Jubilees

Book about author

On 17 August, Chief Editor of the JINR Newsweekly "Dubna: science, cooperation, progress" Evgeny Molchanov turned 75. The staff members of the newsweekly congratulate their chief on this wonderful date, wish him health and well-being. Journalists, publicists, writers have one advantage - to tell about their biography in the first person, to collect, like a puzzle, facts, photographs, travel notes, somewhere heard stories and anecdotes so that the heap of these observations and notes in all truthfulness presents the appearance of the author. This was the book of E.M.Molchanov "Notes of an islander", an excerpt from which we publish in honor of the hero of the day.

In the footsteps of "Retro-Grad"
Things need to be put in order -
The end of the millennium is coming.
And so as not to sink this experience into oblivion -
Pick up everything, mark, feel
That aroma, this special taste,
That the sense of smell will mark milestones with an age...
And my dog has a crappy bite,
Alas, our dog age is short!

... "Retro Grad" is a nostalgic image. I came up with it when I filmed a series of TV shows about Dubna - a young city on an island made up of glacial moraine ridges and surrounded by ancient swamps. Swamps are gradually sucked in and on the ridges of pines, they ozonize the air.

I was born and live in this city. When in 1978 I was admitted to the Union of Journalists of the USSR, the editor of the regional newspaper, having learned about the documents, raised his glasses and said: "Please note, comrades, Evgeny Makarievich was born in Dubna, returned here after the army, graduated in absentia from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University and still works in the same newspaper. In my opinion, this is a fact of patriotism." And then I thought and now, that just sucks our swamp...

Yulka spent school holidays here, I cooked semolina porridge for her for breakfast and later, in Moscow, she complained to her mother that her dad fed her porridge... without sausages!..

Now, Yulka and Andrey bring their son Nikita to Dubna. Nikita is soon six and it seems that I have never rejoiced in my life like now, when my grandson clearly pronounces, finally, the letter "r" - after hard studies with a speech therapist and my attempts to teach Nikita our studio tongue twisters like "Rats in a rig gnawed rice". Along the way, I explain that "Riga" is not a city, but a place where grain is dried, which porridge is boiled from, including the one that I fed your mother in childhood, Nikita, without sausage!

So, I'm sitting in the kitchen smoking, looking out the window and thinking it would be a good idea to make a coffee. When matches run out, a lighter comes to the rescue that runs out of gas but there is a spark. It can light a stove burner. My kitchen is an experience of a timid creative life. Attempts of daring dreams crashing about the commercialism of everyday life.

"And years, endless satellites of eternity pass away... And they take parting and meetings, sadness or joy with them... Only, maybe someday, on a cloudy evening, forgetting about daytime fatigue, I will sit down... I will have nothing to do... I will write poetry. About old age." Quite unexpectedly, once upon a time it was written and today, it was just as unexpectedly remembered.

Why is that me? And to what I wanted to say about our Dubna island character. I once wrote about it. About the streets of Dubna that bear the names of the founding fathers. About our island, surrounded by Dubna, Sister, Volga, the Moscow Canal. And staying as a guide of a group of participants of some seminar that came to Dubna from different cities of Russia, for "animation" I mentioned the peculiar psychology of the islanders. The one that is so comprehensively and thoroughly described by Vsevolod Ovchinnikov in his books about the British and Japanese islands - "Oak Roots" and "Sakura Branch". Aborigines, as you know, have their own supra or extra-maternal pride, decorated with a kind of island eccentric.

My first attempts at original prose texts not intended for periodical printing involved dates, friendships and family events. In every good deed there should be a little game. On blissful tropical islands, where food grows overhead, clothes are not needed and sultry Creoles sing incendiary songs, all life is a game. It is no coincidence that it was there that the participants of the popular TV game were placed in the "last hero". On our island, where two weeks are summer and everything else is spring-autumn-winter, you can't jump naked. Therefore, the natives here are fastened, as a rule, with all buttons, so as not to be caught by an unexpected northwest wind, which it becomes chilly from even in July.

Such a strict form of clothing is not very conducive to spiritual openness but the need for self-expression still finds a way out - each has its own, often far beyond the coastal borders of our island. Famous water skiers and a certified yacht captain, masters of sports in tourism live in Dubna - climbers, water divers, pioneers of routes of the highest categories of difficulty and the owner of the "Crystal Owl" of the TV club "What? Where? When?" A separate book could be written about each of these people. However, some of them have already taken care of it themselves - from Samizdat and the Internet to solid printing houses, they have replicated their memories, stories about Dubna and Dubna rezidents, milestones of its history and enterprises, proudly called city-forming.

In my biography of such enterprises there are three - the Volzhsky district of hydraulic structures (immediately after school, sailor on a sanitary boat), Dubna Machine-Building Plant, where I gained the first and only working profession of an electrician, supported by the corresponding, however, due to the relative short stay in this hypostasis, low discharge and probably, to the end - the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. And the "retro-city-forming" moreover, "forming" - in two meanings: to create something and to give education - became a three-year service on Dubna television for me...

Put your old-timers and the city itself. Previously, visiting journalists liked to notice paradoxes here, which local residents have long been accustomed to. There is a fire brigade near the cafe "Ogonek". The Swimming Pool "Archimedes" is on the banks of the Volga River. The right and left banks of this river, dividing the city into two parts, are united by a... tunnel dug under the lock chamber No. 1 of the Moscow Canal. Squirrels jump along pines and lindens right in the city. Moose sometimes swim across Dubna and appear in the city limits. Once, the windows of the gym were even struck by a capercaillie - a bird that usually lives in deaf spruce and pine forests. No, no, yes and a fox family will appear somewhere on the outskirts of Dubna. I saw a fox with pups on the banks of Dubna, when the Ratmino dispensary was just beginning to be built - they nimbly scurried among sewer pipes folded on a sandy wasteland. Beavers have lived in the floodplain of the Chernaya Rechka quite recently and now, they are unlikely to return - nowhere...

To God, I do not invent anything - I only tell about what I myself saw. The respect for fact brought up in me over the years does not allow me to lie where there is no need for it. Reality in this regard far reserves idle fiction.

In the city centre, near a bookstore, I met a friend that was walking two huskies - his hunting assistants and he said that here, in the area of Veksler Street, he had already seen a marten more than once in broad daylight - this predator rarely tries to catch people's eyes but here it was completely insolent. Dogs trained on forest game, of course, diligently clothed a rare guest. And this is in the centre of the science city...

Have you noticed that in recent years, archaic vocabulary has suddenly begun to return to our new Russian language, littered with tracing paper from English (that should indicate both new economic phenomena and our readiness to switch to democratic rails)? But even here it was not without centauristics. And when I see a similar phrase on express cars (Dubna science city), I think, now what to call our textile, agricultural-industrial, gold-washing, ore-mining and other industry settlements? As for Retro-Grad - to blame, succumbed to outside influence. But - I will try to improve...

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