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Dmitry Glukhovsky: "Putin will be in power until he dies of old age." Interview with Dmitry Glukhovsky about new projects, games and Andrzej Sapkowski

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 I, first of all, 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 the Interior. 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 our shod heels or caterpillar tracks over 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 the 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 or a KGB officer, and even Lenin is not a special serviceman or 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 myself emigrated three times, but in this 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 to 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.

- I wanted to become a writer immediately, without postponing for "that's when I grow up." My father worked at the State Radio and Television in the editorial office of broadcasting to Yugoslavia. He was both a reporter and an editor, and at the same time worked as a translator of Serbian poetry into Russian. All evenings he sat in the kitchen, smoking and drumming on his Olympia. I would wait for my dad to leave for work and grab his typewriter. As soon as he stepped out of the door, I filled the Olympia with a blank sheet of paper and began to hit the keys with all my might: otherwise the letters would not be imprinted. Sometimes I missed with a sweep - and my children's fingers slipped between the keys. It hurt, even skin was torn off. But on the other hand, I realized that writing is inextricably linked with torment.

- And what did mom do?

- My nutrition and upbringing mainly. Parents studied together at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, and then my mother went to the TASS photo chronicle as a photo editor and archivist. True, she did not work there for long. She got pregnant, went on maternity leave, and I turned out to be a rather sickly child. Because of the endless bronchitis, I almost didn’t go to the garden, and my mother, respectively, to work. To improve my health, I was often sent to my mother's parents in the Kostroma region, in the city of Manturovo. District center for 33 thousand inhabitants, semi-village semi-pastoral, own house, garden of 20 acres. I not only breathed fresh air there - all the duties of a person living on earth extended to me. I collected the Colorado potato beetle from potatoes, and slugs from cabbage. There was a real Russian stove in the house, and we cooked food in it, baked pies - I also baked, by the way. When he got older, he began to carry water from the well.

- A rather unexpected immersion into traditional Russian life for a Muscovite.

“Especially when you consider that my father is from a professorial medical dynasty. Imagine two completely different worlds: Manturov’s grandparents have a well and a stove, while Moscow’s have an Arbat apartment with four-meter ceilings. It belonged to my great-grandfather, a professor of medicine, a urologist who treated party bosses, even Beria, I think. Beria abused women. Based on his hobbies, he even specially organized an all-Union competition for gymnasts and became his - and their - patron. Great-grandfather was friends with Professor Vovsi, Stalin's personal doctor, who in 1953 became the main defendant in the “doctors' case” - the last chord of Stalin's repressions. A case was then inspired against a number of medical luminaries. Both the doctors themselves and their families were arrested. My great-grandfather, too, would certainly have fallen under this flywheel, had he not died of a stroke shortly before the start of the repression. Thus, our family was not exiled anywhere and everyone remained to live in their Arbat apartment. Under my great-grandfather, it seemed to have five rooms, but when the daughters grew up, they divided it, and my grandmother Nina Yakovlevna already had a two-room apartment. I describe it in the novel "Twilight" - old, with high ceilings and ancient furniture made of Karelian birch.

First, my grandmother married the geologist Marat Zinovievich Glukhovsky. He, by the way, also appears in my stories. I have a book “Stories about the Motherland”, and one of its characters is a geologist, doctor of sciences, like my grandfather, exploring the bowels of the earth, opens the gates to hell. This is my own grandfather. Because of the constant expeditions, his relationship with his grandmother finally deteriorated, and she divorced him when my father was young. She married the chief artist of the Krokodil magazine Andrei Porfiryevich Krylov, the son of a painter and cartoonist who created the famous Kukryniksy collective with friends Mikhail Kupriyanov and Nikolai Sokolov. This grandfather, my father's stepfather, is also like my own, I love him very much and always listened to his stories with my mouth open. He traveled the entire Union at one time - he visited Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, Chukotka and Kamchatka, all the countries of the socialist camp, flew to Cuba four times. And from each trip he brought impressions, souvenirs and sketches, which he then turned into oil paintings, and made friends all over the world. And my mom and dad lived in Strogino in an ordinary sixteen-story panel building, in an apartment with an area of thirty-something meters, with synthetic brown carpets and typical Romanian furniture - the whole country was filled with sideboards like ours. The apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, in which we are now talking, is my attempt to reconstruct the one in Arbat. Renovating it, I tried very hard to make it the same in spirit and in detail.

- Wow. I thought you inherited it in approximately this form. There is a feeling of a family nest in it, where everything has been preserved for decades.

- Remaking it, I just didn’t rely on my memory, but took my grandfather to the construction market to pick up colors. In this sense, the main pride is the entrance hall: it is exactly the same terracotta color as it was on the Arbat. And the furniture here is great-grandfather's - the sideboard, the table and chairs are a hundred and fifty years old, the mirror is generally more than two hundred.

I not only came to visit the Arbat apartment, but also lived there for three years when I was in elementary school. I was sent to a nearby French special school - it was our family: my father went to it before me, and my grandmother went to it, although in her time it was not yet a special school, but a women's gymnasium. From my parents, from Strogino, it took a long time to get there, and from my grandparents - just cross the Arbat obliquely.

- Still, it's a pity when a child does not live with his mother. Have you thought about enrolling you in a school at your place of residence?

- I was enrolled in a school in Strogino, I went to the zero grade for a year, and then the teacher told my parents: “The boy has abilities, don’t cripple him with our school.” I started reading and writing at the age of two and a half, by the age of five I was adding and subtracting three-digit numbers in my mind, their program was really not very interesting to me. In general, I showed promise: my grandparents thought that I would grow up as a great scientist, I would receive a Nobel Prize. Oh, I feel, I'm letting them down, they won't see my Nobel Prize as their ears! In fact, I don’t think that I have any outstanding abilities - they just worked with me a lot, developed them. My daughter Emilia is four years old, and she also reads and writes from the age of three, even earlier - because we also study a lot. After all, it is quite clear that if the child's abilities are developed, then by the age of five he will quite calmly master the school curriculum of the class up to the third. The first two years it was so easy for me at school that I completely loosened my belt, all I did was chatter in class, and triples went in the middle classes. It got better in the seniors, but in the certificate they still got two triples for me.

- It's funny, if in Russian and literature.

- No, for them, of course, five. No luck with physics and astronomy: I went into a clinch with a teacher. She seemed to be nice, and then once - and put a trouban, I didn’t even have time to understand what was happening. But in general, teachers initially did not expect exemplary studies and exemplary behavior from me, because they perfectly remembered my dad. He hooliganized, boxed, fought, smoked from the age of six in the doorways, but at the same time he was apparently a completely charming child, because everyone loved him, despite his difficult character and long list sins.

- And you, too, from the first class, ran at recess to smoke in the gateway - in the same one as dad?

- No, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t box, and in general I’m a completely different person. With friends, I came up with games two or three times, which everyone then played for several years. First, our entire class was drawn into the game, then the fashion spread to parallel classes, and so on. When I read “Konduit and Shvambrania” by Lev Kassil, my friend and I came up with our own states with their own monetary system, between which there were complex diplomatic relations, wars broke out. Soon a variety of states were established in each class - and the game went on and on! I also developed a modified version of the Cossack-robbers.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union, a wild fashion for obscurantism began. I read in the Question Mark magazine about bioframes - wires with which they searched for underground water sources, answered questions - and we made such bioframes and ran with them, looked for each other in the yards, guessed the codes to other people's entrances. By the way, it worked. And then we all started writing fantasy novels. Even the doubles wrote. Why, even the players began to compose something fantastic!

- I came up with games that everyone then played for several years. Pictured on the far left. Photo: From the personal archive of Dmitry Glukhovsky

- Did you start working in that genre at the age of three?

- Not. As a child, I mostly wrote about politics. About Lenin - I had remixes from patriotic literature, which they read to us in kindergarten and which I studied on my own. There were also journalistic essays about how everything is heading in the Soviet Union, wheat is ripening, computers are doing calculations, steamship factories are smoking, and life is steadily getting better. I don’t know where I got this from - either I re-read my father’s materials, or I revised the TV. And I got carried away with science fiction only in the middle classes - first by Bulychev, then by the Strugatskys - and soon our endless fantasy novels began in notebooks with 48 sheets in a box. Because more text was placed in the cell and it looked more solid, more mature than the ruler.

- Have you bought a personal typewriter by that time?

- Dad switched to an electric Yatran, and gave the old mechanical one to me.

- Beautiful and symbolic: a typewriter passes from a writing father to a writing son. By the way, were your parents serious about your work?

- In my school years, no one believed that I was actually determined to become a writer. The elders, especially dad, persuaded me to go to study as a financier or economist, although I have no ability in the exact sciences. But the strength of my father's conviction was such that I still studied economics for a year. With each lesson, it became more and more boring and incomprehensible. I always sat in the front rows to make eyes at a beautiful young teacher, but even that didn’t work out for me: my eyes stuck together, and I fell asleep. And statistics in general was a complete nightmare for me! And not only are the subjects terrible, but also in Hebrew - I studied in Israel.

- Why there? Some special economic department?

“That's not the point. I had an example to follow - my grandfather, a journalist and traveler who traveled to a bunch of countries and felt like a citizen of the world. In addition, I graduated from school in 1996, when Russia began to open up to the world, everyone began to travel a lot more, and I really wanted to live and study abroad. But we could not afford foreign countries like England or the USA, and a year of study at the University of Jerusalem cost $ 3 thousand - this was a more acceptable option. I wanted to do journalism, but there is no separate journalism faculty - only a large faculty of social sciences, and it has different areas, from which I chose journalism and economics. And with journalism, everything turned out wonderfully, although teaching is not at all like ours: without studying the language and literature, it is very applied - working with all the mass media, psychology, areas of law related to journalism.

Is everything in Hebrew too?

- Well, yes. I arrived a year before entering, for six months I just studied the language, for the other six months I studied preparatory courses, and then studied on a par with the locals.

Did everything turn out the way you dreamed?

- By parent stories i imagined student life a crazy fun and wonderful time, but for me it turned out to be more of a school of life and hardening. I started studying at the age of 17, and the Israelis first serve in the army for three years, demobilize at 21-22, then travel the world and work, and at 23-24 they go to university. That is, everyone around was five years older than me, much more experienced and with a completely different

mentality - the middle between American and Arab. I really liked it there, but I still felt like an alien.

Working in France on the EuroNews channel was like student life, sung by parents, much more. I arrived there at the age of 22, after graduating from the university, I started as an editor, and at the end I switched to correspondent work. What I could and should have learned there, I learned in a few days, and then it was very easy. By that time I spoke four foreign languages, and they all came in handy, as there is an international team. The first year and a half was terribly interesting, but I have one problem: monotonous work bores me. After working for EuroNews for three years, I returned to Russia and got a job at the Russia Today TV channel.

- And it became more interesting to work and live?

- More fun. I have been everywhere - and at the North Pole, and in Chernobyl, and in a hot spot I was once. On the Lebanese-Israeli border, when Israel was at war with Hezbollah. For two weeks I sat under mortar shelling, making reports. But this, of course, does not make me a military commander - so, a single interesting experience. Some guys, my former colleagues, don’t get out of the war at all, now they are sitting in the Donbass as reporters. Such work changes a person: he becomes hardened, some feelings are dulled, and he becomes dependent on adrenaline. Israeli acquaintances who served in the army said: “You crawl around Lebanon for five days, sit in ambush with a machine gun, ready for snipers to shoot you at any moment, and then you return home to Tel Aviv for two days and, as if through a dusty bag you look at everything as if in a dream. Real life in the war, and in a peaceful city there is no sense of the reality of what is happening.

Was that the most dangerous trip?

- Judging by the consequences, the most dangerous was an innocent trip to Guatemala as part of the presidential pool. When we arrived, we were treated to a cocktail at the hotel on the occasion of arrival - and he turned out to be with jaundice! Seven journalists and seven people from the presidential press service fell ill. Moreover, the composition of the cocktail included two different strains of hepatitis - the first had a shorter incubation period, the second had a longer one, so we first got sick with one variety, and then another. But, fortunately, food-borne hepatitis is curable, unlike those that are contracted through the blood. So I was cured, only with fatty and fried foods I had to quit. And with alcohol. But it was in Guatemala - after a half-year stupor - that I managed to complete the novel "Twilight". You know, after all, almost half of the population of Guatemala are Mayan Indians, and "Twilight" is the story of a translator who is entrusted with an order to decipher the diary of a Spanish conquistador sent on a secret mission into the wilds of the jungle - in the very heart of the Mayan lands, in order to find and destroy all Mayan manuscripts , one of which contains doomsday prophecies. The whole book was ready, and with the ending I was stuck for many months. And on that trip to Guatemala, it was like the chakras opened up. But I had to pay a price for it - a month and a half in a hospital bed.

- Have you ever wanted to avoid the obviously dangerous trips like Chernobyl?

— On the contrary, I was torn to Chernobyl: I really wanted to see live what an abandoned city looked like, poisoned by radiation, — this is my topic. “Metro 2033”, my most famous book, “Metro 2034” and “Metro 2035”, which just came out, are novels about how people in Moscow survive two decades after the third world war, after the nuclear bombings. Descriptions of empty dead Moscow are very important in Metro 2035: everything is contaminated with radiation, abandoned houses around, rusty cars in endless traffic jams, empty mailboxes tin lids flap in the wind. And life and civilization remained only in the Moscow metro, which was built as the world's largest anti-nuclear bomb shelter. The protagonist does not lose hope to find other survivors somewhere else on Earth and bring people there from the subway, from the dungeon. So God himself ordered me to study Chernobyl.

And this place surprised me very much: it usually seems to be an extinct zone where mutant moose roam, and it seems that it is located in the wild wilderness. But the nuclear power plant is only an hour away from Kyiv, a city where several million people live - this was the first discovery. The second discovery was that there is absolutely blossoming nature. Still, without a person, she is prettier. But the city itself was strictly the way it was described: a rusty Ferris wheel, empty houses, from which either looters or the owners took out absolutely all the furniture, not being afraid of radiation. Glasses are dusty Kindergarten with abandoned toys.

So the reporter's work determined a lot in my life. Yes, and my marriage, I also owe work. It was at Russia Today that we met Lena: she was my producer and helped me get through the most interesting business trips.

- Did you believe then, hoped that you would be published and your books would become bestsellers?

“I didn’t expect to even become a published author. There was a dream, bright, but timid. And in my free time from studies, and then from journalism, I continued to do what I did in high school. I'm the story of "Metro 2033" - about how people live in the subway after nuclear war, - came up with at the age of 15, and then for many years he slowly wrote it. I really wanted someone other than friends to read it, and when I finished the first version at the age of 22, I sent it to all the publishers I could, but was ignored by everyone. I am stubborn - for several months then I called them: “Haven't you read it yet by any chance? Have you heard that the person who promised to look did not return from vacation? And every time you have a heartbeat, sweat, and you press the wrong buttons on the phone, because your little hands are shaking. And once in the publishing house that eventually released me, they said: “You know, it’s damp in this form, and, most importantly, the ending is unformatted. In genre novels, it does not happen that the hero walks and walks towards the goal and, before reaching the halfway point, is killed. Add, change the ending, and we may consider your proposal. But I no longer believed that someone would agree to print my Metro - I decided that no one understood me and everyone rejected me. And the year was 2002, the Internet was already developing with might and main, people downloaded and read books in pirated libraries, and I thought: if you can post other people's books, then why not hang your own? I made a website, posted the novel there for free and began to write on all forums dedicated to the metro and science fiction: they say there is such a dystopian novel, please read it and tell me what you think about it. And the subway drivers, engineers, track workers - people who, unlike me, knew the subway very well from the wrong side, said that I describe the feelings that arise there very correctly. There were, of course, bores who found fault: “The fire at the station cannot burn, because there is no ventilation, the station will be covered with smoke, and everyone will suffocate.” But I didn’t write a TTX reference book, but a book about the human soul. The main thing in this was not to make a mistake, and not in the description of the engineering wisdom of Metrostroy.

In Metro 2033, by the way, there is also a secret, personal layer that is clear only to me and my school friends. The journey of the protagonist, Artyom, from VDNKh to Arbatskaya, follows the route I traveled from home to school (we had already moved from Strogino at that time). Or, for example, after some tense scenes, there is an episode at the Polyanka station - two middle-aged people are sitting there, smoking a hookah, burning books to warm their hands, and having lengthy conversations. Well, these are my closest friends. The names of the heroes are the same as my friends - Sergey Andreevich and Evgeny Dmitrievich, and they talk about what really happened with my friends. One recalls that he had a green "Moskvich-2141" and he drove it around Moscow at night, installing a makeshift accelerator on nitrous oxide. Another is that the Smolenskaya metro station had a “headquarters” of prostitutes, who really hung around there forever in the nineties. So I saved my beloved comrades in World War III.

“Metro 2033 has a secret, personal layer that only me and my high school friends understand. With prototypes of the heroes of the novel - classmates Sergei and Eugene. Dmitry is pictured on the left (mid-1990s). Photo: From the personal archive of Dmitry Glukhovsky

— You often describe in books real people and events?

- I still try to invent, create heroes - although, of course, I endow them with features and speech of both my relatives and strangers, which can be overheard somewhere in the train or in the store. And as for the events, that is, those without which the writing of another novel would have been completely impossible. Here I have a book "The Future", for example. Her idea came to mind when I was 19 years old: what will happen to us, to humanity, when we defeat old age, aging and will no longer die? After all, this society will be completely different than ours today - people will probably not need God: who needs a soul if the body is immortal? There will be no creation in it, because when creating, people try to leave something behind. But the main thing is that the planet will be overpopulated, which means that the birth rate will be limited. And now, for example, they will force these immortal people to choose: to live forever, remaining forever young, or to have offspring. And if a couple decides to have a child, then one of them - a man or a woman - must give up eternal youth and life, receive an injection that will age him, and die ten years later before the child reaches adolescence and can continue on his own. genus. I came up with

this story is 17 years ago, but until I got married and had a child of my own, I simply could not take it on.

You know, after all, few people tell the truth about this, you can’t rely on others: when a girl confesses for the first time to her boyfriend that she is pregnant, and he replies that he is very happy, he is lying. In fact, he is afraid - afraid of how his life will now change, of responsibility, afraid of losing freedom. A child is something irrevocable that binds you and your woman forever. When young guys at the windows of the maternity hospital write with crayons “Thank you for your son!”, This is just a fawning. A father's love is not like a mother's. She comes with time. The first feeling - again fear, anxiety - not even for the child, for the wife. And when they give you a tiny red-faced gnome in the maternity hospital, it’s wildly scary not to break it by accident and not drop it. Love comes later, slowly: that's when the wife, exhausted during the day, fell asleep at night, and you sit all night with your daughter, who is three days old, sleeping on your stomach. When it's the first time for you - and not for your wife! smiles in response to your smile. It's chilling, chilling. When you rejoice and miss you without you. And the more time you spend with your child, the more you fall in love with him.And a year ago, a son, Theodore, was born. So I have the complete set. Each with their own entertainment. With my daughter, for example, we played “Chuk and Gek” all winter, I specially bought a Lego set “Polar base”. I read to her a lot: I introduced her to the Moomin-trolls and Carlson, and now she already reads herself. I play cars with my son Theo, he just loves them. And he's also a fan of cows. It shows very funny how a cow mooes, in such a hoarse bass that this baby doll does not understand how it publishes at all. And recently there was a joyful event: they found a place in the dacha where real black-and-white spotted cows graze, as in the pictures in his books. He fell into the astral plane from surprise, and then did not want to leave and rushed to his cows again. dead hour. Until you go through this, you will not understand how it is possible to choose a child between eternal youth and a child. So I took up the novel The Future after Emilia was born. I had to get naked in front of the reader, honestly talk about feelings - and it's worth it: forty-year-old men confessed to me how they cried over some pages. You need to write about what you yourself have lived, and then it will come out truthfully. Each book is a step forward, the result of the past years.

— But your new novel- "Metro 2035" is a continuation of your very first book, which is already ten years old.

- Yes. And the main character is the same, albeit matured - scorched wings and somewhat disappointed. And the book, of course, came out more mature: I myself became ten years older, and our country, and all my readers. The first novel was about how a young man is looking for his place in the world, in life, trying to understand what to believe in and what not to believe, what his purpose and mission are, and at the same time protect his native metro station from a terrible threat from a radioactive surface . And in Metro 2035, Artyom has a different dream and goal: to bring people out of the dungeon up to the sun and sky. But is there somewhere to lead and will people follow him? Of course the events recent years in life

The countries here influenced me a lot, made me think about a lot. And although I refused offers to write a sequel for a long time, in the end I felt that I myself want this.

You know, "Metro 2033" still brought me popularity, changed my life and remains my most famous novel, although it is a youthful, naive thing in many ways. When you return to the roots, you are afraid to spoil something, to disappoint readers, to break the legend. This is definitely not worth doing for the sake of money - and after all, many authors are tempted by money to write or film a bad sequel to a successful first thing! So, I must admit, I had jitters when I wrote Metro 2035. The book, however, turned out to be different: tougher, more realistic, intertwining two love lines at once - and not necessarily sugary romantic. And by the way, you can start reading "Metro" right from it - the hero is the same, but the plot is separate, independent, so there is no need to refer to the original source. As for new readers, I was calm. And I was worried about the old ones: would they understand the deviation from the canons? But here I met with them - with those who had already read. And I was surprised: how different they are - a lot of girls, middle-aged people, whole families come. I ask: did not disappoint you with a new book? They told me: “Swallowed overnight. When is the next one? And I don't know. To write the next one, I still have to live and live ...

Family: wife - Elena, daughter - Emilia (4 years old), son - Theodore (1 year old)

Education: graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Jerusalem with a degree in journalism and international relations

Career: since 2002, he worked for the EuroNews channel in France, in 2005 he returned to Russia and began working as a correspondent for the Russia Today TV channel. In 2002, he posted his first novel, Metro 2033, on the Internet - it was not published until 2005. Now the book has been translated into 37 languages and formed the basis of two video games. Author of the books "Twilight", "Metro 2034", "Stories about the Motherland", "Future", etc. On June 12, 2015, Dmitry published a new novel - "Metro 2035"

The actions of Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels usually take place in a closed space. In the legendary trilogy, it was the subway, in "Twilight" - 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 that is 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 this is 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 I, first of all, 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 the desire for revenge, are stronger than education?

Of 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 are no Russian troops there, 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.

- An old trick: instead of washing ourselves, are we 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 in the "Text" we are just faced with a representative of a system that shares these beliefs.

With hereditary and representative. Because this FSKN operative, whom the protagonist kills in revenge for his lost youth, is a hereditary security official. His father is a police general, deputy head of the personnel department for the city of Moscow in the Ministry of the Interior. 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 little incorruptible ...

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 ...

- 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.

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 simply 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 bigger the country, the more respect?

In Berdyaev's "Russian Idea" it is said that the only national idea that has taken root here and turned out to be universal is the idea of territorial expansion. The 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 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, well, they know her in some 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 the 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 young people, this entire 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 proportionally do not have many young people. 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 the people who now have big 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 the 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 it 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.

- 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?

- 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 really expected, 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 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.

- 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 to sit here and whine, and suffer abroad from the inability to adapt. This is such authoritarianism, adjusted for all modern theories and textbooks.

- 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 main character 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 a 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 ban, 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.

- Conservative in domestic 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 is also around sex and in general around what they do in their free time. And as soon as diktat and censorship begin here, people will accumulate anger.

From an interview with the writer Dmitry Glukhovsky to the Internet publication Sobesednik.ru.

It is known that your great-grandfather was friends with Stalin's personal doctor, and you, having studied as an international journalist in Israel, worked for Russia Today, entered the Kremlin pool, and then, once again, the opposition. Why such a turn?

Well, this is not my turn, but Putin's. You may have forgotten, but in the 2000s we were going to become a civilized European state, striving for the future, not for the past. And RT was originally created to show the West that everything is in order with freedom of speech. So for all the years of work on the channel, I didn’t have to somehow prevaricate: it was enough to remain open-minded, to balance pro-Kremlin information with anti-Kremlin information. In the pool, the most interesting thing was to debunk the magic: there is nothing special about the inhabitants of the Kremlin. You can probably put anyone on the throne - and the gears will continue to spin. They were afraid that after Stalin's death everything would collapse - but nothing collapsed, and life was much better under Khrushchev. What to say about leaders new Russia. As for my opposition… Today I stand on the same rails on which I stood ten years ago, in fact. But the platform drove off in an unknown direction. During this time, we have turned into an authoritarian police state, we have banned social and political life, the Internet is being strangled, we have been put on a strict collar, all opposition has been fed or physically eliminated, the TV has gone berserk and sprays with poison, we have quarreled with both the CIS and the West. We went to Europe, arrived in Kolyma. It's time to stop pretending.

Dmitry Glukhovsky. Photo: Alena Pozevalova, www.om1.ru

Are you trying to leave no trace? Or is it already useless, because Big Brother has already counted everyone? How Big Data is changing us? Should you be afraid of search engines, social networks and your own smartphones?

It seems to me that resistance is futile. If the secret services are seriously interested in someone, there is no way to hide yourself from them. Phones are hacked, computers are hacked, wiretapping can be installed in any gadget, you can spy on a person through a webcam, you can know what kind of porn he watches, with whom he cheats on whom, find out all his business ins and outs. People are worried that it is now more difficult for them to be hypocritical, but this only leads to the fact that they no longer hide their true nature. When the collection of compromising evidence cannot be avoided, you need to recognize your human weaknesses, and this will make you invulnerable. Think you're the only one watching porn? Yes, all the girls are watching it today. Do you think you're the only one with a mistress? Yes, monogamy has disappeared from the world in general. But this does not mean that love has disappeared. It's just time for us to stop pretending to be someone else, it's time to become ourselves. At all times, the state and the church have tried to take control of our personal lives, to limit it with many prohibitions, to declare any form of sexual behavior as a perversion, except for those aimed directly at childbearing. Make people feel guilty. Whoever is to blame - he is obedient, he does not argue with the authorities, he either plays along with it, or sits quietly and does not blather. This alone is the whole point of the so-called struggle for morality. In general, I am convinced that the more fiercely a politician or a religious figure fights for morality, the more vicious he himself is. If you want to stay under their hood, sit in the closet, be afraid of being exposed, which is still inevitable in the world of social networks and big data. Be yourself and be free.

- Do you consider Snowden the last romantic of the Earth?

Snowden is a romantic? Do not know. But he did a great and necessary thing, in the interests of civil society all over the world. It is tragic, of course, that in the end he ended up in our clawed paws, from which everything he recites sounds much less convincing. But it's not as sad as being Assange and cuckooing in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Do you know Pavel Durov? They say that his Telegram is the most inaccessible to the special services, which Durov, after weaning VKontakte, refuses to reciprocate.

I happened to have a personal conversation with him. “Vkontakte” was taken away from him, because Durov is a joker, an unpredictable player who, moreover, has too much ambition for a manager and his own ideology. Such a person should not be allowed to control the most powerful media in the country, which is VK. Next is a matter of technology. As for Telegram, I heard different opinions about its reliability. I think, with a strong desire, the correspondence of a particular person can be hacked. In any case, it is more reliable than any Russian messenger and than the Belarusian Viber, about which knowledgeable people told me that it has servers in Lubyanka.

Despite the total transparency and face recognition system, people are forbidden to gather on the street. What are they afraid of?

The authorities are effective in their concern for stopping threats. Threatening yourself first. First, the parliamentary opposition was castrated, and now the Liberal Democratic Party, A Just Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation are just subdivisions of the party in power, fat sleepy cats. Then the oligarchs were flogged and sworn in. The governors had their teeth pulled out. It remains to clear the street - the embodiment of a nightmare since the Maidan. For the sake of this, they invented a whole host of senseless pioneers, from the “Young Guard” to “Ours”, and drove idlers and young opportunists there. Then they began to lure football fans and bikers, Cossacks and just some thugs, invented the Russian Guard and gave it the right to shoot at the crowd, at women and minors, adopted a host of repressive laws, staged show trials and launched an attack on the Internet. People in power are afraid of only one thing: to lose it. After all, there are no idiots in our country who believe that our elections are real? Well, the politicians whom we allegedly elect know their price very well. Despite all the royal army - OMON and the National Guard, the incessant propaganda on TV, the battalions of political strategists who are hired to help the authorities fool the people and keep them in check - these people feel great self-doubt and do not believe in the sincerity of eighty-six percent .

- Do you think the result of the elections is definitely predetermined? Or can everything suddenly fall on your ears?

Putin will be elected, Navalny will not be allowed in, the Communists and Zhirinovites will get on all fours in their usual ritual of obedience, Putin will be elected by the detached Tajiks and Caucasian state employees with a result of 75%. Putin will be in power until he dies of old age. We will turn into a cozy Central Asian monarchy. This is real stability.

That is, everything is the same as before, but with new technologies? Should we expect in this case that our president will start, for example, a YouTube channel before the elections?

Why does YouTube need a person who has already got several channels on central television? For schoolchildren, he is still a grandfather. TV viewers will vote for Putin.

But the TV seems to have already died, rolled into asphalt by the Internet, and this should please a normal person.

The TV did not die anywhere, it is more alive than all the living. We fell in love with Crimea through TV, changed our minds about condemning the authorities for theft, we have been fighting Ukraine for three years through it. TV can do something that the Internet has never learned to do: forge mythology, create entire imaginary worlds and move peoples into them. Russian Federation. And the people can be understood: we have such a terrible history and such a dull reality that God himself ordered us to escape from them into the myth of a great empire rising from its knees.

Well, bloggers who eclipsed the writers in the hearts of those in power - we started with this - isn't this fundamentally new?

All of these channels have been around for a few years now. It was the presidential administration that just noticed them - because some shkolota was seen at the rally on March 26. And now you urgently need to tame the shkolota, because suddenly she will overthrow the king. Let's find school Mamontov and school Solovyov, bribe them, like adults Solovyov and Mamontov, with money and a sense of being chosen, massage them with their sense of their own greatness - and let Sasha Spielberg and Ivangai put on T-shirts with patriotic prints and do two times "ku". Then, of course, the shkolota, following them, will renounce the devil and will no longer take it into his head to wander to rallies. And rightly so - there is nothing to tempt the Russian Guard.

BOOKS ARE LIKE A SOUL IN CANS
Writer Dmitry Glukhovsky - about plans for immortality

Interest in the novels of the popular writer Dmitry Glukhovsky is acquiring new dimensions and forms. The Hollywood company MGM has already bought the rights to the film adaptation of Metro 2033, and South Korea has become interested in the dystopia Future. The author does not have to complain about circulation, in Russia they are huge, but he is even more inspired by the prospect of seeing his heroes on the big screen.

- How important is it for you to see the screen version of your work?
Every writer wants to be heard. The best thing that can happen to him is the Nobel Prize. Screen adaptation of the book - in second place. A film adaptation is good because it simplifies the novel, squeezes the main emotions out of it, wraps the story in glossy posters with tanned faces of the actors ... And makes your story accessible to the masses. The book is a coconut, to get to the pulp and juice, you need to split the shell; film - chewing gum with coconut flavor. Chemistry, fake - but sold at every corner; besides - are you personally ready to spend your energy on the shell? But thanks to the film about the book, millions will learn about the writer. And what else he will say to these millions who have suddenly listened to him depends only on him. Screening is a chance that not everyone gets. I want to be heard not only in Russia.

You are clearly ambitious, but at the same time in ordinary life you behave quite atypically. Avoid the media, refuse to host popular TV and radio broadcasts. Do you need recognition?
- Flashing on the screen is useless. A Russian writer should be an oracle, not a teletubby. Truths are expected from him, knowledge of how the world and the soul are arranged. Each statement of the writer must be a complete postulate. He has no right to lowing and interjections. If you appear at Malakhov's in his nightly freak circus with the caption "writer", this does not make you a writer. I don't need people to recognize my face on the street, I feel embarrassed about it. I need people to read what I write - and to argue about my novels. I tried to host programs on TV. Being a TV presenter alone is good: unfamiliar women smile at you. There is no other meaning here. As soon as the leader disappears from the box, he is immediately forgotten. He's alive while he's talking, so he's forced to chirp without shutting up, even if he has nothing to say. And I want to be remembered for a while longer. Books are my soul in cans. I throw books from my island into the ocean of nothingness, like letters in bottles. They will outlive me. I plant my personality to readers, instill it. And the hosts, remind again what they do there?

- Are your ambitions limited to literary activity?
- Literary activity is not a limitation of ambitions. It has no limits. It has to compete with the classics - with the titans, with the geniuses. How does my "Future" look against the background of Huxley and Zamyatin, Bradbury and Orwell? It is a desperate struggle - and a doomed one. But I have not written a single book for which I would be ashamed now. Metro 2033 was my high school romance, actually. And at that moment I couldn't do better. "Twilight" took away from me everything that had accumulated in me by that moment: strength, experience, understanding of life, command of the language. "Stories about the Motherland" was also a new step. Now - "Future". This does not mean that the book is perfect or even just good. It means I did everything I could.

- So much so that, it turns out, girls cry over your books ...
- And forty-year-old men. Some confessed to me here that they could not hold back their tears in the final scenes of the novel "The Future".

- Forty-year-old men are vulnerable creatures.
- You just need to know where to hit. Surprisingly, men are taken by what is associated with infants. Somehow it penetrates between the plates of their armor, between the ribs - and right into the heart.

- On the one hand, you protect your personal life, but at the same time you are very frank in your texts.
- Let the Teletubbies trade their personal lives. The poor fellows can be understood: they do not create anything, and they have to sell themselves. The more dramatic the confession of the Teletubby in "Seven Days", the higher his rate at the corporate party. I don't want the whole country crawling under my covers. But I also feel the need for confession. Singers undress on the covers, writers under the covers. I am not a religious person, and I miss the booth where you can go to tell the barred pastor about your sins, dreams and fears. And I pretend to be the hero of my books and confess to my reader. Frankly, there is exhibitionistic pleasure in this, only you are not stripped naked, but to the meat. We must speak the truth. We must try to tell the truth at least.

- Why do you need it?
- I can't wear masks. I get tired of masks very soon, they rub me. I sincerely envy Pelevin, who put on a carnival mask twenty years ago and never took it off. And other authors who manage to create an invented image for themselves, put it on and walk in it all their lives.

-Do you think the reader cares about the sincerity of the author?
- Undoubtedly. Fake, fiction - just do not hurt the living.

In the novel "Twilight" my hero at night in his dreams walks a dog that he once had and died - but in dreams she returns to him and asks for a walk. This is my personal story. It was my dog, and still, many years after her death, I often dream about walking with her. And this short, half-page digression, which has nothing to do with the plot of the book, touches other people more than the rest of the novel. The reader goes into the book for experiences, for emotions. Falseness and commonplaces do not catch and are not remembered. And commercial literature is all assembled from falsehood.

- Why?
- When the authors give out a book every six months, they are forced to operate with templates. They simply do not have enough life experience for reliable emotional descriptions. Jack London had enough experience to write several books, and Varlam Shalamov had enough of all his monstrous experience to write a book of stories. But commercial authors do not go out into the world, they sit at home and shuffle patterns that they pick up in other people's works. Their books are constructor; like something new, but everything is made up of old parts.

- What is important to you?
- At the age of 17 I wanted to write a clever thing. At 25, I wanted to write something smart and beautiful. At 30, I wanted to write a smart and controversial thing. At 34, I realized that the vast majority of readers are not interested in either your philosophizing or your stylistic delights. They want to feel, experience. We all sit on emotions, like on drugs, and are constantly looking for where to go. Out of a hundred readers, all a hundred are able to enjoy the hero's emotional adventures. Only ten will appreciate the language and metaphor. And only one will understand that the text is woven from quotes from the classics.

- It seems to me that most go to the theater and cinema for the sake of entertainment. And books are read for the same reason.
- Ryazanov's comedies and Zakharov's films - for all time. They are essentially eternal. They are truthful, they have emotion, there is a spark of life. And ironic detective stories will rot ahead of their creators. Entertainment is for a single use. Used and discarded. Well, then - who sets what tasks for himself. Someone needs to earn their own bread. And I want immortality.

- Do you know what exactly and how to do it in order to succeed?
- You have to feel what you write about. "Future", for example, is a novel about how people overcome aging. How to stay forever young. But because of this, the world is overpopulated, and each couple is offered a choice: if you want to have a child, give up eternal youth, grow old and die. Live yourself or let someone else live. I had the idea about fifteen years ago, but have not yet begun to appear grey hair, I didn’t understand how to talk about old age, and until I became a father, I didn’t know what to write about small children.

- Is there still a risk for you to remain the author of one bestseller?
- The masses are able to keep one work in their heads. This one is like with artists who get a bright role. Tikhonov - always Stirlitz. Glukhovsky is the guy who wrote "Metro", and it doesn't matter what I wrote there after, what I wrote there all my life. The price of popularity: everyone knows you, but everyone knows you from one of your works. By school work in my case.

The first pages of Metro were written when I was 17-18 years old. I wrote "The Future" for three years and I had eight versions of the first chapter. A lot of ideas came, as they say, after. That is why I did not publish this novel as it was being written online. And there were no drafts. I just wrote one chapter after another and put it on the site. And has never ruled since. And this is a fundamental position. The book was written, when it was written, in the language and with the metaphors that I knew at that time, and I addressed those topics that were important to me then. And maybe today I find a lot of awkward in the "Metro". But the book is a cast of the author's soul, a plaster mask. The soul grows, ages, disappears, but the mask remains.

- Ultimately, for whom do you write?
If you want to write for others, you must write for yourself. Write what you think. The way you feel. Write as if no one will ever read it - and you don't have to pretend or lie. Then the real thing will come out, and people will read about you - but also about themselves. And if you write for others, for imaginary others, you write too generally, you write for no one. Because we are all, by and large, the same; but we all put on masks. And we ourselves forget that we put on masks, and we believe that other people's masks are their faces. This is theory. But in practice, this is how the reader wants you to write more about the metro, the publisher wants you to write what was on sale, and you want to write about what is burning you now, but all the time you think: what if they don’t buy it? People's love - it is. Change does not forgive.

- I don’t want to count your money, but tell me, does writing income allow you to exist comfortably?
- Quite. After all, "Metro" is not only books, but also computer games, and film rights, and who knows what else. This is what gives me the freedom to write about whatever I want. Leo Tolstoy - the estate, and I - computer games. Where are we rolling?

Your heroes in the Aftertime have gained eternal life, but they can still die, from a catastrophe or an accident. That is, they are still not immortal.
- About immortality, about the impossibility of dying, has already been said a hundred times. This is the story of the Wandering Jew, and "Makropulos' Remedy" by Chapek, and "Interruptions with Death" by Saramago. I was interested in the victory over old age and the choice between life for myself and life for the sake of the child. In addition, complete immortality is a fantasy, and life extension is a matter of foreseeable prospects. Today, biology and medicine are completely focused on finding means and opportunities to fight cancer and aging. Clearly, there will be a breakthrough in the foreseeable future. Will we be able to live ten or twenty years longer or will our grandchildren be freed from old age, this is a matter of our luck. But the fact that this will happen during the 21st century is obvious to me. At least I'm looking forward to this breakthrough. Jules Verne predicted many inventions because he read scientific journals, analyzed what was happening and made medium-term forecasts.

The problem is that in a situation of the probability of death with an infinitely long life, the issues of relationship with God only become more complicated. And your hero and other "immortals" prefer to simply ignore his existence.
- It cannot be said that the main character of "Future" does not need God. He insults him, blasphemes, visits a brothel set up in the temple. He is looking for him, but only for revenge. For him, God is a traitor. The bitterness and hatred that he feels for God come from his childhood resentment. His mother promised him protection, said that God would not leave him - and both of them betrayed him. His lonely creepy childhood is a meat grinder, and the creature that comes out of this meat grinder hates both his mother and the one in whom she believed. So the hero of "The Future" is not a typical representative of his time. Will immortal people need God? It seems to me that most people remember heaven when the earth leaves under their feet. The need for the soul arises with the disintegration of the body.

- I'm afraid this is a subject of great discussion.
- Well, yes, there is also the question of the emptiness of being. We do not see the meaning in our short life, and it will be even more difficult to fill the endless life with meaning, is that what you mean? But the meaning that religions offer us is far from the only one. Ideologies gave us meanings, which were quite enough for the billions of people for whom they lived and sacrificed themselves. In addition, in The Future, the question of the meaninglessness of existence does not go anywhere: people simply drown themselves with antidepressants. This is the right way: today all the States are on antidepressants, Europe is on marijuana, and Russia is on alcohol.

But, being, as you say, a non-religious person, in two novels you already address the theme of God in one way or another.
- I understand that there are things that cannot be explained.

- What do you think?
- I want to be a mystic. I want to believe. But everything I hear about faith and religion cannot be believed by a sane person. Convince me! I want to believe in the soul. Into reincarnation. It's very romantic, and I would like to be romantic. But I can't. Of course, it is easier for a believer to live than an unbeliever. I hate to think that I am a piece of meat, and that my so-called soul is a set of electrical and chemical reactions and that as soon as these reactions stop, I will be gone forever. But for this, you see, you need some courage.

- Okay, tell me, are you ready to work on a new book?
- Yes. I am going to explore the theme of slavery, the theme of submission and obedience, the theme of obscurantism and lies, the theme of masters and servants. Does the government turn the people into cattle, or is he himself glad to be a herd, because this way it is easier and more comfortable for him? Why is everything so and is it possible otherwise? The novel will be called "Metro 2035".

- But you again "wrap" the new book in the brand "Metro"?
- Again - and for the last time. I want to return to the same world whitened with gray hair and wiser experience. In "Metro 2033" these topics are also raised in passing - there is a layer of social criticism, satire about Russian political life. Since I wrote the first Metro, I have learned something about people and about the structure of society. I need to update my story. You need to write "Metro ten years later."

Text: Eteri Chalandzia