Zanadvorov, German Leonidovich

The early years

Born on September 18 ( October 1, according to a new style) 1910 in Perm . Mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, was a teacher, father, Leonid Petrovich, was a railway engineer. On the male line, the Zanadvorovs came from the old noble families of Russia, which had their origin from the time of Peter the Great.

Herman was the eldest of four children. The family could not boast of wealth, but the parents tried to pay as much attention as possible to their offspring, every summer they took them to the village, to the "summer cottage". The house had a good library. Germana grew up as a capable child; at the age of five, he independently mastered reading. He began to study when the family lived in Omsk , and immediately went to third grade. Later, he surprised his parents by drawing the scenery for the fairy tale “The Frog Princess ”, carving hero figures and playing all the roles alone.

As a child, he was fond of designing toy ships. Once built a steam ship; from the burning alcohol, the water poured into the flask was heated, and a stream of steam, beating from the flask through a special tube, set the blade wheel in motion. Sister Tatyana Leonidovna remembered the three of them - German, she and their brother Vladislav - launched the Victoria sailing brig on the Nizhny Tagil pond ^[1] .

In school years, the main hobby of Herman was history. He and his brother Vladislav, who was three years younger ^[1] , read a lot of historical literature and came up with complex war games. From paper they made figures of soldiers, generals and marshals. Sometimes the number of their "army" reached 500 "people". The game of the war of 1812 was especially popular among the brothers. Then they still did not suspect what a tragic role the real war would play in their fate.

Because of their father’s profession, the Zanadvorovs often moved from one city to another, lived in Perm , Omsk, Nizhny Tagil , Ishim , Chelyabinsk , Sverdlovsk ... Brothers went hiking with pleasure, collected collections of stones, insects. Once near the Shartash station, near Sverdlovsk, they found a fragment of a mammoth tusk, which was handed over to the Nizhny Tagil Museum ^[1] . They studied well and loved to read. Books developed a craving for literary work in them. German began to write while still a schoolboy. His first works were articles in the wall newspaper and poems published in the newspaper Tagil Worker.

In 1928, German graduated from school in Nizhny Tagil and went to the city ​​on the Neva to enter the geological faculty of Leningrad University . Despite the excellent passing of exams, he was not accepted: the origin was not worker-peasant. Brother Vladislav was more fortunate: he decided to study as a geologist in Sverdlovsk.

Work life

Soon, the Zanadvorov family moved to Chelyabinsk. German got a job at the chemical laboratory of the D.V. Kolyuschenko plant . He was mobilized in the army, but did not reach the end of his term, freed due to illness (in the eighth grade, he somehow wade a cold river, a severe cold led to rheumatism and rheumatic heart disease ^[1] ). He worked at the plant for some time, then transferred to the railway newspaper “On Steel Ways” (hereinafter “Call”). In 1933, he worked for several months in the newspaper Chelyabinsk Worker as a correspondent for the industrial transport department.

German proved to be a talented journalist. But he dreamed of something higher than just journalistic articles. He was haunted by the idea of ​​writing a novel about the inventors of the Cherepanovs locomotive. For this, he devoted much time to self-education, studied the history of the Urals , and was well versed in the work of D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak . He could have taken place as an excellent journalist, become an outstanding prose writer, but his illness hindered him greatly.

Five years, German worked in Chelyabinsk. In 1934, on the advice of doctors, he changed the climate, moving to Ukraine. In Kiev, he became an employee of Rabochaya Gazeta and a year later was appointed to the post of executive secretary of the editorial office. He married an employee of Maria Yaremchuk. Despite the move, his illness did not leave him; he often lay in the hospital. In 1937, he wrote to his sister:

"... I know for sure enough: not so many years are allotted to me ... In my opinion, since you have been given a short time, so live it as it should, do it and find out the maximum that is possible during this time."

He did not change this principle until the end of his short life.

In 1940, Zanadvorov and his wife were transferred to work in the political department of the Southwest Railway . He began to write short stories, a book about the Cherepanovs. However, everything that he created then disappeared during the war.

War and Doom

The Great Patriotic War began. Despite German's disability, he and his wife were enrolled in the Fifth Army as frontline journalists. The army was surrounded, and Herman was in a prisoner of war camp. Maria saved him by persuading the policemen to let her sick husband go. She decided to take half-dead Herman to her homeland, the village of Vilkhovaya (Grushkovsky district of Odessa region, nowadays the Annunciation district of Kirovograd region ). Maria sold a coat, bought a horse. At first she drove her husband on horseback, but on the way the horse fell, and then Maria drove him in a wheelbarrow. On the way, Herman persuaded Maria: "Drop me, I will die anyway." With great difficulty, they reached Vilkhova, breaking 300 km through the occupied territory. In the village, Mary, together with her parents, nursed the patient, and he gradually felt better.

German and Maria lived in the Nazi-occupied village for almost two and a half years - from November 1941 to March 1944. Zanadvorov organized resistance there to the invaders. Maria’s friend Zinaida Sychevskaya, a former underground worker from Vilkhova who worked as a teacher after the war, described in her memoirs her first impression of meeting him:

“German Leonidovich came to us in early November 1941. German's appearance caused pain and pity. So thin. Sore, pale, sunken eyes, lame. Low. But there was so much inner strength in this physically weak person! Such deep judgments and high culture. From the first meeting, he evoked sympathy and respect. We listened to his advice, everything was clear with him. Kindness and truth, strength and warmth blew from him. We believed him and realized that he was our leader. ”

Before Herman appeared in the village, the locals, ready to fight the Nazis, were disorganized. Zanadvorov managed to combine them. He headed the underground group Pobeda, later renamed the Red Star (Ukrainian: Chervona Zirka ) ^[2] , established contact with the partisans, devised leaflet texts for them, helped the villagers to avoid being hijacked to Germany, and obtained information about the situation at the fronts. Friends managed to get a typewriter to print leaflets, assemble a radio. Zinaida Sychevskaya writes in her memoirs: “The members of the underground organization detained carts with bread that went to Germany, hid and treated partisans, helped young people escape and hid from being hijacked to Germany, distributed leaflets, planted faith in victory.”

But the main occupation of Zanadvorov in those troubled days was literature. At night, secretly, closing the shutters tightly, on a lounger behind the curtain, in the light of a smoker on the reverse sides of collective farm consignments, he wrote in pencil his stories, essays, chapters of a future novel about the war, and kept a diary. What he wrote then was an accusation of fascism and Nazism. These works are evidence of the atrocities and atrocities of the invaders. They do not leave the reader indifferent. The stories of German Zanadvorov are concise, truthful and tragic. The "Lullaby" tells of how a young Jewess was horrified that a German soldier would crush her infant with the boot, go crazy and strangle the baby herself. In the story "Cream", the Nazis hang the mother of three small children just because she did not give milk to the invaders. The story “It was spring” - about the love, fidelity and death of a young partisan, in it German surprisingly accurately predicted how they would die with Mary ...

Zanadvorov was looking for ways to forward manuscripts to his own. He decided to build a balloon, tie papers to it and send it to the rear. For this, he wrote an appeal: “Comrade! This bundle is from the German rear. The manuscripts in it are the conscience of a journalist in the occupied territory. The hottest, most convincing request: without delaying even an hour, to find a way to transfer them to the editorial office of the newspaper "Red Banner" for the poet Boris Poliychuk. " Part of his works thus flew into the unknown. In the future, I had to abandon the idea of ​​transporting papers by air: Herman was afraid that they would disappear.

In the diary he writes:

“We need to learn patience, but every day I feel how my nerves are losing. Sometimes it seems that I am losing my mind. But I have no right to show to anyone that I am renting. To some local comrades, I am to some extent an example ... "

His diary ends with the words:

“If I don’t survive, my stories and notes ...”

On the night of March 4-5, 1944, a week before the liberation of the village from the Nazis ^[2] , there was a conditional knock on the window. However, instead of partisans, policemen broke into the house. Someone betrayed Herman. He was tied up and taken away. Maria rushed after him. The next morning, their bodies were found in a ravine outside the village ...

Shortly before his death, Herman buried a manuscript box in the courtyard. Maria's father found him after the execution of his daughter and son-in-law. In 1946, German’s mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who came from the Urals, visited the grave of her son; she took the manuscript with her. In 1962, the sister of German Tatyana Leonidovna with her 13-year-old daughter Natasha visited Vilkhova.

From Zanadvorov’s works, chapters of an unfinished novel, six stories, diaries (in 413 small leaves, written in small handwriting), as well as farewell letters to parents and a friend were preserved. To the latter, he bequeathed his manuscripts in the hope that he would publish them and do so as soon as possible. Herman’s mother found a friend, but he did not accept Zanadvorov’s archives: apparently, he was afraid of responsibility for contacting a person from the occupation .

The archive was taken to Magnitogorsk , and for almost twenty years no one except the Zanadvorov family knew about it. Everyone understood that it was impossible to publish the works of the author, who was in occupation, in those days. But years later, Herman’s sister Tatyana Leonidovna, philologist, candidate of sciences, who worked for 33 years at the Magnitogorsk Pedagogical Institute , and several of her students transcribed Zanadvorov’s notes in four and a half months. Over 300 typewritten pages came out. Herman was entrusted with reading the manuscript to Nikolai Pavlovich Voronov , a Magnitogorsk writer, a friend of Tatyana. He prepared the texts for publication, but the Diary did not go out of print for a long time. Censorship was in the way. But Voronov persistently sought his publication.

Initially, the works of G. L. Zanadvorov appeared only in periodicals . In 1961, in the newspaper Magnitogorsk Worker , Voronov published his essay Fidelity about the writer G. L. Zanadvorov and his story, “It Was Spring.” In 1962, the journal “Ural” (No. 8-10) published the abbreviation “Diary of the executed”, and in the journal “ Ural Pathfinder ” two of German's pre-war stories. In 1963, in the Twinkle (No. 15), N. Voronov's essay, “Manuscripts Sent in a Balloon,” dedicated to G. L. Zanadvorov, and German's story “Overture” were published. In the same 1963, Nikolai Pavlovich read on the radio the story of Zanadvorov's “Duma about Kalashnikov”, which was published in the newspaper Trud the next year.

Only after Nikolai Voronov’s appeal to the Central Committee of the party in Chelyabinsk in 1964 did the first book by German Leonidovich “The Diary of the Shot” be published. It included not only Herman's diary entries, but also chapters from the novel, stories, letters. Responses to the book were published in several central publications, such as the Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta newspapers , the New World and Ogonyok magazines. And in 1967, N. Voronov’s book “The Zanadvorov Brothers”, a two-volume book “The Wind of Courage”, where the works of both Zanadvorov brothers German and Vladislav were published, was published in Perm.

The name of German Zanadvorov was carved at the memorial in Kiev to workers of the South-West Railway Department who died during the war.

• Zanadvorov G. L. THE DIARY OF THE SHOT ( Collection. Author: German Leonidovich Zanadvorov. Compiled and edited on a voluntary basis by N. P. Voronov. Design by R. V. Melnikov. Binding E. K. Pervyshina ). - Chelyabinsk: South Ural Book Publishing House, 1964 ^{[1] [3]} .
  • SUMMARY
    • G. L. Zanadvorov (p. 5)
  • CHAPTER NOVELTY AND STORIES
    • Chapters of the novel
      • War? .. It can’t be! (p. 27)
      • Orzhitsa (p. 34)
      • In captivity (p. 52)
      • Women (p. 64)
    • The stories
      • Lullaby (p. 74)
      • Prayer (p. 82)
      • Cream (p. 87)
      • It was spring (p. 94)
      • The Duma of Kalashnikov (p. 102)
      • Overture (p. 114)
  • DIARY AND LETTERS
    • Letters (p. 127)
    • Diary (p. 133)

• Zanadvorov German Leonidovich . Literary map of the Chelyabinsk region.
• Zanadvorov German Leonidovich . Writers of the Ural land.
• Zanadvorov brothers . Magnitogorsk metal.