Boris Pilnyak and his creative destiny. See what “Pilnyak, Boris Andreevich” is in other dictionaries

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich (real name Vogau) (1894–1938), Russian writer.

Born on September 29 (October 11), 1894 in Mozhaisk in the family of a veterinarian from Russified Volga Germans. Mother is Russian, the daughter of a Saratov merchant. Pilnyak spent his childhood and youth surrounded by the zemstvo intelligentsia in the provincial cities of Russia - Saratov, Bogorodsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kolomna. In this heterogeneous environment, which professed populist ideals, the sense of duty of the educated class to “peasant Russia” was nurtured, and the code of ascetic service to democratic values ​​was strictly observed. The impressions of his childhood years spent in the Russian outback, which concealed wild passions that were invisible until then, “dislocations” and “whirlwinds” of the consciousness of the “grassroots” mass of people, were reflected in the future in many of Pilnyak’s works.

Russia walked under the Tatars - it was Tatar yoke. Russia walked under the Germans - there was a German yoke. Russia is smart to itself... I say at the meeting: there is no international, but there is a people's Russian revolution, a rebellion - and nothing more. In the image of Stepan Timofeevich. - “And Karl Marxov?” - they ask. “He’s a German, I say, and therefore a fool.” - “What about Lenin?” - Lenin, I say, is one of the men, a Bolshevik... We must, I say, ring a bell from the liberation of the yoke!.. So that there is faith and truth... Believe in what you want, even in a block of wood. And the communists are out too! - The Bolsheviks, I say, will manage on their own. (novel The Naked Year)

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich

I started trying to write early – at the age of 9. In March 1909, his first essay was published. His professional career began in 1915, when a number of his stories were published in the magazines and almanacs “Russian Thought”, “Harvest”, “Flashes”, “Milky Way” - already under the pseudonym B. Pilnyak (from the Ukrainian “Pilnyanka” - a place of forest development; in a village of that name, where he lived in the summer young writer and from where he sent stories to the editors, the residents were called “Pilnyaks”). It is believed that the path to literature was first opened for him by the story Zemstvo Delo, which was published at the same time in the Monthly Journal by V.S. Mirolyubov.

In 1918, Pilnyak’s first book, With the Last Steamship, was published. Subsequently, he considered it frankly weak, with the exception of two stories - Above the Ravine and Death, which he invariably included in almost all lifetime editions of selected works. The writer considered the collection Bylyo (1920) “the first book of stories about the Soviet revolution in the RSFSR.” His role in the creative fate of the author is indeed extremely significant, since the stories that made up the collection became creative laboratory for the novel The Naked Year published in 1922. Many stories were included in the novel as separate chapters, thereby emphasizing the “fragmentation” of its composition, breaking up into relatively independent parts.

The Naked Year secured Pilnyak's place as a classic of Russian literature of the 20th century. In the history of Russian prose of the post-revolutionary period, the novel played the same role as the Twelve Blocks in the history of poetry. It became an innovative artistic reflection of the revolutionary elements and set an adequate language for depicting the tectonic shifts of Russian history. At the center of the novel is life in the terrible and hungry year of 1919 in the conventional provincial city of Ordynin, which symbolically expands to an all-Russian scale.

Come on, sleuths, what about Orthodoxy in fairy tales? (novel The Naked Year)

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich

At the same time, time boundaries turn out to be no less symbolic and transparent than spatial boundaries themselves: through completely certain moment The arrival of the revolution in the town of Ordynin reveals an endless retrospective of a thousand years of Russian history. Starting from the position of a detached reporter who wants to capture what is happening, the author moves towards creating a sweeping historiosophical canvas. With its themes and style, Pilnyak frankly inherits the artistic discoveries of A. Bely as the author of the novels Silver Dove and Petersburg. Understanding the Revolution and Philosophy national history in the novel The Naked Year they were also influenced by the ideology of Scythianism, which was also reflected in Blok’s works of 1918–1919. For Pilnyak, revolution is not just a social cataclysm.

This is a grandiose breakthrough of the irrepressible sectarian-pagan element that has always languished in Russian soil, rebellious bravado, demonic anarchism, Asian chaos, mystical “Razinovism”, which since the time of Peter I has been crushed by the weight of the superficial European civilization, which gave the world a fragile intellectual-aristocratic culture now doomed to destruction. In this sense, according to the author’s logic, the roots Russian revolution and Bolshevism like her name driving force- not in the class sentiments of the recent past and not in the European wisdom of Marxism, but in the energies of the age-old instincts of the dark peasant mass, anticipating the disastrous, but also cleansing revelry.

The revolution in the novel is a “leap into Russian XVII century”, to the origins, behind which peeps the pre-temporal past, paradoxically connecting with the revelations of the future. In this “leap” the person himself is revealed in a new way. It is described in an emphatically naturalistic manner; a natural-zoological, “animal” principle is revealed in it. Pilnyak shows how human instincts, secrets and calls of the flesh are released from under the former shrouds, and the unconscious breaks through.

The whole history of muzhik Russia is the history of sectarianism. (novel The Naked Year)

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich

Naked year – fundamentally innovative work from the point of view of novel technique. Artistic structure here is based on the rejection of traditional storyline, which is replaced by a mosaic of episodes, relatively independent passages, interacting with each other rather on the principle of musical counterpoint. There are no main characters in the novel.

The reader is presented with a whole gallery of “equal” characters, reflecting the different cultural “faces” of the city and its environs: ordinary employees, Bolsheviks “in leather jackets”, inhabitants of collapsing noble nests, representatives of the clergy, members of an anarchist commune, sectarians, healers, etc. . Such “fragmentation” of artistic vision seeks to express the dynamics of history itself, the collapse of established cultural forms, the “European style” of life, which was previously embodied in the harmony of the classic Russian novel of the era critical realism. At the same time, the Russian classics themselves of the 19th and early 20th centuries. becomes in the novel the object of literary play and artistic rethinking. The author puts his main historiosophical idea into images that implicitly refer attentive reader to the heroes of War and Peace by L.N. Tolstoy, the Lord Golovlevs by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Karamazov Brothers by F.M. Dostoevsky, Village and Sukhodol by I.A. Bunin, etc.

Like a master artistic language The author focuses on the speech form of skaz (reproduction of an oral, sounding word), dating back to N.S. Leskov and tested in the modernist prose of A.M. Remizov and the same Bely. Pilnyak's Naked Year acted as a translator of the stylistic achievements of the leading masters of the 1900s–1910s to the generation of writers who came to literature on the revolutionary wave.

The novel emphasizes those features of modernist prose that most anticipate the art of the avant-garde. Thus, E. Zamyatin once noted: “Pilnyak’s compositional technique has something very unique and new - this is the constant use of the technique of “displacement of planes.” One plot plane - suddenly, broken - is replaced by another, sometimes several times on one page ". It is obvious that such a “displacement of planes” is a transfer to literary text one of the characteristic aesthetic principles cubism. In extremely unexpected, picturesque, compressed images, often built on hyperbole, exaggerated details (especially vivid ones in descriptions of the phantasmagoria of Russian “district” life), one can feel the influence of the poetics of expressionism. In addition, Pilnyak tries to activate not only the reader’s consciousness, but also his hearing, and even his vision.

The author, like the futurist poets, creates a synthetic work where artistic sense contains not only sound writing, but also typographic typing, its placement on the page: playing with different fonts, italics, margin shapes, etc. The Naked Year can rightfully be called the first in Soviet literature an avant-garde work of large epic form. From the point of view of historical poetics, this novel certainly played its role in establishing the tale as one of the key narrative techniques in Russian prose of the 1920s (A. Vesely, M. Zoshchenko, I. Babel, etc.) . It is generally accepted that the Naked Year formed the entire “Pilnyak school” in young Soviet literature and contributed to the birth of such a striking phenomenon of the 1920s as “ornamental prose.”

Since the early 1920s, Pilnyak's work has caused heated debate in criticism. The reason for this lay in the uniqueness of his creative and civic position. On the one hand, he became one of the founders of great Soviet prose, always emphasized his loyalty to the revolution and new government, although he was never a member of the Communist Party, on the other hand, an internal imperative invariably forced him to observe the principle of artistic objectivity, to put the truth of art above any ideological prescriptions.

“Loyal” criticism immediately sensed the danger and lack of a “communist core” in the perception of the revolution as a cleansing thunderstorm, a “blizzard,” “March spring waters.” “It’s unlikely that another Soviet writer simultaneously evoked such contradictory assessments as Pilnyak,” wrote the contemporary writer Vyach. Polonsky. – Some consider him not only a writer of the era of revolution, but also a revolutionary writer. Others, on the contrary, are convinced that it is the reaction that guides his hand. Few doubted Pilnyak's talent. But his revolutionary character raised great doubts.”

Similar complexity internal position, consciously distancing herself from any too simple circuits, led to curiously contradictory attempts to certify Pilnyak from the point of view of his ideological position and belonging to certain literary trends and groups.

He was called a “Bolshevik”, and a “fellow traveler”, and an “internal emigrant”, and an “enemy”, and a “Serapion brother”, and a “Perevalets”, and a “Smenovekhovite”. But Pilnyak himself invariably considered himself the author of works about Russia, staying within the ideology of today only insofar as he pronounces himself in it thousand-year history fatherland. In Excerpts from a Diary (1924), he admitted: “I am not ... a communist, and therefore I do not admit that I should be a communist and write like a communist, - and I admit that communist power in Russia is determined - not by the will of communists, but by historical destinies Russia, and since I want to trace (as best I can and as my conscience and mind tell me) these Russian historical destinies, I am with the communists, that is, since the communists are with Russia, to the extent I am with them... I admit that the fate of the Russian Communist Party is much less interesting to me than the fate of Russia."

And even in the much less “harmless” 1930s, Pilnyak continued to deny the obligatory principle of party leadership of literature and defended the writer’s right to independence and objectivity.

In 1922, Pilnyak was one of the first representatives of official Soviet literature to visit Germany. He was entrusted with the mission of representing writers “born in the revolution” in the West. The Naked Year made such a favorable impression on emigrants of various political views that Pilnyak was equally favorably received by all of “Russian Germany” - from Remizov and Bely to the Menshevik Yu. Martov. At the same time, Pilnyak published three books in Berlin (The Naked Year, Ivan da Marya, The Petersburg Tale, or the Holy Stone City).

The trip to Berlin confirmed Pilnyak in the fidelity of his calling and gave him a feeling creative freedom and breadth of vision, contributed to the final self-determination as an artist-historiosophist who comprehends the present day. Upon returning to his homeland, he noted: “I love Russian - albeit absurd - history, its originality, its absurdity... its dead ends - I love our garbage-ism. I was abroad, I saw emigration, I saw the people of Zemshchensk. And I know that the Russian revolution is where we must take everything together, communism, Socialist Revolutionaryism, White Guardism, and monarchism: all these are the heads of the Russian revolution, but main chapter- in Russia, in Moscow... And one more thing: I want to be a historian in the revolution, I want to be an indifferent spectator and love everyone, I threw out all kinds of politics. Communism is alien to me..."

In 1923, Pilnyak visited Great Britain, where he met with the largest English writers, including G. Wells and B. Shaw. Britain deeply impressed him with the level of industrial progress and the development of modern civilization. Pilnyak reconsiders the former system of views and abandons the previous apology for “peasant Rus'”, the mysticism of fields and spaces in favor of a new ideal of industrial urbanism and strict rationality. On the ideological plane, this entailed a switch from “Scythian” spontaneity to pro-communist positions and openness to the constructivist poetry of the proletariat, factories and machines.

A similar evolution is reflected in a new novel, which was created based on vivid impressions during the trip - Cars and Wolves, where the “chaotic” beginning - savagery, ignorance and dark instincts ("wolves") - is contrasted with the "cosmic" beginning - the utopia of industrial progress (" cars"). Commenting on the work on the work, Pilnyak writes in Excerpts from his diary: “... for the first time now, after England, a communist, workers’, machine revolution “sounded” to me - not a field, not a peasant, not a “Bolshevik” revolution, a revolution of factories and urban workers suburbs, machine revolution, steel, like mathematics, like steel. Until now, I wrote in the name of the “wildflower” of the thistle, its life and flowering, - now I want to contrast this flower - with machine flowering. My novel was mixed not with sweat, as before, but with soot and oil: - this is our city , machine revolution...".

However, this reorientation did not in any way entail good-naturedness and conformism. “I have the bitter fame of a man who goes to trouble,” said Pilnyak. The validity of these words is confirmed, first of all, by the publication in 1926 of the Tale of the Unextinguished Moon. The edition of the magazine “New World” in which this work was published was confiscated.

The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon is a daring essay. Here the author decided to present his version of the death of the prominent Red Army commander M. Frunze, according to which he was sent to his death under the guise of an operation to remove a stomach ulcer. The prototypes of the main characters are not named, but contemporaries easily discerned familiar features. Here Pilnyak tried to depict one of the sides in the mechanism of the Bolshevik regime - the most severe discipline characteristic of revolutionary organisms.

Its iron law overcomes all manifestations of common sense: main character undergoes a medically unnecessary operation in order to carry out an order. The former People's Commissar for Military Affairs bows to the will of the leadership and senselessly sacrifices his own life.

However artistic merit the stories are by no means limited to topical socio-political subtext. Pilnyak comes out here and on more high level generalizations, tries to reveal the deep, existential meanings of what is depicted. Gavrilov (M. Frunze) is a largely symbolic character. The author focuses on understanding the internal tragedy of loneliness and doom of the “patriarch” of revolutionary tyranny, one of the “creators of history.” Penetrating into the psychology of such a tragedy, Pilnyak partly anticipates the discoveries of Western literature of the second half of the 20th century (The Autumn of Patriarch Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

According to the logic of the narrative, the entire life of the army commander was aimed at ensuring that the will of the “stiff man” doomed to death reigns, which replaces the inexorable Rock in the created “new” world ancient tragedy. And like any uprising tragic hero against the dictates of Rock, any attempts to escape from the inevitable are absurd in their senselessness. This new world, created by the “Hercules” and “Prometheans” of the 20th century, is generally completely absurd, but also, paradoxically, super-rationalistic. Similar plot outgrows the framework of national literature and touches on the realities of not only Soviet Russia. Pilnyak is moving along a path similar to the one that F. Kafka followed in Europe almost in the same years in his novel The Process.

The scandal caused by this work forced Pilnyak to appear in Novy Mir (1927, No. 1) with a “repentant” letter, in which he, however, admitted himself guilty only of “tactlessness” and accusations of “insulting the story to the memory of Frunze.” "Rejected it completely.

However, in the second half of the 1920s, Pilnyak continued to actively work and publish. In 1929 his collected works were published in 6 volumes, and in 1929–1930 an eight-volume edition was published. The books Mother of Cheese Earth (1925), Zavolochye, Roots of the Japanese Sun, Regular Stories, Spilled Time, Stories from the East (all - 1927), Chinese Tale (1928) appeared. Some of them were written based on impressions from trips around the USSR and foreign countries: Pilnyak visits Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Mongolia, China, Japan, USA.

The year 1929 was marked by a new scandal. At the Berlin publishing house Petropolis, which published primarily Soviet writers, Pilnyak published the stories Stos in Life and Mahogany. Storm of indignation in official literary circles caused by the very fact of publishing books in the West, but to a greater extent - ideological content Mahogany. In this short story, the writer again presented sketches from the life of a provincial town. The town and its surroundings are affected by new ulcers generated by Soviet life: the “natural suspicion” of the Bolshevik leadership and its detachment from real life ordinary people, the desire to crush the most hardworking and proactive - the so-called. "kulaks" and so on.

However, all this is nothing more than private motives of the story, which do not occupy a leading place here. The main thing in the artistic world of Mahogany is pervasive melancholy as the main tonality of life in the Soviet hinterland. This melancholy equally takes possession of the souls of the former bar, and the current young people, and the romantic enthusiasts of the first years of the revolution, who turned into beggars, into “déclasse elements”, doomed to escape from the present and remain faithful to “high ideals” only in the frenzy of everyday life. drunkenness.

As soon as the publication of the story became known in the USSR, the persecution of Pilnyak began. The newspapers were full of headlines: “The Soviet public is against the Pilnyakovism”, “Forays of the class enemy in literature”, “On the anti-Soviet act of B. Pilnyak”, “Lessons of the Pilnyakovism”, “Against the Pilnyakovism and reconciliation with it”, etc. For the first time, the formula “I haven’t read it myself, but I am sincerely indignant…”, which later became notorious, was tested. It is characteristic that in the vast majority of articles, Pilnyak’s work, barely forty standard pages long, was invariably called a novel... The campaign lasted from September 1929 to April 1931. By this time, Pilnyak headed the All-Russian Writers Union.

Protesting against the ongoing campaign, Pilnyak and B. Pasternak submitted statements of resignation from the writers' organization. At the same time, in solidarity with Pilnyak and E. Zamyatin, A. Akhmatova left the writers’ organization. One of the few who stood up for Pilnyak at this difficult time was A.M. Gorky, who, by the way, did not sympathize with the story “Mahogany” itself. “Besides Pilnyak, there are many other writers on whose heads “unanimous” people are testing the power of their fists, trying to convince the authorities that they know how to protect the ideological purity of the working class and the virginity of youth...” the classic wrote indignantly Soviet literature.

And yet Pilnyak continued to work. Over the remaining seven years, he wrote six more volumes of fiction and journalistic prose. Among them are the book Okay, The Birth of Man, Selected Stories, inspired by travels around the United States, and finally, The Ripening of Fruits, an essay telling about the beneficial consequences of cultivating a new life in Central Asia.

In 1937 Pilnyak wrote his last novel, published only in 1990 – Salt Barn. This work was conceived as the last word of the writer, his creative testament. On the pages of the novels, the author returns to the years of childhood and youth spent in the provinces, to the maturation of the revolution, to the origins of the epochal shifts in Russian life that took place before his eyes. The novel affirms a simple and high moral maxim: everyone must selflessly fight for their beliefs and live in accordance with their own worldview.

Gradually the atmosphere around Pilnyak became more and more stuffy. They stop printing it. In October 1937 he was arrested. On April 21, 1938, he was convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on charges of state crime and sentenced to death penalty. The sentence was carried out in Moscow.

Boris Andreevich Pilnyak - photo

Boris Andreevich Pilnyak - quotes

The whole history of muzhik Russia is the history of sectarianism. (novel The Naked Year)

Come on, sleuths, what about Orthodoxy in fairy tales? (novel The Naked Year)

Russia walked under the Tatars - there was a Tatar yoke. Russia walked under the Germans - there was a German yoke. Russia is smart to itself... I say at the meeting: there is no international, but there is a people's Russian revolution, a rebellion - and nothing more. In the image of Stepan Timofeevich. - “And Karl Marxov?” - they ask. “He’s a German, I say, and therefore a fool.” - “What about Lenin?” - Lenin, I say, is one of the men, a Bolshevik... We must, I say, ring a bell from the liberation of the yoke!.. So that there is faith and truth... Believe in what you want, even in a block of wood. And the communists are out too! - The Bolsheviks, I say, will manage on their own. (novel The Naked Year)

Biography

Born in Mozhaisk, in the family of veterinarian Andrei Ivanovich Vogau, who came from German colonists of the Volga region and was born in Ekaterinenstadt. Mother - Olga Ivanovna Savinova, was born into the family of a Saratov merchant. Wife - Maria Alekseevna Sokolova, doctor at the Kolomna hospital; divorced in 1924. The second wife is Olga Sergeevna Shcherbinovskaya, an actress at the Maly Theater. Third wife - Princess Kira Georgievna Andronikashvili, actress, director.

Pilnyak spent his childhood and youth surrounded by the zemstvo intelligentsia in the provincial cities of Russia - Mozhaisk, Saratov, Bogorodsk (modern Noginsk), Nizhny Novgorod, Kolomna. In 1913 he graduated from a real school in Nizhny Novgorod. Graduated in 1920. Since 1924 he lived in Moscow.

I started trying to write at the age of 9. In March 1909, his first essay was published. His professional career began in 1915, when in the magazines and almanacs “Russian Thought”, “Harvest”, “Flashes”, “ Milky Way"published a number of his stories - already under the pseudonym Bor. Pilnyak (from the Ukrainian “Pilnyanka” - a place of forest development; in the Kharkov village of that name, where he visited his uncle Alexander Ivanovich Savinov, the residents were called “pilnyaks”).

In 1929, he was removed from the leadership of the All-Russian Writers' Union for publishing the story “Mahogany” abroad. However, the story was legally transferred to the Berlin Russian publishing house through VOKS channels, and was subsequently included in the novel “The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea,” published in the USSR in 1930. “Not so long ago, Pilnyak published the counter-revolutionary “Mahogany Tree” abroad. “Mahogany” he has now remade, polished and made the novel “The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea.” But even with a superficial reading, it is clear that this is a superficial alteration; it is clear that Pilnyak hides a white core behind the red words,” noted L. Shemshelevich in the Discussion about “ Quiet Don"in the Rostov Association of Proletarian Writers.

Despite the criticism, until 1937 Pilnyak remained one of the most published writers. On October 28, 1937 he was arrested. On April 21, 1938, he was convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on trumped-up charges of a state crime - espionage for Japan (he was in Japan and wrote about this in his book “The Roots of the Japanese Sun”) - and sentenced to death. Shot on the same day in Moscow.

Rehabilitated in 1956.

There are two preserved houses in Kolomna that are directly related to the writer. In house number 14 on Polyanskaya Street he lived with his parents. He moved to house No. 7 on Arbatskaya Street when he got married and lived here for seven years. After moving to Moscow, his first wife and their children continued to live in this house. On October 24, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the facade of the house.

For most of the “starting” year in professional literature in 1915, he constantly lived at the dacha in the village of Krivyakino, Kolomna district (where his father worked as a veterinarian), now it is Kuibyshev Street in the town of Voskresensk near Moscow. In Moscow he lived on Vorovskogo Street, 26 (now Povarskaya), from the end of 1927 on 2nd Street. Yamskogo Polya, 1 (since 1934 called Pravdy Street), since June 1936 - in a house in Peredelkino.

The house on Rogozhskaya Street in Noginsk, where in 1904-1912 future writer lived with his parents. When visiting the city in subsequent years, Pilnyak stopped in this place for the night. Andrei Bely, Andrei Sobol and Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy were in the house with him.

Several houses have also survived in the writer’s homeland - Mozhaisk. However, it is not known exactly in which house the writer lived. As follows from his memoirs, from the windows of the house that the Vogau family rented, one could see St. Nicholas Cathedral, and opposite was the Shishkins’ house, and under the windows there was a square. Only one house fits this description - it is a stone two-story mansion located at the intersection of Volodarsky Street and Moskovskaya Street. However, there is a theory that the doctor could rent housing not far from the vet. clinics on Klementyevskaya Street. an old house on the territory of the city hospital (now the dermatology department), despite its antiquity (this is the last pre-revolutionary and pre-war building on the territory of the Hospital Town), cannot be Pilnyak’s house for the reason that it was built after the Vogau family left the city.

Boris Pilnyak is mentioned in the famous open letter of accusation to I.V. Stalin by Fyodor Raskolnikov.

In the USSR, from 1938 to 1975, Pilnyak’s books were not published. In 1964, Moscow magazine published chapters from the novel “Salt Barn.”

Family

Creation

The chaos of revolutionary events was formally reflected in Pilnyak’s fragmentary, episodic, experimental narrative technique, which (under the influence of A. Bely, as well as A. Remizov and E. Zamyatin) moved away from the traditional realistic narrative, determined by the completed action. Event elements exist in isolation from each other, break off, shift in time and are brought together thanks to figurative symbols and repetition techniques.<…>Pilnyak's ornamental style, which had a significant influence on other Russian writers, is also evident in the microstructures of his prose, even in syntax.

According to Gleb Struve, Pilnyak “became the head of an entire school or movement in Soviet literature.” This direction is usually called “ornamental prose.”

Lifetime publications

• With the last ship. M., Creativity, 1918
• Bylye, M., Links, 1920; 2nd ed. - Revel, 1922.
• Naked Year, Petersburg - Berlin, ed. Grzhebina, 1922.
• The Petersburg Tale, Berlin, Helikon 1922.
• Ivan da Marya, Berlin-Pb., ed. Grzhebina, 1922.
• Metelinka, Berlin, Ogonki, 1923.
• St. Peter-Burch, Berlin, 1922
• The deadly beckons. M., 1922
• Nikola-on-Posady. M.-Pb., “Circle”, 1923.
• Simple stories. Pg.: Time, 1923. - 80 p.
• Stories about black bread. M., Krug, 1923
• The Third Capital, 1923 (1924 under the title "Mother-Stepmother")
• Naked year. M., Krug, 1923; The same, Ed. author, 1924; the same, M., GIZ, 1927
• English stories, M.-L., Krug, 1924.
• Stories. Ed. author, 1924
• Stories. Ed. author, 1924
• Cars and wolves. Leningrad, GIZ, 1925.
• The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon // “New World”, 1926, No. 5 (The story was filmed in 1990)
• The mother of cheese is the earth. M., 1926
• Blizzard. - M., Ogonyok, 1926
• Heirs and other stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1926
• A story about keys and clay. M.-L., GIZ, 1926
• Russia in flight. M., 1926
• Ivan Moscow (story), 1927.
• Zavolochye. L., Priboi, 1927. - 144 pp., 6,000 copies.
• Next stories, M., Krug, 1927.
• Chinese Diary, 1927.
• Time squandered. Stories. - M.-L., GIZ, 1927.
• Roots of the Japanese sun. - L., Priboy, 1927.
• A big heart. M., GIZ, 1927
• Stories. M., Nikitin subbotniks, 1927
• Stories from the East. - M., Ogonyok, 1927
• Chinese story. M., GIZ, 1928
• Mahogany, Berlin, 1929.
• Stories. M., Nikitin subbotniks, 1929
• The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, M., Nedra, 1930.
• Stories. M., “Federation”, 1932. - 284 pp., 5,200 copies.
• Okay. M., Federation, 1933; the same, M., GIHL, 1933; the same, M., Goslitizdat, 1935
• Stories. Paris, 1933
• Stones and roots. M., Soviet literature, 1934; the same, M., Goslitizdat, 1935
• Selected stories. M., " Fiction", 1935.- 320 pp., 10,000 copies.
• The Birth of Man M., 1935
• Ripening of fruits, 1936.
• Meat (together with S. Belyaev) // “New World”, 1936.
• Pilnyak B. A. Collected works: in 8 volumes. - M.-L., GIZ, 1929-1930.

• The Murder of the Army Commander, 1965 (“The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon”)
• Naked Year, 1966
• Stones and Roots, Chicago, 1966
• Time Spattered, 1966
• Mahogany, 1966
• Byle, 1970
• Cars and Wolves, 1971
• Okay, 1972
• Doubles, London, OPI, 1983 (novel reconstructed by M. Geller)

• Pilnyak B. A. Selected works. M.: “Fiction”, 1976; L., "Fiction", 1978,1979 - 702 p.
• Pilnyak B. A. A Whole Life: Selected Prose. - Mn.: Mastatskaya Literature, 1988.
• Pilnyak B. A. Letters to Mirolyubov and Lutokhin // Russian literature. - 1989, No. 2.
• Pilnyak B. A. Mahogany // Friendship of Peoples. - 1989, No. 1.
• Pilnyak B. A. The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon. - M., Book Chamber, 1989
• Pilnyak B. A. Time spilled: Novels, stories, stories. - M.: Soviet writer, 1990.
• Pilnyak B. A. Novels. - M.: Sovremennik, 1990. - 607 p.
• Pilnyak B. A. Human wind: Novels, stories, stories. - Tbilisi, 1990.
• Pilnyak B. A. The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon. - M., Pravda, 1990
• Pilnyak B. A. Excerpts from the diary // Perspectives. − 1991, No. 3. - P. 84-88.
• Pilnyak B. A. Letters to M. Gorky // Russian literature. - 1991, No. 1.
• Pilnyak B. A. Zashtat. - N.-Novgorod, 1991; 320 pp., 65,000 copies.
• Pilnyak B. A. Tales and stories 1915-1929. - M.: Sovremennik, 1991., 686 pp., 100,000 copies.
• Pilnyak B. A. Novel. Stories. Stories. - Chelyabinsk, YuUKI, 1991.
• Pilnyak B. A. The Third Capital: Tales and Stories. - M.: Russian book, 1992.
• Pilnyak B. A. Works: in 3 volumes. - M., Lada-M, 1994., 10,000 copies.
• Boris Pilnyak: Today's reading experience: a collection of articles. - M., 1995.
• Pilnyak B. A. Collected works in six volumes. - M.: Terra, 2003-2004.
• Pilnyak B.A. I have had bitter fame. Letters. - M., Agraf, 2002
• Boris Pilnyak. Zavolochye. - M.: European publications, 2007.
• Pilnyak B. A. Letters. T. 1: 1906-1922. T. 2: 1923-1937. Compilation, preparation of the text, preface and notes by K. B. Andronikashvili-Pilnyak and D. Kassek. - M.: IMLI RAS, 2010.

Born in the family of veterinarian Andrei Ivanovich Vogau, who came from German colonists of the Volga region and was born in Ekaterinenstadt. Mother - Olga Ivanovna Savinova, was born into the family of a Saratov merchant. Wife - Maria Alekseevna Sokolova, doctor at Kolomna Hospital; divorced in 1924. The second wife is Shcherbinovskaya, Olga Sergeevna, actress of the Maly Theater. The third wife is Princess Kira Georgievna Andronikashvili, actress, director.

Pilnyak spent his childhood and youth surrounded by the zemstvo intelligentsia in the provincial cities of Russia - Mozhaisk, Saratov, Bogorodsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kolomna. In 1920 he graduated from the Moscow Commercial Institute. Since 1924 he lived in Moscow.

I started trying to write at the age of 9. In March 1909, his first essay was published. His professional career began in 1915, when a number of his stories were published in the magazines and almanacs “Russian Thought”, “Harvest”, “Flashes”, “Milky Way” - already under the pseudonym B. Pilnyak (from the Ukrainian “Pilnyanka” - a place of forest development; in the village of that name, where the young writer lived in the summer and from where he sent stories to the editors, the residents were called “pilnyaks”).

In 1918, Pilnyak’s first book, “With the Last Steamship,” was published.

Chairman of the All-Russian Writers' Union. Novels “The Naked Year” (1922), “Cars and Wolves” (1925), “The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea” (1930), “Okay! An American Novel” (1931), “The Salt Barn” (1937) and others .

Pilnyak's literary and political positions have repeatedly led to the organization of widespread critical campaigns against him. He was constantly criticized for ideological errors, formalism, eroticism, mysticism, etc. Nevertheless, until 1937, Pilnyak remained one of the most published writers.

In 1926, Pilnyak wrote “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” - based on widespread rumors about the circumstances of the death of M. Frunze with a hint of the participation of I. Stalin.

In 1929 he was removed from the leadership of the All-Russian Writers' Union for publishing abroad the story "Mahogany". However, the story was legally transferred to the Berlin Russian publishing house through VOKS channels, and was subsequently included in the novel “The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea,” published in the USSR in 1930. “Not so long ago, Pilnyak published the counter-revolutionary “Mahogany Tree” abroad. “Mahogany” he has now remade, polished and made the novel “The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea.” But even with a superficial reading it is clear that this is a superficial alteration; it is clear that Pilnyak hides a white core behind the red words.”

Arrested on October 28, 1937. On April 21, 1938, he was convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on trumped-up charges of a state crime and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on the same day in Moscow.

Rehabilitated in 1956.

There are two preserved houses in Kolomna that are directly related to the writer. In house number 14 on Polyanskaya Street he lived with his parents. He moved to house No. 7 on Arbatskaya Street when he got married and lived here for seven years. After moving to Moscow, his first wife and their children continued to live in this house. On October 24, 1980, a marble memorial plaque was unveiled on the facade of the house.

In Moscow he lived on the street. Vorovskogo, 26 (now Povarskaya), from the end of 1927 - on 2nd street. Yamskogo Polya, 1 (since 1934 called Pravdy Street), since June 1936 - in a house in Peredelkino. Pilnyak’s house has also been preserved on Rogozhskaya Street in Noginsk (Bogorodsk), where he lived with his parents from 1907-1911.

Boris Pilnyak is mentioned in the famous open letter of accusation to J.V. Stalin by Fyodor Raskolnikov, midshipman of the October Revolution.

In the USSR, from 1938 to 1975, Pilnyak’s books were not published. In 1964, the magazine "Moscow" published chapters from the novel "Salt Barn".

The writer's son, Boris Andronikashvili, a screenwriter and historian, was the first husband of Lyudmila Gurchenko. They had a daughter, Maria (1959), and grandchildren, Elena and Mark, who died in 1998 from a drug overdose.

Creation

According to Gleb Struve, Pilnyak “became the head of an entire school or movement in Soviet literature.” This trend is usually called “ornamental prose,” and those who wrote in this style in the 1920s were often called “sweepers.”

Sergei Yesenin spoke of Pilnyak - “a hack, the likes of which the world has never seen,” pointed to his anger and misanthropy, and emphasized: “his art never slept with him! He pure water speculator".

• “Krasnaya Novy” contains “Materials for the Novel” by Bohr. Pilnyak. This sensational writer makes an interesting confession in the preface to the new work. Criticism has repeatedly pointed out to him that he introduces into his works large passages from previously published ones, that he has not developed his own style, and imitates Bely, Bunin, and Remizov. As if answering her, he writes: “My things live with me so awkwardly that when I start writing a new thing, I take the old ones as material, destroy them in order to make a new and better one - partly because I value my things much more.” what I want to say now, and I sacrifice old work if it helps me; this is also because I have little imagination... I came from Bely and Bunin, many do a lot better than me, and I consider myself entitled to take this best or something that I can do better.”

Bibliography

• Byle, M.1919, 2nd ed. - Revel, 1922
• Naked Year, 1922
• The Petersburg Tale, Berlin, 1922
• Ivan da Marya, Berlin, 1922
• Metelinka, Berlin, 1922
• St. Petersburg, Berlin, 1922
• The deadly beckons. M., 1922
• Simple stories. P., 1923
• The Third Capital, 1923 (1924 under the title "Mother-Stepmother")
• English stories, 1924
• Cars and wolves. Leningrad, 1925.
• The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon // “New World”, 1926, No. 5 (The story was filmed in 1990, directed by Evgeny Tsymbal)
• Ivan Moscow (story), 1927
• Zavolochye. L., 1927
• Regular stories, 1927
• Chinese Diary, 1927
• Mahogany, Berlin, 1929
• The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea, 1930
• Okay, 1933
• Stones and Roots, 1933 (“New World”), 1934
• Ripening of fruits, 1936
• Meat (together with S. Belyaev) // “New World”, 1936

• Pilnyak B. A. Collected works: in 8 volumes. - M.-L., 1929-1930.

• The Murder of the Army Commander, 1965 (“The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon”)
• Naked Year, 1966
• Stones and roots, 1966
• Time Spattered, 1966
• Mahogany, 1966
• Byle, 1970
• Cars and Wolves, 1971
• Okay, 1972
• Doubles, 1983 (novel reconstructed by M. Geller)

• Pilnyak B. A. Selected works, 1976
• Pilnyak B. A. Whole Life: Selected Prose. - Mn.: Mast., 1988.
• Pilnyak B. A. Spilled time: Novels, stories, stories. - M.: Soviet writer, 1990.
• Pilnyak B. A. Novels. - M.: Sovremennik, 1990. - 607 p.
• Pilnyak B. A. Human wind: Novels, stories, stories. Tbilisi, 1990.
• Pilnyak B. A. Excerpts from the diary // Perspectives. ? 1991. No. 3. - P. 84-88.
• Pilnyak B. A. Letters to M. Gorky // Russian literature. ? 1991. No. 1. - p. ...
• Pilnyak B. A. Letters to Mirolyubov and Lutokhin // Russian literature. - 1989. No. 2. - p. ...
• Pilnyak B. A. Novels and stories 1915-1929. - M.: Sovremennik, 1991.
• Pilnyak B. A. The Third Capital: Tales and Stories. - M.: Russian book, 1992.
• Pilnyak B. A. Works: in 3 volumes. - M., 1994.
• Boris Pilnyak: Today's reading experience: a collection of articles. - M., 1995.
• Pilnyak B. A. Collected works in six volumes. - M.: Terra, 2003-2004.
• Boris Pilnyak. Zavolochye. - M.: European publications, 2007.
• Pilnyak B. A. Letters. T. 1: 1906-1922. T. 2: 1923-1937. Compilation, preparation of the text, preface and notes by K. B. Andronikashvili-Pilnyak and D. Kassek. M.: IMLI RAS, 2010

« And there is happy people, can think honestly, live and not be afraid of the truth!»

120 years ago, on October 11, 1894, a classic was born Russian literature 20th century, writer Boris Pilnyak.

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich (real name Vogau), Russian writer. Born in Mozhaisk in the family of a veterinarian from the Russified Volga Germans. Mother is Russian, the daughter of a Saratov merchant. Pilnyak spent his childhood and youth surrounded by the zemstvo intelligentsia in the provincial cities of Russia - Saratov, Bogorodsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kolomna. In this heterogeneous environment, which professed populist ideals, the sense of duty of the educated class to “peasant Russia” was nurtured, and the code of ascetic service to democratic values ​​was strictly observed. The impressions of his childhood years spent in the Russian outback, which concealed wild passions that were invisible until then, “dislocations” and “whirlwinds” of the consciousness of the “grassroots” mass of people, were reflected in the future in many of Pilnyak’s works. I started trying to write early - at the age of 9. In March 1909, his first essay was published.

His professional career began in 1915, when a number of his stories were published in the magazines and almanacs “Russian Thought”, “Harvest”, “Flashes”, “Milky Way” - already under the pseudonym Boris Pilnyak (from the Ukrainian “Pilnyanka” - a place of forest development; in a village with that name, where the young writer lived in the summer and from where he sent stories to the editors, the residents were called “pilnyaki”). It is believed that the path to literature was first opened for him by the story Zemstvo Delo, which was published at the same time in Mirolyubov’s Monthly Journal.

Boris Pilnyak with his mother O. A. Vogau and sister Nina. Kolomna. April 1915

In 1918, Pilnyak’s first book, “With the Last Steamship,” was published. Subsequently, he considered it frankly weak, with the exception of two stories: “Over the Ravine” and “Death,” which he invariably included in almost all editions of his selected works during his lifetime. The writer considered the collection Bylyo (1920) “the first book of stories about the Soviet revolution in the RSFSR.” His role in the author’s creative life is indeed extremely significant, since the stories that made up the collection became a creative laboratory for the novel “The Naked Year” published in 1922. Many stories were included in the novel as separate chapters, thereby emphasizing the “fragmentation” of its composition, breaking up into relatively independent parts.

"The Naked Year" secured Pilnyak's place as a classic of Russian literature of the 20th century. In the history of Russian prose of the post-revolutionary period, the novel played the same role as The Twelve Blocks in the history of poetry. It became an innovative artistic reflection of the revolutionary elements and set an adequate language for depicting the tectonic shifts of Russian history. At the center of the novel is life in the terrible and hungry 1919 provincial town of Ordynin, which symbolically expands to an all-Russian scale. With its themes and style, Pilnyak frankly inherits the artistic discoveries of A. Bely as the author of the novels “Silver Dove” and “Petersburg”.

The understanding of the revolution and the philosophy of national history in the novel “The Naked Year” were also influenced by the ideology of Scythianism, which was also reflected in Blok’s works of 1918-1919. For Pilnyak, revolution is not just a social cataclysm. This is a grandiose breakthrough of the irrepressible sectarian-pagan element, eternally languishing in Russian soil, rebellious bravado, demonic anarchism, Asian chaos, mystical “Razinovism”, since the time of Peter I, crushed by the burden of superficial European civilization, which gave the world a fragile intelligentsia-aristocratic culture, now doomed to destruction. . In this sense, according to the author’s logic, the roots of the Russian revolution and Bolshevism as its driving force are not in the class sentiments of the recent past and not in the European wisdom of Marxism, but in the energies of the age-old instincts of the dark peasant mass, anticipating disastrous but also cleansing revelry.

"The devil has tied us together with a thread"

About the relationship between the two famous writers the beginning of the last century, Zamyatin and Pilnyak are known quite a lot.Their names in literature have always been placed side by side - due to the similarity of creative approaches, views on literature and - similarity writers' destinies, alternating between success, disgrace, persecution, oblivion... The age difference, general culture and literary manners did not prevent them from finding mutual language and feel like-minded people in each other, carry friendship through your whole life.

Their acquaintance is usually dated back to 1921, although, judging by the mentions in Pilnyak’s letters, more early period, the writer has long highlighted Zamyatin’s work. By this time, Pilnyak had already announced himself in the press, he had high connoisseurs (Trotsky, Voronsky, Lunacharsky), he had already written the novel “The Naked Year”, which, while still in manuscript, was taken by Pasternak to Gorky and aroused the approval and further support of the latter . On this wave, at the end of April 1921, Pilnyak travels to Petrograd, where he meets Gorky and, as one might assume, Zamyatin.

Immediately after returning to Moscow, he undertakes to arrange Zamyatin’s affairs and writes a letter in which he clarifies the details and circumstances of the writer’s future imminent arrival in Moscow - performances in Moscow, accommodation for the night, enters into all the details of the upcoming visit, without forgetting his turn, ask Zamyatin for services for himself. The tone of the letters of a businesslike, self-confident person creates the feeling that Pilnyak had known Zamyatin for a long time and was only waiting for an opportunity to express his respect and devotion to him.

At this timeZamyatin travels to Moscow and Pilnyak takes him to his place in Kolomna. Zamyatin stayed with Pilnyak in Kolomna from June 18 to June 23, 1921. In a letter to his wife dated June 20, 1921, he described this city as follows: “But Kolomna is wonderful: the Kremlin, towers, monasteries, cathedrals, churches, the Moscow River, the Oka. Nikola Pilnyakovsky<...>- adorable. Unfortunately, this Nikola has a very loud voice."

A meeting in Moscow and a trip to Kolomna brought the two writers closer together. Since then, their relationship and correspondence have not been interrupted - they visit each other, help in organizing affairs, experience literary persecution together, discussing them when they meet and in letters, oppose the official authorities in their views on creativity and, as a rule, simultaneously experience the consequences love of freedom in literature. In February 1922, Zamyatin was severely criticized for the fairy tales "Arap" and "The Church of God" he published. Around the same time, Pilnyak also had to face problems associated with the publication of the story “Ivan da Marya” dedicated to Gorky. The story became the reason for the confiscation of Pilnyak’s collection of stories “Deadly Beckons” by the GPU and the subject of Trotsky’s persistent efforts.

In August 1922, Zamyatin was arrested and sentenced to deportation from the country, and Pilnyak showed his loyalty to his friend by using all his connections in the country's leadership. On September 9, Zamyatin was released, and on October 11, he and his wife were issued foreign passports. It is not entirely clear whether Zamyatin wanted to be expelled from the country or not and how things actually stood. It is known that Zamyatin repeatedly tried to postpone this deportation, and Pilnyak provided him with significant assistance in this.

Boris Pilnyak with his father A.I. Vogau and son Andrei. Kolomna. Summer 1923

Writers had to continue helping each other in the future. The writers met constantly, visited each other - on each of his visits to Moscow, Zamyatin, as a rule, stayed with Pilnyak. Escaping the bustle of the city, in June 1924 Pilnyak went for a month to the Shihanskoye forestry on the Volga, where he finished work on the novel “Machines and Wolves”, and in August he went to Arkhangelsk aboard the icebreaker “Perseus”, setting off on a polar expedition to Spitsbergen.

In 1925 he travels through the Marmara, Aegean, and Mediterranean seas, visits Constantinople, Piraeus, Port Said and describes this trip in “The Tale of Keys and Clay” (1925). In February 1926, Pilnyak was already traveling to China and Japan. And about this trip in the same year he wrote the novel “The Roots of the Japanese Sun” and “The Chinese Diary” (1927). Despite the distance between Moscow and Leningrad and Pilnyak’s endless travels around the country and the world, their friendship grows stronger. Correspondence, meetings, arrangement of each other’s literary and publishing affairs in Moscow and Leningrad, mutual support before literary criticism- all this fills the relationship between two friends.

In the article “New Russian Prose” Zamyatin wrote: “What is valuable about Pilnyak, of course, is not that he takes clay for modeling only from the pits dug by the revolution, and not his two-color journalism, but that for his material he looking for new form and works simultaneously on painting and on the architecture of words; this is for a few<...>But Pilnyak never has a frame, his plots are still of the simplest, invertebrate type, his story or novel, like earthworm, you can always cut it into pieces - and each piece, without much grief, will crawl its way."

Despite Pilnyak's great popularity, criticism of his works almost never stopped. I didn’t like Pilnyak’s independence and his personal interpretation of the processes taking place in the revolutionary country. "<...>“You write about stuttering,” Pilnyak writes to Zamyatin in a letter on January 3, 1924, “don’t tell anyone, but I “stammered” so much that I completely forgot how to understand what literature is and how to write. I don’t want to write like I wrote before, I’m tired of it and it’s too simple - “to be clever” is the easiest thing - - and now I’m philosophizing over simplicity, it’s very difficult. - This is for two reasons: 1) the revolution is over, and everyone has a hangover, “hereticism” is now new, it is necessary to count, and in the calculation it turns out that Russia, as it was a hundred years ago, is the same now - and Russia is not in Moscow and St. Petersburg (these are like Gogol's triplets), but - where there are no people, but only an animal, 2) we already have wrinkles under our eyes, we are growing, there is no point in marking time, we need to study not to become a fool die".

In 1926, Pilnyak “hinted” about the impending personality cult of Stalin, publishing in the fifth issue of the magazine “New World” “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” - about the death of the army commander on the operating table, where he lay down on the orders of the leader of the country, “a man who did not hunch over.” The issue's circulation was confiscated, and a scandal erupted among critics. Despite the attacks and ban on The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, Pilnyak continued to write, publish, and supervise writers.

Photo taken during a visit to grandmother Anna Vogau in 1929 in Baronsk: standing - Boris Pilnyak and his uncle, artist Alexander Savinov; sitting from left to right: Savinov’s wife, Pilnyak’s mother, his grandmother and his children Andrei and Natalya.

In 1929, Pilnyak and Zamyatin greeted the new “elaboration” as leaders of literature in Moscow and Leningrad (Pilnyak at that time headed the All-Russian Writers Union, and Zamyatin headed it in Leningrad). The reason for the organized persecution was the publication in Berlin, where they published Soviet writers, Pilnyak's story "Mahogany" and Zamyatin's novel "We".

During almost the entire “campaign,” Zamyatin, when visiting Moscow, lived with Pilnyak. On August 29, 1929, he wrote to his wife: “General panic: everywhere there are articles addressed to Pilnyak and me: why Pilnyak’s novel “Mahogany,” banned by our censorship, was published in Petropolis, and why the novel “We” was published in “Will of Russia” ? All this is connected with the campaign against the Writers' Union, launched in "Lit<ературной>Gas<ете>" and "Com<сомольской>Truth." Pilnyak and Zamyatin experienced the persecution together, taking joint retaliatory steps; the latter helped his friend with the publication of his works in Leningrad.

In 1930, Pilnyak turned to Stalin with a request to travel abroad, the trip was allowed. In 1931 Pilnyak went to the USA, and in 1932 he went to Japan a second time.

A little later, Zamyatin made a similar request to Stalin. Casting a retrospective glance at the history of systematic and ever-increasing barriers to creativity, he wrote: " To exterminate the devil, of course, any manipulation is acceptable - and the novel, written nine years earlier, in 1920, was submitted next to "Mahogany" as my last, new job. A persecution unprecedented in Soviet literature was organized, which was noted even in foreign press" . In 1931 Zamyatin left the country forever.

In the 1933 article “Moscow - St. Petersburg” Zamyatin wrote: “Over the years, when Yesenin sang loudly there and Mayakovsky growled magnificently, Moscow produced only one new and original prose writer - Pilnyak, and it must be said that this was a typical product of Moscow soil. If we find a strong masculine spirit among the majority of St. Petersburg young prose writers , a plot constructed with engineering precision, then Pilnyak's plot plan is always as unclear and confusing as the plan of Moscow itself. If the "Serapion Brothers" have kinship with the Acmeists, then in the colorful embroideries of Pilnyak's prose we recognize the motives of imagism - right down to its peculiar "Slavophilism" and faith in the messianic tasks of the new Russia." In 1937, Zamyatin died.

Pilnyak was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938.

The proposed 14 letters from B. Pilnyak to E. Zamyatin cover the period 1921-1922. Unfortunately, we are not aware of the existence of Zamyatin’s letters to Pilnyak, which were most likely burned during the latter’s arrest, and we are unable to reconstruct complete picture correspondence between two writers.

http://winter-wolga.ucoz.ru/forum/4-204-1

The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon

Boris Andreevich Pilnyak (Vogau)

PREFACE
The plot of this story suggests that the reason for writing it and the material was the death of M. F. Frunze. Personally, I hardly knew Frunze, I was barely familiar with him, having seen him twice. I don’t know the actual details of his death - and they are not very significant for me, because the purpose of my story was in no way a report on the death of the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. - I find it necessary to tell the reader all this so that the reader does not look for genuine facts and living persons in him.
Bor. Pilnyak
Moscow 28 Jan. 1926

Boris Pilnyak. The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon

The first snow, the snow that brings the earth from autumn into winter, always falls at night to put boundaries between the autumn slush, fog, drizzle, fallen leaves and street litter that were yesterday - and between the white, cheerful day of winter, when everything has disappeared cracks and noises and when in silence a person needs to pull himself up, think inside and not rush anywhere.

Boris Pelnyak - “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon”

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich (real name Vogau) (1894-1938), Russian writer.

Born on September 29 (October 11), 1894 in Mozhaisk in the family of a veterinarian from Russified Volga Germans. Mother is Russian, the daughter of a Saratov merchant. Pilnyak spent his childhood and youth surrounded by the zemstvo intelligentsia in the provincial cities of Russia - Saratov, Bogorodsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kolomna. In this heterogeneous environment, which professed populist ideals, the sense of duty of the educated class to “peasant Russia” was nurtured, and the code of ascetic service to democratic values ​​was strictly observed. The impressions of his childhood years spent in the Russian outback, which concealed wild passions that were invisible until then, “dislocations” and “whirlwinds” of the consciousness of the “grassroots” mass of people, were reflected in the future in many of Pilnyak’s works.

Russia walked under the Tatars - there was a Tatar yoke. Russia walked under the Germans - there was a German yoke. Russia is smart to itself... I say at the meeting: there is no international, but there is a people's Russian revolution, a rebellion - and nothing more. In the image of Stepan Timofeevich. - “And Karl Marxov?” - they ask. “He’s a German, I say, and therefore a fool.” - “What about Lenin?” - Lenin, I say, is one of the men, a Bolshevik... We must, I say, ring a bell from the liberation of the yoke!.. So that there is faith and truth... Believe in what you want, even in a block of wood. And the communists are out too! - The Bolsheviks, I say, will manage on their own. (novel The Naked Year)

Pilnyak Boris Andreevich

I started trying to write early - at the age of 9. In March 1909, his first essay was published. His professional career began in 1915, when a number of his stories were published in the magazines and almanacs “Russian Thought”, “Harvest”, “Flashes”, “Milky Way” - already under the pseudonym B. Pilnyak (from the Ukrainian “Pilnyanka” - a place of forest development; in the village of that name, where the young writer lived in the summer and from where he sent stories to the editors, the residents were called “pilnyaks”). It is believed that the path to literature was first opened for him by the story Zemstvo Delo, which was published at the same time in the Monthly Journal by V.S. Mirolyubov.

In 1918, Pilnyak’s first book, With the Last Steamship, was published. Subsequently, he considered it frankly weak, with the exception of two stories - Above the Ravine and Death, which he invariably included in almost all lifetime editions of selected works. The writer considered the collection Bylyo (1920) “the first book of stories about the Soviet revolution in the RSFSR.” His role in the author’s creative life is indeed extremely significant, since the stories that made up the collection became a creative laboratory for the novel The Naked Year, published in 1922. Many stories were included in the novel as separate chapters, thereby emphasizing the “fragmentation” of its composition, breaking up into relatively independent parts.

The Naked Year secured Pilnyak's place as a classic of Russian literature of the 20th century. In the history of Russian prose of the post-revolutionary period, the novel played the same role as the Twelve Blocks in the history of poetry. It became an innovative artistic reflection of the revolutionary elements and set an adequate language for depicting the tectonic shifts of Russian history. At the center of the novel is life in the terrible and hungry year of 1919 of the conventional provincial city of Ordynin, which symbolically expands to an all-Russian scale.

At the same time, the temporal boundaries turn out to be no less symbolic and transparent than the actual spatial boundaries: through the very specific moment of the revolution’s arrival in the town of Ordynin, an endless retrospective of a thousand years of Russian history shines through. Starting from the position of a detached reporter who wants to capture what is happening, the author moves towards creating a sweeping historiosophical canvas. With its themes and style, Pilnyak frankly inherits the artistic discoveries of A. Bely as the author of the novels Silver Dove and Petersburg. The understanding of the revolution and the philosophy of national history in the novel The Naked Year were also influenced by the ideology of Scythianism, which was also reflected in Blok’s works of 1918-1919. For Pilnyak, revolution is not just a social cataclysm.

This is a grandiose breakthrough of the irrepressible sectarian-pagan element, eternally languishing in Russian soil, rebellious bravado, demonic anarchism, Asian chaos, mystical “Razinovism”, since the time of Peter I, crushed by the burden of superficial European civilization, which gave the world a fragile intelligentsia-aristocratic culture, now doomed to destruction. . In this sense, according to the author’s logic, the roots of the Russian revolution and Bolshevism as its driving force are not in the class sentiments of the recent past and not in the European wisdom of Marxism, but in the energies of the age-old instincts of the dark peasant mass, anticipating disastrous but also cleansing revelry.