I, Solntsev Roman Kharisovich, was lucky to be born on May 21, 1939 and go to school on the banks of the glorious Kama River, which, as scientists note, is actually full of water at the place of their confluence. But just as the river Kama lost the title of great to my sister, so I have been accustomed all my life to be in second place in all the eternal writer’s debates: who is genius?
But it is especially joyful that I was lucky to see the white light in the “Shishkin” forests: there was such a wonderful Russian artist Shishkin, it was in that region that he created many of his famous paintings, for example, “Morning in a pine forest”. Therefore, wherever I later went in my wanderings around Russia, in which hotel or dining room I did not go, it seemed to me - I am again at home: everywhere my relatives looked at me from the walls. These are now in vogue abstract triangles and circles. . .
And I was lucky that the famous writer Konstantin Simonov noticed my first poems, and that he bestowed on me his exacting friendship, which lasted until his death. And a little later, I was lucky to be friends and work alongside the great writer Viktor Astafiev. . .
I was lucky that many of my plays were staged in the best theaters of the USSR, and later in Russia, that my stories and stories were published in the best Russian journals, that I have not yet lost my mind and continue to write my books at a level that is quite worthy, as my colleagues say.
I know my faults - hot, hasty... but the first love - it is more important, and my first love, driving me crazy since childhood - is poetry. I still write poems when they come as wonderful guests in the middle of the night. But I also write plays - I have recently finished working on the tragic story of the "Regime of Aska" (about the loneliness of people), I write and prose - in the summer I hope to finish work on the novel "Enjoyment". What are you going to say in two words? Perhaps, about the great gift that was given to each of us by our father and mother, the Lord God and fate, about life, which, despite the abominations of existence, on our huge trials, is still a miracle and joy.
That's all. Half the time is spent on teaching (we must earn bread), on the publication of the journal “Day and Night”, which we established with V. P. Astafiev to help young Siberian writers, put them on the wing. This work is carried out by me and two or three of mine to gather on the pen, in fact, on a voluntary basis.
Of course, good deeds are punishable, there are colleagues who hiss maliciously at us. So they hissed at Astafiev (although they now pretend to be his favorite friends), so hiss at all who “in glasses” or “hat” – our tragic revolution, past the fact that it created a great empire, encouraged and all the dark in people.
Reading modern books, leafing through their own books with irritation, I sometimes think: if Yesenin had not hanged himself and shot himself Mayakovsky, did not rot in prison Mandelstam, did not die in exile Shmelev and Berdyaev, Ilyin and Brodsky, if they had not shot Pavel Vasilyev and climbed into the noose of Marina Tsvetaeva, if they had not broken the fate of Anna Akhmatova with her arrested son and Tvardovsky with his family exiled beyond the Urals, if! . . . . . . Alas, we have what we have. . .
It is a great happiness that the boy Astafyev did not die in the war, that the bandits did not kill Rasputin in the seventies in Krasnoyarsk (live remained), that there is still Alexander Solzhenitsyn, there is Mikhail Uspensky (Krasnoyarsk), Evgeny Popov (Moscow), Mikhail Vishnyakov (Chita), Valentin Kurbatov (Pskov), Mikhail Kuraev (Peter) ... will be recruited from a dozen Russian writers, whose works allow us to hope that a country with a great history will not turn into a third-rate hotel for foreigners. . .
Gotta work.