Denis Dragunsky, philologist and writer, reflects on why we draw a line under our achievements. Does it really help us?
Many years ago, namely in the spring of 1984, I watched TV, the Vremya program. The journalist interviewed a prominent Soviet writer Yuri Bondarev, who just turned 60 years old.
«What! The time has come to take stock, ”said the journalist. Yuri Vasilievich was directly taken aback by such a turn. “No, sorry! he said after an expressive pause. — Somehow you are too early about the results. I have serious plans for the future.» By the way, a year later he released a new and very interesting novel, The Game, about which they talked and wrote a lot, and lived for another 36 years.
The famous English writer Somerset Maugham has a book that is called “Summing Up”. But this is more of a guide for novice writers, based on the author’s personal experience as a writer and as a reader. Moreover, Maugham himself worked perfectly for more than a quarter of a century.
Summing up the results of one’s own life and work is an intermediate thing. Life is always the future, and the past (with all due respect to it) is the material, fuel, motivator and springboard. In extreme cases, the canvas on which you embroider a new picture of the coming years. I know for myself. At least three times I «took money» — once in thirty years, finally parting with philology for the sake of the theater. The second time was just ten years later, when I realized that my attempts to become a playwright had failed.
I summed up the results so resolutely that I threw in the trash twenty useless — as it seemed to me then — plays. Of course, life punished me with a purely dramatic plot: a week later a well-known director called me and asked me to read one of my plays, which someone told him about, but alas! A large trash can has already been taken away from the yard.
If we sum up, then only intermediate ones — to start a new life project
The best time was the third. I am already 57 years old, I am a political scientist and even a politician: editor-in-chief of a reputable scientific journal and an activist of the Union of Right Forces party. Not only that: I am a candidate for deputies of the State Duma, I have a «passing place» (that is, if the party gains 5%, I get to the parliamentary bench, and these 5% were promised to us by very high-ranking bosses).
But promises do not always come true: in the elections we fly like thin pressed wood over the capital of France. Party dissolved; and my journal is closed. The results are sad, it remains to look for a quiet place in a quiet newspaper and wait for a pension. However, I suddenly start writing short stories and posting them on the Internet. A year and a half later, I publish my first book. Today I have twenty-two of them, twenty-third comes out by the New Year.
Now I am seventy. Looking back over the past twelve years, I re-read my stories and feel a little bored with the novel genre that I have excelled at over the years. But I remember that both readers and critics constantly tell me: “Each of your stories is a compressed script for a movie, or even an entire series.” So I’m thinking, why not go to me as a screenwriter? In general, if we sum up, then only intermediate ones — to start a new life project.