The writer Yuri Vasilievich Bondarev.
Photo: TASS photo chronicle.
“THE DIAMOND SHINE OF A SIMPLE WORD”
Yuri Bondarev was one of the best Russian writers of the 20th century. Today it will seem like a rather bold statement to many, but it is enough to reread “Hot Snow” or “Silence” to remember how extraordinary the author of it was. And in the USSR, where dozens of excellent books about the war were written, Bondarev had few competitors.
He knew war very well. He emerged as a cadet from infantry school in 1942, an eighteen-year-old who had just finished tenth grade. At Stalingrad he soon became commander of a mortar crew and then of an artillery battery. He managed to survive the meat grinder of the most terrible battle of the 20th century. He suffered frostbite, shock and was injured several times. “We went through all the circles of hell, full of hope, and we felt like people defending their home, their family and their loved ones. We seemed like very adult people who could no longer be surprised by anything. And at the same time, my companions, who returned after the war and were not afraid of anything, were afraid to kiss a girl… I think it was a miracle that I survived the war. Death was always there. One day a projectile fell in front of me and then I heard: “Lord, save and preserve!” And it did not explode,” said Yuri Vasilyevich in an interview with the writer Sergei Shargunov, which was his last.
He thought about becoming a writer as a child: he called his first story his school essay “How I Spent the Summer”; the teacher read it aloud and then in every possible way encouraged the student’s literary inclinations. (Only later did I have to forget about writing for a long time. “During the war, I did not think about literature,” Bondarev said in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda in 1972, “only occasionally, when in the liberated cities I came across disheveled, sometimes burned, covered in dust among the ruins of the houses in the book, I remembered that in life there is not only war”). When the fighting ended, he composed stories and also poems in which, in his own words, he imitated Yesenin, Blok and Tvardovsky. At the same time, he “had an irresistible desire to become a driver”, and when he overcame this temptation, he thought about entering VGIK. But a friend who read several pages of his prose suggested he go to the Literary Institute.
Yuri Bondarev was one of the best Russian writers of the 20th century.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
A rather funny story happened there: “I come, the secretary is sitting, a rather pretty young woman. “Show me what you write: poetry, prose?” – “Both.” I read: “Aha, so, so, yes… By patronymic Vasilyevich? Yuri Vasilyevich, the poems are not successful. There’s a trash can there, break the pile and throw it away. Are these stories? I read it. “You can go. They will call you.” I called two days later: “Congratulations. I told your stories to Paustovsky and he told me: accept without exams.
To 21-year-old Yuri, writers then seemed like magicians capable of creating a world “more real than real”, and Konstantin Paustovsky, in whose seminary he studied, was just one of them. He was grateful to him all his life and recalled: “Paustovsky drew impeccably pure water from his wells; Freshness emanated from her. His crystalline words shine and shine like drops on the sunlit leaves. And his books are filled with a transparent and fragrant air… He revealed to me the grace, the diamond brilliance of the simplest word.”
This was written in 1957, when the first of Bondarev’s most famous books, “The Battalions Call for Fire,” was published. At that time, he was already a member of the Writers’ Union (where he was accepted at the age of 27, after the first published stories of his), but it was “Battalions” that attracted the attention of the reading public. They talked about crossing the Dnieper in 1943, an operation in which Bondarev personally participated. Already in the 80s, he recalled: “The stories “The battalions ask for fire” and “The last rescues” were born, I would say, from living people, from those I met in the war, with whom I walked the roads. from the steppes of Stalingrad, Ukraine and Poland, shouldered weapons, pulled them out of the autumn mud, shot, stood in front of direct fire, slept, as soldiers say, in the same pot, ate tomatoes that smelled burnt and The Germans grew fat and shared the last of the tobacco for a bun at the end of the tank attack.
One hundred years have passed since the birth of the outstanding Soviet writer
Photo: TASS photo chronicle.
Later, Bondarev used fragments of the story “The Battalions Call for Fire” when he wrote the script for “Liberation”, the saga of Yuri Ozerov, one of the most important projects in the history of cinema. In that epic, Stalin appeared on the Soviet screen for the first time in many years. Some accused Bondarev of resurrecting the leader on the screen (it was around then that the “Stalinist” label began to stick to him). Although in reality this line was followed by Bondarev’s co-author, former Pravda special correspondent Oscar Kurganov. Bondarev’s own father was arrested “for defamation” in 1949, after having spent several years in the camps and returning from there with tuberculosis. And certainly no one will call Bondarev’s “Silence” a “Stalinist” novel.
“I COULD NOT KEEP SILENCE WHEN THE COUNTRY WAS IN TROUBLE”
In Soviet times, Bondarev received an incredible number of awards: from the Order of the Badge of Honor to the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, from the title of Hero of Socialist Labor to Lenin and various State Prizes. But at the end of his life, first of all, he was not proud of them, but, for example, of the fact that Marshal Zhukov, with whom he communicated while working on “Liberation”, did not reproach the authors of the script the inaccuracy of it. And the fact that he, along with other cultural figures, managed to thwart a project to divert Siberian rivers, which seemed like an “abuse of nature.” And because “I couldn’t keep silent when the country got into trouble”, that is, in the late 80s and 90s.
He asked himself: “Can our restructuring be compared to a plane that took off without knowing if there was a landing spot at its destination?” In July 1991 he signed the appeal “Word to the People” (“The Homeland, our country, the great state, which was given to us for its preservation by history, nature, the glorious ancestors, is dying, breaking down, sinking into the darkness and oblivion…” – this was later called “Manifesto of the State Emergency Committee”). In 1994, when Yeltsin tried to award him the Order of Friendship of Peoples, he responded to the president with a telegram: “Today this will no longer help the good harmony and friendship of the peoples of our great country.” He said Volgograd should be renamed Stalingrad; again, not because he was somehow affectionate towards Stalin, but because this toponym is “a symbol in its exact verbal expression”, and it is strange that it is “carefully preserved by the French.” , not you and me” (in Paris there is the Stalingrad Battle Square and the Stalingrad metro station).
It was probably possible to argue with him, but it happened that Bondarev, without entering into discussion with him, was practically erased from literature: his last novels went unnoticed by the general public. In any case, his early works will forever remain classics. “It often seems to me that I have already written a great novel about the war and the post-war period, about my generation, and that in it I have expressed everything I know and feel. But it only seems, and apparently, because I constantly think about the future with some kind of joyful pain, I often dream of pages, scenes, episodes that are already written: is it not this unwritten novel that constantly makes me work? ? -he said at the end of the 60s. Yes, this book was written by him during his life; It was simply published under different names and on different covers.
