Between Paris and the slow cooker
“Come in,” calls Olga Vladimirovna in the huge two-story mansion.
It leads to the “Mayak” assisted living home itself, which according to the laws of common sense should not exist, but lives above the barriers. The doctors simply convinced the inconsolable mother: there is a chance that Zhenya will talk about her or that the disease will not worsen, if she is among her own species. Among those whose nerves are so exposed that they read her own people, but not their own when they are together. And now it’s no longer the children who seem special. But it is impossible to believe that they are adults, that they work in a sawmill, in a cheese factory and in a bakery, and even teach those around them to perceive special people as equals. It is also hard to believe that the embarrassed Artur Kuzhagulov or the “big” Yura Pshenichka is 31 years old and the “little” Yura Obraztsov is 23. They look like they are 13-15 years old, but they hold hands like children.
“There are children,” Olga knows what she is saying, “you won’t see that yet.” The next day I introduced Tanya Skorobogatova, part of the house, although she lives under another roof. The girl is older than everyone else, but she looks and lives like an inch.
Meanwhile, the boys call up to the second floor, where their rooms are. Yura Pshenichka’s eyes light up when she shows her fish in the aquarium. Grisha Tyurin, 23, and Valya Ertskin, 20, remain silent until the conversation turns to their favorite cartoons about the Three Heroes and Masha and the Bear. Only Zhenya Timoshenko is silent. He listens as if he is about to say something. You just have to wait.
Olga Timoshenko has two children. Mikhail, 30, is a rising star of Parisian opera, freelancing at the Vienna Opera and London’s Covent Garden, and 20-year-old Zhenya is special: she has autism. My husband and I separated when Zhenya was little. Until recently, no one could have imagined that Misha would live and study in Vienna and perform in European capitals. Like her mother and her brother Zhenya, after visiting clinics, psychoneurological boarding schools and orphanages, only by miracle did they build a shelter home in the Iversky Monastery.
The “blame” of everything is the multicooker and Zhenya’s puberty. When she began to grow up, the boy stopped concentrating on classes at the Orenburg Touch Center. The mother took the child there twice a week from the city of Mednogorsk, where they lived two hundred kilometers away. Doctors advised the boy, whose illness was worsening, to move to a more familiar environment: people like him, but with a mild form of autism.
“They rejected him, he rejected them,” Olga remembers, “it was the city of Gai, a boarding school.” It’s often every man for himself. And newcomers are intimidated. Zhenia began to fight. I felt crushed by internal hysteria. I can’t call it cunning or tactics, more out of desperation, on one of my visits to the PNI he brought a slow cooker.
And the miracle pan didn’t just come together. The boarding school children gradually stopped eating soup and ate it with sweets, and Zhenya came across the fact that she, along with everyone else, taught the newcomers the unknown: making pies and dumplings. Thus, the multicooker became the precursor of a common house for eight children under the wing of Olga Timoshenko. Although I had to wander for years. Orenburg, with its study centers, rehabilitation and availability of work, was not economically viable for Olga. They bought land in the resort town of Sol-Iletsk, but Misha Timoshenko not only won another music competition. Her voice was noticed since childhood by the director of the Mednogorsk music school, Russian Culture Worker Tatyana Mayorova. She helped him obtain a Denis Matsuev scholarship and passed it along the creative chain to Mikhail Lansky, a professor at the Weimar Music School. He, after hearing young Misha’s presentations at the competition, called him to an audition and offered him to study the art of opera at the conservatory in Weimar, Germany.
The Grand Prize of the María Callas International Competition opened the doors of the Vienna Opera and Covent Garden in London to Mijaíl Timoshenko
“Of course, go ahead,” I said to my son,” Olga recalls, “and to myself: “The competition won’t pass.” Where without languages? He left, I found myself involved in loans and looking for sponsors for the shelter. Misha calls: “Mom, they accepted me.” I felt like the world was slipping away from my feet. I don’t even have money for my son to buy a plane, and the happy child shouts on the phone that before starting school you “only” have to pass the category “C” German exam, otherwise you won’t get it. I do not accept it. “No,” I tell him and I understand that I am worse than an executioner, “come on, as you wanted, you will go to the Polytechnic University to be an engineer. Without a piece of bread or butter… He hung up “I’m sitting like a stone. How can he “bite”? Is Zhenya not enough for me? I wasn’t just scared. I realized that the two sons were somehow connected to each other, and maybe I wouldn’t find them. This connection is due to ignorance.
Photo: From the personal archive of Olga Timoshenko.
“You’re welcome?! And for what?”
And then the mother, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, deeply in debt, between refusals from sponsors and rushing to Mednogorsk, where she works as an economist, realized: fate was treating her like a dog. You are afraid of her, she attacks, the fear has subsided, she will turn wherever you want. So that her son could study in Germany, Olga sold her mother’s apartment, but it was not enough, she sold hers and now there is a new blow: the “C” category in German can only be obtained in Yekaterinburg, 700 kilometers from distance. “I don’t know how I got over it,” Mikhail recalls. “Even while he was sleeping he was mumbling in German. Like crazy.”
Soon her son left for Weimar and Olga retired: homeless, she is torn between work and trips to a boarding school with eight children in the city of Gai. It was a house without a house, but with a name: the “Mayak” assisted living house. Misha only had enough money to study in Weimar for two and a half years out of four, and the rest of the time she had to take out a loan. As soon as my mother got used to living in three or four parallel realities: between hospitals, work, schools, loans and pensions, and pushed the hope of an assisted living home to a corner of her memory, a call came from the Iversky Convent. in Orsk. She called the confessor of the monastery, Archpriest Sergius Baranov.
“You’re welcome?! And for what,” Olga the priest recalled in confession, when she tried to understand why she had two such different children.
“And I relived everything that happened to me when I was afraid to let Misha go to Germany,” Olga recalls. – Father tells me that there is a house a hundred steps from the monastery, but I cannot understand or believe that this is a house for us. I have no strength. I told him, “I don’t have a cent.” Him: “Come and see.” On the way to the house I woke up: the priest said, or I can’t believe that the donor of the Russian Orthodox Church for the house will pay the full amount: 4 million? Something warmed inside me, and I saw a house, I had no strength: the walls were frozen, there were no windows, there was water in the basement, there was a wall of weeds in the yard… Why?
“You’re welcome?! And for what?” Olga the priest recalled in confession, when she tried to understand why she had two such different children.
“Mom, you have a bite,” they called me from the Opera Bastille, where Misha auditioned after graduating from the conservatory in Weimar, “it’s not my place to teach you. Write scholarship applications. Do you know why? Me too I don’t think they will take me to the “Opera Bastille”. Who am I? And… And the artistic director of the Academy, Christian Schirm, called and said that I had been accepted. Do you know where he called? To the Alexander Cathedral Nevsky in Paris. I sang in the choir there at the Christmas service. I kinda didn’t let go of the trumpet. Mom, the good news came to the church. You too. Yes, by the way, it was It’s my turn to help.
Not immediately, but the house healed. With light in the windows, flowers on the windowsills and working people.
At home. When the time comes to reach the age of majority or receive the status of legal capacity and the right to receive social housing, no one leaves Mayak. Photo: Press service of the Iversky Monastery in Orsk
Listening to grudges is erased
Let’s go to the monastery. “Out of obedience,” they are asked questions about who works there.
“We have different things here every day,” share Andrei Barsukov, 23, and Maxim Laktionov, 20. – In the carpentry workshop we help in the sawmill. In a greenhouse, like in our house, we remove weeds, water and store preparations in the basement. But more often “ours” is a cheese shop, a bakery and a pastry shop.
We open the door of the cheese factory. The aromas of milk, thyme and cooked cheeses tickle the nose.
“You don’t have to ask the kids for anything,” Samuel’s mother came out to greet him. – Arriving late. Once I was distracted by Moscow pilgrims, Maxim and the “great” Yura poured water on me in jars and are already loading cheeses into the cart. And all with a smile. We learn from them at such heights when work is a reward. What us? Parishioner grandmothers call them “fireflies.”
Olga Timoshenko will complain later: her grandmothers spoil their boyfriends. Either they bring a pet chicken into the house or they get into the habit of handing over an envelope with money. “Old women live a long time,” he shares, “they work in retirement. I don’t accept it: “The boys get paid.” They sigh: “Don’t offend me.” But we have a good crop of tomatoes. “They accept it, as long as I don’t refuse to help them like “fireflies.” “Then I realized that my guys give in a way that makes people feel the need to share.”
Olga necessarily asks to enter the monastery’s chicken coop.
– Where does “little” Yura work? – Asked.
– Obedience is not your job. Obedience, like rain and snow, erases resentments,” corrects the “great” Yura Pshenichka, “my father says so.”
And he hurries to the bakery. You have to take out the garbage cans. From the painted tower-hut, “little” Yura Obraztsov waves his hand in an inviting manner. He immediately reports that the priest invented the mansion for the chickens and painted it himself. Yura comes here like in a fairy tale. “Once it was like in a boarding school,” Yura serves food to the red chickens, like the sun in the heat, “they brought chickens and they died on the way. And then they died.”
Suddenly he started making excuses. The chickens either did not survive the difficult journey or were too crowded in the mansion and half-dead they were taken somewhere. “They gave it to me,” Olga admits, “I’m a simple village girl, I cut off their heads before it was too late, so that the nuns, half fainting, clung to the wall. But where should I go? “Go? I need to feed the kids.”
But Yura stands firm.
“I don’t blame anyone,” he continues serving food, “I know they don’t care about me.” I joined people like me and I don’t care anymore.
Then the guy determined in his gut that blaming the world for his problems is the same as spitting against the wind in the steppe. So he and his comrades shoulder the responsibility as best they can. “Only they are followers,” Olga admits. “They were applying for pension cards at the bank. Someone distracted me a little and my two children were already signing papers for a loan. I was screaming. They don’t understand.” : “How can I refuse if I ask politely?”
Formula for Holy Madness
“Mayak” does the worst job of learning to refuse. So much so that Olga Timoshenko asked not to reveal the names of her two boyfriends. They are almost healthy. One has already received legal capacity and social housing. The other is about to become “like everyone else” and will have the right to choose: go to the normal world or stay in “Mayak”.
Photo: Documentary Film Center
“I will not name the cities so as not to provoke anger and accusations of ingratitude,” says Olga, “but the apartment we received is empty.” The good thing is that she is on the fourth floor and it is difficult for a sick person to even bring food up. I can’t call it an “apartment.” These are “apartments” in a former hostel, where part of the house is rented and the other is occupied by drinkers. We pay utilities, but we do not have the right to sell the apartment for five years. My dream is to sell it and buy a one-bedroom apartment next to ours.
Meanwhile, before Covid, his son Misha sang in the Trinity Cathedral of the Iversky Monastery. Now, when kids hear Renato’s arias from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera or Rigoletto from Verdi’s Rigoletto, with which bass-baritone Mikhail Timoshenko’s career began, they adopt a stance: “Ours?” The guys became opera connoisseurs after the film “Paris Opera” by Jean-Stéphane Bron. Misha has one of the main roles there. “Do you know why?” Yura Obraztsov asks proudly. “There in the cinema, Bryn Terfel himself, considered one of the best voices in the world, calls Misha a singer with whom he is in the same boat.”
Thus, Yura Obraztsov helped to understand the mystery of the formula of the “holy fool”, as Olga’s mother is called by her father. When three madnesses meet – a mother and her two children – and illuminate each other’s path, they multiply the mind. Olga thinks differently: “When Misha is getting better, Zhenya feels better.” The Mayak family also prays for Misha and her common dream. So that Mikhail Timoshenko sings at the Mariinsky Theater or the Bolshoi and his family attends his concert.
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Rising star of the opera stage
Mikhail Timoshenko, 30 years old, was born in the village of Kameikino, Orenburg region. In 2009, he began studying singing at the Mednogorsk music school. In 2015 he graduated from the Weimar Conservatory (Germany). Then, in 2017, he joined the Academy of Music “Del Opera national de Paris” in France. Winner of the Grand Prize of the María Callas International Competition in 2017 together with Elitsa Desseva (piano). He took first place in the Hugo Wolf competition, Stuttgart, Germany (2018), the Franz Schubert competition, Graz, Austria (2018), Wigmore Hall, London, United Kingdom (2019).
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