October 3: Vyacheslav Shishkov's birthday, the author of "Gloomy River"
Vyacheslav Shishkov was born on October 3, 1873, in Tver Province. He was a writer and engineer, and the author of the novels "Vataga," "Yemelyan Pugachev," and "Gloomy River."
The river is wicked, fierce... God created it that way... It's like human life: try to understand it. That's why it's called the Gloomy River.
Childhood and youth
His grandfather was a landowner, his grandmother his serf. His father was a small shopkeeper. He grew up in a large family, the first of nine children. At 11, he wrote his first story, "The Wolf's Lair," about the life of a bandit. At 15, he entered the Vyshnevolotsk Technical Construction School.
A wonderful person with rare abilities, with a good, kind heart, such people are rarely found in life.
(from the description of the head of the school)
Engineer in Siberia
At 20 he left for Siberia. He entered Tomsk district of communications for the position of clerical worker.
Later he led expeditions on rivers Irtysh, Ob, Katun, Yenisei, Chulym, Lena, Lower Tunguska и AngaraHe explored their navigability potential over thousands of miles. He worked in the harsh conditions of the virtually deserted taiga. He prepared surveys for the future Chuya Highway.
I love Altai deeply. My love grows with each passing year. And I don't know how I can repay Altai for the joy and happiness it bestows upon me every day, every minute.
The Path to Literature
In 1908, his first publication, the symbolic fairy tale “Cedar,” was published in the Tomsk newspaper “Sibirskaya Zhizn.”
He published short stories (“They Prayed,” “Swift Court,” “Kralya”) and travel collections about the everyday life of a road engineer (“Along the Chuysky Tract” and “Chuisky Tales”).
Since 1911 he was a regular participant in Potanin’s “Thursdays” (Grigory Potanin — a major researcher and public figure of Siberia), where the creative and scientific intelligentsia of Tomsk gathered.
In 1915 he moved to Petrograd, where he became close with Bitter. A year later, with his assistance, he published his first collection of stories, “Siberian Tale.”
After the October Revolution of 1917, he left the engineering service and devoted himself entirely to literature. Siberia and Altai remained one of the main themes of his work.
Novels and the War Years
In 1923 he wrote the novel "Vataga" about the Civil War.
"Do you have a master, a husband?" he slapped his wet, fleshy lips.
No, sir, no... He's fighting... Under Kolchak.
"Under Kolchak?" Garaska drawled, chewing bread and sour cream. "Zykov will find out, he'll give you a good beating."
“As for [mobilization], sir... Not of my own free will,” the butterfly said tearfully, and her heart sank.
"Nothing according to the billing," said the man in red Uhlan trousers. "If it's according to the billing, he's not guilty."
To the east, along soulless steel belts, rattling trains rush, filled with typhus, fear, and despair. These are people fleeing from people, fleeing like animals, along the narrow, bestial path of enmity. And, like animals, they are merciless, cowardly, and cruel. People are like animals: some flee, others catch up.
From 1927 he lived in Detskoye Selo (Pushkin). There he worked on the story "Wanderers" about street children.
A bad will will lead you into captivity
In 1932 he wrote the novel “Gloomy River” about life in Siberia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
But no one knows themselves to the core. Even the prophetic raven doesn't sense where to lay their bones.
In 1933, he took part in a trip of writers, artists and journalists to the construction site of Stalin’s White Sea Canal.
He was the only writer who refused to write anything about this for the propaganda collection.
He spent the last seven years of his life working on a three-volume historical epic, "Yemelyan Pugachev," in which he portrayed him as an extraordinary man. He only managed to publish the first volume (he received the Stalin Prize, posthumously).
During the Great Patriotic War, he lived in besieged Leningrad and wrote articles for front-line newspapers.
In the spring of 1942, he was evacuated to Moscow. There, he continued to perform on the radio and in hospitals, writing essays and patriotic books.
Last years
According to the recollections of his contemporaries, in his last years he became disillusioned with Soviet power.
The last time I met him on the street was in the autumn of 41. “What have they done to the country! In twenty-five years they have ruined it, made it impoverished,” he said indignantly, embitteredly.
(translator and diary author Lyubov Shaporina)
He died in 1945 in Moscow, at the age of 71, two months before Victory Day.
