May 21, 1924
В Smolensk was born Boris Vasiliev. A war veteran and screenwriter. Author of "The Dawns Here Are Quiet" and "Tomorrow Was the War."
It's easier to write about war than not to write about it.
I reject war as a means of resolving conflicts. I remember—war smells of corpses. And nothing more.
His father was an officer in the Imperial Army, and later the Red Army. His mother came from noble families.
At the age of 10 he moved with his parents to Voronezh, where my father was transferred. He acted in school plays and published a handwritten magazine with a friend.
At 17, with the outbreak of war, he went to the front as a volunteer. In 1943, under Vyazma, He stepped on a mine and was shell-shocked. While still recovering, he entered the Stalin Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Forces. He graduated after the war and tested tanks and vehicles in the Urals. In his demobilization report, he wrote that he wanted to pursue a career in literature.
In 1954, he wrote his first play, "Tankers," about the generational change in the army after the war. However, just before its premiere at the Theater of the Soviet Army, the production was banned. Only 17 years later, in 1972, was it adapted into the cult Soviet film "Officers."
Maybe it's a good thing they banned it without any explanation? If they had issued any comments, I would have wasted a lot of time, and the play would have been ruined anyway.
In the late 50s, he graduated from the Goskino screenwriters' studio. He earned his living by writing scripts for KVN (KVN) and film magazines.
In 1969, the magazine Yunost published the story “The Dawns Here Are Quiet…”, which made Vasiliev famous throughout the Soviet Union.
Men are born to die in battle, nothing can be done about it. But there were, I specifically checked, 350 women at the front. How did they fight? And without any rear services? That's how the Zori came to be.
In 1970, he published the novella "Ivan's Boat," a parable about the life of a former front-line soldier in a provincial village. The film adaptation was again banned: Goskino officials felt the characters were too ambiguously divided between good and bad. The film was released only during perestroika.
Vasiliev was criticized for his unreliability and excessive romanticism ("How could five girls stop 16 Hitlerite wolves?"). But the Taganka Theatre production of the story became one of the most acclaimed of the 70s.
He was completely unique, had a unique view of the war. What "dawns"? Blood all around. But he saw these girls who weren't supposed to kill or be killed. He saw how they carried everything human through all this. (critic Lev Anninsky)
The film was released in 1972. Following "Officers," it also instantly became a cult classic.
That same year, he wrote another story, a requiem for his generation, "Tomorrow Was the War." Written in the "school yearbook" genre, it describes Soviet society at the height of Stalin's repressions and on the eve of the German invasion. Another "banned" novel, it wasn't adapted for film until 1987.
I worked ten hours a day, wrote quickly, and the story flowed from my pen with almost no errors. I knew it was a success because I tested it on my friends. The editors of Yunost were overjoyed; it was typed, but it never saw the light of day—the ideological department of the Central Committee rejected it.
During perestroika, he was a people's deputy of the USSR and a member of the Supreme Soviet. In October 1993, he signed the "Letter of Forty-Two" in support of the violent dissolution of the Supreme Soviet of Russia and demanding the banning of all communist parties.
In 2002 he became a member of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights.
In the last years of his life, he wrote historical novels and books on the history of ancient Rus'. They contain many analogies: to the struggle for power ("Prophetic Oleg," "Prince Yaroslav and His Sons"), the treachery and cruelty of princely power ("Olga, Queen of the Rus'"), and the spiritual crisis of society ("Glukhoman").
He died in 2013, at 88, due to arrhythmia.
