Alexander Green: “Here's the thing, young man, I believe in God. Alexander Green. Scarlet Sails of Love and Hope Screen adaptation by Alexander Grin

Alexander Green with his wife Nina. Old Crimea, 1926

The fate of the widow of the famous writer, the author of "Scarlet Sails" and "Running on the Waves" Alexander Grin, was dramatic. Nina Grin during the Nazi occupation of Crimea worked in a local newspaper, which published articles of an anti-Soviet nature, and in 1944 she left for forced labor in Germany. Upon her return, she ended up in the Stalinist camp on charges of complicity with the Nazis and spent 10 years in prison. Historians are still arguing about how fair this accusation was.

Nina Green

Understanding this story is hindered by the lack of reliable information: information about the life of Nina Nikolaevna Green cannot be called complete, there are still many blank spots. It is known that after the death of her husband in 1932, Nina, together with her sick mother, remained to live in the village of Stary Krym. Here they found the occupation. First, the women sold things, and then Nina was forced to get a job to escape hunger.

Left - A. Green. Petersburg, 1910. On the right - Nina Green with the hawk Gul. Feodosia, 1929

She managed to get a job first as a proofreader in a printing house, and then as an editor of the Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District, where anti-Soviet articles were published. Later, during interrogations, Nina Green admitted her guilt and explained her actions as follows: “The position of the head of the printing house was offered to me in the city government, and I agreed to this, since at that time I had a difficult financial situation. I could not leave the Crimea, that is, evacuate, because I had an old sick mother and I had bouts of angina pectoris. I left for Germany in January 1944, afraid of the responsibility for working as an editor. In Germany, I worked first as a worker and then as a camp nurse. I plead guilty to everything."

A. Green in the office. Feodosia, 1926

In January 1944, the writer's widow voluntarily left the Crimea for Odessa, as she was frightened by rumors that the Bolsheviks shot everyone who worked in the occupied territories. And already from Odessa she was taken to forced labor in Germany, where she performed the duties of a nurse in a camp near Breslau. In 1945, she managed to escape from there, but this aroused suspicion in her homeland, and she was accused of aiding the Nazis and editing a German regional newspaper.

Left - A. Grinevsky (Green), 1906. Police card. Right - Nina Green, 1920s

The worst thing was that Nina Green had to leave her mother in Crimea, according to the testimony of the attending physician V. Fanderflaas: “As for Nina Nikolaevna’s mother, Olga Alekseevna Mironova, before the occupation and during the occupation she suffered from mental disorders, manifested in some oddities in behavior... When her daughter, Grin Nina Nikolaevna, left her at the beginning of 1944 and went to Germany herself, her mother went crazy.” And on April 1, 1944, Olga Mironova died. But according to other sources, Nina Green left Stary Krym after the death of her mother.

The last lifetime photograph of A. Green. June 1932

The fact is that Nina Green did not exaggerate the hopelessness of her situation at all - she found herself in the same difficult situation as thousands of other people who found themselves in the occupied territories, in captivity or in forced labor in Germany. However, it is impossible to call her a traitor to her homeland, if only because back in 1943 she saved the lives of 13 arrested people who were doomed to be shot. The woman turned to the mayor with a request to vouch for them. He agreed to vouch for ten, and marked three from the list as suspected of having links with the partisans. The writer's widow changed the list, including all 13 names, and took it to the head of the prison in Sevastopol. Instead of being shot, those arrested were sent to labor camps. For some reason, this fact was not taken into account in the case of Nina Green.

On the left is the writer's widow at Green's grave, 1960s. Right - A. Green

Writer's widow Nina Green. Old Crimea, 1965

The woman spent 10 years in the Pechora and Astrakhan camps. After Stalin's death, many were amnestied, including her. When she returned to Stary Krym, it turned out that their house had passed to the chairman of the local executive committee. It cost her great efforts to return the house in order to open the Alexander Grin Museum there. In the same place, she completed a book of memoirs about her husband, which she began to write while in exile.

Widow of writer Alexander Grin, 1960s

Nina Green with sightseers at the house-museum in Stary Krym, 1961

Nina Green died in 1970 without waiting for her rehabilitation. The authorities of Stary Krym did not allow the “fascist henchman” to be buried next to Alexander Grin and took a place on the edge of the cemetery. According to legend, a year and a half later, the writer's fans carried out an unauthorized reburial and transferred her coffin to her husband's grave. Only in 1997, Nina Green was rehabilitated posthumously and proved that she had never assisted the Nazis.

House-Museum of A. Green

Alexander Grin (real name Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky). August 11 (23), 1880, Sloboda, Vyatka province, Russian Empire - July 8, 1932, Stary Krym, USSR. Russian prose writer, poet, representative of neo-romanticism, author of philosophical and psychological works, with elements of symbolic fantasy.

Father - Stefan Grinevsky (Polish Stefan Hryniewski, 1843-1914), a Polish gentry from the Disna district of the Vilna province of the Russian Empire. For participation in the January Uprising of 1863, at the age of 20, he was exiled indefinitely to Kolyvan, Tomsk province. Later he was allowed to move to the Vyatka province, where he arrived in 1868. In Russia, he was called "Stepan Evseevich".

In 1873 he married 16-year-old Russian nurse Anna Stepanovna Lepkova (1857-1895). For the first 7 years they had no children, Alexander became the first-born, later he had a brother Boris and two sisters, Antonina and Ekaterina.

Sasha learned to read at the age of 6, and the first book he read was Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. From childhood, Green loved books about sailors and travels. He dreamed of going to sea as a sailor and, driven by this dream, made attempts to run away from home. The upbringing of the boy was inconsistent - he was either spoiled, then severely punished, then left unattended.

In 1889, nine-year-old Sasha was sent to the preparatory class of the local real school. There fellow practitioners first gave him Nickname "Greene". The report of the school noted that the behavior of Alexander Grinevsky was worse than all the others, and in case of non-correction, he could be expelled from the school.

Nevertheless, Alexander was able to finish the preparatory class and enter the first class, but in the second class he wrote an insulting poem about teachers and was nevertheless expelled from the school. At the request of his father, Alexander in 1892 was admitted to another school, which had a bad reputation in Vyatka.

At the age of 15, Sasha was left without a mother who died of tuberculosis. 4 months later (May 1895), my father married the widow Lidia Avenirovna Boretskaya. Alexander's relationship with his stepmother was tense, and he settled separately from his father's new family.

The boy lived alone, enthusiastically reading books and writing poetry. He worked as a binder of books, correspondence of documents. At the suggestion of his father, he became interested in hunting, but due to his impulsive nature, he rarely returned with prey.

In 1896, after graduating from the four-year Vyatka city school, 16-year-old Alexander left for Odessa deciding to become a sailor. His father gave him 25 rubles of money and the address of his Odessa friend. For some time, "a sixteen-year-old, beardless, puny, narrow-shouldered boy in a straw hat" (as the then Greene described himself ironically in "Autobiographies") wandered in an unsuccessful search for work and was desperately hungry.

In the end, he turned to a friend of his father, who fed him and got him a job as a sailor on the steamer "Platon", cruising along the route Odessa - Batum - Odessa. However, once Green managed to visit abroad, in Egyptian Alexandria.

A sailor did not come out of Green - he was disgusted with the prosaic sailor's work. Soon he quarreled with the captain and left the ship.

In 1897, Green went back to Vyatka, spent a year there and again left in search of happiness - this time to Baku. There he tried many professions - he was a fisherman, laborer, worked in railway workshops. In the summer he returned to his father, then again went on a journey. He was a lumberjack, a gold digger in the Urals, a miner in an iron mine, and a theater copyist.

In March 1902, Green interrupted his series of wanderings and became (either under pressure from his father, or tired of starvation ordeals) a soldier in the 213th Orovai reserve infantry battalion stationed in Penza. The morals of military service significantly increased Green's revolutionary moods.

Six months later (of which he spent three and a half in a punishment cell), he deserted, was caught in Kamyshin, and fled again. In the army, Green met with the Socialist-Revolutionary propagandists, who appreciated the young rebel and helped him hide in Simbirsk.

From that moment on, Green, having received the party nickname "Lanky", sincerely gives all his strength to the fight against the social system he hates, although he refused to participate in the execution of terrorist acts, limiting himself to propaganda among the workers and soldiers of different cities. Subsequently, he did not like to talk about his "Socialist-Revolutionary" activities.

In 1903, Greene was once again arrested in Sevastopol for "speeches of anti-government content" and the dissemination of revolutionary ideas, "which led to the undermining of the foundations of autocracy and the overthrow of the foundations of the existing system." For trying to escape, he was transferred to a maximum security prison, where he spent more than a year.

In the documents of the police, it is characterized as "a closed nature, embittered, capable of anything, even risking his life." In January 1904, the Minister of the Interior V.K. Plehve, shortly before the SR assassination attempt on him, received a report from the Minister of War A.N. and then Grinevsky.

The investigation dragged on for more than a year (November 1903 - February 1905) because of two attempts to escape Green and his complete denial. Green was judged in February 1905 by the Sevastopol Naval Court. The prosecutor demanded 20 years of hard labor. Lawyer A. S. Zarudny managed to reduce the sentence to 10 years of exile in Siberia.

In October 1905, Grin was released under a general amnesty, but already in January 1906 he was arrested again in St. Petersburg.

In May, Grin was exiled for four years to the city of Turinsk, Tobolsk province. He stayed there for only 3 days and fled to Vyatka, where, with the help of his father, he obtained someone else's passport in the name of Malginov (later it would be one of the literary pseudonyms of the writer), according to which he left for St. Petersburg.

In the summer of 1906, Green wrote 2 stories - "Merit of Private Panteleev" and "Elephant and Pug".

The first story was signed "BUT. S. G.” and published in the autumn of the same year. It was published as a propaganda brochure for punishing soldiers and described the atrocities of the army among the peasants. Green received the fee, but the entire circulation was confiscated at the printing house and destroyed (burned) by the police, only a few copies were accidentally preserved. The second story suffered a similar fate - it was handed over to the printing house, but was not printed.

Only starting from December 5 of the same year, Green's stories began to reach readers. And the first "legal" work was the story written in the autumn of 1906 "To Italy", signed "BUT. A. M-v "(that is, Malginov).

For the first time (under the title "In Italy") it was published in the evening edition of the newspaper "Birzhevye Vedomosti" dated December 5 (18), 1906. Pseudonym "BUT. S. Green first appeared under story "Happening"(first publication - in the newspaper "Tovarishch" dated March 25 (April 7), 1907).

At the beginning of 1908, in St. Petersburg, Green published the first author's collection "Invisible hat"(subtitled "Tales of the Revolutionaries"). Most of the stories in it are about the Social Revolutionaries.

Another event was the final break with the Social Revolutionaries. Green hated the existing system as before, but he began to form his own positive ideal, which was not at all like the Social Revolutionary.

The third important event was the marriage - his imaginary "prison bride" 24-year-old Vera Abramova became Green's wife. Knock and Gelli - the main characters of the story "A Hundred Miles Down the River" (1912) - are Green and Vera themselves.

In 1910, his second collection, Stories, was published. Most of the stories included there are written in a realistic manner, but in two - "Reno Island" and "Lanfier Colony" - the future Green storyteller is already guessed. The action of these stories takes place in a conditional country, in style they are close to his later work. Green himself believed that starting from these stories he could be considered a writer.

In the early years, he published 25 stories a year.

As a new original and talented Russian writer, he meets Alexei Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Kuzmin and other major writers. He became especially close with.

For the first time in his life, Green began to earn a lot of money, which, however, did not stay with him, quickly disappearing after revelry and card games.

On July 27, 1910, the police finally discovered that the writer Green was the fugitive exile Grinevsky. He was arrested for the third time and in the autumn of 1911 was exiled to Pinega, Arkhangelsk province. Vera went with him, they were allowed to officially get married.

In the link Green wrote "Life of Gnor" and "The Blue Cascade of Telluri". The term of his exile was reduced to two years, and in May 1912 the Grinevskys returned to St. Petersburg. Other works of the romantic direction soon followed: The Devil of Orange Waters, The Zurbagan Shooter (1913). They finally form the features of a fictional country, which the literary critic K. Zelinsky will call "Greenland".

Green publishes mainly in the "small" press: in newspapers and illustrated magazines. His works are published by Birzhevye Vedomosti and the supplement to the newspaper, the Novoye Slovo magazine, the New Journal for All, Rodina, Niva and its monthly supplements, the Vyatskaya Rech newspaper and many others. Occasionally, his prose is placed in the solid "thick" monthly journals "Russian Thought" and "Modern World". In the latter, Green published from 1912 to 1918 thanks to his acquaintance with A.I. Kuprin.

In 1913-1914, his three-volume edition was published by the Prometheus publishing house.

In 1914, Green became a contributor to the popular New Satyricon magazine, and published his collection Incident on Dog Street as an appendix to the magazine. Green worked during this period extremely productively. He did not yet dare to start writing a long story or novel, but his best stories of this time show the deep progress of Green the writer. The subject of his works is expanding, the style is becoming more and more professional - it is enough to compare a funny story "Captain Duke" and a refined, psychologically accurate novella "Returned Hell" (1915).

After the outbreak of the First World War, some of Greene's stories take on a distinct anti-war character: such are, for example, "Batalist Shuang", "Blue Top" ("Niva", 1915) and "Poisoned Island". Due to the “impermissible review of the reigning monarch” that became known to the police, Green was forced to hide in Finland from the end of 1916, but, having learned about the February Revolution, he returned to Petrograd.

In the spring of 1917 he wrote a short story "Walk to the Revolution", indicating the writer's hope for renewal.

After the October Revolution, Green's notes and feuilletons appeared one after another in the journal "New Satyricon" and in the small small-circulation newspaper "Devil's Pepper Pot", condemning cruelty and atrocities. He said, "I can't get my head around the idea that violence can be destroyed by violence."

In the spring of 1918, the magazine, along with all other opposition publications, was banned. Greene was arrested for the fourth time and almost shot.

In the summer of 1919, Green was drafted into the Red Army as a signalman, but he soon fell ill with typhus and ended up in the Botkin barracks for almost a month. sent seriously ill Greene honey, tea and bread.

After recovering, Green, with the assistance of Gorky, managed to get an academic ration and housing - a room in the "House of Arts" on Nevsky Prospekt, 15, where Green lived next to, V. A. Rozhdestvensky, O. E. Mandelstam, V. Kaverin.

Neighbors recalled that Green lived as a hermit, almost did not communicate with anyone, but it was here that he wrote his most famous, touching and poetic work - extravaganza "Scarlet Sails"(published in 1923).

In the early 1920s, Green decided to start his first novel, which he called The Shining World. The protagonist of this complex symbolist work is the flying superman Drud, who convinces people to choose the highest values ​​of the Shining World instead of the values ​​of "this world". In 1924 the novel was published in Leningrad. He continued to write stories, the peaks here were "The Loquacious Brownie", "The Pied Piper", "Fandango".

In Feodosia Green wrote a novel "Gold chain"(1925, published in Novy Mir), conceived as "a memoir of the dream of a boy seeking miracles and finding them."

In the autumn of 1926, Green completed his main masterpiece - the novel "Running on the waves", on which he worked for a year and a half. This novel combines the best features of the writer's talent: a deep mystical idea of ​​the need for a dream and the realization of a dream, subtle poetic psychologism, and a fascinating romantic plot. For two years the author tried to publish the novel in Soviet publishing houses, and only at the end of 1928 the book was published by the Zemlya i Fabrika publishing house.

With great difficulty, in 1929, Greene's last novels were also published: "Jesse and Morgiana", "The Road to Nowhere".

In 1927, the private publisher L.V. Wolfson began publishing a 15-volume collection of Green's works, but only 8 volumes were published, after which Wolfson was arrested by the GPU.

NEP came to an end. Green's attempts to insist on fulfilling the contract with the publishing house only led to huge legal costs and ruin. Green's binges began to repeat again. However, in the end, the Green family still managed to win the process, sue seven thousand rubles, which, however, greatly depreciated inflation.

In 1930, the Grinevskys moved to the city of Stary Krym, where life was cheaper. Since 1930, Soviet censorship, with the motivation "you do not merge with the era", banned the reprints of Green and introduced a limit on new books: one per year. Greene and his wife were desperately hungry and often sick. Green tried to hunt the surrounding birds with a bow and arrow, but was unsuccessful.

Novel "Handy", begun by Green at this time, was never completed, although some critics consider it to be his best work.

In May 1932, after new petitions, a transfer of 250 rubles unexpectedly came. from the Writers' Union, sent for some reason in the name of "the writer Green's widow Nadezhda Green", although Green was still alive. There is a legend that the reason was Green's last mischief - he sent a telegram to Moscow: "Green is dead, send two hundred funerals."

Alexander Grin died on the morning of July 8, 1932 at the age of 52 in Stary Krym from stomach cancer. Two days before his death, he asked to invite a priest and confessed. The writer was buried at the city cemetery of Stary Krym. Nina chose a place from where the sea can be seen... Sculptor Tatyana Gagarina erected a monument "Running on the Waves" on Green's grave.

Upon learning of Grin's death, several leading Soviet writers called for a collection of his writings to be published; even Seifullina joined them.

Collection of A. Green "Fantastic Novels" came out in 1934.

Alexander Green. Geniuses and villains

Personal life of Alexander Green:

Since 1903, in prison - due to the absence of acquaintances and relatives - she visited him (under the guise of a bride) Vera Pavlovna Abramova, the daughter of a wealthy official who sympathized with revolutionary ideals.

She became his first wife.

In the autumn of 1913, Vera decided to separate from her husband. In her memoirs, she complains about Green's unpredictability and uncontrollability, his constant revelry, mutual misunderstanding. Green made several attempts at reconciliation, but without success. On his 1915 collection, presented to Vera, Green wrote: "To my only friend."

He did not part with the portrait of Vera until the end of his life.

In 1918 he married a certain Maria Dolidze. Within a few months, the marriage was recognized as a mistake, and the couple broke up.

In the spring of 1921, Green married a 26-year-old widow, a nurse Nina Nikolaevna Mironova(after Korotkova's first husband). They met back in early 1918, when Nina worked for the Petrograd Echo newspaper. Her first husband died in the war. A new meeting took place in January 1921, Nina was in desperate need and was selling things (Green later described a similar episode at the beginning of the story "Pied Piper"). A month later, he proposed to her.

During the next eleven years assigned to Green by fate, they did not part, and both considered their meeting a gift of fate. Green dedicated the Scarlet Sails extravaganza completed this year to Nina: “The Author offers and dedicates to Nina Nikolaevna Green. PBG, November 23, 1922"

The couple rented a room on Panteleymonovskaya Street, moved their meager luggage there: a bunch of manuscripts, a few clothes, a photograph of Father Green, and an unchanging portrait of Vera Pavlovna. At first, Grin was hardly published, but with the beginning of the NEP, private publishing houses appeared, and he managed to publish a new collection, White Fire (1922). The collection included a vivid story "Ships in Lissa", which Green himself considered one of the best ..

Nina Nikolaevna Green, the writer's widow, continued to live in Stary Krym, in an adobe house, and worked as a nurse. When the Nazi army captured the Crimea, Nina stayed with her seriously ill mother in the Nazi-occupied territory, worked in the occupation newspaper "Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District". Then she was driven away to work in Germany, in 1945 she voluntarily returned from the American zone of occupation to the USSR.

After the trial, Nina received ten years in the camps for "collaborationism and treason", with confiscation of property. She served her sentence in the Stalinist camps on the Pechora. Great support, including things and products, was provided to her by Green's first wife, Vera Pavlovna. Nina served almost her entire term and was released in 1955 under an amnesty (rehabilitated in 1997). Vera Pavlovna died earlier, in 1951.

Meanwhile, the books of the "Soviet romantic" Green continued to be published in the USSR until 1944. In besieged Leningrad, radio programs were broadcast with the reading of "Scarlet Sails" (1943), the premiere of the ballet "Scarlet Sails" was held at the Bolshoi Theater.

In 1946, L. I. Borisov’s story “The Wizard from Gel-Gyu” about Alexander Green was published, which earned praise from K. G. Paustovsky and B. S. Grinevsky, but later - condemnation from N. N. Green.

During the years of the struggle against cosmopolitanism, Alexander Grin, like many other cultural figures (A. A. Akhmatova, M. M. Zoshchenko, D. D. Shostakovich), was branded in the Soviet press as a “cosmopolitan”, alien to proletarian literature, “militant reactionary and spiritual emigrant". For example, V. Vazhdaev's article "Preacher of Cosmopolitanism" ("New World", No. 1, 1950) was devoted to "exposing" Green. Green's books were taken from libraries en masse.

Beginning in 1956, through the efforts of K. Paustovsky, Yu. Olesha, I. Novikov and others, Green was returned to literature. His works were published in millions of copies. Having received through the efforts of Green's friends a fee for "Favorites" (1956), Nina Nikolaevna arrived in Stary Krym, found with difficulty the abandoned grave of her husband and found out that the house where Green died had passed to the chairman of the local executive committee and was used as a barn and a chicken coop.

In 1960, after several years of struggle to return home, Nina Nikolaevna opened the Green Museum in Stary Krym on a voluntary basis. There she spent the last ten years of her life, with a pension of 21 rubles (the copyright was no longer valid).

In July 1970, the Green Museum in Feodosia was also opened, and a year later, Green's house in Stary Krym also received the status of a museum. Its opening by the Crimean regional committee of the CPSU was linked to the conflict with Nina Nikolaevna: “We are for Grin, but against his widow. The museum will only be there when she dies.”

Nina Nikolaevna Green died on September 27, 1970 in a Kiev hospital. She bequeathed to bury herself next to her husband. The local party leadership, irritated by the loss of the chicken coop, imposed a ban; and Nina was buried at the other end of the cemetery. On October 23 of the following year, Nina's birthday, six of her friends reburied the coffin at night in the place intended for it.

Bibliography of Alexander Green:

Novels:

Shining World (1924)
Golden Chain (1925)
Wave Runner (1928)
Jesse and Morgiana (1929)
Road to Nowhere (1930)
Impatiens (not finished)

Novels and stories:

1906 - To Italy (the first legally published story by A. S. Green)
1906 - Merit of Private Panteleev
1906 - Elephant and Pug
1907 - Oranges
1907 - Brick and Music
1907 - Beloved
1907 - Marat
1907 - On the stock exchange
1907 - At leisure
1907 - Underground
1907 - Case
1908 - Hunchback
1908 - Guest
1908 - Eroshka
1908 - Toy
1908 - Captain
1908 - Quarantine
1908 - Swan
1908 - Little Committee
1908 - Mate in three moves
1908 - Punishment
1908 - She
1908 - Hand
1908 - Telegrapher from Medyansky Bor
1908 - Third floor
1908 - Hold and deck
1908 - Assassin
1908 - The Man Who Cries
1909 - Barca on the Green Canal
1909 - Airship
1909 - Dacha of a large lake
1909 - Nightmare
1909 - Little conspiracy
1909 - Maniac
1909 - Overnight stay
1909 - Window in the forest
1909 - Reno Island
1909 - By marriage announcement
1909 - Incident in Dog Street
1909 - Paradise
1909 - Cyclone in the Plain of Rains
1909 - Navigator of the Four Winds
1910 - In flood
1910 - In the snow
1910 - Return of the "Seagull"
1910 - Duel
1910 - Khonsa estate
1910 - The story of one murder
1910 - Lanfier Colony
1910 - Yakobson's raspberry
1910 - Puppet
1910 - On the island
1910 - On the hillside
1910 - Find
1910 - Easter on the steamer
1910 - Powder magazine
1910 - Strait of Storms
1910 - Birk's story
1910 - River
1910 - Death of Romelink
1910 - The Secret of the Forest
1910 - A box of soap
1911 - Forest drama
1911 - Moonlight
1911 - Pillory
1911 - Atley's mnemonic system
1911 - Words
1912 - Hotel of Evening Lights
1912 - Life of Gnor
1912 - Winter's Tale
1912 - From the detective's memorial book
1912 - Ksenia Turpanova
1912 - Puddle of the Bearded Pig
1912 - Passenger Pyzhikov
1912 - The Adventures of Ginch
1912 - Passage yard
1912 - A story about a strange fate
1912 - Telluri Blue Cascade
1912 - Tragedy of the Suan Plateau
1912 - Heavy air
1912 - Fourth for all
1913 - Adventure
1913 - Balcony
1913 - Headless Horseman
1913 - Back of the Road
1913 - Granka and his son
1913 - Long way
1913 - Devil of Orange Waters
1913 - Lives of great people
1913 - Zurbagan shooter
1913 - History of the Tauren
1913 - On the hillside
1913 - Naive Tussaletto
1913 - New circus
1913 - Tribe Siurg
1913 - The last minutes of Ryabinin
1913 - The seller of happiness
1913 - Sweet Poison of the City
1913 - Taboo
1913 - Mysterious Forest
1913 - Quiet weekdays
1913 - Three Adventures of Ehma
1913 - Man with man
1914 - Without an audience
1914 - Forgotten
1914 - The riddle of foreseen death
1914 - Earth and water
1914 - And spring will come for me
1914 - How the strong man Red John fought the king
1914 - War Legends
1914 - Dead for the living
1914 - In the balance
1914 - One of many
1914 - A story ended thanks to a bullet
1914 - Duel
1914 - Penitential manuscript
1914 - Incidents in Mrs. Cerise's apartment
1914 - Rare photographic apparatus
1914 - Conscience spoke
1914 - Sufferer
1914 - A strange incident at the masquerade
1914 - Fate taken by the horns
1914 - Three brothers
1914 - Urban Graz receives guests
1914 - Episode during the capture of Fort Cyclops
1915 - Sleepwalking Aviator
1915 - Shark
1915 - Diamonds
1915 - Armenian Tintos
1915 - Attack
1915 - Battle painter Shuang
1915 - missing
1915 - Battle in the air
1915 - Blonde
1915 - Bullfight
1915 - Bayonet fight
1915 - Machine gun fight
1915 - Eternal Bullet
1915 - Explosion of the alarm clock
1915 - Returned Hell
1915 - Magic Screen
1915 - Invention of Epitrim
1915 - Khaki Bey's Harem
1915 - Voice and sounds
1915 - Two brothers
1915 - Double of Plereza
1915 - The Case with the White Bird, or the White Bird and the Ruined Church
1915 - Wild Mill
1915 - Man's Friend
1915 - Iron bird
1915 - Yellow City
1915 - The Beast of Rochefort
1915 - Golden Pond
1915 - Game
1915 - Toys
1915 - Interesting photo
1915 - Adventurer
1915 - Captain Duke
1915 - Swinging Rock
1915 - Dagger and mask
1915 - Nightmare case
1915 - Leal at home
1915 - Flying Doge
1915 - Bear and German
1915 - Bear Hunt
1915 - Sea battle
1915 - On the American mountains
1915 - Over the abyss
1915 - Assassin
1915 - Pick-Meek's legacy
1915 - Impenetrable shell
1915 - Night walk
1915 - At night
1915 - Night and day
1915 - Dangerous Jump
1915 - The original spy
1915 - Island
1915 - Hunting in the air
1915 - Hunting for Marbrun
1915 - Hunt for a bully
1915 - Mine Hunter
1915 - Dance of Death
1915 - The duel of leaders
1915 - Suicide note
1915 - The incident with the sentry
1915 - Kam-Boo Bird
1915 - Way
1915 - Fifteenth of July
1915 - Scout
1915 - Jealousy and a sword
1915 - Fatal place
1915 - Woman's hand
1915 - Knight Mallar
1915 - Masha's wedding
1915 - Serious prisoner
1915 - The power of the word
1915 - Blue Top
1915 - Killer Word
1915 - Death of Alamber
1915 - Calm soul
1915 - Strange weapon
1915 - Terrible package
1915 - The terrible secret of the car
1915 - The fate of the first platoon
1915 - The mystery of the moonlit night
1915 - There or There
1915 - Three meetings
1915 - Three bullets
1915 - Murder in a fish shop
1915 - The murder of a romantic
1915 - Suffocating gas
1915 - Terrible vision
1915 - Host from Lodz
1915 - Black Flowers
1915 - Black novel
1915 - Black Farm
1915 - Miraculous failure
1916 - Scarlet Sails (fantastic story) (published 1923)
1916 - Great happiness of a little wrestler
1916 - Merry Butterfly
1916 - Around the World
1916 - Resurrection of Pierre
1916 - High technology
1916 - Behind bars
1916 - Capture the banner
1916 - Idiot
1916 - How I was dying on the screen
1916 - Labyrinth
1916 - Lion Strike
1916 - Invincible
1916 - Something from a diary
1916 - Fire and Water
1916 - Poison Island
1916 - Grape Peak Hermit
1916 - Vocation
1916 - Romantic murder
1916 - Blind Day Canet
1916 - One hundred miles along the river
1916 - Mysterious record
1916 - The Secret of House 41
1916 - Dance
1916 - Tram sickness
1916 - Dreamers
1916 - Black Diamond
1917 - Bourgeois Spirit
1917 - Return
1917 - Uprising
1917 - Enemies
1917 - The main culprit
1917 - Wild Rose
1917 - Everyone is a millionaire
1917 - Mistress of the bailiff
1917 - Pendulum of Spring
1917 - Gloom
1917 - Knife and pencil
1917 - Firewater
1917 - Orgy
1917 - On foot to the revolution (essay)
1917 - Peace
1917 - To be continued
1917 - Rene
1917 - Birth of Thunder
1917 - Fatal Circle
1917 - Suicide
1917 - Creation of Asper
1917 - Merchants
1917 - Invisible Corpse
1917 - Prisoner of the "Crosses"
1917 - Sorcerer's Apprentice
1917 - Fantastic Providence
1917 - A man from Durnovo's dacha
1917 - Black car
1917 - Masterpiece
1917 - Esperanto
1918 - Atu him!
1918 - Fighting death
1918 - Ignorant Buka
1918 - Vanya got angry with humanity
1918 - Jolly Dead
1918 - Back and forth
1918 - Barber's invention
1918 - How I was king
1918 - Carnival
1918 - Club black
1918 - Ears
1918 - Ships in Lisse (publ. 1922)
1918 - The footman spat in the dish
1918 - It became easier
1918 - Retired platoon
1918 - Fallen Leaf's Crime
1918 - Trivia
1918 - Conversation
1918 - Make a grandmother
1918 - The power of the incomprehensible
1918 - The old man walks in a circle
1918 - Three Candles
1919 - Magical disgrace
1919 - Fighter
1921 - Vulture
1921 - Competition in Lissa
1922 - White fire
1922 - Visiting a friend
1922 - Rope
1922 - Monte Cristo
1922 - Gentle romance
1922 - New Year's holiday of father and little daughter
1922 - Saryn on the kitch
1922 - Typhoid dotted line
1923 - Riot on the ship "Alceste"
1923 - Brilliant player
1923 - Gladiators
1923 - Voice and Eye
1923 - Willow
1923 - Be that as it may
1923 - Horsehead
1923 - Order for the army
1923 - The Lost Sun
1923 - Traveler Uy-Fyu-Eoy
1923 - Mermaids of the Air
1923 - Desert Heart
1923 - Loquacious brownie
1923 - Murder in Kunst-Fisch
1924 - Legless
1924 - White ball
1924 - The Tramp and Warden
1924 - Cheerful fellow traveler
1924 - Gatt, Witt and Redott
1924 - Siren Voice
1924 - Boarded up house
1924 - Pied Piper
1924 - On the Cloudy Shore
1924 - Monkey
1924 - By law
1924 - Incidental Income
1925 - Gold and miners
1925 - Winner
1925 - Gray car
1925 - Fourteen Feet
1925 - Six matches
1926 - Marriage of August Esborn
1926 - Snake
1926 - Personal reception
1926 - Nurse Glenaugh
1926 - Someone else's fault
1927 - Two Promises
1927 - The Legend of Ferguson
1927 - Daniel Horton's Weakness
1927 - A strange evening
1927 - Fandango
1927 - Four guineas
1928 - Watercolor
1928 - Social reflex
1928 - Elda and Angotea
1929 - Mistletoe branch
1929 - Thief in the woods
1929 - Father's Wrath
1929 - Treason
1929 - Opener of locks
1930 - Barrel of fresh water
1930 - Green Lamp
1930 - The story of one hawk
1930 - Silence
1932 - Autobiographical story
1933 - Velvet curtain
1933 - Commandant of the port
1933 - Pari

Storybooks:

Cap of Invisibility (1908)
Stories (1910)
Curious Stories (1915)
Famous Book (1915)
Incident in Dog Street (1915)
Adventurer (1916)
The Tragedy of the Xuan Plateau. On the Hillside (1916)
White Fire (1922)
Desert Heart (1924)
Gladiators (1925)
On the Cloudy Shore (1925)
Golden Pond (1926)
The Story of a Murder (1926)
Navigator of the Four Winds (1926)
Marriage of August Esborn (1927)
Ships in Lissa (1927)
By Law (1927)
Merry Traveler (1928)
Around the World (1928)
Black Diamond (1928)
Colony Lanfier (1929)
Window in the Woods (1929)
The Adventures of Ginch (1929)
Fire and Water (1930)

Collected works:

Green A. Collected works, 1-6 vols. M., Pravda, 1965.

Green A. Collected works, 1-6 vols. M., Pravda, 1980. Reprinted in 1983.
Green A. Collected works, 1-5 vols. M .: Fiction, 1991.
Green A. From the Unpublished and Forgotten. - Literary heritage, vol. 74. M .: Nauka, 1965.
Green A. I am writing you the whole truth. Letters 1906-1932. - Koktebel, 2012, series: Images of the past.

Screen versions of Alexander Green:

1958 - Watercolor
1961 - Scarlet Sails
1967 - Running on the waves
1968 - Dream Knight
1969 - Colony Lanfier
1972 - Morgiana
1976 - Redeemer
1982 - Assol
1983 - Man from the country Green
1984 - Shining World
1984 - Life and books of Alexander Grin
1986 - Golden chain
1988 - Mr. Designer
1990 - One hundred miles on the river
1992 - Road to nowhere
1995 - Gelly and Knock
2003 - Infection
2007 - Running on the waves
2010 - The True Story of Scarlet Sails
2010 - Man from the unfulfilled
2012 - Green Lamp

Gifted life

Korkin was a man of average physical strength, frail build; his healthy eye, in contrast to the broken, closed one, looked with redoubled intensity; he shaved, reminiscent of a tavern waiter. In general, his thin, crooked face did not make a terrible impression. "Junk", a brown coat and a scarf were his unchanging clothes. He never laughed, but spoke in a thin, low voice.

On Saturday evening, Korkin sat in a tavern and drank tea, considering where to spend the night. The police were looking for him. Slammed, breathing frosty steam, the door; a drunken boy entered, about fourteen years old. He looked around, saw Korkin and, winking, went towards him.

You, listen, they want you here, you have business, - he said, sitting down. Fryer asked.

What is it?

Some kind of gentleman, - said the hooligan, - I sniffed with him at the station. He needs someone to "sew". Looking for a master.

Let's go to Liverpool. He sat down in the office, drinking and running around. Kulachonko squeezed, cracked on the table, gritted his teeth. Psycho.

Let's go, - said Korkin. He got up, covered the lower part of his face with a scarf, pushed the "junk" to his eyebrows, hastily finished smoking his cigarette, and went outside with the hooligan.

A man in his thirties was pacing around the faded, sour-dull office of Liverpool, nervously rubbing his hands. He was wearing a short, waist-length, gray coat, a white lamb on the sleeves and collar gave the coat a foppish, feminine look. The hat, also white, sat on a bearded, coquettishly thrown back head in a very coquettish manner.

A gloomy face, with a prominent lower jaw, outlined by a thick, wedge-trimmed, dark beard; sunken, restless eyes, twirling mustaches and something dancing in all movements from a sliding, skating gait to turning elbows outward - gave the general impression of a sleek, hysterical male.

Korkin knocked and entered. The stranger blinked nervously.

They called on business, - said Korkin, looking at the bottles.

Yes, yes, on the case, - the unknown person spoke in a whisper. - Are you the one?

The same one.

You are drinking?

By the way he abruptly said “you,” Korkin could see that the master despised him.

You drink,” Korkin replied impudently; sat down, poured and drank.

The master was silent for some time, stroking his beard airily with his fingers.

Give me one thing," he said gloomily.

Speak ... why did you call.

I need one person to be gone. For this you will receive a thousand rubles, and now the deposit is three hundred.

His left cheek twitched, his eyes puffed up. Korkin drank the second portion and quipped:

You yourself ... weakly ... or what? ..

What? What? - the barin started up.

Yourself... are you cowardly?..

The master rushed to the window and, standing half-turned there, threw:

I'm a blockhead," Korkin replied calmly.

Barin didn't seem to hear it. Sitting down at the table, he explained to Korkin that he wanted the student Pokrovsky dead; gave his address, described his appearance, and paid him three hundred roubles.

Pokrovsky will be ready in three days,” Korkin said dryly. You will find out from the newspapers.

They agreed where to meet for a surcharge, and parted ways.

All the next day Korkin waited in vain for the victim. The student did not enter or leave.

By seven o'clock in the evening Korkin was tired and hungry. On reflection, he decided to postpone the matter until tomorrow. With a last glance at the black arch of the gate, Korkin headed for the tavern. While eating, he noticed that he somehow felt uneasy: his joints ached, he shuddered, he wanted to stretch. The food seemed odorless. However, it did not occur to Korkin that he had a cold.

The criminal ate the cabbage soup in disgust. Sitting afterwards at tea, he experienced a vague anxiety. Wandering thoughts wandered, irritated by the bright light of the lamps. Korkin wanted to fall asleep, forgetting about the police, the iron weight prepared for Pokrovsky, and everything in the world. But the brothel where he spent the night opened at eleven.

Korkin had two free hours. He decided to spend them in the cinema. He was attacked by a strange frivolity, complete contempt for the detectives and a dull indifference to everything.

He went into one of the Bioscopes. Under this cinema there was the so-called "Anatomical Museum", an arbitrary collection of wax models of parts of the human body. Korkin came here too.

Korkin looked around the room from the threshold. Behind the glass, one could see something red, blue, pink and blue, and in each object of such unusual shape there was a hint of the body of Korkin himself.

Suddenly he experienced an inexplicable burden, a strong heartbeat - whether because he met with the object of his "case" in his, so to speak, unusual, dispassionately intimate form, or because on the model depicting the heart, lungs, liver, brain, eyes and so on, strangers watched with him, far from suspecting that the same, only living mechanisms were destroyed by him, Korkin - he did not know. His sharp, new sensation was as if, being in a large society, he saw himself completely naked, undressed mysteriously and instantly.

Korkin stepped closer to the crates; contained in them magically attracted him. Before others, the inscription caught his eye: "The circulatory system of the respiratory tract." He saw something like a tree without leaves, gray in color, with countless small branches. It seemed very fragile, exquisite. Then Korkin looked at the red, skinless man for a long time; hundreds of oval muscles intertwined one with another, tightly pouring elastic outlines over the skeleton; they looked dry and proud; thousands of blue veins flowed through the red muscles.

A large black eye gleamed beside this box; Behind his eyelashes and cornea, some parts were visible, incomprehensible to Korkin, similar to a small machine, and, looking at them stupidly, he remembered his gouged out eye, behind which, consequently, the same mysterious machine as the one he saw was crushed .

Korkin carefully examined everything: the brain, resembling the kernel of a walnut; section of the head along the profile line, where many compartments, voids and partitions were visible; light, like two large pink mugs, and a lot of other things that left him feeling terribly dumbfounded. All this seemed to him forbidden, accidentally and criminally spied on. A frightening secret was hidden in the chaste, wax expressiveness of the models.

Korkin went to the exit. Passing by an old cab driver who was standing next to a woman in a headscarf, he heard the cab driver say:

Everything is as shown, Vavilovna. God's work ... cunning ... and-them - a cunning backwater! That's it... we, then, are inside, here... yeah!

A superstitious fear penetrated Korkin - the fear of a peasant, long muted by the city. In an environment where all the phenomena of life and nature: the growth of grasses, bread, death and illness, misfortune and joy, are invariably associated with God and his will, such a superstitious attitude towards the obscure never disappears. Korkin walked down the street, with difficulty overcoming fear. Finally, the fear passed, leaving fatigue and irritation.

Korkin was about to head for the night, but he remembered the student Pokrovsky. He was irresistibly drawn to see this man, even for a glimpse, not even knowing if he could be killed today; he felt a lingering desire to touch the decision, the end of the "case"; enter the circle of familiar, heavy excitement.

He approached that gate and, after waiting a little, suddenly came face to face with a tall, limping young man who had come out from under the gate into the street.

He, - having compared the signs, said Korkin and stretched like a dog behind the student. There were no passers-by around.

"Amba! - thought Korkin, - I'll hit him. Trembling with chills, he took out the weight, but then, stopping the decision, it seemed to Korkin that the student, if we run ahead, would have huge eyes covering the whole face with mysterious machines. He also saw that the student's body under the coat was devoid of skin, that muscles and tendons, intertwined in rhythmic contractions, lived a strict, complex life, saw Korkin and imperiously pushed him aside.

Feeling that his hand did not rise, that it was terrible and muffled around, Korkin walked past the student, throwing through his teeth:

You live for nothing.

What? the student asked quickly, recoiling.

Live for free! Korkin repeated, and knowing already, with dull resignation to what had happened, that the student would never be killed by him, he turned into an alley.

The life of Alexander Green

Writer Green - Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky - died in July 1932 in Stary Krym - a small town overgrown with centuries-old walnut trees.

Grim lived a hard life. Everything in her, as if on purpose, developed in such a way as to make Green a criminal or an evil layman. It was incomprehensible how this gloomy man, without staining, carried through a painful existence the gift of powerful imagination, purity of feelings and a shy smile.

Green's biography is a merciless verdict on the pre-revolutionary order of human relations. Old Russia rewarded Grin cruelly - it took away from him from childhood his love for reality. The environment was terrible, life unbearable. She looked like a wild mob. Green survived, but his distrust of reality remained with him for the rest of his life. He always tried to get away from her, believing that it is better to live in elusive dreams than the "rubbish and garbage" of every day.

Green began to write and created in his books a world of cheerful and courageous people, a beautiful land full of fragrant thickets and sun - an uncharted land, and amazing events that turn your head like a sip of wine.

“I have always noticed,” Maxim Gorky writes in My Universities, “that people like interesting stories only because they allow them to forget a difficult but familiar life for an hour.”

These words refer entirely to Green.

Russian life was limited for him by the philistine Vyatka, a dirty vocational school, doss houses, overwork, prison and chronic hunger. But somewhere beyond the gray horizon sparkled countries made of light, sea winds and flowering grasses. There lived people brown from the sun - gold diggers, hunters, artists, cheerful vagabonds, selfless women, cheerful and gentle, like children, but above all - sailors.

To live without faith that such countries flourish and make noise somewhere on the oceanic islands was too hard for Green, sometimes unbearable.

The revolution has come. She shook a lot that oppressed Green: the bestial structure of past human relationships, exploitation, apostasy - everything that forced Green to flee from life into the realm of dreams and books.

Greene sincerely rejoiced at her arrival, but the wonderful possibilities of the new future brought to life by the revolution were still not clearly visible, and Greene belonged to people suffering from eternal impatience.

The revolution did not come in festive attire, but came as a dusty fighter, like a surgeon. She plowed the thousand-year-old layers of musty life.

A bright future seemed to Green very far away, and he wanted to feel it now, immediately. He wanted to breathe the clean air of future cities, noisy with foliage and children's laughter, enter the homes of people of the future, participate with them on tempting expeditions, live a meaningful and cheerful life next to them.

Reality could not give this to Green immediately. Only imagination could transfer him to the desired environment, to the circle of the most extraordinary events and people.

This eternal, almost childish impatience, the desire to immediately see the final result of great events, the realization that this is still far away, that the restructuring of life is a long process, all this caused Green to be annoyed.

Previously, he was intolerant in his denial of reality, now he was intolerant in his demands on the people who created the new society. He did not notice the rapid course of events and thought that they were moving unbearably slowly.

If the socialist system had blossomed, like in a fairy tale, overnight, Green would have been delighted. But he did not know how to wait and did not want to. Waiting bored him and destroyed the poetic structure of his sensations.

Perhaps this was the reason for Green's alienation from the time, which is obscure to us.

Green died on the threshold of socialist society, not knowing at what time he was dying. He died too soon.

Death caught him at the very beginning of a spiritual crisis. Green began to listen and look closely at reality. If not for death, then perhaps he would have entered the ranks of our literature as one of the most original writers who organically merged realism with a free and bold imagination.

Green's father - a participant in the Polish uprising of 1863 - was exiled to Vyatka, worked there as an accountant in a hospital, drank himself and died in poverty.

Son Alexander - the future writer - grew up as a dreamy, impatient and absent-minded boy. He was fond of many things, but did not bring anything to the end. He studied poorly, but he read avidly Mine-Read, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard and Jacollio.

“The words 'Orinoco', 'Mississippi', 'Sumatra' sounded to me like music,” Green said later about this time.

It is difficult for today's youth to understand how irresistibly these writers acted on children who grew up in the former Russian wilderness.

“To understand this,” says Green in his autobiography, “one must know the provincial life of that time, the life of a remote city. This atmosphere of intense suspiciousness, false pride and shame is best conveyed by Chekhov's story "My Life". When I read this story, I seemed to be completely reading about Vyatka.

From the age of eight, Green began to think hard about travel. He retained his thirst for travel until his death. Every journey, no matter how insignificant, caused him deep excitement.

Green had a very precise imagination from an early age. When he became a writer, he imagined those non-existent countries where the action of his stories took place, not as foggy landscapes, but as well-studied, hundreds of times traveled places.

He could draw a detailed map of these places, he could mark every turn of the road and the nature of the vegetation, every bend in the river and the location of houses, he could finally list all the ships anchored in non-existent harbors, with all their maritime features and the qualities of a careless and cheerful ship crew .

Here is an example of such an exact non-existent landscape. In Lanfier's Colony, Green writes:

“In the north, the forest darkened with a motionless green herd, skirting to the horizon a chain of chalk cliffs, dotted with crevices and patches of emaciated shrubs.

To the east, across the lake, a white thread of road wound out of town. Trees protruded here and there around the edges, looking as tiny as lettuce shoots.

To the west, encircling a plain pitted with ravines and hills, stretched the blue expanse of the ocean sparkling with white sparks.

And to the south, from the center of a sloping funnel, where houses and farms were dotted, surrounded by slovenly planted greenery, stretched oblique quadrangles of plantations and plowed fields of the Lanfier colony.

From an early age, Green was tired of a bleak existence.

At home, the boy was constantly beaten, even a sick, exhausted mother, with some strange pleasure, teased her son with a song:

And in captivity
Involuntarily,
Like a dog, vegetate!

“I was tormented hearing this,” said Green, “because the song was about me, predicting my future.”

With great difficulty, the father sent Green to a real school.

Green was expelled from the school for innocent poems about his class mentor.

His father severely beat him, and then for several days knocked on the doorsteps of the director of the school, humiliated himself, went to the governor, asked that his son not be expelled, but nothing helped.

His father tried to get Green into a gymnasium, but he was not accepted there. The city has already given the little boy an unwritten "wolf ticket". I had to send Green to the city school.

Mother died. Green's father soon married the psalmist's widow. The stepmother had a child.

Life went on as before without any events, in the cramped quarters of a miserable apartment, among dirty diapers and wild quarrels. Brutal fights flourished in the school, and the sour smell of ink was strongly eaten into the skin, into the hair, into the worn student blouses.

The boy had to whitewash the estimate of the city hospital for a few kopecks, bind books, glue paper lanterns for illumination on the day of Nicholas II's "accession to the throne" and rewrite the roles for the actors of the provincial theater.

Green belonged to the number of people who do not know how to get along in life. In misfortunes, he was lost, hiding from people, ashamed of his poverty. A rich fantasy instantly betrayed him at the first encounter with difficult reality.

Already in adulthood, in order to get away from want, Green came up with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bgluing boxes from plywood and selling them on the market. It was in Stary Krym, where one or two caskets could be sold with great difficulty. Just as helpless was Green's attempt to get rid of hunger. Grin made a bow, went with it to the outskirts of the Old Crimea and shot birds, hoping to kill at least one and eat fresh meat. But nothing came of it, of course.

Like all losers, Green always hoped for chance, for unexpected happiness.

Dreams of a "dazzling event" and joy are full of all Green's stories, but most of all - his story "Scarlet Sails". It is characteristic that Green considered and began to write this captivating and fabulous book in Petrograd in 1920, when, after a typhus, he wandered around the icy city and every night looked for a new lodging for the night from random, semi-acquainted people.

“Scarlet Sails” is a poem that affirms the strength of the human spirit, illuminated through and through, like the morning sun, with love for spiritual youth and the belief that a person, in a fit of happiness, is capable of performing miracles with his own hands.

The Vyatka life dragged on dull and monotonous, until in the spring of 1895 Green saw a cab driver on the pier and on it two navigational students in a white sailor uniform.

“I stopped,” writes Green about this incident, “and looked, as if spellbound, at the guests from a mysterious, beautiful world for me. I didn't envy. I felt delight and longing.”

Since then, dreams of naval service, of the "picturesque work of navigation" have taken possession of Green with particular force. He began to gather in Odessa.

The Green family was a burden. His father got him five rubles for the journey and hurriedly said goodbye to his gloomy son, who had never experienced either paternal affection or love.

Grin took watercolors with him - he was sure that he would paint with them somewhere in India, on the banks of the Ganges - took a beggar's belongings and left Vyatka in a state of complete confusion and jubilation.

“For a long time I saw on the pier in the crowd,” says Green about this departure, “the bewildered gray-bearded face of my father. And I dreamed of a sea covered with sails.

In Odessa, Green's first meeting with the sea took place - the sea that then flooded the pages of his stories with a blinding light.

Many books have been written about the sea. A whole galaxy of writers and researchers tried to convey an extraordinary, sixth sensation, which can be called "the feeling of the sea." They all perceived the sea in different ways, but none of these writers make noise and shimmer on the pages of such festive seas as Green's.

Green loved not so much the sea as the sea coasts he invented, where everything that he considered the most attractive in the world was connected: the archipelagos of the legendary islands, sand dunes overgrown with flowers, foamy sea distance, warm lagoons sparkling with bronze from the abundance of fish, centuries-old forests, mixed with the smell of salty breezes the smell of lush thickets, and, finally, cozy coastal cities.

In almost every story by Green there are descriptions of these non-existent cities - Lissa, Zurbagan, Gel-Gyu and Girton.

In the appearance of these fictional cities, Green put the features of all the Black Sea ports he saw.

The dream has been achieved. The sea lay before Green like a road of miracles, but the old Vyatka past immediately made itself felt. Green with particular acuteness felt his helplessness, uselessness and loneliness by the sea.

“This new world did not need me,” he writes. - I felt constrained, a stranger here, as everywhere. I was a little sad."

Marine life immediately turned to the wrong side of Green.

Green wandered about the port for weeks and timidly asked the captains to take him as a sailor on the steamers, but he was either rudely refused or ridiculed in the eyes - what a sailor could turn out of a frail young man with dreamy eyes!

Finally, Green was "lucky". He was taken without pay as an apprentice on a steamer that sailed from Odessa to Batum. Green made two autumn voyages on it.

From these flights, Green only had a memory of Yalta and the ridge of the Caucasus Mountains.

“The lights of Yalta were remembered the most. The lights of the port merged with the lights of an unseen city. The steamer approached the pier with the clear sounds of the orchestra in the garden. The smell of flowers flew by, warm gusts of wind. Voices and laughter could be heard in the distance.

The rest of the flight is forgotten by me, except for the procession of snowy mountains that does not disappear from the horizon. Their peaks, stretched at the height of the sky, even from afar showed the world of vast worlds. It was a chain of highly elevated countries of sparkling ice silence.

Soon the captain put Green off the ship - Green could not pay for food.

Kulak, the owner of the Kherson "dubk", took Grin as an assistant to his schooner and ordered him around like a dog. Green hardly slept - instead of a pillow, the owner gave him broken tiles. In Kherson, he was thrown ashore without paying money.

From Kherson, Green returned to Odessa, worked in port warehouses as a marker and made the only foreign trip to Alexandria, but he was fired from the ship for a collision with the captain.

Of all his life in Odessa, Green only had a good memory of working in port warehouses:

“I loved the spicy smell of the warehouse, the feeling of an abundance of goods around me, especially lemons and oranges. Everything smelled: vanilla, dates, coffee, tea. In combination with the frosty smell of sea water, coal and oil, it was indescribably good to breathe here, especially if the sun was warming.

Green was tired of Odessa life and decided to return to Vyatka. He rode home like a hare. The last two hundred kilometers had to walk through liquid mud - there was bad weather.

In Vyatka, his father asked Green where his things were.

“Things were left at the post station,” Greene lied. - There was no driver.

“Father,” Green writes, “smiling pitifully, kept silent in disbelief, and a day later, when it turned out that there were no things, he asked (he smelled strongly of vodka):

- Why are you lying? You were walking. Where are your things? You lied!"

The damned Vyatka life began again.

Then there were years of fruitless searches for some place in life, or, as it was customary to express it in philistine families, the search for "occupation."

Green was a bath attendant at Murashi station, near Vyatka, served as a clerk in the office, wrote petitions to the court for peasants in a tavern.

He could not stand it for a long time in Vyatka and left for Baku. Life in Baku was so desperately hard that Green had a memory of it as continuous cold and darkness. He didn't remember the details.

He lived by casual, penny labor: he drove piles in the port, cleaned off the paint from old steamers, loaded timber, and, together with the tramps, was hired to put out fires on oil rigs. He was dying of malaria in a fishing cooperative and almost died of thirst on the deadly sandy beaches of the Caspian Sea between Baku and Derbent.

Green spent the night in empty boilers on the pier, under overturned boats or just under fences.

Life in Baku left a cruel imprint on Green. He became sad, taciturn, and the external traces of Baku life - premature old age - remained with Grin forever. Since then, according to Green, his face has become like a crumpled ruble paper.

Green's appearance spoke better than words about the nature of his life: he was an unusually thin, tall and round-shouldered man, with a face excised with thousands of wrinkles and scars, with tired eyes that lit up with a beautiful brilliance only in moments of reading or inventing extraordinary stories.

Greene was ugly, but full of hidden charm. He walked heavily, as loaders walk, torn by work.

He was very trusting, and this trust was outwardly expressed in a friendly, open handshake. Green said that he best recognizes people by the way they shake hands.

Green's life, especially in Baku, in many ways resembles the youth of Maxim Gorky. Both Gorky and Grin went through vagrantism, but Gorky emerged from it as a man of high civic courage and the greatest realist writer, while Grin became a science fiction writer.

In Baku, Green reached the last stage of poverty, but did not betray his pure and childish imagination. He stopped in front of the shop windows of photographers and looked at the cards for a long time, trying to find at least one face among hundreds of stupid or wrinkled faces that spoke of a life of joy, high and carefree. Finally, he found such a face - the face of a girl - and described it in his diary. The diary fell into the hands of the owner of the rooming house, a vile and cunning person who began to mock Green and an unfamiliar girl. The case almost ended in a bloody fight.

From Baku, Green again returned to Vyatka, where his drunken father demanded money from him. But, of course, there was no money.

We had to come up with some ways to drag out existence again. Green was incapable of it. Again he was seized by a thirst for a happy chance, and in winter, in severe frosts, he went on foot to the Urals to look for gold. His father gave him three rubles for the journey.

Green saw the Urals, a wild country of gold, and naive hopes flared up in him. On the way to the mine, he picked up a lot of stones lying under his feet, and carefully examined them, hoping to find a nugget.

Green worked at the Shuvalov mines, wandered around the Urals with a benevolent old wanderer (who later turned out to be a murderer and a thief), was a lumberjack and a raftsman.

After the Urals, Green sailed as a sailor on the barge of the shipowner Bulychov - the famous Bulychov, taken by Gorky as a prototype for his famous play.

But this work is over.

It seemed that life had closed its circle, and Green no longer had any joy or reasonable occupation in it. Then he decided to become a soldier. It was hard and embarrassing to volunteer in the tsarist army drilled to the point of idiocy, but it was even harder to sit on the neck of an old father. The father dreamed of making Alexander, his first-born, a “real person” - a doctor or an engineer.

Green served in an infantry regiment in Penza.

In the regiment, Green first encountered the Social Revolutionaries and began to read revolutionary books.

“Since then,” says Green, “life has turned to me with an unmasked, previously mysterious side. My revolutionary enthusiasm was boundless. At the first suggestion of a volunteer SR, I took a thousand proclamations and scattered them in the courtyard of the barracks.

After serving for about a year, Green deserted from the regiment and went into revolutionary work. This part of his life is little known.

Grin worked in Kyiv and Sevastopol, where he became famous among the sailors and soldiers of the fortress artillery as an ardent, fascinating underground speaker.

But in the dangers and tensions of revolutionary work, Green remained the same contemplative as before. It was not for nothing that he himself said about himself that the phenomena of life interested him mainly visually - he liked to look and remember.

Green lived in Sevastopol in the autumn—that clear Crimean autumn, when the air seemed like transparent warm moisture, poured into the boundaries of the streets, bays, and mountains, and the slightest sound passed through it with a light and long-lasting trembling.

“Some shades of Sevastopol entered my stories,” Green admitted. But to anyone who knows Greene's books and knows Sevastopol, it is clear that the legendary Zurbagan is an almost exact description of Sevastopol, the city of transparent bays, decrepit boatmen, sunlight, warships, the smells of fresh fish, acacia and siliceous earth, and solemn sunsets uplifting to the sky all the brilliance and light of the reflected Black Sea water.

If there were no Sevastopol, there would be no Green's Zurbagan with its nets, the thunder of shod sailor's boots on sandstone, night winds, high masts and hundreds of lights dancing in the roadstead.

In none of the cities of the Soviet Union is the poetry of marine life, expressed by Green in the following lines, as clearly felt as in Sevastopol:

“Danger, risk, the power of nature, the light of a distant land, wonderful uncertainty, flickering love, blossoming with a date and separation; fascinating effervescence of meetings, faces, events; the immeasurable variety of life, and high in the sky - either the Southern Cross, or the Bear, and all the continents - in keen eyes, although your cabin is full of never-leaving homeland with its books, paintings, letters and dry flowers ... "

In the autumn of 1903, Green was arrested in Sevastopol at the Grafskaya pier and spent time in Sevastopol and Feodosiya prisons until the end of October 1905.

In the Sevastopol prison, Green first began to write. He was very shy about his first literary experiments and did not show them to anyone.

Green spoke little about himself, he did not have time to finish his autobiography, and therefore many years of his life are almost unknown to anyone.

After Sevastopol, Green's biography fails. It is only known that he was arrested a second time and exiled to Tobolsk, but he fled from the road, made his way to Vyatka, and at night came to his old, sick father. His father stole for him from the city hospital the passport of the deceased son of the deacon Malginov. Green lived under this name for a long time and even signed his first story with it.

With someone else's passport, Green left for St. Petersburg, and here, in the Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper, this story was published.

It was the first real joy in Green's life. He almost kissed the grouchy newspaperman from whom he bought a newspaper issue with his story. He assured the newspaperman that the story had been written by him, but the old man did not believe it and looked suspiciously at the leggy, freckled young man. From excitement, Green could not walk, his legs trembled and buckled.

Work in the Socialist-Revolutionary organization already clearly weighed on Green. He soon left it, refusing the assassination entrusted to him. He was caught up in thoughts of writing. Dozens of plans burdened him, he hastily looked for a form for them, but at first he did not find it.

He wrote still timidly, with an eye on the editor and the reader, he wrote with that feeling, well known to novice writers, that a crowd of mocking people was standing behind him and reading every word with condemnation. Green was still afraid of the storm of plots that raged in him and demanded release.

The first story that Green wrote without looking back, only by virtue of a free inner impulse, was Reno Island. It already contained all the features of the future Green. This is a simple story about the strength and beauty of virgin tropical nature and the thirst for freedom of a sailor who deserted from a warship and was killed for this by order of the commander.

Green began to print. Years of humiliation and hunger, however, very slowly, but still a thing of the past. The first months of free and beloved work seemed to Green a miracle.

Soon Grin was again arrested on the old case of belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, spent a year in prison and was exiled to the Arkhangelsk province - to Pinega, and then to Kegostrov.

In 1912 Green returned to Petersburg. Here began the best period of his life, a kind of "Boldino autumn". At the time, Green wrote almost continuously. With an insatiable thirst, he reread many books, he wanted to know everything, to experience it, to transfer it into his stories.

Soon he took his first book to his father in Vyatka. Green wanted to please the old man, who had already come to terms with the idea that a worthless tramp had come out of Alexander's son. Father Green did not believe. It took the old man to show contracts with publishing houses and other documents to convince him that Green really became a "man." This meeting of father and son was the last: the old man soon died.

The February revolution found Green in Finland, in the village of Lunatiokki; he greeted her with delight. Upon learning of the revolution, Grin immediately set out on foot for Petrograd—the trains were no longer running. He left all his belongings and books in Lunatiocchi, even the portrait of Poe, with whom he never parted.

Almost everyone who has written about Greene speaks of Greene's closeness to Edgar Allan Poe, Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Stevenson, and Kipling.

Green loved "Mad Edgar", but the opinion that he imitated him and all the listed writers is incorrect: Green recognized many of them, being already a well-established writer himself.

He greatly appreciated Merimee and considered his "Carmen" one of the best books in world literature. Green read a lot of Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Chekhov (Green was shocked by Chekhov's stories), Gorky, Swift and Jack London. He often re-read the biography of Pushkin, and in adulthood he was fond of reading encyclopedias.

Green was not spoiled for attention and therefore appreciated it very much.

Even the most common kindness in human relations or a friendly act caused him deep excitement.

This happened, for example, when life first pushed Green against Maxim Gorky. It was 1920. Green was drafted into the Red Army and served in a guard regiment in the city of Ostrov, near Pskov. There he fell ill with typhus. He was brought to Petrograd and, together with hundreds of typhoid patients, was placed in the Botkin barracks. Green was seriously ill. He left the hospital nearly disabled.

Homeless, half-sick and hungry, with severe dizziness, he wandered for days on end in the granite city in search of food and warmth. There was a time of queues, rations, oil lamps, stale bread crusts and icy apartments. The thought of death grew stronger and stronger.

“At this time,” writes the writer’s wife in her unpublished memoirs, “Grin’s savior was Maxim Gorky. He learned of Green's plight and did everything for him. At Gorky's request, Green was given an academic ration, rare in those days, and a room on the Moika, in the House of Arts, warm, bright, with a bed and a table. To the tormented Grin, this table seemed especially precious - one could write at it. In addition, Gorky gave Green a job.

From the deepest despair and expectation of death, Green was brought back to life by Gorky's hand. Often at night, remembering his hard life and Gorky's help, Green, who had not yet recovered from his illness, wept with gratitude.

In 1924 Green moved to Feodosia. He wanted to live in silence, closer to his beloved sea. This act of Green reflected the true instinct of the writer - coastal life was that real breeding ground that gave him the opportunity to invent his stories.

Green lived in Feodosia until 1930. There he wrote a lot. He wrote mostly in the winter, in the mornings. Sometimes he would sit in an armchair for hours, smoking and thinking, and at that time he could not be touched. In these hours of reflection and free play of the imagination, Greene needed focus much more than during his working hours. Green plunged into his thoughts so deeply that he was almost deaf and blind, and it was difficult to get him out of this state.

In the summer, Green rested: he made bows, wandered by the sea, fiddled with stray dogs, tamed a wounded hawk, read and played billiards with cheerful Feodosia residents - descendants of the Genoese and Greeks. Greene loved Theodosius, a sultry city by a green hazy sea, built on white rocky land.

In the autumn of 1930, Greene moved from Feodosia to Stary Krym, a city of flowers, silence, and ruins. Here he died alone from a painful disease - cancer of the stomach and lungs.

Green died as hard as he lived. He asked to put his bed to the window. Outside the window, the distant Crimean mountains shone blue and the reflection of the beloved and forever lost sea.

In one of Green's stories - "The Return" - there are lines, as if written by him about his death, - they convey the atmosphere of Green's dying so accurately: "The end has come in the light of open windows, in the face of wildflowers. Already out of breath, he asked to be seated by the window. He looked at the hills, taking in the last breaths of air with a bleeding piece of lung.

Before his death, Green greatly yearned for people - this had never happened to him before.

A few days before his death, author's copies of Green's last book, An Autobiographical Tale, were sent from Leningrad.

Green smiled weakly, tried to read the inscription on the cover, but could not. The book fell from his hands. His eyes had already taken on an expression of heavy, deaf emptiness. Green's eyes, which could see the world so unusually, were already dying.

Green's last word was either a groan or a whisper: "I'm dying ..."

Two years after Grin's death, I happened to visit Stary Krym, at the house where Grin died, and at his grave.

Wildflowers were blooming in the thick, fresh grass around the little white house. Walnut leaves, sluggish from the heat, smelled medicinal and tart. There was a deep silence in the rooms with austere, simple furnishings, and a sharp ray of sun lay on the chalk wall. He fell on the only engraving on the wall - a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe.

Green's grave in the cemetery behind the old mosque is overgrown with thorny grasses.

The wind was blowing from the south. Very far away, behind Feodosia, the sea stood like a gray wall. And above everything—over Green's house, over his grave, and over Stary Krym—was the silence of a cloudless summer day.

Greene died, leaving us to decide whether our time needs such passionate dreamers as he was.

Yes, we need dreamers. It's time to get rid of the mocking attitude to this word. Many still do not know how to dream, and perhaps that is why they cannot become on a level with time.

If a person is deprived of the ability to dream, then one of the most powerful incentives that give rise to culture, art, science and the desire to fight for the sake of a beautiful future will disappear. But dreams should not be divorced from reality. They must anticipate the future and give us the feeling that we are already living in this future and that we ourselves are becoming different.

It is generally accepted that Green's dreams were out of touch with reality, were a bizarre and meaningless game of the mind. It is commonly thought that Greene was an adventurous writer—a master of plot, it is true, but a man whose books lacked social significance.

The meaning of each writer is determined by how he affects us, what feelings, thoughts and actions his books evoke, whether they enrich us with knowledge, or are read as a funny set of words.

Green populated his books with a tribe of brave, simple-hearted, like children, proud, selfless and kind people.

These whole, attractive people are surrounded by the fresh, fragrant air of Green's nature - completely real, taking the heart with its charm. The world in which Green's heroes live may seem unreal only to a person who is poor in spirit. Anyone who has experienced a slight dizziness from the very first breath of the salty and warm air of the sea coasts will immediately feel the authenticity of the Green's landscape, the wide breathing of the Green's countries.

Green's stories evoke in people a desire for a varied life, full of risk, courage and the “feeling of high”, characteristic of explorers, sailors and travelers. After Green's stories, one wants to see the whole globe - not countries invented by Green, but real, authentic, full of light, forests, multilingual noise of harbors, human passions and love.

“The earth teases me,” Greene wrote. “Its oceans are vast, the islands are innumerable, and there are many mysterious, deadly curious corners.”

Fairy tales are needed not only for children, but also for adults. It causes excitement - a source of high and human passions. It does not allow us to calm down and always shows new, sparkling distances, a different life, it disturbs and makes us passionately desire this life. This is its value, and this is the value of the sometimes inexpressible in words, but the clear and powerful charm of Green's stories.

Our time has declared a merciless struggle against hypocrites, dullards and hypocrites. Only a hypocrite can say that we must rest on our laurels and stop. Great things have been achieved, but even greater things lie ahead. New lofty and difficult tasks arise in the near future, the task of creating a new man, cultivating new feelings and new human relations worthy of the socialist century. But in order to fight for this future, you need to be able to dream passionately, deeply and effectively, you need to cultivate in yourself a continuous desire for meaningful and beautiful things. This desire was rich in Green, and he conveys it to us in his books.

They talk about the adventurism of Green's plots. This is true, but his adventurous plot is only a shell for deeper content. You have to be blind not to see love for a person in Green's books.

Greene was not only a great landscape painter and master of the plot, but also a very subtle psychologist. He wrote about self-sacrifice, courage - the heroic traits inherent in the most ordinary people. He wrote about love for work, for his profession, about the unexplored and power of nature. Finally, very few writers have written about the love of a woman as cleanly, carefully and emotionally as Green did.

I could cite here hundreds of excerpts from Green's books that excite everyone who has not lost the ability to get excited before the spectacle of beauty, but the reader will find them for himself.

Green said that "the whole earth, with everything that is on it, is given to us for life, for the recognition of this life wherever it is."

Green is a writer needed by our time, for he has made his contribution to the education of lofty feelings, without which the realization of a socialist society is impossible.

Notes

For the first time, under the title "Alexander Grin", it was published in the Almanac "Year XXII", No. 15, M. 1939. In a revised form, it was published as an introductory article to A. Grin's "Chosen Ones", Goslitizdat, 1956 (Printed according to the text of Goslitizdat , 1956)

Russian writer, author of about four hundred works ... His works are in the neo-romantic genre, philosophical and psychological, mixed with fantasy. His creations are famous throughout the country, they are loved by adults and children, and the biography of the writer Alexander Green is very rich and interesting.

Early age

The real name of the writer is Grinevsky. Alexander is the first child in his family, where there were four children in total. He was born on August 23, 1880, in the Vyatka province, in the city of Slobodskoy. Father - Stefan - a Pole and an aristocratic warrior. Mother - Anna Lepkova - worked as a nurse.

As a boy, Alexander loved to read. He learned this early and the first thing he read was a book about Gulliver's Travels. The boy liked books about traveling around the world and sailors. He repeatedly ran away from home to become a navigator.

At the age of 9, little Sasha began to study. He was a very problematic student and caused a lot of trouble: he behaved badly, fought. Once he wrote insulting poems to all the teachers, because of this he was expelled from the school. The guys who studied with him called him Green. The boy liked the nickname, then he used it as a writer's pseudonym. In 1892, Alexander was successfully enrolled in another educational institution, with the help of his father.

At the age of 15, the future writer lost his mother. She died of tuberculosis. Less than six months later, my father married again. Green didn't get along with the pope's new wife. He left home and lived separately. He moonlighted as weaving and gluing book bindings and rewriting documents. He was fond of reading and writing poetry.

Youth

A brief biography of Alexander Green contains information that he really wanted to be a sailor. At the age of 16, the young man graduated from the 4th grade of the school, and with the help of his father, he was able to leave for Odessa. He gave his son a small amount of money for the journey and the address of his friend, who could shelter him for the first time. Upon arrival, Green was in no hurry to look for his father's friend. I didn’t want to become a burden to a stranger, I thought I could achieve everything on my own. But alas, it was very difficult to find a job, and the money ran out quickly. After wandering and starving, the young man nevertheless sought out his father's friend and asked for help. The man sheltered him and got him a job as a sailor on the ship "Platon". Green did not serve long on deck. The sailor's routine and hard work turned out to be alien to Alexander, he left the ship, finally quarreling with the captain.

According to a brief biography, Alexander Stepanovich Green returned to Vyatka in 1897, where he lived for two years, and then went to Baku "to try his luck." There he worked in various industries. He was engaged in fishing business, then he got a job as a laborer, and then he became a railway worker, but he did not stay here for a long time either. He lived in the Urals, worked as a goldsmith and lumberjack, then as a miner.

In the spring of 1902, tired of wandering, Alexander joined the 213th Orovai reserve infantry battalion. Six months later he deserted from the army. For half of his term of service, Green was in a punishment cell for his revolutionary sentiments. In Kamyshin he was caught, but the young man again managed to escape, this time to Simbirsk. In this he was helped by the Socialist-Revolutionary propagandists. He interacted with them in the army.

Since then, Greene has rebelled against the social order and enthusiastically divulged revolutionary ideas. A year later, he was arrested for such activities, and later caught trying to escape and sent to a maximum security prison. The trial took place in 1905, they wanted to give him 20 years in prison, but the lawyer insisted on commuting the sentence, and Green was sent to Siberia for half the term. Very soon, in the autumn, Alexander was released ahead of schedule and arrested again six months later in St. Petersburg. While serving his sentence, he received visits from his fiancée, Vera Abramova, the daughter of a high official who secretly supported the revolutionaries. In the spring, Green was sent to the Tobolsk province for four years, but thanks to his father, he got someone else's passport and, under the name Malginov, escaped three days later.

mature years

Soon Alexander Grin ceased to be a Socialist-Revolutionary. They played a wedding with Vera Abramova. In 1910, he was already a fairly well-known writer, and then it dawned on the authorities that the fugitive Grinevsky and Grin were one and the same person. The writer was again found and taken under arrest. Sent to the Arkhangelsk region.

When the revolution took place, Green was even more dissatisfied with social foundations. Divorces were allowed, which Vera, his wife, took advantage of. The reasons for the divorce were the lack of mutual understanding and the obstinate, quick-tempered nature of Alexander. He tried to go to reconciliation with her more than once, but in vain.

Five years later, Green met Maria Dolidze. Their union was very short-lived, only a few months, and the writer was left alone again.

In 1919, Alexander was called to the service, where Green was a signalman. Very soon he contracted typhus and was treated for a long time.

In 1921 Alexander married Nina Mironova. They fell in love with each other very much and considered their meeting a magical gift of fate. Nina was then a widow.

last years of life

In 1930, Alexander and Nina moved to Stary Krym. Then Soviet censorship motivated refusals to reprint Green with the phrase: "You do not merge with the era." For fresh books, they set a limit: to release no more than one per year. Then the Grinevskys "fell to the bottom of poverty" and were terribly hungry. Alexander tried to hunt for food, but to no avail.

Two years later, the writer died of a tumor in the stomach. He was buried in the cemetery of Stary Krym.

Creativity Green

The very first story, entitled "The Merit of Private Panteleev", was created at a difficult time for Alexander, in the summer of 1906. The work began to be published months later in the form of a campaign brochure for punishers. It was said in it about official, military unrest. Green was rewarded, but the story was taken out of print and destroyed. The story "Elephant and Pug" overtook the same fate. Several copies were randomly saved. The first thing that people could read was the work "To Italy". The writer published these stories under the name of Malginov.

From 1907, he already signed as Green. One year later, collections went into publication, 25 stories per year. And Alexander began to pay good fees. Green created some of his creations while in exile. At first it was published only in newspapers, and the first three volumes of works were published in 1913. A year later, Green had already begun to masterfully approach writing. Books became deeper, more interesting and sold out even more.

In the 1950s, stories were still printed. But novels also began to appear: "The Shining World", "The Golden Chain" and others. "Scarlet Sails" Alexander Green (biography confirms this) dedicated to his third wife - Nina. The novel "Touchless" remained unfinished.

After the demise

When Alexander Stepanovich Green died, a collection of his works was published. Nina, his wife, stayed there, but was under occupation. She was sent to Germany, to camps. When the war ended, upon returning home, she was accused of treason and sentenced to ten years in labor camps. All of Green's works were banned, and they were rehabilitated after Stalin died. Then the new books started coming out again. While Nina was in the camps, their house with Alexander passed to other people. The woman sued them for a long time, in the end she “recaptured” him. She made a museum dedicated to her writer husband, to whom she devoted the rest of her life.

Characteristic features of Alexander Grin's prose

The author is recognized as a romantic. He always said that he was a conductor between the dream world and the human reality. He believed that the world is ruled by good, bright and kind. In his novels and stories, he showed how good deeds and bad deeds are reflected in people. He urged to do good to people. For example, in Scarlet Sails, through the hero, he conveyed such a message in the phrase: “He will have a new soul and you will have a new one, just do a miracle for a person.” One of Green's lofty themes was the choice between goodness and high values ​​and low desires and the temptation to do evil.

Alexander knew how to exalt a simple parable in such a way that a deep meaning was revealed in it, explaining everything in simple, understandable words. Critics have always noted the brightness of the plots and the "cinematographic" nature of his works. He freed his characters from the burden of stereotypes. From their belonging to religions, to nationality and so on. He showed the essence of the person himself, his personality.

Poems

Alexander Stepanovich Grin was fond of writing poetry since the time of the school, but they began to print only in 1907. In his autobiography, Alexander told how he sent poems to various newspapers. They were about loneliness, despair and weakness. “It was as if a forty-year-old Chekhov hero wrote, and not a little boy,” he said about himself. His later and more serious poems began to be printed, in the genre of realism. He had lyrical poems that were dedicated to his first, and after - to his last wife. In the early 60s, the publication of his poetry collections failed. Until the poet Leonid Martynov intervened, who said that Green's poems should be printed, because this is a true heritage.

Place in literature

Alexander Stepanovich Green had neither followers nor predecessors. Critics compared him with many writers, but there was still very, very little resemblance to anyone. He seemed to be a representative of classical literature, but, on the other hand, special, unique, and it is not known how to accurately determine his creative direction.

The originality of creativity was in the differences of the genre. Somewhere there was fantasy, and somewhere realism. But the focus on human moral values ​​still refers Green's works more to the classics.

Criticism

Before the revolution, the work of Alexander Stepanovich Green was criticized, many treated him very dismissively. He was condemned for excessive display of violence, for exotic names of characters, accused of imitating foreign authors. Over time, the negative critics weakened. They often began to talk about what the author wants to say. How he shows life in its real reflection and how he wants to convey to readers faith in a miracle, a call for goodness and right action. After the 1930s, people began to talk about the works of Alexander differently. They began to equate him with the classics and call him a master of the genre.

Views on religion

In his youth, Alexander was neutral about religion, although he was baptized according to Orthodox customs as a child. His opinion about religion changed throughout his life. It was noticeable in his works. For example, in The Shining World, he exhibited more Christian ideals. The scene where Runa asked God to make faith stronger was cut due to censorship.

With his wife Nina, they often went to church. Alexander Green, whose biography is presented to your attention in the article, loved the holiday of Holy Easter. He wrote in letters to his first wife that he and Nina were believers. Before his death, Greene received communion and confession from a priest invited to the house.

The biography of Alexander Green is now known to you. Finally, I would like to tell you some interesting facts:

• Green had many pseudonyms, in addition to the well-known two, there were also these: Odin, Victoria Klemm, Elza Moravskaya, Stepanov.
• On his chest, Alexander had a large tattoo depicting a ship. She was a symbol of his love for the sea.
• An interesting fact in the biography of Alexander Stepanovich Green is that all his life he considered his first wife to be his closest friend and did not stop corresponding with her.
• Many streets, museums, and even one tiny planet discovered in the 80s (Grinevia) were named after Alexander Grin.
• There is also Alexander Grin Street in Riga, but it was named after his Latvian namesake and colleague.
• K. Zelinsky called the fictional country where the actions of several novels of the writer take place, "Greenland".