Green is a gift of life. The love story of alexander and nina green. Wanderings and revolutionary activities
The life of Alexander Green
The writer Green - Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky - died in July 1932 in the Old Crimea - a small town overgrown with centuries-old walnut trees.
Grim had a hard life. Everything about her, as if on purpose, worked out so as to make Green out of a criminal or an evil philistine. It was incomprehensible how this sullen man, without staining, carried through the painful existence the gift of a powerful imagination, purity of feelings and a shy smile.
Green's biography is a ruthless sentence to the pre-revolutionary system of human relations. Old Russia rewarded Green cruelly - she took away from him the love of reality since childhood. The environment was terrible, life was unbearable. She looked like wild lynching. Green survived, but the distrust of reality remained with him for life. He always tried to get away from her, believing that it is better to live in elusive dreams than "rubbish and rubbish" every day.
Green began to write and created in his books a world of cheerful and courageous people, a beautiful land full of fragrant thickets and the sun - a land that is not mapped, and amazing events that dizzy like a sip of wine.
“I have always noticed,” writes Maxim Gorky in the book “My Universities”, “that people like interesting stories only because they allow them to forget for an hour the hard, but familiar life. "
These words refer entirely to Green.
Russian life was limited for him by the philistine Vyatka, a dirty craft school, lodging houses, backbreaking work, prison and chronic hunger. But somewhere beyond the gray horizon, countries made of light, sea winds and flowering grasses sparkled. There lived people brown from the sun - gold diggers, hunters, artists, cheerful tramps, selfless women, cheerful and gentle as children, but above all - sailors.
To live without the belief that such countries flourish and rustle somewhere on the ocean islands was too difficult for Green, sometimes unbearable.
The revolution has come. She was shaken by many things that oppressed Green: the bestial structure of past human relations, exploitation, split-off - everything that made Green flee from life into the realm of dreams and books.
Green was sincerely rejoicing at her arrival, but the wonderful perspectives of the new future brought about by the revolution were still dimly visible, and Green belonged to people suffering from eternal impatience.
The revolution did not come in a festive dress, but came as a dusty fighter, as a surgeon. She plowed thousands of years of musty life.
The bright future seemed to Green very distant, and he wanted to feel it now, immediately. He wanted to breathe clean air future cities, noisy with foliage and children's laughter, enter the homes of people of the future, participate with them in tempting expeditions, live a meaningful and fun life next to them.
Reality could not give this to Green at once. Only imagination could transfer him to the desired environment, to the circle of the most extraordinary events and people.
This eternal, almost childish impatience, the desire to immediately see the end result of great events, the consciousness that it is still a long way off, that the restructuring of life is a long-term business, all of this annoyed Green.
Previously, he was intolerant in his denial of reality, now he was intolerant in his exactingness towards people who created a new society. He did not notice the rapid course of events and thought that they were going unbearably slowly.
If the socialist system blossomed, like in a fairy tale, overnight, then Green would be delighted. But he did not know how to wait and did not want to. The anticipation bored him and destroyed the poetic structure of his feelings.
Perhaps this was the reason for Green's aloofness from time, which is obscure to us.
Green died on the doorstep socialist societywithout knowing what time he dies. He died too early.
Death found him at the very beginning of a mental breakdown. Green began to listen and look closely at reality. If not for death, then perhaps he would have entered the ranks of our literature as one of the most original writers, organically merging realism with a free and bold imagination.
Green's father, a participant in the Polish uprising of 1863, was exiled to Vyatka, worked there as an accountant in a hospital, drank himself to death and died in poverty.
Son Alexander - a future writer - grew up as a dreamy, impatient and absent-minded boy. He was carried away by a lot of things, but did not bring anything to the end. He studied poorly, but avidly read Mayne-Reed, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard and Jacolliot.
“The words Orinoco, Mississippi, Sumatra sounded like music to me,” Green said later about this time.
It is difficult for today's youth to understand how irresistibly these writers acted on children who grew up in the former Russian wilderness.
“To understand this,” says Green in his autobiography, “you need to know the provincial life of that time, the life of a remote city. This atmosphere of tense suspiciousness, false pride and shame is best conveyed by Chekhov's story My Life. When I read this story, I kind of completely read about Vyatka. "
From the age of eight, Green began to think hard about travel. He kept his thirst for travel until his death. Every journey, even the most insignificant, caused him deep excitement.
Green from an early age possessed a very accurate imagination. When he became a writer, he imagined those nonexistent countries where the action of his stories took place, not as foggy landscapes, but as well-studied, hundreds of times traveled places.
He could draw detailed map of these places, he could mark every turn of the road and the nature of the vegetation, every bend of the river and the location of houses, he could finally list all the ships standing in non-existent harbors, with all their maritime characteristics and the qualities of a carefree and cheerful ship crew.
Here is an example of such a precise non-existent landscape. In Colony Lanfier, Greene writes:
“In the north, a motionless green herd darkened the forest, skirting to the horizon a chain of chalk rocks, dotted with crevices and spots of thin shrubs.
In the east, beyond the lake, there was a white thread of the road leading out of town. In some places, trees stuck out along the edges of it, which seemed tiny, like shoots of lettuce.
To the west, encircling a plain dug by ravines and hills, stretched the blue expanse of the ocean, sparkling with white sparks.
And to the south, from the center of a sloping funnel, where houses and farms were full of luscious greenery, stretched oblique quadrangles of plantations and plowed fields of the Lanfier colony.
From an early age, Green was tired of a bleak existence.
The boy's houses were constantly beaten, even the sick, exhausted homework the mother, with some strange pleasure, teased her son with a song:
And in captivity
Involuntarily,
Grow like a dog!
“I was tormented by hearing this,” Green said, “because the song referred to me, predicting my future.”
With great difficulty, the father sent Green to a real school.
Green was expelled from school for innocent poetry about his class teacher.
The father severely beat him, and then for several days he knocked the thresholds of the school director, humiliated himself, went to the governor, asked that his son not be expelled, but nothing helped.
Father tried to get Green into a gymnasium, but he was not accepted there. The city has already given the little boy an unwritten "wolf ticket". I had to send Green to the city school.
The mother is dead. Green's father soon married the psalmist's widow. The stepmother had a child.
Life went on as before without any events, in the cramped quarters of a squalid apartment, among dirty diapers and wild quarrels. At the school, brutal fights flourished, and the sour smell of ink firmly eaten into the skin, hair, and worn student blouses.
The boy had to re-whitewash for a few kopecks the estimates of the city hospital, bind books, glue paper lanterns for illumination on the day of Nicholas II's “accession to the throne,” and rewrite roles for the actors of the provincial theater.
Green was one of the people who did not know how to get comfortable in life. In misfortune, he was lost, hid from people, was ashamed of his poverty. Rich imagination instantly cheated on him at the first encounter with difficult reality.
Already in adulthood, in order to get away from poverty, Green came up with the idea of \u200b\u200bgluing boxes from plywood and selling them on the market. It was in the Old Crimea, where with great difficulty it would have been possible to sell one or two boxes. Just as helpless was Green's attempt to get rid of hunger. Green made an onion, went with it to the outskirts of the Old Crimea and shot at birds, hoping to kill at least one and eat fresh meat. But of course nothing came of it.
Like all losers, Green always hoped for a chance, for unexpected happiness.
All of Green's stories are full of dreams of a “dazzling event” and joy, but most of all - his story “Scarlet Sails”. It is characteristic that Green pondered and began to write this captivating and fabulous book in Petrograd in 1920, when after a rash he wandered around the icy city and looked every night for a new overnight stay with random, half-familiar people.
"Scarlet Sails" is a poem that affirms the strength of the human spirit, shone through, like the morning sun, with love for spiritual youth and the belief that a person, in a fit of happiness, is able to perform miracles with his own hands.
Sadly and monotonously, Vyatka life dragged on, until in the spring of 1895 Green saw a cabman on the pier and on him two navigational students in a white sailor uniform.
“I stopped,” Green writes about this case, “and looked as if spellbound at the guests from a wonderful, mysterious world for me. I was not jealous. I felt delight and longing. "
Since then, the dreams of naval service, of the "picturesque work of seafaring" took possession of Green with special force. He started going to Odessa.
The Green family was a burden. His father got him five rubles for the journey and hastily said goodbye to his gloomy son, who had never experienced either his father's affection or love.
Green took with him watercolors - he was sure that he would paint with them somewhere in India, on the banks of the Ganges, - took the beggarly belongings and in a state of complete confusion and exultation left Vyatka.
“For a long time I saw in the crowd on the dock,” says Green about this departure, “the confused gray-bearded face of my father. And I dreamed of the sea covered with sails. "
In Odessa, Green's first meeting with the sea took place - the sea that then flooded the pages of his stories with dazzling light.
Many books have been written about the sea. A whole galaxy of writers and researchers tried to convey an extraordinary sixth sensation, which can be called the "feeling of the sea." All of them perceived the sea in different ways, but none of these writers have such festive seas as Green's, noisy and shimmer on the pages.
Green loved not so much the sea as the sea coasts he invented, where everything that he considered the most attractive in the world connected: archipelagos of legendary islands, sand dunes overgrown with flowers, foamy sea distance, warm lagoons sparkling with bronze from the abundance of fish, centuries-old forests, mixed with the smell of salty breezes the smell of lush thickets, and, finally, cozy seaside towns.
Almost every story by Green contains descriptions of these nonexistent cities - Lissa, Zurbagan, Gel-Gyu and Gerton.
In the appearance of these fictional cities, Green put the features of all the ports of the Black Sea he had seen.
The dream has been achieved. The sea lay in front of Green like a road of miracles, but the old Vyatka past immediately made itself felt. Green with a special acuteness felt by the sea his helplessness, uselessness and loneliness.
“This new world didn't need me,” he writes. - I felt embarrassed, a stranger here, as everywhere. I was a little sad. "
Sea life immediately turned inside out to Green.
Green wandered around the port for weeks and timidly asked the captains to take him as a sailor on ships, but he was either rudely refused or ridiculed in the eyes - what a sailor could turn out to be from a frail youth with dreamy eyes!
Finally, Green was "lucky." He was taken without a salary as an apprentice on a steamer that sailed from Odessa to Batum. Green made two autumn flights on it.
From these flights, Green has only the memory of Yalta and the ridge of the Caucasus Mountains.
“The lights of Yalta are the most memorable. The port lights merged with the lights of an unprecedented city. The steamer approached the jetty with the clear sounds of the orchestra in the garden. The smell of flowers flew by, warm gusts of wind. Voices and laughter were heard in the distance.
I have forgotten the rest of the voyage, except for the procession of snowy mountains that does not disappear from the horizon. Their peaks, stretched at the height of the sky, even from a distance, showed the world of huge worlds. It was a chain of high-rise countries, glittering with ice of silence. "
Soon the captain kicked Green off the steamer — Green could not pay for the food.
Kulak, the owner of the Kherson "oak", took Green as henchmen to his schooner and pushed him around like a dog. Green hardly slept - instead of a pillow, the owner gave him a broken tile. In Kherson he was thrown ashore without paying any money.
From Kherson, Green returned to Odessa, worked in port warehouses as a marker and made the only overseas voyage to Alexandria, but he was fired from the ship for a collision with the captain.
From all his Odessa life, Green has only a good memory of working in port warehouses:
“I loved the spicy smell of the warehouse, the abundance of merchandise around me, especially lemons and oranges. Everything smelled like vanilla, dates, coffee, tea. Combined with a frosty smell sea \u200b\u200bwater, coal and oil was indescribably good to breathe here - especially if the sun was warming. "
Green got tired of life in Odessa and decided to return to Vyatka. He rode home "hare". For the last two hundred kilometers I had to walk through the liquid mud - it was bad weather.
In Vyatka, the father asked Green where his things were.
“Things were left at the post office,” Green lied. - There was no cab.
“Father,” writes Green, “smiling pitifully, remained silent in disbelief, and a day later, when it turned out that there were no things, he asked (he smelled strongly of vodka):
- Why are you lying? You walked. Where are your things? You lied! "
The damned Vyatka life began again.
Then there were years of fruitless searches for some place in life, or, as it was customary to express in philistine families, the search for "occupation."
Green was a bath attendant at the Murashi station, near Vyatka, served as a scribe in the office, wrote petitions to the court in a tavern for peasants.
He could not stand it for a long time in Vyatka and left for Baku. Life in Baku was so desperately difficult that Green had a memory of it as a continuous cold and darkness. He did not remember the details.
He lived by casual, penny labor: he hammered piles in the port, cleaned paint from old steamers, loaded timber, together with tramps he was hired to extinguish fires on oil rigs. He was dying of malaria in a fishing cooperative and nearly died of thirst on the sandy deadly beaches of the Caspian Sea between Baku and Derbent.
Green spent the night in empty cauldrons on the dock, under overturned boats or just under fences.
Life in Baku left a cruel imprint on Green. He became sad, taciturn, and the external traces of Baku life - premature old age - remained with Green forever. Since then, according to Green, his face has become like a crumpled ruble note.
Green's appearance spoke better than words about the nature of his life: he was an unusually thin, tall and stooped man, with a face excised by thousands of wrinkles and scars, with tired eyes that burned with a beautiful shine only in moments of reading or inventing extraordinary stories.
Green was ugly, but full of hidden charm. He walked hard, like loaders, torn by work, walk.
He was very trusting, and this trustfulness was outwardly expressed in a friendly, open handshake. Green said that he knows people best by the way they shake hands.
Green's life, especially in Baku, in many of its features resembles the youth of Maxim Gorky. Both Gorky and Green went through a tramp, but Gorky emerged from him as a man of high civil courage and the greatest realist writer, while Green is a science fiction.
In Baku, Green went to the last degree of poverty, but did not change his pure and childish imagination. He stopped in front of the windows of photographers and looked at the cards for a long time, trying to find at least one face among hundreds of dull or sickly crumpled faces who spoke of a joyful, high and carefree life. Finally, he found such a face - the face of a girl - and described it in his diary. The diary fell into the hands of the owner of the shelter, a vile and cunning man who began to mock Green and unknown girl... It almost ended in a bloody fight.
From Baku, Green returned to Vyatka, where his drunken father demanded money from him. But of course there was no money.
It was necessary to come up with some ways again to drag out existence. Green was unable to do this. Again he was possessed by a thirst for a happy chance, and in winter, in severe frosts, he went on foot to the Urals to look for gold. His father gave him three rubles for the journey.
Green saw the Urals - a wild land of gold, and naive hopes flashed in it. On the way to the mine, he picked up many stones lying under his feet, and carefully examined them, hoping to find a nugget.
Green worked in the Shuvalov mines, wandered around the Urals with a complacent old man, a wanderer (who later turned out to be a murderer and a thief), was a woodcutter and rafters.
After the Urals, Green sailed as a sailor on the barge of the ship owner Bulychov - the famous Bulychov, taken by Gorky as a prototype for his famous play.
But this work also ended.
It seemed that life had closed a circle, and Green no longer had any joy or reasonable occupation in it. Then he decided to become a soldier. It was hard and ashamed to volunteer in the tsarist army, drilled to idiocy, but it was even harder to sit on the neck of the old man's father. My father dreamed of making Alexander, his first child, a "real person" - a doctor or an engineer.
Green served in an infantry regiment in Penza.
In the regiment, Green first encountered the Socialist-Revolutionaries and began reading revolutionary books.
“Since then,” says Greene, “life has turned to me with the exposed, previously mysterious side. My revolutionary enthusiasm was unlimited. At the first proposal of a freelance Socialist-Revolutionary, I took a thousand proclamations and scattered them in the courtyard of the barracks. "
After serving for about a year, Green deserted from the regiment and went into revolutionary work. This period of his life is little known.
Green worked in Kiev and Sevastopol, where he became famous among the sailors and soldiers of the serf artillery as an ardent, fascinating underground speaker.
But in the dangers and tension of revolutionary work, Green remained as contemplative as before. It was not for nothing that he himself said about himself that life phenomena interested him mainly visually - he loved to look and remember.
In Sevastopol, Green lived in autumn - that clear Crimean autumn, when the air seems to be transparent warm moisture, poured into the boundaries of streets, bays and mountains, and the slightest sound passes through it with a light and lasting tremor.
“Some shades of Sevastopol have entered my stories,” Green admitted. But to everyone who knows Green's books and knows Sevastopol, it is clear that the legendary Zurbagan is an almost accurate description of Sevastopol, the city of transparent bays, decrepit boatmen, sun reflections, warships, smells of fresh fish, acacia and siliceous earth and solemn sunsets rising to to the sky all the glitter and light of the reflected Black Sea water.
If it were not for Sevastopol, there would be no Green's Zurbagan with its nets, thunder of shod sailor boots over the sandstone, night winds, high masts and hundreds of lights dancing in the roadstead.
In none of the cities of the Soviet Union is poetry felt so clearly as in Sevastopol marine lifeexpressed by Green in the following lines:
“Danger, risk, power of nature, light of a distant land, wonderful uncertainty, flickering love, blooming with date and separation; a fascinating boil of meetings, persons, events; the immense variety of life, and high in the sky - now the Southern Cross, now the Bear, and all the continents - in the keen eyes, although your cabin is full of the never-leaving homeland with its books, paintings, letters and dried flowers ... "
In the fall of 1903, Green was arrested in Sevastopol at the Grafskaya pier and served in the Sevastopol and Feodosia prisons until the end of October 1905.
In the Sevastopol prison, Green first began to write. He was very shy about his first literary experiments and did not show them to anyone.
Green spoke little about himself, he did not manage to finish his autobiography, and therefore many years of his life are almost unknown to anyone.
After Sevastopol in the biography of Green comes a failure. It is only known that he was arrested a second time and exiled to Tobolsk, but fled from the road, made his way to Vyatka and at night came to his old, sick father. The father stole for him from the city hospital the passport of the deceased son of the deacon Malginov. Green lived under this name for a long time and even signed his first story with it.
Green left for St. Petersburg with someone else's passport, and this story was published here in the Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper.
It was Green's first real joy. He almost kissed the grumpy newspaperman from whom he bought the newspaper with his story. He assured the newspaperman that the story was written by him, but the old man did not believe and looked suspiciously at the ankle-faced, freckled young man. Green could not walk from excitement, his legs trembled and buckled.
Work in the Socialist-Revolutionary organization was already clearly weighing on Green. He soon left her, abandoning the assassination attempt entrusted to him. He was captured by thoughts of writing. Dozens of ideas weighed down on him, he hastily looked for a form for them, but at first he could not find.
He wrote still timidly, with an eye on the editor and the reader, wrote with that well-known feeling for novice writers that a crowd of mocking people stood behind him and read every word with condemnation. Greene was still afraid of the storm of plots that raged in him and demanded release.
The first story, written by Green without looking back, only because of free inner motivation, was "Reno Island". It already contained all the features of the future Green. This is a simple story about the power and beauty of the pristine tropical nature and the thirst for freedom of a sailor who deserted from a warship and was killed for it on the orders of the commander.
Green began to print. Years of humiliation and hunger, it is true, very slowly, but still a thing of the past. The first months of free and beloved labor seemed a miracle to Green.
Soon Green was again arrested on the old case of belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, spent a year in prison and was exiled to the Arkhangelsk province - to Pinega, and then to Kegostrov.
In 1912, Green returned to St. Petersburg. Here began the best period of his life, a kind of "Boldin autumn". At the time, Green wrote almost continuously. With an insatiable thirst, he re-read many books, wanted to learn everything, experience, transfer to his stories.
Soon he took his first book to his father in Vyatka. Green wanted to please the old man, who had already come to terms with the idea that a worthless vagrant had emerged from Alexander's son. Father Green did not believe it. It took the old man to show the contracts with the publishing houses and other documents to convince him that Green really became "human." This meeting between father and son was the last: the old man soon died.
The February revolution found Green in Finland, in the village of Lunatiokki; he greeted her with delight. Upon learning of the revolution, Green immediately set off on foot for Petrograd — the trains no longer ran. He threw all his belongings and books in Lunatiokki, even the portrait of Poe, which he never parted with.
Almost everyone who has written about Greene speaks of Greene's closeness to Edgar Poe, Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Stevenson and Kipling.
Greene loved “mad Edgar”, but the opinion that he imitated him and all the writers listed above is incorrect: Greene recognized many of them, being already a well-established writer himself.
He greatly appreciated Merimee and considered him "Carmen" one of best books in world literature. Green read a lot of Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Chekhov (Green was shocked by Chekhov's stories), Gorky, Swift and Jack London. He often reread the biography of Pushkin, and in adulthood he was fond of reading encyclopedias.
Green was not spoiled by attention and therefore greatly appreciated it.
Even the most common affection in human relations or a friendly act caused him deep excitement.
This happened, for example, when life first pushed Green against Maxim Gorky. It was 1920. Green was drafted into the Red Army and served in a guard regiment in the city of Ostrov, near Pskov. There he fell ill with a syrup. He was brought to Petrograd and, along with hundreds of typhus, were placed in the Botkin barracks. Green was seriously ill. He left the hospital almost disabled.
Homeless, half-sick and hungry, with severe dizziness, he wandered all day through the granite city in search of food and warmth. There was a time of queues, rations, smoke boxes, stale crusts of bread and icy apartments. The thought of death became more and more intrusive.
“At this time,” the writer's wife writes in her unpublished memoirs, “Maxim Gorky was Green's savior. He found out about Green's plight and did everything for him. At the request of Gorky, Green was given a rare academic ration at that time and a room on the Moika, in the "House of Arts" - warm, light, with a bed and a table. To the tortured Green, this table seemed especially precious - one could write behind it. In addition, Gorky gave Green a job.
Out of the deepest despair and expectation of death, Green was brought back to life by the hand of Gorky. Often at night, remembering his hard life and Gorky's help, Green, who had not yet recovered from his illness, wept with gratitude. "
In 1924, Green moved to Feodosia. He wanted to live in silence, closer to his beloved sea. This act of Green reflected the writer's true instinct - the seaside life was the real breeding ground that gave him the opportunity to invent his stories.
Green lived in Feodosia until 1930. There he wrote a lot. He wrote mainly in the winter, in the morning. Sometimes he sat in an armchair for hours, smoked and thought, and at that time he could not be touched. In these hours of contemplation and free play of the imagination, Green needed concentration much more than during his work hours. Green plunged into his thoughts so deeply that he was almost deaf and blind, and it was difficult to get him out of this state.
In the summer, Green rested: he made bows, wandered by the sea, fiddled with stray dogs, tamed a wounded hawk, read and played billiards with cheerful Theodosian inhabitants - descendants of the Genoese and Greeks. Green loved Theodosia - a sultry city by the green, muddy sea, built on white stony ground.
In the fall of 1930, Green moved from Feodosia to Old Crimea - a city of flowers, silence and ruins. Here he died alone from a painful illness - cancer of the stomach and lungs.
Green died as hard as he lived. He asked to put his bed to the window. Outside the window, the distant ones turned blue crimean mountains and the reflection of the beloved and forever lost sea.
In one of Green's stories - "The Return" - there are lines, as it were, written by him about his death, - as if they convey the atmosphere of Green's dying: “The end came in the light of open windows, in the face of wildflowers. Gasping for breath, he asked to be seated by the window. He looked at the hills, taking in the last breaths of air with a bleeding piece of lung.
Before his death, Green longed for people, something that had never happened to him before.
A few days before his death, author's copies of Green's last book, The Autobiographical Tale, were sent from Leningrad.
Green smiled faintly, tried to read the writing on the cover, but could not. The book fell from his hands. His eyes had already acquired the expression of a heavy, deaf emptiness. Green's eyes, which knew how to see the world so extraordinarily, were already dying.
Green's last word was either a groan or a whisper: "I'm dying ..."
Two years after Green's death, I happened to be in Old Crimea, in the house where Green died, and at his grave.
Around the little white house, wildflowers bloomed in the thick and fresh grass. The leaves of the walnut, sluggish from the heat, smelled medicinal and tart. In the rooms with a harsh, simple atmosphere there was a deep silence and a sharp ray of sun lay on the chalk wall. He fell on the only engraving on the wall - a portrait of Edgar Poe.
Green's grave in the cemetery behind the old mosque is overgrown with thorny grasses.
The wind was blowing from the south. Far away, beyond Theodosia, the sea stood like a gray wall. And over everything - over Green's house, over his grave and over the Old Crimea - there was the silence of a cloudless summer day.
Green died, leaving it up to us to decide whether our time needs such wild dreamers as he was.
Yes, we need dreamers. It's time to get rid of the mocking attitude to this word. Many people still do not know how to dream, and maybe that is why they cannot become level with time.
If you take away the ability to dream from a person, then one of the most powerful incentives that give rise to culture, art, science and the desire to fight for a wonderful future will disappear. But dreams should not be divorced from reality. They should foresee the future and create in us the feeling that we already live in this future and ourselves are becoming different.
It is generally accepted that Green's dreams were divorced from life, were a bizarre and meaningless play of the mind. It is generally believed that Green was an adventurous writer - true, a master of the plot, but a man whose books are devoid of social significance.
The meaning of each writer is determined by how he acts on us, what feelings, thoughts and actions his books evoke, whether they enrich us with knowledge, or are read as a funny set of words.
Green populated his books with a tribe of brave, simple-minded, like children, proud, selfless and kind people.
These whole, attractive people are surrounded by the fresh, fragrant air of Green's nature - completely real, taking the heart with its charm. The world in which Green's heroes live may seem unreal only to a beggar in spirit. The one who experienced slight dizziness from the first breath of salty and warm air sea \u200b\u200bcoasts, will immediately feel the authenticity of the Green's landscape, the wide breath of the Green's countries.
Green's stories evoke in people a desire for a varied life, full of risk, courage and the "sense of high" inherent in explorers, sailors and travelers. After Green's stories, I want to see the whole globe - not the countries invented by Green, but real, authentic, full of light, forests, multilingual noise of harbors, human passions and love.
“The earth teases me,” Green wrote. - Its oceans are huge, the islands are countless, and the mass of mysterious, deadly curious corners.
A fairy tale is needed not only for children, but also for adults. She causes excitement - the source of high and humane passions. She does not allow us to calm down and always shows new, sparkling distances, a different life, she worries and makes us passionately desire this life. This is its value, and this is the value of the inexpressible sometimes words, but clear and powerful charm of Green's stories.
Our time has declared a merciless struggle to hypocrites, dullards and hypocrites. Only a hypocrite can say that it is necessary to calm down and stop. The great has been achieved, but even greater lies ahead. New lofty and difficult tasks arise in the near distance of the future, the tasks of creating a new person, fostering new feelings and new human relations worthy of the socialist age. But in order to fight for this future, you need to be able to dream passionately, deeply and effectively, you need to cultivate in yourself a continuous desire for meaningful and beautiful things. Green was rich in this desire, and he passes it on to us in his books.
They talk about the adventurous nature of Green's plots. This is true, but his adventurous plot is just a shell for deeper content. One must be blind not to see love for man in Green's books.
Green was not only a great landscape painter and master of plot, but was also a very subtle psychologist. He wrote about self-sacrifice, courage - heroic traits inherent in the most ordinary people. He wrote about love for work, for his profession, about the lack of study and the power of nature. Finally, very few writers have written about love for a woman as purely, carefully, and emotionally as Green did.
I could cite here hundreds of excerpts from Green's books that excite everyone who has not lost the ability to worry in front of the spectacle of the beautiful, but the reader will find them himself.
Green said that "the whole earth, with everything that is on it, is given to us for life, for the recognition of this life wherever it is."
Green is a writer necessary for our time, for he made his contribution to the education of high feelings, without which the realization of a socialist society is impossible.
Notes
For the first time under the name "Alexander Green" it was published in the Almanac "Year XXII", No. 15, M. 1939. In a revised form it was printed as an introductory article to A. Green's "Chosen", Goslitizdat, 1956 (Published according to the text of Goslitizdat , 1956)
Alexander Green with his wife Nina. Old Crimea, 1926
The fate of the widow famous writer, the author of "Scarlet Sails" and "Running on the Waves" Alexander Grin, has developed dramatically. During the fascist occupation of Crimea, Nina Green worked in a local newspaper, where articles of an anti-Soviet nature were published, and in 1944 she left for forced labor in Germany. Upon her return, she ended up in a Stalinist camp on charges of aiding the Nazis and spent 10 years in prison. Until now, historians are debating how fair this accusation was.
Nina Green
The lack of reliable information hinders the understanding of this story: information about the life of Nina Nikolaevna Green cannot be called complete, there are still many blank spots. It is known that after the death of her husband in 1932, Nina, together with her sick mother, remained to live in the village of Stary Krym. Here they were found by the occupation. At first, the women were selling things, and then Nina was forced to get a job to save herself from hunger.
Left - A. Green. Petersburg, 1910. On the right - Nina Green with the hawk Guly. Feodosia, 1929
She managed to get a job first as a proofreader in a printing house, and then as an editor of the "Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District", where anti-Soviet articles were published. Later, during interrogations, Nina Green pleaded guilty and explained her actions as follows: “The position of head of the printing house was offered to me in the city government, and I agreed to this, since at that time I had a difficult financial situation. I could not leave the Crimea, that is, evacuate, since I had an old sick mother and had attacks of angina pectoris. I left for Germany in January 1944, fearing responsibility for the fact that I worked as an editor. In Germany, I worked first as a worker and then as a camp nurse. I admit my guilt in everything. "
A. Green in his study. Feodosia, 1926
In January 1944, the writer's widow voluntarily left Crimea for Odessa, as she was frightened by rumors that the Bolsheviks shot everyone who worked in the occupied territories. And already from Odessa she was taken to forced labor in Germany, where she performed the duties of a nurse in a camp near Breslau. In 1945, she managed to escape from there, but at home this aroused suspicion, and she was accused of aiding the Nazis and editing a German district newspaper.
Left - A. Grinevsky (Green), 1906. Police card. Right - Nina Green, 1920s
The worst thing was that Nina Green had to leave her mother in Crimea, according to the testimony of the attending physician V. Fanderflyas: “As for Nina Nikolaevna's mother, Olga Alekseevna Mironova, she suffered before and during the occupation. mental disordersmanifested in some strange behavior ... When her daughter, Grin Nina Nikolaevna, at the beginning of 1944 left her, and she went to Germany, her mother went crazy. " On April 1, 1944, Olga Mironova died. But according to other sources, Nina Green left the Old Crimea after the death of her mother.
The last lifetime photograph of A. Green. June 1932
The fact is that Nina Green did not exaggerate the hopelessness of her situation - she found herself in the same difficult situation as thousands of other people who ended up in the occupied territories, in captivity or in forced labor in Germany. However, it is impossible to call her a traitor to her homeland, if only because back in 1943 she saved the lives of 13 prisoners who were doomed to be shot. The woman turned to the mayor with a request to vouch for them. He agreed to vouch for ten, and noted three of the list as suspects in links with the partisans. The writer's widow changed the list, including all 13 surnames, and took it to the head of the prison in Sevastopol. Instead of being shot, those arrested were sent to labor camps. For some reason, this fact was not taken into account in the Nina Green case.
Left - the writer's widow at Green's grave, 1960s. Right - A. Green
The widow of the writer Nina Green. Old Crimea, 1965
The woman spent 10 years in the Pechora and Astrakhan camps. After Stalin's death, many were amnestied, including her. When she returned to Old Crimea, it turned out that their house had passed to the chairman of the local executive committee. It took her great efforts to return the house in order to open the Alexander Green Museum there. There she completed a book of memoirs about her husband, which she began to write back in exile.
Widow of the writer Alexander Green, 1960s
Nina Green with tourists at the house-museum in the Old Crimea, 1961
Nina Green passed away in 1970 without waiting for her rehabilitation. The authorities of the Old Crimea did not allow to bury the "henchman of the Nazis" next to Alexander Green and allocated a place at the edge of the cemetery. According to legend, after a year and a half, the writer's fans made an unauthorized reburial and transferred her coffin to her husband's grave. It was only in 1997 that Nina Green was rehabilitated posthumously and it was proved that she had never supported the fascists.
A. Green House Museum
Alexander Green (real name Grinevsky; 1880-1932) - a famous Russian writer-prose writer and poet, representative of neo-romanticism, author of philosophical and psychological, with elements of symbolic fantasy, works. He wrote his works mainly in the style of neo-romanticism and symbolism.
Green's biography
His father, Stepan Evseevich, was from a family of Polish gentry. In his younger years, he took part in the January Uprising, for which he was exiled for a period of 5 years.
The mother of the future writer, Anna Stepanovna, worked as a nurse. Interestingly, she got married when she was only 16 years old. In addition to Alexander, two more girls and one boy were born in the Grinevsky family.
Childhood and youth
When Alexander Green learned to read at the age of six, he began to spend all his time reading books. In particular, he liked adventure stories with an interesting plot.
Once, after reading stories about famous seafarers, young Green began to dream of going to sea. For this reason, he has repeatedly escaped from home to repeat the fate of his heroes.
When the boy was 9 years old, he was sent to a real school. An interesting fact is that it was there that Alexander was given the nickname "Green".
The teachers claimed that he had a very nasty character. He constantly dabbled in and did not obey teachers, for which he was repeatedly punished.
While studying in 2nd grade, Green wrote a poem about his teachers, in which there were many offensive words and humorous allusions.
In this regard, Alexander Green was expelled from the school. After that, he continued his studies at the Vyatka school.
In 1895, a tragedy occurred in Green's biography: his mother, whom he dearly loved, died of tuberculosis.
When Green's father remarried, Alexander could not get along with his stepmother. As a result, he left home and began renting separate housing for himself.
To feed himself, he had to take on any job. During that period of his biography, he worked as a loader, excavator, fisherman and even for some time was an artist of a traveling circus.
Wanderings and revolutionary activities
After graduating from college, Green went to Odessa to fulfill his childhood dream. He wanted to become a sailor on a large ship.
Interestingly, initially he even had to wander for some time, without sufficient means of subsistence.
At one point, he finally found himself on board the ship. However, every day Alexander became more and more disappointed in the sailor business. As a result, Green had a serious quarrel with the captain and went ashore.
In 1902, he was forced to enter the service, as he was sorely lacking money. Life as a soldier turned out to be so difficult for Green that he decided to desert.
Then a new hobby occurs in Green's biography: he meets the revolutionaries and begins campaigning with them.
A year later, the writer was arrested and sent to a 10-year hard labor in Siberia. In addition, he received an additional 2 years of exile in Arkhangelsk.
Green's works
In 1906 in creative biography Alexander Green, a significant event took place. From under his pen came the first work "The Merit of Private Panteleev", in which it was a question of offenses in the army.
However, the entire edition was withdrawn from the press and destroyed. After that, Green wrote a new work "The Elephant and the Pug", which was also withdrawn and burned.
Alexander Green and his tame hawk And only the story "To Italy" became the first creation of the writer that readers could read.
Since 1908, Alexander Stepanovich began to publish all his works under the pseudonym "Green". Every month from under his pen came out 2 new stories or novels.
This allowed him to earn the amount of money that he needed for a normal existence.
Alexander Green in St. Petersburg, photo 1910 Soon he wrote so many works that in 1913 Alexander Green published his works in 3 volumes.
Every year his work became more meaningful and profound. In addition, a lot of aphorisms and wise sayings appeared in his books.
"Scarlet Sails"
From 1916 to 1922 Alexander Green wrote the most significant story in his biography - "Scarlet Sails". This work immediately brought him immense popularity.
The story told about strong faith and lofty dreams, as well as the fact that each of us is able to perform a miracle for a loved one. After the publication of "Scarlet Sails", the beautiful Assol became an idol for many girls.
6 years later, Alexander Green presents the novel "Running on the Waves", written in the genre of romanticism.
After that, such works as "Velvet Curtain", "We Sit on the Bank" and "Stone Pillar Ranch" were published.
Personal life
When Green was 28 years old, he married Vera Abramova, with whom he lived for 5 years. It is interesting that their parting took place on the initiative of Vera.
Alexander Green with his first wife Vera (far left) in the village of Veliky Bor near Pinega, 1911 According to her, she was tired of enduring drunkenness and unpredictable behavior of her husband. And although the writer repeatedly tried to establish relations with her, he did not succeed in doing this.
The second wife in the biography of Alexander Green was Nina Mironova, with whom he lived happily for the rest of his life. There was a real idyll and complete understanding between the spouses.
Alexander Green and his second wife Nina When the writer is gone, Nina will be called an enemy of the people and sent to correctional camps for 10 years. An interesting fact is that both Green's wives knew each other and maintained friendly relations.
Death
Shortly before Green's death, doctors discovered he had stomach cancer, from which he later died.
Alexander Stepanovich Green died on July 8, 1932 in the Old Crimea at the age of 51. At the place of his burial, a monument with the characters of his novel "Running on the Waves" was erected.
The last lifetime photo of Alexander Green An interesting fact is that during the reign of Green's books were considered anti-Soviet, and only after the death of the leader of the peoples, the name of the writer was rehabilitated.
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Russian prose writer and poet Alexander Green(Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky; August 23, 1880, Slobodskoy, Vyatka provinces - July 8, 1932, Old Crimea) entered literature as a representative of romantic realism (neo-romanticism) and the author of philosophical and psychological works with elements of fantasy.
His father, a Polish nobleman Stepan (Stefan) Grinevsky (1843 -1914), was exiled from Warsaw to the Russian North for participating in the 1863 uprising. Mother - Anna Grinevskaya (née Lepkova, 1857-1895), daughter of a retired college secretary. In 1881 the family moved to the town of Vyatka (now Kirov).
At the age of sixteen, Alexander Grinevsky graduated from the four-year Vyatka city school with mostly satisfactory grades and completed his formal education. The young man, who had dreamed of seas and distant countries since childhood, was poisoned on a free voyage through life - his mother had died by that time, and his father and stepmother did not mind. He left for Odessa. He led a wandering life, worked as a sailor, fisherman, excavator, wandering circus performer, railway worker, washed gold in the Urals.
In 1902, due to extreme need, he voluntarily entered the soldier's service, but due to the severity of life according to the charter, he fled twice. During the service he became close to the Socialist-Revolutionaries (Socialist-Revolutionaries) and took up revolutionary activities. True, after the fugitive soldier refused to participate in terrorist attacks, the Social Revolutionaries successfully used him for propaganda among sailors and soldiers. As the writer writes in his Autobiographical Tale: “It happened in October 1903, after many strikes and demonstrations on such large citieslike Odessa, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev and others. " He was sent from Odessa to Sevastopol for revolutionary propaganda among the rank and file of the serf artillery and sailors of the naval barracks, in order to win over to the side of the "social revolutionary party." But he was arrested on November 11, 1903. Thanks to his imprisonment, I got to Feodosia for the first time, where a trial of political prisoners took place. He was released from prison under an amnesty on October 20, 1905.
In 1906 he was arrested in St. Petersburg, where he lived illegally, and was exiled to the Tobolsk province; from where he fled and returned to Petersburg. He lived under someone else's passport. Published in the capital magazines, the pseudonym "A.S. Green ”first appeared under the story“ A Case ”(1907). Green's first collections of short stories, The Invisible Hat (1908) and Stories (1910), attracted critical attention.
Alexander Green was actually married twice. His first wife was the daughter of a wealthy official, Vera Pavlovna Abramova, with whom he got married in 1910. In the same year, in the summer, Alexander Grinevsky was arrested for the third time for escaping from exile and living under false documents and sent into exile in the Arkhangelsk province in the provincial Pinega.
Years of living under an assumed name led to a break with the revolutionary past and the formation of Green as a writer.
In May 1912, Grinevsky returned to St. Petersburg under his own name, but with the virus of the most common Russian disease of the soul. Due to continuous revelry, the first wife, Vera Pavlovna, left her husband. In 1912-1917, Green worked actively, publishing about 350 short stories. In 1914 he became an employee of the New Satyricon magazine.
Due to the "impermissible review of the reigning monarch," which became known to the police, Green from the end of 1916 was forced to hide in Finland, but after February revolution returned to Petrograd.
In the post-revolutionary years, the writer actively collaborated with Soviet publications, especially with the literary and art magazine "Plamya", which was edited by the People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky.
In 1919, Green was drafted into the Red Army, but soon fell seriously ill with typhus and returned to Petrograd. The sick writer, without a livelihood and without a place to live, was helped by Maxim Gorky, at whose request Green was given an academic ration and a room in the House of Arts. Here the writer worked on two novels, as well as the story "Scarlet Sails", the idea of \u200b\u200bwhich originated in 1916.
The writer married the second time in 1921 to a 26-year-old widow, nurse Nina Mironova (after Korotkova's first husband). To her he dedicated the story of the Scarlet Sails extravaganza published in 1923, which became the pinnacle of neo-romanticism. Nina became the prototype for Assol, who dreams of happiness, of a prince and a ship with scarlet sails. She became a real guardian angel of the writer and our next article is dedicated to her.
In 1924, the writer and his wife left for the Crimea in Feodosia, where he worked fruitfully until November 1928. During this period, under the pseudonym Alexander Green wrote "Running on the Waves", "The Golden Chain", forty stories and began "Autobiographical Tale".
Like the poet Maximilian Voloshin, who created the mysterious country of Cimmeria, Alexander Green placed his literary heroes in the fantastic Greenland, where the action of his romantic stories "Running on the Waves", "Scarlet Sails" and other works takes place. True, the name was given after the death of the writer. The main advantage of his characters was not only the ability to fly, walk on the waves, but the ability to embody their hopes and dreams. And this is so important to every person - hence the attractiveness of his works for readers, especially young people. As critics write, in his works, Green conveyed the longing for the Unfulfilled. He did not become a sailor, became disillusioned with the revolutionaries (Socialist-Revolutionaries), lived in poverty and misery. But the life of this untimely man was warmed by the sacrificial love of Nina Nikolaevna Green, his second wife.
In 1927, a 15-volume collection of Green's works began to be published, but only 8 volumes came out. Since 1930, the Soviet censorship, with the motivation "you do not merge with the era," forbade the reprints of Green, and the GPU arrested a private publisher. The fee was not paid in full, there was a lack of money, hunger and disease. Green's fashionable Russian illness of the soul worsened, and binges began to recur more and more often. I had to sell an apartment in Feodosia and move to Old Crimea, where life was cheaper. At the end of April 1931, Greene at last time went to Koktebel, to visit Voloshin. This route is still popular with tourists and is known as the Green's Trail.
In the Old Crimea, a house (an adobe hut with an earthen floor) with a small plot was purchased from a nun in May 1932 by Alexander Grin's wife, Nina Nikolaevna, in exchange for a gold wristwatch
In the summer, Alexander Green traveled to Moscow, but no publishing house showed interest in his new novel, Impatient, which some critics considered his best work. The Writers' Union rejected a pension as an "ideological enemy". At the end of Green's life, printing almost ceased. In the memoirs of his wife, this period is characterized by one phrase: "Then he began to die" in complete poverty and oblivion.
Alexander Grin died in the Old Crimea from stomach cancer on the morning of July 8, 1932, at the age of 52, he was buried in the Old Crimean cemetery. When Alexander Green died, none of the writers who were resting in the neighborhood in Koktebel came to say goodbye to him.
After Green's death, at the request of several leading Soviet writers in 1934, a collection of Fantastic Novels was published. The writer Green was posthumously placed on the pedestal of the "Soviet romantic" by the communist authorities, and the premiere of the ballet "Scarlet Sails" was held at the Bolshoi Theater.
IN post-war years fight against cosmopolitanism Alexander Green, like other cultural figures (A. A. Akhmatova, M. M. Zoshchenko, D. D. Shostakovich) was again branded as a "reactionary and spiritual emigrant." The writer's books were seized from libraries. Only after Stalin's death his works, through the efforts of Konstantin Paustovsky, Yuri Olesha and other writers, began to be published in millions of copies since 1956.
The peak of Green's readership fell on Khrushchev's "thaw." In the wake of the romantic upsurge in the country, Alexander Green has become one of the most published and revered Russian authors, the idol of youth.
Today, the works of Alexander Green have been translated into many languages, streets in many cities, mountain peaks and a star bear his name. Many works, including "Scarlet Sails" and "Running on the Waves", have been filmed.
The annual creative festival "Greenlandia" (Old Crimea, August 22-24) is timed to coincide with the writer's birthday. On the slope of Mount Agarmysh, festival participants raise symbolic scarlet sails. Creative groups, artists, musicians, writers, poets and bards perform on the improvised stage and on the concert venue of the Green's house. The festival ends with a hike from the Old Crimea to Koktebel, along the "Green's path" with a visit to the House-Museum of MA Voloshin.
***
Konstantin Paustovsky, who did a lot to popularize the work of Alexander Green, has the following lines: “Green has lived a hard life. Everything about her, as if on purpose, worked out so as to make Green out of a criminal or an evil philistine. " But the opposite happened. About his story "Scarlet Sails" and today, almost a century later, they write on social networks: “This is such a wonderful book! This is an absolutely delightful book! This is the most romantic story I've ever read! And I can't even explain why I didn't meet her earlier, but only, my God, what a charm all this time passed me by! "Scarlet Sails" has long been not just a name, it is a symbol. A symbol of love and hope. A symbol of faith in a dream and the embodiment of the most unrealizable dreams. These are the simplest and most important truths. If you can do a miracle for someone, do it. Come to the rescue, smile, cheer up, support. And you will understand how pleasant it is, how inexpressibly wonderful. There is no magic, and nothing happens by itself: miracles are done by the hands of people who love you. And how beautiful, incredibly beautiful, Green writes! Creates totally mesmerizing, delightful entanglements of words. The text is literally tangible, it comes to life before our eyes. From the pages you can hear the splash of waves and the cries of seagulls, and then from the predawn fog the huge figure of the ship rises before us. The lines of the mast are sharply defined. Flaming sails are torn in the wind. And the confused Assol was already frozen on the shore. And on her lips - salty sea spray. And on her cheeks are the rays of the rising sun. The book gives a feeling of absolute, boundless happiness, great faith in a miracle, in real, fabulous and beautiful love. Warm, light, a wonderful story to goosebumps! " (Masha_
Uralskaya 09.10. 2013. —