April 3, 1920
Born in Moscow Yuri Nagibin — writer, screenwriter, journalist.
You have to fight with yourself, everything else is not scary
The father was a nobleman, he was killed in the Civil War before his son was born.
At first, Yuri's stepfather was a lawyer Mark Leventhal, then - a writer Yakov Rykachev, who encouraged his stepson's literary endeavors. Both stepfathers were subsequently repressed.
After school, he studied to become a doctor, but after a stint in a morgue, he transferred to the screenwriting department of VGIK, where he was unable to graduate due to the war. In the fall of 1941, he was drafted into the army as an instructor in the political department and worked as a special correspondent for the newspaper Trud. He was shell-shocked in one battle. After the war, he published his first collection of wartime stories.
In 1956, shortly after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the report Khrushchev About Stalin’s personality cult, Literary Moscow published two of his stories: “Khazar Ornament” and “Light in the Window.”
Both showed the exact temperature to which the Moscow intelligentsia allowed itself to warm up and express itself (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
He earned his living not only from short stories and novellas, but also from film scripts: over 40 films were made from them. One of them, "Women's Kingdom," is about rural women left without men after the war.
A new human type has emerged: the unyielding Soviet widow. I keep hearing, through the death knell, "So-and-so is holding up just fine!" I wish someone would hold up poorly for a change.
In 1963, he suffered a heart attack due to problems with the script for the film "The Chairman" Mikhail Ulyanov (It was heavily censored and particularly poignant scenes were cut out).
In his stories, he subtly criticized the Soviet system. However, some of his articles were fiction, which he presented as fact. For example, Nagibin later admitted that in 1950 he wrote "a hack piece for a newspaper about Stalin's electoral district."
[According to the plot], some gypsy camp comes to vote for Stalin, singing and dancing, but they're not allowed in. They shout that they want to cast their ballots for their beloved leader. A disabled Georgian pilot, shot down in battle, crawls back on stumps. The editor asks, "Tell me, did any of this actually happen?" I say, "Do you think it could have?" He replies, "But we could have gone down!" But not only didn't we go down, we even got bonuses!
In his inner circle, he enjoyed a reputation as an "impeccable writer in matters of conscience, honor, and duty." In 1966, he signed a letter in defense of writers. Sinyavsky и Daniel. At the same time, he said that he had no friends in literature.
In 1981 he suffered a second heart attack, but continued to work and lectured in the USA (he has lectured at 25 American universities).
It's a pity that there is no circuit breaker in a person that would burn out from too much heat and break the circuit, saving the device from destruction.
In his final years, he lived with his sixth wife (officially, fifth) in Italy. The writer had no children.
He took procreation very seriously. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he told me, "I don't want to have children in this country." (Alla Nagibina)
In 1993, he signed the “Letter of Forty-Two” calling on the Yeltsin government to ban “all types of communist associations.”
He died in 1994 at his dacha in the village of Sovetsky Pisatel near Moscow: he fell asleep and never woke up after reading the manuscript of his two-volume Diary about the events of the 1940s–1980s.
"Diary," like the confessional novel "Darkness at the End of the Tunnel," was published after the writer's death. Critics consider both books to be his best works.
About everything - frankly, about myself - mercilessly
Our life has one huge advantage over the life of a Western person: it almost removes the fear of death.
