Okhlobystin spoke about this and many other things at a meeting with journalists
Photo: Boris KUDRYAVOV
Ivan Okhlobystin’s new novel is called The Great Tushino Zga, its action takes place at the end of the 80s and the characters are schoolchildren who run through the Tushino district, fall in love and have various adventures. The writer and actor talked about this area, the city and many other things in a meeting with journalists.
About Tushino
– This is a special area for me. My stay there coincided with grouse currents with my wife. All my children were born there, except for Vasya, who was born in Central Asia. This is a special area, a micro universe. There, women say to each other: “Tomorrow I will go to the city”, that is, Tushino is not perceived as Moscow… And the book is my love song for this area and for the people who live there.
In addition, the remains of the “Aleshkin people” – the most ancient on the territory of Moscow – who lived there in the parking lot thousands of years before our era, were found there. There is also a round ravine at the place where a meteorite fell during the Paleolithic, and in Tushino they believe that if you go there on certain days, you can hear the heartbeat of the Earth. True, this is what children say, I personally have not witnessed it. In addition, Tushino is Buran, there is a famous plant that made the space shuttle … And one more thing: if some kind of trouble in Moscow began to be global, then they started with Tushino. That is, it seems that there is an entrance to hell, and people accustomed to eternal cataclysms live on the border. All this gave me a special intertwining, a special mosaic for the book.
About what is zga
– No wonder they say “you can’t see anything.” I mean, it’s kind of a flash. (In fact, Dahl’s dictionary defines “zga” as “dark, dark, dark”, or as an abbreviation for “path”, that is, road. However, in the Ryazan dialect, as they say, “zginka” means “brightness”.- Ed.) It can be an interior perception, it can be a visual effect. And when in Tushino a girl is attacked by thugs, they say “this is not according to her”, that is, “not according to concepts.” And there is a mystical meaning here. At a time when I was involved in regional Russian mythology, I came across the following expression: “Fog gives rise to hthon, hthon gives rise to horror, horror gives rise to zg, zg devours darkness.”
About the novel as a fairy tale.
– A strange story: I finished it halfway, and it was February 24 of last year. And that interrupted me: I couldn’t go back to the novel because other events distracted me. I tried to fulfill in my social networks the function for which I received my education: comfort, distract, entertain. We, the artists, the directors, the artists are the buffoons of the Majesty of her the people, and then she was left in uncertainty. Our task was somehow to relieve the moral pressure. And only in February of this year I re-read a book whose genre I cannot even define: in general, this is a fairy tale, like all my books. Why worry about realism? We need fairy tales, we don’t have enough fairy tales.
about directing
– I decided to enter VGIK in the 8th grade, when I realized that there are no magicians, and the closest profession to a magician is a film director. Then it turned out that as a director I am not very good. Because there it is necessary to combine creative and administrative principles. I made a movie and I was numb with fatigue. For some, this is natural: I saw Klim Shipenko while filming “Kholop” and everything turned out great for him. But I can do creativity or management, and not both. If I did a couple more movies, I’d either go crazy or die of a stroke. I decided to protect myself from this. At that time, I had already written and sold scripts, I sold them, I did not earn much, but I do not need much, I am a rather ascetic person.
About new movies
– I am going through a difficult period: a production typhoon. Because some of the artists escaped through Upper Lars last year or intended to, the producers postponed a lot of filming for this year. Now one project overlaps another and my next day off will be November 1st. “Kholop-2”, “Polar-3”, “More than football”, “Surrogate mother”, some other film, something about the New Year … And also, it seems, I starred somewhere, I don’t remember. After all, I haven’t seen most of my movies through to the end, nor have I seen Interns through to the end. I am like that Chukchi, a writer, not a reader. There are about 350 episodes on Interns. When I realize I’ve come close to Alzheimer’s, I’ll drop them all, be asked to write the entire Interns on a USB stick, watch the series every day, analyze it, and remember it. This will be my corridor to the past.
