“Igor was a walking encyclopedia”
School No. 45 has perhaps changed little since 1982, when Igor Letov (everyone who knew future star, they remembered him under his real name, and not under what the passport officer mistakenly wrote in the documents for 16-year-old Letov) crossed her threshold for the last time.
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 teacher primary classes 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 loved the lessons very much extracurricular reading. 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. Beginning with 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, former political department propagandist Soviet army doesn't go outside. 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 "Views 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 lasts, the more frank the interlocutor becomes, and in last minutes It becomes unbearable at the door from shaking hands for too long.
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 designer, founder, leader and only permanent member of the Civil Defense group.
We decided to recall his biography and try to understand the work of the cult figure of Russian rock.
When in the spring of this year there was a rumor that Yegor Letov supposedly did not die, but lived in the taiga as a hermit for all these nine years, and now he was found and brought to the hospital, many believed it. Maybe even for one second, but they believed it.
Because it would be very much in the spirit of Letov.
A multifaceted man, a quirky man, a man who demanded a lot from others, a man who clearly felt that something was wrong with the world and rabidly did not agree to put up with it, a man who walked with leaps and bounds somewhere beyond the horizon.
Punitive psychiatry, running from the KGB, dozens of albums, sometimes recorded in complete solitude, participation in the NBP, intense passion for psychedelics, walks through Siberian forests and mountains - everything, it all happened.
The early albums, reckless, angry, dirty, can give the impression of purely political protest. Like, the USSR is bad, but without it it will be good. Some are still sure that Letov is about this, and now he is relevant only because we have a lot of Soviet things left in us. When the Union collapsed and Letov began making different music, many guessed that it was not the Soviets who were at fault. In any case, not only in them.
What is the song “KGB Rock” about then? And why “Lenin is Hitler, Lenin is Stalin”? And then a song dedicated to the defenders of the House of Soviets in October 1993? How is this possible? No no, this is late Letov blown away! About some “phenomenon of a hare sitting in the grass covered with drops of dew”, about “a kind glow, a bottomless window”...
“For me, all the totalitarian categories and realities I use are images, symbols of eternal, metaphysical totalitarianism, inherent in the very essence of any group, any area, any community, as well as in the world order itself. It’s in this charmingly unholy sense that I will always be against it!”
By and large, all these political realities, all this shouting, all this uncouthness, all this rudeness and dirt of early Letov - it’s just artistic technique. A technique that he practiced while he was surrounded by industrial melancholy, the magazine “Korea”, and the “Memory” society. And what was familiar to the listener was suddenly transformed in a completely uncompromising form, turned inside out. And the point is not that an asphalt plant devouring a forest is an ugly phenomenon, but that it is only a manifestation of ugly human traits.
Gnashing guitar riffs, ear-scratching solos, heart-rending prowess of the drums, scream, scream, scream - the scream of a slaughtered animal.
There was such a language then. Then only he got there. Then it was impossible to do this, and therefore Letov did just that.
According to Bakunin, freedom among slaves becomes a privilege: the ideal anarchist is a free person who liberates others. So Yegor Letov tried to free him: to let him look at everything from a detached perspective, to drag him out of the zoo. And, in general, it worked: cassettes with his albums were rewritten and re-recorded throughout the USSR, quiet rumors were everywhere, and without him, the notorious Siberian punk, perhaps, would not have existed in the form in which we know it.
“Civil Defense” of the eighties is such a wild vitality, such crazy energy, drive that it is absolutely clear in my head: “we will tear the world to shreds, but we will live as we see fit.” Just look at how Letov behaves at concerts. Well, from Letov’s main opus of those years, "Russian field of experiments", it’s simply scary. However, fear is the dizziness of freedom, as Soren Kierkegaard wrote.
And I think: well, everything can’t be that bad... But it is! And even worse! However, it is stupid to think that Letov is just a gloomy person. If you casually read Dostoevsky, you can also see one darkness, one destruction, one depression. But the main thing there is not this, but the light in spite of it. Or rather, hope for light.
“Everything that is real is generally quite scary. For the right individual. But in general, you know, everyone tells me that you have nothing but darkness, obscurantism, depression... This once again shows that no one gives a damn! I’m speaking completely soberly and sincerely now - all my songs (or almost all) are about love, light And joy. That is, about what does it feel like- when this is not the case! Or what it is like when it is born in you, or, more accurately, when it dies. When you are alone with all the rubbish that is rotting inside you and that is flooding you outside. When you are not who you are must be!"
That's how early Letov.
Mature period his creativity begins after the dissolution of Civil Defense. The group has become too popular, they are about to fill stadiums. But Letov doesn’t want to sell himself: he doesn’t even need songs into the void. Because he creates new project“Egor and...” (the name is obscene: just so that we and any other press could not really mention it) and records the most powerful album “Jump-Jump”.
Psychedelia, the spirit of garage rock of the 60s, noise tricks worked out in the “Communism” project, and new heights, new methods of struggle. There is no longer room for political realities here - despite the tragic events in the country. Here is a fool walking through the forest, a bear climbing a pine tree, Mayakovsky squeezing the trigger, songs about holiness, mice and reeds.
The figurative series becomes wider and seemingly more meaningless. The music is mostly made softer and more melodic. Something thoughtful and mysterious appears. It is becoming increasingly difficult to interpret songs directly. But scary things are still present: this, of course, is a ten-minute "Jumping gallop"- a pile of meanings and images, either about the departure of the soul from the body, or about disincarnation. True shamanism. A real mind blower.
Yegor himself said that this album is about love. Very beautiful and very sad. Perhaps Letov’s most beautiful things are collected here. “Strangle with obedient hands your disobedient Christ.” “We quickly hurried, without hiding, the hours to our absurd funny country.” " Eternal spring in solitary confinement."
This album, like Yegor’s most demonic works (“Everything is like people’s”, “Russian Field of Experiments”, “Conspiracy”), leads to unexpected catharsis. Acts like LSD.
Letov's poetry is structured in a strange way. Indeed, she gravitates towards futurists and zaumists like Vvedensky or Kruchenykh. But he does not have a deconstruction of language: with a sort of abstractionist’s brush he paints images, concepts, aphorisms. And they make it clear something- let it something and it is not always possible to express it verbally.
In the album “One Hundred Years of Solitude” this poetry (in which something broad and Russian is increasingly evident) is also supported by extremely inventive and varied music (inspired by 60s bands, Sonic Youth, Michael Gira and others). There has never been such a scattering of all kinds of effects, solos and musical-noise discoveries in Letov’s work: neither before nor after.
But then there was a return to politics, both in practice and in the albums “Solstice” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” But here, perhaps, it turned out like with Kuryokhin: when just music was not enough for him, he went into politics: and one thing continued, but did not interfere at all. As is known, a real artist- wide
Some still think big mistake the fact that Letov got involved with the red-browns in the 90s and did not continue to work in the same aesthetics that he developed in the album “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” This is, of course, funny. Letov, after all, always fled from the clutches of certainty, from a too clear paradigm. When everyone already perceived him as an anarchist, he sang “I don’t believe in anarchy!” So, when he was already branded a National Bolshevik, he renounced and recorded his thoughtful and enchanting last albums: “A Long Happy Life” and “Why Do I Dream?” Like the German romantic writers, Letov does not know the truth, but he sees indications of it and points it out to others.
One can discern stupidity and immaturity in his interviews, in his inconsistency, in his changeable views. But still it was the smartest person: from those that almost everyone read and listened to. With an incredible taste for art. Moreover, unlike other Russian rockers, he never scolded the so-called “pop” without reason, if it was really interesting and well made. And changeability is always better than callousness - if a person is still firm in his main ideals.
“I don’t think our rebellion is over. On the contrary, he went to new level. Latest album an example of this. Rebellion against rebellion as a cliche.”
So what is Letov? The phenomenon in Russian culture is not yet fully understood and experienced. A man who devoted himself entirely not just to music, but to some unknown service. Kicking with all his might against something that is impossible to overcome. He honestly tried to do what he had to do, living by the principle “why aren’t they all saints if they can be them right away?” And just a romantic figure. An idealistic reasoner who sang about things that, unfortunately, are still eternal. And although “dogs rule the world,” the “plastic world” has not yet won. For “the fallen will pick up a star, the blind will overcome the rainbow.”
If you walk around Moscow, along Arbat, along the passages and listen to street musicians, here and there you will still come across “Everything is going according to plan,” “Obsession,” “The detachment did not notice the loss of a soldier.” " Recently Letova
I remember very well the first time I heard Yegor Letov’s songs. It was in the schoolyard and naturally not his doing. Everything goes according to plan. I will hear this slogan hundreds of times later. My friends and strangers will sing it in a vile voice over a bottle of port. This song will be defiantly played by boys in tracksuits. It was such a time. My childhood was spent in the entrances and gateways. Do I regret this? What's the point of regretting something that has already happened? There will never be another childhood anyway. Just like it won't more walls entrances covered with the inscriptions “Tsoi is alive!”, “ civil defense" and "Nirvana".
2
45
In the 2000s, all these clubs, tours, interviews in glossy magazines appeared, and the worst thing about Letov began to be played on the radio. Just a little more and he would have become a regular participant in festivals like Nashestvie. That is, he would come close to all Russian rock, from which he had been running all his life, but at the same time he was one of the most influential figures of this very Russian rock.
Igor Fedorovich died while I was serving in the army. I immediately understood very clearly that there would be no more concerts, albums and interviews. There will be nothing more except some kind of emptiness. He remained some kind of legend from Siberia for me. A riddle that cannot be solved. A man who managed to combine protest, quotes from dozens of writers and a sound unlike anything else in his songs. A sort of real rock and roll in Soviet reality.
Those who have played enough of all these teenage transitional ages are now living peacefully, including me. But then I remembered that Yegor Letov’s birthday falls in September. He still didn’t mark it, so I’ll post it today. There is no point in getting attached to a date. Yes, and now I’m hearing in my headphones “Your logic makes me sick...”. It's 2013...
P.S. I took absolutely all the photos from the guys here from
Letov and " sanitary paradoxes ordinary 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 - the most famous musician Omsk, although hometown he did not like 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 The countries are not painted with fans at all. 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 handsome guy, I looked at his photographs and was amazed by it. 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, Egor Letov, died at home in Omsk at the age of 43. According to the band's drummer Pavel Peretolchin, death was due to heart disease.
The leader is different famous rock band– “Metal Corrosion” - Sergei Pauk suggested that Letov’s death could be beneficial to someone in the recording industry. “In Russia it begins after a rock idol dies, as it happened with Tsoi and Talkov. Then the record company earns huge sums,” says Pauk.
"Passed away outstanding musician, which has influenced more than one generation of people who in one way or another associate themselves with non-conformist music, with punk rock, with garage rock, with protest rock,” said the leader of the Russian punk rock group “Naiv” Alexander (Chacha) Ivanov. According to him, Letov was “the most prominent representative of Soviet punk rock, original and very extraordinary.”
The leader of another famous rock band, “Corrosion of Metal,” Sergei Pauk suggested that Letov’s death could be beneficial to someone in the recording industry. “In Russia, show business begins after a rock idol dies, as was the case with Tsoi and Talkov. Then the record company earns huge sums,” says Pauk.
Showman of the group "AuktYon" Oleg Garkusha said that an entire generation grew up on the songs of Yegor Letov. "It was wonderful person. An insane number of young and older people grew up listening to his songs - songs of protest, challenge and freedom. Letov was a talented and brilliant person, and such a person left,” he added.
Igor Fedorovich Letov, known as Egor Letov, was born in Omsk on September 10, 1964. Leader of the Civil Defense group, he was one of the most prominent representatives punk movements in the USSR in general, and in Siberia in particular. The younger brother of the famous saxophonist Sergei Letov.
He began his musical activity in the early 1980s in Omsk, forming, together with like-minded people, the rock group “Posev”, and later the rock group “Civil Defense,” popular Internet portals report. At the dawn of their activities, the musicians of “Civil Defense”, due to political persecution by the authorities, were forced to record musical works in semi-underground apartment conditions.
In 1987-1989, Letov and his associates recorded a number of Civil Defense albums (“Red Album”, “Good!”, “Mousetrap”, “Totalitarianism”, “Necrophilia”, “So the Steel Was Tempered”, “Combat Stimulus” , “Everything is going according to plan”, “Songs of joy and happiness”, “War”, “Armageddon Pops”, “Healthy and Forever”, “Russian Field of Experiments”), at the same time albums of the project “Communism” (Egor Letov) were recorded , Konstantin Ryabinov, Oleg Sudakov (Manager)), the collaboration between Letov and Yanka Diaghileva began.
Despite the semi-underground existence of musicians and their so-called. GroB studios, by the end of the 1980s and especially in the early 1990s, they became widely known in the USSR (later Russia), mainly in youth circles. Letov's songs were distinguished by powerful energy, lively, simple, energetic rhythm, non-standard, sometimes shocking lyrics, and a kind of rough and, at the same time, refined poetry. The basis of Letov’s lyrics is the incorrectness of everything around him, and he expresses his position not directly, but through the depiction of this incorrectness. Yegor Letov was not a star. He was the one and only. Letov created provincial, Siberian urban rock, the most accurate, direct, most authentic.
In the early 1990s, Letov, within the framework of the project “Egor and the Opissed”, recorded the albums “Jump-Jump” (1990) and “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1992), which are among his most popular and beloved albums. . In 1994, Letov became one of the leaders of the national communist rock movement “Russian Breakthrough” and was actively touring.
In 1995-1996, he recorded two more albums, “Solstice” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (his group is again called “Civil Defense”); the music in these albums becomes more polished, “faceted”, the lyrics lose their excessive roughness, becoming more poetic, each song resembles a hymn, at the same time acquiring psychedelicity.
Egor Letov long time supported the National Bolshevik Party, which many consider to be a contradiction to the ideals of anti-fascism, anti-nationalism and punk rock in general. In February 2004, Letov officially disowned any political forces, including nationalist ones. Before recent years interest in the work of Yegor Letov waned until two new albums by the group “Dolgaya” were released in 2004-2005 Happy life" and "Reanimation", which collected all the songs written from the release of the albums "Solstice" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in the mid-90s.
In May 2007, the album “Why Do I Dream” was released. It should be noted that a song with this name is present on the album “Psychedelia Tomorrow” released in 2001 as part of the “Opi***nevye” project.
Egor Letov. "My Defense"