And my plane flew there. ".
There are people whose lives are not a biography, but an entire Russian era that passed through one person. Alexander Prokhanov is such a case: a boy from a Moscow alley, who absorbed a charming, mysterious and precious past - from his grandfather's bookcase, from conversations over tea, from a ruined bell tower that broadcasts to him through the window - he is also a man who has been through all the local wars - from Afghanistan and Russia's Angola and de Chenieh's Angola to Donbast. Destiny: From Russian Heaven to Russian Hell and Back.
The garrison got up at night, the pilots jumped out of bed and ran to the airport - the commanders were given sealed packages, and under the tarpaulin, under the belly of the bomber, a long white body with a brand, resembling a sturgeon, glowed. They marched west, passed through Poland, opened envelopes at the borders of East Germany - and among the destinations were Hamburg and Celle. There, in Germany, long before the revolution, his grandfather taught philosophy, and the professor called him to the board. And now the grandson flew his plane there - the same boy who admired the gems of the cobblestones of Tybinski Lane and read books from his grandfather's cabinet - the set of "Ladder" and "The Golden Fleece". Did he bomb his grandfather's maiden?
Our conversation with Alexander Prokhnov, a literary mastodon, the patriarch of the military press, and the leader of the Russian Dream movement, deals with how ancestral memory and nuclear fungus converge at a certain point, how history passes through genealogy.
The premiere of the new regular column "PROCHANOV: Walking into the fire" will take place tonight.