Michael Dovzhenko

Who didn’t write poems being 19?! I wasn’t an exception. Today I don’t write poems anymore. There’s a special thing about poetry: either you have the gift or you don’t. And you can’t force yourself to create something good. After all I believe that good poems can come through unhappy love affair. And the unhappier it is, the better the poems are. Taking into consideration the fact that my pieces can be hardly called masterpieces I have had almost no unrequited feelings.

I always fall in love and like the thing! The state of constant being in love has encouraged me to do some great deeds. Nowadays I get these emotions from my wife and my son. I mean there are some certain art incentives at every other stage.

I’ve got used to surprises. You know, one can not set long-term plans in the sphere I am involved into? to say nothing about planning in our country. You can wake up in the morning and find out that you’ve got no more work to do and get heavily involved into a new project just the very same evening. Isn’t it a surprise? (laughing).

Now I am 32, and whom am I going to be when 60? I happen to speculate on the thing, but what is the good of it? “Blessed is he who in youth stays young, Who only ripens when he's ready!” I think we’d better not guess at the future. Let the life take its own course.

I dreamt to be a detective when a boy. I read much of Conan Doyle when I was eight. These were times when there could hardly be anything more wonderful than becoming a detective.

Well, speaking about literature characters, I’ve always liked the fool of Henry the Third, Chicot. I wanted to be much like him when at school. He was the most quick-witted and cunning. He seemed to always be in the shadow but ruled the situation at the same time.

There are people who have stage fright. I am the one who feels high when on stage. It’s a great feeling when you make jokes on the stage and some several hundreds of people burst into laughing simultaneously.

It’s great if I am popular, at the same time it’s absolutely ok with me if I am not. What is really important is the possibility to leave something behind or to create something new. And that will be just terrific if a great deal of people will get to know about the thing. Provided your projects bring fortunes, nobody will be stupid enough to refuse the thing.

My wife cooks better than any qualified cook! It makes me stay at home another time. Any restaurant is sure to be inferior to her skills. That’s why we often invite our friends to our place to drink some wine and have dinner in a family circle. I guess that is also a kind of age-specific.

There’s no use having fear or not having fear for something that will obviously happen. I guess people would be even more frightened if they knew what would happen to them in the end. One of my friends’ illness was wrongly diagnosed, they told him that he had some two months left. What does a man feel under such circumstances? I guess that must be pretty dull. I mean there’s something soothing about uncertainty.

The degree of freedom is inversely as the man’s age. The older he is, the less free he becomes. A 70 year old can hardly dance rock-n-roll as energetically as a 20 year old can, or let’s say drink to excess and be sound next morning. I mean it’s so important to try all the things you will never be able to try at a high age.

We all have some creature inside that shows up at a critical moment. These moments serve as a kind of PH paper with the help of which you can see the real inside of the individual.