May 12, 1909
Born Yuri DombrovskyWriter. Long-term Gulag prisoner. Author of the duology "Keeper of Antiquities" and "Faculty of Unnecessary Things."
Trouble comes when powerlessness begins to show strength
Have you noticed, by the way, that when brute force is freed from its legal and humanitarian shell and comes to light, so to speak, in a crystalline pure form, it always claims divinity?
For some reason, once empires become Great, they always start to starve.
He came from a family of intellectuals. He grew up in Moscow and trained as a proofreader. In 1933, he was arrested for the first time for "anti-Soviet agitation" and "hooliganism." He told his relatives that he had torn down a red flag from the house of his girlfriend, who had cheated on him. He was exiled to Alma-Ata, where he worked as an archaeologist, art historian, and journalist.
The second time he was arrested was in 1936. The third time was in 1939. For “anti-Soviet agitation” he was sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp.
There's a great fear in the world right now. Everyone is afraid of everything. Everyone only cares about one thing: to sit it out and wait it out.
He was released early in 1943 due to disability. He returned to Alma-Ata. He worked in the theater and lectured on Shakespeare. He began writing an anti-fascist novel, "The Monkey Comes for His Skull."
In 1949, he was arrested again. Pionerskaya Pravda correspondent Irina Strelkova testified at trial that he "disdainfully treated Soviet literature" and "denigrated Fadeev's great realistic novel." He was sentenced to 10 years.
Scoundrels never do anything themselves; they have honest people to do it for them, who only need to whisper a word and everything will be done in the best possible way in two or three hours.
A few years after his release, he returned to Moscow. In 1964, his novel "The Keeper of Antiquities" was published in Novy Mir. Around the same time, he began writing "The Faculty of Unnecessary Things." He completed what is arguably his best book—about the fate of Christian-humanist values in an anti-Christian and anti-humanist world—in 1975.
There are times when a word is a crime
In 1978, the novel, which could not be published in the USSR, was published in the West. Soon after, the writer was brutally beaten by unknown assailants. Two months later, he died of severe internal bleeding.
