Alexander Green. Scarlet sails of love and hope
Childhood, family
Sasha was born in the Urals near Vyatka. The real name of the writer is Alexander Grinevsky. He was the eldest child in the family. The boy loved to read and learned to read at the age of 6. His first book hero was Gulliver, so his desire for sea travel is understandable. He loved adventures very much, so he often left home. The father was from the Polish nobility, and the mother was a simple Russian girl. From the age of ten, his parents tried to educate their son and sent him to a real school.For bad behavior, Alexander was expelled and transferred to study at another institution. To be more precise: Sasha already knew how to write poetry. But because the student dared to direct insults at poetic form, he was expelled. The biography of the future writer was overshadowed by the early death of his mother. She died due to tuberculosis when the teenager was fifteen years old. The father quickly found consolation, but the stepmother did not favor the young man. Alexander lived separately, wrote poetry, earned a little money by copying documents and mastered the profession of book binder.
After college, Green (this nickname stuck firmly to him since his studies) went to Odessa. The father gave his son money and an address where the young man could get help. At first the guy tried to get a job himself, he had to starve.
But then, turning to the address of his father’s friend, Alexander managed to get on the ship. Due to his quarrelsome character and the monotony of the work he performed, the future writer could not stand it for a long time - he returned home. A year later, Green left for Batumi, changed many professions and eventually returned to his father.
The spirit of rebellion prevented Green from any endeavor. When the young man turned 22 years old, he was called up to military service, but after six months he escaped, as he spent half of his service in a punishment cell. He joined the Social Revolutionaries, but violence was unacceptable for him, he refused to carry out Act of terrorism.
Alexander Green experienced what arrest and exile were like. He was actively involved in revolutionary activities. The investigation took a long time, and all this time Alexander was kept in a maximum security prison, and then sentenced to Siberian exile, where he spent three days. His father rescued him by making him a fake passport and transporting his son to the capital.
Writer's career
Green is a man who is constantly in search. His first stories were far from perfect, but he became interested in writing. At first, the author was embarrassed to put his real signature on the stories. The writer's pseudonyms were heard everywhere. There was no talk of fiction at all. The works were full of realism, and the heroes were ordinary people. Fictional countries and heroes appeared to the young writer much later. Newspapers and magazines publish his original stories with great pleasure. When the system changed, the writer was drafted into the Red Army as a signalman, but he was unable to serve - he fell ill with typhus.
Maxim Gorky fought for Alexander’s life, supplying the sick man with honey, bringing bread and coffee. Green received housing in the St. Petersburg House of Arts and rations, like a real writer. The writer's neighbors were Veniamin Kaverin. Despite the fact that the writer had an excellent literary style, he was gloomy by nature and did not like communication. Only in his third wife, Nina Mironova, did he find a truly faithful friend and loving woman, more than once thanking fate for allowing him to meet such a person on his way loved one.
Literature
Researchers of the writer’s work have calculated that there were about four hundred published works during his lifetime. The twenties were the most fruitful. Alexander Green's novels have become recognizable. Soon the world-famous “Scarlet Sails”, “Shining World”, “Golden Chain” and “Running on the Waves” appeared.
The writer does not fit into the framework of the new literary movement, his books are no longer published. The family lives from hand to mouth, since Green no longer earns money from his creative work. He didn't even have the means to complete his latest novel. Malnutrition led the writer to stomach cancer. In the cemetery where Green is buried, there is a monument made by the sculptor Gagarina, “Running on the Waves.”
Personal life
The writer was married three times. When Greene was sent to prison, his first wife Vera Abramova visited the rebel and author, disliked by the authorities. She was the daughter of a major official, but she favored the revolutionaries. Their relationship lasted from 1906, the woman followed him into exile, but in 1913 the marriage broke up. This was Alexander Stepanovich’s true love, since the writer never parted with the portrait of Vera.
The second wife Maria Dolidze, unable to bear the writer’s character, filed for divorce a few months later. The third wife breathed life into Green; she not only gave him a dream, but also made it come true. An enchanting work about a dream is dedicated to the third wife Nina.
“He could rightfully say about himself in the words of the French writer Jules Renard: “My homeland is where the most beautiful clouds float.” Green wrote almost all of his things to justify a dream. We should be grateful to him for this. We know that the future we strive for was born from an invincible human quality - the ability to dream and love,” K. Paustovsky said about his favorite writer.
Greene's legacy is much more extensive than it seems. His early stories are quite gloomy, full of bitter irony, and this is not surprising - life often turned to the writer on a gloomy, harsh side. And it is all the more surprising that Greene managed to retain the ability not only to believe in the bright, but also to communicate this faith to others.
Writer A. Varlamov in his book “Alexander Green” (ZhZL, 2005) notes: “He was born in the same year as Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok, died in the same summer as Maximilian Voloshin. In essence - the pure time frame of the Silver Age, all were children of the terrible years of Russia, who did not yet know that the worst was ahead of Russia. But even in the motley picture of the literary life of that time, Greene stands apart, outside literary trends, movements, groups, circles, workshops, manifestos, and his very existence in Russian literature seems something very unusual, fantastic, like his very personality. And at the same time very significant, necessary, even inevitable, so that it is impossible to imagine great Russian literature without his name.”
Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky was born on August 11/23, 1880 in the city of Slobodskaya Vyatka province. Since childhood, he was irresistibly drawn to search for a different life. The reality that he had to face was very far from what his soul gravitated towards. WITH early years Green was attracted by sea travel. The writer subsequently endowed one of his most famous characters, Captain Gray from Scarlet Sails, with an obsessive thought about the sea. Just like Greene himself, his Gray voraciously read books about seafarers, ran away from home to become a sailor, and then, once on a ship, went through trials, comprehending the basics sea life. True, Gray completed the job that Greene failed in reality - he became captain.
But for the writer everything turned out differently. He spent some time as a sailor on a ship plying the Odessa route, but soon left the ship and began to look for himself in other activities.
Green spent his life in overwork, poverty and malnutrition. But his gaze remained naive and pure
K. Paustovsky, who was reverent about Green’s work, dedicated to him the essay “The Storyteller,” which was included in the story “The Black Sea”: “Green, a man with a difficult, painful life, created in his stories incredible world, full of tempting events, wonderful human feelings and seaside holidays. Green was a stern storyteller and poet of sea lagoons and ports. His stories caused a slight dizziness, like the smell of crushed flowers and fresh, sad winds. Green spent almost his entire life in rooming houses, in penniless and backbreaking labor, in poverty and malnutrition. He was a sailor, a stevedore, a beggar, a bath attendant, a gold miner, but above all, a loser. His gaze remained naive and pure, like that of a dreamy boy. He did not notice his surroundings and lived on the cloudy, cheerful shores. Greene's romance was simple, cheerful, brilliant. She aroused desire in people varied life, full of risk and “a sense of the high,” a life characteristic of explorers, sailors and travelers. She evoked a stubborn need to see and know everything Earth, and this desire was noble and beautiful. With this, Green justified everything he wrote.”
Alexander Grinevsky served as a soldier in the 213th Orovaisky reserve infantry battalion, stationed in Penza. In 1902 he deserted, but was caught in Kamyshin. A rather remarkable official description of his appearance from that time has been preserved: “Height - 177.4. Eyes - light brown. Hair is light brown. Special features: on the chest there is a tattoo depicting a schooner with a bowsprit and a foremast carrying two sails."
Green escaped from the casemates, soon met the Social Revolutionaries and became involved in revolutionary activities. And almost immediately, in 1903, he was arrested for propaganda work among sailors in Sevastopol. For attempting to escape, Green was transferred to a maximum security prison. After 2 years, the writer was released under an amnesty. But his misadventures did not end there: in 1906, Green was arrested again (this time in St. Petersburg) and exiled for 4 years to Turinsk, Tobolsk province. From there he fled to Vyatka, and then to Moscow, using forged documents. It seems that during these years Greene found a way out for his inner desire for light precisely in revolutionary activity. And although he later did not like to remember this period of his life, his unstoppability and stubbornness in trying to achieve his goal are certainly impressive.
These difficult impressions are embodied in early stories writers such as " Winter's Tale" and "One hundred miles along the river", where the motive of escape from prison or hard labor appears.
Romance in Greene’s work should be perceived not as a “departure from life,” but as a coming to it
M. Shcheglov in the article “The Ships of Alexander Green” notes: “In many of Green’s stories, the same psychological experience is staged in different variations - the collision of the romantic, full of mysterious symptoms of the soul of a person, capable of dreaming and languishing, and the limitations, even vulgarity of people every day , happy with everything and accustomed to everything... Romance in Green’s work should essentially be perceived not as a “departure from life,” but as a coming to it - with all the charm and excitement of faith in the goodness and beauty of people, in the reflection of a different life on the shores serene seas, where joyfully slender ships sail..."
The pseudonym A. S. Green first appeared under the story “The Case,” dated 1907. A year later, Greene published his first collection, “The Invisible Cap,” with the subtitle “Stories about Revolutionaries.”
In 1909, Greene's first romantic novel, Reno Island, was born. This was followed by other works of this direction - “Lanphier Colony” (1910), “Zurbagan Shooter” (1913), “Captain Duke” (1915). In these works, a kind of fantastic space is formed, which will later receive the name “Greenland” - with the light hand of the literary critic K. Zelinsky. Researcher of the work of A. Green T. Zagvozdkina gives this space, this fictional country the following description: “Greenland is a universe, ... a universe that has its own spatio-temporal parameters, its own laws of development, its own ideas, heroes, plots and collisions. Greenland is an extremely generalizing, romantically conventional myth of the twentieth century, which has a symbolic nature.”
Mental, as they would now say, “virtual” escapes to “Greenland” continued to save the writer during his service in the Red Army, where he became seriously ill and was sent to Petrograd. There, in 1920, Greene managed to get a room in the House of Arts, in which he lived from 1921 to 1924. The writer’s neighbors in the “House” were N. Gumilev, M. Shaginyan, V. Khodasevich, M. Lozinsky, O. Mandelstam.
Difficult living conditions, it seemed, only helped the writer to immerse himself in a different reality and create bright, magical worlds. V. Rozhdestvensky, one of Green’s neighbors, recalled: “There was nothing in the room except a small kitchen table and the narrow bed on which Green slept, covering himself with a shabby coat. Green wrote as a martyr, from morning until dusk, all shrouded in clouds of cigarette smoke... There was something in him at those moments reminiscent of the appearance of the unforgettable Knight of the Sad Image. He was just as selflessly and concentratedly immersed in his dream and did not notice the wretched surroundings.”
In 1923, the “extravaganza story” “Scarlet Sails” was published, which later became business card writer. It is believed that the prototype of the main character of the story with the fantastic name Assol was Green’s wife, Nina Nikolaevna. On their next wedding anniversary, the writer told her: “You gave me so much joy, laughter, tenderness and even reasons to approach life differently than I had before, that I stand as if in flowers and waves, and a flock of birds overhead. My heart is cheerful and light.”
The image of the dreamer Assol is not as simple as it might seem. Some believe that Greene paints us an infantile girl who cannot find contact with reality and believes only in illusion. However, Assol is an unusual person. She vigilantly and insightfully sees what most cannot see, the power of her faith is so strong that everything comes true. Here's the description inner life The heroine meets us in the story: “Unconsciously, through a kind of inspiration, she made at every step many ethereal-subtle discoveries, inexpressible, but important, like purity and warmth. Sometimes - and this continued for a number of days - she was even reborn; the physical confrontation of life fell away, like silence in the blow of a bow, and everything she saw, what she lived, what was around, became a lace of secrets in the image of everyday life.”
When a person’s soul conceals the seed of a miracle, give him this miracle... He will have a new soul and you will have a new one...
Priest Pafnuty Zhukov from Syktyvkar saw deeply religious content in Green’s romantic story: “Too much evidence that Scarlet Sails is a prophetic book. Here are its symbols: the sea is a symbol of eternity, the ship is the Church, the groom is the Savior stretching out his hands to us from the Cross, and the description of a blooming rose valley is a symbol of eternal bliss and communication with heavenly angels. In those days when priests were expelled and killed and the Gospel was burned on street fires, in Soviet Russia a man wrote books. He wrote anywhere - on a stone, on a box, on other people's tables in an unheated apartment. And then such an emptiness opened up in Green’s soul that he almost screamed in fear. We don’t know whether he was thinking about God at that moment, but we know that God remembered him and put prophetic words into his tormented heart, addressed to those who still believed that the world was not only blood, hunger, and betrayal. And here is this book before us. Let’s read her prophecy: “...One morning, in the distance of the sea, a scarlet sail will sparkle under the sun. The shining bulk of the scarlet sails of the white ship will move, cutting through the waves, straight towards you..., and you will leave forever for a brilliant country where the sun rises and where the stars will descend from the sky to congratulate you on your arrival.”
In 1924, Green left Petrograd and went south, first to Feodosia and then to Stary. This “Crimean” period became very fruitful for the writer: from his pen came the stories “The Shining World” (1924), “The Golden Chain” (1925), “Running on the Waves” (1928), “Jessie and Morgiana” (1929 ), a series of stories.
In his book, A. Varlamov cites an excerpt from Green’s letter to V. Kalitskaya: “... Religion, faith, God are phenomena that are somewhat distorted if we denote them in words.<…>I don’t know why, but for me it’s like this... Nina and I believe without trying to understand anything, since it’s impossible to understand. We are given only signs of the participation of the Higher Will in life. It’s not always possible to notice them, but if you learn to notice, many things that seemed incomprehensible in life suddenly find an explanation.”
Green to Dombrowski: “You better apologize to yourself for being an unbeliever. Although this will pass, of course. Will soon pass"
The same book contains an interesting fact: “To the writer Yuri Dombrovsky, who was sent to Green in 1930 for an interview from the editors of the magazine “Atheist,” Green replied: “That’s it, young man, I believe in God.” Dombrowski further writes that he became confused and began to apologize, to which Green good-naturedly said: “Well, what is this for? Better apologize to yourself for being an unbeliever. Although this will pass, of course. Will soon pass"".
There, in Old Crimea, Alexander Stepanovich and his wife often attended church. Nina Nikolaevna recalled: “ Service in progress. There is not a soul praying in the church, only the priest and the sexton are celebrating the all-night vigil. The rays of the setting sun illuminate the church with slanting, pink stripes. Thoughtful and sad. We stand against the wall, pressed close to each other. The Church always excites me, revealing a soul that grieves and asks for forgiveness. For what? - Don't know. I stand without words, I pray with the mood of my soul, I ask with the words of God’s mercy for us, so tired of a hard life recent years. Tears are streaming down my face. Alexander Stepanovich presses my hand closer to him. His eyelids are drooping and tears are pouring from his eyes. The mouth is compressed mournfully and sternly.”
I have no evil or hatred towards any person in the world, I understand people and do not take offense at them.”
Two days before his death, Green asked for a priest to come to him. In his last letter to his wife, he said: “He invited me to forget all evil feelings and in my soul to reconcile with those whom I consider my enemies. I understood, Ninusha, who he was talking about, and answered that I have no evil or hatred towards a single person in the world, I understand people and am not offended by them. There are many sins in my life, and the most serious of them is debauchery, and I ask God to forgive me for it.”
K. Paustovsky, who did a lot to preserve the memory of Alexander Green, recalled his visit to the writer’s final refuge: “Before leaving Old Crimea, we went to Green’s grave. Stone, steppe flowers and a thorn bush with prickly needles - that was all. A barely noticeable path led to the grave. I thought that many years from now, when Green’s name is spoken with love, people will remember this grave, but they will have to move apart millions of dense branches and crush millions of tall flowers to find its gray and calm stone.”
Since 1941, Greene's books have ceased to be published. However, after 1953, his works became popular and were published in millions of copies - thanks to the efforts of K. Paustovsky, Y. Olesha and other writers. In 2000, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the birth of A. S. Green, the Union of Writers of Russia, the administration of the city of Kirov and the city of Slobodsky established the annual Russian Literary Prize named after. A. Green for works for children and youth, imbued with the spirit of romance and hope. The writer’s birthday and memorial day in Old Crimea are invariably accompanied by celebrations, the so-called “Grinovsky readings”, and various events. In 2005, with the support of friends of Green's house, the annual celebration of raising the Scarlet Sails on Mount Agarmysh above the Old Crimea was revived. The sails are raised over the city by admirers of the writer’s work at dawn on August 23, Alexander Green’s birthday.
“When the days begin to gather dust and the colors fade, I take Green. I open it on any page. This is how the windows in the house are cleaned in the spring. Everything becomes light, bright, everything again mysteriously excites, as in childhood,” these words of Daniil Granin revive for us the memory of Alexander Green, a wonderful Russian writer.
Russian prose writer and poet Alexander Green(Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky; August 23, 1880, Sloboda, Vyatka province - July 8, 1932, Old Crimea) entered literature as a representative of romantic realism (neo-romanticism) and the author of philosophical and psychological works with elements of fantasy.
His father, Polish nobleman Stepan (Stefan) Grinevsky (1843 -1914) was exiled from Warsaw to the Russian North for his participation in the 1863 uprising. Mother - Anna Grinevskaya (née Lepkova, 1857-1895), daughter of a retired collegiate secretary. In 1881, the family moved to the city of Vyatka (now Kirov).
At the age of sixteen, Alexander Grinevsky graduated from the four-year Vyatka City School with mostly satisfactory grades and completed formal education. The young man, who had dreamed of the seas and distant countries since childhood, set out on a free voyage through life - his mother had died by that time, and his father and stepmother did not object. He left for Odessa. He led a wandering life, worked as a sailor, fisherman, navvy, a traveling circus performer, a railway worker, and panned for gold in the Urals.
In 1902, due to extreme need, he voluntarily entered military service, but due to the severity of life, he escaped twice according to the regulations. During his service, he became close to the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and became involved in revolutionary activities. True, after the fugitive soldier refused to participate in terrorist attacks, the Socialist Revolutionaries successfully used him for propaganda among sailors and soldiers. As the writer writes in the “Autobiographical Story”: “This happened in October 1903, after many strikes and demonstrations in such large cities as Odessa, Yekaterinoslav, Kyiv and others.” He was sent from Odessa to Sevastopol for revolutionary propaganda among the rank and file of the fortress artillery and the sailors of the naval barracks in order to win over the side of the “social revolutionary party.” But he was arrested on November 11, 1903. Thanks to his imprisonment, he came to Feodosia for the first time, where a trial of political prisoners took place. He was released from prison under an amnesty on October 20, 1905.
In 1906, he was arrested in St. Petersburg, where he lived illegally, and deported to the Tobolsk province; from where he escaped and returned to St. Petersburg. Lived on someone else's passport. Published in metropolitan magazines, pseudonym “A.S. Green" first appeared under the story "The Case" (1907). Green's first collections of short stories, The Invisible Cap (1908) and Stories (1910), attracted critical attention.
Alexander Greene was actually married twice. His first wife was the daughter of a wealthy official, Vera Pavlovna Abramova, whom he married in 1910. In the same year, in the summer, Alexander Grinevsky was arrested for the third time for escaping from exile and living on false documents and sent into exile in the Arkhangelsk province in provincial Pinega.
Years of living under an assumed name led to a break with the revolutionary past and Green's development as a writer.
In May 1912, Grinevsky returned to St. Petersburg under his own name, but with the virus of the most common Russian disease of the soul. Due to continuous carousing, the first wife, Vera Pavlovna, left her husband. In 1912-1917 Greene worked actively, publishing about 350 stories. In 1914 he became an employee of the New Satyricon magazine.
Due to an “inappropriate comment about the reigning monarch” that became known to the police, Green was forced to hide in Finland from the end of 1916, but, after February Revolution returned to Petrograd.
In the post-revolutionary years, the writer actively collaborated with Soviet publications, especially with the literary and artistic magazine “Flame,” which was edited by People’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky.
In 1919, Green was drafted into the Red Army, but soon became seriously ill with typhus and returned to Petrograd. The sick writer, without a means of subsistence and without housing, was helped by Maxim Gorky, at whose request Green was given academic rations and a room in the “House of Arts.” Here the writer worked on two novels, as well as the story “Scarlet Sails,” the idea of which originated back in 1916.
The writer married for the second time in 1921 to a 26-year-old widow, nurse Nina Mironova (after Korotkova’s first husband). He dedicated the extravaganza “Scarlet Sails”, published in 1923, to her, which became the pinnacle of neo-romanticism. Nina became the prototype of Assol, dreaming of happiness, of a prince and a ship with scarlet sails. She became a real guardian angel of the writer and our next article is dedicated to her.
In 1924, the writer and his wife left for Feodosia in Crimea, where he worked fruitfully until November 1928. During this period, under the pseudonym Alexander Green, he wrote “Running on the Waves,” “The Golden Chain,” forty stories and began “Autobiographical Tale.”
Like the poet Maximilian Voloshin, who created the mysterious country of Cimmeria, Alexander Green placed his literary heroes in the fantastic Greenland, where the action of his romantic stories “Running on the Waves”, “Scarlet Sails” and other works takes place. True, the name was given after the death of the writer. The main advantage of his heroes was not only the ability to fly and walk on the waves, but the ability to realize their hopes and dreams. And this is so important for every person - hence the attractiveness of his works for readers, especially young people. As critics write, in his works Green conveyed the longing for the Unfulfilled. He did not become a sailor, became disillusioned with the revolutionaries (Socialist Revolutionaries), and lived in poverty and squalor. But the life of this untimely man was warmed by the sacrificial love of Nina Nikolaevna Green, his second wife.
In 1927, a 15-volume collected works of Greene began to be published, but only 8 volumes were published. Since 1930, Soviet censorship, with the motivation “you do not merge with the era,” banned reprints of Greene, and the private publisher was arrested by the GPU. The fee was not paid in full, and lack of money, hunger and illness set in. Green's fashionable Russian disease of the soul worsened, and his binges began to recur more and more often. I had to sell my apartment in Feodosia and move to Old Crimea, where life was cheaper. At the end of April 1931, Greene last time I went to Koktebel to visit Voloshin. This route is still popular among tourists and is known as the Greene Trail.
In Old Crimea, a house (an adobe hut with an earthen floor) with a small plot was purchased from a nun in May 1932 by Alexander Green’s wife, Nina Nikolaevna, in exchange for a gold wristwatch
In the summer, Alexander Green went to Moscow, but not a single publishing house showed interest in his new novel “Touchable,” which some critics considered his best work. The Writers' Union refused a pension as an "ideological enemy." At the end of his life, Greene was almost no longer published. In the memoirs of his wife, this period is characterized by one phrase: “Then he began to die” in complete poverty and oblivion.
Alexander Green died in Old Crimea from stomach cancer on the morning of July 8, 1932, at the age of 52, and was buried in the Old Crimea cemetery. When Alexander Greene died, none of the writers who were vacationing next door in Koktebel came to say goodbye to him.
After Greene's death, at the request of several leading Soviet writers, a collection of Fantastic Novels was published in 1934. Posthumously, the writer Green was placed on the pedestal of the “Soviet romantic” by the communist authorities, and the ballet “Scarlet Sails” premiered at the Bolshoi Theater.
IN post-war years struggle against cosmopolitanism, Alexander Green, like other cultural figures (A. A. Akhmatova, M. M. Zoshchenko, D. D. Shostakovich) was again branded as a “reactionary and spiritual emigrant.” The writer's books were confiscated from libraries. Only after Stalin's death, through the efforts of Konstantin Paustovsky, Yuri Olesha and other writers, his works began to be published in millions of copies since 1956.
The peak of Green's readership came during Khrushchev's “thaw.” In the wake of the romantic upsurge in the country, Alexander Green turned into one of the most published and revered domestic authors, an idol of youth.
Today, the works of Alexander Greene have been translated into many languages, streets in many cities, mountain peaks and a star bear his name. Many works, including “Scarlet Sails” and “Running on the Waves,” have been filmed.
The annual creative festival “Greenland” (Old Crimea, August 22-24) is dedicated to the writer’s birthday. On the slope of Mount Agarmysh, festival participants raise symbolic scarlet sails. Creative groups, artists, musicians, writers, poets and bards perform on the improvised stage and concert platform of the Green House. The festival ends with a walk from Old Crimea to Koktebel, along the “Green’s path” with a visit to the House-Museum of M. A. Voloshin.
***
Konstantin Paustovsky, who did a lot to popularize the work of Alexander Green, has the following lines: “Green lived a hard life. Everything in her, as if on purpose, worked out in such a way as to make Green a criminal or an evil man in the street.” But it turned out the other way around. Even today, almost a century later, they write about his story “Scarlet Sails” in in social networks: “This is such a wonderful book! This is an absolutely amazing book! This is the most romantic story I have ever read! And I can’t even explain why I didn’t meet her earlier, but, my God, what a charm passed me by all this time! “Scarlet Sails” is no longer just a name, it’s a symbol. Symbol of love and hope. A symbol of faith in a dream and the embodiment of the most unrealistic dreams. These are the simplest and most important truths. If you can create a miracle for someone, do it. Come to the rescue, smile, cheer, support. And you will understand how pleasant it is, how inexpressibly wonderful. There is no magic, and nothing happens on its own: miracles are created by the hands of people who love you. And how beautifully, incredibly beautifully Green writes! Creates absolutely bewitching, delightful intricacies of words. The text is literally tangible, it comes to life before our eyes. The splashing of waves and the cries of seagulls can be heard from the pages, and then a huge figure of a ship rises in front of us from the predawn fog. The lines of the mast are sharply defined. Flaming sails are torn in the wind. And the confused Assol was already frozen on the shore. And on her lips there are salty sea spray. And on her cheeks there are rays rising sun. The book gives a feeling of absolute, boundless happiness, great faith in miracles, in real, fabulous and beautiful love. Warm, bright, goosebumps wonderful story!” (Masha_
Uralskaya 09.10. 2013. —
Alexander Green(real name Grinevsky; 1880-1932) - famous Russian prose writer and poet, representative of neo-romanticism, author of philosophical and psychological works, with elements of symbolic fiction. He wrote his works mainly in the style of neo-romanticism and symbolism.
Green's biography
His father, Stepan Evseevich, was from a family of Polish nobles. In his younger years, he took part in the January Uprising, for which he was exiled for a period of 5 years.
The future writer’s mother, Anna Stepanovna, worked as a nurse. Interestingly, she got married when she was only 16 years old. In addition to Alexander, two more girls and one boy were born into the Grinevsky family.
Childhood and youth
When Alexander Green learned to read at the age of six, he began to spend all his time reading books. In particular, he liked adventure works with an interesting plot.
One day, after reading stories about famous sailors, young Green began to dream of going to sea. For this reason, he repeatedly escaped from home in order to repeat the fate of his heroes.
When the boy turned 9 years old, he was sent to a real school. An interesting fact is that it was there that Alexander was given the nickname “Green”.
The teachers claimed that he had a very bad character. He constantly played around and disobeyed his teachers, for which he was repeatedly punished.
While studying in the 2nd grade, Green composed a poem about his teachers, which contained many offensive words and humorous allusions.
In this regard, Alexander Green was expelled from the school. After that, he continued his studies at the Vyatka School.
In 1895, a tragedy occurred in Green's biography: his mother, whom he loved dearly, died of tuberculosis.
When Green's father remarried, Alexander was unable to get along with his stepmother. As a result, he left home and began renting separate housing for himself.
To feed himself, he had to take on any job. During that period of his biography, he worked as a loader, digger, fisherman, and even for some time was an artist in a traveling circus.
Wanderings and revolutionary activities
After graduating from college, Green went to Odessa to fulfill his childhood dream. He wanted to become a sailor on a big ship.
It is interesting that initially he even had to wander for some time, without sufficient means of subsistence.
One fine moment he finally found himself on board the ship. However, every day Alexander became more and more disillusioned with the sailor's business. As a result, Green had a serious row with the captain and went ashore.
In 1902, he was forced to enlist because he was sorely short of money. Life as a soldier turned out to be so difficult for Green that he decided to desert.
Then a new hobby occurs in Green’s biography: he meets revolutionaries and begins campaigning with them.
A year later, the writer was arrested and sent to 10 years of hard labor in Siberia. In addition, he received an additional 2 years of exile in Arkhangelsk.
Green's works
In 1906, a significant event occurred in the creative biography of Alexander Green. From his pen came the first work, “The Merit of Private Panteleev,” which dealt with offenses in the army.
However, the entire edition was withdrawn from print and destroyed. After this, Green wrote a new work, “Elephant and Pug,” which was also confiscated and burned.
Alexander Green and his tame hawk And only the story “To Italy” became the first creation of the writer that readers could read.
Since 1908, Alexander Stepanovich began publishing all his works under the pseudonym “Green”. Every month 2 new stories or novellas came out from his pen.
This allowed him to earn the amount of money he needed for a normal existence.
Alexander Green in St. Petersburg, photo 1910 Soon he wrote so many works that in 1913 Alexander Green published his works in 3 volumes.
Every year his work became more meaningful and deep. In addition, quite a lot of aphorisms and wise sayings appeared in his books.
"Scarlet Sails"
From 1916 to 1922, Alexander Green wrote the most significant story in his biography, “Scarlet Sails.” This work immediately brought him enormous popularity.
The story told about firm faith and a lofty dream, as well as the fact that each of us is able to perform a miracle for a loved one. After the publication of “Scarlet Sails”, the beautiful Assol became an idol for many girls.
After 6 years, Alexander Green presents the novel “Running on the Waves,” written in the genre of romanticism.
After this, such works as “The Velvet Curtain”, “We Sat on the Shore” and “Stone Pillar Ranch” were published.
Personal life
When Green was 28 years old, he married Vera Abramova, with whom he lived for 5 years. It is interesting that their separation occurred on the initiative of Vera.
Alexander Green with his first wife Vera (far left) in the village of Velikiy Bor near Pinega, 1911. According to her, she was tired of enduring her husband’s drunkenness and unpredictable behavior. And although the writer repeatedly tried to establish relations with her, he never succeeded.
The second wife in the biography of Alexander Green was Nina Mironova, with whom he lived happily for the rest of his life. There was a real idyll and complete mutual understanding between the spouses.
Alexander Green and his second wife Nina When the writer is gone, Nina will be called an enemy of the people and sent to correctional camps for 10 years. An interesting fact is that both of Greene's wives knew each other and maintained friendly relations.
Death
Shortly before Greene's death, doctors discovered he had stomach cancer, from which he later died.
Alexander Stepanovich Green died on July 8, 1932 in Old Crimea at the age of 51. At the site of his burial, a monument was erected with the characters from his novel “Running on the Waves.”
The last lifetime photo of Alexander Green An interesting fact is that during his reign, Greene’s books were considered anti-Soviet, and only after the death of the leader of the peoples was the writer’s name rehabilitated.
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Life of Alexander Green
The writer Green - Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky - died in July 1932 in Old Crimea - a small town overgrown with centuries-old walnut trees.
Grim lived hard life. Everything in her, as if on purpose, worked out in such a way as to make Green a criminal or an evil everyman. It was incomprehensible how this gloomy man, without staining, carried through a painful existence the gift of a powerful imagination, purity of feelings and a shy smile.
Green's biography is a merciless verdict on the pre-revolutionary system of human relations. Old Russia rewarded Green cruelly - it took away his love of reality from his childhood. The environment was terrible, life was unbearable. It looked like wild lynching. Green survived, but his mistrust of reality remained with him throughout his life. He always tried to get away from her, believing that it was better to live with elusive dreams than with the “trash and rubbish” of every day.
Green began writing and created in his books a world of cheerful and brave people, a beautiful land full of fragrant thickets and sun - a land not mapped, and amazing events that turn your head like a sip of wine.
“I have always noticed,” writes Maxim Gorky in the book “My Universities,” “that people like interesting stories only because they allow them to forget for an hour their difficult but familiar life.”
These words apply entirely to Green.
Russian life was limited for him to the philistine Vyatka, a dirty trade school, shelters, backbreaking labor, prison and chronic hunger. But somewhere beyond the gray horizon sparkled countries created from light, sea winds and flowering grasses. People brown from the sun lived there - gold miners, hunters, artists, cheerful vagabonds, selfless women, cheerful and gentle as children, but above all - sailors.
Living without the belief that such countries flourish and make noise somewhere on the ocean islands was too difficult for Green, sometimes unbearable.
The revolution has come. She shook many things that oppressed Green: the bestial structure of past human relationships, exploitation, detachment - everything that forced Green to flee from life into the realm of dreams and books.
Green sincerely rejoiced at her arrival, but the wonderful vistas of the new future brought to life by the revolution were still unclearly visible, and Green belonged to people suffering from eternal impatience.
The revolution did not come in festive attire, but came like a dusty fighter, like a surgeon. She plowed up thousand-year-old layers of musty everyday life.
The bright future seemed very distant to Green, but he wanted to feel it now, immediately. He wanted to breathe the clean air of future cities, noisy with foliage and children's laughter, to enter the houses of people of the future, to participate with them in tempting expeditions, to live a meaningful and cheerful life next to them.
Reality could not give this to Green immediately. Only imagination could transport him to the desired environment, to the circle of the most extraordinary events and people.
This eternal, almost childish impatience, the desire to immediately see the end result of great events, the consciousness that this is still far away, that the restructuring of life is a long-term affair, all this caused Greene annoyance.
Previously, he was intolerant in his denial of reality, now he was intolerant in his demands on the people who created the new society. He did not notice the rapid pace of events and thought that they were moving unbearably slowly.
If the socialist system had blossomed, like in a fairy tale, overnight, Green would have been delighted. But he couldn’t wait and didn’t want to. Waiting bored him and destroyed the poetic structure of his feelings.
Perhaps this was the reason for Green’s alienation from time, which is incomprehensible to us.
Green died on the threshold of a socialist society, not knowing what time he was dying. He died too early.
Death found him at the very beginning of a mental turning point. Green began to listen and look closely at reality. If not for death, then perhaps he would have entered the ranks of our literature as one of the most original writers who organically merged realism with a free and bold imagination.
Green's father, a participant in the Polish uprising of 1863, was exiled to Vyatka, worked there as an accountant in a hospital, became an alcoholic and died in poverty.
Son Alexander, a future writer, grew up as a dreamy, impatient and absent-minded boy. He was interested in many things, but did not follow through with anything. He studied poorly, but he voraciously read Main-Reid, Jules Verne, Gustav Aimard and Jacolliot.
“The words ‘Orinoco’, ‘Mississippi’, ‘Sumatra’ sounded like music to me,” Green later said about this time.
It is difficult for today's youth to understand how irresistibly these writers had an effect on the children who grew up in the former Russian wilderness.
“To understand this,” says Green in his autobiography, “you need to know the provincial life of that time, the life of a remote city. This atmosphere of intense suspiciousness, false pride and shame is best conveyed by Chekhov’s story “My Life.” When I read this story, it was as if I was completely reading about Vyatka.”
From the age of eight, Green began to think hard about traveling. He retained his thirst for travel until his death. Every journey, even the smallest one, caused him deep excitement.
Green had a very accurate imagination from an early age. When he became a writer, he imagined those non-existent countries where the action of his stories took place not as foggy landscapes, but as well-studied places, traveled hundreds of times.
He could draw detailed map of these places, could note every turn of the road and the nature of the vegetation, every bend of the river and the location of houses, could finally list all the ships docked in non-existent harbors, with all their maritime features and the properties of a carefree and cheerful ship crew.
Here is an example of such an exact non-existent landscape. In the story "The Lanphier Colony" Greene writes:
“In the north, the forest darkened in a motionless green herd, bending to the horizon a chain of chalk rocks, dotted with crevices and patches of skinny bushes.
In the east, beyond the lake, a white thread of road wound its way out of the city. Here and there, trees stuck out along its edges, seemingly as tiny as lettuce shoots.
In the west, hugging a plain riddled with ravines and hills, stretched the blue expanse of the ocean, sparkling with white sparks.
And to the south, from the center of the sloping funnel, where houses and farms were colorful, surrounded by sloppily planted greenery, stretched the slanting quadrangles of plantations and plowed fields of the Lanphier colony.
From an early age, Green was tired of his joyless existence.
The boy was constantly beaten at home, even when she was sick and exhausted. homework The mother, with some strange pleasure, teased her son with a song:
And in captivity
Involuntarily,
Vegetate like a dog!
“I was tormented when I heard it,” Green said, “because the song related to me, predicting my future.”
With great difficulty, his father sent Green to a real school.
Green was expelled from school for writing innocent poems about his class teacher.
His father severely beat him, and then spent several days beating the director of the school, humiliating himself, going to the governor, asking that his son not be expelled, but nothing helped.
His father tried to get Green into school, but he was not accepted there. The city has already issued little boy unwritten “wolf ticket”. I had to send Green to the city school.
Mother died. Greene's father soon married the psalm-reader's widow. The stepmother gave birth to a child.
Life went on as before without any events, in the cramped conditions of a wretched apartment, among dirty diapers and wild quarrels. Brutal fights flourished at the school, and the sour smell of ink ate deeply into the skin, hair, and worn student blouses.
The boy had to re-whiten estimates for a city hospital for a few kopecks, bind books, glue paper lanterns for illumination on the day of Nicholas II’s “accession to the throne,” and rewrite roles for actors in a provincial theater.
Green was one of those people who did not know how to get settled in life. In misfortunes, he became lost, hid from people, and was ashamed of his poverty. His rich imagination instantly betrayed him at the first encounter with difficult reality.
Already in mature age To get away from poverty, Green came up with the idea of gluing boxes from plywood and selling them on the market. This was in Old Crimea, where it would have been difficult to sell one or two boxes. Green's attempt to get rid of hunger was just as helpless. Green made a bow, went with it to the outskirts of Old Crimea and shot at birds, hoping to kill at least one and eat fresh meat. But nothing came of this, of course.
Like all losers, Green always hoped for chance, for unexpected happiness.
All Green's stories are full of dreams of a “dazzling incident” and joy, but most of all his story “Scarlet Sails”. It is characteristic that Green thought about and began writing this captivating and fabulous book in Petrograd in 1920, when after the rash he wandered around the icy city and every night looked for a new place to stay with random, semi-familiar people.
“Scarlet Sails” is a poem that affirms the strength of the human spirit, shone through, like the morning sun, with love for spiritual youth and the belief that a person, in a rush to happiness, is capable of performing miracles with his own hands.
Life in Vyatka dragged on sadly and monotonously, until in the spring of 1895 Green saw a cab on the pier and on it two navigator students in a white sailor uniform.
“I stopped,” Greene writes about this incident, “and looked, enchanted, at the guests from a mysterious, beautiful world for me. I wasn't jealous. I felt delight and melancholy."
Since then dreams of maritime service, about the “picturesque labor of navigation” possessed Green with particular force. He began to prepare for Odessa.
Greene was a burden to the family. His father got him five rubles for the journey and hastily said goodbye to his gloomy son, who had never once experienced his father’s affection or love.
Green took watercolors with him - he was sure that he would paint with them somewhere in India, on the banks of the Ganges - he took a beggar's belongings and, in a state of complete confusion and jubilation, left Vyatka.
“For a long time I saw in the crowd on the pier,” Green says about this departure, “the confused gray-bearded face of my father. And I dreamed of a sea covered with sails.”
In Odessa, Greene's first meeting with the sea took place - the sea that later flooded the pages of his stories with a dazzling light.
Many books have been written about the sea. A whole galaxy of writers and researchers tried to convey an extraordinary, sixth sensation, which can be called the “sense of the sea.” They all perceived the sea differently, but none of these writers have such festive seas rustling and shimmering on their pages as Greene’s.
Green loved not so much the sea as the sea coasts he imagined, where everything that he considered the most attractive in the world was connected: archipelagos of legendary islands, sand dunes overgrown with flowers, foamy sea distances, warm lagoons sparkling with bronze from the abundance of fish, ancient forests, the smell of lush thickets mixed with the smell of salty breezes, and, finally, cozy seaside towns.
Almost every story by Green contains descriptions of these non-existent cities - Lissa, Zurbagan, Gel-Gyu and Gerton.
Green put into the appearance of these fictional cities the features of all the Black Sea ports he had seen.
The dream was achieved. The sea lay before Green like a road of miracles, but the old Vyatka past immediately made itself felt. Green felt with particular acuteness his helplessness, uselessness and loneliness by the sea.
"This new world didn’t need me,” he writes. “I felt cramped, a stranger here, like everywhere else.” I was a little sad."
Marine life immediately turned its back on Green.
Green wandered around the port for weeks and timidly asked the captains to take him on as a sailor on ships, but he was either rudely refused or ridiculed to his face - what a sailor a frail young man with dreamy eyes could turn out to be!
Finally, Green got lucky. He was hired as an apprentice without salary on a ship sailing from Odessa to Batum. Green made two autumn voyages on it.
From these flights, Greene only had memories of Yalta and the ridge of the Caucasus Mountains.
“The lights of Yalta were remembered most of all. The lights of the port merged with the lights of an unprecedented city. The steamer approached the pier with the clear sounds of an orchestra in the garden. The smell of flowers and warm gusts of wind flew by. Voices and laughter could be heard in the distance.
The rest of the flight was forgotten by me, except for the procession of snowy mountains that never disappeared from the horizon. Their peaks, stretched high in the sky, even from a distance revealed a world of enormous worlds. It was a chain of highly elevated countries of sparkling silence with ice.”
Soon the captain took Green off the ship - Green could not pay for food.
Kulak, the owner of the Kherson "oak", took Green as his assistant on the schooner and pushed him around like a dog. Green hardly slept; instead of a pillow, the owner gave him a broken tile. In Kherson he was thrown ashore without paying money.
From Kherson, Green returned to Odessa, worked in port warehouses as a labeler and made his only overseas voyage to Alexandria, but he was fired from the ship for a collision with the captain.
Of his entire Odessa life, Green only has good memories of working in port warehouses:
“I loved the spicy smell of the warehouse, the feeling of an abundance of goods around me, especially lemons and oranges. Everything smelled: vanilla, dates, coffee, tea. Combined with a frosty smell sea water, coal and oil, it was indescribably good to breathe here, especially if the sun was warm.”
Green was tired of Odessa life and decided to return to Vyatka. He rode home like a hare. The last two hundred kilometers had to be walked through liquid mud because the weather was bad.
In Vyatka, Green's father asked him where his things were.
“The things were left at the postal station,” Greene lied. — There was no cab driver.
“Father,” writes Green, “smiled pitifully, remained silent in disbelief, and a day later, when it turned out that there were no things, he asked (he smelled strongly of vodka):
- Why are you lying? You were walking. Where are your things? You lied!”
The damned Vyatka life began again.
Then there were years of fruitless searches for some place in life, or, as was commonly expressed in philistine families, the search for “occupation.”
Green was a bathhouse attendant at the Murashi station, near Vyatka, served as a scribe in the office, and wrote petitions to the court in a tavern for peasants.
He couldn’t stand it for a long time in Vyatka and left for Baku. Life in Baku was so desperately difficult that Greene remembered it as continuous cold and darkness. He didn't remember the details.
He lived by random, cheap labor: he drove piles in the port, peeled paint from old steamships, loaded timber, and, together with tramps, was hired to extinguish fires on oil rigs. He died of malaria in a fishing cooperative and almost died of thirst on the sandy, deadly beaches of the Caspian Sea between Baku and Derbent.
Green spent the night in empty cauldrons on the pier, under overturned boats, or simply under fences.
Life in Baku left a cruel imprint on Green. He became sad, taciturn, and the external traces of Baku life - premature old age - remained with Green forever. Since then, according to Green, his face began to look like a crumpled ruble note.
Green's appearance spoke better than words about the nature of his life: he was an unusually thin, tall and stooped man, with a face carved with thousands of wrinkles and scars, with tired eyes that lit up with a beautiful shine only in moments of reading or inventing extraordinary stories.
Green was ugly, but full of hidden charm. He walked heavily, like loaders walk, worn out by their work.
He was very trusting, and this trustfulness was outwardly expressed in a friendly, open handshake. Greene said he best recognizes people by the way they shake hands.
Green's life, especially in Baku, is reminiscent of Maxim Gorky's youth in many of its features. Both Gorky and Green went through travail, but Gorky emerged from it as a man of high civic courage and the greatest realist writer, while Green was a science fiction writer.
In Baku, Green reached the last degree of poverty, but did not change his pure and childish imagination. He stopped in front of the photographers' display cases and looked at the cards for a long time, trying to find among the hundreds of dull or disease-worn faces at least one face that spoke of a joyful, high and carefree life. Finally, he found such a face - the face of a girl - and described it in his diary. The diary fell into the hands of the owner of the shelter, a vile and cunning man, who began to mock Green and the unfamiliar girl. The matter almost ended in a bloody fight.
From Baku, Green returned to Vyatka again, where his drunken father demanded money from him. But, of course, there was no money.
It was necessary to again come up with some ways to prolong existence. Green was unable to do this. Again he was overcome by a thirst for a happy occasion, and in the winter, in severe frosts, he went on foot to the Urals to look for gold. His father gave him three rubles for the journey.
Green saw the Urals - a wild land of gold, and naive hopes flared up in him. On the way to the mine, he picked up many stones lying under his feet and carefully examined them, hoping to find a nugget.
Green worked at the Shuvalovsky mines, wandered around the Urals with a benign old wanderer (who later turned out to be a murderer and thief), and was a woodcutter and raftsman.
After the Urals, Green sailed as a sailor on the barge of the shipowner Bulychov - the famous Bulychov, taken by Gorky as a prototype for his famous play.
But this work also ended.
It seemed that life had closed in a circle, and Green no longer had any joy or reasonable occupation in it. Then he decided to become a soldier. It was difficult and shameful to volunteer for the tsarist army, which was drilled to the point of idiocy, but it was even harder to sit on the neck of your old father. His father dreamed of making Alexander, his first-born, a “real person” - a doctor or engineer.
Green served in an infantry regiment in Penza.
In the regiment, Greene first encountered the Social Revolutionaries and began reading revolutionary books.
“Since then,” says Green, “life has turned to me with an exposed side that previously seemed mysterious. My revolutionary enthusiasm was boundless. At the first suggestion of a volunteer Socialist-Revolutionary, I took a thousand proclamations and scattered them in the courtyard of the barracks.”
After serving for about a year, Green deserted the regiment and went into revolutionary work. This period of his life is little known.
Green worked in Kyiv and Sevastopol, where he became famous among the sailors and soldiers of the fortress artillery as a fiery, fascinating underground speaker.
But in the dangers and tensions of revolutionary work, Greene remained as contemplative as ever. It was not for nothing that he himself said about himself that life’s phenomena interested him mainly visually - he loved to watch and remember.
Green lived in Sevastopol in the autumn - that clear Crimean autumn when the air seems transparent warm moisture, poured into the boundaries of streets, bays and mountains, and the slightest sound passes through it with a slight and long-lasting trembling.
“Some shades of Sevastopol entered my stories,” admitted Green. But to everyone who knows Green's books and knows Sevastopol, it is clear that the legendary Zurbagan is an almost exact description of Sevastopol, the city of transparent bays, decrepit boatmen, sunlight, warships, the smells of fresh fish, acacia and flinty earth and the solemn sunsets that rise to the sky has all the sparkle and light of the reflected Black Sea water.
If there were no Sevastopol, there would be no Zurbagan of Grinov with its nets, the thunder of savvy sailor boots on sandstone, night winds, high masts and hundreds of lights dancing on the roadstead.
In none of the cities Soviet Union The poetry of marine life expressed by Green in the following lines is not felt as clearly as in Sevastopol:
“Danger, risk, the power of nature, the light of a distant country, the wonderful unknown, flickering love, blooming with meeting and separation; a fascinating flurry of meetings, people, events; the immeasurable variety of life, and high in the sky - the Southern Cross, the Ursa Bear, and all the continents - in the watchful eyes, although your cabin is full of the never-leaving homeland with its books, paintings, letters and dried flowers ... "
In the fall of 1903, Green was arrested in Sevastopol on the Grafskaya pier and served in Sevastopol and Feodosia prisons until the end of October 1905.
In the Sevastopol prison, Greene first began to write. He was very shy about his first literary experiences and did not show them to anyone.
Green talked little about himself; he did not have time to finish his autobiography, and therefore many years of his life are almost unknown to anyone.
After Sevastopol, Green’s biography begins to fail. It is only known that he was arrested a second time and exiled to Tobolsk, but he ran away from the road, made his way to Vyatka and at night came to his old, sick father. His father stole for him from the city hospital the passport of the deceased son of sexton Malginov. Green lived under this name for a long time and even signed his first story with it.
Green went to St. Petersburg with someone else’s passport, and here, in the Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper, this story was published.
This was the first real joy in Green's life. He almost kissed the grumpy newspaperman from whom he bought a copy of the newspaper with his story. He assured the newspaperman that the story was written by him, but the old man did not believe it and looked suspiciously at the long-legged, freckled young man. Green could not walk from excitement; his legs were trembling and buckling.
Work in the Socialist Revolutionary organization was already clearly burdening Green. He soon left it, abandoning the assassination attempt entrusted to him. He was caught up in thoughts of writing. Dozens of ideas weighed him down; he hurriedly looked for a form for them, but at first he could not find one.
He wrote still timidly, with an eye on the editor and the reader, he wrote with that feeling, well known to beginning writers, as if a crowd of mocking people was standing behind him and reading every word with condemnation. Green was still afraid of the storm of plots that raged within him and demanded release.
The first story Greene wrote without thinking back, only by virtue of a free inner impulse, was “Reno Island.” It already contained all the features of Green’s future. This is a simple story about the strength and beauty of pristine tropical nature and the thirst for freedom of a sailor who deserted from a warship and was killed for it by order of the commander.
Green began publishing. Years of humiliation and hunger, although very slowly, were still becoming a thing of the past. The first months of free and beloved work seemed like a miracle to Green.
Soon Green was again arrested on an old case of belonging to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, spent a year in prison and was exiled to the Arkhangelsk province - to Pinega, and then to Kegostrov.
In 1912, Green returned to St. Petersburg. Here began the best period of his life, a kind of “Boldino autumn.” At that time, Greene wrote almost continuously. With an insatiable thirst, he re-read many books, he wanted to know everything, experience it, transfer it into his stories.
Soon he took his first book to his father in Vyatka. Green wanted to please the old man, who had already come to terms with the idea that Alexander’s son had turned out to be a worthless tramp. Green's father didn't believe him. It was necessary to show the old man contracts with publishing houses and other documents to convince him that Green had really become a “man.” This meeting between father and son was the last: the old man soon died.
The February Revolution found Green in Finland, in the village of Lunatiokki; he greeted her with delight. Having learned about the revolution, Green immediately went on foot to Petrograd - the trains were no longer running. He left all his belongings and books in Lunatyokki, even the portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, which he never parted with.
Almost everyone who has written about Greene talks about Greene's closeness to Edgar Poe, to Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Stevenson and Kipling.
Green loved “mad Edgar,” but the opinion that he imitated him and all the listed writers is incorrect: Green recognized many of them, being already a fully established writer himself.
He valued Merimee very much and considered his "Carmen" one of best books in world literature. Green read a lot of Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Chekhov (Green was shocked by Chekhov's stories), Gorky, Swift and Jack London. He often re-read Pushkin's biography, and in adulthood he became interested in reading encyclopedias.
Green was not spoiled by attention and therefore valued it very much.
Even the most ordinary affection or friendly deed in human relations caused him deep excitement.
This happened, for example, when life first confronted Green with Maxim Gorky. The year was 1920. Green was drafted into the Red Army and served in a guard regiment in the city of Ostrov, near Pskov. There he fell ill with rash. He was brought to Petrograd and, along with hundreds of typhus patients, put in the Botkin barracks. Green was seriously ill. He left the hospital almost disabled.
Homeless, half-sick and hungry, with severe dizziness, he wandered for days around the granite city in search of food and warmth. There was a time of queues, rations, smokehouses, stale crusts of bread and icy apartments. The thought of death became more and more annoying and stronger.
“At this time,” writes the writer’s wife in her unpublished memoirs, “Maxim Gorky appeared as Green’s savior. He learned of Green's plight and did everything for him. At Gorky’s request, Green was given a rare academic ration in those days and a room on the Moika, in the “House of Arts,” - warm, bright, with a bed and a table. To the tortured Green, this table seemed especially precious - he could write at it. In addition, Gorky gave Green a job.
From the deepest despair and expectation of death, Green was brought back to life by the hand of Gorky. Often at night, remembering his hard life and Gorky’s help, Green, who had not yet recovered from his illness, cried with gratitude.”
In 1924, Green moved to Feodosia. He wanted to live in silence, closer to his beloved sea. This act of Green reflected the true instinct of a writer - seaside life was the real breeding ground that gave him the opportunity to invent his stories.
Green lived in Feodosia until 1930. There he wrote a lot. He wrote mainly in the winter, in the mornings. Sometimes he would sit in a chair for hours, smoke and think, and during this time he could not be touched. In such hours of reflection and free play of the imagination, Green needed concentration much more than during working hours. Green was immersed in his thoughts so deeply that he was almost deaf and blind, and it was difficult to bring him out of this state.
In the summer, Green rested: he made bows, wandered by the sea, tinkered with stray dogs, tamed a wounded hawk, read and played billiards with the cheerful Feodosian residents - descendants of the Genoese and Greeks. Green loved Feodosia - a sultry city near the green, muddy sea, built on white rocky soil.
In the fall of 1930, Green moved from Feodosia to Old Crimea - a city of flowers, silence and ruins. Here he died alone from a painful illness - stomach and lung cancer.
Green died as hard as he lived. He asked to put his bed next to the window. Outside the window were the distant Crimean mountains and the reflection of the beloved and forever lost sea.
In one of Greene’s stories, “Return,” there are lines that he seemed to have written about his death, so accurately they convey the atmosphere of Greene’s dying: “The end came in the light of open windows, in the face of wildflowers. Already out of breath, he asked to be seated by the window. He looked at the hills, taking in the last breaths of air with a bleeding piece of lung.”
Before his death, Green was very homesick for people - this had never happened to him before.
A few days before his death, the author's copies were sent from Leningrad last book Green - "Autobiographical story".
Green smiled faintly and tried to read the inscription on the cover, but could not. The book fell out of his hands. His eyes had already acquired an expression of heavy, dull emptiness. Green's eyes, which were able to see the world so unusually, were already dying.
Green’s last word was either a groan or a whisper: “I’m dying...”
Two years after Greene’s death, I happened to visit Old Crimea, in the house where Greene died, and at his grave.
Around the small white house, wildflowers were blooming in the thick, fresh grass. The nut leaves, withered from the heat, smelled medicinal and tart. In the rooms with austere, simple furnishings there was deep silence and a sharp ray of sun lay on the chalk wall. It fell on the only engraving on the wall - a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe.
Green's grave in the cemetery behind the old mosque is overgrown with thorny grasses.
The wind was blowing from the south. Very far away, beyond Feodosia, the sea stood like a gray wall. And over everything - over Green's house, over his grave and over Old Crimea - there was the silence of a cloudless summer day.
Greene died, leaving us to decide whether our time needs such wild dreamers as he was.
Yes, we need dreamers. It's time to get rid of the mocking attitude towards this word. Many people still don’t know how to dream, and maybe that’s why they can’t catch up over time.
If you take away a person’s ability to dream, then one of the most powerful motivations that gives rise to culture, art, science and the desire to fight for a wonderful future will disappear. But dreams should not be divorced from reality. They must predict the future and create in us the feeling that we are already living in this future and that we ourselves are becoming different.
It is generally accepted that Greene's dreams were divorced from life and were a bizarre and meaningless game of the mind. It is generally believed that Greene was an adventurous writer - a master of plot, it is true, but a man whose books were devoid of social significance.
The significance of each writer is determined by how he affects us, what feelings, thoughts and actions his books evoke, whether they enrich us with knowledge, or are read as a funny set of words.
Green populated his books with a tribe of brave, simple-minded, like children, proud, selfless and kind people.
These integral, attractive people are surrounded by the fresh, fragrant air of Grinovsky nature - completely real, touching the heart with its charm. The world in which Greene's heroes live may seem unreal only to a person poor in spirit. The one who experienced slight dizziness from the first breath of salty and warm air sea coasts, will immediately feel the authenticity of Grinovsky landscape, the wide breath of Grinovsky countries.
Greene's stories evoke in people a desire for a varied life, full of risk, courage and the “sense of highness” characteristic of explorers, sailors and travelers. After Greene's stories, I want to see the whole globe - not the countries invented by Greene, but real, authentic ones, full of light, forests, multilingual noise of harbors, human passions and love.
“The earth teases me,” Greene wrote. “Its oceans are huge, its islands are countless, and there are a lot of mysterious, deadly curious corners.”
A fairy tale is needed not only for children, but also for adults. It causes excitement - a source of high and humane passions. She does not allow us to calm down and always shows us new, sparkling distances, a different life, she worries and makes us passionately desire this life. This is its value, and this is the value of the sometimes inexpressible, but clear and powerful charm of Green’s stories.
Our time has declared a merciless fight against bigots, idiots and hypocrites. Only a hypocrite can say that we need to calm down and stop. Great things have been achieved, but even greater things lie ahead. New high and difficult tasks arise in the near distance of the future, the task of creating a new person, cultivating new feelings and new human relationships worthy of the socialist age. But in order to fight for this future, you need to be able to dream passionately, deeply and effectively, you need to cultivate in yourself a continuous desire for what is meaningful and beautiful. Green was rich in this desire, and he conveys it to us in his books.
They talk about the adventurous nature of Green's plots. This is true, but its adventurous plot is only a shell for deeper content. You would have to be blind not to see love for a person in Greene’s books.
Greene was not only a magnificent landscape painter and master of plot, but he was also a very subtle psychologist. He wrote about self-sacrifice, courage - heroic traits inherent in the most ordinary people. He wrote about his love for work, for his profession, about the lack of knowledge and the power of nature. Finally, very few writers wrote so purely, carefully and emotionally about love for a woman, as Greene did.
I could cite here hundreds of excerpts from Greene’s books that would excite everyone who has not lost the ability to be moved by the sight of beauty, but the reader will find them himself.
Greene said that “the whole earth, with everything that is on it, is given to us for life, for the recognition of this life wherever it is.”
Green is a writer needed by our time, because he contributed to the education of high feelings, without which the implementation of a socialist society is impossible.
Notes
It was first published under the title “Alexander Green” in the Almanac “Year XXII”, No. 15, M. 1939. In a revised form, it was published as an introductory article to A. Green’s “Selected”, Goslitizdat, 1956 (Printed according to the text of Goslitizdat , 1956)
