Astafiev's works about the war list. The trench truth about the war by Viktor Astafiev. Interesting facts from life

Russian, Soviet writer, prose writer. playwright, essayist. He made a huge contribution to Russian literature. The largest writer in the genre of "village" and military prose. Veteran of the Great Patriotic War.

Biography

Victor Astafiev was born in the village of Ovsyanka, not far from Krasnoyarsk. The writer’s father, Pyotr Pavlovich Astafiev, went to prison for “sabotage” several years after the birth of his son, and when the boy was 7 years old, his mother drowned in an accident. Victor was raised by his grandmother. After leaving prison, the father of the future writer married a second time and went to Igarka with his new family, but did not earn the expected big money; on the contrary, he ended up in the hospital. The stepmother, with whom Victor had a tense relationship, kicked the boy out into the street. In 1937, Victor ended up in an orphanage.

After graduating from boarding school, Victor went to Krasnoyarsk, where he entered a factory apprenticeship school. After graduating, he worked as a train compiler at the Bazaikha station near Krasnoyarsk until he volunteered for the front in 1942. Throughout the war, Astafiev served with the rank of private, from 1943 on the front line, he was seriously wounded and shell-shocked. In 1945, V.P. Astafiev was demobilized from the army and, together with his wife (Maria Semyonovna Koryakina), came to her homeland - the city of Chusovoy in the western Urals. The couple had three children: daughters Lydia (1947, died in infancy) and Irina (1948-1987) and son Andrei (1950). At this time, Astafiev works as a mechanic, laborer, loader, carpenter, meat washer, and meat processing plant watchman.

In 1951, the writer's first story was published in the Chusovskoy Rabochiy newspaper, and from 1951 to 1955 Astafiev worked as a literary employee of the newspaper. In 1953, his first book of short stories, “Until Next Spring,” was published in Perm, and in 1958, the novel “The Snows Are Melting.” V. P. Astafiev is accepted into the Writers' Union of the RSFSR. In 1962 the family moved to Perm, and in 1969 to Vologda. In 1959-1961, the writer studied at the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow. Since 1973, stories have appeared in print that later made up the famous narrative in the stories “The King of Fish”. The stories are subject to strict censorship, some are not published at all, but in 1978, V. P. Astafiev was awarded the USSR State Prize for the narration in the stories “The King Fish”.

In 1980, Astafiev moved to live in his homeland - in Krasnoyarsk, in the village of Ovsyanka, where he lived for the rest of his life. The writer accepted perestroika without enthusiasm, although in 1993 he was one of the writers who signed the famous “Letter of the 42”. However, despite numerous attempts to draw Astafiev into politics, in general the writer remained aloof from political debates. Instead, the writer actively participates in the cultural life of Russia. Astafiev, member of the board of the USSR Writers' Union, secretary of the board of the RSFSR Writers' Union (since 1985) and the USSR Writers' Union (since August 1991), member of the Russian PEN Center, vice-president of the European Forum writers' association (since 1991), chairman of the commission on literature. legacy of S. Baruzdin (1991), deputy. Chairman - member of the Bureau of the Presidium of the International. Literary Fund. He was a member of the editorial board of the magazine "Our Contemporary" (until 1990), a member of the editorial boards of the magazines "New World" (since 1996 - public council), "Continent", "Day and Night", "School Roman Newspaper" (since 1995), Pacific almanac "Rubezh", the editorial board, then (since 1993) the editorial council of "LO". Academician of the Academy of Creativity. People's Deputy of the USSR from the Union of Writers of the USSR (1989-91), member of the Presidential Council of the Russian Federation, the Council for Culture and Art under the President of the Russian Federation (since 1996), the Presidium of the Commission on State Affairs. Prizes under the President of the Russian Federation (since 1997).

He died on November 29, 2001 in Krasnoyarsk, and was buried in his native village of Ovsyanka, Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Interesting facts from life

In 1994, the Astafiev Non-Profit Foundation was created. In 2004, the foundation established the All-Russian Literary Prize named after. V. P. Astafieva.

In 2000, Astafiev stopped working on the novel “Cursed and Killed,” two books of which were written back in 1992–1994.

On November 29, 2002, the memorial house-museum of Astafiev was opened in the village of Ovsyanka. Documents and materials from the writer’s personal fund are also stored in the State Archives of the Perm Region.

In 2004, on the Krasnoyarsk-Abakan highway, not far from the village of Sliznevo, a brilliant forged “Tsar Fish”, a monument to the story of the same name by Viktor Astafiev, was installed. Today this is the only monument in Russia to a literary work with an element of fiction.

Astafiev invented a new literary form: “zatesi” - a kind of short stories. The name is due to the fact that the writer began writing them during the construction of the house.

Victor Astafiev

Stories

silent bird

The old osprey, slightly moving its flaccid, rag-like wings, which had holes in their flapping, smoothly and stubbornly circled over the Yenisei, looking out for prey.

Higher up the river, a huge hydroelectric station was grinding water, turning its force and power into electricity, and with tight, steeply curled waves, either with the blow of a drain green from tension, or with the roar of powerful machines and the whirling of wheels, it deafened or crushed small, less often large, fish. She swam upward with her belly, moving her gills, either revealing their red heat to the sky, or closing the crispy covers of her gills into narrow slits as she inhaled, and persistently trying to tip over onto her side, then onto her white, sensitive belly. Some fish managed to stand on its edge, with the “holy feather” upward, and even for a while turn its head to meet the current, fight it, cut through the water, resting its tail on the stream, stubbornly swim up and up, somewhere to where the source of the fish family or where there was once a large free water of eternity, which planted in the fish brain an ineradicable call to movement, to the promised water, or to something never guessed by a cunning man who pretends to have comprehended everything around him, and even about such a silent the creature is like a fish, and there is nothing to know - it is only fit for a cauldron and a frying pan.

In the first years of operation of the hydroelectric station, as on all blocked rivers, there was a lot of fish crowded around the dam and there was enough for everyone: birds, animals, even insatiable crows. And the people, who here, like the raven, were called vultures because they caught half-dead or even dead fish, had enough for a drink and a snack.

But years passed, the fish, crushed by water and iron, which died, which found other paths and waters, entered and settled in them, and rarely, rarely, will carry along the Yenisei, which has become shallow, fussy, turned up from the bottom, like an old sheepskin coat, with pebbles, gray rifts and shallows, a yawning perch or a convulsively whispering something with a sluggish mouth, a fir tree sparkling with scales, and then the old osprey from a shaggy, sedentary creature, similar to a frayed fur hat, thrown into the sky for the sake of boredom, was immediately transformed, squeezing body and wings, fell quickly and prudently down, deftly taking prey from the water in one go.

Osprey lived in red rocks, riddled with caves, along the left bank of the Yenisei. On a lonely, wind-blown tree she had a nest, visible from afar, and already beginning to crumble. Here, on the left bank of the river, it is not as noisy and crowded as on the right; rarely, as if stealthily, a private Zhiguli car hobbles along the edge of the rocky bank towards the dachas or a dump truck with stolen concrete, a truck with nails and lumber snores with a tense engine.

The osprey is accustomed to this furtive, rushing noise and rare movement, and it lives high up. Under a tree, lonely and half-dried, in a crevice overgrown with honeysuckle, thorn and meadowsweet, she has a quiet hideout. She sleeps there and can think about something in her birdlike, unknown thought, and the winds and planes fly over her, the summer whips and hasty and some restless leaves settle between the stones in the autumn, littering the old tree with fragments of twigs and nests. The osprey is no stranger to loneliness: loneliness is the lot of a predator, even one as humble as the osprey, which cleans large and small bodies of water from dead meat and sick fish, especially new ones, so terribly polluted with all kinds of algae, which have not yet established either shores or aquatic life, no weather, no nature.

The old osprey needs a little food. The summer day was great, and she would have spotted and grabbed five or two fish from the water, slowly pecked them in the stones, and the mice would have picked them up and worn out the bones. Mice have very sharp incisors; any bone can be given to their tooth. It is they, the mice, who wear down and turn into dust the deer and eagles antlers discarded in the taiga, animals and beasts that have died from wounds and diseases: a mouse, a raven, an osprey - orderlies, and what orderlies of the waters and forests!

But the osprey is old, old. The claws on her paws became dull, the skin on them became callous, and her fingers shriveled. To bring the caught prey to the rocks, the osprey needs to hold it tightly in its claws, and it sits on a floating boom made of sawn timber, a wide and comfortable boom, finishes off the fish with its beak, if it is still alive, and tries to jump, roll off the boom, then the bird already confidently takes the bird in its paws, clutches the fish in its claws and slowly, flapping its wings, heads into the rocks, into the red, ancient stones, filled with the wise silence of millennia, so that there, in the proud, high distance, it can feed, clean its beak on the stones and, resting , look down at the motorboats, boats and tugboats scurrying along the river, at the “Rocket”, like a child’s toy, flying up and down the river. She, the Rocket, has some kind of light smoke behind her, also like a toy. Floating logs will swing somewhere and for some reason, move a creaky boom, hit the shore, a stone sharpened by the wave will roll, throwing bark, wood chips, tree fragments, garbage and fuel oil rags onto it. And for a long time, after the “Rocket” has taken off and disappeared behind the islands, among the urban, motionless communities, near the shore there will still be a muddy strip of water splashing, calming down and settling. And, dozing off, the old, tall bird will split the world in two in its pupil: the sunny sky with life-giving blueness - in the upper half - and the small, vain, lower world, emanating noise and stench, with this ever-swaying, always beating against the shore, dirty, disturbed stripe water.

The old bird will rest, calm down, gain strength - and again go to work, again circle after circle above the river, as if in an endless, tiresome and sweet dream, the restless, forgotten soul soars. And along the shore, crows sit on booms and logs and guard their moment. In Siberia, crows are as black as firebrands, there is no gap on the body, no shadows or shades, and the character of the local crow is that of a black convict: neither for itself, nor for the birds, nor for people there is any peace from it. Together with the magpies, the crow drags everything that the eye can lay its hands on, even the soap in the yard and on the pier. Ruthlessly cleans birdhouses and nests of eggs and chicks, picks up unwary chicks, tears grub out of the backpack of a forgetful, dreamy fisherman. Crows don't like each other either: they see that some sneaky one is lucky, she dug up something or stole something, is carrying prey in her beak, is aiming to grunt - immediately the horde rushes to catch up and fight off - brotherhood is not in honor here. The crow, which is older and more experienced, snatches food or gets it - rather silently waves into the weeds, under the fence of the barn or into the creases of the eyebrows and there, looking around like a thief, quickly greedily pecks alone - a crust of bread, dead meat, it happens, and eats a sprat in a tomato plant. The drunks get drunk on the shore, fall over, and the crow picks up everything from them and beats them up; Once she grabbed a chatter from a glass with her beak, shook her head, jumped to the river - to rinse her throat: the crows had not yet mastered the chatter.

Crows never immediately rush after an osprey. Seeing that she has got hold of a fish, they release her to the middle of the river and then, with a triumphant, hostile cry and hubbub, they rush after the miner, quickly overtake and attack her from all sides, growling and croaking at the same time. I think I can even make out that they are shouting: “Give it back, har-harya, give it back!” Our harrrrrch! Harrch!..”

The osprey dodges for a while, wobbles, hugs the water, and glides over the river. Now the shore is not far, and the rocks with their native crevices are close - there the robber crows cannot do anything with her, there she will hide from the black gang in the stones, in the dry, thorny bushes. The osprey knows how to hide, it knows how to find such a place and sit in such a hiding place, it will all collapse and freeze, so that it itself will become like a stone, even the jackal's all-seeing eye of a crow will not distinguish it in the stones.

But the osprey is being chased by a black gang, skilled in robbery and theft, they are knocked down from below, swooping in from above like enemy fighters, and pecked with their beaks, clawed at with their paws, and scream deafeningly, in a flock, discordantly and all together: “Harrrrrch! Harrch! Har! Har! Har...” So they knocked out the feathers or pulled them out of the old bird, walked along the spine with thinned feathers and claws. And the osprey could not withstand the onslaught, unclenched its crooked paws, and dropped its prey from its claws. The little fish sparkled like silver in the sun, fell into the water, the crows, swirling, circled over it, chased downstream, clapping, yelling, pushing each other, but they couldn’t take the fish from the water and in the end they lost it and scattered to the sides with curses. . Having settled on the logs, they arrange their feathers with their beaks, put themselves in order and grumble gloomily: “The harrrch has sailed away! Harrrya has flown away!” - however, we have nowhere to rush, they say, our life is like this - wait, endure and hope. But over the creases of the logs, over the booms and the entire flock of crows, for almost half an hour the mother crow dangles, flaps her wings and covers her babies with words overheard on the shore, gleaned from drunkards, mainly from thieves: “Frayerrrra! Harry! Trrrepachi! You’ve been shaking this shit on the ground for the third time, but you can’t tear away the food, you suck!” Children, humbly bending their paws, press their bellies against the heated logs, meekly listen to the scolding of their parents, and learn to be wise.

The osprey, having lost its prey, each time uttered a long, thin groan and flapped its weakening wings towards the shore, towards the rocks, and I never saw where it flies away, where it lands, because close to and against the background of the rocks it became invisible. For some time, something gray, shaggy still flashed, fluttering like a night butterfly or a dusty leaf in the air, but the light of the rocks, their reddish-gray shadow gradually absorbed the bird, and all movement froze, nothing disturbed the peace of the stone masses - neither screams, not a groan, not a flapping of the wings, and only at night, first behind the Guard Bull, then on the descent from it and along a narrow strip of the shore, the light of car headlights sometimes flashed and the light of a patient fisherman or a tourist sheltered by the river cut through the darkness and lay like a strip on the water.

By autumn, the osprey stopped appearing over the Yenisei. Did the silent bird fly away...

Viktor Astafiev might not have gone to the front. He had the legal right to do so. After graduating from the factory school, he was like"train maker" - a certified railway worker was given a “reservation”. Igarsky orphanage and orphan Vitka Astafiev graduated from sixth grade the winter before the war. He was no longer allowed to stay in a social institution because he had reached his age. It was necessary to start an independent life, think about the future, and, therefore, somehow get out of the North. The young man earned money for the journey himself by becoming a horse carrier at a brick factory that existed in Igarka in those years. The teenager picked up sawdust at the lumber mill, loaded it onto a cart and took it to the furnaces where the bricks were fired. By the summer, the necessary amount of money to buy a ticket for the ship had been saved, and in Krasnoyarsk he entered the railway school of factory training No. 1 at the Yenisei station - the prototype of a modern vocational school.

War was already raging in the West. Almost without rest, always hungry, in fact, still children, Victor had barely turned eighteen, the young railway workers were constantly busy with work. Trains with equipment from evacuated factories and people arrived at Bazaikha station one after another. On one of the trains from Leningrad, a carriage was unhooked, and the dead were carried and stored into it along the route from the besieged city. Victor was included in the burial group. As he later wrote in “The Last Bow”: “I was not just crushed by the funeral, I was gutted, destroyed by it, and, without going to work, I went to Berezovka, to the military registration and enlistment office to ask to go to the front.” This happened just four months after the start of his work history.

Volunteer Astafiev, like most young conscripts of his age, in 1942 was first sent to the 21st Infantry Regiment, located near Berdsk, and then he was transferred to the 22nd Automobile Regiment in the military town of Novosibirsk, and only in the spring of 1943 he was sent to the front line...

In August 1994, during one of Viktor Petrovich’s visits to Igarka, we sat with him for several warm evenings on the porch of the timber processing plant hotel - unimaginable happiness for me. They talked about everything, but still the topic of war was never touched upon. I was afraid to ask, knowing how easily I could disturb his wounded heart. Apparently, in the city of his childhood, Viktor Petrovich only wanted pleasant memories, those that were before...

On Viktor Petrovich’s next, last visit there was a meeting with readersin 1999, filmedSt. Petersburg cameraman Vadim Donetsfor the film “Everything has its hour.With Viktor Astafiev along the Yenisei". It was at a meeting with readers that librarian Svetlana Bogd asked a questionnew: “Your first works were imbued with goodness, now they smack of some kind of harshness. Why?"

Now it’s clear why. In the nineties, Viktor Petrovich wrote his most important work about the war - the novel “Cursed and Killed.” I wrote this despite the persecution of the writer going on in periodicals. Such a biting and mercilessly capacious assessment of the war, contained in the very title of the novel, could only be given by a person who had great courage, endured suffering and said openly what crossed out all the works of art about the heroics of war previously created by powerful monumental propaganda.He wrote:

« I was an ordinary soldier in the war, and our soldier’s truth was called “trench truth” by one very lively writer; our statements are “point of view.”

And here are his “trench postulates”, born from the first days of being in a training unit near Novosibirsk: no serious preparation, no training of young, unfired fighters was carried out. “They simply forgot about us, they forgot to feed us, they forgot to teach us, they forgot to give us uniforms.”. According to Astafiev, when they finally arrived from the reserve regiment at the front, the army was more like vagabonds. These were not soldiers, but exhausted, tired old men with dull eyes. Due to lack of strength and skill, most of them died in the first battle or were captured. “They never brought the benefit to the Motherland that they wanted, and, most importantly, they could bring.”

Most of the soldiers wore tunics with a seam on the stomach. The same seams were on the underwear. Many did not know why this seam was made, they were perplexed, but the explanation was simple - the clothes were taken from the dead. You can’t take it off like that, you just have to cut it and then sew it up. Realizing this, the soldiers themselves began to dress in this way, taking clothes off the dead Germans - they were preparing for war seriously, the cloth was good, and wore out less. Ukrainian peasant women, and it was in Ukraine that soldier Astafiev’s military journey began, often mistook our soldiers for captured Germans, not understanding who was in front of them in such pitiful attire. Viktor Astafiev received a tunic with a turn-down collar, apparently for a junior officer, but it contained more lice - that’s all its advantage. Only in December 1943 was the unit finally equipped. And the young fighter and his friend did not fail to immediately capture themselves in the photo.

Private Viktor Astafiev fought in the 17th Artillery, Orders of Lenin, Suvorov, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, Red Banner breakthrough division, which was part of the 7th Artillery Corps of the main striking force of the 1st Ukrainian Front. The corps was the reserve of the High Command.

“The Cheerful Soldier” Viktor Astafiev was a driver, artilleryman, reconnaissance officer, and signalman. Not a staff telephone operator, but a line supervisor, ready, at the first order of the commander, to crawl under bullets, looking for a rush on the line. This is how he himself wrote about the specifics of his military position as a telephone operator later: “When the scolded, scolded, tattered, torn line signalman went alone to the cliff, under fire, he would shine his last, sometimes angry, sometimes sadly envious glance at the soldiers remaining in the trench, and clutching the parapet of the trench, he could not overcome the steepness. Oh, how understandable he is, how close he is at that moment and how awkward it is to be in front of him - you involuntarily look away and wish that the break in the line was not far away, so that the signalman would return “home” as soon as possible, then he and everyone’s soul would feel better.”

Signalmen experienced the possibility of death more often than others, and their joy in life was sharper.Recently analyzed by mesad statistics of the combat path of soldiers drafted by the Igarsky military registration and enlistment office, confirms what has been said: northerners were often appointed signalmen, and among them there was a higher percentage of both those who died and received awards. Fighter Astafiev echoes this: “And when, alive and unharmed, the signalman collapses into the trench, clanking the piece of wood from his apparatus, and leans against its dirty wall in happy exhaustion, give him, out of brotherly feelings, a half-smoked cigarette. The signalman brother will pull it, but not right away, first he will open his eyes, look at the one who gave the “forty”, and you will read so much gratitude that it won’t fit in your heart.”

However, the work of the “lineman” was also appreciated by the government award from the command. In the battle on October 20, 1943, Red Army soldier Astafiev corrected the telephone connection with the forward observation post four times. “While performing the task, he was covered with earth by a nearby bomb explosion. Burning with hatred for the enemy, Comrade Astafiev continued to carry out the task under artillery and mortar fire, collected pieces of cable, and again restored telephone communications, ensuring uninterrupted communication with the infantry and its support with artillery fire.”- this is what is written on the award sheet when senior telephone operator Astafiev was nominated for the medal “For Courage”...

If only we could laugh now at the literary opuses of the staff clerk, but Viktor Petrovich may not have even seen this document, and left his descendants with memories of a completely different plan:

- Once we were dragging and dragging on the shoulders and on the hump a platoon of command and a half with communications, with a stereo tube, a compass, tablets and other equipment, and the car stopped and wouldn’t move: it was us who, overnight, jumping into the back and then back, dragged a full body of dirt , overloaded the poor lorry. They threw out the dirt, some with shovels, some with bowler hats and helmets, some in handfuls, and managed to get to the place where the brigades were concentrated almost on time,” he told about the night march to the filmmakers sent by Nikita Mikhalkov before the filming of the new film “Citadel” to the great Siberian writer-front-line soldier for “private » impressions of military everyday life.

I vividly imagine how, slightly squinting his wounded eye, he retells to them this and another episode from another night forced march, known to him from the words of his division commander. That commander was not much older than his subordinates, but “a tough character until the first wound, who could even kick a soldier”, and use a strong word:

- They pushed, pushed, rocked, rocked the car somehow and that’s it, the equipment stopped moving. I jumped out of the cab with a flashlight, well, I think now I’ll give you slobs a boost! I illuminated it with a flashlight, and you, about twenty of you, clung to the body of the car, leaned on it, some up to your knees, some up to your waist in mud - sleeping... I already groaned...

This is how our fellow countryman fought. But it was not these essentially innocent tales of a soldier exhausted in marches that the “victorious generals” could not forgive the future writer.

According to Astafiev, it was the war that became the reason that he took up the pen. In the early 50s, Viktor Petrovich went to a literary circle opened at the local newspaper “Chusovskoy Rabochiy” in the Urals, where he once heard a short story by a writer - a political worker during the war. The war was beautiful for him, and the main thing that outraged him was that someone who was also on the front line wrote about it. Astafiev, according to him, had a ringing in his shell-shocked head from such lies. Arriving home and calming down, he decided that the only way to fight lies was the truth. And overnight, in one breath, he wrote his first story, “A Civilian” (modern title “Siberian”), in which he described the war as he saw and knew it. And that was the beginning.

When citing this well-known fact, the writer’s biographers do not always say that the former orphanage resident had nowhere to return from the war. With his front-line wife, he went to her native Ural town of Chusovoy. The displaced tenants did not think of releasing to the front-line soldier’s family the outbuilding they occupied and were not paying for in the courtyard. The major brother-in-law, who had returned from the war, took the best place in the house in a room on the second floor, filling the room to capacity with trophy rags and talking “through his lips” with the junior in rank, Victor, who was forced to huddle with his young wife in the kitchen behind the stove on the floor. Victor either shoveled snow or unloaded wagons before he got a job as a watchman at a sausage factory, where this story was born on the night shift. The writer’s wife Maria Koryakina told about this. She told not only about the ups and downs of the family life of front-line soldiers returning from the war, but also about her daughter Lidochka, who died of dyspepsia in infancy. The young mother did not have enough milk due to constant malnutrition.

It is clear thattopicThe events of the last war inspired the beginning writer. In 1960, the lyrical story “Starfall” was added to the assets of the emerging writer, and in 1971 “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess”. Modern pastoral - the author makes a note in the subtitle of the latter. Both stories are poetic, touching and tragic works about first love, crippled and destroyed by war. More than once, I, like many of my peers, re-read them; apparently, Igar librarian Svetlana Bogdanova also mentioned them - “imbued with goodness”...

However, if in “Starfall” the author refrains from talking about battles, moving the action to a military hospital, then in “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess”alreadyTerrible episodes begin to appear, forever etched in the soldier’s memory. War cripples the young souls of the heroes, it erases the good, leaving the brightest, involuntarily noticed, lodged in the brain and continuing to torment the author with nightmares.

In peacetime, in the memory of the aged soldier Astafiev, neat paired holes gape in the rich Ukrainian black soil - these are the felt boots left by the soldiers during the forced march, because “ I pulled it out once, pulled it out twice, there was about three pounds of such dirt on them that the third time I took a step and continued walking barefoot.”.

Or here’s another story told to Mikhalkov’s visitors about a halt in an autumn snow-dusted forest, either in a clearing or in a swamp. Having placed a bunch of dry grass torn out from the snow on a hummock under him, soldier Astafiev sits, slurping the quickly cooling soup. Feels something slimy underneath him, gets up, “Fuck you, German, frozen into the ground below me. What? ...he put more stubble on it and sat back down. There is no time, and I want to eat. This is how you get drawn into war. They say it's the experience of war. Here it is. So that you can eat, sleep like the last beast, endure the lice... I remember we had a dapper officer, he crawled into his head with both hands: Well, I’m so tired of these lice.”

Subsequently, I find an episode with an officer eaten by lice in the novel “The Citadel”.

For Astafiev, the worst thing in war is the habit of death. When death becomes everyday, commonplace and no longer evokes any emotions, when you can sit and eat on the frozen corpse of your enemy without disgust.

The terrible shocks of the young Astafiev, which continue to disturb the memory of him and the elderly - when, during the retreat from Zhitomir, our tanks, vehicles, transporters walked along the retreating, already killed, defeated: “...on the highway, in the liquid mud, there are corpses rolled into plywood, only here and there white bones will come out, and teeth... Tanks are moving, tracks are winding up, an overcoat, guts, such an aesthetic spectacle.”

Astafiev’s war is really not at all similar to what we are used to seeing in war films, or reading in military prose. The heroes of most literary works went on the attack shouting “Hurray!”, closed the embrasures, and died, causing fire on themselves. According to Astafiev, they lied so much about the war and everything connected with it was so confused that in the end, the fabricated war overshadowed the real war.

The war did something irreparable to Vitenka Astafiev: “Small, completely illiterate, I was already composing poems and all sorts of stories, for which the FZO and in the war loved me and even pulled me out of the bridgehead, but there on the bridgehead remained half of me - my memory, one eye, half of faith, half of thoughtlessness and “The boy who lived comfortably inside me for a long time, cheerful, big-eyed and cheerful, remained completely.”

(From Astafiev’s letter to Kurbatov, “Endless Cross”, Irkutsk, 2005)

The most difficult and tragic thing in Astafiev’s military biography was the crossing of the Dnieper in the fall of 1943. Into the water, without preparation, without respite, building on their recent success at the Kursk Bulge, the soldiers jumped naked, carrying bundles of clothes and rifles over their heads. They melted down without special floating devices, as best they could. In the section where Astafiev sailed, out of 25 thousand people, only every sixth reached the other shore. And there were dozens of such crossing points. In the Battle of the Dnieper, Soviet troops lost about 300 thousand soldiers: “the majority sank senselessly, due to mediocre preparation, without ever firing a shot”.

All his life, Astafiev maintained that we won this war only because we simply overwhelmed the Germans with corpses and covered them with our blood. And he had the right to say so. Private Viktor Astafiev fought on the Bryansk, Voronezh, Steppe and First Ukrainian fronts - in the thick of hostilities. At the Dnieper bridgehead, Astafiev injured her eye and was seriously concussed:

- A nasty wound to the face. Small fragments of a cluster bomb, or a battalion mine and crumbling stones... damaged the eye, bloodied the lips, forehead, the guys were afraid they wouldn’t make it to the medical battalion, - he said later.

In the area of ​​the Polish city of Dukla, Astafiev received a severe through bullet wound to his left forearm with bone damage:When you are wounded, there is a resounding blow throughout your whole body, the blood will open, your head will ring very, very strongly and you will feel nauseous, and you will feel lethargic, as if kerosene is burning out in a lamp, and the yellow, barely glowing light will waver and freeze over you so that it becomes scary to breathe and will pierce you with fear. And if he screamed from the blow, then when he saw the blood, he became deaf from his own voice and ringing, shrank into himself, crouched to the ground, afraid to extinguish this original light, this wavering glimpse of life.

(Astafiev V.P. “Everything has its hour”, Moscow, “Young Guard”, 1985)

Soldier Astafiev remained in the active army until September 1944, dropping out due to a serious injury, but continuing to hang around in non-combatant units, performing the duties of either a postman or a guard until the end of 1945.

Almost every family was touched by the war with its deadly wing. The Astafievs also had tragic losses. On September 24, 1942, his uncle, his father’s brother Ivan, died near Stalingrad; before the war, he was a woodcutter at the lumber exchange of the Igarsky lumber mill. As a leader in production in peacetime, his portrait was placed on the city Board of Honor, and the young man himself was sent to study at the Achinsk Agricultural Technical School. During the war, Ivan Astafiev was a telephone operator or intelligence officer, but reliable data about this has not been preserved. Viktor Petrovich also did not know the place of his death, clarifying the uncle’s fate only decades after the end of the war. A fellow Volgograd writer, born in Igarka, Boris Ekimov, helped him in this.

Another guy -GodfatherwriterVasily is only ten years older than Victor. A joker, a merry fellow, a favorite of women, nicknamed “Magpie” for his irrepressible character, he was closest to Victor in his youth. In February 1942, Victor accompanied him to the front from Krasnoyarsk. Vasily, by cunningly bypassing military censorship, let Victor know that, they say, he was fighting as a tanker next to him, in Ukraine. At the Lyutezhsky bridgehead near Kiev he was seriously wounded, sent to the hospital, but on the way he was marked as missing. As he later admittedVictor, he came up with a meeting with him, already dead, describing it in the novel “The Last Bow”. In fact, the soldier's final resting place is unknown.

Vasily Astafiev was barely 29, Ivan - 24. To the credit of Igarsk residents, the names of Viktor Petrovich’s relatives - Vasily Pavlovich and Ivan Pavlovich Astafiev are listed on the city memorial in memory of the victims. Even the writer’s father, Pyotr Pavlovich, who was sick with an incurable skin disease, was drafted into the war.

The front-line biography of Private Viktor Astafiev was awarded the Order of the Red Star, medals “For Courage”, “For Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945”, “For the Liberation of Poland”.
Viktor Petrovich Astafiev not only had the moral right to write, but simply had to do it, saying the most important thing, leaving as a legacy to his descendants what he and his family experienced, and which, he believed, should not have become a subject for future generations their personal knowledge and experience.

In addition to the stories “Starfall”, “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess”, “So I Want to Live”, “Overtone”, “The Cheerful Soldier”, many stories and ideas were written by Viktor Petrovich about the war. Involuntarily, in the features of most of the characters one sees the author - Vitka, an orphanage from the polar city, not always named, but recognizable by those vivid details that are unique only to Igarka - repressed people, timber transshipment, sea vessels, features of hunting and fishing in the vicinity of the city.

In the first half of 1990, Astafiev wrote: “Yes, I’m writing a book about the war, I’ve been writing for a long time, but not about the 17th division, but about the war in general. A soldier’s book, otherwise there are already a lot of general’s books, but almost no soldiers’ books.” And further: “I have been preparing for my entire creative, and maybe not only my creative life, for my main book - a novel about the war. I think that for her sake the Lord saved me not only in the war, but also in difficult and difficult circumstances, sometimes on the verge of death, and helped me survive. He tormented me with memory, pressed me with a burden of memories so that I would fulfill his main commandment - to tell the whole truth about the war, because as many people were in the fiery crucible of war, they brought so many truths home.”

The writer was more and more convinced of the need to write differently from what was done before him by the attitude he observed in life towards the fate of front-line soldiers. In American literature after the end of the Vietnam War, the term “lost generation” appeared. Soviet propaganda continued to talk about the victorious warrior. Although the realities of peaceful life were different. The shell-shocked Astafiev no longer had to drive trains on the railway - a job for which he was trained and dreamed of doing it. Young disabled war veterans could not receive either housing or good food. Many of those who returned from the front alive either drank themselves to death or died from wounds that continued to torment them in the first post-war years. But most of all, the soldiers’ consciousness was tormented by the episodes of their military youth. And Astafiev finally pushed out of his wounded memory what was unbearably burning him from the inside.

On February 11, 1993, having finished the draft of the second part of the book, Viktor Petrovich wrote to his friend, literary critic Kurbatov: “I wanted to avoid unnecessary deaths and blood, but you can’t escape memory and truth - continuous blood, continuous death and despair already overwhelm the paper and spill over the edge.”

The writer considered war a “crime against reason.”Both critics and politiciansadmitthat from a historical point of view, the novel “Cursed and Killed” plausibly describes the events of the Great Patriotic War. But the extremely naturalistic description of the life of soldiers, the relationships between subordinates and commanders, and the actual fighting caused a whole stream of dissatisfaction not only among the commanders of military operations, but also among ordinary participants in the war.

And although Astafiev convinced his general opponents to at least not lie to themselves: “How many people did they lose in the war? You know and remember. It's scary to name the true number, isn't it? If you call it, then instead of a ceremonial cap, you need to put on a schema, kneel on Victory Day in the middle of Russia and ask your people for forgiveness for a mediocrely won war, in which the enemy was buried with corpses and drowned in Russian blood.”, his brothers at the bayonet did not want to hear him either. For them, who miraculously returned from the front alive, the war, which coincided with their youth, is the brightest, in fact, heroic period of life.

I remember how my father, also a participant in that war, once abruptly interrupted a veteran who was crying at a meeting with young people and was trying to talk about cases of cannibalism at the front: “That’s not what you’re talking about, Peter.” Having themselves experienced the leaden abominations of the war, they, apparently, instinctively wanted to protect us, and they themselves tried to erase from their memory what they saw and experienced. Ostrich effect...

Astafiev openly declared with civil courage:They started calling us soldiers only after the war, and so - a bayonet, a fighter, in general - an inanimate object...

And he was accused... of lack of patriotism, of slandering the Russian people... They tore out lines from phrases spoken in the heat of the moment and reinterpreted them in their own way. And he wanted us to know the whole truth about the war, and not just the officially resolved one.

“Along the road and in the fields, the tubercles turn black in scatterings. Some burning tankers crawled into the ditch, hoping to be extinguished in the ditch water, and then they died down: their faces were black, their hair was red, some were face up, you could see empty eye sockets - their eyes were bursting, their skin was bursting, there was crimson flesh in the cracks. Flies swarmed the corpses. It’s time to get used to this landscape, but I just can’t get used to it.”

(Astafiev V.P. “So I want to live”, Irkutsk, “Vector”, 1999).

Astafiev believed that it was criminal to show the war as heroic and attractive: Those who lie about the past war bring the future war closer. There was nothing dirtier, harsher, bloodier, more naturalistic than the last war in the world. It is necessary not to show a heroic war, but to scare, because war is disgusting. We must constantly remind people about it so that they don’t forget. With your nose, like blind kittens, poke into the shitty place, into the blood, into the pus, into the tears, otherwise you won’t get anything from our brother.

Or about the thoughts of the “trenchmen”:

“This is the grave state of being a soldier, when you think that I wish I had died sooner, that they would have killed me.” Believe me, I’ve been in this position dozens of times, I’ve been exhausted dozens of times: I could have killed him.

And the heroic feat of the commander in saving the life of a soldier, according to Astafiev, was an unexpected command from him to his subordinate:

Go get some sleep.

Well, how are you guys here, there aren’t enough of you, we have to dig, we have to work...

Go, this doesn't concern you...

This is how his squad commander saved the life of comfrey Astafiev twice. Soldier Astafiev left, fell somewhere in an oak forest on some kind of bedding and fell into a dead sleep. He slept for how long, he doesn’t remember anything, then he got up, went to the kitchen, ate a little porridge, in general, rested, came back - full of strength, a joker, - a cheerful soldier... Isn’t this a heroic act?Heroes of the novel "Bridgehead"got used to itaccording to Astafiev, “half asleep, half frozen, half awake, half heard, half alive...” (Astafiev “Cursed and Killed”).

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The novel “Cursed and Killed” remained unfinished; in March 2000 the writer announced the termination of work on it; in November 2001, Viktor Petrovich Astafiev died.

And shortly before his death, in July, deputies of the Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory refused to provide a monetary reward in the amount of only three thousand rubles as an additional pension to a front-line soldier who was lying in the hospital with severe consequences of a stroke, in fact, a terminally ill person.
GriefO…

« Astafievskaya’s truth about the war, in the opinion of the Ural resident Gladyshev, turned out to be untimely? Inappropriate? Extra?The writer’s warning that those who lie about the past war bring the future war closer was memorable. I think that understanding the trench truth of Viktor Petrovich Astafiev is a matter of honor for both politicians and ordinary citizens of the country.

War is terrible, and a stable gene must be developed in the body of the new generation to prevent this from happening again. It’s not for nothing that the great writer, speaking in the language of the Siberian Old Believers, put the epigraph of his main novel: “ It was written that everyone who sows unrest, wars and fratricide on earth will be cursed and killed by God.”.

At the center of the film is an interview with Russian prose writer Viktor Petrovich Astafiev, in which he shares his memories of the Great Patriotic War.

Genre: documentary
Year of manufacture: 2010
Director: Andrey Zaitsev.

Viktor Petrovich Astafiev (May 2, 1924, Ovsyanka village, Yenisei province, USSR - November 29, 2001, Krasnoyarsk, Russia) - an outstanding Soviet and Russian writer. Laureate of two State Prizes of the USSR (1978, 1991) and three State Prizes of the Russian Federation (1975, 1995, 2003)

Victor Petrovich Astafiev was born on May 1, 1924 in the village of Ovsyanka (now Krasnoyarsk Territory) in the family of Pyotr Pavlovich Astafiev and Lydia Ilyinichna Potylitsina. He was the third child in the family, but his two older sisters died in infancy. A few years after the birth of his son, Pyotr Astafiev goes to prison with the wording “sabotage.” In 1931, during Lydia Ilyinichna’s next trip to her husband, the boat in which she, among others, was sailing, capsized. Lydia Ilyinichna, falling into the water, caught her scythe on a floating boom and drowned. Victor was 7 years old at the time. After the end of the fishing season, returning to Igarka, Pyotr Astafiev ended up in the hospital. Abandoned by his stepmother and relatives, Victor ended up on the street. For several months he lived in an abandoned hairdresser's building, but after a serious incident at school he was sent to an orphanage.

In 1942 he volunteered for the front. He received military training in the automotive training unit in Novosibirsk. In the spring of 1943 he was sent to the active army. He was a driver, a signalman in howitzer artillery, and after being seriously wounded at the end of the war, he served in the internal troops in Western Ukraine.

He was awarded the Order of the Red Star, medals “For Courage”, “For the Liberation of Warsaw”, “For Victory over Germany”.

In the battle of October 20, 1943, Red Army soldier V.P. Astafyev corrected the telephone connection with the advanced NP eight times. While performing the task, due to a nearby bomb explosion, he was covered with earth. Burning with hatred for the enemy, Comrade. Astafiev continued to carry out the task even under artillery and mortar fire, collected pieces of cable and again restored telephone communications, ensuring uninterrupted communication with the infantry and its support with artillery fire.
- From the award list for the medal “For Courage”

“Unceremonious” war by Viktor Astafiev

For more than half a century since the end of the Great Patriotic War, we have become accustomed to pompous phrases about the heroism and exploits of Soviet people in the war, which have merged into a single, largely pathetic picture. But when front-line soldiers share their memories of what happened on the battlefields, the war appears in its most disgusting and unsightly guise...

On May 13, within the framework of the Golden Knight film club, a documentary film directed by Andrei Zaitsev “Viktor Astafiev. The Cheerful Soldier" (2010) - pictures about the "unpretentious" war.

Viktor Astafiev is a Russian front-line writer, known for such works as “The Last Bow”, “The Tsar Fish”, “The Sad Detective”; He went to the front as a volunteer, went through the war as a simple soldier, was first a driver, then an artillery reconnaissance officer, and at the end of the war - a signalman. He always spoke about the war reluctantly, touching on this topic only in short stories and short stories. But still, 40 years later he wrote the novel “Cursed and Killed,” telling the terrible truth of that war.

Documentary film “Viktor Astafiev. The Jolly Soldier" was released on the occasion of the writer's 86th birthday. It is based on a recording of a three-hour conversation with Viktor Petrovich in February 2000, made for director Nikita Mikhalkov, who at that time was working on the script for “Burnt by the Sun - 2” and for whom those details of the war that could be noticed by the writer’s eye were important. The interview took place in Astafiev’s native village of Ovsyanka, Krasnoyarsk Territory, in a homely environment, so Viktor Petrovich felt free and sometimes did not hesitate in his expressions.

According to the writer, it was the theme of war that served as the reason to take up the pen. He was outraged by how implausibly the war was described in post-war prose, presented as heroic, beautiful, victorious. The writer complained that the invented war overshadowed the real war. In his works, Astafiev contrasted such a description of the war with a plausible account of military events.

In A. Zaitsev’s film, Astafiev recalls the unpleasant details of those years: how in the reserve regiment (which in the novel “Cursed and Killed” is called the “Devil’s Pit”), designed to train recruits, in fact there was no training, how there was a lack of uniforms and things it was necessary to remove from the killed Germans, as they did not care about interring the bodies of our dead, unlike the Germans, who always buried their dead, as funeral teams often marauded.

Astafiev’s most difficult memories are the crossing of the Dnieper during the autumn offensive of the Red Army in 1943. The crossing was not prepared, once again the command relied on the “Russian chance” and the dedication of the soldiers. In V. Astafiev’s area alone, out of 25 thousand people, only 3,600 reached the shore.

The price of human life was then negligible. No one was interested in human losses. The main thing was the result, victory at any cost. According to the writer, people were thrown into the furnace of war like straw.

For V. Astafiev, the worst thing in war is the habit of death, when it becomes everyday and no longer evokes any emotions. Therefore, the writer considered it criminal to romanticize the war, to make it spectacular, heroic, attractive.

The film uses a chronicle of the war years. But these are not those official military reports, often staged, approved for showing to viewers. Chronicle in the film “Viktor Astafiev. The Cheerful Soldier" reveals the unvarnished, terrible truth about the war: ordinary soldiers transporting mines across the river, fighting under heavy enemy fire without shouting "Hurray!"; a field strewn with dead, mutilated corpses. These recordings lay “on the shelf” for many decades and were not presented to a wider audience.

The film also includes excerpts from the play “Cursed and Killed.” The heartfelt performance of actors A. Filimonov and R. Bondarev leads viewers through the pages of V. Astafiev’s novel, more acutely conveying the pain and tragedy of the events told by the writer.

The film is accompanied by a voice-over text read by the famous Russian artist Alexey Petrenko. A measured, calm, quiet story about the fate of the writer, about the circumstances of filming an interview with him, comments from military chronicles are organically woven into the outline of the film, helping to convey Astafiev’s position to the viewer.

The film was awarded the Golden Eagle prize as the best non-fiction film, the Laurel Branch as the best full-length non-fiction television film, and the Audience Award of the Flahertiana International Documentary Film Festival.

After watching the film, it was difficult to start a discussion in the hall. The audience was still impressed for some time. Still, the conversation took place. The film club participants not only shared their impressions of the film they watched, but also recalled the stories of their loved ones about the war, and talked about today’s attitude – their own and that of the state – towards that time, the May 9 holiday.

The film resonated with the pomp that accompanies Victory Day and the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow on June 22 - perhaps the only days on which the war is remembered. Even though Astafiev’s truth may repel some people, you may not agree with it to the end, but you need to watch the film in order to know at what cost the Victory was achieved, in order to hate the war - this was the unanimous opinion of the participants of the Golden Knight film club.

A. Turkanova

Comments: 0

They defended the country and performed great feats. Then, when the war was already over, they endured inhuman suffering. And their very life, their very existence, also became a feat. Thousands of disabled people: armless, legless, restless, begging in train stations, on trains, on the streets... His chest was covered in medals, and he was begging near a bakery. The USSR government decided to get rid of them at any cost. In 1952, disabled WWII cripples were secretly taken to special boarding schools. Within a few months, the victorious country cleared its streets of this “shame.” They were collected overnight from all over the city by special police and state security squads, taken to railway stations, loaded into heated vehicles and sent to special “boarding houses”. Their passports and soldier's records were taken away - in fact, they were transferred to the status of prisoners.

Thousands of those who emerged from the battlefields completely or almost completely disabled were cynically nicknamed “samovars” for the absence of limbs and exiled to numerous monasteries so as not to spoil the bright holiday of millions with their squalor. It is still unknown how many living human stumps died in such exiles; their names have not yet been declassified.

It would seem that we know everything about the Great Patriotic War. But in this film with unique archival footage, secret, previously unknown or carefully hushed pages of the prehistory of the war and its beginning are revealed. The first film, “On the Eve,” tells about Soviet intelligence officers and counterintelligence officers, the heroes of the invisible secret war against Nazi Germany, which began long before the tragic night of June 22, 1941, about the invisible confrontation between the two intelligence services. The second film, “Reckoning,” talks about the war. The beginning of the war is the tragic unpreparedness of our army, huge human casualties and losses, this is order No. 270, which declared everyone who was captured to be traitors and traitors to the Motherland, this is the mass heroism of the people, but this is also fear and panic in Moscow.

Astafiev Viktor Petrovich; Russia, Krasnoyarsk; 05/01/1924 – 11/29/2001

Astafiev’s works are known far beyond the borders of our country. Many of them were translated into various languages ​​of the world and published in large editions. And this is not surprising. Indeed, in the 80s, Viktor Astafiev’s stories bordered on the brink of censorship, and in foreign publications he was often called, on a par with, the conscience of the Soviet people. At the same time, many of his works were included in the school curriculum, which contributed to him gaining a high place in our ranking.

Victor Astafiev biography

In the Urals, where Viktor Petrovich Astafiev settled, he tried many professions. At first he was a mechanic, then an auxiliary worker, a storekeeper, a teacher, and tried many other professions. He found his place in the editorial office of the Chusovsky Rabochiy newspaper. Here, for the first time, it becomes possible to read Astafiev’s works first as articles and then as stories.

Viktor Astafiev’s first story was published in 1955 in the magazine “Smena”. It was the story "Civilian". After this, he left the newspaper and began work on the novel “The Snow is Melting,” which was published in 1958. Subsequently, many more novels and stories by Viktor Astafiev appeared. Like most other writers of that time who went through the war, such as, and many others, his works were about the war and about military topics. Although in his works Astafiev paid a lot of attention to the village. His books have become very popular in our country and abroad, for which Viktor Astafiev has been repeatedly awarded with various prizes and awards. Viktor Astafiev died in 2001 and was buried in his native village of Ovsyanka.

Astafiev's works on the Top books website

Among the works of Astafiev are represented quite widely. And on the eve of Victory Day, against the backdrop of growing interest in books about the war by Viktor Astafiev, the stories are especially popular. This allowed many of the writer's books to be included in our rating. At the same time, interest in many of them is only growing, so you can count on an increase in their positions in the ratings of our site.

Victor Astafiev list of books

In addition to the stories and novels presented below by Viktor Astafiev, his work contains a huge number of stories. The list of all of them is quite large and they are not represented in our list of books by Viktor Astafiev.

1. Cheerful soldier
2. War is raging somewhere
3. Until next spring
4. Starfall
5. From the quiet light
6. Theft
7. Fishing for minnows in Georgia
8. Overtone
9. The Shepherd and the Shepherdess
10. Pass
11. Sad detective