Elshtein-Gorchakov, Henry Natanovich

Born in the city of Berdyansk . Father - Nathan Samuilovich Elshtein (1891-1938), disabled person, from 16 years old participated in the revolutionary movement. He was a member of the Bund . He spent three years in exile in the Arkhangelsk province . Later he moved away from politics, taking up journalism and advocacy . Mother - Rakhil Meerovna (1893-1961), a housewife, later an employee of a wheelchair farm. The elder brother - Samuil Natanovich (1918-1941), died during the Great Patriotic War near Moscow .

In 1924, the family of five-year-old Heinrich moved from Kiev to Moscow. In 1938, Nathan Elstein was arrested and shot on October 4 of that year. Rehabilitated posthumously in 1956 .

In 1938, Heinrich Elstein successfully passed the entrance exams at the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI) , but was not accepted due to the arrest of his father. Refusing to take documents, he began the struggle for the right to study, and in 1939 he was accepted to college without examinations. Later, because of the repressed father, Heinrich was not hired by the large-circulation newspaper of the number factory and the editorial board of Komsomolskaya Pravda , and the executive secretary of the Moscow City Council, Osoaviahim , was dismissed. In August 1941 , having a white ticket, he volunteered for the front. The first three months he served in special parts of the intelligence department of the Western Front , but, having filled out a questionnaire to be sent to the partisan detachment, he was sent to his military registration and enlistment office with the order: "for the inability to use," he was transferred to a reserve regiment and was discharged in May 1942 for health reasons.

In September 1942 he was accepted to the third year of the Literary Institute. Gorky . In 1943 he presented the chapter of the novel “The Eleventh Doubt”, for which he was sharply criticized, was expelled from the Komsomol and the institute as a future thesis . On April 16, 1944 he was arrested. Convicted by a special meeting of eight years in the camps under Articles 58-10 h.2 and 58-11 . Until August 1945 he was held in Moscow prisons. Then he served four years in the Mariinsky camps in the Kemerovo region (Letyazh OLP and Suslovsky branch of Siblag ). Since June 1949 he was in the Kolyma camps: camps "Central", "Sopka" and Kotsugan of the Butugychag branch of Berlag . In August 1951, he was released with eight months of working days. He was left in Kolyma on an indefinite exile settlement in the village of Ust-Omchug, Tenkinsky district of the Magadan Region , worked at the Vetren mine, then a year in the pharmacy department of Magadan as a senior engineer-economist, headed the planning department. He returned to Moscow only in 1960 after the removal of a criminal record. In 1962 he completed his studies at the Literary Institute. In 1963, rehabilitated .

He was engaged in literary criticism and, specializing mainly in Russian poetry , mainly in the works of Marina Tsvetaeva . He was a freelance consultant to the Literary Consultation of the Union of Writers of the USSR . He wrote his works of art, but did not have the opportunity to publish.

He gained fame as a writer in the late 1980s , when he began to be published in Soviet journals, Literary Issues and Our Heritage , as well as in western ones: New Journal ( New York ), Vienna Almanac , Grani ( Frankfurt am Main ), Russian Thought ( Paris ) and others.

In November 1989, he gave a lecture at Yale University "To the sources of the tragic at Marina Tsvetaeva."

In May 1990, three chapters of the novel “The Eleventh Doubt”, the diaries of 1942, the socio-political essay and other “material evidence” in his 1944 case were returned to the Heinrich Gorchakov from the KGB .

In 1992, he made a presentation on “Death as a Feat” at the International Symposium on the Centenary of Marina Tsvetaeva in Paris. In 1993, he read a report on Marina Tsvetaeva's “The Secret of the Verse” at the First International Scientific and Thematic Conference in Moscow. In the same year, the American publishing house Aytiqvari published his book On Marina Tsvetaeva. Through the eyes of a contemporary . ”

Since September 1994, he lived in Israel , in Afula . Member of the Federation of Writers Unions of Israel. The author of the book of camp memoirs “L-1-105” (Jerusalem, 1995 [published as an audiobook in 2006 ]; second edition of the book is Moscow, “University Book”, 2009). In 1997, he was awarded the first prize of the Union of Russian-speaking writers of Israel for this book as the best book of the year. In the same year, a second book of memoirs , Fate Overlaid Circuits: From Kolyma to Jerusalem , was published on a grant from the American Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Culture (Jerusalem; audiobook - Moscow, 2007; second edition of the book - Moscow, University Book, 2010). In 2000, the Moscow publishing house Concord LTD published a book about Solzhenitsyn - “Afterword.“ L-1-105 “”, written with his wife Leia Gorchakova-Elshtein. In 2002, the Jerusalem publishing house “S-press” published the book “Secrets of Poetry " .

In 2013, the book “The Glory of an Authentic Charter” was published (a thesis on A. Twardowski’s poem “Far Away”, 1962, Manzhent Publishing House, Smolensk). He is the author of a number of articles published in the journal Russian Literature (Amsterdam), in the collections Song of Life (Paris), Cultural Heritage of Russian Emigration (Moscow), and in the Moscow and Israeli press.

• Personal site of Heinrich Gorchakov
• Henry Gorchakov (Elshtein) - Administration and scientific management of the Marina Tsvetaeva House-Museum
• http://prstr.narod.ru/texts/num0803/gor0803.htm (inaccessible link)