I started reading early - at four. Dad read me " Pinocchio" Alexei Tolstoy , and I am thrilled asked again and again. Mom I reread this book and I , looking over her shoulder , and he learned to read . Lesson is so fascinated me that I immediately began to read tales of Pushkin himself and Andersen , Perrault and Hoffman , Hauff and Afanasyev. But even more exciting was the nightly reading aloud my dad an hour and a half or two at bedtime , world classics - Dickens and Shakespeare, Balzac and Stendhal , Kipling and Rostand , Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky . Mayne Reid and Jack London , and Thackeray Galsworthy , Dumas and Victor Hugo , Cervantes and Twain.
My dad - Hereditary Petersburg intelligentsia - was brilliantly educated man . In his youth, he graduated from the elite Vyborg Commercial College , owned three European languages ​​, knew Latin and Greek , and the theory of rhythmic speech he attended the lectures of the Bloc . Later he graduated from college Stieglitz ( future Mukhina ) , then the Academy of Fine Arts in the class Dobuzhinskiy , Lebedev and Rudakov . He read wonderful poetry and prose - as a professional reciter .
My mother - Vera Denyakin - in 1939 graduated with honors from the Central Asian State University ( SAGA ) at the Faculty of Human Physiology and married my father , who was 12 years older than her. In May 1940 I was born , and a year later the war began.
Mother was a music man - she had a gramophone and record collection of classical music. Every day she sang me songs or arias from operettas, accompanying himself on the mandolin.
It so happened that I have never had any little brothers or sisters . All my love to the parents concentrated on me , and it shaped me as an artist and as a person. I grew up very sensitive and impressionable child. Parents told me that lying and stealing is not allowed. They themselves exactly what lived , but seething around another life, which initially caused me puzzled , and then a hot protest. But this protest had to hide - for reasons obscure to me . Father explained it this way . Man can not and should not fight the machine. Demonstrate and declare their opposition to the authorities - fun bad . If you are forced to live in a cage with a tiger , then bully him - not frivolous , and madness. You can , of course, shows tiger fig in the pocket - but , although it is safer to make much sense in this.
The relationship of the artist with the power to be a problem in all ages . Power has always sought to use any talented person for their own purposes - to promote the existing system. The poet also - their objectives and goals , and so he does not have time to implement because of the brevity of life. And then there's the need to keep the defense to power 'm not crushed .
Label rebel I was still in school. Did not realize how dangerous and inappropriate. Way of fighting the regime was not for me. Conformism way - too. I really do not want to spend time and effort on the confrontation with the Soviet authorities , realizing the futility of this lesson . Therefore dissident I've never been , never engaged in any subversive activities . Of course , this power I absolutely did not like and I were with her own accounts - but I treated it as a necessary evil , trying to find in it something good and useful for themselves. As said Nahum Korjavin all of us , Russian artists of hard times , I did not try to be an ascetic , I did not want to burn in the fire . I just had a Russian poet in the year , I inherited . And the other ruler of the minds of our generation quipped : "I gaze at the world from under the table. The twentieth century - a century of extraordinary . What are you interesting for the historian , the sadder for the contemporary . " Alas , alcoholism - this cap of invisibility , comforter creative people - half ruined my friends.
Another unfair label hung me from my youth - Mark garde . Although all of my "innovation" in the USSR consisted only in the fact that I dare to be yourself.
5 years and up to 11 I was drawing all around, like all children , trying to make like the fact that his father did . At 12 years old the first time I went with my dad to Moscow , and he showed me the world of French Impressionism , take me to the Pushkin Museum . I remember as a little before Degas pastel " Blue Dancers " I was like lightning struck . The whole world changed - I began to see it colored !
It was at that moment I decided to become an artist and only an artist . Parents , trying to keep me from the heavy fraction and ambiguous Soviet artist , dreamed that I have mastered the craft of the architect. But I was interested in Impressionism.
My dad was a graphic artist . Every day he went on sketching , sketching through the maze of streets and alley of old Tashkent . I accompanied him to three years . Under pencil father surrounding slums and mud wreck turned into a mysterious and romantic ruins, and old mosques , adapted for warehouses or factory shop - in the majestic and abandoned temples covered superhuman beauty ornament. Such was his St. Petersburg school . I unsuccessfully tried to imitate him . When I became a " impressionist " sounded familiar landscapes in color and are much more expressive and poetic .
Most first Early works Sasha. 1958g. - 1963 .