Vasily Aksenov with his wife Kira. Aksenov Vasily: biography and best books of the writer. Vasily Aksenov, Vladimir Vysotsky and Victor Erofeev
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Biography, life story of Maya Carmen (Aksyonova)
Maya Afanasyevna Karmen (Aksenova) is the second and last wife of the writer.
Childhood and youth
Maya was born in Moscow on June 5, 1930 in the family of Afanasy Andreevich Zmeul, a Soviet historian and hero civil war. After school, Maya entered the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade (at that time it was headed by her father), after which she began working at the Chamber of Commerce.
Maya Zmeul was a typical representative of the “golden youth”. Thanks to her father's money and connections, she got everything she wanted. After the death of her mother, her stepmother came to her house, with whom she developed a warm relationship.
Husbands
In 1951, Maya married Maurice Ovchinnikov, a foreign trade worker. In 1954, the couple had a daughter, Elena. Alas, the relationship between Maya and Maurice did not work out. After several years of marriage, they decided to file for divorce.
Maya's second husband was director Roman Carmen. With him, Maya lived in grand style - a luxurious apartment, a dacha near Moscow, regular trips abroad, cars with personal drivers at any time of the day, an elite social circle. And all this against the backdrop of a sincere and incredible strong love to each other. It would seem that the union of Maya and Roman is indestructible. But in 1970 everything changed. The Carmen couple went to Yalta (Roman needed to restore his health after a heart attack), where Maya met. This meeting changed her whole life.
Maya and fell in love at first sight. At that time they were both married. Secret dates began, kisses were stolen... But, as you know, sooner or later everything secret becomes clear. Despite the fact that Maya’s affair became public knowledge, the lovers did not take any action. Maya could not leave her husband, and did not dare to persuade her against her will. In 1978, when Roman Carmen died, Maya had no choice but to try to start a family with. Soon he divorced his then-wife Kira. In 1980, Maya got married.
CONTINUED BELOW
Life in the USA
Immediately after the wedding, the Aksenov family, including Elena, Maya’s daughter from her first marriage, and her son Ivan, went to Paris. From there the family moved to America, planning to stay there for a couple of years. But due to the unexpected deprivation of citizenship, they had to stay in a foreign land for 24 years. In the USA, Maya Aksenova taught Russian to university students.
A series of tragedies
In 1999, a terrible grief occurred in the Aksenov family. Maya Aksenova’s grandson Ivan died tragically. A 26-year-old boy accidentally fell out of a window. The misfortunes did not end there. In 2004, the couple returned to their Moscow apartment, and in 2008 they suffered a stroke.
The love story of Vasily Aksenov and Maya Carmen
Once, at the end of the 60s of the last century, a popular young Soviet writer came to Yalta to relax and work in the House of Creativity. On his first day in the writers' canteen, he met his friend, an equally famous poetess. We started talking. Clasping her hands, she exclaimed: “What, you don’t know Maya? Now I’ll introduce you!”
One of the most famous sixties novels of the century began with this remark: the writer Vasily Aksenov and the Moscow socialite-tiger Maya Carmen. (You can easily recognize Bella Akhmadulina in their mutual friend).
The surname Carmen surprisingly suited this woman and, although according to her passport she was Ovchinnikova, “all of Moscow” knew her as the wife of a high-ranking documentary director Roman Carmen. Aksenov and the poet Grigory Pozhenyan, who came with him to the House of Creativity, had heard a lot about Maya. Pozhenyan was ready to rush into battle, but, having seen with his own eyes the spark that flashed between Vasily and Maya, he decided not to interfere with his friend. “I’ll get out of the way - that’s the law. The third must leave,” Pozhenyan later wrote in one of his songs.
In this dining room filled with celebrities, Aksenov saw the sad, tired eyes of a stranger covered in myths and realized that he was lost. The original turned out to be much more spiritual than many copies, which were drawn by the inflamed imagination of men who wanted to stay face-to-face with Carmen’s wife. 34-year-old Maya Zmeul, by her first husband Ovchinnikov, by her second Carmen, spent the entire previous winter nursing her not-so-happy documentarian after a heart attack that overtook him at the most dangerous age for a man - at the turn of 60 years. And the laureate of state prizes and friend of the secretaries general, Roman Carmen, was not very happy because of the sexual achievements of the wives he inherited. The first two made him famous throughout the bohemian world with their loud betrayals. And the third, Maya, a quarter of a century younger, with blond pigtails and a little daughter Alena, seemed to Carmen an angel in the flesh. But then the angel began to turn into a demon-tempter...
Vasily Aksenov was not free at the time of his meeting with Maya. Having become a famous writer, he completely lost his monogamous character traits. The intensely jealous wife Kira and son Alyosha did not stop the creator of confessional prose from working hard and constantly playing tricks. At the time we are talking about, Aksenov’s affair with the first beautiful intellectual of the city on the Neva, Asya Pekurovskaya, was rumored. At the peak of this romance, Asya managed to briefly marry the still unknown Sergei Dovlatov.
An interesting scene took place in the “Roof” restaurant of the “European” hotel, where Aksenov and Pekurovskaya once had dinner (and Dovlatov was serving in the army at that time, away from his wife Asya and the men accompanying her). After dinner, they went down the stairs built by the modernist Fyodor Lidval and argued whether there were any good writers left in St. Petersburg, or whether everyone, like Aksenov, had moved to Moscow. “Well, name at least someone!” – Aksenov called to Asya. And then they saw Andrei Bitov, sprawled at their feet, drunk, as they say, out of his mind. Pointing her finger at Bitov’s tie that had slipped to one side, the clever and beautiful Asya said: “Here lies one of best representatives Petersburg prose! - and, stepping over the writer’s body, Dovlatov’s fleeting wife and the prose writer Aksenov, who had joined her, went to catch a taxi...
Meanwhile, the holiday romance between Maya Carmen and Vasily Aksenov turned out to be of a completely different genre. Everyone knew about their protracted meetings. Maya was condemned more, Vasily less. Only Bella Akhmadulina did not condemn anyone, considering herself Aksenov’s sister and Maya’s faithful friend. However, she also considered herself a friend of Roman Carmen. “Oh times, oh morals!” - some latent bigot will quote. In fact, free morals accompany any passionate times. Then, after the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the modern Renaissance began to shrink to a state now called stagnation. And the romance between Aksenov and Maya continued. They were seen in Yalta, Koktebel, Sochi, the Baltic states, and St. Petersburg. Aksenov’s wife Kira grew painfully fat from these visions, Maya’s husband Roman Carmen suffered new heart attacks and asked his wife not to leave him. She looked after the sick Carmen, and then met with Aksenov somewhere away from spiteful Moscow. “Give back Mike to Roma!” - Yulian Semyonov repeated to his loving colleague when they met.
One day, Aksenov’s friend, a connoisseur of jazz and literature, Alexander Kabakov, spent a whole month vacationing with his wife Ella in Tallinn. One evening they went out onto Laboratorium Street, described in Aksenov’s prose. And Kabakov said: “The spirit of Vasily Palych hovers here.” At these words, Aksenov and Maya Carmen appeared on the other side of the street. Kabakov recalled: “The beautiful Maya had a Marilyn Monroe type at that time. Moreover, Monroe in that famous shot where the wind from the underground ventilation lifts up the hem of her dress.” I, the meticulous author of these lines, looking at the photograph of Maya Afanasyevna, did not see the slightest resemblance to Marilyn. Not very young and not at all doll-like, the woman amazes with her gaze. The look is absolutely happy. And Aksenov, who is hugging her, has a look of absolute love. Irresistible photo! And cutting it in half (he – separately, she – separately) is impossible.
In the mid-70s, Aksenov completed “Burn,” a turning point in his life and work. Up to half of the Burn main character drinks heavily, then suddenly stops drinking. The same thing happens with Aksenov. From the middle of the novel, he begins to write, fueled by completely different energies. Aksenov dedicated his most important novel to Maya. Alisa Fokusova from “The Burn” is one of the incarnations of Maya, just like Ralissa Nomad from the sunset novel “Mysterious Passion”. Mysterious passion for what? Towards creativity, love, freedom? Well, yes... However, Akhmadulina’s poems, from which Aksenov carved out the title of the novel, sound like this: “A mysterious passion for betrayal, my friends, clouds your eyes”...
Roman Carmen died in 1978 from a heart attack. Maya never divorced him. After the scandal with the Metropol almanac and Aksenov’s subsequent exodus from the Writers’ Union, the need to leave the USSR is brewing. Aksenov divorced Kira and on May 30, 1980 married Maya. They had a very sad wedding at the Peredelkino dacha. By chance or not, the date of marriage registration coincided with the 20th anniversary of the death of Pasternak, who died in the same Peredelkino.
And already on July 22, friends saw off the newlyweds to Sheremetyevo. 48-year-old Aksenov and 50-year-old Maya, as well as her daughter Alena and grandson Ivan, flew to Paris to end up in America in a couple of months. We thought it would be forever. On July 25, 1980, Aksenov called Akhmadulina from Paris to Moscow and heard: “And Volodya died today.”
Vasily and Maya Aksenov lived in the USA for 24 years. Mostly well. He became an American professor and published whatever he wanted. But in 1999, tragedy struck. 26-year-old Ivan, Maya’s grandson, whom Aksenov loved like a son, stepped from the seventh floor. Into the sky. “How will we continue to live?” – Maya asked. “We will live sadly,” answered Aksenov...
In 2004 they moved to France, to Biarritz. And in Moscow, back in the 90s, they were given an apartment in a high-rise building on Kotelniki to replace the one that was taken away after leaving. On January 15, 2008, Aksenov lost consciousness while driving, leaving the courtyard of this same high-rise building. The result was a severe ischemic stroke, two operations and a year and a half in a coma. On July 6, 2009, Vasily Pavlovich passed away. And even earlier, Maya’s daughter Alena, who came from the USA to Moscow to look after her beloved stepfather, died in her sleep. She was 54 years old. Maya Afanasyevna, who lost her grandson, daughter and husband, was left completely alone. Only the Tibetan spaniel Pushkin, Aksenov’s favorite, forced her to live on. She said she couldn't leave him. Are you still alive, my friend Pushkin?..
P.S. In 2006, I met Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov at the Crimea Island film festival in Sevastopol. He took 15 minutes to talk to me. The chairman of the jury was waiting to watch the next film. Exactly at the 15th minute they came for Aksenov. He looked at those who had come: “I’m not going to the cinema. This conversation is more important to me.” And we continued our conversation. He had sad eyes, but he was joking and so, not seriously, he mentioned that Maya Afanasyevna now reads mainly ladies' detective stories, since they have a calming effect on her, unlike her husband's works. “How do you feel about your destiny as a writer?” – I asked. And Aksenov answered sadly: “In the 60s and 70s they read me, but did not know me by sight. Now they recognize me on the street, but they don’t read me.”
Aksenov was seriously ill for a long time. Stroke, intensive care, coma, surgery...
For a long time we had hope. - The writer’s wife Maya Afanasyevna found the strength to talk briefly with us immediately after the difficult news. - On Monday I was in his hospital all day. I arrived home and suddenly they called me - my husband is no more... I need to come to my senses. Because I don't understand at all that this is true...
For more than a year, Vasily Pavlovich was confined to a hospital bed. His stepdaughter Elena (she considered Aksenova to be her father) came to Russia from the USA as soon as she learned about the disaster that had happened. For almost six months she nursed Vasily Pavlovich in the clinic of the Institute. Burdenko. And in August 2008, she died in her sleep in the apartment of her mother Maya Afanasyevna - she had a heart attack. This was a serious blow for the entire writer's family.
A couple of months ago, Aksenov seemed to be on the mend. Started to move right hand, work with a speech therapist, but...
On February 22, my father was transferred to Sklif and had surgery. Since then, the condition has been serious,” said the writer’s son Alexey Vasilyevich then, in February.
And now - the end. Vasily Aksenov died at the age of 77.
In the early 60s he was the most fashionable writer. At the age of 27 he wrote the story “Colleagues”, at 29 - “Star Ticket” - cult books for the sixties, who at that time were the same romantically minded boys and girls as Aksenov’s heroes. Aksenov's plays and films based on his scripts were a huge success. But it didn’t last long: discord quickly emerged between the internal freedom of his characters and the Soviet system. The Thaw ended, the authorities began to treat Vasily Pavlovich with suspicion. In the 70s, he finally moved into the category of dissident writers: the publication of such novels as “Burn” or “Island of Crimea” in the USSR was out of the question. It all ended in forced emigration: Aksenov was deprived of Soviet citizenship and moved to America, where he began teaching literature.
The exile did not last long: just a few years later, perestroika began in the Soviet Union, Vasily Pavlovich returned to his homeland in triumph and again became one of the most popular authors. For the last twenty years he has been shuttling between America, Europe and Russia. He preferred to work in Biarritz. “It’s difficult to write in Moscow,” he said four years ago in an interview with KP, “you’re constantly distracted by something. In Biarritz it’s a different matter: there I have a small house on the seashore, only the waves are noisy and planes are flying overhead...”
Farewell to the writer will take place on Thursday morning at the Moscow Central House of Writers. He will be buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.
AKSENOV’S MOST FAMOUS BOOKS:
* "Colleagues" (1960)
* "Star Ticket" (1961)
* “Overstocked Barrel” (1968)
* "Burn" (1975)
* “Island of Crimea” (1979)
* “Moscow Saga” (1994)
* "New Sweet Style" (1998)
* “Voltairians and Voltairians” (2004)
PERSONAL VIEW
Left us on the dewy grass good man, cheerful and calm
Alexander MESHKOV
The favorite writer of the youth of the 70s, Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov, has passed away.
Probably, after all, the main mission of this writer was to show our young, intimidated minds, clouded by harsh propaganda, that there is another life, another worldview and another literature, free from ideological dogmas. Aksenov did it very subtly, beautifully, boldly and cheerfully.
It was necessary to try even harder to suspect his works of unreliability. Skillfully using irony and delicately juggling literary cliches, Aksenov created his own unique secret language. Not knowing Vasily Aksenov during my student years was considered bad manners.
I came to the university not knowing him. I had an excuse: I had just returned from the army, there were no books there. And by the time I returned, Aksenov’s books had already been removed from libraries. Clean up: “Colleagues”, “Overstocked Barrels”, “Oranges from Morocco”, “It’s Time, My Friend, It’s Time”, “Star Ticket”. In the new literary encyclopedia, Aksakov was immediately followed by Aksefeld Israel, then Aksirov Zalimkhan. The film “Colleagues” and the sparkling comedy “Striped Flight”, the script of which Aksenov wrote together with Viktor Konetsky, disappeared from the screens. Aksenov was erased from our lives; he was buried by the literary elite back then. But not us.
In 1980, when Aksenov was deprived of Soviet citizenship, his books for a long time After the ban, one could still read in the theater library. True, only in the reading room. That's where we went. In those days, we had to read Aksenov secretly, on the sly. And “on the sly” the banned books of the rebel Aksenov were brought from abroad by our friends, agents of world imperialism, foreign trainees from England, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland and America. They even brought the scandalous almanac Metropol, corrupting our fragile souls with this pulp fiction. They wondered why we, Russians, do not have the right to read completely harmless and even politically biased books by our own Russian writer.
After all, Aksenov even had a book from the “Fiery Revolutionaries” series. “Love of Electricity” is called, about Commissioner Krasin. But we understood that writers also need to eat something, and we ourselves read his play “The Four Temperaments” aloud in the dorm, rolling around on the floor with laughter. His "Bochkotaru", like Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit", was stolen for quotes. We spoke the language of our favorite heroes, like conspirators. Old man Mochenkin, grandfather Ivan, was our favorite. It is then that he will return to us, justified by the authorities, already serious and academic, to open to us his heart, wounded by the lashes of trials and arrows of loss, in the main work “The Moscow Saga”.
All the amusing, sweet and apolitical heroes of “Overstocked Barrels,” who are so similar to us, dream the same good dream: “... as if a good man, cheerful and calm, was walking along the dewy grass.” Probably, it was Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov himself, before whom we, the confused and deceived generation, about whom and for whom he wrote, bow our gray and no longer shaggy heads...
Years of life: from 08/20/1932 to 07/06/2009
Russian writer and poet, playwright, screenwriter and translator.
Vasily Aksenov was born on August 20, 1932 in Kazan. He was the third youngest child in the family, and the only common child of the parents. His father, Pavel Vasilyevich Aksenov, was the chairman of the Kazan City Council and a member of the bureau of the Tatar Regional Party Committee, and his mother, Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, worked as a teacher at the Kazan Pedagogical Institute, then she was the head of the cultural department of the newspaper "Red Tataria", and was a member of the Kazan regional party organization.
In 1937, the parents were repressed. Subsequently, Evgenia Ginzburg became the author of a book of memoirs “Steep Route” - one of the first book-memoirs about the era Stalin's repressions and camps. After the arrest of his parents, five-year-old Vasya was sent to an orphanage. Two years later, his father’s brother found him and took him to his place. In 1948 E.S. Ginzburg, who at that time lived in a settlement in Magadan, obtained permission for her son to come to her. Evgenia Ginzburg described her meeting with Vasya in the book “Steep Route”.
Magadan amazed Vasily Aksenov with its freedom - a real “salon” gathered in his mother’s barracks in the evenings. In the company of “former camp intellectuals” they talked about things that Vasily had never even suspected before. The future writer was shocked by the breadth of the problems discussed and discussions about the fate of humanity. Many years later, in 1975, Vasily Aksyonov described his Magadan youth in the autobiographical novel “Burn”.
In Magadan, Vasily Aksenov graduated from school. After he graduated from the 1st Leningradsky in 1956 medical school, worked as a quarantine doctor in the Far North, Karelia, and the Leningrad Marine commercial port and in a tuberculosis hospital in Moscow.
In 1958, Aksyonov’s first stories “Torches and Roads” and “One and a Half Medical Units” were published in the magazine “Yunost”, and in 1960 his first story “Colleagues” was published, which was later adapted into a film of the same name. Thanks to this story, Aksyonov became widely known. He left medicine and took up literature closely.
Many of them early works Vasily Aksenov’s novels “Star Ticket”, “It’s Time, My Friend, It’s Time”, the stories “Oranges from Morocco” and “It’s a Pity That You Weren’t With Us” caused a mixed reaction from the authorities. After this, the management of the Yunost magazine in 1963 persuaded him to write and publish a repentant article “Responsibility” in the Pravda newspaper. Later, his satirical story “Overstocked Barrels,” written in 1968, also became the reason for accusing the author of “hidden anti-Sovietism.”
In 1972, Aksenov wrote an experimental novel, “The Search for a Genre.” Then, in 1972, together with O. Gorchakov and G. Pozhenyan, he wrote a novel-parody of the spy action film “Gene Green - the Untouchable” under the pseudonym Grivadiy Gorpozhaks (a combination of the names and surnames of the real authors). In 1976, Aksenov translated E. L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” from English.
In the 1970s, after the end of the Thaw, Aksyonov’s works ceased to be published in the Soviet Union. The novels “Burn” in 1975 and “Island of Crimea” in 1979 were created by the author from the very beginning without any expectation of publication. At this time, criticism of Vasily Aksenov and his works became increasingly harsh - such epithets as “non-Soviet” and “non-national” were used. In 1977 and 1978, Aksyonov’s works began to appear abroad, primarily in the USA.
His friends recalled: “He was untouchable in his own way and was respected even among those writers who belonged to a completely different “camp.” They felt a certain reverence for him, even the secretaries of the Union called him Vasily Pavlovich.” However, after Metropol everything changed.
In 1979, Vasily Aksenov, together with Andrei Bitov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Fazil Iskander, Evgeny Popov and Bella Akhmadulina, became one of the organizers and authors of the uncensored almanac "Metropol". Never published in the Soviet censored press, the almanac was published in the USA. In protest against the subsequent expulsion of Popov and Erofeev from the Union of Writers of the USSR in December 1979, Vasily Aksyonov, Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin announced their withdrawal from the Union of Writers.
On July 22, 1980, Aksenov left for the United States by invitation, after which he and his wife Maya Carmen were deprived of Soviet citizenship. Until 2004, he lived in the United States, teaching Russian literature at J. Mason University in Fairex, Virginia. Here is how Aksyonov explained what happened: “There is an opinion that a Russian writer cannot write outside of Russia. That as soon as he gets abroad, he begins to whine, choke and ends his life in the nearest ditch. This is not entirely true, if we remember the experience of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, who spent abroad long years and they wrote far from their worst things there. That’s how my fate worked out. When you leave your homeland forever, you experience stress, then you begin to somehow fight it, come to your senses and suddenly realize that you can write wonderfully.”
Since 1981, Vasily Aksenov has been a professor of Russian literature at various US universities: he worked at the Kennan Institute from 1981 to 1982, at the University of Washington from 1982 to 1983, at the Goucher University from 1983 to 1988, at George Mason University from 1988 to 2009.
The novels "Our Golden Iron" (1973, 1980), "Burn" (1976, 1980), "Island of Crimea" (1979, 1981), a collection of short stories, written by Aksenov in Russia, but first published only after the writer's arrival in America, were published in the United States "Right to the Island" (1981). Also in the USA, Vasily Aksenov wrote and published new novels: “Paper Landscape”, “Say Raisins”, “In Search of the Sad Baby”, the “Moscow Saga” trilogy, the collection of stories “The Negative of a Positive Hero”, “The New Sweet Style”, dedicated to life Soviet emigration in the United States, "Caesarean glow".
For the first time after nine years of emigration, Aksenov visited the USSR in 1989 at the invitation of the American Ambassador J. Matlock. In 1990, Vasily Aksenov was returned to Soviet citizenship, after which the writer lived in Moscow and traveled to Biarritz in France, where he had a home since 2002.
From 1980 to 1991, Vasily Aksyonov actively collaborated as a journalist with the Voice of America and Radio Liberty. Collaborated with the magazine "Continent" and the almanac "Verb". Aksyonov’s radio essays were published in the author’s collection “A Decade of Slander” in 2004.
Vasily Aksenov was married twice. His first wife is Kira Mendeleeva, a girl from a very famous family. Her father is brigade commander Lajos Gavro, and her grandmother Yulia Aronovna Mendeleeva is the first rector of a pediatric university in Leningrad. In this marriage, Aksyonov’s only son, Alexey, was born.
The writer’s second wife was Maya Afanasyevna Karmen, ex-wife famous documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Aksyonov called Maya the main passion of his life.
Aksyonov was fond of historical literature, he was especially interested in the 18th century. They read many books on the history of the sailing fleet. Since his student days he was fond of jazz. His sports interests included jogging and basketball. Vasily Pavlovich was not without human weaknesses. His bad habit was smoking. The writer did not hide this; in one of his many interviews he said: “I smoked a pipe at the age of 22, when I imagined myself as Hemingway. But a cigarette was always more pleasant. Later, Marina Vladi gave me a cool pipe. I walked around with it for a very long time.”
They wrote about Aksyonov that in the 1960s it was he who “was the first to introduce the word “jeans” into the Russian language and made them his uniform.” “He walked, so denim and so jazzy,” recalled Bella Akhmadulina. And the writer Evgeny Popov, congratulating the writer on his anniversary, noted: “From Aksyonov’s denim jacket, just like from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” all modern Russian literature came out.”
“He was distinguished by amazing power, and our literature would certainly be empty without him,” said the writer Dmitry Bykov. “And most importantly, he was a good man, which almost never happens among us. First of all, I was struck by his ability to experiment in Aksyonov, because that I don’t know a single young writer who could write such a daring work as “Moscow Kva-Kva,” so striking in courage, an absolutely Platonic experiment.”
On January 15, 2008, Aksyonov suddenly became ill while he was driving a car. An accident occurred, Vasily Aksyonov was urgently hospitalized at Hospital No. 23, from which he was transferred to the Sklifosovsky Institute. Aksyonov was found to have a blood clot in the carotid artery that supplies left hemisphere brain After a long illness, Vasily Aksenov died on July 6, 2009. He was buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.
Every year since 2007, a literary and musical festival has been held in Kazan. international festival called "Aksenov-fest". For the first time it was held with the personal participation of Vasily Pavlovich.
In 2009, the Literary House-Museum of Vasily Aksenov was opened; it now houses a literary city club.
In 2010, the autobiographical unfinished novel of the writer “Lend-Lease” was published. Its presentation took place on November 7 at the Vasily Aksenov House-Museum.
The writer was a member Russian Academy arts
In 2011, Evgeny Popov and Alexander Kabakov jointly published a book of memoirs about Vasily Pavlovich, which was called “Aksenov”. In it they examine the writer's fate, the intricacies of biography, and the process of the birth of a great Personality. The main task and idea of the book is to prevent the distortion of facts in favor of certain events.
Writer's Awards
2004 - Winner of the Booker - Open Russia Prize for the best novel of the year "The Voltairians and Voltaireans"
2005 - Awarded the Order of Arts and Letters, one of the highest awards in France
Holder of the title Doctor of Humane Letters (USA)
Member of PEN Club and American Authors League
Bibliography
Prose
1960 - (story)
1961 - "(story)
1963 - (story)
1964 - “Catapult” (story and stories)
1964 - (story)
1964 - “Halfway to the Moon”, (collection of short stories)
1965 - “Victory” (story with exaggerations)
1965 - “It’s a pity that you weren’t with us” (story)
1968 - (story)
1969 - (story)
1971 - "A story about a basketball team playing basketball" (essay)
1972 - (story)
1972 - (story)
September 20-21 House of Russian Abroad named after. A. Solzhenitsyn organized a memorial evening, an exhibition and a scientific conference for the 80th anniversary of the birth of Vasily Aksenov. Especially for RG, the widow of Andrei Voznesensky, writer Zoya Boguslavskaya, shares her memories of her friend and comrade-in-arms in the “sixties.”
He left for the States on a sultry July afternoon in 1980. There were a lot of people at the dacha in Peredelkino. Everyone laughed and told jokes, but the taste of hysteria from the knowledge that perhaps we would never see each other was felt, growing stronger. The farewell coincided with the wedding. Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov joined new life. Ahead is an uninhabited country, new woman- Maya, whom he fell in love with passionately, took a long time to conquer.
That day everything was intertwined: a celebration of love, the expectation of a miracle and separation, the bitterness of loss - everything was tragically unpredictable. What remains from the wedding is a photograph where a dressed-up Vasily and I are standing in an embrace in front of his car, pretending that everything is fine, that he has finally escaped, freedom, new sensations, and everyday comfort are ahead.
And a week before, in A. Voznesensky’s and my apartment on Kotelnicheskaya, we were furiously arguing about their upcoming departure. Vasily and Maya, me and Andrey with distorted faces, running around the room, uselessly and recklessly talk about the ways and meanings of the current emigration. Will he come back or won't he come back? If only it were possible to look into the book of destinies... If only I knew... If only I knew?..
You won’t be able to live there,” Andrey insists, turning pale, “without the elements of the Russian language, when faces, nature, smells are all just in memory. Besides, there are a dime a dozen celebrities there.
“Nothing like that,” Maya answers, gritting her teeth, “they will honor him there.” He will not hear daily threats or telephone swearing. Lord, just think that the nitpicking of every word, the persecution of censorship, will end! Already, American publishing houses are arguing about who will be the first to publish his new book.
Well, yes,” I scoff, “40 thousand couriers alone.” This won't happen! Each manuscript will go through the unbearably slow process of ordering reviews, then, even if they are enthusiastic, they will wait for the assessment of the publisher's internal experts.
That’s not the point, Zayata (Zoya), Vasya mumbles. “It’s just not possible here anymore.” They are pressing from all sides, you can’t breathe.
I knew that behind these words of Aksenov there was a harsh backstory associated with the publication of the novel “Burn,” the most significant work for him in recent decades. Banned by censorship in our magazines, it has already been in demand by several foreign publishers. The author's hesitation was painful; he began secret correspondence regarding the possible publication of "The Burn" in the West. Soon Aksenov was summoned to the KGB, where he was warned “in a friendly way”: “If this anti-Soviet movement comes out abroad,” he will either be imprisoned or deported. A softening of the harsh alternative could only be Aksenov’s consent to voluntary emigration within a month. The threat was real.
We remembered well how a decade ago N.S. Khrushchev destroyed exhibitions of abstract artists, the almanac “Tarussky Pages”, and during a historical meeting with the intelligentsia on March 8, 1963, he shouted that he would expel Andrei Voznesensky from the country:
Why do you advertise that you are not a party member? - the leader lost his temper and waved his fist. - Look what you are, you understand! "I'm not a party member!" He wants us to create some kind of non-party party. Here, you know, there is no place for liberalism, Mr. Voznesensky. Enough!..
And then Khrushchev saw that Aksenov was not applauding: “Why are you standing silently?” he switched to Vasily Pavlovich. “Avenge the death of your parents, Aksenov?” “Nikita Sergeevich, my parents are alive,” Vasily Pavlovich quietly corrected him. “Our family sees your merit in this.”
Khrushchev cast an angry glance towards the disinformers who had put him in a stupid position, and continued his work. This performance of “public” flogging, perhaps unique in Soviet cult history, united the two daring idols of that time for the rest of their lives.
Subsequently, Aksenov would sign one of his books to Voznesensky: “Dear Andrei! Do you remember how you and I stood under the dome of the Blue Hall, where we both had so much fun? With love, your Vasyata.”
And Voznesensky recalls this moment in verse: “The first meeting:/ the monster blew, but it didn’t mow us down./ Both stood before the numb elements./ The second meeting: over my father’s black grave/ I felt your hand, Vasily. /.../ Are we guilty of the terms in which they were friends, / that the city - venous - rivers repelled us?
Of course, Khrushchev's furious outburst against two young writers was not accidental. It was prepared by the denunciation of the Polish writer Wanda Wasilewska, who, during a personal meeting with Khrushchev, accused A. Voznesensky and V. Aksenov of ideological sabotage. She quoted an interview that they, while in Poland, gave to their leading newspaper, where they dared to assert that “socialist realism” is not the main and not the only method of Soviet art.
Thus, the historic meeting of the head of the country with the intelligentsia marked a sharp divide in the life of Soviet artists. Between the “Khrushchev Thaw” of 1961 and “Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika” of 1985, a black hole was dug into which a whole layer of outstanding creators of the generation of the 60-70s of different genres and directions fell.
After the arrest and exile of I. Brodsky (1972) and A. Solzhenitsyn (1973), under severe pressure, the following were pushed out of the country: V. Voinovich, G. Vladimov, Yu. Aleshkovsky, A. Galich, S. Dovlatov, M. Baryshnikov , R. Nuriev, M. Shemyakin, N. Makarov, Y. Cooper, O. Tselkov, L. Zbarsky, I. Rabin, O. Ioseliani, P. Lungin and many other now revered classics of the 20th century.
The Aksenovs left in 1980, when it seemed that the movement to the West had slowed down somewhat. However, at the border they endured all the bullying from officials who took away manuscripts, paintings, and tape recordings that accompanied forced emigrants...
When Aksenov came to America, our communication did not stop. It so happened that his arrival in New York coincided with my stay at Columbia University, for two months I was an invited “guest writer” to work on the book “American Women”... One of the most memorable for me was our intersection - in moment of the gravest drama in Aksenov’s life. That day he learned from newspapers and phone calls that he had been stripped of his Russian citizenship.
We are sitting with him in the cafeteria of Columbia University for professors. In the USA, meals for students and teachers are provided separately. - Criminals! - Aksenov shouts, not paying attention to his chewing colleagues. - You cannot deprive a person of his homeland!.. They want to cross out my life for all the past years, my books, my parents, my Magadan childhood in the Kostroma orphanage, my son Leshka (Keith in his stories), who continues to live in the Union.
I have nothing to object to; I completely share his indignation. Then we wandered for a long time along the dark embankment, the wet branches of the park tickled our faces. We both didn’t know that the citizenship taken away was just an episode in a long creative life writer Aksenov.
And so he returned, began to live in his country with Maya, in the same city with the children - Alyosha and Alena. They were given an apartment in a high-rise on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment, and now Andrey and I’s apartment was right above them.
Personal history, as it happens, has returned to normal...
We witnessed the beginning of Aksenov’s romance with Maya. They arrived from Yalta by train, together with Bella Akhmadulina, having fun all the way. Aksenov and Maya decided not to separate; they both had families. Maya and Roman Carmen lived with us in the same house, all in the same high-rise building on Kotelnicheskaya. I became friends with Maya, she often came running to me in horror at the situation. Nothing seemed to suggest her divorce from Carmen, the world's highest-flying documentary maker. Roman Carmen was a kind of legend, an eyewitness to Spanish events, a friend of Hemingway and Castro, he captured unique footage of the Great Patriotic War.
Golden-haired Maya aroused admiration among secular society for her youth, temperament, and amazingly insightful mind. She went to Aksenov at the peak of his disgrace; his only elegant outfit for the wedding was brought from America by her. And since then they have never parted. His main character “beauty” is always Maya in different variations. In one of his plays (I think in "Heron") he portrayed Maya and all of us as girls of all tastes.
At the end of the 60s, Aksenov recalled, the turning point in my worldview was partly due to the general generational hangover (Czechoslovakia, Brezhnevism, totalitarianism). It seemed to me that I had missed something that could illuminate my life and my writing. And then, in 1970, in Yalta I met Maya. We experienced very strong romantic love, and then it grew into spiritual intimacy. She knows me like crazy, I’m smaller than her, but both of us, especially now in old age, understand who we can rely on...
In addition to their Moscow housing, the Aksenov couple still had two working apartments in the West - one in Washington, the other on the ocean in Biarritz, essentially an artist’s studio.
As the years passed, time repaid almost everyone who suffered because of Metropol. Almost all of the writers returned; fate rewarded them for their persecution with increased attention from others, an increase in book circulation, universal love and demand. It seemed that justice had triumphed... But who can calculate how many plans, loves and affections, experience, lost joy of communication and lack of creative connections emigration can cost an artist?
“How can we describe everything without a letter replacing everything that is taken away in art,” Bella Akhmadulina from Moscow complains in a letter to Aksenov in Washington, “seeing each other, chatting, talking and making reservations, or should I always write a letter to you?.. My beloved and ours! Forgive the confusion of my speeches, my thought about you is my constant occupation, but I don’t know where to start, how to end.” Her husband, artist Boris Messerer, joins in, rhyming: “Here is a new day that I will send to you/ to notify about the tearing of hearts / when I walk on snow and ice / through the forest and the abyss between you and me.”
“Vaska, I congratulate you on your birthday,” Bella Akhmadulina writes another time. “I miss you very much and, as always, I talk to you “across hundreds of separating miles.” And later, when I was already seriously ill, I diagnosed myself: “The soul has overpowered the body”...
How do you evaluate the American period of your life? - I ask Aksenov just before his return to Russia. - I mean teaching at the university, writing, America itself.
I devoted 21 years of my life to the “American university,” more precisely, to teaching Rus-Lit and my own phil-concept to boys and girls (sometimes of advanced age) from different states and countries. The university campus is the most for me habitat, but now I’m already thinking about resigning. I don’t know yet where I’ll spend more time.
I remember our later conversation, when he had already spent a lot of time in Biarritz and once again returned to Moscow. Traditionally, we sit in the Central House of Writers, drink juices and water. There were many versions about how Vasily Pavlovich “gave up”. In fact, I have already stated more than once how I personally witnessed his conversation with the doctor, which instantly stopped his libations. Today he could taste a glass of wine, nothing more.
Aksenov divided himself and his time into several equal parts. “We live in two houses,” he explained, “in Washington and in Moscow. Now this has also been added to a small house in the Basque Country. You constantly forget where you left your sweater or pants. “Maya, you don’t know where my suit is, that , another?" And she replies: “Don’t you remember, Vasya, where my cloak hangs, on Kotelniki or in Fairfax?”
Why do you write better in French Biarritz than in Moscow?
Because in Biarritz I have only one interlocutor at my desk,” Aksenov smiles. - There are too many interlocutors in Russia, and I get lost. Sometimes I have the feeling that writing and emigration are quite close concepts.
Well, really. But you often look absolutely happy. When, at what moments does this happen to you?
“In the process of writing a novel,” Aksenov states extremely seriously. - While I am writing it, I am absolutely happy. I'm quite sad when I say goodbye to him. You see, in the new novel I create a special world and only from those characters that are interesting to me...
I don’t remember Aksenov casually dressed, in a rumpled suit or washed-out shirt. His outfit is always “company”, famous labels. I explain his persistent passion for corporate style, technology, and charming women to those deprivations in childhood, when, perhaps as a teenager, he stood in front of an elegant store window, like characters from a fairy tale, dreaming that someday he, too, would be able to buy all this. And I was able to, and I bought it.
Does your personal life influence your creativity? Biographical facts, an aura of intense passion? I remember Yuri Nagibin used to say: “Every novel of mine is my unwritten novel.” For you too?
I agree that every successful romance (in this case, a love adventure) can become a heap of fascinating pages. But it is worth adding to this that a failed love affair can become a heap of even more exciting pages...
I think that the decades after his return to Moscow were the most disturbing and fruitful for the late Aksenov. Inexhaustible creative energy (he wrote almost a novel a year), a constant feeling of being in demand and the realization that he no longer had the same drive... It seemed that Aksenov’s presence in our art and life, as well as in gossip columns, was immutable, undeniable. If only I knew?
There was no long-term illness, ailments, special nervous breakdowns or depression... The suddenness of a severe illness that instantly paralyzed his activities came as a shock to everyone around him. He failed to become old. Nature preserved in him the need for writing, his external attractiveness and charm, and his outstanding talent as a writer. Even at 75, he daily included in his daily routine morning jogging along the Yauzskaya embankment, the intense rhythm of a jazz fan, easily hitting the basketball basket with the ball, and daily planning several pages of text on a Macintosh.
On that fateful day, he was driving a car with his editor, when suddenly his brain turned off, he lost consciousness, the car skidded and only a miracle saved the passengers from a fatal collision on the roadway. The companion called an ambulance, Vasily Pavlovich was admitted to the Tagansk regional hospital, and then to the Institute. Sklifosovsky, where a brain thrombus was removed.
In recent months he was in the Burdenko clinic with Academician A.N. Konovalova. Alexander Nikolaevich himself and the attending physician, neuropathologist Vladimir Naidin, did everything using the latest achievements of world medicine, but everything was useless. He spent many months in a coma from which he never recovered.
I’m next to him in the bunker of the Burdenko clinic for the “unmemorable.” It is impossible to believe that Aksenov has been lying here unconscious for so long. Calm face, light blush, almost untouched thick hair. The body of a man that seemed to retain muscle strength and charm. It’s like a shell of a person from whom the personality, biography, and strongest passions have been taken out. And I sit next to him, turning over the pages of his life to myself.
“You talk to him, Zoya, talk,” Maya’s daughter, Alena, who loved Vasily Pavlovich very much, instructed me. It is she who constantly sits next to him for many hours. She is sure that this is temporary anyway, he will wake up and it will turn out that he heard everything, everything that was broadcast to him while he was in a coma. Following her instructions, I look at Aksenov’s prostrate body, covered in wires, and tell him last news. I outline in detail the gossip surrounding “The Mysterious Passion,” which he managed to read in the “Caravan of Stories” in a truncated form. A boom of delight and indignation was caused by the recognition of the prototypes caricatured in the novel. But the author did not think about this. It was written to him that the flight of fantasy led far from reality. Some grievances continued even after the death of Vasily Pavlovich. His inventions brought only tenderness to Andrey and me.
I remember him at that time when his mother was still alive - perhaps the most fateful person in the development of Aksenov the writer. As a person, Vasily Pavlovich was constructed from the first impressions of the Kostroma orphanage for children of “enemies of the people”, then Magadan, where he settled at the age of 12 with his exiled mother Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. According to Vasily Pavlovich, the circle real characters The “steep route” (authored by his mother) consisted of outstanding people of that time: repressed scientists, politicians, artists, who formed a kind of “salon”, the content of which was reasoning on the highest topics. The impact of these considerations on children's consciousness is difficult to measure.
Even in his youth, he says, my mother developed a tendency to create a kind of “salon” around herself. thinking people. The first such salon, which included the Trotskyist Professor Elvov, exiled to Kazan, cost her her freedom.
The reader of "Steep Route" will find such a Ginzburg salon in a camp barracks. In post-camp exile, in Magadan, another salon arose, already of international class... The Soviet youth Vasya Aksenov was simply stunned in such a society: “I never imagined that such people existed in real life.” Soviet life... My mother and I immediately became friends. She revealed to me one of the main Soviet secrets, the existence of the “Silver Age”. In addition, she introduced me to the idol of her youth, Boris Pasternak.
By the end of school, I knew by heart many of his poems, which could not be obtained anywhere in printed form at that time... In addition, I learned from her how to be cunning with power, that is, how to find in " Soviet people" human qualities".
There was a short period when I had the opportunity to communicate quite closely with Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. She lived in Peredelkino at the dacha of film screenwriter Joseph Olshansky. Her porch blends into the birch and pine trees of the expansive property. On this porch she read to me the final chapter of “The Steep Route,” which after her death remained a document of the era...
At this time, Maya, who was in love with him, came to Peredelkino almost every day. We already knew that Evgenia Semyonovna was terminally ill with the most terrible disease of the century; vitamins, vegetables, and fruits were needed to stabilize her condition. Maya brought freshly squeezed carrot juice and something else that she prepared herself. They became very close, which played an important role in their marriage.
Aksenov himself had an unusually close relationship with his mother. His love for her, his willingness to take on the most difficult situations is a rare gift. And perhaps the son’s great feat was his journey with his mother by car across Europe to Last year her life. Hiding his despair, he fulfilled Evgenia Semyonovna’s dream and repaid what her life had wrongfully taken from her. She traveled her last journey with her son, talked with friends in France, Germany, and enjoyed the originals of world masterpieces in museums. They left and returned to Paris, to the same hotel where I was - L Eglon (Eaglet), whose windows overlook the Montparnasse cemetery. I watched their last holiday and how happy they both were!
She was buried on a chilly May day in 1977, the rain was pouring down, there were not many people there. It was striking that there were no those who would definitely have been present if it had not been for the rain.
Aksenov behaved courageously, from time to time turning away from the mourners, pressing his face to the tree, his shoulders trembling. For him, that part of his existence that was connected with his family, which fell under the steamroller of Stalin's time, was forever gone. He said goodbye to his mother, who had become the judge and lawyer of his life whom no one could replace.
I hope that in my homeland the boot that once gave me a kick in the ass will not grow again,” he laughs.
If you weren't writing, what would you be doing? - I ask him.
To be honest, I can’t even imagine such a situation...
Now Vasily Pavlovich would be eighty years old.
Andrey Voznesensky - about Aksenov
“For 20 years now, our country has been listening to Aksenov’s confessional monologue, listening eagerly - children became fathers, villages became cities, country roads became highways, heaven became everyday life, “fashion” became a classic - but the voice remained the same purity, it did not change us, the artist, the tape recorder of our existence - we have not betrayed him.
Aksenov is a tape recording, an almost uncensored recording of today's time - a city, a person, a soul. I once wrote him poems for his fortieth birthday... “Falentary-year-old Vasily!/ Denim Sirin, an artist in flight and strength,/ Mustache forged your mouth with a rusty jeans, Vasily,/ Take away youth.../ O crowned name - Vasily.”
