Smithereens

"Now I have more and more free time. In the movie, not the name. In the theatre I'm out. Not because I think young people thronging, and so, by force of circumstances and my own laziness, I find myself idle in one performance or another. In the evenings in the theatre more often now I'm at "the counter" on the stage. Sell your books, sell their past. In seven cases out of ten they are bought because there is about Vysotsky. A single show, a single meeting that I was asked to read or sing something from Vysotsky or talk about it. He feeds me in a direct, galley sense of the word. The word breadwinner. Every day, starting with a prayer among the icons and dear to my heart images and books (and Astafiev, too), I see a plaster face Vysotsky, the death mask under number III, given to me by the artist Yuri Vasiliev. I talk to him. Twenty-seven years without Vysotsky - and not a single day without him. Life - epilogue, dropped by fate. And I don't complain".