Zalygin, Sergey Pavlovich

Zalygin was born on December 6, 1913 (November 23 according to the old style) in the village of Durasovka in the Ufa province (now Sukharevka , Meleuzovsky district , Korneevsky s / s, Bashkortostan ). Father - Pavel Ivanovich Zalygin, a native of the peasants of the Tambov province, studied at Kiev University, was expelled and exiled to the Ufa province for revolutionary activity; mother - Lyubov Timofeevna Zalygina (abkin Abkin), the daughter of a bank employee in the town of Krasny Kholm, Tver province, studied at the Higher Women's Courses in St. Petersburg.

The early years of Sergei Zalygin passed in the Urals, at the Satka plant. In 1920, the family moved to Altai, in the city of Barnaul, where Sergei graduated from a seven-year school, then the Barnaul Agricultural College. He worked as an agronomist in the Tashtypsky district farm union of Khakassia (1931), and witnessed the tragic events of collectivization. In 1933–1939 studied at the Omsk Agricultural Institute at the irrigation and drainage faculty. During his studies, he was fond of the ideas of the scientist and poet P. L. Dravert , the works of A. I. Voeikov , V. I. Vernadsky . During the Great Patriotic War he served as an engineer-hydrologist in the Siberian Military District, at the Salekhard Hydrometeorological Station. After demobilization, he returned to the Department of Irrigation and Reclamation at the Omsk Agricultural Institute, in 1948 he defended his thesis on the topic “Choice of a billing year for the design of irrigation systems in the unstable humidification zone”, headed the department, went on business trips to rural areas of the Omsk region, and also to the construction of Ust- Kamenogorsk and Bukhtarma hydropower plants.

He began to write in his school years. In 1930, his play was on the club stages of Barnaul ^[1] . While studying at the Omsk State Agricultural Institute, he was a staff correspondent for the newspaper Omskaya Pravda; after the war he continued to cooperate in it. In the 1940s - the beginning. 1950s He wrote stories published in the Omsk Almanac, in the Siberian Lights magazine and in copyright collections. The first collection was published in 1941 ("Stories", Omsk), the next in the postwar years ("Northern Stories", Omsk, 1947; "Grain", Omsk, 1950; "On the Great Land", M., 1951, and other).

Since 1952 he became the author of The New World (the first publication is the story "Second Action", 1952, No. 9), where he prints a series of essays, "This Spring" (1954, No. 8) about the interference of authorities in life peasant. This publication brought Zalygin fame and brought him close to the chief editor of the magazine A. Tvardovsky , whose influence he explained his decision to become a professional writer ^[2] . Since 1970, after the dispersal of the editorial board of the New World and the resignation of Twardowski, and until 1986, Zalygin, out of solidarity, did not submit his works to this journal ^[3] .

In 1955, Zalygin moved to Novosibirsk and engaged mainly in literary work, leaving no scientific work (he was an employee of the Transport and Energy Institute of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, participated in the project of academician P. Ya. Kochina on the irrigation of the Kulunda steppe). In these years, he writes, along with stories, works of larger forms: the satirical novel "Witnesses" (1956), the novel "Altai Trails" (1959–1961), which reflected his impressions of participating in a biological expedition to Altai under the guidance of a professor G.V. Krylova (1957). The literary critic I. Dedkov called the “Paths of Altai” “an introduction to the philosophy <...> on whose basis all the main books of Zalygin were built” ^[4] . In 1956, Zalygin made a trip to China as part of a group of writers. Impressions of this trip are reflected in a series of essays ^[5] .

In 1964, in the “New World” Zalygin's novel “On the Irtysh” was published, dedicated to the catastrophic reconstruction of peasant life at the turn of the 1930s. - collectivization. “For the first time in the Soviet censored press, the truth about collectivization was told, for the first time collectivization was interpreted not in the canonical Sholokhov interpretation, but as a tragedy of the Russian peasantry, and more broadly - a national catastrophe” ^[6] . Official criticism accused the author of distorting “concrete historical truth” and “ideological and artistic insolvency” ^[7] . The artistic significance of the story can be judged by the review of A. Nyman : “For more than seventy years, the reading day has been separated from the events described, which I have perceived as a living tragedy from my youth. <...> The tragedy did not disappear, did not weaken, it simply moved to the area reserved for tragedies. I read “On the Irtysh,” like Sophocles, like Aeschylus ” ^[8] .

By the end of the 1960s, Zalygin moved to Moscow, completely switched to literary activity. In 1968-1972 leads a prose workshop at the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky. In 1969, he became secretary of the board of the joint venture of the RSFSR; in 1986–1990, he entered the bureau of the secretariat of the joint venture of the USSR. He signed a letter from a group of Soviet writers to the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda on August 31, 1973, about Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov ; was one of those who condemned the metropolitan anthology in 1979. At the same time, Zalygin was never a member of the Communist Party and in 1986 became the first non-partisan editor-in-chief of the Soviet literary magazine.

In 1967, Salt Pad was published, a novel about the events of the civil war in Siberia, based on historical documents (Zalygin collected materials for several years, worked in archives). Here, the image of a fanatic-communist is opposed, which is opposed by the main character - the peasant leader Meshcheryakov (his partisan commander E. M. Mamontov was his prototype). In 1973, two experimental works for Zalygin were published: the psychological novel South American Version and the science fiction novel Oska - A Funny Boy. In the novel "Commission" (1975) Zalygin returns to the period of the civil war in Siberia. The action of the following, the most ambitious, novel “After the Storm” (1982–1985) takes place in the 1920s. It does not involve peasants, but “former” intellectuals who were exiled or fled from Soviet power to the Siberian hinterland. I. Dedkov defined the uniqueness of this novel: “reproduction not so much of characters <...> as of various individual or group“ philosophies ”. This is an attempt to recreate the “ideological landscape” of Soviet Russia of the twenties, to understand the life of human thought of this time ” ^[9] . “After the Storm” is Zalygin’s last major work on a historical theme. In the 80s and 90s, he writes short stories and short stories about modern life. Works of the 90s they differ in general in a more free form, in the combination of fiction with journalism.

An extensive part of Zalygin's literary heritage consists of essays and articles on Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as on Hungarian and Latvian writers. The most significant of his literary works are about A.P. Chekhov (essay "My Poet", 1969) and A. Platonov ("Tales of the Realist and the Realism of the Storyteller", 1970).

In 1986, Zalygin was appointed editor-in-chief of the New World magazine, which, under his leadership, began to play an important role in the politics of publicity. In the first issue of the “New World” for 1987, the novels “Pit” by A. Platonov and “Bison” by D. Granin were published. For the first time in the USSR, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak appeared on the pages of the New World (the text was prepared and commented by V. Borisov and E. Pasternak), 1984 by George Orwell, The Gulag Archipelago and other works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; the novels “The Humble Cemetery” and “Stroybat” by Sergei Kaledin, “Odlyan, or Air of Freedom” by Leonid Gabyshev, journalistic materials about the Chernobyl disaster by G. U. Medvedev , “Advances and Debts” by the economist N. P. Shmelev and others were published. During the years of perestroika, the struggle between the magazine and censorship authorities did not go smoothly. Some episodes of this struggle are described by A. Solzhenitsyn (“A grain between two millstones”, part 4 // Novy Mir, 2003, No. 11) and Zalygin himself (“Notes that do not need a plot” // October, 2003, No. 9 -eleven). In 1991, the circulation of the New World reached two million seven hundred thousand copies.

Over the years of work in the "New World" Zalygin has gained a reputation as a determined and principled person ^[10] . At the same time, as the head of a prestigious magazine that held a “non-partisan” (both politically and aesthetically) position, he could refuse to publish to famous authors ^[11] .

In 1989-1991 - People's Deputy of the USSR. Member of the Presidential Council under M.S. Gorbachev. In 1990, he signed the Roman appeal.

Since 1991 - Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (section of the language and literature).

Sergei Pavlovich Zalygin died on April 19, 2000. He was buried in Moscow at the Troekurovsky cemetery ^[12]

Leaving the profession of a hydrologist engineer in the early 60s, Zalygin continued to monitor developments in land reclamation and water management in the country and took an active part in public campaigns against environmentally dangerous hydro-construction projects developed by the State Planning Commission until the last years of the USSR.

The turning point for Zalygin was 1961–1962. - until then, "I had no fundamental doubts about the Great Plan for the transformation of nature ." In 1961, a feasibility study for the project of the Nizhne-Ob Hydroelectric Power Station was compiled at the Hydroproject ^[13] - “I was horrified, shocked. After all, I used to be a hydrologist, the head of hydrographic work in Western Siberia, I worked in the alignment of the Angalsky cape (Salekhard), where it was planned to build a hydroelectric station, and visually, as in reality, imagined that he would create a 132 reservoir in the nature of the great lowland. thousand square meters km, and what - in the regime of the Kara Sea, which is not in vain called the “weather kitchen” ” ^[14] . Zalygin became one of the main participants in the struggle to prevent the construction of the Lower Ob. He traveled around the country, collecting information from engineers, scientists, and geological prospectors. The main reason for the cancellation of the project was the arguments of prospectors that flooding would leave giant deposits of oil and gas under water. Zalygin’s articles published in Literaturnaya Gazeta (Forests, Lands, Water, June 26, 1962; Forests, Lands, Water, and the Office, Jan 26, 1963) played an exceptional role in giving this struggle a public, civil character. In January 1963, opponents of the hydroelectric station hung a number of Literary Gazette with its article in the hall where the decisive meeting of the State Planning Commission was to take place - at which the construction of the hydroelectric station was canceled.

In 1985–1986 Zalygin organizes speeches by writers and the public against the project of transferring part of the flow of Siberian rivers to the south , and publishes a number of articles in the central press ^[15] . He took the cancellation of the project as evidence of new, unprecedented opportunities for democratic intervention in the environmental activities of the state ^[16] . In the wake of this success, the Ecology and Peace Association was created, which Zalygin led from the moment of its creation in 1989 until 1993. The optimism of the perestroika years regarding the environmental policy of the state and the public environmental movement soon gave way to Zalygin's anxiety and disappointment ^[17] . In 1993, he joined the Kedr ecological party, but in 1995, due to disagreements with the party’s leadership, he quit ^[18] . However, the problem of the relationship between man and nature does not cease to occupy him; most of Zalygin's works of the 90s are subordinate to her (including The Ecological Novel ^[19] ).

• Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1964)
• Hero of Socialist Labor with the presentation of the Order of Lenin (1988)
• USSR State Prize (1968) for the novel Salt Pad
• Prize named after M. D. Millionshchikov Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1989)
• environmental award of the American magazine "Conde Nast Traveler" (1991)
• Order of Friendship of Peoples ( December 5, 1993 ) - for his great personal contribution to the development of domestic literature and art, the strengthening of international cultural relations and fruitful social activities ^[20]
• Moscow City Hall Prize in the field of literature and art ^[21] (1999)
• Prize of the President of the Russian Federation in the field of literature and art of 1999 ( February 17, 2000 ) ^[22]

Major Publications of Fiction and Journalism

• Selected Works in 2 vols. M .: Hood. literature, 1974
• Collected works in 4 vols. M.: Young Guard, 1979-1980
• Position [Publicist. essays]. M .: Soviet Russia, 1988
• Collected Works in 6 vols. M.: Fiction, 1989–1991
• Freedom of Choice [Hood. and an autobiographer. works of the 1990s]. M .: Panorama, 1998

Selected Literature

• Cossack V. Lexicon of Russian literature of the XX century = Lexikon der russischen Literatur ab 1917 / [trans. with him.]. - M .: RIC "Culture", 1996. - XVIII, 491, [1] p. - 5,000 copies. - ISBN 5-8334-0019-8 .
• Vakhitova T. M. S. P. Zalygin // Russian literature of the XX century. Prose writers, poets, playwrights. Bibliographic dictionary. M., 2005.Vol. 2, p. 19-23.
• Zalygin, Sergey Pavlovich // Encyclopedia " Around the World ".
• Kolesnikova G. Sergey Zalygin. M .: Soviet writer, 1969
• Terakopyan L. Sergey Zalygin. M., 1973
• Nuikin A. Maturity of the artist: Essay on the work of S. Zalygin. M., 1984
• Dedkov I.A. Sergey Zalygin. Pages of life and creativity. M .: Sovremennik, 1985
• He is. Hand over your thoughts ... (Preface to Sob. Cit. S. Zalygin in 6 volumes vol. T. 1, 5-30)
• Slavnikova O. Old Russian. Late prose of Sergei Zalygin // New World, 1998, No. 12
• Kostyrko S. P. Do not be afraid of yourself // New World, 2003, No. 12
• He is. Zalygin's scale
• Arosev G. The Chosen One of Fate // New World, 2013, No. 12

The most complete bibliography in Russian and Polish is collected in the dissertation by I. Rudzevich. Man and nature in the works of Sergei Zalygin (Olsztyn, 2003)