It is the 90th anniversary of the birth of the famous Soviet writer. Photo: Valentin Cheredintsev/TASS
Kir Bulychev wrote about himself: “I had no intention of being a writer and now I don’t want to be one. First I wanted to be an artist and then a paleontologist. I didn’t even receive an education I liked. I was going into geological exploration, but I went into translation. As long as there were only two C grades on the enrollment certificate: in trigonometry and in English…”
To analyze how he finally became a writer, Bulychev wrote something like an autobiography – a short book “How I Became a Science Fiction Writer.” But it will not be understood how a person who “does not want to be a writer” did not write a couple of stories, but simply a monstrous number of books. When Bulychev is mentioned, everyone instantly remembers Alisa Selezneva, “The Secret from the Third Planet” and “Guest from the Future”, but, in addition to the stories about the “girl from the Earth”, she wrote, or rather, tapped on a typewriter that he had been accustomed to since his youth: tens of thousands of pages. Cycles of stories about the cities of Velikiy Guslyar and Verevkin. Novels about Cora Orvat, a kind of adult Alice (Alice herself, according to Bulychev, should not have become an adult girl and deal with non-childish problems, including sexual ones). The “River Chronos” series about alternative versions of Soviet history, which he himself called his main work, and which remained unfinished, although it includes nine books. Cycles about the intergalactic police, about Doctor Pavlysh, about Andrei Bruce (it consists of only two books, and Bulychev considered the second, “The Witches’ Dungeon”, unfinished, but in 1989 it was quite successfully filmed by Yuri Moroz). Many stories and tales that do not belong to any cycle. In addition to a colossal amount of historical and popular science literature, from the biography of the Burmese politician Aung San, published in the ZhZL series, to collections such as “England. Gods and Heroes” and “Pirates. Corsairs. Raiders.” Plus many more translations. In addition to articles. In addition to scripts. In addition to poems…
“FATE TOOK ME BY THE HAND”
He was born in Moscow, in the Grauerman maternity hospital on Arbat (where “at that time all worthy citizens of Moscow were born”). The father was considered a mechanic, the mother a factory worker, although it was “difficult to find more false information”: in fact, the parents only pretended to be proletarians. Dad was from an impoverished noble family, my mother was the daughter of a colonel and a student at the Elizabethan Institute for Noble Maidens. They both managed to avoid repression and live fairly long lives only by some miracle (the father, about 30 years old, for example, worked as a prosecutor in Saratov, one day he accidentally found out that he was going to be arrested in the morning and, without waiting this, he rushed to Moscow; that is the only way and he was saved).
His son Igor Mozheiko (this is the writer’s real name) survived the war, the evacuation and a serious heart disease that almost took him to the grave. He learned to read late, at the age of eight, but then read books avidly. All his life he reread Alexander Green (“Running on the Waves” once a year), Louis Boussenard, Pierre Benois, Louis Jacolliot, Alexander Belyaev, Sergei Belyaev (of the two science fiction writers with the same name, he valued the most second ).
Of course, the reader is still not a writer, but fate “held by the hand” of Igor. Entering the translation department, he came across the story of Arthur C. Clarke “The Pacifist”, translated it into Russian with a friend and it was published in the magazine “Knowledge is Power” (and then, as it turned out by chance, It was also republished in a Chinese magazine under the names of the translators, Igor Mozheiko and Leonid Sedov). Then there was work in Burma (now the country is called Myanmar): Igor was a translator, and also served as a janitor during the construction of facilities “donated” by the USSR to Burma in exchange for rice supplies. In Rangoon he spent long hours in a store selling English magazines and novels, including science fiction (he brought home about a thousand books that were not available in the USSR). Then he wrote a lot about Burma, published in “Around the World”, where the first story appeared, “shameful”, “pasted together from pieces of official patriotism”…
“Around the World” had an appendix, the “Seeker” almanac, where fantasy and adventure prose was published. One day a drama occurred: the censors removed the translated story from the magazine and the illustration was put on the cover. And this cover had already been printed in a circulation of 300,000 copies. Heartbroken, they decided to have a drink, and the heated Mozheiko had an epiphany: he invited his colleagues to write a story that fit the image (“About him. On the cover there was a chair drawn on the bench chair. In the background, If I’m not mistaken, there is a red hill). As a result, the story (about how dinosaurs did not become extinct and were discovered in the Far East, only in a very reduced form) was written only by Mozheiko and was included in the issue. Under a pseudonym, because Igor feared that at the Institute of Oriental Studies, where he worked, they would extremely disapprove of the fact that an employee was dabbling in science fiction. The pseudonym was invented “in a minute”: Kir, in the name of his wife Kira, and Bulychev, his mother’s maiden name. “Maybe if you had given me more time, I would have created something more sophisticated. But there was no time.”
HE PREDICTED SMART WATCHES AND SPACE TOURISM
Bulychev was sure that not a single science fiction writer in history could predict the future. When asked to make forecasts, he responded irritably: “We can’t even predict the weather for the day after tomorrow!” He added: “When London 130 years ago was deciding what the city would be like in 100 years, they unanimously decided that it would drown up to the second floor in horse manure and die because there would be too many carriages. We cannot predict anything.” When they told him about the fulfilled prophecies of Jules Verne, he responded that he was “an intelligent man who read popular scientific literature. He knew the famous aeronaut Nodar very well, from him he received information and built the Robur ship the Conqueror. Everything was written, but everything was not yet built! But no one thinks of reading those scientific magazines that Jules Verne read…”
And yet, in Bulychev’s books (as well as in the books of his predecessor Alexander Belyaev) one can find many details of an imaginary future that has come true in our world. Belyaev, it is worth remembering, described in the 1920s and 1930s mobile phones, online video and movie viewing, video communications, artificial eye lenses and drones. And Bulychev, in the story “One Hundred Years Ahead,” describes “smart watches” like the Apple Watch (one character wears “a wide bracelet, but without pictures,” on which words and numbers suddenly flash: “Hour 10: 12:36 , t 15C It won’t rain”), tablets, cleaning robots, space tourism, unmanned urban transport, an aquarium in Moscow, kilometer-high buildings… In Saudi Arabia, the Jeddah skyscraper is currently being built Tower. built, which should be completed in 2028, is exactly 1,000 meters high. Unfortunately, the writer did not live to see all this.
But there are still many decades until 2082, when the action of Bulychev’s story takes place. Most likely, by then humanity will learn to make flying cars. If he survives alone.
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