The actions of Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels usually take place in enclosed space. In the legendary trilogy it was the subway, in Twilight it was an Arbat apartment, now a smartphone. And each time a whole life arises in this space, which millions of readers live together with the author. The just published "Text" is perhaps the most hermetic of all, but at the same time it comes into contact with the life of everyone even more sharply, although the heroes of the novel are exceptional in their fate and position. Still a young man released after a seven-year prison sentence, convicted on false charges allegedly for drug trafficking, in fact because of a personal conflict with an FSKN operative, is released from the zone in Solikamsk, arrives in Moscow, learns that his mother two days before died. And the life he planned to return to is now impossible. And he, in the heat of passion, kills the man who sent him to serve out these seven years. Takes his smartphone, picks up a password for it ...
And this is where Monte Cristo ends and the story begins about how one person lives for another.
“This is the first novel written in a completely different genre than the previous ones. When you took it on, did you somehow formulate a task for yourself?
— There are books that grow out of an idea, and there are books that grow out of a hero. And this book grew out of a hero. I accumulated feelings and thoughts from what is happening with the country, and I wanted to convey them through the collisions of his life.
— What was it that bothered you?
- Here are the transformations that have affected the country, especially the capital, over the past seven years, and the collapse of ethics, the abolition of ideas about good and evil from above and below society, here is the total penetration of prison culture into ordinary life. It seemed to me that a story about a man who served a seven-year sentence, returned to Moscow and lived his life for another person, could absorb many experiences.
- Your hero, both in education, and in origin, and in occupations, is a complete opposite to you. Where do you get an understanding of this psychology and this way of life, including prison life?
- I don’t know, for sure it was described by someone better than me, but this is my personal discovery: what we consider to be ugly manifestations of personality (excessive aggression, downtroddenness, etc.) is just a response to the environment, which is designed to ensure the survival of the organism. If your parents thump and beat you, then you grow up to be a thief and a bully, because otherwise you will not survive in this family. It deforms you, you become aggressive, you get used to either suppressing others, or keeping your opinion to yourself, and then it develops into a behavior model. It is designed to allow you, as an animal, to adapt to the environment and survive in it. Any impact leads to transformation. And if you can imagine these influences, then you can also imagine how a person who has been subjected to these influences behaves. On the other hand, if you are not looking for a genuine texture for such a book, then nothing will work. And my manuscript was read by acting employees of law enforcement agencies, and former employees of the Federal Drug Control Service, and several convicted criminals .. And I, first of all, asked them about the psychological reliability. One said: “It’s written right about me.”
— One of your main characters is brought up by a mother with principles, the second by a father without principles. But both of them go to crime. Do you think that natural instincts, in this case Thirst for revenge is stronger than education?
- From what remains after reading the book and after writing it, this is probably the central question. And it has a lot to do with what's going on. People belonging to the system of power, as well as people collaborating with power, helping it to exist, adhered to this behavior before, but now they are starting to openly proclaim these principles. There is a complete rejection of ideas about ethics. The concepts of good and evil no longer apply. It started with the first persons of the state who openly lie to the camera. For example, about Crimea: first they claim that the peninsula will not be annexed, and two weeks later he joins that there are no Russian troops there, then they admit that there is our special forces. Now Putin, in an interview with Oliver Stone, says that our media is independent of the state and that the special services do not read the correspondence of Russians. This is generally chickens to laugh at. And then, recognizing everything after the fact, he smiles and says that it was such an Indian military trick and that it was all justified. So again, the end justifies the means. And this is not only practiced, but preached from the highest levels.
— If people accept this shameless lie and continue to support the authorities, then it means that it is easier for them to live in pink glasses without distinguishing between good and evil. The president simply takes into account and exploits people's psychology.
- What Putin says is the right of the strong. I can afford, so I allow myself. And further in the spirit that there is neither darkness nor light, everything is dirty, everything is smeared, and in the West they are smeared.
What happened to the Trump campaign was an attempt to discredit their electoral system. Trump, an eccentric, unpredictable, uncontrollable person, was not particularly needed by us. It was necessary to prove that the American electoral system is so rotten that it will not allow a person who is really popular with the people to power. The elites will rally in a conspiracy and will not let him win. We were prepared for this by all means. And when he won, it was a crushing surprise for everyone.
- An old trick: instead of washing ourselves, we are trying to cover up others?
- We are not trying to prove that we are better (this is implied), we just pay attention to who is trying to teach us - people who are completely corrupt, corrupt, unprincipled, and even homosexuals are found. They are trying to impose on us a picture of the world in which ideas about elementary ethical categories simply do not work.
And such a standard of behavior is set by the first person of the state, it does not matter whether he plays the boy, whether he plays the godfather. And we let him down, because he is an alpha male, because he is a king, he can. This goes down the pyramid: the boyars behave in the same way, and they teach the same to their lackeys, and then the population is re-educated in the spirit of complete disregard for the concepts of good and evil. Anything is possible if you can. You can bend others - bend down, be a predator, eat the weak.
— And in the "Text" we are just faced with a representative of a system that shares these beliefs.
- With a hereditary representative. Because this FSKN operative that he kills the protagonist, avenging his lost youth, he is a hereditary enforcer. His father is a police general, deputy head of the personnel department for the city of Moscow in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He attached his son to a bread place, because there was an opportunity to attach. The mother did not want to, she knew that her son was weak-willed, arrogant, a rogue and a beetle, but she was afraid to argue with her father. And then the father teaches his son life principles. And the principles are simple - eat those whom you can devour, collect dirt on those whom you cannot devour.
— But this is a typical special service policy towards people.
- The president's idea of people is very predetermined by his professional formation. He doesn't believe in virtue at all, in my opinion. He believes that all people are vicious, unprincipled, that they must either be bribed or blackmailed. He is a recruiter, and how a recruiter looks at us. He does not even recognize the theoretical right to be guided by other criteria, to be incorruptible, for example.
- Well, he sees few incorruptibles ...
- Now the principles have really devalued, and people are not ready to fight or die for them.
— But you also have the mother of the main character, who brought him up in strict concepts of honor, when he goes to prison, teaches him not to stick out, adapt, etc. It turns out that life is really more valuable than principles?
“Time is such that life is more precious than principles. I suspect it has always been like this. We were brought up on the Soviet myth, but what did we know about this time? People who consume mass culture do not know much about what really happened at the fronts and in the rear, how much people were motivated by patriotic feelings ...
The Nazis killed the family, and here you really cannot step over yourself, and then you are capable of some kind of heroic action. Not because you love an abstract homeland, or even more so some Stalin, but because you cannot live otherwise. Genuine motivations are much more personal. Especially in a country where the Bolsheviks for 20 years established their power through bloodshed and coercion. Well, how to love such a Motherland recklessly? No matter how your brain was washed by propaganda, but still there are personal experiences that contradict this.
— Have you noticed that the reenactors who filled Moscow on holidays are all dressed in military clothes? What is the reason for such militarization of consciousness?
- There are two points here. The first is the fear of looking into the future, perhaps purely biological in people of the post-war generation. They know Brezhnev's world, they know the world of perestroika, but they already know the new world poorly. What lies ahead? 10-15 years of more or less active mental and physical labor? The presidential term that we are living out is a term where everything is turned exclusively back, into the past.
— Your hero lives someone else's life in a smartphone, just like today's younger generation. And if he observes the life of another family, then the children discover in their gadgets a different world, unlike the one they see when emerging from virtual reality. Can the authorities cope with the dissonance that sounds more and more insistently in their brains?
- Children will inevitably win, the question is whether current government spoil them. The change of generations is a historical process, and few people managed to transform the national mentality in four years. Maybe only Saakashvili, but he broke people over the knee. The ideas of his reformist activities to eradicate corruption, the power of thieves in law, etc. gave people the opportunity to move to another country in four years. However, when he left, everything began to grow back in the same dense direction.
In our situation, we still have to wait for the change of generations, the arrival of people with a different mentality. Now even the FSB has such people.
- But among the 86 percent who support the president, there are clearly many people with a new mentality, but what's the point?
— There is a demand for the feeling of belonging to a superpower in all segments of the population. For young people, especially teenagers, this is superimposed on the need to increase their own self-esteem.
A person who does not belong to administrative bodies or supervisory departments has little chance of feeling the necessary self-respect. He lives in constant fear of colliding with the system, he has no rights. If you were beaten by a policeman and you have no one to call, you are to blame. If there is someone from the system to stand up for you - a judge, a prosecutor, even a doctor who has operated on someone - you need to pull the person out of the system in order to protect yourself. Here is our fundamental difference from the countries of the West, where there are elementary legal guarantees and where, if there is no very severe conflict of interest, you are protected by rules and laws
- That is, there is a substitution - if there is no way to feel respect for yourself, then you have to be proud that the state is respected ...
- By iconizing and canonizing Stalin and Nicholas II, people just want to say that they are part of the empire. I am an ant, I can be crushed, moved and devoured, including my own, but the whole forest, the whole district is afraid of us like an anthill. The feeling of one's own insignificance is redeemed by the feeling of belonging to some kind of super-being that instills fear in the surroundings. Hence the desire to feel like a superpower again. Such a sublimation of self-respect, which we lack so much.
And the constant desire to be appreciated by the West (because we are notorious as a people) also comes from private life. Let them not be afraid of me, because I am drinking in the yard in sweatpants and an alcoholic T-shirt, but let them be afraid of the country to which I belong.
— And the bigger the country, the more respect?
- Berdyaev's "Russian Idea" says that the only national idea that has taken root here and turned out to be universal is the idea of territorial expansion. Habitat is a very tangible, measurable, very animal concept. Not conscious, but irrational and understandable basic. And it is important that, unlike implanted Orthodoxy, this is a supra-religious thing. I talked with the Kalmyks, on the one hand, they feel like nationalists, they have a difficult attitude towards Russians, whom they despise for weakness, for softness, for drunkenness, but at the same time they feel pride because they belong to Russia. And when Russia behaves threateningly towards its neighbors, it gives them pleasure. Therefore, when we rumble our shod heels or caterpillar tracks over the squares of all the small European states - 1956, 1968, 2008 - a wave of pride rises in inexperienced souls.
— In my opinion, you overestimate the general knowledge of history.
- Well, they know her in some kind of mythologized way, in which the media gives them a conversation that not everything is so simple in our dramatic history. Beria is fine that he strangled the raped gymnasts, but he created the atomic bomb. As if one could somehow be redeemed by the other. Here are the origins of teenage Stalinism. And therefore, Putin, positioning himself as a cool dude, of course, finds some kind of response from them. In vain he confessed to Stone that he had grandchildren. Putin's grandfather is a step away from the young.
- Yes, for the young, this whole agenda that is being discussed on TV is pure crap.
- A culture has already been formed on the Internet, where all these achievements - Crimea, Donbass, endless war, purchased systemic oppositionists, hired intellectuals, Duma, neutered cats - are not very relevant and relevant to these people. However, the authorities, in order to continue to steer, begin to invade this little world, take away freedom. And it starts to affect them.
— The authorities do not understand that by doing so they are digging a hole for themselves?
“We don’t have a lot of young people proportionally. And I don't think she can do anything right now. How can there be a change of power in the country? Even if you capture the Kremlin, not to mention the Post Office and railway stations, there will be no benefit in this. Power is not in the Kremlin. Power is in the consensus of the elites. The change of power takes place, probably, when Dzerzhinsky's division refuses to move forward, when the military begins to get drunk, when important people stop answering the phones - at this moment the power passes to others.
— Do you observe the consensus of the elites now?
- All people who are now with a lot of money are indebted to the authorities. And now there is not a single major player capable of challenging the authorities; it will immediately be ground to powder. Most likely, he will not dare to do this, because tons of compromising evidence will definitely be found on him.
But Navalny made up his mind.
- The fact that one particular Navalny managed to excite a certain number of young people across the country, especially in two or three large cities, is the beginning of a trend. I'm not saying that now the schoolchildren will go to the embrasure, stain the bayonets of the riot police with their innocent blood, and everything will turn upside down. The Paris of 1968, of course, shook de Gaulle, but we are not there, and we are not de Gaulle. We have total control over the media, we can say that Navalny distributes drugs to children there, and so on. However, if there is the blood of young innocent people, then there is a fork: either the one who shed this blood loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, or he is forced to continue to impose his legitimacy, turning into a dictator.
- Navalny is not threatened in the foreseeable future…
- ... and Putin avoids becoming a dictator, he is satisfied with a relatively mild authoritarian regime, where the opposition is squeezed out, and only in rare cases is eliminated by the hands of some vassals, and it is not clear whether this happens as a result of hints or on local initiative. Apparently, he does not need the country to become a dictatorship; he would still like to be recognized by the international community. He does not want the role of Gaddafi, or the role of Hussein, and even a more prosperous Kim Jong-un, although we can exist hermetically, as we have already done. All, let's say, repressions, came from the fear of losing power, were a response to some kind of public fluctuations. Such a semi-thermidor, a reaction to the semi-revolution that did not happen in 2012. And the reaction was precisely to the confusion that arose among the ruling elite, and an attempt to restore order in their camp by flexing their muscles, and to intimidate any oppositionists with the redundancy of these measures.
— Does he really believe that the whole world does not sleep, does not eat, only thinks how to deal with us, or is this also a propaganda story?
“You have been taught for at least five years that there are enemies around, everyone is trying to recruit each other, everyone should be suspected .. You see, what is the tragedy. On the final stages the existence of the Roman Empire, the commanders of the Praetorian Guard came to power one after another, because they had the resource to eliminate the real emperors .. And this did not lead to anything good, their power, although it was at some point absolute, was used for good nation and empire, they could not. The fact is that the Praetorians, like representatives of the State Security Committee, are very special people, trained to search for and eliminate threats to power.
But a professional politician, capable of carrying out grandiose reforms in his country, directing it along a new path, is a completely different quality. Peter the Great is not a special serviceman, not a KGB officer, Gorbachev is not a special serviceman or a KGB officer, and even Lenin is not a special serviceman or a KGB officer. This is a completely different scale of people.
— Well, then Putin is not to blame. These are the people who put him in power, did not take into account his professional qualities.
“It seems to me that he knows how to tell people what they want to hear from him, and he is a brilliant manipulator. In addition, an excellent personnel officer, surrounded himself with an impenetrable wall of people who owe him everything and depend on him in everything. He knows how to protect himself from any threats.
— This is a tactic. What is the strategy?
There is no strategy, and never has been. Conservation of the current position, he manages us like clerks in a corporation. The President is not statesman, he is a cunning politician, all he does is solve the problem of how to stay in power. There is no project for the country, and never was. Silly talk about the future under Medvedev was invented by some hipsters, I don't know why. But there is no project for the country, no understanding of who we should become, ceasing to be Soviet Union. Empire, okay. And what to do in order to become an empire?
Photo: Vlad Dokshin / Novaya — Crimea, for example, to join.
- Well no. With an economy that crap one's pants, you can't annex any Crimea. Take the example of Deng Xiaoping - that's a statesman. You first pull the country out of poverty, give people the opportunity to support and feed themselves, move their lives for the better, and they will move, like barge haulers on the Volga, all this ship stuck aground forward. But no, the middle class is a danger to the authorities. Talk about supporting business is just talk; for them, business is just pasture for the security forces. Reliance goes to the security forces and state employees, to people who depend on the state.
— How can others survive? Those who are not going to adapt to power and do not want to sit on the stove.
- The era when it was possible to take place is over, the country will not develop under this rule. The president is afraid to initiate change, perhaps thinking he won't be able to ride the rising tide. His only initiative act was the Crimea. The exact hit in the imperial nostalgia. But from the point of view of the country's development, the step is catastrophic. We are in international isolation, resources for modernization are running out, financial bonds are being replaced by administrative ones, a whole generation has grown up, accustomed not to serve the Fatherland, but to treat it like rent. This is no longer stagnation in the blood, this is gangrene. And I'm afraid the next presidential term will be a period of further degradation.
— So, leave?
Well, firstly, not everyone wants and can leave.
— Yes, we are not very welcome there.
- And the Chinese are not very welcome, but the Chinese are everywhere. I cannot call for emigration, I myself emigrated three times, but in this moment I live here. It's a matter of motivation for everyone. When the Union collapsed, I was 12 years old, I belong to that generation of people who are in ruins " iron curtain» see opportunities - to go to study, to see the world.
Why is it necessary to make a choice once and for all - to leave Russia or stay and endure, play pseudo-patriotic games like "Zarnitsa", knowing what people who profess such patriotism really do.
The concept of patriotism - stay and suffer with the country - is being imposed by people whose children have long been in London and Paris, as we see on their Instagrams. We once again agree to play the games that are imposed on us. And you just need to disengage from this and do what is good for you.
I am not ready either to call for a revolution or for emigration. The situation in the country is not so desperate that there is a choice - either to flee or to the barricades. Still, Russia in 2017 is not the same as a hundred years ago, the situation there was much more desperate.
— Moreover, privacy has not yet been banned.
- Of course, the current authoritarianism is much wiser than what was under Brezhnev. If you are doing your own thing - do it, homosexual - there is no article for homosexuality, well, just don’t preach, if you want American music - please, if you want to leave to study - go, if you want to emigrate - your business. On the contrary, let all the active ones get out as soon as possible than to sit here and whine, and suffer abroad from the inability to adapt. This is such authoritarianism, adjusted for all modern theories and textbooks.
There is no disaster. The trend is just wrong. We traveled by train to Europe, and at night we changed the carriages and went in the direction of Kolyma. We are not in Kolyma, but the direction is no longer European.
— Your hero, one might say, is a modern Petrarch. As the poets of the late Renaissance were inspired by unattainable women, so he sacrifices himself for the sake of Platonic love. Do you consider love a reliable refuge from external adversity?
“…In the novel, the protagonist falls in love by force. To hold out for a week, he needs to get into the skin of the murdered man, that is, into his phone, and understand the intricacies of his life. In particular, in a very conflicting relationship with his parents, with a woman whom he tried to leave and could not leave. And our hero, Ilya Goryunov, as often happens in a man's life, falls in love with a picture on his phone. And through this love, a certain transformation begins in him. He learns that she is pregnant and feels guilty for taking the life of the father of the unborn child. And so, when he finds out that she is going to have an abortion, he weaves a complex intrigue to keep her from doing this, and gives her 50 thousand rubles, which he had hardly obtained to escape from the country.
— That is, he saves someone else's child at the cost of his own life.
- He understands that he still belongs to the world of the dead, and she to the world of the living. And he still can’t escape responsibility, his mother taught him to think that retribution follows everything. However, saving his beloved, not himself, is his choice. A person always decides for himself - who he wants to be, who he wants to remain.
- And this is after so many years of living in such a perverted society as a prison?
- Any feelings become stronger and brighter when it is impossible to realize them. If you can get a girl or a young man on the first, second, third date, you don’t even have time to kindle a feeling inside yourself. In the Middle Ages, perhaps, or in such a moralizing society that we had in the 70s and 80s, sexual freedom seemed like a rebellion against a system that assumed standard behavior - to guard oneself, not to allow too much, to repel sexual attacks. Through the regulation of sexual life, the state obtains significant power over the individual. The Platonic flourishes where the physiological is not allowed to grow. Through the prohibition, since human nature is weakly transformable, all that can be done is to instill a sense of guilt. A person is guilty, he is a priori loyal.
On the other hand, now many girls, if a young man does not try to drag them to bed in two weeks, get upset and wonder what is wrong with him - is he really gay? .. And simultaneous novels for girls with several young people, and for young people with girls, until they began to live together, is not something that is the norm, but something quite taken for granted. In principle, Russia is not a conservative society; on the contrary, we have a rather riotous country. I think this is good, because all societies where sex life is regulated are much more more prone to fascism.
- Conservative in everyday and social terms, Germany and Japan proved this in their time.
“Human nature must be given a natural outlet. As long as Putin is smart enough not to get into his personal life and stop the attempts of zealous deputies and figures like bikers who stick to the budgetary udder to interfere in the personal lives of citizens, I think he will stand. Although he has already climbed into the Internet. The Internet, it is also around sex and in general around what they do in free time. And as soon as diktat and censorship begin here, people will accumulate anger.
While anger is still given various outlets. Life is getting worse, people are getting poorer, but they, in general, treat this with a certain patience. After all, our well-being in fat years seemed so impossible that we did not really believe in its duration. But there are things, the habit of which is too great. And they understand it very well. And rather, they are intimidated by the fact that they will invade privacy in order to hint: let's not aggravate now, let's leave everything as it is, the border is open, the Internet is free, don't force us to act, it could be worse.
Now the police are spinning teenagers, wanting to discourage those who planned to go to the next actions. Therefore, it is necessary to twist not a hundred, but a thousand, so that people think, yes, the risks are great. And when they so uncompromisingly sweep these teenagers with arms and legs like matches, this, of course, is a cruel intimidation. But then it can lead to the opposite result, violence breeds violence.
The actions of Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels usually take place in a closed space. In the legendary trilogy, it was the subway, in "Twilight" - an Arbat apartment, now a smartphone. And each time a whole life arises in this space, which millions of readers live together with the author. The just published "Text" is perhaps the most hermetic of all, but at the same time it comes into contact with the life of everyone even more sharply, although the heroes of the novel are exceptional in their fate and position. Still a young man released after a seven-year prison sentence, convicted on false charges allegedly for drug trafficking, in fact because of a personal conflict with an FSKN operative, is released from the zone in Solikamsk, arrives in Moscow, learns that his mother two days before died. And the life he planned to return to is now impossible. And he, in the heat of passion, kills the man who sent him to serve out these seven years. Takes his smartphone, picks up a password for it ...
And this is where Monte Cristo ends and the story begins about how one person lives for another.
This is the first novel that is written in a completely different genre than the previous ones. When you took it on, did you somehow formulate a task for yourself?
There are books that grow out of an idea, and there are books that grow out of a hero. And this book grew out of a hero. I accumulated feelings and thoughts from what is happening with the country, and I wanted to convey them through the collisions of his life.
- What was it that bothered you?
Here are the transformations that have affected the country, especially the capital, over the past seven years, and the collapse of ethics, the abolition of ideas about good and evil from above and below society, here is the total penetration of prison culture into ordinary life. It seemed to me that a story about a man who served a seven-year sentence, returned to Moscow and lived his life for another person, could absorb many experiences.
Your hero, both in education, and in origin, and in occupations, is a complete opposite to you. Where do you get an understanding of this psychology and this way of life, including prison life?
I don’t know, for sure this is described by someone better than me, but this is my personal discovery: what we consider to be ugly manifestations of personality (excessive aggression, downtroddenness, etc.) is just a response to the environment, which is designed to ensure the survival of the organism. If your parents thump and beat you, then you grow up to be a thief and a bully, because otherwise you will not survive in this family. It deforms you, you become aggressive, you get used to either suppressing others, or keeping your opinion to yourself, and then it develops into a behavior model. It is designed to allow you, as an animal, to adapt to the environment and survive in it. Any impact leads to transformation. And if you can imagine these influences, then you can also imagine how a person who has been subjected to these influences behaves. On the other hand, if you are not looking for a genuine texture for such a book, then nothing will work. And my manuscript was read by acting employees of law enforcement agencies, and former employees of the Federal Drug Control Service, and several convicted criminals .. And I, first of all, asked them about the psychological reliability. One said: “It’s written right about me.”
- One of your main characters is brought up by a mother with principles, the second by a father without principles. But both of them go to crime. Do you think that natural instincts, in this case the desire for revenge, are stronger than education?
Of what remains after reading the book and after writing it, this is probably the central question. And it has a lot to do with what's going on. People belonging to the system of power, as well as people collaborating with power, helping it to exist, adhered to this behavior before, but now they are starting to openly proclaim these principles. There is a complete rejection of ideas about ethics. The concepts of good and evil no longer apply. It started with the first persons of the state who openly lie to the camera. For example, about Crimea: first they claim that the peninsula will not be annexed, and two weeks later he joins that there are no Russian troops there, then they admit that there is our special forces. Now Putin, in an interview with Oliver Stone, says that our media is independent of the state and that the special services do not read the correspondence of Russians. This is generally chickens to laugh at. And then, recognizing everything after the fact, he smiles and says that it was such an Indian military trick and that it was all justified. So again, the end justifies the means. And this is not only practiced, but preached from the highest levels.
- If people accept this shameless lie and continue to support the authorities, then it means that it is easier for them to live in rose-colored glasses, without distinguishing between ideas of good and evil. The president simply takes into account and exploits people's psychology.
What Putin says is the right of the strong. I can afford, so I allow myself. And further in the spirit that there is neither darkness nor light, everything is dirty, everything is smeared, and in the West they are smeared.
What happened to the Trump campaign was an attempt to discredit their electoral system. Trump, an eccentric, unpredictable, uncontrollable person, was not particularly needed by us. It was necessary to prove that the American electoral system is so rotten that it will not allow a person who is really popular with the people to power. The elites will rally in a conspiracy and will not let him win. We were prepared for this by all means. And when he won, it was a crushing surprise for everyone.
- An old trick: instead of washing ourselves, are we trying to cover up others?
We are not trying to prove that we are better (this is implied), we just pay attention to who is trying to teach us - people who are completely corrupt, corrupt, unprincipled, and even homosexuals are found. They are trying to impose on us a picture of the world in which ideas about elementary ethical categories simply do not work.
And such a standard of behavior is set by the first person of the state, it does not matter whether he plays the boy, whether he plays the godfather. And we let him down, because he is an alpha male, because he is a king, he can. This goes down the pyramid: the boyars behave in the same way, and they teach the same to their lackeys, and then the population is re-educated in the spirit of complete disregard for the concepts of good and evil. Anything is possible if you can. You can bend others - bend down, be a predator, eat the weak.
- And in the "Text" we are just faced with a representative of a system that shares these beliefs.
With hereditary and representative. Because this FSKN operative, whom the protagonist kills in revenge for his lost youth, is a hereditary security officer. His father is a police general, deputy head of the personnel department for the city of Moscow in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He attached his son to a bread place, because there was an opportunity to attach. The mother did not want to, she knew that her son was weak-willed, arrogant, a rogue and a beetle, but she was afraid to argue with her father. And then the father teaches his son his life principles. And the principles are simple - eat those whom you can devour, collect dirt on those whom you cannot devour.
- But this is a typical special service policy towards people.
The president's idea of people is very predetermined by his professional formation. He doesn't believe in virtue at all, in my opinion. He believes that all people are vicious, unprincipled, that they must either be bribed or blackmailed. He is a recruiter, and how a recruiter looks at us. He does not even recognize the theoretical right to be guided by other criteria, to be incorruptible, for example.
- Well, he sees little incorruptible ...
Now the principles have really devalued, and people are not ready to fight or die for them.
- But you also have the mother of the main character, who brought him up in strict concepts of honor, when he goes to prison, teaches him not to stick out, adapt, etc. It turns out that life is really more valuable than principles?
Time is such that life is more precious than principles. I suspect it has always been like this. We were brought up on the Soviet myth, but what did we know about this time? People who consume mass culture do not know much about what really happened at the fronts and in the rear, how much people were motivated by patriotic feelings ...
The Nazis killed the family, and here you really cannot step over yourself, and then you are capable of some kind of heroic action. Not because you love an abstract homeland, or even more so some Stalin, but because you cannot live otherwise. Genuine motivations are much more personal. Especially in a country where the Bolsheviks for 20 years established their power through bloodshed and coercion. Well, how to love such a Motherland recklessly? No matter how your brain was washed by propaganda, but still there are personal experiences that contradict this.
- Have you noticed that the reenactors who filled Moscow on holidays are all dressed in military clothes? What is the reason for such militarization of consciousness?
There are two points here. The first is the fear of looking into the future, perhaps purely biological in people of the post-war generation. They know Brezhnev's world, they know the world of perestroika, but they already know the new world poorly. What lies ahead? 10-15 years of more or less active mental and physical labor? The presidential term that we are living out is a term where everything is turned exclusively back, into the past.
- Your hero lives someone else's life in a smartphone, just like today's younger generation. And if he observes the life of another family, then the children discover in their gadgets a different world, unlike the one they see when emerging from virtual reality. Can the authorities cope with the dissonance that sounds more and more insistently in their brains?
Children will inevitably win, the question is whether the current government will have time to spoil them. The change of generations is a historical process, and few people managed to transform the national mentality in four years. Maybe only Saakashvili, but he broke people over the knee. The ideas of his reformist activities to eradicate corruption, the power of thieves in law, etc. gave people the opportunity to move to another country in four years. However, when he left, everything began to grow back in the same dense direction.
In our situation, we still have to wait for the change of generations, the arrival of people with a different mentality. Now even the FSB has such people.
- But among the 86 percent who support the president, there are clearly many people with a new mentality, but what's the point?
There is a demand for the feeling of belonging to a superpower in all segments of the population. For young people, especially teenagers, this is superimposed on the need to increase their own self-esteem.
A person who does not belong to administrative bodies or supervisory departments has little chance of feeling the necessary self-respect. He lives in constant fear of colliding with the system, he has no rights. If you were beaten by a policeman and you have no one to call, you are to blame. If there is someone from the system to stand up for you - a judge, a prosecutor, even a doctor who has operated on someone - you need to pull the person out of the system in order to protect yourself. This is our fundamental difference from the countries of the West, where there are elementary legal guarantees and where, if there is no completely strict conflict of interest, you are protected by rules and laws
That is, there is a substitution - if there is no way to feel respect for yourself, then you have to be proud that the state is respected ...
By iconizing and canonizing Stalin and Nicholas II, people simply want to say that they are part of the empire. I am an ant, I can be crushed, moved and devoured, including my own, but the whole forest, the whole district is afraid of us like an anthill. The feeling of one's own insignificance is redeemed by the feeling of belonging to some kind of super-being that instills fear in the surroundings. Hence the desire to feel like a superpower again. Such a sublimation of self-respect, which we lack so much.
And the constant desire to be appreciated by the West (because we are notorious as a people) also comes from private life. Let them not be afraid of me, because I am drinking in the yard in sweatpants and an alcoholic T-shirt, but let them be afraid of the country to which I belong.
- And the bigger the country, the more respect?
In Berdyaev's "Russian Idea" it is said that the only national idea that has taken root here and turned out to be universal is the idea of territorial expansion. The habitat is a very tangible, measurable, very animal concept. Not conscious, but irrational and understandable basic. And it is important that, unlike implanted Orthodoxy, this is a supra-religious thing. I talked with the Kalmyks, on the one hand, they feel like nationalists, they have a difficult attitude towards Russians, whom they despise for weakness, for softness, for drunkenness, but at the same time they feel pride because they belong to Russia. And when Russia behaves threateningly towards its neighbors, it gives them pleasure. Therefore, when we rumble our shod heels or caterpillar tracks across the squares of all the small European states - 1956, 1968, 2008 - a wave of pride rises in inexperienced souls.
- In my opinion, you overestimate the general knowledge of history.
Well, well, they know her in some mythologized way, in which the media gives them a conversation that not everything is so simple in our dramatic history. Beria is fine that he strangled the raped gymnasts, but he created the atomic bomb. As if one could somehow be redeemed by the other. Here are the origins of teenage Stalinism. And therefore, Putin, positioning himself as a cool dude, of course, finds some kind of response from them. In vain he confessed to Stone that he had grandchildren. Putin's grandfather is a step away from the young.
- Yes, for young people, this entire agenda that is being discussed on TV is pure crap.
A culture has already been formed on the Internet, where all these achievements - Crimea, Donbass, endless war, purchased systemic oppositionists, hired intellectuals, Duma, neutered cats - are not very relevant and relevant to these people. However, the authorities, in order to continue to steer, begin to invade this little world, take away freedom. And it starts to affect them.
- The authorities do not understand that by doing so they are digging a hole for themselves?
We proportionally do not have many young people. And I don't think she can do anything right now. How can there be a change of power in the country? Even if you capture the Kremlin, not to mention the Post Office and railway stations, there will be no benefit in this. Power is not in the Kremlin. Power is in the consensus of the elites. The change of power occurs, probably, when Dzerzhinsky's division refuses to advance, when the military begins to get drunk, when important people stop answering the phones - at this moment power passes to others.
- Do you observe the consensus of the elites now?
All the people who now have big money are indebted to the authorities. And now there is not a single major player capable of challenging the authorities; it will immediately be ground to powder. Most likely, he will not dare to do this, because tons of compromising evidence will definitely be found on him.
- But Navalny made up his mind.
The fact that one particular Navalny managed to excite a certain number of young people across the country, especially in two or three large cities, is the beginning of a trend. I'm not saying that now the schoolchildren will go to the embrasure, stain the bayonets of the riot police with their innocent blood, and everything will turn upside down. The Paris of 1968, of course, shook de Gaulle, but we are not there, and we are not de Gaulle. We have total control over the media, we can say that Navalny distributes drugs to children there, and so on. However, if there is the blood of young innocent people, then there is a fork: either the one who shed this blood loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, or he is forced to continue to impose his legitimacy, turning into a dictator.
- Navalny is not threatened in the foreseeable future…
- ... and Putin avoids becoming a dictator, he is satisfied with a relatively mild authoritarian regime, where the opposition is squeezed out, and only in rare cases is it eliminated by the hands of some vassals, and it is not clear whether this happens as a result of hints or on local initiative. Apparently, he does not need the country to become a dictatorship; he would still like to be recognized by the international community. He does not want the role of Gaddafi, or the role of Hussein, and even a more prosperous Kim Jong-un, although we can exist hermetically, as we have already done. All, let's say, repressions, came from the fear of losing power, were a response to some kind of public fluctuations. Such a semi-thermidor, a reaction to the semi-revolution that did not happen in 2012. And the reaction was precisely to the confusion that arose among the ruling elite, and an attempt to restore order in their camp by flexing their muscles, and to intimidate any oppositionists with the redundancy of these measures.
- Does he really believe that the whole world does not sleep, does not eat, only thinks how to deal with us, or is this also a propaganda story?
You have been taught for at least five years that there are enemies around, everyone is trying to recruit each other, everyone should be suspected .. You see, what is the tragedy. At the final stages of the existence of the Roman Empire, the commanders of the Praetorian Guard came to power one after another, because they had the resource to eliminate the real emperors .. And this did not lead to anything good, their power, although it was at some point absolute, but they could not use it for the good of the nation and the empire. The fact is that the Praetorians, like representatives of the State Security Committee, are very special people, trained to search for and eliminate threats to power.
But a professional politician, capable of carrying out grandiose reforms in his country, directing it along a new path, is a completely different quality. Peter the Great is not a special serviceman, not a KGB officer, Gorbachev is not a special serviceman or a KGB officer, and even Lenin is not a special serviceman or a KGB officer. This is a completely different scale of people.
- Well, then Putin is not to blame. These are the people who put him in power, did not take into account his professional qualities.
It seems to me that he knows how to tell people what they want to hear from him, and he is a brilliant manipulator. In addition, an excellent personnel officer, surrounded himself with an impenetrable wall of people who owe him everything and depend on him in everything. He knows how to protect himself from any threats.
- This is a tactic. What is the strategy?
There is no strategy, and never has been. Conservation of the current position, he manages us like clerks in a corporation. The president is not a statesman, he is a cunning politician, all he does is solve the problem of how to stay in power. There is no project for the country, and never was. Silly talk about the future under Medvedev was invented by some hipsters, I don't know why. But there is no project for the country, no understanding of who we should become, having ceased to be the Soviet Union. Empire, okay. And what to do in order to become an empire?
- Crimea, for example, to join.
Well no. With an economy that crap one's pants, you can't annex any Crimea. Take the example of Deng Xiaoping - that's a statesman. You first pull the country out of poverty, give people the opportunity to support and feed themselves, move their lives for the better, and they will move, like barge haulers on the Volga, all this ship stuck aground forward. But no, the middle class is a danger to the authorities. Talk about supporting business is just talk, for them business is just pasture for the security forces. Reliance goes to the security forces and state employees, to people who depend on the state.
- How can others survive? Those who are not going to adapt to power and do not want to sit on the stove.
The era when it was possible to take place is over, the country will not develop under this rule. The president is afraid to initiate change, perhaps thinking he won't be able to ride the rising tide. His only initiative act was the Crimea. The exact hit in the imperial nostalgia. But from the point of view of the country's development, the step is catastrophic. We are in international isolation, resources for modernization are running out, financial bonds are being replaced by administrative ones, a whole generation has grown up, accustomed not to serve the Fatherland, but to treat it like rent. This is no longer stagnation in the blood, this is gangrene. And I'm afraid the next presidential term will be a period of further degradation.
- So, leave?
Well, firstly, not everyone wants and can leave.
- Yes, we are not very welcome there.
And the Chinese are not really expected, but the Chinese are everywhere. I cannot call for emigration, I emigrated three times myself, but at the moment I live here. It's a matter of motivation for everyone. When the Union collapsed, I was 12 years old, I belong to that generation of people who see opportunities in the collapse of the Iron Curtain - to go to study, to see the world.
Why is it necessary to make a choice once and for all - to leave Russia or stay and endure, play pseudo-patriotic games like "Zarnitsa", knowing what people who profess such patriotism really do.
The concept of patriotism - stay and suffer with the country - is being imposed by people whose children have long been in London and Paris, as we see on their Instagrams. We once again agree to play the games that are imposed on us. And you just need to disengage from this and do what is good for you.
I am not ready either to call for a revolution or for emigration. The situation in the country is not so desperate that there is a choice - either to flee or to the barricades. Still, Russia in 2017 is not the same as a hundred years ago, the situation there was much more desperate.
- Moreover, privacy has not yet been banned.
Of course, the current authoritarianism is much wiser than what was under Brezhnev. If you are doing your own thing - do it, homosexual - there is no article for homosexuality, well, just don’t preach, if you want American music - please, if you want to leave to study - go, if you want to emigrate - your business. On the contrary, let all the active ones get out as soon as possible than to sit here and whine, and suffer abroad from the inability to adapt. This is such authoritarianism, adjusted for all modern theories and textbooks.
There is no disaster. The trend is just wrong. We traveled by train to Europe, and at night we changed the carriages and went in the direction of Kolyma. We are not in Kolyma, but the direction is no longer European.
- Your hero, one might say, is a modern Petrarch. As the poets of the late Renaissance were inspired by unattainable women, so he sacrifices himself for the sake of Platonic love. Do you consider love a reliable refuge from external adversity?
- ... In the novel, the main character falls in love by force. To hold out for a week, he needs to get into the skin of the murdered man, that is, into his phone, and understand the intricacies of his life. In particular, in a very conflicting relationship with his parents, with a woman whom he tried to leave and could not leave. And our hero, Ilya Goryunov, as often happens in a man's life, falls in love with a picture on his phone. And through this love, a certain transformation begins in him. He learns that she is pregnant and feels guilty for taking the life of the father of the unborn child. And so, when he finds out that she is going to have an abortion, he weaves a complex intrigue to keep her from doing this, and gives her 50 thousand rubles, which he had hardly obtained to escape from the country.
- That is, he saves someone else's child at the cost of his own life.
He understands that he still belongs to the world of the dead, and she to the world of the living. And he still can’t escape responsibility, his mother taught him to think that retribution follows everything. However, saving his beloved, not himself, is his choice. A person always decides for himself - who he wants to be, who he wants to remain.
- And this is after so many years of living in such a perverted society as a prison?
Any feelings become stronger and brighter when it is impossible to realize them. If you can get a girl or a young man on the first, second, third date, you don’t even have time to kindle a feeling inside yourself. In the Middle Ages, perhaps, or in such a moralizing society that we had in the 70s and 80s, sexual freedom seemed like a rebellion against a system that assumed standard behavior - to guard oneself, not to allow too much, to repel sexual attacks. Through the regulation of sexual life, the state obtains significant power over the individual. The Platonic flourishes where the physiological is not allowed to grow. Through the ban, since human nature is weakly transformable, all that can be done is to instill a sense of guilt. A person is guilty, he is a priori loyal.
On the other hand, now many girls, if a young man does not try to drag them to bed in two weeks, get upset and wonder what is wrong with him - is he really gay? .. And simultaneous novels for girls with several young people, and for young people with girls, until they began to live together, is not something that is the norm, but something quite taken for granted. In principle, Russia is not a conservative society; on the contrary, we have a rather riotous country. I think this is good, because all societies where sex life is regulated are much more prone to fascism.
- Conservative in domestic and social terms, Germany and Japan proved this in their time.
Human nature must be given a natural outlet. As long as Putin is smart enough not to get into his personal life and stop the attempts of zealous deputies and figures like bikers who stick to the budgetary udder to interfere in the personal lives of citizens, I think he will stand. Although he has already climbed into the Internet. The Internet is also around sex and in general around what they do in their free time. And as soon as diktat and censorship begin here, people will accumulate anger.
While anger is still given various outlets. Life is getting worse, people are getting poorer, but they, in general, treat this with a certain patience. After all, our well-being in fat years seemed so impossible that we did not really believe in its duration. But there are things, the habit of which is too great. And they understand it very well. And rather, they are intimidated by the fact that they will invade privacy in order to hint: let's not aggravate now, let's leave everything as it is, the border is open, the Internet is free, don't force us to act, it could be worse.
Now the police are spinning teenagers, wanting to discourage those who planned to go to the next actions. Therefore, it is necessary to twist not a hundred, but a thousand, so that people think, yes, the risks are great. And when they so uncompromisingly sweep these teenagers with arms and legs like matches, this, of course, is a cruel intimidation. But then it can lead to the opposite result, violence breeds violence.
Editorial website talked to a Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, who is known to the gaming audience as the author of post-apocalyptic novels in the Metro universe, about his new projects, approach to work, games and Andrzej Sapkowski.
The shooter will go on sale on February 22, 2019 Metro Exodus ("Metro: Exodus"), for which Glukhovsky wrote the screenplay.
Good afternoon! Tell about breaking news. What was interesting for you and what are your plans for the near future?
From the most recent - last year the book “Text” was published, the first realistic work I have. The story of a guy, a student of philology from Lobnya. Decided to celebrate successfully passed the exam of the second year. I went to Red October, to the club, and there was a drug control, a raid. They stuck to his girlfriend, began to search, and he stood up for her, after which they planted bags on him and put him in jail for seven years. He was released from prison and immediately, in a state of passion, intoxicated, killed the man who hid him behind bars. It was a young drug control officer whose phone the protagonist gets access to.
The next day, he comes to his senses and realizes that he can now be identified by cameras, tracking, billing, and so on. And to avoid punishment, he decides to pretend that the guy is still alive. She studies and uses his phone, writes from him, reincarnating as this person. The story is called “Text”, because the main character does everything with text, he cannot speak with his voice. The book came out last year. Now it has been staged as a performance at the Yermolova Theatre. Another movie coming soon.
Have you considered making a game based on this book?
I don't even know what kind of game this could be. Lobnya, Red October, train... The setting is a little strange and the plot is also not very clear.
Returning to the previous question, this is from what was the last.
The next big project to come out is an audio series coming up for the Storytel platform. There is such an application with audiobooks on Google Play and iTunes. The audio series is structured like a normal television series, meaning it is 10 episodes of 50 minutes per season. Several acts, cliffhanger at the end. Like a real series, but without a picture, but just with sound. It's called Post. You can listen while driving, riding the subway, jogging or ironing your socks, for example.
We have recently launched public on VKontakte, which will become our main media for this project.
“Post” is a story about how, on the ruins of a collapsed Russia, the last bond is the rusty Trans-Siberian. And on this Trans-Siberian, specific principalities are planted, as if on a skewer. And one of them is in the spotlight. This is not Moscow, but, as it were, one fortress city that sits on this railway. Actually, Post. Somewhere along the river. And he is at the epicenter of all events.
This is the expected audio series on Storitele. In the form of a book, there will be no “Lent” at all - only audio. Should come out at the beginning of winter. Maybe January or February.
Have you thought about expanding this project into a movie or even a game if it becomes popular?
In general, it was originally a project for a television series, but while I was inventing it, it became a bit political, as it were. Because about the collapsed Russia. Then it became impossible to say that something would fall off of us, because this something is Crimea. And the Crimea falls off - this is the 282nd immediately. Therefore, the telly got back a little pissed off. Well, okay.
During this time, the situation has changed again. It’s not so scary anymore, everyone has already forgotten about the Crimea, how would they pass. But the idea still remains, and it's cool, from my point of view. My own idea, with which I have been living for several years now. And now I have found a partner suitable for “bombing” all this.
Can the idea grow into something more?
It can outgrow, of course. It seems to me that this is a format that, in principle, is suitable for some kind of game. The defense of the fortress is an understandable concept. With some sorties, diplomacy and so on. It may well be. Note to the hostess: if developers read us, I say hello. Here's a great idea for a game.
Well, in the future, maybe some other book series will be, for example. For a long time I had an idea with characters that I understand, a drama, a dilemma. Nobody made audio series with us, in principle, and now you can again, as it were, create something new, unusual and interesting, by implementing an idea that has been burning my soul for a long time.
What other ideas are you currently working on?
Lots of other stuff too. What I have listed is the nearest one already. There are ideas for several books, plays, television scripts. A lot of things, and in different genres.
The “Text” mentioned above is a realistic work, then a dystopian story, followed by family drama a tough one about the relationship between people in marriage, and after that, maybe a book about artificial intelligence, or maybe not. All. Well, that is, different things.
Where do you get ideas from? What are you inspired by? Does it happen that you specifically work on the idea of a book for a certain audience?
No, no... Making a book for an audience is a f**k. Idiocy. You can't make a book for a specific audience. Let the marketers of the series of the STS TV channel do this. “Who is our audience? Grannies. Let's do something fun for the grannies." Accordingly, about youth - a handsome man and a milkmaid. Whatever. They are forced to do this because they are responsible for other people's money. I don't have to answer for anything. I'm a completely irresponsible dude, I do what I want, and that's the magic.
When you do what is interesting to you, and not what you think is interesting to others. When you don't try to imagine some target audience, which should be interested in a certain proportion of boobs and action.
We all live more or less standard lives. And the dilemma that we are going through, and some kind of collision, more or less typical. First you're a jerk off teenager, then you have your first love, then you got married, some temptations appeared, you broke up, you still have children, your parents are getting old, you have already stopped rebelling against them and you start to feel sorry for them, you had a fight with someone at work … These are all fairly standard things. Thank God that we do not live during the Second World War, because then the standard things were of a different nature. Now they are more “soft” with us. But nonetheless. You lived it, somehow formulated it for yourself, and if you formulated it honestly and accurately, you can infect others with it.
There is a lot of pop music where this is formulated dishonestly and inaccurately, because it is done with the expectation of "the supposed taste of the audience." And you just do everything honestly, as it is. Didn't sell and didn't sell. Something else will work. Don't look too hard at the audience. You have to do everything the way you feel. Write what you want to write now.
I have had seven books and none of them has been as successful as Metro 2033. Well, okay. And what now, too upset? There is a trilogy, we closed this topic. Or should I, like Lukyanenko, Perumov, Rowling or Akunin, rivet endless continuations? You are losing your freedom. You don't do what you want. It becomes work for you. Physical such, heavy, exhausting boring and unpleasant work.
A huge super luxury is when you can do whatever you want, and now they are paying something for it. But who in general has such luxury in our life? Usually work is boring, you sit it out, and then you go to catch a sprat on a bloodworm, because there you rest your soul ... Why the hell? There is unique opportunity do what you want to do, and somehow still earn money from it. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good.
I have books that, as it were, were not particularly interesting to anyone, although I think that they are still super, and they have found some kind of audience. For example, my book “Stories about the Motherland” probably has a circulation of 50 thousand, and it has never been printed. Came out ten years ago, and here it is. And Metro 2033 has a circulation of millions, and every year it prints 50-100 thousand more. I do not regret at all that I wrote “Stories about the Motherland”. I think it was a great thing for that time, the spirit of the time, the tenth year. Didn't sell, well, didn't sell. You can't worry about it. This is the road to nowhere. Then you will fabricate a product and everything will end up being exposed by your readers. They will say: “Well, I’m baked. Does some shit.”
I understand and support you. The main thing is self-realization and thoughts, but what about responsibility to the audience?
Irresponsibility to the audience. The responsibility to the audience is with the producers of Star Wars.
If you think that the responsibility is to do exactly the same as it was, because people are used to it, they like it and they want more, then you are wrong.
If you have lost interest in this and do as it was, because they are waiting for it, they will still be disappointed. If you, like Pelevin, endlessly do the same thing, because you have some kind of army of your own type of fans, they will still be disappointed, because they will get tired of it. I'm fed up here. I was a wild fan of Pelevin, but I just can't. The 25th book is the same to read - well, how much can you?
I'd rather experiment, because at least I will be "pinned". And if they “pin” me, then someone else. Of course, some people fundamentally want mutants in the subway, and nothing can be done about them. Well, please, it's their right. There are computer games about mutants in the subway and there is a book series. But can I keep the freedom to do what I like now? I sort of grew out of short pants. I would not say that I have improved a lot, but other topics are now interesting to me.
It turns out that after you have realized in one topic, you want to move on to something else?
Yes, I want to enjoy it in the process. I want to be "pinned" from working on a new thing. I want it to be on the topic that is relevant to me now. And to have a definite challenge. Because I haven’t written about it yet, and haven’t written in this language, and I didn’t have such heroes yet, I didn’t dare to write on any topic. Whether it's about love or about politics or something else. I mean, I was afraid to do it. For example, he was afraid to swear in books up to a certain point, to write about women's feelings from the point of view of a woman. There are a lot of things you're not sure about.
You explore the world around you, as well as explore yourself, uncomplex, maybe squander or even disappointed. You learn and understand some new things.
And from my point of view, every new thing, book or something else, should be summing up the intermediate result. That is, you understood something about life, about yourself and people, so you must invest it in a new thing. And then it will be some step forward.
If you again, just to earn money, repeated the old trick again, then you yourself did not get pleasure ...
But there are people who enjoy this old trick...
Recently there was news about Andrzej Sapkowski, who says that he was underpaid for The Witcher, although there was an understandable contract. What do you think about it?
Well, the old man fucked up. And now regrets, of course. Watching it turn into a global franchise and realizing his pension could have been bigger. A very simple story.
Sorry for him. But apparently, he is some kind of normal genre writer, he has a lot of fans, and I think that if he was a bad author, there would not be such a loyal fan base. I didn't read it myself.
The game did a lot for him. And if there was no game, he would have remained an unknown Polish author unambiguously.
He did not understand the potential, because the old one is simple. Well, I probably thought about games in the spirit of “What is it ... Shooters ... Schoolchildren kill teenagers in schools ...”. This is how I imagine it. Therefore, he did not appreciate the potential.
And I’m just 30 years younger than him, I grew up there, so I understood the “scale of the disaster”, I understood what it is and that you need to be as much a part of it as possible. And we normally, humanly, agreed with the developers and creators, and I am much more satisfied with my life than Andrzej Sapkowski. And I was not excluded from the development process, but on the contrary, we had quite a symbiosis with them, and everyone is happy. Pity the old man.
How much time do you spend playing?
This is a process that takes years. I sketched some idea, which I thought about for three weeks or a month, and sent it. They thought about it for six months, sent it back. I expressed my comments, sent again. Then I flew to Malta, then to Kyiv, then somewhere else, or they came to some place, we talked to them ... Then I started writing dialogues, they say that there is too much, cut here ... Then they they send their dialogues, I answer that it’s somehow not very good, the characters speak as if they are buying something in the market in Kyiv, let’s redo it ... I rewrote it. Well, and so on. We discuss, I propose to change something, they ask for something, we make changes and all that. This is a long process that takes years. Pure time is impossible to calculate. Symbiotic story. It is clear that my workload here to a greater extent is the workload as a playwright. Well, ensuring the integrity of the Metro universe.
Metro: Exodus continues the story of Metro 2035. That is, where the story of “2035” and the book trilogy ends (and there will be no more books), there the story is picked up by “Exodus”. If you want to understand what to expect in Exodus, then you need to read the books. You are interested in what's next - it's only in the game. Mosaic such storytelling is also quite innovative. It's not a Game of Thrones where the book is the season, the book is the season, the season, the season, oh, where's the book? At some point, they start to drift apart because the producer already knows better.
We are handcrafted. This is not a production line at Tesla's shiny factories in California. These are people sitting and cutting something with a knife. And so I sit. And it is precisely due to the fact that this is all handmade that a thing with a certain taste is obtained. And you understand that it is not blurred, that you have not seen such a thing and that it is quite unique.
It turns out that you inspire developers, and they inspire you?
Undoubtedly. They inspire me a lot in general, in principle, not only with games, but also with some kind of drive and obstinacy. I believe that their dedication and dedication to their work is absolutely unique.
Are you playing games now? They used to get involved.
I have a PlayStation, on which I download all sorts of games for myself to watch. But not to say that I would now take some game and go through to the end. For example, I played new Wolfenstein, played Limbo with great pleasure. Such things. Arcades are different. 3D shooters are hard for me to play. This has to be done somehow in the company. Well, how would one sit, delve into ... Just when you grow up, there is less free time, and with great pleasure you already watch Netflix or HBO.
Or stream on YouTube.
Maybe, but I'm more into the emotions that a good show can give. You sit on a certain emotional drive. Games are interesting as peeping into other people's dreams, it seems to me. I love beautiful, spectacular games. Some BioShock is new, although it is no longer new, where you get and wonder, looking at some things. Especially on the big screen - generally beauty.
Have you seen the Death Stranding trailer? It stars Norman Reedus.
We must see. I will not pretend that I am so cool, youthful and always following everything, because this has not been the case for a long time. I'm 85 and I'm not a cake. But I am looking for some things. You turn on the trailer for your game, then switch to another one, and you can stick around for half a day. You think it's cool, you have to play and see it. But I can’t say that I’m some kind of supergamer now. It wouldn't be fair if I told you that just to be cool. I'm not cool.
Aren't you tired of "Metro" yet?
I'm tired of Metro, of course, and I don't write about it anymore. But the world continues to live its own life. The game series is too important to be left to chance. Therefore, of course, I delved into all this, invented everything, but some things, for example, concerning the fight against mutant bears, people do themselves. I've never been good at this - in the heroic part, shooting and so on.
But when it comes to experiences, dramas, relationships between characters, turning NPCs into living people - this has always been my specialty. And that's what I'm interested in. Whether I get it or not is another question, but I just like it. And I tried to bring it all. Well, endowing the game with some meanings, subtexts, allusions, and so on.
It is very important that the game does not turn into some kind of ordinary shooter, where the main emotion that you get is adrenaline. This thing should continue to be sentimental, perhaps with philosophical overtones, very emotionally charged. With longing, nostalgia, unfulfilled dreams and so on. The game should have everything that is in the books and is an important part of the atmosphere.
Whatever awesome game with realistic graphics you sit down to play, it's like going to the conservatory to listen to a symphony orchestra. And the fact that people play here at the highest academic level, and not strum the balalaika, is not news to you - you are ready for this, therefore it is not very surprising.
Likewise with stunning graphics created by cutting-edge studios for $200 million. You knew that there would be this graphics. Yes, now they look just like alive, they run, shoot, everything explodes ... But surprise me? And suddenly you get something that you didn’t expect at all - some kind of human story, completely poignant there. Years later, Western developers also come to this and hire Oscar-winning screenwriters, because they understand that nothing breaks through a person like a story. We understood this even when there was no money for graphics. They relied on the atmosphere and human history, and it worked.
What would you like to say to our readers? We have a lot of Metro fans!
Dear guys and girls, site visitors! Thank you for being you. For your interest in games. I hope that a new game on “Metro” will not disappoint you and you will have someone to wash the bones on the forums of this wonderful site. Basically, play games. It's better than drinking cognac on the porches and spreading rusty syringes. Thank you! This is Dmitry Glukhovsky. Till!
Material prepared: ACE,Azzy, skyerist
Before the events of March 26, I believed that our youth is quite apolitical. It seemed to me that, in principle, they were not interested in participating in political activity, because they prefer to either put the theory of small deeds into practice, or they are sealed somewhere in their micro-startups, subcultures - and political life countries seem to them some kind of abstraction. Which they don't even want to mess with. But, the events of March 26 and June 12 showed that I was wrong. And here, on the one hand, there is the influence of Navalny, who can speak their language - through video blogs, which are now the new media, through memes. On the other hand, this is their reaction to the fact that Putin is, in fact, a grandfather. So young, he is basically a grandfather. This is a man for yesterday - for the 90s. He does not let them into the future. People want the future open world without borders, in high-tech, in the free Internet, in free communication. And they are forcibly dragged into our day before yesterday, the Second World War, in the style of Shoigu's military-patriotic youth. This can't be annoying. Up to a certain point, it was cool, and there were teenagers who enjoyed playing Stalinism. Well, such, in its view, Stalinism is from computer games. But it is obvious that the impression that the country is rising from its knees was very short-term and deceptive. Nobody rises from anywhere. To rise from your knees, you must first be on them. And yet we continue to wallow. On the other hand, the state is increasingly invading what used to be private. While politicians were engaged in politics, while they only cleaned up the political space, tamed the systemic opposition, fed communists or liberals with dog food, collected dirt on the oligarchs, all this, as it were, did not concern people. We simple people, and all this happens in high spheres and concerns a circle of 50-100 people. And the remaining 140 million existed as a parallel life, which, in principle, became better day by day. Up to a certain point, until the potential for well-being has been exhausted. And now, due to the fact that the economy is deteriorating, people feel a drop in the quality of life. I think more or less everyone feels this, except for Oleg Tinkov. The state is gradually turning from an authoritarian to a totalitarian one. The conservative trend is becoming stronger and stronger, and more and more often officials invade the private lives of citizens. First, they explain to us that if you are gay, then you don’t need to tell anyone about it. And thank you for not planting yet. Through the mouths of some Yarovaya or Mizulina, who has been transformed from a democrat into a champion of conservative values, they explain to us what is moral and what is immoral. Although it is obvious that the thought is a gathering of the most immoral and unprincipled people. And now they are trying to regulate our freedom of action on the Internet. The Internet, of course, is the space where we actually spend 20-30% of the day - and this is an outlet. And even if we have some kind of infringement on the outside, a restriction in material possibilities we can keep our minds busy on the internet. Including things that are illegal in some countries (for example, in Saudi Arabia). As long as the state does not invade this territory, we are ready to turn a blind eye to some things. But when they propose to introduce name identification when entering the Internet, in instant messengers using a passport, thereby destroying anonymity completely, this is already an attempt on the privacy of each person. I think that young people who grew up in this and appeared in such a context would not want to leave our, conditionally, Argentina, to get into some kind of “Saudi Arabia”. You can understand these people. I don't want to go to Saudi Arabia either.
But will they make a revolution? It depends on how they treat these rallies. I don't think they treat it like a real protest, a revolution. For them, this is a kind of movement, a new fan activity that they are trying. This is an adrenaline rush, a rebellion against the system of old people, an opportunity to try something new. This is a new extreme, which is just emerging. Not everyone is ready to engage in, for example, jumping between high-rise buildings. Of course, this is a certain circle of people with problems with adrenaline receptors. Most of rollerblading, but will not climb onto the roof. Here, those who will climb onto the roof will most likely go to rallies further.
What will the authorities do with these children? First, you need to brainwash them properly. Tell them about military-patriotic education. I was driving along Rublyovka just now, and everything there is pasted over with advertisements for the Patriots park. "Here grow heroes." Everywhere patriots, red stars. Let's start with the brainwashing of the children of the elite, and then move on to the patriotic education of schoolchildren. There was a pioneer, a wonderful organization, children were brainwashed right from birth. I was rereading my first journalistic columns here on a typewriter, and found that at the age of 6 I glorified Lenin and the wise structure of the socialist state. In the USSR, the system of education was very wisely debugged, children with early years laid down the "correct" principles. Here it works great. Then the youth must be well intimidated, as it should be. For this you need more people arrest. Because if a person thinks that 20,000 people came to the action, and only 100 were detained, he will think that this will not affect him. And if 20 thousand came out, and 1000 were detained, then he begins to be afraid. But it seems to me that all this is being done in vain, because, as our American friends say, "violence breeds violence." If you say that policemen can pull girls by the hair, then why can't boys throw Molotov cocktails at policemen? And if boys can do it, then why can't the police shoot them with rubber bullets? A choice arises: either our country turns into a dictatorship, or the revolution sweeps away all power with all its minuses / pluses. We are embarking on a very wrong path with these cruel detentions. If the people in power have the sole purpose of staying in power, it would be much wiser to stick to the old line and just let the people blow off steam from time to time instead of escalating the confrontation.
From an interview with the writer Dmitry Glukhovsky to the Internet publication Sobesednik.ru.It is known that your great-grandfather was friends with Stalin's personal doctor, and you, having studied as an international journalist in Israel, worked for Russia Today, entered the Kremlin pool, and then, once again, the opposition. Why such a turn?
Well, this is not my turn, but Putin's. You may have forgotten, but in the 2000s we were going to become a civilized European state, striving for the future, not for the past. And RT was originally created to show the West that everything is in order with freedom of speech. So for all the years of work on the channel, I didn’t have to somehow prevaricate: it was enough to remain open-minded, to balance pro-Kremlin information with anti-Kremlin information. In the pool, the most interesting thing was to debunk the magic: there is nothing special about the inhabitants of the Kremlin. You can probably put anyone on the throne - and the gears will continue to spin. They were afraid that after Stalin's death everything would collapse - but nothing collapsed, and life was much better under Khrushchev. What can we say about the leaders of the new Russia. As for my opposition… Today I stand on the same rails on which I stood ten years ago, in fact. But the platform drove off in an unknown direction. During this time, we have turned into an authoritarian police state, we have banned social and political life, the Internet is being strangled, we have been put on a strict collar, all opposition has been fed or physically eliminated, the TV has gone berserk and sprays with poison, we have quarreled with both the CIS and the West. We went to Europe, arrived in Kolyma. It's time to stop pretending.
Dmitry Glukhovsky. Photo: Alena Pozevalova, www.om1.ru
Are you trying to leave no trace? Or is it already useless, because Big Brother has already counted everyone? How Big Data is changing us? Should you be afraid of search engines, social networks and your own smartphones?
It seems to me that resistance is futile. If the secret services are seriously interested in someone, there is no way to hide yourself from them. Phones are hacked, computers are hacked, wiretapping can be installed in any gadget, you can spy on a person through a webcam, you can know what kind of porn he watches, with whom he cheats on whom, find out all his business ins and outs. People are worried that it is now more difficult for them to be hypocritical, but this only leads to the fact that they no longer hide their true nature. When the collection of compromising evidence cannot be avoided, you need to recognize your human weaknesses, and this will make you invulnerable. Think you're the only one watching porn? Yes, all the girls are watching it today. Do you think you're the only one with a mistress? Yes, monogamy has disappeared from the world in general. But this does not mean that love has disappeared. It's just time for us to stop pretending to be someone else, it's time to become ourselves. At all times, the state and the church have tried to take control of our personal lives, to limit it with many prohibitions, to declare any form of sexual behavior as a perversion, except for those aimed directly at childbearing. Make people feel guilty. Whoever is to blame - he is obedient, he does not argue with the authorities, he either plays along with it, or sits quietly and does not blather. This alone is the whole point of the so-called struggle for morality. In general, I am convinced that the more fiercely a politician or a religious figure fights for morality, the more vicious he himself is. If you want to stay under their hood, sit in the closet, be afraid of being exposed, which is still inevitable in the world of social networks and big data. Be yourself and be free.
- Do you consider Snowden the last romantic of the Earth?
Snowden is a romantic? Don't know. But he did a great and necessary thing, in the interests of civil society all over the world. It is tragic, of course, that in the end he ended up in our clawed paws, from which everything he recites sounds much less convincing. But it's not as sad as being Assange and cuckooing in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Do you know Pavel Durov? They say that his Telegram is the most inaccessible to the special services, which Durov, after weaning VKontakte, refuses to reciprocate.
I happened to have a personal conversation with him. "VKontakte" was taken away from him, because Durov is a joker, an unpredictable player, who, moreover, has too big ambitions for a manager and his own ideology. Such a person should not be allowed to control the most powerful media in the country, which is VK. Next is a matter of technology. As for Telegram, I heard different opinions about its reliability. I think, with a strong desire, the correspondence of a particular person can be hacked. In any case, it is more reliable than any Russian messenger and than the Belarusian Viber, about which knowledgeable people they told me that he had servers in Lubyanka.
Despite the total transparency and face recognition system, people are forbidden to gather on the street. What are they afraid of?
The authorities are effective in their concern for stopping threats. Threatening yourself first. First, the parliamentary opposition was castrated, and now the LDPR, A Just Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation are just subdivisions of the party in power, fat sleepy cats. Then the oligarchs were flogged and sworn in. The governors had their teeth pulled out. It remains to clear the street - the embodiment of a nightmare since the Maidan. For the sake of this, they invented a whole host of senseless pioneers, from the “Young Guard” to “Ours”, and drove idlers and young opportunists there. Then they began to lure football fans and bikers, Cossacks and just some thugs, invented the Russian Guard and gave it the right to shoot at the crowd, at women and minors, adopted a host of repressive laws, staged show trials and launched an attack on the Internet. People in power are afraid of only one thing: to lose it. After all, there are no idiots in our country who believe that our elections are real? Well, the politicians whom we allegedly elect know their price very well. Despite all the royal army - OMON and the National Guard, the incessant propaganda on TV, the battalions of political strategists who are hired to help the authorities fool the people and keep them in check - these people feel great self-doubt and do not believe in the sincerity of eighty-six percent .
- Do you think the result of the elections is definitely predetermined? Or can everything suddenly fall on your ears?
Putin will be elected, Navalny will not be allowed in, the Communists and Zhirinovites will get on all fours in their usual ritual of obedience, Putin will be elected by the detached Tajiks and Caucasian state employees with a result of 75%. Putin will be in power until he dies of old age. We will turn into a cozy Central Asian monarchy. This is real stability.
That is, everything is the same as before, but with new technologies? Should we expect in this case that our president will start, for example, a YouTube channel before the elections?
Why does YouTube need a person who has already got several channels on central television? For schoolchildren, he is still a grandfather. TV viewers will vote for Putin.
But the TV seems to have already died, rolled into asphalt by the Internet, and this should please a normal person.
The TV did not die anywhere, it is more alive than all the living. We fell in love with Crimea through TV, changed our minds about condemning the authorities for theft, we have been fighting Ukraine for three years through it. TV can do something that the Internet has never learned to do: forge mythology, create entire imaginary worlds and resettle the peoples of the Russian Federation into them. And the people can be understood: we have such a terrible history and such a dull reality that to escape from them into the myth of rising from its knees great empire God himself told us.
Well, bloggers who eclipsed the writers in the hearts of those in power - we started with this - isn't this fundamentally new?
All of these channels have been around for a few years now. It was the presidential administration that just noticed them - because some shkolota was seen at the rally on March 26. And now you urgently need to tame the shkolota, because suddenly she will overthrow the king. Let's find school Mamontov and school Solovyov, bribe them, like adults Solovyov and Mamontov, with money and a sense of being chosen, massage them with their sense of their own greatness - and let Sasha Spielberg and Ivangai put on T-shirts with patriotic prints and do two times "ku". Then, of course, the shkolota, following them, will renounce the devil and will no longer take it into his head to wander to rallies. And rightly so - there is nothing to tempt the Russian Guard.
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