Dementia crept to the soup and poured sugar

4 February is a day when we talk about the fight against cancer. But some societal diseases are no less deadly. Journalist Vladimir Solovyov (Glinsky) fought cancer for several months. And he battled another disease — indifference, poverty, and lack of rights as a «socially unprotected member of society», as he called journalists — for years. The system of the «House of Sorrow» squeezed him out, leaving him without means. But he remained a journalist to the end. He even kept a diary at the cancer center. His story is a reason to ask: which incurable diseases of our society are we truly fighting?

Almost 5 years ago, Vladimir Glinsky (Solovyov) stormed out of the House of Press building in Ufa in anger; on 24 August 2021, he resigned and never returned. No one knew then that he had only one year to live.

«As of Friday, I am completely free. I no longer work at the House of Sorrow (he deliberately distorted the name; in journalistic circles, the House of Press is often called that — Ed. note). I am extremely glad that I no longer have to participate in this preposterous circus with bureaucratic horses. Also, I can finally voice my position on the upcoming elections — I couldn»t care less which spider remains in the jar. I will no longer play these «exciting» games of «supposed elections»,« he wrote angrily in his electronic diary.

Glinsky is one of the most unjustly forgotten journalists of Bashkortostan in the 1990s and 2000s. A period when many representatives of the profession absorbed the full horror of the era and could not reflect it. It accumulated and detonated within them. Glinsky tried to publish his last book with the symbolic title «Man and the Bomb» but did not succeed.

«Damn, I wanted to howl»

Vladimir Solovyov died on 27 September 2022.

We will tell his story in reverse — from death to life.

On 25 August 2022, he writes from an oncology center ward:

«Holy crap. A room the size of a kitchen. A ward for five. Tube feeding — figure it out yourself. Chemotherapy? Want a pump — 2,000 rubles ($22 at current rates). Almost no internet. Outlets… Two outlets for the ward, can barely reach with a netbook. You have to get your own linen. Somehow I didn»t expect this. I got used to normal conditions over the last six months. They«ll start chemo today. Actually, they already are,» — this was his last post.

Before chemo, 24 August 2022: «Heading to chemotherapy. Confessed.»

Dramatically, he learned about his illness — stage 4 stomach cancer — in August, literally a couple of months before his death.

16 August 2022: «On the positive side… I haven»t taken hypertension meds for two and a half months. In fact, I don«t even have hypertension anymore. Quite the opposite. Even coffee doesn»t raise my blood pressure.«

Apparently, Glinsky went undiagnosed for a long time.

12 August 2022. «The last two months I»ve spent in hospitals. On intravenous feeding, esophageal obstruction. They thought it was achalasia (a neuromuscular esophageal disease — author«s note) stage 4. But from August 3, it became clear — cancer. Localized in the stomach. <...> Mood? Fighting. I found a worthy opponent. Everything becomes serious again.»

Ironically, six months before his own cancer was detected, he met a friend who also had cancer. Glinsky did not yet know about his own diagnosis; he expressed sympathy and even wanted to give him money.

17 December 2021. «Yesterday, when I was returning from the police station, I met a guy. A boxer, the same age as my older son. Pancreatic cancer. Doctors gave him three months. Damn, I wanted to howl from the understanding that I couldn»t help. We smoked, chatted. Well, we drank. We agreed to meet at Kashkadan on the ring. Just to dance. Everyone has already written him off anyway. Just to dance. Then I realized that my problems are not problems. Yes, he refused to take money from me. He said he wouldn«t be able to pay it back anyway.»

Glinsky was detained by police that day, 17 December 2021.

«It was a strange day. I went out to the store to buy some apples. Then at the exit the cops picked me up. Turns out someone who looks like me is committing robberies around the district. No, it»s all fine — they sorted it out and let me go. Everything was polite and within bounds. But now I«m curious myself what bastard looks like me and is prowling the area. But I lost the day. I only got home around midnight.»

Her Majesty Dementia

As a journalist and blogger, Glinsky wrote in the style of neo-sentimentalism. This is a focus on a person«s inner world, experiences, with added irony and black humor, culminating in catharsis of self-identification.

He spent the last year of his life in a friend«s apartment, caring for his mother, who suffered from dementia. It was a year of hypertrophied, existential loneliness… and poverty.

In his diary, he called the elderly woman «Dementia». It seemed he was describing not an illness but a distorted reality that consumed a person, leaving only a shell.

Even in the ward of his «cancer building», 11 August 2022, he remembered her with a shudder:

«I dreamed of that old woman with dementia, on whom I wasted the last year. I dreamed again how she acts crazy. She moves things, hides things, or on the contrary, pulls things out of bins. For some reason she drew on me at night… That»s not strange. What«s strange is something else. I no longer felt hatred for her — only pity and tenderness, as for a defenseless creature.»

The monologues about dementia became a shell through which he studied this world in detail with neo-sentimentalism. Probably no one has written about the lives of the elderly so frankly.

11 December 2021

«Dementia would be useful for partisans. Because no Gestapo would get anywhere. She remembers nothing. I just made borscht, fed her; two minutes later I ask: »How is the soup?« »I don«t know, I didn»t eat…« »Okay, would you like some soup?« »No, I already ate.«

Only alcoholism is worse than dementia, because it»s aggressive and unpredictable. Last night I«m reading an e-book… Suddenly in the silence: »What are you looking for?« Again: »What are you looking for?« »I«m not looking for anything, I»m reading…« »But you«re clicking something there.» «I»m reading.« »Then why are you yelling?!« In short, stop the bus, I»m getting off.«

24 October 2021

«When people advise me to step out of my comfort zone, I always ask them to at least show it to me. I wanted to finish editing a text, but dementia never sleeps. She discovered jars of jam, compote, and pickles under her bed for the hundredth time. She lined them up in the middle of her room and chases us, demanding we put them away.»

And yet, when Dementia gave him breaks, he found time for the joys of life.

27 October 2021

«Today I went to »Monetka« and saw something I hadn»t seen in a long time — green bananas. People started to reassure me: «Just hold onto them and they»ll ripen…«

I don»t need ripe ones at all. I«ll finally fry them Cuban-style. In the late 80s, my friend who served in Cuba once fried them for us (and only green ones were sold then). It turned out interesting. So today, if nothing extraordinary happens, I»ll try to recreate that recipe.«

But returning home, he encountered HER again.

18 September 2021

«Well, today at 4 a.m. we almost got blown up again. I smelled gas, ran to the kitchen — the gas was on, the gas detector wasn»t working because she had rearranged the burners again. And she went to bed. Should I install a lock on the kitchen? But then I«d have to get up in the middle of the night to feed her constantly: she eats a loaf of bread with soup overnight.»

15 September 2021

«Today I solved the biggest mystery of the month: why my soup goes sour within a day. I knew the culprit from the start. But I had many versions of what she does. First: she pours leftover soup into the common pot. Second: she reheats all the soup in the common pot. Third: she adds some crap to it (after I saw her pouring sugar into the soup, I wouldn»t be surprised).

And today I caught her red-handed. She had just eaten the borscht I«d made. I asked if she wanted more: »No! I ate!« And then I happen to walk past the kitchen and hear her moving the huge pot of borscht. I go in… She»s just slurping it with a spoon from the common pot. So that«s the answer… Now what? Should I put a lock on the fridge? Because as soon as I started explaining that she»s ruining the soup, that she should eat from a plate, she immediately went into defensive mode — can«t hear, can»t see, can«t understand. But I»m also fed up with pouring out almost full pots of soup on the second or third day after cooking…«

«Just to avoid getting into another mess»

Vladimir Solovyov lived out his days in poverty. After resigning from the «House of Press» in August 2021, Glinsky tried to earn money through private editing. He saw no other path besides journalism. He set low rates, but only managed about 8,000 rubles ($89 at current rates) per month. For comparison: the average salary in the country then was 51,000 rubles ($600 at current rates), and the per capita income was 35,000 rubles ($389 at current rates).

«A journalist today is one of the most socially unprotected members of our society, with low-paid work. We are like a guard who has been tired for a long time. And the only thought left is: »Just to avoid stepping in another pile of crap,«» he said back in 2018 in an interview with «Electrogazeta».

As it turns out, his own fate seemed to confirm this mindset.

On almost all of his pages, he posted pleas for money.

14 November 2021: «Folks, can anyone help? There»s no bread, milk, or eggs at home. I thought I earned some money, but they haven«t sent [the fee].»

11 December 2021: «My dissolution in the eyes of the state continues. No registration, no official job, I can»t log in to «Gosuslugi» (State Services)… Now I can«t enter the self-employed account. Either they don»t like my TIN, or my phone number. And so it«s been all my life. If anyone»s documents are supposed to get lost in the archive, it«s mine. It»s always been that way.«

A caustic resentment toward life seeped through his posts. He made jabs at the standard of living in Ufa compared to Moscow, and nostalgized about the Soviet Union:

«How often can you find wailing about the shortage of goods in the USSR. Yet back then I managed to eat Roquefort, buy squid by weight at the »Ocean« store, delicious sausages, red fish from the Far East, and caviar — red and black.

And now it»s supposedly abundance… Where is it all? I remember moving to a village near Ufa in 2009. A sizable one — 2,500 people. In the store I couldn«t find olive oil. Or regular butter — only spread. And no cheese — only artificial substitutes. I asked why. »Who would buy it?!« Well. And now even in a million-strong metropolis, to find these things you have to search for expensive chains.»

His critical publications about the standard of living increased after leaving the newspaper. Even when the Ufa blogosphere started discussing the new law on fakes, Glinsky couldn«t resist:

«As an experienced journalist, I can say: all our publications — municipal, regional, federal — are full of fakes, sometimes supplied by the administrations. Have you ever seen any official punished for lying in the press or on air? But private individuals, especially bloggers and internet journalists, are constantly cracked down on for it,» he wrote on 19 October 2021, outraged at the selectivity of justice.

So why do people need the media? He knew the answer.

«All human life consists of worries about daily bread, and the soul walks along the road of loneliness. It rushes from extreme to extreme. Modern man has a gaping hole where the soul should be, which he tries to fill with information trash. But it doesn»t work. And this feeling of one«s own incompleteness haunts him,» he said in the same 2018 interview.

He himself fled from the incompleteness of life, or from the life he had:

«When I wake up, I have problems figuring out where I am. I open my eyes and for a long time can»t understand where I am. I«ve moved too often,» he confessed in his diary.

Love could have saved him. But that didn«t work out either:

«There is a person who, to save me, needs only to say a few words. But that person will never say them, because they want to save themselves from me. And you call it the irony of fate,» he wrote shortly before his death.

Then he adds bitter conclusions, almost mystical understanding of why this happened:

«I know what this all came to me for. For betraying myself. It was in November 2019. I did something I had denied all my life as possible for me. By doing so, I not only insulted a loved one — most importantly, I betrayed myself. And since then, everything in me began to break. Not just my body — everything… Jobs and side gigs started disappearing, purpose vanished. And in its place came life side by side with an ever-drinking alcoholic friend and his mother, sliding into irreversible, vicious dementia. You can never betray yourself. On the other hand, the illness made me more tolerant of the world and people. I notice that what used to infuriate me now brings a smile. Only my own weakness infuriates me.»

«He pulled out the root of the soul, shook it in front of us — so that we could see, here it is, the soul, together with its roots»

But it wasn«t always like this. From 2004 to 2021, Vladimir Glinsky was a fairly well-known journalist at the then-popular »Ufimskiye Vedomosti« (Ufa Gazette). Many students knew him as a teacher, curator, and mentor.

At the time, few understood that he was a living cross-section of the modern journalist, gathering all the pain of the era into his flesh and bones.

He «crawled» into the thick of it — dumps, homeless shelters, dens. When homeless children lived at the railway station in the early 2000s, he was one of the first — no, perhaps the only one — who dared to write about it.

«It cost me a lot, but I managed to publish it,» he admitted.

«He pulled out the root of the soul, shook it in front of us — so that we could see, here it is, the soul, together with its roots. When I talk to the subjects of my publications, I always wonder, did I get to the root?» his students said about him.

Thanks to his training, which he conducted on Thursdays for students, a whole galaxy of journalists emerged who knew how to «extract» the root from a person«s soul.

In the «Vedomosti» editorial office, they «tolerated» him for his talent despite his waywardness. Once, he refused to write about a high-ranking official who answered his question about Beslan: «Children? I didn»t feel sorry for them.« Glinsky brought the voice recorder to the office, threw it on the table, and said he wouldn»t write it. He was reminded of the editorial assignment. «Then I»ll go on a bender,« he said curtly and left. Another journalist published the interview, heavily cutting the text.

Perhaps Glinsky brought this sense of justice from Moscow in 1993 — he was there, at the White House. The blood on the pavement became an indelible stain on all his future texts.

Then there was work at a youth newspaper in Ivanovo, even a stint as a deputy. His return to Ufa brought a modest salary at «Istoki» (Sources), eternal worries about daily bread.

Ufa was not and never became his home. Glinsky was originally from the now-nonexistent Tselinograd (now Astana). The flight to Russia from the chaos happened in the 1990s and brought only wandering.

In the capital of Bashkortostan, he studied at the journalism faculty. Then he worked as a milling machine operator at a factory, rehearsed at the «Yubileiny» Palace of Culture. He was searching for himself and could have become someone else, although he chose journalism as a child — after winning a poetry contest when he still lived in Kazakhstan. His poem was the best. That inspired him to write. So it worked out…

«Mom had a drink — and I climbed out to freedom»

Vladimir Solovyov was born on 8 August 1967. As he wrote himself shortly before his death, it happened like this:

«Exactly 55 years ago, in the glorious city of Tselinograd, an expected but unexpected event occurred. My dad was celebrating with his comrades the end of another commissioning project. Naturally, they were drinking. And then — my non-drinking mother suddenly wanted to knock back some vodka. She took a sip, and that»s when I climbed out to freedom.«