Zholkovo biography

Literature Alexander Zholkovsky: “I am a very ill -mannered person” Wolves in evacuation, music lessons, acquaintance with Igor Melchuk and admission to the philological faculty, meetings with Yuri Lotman and Vladimir Propp, work on Turing Machine, emigration and vignette. In the new issue of the “Scientific Council” cycle - philologist and linguist Alexander Zholkovsky Alexander Konstantinovich Zholkovsky r.

The creator of the essential genre of Vignetka. Scientific interests: theoretical semantics and poetics, artistic and memoir prose. We were evacuated in Sverdlovsk and near Sverdlovsk. Either it was a departure from Moscow - then I was incomplete four years, or a return back - then six. And here we are going to some area: we need to buy train tickets, wait, take places.

I have diarrhea, I need to plant on the pot. This atmosphere of anxiety, uncertainty, crowd, station, some rush and inner miserable state still sits somewhere in the depths. Sometimes this hut was so covered with snow that it was impossible to open the door and had to dig out. I went to kindergarten through the field through huge snowdrifts. And there were wolves. This was happening near Sverdlovsk now Yekaterinburg, at the Bazhenovo state farm, in the winter - a year.

I had absolutely hooligan friends, factory guys, with whom I at the age of four to five years terribly cursed. Then, having arrived in Moscow, I continued to swear for some time, completely not understanding the boundaries and terrifying my academic parents. And then once - and all this has passed. The kayak rolled over and he drowned. Mom grieved for a very long and hard time.

She was a musicologist, loved left art, futurists and instilled in me a love of Mayakovsky, Eisenstein. Mom taught the history of music at the Muzuccal at the Conservatory in Merzlyakovsky Lane and was engaged in glink. I was absolutely mediocre for music, I had no hearing, but I played the piano for six years - absolutely hopelessly, painfully, with a change of teachers.

And in the end he threw it. Mom said: "Of course, you can quit, but then you will regret it." And I regretted it very soon, because it is wonderful to be a guy who at the same time can play the piano in the company. And my mother, after a while, married her professor. This happened when a war came: in order not to get lost, one had to be married. My stepfather, dad, was Lev Abramovich Mazel, a large Russian musicologist.

He graduated from Mehmat and the Moscow Conservatory, but chose a musicology and became a very famous theorist. About children's reading Alexander Zholkovsky in the fifth grade.

In the fifth grade - years all the guys read a writer named Nick. There, American spy activity was exposed against the Soviet Union. And my mother did not tell me: "You will not read it." Me: “How so? Two years passed, and I myself did not want to, because during this time she slipped me Oscar Wilde, Anatoly France and so on. I developed a free intellectual taste in me, and no nickname.

I could no longer read Shpanov. It was also allowed to read Tom Ilf and Petrov - “Twelve Chairs” and “Golden Calf”. I bought this book from my deskthant neighbor for three rubles and read at a very early age. Since then, quotes from Ilf and Petrov are sitting in my head stronger than all quotes - maybe except Pushkin. About the school, Alexander Zholkovsky with classmates, the first on the left in the second row.

In September, I was supposed to be seven years old, and in August my mother led me to write me down in school. She was asked: “Does he know how to count? They were interested in whether I could count up to a hundred, but my mother thought that we were talking about adding, subtracting, multiplication and division within a hundred, and hesitated. And I was identified in the first “D”, in a group of not able to count up to a hundred.

My school career consisted in the fact that gradually everyone was eliminated and my class increased in the rank. However, I did not reach the rank of the tenth of “A”, the class of perfect geniuses and graduated from the school as part of the tenth “B”, which was a little to the same. But still with a gold medal. They dreamed that I had a serious profession: a doctor, an engineer ...

But I did not have such a desire, but it was something else to ask what this word means and why it means. Mom at the Music School was a favorite student whom she called "my redhead." And so she says: “He is studying at the philological faculty. If you want to enter the philological faculty, I will invite him, he will come and tell you what a philological faculty is. ” And she invited her wonderful red -haired student, and Igor Melchuk came, who was five years older than me.

It was a year, I was in the ninth grade, it was necessary to seriously decide where to enter. And I was able to read books directly at home and prepare for an interview. It was easy to pass it: it was written in my passport that I was Russian. My own father is Konstantin Platonovich Zholkovsky - a Jew by mother. And according to the Russian system, unlike the Jewish, a Jew by mom and Russian in dad are Russian.

When the matter came to receiving a passport, my parents wrote me down Russian to avoid trouble.So I was Russian, a gold medal and also the boy did not go to the philological faculty, we had one hundred girls and five boys on the course. Therefore, I went through an interview, without really knowing anything, and accepted me without conversations. In the second row, Alexander Zholkovsky, Vadim Rogovin.

Winter - years. The future famous Marxist-discident and camp man Marat Czechkov sits. At the old Moscow State University on Mokhova, 9. Remember: you make your schedule and visit what you want. You do not watch their schedule or listen. You choose what you are studying, and you do it yourself. ” I believed him and did so. This was the first guide. Then, when I just came to emigration to Vienna, he immediately called me there from Canada.

It was a year. Everything can be reviewed. About teachers Yuri Shcheglov near the metro station "Park of Culture" before traveling to Sunday. Firstly, my stepfather, dad, Lev Abramovich. He really loved to ask me questions: "Think why so." It was such a constant training aimed at thinking. Secondly, Melchuk, with whom we spent at the same table as co-authors for fifteen years, until he left.

It was a great experience with a great man. I also had a friend and co -author Yuri Shcheglov. Melchuk is a wonderful linguist, and Shcheglov is a wonderful literary critic. I admired his thoughts on the student bench. In August, it was necessary to appear at some pre-collection of those who received, and I first saw him. He says: "I, preparing for the beginning of classes, re -read the poems of Tyutchev and Fet." There was a year - and he re -read not Fadeev and Simonov, but Tyutchev and Fet!

He said that he re-read Tyutchev and Fet, and our teacher somehow looked at him strangely. ” Dad told me: "You came across a smart boy, it will be useful to be friends with him." And in the spring of the year in the Pushkin Museum there was an exhibition of paintings by the Dresden Gallery. And I opened my ears and listened to how this person thinks. At some point, I felt that I could also do something like that, and began to ask him: “But how do you do what you think about it?

I had another teacher - Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov - - linguist, semiotic, anthropologist, translator; Doctor of Philology, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At first it was love, quite mutual, he even switched with me, a young man to "you." And since he died, I left these revelations and say now: "My teacher, my teacher." I must say that he was a teacher not only in the field of scientific studies - he was a rare example of free behavior in Soviet times.

Later, in the year, when I graduated from the university and worked with Shcheglov, I accidentally - traveling from a karelian Isthmus - ended up in Leningrad. I had a couple of days before the train, and I thought: let me find Proppa. Nobody believes me, but I just opened the phone book: in the telephone booth on Palace Square lay a directory. It was far from going to Moskovsky Prospekt.

I got up early, got, found the house, calling the doorbell. A young man of a sports appearance opens, a little older than me later it turned out that this was his son.