Telephone Book

The book of memories by the author of "Shadows" and "Ordinary Miracle", "Dragon" and the script for "Cinderella", the sage and storyteller Yevgeny Schwartz, affectionately named "Telephone Book", has no analogues in memoir literature. First of all, this is genuine... prose, written exclusively for himself, without regard to contemporaries and censorship, and therefore absolutely truthful. Secondly, this is noble prose, as noble as its creator, — devoid of envy and whining, strict to the author himself and fair to the life characters depicted in it. Why "Telephone Book" and not just "Book of Memories"? Because the draft for memory was a real telephone book with the surnames of real people the writer met in life, — from "A" to "Ya". From known, celebrated, renowned, caressed by the love of the people to the small fry of this world, who do not aspire to special glory — masters of telephone installation or a theater seamstress. Schwartz formulated the task of creating the book this way: "I write about living people, whom I try to portray as thoroughly and accurately as possible, like a natural phenomenon. Recently, I have been afraid that the people of a complex time, under its pressure, who accepted or did not accept complicated forms, changing unnoticed for themselves or stubbornly not noticing the changes around, — will disappear. No, simpler. I am afraid that everything that is now buzzing and living around — will die, and no one will even mention them with a word — the living. And this is not entirely accurate. It seems to me that any living face is a historical face — and so on, and so forth. So I write, naming the names and surnames of historical figures." And this task set by the writer was fulfilled with honor.