The society was wonderful, funny, untravelled, very mobile, drinking, working. Exhibitions, workshops, beer, sometimes (or quite often) dry wine. There weren't any drugs yet, and when they started, I wasn't in those companies anymore. In 1958, in the studio, I made friends with Leonid Sergeevich (Ledik) Muravyov (1941-1995): he, my classmate, was still in the 10th grade, and then became a wonderful restorer of Russian icons and frescoes. This acquaintance determined my whole life. And then with his brother Volodya, a wonderful translator, a smart girl, who hired me to work at the Library of Foreign Literature and with whom we talked daily for thirty years. We met Alik Ginzburg at some exhibition - and at that time the exhibitions were like discussion clubs - and we got acquainted with Alik Ginzburg. He walked with a broken arm because he fell out of the window from the high fourth floor. A year later, he came to Pasternak's funeral on crutches because he jumped out of the window and his leg couldn't stand it. Alik was a strong, Moscow canoe champion, cheerful, cheerful, friendly, and open-minded.
In the first decade of my scientific development, there was a lot of significance to the external contingencies, the pure interference of providence in my life. It was an accident that I wanted to deal with Khodasevich. It seems that Georgy Alexandrovich Lesskis
gave me the opportunity to read a reprint of "European Night" on quarters of paper, now it's called A5, in fact it's a quarter of a double sheet of writing paper. Undoubtedly, the typewriting did not go back to the Parisian edition of the book, but to one of the copies of the text printout, which Vladislav Felicianovich
sent it to his wife Anna Ivanovna, who was abandoned in Moscow, before the Parisian book was published. These printouts were multiplied by samizdat and went hand in hand. In 1960, I did not know that Khodasevich belonged to the most excluded Soviet cult-politopolitan writers, that he was placed in the same cell as Merezhkovsky and Gippius. If I was at the Russian branch, no one would have ever approved me the subject of a term paper or diploma thesis anything related to Khodasevich, although there were no formal bans on this name or any other. The "European Night" made an overwhelming impression on me: it turned out that our world today is just like the world described in the text, despite the fact that I live in the USSR in the 1960s, not in the twenties in Berlin. His everyday environment, his everyday life is just a matter of everyday timeliness, and his meanings transcend that reality and at the same time correspond to the reality of my life.
Then I happened to be in Baku, where I realized that, since I am in Baku, I have to go to the archive and deal with Vyacheslav Ivanov. And it turned out to be a lifelong activity. It was an accident that I became an Italianist. I was led by angels, not by my stunted, shabby brain.
Of all the activities that are my business, namely simultaneous translation of movies, writing notes on Italian literature and theater, and some other "exactly", the main was and is the publication of texts of Russian literature and Russian philosophy, and now also Russian artists of the late XIX - early XX century. In the center of my interests - the text, its history and, if you like, its "correctness".
It is not at all easy to explain what a text is. The main thing is that the text is not only the final set of words printed in a book or on a printer, recorded by hand, typewriter, computer keyboard or sounded on the radio, from the stage or from a TV set. Usually, a "simple person" in his or her perception of the text is limited to what he or she has read or heard. For a philologist, a cultural historian (as well as for an investigator, a psychiatrist, and people of other professions whose work is directly related to the search for the meaning of the text), the text is a multidimensional phenomenon. First of all, the text has a history - from the first thought of it by the author to its transformation into something that is given to the publisher or performed in front of the public. He lives on - whether the author remakes it (often more than once, not two remakes it) and each time gives the reader the "edition corrected and supplemented", sometimes by many degrees, up to 180, changing the meaning. Sometimes outsiders interfere in the text against the will of the author - or, conversely, with his consent. One way or another, the text is perceived by those to whom it is addressed or to whom it came across by accident, causes a reaction and is interpreted.
So, all these meetings of the text with its own author and each reader, in the time of its creation and in the whole subsequent history fill the text with meaning, complicate it, enrich it, even if the text sometimes disappears from cultural use. And the philologist must understand and convey to others this understanding of the complex meaning of the text.