With the departure of Mikhail Zhvanetsky, we say goodbye to the memory of that culture of laughter and criticism, when the truth could only be spoken in a hint, in a half-whisper, so that people would understand, but the authorities did not have the opportunity to deal with the joker, but only complacently - or not very much -.

This was the era of people who wanted to speak the truth and survive at the same time - and therefore it was the era of strokes.. I will forever remember the sad eyes of Arkady Raikin, for whom Zhvanetsky wrote his best humoresques.

I also remembered the words of Zhvanetsky himself, who told me how the era in which he can listen to my reports on the radio without any " And the fact that even in the last years of Zhvanetsky's life, the style of Zhvanetsky itself was much more popular in Russia than in Ukraine, once again confirms how far we have gone from the darkness in the neighboring country.

With Zhvanetsky, what we used to call the Odessa culture of humor is finally leaving - what was actually a Jewish tradition, not always well translated into Russian. This culture actually died during the Holocaust, but there were still people who were able to remember and reproduce it, people for whom it was the air. With the death of Zhvanetsky, this culture can only be imitated.

Original.