Nikolaeva Olesya: the writer’s work and biography

How did it all begin?

The biography of Olesya Nikolaeva, like each of us, begins with her own birth. The future writer saw the world in 1955. It was a beautiful summer day. On June 6, the air in Moscow was warm, and there was a sweet smell of something mysterious. This day gave the world Olesya Alexandrovna.

She spent her childhood in Moscow. Like everyone else, Olesya Nikolaeva went to school, entered and graduated from college. Yes, not just any one, but the same one where he now teaches.

By the way, a couple of interesting facts about the writer:

• She began writing poetry at the age of seven. Prose - at the age of fifteen.
• Born into the family of a front-line writer.
• Real name at birth - Olga. Olesya is a creative pseudonym.

Notes

1. [dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc3p/213010 NIKOLAEVA Olesya]
2. ↑ 12
   [litinstitut.ru/node/361/ Nikolaeva Olesya Aleksandrovna | Literary Institute named after A.M. Gorky]
3. ↑ 1234
   [magazines.russ.ru/authors/n/onikolaeva/ Magazine room | Olesya Nikolaeva]
4. laidinen.ru/women.php?part=2077&letter=Н&code=2080
5. ↑ 12
   [www.filgrad.ru/texts/nikolaeva5.htm Olesya NIKOLAEVA in Filippov-Grad]
6. [dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/es/39605/Nikolaeva Nikolaeva Olesya]
7. [www.katolik.ru/mir/1016-archive/78039-st10109.html Laureate of the national “Poet” award - poetess and religious publicist Olesya Nikolaeva]
8. [www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/104990.html Famous Orthodox writer Olesya Nikolaeva became a laureate of the Russian National Poet Prize / News / Patriarchia.ru]
9. www.eparhia-saratov.ru/txts/journal/articles/03person/15.html
10. [ruskline.ru/monitoring_smi/2005/03/04/roman_olesi_nikolaevoj_mene_tekel_fares_br_slovo_o_lyubvi_v_izmenyayuwemsya_mire/ Olesya Nikolaeva’s novel “Mene, tekel, fares”: a word about love in a changing world]
11. [www.pravoslavie.ru/sm/6088.htm Olesya Nikolaeva. Kiss of Judas / Orthodoxy. Ru]
12. [www.taday.ru/text/208591.html With a through rhyme... - Tatiana Day]
13. [www.ahm.ru/page_olesya_nikolaeva.html Publishing house "Art House Media"]
14. [www.penrussia.org/new/topic/pencenterru/page/14 PEN-Russia. PEN Russia]
15. [prochtenie.ru/passage/26947 Olesya Nikolaeva. Hero | Reading]
16. [www.taday.ru/text/1619559.html Olesya Nikolaeva: All good literature, in essence, is Orthodox - Tatyana’s Day]
17. [www.russianorthodoxchurch.ws/synod/2012/20121010_washingtondc.html Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia - Official Page]
18. [odinnadz.blogspot.ru/2012/04/blog-post_16.html Ordinary miracles of Olesya Nikolaeva: virtual exhibition | Eleventh]

Creative activity

The largest section in the biography of Olesya Nikolaeva is devoted to creativity. As we said above, the girl began writing at the age of seven. And its first publication was published in 1972. The very first collection of poems was published in 1980. It was called "Garden of Miracles." Eight years later, Olesya Alexandrovna became a member of the Writers' Union. At the same time, she taught at the university.

Ten years later, in 1998, Olesya Nikolaeva became the head of the journalism department and gave a course of lectures on Orthodoxy in creativity. Few people know, but this woman broadcast on the Spas channel in the early 2000s.

One of her most interesting books dedicated to Orthodoxy is “Heavenly Fire.” This is a series of stories in which God's providence in human destinies is clearly visible. In one of these stories, Olesya Alexandrovna talks about a miracle that happened specifically to her. And this cannot be ignored.

Autobiography (Olesya Nikolaeva)

I was born on Pushkin’s birthday, June 6, 1955, into a family of Moscow writers. My name - Olesya - has a literary origin: at that time, the first collection of works by Kuprin in the history of Soviet power was published, one of the stories of which was called “Olesya”.

At first, before school, I was raised by two Don Cossack women - my maternal grandmothers, who led a very ascetic lifestyle.

When I was 7 years old, my dad took me with him on a business trip to Leningrad. There, in the Hermitage and in St. Isaac's Cathedral, I learned about Jesus Christ and, among the paintings of Italian and Spanish painters, I believed in Him as God who had come in the flesh.

Around the same time, I realized that I was a poet, although I had not yet written poetry, but I was composing historical novels from the life of the English aristocracy of the 17th century. What I liked most was naming the characters: Arthur, Charles, Julia, Olivia, Arabella. But one friend told me in secret that she writes poetry, and I experienced a terrible shock from the fatal mistake of life, because it was me, it was me, and not she SHOULD have written them!..

My life was going very well: I studied at the best English school, a “French girl” came to my house and taught me French grammar. I also had a music teacher - an old Dutch woman, Frederika Ludvigovna, with purple hair, who had settled in Russia since time immemorial. We lived in a fashionable house on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, which was brand new at that time. Many guests came to the parents, including famous poets and writers in Russia - Bulat Okudzhava, Semyon Kirsanov, Evgeny Yevtushenko, David Samoilov, Yuri Levitansky, and the very young Andrei Bitov, Vasily Aksenov, Anatoly Gladilin. And many, many more...

Some animals always lived in my parents' house - dogs, cats, guinea pigs, squirrels and even a boa constrictor and a monkey, not to mention fish and birds.

At the age of sixteen, I met a certain young man in the clinic, about whom a secret voice told me that he would be my husband. I then looked for him for three years and, having found him, married him. Our children's names are Alexandra, Nikolai and Anastasia. And my husband is Vladimir Vigilyansky.

After school, I entered the Literary Institute, where I studied in a poetry seminar with Evgeniy Vinokurov.

For the first twelve years of our lives, my husband and I were very poor, one might even say we were beggars: he was not hired because not only was he not a member of the Communist Party, but he had never even been a Komsomol member, and his specialty was “literary worker, critic, art critic” must have had an ideological connotation in those years. I was hardly published at all. And in general, the KGB looked after us and sometimes even openly “followed” us through the eyes of its employees, because we were friends with foreign correspondents, and with the Proffers, and with the “metropolitan people” who were then in disgrace.

Luckily, Georgia warmed me up, and I regularly published my poems and translations of Georgian poets there, which were later included in my book “The Fig Tree,” published by the Tbilisi publishing house “Merani”.

In the eighties, my husband and I ended up in Rakitnoye - the Hermitage of the Great Elder Fr. Seraphim Tyapochkin - a seer and miracle worker, and this changed our lives: we were baptized, got married, began going to church, traveling to monasteries, where we made many friends among monks and clergy, who greatly helped us receive a church education.

Echoes of this new plot of my life can be heard in the novel “Augustine” and the stories “Disabled Childhood” and “Kuks from the Family of Seraphims.” In addition, I dare say, church liturgical poetry had a strong influence on the poetics of my poems and essays (“Word and Silence”, “Apology of Man”, etc.)

Perestroika began, and I was accepted into the Writers' Union, where they had not wanted to admit me for seven years, as a “writer's daughter,” and my poems began to be widely published. I started publishing books—poems, prose, essays. I was invited to Paris and Grenoble for a celebration of Russian poetry, to Italy for a festival of poets, to New York for a conference of women writers, to Geneva to give a series of lectures, etc.

In 1989, I became a teacher at the Literary Institute, where for two years I gave a course of lectures on the history of Russian religious thought and where to this day I teach a seminar on literary craftsmanship.

At the end of the eighties, I learned ancient Greek, which I even taught to the monks of the Pskov-Pechersk Monastery, where I often went in those years.

In 1992 I was accepted into the Russian Pen.

In 1993, I made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem - to the Holy Sepulcher.

Soon my husband, a writer and journalist, was ordained a priest, and I was invited to work at the Novodevichy Convent as a driver for its abbess, Abbess Seraphima. True, my monastic chauffeur career soon ended, becoming only an exotic episode in my life. It is described in the essay “Oxymoron, or Holiness as a category of Freedom” (LG) and in the short story “Man in the Interior” (magazine “Russia”)

From everything described, it is obvious that the Lord was merciful to me and kept me on my paths, braiding three lines, three internal plots of my life into a single strand. These lines are: God-seeking, love and creativity.

Glory to the Lord forever and ever. Amen.

nikolaeva.poet-premium.ru

Personal miracle

By the age of 25, Olesya Nikolaeva was a happily married woman and mother of two children. At the age of 28, she became pregnant with her third child. One winter, she and her children were going to the All-Night Vigil service. Before leaving the house we decided to drink tea. The woman began to light the stove, and a piece of burning sulfur from the match flew straight into her eye. A huge thorn immediately formed.

Here Olesya Aleksandrovna is sitting at home with her young children, it’s bitterly cold outside. And at this time the phone rings. Monk Leonid, a great friend of the family, called. He was wretched from his mother’s womb: in appearance he looked like a woman, but in reality he was a man.

Olesya Nikolaeva does not know what to do. I asked Father Leonid for prayer help. He advised me to put olive oil in my eye, but not to go to the hospital alone. The woman obeyed, and the next morning her husband returned from the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. And he immediately took me to the hospital. But the doctor looked at the couple as if they were crazy. Nothing was found in Olesya Alexandrovna’s eye.

Two weeks later, a new disaster happened. Olesya fell ill with purulent bronchitis. She is due to give birth in a month, and because of this they won’t take her to the hospital. But they don’t take me to the maternity hospital because of bronchitis. In general, the woman realized that her end was coming. It’s scary: dying at 28 years old, being pregnant and leaving a husband with two small children.

When Olesya Aleksandrovna began to feel completely out of breath, the ambulance took her to the hospital. And then the child decided that it was time for him to be born. At that time, when Olesya Nikolaeva was in labor pains, her husband kept calling monk Leonid with requests for prayerful help. The poor monk prayed for almost two days for the health of the woman in labor. Begged. Olesya gave birth to a healthy girl, named Anastasia. And a year after Nastya’s birth, father Leonid died.

Such miracles happen in life sometimes.

Let's summarize

We talked about the Orthodox author Olesa Nikolaeva (her photo is in the article). Let's highlight the main aspects:

• The first collection of poems was published in 1980.
• Olesya Aleksandrovna is a member of the Writers' Union and a teacher at the Literary Institute.
• Her works are a reflection of human relationships with God, life in Christ, so to speak.
• Married, has three children.

That's all we wanted to tell you about Olesa Nikolaeva. Read her books, they are unlikely to leave their readers indifferent.

Recognition and awards

• Medal of the City of Grenoble (France, 1990)
• Alfred Toepfer Pushkin Prize-Scholarship (1998)
• Boris Pasternak Prize (2002)
• “For the best prose of the year” by the magazine “Znamya” (2003)
• “Antologia” - “for the highest achievements of modern Russian poetry” (2004)
• Diploma "Moscow Account" (2004)
• Russian National Prize "Poet" (2006)
• “Nestor the Chronicler” Award for the book “It’s No Thing” (2008)
• “Best poetry book of the year” (XXII MIBF, 2009)
• “Best Book of the Year” (RSL, 2009)
• Prize from the magazine “New World” “For the best poetry selection of the year” (2010)
• Order of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Princess Olga for current educational activities (2010)
• “Radiant Angel” Film Festival Award “For Best Feature Film Script” (2010)
• Order of Cultural Heritage of the International Federation of Russian-Speaking Writers (2011)
• Patriarchal Literary Prize (2012)