Interview of Eldar Akhadov to Vladimir Tolstikov
Eldar Akhadov is a Russian poet, novelist and literary researcher, co-chairman of the Literary Council of the Assembly of the Peoples of Eurasia, honorary member of the Writers' Union of Azerbaijan, member of the Russian branch of the International PEN Club, the Writers' Union of Russia, the South Russian Writers' Union, the Russian Geographical Society. Winner of many national and international literary awards. Author of 73 books in five languages: Russian, Azerbaijani, English, Spanish and Serbian. The books were published in Russia, Azerbaijan, the USA, Serbia, Mexico, India and Egypt.
Vladimir Tolstikov is a member of the Moscow Union of Journalists, a teacher, editor-in-chief of the independent open newspaper "A" in the Circle", an educational and methodological laboratory of children's and youth journalism.
In the photos:
1. and 2. Fragments of a meeting with readers in the museum of Dolgoprudny, Moscow region
3. Eldar Akhadov on the left, Vladimir Tolstikov on the right
4. The vision of an Angel in the winter snow-covered tundra
5. Little Eldar with his mother, photo of the early 1960s
6. Icon of St. Nicholas of Myra, brought from Myra of Lycia (present-day city of Demre, Turkey)
7. Eldar Akhadov with his mother over the bank of the Yenisei, 2010
- Eldar, I will start with the fact that the literary meeting with you at the Historical and Art Museum of the city of Dolgoprudny, Moscow region, made an indelible impression on me and my editorial team of young journalists from A in the Circle. One girl even brought her mother and brothers with her. And I didn't regret it. The information at the meeting with you was presented in such a way that we were in constant tension and increased attention. Personally, I was shocked by the "Prayer for You" read in front of the audience, the "Russians" video, your story about meeting an Angel. And, as a result, a few days later, there was a desire to interview you.
- Thank you for your kind words. I am ready to answer all questions directly and openly.
- Each person has his own meaning of Faith. And for some reason, everyone comes to the same conclusions. How does this happen? What is the object of your faith?
- There are fundamental concepts in which each individual has his own separate meaning, however, leading to approximately the same conclusions. For example, the concepts of Good and Evil. Everyone who lives is convinced that Good will eventually triumph over Evil, no matter how it turns out. Why? For one simple reason: the winning side, under any circumstances, called and will call itself Good! And this rule is unshakable.
That is why Good will definitely win, and Evil will certainly be trampled. For the victor assigns to himself the role of Goodness and all that is good, and the vanquished gets everything else. Second. Some people believe in God. Others BELIEVE that there is no God. Both are essentially faith. Those who say that the existence of God is unprovable usually "forget" to add that for the same reason the non-existence of God is also unprovable!
Faith and religion are often antagonists, because ritual does not matter for faith in God. Rituals and all kinds of conventions are important only for religions: what to wear, how to bow, in what sequence what words to repeat, what to eat and drink, what not to eat and not to drink, and so on, and so forth, formal rituals turn faith into a kind of impersonal set of rules, behind which there is no sincere feeling No, and it can't be.
I am a believer, I say this consciously and sincerely, but I personally do not need rituals for faith. God communicates with me according to His will at any time convenient to Him, He is everywhere near us and inside us.
"God has no religion," wrote Mahatma Gandhi. God does not revel in his greatness, he is God, not a narcissistic turkey, it is religious rituals that expose him as a vindictive, self–satisfied ghoul who needs to be appeased with endless flattery, otherwise he will flood the whole world with blood, it is religions, not God, for the sake of their earthly power, they oppose some believers to others, imposing religious rivalry and wars on them.
About the Temple. I lived in the North among the Nenets and other Northerners. For them, the Temple is everywhere. The temple is the whole universe. According to their concepts, it is impossible to separate a person from the Temple, because our whole life takes place in the Temple...
The road flows along the cliff,
Forests are crowding over the sea.
Through the eyes of the autumn God
The heavens are looking at the mountains.
And the sun is setting on your shoulders
And breathes in the face, and bakes…
What are you sad about, man?
Where is your time going?
Not to the wanderers of the city of Bari,
Not to the ancient temple in Demre,
And by the way, about the true gift –
To rejoice about love and kindness.
Who will have little time, who will have a lot,
But the Creator's covenants are eternal.
The road flows along the cliff,
Which will have no end…
- What religion are you?
- My faith in the One God does not depend on religion, although I have been to churches and mosques, and have always behaved there with respect to all those present. I can't call myself personally a non-believer in any way, but - without intermediaries.
- We've been learning-learning-learning all our lives. And at the exit – it turns out that they have not learned anything. Is our mind powerless to cope with this task?
- The mind can have an absolutely unpredictable, unimaginable form of existence. For example, water meets all the signs of a living mind. She feels and remembers, she is inside us and outside, and controls us everywhere. Perhaps we live inside a mind that we don't know anything about. God is a self-developing intelligent system, not a paradigm frozen out of space and time.
We do not know and cannot know exactly what God looks like, and does He look at all at all? Does He need to look like something? Perhaps looking is not the most important thing in His activity. Thought has no speed limit, it is instantaneous. For God, "now" and "always" are the same.
- Which is closer to the truth – thoughts or feelings?
- What has no beginning has no end. Feelings and thoughts are immortal. Harmony is one of the foundations of life. Just like love. The attraction of the living to the living.
- This list does not mention death. What is the reason for this?
- Why am I talking about life and not talking about death? Because life is existence, and death is non-existence, and non-existence means non-existence, something that does not exist. Therefore, there is no death.
- What is a PERSON?
- A person is what he thinks and feels. And this is immortal. The physiological has nothing to do with it.
- What can you say about the language of the Bible and the Gospels?
- People wrote the Bible. No God wrote it. This is a document compiled by a lot of people who had different levels of knowledge and were intelligent to varying degrees. The most ancient fragments of the Bible consist of fragments of completely different books, to put it mildly, which had little in common with monotheism…
God is Love, compassion and self–sacrifice. There is an awful lot of non-God in the opening chapters of the Bible. I tried to collect the grains of truth about Jesus from the four canonical Gospels. This is a separate book, for which I have repeatedly received threats from those who are used to just banging their forehead on the floor and not thinking about anything.
- The Bible and the Gospel are the source of truth. What algorithm have you worked out to see this truth in a heap of later attributions?
- About the Bible and especially the Gospels. For more than two thousand years, man has not learned to read what he has written and evaluate what he has read objectively, separating the later postscript, lacunae and additions, abundantly available in sacred texts, when people tried to "legitimize" their desires and ideas by attributing them to I.H. in fact, the first thing I saw in all canonical texts: Jesus categorically demanded, and begged, and asked every day and hour for one thing: NEVER to call him God!!! Never! In addition, Jesus never spoke or hinted at the betrayal of Judas, on the contrary, He called him a beloved disciple. But Peter was called Satan and demanded his expulsion precisely as a traitor. But this is exactly what priests of all directions equally do not want to know or notice for two thousand years... This is what concerns the historical, not the legendary background. Jesus was never a priest, but Peter was.
The story of Peter's sufferings is completely invented. In fact, it was most profitable for him to kill Christ. It allowed him to gain power over the Christian community, its money and property. What kind of conscience can Satan have? Remember and never allow yourself to forget that it was he who was told by the Teacher "Get away from me, Satan!" The story of his suffering and execution was invented either under his personal control or by his followers.
I have been looking into it for many years, very carefully – Peter is not an apostle, not a disciple and not a follower, he is an enemy of Christ, his rival and a burning black envious. Pavel - yes. Paul is a disciple. The Apostle. Scientist. A martyr. But not Peter. By the way, Peter was called Kifa during his lifetime. That's his name. The naming of Cephas by Peter was attributed to Christ by the obliging chroniclers of Cephas.
And Judas was envied in a black way by the rest of the companions, because he was a cashier. Judas had the entire cash register of their group. He didn't need any 30 funny pieces of silver in the spirit: why? Did he want money? Absolutely far-fetched nonsense. In the cash register, which was under his protection, there was ten times, a hundred times more money than the beggarly thirty pieces of silver. Thanks to the successful speeches and speeches of the Teacher, their cash register was never empty. Judas was blamed for all his sins not only because he died first. Criminals always blame all their own possible guilt and crimes on the dead, because they are unrequited. Judas was both a bodyguard, a cashier, and the most trusted person of the Teacher, and died protecting Him, literally in the first seconds of Christ's arrest. Because the only one was not afraid, did not run, did not keep silent, did not deny, did not lie, but engaged in battle with all those who wanted to arrest Christ. And he died in an unequal battle.
None of the arresters had any special need to find out who Jesus was here: a week before, the whole city welcomed Christ, every Jerusalem family saw and knew the Teacher by sight.
The Bible and the Gospels have been repeatedly disfigured by "adjustments" for thousands of years. Separating the attributed from the real event is often the most difficult thing. Don't be afraid of the truth. She has power.
The main thing that helped me to separate fiction from the truth was the non-necessity of the actions performed. If there is an obligation, then there was some intention of the chronicler. Christ had no intentions, which means that the obligation in his actions is a deliberate lie, invented later "for personal use." But if there is no set for a certain result, then it's true.
In general, what I like about Jesus is His cheerfulness, the ability to enjoy life, which is what He told the disciples. And a sense of humor, and indeed sensuality was inherent in Him. It was not for nothing that women loved Him so much that many left their husbands, following him. And the husbands were jealous, not realizing that it was not the physical, but the spiritual in a person that was more important to Him. And that their women followed this spiritual, not physical.
Here is a parable that is not made up: about the precious oil poured on His head. Why did the woman pour oil on I.H.'s head? Because the greedy students with her began to talk about how much money they could get by selling this jug of oil. And she realized that her gift would go to them, not to Christ, as soon as she left. Then, in order to prevent such a development of events, she poured all the oil on His head. I absolutely believe in such a truth of events.
- The icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker is especially revered in your family. What is the reason for this?
- In ancient times, the city of Demre (Turkey) was called Mira, and the country was called Lycia. The bishop of the city in the IV century was St. Nicholas the Wonderworker (Nicholas of Myra); here he was buried in a sarcophagus, in the church of St. Nicholas built immediately after his death. In May 1087, the relics of the saint were taken by Italian merchants to the city of Bari.
According to family legend, Nikolai is our relative. In the summer of 2014, my wife Lyubov and my children, Ruslana and Timur, were in the Lycian World (Demre). My children left Grandpa a bouquet of flowers.
During the Great Patriotic War in the winter of 42-43, Nikolai knocked on our grandmother's house and stayed overnight, and then disappeared. It was in the hungry Tatar village of Ust-Uz, Penza region, after my Leningrad refugees moved there. And a miracle happened: during several weeks of the most hungry time, a cast iron filled with hot boiled potatoes appeared in the stove. And the family survived, including my mother.
Fortunately, this is not a fairy tale. I believe in my mother's story. My mother is a blockade runner, and, thank God, she is still alive. Mom often remembers that winter and this moment. She says that her mother said that it was our relative, and that he is a saint.
- A few words about your family's pedigree.
- My wife, Lyubov Akhadova, is Russian and half Tatar, on her mother's side, and on her father's side - from a noble family that once had horse factories and a palace in Peterhof.
In 1904, my maternal great-great-grandfather was introduced into the hereditary nobility by a personal decree of Emperor Nicholas II for special merits in the spiritual field: he was the leader of the Muslims of the Volga region and lived in Penza. There is an area of Akhuna. His lands are named after his position.
- According to your statement, an Angel is depicted on the cover of your book "Waiting for a Miracle". What events preceded this?
- It was a vision in the tundra during a trip to a geodetic object. As a group, we examined the condition of old geodetic points, which sometimes had to be dug out from under the snow. The icy desert. Drifting snow. Wind. And before us is the light of an angel.
- You claim that the task of any level of complexity should be entrusted exclusively to one responsible person. Was this position developed during your work in the Far North?
- The greater the number of responsible persons, the greater the risk of non-fulfillment or poor-quality formal fulfillment of the task. The experience of life led me to this idea.
- You have school-age children. Therefore, the next question will be appropriate. Many agree that the current education has turned into a frank coaching in preparing students for the OGE and USE. Why is this format chosen?
- Because "it's easier this way." You don't need to KNOW the subject, you need to know the button to press. Teaching and learning is a great work of acquiring knowledge. The format of the Unified State Exam is no!!!!! he does not give knowledge, he teaches how to properly get himself an incentive "banana". An ordinary Soviet bad student of my time, the seventies, is a head more literate than the current "medalists". Extraordinary teachers are bullied for trying to give knowledge. No one touches those who sit obediently in the dark.
Parents just remember that they once gave knowledge at school.
- If you look at the essence of the problem, it has a centuries-old history. Is that so?
- Christ was crucified, Mohammed was mocked and beaten. It was the entertainment of the crowd. Why were they executed? For the Word.
Viktor Petrovich Astafyev said and wrote about this better than me, telling in his "Adventures" about the fate of the poets: "No one is as naive and gullible as a poet. Hundreds of years before the current enlightened and cruel time, the poet was punished, burned, whipped, beheaded, killed with pistols in a duel, and he kept rushing and rushing towards the winds, a singer and a martyr, hoping that the winds would fly over him, troubles would pass him by… And this has always been the case - poetry was driven by faith in kindness and mercy, the poet and musician are all closer to heaven and God."
I don't remember the school system, I don't remember those who didn't give me anything, but I remember in the face of each of my Teachers, and what they sacrificed for their students. Faith and memory gave me the strength to live then and there, where it seemed unbearable to others.
- Your life position in the current realities.
- Miracles happen in everyone's life. But not everyone knows how to notice them. In order for life to love you, you just need to love it, and not your sufferings in it. Live and rejoice, because life is even the most difficult, it is being. Be sincere, love people, because no one expects hatred, everyone needs love... even those who don't understand it.
- Could you divide your life into "BEFORE" and "AFTER"?
- No. Life is a single field and death is not divided into parts. Life is existence, death is non-existence, something that does not exist...Individual life events are the breaths of the wind of time.
- An unusual question. Are you an adult or a child? If a child, then he has a dream. Which one?
- Of course, the child. I'm a poet. I have a lot of dreams. Here is one of them: to see at least in relative proximity the star that I gave to my wife. The star has specific coordinates. And I have documents for her. The star is called "Lyubov Akhadova" (Love of Akhadov), it is located in the constellation of Capricorn. The documents, including the certificate of ownership, were issued by Roscosmos in 2017.
Or once again drink water from the rivers named after me. I just found them once, and my topographers put them on the map.
- Thank you for such a succinct interview. Let your ideas come true and your dreams come true.
- Тhanks. And I will add on my own that if you save at least one child, it means that you did not teach in vain. And remember: our future needs such ascetics as you.
Eldar Akhadov is a Russian poet, novelist and literary researcher, co-chairman of the Literary Council of the Assembly of the Peoples of Eurasia, honorary member of the Writers' Union of Azerbaijan, member of the Russian branch of the International PEN Club, the Writers' Union of Russia, the South Russian Writers' Union, the Russian Geographical Society. Winner of many national and international literary awards. Author of 73 books in five languages: Russian, Azerbaijani, English, Spanish and Serbian. The books were published in Russia, Azerbaijan, the USA, Serbia, Mexico, India and Egypt.
Vladimir Tolstikov is a member of the Moscow Union of Journalists, a teacher, editor-in-chief of the independent open newspaper "A" in the Circle", an educational and methodological laboratory of children's and youth journalism.
In the photos:
1. and 2. Fragments of a meeting with readers in the museum of Dolgoprudny, Moscow region
3. Eldar Akhadov on the left, Vladimir Tolstikov on the right
4. The vision of an Angel in the winter snow-covered tundra
5. Little Eldar with his mother, photo of the early 1960s
6. Icon of St. Nicholas of Myra, brought from Myra of Lycia (present-day city of Demre, Turkey)
7. Eldar Akhadov with his mother over the bank of the Yenisei, 2010
- Eldar, I will start with the fact that the literary meeting with you at the Historical and Art Museum of the city of Dolgoprudny, Moscow region, made an indelible impression on me and my editorial team of young journalists from A in the Circle. One girl even brought her mother and brothers with her. And I didn't regret it. The information at the meeting with you was presented in such a way that we were in constant tension and increased attention. Personally, I was shocked by the "Prayer for You" read in front of the audience, the "Russians" video, your story about meeting an Angel. And, as a result, a few days later, there was a desire to interview you.
- Thank you for your kind words. I am ready to answer all questions directly and openly.
- Each person has his own meaning of Faith. And for some reason, everyone comes to the same conclusions. How does this happen? What is the object of your faith?
- There are fundamental concepts in which each individual has his own separate meaning, however, leading to approximately the same conclusions. For example, the concepts of Good and Evil. Everyone who lives is convinced that Good will eventually triumph over Evil, no matter how it turns out. Why? For one simple reason: the winning side, under any circumstances, called and will call itself Good! And this rule is unshakable.
That is why Good will definitely win, and Evil will certainly be trampled. For the victor assigns to himself the role of Goodness and all that is good, and the vanquished gets everything else. Second. Some people believe in God. Others BELIEVE that there is no God. Both are essentially faith. Those who say that the existence of God is unprovable usually "forget" to add that for the same reason the non-existence of God is also unprovable!
Faith and religion are often antagonists, because ritual does not matter for faith in God. Rituals and all kinds of conventions are important only for religions: what to wear, how to bow, in what sequence what words to repeat, what to eat and drink, what not to eat and not to drink, and so on, and so forth, formal rituals turn faith into a kind of impersonal set of rules, behind which there is no sincere feeling No, and it can't be.
I am a believer, I say this consciously and sincerely, but I personally do not need rituals for faith. God communicates with me according to His will at any time convenient to Him, He is everywhere near us and inside us.
"God has no religion," wrote Mahatma Gandhi. God does not revel in his greatness, he is God, not a narcissistic turkey, it is religious rituals that expose him as a vindictive, self–satisfied ghoul who needs to be appeased with endless flattery, otherwise he will flood the whole world with blood, it is religions, not God, for the sake of their earthly power, they oppose some believers to others, imposing religious rivalry and wars on them.
About the Temple. I lived in the North among the Nenets and other Northerners. For them, the Temple is everywhere. The temple is the whole universe. According to their concepts, it is impossible to separate a person from the Temple, because our whole life takes place in the Temple...
The road flows along the cliff,
Forests are crowding over the sea.
Through the eyes of the autumn God
The heavens are looking at the mountains.
And the sun is setting on your shoulders
And breathes in the face, and bakes…
What are you sad about, man?
Where is your time going?
Not to the wanderers of the city of Bari,
Not to the ancient temple in Demre,
And by the way, about the true gift –
To rejoice about love and kindness.
Who will have little time, who will have a lot,
But the Creator's covenants are eternal.
The road flows along the cliff,
Which will have no end…
- What religion are you?
- My faith in the One God does not depend on religion, although I have been to churches and mosques, and have always behaved there with respect to all those present. I can't call myself personally a non-believer in any way, but - without intermediaries.
- We've been learning-learning-learning all our lives. And at the exit – it turns out that they have not learned anything. Is our mind powerless to cope with this task?
- The mind can have an absolutely unpredictable, unimaginable form of existence. For example, water meets all the signs of a living mind. She feels and remembers, she is inside us and outside, and controls us everywhere. Perhaps we live inside a mind that we don't know anything about. God is a self-developing intelligent system, not a paradigm frozen out of space and time.
We do not know and cannot know exactly what God looks like, and does He look at all at all? Does He need to look like something? Perhaps looking is not the most important thing in His activity. Thought has no speed limit, it is instantaneous. For God, "now" and "always" are the same.
- Which is closer to the truth – thoughts or feelings?
- What has no beginning has no end. Feelings and thoughts are immortal. Harmony is one of the foundations of life. Just like love. The attraction of the living to the living.
- This list does not mention death. What is the reason for this?
- Why am I talking about life and not talking about death? Because life is existence, and death is non-existence, and non-existence means non-existence, something that does not exist. Therefore, there is no death.
- What is a PERSON?
- A person is what he thinks and feels. And this is immortal. The physiological has nothing to do with it.
- What can you say about the language of the Bible and the Gospels?
- People wrote the Bible. No God wrote it. This is a document compiled by a lot of people who had different levels of knowledge and were intelligent to varying degrees. The most ancient fragments of the Bible consist of fragments of completely different books, to put it mildly, which had little in common with monotheism…
God is Love, compassion and self–sacrifice. There is an awful lot of non-God in the opening chapters of the Bible. I tried to collect the grains of truth about Jesus from the four canonical Gospels. This is a separate book, for which I have repeatedly received threats from those who are used to just banging their forehead on the floor and not thinking about anything.
- The Bible and the Gospel are the source of truth. What algorithm have you worked out to see this truth in a heap of later attributions?
- About the Bible and especially the Gospels. For more than two thousand years, man has not learned to read what he has written and evaluate what he has read objectively, separating the later postscript, lacunae and additions, abundantly available in sacred texts, when people tried to "legitimize" their desires and ideas by attributing them to I.H. in fact, the first thing I saw in all canonical texts: Jesus categorically demanded, and begged, and asked every day and hour for one thing: NEVER to call him God!!! Never! In addition, Jesus never spoke or hinted at the betrayal of Judas, on the contrary, He called him a beloved disciple. But Peter was called Satan and demanded his expulsion precisely as a traitor. But this is exactly what priests of all directions equally do not want to know or notice for two thousand years... This is what concerns the historical, not the legendary background. Jesus was never a priest, but Peter was.
The story of Peter's sufferings is completely invented. In fact, it was most profitable for him to kill Christ. It allowed him to gain power over the Christian community, its money and property. What kind of conscience can Satan have? Remember and never allow yourself to forget that it was he who was told by the Teacher "Get away from me, Satan!" The story of his suffering and execution was invented either under his personal control or by his followers.
I have been looking into it for many years, very carefully – Peter is not an apostle, not a disciple and not a follower, he is an enemy of Christ, his rival and a burning black envious. Pavel - yes. Paul is a disciple. The Apostle. Scientist. A martyr. But not Peter. By the way, Peter was called Kifa during his lifetime. That's his name. The naming of Cephas by Peter was attributed to Christ by the obliging chroniclers of Cephas.
And Judas was envied in a black way by the rest of the companions, because he was a cashier. Judas had the entire cash register of their group. He didn't need any 30 funny pieces of silver in the spirit: why? Did he want money? Absolutely far-fetched nonsense. In the cash register, which was under his protection, there was ten times, a hundred times more money than the beggarly thirty pieces of silver. Thanks to the successful speeches and speeches of the Teacher, their cash register was never empty. Judas was blamed for all his sins not only because he died first. Criminals always blame all their own possible guilt and crimes on the dead, because they are unrequited. Judas was both a bodyguard, a cashier, and the most trusted person of the Teacher, and died protecting Him, literally in the first seconds of Christ's arrest. Because the only one was not afraid, did not run, did not keep silent, did not deny, did not lie, but engaged in battle with all those who wanted to arrest Christ. And he died in an unequal battle.
None of the arresters had any special need to find out who Jesus was here: a week before, the whole city welcomed Christ, every Jerusalem family saw and knew the Teacher by sight.
The Bible and the Gospels have been repeatedly disfigured by "adjustments" for thousands of years. Separating the attributed from the real event is often the most difficult thing. Don't be afraid of the truth. She has power.
The main thing that helped me to separate fiction from the truth was the non-necessity of the actions performed. If there is an obligation, then there was some intention of the chronicler. Christ had no intentions, which means that the obligation in his actions is a deliberate lie, invented later "for personal use." But if there is no set for a certain result, then it's true.
In general, what I like about Jesus is His cheerfulness, the ability to enjoy life, which is what He told the disciples. And a sense of humor, and indeed sensuality was inherent in Him. It was not for nothing that women loved Him so much that many left their husbands, following him. And the husbands were jealous, not realizing that it was not the physical, but the spiritual in a person that was more important to Him. And that their women followed this spiritual, not physical.
Here is a parable that is not made up: about the precious oil poured on His head. Why did the woman pour oil on I.H.'s head? Because the greedy students with her began to talk about how much money they could get by selling this jug of oil. And she realized that her gift would go to them, not to Christ, as soon as she left. Then, in order to prevent such a development of events, she poured all the oil on His head. I absolutely believe in such a truth of events.
- The icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker is especially revered in your family. What is the reason for this?
- In ancient times, the city of Demre (Turkey) was called Mira, and the country was called Lycia. The bishop of the city in the IV century was St. Nicholas the Wonderworker (Nicholas of Myra); here he was buried in a sarcophagus, in the church of St. Nicholas built immediately after his death. In May 1087, the relics of the saint were taken by Italian merchants to the city of Bari.
According to family legend, Nikolai is our relative. In the summer of 2014, my wife Lyubov and my children, Ruslana and Timur, were in the Lycian World (Demre). My children left Grandpa a bouquet of flowers.
During the Great Patriotic War in the winter of 42-43, Nikolai knocked on our grandmother's house and stayed overnight, and then disappeared. It was in the hungry Tatar village of Ust-Uz, Penza region, after my Leningrad refugees moved there. And a miracle happened: during several weeks of the most hungry time, a cast iron filled with hot boiled potatoes appeared in the stove. And the family survived, including my mother.
Fortunately, this is not a fairy tale. I believe in my mother's story. My mother is a blockade runner, and, thank God, she is still alive. Mom often remembers that winter and this moment. She says that her mother said that it was our relative, and that he is a saint.
- A few words about your family's pedigree.
- My wife, Lyubov Akhadova, is Russian and half Tatar, on her mother's side, and on her father's side - from a noble family that once had horse factories and a palace in Peterhof.
In 1904, my maternal great-great-grandfather was introduced into the hereditary nobility by a personal decree of Emperor Nicholas II for special merits in the spiritual field: he was the leader of the Muslims of the Volga region and lived in Penza. There is an area of Akhuna. His lands are named after his position.
- According to your statement, an Angel is depicted on the cover of your book "Waiting for a Miracle". What events preceded this?
- It was a vision in the tundra during a trip to a geodetic object. As a group, we examined the condition of old geodetic points, which sometimes had to be dug out from under the snow. The icy desert. Drifting snow. Wind. And before us is the light of an angel.
- You claim that the task of any level of complexity should be entrusted exclusively to one responsible person. Was this position developed during your work in the Far North?
- The greater the number of responsible persons, the greater the risk of non-fulfillment or poor-quality formal fulfillment of the task. The experience of life led me to this idea.
- You have school-age children. Therefore, the next question will be appropriate. Many agree that the current education has turned into a frank coaching in preparing students for the OGE and USE. Why is this format chosen?
- Because "it's easier this way." You don't need to KNOW the subject, you need to know the button to press. Teaching and learning is a great work of acquiring knowledge. The format of the Unified State Exam is no!!!!! he does not give knowledge, he teaches how to properly get himself an incentive "banana". An ordinary Soviet bad student of my time, the seventies, is a head more literate than the current "medalists". Extraordinary teachers are bullied for trying to give knowledge. No one touches those who sit obediently in the dark.
Parents just remember that they once gave knowledge at school.
- If you look at the essence of the problem, it has a centuries-old history. Is that so?
- Christ was crucified, Mohammed was mocked and beaten. It was the entertainment of the crowd. Why were they executed? For the Word.
Viktor Petrovich Astafyev said and wrote about this better than me, telling in his "Adventures" about the fate of the poets: "No one is as naive and gullible as a poet. Hundreds of years before the current enlightened and cruel time, the poet was punished, burned, whipped, beheaded, killed with pistols in a duel, and he kept rushing and rushing towards the winds, a singer and a martyr, hoping that the winds would fly over him, troubles would pass him by… And this has always been the case - poetry was driven by faith in kindness and mercy, the poet and musician are all closer to heaven and God."
I don't remember the school system, I don't remember those who didn't give me anything, but I remember in the face of each of my Teachers, and what they sacrificed for their students. Faith and memory gave me the strength to live then and there, where it seemed unbearable to others.
- Your life position in the current realities.
- Miracles happen in everyone's life. But not everyone knows how to notice them. In order for life to love you, you just need to love it, and not your sufferings in it. Live and rejoice, because life is even the most difficult, it is being. Be sincere, love people, because no one expects hatred, everyone needs love... even those who don't understand it.
- Could you divide your life into "BEFORE" and "AFTER"?
- No. Life is a single field and death is not divided into parts. Life is existence, death is non-existence, something that does not exist...Individual life events are the breaths of the wind of time.
- An unusual question. Are you an adult or a child? If a child, then he has a dream. Which one?
- Of course, the child. I'm a poet. I have a lot of dreams. Here is one of them: to see at least in relative proximity the star that I gave to my wife. The star has specific coordinates. And I have documents for her. The star is called "Lyubov Akhadova" (Love of Akhadov), it is located in the constellation of Capricorn. The documents, including the certificate of ownership, were issued by Roscosmos in 2017.
Or once again drink water from the rivers named after me. I just found them once, and my topographers put them on the map.
- Thank you for such a succinct interview. Let your ideas come true and your dreams come true.
- Тhanks. And I will add on my own that if you save at least one child, it means that you did not teach in vain. And remember: our future needs such ascetics as you.
