Dyatlov Pass (story)

The story has two storylines - fiction and documentary. Several mystical coincidences force the main character, on behalf of whom the story is being narrated, to abandon the planned story about the school, and she, against her will, begins to write about what happened in 1959, long before her birth, the death of a student tourist group of the Ural Polytechnic Institute , led by fifth-year student Igor Woodpeckers.

More than ten years after the publication of the story, Anna Matveeva talked about her plan:

Nekrasov ’s film [“ The Secret of the Woodpecker Pass ”] inspired me for this work, and it turned out to be the most complete, since I worked a lot in the archives. When I became acquainted with this topic, I experienced strong feelings and most of all - a sense of injustice of what happened to the students. It consists not only in the fact that young people died, but also in the veil of secrecy: they tried to shut up their death in every possible way, few people knew about it outside the Sverdlovsk Region for more than 40 years, their parents were not given the bodies of the dead children for funerals for a long time ... ^{[ one]}

Anna Matveeva considers in the story 16 versions of the death of the Dyatlov tourist group of various origins and gives her own assessment of the probability of each (from 0 to 70%), but she dwells on her own refined one. At the same time, using the art form of a literary work, Matveeva sets out this version not even on behalf of the main character or other heroes, but by means of a text that appears from nowhere on the main character's computer. According to Matveeva, Dyatlov’s group died from a warhead explosion or a rocket fuel explosion:

The group was under the influence of two factors - a shock wave (obviously from an explosion), which caused severe bodily harm in some of the group members (presumably for those who STANDED at the time of exposure, those who lay only stunned) and chemical poisoning (rather total from nitric acid). Thus, the subsequent death of the group members was caused not only and not so much by the low ambient temperature, but by exposure to chemicals. Indirect signs - unusual skin color, vision problems and lungs.

Two possible sources of explosion are a warhead or an explosion of rocket fuel. A warhead - either conventional or nuclear - a TNT shell explosion and radioactive contamination of the area. WITHOUT NUCLEAR EXPLOSION ^[2] .

Art criticism

Literary critics Alexei Mokrousov (in the Domovoi magazine ) and Dmitry Bykov (in the Russian Journal ) reacted positively to the journal publication of the Dyatlov Pass. Bykov, who said about the author of the story that “the other texts of Matveyeva do not particularly inspire me, this is really a good female urban prose, but nothing more”, not only highlighted “Dyatlov Pass”, but wrote that the author “did the best thing in Russian literature of 2001 ” ^[3] .

At first, I was annoyed by the details of the storyteller’s personal life, the history of her relationship with her husband, long conversations with friends - but then I realized that Matveyeva was not writing, in fact, about the tragedy at Dyatlov Pass. She writes about how a modern woman is experiencing this tragedy, how she learns to live with a clear understanding of the simple fact that there are insoluble issues, irrational forces and unpunishable crimes. How she learns to live for others who have not survived - not to avenge them, but to live for them; how she tries to penetrate the world of another ^[3] .

What was significant in Bykov’s perception of the story was that he first read documentary material about the death of the tourist group:

The thing, firstly, is that this thing catches for real: I hardly slept for three nights, it’s really scary ^[3] .

However, and ten years later, in 2011, he, specifying the reason for the success of Anna Matveeva, did not change his opinion about the book as a whole, again returning to the importance of the documentary basis:

Oddly enough, in this virtuoso book - unconsciously-virtuoso, it seems to me, because the author was inexperienced - it’s more terrible to read not versions, not autopsy reports, and even more so not discussions about possible mystical causes of the disaster, but lists of property discovered by tourists in backpacks . Bike footcloths, notebooks with recordings of tourist songs of that time, the wall newspaper "Evening Otorten" made on the last night ... Why do these everyday, purely everyday things make such a wild impression? Probably because they let the tragedy go down in life, proving that it didn’t happen somewhere, but nearby: students from the Dyatlov group sang the same songs that our parents studied at the same Sverdlovsk institutes as they are now, renamed ... The special sadness is that they were all so Soviet, in the best sense, so proud of their satellite, they were waiting for the first man to go into space (and did not wait), and now they would most likely be disappointed, forever grumbling with MNS or retired teachers who vote for the communists. Life shows how close everything is ^[4] .

Content criticism

Critics of the documentary content of the story of Anna Matveeva note that she cites the materials of the case, which she is unlikely to have completely read, drawing conclusions from these separate materials that are not entirely reliable. At the same time, the most massive, book-supporting online discussion was launched at the forum of the Urals Television Agency , owned by Anna Matveeva's husband Innokenty V. Sheremet .

Quotes that are cited from the materials of the “case” sometimes break off at a place that does not have sufficient informational significance, and where it is necessary according to the “script” of a work of art. This creates both a misconception among the reader and some unhealthy excitement among engaged researchers on this issue. For example, Matveeva cites an excerpt from the conclusion of the pathologist that a member of the Dyatlov group D. had no language. But what was written further, that is, almost half of the soft tissues of the face was not, for some reason completely ignored. Of course, the most zealous regulars of the TAU Riddle of the Woodpeckers forum, who accept the only version - the "Sweep version", immediately spread a discussion of this piquant detail (lack of only language) into almost 100 pages of the forum.

Meanwhile, this can easily be explained by the fact that this participant was found already in the month of May, in the current stream as a result of thawing, when all kinds of small rodents and insects wake up from hibernation, and water can also have a strong destructive effect on dead tissue.

- Version of the analysis of the incident with the I. Dyatlov group

In 2006, Anna Matveeva sold the rights to the film adaptation of the novel “Dyatlov Pass” to the Sverdlovsk film studio ^[1] . The script of the movie thriller with the working title “Pass”, with the complete retention of the plot of the book, was written by Alexander Arkhipov and Yaroslav Pulinovich . The film was supposed to be directed by Marina Kaltmina ^[5] . The film as a result was never shot.

• The main character-narrator has a “supertourist” father, a hunter and fisherman, whose profession remains unknown to the reader. (To the father, the heroine contrasts herself with the “urbanoid,” who is afraid of tourists.) At the same time, the heroine casually mentions in one of the dialogues the author’s real father, the Ural toponymist Alexander Matveev , without giving his name:

The mountains there <...>, judging by the photographs, are wide and short, bald - there is almost no vegetation there. True, one scientist with a bunch of books about the geographical names of the Urals wrote that he had been to Kholat-Syakhyl several times and saw amazingly bright forget-me-nots on top of it ... ^[6]

• 2001 - Long list of the National Bestseller Award .
• 2001 - Finalist of the Belkin Prize.

• Matveeva Anna . Dyatlov Pass: A Tale (Beginning) // Ural . - 2000. - No. 12 .
• Matveeva Anna . Dyatlov Pass: A Tale (Ending) // Ural . - 2001. - No. 1 .
• Matveeva Anna . Dyatlov Pass // Anna Matveeva . Pas de trois. - Yekaterinburg: U-Factor, 2001.
• Matveeva Anna . Dyatlov Pass // Anna Matveeva . Pas de trois. - Yekaterinburg: U-Factor, 2002.
• Matveeva Anna . Dyatlov Pass. - M .: AST , 2005.

• Bykov Dmitry . Bykov-quickly: look-26 // Russian Journal . - January 16, 2002.
• Bykov Dmitry . Dmitry Bykov is looking for skeletons in the closet. Should I go back to unsolved crimes? // GQ . - February 10, 2012. Archived December 20, 2016.