Denis Dragunsky, a philologist and writer, reflects on why we

https://pomboforcongress.com/dernieres-nouvelles-du-sexe-de-l-annee-deuxieme/

bring a line under our achievements. Does it really help us?

Many years ago, namely in the spring of 1984, I watched TV, the program “Time”. The journalist interviewed the prominent Soviet writer Yuri Bondarev, who was just 60 years old.

“What! It’s time to take stock, ”the journalist said. Yuri Vasilievich directly taken aback from such a turn. “No, sorry! – he said after an expressive pause. -Somehow you are too early about the results. I have serious plans for the future “. By the way, a year later he released a new and very interesting novel “Game”, about which they talked about and wrote a lot, and lived another 36 years.

The famous English writer Somerset Maugham has a book, which is called – “Summing up”. But this is rather an instruction for novice writers, based on the personal experience of the author as a writer and as a reader. Moreover, Maugham himself worked perfectly for more than a quarter century.

Summing up of your own life and work is an intermediate thing. Life is always a future, and the past (with all respect for it) is material, fuel, motivator and springboard. In extreme cases, a canvas on which you embroider a new picture of the coming years. I know by myself. I “knocked out grandmas” at least three times – once every thirty years, finally parting with philology for the theater. The second time – only ten years later, when I realized that my attempts to become a playwright failed.

I summed up the results so decisively that I threw it into the trash twenty no one – as it seemed to me then – plays. Of course, life punished me with a purely dramatic plot: a week later a famous director called me and asked me to read one of my play, which someone told him, but alas! A large garbage container has already been taken from the yard.