Has anyone seen my girl Karina Dobrotvorskaya. Book of September: memoirs of Karina Dobrotvorskaya

23.04.2024

Book of September: memoirs of Karina Dobrotvorskaya

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Book of September: memoirs of Karina Dobrotvorskaya

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Text: Lisa Birger

She’s very beautiful, very successful, and she also talks—this is probably how the average person reacts to the sudden literary career of Karina Dobrotvorskaya, president and editorial director of Brand Development of the publishing house Condé Nast International and an iconic figure of Russian glamor. It would be nice to write frivolous books about fashion in the style of Vogue, advice to girls just looking for their own style on how to wear a tuxedo correctly. But instead, first Karina Dobrotvorskaya collects into one book the memories of the Leningrad “siege girls”, building their hunger in parallel with her own bulimia, her own fears and disorders associated with food. And now they’re coming out with “Has anyone seen my girl? 100 letters to Seryozha” - letters to her deceased husband. This is extreme, very sincere and not quite prose, that is, texts that are not entirely intended for the eyes of the reader from the outside. I can’t even say that this book should be read right now. You may not even need to read it at all. Which does not detract from its, so to speak, social significance.

Sergei Dobrotvorsky, a bright person and an outstanding film critic, whose memory is preserved today only by the faithful staff of the Session magazine, died in 1997. By that time, Karina had already left him for her current husband and was even 9 months pregnant. He died of a heroin overdose, the friends he was with, frightened, took his body outside and put him on a bench in the playground - he sat there, dead, until the middle of the next day. In the preface to the book, Dobrotvorskaya writes that his death was the main event of her life. “I didn’t like him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish watching, I didn’t share. After he left, my life fell apart into external and internal. Outwardly, I had a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment, a wonderful job, a fantastic career and even a small house on the seashore. Inside there is frozen pain, dried tears and an endless dialogue with a person who was not there.”

In her “letters” (the quotes here are intentional - the description of events is too systematic, chronological, these are more likely the kind of letters that you write publicly, like messages on Facebook, than something truly intimate) Dobrotvorskaya consistently recalls the story of an affair, marriage, divorce, care. Practically - from the first university parties, the first sex, the first conversation, the first attempts to arrange a life together, the first trips abroad (in the 90s this still meant eating one banana a day in order to save up for one, but chic suit from Paris) - to latest quarrels. A parallel to all this is modernity, where the heroine has a young lover, and it is he who becomes the catalyst for this sea of letters that have broken through. There - painful shame for hand-pasted wallpaper, an apartment without a telephone, a bathroom covered in giant red cockroaches, here - life in Paris, where every morning, leaving the house, the heroine admires the Eiffel Tower. There are rationed goods, pasta with ketchup, and pancakes made from powdered eggs and powdered milk. Here is an endless raid on Michelin-starred restaurants.

This endlessly repeated juxtaposition of yesterday's poverty with today's chic should not and is not intended to be the main thing here. However, that is exactly what it becomes. Dobrotvorskaya’s book actually has one obvious, let’s say, source of inspiration - it is even briefly mentioned in the preface. This is Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” - Dobrotvorskaya translates it as “The Year of Magical Thoughts”. In her book, Didion recounts how she spent a year of her life after her husband, John Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack in their family living room. This piercing, stunning read is almost the main American book of the last decade. Baring, it would seem, every last nerve, recalling the past on repeat and describing her suffering in the present, Joan Didion legitimizes suffering for the first time in American culture. What is usually hidden - tears, grief, unwillingness to live - becomes the main plot for her.

Dobrotvorskaya also decides to write about what is not spoken about in Russian culture. About poverty. About the suffering around poverty. About the intimate life of two people, sex, betrayal. Add to this that she calls almost all the characters in her book by name, and you can imagine how many people will definitely not like it. However, the main idea here, clearly borrowed from Didion, is that if you start talking about pain, it will subside. This is psychotherapy in a word, the belief that it is enough to speak out and everything will pass. So in the Middle Ages they treated with bloodletting, believing that with bad blood the disease would go away. A completely erroneous idea, by the way, that cost us Robin Hood.

The trouble is that, inspired by Didion, Dobrotvorskaya read her incorrectly. Joan Didion never promised that the pain would go away; moreover, she repeatedly repeats that nothing will go away. But she is a brilliant essayist, the best of her generation, who has spent years training to turn her every experience into text. In "The Year of Magical Thinking", she simply, for lack of other options, turns herself into a guinea pig, standing back and observing her own suffering. She is there, for example, all the time reading books about loss and experiencing trauma and comparing the comments of doctors and psychoanalysts with her own experience. Thus, Didion’s confession is addressed to each of us; anyone who has known the bitterness of loss can try it on - that is, all of us. Dobrotvorskaya’s confession is personal psychotherapy, where intimacy is even inappropriate and leaves a feeling of some discomfort, and the author (whether consciously or not, I wonder) does not evoke the slightest sympathy.

That is, “letters to Seryozha” cannot be read as a book about the experience of loss. What remains in it? First of all, a story about these 90s, when everything happened: all this hunger, cards, powdered pancakes, dreams of abroad, etsetera, etsetera. The desire to “have it all” grew out of a time when there was nothing. To read Dobrotvorskaya, it is this “nothing that happened” that is a real trauma for her. When you fall in love with the suits of a new fashion designer, but they cost 1000 dollars, and your salary is 200. When you go to America and save up for a new video recorder, and it is stolen from you on your first day in your homeland - how to survive this?

Dobrotvorskaya quite frankly describes that she was going after money, that “I wanted change” - this is a grand cru cooling down in a bucket. And precisely because she is so honest with us, it is not worth crucifying her for this and I do not want to. It is impossible not to notice that all this is the confession of a woman who, saying goodbye to her young lover, finally tells him “I will cancel your tickets myself.” But in the past, in addition to everyday life, there was also art - Sergei Dobrotvorsky himself and his entire circle were people in love with cinema, books, and old culture. And we must understand that all this glamor was created for us by people who knew Pasolini’s films by heart.

When Dobrotvorskaya writes about modernity, about a young lover devouring seasons of TV series, she, perhaps unconsciously, contrasts yesterday's absorption of culture with its consumption today. Modern man knows how to use gadgets correctly, but is unable to watch the “Autumn Marathon” to the end. And here it is no longer clear what Dobrotvorskaya is complaining about - completely beyond the scope of this prose is the fact that she herself created this man.

Photos:"Edited by Elena Shubina", AST Publishing House

Loving hurts. As if she gave permission

flay yourself, knowing that the other one

can disappear from your skin at any moment.

Susan Sontag. “Diaries”

When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the wife

She even shouted: “Let me go to him!”

but she didn’t follow her husband to the grave...

A.P. Chekhov. "Speaker"

hundred 1997, Sergei Dobrotvor died

skiy. By that time we had already been two months

were divorced. So I didn't

his widow and was not even present at

funeral.

We lived with him for six years. Crazy, happy

rainy, easy, unbearable years. It so happened that these

years turned out to be the most important in my life. Love

for him, which I cut off - with the strongest love.

And his death is also my death, no matter how pathetic it may be

In these seventeen years there was not a single day when I was with him

didn't talk. The first year passed in semi-consciousness

nom condition. Joan Didion in her book “The Year of Magic”

thoughts” described the impossibility of breaking ties with a dead

our loved ones, their physically tangible presence

near. She - like my mother after my father's death -

couldn’t give my dead husband’s shoes: well, how could he?

after all, there will be nothing to wear if he returns - and he

will definitely return.

Gradually the acute pain subsided - or did I just

I learned to live with it. The pain went away, and he stayed with me.

I discussed new and old films with him, asked

asked him questions about work, boasted about her career,

gossiped about friends and strangers, told

about her travels, resurrected him in repeating

I didn’t fall in love with him, I didn’t finish the deal, I didn’t finish

trill, did not divide. After he left, my life changed

fell into external and internal. Outwardly I have

there was a happy marriage, wonderful children, a huge apartment

great job, fantastic career

and even a small house on the seashore. Inside -

frozen pain, dried tears and endless dia-

log with a person who was no longer there.

I'm so used to this macabre connection, this

Hiroshima, my love, with a life in which

the past is more important than the present, which I almost didn’t think about

that life could be completely different. And what

I can be alive again. And - scary to think -

happy.

And then I fell in love. It started out easy

enthusiasm. Nothing serious, just pure joy.

But in a strange way this weightless feeling, no matter what

in my soul, which has no pretense, suddenly opened in it

some kind of sluices from which poured out what had been accumulating for years -

mi. Tears flowed, unexpectedly hot. It poured

happiness mixed with unhappiness. And it’s quiet inside me, like

mouse, the thought scratched: what if he, dead, me

will he let you go? What if it allows you to live in the present?

For years I talked to him. Now I started writing to him

letters. Again, step by step, living ours with him

life that holds me so tightly.

We lived on Pravda Street. Our truth with him.

These letters make no claims to objective

portrait of Dobrotvorsky. This is not a biography, not a memoir.

ry, not documentary evidence. This is an attempt

literature, where much is distorted by memory or created

imagination. Surely many knew and loved

Seryozha is completely different. But this is my Seryozha Dobrotvor-

skiy - and my truth.

Quotes from articles and lectures by Sergei Dobrotvorsky

January 2013

Hello! Why don't I have your letters left?

Only a few sheets of your funny books have survived.

poems written and drawn by hand

creative printed font. A few notes too

written in large semi-printed letters.

Now I understand that I hardly remember yours

handwriting There were no emails, no SMS - there was nothing then.

No mobile phones. There was even a pager

an attribute of importance and wealth. And we transferred the articles

Vali typed - the first (286th) computer appeared in our country only two years after

how we started living together. Then into our lives

Square floppy disks also came in, which seemed somehow alien.

planetary. We often transferred them to the Moscow

“Kommersant” with a train.

I'm waiting for my voice to come back. The words will probably come back with him. Or maybe not. Maybe you will have to be silent for a while and cry. Cry and remain silent. A person uses words to cover up embarrassment, to plug up the black hole of fear, as if this were possible. My friend wrote a book and I just read it. Tomorrow (today) I have to submit the script, and I recklessly dived into Karina’s manuscript. I emerge in the morning - dumbfounded, speechless, helpless. There is no one to help me. Seryozha is dead, Karina... What time is it in Paris? Minus two. No, it's early, she's sleeping. And I don’t want to talk. Impossible to talk. My friend wrote a book. And all I can do now is describe my crying. An ancient woman's cry.

Karina and I had a short but incredibly acute “attack of friendship.” As if our friendship at that time was some kind of exotic disease, which our healthy and young organisms later coped with. They managed to cope, they even developed a strong antigen, but later it turned out that each of us carries the virus of attachment within us - for life. Many things happened to us at the same time, in parallel. We trained our love muscles often on the same objects, we suffered like children from the same diseases, including jaundice (at the same time) and appendicitis (within a week of each other). And after thirty years of dating, we wrote a book. I - a little earlier, my “Wax” was already published. Both books are about death and love and about the only possible sign of equality between them. “I wrote it a little earlier” - this means: I screamed a little earlier from the horror that was revealed in myself, from the inability to hold back the scream. She screamed earlier, like a twin born ten minutes early.

Karina's book concerns me in exactly the same way as her life concerns me. Like the life of Seryozha, Sergei Nikolaevich Dobrotvorsky, like his death, concern me and many others. “Touches” is not only “has a relation,” it means “touches” and with its touch causes pain, almost voluptuous, erotic, equal to pleasure. After all, you have to be able to write like this, discarding any hint of stylistic beauty or cleverness! And in order to have the right to write like this about the main event of your life, about the main sin for which you punished yourself for years, you need to live the life of Karina Dobrotvorskaya, which is impossible for an outsider. And my night cry, the cry of the first morning after reading “Letters to Seryozha” was: “My poor one! What have you done with your life?!”

They were together, she left, he died a year later - the bare facts."Has anyone seen my girl?" This courageous girl? This bitch? This angel?

One day, a mutual friend of Karina and I, listening to another exciting story about our early love escapades, suddenly asked: “I don’t understand. Here too (he studied at some technical university), girls fall in love, and go to parties, and suffer, and talk about it. But why does it come out so beautifully for you, but usually for them?!” The question was rhetorical, but it caused cheerful laughter and youthful pride. Yes, we are!

In this logic, the meeting of Karina and Seryozha, romance, marriage, partnership were as if predetermined. No, this was not engraved in imperishable gold letters on some cosmic tablets. “We should have met” - this, in my understanding, is pure logic. After all, “that’s who we are!”, everything should be the best for us, and I don’t remember anyone better than Seryozha at that time. The sacred berry of eros within these relationships remained uncrushed, unrotted until the very end. Between these people lived something that cannot be profaned. And he still lives.

And it was also not surprising that they broke up. It was a pity, it was painful, as if it was happening to me (I was talking about parallels: on those same days I was experiencing my own painful breakup), but not surprising. Love is full of pain. This is among other things.

Hey, somebody! Has anyone seen this steely woman with the eyes of a frightened teenage deer? She executed herself all her life - effectively, terribly, burning out feelings in herself, like some mystical vivisector from a horror movie about the Alien - with fire, napalm. And every line of the book is the chronicle of a survivor in the desert. And then the execution suddenly became public. And saving. Speak, people, rage, get angry, condemn, but she did it - she wrote about him, about herself and about eternal love.

The point is not in the documentary (although the book is documentary) or even in the veracity (factual and emotional) of the memories. The point is the impossibility of losing them and the impossibility of storing them. And another thing is that the deceased Seryozha did not die. He is the only reality in which Karina is confident, in which she lives.

I noticed: people are horrified by the truth, any hint of it. Despite the plebeian cult of “sincerity,” the truth—the transparent, visible and inextricable connection between a phenomenon and the word by which the phenomenon is called—is frightening. People, good, caring people, begin to look for the reasons for the emergence of a truthful statement. And they are found, of course, most often in negative space. “What kind of dancing on bones?!”, “She’s doing this for self-PR!”, “I should think about my husband and children!” This is the little that I heard when Karina's book came out. And the people are all wonderful, but they are very caring. As a rule, they did not read the book itself, limiting itself to the summary. But everything is already clear to everyone. Everyone already has ready-made answers. But I know: words grow like a palisade, fencing off from meaning, from authenticity, from human sovereignty. Otherwise, you need to confront yourself with the obviousness of a disappointing fact: everything is not so simple, and life is blood and tears, and love is pain and chaos.

In his last spring, we met on the set of a small film that my classmate was filming. Seryozha agreed to appear in a cameo. Between shots, between shots of his whiskey, he suddenly asked: “How are you?” - "Fine". He twisted his mouth in disgust: “Yes, I was told that you are holding on.” He was referring to my own breakup and my laments about it. I was surprised. Who did you hear it from? And if this is called “holding on,” then I’m already losing the meaning of the words. But I answered, proud of myself: “Yes, I’m holding on.” - “But I’m not.” All. Dot. He doesn't.

Has anyone seen a girl with a stone in her palm? With the stone she kills herself with every day, trying to reach her own heart? Calling a spade a spade is a thankless and cruel undertaking. Truth - this means to bypass, stop lengthy explanations, motivation and review of long-term goals. There is only the past, perhaps the present, and, strangely enough, there is probably a future. The connection between them is not obvious, although it is often equated to an axiom. Only one thing can connect them, passing through the past, present and illusory future, something unique, something unique, each has its own - hope, for example. Blessed is he who believes... For Karina, this is pain, the utter pain of enduring love. Has anyone seen a beautiful girl without illusions and hope? She is here, she stands and waits for the pain to subside.

Karina Dobrotvorskaya. “Has anyone seen my girl? One hundred letters to Seryozha."

Publishing house "Editing Elena Shubina"

Karina Dobrotvorskaya. Has anyone seen my girl? 100 letters to Seryozha. Edited by Elena Shubina

M.: AST, 2014.

Karina Dobrotvorskaya wrote a 100-episode melodrama about life, love and pain. The book is tender - and bordering on vulgarity, frank - and threatening to slip into bad taste.

Not at all high-brow, devoid of stylistic delights, this big novel about a big man is divided into tiny chapters, supplemented with color inserts and fits into two days - as they say, it’s impossible to tear yourself away from it. Such novels are not intended for intellectuals, but for those who are part of the “widest circle of readers.” The first contradiction arises: the book is written touchingly, very feminine, in the spirit of romance novels, but at the same time it is about the elite, who regularly ridicule the simple joys of life and never tire of talking about an apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

The second contradiction: the intelligentsia is also interested in this book. In addition to the fact that Dobrotvorskaya is a super-successful woman in her own right, the main face of Russian quality glossy magazines, an editor who moved from a division of the publishing house Condė Nast Russia to Condė Nast International, she writes about her first husband Sergei Dobrotvorsky, a film critic and critic, closely collaborated with the magazine “Seance”, and adds comments to these letters, of which one could compile a “Short Course in Good Cinema.” The style begins to lag behind the rich content: it is distinguished not only by linguistic monotony, passing from chapter to chapter, but also by compositional monotony: each letter ends on the same note, which almost immediately becomes unbearable: “And in bed between us it’s not at all there was a difference in height”, “And even you didn’t touch me like that anymore”, “And I told him about you - on the very first night.”

The third contradiction is of a factual nature. Having started writing these letters for herself, “on the table,” Dobrotvorskaya soon receives an offer to publish them. A personal story turns into a public one, and in the process of writing - courage in this case threatens with a loss of frankness and modeling a pose. At some point, the book even begins to “dictate life”: in parallel with the destruction of the connection between the Dobrotvorskys, the heroine’s new love also dies - or maybe this is how “adjustment to the answer” is accomplished.

Dobrotvorskaya questions the criterion of the norm. She writes a very uneven book - and it seems that this is her sincerity. “I don’t need your faith, I need your truth!” - Sergei Dobrotvorsky repeats many times in these letters. Essentially, they are a collection of notes addressed to a loved one - and to nowhere. Without pity, remember unsightly deeds, ambiguous behavior and talk about it into the void in which thousands of people hide, and nothing is known about them, including whether they will be able to appreciate such sincerity; here it makes sense to talk not about a writer’s reputation, but about a human reputation. By mixing mutually exclusive criteria - disgusting and touching, public and private, status and ordinary - Dobrotvorskaya achieves the effect of “irritation”: on the one hand, I really like the book, on the other hand, I really don’t like it.

Discussing the “exhibitionism of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube,” the author notes: now, if life is not reflected in photos, check-ins, likes, then it is as if it does not exist; it seems that the signs of social media can change the present and sometimes even rewrite the past. But in fact, no one has yet managed to turn back time, and every word in this book reads: you cannot be ashamed of what happened and try to reshape it.