Creative biography. Creative biography Konstantin Fedin short biography

Fedin, Konstantin Alexandrovich- Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin. FEDIN Konstantin Alexandrovich (1892 1977), Russian writer, public figure. Belonged to the Serapion Brothers. In novels (“Cities and Years”, 1924; “Brothers”, 1927 28; trilogy “First Joys”, 1945, ... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

Russian Soviet writer, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958), Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Corresponding member of the German Academy of Arts (1958). Born into a bourgeois family. He spent his childhood and youth... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Fedin Konstantin Alexandrovich- (18921977), writer, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958), Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). In 192137 he lived in Petrograd (Leningrad), was a member of the Serapion Brothers group, and collaborated in the Petrograd press. Petrograd during the Civil War and... Encyclopedic reference book "St. Petersburg"

- (1892 1977) Russian writer, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958), Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Belonged to the Serapion brothers. Novels, including Cities and Years (1924), Brothers (1927 28); trilogy First Joys (1945), An Extraordinary Summer (1947... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

- (1892 1977), writer, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958), Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). In 1921 37 he lived in Petrograd (Leningrad), was a member of the Serapion Brothers group, and collaborated in the Petrograd press. Petrograd during the Civil War and... St. Petersburg (encyclopedia)

- (1892 1977), Russian writer, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1958), Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Belonged to the Serapion Brothers. Novels, including “Cities and Years” (1924), “Brothers” (1927 28); in the trilogy “First Joys” (1945), ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

Soviet writer. Genus. in Saratov. His father was from a peasant background and later became a merchant. Fedin graduated from a commercial school in Kozlov. From 1911 to 1914 he studied at the Moscow Commercial Institute. From 1914 to 1918, a civilian prisoner in Germany. Since 1918... ... Large biographical encyclopedia

FEDIN Konstantin Alexandrovich- (18921977), Russian Soviet writer, academician. USSR Academy of Sciences (1958), Hero of Socialism. Labor (1967). 1st sec. (195971) and before. board (197177) SP USSR. Rum. “Gorodai Years” (1924), “Brothers” (192728), “The Rape of Europe” (book 12 ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary

Konstantin Fedin Monument to Fedin in Saratov Birth name: Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin Date of birth: February 24, 1892 Place of birth: Saratov, Russian Empire Date of death: July 15, 1977 ... Wikipedia

Books

Konstantin Fedin, B. Brainina. Moscow, 1953. State Publishing House of Fiction. With photos. Publisher's binding. The condition is good. Original cover retained. Konstantin Alexandrovich...
First joys, K. Fedin. Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin is the author of books included in the golden fund of Soviet literature. The novel “First Joys” opens a trilogy that shows historical moments in life...

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Fedin Konstantin Aleksandrovich (1892 - 1977), prose writer. Born on February 12 (24 NS) in Saratov in the family of a stationery merchant and self-taught poet. My childhood and teenage years were spent in Saratov. At the age of seven he entered primary school, and then began learning to play the violin. In 1901 he entered a commercial school. In the fall of 1905, together with the whole class, he participated in a student “strike.” In 1907 he fled to Moscow, pawning his violin in a pawnshop. Soon found by his father, he returns home, but, not wanting to work in his father’s store, insists on continuing his education and studies at a commercial school in Kozlov (Michurinsk). Here, thanks to literature teachers, I re-read works of Russian literature in a new way, finding in them “an incomparable joy.” I started dreaming about writing.

In 1911 he entered the economics department of the Moscow Commercial Institute. My student years were filled with a mature desire to write literary works. Fedin's first literary experiments were published in 1913 - 1914 in the St. Petersburg "New Satyricon" by A. Averchenko.

It’s harder for old people to die: they know a lot.

Fedin Konstantin Alexandrovich

In the spring of 1914 he went to Germany to improve his German language, lived in Nuremberg, where he was overtaken by the First World War. Detained as a civilian prisoner, he was interned in Saxony and lived there until the German revolution (1918). He gave Russian language lessons, served as a chorister and actor in the theaters of Zittau and Görlitz. He ended up in a prisoner exchange party and returned to Moscow in the fall of 1918. He worked for some time at the People's Commissariat of Education.

In 1919 he lived and worked in Syzran, edited the newspaper "Syzran Communard", where he had to write editorials, feuilletons, and theater reviews, conduct city reports and an international review. The revolutionary Volga events of 1919 gave him enormous material for his writing.

In the fall he was mobilized to the front and ended up in Petrograd - at the very height of Yudenich's offensive. First he was sent to the cavalry division, then transferred to the editorial office of the newspaper "Boevaya Pravda", where he worked as an assistant editor until 1921. He collaborated in the Petrograd press, publishing articles, feuilletons, stories, and edited the magazine "Book and Revolution" (1921 - 24). In 1923, Fedin's first book was published - the collection "Wasteland". In 1922 - 1924 he wrote the novel “Cities and Years” - one of the first Soviet novels about the paths of the intelligentsia in the revolution and civil war, which became a work of Soviet literary classics.

In 1928 he made a long trip to Norway, Holland, Denmark, and Germany. Three years later, seriously ill, he went to Switzerland. Gorky, with whom friendly relations had developed back in 1920, introduced Fedin to Romain Rolland. In 1933 - 1934 he visited the cities of Italy and France. These trips gave impetus and material for the creation of two novels: “The Rape of Europa” (1933 - 1935), “Sanatorium Arcturus” (1940). During the Patriotic War, in 1942, he wrote the play “Test of Feelings.” In 1943 he began working on a long-planned trilogy and by 1948 completed two novels - “First Joys” and “An Extraordinary Summer”, which were received with interest by readers, and worked on the last part of the trilogy - “The Bonfire” (1961 - 1965). In 1957, the book “Writer, Art, Time” was published, where he gives portraits of his friends and contemporaries (Gorky, S. Zweig, Rolland, etc.). The memoirs "Gorky Among Us" (1941 - 68) were published. K. Fedin died in 1977 in Moscow.

Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin was born on February 24 (February 12, old style) 1892 in the family of a stationery store clerk, Alexander Erofeevich Fedin, and his wife Anna Pavlovna in a small courtyard outbuilding on Bolshaya Sergievskaya Street in Saratov (now Chernyshevsky Street).

In the period from 1899 to 1901. Fedin received his primary education at the Sretensky Elementary School (today the State Museum of K. A. Fedin is located in this building), and in 1901 he entered the Saratov Commercial School. In 1907, Fedin secretly left for Moscow from his parents, then from 1908 to 1911. studied at the Kozlovsky Commercial School (now the city of Michurinsk). Fedin's first literary experiments date back to 1910. This was an imitation of Gogol. “His “Overcoat,” writes Fedin in his “Autobiography,” “remained for a long time one of my deepest inner shocks.”

From 1911 to 1914 Fedin is a student at the Moscow Commercial Institute (now the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy). In 1913-1914 - the first publication in the “New Satyricon” under the pseudonym “Nidefak”.

In 1914, Fedin was sent to Germany for in-depth study of the German language, where, due to the outbreak of World War I, he remained as civilian prisoner of war No. 52 until 1918. From 1916 to 1917, Fedin worked as an actor at the operetta theater in Zittau, working on the novel “The Wilderness,” the manuscript of which was destroyed by the author in 1928. The years of Fedin's stay in Germany became valuable material for the creation of the novel “Cities and Years” (1924), which brought Fedin European fame.

On September 4, 1918, Fedin returned to Moscow, and in 1919 he worked in Syzran, editing the newspaper “Syzran Communar”. The magazine “Responses” publishes Fedin’s stories “Fairy Tale”, “Triolet of May”, articles “Spartacists”, “And there is peace on earth...”, “Maxim Gorky”.

In 1920, Fedin’s correspondence with Maxim Gorky began. Fedin sends Gorky manuscripts of the stories “Sorrow” (not published), “Uncle Kisel” (first published in the newspaper “Syzransky Kommunar” dated November 22 and 23, 1919).

In 1921 he became a member of the Serapion Brothers group.

In the period from 1921 to 1923. Fedin publishes novels and short stories “The Garden”, “Anna Timofeevna”, “Wasteland”, “The Story of One Morning”. The story “The Garden” was awarded first prize at the House of Writers competition. In 1924, the first edition of the novel “Cities and Years” was published, in 1926 - “The Narovchatov Chronicles”, in 1928 - “Brothers”.

In 1928, Fedin traveled abroad, where he met with Johannes Becher, Ernest Toller, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, Leonhard Frank. In 1932 he visited Romain Rolland in Villeneuve. In 1933 he met in Paris with L. Frank, A. Malraux, Louis Aragon.

In August 1934, Fedin spoke at the First All-Union Congress of Writers and was elected to the board of the Union.

In 1934, Fedin’s book “The Rape of Europe” was published.

In 1936, Fedin and his family moved to Peredelkino.

In 1939, Fedin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. In 1941, a magazine publication of the book “Gorky Among Us” appeared, and in 1944 a separate edition was published.

From October 1941 to January 1943. Fedin and his family live in evacuation in the city of Chistopol. In September-August 1943, he left for the active army near Orel.

Present at the trial of war criminals in Nuremberg as a correspondent for the newspaper Izvestia. In 1947, Fedin was approved as a professor at the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky in the department of “Soviet literature and creativity”.

In the period from 1946 to 1948, Fedin published novels written on Saratov material: “First Joys” and “An Extraordinary Summer.”

In 1951 he was elected to the Supreme Council of the RSFSR. In 1958 he was elected academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1960, Fedin was awarded the honorary title of Doctor of Philosophy (Humboldt University, Berlin).\

In 1967, for the 75th anniversary The writer was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.

Autobiography

My entire childhood, from birth in 1892, and early youth, until 1908, passed in Saratov, which in our family was fondly called “the capital of the Volga region.” Now I seem to remember more vividly than ever my parental family in one or another tiny apartment and my childhood impressions of the Volga with its clumsy steamships, endless lines of rafts, tarred fishermen’s planks and the surrounding orchards of the villages. This is where my first ideas about the Russian land came from - as a World, about the Russian people, as a Man. Here the initial concepts of beauty were formed - from the art gallery of the Radishchev Museum, where there were many excellent Russian masters and Western artists - Barbizonians, collected by the famous Bogolyubov; from school plays in which I participated; from drama and opera theaters; from violin lessons, which tormented me and at one time completely cooled my interest in music.
I began to remember myself at the age of four. We then lived on the parade ground - a large dusty square, where the length of squat artillery stables stood green battery guns, with their muzzles pointed from afar at our wooden “outhouse” with three windows.
I can clearly see a soldier walking in front of the guns with his saber drawn and large short-tailed horses being driven on a line in a cloud of dust.
One evening the entire square was illuminated by jumping tongues of fire in black smoke: stinking kerosene bowls were being burned, and people were wandering around, inhaling fumes and soot. It was a city illumination arranged for a “festival” on the day when Nicholas II “celebrated” his coronation in Moscow with the tragic Khodynka, which said so much about the Tsar to the Russian people. Starting with these bowls, I remember more and more details of my childhood life.
In 1899, I went to elementary school, where one of the teachers was my mother’s uncle, Semyon Ivanovich Mashkov, with whom she spent her girlhood before marriage. Mashkov’s house was very close to our family, but differed from it, primarily in that it was much higher in culture. Here the most heated conversations among adults that I had heard then were held, newspapers were read, which I did not see at all at home at that time, teachers and students gathered (we didn’t have students either), and almost always my father argued frantically at such meetings, quarreled and went home. Mashkov’s life seemed to me very harmonious, clear, inspired something poetic, and this feeling was strengthened by my mother, who treated her uncle with adoration.
At the age of seven I began to learn to play the violin. This school continued with interruptions, it seems, until 1906, when I decided to take up music seriously, entered the conservatory, but suddenly I hated the classes there and stopped playing. Twenty years later, talking about Nikita Karev in the novel “Brothers,” I recalled my early love and hatred for the violin.
In 1901 I entered a commercial school. The memory of the teaching retained little good in him. But within its walls I experienced with my comrades the experiences that were brought by the Russian-Japanese War, and especially by the revolution. For the first time, an exciting real world was opening up beyond the boundaries of our childish fantasies, above lessons and textbooks.
This world was connected for me with the earliest impression of great street events that I accidentally observed - with the dispersal of a protest demonstration against the execution of student Balmashev in 1902, who killed the Minister of Internal Affairs Sipyagin. In the autumn of 1905, I had not yet turned fourteen years old, but I was seized with general excitement; together with the whole class, he took part in a student “strike”, went with his comrades to the 1st gymnasium (where Chernyshevsky taught more than half a century ago) to “remove” gymnasium students from classes, ran away through the courtyards from the Cossacks who had cordoned off the gymnasium.
My father looked on my behavior as dangerous mischief, and impressively called me to obedience. However, at this time I had my first chance in self-defense from my father’s admonitions: he himself never ceased to be indignant at the pogroms and the Black Hundreds. When the cruel “pacifier” of the Saratov peasants, General Sakharov, was killed in the house of Governor Stolypin, the father passed over the event with stern silence - the “foundations” in which he kept his family did not allow him to approve the terrorist act, but he also could not approve of the executions and inhumanity of the pacification of the peasants forgive.
My mother, Anna Pavlovna, née Alyakrinskaya, the daughter of a national teacher, raised by her priest grandfather in the wilderness of the Penza province, brought into the house the way of Russian spiritual families. His father, Alexander Erofeevich, was the son of a serf peasant, also a Penzyak by birth, he studied trade, served as a “boy”, then as a clerk for merchants and subsequently became a merchant-stationer. He was self-taught, before his marriage he tried to write poetry and all his life he had a weakness for simple rhyme, collected religious books, loved churchliness and in this sense lived in complete harmony with his mother, although their characters were sharply different.
Life was strict, established by the father once and for all, like a calendar. There was a sense of coercion throughout. By the age of fifteen, the house seemed to me an unbearable oppression, I began to study very poorly and in December 1907 fled to Moscow, pawning my violin in a pawnshop.
One of my school friends, who studied painting and once infected me with a craving for oil painting, sheltered me in his basement, on Kislovka, and together we dreamed that I would also be an artist, and while I served him in kind, standing in the middle of a gloomy room in Bonaparte's pose. Soon my father found me and peacefully took me home, making me promise to work in his store. In the summer of 1908, I made another attempt to escape - by boat down the Volga, but did not complete the desperate enterprise, returned home and soon insisted on continuing my education. My mother turned out to be a good support for me in this, as she was throughout her not very easy life. I think that only thanks to her sensitive will I did not go astray.
The next three years were the best in my youth - senior classes at a commercial school in Kozlov (Michurinsk). I now lived alone, in an environment that did not burden me with memories of Saratov, where everything troubled my conscience - escapes, interrupted studies, and comrades who had left me, and work in a store.
I owe a lot to Kozlov’s teachers, especially the literati, as teachers of Russian literature were then called. Class activities went beyond the scope of the curriculum - we read collections of “Knowledge”, wrote essays about Russian “modernists”, about Ibsen, and this opened up our view of literature as a chain of living phenomena changing in the struggle, and not a scholastic school “subject”. With new eyes I re-read what had previously left me indifferent, and soon found incomparable joy in books.
Here, in Kozlov, I began to dream of writing.
In 1911 I entered the economics department of the Moscow Commercial Institute. My student years were filled with a mature desire to write. The first story was written in the summer of 1910, in Uralsk, where I was visiting my sister. It was an imitation of Gogol - his “Overcoat” remained for a long time one of my deepest inner shocks. I realized that this was imitation much later, in my mature years, and when the story was being written, it seemed to me that I was singing like a bird. I then sent this bird song from Kozlov to St. Petersburg, to the “New Journal for Everyone,” and suffered the first grief, so familiar to new writers: the magazine returned the manuscript to me without any answer. Only in 1913 and early 1914 were my “little things” and poems published in the St. Petersburg “New Satyricon” by Arkady Averchenko - before that failure after failure followed.
In the spring of 1914 I went to Germany with the aim of improving my German language and settled in Nuremberg. In the village of Stein, next to Faber's palace, I earned my first five marks by playing the violin at a peasant dance with my friend, a folk teacher, who accompanied me on the piano. I never needed the violin again.
I was caught up in the war in Bavaria and tried to get home, but on the way, in Dresden, I was detained as a civilian prisoner. I was soon expelled from Dresden.
I had to live interned in Saxony and Silesia almost until the German revolution. I gave Russian language lessons, served as a chorister and actor in the theaters of Zittau and Görlitz, continued to write and composed my first novel, “The Wilderness,” which I later destroyed. My literary means were changeable, remaining naive - I tried to combine everyday life writing with psychologism, I was fascinated, first of all, by Dostoevsky, then by the Scandinavians, especially Strindberg and Bjornstern-Bjornson, and finally by the Expressionists with their early magazine “Die Aktion”. The magazine was international in its sentiments, its position was close to that of the German Spartacists, whose young representatives I met in Saxony, and then got to know better during my first visit to Berlin, in the summer of 1918, when protest against the war was already beginning to be felt among the population. I was invited to serve as a translator at the first Soviet embassy in Germany, but the German authorities, having learned about this, hastened to include me in the exchange party of prisoners - after fifty months of servitude in my position as a “hostile foreigner.”
Returning to Moscow this fall, I worked for some time at the People's Commissariat of Education. It was a difficult time - the traces of post-war devastation were deep, hunger made itself felt too severely. Soon I was presented with a tempting opportunity to work at least in the provincial press, and I went, at the beginning of 1919, to the Volga, to Syzran. Here, at the department of public education, I founded a small literary magazine, where local Soviet youth and some “writers from the people” (as the then followers of the poet Surikov were called) were published, who sent their manuscripts from Simbirsk, Samara, Suzdal, Tver, etc. I edited the newspaper “Syzran Communard”, worked as secretary of the city executive committee, passionately dedicating myself to a life full of disruption, innovation and dreams, which, being “district” in scale, were internally huge for me, like a revolution.
The short months of work in Syzran left a strong imprint on my entire life path. In addition to being trained as a newspaperman, who had to write everything from editorials and feuilletons to theater and book reviews, or conduct, along with city reporting, an international review, the revolutionary Volga events of 1919 gave me inexhaustible material for writing. Before that, for almost five years, cut off from my homeland and forced to withdraw into myself, I found myself in the world of a common struggle for the socialist future of the people and quickly went through my elementary school of social life.
In the fall I was mobilized to the front and found myself in Petrograd - at the very height of Yudenich's offensive. First, I was sent to the Separate Bashkir Cavalry Division - here I was in charge of the expedition, supplying the seal to the four regiments of the division fighting at the front. Then I was transferred to the editorial office of the 7th Army newspaper “Boevaya Pravda,” where I worked as an assistant editor until the beginning of 1921.
Leningrad took an exceptional place in my entire existence. Its impact on consciousness cannot be called anything other than poetic. Traditions in the field of art and labor culture, the age-old romance of the revolutionary struggle, the glory of October and that patriotic character of the Leningrader, which is known everywhere - everything here was created in order to believe in life and appreciate its gifts. I lived in Leningrad, not counting trips abroad, for eighteen years and I deeply value what I learned from its revolutionary culture.
In 1920 I met Gorky. Today, when more than three decades have passed since that memorable February day, I can say even more confidently than before that the fact of this acquaintance with Gorky became a huge event in my writing life. The very first meeting with him marked the beginning of a cordial communication that lasted until his death.
The living Gorky, with his charm, his artistic and moral authority, was often the first judge of my stories and tales. His role in the formation of the emerging Soviet literature of the 20s was enormous; his participation in the destinies of writers often determined the entire further development of talents and embellished the path of the young writer.
Gorky never tired of awakening in the writer an interest in life and turning his gaze to reality. This influence was also beneficial for most of the writers from the Serapion Brothers circle, to which I belonged. This circle was an exponent of formalistic tendencies in bourgeois literature, which at first had a sharp and harmful effect on young writers - the “serapions”, who, following the “formal school”, considered every literary work not as a reflection of reality with its social struggle, but only as “the sum of stylistic techniques." The Gorky principle, which served as a moral and aesthetic support in those early years of my work, helped me and retained its significance for me throughout my life.
Issues of art have always worried me not only in the abstract, but in life practice: a person of art, an artist in society. While I came to the understanding of art that I developed over time, I wandered a lot through crossroads, and these crossroads are the story of the development of a writer.
A truly biography of an artist should not be a description of the facts of his existence, but an explanation of how these facts were understood by him. The colorfulness of the facts in itself is not sufficient for a biography; it requires a clear look at the misconceptions experienced. But attempts to see oneself from the outside are difficult to succeed, and the more objective a writer wants to be, the more, obviously, his autobiography should develop into a narrative.
However, I cannot help but speak at least briefly about my misconceptions on an issue that occupied an exclusive place in my literary work. I lived for a long time with erroneous ideas about the “specific” in art, and two of my errors should have significantly interfered and interfered with the work.
I thought that there was a conflict between the reflection of reality in literature and “pure fiction,” the writer’s fantasy. In fact, there is no such collision in realist art. Gorky very accurately wrote to me in one of his letters that an artistic image is not “pure fiction” at all, that it is “...precisely that genuine reality that only art creates, that “extract” from reality, that clot of it that results from the mysterious work of the artist’s imagination.” According to Gorky, the traits of a hero, encountered in thousands of people, “dust of impressions” compacted into stone, are transformed by the artist into what I called “pure fiction.”
The reflection of reality in the image does not conflict with the artist’s imagination. The truth of the image is determined by the extent to which fantasy harmonizes with reality and contributes to its reflection.
It may not be difficult to understand this speculatively. But it was difficult to grasp sensually, through the writer’s experience, how to make an organic image in a work that arises from observations of real life and at the same time at the call of fantasy.
Another mistake was my idea (perhaps not always realized) that the task of a writer is to develop certain qualities once and for all. Meanwhile, the qualities of the art of writing are constantly changing in connection with the social development of classes and the nation as a whole, with the movement of history and depending on the material that the artist touches.
The contradiction in which my search for many years took place was as follows. On the one hand, I had a prejudice that there were forms created by art once and for all. On the other hand, I easily rejected these forms as dead. The task was to concretely (that is, in relation to one’s work) see the forms in their development and recognize them as inseparable from the social content of art.
Gorky made this and many other searches for the solutions the writer needed easier for me with all the generosity of his great soul.
For six years, from the end of 1919, I was closely associated with Leningrad journalism, published articles, feuilletons, stories, and edited (1921-1924) the critical and bibliographic magazine “Book and Revolution.” My stories, published in newspapers of that time, reflected the impressions of reality - the war and revolution - much more than my first collection, published in 1923.
This book (“Wasteland”) was affected by all the brakes that slowed down my growth - the old material accumulated before the war still lingered behind me, not processed by imagination, not embodied to the best of my ability. It took a lot of effort to finally get rid of it. With “Wasteland” I put an end to my unfulfilled expectations from the time of the first story returned to me by the editors until the first novel destroyed by myself.
From 1922 to 1924 I wrote the novel Cities and Years. With its entire structure, it seemed to express the path I had traveled: in essence, it was a figurative comprehension of the experiences of the World War, carried out from German captivity, and the life experience that the revolution generously endowed. The form of the novel (especially its composition) was a reflection of the then literary struggle for innovation. The newspaper clippings and seemingly insignificant documents of German military life that I collected while in captivity served their purpose in helping to recreate the picture of the notorious Prussian philistinism, national intolerance, intoxication with blood and, finally, the cruel disappointment of the Germans after the defeat and flight of Wilhelm. With Hitler's rise to power, the German translation of this novel was burned in Germany along with other books that exposed the First World War.
In 1923-1926, I lived for a long time in the deep forest reserves of the old way of life of the Smolensk region, where events were only slowly brewing, which were to grow to the size of a social revolution in the entire peasantry two or three years later. The collection of stories and short stories “Transvaal” remained a memory of this period of my life.
More than once I had the opportunity to observe Western Europe. In 1928, after finishing the novel “Brothers,” I made a long trip to Norway, Holland, Denmark, Germany during the period of highest “stabilization” and saw the West having fun, turning a blind eye to the grief of the world.
Three years later, seriously ill, I went to Switzerland. Gorky, as had already happened once in Petrograd, during my illness in 1921, again intervened with extraordinary participation in my fate and helped me carry out the necessary long-term treatment. To his tireless initiative I was obliged this time to meet the great Frenchman Romain Rolland, who invited me to his place in Villeneuve, on Lake Geneva, when I had recovered sufficiently, in the spring of 1932. Meetings with him and further communication showed me in his person a European with a sincerely social temperament and unshakable strength of heart, I would say: a European of the future. Stefan Zweig, in a letter to me, called Rolland “the eye of Europe.” And, truly, no other writer saw with such pain the tragedy towards which the West was rapidly rushing.
At this time, the general crisis was the only topic in Europe. One might say that the West was in mourning and was ready to tear it off itself at any cost. This price was offered to him by German fascism. At the end of 1932 in Germany, I witnessed the last pre-Hitler elections, which foreshadowed darkness. And when I went on a trip again - in 1933-1934 - and traveled through the cities of Italy and France, official swaggering Rome was celebrating the decade of Mussolini's rule; and in Paris the “Fiery Crosses” came out with a pogrom on the street.
Trips to the West in the late 20s and early 30s gave impetus and material for the writing of two novels: “The Rape of Europa” (first book, 1933, second book, 1935) and “Sanatorium Arcturus” (1940). In the first, I wanted to show Western Europe in its contradictions with the new world that was rapidly being built in the East, in the Soviet Union. In the second I give a picture of Western life depressed by the trials of these years.
I have now moved away from the Western theme in prose, but I hope to return to it in order to make up for the well-known understatement in my previous novels by introducing an image that arose in me as the fruit of my acquaintance with Romain Rolland. Much is revealed to the imagination when you meet, sometimes in the light of the sun, sometimes in the darkness of night or dull twilight, writers as different as Romain Rolland and Martin Andersen Nexo, or like H.G. Wells, Leonard Frank or even Hans Fallada. Their views testify to the great contradictions of the West and express its tragic diversity.
During the Great Patriotic War with Germany, I visited the front-line cities and villages of my homeland, which fought against the enemy. I saw Orel and many Oryol old Russian towns that disappeared from the face of the earth. I saw Leningrad, living after a nine-hundred-day siege, as a miracle, as an immortal adornment of our culture. I saw the ruins of monuments of St. Petersburg history - a ring of former palaces around Leningrad. I saw Pskov Pushkin memorial places - the villages of Mikhailovskoye, Trigorskoye, the ancient settlement of Voronichi and Pushkinskie Gory with the grave of the poet, desecrated by Nazi dugouts. Western Europe made Russian people think about a lot during the Second World War.
And how the answer to these feelings was my new trip abroad in 1945-1946 to Germany, to the trial of the perpetrators of the war in Nuremberg.
A strange coincidence of circumstances brought me, more than three decades later, to the very village of Stein, to the same hotel near Faber's castle, where before the First World War I played the violin. In Nuremberg, the arched door from which I fled, hoping to leave Germany, in 1914, survived in a pile of rubble. This is where my knowledge of the West began. Here I have now seen the fruits of “European wisdom”. From a young age I heard cries about the “salvation” of Europe. For seven weeks in a row I looked at the Nuremberg panopticon of the newest and most radical “saviors” of Europe, and what the international tribunal said about these spirits of the dungeon behind the barrier of the dock gave me some hope that maybe Europe would really be saved.
Three cycles of journalistic essays were written during this difficult time for his native land and unforgettable in terms of folk heroism - the writer’s too weak tribute to his country in the time of its sacrificial struggle with the enemy. And I never cease to hope that in my prose I will be able to more fully embody the person born of the history of the Great Patriotic War.
During the years of this war, I began to work on a very long-planned trilogy and during 1943-1948 I completed two novels: “First Joys” and “An Extraordinary Summer.” Turning to purely Russian material, after all my previous novels were, more or less, connected with the theme of the West, was not only a long-ripened strong desire, but was an expression of my search for a great modern hero. When the fate of the native country was decided by the war, the conviction became even stronger than before that the future of Russian life is inseparable from its Soviet system and that the truly great hero of our time should and can be recognized as a communist, whose active will is unequivocal to Victory. I tried to make this hero the main character of my latest novels, showing his formation in the pre-revolutionary era of Russia and during the civil war.
I continue to work on a new novel, which should complete the duology of “First Joys” and “An Extraordinary Summer” by turning it into a trilogy. So far I have been able to publish only small excerpts from the third novel, which I called “The Bonfire.” Its action develops in the second half of 1941 and takes place mainly in Central Russia. My constant desire to find an image of time and to include time in the narrative on equal and even preferential terms with the heroes of the story - this desire appears in my current plan more persistently than before. In other words, I look at my trilogy as a historical work.
The post-war years, filled with events transforming the history of mankind, unusually raised the importance of Soviet literature and increased its debt to its native country. The tasks of a writer have increased and become even more honorable than before. The voice of Soviet literature is increasingly heard beyond the borders of our homeland.
Together with many of my literary comrades, and sometimes alone, I had the opportunity to visit abroad again and again. I saw a rapidly growing world of peoples liberated from capitalism, and if I could say about these new “cities and years” at least only what I myself witnessed, I would partly fulfill my duty to our time, which has given me so much. Since 1950, I have visited countries that I did not know in the past - Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, England and Scotland, Belgium, Finland, and I also visited those that, more or less, were known to me from ancient times - in Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland. The trips were connected with social tasks and, above all, with the international struggle in defense of peace.
I am convinced that of all the conceivable goals of an artist, the main one - in an ideological, moral sense - should always be this struggle to preserve peace between peoples. The writer’s work should be permeated with this desire, and as long as he has strength, he is obliged to give it to the idea of peace.
The post-war years showed that both Soviet fiction and foreign writing from East and West in the general movement of peace supporters could achieve a lot with their journalistic works. I would very much like and hope to write a book consisting of pictures of the West and telling about my foreign travels and life abroad. This should be a kind of “Walking to the West”, which will include the impressions of a Russian person who saw foreign countries for the first time before the World War of 1914 and then compared their life from decade to decade for more than forty years.
This is a matter for the future. For now, I could only collect my literary journalism into a book called “Writer, Art, Time.” And if we talk about this kind of work dedicated to the life of literature and my life in literature, then in my thoughts there is the end of the memoirs “Gorky Among Us” - a book, two parts of which were published in 1943 and 1944.
While preparing this old autobiographical note of mine for this publication, I paid attention to the words: the more objective a writer wants to be, the more, obviously, his autobiography should develop into a narrative. I feel this is true. As soon as the imagination touched the past, many events, pictures, faces, and behind them - thoughts, dreams crowded in the memory - and pulled towards memories.
They say that craving for memories is a sign of age. Probably. But this means that most writers only in old age gather the strengths that great writers already possessed at a young age. An example is memories of Leo Tolstoy's childhood. After all, only one thing is important - that the forces themselves are not an illusion, and that they appear in old age is not important.
...The heart (and not just it, but everything human that lives in me) demands that I do the “best” that you never stop dreaming about as the best. This, of course, is a book - some kind of full-fledged and full-blooded book, written with all my heart, calling to you day and night. I had this feeling before: I’ll write the best I’m capable of, I’ll write in such a way that everything previously written will fade into oblivion next to this new and - perhaps “perfect” - I’m about to write! And when I had to write, I did not, of course, cease to hope that I was writing this best, for which I was, as it were, created (although hope was never completely constant - on the contrary! - the curve of aspirations and despair jumped up and down, and I always suffered more, which made me happy). But time passed, I was disappointed and again waited with longing for the time when I would get down to something better, something dear to my heart - some book that would be “the main thing” in all and for all of life.
It happens like this: you struggle and struggle to clarify some detail - you cross out one word, look for another, rummage through your memory, books, dictionaries - and then suddenly it turns out that the detail itself is not needed, and you just throw it away, and everything will fall into place .
The reader always needs the most important thing, and that’s all. And the main thing is the thought.
The reader, that is, the imaginary person you, the artist, need, for whom you write, is smarter than you. He is quick-witted, he has a keen sense, he quickly understands everything, and whatever you think, whatever you plan, he will immediately grasp it. He is the highest and strictest critic; he cannot be deceived by trifles and flourishes. And he lives in you.
Listen to him, and everything will be fine.

Creative biography. Creative biography Konstantin Fedin short biography

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