The soul of “BE_TWIN” is hidden inside the homophonic calque of the English title of the story – “Between”. Mark Scripka
Between St. Petersburg and Moscow
St. Petersburg is a city of my emotions, I loved it as a woman, as a man, and I had lived in really long before I got friends there. When I moved to Moscow, St. Petersburg wouldn’t let me go for a long period, recalling itself through either phone, or news items on TV. Then all this happened.
playUrgently skipping the traffic to aiming –
You, never died, forever stayed
Fed up with passers-by no naming!
Roubles in hand, Leningradsky station
Moving or going, hasty feelings
Time of departure, journey time
Stuck in position scoreboard figures
Maybe I’ll finally manage to find
Remedy, something, a drug, a pellet,
Wonder, or Heaven, or even God
Five to departure. A cigarette. Yellow
Shade of the stripe on its circle, or gold?
Great. I will surely choose to have it
Ash and smoke. An ideal finale!
Life like a flash – totally faded
On panorama between reality
Moving or going, hasty feelings
Someone has spoilt the photoshot
You, not a master of brush – just dreaming
In a puddle of ink to blot
Midnight expresses never pending
Stop-and-go rhythms of railway gloves
The buttoned-up world, hibernating
With self-declared allergy for love.
September, 2005
Moscow – Saint Petersburg train
In 1995, Mark Skripka (Oleg Scripchenko) leaves Murmansk for Saint Petersburg. There he manifests himself very quickly: first short stories appear, and two lyric collections get published – “Our Autumn” (1996) and “The Night Sun” (1998).
‘It was a great time, – the author notes. – Youth is always full of hope. You don’t know where, but you find the strength to fight for the place in the sun, get all bold and brash… I was dreaming of greatness, believing to have something special inside that separated me from everyone else. I surely must have THINGS to say!
So I did. And now I want to be heard.’
Working for St. Petersburg TV-channel, studying at the Leningrad Cherkasov State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema (now – the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts) for TV director – to give up everything there, move to Moscow, enter the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and collect memories of beloved St. Petersburg. In July, 2008, the diploma commission in the Literature Institute faced the voluminous project titled “Oleg Petrovich Scripchenko. The movie-essay BETWEEN”
In Moscow Scripka is the author of lots of poems and lyrics. As a songwriter, from 1996 he has been collaborating with the composers Sasha Morozova, Sergey Pleshak, Gasan Bagirov, Igor Dunkul.
Up to now, the author has finished his second movie-essay, titled “A Long Tour”, and started his third one. Both stories written and poems are being translated into English.
“BETWEEN”, or “BE_TWIN”, became Mark Scripka’s leading voice of the years in the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute – the story that had been with him for months, as it should have been. It included the author’s poems to his friend, the hero of the movie-essay, and their life in St. Petersburg.
‘These poems were written a while ago, – the writer tells in an interview to a central magazine. – But they are not random here. They are parts of the whole. For a certain time, I didn’t know about this ‘whole’, just couldn’t know. But now, as the day has come, all pieces of the complex literary puzzle are put in their places’.
There was a film script with the same title, to which Scripchenko vainly tried to attract the movie elite’s attention, either because it was, perhaps, too bold and untraditional, or because behind the text of the script the essence of the Movie-essay loomed, ready to be born.
It was born then – and it told the Story, which is the favorite and most successful portfolio of the essay, showing it the way it should be: a beautiful and strong woman, created to be loved. It is Ed himself, appearing in character of San Sanna. The San Sanna can belong to a capital only, same as the Story. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, Madrid or Rome – this all could have happened only here. Or somewhere BETWEEN…
The title of the book does not show any tragic uncertainty, or a condition of each individual character. EVERYTHING in our lives, in the surrounding space is in BETWEEN. The space itself is a gap BETWEEN the sky and the Earth, the Earth and the neighboring planets, one Universe and the other. We find ourselves BETWEEN the ones like us and the ones totally different.
‘Between you and me, between us’, – the epigraph says. Look around – and you will see the world we live in there, BETWEEN. Fathers and sons, men and women, men and men, women and women issues – here is what the author tells us about.
A writer’s aim is to catch the reader’s eye, place his creation between himself and the audience. I deliberately speak of the audience: we are facing the MOVIE story. Scripchenko is balancing between script and prose, and in a moment you stop reading and find yourself in the auditorium, seeing every scene, every face, feeling scents and temperature.
The author chooses the most appropriate writing style, with frequent, non-random spaces. With their help he changes the area of the essay and places of action, conveys the mood and state of the characters.
The movie-essay “BETWEEN”, or “BE_TWIN”, describes the events of one autumn. Rare romantic returns to the past are islets of a single long path – a lifetime. Skripchenko has achieved a stunning effect: the reader suddenly turns into the viewer, then back into the reader, staying constantly NOWHERE and EVERYWHERE, watching the same people at DIFFERENT times of their lives; he comes back to the SAME room, which the author forced him to leave, after a LONG PERIOD of time, when a person who seemed to have been leading the reader by hand, is gone.
Ed dies – Yana gives birth to a boy. She calls him after her best friend. As for us, we live somewhere BETWEEN taking the same train to St. Petersburg with Ed’s palm on one of its coupe’s glasses.
Ekaterina Ivleva, a member of Union of Writers of Russia, Literature Union of the Russian Federation
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