Ilya Oleinikov and Denis Klyaver: Why did the son hide his relationship with his father and abandoned his surname

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The children of famous parents use the chances given to them by fate in different ways: someone is proud of his loud surname and does not hide the fact that it helps to build a successful career, and someone does not advertise kinship in order to avoid comparisons and achieve success on their own. The son of the famous artist Ilya Oleinikov bore a different surname, and only after his departure he spoke about their difficult relationship and why for many years no one knew who his father was …

How Klyaver became Oleinikov

Many fans of the singer, even after they found out who his father was, were sure that Klyaver was his stage name. In fact, this was his father's real surname. In childhood and adolescence, Ilya Oleinikov bore the surname Klyaver, but when he began performing on stage as an artist of the spoken genre, he borrowed the maiden name of his wife, Irina Oleinikova. It turned out that they exchanged surnames, because after marriage she became Klyaver!

It was quite difficult for an artist with a Jewish surname to break through on the Soviet stage, the performances of Ilya Klyaver and his colleague Roman Bronstein were cut from television programs, and Vladimir Vinokur advised the artists to take pseudonyms. Bronstein became Kazakov, Klyaver became Oleinikov. It was after this that the first resounding popularity came to them, and the duet of Oleinikov and Kazakov often began to be invited to theaters and on television. And after the tandem of Ilya Oleinikov and Yuri Stoyanov was born, the whole country learned about the artists.

When Denis was born, his father was not yet a famous artist, the family lived in a communal apartment, later they moved to a small one-room apartment. When he was 8 years old, he finally got his own room in a "kopeck piece" on the outskirts of Leningrad. My father made a non-standard renovation in it: he painted the walls over the wallpaper with black gouache, and then painted patterns on them with colored gouache.

Since childhood, Denis was fond of music, learned to play the piano, and at the age of 12 he wrote his first song. The father's son's abilities did not please his father - he really did not want him to follow in his footsteps and become an artist, because Ilya Olenikov's path to recognition and success was too long and thorny, and he did not want the same fate for his son. But Denis could not imagine his life without music and after the 8th grade he entered the music school. When he was in his third year, he received a summons to the army, and his father insisted that he go to serve.

An independent path to success

In one of the leave Denis met Stas Kostyushkin, the son of jazz saxophonist Mikhail Kostyushkin, whose work Klyaver had long been fond of. Together they decided to create a duet, and in 1994 the group "Tea for Two" appeared. The first popularity came to them after a two-year tour with Laima Vaikule, and in the late 1990s. they gave their first solo concert in St. Petersburg. The duo existed until 2013, after which each of them took up solo work, and Kostyushkin managed to achieve more noticeable success in this.

Denis Klyaver tried to build a musical career on his own so that no one would say that he achieved success only thanks to the patronage of his father. Oleinikov initially helped the group financially and invested a large sum in their first videos, but later Klyaver and Kostyushkin returned the invested funds - for them it was a matter of principle.

When he was just starting his career on stage, his mother asked him if he also wanted to perform under the name of Oleinikov. But Denis really liked his father's real surname, besides, times had changed, and there were no longer any obstacles for an artist with a Jewish surname. In addition, the singer really did not want to be compared with his father. He always felt an internal competition with his father and dreamed of proving to him that he could achieve everything on his own.

Lost chances

Most of his fans did not even suspect that he was the son of Ilya Oleinikov. Only after he was gone in 2012, the singer began to talk about his father in an interview. Klyaver was very upset by his departure and once admitted: "".

Only years later, the singer spoke about his relationship with his father. As it turned out, they were never really close, although they loved each other very much. Due to constant employment, both could not spend enough time with each other - when Denis was little, Ilya Oleinikov was focused on building his career, and later his son became famous and began to disappear on tour. As a child, Denis did not see his father for months and missed him so much that in his absence he climbed into the closet and buried his nose in his clothes, which smelled of tobacco and cologne.

They simply did not have enough time to communicate with their father. Klyaver admitted that they never spoke heart to heart, did not be frank, and only after his father died, the singer realized how much they both missed. Only once did they manage to talk the way they both wanted for a long time. Once they were driving together from Moscow to St. Petersburg and for several hours they shared the most intimate.

In his family, Denis Klyaver now tries not to repeat the same mistakes and spends maximum time with his youngest son. Unfortunately, he did not manage to pay enough attention to the older children - then his whole life was on tour, but after his father left, he revised his life priorities and finally realized that family values should come first. The singer says: "".

They were united not only by the joint project "Gorodok": How the stars brought together Ilya Oleinikov and Yuri Stoyanov.