“I don’t remember where I started to find out the details... There was a Bolshoi at home Encyclopedic Dictionary. Probably from there. The worst thing I could learn about the disease at all is that it is incurable. From there about disability, difficulty walking, balance problems and a couple more paragraphs of nightmares. But most importantly, it is incurable."
The author of these lines is Irina Yasina, member of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, columnist for RIA Novosti, daughter of the scientific director of the National Research University-Higher School of Economics Evgeny Yasin. The lines are from her new autobiographical book "Case History".
A terrible diagnosis, melancholy and loneliness, betrayal by her husband, a wheelchair... A difficult book. It’s one thing to savor the details of fictitious romances and infidelities, but it’s quite another to read about how a disease eats away everyday life day after day... “Case History” is an anti-gloss, where what happened is told without the help of internal Photoshop. How to remain charming, cheerful, and amazingly efficient in the face of such a somersault of fate, our conversation with Irina Yasina.
"Tell a dirty joke, after all!"
Russian newspaper: Unfortunately, our usual reaction to great misfortune or serious illness is to drink something bitter. Some people are driven to church for the same reasons. You found some other way or even your own religion, which helped you to keep yourself a very active person, not to drink too much, not to become depressed, not to become sad. Was this optimistic outlook born out of spite of the diagnosis or has it always been there?
Irina Yasina: This is what distinguishes any adult from a child, teenager or crazy old man. How can you start drinking? You have a family, you owe someone to be in shape, and this shape is not necessarily physical, this also needs to be understood. A sense of responsibility, firstly, to the parents, and secondly, to the daughter, in this order, in fact, is my “anchor”.
RG: It often happens that it is the most loving and closest people, unable to cope with the grief that has befallen them, who complicate the life of a sick person. Let’s not talk about my husband’s reaction for now, how did your parents react? Who helped whom?
Yasina: Although the parents are very close to each other and love each other very much, they behaved differently. I knew that my mother would cry and suffer. Not in front of me, of course, she is a reserved person. But I realized that it was much harder for her than for me. You know, the feeling a mother gets when her baby just coughs? You immediately forget about everything you are doing and think only about this cough. And here is such a big problem. Mom, in turn, realized that a person with my character cannot simply be advised to lie down and everything will pass. Moreover, we knew: it wouldn’t work.
And then any adult young man is still stronger than an older man. Even if he is sick. Simply because he still has some time ahead to correct mistakes, to take care of something. And old people have very little time. Therefore they are more defenseless. There must be mutual guardianship, not in the sense of “go away”, but somewhere to remain silent, somewhere to shake hands, somewhere to cry together, somewhere to say: okay, let’s break through. Tell an obscene joke after all.
RG: Have you ever had to lie to your parents or hide something?
Yasina: First of all, yes. I was embarrassed by the disease and pretended that everything was fine with me. Mentally it was the most difficult time.
RG: You write that you were able to pull yourself together and find balance in six months.
Yasina: No, longer. For six months I was “completely on guard” when I didn’t want to leave the house. And a feeling of the future appeared, some kind of life began, probably in two years. At some point I realized that one and a half to two years is the period of adaptation that any person needs after he experiences global changes. I talked to some of my friends who were forced to immigrate. So the feeling of temporality passes somewhere through this period. Then people, relatively speaking, unpack their suitcases. And it’s the same with illness.
"Dad, what if I were your wife?" - “I would kill you!”
RG: Have your friends disappointed you?
Yasina: Yes, we were disappointed. Especially those who are successful. I get the feeling that many of them simply shrug off other people's grief as if it were contagious. They may not even say it. But my youthful friends have practically all disappeared. But what new ones have appeared! It's just happiness.
RG: And in psychological trainings It is often said that failure is contagious...
Yasina: I know for sure that this is not so. Moreover, I can say a paradoxical thing: I am simply happy that something happened in my life that led me to meet the people with whom I communicate now.
RG: At the onset of your illness, you were 35 years old and married. Write here in the “Case History”: “...After a few nights of my hysterics screaming: “What will happen to me!” my husband said that he wanted to live alone, but would always help me financially...” The men who surrounded you , apparently, turned out to be not a very strong sex?
Yasina: My husband left, but I have a dad who is the absolute ideal man for me, so I can’t give up on men.
RG: When a woman has such a father, it is difficult for her to find a spouse who could match...
Yasina: Yes, there is such a problem. One of my friends, an older woman who admired her own father all her life, once said: “You and I are women beaten by our own fathers.” And dad? He is wonderful, strong, humorous, generous, cheerful. Of course, finding “something similar” is very difficult. I once had a wonderful conversation with my father. I felt especially bad about something, he wanted to support me, started praising me, saying how wonderful I was, what a comrade-in-arms, a fighting friend, and stuff like that. And I asked: “Dad, what if I were your wife?” - “I would kill you!” - Dad answered frankly.
Men are weak, it's true. There are wonderful people among them, but I would like there to be more of them. Women, as my story has shown, are more frank, kinder, more decisive. They come to help more easily, sacrifice more easily. Money, time, energy, yourself. I am for matriarchy.
RG: But the nature of male betrayal, as it manifested itself in your case, where does it originate?
Yasina: This is a very deep problem. Boys are raised by mothers who instill in them: dear, think only about yourself, don’t pay attention to anyone, the main thing is that you achieve success. Their mothers love them so much that they are unable to love and respect even their own wives.
RG: But they fall in love because they themselves loved little...
Yasina: Yes, such a vicious circle.
“Do you want me to sit at home and look into my husband’s mouth?”
RG: Are men’s complaints against modern career women legitimate?
Yasina: The role of a woman in society is changing, so the question is quite legitimate: “If you want me to sit at home, give birth to four children, cook dinner and look into my husband’s mouth, then why am I a Doctor of Philosophy? No, there are happy wives who they manage to combine home and work, but this is very rare. Men are raised by their mothers in the spirit that “a woman should serve the family.” And, in fact, we have equal rights, but a woman can achieve the same. , as a man.
RG: But if everyone pulls the blanket on themselves, if traditional family roles are so displaced, happiness in marriage is hardly possible?
Yasina: I know a few happy families, in which women work hard and earn good money, and men, let’s say, are in the wings. This does not stop them from raising happy children and living together for 25 years. Happiness is generally possible in any situation. Who makes money is an external question. What is more important is what happens inside human relationships: whether people know how to adapt, accommodate, change. If you live your whole life with your youthful ideal of happiness, nothing good will come of it.
RG: Why, is it bad not to give up the ideals of youth?
Yasina: This ideal is beautiful, but it is primitive, and everyone has the same one. And life endlessly throws up surprises. Well, we will stand firm and say that happiness is this and not another: happiness when I can dance all night, walk in high heels all day, or ride a bicycle 20 kilometers. And if I can’t do all this, then there’s no longer any happiness, and why should I have such a life? What nonsense. It’s just that happiness is really very diverse. You just need to give yourself the trouble to adapt.
"For me, the 90s are a time of endless creativity"
RG: A beautiful woman in a wheelchair is a “strange animal” on our streets. Have you ever seen curious looks on yourself?
Yasina: Of course it happened. It's offensive at first, but then you get used to it. You have to smile. A smile is an absolute weapon. There is no other way out. Well, what can you do, there is a man without an arm, without a leg, and there is a man without a soul. You can attach a prosthetic leg, but you cannot attach a prosthetic soul.
RG: Ira, you and I studied at the university almost at the same time; we are the same generation, which, after graduating from the university, immediately plunged into the 1990s. Several people did not make it out of my course: some were killed, some drank themselves to death. Is this a good or bad time for you?
Yasina: There are probably the same number of people strong and weak, confused and collected in any generation. For me, the 90s are a time of endless creation, creativity, growth. Not everyone experiences what you and I have experienced. I don’t even remember our student youth very well, because then came the 90s: an incredible volcano, a cataclysm of change.
I don’t suffer from amnesia, I remember very well the Soviet era with queues and the ban on reading “Doctor Zhivago” on the subway... I remember how in the seventh grade I saw a photograph of Chambord Castle on the Loire near Paris - shortly before that, like all children, I was reading Dumas’s novels “The Three Musketeers” and “Queen Margot”, she was impressed by the description of the romantic Middle Ages. And then I look at the castle and realize that I will never see it. And at the age of 13 we should dream and believe that the world is open to us. Instead, we know that if you do not join the party, then you will definitely not see anything in the world. And if you join, maybe you’ll go on an excursion as part of an organized delegation. I had no illusions about the charm of the Soviet Union. And not now. Moreover, it has become even smaller. Because I learned more. The 1990s were a great time. Very difficult, but creative. What we experienced in 10 years, England experienced for centuries, remember, in textbooks - “the period of initial accumulation of capital, enclosure: XV-XVIII centuries.”
RG: Have you ever wanted to leave the country?
Yasina: I even tried to do this once: in 1990, my then-husband and I left to study in America. In August 1991 we were in Moscow. After which I returned to the USA, where I worked, fell to my knees in front of my boss and begged: “Please let me go home! I want to build new life"Americans are patriots in in the best sense this word, so I was seen off as a heroine.
There were moments when it was completely easy to leave. It didn’t work out, and I don’t regret it at all. First of all, I am a person of the Russian language. I don’t know how to express myself in any other language: neither English nor Polish, although I know these languages. Where he was born is where he came in handy. Why am I in another place? And one more thing. I really love Russian nature. There is a city apartment, it is located exactly five minutes from my work, but I drive an hour and a half every day to a country house to see my trees, flowers, squirrels, cats, hares - everything is here. Living in nature, you feel the change of seasons. The leaves begin to turn yellow and buds appear. I can't live without it anymore.
“I accidentally found out that I was baptized at the age of two”
RG: You are an intelligent person and will not be offended by the question: is society always to blame for misunderstanding people with disabilities? Do you need leniency, to be treated as weak?
Yasina: On the one hand, I am, of course, weak, I need help. And I have to ask for it...
RG: But we don’t know how to ask with dignity... Have you asked God for help?
Yasina: I am a non-religious person, I never have been, I grew up in an absolutely atheistic family. I accidentally found out that I was baptized at the age of two by my grandmother and godmother. It was all like that. Even before my illness, in 1996, my daughter and I almost got into a car accident. I was driving, the child was sleeping, winter, Moscow region, a little white snow fell on thin ice, and stupid Ira wanted to switch the music... We skidded, began to spin, if there were oncoming cars, it would have ended badly, but it was night, there was no one on the highway, we were thrown sideways into a snowdrift, the car stalled, and we stopped wonderfully... A “nine” slowed down nearby, three shaven young men got out of it, I once again said goodbye to life, and the guys sweetly asked: “Girl, should I push you out?” And they pushed me out. In the morning I called my aunt: “Aunt Gal, go to church for me, light a candle. The Lord God saved me twice in one evening.” She: “Why don’t you go yourself? Go. We baptized you and your grandmother...” - in general, she told me everything. I ask, do your parents know? She said with such a Vladimir accent: “Why do they, the communists, know?” After it turned out that I was a baptized person, I immediately baptized my daughter - not for religious reasons, but for reasons of historical continuity: if all my ancestors were baptized for hundreds of years, then I cannot take responsibility and interrupt this line . Well, if Varya decides that she will not baptize her children, that is her choice.
I tried to contact one of the Moscow churches near my home. The aunts, very preoccupied with cleaning the temple, simply drove me away; no one was interested in what the young, confused and frightened woman was looking for, why she was asking about Panteleimon the healer. However, I still had a happy meeting: in 2003 I met Father Georgy Chistyakov. There was a light coming from him that was simply impossible to bear, you could feel it on your skin, but, unfortunately, he died very quickly... I was ready to go to him and tell him about my misfortune, and I’m sure he would have heard me.
"Elite" is a livestock term."
RG: Irina, why did you decide to write about yourself with such a degree of frankness?
Yasina: Firstly, I was one hundred percent sure that this was necessary. The number of unhealthy people, with sick relatives and friends, is gigantic. In addition, there are healthy people who think about the soul.
My mother was very worried about my story: that I was opening up so much. No, we love gossip, especially when it concerns glamorous characters. But talking about ourselves frankly is not our style. And he is very close to me. I didn't make an effort. Then, when the story was published, my mother told me: “You were right, but you are a person of a new time, you understand that people will help, but I expect something different, because I grew up in Stalin’s times.” My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lost her husband in the war. In the first weeks of the war he went missing. She was left a 30-year-old widow with two children, with three years of education, a girl from the village. She sewed for neighbors to feed the children. They “knocked” on her and sent a financial inspector. Grandmother was afraid that the neighbors would see that she was working at home, they would notice some threads, pieces of fabric, so she forbade her mother to invite guests to her place, asking: “Lidochka, don’t open the door for anyone!” Hence the habit of secrecy. To be closed meant to be protected. But I have a different approach. As long as you are open, you are free. As long as you are free, you are protected. I am not afraid of the future, despite the fact that science still does not know how to treat my disease.
“As long as you are unhappy with life, it passes!”
RG: Nothing ever came to light about your grandfather, who went missing?
Yasina: You won’t believe it, but just on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War we found his grave. For the first time in my life, I not only felt the beginning of a war in my soul, I was torn apart, I wanted to cry, I couldn’t think about anything. He is buried near Hannover, on the territory of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he ended up in November 1941. And on January 23, 1942, at the age of 35, he died of sepsis. Apparently he was wounded. Grandfather was captured on July 12, having been drafted on June 26. They just reached the city of Sebezh in the Pskov region with their regiment and were surrounded. I imagined how my grandmother saw him off, how she cried. She left behind a 7-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter, my mother.
The grandfather, who was a legend, suddenly became a lively, warm, 35-year-old. In the fall we will go to Hanover, take a handful of earth from the cemetery and bury it in my grandmother’s grave, write: “Alexey Stepanovich Fedulov, born then, died then.”
RG: How did you find out the details about the death of Alexei Fedulov?
Yasina:
Through Memorial. The Americans or the British handed over to Soviet Union all the concentration camp archives back in 1953. And no one informed the widow that her husband was no longer alive. Although the documents contained his home address, last name, first name and patronymic of his grandmother, first name of his father and mother, place of birth - the village of Dobrynskoye, Vladimir Region. And my grandmother waited until the end of her days, until her death in 1988, for her Alyosha. Nobody put a note in the mailbox; it cost two kopecks to send a letter! But that’s okay, the main thing is that the grandfather was found.
RG: You wrote in the book that you are happy now. Few people can say this about themselves.
Yasina: We love to be poor. Meanwhile, as my dad says, as long as you are unhappy with life, it passes. This is what I repeat to myself all the time. It often happens - you feel bad, there are troubles at work, you don’t know what to do, someone betrays you, someone doesn’t call - life.
key question
Russian newspaper: Our society has a hard time accepting “others.” The lack of a comfortable living environment for people with disabilities - what is this if not an attempt to remove those who are different out of sight, so that they sit at home and do not upset ordinary people...
Irina Yasina: Everything is changing for the better. We just have this problem: we compare ourselves with the best examples. Let's say we look at America and envy. But one of my friends, having suffered from polio at the age of two, could not go to school, because in Washington, the capital of the United States, in the mid-50s there was not a single school that could be wheelchair accessible. Her mother and her friends went to demonstrations, and they ensured that two schools were equipped with lifts. We won’t have it right away, like in America, but everything is changing very quickly. Progress, as they say, is obvious. And not only in Moscow. Recently I was in Plyos, Ivanovo region: no one there looks at you as if you were an exotic creature, everyone helps, everyone is kind. In Vladimir, a ramp is being built at the station. And five years ago, at the Sheremetyevo-2 international airport, I went on strike so that they would give me a special device with which a person in a wheelchair could board an airplane. The flight was delayed, but I got my way.
I must say that everyone who was around supported me. I also learned to ask for help. I constantly ask my colleagues and friends. At work, everyone helps me, they know what to move so that the stroller can pass, how to position my leg so that there are no spastic reactions. It's not shameful. And the people who helped you feel good. People love to be good. It is unpleasant for them to know that they are disorganized and callous.
But people with disabilities should be able to ask, and not be shy about it. Sometimes people complain to me: we sit at home, don’t go out, no one helps us. And I say: hello, how do people know that you need help? I know cases where a disabled person feels comfortable because no one bothers him. No one will impose themselves. A person with a problem should at least articulate his problem. Say: I’m not happy with this, come up with something, help me come up with...
Irina Yasina
Medical history. Trying to be happy
Happy Ira
There is one common and dubious truth, which was formulated in the twentieth century by the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky - “Man is born for happiness, like a bird is born for flight.” A tempting thought, with great and serious consequences: when no happiness occurs in life, but, on the contrary, difficulties, misfortunes, cruel trials and a lot of joyless work are offered, a person experiences great disappointment. I much prefer the idea that a person has the potential to become happy. This is associated with overcoming the difficulties and complexities of life, with confronting misfortunes and unchosen circumstances. Let us leave aside the very content of this vague concept - happiness. I have long come to the conclusion that the moments of happiness that every person sometimes experiences do not make him happy at all. Each of us goes through his own life from birth to death, and inside each human life has its own high task. Some people do great, realizing their potential, while others struggle and yearn, avoiding or failing to cope with their unique life assignment.
Ira Yasina is one of those people who carries out her task, despite difficult circumstances that would hinder another person, unsettle her, turn her into an egocentric person, whose entire life content boils down to dissatisfaction, complaints and depression.
Gone are the days when we chose our teachers among older, highly educated, outstanding people. Today the best teachers our friends turn out to be, and not necessarily the elders, and not necessarily the most authoritative. Ira Yasina is my friend. I appreciate those qualities that have always been characteristic of her: intelligence, honesty, high professionalism.
She is younger than me in age, but older in experience. The ordeal that befell her, a severe and as yet incurable illness, transformed a good but ordinary woman into an extraordinary personality. It was the illness that opened up such reserves of courage and courage in her soul that today she has become a teacher for many people, healthy and sick. In difficult moments of my life, I turn my gaze to her. And it’s not just about the war that she so successfully wages against her illness. She knows how to look fear in the eye and defeat it. Bad mood, fatigue, self-pity, and maybe despair wins. I can only guess about this. And I would like to learn this too. The proposed book is a textbook for those who find it difficult, who do not yet know how to cope with the cruel blows of life, and I am grateful to Ira for her sincerity, for her high ruthlessness towards herself and mercy towards others.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Dedication
I"ve loved, I"ve laughed and cried.
I"ve had my fill; my share of losing.
And now, as tears subside,
I find it all so amusing.
When my father turned 70, my friend called me with congratulations and said: “You, Yasina, don’t go to the casino. You’ve been lucky once in your life.”
Are you lucky? Of course I was lucky. For all of you, he is Evgeniy Grigorievich, but for me, he is a folder, a daddy.
I never called him father. Father is not a kind word, almost stern. And dad was and is always warm and affectionate.
When did I discover that I have such a dad? Probably at the time from which I remember myself more or less coherently. That is, since the age of eight. Before this, memories were like flashes, little legends, either it happened or it didn’t. For example, there is a family legend about how Yasin raised me by locking me in a closet. Mom says that we were walking in the park and, at three years old, I passionately wanted a ball. Naturally, there were no balls. I whined for a while, and then lay down on the ground, apparently trying to clearly depict the legality and validity of my claims. Dad was not convinced by the argument. The legend says that he grabbed me in his arms and jumped home. Where he locked me screaming in the toilet. And turned off the light. But I don't remember this. My first clear memory, organized by day, is the summer of 1972, we are at my grandfather’s dacha near Odessa, my dad is wearing shorts, carrying collective farm melons in his backpack from Zatoka. Teaches me to swim, saves me from huge jellyfish, draws on the wooden wall of the toilet on the site funny pictures about the Indians. Teaches me to play badminton. And we also go to the opposite bank of the Dniester, to Belgorod-Dnestrovsky, in Suvorov’s times, the Akkerman fortress, and dad gets nervous when we constantly come across piles of human feces under every heroic loophole.
Dad remembers himself from about the same age, from the age of seven. The war began, and the childhood picture memory “I remember how my mother and I took pictures in the yard” turned into a connected line of hasty evacuation from Odessa, loading onto a train in Znamenka, bombing near Dnepropetrovsk. Dad remembers that he got up from the floor and stood near the window of the carriage and saw the low-level flight of the Messerschmitts, while mom and other people were hiding under the shelves at that time. Then there was life in Northern Kazakhstan, first in Aktyubinsk, and then in Akmolinsk, then Verkhny Ufaley in the Urals. Grandfather, Grigory Lvovich, worked for railway, was engaged, as they would say now, in supplying the front. When the front began to move west, dad also began to move west. He remembers the absolutely destroyed, just liberated Kharkov and the Lozovaya station, where they lived for almost a year in hunger and lice. Dad was sick with typhus.
His memory of the famine is still very strong. In the summer of 1942, when they lived in Kazakhstan, his mother sent him to, as they would now say, a “pioneer camp” in the village of Shchuchye. In the morning, the children went to pick mushrooms, then they cooked the mushrooms, and this was their food for the day. Maybe since then Yasin leaves nothing on his plate and eats everything with bread. Even porridge and pasta.
In the family archive there is one of my favorite photographs from around the time when we became friends with dad. I am eight years old, and Yasin, accordingly, is about forty. Dad with a beautiful beard. Apparently, that’s why I’ve liked bearded men all my life. These are the years of stagnation, about which my father will say: “It seemed to me that I had already been buried.” What could such a restless and thinking person like dad do in the sluggish seventies? I remember that he worked a lot. I came home from work late, and on weekends I always wrote something at the desk in my parents’ room. In his office, combined with their bedroom. When dad was working, the door to the parents' room was closed, grandmother walked around the house quietly and swore at me when I made noise. It was strictly forbidden to touch the pen with which Yasin wrote. It was a Chinese fountain pen, the nib of which was very slanted to the right. It seemed to me that writing with it was inconvenient, but Yasin claimed that this little green pen gave him inspiration. Yasin was still smoking then. I don’t remember when he switched from cigarettes to pipes, but I always associate the smell of sweet pipe tobacco with my dad’s workplace.
Dad came home from work, had dinner, and we went for a walk. Yasin generally always kept himself in good physical fitness. I did exercises, ran, and at one time even went swimming. Walks with dad after his work were incredibly interesting - he was always telling something. Not about politics and economics, I was not interested in that then, but about musketeers, pirates, great geographical discoveries and historical battles - that’s it! Interest in history and geography always lived in him. Once in Odessa, he wanted to enter the geography department of the university, but because of the fifth point he did not dare. There was always a geographical map hanging above my childhood bed. Therefore, I know the geography of the southern regions of the USSR especially well. Tajik Khorog and Turkmen Kushka were exactly opposite my nose. Well, if you sit down in bed, then here it is, Transbaikalia.
We also had a Collection. Old folders with yellowed sheets on which are pasted black and white photographs cities and monuments of inaccessible foreign countries, stand in the closet. Dad subscribed to Around the World, Czech and Polish travel magazines, cut out pictures with scissors, came up with captions, and formed folders. Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and then the churches of France, Ravenna, the Great Wall of China, Indian Ajarta and Madagascar. He visited everywhere without leaving his room. And I am with him. Dad taught me to distinguish the Romanesque style from the Gothic style, to draw on the map the travel routes of Bartolomeo Dias and Vasco da Gama. We played cities for hours, in the evenings, and it was indecent not to know whose capital was Antananarivo.
I didn’t know at all what dad was doing. Only from the spines of the books that filled the bookcase, hand-knitted by one of our distant relatives, could I understand - statistics, automated control systems, economics. No, not the economy - a planned economy. The names of the authors were also very beautiful - Kantorovich, Urlanis. Volumes of the collected works of Marx and Engels hung from the top shelves.
When did I begin to understand that dad was a noticeable and significant person? Definitely not before I entered university. Of course, everyone at our entrance to Perovo respected him. He didn’t drink, regularly picked up neighbors who had gotten too drunk and carried them to their apartments, and never gave them loans for drinks. And at the university they suddenly started asking me - what are you, the daughter of Evgeniy Grigorievich? Ah, then it’s clear.
What is clear? It is clear that I will be assessed in some special way, perhaps more leniently, or perhaps vice versa. At the faculty I encountered both. Mathematics departments, in the disciplines of which I clearly did not shine, could give me a decent grade for “hereditary knowledge of subjects,” but fighters on the ideological front from the department of political economy wanted to find fault, but they could not. My humanitarian brain memorized all the socialist crap from one reading. True, after the session everything cheerfully flew out of my head.
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Irina Yasina
Medical history. Trying to be happy
Happy Ira
There is one common and dubious truth, which was formulated in the twentieth century by the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky - “Man is born for happiness, like a bird is born for flight.” A tempting thought, with great and serious consequences: when no happiness occurs in life, but, on the contrary, difficulties, misfortunes, cruel trials and a lot of joyless work are offered, a person experiences great disappointment. I much prefer the idea that a person has the potential to become happy. This is associated with overcoming the difficulties and complexities of life, with confronting misfortunes and unchosen circumstances. Let us leave aside the very content of this vague concept - happiness. I have long come to the conclusion that the moments of happiness that every person sometimes experiences do not make him happy at all. Each of us goes through our own journey from birth to death, and within each human life there is its own high task. Some people do great, realizing their potential, while others struggle and yearn, avoiding or failing to cope with their unique life assignment.
Ira Yasina is one of those people who carries out her task, despite difficult circumstances that would hinder another person, unsettle her, turn her into an egocentric person, whose entire life content boils down to dissatisfaction, complaints and depression.
Gone are the days when we chose our teachers among older, highly educated, outstanding people. Today, the best teachers are our friends, and not necessarily the elders, and not necessarily the most authoritative. Ira Yasina is my friend. I appreciate those qualities that have always been characteristic of her: intelligence, honesty, high professionalism.
She is younger than me in age, but older in experience. The ordeal that befell her, a severe and as yet incurable illness, transformed a good but ordinary woman into an extraordinary personality. It was the illness that opened up such reserves of courage and courage in her soul that today she has become a teacher for many people, healthy and sick. In difficult moments of my life, I turn my gaze to her. And it’s not just about the war that she so successfully wages against her illness. She knows how to look fear in the eye and defeat it. Bad mood, fatigue, self-pity, and maybe despair wins. I can only guess about this. And I would like to learn this too. The proposed book is a textbook for those who find it difficult, who do not yet know how to cope with the cruel blows of life, and I am grateful to Ira for her sincerity, for her high ruthlessness towards herself and mercy towards others.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Dedication
I"ve loved, I"ve laughed and cried.
I"ve had my fill; my share of losing.
And now, as tears subside,
I find it all so amusing. 1
"I I loved, I laughed, I cried, I received it in full and experienced many defeats, but now that the tears have dried, I am pleased to remember this too.” (English)- line from a song My Way Frank Sinatra with lyrics by Paul Anka.
When my father turned 70, my friend called me with congratulations and said: “You, Yasina, don’t go to the casino. You’ve been lucky once in your life.”
Are you lucky? Of course I was lucky. For all of you, he is Evgeniy Grigorievich, but for me, he is a folder, a daddy.
I never called him father. Father is not a kind word, almost stern. And dad was and is always warm and affectionate.
When did I discover that I have such a dad? Probably at the time from which I remember myself more or less coherently. That is, since the age of eight. Before this, memories were like flashes, little legends, either it happened or it didn’t. For example, there is a family legend about how Yasin raised me by locking me in a closet. Mom says that we were walking in the park and, at three years old, I passionately wanted a ball. Naturally, there were no balls. I whined for a while, and then lay down on the ground, apparently trying to clearly depict the legality and validity of my claims. Dad was not convinced by the argument. The legend says that he grabbed me in his arms and jumped home. Where he locked me screaming in the toilet. And turned off the light. But I don't remember this. My first clear memory, organized by day, is the summer of 1972, we are at my grandfather’s dacha near Odessa, my dad is wearing shorts, carrying collective farm melons in his backpack from Zatoka. He teaches me to swim, saves me from huge jellyfish, and draws funny pictures about Indians on the wooden wall of the toilet on the property. Teaches me to play badminton. And we also go to the opposite bank of the Dniester, to Belgorod-Dnestrovsky, in Suvorov’s times, the Akkerman fortress, and dad gets nervous when we constantly come across piles of human feces under every heroic loophole.
Dad remembers himself from about the same age, from the age of seven. The war began, and the childhood picture memory “I remember how my mother and I took pictures in the yard” turned into a connected line of hasty evacuation from Odessa, loading onto a train in Znamenka, bombing near Dnepropetrovsk. Dad remembers that he got up from the floor and stood near the window of the carriage and saw the low-level flight of the Messerschmitts, while mom and other people were hiding under the shelves at that time. Then there was life in Northern Kazakhstan, first in Aktyubinsk, and then in Akmolinsk, then Verkhny Ufaley in the Urals. Grandfather, Grigory Lvovich, worked on the railway, was engaged, as they would say now, in supplying the front. When the front began to move west, dad also began to move west. He remembers the absolutely destroyed, just liberated Kharkov and the Lozovaya station, where they lived for almost a year in hunger and lice. Dad was sick with typhus.
His memory of the famine is still very strong. In the summer of 1942, when they lived in Kazakhstan, his mother sent him to, as they would now say, a “pioneer camp” in the village of Shchuchye. In the morning, the children went to pick mushrooms, then they cooked the mushrooms, and this was their food for the day. Maybe since then Yasin leaves nothing on his plate and eats everything with bread. Even porridge and pasta.
In the family archive there is one of my favorite photographs from around the time when we became friends with dad. I am eight years old, and Yasin, accordingly, is about forty. Dad with a beautiful beard. Apparently, that’s why I’ve liked bearded men all my life. These are the years of stagnation, about which my father will say: “It seemed to me that I had already been buried.”
What could such a restless and thinking person like dad do in the sluggish seventies? I remember that he worked a lot. I came home from work late, and on weekends I always wrote something at the desk in my parents’ room. In his office, combined with their bedroom. When dad was working, the door to the parents' room was closed, grandmother walked around the house quietly and swore at me when I made noise. It was strictly forbidden to touch the pen with which Yasin wrote. It was a Chinese fountain pen, the nib of which was very slanted to the right. It seemed to me that writing with it was inconvenient, but Yasin claimed that this little green pen gave him inspiration. Yasin was still smoking then. I don’t remember when he switched from cigarettes to pipes, but I always associate the smell of sweet pipe tobacco with my dad’s workplace.
Dad came home from work, had dinner, and we went for a walk. Yasin generally always kept himself in good physical shape. I did exercises, ran, and at one time even went swimming. Walks with dad after his work were incredibly interesting - he was always telling something. Not about politics and economics, I was not interested in that then, but about musketeers, pirates, great geographical discoveries and historical battles - that’s it! Interest in history and geography always lived in him. Once in Odessa, he wanted to enter the geography department of the university, but because of the fifth point he did not dare. There was always a geographical map hanging above my childhood bed. Therefore, I know the geography of the southern regions of the USSR especially well. Tajik Khorog and Turkmen Kushka were exactly opposite my nose. Well, if you sit down in bed, then here it is, Transbaikalia.
We also had a Collection. Old folders with yellowed sheets, on which are pasted black and white photographs of cities and monuments of inaccessible foreign countries, stand in the closet. Dad subscribed to Around the World, Czech and Polish travel magazines, cut out pictures with scissors, came up with captions, and formed folders. Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and then the churches of France, Ravenna, the Great Wall of China, Indian Ajarta and Madagascar. He visited everywhere without leaving his room. And I am with him. Dad taught me to distinguish the Romanesque style from the Gothic style, to draw on the map the travel routes of Bartolomeo Dias and Vasco da Gama. We played cities for hours, in the evenings, and it was indecent not to know which Antananarivo was the capital.
I didn’t know at all what dad was doing. Only from the spines of the books that filled the bookcase, hand-knitted by one of our distant relatives, could I understand - statistics, automated control systems, economics. No, not the economy - a planned economy. The names of the authors were also very beautiful - Kantorovich, Urlanis. Volumes of the collected works of Marx and Engels hung from the top shelves.
When did I begin to understand that dad was a noticeable and significant person? Definitely not before I entered university. Of course, everyone at our entrance to Perovo respected him. He didn’t drink, regularly picked up neighbors who had gotten too drunk and carried them to their apartments, and never gave them loans for drinks. And at the university they suddenly started asking me - what are you, the daughter of Evgeniy Grigorievich? Ah, then it’s clear.
What is clear? It is clear that I will be assessed in some special way, perhaps more leniently, or perhaps vice versa. At the faculty I encountered both. Mathematics departments, in the disciplines of which I clearly did not shine, could give me a decent grade for “hereditary knowledge of subjects,” but fighters on the ideological front from the department of political economy wanted to find fault, but they could not. My humanitarian brain memorized all the socialist crap from one reading. True, after the session everything cheerfully flew out of my head.
That is, dad was a friend and brother to one part of the faculty, and an adversary to the other. Then I asked him many times: at what point did he stop believing in communism? Didn't you believe it? I couldn’t help but believe, both by upbringing and education. He always said that the point of no return was 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1968, my dad learned Czech so he could read their newspapers, and in 1980, he learned Polish.
Then there was my crazy youth. My father and I were still close. But it's no longer like that. My loves, growing up, independence without wisdom, marriage alienated me from him. At the same time, living in the country became more and more interesting. And it’s becoming more and more interesting to listen to dad.
I had no chance to dodge and not be his supporter - a supporter of freedom, the market and the minimal presence of the state in the life of society and every person. He convinces you when you listen to him on the radio, but at home he also talks about all this...
When the father was a minister, and I was a journalist, I never pestered him, trying to find out what a journalist was not supposed to know... We never even agreed on this - it was assumed by itself. Like what he told me as a child: “Don’t disgrace the family!”
I tried. Sometimes I felt offended. All my successes were due to the fact that Yasin helped. It's good that I never became an economist. To be an economist with such a surname and, to put it mildly, a complete inability to do science, would be ridiculous. I have other advantages: I quickly (but superficially) grasp, I can in simple words explain. But to sit and think for more than a minute... And he spends hours on abstract topics... I bow down.
- Well, of course, with such and such a father...
Like, you can be a complete fool, and still success is inevitable.
No matter how it is!
Dad is the one rare person, who, having left power, felt relieved. I got involved in university. He loves his HSE - High school an economy that is nurtured and inspired by him...
And this is how you all know him. And I hope you respect me. And I just love you to the point of some quiet purring, to the point of freezing. And my story is dedicated to my dad, my teacher and judge.
1999 – the end of my youth
How difficult it is to start! Although in conversations with close friends, with my daughter, with myself, I said all this many times. But the written text is different, I’m a journalist, I know. Really, it’s quite easy to give an interview when you’re asked questions. And you look at the transcript of what was said, and you have to edit, cross out, add. Written text requires more responsibility. Before yourself first.
When did she come? She is my illness, a being that changed my life, did not distort, did not steal, but slowly and steadily knocked out old habits, established interests, changed tastes and attitudes towards home, towards things, towards love, towards other people's weaknesses. Taking one thing away, another was always generously given.
The disease has several birthdays. The first is when you start to feel it. The second is when they make a diagnosis and you realize that this is forever. And the third is when you realize that it, your illness, has been with you for a very long time. You were just recently introduced.
But in reality, I realized that I didn’t just start to get tired quickly, but that something was seriously wrong, in May 1999. All the symptoms appeared before: leaden fatigue set in (but if you lie down, it quickly went away), the left leg twisted too often (maybe the shoes were uncomfortable or the ligament was previously pulled, but now it has come out), the fingers went numb (I should have smoked less in my youth )… But in May 1999, when my parents and I went to London and Edinburgh, something big, global and unknown fell upon me. I got scared and decided to surrender to the doctors upon my return. But other problems appeared at home, and I only reached the doctors in mid-summer.
Doctors, in my understanding at that time, had an innate presumption of guilt. They definitely wanted to heal me, rob me and make me their slave. They, it must be said, were identical to this attitude towards themselves. I cannot remember without laughing how, among other experiments, I was sent to undergo hypnosis treatment. I’m actually an uninspired person, which is usually clear from a simple conversation. And when they try to hypnotize you to the accompaniment of a drill working in the corridor!
Because of this, when, after a month of being stuffed with tranquilizers, I was sent to an ophthalmologist, I was terribly indignant.
- To hell with this whole medical examination! “I check my myopia when I order new glasses with fashionable frames,” I dusted.
I remember my almost hysteria about the vision test (there were even tears!) very well. Summer, beauty, no premonitions.
And for some reason a young girl, an ophthalmologist, became worried and sent me to do nuclear magnetic resonance.
An hour later the result was ready. The doctors had no doubt - multiple sclerosis. I don’t think they told me these words at first. And if they had told me, I wouldn’t have been scared. I didn't know what it was. I remember some vague words like “shadows in the brain.” Why suddenly?
How did I get the details? There was no medical literature in my house. I was afraid to talk about the terrible phrase with anyone (and even then I was afraid to say it). There was a Big Encyclopedic Dictionary at home. My mother-in-law loved to use it when solving crossword puzzles. Probably from there. I also remember that I was sitting in another doctor’s office, and she came out. Like a thief, I quickly stole a neurological reference book from the shelf. Secretly. I read it. The doctor has returned. I didn’t ask any questions, as if if I didn’t say the word out loud, it wouldn’t become a reality. The worst thing I could learn about the disease at all is that it is incurable. And also about disability, difficulty walking, imbalance and a couple more paragraphs of nightmares. But most importantly, it is incurable.
Can a young woman (35 years old!), relatively healthy, accustomed to not paying attention to her body, even understand the meaning of this word? I didn’t particularly care about it, I didn’t like any kind of exercise or fitness pool since childhood, and my body, sometimes playing pranks, didn’t interfere with my life active life. Accustomed to success, a great dancer, who loves dirt bikes and high heels? I could read the description of the disease with horror, I could admit that this could happen in principle. To understand, let alone try on yourself - no! Moreover, so far I was just getting tired and stumbling. No, not only that! It is already becoming difficult to walk down the steps. We need a railing or someone's hand.
There was a particular problem with my hand. At the time I read the word “incurable,” I had a husband. We have lived since our student days, experienced a lot, worked a lot (after all, the dashing 90s were our time!), and enjoyed life a lot. He was cheerful, witty, generous, not without complexes and strange habits, but who pays attention to them when you are close to students? As we ourselves joked with him, “we were together during communism...”.
The problem is that my husband loved to go for walks. You know that student joke: “What is a symposium? Drunken orgy with women.” That's it. I guessed, of course. But he violated the rules of the hostel only once in all the years (he came home in the morning, not in the evening), he lied masterfully, and I, apparently, wanted to believe. For which I paid. After a few nights of my hysterics screaming “What will happen to me?!” my husband said that he wants to live alone, but will always help me financially.
What it means to “live alone” is clear even to a gullible fool like me. The questions that life posed to me became more and more existential.
What, is my life ending? You can still come to terms with this. After all, I read a lot of Remarque in my youth. Instead of fighting the disease for years in a high-altitude sanatorium, Lilian buys chic dresses from Balenciaga and enjoys life for several months. And then back to the sanatorium, but not for long. What lay ahead of me frightened me more than death. Helplessness. Addiction. Loneliness.
I was scared to wake up. Before waking up and even in the first seconds after it, there was a faint hope that I was dreaming all this. For the first six months, I couldn’t really work, read, or adequately perceive those around me. I didn’t have an exciting job then - after the Central Bank, which I left immediately after the default in August 1998, everything was boring. There weren’t as many job offers as I would have liked, but I made money. It was also not possible to perceive cinema or theater.
I understood that for my daughter the atmosphere in the house had become simply terrible. Dad left. Mom cries all the time and doesn’t communicate with anyone. In order to somehow protect the ten-year-old girl from what was happening, I got a puppy. The funny little pug we named Leo helped a lot. A puppy is just a puppy - he plays, gnaws on my flowers in pots, blows on the floor, learns to raise his back paw. He became an excellent partner for my daughter. Leo helped her not even remember those most terrible days for me.
I actually don’t remember that time well. Was I looking for someone to blame? I was looking for it, of course. The first to turn up were the husband and his young girlfriend, whom, of course, they told me about in detail. Katya, lives on Plyushchikha, twenty-two years old. She, however, did not hide - for example, she came to congratulate her husband on his birthday when we were sitting at the table with the guests. With a bouquet. I kicked her out. True, she herself didn’t sit at the festive table after that either. I asked my husband’s friend, who had once been a witness at our wedding, to take me three streets from the restaurant home.
“Well, guys, you give it,” muttered Seryoga.
You? WITH plural I didn't agree.
My husband really liked the behavior of his girlfriend, such a fight for him.
In my head I understood that although they both behaved like pigs, it was still not their fault that I got sick. And my heart... It was torn to pieces. I was 35, and the woman in me was dying. It seemed to me that my husband left because of my illness. He, the fool, was simply unlucky. His next novel and my illness simply coincided in time. Well, yes, and his girlfriend went all-in in the fight for her own future.
My diagnosis did not stop my husband - he left at the most difficult moment. The moment I denied what was happening. A mad desire to return the past. But I say this now so calmly...
This couple made fun of me to their heart's content. The girl Katya could ring the doorbell of the apartment in the morning and hand over the tie that “your husband forgot at night.” Or, conversely, show up by phone after midnight and carefully advise “not to worry, he’s already left.” When I complained to my husband, he said that I had made it all up. My nerves were on edge.
And since I am honest by nature, I understood that there would be no other husband in my life. If this one, with whom I lived for fourteen years and gave birth to a daughter, left, then why talk about someone else. Any man will hear the words “multiple sclerosis” and...
I hadn’t dug into myself yet. I was hiding... The most important meaning of life became to pretend that everything was the same. That is, the same heels. The same forces. Under no circumstances should I let others know that something is happening to my body. To lie that I sprained my ankle and that’s why I’m holding on to the railing... Creating the appearance of the existence of the former Ira Yasina took up all my time. There has never been a more terrible period in my life.
"Banner" 2011, No. 5
non fiction
Irina Yasina
Medical history
About the author| Irina Yasina was born in 1964 in Moscow. In 1986 she graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University. Lomonosov. Journalist by profession. Author of the book “Man with Human Potential”, published in children's project Lyudmila Ulitskaya.
Irina Yasina
Medical history
1999 - the end of my youth
How difficult it is to start! Although in conversations with close friends, with my daughter, with myself, I said all this many times. But the written text is different, I’m a journalist, I know. It’s true, it’s quite easy to give interviews when you’re asked questions. And you see a transcript of what was said, and you have to edit, cross out, add. Written text requires more responsibility. In relation to yourself, first of all.
When did she come? She is my illness, a being that changed my life, did not distort, did not steal, but slowly and steadily knocked out old habits, established interests, changed tastes and relationships: to home, to things, to love, to other people's weaknesses. Taking one thing away, another was always generously given.
The disease has several birthdays. The first is when you start to feel it. The second is when they make a diagnosis and you realize that this is forever. And the third is when you realize that it, your illness, has been with you for a very long time. You were just recently introduced.
But I really realized that I not only began to get tired quickly, but that something was seriously wrong, in May 1999. All the symptoms appeared before: leaden fatigue set in (but if you lie down, it quickly went away), the left leg twisted too often (maybe the shoes were uncomfortable or the ligament was previously pulled, but now it’s coming out), the fingers went numb (I should have smoked less in my youth )... But in May 1999, when my parents and I went to London and Edinburgh, something big, global and unknown fell upon me. I got scared and decided to surrender to the doctors upon my return. But other problems appeared at home, and I only reached the doctors in mid-summer.
Doctors, in my understanding at that time, had an innate presumption of guilt. They definitely wanted to heal me, rob me and make me their slave. Therefore, when, after a month of being stuffed with tranquilizers, I was sent to an ophthalmologist, I was terribly indignant.
Fuck this whole medical examination! “I check my myopia when I order new glasses with fashionable frames,” I dusted.
And for some reason a young girl, an ophthalmologist, became worried and sent me to do nuclear magnetic resonance.
An hour later the result was ready. The doctors had no doubt - multiple sclerosis. I don’t think they told me these words at first. And if they had told me, I wouldn’t have been scared. I didn't know what it was.
I don’t remember where I started to find out the details. There were no medical reference books in my house. I was afraid to talk about the terrible phrase with someone (I was afraid to say it too). There was a Big Encyclopedic Dictionary at home. Probably from there. The worst thing I could learn about the disease at all is that it is incurable. From there about disability, difficulty walking, balance problems and a couple more paragraphs of nightmares. But most importantly, it is incurable.
Can a young woman (thirty-five years old!), relatively healthy, accustomed to not paying attention to her body, even understand the meaning of this word? I didn’t particularly care about it, I didn’t like exercise, the pool, or other fitness since childhood, but my body, sometimes playing pranks, didn’t stop me from living an active life. Accustomed to success, a great dancer, who loves dirt bikes and high heels? I could read the description of the disease with horror, I could admit that this could happen in principle. To understand, let alone try on yourself - no! Moreover, so far I was just getting tired and stumbling. No, not only that! It's already becoming difficult to walk down the steps. We need a railing or someone's hand.
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