January 14, 1911
He was born in the Chernigov province Anatoly Rybakov — writer and screenwriter. Author of "The Dagger" and the cult novel "Children of the Arbat," about the fates of young people during Stalin's reign of terror.
The word is the only thing that lives forever
Real surname - Aronov. His father, a process engineer, worked as a manager at a private distillery. At the age of eight, he moved with his parents to Moscow, living on Arbat Street. After finishing school, he worked as a loader at a chemical plant and later as a driver.
In 1930, at 19, he entered the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. In 1933, he was expelled for articles in the institute's wall newspaper (according to another version, for "conciliatory statements toward the Trotskyist opposition") and then arrested. He was sentenced to three years of exile for counterrevolutionary agitation and propaganda.
After his release, he initially worked as a driver and mechanic. He left his post as chief engineer at the Ryazan Regional Motor Transport Directorate to join the battlefronts of the Great Patriotic War. He served in the Red Army in automobile units. He fought in Leningrad и Stalingrad, participated in the defense of Moscow and the assault Berlin. For his military services, his criminal record was cleared (he was fully rehabilitated in 1960).
In 1946, after demobilization, on his way home in his Opel, he stopped in West Berlin to request political asylum at the US commandant's office. At the last moment, he changed his mind, fearing for the fate of his relatives in the USSR.
Upon returning to Moscow, he decided to try to make a living by writing.
In 1948, after lengthy negotiations, his story “The Dagger” was published in Detgiz: the 37-year-old author signed it with his mother’s surname.
In 1950, his very first novel, "The Drivers," brought Rybakov the Stalin Prize, membership in the Writers' Union, a one-room apartment in central Moscow, and widespread acclaim. After the collapse of the USSR, he did not deny the novel's "utter opportunism" and chose not to include it in his complete works.
In 1955, he published his second novel, "Ekaterina Voronina" (the author's title was "A Lonely Woman"). To write it, he spent two years on the Volga, sailing on passenger ships and self-propelled barges.
In 1964, inspired by Khrushchev’s “thaw,” he wrote his third novel, “Summer in Sosnyaki,” about the construction of the first five-year plans.
Khrushchev was the last revolutionary worker in the country and remained loyal to the revolution until the end of his days.
In the 1960s, he wrote his most famous novel, "Children of the Arbat," about the generation of the 1930s and Stalinism. The protagonist's life is largely autobiographical. The book was published only during perestroika.
Youth has its rights. And its first right is to laugh.
Mutual trust arises only where there are common enemies.
A clever tyrant always flatters the people
During the Soviet years, he was also able to publish a trilogy about the teenager Sergei Krasheninnikov (Krosh) and the novel Heavy Sand, about the life of a Jewish family in northern Ukraine and the tragedy of the Holocaust.
The treatment of the Jewish theme became a sensation in the country's cultural scene, where perhaps no one had previously written so openly about Jewish life. The story was based on documentary material from the lives of the characters.
It's not the situation a person finds themselves in—that's often beyond their control. It's how a person gets out of that situation—that always depends entirely on them.
Over 50 years of literary work, he wrote six short stories and nine novels. Almost all of them have been successfully adapted into films.
In 1971, he was removed from his post as chairman of the selection committee of the Moscow Writers' Organization for refusing to consent to Solzhenitsyn's exclusion from the Writers' Union.
During the perestroika years, he was president of the Soviet human rights organization PEN Center. He wrote sequels to Children of the Arbat—the books "Thirty-Fifth and Other Years," "Fear," and "Dust and Ashes."
After the collapse of the USSR he lived in New York. He died in his sleep in 1998, at the age of 87. He was buried in Moscow.
