Dmitry Glukhovsky: The omnipotence of the special services is always a harbinger of the last times. Writer Dmitry Glukhovsky about why the country is stuffed into pockets

Glukhovsky was the first Russian author to make his book publicly available online. He then wrote his first "Metro" and gave it in pieces. This was back in 2002. Today he is one of the most successful and - it happens! - independent writers of Russia.

dates

2002 - Started work on the Euronews channel in Lyon

2005 - the first book "Metro 2033" was published

2007 - made the world's first TV report from the North Pole

2011 - became the father of the girl Emilia

The World Cup is an excellent backdrop for tough pension reform

- Dmitry, what can you say about the football championship? Are you a fan?

No. Absolutely indifferent to football. Because of this, of course, I always feel a little inadequate for all the unfolding euphoria. In addition, my grandfather, for example, is a spartan fan who is crazy just before a heart attack. And other relatives, who are 75 years old, enthusiastically watch basketball games. What is there to see?

But from all that I see, I am pleased that Russia has opened itself to the world. True, experience shows that these discoveries occur on the eve of some kind of contraction and enclosure, that then all this is remembered like some kind of midsummer night's dream. This was the case with the 1980 Olympics at the start of our invasion of Afghanistan - and international isolation followed. And the Sochi Games also seemed to be an integration of a friendly and open Russia into the global world - and they were exactly on the threshold of 2014 with its Crimea, Donbass and our new isolation. And now everything seems to be so good, and all these crazy Mexicans, Uruguayans are having fun on the streets, and we suddenly turned out to be so kind, and not squeezed and embittered, and our cops don’t chase anyone. And everyone was allowed in without visas, including, apparently, "MI-6 spies" - and nothing, normal. That is, it was possible to simply unclench, so to speak, the sphincter, and nothing monstrous happens. But the ability to learn lessons and project them into the future makes one suspect that right now, right now, a bad thing will happen. Here we will finish, celebrate, everyone will disperse and after that they will never get here again. All this may be the last time.

- Is this byaka already prepared? After all, the annexation of the Crimea was prepared much in advance.

With Crimea, everything was done brilliantly from a logistical point of view, including bought or intimidated local politicians. So there was an advance plan. Donbass is another matter. There is a mess, and no one can do anything. Neither attach nor detach. Some fermentation of the masses. It is clear that people did not have a plan.

Well, what was planned to be held under the sauce of the championship is already passing - the increase in VAT and the retirement age. This decision, I think, was made a long time ago. It's just that people were brainwashed with some other, redundant projects in advance, preparing to announce a real tough decision right now. It is clear that football emotions are a great backdrop for such things.

Shenderovich once again incurred anger by saying that if such a classy championship were held in a more decent country, then there would be more joy.

I really want to be happy for Russia, of course. But after the Sochi Games, there were no normal reasons for joy. Because Crimea is the joy of Cain's victory over Abel. Hitting a brother on the back of the head with a stone and taking something away from him is a great victory, huh. Moreover, it turned out that all the joy about our victories in Sochi was in vain, because we were cheating, which I am sure of.

When you understand the socio-political structure of the Russian Federation and understand what kind of mentality people who are at the helm have, who they are in essence, in their past, yes, you understand, these people could, justifying themselves in any way, go to any scam in any scale.

In Soviet times, the party and the KGB opposed and competed with each other. And now there is the omnipotence of the special services, which, in principle, is always a harbinger of the last times. When in Rome the Praetorians - and this is actually the secret services - began to come to power, these were already the last, sunset times for Rome. People who are engaged in guarding, digging in, searching for threats, people who are professionally suspicious - they cannot, are not capable of leading the country forward.

- But Putin communicates with young people and talks about the future.

Political technologists are trying to invent an image of the future for Putin, but they cannot. Just because he's not talking about it at all. It is about protection and conservation, about the neutralization of threats. This is where he does a great job. And the political field around him is utterly cleared. The oligarchs are all reined in. Whoever is not reined in, hangs himself, whoever does not hang himself, he is sitting in Switzerland, and his teeth do not fall on his teeth. Politicians either cooperate, or are shot, or left the clearing, realizing that there is nothing to catch. And in principle, this is not even a dictatorship, it is rather soft in comparison with Pinochet authoritarian regime. We don’t even need to be flogged with rods - we ourselves are trying to be quieter.

Medvedev is wrecking

- According to a recent poll, 51% of Russians hope that Putin will be president in 2024 as well.

Well, listen, Putin is a symbolic figure. People are ill-informed and deceived by television. Medvedev is responsible for all the failures and tightening the screws - people do not understand that no decisions, especially those related to living standards and taxes, can be taken without Putin's understanding of the issue. Without his veto or approval. He is a very informed person. But he has the wrong priorities, from my point of view. People live in a world of myth, not seeing cause and effect relationships. And this division into the right tsar and the abusing boyars is our age-old monstrous naivety.

You, with whom you talk, will hear: "Putin is handsome." I can even judge by my family. Grandparents blame Medvedev for all troubles. They think that he is self-sabotaging.

This whole Putin story is an eternal missed chance. Although his decision with Crimea was a well-thought-out multi-move - to slip through the emerging economic crisis and at the same time not let Ukraine into NATO. Coupled with the TV rot that swept us here, everything worked. We swallowed the fall of the ruble and the halving of the standard of living, not falling out of love with Putin and accustomed to eating ersatz cheese. But! Taking Crimea and losing Ukraine forever was, of course, a monstrous pro... fiasco. Because we kind of grabbed the Crimea and forgot, but for them it is a huge bleeding wound. Which brings both pain and suffering. We pushed the Ukrainians away from us, perhaps forever. This is total idiocy. We took a useless, unnecessary piece of land and lost the fraternal people with whom we are connected by a thousand years of common history. Not just friendship, as with Venezuela, but interpenetration at the level of families, cultures, life, history.

What Russian has not dreamed of marrying a Ukrainian girl? And what Ukrainian did not work in Russia because of his youth? And whoever did not go to Odessa has no heart. These were the people closest to us. All our graters were at the level of "Muscovites", "Khokhlov" and jokes about lard - the most innocent story. And what is it all for?

With Ksenia Sobchak, everything is clear to me

You once wrote that we never became Europeans because of imperial pride and complexes. Well, seriously?

We have a completely different story. Europeans civil revolutions and the process of crystallization of a citizen who demands respect for himself, who believes that he has rights, took place 200 years ago. Unless the Germans had then collective insanity. Our revolution has a different etymology. And instead of civil society, a new serfdom emerged. We once again found ourselves in slavery to the privileged class. It repeats and repeats. Only the privileged class has changed - criminals and demagogues have come to power. And we never became citizens.

But still, people who are now 20 and 30 years old are not the same 20-year-olds that were in the Soviet Union. So it's a question of the emergence of an unhounded generation. But our authorities are trying to fool the current generation of young people. All people involved in youth policy, burn in hell!

- Have you watched the film Sobchak about Sobchak?

Watched. A very boring movie. There is one good hero - it's Putin. He is reliable and wonderful - that's why he is a successor, and not because he understood that our politics is based on the games of special services and crime. With Ksenia Anatolyevna, now everything is finally clear. We got it, thanks.

- You once asked Voinovich to draw a utopia for Russia in 2100. He then laughed it off. Can you do it yourself?

Free, prosperous, with healthy capitalism and a measure of social responsibility. The main problem is to keep such a gigantic country as Russia from disintegration in the future. Now this is being solved with the help of the FSB. We have a case for every boss. While you are our man, do what you want, knock people down, go to the sauna with prostitutes, take bribes. But you know daddy's piling up. Instead, we need federalism, an independent judiciary, and competition among governments. And most importantly, its turnover. Forced change of power after 4 or maximum 8 years. This is the whole point in the grand scheme of things. And this whole story “If not Putin, then who?” - so some remember how Stalin was quickly forgotten and thrown out of the mausoleum - he did not justify the trust. So it would be nice for us to develop a little, like an ordinary country. Poland could be a good example for us.

Medvedev even tried to take us to some other place to have a look. True, he spoke more than he did, but the rhetoric was better - there was no trench in which one was supposed to sit. And after all, neither famine nor locusts happened without Putin. And the mood was better. But Dimon threw us. Putin came and redid everything in his own way, as in a joke about a husband and a lover. And instead of a utopia, I think we will slowly smolder and rot.

- But he said that there will be an economic breakthrough and everything will be fine.

It doesn't matter what Putin said. What matters is what Putin does, because his words in all cases are at odds with his deeds. Putin is a man whose power is based on the disorientation of everyone - both "partners" and the population of the Russian Federation. He often tells lies. While he mystifies, he is unpredictable. As soon as it became transparent, everything opened up for a blow.

Honesty does not require heroism

It so happened that in our country literature is given great importance. When you write, do you think about artistic value, or is a book just a consumer product?

No-o-o. It is impossible to treat a book as a commodity. For me, this is the only way to self-realization. In general, I don’t do anything else - I write books and indulge in journalism a little. And if I start exchanging and stamping, I stop trying to surpass myself yesterday, to summarize what I understood, then I will become nonsense. It's a matter of proving to yourself what you're worth. So I try to write a different book every time. It's boring to repeat yourself.

Well, I was lucky, I accidentally discovered the formula for success and at the age of 27 I already had large circulations and translations.

- What will be your next book?

The two will be very different. One is about artificial intelligence. And the second is such magical realism on Russian soil. Everyone says: here you are a cosmopolitan, you lived there and lived there, and dad is from the Arbat, from a medical dynasty. It is clear that I was a city boy, but at the same time, right in the core, there is a powerful Russian component in me. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the summer in a real village house with a well, with a passage, with a washbasin, with cucumbers in greenhouses, with beetles and slugs in cabbage. I spent all my holidays there. There is a completely different attitude to life and death. IN big city we are completely isolated from death. We don't see funeral processions. We have the dead fussily carried out of the entrance in zipped bags. And there is a cemetery within the city limits, and a coffin on a ZIL with lowered red sides travels through the whole city. There, your dead relatives, as it were, do not go anywhere. They appear to you in dreams, they give you everyday advice, something else. Because of this, there is no feeling of irreversibility and finality of existence.

- It will be straight Marquez-Marquez?

I do not know yet. But Cortazar, Marquez and Borges are just my tribute.

You will be forty in a year. Maybe it's time to change the strategy of life?

Horror, yes. But I had a life strategy from the very beginning. Capturing the Universe. Through stories to take power over the minds. Power in the vulgar sense - over human resources and financial flows - does not interest me at all. She spoils people, but I don’t want to spoil, I basically like myself and built everything in such a way that I don’t depend on anyone.

I was offered to join the Human Rights Council under the President, they called me to the Council for Culture. They were invited to meetings like “Putin and writers”. And I didn't go anywhere. Because when they try to feed you, it is always a temptation and a temptation. It's not that I'm some kind of desperate oppositionist, I'm not subversive, but it's very important for me to maintain freedom of thought and judgment. When you start feeding from someone's hand, you can no longer bite it. Which is clearly seen in different writers in our country. This is about the role of literature in our life. Literature, with total propaganda in the big media, remains the last space of freedom where an honest discussion on important topics is possible.

- By the way, you could be a good politician.

No no no. I can't and don't want to. It would break me. I can't take that many compromises. Or they will kill you, really break your back, or you yourself will make it more dead, you will be reborn into something else. What for? I believe that to maintain a certain honesty of judgment in our times does not require much heroism. When everyone lies wildly, and you just call black black and white white - it seems to be some kind of courage and originality. You didn't do anything amazing though.

Being Navalny - yes, it requires heroism. I wouldn't want to. I have always been interested not so much in the detailed structure of power, to which I am rather squeamish, but in the degeneration of a person from a people who has fallen into power. Violence, lies, manipulation - and a person decomposes through permissiveness and impunity. I have several books about it.

P.S. At the very end of the interview, Glukhovsky asked: “So, you can publish all this directly in the newspaper?” Well, let's publish.

The material was published "Interlocutor" No. 26-2018 under the heading “Criminals and demagogues have come to power in our country. But we never became citizens.”

All your previous novels were about the future, and the new one is about the present. Why did you decide to change your approach?

Because the present has become interesting. About eight years ago, when I wrote "Metro 2034", the present was boring, besides, it seemed to us then that there was nothing to complain about. It was the time of Medvedev's modernization. It seemed that protest political activity had faded to nothing, because Medvedev intercepted the protest agenda. After all, he said very correct things, another question is that what he did was in no way connected with what he said ...

But in the last 2-3 years, the official agenda has become so obscurantist that now it is very interesting to live, to watch how the system takes steps to ensure that everything goes to hell. One can observe how fascism is modeled at the state level. After all, you and I did not live in the period of the formation of a totalitarian regime, or even a simulation of such formation.

Do you think that fascism is on the rise? Or that there is a simulation of its formation?

At certain moments, it begins to seem that everything is very serious. Until some time, it was postmodern, a parody of the cannibalistic practices of the first half of the 20th century, including television parody. Television is used to achieve a virtual effect - instead of dealing with reality. You invite extras, Cossacks and vacationers, with their help you depict something, then with the help of TV channels and talk shows you replicate it throughout the country and create an "impression of what is." You create the impression of the formation of a totalitarian state - in order to crush the protest. You create the impression of an absolute Putin's majority - in order to break all those who waver. Or (with) you create the impression of liberalization - in order to reassure people who are impatient for the future.

This is reminiscent of Guy Debord's theses about the "society of the spectacle." But why do you think the current authorities do not seek to develop a real ideology, and not just "pretend that"? No request? No ability? No interest?

These people are purely cynical and very pragmatic. And I have a feeling that they are completely insatiable, just some Tim Tylers. Apparently, their childhood was so hungry that they never manage to eat. They stuff everything into themselves and can’t digest it, but they can’t eat too much.

This is a tragic situation: in power in the country are people who are not statesmen at all. Of course, merchants cannot rule the country, but neither can special agents. In Rome, the advent of the Praetorians to power marked the onset of the "last times" and a pre-decay state. Praetorians are excellent at preventing conspiracies, guarding the emperor, catching villains, but at the same time they do not have strategic thinking. They act like guards. Power in our country is divided between security guards and merchants.

Merchants treat the state in which the people live as a commercial corporation that must be managed, extracting personal profit from it, without thinking about the interests of the people. The people for them is largely a burden to the territory. They bought an "apartment with a burden", with a grandmother who lives there, and until she passed away, nothing can be done with the apartment. This apartment is called the Russian Federation". It seems that there is some kind of social contract and you can’t help your grandmother die, but there’s no interest in helping her either. You just have to wait until she dies.

It seems that people are in the wrong place. Nevertheless, they are very well entrenched in this place. But the only task they solve is the task of their continued stay in power. They are not trying to make the country better. They want to simulate rising from their knees, simulate the rebirth of Russia as a great power, simulate confrontation with the West, simulate modernization, and so on. Any "state project" always has a specific beneficiary, most often from among childhood friends.

Are you interested in their logic or how it affects society?

I'm interested in the reaction of the population. After all, I am also not the heir of some nomenklatura figure, who from childhood was introduced to the secrets of controlling the masses. I, as a representative of the plebs, go from the state of one of the heads of the livestock and gradually, with the help of acquaintances and my own interest, I begin to understand what is behind this veil of propaganda and half-truth.

And what do you think is the reaction from society? OK? Resistance? Indifference?

At first, the population simply survived. Then they gave him food, and he was very happy about this, because he had not been given food for a long time. He was also allowed to have housing, a car and travel abroad. And that was enough for 10 years. As soon as these valves - foreign travel, housing, food - began to turn on, it was necessary to distract the population with something. Preemptively imitating the siege of our fortress by the Western forces of darkness and darkness, we ourselves initiated all these crises.

That is, for some time people were not up to it. While the level of prosperity was growing, the mythology worked that we never lived as well as we do now. What, they say, does it matter how much they steal if they steal not from our pocket. And for the time being, they really did not steal from our pocket - except for some individual stories like the Magnitsky case. But all the rest of the money was stolen directly from the bowels, to which the people never had any relation or access. But at the moment when they began to get into people's pockets (because there was no longer enough resource money), the population began to move.

The government simulated a conflict with the West, which allowed it to divert the attention of people from internal problems and switch it to external ones, and at the same time explained all our troubles by a malicious external influence. In addition, they got the opportunity to say that since we are in a besieged fortress, we must look for traitors inside. This logic works flawlessly, and they applied it. In this regard, intelligent people sit in the presidential administration at the management level. I think that different scenarios were discussed there, and this one was chosen because it has already been successfully applied many times in various countries.

And what would be the reaction of society if the ideology was offered seriously? If you were offered to truly build an empire with an alternative picture of the world to the West, a system of values ​​and a path of development?

Before the Crimean events, I always said that we have a country of ideological hangover. For 75 years we have been told about building a paradise on earth and attributed all our difficulties and sufferings to this. Then the authorities suddenly told us that all this was not so, that everything they told us about building communism could be forgotten, and they advised us to go and attend to our private affairs, to live as we want.

They, too, at that moment had important matters to cut and distribute the socialist economy. For more than ten years, the state withdrew itself from the ideological sphere. It has become as if the state of technocrats who are not interested in any ideology. And the population in those years would have reacted with great skepticism and disgust to any attempt to instill any ideology again.

But another moment has come. According to Maslow's pyramid, first the nation provided security (in Chechnya), then it ate - and it wanted self-respect. And self-respect for us is the return of the status of the empire. Empire is a powerful and not exclusively Russian idea. One way or another, any former empire dreams of the return of imperial status. This applies even, for example, to Hungary, not to mention the UK.

Therefore, it ceased to surprise me how the same people could fall into reverence at the thought of both Nicholas II and Stalin. They seem to be opposites, but in reality there is no contradiction. AND royal Russia, and the Stalinist Union were empires.

When teenagers say that they love Stalin, it is obvious that the point is not Stalin, about whom they know nothing. They know about mustaches and about "shoot everyone". Stalin is a meme. He has very little to do with a specific historical figure.

Similarly, Nicholas II is a meme and a symbol of the empire. People just want an empire.

So they still want to?

Undoubtedly. And it is foolish to reproach them for this, we were a great power that for decades inspired fear and horror in our neighbors, and this suited us perfectly. It was considered optional that we be respected, as, for example, Japan is respected.

Is there a way to combine life in an empire with full civil rights?

Yes, such empires exist. The United States of America is such an empire. Inside the country, it is democratic and gives people freedom, but outside it behaves like an empire. It seems to me that we could well be such an empire. We would like to live in a country where a person is free and his rights are protected.

I think people feel very insecure. And the request for the greatness of the state is a sublimation: instead of resolving the issue of personal insecurity, it is transferred to a higher level. Maybe no one respects me, but everyone respects my country. I am an ant, but together, like a termite mound, we can devour anyone. 86% of citizens are ready to sign this. That is why they like tank parades on Red Square and the Russian flag over Sevastopol. They identify with these tanks and believe that they are personally afraid of them.

I think that we would like to live in a country where it is possible, if necessary, to find justice for the illegal actions of the police, where, with the help of elections, it is possible to remove at least the mayor, and even the president. Although our president is more of a symbol than a person, individual. That is why no one asks with whom he baptizes children in the truest sense of the word. We like his round statements and quotes precisely because he is also, by and large, a meme. In general, the American civilizational model could be close to us. This is why we compare ourselves with them all the time. They are a competing design.

My experience of living in Europe suggests that it is easier for Russians to find a common language with Americans than with Europeans. Didn't you have that feeling?

I can agree with this. Americans are more rollicking, just like us. And they are quite sincere people, while Europeans are quite clamped and notorious, this is due to their history. Europeans have a lot more taboo topics, in America this is by and large only political correctness. Don't touch blacks and gays and say whatever you want.

And they, like us, are a melting pot, a multi-ethnic story. In our country, this happens under the dominance of Russians. They have Anglo-Saxons, having formed a culture and political system have now receded into the background. Therefore, it is easier for us with them, besides, they are also an empire. The same liberal empire that Surkov talked about.

I don't understand why their model can't work for us. Why do we need this suppression of private initiative, intoxication, feeding and intimidation - four pillars on which our power system rests. Maybe the difference is precisely in this, in how people came to power. The people who came to power in the US are a meritocracy. Even if you are a protege of the Rothschilds, you must prove yourself. And we have very random people in power.

One of the main recent stories on the theme of "power and art" is the battle of the authors of "Matilda" with the deputy Poklonskaya. Do you agree that this is her private initiative, or is there something else behind it?

Characters like Poklonskaya are useful for power. They indicate a conservative trend. People in power are mostly pragmatists. Not to mention the fact that they are Chekists who have undergone professional deformation - "enemies are all around", "people can be manipulated", "compromising evidence can be found on everyone."

It's like a talk show here. It is necessary to call one balanced person, eight rabid imperialists, one marginal democrat, preferably a Jew, and some cartoonish Ukrainian or American. These latter will be whipping boys, the rabid ones will spit, and the conditional “Soloviev” (who sold his soul to the devil, but an exceptionally talented demagogue), as if moderating this discussion, will turn the bowl so that the only balanced person will win the vote with a convincing majority. This is how public opinion works. Poklonskaya, in a certain sense, performs on a national talk show. There are a number of speakers - Chaplin, Poklonskaya, Zheleznyak. This talk show sets the national agenda.

To what extent is this talk show moderated, to what extent is it controlled?

There is control domestic policy administration of the President of Russia, it is engaged in moderation, work with leaders of public opinion. Also there is different kind expert institutions that develop and propose certain agendas.

Another thing is that all this management comes down to situational response and distraction. By and large, all this is just a giant smoke machine that does not develop a strategy for the development of the country, but produces a smoke screen. No one has strategic thinking there, there is only tactical response. The West is like this to us, and we are like this to them. Navalny is this, and we are to him - this is it.

These people have no project for the country. They were at the head of a great power with a very dramatic and bloody history. And they feel out of place. The scale does not match the role. These people, from Yakunin to Medvedev, are people from the local cooperative who suddenly became the head of the state.

You started our conversation by making the present interesting. Would you prefer it to stay like this so that there is something to write about, or is it better to become a little more boring?

As an observer and writer, of course, it is very interesting for me. Although, let's say, the 2000s were interesting, being at the same time satisfying. We are only now beginning to understand this. Then people were a little dizzy, it seemed that every next day would be better than the previous one. Now there is the opposite feeling - that every next day will be worse. And yet, as an observer, today's Russia fascinates me.

Select the fragment with the error text and press Ctrl+Enter

The actions of Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels usually take place in a closed space. In the legendary trilogy it was the subway, in Twilight it was an Arbat apartment, now a smartphone. And each time a whole life arises in this space, which millions of readers live together with the author. The just published "Text" is perhaps the most hermetic of all, but at the same time it comes into contact with the life of everyone even more sharply, although the heroes of the novel are exceptional in their fate and position. Still a young man released after a seven-year prison sentence, convicted on false charges allegedly for drug trafficking, in fact because of a personal conflict with an FSKN operative, is released from the zone in Solikamsk, arrives in Moscow, learns that his mother two days before died. And the life he planned to return to is now impossible. And he, in the heat of passion, kills the man who sent him to serve out these seven years. Takes his smartphone, picks up a password for it ...

And this is where Monte Cristo ends and the story begins about how one person lives for another.

“This is the first novel written in a completely different genre than the previous ones. When you took it on, did you somehow formulate a task for yourself?

— There are books that grow out of an idea, and there are books that grow out of a hero. And this book grew out of a hero. I accumulated feelings and thoughts from what is happening with the country, and I wanted to convey them through the collisions of his life.

— What was it that bothered you?

“Here are the transformations that have affected the country, especially the capital, over the past seven years, and the collapse of ethics, the abolition of ideas about good and evil from above and below society, here is the total penetration of prison culture into ordinary life. It seemed to me that a story about a man who served a seven-year sentence, returned to Moscow and lived his life for another person, could absorb many experiences.

- Your hero, both in education, and in origin, and in occupations, is a complete opposite to you. Where do you get an understanding of this psychology and this way of life, including prison life?

- I don’t know, for sure it was described by someone better than me, but this is my personal discovery: what we consider to be ugly manifestations of personality (excessive aggression, downtroddenness, etc.) is just a response to the environment, which is designed to ensure the survival of the organism. If your parents thump and beat you, then you grow up to be a thief and a bully, because otherwise you will not survive in this family. It deforms you, you become aggressive, you get used to either suppressing others, or keeping your opinion to yourself, and then it develops into a behavior model. It is designed to allow you, as an animal, to adapt to the environment and survive in it. Any impact leads to transformation. And if you can imagine these influences, then you can also imagine how a person who has been subjected to these influences behaves. On the other hand, if you are not looking for a genuine texture for such a book, then nothing will work. And my manuscript was read by acting employees of law enforcement agencies, and former employees of the Federal Drug Control Service, and several convicted criminals .. And, first of all, I asked them about the psychological reliability. One said: “It’s written right about me.”

— One of your main characters is brought up by a mother with principles, the second by a father without principles. But both of them go to crime. Do you think that natural instincts, in this case Thirst for revenge is stronger than education?

- From what remains after reading the book and after writing it, this is probably the central question. And it has a lot to do with what's going on. People belonging to the system of power, as well as people collaborating with power, helping it to exist, adhered to this behavior before, but now they are starting to openly proclaim these principles. There is a complete rejection of ideas about ethics. The concepts of good and evil no longer apply. It started with the first persons of the state who openly lie to the camera. For example, about Crimea: first they claim that the peninsula will not be annexed, and two weeks later he joins that there is no Russian troops, then they admit that there is our special forces. Now Putin, in an interview with Oliver Stone, says that our media is independent of the state and that the special services do not read the correspondence of Russians. This is generally chickens to laugh at. And then, recognizing everything after the fact, he smiles and says that it was such an Indian military trick and that it was all justified. So again, the end justifies the means. And this is not only practiced, but preached from the highest levels.

— If people accept this shameless lie and continue to support the authorities, then it means that it is easier for them to live in rose-colored glasses, without distinguishing between ideas of good and evil. The president simply takes into account and exploits people's psychology.

- What Putin says is the right of the strong. I can afford, so I allow myself. And further in the spirit that there is neither darkness nor light, everything is dirty, everything is smeared, and in the West they are smeared.

What happened to the Trump campaign was an attempt to discredit their electoral system. Trump, an eccentric, unpredictable, uncontrollable person, was not particularly needed by us. It was necessary to prove that the American electoral system is so rotten that it will not allow a person who is really popular with the people to power. The elites will rally in a conspiracy and will not let him win. We were prepared for this by all means. And when he won, it was a crushing surprise for everyone.

- An old trick: instead of washing ourselves, we are trying to cover up others?

- We are not trying to prove that we are better (this is implied), we just pay attention to who is trying to teach us - people who are completely corrupt, corrupt, unprincipled, and even homosexuals are found. They are trying to impose on us a picture of the world in which ideas about elementary ethical categories simply do not work.

And such a standard of behavior is set by the first person of the state, it does not matter whether he plays the boy, whether he plays the godfather. And we let him down, because he is an alpha male, because he is a king, he can. This goes down the pyramid: the boyars behave in the same way, and they teach the same to their lackeys, and then the population is re-educated in the spirit of complete disregard for the concepts of good and evil. Anything is possible if you can. You can bend others - bend down, be a predator, eat the weak.

— And in the "Text" we are just faced with a representative of a system that shares these beliefs.

- With a hereditary representative. Because this FSKN operative that he kills main character, avenging his lost youth, he is a hereditary enforcer. His father is a police general, deputy head of the personnel department for the city of Moscow in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He attached his son to a bread place, because there was an opportunity to attach. The mother did not want to, she knew that her son was weak-willed, arrogant, a rogue and a beetle, but she was afraid to argue with her father. And then the father teaches his son his life principles. And the principles are simple - eat those whom you can devour, collect dirt on those whom you cannot devour.

— But this is a typical special service policy towards people.

- The president's idea of ​​people is very predetermined by his professional formation. He doesn't believe in virtue at all, in my opinion. He believes that all people are vicious, unprincipled, that they must either be bribed or blackmailed. He is a recruiter, and how a recruiter looks at us. He does not even recognize the theoretical right to be guided by other criteria, to be incorruptible, for example.

- Well, he sees few incorruptibles ...

- Now the principles have really devalued, and people are not ready to fight or die for them.

— But you also have the mother of the main character, who brought him up in strict concepts of honor, when he goes to prison, teaches him not to stick out, adapt, etc. It turns out that life is really more valuable than principles?

“Time is such that life is more precious than principles. I suspect it has always been like this. We were brought up on the Soviet myth, but what did we know about this time? People who consume mass culture do not know much about what really happened at the fronts and in the rear, how much people were motivated by patriotic feelings ...

The Nazis killed the family, and here you really cannot step over yourself, and then you are capable of some kind of heroic action. Not because you love an abstract homeland, or even more so some Stalin, but because you cannot live otherwise. Genuine motivations are much more personal. Especially in a country where the Bolsheviks for 20 years established their power through bloodshed and coercion. Well, how to love such a Motherland recklessly? No matter how your brain was washed by propaganda, but still there are personal experiences that contradict this.

— Have you noticed that the reenactors who filled Moscow on holidays are all dressed in military clothes? What is the reason for such militarization of consciousness?

- There are two points here. The first is the fear of looking into the future, perhaps purely biological in people of the post-war generation. They know Brezhnev's world, they know the world of perestroika, but they already know the new world poorly. What lies ahead? 10-15 years of more or less active mental and physical labor? The presidential term that we are living out is a term where everything is turned exclusively back, into the past.

— Your hero lives someone else's life in a smartphone, just like today's younger generation. And if he observes the life of another family, then the children discover in their gadgets a different world, unlike the one they see when emerging from virtual reality. Can the authorities cope with the dissonance that sounds more and more insistently in their brains?

- Children will inevitably win, the question is whether the current government will have time to spoil them. The change of generations is a historical process, and few people managed to transform the national mentality in four years. Maybe only Saakashvili, but he broke people over the knee. The ideas of his reformist activities to eradicate corruption, the power of thieves in law, etc. gave people the opportunity to move to another country in four years. However, when he left, everything began to grow back in the same dense direction.

In our situation, we still have to wait for the change of generations, the arrival of people with a different mentality. Now even the FSB has such people.

- But among the 86 percent who support the president, there are clearly many people with a new mentality, but what's the point?

— There is a demand for the feeling of belonging to a superpower in all segments of the population. For young people, especially teenagers, this is superimposed on the need to increase their own self-esteem.

A person who does not belong to administrative bodies or supervisory departments has little chance of feeling the necessary self-respect. He lives in constant fear of colliding with the system, he has no rights. If you were beaten by a policeman and you have no one to call, you are to blame. If there is someone from the system to stand up for you - a judge, a prosecutor, even a doctor who has operated on someone - you need to pull the person out of the system in order to protect yourself. This is our fundamental difference from the countries of the West, where there are elementary legal guarantees and where, if there is no completely strict conflict of interest, you are protected by rules and laws

- That is, there is a substitution - if there is no way to feel respect for yourself, then you have to be proud that the state is respected ...

- By iconizing and canonizing Stalin and Nicholas II, people just want to say that they are part of the empire. I am an ant, I can be crushed, moved and devoured, including my own, but the whole forest, the whole district is afraid of us like an anthill. The feeling of one's own insignificance is redeemed by the feeling of belonging to some kind of super-being that instills fear in the surroundings. Hence the desire to feel like a superpower again. Such a sublimation of self-respect, which we lack so much.

And the constant desire to be appreciated by the West (because we are notorious as a people) also comes from private life. Let them not be afraid of me, because I am drinking in the yard in sweatpants and an alcoholic T-shirt, but let them be afraid of the country to which I belong.

— And the larger the country, the more respect?

- Berdyaev's "Russian Idea" says that the only national idea that has taken root here and turned out to be universal is the idea of ​​territorial expansion. Habitat is a very tangible, measurable, very animal concept. Not conscious, but irrational and understandable basic. And it is important that, unlike implanted Orthodoxy, this is a supra-religious thing. I talked with the Kalmyks, on the one hand, they feel like nationalists, they have a difficult attitude towards the Russians, whom they despise for weakness, for gentleness, for drunkenness, but at the same time they are proud of the fact that they belong to Russia. And when Russia behaves threateningly towards its neighbors, it gives them pleasure. Therefore, when we rumble with our shod heels or caterpillar tracks across the squares of all the small European states - 1956, 1968, 2008 - a wave of pride rises in inexperienced souls.

— In my opinion, you overestimate the general knowledge of history.

- Well, they know her in some kind of mythologized way, in which the media gives them a conversation that not everything is so simple in our dramatic history. Beria is fine that he strangled the raped gymnasts, but he created atomic bomb. As if one could somehow be redeemed by the other. Here are the origins of teenage Stalinism. And therefore, Putin, positioning himself as a cool dude, of course, finds some kind of response from them. In vain he confessed to Stone that he had grandchildren. Putin's grandfather is a step away from the young.

- Yes, for the young, this whole agenda that is being discussed on TV is pure crap.

- A culture has already been formed on the Internet, where all these achievements - Crimea, Donbass, endless war, purchased systemic oppositionists, hired intellectuals, Duma, neutered cats - are not very relevant and relevant to these people. However, the authorities, in order to continue to steer, begin to invade this little world, take away freedom. And it starts to affect them.

— The authorities do not understand that by doing so they are digging a hole for themselves?

“We don’t have a lot of young people proportionally. And I don't think she can do anything right now. How can there be a change of power in the country? Even if you capture the Kremlin, not to mention the Post Office and railway stations, there will be no benefit in this. Power is not in the Kremlin. Power is in the consensus of the elites. The change of power occurs, probably, when Dzerzhinsky's division refuses to advance, when the military begins to get drunk, when important people stop answering the phones - at this moment power passes to others.

— Do you observe the consensus of the elites now?

- All people who are now with a lot of money are indebted to the authorities. And now there is not a single major player capable of challenging the authorities; it will immediately be ground to powder. Most likely, he will not dare to do this, because tons of compromising evidence will definitely be found on him.

But Navalny made up his mind.

- The fact that one particular Navalny managed to excite a certain number of young people across the country, especially in two or three large cities, is the beginning of a trend. I'm not saying that now the schoolchildren will go to the embrasure, stain the bayonets of the riot police with their innocent blood, and everything will turn upside down. The Paris of 1968, of course, shook de Gaulle, but we are not there, and we are not de Gaulle. We have total control over the media, we can say that Navalny distributes drugs to children there, and so on. However, if there is blood of young innocent people, then there is a fork: either the one who shed this blood loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, or he is forced to continue to impose his legitimacy, turning into a dictator.

- Navalny is not threatened in the foreseeable future…

- ... and Putin avoids becoming a dictator, he is satisfied with a relatively mild authoritarian regime, where the opposition is squeezed out, and only in rare cases is eliminated by the hands of some vassals, and it is not clear whether this happens as a result of hints or on local initiative. Apparently, he does not need the country to become a dictatorship; he would still like to be recognized by the international community. He does not want the role of Gaddafi, or the role of Hussein, and even a more prosperous Kim Jong-un, although we can exist hermetically, as we have already done. All, let's say, repressions, came from the fear of losing power, were a response to some kind of public fluctuations. Such a semi-thermidor, a reaction to the semi-revolution that did not happen in 2012. And the reaction was precisely to the confusion that arose among the ruling elite, and an attempt to restore order in their camp by flexing their muscles, and to intimidate any oppositionists with the redundancy of these measures.

— Does he really believe that the whole world does not sleep, does not eat, only thinks how to deal with us, or is this also a propaganda story?

“You have been taught for at least five years that there are enemies around, everyone is trying to recruit each other, everyone should be suspected .. You see, what is the tragedy. At the final stages of the existence of the Roman Empire, the commanders of the Praetorian Guard came to power one after another, because they had the resource to eliminate the real emperors .. And this did not lead to anything good, their power, although it was at some point absolute, but they could not use it for the good of the nation and the empire. The fact is that the Praetorians, like representatives of the State Security Committee, are very special people, trained to search for and eliminate threats to power.

But a professional politician, capable of carrying out grandiose reforms in his country, directing it along a new path, is a completely different quality. Peter the Great is not a special serviceman, not a KGB officer, Gorbachev is not a special serviceman and not a KGB officer, and even Lenin is not a special serviceman and not a KGB officer. This is a completely different scale of people.

— Well, then Putin is not to blame. These are the people who put him in power, did not take into account his professional qualities.

“It seems to me that he knows how to tell people what they want to hear from him, and he is a brilliant manipulator. In addition, an excellent personnel officer, surrounded himself with an impenetrable wall of people who owe him everything and depend on him in everything. He knows how to protect himself from any threats.

— This is a tactic. What is the strategy?

There is no strategy, and never has been. Conservation of the current position, he manages us like clerks in a corporation. The president is not a statesman, he is a cunning politician, all he does is solve the problem of how to stay in power. There is no project for the country, and never was. Silly talk about the future under Medvedev was invented by some hipsters, I don't know why. But there is no project for the country, no understanding of who we should become, having ceased to be the Soviet Union. Empire, okay. And what to do in order to become an empire?

Photo: Vlad Dokshin / Novaya

— Crimea, for example, to join.

- Oh no. With an economy that crap one's pants, you can't annex any Crimea. Take the example of Deng Xiaoping - that's a statesman. You first pull the country out of poverty, give people the opportunity to support and feed themselves, move their lives for the better, and they will move, like barge haulers on the Volga, all this ship stuck aground forward. But no, the middle class is a danger to the authorities. Talk about supporting business is just talk; for them, business is just pasture for the security forces. Reliance goes to the security forces and state employees, to people who depend on the state.

— How can others survive? Those who are not going to adapt to power and do not want to sit on the stove.

- The era when it was possible to take place is over, the country will not develop under this rule. The president is afraid to initiate change, perhaps thinking he won't be able to ride the rising tide. His only initiative act was the Crimea. The exact hit in the imperial nostalgia. But from the point of view of the country's development, the step is catastrophic. We are in international isolation, resources for modernization are running out, financial bonds are being replaced by administrative ones, a whole generation has grown up, accustomed not to serve the Fatherland, but to treat it like rent. This is no longer stagnation in the blood, this is gangrene. And I'm afraid the next presidential term will be a period of further degradation.

— So, leave?

Well, firstly, not everyone wants and can leave.

— Yes, we are not very welcome there.

- And the Chinese are not very welcome, but the Chinese are everywhere. I cannot call for emigration, I emigrated three times myself, but at the moment I live here. It's a matter of motivation for everyone. When the Union collapsed, I was 12 years old, I belong to that generation of people who see opportunities in the collapse of the Iron Curtain - to go to study, to see the world.

Why is it necessary to make a choice once and for all - to leave Russia or stay and endure, play pseudo-patriotic games like "Zarnitsa", knowing what people who profess such patriotism really do.

The concept of patriotism - stay and suffer with the country - is being imposed by people whose children have long been in London and Paris, as we see on their Instagrams. We once again agree to play the games that are imposed on us. And you just need to disengage from this and do what is good for you.

I am not ready either to call for a revolution or for emigration. The situation in the country is not so desperate that there is a choice - either to flee or to the barricades. Still, Russia in 2017 is not the same as a hundred years ago, the situation there was much more desperate.

— Moreover, privacy has not yet been banned.

- Of course, the current authoritarianism is much wiser than what was under Brezhnev. If you are doing your own thing - do it, homosexual - there is no article for homosexuality, well, just don’t preach, if you want American music - please, if you want to leave to study - go, if you want to emigrate - your business. On the contrary, let all the active ones get out as soon as possible than sit here and whine, and suffer abroad from the inability to adapt. This is such authoritarianism, adjusted for all modern theories and textbooks.

There is no disaster. The trend is just wrong. We traveled by train to Europe, and at night we changed the carriages and went in the direction of Kolyma. We are not in Kolyma, but the direction is no longer European.

— Your hero, one might say, is a modern Petrarch. As the poets of the late Renaissance were inspired by unattainable women, so he sacrifices himself for the sake of Platonic love. Do you consider love a reliable refuge from external adversity?

“…In the novel, the protagonist falls in love by force. To hold out for a week, he needs to get into the skin of the murdered man, that is, into his phone, and understand the intricacies of his life. In particular, in a very conflicting relationship with his parents, with a woman whom he tried to leave and could not leave. And our hero, Ilya Goryunov, as often happens in a man's life, falls in love with a picture on his phone. And through this love, a certain transformation begins in him. He learns that she is pregnant and feels guilty for taking the life of the father of the unborn child. And so, when he finds out that she is going to have an abortion, he weaves a complex intrigue to keep her from doing this, and gives her 50 thousand rubles, which he had hardly obtained to escape from the country.

— That is, he saves someone else's child at the cost of his own life.

- He understands that he still belongs to the world of the dead, and she to the world of the living. And he still can’t escape responsibility, his mother taught him to think that retribution follows everything. However, saving his beloved, not himself, is his choice. A person always decides for himself - who he wants to be, who he wants to remain.

- And this is after so many years of living in such a perverted society as a prison?

- Any feelings become stronger and brighter when it is impossible to realize them. If you can get a girl or young man on the first, second, third date, you don’t even have time to kindle a feeling inside yourself. In the Middle Ages, perhaps, or in such a moralizing society that we had in the 70s and 80s, sexual freedom seemed like a rebellion against a system that assumed standard behavior - to guard oneself, not to allow too much, to repel sexual attacks. Through the regulation of sexual life, the state obtains significant power over the individual. The Platonic flourishes where the physiological is not allowed to grow. Through the prohibition, since human nature is weakly transformable, all that can be done is to instill a sense of guilt. A person is guilty, he is a priori loyal.

On the other hand, now many girls, if a young man does not try to drag them to bed in two weeks, get upset and wonder what is wrong with him - is he really gay? .. And simultaneous novels for girls with several young people, and for young people with girls, until they began to live together, is not something that is the norm, but something quite taken for granted. In principle, Russia is not a conservative society; on the contrary, we have a rather riotous country. I think this is good, because all societies where sex life regulated, much more prone to fascism.

- Conservative in everyday and social terms, Germany and Japan proved this in their time.

“Human nature must be given a natural outlet. As long as Putin is smart enough not to get into his personal life and stop the attempts of zealous deputies and figures like bikers who stick to the budgetary udder to interfere in the personal lives of citizens, I think he will stand. Although he has already climbed into the Internet. The Internet, it is also around sex and in general around what they do in free time. And as soon as diktat and censorship begin here, people will accumulate anger.

While anger is still given various outlets. Life is getting worse, people are getting poorer, but they, in general, treat this with a certain patience. After all, our well-being in fat years seemed so impossible that we did not really believe in its duration. But there are things, the habit of which is too great. And they understand it very well. And rather, they are intimidated by the fact that they will invade privacy in order to hint: let's not aggravate now, let's leave everything as it is, the border is open, the Internet is free, don't force us to act, it could be worse.

Now the police are spinning teenagers, wanting to discourage those who planned to go to the next actions. Therefore, it is necessary to twist not a hundred, but a thousand, so that people think, yes, the risks are great. And when they so uncompromisingly sweep these teenagers with arms and legs like matches, this, of course, is a cruel intimidation. But then it can lead to the opposite result, violence breeds violence.

The protagonist of "Text" Ilya is a half-educated philologist. Why did you give your protagonist such a distinctly literary education?

Who is less prepared for reality than a philologist? Is there an education that is more disorienting in Russian life than literary and linguistic education? Where are the Russian classics - and where is our life today? Here is such a person - brought up in the humanistic tradition, in the idea that crime and punishment are always soldered - and it is interesting to put him in jail for seven years for something he did not commit. Moreover, on the most simple and popular charge, two hundred and twenty-eighth (Article 228 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Illegal acquisition, storage, transportation, manufacture, processing of narcotic drugs.” - Note. ed.). And let him apply the literature of the Silver Age, let him apply the Romano-Germanic group to the zone and life after the zone. From the furnaces into the ice water. How was the steel tempered? And such a person comes out - Russia: half thinking in a hair dryer, half - in Babel's language.

- A significant part of the novel - correspondence in instant messengers and by mail - is framed as ordinary dialogues. You deliberately did not somehow highlight it graphically - as modern Western writers often do?

- On paper, emoticons look poor, emoji look bastard. They don't take root. What for? So that a reader who grew up on smartphones would take paper in their hands more boldly? Yah. It is much more interesting to exfoliate them and give them a simple dialogue: will it work?

In connection with the "Text" many people remember the "little man" of Russian literature and the sensitive killers of Dostoevsky. How important is this tradition for you, which goes back to Samson Vyrin and Rodion Raskolnikov?

I never considered myself a Russian writer: I wanted to be a citizen of the world, I grew up on Western prose, and received our classics fish oil at school, like everyone else. But here Europeans, Asians read my books in translations and say - typical Russian literature, continuation of traditions. Maybe it's in the blood somewhere. Antibodies that are formed from this life of ours. As he said: "The Germans do things - we ... [figachim] tragedy."

- Your novel is written in a dry, fried language of a somewhat Limonovian rendition. Is it possible to say that the cabbage soup, cooling in Ilya's Lobna kitchen, is poured from the same saucepan that is on Eddie's New York stove?

I read Limonov at school as soon as he was released here: my parents were friends with his first Russian publisher. Porn is given to him well - for the sake of this and read. Better than politics. He is a total counterfeiter. Do they get inspired? No thanks. I am Babel, Platonov. Those who forged Newspeak. It is necessary to be inspired by the unattainable. The present time also requires Newspeak: to fit our present into our eternal. Anglicisms and memes to cross with camp jargon and early Soviet prose. Who else to entrust this if not a philologist?

- “Text” is, among other things, a novel about tech addiction. How is your own relationship with electronics? Do you sketch on your phone or use a notebook?

Well, of course, I'm completely addicted. I have two phones, I stick to them in Macedonian. Carousel of Facebook, mail and instagram, always waiting for messages. I run my own social networks and I created an account for myself everywhere. When no one writes to the colonel, I read the news. The focus of attention was reduced to one minute. Learned how to write on paper. The hand gets tired of the pen by the end of the sentence, the letters dance, but I know blind typing and without looking I type messages on the iPhone, without looking up from the steering wheel. All the time I try to photograph happiness or at least delight. Instead of memories, I keep albums from the iPhone in my head. Refused erudition in favor of "Wikipedia". typical representative.

Glukhovsky's First (2005) Novel: Survivors nuclear war earthlings huddle in the Moscow metro. Translated into 37 languages, the total circulation is  1,000,000 copies.

1 of 7

Continuation of the post-apocalyptic saga. The most popular Russian book of 2009, outselling Akunin, Ulitskaya and Minaev.

3 of 7

Collection (2010) of Glukhovsky's short, "realistic" prose - guiding with nanorobots, corruption and the search for a national idea.

4 of 7

In Europe of the 25th century, a vaccine against aging is being invented: humanity can afford it if it refuses to have children. Initially, The Future (2013) was published on VKontakte.

5 out of 7

Finale (2015) of the underground cycle, which grew out of Glukhovsky's work on computer game Metro: Last Light. Laureate of the "Ozon.ru Online Awards" in the nomination "Best Fiction Book".

6 out of 7

Fresh (2017) Glukhovsky's novel, favored by the country's leading literary critics.

7 out of 7

Your book is marked with today: the novel is filled with Trump, the National Guard and other signs of the times. How universal is the story you told about arbitrariness and humiliation? Are these inescapable features of Russian life?

I needed a text about today. Urban romance. It seemed to me that everything I read from Russian was completely out of date. I wanted to make such a box with nails: to hammer a nail into each of today's main topics.

Some of today's topics are eternal topics. lack of rights ordinary person in front of the system. A system of government and management built on brainwashing and intimidation. The ability of the authorities to involve in themselves, to magnetize the most unscrupulous. And her ability to leprove the idealists who find themselves in her, to infect them with cynicism and hypocrisy.

But there is also something new. Decay of truth. The collapse of the coordinate system in which there is good and evil. The decay of Christian ethics based on humility. Possession of the church by the demons of power. Celebration of strength. Who rules us today, who is the main newsmaker in politics and business, and now also in art and spirituality? Prosecutor's office. Investigative committee. FSB. Siloviki. People endowed with power and, except for power, do not believe in anything.

Although, maybe this is eternal, but it just seems new. It's just that each generation has to wade through the lies, debunk the myths on its own. Himself to encroach on those who guard these myths, because through them he guards his power.

A significant role in the novel is played by the "people's" Article 228, which is charged with an innocent protagonist and according to which almost 150 thousand people are imprisoned in the country. Do you like the idea of ​​drug legalization - partial or complete?

I am for the legalization of soft drugs, prostitution and gambling. All the same, all kinds of human vices are covered by special services. It's just that instead of normal taxes, on which we could finally shift the tiles on Tverskaya, the margin goes to the construction of private castles in the Crimea.

In an interview, you said that your most famous cycle, Metro, is not least the exposure of a soviet, a man of the Soviet formation who does not want to go to the surface. Do you see in modern Russia others - primarily typologically - figures who tend, figuratively speaking, to get off the ring road?

It seems to me that the whole generation of thirty-year-olds is already different. Twenty-year-olds are generally aliens. Everyone who does their own thing is different. They would like to go into the future, but they will not be allowed into the future. Power is aging, graying, balding. The authorities want to go back to the scoop, to the times of their youth. The future frightens her: like any pensioner, the president does not want to adapt to a changing world, he demands that the world return to its usual state, and is offended when the world refuses. Why then are there many Stalinists among young people, you ask? Stalin for them is a symbol of the empire. The image of the empire is a compensation for age complexes. They want to feel respect for themselves. In today's Russia, this is impossible. In America, teenagers, dreaming of superpowers that would make their peers respect them, and be afraid of hooligans, masturbate on superheroes, and in our country - on Stalin. Stalin is the Russian Spiderman.

The political upheavals of the 2010s affected most Russian writers: some became prominent oppositionists, others formed their own combat units, and still others preferred to stay above the fray. What place do you occupy in this socio-literary disposition?

Politics corrupts. Power is the breath of Satan. Writers who go to power to offer it their ability to talk people for money are selling their souls. Writers who think that they can speak power itself, educate it with their moralizing - and for this they get closer to it - idiots. As soon as they open their mouths there, they will immediately put bread in there and give them communion. Look at the directors who have become deputies: they are all empty-eyed. What kind of power do deputies have? And the soul - take it out and put it down. No, getting into politics is a bad thing. A writer in Russia should simply tell the truth, call a spade a spade. No one else.

Among the domestic prose writers who influenced you are the bearers of very different views: Babel and Bulgakov, Platonov and Shalamov. Does it matter to you what political position the author takes? Can you like a book written from positions that are not close to you?

Here is a little different. What matters is whether the author is sincere. If a person is a convinced communist, a real, idealistic one, it is interesting to listen and read. If you are a devout Imperial, we will also listen. And if you're just an opportunist and a counterfeiter who doesn't believe in what he says, a swindler, a propagandist - I'm disgusted. Here one cannot admire the power of talent - hypocrisy obscures everything.

After the release of the new novel, they began to write about you - with some confusion - as a serious author who "overcame" his early genre pieces. Do you believe in this supposedly unresolvable dichotomy of "entertainment fiction" versus "serious fiction"?

Well, “Text” is in fact fundamentally no different from “Future” or “Metro 2035”. Take aback from those who simply disdain fantasy. Who came up with genres anyway? They are insanely tight. I want to mix them up, break them, I don’t want to make any fateful choices once and for all: either you are in science fiction, or in a thriller, or in “real literature”. Why can't a thriller be written as serious prose? Who said that fiction should entertain and distract? Why should modern prose be plotless and boring? Literature, in fact, can give complete freedom - literature has a zero budget, you don’t have to ask the Ministry of Culture for money for a book, you don’t have to approve the plot from the producers, you don’t have to worry about ratings. Gotta use this! But no. Writers are afraid of publishers, publishers are afraid of readers. The reader, if he falls in love with a writer for some book, then asks only for supplements. You can’t surprise him - he can have indigestion. Publishers think so. I've decided to test it on my own skin.

In the early 2000s, you were one of the pioneers of online self-publishing: Metro 2033 was read primarily on the Internet. How do you assess the prospects of online literature today? Can the "new samizdat" seriously compete with more traditional publishing institutions?

Maybe, of course. It only suffers from a lack of editing. Editing and marketing are the only two useful functions of a publishing house. It’s embarrassing to sell yourself, but to rule - the hand does not rise.

In March last year, you confirmed that the film adaptation of "Metro" will be taken up in Hollywood: producers are attached to the project " social network and Sin City. What is happening with the painting now?

Now they are looking for a director. Here they showed Darabont, he liked everything, he read the book, the game went through, but he could not come up with a director's take and spat.

Another international project in which you participated was the creation of a libretto for the opera Three Astronauts based on a story by Umberto Eco. Is she finished? When will it be heard?

The libretto is finished, but the music is not ready yet. The work of the composers dragged on, and while they were waiting, both authors of the original work died - and, and Eugenio Carmi. I managed to meet Carmi, I was at his family dinner in Milan, and Eco, whose fan I have always been, ended up in the hospital then - and it didn’t work out. Now the creators of the opera have to sort things out with his heirs, agents. I want to believe in the best, in general.

Your readers noted the transition to a conditionally "realistic" letter in the collection "Stories about the Motherland". Would you like to return to the small form in the future? What is generally more sensitive to rapidly changing times - a story written on the occasion or a weighty, fundamental novel?

I liked writing stories. A novel, of course, is a cast-iron thing, heavy, cast, a cannonball that can tear your head off. The novel fits more time. And the story is a pellet. But if in the collection they are correctly matched to each other, with a mosaic, you can also achieve good lethal force. And then, the story is always a miniature work, artistic cutting on a grain of rice. There is no place for superfluous things in it; in its few pages it must fit the whole world with living people. Before Metro 2033, I wrote stories - in my first year, in my second year. Such, in the spirit of Cortazar. Somewhere they hang out on the net. So maybe there will be stories again. And novels: magical realism on Russian soil and polar horror. And plays. And screenplays. All will be. Please fasten your seat belts.

Famous Russian science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky arrived in Krasnoyarsk with a presentation of his new novel "Metro 2035". Although, as it turned out, he can beat him for the “fantastic” characterization.

In an interview, Glukhovsky told why Russian writers rarely travel around the country and meet with readers, whether there is journalism in Russia now, and why young writers should not ask Glukhovsky for help.

Dmitry Glukhovsky today, August 24, was a guest on the New Morning program. And before that, he gave a long interview to journalist Sergei Sannikov.

– Have you come to tell the people of Krasnoyarsk about your new novel? Tell us.

– The book was published on June 12 in Moscow. I first had a presentation there, then in St. Petersburg and Voronezh. After there were three cities in the Urals. Now the tour continues. In the autumn I plan to go to the Far East, but for now Siberia.

Speaking of the book, Metro 2035 is the end of a trilogy that started 20 years ago, when I came up with all this at school. The first book on paper came out 10 years ago.

And the decision was not easy - to return to what had begun so long ago. take over new novel was a big decision for me. It was important that some kind of sequel did not turn out, as often happens when a sequel is written out of necessity.

For a long time I thought about Metro 2035 being, on the one hand, a continuation, on the other hand, an independent work that can be read separately from all previous books.

The task was not easy and not banal. And I think everything worked out.

- Certainly. 10 years ago, another me wrote the book. The first book was so educational - a young man leaves his father's house and seeks his destiny in life.

Now the idea of ​​the state of minds, how society works, about the structure of power - all this has changed a lot. And it has changed in the last two years for obvious reasons - because of the events that have taken place in the life of our country.

Plus, the book is stylistically different. She has a different mood. She is more mature and realistic. This is not a fantasy novel.

I would call it a novel about Russian life, rather. This is a book about why things are the way we are and why we will always be this way.

- But you are often called exclusively a science fiction writer ...

- When a person calls me a science fiction writer, I want to immediately hit him with something heavy and stupid. Only two of the books are exceptionally fantastic. The rest is a mix.

- Why do you have a post-apocalyptic theme?

- When the Soviet Union collapsed, I was 12 years old. I grew up in some country that seemed unshakable to me. And suddenly all of this in one day shatters into dust.

Everything that generations of people believed in is recognized as failed. All heroes become non-heroes. And the feeling of life on the ruins of an empire...

For me, unlike Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the collapse of the USSR is not a tragedy at all. For me, this is an interesting cultural experience from adolescence. From the ruins of the empire you are trying to lay down a hut.

And my passion for post-apocalyptic was born from this feeling: there was a world that fell apart, and you survive on its rusty ruins.

– The reason is simple: 70% of all book sales in our country take place in Moscow. And in the US, all over the country. Americans are a more reading nation than we are. And they buy more books.

If you write about Russia, you should simply look at it. The last time I went was six years ago - now I understand that my ideas are outdated.

Million-plus cities have become more beautiful, people have dressed up and everything is not the same as six years ago. Financially, such tours are not justified in any way.

How important is it for a writer to come face to face with his reader?

- I really like. I am very grateful to my readers, I love meeting them. Moreover, all my books are free on the site and those people who buy paper books - I am very grateful to them!

– You worked for RussiaToday, where the point of journalism is to show Russia as a successful country with a confident future. How do you generally assess the quality of journalism in modern Russia? All those patriotic talk shows and so on...

– When I switched from EuroNews to RussiaToday, this channel was created just to show the freedom of the press in our country. She was noticeably bigger.

No one scolded Putin, but there was no whipping up of patriotic hysteria. And there was no whipping up of hysteria due to hatred in other groups. Now everything is different.

Now we are good, not because everything works out for us, but because we are surrounded by completely finished freaks. Americans are cannibals, Ukrainians are cannibals and Nazis. The Dutch and Germans are pedophiles. And against this background, we are the best.

For some reason, we are offered to be proud of the fact that we are a stronghold of spirituality. Although any person over the age of 18 understands that we are one of the most reckless peoples in the world!

When I started working for RussiaToday, everything was calmer. I did not have to sacrifice my principles, which I acquired on EuroNews: show one side of the conflict - show the other.

Now, of course, RussiaToday is an open propaganda channel that just “drives”, like all of our television. Especially talk shows on all channels are open propaganda of hatred towards Western countries.

There is no journalism today. Except cultural, maybe. And political journalism has been replaced by brainwashing propaganda.

Let's get back to literature. The novel "Metro 2033" you published on the Internet. It was a new and unusual move. How can today's young writers make themselves known?

– Now everything is more difficult. Then the Internet was not a mass phenomenon. Even in 2002, when I posted on the Metro-2033 network, there were no social networks or blogs.

Were guest books and home pages. And people are wildly afraid of the Internet. Novice writers believed that the text would be stolen and published under a different name, and eminent writers feared that they would read everything and not buy the book in paper. And I had nothing to lose.

– How often do you receive manuscripts with requests to read and help with the first edition?

- I do not advise anyone and do not help. I'm an asshole in this regard. I helped once and it started. I attached the book to a familiar publishing house and this author loaded me with so many of his problems that I had to deal with his book, and not mine.

I did a good deed for a man, and they tried to sit on my neck. So I don't help young writers - it's a cruel world and it's every man for himself.

– Is a successful writer an indicator of the quality of his literature?

- Not. Firstly, the vast majority of readers are not able to assess the literary level of the author. The reader finds figurative language too complicated. Stylistic experiments do not understand. And flips through philosophy.

Secondly, we must understand that 10% of the country's population reads in our country. Of these 10%, another 10% understands literary delights. Successful literature is one that leaves an emotional response in the reader.

People buy books for the same reason they go to the movies - to fill an emotional deficit. They want to be someone else and experience the emotions of another person through some kind of concentrated story. People sit on emotions, this is the main drug.

Sergey Sannikov