Festive "" Tyatya, tyatya dragged our nets ...". – Yes, Chesnokov is an incredible composer.

Pious brothers and sisters often reproach me for the fact that the stories that I tell about our singing life are somewhat frivolous and completely devoid of reverent awe in the use of terminology.

But here the thing is, to whom the monastic cell, and to whom the wedding candle. For some, all life is a mournful path to a damp grave, for another it is a joyful procession into eternal life, not without contrition for sin. haha, naturally. Therefore, the mourner-cry, joyful-laugh. And believe me, there is not so little funny in our church life.

Keeping a good choir is not a cheap pleasure, any rector will tell you about this, with heartbreaking details. The chorus is always hungry for money and a hearty meal, it just so happened. Once upon a time, in the last century, during the extensive persecution of the Church of the temples, it was - to count on one's fingers - people served in them, who were still living in tsarist times and spoiled by good liturgical music so much that they did not disdain to maintain festive choirs from twenty to forty souls, and in addition to them, everyday ones, in which the elders and old women, who survived the persecution, sang, ten or fifteen people each.

Times changed, traditions were forgotten, the splendor of festive choral singing began to fade into the background, problems of a different nature came to the fore. Restoration, construction, gilding of domes, which is undoubtedly also an important and charitable matter.

In connection with the new realities, the need for large singing groups disappeared, modernization was carried out and the parish choirs were "stung" to trios, quartets, maximum quintets, which immediately narrowed the repertoire limits and the "divinely inspired" one and two-voice banner was used, a simple everyday life , or circumcised Pal Grigorych Chesnokov. Times are not chosen. As you can, you spin with the repertoire, adjusting to the number of singers.

But sometimes, when there are patronal feasts or a visit from a bishop, the choir directors, who still remember the blessed times of "great sacred music," call on additional singing forces "to strengthen the composition" and, at least once a year, take their souls away, performing good music. old music, the era of church musical heyday.

I used to be invited to such holidays quite often, and I went to them with pleasure and sang, this is also an opportunity to earn money and meet new people, whom you then, in turn, invite to your place "for reinforcement". One of these invitations nearly cost me my right eye.

Five years ago, on a late September evening, the phone rang. Hello, hello, I am the regent of such and such a temple, someone recommended you to me, could you sing with us tomorrow episcopal service, I have an altitsa got sick. I look at my schedule, I'm free in the morning, why not go? The temple is central, it is convenient to get there, I agreed. We discussed the repertoire, everything is familiar, everything was once peto, no surprises.

I must say that any musician can become a regent, with a certain work experience. Not necessarily a conductor. There are plenty of regents from string players, pianists and wind players. There are even former accountants and cooks. They manage as best they can. But the regent who invited me to that service turned out to be an eternal student of the composer department of the conservatory. Oh, to know how it all turns out ... It would be better to get enough sleep.

I'm coming as agreed. The regent met me, the spitting image of Tchaikovsky, only not Pyotr Ilyich from the front portrait, but the one who fought all night over the score in the office. Ruffled, with a side tie and slippers. A colorful young man, it is immediately clear that a genius, although not recognized (here it was immediately necessary to drape from a low start! But greed! But a meal! Understand me.

The deacon gives the first exclamation. Choir in combat stance. The regent gives the tone ... The choir starts from a place in the gait "From the rising of the sun to the west, praise be to the name of the Lord." Fritissimo, presto, vivace! Aaaah, mamaaaa, what is this? Where I am?! Holy Roman the Melodist, give me strength!

All members of the ensemble turned out to be soloists. From the breed of those who slightly opened their mouths, and from there fire engine flies out at full speed, buzzing. Three orchestras of one hundred people to block? Yep, that's nonsense. And I’m not Elena Obraztsova at all, well, I have some kind of choral voice, but I can’t shout down the eight trumpets of the apocalypse to them, even if you die. And I'm in the party alone. And against me are three sopranos, four tenors and four basses. And a regent who looks like Tchaikovsky. And nowhere to run. The submarine goes non-stop to Vladivostok station.

And let me also yell like a fool, as best I can, of course, without pretension. I look, it seems that no one is pointing a finger at me, scolding me, so not everything is so bad. Let's eat. Well, how do we eat ... Orem. But beautiful and musical, like the last time. And the regent-Tchaikovsky still gives heat. He waves his hands so that the headscarves fly off the singing heads. And we all, in unison, are already voting for eight forts.

In the meantime, I'm scrolling through the notes, looking at what we'll be singing in the next two hours. The repertoire is magnificent, expensive, rich. Degterev, Berezovsky, Vedel, Kalinnikov. Phew, even here without steps, everything is familiar. But ... "The old woman did not suffer long in high-voltage wires" ... Regent-composer, I simply remind you. It is important to understand what happened next.

Before "Cherubim" everything went smoothly. We sang the slow first part, the priesthood came out to the Great Entrance, everything went on as usual. And the second part of the "Cherubim" begins with the words "Let us raise up the King of all" and is traditionally sung cheerfully, cheerfully, solemnly and loudly (although we all sang loudly then). And we all burst out, and here, just the page needs to be turned. And our steam locomotive is already flying ahead, in the commune there is a stop. We turn over and then our locomotive at full speed crashes into a concrete wall and all the horses with people, of course, immediately mix up. Why? And due to the fact that the regent-composer-Tchaikovsk Iy took and rewrote the score by heart by everyone performed work to your taste. And we all know this chant by heart in the author's edition. Classic. And the regent is not even a neoclassic at all, but a good postmodernist, judging by the corrections. And we, in all tin-plated throats, some into the forest, some for firewood from surprise.

The regent acquires the color of borscht. Crimson with transitions to green. And he starts shaking his fist and scolding us for inattention. All of us, frantically, begin to fiddle with music folders for new corrections, so as not to screw up any more and find out that our musical leader prefers to correct a large form.

"The Grace of the World" is all scribbled by the nervous hand of the composer-regent, it is generally scary to look at a sacramental concert, there is no lively tact there. And all the edits are entered by hand, you don’t always understand what he did there, either a low F or a high E. In short, not a service, but a Paris-Dakkar rally, with a fallen off steering wheel and an empty gas tank.

Sight-reading, a useful skill, but not at a festive service and not with a squad that saw party comrades for the first time. And such sophisticated torture, when you know the work, and they took it, and rewrote it in their own way, I’ll tell you, it doesn’t help you in any way good sound vocal ensemble.

All the members of this choir of suicide bombers, in short breaks, fussily sorted through the pages of the scores in order to at least approximately understand the intention of the "author" and to understand what key the next measure would be in and where an unexpected modulation awaits us.

And here, then, the time comes to sing the sacramental concert of Stepan Anikeevich Dekhtyarev "Come, faithful, who love God's glory." The thing is complex, not without frills and little used by the current choral community. I look at the notes, and there is blue-blue from the corrections. And I understand that now something irreparable will happen ...

And here, then, the time comes to sing the sacramental concert of Stepan Anikeevich Dekhtyarev "Come, faithful, who love God's glory." The thing is complex, not without frills and little used by the current choral community. I look at the notes, and there is blue-blue from the corrections. And I understand that now something irreparable will happen ...

Dear, - I turn to the regent-composer, - let's we are this beautiful work Let's not sing, shall we? I am afraid that after the execution of this masterpiece, the bishop will beat us with a celebratory staff and finish us off with trikirium and dikirium even without the help of faithful subdeacons...
With the signature look of a soldier looking at a louse, the regent measured me three times before answering in a hissing, contemptuous whisper.

Are you afraid?! Not confident in your abilities? You were introduced to me as a pro, I see you were mistaken.
- I'm afraid, because they called me as a chorister, and here gymnasts were required under the dome of the circus. These somersaults of yours with jumps in sevenths and decims are much more expensive, don't you think?!
- I can’t find it, - the regent-Tchaikovsky snapped and poked me in the chest with the score rolled up into a tube, - they called me to sing, stand and sing what they gave, I haven’t discussed the repertoire with the singers yet ... They are completely mad ...
Then I realized that further dialogue could lead to the fact that I would be left without a fee and shut my mouth. My eyes glided wistfully over the corrected nervous hand of the game. The harmonic constructions created by Pyotr Ilyich's double brought me into a state of fierce amazement, which, in fact, in no way freed me from the obligation to sing this entire apocalyptic set of notes.
The only thing that reconciled with reality was that all the other members of the choir looked at the notes with no less horror than I did, which betrayed them as more or less sane people. Only one soloist was calm - a baritone by the name of Kozlov, and then only because he did not look at the notes in principle. Didn't consider it necessary. On that, he got burned. And together with him, our entire "hopeful little orchestra, under the control of love."

I crossed myself a hundred times and called for help three hundred times all the more or less significant saints who had ever been seen assisting the chanters. But, either my ardent prayer did not have time to reach the heights of the heavens, or else on what kliros these saints were called for help more insistently and they threw all their strength there ... My prayer did not reach. And from the first measure, I gave out a powerful cock, not seeing a passing flat, not very clearly written by the trembling hand of the regent.

A look worthy of incinerating the worst sinner in the first minute doomsday burned through me. The regent, filled with wild hatred (and I partly understand him), painfully poked me with a tuning fork in the forearm. Gathering all my brains and ears into a fist, I fixed my eyes on the party and began to shout the already correct accidentals, praying to God that this madness would not end in a celebratory throne fight between the altiha and the regent.

And then the baritone soloist by the name of Kozlov grabbed a solo with all his urine, without looking at the notes. Naive fool. His solo was crossed out with a red felt-tip pen, and on top of all these handwriting was written a viola solo, that is, mine. Which I undertook to perform with no less heat and fervor. Needless to say, the interval that Kozlov and I gave out was so indigestible and terrible that the screams of sinners in hellish cauldrons next to our triton howl would have seemed like angelic singing ...

The last thing I saw at that moment was the regent's face twisted with anger and a tuning fork rapidly flying into my eye. Not to Kozlov, roaring like a wild beluga past the cash register, but to me, honestly fulfilling what was written ...

Pain. Unfair punishment. The eye, as it seemed to me then, flowed out directly to the floor. Everything was mixed up. Which, in fact, did not prevent me from grabbing a thick “Colored Triode” and hitting the regent on the crown of my head. The chorus froze, not knowing whether to cry or laugh. The sextons, crowding on the other choir and seeing the carnage from beginning to end, bent over three deaths and silently laughed, covering their mouths with some "Book of Hours", some with "Psalter". The holiday was a success. And, it seems, is still commemorated in that parish as one of the best;)

I, offended, humiliated and insulted, picked up my purse and supporting my protruding eye, jumped out onto the porch and sobbed there from the bottom of my heart. Baritone Kozlov jumped out after me and, like a decent person, took me to the emergency room, where they sealed my eye (thanks, they didn’t put it in plaster!) And I went to the optometrist for another month as if I were going to work. And the regent, they say, had a concussion. So everything went off without mutual claims, everyone was good;) And the fee was transferred to me in double size, so everything was decided amicably. No one was imprisoned, and thank God, as they say.

By the way, when I first watched this wonderful film with my son, my personal memories flooded in with such force that I could not sleep all night, remembering that evening when I first saw that fabulous closet from my childhood. No, neither a fire-maned lion nor an ox full of eyes met me, but the meeting with those whom I then saw was no less beautiful than the meeting with fairy-tale heroes.

My parents, being young and very energetic people, constantly threw me to my grandmothers, as, indeed, all young fathers and mothers who have studies, business trips, expeditions, nothing new. I myself constantly send my son to my mother, spinning in business. It is a matter of life and commonplace at all times.

It was November, the very beginning, when they brought me to my grandmother for a visit. Time is not suitable for street fun, cold, damp. The snow hasn't fallen yet. he sprinkled the earth several times, but it was still early, and everything was gray-black, unfriendly, gloomy. Thank God, I already knew how to read then and I always found something to do, otherwise, of course, I would have been very bored.

A couple of days after my arrival, my grandmother came home from work a little earlier, dressed up herself, put on the best of the dresses brought by my mother, wrapped me in a goat shawl, over a coat, and we went to visit. To whom - they did not report to me. Rodney half of the village, to clarify to whom this time, not from hand. To whom do not come - everywhere is good. There will be dumplings, there will be tea, there will be conversations about everything, and if the mood is right, then my grandmothers will sing. And they sang great. I especially loved the sad song "Zozulya Kuvala", where my grandmothers gave out such powerful polyphony that no Pyatnitsky choir ever dreamed of. As a little girl, my soul was torn with pity for the unfortunate woman and her fate, restless, like that zozulya bird ... The power of art, what can I say.

We walked for a very long time along the dark streets of the village and finally reached a house completely unfamiliar to me, where a huge and terrible dog rushed around the yard on a long chain.

Malvina! Malvina! Tse I, Claudia, open! ' shouts the grandmother.

Malvina? We came to visit the real Malvina? My imagination immediately gives me the image beautiful girl With blue hair and I imagine how we will get to know her now, and even become friends, and I will run to visit her to drink tea from beautiful golden cups.

Wart. Ich werde jetzt offne! , - comes from the porch.

A few minutes later, a grandmother comes out into the yard, completely different from Malvina, such an ordinary rural grandmother, in a scarf and a dark staple dress with small flowers. The fact that she answers my grandmother in German does not bother me at all, because by that time two powerful diasporas had been living in the village for a long time and thoroughly - Ukrainian and German.

For a long time, even during the war, everyone was mixed up, transferred, some by evacuation, some by exile from the Lviv region, some from the Volga region, and some by Tselina brought to these parts. And I have not heard a purely Russian speech in our Palestinians since my birth. Everything is mixed up - Russian, language, surzhik, German. And everyone understood each other perfectly and completely freely used this free linguistic alloy, not at all embarrassed.

Grandmother Malvina holds her dog tightly, while Baba Klava and I, in the meantime, climb the high porch, pass the cold passage, then warm and find ourselves in a house where the upper room is already full of the same guests who sit decorously on chairs and benches.

One thing confuses me - the table is not covered. This simply cannot be in Siberia, where the laws of hospitality break even the most stingy souls. A guest came - feed, drink, and if a wanderer, then put to sleep on everything clean. Law. Undefeated.

And here - nothing. There is no kettle on the stove either. What's the trouble? It seems that no one has died, there is no coffin to be seen, which means that my old women are not going to read on the dead ... What kind of miracles? Unclear. But it is not customary to ask questions to adults, I sit silently, burning with curiosity.

Finally Grandma Malvina returns from the yard, washes her hands, changes her scarf from dark to light.

Mit Gott. fangen.

All the grandmothers, and there are thirty of them, both Ukrainian and German, solemnly get up and go into the second, large room.

And there ... And there is nothing remarkable, in my childish understanding. Well, a bed, with neatly fluffed pillows and richelieu lace peeking out from under the bedspread. Well, embroidery, where it is beautiful in German, with a cross, quotes from the New Testament are embroidered, all this is already familiar and of little interest.

And then all the grannies take candles in their hands, light them one from the other, and Grandma Malvina comes up to the closet, opens it, draws back some curtains inside, and there ... There is a Church. Because the back wall of the cabinet is not made of plywood, like everyone else, but of two large, iconostasis icons - Kazan and the Annunciation. Two huge, incredibly beautiful images, on one of which is a young girl receiving the gospel from the Archangel Gabriel, and on the second is the Mother with the Divine Infant.

And on the cabinet doors, on the inside, behind homemade curtains, there are small icons. And the Lutheran grandmother Malvina, puts two home-made lamps on the bottom of the closet, everything is lit up with magical light, and the grannies, like priests on Easter at the altar, very quietly begin to sing the Kazan troparion, starting in one voice, and then they diverge into two, and then for four votes ... And then "Eternal Council", and "Queen", then greatness.

Candles give that uneven light that enlivens the faces on the icons, and I, with my little mind, try to understand how the Church can live and be in an ordinary closet, and there it is the Church, and not just hidden icons. There is a living and very touching Mother of God - the Girl on the right, and very serious Mother of God Mom is on the left.

Grandmothers sing and sing, there is no time, I am not there, there is only a magical, very beautiful divine world that Malvina hides in her closet.

And there is no village, no closet, there is only the sky, which is both far and close at the same time. My little village Narnia... And the troparion, which I memorized from the first time and forever and for the rest of my life. Zealous Intercessor, Mother of the Lord Most High, pray for all your Son, Christ our God.

Then, when everything was already sung and all the prayers were read, a teapot and honey and caramels appeared, but I, under my childhood impression, having lost my appetite from an excess of emotions, no longer remembered all this.

And I remembered my grandmother and my way home when she told me how her friend, a German, Lutheran Malvina, saved from a desecrated, somewhere in the Volga region, Orthodox church, these icons. How she forced her husband, Friedrich, to replace the wall of the closet with icons from the temple iconostasis, and how she was able to take him, the only thing that she managed to grab from the property when they were deported by the whole village, and take him to Siberia safe and sound.

And since then, twice a year, on Kazan and the Annunciation, Baba Malvina gathered her Orthodox friends, opened the doors of her closet, and they could pray "like at a church", at the very real temple images.

Where is she now, that, my magical Narnia? Where are these images? God knows. They were never transferred to the temple, which was built much later than death Malvina. But I know for sure that somewhere they are. And twice a year the doors of the old closet open with a creak and someone sings "Queen" and "Intercessor". It simply cannot be otherwise.

(Ulyana Menshikova)

“Wherever I go, I get a church choir”

- Tell us how you sang at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

“We are all, due to the circumstances of these political all sorts, sometimes not brothers, sometimes not sisters, then suddenly, on the contrary, brothers and sisters, we are played like that in all directions. And we ... When people are tied with blood - rivers, tons of it, the people washed themselves with this blood during the years of the Great Patriotic War, and again push, but do not mind external enemy already with each other. What the hell, guys? What are you talking about? What, Moscow was defended by professional shooters, gunners? No. A man who worked as an accountant yesterday, who was a driver in the subway that picked cotton in Uzbekistan. It is necessary - it means that it is necessary, the Motherland sent it. And they went and defended as best they could, and lay down there.

Therefore, we came and sang not for the sake of vocal beauty, but for the sake of what people have always united, everything for the sake of it. I wanted to gather people together and sing so that we would not fight, so that we would not kill each other because you have a blue passport, and I have a red passport.

They hit you in the face, not your passport. Be human, really.

Collected all literally days for ten. This generally applies to my whole life as a whole. If I sit and think for a long time about how no matter what happens, there will be nothing at all, obstacles await us at every step, so go do it, I think so.

– And how did the idea of ​​such flash mobs come about?

- I have a wonderful grandfather, an incredible hero, he spent almost four years in captivity, led the party organization there, prepared escapes and so on. 20 years after his death, an article was published in Altaiskaya Pravda, the man with whom they were in captivity was looking for him. He said: "I need to find this man, Ivan from Altai, because he saved hundreds of people, did not let us give up." There was a big stir in the village when this article was published, and they learned that Ivan Nesterovich (by that time he had already died) was such an incredible person.

And here is May 9th. My thoughts come abruptly, I do everything quickly. I write on the social network: “Guys, why don’t we sing songs from Bolshoi Theater? And this human funnel begins, people gather one by one. 3-4 rehearsals and we are ready. You can't make a choir out of a simple crowd, that's for sure, there must be a backbone who clearly knows what he is singing.

“People stopped, sang with us, filmed us on cameras. A veteran from Odessa stood next to me from beginning to end, and then hugged and kissed me. And, most importantly, even if people were in a hurry, as soon as they catch up with us, they begin to sing.

And then I went to my mother to make repairs, to the Altai mountains. I have a lot of work, I'm like anyone who came to Moscow ... in fact, why am I here? I don't like Barnaul, or the Altai Territory? I love it very much, I feel good there. But I have a salary of 5,000 rubles at three jobs - naturally, I cannot afford to help my parents. And you know, including something else in the scope of my duties was not at all part of my plans. I go to rural temple, I sing to myself one akathist with the children, I feel great, I don’t think about any Moscow.

- And how did the choir turn out?

- They continued to correspond: “Ulyan, hello. And I liked it so much, but it was good for everyone. ” I think: “So, people themselves want it!” She returned to Moscow: “It is wrong to leave people. We can continue to sing together. And we got together. Our first rehearsal was in some kind of anti-cafe, where everyone really liked us. People, when they sing, are transformed. In one second. Amazement, people's attitude towards themselves in general is different. Thanks to mother Irina Milkina for the premises at the church of Euphrosyne of Moscow, where we regularly meet. Now we are about 50 people.

It is interesting that at first 90% of the choir came in trousers, no one took a scarf with them. And mother made us an absolutely correct remark: “Girls, please come in a skirt.” We go through the temple to the rehearsal. And only two people were indignant: “Why? Like this?" I say, “Well, that's it. Look at me. I am always in a skirt. I take it easy. If you don't feel comfortable, you can take it with you."

And just these two people fell off. All the rest remained. They came in skirts. And you see, in addition to music, I tell them what Christmas is and how to sing this carol so that it does not look like "We are waiting for a deadly fire." And in parallel I explain where, how I was born, who was there nearby, who was the first to come, who was the first to sing “Glory to God in the highest.”

It's also all images, you know? You can't sing without knowing what you're singing about. And we imagine this nativity scene, this night, these lambs, and who else was there. And the person is already vocally beginning to rebuild. He no longer sings it like a song at the table, such a church chanter is already beginning to emerge in him.

- And how do you calm people down when they say: oh, but I can’t sing?

- I explain that it is not the gods who burn the pots. Any craft can be learned. I have such a phrase: "I can teach even a window sill to sing." Absolute pathology I came across a couple of times only in my entire life.

And so there is usually no coordination between hearing and voice. A person hears perfectly, but he himself cannot sing cleanly. My task is to take this ear and tie it to this throat.

The patriarch made a speech: "Let's all the people sing!" Organize and involve people. Here I attract. To Orthodoxy and fragrance. They go to my akathist. They sing the troparion "Lord, have mercy." Wherever I go, I have everywhere church choir it turns out, no matter what we sang.

- Great.

- Yes. For some reason, people believe that I do everything for something, that is, for myself. Although my popularity is not a special boon, I have encountered moments that would be better not to have happened in my life. And financially it's all the same. I just want people all around to sing and understand that we, Orthodox people, are just like everyone else. That only a few go to exhibitions with crowbars. And we are capable of creation, of normal human manifestations.

“Grandma starts to change clothes, which means that the dead man happened in the village”

- There is absolutely nothing to envy in my life, except for the fact that this Siberian hardening, these grandmothers, who have gone through three wars, who passed this genotype.

My paternal great-grandmother came from Romania on foot to Altai. They went with the whole family, and everyone died on the way, except for her. She was 26 years old. She married my great-grandfather, an Austrian loyalist who became an Old Believer. He was 86 and she was 26. She gave birth to my grandmother Anna Makarovna.

We lived in a communal apartment, and we had a common toilet for everyone. In order to get to it, it was necessary to overcome a very long dark corridor, where all sorts of basins, some boards for washing clothes, and something else hung. So that I would not be afraid, I began to sing. All these basins with buckets and everything else resonated, and here I am with a song to the toilet and back again with a song.

- Childhood is a time when you run out of the toilet at night and are glad that you didn’t eat it, yes. And you sang at the same time.

“I have been singing since I was seven years old. My parents worked a lot, I'm with my grandmothers. And the village of Novichikha Altai Territory: half are Western Ukrainians, the other half are Volga Germans. There was no temple. The repressed priest alone lived, he died, and there were grandmothers who walked, read the Psalter over the dead, sang the canon. And where do I go? Here they will put me near this coffin of a stranger, they will put me, and I am sitting, listening. Already at the age of six I knew the canon by heart. I had a thin, pitiful voice, I sang along with my grandmothers.

And nothing shocked me, it was so natural. I look, my grandmother begins to change clothes, which means that the dead man happened in the village, that is, we will go somewhere. I wasn't afraid. It was a natural moment in life, now a person has died, which means that you need to read, sing over him, go to the cemetery, and then there will be dinner, in which there will be a lot of delicious food. Such a childish perception.

In general, everyone was singing there, because Ukraine is voices. Absolutely illiterate women laid out all this for five, for six, dispersed, then in unison. German grandfathers played violins. Actually, the parties were...

- German grandfathers on violins - sounds like in the movies.

- Yes, and German grandmothers named Malvina, for example, did not speak Russian at all. People worked hard. Imagine, 30 acres of a garden, 15 gardens. However, they are still working elsewhere.

And here is the holiday. There is a table in the yard. People are singing. They drank a lot. I remember grandfather Konstantin with a violin. Imagine what eclecticism - here you have Ukrainian songs, and here you have this "Dear Augustine".

- I lived with my parents in the city of Barnaul on Nikitin Street, where the Pokrovsky Cathedral stands. The only one operating in the entire city. I remember the first time I got there. It was lunch time, my girlfriend and I reached the temple. I was shocked, of course. Light through these stained glass windows. A light in which not even a speck of dust flies. The smell of old incense, which I have not been able to confuse with anything since then. Then we began to resort there with her already during the service.

Why, what attracted you?

- It smells beautiful, delicious, things I know are singing. Although the singing just repulsed me, it was good, but the manner was Komsomol. But one day I heard heavenly female voice when I got there on Saturday evening. There was an all-night vigil, and the choir performed with soloist Smirnov "Praise the name of the Lord."

Of course, this feeling is hard to forget. By the way, with my grandmothers, I didn’t hold singing at coffins for singing. It didn't apply to music at the time.

- Well, yes.

– And then it turned out that I can sing along in the kliros. I walked with them, sang something along. And in the eighth grade I came to Sunday school, my mother pushed me there. And my girlfriend and I began an active church life. No one raped us, but somehow we quickly learned to defend all the services and slowly participate in the service, “Lord have mercy”, something else to sing.

We were very well taken care of and loved very much. Loved truly, as children are loved. Of course, we were already teenagers, boys walked with us, we laughed, but no one ever shut our mouths. We were told how to behave in the temple. There was no forced this: “Why are you without a headscarf? Why are you not wearing a long skirt?

In general, with regard to clothing, we took an example from the mothers of our priests. Surprisingly elegant women came to all the holidays! With a hairdo, on top of which there is a very light handkerchief. In very beautiful costumes, be sure to wear beads. And all the children came very smart.

Photo by Rodion Solovyov

“Under the lantern we open the kitchen and get to the bishop's refrigerator”

- This road to singing is already professional, was it straight, or did you try to get off it?

- No, God forbid. At the music school, I closed the coffin lid, as I call it, the piano, and said: “Goodbye, my love, goodbye.” I was about to enter the Altai University for journalism, I passed the creative competition with the top five. And my mother’s spiritual father, Father Mikhail, began to say: “Zoya, they will teach her to drink, smoke and swear there. Where are you sending your child? She sings great. In general, the regent is a wonderful profession, in demand, well paid. To the music! Mom says: “It’s true. Come on, my friend, you will go to the seminary, father Michael blessed.

- And you?

- I went to the Tomsk Theological Seminary, which had just been organized for the first year. What is the seminary in this unfortunate year 1991-1992? They gave us some unrepaired building, settled us in a house, which we washed, bleached, removed fleas, our legs were eaten to the very bones by these fleas.

Theological disciplines were taught by priests from the Moscow Theological Seminary and Academy. Vitaly Sotnikov, professor of Tomsk University, taught musical conducting, and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, soloist of his choir, taught vocals. These people were inaccessible to us at that time of the level of both musical and human. Huge thanks to them for giving me all of this.

At first, Father Seraphim was assigned to us as spiritual leader, who starved us almost half to death, we fasted and prayed endlessly. There was no radio "Radonezh" then, there was nothing to listen to. And by the second month, we had already put together a team that robbed a warehouse with products.

- Are you so hungry?

- We were starving and brutalized, we were not even allowed to go beyond the fence, although the gates were open, but the priest did not bless. We also had a battle for a memorial service. Food was constantly brought to the requiem table, but it was taken away by the ladies who worked in the refectory, everything was saved up for the arrival of the bishop. We will sing this memorial service, stand, look at this pack of gingerbread, and the workers take the table in a circle, brush everything into a basket and run away to hide it. We are generally on the beans in full.

We have porridge without butter, without anything, some kind of bread. “I ate dry crust.” The headman, Artyom Nikiforovich, had the keys to the warehouse. He was sinful, he drank a little. Dimka Naumenko and I, I had such an accomplice there, we stole the keys. Who steals like that, I still can not understand. The churchyard is round, next to the house where the whole priesthood lives, and someone can always be at the window. And a lantern.

And we, under this lantern, quite calmly open the kitchen and get to the bishop's refrigerator. They stole sterlet, sturgeon and everything mega-tasty.

In the morning everything was revealed. Since we were the two most cheerful geese in the entire seminary, we didn’t even have to calculate. When they called me to the priest, it was Vesuvius, the whole sky was in smoke. Do you know how a philologist-linguist swears? Biblical-philological, with examples from the Holy Scriptures, very cool and scary. But I knew from childhood that if a man starts yelling at a woman, you never need to shout back or make excuses - you need to cry.

“And you cried, naturally?”

- I sobbed, and at first beautifully, I really loved the old Soviet cinema, you know, with long close-ups and pauses. It seems that you are sitting, looking at the floor, and a large beautiful tear is rolling down your cheek. But I suddenly felt so sorry for myself, I think: “We are hungry, but they offend us here.” And immediately everything turned into an emotion, you know, when children's sobs, when everything is already, when everything is already ugly, and you are already starting to hiccup. The father, of course, was stunned. A child is sitting in front of him - he was over 50, and I was 17 or 18 years old. And he rushed to console me, began to feed and drink something.

I told how we were tortured, how we were starving, how we could not even receive a parcel in the mail from our parents, because Father Seraphim did not bless. Batiushka did not know, they immediately called everyone - the whole refectory, Father Seraphim, and the anger that fell on me was nothing compared to what was happening. Since that day, our lives have changed. They began to feed us normally, instead of the Athos one, we became the usual worldly rule, and somehow everything got better.

We were there in a very correct musical space. And love this music with all my heart. We were told that you can bring a person to God with the help of your singing, and you can turn him away forever. As a parishioner, if you will regent, and a chorister who will come to your choir.

“The cuckoo calls twelve times, everyone gets up and leaves”

- You became a popular blogger, how does this affect your life?

- For example, they can write to me in a personal: “They turned on the recording of your choir, and a satanic howl rang out from the speakers, this is a sign!” And everything in this spirit. Or "Give money" endlessly. What money do I have? I live with friends. So I disconnected from strangers, and I stopped pouring all this disgrace.

- And how did the popularity come?

- I registered on Facebook, I have a singer Roma, subscribed to him. And there was some kind of parental day, and he wrote something there about the refectory, about the memorial service. In response, I told in the comments a story from the 90s about the funeral of authority, when it all ended with a restaurant and a prison. And somehow, apparently, I wrote cheerfully about this, that Roma said: “Yes, you take it out in a separate post.” And this story collects two thousand likes. Well, that's quite a lot, right?

- Well, yes.

- And then this story was posted on some Orthodox resources, and what started there! People, for example, born in 1995, wrote "this is a complete lie." Someone called me "Juda Menshikov". But it was just such a time, very serious. A man brought you yesterday and put up golden domes, and tomorrow they brought him in a coffin, killed. This is part of our history, and why hide and lie about something.

“And now all these stories have turned into a book, and you can already be called a writer.

- The fact that I have some kind of book coming out now is also amateurism, not literature at all. These are such tales that turned out to be of interest to the Orthodox publishing house, which completely shocked me. I never intended to publish because a book has to be a book - Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy and all that. And I get such an Orthodox Daria Dontsova. The newspaper "Life" is the life of an Orthodox person, such an ambiguous, a little bit funny, like me.

If a secular publication had come, I would have said exactly and unequivocally “no”. And here are people from the sphere in which they called me a non-Orthodox Judas, a heretic and all that, church people came to me, I say: “Oh, let's.”

Photo by Efim Erichman

Your stories are incredible, of course.

- You know, I just now realized why and for what I was given such a fierce life. Incredible things happen to me. Again, this is not my dignity - it's like good voice, this is a given - strong nerves, the ability to quickly get together in a very Hard time, and I got into very difficult circumstances, and not only life, but such, even in terms of disasters. Remember, there was a terrible accident, a gas explosion on the train "Novosibirsk - Adler"? I rode in it.

I was still a girl then and, thank God, I survived. I saw these people torn to shreds, I helped to pull them out. And after that I had no depression, no stress, nothing at all. This is some kind of peasant hardening of a grandmother, mother, great-grandmother.

- The most amazing story is how you were called to read the Psalter over the deceased at night in an unfamiliar village, and she began to cry. You could actually go crazy.

- I was very scared! But for some reason, she didn’t run anywhere shouting “Help!” I was a religious girl, I understood that all sorts of incidents and miracles can happen, something may seem to me, something may be a temptation. My grandmothers loved horror stories tell in the style of Gogol and Viy.

– This is an absolute Gogol, of course.

- Yes exactly. Do not believe me, I spent the day and night with Gogol at a certain age. I had no doubt that the dead could cry. I was like that Khoma Brut, but I didn’t draw a circle around me, it was some kind of movie around me, and I was in it.

In the Barnaul church, we often read the Psalter over the dead, I, as such a young heavenly nun, read: “Have mercy on me, God, according to your great mercy,” impassively, on one note. And then one day I was offered about $500 to read. I say: "I need to go to the cinema." The Bodyguard just came out with Kevin Costner. But the porridge boots are asking, I think: “What kind of love? What "Bodyguard"? Of course, I will go over the dead man to read.

The customers asked for a nun, but there was no one besides me, I dressed up and went, there is always a military Orthodox outfit: a long black skirt, a turtleneck, a scarf. Brought to the village. The house is an ordinary rural house, kittens go there, some kind of lilac blooms. Dead grandmother, her son - a new Russian in an expensive coat and village relatives. I started reading, then the cuckoo in the clock cuckoos 12 times, everyone gets up and leaves at once.

- Horror.

- Me: "Huh?" "Calm down, calm down, you've been paid, it's your job." I stand, read, there is no light, the candles are burning. And then I see a tear from my grandmother. Here I have Gogol and grandmothers' stories about resurrections and exits from the graves. I can honestly say that I stopped reading the Psalter and began to sing everything that I remembered from the spiritual repertoire.

There is such an animal fear when you cannot control it. I started to sing and I was let go. Grandmother was covered with perspiration, but only then they told me that she was simply frozen in the morgue.

In the morning the son came: “How are you?” I say: “You know, things are good, but your mother cried so much in the coffin at night.”

And how he broke through there near his mother's coffin, no "Gangster Petersburg", of course, can be compared with this. He confessed not to me, but to his mother, he never told anyone what I heard then.

Photo by Efim Erichman

“This is not so much a profession as a ministry, whether we like it or not”

– What do you think an ideal regent should be able to do?

- Music school, music school, regent's class. If there is also a conservatory for this, then it’s generally fine, because only then you are not afraid to be either in the countryside or in big city. You know, the temple "Joy of All Who Sorrow" on Ordynka and the famous regent Nikolai Matveev, whom they went to listen to. And someone came to listen and stayed.

I studied at the seminary and at the conservatory - I'm not afraid to come to a remote village, where half a leaf from the Typicon lies, and there is no Book of Hours, no notes, nothing at all. By evening, I will definitely find a person who will sing the liturgy with me and half of it. I’ll learn “Lord, have mercy” and a couple of troparia with him and organize some kind of feasible children’s choir, if there is a music school there. I'm not afraid to be in some big church with a big choir of 40-50 people.

Guys, we don't know where life will take us. And everywhere we should not interfere with the priest’s service, he has time to pray and perform proskomidia. He stands and does not worry about you, he knows: everything will be right.

– Do you often get told that singers don’t pray?

- I heard this: “I sang in the kliros for five years, and I didn’t have a second to pray there.” And I know why you didn't have a second. You came to the temple, saw these unfamiliar notes, and you tumbled the whole service, but you weren’t smart enough to take this sheet home with you and learn it. In a year you will begin to pray on the kliros, because everything is familiar to you. You sing, this euphony is next to you, you already reach the moment when you not only sort through the notes with your mouth, but when you comprehend the word that is here.

And so the parishioners love us very much. The abbots do not like us, and they do it right. Because we are with them not in spiritual, so to speak, closeness, but in commodity-money relations. And we, especially on holidays, of course, make good money. But then again, what's good? I am 43 years old. I don't have my own apartment, I don't have a car, I don't have anything. And I still work in three places.

Singers, I also read here, they must have spiritual education. Yes, well, we will get those who did not have time - I, thank God, received it in due time. But where does it say about rights? Why do I have two entries in my work book: one is fictitious, as it turned out later, the second seems to be correct. In our church, they still do not formalize me. It's taxes, something else. And none of my choristers, practically none of them, is decorated.

So you are nobody?

- We are nobody, we are volunteers with a piece of paper. When I come to the gates of paradise, and I will definitely go there, I will bring this piece of paper to the Apostle Peter. He will say: “No, you did this, that, the fifth or tenth, you are unworthy. You took money from the Church, after all." And I paper: “And I am a volunteer. And I signed up." And he then: “Well, where to go? A document is a document. Come on in."

Here. And with this hope, I do not demand anything from anyone, you understand.

I can't live without it. I love you very much, you know? I love temples, I… well, the fact that I love God is a matter of course, I love this music, to be in this space.

I love the service, you can't imagine how. Another person would have already burned out during this time, but I love her, at least five hours, at least for how long.

I love Passion Week just to the point of unconsciousness. This is “Your Supper”, Lvov, this is “Let all human flesh be silent on Holy Saturday”, there are such unusual words, and they are also set to unpretentious, but completely soulful music. On this day I always take the viola, because I know for sure: I will not sing, I will weep, pity the Lord.

– Do you often cry in the kliros?

– I have been singing for many years, regent with completely different bands. Having sung for so many years, I cry when Masha Kozyreva, the soloist of the temple, the singer of the church of St. Tatiana at Moscow State University, comes and sings “Praise the name of the Lord” at my place. That is what I heard when I was a child. Tears are always... (Ulyana looks up, trying to hold back her tears).

These are not tears of operatic tenderness, when I took some note, but this prayer: “Lord, how is it?” This superworldly world opens up, the angels sing like that.

People have a gift. And everything is in your hands. I quickly get rid of people, sometimes even very hard, who do not understand that this is not so much a profession as a ministry, whether you like it or not.

And if you stand the whole service and think about: “How can I get into this note. And the new rector appointed me a stichera to sing, it would be nice if there were 3 of them, not 12. I would rather go home and eat a cutlet, ”I part with such people very quickly, I can’t with them. Usually there are people who understand what they are doing. I love them very much.

I don't have a great vocal gift. I can sing, I have an ordinary choral voice - I can sing some song. But if I sing solo, no one will ever listen to me. It will be smooth and calm. And a person comes to you ... The vocal teacher will only process it a little, teach you how to send it to the resonators. And he opens his mouth, something out of this world, something divine and beautiful - and you think what to do with this voice, to sing something with it that works by itself - and you find it. He sings Chesnokov's "Eternal Council" at the Annunciation.

– Yes, Chesnokov is an incredible composer.

What did Chesnokov do? He took the usual chant "Sofronievsky Cherubim" and made it just something that would make everyone's hair stand on end. He has a spiritual concert "Oh, Sweet, All-Generous Jesus" - there is our Russian field, there is all our Mother Rus' in these consonances.

I am going on the material that I heard from our old regents, and I want the only one who, perhaps, will become regent, so that he knows who the priests of Metals, Turchaninov, Chesnokov, Bortnyansky are. I want young people, and not only them, to know real music, so that students don’t ask me “What is romance?”

Once I was asked to go to the Moscow region to conduct a bishop's service. It was Christmas time, and Vladyka Savva was serving. I love him so! After the service, when he gave the cross, he said: "Sing a carol at least some." And everyone stands and is silent - the whole temple is silent, and the whole kliros is silent, I will tell you more.

Photo by Efim Erichman

- Like this?

- Vladyka sings: "The night is quiet over Palestine." He does not remember this case, but I remember, there are either 9 or 12 verses, and he remembers all the words, intones perfectly, a very pleasant voice, sings cleanly and beautifully. And the two of us sang together in this temple, someone sang the first two verses with us, and that's it.

There was another moment. God be with her, with carols. Prayer to the Mother of God, a temple in the center of Moscow. I’m at the end, where I have to go to the cross for anointing, I’m chanting “My Prescient Queen”, and there is silence in the temple. The parishioners in hats, about 50 years old, are very nice, and I am in such proud solitude this “Queen” ... Everyone loves her very much, in many churches they sing with all parishes, but here there is silence. I say: “Don’t you know the Queen?” "We don't sing it." I understand that something is wrong.

I always say, now is such a time, I took a smartphone, went to YouTube, went to "Contact" - tons of beautiful, wonderful, beautifully performed music. Take the choir of Vladimir Gorbik from us - this is aerobatics. Take a lot from the Sretenites, from the Danilovites. Take the records of the Synodal Choir, there are a lot of old records of all sorts and different ones, moreover, such collectives where grandmothers sing. Absorb, absorb, if you were not taken to the Philharmonic or the Conservatory as a child. Now listen, go around. Moscow is a city where thousands of events take place.

“It’s easy to say: we are striving for folk singing”

– How did you react to the proposal of the Patriarch to develop folk singing in churches?

- About folk singing, which should replace everything, having a colossal musical baggage of thousands of years, I can give such an example. Let's say I want to make a movie. After all, I want to be a director since childhood, you won’t believe it, I still want to. I take my iPhone, shoot, rivet something in some cheap editor, take amateur actors and everywhere at the state level I try to convey that this has the right to be on a par with professional cinema. I am against amateurism in general in everything. In general, in everything - in the cinema, in dance.

This is a very personal and painful story for me. I have been involved in these choirs, parishioners, and children for twenty years. Why am I against amateur art in the temple and the abolition of paid choirs?

Once I personally suffered from this folk singing. I came to our temple. Wonderful, kindest soul the rector brings two women to me and says: “They want to sing so much. They went to courses here, to the church of Michael the Archangel. We will still need a kliros someday.” And I'm already an old beaten sparrow. I say: “Father, I will learn them. But in a year you will bring them to me and say: “Now this choir will sing. And you go, please, look for yourself some other job.

He still laughed and said: “Well, what are you doing? Well, how is that possible? Here. As a result, evening and morning, an akathist, a prayer service - they sang terribly, and the age came difficult - over 55. It's already difficult, you understand? But people knew that here we sing "Cherubic", here - "Grace of the world." That is, this is also a charter, in addition to singing.

– And what happened then?

- A year passes, and they say to me: “They already sing so beautifully now, let the folk choir sing on weekdays,” and this is minus 80 percent of the salary. I come - Saturday, evening, Sunday, morning, I get a rate for two services. Let's say a thousand rubles. Or I will have nine exits - and I will receive nine thousand. Right? This is a profession that should feed me.

And I say: “Why? Folk choir must sing on Sunday. Everyone should sing litanies. And they do not want on Sunday, they want on weekdays. And this is a story that goes around and around. Most of these women are either childless or grandchildren, that is, people have nowhere to go. And this enthusiasm.

This year we have learned one "Cherubic", one "Grace of the World", for example, some kind of "Lord, have mercy." But not only is it not very beautiful in terms of sound. It will go for a prayer service, it will go for an akathist, it will not work for a festive service. And Easter! It's actually a holiday holiday. By its statutory design, it generally stands out from everything. You have to know a lot to sing all this. And we will have Great Lent. There is generally space. I am still confused about many things myself. At the liturgy, folk singing is good in three places - “I believe”, “Our Father”, a petitionary litany, if they want - a special litany, where “Lord, have mercy. Give, Lord."

– I just wanted to ask, where then do you allow parishioners to participate?

- No, well, if you wish, you can give everything away, and let them sing. Litany, petitionary litany, a special litany, you can give Sunday communion. Well, these are some small things. Here it is easy to say: we are striving for folk singing. So, tell me how to achieve it.

For example, this pause, when the priesthood takes communion in the altar, everyone perceives, it seems like the performance is over, you can walk, the noise begins. So let a man come out of the altar and sing with them “I love the Queen”, “Virgin Mother of God, rejoice.”

Photo by Efim Erichman

“I will always fight for the fact that the Church is the house of God”

– Are you often accused of insufficient Orthodoxy?

– I am an independent person. I know how - it's hard to accuse me of some meanness, something else. I'm like that, you know, Lenin on an armored car. How are the people in the temple? They see that something is happening, for example, injustice. Everyone is hiding for a blessing, for something else. I come up and say: “You see, this is not possible.” The woman in the temple is silent. And I begin to seek some kind of truth, justice, some money for treatment, something else. But this is not possible; it must be done differently. I don’t know how to do it any other way, but the Lord sends me such people who put up with me with everything. They haven't been kicked out for character yet.

Painted nails bothered everyone. Well, all some little things, some kind of nonsense. They also said that I was a heretic. And not once, not twice, because I have such an attitude towards Orthodoxy. I say: “What should it be? Tell me!"

– Yes, what?

- I don't know. And they don't know. Probably not supposed to be cheerful and joyful. Petty, stupid nit-picking from people who don't really know what Orthodoxy is, I guess. Or am I too bright, there are many of me. That is, I can’t take a corner and sit in it in a handkerchief. I need everyone to sing, dance, enjoy life.

With all the trials that my family had, in theory, everyone had to lie down in these coffins and wait for the death of their glorious one. And we, with a disabled brother, with a father with three strokes, with my not entirely successful one, maybe personal life- we are at home laughing. And I think that's why I live like this.

You see, for people, as far as temple life, religious life in general, this external paraphernalia is very important.

That is, if you are in a long dress, a handkerchief is tied on top like this - and you are a ready believer. And if he denounced some scoundrel - in general, well done.

They tell me: “We should keep silent, no matter how something happens.” I answer: “OK, but what can come out?” “And suddenly you will be kicked out of the temple.” I say: “I can be fired as a regent, for example, but no one can ever kick me out of the temple.”

– In response to harsh responses, you wrote a story about joyful faith.

– Yes, I sang in the large bishops' choir at the main cathedral. And it was run by the mother of one of the priests. Once we were rehearsing Bortnyansky's "We praise God to you." And mother is all: "You sing the wrong music, you sing the wrong music." Lord, what's wrong? Fast, slow, quiet - what's wrong with that? Are we not entering the 6th step? Who's lying? She says: “Remember once and for all: Orthodoxy is a faith of worship,” she spoke like this. "You must sing like you're all going to die now!" You can start dancing with joy and dance if you imagine that you will die. She's a chic preacher, connoisseur Old Testament, the New Testament and patristic traditions, and everything - this is a separate conversation, this family is very famous and very interesting. Thank her very much. If not for her, I would not have any joyful faith in my life.

- When do you remember it?

“Without her, I would have thought that one should yearn and repent of sins endlessly. When someone starts to annoy me very much, and this happens, I remember the words of Luka Voyno-Yasenetsky: "Everyone has his own war." I especially understood this when I went to the children's hospice "House with a lighthouse", they have such an event called "Grieving". They gather the parents of children who have recently died.

I went to them as a cook. We raised money on Facebook for groceries. In my biography there was catering business I cooked and worked as a chef. Ten families are sitting... Here are ordinary people from Moldova, here are very wealthy people from Moscow. This man in the trolley bus touched you, you don’t know anything about him at all, you are ready to beat him with a word, and he, maybe yesterday, buried a five-month-old or twenty-year-old child. Therefore, once again, when I want to open my mouth and explain something to someone in a rural way, I close it, because I don’t know what kind of war he has. I have mine, he has his. This is very chilling.

- The main thing is to remember.

- What do you see as your mission?

- Personally mine, without pathos without any?

– Absolutely.

- I am the breadwinner for my family and will remain her until the end of my days. I have a very sick brother. I have parents. I have a son whom I can’t raise here myself… I won’t forget, I had 10 rubles, and the boy says to me: “Mom, buy me a lollipop.” I say, "Son, it's for the bus, otherwise we'll have to walk." He asks: “Well, buy it,” a three-year-old child. I buy a lollipop and carry a three-year-old boy in my arms for 12 kilometers.

I don't want to live like this. I want my mother to have the opportunity to go to the dentist, my father to have money for a good examination so that I can repair them. This is my human purpose.

Photo by Rodion Solovyov

As for my church service, I was and remain a warrior in this field, as I believe, an educator, by virtue of the merits and demerits granted to me. I will always teach, I will always fight and fight for the fact that the Church is the house of God and a type of Heaven. And everything is a little different there than on earth.

We, as if through a cloudy glass, see it all. We read the holy fathers about angels. This is angelic singing - the kind of music that does not exist on earth, in the good sense of the word. I am always in favor of singing in the church in such a way that any of the parishioners feel like that ambassador of Prince Vladimir: “I don’t know where we are, on earth or in heaven.”

There is a lot of music in the world! But the most beautiful is spiritual music, and I will teach it, I will study it, I will shake my unfortunate singers like this, there are only four of them, but they will sing with me good music and they will sing so well that I will weep, that they will weep, and that the people below will rejoice. And so that our divine service would be a divine service, and not an amateur song club.

My Elka died on a cold December night. It was hard to leave. She unbearably wanted to live, despite her torment. Struggled.

At home we were alone and the whole process of leaving, or rather, the transition from our world to eternity, took place before my eyes. We were both exhausted, she with her terrible illness, and I with her involvement in it. And when Elka breathed out quietly: "Oh, my mother has come ...", I realized that this was all the end. She calmed down in one minute, straightened up all over, smiled, and at that moment I fell asleep. In one second, she fell into a dream, and we did not sleep with her for ten days, if not more. Nothing surprising.

I was awakened by a phone call, a la Once Upon a Time in America. Remember? The call that haunted Noodles in his opium dreams of repentance.
I still couldn’t wake up, the days then mixed with the night, I was exhausted to the limit, despite the fact that I was then young and still powerful.

The phone fell silent for a short while, and then again began tediously and persistently to wake me up. I woke up, habitually tucked a blanket in Elka (she was very cold last days) and picked up the phone with the desire to send the caller to those distances that, as Elka used to say, we saw in one place (here is an indescribable pun).

Hello..
- Ulechka, hello! How is Ella?
Ella is dead.
- Tell her that today at 11.30 "Sun Valley Serenade" on the second ... How did you die? ... How?
- Physiologically. No Elka. All.

After hanging up, I automatically went to prepare the "equipment". She pulled out a basin, took three jugs of water, put brushes, napkins, toothpaste on a tray (God knows why), and went to put her friend in order. She washed, combed her hair, changed her underwear, changed into a clean shirt and called an ambulance and the police. Ella couldn't even look bad when she was dead. This was her whole life.

And the phone kept ringing and ringing, and her many friends and acquaintances were in a hurry to remind Elka that her favorite film was about to begin. So everyone knew that she was no more.

Doctors and police officers arrived, ascertained the fact of death, gave me a mountain of papers and sensibly explained what to do with all this. Have left. And we were alone again.

And I went for the coffin. And I bought it. A huge coffin upholstered in blue plush. There were no reds at that time. Snapped up. Bought a huge one to go with it. wooden cross, bedspreads-corollas-wreath and went back to Elka.

She was still alone, the working day was in full swing, it is clear that everyone has no time and that everyone will catch up by the evening. The driver and I brought all my mournful acquisitions into the house. She dressed the heavy and unexpectedly softened Elvira into a "mortal" and herself, from the bed, dragged her into the coffin. Those who have cared for the bedridden for many years will understand that it was not difficult.

I turned on the "Serenade" and, to the sounds of "Chattanoga-choocha", fell asleep again, already sitting at Elka's feet.

I woke up from someone's intense whisper. mother honest, full house people, I sleep and they, pitying me and not wanting to wake me, hissed and hissed at each other, deciding something and agreeing on something.

Elka's old friend, from her school days, unique in her unfortunate love of love and breathtakingly beautiful squint, Anna Lvovna, without letting me really wake up, began to hurriedly ask me what happened to the apartment? I, with Elkin's bass, boomed to her - Anya, your mother, let's bury her, and then we'll talk about all this.

⁃ Okay, okay, Ulya, yes, of course, later... Listen, did you find her cemetery documents?

And then I remembered, on Elkino's sixtieth birthday, one of her friends, an American pastor from some incomprehensible sect named Steve, solemnly, at the anniversary feast, presented Elka with documents for the place of her future burial at the new, paid cemetery with the romantic name "Quiet dol".

The story was stunning. Imagine, a Russian person, I will even say more - a Russian woman with the surname Ivanova, even if she is disabled, to present such a wonderful American gift - a place for a grave. Effective, visionary.

Elkin's face then had to be seen. The guests froze, waiting for Elkin's wrath, terrible and beautiful in its uniqueness. She paused for a Maugham pause, looked pointedly at Steve, and said,
⁃ Thank you Steve. According to our Russian tradition, I would like to send you to hell... But you can't. You're waiting for a girl from the army, and so traumatized. Thank you friend, made the holiday!
⁃
And Steve was actually expecting a girl from the army. His bride then served either in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, in the zone of active hostilities. Lost her leg in that war, came back and Steve married her. But all this was later.

⁃ Anya, exactly! Well, I completely forgot ... Yes, all these papers are in the Bible. The one Steve gave me.

We found the documents, phoned the cemetery managers and it turned out that the wonderful Steve gave Elka an all-inclusive funeral. A hearse, a bus for mourners, everything will come to us, pick it up, take it away and bury it. Good guy Steve, in vain we then attacked him so ...

And then Father Oleg arrived in time, with a group of grief from the seminary. They sang lithium, asked how to help.

⁃ Father, remember, Ella asked to be buried in the church, and also really wanted to be left there for the night?

⁃ Of course I remember. Let's agree this: tomorrow at lunchtime I will send the guys and they will take Ella to the temple.

And Elka lived, right behind the fence of the former convict jail, in which there was the temple of Alexander Nevsky, with the advice given to several organizations, and in the early 90s, partially transferred to the church.

It was an interesting place. The first floor was occupied book Shop and a warehouse, on the second floor there was the temple itself, seminary classes and cells (for the guys, the girls were prudently left at the Peter and Paul Cathedral). And on the right side of the long-suffering prison, the most expensive and prestigious at that time Tomsk tavern "Eternal Call" raged. Such is the symbiosis. It was especially fun on Saturday evenings, when the vigil was served in the temple, and those who did not really like vigils were having fun in the restaurant. Here you have "Blessed be the Lord", and here is "Zhigan-lemon". Everything is nearby, everything is within walking distance.

"Tomorrow at lunchtime," Oleg's father said. And then I lost my focus. Seminarians and punctuality (if it does not concern the service), the concepts are absolutely incompatible. At lunchtime, according to my understanding, this is in broad daylight, and not in any way the Siberian December 18 hours. But the Bursaks thought differently and came when dinner came, according to their Aramaic time.

Six o'clock pm. City center. Intersection of Sovetskaya and Herzen streets. Tram station. Crowds of young people from the university, employees go home from work. Visitors are rushing into the tavern, someone is in a hurry to the bookstore.

A girl comes out from around the corner. In her hands is a huge grave cross, following her, six bursaks in fluttering cassocks with a hefty coffin at the ready are taxiing out of the dark Tomsk gateway. Tram and car communication is terminated at this moment. People walking towards us shied away on the rails, life stops. The crowd at the bus stop, as if in slow motion, synchronously turns after our quiet procession. Doorman at " Eternal call"chokes on a cigarette butt.

The impression made on people, I think Elka liked it;)

We begin to enter the temple, which is located on the second floor. The stairs are steep, almost sheer. And the porter boys, all as they are, are of different heights. And then one, entangled in the skirts of a long cassock, stumbles and falls. There is confusion in the ranks, the coffin also falls and with a terrible roar moves down the stairs. Silence.

⁃ Jesus Christ! It did not fall out, thank you, Lord! Brothers, rise!

The brethren, for reliability, having tucked the cassocks into their trousers, this time bring Elka into the temple without incident. Phew... Let's start reading the Psalter. I read a few kathismas and left to prepare for tomorrow's commemoration.

In our tradition, it is supposed to bury the dead in broad daylight, before sunset. And everyone follows this tradition. Believers and non-believers. Orthodox and not so. But only not workers of paid churchyards, as it turned out. We buried Ella at noon, and the hearse arrived at 5 pm.

“Full house,” the driver briefly explained to me.

In general, double - two. Cemetery, as usual, outside the city. Blizzard. Darkness. Let's go. We arrived at the resting place in an hour and a half, when by Tomsk December standards it was already dead of night. The blizzard suddenly stopped, it got colder, and the cemetery greeted us with beautiful calm weather, clear starry sky and full moon.

And in this December night, beautiful in its picturesqueness, under the light of Gogol's moon, to the sound of a censer and our modest duet with the priest, quietly singing "Holy God, holy strong, holy immortal, have mercy on us", a thinned procession of grieving friends makes three circles in throughout the cemetery.

As we found out later, we were no longer expected. And we wore Elka along and across between the trees and graves. We met, so to speak ...

Well, then the managers realized it, jumped out of their hut and sent us to the burial place (thank you, at least they dug a hole, and I didn’t have to dig it for half a night, which I wouldn’t be surprised at all).

I stood at her grave and did not cry. I sang, looking at this surreal spectacle and smiling. Starlight Night, full moon hanging over the cross. And as soon as everything that was supposed to have been done, the sky was overcast and fluffy Christmas snow began to fall. He immediately covered the clods of frozen earth on the grave and lay down with magnificent epaulettes on the cross. Beautiful...

The wake began at 22:00. All stereotypes have already been destroyed, so no one bothered with time.

They remembered Elkin's life, who, when and how met her, remembered her novels, parties and her sharp tongue and the dignity with which she carried her cross.

Then they turned on the gramophone and listened to her favorite songs. Leaving, everyone came up to me with the words

⁃ Ul, Elka told me that after her death, you can take...
Gramophone
Icon
Books
picture
Etc..

By morning, there was almost nothing left in the house. At 8:00 the seminarians came with huge bags and carried away the entire library. It turns out that Elka also wrote to her father Oleg.

And at 10 in the morning, when I was packing my things, the housing office workers came with an ax and neighbors. They showed me a government paper, which said that Elkin's apartment was moving away in order to expand the living space to her neighbors. The paper was signed three days before Elkin's death.

I inherited the "equipment". Large enamel basin and three nylon jugs.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

"Orthodoxy is a joyful faith!" - this fervent phrase can be limited to briefly talking about the leitmotif of the first book Ulyana Menshikova, a famous regent, a popular blogger, and now, as it turned out, also talented writer. On the cover in emerald letters - "About everything" - and this is really a telling title.

The favorite of more than one thousand subscribers on the Internet captivates the reader from the first page - good-natured humor, principled honesty and apt style. And he inadvertently puts him before a choice, like an epic sign at a crossroads: “If you go to the right, you will be saved, if you go to the left, you will be lost without a trace and glory.”

About those who inspired and continue to inspire Ulyana to enjoy life and write in Shukshin's style touching stories, - our conversation.

One well-known preacher recently noted that we live in a completely shameless time, and if something good happens, then tears well up in the eyes, and hope appears: “Not everything has died…”. Do you think our time is shameless?

If you read history not from a textbook, but from books, then a simple truth will become obvious to us: there has never been a Golden Age on earth. People have always suffered, constantly someone hated someone, tyrannized or killed. Time is not to blame for anything. Times are always the same (remember “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears?”) - Here's your winter, here's your summer, spring, autumn. And there were always good ones, and there were always evil ones, who always outnumbered the good ones. And wonder good deed it is not necessary, it is better to rejoice and be sure not to forget to thank, not only the Lord, but also a specific person. Thank him for being him.

You thank many on the pages of your book. I wonder how the compassionate Ulyana Menshikova, who sympathizes with all the homeless and sick, “began” with?

What does compassionate mean? I am by no means inclined to feel sorry for "the whole world." It's just the way my parents raised me. I'm very sick brother he was born that way. And dad immediately said that the patient should not be abandoned. Are you tired, not tired, are you good or bad ... Zhenya did not sleep for years due to severe birth injury. In these births, the mother almost died, and the child died. Doctors revived him. And as a result - he does not see, does not understand anything, does not talk, does not know how to eat himself, if he falls, he will not be able to get up on his own. In his body, the concentration of all the most terrible things that can happen to a person. And this is our Groom. According to forecasts, he was supposed to die in six months, then in a year, in one and a half, in five years. He is 34 years old today. And this miracle is called "mother's prayer."

As a rule, parents are advised not to take such children home ...

While my mother was in intensive care, my father and I came to the maternity hospital for him, but they don’t give us back. They say he will die anyway, and you will give birth to yourself. I remember my father's answer: “This is my son, and he will die in my arms. At home. And I will bury him." That's all.

I believe that the father's feat in our family is even higher than the mother's. Communicating with many families where disabled children grow up, I notice that more often men leave the family, they can not stand it. For them, being overly selfless, as women can be, is unusual. My dad - a man of incredible dedication. For more than thirty years, every morning he starts by washing Zhenik, then he shaves him, dresses him in a cleanly ironed shirt. You will come in and you will not understand where we have a sick person, because this unfortunate, blind, deaf Zhenik in a shirt, in trousers and always trimmed. Thanks to the iron self-discipline of his father.

His father even taught him to walk. The doctors were completely stunned and did not understand what was happening. After all, they never voiced a clear diagnosis, and the fact that there is cerebral palsy, - this is self-evident. According to their forecasts, he could not walk at all. His father stretched out his legs for two years, and Zhenik went with us at the age of ten.

Your story about how the military registration and enlistment office remembered the “deserting” fighter and sent the military with a summons to the army directly to your home sparkles with good-natured humor. Turns out, back side the medals don't look so radiant...

I'll tell you more. Zhenya suffered from insomnia for the first ten years due to severe pain. And tortured us. Mom rocked, rocked him for years and suddenly says: "I'm going to throw him out of the balcony now, I can't take it anymore." And we understand that she will throw it away, because she has not really slept for many years. I was then 14 years old, I took it from her, and my mother fell asleep for almost three days. We continued to rock with dad. I can’t say that I myself didn’t hate my brother at such moments, but he didn’t give us any rest at all. From day to day. But my parents always surprised me: if I could be angry with him for 3 days, then my mother - 5 minutes, and then again pity and love for a sick child won everything.

Was there really no medical solution to the problem?

Why was he screaming? He was in pain. How were the doctors not smart enough to prescribe an elementary painkiller? I grew up a little and say: give him analgin. No one gave him a simple painkiller, but they began to give - he stopped screaming. At the age of ten, he was prescribed azaleptin, chlorpromazine. But even with them, he can not sleep for two weeks. Something happens to the nervous system periodically, it exhausts him, but does not allow him to fall asleep. We noticed that the most severe attacks always happen before big holidays, around Easter, around Christmas. Mom is already laughing (it’s impossible to cry for so many years, you need to somehow live with it all): “Well, great holidays - the great torment begins." He then screams terribly, as in hell, probably, they don’t scream. I am amazed, because a person has very thin ligaments, and if you scream like that for 20 minutes, then there will be no voice for a long time. But Groom can. He would make a good opera singer. Vocal hardy.

Everything that I earn today at several jobs, I want to spend for my mother. Buy her an elegant fur coat. Take to the dentist. After all, at the age of 30, being an incredibly beautiful, intelligent woman, she gave birth to my brother, and completely different needs came to the fore of her life. It is so sweet - be able to pamper her a little today.

I now remembered how despondent this summer that I did not manage to see the sea. If I understand correctly, your parents haven't seen him for 34 years?

Which sea? What are you about? There is no sea, even in conversations. They love their son like they never loved me. And thank God that they don’t love me like that, because you can die from such love. I can't even imagine what will happen to my parents if something happens to him. This love - from God. She's over that saliva, over the endless bowel problems, over the side effects of the drugs. Over fear. Because death lives in our house all the time. After all, Zhenik periodically dies.

How does this happen? He doesn't eat or drink for two weeks, we can't stuff anything into him. And here lies an almost withered saint. Bedsores to the bones are formed instantly, in three days, because the skin becomes transparent, like parchment. Suitable mom - she is our leader - and says: "So, Zhenik, you will not die, because we do not want you to die." And he is reborn, our Phoenix bird!

He hears?

He hears great. And you know, I once, when I was still a teenager, had a dream. As if I had died, and in the sky, in the clouds, Zhenya comes up to me and starts talking to me. I am surprised: “Listen, but you…”. And he replies: “So it’s there, on Earth, I got such a body in which I can’t speak, but my soul is different.” We live with him - we understand that he hears everything, knows everything and saves us at the same time. Just starting to die, mom immediately kneels down. She endlessly prays to the Lord, if only Zhenya would live.

A famous physicist, the founder of quantum mechanics, once mentioned that he was brought up by the light from under the door of his father's office. I understand that in the light of parental love lies your family secret?

My golden childhood until the age of 8, until my ailing brother was born, is permeated with fatherly love. Dad was happy as a child, buying me beautiful dresses and dolls. In 1979, I had a huge children's car with batteries, which I used to drive around Barnaul. Where did he get it in the Soviet Union?

At the same time, the father was incredibly handsome man. They constantly turned to him on the street, and he was so absorbed in me, my mother, then Zhenya, that he did not seem to notice what fate he had. As a result, dad had three strokes, he changed terribly, this is not at all the person I knew in childhood. Last stroke - hemorrhage, huge hematoma, craniotomy. My mother and I came to the hospital, we stand, look at him and understand that we can’t pull two. After a couple of days, our dad got up and lit a cigarette. The neurosurgeon did not believe me, he said that after such an operation, a very long rehabilitation. So we have miracles at every turn of the apartment.

It would seem that your youth was not carefree. You, probably, in your youth, rejoiced at the departure to another city, to freedom. And suddenly - a meeting with Elka, the heroine of several of your stories. Not afraid of the prospect of continuing the feat?

What a feat? What everyone does, you do. Are we rocking? Fine. Are we digging gardens? Eat! And with Elka ... it's a story in general!

She was the spiritual daughter of the remarkable priest Oleg Bezrukiy. And we, four pupils of the regency course at the Tomsk Seminary, were brought by the priest to her home. Initially warning: there, behind the door, is a seriously ill woman who has been lying for more than 30 years. My imagination immediately drew a foul-smelling mattress, duck and bedsores. Of course, I grumbled: “Lord, I didn’t have time to leave home, You again led me to all this!”. We go in, and there is Alla Pugacheva. Diva. Gorgeous white curls and fingers disfigured by rheumatoid arthritis, but with a manicure. After we met Elka, I stopped understanding women who say that they have no time to get a manicure. We don't know what it's like to do a manicure while bedridden.

That is, do you think that a woman should remain well-groomed and beautiful in any circumstances?

I don’t think anything, I just saw her feat. When a cripple did not turn herself into a cripple, but lived brightly in spite of her illness. Of the four girls, only I stayed with her, because thanks to my brother I knew how to serve a pot (diapers had not yet been invented), and perform other procedures. The rest of the girls did not stay, not because they were merciless, they simply did not know how to do it. I had lived in a similar space before and was not afraid to be next to a disabled person again.

I was 18, Elke - 55. You have no idea how we fought with her. She also drank a diuretic for pressure at night, and then every hour and a half she woke me up. I have classes in the morning. I had to get up three hours before school in order to have time to wash her, comb her hair, make up, she ossified overnight. It was our joint work. She loved me very much, and I loved her.

But could you leave? Or “you can’t leave the patient,” as dad taught?

It is forbidden. I could quarrel with her, hate, but not quit. Elka… This is such a school of life! I graduated from seminary and left Tomsk. Came back just to see you off last way my friend. At the end of her life, she suffered terribly from cancer. Doctors could not make a diagnosis for a long time, she constantly vomited, as if with toxicosis, without stopping. The only thing she could eat and drink was ice-cold Coca-Cola. Nothing else. I bought it in boxes.

She died terribly, my martyr, but with dignity. Before her death, she brightened up and said to me: “Ulyana, open the door, mom has come.” I opened the doors - and the deceased mom and dad "came" to her. In any case, she saw them already with spiritual eyes. When a person leaves, when he crosses the threshold of eternity, his gaze seems to be directed through you. He is here next to you - moment, and it is no more. You are only a witness to the transition.

You talked about the school of life, what did it consist of?

Elka was a very cheerful person. She looked unbearable. Believe it or not, she was always looked after by “suitors”. Her men loved, were ashamed of it, but loved. The love relationship was chaste, due to the circumstances. She didn’t need anything carnal, but she couldn’t live without passions. Elka had amazing facial expressions, in general, she was an actress. Gorgeous operetta character. And she lived in this operetta, she built it with her own hands no matter what.

“Every time I try to fall into a depressive coma with regrets, self-flagellation and exquisite suffering, Elka flies to my aid,” - as I previously wrote about it. And I'm slowly coming to my senses.

Judging by your Facebook page, after her death, the need for compassion has not dried up. You periodically invite subscribers to visit the parental "mourning" in the children's hospice. Tell us how it happens, and why do you need “it”?

There is such a word - "necessary". One more thing - "duty". My mother had little time to educate me, so the whole house was pasted over with A4 sheets with exhortations: “It’s hard to learn - easy in combat", or "Daughter! Turn off the lights!” because I read a lot and until late. The lines of Zabolotsky reproachfully looked at me from the wall: “The soul is obliged to work day and night, and day and night!”. She really has to.

I believe that the better you live, the more you have to do the dirty work. Otherwise, there is a danger of breaking. human personality - such a flimsy thing, it's so easy to go crazy literally in one day and stop being a person.

We are now, for example, going to the station to feed the homeless. I think that Dr. Liza's foundation will do just fine without me, because the sacred cause will live forever. But since Elizaveta Petrovna is not there, we must all pick up this banner so that "the detachment does not notice the loss of a fighter and sings the song to the end." We noticed this loss, so let's go and feed, water and what we need. - do…

As for the hospice… I remember reading on Facebook about a child who is in intensive care and imagined that this tiny child was under IV drips, and his mother was leaving him to spend the night somewhere far away. All New Year he cries because he wants to visit his father and mother, but he cannot. The doomed little man suffers, and the mother and father understand that death is very close.

Did you visit this child?

Didn't go. At that time, I could only help with my hands, and no one needed my hands in intensive care. But for a long time I thought about how to find a use for myself in this whole story. And suddenly I read a post about "mourning" in the children's hospice "House with a lighthouse." I understand that I can go and cook for them, for parents who have recently buried their children. While they were passing various programs with psychologists, I went for forks for a meal and overheard them talking about the agony of their children. It's scary to even think about it.

Be there, help with money, hands - not my need, it's a duty. The duty of each of us. You need to live it. Since the Lord did not give me 8 children, but I wanted to, then I have to help eight of them. I constantly walked along the edge of my life, but, thank God, I was not hurt, neither my arm nor my leg was torn off. Therefore, since it didn’t hurt - so go help because you're lucky.

In one of your comments you call yourself a disaster woman. What was the reason for this, if not a secret?

At the age of 13 I went to a music school. At a stop before our eyes, KamAZ collided with a truck, the trailer that came off demolished the driver's cab. We were a few steps away and saw how the driver was cut in half. Seeing a person from the inside, I realized how fragile he is.

I was at the entrance to the Lubyanka metro station when the explosion took place, causing many deaths. I was waiting for my friend Masha, who five minutes before the explosion called and said that she was coming. I rushed inside to look for her. She squeezed through the crowd rushing outside, and there ... Fortunately, Masha was on the next train.

My mother still does not know that I was on the ill-fated train "Novosibirsk - Adler" and became an eyewitness to one of the largest railway accidents in our country. And again - torn people, the smell of blood and groans ... We carried the wounded for several hours. I don't know why the Lord let me see so much. Sometimes I sit and suffer: “Lord, I want peace!” .

My first acquaintance with you began with a story about a homeless man who saved your life. Even then I thought: how does she not disdain “such” friendship?

I do not disdain, and no one disdains me. They are so funny and touching, our homeless people. It is a pity that the holy fools have disappeared. A Seryoga - it was generally a king-king, albeit a dirty one. He didn't ask for anything. He sat on the porch and reigned. He was not engaged in begging, but was pathologically polite, so Seryoga was brought “gifts”. For example, a green coat with a fox collar ( laughs). He knew each parishioner by sight, he was always interested in whom the daughter gave birth to or what grade the son passed the last exam. For example, Serega taught me how to treat alcoholics correctly, for which I am immensely grateful to him. He thought like this: “And you never condemn a drinking person. If you see an alcoholic, then thank the Lord that he led you past this passion.

I can’t ignore another character, the mother regent from your student stories. From her phrase, one might say, the cry of the soul: “Orthodoxy is a joyful faith!” the book starts...

She at all brilliant woman Books should be written about her, films should be made about her. A man of absolutely academic church education. Put any Protestant next to her, especially when he quotes the Bible, she will “unravel” him into a beautiful fringe. And how she worked on the choir! She sang the chief conductor opera house, famous soloists, some incredible musicians, and mother sits and tells these "great musicians" what they really sing about. For example, if the Christmas canon, then who are the "three youths in the cave" - Ananias, Azarias, Misail.

It is important in what context her phrase about joy Orthodox faith sounded ( laughs). We rehearsed Bortnyansky “We praise God to you” before the week of the Triumph of Orthodoxy (this is when an anathema is sung once a year to all the scoundrels). The work is pretentious, major, the whole rehearsal fought and we can’t understand why, in her words, we sing “ugly music”. Mother is trembling all over, and a huge chiffon bow on a hairpin, which she wore instead of a scarf, is trembling on her head. We, all 40 people of the choir, finally could not stand it and begged in despair: they say, explain that we are doing it wrong! Mother looked around at us with narrowed eyes and said sternly (it must be added, she did not pronounce half of the letters of the alphabet): “Remember the ryaz and forever! Piavoslavie - this is zealous faith! And you need to sing zealously, as if you will know now! You can't convince me, I have never met a better theologian than my mother.

And one of my very first teachers (eternal memory to him!) - father Mikhail Skachkov, a unique regent-nugget, violinist, participant in the Great Patriotic War, who loved and understood worship, - when he shared the secrets of the regency, he said: “There is a great responsibility on the choir. Our people are very musical, they hear everything - and musical falsehood, and spiritual falsehood. Therefore, our task is not only to hit the notes, but also to tune ourselves into the prayerful mood that the divine service dictates to us. Easter - Celebrate Holy Saturday - mourn the death of our Savior. You, as a regent, are obliged to enlighten the singers who come to you. Tell about the holidays, tell what happens during the liturgy. Knowing this, the chanter will always tune in and pray with you. And people will feel it. And it will be a conciliar prayer.” I carry this example through my whole life and always tell the choristers what we sing about, what happens at a particular moment of worship. You can be seven spans in your forehead in terms of musical education, but if you do not understand what is happening in the temple, everything is in vain.

You can't sing and not pray, so I'm sure: there is no place in the choir random people. When my chanters open their mouths and sing the "old chant" Cherubim, I stop and cry. The Lord sends me such singers that with them “to the feast, and to the world, and to good people”, to sing, dance, feed all the unfortunate - for happiness. In general, in the world great music singers with voices like my choristers buy villas by the ocean, and ours - they sing for a penny and help the poor out of what they earn.

I have a cherished dream - create a trade union. After all, the chanter - the most disenfranchised person in the world, for whom there are no such concepts as "sick leave", "maternity leave", "holiday". All singing Russia lives like that. I dream that the union would support every sick singer, even in the most remote village, so that he would have at least some money so that he could buy medicine.

If it is God's work, it must be done while you are alive. Go and “beat” not for yourself, for people, because there is no one to stand up for them, there is no one to pity them. If you can - sorry, but not in words only.

And my second dream - to get acquainted with mother Juliana Denisova, a musician, regent, composer of the highest level. We are in fullness, probably in fifty years, so we realize that she - whole era in modern church music. Matushka wrote such spiritual music, which every time takes your breath away, in which both ancient times and modernity are miraculously intertwined. An absolutely heavenly level of musicality, professionalism and the very prayerfulness that everyone is craving so much. This is the most complex "simplicity" in the world, in which everything - prayer, colossal work and training. This is something that will never die. This is how to praise the Creator - a great gift and happiness.

For me God - absolute beauty, composed of a thousand thousand complexities. This complexity should be sung in such a way that any passer-by who comes in from the street realizes that behind the apparent simplicity inside, there is a very large, like the world, serious structure, which was built by well-trained, talented and caring people. I saw the sky, sorry for the pathos, and heard, thanks to the talent of my singers. You can sing this at a concert as you like, but in the temple - how to sing for the last time. So that, as the mother regent said, "I wanted to die." And death, according to the apostle Paul, - "acquisition", a joyful, long-awaited Meeting.

Talking about your grandmother, who got married at the age of 72, you probably didn’t notice how you gave hope and comfort to many. Are all ages submissive to love?

Absolutely. After all, I met love real woman who is 99 years old today. True, she had already buried her husband, but death did not accept him. Either senile sclerosis, or a boundless heart, but she considers him alive and is waiting. Well, okay. All the more until meeting There, remained a bit.

Most of all in this story, I love Baba Shura’s answer to her children, who scolded her for the fact that she was going to wear a veil for a wedding: “Yes, you all go ... In my life there was either virgin lands, or war, I generally never had a white dress put on, and you only think about what people will say! And went to the wedding beauty - in shoes, in a white dress, with hair dyed with Ruby dye in a fiery red color and with small permanent chemistry on her head. And on top - veil. In their family, everyone is born with very large facial features, like the Indians, and this fine chemistry gave the whole grandmother's image a touching comedy.

Women's happiness is still in love?

For me - Yes. In general, any happiness - it is in love. Our whole life depends on whether they love you or not, whether you love or not. Your loved ones, your homeland, business.

And what is more important?

Harmony is paramount. It is impossible for you to love and not be loved, or vice versa. Then it turns out a tragedy, and when there is reciprocity - This is good. Love - It's not just kisses and admiration. Love - it is to regret, to help, to humble, to be able to remain silent. Like my dad and mom. There has been no passion for many years, and every day for the sake of each other they go to a feat. Their love has grown into something transcendental.

Who else besides your parents inspires you?

To rejoice...

Our Lord Jesus Christ, who else. I have no heroes except my Christ, Mother of God and my parents. Mother of God - greatest example for woman. She stood at the cross and saw how her child was killed. At first people rejoiced at him, and then mocked him. How can you survive this? Me too The only son, and I cannot imagine how one can know his fate from beginning to end and live with this knowledge. No pain of a brother, mother, sister, father can be compared with what the pain of your child is. And in the hospice this hell is repeated, repeated, repeated.

You have seen so much grief, but despondency is not your Achilles' heel, is it?

I saw this grief, and then what? Has anyone else seen him besides me? And how without grief, how without it? It's part of our life. Like in a temple. Here the fullness of time is viewed - here is the liturgy, here they brought the deceased, someone came to get married, and someone is only being baptized.

Any bad emotion should be short. Because there is no point in wasting precious time on it. You can’t lose heart for a second, even if you are in difficult circumstances, you still need to look for a reason to rejoice. Not the thoughtless, reckless joy of a fool. And for the joy of glorifying life. I'm alive, Lord, let me do something good.

New expensive perfumes or a luxurious fur coat give 10 minutes of happiness, and then what? And then it will begin to turn yellow, become covered with moss, the fragrance will expire. Joy can be real only when you live not for yourself. There are always people who need our help.

I learned that you failed to spend the royalties received from the book on your dream. Do not take it as perseverance, tell the readers this "sad" story, please.

Book - This, of course, is loudly said, I'm not a writer. I don’t go home, I cool off all the time in transport, between work. I go into the trolleybus, hold on with one hand, stagger from side to side, and suddenly a funny memory pops up in my head. In fact, I really want to make people laugh, so that they have fun. In 20 minutes I write a post and post it on the Internet. And then a call from the publishers with a proposal to release a book. They seem to be a little crazy, like me. Because in the comments to my texts on Facebook, the zealots of piety accused me of whatever they called me and of whatever. I ask: are you serious?

They say: yes, we ourselves are the same fools. Wonderful! I say: let's talk in September. Thought they forgot - no, I did not have time to come to Moscow - Here they are, my dear ones. They just copied posts from Facebook, did everything themselves, from beginning to end, edited, came up with a cover and released a five thousandth edition.

But I don’t have time, I keep running, rushing, and the last one to see her, opened the book only at the presentation. I go and dream about how I will spend the fee, but I had one dream, simple, down to earth and very feminine. She did not tell anyone about this dream, only God knew. Now I'll make it happen! And wow, memory slips me a promise that I gave God many years ago and forgot about it long ago. I then lived in extreme need and could not help people in terrible trouble. Desperation was eating away at me, and I said to God: “Lord, if I ever have a good amount, I will give it entirely to those in need.” More than ten years have passed, and then my vow knocks on my dreaming head: “I gave my word - hold on!"