19 2003 October, the
Died in Germany Georgy Vladimov — writer, human rights activist, and dissident. Author of the story "Faithful Ruslan," written from the perspective of a Gulag guard dog, and the war novel "The General and His Army," which won the Russian Booker Prize.
Russia is fate, it is destiny, it is fate
Born in 1931. Parents were literature teachers. Nikolai Volosevich и Maria Zeifman — divorced when my son was 9.
His mother taught at the Leningrad NKVD Suvorov Military School, where Zhora later studied. On the way to the evacuation, he wanted to flee to the front to avenge his father, who had gone missing in the first days of the war. Tank crews stopped him, carrying a sack of crackers, and persuaded him to return to his mother.
At the age of 13 he came up with the pseudonym “Vladimov” in honor of Mayakovsky. A quarter of a century later, he officially changed his surname - "Nobody knew Volosevich, everyone knew Vladimov."
At 15, he "first embarked on the path of dissidence." In 1946, a decree was issued regarding the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad," branding them "literary scum." Zoshchenko. A friend and I decided to pay our respects to the writer. They showed up at his house in full dress uniform, and when he opened the door, they saluted like a combat officer. A neighbor immediately reported the young men. The matter was hushed up.
In 1952, my mother was arrested under Article 58 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." She was sentenced to 10 years in prison without the right to correspondence (she was released after two years).
In 1953, he graduated from law school. He worked as an investigator and then as an assistant prosecutor. A year later, he tried his hand at literary criticism. In 1956, he became the prose editor at Novy Mir. Soon, he began writing himself.
The story "Big Ore" brought him fame in 1961; it became one of the literary manifestos of the "sixties".
A person in whom dignity has awakened cannot tow himself back—he either breaks down, dies as a person, or breaks his neck.
(Lev Anninsky about the main character)
Later, he got a job as a sailor on a fishing vessel and went to the Atlantic for three and a half months to fish for Norwegian herring. He was mistaken for a taxi driver looking to earn some extra money for a new Volga. In 1969, he completed "Three Minutes of Silence," a novel about self-awareness in times of mortal danger.
Death is not when you fall asleep, death is when you don't wake up
In 1963, he began writing "The Tale of the Guard Dog." It was based on a true story: a pioneer camp was built on the site of a labor camp, and when the first group of children arrived, the feral guard dogs, whom the guards hadn't dared kill, ran out of the forest and began silently escorting the convoy. Editor-in-Chief of Novy Mir Tvardovsky He suggested making the tragedy of a dog the central theme, seeing the meaning of life in serving the Master. This is how "Faithful Ruslan" was born.
Service! The masters came and went, but it was always there, as long as this world stood, fenced in by two rows of barbed wire and watchtowers at the corners.
The Thaw was ending. The story was not published. It began to circulate in samizdat, without the author's name. In 1975, Vladimov agreed to publication in West Germany. A persecution began in the USSR. Books were removed from libraries, plays were removed from public viewing. He was banned from attending a book fair in Germany. In 1977, he sent a letter of resignation to the Writers' Union.
Bear the burden of the gray, do what you are fit and called to do—press, persecute, do not let go. But—without me. I return ticket #1471.
By that time, Vladimov already had a reputation as “unreliable”: in 1967, he addressed the Congress of the Union of Writers with a demand for freedom of creativity and discussion of writing. Solzhenitsyn about censorship.
Are we a nation of scoundrels, whisperers and informers, or are we a great people who have given the nation a galaxy of geniuses?
In 1972 I met Sakharov, From 1977 to 1983 he headed the Moscow section of Amnesty International.
In 1983, under threat of criminal prosecution, he left for Germany at the invitation of Heinrich Böll give lectures in Cologne. A month later he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
In exile, he wrote a war novel, "The General and His Army." It was published in Russia in 1994 and recognized as "the best Booker Prize novel of the decade."
His citizenship was restored in 1990. But he had nowhere to live in his homeland—the state had confiscated his former cooperative apartment. It wasn't until 2000 that he was given a dacha in Peredelkino.
He died at the age of 72, Frankfurt am Main.
