Ivan DRACH: “When you have a Book, you can Touch it, Turn its Pages one Hundred Times … There is Some Original Intima in that”

On the day of our meeting with Ivan Drach I remembered that the year 2010 was the year of tango and in 2011 Buenos Aires is appointed by the world to be the capital of book. It also turned out that in the refined Kyiv restaurant with the shellfish orientation you can be warmed by very decent tea which doesn’t have the smell of water-plants.
Also exactly on that day in periodical “Viche” imposed the last portion of the poet’s ballads written in 1960 before the film Tetyana Yablonska. During the year our periodical has published by portions this touching cycle – the content of the album which was not printed: in 1969 its four thousand editions were cut with a knife because the authors were blamed for nationalism. It turns out that more than forty years have passed before the parliamentary edition revived the justice, as the album – in the periodical version – after all has seen the world!

All these facts, at the first sight, were separated, either they were touched during the conversation or were outpoured in causes for flashbacks. 

Waiting for the concert in an organ hall, we ordered tea in the restaurant with mineral deposits of shells, where citizens of Kyiv are fed with seafood. Ivan Drach, a man from my school textbook, a herald from my adult TV, creator of poetries from the time of endless admiration of literature, said: “I will tell you about oysters”. And told how in hungry military childhood his fellow-villagers were rescued by oysters (certainly, in their river embodiment). If there was oil in the house, it was dropped on shellfishes. Many years after when Ivan Fedorovych traveled around Latin America local habitants tried to surprise a guest with the slippery sea gifts. And the latter, in his turn, told them about culinary experience of his childhood. “They could not imagine to what extent I hate these oysters!” – was heard by the well disciplined staff of the restaurants.