“The Lone Sail Whitens” - a story by Valentin Kataev , written in 1936 .
| Lone sail whitens | |
|---|---|
 Cover of the first edition of the story | |
| Genre | story |
| Author | Valentin Kataev |
| Original language | Russian |
| Date of writing | 1936 |
| Date of first publication | 1936 |
As the name is taken the first line of the poem by Mikhail Lermontov “ Sail ”.
Until 1986, the story “The Lone Sail Whitens” was published 121 times in the USSR and was translated into 34 languages. The total circulation amounted to 7.955 million copies [1] .
The story “A sail sailing lonely” is included in the epic (later called “Waves of the Black Sea”), which is connected by common protagonists, along with works created later on (indicated in the order of development of the storyline):
- The novel "Farm in the steppe" - 1956.
- The story "The Electric Machine" - 1943.
- The novel "Winter Wind" - 1960.
- The novel "Catacombs" ("For the power of the Soviets") - 1948.
Story
The action takes place in Odessa in 1905 . Brothers Petya and Pavlik Bachey are returning from the summer vacation to the city. They spent the whole summer in “economy” (an estate rented out by summer owners to summer cottages), and the revolutionary events of 1905 literally passed by them - a wave of black smoke from the battleship “Potemkin” and the Black Sea Fleet on the sea horizon. On the way, the boys and their father save Rodion Zhukov, a fugitive Potemkin sailor, from his pursuers, sneaking from Romania to Odessa. In Akkerman, the family transplanted to the ship going to Odessa. On the same ship Petya again meets the sailor. But, besides the sailor, there is also a detective on the ship, who has tracked down the criminal and is going to arrest him upon arrival in Odessa. The sailor manages to escape by jumping from the ship into the sea and swimming towards the shore. A detective, injured in an attempt to detain, was forced to wait for the ship to land. The sailor hardly swam to the fishing scows and began to sink, but he was saved by the old fisherman and his grandson - Gavrik, friend of Petit. The sailor was seriously ill, but he was cured, having sheltered for the time of recovery in a fishing hut on the Black Sea. This sailor with a small tattoo on his arm in the form of a blue anchor will be found more than once in the plot of all four works included in the epic “ Waves of the Black Sea ”.
The story is autobiographical in nature. The main character of the story, Pete Bachey, who was written off from himself, Kataev gave the name of his father and the surname of his mother, and the image of Pavlik, brother Petya, was written off from the author’s younger brother - Yevgeny Petrovich Kataev, who later wrote satirical works under the pseudonym Yevgeny Petrov . Eugene Petrov earned worldwide fame by co-writing with Ilya Ilf the satirical novels “ 12 Chairs ” and “The Golden Calf ”.
Films
- 1937 - Feature film “The Lone Sail Whitens” ( Soyuzdetfilm )
- 1975 - The epic "Waves of the Black Sea" ( Dovzhenko Film Studio , TO "Ray" )
In monumental art
In Odessa, on Vera Kholodnaya Square in 1988, a monument was erected to the main characters of the story - the boys Pete and Gavrik.
See also
- Conduit and Swamp
- Shkid Republic (story)
- The road goes far ...
Notes
- ↑ Book Publishing of the USSR. Figures and facts. 1917-1987 / E.L. Nemirovsky , M.L. Platova. - M .: Book, 1987. - S. 301. - 320 p. - 3000 copies.