Dmitry Glukhovsky: Why is the novel “Text” perceived as absolutely reliable. Dmitry Glukhovsky: The omnipotence of the special services is always a harbinger of the last times

The famous Russian science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky came to Krasnoyarsk to present his new novel “Metro 2035”. Although, as it turns out, he can be beaten for the “fantasy” characteristic.

In an interview, Glukhovsky explained the reasons Russian writers they rarely travel around the country and meet with readers, whether there is journalism in Russia now and why young writers should not ask Glukhovsky for help.

– Have you come to tell Krasnoyarsk residents about your new novel? Tell us.

– The book was published on June 12 in Moscow. First I had a presentation there, then in St. Petersburg and Voronezh. Afterwards there were three cities in the Urals. Now the tour continues. In the fall I plan to Far East, and for now Siberia.

If we talk about the book, “Metro 2035” is the end of a trilogy that began 20 years ago, when I came up with it all at school. The first book on paper was published 10 years ago.

And the decision was not easy - to return to what began so long ago. take up new novel was a responsible decision for me. It was important that it didn’t turn out to be some kind of sequel, as often happens when a sequel is written out of necessity.

I thought for a long time about how “Metro 2035” would be, on the one hand, a continuation, and on the other, an independent work, which can be read separately from all previous books.

The task was not easy and not trivial. And I think everything worked out.

- Certainly. 10 years ago a different me wrote a book. The first book was so educational - a young man leaves his father’s house and searches for his purpose in life.

Now the idea of ​​the state of mind, how society is structured, the structure of power - all this has changed a lot. And it has changed in the last two years for obvious reasons - due to the events that have occurred in the life of our country.

Plus, the book is stylistically different. She has a different mood. She's more mature and realistic. This is not a fantasy novel.

I would rather call it a novel about Russian life. This is a book about why things are like this for us and why things will always be like this for us.

– But you are often called exclusively a science fiction writer...

– When a person calls me a science fiction writer, I immediately want to hit him with something heavy and stupid. Only two books out of all are exceptionally fantastic. The rest are a mix.

– Why do you have a predominant post-apocalyptic theme?

– When the Soviet Union collapsed, I was 12 years old. I grew up in some country that seemed unshakable to me. And suddenly all this crumbles to dust in one day.

Everything that generations of people believed in is recognized as invalid. All heroes become non-heroes. And the feeling of life on the ruins of an empire...

For me, unlike Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the collapse of the USSR is not a tragedy at all. For me, this is an interesting cultural experience from adolescence. You are trying to build a shack from the ruins of the empire.

And my fascination with post-apocalypticism was born from this feeling: there was a world that fell apart, and you survive on its rusty ruins.

– The reason is simple: 70% of all book sales take place in Moscow. And in the USA - throughout the country. Americans are a more reading nation than us. And they buy more books there.

If you write about Russia, you simply have to watch it. Last time I went six years ago - now I understand that my ideas are outdated.

Cities with a population of over a million have become more beautiful, people have dressed up, and everything is no longer the same as six years ago. Financially, such tours are practically not justified.

– How important is it for a writer to meet his reader face to face?

- I love. I am very grateful to my readers, I love meeting them. Moreover, all my books are available for free on the site and those people who buy paper books - I am really very grateful to them!

– You worked for RussiaToday, where the point of journalism is to show Russia as a successful country with a confident future. How would you generally assess the quality of journalism in modern Russia? All these patriotic talk shows and so on...

– When I switched from EuroNews to RussiaToday, this channel was created precisely in order to show freedom of the press in our country. There was noticeably more of it.

Nobody scolded Putin, but there was no whipping up of patriotic hysteria. And there was no whipping up of hysteria through hatred of other groups. Now everything is different.

Now we are good not because everything works out for us, but because we are surrounded by complete freaks. Americans are cannibals, Ukrainians are cannibals and Nazis. The Dutch and Germans are pedophiles. And against this background, we are the best.

For some reason, we are asked to be proud that we are a stronghold of spirituality. Although anyone over 18 years old understands that we are one of the most riotous peoples in the world!

When I started working for RussiaToday, everything was calmer. I did not have to sacrifice my principles, which I acquired at EuroNews: show one side of the conflict - show the other.

Now, of course, RussiaToday is an openly propaganda channel that simply “drives”, like all of our television. Especially talk shows on all channels are open propaganda of hatred towards Western countries.

There is no journalism today. Besides cultural, maybe. And political journalism has been replaced by propaganda that washes the brain.

- Let's return to literature. You published your novel “Metro 2033” on the Internet. This was a new and unusual move. How can today's young writers make themselves known?

– Now everything is more complicated. The Internet was not a mass phenomenon back then. Even in 2002, when I posted Metro 2033 online, there were no social networks or blogs.

There were guest books and home pages. And people were wildly afraid of the Internet. Beginning writers believed that the text would be stolen and published under a different name, and eminent writers were afraid that they would read everything and not buy the book in paper. And I had nothing to lose.

– How often do people send you manuscripts asking you to read and help with the first edition?

– I don’t advise or help anyone. I'm an asshole about this. I helped once and it started. I submitted the book to a familiar publishing house and this author loaded me with so many of his problems that I had to deal with his book, and not my own.

I did a good deed for a person, and they tried to sit on my neck. So I don’t help young writers - it’s a cruel world and everyone is for themselves.

– Is a successful writer an indicator of the quality of his literature?

- No. Firstly, the vast majority of readers are not able to assess the literary level of the author. Figurative language the reader finds it too complicated. Doesn't understand stylistic experiments. And he skims through philosophy.

Secondly, you need to understand that 10% of the country’s population reads. Of these 10%, another 10% understands literary delights. Successful literature is one that leaves an emotional response in the reader.

People buy books for the same reason they go to the movies - to fill an emotional deficit. They want to be someone else and through some concentrated story experience the emotions of another person. People sit on emotions, this main drug.

Sergey Sannikov

It is known that your great-grandfather was friends with Stalin’s personal doctor, and you, having trained as an international journalist in Israel, worked for Russia Today, were part of the Kremlin pool, and then once - the opposition. Why such a turn?

Well, this is not my turn, but Putin’s. You may have forgotten, but in the 2000s we were going to become civilized European state, strived for the future, not the past. And RT was initially created to show the West that everything is fine with freedom of speech. So, in all the years of working on the channel, I didn’t have to bend my heart in any particular way: it was enough to remain unbiased, to balance pro-Kremlin information with anti-Kremlin information. In the pool, the most interesting thing was to debunk the magic: there is nothing special about the Kremlin inhabitants. You can probably put anyone on the throne - and the gears will continue to turn. They were afraid that after Stalin’s death everything would collapse, but nothing collapsed, and life was much better under Khrushchev. What can we say about the leaders? new Russia. As for my opposition... Today I stand on the same rails on which I stood ten years ago, in fact. But the platform drove off in an unknown direction. During this time, we turned into an authoritarian police state, we were banned from social and political life, we were strangling the Internet, we were put on a strict collar, we fed or physically eliminated all the opposition, the TV went crazy and sprayed poison, we fell out with both the CIS and the West. We went to Europe and came to Kolyma. It's time to stop pretending.

Dmitry Glukhovsky. Photo: Alena Pozevalova, www.om1.ru

Are you trying not to leave a trace? Or is it already useless because Big Brother has already counted everyone? How is Big Data changing us? Should you be afraid of search engines, social networks and your own smartphones?

It seems to me that resistance is futile. If the intelligence services become seriously interested in someone, there is no way to hide yourself from them. Phones are hacked, computers are hacked, any gadget can be wiretapped, you can spy on a person through a webcam, you can know what porn he watches, with whom he is cheating on whom, and find out all his business details. People are worried that it is now more difficult for them to be hypocrites, but this only leads to the fact that they stop hiding their real essence. When collecting incriminating evidence cannot be avoided, you need to admit your human weaknesses, and this will make you invulnerable. Do you think you're the only one watching porn? Yes, all the girls are watching it today. Do you think you're the only one with a mistress? Yes, monogamy has disappeared from the world in general. But this does not mean that love has disappeared. It's just time for us to stop pretending to be someone else, it's time to become ourselves. At all times, the state and the church have tried to take control of our personal life, limit it with many prohibitions, declare any form of sexual behavior, except those aimed directly at procreation, as perversion. Make people feel guilty. Whoever is at fault is obedient, he does not argue with the authorities, he either plays along with it, or sits quietly and does not blather. This alone is the whole meaning of the so-called struggle for morality. In general, I am convinced that the more fiercely a politician or religious figure fights for morality, the more vicious he is. If you want to remain under their thumb, sit in the closet, be afraid of exposure, which is still inevitable in the world of social networks and big data. Be yourself and be free.

- Do you consider Snowden to be the last romantic of the Earth?

Is Snowden a romantic? Don't know. But he did a great and necessary job, in the interests of civil society worldwide. It is tragic, of course, that in the end he ended up in our clawed paws, from which everything he recites sounds much less convincing. But this is not as sad as being Assange and cuckooing in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Do you know Pavel Durov? They say that his Telegram is the most inaccessible for the special services, to whom Durov, after taking away VKontakte, refuses to reciprocate.

I happened to communicate with him in person once. “Vkontakte” was taken away from him because Durov is a joker, an unpredictable player, who also has ambitions and his own ideology that are too big for a manager. Such a person cannot be left in control of the most powerful media in the country, which is VK. Next is a matter of technology. As for Telegram, I have heard different opinions about its reliability. I think, with a strong desire, correspondence specific person can be hacked. In any case, it is more reliable than any Russian messenger and than the Belarusian Viber, about which knowledgeable people They told me that he has servers in Lubyanka.

Despite total transparency and a facial recognition system, people are prohibited from gathering on the street. What are they afraid of?

The authorities are effective in their concern for stopping threats. Threat yourself first. First, the parliamentary opposition was castrated, and now the LDPR, A Just Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation are simply subdepartments of the party in power, fat, sleepy cats. Then the oligarchs were flogged and sworn in. The governors' teeth were pulled out. All that remains is to clear the street - the embodiment of a nightmare since the Maidan. For this reason, they invented a multitude of senseless pioneers, from the “Young Guard” to “Nashi”, and drove idlers and young opportunists there. Then they started feeding football fans and bikers, Cossacks and just some thugs, they came up with the Russian Guard and gave it the right to shoot at the crowd, at women and at minors, they adopted a host of repressive laws, staged show trials and launched an attack on the Internet. People in power are afraid of only one thing: losing it. There aren't any idiots in our country who think that we have real elections? Well, the politicians we supposedly elect know their value very well. Despite all the royal army - the riot police and the National Guard, the incessant propaganda on TV, the battalions of political strategists who are hired to help the authorities fool the people and keep them in line - these people feel great self-doubt and do not believe in the sincerity of eighty-six percent .

- Do you think the election result is definitely predetermined? Or can everything suddenly go wrong?

Putin will be elected, Navalny will not be allowed in, the communists and Zhirinovites will stand on all fours in their usual ritual of submission, Putin will be elected by detached Tajiks and Caucasian state employees with a result of 75%. Putin will be in power until he dies of old age. We will turn into a cozy Central Asian monarchy. This is true stability.

That is, everything is the same as before, but with new technologies? Should we then expect that our president will start, for example, a YouTube channel before the elections?

Why does a person who has already created several channels on central television need YouTube? For schoolchildren, he is still a grandfather. TV viewers will vote for Putin.

But the TV seems to have already died, rolled into asphalt by the Internet, and normal person this should make you happy.

TV has never died; it is more alive than all living things. We fell in love with Crimea through TV, changed our minds about condemning the authorities for theft, and through it we have been fighting with Ukraine for three years. TV can do something that the Internet has never learned to do: forge mythology, create entire imaginary worlds and move peoples into them Russian Federation. And people can understand: we have such scary tale and such a sad reality that one can escape from them into the myth of rising from one’s knees great empire God himself commanded us.

Well, bloggers who have eclipsed writers in the hearts of those in power - we started with this - isn’t this fundamentally new?

All these channels are already several years old, actually. It was the presidential administration that just noticed them - because some schoolboy was noticed at the rally on March 26th. And now we urgently need to tame the shkolota, because suddenly she will overthrow the king. Let's find school Mamontov and school Solovyov, bribe them, like adults Solovyov and Mamontov, with money and the feeling of being chosen, massage their sense of their own greatness - and let Sasha Spielberg and Ivangay put on T-shirts with patriotic prints and do “ku” twice. Then, of course, the schoolboys will follow them and renounce the devil and will no longer think of hanging around at rallies. And rightly so - there is no point in tempting the Russian Guard.

Glukhovsky was the first Russian author, who posted his book publicly available online. He was then writing his first “Metro” and delivering it piece by piece. This was back in 2002. Today he is one of the most successful and - it happens! - independent writers of Russia.

dates

2002 - start of work on the Euronews channel in Lyon

2005 - the first book “Metro 2033” was published

2007 - made the world's first TV report from the North Pole

2011 - became the father of a girl named Emilia

The World Cup is an excellent backdrop for tough pension reform

- Dmitry, what can you say about the football championship? Are you a fan?

No. Completely indifferent to football. Because of this, of course, I always feel a little inadequate with all the euphoria that has unfolded. In addition, my grandfather, for example, is a crazy Spartak fan to the point of a heart attack. And other relatives, who are 75 years old, enthusiastically watch basketball matches. What is there to see there?!

But from everything I see, I am pleased that Russia has opened itself to the world. True, experience shows that these discoveries occur on the eve of some kind of compression and enclosure, that then all this is remembered as some kind of dream in summer night. This happened with the 1980 Olympics, which took place at the beginning of our invasion of Afghanistan - and then international isolation followed. And the Sochi Games also seemed like an integration into the global world of friendly and open Russia- and were exactly on the threshold of 2014 with its Crimea, Donbass and our new isolation. And now everything seems to be so good, and all these crazy Mexicans and Uruguayans are having fun in the streets, and we suddenly turned out to be kind, and not uptight and embittered, and our cops are not chasing anyone. And everyone was allowed in without visas, including, apparently, “MI6 spies” - and nothing was wrong. That is, one could simply unclench the sphincter, so to speak, and nothing monstrous would happen. But the ability to learn lessons and project them into the future makes one suspect that something bad is going to happen right now. Once we finish, we celebrate, everyone leaves and then they will never come here again. All this may be the last time.

- Is this shit already prepared? After all, the annexation of Crimea was prepared much in advance.

With Crimea, everything was carried out brilliantly from a logistical point of view, including bought or intimidated local politicians. So there was a plan in advance. Donbass is a different matter. It's a mess there and no one can do anything. Neither attach nor detach. Some kind of fermentation of the masses. It is clear that people did not have a plan.

Well, what was planned to be held under the guise of a championship is already taking place - an increase in VAT and the retirement age. This decision, I think, was made a long time ago. People were simply brainwashed with some other, redundant projects in advance, in preparation for announcing a real tough decision right now. It is clear that football emotions are an excellent background for such things.

Shenderovich once again incurred anger by saying that if such a great championship were held in a more decent country, there would be more joy.

I really want to be happy for Russia, of course. But after the Sochi Games there were no normal reasons for joy. Because Crimea is the joy of Cain's victory over Abel. Hitting your brother in the back of the head with a rock and taking something away from him is a great victory, yeah. Moreover, it turned out that all the joy about our Sochi victories was in vain, because we cheated, of which I am sure.

When you understand the socio-political structure of the Russian Federation and understand what kind of mentality the people at the helm have, who they are essentially, according to their past - yes, you understand, these people could, justifying themselves in any way they wanted, resort to any scam in on any scale.

In Soviet times, the party and the KGB opposed and competed with each other. And now there is the omnipotence of the special services, which, in principle, is always a harbinger of the last times. When the Praetorians - and these are actually the special services - began to come to power in Rome, these were already the last, sunset times for Rome. People who are engaged in security, entrenchment, searching for threats, people who are professionally suspicious - they cannot, are not capable of leading the country forward.

- But Putin communicates with young people and talks about the future.

Political strategists are trying to invent an image of the future for Putin, but they cannot. Simply because he's not talking about that at all. It is about protection and conservation, about neutralizing threats. This is what he does very well. And the political field around him has been completely cleared. The oligarchs are all under control. He who is not brought under control has hanged himself; he who has not hanged himself is sitting in Switzerland, and he has lost his teeth. The politicians either cooperate, or are shot, or leave the clearing, realizing that there is nothing to catch. And in principle, this is not even a dictatorship; it is a rather mild authoritarian regime in comparison with Pinochet. We don’t even need to be whipped with rods - we ourselves try to be quieter.

Medvedev is sabotaging

- According to a recent survey, 51% of Russians hope that Putin will be president in 2024.

Well, listen, Putin is a symbolic figure. People are ill-informed and deceived by television. Medvedev is responsible for all the failures and tightening of the screws - people do not understand that no decisions, especially related to living standards and taxes, can be made without Putin delving into the issue. Without his veto or approval. He is a very informed person. But he has wrong priorities, from my point of view. People live in a world of myth, not seeing cause-and-effect relationships. And this division into the right king and the abusive boyars is our eternal monstrous naivety.

No matter who you talk to, you will hear: “Putin is handsome.” I can even judge by my own family. Grandfathers and grandmothers blame Medvedev for all troubles. They think that he is the one doing the sabotage on his own.

This whole Putin story is an eternal missed opportunity. Although his decision with Crimea was a well-thought-out multi-step - in order to get past the emerging economic crisis and at the same time not allow Ukraine into NATO. Coupled with the television pus that has overwhelmed us here, everything worked. We swallowed the halving of the ruble and the standard of living without falling out of love with Putin and learning to eat ersatz cheese. But! Taking Crimea and losing Ukraine forever was, of course, a monstrous failure. Because we kind of grabbed Crimea and forgot, but for them it’s a huge bleeding wound. Which causes both pain and suffering. We alienated the Ukrainians, perhaps forever. This is total idiocy. We took a useless, unnecessary piece of land and lost the fraternal people with whom we are connected by a thousand years of common history. Not just friendship, as with Venezuela, but mutual penetration at the level of families, cultures, everyday life, history.

What Russian hasn't dreamed of marrying a Ukrainian girl? And what Ukrainian didn’t work in Russia when he was young? And whoever has not traveled to Odessa has no heart. These were generally the people closest to us. All our graters were at the level of “Muscovites”, “Khokhlovs” and jokes about lard - the most innocent story. And what is this all for?

Everything is clear to me with Ksenia Sobchak

You once wrote that we never became Europeans due to imperial pride and complexes. But seriously?

Our story is completely different. Europeans civil revolutions and the process of crystallization of a citizen who demands respect, who believes that he has rights, occurred 200 years ago. Except that the Germans then went into collective insanity. In our country, revolution has a different etymology. And instead of civil society, a new serfdom emerged. We once again found ourselves in slavery to the privileged class. This is repeated and repeated. Only the privileged class has changed - criminals and demagogues have come to power. But we never became citizens.

But still, people who are now 20 and 30 years old are not the same 20-year-olds who were in the Soviet Union. So it is a question of the emergence of an unharmed generation. But our government is trying to fool the current generation of young people. All people involved in youth politics should burn in hell!

-Have you watched the film Sobchak about Sobchak?

Watched. A very boring movie. There's one there good hero- this is Putin. He is reliable and wonderful - that’s why he is the successor, and not because he understood that our politics are based on the games of the special services and crime. Everything is now completely clear with Ksenia Anatolyevna. We understand everything, thank you.

- You once asked Voinovich to draw a utopia for Russia in 2100. He then laughed it off. Can you do it yourself?

Free, prosperous, with healthy capitalism and a measure of social responsibility. the main problem- keeping such a gigantic country like Russia from collapse in the future. Now this is being resolved with the help of the FSB. We have a case for every boss. As long as you are our man, do whatever you want, kill people, go to the sauna with prostitutes, take bribes. But you know that daddy is saving up. Instead, we need federalism, an independent judiciary and competition between government bodies. And most importantly, its changeability. Forced change of power after 4 or maximum 8 years. That's the whole point by and large. And this whole story “If not Putin, then who?” - this is how some remember how Stalin was quickly forgotten and thrown out of the mausoleum - he did not justify the trust. So it would be nice for us to develop a little, like an ordinary country. Poland could be a good example for us.

Medvedev even tried to take us to some other place to see it. True, he spoke more than he did, but the rhetoric was better - there was no trench in which one was supposed to sit. And without Putin, neither famine nor locusts happened. And the mood was better. But Dimon cheated us. Putin came and changed everything in his own way, as in the joke about a husband and a lover. And instead of a utopia, I think we will slowly smolder and rot.

- But he said that there would be an economic breakthrough and everything would be fine.

It doesn't matter what Putin said. The only thing that matters is what Putin does, because his words are in every case at odds with his actions. Putin is a man whose power is based on the disorientation of everyone - both “partners” and the population of the Russian Federation. He very often tells lies. While he is mystifying, he is unpredictable. As soon as it became transparent, that’s it, it opened up for the strike.

Honesty does not require heroism

It so happens that in our country literature is given great importance. When you write, do you think about artistic value or is a book just a consumer product?

Noooo. You can’t treat a book like a product. For me it the only way self-realization. In general, I don’t do anything else - I write books and dabble a little in journalism. And if I start to waste my time and cliché, stop trying to surpass myself yesterday, to summarize what I understand, then I will become nonsense. It's a matter of proving to yourself what you're worth. That's why I try to write a different book every time. It's boring to repeat yourself.

Well, I was lucky, I accidentally discovered the formula for success and at the age of 27 I already had large circulations and translations.

- What will be your next book?

There will be two very different ones. One is about artificial intelligence. And the second is such magical realism on Russian soil. Everyone says: you’re a cosmopolitan, you lived there and lived there, and your dad is from Arbat, from a medical dynasty. It’s clear that I was a city boy, but at the same time, there is a powerful Russian component in me, right at the core. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the summer in a real village house with a well, a canopy, a washbasin, with cucumbers in greenhouses, with beetles and slugs in cabbage. I spent all the holidays there. There is a completely different attitude towards life and death. In a big city we are completely isolated from death. We don't see funeral processions. In our country, the dead are fussily carried out of the entrance in zipped bags. And there is a cemetery within the city limits, and the coffin on a ZIL with lowered red sides is driving through the entire city. Your dead relatives don’t seem to disappear there. They appear to you in dreams, give you everyday advice, and something else. Because of this, there is no feeling of irreversibility and finality of existence.

- Will it be straight Marquez-Marquez?

I do not know yet. But Cortazar, Marquez and Borges are my tribute.

- You will be forty in a year. Maybe it's time to change your life strategy?

Horrible, yes. But I had a life strategy from the very beginning. Taking over the Universe. Through stories, gain power over minds. Power in the vulgar sense - over human resources and financial flows - does not interest me at all. She spoils people, but I don’t want to spoil myself, in principle I like myself and have built everything so that I don’t depend on anyone.

I was offered to join the Human Rights Council under the President, and I was invited to join the Cultural Council. They invited me to meetings like “Putin and Writers.” And I didn't go anywhere. Because when they try to feed you, it is always temptation and temptation. It’s not that I’m some kind of desperate oppositionist, I don’t carry out subversive activities, but it’s very important for me to maintain freedom of thought and judgment. When you start feeding from someone's hand, you can no longer bite it. This is clearly evident from the different writers we have. This is about the role of literature in our lives. Literature, with total propaganda in the big media, remains the last space of freedom where an honest discussion on important topics is possible.

- By the way, you could be good politician.

No no no. I can't and I don't want to. It would break me. I can't stand so many compromises. Either they will kill you, really break your back, or you yourself will make it worse and be reborn into something else. For what? I believe that maintaining a certain level of honesty in judgment in our times does not require much heroism. When everyone is wildly lying, and you simply call black black and white white - it seems like some kind of courage and originality. Although you haven't done anything incredible.

Being Navalny - yes, it requires heroism. I wouldn't want it that way. I have always been interested not so much in the detailed structure of power, which I am quite squeamish about, but in the degeneration of a person from the people who has come to power. Violence, lies, manipulation - and a person decays through permissiveness and impunity. I have several books about this.

P.S. At the very end of the interview, Glukhovsky asked: “So, can you publish all this directly in the newspaper?” Well, let's publish it.

The material was published "Interlocutor" No. 26-2018 under the heading “Criminals and demagogues have come to power. But we never became citizens.”

Deutsche Welle:Apart from biographical and journalistic things, "Text" - your firsta novel about the present, about today's life in Russia. What prompted you to take it up?

Dmitry Glukhovsky: Over time, I got the impression that no matter what fantasies I indulged in about the future of Russia and no matter what utopian metaphors I used to describe Russian reality, reality was still more fantastic, more desperate and more absurd than my most amazing fantasies. We have written so much about the past, often with a desire to whitewash it, and about the future - most often with fear of tomorrow! But about today, there are, unfortunately, almost no cutting-edge things that would be about us, about conversations on the trolleybus, about newspaper headlines and about the main problems of today. And I decided that I needed to speak out.

- One of the German newspapers, reviewing" Text" , wrote that the author is being butchered, dealing with political system Putin. How strong is the political component in the novel?

In fact, paradoxically, this book is the least political of all my books. I used to very actively use futuristic metaphors to talk about the political component of today. For example, in “Metro 2033” my people did not want to leave the bunker in which they were sitting, twenty years after the Third World War, still refusing to believe that the war was over. This, of course, had direct relation to the situation in society as a result of the annexation of Crimea, to the vulnerability Russian society for militaristic propaganda, which again used language cold war. Now - as a result of propaganda - society is very politicized and politicized in a specific way, that is, some completely illusory picture of the world has been created for it, by which it should be distracted from current, everyday, everyday, economic problems.

In "Text" politics runs in the background. But in much to a greater extent the novel is about society, about people, about the situation they find themselves in today. Moreover, it’s not even about the lack of freedom, because, from my point of view, people in Russia have certain personal freedoms, only political freedoms are missing.

The main problem of today's Russian society is different. This is the disdain of those who belong to the power caste (here we are talking about politicians, and officials, and security forces, and representatives of the pro-government press, and the pro-government church), for all other people, their complete unwillingness to obey the laws of morality. People belonging to this ruling caste are so unpunished, so privileged, that they do not want to admit the existence of any restraining factors at all, they refuse to believe that there is good and evil, truth and falsehood. Any person who watches TV in Russia, reads newspapers, sees without my help that those in power lie, that they steal, that, when caught red-handed, they are never even embarrassed, that they are ready to justify murder if the goal is in their opinion, justifies it.

And the other caste, the second, lower caste, are ordinary, simple people. They are completely powerless. They have no guarantees of any rights, not even the right to life, not to mention the right to property. At any moment, by decision of any authority or by the arbitrariness of a particular official or security officer, everything can be taken away from them. A person can lose his freedom and, in some extreme cases, even his life. And then no one will be able to prove anything. And cynics impose on these ordinary people ideas about justice and injustice, good and evil, about some higher mission of Russia. This is probably the main political component of the book, which is reflected in the plot. In the story, let me remind you, a guy from a simple family, a student of the Faculty of Philology, comes into conflict in a nightclub with a man who works in the drug police. And he is punished by having drugs planted on him and being sent to prison for seven years - without the opportunity to justify himself.

Context

- What role does Moscow play in this caste and social antagonism?, contrast between Moscow and the rest of Russia? Moscow looks like a kind of anti-hero or anti-heroine of a novel...

Moscow is my favorite city. It's not difficult to love her. Moscow is the richest, fattest city in Russia, the most well-groomed, the most favored, bribed by the authorities. After all, revolutions, as we know, take place in capitals, and in order to prevent these revolutions, it is necessary to appease the residents of the capital in every possible way. And the rest of the country (with the possible exception of million-plus cities, which, with some delay, are following Moscow) is stuck somewhere in the mid-nineties. This is a poor country. People are forced to take out loans at extortionate interest rates in order to buy the things they need or simply survive from paycheck to paycheck; they don’t see any special prospects in life. I myself am from Moscow, but my mother is from near Kostroma, and I have many relatives there who are clear example how people live outside the capital.

- Much of the novel's action takes place on a smartphone. Is this just a sign of the times or something more?

This is primarily a sign of the times. If we write about the present, then it was impossible to do without a smartphone. But there's another one important thing. The smartphone provides an excellent opportunity for transformation. Thus, the central character of the novel, having taken possession of the smartphone of the person he killed, gradually takes his place, becomes him.

The way it is. Here, however, it should be noted that social media really different. They were very flaky. If, say, VKontakte is a medium informal communication, related to leisure, then Facebook has indeed reserved the place of the intellectual kitchen of the Brezhnev era, where people gather, discuss political, social, economic problems... This is where the heated discussions take place. AND for the most part They don’t spill out beyond Facebook, just as they didn’t spill out beyond dissident, frontier kitchens forty years ago. Facebook remains, despite political provocateurs, trolls, and so on, an island of freedom.

- How they perceivenovel" Text" Russian readers and spectators (a play based on the novel was staged at the Ermolova Theater)?

Of all the reactions that I heard, the most flattering for me was the assessment of the novel as completely realistic. What is described there is perceived as absolutely possible. There is nothing fantastic in the fact that a guy who cannot pay off the police, investigators and prosecutors ends up behind bars on false charges, there is nothing impossible in the fact that he has been sitting in a camp for seven years, there is nothing impossible in a conflict between a random person and law enforcement system - and not even with the system itself, but with some of its random representatives. It was important for me that all this was completely reliable - both psychologically and factually. This is the most important thing: no one doubts the reality of what is happening. Many people believe that this story really happened.

See also:

• The history of Teriberka begins in the 16th century, when fishermen began to settle here. But the village began to actively develop already in the 19th century: the first school and a paramedic station appeared here. In the 20s of the 20th century, the Soviet government created a collective farm. In the 60s, 5,000 people lived in Teriberka, but now there are only 600 left.



The director of the Teriber House of Culture says that 15 years ago, when the devastation began, journalists often came to them: “A boy in a black coat came running, as it turned out, the NTV company, burst into my office and asked: “Well, what’s wrong with you? It’s okay, why did I come?” When we saw this report, people stopped giving interviews.”



Ten years ago, the only school in Teriberka was closed because there were only 50 students left. Now children drive or walk, depending on your luck, to school in the neighboring village of Lodeynoye, five kilometers away.



IN closed school, which is in the village, children play: with reagents in the former chemistry classroom, with molecular structures in the former physics classroom, or simply run through the books and educational tables with which the floor is covered.



All teachers were “optimized”, that is, they were simply made redundant; many are now also forced to travel to neighboring Lodeynoye or sit without work altogether.



Lodeynoye was formed in the middle of the last century as a workers’ settlement. It has nothing to do with antiquity. People settled there who came from all over the country to service ship repair shops and a fish factory. When perestroika began and the villages were united, it was as if they had forgotten about these five kilometers between them.



From the school window you can see a farm with cows. In the mornings, in the store, which is also a kind of branch of Russian Post, you can buy milk and cottage cheese. The store that appears in the film "Leviathan" is old, it was opened to create an ambiance.



When Teriberka grew, the local cemetery was moved further away, beyond the territory of the village, and a hospital was built on the site of the old one. But now it also looks like the buildings in Pripyat. An ambulance is called from a neighboring village. If it’s really bad, they take you to Murmansk 120 kilometers away.

“I wanted to become a writer immediately, without putting it off until “when I grow up.” My father worked at the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company in the editorial office of broadcasting to Yugoslavia. He was both a reporter and an editor, and at the same time earned money by translating Serbian poetry into Russian. All evenings he sat in the kitchen, smoking and drumming on his Olympia. I would wait until dad left for work and grab his typewriter. As soon as he walked out the door, I was heading to Olympia. Blank sheet paper and began to hit the keys with all his might: otherwise the letters would not be printed. Sometimes I missed with a swing - and my childish fingers slipped between the keys. It hurt, it even tore off the skin. But I realized that writing is inextricably linked with suffering.

- What did mom do?

- Mainly through my nutrition and upbringing. My parents studied together at the journalism department of Moscow State University, and then my mother went to TASS photo chronicle as a photo editor and archivist. True, she did not work there for long. She became pregnant, went on maternity leave, and I turned out to be a rather sickly child. Due to endless bronchitis, I almost didn’t go to the garden, and my mother, accordingly, didn’t go to work. To improve my health, I was often sent to my mother’s parents in Kostroma region, to the city of Manturovo. Regional center for 33 thousand inhabitants, semi-rural, semi-pastoral, own house, garden of 20 acres. I didn't just breathe there fresh air- All the responsibilities of a person living on earth extended to me. I collected Colorado potato beetles from potatoes and slugs from cabbage. There was a real Russian stove in the house, and we cooked food in it, baked pies - I baked it too, by the way. When I got older, I started fetching water from the well.

— Quite an unexpected immersion into traditional Russian life for a Muscovite.

— Especially considering that my father is from a professorial medical dynasty. Imagine, two completely different worlds: Mantura’s grandparents have a well and a stove, and Moscow’s have an Arbat apartment with four-meter ceilings. It belonged to my great-grandfather, a professor of medicine, a urologist who treated party bosses, even Beria, it seems. Beria abused women. Based on his hobbies, he even specially organized All-Union competition gymnasts and became his - and their - patron. Great-grandfather was friends with Professor Vovsi, Stalin’s personal physician, who in 1953 became the main defendant in the “Doctors’ Case” - the last chord Stalin's repressions. A case was then initiated against a number of medical luminaries. Both the doctors themselves and their family members were arrested. My great-grandfather would also certainly have fallen under this flywheel if he had not died of a stroke shortly before the start of the repression. Thus, our family was not exiled anywhere and everyone remained to live in their Arbat apartment. Under my great-grandfather, it seems to have been a five-room apartment, but when the daughters grew up, they divided it, and my grandmother Nina Yakovlevna already had a two-room apartment. I describe it in the novel “Twilight” - old, with high ceilings and ancient furniture made of Karelian birch.

First, my grandmother married geologist Marat Zinovievich Glukhovsky. By the way, he also appears in my stories. I have a book “Stories about the Motherland”, and one of its characters - a geologist, doctor of science, like my grandfather - while exploring the bowels of the earth, opens the gates to hell. This is my own grandfather. Due to constant expeditions, his relationship with his grandmother completely deteriorated, and she divorced him when my father was little. She married the main artist of the Krokodil magazine, Andrei Porfiryevich Krylov, the son of a painter and caricaturist who, with friends Mikhail Kupriyanov and Nikolai Sokolov, created the famous group “Kukryniksy”. This grandfather, my father’s stepfather, is like my own, I love him very much and always listened to his stories with my mouth open. He traveled all over the Union in his time - he visited Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Chukotka and Kamchatka, all the countries of the socialist camp, and flew to Cuba four times. And from each trip he brought impressions, souvenirs and sketches, which he later turned into oil paintings, and made friends all over the world. And my mom and dad and I lived in Strogino in an ordinary sixteen-story panel building, in an apartment with an area of ​​thirty-something meters, with synthetic brown carpets and standard Romanian furniture - the whole country was filled with sideboards like ours. Apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, in which we are talking now, is my attempt to reconstruct the one in Arbat. When renovating it, I tried very hard to make it the same in spirit and in detail.

- Wow. I thought that you inherited it in approximately this form. There's a feeling in it family nest, where everything is preserved for decades.

“When remaking it, I didn’t just rely on my memory, but took my grandfather to the construction market to select colors. In this sense main pride- hallway: it is exactly the same terracotta color as it was on Arbat. And the furniture here is from my great-grandfather - the sideboard, table and chairs are a hundred and fifty years old, the mirror is generally over two hundred.

I not only came to visit the Arbat apartment, but also lived there for three years when I studied at junior classes. I was sent to a nearby French special school - it was our family school: my father went to it before me, and my grandmother before him, although in her time it was not a special school, but a girls’ gymnasium. It took a long time to get there from my parents, from Strogin, and from my grandparents I only had to cross the Arbat diagonally.

“It’s still a pity when a child doesn’t live with his mother.” Have you ever thought about enrolling you in a school near your place of residence?

“I was enrolled in a school in Strogin, I spent a year in grade zero, and then the teacher told my parents: “The boy has talent, don’t cripple him with our school.” I started reading and writing at two and a half years old, by the age of five three digit numbers I added and subtracted in my head, their program really wasn’t very interesting to me. In general, I showed hope: my grandparents thought that I would grow up to be a great scientist and that I would receive a Nobel Prize. Eh, I feel like I’m letting them down, they won’t see my Nobel Prize as their ears! In fact, I don’t think that I have any outstanding abilities - they just worked with me a lot, developed them. My daughter Emilia is four years old, and she has also been reading and writing since she was three years old, even earlier - because we also study a lot with her. After all, it is absolutely clear that if you develop a child’s abilities, then by the age of five he will quite easily master the school curriculum of grade up to the third. The first two years it was so easy for me at school that I completely let myself go, all I did was talk in class, and in middle school I started getting C grades. It got better in seniors, but I still got two C marks on my certificate.

— It’s funny, if it’s in Russian and literature.

- No, for them, of course, A's. I had no luck with physics and astronomy: I got into a clinch with the teacher. She seemed nice, and then all of a sudden she set the trouban, I didn’t even have time to understand what was happening. But in general, the teachers initially did not expect exemplary studies from me and exemplary behavior, because they remembered my dad very well. He was a hooligan, boxed, fought, and smoked in the alleys from the age of six, but at the same time he was, apparently, an absolutely charming child, because everyone loved him, despite his difficult character and a long list of sins.

- And you, too, from the first grade, ran into the gateway during recess to smoke - in the same one as dad?

- No, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t box, and in general I’m a completely different person. With friends, I came up with games two or three times, which everyone then played for several years. At first our entire class was drawn into the game, then the fashion spread to parallel classes and so on. When I read “Conduit and Schwambrania” by Lev Kassil, my friend and I came up with our own states with their own monetary system, between which there were complex diplomatic relations, wars broke out. Soon a variety of states were founded in each class - and the game went on and on! I also developed a modified version of the Cossack Robbers.

During the collapse Soviet Union a wild fashion for obscurantism began. I read in the magazine “Question Mark” about bioframes - the wires with which they were looking for underground springs water, answered questions - and we made these bioframes and ran around with them, looked for each other in the yards, guessed the codes to other people's entrances. By the way, it worked. And then we all started writing science fiction novels. Even poor students wrote. Why, even the football players began to compose something fantastic!

— I came up with games that everyone then played for several years. In the photo - the one on the far left. Photo: From the personal archive of Dmitry Glukhovsky

— Did you start working in that genre at the age of three?

- No. As a child, I mostly wrote about politics. About Lenin - I had remixes from patriotic literature that was read to us in kindergarten and which I studied on my own. There were also journalistic essays about how in the Soviet Union everything is sprouting ears, wheat is ripening, computers are doing calculations, steamship factories are smoking, and life is steadily getting better. I don’t know where I got this from - either I re-read my dad’s materials, or I watched TV. But I became interested in science fiction only in middle school - first with Bulychev, then with the Strugatskys - and soon our endless science fiction novels began to appear in notebooks with 48 squared pages. Because more text fit into the box and it looked more solid, more mature than a ruler.

— Did they buy you a personal typewriter by that time?

— Dad switched to the electric Yatran, and gave the old mechanical one to me.

— It’s beautiful and symbolic: a typewriter passes from a writing father to a writing son. By the way, did your parents take your creativity seriously?

- IN school years no one believed that I was actually determined to become a writer. The elders, especially my father, encouraged me to study to become a financier or economist, although I have no ability to exact sciences. But the strength of my father’s conviction was such that I still studied economics for a year. With each lesson there it became more and more boring and incomprehensible. I always sat in the front rows to make eyes at the beautiful young teacher, but even that didn’t work: my eyes stuck together and I fell asleep. And statistics in general were a complete nightmare for me! And not only are the subjects terrible, but they are also in Hebrew - I studied in Israel.

- Why there? Some kind of special Faculty of Economics?

- That's not the point. I had an example to follow - my grandfather, a journalist and traveler, who had traveled to a bunch of countries and felt like a citizen of the world. In addition, I graduated from school in 1996, when Russia began to open up to the world, everyone began to travel a lot more, and I really wanted to live and study abroad. But we couldn’t afford foreign countries like England or the USA, and a year of study at the University of Jerusalem cost $3 thousand - this was a more acceptable option. I wanted to study journalism, but there is no separate journalism department there - only a large faculty of social sciences, and it has different directions, from which I chose journalism and economics. And with journalism, everything worked out wonderfully, although the teaching was not at all the same as ours: without studying language and literature, it was very applied - work with all mass media, psychology, areas of law related to journalism.

— And everything is in Hebrew too?

- Well, yes. I arrived a year before admission, I just learned the language for six months, the other six months I studied preparatory courses, and then studied along with the locals.

— Did everything turn out as you dreamed?

— According to my parents’ stories, I imagined student life crazy fun and great time, but for me it turned out to be more of a school of life and hardening. I started studying at the age of 17, and Israelis first serve in the army for three years, are demobilized at 21-22, then travel around the world and work and go to university at 23-24. That is, everyone around me was five years older than me, much more experienced and with completely different

mentality is average between American and Arab. I really liked it there, but I still felt like an alien.

Working in France on the EuroNews channel was much more like the student life sung by my parents. I arrived there at the age of 22, after graduating from university, I started as an editor, and at the end I switched to correspondent work. I learned what I could and should learn there in a few days, and then it was very easy. By that time, I spoke four foreign languages, and all of them came in handy, since there was an international team there. The first year and a half was terribly interesting, but I have one problem: the monotonous work gets boring for me. After working for three years at EuroNews, I returned to Russia and got a job at the Russia Today TV channel.

— Has work and life become more interesting?

- More fun. I have visited everywhere - the North Pole, Chernobyl, and hot spot was once. On the Lebanese-Israeli border, when Israel was at war with Hezbollah. I sat under mortar fire for two weeks, reporting. But this, of course, does not make me a military commander - so, an individual interesting experience. Some guys, my former colleagues, never came out of the war at all; now they are working as reporters in the Donbass. This kind of work changes a person: he becomes hardened, some feelings become dulled, and he becomes dependent on adrenaline. Israeli acquaintances who served in the army said: “You crawl around Lebanon for five days, sit in ambush with a machine gun, ready to be picked off by snipers at any moment, and then return home for two days to Tel Aviv and, as if through a dusty bag, you look at everything as if in a dream. Real life is at war, but in a peaceful city there is no sense of the reality of what is happening.”

— Was that the most dangerous business trip?

— Judging by the consequences, the most dangerous was an innocent trip to Guatemala as part of the presidential pool. When we arrived, we were treated to a cocktail at the hotel on the occasion of our arrival - and he turned out to have jaundice! Seven journalists and seven people from the presidential press service were seriously injured. Moreover, the cocktail included two different strains of hepatitis - the first had a shorter incubation period, the second had a longer incubation period, so we first got sick with one variety, and then the other. But, fortunately, food-borne hepatitis is curable, unlike those that are contracted through the blood. So I was cured, I just had to give up fatty and fried foods. And with alcohol. But it was in Guatemala - after a six-month stupor - that I managed to complete the Twilight novel. You know, almost half of the population of Guatemala are Mayan Indians, and Twilight is the story of a translator who is entrusted with an order to decipher the diary of a Spanish conquistador sent from secret mission into the wilds of the jungle - into the very heart of the Mayan lands to find and destroy all the Mayan manuscripts, one of which contains doomsday prophecies. The whole book was ready, but I was stuck with the ending for many months. And on that trip to Guatemala, it was as if the chakras opened. But I had to pay a price for it - a month and a half in a hospital bed.

— Have you ever wanted to avoid obviously dangerous trips like Chernobyl?

- On the contrary, I was eager to go to Chernobyl: I really wanted to see in person what an abandoned city, poisoned by radiation, looks like - this is my topic. “Metro 2033,” my most famous book, “Metro 2034,” and now “Metro 2035,” which just came out, are novels about how people in Moscow survive two decades after the third world war, after nuclear bombings. In “Metro 2035” the descriptions of empty, dead Moscow are very important: everything is contaminated with radiation, there are abandoned houses around, rusty cars in endless traffic jams, empty mailboxes with tin lids flapping in the wind. But life and civilization remained only in the Moscow metro, which was built as the world's largest anti-nuclear bomb shelter. The main character does not lose hope of finding other survivors somewhere else on Earth and leading people there from the subway, from the dungeon. So God himself ordered me to study Chernobyl.

And this place really surprised me: usually it seems to be an extinct area where mutant moose roam, and it seems that it is located in the wilderness. But the nuclear power plant, just an hour's drive from Kyiv, a city where several million people live, was the first discovery. The second discovery was that nature was absolutely blooming there. Still, she becomes prettier without a person. But the city itself was strictly as it was described: a rusty Ferris wheel, empty houses, from which either looters or the owners took out absolutely all the furniture, not being afraid of radiation. The glass is dusty, kindergarten with abandoned toys.

So reporting work has determined a lot in my life. And I also owe my marriage to work. We met Lena at Russia Today: she was my producer and helped me arrange the most interesting business trips.

— Did you believe then, hope that you would be published and your books would become bestsellers?

“I didn’t expect that I would even become a published author.” There was a dream, bright, but timid. And in my free time from studying, and then from journalism, I continued to do what I did in high school. I mean the story “Metro 2033” - about how people live in the metro after nuclear war, - I came up with at the age of 15, and then for many years I slowly wrote it. I really wanted someone other than my friends to read it, and when I finished the first draft at the age of 22, I sent it to all the publishers I could, but was ignored by everyone. I’m stubborn - I called them for several months afterwards: “Have you read it yet by chance? Haven’t you heard, the person who promised to look hasn’t returned from vacation?” And every time you have heart palpitations, sweat, and you press the wrong buttons on the phone because your little hands are shaking. And one day the publishing house that eventually released me said: “You know, it’s a little damp in this form, and, most importantly, the ending is unformatted. In genre novels, it doesn’t happen that the hero walks and walks towards the goal and, before reaching halfway, is killed. Write it down, change the ending, and we might consider your proposal.” But I no longer believed that anyone would agree to publish my “Metro” - I decided that no one understood me and everyone rejected me. And it was 2002, the Internet was already in full swing, people were downloading and reading books in pirated libraries, and I thought: if you can post other people’s books, then why not post your own? I made a website, posted the novel there for free and began writing on all forums dedicated to the metro and science fiction: they say, there is such a dystopian novel, please read it and tell me what you think about it. And metro drivers, engineers, track workers - people who, unlike me, knew the metro very well from the inside out, said that I describe the feelings that arise there very correctly. There were, of course, bores who nagged: “The fire can’t burn at the station because there is no ventilation, the station will be filled with smoke, and everyone will suffocate.” But I didn’t write a technical characteristics manual, but a book about human soul. The main thing was not to make a mistake in this, and not in the description of the engineering intricacies of Metrostroy.

In Metro 2033, by the way, there is a secret, personal layer that is understandable only to me and my school friends. The journey of the main character, Artem, from VDNH to Arbatskaya, follows the route along which I traveled from home to school (we had already moved from Strogin by then). Or, for example, after some tense scenes there is an episode at the Polyanka station - two middle-aged people are sitting there, smoking a hookah, burning books to warm their hands, and having lengthy conversations. So, these are my closest friends. The names of the heroes are the same as my friends - Sergei Andreevich and Evgeniy Dmitrievich, and they talk about what really happened to my friends. One recalls that he had a green Moskvich-2141 and he drove it around Moscow at night, installing a homemade accelerator on nitrous oxide. Another is that near the Smolenskaya metro station there was a “headquarters” of prostitutes who actually hung around there in the nineties. This is how I saved my beloved comrades in the Third World War.

“Metro 2033 has a secret, personal layer that only me and my school friends understand. With the prototypes of the novel's heroes - classmates Sergei and Evgeniy. Dmitry is pictured on the left (mid-1990s). Photo: From the personal archive of Dmitry Glukhovsky

— You often describe in books real people and events?

“I still try to invent and create characters - although, of course, I endow them with the features and speech of both my relatives and strangers whom I happen to overhear somewhere on the train or in a store. As for events, there are those without which writing another novel would be completely impossible. Here I have a book “The Future”, for example. The idea came to me when I was about 19 years old: what will happen to us, to humanity, when we defeat old age, aging and no longer die? After all, this society will be completely different from ours today - people probably won’t need God: who needs a soul if the body is immortal? There will be no creation in it, because while creating, people try to leave something behind. But the main thing is that the planet will be overpopulated, which means the birth rate will be limited. And now, let’s say, they’ll force you to choose these immortal people: live endlessly, remaining forever young, or have offspring. And if any couple decides to have a child, then one of them - a man or a woman - must refuse eternal youth and life, receive an injection that will age him, and die ten years later before the child reaches adolescence and will be able to continue the family line himself. I came up with it

This story was a whole 17 years ago, but until I got married and had my own child, I simply could not take it on.

You know, few people tell the truth about this, you can’t rely on others: when a girl confesses for the first time to her young man that she’s pregnant, and he replies that he’s very happy, he’s lying. In fact, he is scared - scared of how his life will now change, of responsibility, scared of losing freedom. A child is something irrevocable that binds you and your woman forever. When young guys at the windows of the maternity hospital write with crayons “Thank you for your son!”, it’s just toadying. A father's love is not like a mother's. It comes with time. The first feeling is again fear, concern - not even for the child, for the wife. And when you are given a tiny red-faced gnome in the maternity hospital, you are terrified not to accidentally break it or drop it. Love comes later, slowly: that’s when your wife, tired for the day, falls asleep at night, and you sit all night long with your daughter, who is three days old, sleeping on your stomach. When is it the first time for you - and not for your wife! - smiles in response to your smile. It gives me chills and chills. When he rejoices at you and misses you. And the more time you spend with your child, the more you fall in love with him. And a year ago, his son, Theodore, was born. So I have a complete set. Each has its own entertainment. For example, my daughter and I played “Chuka and Gek” all winter, and I specially bought a “Polar Base” Lego set. I read to her a lot: I introduced her to the Moomins and Carlson, and now she reads on her own. I play with my son Theo and he just loves them. And he's a cow fan. It’s very amusing to show how a cow moos, in such a hoarse bass voice that it’s unclear how this baby doll makes it at all. And recently there was a joyful event: at the dacha they found a place where real black and white spotted cows graze, like in the pictures in his books. He fell into the astral plane in surprise, and then did not want to leave and was eager to get to his cows for another hour. Until you go through this, you won’t understand how you can choose a child between eternal youth and a child. So I took up the novel “The Future” after Emilia was born. I had to bare myself before the reader and talk honestly about my feelings - and it was worth it: forty-year-old men confessed to me how they cried over some pages. You need to write about what you yourself have lived, and then it will come out truthfully. Each book is a step forward, the result of the years lived.

— But your new novel, “Metro 2035,” is a continuation of your very first book, which is already ten years old.

- Yes. AND main character the same one, albeit matured - with singed wings and somewhat disappointed. And the book, of course, came out more mature: I myself have become ten years older, so has our country, and all my readers. The first novel was about how a young man is looking for his place in the world, in life, trying to understand what to believe in and what not to believe, what is his purpose and mission, and at the same time protect his home metro station from a terrible threat from a radioactive surface . And in “Metro 2035” Artyom has a different dream and goal: to lead people out of the dungeon and up, to the Sun and the sky. But is there somewhere to lead and will people follow him? Of course events recent years in life

The countries here influenced me a lot and made me think about a lot. And although I refused offers to write a sequel for a long time, in the end I felt that I wanted it myself.

You know, “Metro 2033” nevertheless brought me popularity, changed my life and remains my most famous novel, although it is a youthful, naive thing in many ways. When you return to the roots, you are afraid of spoiling something, disappointing readers, breaking the legend. This is definitely not worth doing for the sake of money - but many authors are tempted by money to write or film a bad sequel to a successful first thing! So, I must admit, I had jitters when I wrote “Metro 2035.” The book, however, turned out to be different: tougher, more realistic, intertwining two love lines at once - and not necessarily cloyingly romantic. And by the way, you can start reading “Metro” right away - the hero is the same, but the plot is separate, independent, so there is no need to turn to the original source. I was calm about new readers. And I was worried about the old ones: will they understand the deviation from the canons? But here I met with them - with those who had already read it. And I was surprised: how different they are - many girls, middle-aged people, whole families come. I ask: did the new book disappoint you? They told me: “We swallowed it overnight. When is the next one? I don't even know. To write the next one, I still need to live and live...

Family: wife - Elena, daughter - Emilia (4 years old), son - Theodor (1 year old)

Education: Graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Jerusalem with a degree in Journalism and International Relations

Career: Since 2002 he worked for the EuroNews channel in France, in 2005 he returned to Russia and began working as a correspondent for the Russia Today TV channel. In 2002, he posted his first novel, Metro 2033, on the Internet; it was published only in 2005. The book has now been translated into 37 languages ​​and has formed the basis of two video games. Author of the books “Twilight”, “Metro 2034”, “Stories about the Motherland”, “The Future”, etc. On June 12, 2015, Dmitry published a new novel - “Metro 2035”