Alexander Nikolaevich Zhitinsky, January 19, 1941, Simferopol — January 25, 2012, Finland — Soviet and Russian writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, founder of the Helikon Plus publishing house. Author of 12 books, some of which are dedicated to the legends of Russian rock. He also published under the pseudonyms Rock-Amateur.
Early biography
Born on January 19, 1941 in the city of Simferopol, in the family of a military pilot, later Lieutenant General of Aviation Nikolai Stepanovich Zhitinsky (1909-1975) and Antonina Illarionovna Zhitinskaya (1912-1994). In addition to Alexander, the family included a younger brother, Sergei, and a younger sister, Natalya.
During the war, the family was evacuated to the Kuibyshev region. My father fought in the Northern Fleet. After the war they lived in Taganrog and Port Arthur (1946-1948), and later in Moscow, where Zhitinsky went to school. In 1954, after the father’s next transfer, the family moved to Vladivostok. In 1958 he graduated from high school in Vladivostok with a gold medal. Zhitinsky entered the electrical engineering department of the Far Eastern Polytechnic Institute, then transferred to the second year of the Moscow Aviation Institute (radio engineering department), and a year later — to the radio electronics department of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. M. I. Kalinina. The transfers were associated with a change in the family’s place of residence (due to the reduction of the army and navy undertaken at that time by N. S. Khrushchev, his father’s position in Moscow was reduced, and a place was found for him in Leningrad). In 1965, he graduated with honors from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute with a degree in electrical engineering, then completed graduate school (without defending a dissertation), and worked as a junior researcher at the institute.
Literary creativity
“I have been engaged in literary creativity since 1962, until the mid-1970s I wrote mainly poetry. The first publication took place in 1969. The first major prose work written in 1971-1972, the story “The Staircase,” was circulated for a long time in samizdat, and appeared in print only in 1980 in the September issue of the magazine “Neva.” Since 1978 — professional writer (writer, screenwriter, publisher), since 1979 — member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, since 1986 — member of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR.
Rock-Amateur
In the 1980s, he took an active part in the life of domestic rock music, which was in the underground. He wrote articles under the pseudonym Rock Amateur, wrote the columns “Notes of a Rock Amateur” and “Musical Epistolary” in the Aurora magazine, and in 1990 published the book “The Journey of a Rock Amateur.” In 1984-1988 he served on the jury of festivals at the Leningrad Rock Club. He organized two rock festivals. In the fall of 1989, he organized and held a grandiose nine-day (September 16-24) rock festival for the Aurora magazine in Leningrad, at which about a hundred bands from all over the country performed. The songs of the winners of the Aurora magazine magnetic album competition were released by AnTrop studio in the form of an audio cassette. The second (Christmas) rock festival «Aurora-90» was held on December 21-23, 1990. After 1991, he withdrew from active participation in the domestic rock movement, although he maintained friendly relations with many rock musicians. As Zhitinsky himself later wrote about this
It would be more accurate to say that Mike’s death in 1991 seemed to draw a line under the active work of RD, and perhaps under the whole period of Russian rock. Why did it happen so? And were there any objective reasons for this? RD answers this question in the affirmative. Unfortunately, the Russian rock that attracted his attention in the early eighties — sincere, honest, poor, romantic, free, barracks — no longer exists as a phenomenon. Some representatives have survived, but they are not the ones who make the difference in rock. It’s strange, Russian rock in its version remained in the USSR, it will forever retain the name “Red Wave”. In Russia now there is a different kind of rock — commercial, although there are also numerous amateur groups who want to break through. But they can only break through commercially.
Publishing activities
In 1991-1992, he participated in the organization of the International Congress-Cruise of Writers of the Baltic Sea Countries (“Baltic Waves”), which took place from February 23 to March 10, 1992, in which 300 writers from 10 countries took part. In 1991, he organized and headed the publishing house “New Helikon” (“Helikon Plus” since 1997, specializes in publishing works by online writers). The publishing house began active work in 1993, immediately after the end of the Baltic Waves cruise, and by the beginning of 1996 it had published about 30 books, mainly by contemporary St. Petersburg authors. “New Helikon” became one of the first Russian publishing houses to practice print-on-demand technology. By his own admission
“I’m not used to writing for money. I always wrote only what I liked, and when they paid money for it, I said thank you. In the new conditions it was necessary to earn something. I understood that I couldn’t be a commercial writer, and I didn’t want to… Now I have to write novels, but I don’t like it and I don’t know how. And I decided that I would rather publish it, and publish it in a unique way. <…> My publishing house lives for the most part on money from books published on orders from authors. The author comes, brings money and his book. I don’t refuse anyone because of artistic incompetence, because I, as a waiter, perform a service, I cannot serve one and not another.”
Online projects on the Internet
Zhitinsky is one of the pioneers of online literary projects on the RuNet. An Internet user since the fall of 1995, in 1996 he organized and released, together with the Nevalink company, the first fully electronic literary and artistic almanac on the Russian Internet, “Art Petersburg,” which covered all types of arts in St. Petersburg: literature, music, theater, cinema, painting, architecture. In May 1996, “Art-Petersburg” was presented at a book exhibition in St. Petersburg. As Zhitinsky himself later wrote:
Writer Daniil Granin gave a speech, the first page of the site could be seen on the demo screen, the audience was surprised, but little understood. The Internet in Russia was still a complete curiosity.
In 1997, at the suggestion of the Peter publishing house, which specializes in publishing computer literature, Zhitinsky wrote a reference book “Yellow Pages. Recreation and Entertainment» on cultural and entertainment resources of the Internet. The book, which had the subtitle “Notes of a Web Amateur,” along with other resources, contained annotations of the first websites of rock bands that had already appeared on the Russian Internet. In the wake of the book, Zhitinsky created the information resource “Russian Lace” (1997-1998) — a daily web review, where he posted articles about one or another resource on the Russian-language Internet. The resource was very popular for that time; several hundred people read it every day. In 1997-1998, together with Leonid Delitsyn, he held the network literary competition “Art-Teneta”, and later in 1998 his own “Art-Lito”, the chairman of the jury was B.N. Strugatsky. The last competition was organized together with Lito. Laurence Stern (1997-2001) — the most famous network project of Zhitinsky — a virtual literary association in which up to 70 young writers from all over the world, writing in Russian, studied for several years. Such now famous writers as Dmitry Gorchev, Linor Goralik, Dmitry Kovalenin, Vadim Smolensky, Dmitry Novikov began their literary career there; at one time Bayan Shiryanov was a member of Lito. From April 2001 until his death, Alexander Zhitinsky maintained a blog on LiveJournal.
A unique literary result of a ten-year immersion in the Internet environment was the novel “Sovereign of the Whole Network,” published in 2007, in which real events are intertwined with virtual events occurring on the Internet, and with miracles occurring in reality. In 2008, the novel won the ABS Prize in the category “fiction”.
Last years
In July 2007, he headed the Center for Contemporary Literature and Books in St. Petersburg.
Zhitinsky’s last work is the novel “Quicksand”, published shortly before his death, a continuation of the story “The Staircase” written 40 years earlier. Boris Strugatsky, to whom the author gave the novel to read, rated Quicksand highly: “Luck. There is life in the old dog yet! Everything is sad, and everything is true, and everything is about us, the current and unfortunate…»
He died suddenly in Finland on January 25, 2012, where he came to visit his brother Sergei, who lived there. His daughter Olga reported this on her LiveJournal blog. He was buried on February 4 in Komarov.
Family
Was married three times
first wife (since 1961)
daughter Olga (born in 1962)
son Sergei (born in 1968)
second wife — professor of LGITMiK Elena Viktorovna Markova
daughter Alexandra (born 1982)
third wife (from 1989 to 2012) — Elena Valentinovna Zhitinskaya, director of the Helikon Plus publishing house.
daughter Anastasia (born in 1992)
Essays
Novels
The Lost House, or Conversations with My Lord (1987)
Destination (1987)
Child of the Age (1994)
Bullshit (1997)
Sovereign of the entire Network (2007)
Quicksand (magazine version 2011, 2012)
Filmography
1983 — Unicum
1985 — Walk the Line
1987 — Time to Fly
1988 — Branch
1989 — Staircase
1990 — When the Saints Come Marching In
1995 — Young Peasant Lady
Zhitinsky Alexander Nikolaevich
Zhitinsky Alexander Nikolaevich
(1941—2012s)
