Primary school teacher Yegor Letova: “He was a walking encyclopedia. Letov and the “sanitary and everyday paradoxes of everyday consciousness” Where is he buried: Old-Eastern Cemetery, Omsk

Letov and “sanitary and everyday paradoxes of everyday consciousness”

Five years ago, on February 19, 2008, Yegor Letov died. His “Civil Defense” with semi-schizophrenic lyrics that “grandfather Lenin decomposed into mold and linden honey” became for many compatriots a gloomy symbol of Omsk, along with the drug-addicted bird Wingedum and Dostoevsky’s prison. Egor Letov is the most famous musician of Omsk, although he did not like his hometown and, on principle, did not give concerts there. I think I understand why.

My family was friends with the father of Igor (that’s what Yegor was called according to his passport) and Sergei Letov. Fyodor Dmitrievich Letov differs from his sons in character - he is a participant in the Great Patriotic War, a disciplined Soviet military man with strong convictions. My parents knew that Fyodor Dmitrievich’s sons were musicians, but the name “Civil Defense” meant nothing to them.

And it told me. Grob, along with the legends of Russian rock, along with Yanka, was listened to by my classmates and my friends. It so happened that first I heard the songs, then I found out that Yegor Letov lives in Omsk, in my area, and moreover, he is the son of a friend of our family.

It was very strange to study the musician’s biography not from texts on the Internet, but from the words of his father. Catch those things that will never be said in public. And, conversely, know nothing about the legend created from Igor by his fans.

Fyodor Dmitrievich Letov, father of the musician

A dark apartment on the first floor of a five-story building in the Chkalovsky village. (After a couple of stops you will see the same “cemeteries and vegetable gardens” from the song “Eternal Spring”). Near the telephone in the corridor there is a huge poster of one of the “Civil Defense” albums, “Solstice”; here, on the wallpaper, are written the telephone numbers of the band members and managers. One of the rooms is equipped as a studio: “ Damn, is it really the legendary Coffin Records whose name is written on the discs?", I think. There is a strong cat smell in the apartment, two cats are running around. They tell me that one of them used to belong to Yegor’s friend Makhno. Makhno, also known as Groba guitarist Evgeniy Pyanov, fell out of a window and crashed while intoxicated at the end of 1999. " Bet on a box of vodka", they explain to me. The kitten that Makhno left with the Letovs has already grown up and is rubbing against my legs.

On one of my visits, I was allowed to look into Yegor’s room; he and his wife Natalya had just left on tour. All the walls are covered with colorful, super-saturated collages, like on the covers of Grob’s albums. Endless shelves with disks. On the table is a sheet of paper with a list of things for the trip. Very neat handwriting, as if every word was written out. I was very surprised - you expect more impulsiveness from Letov. On the wall there is a small photo of participants in the Civil Defense in Jerusalem. Yegor believed in God and, as I understood, this trip was, in fact, a pilgrimage.

Egor Letov's room

The strangest thing is that neither the house nor the entrance of one of the most famous punks in the country was painted at all by fans. You expect to see something like Tsoi’s wall in St. Petersburg, but you only notice a lonely anarchy icon the size of a 5-ruble coin at the front door. I ring the bell and an old shaggy man in horn-rimmed glasses opens it. He is wearing a T-shirt with a bright psychedelic pattern, family shorts, and old slippers on his feet.

-And Fedor Dmitrievich house A? - I mutter chokedly. It seems to me that this very person, Igor Letov, whom I saw for the first time, will definitely scold me and kick me out. Instead, he swings the door open, turns his back, and silently walks down the hallway to his room.

Of course, I told my teenage friends about this meeting. Everyone took “Letov in shorts” as another reason to laugh. And then I felt unpleasant that our names were put next to each other, and soon I began to keep quiet about my acquaintance with Igor Letov.

It turns out that in his youth Yegor Letov was a handsome guy, I looked at his photographs and was amazed by this. Here is Letov, here is Yanka Diaghileva, who is in love with him - by all measures not a beauty, but even the opposite. And yet some kind of glowing sad girl. Also a legend of Russian rock. She committed suicide at age 24. Yankee's swollen corpse was fished out of the Inya River two weeks later. Many blamed Letov for her death, and his behavior at Yankee’s funeral was called “bestiality.”

Egor Letov lived to be 43 years old. In recent years, due to alcoholism and drugs, he was often hospitalized. He was taken away from this very apartment. Old Fyodor Dmitrievich, who needed help due to his age, knew that everything was moving towards the end, that he would outlive his son. Doctors pulled Yegor out a couple of times, but on February 19, 2008 they didn’t have time. Cause of death: acute respiratory failure, which developed from alcohol poisoning.

A real Siberian punk, a fighter against the system, a lover of Dostoevsky, even, in a sense, a Russian philosopher and poet. One of his later songs contains the following lines:

"Long happy life

Such a long happy life

From now on long happy life

To each of us

Each of us."

For his biography, Yegor Letov lived a really long time.

Everything I learned about Letov does not fit into a single image. It's like a collage from an album cover: some people admire it, some people find it disgusting. The choice is rather not meaningful, but intuitive. Having crossed adolescence, I stopped listening to Letov. His songs reflexively began to cause rejection, even to the point of physical illness and headaches. A few more years passed, and I began to regard Grob as Stas Mikhailov. If there is a need, for example, to write this text, I turned it on and listened.

Photo Your Day, KP

The leader of the Civil Defense group, Igor Fedorovich, also known as Yegor Letov, died back in February 2008. But fans still remember this man. He was the most extraordinary figure in the history of Russian rock, the first punk in the Soviet Union, a talented man with a difficult fate.

We have already written about it in more detail. And today, “Your News”, with some difficulty, found Igor Fedorovich’s brother, Sergei Letov, and asked him several exciting questions. And although Yegor has not been with us for a long time, we have an exceptional opportunity to communicate directly with his closest relative and once again remember the legendary figure.

Please tell us how you live and what you do?

I have lived in Moscow since 1974. Currently I serve in three Moscow theaters: the Taganka Theater, the Chelovek Theater-Studio, and the Center for Directing and Drama. I am currently performing in three plays. In addition, I am the author of the music for these performances.

I do musical accompaniment for silent films. This year he performed dubbing films in Paris, Brussels, Liege, Dordrecht, Madrid, not to mention St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yekaterinburg. I have been teaching at the Institute of Journalism and Literary Creativity for 13 years. In January, he lectured at Niigata University and in Tokyo (Japan), and at the same time played there in clubs and museums with local free jazz musicians.

They performed with Alexander Sklyar and Oleg “Sharr” (ex-Aquarium) at a festival in Teriberka, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. It was there, in Teriberka, that the film “Leviathan” was filmed.

Recorded this year with the group “25/17” and Gleb Samoilov. There was a recording with rapper Rich (“Lithium”). Also with Vadim Kurylev (“Electric Partisans”, “Adaptation”, ex-DDT), this album is still in the works.

I have three daughters - the youngest is 5 years old. Three granddaughters - the eldest is in her 3rd year at university, the middle one is learning to play the saxophone at a music school.

What happened to the members of the Civil Defense group after the death of Igor Fedorovich Letov?

Natalya Chumakova (wife of Yegor Letov - author's note) is actively involved in publishing Igor's creative heritage and has made a film about him. Chesnokov recently performed in Omsk with arrangements of Civil Defense songs. Kuzma Ryabinov is the most active member of “Defense” at the moment. With our participation, his double vinyl album was released in Canada this year. In the Kamchatka boiler room, his project “Virtuosi of the Universe” celebrated its anniversary this summer. I specially came to this concert from Moscow on the Sapsan.

Do you know about rumors on the Internet that Yegor Letov is alive and hiding from prying eyes somewhere in the vast expanses of our homeland. What do you think about it?

The word “Motherland” is written with a capital letter in Russian. I didn’t find your question interesting, to put it mildly.

Sorry... What kind of relationship did you have with Igor Fedorovich? I really want to know some new details of his life.

The relationship was different. In the early 80s, Igor came to me in the Moscow region and began to take his first steps in music and began writing poetry. We tried to play free jazz together. He was unable to adapt to Moscow life, he was expelled from vocational school, and his parents demanded that he return to Omsk. In the first years after his return to Omsk, he wrote me long letters weekly - often accompanied by handwritten lyrics of the songs “Time Machine”, “Sunday” and the like. I sent him tape recordings of the DK albums in which I participated. Then he had a conflict with the KGB. He was forcibly placed in a mental hospital, and the letters stopped arriving. In 1988, while I was at a jazz festival in Estonia, our mother died. I found a telegram about this at the door when I returned. There were no mobile phones or the Internet back then. However, Igor was very worried that I did not come to the funeral (and I simply did not know that she had died). There was a pause in communication for some time. In 1993, Igor and his group, together with the “Barkashovites,” stood in defense of the Supreme Council, and I was very worried about him. Since 1993, we have again become closer. Evgeny Grekhov, director of Civil Defense in the first half of the 90s, contacted me due to the fact that Igor had problems with alcohol, asked me to use all my influence as an older brother...

In 1997, Igor, Kuzma and Makhno came to the performance of my ensemble TRI "O" at the Marat Gelman Gallery. We were drinking at some construction site and there we first started talking about playing together again. From 1998 to 2004 I began to participate in Civil Defense concerts, even together with Igor. Although such duets have happened before - in 1997, for example, at my birthday in the Skrin Internet cafe...

From 1998 to 2004, I was engaged in mastering discs for “HOR Records”, a company that mainly produced discs and cassettes of Igor and his circle. In recent years 2004-2008 we communicated much less.

What are your plans for the future? Will there be any other musical projects?

In October I am dubbing the Argentine film “Antenna” with Oleg “Sharr” at the Bashmet Center. Then I fly to Sochi for the festival of youth and students with the play “Revolution Square, 17”. In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk I play with “Va-Bank” the musical accompaniment for a Japanese silent film. On the day of my return from Sakhalin, I fly to Brussels - there in the evening I will accompany the French actress Valerie Chenet, who will recite Mayakovsky’s “About This”. There is still a tour of Siberia ahead - first solo, and in a couple of months with Oleg Garkusha (soloist of the group “AuktYon” - author’s note).

What do you think about the current order, how do you like the situation in the country as a whole?

Everything goes according to plan!

That’s how simple but informative our short conversation with Sergei Fedorovich Letov, brother of the great Russian rock musician Yegor Letov, was. As can be seen from the interview, these are two completely different people, with different destinies, but, of course, both are absolutely outstanding people.

Follow the news. Perhaps a few more exclusives from the incomprehensible world of art await you.

On February 19, in Omsk, in his apartment at the 44th year of his life, the founder and permanent leader of the cult rock group “Civil Defense” Egor Letov suddenly died. The musician died in his sleep from cardiac arrest.

With the departure of Igor (Egor) Letov, an entire era in Russian rock ended. The so-called “Siberian punk” has finally disappeared into oblivion. It was not so much a musical genre as a way of life, characterized by total rejection of the Soviet system and, as a result, rabid anarchism.

It was Letov who brought protest in Soviet rock music to radicalism. And it was he who became a kind of ideologist of the rebellious youth of the 80s and 90s of the last century.

Created by him in 1984 at the age of 20, Civil Defense was initially doomed to an “underground” existence and persecution by law enforcement agencies. Understanding and accepting this perfectly, Letov concentrated on studio work, recording five or even ten albums a year in his own apartment. Magneto-albums "Grob" of that time ("Mousetrap", "Red Album", "Good!", "Totalitarianism", "So the Steel Was Tempered", "War", "Nausea") were made deliberately dirty, carelessly and simply, with a large amount of anti-Soviet language and profanity in the texts.

The revolutionary approach found a lively response among the masses. The group's self-made recordings were distributed throughout the country, after which the authorities had to intervene in the matter. Co-founder of "Grob" Konstantin "Kuzya Uo" Ryabinov was urgently sent to the army, despite heart problems, and Letov ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where he was pumped with psychotropic drugs for several months (he even went blind for a while).

After leaving the hospital, Letov realized that now he had nothing to lose at all, and began to create with renewed vigor. In addition to "Defense", he participated in the projects "Communism", "Egor and Op...denevshie" (with Igor "Jeff" Zhevtun), "Great Octobers" (with Yanka Diaghileva), "The Gypsies and I from Ilyich" (with Oleg " Manager" Sudakov), "Survival Instructions" (with Roman Neumoev), "Black Lukich" (with Vadim Kuzmin).

By 1990, the popularity of "Grob" had become so enormous that Letov, as a true anarchist, disbanded the group to prevent its commercialization. Soon he begins to cooperate with the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov and the Russian Breakthrough movement, and in the 1996 presidential elections he supports the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov.

At the end of the 90s, Letov became disillusioned with politics and disappeared from view of the general public, touring with the revived “Defense” in outlying cinemas.

The 2000s became a real renaissance for him. Over the course of four years, “Grob” released the trilogy “Long Happy Life” - “Reanimation” - “Why Do I Dream?”, which revealed the lyrical side of Letov’s work.

The death of the musician became all the more unexpected when, it would seem, he had finally achieved peace of mind. However, in a recent offline interview for visitors to the band’s website, Letov admitted that the last album took a lot of energy from him and the new record may not be released at all. However, he continued to make plans for the future.

With his creativity, Yegor Letov erected a monument to himself during his lifetime. Probably, in every Russian city in residential areas you can meet teenagers singing the imperishable “Everything is going according to plan”, “About a fool” and “Russian field of experiments” with a guitar.

43 years is, of course, insignificant. But by the standards of a revolutionary like Letov, it looks like a long and happy life. Rest in peace, Igor Fedorovich...

Fans prefer to gather at the grave of the famous singer to mark the anniversary of his death. The largest fan celebration is considered to be the “party” organized in 2010, when exactly 20 years had passed since Tsoi’s death.

Fans of Tsoi's work gathered at the singer's grave. The video was filmed in 2010.

During the “partying all night until the morning,” the fans behaved as if they were at a street concert: they smoked, drank and shouted “Kino” songs with a guitar. True, most of the alcoholic drinks ended up not in the hands of fans, but on the singer’s tombstone - in the video it is completely filled with glasses, cans and bottles of wine and port. Despite the torrential downpour that fell on August 15, 2010, connoisseurs of creativity put cigarettes and CDs with his recordings there.

On the 25th anniversary of the artist’s death, in 2015, fans behaved more decorously: they gathered, honored the memory of the deceased, and dispersed. But by this time, the singer’s grave had already become a rather dangerous place: from time to time, “Kino” listeners welcome guests cordially, but on other days, they drag the bodies of unconscious brawl victims onto the railway tracks.

On August 15, 2016, because of these events, a police squad was on duty at the grave of Viktor Tsoi. Apparently, not the last time.

Yuri Klinskikh, "Gas Sector"

Where he is buried: Left Bank Cemetery, Voronezh.

Judging by the collection of videos on the Internet, there are always people standing at the grave of the lead singer of the Gaza Sector group. These can be a variety of characters: fans, punks, or just .

The fence within a radius of hundreds of meters from the artist’s burial site is covered with the words “Punky Hoy!” and mentions of the cities from which fans came. Despite this, a popular video on request “Yuri Klinskikh” is instructions on how to get to the singer’s grave.

Performance of the song "Collective Farm Punk" at the grave of Yuri Klinsky.

Another popular video is from an incident in 2010, when the guitarist of the first line-up of the Gaza Strip, Igor Kushchev, came to celebrate 10 years since the death of the Klinskys. The musician, who had had too much to drink, became very emotional and at some point became talk to the singer's gravestone and reproach the deceased for “betraying them.”

Video of fans singing songs at the singer's grave.

Mikhail Gorshenev, "The King and the Clown"

Where he is buried: Theological Cemetery, St. Petersburg.

There is silence and calm at the grave of the lead singer of the group “The King and the Jester”: no tears of former colleagues or alcoholic parties. A year after the singer’s funeral, a monument appeared at the grave. It was installed with money raised from a charity concert of the Kukryniksy group, in which Mikhail’s brother sings.

An amateur video filmed in the year of the singer’s death.

On the anniversary of “Gorshka’s” death, his mother Tatyana Ivanovna came to the grave together with fans of “The King and the Jester”, touchingly showed the singer’s “goat” to the singer’s friends, read poems of her own composition and was glad that the group’s fans dug up her entire garden at the dacha.

Despite the exemplary behavior of Gorshk fans, the authorities of Russian cities are in no hurry to meet them halfway - projects to erect a monument to the late soloist in Krasnoyarsk, Voronezh and St. Petersburg did not find support.

Egor Letov, "Civil Defense"

Where he is buried: Old-Eastern Cemetery, Omsk.

The grave of Yegor Letov in Omsk is perhaps the most peaceful place in the city. Nobody organizes holidays there; relatives come alone, without dozens of fans.

There are no videos on YouTube of fans “getting together” with a guitar and beer. Like the Klinskys, Letov has visual instructions on how to get from the entrance to the Staro-Vostochnoe cemetery to the singer’s burial place. He has more such videos than any other Russian musicians - either the cemetery in Omsk is very large, or it’s easy to get lost in it.

Celebrities and politicians come to honor the memory of the singer. In 2011, Letov’s grave was visited by the head of the A Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, and in 2014, Yuri Shevchuk came to the Staro-Vostochnoe cemetery.

“Igor was a walking encyclopedia”

School No. 45, perhaps, has changed little since 1982, when Igor Letov (everyone who knew the future star remembered him by his real name, and not by what the passport officer mistakenly wrote to 16-year-old Letov in his documents) crossed its threshold for the last time once.

They say he could often be seen in this nook,” he shows director Elena Mashkarina,

Modern students also like to sit on a dark window sill at the end of the corridor near the gym. True, many of them know nothing about the music of Civil Defense.

The school archive still contains, among hundreds of others, the yellowed personal file L-139. The first years are straight A's.

A neat, friendly boy, cultured, well-mannered - this is how Letova remembers primary school teacher Nina Filippova.

She worked at this school on Tovstuho Street for 39 years, and remembers well her 3-2nd grade, where Igor studied. The woman quickly finds in the album a pioneer with blond hair combed to one side: “There he is, right behind me.” In the photo there are 26 third graders. Girls in uniform are sitting in front, boys in snow-white shirts are lined up behind. The picture was taken by an amateur photographer from the factory, who was brought by the mother of one of the students in March 1975. Nina Ivanovna recalls that the future musician was sitting in the fourth row by the window.

– Igor really loved extracurricular reading lessons. I was well prepared for classes. He brought heavy, thick books, stuffed with bookmarks... They organized exhibitions and competitions - and he was an active participant.

The ten-year-old student Letov drew well, and when poetry was read, the boy’s eyes lit up. He had a huge library at home.

“There were more boys than girls in that class.” They were, as they say, loudmouths. I even called them “26 Baku commissars”... He ( Igor) was always surrounded by guys. The boys liked that he knew a lot. Walking encyclopedia! Igor was very neat. Starting with the appearance. Back then, it was generally difficult to get uniforms - they didn’t bring them. I still remember his sand suit with a tie... His fingers were neat, his nails were always trimmed. But this, perhaps, depends on the mother... She ( Tamara Letova) was taking care of her sons, it seems to me so. I didn’t miss a single meeting, I listened to everything. And dad came.

Yegor’s father, by the way, was a military man, and once taught classes on... civil defense at school No. 45, the teacher recalls.

“They hired a tutor so that my son could learn to play the guitar.”

Fyodor Dmitrievich Letov lives, as he did 50 years ago, in a house on Petra Osminin Street. Today, the former propagandist of the political department of the Soviet army does not go out into the streets. Eldest son Sergei ( saxophonist, constantly travels around the world) visits his 88-year-old father two to three times a year. Social workers bring food to the pensioner three times a week. The man usually reads by the window and walks around the apartment, leaning on two canes.

The musician loved to spend time in this nook during his school years. Photo: Andrey KUTUZOV

In a day I cover, as expected, one and a half to two kilometers. From that window in the kitchen to the window in the room is 18 meters, which means one circle is 36,” explains Fedor Dmitrievich.

The rocker spent his childhood in this 3-room apartment. Here he lived with his wife Natalya Chumakova in the 2000s (in 2007 the couple moved to a new building, where six months later, in February 2008, the musician died in his sleep from cardiac arrest).

In the musician’s bedroom, nothing has changed since the day of his death - the room, which has not seen European-quality renovation, is dark and gloomy. The ceiling is covered here and there with rather strange strokes, colors and words, the meaning and purpose of which, most likely, is clear only to Yegor. Sovdepov's cabinets are filled with a hundred or two books and dusty videotapes. There are figurines of cats on the shelves. Numerous fans gave them to the musician, who doted on animals. The walls are covered with "GO" posters and posters of football players. Only one poster, “Types of Nuclear Explosions,” belongs to the father of the family. This manual, which the military man used in his civil defense courses, fits perfectly into the concept of the group of the same name.

Fyodor Dmitrievich turned the room into a kind of museum. It seems that everything remains as it was during Yegor’s life, but one can feel the army order. Albums, folders and newspapers are neatly laid out on the table. The father collected photographs of his son, from the very first ones, where the boy was only a few months old, to those that were taken in the nineties on a point-and-shoot camera.

The folder contains photographs that one of the “GO” fans found on the Internet and printed for Letov Sr. Some are admired by a man who was once into photography. Others, out of habit, consider and sometimes comment. Part of the photo dates back to the time when Civil Defense was transformed following foreign punk: the usual Yegor Letov is unrecognizable under a white layer of paint with a deliberately black outline around the eyes and lips.

Nothing has changed in Yegor Letov’s bedroom since his death Photo: Andrey KUTUZOV

“I’ve never seen him like this in my life,” as if the pensioner were answering our silent question.

The photographs where the son is filmed in the ranks of the National Bolsheviks hurt the elder Letov, a communist. By the way, Yegor had a party card number four. This is understandable: when the party appeared, it needed a person who could lead a crowd of young people against the existing government. The musician Letov was ideal for this role, although, according to his father, he was an anarchist - outside politics and power.

Rolled up newspapers with materials about Yegor are laid out on the edge of the table. The elderly owner of the apartment, it seems, can spend hours showing “archives” and talking about his son. The longer the conversation goes on, the more frank the interlocutor becomes, and in the last minutes at the door it becomes unbearable from too long a handshake.

The iron door of the entrance slowly closes, and there, on the landing, remains an incredibly lonely man. He raised two famous sons, and today he spends his lonely old age in the gloomy confinement of a museum apartment, the area of ​​which is measured in leisurely steps - 18 meters from the window in the kitchen to the window in Igor’s bedroom and back.

Fyodor Dmitrievich carefully preserves photographs of his youngest son Photo: Andrey KUTUZOV

REFERENCE

Egor LETOV. Real name: Igor Fedorovich Letov. Born on September 10, 1964 in Omsk, died on February 19, 2008.

Soviet and Russian musician, poet, graphic artist, founder, leader and only permanent member of the Civil Defense group.