July 11: Writer Anatoly Pristavkin, author of "The Golden Cloud Spent the Night," died.
On July 11, 2008, 76-year-old writer and public figure Anatoly Pristavkin died in Moscow. He was the author of the novels "The Golden Cloud Spent the Night," "The Dove," and "My Distant Wagon." He was also the chairman of the first presidential pardon commission.
Russia is big, there are many beautiful places in it, but the mess is the same everywhere.
Orphanage, factory, technical school
Pristavkin was born in Lyubertsy, near Moscow, in 1931, to a working-class family. His father made shoe lasts and went to the front at the outbreak of World War II. His mother died of tuberculosis that same year.
He grew up in an orphanage and attended a vocational school. By the age of 14, he was already working at the Sernovodsk cannery and at the Zhukovsky airfield. At 15, he enrolled in the evening program at the Moscow Aviation Technical School. He worked as an electrician and radio operator. He wrote and published poetry in the newspaper and was an excellent reciter.
In 1959, he entered the Gorky Literary Institute, studying under the poet and songwriter Lev Oshanin. He also published a series of stories, "War Childhood," in the magazine "Yunost"—about children's lives shattered by war.
Sometimes it seems to me that the whole earth, our planet, has become half a meter higher than these endless mass graves.
Taiga, Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, and the First Books
After graduating, he worked as a staff correspondent for the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper during the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, combining journalism with work on a concrete crew. The taiga and its inhabitants made a deep impression on him. During those years, he wrote the documentary stories "My Contemporaries," "Bonfires in the Taiga," "Seliger Seligerovich," "Land of the Power Line," and the novel "The Dove" (adapted for film).
When our people drink, they go wild. That's well known. But when they don't drink, they also go wild. When are they themselves again?
Living by habit is the weight that keeps people from taking off.
"A golden cloud spent the night" - a symbol of glasnost
The story "A Golden Cloud Spent the Night" about the Kuzmenysh brothers from an orphanage and the deportation of peoples under Stalin brought the writer Anatoly Pristavkin all-Union, and with it, international fame.
There are no bad people, there are only bad people
Anyone who has experienced this will believe: there is no person in the world more inventive and goal-oriented than a hungry person, especially if he is an orphan who has developed a brain during the war on where and what to get.
Russia won't lose anything if the kids eat their fill once in their lives
The novella first drew public attention to the tragedy of the Chechens and Ingush, who were expelled from their lands during the Great Patriotic War. He wrote it for almost ten years, but published it only during perestroika. Along with Anatoly Rybakov's novel Children of the Arbat, "Tuchka" became one of the symbols of glasnost. The book won a State Prize, was translated into 30 languages (with 4,5 million copies sold in the USSR alone), and was adapted into a film by director Sulambek Mamilov.
Other short stories and novels include "The Soldier and the Boy," "Radio Station Tamara," "The Quiet Baltic," "The Town," "Ryazanka," "The Valley of the Shadow of Death," and "My Distant Wagon." He received the German National Prize for his short story "The Little Cuckoos" (a sequel to "The Clouds").
The silence that is born among many people at once is very touching.
Pardon for 57 thousand prisoners
Pristavkin taught at the Literary Institute. In 1991, he headed the council of the independent writers' movement "April" within the Writers' Union of the RSFSR.
He was a member of the committee of the international movement for the abolition of the death penalty "Hands Off Cain" and the executive committee of the Russian PEN Center. In 1993, he signed the "Letter of 42" in support of the policies of Yeltsin and his team.
Since 1992, he has been the chairman of the first presidential pardon commission (later, presidential adviser on pardons). Over the course of ten years, it commuted the sentences of 57 prisoners. Pristavkin's documentary novel, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death," is about his work on this commission.
In 2002, he became a laureate of the Father Alexander Men Prize, and in 2003, the National Pride of Russia Prize.
