Dmitry Glukhovsky: “Children will inevitably win, the question is whether the current government will have time to ruin them. Dmitry Glukhovsky: Why the novel “Text” is perceived as absolutely reliable

Editorial website talked to 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 script.

Good afternoon Tell us about latest news. What interesting things did you do and what are your plans for the near future?

The most recent thing is that last year the book “Text” was published, my first realistic work. The story of a guy, a philology student from Lobnya. I decided to celebrate the successfully passed second year exam. I went to Red October, to the club, and there was drug control and a raid. They accosted his girlfriend, began to search her, and he stood up for her, after which they planted bags on him and imprisoned him for seven years. He left prison and immediately, in a state of passion and intoxicated, killed the man who had put him behind bars. It was a young drug control officer whose phone main character gains access.

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 it, transforming into this person. The story is called “Text” because the main character does everything in text and cannot speak with his voice. The book came out last year. Now it is staged as a play at the Ermolova Theater. Another movie will be coming soon.

Have you thought about making a game based on this book?

Yes, I don’t even know what kind of game this could turn out to 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 the last one.

The next big project that will be released is an audio series being prepared for the Storytel platform. There is such an application with audiobooks in Google Play and iTunes. The audio series is structured like a regular television series, meaning there are 10 50-minute episodes per season. Multiple acts, cliffhanger at the end. Like a real series, but without pictures, just with sound. It's called "Post". You can listen to it while you're driving a car, riding the subway, jogging, or ironing your socks, for example.

We started recently 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 piece of support is the rusty Trans-Siberian Railway. And on this Trans-Siberian Railway there are appanage principalities skewered, like 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 on the river bank. And he is at the epicenter of all events.

This is the audio series expected on “Storitele”. There will be no “Lent” in the form of a book at all - only audio. Should be out early winter. Maybe January-February.

Have you thought about expanding this project into a film or even a game if it becomes popular?

This was originally a project for a television series, but while I was coming up with it, it became a little political. Because it’s about a collapsed Russia. Then it became impossible to talk about something falling away from us, because that something was Crimea. And Crimea falls off - this is the 282nd at once. That's why the TV got a little pissed. Well, okay.

During this time the situation has changed again. It’s not so scary anymore, everyone has already forgotten about Crimea, it’s as if we’ve passed through. But the idea still remains, and it's cool, from my point of view. My own idea, which I have been living with for several years. And now I have found a partner suitable for “bombing” it all.

Can the idea develop into something more?

It may outgrow, of course. It seems to me that this is a format that, in principle, is suitable for some kind of game. Fortress defense is a clear concept. With some sort of forays, diplomacy, and so on. It may well be. Note to the hostess: if developers are reading us, I say hello. Here's a great idea for a game.

Well, in the future maybe there will be some other book series, for example. For a long time I had an idea with characters, drama, and dilemma that I understood. In principle, no one has made audio series here, and now we can again, as it were, create something new, unusual and interesting, implementing an idea that has been burning my soul for a long time.

What other ideas are you working on now?

Lots of other things too. What I have listed is the closest one already. There are ideas for several books, plays, and television scripts. A lot of things, and in different genres.

The above-mentioned “Text” is a realistic work, then a dystopian story, followed by a tough family drama about the relationships between people in marriage, and after that, perhaps a book about artificial intelligence, or maybe not. All. Well, that is, different things.

Where do you get ideas from? What inspires you? Does it happen that you specifically develop a book idea for a specific audience?

No, no... Making a book for an audience is bullshit. Idiocy. You cannot make a book for a specific audience. Let the marketers of the STS TV series 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 at all. 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 are not trying to represent some target audience that should be interested in a certain proportion of tits and action.

We live more or less standard lives. And the dilemma that we are going through, and some collisions that are typical to one degree or another. First you are a nerdy teenager, then you have your first love, then you get married, some temptations appear, you break up, you have children, your parents are getting old, you have already stopped rebelling against them and begin to feel sorry for them, you had a fight with someone at work … This is all pretty standard stuff. Thank God that we do not live during the Second World War, because then standard things were of a different nature. Nowadays we have them that are more “soft”. But nonetheless. You lived it, somehow formulated it for yourself, and if you formulated it honestly and accurately, then you can infect others with it.

There is a lot of pop music where this is formulated dishonestly and inaccurately, because it is made with the “presumed taste reference points of the audience” in mind. And you just do everything honestly, as it is. It didn't sell and didn't sell. Something else will work out. 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 had seven books, and none of them became as successful as Metro 2033. Well, okay. So what now, get too upset? There is a trilogy, we closed this topic. Or should I, like Lukyanenko, Perumov, Rowling or Akunin, rivet endless sequels? You are losing your freedom. You don't do what you want. It becomes a job for you. Such physical, hard, exhausting, boring and unpleasant work.

A huge super luxury is when you can do whatever you want, and now they also pay you something for it. But who actually has such luxury in our lives? Usually work is boring, you sit through it, and then you go catch sprat with bloodworms, because there you can relax your soul... Why the hell? There is unique opportunity do what you want to do and somehow make money from it. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

I have books that seem to be of no particular interest to anyone, although I think they are still great and have found some kind of audience. For example, my book “Stories about the Motherland” has a circulation of probably 50 thousand, and it has never been printed. It came out ten years ago, and here it is. And “Metro 2033” has a circulation of millions, and another 50-100 thousand are printed every year. I don’t regret writing “Stories about the Motherland” at all. I think it was a great thing for that time, the spirit of the time, the tenth year. It didn’t sell, well, it didn’t sell. You can't worry about it. This is a road to nowhere. You will then fabricate a product and it will all end with you being exposed by your readers. They will say: “Well, it’s baked. He’s doing 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. Star Wars producers have a responsibility to the audience.

If you think that responsibility means doing it exactly the same as it was, because people are used to it, they like it and want more, then you are mistaken.

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 endlessly, like Pelevin, do the same thing, because you have some kind of army of your own, like fans, they will still be disappointed, because they will get tired of it. I'm tired of it. I was a wild Pelevin fan, but I just can’t anymore. Read the 25th book the same - well, how long can you?

I’d rather experiment, because at least I’ll be teased. And if they “poke” me, then so will someone else. Of course, some people fundamentally want mutants in the subway, and nothing can be done about them. Well, please, that's their right. There are computer games about mutants in the subway and there is a book series. But can I retain my freedom to do what I like now? I seem to have grown out of short pants. I wouldn’t say that I have improved much, but I’m just interested in different topics now.

It turns out that after you have realized yourself in one topic, you want to move on to something else?

Yes, I want to enjoy it in the process. I want to be excited about working on a new thing. I want it to be on a topic that is relevant to me now. And so that there is a certain challenge. Because I haven’t written about this yet, and I haven’t written in this language, and I haven’t had such heroes yet, I didn’t dare to write about any topic. Whether it's about love or politics or something else. That is, I was afraid to do it. For example, I was afraid to swear in books until a certain point, or to write about women’s feelings from a woman’s point of view. There are a lot of things you're not sure about.

You explore the world around you, just as you explore yourself, you become uninhibited, perhaps wasteful, 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 a summary. That is, you have understood something about life, about yourself and people, which means you must put it into new thing. And then this will be some kind of step forward.

If you again, just to earn money, repeated the old trick again, then you yourself did not get any 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 a clear contract. What do you think about it?

Well, the old man fucked up. And now he regrets it, of course. He watches it grow into a global franchise and realizes that his pension could have been greater. 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 were a bad author, there would not be so many loyal fans. I haven't read it myself.

The game did a lot for him. And if there had not been a game, he would definitely have remained an unknown Polish author.

He didn't understand the potential because he was just old. Well, I probably thought about games in the spirit of “What is this... Shooters... Schoolchildren killing teenagers in schools...”. That's 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 was 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. I feel sorry for the old man.

How much time do you devote to the game?

This is a process that takes years. I sketched out some idea that I thought about for three weeks or a month, and sent it off. They thought about it for six months and sent it back. I expressed my comments and sent it again. Then I flew to Malta, then to Kiev, 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 here, cut here... Then they they send in their dialogues, I answer that it’s somehow not very good, the characters speak as if they were buying something at the market in Kiev, let’s redo it... I rewrote it. 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 lasts years. Net time cannot be calculated. Symbiotic story. It is clear that my workload here is largely that of 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), “Exodus” picks up the story. If you want to understand what to expect in Exodus, then you need to read the books. You're interested in what's next - that's only in the game. This kind of mosaic storytelling is also quite innovative. This is not “Game of Thrones”, where the book is a season, the book is a season, season, season, oh, where is the book? At some point they start to separate because the producer already knows better.

We do hand craftsmanship. This is not assembly line production in Tesla's shiny California factories. These are people sitting and cutting something out with a knife. And I sit like that. And precisely due to the fact that it is all handmade, the result is something with a certain taste. And you understand that it’s not blurry, that you haven’t seen anything like this and that it’s quite unique.

It turns out that you inspire developers, and they inspire you?

Undoubtedly. They really inspire me in general, in principle, not only with their games, but also with some of their drive and stubbornness. I believe that their dedication and commitment to their work is completely unique.

Are you playing games now? We used to get carried away before.

I have a PlayStation on which I download all sorts of games for myself to watch. But I can’t say that I would now pick up and play through some game to the end. For example, I played the new Wolfenstein and had great fun playing Limbo. Such things. Arcades are different. 3D shooters are difficult for me to play. This needs to be done somehow in the company. Well, it’s like sitting alone and delving into it... It’s just that when you grow up, you have less free time, and with great pleasure you already watch Netflix or HBO.

Or stream on YouTube.

Maybe, but I rely more on the emotions that a good series can give. You get on a certain emotional drive. Games are interesting like spying on 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 find yourself and are surprised, looking at some things. Especially on the big screen - it’s absolutely beautiful.

Have you seen the Death Stranding trailer? It stars Norman Reedus.

We need to look. I won’t pretend that I’m so cool, youthful and always keeping track of everything, because that’s not the case for a long time. I'm 85 and I'm not a cake. But I keep an eye on some things. You turn on a trailer for your game, then switch to another, and you can get stuck like that for half a day. You think it’s cool, I need to play and see this. But I can’t say that I’m some kind of super gamer now. It wouldn't be fair if I told you something like that just to sound 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, came up with everything, but some things, for example, related to the fight against mutant bears, people do themselves. I was never good at this - the heroic part, shooting and so on.

But when it comes to emotions, drama, relationships between characters, turning NPCs into living people - this has always been my specialty. And that's what interests me. Whether I succeed or not is another question, but I really 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 you get is adrenaline. This piece 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.

What an awesome game with realistic graphics No matter where you sit down to play, it’s like going to a conservatory to listen to a symphony orchestra. And the fact that people play here at the highest academic level, and do not strum the balalaika, is not news to you - you are ready for this, so it is not very surprising.

Likewise with stunning graphics created by cutting-edge studios at a cost of $200 million. You knew those graphics would be there. 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 that is absolutely poignant. Years later, Western developers also come to this and hire Oscar-winning screenwriters, because they understand that nothing breaks a person like a story. We understood this back when there was no money for graphics. They relied on 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. Because you are interested in games. I hope that the new Metro game will not disappoint you and that you will have someone to wash your bones on the forums of this wonderful site. In general, play games. It's better than drinking cognac in doorways and using rusty syringes. Thank you! This is Dmitry Glukhovsky. Bye!

Material prepared by: ACE,Azzy, SkyerIst

The actions of Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels usually take place in a confined space. In the legendary trilogy it was the metro, in Twilight it was an Arbat apartment, now it’s a smartphone. And every time in this space there is whole life, which millions of readers live with the author. The just released “Text” is perhaps the most hermetic of all, but at the same time it is even more acutely in touch with everyone’s life, although the heroes of the novel are exceptional in their fate and position. Released after a seven-year prison sentence, still a young man, convicted on false charges allegedly for drug trafficking, in fact due to a personal conflict with an FSKN operative, is released from the zone in Solikamsk, comes to Moscow, finds out that his mother two days before died. And the life he planned to return to is now impossible. And he, in a state of passion, kills the man who sent him to serve these seven years. Takes his smartphone, finds the 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 on it, did you somehow formulate the task for yourself?

— There are books that grow from an idea, and there are books that grow from a hero. And this book grew precisely from the hero. Feelings and thoughts accumulated from what was happening to the country, and I wanted to convey them through the collisions of his life.

—What exactly worried 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 top to bottom of society, and here is the total penetration of prison culture into ordinary life. It seemed to me that a story about a man who served a sentence for seven years, returned to Moscow and lives his life for another person could absorb many experiences.

— Your hero is the complete opposite of you in terms of upbringing, origin, and activities. Where do you get your understanding of this psychology and this life, including prison?

- I don’t know, probably someone described this better than me, but this is my personal discovery: what we consider ugly manifestations of personality (excessive aggression, downtroddenness, etc.) is simply a response to the environment, which is designed to ensure the survival of the body. If your parents drink and beat you, then you grow up to be a thief and a hooligan, because otherwise you will not survive in this family. This deforms you, you become aggressive, you get used to either suppressing others, or keeping your opinion to yourself, and then it develops into a pattern of behavior. It is designed to allow you, like an animal, to adapt to your environment and survive in it. Any influence leads to transformation. And if you can imagine these influences, then you can imagine how a person who has been subjected to these influences behaves. On the other hand, if you are not looking for genuine texture for such a book, then nothing will work. And my manuscript was read by both current law enforcement officers and former employees FSKN, and several imprisoned criminals... And I, first of all, asked them about psychological reliability. One said: “It’s written right about me.”

— One of your main characters is raised by a mother with principles, the other by a father without principles. But both of them commit crimes. Do you believe that natural instincts, in in this case thirst for revenge, stronger than education?

— From what remains after reading the book and after writing it, this is probably the central question. And this has a lot to do with what is happening. People belonging to the system of power, as well as people who collaborate with power, help it to exist, adhered to this behavior before, but now they are beginning 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 top officials of the state who openly lie to the camera. For example, regarding Crimea: first they claim that the peninsula will not be annexed, and two weeks later they annex that there are no Russian troops there, then they admit that there are our special forces. Now Putin, in an interview with Oliver Stone, says that our media is independent from the state and that the intelligence services do not read the correspondence of Russians. This is generally a joke for the chickens. And then, admitting everything after the fact, he smiles and says that it was such an Indian battle trick and that it was all justified. That is, again the end justifies the means. And this is not just 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 with rose-colored glasses, not distinguishing between ideas about good and evil. The President simply takes into account and exploits popular psychology.

“What Putin says is the right of the strong.” I can afford it, so I allow myself. And further in the spirit that there is neither darkness nor light, everyone is dirty, everyone is smeared, and in the West they are smeared.

What was happening with the Trump campaign was an attempt to discredit their electoral system. We didn't particularly need Trump, an eccentric, unpredictable, uncontrollable person. It was necessary to prove that the American electoral system was so rotten that it would not allow a person truly popular among the people to come to power. The elites will unite in a conspiracy and will not allow him to win. We were prepared for this by all means. And when he won, it was a crushing surprise for everyone.

— The old trick: instead of cleaning ourselves up, we try to cover up others?

- We are not trying to prove that we are better (this is implied), we are simply paying attention to who is trying to teach us - people who are completely corrupt, unprincipled, and even homosexuals. They are trying to impose on us a picture of the world in which ideas about elementary ethical categories simply do not work.

And this standard of behavior is set by the first person of the state, no matter whether he plays the boy or the godfather. And we let him have it, because he is an alpha male, because he is a king, he can do it. This goes down the pyramid: the boyars behave the same way, and teach their slaves the same thing, and then there is the re-education of the population in the spirit of complete disregard for the concepts of good and evil. Anything is possible if you can. If you can bend others, bend them, be a predator, eat the weak.

“And in the “Text” we are faced with a representative of a system that shares these beliefs.

- With a hereditary representative. Because this FSKN operative, whom the main character kills, avenging his lost youth, is a hereditary security officer. His dad is a police general, deputy head of personnel management for the city of Moscow at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He placed his son in a place of bread because there was an opportunity to place him. The mother did not want to, she knew that her son was weak-willed, arrogant, a scoundrel and a bug, but she was afraid to argue with his father. And then the father teaches his son his life principles. And the principles are simple - eat those you can eat, collect dirt on those you cannot eat.

— But this is a typical secret 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 he looks at us like a recruiter. He does not even recognize the theoretical right to be guided by other criteria, to be incorruptible, for example.

- Well, he doesn’t see many incorruptible people...

“Now the principles have really been devalued, and people are not ready to fight or die for them.

— But you also have the main character’s mother, who raised him in strict concepts of honor; when he goes to prison, she teaches him to keep his head down, adapt, etc. It turns out that life is really more valuable than principles?

- The times are such that life is more valuable than principles. I suspect that this has always been the case. We were brought up on the Soviet myth, but what did we know about that time? People consuming popular culture, they don’t know much about what really happened at the fronts and in the rear, to what extent people were motivated by patriotic feelings...

The Nazis killed a family, and this is where you really can’t get over yourself, and then you are capable of some heroic actions. Not because you love the abstract Motherland, or even more so some kind of Stalin, but because you cannot live otherwise. True motivations are much more personal. Especially in a country where the Bolsheviks established their power for 20 years through bloodshed and coercion. Well, how can you love such a Motherland recklessly? No matter how brainwashed you are by propaganda, you still have personal experiences that contradict this.

— We noticed that the reenactors who filled Moscow in holidays, everyone is dressed in military uniform? What is the reason for this militarization of consciousness?

- There are two points here. The first is the fear of looking into the future, perhaps purely biological among people of the post-war generation. They know the Brezhnev world, they know the world of perestroika, but they don’t know it well anymore new world. What lies ahead? 10-15 years of more or less active mental and physical labor? The presidential term that we are living through is a period where everything is turned exclusively back to the past.

— Your hero lives someone else's life on a smartphone, just like today's younger generation. And if he observes the life of another family, then 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?

“The 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 have managed to transform the national mentality in four years. Maybe only Saakashvili, but he broke people over his 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 within 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 a change of generations, the arrival of people with a different mentality. Now even the FSB has them.

“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 a feeling of belonging to a superpower in all segments of the population. For young people, especially teenagers, this is coupled with the need to increase their own self-esteem.

A person who does not belong to administrative bodies or supervisory agencies has little chance of feeling the necessary self-respect. He lives in constant fear of clashing with the system; he has no rights. If you are beaten by a policeman and have no one to call, it is your fault. If there is someone from the system to stand up for you - a judge, a prosecutor, at least a doctor who operated on someone - you need to pull the person out of the system in order to protect yourself. This is our fundamental difference from Western countries, where there are basic legal guarantees and where, if there is no absolutely severe conflict of interest, you are protected by rules and laws

- That is, a substitution occurs - 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, run over and eaten, including by my own people, 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 superbeing that brings fear to the surrounding area... Hence the desire to again feel like a superpower. Such a sublimation of self-respect, which we so lack.

And the constant desire to be appreciated by the West (because we are complex as a people) also comes from private life. Let them not be afraid of me, because I’m drinking in the yard in sweatpants and an alcoholic T-shirt, but let them be afraid of the country to which I belong.

— And what bigger country, the more respect?

— Berdyaev says in “Russian Idea” that the only national idea, which 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 in a basic way. And it is important that, unlike the implanted Orthodoxy, this is a supra-religious thing. I talked with Kalmyks, they, on the one hand, feel like national people, they have difficult attitude to the Russians, whom they despise for their weakness, for their softness, for their drunkenness, but at the same time they feel proud because they belong to Russia. And when Russia behaves threateningly towards its neighbors, they enjoy it. Therefore, when we thunder with our shod heels or caterpillar tracks across the squares of all sorts of small European states - 1956, 1968, 2008 - a wave of pride rises in inexperienced souls.

— In my opinion, you overestimate everyone's knowledge of history.

- Well, okay, they know her in some kind of mythologized way, in which the media feeds them with conversations that not everything is so simple in our dramatic history. Beria, okay, strangled the raped gymnasts, but he created an 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 guy, of course, finds some kind of response among them. It was in vain that he admitted to Stone that he had grandchildren. Putin, grandfather, is a step away from the young.

— Yes, for young people, this whole agenda that is 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, in order to continue to rule, the authorities begin to invade this little world and take away freedom. And it begins to affect them.

— The authorities don’t understand that by doing so they are digging a hole for themselves?

“We don’t have that many young people proportionally.” And I don't think she can do anything now. How can a change of power occur in a country? Even if you capture the Kremlin, not to mention the Post Office and train stations, it will be of no use. The power is not in the Kremlin. Power lies in the consensus of the elites. A change of power probably occurs when Dzerzhinsky’s division refuses to move forward, when the military begins to cry, when important people stop answering the phones - at that moment power passes to others.

— Are you seeing a consensus among the elites now?

- All people who now have a lot of money are obliged to the authorities. And now there is not a single major player capable of challenging the authorities; it will immediately be ground into 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 throughout the country, especially in two or three major cities, is the beginning of a trend. I’m not saying that now schoolchildren will go into the breach, stain the bayonets of the riot police with their innocent blood, and everything will turn upside down. Paris in 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 blood of young innocent people, then there is a fork in the road: either the one who shed this blood loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, or he is forced to further impose his legitimacy, turning into a dictator.

— Navalny is not in danger of this in the foreseeable future…

— ... and Putin avoids becoming a dictator, he is satisfied with a relatively soft 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 the initiative of the localities. He, apparently, 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, nor the role of Hussein, or even the more prosperous Kim Jong-un, although we can exist hermetically, as we have already done. All, let’s say, repressions occurred out of fear of losing power, and were a response to some kind of social fluctuations. This is a semi-thermidor, a reaction to the semi-revolution that did not happen in 2012. And it is a reaction precisely to the confusion that has arisen among the power elite, and an attempt to flex its muscles to restore order in its camp, and to intimidate any oppositionists with the redundancy of these measures.

— Does he really believe that the whole world doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, just thinks about 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 must be suspected... You understand what the tragedy is. In 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 at some point absolute, was They were unable to use it for the benefit of the nation and empire. The fact is that the Praetorians, like representatives of the State Security Committee, are very special people, trained to find 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 service agent, not a KGB agent, Gorbachev is not a special service agent or a KGB agent, and even Lenin is not a special service agent or a KGB agent. This is a completely different scale of people.

— Well then, Putin is not to blame. It was the people who put him in power who 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 has surrounded himself with an impenetrable wall of people who owe everything to him and depend on him for everything. He knows how to protect himself from all threats.

— This is a tactic. What's the strategy?

— But there is no strategy, and never has been. Conservation of the current situation, 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 there never has been. The stupid conversations about the future under Medvedev were invented by some hipsters, I don’t know why. But there is no project for the country, there is no understanding of who we should become after ceasing to be Soviet Union. Empire, okay. What to do to become an empire?

Photo: Vlad Dokshin / Novaya

— Crimea, for example, should be annexed.

- Oh no. With a shitty economy, you can’t annex any Crimea. Take the example of Deng Xiaoping - what a statesman. First, lift the country out of poverty, give people the opportunity to support and feed themselves, to move their lives for the better, and they will move this whole stranded ship forward, like barge haulers on the Volga. But no, the middle class poses a danger to the authorities. Talk about supporting business is just talk; for them, business is just fodder for the security forces. Reliance is on the security forces and state employees, on people who depend on the state.

— How can the rest survive? For 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 succeed 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 proactive act was Crimea. A perfect hit on 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 drying up, financial bonds are being replaced by administrative ones, an entire generation has grown up accustomed not to serve the Fatherland, but to treat it as rent. This is no longer stagnation in the blood, this is gangrene. And I’m afraid that the next presidential term will be a period of further degradation.

— So should we leave?

- Well, first of all, not everyone wants and can leave.

— Yes, they don’t really expect us there.

— And the Chinese are not very welcome, but the Chinese are everywhere. I cannot call for emigration, I myself emigrated three times, but at the moment I live here. It's a matter of everyone's motivation. When the Union collapsed, I was 12 years old, I belong to that generation of people who are in ruins " iron curtain“they see opportunities - to go study, see the world.

Why do you have to make a choice once and for all - leave Russia or stay and endure, play pseudo-patriotic games like “Zarnitsa”, knowing what people who profess such patriotism actually do?

The concept of patriotism - stay and suffer with the country - is imposed by people whose children have long been in London and Paris, as we see from their Instagrams. We once again agree to play the games that are imposed on us. And you just need to abstract yourself from it and do what’s good for you.

I am not ready to call for revolution or emigration. The situation in the country is not so desperate that there is a choice - either flee or go to the barricades. Still, Russia in 2017 is not the same as a hundred years ago; the situation there was much more desperate.

— Moreover, private life has not yet been prohibited.

— Of course, current authoritarianism is much wiser than what it was under Brezhnev. If you are doing something of your own - do it, homosexual - there is no article about homosexuality, just don’t preach, if you want American music - please, if you want to go study - go, if you want to emigrate - it’s your business. On the contrary, let all the active ones leave as quickly as possible rather than 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 catastrophe. The trend is just wrong. We traveled by train to Europe, and at night we switched 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. Just 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 under duress. To survive for a week, he needs to get into the skin of the dead man, that is, into his phone, and understand the intricacies of his life. In particular, in a very conflictual 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 based on a picture on his phone. And through this love he begins a certain transformation. He finds out that she is pregnant and feels guilty for taking the life of the father of the unborn child. And therefore, when he finds out that she is going to have an abortion, he weaves a complex intrigue to keep her from doing so, 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 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 everything comes with a price to pay. 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 after so many years of living in such a perverted society as prison?

— Any feelings become stronger and brighter when it is impossible to realize them. If you can get the girl or young man on the first, second, third date, you don’t even have time to ignite the feeling within yourself. In the Middle Ages, probably, or in such a moralizing society as we had in the 70s and 80s, sexual freedom seemed to be a rebellion against a system that assumed standard behavior - to look after oneself, not to allow too much, to repel sexual attacks. Through the regulation of sexual life, the state gains significant power over a person. The platonic flourishes where the physiological is not allowed to grow. Through prohibition, since human nature is weakly amenable to transformation, all that can be done is to instill a sense of guilt. But the person is guilty, he is a priori loyal.

On the other hand, now many girls, if a young man doesn’t try to drag them into bed after two weeks, get upset and wonder what’s wrong with him - is he gay?.. And simultaneous romances for girls with several young men, and for young men with girls, until they began to live together, it is not only the norm, but something completely taken for granted. In principle, Russia is not a conservative society; on the contrary, we have a rather wild country. I think this is good, because all societies where sexuality is regulated are much more prone to fascism.

— Conservative in everyday life and socially Germany and Japan proved this in their time.

— Human nature needs to be given a natural outlet. As long as Putin is smart enough not to meddle in his personal life and stop the attempts of zealous deputies and figures like bikers who cling to the budget udder to interfere in the personal lives of citizens, I think he will stand. Although he was already on the Internet. The Internet is also around sex and in general around what people do in their free time. And as soon as dictatorship and censorship begin here, people will accumulate anger.

While anger is still given various outlets. Life is getting worse, people are becoming poor, but they, in general, treat this with a certain patience. After all, our well-being during the fat years seemed so impossible that we didn’t really believe in its duration. But there are things that are too much to get used to. And they understand this perfectly well. And they are more likely to intimidate by invading privacy in order to hint: let’s not escalate things 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 targeting teenagers, wanting to discourage those who were planning to go to the next protests. Therefore, you need to twist not a hundred, but a thousand, so that people think, yes, the risks are great. And when they so uncompromisingly sweep away these teenagers with arms and legs like matchsticks, this, of course, is cruel intimidation. But then this can lead to the opposite result; violence begets violence.

Deutsche Welle:Apart from biographical and journalistic things, "Text" - your firsta novel about the present, about today's life in Russia. What prompted you to take it up?

Dmitry Glukhovsky: Over time, I got the impression that no matter what fantasies I indulged in about the future of Russia and no matter what utopian metaphors I used to describe Russian reality, reality was still more fantastic, more desperate and more absurd than my most amazing fantasies. We have written so much about the past, often with a desire to whitewash it, and about the future - most often with fear of tomorrow! But about today, there are, unfortunately, almost no cutting-edge things that would be about us, about conversations on the trolleybus, about newspaper headlines and about the main problems of today. And I decided that I needed to speak out.

- One of the German newspapers, reviewing" Text" , wrote that the author is dismantling, cracking down on Putin’s political system. How strong is the political component in the novel?

In fact, paradoxically, this book is the least political of all my books. I used to very actively use futuristic metaphors to talk about the political component of today. For example, in “Metro 2033” my people did not want to leave the bunker in which they were sitting, twenty years after the Third World War, still refusing to believe that the war was over. This, of course, was directly related to the situation in society as a result of the annexation of Crimea, to the vulnerability of Russian society to militaristic propaganda, which again used the language cold war. Now - as a result of propaganda - society is very politicized and politicized in a specific way, that is, some completely illusory picture of the world has been created for it, by which it should be distracted from current, everyday, everyday, economic problems.

In "Text" politics runs in the background. But to a much greater extent, the novel is about society, about people, about the situation they find themselves in today. Moreover, it’s not even about the lack of freedom, because, from my point of view, people in Russia have certain personal freedoms, only political freedoms are missing.

The main problem of today's Russian society is different. This is the disdain of those who belong to the power caste (here we are talking about politicians, and officials, and security forces, and representatives of the pro-government press, and the pro-government church), for all other people, their complete unwillingness to obey the laws of morality. People belonging to this ruling caste are so unpunished, so privileged, that they do not want to admit the existence of any restraining factors at all, they refuse to believe that there is good and evil, truth and falsehood. Any person who watches TV in Russia, reads newspapers, sees without my help that those in power lie, that they steal, that, when caught red-handed, they are never even embarrassed, that they are ready to justify murder if the goal is in their opinion, justifies it.

And the other caste, the second, lower caste, are ordinary, simple people. They are completely powerless. They have no guarantees of any rights, not even the right to life, not to mention the right to property. At any moment, by decision of any authority or by the arbitrariness of a particular official or security officer, everything can be taken away from them. A person can lose his freedom and, in some extreme cases, even his life. And then no one will be able to prove anything. And this ordinary people Cynics impose ideas about justice and injustice, good and evil, about some higher mission of Russia. This is probably the main political component of the book, which is reflected in the plot. In the plot, let me remind you, a guy from a simple family, a student of the Faculty of Philology, comes into conflict in a nightclub with a man who works in the drug police. And he is punished by having drugs planted on him and being sent to prison for seven years - without the opportunity to justify himself.

Context

- What role does Moscow play in this caste and social antagonism?, contrast between Moscow and the rest of Russia? Moscow looks like a kind of anti-hero or anti-heroine of a novel...

Moscow is my favorite city. It's not difficult to love her. Moscow is the richest, fattest city in Russia, the most well-groomed, the most favored, bribed by the authorities. After all, revolutions, as we know, take place in capitals, and in order to prevent these revolutions, it is necessary to appease the residents of the capital in every possible way. And the rest of the country (with the possible exception of million-plus cities, which, with some delay, are following Moscow) is stuck somewhere in the mid-nineties. This is a poor country. People are forced to take out loans at extortionate interest rates in order to buy the things they need or simply survive from paycheck to paycheck; they don’t see any special prospects in life. I myself am from Moscow, but my mother is from near Kostroma, and I have many relatives there who are a clear example of how people live outside the capital.

- Much of the novel's action takes place on a smartphone. Is this just a sign of the times or something more?

This is primarily a sign of the times. If we write about the present, then it was impossible to do without a smartphone. But there is one more important thing. The smartphone provides an excellent opportunity for transformation. Thus, the central character of the novel, having taken possession of the smartphone of the person he killed, gradually takes his place, becomes him.

The way it is. Here, however, it should be noted that social networks are very different. They were very flaky. If, say, VKontakte is a medium for informal communication related to leisure, then Facebook has really reserved the place of the intellectual kitchen of the Brezhnev era, where people gather, discuss political, social, economic problems... This is where the heated discussions take place. And for the most part, they don’t spill out beyond Facebook, just as they didn’t spill out beyond dissident, frontier kitchens forty years ago. Facebook remains, despite political provocateurs, trolls, and so on, an island of freedom.

- How they perceivenovel" Text" Russian readers and spectators (a play based on the novel was staged at the Ermolova Theater)?

Of all the reactions that I heard, the most flattering for me was the assessment of the novel as completely realistic. What is described there is perceived as absolutely possible. There is nothing fantastic in the fact that a guy who cannot pay off the police, investigators and prosecutors ends up behind bars on false charges, there is nothing impossible in the fact that he has been sitting in a camp for seven years, there is nothing impossible in a conflict between a random person and law enforcement system - and not even with the system itself, but with some of its random representatives. It was important for me that all this was completely reliable - both psychologically and factually. This is the most important thing: no one doubts the reality of what is happening. Many people believe that this story really happened.

See also:

• The history of Teriberka begins in the 16th century, when fishermen began to settle here. But the village began to actively develop already in the 19th century: the first school and a paramedic station appeared here. In the 20s of the 20th century, the Soviet government created a collective farm. In the 60s, 5,000 people lived in Teriberka, but now there are only 600 left.



The director of the Teriber House of Culture says that 15 years ago, when the devastation began, journalists often came to them: “A boy in a black coat came running, as it turned out, the NTV company, burst into my office and asked: “Well, what’s wrong with you? It’s okay, why did I come?” When we saw this report, people stopped giving interviews.”



Ten years ago, the only school in Teriberka was closed because there were only 50 students left. Now children drive or walk, depending on your luck, to school in the neighboring village of Lodeynoye, five kilometers away.



In the closed school that exists in the village, children play: with reagents in the former chemistry classroom, with molecular structures in the former physics classroom, or simply run through the books and educational tables with which the floor is covered.



All teachers were “optimized”, that is, they were simply made redundant; many are now also forced to travel to neighboring Lodeynoye or sit without work altogether.



Lodeynoye was formed in the middle of the last century as a workers’ settlement. It has nothing to do with antiquity. People settled there who came from all over the country to service ship repair shops and a fish factory. When perestroika began and the villages were united, it was as if they had forgotten about these five kilometers between them.



From the school window you can see a farm with cows. In the mornings, in the store, which is also a kind of branch of Russian Post, you can buy milk and cottage cheese. The store that appears in the film "Leviathan" is old, it was opened to create an ambience.



When Teriberka grew, the local cemetery was moved further away, beyond the territory of the village, and a hospital was built on the site of the old one. But now it also looks like the buildings in Pripyat. An ambulance is called from a neighboring village. If it’s really bad, they take you to Murmansk 120 kilometers away.

Glukhovsky was the first Russian author to make his book publicly available online. He was then writing his first “Metro” and delivering it piece by piece. This was back in 2002. Today he is one of the most successful and - it happens! - independent writers of Russia.

dates

2002 - start of work on the Euronews channel in Lyon

2005 - the first book “Metro 2033” was published

2007 - made the world's first TV report from the North Pole

2011 - became the father of a girl named Emilia

The World Cup is an excellent backdrop for tough pension reform

- Dmitry, what can you say about the football championship? Are you a fan?

No. Completely indifferent to football. Because of this, of course, I always feel a little inadequate with all the euphoria that has unfolded. In addition, my grandfather, for example, is a crazy Spartak fan to the point of a heart attack. And other relatives, who are 75 years old, enthusiastically watch basketball matches. What is there to see there?!

But from everything I see, I am pleased that Russia has opened itself to the world. True, experience shows that these discoveries occur on the eve of some kind of compression and enclosure, that then all this is remembered as some kind of dream in summer night. This happened with the 1980 Olympics, which took place at the beginning of our invasion of Afghanistan - and then international isolation followed. And the Sochi Games also seemed like an integration into the global world of friendly and open Russia- and were exactly on the threshold of 2014 with its Crimea, Donbass and our new isolation. And now everything seems to be so good, and all these crazy Mexicans and Uruguayans are having fun in the streets, and we suddenly turned out to be kind, and not uptight and embittered, and our cops are not chasing anyone. And everyone was allowed in without visas, including, apparently, “MI6 spies” - and nothing was wrong. That is, one could simply unclench the sphincter, so to speak, and nothing monstrous would happen. But the ability to learn lessons and project them into the future makes one suspect that something bad is going to happen right now. Once we finish, we celebrate, everyone leaves and then they will never come here again. All this may be the last time.

- Is this shit already prepared? After all, the annexation of Crimea was prepared much in advance.

With Crimea, everything was carried out brilliantly from a logistical point of view, including bought or intimidated local politicians. So there was a plan in advance. Donbass is a different matter. It's a mess there and no one can do anything. Neither attach nor detach. Some kind of fermentation of the masses. It is clear that people did not have a plan.

Well, what was planned to be held under the guise of a championship is already taking place - an increase in VAT and the retirement age. This decision, I think, was made a long time ago. People were simply brainwashed with some other, redundant projects in advance, in preparation for announcing a real tough decision right now. It is clear that football emotions are an excellent background for such things.

Shenderovich once again incurred anger by saying that if such a great championship were held in a more decent country, there would be more joy.

I really want to be happy for Russia, of course. But after the Sochi Games there were no normal reasons for joy. Because Crimea is the joy of Cain's victory over Abel. Hitting your brother in the back of the head with a rock and taking something away from him is a great victory, yeah. Moreover, it turned out that all the joy about our Sochi victories was in vain, because we cheated, of which I am sure.

When you understand the socio-political structure of the Russian Federation and understand what kind of mentality the people at the helm have, who they are essentially, according to their past - yes, you understand, these people could, justifying themselves in any way they wanted, resort to any scam in on any scale.

In Soviet times, the party and the KGB opposed and competed with each other. And now there is the omnipotence of the special services, which, in principle, is always a harbinger of the last times. When the Praetorians - and these are actually the special services - began to come to power in Rome, these were already the last, sunset times for Rome. People who are engaged in security, entrenchment, searching for threats, people who are professionally suspicious - they cannot, are not capable of leading the country forward.

- But Putin communicates with young people and talks about the future.

Political strategists are trying to invent an image of the future for Putin, but they cannot. Simply because he's not talking about that at all. It is about protection and conservation, about neutralizing threats. This is what he does very well. And the political field around him has been completely cleared. The oligarchs are all under control. He who is not brought under control has hanged himself; he who has not hanged himself is sitting in Switzerland, and he has lost his teeth. The politicians either cooperate, or are shot, or leave the clearing, realizing that there is nothing to catch. And in principle, this is not even a dictatorship, it is a rather mild authoritarian regime in comparison with Pinochet. We don’t even need to be whipped with rods - we ourselves try to be quieter.

Medvedev is sabotaging

- According to a recent survey, 51% of Russians hope that Putin will be president in 2024.

Well, listen, Putin is a symbolic figure. People are ill-informed and deceived by television. Medvedev is responsible for all the failures and tightening of the screws - people do not understand that no decisions, especially related to living standards and taxes, can be made without Putin delving into the issue. Without his veto or approval. He is a very informed person. But he has the wrong priorities, in my opinion. People live in a world of myth, not seeing cause-and-effect relationships. And this division into the right king and the abusive boyars is our eternal monstrous naivety.

No matter who you talk to, you will hear: “Putin is handsome.” I can even judge by my own family. Grandfathers and grandmothers blame Medvedev for all troubles. They think that he is the one doing the sabotage on his own.

This whole Putin story is an eternal missed opportunity. Although his decision with Crimea was a well-thought-out multi-move - in order to get past the emerging economic crisis and at the same time not allow Ukraine into NATO. Coupled with the television pus that has overwhelmed us here, everything worked. We swallowed the halving of the ruble and the standard of living without falling out of love with Putin and learning to eat ersatz cheese. But! Taking Crimea and losing Ukraine forever was, of course, a monstrous failure. Because we kind of grabbed Crimea and forgot, but for them it’s a huge bleeding wound. Which causes both pain and suffering. We alienated the Ukrainians, perhaps forever. This is total idiocy. We took a useless, unnecessary piece of land and lost the fraternal people with whom we have been connected for a thousand years shared history. Not just friendship, as with Venezuela, but mutual penetration at the level of families, cultures, everyday life, history.

What Russian hasn't dreamed of marrying a Ukrainian girl? And what Ukrainian didn’t work in Russia when he was young? And whoever has not traveled to Odessa has no heart. These were generally the people closest to us. All our graters were at the level of “Muscovites”, “Khokhlovs” and jokes about lard - the most innocent story. And what is this all for?

Everything is clear to me with Ksenia Sobchak

You once wrote that we never became Europeans due to imperial pride and complexes. But seriously?

Our story is completely different. For Europeans, civil revolutions and the process of crystallization of a citizen who demands respect, who believes that he has rights, occurred 200 years ago. Except that the Germans then went into collective insanity. In our country, revolution has a different etymology. And instead civil society a new serfdom emerged. We once again found ourselves in slavery to the privileged class. This is repeated and repeated. Only the privileged class has changed - criminals and demagogues have come to power. But we never became citizens.

But still, people who are now 20 and 30 years old are not the same 20-year-olds who were in the Soviet Union. So it is a question of the emergence of an unharmed generation. But our government is trying to fool the current generation of young people. All people involved in youth politics should burn in hell!

-Have you watched the film Sobchak about Sobchak?

Watched. A very boring movie. There's one there good hero- this is Putin. He is reliable and wonderful - that’s why he is the successor, and not because he understood that our politics are based on the games of the special services and crime. Everything is now completely clear with Ksenia Anatolyevna. We understand everything, thank you.

- You once asked Voinovich to draw a utopia for Russia in 2100. He then laughed it off. Can you do it yourself?

Free, prosperous, with healthy capitalism and moderation social responsibility. The main problem is to keep such a gigantic country like Russia from collapse in the future. Now this is being resolved with the help of the FSB. We have a case for every boss. As long as you are our man, do whatever you want, kill people, go to the sauna with prostitutes, take bribes. But you know that daddy is saving up. Instead, we need federalism, an independent judiciary and competition between government bodies. And most importantly, its changeability. Forced change of power after 4 or maximum 8 years. That's the whole point in the grand scheme of things. And this whole story “If not Putin, then who?” - this is how some remember how Stalin was quickly forgotten and thrown out of the mausoleum - he did not justify the trust. So it would be nice for us to develop a little, like an ordinary country. Poland could be a good example for us.

Medvedev even tried to take us to some other place to see it. True, he spoke more than he did, but the rhetoric was better - there was no trench in which one was supposed to sit. And without Putin, neither famine nor locusts happened. And the mood was better. But Dimon cheated us. Putin came and changed everything in his own way, as in the joke about a husband and a lover. And instead of a utopia, I think we will slowly smolder and rot.

- But he said that there would be an economic breakthrough and everything would be fine.

It doesn't matter what Putin said. The only thing that matters is what Putin does, because his words are in every case at odds with his actions. Putin is a man whose power is based on the disorientation of everyone - both “partners” and the population of the Russian Federation. He very often tells lies. While he is mystifying, he is unpredictable. As soon as it became transparent, that’s it, it opened up for a strike.

Honesty does not require heroism

It so happens that in our country literature is given great importance. When you write, do you think about artistic value or is a book just a consumer product?

Noooo. You can’t treat a book like a product. For me this is the only way of self-realization. In general, I don’t do anything else - I write books and dabble a little in journalism. And if I start to waste my time and cliché, stop trying to surpass myself yesterday, to summarize what I understand, then I will become nonsense. It's a matter of proving to yourself what you're worth. That's why I try to write a different book every time. It's boring to repeat yourself.

Well, I was lucky, I accidentally discovered the formula for success and at the age of 27 I already had large circulations and translations.

- What will be your next book?

There will be two very different ones. One is about artificial intelligence. And the second is such magical realism on Russian soil. Everyone says: you’re a cosmopolitan, you lived there and lived there, and dad is from Arbat, from medical dynasty. It’s clear that I was a city boy, but at the same time, there is a powerful Russian component in me, right at the core. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the summer in a real village house with a well, a canopy, a washbasin, with cucumbers in greenhouses, with beetles and slugs in cabbage. I spent all the holidays there. There is a completely different attitude towards life and death. IN big city we are completely isolated from death. We don't see funeral processions. In our country, the dead are fussily carried out of the entrance in zipped bags. And there is a cemetery within the city limits, and the coffin on a ZIL with lowered red sides is driving through the entire city. Your dead relatives don’t seem to disappear there. They appear to you in dreams, give you everyday advice, and something else. Because of this, there is no feeling of irreversibility and finality of existence.

- Will it be straight Marquez-Marquez?

I do not know yet. But Cortazar, Marquez and Borges are my tribute.

- You will be forty in a year. Maybe it's time to change your life strategy?

Horrible, yes. But I had a life strategy from the very beginning. Taking over the Universe. Through stories, gain power over minds. Power in the vulgar sense - over human resources and financial flows - does not interest me at all. She spoils people, but I don’t want to spoil myself, in principle I like myself and have built everything so that I don’t depend on anyone.

I was offered to join the Human Rights Council under the President, and I was invited to join the Cultural Council. They invited me to meetings like “Putin and Writers.” And I didn't go anywhere. Because when they try to feed you, it is always temptation and temptation. It’s not that I’m some kind of desperate oppositionist, I don’t carry out subversive activities, but it’s very important for me to maintain freedom of thought and judgment. Once you start feeding from someone's hand, you can no longer bite it. This is clearly evident from the different writers we have. This is about the role of literature in our lives. Literature, with total propaganda in the big media, remains the last space of freedom where an honest discussion on important topics is possible.

- By the way, you could be a good politician.

No no no. I can't and I don't want to. It would break me. I can't stand so many compromises. Either they will kill you, really break your back, or you yourself will make it worse and be reborn into something else. For what? I believe that maintaining a certain level of honesty in judgment in our times does not require much heroism. When everyone is wildly lying, and you simply call black black and white white - it seems like some kind of courage and originality. Although you haven't done anything incredible.

Being Navalny - yes, it requires heroism. I wouldn't want it that way. I have always been interested not so much in the detailed structure of power, which I am quite squeamish about, but in the degeneration of a person from the people who has come to power. Violence, lies, manipulation - and a person decays through permissiveness and impunity. I have several books about this.

P.S. At the very end of the interview, Glukhovsky asked: “So, can you publish all this directly in the newspaper?” Well, let's publish it.

The material was published "Interlocutor" No. 26-2018 under the heading “Criminals and demagogues have come to power. But we never became citizens.”

From an interview with writer Dmitry Glukhovsky to the online publication Sobesednik.ru.

It is known that your great-grandfather was friends with personal doctor Stalin, and you, having trained as an international journalist in Israel, worked for Russia Today, were part of the Kremlin pool, and then once - 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, we were striving for the future, not the past. And RT was initially created to show the West that everything is fine with freedom of speech. So, in all the years of working on the channel, I didn’t have to bend my heart in any particular way: it was enough to remain unbiased, 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 Kremlin inhabitants. You can probably put anyone on the throne - and the gears will continue to turn. 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? 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 turned into an authoritarian police state, we were banned from social and political life, we were strangling the Internet, we were put on a strict collar, we fed or physically eliminated all the opposition, the TV went crazy and sprayed poison, we fell out with both the CIS and the West. We went to Europe and came to Kolyma. It's time to stop pretending.

Dmitry Glukhovsky. Photo: Alena Pozevalova, www.om1.ru

Are you trying not to leave a trace? Or is it already useless because Big Brother has already counted everyone? How is Big Data 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 intelligence services become seriously interested in someone, there is no way to hide yourself from them. Phones are hacked, computers are hacked, any gadget can be wiretapped, you can spy on a person through a webcam, you can know what porn he watches, with whom he is cheating on whom, and find out all his business details. People are worried that it is now more difficult for them to be hypocrites, but this only leads to the fact that they stop hiding their real essence. When collecting incriminating evidence cannot be avoided, you need to admit your human weaknesses, and this will make you invulnerable. Do you 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 life, limit it with many prohibitions, and declare any form of perversion sexual behavior, except those aimed directly at childbirth. Make people feel guilty. Whoever is at fault 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 meaning of the so-called struggle for morality. In general, I am convinced that the more fiercely a politician or religious figure fights for morality, the more vicious he is. If you want to remain under their thumb, sit in the closet, be afraid of exposure, which is still inevitable in the world of social networks and big data. Be yourself and be free.

- Do you consider Snowden to be the last romantic of the Earth?

Is Snowden a romantic? Don't know. But he did a great and necessary job, in the interests of civil society throughout 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 this is 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 for the special services, to whom Durov, after taking away VKontakte, refuses to reciprocate.

I happened to communicate with him in person once. “Vkontakte” was taken away from him because Durov is a joker, an unpredictable player, who also has ambitions and his own ideology that are too big for a manager. Such a person cannot be left in control of the most powerful media in the country, which is VK. Next is a matter of technology. As for Telegram, I have heard different opinions about its reliability. I think that if you really want to, the correspondence of a specific 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 has servers in Lubyanka.

Despite total transparency and a facial recognition system, people are prohibited from gathering on the street. What are they afraid of?

The authorities are effective in their concern for stopping threats. Threat yourself first. First, the parliamentary opposition was castrated, and now the LDPR, A Just Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation are simply subdepartments of the party in power, fat, sleepy cats. Then the oligarchs were flogged and sworn in. The governors' teeth were pulled out. All that remains is to clear the street - the embodiment of a nightmare since the Maidan. For this reason, they invented a multitude of senseless pioneers, from the “Young Guard” to “Nashi”, and drove there idle people and young opportunists. Then they started feeding football fans and bikers, Cossacks and just some thugs, they came up with the Russian Guard and gave it the right to shoot at the crowd, at women and at minors, they 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: losing it. There aren't any idiots in our country who think that we have real elections? Well, the politicians we supposedly elect know their value very well. Despite all the royal army - the riot police 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 line - these people feel great self-doubt and do not believe in the sincerity of eighty-six percent .

- Do you think the election result is definitely predetermined? Or can everything suddenly go wrong?

Putin will be elected, Navalny will not be allowed in, the communists and Zhirinovites will stand on all fours in their usual ritual of submission, Putin will be elected by 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 true stability.

That is, everything is the same as before, but with new technologies? Should we then expect that our president will start, for example, a YouTube channel before the elections?

Why does a person who has already created several channels on central television need YouTube? 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 normal person this should make you happy.

TV has never died; it is more alive than all living things. We fell in love with Crimea through TV, changed our minds about condemning the authorities for theft, and through it we have been fighting with Ukraine for three years. 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 people can understand: we have such scary tale and such a sad reality that one can escape from them into the myth of rising from one’s knees great empire God himself commanded us.

Well, bloggers who have eclipsed writers in the hearts of those in power - we started with this - isn’t this fundamentally new?

All these channels are already several years old, actually. It was the presidential administration that just noticed them - because some schoolboy was noticed at the rally on March 26th. And now we 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 the feeling of being chosen, massage their sense of their own greatness - and let Sasha Spielberg and Ivangay put on T-shirts with patriotic prints and do “ku” twice. Then, of course, the schoolboys will follow them and renounce the devil and will no longer think of hanging around at rallies. And rightly so - there is no point in tempting the Russian Guard.