How can we preserve in our children faith in justice and self-esteem? Philologist and writer Marietta Chudakova reflects on the important role that family and books play in education.
Psychologies: What does the word “freedom” mean to you?
Marietta Chudakova: I immediately remember Khlebnikov: “Freedom comes naked, Throwing flowers on the heart, And we, walking in step with her, Talk to the sky on “you” *. This is a very profound quotation, as only poets do. Deeper than the man himself, maybe he thinks. Imagine a beautiful seventeen- or sixteen-year-old girl who suddenly, by the force of things, found herself naked among the crowd. And it depends on this crowd – either quickly cover it up, cover up its nakedness, or outrage over it. Freedom comes naked, it comes as an opportunity. And she has no protection against abuse!
What is freedom anyway?
M. Ch .: There are different freedoms. Free will, freedom of choice between good and evil, which is given to us from birth. For me, this is an axiom. But if a person chooses evil, he can become a slave of his choice, a slave of evil. This happened to many before our eyes… And then these people find themselves in the grip of their choice, they are no longer free. And when a person makes a choice in favor of good, he becomes free, in my opinion. That’s what I’m thinking now, in answer to your question.
You are a man of decisive actions, firm principles, clearly expressed opinions. For me and for so many, you personify a free person, a person without fear. Where does this feeling come from?
M. Ch .: I do not know. This is a natural quality. My favorite Spanish proverb is: “No one can say ‘I dare’.” He can only say, “I was brave.” My father is Dagestan, and it was really not accepted to be afraid there, at least among men. Maybe it was passed down from his father somehow. Parents – I later realized this, over the years – treated their children with extraordinary respect (I have two sisters and two brothers). I’ll give you a small example. I had a girlfriend, I studied with her from the fifth grade to the fifth year at the philological faculty. Money in our family was obviously less than hers. They gave me some pennies with me, and then I pushed them away, and they told me: “No, take it to the buffet.” Well, I almost always tried to pay for it, you know why? She said that her mother asks her in the evening: “Where is the money?” I could not imagine that in our poor family, parents would ask someone such a question. It was completely out of the question! Or, for example, to say: you’re lying! It was not customary to lie and it was not customary to punish children. Mom hated the word “punish”, she said: “My children already know perfectly well when I am unhappy with them, when they offended me – I don’t need to punish them for this.” And never forced me to ask for forgiveness. Everything was handled in a different way.
Perhaps this is how they protected self-esteem in children?
M. Ch .: I think, yes. I guess it’s genetics as well. It’s funny, but I always scold my XNUMX% Russian friends: “For you to understand that you hurt your feelings, you need to explain for a long time.” If I was hurt, so to speak, for the living, I hear my voice! I’m not exaggerating: I don’t have time to find words, come up with an answer – I just already hear my voice from the outside … I once went by subway with my father for a whole semester: I went to university, he went to work. We enter Sokolniki on the platform, and then someone touched him. He turned around abruptly, staring at him with a terrifying look. I said: “Dad, it’s just embarrassing to travel with you. He accidentally hit you.” He replied: “Daughter, there is nothing I can do. We can’t touch a man with a finger.”
Start working with your head!
In the preface to her book “For Smart People from 10 to 16 Years Old,” Marietta Chudakova writes: “Having thought about it, I came to the conclusion that this book is still not for everyone, even among the smart ones. But only for those who either already love and know how to analyze, or want to learn it. What does it mean to “analyze”? Well, first of all – to think. Work with your head. Use your mind as a working tool. Do not be content with emotions alone – like “I don’t like it!” Or – “And my grandmother says that …”. But try to learn and understand. It seems to you, for example, that someone acted badly because they personally caused you and your loved ones some – and maybe very sensitive – inconvenience. But this, I must tell you in confidence, is still not enough to immediately hate him and start vilifying him. (Although it seems to many adult uncles and aunts in Russia that it is quite enough.) First you need to disassemble everything that happened into its component parts. Then establish cause-and-effect relationships between them … However, all this will become clear later.
M. Chudakova “Egor” (Time, 2012).
Yes, such a keen sense of personal space …
M. Ch .: It is known that the British should have a distance of more than 30 centimeters. I have the same habit; if a person comes close to me, I can’t talk at all. And when I first came to America and learned the word privacy (before that I read non-fiction in English, but I didn’t know such a word), I exclaimed: “Wow! I always lacked this in Russia, but I did not know that there was even a special word for this. Although I always felt very keenly that no one here takes privacy into account.”
How did you survive the parting with illusions? It’s also a liberation…
M. Ch .: I remember exactly this moment! Three and a half hours of reading Khrushchev’s report that turned my whole life upside down. Second course. The secretary of the party bureau came out and announced, I remember well: “The document of the Central Committee of the CPSU will be read out now. Not up for discussion.” A dissatisfied noise swept through the audience, where there were more than three hundred students: oo-oo-oo-oo. It was out of the question that during the life of Stalin discontent manifested itself even like this, namelessly. In general, then I entered the audience with one person, left with another. I remember very well the words that burned in my brain: “No, I will never, never follow an idea that requires millions of victims!” In my family, my father and brothers were communists, and I turned from an ideological Komsomol member into a convinced ideological anti-communist. But at the same time, the conviction and ideological spirit in me come from my father. It happens.
When the terrible picture of Stalin’s crimes was revealed, how did it affect your father?
M. Ch .: It had a terrible effect on my father that Stalin knew. Terrible. Here we must return to the moment when my father graduated from the Agricultural Academy and, as a true son of his republic, went to Dagestan. He was appointed Fisheries Manager in Dagestanskiye Ogni, not far from Derbent. His mother went with him with two children, pregnant with her third child. Mom always told me: how well they lived there, they never lived again. They were given a two-story villa, two nannies, and a cook and a Red Army guard with a gun, because at any moment they could come down from the mountains and kidnap their mother. But my mother fell ill with tropical malaria, which was common there. There was such a feature: none of the Dagestanis were sick, only visitors were sick. She gave birth to a third child, my older sister with a temperature of forty, all stuffed with quinine … And the doctor said to my father: “Omar, leave, you will lose your family. All your children will get sick, die, may die. You see, the Russians can’t stand our climate. And there’s nothing we can do. We cannot cure your wife. Leave.”
He left. And a few years later, terror began and everyone who bore the surname Khan-Magomedov, including my grandfather, was all cut down within a year. Women were not taken. They started, of course, with my uncle, with the People’s Commissar, they were interested in the highest ranks, so to speak, and then they took everyone who bore this surname. All to one. Moreover, it is interesting that this People’s Commissar, my father’s uncle, was taken in Pyatigorsk. I then wrote out his investigation file and watched it. They began to interrogate him in the same place in the NKVD investigation prison, and this man tried to escape from the investigator’s office. He almost succeeded! He jumped into a flight of stairs (well, mountaineer, it was all possible for him), but landed badly, broke his heel. They took him, the doctor extended his bulletin for two months, then he was forced to give him up for torture, everything was as it should be. My father always wrote: my father was repressed, 10 years without the right to correspond. Then they still believed that this was true, that he was somewhere in the northern camps. Then the party gave my father a piece of paper: “died in 1942 from pneumonia.” He said: “Well, yes, of course, we southerners cannot stand this climate.” He believed in it. Later I only found out from my grandfather’s investigation file that nothing of the kind was shot in January 1938.
As I later realized, my father was expecting that he could be taken at any moment. They did not take it only because he lived in another city. It has long been known that they were taken in places, but there was no time to look for these names in other cities. Here, miraculously, he was not touched, but no doubt he was waiting. And many years passed after his death, when I appreciated how he never created an atmosphere at home that one should be afraid of something. There was no atmosphere of fear in the post-war years, which I already remember. We, on the contrary, knew that my father had returned from the war, where he had gone as a volunteer, fought in all the terrible battles: the Moscow battle, Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, reached the Elbe and returned. Alive and unharmed, which was very rare. But I remember very well the evening in 1956 when he returned from reading a report from the Ministry of Fisheries. It was white, chalky pallor. Came home, undressed, sat down at the table. Silently. I’m sitting. And then, verbatim, his text: “I did not know that Stalin knew everything. He paused. “I thought these were terrible mistakes, but Stalin does not know about them!” Still silent. I sat without breathing because he was not in his usual state. The main thing is his pallor, I have never seen him so pale. “I don’t understand how those who knew he knew didn’t kill him.” He paused again and said: “If I knew this, I would sacrifice everything and kill him.” It was implied – not only with his life, but with his family, with everything in the world. And since he did not know how to lie, he said what he really thought, and undoubtedly he would have done it!
Read more:
- From will to freedom
You, a literary historian, suddenly started writing books for children ten years ago. Why? Are you tired of science, do you want to master a new genre, or do you see it as your mission?
M. Ch .: No, I love my job as passionately as I did when I was 23, but come on: it’s sick that teenagers are fed only fantasy, as if their real country does not exist in nature. In general, everyone gave up on teenagers: they do not see their place in Russia. They hear from adults that thieves and criminals are all around, everything is sold, plundered and divided, “nothing depends on us.” And teenagers are active people, they want to do something fair, kind. And I decided to show them this opportunity. That being said, I am a huge Harry Potter fan. But you can’t be in Russia straight from the magical land after school. I remember one compliment: that according to my “Wife Osinkina” one can study the geography of Russia. This was one of my goals. Everything there is written off from nature, I describe only those places that I myself drove by car. I also wanted to tell you about our Constitution, which, in my opinion, is very good. Give some basic information on the law. Everything about crimes and punishments is “correct” there – sitting weekly in the Pardon Commission under President Yeltsin, I read tens of thousands of sentences. Also, of course, this is a book about respect for children – it is a guarantee that they will be able to grow up as free people. But so far, even the respect of parents for all the surrounding fellow citizens is a rare case in our country. Still, alas, the Soviet impulse has not been extinguished: “What are the subtleties between us – slaves ?!”
In Zhenya’s family, I recognize your family. Did you manage to raise your daughter free?
M. Ch .: It is difficult for me to answer this question. Ask your daughter. Sasha and I (Alexander Chudakov – the husband of Marietta Chudakova. – Ed.) had this idea: how to make sure that the child does not become Soviet. We did not buy a TV, she hated and despised us for it, but I said: please, go to your friends. Protected as best they could. Masha wrote a lot herself, drew beautifully. Very funny, in the third grade she comes running – and we had a common table with her, there was a queue for it. I told her: “Well, Masha, let me sit down, I’ll write.” And she says: “You work all day, but I didn’t take a pen in my hand all day!” Well, I gave in. There are many books in the house, she could take any. I have only seen one book that is harmful to a child. At first, I could not understand why my daughter suddenly became some kind of bandit. In the diary they write: “I ran through the basements with the boys and blew up caps”, “howled like a wolf in the classroom.” It turned out that she had read Pippi Longstocking. And there the main thought is “Do not listen to anyone!” It struck me. But maybe such a splash is needed sometimes. There is also freedom in this.
I told Masha as soon as she began to understand: “You can do anything, you are allowed everything, except for what interferes with other people.” Everything! I tried to instill this in her: just think about it, does it interfere with others or not? Well, for example, she endlessly brought us cats and dogs. How many passed through our house! We put them in order, and then gave them to good people, and she knew that she could bring anyone, any mangy kitten or puppy. In this sense, complete freedom. And she understood this very well: parents do not allow anyone to carry any living creatures home, but she can.
You travel a lot around Russia, give speeches, deliver good books, talk to young people. Do you think books can seriously influence them?
M. Ch .: I proceed from the fact that good books have practically no moral influence on adults, but on children and adolescents – a huge one. Family and books – that’s what makes up a free person. In fact, they’ll manage on their own.
* V. Khlebnikov. Selected Works (Azbuka, 1998).