Escape from the “land of fools who are not afraid”

There are several legends about the death of Evgeny Petrov, Evgeny Petrovich Kataev, Ilf-i-Petrov, which occurred 80 years ago on June 2, 1942.

However, as with other parts of his life, they tell very different things. For example, about how he started writing. Also, his older brother Valentin Kataev has contributed to the controversial mythology. Then Evgeny wrote his first story out of anger, so as not to sit on Valentin Petrovich’s neck. Then Valentin Petrovich himself went to smoke and asked the teenager to continue part of a series of works for him, which went from issue to issue, from wheels to newspaper. And he wrote it in such a way that there is no need to edit anything…

Probably, legends should always accompany his famous biographies, but the elder Kataev knew how to adapt his stories and texts not only to the interests of the people, but also to the nuances of the present moment, that is, to the needs of power and its needs. discourse According to Kataev, Petrov died on a plane leaving Messerschmites. He did not leave any “Messerschmites”, but the date before the fatal flight could have already turned into death.

Yevgeny Petrov, a war correspondent and very fearless, visited the besieged Sevastopol and returned from it to Novorossiysk with the destroyer Tashkent. The ship was attacked by the Germans, the leading destroyer Bezuprechny sank, it was impossible to save the people swimming in the fuel lakes due to the constant shelling … Admiral Ivan Isakov was present at all these events, then watched the reaction of Petrov, shocked by everything he saw and experienced. Allegedly, the writer drank for several days, as a result of which he ended up in Krasnodar. On the day of his inevitable departure for Moscow, the same Isakov found on the veranda where the military commander had spent the night, a large number of scribbled papers, each of which was pressed with pebbles: “These were Yevgeny Petrov’s notes. He fell into the water with his bag during the war.”

And then there are two versions. Douglas aircraft flew low so their own aircraft would recognize themselves and would not fire. “The shadow of the plane fell,” wrote literary critic Yakov Lurie, and “the cattle grazing there were frightened by this moving shadow. The pilot was delighted with this and began to deliberately scare the cows. Then it fell into the mound. Another version: the pilot and navigator let Yevgeny Petrov sit at the helm, and it was not possible to get away from the suddenly discovered hill, although the pilot controlled his actions.

The elder brother claimed that the death of Yevgeny Petrov happened since the little one almost drowned in childhood. This youngest is told with surprisingly touching love in the completely magical prose of 1935 by this cynical Valentin Kataev in the children’s story “The lonely sail turns white.” Petya’s younger brother, Little Pavlik, who drives the toy horse Kudlatka, is the future half of Ilf-and-Petrov. “Have any of your brothers died?” – Kataev allegedly said this sentence with inevitable despair.

The unlucky younger brother was lucky to be the co-author of at least two satirical novels, the texts of which not only went to the people, but also became a cipher in the communication of several generations of more or less intelligent Soviet layers. post-Soviet society. He made a career, fame and prosperity came, in 1937 he received an apartment in Lavrushinsky, and in 1939 he was awarded the Order of Lenin and was appointed editor-in-chief of Ogonyok.

He was lucky, but he was lucky. It was dangerous to fly too high in the days of Stalinism, which matured after Stalinism, the childish frivolity of the NEP. It was a big risk when Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, moving towards the status of the classics, were invited to write to the newspaper Pravda itself. A bullet in the corner of the house where the military commander Petrov spent the night in the Finnish war or mortar shelling near Moscow is half the problem. The main mine exploded right next to the two co-authors on December 9, 1932, when their first paper was published in Kloop’u Pravda.

It describes a kind of abstract Soviet institution where everyone is busy with something other than work, and no one, including the head of the office, knows what work means and how to decipher the name itself.

If Kloop’s boss was transferred from “milk” to a new job – real Bolsheviks do not care what they lead, then the editor-in-chief of Pravda, in fact, once Stalin’s briefcase, “Mekhlis, match!” was nicknamed. he also knows where he is, which is reported to the press (more precisely, Marx).

Regarding Feuilleton, Mekhlis had an unpleasant conversation with Stalin. In turn, Aron Erlich, editor of the literary and artistic department of the main Bolshevik newspaper, once had a friend and colleague of those who made the famous fourth page of “Beep” (from Yuri Olesha to Mikhail Bulgakov). Difficult conversation with Mekhlis.

Erlich had to nod to vouch for Ilf and Petrov, and fortunately, Aron Isaevich was not suppressed and lived until it was dissolved. True, he had to criticize his wards in a special article. He did this deftly without offending anyone and without pulling his friends out of the way: he wrote that a mistake had been made at Feuilleton – “a typical exception feels like a typical rule.” A little reminds me of the vague reasoning of Ilfopetrovsky accountant Berlaga: “I did this not in the interests of truth, but in the interests of truth.” You can say – and “True”! But the heads of the two satirists did not fly.

A few months later, in August 1933, Ilf and Petrov entered the unfortunate writer’s brigade, which, on the initiative of Maxim Gorky, was sent to participate in the “rebeating” of the Soviet people in the construction of the White Sea Canal. But if all the participants of this amazing expedition, from Kataev to Shklovsky, sent their article about the happy transformation of a person through forced labor in a thick book, Ilf and Petrov escaped this task. And they wrote nothing but an evasive text in Komsomolskaya Pravda, in which they said that they wanted to write a third novel about Ostap Bender, about whom he was retrained as an honest Soviet man, but after what they saw in the newspaper. The White Sea Channel, the need to write such a thing disappeared – he wrote his own life.

Miraculously, they managed to avoid participating in the persecution campaigns against the accused during the more frequent Stalinist trials. However, unlike the cheerful and sociable Petrov, the introverted Ilf felt that disaster was approaching. In the last year of his life, he described this feeling with the words “A brick is flying”. “It’s too bad I’ve been so unlucky,” she wrote about Ilf’s disease. He knew he was lucky to die of tuberculosis in 1937. And that lucky poor Yevgeny Petrov was left with the white papers and a tougher political regime that demanded absolute fidelity assurances.

Petrov wrote a lot and worked in different genres, including satisfying his passion for music, co-wrote the screenplays for the films History of Music and Anton Ivanovich Gets Angry with Georgy Moonblit. But none of them made it into literary history, including the unfinished fantasy novel about the happy future of communism. It seems that Yevgeny Petrovich never recovered from the death of Ilya Arnoldovich: “Ilf was lying on his sofa, his arms stretched out on either side, his eyes closed and a very calm face, in a minute suddenly turned white. ”

The best he wrote was the outline of the failed book on the Ilf. Worst of all is a report published in Litgazeta on the trial of Bukharin-Rykov (right-wing Trotskyist bloc) in 1938. Petrov started playing the game by the rules to maintain his status as a living classic. For this, again, according to a literary legend, he received a murderous statement from the drunken Olesha about the Order of Lenin: “I see myself at someone else’s expense, and you are wearing someone else’s order.”

Perhaps because of the search for a deal with himself, Evgeny Petrov went on military missions. But even here he was not lucky – his first reports were from Stalin’s unjust wars of plunder – Finland 1939 and the “liberation” campaign of 1940.

Had Ilf not died in 1937 and Petrov in 1942, they would hardly have survived the post-war repressions, repressions that were even more plentiful and massive than in the late 1930s. After their trip to America, which resulted in the One-Storey America, for some reason they found it necessary to write a letter to Stalin worth borrowing about the arrangement of the Hollywood pavilions. The leader was disturbed by this letter.

After the death of the two authors came the only ones from the Soviet galaxy, who in 1966 were called “incredibly talented” and found a way to bypass the censorship slingshot, even chosen by Vladimir Nabokov. in the darkest years of Soviet history.

In 1947, for the 30th anniversary of Soviet power, the Soviet Writer publishing house republished some of the most important books of the era, including The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf. What started here! Fadeev’s note to Stalin and Malenkov: “a harmful book”, “a slander on Soviet society”, “the authors … characterized by bourgeois-intellectual skepticism and nihilism.” Also, a note from the Central Committee to Agitprop to Malenkov containing an analysis of “vulgar jokes”, the worst of which turned out to be “Marx and Engels these thugs had done business”. The decision of the secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks, the condemnation of criticism of the editor of the Soviet literature department Anatoly Tarasenkov, the hysteria of Alexander Fadeev … Maria Belkina, the writer and his wife, Tarasenkov, recalled: “The circulation of the book went under the knife. Tarasenkov was scolded. After the meeting, Fadeev began to have a drink “to drive the bear,” as Tvardovsky said. However, Fadeev notes that Belkin adored Ilf and Petrov and “laughed to tears like a child, quoting fragments by heart.”

In essence, the co-authors themselves predicted their ending. Evgeny Petrov wrote that he does not remember who said this phrase during a business trip in America, most likely Ilf: “It would be nice if we died together in some kind of aviation or car accident.” So, in essence, it happened despite the fact that Ilf’s physical death was five years apart from Petrov’s physical death.

Ilf and Petrov are the authors of the dissolution. It originated during the NEP era and had its second birth in the 1950s. The rehabilitation of the immortal novels came at the same time as the rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinist terror – the books were republished in 1956 and subsequently signed for reprint countless times. Excerpts from Ilf and Petrov – the generation of thaws, which, according to the “material” knowledge, determined who is here and who is a stranger, and several more generations have grown. The Strugatsky brothers, Babel, Bulgakov partly played the same role.

However, the sketches and sentences of Ilf and Petrov do not know time limits. Feeling that a deadly “brick” is approaching, take at least this from Ilf’s Notebooks: “Land of fools who are not afraid. Time to scare.” And elsewhere: “Among fearless fools, it’s hard and boring.”

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.



Source: Gazeta

Popular

More from author

Germany announced that it is ready to guarantee the security of Gaza 03:20

Germany could become the guarantor of the security of the Gaza Strip once the conflict between the Palestinian territory and Israel ends. This...

The number of foreign agents in Russia increased 3.5 times in three years 03:53

The number of foreign agents in Russia has more than tripled in three years, reaching 579 natural and legal persons, as well as media...

“The governor could not play all the roles.” Interview with director Andrey Bogatyrev about “Umalta Gold” Director Bogatyrev: Governor Degtyarev did not star...

— Tell us about your new movie “The Gold of Umalta”: How did this project come to you? How did the idea of...

Scientists found a way to clean the toxic alkaloid in barley 03:17

German scientists from the Leibniz University of Hannover have found a key gene responsible for the production of the toxic alkaloid gramine in barley,...