In the final year of school my plans changed. Everything was turned upside down by a theatre club that was organized at school. Unfortunately it was led by an adventurer who had absolutely no talent. After a year we had been irrecoverably inoculated with every imaginable failing of the actor’s art, but the most terrible thing of all was that each one of us firmly believed in his own genius. Instead of preparing for our future lives and choosing a profession to match our abilities, with a decent and stable income, we started dreaming about art.
In its short existence the club didn’t stage even a single production; all we did was rehearse. Yevgeny Schwartz’s play An Ordinary Miracle, which we had arrogantly chosen to stage, never got any farther than the first act, but we already thought of ourselves as stage artistes.
I remember what a terrible state of alarm I threw my father and mother into when I announced that I intended to go to Moscow, no less, and join the Theatrical Institute to become an actor.
I must give my parents due credit, for they did try to rescue their son from the impending catastrophe. The only one who supported me in my vainglorious dreams was Vovka, but only until it was made clear to her that her brother Alyoshka was not going to end up on the practice stage at the Moscow Art Theatre, but go straight into the army. After this sudden enlightenment, Vovka fell silent and I lost my only ally. My parents had already launched a new educational campaign. Now, to spare my vanity, they started denouncing the nepotism inherent in theatrical institutions: “No one ever gets in there without graft.”
My courage failed me and they cunningly tempted me with a different prospect. My father said that he didn’t want to destroy my dreams, but wouldn’t it be better first to acquire a solid profession in a technical college? And then, five years later, if I still couldn’t live without art, I would be more mature, I would know myself better, and I could go to college to study directing, which already sounded more respectable in itself. I thought about it and agreed to the technical college and a “solid profession”.
To this day that expression reminds me of something rectangular and heavy, resembling simultaneously a silicate brick and a reinforced concrete pillar. I chose the most solid area of all—“Machinery and Technologies for Foundry Engineering”. In the entrance exams in Maths and Physics I made a whole heap of mistakes and got a pretty bad fright, but they pulled me up to a “B”. After an entirely fictitious exam—a composition—I was accepted for the first year of the course.
I wasn’t interested in my studies; every subject was alien to me. But I didn’t skip lectures and for the exams I dutifully copied out heaps of cribs, which they didn’t take away from us.
After the mid-year exams many students were kicked out of the institute, but not out of the Faculty of Mechanics and Metallurgy. They hoisted up our grades as high as they could, and I tried hard not to fall behind too. Doing all those drawings was hard, but even that problem could be solved—for a small reward, students who specialized in perspective geometry would do them for me. My grant was just enough to cover the especially hideous course requirements in the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms—TMM—which had been known since time immemorial as “This Murders Me”. I lived with my parents and didn’t have the kind of financial problems that students from out of town might face.
It was 1991 and my assessments still contained, as a final flourish from the Soviet age, an examination on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which I passed with a “B”, and a test on Scientific Atheism.
Of course, I didn’t forget what my true calling was and why I was there—to acquire that “solid specialization”, that indulgence from my parents and myself, so that, with a mechanical engineer’s diploma tucked under my jacket, I could stride fearlessly into the artistic world with a clear conscience.
When they started developing a team at their institute for the Club of the Jolly and Ingenious competition, I dashed to join it. My first trial appearances on stage made it clear that I was “not funny”. Everyone realized it. I attributed this acting failure to my noble, entirely unclown-like stature and dramatic talent. Disappointed, I consoled myself with the thought that my natural gifts were not those of a buffoon in amateur dramatics, but of a serious artiste.
I managed to make up two feeble jokes. One played on the name of Ukrainian vodka with pepper, horilka—“In Ukraine they’ve started making vodka for monkeys—Gorillka…”—and the other developed that Russian saying, “There’s no virtue in standing”— “There’s no virtue in standing. Take the weight off. Virtue’s in the backside.” They laughed at the second joke and ditched it. I also reworked the song ‘The Beautiful Distance’ to include the words, “I promise I’ll be cleaner and I’ll shave.”
My hour of stardom arrived when our institute’s team got involved in the municipal festival. Three days before the quarterfinals, it turned out that the competition sections “Greetings” and “Homework” were still not ready. The Jolly and Ingenious were headed for the bottom, taking their captain with them. They laid out witticisms written on scraps of paper like a game of patience and couldn’t gather them together into a single whole. The mournful prospect of an exit from the festival loomed over us.
The manager of the student club, Dima Galoganov, dropped in to see us. He was a recent graduate of the institute and now a petty bureaucrat. Galoganov sombrely swore to disband the team in the event of failure.
During the castigation I looked through the archive, which contained the rejected dross, jumbled it up together with some lightweight jokes, and suddenly a complete plan of the performance took shape in my mind.
Raking up the pieces of paper and the notebook, I announced that by the next day I would write a complete programme for all the sections. In one night of work I managed to sew those dismal scraps together into a colourful and entirely original performance. One leitmotif was particularly successful, using songs in which the words “go crazy” figured at least in passing: “He’s wearing a camouflage tunic, it’ll make her go crazy”, “I’m going crazy or ascending to a higher plane of lunacy”, “And the postman will go crazy trying to find us”, “I’m going crazy over you”. The moment the singer reached that phrase with “crazy” in it, he suddenly started pulling dumb faces, smiling, gurgling and dribbling. In the final song we really cracked the audience up when our entire line-up started gurgling like idiots. Our team triumphantly won through to the semi-final, and a star of Moscow’s Club of the Jolly and Ingenious who was on the jury said that our performing skills were worthy of a higher league.
The president of the institute congratulated the manager of the student club, Galoganov, on our victory, and Galoganov didn’t forget about me. In three days I had become number one in the team. From being a rank-and-file writer of jokes, I was elevated to a position with obscure contours, within which the functions of a director could be vaguely discerned. Moreover, no one objected to my elevation. On the contrary, I was loudly congratulated and thanked.
I made haste to inform my family about my success and they nodded smugly—“Well, what did we say?”, “Well, well, only a second-year student and already a director…”—and they winked at me cunningly, as if to say, “The best is yet to come.”
My new purpose in life eventually robbed me of my “solid profession”. From the second year I hardly studied at all, but worked on the CJI. I was granted most of my course tests and exams as a gift, thanks to the vice-president for cultural affairs.