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Dobychin Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin Leonid Ivanovich

(1896-1936), Russian writer. In the collections of stories “Meetings with Liz” (1927), “Portrait” (1931) the collision of the “former” world with post-revolutionary reality; anti-psychologism, lyrical subtext. In the novel “The City of En” (1935) the hero’s memories of childhood.

DOBYCHIN Leonid Ivanovich, Russian writer.
Family. Studies. First literary experiments
Born into a family of doctors, his father is a doctor, his mother is a midwife. He was the eldest of five children in the family. He studied at the Dvinsk gymnasium (now Daugavpils), where the Dobychins moved in 1896. In 1916 he graduated from the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Information about Dobychin’s life in the capital during October revolution 1917 no. In the spring of 1918 he moved to Bryansk, where his family moved. For a short time he worked as a teacher, then as a statistician.
In the spring of 1924 he sent M. Kuzmina to Leningrad (cm. KUZMIN Mikhail Alekseevich) his first handwritten collection of five stories, “Evenings and Old Women,” but received no response. In August 1924, he sent two stories to the Leningrad magazine “Russian Contemporary” - “Meetings with Liz” and “Kozlova”. One of the magazine's leaders, K. Chukovsky (cm. CHUKOVSKY Korney Ivanovich) , accepted both, immediately publishing "Meetings with Liz" (1924, No. 4).
Dobychin and Joyce
In 1925, Dobychin's regular trips from Bryansk to Leningrad began. However, loneliness always remained the dominant factor of his fate.
He was often compared to Joyce (cm. JOYCE James) . Both writers are characterized by non-confessional religiosity - a sign of filial abandonment, abandonment. In their “odysseys,” the hero closest to the author is the destitute son, Telemachus, in the disgusting world of “adult suitors,” whose lot is moral paralysis. And when communicating with paralytics, it makes no difference whether they are good or evil. Perhaps in this disgust lies the answer to the Dobynsky plots, indifferent to “good” and “evil.” In such a situation, the artist chooses the neutral position of a “chronicler.” It is convenient for solving modern artistic problems and, above all, for replacing the traditional plot structure in fiction with montage, which is what most researchers of Dobychin’s stylistics pay attention to. Going back to the “montage” discoveries of G. Flaubert (cm. FLAUBERT Gustave) in Madame Bovary, her acquaintance with cinema confirmed her.
Psychologically, Dobychin’s method is justified by an orientation toward “infantilism,” contrasted in its discreteness with “adult” consciousness.
In Dobychin’s prose, sadness rather than satire takes over. From which it does not follow that to " scary world"He was blind or deaf. From the very first literary steps he understood everything perfectly well - both about “Chiefs” and about “Censorship” (the writer invariably writes such “dangerous” words with sarcastic respect in capital letters). But his “accusation” consisted in the fact that he did not seem to notice the subject of the accusation, deprived it of the honor of being personified, and described it as dead nature. Literally painted “still lifes” on the field of battle and screams. Dobychin “did not notice” any Big People, no Big Ideas. “I didn’t notice” the Soviet Power itself.
"Meeting Liz"
In the summer of 1926, Dobychin got a new job in Bryansk in the Gubstatburo, in the “local economy department.” In 1927, his first collection, “Meetings with Liz,” was published in Leningrad. The next collection of stories, “Portrait,” appears at the end of 1930 (in the imprint - 1931). In an expanded and revised form, he repeated the book “Meetings with Liz.” In 1933, the prose writer prepared, but did not publish, the collection “Material”, in which it was also intended to use already published texts. With scrupulous care in literary finishing, Dobychin leaves his works as if open. Including the novel from provincial life, “The City of En” (1935), which was created over several years. The writer's attitude is this: the book can be mounted anew every time - the main thing in it is the good quality of the material. What is important is the initial purity, the “primary elements” of art, its “monads,” discovered by the author himself. Dobychin believed that life, seen at arm's length, is the very substance that should first of all be correlated with world harmony and world cataclysms.
Moving to Leningrad
Until 1934, Dobychin lived with the “failed event” of moving to Leningrad, but in the Leningrad literary atmosphere it turned out to be no easier to breathe than in the city of En. Only the literary critic N. Stepanov wrote kindly about Dobychin; other reviewers did not constrain themselves either in volume or in expressions - “Shameful book”, “On epigonism”, “Idle talk” - these were the names of the responses to Dobychin’s books.
“The City of En” was especially hard hit. Meanwhile, the leitmotif of this novel is the thirst for the rooted human need for friendship and emotional communication. That all this is impossible, that complete openness is illusory and leads to drama - his little hero is just beginning to vaguely guess about this.
"Shurka's relatives"
Dobychin's last work - the story "Shurka's Relatives" - was published only in post-perestroika 1993. The remote provincial life of the turbulent military and revolutionary years To good deeds does not incline any of the characters. This story ends simply: “Shurka thought and decided that he needed to go rogue again.”
In the midst of declared victories Great Art Dobychin showed that the “ugly”, “one-dimensional” existence “ little man" - still eternal theme Russian prose.
Tragic end
Circumstances last months Dobychin's life is tragic. Following the Pravda article of January 28, 1936, “Confusion Instead of Music,” at a string of literary discussions and meetings, the writer turned out to be the main target in Leningrad both as a “formalist” and as a “naturalist.” On March 25, at the House of Writers, Dobychin denied the accusations with almost one sentence and immediately left. The meetings at which he was branded continued until mid-April. There was no more loot on them. He has gone. Yours last letter to Chukovsky he ended with the words: “Don’t look for me - I’m going to distant lands.” A secret informant told the NKVD that on March 28, Dobychin left his apartment, giving him the keys, and said that he would not return to it. After this, no one saw Dobychin either alive or dead.
The hopelessness of Dobychin’s case lay in the fact that he died in opposition to the entire Literary Society, and not just to the Chiefs.

IX. Leonid Dobychin

We live without feeling the country beneath us,

Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,

And where is enough for half a conversation, -

The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.

His thick fingers are like worms, fat

And the words, like pound weights, are true.

The cockroaches are laughing,

And his boots shine.

And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders.

He plays with the services of demihumans.

Who whistles, who meows, who whines,

He's the only one who babbles and pokes.

Like horseshoes, he forges decree after decree, -

Some in the groin, some in the forehead, some in the eyebrow, some in the eye. No matter what his punishment is, it’s a raspberry,

And a broad Ossetian chest.

O. Mandelstam

I dreamed that I was summoned somewhere and I had to go where they would talk to me and demand that I tell everything. On the street of a provincial old town, a rattler is moving towards me - or an old car with high wheels, reminiscent of a heavy, tall, clumsy rattletrap. There are people with strange faces sitting in it: low foreheads, pale, with flattened noses, talking loudly, confidently about something related to the matter for which I was summoned. On the way, I go down to the dirty restroom in the basement, along slippery steps, and when I come out, a hunchback pops out behind me and shouts furiously: “We need to turn off the light!”

I am standing on one knee at the entrance of the house, to which not only I, but also others, such as Tikhonov, and the authorities are invited. He nods at me and walks up the steps, preoccupied and serious. He throws some kind of joke at me, and I answer half-jokingly, but I think that we will both be in trouble, but it will work out for him. Finally I enter. This is a reception area, but at the same time it is a hairdressing salon. They cut their hair and shave it. There are tattered magazines and old newspapers on the table. They sit in silence. I sit down too. You can leave, but you can't.

You can breathe, but you can’t. I’m already in the chair, and they’re starting to cut my hair. An elderly hairdresser, gray, calm, carefully doing his job. At this time, one of those riding in the car appears from the office where I should enter after my hair is cut. He says to the hairdresser: “But it’s true, Major Lykov, they took this one in Peredelkino.” Both laugh. I'm scared, but I'm silent. I'm in a chair, and the major is with scissors. Now he will bend over and start pressing on his eyes, and nothing can be done. I sit and wait.

This dream, recorded on the night of August 8, 1964, is an echo of spiritual trepidation, alertness, doom, coming from the sad and terrible distant thirties. For some reason, he connected his memory with the death of Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin, when I also remained silent, because it was also “nothing is possible.”

In my book “Interlocutor” (1973), published (intentionally) in a small print run, silenced and soon becoming a rarity, L.I. One chapter is dedicated to Dobychin. It tells sparingly what and how he wrote, and even more sparingly about how he lived, and not a word about how he died. Meanwhile, the story of his untimely death, his death should not be forgotten. He committed suicide, but in fact was mercilessly killed.

He was a talented, original writer, from whom only three small books remained - “Meetings with Liz”, “Portrait” and “The City of En” (the first two largely repeat each other). Here’s what I wrote about him in “Interlocutor”: “Tiny, two or three pages, stories written with almost no subordinate clauses and represent, as it were, a dispassionate list of insignificant incidents. However, they are read with tension, and this is not the tension of boredom. This is a search for those internal, sometimes barely noticeable psychological changes for which the author took up the pen. Sometimes it is a disappointed hope (“Dorian Gray”), sometimes it is hatred of bourgeois indifference (“Meetings with Liz”). But more often than not, it’s just a mental movement that flashed and disappeared: affection, sympathy, kindness.

Dobychin wrote about what goes unnoticed in everyday life, about the fleeting, optional, encountered at every step. His tiny stories are an example of thriftiness with every word. It is impossible to retell them.

In “Interlocutor” I cited one of them in its entirety. Here, in order not to repeat myself, I will give another one. It's called "Please".

“The veterinarian took two rubles. The medicine cost seven hryvnia. There was no benefit. “Go to grandma,” the women taught, “she will help.” - Selezneva locked the gate and in a scarf, with her hands in the cuffs, bent over, short, in long skirt, in felt boots, she set off. A thaw was expected. The trees were black. Garden fences divided the slopes of the hills into crooked quadrangles.

Factory chimneys were smoking. The new houses stood with round corners. Engineers with pointed beards and hats with badges walked proudly. Selezneva stood aside and stopped and looked at them: she was paid forty rubles a month, they were told that it was six hundred. Thistles stuck out from under the snow. Gray fences loomed. “Auntie, hey,” the boys shouted and rolled on the sled at their feet. The courtyards below, with paths and apple trees, and meadows and forests were visible in the distance. There were firebrands lying at the grandmother's gate. Selezneva called. The grandmother, with dark curls on her forehead sewn to a scarf and wearing an overcoat, opened the door for her. “Look at that pine,” said the grandmother, “and don’t think.” - The pine tree was turning blue, sticking out over the strip of forest. Grandma muttered. Music was playing on the skating rink. “Here’s the salt,” the grandmother pushed Selezneva. - You give it to her... The goat bent over the drink and turned away from him. With her head down, Selezneva left. “There you are,” said the short guest in a homemade hat. Selezneva greeted her. “He will come to see you,” the guest announced. - I would advise. The deceased was a smart lady, everything was intact - his house was full of things. - Picking up the lantern from the ground, they walked slowly, hugging each other.

The guest arrived wearing a seal cap and a brown coat with a lambskin collar. “I’m sorry,” he said and, with sparkling eyes, grinned into his gray mustache. “On the contrary,” answered Selezneva. The guest enjoyed watching. “Time is rushing,” the guest was surprised. - Spring is just around the corner. We are already learning the May anthem.

Sisters, -

looking at Selezneva, he suddenly began to sing, waving his spoon. The guest pushed Selezneva, beaming, “put on your wedding dresses, strew your path with garlands of roses.”

Brothers, -

swaying, the guest joined and blinked at Selezneva so that she wouldn’t lag behind:

Open your arms to each other: the years of suffering and tears are over.

“Wonderful,” the guest rejoiced. - Wonderful, true words. And you sing excellently. “Yes,” Selezneva nodded. She didn't like the guest. The song seemed stupid to her. “Goodbye,” they finally said goodbye. Throwing on her cap, Selezneva ran out. It smelled wet. The music was coming from afar. The goat did not bleat when the lock rattled. She lay motionless on the straw. It's dawn. The roofs were dripping. There was no need to bring drinks. Having washed herself, Selezneva went out in time to arrange everything before the office. A man from the market agreed to a contract for fifty dollars, and, sitting down in the firewood, Selezneva rolled up to them. “Yes, she’s alive,” he said, entering the barn. Selezneva shook her head. The boys ran out to get the sleigh. “Dead goat,” they shouted and jumped around. People dispersed. Bending over, Selezneva pulled the sled with the box and began to rake out the flooring. “Hello,” yesterday’s guest suddenly appeared behind us. He was grinning, wearing a sealed cap from a dead woman's muff, and his eyes sparkled. His cheeks were shiny. “Your gates are wide open,” he said, “it’s too early for school, dude, I think.” - Putting down the rake, Selezneva pointed to the empty fence. He sighed politely. “I cry and sob,” he began to hum, “I always see death.” - Looking down, Selezneva touched her fingers to the wall of the barn and looked at them. Drops fell on the sleeves. The crow cawed. “Well,” the guest stuck out his mustache. - I won't detain you. I want to send a woman to you to talk. “Please,” said Selezneva.”

In his passionate denial of philistinism, Dobychin was close to M. Zoshchenko, although both writers would be horrified by such a comparison. Zoshchenko - conversationality, swagger, attraction to the whole, freedom of intonation. Dobychin - restraint, emphasized laconicism, mosaic, reticence. But Dobychin’s heroes could sit in Zoshchenko’s works as if they were in their own home.

His straightforwardness amazed me. He was incapable of lying. After reading my novel “The Artist Unknown,” he came sulky, upset, was silent for a long time, and then muttered through his teeth that he liked only one phrase: “He drank tea with the wooden importance of peasants.”

His silence was sometimes the cause of funny incidents.

After the murder of Kirov, all former nobles were expelled from Leningrad, including famous director Bolshoi drama theater- Tverskoy. His real name- Kuzmin-Karavaev, and there were rumors (probably inspired) that he was Kerensky’s adjutant. We knew each other, and the already famous actor Polizeimako came to me to complain about his forced departure. To his misfortune, he found Dobychin at my place, who immediately became ruffled, perhaps because the actor interrupted our conversation.

“I just came from the station, they were seeing off Tverskoy,” Polizeymako said bitterly. - They drove me somewhere to hell! Such a person! For what? Even if he was Kerensky’s adjutant a hundred years ago, for mercy’s sake, who could have thought that he would have to answer for this? And in front of whom, I ask you? Before whom! Before the ignorant lackeys!

Leonid Ivanovich remained silent. Policeman looked at his face with pursed lips, blinked and softened his wording slightly:

Well, if not in front of lackeys, then in front of ungrateful people! Because this is how to repay for everything that Tverskoy has done for our art...

Continuing his speech, he glanced questioningly at Dobychin from time to time, obviously expecting support. But Leonid Ivanovich was mysteriously silent.

Generally speaking, whoever, but Tverskoy, just like talented person, deserved an exception to the rule. I understand that some people had to leave voluntarily. You can't erase the past. If you were Kerensky's adjutant...

He talked a little about the fact that Tverskoy, perhaps, should not have been under Kerensky, especially since he already intended to devote himself to theatrical art.

Dobychin was silent. Opening his mouth slightly, Polizeimako looked at him again, this time cautiously, and also fell silent. I noticed that not only Kerensky’s adjutants, but also the Minister of War of the Provisional Government, Verkhovsky himself, works at the General Staff. But it was already too late. Lightning of understanding flashed in Polizeimako's eyes, widened with fear.

Generally speaking, yes,” he said. - I was extremely unpleasant about this commotion at the station. They came with flowers - and who? Those who first of all spoiled Tversky in the theater. Well, he left, so why organize a demonstration in a public place?

Leonid Ivanovich did not answer a word to this completely well-intentioned tirade, and Polizeymako - a strong man with thick shoulders - fell before his eyes like fermented dough.

Saying nothing, nervously adjusting his pince-nez from time to time (he wore pince-nez, not glasses), Dobychin, without a doubt, seemed to the actor the living embodiment of the Big House.

I saw the Policeman off and came back laughing. Leonid Ivanovich didn’t even smile. But I saw that everything was seething in him.

We corresponded, and I still have his short, paradoxical letters. One day he sent me three of his handwritten miniatures - it was a gift. He sent me “The City of En” with a student photograph pasted on the frontispiece. He was an easily vulnerable person, fearful of any assessments and considering them - not without reason - to be useless, because anyway he did not know how to write and could not write otherwise. A technical engineer by training, he worked in Bryansk, but, having taken up literature, he often lived for a long time in Leningrad. He was straightforward. His nobility was cutting, irreconcilable, sarcastic, uncomfortable. He didn't fit in psychologically literary circle Leningrad and was friendly, perhaps, with only N.K. Chukovsky, which did not stop him from calling him “Monsieur Kolya.” His spiritual wealth was firmly, painfully, forever hidden under seven seals of irony, which sometimes broke through with an unusually apt nickname, joke, or caricature. However, he did not want to offend anyone. He was evil, hopelessly, hopelessly kind.

Why in the literature of those years was his place - albeit small - considered special, separate? Because he had no neighbors, no teachers, no students. He didn't remind me of anyone. He was on his own. He existed in literature - and not only in literature - without demanding anything, without counting on anything, without looking around and without fear of stumbling.

In the spring of 1936, the famous editorial “Confusion Instead of Music” appeared in Pravda - the same one that Shostakovich (I mentioned this) wore on his chest all his life (see Appendix No. 12). Formalism was again declared the main enemy of Soviet art. Even in those years when a certain Nazarenko appeared at the Institute of Art History, who published a book in which the dependence of literature on the country’s productive forces was expressed in numbers (the increase in production was directly linked to the successful development of poetry and prose), unrepentant young formalists sang a song:

A wall collapsed at the Art Institute.

Wall, wall, crush Yashka Nazarenko!

This was in the late twenties. The institute died, Tynyanov switched to prose, Eikhenbaum, expelled from everywhere, was busy editing the classics, some of their students repented (Koversky) and suggested that I repent. I refused. Times were completely different, the songs had long since fallen silent. Mandelstam already wrote:

I live on the black stairs, and to the temple

A bell torn out with meat hits me.

And all night long I wait for my dear guests,

Moving the shackles of the door chains.

The rough, backhanded blow in the music aroused natural fears that in Leningrad, the birthplace of OPOYAZ, it would respond to former formalists who were overshadowed by prose, editing, and film work. Nothing happened! Apparently, the secretariat decided to get off cheaply: Dobychin was elected “whipping boy”. In fact, he was a convenient figure: he was published in “Russian Contemporary”, lives on visits, is associated with the uninfluential N. Chukovsky, G. Gore, E. Shvarts, L. Rakhmanov. He writes some suspicious, maliciously ironic stories.

It is clear that it is difficult for me to recall in my memory the picture of this meeting with sufficient completeness. And is it necessary? House of Writers named after. Mayakovsky was overcrowded. Somewhere the “culprit” of the commotion flashed and disappeared. Oh, how wisely he would have acted if he had stayed at home!

The report was entrusted to little Efim Dobin, who later wrote several useful books. But then he was not a literary-party figure, but a party-literary figure - and a slightly funny figure, perhaps because his very small stature did not correspond to the significance with which he tried to act.

I don’t remember what Dobychin was accused of, but I remember that these accusations had the opposite relation to the writer’s works. Dobin accused the passionate, caustic, sharp denouncer of philistinism of militant philistinism, and behind his reticence he discerned antipathy towards “ positive hero", about which Leonid Ivanovich never wrote at all.

Of the ordinary accusers, everyone remembers Naum Berkovsky - this, according to writers who knew him in the fifties and sixties, is difficult to believe. Judging by his obituaries, he became a first-rate (and progressive) scholar of Western European literature. When I told them about this meeting, they gasped and shrugged their shoulders in disbelief.

What was disgusting in his speech was not only the posing, not only the condescension, negligence, not only some kind of dashing hussarism, strange for a Jew in those years, but the fact that no one forced him to speak.

He tried to kill Dobychin of his own free will and did it skillfully - not like Dobin.

Dobychin is our Leningrad sin,” he said coquettishly.

I don't remember any other performances. Why no one - including me - came out in defense of Dobychin is easy and at the same time difficult to explain. Of course, they were cowards - after all, behind such performances the concept of “group” immediately appeared, and it began to smack of those who were two steps away Big house. But cowardice was accompanied by a feeling of awkwardness, and awkwardness was accompanied by hopelessness. The awkwardness can be explained by the following example: it would be as if in good (conditionally) society someone spoke a foreign language. And hopelessness is different: if, when Christ was crucified, among his disciples there would have been a madman who would have rushed to defend him. Why such crazy people weren’t around in the thirties is a special question that needs to be discussed separately.

After the debate, the floor was given to Dobychin. He walked across the hall, short, in his best suit, focused but not in the least afraid. At the pulpit he was silent at first, and then, wringing his crossed fingers, he said in a quiet, dull voice:

Unfortunately, I cannot agree with what was said here.

And, going down the steps, he walked through the hall again and disappeared.

The next day I called him and the conversation started as if nothing had happened. Still, he wanted - and I could feel it - for the conversation to turn to last night, and I cautiously asked why he limited himself to one phrase.

Because I vertically challenged and the light hit me right in the eyes,” he answered with irritation.

He talked about the lights on the lectern, placed so as to illuminate the face of the speaker.

Then we fell silent, and nervous breathing was heard in the receiver. There was always a sense of tension in his demeanor, as if with all his might he was holding back the directness that was bursting out of him. It was the same in this conversation. He laughed hoarsely when I said something indignantly about Dobin and Berkovsky, and remarked sarcastically:

They were absolutely right.

We said goodbye calmly. It never occurred to me that I was in last time heard his voice.

The next day Nikolai Chukovsky called me, excited, upset, and read me Dobychin’s letter. Leonid Ivanovich asked to repay debts to his friends from the money that (as he mistakenly assumed) was owed to him from Krasnaya Novy for the proposed story, and said goodbye, but somehow said goodbye mysteriously. “Don’t look for me, I’m going to distant lands,” the letter ended with these words.

What do you think this means?

Maybe he decided to return home to Bryansk?

No! I went to see him at the Moika. Empty room. No linen in the wardrobe, no books. There is a passport in the desk drawer.

Two weeks later, the Chukovskys received a letter from Bryansk from Leonid Ivanovich’s mother. She wrote that he sent her, without a single word of explanation, his personal items. “I beg you, inform me of the fate of my unfortunate son.”

The organizing secretaries of the Writers' Union changed very often in the thirties, and not because they wanted it. The all-powerful leader, who had just energetically pursued the “party line” in literature, suddenly disappeared, and in his place another, no less energetic, appeared. I remember Zilstein, gentle, polite, - it was believed (without reason) that his appointment was a victory intelligent literature. Perhaps that is why he “roared” - this So it was called - already three months after his appointment. There was a worker, a blacksmith (I don’t remember his last name), who was tormented at his high post simply because his hand was accustomed to holding not a pen, but a hammer. When he was imprisoned, his pregnant wife in a headscarf came to the Union and begged for help.

There was (after the war) a young Kozhemyakin who could not pronounce the word “laureate” and before my eyes they put a note on his table: “Not “loireate”, but “laureate.”

When Dobychin was being persecuted (see Appendix No. 13), the secretary was a certain Bespamyatnoe from Sportintern - a tall, dense, gloomy, determined man who immortalized himself frank confession, quite suitable for introducing into literary policy serious changes.

Alexander Sergeevich Shcherbakov himself, “a prominent figure in the Communist Party and Soviet state", as stated about him in the TSB. This happened, no doubt, in the spring of 1936, when (according to the same TSB) he was still secretary of the Writers' Union. I remember that a cheerful, handsome Fadeev came with him. Shcherbakov addressed a small group of writers (I was among them) with a reproachful speech, the meaning of which was that the writers of the city of Lenin could not “create” (so he said) anything significant at the time the young Tvardovsky from Smolensk spoke , for example, with a good poem “Ant Country”. He addressed us, but no doubt reproached Bespamyatnov, as if this figure from Sportintern could order “War and Peace” for Olga Forsh, and “Gargantua and Pantagruel” for Zoshchenko.

Fadeev made a long, encouraging, slurred speech (interrupted by his unexpectedly high-pitched, unpleasant laugh), from which it followed that not all was lost and, even if something was lost, Leningrad writers were generally still trying to correct the mistakes they had made.

The writers remained silent - the future was unclear. It seems that only Mikhail Kozakov said something. In conclusion, the floor was given to Bespamyatnov, and it was then that he uttered, justifying himself, his immortal phrase:

“After all, I was like a nail inserted into a clock mechanism!..”

But let’s leave this scene that killed our organizing secretary and go back to the time when he was still in management.

Two or three days after Dobychin’s disappearance, a group of writers - I remember clearly that besides me there were N. Chukovsky, M. Kozakov, E. Shvarts - went to the secretariat to demand that the Writers’ Union take part in the fate of Leonid Ivanovich, or at least found out where he was and what happened to him. Bespamyatnov listened to us and remained silent, and when the critic A. Gorelov (member of the secretariat) wanted to say something, he interrupted him in a threatening and warning tone:

Anatoly!

Then he began to vaguely assure us that nothing had actually happened. There is every reason to believe that Dobychin has left.

This is still unknown, it is becoming clear, but he was seen on the third day. Apparently in Luga. He has friends there, and he apparently decided to stay with them and relax. Bespamyatnov, without a doubt, was lying - or, as they say, “obscure.” It is possible that it was at these moments that the thought of a nail inserted into a clock mechanism occurred to him. The Party ordered him to remain calm, and he kept it. But in our excited speeches we could hear, albeit secretly, the question: “Why did you kill him?”

And, guessing that, in our person, almost all Leningrad writers demanded an answer from him to this question, he, apparently, came to the conviction that a second, calming meeting could not be done without.

I forgot to mention that the main reason for the attack on Dobychin was not only his stories, but (mainly) the story “City of En” - his best book. It mercilessly, with bitter frankness, shows the life of a boy, then a young man, in a provincial town - perhaps in Dvinsk with its mixed, at the beginning of the century, Russian-Polish population.

Arseny Tarkovsky’s beautiful poem “Things” names the things of his childhood.

There are fewer and fewer things among which

I lived as a child, it remains in the world.

Where are the lightning lamps? Where's the black powder?

Where is the black water from the bottom of the well?

Where is "Isle of the Dead" in a decadent frame?

Where are the plush red sofas?

Where are the photos of men with mustaches?

Where are the reed airplanes?..

Where solid sign and the letter “yat” with “fitoy”?

One is gone, the other has changed,

And what was not separated by a comma,

That was separated by a comma and death...

Any of these missing items can be found in the "City of En". But the story is not written about them. They simply exist, just as the city itself exists with its repetitive, mechanical life, sliding before the eyes of adults and every minute taking shape before the eyes of a child.

By the way, about the eyes. An unconscious, unexplained incompleteness of vision runs through the entire book. little hero. No one realizes that he is nearsighted, neither he himself, nor his relatives, nor his schoolmates. The world is shifted, slightly erased, shaded. But then one day his gaze accidentally falls into the glass of someone else's pince-nez, and on the same day, after visiting an eye doctor, normal vision returns to him. But does his spiritual world become richer, which no longer needs additional, exciting work imagination?

“The story is written not about disappeared objects, but about disappeared relationships” (“Interlocutor”),

At the second meeting central figure was A.N. Tolstoy - he was brought from Moscow in order to calm the agitated public opinion. He did not make ideological accusations - the speech was structured subtly. He did not, as Berkovsky did, take advantage of the myopia of the teenager, the hero of “The City of En,” to accuse the forty-year-old engineer-economist and writer of political myopia. He behaved condescendingly, kindly, and even took pity on Dobychin as a man of the old, outdated, dead world.

In the person of Dobychin, an embittered, helpless envious greedy, but empty eyes watches the blossoming life, the flight of youth, and this blind envy takes revenge on him, kills him, he said<или что-то в этом роде).

But the “envious person” was at the same time a harmless dreamer, haunted by the ghosts of unfulfilled happiness - here his mysterious disappearance was briefly mentioned. And - no longer in passing - about the fact that nothing happened: one must be tolerant of criticism.

Did Tolstoy know that his role as a guest performer was shameful? Without a doubt. But he didn’t walk through that.

Fedin was not at the meeting. He had already moved to Moscow by then. But there was his wife, Dora Sergeevna. During the break, I went up and said hello to her.

What a scoundrel! - she said loudly about Tolstoy, not paying attention to those present. (This was in a crowded corridor.) - You don’t know him yet! This guy can sneak up on tiptoe at night, smother him with a pillow, and then say that’s what happened. Judas!..

Pasternak wrote in “People and Positions” that suicide is preceded by the consciousness of a spiritual barrier that is erected between the past and the present. “When they come to the thought of suicide, they give up on themselves, turn away from the past, declare themselves bankrupt, and their memories invalid. These memories can no longer reach a person, save and support him. The continuity of internal existence is broken, the personality is over. Perhaps, in conclusion, they kill themselves not out of loyalty to the decision made, but out of the intolerance of this melancholy, unknown to whom it belongs, this suffering in the absence of the sufferer, this empty expectation, not filled by the ongoing life of life” (People and Positions // New World. 1967. No. 1).

The examples with which he tries to prove this idea are not always convincing. Fadeev, who left on the night table a thick letter addressed to the Central Committee, which Sun. Ivanov and Fedin saw with their own eyes (it mysteriously disappeared when officials appeared) - Fadeev did not kill himself with a “guilty smile” and hardly said to himself before his death: “Farewell, Sasha.” Without a doubt, he soberly assessed his anti-Party step, and it can be assumed that he saw neither the strength nor the opportunity to change the situation in literature in such a way that his new activity would make him forget what he was guilty of before it. Literature was changing without his participation, in which no one was interested. Two or three months before Fadeev’s suicide, I came across his article in Komsomolskaya Pravda. In her, the “personality” was truly erased. Any Komsomol activist could have written such an article.

It seems to me that Dobychin committed suicide for the purpose of self-affirmation. He had a high opinion of himself. He considered “The City of En” to be a work of European significance - and once in a conversation with me he even admitted this, which was completely unlike him.

His suicide is similar to the Japanese “harakiri”, when the humiliated person rips open his stomach with a sword if there is no other way to preserve his honor. He killed himself to prove that he despised the perpetrators of his shame: “Oh, is that so? Here you go!...” If he had not been so scrupulous in his moral world, if he had at least allowed himself to “lower himself” to a completely frank conversation with friends, he might have managed not to exaggerate the size of what happened to such an extent bad luck with him. And he could not imagine how soon his step would be forgotten.

SOBOLEV LEONID SOBOLEV LEONID (writer: “Overhaul”, “Sea Soul”, etc.; committed suicide on February 17, 1971 at the 73rd year of his life). Sobolev committed suicide due to a serious illness - he had stomach cancer. Shortly before his death, he went to the hospital for surgery and,

UTESOV LEONID UTESOV LEONID (pop singer, theater and film actor: “Trading house “Antanta and K” (1923), “Career of Spirka Shpandyr”, “Aliens” (both 1926), “Jolly Fellows" (1934), “Jolly stars" (1954), etc.; died on March 9, 1982 at the age of 87). In 1962, after

FILATOV LEONID FILATOV LEONID (theater and film actor: “Ivantsov, Petrov, Sidorov” (1979), “Crew” (1980), “You never dreamed of it,” “Who will pay for luck,” “From evening to noon,” “ Women joke seriously", "Loop" (t/f) (all - 1981), "Yaroslav the Wise" (1982), "Rooks", "From the life of a criminal chief

Leonid BRONEVOY L. Bronevoy was born on December 17, 1928 in Kyiv. His father had a rich military biography: he fought for the Reds from the age of 14, after the civil war he joined the NKVD apparatus and by the mid-30s rose to the rank of general. During Stalin's purges he was lucky: in

Leonid KURAVLEV L. Kuravlev was born on October 8, 1936 in Moscow into a simple family. His father (he was originally from Ryazan) worked as a mechanic at an aircraft factory, his mother (originally from the Yaroslavl region) was the deputy director of a hairdressing salon. However, she raised her son almost alone