V.Kozlov, F.Putnin
The creative path of Sergeyev-Tsensky
Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky is an outstanding Soviet writer, the author of the majestic epics "Sevastopol Strada", "Transformation of Russia" and other works that won the ardent love and gratitude of readers. The talent of Sergeev-Tsensky is striking both in its power and in its scope. “In the person of Sergeev-Tsensky,” A.M. Gorky wrote in the preface to the translation of the novel “Valya” into Hungarian, “Russian literature has one of the brilliant successors of the colossal work of its classics - Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Leskov.” Sergeev-Tsensky was a tireless seeker, he avoided the beaten paths, which critics did not always understand. The difficulty of his literary career was repeatedly pointed out by A.M. Gorky, who persistently recommended young writers to study with Sergeev-Tsensky and tirelessly promoted his work in our country and abroad.
The poetry of Sergeev-Tsensky's prose, his amazing skill as a landscape painter and portrait painter, his excellent knowledge of the life and language of the people, the variety of themes and plots, the wealth of visual means, the completely original, wise and humane approach to the people and events depicted - all this puts Sergeev-Tsensky in a number of the best Russian writers.
The theme of the Motherland runs through all the work of the writer. In the Soviet years, Sergeyev-Tsensky came to the conclusion that it was impossible to transform a person without a revolutionary transformation of the whole country from the thought he had suffered about the need to transform a person, and he sang this revolutionary transformation of the Motherland.
Sergeev-Tsensky's literary path was long and difficult. There were great difficulties and temporary delusions on this path, but the writer invariably went forward and higher. In the Soviet years, on the land transformed by October, his talent reached its peak.
Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev was born on September 30, 1875 (according to the new style) in the village of Preobrazhensky, Tambov province. The pseudonym "Tsensky" is a tribute to the love of his native Tambov land, the Tsna River, on the banks of which he spent his childhood.
Little is known about his parents. Father, Nikolai Sergeevich Sergeev, took part in the heroic defense of Sevastopol, was seriously wounded. After retiring, he taught at a local school. Mother, Natalya Ilyinichna, a Terek Cossack who learned to read and write from her husband, was as attentive and affectionate to her three sons as her father was.
Seryozha Sergeev learned to read at the age of five. He took books from the library of his father, a great lover of literature. The father, the writer recalled, "had two cabinets: one contained books by artists of the word - classics, in the other those books that related to the Crimean War. These books seemed very boring to me then, and I did not read them, not at all suspecting that I I will have to read them at the age of sixty, when I decided to write the epic "Sevastopol Strada"*.
* Soviet writers. Autobiographies in two volumes. Volume II. Goslitizdat. M., 1959, p. 355.
He began reading with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Turgenev, bypassing the so-called "children's" books. Acquaintance with the classics Sergei Nikolaevich considered very beneficial for himself. “For me, it is beyond doubt,” he wrote, “that it was precisely this contact of mine in early childhood with the classics ... that developed my love for the artistic word, fantasy, understanding of the form of poetic works”*.
* S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. About artistic skill. Krymizdat. Simferopol, 1956, p. 186.
At the age of seven, he writes poetry, draws, and sculpts in clay. Prose, according to him, he dared to write at the age of eleven. He showed his story to his father. The father, not having read it to the end, threw the notebook into the oven, explaining to the shocked author:
“You must have thought that it was easier to write in prose than in verse? No, more difficult, twenty times more difficult!
Why? I whispered.
Because everyone thinks the way you thought, and absolutely everyone who has studied can express their penny thoughts in a coherent way ... So, if you write in prose, then you need to write in a way that no one will write ... You are not mature enough even before prose, maybe only in ten years you will reach.
And the verses? I asked and waited with bated breath...
Write poems *.
* S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. About artistic skill. Krymizdat. Simferopol, 1956, pp. 188-189.
The "review" was harsh and came from a fan of prose, not poetry, but the strict judgment of his father saved the young author from conceit.
Both elder brothers of the writer died early. Losses followed one after another: Sergei Nikolayevich's mother soon died, then his father. The future writer was left without any means of subsistence. He studied at the elementary school at the Ekaterininsky Teacher's Institute in Tambov, at the district school and in preparatory classes at the same institute. After the death of his father, the dream of a metropolitan university had to be abandoned.
Since 1892, Sergei Sergeev was a state-funded student at the Teachers' Institute in the small town of Glukhov. The young man is seriously preparing for the noble work of the people's teacher, he reads a lot.
In the summer of 1895, Sergei Nikolayevich was appointed to the Nemirov gymnasium. Unexpectedly, he refused a place in the gymnasium and entered the military service as a volunteer. He later recalled with a smile that he considered himself too young to teach at the women's gymnasium, among the students of which were his peers. And military service still had to be served. A year of service - as a private, corporal, non-commissioned officer - became for the future author of numerous "military" books a year of acquaintance with the army environment and disappointment in it. To leave the army, Sergeev-Tsensky takes exams for an ensign in the reserve. In September 1896, he was already teaching Russian at the Kamianets-Podilsky city school.
Works similar to those written about Chekhov the doctor will still be written about Sergeev-Tsensky as a teacher. He taught, in addition to language and literature, mathematics and physics, history and geography, natural science and anatomy, drawing and drawing. It was not easy, but the craving for the acquisition of encyclopedic knowledge, which manifested itself within the walls of the Teachers' Institute, would not leave Sergeyev-Tsensky until the end of his life. The young teacher boldly applied advanced teaching methods, read the works of Russian classics with students beyond the program, staged performances with them. In the Latvian town of Tulsa, Sergeev-Tsensky is both the director of Gogol's "Inspector General" and the performer of the role ... Marya Antonovna. Collisions with all kinds of "men in a case" from the school authorities were one of the reasons for the writer's moving from city to city at the end of the school year. An even more important reason for moving was the desire to better know the country, the life of its people.
Sergeev-Tsensky considered the beginning of his literary activity in 1898, when his story "The Demigod" and the fairy tale for children "The Insidious Crane" were published.
The short story "The Demigod" is permeated with the mood of the approaching revolution. It already sounds one of the main themes of Sergeyev-Tsensky's work - the theme of man. The story is imbued with faith in the wonderful future of mankind: "All full of the present, all the creator of the future, rebellious and possessing everything, a man will stand on the land he conquered!" *. In the image of a crane - the "savior" of fish from a natural disaster, a capitalist predator is guessed, hiding behind liberal phrases.
* S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. Leads and stories. Krymizdat, Simferopol, 1963, pp. 7-8.
From story to story, the skill of the writer grows stronger. Sergeev-Tsensky rises to great social generalizations in the story "Tundra". The death of a poor seamstress is to blame for the chilling tundra - a symbol of the capitalist city and all of the then Russian reality. Having told about the tragedy, the author expresses the belief that "there is a way out, far away somewhere, but there is."
In early 1904, Sergeev-Tsensky, who worked as a teacher in Pavlograd, was drafted into the army and served first in Kherson, then in Odessa and Simferopol. In Kherson, ensign Sergeev clashed with his company commander: “It was me who shouted at my company commander in the ranks: “Captain! How dare you beat the soldiers!" And everything happened as I described. (For this crime against discipline, I was transferred to another regiment.) *. In Odessa, Sergeev-Tsensky explains to the soldiers the truth about Bloody Sunday - and again a major clash with the authorities and transfer to another part. In October 1905, he became an unwitting witness to the Black Hundred pogrom in Simferopol. Outraged by the criminal inaction of the tsarist police and troops, S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky applied to the commission of lawyers. The statement was published by the Crimean newspapers. The authorities took up arms against the recalcitrant ensign , reactionary officers and local Black Hundreds, the threat of reprisal hung over him.If we add to this the refusal to go along with the regiment to pacify the peasant unrest, as well as the literary activity that was not stopped even in the army, then Sergeev-Tsensky got off relatively lightly for his "crimes" the fact that at the end of 1905 he was dismissed from the army for "political unreliability."
* Letter to A.G. Gornfeld. TsGALI, fund 155, op. 1, unit ridge 470, l. 21.
The events of the first Russian revolution determined the direction of his creative searches for many years. On February 2, 1905, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote to the progressive publisher V. S. Mirolyubov: "Until now, I sincerely think that in each of my stories I protested"*.
* Archive of Mirolyubov. IRLI. fund 185, op. 1, no. 1051.
And indeed it was. Take, for example, the story "The Silent Ones" (1905). Neither the robbery, nor the fire, nor the brutal murder in the monastery broke the vow of silence taken by the "bast-worker", the "shoemaker from the city" and the intellectual. A revolution has begun - and three former monks went out to fight for freedom against a huge and dark force.
The story "The Silencers" and the story "The Garden", according to A.I. Kuprin, who visited Sergeev-Tsensky in Alushta in 1906, brought their author a "political name". For "Silent" magazine "Questions of Life" received a warning, and for printing the story "Garden" was closed in 1905.
The story "The Garden" is a significant step forward in the ideological and artistic development of the writer, and the image of its central character Shevardin is the first attempt to draw the image of the people's protector. The young agronomist Shevardin is worried about the uncomplaining suffering of the peasants living in dire poverty. "Yes, how much more - a hundred years, a thousand years - will you be silent?" he exclaims. By describing the count's crimes, the author justifies his murderer Shevardin, although he does not hide the fact that his lone hero failed to rouse the peasants to fight, to shake the "million-pood bell".
The landscape is penetratingly lyrical and multicolored in the story, which has become its full-fledged "hero". Here, those features of the talent of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, which P.A. Pavlenko later spoke so well, came out in relief: “Nature and human speech are two hobbies of Tsensky. and convey them with an exceptional poignancy that is not repeated by anyone else"*.
* P.A. Pavlenko. Sobr. op. in 6 volumes. T. 6., GIHL, M., 1955, p. 161.
The impetus for the idea of the story "Forest Marsh" was, according to the writer, a tragic incident from military life (soldiers of the reserve battalion raped and killed the wife of a sergeant major * who had arrived from the village *). In "Forest Marsh", as the author himself admitted, his observations on peasant life in the Tambov and Ryazan provinces (during his youth and years of teaching) were used.
The image of Antonina is one of the first female images in the work of Sergeev-Tsensky, given in a "close-up". The story truly reveals the psychology of a young peasant woman, who has been haunted by the forest swamp since childhood, morally disfiguring her, but not killing her painful desire to find a way out. The forest swamp - a symbol of darkness, ignorance, poverty and bestial savagery of morals generated by the exploitative system - turns out to be stronger than Antonina.
A connoisseur and subtle interpreter of the work of Sergeev-Tsensky, critic N.I. Zamoshkin wrote: "Man - it sounds proud" - at the dawn of liberation, it was said strongly, weightily. A stone was thrown into the swamp. Following Gorky, Sergeyev-Tsensky also threw his stone: "You first rise to the rank of a man, serve the mind in the service; a man is a rank ... and above all ranks of angels" (from "Forest Marsh" and the author's epigraph to the story "Miracle "...). There is a new connotation here: rise to the rank, then your name will sound proud. And, finally, the third stone: "Carry the name of man in pride" (Mayakovsky), having served, do not let go of the banner of man, carry it always "*.
* N.I. Zamoshkin. Unpublished monograph about S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. Archive of the Alushta Literary and Memorial Museum of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky.
After leaving the army, Sergeyev-Tsensky settled in Alushta and devoted himself entirely to artistic creativity. The revolutionary events in Odessa and Simferopol were still fresh in his memory, the lightning of isolated peasant and soldier uprisings still flared up in different parts of the country, but the revolutionary moods nevertheless clearly subsided, and the reaction went on the offensive. In 1906-1907 Sergeev-Tsensky wrote the novel "Babaev". About the idea of his first novel, he later wrote criticism to E. Koltonovskaya: “Then, as a reserve officer, I had to come into very close contact with the pogrom of Jews, the role of the police and my regiment in this pogrom, and with the terrible result of the pogrom - 52 killed. That's what made a stunning impression on me and gave a tone to "Babaev", and by no means a fascination with Dostoevsky, as you write. I thought about why they coped with the revolution so easily, and came to "Babaevism" as a phenomenon, and Babaev as a type " *.
* Letter from Sergeev-Tsensky to E. Koltonovskaya dated January 16, 1914. Cited. according to the book: K.D. Muratova. The emergence of socialist realism in Russian literature. Ed. "The science". M.-L., 1966, p. 204.
The image of Babaev is sometimes called the last image of a superfluous person in Russian literature - a degenerate superfluous person who has lost the best qualities of his predecessors. This ruined nobleman still retained a sharp look at the vulgarity and meanness of the world around him, but there is no longer any desire to resist this vulgarity and meanness, any ideals and nothing sacred in the soul. Babayevshchina - a genuine decrepitude of the human soul ("babay", the writer explained, in Tatar means old man) took root not only in the souls of officers. The police officer Zhurba, adviser Gresev, lawyer and landowner Sasha have the same decrepit, devastated souls. Sergeev-Tsensky's novel is dedicated to the debunking of extreme individualism, egoism, alienation from the advanced ideas of his time, the debunking of "Babaevism".
Lieutenant Babaev inevitably goes to his moral and physical death. This degradation occurs before the eyes of the reader. Babaev refuses to play in love, but immediately goes to a corrupt woman; he confesses to his crime, but only in order to provoke the victim, to make him his enemy and thereby get rid of vague remorse. And there is in the novel an image of a growing, ennobling soul and heart of the revolution. Babaev and others like him are opposed by revolutionaries drawn with great sympathy. The narrator's publicistic digressions sound strongly.
The disadvantage of the novel "Babaev" is the complexity of the style. In part, it is explained by the writer's desire to follow unbeaten paths, in part it was a tribute to the times. Later, A.M. Gorky wrote to Sergeev-Tsensky: “In the past, I read your books very carefully, it seems that I felt the honest and bold intensity of your search for form well, but I can’t say that your word completely reached me, I didn’t understand a lot and something made me angry, it seemed like deliberate outrageousness.
* See "My Correspondence and Acquaintance with A.M. Gorky". (Volume 4 of this edition.)
The events of the story "The Sorrow of the Fields" (1909) unfold in the depths of the black earth of Russia. Sergeev-Tsensky solves the traditional theme in Russian literature of the early 20th century of the impoverishment of the nobility, the theme of the death of the noble nest in his own way. The heroes of the story are both peasants and seasonal workers. The story begins and ends with the appearance of the heroic peasant Nikita Dekhtyansky. The author expresses love for the Motherland and pain for it in a lyrical digression:
"My fields! .. My childhood, my love, my faith! I look at you, to the east and to the west, and there is fog from tears in my eyes. Is it in childhood, or something, in a green April childhood, you looked at me so bottomless look, meek and stern? And now I stand and wait, I stand and listen sensitively, respond!
Subsequently, Sergeev-Tsensky, linking the idea of this story with the epic "Transformation of Russia", wrote: "It was necessary to throw up" before the eyes of the people, "as Gogol would say," the sadness of the fields "- precisely the" sadness "of the all-Russian fields, which dreamed of in order to give birth to something very big, “to throw out of themselves under the caress of the sun,” and they could not, could not because the million-pound burden of tsarist autocracy and the power of international capital lay on them. This characterization of the story, given more than forty years after its writing, fully corresponds to its objective meaning.
* Manuscript of the article by Sergeev-Tsensky "Word to the Young". TsGALI, fund 1161.
The story "The Sorrow of the Fields" became one of the favorite works of A.M. Gorky. Gorky used the name of the story to characterize the talent of Sergei Yesenin. In the essay "Sergey Yesenin" he wrote: "...Sergey Yesenin is not so much a person as an organ created by nature exclusively for poetry, to express the inexhaustible" sadness of the fields "...". Pointing out the place of the story in the creative development of Sergeev-Tsensky, Gorky wrote: “Amazed by the extraordinary form, critics and readers did not notice the deep content of the works of Sergeev-Tsensky. about which he writes.
* See "My Correspondence and Acquaintance with A.M. Gorky".
The image of a businessman-entrepreneur is drawn in the story "Movements" (1910). Its hero, Anton Antonych, comes from a poor family; The energy of Anton Antonych is amazing. But he is a cruel exploiter. The frenzied energy developed by him for personal enrichment can only cause hatred among the people around him. In his story, Sergeev-Tsensky artistically investigated the type of storage device and pronounced his unambiguous verdict on him - using the example of far from the worst of them.
About the story "Movement" K.I. Chukovsky wrote: "The coming year brought an unexpected joy to literature - the story of Sergeev-Tsensky" Movement "... you even wonder where such purity and beauty come from in our spitting time!" *.
There is no doubt a connection between the writer's creative successes in the early 1910s and a new revolutionary upsurge in the country. Sergeev-Tsensky could not but be influenced by personal communication with prominent Bolsheviks. He handed over to VD Bonch-Bruyevich a poem in prose "When I'm Free" and other works for publication in the party press. Together with N.S. Angarsky (Klestov), Sergeev-Tsensky actively participated in the work of the “Book Publishing House of Writers in Moscow”. Sergeev-Tsensky's name was placed in an announcement about permanent employees of the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda, published on the front page of the first issue of Lenin's newspaper Pravda.
“When in 1910 several of my poems in prose appeared in the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda under the general title “When I will be free”, three district police officers of the metropolitan police appeared on the territory of my dacha near Alushta (due to the arrival of the tsar in Livadia) and announced to me that I am under their supervision ... And I looked at them as building material for my epic and at that time I was thinking about a sketch for her - the story "Bailiff Deryabin", which was written by me in the same 1910, in the autumn, upon arrival in Petersburg" *.
* Manuscript of the article by Sergeev-Tsensky "A word to the young" TsGALI, fund 1161.
In "Bailiff Deryabin" Sergeev-Tsensky brought out one of the pillars of the tsarist police, a figure far from ordinary. Deryabin is a typical tsarist executioner, a sadist, a bribe-taker, an extortionist, but at the same time he sees beyond his colleagues in the profession. He is a thinking cop, as critics rightly point out. He is clearly aware of his role in the state mechanism. “Russia is a police state, if you want to know,” Deryabin confesses. “And the bailiff is a spinal column, a fact! Just take it out, try it, it’s jelly right away! him in the red corner in a place of honor, a policeman, and we have him in the corner where they put the chamber pots. After reading Kuprin's stories "Garnet Bracelet" and "Bailiff Deryabin" by Sergeyev-Tsensky, Gorky wrote to one of his correspondents: "Wonderful. And I'm glad, I'm happy! Good literature begins"*.
* Quoted. according to Sobr. op. A.I. Kuprin in 6 volumes, volume 4, GIHL, M., 1958, p. 773.
Living in Alushta, Sergeev-Tsensky in his work was not limited to Crimean impressions. "The production material for a writer is a person," Sergeev-Tsensky liked to repeat, "and the more the writer sees and observes people, the better." Sergeev-Tsensky made especially many trips in 1906-1914. He visited the most remote corners of the country. A trip to Siberia in 1910 was inspired by "Bear Cub". The writer studied Siberian life in such a way that Vyacheslav Shishkov claimed that the author of "The Bear Cub" was a native Siberian.
The action of the story takes place in a small Siberian town in which the regiment is quartered. The life of the army in peacetime is the main theme of "Bear Cub". The writer sees the inability of tsarism to radically change the situation in the army, which was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War. The regiment is headed by the patriarchal-good-natured, but bogged down in the swamp of the narrow-minded, humiliated to embezzlement, Colonel Alpatov. It is no less sad that the fate of Alpatov and the appointment of a new regiment commander depend on the soulless, arrogant, terribly distant not only from the mass of soldiers, but even from the officers of the baron, who sends his protege "small, frail" Colonel Kurch to Alpatov's place.
Depth of thought, variety of themes, high skill are inherent in the works of Sergeev-Tsensky of the pre-war years. The southern landscape is dazzlingly colorful in the stories "The Leisurely Sun" and "Smiles". A high-ranking official, petrified in soul, is depicted satirically in the story “The Neighbor”, who is not able to “love” the “neighbors” who are far from him in their social status, and as for nature, “he was still more grateful to a man for a lamp and a bathroom than God for the sun and the sea." Pure, sublime love was sung by Sergeyev-Tsensky in the prose poem "Snow" and the poem "Nedra". A special place in his pre-war work is occupied by stories about children: "Sky", "Fear", "Lerik". The first of them, "Sky" (1908), evoked an enthusiastic response from VG Korolenko. According to the critic A.B. Derman, Korolenko shared with him his impressions of the story he had just read: “His eyes positively shone with admiration when he spoke of subtle art and simplicity, with which the writer, without sinning one iota against naturalness, did in this story, the bearer and herald of the highest truth of a three-year-old child"*. Faith in children, as N.I. Zamoshkin correctly noted, “described for him (Sergeev-Tsensky) a further path, different from the path of Andreev, Artsybashev, Sologub. Tsensky turned not to ...“ everything is permitted ”, but to the thought of the future man - a moral creative personality"**, that is, in essence, to the idea of the coming transformation of man. In 1912, A.M. Gorky wrote to the writer S.A. Nedolin (Across): “Judge Tsensky correctly: he is a very great writer, the largest, most interesting and reliable person in all modern literature. The sketches that he now writes are - to a big picture, and God forbid that he take it! I read it with great pleasure, following everything that he writes "***.
* Journal "Literary Review". No. 21 for 1940. p. 51.
** N.I. Zamoshkin. "Fortieth Anniversary (S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky)". October, No. 11, 1940, p. 169.
Gorky turned out to be a prophet: the works of Sergeev-Tsensky were indeed sketches for a large painting, The Transformation of Russia. Some of them were included in the epic: supplemented by the author "Bailiff Deryabin", the story "Heaven", which turned into the first chapter of "The Riddle of Coke", "Inclined Elena", "Valya".
Material for the story "Inclined Elena" (1913) Sergeev-Tsensky was given his trips around the country, in particular trips to the Donbass, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinoslav. The very intention of Sergeev-Tsensky to pit an engineer-manager of a mine and an industrial worker in an acute social conflict, to give a broad picture of hard labor and the terrible life of miners, marked a new step in the writer's work. Gorky, at the first personal meeting with Sergeev-Tsensky in 1928, was surprised how the writer, not being a mining engineer, could write a story from mining life with such knowledge of the matter. Having told the cruel truth about the life of the miners, Sergeyev-Tsensky thereby continued the best traditions of critical realism. The further literary fate of the protagonist of "Inclined Elena" engineer Matiytsev is interesting. After the Great October Socialist Revolution, Sergeev-Tsensky showed the transformation of Matiytsev into a hardened Bolshevik, into a staunch fighter for the people's happiness (in the stories "Court", "Memory of the Heart", "Date").
Sergeev-Tsensky turned to the image of the industrial proletariat under the influence of a new upsurge in the labor movement in the country. On January 26, 1914, in the newspaper Put Pravda, in the article The Revival of Realism, M. Kalinin wrote: “There are now much more writers depicting a “rough life” than in recent years. M. Gorky, Count A. Tolstoy, Bunin, Shmelev, Surguchev and others draw in their works not "fabulous distances", not mysterious "Tahitians", but real Russian life with all its horrors, everyday everyday life.Even Sergeev-Tsensky is one of the former and undoubtedly the most talented Russian decadents - is now definitely moving towards realism. All his latest works are imbued with a kind of cheerful attitude to the world "*.
* Sat. "Bolshevik press". Issue. III. Ed. VPSh and AON at the Central Committee of the CPSU, M., 1961. p. 402.
In the early 1910s, Sergeev-Tsensky crystallized the idea of a big picture from the life of Russian society - the epic "Transfiguration". Initially, the transformation of a person and Russian life in general, according to the author, seemed to him in images "purely intimate". In the Soviet years, the main parts of the epic were written, and it received a name that correctly reflects its essence - "The Transformation of Russia."
The novel "Valya" (1914) depicts that part of the Russian pre-war intelligentsia that was sensitive to all kinds of humiliation of human dignity, to beauty and ugliness in the world around it. At the same time, this intelligentsia was far from the people, from revolutionary ideas, was completely incapable of defending itself from "red-cheeked" businessmen like Ilya Lepetyuk or Fyodor Makukhin.
Already after the publication of the novel "Valya" in a separate book in 1923, Gorky wrote to Sergeyev-Tsensky: "... in this book, unfinished, requiring five books of continuation, but as if played on a pipe, you stood in front of me, a reader, a huge Russian artist, master of verbal mysteries, insightful visionary and landscape painter - a painter such as we do not have today. Your landscape is the most magnificent news in Russian literature "*.
* "My correspondence and acquaintance with A.M. Gorky".
The First World War interrupted the literary activity of Sergeev-Tsensky. The writer was called up as a reserve warrant officer in the Sevastopol militia. The military-chauvinist frenzy that gripped a significant part of the Russian intelligentsia did not affect Sergeyev-Tsensky. It was hard for him in this forced military service. However, during the year spent in Sevastopol, the author accumulated a large stock of impressions about the life of the army in wartime. The authorities realized that the writers drafted into the army were getting an accurate idea of the order that existed in the army, and in the summer of 1915 Sergeev-Tsensky was demobilized.
February and October 1917 caught Sergeyev-Tsensky in Alushta. Here he lived the years of the civil war, endured hunger and deprivation. The writer categorically refused to cooperate in the White Guard press, not to mention the service in the White Army. Not fully understanding the events that were taking place, he nevertheless did not drop the honor and dignity of the Russian democratic writer. This fact is noteworthy. In 1918, S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky and K.A. Trenev petitioned for the release of Laura Bagaturyants, the chairman of the underground Crimean Revolutionary Committee, who was captured by the White Guard counterintelligence. The brave Bolshevik was saved*.
* See the article by V. Shirokov "Soldiers of the Revolution" in the newspaper "Krymskaya Pravda" dated March 7, 1965.
A striking manifestation of Lenin's attitude towards the outstanding masters of the old culture was the issuance of letters of protection and mandates to Sergeev-Tsensky. The mandate dated May 8, 1919 stated: "The Alushta Military Revolutionary Committee hereby certifies that citizen Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky, as a great representative of Russian art and a wonderful Russian writer, is under the high patronage of Soviet power"*.
* The originals of the safe-conduct and mandates are in the Alushta Literary and Memorial Museum of Sergeev-Tsensky.
However, in the Crimea, power often changed hands. The writer and his wife (in 1919 Sergeev-Tsensky married the teacher Khristina Mikhailovna Bunina) suffered severe trials. White newspapers reported on the safe-conduct issued by the Bolsheviks to Tsensky. The attitude of the Wrangel authorities towards the writer was menacingly hostile. But there was no shortage of invitations from abroad. But Sergei Nikolaevich did not end up in the ranks of emigrants.
I have to go through what my people are going through, - he said to his relatives.
The writer did not go abroad even in the first years after the liberation of the Crimea, when famine struck the peninsula.
Having written very little during the years of the civil war, Sergeev-Tsensky, immediately after the liberation of the Crimea by the Soviet troops, again sits down at his desk. Already in February 1921, he wrote a long story "Miracle", which takes place in the Crimea occupied by the Germans. Events close in time are also discussed in the stories "In a Thunderstorm", "Cruelty", "Professor's Tale", "Dairy Farm" written by him in 1921-1922, and in the play "The Master".
The stories "Into a Thunderstorm" and "Cruelty" make a strong impression. They are distinguished by the persuasiveness that is inherent in books that tell about personal experiences or written in the hot pursuit of events. When analyzing them, it must be taken into account that they were written when Soviet realistic prose was still being formed, such fundamental works for Soviet literature as "Chapaev" and "Iron Stream" had not yet been published.
The story "Into the Thunderstorm" (1922) is based on the autobiographical death in 1921 from cholera of twelve-year-old Marusya, Khristina Mikhailovna's daughter from her first marriage. Why did a gifted, charming girl die? How to live if such wonderful children, slain by hunger and disease, die? This is the agonizing question that confronts the heroes of the story. Neither the path of the Nepman businessman, nor the departure abroad, which the lawyer Maxim Nikolayevich and his wife first think about, none of these paths is approved by the writer. The course of history is inevitable, the people came to power by right. Explicitly expressing the author's thoughts, Maxim Nikolaevich says: "And if the pieces on the chessboard of Russian history were again placed in the same, pre-revolutionary order, and if the players began to replay the game again, the result of the game would inevitably be the same ..." The pathos of the story, which represents a real requiem in prose - in condemning the passivity and confusion of the parents of the deceased girl.
The theme of the story "Cruelty" (1922) is the hasty evacuation of the Reds from the Crimea in June 1919, the death of six Bolshevik commissars on the way at the hands of a brutal fist. The path of each of the six to the revolution is traced and motivated. “After Andreev’s The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men, I don’t know a sharper thing,” * wrote V.P. Polonsky, an outstanding Soviet critic and editor of Novy Mir, who published Cruelty in this magazine, to the author of the story Cruelty. Telling the "prehistory" of the commissars, Tsensky relied on his richest life experience, and these are the best pages of the story. But at that time the writer knew little about the work of the Bolsheviks in the countryside. He exaggerated the scope of the excesses that were sometimes allowed in the village by the local authorities, he took the isolated and accidental for the typical.
Responding to Polonsky's criticisms, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote that his Beshuran (the village where the massacre of commissars takes place) cannot "cast a shadow over the entire great expanse from the Black Sea to the White Sea and from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean", that he depicted the episode struggle for Soviet power - "one of a million episodes of all shades" *.
However, the exclusivity of the events that took place in Beshurani is not specified in the story.
In "Cruelty" the bestial essence of kulaks is revealed. They are shown by the author as "... the most brutal, the most brutal, the most savage exploiters who have more than once restored the power of landowners, tsars, priests, capitalists in the history of other countries"*. Almost all the commissioners in "Cruelty" are drawn by the author with deep sympathy. But the submissiveness of the peasants to the kulaks is exaggerated. Nevertheless, the ending of the story should not obscure the positive that is contained in it. It is significant that the criticism of the 1920s, the time when the events of the civil war were not yet a distant past, and the kulaks existed in the countryside, did not cross out the merits of Cruelty. G. Yakubovsky wrote: “One can and should argue with him (Sergeev-Tsensky) ... but it is difficult and almost impossible to pass indifferently past his skill. fight against it..." D. Gorbov noted that the massacre of the commissars described in the story could have taken place in life, however, "this plausible episode, filed by the "big plan", as something supposedly exclusively characteristic of the era of the civil war, ceases to be plausible in such a role" ***. A. Lezhnev was also not satisfied with the outcome of the work. Nevertheless, A. Lezhnev notes that the narration in "Cruelty" "reaches such strength and expressiveness, which we rarely meet" ****.
* V.I. Lenin. Works. 4th edition, volume 28, page 39.
** Novy Mir, No. 4, 1928, p. 251.
**** Print and Revolution, No. 4, 1926.
In 1927, Sergeev-Tsensky published on the pages of the Krasnaya Nov magazine the novel Doomed to Die, depicting the Russian intelligentsia on the eve of the First World War. A passionate dispute rages on the pages of the novel between the champion of realism in art, the great artist Syromolotov, and the supporters of modernist trends - his son Vanya and the poet Khadzhi. The correctness of realists, supporters of an ideological art close to the people, and the inconsistency of their opponents are shown in the novel all the more convincingly because the reader sees their paintings, gets acquainted with their poems, with their ideas, with their creative laboratory. Compared with "Valya" in the novel "Doomed to Perish" the range of phenomena depicted is wider. Beginning with "Doomed to Perish", History is one of the main characters in the epic "Transformation of Russia".
In March 1928, Pravda published Gorky's letter to Romain Rolland, which was a review of Soviet literature. “It seems to me,” Gorky wrote, “that two absolutely amazing masters are now at the head of Russian fiction. These are Sergeev-Tsensky and Mikhail Prishvin ...” *. This exceptionally high rating was given after Sergeev-Tsensky published the novels "Valya" and "Doomed to Perish", the stories "Living Water", "Arakush", "Old Snake", the stories "Captain Konyaev", "Miracle".
* Quoted. by the book: Literary heritage. Gorky and Soviet writers. Unpublished correspondence. Volume 70. Ed. AN SSSR, 1963. p. 20.
The period that began in the mid-1920s and ended when Sergeev-Tsensky began work on the epic "Sevastopol Strada" can be called the "novelistic period" in the work of Sergeev-Tsensky. The stories of Sergeyev-Tsensky of those years reflected his impressions of trips to new buildings of the first five-year plans, to Moscow, the Caucasus and the Crimea. These works, distinguished by a deep understanding of contemporary reality, have withstood the test of time. “In the skill of the story,” N.I. Zamoshkin rightly notes, “Tsensky is as original and diverse as in his big things ... He makes his stories like small novels: they do not have etude, a sketch of some important , but of a brief moment. They contain a lot of matter, details of everyday life ... they are solid in construction. An acute collision, which is also characteristic of Tsensky's stories, never sticks out unprepared - it ripens inside everyday life, a whole complex of conditions "*.
* N.I. Zamoshkin. Unpublished monograph about S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. Archive of the Alushta literary memor. Museum of Sergeyev-Tsensky.
The writer returns to depicting the events of the civil war, but covers them in a different way. New heroes appear in his works: a Soviet teacher, a worker elected chairman of the city council ("Lighthouse in the Fog"), a Chuvash graduate student who is going to write the history of the culture of his native people ("Lucky").
One of the best stories by Sergeev-Tsensky "Water of Life" (1927) gained well-deserved fame. Its theme is the same as the theme of "Cruelty": the massacre of the crowd led by the White Guards against the Bolsheviks. But in this story, peasant women rescue a half-tormented Bolshevik. The people's love for their defenders and liberators is the water of life. Fyodor Titkov and his comrades are free from the random features that some of the heroes of the story "Cruelty" were endowed with.
In the stories of the 20s - 30s - "Infant Memory", "Arakush", "Lost Diary", "End of the World", "Crows", "Vulture and Count", "Fairytale Name" - Sergeev-Tsensky with love and subtle observation, with an excellent knowledge of child psychology, tells about the children of the Soviet country, children in whom he sees future heroes of labor, scientists, poets, composers, travelers. The writer is also concerned about the problem of educating an honest citizen and worker from a small person.
In the stories and short stories of this period, the writer opposes hardened individualistic proprietors, self-satisfied and ignorant philistines, anti-social elements "hiding from time". Sergeev-Tsensky combined some of his stories into a cycle under the expressive title "Small Owners" ("Bone in the Head", "Lighthouse in the Fog" and others).
In the center of the story "Lighthouse in the Fog" is the peasant Drok, an individualist by nature. How much humor in the descriptions of his family life, his forced leadership of the church council! The psychology of Gorse is revealed with merciless truthfulness and humor that turns into sharp satire. The climax of the story is the condemnation of Gorse by the mouth of his own brother after the fire. The misfortune helped Drok realize that he lived in a fog. Now his beacon is the Soviet government, which came to his aid in trouble. Drok's transformation has only just begun, but it is inevitable.
Later included in the "Transformation of Russia" novel "Search, always seek!" (1932-1934) - the largest work of Sergeev-Tsensky on Soviet reality both in terms of volume and significance. Consisting of two stories, the novel is a completely finished work. At the same time, he is an important link in the epic "Transformation of Russia". Imbued with a bright worldview, fanned by the romance of a revolutionary and labor feat, the novel belongs to the number of books born of a popular upsurge in the years of the first five-year plans. Its main character is inspired work for the benefit of socialist society. The novel traces the path of formation of young Soviet intellectuals. The author poetizes the very process of scientific creativity.
The first part of the novel is the lyrical story "Memory of the Heart". This is a song to the glory of a great love carried through many years and at the same time a sad story of a woman who realized too late the meaning of her meeting with a real person - Dautov.
The image of Dautov is a great success of the writer, crowning his tireless desire to give a vivid image of a positive hero. The nobility of Dautov's ideals and deeds is revealed in his behavior in the revolutionary underground, in hard labor and in exile, at the front, in his attitude towards Serafima Petrovna, in his paternal feeling for little Tanya. In the affairs of the Bolshevik Party, its active fighter Dautov sees the realization of the best ideals of mankind, the concrete embodiment of the progress of world culture. "This is us, we will start a new historical period on earth - the period of man!" Dautov says.
A song in praise of labor sounds in the second part of the novel - the story "The Riddle of Coke". The chapters devoted to childhood, youth and student years of Leni Slesarev are the stages of his formation as a person, citizen, scientist. A worthy "rival" of Leni Slesarev in solving the "mystery of coke" is his closest friend Andrey Shamov. Like Lenya, he is talented, stubborn, hardworking. And yet, Lenya Slesarev made a scientific and technical discovery. Shamov followed the usual path learned from his teachers. His opponent made a bold "jump over hundreds of formulas", applied the laws of physics where the methods of chemical analysis had previously dominated. Lenya is a bold innovator (this is where the "artistic" imagination developed in him since childhood came in handy). He shows great determination. Lenya perfectly understands the importance of coke for the industrialization of the country and works for a lofty goal. Lenya is attracted by the Dneproges, but he will not change his specialty, as Kachka did, he will not leave the dream of conquering coke for the sake of a brilliant career in another field of science.
The history of the creation of the novel is interesting.
During the years of the first five-year plan, massive accidents began at the country's coke plants. One of their reasons was that due to the acute shortage of coking coals, coals of other grades were put into use. The iron smelting plan was thwarted. In 1932, the Pravda newspaper called for putting an end to the backwardness of the coke industry in leading articles: "Ores and coke!", "Coke and blast furnace ore!", "Remove shame from ferrous metallurgy!"
In the same year, young scientists Leonid Sapozhnikov and his wife Lyubov Bazilevich proposed a plastometric method for determining the coking capacity of coal. He played an outstanding role in keeping coke ovens running smoothly. The history of the discovery of this method formed the basis of the entire "research and production" part of the novel. In the summer of 1934 Sergeev-Tsensky visited scientific institutes and factories in Dnepropetrovsk. L.M. Sapozhnikov, whose role in the discovery was especially great and whose whole life was well known to the writer, became the prototype of Leni Slesarev. Now Leonid Mikhailovich Sapozhnikov is a prominent Soviet coking scientist, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Valya and Doomed to Perish are followed in the epic by two novels devoted to the military-historical theme. The action of the novel "Zauryad-Regiment" (1934) takes place in the first year of the World War in the militia squad of Sevastopol. The novel absorbed many of the writer's personal impressions, and its central character, Ensign Liventsev, often does what Sergeev-Tsensky himself did in 1905 and 1914-1915. And yet the image of Liventsev is only partly autobiographical.
In "Zauryad-regiment" Sergeev-Tsensky depicts the order and customs of the tsarist army, which entered into a war of unprecedented scope. A gallery of ordinary military men, their ordinary ladies, ordinary officials, etc. crowns an episodic, but quite expressive image of an ordinary king. But in the ranks of the army, plunged by tsarism into an unjust imperialist war in order to "defend millions of Russians against millions of Germans," there were not only ordinary warriors. In the novel Fierce Winter (1936), the same regiment (former retinue), which underwent thorough training in the rear under the leadership of an energetic and capable commander, takes part in military operations in Galicia in the winter of 1915-1916. Along with exposing the imperialist, anti-people nature of the war, the author is concerned about the topic of command and control, talent and mediocrity of commanders. Work on the image of the people at war, on battle scenes and images of military leaders prepared Sergeev-Tsensky to take on the huge topic of the heroic defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War.
In 1936, Sergeev-Tsensky began work on a book for older children about the heroic defense of Sevastopol in 1854-1855. In the course of the work, the author's intention changed, and in a relatively short time - two and a half years - Sergeev-Tsensky wrote the epic novel "Sevastopol Strada" in one hundred printed sheets. In 1941, simultaneously with "Quiet Don" by M.A. Sholokhov and "Walking through the torments" by A.N. Tolstoy, the epic was awarded the State Prize of the first degree. The epic has been translated into many languages and received worldwide recognition.
The name of the epic is much narrower than its content. This is a book about the entire Crimean War, this is a real encyclopedia of Russian pre-reform life. The writer leads the reader not only along the bastions of the besieged Sevastopol - he transfers the action to St. Petersburg and London, to Moscow and Paris, to Constantinople and Vienna, to sailors' dugouts, to the Russian fortress village and the offices of outstanding thinkers. The author's great success was the images of admirals Nakhimov and Kornilov, officers Khlaponin and Stetsenko, privates Chernobrovkin, Cats and Shevchenko, military engineer Totleben, the great surgeon Pirogov, the first Russian sisters of mercy, patriotic residents of the city. In a satirically revealing way, the negative characters of the epic are given: the Russian tsar and European monarchs, mediocre military leaders of the Russian and foreign armies, landowners-serfs, gendarmes, quartermasters-stealers. The rebuff to the invaders cost the people a huge effort, and this justifies the likening of the defense of Sevastopol to peasant suffering - hard work in the fields.
The influence of The Sevastopol Harbor and Sergeev-Tsensky's novels about the First World War (Zauryad-Regiment and Fierce Winter) on Soviet historical prose is generally recognized.
“The success of the historical novel of the thirties,” writes S.M. Petrov, also reflected the great epic scope of the talent of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, his ability to build complex compositions, freely moving from artistic images and paintings to journalism and historical commentaries "* .
* History of Russian Soviet Literature. Volume II. Ed. Academy of Sciences of the USSR. M., 1960, p. 67.
Numerous reviews of grateful readers were a high reward for the writer for his work. The flow of reader letters about the patriotic epic of Sergeev-Tsensky during the years of the war with Nazi Germany especially increased. "Your "Sevastopol Strada" is fighting next to us. She is defending Sevastopol," the Black Sea sailors wrote to Sergeyev-Tsensky in 1942 from the besieged city.
Here are the lines from a letter from a reader from Kyiv, comrade. G. Zosimovich:
“From a young age, I was a big fan of your work. But I especially appreciated all the beauty, all the strength of it, when in the difficult years of the war I stayed with my four-year-old daughter in Kyiv occupied by the Germans. suffering! In a difficult time of oppression and darkness, such feelings could only be evoked by a truly artistic work. Until now, The Sevastopol Strada has remained for me the dearest, most beloved book "*.
* Letter to S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, 1955. Archive of the Alushta literary memor. Museum of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky.
From the first days of the war, Sergeev-Tsensky, with his pen, has been participating in the nationwide struggle against the hated enemy. Very rarely speaking as a publicist, Sergeev-Tsensky during the war years collaborated in sixteen central and peripheral publications. On June 28, 1941, the Krasny Krym newspaper published his article "We make our history ourselves", calling on fellow citizens to rally around the party and government in the fight against a terrible enemy, "trying to turn the wheel of our history back." In the harsh year of 1941, his articles "The Arithmetic of War", "To You, Moscow", "Sevastopol" - in "Pravda", "Russian Sailors" - in "Izvestia", "Courageous Images of Our Ancestors" - in "Red Star" appeared. In subsequent years, the writer also appeared in the magazines "Bolshevik", "Krasnoarmeyets", "Krasnoflotets" and other publications.
Being evacuated in Moscow, then in Kuibyshev and Alma-Ata, the writer works with full exertion, meets with front-line soldiers, speaks to soldiers leaving for the front, and corresponds with them. Sergeev-Tsensky bows his gray head before the feat of the Soviet people, unprecedented in the history of mankind. With his journalistic articles, he responds to the most important events in the life of the country. The fiery and passionate journalism of Sergeev-Tsensky has a broad historical perspective. He gives heroic examples from Russian history, resurrects the images of the ancestors of the courageous defenders of the Russian land.
In the article "Greatness of Spirit" Sergeev-Tsensky wrote:
"People die - the people are immortal, and through all the centuries known to historians, our people carried their wonderful greatness of spirit.
"Let's lay down our bones! Let's not disgrace the Russian land! .." - these famous words are over a thousand years old. We will not disgrace either the Russian land or the Russian name - here it is, the testament of millennia! And Hitler's shameless gang wanted to deal with such a people in a few weeks!
During the war, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote many stories. The story "The Sly Girl", first published in Pravda, went through ten editions. His heroine Zina embodied the best features of the Russian national character. The surgeon Ivan Petrovich from the story "The Old Doctor" prefers death to cooperation with enemies. The unbreakable friendship of the peoples of our country is sung by the story "At the Edge of the Funnel".
In April-May 1942, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote "Brusilovsky Breakthrough" a novel about the offensive of Russian troops in 1916, which marked the beginning of a turning point in the course of the World War. Talented and indecisive military leaders in the novel are opposed by the talented Russian commander Alexei Nikolaevich Brusilov. The theme of military art, which occupies such a prominent place in the "Sevastopol Strada", receives its further development in the novel. The novel immediately gained wide popularity and was translated into foreign languages.
In 1943-1944, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote two more novels, The Guns Are Putting Up and The Guns Have Spoken, which, like Brusilov's Breakthrough, continued the epic The Transformation of Russia. The first novel depicts the setting in which World War I broke out. The novel "The Guns Have Spoken" is dedicated to the first months of the World War. Its action is deployed on the fronts of Galicia and East Prussia, as well as in the rear. In these two novels, the military theme and the theme of art are closely intertwined, their main character is the artist Alexei Fomich Syromolotov.
In 1943, the patriotic writer, a brilliant successor to the best traditions of classical Russian literature, was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Sergeev-Tsensky was also awarded the degree of Doctor of Philology.
Sergeev-Tsensky is following the events in the Crimea with special attention. On May 10, 1944, on the day of the liberation of Sevastopol, he appeared on the pages of Izvestia with a long article in which he wrote:
"Joy after joy gave us in the past year the heroism of our soldiers, and, finally, here it is, a new joy: the whole Crimea again became ours, Soviet!"
In August 1944 Sergeev-Tsensky returned to Alushta.
Sergeev-Tsensky welcomed the 20th Congress of the CPSU that opened in Moscow with a long article entitled "The Joy of Creativity." The article is full of deep thoughts about the writer's place and duty in a society building communism.
The main work of the writer in the post-war years was the work to complete the epic "Transformation of Russia". The novel "Morning Explosion" was written, the story "Court", together with the pre-revolutionary story "Inclined Elena", which made up the novel "Transformation of a Man", the sketch "Lenin in August 1914" was written, a new edition of "Bailiff Deryabin" was created. In the last year of his life, the writer began work on the novel "Spring in the Crimea" and on the epilogue of the epic story "Date".
The "Court" paints a stunning picture of hard labor miner's life in pre-revolutionary Russia. And now the hero of "Inclined Helen" is not alone - the young Bolshevik Kolya Khudoley contributes to his spiritual transformation.
In the novel "Morning Explosion" a panorama of "sailor" and "officer" Sevastopol is developed before the revolutionary events of 1917. The real event - the explosion of the battleship "Empress Maria" in the Sevastopol Bay on October 7, 1916 - is, as it were, a harbinger of an even more grandiose "explosion" - the collapse of the Russian autocracy in 1917. After reading The Morning Explosion, Sholokhov telegraphed Sergeev-Tsensky: "I read The Morning Explosion with true pleasure. I bow my head in wonder and gratitude before your mighty, ageless Russian talent"*.
* October, No. 9, 1955, p. 155.
From showing in the epic the events of the First World War and the ever-growing revolutionary movement in Russia, Sergeev-Tsensky naturally approached the reconstruction of the image of the brilliant leader of the revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In the sketch "Lenin in August 1914" (1956), for the first time in the work of Sergeyev-Tsensky, the grandiose figure of Lenin appears. The writer treated the work on recreating the image of the leader with great responsibility. He read and studied a huge number of documents, met with people who personally knew Ilyich. A brilliant thinker and revolutionary, a courageous fighter, principled in every act, a modest and sensitive person - this is how Vladimir Ilyich appears on the pages of the sketch.
The epic "Transformation of Russia", first released by a separate edition of Krymizdat in 1956-1959, includes twelve novels, three stories and two studies.
For forty-six years, a majestic epic has been created. Sergeev-Tsensky, in his words, "decided to write this bulk in the form of separate novels and stories" because of the exceptional complexity of the content of the epic. “I want,” he said, “to show a picture of the transformation of old Russia into the USSR.”* Over the past decades, the creative plans of the writer have changed more than once, and the author himself has changed, having passed the path from critical realism to socialist realism. The decisive factor in changing his plans was life itself.
The epic "Transformation of Russia" is living evidence of the successive connection between the works of Soviet literature and the best traditions of Russian classical literature. Sergeev-Tsensky once said:
"The theme of the transformation of Russia is not new in our literature. What is Gogol's Dead Souls? This is also an attempt to show the transformation. The second volume was not a success for the great Gogol. them I inherited the theme.
If there had not been a revolution, then I would not have coped with the topic, because in what plan should this transformation be, just think of it! What needed to be transformed - tsarist Russia, bourgeois mores - this was in life. This is what the first novels are about. Then - the forces that will transform, and who collects them, and then the transformation itself and its results in people and their deeds. Revolutionary reality itself was needed in order to depict it truthfully and vividly.
* Quoted. according to the memoirs of G.S. Makarenko in the book: Sergeev-Tsensky in life and work, Tambov book publishing house, 1963, pp. 124-125.
Despite the large volume, the epic "Transformation of Russia" is a single whole both in its main idea and in its composition.
The epic has three main themes. The theme "War and the People" is the theme of the novels about the First World War: "Zauryad-Regiment", "Fierce Winter", "Brusilovsky Breakthrough" ("Stormy Spring" and "Hot Summer"). The protagonist of these works is Nikolai Ivanovich Liventsev, a participant in the First World War, who had a hard time with the defeat of the Russian army. In the story "Date", which takes place in 1934, Liventsev is already a professor of mathematics, a communist scientist.
"Revolution and the people" - this is the theme of "Transformation of Man", "Search, always seek!", the study "Lenin in August 1914", "Captain Konyaev", "Lions and Suns", "Date". Through most of these works, the image of an engineer, later a communist, Matiytsev-Dautov, passes through. The events of the February Revolution in Petrograd and Sevastopol are devoted to the story "Captain Konyaev" and "Lions and the Sun". Their characters are doomed to death by history - the terry nationalist and monarchist Konyaev, the huckster-speculator Poleznov. They are opposed by the working people, welcoming the fall of the Romanov dynasty: "And in the streets, illumined by an unprecedented sun, the revolution sparkled, reared, foamed, rumbled, thundered and sang."
The theme "Art and the people" was developed in the novels "Doomed to perish", "The guns are put forward", "The guns started talking", "Morning explosion", "Spring in the Crimea". In these works, the author assigned a major role to the artist Syromolotov. Admiring the novel Doomed to Perish, Gorky wrote to Sergeev-Tsensky: "Your old man Syromolotov is monumental."* Unlike Liventsev and Matiytsev, Syromolotov appears on the pages of the epic as a man of advanced years, a venerable artist. The path of Syromolotov is especially difficult, but in the end the old artist naturally and naturally approaches the heroes who are marching towards the revolution. There is not only a civil, but also a creative transformation of the old master. In the epic, his creative laboratory is revealed, the process of the birth of each of his paintings is shown. On the example of Syromolotov, Sergeev-Tsensky showed the transition to the side of the socialist revolution of the best representatives of the old intelligentsia.
* "My correspondence and acquaintance with A.M. Gorky".
Sergeev-Tsensky intended to include several more novels in the epic, in which the images of Syromolotov, Liventsev, Matiytsev-Dautov and others were to be further developed. The transition of Liventsev among the best representatives of the Russian army to the side of October was to be shown in the novel "Mature Autumn". The sketches of the novels "The Arrival of Lenin" and "The Great October" have been preserved, in which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was to become the central character. In them, the author intended to depict the meeting of the artist Syromolotov with the great leader of the revolution. Two works included in the epic ("Spring in the Crimea" and "Date") remained unfinished.
In the article "Outstanding Work of the 20th Century" Academician V. Vinogradov, writers M. Sholokhov and E. Permitin, People's Artists of the USSR A. Gerasimov and N. Tomsky, People's Artist of the RSFSR A. Zhiltsov, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences M. Khrapchenko wrote:
"The epic strikes both with the grandeur of the idea, the depth of the ideological content, and artistic skill. In it, the writer truthfully and vividly painted an epoch-making picture of the life of our people in the first quarter of the 20th century, showed historical events that dramatically influenced the fate of Russia: three wars and three revolutions. The bogatyr artist painted a gigantic canvas about how, by the will of the revolutionary masses, led by the Communist Party and the great Lenin, monarchist Russia was transformed into socialist Russia.
The image of V.I. Lenin is the indisputable success of the writer.
One of the main themes of the epic - war and the people - received a bright, figurative solution. No one in Russian literature has exposed with such artistic force and passion the abominations and crimes against humanity of the organizers of the world imperialist slaughter, as S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky did. In this regard, the "Transformation of Russia" is a powerful weapon in the hands of our contemporaries in their struggle for peace, for the prevention of a new world war.
Deeply and comprehensively, from the Marxist-Leninist positions, the writer developed the second main theme of the epic: the relationship of art to reality, the theme - the artist and the people - is one of the most acute and pressing topics of today ...
We are firmly convinced that the epic "Transformation of Russia" by S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky ... is an outstanding work of not only Soviet, but also world literature of the 20th century "*.
In 1955, the country celebrated the 80th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky. His many years of literary and civil feat was crowned with the highest award - the Order of Lenin. In his speeches at solemn meetings in Simferopol and Alushta, the writer expressed his heartfelt gratitude to the party and the government, to all readers for the high appreciation of his work. Sergeev-Tsensky received hundreds of congratulatory letters and telegrams from all over the country and from abroad.
On December 3, 1958, at the age of 84, after a severe long illness, Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky died in Alushta. An obituary published in Pravda said: "The oldest, outstanding writer, academician Sergei Nikolayevich Sergeev-Tsensky, has died, before whose mighty, ageless Russian talent millions of sympathetic Soviet readers bow their heads in gratitude."*
V.Kozlov, F.Putnin
Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky (Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev)
Born in the village of Preobrazhensky, Tambov province, in the family of a zemstvo teacher, a retired captain, a participant in the Sevastopol defense in 1854-1855. My father had a rich library. He read Krylov, Lermontov, Pushkin, wrote poems, which his father viewed with approval. Then, after graduating from the teacher's institute in Glukhov with a gold medal, he was appointed to the Nemirovskaya gymnasium in the Kiev province as a teacher of Russian language and literature, taught for almost ten years and, starting in 1898, simultaneously wrote and published the first stories. For a whole year he served in the 19th Kostroma Infantry Regiment, received the rank of ensign of the reserve and again began teaching in Kamenetz-Podolsk, then moved to Kupyansk as a teacher of history and geography. He entered Kharkiv University as a volunteer, working as a tutor for wealthy families, but soon Kharkiv University was closed due to student strikes, and the documents were returned. Then he received the first literary fee for a fairy tale published in the children's magazine Reading Room of the People's School (December 1898). The stories “I forgot”, “The Bell”, “Abstract of history” appeared in print, then in Spassk, Ryazan province, Sergeev, a teacher at the city school, published the story “Tundra”, in which he showed the tragic love of a deceived woman. "Tundra" appeared in the January issue of "Russian Thought", and the story "Fate is lying!" - in the January issue of Russkiy Vestnik. S.N. Sergeev taught physics, natural science, read Chekhov's works in class, was interested in almost all branches of knowledge and spoke about it enthusiastically and passionately. At the same time, his works began to appear more and more often. S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky was so in love with the beautiful Tsna River that he made its name part of his writer's family.
On the eve of the revolution of 1905, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote and published the story "My friend", in which he spoke about a company commander who was sent to pacify the striking workers and refused to shoot at them. The story accidentally caught the eye of Leo Tolstoy, he read it with approval and recommended that the publisher I. Gorbunov-Posadov print it as a separate edition, which happened in 1906. At the same time, Sergeev-Tsensky completed work on the story "The Garden", which opened a new artist as a bright painter and one of the creators of a full-fledged hero from the people, fighting for the people's truth and justice with the rich owners of the land.
On February 20, 1905, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote to the publisher and critic V.S. Mirolyubov about the mournful fate of his writings:
“It seems that in the editorial office of your magazine there was my story“ My friend ”(the theme is the revolt of the workers and its pacification with volleys), but they sent it back, motivating this by the fact that at the present time“ there is nothing to think about its placement. With the same success, "My friend" bypassed several more editions and now rests in the table or basket of "Our Life". It was a “protesting” story, but the fate of such protests, unfortunately, has long been known to me, and protesting within the framework of what is permitted by censorship is somehow even ridiculous.
At present, in the editorial office of the World of God lies my rather large one - in 31/2 ovens. sheet - the story "Garden"; I confess that I do not particularly hope to see him in print, and only because the hero himself is protesting.
God grant that someday we will stop stuttering and laugh at our tongue-tied tongue” (Head of the department of the IRLI. Archive of V.S. Mirolyubov. F. 185. Op. 1. No. 1051).
Aleksey Shevardin - the hero of the story "The Garden" - is a strong, literate man, loves the land, graduated from an agricultural school, but the land is owned by the count, "small" and "annoyingly unnecessary", "he interfered with life all around." How to turn around here so that people stop being slaves? Shevardin repeatedly appeals to people with appeals: “Yes, how much more - a hundred years, a thousand years - will you be silent? You are a million pound bell! With what lever can you swing and grab the sides with your tongue so that the air trembles around? All life, in his opinion, could be “one luxurious garden”, but there is nothing like that, “there are no schools, no hospitals, no beauty, no meaning - one continuous “no”. Aleksey Shevardin kills the count and calls for a fight, but remains alone, he sees the count in the royal crown, which means that tsarism has outlived its usefulness.
But soon these calls for the struggle of Alexei Shevardin seemed to S. Sergeev-Tsensky "tongue-tied", he did not laugh at this, but bitterly regretted that life did not respond to his calls. The writer became interested in modernism, which was popular at that time, joined the Rosehip, began to write manneredly and pretentiously, imitating the Symbolists.
In a letter to Mirolyubov, feeling that he was betraying realism, he wrote: “Sinful - I love the balancing act of moods, the glow of metaphors, the jump over the obstacles of everyday life. I can't stand simplicity...
And in such a terrible turmoil, when nothing simple is left in life ... You are talking about simplicity ”(Ibid.).
In the first issue of the almanac Rosehip (1907), S. Sergeev-Tsensky published the story Forest Swamp, at the same time the novel Babaev appeared in the Russian Thought magazine (1907. No. 1, 2, 12). These works reflected pictures of living reality, full of popular protest and patience: Lieutenant Babaev, sent with a detachment to pacify the rebellious peasants, fell into a hysterical fit at the sight of the flogged peasants, and the just punished "huge peasant" carefully hugged him and sympathetically said to him: "Barin! Our blue dove! Killed like... Nothing! Listen, nothing! We endure…”
Babaev can reproach his company commander for the rough treatment of the soldiers, but he will go to flog the rebellious peasants; may fall into hysterics at the sight of the peasants punished by him and may shoot three workers captured at the barricades. He is complex and contradictory, and there is no place for him in life: he is killed by a protesting girl who believes in the renewal of life.
S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky did not belong to any party, including a literary one, and therefore criticism was heard from both the realists and the symbolists. He sharply opposed critical attacks that did not understand his convictions: “I’m just an artist - moreover, I’m just studying art, and I consider myself an artist relatively - but let me be allowed to get away from the tutelage of political parties ... Every magazine and every newspaper why - they considered it their duty to acquire hooligan reviewers who are more toothy (they must be chosen by their teeth) - and I personally speak only for myself - I do not understand at all who needs this. A writer I respected told me: it’s still good that they scold you, but when they are completely silent, then it’s bad ”(Lebed. 1908. No. 1. P. 33). And in a letter to V.S. Sergeev-Tsensky only confirmed his creative position to Mirolyubov: “You read newspapers and do not believe your eyes. How many of our mutual acquaintances flashed and still flashes in roles unusual for them, how life has broken and broken everyone, how disgusting it has become to live in the world in general and in liquidated Russia in particular ”(Head of the department of the IRLI. Archive of V.S. Mirolyubov. F. 185 (Inventory 1, No. 1051).
In 1908, Sergeev-Tsensky wrote the story “The Sorrow of the Fields” (Rose rose. 1909. Book 9), in which the image of the good-natured hero Nikita is remembered, he is “a powerful, dark, plowing, sowing, harvesting, fruit-bearing creature of the fields”, here both sympathy for the countryside and faith in the future of Russia manifested itself.
“The Sorrow of the Fields” attracted the attention of Maxim Gorky, since then he has carefully watched the work of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, noting the "handsome and rapid growth" of the writer, calling him "a very great writer", "the largest, most interesting and reliable person" in Russian literature. At this time, such works by Sergeev-Tsensky appeared in print as the novels "Movements" (Northern Thought. 1910. No. 1-3, 6), "Inclined Elena", "Bear Cub", in which the writer returned to realistic writing, to social motives, the language has become a pure and full-fledged Russian language, “without the balancing act of moods” and the “glow of metaphors” that fascinated him quite recently.
They paid attention to the works of S. Sergeev-Tsensky and critics of various directions, almost in each of their articles they asked themselves: who is this new, so controversial writer? And everyone answered in their own way - A.G. Gornfeld, A. Derman, Yu. Aikhenwald, K. Chukovsky. In 1910 Vl. P. Kranichfeld (1865-1918; from a noble family) in the article "In the world of ideas and images" wrote:
“With the advent of the novel by Sergeev-Tsensky “Movement”, it can be said with confidence that the “student years” of its gifted author are over ... Until recently and so often, surprising readers with the playful extravagance of his creative methods, now Sergeev-Tsensky stands before us as a fully formed large and an original artist, whose magnificently unfolded talent cannot be ignored by criticism ... In "Movements" Sergeev-Tsensky for the first time showed himself in all respects as a great artist, determined in all respects, with a subtle sense of life and the poetry of nature and with bold original techniques of creativity ... Sergeev-Tsensky had, of course, before things that riveted attention with their artistic merit. Even from his early stories, some then already testified to the remarkable talent of the novice writer ... It can be said that even the unsuccessful works of Sergeev-Tsensky ... “Coastal”, the play “Death” - have always been marked by a great talent, eagerly seeking, but in the data, according to at least in cases of not finding ...
This imbalance of the artist, from whom in each of his new works one could expect some new, completely unexpected extravagance, served, one might think, as the reason why criticism until recently hushed up his work. A whole critical literature has already been created about many of the young and incomparably weakest associates of Sergeev-Tsensky in the field of the Russian artistic word, while about Sergeev-Tsensky one can hardly indicate more than three or four serious articles, and even those give an assessment of only individual of his works. The artist in all his spiritual form, in his searches and achievements, is completely unappreciated by criticism” (Modern World, 1911, No. 1).
Vl. Kranihfeld realized that the writer had hit a new road, he was especially good when he painted landscapes; he had a great craving for painting, because even as a child the boy confessed to his father that he was drawn to writing and painting. “Unrestrained in his search for new colors, new lines and forms,” wrote Vl. Kranichfeld, - Sergeev-Tsensky, with all his deviations to the sides, managed to achieve amazing results. In landscape painting, among our modern writers, he has no rival. In his landscapes, in full splendor, his amazing sensitivity to colors, to their mysterious combinations and transitions, is expressed. There is so much air and sky in them that they seem to be saturated with light, and each colorful spot, in full harmonic coherence with the whole picture, lives its own special, integral and complete life. Here, in the midst of this rich, peculiar life of colors, a miraculous rebirth of man himself takes place.
In the book "Critical Studies" (St. Petersburg, 1912) E.A. Koltonovskaya (1870-1952) attributed the work of Sergeev-Tsensky, like the work of B. Zaitsev, A. Tolstoy, A. Remizov, to "lyrical realism", to "neo-realism", in contrast to the work of L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoevsky, whom she counted as representatives of “everyday”, “material” realism, noting in the work of Sergeev-Tsensky: “Growth is heroic. The progress in the degree of the artist's ability to dispose of his own forces is amazing. D. Philosophers in the article "Dead Men and Beasts" calls on Sergeev-Tsensky, "having overcome naturalism", to go "to the present, i.e., symbolic realism." A.G. Gornfeld (1867-1941) in 1913 gave a detailed report on the work of Sergeev-Tsensky, who soon answered criticism with a letter: “Your article is the only thing what is said about me essentially…»
Sergeev-Tsensky settled in Alushta, met Kuprin, Gorky, Repin, Chukovsky and many prominent figures in literature and art.
But the main thing is that Sergeev-Tsensky conceived and began to collect materials in a series of novels "Transfiguration". The poem “Valya” (“Transfiguration”) was written in 1912, in which, without any “extravagances”, the artist declared that it was impossible to live like this any longer, changes were needed, new people were needed who could remake living conditions.
Sergeev-Tsensky wrote the poem "Nedra", the stories "Near", "Near the Sea", "The Slow Sun", "The Bell", the story "Lerik", and thoughts revolved around the theme of the second novel - to write about the miners, about their dramatic fate. This is how the novels "Inclined Elena" and "Court" appeared.
During the outbreak of the First World War, S. Sergeev-Tsensky was mobilized as an ensign of the reserve, but a year later, in 1915, he was fired on vacation, but, returning to Alushta, he fell silent, the war that broke out so much seemed to him "unheard of and disgusting massacre" , "complete nonsense, the game of two-year-old babies." The year was 1917, and in a letter to Gorky he wrote that this was not a war, but "some kind of continuous suffocating gas", "everything in the world is too disgusting."
Biographers have calculated that S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky for many years of his life, working on the epic "Transformation of Russia", wrote 17 novels and short stories: "Valya", "Bailiff Deryabin", "Transformation of a Man", "Doomed to Die", "Zauryad-Regiment", " Lenin in August 1914”, “The guns put forward”, “The guns spoke”, “Fierce winter”, “Stormy spring”, “Hot summer”, “Morning explosion”, “Captain Konyaev”, “Lions and the sun”, “Spring in the Crimea”, “Search, always seek!”, “Date” – three generations of Russian characters over the thirty years of the twentieth century participated in the changes in Russian life, political, social, economic…
Gorky, after reading several books of the epic cycle after the revolution, wrote to Sergeyev-Tsensky:
“I read “Transfiguration”, I am delighted, excited, - you wrote a very good book, S.N., very much! Powerfully takes over the soul and revolts the mind, like everything good, real Russian. It always has such an effect on me: my heart is glad to tears, exults: oh, how good it is and how much ours, Russian, mine. And the mind gets angry, screams ferociously: why, this is a formless confusion of blind feelings, the most absurd squalor, you can’t live with this, you won’t create any “progress”! and excessively, over the edge, and their content spills into the soul of the reader with caustic moisture, cruelly exciting. You read, as if listening to music, admire your lyrical, multicolored painting, and rise in your soul, in her memory, something very big with a high hot wave.
In the past I have read your books very attentively, I seem to have felt the honest and bold intensity of your quest for form, but I cannot say that V.’s word completely reached me, I didn’t understand a lot and something made me angry, it seemed like deliberate outrageousness. And in this book, not finished, requiring five books of continuation, but as if played on a pipe, you stood in front of me, the reader, a great Russian artist, the lord of verbal secrets, an insightful visionary and landscape painter, a painter such as we do not have today. Your landscape is the most magnificent piece of news in Russian literature. I can say this, because I saw the places you draw well. Probably, smart people and "red-cheeked" will tell you: "This is panpsychism." Don't believe. It's just a real, genuine art ... Will you write a book further? This is absolutely necessary. The beginning obliges you to continue this epic to the extent of "War and Peace". I wish you cheerfulness, I firmly shake your hand. You are a very great writer, very…”
In the 1920s, Sergeev-Tsensky was subjected to criticism from the proletkultists, napostovites, official communist criticism for his stories, novels and novels. With difficulty, his novels made their way to the press, and critics, reviewers, and publishers stood in their way to the reader. A brief review of the first book of the epic Transformation of Russia appeared in the Izvestia newspaper: “A boring, unnecessary novel about boring people. The author places his characters outside of society, outside of life. These are small people with small interests, or rather, without them, they simply “vegetate” on earth. The complete absence of rich strokes and vibrant colors. And who could possibly need such "works" (1926. November 18). In the journal "At a Literary Post" critic J. Elsberg in the article "Counter-revolutionary allegorical everydayism. Creativity S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky" wrote: "In the person of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, we have a writer who is a spokesman for naked counter-revolutionary sentiments ”(1927. No. 22-23). And this sounded almost everywhere, which played its natural prohibitive role in the publication of the second book of the epic - "Doomed to perish".
Sergeev-Tsensky turned to A.M. for help. Gorky: in December 1926, due to the fact that the State Publishing House refused to publish the novel, he wrote: “The fact is that the first part was published by one editor, a certain Nikolaev, and now there is another one - a certain Beskin, and the first one was so kind , so Olympicly inaccessible and the second one ... Obviously, under the influence of your opinion about my book in No. 12 “Nov. of the world ", an article by Zamoshkin appeared, who reacted to the "Transfiguration" quite tolerantly and even with praise. The novel lay dormant for three years. Sergeev-Tsensky sent a telegram to Gorky in Moscow: “Dear Alexei Maksimovich. I kindly ask you to facilitate the release of my novel "Doomed to Perish" in the MTP (Moscow Association of Writers), detained by Kerzhentsev's assistant Rosenthal, as well as another book, "Poet and Poetess", detained in the "Federation". In a letter to Gorky, Sergeev-Tsensky described in detail his publishing history and the persecution raised by “Mashbitz, Gelfond, Elsberg, Rosenthal and others who sign with the same letters or do not sign at all, who themselves are clearly ashamed of their attacks ...”.
Gorky and Sergeev-Tsensky overcame the attacks of critics and publishers, and the novels Doomed to Perish (1927), Zauryad-Regiment (1934), Search, always search! (1935), "Fierce Winter" (1936) with the blessing of A.M. Gorky were published.
But the attacks continued. On May 24, 1935, Literaturnaya Gazeta published an article by A. Kotlyar “Philosophy of Philistine”, in which S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, as if continuing to smash the Izvestia newspaper and the magazine At the Literary Post.
In the 30s, the writer, having visited Sevastopol again, looked with interest at Malakhov Kurgan, at the Ship and the North Side, visited the Historical Boulevard, the cathedral where Admirals Kornilov, Istomin, Nakhimov are buried, in the museum, in the library. I read materials about the Battle of Sevastopol, and the Crimean War in all its richness entered the soul of the writer, he decided to write about the heroic days of the people's battle. Sergeev-Tsensky remembered Pushkin's words from a letter to Gnedich: The shadow of Svyatoslav wanders without being sung, you once wrote to me. And Vladimir? And Mstislav? And Donskoy?
And Yermak? And Pozharsky? The history of the people belongs to the poet." Thus began the "Sevastopol Strada", and admirals, and sailors, and officers, and the civilian population came to life in the eyes of the author, who began to collect documents, books, maps, and reports.
Sergeev-Tsensky worked hard, but difficulties with publication began again. The archive contains a record of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky: “Work on the epic “Sevastopol Strada” began in 1936. During this year, the author wrote over 40 author's sheets, but what was written turned out to be very difficult to print. In the publishing house "Soviet Writer", to which the author applied, the manuscript was decisively rejected by the editors Bas, Gus and Chechenovsky, as a "red patriotic" work. All members of the editorial board, with the exception of F. Panferov, categorically spoke out against the placement of the epic in the October magazine ... "Panferov insisted on publication in the magazine, and in 1939-1940" Sevastopol Strada "in three books was published as a separate edition.
This was largely facilitated by the article by E. Petrov "Remark of the writer" (Literaturnaya gazeta. 1938. No. 44), in which there are such encouraging lines about Sergeev-Tsensky:
“In the “genealogical tree of literature”, which, obviously, to intimidate Soviet writers, was drawn in the journal “On a Literary Post”, S. Sergeev-Tsensky was drawn in the form of a gallows man, and under him there was a playful inscription: “a living corpse”.
The label has been placed. In some way, an “exhaustive characterization” was given ... Sergeev-Tsensky was thrown to be torn to pieces and stoned and cited by critics ... He was teased in some dark corners by quite small and cowardly critics and critics who, of course, would never dare to attack him to attack, if it weren’t for that terrible Rappov brand - “a living corpse”. Surprising in Sergeev-Tsensky willpower, writer's discipline and love of work. Finding almost no serious and meaningful criticism of his works, all bitten by evil critical mosquitoes, he not only remained one of the most prolific Soviet writers, but also continuously improved his great talent. After the excellent novel "Masses, Machines, Elements" (in my opinion, this is the best that was created by Soviet literature about the war of 1914-1918), S. Sergeev-Tsensky came out with a large historical novel "Sevastopol Strada".
But the inertia of the “living corpse” continues to some extent even now ... What author would they allow themselves to write about with such extraordinary ease that his new work is just a “pseudo-historical novel” and not even a novel at all, but a “fictionalized chronicle” , while only the beginning of this work was published in the journal. But about Sergeyev-Tsensky, everything is allowed. He still continues to work, and his unfinished work has already received the mark "failed".
No. 41 of Literaturnaya Gazeta contains Comrade Mironov's article "On Historical and Pseudo-Historical Novels." In the text of the article itself, the novel is called "fundamental" in quotation marks. Meanwhile, "Sevastopol Strada" is a fundamental novel without any quotation marks. Furthermore. The fundamental nature of the novel is the first thing I want to note when I read the first four parts in the October magazine (the whole novel will be in nine parts). The novel impresses with its conscientiousness, abundance of facts and magnificent details, a broad historical picture, the depth of the depiction of the main characters and the brilliant skill with which all episodic persons are written without exception ... The main and main advantage of the published four parts is that they are imbued with truly popular patriotism ... The conclusion about the hero people, which Sergeyev-Tsensky makes, is not unsubstantiated and hasty, which would be natural for a pseudo-historical novel ...
Here we are faced with a completely exceptional phenomenon, which needs to be understood as deeply as possible. While crude and vulgar criticism only spoiled the life of the artist, Soviet reality itself, the deep nationality of Soviet power, the will of the Soviet peoples to defend the fatherland and fight against fascism breathed new life into the artist and helped him create a work whose historicity is extremely modern ... Before us is a real epic of the Sevastopol events. And if this is not a novel, Comrade Mironov, then what is called a novel?
In 1941 S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky for the novel "Sevastopol Strada" received the highest award - the Stalin Prize of the first degree, like Mikhail Sholokhov for "Quiet Flows the Don", like Alexei Tolstoy for "Walking through the torments", like Galina Ulanova for her artistic activity.
During the Great Patriotic War, S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky with his wife Khristina Mikhailovna was forced to leave Alushta, leaving in it a huge archive, a library, everything acquired over many years. Were in Kerch, Krasnodar, Moscow, Kuibyshev, Alma-Ata. But the work continued, dozens of articles were written, published in Pravda and Krasnaya Zvezda, military stories and short stories about military duty, about patriotism, about military feat. In 1943, the novel "Brusilov's Breakthrough" was published, then the novel "The Guns Are Putting Out" (1944), and the novel "The Guns Talked" was written.
In 1943 S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. But the persecution continued: Novy Mir refused to publish the novel The Guns Spoke and returned the manuscript. Only in 1956 the novel was published as a separate edition.
“Sergei Nikolaevich was a strong man. It seemed that over the years of a difficult literary fate, he had to get used to both silence and unfair, unsubstantiated criticism, - wrote I.M. Shevtsov in the book "The Eagle Looks at the Sun" (M., 1963, p. 261). -
But there is a limit to everything; obviously, let itself know and age. When the postman brought a thick package with the novel “The Guns Talked”, Sergei Nikolayevich flared up: he rushed along the “walk” like an angry lion ... ”And he stopped writing.
In 1955, Russia celebrated the 80th anniversary of S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky, the government awarded the Order of Lenin for outstanding services, there were many meetings, congratulatory telegrams. But one of them was the most expensive:
“I read The Morning Explosion with real pleasure. I marvel and bow my head in gratitude before your mighty, ageless Russian talent.
Your Sholokhov».
About S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky wrote many books and articles. But we will quote one of them in conclusion: “Sergeev-Tsensky's style is distinguished by vivid imagery; his descriptions of nature, images of characters and battle scenes are rich in comparisons and metaphors" ( Cossack V. Lexicon of Russian literature of the XX century. M., 1996. S. 377).
Sergeev-Tsensky S.N. Sobr. cit.: In 12 t. M., 1967.
Shevtsov I. The feat of the hero. Tambov, 1960.
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The bloody orgy that swept the Crimea after the evacuation of Wrangel's army was reflected not only in the memoirs and well-known research of S.P. Melgunov, but also in fiction. It is enough to name the work of the writer of the Russian Diaspora, Ivan Shmelev, who lost his only son in the Crimea - "The Sun of the Dead". Or no less penetrating poems by the poet Maximilian Voloshin.
It is much less known that the terrible tragedy that broke out under the sky of Taurida in the autumn of 1920 was reflected in the work of the famous classic of Russian and Soviet literature, S.N. ., winner of the Stalin Prize. In 1920-1921. the writer was in the Crimea and saw what was happening with his own eyes. As a result, the story “Killer's Line” appeared, which is a kind of monument to the era.
S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky
KILLER LINE
(From the series "Crimean stories")
Sorry, he drawled. - You would decorate, so to speak, my modest holiday.
- What are you, a birthday boy, or what?
- More: brigade commander! Received an appointment yesterday. Tomorrow I'm going to receive the brigade.
I congratulated him, apologized a second time that I could not be, and we said goodbye.
I never saw Rybochkin again.
But the next day after the “modest holiday”, Nina Semyonovna, a young female doctor, who was at this holiday, as an artist of the local troupe, my neighbor in the country, came to me. She served in the troupe, since now it was impossible to earn anything with medicine, but in the troupe she still received rations and sometimes got to such dinners.
- Well, this monster Rybochkin - she began. - Can you imagine - he got to the point that he made an offer! “Let's go,” he says, “with me, you will be my wife - sixty-fourth!”
- Are you joking? I wondered.
- What a joke! and tears welled up in her eyes. “Isn’t that all,” he says, “does it matter to you, since you are an artist?” “I,” I say, “are a doctor, not an artist, you should know. I am an artist!”
- “Well, as a doctor, who needs you? - He speaks. “Only they can send someone to fight typhus somewhere ... Hunt for you!” If I were you, I would keep quiet about the doctor ... Keep in mind - that there will be hunger here: - where we go, hunger begins there - this is usually the case. We destroy free trade, we fight speculation, we don't give passes anywhere, and the result is famine. Keep this in mind ... And with me, as a brigade commander, you will, of course, be full. I have a wife now, only I'm so used to it: with every change of place, I change my wives. Which one hangs on me very much and does not want to part with a warm little place, I kill that one.
- Did he say so? I wondered.
- For everyone!
- Drawn?
- And what does he cost? Who will judge him for this? Especially now, during the reign of terror... After all, each brigade has its own Cheka. Can blame anyone and anything!
- Nina Semyonovna! Have mercy on you!.. I think he was just drunk! I almost got scared.
- Not so much! .. He spoke in great detail about the local one - his wife, sister of mercy, Natasha Linchukova. After all, I know her very well - very modest, sweet, and could not even imagine that she suddenly became his wife! .. True, where are you going now? You have to live somehow ... He threw his Browning into the well, - I feel so sorry for killing her, and the fool batman climbed after him, pulled him out, dried him, greased him with lard ... Yes, you are a bastard, I shout to him - what have you done?! - “It’s a pity for the thing,” he says (he is a Bashkir). - Do you feel sorry for the man, bitch muzzle? Now go tell her to go away herself, otherwise I will certainly kill her!
- That's what Bluebeard, sadist! And he is not at all embarrassed by anyone, as if we are all some kind of dust around us, and not people!
- However ... Let me ask you an awkward question: did everyone sit through this “modest holiday” to the end? I inquired.
- All sat.
- And no one was indignant and left? Did they drink and eat?
- No one left ... They ate and drank, because everyone was hungry ... And Nikolai Ivanovich, you know, a Moscow artist, even sang for the occasion: “My soul is gloomy! “Hurry, singer, hurry! Here is a golden harp ... And Ilyinskaya even hid two bottles of wine from the table in her huge muff: "I will exchange, she says, for bread, otherwise the guys have nothing to eat tomorrow."
I remembered my flour, I remembered that my wife and I survived only with a small supply of drying, which was in the closet, in the dining room, and therefore not stolen, and by the fact that my wife exchanged flour and cereals for her dresses and dishes in the homes of wealthy Tatars , - and understood the poor "artists involuntarily."
Nina Semyonovna persuaded Rybochkin's sixty-third wife to hide. Rybochkin left to receive a brigade. That terrible time, about which it was difficult to say otherwise than in the words of Rybochkin: “Man cursed man!” it has come to us, in our seaside wilderness, has come to us from the big cities of the Crimea. They have been groaning there for a long time, and we have groaned too.
It was early December in the evening. I met a local gymnasium teacher, mother of two young children, whose husband, who was an officer in the German war, was shot for being a former officer. She was a nervous woman, exhausted by her own hunger and the hungry crying of her children, who suffered from insomnia from worries and from the cold in the apartment.
- You hear? - she said to me in a breakdown: - the earth is groaning! I looked at her like she was crazy.
- Here and now ... Here again! .. Listen better! .. Here in this beam.
I listened. Indeed: the sounds were deaf, trumpet-like, similar to those made by the marsh bird, the bittern, the buchilo, the water bull. This is what I told her:
- A bird, it must be.
- What a bird! And everywhere she groans, - after all, not in one place! .. And where did she suddenly
come on, this bird? It didn't exist before, but now it has!
She even seemed to be upset by the explanation I offered her.
- Well, let it not be a bird ... But how can the earth moan? I asked without even a hint of mockery.
- I don’t know ... I was chopping wood in a beam, over there, and some man was looking for his heifer. He says the earth is groaning. “All over the Crimea,” he says, so! ..
“Listen,” I said, “but you did study!” You, moreover, a mathematician, graduated from the courses ... Let me, the professor, scold you: Aren't you ashamed to say such things: "the earth is groaning?" “It’s forgiven for the dark man who was looking for a heifer, but you ... you ...
- Ah, now we are all dark! she cried. - And what does my courses have to do with it now? .. Yes, if I were on the ground, I would have groaned myself! ... Even if she does not even groan, but since it seems to everyone that she is groaning, then she is groaning! It is enough that everyone equally feels that she is moaning!
- It means, like: "Amen!" - did the stones strike him in response?.. Did the stones cry out? Do you know what I remembered: these are probably dolphins or beluga whales ... In general, sea animals ... the same sirens that Homer wrote about in The Odyssey.
- And it must be, as you explained, people go so that the earth itself from
moaned sympathy for them. And here she is moaning.
We groaned, as it turned out later, really dolphins, but there was reason to groan and the earth.
It's apocalyptic times. There is such a phrase in the apocalypse: “And it will be impossible to buy or sell” ... I confess, I did not understand it at all before. The main thing, I did not represent clearly; Why can't you buy or sell? And in the fiery book of the Patmosian, this seemed to me to be some kind of meaningless place.
And yet life justified this seemingly meaningless place: it was impossible to buy or sell anything, simply because both were forbidden. The question remained open: how was the population supposed to exist? A direct and clear answer was prompted: it was bound to die, but one still did not want to believe in such an answer. It was possible to leave a naked person on bare earth, but to completely strip the earth of a person - to make a desert out of a flowering land in the name of the speedy happiness of the same person - this already seemed incomprehensible gibberish.
As a citadel of the White Guard, the entire Crimea was declared "outlaw".
Everywhere the Chechens came in large numbers, arresting and "putting out" the remnants of the bourgeoisie, or simply the intelligentsia, stuck in the Crimea. But for every careless word, workers were also arrested and put in a “basement” for a long time, sometimes they were taken out to be shot along with representatives of the upper classes and the remnants of the officers who believed in the amnesty and appeared for registration. People were so intimidated, finally, by countless "musts" and not a single "possibility", that they no longer showed up on the streets, and the streets became deserted. Fathers began to be afraid of their own children, acquaintances - good acquaintances, friends - friends.
Employees of numerous Soviet institutions, except for a piece of black wholemeal bread with sex, did not receive anything for their work, since money was declared a bourgeois prejudice, just like all the conveniences of life in general. However, the Chekists flaunted in beaver coats and hats and had a very well-fed appearance. They ordered steaks for themselves, and for this they selected rare thoroughbred cows from the population and cut them out sometimes three days before calving.
It became incomprehensible how it was possible to run a household in such an environment, and it was explained that farming was a crime, and that every owner was a bourgeois, a clear enemy of the Soviet system. The owners began to self-govern: intensively slaughter livestock and poultry. It got to the point that the roosters had already ceased to sing, and the cows to moo, for the simple reason that they were no longer there. All the horses were listed in tramot, and they were mercilessly driven, forgetting that they needed to be fed. Soon only carriages without horses were left in the tram. Hungry skinny dogs that left their hungry owners roamed the city in packs, then migrated to the neighborhood, where they could eat carrion. Shepherds drove flocks of Tatar goats and sheep far into the forests, but there the greens hunted for them, the number of which increased greatly, as many turned green from hunger.
The Tatars I sometimes met, looking around, bulging their eyes and saying in a whisper: “What are we going to do now, tell me? Kantsy Kaanians are in a bad way to live astalsi! .. We wake up to die .... They still hoped that Turkey would intercede for them - Enver Pasha - whom they called their sovereign, since it is impossible to imagine existence without a sovereign could. Possessing a great reserve of oriental patience, they patiently waited for someone to come from somewhere and say that it was impossible to torture them like that - and in the mornings they looked at the sea for a long time: maybe the "englesi" of their dreadnoughts, maybe the "French "...
The Russians only became more silent, thinner and gloomier. Workers were herded into Soviet workshops, where they worked for a pound of bread, squabbling with those who watched the work. Fishermen were driven into the sea with rifles on longboats to catch kamsa - and both longboats and nets were taken from their owners - and the fishermen, who had previously brought full catches, sixty pounds per longboat, now brought two, three, and even before the arrival of the naval police they hurried to distribute half to the hungry, and the police took the rest. And so in everything.
People who had never dug the land were sent to responsible work - to dig up vineyards that had been taken from their owners and now became state farms. People who had no idea about pruning were sent to cut pear and apple orchards in order to eradicate the bourgeois heritage. They took the rest of the dairy cows, collected them on a Soviet farm, and there they spoiled them and reduced their milkiness to nothing.
Tatars, as farmers, were not deprived of gardens and tobacco plantations, but not a single Tatar went out to his garden in winter and did not go out to plantations in spring. - “Why are we going to murmur, tell me? they said in bewilderment. - For him to come, take it for himself? Let him work himself! ”... And the gardens became deserted, the vineyards began to be cut down for fuel.
So the winter passed.
Everything shrank, everything froze. Lived and enjoyed all the benefits of life in the space of the Crimea, only those who were put in "cellars", judged and "discharged" by tens of thousands.
And one of the most active Chechens was with the brigade of my friend Rybochkin. It was said that there was even a case of acute insanity of the head of the Cheka, the Latvian Svestyn: he had, as it were, to be present at the mass execution of several hundred people in one night, and he went crazy. But Rybochkin apparently lived well. People who saw him told me that he had gained weight and acquired an important gait, that his wife was now a former countess, whom he only saved from certain execution in this way - that he was in his district - everything - like how old circus wrestlers wrote about himself in the posters: "Champion of the world and surroundings."
Hearing this, I was not surprised. The last time I had to hear about brigade commander Rybochkin was in the summer of 1921. On the pass, a green car was fired upon, in which Rybochkin was traveling with two subordinates. Since there were twelve attackers, there was nothing to think about resistance, especially since the driver was killed by the very first shots, and the car ran into a roadside beech and broke the chassis. However, although the other two immediately surrendered, Rybochkin, believing in his star, fired back from the Browning until he ran out of bullets. He managed to wound two of them, one of them fatally. Then he took off running into the woods. But the greens knew the forest near the Pass better than he did. They caught him, tied him up, brought him back to the highway, tied him to a car and set fire to a tank of gasoline.
The car burned down, and with it Rybochkin, a fatal man marked by the “killer line”, and the author of four sayings about modernity, of which the last one: “Man cursed man,” burned down, seems to me the most successful.
Crimea. Alushta.
March 1922.
Published: Crimean Archive, No. 2. - Simferopol: 1996. - p. 113-116
Sergeev-Tsensky (real name - Sergeev) Sergei Nikolaevich (1875 - 1958), prose writer. He was born on September 18 (30 n.s.) in the village of Preobrazhenskoye, Tambov province, in the family of a teacher, a great lover of reading, which influenced his son. Brought up on the poems of Pushkin, Lermontov and Krylov's fables, having learned many of them by heart, at the age of seven he began to compose poetry himself.
After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered the Glukhovsky Teachers' Institute, where he continued to write poetry. Later, many of the poems of this period will be included in his first poetry collection, Thoughts and Dreams (1901).
After graduating from the institute in 1895, he was assigned to a gymnasium, but at his own request he served military service and only a year later became a teacher of the Russian language in Kamenetz-Podolsk. Realizing that knowledge of life is necessary for creativity, he often changes the "environment and landscape": he works in the Kharkov, Odessa, Moscow educational districts, in Pavlograd and in Talsen (near Riga).
Since 1900, he began to write stories, the first of which were published in Russian Thought (Forgotten and Tundra). Staying in the army during the Russo-Japanese War and in the first year of the First World War gave Sergeyev the richest material for the novel "Lieutenant Babaev", the stories "Bailiff Deryabin" and "My friend", the epic "Sevastopol Strada" and "Transformation of Russia".
The writer owes his recognition to Kuprin, who convinced him to come to St. Petersburg to publish his books there. The works of Sergeev-Tsensky immediately attracted the attention of both readers and critics. There were large articles devoted to his literary activity.
In 1905 the writer lived in the Crimea, in Alushta, where he had his own house. Here he met the revolution of 1917, survived the civil war. During this time he wrote little. From 1923 he turned to historical themes (plays, stories and novels about Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol).
In the 1930s, the stories "Lucky Girl", "Lighthouse in the Fog", the stories "Oral Account", "Crows", etc. were published. M. Gorky supported the writer, seeing in him a continuer of the traditions of Russian classical literature.
During the Patriotic War, he wrote journalistic articles, stories about contemporary heroes (the collection Real People, 1943), the novels Brusilovsky Breakthrough, The Guns Are Pushing, and The Guns Talked (1944).
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S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky - st. Sergeeva-Tsensky, 5. Open for visits from 9 am to 5 pm, except Sunday and Monday.
The museum was opened on May 6, 1962 in the house where from 1906 to 1941 and from 1946 to 1958 an outstanding master of Russian Soviet prose, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky (1875-1958) lived.
Arriving in Alushta in 1905, the writer purchased a piece of land on a mountainside, a few kilometers from Alushta, "at the junction of two elements": the sea and the coast. According to his project, he built a writing workshop - a house of three rooms and a veranda, and subsequently planted fruit trees and cypress alleys.
During the Great Patriotic War, the archive and part of the writer's library were taken to Germany, the house was destroyed, and the garden was almost completely cut down. In August 1944, S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky returned to Alushta and began restoring the house, adding two rooms and two verandas to it. Within two years, a new garden and three cypress alleys were planted, which have survived to this day.
In this house on Mount Orlina, the most significant works that were included in the treasury of Soviet literature were written: the epics "Transformation of Russia" and "Sevastopol Strada" (for which the writer was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1941), as well as novels, short stories, plays, essays, literary-critical and journalistic articles, poems and fables.
For almost half a century, S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky lived in Alushta. The writer is buried in the park, not far from the house. On the grave there is a monument made of Crimean diabase. The authors are sculptors N. Petrova and II. Kachanov.
The museum's funds include 20 thousand museum items: manuscripts, documents, archival materials, books, magazines, personal belongings of the writer and his family.
The house-museum is an architectural monument of the early 20th century. and historical and memorial building. In 1965, a memorial plaque was installed on its facade.
The exposition of the museum consists of two departments: literary and memorial. The literary exposition is located on the western and eastern verandas, it introduces visitors to the life and work of S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky, talks about his literary environment, friends and students, about the meetings that took place in this house with A. Kuprin, K. Chukovsky , A. Novikov-Priboy, N. Nikandrov, S. Marshak, P. Pavlenko, A. Peregudov, A. Perven-penym, E. Popovkin, K. Trenev, I. Shmelev ...
Almost all publications of the works of S. N. Sergeev-Tsepsky are exhibited, as well as books translated into many foreign languages, starting with the novel "Babaev" (1910) and ending with the latest translation of the novel "Valya" (1979).
In the rooms of the house (library, study, dining room, room of the wife of X. M. Sergeeva-Tsenskaya, living room), on the southern veranda, called by L. Kuprin "walking", the atmosphere that was during the life of the writer is completely preserved - the memorial department of the museum. In a small room (former kitchen) there is a part of a study from a Moscow apartment.
At present, the library of S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky has more than 10 thousand books and magazines: the works of V. I. Lenin with the notes of the writer, K. Marx and F. Engels, books on philosophy, art, literature, medicine, military affairs, agronomy, the history of Russia, the Crimean, World and Civil Wars, unique editions of the 18th-19th centuries.
In the writer's office on the desktop there are things that he used in the last days of his life: books, a notebook, a pen, a dan wesson pneumatic revolver, glasses and a calendar with the date - December 3, 1958 - the day of death of Sergei Nikolayevich. In recent years, the study served as a bedroom for the writer. Above the bed hangs a watercolor - a study "Cossack", donated by I. E. Repin in 1926 with a dedicatory inscription. By the bed there is a bookcase with books presented to S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky by friends. On one of them is written: “To the beloved artist of the word. M. Gorky, 15.V1II.1927. Sorrento.
The family used to gather around the dining table in the spacious dining room. Guests were welcomed here, they were cordially treated to fruits from the garden, and a casual conversation was conducted over a cup of tea. The attention of visitors is attracted by the portrait of S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky, painted by the Sevastopol sailor Yu. Bolshakov.
The cosiness of the room is given by an old carved oak set. Almost the entire wall is occupied by the picture of the artist S. Kolesnikov "Spring Plowing" (1915), which the writer really liked.
The house of S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky in Alushta is the only museum in our country that contains almost all the materials related to the life and work of this writer
The museum hosts conferences, literary readings with the participation of scientists and writers from many cities of the country. Open days (September 30), literary evenings, "musical lounge", meetings with those who personally knew the writer are traditional.
