do next. I must say that I have been thinking about this on an ongoing basis for the last twelve years. During this time, I tried a lot of things, I don’t want to talk about all this - kind people sorted my life on Wikipedia.

I myself was quite amazed at all these turns when I saw them archived on one page. The only thing I would like to add to this is that my apparent inconstancy and frivolity are associated exclusively with the painful search for a new place in the sun.

By the summer of 2008, I think I had discovered such a place.

Astana and Irons

In August, I assembled a band of the best Moscow jazz musicians, we rehearsed and two weeks later performed at the opening of the Eurasia Film Festival in Astana. It was September 7, 2008. I now celebrate this day as the Day of my initiation as a musician. The program consisted of covers of Soviet and American song classics - Nat King Cole, Sinatra, Bernes, Utesov, Lagutenko, Pugacheva - and was received with a bang. Jeremy Irons, who was sitting in the hall at the banquet table, stretched his long neck all evening, trying to see me on the dark stage, which pretty much embarrassed me: I was only thinking about not lying to the English texts. In the morning the concierge brought a two-line note to my room: Thank you for the show. Jeremy Irons. I counted it as a blessing for the journey.

Jeremy Irons and Igor Grigoriev

For two years, with varying success, I made money by performing other people’s songs at corporate events, birthdays and private parties.

I was paid money, I was praised, but in the meantime I was desperately searching for my own repertoire. I rushed at everyone who, it seemed to me, could help - from Igor Nikolaev to Yuri Entin - but no one understood what genre I should write in. With each such meeting, hopes of finding their author faded. In the winter of 2009, I stopped my concert activities, realizing that I had exhausted myself with covers, and locked myself in my apartment, promising myself not to leave it until I wrote a song.

First song

The composition of the first song was facilitated, as usual, by the difficult dramatic vicissitudes of my personal life, of which I am an expert. In the wake of another separation and another broken heart, I wrote “The Ballad of the Lost Hat,” which at first I did not dare show to anyone. One day, while drinking with my musicians, on my fifth drink, I plucked up the courage and asked for attention. When I finished singing “Hat,” I found confusion on the faces of the guests. We continued the interrupted conversation, but the conversation did not go well. I was going crazy - my premiere was a failure. Already when everyone was leaving, Anton Belyaev, a musician and arranger, with whom we would later start making an album together, came up to me and said to me: “You know, when you sang that “Hat” of yours, it was as if the chair was knocked out from under me and with this They hit me in the head with a chair with all their might.” I slammed the door behind the guests and began jumping around the room like a child. Suspicious, I mistook success for failure. But it was still a success, my first success as an author.

In March 2010, I seemed to burst into tears. I composed two or three songs a day. My voice recorder stayed with me under my pillow at night - in the middle of the night I could wake up and hum an incomprehensible melody into it, which I put in order in the morning. At first I was embarrassed by these mooings of mine, until Anton Belyaev accidentally heard them. He advised me to release them separately as the soundtrack of a deep psychedelic trip that visited me. I joked about the idea, but kept all these notes in a separate folder just in case.

By April, demos for three dozen songs had been recorded, and I went to an oligarch I knew to ask for money for promotion. On the way, I stopped by to visit my friends Yegor and Ira Rzhevsky to show off what I had done. We had a fun party listening to my songs. As a result, I didn’t get to the oligarch - that same evening Yegor and Ira offered me money to record the first songs and a video clip.

Almaty. Start

In June, our team landed in Almaty to record with a symphony orchestra and shoot our first video. We did not want to record in Moscow, naively believing that in any other city we would do it faster and cheaper. In addition, a strange karmic knot connects me with Kazakhstan - several of my close friends and even loves, including my wife, come from there. Plus, in those parts there was such a glorious beginning with Irons. Kazakhstan seemed to me like a lucky talisman, platform number 9¾.

In two weeks, we recorded several songs with an orchestra and local exotic instruments and shot a video clip for the title song of the album, “Dreams of My Spring,” spending a lot of nerves and money on it. But this is a separate conversation.

I’m posting a video of how everything roughly happened.

And this is how I entered the fall of 2010 - with a modest but expressive musical biography, my own songs and a million grandiose ideas for the future.

I accepted the offer from Denis Boyarinov to share details of my musical career on OPENSPACE.RU with enthusiasm. There were two reasons for this.

First: I would like to try out a new scheme for promoting music for myself, using all possible audience segments at the same time, first separating them, and then combining them together. I’ll tell you what I’m talking about now later. At the same time, I would like to use all possible platforms, including the Internet, which over the past three years has become a serious alternative to radio and television. And yes, I really like the portal on which you are reading this now.

The second reason, no less important: I would like to introduce you to young and talented musicians, arrangers, music video directors, designers, stylists, artists - all my associates in the project. I want you to like them. Finding new heroes and launching new stars is what has always inspired me in my work. I have always tried to gather around me people stronger and more talented than myself and I always feel joy from the learning and inspiration that they give me.

In general, there were no more reasons to fit into the adventure called IGOR GRIGORIEV IN OPEN SPACE. But these two were enough.

Every week I will share news of my new life, but in the meantime, advice to other artists, as young and beginning as I am.

Advice from I.G.

At the very beginning of your career, do not show your creativity to people who do not understand you, no matter what their status, position and degree of influence. Show it only to kindred spirits - your boyfriend, girlfriend, brother, sister, only to those who feel you, love you and are ready to forgive you the flaws and imperfections of your first works. It is these people who will give you self-confidence and add energy to continue creativity. You will understand your mistakes later yourself, when you get better at it and train your ear, but first protect yourself from mistakes. If you are a creative, and therefore sensitive, person, then even a slight omission on the part of the baron you respect can seriously cut off your wings. Tell them all to go to hell. Self-confidence and courage are what you need to get started. And nothing more.

IGOR GRIGORIEV: We have been living without heroes for the last 10 years(www.pl.com.ua/?pid=28&artid=9889)

Fans of the founder of conceptual gloss, the first editor of OM magazine Igor Grigoriev, can rejoice: he has returned to active work again. This time he sings. And he does it, like everything he has done so far, well.

We recorded an interview with him via Skype on the eve of his Kyiv concert, and, looking into the camera, I was once again convinced that the best drops of Makropoulos are life today for today. A traveler and sybarite, Grigoriev, at forty-three, retained the appearance and habits of a young man. There is no bile in his jokes, and no bitterness in his memories. Oddly enough, he is a person of today - in every sense of the word.

THESE ARE BARBARIANS AND ABSOLUTE BANDITS, WHATEVER THEY SPONSORED!

– Igor, your biography is so similar to an adventure novel, at times with elements of the plot of Indian cinema, that you simply don’t know where to start. Let's say, one of the unsolvable mysteries: how, after childhood in the village, adolescence in a foster family and military service, do you suddenly enter MGIMO on the first try?

– You know, at the age of 20 people are supposed to be adventurers. As for my admission to MGIMO, I was simply lucky: I was young, ambitious and did not allow the thought of failure. I arrived in Moscow with two string bags, got out on Vernadsky Avenue, and the prospect of southwestern new buildings opened up before me. The second time I experienced such an impression of a grandiose, fantastic city was only years later - when I arrived in New York. And then I lit a cigarette and said to myself: I like this city, and I will make it.

– Well, yes, young Rastignac said something similar, looking at Paris from the top of a hill.

- Is very similar. I chose MGIMO according to the standard, precisely because it was very difficult to get into it, and not because I wanted to be a diplomat.

– Together with Boris Zosimov, you created the Imperial magazine, which ushered in the era of gloss in Russia. In this regard, what is your opinion about the oligarchs of the first wave, what role did they play in the formation of the newest culture of Russia? And how did they differ from the second wave oligarchs like Mamut, Prokhorov, Deripaska and others, whom you hate so passionately?

– I have never directly encountered those that were in the early 90s, so for me they are a kind of cliché: a crimson jacket, a chain, a shaved head. But I still meet their followers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. We recently walked into a restaurant and saw a company that took us back to the 90s. I believe that these people are the foam of history, which has left no trace in it other than a bloody one. Today's people, including those who flirt with art, are no different. But, as one of my friends says, if there is an opportunity to cheat them out of money, then we should do it. And, thank God, there are artists who sell them their paintings and even fly on their personal planes. As they say, a filthy sheep gets a tuft of wool. Because the current oligarchs are a gang of egoists and murderers, for whom this country is nothing more than a field for profit. They do not think in terms of old age, and this explains a lot. Because a person who wants to grow old in some place subconsciously prepares a comfortable platform for himself. But these people, whom I observe in Courchevel or Sardinia, have reserved a ghetto for themselves, and they don’t care about the rest. These are barbarians and absolute bandits, no matter what they sponsor.

THE MAGAZINE BUSINESS IS EXPERIENCED BY THE SAME CRISIS AS ALL MASS CULTURE

– You stood at the origins of Russian gloss. Moreover, OM remains the best conceptual journal in the post-Soviet space. The further history of this business took him into the provincial jungle of pictures from the life of the fashion and modeling business. The texts are unreadable, there are no problems, and so are the characters.

– Glossy magazines in the West in the 60s and 70s were some kind of clubs that included great photographers, talented writers and journalists. OM took the best from this experience and with his existence actually closed the time of the heroes. With the default of 1998 in Russia, this time ended. Yes, strictly speaking, this is a global process, and for the last 10 years we have been living without heroes. The Moscow glossy carousel spins the same characters, without even thinking about stepping on their tail. The magazine and glossy business is experiencing the same crisis as all of mass culture. I talk to 20-year-olds all the time and I have to say that they have Cobain, Sinatra, Morrison on their iPods. Why? Because our time has not given rise to a new wave of heroism.

– Your entry into politics in the late 90s is surprising for a person with your vigilance and understanding of the funny and absurd. The public political movement you founded then was called “Generation of Freedom.” This is despite the fact that in Russia historically there has never been a place for freedom.

- (Sad.) Yes, it never happened... But in the first half of the 90s we were inspired by the changes in the country, and my entry into politics was akin to the adventurism that motivated me when I entered MGIMO. Okay, I told myself, I have my own audience, I have something to tell them, and I know where to take them. As a result, I fled the country the day before the decisive press conference. As they say, God took it away.

– You see, the sad thing is not that something didn’t work out, the sad thing is that the entire generation of 40-year-olds has undergone some kind of inexplicable upheaval today. Ivan Demidov, for example, from the screen of the Slavyansky channel, it seems, is broadcasting something about morality and ethics, Boris Grebenshchikov goes to Surkov for orders in the Kremlin. It was they and people like them who made it clear to the current generation of 20-year-olds that conformity is the best thing you can choose for your destiny. How to deal with the responsibility of the former masters of minds?

- Well, yes, it’s hard to object to that. You know, my alter ego lives in the West, his name is Tyler Brule. Our paths developed in parallel. In '94 he made Wallpaper magazine. I'm in '95 - OM. I left in '98, he left a year later. But Tyler left there with a personal helicopter, a house in Zurich and an island in the Mediterranean Sea. I left with nothing, because the work of a talented independent person in our country has never been paid and is not paid to this day. Therefore, I don’t really blame those who took a different path. Let’s take my former comrade Kirill Serebrennikov, to whom I once said in my heart: “Why are you doing so much of everything?! You’re not an orchestra that can be called to a wedding, banquet and funeral!” And he answered me very simply: “I now have 60 meters on Ostozhenka, I need another 60 meters to transport my mother from Rostov.” Tell me, is he a traitor or not? After all, he is ready to stage this novel by Surkov! Can I blame him? I can not.

– We are not talking about 60 meters. The point is that some are fleeing hunger and humiliation, while others simply turned out to be “the best students.” Like, for example, Fyodor Bondarchuk, who never felt the need for 60 meters, but is ready for any vulgarity for the sake of money and popularity. His films of recent years should be canonized as examples of opportunism and vulgarity.

- That's all true. But now we are not talking about Fed Bondarchuk or Tina Kandelaki, we are talking about talented people who cannot live with dignity in proportion to their talent. And tell me, why did I come to this “2020” forum?! (At the “Strategy 2020” forum, an unpleasant dialogue took place between Grigoriev and the Kremlin ideologist Surkov on the topic “what is the real elite,” which Russian publications later wrote about. - Author).

– Really, why did you go there? Do you still not know why Surkov is gathering the intelligentsia?

– But I’m still a romantic! They called and said: “Igor, we need people like you now. There is a lot of money in the country, and we would like to do something really significant for the country.” I was inspired and thought: what if something really changed?

PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT UNTIL YOU OFFER IT FOR THEM

– Well, yes, “there is a lot of money in the country” sounds very exciting. Any idea will inadvertently inspire you.

– (Laughs.) Renata Litvinova once told me: “The most erotic gift is money.” I understand her: when she married a rich man, she blossomed! There was no longer any need to earn money at some corporate events. For me, money is an opportunity to freely broadcast myself into space. Or travel. Or help good people. When I was in the Himalayas, where dust storms constantly occur, I took with me a certain number of bottles of Visine to save local children and grandmothers from chronic conjunctivitis. To them I was the big white doctor.

– Why didn’t your romance with Russian TV work out - they never launched Twin Twix, and quickly closed the Saturday Night Fever program?

– Television has fallen into a pathological dependence on ratings - people, they say, watch this. But if the same type of bread is supplied to stores, they will also buy it, because they need to eat something. As a result, TV was eaten up by a whole generation, which threw the “box” into a landfill. Young people will not watch all these Basques wandering from channel to channel. By the way, I told Kostya (Ernst - author) about this, who now feels as if the whole world is spinning in one place, and quoted him a phrase from an American millionaire who got rich in the service sector: “I never followed people.” . Often people don’t know what they want until you offer it to them.”

– Ernst, I think, himself understands that his TV will end as soon as at least a quarter of the Russian population has the Internet. But he is a temporary worker who is given three to five years to cut the dough. Igor, what people in Russia are you interested in today?

- Of course, there are probably such people. I’m looking for them not only in Russia, I’m looking for them all over the world. And I am very happy when I find in New York or Rome, where in taverns they sing their endless lyrical saga. In Russia, unfortunately, some kind of reverse process is taking place. I recently read Andrei Konchalovsky’s memoirs about what Mosfilm was like in the 60s. It was a company of amazing people who gathered, discussed Western and domestic films, and could fight over some shot of Kalatozov. Where are these blocks, where are these monsters? There are no more generations, no communities. That's why I'm looking for individual people, bits of talent in LiveJournal and other networks. If I feel “substance” and not “the shadow of substance”, I begin to persuade: write, write! Perhaps in the future these individuals will begin to form communities, without which any social release is impossible.

– Why did you start making videos, and then films?

– This was my childhood dream. I even had the nickname Director at school. The story behind Twin Twix is ​​this: I'm a big fan of Woody Allen...

– ... and, probably, you like freaks in general?

- Well, these are interesting creatures. But to love? Don't know. I'm a freak myself. And every freak, as you know, needs an audience, and not another freak nearby.

If we return to cinema, then, unlike the journalistic profession, it happens here and now. Nothing can be rewritten. As a result, you become dependent on people - albeit untalented ones, but not the ones you need for this job. There is no critical mass in Russian cinema to make decent work.

– Your life today is connected with music. Why did you start singing?

– I got into this story because I ran out of money. I was traveling and they ran out. And my first performance at the festival attracted attention. Then I received blessings from various famous people and suddenly I realized that everything was serious. Being a perfectionist, I constantly “eat” myself; I always have pockets full of ashes for myself. I shake before going on stage. And I know what I use to captivate viewers – dysfunction. In my case, it’s not about charisma, not about artistry, not about baggage, but precisely about this dysfunction.

– Do you use stimulants before a concert?

“I used to be able to drink a little, but now I’ve given up on it.” I don’t use drugs, but I love good alcohol, for which my friends contemptuously call me blue (laughs).

– Age-related fears – what are they like after 40? Fear of loneliness, fear of aging?

– Loneliness is felt most acutely after a concert, when you are driving home alone. But this has all been decided a long time ago. But the fear of aging is serious. When the body cannot reproduce the spontaneous expressions of the soul - what could be worse than that?

AFTERWORD

– Your colleague Igor Shulinsky once expressed himself very eloquently about the 90s: “We thought we would see the sky in diamonds, but we saw x...”

- I'm a fatalist. In general, after an injury, when a rogue wave covered me in Brazil and my arm was almost torn off, I, as a rule, refuse to talk about these topics, so as not to speak platitudes. The next morning I woke up and realized that I couldn’t get out of bed to go pee... At such a moment, all claims to life and reflections are worth nothing. It was a very valuable experience.

The most important thing in life? Answer yourself three questions: “who are you?”, “where are you from?” and “where to now?” If you answered these questions, then internally you are ready for anything.

The editors thank Svetlana Volnova for organizing the interview with Igor Grigoriev.

DOSSIER "PL"

IGOR GRIGORIEV

He spent his childhood and adolescence in the village of Lakedemonovka in a peasant family. He arrived in Moscow in the summer of 1987 and entered MGIMO as a full-time student at the Faculty of International Relations (specialization - Thailand and Thai language).

Since 1988, he began to combine his studies with his work as concert director of Irina Ponarovskaya.

In 1991, he left his studies at MGIMO and began studying journalism. In 1993, he met show businessman Boris Zosimov, with whom he published Russia’s first thick glossy magazine, Imperial. In May 1995, he began working on the OM magazine. For five years in a row, the magazine was awarded the title of best magazine of the year as assessed by fellow journalists. In November 1998, Grigoriev resigned as editor-in-chief.

In December 1998 he founded the All-Russian public political movement “Generation of Freedom”. In December 1999, it became part of the “Bear” association; three candidates from the movement were elected deputies of the State Duma of the third convocation. Igor Grigoriev himself left the movement due to a conflict within the management elite.

In May 1999, Igor Grigoriev settled in Prague. He was a co-owner of a small cafe in the city center, which became a place of informal meetings for employees of Radio Liberty.

In 1999, he returned to Moscow at the invitation of the general producer of the TV-6 channel, Ivan Demidov. In May 2000, the channel began airing a weekly information and entertainment program, “Saturday Night Fever with Igor Grigoriev.” The program remained on the air until November 2000.

After leaving television, Igor made videos. Among Grigoriev’s famous works are “Beads” (for Dmitry Malikov) and “Go, I will be” (for the group “Mumiy Troll”).

In 2004, he began filming the television series Twin Twix based on his own script. A copy of the “pilot” is still circulating in narrow cinematic circles.

In 2006, he left Russia and settled in Rio de Janeiro. Since June 2006, he has kept a constant online diary in which he publishes reports about his travels.

In 2008, after a ten-year break, Igor Grigoriev returned to active creative activity with a musical project. In November 2008, he signed a contract with the agency City Concerts International Artists, which specializes in concert activities of foreign artists in Russia, becoming the first and only Russian performer on the agency’s roster.

“Pink crucifixion”, “there will be no spring”... Are you consciously on the same wavelength as Henry Miller, or does it come out naturally?

I cannot seriously answer this question. What the hell?))) Where am I, where is Miller... Besides, I don’t count Miller among my idols. I support Miller in his belief that real spiritual upgrade is possible only in a marginal state, when you are up to your neck in dirt, shit, blood and sperm.))) Enlighten yourself at a Kabbalah seminar, sitting in an ergonomic chair with a book by Yehuda Berg in a break between training at Worldclass and dinner at Vanilla, means something wild: you are Alena Doletskaya. Miller's main book is the only one I've gotten through, but I like the words with which it begins: “I live in the Villa Borghese. There is not a speck of dust around, all the chairs are in place. We are alone here, and we are dead.” Therefore, like Miller, I am interested in outsiders, bearers of unforgivable vices. They are closest to God. I myself have received revelations in moments of extreme despair and in the most inappropriate places. For example, sitting on a push, suffering from diarrhea. At this point, our common wave with Miller calmly subsides.)

Why Rio? You weren't detained by border guards? Are you the Count of Monte Cristo? Are they loading oranges in barrels?

In Rio I found the state of contentment with the present that I had long sought in the Himalayas. And this in itself is strange, since all spiritual Himalayan schools are built on practices that teach the acquisition of this state, but Rio is still anthropologically and culturally the complete opposite of the Himalayas. The answer, however, is simple. Brazil remains still a pagan country with hundreds of sects and local cults, and besides, the worldview of Brazilians is not at all burdened with cultural baggage. A person reading a book on a Rio beach is most likely a foreigner, or at worst an Argentinean. They are, of course, aware that they have Amadou, Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector, but this knowledge is not dominant. A culture that is based on reflection and the eternal search for the existential “I” is not able to dominate in the land of year-round bright sun, lush ocean, birds of paradise, prominent asses, easy love and beautiful thoughtlessness. In the land of primitive happiness, in a word. Anthropologically, Brazil has retained the characteristics of a human paradise as seen by the Portuguese who landed on Brazilian shores 500 years ago. The general public does not know that More described his “Utopians” from the notes of his associates Cabral and Vespucci, who were fascinated by the beauty of the Brazilian aborigines and the anarchic but fair system that reigned there. Therefore, what I was looking for in esoteric and exoteric teachings turned out to be in pure carnal form on the beaches of Ipanema.

And, of course, oranges don’t grow in Brazil, no one wears white pants, and monkeys live only in the Amazon, and even those are small.

They say “scoop”, they mean “Kazakhstan”. Home of Borat and the world's best potassia. Do you often visit Kazakhstan, what is really happening there?

Kazakhstan, of course, is a wild country, but no wilder than other lands inhabited by nomads. The way of life and worldview of nomads are determined by a combination of three factors - the dull monotony of the landscape, the minor key of the wind and the main ram, which leads the herd, and therefore the people, to where there is grass and water, that is, life. The entire movement towards life is predetermined by the ram leader; at no point on this path is there any reason for emotional clouding of the mind. Under such conditions, people become prone to deep introspection. With external savagery, they become the owners of a third eye. Almost every Kazakh is a mystic, but not of the Muslim, but of the shamanic kind. This is what makes them attractive to me, and I turn a blind eye to their lack of secularism. In general, this is not difficult to do.)))

You wrote in your “Proust Questionnaire” that you don’t recognize poetry and you don’t have any favorite poets. Hasn't that changed? Where does this mistrust of poetry come from?

Distrust of a subject is a consequence of knowledge of the subject. I'm not at all familiar with poetry. It so happened that she passed me by. I even remember how it happened. I think I was in third grade, and the teacher told me to write a quatrain about autumn. I was so inspired by the task that I wrote a poem over the course of the evening. When I was reading it in class, on the fifth quatrain, the teacher stopped me, asking who I had ripped all this off from. I remember how I ran away from school to the river, hid in the reeds and sobbed there from resentment. From that moment on, poems ceased to exist as objects of my admiration. True, something periodically broke through the armor of rejection - at one time I was fascinated by young Limonov, for example. Now I am forced to write the lyrics to my songs myself, and, oddly enough, I can do it. For example, I really love this line of mine: “I had dreams, in the middle of spring I won’t wake up - don’t wind the clock. I won’t come back, I’ll stay in them, and you go...” I think it's great.))

Zinaida Gippius described Nikolai Gumilyov as “a young man who sniffed the ether and proclaimed himself Mohammed, Buddha and Jesus at the same time.” Don’t you notice this “neophyte’s delight” behind you? You don’t forget that such an important experience for you of “climbing the cross” and “descending from it” was experienced by countless millions of inhabitants of this planet, and was described in thousands of texts, be it Plato’s dialogues and “The Book of the Dead”, “The Divine Comedy” , plays by Shakespeare, prose of Tolstoy, “Ulysses”, poems by Pushkin and Mandelstam, songs by The Beatles, studies by Propp and Lévi-Strauss, etc. and so on. I’m not talking about countless “things” that were done worse, but no less metaphysical in origin - for example, many texts published in OM.

An enthusiastic neophyte is like a buffoon who believes that everything is allowed to him and loses control over self-dosing. I have always wondered whether the jester who goes to the chopping block for his long tongue regrets that he was intemperate.)

But, nevertheless, you accurately noticed my condition at the moment. Sometimes I physically shake from this sensation. At such moments, I clearly see how millions of puzzles open up and form an extremely harmonious and beautiful picture. Into a sort of Borgesian Aleph, a gathering point of all points. But as soon as I want to fix it, it crumbles and leaves me. All that remains are mirages and smells, which in my case turn into songs.

Comparisons of my type with Gumilyov seem incorrect to me, since Gumilyov was a classic “martyr”. I am even familiar with some of these prophet-martyrs. They constantly attract suffering to themselves, receiving masochistic pleasure from it. For example, Rustam Khamdamov savors his life as an outcast, dressing it up with endless sores and nostalgia for the past. Gumilev was looking for martyrdom and, as a result, found it. This kind of reflection deactivates the prophet’s ability to communicate clearly and loudly, which is why prophets are equipped here in general. Here Pushkin is a prophet of the opposite sense to Gumilyov, because he is wealthier. Gumilyov is boring. He is an esthete, a nobleman and a “twilight” intellectual. The congregation does not hear him. His poems lack the categorical rudeness of a barbarian. A true prophet is always a barbarian. An arrogant, cruel, rude, ignorant destroyer of the dominant cultural field.

I noticed that people who spent their childhood in the countryside almost never lose the ability to “fly,” no matter how much they wander around the cities. Tell us about the village of Lakedemonovka.

This is a settlement on the shores of the Miussky Bay, where during my childhood there were monster sturgeons, and I devoured black caviar, scooping it with a spoon from a three-liter jar straight from the refrigerator. This is a fertile region in which the dark sides of the Russian character bloom as fully as the lilacs outside the window or the apricot trees in the garden. I remember that I always wanted to escape from there. I made my first escape attempt when I was four years old. I put three oranges in the chamber pot and went with these simple belongings to the neighboring village. My plans were to briefly stay with my parents’ friends, and then go further towards Ukraine, because my parents brought chocolates and delicious marshmallows from there, and for me Ukraine was the land of endless marshmallows. But a big incident happened, they found me out and noisily returned me home. Now my connection with the village is limited to trips to my old mother, who lives there alone and, due to her bad character, has quarreled with all her neighbors and relatives. I have to fly there once every three months to bathe her and replenish the refrigerator with provisions for the next three months. I think that after she leaves I will forget the way there.

Cross-dressing is an ancient tradition, both among the Slavs and any other peoples who have not lost touch with the land. Before the revolution, it was customary for boys up to a certain age to dress as girls. Do you have any standard answers to “guys” who say that you are “not a man”? By the way, were you compared to Mikhail Kuznetsov in the second part of “Ivan the Terrible”?

I made the decision to play a woman the day before filming for a simple reason - there was no one to play her. Not a single actress who competed for the role of the Harpist seemed funny to me. But miraculously, from my Harpist came a collective portrait of a Soviet woman, beaten, but not saying goodbye to her Dream.))) That’s why the female audience reacts so positively to the video. I was told that in my heroine many role models of Soviet women of the last fifty years can be discerned - from Svetlana Svetlichnaya to Lyudmila Chursina.

Dressing as a woman is, of course, a classic carnival trick, replacing the good “yang” with the evil “yin”. Therefore, such a trick is always to the liking of the viewer. Dustin Hoffman is well remembered from the film “Tootsie”, Alexander Kalyagin’s main role is considered “aunt”, and Jack Lemmon generally remained an actor in one role - Daphne from the comedy “Some Like It Hot”. In Brazil, for example, many men do not have enough imagination to come up with a bright image for Carnival, and then they put on their wife’s blouse, expose their boobs and go to the parade with the whole family. And so you see an interesting picture: a couple is walking - a woman, next to him is a man in a woman’s dress with one child in his arms, the other in a stroller. Note that for them, dressing in women's clothes is just a way of least resistance to the call of the “carnival”. And it doesn’t occur to anyone that the next day they will have to justify themselves to their friends and colleagues and prove that they are, after all, “men.”

The standard story of the era of so-called “postmodernism” is that something that was intended as a joke turns out to be more serious than serious. How long ago have you begun to discern the internal logic of your biography? And are there “points” in it that are still unclear to you? Why was the magazine called “Om”?

Well, yes... The last of these “points” concerns composing music, despite the fact that I have no musical education, and for me, musical notation and Chinese reading are visually phenomena of the same order.))) In Brazil, I saw a documentary about the first samba composers. These were completely illiterate old people to whom music came, and they did not understand how it happened. Since there were no voice recorders or recorders at that time, and the old people did not rely on their memory, they used their grandchildren to memorize melodies. All of Kartola’s melodies were memorized by his granddaughter, and then sung to the musicians for learning. Chaplin wrote his grandiose soundtrack for the film City Lights in almost the same way.

And the logic of my life is simple and predictable: from birth I strive for peace, but I am constantly recruited for training camps.

The theme of the “second coming” is as old as Christianity itself. European people are accustomed to seeing in every local disaster a sign that the Dude will soon return.

Bowie sang about “Five Years” until the end of the world, the Beatles about “the coming of the Sun King,” Jim Morrison about being The Lizard King, Led Zeppelin about the coming final battle. Nothing, however, happens.

Now, it seems, there is not a single area of ​​culture that is not affected by the premonition of the apocalypse. Gorillaz, Antony and the Johnsons, Arctic Monkeys, Gutter Twins, and Massive Attack sing about him.

What is it, the seventh part of “Harry Potter” (released 2012 years after the birth of the historical I.H.) was not called “H.P.” only for commercial reasons, it seems. and the gifts of the Magi.”

Julian Assange recently “made everything secret obvious.” With all this, the great English poet-prophet T.S. Eliot wrote that the end of the world will not manifest itself in any way in visible reality. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Are you personally expecting some kind of disaster, or are you ready to get a “long happy life” instead of a “cross”?

Eliot is absolutely right, and the end of the world has already happened. Its final phase - clearing the fields - is happening before our eyes, but few people see it. Many so-called living people think that they are still alive, because all the signs of visible reality indicate so. But reality itself has already excluded them from its circulation. Such zombies can be easily identified by their hysterical reaction to my video. They react to any vital field like demons to a cross. Arm yourself with my video like a cross and go through your friends. It will become clear to you who is no longer with you. Or with us)))

The 90s in Russia passed, it seems, under the sign of Khlebnikov, a great prophet, but rather ruthless and inhuman. Now Vvedensky is returning to us, whose God is not the cosmic Cthulhu, but rather the domestic God of trifles. Fedorov, naturally, felt this before others.

What can you say about Vvedensky other than “that’s very cool”?

Here is Vvedensky, one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. It is no coincidence that he is returning right now. But, you know... for Vvedensky to really happen, he needs to come up with a voice, show it. Everyone knows with what intonation one should recite Mayakovsky or Akhmatova. But in what key should we read the strange, often primitive Vvedensky? After all, this is a very important question - setting the tone. Although, in fact, I don’t want Vvedensky to happen at all. Let mothers read his children's poems to their children at night. And that will be enough. So I wrote music for his poem “In angry and sleepy restaurants,” but also music. and the image that I came up with for the video has nothing to do with Vvedensky. After all, the prophets thought through their doctrines with one goal - to hide real knowledge from the people))) For the same reasons, the people should not demonstrate their Gods.

What is your personal attitude towards Islam? We all know what the “public face” of Islam is now, but at one time it was the most courtly of religions: Mohammed cut off his cloak so as not to disturb the cat, the main Muslim symbol is the moon. Before contact with Muslims, Christian Europe was, by and large, a desert in which “the righteous were sausaged like lads on heroin.” Or is this all “not your thing”?

I don’t want to pretend to be a know-it-all, but it seems to me that the main problem with Islam is that it was immediately elevated to its shield by Arab degenerates. As a result, a civilizational catastrophe occurred - Islam was replaced by Islamism. This could not happen to any other major religion except Islam, because Islam is the most vulnerable religion. It was created by hedonistic poets, reclining on soft pillows with the revelations of their predecessors in their hands. And then what to ask of a religion that considers sex one of the ways of worshiping the Almighty?))) In essence, the Koran is an openwork and free interpretation of Christian commandments. The interpretations of good, evil and moral laws in Islam turned out to be too liberal and too vague, which allows manipulators to make blind kittens out of Muslims. Unfortunately, Islam cannot be returned. But, even more unfortunately, Islamism cannot be stopped.

You say that Kashin is of little interest to you, because he is “just a pawn.” But are you sure that you are a figure? You say yourself that songs “come to you in your dreams.” On the other hand, doesn't Alice Through the Looking Glass, probably the greatest esoteric book in the new European tradition, teach that only a pawn can become the Scarlet Wife? Or, take Orwell: If there is hope... it lies in the proles. By origin, it seems, you are also “from the peasants”, and not “from the nobles”.

Of course, I'm not a figure at all. For the last 12 years I have been killing myself in search of my place in the sun, and nothing has worked out for me. Then at one moment someone opened the tap and music started flowing into me. I had no choice but to fix it. If you ask me what I want most now, I will answer - I don’t want anything else. But I have no right to let down the forces that recruited me to action and handed me such a powerful weapon as music.

The caricature “General Lebed” from the 90s (which, of course, had nothing to do with reality - the vocabulary of the real General Lebed was slightly less than Pushkin’s) had a favorite saying: “I fell and did a push-up.” And this cartoon Swan also said, “It’s hard to swim in hydrochloric acid with your legs cut off.”

Igor Grigoriev is a man who has the talent to fall, the tenacity to swim in hydrochloric acid and the strength to do push-ups.

Another saying says that the first to escape a ship are the rats. Not every proverb is worth following; many of them were invented by the elders in the barracks to intimidate the juniors in the barracks, so that unnecessary thoughts would not come to their minds.

A short acquaintance with Grigoriev’s biography is enough to be convinced: in addition to following the call, there is another equally frequently repeated motive in his life - escaping from a sinking ship. He runs without knowing why, jumps without laying down a straw - and always ends up being right. “Thematically” he can be compared with Ilya Lagutenko, but in the “leak away” and “we leave” of the latter there is still a philistine desire to lay straw.

Let’s compare two “Ranetki”: You can’t argue that “Mumiy Troll” has everything exactly: an apple from the tree of knowledge, a prison called “world supermarket”, crocodile tears of “slaves of enlightenment”, who, without much pleasure, finally learned that everything is Soviet propaganda spoke about the “world bourgeoisie” and “the machinations of imperialism” was true.

Seen from the point of view of a man who voluntarily went to work as an ant to build a pyramid, the name of the owner of which he will never know (aka “hipster” aka “normal”), there is courage and even some visionary depth in the song “MT”: in the end, Not everyone, probably, in January 1999 understood what it was about.

But the feline gloating with which Lagutenko voices his “truths” ultimately led him to “social commentary”, which is no longer interesting to anyone

It is not interesting not because there is some kind of untruth there, but because in 2007, singing songs identical to the ten-year-old editorials of the newspaper “Zavtra” with curses addressed to “Gaidarochubais” is a rather empty exercise.

When Grigoriev sings the same “Ranetka”, you hear not journalism, but a story from life. And this story exists apart from some “social contexts” and discourses. And this is deeply true.

Because Russia became a “prison of nations” not under “Puten” and not under Nicholas I, but much earlier, and “a man is born a slave, a slave goes to his grave” was said not yesterday, but almost 200 years ago. Take some modern “Russian traveler” who complains about “Russian savagery” - the personal freedoms that he has now could not have been dreamed of by the poet Pushkin or the poet Lermontov in his wildest dreams. That did not stop them from writing works of extreme courage and audacity.

Without the Tsar’s whip, many simply have nothing to do with themselves, and if you read the meaning of their “servant letters”, they are not at all about “they beat a lot,” but about the fact that “the whip is short.”

Prigov once said that Russia, a country in which the metaphysical fear of freedom is stronger than all other fears, is doomed, apparently, to walk in the same circles: a breath of air is necessarily followed by bloodletting.

And indeed, if we compare today’s situation with the one that Andrei Bely described in the preface to “The Beginning of the Century,” little has changed: the same liberal idle talk on the one hand, gendarme security on the other, petty-bourgeois stupidity on the third.

But freedom is not the thickness of a wallet, the number of KGB connections and “symbolic capital.” Freedom is a state of consciousness; it is achievable under any political system and economic circumstances.

Freedom is the freedom to sing and dance, knowing that the guns of gangsters are looking at you, that the spring that you conjure may not come, that both your body and your dance are ultimately corrupt.

Grigoriev often does not understand what he is doing, he does not calculate his strength well, he does not know his place in this world; but he is never wrong. He dances and sings because he was told that he can dance and sing. Today he is no longer a little rat who escaped from a ship called the Titanic, inevitably moving towards an iceberg. Western civilization, but a man who has a pipe, and with this pipe he is ready to lead away other little rats - as in the barracks they call people who are not completely in their hearts freedom died.

This is everyone’s personal choice - to keep their mind in the earthly city or the heavenly city, but do not forget - somewhere there is an eternally young man with a pipe; he sings and dances, and this song and dance will never stop.

A man sits in front of me and every minute he says that he is tired. This is the editor-in-chief of the magazine “OM” Igor Grigoriev. For the last five years, no one knew anything about him. And suddenly he is back in action. I wanted to make a sad film about great love, but now I’m launching a New Year’s comedy about women. He considers Eduard Limonov a genius, compares Lars von Trier in cruelty to Chekhov and is afraid to say banal things.

– You returned to OM magazine. Why?

– It’s not like I’m back. In general, I never left. I just haven't been involved with the magazine for the last five years. It was sad to look at the magazine all this time. He is my child, no one else's.

- Why did you bring the child to such a state?

- The devil knows! This is the kind of father I am. Absolutely lousy father. In general, I’ll tell you: I’m tired of working. I do not want to work. These last five years I have done nothing. And I really liked it. I do not want to do anything. Nothing!

– What then to do?

- Travel. The only activity that is worthy of me now. I would leave, come back, throw my bag, grab a new one, and so on.

– The fascinating world of the jetset...

- What are you speaking about? That is out of my range. Do you have a jet-set magazine?.. I can’t stand jet-set...

– Back in January 2002, you talked about filming a film based on the book by Denis Bushuev. The film was supposed to be about the love of a young teacher and his 14-year-old student. What's going on with the project now?

– A very good script has been written and is lying on the table, waiting in the wings. The state did not consider it possible to give money...

– Why the state? Couldn't you find sponsors?

– No, we submitted the script to the state commission. And we were refused. But I think the script needs to rest.

– Did Renata Litvinova somehow participate in the project?

– Renata did not participate in any way. She said that she had not seen so much dirt and filth in one script for a long time. She did not accept my offer to become a co-author. But I'm making a different movie. Comedy.

– It’s impossible to say about you that you can make comedies.

– The fact is that this is the only thing I want to do. To be weird.

- What is the movie about?

- About women.

– Ozone in Russian?

- Then it's Woody Allen. For him, women are certainly a non-discussable object for satire. A man by himself is a rather boring creature. If a man is not boring, then he is no longer a man.

– What is the classical understanding?

– This is what 85% of all men do.

- Who?

– Words cannot clearly explain. You see, a man is a very stable creature, unlike a woman, a creature that constantly reflects. A woman, for example, begins to lose weight from birth. What is female friendship worth? Men are friends with each other evenly, steadily, firmly. Boring. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

- I understand so far.

“Watch those women over there, they’re sitting at the table behind us.” This is already cinema. Over the past five minutes, they straightened their hair several times, refreshed their lipstick and changed their position three times.

– So, who’s starring in the film? Famous actresses or your discoveries?

- Finds. I needed thirty-year-old actresses, and none of this generation that I knew suited me. I work with amazing girls, almost all of them were once rejected by directors. But there are no bad actors, there are only bad directors. I needed blank sheets of paper to put paint on.

– So all the heroines are about thirty?

- Yes. Thirty is an interesting age. Especially if the woman is not yet married. It’s like “The last minute call” at airports. If you are about thirty and not yet married, you are in constant combat readiness. A very funny situation. From the outside.

- This is a series?

- No. Four-part feature film.

- What's the movie's name?

- “Twin Twix.” This is the name of the bar where the heroines gather. Such a society consisting of only women. And yet they are all celebrities.

- Do you feel a woman?

- Certainly. The purpose of a woman is quite simple: a woman is a man's pleaser. This is a classic type of woman. And I respect this type to the highest degree. A woman is a secondary creature, incapable of feats, but her mission is to motivate a man to feats.

– Do you tell women this?

- Every day. And first of all, to my smart wife, who feeds me, praises me and makes me laugh. And at the same time he will not contradict him on a single occasion. If you meet such a woman, consider yourself extremely lucky. This is the woman of your life. Nowadays they practically don’t produce them.

– Do you communicate with men?

- Due to duty. For entertainment, men are interesting if they are not men.

– Do you need to feel smarter than others?

- Yes, for me. You won’t deny that the fingers of two hands are enough to list the people you want to listen to. For example, Andrei Sergeevich Konchalovsky. It’s rare about someone you can say “I have the HONOR to know.” I have the HONOR of knowing him. I have the HONOR to know Inna Mikhailovna Churikova. I dream of the HONOR of being represented by Bekhtereva.

– Are you a metrosexual?

- Well, who else?.. My editor Denis Boyarinov says that there are only two metrosexuals in Russia - Grigoriev and Lagutenko.

– Is it fashionable?

– What are we, journalists? To throw new concepts into the people, to make them fashionable. Do you think it’s been interesting for me since 951 to stitch together 200 pages into one magazine every month? You're wrong if you think it's interesting. What's interesting is what's around these pages.

– Do you often say the word “fashionable”?

– It's already overused.

- Trend?

- Trend? Another word that I translated into Russian in 1993. These new words... Yesterday Kirill Serebrennikov called me and said that with my new magazine I had established anti-glamorous glamor. Funny.

– Are you coming to St. Petersburg?

– Unfortunately, or fortunately, not often. I came to you six times. The first time I came to St. Petersburg, and it greeted me with low skies, chilly wind and cold. People walked with their collars up and wrapped in scarves. I thought: “What a mess! In this city, people should drink vodka and cry, drink vodka and cry. Wake up in the morning, take a drink, cry – and so on until the evening.” And then I came a second time. The clouds cleared a little, and it didn’t seem so bad anymore. When I arrived for the third time, I accidentally found myself at the same table in a restaurant with your former governor Yakovlev. And I tell him: “Listen, light up Nevsky! You have such a magical city. But at night... Light up Nevsky." I must say that by that time I was drunk, and I didn’t give a damn how he would react. I just blurted out. And then, a few months later, my friend called me from St. Petersburg and said that Nevsky glows at night. And the fourth time I arrived in your city, I was met by a St. Petersburg driver. And we drove through the spring city, and behind me I reasoned out loud that the more I come here, the more I like it. And suddenly this same driver says, says quietly, almost to himself: “And difficult love is true love.” You know, in the life of every person there are such phrases, little phrases, from which your worldview is formed. And this driver says this... And I think: “What a son of a bitch...” When like this, step by step you make your way under the low sky, through raised collars... This is a different kind of concept... That’s why I hate giving interviews. I often say strange things. And you must understand them the same way I understand them...

– You speak as if you are tired of just explaining your thoughts...

- Tired, tired...

– You need to speak in some kind of inhuman language... Maybe with gestures. Watch it so that everyone understands everything. That’s how you just exhaled smoke upward, and it would be clear to everyone that you should be left... And there’s already a paragraph of text.

- Well, yes... Well, of course... Of course, everything has been clear to everyone for a long time. Here you are, I make magazines, we make films. For what? And so everything is clear. Games, games of games, games of games about games. Damn, how predictable everything is. But I have to work, because I personally have no other sources of income. I turn 37 this year, and I wonder if I really don’t deserve peace?

– Don’t you feel sorry for yourself?

- What a pity.

- Are you crying?

- Well, I cry... If I crush the cat’s tail... I cry at melodramas. So, you know, shed a tear. Just like before, doctors used to bleed for relief.

- Publicly?

“I want to do it publicly, but it doesn’t work.” Sometimes I want to cry so that an image will form, so that everyone will appreciate it... We were talking about something else...

- Tell me, have you understood the essence?

- I think yes. I left OM magazine in 1998 in a very unhinged state. I was very tired of everything, of the life I led. From everything. I don’t want to remember the details, but I was faced with a severe need to break the circle. And I went to Europe, stopped in Prague, the same infernal city as your St. Petersburg. Sometimes he took a backpack over his shoulder and traveled around Europe. He worked at the bar, mixed cocktails and introduced himself as Anton, Ivan, Stepan - depending on his mood. And I really liked it. I was a man without a myth, without the long tail of a legend.

– Have you really learned the essence behind the bar?

– No, no, I learned the essence later. But the bar counter was a necessary prelude to understanding the essence.

– Is this a physical moment? Did you get in the shower and find out?

- Like that. When I returned from abroad, I woke up in the morning and saw Hollywood snow falling outside the windows. I have huge – floor to ceiling – windows, huge. And such large, unreal snow fell. And I said to myself: “Listen, guy, you have too many reasons to be happy! You are the happiest person in this world! The happiest".

– And you know everything now, after you have learned the essence?

- Almost all. Even how your life will end.

-Can you tell me?

- I'm afraid this won't excite you.

- Tell. Maybe give me some money? Is one hundred rubles enough?

- No, no, you're just humiliating me.

“We may never see each other again.” I'm just taking advantage of the opportunity.

– You are making very serious statements now. Do you know that according to the Buddhist concept, people never meet for nothing? And if you and I met today and are sitting at the same table, it means that we knew each other in a past life. And next time we'll meet again. However... Let's talk about something fun.

– Make a portrait of an ideal man.

– An ideal man has one quality - he must constantly do things in his life that are worthy of all respect. Then he has the right to be called so proudly.