Why Valery Rozov is a legend forever. Eternal flight

Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Eternal flight of thought

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's story "Night Flight" was first published in 1931 by Gallimard. In the same year, the book received the Femina literary prize. In 1932, the American company United Artists made a film based on the book. In 1939, Italian composer Luigi Dallapicola wrote the opera Night Flight.

For advanced people In France, the book sounded like a statement of the beauty and greatness of duty in the atmosphere of individualism characteristic of French society of that time. With “Night Flight” the genre was revived fiction based on documentary material.

Among the pilots, Saint-Exupery's airline comrades, the book caused dull irritation, which echoed in the writer's soul with bewilderment and pain. “Guillaume, I heard you are coming, and my heart is already skipping a beat,” he wrote to his friend after the book was published. - If only I knew which one terrible life I have been leading since you left, and what a disgust for life I have learned little by little! Because I wrote this ill-fated book, I found myself a victim of the gossip and enmity of my comrades.

Mermoz will tell you what fame was created for me by the people whom I loved so much and whom I have not met for a long time. They will tell you how arrogant I am. No one - from Toulouse to Dakar - doubts this.

I hope you come at a time when the wind is changing. And perhaps I will be able to get rid of the slander. I could not write to you because of continuous disappointments and unfair rumors. And you probably thought that I had changed. And I couldn’t justify myself to the only person I treat like a brother...

Even Etienne, with whom, after my return from South America We have never met, despite this, I told my friends here that I had become a poser.

After all, my whole life is poisoned when such an opinion is shared by my best comrades and when my work on the airlines, after the “crime” I committed by writing Night Flight, disgraces them.

Saint-Exupéry was not at all mistaken about the high human merits of his airline comrades and the feelings that connected him with them. Their alienation, which he experienced so painfully, was caused by the discrepancy between the high pathos of “Night Flight” and the situation when the book was published. It was a time of economic crisis. The entrepreneur who financed Aeropostal went bankrupt, management changed on the lines, contradictions between different managers and different methods leadership has escalated. And Saint-Exupéry sang in “Night Flight” a social hierarchy in which the pilots are headed by a leader who educates his subordinates in the spirit of firmness and fearlessness, while the service personnel are at the lowest level.

The resentment of the pilots, who began to say about Saint-Exupéry that he was not a real pilot, but an amateur, that he did not deserve the right to fly on regular lines, was caused by what they learned in the Riviera from “Night Flight” by airline director Didier Dora (he the author dedicated his book). This extraordinary leader did not arouse sympathy among his subordinates. Pedantic, cold and dry, in their eyes he was not at all ideal.

From the point of view of Saint-Exupéry, Rivière was a “great leader,” precisely the person who is able to fill people’s lives with meaning. The pilots saw that Dora did not care who he served, that he could not and did not want to be personally responsible for the fate of those people whom he “forged.” Dora himself also recognized himself in Riviere and subsequently became so accustomed to the image that he could no longer distinguish his words and thoughts from Riviere’s reasoning.

But, no matter how great the writer’s grief was, no matter how it increased after his favorite “line” turned into an ordinary commercial enterprise that had lost poetry and moral height, he remained faithful to the ideal of brotherhood that united people in their work, and when the “Planet of People”, presented the book to Didier Dora with a dedication in which he called him the creator “ special civilization" Saint-Exupéry’s mistake was that he did not see the fragility and instability of this “special civilization” in an atmosphere of general competitive struggle, depersonalizing any individual creativity, turning the poetry of aviation into service on an airplane.

This inaccuracy of perception of reality affected primarily the work itself: the scheme of human relations in it looks unconvincing, unreliable, and the writer, while working on the book, was faced with a difficulty that he could only overcome by violence against himself: in the original version of “Night Flight” there were four hundred There are only one hundred and eighty pages left in the final one. In a letter to his mother from Buenos Aires, Saint-Exupery says that he is writing his new book about a night flight, and quotes lines reproducing childhood memories. But the poetry of childhood, the joy of feeling life, did not fit in with the harsh world where “the morality of the conqueror, the morality of the soldier” reigns; the child turned out to be superfluous in it, and the author expelled him from the book, sacrificing the essence for the sake of form.

Modern critics, paying tribute to the purity and nobility of language

“Night Flight”, at the same time noted the imperfections of the book, but attributed its shortcomings to a certain “literary” style and images. This forced Saint-Exupery to formulate the principles on the basis of which he wrote Night Flight, to defend not the book itself, but his method. “I just can’t find the star on which I live,” he wrote in 1931 to the writer Benjamin Cremieux. - I really found myself lost in interplanetary space. And if I spoke in one book about the only inhabited star, can this reflection, generated more by my flesh than by my consciousness, be considered literary? Couldn't it be more authentic, more honest, than any other reflection? In my opinion, even the rudest person does not think in technical terms when the need to act does not allow him to choose words and he allows the body to think on its own - not in words, but in symbols, beyond words. He then forgets them, as if awakening from a dream, and replaces them with technical language, but everything was contained in the symbol. And this was not literary.

This image seems dubious to me. I find it artificial precisely because the words alone are symbolic, because the symbol does not grow out of a deep inner experience and does not correspond to what was actually dreamed...

Do you think I was making up the words? Why do I need it? No, I caught this very consciousness, living in a dream, which sometimes manages to be captured at the moment of awakening.”

Here, as in one of his letters to René de Saussin, Saint-Exupéry explains his intuitive aesthetics. He listens to deep sensations, to the “thoughts of the body” at the moment of a flight or other action, trusts these feelings more than anything, even if at first glance they seem banal. He talks about this in his essay “The Pilot and the Elements.” The proportions and character of “Night Flight” were also suggested to him by intuition, and if the book nevertheless turned out to be contradictory, Saint-Exupery was more likely to be ready to see its shortcomings in the imperfection of expression, but not in the method of creativity. He rejected any “professional” approach to creativity, and, of course, the pilots were mistaken when they called him an amateur pilot. He was a professional pilot. But as a writer, he asserted himself as an amateur, asserted his right to literary amateurism as the only correct, from his point of view, attitude towards literature, in which a book may be unsuccessful, but always remains a creative act, and not a handicraft.

Many years later, during the war, Saint-Exupery would confirm his commitment to the educational principle of the Riviera-Dora: “It is enough to defeat the ghost of fear, and this craft (craft, pilot) becomes the same as any other. Whether to fly at an altitude of ten thousand meters or weave straw chairs... because the ghost is already dead; I checked this more than once. And during night flights. And when he drowned in the sea. And when he was dying of thirst... Dora did not teach people courage: he forced them to kill ghosts. I already talked about this in Night Flight.

Planet of People

In 1938, Saint-Exupery took a flight to New York - Tierra del Fuego, during which he suffered an accident in Guatemala. While undergoing treatment in New York, he wrote Planet of Humans, which he continued to work on upon his return to France. At the beginning of 1939, the book was published by Gallimard's publishing house. In the same year, the French Academy awards the book Big bonus novel.

Planet of the Humans was an immediate and particular success among its contemporaries in France and in the United States, where it immediately became a “bestseller.” This success was not so much a literary success as a human success for the personality of Saint-Exupery, who definitely and clearly expressed the life aspirations of people before the threat of Nazism looming over the world. Of course, in the United States, separated from Europe by an ocean, European events were not perceived so keenly, and “Planet of Humans” seemed to be a somewhat exotic work there. It has been compared to Joseph Conrad's Mirror of the Seas, and its author has been called the "Conrad of the air." But in France the book caused a real response from hearts. Workers at the printing house where it was printed presented the writer with a special copy of the book, printed on aircraft canvas.

Saint-Exupéry himself, in one of his letters, defined the purpose of his book as follows: “I wrote “Planet of People” with passion to tell my generation: you are inhabitants of one planet, passengers of one ship!”

Since Saint-Exupéry had to part with the “line,” he led a life full of material worries, accepted newspaper offers, and participated in a flight where a prize was awarded for the speed record. In a letter to a close friend (in 1936), he explains how external circumstances prevent him from being creative:

“I know why it’s so hard for me to start writing articles. Cinema and journalism are vampires that prevent me from writing what I want to write. For many years now I have not had the right to do the only thing that I like. I feel like a prisoner weaving baskets. Meanwhile, in another place I would be much more helpful and generous. My disgust is nothing more than resistance to moral suicide, because as soon as I enthusiastically take up the production of empty trinkets for the cinema, I will quickly get my hands on and begin to earn a lot of money, but I cannot expect joy from such successes. It is precisely this enthusiasm that I resist. I don’t want to waste my talent on trifles. To pay off my debts and earn a living, I will have to write another script and spend an irrevocable six months on it. I want to at least drink all the bitterness to the dregs. If I get rid of her, I'm dead. I will again throw away six months of my life, which could have been ebullient and fruitful: it cannot bring joy.

And then I will somehow explain to you that separating the goal and the means is sophistry. These differences are invented in hindsight. In fact, when, like the Spanish anarchists, they shoot dissidents, freedom does not happen. I no longer believe that I write a screenplay to gain the freedom to write books.

The blind but powerful logic of actions leads to the fact that every script I write, every article deprives me of another chance to write a book. And they give you an extra chance to write other scripts. I cannot even improve my commerce with this false consolation.”

The book is a suite of reports about the trials experienced, about trips to the USSR and Spain, which was engulfed in civil war.

How did the writer manage to create a whole from these disparate impressions? First of all, he was driven by the desire to maintain integrity and clarity of consciousness in the situation before the World War, when many representatives of the intelligentsia “lost their heads.” “The incredible absurdity of our time is depressing,” he wrote in the spring of 1940, explaining to a friend his view of what was happening. - This, of course, is a consequence of the same reasons: the modern era is not “comprehensible”, because over the course of a century events have developed too quickly, and comprehension is a slow process... All this is very bitter, there is not a very broad choice left: either reconcile with slavery under the yoke of Hitler, or resolutely abandon it. But taking full responsibility for such a refusal. And do it silently. I don't want to go on the radio: it's just obscene if you can't offer people real faith. So I take full responsibility for the refusal; only I needed to cross a certain threshold in order to better understand what I was giving up. From freedom. From the warmth of loving flesh. And maybe from life. But what's the point? And this is as bitter as the doubts of a believer. And, of course, just as fruitful. An unbearable contradiction always forces one to create the truth..."

“Planet of Humans” was born from this fruitful bitterness. She gave the writer a charge of new creative energy, and everything that he saw and experienced sparkled in the book with new, fresh colors. In this case, Saint-Exupery also had to defend his creative method. Notes in " Notebooks“retain an echo of the writer’s intense anger, most likely caused by some superficial judgment about his new book:

"Plan in literary creativity is an illusion of logicians, historians and critics. After all, lines of force are necessarily formed around a strong pole. A plan is a consequence of an intense life, not its cause. How can one speak of a (preliminary) plan for symphonies or sculptures that, when completed, look perfectly harmonious? If before writing I sketch in general outline some of the lines of my work (here it is more sublime, here the style of memory, here it is darker...), then it is not at all this plan that determines my work. It only expresses that I intend to write something. For the essence, of course, is revealed before the form. But since my work consists solely in identifying and revealing the relationships, that is, the only thing that matters, it is absurd to think that they represent a rigid scheme that determines the content of the work.

It is this plan that I will continuously change until the words become similar to the non-verbal meaning.”

It is no coincidence that Saint-Exupéry compared his creative process to the growth and development of a tree: in “Planet of People,” memories, reflections, and descriptions of the most varied order were freely arranged, and yet together they formed an organic whole. The book includes, albeit in a reinterpreted form, even official reports, documents, and Spanish reports. In Planet of the People, Saint-Exupéry openly talks for the first time about his fellow pilots - Mermoz and Guillaume (Jean Mermoz, one of the pioneers of the French civil aviation, died in 1936 during a flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Henri Guillaumet died in 1940 when he was flying a passenger plane and was shot down by unknown fighters). In the second essay of Chapter VIII the reader will find a whole episode (the awakening of the sergeant) from the essay “Madrid”, written in 1937. And the very last, most pathetic episode of the book - a story about a child in which, perhaps, “Mozart was killed” - already appeared in one of the reports in 1935. The writer deleted only a few words from it and added the phrase with which the book ends.

Military pilot

Started in December 1941, in New York. In February 1942, an American edition of the book entitled “Flight to Arras” was published in the United States. The same year the book was published in France by Gallimard. At the request of the occupation authorities, this publication was banned. In 1943, in Lyon, members of the Resistance movement carried out a clandestine publication of the book.

“I beg you to influence Sh. so that I am allowed to fly a fighter,” Saint-Exupéry writes to a close friend after he was drafted into the army in the fall of 1939 and appointed as an instructor in a training regiment. - I'm getting more and more out of breath. It is impossible to breathe in this country. Lord, what are we waiting for? As long as I do not take part in the war, I am mentally ill. I have a lot to say about events. I can talk about them as a fighter, but not as a tourist. This is my only opportunity to speak out. You know, do not you.

Save me. Arrange my assignment to a fighter squadron. You know very well that I do not like war, but it is unbearable for me to remain in the rear when others are risking their lives. It is necessary to fight, but while I am taking safe walks over Toulouse, I have no right to say this. This role is simply humiliating. Give me the opportunity to go through trials, because I deserve it. I am disgusted by the view that we need to protect “valuable” people. Only by participating can a person play an effective role. If "valuable" people are truly the salt of the earth, they must connect with the earth. You cannot say “we”, separating yourself from others. Only a scoundrel can say “we” in this case!

Everything I love is at risk. When a forest fire starts in Provence, anyone who doesn't want to be a scoundrel grabs a bucket and shovel. I want to participate in the war out of love, out of my inner faith. I can't help but participate. Make sure I am assigned to a fighter squadron as soon as possible.”

Friends tried to prevent Saint-Exupéry from his intentions, and yet he insisted on his own, was enrolled in the 2/33 reconnaissance aviation group and thereby achieved the right to express what he considered necessary. “Military Pilot” was born externally from the experiences of flying over a burning country, internally from an intense comprehension of the events that took place in Europe since the early thirties.

In 1935, Saint-Exupéry visited the CGCP, in 1936 and 1937 - Republican Spain, in 1937 and 1939 - Nazi Germany, in 1938 and 1939 - the USA. The picture of the balance of power on the eve of the war and general view the writer had already formed an understanding of the events by the time of the creation of “Planet of People”. All that remained was to earn the moral right to turn to people and tell them in the name of what values ​​the struggle against fascism, or more precisely, the struggle of the West against fascism, could be justified and filled with meaning.

In 1943, in one of his letters, Saint-Exupery formulated the direction of his creative efforts in the books he wrote during the war:

“Western Christian civilization is itself to blame for being under threat. What has it done over the past eighty years to win the hearts of people to its values? The new moral was proposed: “Get rich!” Gizo or American comfort. What could inspire the young man after 1918? My generation played on the stock exchange, discussed models of cars and bodies in bars, and engaged in vile speculation in American goods.”

Of course, Saint-Exupery did not write “The Military Pilot” for the sake of moral exhortations. He realized that hatred of fascism and moral protest in themselves are incomplete tools and it is necessary that people who know what they are fighting against also know what is worth fighting for. Among other anti-fascist works, Saint-Exupéry’s “Military Pilot” was especially dear to resistance fighters precisely because it briefly but comprehensively revealed the content of those positive values ​​that fascism threatened to destroy.

The newspapers of occupied Paris responded enthusiastically to the publication of The Military Pilot: many writers and critics who remained in France expressed their solidarity with the author of the book. She was greeted by underground periodicals. For those who saw in the war not just a clash of forces, but a clash of worldviews, “Military Pilot” was a worthy response to the front line French culture against the encroachments of Nazi fanatics.

External plot"Military Pilot" is a story about one day of the war. The inner content of the book - a day of busy life human consciousness. A report on military events, childhood memories, lyrical confession, reflections, the high pathos of the sermon - all this organically merged in its text, revealing the personality of the author, who in the book became a living personification of the national spiritual culture. Philosophical basis The "military pilot" is formed by lyrical reflection, which is a feature of Saint-Exupéry’s literary style. It is already present in his first works, established itself in the reports of the thirties, united the essays of “Planet of People” into one whole, and, finally, in “Military Pilot” and in “Letter to a Hostage” it acquired a new, even deeper content.

Unity and mutual connection thoughts in “The Military Pilot” are formed, as it were, by “key words” such as “etendue”, “presence”, “densite”, “substance”, “communaute”, “Etre”, “clef de voute”, and other words -symbols that reveal Saint-Exupéry’s poetic ideas about man and human relationships.

Thus, the word “aventure”, usually meaning adventure, adventure, adventure, in the language of Saint-Exupéry is filled with a completely different content. In the most general sense, it means for a writer an internal movement, a movement of the soul towards the unknown. Saint-Exupery contrasts this with mental immobility and laziness, “philistinism of the heart.” “Aventure” is the effort of a scientist, leading him to a discovery, and the effort of a poet, creating a new image, and the effort of an artist, as a result of which he enriches people with a new vision of the world. This is a person’s intervention in the world of phenomena around him, but the intervention is purposeful, expanding his own inner world. And if such an intervention is associated with danger to life, then the word “aventure” can also mean a feat for Saint-Exupery. But in order for the effort of each individual person to have general meaning, it is necessary that his “adventure” respond to the deepest impulses of the soul, be the acquisition of general truth, a movement of the spirit.

The word “etendue” (extent, space) means for the writer the spiritual content of a person, his completeness inner life as opposed to spiritual emptiness or artificial fullness.

The word “presence”, which runs through most of the writer’s works, expresses the experience of this fullness of life, the feeling of a person’s spiritual closeness with nature and other people.

The writer denotes the spiritual content of a person, the richness of his inner life with the word “density” (density, saturation). According to him, only it creates the real, worthy of a person a civilization in which everything is interconnected by “invisible connections”, connections of love. Saint-Exupéry contrasts the understanding of civilization with the system of relations characteristic of bourgeois democracies of the French or American type. In the final chapters of The Military Pilot, Saint-Exupery states the destruction of spiritual culture in the West and poses the problem of its revival. He embodies his thoughts in the image of a cathedral and stones that once made up the cathedral, but are now scattered. Each person, asserting his will against others, becomes lonely and powerless, the spirit of creativity leaves him, and the struggle of each “individual personality” against other similar individuals makes egoistic bourgeois democracy an easy prey for the fascist regime, in which people are united not internally, but externally, Together they form not a cathedral, but a heap, crushing each other with their weight.

To revive culture means for Saint-Exupery to create thirst. The word “thirst,” with all the richness of shades that Saint-Exupéry gives it, means the active need of every person for truth. If a person has such a need, he seeks to quench his thirst in creativity, in the perception of nature, art, other people, and this, according to Saint-Exupery, can shape the spiritual world of the individual, make every person capable of creating a great community of people (his writer calls it the word “Etre” - Creature).

When Saint-Exupery returned to North Africa in 1943 and again took part in the struggle, the “Military Pilot” already received the widest fame that was possible during the war. In the USA, the book was perceived as a revelation and had a huge impact on public opinion countries. She revealed to all honest Americans the essence of what was happening in Europe and contributed to the consolidation of anti-fascist forces in the USA.

It is significant that not only the German occupiers and the Petain authorities banned the distribution of “Military Pilot”. General de Gaulle's headquarters also banned this book in North Africa: de Gaulle clearly did not approve of Saint-Exupery's position. This led to a deliberate “misunderstanding” of the book among the general’s circle and in the press that supported him. The writer took this calmly; he knew that it was impossible to perceive the book ambiguously. “It’s very strange,” he wrote in 1943, “that an atmosphere of bickering can distort the meaning of such plain text. I am completely indifferent to the fact that the Algerian rear officials see some kind of secret intentions in him... Is there at least one line in the book that allows one to think that the words “I am responsible” have the slightest relation to the humiliated “mea culpa”? “I am responsible "should be the motto of the dignity of every person. This is faith in action. This is the very basis of the consciousness that you are living."

It is unlikely that anyone except Saint-Exupéry’s closest friends knew that the profession of a pilot, journalist, writer and the fight against fascism did not exhaust his inner life. In 1936, he began his main, but remaining unfinished book, “The Citadel” (the first conventional title was “Qaid”), and almost everything he wrote since then bears traces of this plan. Most of them are contained in “Military Pilot”. From the beginning of the war, Saint-Exupéry used every free minute to work on the manuscript. He wrote to a friend from New York in 1942:

“During the war I changed. I have reached the point of complete disgust for everything that concerns me. Almost all the time I feel strangely sick and completely indifferent. I want to finish Qaeda. That's all. I exchange myself for him. I think it stuck with me like an anchor. In the next world they will ask me: what did you do with your talents and what did you give to people? Since I did not die in the war, I must exchange myself for something else. Whoever helps me with this is my friend. I do not pursue any selfish goal, I do not seek any recognition. All this is finally decided for me. This thing will appear after my death, it is unlikely that I will ever finish it. It contains seven hundred pages of ore; for a regular article, it would take me ten years, not to mention a more thorough finishing. In short, I will work on them as long as I have enough strength. And I won’t do anything else. By myself, I no longer have any meaning. I'm vulnerable, defenseless, I'm running out of time, and I want to complete my tree. Guillaume died. I want to finish my tree as soon as possible. I want to quickly turn into something other than myself. I'm no longer interested in taking care of myself. My teeth, my liver and so on - all this has become decrepit and in itself means nothing. I want to become something else instead of all this when death comes... Maybe I'm wrong about my book, maybe it's just a mediocre thick book, but I don't care: that's all I'm capable of. And I have to do everything I can, it’s better than being killed in the war.”

The manuscript of The Citadel consists of isolated texts and sketches that give no idea of ​​what the unity of the book should be. The manuscript was first published in 1947 by Gallimard. The publishers of the unfinished manuscript entitled it "Citadel" (Saint-Exupery had intended to title his book with a line from its text: "Citadel, I have erected you in the heart of man!").

Literature

1. Grigoriev V.P. Antoine Saint-Exupéry. Biography of the writer. - L., 1973

2. Nora Gal. Under the star of Saint-Aix. - M., 2004

3. Grachev R. About the first book of the writer-pilot. - L., 1990

4. Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry. Memories of a Rose. - M., 2006

5. Marcel Mijo. Saint-Exupery. - M., 1965

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Tu-16R. Coincidence

In memory of the crew of the Tu-16R, tail number 29

On October 20, 2017, activists of the regional branch of the “Search Movement of Russia” established a site several tens of kilometers west of the village of Gastello, Poronaisky district.

This was preceded by extensive archival work and correspondence with the colleagues of the deceased pilots.

Prologue

On June 13, 1985, during landing in difficult weather conditions, with unsatisfactory control of the flight director, as well as as a result of the Tu-16R going beyond the glide path of the 134th separate Guards long-range reconnaissance aviation squadron, tail number 29, piloted by Guards captain A.N. Shikolay, collided with the Olovyannaya hill, which has a height of 704 meters and is located 20 kilometers northwest of the village of Gastello, Sakhalin region.

From the history of 134 OGDRAE

Formed on May 12, 1941, as part of the Navy Air Force as the 50th SAP on the basis of the second and fifth air squadrons of the fourth MTAP, the 36th airborne battalion and the 27th UAE air defense with deployment at the Novorossiya airfield.

Regiment composition: 1 and 2 MTAE DB-3 aircraft, 3 BAE on SB aircraft at the Novonezhino airfield, 4 IAE Air Defense at the Novonezhino airfield.

On November 13, 1943, he was withdrawn from the 2nd MTAD and on November 30, 1943, reorganized into the 50th ODRAP, reporting to the commander of the Pacific Fleet Air Force. The 1st and 2nd squadrons retained the DB-3B in service, and the 3rd soon received single-seat fighter-based reconnaissance aircraft.

On August 9, 1945 it was based at the Novorossiya airfield. It was armed with the following aircraft: 12 A-20, six Tu-2r, 15 Yak-9r, 10 DB-3, one B-25, one Pe-2.

Participated in battles against Japan.

In the spring of 1952, the 50th Guards. ORAP began retraining for Il-28r jet aircraft, to which MiG-15r from the disbanded 1918 ORAE were added in June 1953.

In January 1958, the 50th Guards. The Pacific Fleet Air Force ORAP began retraining for Tu-16r reconnaissance jets. In August of the same year, a squadron on Tu-16r aircraft was separated from the regiment, which received its own number - the 266th ODRAE - and was relocated to the Kamenny Ruchey airfield, and in mid-1960 - to the Kamchatka Yelizovo airfield. In 1973, the 271st Guards. ODRAP (formerly 50th Guards ODRAP) was reorganized into the 134th Guards. ODRAE.

In 1986, the 134th Guards. ODRAE was disbanded, and its personnel and aircraft were included in the 304th Guards. ODRAP as the 3rd AE.

Fatal day

On June 13, 1985, two long-range reconnaissance aircraft, Tu-16R aircraft, are preparing to take off from the Pristan airfield. Goal: transport of aircraft to the Sakhalin airfield in Leonidovo "Rucheyok". The crew of A.N. takes off first. Shikolaja, with a ten-minute lead - the crew of S.G. Tanasiychuk. But for Shikolay’s crew, not everything goes smoothly before the flight: assistant ship commander Z.A. takes over. Tuyushev, instead of him, a recent graduate of the Guard Flight School, Lieutenant A.Z., takes his place in the right seat of the plane. Khairetdinov.

From Tuyushev’s memoirs:

“I was the assistant commander of the crew ship. That day, another person flew in my place. Anvar had just come to serve and was not assigned to any crew. He had to undergo training, take tests, then they give him permission to fly as part of the crew during the day in in simple weather conditions, then at night, then in difficult ones, etc. All this took place in our detachment, guard commander Major Semenov V.I. That day, June 12 (my birthday), I was put on duty as a unit. Because of this, Lieutenant Khairetdinov flew in my crew."

But in addition to the one who is absent due to the PKK outfit, Shikolay’s crew does not have an air gunner-radio operator, and this place is occupied by Guard Warrant Officer V.Ya. Nesterchuk.

Thus, the crew of the aircraft at the time of takeoff looked as follows: the commander of the ship - guard captain Anatoly Nikonovich Shikolai, the assistant commander of the ship - guard lieutenant Anvar Zaynagatdinovich Khairetdinov, the navigator - guard captain Anatoly Yurievich Nevzorov, the navigator-operator - guard lieutenant Anatoly Ivanovich Bragin, operator radio-technical intelligence - guard senior lieutenant Faat Minvagizovich Nurutdinov, air gunner-radio operator - guard warrant officer Viktor Yakovlevich Nesterchuk, commander of firing installations - guard warrant officer Igor Yakovlevich Kuzmin.

After preparations for departure, both Tu-16s take off, the first is Shikolay’s plane, with a ten-minute interval from it, Tanasiychuk’s plane. But during the flight, due to the need to pass the aviation regiment from the Knevichi airfield, Shikolay’s plane is “put in a circle.”

From the memoirs of navigator 134 OGDRAE Peter Avuev:

“We couldn’t fly to Sakhalin for a week for the training camp organized by the Pacific Fleet command for young commanders due to the weather conditions of Sakhalin Island, and when we were given the go-ahead to fly, everyone was glad that the wait was over. But everything went wrong somehow with "from the very beginning. We took off at 10-minute intervals, but over Cape Nizmny, Shikolaja was placed in a circle by the RP team to allow the regiment with Knevich to pass, and that's how it all started, then they changed the flight mode, increasing the flight speed."

Thus, the Tu-16, following the commands of the flight director, went off course, everything was complicated by the lack of a regular flight control unit (he was in uniform at the home airfield), difficult weather conditions, as well as the peculiarities of the geographical location of the airfield.

From the memoirs of pilot 134 OGDRAE Z.A. Tuyusheva:

“There we walked in a circle at 600 meters. Before the fourth turn, we began to descend to 500 and entered the turn. During the fourth turn, everything changed on the pilot’s instrument panel: altitude, speed, heading and radio compass readings. After reaching the landing - altitude 500 and to the right of the course is a ridge of mountains. In good weather, like a stone wall... There it was absolutely impossible to deviate to the right."

But the crew, listening to the RP and following commands to “turn around”, flew towards this stone wall from the hills, and the weather conditions did not allow us to visually determine the plane’s “departure” from the landing course. The developing situation was complicated by the fact that a civil plane was landing at Leonidovo airfield, and the flight director Special attention paid attention to the landing of this particular aircraft, without fully controlling the process of landing of the Tu-16.

Peter Avuev:

“Upon arrival at Leonidovo, a leapfrog began with the landing of the civilian aircraft, a quick change of echelons, as a result of which we accelerated the speed, blurred the turn to landing from the calculated angle and found ourselves to the right of the runway, just above the ridge of hills. The lower edge of the clouds was 700 meters, and above hills and even lower. The RP, not seeing it on the screen of the landing locator, gave the command to descend along the glide path, but it was too late. Shikolay by that time had “fitted” into the very top of the Olovyannaya hill. And when crews from Knevich began to land instead of Shikolay, and Tolik did not respond to requests, it became clear that something irreparable had happened.”

Search

Immediately after it became clear that a tragedy had occurred, a search and rescue operation was organized. Other military units were also involved, in particular, the 528th Fighter Aviation Regiment.

From the memoirs of Peter Avuev:

“ACC forces were immediately brought in, but our planes were not allowed to take off, the search was started by neighbors - fighters from Smirnykh, but since the cloudiness was getting lower, neither helicopters nor fighters entered the area. The search lasted three days. As soon as the weather permitted, helicopters were flying out. And when it finally cleared up, they immediately sent the helicopter to the expected area with a bearing of 270 degrees, where the mark disappeared, which the tablet operators mistook for an alien aircraft, since flights were also taking place on Smirnykh at that time. They discovered it from the helicopter, it seems, already after lunch. They decided to send a ground search party the next morning, neighbors from a tank regiment helped with equipment, it took three or four hours to get to the hill, I don’t remember exactly, we climbed up the drag as far as possible, where the infantry fighting vehicles we were riding on could climb. There were 100-150 meters left, and these were the hardest meters, everyone tried to reach the scene of the disaster first, because there was a glimmer of hope of finding someone alive. The picture of what they saw led to a stupor, and then everything was done on some kind of automatic machine. On the top lay a torn off tail unit with a cabin. The VSR and KOU were in the cabin, so to speak, their bodies were preserved, unlike the front cabin and the RTR cabin. If they had been 20-30 meters to the left or right, they would have slipped through and this would not have happened. But a combination of circumstances led to this disaster, they entered with their wing under the trunk of a birch tree, which grew at the very top of the hill, due to this part of the plane remained on one side of the hill - this is the landing gear, the tail broke off from the impact and, by inertia, flew to the top of the hill. The fuselage itself broke into several parts and caught fire. But the fire was small, local, from which the RTR officer died, his burnt, charred body, reduced several times, lay next to the cabin, and there was a feeling that he himself opened the hatch of his cabin, perhaps it was already on fire and fell out of the cabin into the fire raging nearby, since there were oxygen cylinders in the area of ​​his cabin. The front cabin also broke off and slid down the slope of the hill. We collected the remains of the front cabin crew members in bags along the entire slope. There was little left of the commander and navigator; the right pilot flew through broken glass cabin, and he was literally smeared across the knots of dead wood. I can’t say anything about the second navigator, I didn’t see him, I was looking for Tolik Nevzorov’s body, but, unfortunately, there were only fragments. It soon began to get dark, by this time the collection of fragments was completed, and we began to prepare the load for descent from the hill. They made a stretcher out of the stern parachutes, on which they laid the bodies and remains, and began the descent from the hill. On the advice of the guide, we went to the other side of the hill - there the descent was more gentle. We went down in the dark to the stream, where we decided to stop for the night, and in the morning along the stream we went out onto the road, where we stopped a passing car and, having loaded the mournful cargo, sent it to the nearest village, while we ourselves remained waiting for our transport, which was left with another sides of the hill."

According to the testimony of colleagues, an altimeter was found among the wreckage of the plane, on which the numbers 700 meters were frozen (the height of the hill is 704 meters). The ship's commander, who saw the hill at the last moment, took the helm, but they were only a few meters short of avoiding tragedy. The commander tried to save the car and crew.

Crew

The commander of the ship, guard captain Shikolai Anatoly Nikonovich, was born on December 22, 1956 at the Sara station in the Gai district of the Orenburg region.

Graduated from school No. 52 in Orenburg in 1974. I studied well.

In 1974 he entered and in 1978 graduated from the Orenburg Higher Military Aviation Command School for Pilots named after I.S. Half a bin.

In 1977 he got married. Wife - Shikolay Lyubov Petrovna. In 1978, son Maxim was born.

After graduating from college, he was sent to serve in the Pacific Fleet, Romanovka military garrison, as the right pilot of a Tu-16.

In 1981, he was sent for retraining as a ship commander in Nikolaev, Ukrainian SSR.

Since 1981, he flew as a commander, first class pilot.

Assistant ship commander, Guard Lieutenant Khairetdinov Anvar Zainagatdinovich was born on January 27, 1963 in Kemerovo.

I went to school in 1970. In 1980, he finished 10th grade well and entered the Orenburg Higher Military Aviation Red Banner Pilot School named after I.S. Polbina, because since childhood I dreamed of being a pilot.

In October 1984, he graduated from college as an officer with a higher military-special education as a pilot engineer. Assigned to naval aviation Far East. He served in military unit No. 62769 in the village of Romanovka, Primorsky Territory.

The ship's navigator, guard captain Anatoly Yuryevich Nevzorov was born on November 29, 1955 in Baltiysk, Kaliningrad region.

The ship's navigator-operator, Guard Lieutenant Anatoly Ivanovich Bragin was born on January 21, 1962 in Perm.

Radio intelligence operator, guard senior lieutenant Nurutdinov Faat Minvagizovich was born on June 20, 1962 in Nurulat, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Air gunner-radio operator, guard ensign Nesterchuk Viktor Yakovlevich was born on May 8, 1952 in Ust-Lamenka, Hungarian district, Novosibirsk region.

Commander of firing installations, guard warrant officer Kuzmin Igor Yakovlevich was born on September 15, 1962 in the village of Din, Mikhailovsky district, Amur region.

According to information from the Sakhalin branch of the Russian Search Movement.

"A man grows as his goals grow"

Friedrich Schiller

What is a person? What is his nature, and what does it incline him to? Is he destined for eternal progress, or for cruel fall? Is it possible to measure human potential, and how to reveal it in yourself? Are there limits to growth, are there barriers to knowledge, or are we stopping ourselves? What will happen if we realize everything that is in us? And will our strength harm us?

Eternal flight

It is difficult to find a creature on earth more contradictory than man. Only recently having left the world of animals, and having barely gained the gift of speech, he declared himself equal to the gods, and decided to claim a special role in the universe. Not wanting to think about the short term of his life, he tends to behave as if eternity belongs to him. And even the endless space seems to him created according to his standards.

Man is the measure of all things, the pinnacle of evolution, and the highest meaning of the existence of the universe. In any case, he usually considers himself as such. The world exists for his sake, and as if it was deliberately designed so that a tribe of people could arise in it. After all, a very slight change in the basic parameters of the universe would lead to the fact that life would be impossible.

Humanity loves to be proud of itself, and often has reason to be so. Having appeared on the surface of the planet not long ago by cosmic standards, it achieved complete dominance on it. And it transformed it more than all other species inhabiting it, subjugating them to its power. We no longer have any competitors among them. And our contribution to what is happening on Earth begins to exceed the forces of nature.

Although the elements are still powerful, the capabilities of people are increasing every century. And competition in strength, previously unthinkable, becomes commonplace. At the same time, increasingly, superiority remains with us. Today, our contribution to climate change on the planet is equal to, and according to some estimates, even greater than the influence of natural processes. This may be a controversial victory for now, but the trend is obvious.

If current growth rates are maintained, in a couple of centuries man will not only surpass the energy of the natural forces of the planet, but will also be able to compete with the Sun. And if it doesn't happen to him fatal fate Phaeton will soon leave him behind. And then the time will probably come when his irresistibly increased power will not only transform the world, but will be able to change fundamental laws being.

Perhaps this is the purpose of man. However, his first steps, although distinguished by ever-increasing strength, are not yet very reasonable. And the power he gains often comes to his detriment. Perhaps in this way humanity is like a growing child, whose mind at first cannot keep up with its growing body, but subsequently makes a huge leap forward. And the revolution of consciousness is yet to come.

Mig-15

Yak-11

Yak-18U

1954 – 1960

1952 – 1954

1952 – 1954, 1960 – 1963

Life is an eternal flight

Mi-8T

Mi-1A, Mi-1M

1995 – 2003 Mi-2

1972 – 1995

1963 – 1971

Nothing is finished.

Everything has just begun.

There will never be an end!

Under general editorship

Life is an eternal flight

Veterans

851st Training Aviation Regiment,

851st and 109th training helicopter regiments

dedicated to

Let's remember everyone by name,

Let us remember with our grief.

It's not the dead who need it,

The living need this...

Life is an eternal flight

Chapter 1. History of the village of Bezenchuk. Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields in the years

Great Patriotic War and post-war time 7

1. History of the village of Bezenchuk 7

2. Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields during the Great Patriotic War

1941 – 1945 9

3. Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields after the Great Patriotic War

1941 – 1945 10 Chapter 2. “They were the first” - book 11

At the origins of regiment 11

851 training helicopter regiment. Taking up the baton 18

About friends - comrades 22

Veterans 851 UAP (1st year) 25

Veterans 851 UVP (1st year) 26

Instructor pilots who served in 851 UVP 26

Chapter 3. The history of the regiment continues. Bezenchuksky regiment in the 70s and subsequent years 29

1. History of 851 UVP. Some touches before 1970 29

2. Aviation group 484 UVP Syzran VVAUL 38

3. 109 UVP Syzran VVAUL 39

4. Chronology of the Bezenchuk Regiment 43

5. The main organizational and staffing events that were carried out in regiment 44

6. Dangerous preconditions for flight accidents 46

7. Everlasting memory 48

8. Applications 50

20. Military personnel, awarded with orders and medals, and which arrived in

regiment for further service from training units 100

21. Military personnel awarded orders and medals for participation in

military operations in Democratic Republic Afghanistan (DRA), and who arrived in the regiment for further service from other units 104

22. Military personnel awarded orders for participation in the liquidation of the consequences of the earthquake in Yerevan in 1988 106

23. Military dynasties 106

24. Work of headquarters and services, mobilization, flight and physical training 107

The history of the 851st regiment from the beginning of its formation until 1970 was written in great detail and reliably by an honored veteran of the regiment, a retired lieutenant colonel, in his book “They Were the First.” We have set ourselves the goal of continuing to write the history of the 851st regiment, from 1970 to the present day.

We decided to call the book “Life is an eternal flight.” As children, we all dreamed of flying and serving in aviation. Even now, older and younger veterans sometimes fly in their dreams, jump with a parachute. We all fell in love with Heaven from childhood and carried this love throughout our lives without betraying it. And even now, when we, having already become veterans, peer into the sky from the ground, it does not want to let us go, so that we do not forget it, and with this, probably, it wants to continue our life on this earth.

This inextricable connection between the Pilot and the Sky is very accurately shown in the poem “Constructor”:

When you start dreaming about heights,

You will understand this man.

He is on earth today, but the dream is

His dream always lives in flight.

The 851st training regiment dates back to May 3, 1952, from the day the USSR Minister of Defense signed the order on the formation of the 851 training aviation regiment (851 UAP), which became part of the 151 (fighter) military aviation school for pilots stationed in Syzran, and began to form on June 24, 1952 in Syzran.

The path traveled by the regiment is marked by many bright, interesting events, the participants of which are thousands and thousands of people who are infinitely devoted to the regiment.

Several generations of aviators successively mastered various types of aircraft - airplanes and helicopters. The flight, engineering and technical personnel, as well as employees of the Soviet Army and the Russian Army, piece by piece created a training and material base, maintained aviation equipment, improved flight training and the methodological skills of the instructors, and trained air fighters - defenders of the Fatherland.

Throughout its existence, the 851st regiment was constantly based in the village of Bezenchuk. Dedicated people served and worked in the regiment. Their patriotism and high professionalism were aimed at quality training and training of air fighters.

A kind word must be remembered about the soldiers and sergeants of conscript service, and during the existence of the regiment there were several thousand of them: junior aviation specialists of squadrons and fuel and energy departments of the regiment, mechanics of Mi-1 helicopters and on-board technicians of Mi-2 helicopters.

The book also contains information about support units: the 936th separate airfield technical support battalion and the 380th separate communications and radio technical support battalion. Without their well-coordinated work, the regiment would not have been able to solve the tasks assigned to it.

The memories of veterans of the regiment and support units are valuable, as they take us back to the distant past years of our youth.

In this book, the team of authors tried to tell about the history of the regiment and support units, about their glorious deeds, about people who multiplied with specific deeds good fame Bezenchuksky garrison. The team of authors also believes that the history of the regiment is inextricably linked with the history of the village of Bezenchuk and it did not end after the reduction of the regiment in 2003. The history of the regiment continues in the destinies and lives of the regiment’s veterans, the veterans’ organization and in ceremonial events held in honor of the regiment’s anniversaries.

In preparing materials for the book “Life is an eternal flight”

took an active part:

Retired Colonel– Chief of Staff of the Ufa VVAUL, military pilot - instructor 1st class, Master of Sports of the USSR in helicopter sports, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1967. Served in the 851st regiment in positions from pilot-instructor to deputy commander - chief of staff of the regiment 1967 - 1982.

Reserve Colonel– commander of the Bezenchuksky 109 UVP, military pilot - instructor 1st class, graduate of the Saratov VVAUL in 1981. He served in the 851st regiment from an instructor pilot to a regiment commander from 1981 to 1986, 1989 to 2003.

Retired Colonel - Deputy Head of the LMO of the Syzran VVAUL, military pilot - instructor 1st class, Master of Sports of the USSR in helicopter sports, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1968. He served in the 851 Airborne Forces from an instructor pilot to a deputy regiment commander for flight training from 1967 to 1986. In 1966 and 1967, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment.

Retired Colonel Uzbekov Kadyr Shagiakhmetovich – Head of the LMO of the Ufa VVAUL, military pilot - instructor 1st class, Master of Sports of the USSR in helicopter sports, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1970. He served in the 851 Airborne Forces from a pilot-instructor to a deputy regiment commander - chief of staff of the regiment 1970 - 1986.

Reserve Colonel– professor of the department of aerodynamics of the educational department of the Syzran VVAUL, associate professor, military pilot - instructor 1st class, master of sports of the USSR in helicopter sports, master of sports of international class, 4-time world champion in helicopter sports, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1978. Served in the 851st Regiment as a pilot-instructor, senior pilot-instructor from 1978 to 1986. In 1976 and 1977, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment.

Retired Colonel - head of the educational department of the Syzran VVAUL, military pilot-instructor 1st class, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1974, graduated from school with a gold medal. Served in the 851 Airborne Airborne Forces from an instructor pilot to the deputy commander of the 4th Airborne Airborne Inspectorate for political affairs from 1974 to 1987. In 1972 and 1973, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel– full-time flight director of the 851st regiment, military pilot - instructor 1st class, master of sports of the USSR in helicopter sports, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1973. Served in the 851st regiment in positions from pilot-instructor to deputy commander of the 2nd UVE, full-time flight director of the 1st regiment, 1995 - 1997. In 1971, he flew as a cadet in the 3 UVE 851 regiment

Retired Lieutenant Colonel– head of the flight test station - senior test pilot, full-time flight director, 1st class military pilot, Master of Sports of the USSR in helicopter sports, graduate of the Syzran VAUL in 1968. Served in the 851st regiment in positions from pilot-instructor to flight commander from 1968 to 1976. In 1966 and 1967, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel– navigator of UVE 851 UVP, military pilot - instructor 1st class, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1971. Served in the 851st Regiment in positions from instructor pilot to UVE navigator from 1971 to 1995. In 1969 and 1970, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment. Participated in the liquidation of consequences at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel– full-time flight director of the 851 UVP, military pilot - 1st class instructor, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1971. Served in the 851st Regiment in positions from pilot instructor to deputy commander of the 4th Airborne Aviation Unit, full-time flight director of the regiment from 1971 to 1992. In 1969 and 1970, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment. Was on a business trip to the DRA 1977 - 1978.

Reserve Lieutenant Colonel - deputy commander of the 109th airborne military personnel, military pilot-instructor 1st class, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1983. Served in the 851st regiment as a pilot-instructor from 1983 to 1987, and deputy commander of the 109 Airborne Forces from 2000 to 2003.

Reserve Lieutenant Colonel– commander of the 4th training helicopter squadron 851 UVP, military pilot - instructor 1st class, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1983. Served in 851, 109 UVP in positions from instructor pilot to UVP commander from 1983 to 2003.

Reserve Lieutenant Colonel - deputy commander of the 3rd UVP for educational work, secretary of the party committee of the 851 UVP, military pilot-instructor 1st class. Served in the 851 Airborne Airborne Forces in positions from pilot-instructor to deputy commander of the 3rd Airborne Air Force for educational work, secretary of the party committee of the regiment 1977 - 1999.

Reserve Lieutenant Colonel– teacher of Syzran VVAUL, 2-time world champion in helicopter sports, military pilot - 1st class instructor. Served in the 851 Airborne Airborne Forces in positions from pilot-instructor to flight navigator-pilot from 1980 to 1988. In 1978 and 1979, he flew as a cadet in the 851st regiment.

Reserve Lieutenant Colonel– commander of the 2nd UVE 109 UVP, military pilot - instructor 1st class, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1984. He served in the 851st Airborne Forces in positions from pilot-instructor to squadron commander in 1984 - 2003. In 1981 – 1983 I flew as a cadet in 851 UVP.

Reserve Major– flight navigator - pilot, military pilot - 1st class instructor, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1983. Served in the 851 Airborne Airborne Forces in positions from pilot-instructor to flight navigator-pilot from 1983 to 2003.

Reserve Major– flight commander, military pilot-instructor 1st class, graduate of the Syzran VVAUL in 1983. Served in the 851st Regiment in positions from pilot-instructor to flight commander of 2 UVE from 1983 to 1999.

Retired senior warrant officer– mechanic of the aviation equipment group of 3 UVE and foreman of the TECh regiment 1976 – 1998.

Drevnyuk Olga Feodorovna – Director of the Rainbow Museum and Exhibition Center in Bezenchuksky District.

When writing the history of the regiment, materials from the books were used:

1. "Syzran helicopter" Syzran 2010

2. “History of villages in the Bezenchuk region”, Bezenchuk village, 2008. museum and exhibition center.

3. “My airfields” (confession of an old pilot) 2010 The author is a retired lieutenant colonel, Honored Trainer of Russia in helicopter sports.

5. Collection of poems by the local history association “Rossy”, Municipal Educational Institution Secondary School No. 4 “My Quiet Motherland” 2007.

6. Collections of poems “Father’s Shore”, “Obelisks”. Author, graduate of Syzran VAUL in 1968. Served in 851 UVP 1968 - 1969. Died in 2011. These collections were donated by the Rainbow IEC at personal visit in the village of Bezenchuk.

Materials from the personal archives of the regiment’s military personnel and their personal memories were also used, for which the team of authors expresses their deep gratitude to them.

Chapter 1

History of the village of Bezenchuk.

Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields during the Great Patriotic War and post-war times

1. History of the village of Bezenchuk

First information about locality Bezenchuk date back to the 60s of the 19th century. “The Department of Udelov No. 000 ordered the manager of the Samara appanage office to resettle the peasants of the Syzran estate in the village of Krasnaya Sosny to the thirtieth plot of land owned by the Samara merchant Nechaev.” It was decided to resettle 99 male revision souls. On April 30, 1860, 24 householders moved to the new village of Bezenchuk and 6 houses were built. They were elected to the position of head.

A year later, Arkhip Yakovlevich Sadov was elected head of the village, under him Bezenchuk was finally formed as a village, residential buildings and outbuildings were erected and the area of ​​crops increased. By 1863, the peasants of the Syzran village of Krasny Sosny almost all moved to a new place of residence in Bezenchuk. In information about populated areas for 1896 it is written: “The village of Bezenchuk, Samara district, Ekaterinovskaya volost is located near the Bezenchuk river. In the village, 75 households are occupied by buildings, 176 men, 211 women. The village has 1 bakery store, 2 groceries, 2 windmills and one blacksmith shop. There were 326 horses, 314 cows and bulls, 747 sheep, Bezenchuk residents did not “keep” pigs and goats.

Versions where did this name come from "Bezenchuk" some:

The local historian, in his book “History in the names of rivers,” connects the origin of this word with the Turkic-Pecheneg tribes who lived in the territory of the Middle Volga region in the 9th century, who were called “BEZENE”. The Hungarians, who wandered through the Volga steppes, called the Pechenegs “BEZENIO”.

The settlement received its name from its founder, a Chuvash named Pisentik, and this is how the river flowing nearby began to be called. The Russians, who later began to live in this settlement, renamed the settlement Bezenchuk.

The name is associated with two Chuvash words “bezan” - small, “chuk” - river.

Bezenchuk is called so from the grass tartarnik, which the Chuvash called “bezentik”.

At the end of the 19th century, construction of the Samara-Zlatoust railway began. Construction was carried out in separate sections, which were then connected together, each with its own station and workers’ village, where building materials were transported for the construction of the railway. First, a village of railway workers was formed - workers and craftsmen who built and maintained the railway, and then the Bezenchuk station was built. Workers for the construction of the road were recruited from nearby villages and hamlets. Many peasants, having entered the service, settled for permanent residence in a workers' village.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Bezenchuk station consisted of a station building, a cargo warehouse, 3 residential barracks for railway workers, 6 - 7 coachmen's yards, an experimental station estate with 15 residential buildings for staff.

In 1903, a selection and experimental agricultural station was organized in the village of Bezenchuk.

Since 1910, according to the Stolypin land reform, the settlement of lands by settlers from Ukraine, Belarus and the central regions of Russia began. They form their own settlements - farms, villages. The villages of Popovich, Kalga, Tovchinnik and others appeared. Until now, the northeastern part of Bezenchuk is called Kalga.

Despite the difficult times of 1 year, the revolution, civil war and Bezenchuk's hunger begins to grow and develop. The village of Borodinsky is formed on the northern side of the railway. In 1930, Bezenchukskaya MTS was formed.

In 1932, a kindergarten was opened at the Bezenchuk regional experimental station. In 1933, the newspaper “Udarnik Bezenchuk” began to be published. There was an elementary school with 261 students, as well as a junior high school with 17 teachers and 509 students, and a school for adults.

In 1935, Bezenchuk became the center of the district. The peaceful work of the Bezenchuk residents was disrupted on June 22, 1941. The Great Patriotic War began. On the first day of the war, 73 applications were submitted to the Bezenchuk military registration and enlistment office with a request to be sent to the front. In total, 12,441 people were mobilized in the Bezenchuksky district, 9,493 people were awarded government awards, and 6,300 people did not return from the front.

The following were awarded the Title of Hero of the Soviet Union: Nikolai Lugovtsev, Vasily Mamistov, Philip Razin, Sergei Fedyakov.

During the war, the Nikolaev Naval Pilot School named after S. Levanevsky was evacuated to the village. The school was stationed in Bezenchuk throughout the war and trained many mine-torpedo aircraft pilots and bomber pilots.

Collective farmers, workers and employees of the region gave their savings for the construction of tank columns and combat aircraft. In 1943, Bezenchuk residents contributed more than 8 million rubles from their savings. 1945, the winners returned home, peaceful life began.

In memory of fellow countrymen who did not return from the war, on the 20th anniversary Great Victory in 1965, the “Grieving Warrior” monument was erected on the central square of the village.

In 1949, an industrial oil field was discovered on the territory of the Bezenchuksky district, and in 1950, NGDU Chapaevskneft was organized.

In 1973, the Kuibyshevkanalvodstroy Trust was located in Bezenchuk with numerous PMKs, a reinforced concrete plant and many other divisions. This was the All-Union Komsomol shock construction project. A new microdistrict “Meliorator” appeared, kindergartens were built: “Rosinka”, “Rodnichok” and “Rucheyok”, a school and a cultural center “Meliorator”.

Bezenchuk residents honorably fulfilled their international military duty in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya and other hot spots.

Bezenchukskaya land is multinational, rich in its historical roots, famous people, in the area there are 2 natural monuments of republican significance - the Aleksandrovskaya floodplain and the Maitugan salt licks.

Now Bezenchuk is the administrative center of the Bezenchuksky municipal district. In July 2008, it was 50 years since the village was awarded the status of “urban-type settlement Bezenchuk”. The district center, the village of Bezenchuk, has a population of 22,952 people. Bezenchuk is a large railway junction through which a highway passes, connecting the center of Russia with Central Asia and Siberia.

Currently, the urban settlement of Bezenchuk includes: the urban-type settlement of Bezenchuk, the Vostok railway crossing, the village of Dmitrievka, the village of Novoorenburgsky and the village of Sosnovka. The population of the urban settlement is 23,454 people.

Military personnel of the Bezenchuk garrison, as well as military personnel transferred to the reserve, actively participated and are participating in the political and economic life of the region and village. The following were elected as deputies of the district council: , P. I. Panferov, Ignatiev of the village council were elected: ,

In 2010, he was elected chairman of the meeting of representatives of the village. Bezenchuk.

He worked as the head of the administration of the village of Bezenchuk from 2006 to 2010, and has been working since October 2010.

Postmaster long time He was a retired colonel who participated in the Great Patriotic War, and a reserve major worked as a convoy commander and was awarded the Order of Labor Glory, 3rd degree.

2. Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields during the Great Patriotic War

1941 – 1945.

Until June 1941, there were no military units in the Bezenchuksky district. But the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 radically changed the history of the region and the fate of many people.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Naval School named after. was evacuated to Bezenchuk from the city of Nikolaev. S. Levanevsky, which trained mine-torpedo aviation pilots and bomber pilots. An airfield was built at the Zvezda station in record time. Temporary airfields (jumping) were located in the village of Bezenchuk, the villages of Prepolovenka, Ekaterinivka, Obsharovka, Zvenigorodka and Mylnaya.

The school first trained pilots for the Navy, then the scope of pilot training expanded, and courses were created to train pilots for the American Douglas B-20 Boston bombers, B-24 North American, supplied under Lend-Lease. "Metchel" and Lockheed "Catalina" flying boats. Airplanes from airfields in Alaska were ferried to Soviet Union. In Bezenchuk, experienced instructor pilots flew them, Soviet communication systems were installed on the planes, and refueling systems were modified to match the standard means used in the Soviet Air Force. During the war, the school trained many specialists for the Air Force.

This is what a veteran of the 851st UVP, who was born in 1927 in the village of Vasilyevka, Bezenchuk district, and from 1961 to 1997 worked in the TECh regiment, remembers about the Bezenchuk airfield: “Until July 1941, here ( on the site where the airfield was built) there was an open field, it wasn’t even plowed. In early July 1941, they began to level the field where the construction of the airfield was planned. Residents of nearby villages also participated in the construction of the airfield. We carried the earth on carts and leveled the field. In August, planes already arrived here. First the "Seagulls" - two-winged seagulls - arrived, then they left, after them they arrived American planes"Bostons". Then they flew away and in 1943 Pe-2 planes arrived. In 1944 I was drafted into the army and then what happened here, I don’t know.”

The airfield in the village of Bezenchuk was created as a jump airfield. At first, the main airfield was at Zvezda station. The airfield was built in record time short time, in connection with the evacuation of the Nikolaev Naval Pilot School to the village of Bezenchuk. Levanevsky, as well as for flights, which used the sites Prepolovenka, Ekaterinivka, Obsharovka, Zvenigorodka and Mylnaya.

Due to the increase in supplies of aircraft from America, one airfield at Zvezda station no longer provided for the full scope of tasks.

In 1942, construction of an airfield began in the village of Bezenchuk. The airfield was built on marshy soils. To drain water, a unique engineering drainage system was built, which ensured water drainage in any weather. The airfield was built by the NKVD troops, and residents of nearby villages and German prisoners of war also participated in its construction. The Bezenchuk airfield was put into operation in 1943 and it became the main airfield.

On the basis of the school, a school of junior aviation specialists (SHMAS) for the Air Force was created. The Levanevsky Pilot School was stationed in Bezenchuk throughout the war and trained many bomber pilots for mine-torpedo aircraft.

The headquarters of the school and the school of junior aviation specialists (SHMAS) were located in the two-story red building of the current Kuibyshev Scientific Research Institute research institute Agriculture (KNIISKH), personnel lived in one-story houses and equipped dugouts.

In the educational building No. 2 of the state farm-technical school there was an educational building of the school named after. S. Levanevsky.

There were some disasters. So, on February 11, 1944, during the flight of the plane, the crew of the B-24 “Metchel” bomber was killed: the crew commander was a pilot, a native of the Nikolaev region, navigator Zmeevets, gunner-radio operator Stepanov. The crew is buried in the cemetery in Bezenchuk.

After the end of the war, Nikolaev Naval Pilot School named after. Levanevsky, was relocated to its former place in Nikolaev, Ukrainian SSR.

In addition, cadet pilots from the Syzran military glider school were trained at the Bezenchuk airfield. In the skies of Bezenchuk they learned to fly heavy-duty landing gliders A-7 designed by Antonov and NK-4 gliders supplied from America. These gliders were used during the war for the needs of the partisan movement. These heavy gliders were towed behind enemy lines by SB-2 bomber aircraft at night.

3. Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields after the Great Patriotic War of 1941 - 1945.

After the war, from 1946 to 1952, the Bezenchuk and Zvezda airfields were used for practical training of Syzran and Saratov cadets flight schools. Students of the military aviation glider school (VAPSh), which was stationed in the city of Pugachev and where bomber aviation pilots were trained, also learned to fly here.

At the Zvezda camp airfield, students were trained on the Ts-25 glider. Permanent composition was housed in dugouts built during the war; cadets and students, conscripts lived in a tent city. The dining room was located under a wooden canopy, and the catering unit (kitchen) itself was located in a summer-type room. The headquarters of the regiment and squadrons were located in a single wooden building, which stood until 2000.

At the Bezenchuk airfield there was only an airfield; there were no buildings or premises, with the exception of a barn at the edge of the field where the starting equipment was stored. The airfield was used for take-off flights on Po-2 aircraft.

Chapter 2

They were the first.

Book

I read with great attention and interest the book published in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Syzran VVAUL. This book quite truthfully and objectively shows the situation of the post-war 40s and 50s, when aviation schools and units were created that became the predecessors of the Syzran VVAUL and 851 UVP.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Eternal flight of thought

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's story "Night Flight" was first published in 1931 by Gallimard. In the same year, the book received the Femina literary prize. In 1932, the American company United Artists made a film based on the book. In 1939, Italian composer Luigi Dallapicola wrote the opera Night Flight.

For the progressive people of France, the book sounded like a statement of the beauty and greatness of duty in the atmosphere of individualism characteristic of French society of that time. With Night Flight, the genre of fiction based on documentary material was revived.

Among the pilots, Saint-Exupery's airline comrades, the book caused dull irritation, which echoed in the writer's soul with bewilderment and pain. “Guillaume, I heard you are coming, and my heart is already skipping a beat,” he wrote to his friend after the book was published. “If only I knew what a terrible life I’ve been leading since you left, and what disgust for life I’ve gradually come to know!” Because I wrote this ill-fated book, I found myself a victim of the gossip and enmity of my comrades.

Mermoz will tell you what fame was created for me by the people whom I loved so much and whom I have not met for a long time. They will tell you how arrogant I am. No one - from Toulouse to Dakar - doubts this.

I hope you come at a time when the wind is changing. And perhaps I will be able to get rid of the slander. I could not write to you because of continuous disappointments and unfair rumors. And you probably thought that I had changed. And I couldn’t justify myself to the only person I treat like a brother...

Even Etienne, with whom we had never seen each other since my return from South America, despite this, told my friends here that I had become a poser.

After all, my whole life is poisoned when such an opinion is shared by my best comrades and when my work on the airlines, after the “crime” I committed by writing Night Flight, disgraces them.

Saint-Exupéry was not at all mistaken about the high human merits of his airline comrades and the feelings that connected him with them. Their alienation, which he experienced so painfully, was caused by the discrepancy between the high pathos of “Night Flight” and the situation when the book was published. It was a time of economic crisis. The entrepreneur who financed Aeropostal went bankrupt, management on the lines changed, contradictions between different managers and different management methods intensified. And Saint-Exupéry sang in “Night Flight” a social hierarchy in which the pilots are headed by a leader who educates his subordinates in the spirit of firmness and fearlessness, while the service personnel are at the lowest level.

The resentment of the pilots, who began to say about Saint-Exupéry that he was not a real pilot, but an amateur, that he did not deserve the right to fly on regular lines, was caused by what they learned in the Riviera from “Night Flight” by airline director Didier Dora (he the author dedicated his book). This extraordinary leader did not arouse sympathy among his subordinates. Pedantic, cold and dry, in their eyes he was not at all ideal.

From the point of view of Saint-Exupéry, Rivière was a “great leader,” precisely the person who is able to fill people’s lives with meaning. The pilots saw that Dora did not care who he served, that he could not and did not want to be personally responsible for the fate of those people whom he “forged.” Dora himself also recognized himself in Riviere and subsequently became so accustomed to the image that he could no longer distinguish his words and thoughts from Riviere’s reasoning.

But, no matter how great the writer’s grief was, no matter how it increased after his favorite “line” turned into an ordinary commercial enterprise that had lost poetry and moral height, he remained faithful to the ideal of brotherhood that united people in their work, and when the “Planet of People”, presented the book to Didier Dora with a dedication in which he called him the creator of a “special civilization.” Saint-Exupéry’s mistake was that he did not see the fragility and instability of this “special civilization” in an atmosphere of general competitive struggle, depersonalizing any individual creativity, turning the poetry of aviation into service on an airplane.

This inaccuracy of perception of reality affected primarily the work itself: the scheme of human relations in it looks unconvincing, unreliable, and the writer, while working on the book, was faced with a difficulty that he could only overcome by violence against himself: in the original version of “Night Flight” there were four hundred There are only one hundred and eighty pages left in the final one. In a letter to his mother from Buenos Aires, Saint-Exupery says that he is writing his new book about a night flight, and quotes lines reproducing childhood memories. But the poetry of childhood, the joy of feeling life, did not fit in with the harsh world where “the morality of the conqueror, the morality of the soldier” reigns; the child turned out to be superfluous in it, and the author expelled him from the book, sacrificing the essence for the sake of form.

Modern critics, paying tribute to the purity and nobility of language

“Night Flight”, at the same time noted the imperfections of the book, but attributed its shortcomings to a certain “literary” style and images. This forced Saint-Exupery to formulate the principles on the basis of which he wrote Night Flight, to defend not the book itself, but his method. “I just can’t find the star on which I live,” he wrote in 1931 to the writer Benjamin Cremieux. - I really found myself lost in interplanetary space. And if I spoke in one book about the only inhabited star, can this reflection, generated more by my flesh than by my consciousness, be considered literary? Couldn't it be more authentic, more honest, than any other reflection? In my opinion, even the rudest person does not think in technical terms when the need to act does not allow him to choose words and he allows the body to think on its own - not in words, but in symbols, beyond words. He then forgets them, as if awakening from a dream, and replaces them with technical language, but everything was contained in the symbol. And this was not literary.

This image seems dubious to me. I find it artificial precisely because the words alone are symbolic, because the symbol does not grow out of a deep inner experience and does not correspond to what was actually dreamed...

Do you think I was making up the words? Why do I need it? No, I caught this very consciousness, living in a dream, which sometimes manages to be captured at the moment of awakening.”

Here, as in one of his letters to René de Saussin, Saint-Exupéry explains his intuitive aesthetics. He listens to deep sensations, to the “thoughts of the body” at the moment of a flight or other action, trusts these feelings more than anything, even if at first glance they seem banal. He talks about this in his essay “The Pilot and the Elements.” The proportions and character of “Night Flight” were also suggested to him by intuition, and if the book nevertheless turned out to be contradictory, Saint-Exupery was more likely to be ready to see its shortcomings in the imperfection of expression, but not in the method of creativity. He rejected any “professional” approach to creativity, and, of course, the pilots were mistaken when they called him an amateur pilot. He was a professional pilot. But as a writer, he asserted himself as an amateur, asserted his right to literary amateurism as the only correct, from his point of view, attitude towards literature, in which a book may be unsuccessful, but always remains a creative act, and not a handicraft.

Many years later, during the war, Saint-Exupery would confirm his commitment to the educational principle of the Riviera-Dora: “It is enough to defeat the ghost of fear, and this craft (craft, pilot) becomes the same as any other. Whether to fly at an altitude of ten thousand meters or weave straw chairs... because the ghost is already dead; I checked this more than once. And during night flights. And when he drowned in the sea. And when he was dying of thirst... Dora did not teach people courage: he forced them to kill ghosts. I already talked about this in Night Flight.

Planet of People

In 1938, Saint-Exupery undertook a flight from New York to Tierra del Fuego, during which he crashed in Guatemala. While undergoing treatment in New York, he wrote Planet of Humans, which he continued to work on upon his return to France. At the beginning of 1939, the book was published by Gallimard's publishing house. In the same year, the French Academy awarded the book the Grand Prize of the Novel.

Planet of the Humans was an immediate and particular success among its contemporaries in France and in the United States, where it immediately became a “bestseller.” This success was not so much a literary success as a human success for the personality of Saint-Exupery, who definitely and clearly expressed the life aspirations of people before the threat of Nazism looming over the world. Of course, in the United States, separated from Europe by an ocean, European events were not perceived so keenly, and “Planet of Humans” seemed to be a somewhat exotic work there. It has been compared to Joseph Conrad's Mirror of the Seas, and its author has been called the "Conrad of the air." But in France the book caused a real response from hearts. Workers at the printing house where it was printed presented the writer with a special copy of the book, printed on aircraft canvas.

Saint-Exupéry himself, in one of his letters, defined the purpose of his book as follows: “I wrote “Planet of People” with passion to tell my generation: you are inhabitants of one planet, passengers of one ship!”

Since Saint-Exupéry had to part with the “line,” he led a life full of material worries, accepted newspaper offers, and participated in a flight where a prize was awarded for the speed record. In a letter to a close friend (in 1936), he explains how external circumstances prevent him from being creative:

“I know why it’s so hard for me to start writing articles. Cinema and journalism are vampires that prevent me from writing what I want to write. For many years now I have not had the right to do the only thing that I like. I feel like a prisoner weaving baskets. Meanwhile, in another place I would be much more helpful and generous. My disgust is nothing more than resistance to moral suicide, because as soon as I enthusiastically take up the production of empty trinkets for the cinema, I will quickly get my hands on and begin to earn a lot of money, but I cannot expect joy from such successes. It is precisely this enthusiasm that I resist. I don’t want to waste my talent on trifles. To pay off my debts and earn a living, I will have to write another script and spend an irrevocable six months on it. I want to at least drink all the bitterness to the dregs. If I get rid of her, I'm dead. I will again throw away six months of my life, which could have been ebullient and fruitful: it cannot bring joy.

And then I will somehow explain to you that separating the goal and the means is sophistry. These differences are invented in hindsight. In fact, when, like the Spanish anarchists, they shoot dissidents, freedom does not happen. I no longer believe that I write a screenplay to gain the freedom to write books.

The blind but powerful logic of actions leads to the fact that every script I write, every article deprives me of another chance to write a book. And they give you an extra chance to write other scripts. I cannot even improve my commerce with this false consolation.”

The book is a suite of reports about the trials experienced, about trips to the USSR and Spain, which was engulfed in civil war.

How did the writer manage to create a whole from these disparate impressions? First of all, he was driven by the desire to maintain integrity and clarity of consciousness in the situation before the World War, when many representatives of the intelligentsia “lost their heads.” “The incredible absurdity of our time is depressing,” he wrote in the spring of 1940, explaining to a friend his view of what was happening. - This, of course, is a consequence of the same reasons: the modern era is not “comprehensible”, because over the course of a century events have developed too quickly, and comprehension is a slow process... All this is very bitter, there is not a very broad choice left: either reconcile with slavery under the yoke of Hitler, or resolutely abandon it. But taking full responsibility for such a refusal. And do it silently. I don't want to go on the radio: it's just obscene if you can't offer people real faith. So I take full responsibility for the refusal; only I needed to cross a certain threshold in order to better understand what I was giving up. From freedom. From the warmth of loving flesh. And maybe from life. But what's the point? And this is as bitter as the doubts of a believer. And, of course, just as fruitful. An unbearable contradiction always forces one to create the truth..."

“Planet of Humans” was born from this fruitful bitterness. She gave the writer a charge of new creative energy, and everything that he saw and experienced sparkled in the book with new, fresh colors. In this case, Saint-Exupery also had to defend his creative method. The notes in the Notebooks contain an echo of the writer’s intense anger, most likely caused by some superficial judgment about his new book:

“The plan in literary work is an illusion of logicians, historians and critics. After all, lines of force are necessarily formed around a strong pole. A plan is a consequence of an intense life, not its cause. How can one speak of a (preliminary) plan for symphonies or sculptures that, when completed, look perfectly harmonious? If, before writing, I outline some of the lines of my work (here it’s more sublime, here it’s a evocative style, here it’s darker...), then it’s not this plan that determines my work. It only expresses that I intend to write something. For the essence, of course, is revealed before the form. But since my work consists solely in identifying and revealing the relationships, that is, the only thing that matters, it is absurd to think that they represent a rigid scheme that determines the content of the work.

It is this plan that I will continuously change until the words become similar to the non-verbal meaning.”

It is no coincidence that Saint-Exupéry compared his creative process to the growth and development of a tree: in “Planet of People,” memories, reflections, and descriptions of the most varied order were freely arranged, and yet together they formed an organic whole. The book includes, albeit in a reinterpreted form, even official reports, documents, and Spanish reports. In Planet of the People, Saint-Exupéry openly talks for the first time about his fellow pilots Mermoz and Guillaume (Jean Mermoz, one of the pioneers of French civil aviation, died in 1936 during a flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Henri Guillaume died in 1940 when was flying a passenger plane and was shot down by unknown fighters). In the second essay of Chapter VIII the reader will find a whole episode (the awakening of the sergeant) from the essay “Madrid”, written in 1937. And the very last, most pathetic episode of the book - a story about a child in which, perhaps, “Mozart was killed” - already appeared in one of the reports in 1935. The writer deleted only a few words from it and added the phrase with which the book ends.

Military pilot

Started in December 1941, in New York. In February 1942, an American edition of the book entitled “Flight to Arras” was published in the United States. The same year the book was published in France by Gallimard. At the request of the occupation authorities, this publication was banned. In 1943, in Lyon, members of the Resistance movement carried out a clandestine publication of the book.

“I beg you to influence Sh. so that I am allowed to fly a fighter,” Saint-Exupéry writes to a close friend after he was drafted into the army in the fall of 1939 and appointed as an instructor in a training regiment. - I'm getting more and more out of breath. It is impossible to breathe in this country. Lord, what are we waiting for? As long as I do not take part in the war, I am mentally ill. I have a lot to say about events. I can talk about them as a fighter, but not as a tourist. This is my only opportunity to speak out. You know, do not you.

Save me. Arrange my assignment to a fighter squadron. You know very well that I do not like war, but it is unbearable for me to remain in the rear when others are risking their lives. It is necessary to fight, but while I am taking safe walks over Toulouse, I have no right to say this. This role is simply humiliating. Give me the opportunity to go through trials, because I deserve it. I am disgusted by the view that we need to protect “valuable” people. Only by participating can a person play an effective role. If "valuable" people are truly the salt of the earth, they must connect with the earth. You cannot say “we”, separating yourself from others. Only a scoundrel can say “we” in this case!

Everything I love is at risk. When a forest fire starts in Provence, anyone who doesn't want to be a scoundrel grabs a bucket and shovel. I want to participate in the war out of love, out of my inner faith. I can't help but participate. Make sure I am assigned to a fighter squadron as soon as possible.”

Friends tried to prevent Saint-Exupéry from his intentions, and yet he insisted on his own, was enrolled in the 2/33 reconnaissance aviation group and thereby achieved the right to express what he considered necessary. “Military Pilot” was born externally from the experiences of flying over a burning country, internally from an intense comprehension of the events that took place in Europe since the early thirties.

In 1935, Saint-Exupéry visited the CGCP, in 1936 and 1937 - Republican Spain, in 1937 and 1939 - Nazi Germany, in 1938 and 1939 - the USA. The writer had already formed a picture of the balance of power on the eve of the war and a general view of events by the time he created “Planet of People.” All that remained was to earn the moral right to turn to people and tell them in the name of what values ​​the struggle against fascism, or more precisely, the struggle of the West against fascism, could be justified and filled with meaning.

In 1943, in one of his letters, Saint-Exupery formulated the direction of his creative efforts in the books he wrote during the war:

“Western Christian civilization is itself to blame for being under threat. What has it done over the past eighty years to win the hearts of people to its values? The new moral was proposed: “Get rich!” Gizo or American comfort. What could inspire the young man after 1918? My generation played on the stock exchange, discussed models of cars and bodies in bars, and engaged in vile speculation in American goods.”

Of course, Saint-Exupery did not write “The Military Pilot” for the sake of moral exhortations. He realized that hatred of fascism and moral protest in themselves are incomplete tools and it is necessary that people who know what they are fighting against also know what is worth fighting for. Among other anti-fascist works, Saint-Exupéry’s “Military Pilot” was especially dear to resistance fighters precisely because it briefly but comprehensively revealed the content of those positive values ​​that fascism threatened to destroy.

The newspapers of occupied Paris responded enthusiastically to the publication of The Military Pilot: many writers and critics who remained in France expressed their solidarity with the author of the book. It was welcomed by underground periodicals. For those who saw in the war not just a clash of forces, but a clash of worldviews, “The Military Pilot” was a worthy response of advanced French culture to the encroachments of Nazi fanatics.

The external plot of “Military Pilot” is a story about one day of the war. The internal content of the book is a day of intense life of human consciousness. A report on military events, childhood memories, lyrical confession, reflections, the high pathos of the sermon - all this organically merged in its text, revealing the personality of the author, who in the book became a living personification of the national spiritual culture. The philosophical basis of “The Military Pilot” is formed by lyrical reflection, which is a feature of Saint-Exupery’s literary style. It is already present in his first works, established itself in the reports of the thirties, united the essays of “Planet of People” into one whole, and, finally, in “Military Pilot” and in “Letter to a Hostage” it acquired a new, even deeper content.

The unity and mutual connection of thoughts in “The Military Pilot” are formed, as it were, by “key words” such as “etendue”, “presence”, “densite”, “substance”, “communaute”, “Etre”, “clef de voute” , and other symbolic words that reveal Saint-Exupéry’s poetic ideas about man and human relationships.

Thus, the word “aventure”, usually meaning adventure, adventure, adventure, in the language of Saint-Exupéry is filled with a completely different content. In the most general sense, it means for a writer an internal movement, a movement of the soul towards the unknown. Saint-Exupery contrasts this with mental immobility and laziness, “philistinism of the heart.” “Aventure” is the effort of a scientist, leading him to a discovery, and the effort of a poet, creating a new image, and the effort of an artist, as a result of which he enriches people with a new vision of the world. This is a person’s intervention in the world of phenomena around him, but the intervention is purposeful, expanding his own inner world. And if such an intervention is associated with danger to life, then the word “aventure” can also mean a feat for Saint-Exupery. But in order for the effort of each individual person to have a general meaning, it is necessary that his “adventure” respond to the deepest impulses of the soul, be the acquisition of a common truth, a movement of the spirit.

The word “etendue” (extent, space) means for the writer the spiritual content of a person, the fullness of his inner life, in contrast to spiritual emptiness or artificial fullness.

The word “presence”, which runs through most of the writer’s works, expresses the experience of this fullness of life, the feeling of a person’s spiritual closeness with nature and other people.

The writer denotes the spiritual content of a person, the richness of his inner life with the word “density” (density, saturation). According to him, only this creates a real civilization worthy of man, in which everything is connected to each other by “invisible connections,” ties of love. Saint-Exupéry contrasts the understanding of civilization with the system of relations characteristic of bourgeois democracies of the French or American type. In the final chapters of The Military Pilot, Saint-Exupery states the destruction of spiritual culture in the West and poses the problem of its revival. He embodies his thoughts in the image of a cathedral and stones that once made up the cathedral, but are now scattered. Each person, asserting his will against others, becomes lonely and powerless, the spirit of creativity leaves him, and the struggle of each “individual personality” against other similar individuals makes egoistic bourgeois democracy an easy prey for the fascist regime, in which people are united not internally, but externally, Together they form not a cathedral, but a heap, crushing each other with their weight.

To revive culture means for Saint-Exupery to create thirst. The word “thirst,” with all the richness of shades that Saint-Exupéry gives it, means the active need of every person for truth. If a person has such a need, he seeks to quench his thirst in creativity, in the perception of nature, art, other people, and this, according to Saint-Exupery, can shape the spiritual world of the individual, make every person capable of creating a great community of people (his writer calls it the word “Etre” - Creature).

When Saint-Exupery returned to North Africa in 1943 and again took part in the struggle, the “Military Pilot” already received the widest fame that was possible during the war. In the United States, the book was perceived as a revelation and had a huge impact on public opinion in the country. She revealed to all honest Americans the essence of what was happening in Europe and contributed to the consolidation of anti-fascist forces in the USA.

It is significant that not only the German occupiers and the Petain authorities banned the distribution of “Military Pilot”. General de Gaulle's headquarters also banned this book in North Africa: de Gaulle clearly did not approve of Saint-Exupery's position. This led to a deliberate “misunderstanding” of the book among the general’s circle and in the press that supported him. The writer took this calmly; he knew that it was impossible to perceive the book ambiguously. “It is very strange,” he wrote in 1943, “that an atmosphere of bickering can distort the meaning of such a simple text. I am completely indifferent to the fact that the Algerian rear officials see some kind of secret intentions in him... Is there at least one line in the book that allows one to think that the words “I am responsible” have the slightest relation to the humiliated “mea culpa”? “I am responsible "should be the motto of the dignity of every person. This is faith in action. This is the very basis of the consciousness that you are living."

It is unlikely that anyone except Saint-Exupéry’s closest friends knew that the profession of a pilot, journalist, writer and the fight against fascism did not exhaust his inner life. In 1936, he began his main, but remaining unfinished book, “The Citadel” (the first conventional title was “Qaid”), and almost everything he wrote since then bears traces of this plan. Most of them are contained in “Military Pilot”. From the beginning of the war, Saint-Exupéry used every free minute to work on the manuscript. He wrote to a friend from New York in 1942:

“During the war I changed. I have reached the point of complete disgust for everything that concerns me. Almost all the time I feel strangely sick and completely indifferent. I want to finish Qaeda. That's all. I exchange myself for him. I think it stuck with me like an anchor. In the next world they will ask me: what did you do with your talents and what did you give to people? Since I did not die in the war, I must exchange myself for something else. Whoever helps me with this is my friend. I do not pursue any selfish goal, I do not seek any recognition. All this is finally decided for me. This thing will appear after my death, it is unlikely that I will ever finish it. It contains seven hundred pages of ore; for a regular article, it would take me ten years, not to mention a more thorough finishing. In short, I will work on them as long as I have enough strength. And I won’t do anything else. By myself, I no longer have any meaning. I'm vulnerable, defenseless, I'm running out of time, and I want to complete my tree. Guillaume died. I want to finish my tree as soon as possible. I want to quickly turn into something other than myself. I'm no longer interested in taking care of myself. My teeth, my liver and so on - all this has become decrepit and in itself means nothing. I want to become something else instead of all this when death comes... Maybe I'm wrong about my book, maybe it's just a mediocre thick book, but I don't care: that's all I'm capable of. And I have to do everything I can, it’s better than being killed in the war.”

The manuscript of The Citadel consists of isolated texts and sketches that give no idea of ​​what the unity of the book should be. The manuscript was first published in 1947 by Gallimard. The publishers of the unfinished manuscript entitled it "Citadel" (Saint-Exupery had intended to title his book with a line from its text: "Citadel, I have erected you in the heart of man!").

Literature

1. Grigoriev V.P. Antoine Saint-Exupéry. Biography of the writer. - L., 1973

2. Nora Gal. Under the star of Saint-Aix. - M., 2004

3. Grachev R. About the first book of the writer-pilot. - L., 1990

4. Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry. Memories of a Rose. - M., 2006

5. Marcel Mijo. Saint-Exupery. - M., 1965