Today, the legendary Russian–Tajik writer and sage Timur Zulfikarov turns 89 years old. On the eve of this event, we visited his monastery under the shade of plane trees and asked him to share his rules of life.
About life principles
– You know, the only law is, of course, love for people and for everything created by the Creator! And the great love between a man and a woman is the greatest feeling, today it has acquired the character of pornography. If Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet in our time, he would have said that they had watched too much pornography, and there could be no love between them.
The romance of heavenly love, the angelic spirit of love disappears. I have a saying on this topic: "Love is a fish swimming in the bottomless, phosphorescent waves of the ocean. Who knows the ways of this fish? No one but the Creator. And what is sex? It's the same fish struggling in oil in a frying pan!" Therefore, what humanity has come to now is very sad.
My second principle in life is that if you have money, help your neighbor. But great literature often goes hand in hand with great poverty, and despite the fact that there are people who call me the greatest writer of our time, all my life I've been trying to jump from the donkey of poverty to the nag of poverty, and I've been falling belly down into the dust. Like many people of our time.
And I am happy that when money appears, I get the opportunity to give it to those in need. If we come into the world with nothing, then we must leave as well. If you're rich, you need to be able to give everything to people.
I have a saying about how the great Ferdowsi died, and the funeral procession was met on the way by a huge caravan with gold and silver sent to him by the Padishah. And when I die, a caravan with utility bills will appear to meet those carrying my body, and I would lift my head out of the shroud and ask them to send all these bills to hell.
I recall Haji Nasreddin's aphorism that if Barki Tojik had the opportunity to control the sun, we would not see sunlight.
And the third principle: gratitude. I am grateful to God for my life, for the love of people, for poetry and wisdom. And I am also grateful to Emomali Rahmon for getting me out of Moscow, saying: "Return to your homeland." And here I am. Then the days of the coronavirus had just begun, I would not have been able to survive the death of my beautiful young son – if I had stayed in the megapolis, I would have wandered around the world a long time ago.
About the works that should become a cultural heritage
– Dante Alighieri's greatest work is The Divine Comedy, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don. And since I have lived a great life, I can name several of my poems as cultural heritage: "The Confession of Ivan the Terrible", "The Book of Death of Amir Timur", "The Book of Childhood of Jesus Christ", "One Day from the childhood of the Prophet Muhammad" and "The Book of Revelation of Omar Khayyam".
My literature is a huge museum with different paintings, for different people. My reader is not in jeans, not in sneakers, not in boots, but in the eyelids. My work is a double–humped camel – one hump is Tajikistan, and the other is Russia.
Tajik–Persian poetry and Oriental culture had a huge influence on me, but the influence of Russian culture, Orthodoxy, and literature is difficult to overestimate.
I say, "In Russia, I'm like a peacock in a chicken coop, and in Asia, like a whale in a ditch. What I am saying is the union of mind and heart. That is, the heart is art, and the mind is revelation.
