Evgeny Grishkovets' main love: The woman for whom the famous playwright gave up a well-fed life abroad

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

Today he is a well-known and successful writer, actor and playwright. Evgeny Grishkovets has millions of fans, his performances invariably gather full halls, and creative meetings with readers are not able to accommodate everyone. But there was a period in his life when he went abroad for permanent residence, and his feelings helped him to return home. Evgeny Grishkovets does not like to talk about his personal life, protecting loved ones from publicity, but thanks in large part to Elena, he returned home from abroad.

Find yourself

Evgeny Grishkovets was born in Kemerovo, lived with his parents in Leningrad for several years, and studying at school was not easy for him because of his dysgraphia. For a long time he had no idea what he would do in the future, until he accidentally got into a pantomime studio in Tomsk. And then I read the book by Ilya Rutberg "Pantomime: First Experiments". It was then that young Eugene realized that he only wanted to do art.

After leaving school, he entered the Faculty of Philology of Kemerovo University. In his second year he was drafted into the army, and Yevgeny Grishkovets, despite all the efforts of his father, ended up serving in the navy. It was a long and difficult three years.

It was incredibly difficult to preserve oneself and one's own dignity in those conditions. In the questionnaire, he indicated that he was engaged in pantomime, he was often attracted to participate in amateur performances, and his colleagues were annoyed by the "artist", and they took revenge on him. Their dislike spilled over into moral humiliation as well as beatings. Later, Russky Island, where the future writer served, will become famous for the fact that cadets died there from dystrophy in the 1990s. And the memories of those years will form the basis of his play "How I ate a dog", thanks to which he became famous.

He passionately dreamed of returning home as soon as possible, recovering at the university, taking up creativity and falling in love. Before being drafted into the army, Evgeny Grishkovets did not even have a hint of a romantic relationship with girls.

After his return, he was expected to study, participate in student theater, search for his place in life and, of course, love.

First and only

Even before Evgeny Grishkovets recovered at the university, in his future group they already started talking about the return of a talented student from the army. The girls breathed his last name and, of course, simply burned out with curiosity, because they had already heard numerous stories about a classmate from those who had managed to study with him for a year.

Elena Solovyova first saw Eugene on the street when she was returning to the hostel from the bakery. Her future husband was introduced to her by a classmate, and the girl was immediately struck by his kind eyes and mischievous freckles on his face. Elena does not hide: she immediately drew attention to the charming young man. Simply because men were rarely met at the philological faculty, and Grishkovets was already a kind of legend.

But at that moment, she did not have any thoughts about a romantic relationship. However, they did not appear then at Eugene. Later, when he felt sympathy for the girl, the future writer himself did not understand whether his feelings were love or not. He simply had nothing to compare with, and, as you know, someone else's experience in these matters does not particularly help.

Eugene drew attention to Elena, having heard the girl's performance at the Student Spring festival, where she sang a medley of songs from the 1960s. But even after that, Evgeny Grishkovets doubted himself, he showed Elena signs of attention, then he behaved very distantly. And then he left for Germany for permanent residence.

They did not even manage to say goodbye plainly: Lena was leaving with the construction team for Sakhalin, he was preoccupied with thoughts about how his fate would turn out in Germany, but promised to write. True, the life of Yevgeny Grishkovets in Germany turned out to be too far from his ideas about well-being, prosperity and unlimited possibilities of creativity.

In fact, he was a pantomime artist on the street, worked part-time in other places and understood more and more clearly that he had no future here. His destiny is to stand like this on the street, playing the role of a monument and collecting what passers-by give. Charity veiled by the illusion of work.

He constantly remembered Lena and understood more and more clearly that it was this woman who should become his wife. True, he diligently drove all these thoughts away from himself. Exactly until the moment when he finally returned to Kemerovo. Almost immediately after his return, he went to the student dormitory and proposed to Elena. And she accepted it.

Sea-going actor's wife

True, they signed two years after Eugene's return from Germany. At one time they lived with Grishkovets' parents, worked together in the theater "Lodge" created by her husband, raised their eldest daughter Natasha, who was born in 1995. When he had already achieved everything he could in his theater in Kemerovo, he set off to conquer the capital. True, he did not intend to live in Moscow at all.

As the writer admits, he considers himself a deeply provincial person. He understands how to live in the provinces, but does not imagine himself in the bustling capital. However, even then in the 1990s, the writer almost gave up his dreams of art. When there was a wife and a little daughter at home, whom there was nothing to feed, he already decided that he could not turn his vocation into a profitable business. And he applied to the Faculty of Law.

It was at this time in the smoking room of the Moscow theater of the Russian army that he showed his solo performance "How I ate a dog." Among the seventeen spectators who witnessed this action was Vladimir Zeldin. After the first show, they started talking about Grishkovets. Suddenly he became famous, in demand and quite successful.

Elena has long been accustomed to her husband's constant business trips. She, like the real wife of a sea captain, is always waiting for him, brings up children and creates all the conditions for her husband to be able to do the main thing in his life.

And the writer admits: his wife is an extraordinary woman, and he himself was incredibly lucky to meet her in his youth. Almost 30 years have passed since their weddings, they became parents of three children, moved to a permanent place of residence in Kaliningrad, where they bought a large house.

Elena is still the first reader of the works of Yevgeny Grishkovets. But he never interferes in his creative process, does not criticize or advise to change anything. She simply transfers her husband's works to the computer, because Yevgeny Grishkovets himself prefers to write in the old fashioned way, on paper.

Evgeny and Elena Grishkovets do not like to give interviews about their lives. For them, home and family are both a quiet pier and a reliable fortress, where they feel good and can hide from any prying eyes.

Evgeny Grishkovets never studied at a theater university, but he was able to become not only a successful writer, but also an actor. However, he not the only one who got on the stage and in the cinema, without a professional acting education, but with a good philological base.