My name is Vladimir Dzekh. Dzekh is not a nickname it’s my real surname. As a child, I was shy of my surname, but one day I started to proud it.
I was born in Chukotka, moved to Kurgan, then to Yekaterinburg, then to Belgrade and now I live in the small town of Almere near Amsterdam. I haven’t finished higher education and I have been a bus assembler on the KAVZ conveyor, a radioman, a salesman, a communication lines fitter, a theater actor, a promoter, a professional photo lab printer, a photographer in a model agency, a night watchman, a printing designer, a web designer , self-employed entrepreneur, sculpture welder and restorer, product designer, capoeira coach, artistic director of a small drum band, and manager of small product team. I talk about all this here.
I’m 50 now and I hope this is just the beginning.
I try to lead a healthy lifestyle: I eat polyunsaturated fatty acids, wear a hat and train my body.
Texts
This site contents a slightly unusual personal blog and other texts written in different years since 1998. Not all of them have been translated into the English, but you can find some.
The blog starts from the main page and it is presented as a regular diary or book. It starts from “The beginning”, and you find fresh entries in the end — I want new visitors read it in usual way, like a book from beginning to end. This is such an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) of the book. Along with writing new posts, I constantly rewrite, polish already published ones and translate them to English.
The entries in this blog appear very late in relation to the events described. This delay is more than 30 years, but it helps to talk about what was really important, what influenced the future course of life, what’s left of what happened.
You can be notified about new articles and other important events from my life by subscribing to a special channel in Telegram.
I value your feedback, and any thoughts on what you have read or seen from here. Fell free to write a line to my in Telegram.
Thanks
Many thanks to the editor Masha Skobeleva, who have proofread all the articles on this site before I published them. Subscribe to her channel about editing «Кавычки-ёлочки» (of course in Russian).
Thanks to Masha Kontorovich for her mentorship. I began to better understand the dramaturgy, images and language of the characters. I wrote a couple of plays on her course “24 hours with a playwright” at the Modern drama center.
Thanks to Anya Platonova, by whom I started writing this blog. I told her stories from childhood, but her interest inspired me to start writing it.
Thanks to Tina, Sveta, Zhenya, Asya and everyone who inspires me to “write more” with their support, feedback and kind words.
Rules of Life
Almost unchanged since 2008.
The strength lie in doubt, brother. *
Creativity, like everything happens in our lives, is the result of countless coincidences coming together. Within this randomness, our brain is always trying to find rhythm, rhyme, or meaning. We enjoy it when it succeeds—but only when it’s not too easy and not too difficult.
The world is endlessly diverse. To cope with it, our brain constantly generalizes: it finds similarities even between distant situations and overlooks details that could completely change our perspective—if only we paid enough attention. As we grow older, we become almost blind to anything new that doesn’t fit our worldview. We simply stop noticing that something remarkable and beautiful is happening right next to us. And it always is. For me, it’s important to hold on to a “tourist’s mindset”—or a childlike way of seeing the world—throughout life.
I enjoy watching children. Everything felt different when we were young. We would be much happier if we could see the world the way we did back then: new, mysterious, and infinite.
The hardest thing is expressing a deep idea in a simple, concise way. More often, the opposite happens: a precise and meaningful thought hides behind layers of necessary words that provide context and examples. But the most fascinating, beautiful, and challenging thing is connecting two simple images in a way that reveals entirely new depths of meaning. To take an ordinary phrase and place it in a new context, give it a different tone, or put it in someone else’s mouth.
Meaning is nothing more than connections. In any dictionary, one word is defined through others. Words cannot exist on their own, nor can ideas, thoughts, or people. A man needs a man.
Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins—these are the four horsemen of the apocalypse that will save the world. Not beauty, or whatever you believe in.
I am a non-religious and apolitical introvert.
I love the absurd.
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* This phrase is a response to a question posed by a character in Aleksei Balabanov film “Brother 2”: “Where does strength lie, brother?”