The sky is blue biography

With literary critic Grigory Freidin, Arnis Radentsa is talking blue, red blood, white underwear, green grass when my husband and I, artist Andrei Krasulin, were young, we had friends who were younger than us. The most beloved of them was Grisha Freudin. In those years, he was not yet a famous Slavist, Andrei - a famous artist, and I did not think to become a writer. It was a difficult and very bright time of our youth.

Grisha and I lived in the same yard on Lesnaya Street. Near the Grishin porch there was almost constantly stood a snack with a bored look, guarding their entrances and exits from the house. Near Grisha and his then wife, Masha Slonim was a smoke of danger. We dumped each other forbidden books, which after a quarter century lay in all bookstores, without causing any interest.

And then Grisha left for America, a completely unopalled student, and in those years it was a farewell forever. And it could not occur to it that many years later we would come to this most mysterious and dangerous country in America with Andrei's exhibition and interrupted communication will recover immediately from the same place where we parted. And Grisha will become a leading Slavist and his books written in English, we will hold in our hands and hardly read.

An alien language that we could barely speak for him became a “worker”. When we began to read his books, it turned out that his books about Babel and about Mandelstam were revealed to us these great poets. What to add to this? I think that Grisha Freudin is one of the best people who met us in life. Lyudmila Ulitskaya How did you come to me? I liked your face. It seemed to me more alive than the main ninety percent of ...

academic world. And my experience shows that the academic world requires great vitality so that intellectual life remains in it. I got into it by chance. In what sense? Where else could you get? I had a lot of different ambitions in my youth. For some time I was interested in linguistics, then the economy. I was always interested in literature, but not as an academic lesson, but as something living.

In the sense that you wanted to write? I wanted to write and wrote. He never wrote poetry, but wrote some criticism, journalism-it was. Then I could not get to the university several times. I was not a Komsomol member and was a Jew - it was a double blow to my dossier. I tried three or four times, in my opinion. I mean, get a job? No, just study. I had a silver medal.

But they flooded me on the exam. Not that they fell over, but underestimated the score, and ... you are talking about this with annoyance. Well, it was unpleasant. Because my friends have already acted, and we began to diverge. Other interests appeared, some kind of professional profile began to form. But I knew English and finally went to work at the institute, it was called "Informelectro".

It was such a sump for talented, but inanimate people. And I worked there in the department of studying the world economy. Somewhere, in my opinion, in the beginning of the 10s, Kosygin decided that if they build a new plant, whatever it may be, they must find a similar plant or a factory in the West. Speaking everything? It is not necessary to spiz, but at least not built an antediluvian plant.

So that he answers at least some modern conditions. And therefore, all the ministries brought themselves the institutions in which people sat, watched magazines, studied what was happening in the West to do the same, respectively. This, of course, was a losing strategy because they always lagged behind ten years. Were secondary. But at least ten, not thirty or forty. Well, there was a very interesting director there, and he attracted interesting people.

Did you have some kind of knowledge about the economy before? I think that in the Soviet Union no one had any knowledge about the economy at all. But the path from the institute studying the world economy to the University of Berkeley is at least not direct? No, not at all straight. They eventually made me a researcher, despite the lack of a diploma. It was interesting, I had library days.

In general, life was good, I could watch and read any magazines. But in what sense was your entry into the academic world random? I met my future wife, she was a graduate student at Harvard University. She is generally a very academic person. Like all academic people, she knew nothing at all other than academic life. Well, she also understood something in politics, she was a student-activist, but in general ...

She knew the theater world, her parents left the theater world, and she studied at a theater school, was engaged in ballet, but she knew nothing but this world. And since we decided to go to live here, she became as if mine - well, I don’t know - the binoculars through which I looked at the world. This binoculars had the possibility of academic life. By that time, two brochures about the American economy had already been published in the Soviet Union.I was very proud that I quoted her not Lenin, but Galbrait.

The institutionalist of this? Yes, yes, it was interesting to me. So when we thought about how our life would turn out, she said: "You will go to graduate from the university, you will go to graduate school." But they took me to graduate school at once. I did not graduate from the university. Neither in the Soviet Union, nor in America? I don't really know if it is great or unhealthy.

I think it's really bad. Because the American college, the university gives the concept of peace and about different opportunities to look at it, study it and live in it. And I didn't have it. I had such a bohemian, homemade, Moscow, kitchen education of a well -read boy who loved to listen to smart people. Why was it worse than the American college? This is not systematically.

Well, life is also not systematic. But science is more systematic. This is, as it were, the whole point. This is the first. Well, the second - you could be a political scientist, historian or physicist. I understood the difference between a physicist and a political scientist, I understood this. But the difference between a political scientist, a sociologist, a literary critic and a historian - for me it was ...

And when I, then, began to choose graduate school, I went to one historian in America. It was such a Scot of Edward Ned Kinan in Harvard. He spoke Russian very well, although there was, maybe there were two weeks in Russia until he was arrested and washed off. I asked him: “Ned, should I go to history or literature? You see, I am interested in such and such questions ... ”He said:“ Well, the story will be eight years old, literature will be six.

” And this turned you to literature? It turned me to literature.