September 3: Ales Adamovich's birthday, the writer who made burned villages speak
On September 3, 1927, near Minsk, Ales Adamovich, a Soviet writer, screenwriter, and public figure, author of "The Khatyn Story," was born into a family of doctors. As a teenager, he served as a liaison for partisans and devoted the rest of his life to preserving the voices of those who survived the burning of Belarusian villages.
Whatever the situation, a person has no right to say: "Enough! It's hopeless!"
Family, a kulak grandfather and partisan youth
My maternal grandfather was an exiled kulak, which is why the family's relationship with the Soviet government was always strained.
As a teenager, Adamovich participated in the partisan movement during the German occupation of Belarus, serving as a signalman. After studying at the Leninogorsk Mining and Metallurgical College in Kazakhstan, he returned to Belarus.
Philological Faculty, Moscow and the First Disgrace
In 1950 he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Belarusian State University and later defended his doctoral dissertation.
In the 1960s, he studied at the Higher Screenwriting Courses in Moscow and taught a course on Belarusian literature at Moscow State University. He was suspended from teaching for refusing to sign a letter of condemnation. Julia Daniela и Andrey SinyavskyAfter that, he worked at the Yanka Kupala Belarusian Institute of Literature.
The Khatyn Tale
In the early 1970s, he became famous throughout the Soviet Union for writing "The Khatyn Story," about a Belarusian village burned by SS soldiers in revenge for the partisans' killing of Germans. The book collected the stories of the miraculously surviving residents.
The stone old man, the one holding the dead boy, has his palm and fingers shot through. I don't know if anyone with sight can see this: almost everyone who was shot along with the children and who somehow survived has a mutilated hand. The one they used to cover the child's head, to press it to the ground.
The very thought that I ate bread today is comforting: there is always so much hope in bread!
"I am from the fiery village" - 300 witnesses
He later co-authored the book "I Am from a Fiery Village," which featured stories from 300 other residents who witnessed the war. Based on this book, director Viktor Dashuk produced a documentary series, "The Khatyn Cycle."
He discovered, raised, showed just one grain of truth, a drop of what he saw, understood, but the bottomless ocean of the people's fiery Khatyn memory remained there, inaudible, invisible to the world.
Books and movies
Other well-known books include “Partisans” (about the harsh everyday life in a Belarusian frontline village), “The Punishers” (about the SS intimidation campaigns), and “The Last Vacation” (about the life of the Soviet scientific intelligentsia).
Author of screenplays for the films "Come and See" (with director Elem Klimov), “War under the Roofs” and “Sons Go into Battle” (based on the novel-dilogy “Partisans”).
Ales Adamovich and cinema without censorship
In 1987, after the landmark congress of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR, which abolished “shelf” censorship, he headed the USSR Institute of Cinematography.
He researched the history of censorship and ideological persecution in cinema. It was during his tenure that the idea emerged to create cycles on the history of Russian cinema: "Cinema and Revolution," "Cinema and Stalinism," "Cinema of the Thaw," "Cinema in the Era of Stagnation," and "Cinema and Perestroika."
Member of Parliament, Memorial, Chernobyl
He was elected as a people's deputy from the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR and was a member of the democratic Interregional Deputy Group.
He was co-chairman of the public council of Memorial and one of the first to raise the issue of the scale of the Chernobyl disaster.
Kurapaty and the "Vendee Perestroika"
He supported the creation of the Belarusian Popular Front and its initiatives, including a rally in memory of the victims of Stalinist repressions in the tract Kurapaty (place of mass executions by the NKVD).
He spoke publicly on the platform, in the press, and at congresses, harshly criticizing the BSSR leadership for attempting to hush up this tragedy. He coined a famous metaphor from that time:
BSSR - Vendée of Perestroika
[region in France, center of the French counter-revolution]
Last performance
In 1993 he signed the “Letter of Forty-Two” in support of Yeltsin’s policies.
He died in 1994 in Moscow after a second heart attack, which occurred after a speech in the Supreme Court.
Dying is not difficult, dying is very hard
The meeting addressed a protracted dispute over the division of the inheritance and property of the former Union of Soviet Writers. The 66-year-old Adamovich delivered an emotional speech in defense of the writers' property rights. The official transcript of this meeting has never been published. According to some recollections, his final words were:
I'm not afraid of death. I could have died as a boy in the war. The rest of my life was a gift.
