While serving in the Navy, Yuz (right) also found time for entertainment. Photo: yuz.ru
Aleshkovsky is considered a classic of Soviet samizdat and country songs, a genius of laughter and swear words. And genius, as Pushkin taught us, is “a friend of paradoxes.” Indeed, there were many paradoxes in the writer’s life.
Preparing for a career as a clown
He was born in Krasnoyarsk in the family of an elder and an accountant. The boy was named Joseph, but in the Polish manner he was called Jozef. Hence the strange name Yuz.
Soon my father was transferred to the capital to serve. Here, Son Mark, the future famous archaeologist and historian, was born. “My brother, three and a half years younger than me, was a positive person, and I was always considered negative,” Aleshkovsky recalls. “He rushed to the hospital with a heavy piece of asphalt pierced through his head, which forever impaired his ability to think formally and logically and killed the gift of timely respect for common sense. Then I went to kindergarten, but was expelled along with a girl for completely innocently and naturally studying the anatomy of our little bodies.”
The boy also suffered failures at school. “One day, while walking, I fell into a deep cellar, hurt my spine, but survived. Doctors and my parents feared that I would remain a dwarf for the rest of my life, although I myself had already begun to prepare for the career of a little circus clown.
“I was a merry fellow, a slacker, a lazybones, a gambler, a swindler, a hooligan, a scoundrel, a smoker, a street urchin, a cyclist, a football player, a glutton, although I always helped my mother with the housework. At home, I was enthusiastically interested in the mystery of childbirth and gender relations, the structure of the Universe, the origin of plant and animal species, and the nature of social injustices, and I also managed to read the great works of Pushkin, Dumas, Jules Verne and Mine Reid,” Yuz described his life with irony.
Composed of a portion of bread and sugar.
In his youth, Aleshkovsky managed to work in a factory. In 1947 he was drafted into the Navy. He served in the Far East. In 1950 he was sent to a concentration camp for four years. “I was an ordinary criminal, a sailor who was caught drunkenly stealing the car of the secretary of the regional party committee so as not to be late for the train to the Korean War, but I didn’t know anything about it yet. We were stopped by a patrol, we fought with the patrol, I waved my belt and shouted: “Polundra!” I was imprisoned on two charges: for hooliganism, that is, stealing a car for hooligan purposes, and for resisting sea patrols.” After the leader’s death, the sailor was released under amnesty, having served only three years.
The camp radically changed his fate. For the better. Firstly, if there had not been a deadline, he could have died in the Korean War (see “KP Help”). Secondly, an amazing story happened to him there. In the camp toilet, Aleshkovsky saw a page from the rare fashion magazine “America” of those days. “This is how I read, in the semi-darkness and in a miasma almost neutralized by frost, Faulkner’s Nobel speech. It was one of the most wonderful moments of my young life, and of my later life as well. For a moment, the freezing winter, the eternal lack of fat, hard labor ceased to exist for me; the inspired music of the great writer’s phrase began to sound in my soul: “Man will not only survive, but also overcome!” It determined my attitude to everything that happened to me.”
Thirdly, the camp made him a world-famous writer. Here Yuz began to compose his songs. Liberating, in his words, from the hellish longing for Moscow, freedom, love. He called the first one “Song of Freedom”.
The birds did not fly where we walked,
where we pass through the stage.
Sometimes we were frozen and malnourished.
from Moscow to Kolyma itself…
And at night, in exchange for a ration of bread and sugar, he told the prisoners stories that began with the slogan: “A sinister black carriage with the white inscription “Bread” drove through gloomy, alarming and harsh London.
No wonder Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, paraphrasing Dostoevsky’s words about Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” from which Russian writers emerged, said: “Aleshkovsky emerged from the quilted jacket of prison.”
Despite all the trials that befell him, Aleshkovsky lived to be 92. Photo: Sergey SHAKHIJANYAN
Yves Montand’s check
After his release, Yuz worked on virgin lands, on construction sites and was an emergency driver for the Mosvodoprovod trust. He treated the ulcer he received in the camp with vodka.
In 1959, he composed the hit “Comrade Stalin, you are a great scientist.” Many considered the song to be folk. This infuriated the author: “How do you imagine the birth of a folk song? The region sits in a heap, drinks a glass of water, and then starts singing, or what?” Later, Vladimir Vysotsky included “Stalin” in his repertoire. The authorship began to be attributed to him.
By the way, Aleshkovsky considered Vysotsky to be the greatest singer of all time. When we met, he said that he was very pleased to hear this song performed by him. “The conversation with him went well; in general, conversations with him went well. For art there, for life. We drank something. I didn’t swear: the beautiful Frenchwoman Marina was sitting there and it was just the three of us.”
At the same time, Aleshkovsky composed “Okurochek”. It was also considered a national hit for a long time. And not only in the USSR. At first, in emigration, Yuz and his family were sheltered by a French model, singer Dina Verni. Yuz said: “She says to me: “Do you know that Yves Montand, your “Okurochek”, is already singing at concerts and on a record?” – “Yes, let him sing,” I say. And she answered the phone: “Yves! The author of “La Migotte” is sitting with me.” – “What an author, the song was written under the Tsar!” And she said to him: “Are you crazy? What Tu-104 plane flew under the Tsar’s command? In general, Montand sent a decent check for the song. It arrived just in time.”
In total, Aleshkovsky has two dozen songs to his credit. I could have written much more, but I didn’t pursue the quantity. I didn’t even learn to play the guitar. “A guardian angel appeared and said: you don’t need to become an artist, you’ll get drunk and die under the fence,” Yuz explained. – And apparently he saved me. I fell in love with prose.”
On pure love – obscenities
It is a paradox, but the former prisoner entered literature as a children’s writer.
“One of my friends worked at the magazine “Family and School”. I told him: “Let me tell you a story, it’s about family, about children.” “Come on,” he says, “I’ll read it,” we will say frankly with doubts. I told him the story “Daddy Shaves”, about the conflict between a little man and his father, who did not understand him. And who began to understand dad, watching him shave. Printed. There was income. And I began to continue. In the Pioneer magazine, in another place. Then the book came out. The father of my future wife showed him my stories. She was an editor. She said: this is what a simple driver writes. And then the second book, the third, decent money, I quit my job as a driver.”
In the mid-1970s, Aleshkovsky became a famous author of children’s books, published in large editions. Popular were the stories about Alyosha Seroglazov, a first-grader nicknamed Dvaportfel, and the little puppy Kysha. The film “Shot and Two Briefcases” was based on them. There were other films based on Hughes’ scripts.
“When I started earning a lot of money and the films were selling, I suddenly composed “Nikolai Nikolaevich”. And I realized that I couldn’t write another word for children.”
The story is written from the perspective of a metropolitan pickpocket who served his sentence and got a job through connections in a dust-free job at a biological institute. Sperm donor…
There was no question of publishing it in the USSR: the story was full of obscene words. “Nikolai Nikolaevich” became a hit of Soviet samizdat. Yuz began to be called the main blasphemer of the Soviet land. However, the writer Victoria Tokareva called the book “the purest novel about the purest love, written with the purest obscenities.”
Based on the writer’s children’s tale, director Eduard Gavrilov made the feature film “Shoot and Dvaportfelya” in 1974. Photo: Still from the film.
“Sometimes I am ashamed of my foul language,” Aleshkovsky said. “But I learned it as a child, it is the language of the street, I did not choose it, it was imposed on me by fate, by life. Unfortunately, I learned bad words on the street long before the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers.”
Having given up children’s literature, the former prisoner began writing books for adults for the table. The picaresque novel “Kangaroo” about the adventures of an old robber in Stalin’s time, “Disguise”…
In December 1978, an ideological scandal broke out in Moscow. Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Vladimir Vysotsky, Vasily Aksenov and several other famous writers published the uncensored almanac Metropol. Typewritten in 12 (!) copies. There were also texts of Aleshkovsky’s camp songs. No one was imprisoned, but Yuz began to be branded as a “malicious anti-Soviet.” And he and his family emigrated. First to Europe, and then to the United States.
After the collapse of the USSR, the writer frequently visited Russia. He even sang “Comrade Stalin” at a chanson concert in the Kremlin. “This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me. Am I talking about Stalin in the Kremlin Palace? Christmas trees!”
Yuz Efimovich Aleshkovsky died on March 21, 2022 in Florida, USA, at the age of 92. A year before his death, he wrote: “Old age is not a joy at my age, especially when the head is empty, the soul is joyful, and the body is in sadness or in sorrow.”
SHALL WE SING?
Song about Stalin
Comrade Stalin, you are a great scientist,
You know a lot about linguistics,
And I am a simple Soviet prisoner,
And my comrade is the gray wolf of Bryansk.
I really don’t know why I’m sitting here.
But prosecutors are apparently right.
I am now sitting in the Turukhansk region,
Where were you exiled under the Tsar?
We immediately confess other people’s sins,
We walk towards an evil destiny,
But that’s what they believed, Comrade Stalin,
How, perhaps, they did not believe themselves.
And here I am sitting in the Turukhansk region,
Where the guards are rude as dogs,
I understand all this, of course.
As an intensification of the class struggle.
Or rain, snow or mosquitoes upon us,
And we are in the taiga from morning to morning,
You made a flame here with a spark.
Thank you, I’m warming myself by the fire.
We carry our difficult cross for nothing
In the steaming frost and in the melancholy of the rains
And, like trees, we fall on our bunks,
Unaware of the insomnia of the leaders.
We dream of you when you wear a party hat
And in a tunic you go to the parade,
We cut down the forest like Stalin and the wood chips.
And the chips are flying in all directions.
Yesterday we buried two Marxists,
The bodies were covered in bright red,
One of them was a right-wing draft evader,
The other, as it turned out, had nothing to do with it.
Before I die forever,
I left you my last words:
Ordered to resolve this matter.
And he shouted in a low voice: “Stalin is the boss!”
Smoke for a thousand years, Comrade Stalin,
And let me have to die in the taiga,
I believe: there will be cast iron and steel.
Quite a lot per capita.
HELP “KP”
Korean War: Wars between the north and south of the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953. The war began on 25 June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea following border clashes. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union, South Korea by the United States and allied countries. The fighting ended with a truce on 27 July 1953.
