Dobrotvorskaya K. Has anyone seen my girl?
100 letters to Seryozha. M.: AST, 2014.
On the dust jacket of Karina Dobrotvorskaya’s book “Has Anyone Seen My Girl? 100 letters to Seryozha” is the epigraph:
You lost your girl.
You didn't make your own movie.
You always sat in the front row.
There was no boundary between you and the screen.
You stepped behind the screen -
How Jean Cocteau's Orpheus stepped into the mirror
Well, that's all.
Karina Dobrotvorskaya made a movie. She made a movie that Sergei Dobrotvorsky, her husband, did not make. She once left him, and he died. Then everyone said “he died of love” without surviving Karina’s departure. The legend of a romantic death lived in the “spectator’s” consciousness for many years, and now it is partly being destroyed: Dobrotvorsky died of an overdose, like many in the 90s, and Sergei’s admirers also cannot forgive the book for this detail... Many do not want to know much at all .
In “100 Letters” one constantly hears the regret that the wonderful film critic and screenwriter Seryozha Dobrotvorsky did not make a real, big, professional movie. Karina thinks a lot about this fact; it always seemed to her like some kind of cowardice, creative cowardice, lack of embodiment, or something. Now she filmed it herself, filmed it on paper: with episodes, their storyboards, role lines, characters, scenery, interior details in different apartments, cities and countries. The movie is black and white, like photographs in a book.
And the heroine of this film is her.
Everyone quarreled because of this book. Well, firstly, because of the “moral and moral”: does Karina have the right to turn to Seryozha, whom - with all his talents - she abandoned for the sake of the Moscow creamy life, a bourgeois family? And secondly and most importantly (hence the “moral and ethical” aspect) - because the tragic departure of a significant person gives rise to a “widow effect”: memory tends to be privatized and monopolized by many who were nearby in one way or another, helped, especially in difficult moment, had some spiritual contacts and, therefore, can consider himself an executor. Memory is monopolized most often by women—devout friends (including abandoned husbands). So after the book was published, the Internet space was filled with everything: “I won’t even open it, I’m afraid I knew Dobsky too well.” - “Opened it. Crazy exhibitionism. Closed." — “The queen of glamor about her suffering? From Paris with love?" - “Where is her ethical right, he died without her!”
Not very calmly (“I don’t understand this kind of undressing...”), but with extreme interest I read, as I know, the book “Dear Mokhovaya” - Seryozha and Karina’s alma mater, the Theater Academy, a close environment, but not affected by the relations of the film crowd of the 90s. “Dear Mokhovaya” in its female incarnation perceived the book as very close to almost everyone who graduated from theater studies. I spoke to many. Almost every reader had an identification effect, if this reader is a theater expert... “Moss Wednesday” is inclined to analyze a dramatic text, which is more important than life, and Karina writes precisely a script, a psychological drama that gives the opportunity for reflection, identification, and interpretation.
In the finale I will also end with some kind of interpretation.
Once upon a time, we were sitting in the editorial basement with a former student, then our editor, and thinking about how we could earn money to publish a magazine. “It is necessary that each of the members of our women’s editorial board, a theater expert by training, write their own story, a women’s novel - and there will be a series “Russian Woman”, which will financially save “PTZh”,” she said, and I agreed.
Now she writes scripts for TV series, I write a book review, and Karina Dobrotvorskaya writes that same women’s story.
We have never been close - neither with Seryozha Dobrotvorsky, nor with Karina Zaks. But there is one bright picture in my memory.
...June, thesis defenses, packed with people, sunny and stuffy auditorium 418, windows open. Karina’s course is defended, including Lenya Popov (I’m his leader) - and in the midst of defenses, the excited Karina (she’s about to defend herself) and Seryozha enter, make their way between people, carrying papers, bags, reviews, the text of the diploma, an answer to the opponent. They crawl to the window and sit on the windowsill. For some reason I remember the backdrop of the sun in Karina’s long hair at that time - and from her plasticity, from her excitement, I understand: she and Seryozha are together. At that moment this was news to me.
The picture has been in my memory for 25 years as a still from some movie. Maybe some of our common films of those years, although we followed different paths.
I call the author of the book Karina, without a last name, because we know each other. Faculty orchid, a gentle beauty with a quiet voice, gravitating towards aestheticism. Her first article in our magazine was called “Lioness” and was about Ida Rubinstein. Karina also wrote to PTZ later, although only a little: she went to Moscow to see her new husband Alexei Tarkhanov. In Moscow, she really became a “lioness” - in the sense that she worked and works in rich glamor magazines, the names of which have nothing to do with the “raznochinny” readers of “PTZ”, scattered throughout the Russian regions... Now, for example, she is the president and Editorial Director of Brand Development for Conde Nast International. The Internet reports that “this position at Conde Nast International, which publishes Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ, AD, Tatler, Allure, Conde Nast Traveler and other legendary magazines around the world, was introduced for the first time and specifically for Karina Dobrotvorskaya. She is responsible for the launch and development of new print and digital products for the international publishing house, which has a portfolio of more than 120 magazines and 80 websites in 26 markets.”
For several days in a row, I walked home with the constant Mokhova, along the same fateful crossing through Belinsky, where Karina first saw Seryozha (this is described in detail in the book), and anticipated the pleasure: now I’ll finish my work and go to bed to read. I recorded this expectation, I was waiting for the meeting with the book. Three hundred pages that can be read in one fell swoop (the book is fascinating, dynamic, addictive, immersive...), I read it for a week in series mode (what awaits me there in the next episode?). Gradually, in small parts, slowly moving from scene to scene. In a word, I watched a serial movie (especially since I know almost all the characters, from Lyuba Arkus to Misha Brashinsky, and the chronotope of the book is also my time/space).
For several years in a row, the Dobrotvorsky family of critics played two or three films a day on video, and in the evening they went to the House of Cinema. Karina compares almost every episode of her real life in one way or another with scenes of a film. “As if I were the heroine of Rosemary’s Baby” (p. 313), “As if at any moment I could find myself in a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (p. 290), however, you don’t have to specify the pages, it’s almost on each: for the Dobrotvorskys, the second reality did not arise episodically, it was not even a context, it, accompanying life constantly, was the text itself; they communicated, often quotationally, through cinema. It seems that even now Karina watches a film a day, so the aestheticization of reality and dual worlds are inevitable. This cinematic quality aestheticizes his and Seryozha’s story, referring each episode to the figurative series of great films that seem to depict the time and life of the 90s. Well, the Dobrotvorskys are made into movie heroes. No wonder Karina always compares Seryozha to David Bowie.
And so, in fact, for everyone who is related to the second reality, to art. We always feel like characters in a film (optionally, a play). Theater people talk in quotes from Chekhov (I once even thought that we live our lives illustrating a story that has already been written: today you are Irina, then Masha, and at the same time Arkadina). We live quotationally, we walk down the street, seeing ourselves from the outside, as if in a frame, and at the same time framing the surrounding reality and watching it like a movie: oh, this should have been filmed, that’s the angle, that’s the light coming in... “Someday about our stories will be made into movies. It’s a pity that Gabin has already died, he would have played me,” a person once told me who hardly knows Bowie and to whom a book from the “Breathless” series by AST publishing house could also be dedicated, but I don’t have Karina’s courage Dobrotvorskaya, and the man is alive. Honestly, the infectiousness of “100 Letters to Seryozha” is such that I even decided to write “with my last breath” and put on the table a documentary novel called “You Will Never Die” - so that later no one would have complaints like with Dobrotvorskaya: Seryozha won’t answer, you can write your own version...
This is not the first book by Karina Dobrotvorskaya. There were also “Siege Girls”: recordings of memories of those who survived the siege as children (the plot of the action is the “siege complex” of every Leningrad child, genetic memory for hunger, phantom pains and fears). In these memories there is a lot that is the same, a lot that is different, but the real development of the action is the diary of Karina herself about how she entered into the topic of the siege and read literature from the siege. In short, as taught in the theater history seminar, Karina studies the sources and shares her thoughts about them in this diary of hers. But she thinks about the blockade (and doesn’t hide it) in expensive restaurants, while eating dishes whose names I don’t remember, and they won’t say anything to our reader, scattered across the regions... She reads blockade books on the terrace of her house in Montenegro, in Paris and New York, while torturing herself with diets to remain beautiful. Her characters thought only about food (as if to eat), she thinks about food almost as much (as if not to eat). Devout fasting for weight loss in glamorous latitudes - and the length of the siege hunger create the lyrical and eccentric texture of the book, its internal plot, and conflict. And the point here is not in understanding her satiety (Karina really has no problem buying an apartment in Paris or on Bolshaya Konyushennaya...) and not in the desire/unwillingness to return to Leningrad, but in a certain Dostoevsky “underground” consciousness of a charming mother of two lovely children and a lucky glamorous journalist. With the talent of a psychologist (why does she need psychologists and psychoanalysts when she understands everything herself?) she explores her own inner landscape and does it with the irony of a prosperous Moscow “lioness” and the insecurity of a little girl living near the Gigant cinema, next to which captured Germans were hanged in front of the crowd.
On the cover of the book are not the besieged girls, but little Karina and her joyful girlfriends of the early 1970s. And this book is about them, about themselves, this is an internal portrait of an intelligent and subtle person, reviewing the theater of his life against the backdrop of the siege scenery, this is a psychoanalysis session, because writing a book is getting rid of the siege phantom... It is very interesting to follow this brave journey.
The last paragraph also applies to the book I’m talking about now. Karina even formulates a “psychotherapeutic” law herself: through text, having fallen in love with a certain “second Seryozha,” she takes out many years of pain over Seryozha Dobrotvorsky. I don’t know if the statement is absolutely sincere that since his death she lived two parallel lives (“After he left, my life fell apart into external and internal. Externally, I had a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment, a wonderful job, a fantastic career and even a small house on the seashore. Inside there is frozen pain, dried tears and an endless dialogue with a person who was no longer there"), but I know for sure: in order to forget something that plagues you, you have to give it to paper. Is it good that the pain goes away? I don’t know, I’m not sure: having given it to the paper, you feel “mournful insensibility”, but you can’t return it...
In general, Dobrotvorskaya’s book is an internal portrait of a constantly reflective person. This is an explanation of oneself in the neorealistic scenery of the 90s: everyone has already noted the detailed reconstruction of the time with its food poverty and creative drive. Building a conflict, as taught, Karina here also resorts to the principle of contrast. She recalls her story with Seryozha, unfolding in the damp St. Petersburg underground, against the backdrop of a new romance taking place in Paris, in expensive restaurants (the new young lover does not like them, but she is used to it). If with Dobrotvorsky there is love as such (one friend of mine would say “vertical”), then here love is physical, “horizontal”. If the first Seryozha is an intellectual, then the second is a computer scientist, read three books, loves TV series. And so on. Actually, the husband Alexey Tarkhanov appears as a contrast (with Seryozha - love, here - the first orgasm, there - a miserable life, here - the white apartment of a wealthy Moscow journalist, there - the tragic impossibility of having children, here - pregnancy with his son Ivan...).
Actually, we get so used to reading the texts of reality itself, so we catch their artistic meaning and give imagery to any movement, that life itself acquires a plot. Karina has nothing to invent when she describes a trip to Seryozha’s grave - this is an uninvented, but internally constructed film episode. She brings him a small clay ox for his grave. “Just don’t turn the ox around for me!” - they often shouted to each other, quoting “The Black Rose is the emblem of sadness...”. Seryozha then drew a sad ox, she blinded it and then took it with her to Moscow. Now she has returned and placed it on the grave. Movie? An episode built in real life. All that remains is to remove...
Karina deals with herself, as if not showing off - and at the same time seeing herself “in the frame” and admiring herself, her outfits, her appearance and talent (at the same time she claims that she is wildly complex, and this is also true). It’s as if she sees the lost “girl” through the eyes of director Dobrotvorsky, who is making a movie about her. She builds the mise-en-scène and, having parted with the new Seryozha, lies on the floor in the same position in which she lay when she learned about Dobrotvorsky’s death. The author, of course, is characterized by extreme egocentrism, but whoever in our environment is not egocentric, is not preoccupied with himself and does not remember himself in the mise-en-scène - let him throw a stone...
Does Karina understand others? Without a doubt. And it gives you a reason to publicly deal with yourself. We're even. She puts an end to “widow privatization”, authoritatively asserting with a book: mine. My history. My Seryozha.
Do those still alive need such frank memoirs? Why not? Does the book have a boulevard flavor? Probably, but that didn't bother me.
Does the book resemble psychological prose? Yes, I think so. At least, many topics resonated with me with understanding and attention, although it is difficult to imagine more different lives than Karina’s and mine... The basement on Mokhovaya and the beggar “PTZh”, guarding the profession that Karina left for the sake of (hereinafter - according to information from the Internet... ), - isn't this the principle of contrast?
Karina Dobrotvorskaya’s prose may be a romance for women, only in the center of it is a completely “Dostoevsky” creature, aware of its “undergroundness” and interesting with this honest undergroundness (but is it only aware of glamor?). It, this female creature, sincerely unravels the labyrinths of its history in a hundred letters to... Ivan.
Yes, yes, Karina and Seryozha called each other Ivans, Ivanchiks and other derivatives. Never by name. Karina named her son Ivan (this is also in terms of the plot of life and Dostoevschina), born from Tarkhanov.
And here I have an interpretative guess. Addressing Ivan, Ivanchik, protected by his undeniable love for her, Karina describes herself and her love, her nature, her destiny, her life - for another addressee, for a new Seryozha. Dobrotvorsky already knew everything. But the second Seryozha (who is actually Sasha Voznesensky, as written in the afterword)... The book of letters to Ivan, as it seems, is addressed in the title to the current lover, these are a hundred letters to the new Seryozha, an explanation with the one who wants to open all the riches the life that has been lived and the result of which is the resulting “cumulative experience” of an intelligent and talented person.
"Has anyone seen my girl?" Yes, that’s the point, I didn’t see it! Didn't see it! Lost! Didn't make it into a movie! I missed the wealth that this girl from Mokhovaya represents! Karina Dobrotvorskaya bravely made this typical emotion public. It’s as if she’s shouting to Seryozha: “You’ve lost!” She didn't lose it - he did. I have lost the one who is now writing this book - a book by no less interesting person, no less significant personality than the late Seryozha Dobrotvorsky.
Marina DMITREVSKAYA
November 2014
Loving hurts. As if she gave permission
flay yourself, knowing that the other one
can disappear from your skin at any moment.
Susan Sontag. “Diaries”
When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the wife
She even shouted: “Let me go to him!”
but she didn’t follow her husband to the grave...
A.P. Chekhov. "Speaker"
hundred 1997, Sergei Dobrotvor died
skiy. By that time we had already been two months
were divorced. So I didn't
his widow and was not even present at
funeral.
We lived with him for six years. Crazy, happy
rainy, easy, unbearable years. It so happened that these
years turned out to be the most important in my life. Love
for him, which I cut off - with the strongest love.
And his death is also my death, no matter how pathetic it may be
During these seventeen years there was not a single day when I was with him
didn't talk. The first year passed in semi-consciousness
nom condition. Joan Didion in her book “The Year of Magic”
thoughts” described the impossibility of breaking ties with a dead
our loved ones, their physically tangible presence
near. She - like my mother after my father's death -
couldn’t give my dead husband’s shoes: well, how could he?
after all, there will be nothing to wear if he returns - and he
will definitely return.
Gradually the acute pain subsided - or did I just
I learned to live with it. The pain went away, and he stayed with me.
I discussed new and old films with him, asked
asked him questions about work, boasted about her career,
gossiped about friends and strangers, told
about her travels, resurrected him in repeating
I didn’t fall in love with him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish
trill, did not divide. After he left, my life changed
fell into external and internal. Outwardly I have
there was a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment
great job, fantastic career
and even a small house on the seashore. Inside -
frozen pain, dried tears and endless dia-
log with a person who was no longer there.
I'm so used to this macabre connection, this
Hiroshima, my love, with a life in which
the past is more important than the present, which I almost didn’t think about
that life could be completely different. And what
I can be alive again. And - scary to think -
happy.
And then I fell in love. It started out easy
enthusiasm. Nothing serious, just pure joy.
But in a strange way it's a weightless feeling, no matter what
in my soul, which has no pretense, suddenly opened in it
some kind of sluices from which poured out what had been accumulating for years -
mi. Tears flowed, unexpectedly hot. It poured
happiness mixed with unhappiness. And it’s quiet inside me, like
mouse, the thought scratched: what if he, dead, me
will he let you go? What if it allows you to live in the present?
For years I talked to him. Now I started writing to him
letters. Again, step by step, living ours with him
life that holds me so tightly.
We lived on Pravda Street. Our truth with him.
These letters make no pretense of being objective.
portrait of Dobrotvorsky. This is not a biography, not a memoir.
ry, not documentary evidence. This is an attempt
literature, where much is distorted by memory or created
imagination. Surely many knew and loved
Serezha is completely different. But this is my Seryozha Dobrotvor-
skiy - and my truth.
Quotes from articles and lectures by Sergei Dobrotvorsky
January 2013
Hello! Why don't I have your letters left?
Only a few sheets of your funny books have survived.
poems written and drawn by hand
creative printed font. A few notes too
written in large semi-printed letters.
Now I understand that I hardly remember yours
handwriting There were no emails, no SMS - there was nothing then.
No mobile phones. There was even a pager
an attribute of importance and wealth. And we transferred the articles
Vali typed - the first (286th) computer appeared in our country only two years after
how we started living together. Then into our lives
Square floppy disks also came in, which seemed somehow alien.
planetary. We often transferred them to the Moscow
“Kommersant” with a train.
I'm waiting for my voice to come back. The words will probably come back with him. Or maybe not. Maybe you will have to be silent for a while and cry. Cry and remain silent. A person uses words to cover up embarrassment, to plug up the black hole of fear, as if this were possible. My friend wrote a book and I just read it. Tomorrow (today) I have to submit the script, and I recklessly dived into Karina’s manuscript. I emerge in the morning - dumbfounded, speechless, helpless. There is no one to help me. Seryozha is dead, Karina... What time is it in Paris? Minus two. No, it's early, she's sleeping. And I don’t want to talk. Impossible to talk. My friend wrote a book. And all I can do now is describe my crying. An ancient woman's cry.
Karina and I had a short but incredibly acute “attack of friendship.” As if our friendship at that time was some kind of exotic disease, which our healthy and young organisms later coped with. They managed to cope, they even developed a strong antigen, but later it turned out that each of us carries the virus of attachment within us - for life. Many things happened to us at the same time, in parallel. We trained our love muscles often on the same objects, we suffered like children from the same diseases, including jaundice (at the same time) and appendicitis (within a week of each other). And after thirty years of dating, we wrote a book. I - a little earlier, my “Wax” was already published. Both books are about death and love and about the only possible sign of equality between them. “I wrote it a little earlier” - this means: I screamed a little earlier from the horror that was revealed in myself, from the inability to hold back the scream. She screamed earlier, like a twin born ten minutes early.
Karina's book concerns me in exactly the same way as her life concerns me. Like the life of Seryozha, Sergei Nikolaevich Dobrotvorsky, like his death, concern me and many others. “Touches” is not only “has a relation,” it means “touches” and with its touch causes pain, almost voluptuous, erotic, equal to pleasure. After all, you have to be able to write like this, discarding any hint of stylistic prettiness or cleverness! And in order to have the right to write like this about the main event of your life, about the main sin for which you punished yourself for years, you need to live the life of Karina Dobrotvorskaya, which is impossible for an outsider. And my night cry, the cry of the first morning after reading “Letters to Seryozha” was: “My poor one! What have you done with your life?!”
They were together, she left, he died a year later - the bare facts."Has anyone seen my girl?" This courageous girl? This bitch? This angel?
One day, a mutual friend of Karina and I, listening to another exciting story about our early love escapades, suddenly asked: “I don’t understand. Here too (he studied at some technical university), girls fall in love, and go to parties, and suffer, and talk about it. But why does it come out so beautifully for you, but usually for them?!” The question was rhetorical, but it caused cheerful laughter and youthful pride. Yes, we are!
In this logic, the meeting of Karina and Seryozha, romance, marriage, partnership were as if predetermined. No, this was not engraved in imperishable gold letters on some cosmic tablets. “We should have met” - this, in my understanding, is pure logic. After all, “that’s who we are!”, everything should be the best for us, and I don’t remember anyone better than Seryozha at that time. The sacred berry of eros within these relationships remained uncrushed, unrotted until the very end. Between these people lived something that cannot be profaned. And he still lives.
And it was also not surprising that they broke up. It was a pity, it was painful, as if it was happening to me (I was talking about parallels: on those same days I was experiencing my own painful breakup), but not surprising. Love is full of pain. This is among other things.
Hey, somebody! Has anyone seen this steely woman with the eyes of a frightened teenage deer? She executed herself all her life - effectively, terribly, burning out feelings in herself, like some mystical vivisector from a horror movie about the Alien - with fire, napalm. And every line of the book is the chronicle of a survivor in the desert. And then the execution suddenly became public. And saving. Speak, people, rage, get angry, condemn, but she did it - she wrote about him, about herself and about eternal love.
The point is not in the documentary (although the book is documentary) or even in the veracity (factual and emotional) of the memories. The point is the impossibility of losing them and the impossibility of storing them. And another thing is that the deceased Seryozha did not die. He is the only reality in which Karina is confident, in which and in which she lives.
I noticed: people are horrified by the truth, any hint of it. Despite the plebeian cult of “sincerity,” the truth—the transparent, visible and inextricable connection between a phenomenon and the word by which the phenomenon is called—is frightening. People, good, caring people, begin to look for the reasons for the emergence of a truthful statement. And they are found, of course, most often in negative space. “What kind of dancing on bones?!”, “She’s doing this for self-PR!”, “I should think about my husband and children!” This is the little I heard when Karina's book came out. And the people are all wonderful, but they are very caring. As a rule, they did not read the book itself, limiting itself to the summary. But everything is already clear to everyone. Everyone already has ready-made answers. But I know: words grow like a palisade, fencing off from meaning, from authenticity, from human sovereignty. Otherwise, you need to confront yourself with the obviousness of a disappointing fact: everything is not so simple, and life is blood and tears, and love is pain and chaos.
In his last spring, we met on the set of a small film that my classmate was filming. Seryozha agreed to appear in a cameo. Between shots, between shots of his whiskey, he suddenly asked: “How are you?” - "Fine". He twisted his mouth in disgust: “Yes, I was told that you are holding on.” He was referring to my own breakup and my laments about it. I was surprised. Who did you hear it from? And if this is called “holding on,” then I’m already losing the meaning of the words. But I answered, proud of myself: “Yes, I’m holding on.” - “But I’m not.” All. Dot. He doesn't.
Has anyone seen a girl with a stone in her palm? With the stone she kills herself with every day, trying to reach her own heart? Calling a spade a spade is a thankless and cruel undertaking. Truth - this means to bypass, stop lengthy explanations, motivation and review of long-term goals. There is only the past, perhaps the present, and, strangely enough, there is probably a future. The connection between them is not obvious, although it is often equated to an axiom. Only one thing can connect them, passing through the past, present and illusory future, something unique, something unique, each has its own - hope, for example. Blessed is he who believes... For Karina, this is pain, the utter pain of enduring love. Has anyone seen a beautiful girl without illusions and hope? She is here, she stands and waits for the pain to subside.
Karina Dobrotvorskaya. “Has anyone seen my girl? One hundred letters to Seryozha."
Publishing house "Editing Elena Shubina"
" This is the first book in the memoir series “Breathless,” conceived by Elena Shubina. The book will be on sale soon. Critic Nina Agisheva wrote about “The Girl,” its author and main character for “Snob.”
Karina, dear, I remember how my Seryozha sent me your text by email with the words: “Look, you might be interested.” I was in no hurry to watch: I don’t like women’s prose and call it “snot with ice cream.” After all, Marina, whom we both adored, was not a woman - she was a genius. And the most interesting - and the most creative - people are those in whom both principles are intricately mixed. But in the evening I sat down at the computer and... woke up in the middle of the night. I haven’t read anything like the power of emotional expression, desperate fearlessness and unvulgar frankness for many years. And in general, all this was not about you, not even about us - about me.
Although I saw the hero of the book - the legendary St. Petersburg critic and your ex-husband Seryozha Dobrotvorsky - only twice in my life. Once in Moscow at the “Faces of Love” festival, where he received a prize for his articles about cinema, and I, wanting to say something nice to him, said socially: “You have a very pretty wife, Seryozha.” The answer was not entirely secular - he looked at me very angrily and said: “No, you are wrong. She's not pretty, she's beautiful." And the second time, years later, when you had already left him and lived with Lesha Tarkhanov, at Lenfilm, where I whiled away the time in the buffet, waiting for the next interview. Seryozha sat down at my table with a bottle of cognac in his hands - and, although we were not closely acquainted, he just unleashed a stream of revelations on me. Not a word was said about you: he had just returned from either Prague or Warsaw and was describing in many words how brilliantly this trip had been, and how happy, incredibly happy he was, how good everything was in his life... Less than he died a month ago. I remember then I looked at him with pity and thought: how he suffers, poor thing. This is love. Now I understand that his behavior was inappropriate, and I know why.
Just one post on my FB speaks about who Dobrotvorsky was and remains for the St. Petersburg intellectual get-together. A student writes: oh, read everything, a book is coming out about the famous Dobrotvorsky - you know, he died the year we entered LGITMIK. So, Karina, all your experiences, for the sake of which you started this book, have faded into the shadows - what remains is the portrait of Seryozha. And he is beautiful, just like his photograph on the cover of the book of his brilliant articles, lovingly published by Luba Arcus. I like it so much that I put this book on the shelf with the cover facing out - and when you and Lesha first came to me, he was just opposite, and Seryozha looked at him bitterly and ironically all evening. He really looked like James Dean. And David Bowie. And in general, what could be more erotic than intelligence? I completely agree with you.
You knew Seryozha closely, very closely, you remembered many of his assessments and aphorisms, phenomenal in accuracy and elegance, which are scattered in the text like a handful of expensive stones - now they don’t write or speak like that! - and at the same time, you are still tormented by his under-incarnation. Yes, articles, yes, paintings, even in the Russian Museum! Yes, scripts, but who remembers these films?! You write: “How to convey a gift that has not been embodied? Talent to live? Artistry mixed with despair?.. Those whom you burned, irradiated - they remember it. But there won't be any. And you won't be there." Karina, there are many such destinies around... I remember my shock at the early films of Oleg Kovalov, at his talent - where is he now, what is he? And those who wrote like gods - what are they doing now?! When was the last time you wrote about the theater? And where are your studies about Isadora Duncan? So what? The main thing is not to take a breath, as your Seryozha wrote in an article about his beloved Godard. Live. And rejoice at the “new manifestos of freedom, permissiveness and love.”
By the way, about permissiveness. I don’t know many authors who are capable of writing so harshly, ironically and frankly about the morals of bohemian St. Petersburg in the eighties and nineties. As, by the way, women who publicly declare that they do not have a waist and that they do not know how to dress. I never expected such “immensity in the world of measures” from the coldly sleek boss of Condenast. It's like a volcano inside an iceberg. And a simple explanation, as eternal as the world, is love. She either exists or she doesn't. And if it is there, it doesn’t go anywhere. Forever with you, until your last breath - and no book can get rid of it. But this is so, a lyrical digression. Let's get back to drinking. Our generation not only paid tribute to him, but also aestheticized it as best it could. It is no coincidence that Dobrotvorsky said about the unforgettable Venichka Erofeev that he “preserved the tradition of conscience in a clot of hangover shame.” Or was this how weakness of will was justified? You write with such pain about those moments when “Mr. Hyde” woke up in Seryozha that it’s impossible not to believe you. And it’s not for us to judge. We will all die next to those with whom we “have something to drink.” But there is a line beyond which it is better not to look. Feeling it, you left - and survived. I thought about this while watching Guy Germanika’s film “Yes and Yes.” Of course, his heroine is no match for you in terms of intelligence and brilliance, but she also loved and was also saved. I don’t understand at all how the numerous detractors of this picture did not consider or hear the main thing: the story of pure and devoted love. And the surroundings - well, excuse me, what they are. Moreover, Germanika does not try to justify it or embellish it, stylize it as something - no, horror is horror. We must run. And all of us, even those who now criticize the film for nothing, somehow escaped. How can one not remember that morality awakens precisely when... And another theme arises in your book and in “women’s” cinema today (I remember Angelina Nikonova and Olga Dykhovichnaya with their stunning “Portrait at Twilight”, Svetlana Proskurina, Natalya Meshchaninova - the list is easy to continue): it is women who disagree again and again, rebel and run away from “doll” houses, although these houses today look more like “dead”. This is exactly what, by the way, Yana Troyanova plays in Sigarev’s play. In general, only girls will survive. While the boys sit on Facebook and self-destruct.
Your book is generally like a movie in which all the pictures of our common life replace one another. Here are BG and Tsoi. Kuryokhin. Here is a stupid parallel cinema in today's opinion - I didn’t like it either, although I once even supervised a dissertation about it at the journalism department. Here's Lynch's Blue Velvet - for some reason it was iconic and special for me. First Paris. First America. An opportunity to earn money, and a lot of it. It was you who wrote: “The desire for money began to eat away at the soul.” Not Seryozha’s, of course: his soul remained free, which is why it still won’t let you go.
And one last thing. I can imagine what an anthill you have stirred up with your book. And how much negativity will be shed - from acquaintances, of course, because strangers will most likely perceive the text simply as an artifact; whether they like it or not is another question. So, don't worry. Seryozha didn’t make his own film, but it’s as if you did it for him. She told about herself, about him, about all the boys and girls of the Russian transitional time. It is over, gone forever. And everyone will leave - but we will remain.
Nina Agisheva
Text: Lisa Birger
She’s very beautiful, very successful, and she also talks—this is probably how the average person reacts to the sudden literary career of Karina Dobrotvorskaya, president and editorial director of Brand Development of the publishing house Condé Nast International and an iconic figure of Russian glamor. It would be nice to write frivolous books about fashion in the style of Vogue, advice to girls just looking for their own style on how to wear a tuxedo correctly. But instead, first Karina Dobrotvorskaya collects into one book the memories of the Leningrad “siege girls”, building their hunger in parallel with her own bulimia, her own fears and disorders associated with food. And now they’re coming out with “Has anyone seen my girl? 100 letters to Seryozha” - letters to her deceased husband. This is extreme, very sincere and not quite prose, that is, texts that are not entirely intended for the eyes of the reader from the outside. I can’t even say that this book should be read right now. You may not even need to read it at all. Which does not detract from its, so to speak, social significance.
Sergei Dobrotvorsky, a bright person and an outstanding film critic, whose memory is preserved today only by the faithful staff of the Session magazine, died in 1997. By that time, Karina had already left him for her current husband and was even 9 months pregnant. He died of a heroin overdose, the friends he was with, frightened, took his body outside and put him on a bench in the playground - he sat there, dead, until the middle of the next day. In the preface to the book, Dobrotvorskaya writes that his death was the main event of her life. “I didn’t like him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish watching, I didn’t share. After he left, my life fell apart into external and internal. Outwardly, I had a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment, a wonderful job, a fantastic career, and even a small house on the seashore. Inside there is frozen pain, dried tears and an endless dialogue with a person who was not there.”
In her “letters” (the quotes here are intentional - the description of events is too systematic, chronological, these are more likely the kind of letters that you write publicly, like messages on Facebook, than something truly intimate) Dobrotvorskaya consistently recalls the story of an affair, marriage, divorce, care. Practically - from the first university parties, the first sex, the first conversation, the first attempts to arrange a life together, the first trips abroad (in the 90s this still meant eating one banana a day in order to save up for one, but chic suit from Paris) - to latest quarrels. A parallel to all this is modernity, where the heroine has a young lover, and it is he who becomes the catalyst for this sea of letters that have broken through. There - painful shame for hand-pasted wallpaper, an apartment without a telephone, a bathroom covered in giant red cockroaches, here - life in Paris, where every morning, leaving the house, the heroine admires the Eiffel Tower. There are rationed goods, pasta with ketchup, and pancakes made from powdered eggs and powdered milk. Here is an endless raid on Michelin-starred restaurants.
This endlessly repeated juxtaposition of yesterday's poverty with today's chic should not and is not intended to be the main thing here. However, that is exactly what it becomes. Dobrotvorskaya’s book actually has one obvious, let’s say, source of inspiration - it is even briefly mentioned in the preface. This is Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” - Dobrotvorskaya translates it as “The Year of Magical Thoughts”. In her book, Didion recounts how she spent a year of her life after her husband, John Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack in their family living room. This piercing, stunning read is almost the main American book of the last decade. Baring, it would seem, every last nerve, recalling the past on repeat and describing her suffering in the present, Joan Didion legitimizes suffering for the first time in American culture. What is usually hidden - tears, grief, unwillingness to live - becomes the main plot for her.
Dobrotvorskaya also decides to write about what is not spoken about in Russian culture. About poverty. About the suffering around poverty. About the intimate life of two people, sex, betrayal. Add to this that she calls almost all the characters in her book by name, and you can imagine how many people will definitely not like it. However, the main idea here, clearly borrowed from Didion, is that if you start talking about pain, it will subside. This is psychotherapy in a word, the belief that it is enough to speak out and everything will pass. So in the Middle Ages they treated with bloodletting, believing that with bad blood the disease would go away. A completely erroneous idea, by the way, that cost us Robin Hood.
The trouble is that, inspired by Didion, Dobrotvorskaya read her incorrectly. Joan Didion never promised that the pain would go away; moreover, she repeatedly repeats that nothing will go away. But she is a brilliant essayist, the best of her generation, who has spent years training to turn her every experience into text. In "The Year of Magical Thinking", she simply, for lack of other options, turns herself into a guinea pig, standing back and observing her own suffering. She is there, for example, all the time reading books about loss and experiencing trauma and comparing the comments of doctors and psychoanalysts with her own experience. Thus, Didion’s confession is addressed to each of us; anyone who has known the bitterness of loss can try it on - that is, all of us. Dobrotvorskaya’s confession is personal psychotherapy, where intimacy is even inappropriate and leaves a feeling of some discomfort, and the author (whether consciously or not, I wonder) does not evoke the slightest sympathy.
That is, “letters to Seryozha” cannot be read as a book about the experience of loss. What remains in it? First of all, a story about these 90s, when everything happened: all this hunger, cards, powdered pancakes, dreams of abroad, etsetera, etsetera. The desire to “have everything” grew out of a time when there was nothing. To read Dobrotvorskaya, it is this “nothing that happened” that is a real trauma for her. When you fall in love with the suits of a new fashion designer, but they cost 1000 dollars, and your salary is 200. When you go to America and save up for a new video recorder, and it is stolen from you on your first day in your homeland - how to survive this?
Dobrotvorskaya quite frankly describes that she was going after money, that “I wanted change” - this is a grand cru cooling down in a bucket. And precisely because she is so honest with us, it is not worth crucifying her for this and I do not want to. It is impossible not to notice that all this is the confession of a woman who, saying goodbye to her young lover, finally tells him “I will cancel your tickets myself.” But in the past, in addition to everyday life, there was also art - Sergei Dobrotvorsky himself and his entire circle were people in love with cinema, books, and old culture. And we must understand that all this glamor was created for us by people who knew Pasolini’s films by heart.
When Dobrotvorskaya writes about modernity, about a young lover devouring seasons of TV series, she, perhaps unconsciously, contrasts yesterday's absorption of culture with its consumption today. Modern man knows how to use gadgets correctly, but is unable to watch the “Autumn Marathon” to the end. And here it is no longer clear what Dobrotvorskaya is complaining about - completely beyond the scope of this prose is the fact that she herself created this man.
Photos:"Edited by Elena Shubina", AST Publishing House
