Years of life of D. Likhachev. Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev: What is the greatest goal of life? Some facts from the life of an academician

1989. Academician Dmitry Likhachev, Photo: D. Baltermants

Freaks of time

It is fortunate that in our collective cultural memory the Soviet era is reflected not only as a time of anthems and repressions. We remember its heroes. We know their faces, we know their voices. Some defended the country with a rifle in their hands, others with archival documents.

The lines from the book by Evgeniy Vodolazkin very accurately represent one of these heroes: “To a person not familiar with the structure of Russian life, it would be difficult to explain why provincial librarians, directors of institutes, famous politicians, teachers, doctors, came to the head of the Department of Old Russian Literature for support, artists, museum staff, military personnel, businessmen and inventors. Sometimes crazy people came."

The one Vodolazkin writes about is Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev (1906-1999).

They came to the main specialist in ancient Russian culture as the main specialist in everything good.

But why was the already quite middle-aged Likhachev beaten in the entrance and his apartment set on fire? Someone so aggressively expressed their disagreement with his interpretation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”?..

It’s just that Likhachev did not participate in the choral condemnation of Andrei Sakharov. He had the courage to help Alexander Solzhenitsyn create the Gulag Archipelago. He took up the fight against illiterate restoration and thoughtless demolition of architectural monuments. It was then, decades later, that they began to reward people for active citizenship. And then Dmitry Sergeevich himself tried to protect himself from attacks and attacks. Without relying on the common sense of others and the police.

And here’s what’s important: he didn’t experience it as a personal insult or humiliation. He was offended that the bustle of life took away his time from doing science. In general, fate rather paradoxically disposed of Academician Likhachev’s personal time. He, it seems to me, smiling sadly, wrote: “Time has confused me. When I could do something, I sat as a proofreader, and now, when I get tired quickly, I’m overwhelmed with work.”

And we use the results of this incredible work every day. Even if we don’t regularly re-read Likhachev’s articles, we watch the Kultura TV channel. And it was created on the initiative of people who were not indifferent to culture, including Dmitry Sergeevich.

So as not to lie...

I was not able to read all of what Likhachev wrote. And not only because I haven’t grown up to some things. I just re-read his memoirs an endless number of times. Dmitry Sergeevich, deeply feeling the word and the forms of its literary existence, felt all the dangers of the memoir genre. But for the same reason, he understood its capabilities, the degree of usefulness. Therefore, to the question: “Is it worth writing memoirs?” - he confidently answers:

“It’s worth it so that the events, the atmosphere of previous years are not forgotten, and most importantly, so that there remains a trace of people whom, perhaps, no one will ever remember again, about whom documents lie.”

And Academician Likhachev writes without complacency or moral self-torture. What is the most remarkable thing about his memories? The fact that they are written on behalf of the Student in the highest sense of the word. There is a type of person for whom apprenticeship is a way of life. Dmitry Sergeevich writes with great love about his teachers - school and university. About those with whom life brought him together beyond the generally accepted “student” age and outside the classroom. He is ready to consider any situation, even an extremely unfavorable one, as a lesson, an opportunity to learn something.

Talking about his school years, he not so much shares his personal impressions as recreates for the modern reader living images of the once famous Karl May school, the wonderful Lentovskaya school. And he immerses all this in the atmosphere of his native, beloved St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad. Likhachev’s family memory is directly connected with the history of this city.

The Likhachev family was known in St. Petersburg back in the 18th century. Working with archives allowed Dmitry Sergeevich to trace the St. Petersburg history of the family, starting with his great-great-grandfather, Pavel Petrovich Likhachev, a successful merchant. The scientist’s grandfather, Mikhail Mikhailovich, was already doing something else: he headed an artel of floor polishers. Father, Sergei Mikhailovich, showed independence. He began to earn money himself quite early, successfully graduated from a real school and entered the Electrotechnical Institute. The young engineer married Vera Semenovna Konyaeva, a representative of a merchant family with deep Old Believer traditions.

Dmitry Sergeevich's parents lived modestly, without grandeur. But this family had a real passion - the Mariinsky Theater. The apartment was always rented closer to the beloved theater. In order to rent a comfortable box and look decent, parents saved a lot. Decades later, having gone through Solovki, the blockade, tough ideological “elaborations”, Academician Likhachev will write: “Don Quixote”, “Sleeping” and “Swan”, “La Bayadère” and “Corsair” are inseparable in my mind from the blue hall of the Mariinsky, entering which I still feel elated and cheerful.”

In the meantime, after graduating from school, the young man, who is not even 17 years old, enters Leningrad (already like this!) University. He becomes a student in the ethnological and linguistic department of the Faculty of Social Sciences. And almost immediately he begins to seriously study ancient Russian literature. With special love, Likhachev remembers the seminars of Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba. They were conducted using the slow reading method. Over the course of a year, they only managed to get through a few lines of a work of art. Dmitry Sergeevich recalls: “We were looking for a grammatically clear, philologically accurate understanding of the text.”

During his university years (1923-1928), an accurate understanding of what was happening in the country came. Arrests, executions, and deportations began already in 1918. Likhachev writes very harshly about the decades of Red Terror:

“While in the 20s and early 30s, thousands of officers, “bourgeois”, professors and especially priests and monks, along with the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry, were shot - it seemed “natural”.<…>In the years 1936 and 1937, arrests of prominent figures of the all-powerful party began, and this, it seems to me, most of all struck the imagination of contemporaries.”

February 1928 became a turning point in Likhachev’s life. Search and arrest. For what? For participation in the humorous youth circle “Space Academy of Sciences”? For the book “International Jewry” found (on a tip from a traitor friend)? Likhachev himself does not indicate the exact, clear reason for the arrest. Maybe she wasn't there. But, in his opinion, this was what happened: “The monological culture of the “proletarian dictatorship” replaced the polyphony of intellectual democracy.”

Solovetsky-Soviet life

In the memories of prison, of the pre-trial detention center, the reader is struck not by walls with mold, not by rats, but... by presentations and discussions of theories. Unable to explain the absurdity of what was happening, Likhachev, surprised and ironic, writes: “Strange things were done by our jailers. Having arrested us because we met once a week for just a few hours to jointly discuss issues of philosophy, art and religion that worried us, they united us first in a common prison cell, and then for a long time in camps.”

Reflecting on the years spent on Solovki, Likhachev talks about many things: about meetings with people of all levels of morality, about lice and “lice-ins” - teenagers who lost all their belongings and lived under bunks, without rations - about churches and icons. But what is most impressive is how mental life and interest in knowledge were preserved in this hell. And, of course, miracles of compassion and mutual assistance.

One could say that in 1932, after the release documents were issued, Likhachev’s troubles ended. But this, alas, is not so. Ahead are difficulties with finding employment, obstacles to scientific work skillfully erected by ill-wishers, trials of blockade hunger... From the memories:

"…No! hunger is incompatible with any reality, with any well-fed life. They cannot exist side by side. One of two things must be a mirage: either hunger or a well-fed life. I think that true life is hunger, everything else is a mirage. During the famine, people showed themselves, exposed themselves, freed themselves from all sorts of tinsel: some turned out to be wonderful, unparalleled heroes, others - villains, scoundrels, murderers, cannibals. There was no middle ground. Everything was real..."

Courageously overcoming all this, Likhachev did not allow his heart to turn into armor. He also refrained from the other extreme - from softness and spinelessness.

Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev is a famous scientist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, thinker, philologist, art critic, author of fundamental works on the history of Russian literature and culture, hundreds of scientific and journalistic works translated into many foreign languages. He was awarded high titles and a number of government awards. Born on November 28, 1906 in St. Petersburg and lived a long life, in which there were deprivations and persecutions, grandiose achievements and world recognition. He studied at the Gymnasium of the Imperial Philanthropic Society, then moved to the famous Karl Ivanovich May Gymnasium, and in 1917 continued his education at the Soviet labor school named after. L. D. Lentovskaya (now school No. 47 named after D. S. Likhachev). In 1923 he entered Petrograd University, into the ethnological and linguistic department of the Faculty of Social Sciences. He graduated from the university in 1928 and was almost immediately arrested for participating in the student group “Space Academy of Sciences,” sentenced to five years “for counter-revolutionary activities” and sent to the Solovetsky special-purpose camp. Dmitry Sergeevich called this period “the most significant period of his life,” his “second and main university.” Cold, hunger, illness, hard work, pain and suffering - he experienced all this himself. From time to time, mass executions were carried out in the camp, and he miraculously managed to escape execution. It was here that he learned to cherish every day, appreciate sacrificial mutual assistance and remain himself in any situation. “It is clear that someone else was taken instead of me. And I need to live for two. So that the one who was taken for me would not be ashamed,” he later wrote. In November 1931, Likhachev was transferred to the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and in August 1932 was released early from prison as a labor shock worker. Dmitry Sergeevich returns to Leningrad, works as a literary editor and proofreader in various publishing houses, and in 1938 receives an invitation to the Pushkin House - Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He begins to write and publish books, defends his dissertation for the degree of candidate of philological sciences. Then - the war, the terrible Leningrad blockade. Together with his family, he is evacuated along the Road of Life to Kazan and continues to work. Soon he becomes an associate professor, a professor, gives a course of lectures at the Faculty of History, again defends his dissertation, this time on a different topic, writes and publishes his works. The range of his interests is unusually wide. The main topic of Likhachev the scientist is ancient Russian literature, but there were other topics that Likhachev the writer simply could not ignore. In his wonderful book “Letters about Kindness,” addressed mainly to youth, he writes: “In life, the most valuable thing is kindness, and at the same time, smart, purposeful kindness...”. And again: “There is light and darkness, there is nobility and baseness, there is purity and dirt: one must grow to the former, but is it worth descending to the latter? Choose the worthy, not the easy.” Eight days before his death, he handed over to the publishing house the manuscript of a revised and expanded version of the book “Thinking about Russia,” on the first page of which it was written: “I dedicate it to my contemporaries and descendants.”

Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev died on September 30, 1999 in the same city where he was born, and he lived, according to his own statement, in only three cities: St. Petersburg, Petrograd and Leningrad. The greatest gift of this outstanding scientist and writer to us, our descendants, is his books, articles, letters and memoirs. For his contemporaries, he was the “conscience of the nation,” “the son of the twentieth century.”

1. D. Likhachev. Native Land. (txt; 615 Kb) (epub; 1 Mb) (fb2; 1 Mb)	2. D. Likhachev. In besieged Leningrad. (txt; 1.2 Mb) (epub; 1 Mb) (fb2; 1 Mb)
3. D. Likhachev. Memories. (txt; 615 Kb) (epub; 1 Mb) (fb2; 1 Mb)	4. D. Likhachev. Notes about Russian. (txt; 1.2 Mb) (epub; 1 Mb) (fb2; 1 Mb)
5. D. Likhachev. Thoughts about life. Memories.

“Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev lived, worked at full capacity, worked every day, a lot, despite his poor health. From Solovki he received a stomach ulcer and bleeding.

Why did he remain healthy until he was 90? He himself explained his physical stamina as “resistance.” None of his school friends survived.

“Depression - I didn’t have this condition. Our school had a revolutionary tradition, and we were encouraged to formulate our own worldview. Contradict existing theories. For example, I gave a talk against Darwinism. The teacher liked it, although he did not agree with me.

I was a cartoonist, I drew school teachers. They laughed along with everyone else. They encouraged boldness of thought and fostered spiritual disobedience. All this helped me resist bad influences in the camp. When I failed at the Academy of Sciences, I did not attach any importance to it, was not offended and did not lose heart. We failed three times!” He told me: “In 1937, I was fired from the publishing house as a proofreader. Every misfortune was good for me. The years of proofreading work were good, I had to read a lot.

They didn’t take me to the war, I had a white ticket due to a stomach ulcer.

Personal persecution began in 1972, when I spoke out in defense of the Catherine Park in Pushkin. And until that day they were angry that I was against the logging in Peterhof and the construction there. This is the sixty-fifth year. And then, in 1972, they became frenzied. They forbade me to be mentioned in print and on television.”

A scandal broke out when he spoke on television against renaming Peterhof to Petrodvorets and Tver to Kalinin. Tver played a colossal role in Russian history, how can you refuse! He said that the Scandinavians, Greeks, French, Tatars, and Jews meant a lot to Russia.

In 1977, he was not allowed to attend the congress of Slavists.

Membership was given in 1953. In 1958 they failed at the Academy, in 1969 they were rejected. He managed to save the Kremlin in Novgorod from development with high-rise buildings, saved the earthen rampart, then in St. Petersburg - Nevsky Prospect, the Ruska portico.

“The destruction of monuments always begins with arbitrariness, which does not need publicity.” He brought ancient Russian literature out of isolation, incorporating it into the structure of European culture. He had his own approach to everything: natural scientists criticize astrological predictions for being unscientific. Likhachev - because they deprive a person of free will. He did not create a doctrine, but he created the image of a defender of culture.

He told me how, while sitting at a meeting at the Academy of Sciences, he got into a conversation with the writer Leonov about a certain Kovalev, an employee of the Pushkin House, the author of a book about Leonov. “He’s mediocre,” said Likhachev, “why do you support him?”

To which he began to defend him and seriously said: “He is our leading scientist in Leonology.” They listened to a report on socialist realism. Leonov told Likhachev: “Why don’t they mention me? Socialist realism - that’s me.”

The problem of personality and power is not only a problem of the intelligentsia. This is a problem for all decent people, no matter what strata of society they come from. Decent people are intolerant not of power as such, but of injustice emanating from power.

Dmitry Sergeevich behaved quietly until his opinion had special significance for society and the authorities. He worked, tried to be invisible and worried about his own conscience, about his soul, wanting to avoid as much as possible any, even the slightest, participation in contacts with the authorities, especially from participation in its unseemly affairs. Likhachev began to argue with the authorities and act publicly for the benefit of society almost as soon as he received sufficient social status, as soon as he felt his weight and realized that he was being taken into account.

His first actions noticed in society were his speeches about renaming streets and cities, in particular his speech on Leningrad television. Perm was Molotov, Samara - Kuibyshev, Yekaterinburg - Sverdlovsk, Lugansk - Voroshilovgrad, etc. Our television was then headed by Boris Maksimovich Firsov, in my opinion, a very smart and decent person. Dmitry Sergeevich’s speech was quite correct in form, but in essence it was a daring challenge to the authorities. It turned out that it was difficult to punish Likhachev for him, because it was inconvenient. Kara suffered Firsov. He was fired, and it was a big loss for the city. Thus, the problem of “speaking or not speaking” against the authorities completely unexpectedly took on a different dimension for Dmitry Sergeevich. By speaking in a newspaper or on television, he put at risk not only himself, but also those people who gave him the opportunity to express their views, addressing society and a mass audience.

The second victim of the authorities in connection with Likhachev’s speeches was the editor-in-chief of Leningradskaya Pravda, Mikhail Stepanovich Kurtynin. He was fired after Likhachev’s article in defense of parks. Kurtynin, like Firsov, was a good editor, and this event was also a loss for the city. Did Likhachev understand that other people could suffer as a result of his speeches? Maybe he understood, most likely he could not help but understand. But he could not remain silent. Of course, in both cases, both Firsov and Kurtynin themselves were well aware that they were taking risks, but, apparently, they were driven by the same thing as Dmitry Sergeevich - conscience, decency, love for their hometown, civic sense.

To remain silent or speak out, regardless of the dangerous consequences, is a difficult question not only for Likhachev, it is also a difficult question for me. This choice sooner or later faces each of us, and here everyone must make their own personal decision.

Be that as it may, Likhachev began to speak. What actually happened for him as a result? He left the shelter. For example, the problem of Tsarskoye Selo Park was not formally a problem for Likhachev as a specialist. He came into conflict with the authorities not as a professional, a specialist in ancient Russian literature, but as a cultural figure, a public figure, in the name of his civic convictions. It is significant that along this path he could have encountered not only personal troubles, but also obstacles to his scientific work. And so it happened: he became restricted from traveling abroad. I would not go beyond the scope of literary studies - I would travel abroad to various congresses and meetings. His work is a rare example in academic life. More often, people choose silence in exchange for expanded professional opportunities.

But if you take such things into account, then you need to close off any possibility of expressing your civic feelings and build relations with the authorities according to the principle “what do you want?” This is the second problem that Dmitry Sergeevich had to face, and he also solved it in favor of fulfilling his public duty.”

Granin D.A., Likhachev’s recipes / Quirks of my memory, M., “OLMA Media Group”, 2011, p. 90-93 and 98-100

Personal matter

Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev (1906—1999) born in St. Petersburg. His father Sergei Mikhailovich Likhachev was the son of a church elder and worked as an engineer in the Main Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs. Mother Vera Semyonovna was from a family of merchants of the same religion (moderate Old Believers).

From 1914 to 1917, Likhachev studied first at the gymnasium of the Imperial Humane Society, then at the gymnasium and the Karl May Real School. In 1917, when the power plant workers at the First State Printing House chose Likhachev's father as their manager, the family moved to a government apartment, and Dmitry continued his education at the Lentovskaya Soviet Labor School.

In 1923 he entered the Faculty of Social Sciences at Leningrad University. Here he studied in the ethnological and linguistic department, simultaneously in the Romano-Germanic and Slavic-Russian sections.

In 1928, he wrote two diploma works: one about Shakespeare in Russia at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, the other about stories dedicated to Patriarch Nikon.

In February 1928, Likhachev was arrested and sentenced to five years for counter-revolutionary activities - participation in the student circle “Space Academy of Sciences”. Clubs were a common feature of student life, the “Space Academy of Sciences” was created for the pursuit of “fun science,” because, as Likhachev wrote, “science itself, which requires the full dedication of one’s time and mental strength, should not be boring and monotonous.” The “Academy” became of interest to the security officers after one of the students, in honor of its first year, sent a congratulatory telegram supposedly from the Pope.

Despite the fact that Likhachev did not complete the course due to his arrest, the university management issued his parents a diploma - the student fulfilled all the requirements of the curriculum.

In 1928-1931, Likhachev served time in the Solovetsky camp: he was a wood cutter, a loader, an electrician, and looked after cows. During his imprisonment, his first scientific work, “Card Games of Criminals,” was published in the magazine “Solovetsky Islands.”

In 1931, he was taken from Solovki to the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, where he worked as an accountant, then as a railway dispatcher. There, Likhachev received the title of “Udarnik BBK”, thanks to which he was released six months ahead of schedule - in the summer of 1932.

Having been freed, he returned to Leningrad and worked as a literary editor at the Publishing House of Socio-Economic Literature (Sotsekgize). In 1934, he entered the position of scientific proofreader at the publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Since 1938, Likhachev worked at the Pushkin House - Institute of Russian Literature (IRLI AS USSR). He started as a junior researcher, in 1948 he became a member of the academic council, in 1954 he received the position of head of the sector, and in 1986 he was appointed head of the department of ancient Russian literature.

During the blockade, he was with his family in Leningrad until June 1942, from where he was evacuated to Kazan along the “Road of Life”. In the same 1942, for his selfless work in the besieged city, he received the medal “For the Defense of Leningrad.”

Since 1946, in addition to working at the Pushkin House, Likhachev taught at Leningrad State University, and in 1951 he became a university professor. He taught special courses for historians: “History of Russian Chronicles”, “History of the Culture of Ancient Rus'” and others.

Likhachev's main scientific works were devoted to the culture, language and traditions of the Old Russian state. He published the books “National Identity of Ancient Rus'” (1945), “Russian Chronicles and Their Cultural and Historical Significance” (1947), “Culture of Rus' in the Time of Andrei Rublev and Epiphanius the Wise” (1962), “Poetics of Old Russian Literature” (1967) and many others.

Likhachev studied in detail “The Tale of Bygone Years” and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” He translated both of these monuments of ancient Russian literature into modern Russian and published them in 1950, providing detailed comments.

In 1953, Likhachev was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1970 he became an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Likhachev actively called for the preservation of cultural monuments of St. Petersburg and other Russian, as well as Ukrainian cities. In particular, he defended Nevsky Prospekt from being “modernized” by completely glazing the first floors of houses, and convinced the authorities to abandon the construction of the Peter the Great tower on Vasilyevsky Island.

Dmitry Likhachev died in the Botkin hospital on September 30, 1999, and was buried in the cemetery in Komarovo.

What is he famous for?

The outstanding Russian thinker and scientist Dmitry Likhachev received worldwide recognition as the author of extensive fundamental research in various areas of Russian culture and philology - from early Slavic writing to the present day. Likhachev is the author of about 500 scientific and 600 journalistic works, devoted mainly to the literature and culture of Ancient Rus'. Popularizer of science, who published “The Tale of Bygone Years”, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and other literary works with scientific commentary.

In 1986, Likhachev organized and headed the Soviet (and later Russian) Cultural Foundation, a large organization for the support of arts and humanities education. Bal is an active opponent of the demolition and “reconstruction” of architectural monuments, in which they are replaced with a new building.

He wrote in “Memoirs”: “I will not tell everything that I had to endure, protecting the Traveling Palace on Srednyaya Rogatka, the church on Sennaya, the church in Murin from demolition, the parks of Tsarskoye Selo from felling, Nevsky Prospekt from “reconstructions”, from sewage. Gulf of Finland, etc., etc. It’s enough to look at the list of my newspaper and magazine articles to understand how much effort and time the struggle in defense of Russian culture took away from my science.”

What you need to know

In 1995, Likhachev developed a draft declaration of cultural rights. The academician believed that the international community should legislate provisions that would ensure the preservation and development of culture as the heritage of all humanity.

The authorities of St. Petersburg supported the initiative, a public commission was created to finalize the ideas of the declaration in order to submit a revised version to the President of Russia and then to UNESCO. The final draft of the document stated that culture is the main meaning and global value of the existence of peoples and states.

In the declaration, Likhachev also gives his vision of globalization - as a process that should be governed not by economic, but by cultural interests of the world community.

This document was not adopted in its entirety. A number of his theses were included in the Declaration on Cultural Diversity, approved by UNESCO in 2003 and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).

Direct speech

About repressions (D.S. Likhachev “Memories »): “One of the goals of my memoirs is to dispel the myth that the most brutal time of repression came in 1936-1937. I think that in the future, statistics of arrests and executions will show that waves of arrests, executions, and deportations began already from the beginning of 1918, even before the official announcement of the “Red Terror” in the fall of this year, and then the tide kept growing until Stalin’s death, and , it seems, a new wave in 1936-1937. was only the “ninth wave”... Having opened the windows in our apartment on Lakhtinskaya Street, we spent the nights in 1918-1919. could hear random shots and short machine-gun bursts in the direction of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

It was not Stalin who started the Red Terror. Having come to power, he only sharply increased it to incredible proportions.

In the years 1936 and 1937, arrests of prominent figures of the all-powerful party began, and this, it seems, most of all struck the imagination of contemporaries. While in the 20s and early 30s officers, “bourgeois”, professors and especially priests and monks, along with the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry, were shot by the thousands - everything seemed “natural”. But then the “self-devouring of power” began, leaving only the most gray and impersonal in the country - that which was hidden, or that which was adapted.”

About the blockade (ibid.):“There was already snow, which, of course, no one removed, and it was terrible cold. And downstairs, under the special school, there was a “Gastronomy”. They gave out bread. Those who received them always asked for additional weights. These “extra weights” were immediately eaten. They jealously watched the scales in the light of the smokehouses (in the stores it was especially dark: in front of the windows, barriers were erected from boards and earth). A kind of blockade theft also developed. The boys, especially those who suffered from hunger (teenagers need more food), rushed to the bread and immediately began to eat it. They didn’t try to run away: they just wanted to eat more before they took it away. They raised their collars in advance, expecting beatings, lay down on the bread and ate, ate, ate. And on the stairs of the houses other thieves were waiting and took food, cards, and passports from the weak. It was especially difficult for the elderly. Those whose cards were taken away could not restore them. It was enough for those so weak not to eat for a day or two that they could not walk, and when their legs stopped working, the end came.<…>

Corpses lay along the streets. Nobody picked them up. Who were the dead? Maybe that woman still has a living child who is waiting for her in an empty, cold and dark apartment? There were a lot of women who fed their children, depriving themselves of the portion they needed. These mothers died first, and the child was left alone. This is how our colleague at the publishing house, O. G. Davidovich, died. She gave everything to the child. She was found dead in her room. She was lying on the bed. The child was with her under the blanket, pulling her mother’s nose, trying to “wake her up.” And a few days later, her “rich” relatives came to Davidovich’s room to take... not the child, but a few rings and brooches left from her. The child died later in kindergarten.

The soft parts of the corpses lying on the streets were cut off. Cannibalism has begun! First, the corpses were stripped, then they were cut to the bones; there was almost no meat on them; the circumcised and naked corpses were terrible.

Cannibalism cannot be condemned indiscriminately. For the most part it was not conscious. The one who circumcised the corpse rarely ate the meat himself. He either sold this meat, deceiving the buyer, or fed it to his loved ones in order to save their lives. After all, the most important thing in eating is protein. There was nowhere to get these proteins. When a child dies and you know that only meat can save him, you cut it off from the corpse...”

On persecution (ibid.):“In October 1975, I was scheduled to speak in the assembly hall of the philology department about “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” When, an hour before the performance, I left the door of my apartment, a man of average height with an obviously pasted-on large black mustache (“false omen”) attacked me on the landing of the stairs and hit me in the solar plexus with his fist. But I was wearing a new double-breasted coat made of thick drape, and the blow did not have the desired effect. Then an unknown person hit me in the heart, but there was my report in the folder in my side pocket (my heart was protected by “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”), and the blow again turned out to be ineffective. I rushed back to the apartment and started calling the police. Then I went downstairs, where the driver (obviously from the same organization) was waiting for me, and I myself rushed to look for the attacker in the nearest streets and alleys. But, of course, he had already changed his sports cap and torn off his glued-on mustache. I went to give a report...

My appeal to the police investigator had the same result as the appeal about the attack on my apartment in 1976.

This time - 1976 - was a time in Leningrad when apartments of dissidents and left-wing artists were set on fire. For the May holidays we went to the dacha. When we returned, we found a policeman walking around in his apartment.<…>It turned out that at about three o'clock in the morning the night before, the sound alarm went off: the house was awakened by a howler. Only one person jumped out onto the stairs - the scientist who lived below us; the rest were afraid. The arsonists (and that was them) hung a tank of flammable liquid on the front door and tried to pump it into the apartment through a rubber hose. But the liquid did not flow: the gap was too narrow. Then they began to widen it with a crowbar and shook the front door. The sound guard, which they knew nothing about (it was assigned to the surname of their daughter’s husband), began to howl wildly, and the arsonists fled, leaving in front of the door both a canister of liquid and plastic ropes with which they tried to seal the cracks so that the liquid would not leak out. , and other “technical details”.

The investigation was conducted in a unique way: the canister with the liquid was destroyed, the composition of this liquid was not determined (my younger brother, an engineer, said that the smell was a mixture of kerosene and acetone), fingerprints (the arsonists ran away, wiping their hands on the painted walls of the stairs) were washed away. The case was passed from hand to hand until, finally, the female investigator said benevolently: “And don’t look!”

However, fists and arson were not only the last arguments in my attempts to “work through”, but also revenge for Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

The attack on the apartment site occurred exactly on the day when M. B. Khrapchenko, who replaced V. V. Vinogradov as academic secretary in a not entirely honest manner, called me from Moscow and offered to sign, together with the members of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, the famous letter of academicians, condemning A.D. Sakharov. “This will remove all accusations and discontent from you.” I replied that I didn’t want to sign, and even without reading it. Khrapchenko concluded: “Well, there is no trial!” He turned out to be wrong: a court was finally found—or rather, “lynching.” As for the May arson, my participation in writing the draft chapter on Solovki in the Gulag Archipelago probably played a role here.”

What is the biggest goal in life? I think: increase the goodness in those around us. And goodness is, first of all, the happiness of all people. It consists of many things, and every time life presents a person with a task that is important to be able to solve.

You can do good to a person in small things, you can think about big things, but small things and big things cannot be separated. Much, as I have already said, begins with little things, originates in childhood and in loved ones.

A child loves his mother and his father, his brothers and sisters, his family, his home. Gradually expanding, his affections extend to school, village, city, and his entire country. And this is already a very big and deep feeling, although one cannot stop there and one must love the person in a person.

You have to be a patriot, not a nationalist. There is no need to hate every other family because you love yours. There is no need to hate other nations because you are a patriot. There is a deep difference between patriotism and nationalism. In the first - love for your country, in the second - hatred of all others.

The great goal of good begins small - with the desire for good for your loved ones, but as it expands, it covers an ever wider range of issues.

It's like ripples on the water. But the circles on the water, expanding, are becoming weaker. Love and friendship, growing and spreading to many things, acquire new strength, become higher, and man, their center, becomes wiser.

Love should not be unconscious, it should be smart. This means that it must be combined with the ability to notice shortcomings and deal with shortcomings - both in a loved one and in the people around them. It must be combined with wisdom, with the ability to separate the necessary from the empty and false. She shouldn't be blind.

Blind admiration (you can't even call it love) can lead to dire consequences. A mother who admires everything and encourages her child in everything can raise a moral monster. Blind admiration for Germany (“Germany above all” - the words of a chauvinistic German song) led to Nazism, blind admiration for Italy led to fascism.

Wisdom is intelligence combined with kindness. Mind without kindness is cunning. Cunning gradually withers away and will certainly sooner or later turn against the cunning person himself. Therefore, the cunning is forced to hide.

Wisdom is open and reliable. She does not deceive others, and above all the wisest person. Wisdom brings the sage a good name and lasting happiness, brings reliable, long-lasting happiness and that calm conscience that is most valuable in old age.

How can I express what is common between my three propositions: “Big in small”, “Youth is always” and “The biggest”?

It can be expressed in one word, which can become a motto: “Loyalty.”
Loyalty to those great principles that should guide a person in big and small things, loyalty to his impeccable youth, his homeland in the broad and narrow sense of this concept, loyalty to family, friends, city, country, people.
Ultimately, fidelity is fidelity to truth—truth-truth and truth-justice.

Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev.