[10:00:80 - 13:32:00] Yura the Romantic: Literature, Friendships, and 'My Team'

Please tell me, uh, journalism, after all, uh, well, according to the general understanding, it seems that it's more of a documentary approach. Did he also love fiction? And do you consider him, uh, a romantic? Uh, an absolute romantic. There are wonderful poems by Andrei Voznesensky, a poet, a great Russian poet, who knew Yura. Yura knew many poets, Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. And for Yura's death, uh, Voznesensky wrote a quatrain. Uh, I won't recite it now, if you give me a second, I'll recite it. Oh, sorry, that's not my phone. Uh, unfortunately, I'll need to get my phone or just add it later. That's it, uh, and there, in that poem, there is Yura's definition: "the last Russian romantic." And this is a romantic way of interacting with the world and an absolute living of this, so to speak, romantic, open. Uh, Yura loved 19th-century literature very much. And we agreed on the manner of reading several books at once. Uh, and he had Tynyanov on his nightstand. These are, uh, stories of the Decembrists, who interested him very much. Among his friends was the wonderful literary critic and historian Yuri Davydov. Among his friends was the fantastic person Bulat Okudzhava. And these were indeed friends, who, uh, by the time we met Yura, they were no longer alive. So Yura went to the cemetery. You know how? Friends would come to his place in Peredelkino at night. And they could take a bottle of wine, stand up and go to the cemetery to the graves, and there, at these graves at night with flashlights, talk, drink, and report on how they lived that time. Because we meet friends at night and drink. So, uh, this is some kind of completely Slavic thing, that there is a concept of a funeral feast and mourning, and there is a concept of going to ancestors and to warriors. To warriors, because these friends were warriors, in essence, those who for, uh, the idea that was very important to Yura, they followed him. Yura spoke wonderfully, he called everyone, you know what? "My team." He would start very proudly, saying: "This is my team." What does this mean? I can, with a phone call, within two or three hours, gather a sea of people, simply, whom I organize for something wonderful. To help someone, to save someone. And this, uh, does not describe, of course, and this is such a, well, a literary metaphor, one can allow oneself. Timur and his team. And he loved Gaidar's books, by the way, and was friends, uh, with Timur Arkadievich Gaidar, uh, a general, a military, naval one, because he interviewed him and, uh, wrote down his stories. And this incredible thirst for people's stories, for personality, for a way of life, uh, this is Yura. And this is journalism, and this is already fiction, and Yura also staged plays at the Youth Theater with Borodin. He has two wonderful plays staged, and his actor friends are also those people who are always in his house, always nearby. With Borodin, and Borodin always wonderfully, he is still the director of the Ramt Youth Theater, always speaks wonderfully of Yury Petrovich.