They attacked Volodya Vyatrovich because of Vysotsky. It's amazing how people just do not want to realize that they live in a changed world! - writes journalist Vitaly Portnikov on the portal of the Chief Medical Officer.

As a child, I copied Vysotsky's texts by hand (although he loved Galich more, for me he was the real one). And I copied Mandelstam. And I know many poets of the Russian Silver Age. And in my first education I am a Russian philologist. Not Ukrainian.

Nevertheless, from the day when I remember myself as a thinking person, I was perfectly aware - thanks to the family and common sense - that my native culture is Sholom Aleichem and "Varnichkes", and my own history is the Maccabean rebellion and the Six Day War. And I also realized that the culture of the country in which I live is Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka, it's a song about Rushnik and Lyatoshinsky. And although I understand perfectly well that I will never have such an "electrical" contact with the volume of the "Kobzar" as an ethnic Ukrainian (and he will never understand what we really feel when we hear "Aidish Mama"), the not less than this is mine.

In Russian culture - it would be strange to deny it - a lot of cultural peaks (historical - less, this is the trouble of any empire). But for me it's other people's peaks. Like Polish, German, French, Japanese. I like to breathe the air of foreign mountains. But nothing compares to me with the domes of Kiev and the cupolas of Jerusalem.

This is another. These are not mountains. These are the roots.

That is why I was struck in my youth by people who declared their Motherland as the Soviet Union. To be honest, I considered them to be people without a homeland, ordinary opportunists. They consumed Soviet culture precisely because of the monstrous cultural deafness, they simply did not want to look at the stars or understand anything in themselves. And it is this cultural deafness that they are now defending, not understanding a very simple thing:.

Vysotsky is not only their own past, but also the cultural heritage of another country, a foreign civilization. And this civilization is also left for us all in the distant past. Far beyond time - in fact.

My oldest friend Chingiz Aitmatov called such people very accurately - mankurt. And no one then did not mind him. And now for some reason they take offense at the almost identical definition of Vyatrovich. Mankurt - they are tenacious.