Daniil Granin: the secret of talented old age

On January XNUMX, the writer Daniil Granin turns ninety-four years old. Youth delights us, old age surprises and attracts. In itself, valor is seen. We feel it as a secret, especially if it is the secret of a talented old age. Are there any secrets that allow you to receive such a gift at the end of life? Old people don’t usually talk about it.

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, an apologist for the right life, treated longevity as a scientist. But in answering doubts about whether a long life is really a high value, he goes beyond his science. His thought is very dear to me: “Soul evolution in old age makes a significant step forward … It cannot be denied that youth is only a preparatory stage and that only at a certain age the soul reaches its full development. This recognition should be the basic principle of the science of life … ”You see, in old age a person will have to experience and understand something that is inaccessible to another age. Then, as they say, there is something to fight for.

We talked with Daniil Alexandrovich more than once both for the press and just like that. His life, of course, was not a model of well-being. Here and external circumstances: the arrest of his father, the war, decades of being at the top of the pyramid in the Soviet years. I remember from my youth: the intelligentsia all the time discussed Granin’s public behavior in difficult circumstances, whether it was Brodsky’s trial or Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion. Many reproached him for being too cautious, others said that in those circumstances he did what he could. The telegram that he, the secretary of the Writers’ Union, abstained from voting on the Solzhenitsyn case, is already an act. But that’s not what we’re talking about now.

I can testify: even today Granin is ready for an open conversation, for a conversation about his life and the life of the country, and he repeats at the same time that the person is always to blame, not the era. About his youthful romanticism, which forced him, an engineer of the Kirov Plant, to remove his armor and go to the front as a militia, he spoke harshly in a conversation with me: “Why did I go to war? What for? It was an impulse, pathos. But after a year and a half or two, I was surprised at myself. I came to receive tanks in Chelyabinsk. And then my Kirov plant was in Chelyabinsk. The guys who started with me have already become senior engineers, heads of departments. And I saw how much they did for the front during this time. What am I? He fed lice, rolled in the mud, in the trenches. That is, even rationally speaking, it was the wrong thing to do.”

To say that in our conversations Granin revealed to me the secret of talented old age would, of course, be wrong. In general, it is unlikely that such simple secrets exist. To look for them in some moral principles is completely naive. But I did understand something. And it happened in the days of December, when I was preparing for the upcoming series of conversations with Granin for television.

Daniil Alexandrovich had a story “Our Battalion Commander”, which I once missed. Now I read it, and it explained a lot to me. The plot is traditional: front-line soldiers go to the place of memorable battles. New houses, grown forest – it is impossible to recognize anything. Everyone except the former battalion commander. He arrived with a map that apparently took more than one year to complete. They remember with enthusiasm and a share of sentimentality, as it should be. Only the commander behaves strangely. “Where are our pillboxes?” someone asks. “We didn’t have pillboxes,” the battalion commander replies. “But you could have used mortars,” someone exclaims about one of the episodes. “And we didn’t have mortars,” says the battalion commander. In the end, it turns out that the battalion commander did not draw his map in vain. In that multi-day battle, all of them, and above all, he made a mistake. Now he understood it exactly. And the cost of this mistake was the life of their comrades. Everyone is frustrated and annoyed. “You’re taking war away from us! What for? After all, nothing can be changed.” “You can’t change it,” says the battalion commander, “but you can change your mind.” To change your mind here, as you understand, is not just to change your mind, but to rethink it.

The hero-narrator is the first to understand the meaning of what happened. He understands that his essay on the battalion commander, where he is represented by a bronze hero, is a bad essay. And at the same time, it was not in vain that he remembered the battalion commander all these twenty years. That’s the problem. Everyone went into their own image of the past, summed up a premature result, built a legend, and only the battalion commander wanted to understand the truth. He kept thinking all these years. It should be noted that this thinking has nothing to do with self-blame. It is important.

Daniil Alexandrovich Granin, of course, is this narrator. And his hero is a battalion commander. This is not all, but it explains a lot in his talented old age.