Gore, Gennady Samoilovich

Gennady (Gdaliy Samuilovich) Gore was born in 1907 in the city of Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude ), spent his first year in prison, where his parents were imprisoned for revolutionary activity . In 1923 he moved to Petrograd, where he entered the literary department of the Faculty of Language and Material Culture of Leningrad State University . He was expelled from the university for his novel “The Cow” (published in 2000 in the magazine “Star” No. 10), after which he devoted himself completely to literary activity. 1930s spent in the Far North . In 1933, the first book of his short stories, “Painting,” was published in Leningrad . In 1934, Gore was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers .

At the beginning of World War II he joined the militia .

In the 1960s, he headed the Central Literary Association of Leningrad.

He was buried at Komarovsky cemetery in St. Petersburg . The grave is a monument of cultural and historical heritage.

The creative manner of Horus evolved in the 1920s under the influence of “strange” prose, especially by such authors as Konstantin Vaginov and Leonid Dobychin . A number of stories of that period, which were of a fantastic nature, were included in the collection “Painting” (1933), which was severely criticized for “formalism”.

In the years 1942-1943 in the evacuation, after the winter spent in the besieged Leningrad , Gore wrote a large cycle of poems, marked by the influence of poetry OBERIU and indirectly reflecting the condition of a person living in constant expectation of death. Some poems from the cycle were published in 2002 in the journal Zvezda, No. 5, in full in 2007, in the bilingual Russian-German edition (Gennadij Gor / Gennady Gor. Blockade / Blockade / Gedichte / Poems. / Aus dem Russischen übersetzt und herausgegeben von Peter Urban // Edition Korrespondenzen, Wien 2007.), and then in Russia in the publication: Gennady Gor. Red drop in the snow. Poems of 1942-1944. M .: Gilea , 2012

In the novel “Universitetskaya Embankment” (1959), the fates of three representatives of science are difficultly intertwined: an atomic physicist, a chemist, and an experienced agronomist. In the story “Five Corners” (1977), the artist Petrov-Vodkin is compared with the writer, in the image of which the features of the author are manifested, the problem of the relationship between the style and biography of the artist is posed.

Fiction Gennady Horus

After the war, Gore continued to write genre and thematically diverse prose, since the 1960s he gained fame as the author of science fiction works . These works are a typical example of "soft" (humanitarian) science fiction, touching on the "eternal themes" of literature: man and Time, the creator and his art, the search for truth and the definition of his place in the universe. In the story “A bothering interlocutor”, excerpts from the diary of a space alien stuck on prehistoric Earth allow the author to push representatives of various historical eras and observe the psychological breakdown of basic concepts and criteria; the real layer of narration combines with the utopian and with the novel about the novel. The same technique - earthly life, seen through the eyes of an alien child living on Earth, was used in the novel "Boy" (1965) (continued - the story "Clay Papuan" (1966)). In the novel “The Wanderer and the Time” (1962), the traditional sci-fi motive “sleeping wakes up” , contrary to the tradition of Soviet science fiction, does not entail a guided tour of the communist utopia. In it, as well as in the novel “Weir” (1964), the author needs paintings of the distant future, primarily for exploring the spiritual world of our descendants. In the story “Olga Nsu” (1965) and the story “Guests from the Oise” (1963), the problems of immortality and prolongation of human memory are discussed, respectively. In the consciousness of the hero of the novel Electronic Melmoth (1964), an immortal artificial personality co-exists in a machine. The close interweaving of reality and science fiction, of different eras and their corresponding psychologies makes up the background of such tales of Horus as the Minotaur (1967) and Theokrit's Blue Window (1968). The theme of the artist and his creation, the creation by the creator of a new reality, as well as various philosophical paradoxes associated with its interaction with the reality of the “old”, occupies an important place in the fantastic work of Horus. The hero of the story "The Great Actor Jones" (1966), "reincarnated" as the personality of Edgar Allan Poe , visits St. Petersburg in the 19th century. The artist, the hero of the story “Geometric Forest” (1973), is also transferred to the past and future by the power of thought, merges, passes into his creation. Similar topics were raised in the novel “Name” (1968) and stories - “Artist Weiss” (1966), “Garden” (1968). The new history of Pygmalion and Galatea, rich in philosophical and poetic allegories, is the plot of the only major science fiction work of the writer - the sculpture “Sculpture” (1971), whose hero is an alien living on Earth, traveling from the distant future in the 1920s, constantly meeting ( and losing) a mysterious woman - a muse, a symbol of romantic creativity.

The works of Gennady Gore are translated into English, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Georgian, Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, German, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, French, Czech, Japanese .

• Order of the Badge of Honor (February 9, 1967)

Books

• Blockade / Blockade / Gedichte / Poems. / Aus dem Russischen übersetzt und herausgegeben von Peter Urban // Edition Korrespondenzen, Wien 2007
• Poems. 1942 - 1944. - Moscow, Gilea. - 2012

Science Fiction List

• 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 .
• Geller L. M. Chapter 4. Structures of the genre: time and space, Ch. 6. Structures of the genre: plot // Universe beyond dogma. Reflections on Soviet science fiction. - London : OPI, 1985 .-- S. 137-140, 184-186. - 446 p. - ISBN 0-903868-58-X .

• Electronic archive G.S. Mountain
• Gore, Gennady Samoilovich in the library of Maxim Moshkov
• Oleg Yuryev about the poetry of Gennady Horus
• Graves of departed poets