Boris Minaev: “I have always been too fond of the process”

“For some, the process is important, and for others, the result. We all share this strange and implicit feature. This also applies to relationships between men and women. I thought for a long time what to compare them with … All sorts of extraneous associations climbed into my head, such as growing strawberries or knocking dust out of carpets. Finally I found this comparison. But you have to go a little further.

At the age of twenty, I had already done a lot. I wrote two stories of three pages each, typed them out on a typewriter and gave them to different people, for example, Dima Vrubel in his handwritten magazine “Mirror”. Well, there are also two or three unfinished texts, which I didn’t even retype, because they were unfinished, but these were the ones my friends liked the most. There was such a story “Katka” there, about a girl whom I never knew and, in principle, never met. Maybe it’s a pity that I didn’t meet … But I wrote about her. So. It seems to me that by these twenty years I managed the most important thing – to understand what I want to do in life. And it really was love. Love for something that I don’t even know what to call until now. By the moment when you sit down at the paper (now at the laptop) and something starts to pour out of you, pour, flow, like from a bad bucket. I don’t know if that dream of writing and the choice I made was the right one, but it doesn’t matter now. Another thing is important – I discovered the process.

It’s the same story as with love for a woman. Never could think of the result. I’ve always been overly fond of the process. Many then married early (although not as early as we do; we – at 19 years old). Someone did not take care of contraception, someone – in order to get away from mom and dad as soon as possible, someone – in order to commit an act (now, of course, I’m talking about male motivation, not about female). But I didn’t have any motives. I just, I repeat, liked the process itself. I just wanted to sleep with this person, breathe the same air with him, live the same life, spend all the time together, look at her, touch her skin, and so on, and so on, and so on … And just imagine, it coincided with the desires of this other person, with a different soul and a different nature. Gradually, “my process” acquired more and more details and details. Every year there were more and more of them. Everything became more. Feelings. Wishes. Illumination. This is very exciting: even the same line of the body can be viewed from different points, and these will be different sensations. On the line, for example, the transition of the ankle to the knee. Well, and on different lines there. When I suddenly hear that a person – from the height of his experience – is asked to tell about the secrets of love, about how to live long with a loved one and not quarrel, I immediately try it on myself and think: what an idiotic question! I would have absolutely no idea what to answer. About the line of transition of the ankle to the knee?

Read more:

• I am writing to you my love…

Of course, the details – they accumulated into very, very complex structures, grew like mycelium on a huge thick tree trunk, which you look at for a long time when you meet him in the forest. By the way, about the forest. When I want to remember something – or not … when something like that is remembered, then, as a rule, these are not our endless walks along the beaches of different oceans, and not through beautiful famous cities, but through the forest, when we Asya and the children rented one or the other old dacha, which had already outlived its expiration date. These old dachas, with their sagging sofas, old staircases and round tables, have always seemed to me the most romantic places on this earth.

Imagine: you look at a woman and feel delight. From the way she lies. Or how it goes. Not sure why, absolutely. But the feeling of delight inside becomes somehow more and more acute. Three years ago, when my book “Psychologist” was published, many people asked me: how is it that you are writing about a person who has three love affairs at the same time, but what about yourself? Well, what about himself? It’s just that so many details have accumulated over a long life that no one will believe if you write: it all happened to one man and one woman. But literature should be believable … Therefore, I had to come up with something. But theoretically, I know that the one who sees the result is right. Who plans. Who goes to the intended goal. It is much easier for him … Once we were sitting in a male company, and one of my friends leaned over to his ear and said: “Do you see that person over there? He has XNUMX registered sexual contacts alone.” Well, yes, what did you think? We do register them. An example was given specifically. We understand the process and the result differently, I’m afraid, too. Some believe, others, as the hero of Clint Eastwood says in one action movie, never keep statistics. We are different creatures in this sense. Although very similar. For one, the process is more important, for the other, repeatability and predictability. Or is it important to me? Or for both of us? Damn, I’m confused. It seems to me that only one thing is important: in love, you should not set yourself up for a result. Set rules. Only in this way, and not otherwise. And if it turns out otherwise, what then? The main thing is that the process should proceed, as the well-known politician used to say. And he was right, for the most part.”