The point is not at all that it was in Ovsyanka, “by the light of a lamp in a village bathhouse,” that Astafiev was born. The matter here is as thin as ice along the banks of the Yenisei: the river does not freeze completely in these places. And to understand this subtlety, it is necessary to look at these shores from above: a few kilometers from the town there is a viewpoint with the sculpture “The King of Fish”. From here you can clearly see the place where the mill was located, whose wheel became the wheel of destiny for the writer. One day he got up and Father Astafiev, who looked after the mill, was sent to prison for being a pest. Then, along this same river, passing this same mill, Viktor Petrovich’s mother was carrying a package for her husband… The place where the ship wrecked is here, to the right of the viewpoint. Since then, the space that connected the two main pains of Astafiev’s life seemed to him like a temple, where birches are candles, where rocks are Easter cakes, where everything is alive, especially frozen fogs. And mom is alive. The Astafiev whom we all love is from this temple.
Oats from “Tsar Fish” – also visible. A picturesque village with a backdrop of wind covered cliffs. It is still difficult to imagine that it will become the Siberian Mikhailovsky, but this is precisely the goal set by the one without whom the national center would definitely never have been built – the director of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, Valentina Yaroshevskaya. She is a legendary personality: “I am the only woman in Russia who has run a museum for more than 45 years.”
Astafiev himself bequeathed to him the care of his legacy. He knew who to trust. What was needed here was a person who was not only faithful, but also disruptive. And soon after his death, work at Ovsyanki began to boil. They opened a memorial house for the writer, then they bought the estate of his grandmother Katerina Petrovna and opened a museum there for the story “The Last Arch”, then the museum expanded to other areas, with gazebos, swings and performance areas.
But Yaroshevskaya wanted more. And she decided to build a national center such as had never existed before in Russia.
“Because he is the only writer of the second half of the 20th century who masters all literary genres and who was mainly translated into foreign languages. Only “The Tsar Fish” was published more than 200 times all over the planet,” emphasizes Yaroshevskaya. “Isn’t this a national treasure?” When is a person from Russia interesting to the world?”
It is not in vain that Yaroshevskaya raises this question, because the answer is not obvious to everyone; Otherwise, the national center would have been built a long time ago, so he had to devote almost twenty years of his life to it, cursing and then putting up with the governors, overcoming the thresholds of higher positions, writing tons of letters, buy land in Ovsyanka at non-rural prices, convince local residents to give permission for construction… But now all the battles are over, and Valentina Mikhailovna shows me what everything will look like outside and inside.
Guests will be greeted by the sculptures “The Fish King” and “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess” – these are the most famous works of Astafiev and the thoughts of his heart; The first is about motherhood, this is understandable, the second, about the Confrontation between love and war. A separate exhibition in the writers’ center will tell about the war, in which Viktor Petrovich volunteered when he was 17 years old. He is dedicated to the novel “Cursed and Murdered.” And this, judging by the project, is one of the most powerful and metaphorical installations. “We found unique images of the Dnieper crossing, and even in online stores we found tunics from that time that could have been taken from dead soldiers,” says Valentina Mikhailovna. There are also ears of grain in the installation, they are from that chapter of the novel in which the hungry soldiers suddenly see an unharvested field in front of them: a yellow sea, silent, without grains, without life. “What is this being done? War.”
And here is the “Family” installation. A rug hangs against the background of a map of the USSR. Viktor Petrovich and his wife Maria Semyonovna embroidered it when, after the war, they came to live in the town of Chusovoy in the Urals. “His family started with this rug, it kept them together, 56 years of marriage is not without reason!”, Yaroshevskaya is sure.
By the way, about carpets. Or rather, about their employers. Before coming to Ovsyanka, I visited the local history museum of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. There are many different antique rugs and panels, the patterns of which cannot be immediately deciphered. It looks like a deer is running, but why, for example, does it have such strange antlers, like a child’s slingshot covered in snowflakes? I think I know where they come from: the frost leaves the same patterns on the windows of Ovsyanka, I saw it myself. As for the Astafievsky rug, the bright roses between the bluish-white stitches are a bit reminiscent of viburnum berries against the background of the blue shutters of a winter Siberian village.
In the new center, spectators will breathe Astafiev’s air, look at the world through his eyes, follow the writer’s path from birth to death, experience with him his sorrows and joys, leaf through his books, watch film adaptations of his works and fragments of television interviews, and listen to his voice. There will be areas for communication and performances, as well as an intellectual center: all research on Astafiev’s work will be gathered here, from school essays to dissertations. And all in the style of a museum: with interactive zones, giant screens, creative installations and brilliant details. So that Astafiev leaves in the soul of the viewer his ideas, through which everyone can find their own path to the writer, to the understanding of the time in which he lived and to his love for the small homeland of the …
In general, the entire Ovsyanka can be considered a museum of love for the small homeland. Astafiev did a lot on the side “where the navel is cut.” He built a temple, a huge library, built a road and lighting for his people… Because “ingratitude is the most serious sin before God.” In his “Last Bow” there is a phrase that he would not be amiss to cross out upon entering Ovsyanka: “If a person has no mother or father, but he has a homeland, he is not yet an orphan…” .
In the library-museum, Astafiev struck up a conversation with the librarian Olga Pushilova, she is a local, she remembers how Viktor Petrovich came to her school, how Boris Yeltsin came to Ovsyanka to see Astafiev… But most of all she keeps in memory how people from the surrounding area came to the library built by Astafiev. Teenagers, even punks, waited for hours on the writer’s stairs.
Are there authorities in the country today with whom young people are willing to walk miles to talk? Young people always have something to ask, but they don’t always have someone to ask. That is why the center is also being built in Ovsyanka, say the promoters and curators of this project.
“It is for young people, it offers as many modern technologies as in the best museums in the world. Ideally, young people could spend the whole day in this center and not get bored,” says the acting director. The deputy governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Vasily Nelyubin, himself once moved to Krasnoyarsk only because Astafiev lives here. In his words, the problem of logistics has also been solved: there will be a regular train service to Ovsyanka, the railway platform is already being arranged, there will be buses, but the main thing is that electric boats will travel from Krasnoyarsk along the Yenisei .
Business is expected to come to Ovsyanka and there will be a place to rest and have a snack.
But still. Will people from the digitized 21st century come here? And now they’re going to Oatmeal? The writer’s cousin, director of the memorial museum Galina Krasnobrovkina, assures that they are coming, and more and more. The guides add: if earlier there were many random people who were more concerned about the ancient icon donated by Oleg Tabakov, now there is an audience that is not afraid to step on calluses and comes in search of answers to pressing questions.
One of the delicate topics is why the writer joined the liberals in the 90s? If we think about it, today this question sounds even sharper than before. Everyone with whom I managed to talk about this in Krasnoyarsk and in Ovsyanki had their own answers, but before expressing them, they asked me to turn off the recorder. Surprisingly. Only the writer Alexander Shcherbakov, who knew Astafiev personally, did not ask: “Most likely, he realized whose power was now and was afraid to get out from under his wing.” According to Shcherbakov, Astafiev, in the spirit of the new times of the 90s, recalled “the grievances for his dispossessed grandfather, the imprisonment of his father, his drowned mother”, reproaching the authorities for everything that had previously been very kind. But, says Shcherbakov, “the fact that he suddenly became anti-Soviet at the end of his life is today as far from the interests of today’s youth as the political views of Leo Tolstoy.” What cannot be canceled: Astafiev remains and will remain one of the bright and significant names of our literature of the 20th century.
Before leaving Ovsyanka, we stayed with 21-year-old guide Sergei Kondrashov on the banks of the Yenisei and watched as steam spread across the water and the sun’s rays streamed through it. For some reason I asked:
– Seryozha, you were born in these places after the death of Astafiev. Who is it for you?
The boy didn’t even think for a second:
– A person with a good heart, a temperate character, not broken and who values his Country is the most important thing.
By the way
After the opening of the Astafiev National Center, another project of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Museum of Local Lore will be activated – the “Siberian Literary Triangle”. The interregional tourist route will link the homeland of Viktor Astafiev, the village of Ovsyanka in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, with the homeland of Vasily Shukshin, the village of Srostki in Altai and the city of Irkutsk, where Valentin Rasputin lived and worked. The project was started last year, thematic exhibitions are held in writers’ museums and the museum and theater studio “Sibiryachok” went along the route with traveling performances. But the new Astafiev Center is expected to become the flagship of the Siberian Literary Triangle.
Literal
From Viktor Astafiev’s farewell letter:
“One morning or one night, perhaps in the fall (I don’t want to do it in the spring), I will stop on the road and return. Where I came from. Where I will go irrevocably, having said goodbye to you, people, forever. But not from nature, of all those who made us related. And may they elevate me to the hill, to that hill that has been waiting for me for a long time, behind my beloved town. Behind my grandmother’s garden. May those whom I loved and whom I love lift me up the ravine where I walked with her among the strawberries. And let them not cry for me. Let them remember me in a word or in a song, and I will hear it. After all, they say that after death people hear for a long time. two more days, but he cannot answer. I will hear it from the earth, since I have become the earth. But before I become earth, I will share my last drop of blood. with my homeland, I will send my last breath to nature. And if in the fall you see the brightest leaf on a tree, it means that a drop of mine has dissolved on that leaf, and nature has come to life with the beauty that I gave my all and for which I shed many tears, endured many torments and I shed blood more than once…
Goodbye People! I remain silent, merged with nature. I hear a new conception of life, a warm breath, the whisper of lovers: I don’t want to make you sad with myself, I give you a luminous leaf from my tree. And the last thought, and the sigh, and the secret hope that the life they conceived will find a more beautiful and more just world. And he will remember, perhaps, and even remember me with a kind word, like Kobzar, lying on the banks of the Dnieper, about me on the illuminated Yenisei, and in his mirror my face will be reflected in a ray of light. And there the song that I haven’t finished singing will sound. I say goodbye to myself without regret and fly until I am lying on the ground at a high altitude. I’m coming! I’m coming! Do you hear: nature calls me! And the mother’s voice sounds in her, moving away from her. And the sounds are silent in the distant darkness. The peace and darkness I’ve been dreaming of for a long time doesn’t scare me so much. Life can be worse…
Greetings, my peace of mind!”
