95 years since the birth of a wonderful writer
Photo: TASS.
You can recognize a person by the way their face changes when they talk about the sea. The mere mention of the sea instantly reveals something deep, hidden and unbearably beautiful. This is the miracle that fills Viktor Konetsky’s stories: witty, lively, somehow very real. No explosive words, no pathos. On June 6, Viktor Viktorovich would have turned 95 years old.
Here is a quote from a random open book: “If the sea could sit in a chair with its feet on a steam radiator and read a book, as the women we love sometimes can, then I would lean down and kiss it.” Under water. hair on the nape of the neck, on the warm neck and said: “Read, read… This is me like this… Sit down…”
Amazing tenderness and simplicity of the prose, transparent as water.
However, for him, the sea was instead of a woman: Viktor Konetsky did not marry for a long time. Perhaps he did not want to take risks: when long journeys are made, it is difficult to expect eternal fidelity from those who wait on the coast. Only at the age of 56 Konetsky decided to get married. There were no children in the family.
His childhood took place during the war. He survived the first winter of the siege in Leningrad, then there was an evacuation. After the war, he and his brother entered the Leningrad Naval Preparatory School. So his last name was still Steinberg, but later he would adopt his mother’s last name: Lyubov Konetskaya. He will also start writing later, after leaving the reserves and working on the first small ship convoy ferry in Arctic history.
What did his contemporaries say about him? That he was categorical and persistent. Unfortunately, he drank a lot if he wasn’t on a flight. Between flights I tried to get away from alcohol with the help of a car: I bought a Volga and put it on my license. He made a lot of money: three films based on his scripts were very successful. By the way, it is still a pleasure to see them: “Thirty Three”, “The Path to the Pier”, “Striped Voyage”…
“The most difficult thing in life is to be able to truly want something,” Konetsky wrote. At the end of his stay on earth, without the sea, he could no longer love. He always saw himself as a sailor, not a writer. The North, the fleet, the ice floes were his habitat. Without them, his prose petered out. His path would always be the path away from the dock, not toward the dock.
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