Vladislav Abashin
It wasn't far, it wasn't near, it wasn't there, it wasn't here — but on the evening of the 28th day of the month of June my mother Lidia Ivanovna Vorobyova gave birth to me in the No. 2 maternity home of the city of Ryazan. She did it with no small help from Vladimir Yakovlevich Abashin. It happened in the last century, in the year of Our Lord 1979. As odd as it may sound, I spent the greater part of my infancy and even my youth in that same city, rarely venturing out — only if to visit my grandmother, with whom I often spent the better part of the summer, or if I was sent off to some Pioneer camp bearing some crazy name. I began to assimilate the arts of division and subtraction, to say nothing of the arts of writing and drawing, among other things, in that very same city of Ryazan in School No. 46. Now, what could it have been? Was the school in a bad location or was it the nearby presence of the soccer stadium, which, for me, was nothing but another place to play army games? I don't know. But whatever it was, I had to squeak by to get the occasional A or B in phys ed (never in winter, though!) or, with some real effort, drawing.
By the end of fifth grade, after having been at constant war with the entire school system, after having suffered the constant threat of teachers wishing to clip my flouncy bangs, after suffering the same old thing in drawing class and my chronic refusal to participate in skiing during phys ed, plus numerous errors of a navigational kind in geography classes, as well as my total ignorance of living organisms in biology — I abandoned the confines of School No. 46 and transferred to another, which bore the equally humorous name of School No. 45.
There I continued to sow dissent among the ranks with my refusal to have haircuts, my love for heavy metal, and my early attraction to the opposite sex. Joining ranks with my comrades at arms Goon (Vyacheslav Kulikov) and Chamych (Roman Fetyulin), we continued to do everything possible to foil every teacher's attempts to teach us anything. However, the final school bell suddenly put an end to that and, having finished school, I passed the entrance exams for Technical College No. 11 where the competition consisted of 3.5 people for every slot. Here nobody gave a damn what color your hair was and how long it was, or what kind of music you listened to. The only important thing here was that you knew how to hold a caliper or a rasp properly and that you at least didn't smoke in class. Three years later I came out of there with a diploma as a mechanic 4th class, hair half-way down my back, and I decided to lay low.
Curiously enough, as soon as you could start walking around Ryazan without getting beat up for wearing long hair, I shaved my head.
I floated down the stream of life, constantly changing my profession and place of work, playing for a time in the Sabateus Charabede rock band, and taking part in all the kinds of activities at the local community center that usually perk up the eyes and ears of police detectives. I don't know how far I would have sunk had it not been for a road accident in 1997. Thanks to a timely concussion and a period of immobility, I suddenly experienced an unheard-of desire to engage in activities I previously considered abhorrent, i.e., the desire to read classical literature (that had been wiped out of my system in school); a burning desire to endlessly watch the Culture Channel on TV; and, which was clearly an aberration, an interest in everything to do with theatre. And I'll tell you — there are no easy cures for the theatre disease.
And so, in 1999, when all my broken bones healed, my brain cleared up again and my soul was freed by Pushkin, Gogol and Shukshin, I barged down to a theatre for the first time in my life. My goal was nothing less than to perform something there. Thanks to my theatrical mother, the People's Artist Zoya Vasilyevna Belova, I found myself taken into what seemed to me to be the absolutely enormous Ryazan Oblast Drama Theatre. However, I soon learned it is impossible to combine study at two theatre institutes with work at a theatre. As a result, I dropped out of both institutes, quit my job, burned my bridges and headed for Moscow, where it took me three years of application processes before I finally ended up where I wanted to be. But that is another story altogether.
By the end of fifth grade, after having been at constant war with the entire school system, after having suffered the constant threat of teachers wishing to clip my flouncy bangs, after suffering the same old thing in drawing class and my chronic refusal to participate in skiing during phys ed, plus numerous errors of a navigational kind in geography classes, as well as my total ignorance of living organisms in biology — I abandoned the confines of School No. 46 and transferred to another, which bore the equally humorous name of School No. 45.
There I continued to sow dissent among the ranks with my refusal to have haircuts, my love for heavy metal, and my early attraction to the opposite sex. Joining ranks with my comrades at arms Goon (Vyacheslav Kulikov) and Chamych (Roman Fetyulin), we continued to do everything possible to foil every teacher's attempts to teach us anything. However, the final school bell suddenly put an end to that and, having finished school, I passed the entrance exams for Technical College No. 11 where the competition consisted of 3.5 people for every slot. Here nobody gave a damn what color your hair was and how long it was, or what kind of music you listened to. The only important thing here was that you knew how to hold a caliper or a rasp properly and that you at least didn't smoke in class. Three years later I came out of there with a diploma as a mechanic 4th class, hair half-way down my back, and I decided to lay low.
Curiously enough, as soon as you could start walking around Ryazan without getting beat up for wearing long hair, I shaved my head.
I floated down the stream of life, constantly changing my profession and place of work, playing for a time in the Sabateus Charabede rock band, and taking part in all the kinds of activities at the local community center that usually perk up the eyes and ears of police detectives. I don't know how far I would have sunk had it not been for a road accident in 1997. Thanks to a timely concussion and a period of immobility, I suddenly experienced an unheard-of desire to engage in activities I previously considered abhorrent, i.e., the desire to read classical literature (that had been wiped out of my system in school); a burning desire to endlessly watch the Culture Channel on TV; and, which was clearly an aberration, an interest in everything to do with theatre. And I'll tell you — there are no easy cures for the theatre disease.
And so, in 1999, when all my broken bones healed, my brain cleared up again and my soul was freed by Pushkin, Gogol and Shukshin, I barged down to a theatre for the first time in my life. My goal was nothing less than to perform something there. Thanks to my theatrical mother, the People's Artist Zoya Vasilyevna Belova, I found myself taken into what seemed to me to be the absolutely enormous Ryazan Oblast Drama Theatre. However, I soon learned it is impossible to combine study at two theatre institutes with work at a theatre. As a result, I dropped out of both institutes, quit my job, burned my bridges and headed for Moscow, where it took me three years of application processes before I finally ended up where I wanted to be. But that is another story altogether.