Elena MAKAROVA
Elena Makarova speaks about an unusual childhood in a family of three poets, family memory of the Gulag, the experience of inner dissent, the refusal of lies and of life “within the system,” and about art as a form of survival and resistance.
In Gregory Antimony’s program, Elena Makarova reflects on her family — the poets Inna Lesnyanskaya, Semyon Lipkin, and Grigory Korin — on the intellectual and moral environment in which her worldview was shaped, on encounters with censorship and pressure, on her work with children, her pedagogical practice, and her search for meaning under conditions of unfreedom.
A separate, central part of the conversation is devoted to Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist and Bauhaus educator who worked with children in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Makarova speaks about her many years of research into children’s drawings, archives, and diaries, about developing her own analytical methodology, and about how art and attentive care for a child’s inner world became a form of psychological salvation under camp conditions.
This interview is a reflection on freedom and unfreedom, on human dignity, on the power of culture, and on the responsibility of memory toward the future.
GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Hello, dear viewers. This is The Interview Hour. My name is Gregory Antimony, and today I am very pleased to introduce my guest, Elena Makarova. I believe that over the course of our conversation you will learn many interesting — and perhaps unexpected — things about her.
Let us assume that most of our viewers do not know you very well. Perhaps we could begin with a brief self-introduction. I could hardly find anything about your childhood — so if you start there, that would be wonderful.
ELENA MAKAROVA:
I have a book titled Tsatsa Zamorskaya, which has already gone through three editions. Everything about childhood is in that book — but not about the childhood I can speak of now.
I was born in Baku. And there were two sides to my formation. In Baku lived my mother, the poet Inna Lesnyanskaya — we will probably speak about her later. My father was the poet Grigory Korin; I will say a few words about him as well.
All of my mother’s family — all of her relatives — were in the Gulag. They were among the first revolutionaries of Azerbaijan, Bolsheviks. They were all imprisoned; very few returned.
I was four or five years old when I heard that “our people are coming back.” It was 1956. In reality, no one returned. But there was a wild tension in the family — that Aunt Taya would return, that Uncle Syoma would return, that someone else would return. No one did.
For me, it was a terrifying puzzle: where had all these people gone?
I went to ask my uncle, who was a teacher of the history of Azerbaijan.
“Uncle, where did all these people go?”
He said, “If you ask questions like that, your parents will be arrested.”
And from about the age of five, I developed a strange perception of the world: that some people return, and some do not. For example, my father returned from the war with a concussion. Many children in our first grade had fathers who were either killed in the war or returned disabled — limping, ill. That seemed normal.
What was not normal was that someone could be taken away somewhere — and was supposed to return. That was abnormal, and I thought about it constantly.
In first grade, when they were accepting children into the Young Octobrists and told us that our grandfather was Lenin, I raised my hand and said that my grandfather’s name was Shabi Pertsevich Korenberg. I was not accepted into the Young Octobrists. Later, I was not accepted into the Pioneers either.
When I was ten, my father took me from Baku to Moscow — my mother was studying at the Literary Institute at the time. My father was jealous and took me away. It was October 18, my birthday. I remember it perfectly: a hat with ties, a train, Moscow.
They took us to be inducted into the Pioneers at Lenin’s locomotive at the Paveletsky Railway Station. The group leader said:
“If anyone touches the sacred train, they will not be accepted into the Pioneers.”
The first thing I did was walk up and touch it.
A woman walking nearby with shopping bags said:
“This piece of trash will grow up and spit on the mausoleum.”
I was not accepted into the Pioneers. Later, at the boarding school, they organized a “dark one” for me — I was almost strangled. After that, my father took me out of the school, and I did not speak for six months. I was also not accepted into the Komsomol, because I had not been accepted into the previous institutions.
In 1967, my father became friends with a Czech-language translator, Miluše Očadlíková, later Zadorozhilova. She said to him:
“Grisha, come to us. We have the Prague Spring. You must see freedom.”
And we went. At that time, it was surprisingly easy. My father disappeared into dissident meetings — with Havel and others. And I was assigned Jan Palach. He was supposed to accompany me to cafés, because I liked to draw, and speaking Russian was forbidden. If you said a word, people would shout: “Natasha, go home.”
He simply made sure that no one hurt me, while I drew.
Then we returned. My father said that if we stayed, my mother would be arrested. I was seventeen. I made an arrangement with a Yugoslav man to smuggle me in the trunk of a car, and I swore I would never return to a country whose tanks had come to Prague.
But my father said:
“No. We must return.”
When we returned, my mother had already left for Semyon Lipkin. She was not arrested. I stayed with my father. He began to drink heavily — because of Prague, and because he was left without my mother.
In tenth grade, a man came to our class and began explaining how good it was that our tanks had entered Prague, because otherwise the capitalists would have come. I stood up and said:
“You are lying. I was there. I saw everything.”
I told them about an old woman who had survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Each time she knocked and asked:
“Are these Russians or Germans?”
“Russians.”
“Oh, how good.”
From such fragments, my picture of the world was formed — and it did not make me happy.
I wrote my first novella at sixteen. It is now being reissued, but at the time it was banned. I wrote A Diary from Prague. I showed it to Zalygin. He said:
“Go home and burn it.”
ELENA MAKAROVA:
That was the moment when I understood that everything was simply closed. There were no possibilities. There was the possibility to write — no one imprisoned me for that. And there was the possibility to work with sculpture, which I had been doing for a long time.
I had been sculpting since childhood — in hospitals, in boarding schools. Everything would pile up in refrigerators, and when my father came, the contents of the refrigerator were handed over to him. So I had a great deal of experience with clay.
There was a world-famous artist, Nikolai Nikolaevich Zhukov, who had drawn Lenin many times. My mother turned to him — he had painted three portraits of her — and said that she had a very talented daughter and perhaps she should be guided somehow.
Imagine the corridor of the Literary Institute: the smell, the walls painted green. A man in a luxurious fur coat and a fox-fur hat walks along the corridor, enters the small room where my mother lived, and says, “So where are your sculptures, Mama?”
“Well, here they are — these tiny little pieces.”
He said, “She’s not suited for monumental work.”
My mother replied, “Maybe she’s suited for something else. Look how well she sculpts.”
He said, “I’ll place her in the Surikov Art School, but I don’t think she’ll last more than two months.”
He turned around and left.
I was admitted to the Surikov School through Zhukov. But as soon as the story with the surname Korenberg began — the surname I had before I married Sergei Makarov — that Korenberg was dealt with very quickly there. I remember how, when we were sculpting a skull, they shoved screws and bolts into it. I sculpted endlessly, and I realized that this was also not my path to victory.
Later I entered the Surikov Institute as an auditor, because I had very good marks in sculpture and very poor marks in drawing. I truly did not like drawing very much. I stayed there for a while. I remember being slow there — though in reality I am not slow — but something there slowed me down.
We had to sculpt a full-length figure, build a metal armature — hook upon hook, iron everywhere. I built the armature and sculpted for twenty-four hours straight. Eventually the sculpture collapsed, and the hook came out. I ended up with a disturbing, hanged-looking young man.
I went to complain to Ernst Neizvestny, for whom I worked, making wax reliefs from his drawings. Ernst said, “You know, I studied at this institute. I spent seven hours sculpting the model. Then I took out all the guts, hollowed out the arms, made cavities, and sculpted my favorite forms inside. When the commission came, everything was sealed back up and stood there like new. And instead of speeding up your rhythm, you go complaining. Of course they’re idiots. You just have to work.”
That kind of work didn’t appeal to me either, because I loved medieval sculpture — where movement is frozen. A raised hand, stopped in time. Monumentality without holes, as if we were stonecutters. In short, I left that as well.
I worked. Then I married the storyteller Sergei Makarov — at that time he was not yet a storyteller, just an educated man with a clear mind. I had two children. And then I began to think about what to do with myself.
I went to teach sculpture to very young children. That was, essentially, my path.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: When did you realize that your mother was such a famous poet?
ELENA MAKAROVA: From early childhood.
Our meetings carry an almond aftertaste.
Almond is a poisonous nut.
In it lies my sin, both old and distant,
Alas, my maternal sin.By the sea where you were growing up,
We were rarely together.
I did not read you fairy tales,
I washed down my poems with wine.I appeal to distance and to time past,
And yet — to eternity, all at once.
Between us, like a harsh reality,
Those childhood fairy tales still stand.
ELENA MAKAROVA: I was completely in love with my mother. I loved everything about her: the way she lay there smoking Belomor, the way she murmured her poems, the way she arranged something under her hair so that it formed a high hairstyle.
There is even a funny story. An Azerbaijani writer once said to my mother:
“Inna khanum, don’t keep your hair shaped like a tube — wear it spread out.”
But my mother kept it shaped like a tube.
She was always wearing high heels, and her eyes were incredibly expressive. When my mother was writing, I would sit absolutely still, afraid to move. We had only one room, and so as not to disturb her, I tried to be a very obedient child.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: And after sculpture — where did you go next?
ELENA MAKAROVA: After sculpture, I could not get rid of the desire to leave this country. That country. I was constantly inventing ways to escape. I thought: I’ll leave with one of the children. But I was never allowed to go anywhere. For twenty years.
For twenty years, a KGB woman whom I recognized by sight — that is a separate story — kept telling me that I would not go anywhere. Leaving was impossible, but something had to be done.
Moscow Region, the city of Khimki, Koltsevaya Street, apartment twenty-two. What was there to do?
But in Khimki there was a school of aesthetic education. I was walking with a stroller sometime in 1976–1977 and thought: I’ll go in — maybe they’ll hire me. And they hired me to teach sculpture.
It was a special school. It had been created by five people. Children from three to seven years old studied there. The school was very well known — the Khimki School of Aesthetic Education. We had subjects such as mathematics, logic, painting, sculpture, and English. Five subjects for very young children.
The children came twice a week for an hour and a half. During the first ninety minutes they studied one set of subjects; during the next ninety minutes, another. The groups were constantly changing. There were many of them — fifteen groups in a row. That was how we worked. At the time, I thought this was normal.
There, I was happy. I was with children. Perhaps also because I had a very difficult childhood myself: boarding schools, hospitals, boarding schools again. In Baku, I was constantly ill. I was taken to a doctor named Listengarten, who said that I had a congenital heart defect. All the doctors believed that I would die tomorrow, and so everyone treated me with extreme anxiety.
I did not have a normal childhood. I did not play with other children; I lived under constant supervision. I did not live through that period the way I probably should have. That is why working with small children gave me an incredible surge of strength.
At that time, Fedya was still very small, while these children were already quick and perceptive. We worked with them wonderfully.
But very soon the school was shut down. A large commission arrived and said that we were disturbing the music department with noise. All of us were dismissed. It was a major scandal.
A large article appeared in Moskovsky Komsomolets about the damage this caused to children. It told the story of a girl named Natasha Zurabova, who became so angry that she painted over the walls of her entire apartment. And it is amusing that there was not a single name mentioned in the article except hers. Today, Natasha Zurabova is one of the most famous artists in Israel. So she did not paint over those walls for nothing.
ELENA MAKAROVA: At the same time, I was writing. Later, my second daughter, Manya, was born. My children did not go to kindergarten. They sat under the table while I typed. Manya remembers the sound of the typewriter. Under the table she had a dollhouse, and she never disturbed me: she played, and I wrote.
During that period, the typeset of my book was destroyed at the publishing house Soviet Writer because the protagonists were Jewish. An editor came to me and said:
“Why don’t you write about children? You speak about them so well.”
I did. The text was published in the anthology Time, a thick volume in which various writers reflected on time and space. My piece received a strong response. The publishing house Znanie предложило me to expand the article and publish it as a separate book. It came out with a print run of 500,000 copies.
Five hundred thousand copies is a great number. For the Soviet Union, perhaps not so much, but for subscribers it was a major event. A real revolution began. Children started being brought to me from all over the country so that I could help socialize them, work with them, support them.
At the same time, I worked with children who were undergoing bone marrow transplants — in sterile conditions, wearing protective shoe covers and gowns. I also worked in intensive care, with a friend of mine who was the head of the department. Children from orphanages were brought to him with diagnoses of developmental delay. He would call me to determine whether it was an illness, fear, a phobia, or trauma.
I came and worked with them.
There was a boy named Tyoma — an extraordinary child. A doctor named Valery brought him by helicopter, with a mechanical ventilation device installed on board. He was taken from an orphanage. We hoped that with my assessment and a psychiatrist’s signature we could place him in a good residential institution.
One day, when we were walking with him to the Sixth Maternity Hospital on Donskaya Street, he was asked a question:
“What is the difference between rain and snow?”
He answered:
“I don’t know. I want you to give me back to my mother.”
They said, “He doesn’t know the difference between rain and snow. Take him back.”
And he was returned to the same orphanage from which he had been taken.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: How old was he?
ELENA MAKAROVA: Fourteen.
I told my mother stories like this when I came to see her, because at that time her dissident period had begun — the Metropol story. I told her everything. And my mother was very hurt by it, because it came across as if I were doing something truly important, while she was just sitting there and, so to speak, doing nothing.
She was hurt in a very childlike way.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: It’s interesting how that whole Metropol story affected your family.
ELENA MAKAROVA: It affected us very well.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: That’s what I thought. It’s hard to imagine otherwise.
ELENA MAKAROVA: The thing is, during that time my mother and I seemed to return to one another — through letters. Later she lived with me; she died in my home. But there was a period when my mother was deeply, deeply immersed in that Metropol life: who said what, who wrote what, which foreign journalists had come, who had spoken to whom.
And this coincided with a time when everything was literally falling out of my hands. When there were all these children I could not help. When I would be traveling somewhere, thinking about a child, inventing some incredible plan to save them — and then, for example, someone would hit me from behind in the subway and I would fall on the escalator.
That is, things were constantly happening that were not directly connected to the dissident story. Perhaps they were connected, but not directly.
At that time, my task was to fully meet the needs of my mother, Semyon Izrailevich, and my father. Every day I went to my father’s place to measure his blood pressure. I went to my mother and Semyon Izrailevich’s to cook, clean, and take care of everyday matters. I was like a girl constantly running errands.
But this was not something anyone forced on me — I put myself in that position. I saw that among all those poets, I was the only prose writer. And so I felt that I had to relate to life in a practical, prosaic way: what to cook, what to bring, how to feed people.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: Among which poets?
ELENA MAKAROVA: Oh, there were many poets. My mother, Inna Lvovna Lesnyanskaya; Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin; and my father, Grigory Korin. He too was a remarkable poet — simply forgotten by everyone else.
ELENA MAKAROVA: Around that time, I was subjected to another brutal public attack. I went to a meeting of young writers, and they shouted at me fiercely. I already had a published book; I was twenty-eight years old. The book was called Katushka. At Soviet Writer, they screamed that it was “plasticine literature,” that it was voyeurism, a vile fascination with filth.
People stood up and said all kinds of things. Before that, Trifonov had told me:
“Lena, they’re going to kill you now. Sit quietly.”
I came — and they killed me. I sat quietly.
There was a man named Poptsov.
GREGORY ANTIMONY: Oleg Poptsov?
ELENA MAKAROVA: Yes, Oleg Poptsov. At the time, he was the editor of the magazine Rural Youth. He summoned me, asked me to bring the stories I wanted to publish, said he really liked my writing and that he would publish everything.
I came. It was the Pravda building, overlooking the railway tracks — near the Savyolovsky station, or somewhere around there. He walked over to the window and said:
“These people — these are the people you should write about. They work, they labor, they do everything for us so that we can sit here now and eat Mishki na Severe candies.”
I said:
“Did you invite me because of the stories?”
He answered:
“No one will publish your stories. What needs to be done is this: you must sign a letter. A letter stating that you do not agree with your mother’s actions.”
I said that I had never signed such letters and would not sign them. At that moment, I was breastfeeding, and my milk had come in. He said:
“Then stay here.”
And he left, locking the door.
There was a bowl of Mishki na Severe candies on the table. I ate all of them. Then I made little boats out of the wrappers — first from the colored ones, then from the silver foil. There were about twenty of them. I lined up an entire fleet — and he still did not return.
I was terrified — because of the milk, because I couldn’t get out. About forty minutes later, he finally came back and said:
“I’m asking you very much to sign it. Nothing will happen to you.”
I said:
“Something will happen to me. I cannot do anything against my conscience. No.”
And I left.
Later, during perestroika, I met him at the Central House of Writers — and he did not recognize me at all.
To be continued...