Koluntsev, Fedor Avisovich

Born in an intelligent Armenian family. Mother - Maria Khristoforovna Barkhudaryan, in the childhood of Chaylakhova (1896 - 1975), originally from Nakhichevan-on-Don, received a musical education, worked as a proofreader in a Moscow publishing house. Father - Avet Bogdanovich Ter-Barkhudaryan (1896 - 1944), a descendant of an ancient Zangesurian clan, a party worker, served in Moscow and Transcaucasia.

Tadeos was born in Moscow, but spent his childhood and youth in Tbilisi. After graduating from school, he entered the philological faculty of Tbilisi University , studied at the MOL literary association, where he met Wil Ordzhonikidze (the future children's writer), Bulat Okudzhava and Gustav Aizenberg - the future famous screenwriter Anatoly Grebnev , whom he maintained friendly relations with until the end of his life . He worked for a short time in the Russian Youth Theater, where Georgy Tovstonogov staged his first performances, instilling in Tadeos a love of theater, but dissuading him from becoming an actor. Unlike many of his peers, he did not participate in the war - astigmatism and severe myopia prevented him.

After the father’s early death, mother and son moved to post-war Moscow, where Tadeos went to work for the Young Guard publishing house and entered the prose department at the Literary Institute . The head of his creative workshop, Konstantin Fedin, noted in his student a good sense of the word and the ability to build a phrase (under the influence of Yuri Olesha , Tadeos was fond of rhythmic prose). In the institute's years, he made his literary debut under the pseudonym “Fedor Koluntsev” (in the language of the Zangzezur ancestors “colun” is firm, stubborn). All his life he combined writing with literary work (he worked as a senior editor at the publishing house "Soviet Writer" for 20 years), he passed on his experience to young writers. F.A.Koluntsev died from a long-standing hereditary pulmonary disease, was buried in Moscow, at the old Armenian cemetery, next to his beloved prose writer Andrei Platonov .

One of the first readers of the first literary experiments of Tadeos, back in the Tbilisi period, was Bulat Okudzhava , who also showed his friend his poems and songs (Fyodor Avisovich sang Bulat Shalvovich’s songs in friendly feasts all his life). About the literary institute seminar, where Yuri Trifonov was Koluntsev’s friend, he said that “the Fedino students had the nickname“ intellectuals ”, as if carrying a reflection of the style and appearance of our leader” ^[1] .

In 1955, a young novelist - already like Fyodor Koluntsev - published a collection of short stories, “Roads are Calling.” An attempt at the same time to become a screenwriter in the studio of A. Dovzhenko was unsuccessful (Alla’s wife was more successful) ^[2] . Three years later, Fyodor Avisovich joined the Union of Writers of the USSR (member ticket No. 00222). In 1962, he released his first novel, At the Nikitsky Gate, in 1967, in the same publishing house, The Soviet Writer, the novel Waiting. About Koluntsev’s third novel, “Morning, Day, Evening” (1978), Yuri Nagibin wrote in an internal review that “the author has a lot of mind, talent, spiritual maturity and love for people, understanding of their weaknesses, oddities, passions”.

Being a non-career man, non-fussing and modest, Fyodor Avisovich was content to classify himself as an “urban” prose writer, whom friends and colleagues nevertheless knew the price - he was friends with the already mentioned friends of youth and Silva Kaputikyan , with Leonid Leonov , with whom he traveled to the first his trip to Yugoslavia with Vladimir Soloukhin and Konstantin Vanshenkin , who left warm memories of their friendship, was familiar with Mitchell Wilson and John Steinbeck , whose letter of invitation to visit Kolunets was carefully kept.

Fyodor Avisovich devoted much time and energy to the education of young writers - in the 80s he taught classes at the Literary Studio at the Komsomol Committee of the Young Communist League, together with Alexander Rekemchuk - a prose workshop at the Literary Institute (prose writer Yevgeny Nekrasov , memoirist George Yelin who left about senior shop assistant interesting memories ^[3] ).

In the late 1980s, Fyodor Koluntsev worked on a large book on the youth and husbandhood of the pre-war generation - before his premature departure on the eve of the 65th anniversary. In an obituary in a writer’s newspaper, it was noted that “one of the brightest and most subtle of our“ urban ”prose writers fell absurdly, inexplicably from the literary process” ^[4] . The widow of the writer Alla Belyakova prepared the latest novel “The Light of Winter” for publication and released in 1991.

In 1951, he married a student at the Literary Institute Alla Mikhailovna Belyakova (1926 - 1994), niece of Alexander Belyakov (navigator of the crew V.P. Chkalov), who became a screenwriter and artist. After the death of her husband, she was engaged in his literary heritage.

• “The roads are calling” (Stories), “Young Guard”, 1955
• “At the Nikitsky Gate” (Roman), “Soviet Writer”, 1962
• “Waiting” (Roman), “Soviet Writer”, 1967
• “Morning, Day, Evening” (Roman), “Soviet Writer”, 1978
• “The Light of Winter” (Roman), “Soviet Writer”, 1991