Two captains novel from the first person. Study of Kaverin’s novel “Two Captains”
“I never forgot about Pskov.
I have happened to mention him more than once in essays and stories.
In the novel Two Captains, I called him Anscom. Like a close, beloved person,
I thought a lot about him during the war years, during the Leningrad siege, in the Northern Fleet"
Kaverin V.A., 1970
We invite you to take a fascinating journey through the city straight out of the pages of the novel Two Captains.”
Remembering his childhood, the main character Sanya Grigoriev describes the city where he spent it. We see the city of Ensk through the eyes of a boy.
The novel begins with Sanya’s words: I remember a spacious, dirty yard and low houses surrounded by a fence. The yard stood right next to the river, and in the spring, when the low water subsided, it was strewn with wood chips and shells, and sometimes with other, much more interesting things...”
“...As a boy I visited the Cathedral Garden a thousand times, but then it never occurred to me that it was so beautiful. It is located high on a mountain above the confluence of two rivers: Peshinka and Tikhaya, and is surrounded by a fortress wall.”
“...On this day, my mother took us with her, me and my sister. We went into the presence” and carried the petition. Presence was a dark building behind the Market Square, behind a high iron fence."
“...The shops were closed, the streets were empty, we didn’t meet a single person behind Sergievskaya”
“The governor’s garden remains in my memory, in which the little son of a fat police officer rode a tricycle.”
and the Cadet Corps.
“...we agreed to go to the city museum. Sanya wanted to show us this museum, which Ensk was very proud of. It was located in the Pagankin Chambers, an old merchant building, about which Petya Skovorodnikov once said that it was filled with gold, and the merchant Pagankin himself was walled up in the basement...”
“The train starts moving, and the dear Ensky station leaves me. Everything is faster! Another minute and the platform ends. Goodbye Ensk!
Literature used in preparing the material:
- Kaverin, V.A. Two captains.
- Levin, N.F. Pskov on old postcards / N.F. Levin. - Pskov, 2009.
May 5 marks the 141st anniversary of the birth of the outstanding polar explorer Georgy Sedov, whose expedition to the North Pole ended dramatically. In the same year, 1912, two more attempts were made to reach the Arctic, but they also ended in tragedy. There were no less secrets and mysteries in these historical events than in the novel “Two Captains”, written on their basis.
The central events of the novel - the search for the missing expedition of Captain Tatarinov - evoke several historical analogies. In 1912, 3 expeditions set out to explore the Arctic: Lieutenant Georgy Sedov on the ship “St. Foka”, geologist Vladimir Rusanov on the boat “Hercules” and Lieutenant Georgy Brusilov on the schooner “St. Anna”. Very little is known about Rusanov’s expedition - it went missing. Her search is reminiscent of the search for the crew of the “St. Mary” in Kaverin’s novel.
The schooner “St. Maria” in the novel actually repeats the travel dates and route of the schooner “St. Anna” by Brusilov. But the character traits, views and appearance of Captain Tatarinov are reminiscent of Georgy Sedov. He was the son of a poor fisherman with many children, and by the age of 35 he had achieved a lot, becoming a senior lieutenant in the fleet. In the description of the expedition of Captain Tatarinov, facts from the expedition of Georgy Sedov were used: the supply of unusable dogs and supplies, the inability to find a radio operator, the discovery of cuts in the hull of the ship, Sedov’s report to the hydrographic department is quoted. The expedition doctor wrote: “ The corned beef turns out to be rotten and completely uneatable. When you cook it, there is such a corpse-like smell in the cabins that we all have to run away. The cod was also rotten" In 1914, during a trip to the Pole, Georgy Sedov died. The remaining members of the expedition, except for the mechanic who died of scurvy, returned to their homeland.
The fate of the navigator of the “St. Mary” Ivan Klimov echoes the true events in the life of the navigator of the “St. Anna” Valerian Albanov, who participated in Brusilov’s expedition. He became one of two surviving team members who managed to return to Russia. Kaverin was familiar with Albanov’s notes. The navigator published the book “To the South, to Franz Josef Land!”, thanks to which the tragic fate of this expedition became known. In October 1912, the schooner was caught in ice and began to drift far from its intended course. She drifted for two years. In April 1914, the navigator, along with a group of 11 people, left the schooner to navigate the drifting ice to Franz Josef Land. Only two remained alive. They were picked up by the schooner "Saint Foka" - the same one on which Lieutenant Sedov went on the expedition - and brought them to land.
There was a version that navigator Albanov decided to leave the schooner because of a conflict with captain Brusilov, which could have flared up over a woman. Erminia Zhdanko took part in the expedition as a ship’s doctor, and some researchers suggest that love for her became a bone of contention between the captain and the navigator. The fate of the crew remaining on the ship, led by Brusilov, remained a mystery - “St. Anna” disappeared, her search led nowhere. Because of this, in 1917 Albanov suffered a nervous breakdown and left military service, and in 1919 he died. Only in 2010 were traces of the crew of the St. Anna discovered, but the ship itself was never found.
Many entries from Albanov’s diaries echo the text of Kaverin’s novel. For example, in the diaries there were the following lines: “ It seemed so easy to fight: they don’t obey, their legs stumble, but I’ll take it and deliberately keep an eye on them and put them in the spots where I want them. I don’t want to move, I want to sit quietly, - no, you’re lying, I won’t deceive you, I’ll get up and go on purpose. Is it difficult?" And the central idea of the novel was the motto: “Fight and search, find and not give up.”
In the novel “Two Captains,” the schooner “St. Maria” also drifts in the ice, and only a few sailors, led by navigator Klimov, manage to escape. They saved letters that did not reach their recipients at the time. Sanya Grigoriev heard these letters as a child, fired up by the idea of unraveling the mystery of the death of the “St. Mary” expedition.
The main character Sanya Grigoriev had several prototypes. The idea for the novel came to Kaverin after meeting a young geneticist Mikhail Lobashev in a sanatorium near Leningrad in the 1930s. He told the writer that in his childhood he suffered from strange muteness, about how he was an orphan and a street child, studied at a communal school in Tashkent, and then entered the university and became a scientist. " He was a man in whom ardor was combined with straightforwardness, and perseverance with an amazing definiteness of purpose. He knew how to achieve success in any business“Kaverin said about him. Many of Lobashev’s features and details of his biography became the basis for creating the image of the main character Sanya Grigoriev. Another prototype was the military fighter pilot Samuil Klebanov, who died in 1942. He initiated the writer into the secrets of flying skill.
Veniamin Kaverin’s novel “Two Captains” became his most famous work, although the author himself was surprised by it. In his declining years he admitted: “ I'm already over eighty. But I still care about everything connected with this Arctic tragedy. By the way, I still cannot understand the reasons for the strange and wonderful success of “Two Captains”; I never considered them among my best books. But, oddly enough, my name as a writer is known primarily from this book, and sometimes it even annoys me...».
The film, based on Kaverin’s novel, became a real hit: .
“Two Captains” is perhaps the most famous Soviet adventure novel for young people. It was reprinted many times, was included in the famous “Library of Adventures”, and was filmed twice - in 1955 and 1976 In 1992, Sergei Debizhev filmed an absurd musical parody “Two Captains - 2”, the plot of which had nothing in common with Kaverin’s novel, but exploited its title as well-known.. Already in the 21st century, the novel became the literary basis of the musical “Nord-Ost” and the subject of a special museum exhibition in Pskov, the author’s hometown. Monuments are erected to the heroes of “Two Captains” and squares and streets are named after them. What is the secret of Kaverin’s literary success?
Adventure novel and documentary investigation
Cover of the book "Two Captains". Moscow, 1940 "Children's Publishing House of the Komsomol Central Committee"At first glance, the novel looks simply like a socialist realist opus, albeit with a carefully worked out plot and the use of some modernist techniques that are not too common for socialist realist literature, for example, such as a change of narrator (two of the ten parts of the novel are written dignity on behalf of Katya). This is wrong.--
By the time he began working on “Two Captains,” Kaverin was already a fairly experienced writer, and in the novel he managed to combine several genres: an adventure travel novel, a novel of education, a Soviet historical novel about the recent past (the so-called novel with a key) and, finally, a military melodrama. Each of these genres has its own logic and its own mechanisms for holding the reader’s attention. Kaverin is an attentive reader of the works of the formalists Formalists- scientists who represented the so-called formal school in literary studies, which arose around the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) in 1916 and existed until the end of the 1920s. The formal school united theoreticians and literary historians, poetry scholars, and linguists. Its most famous representatives were Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Eichen-baum and Viktor Shklovsky.— thought a lot about whether genre innovation is possible in the history of literature. The novel “Two Captains” can be considered the result of these thoughts.
Film studio "Mosfilm"
The plot outline of the investigative journey following the letters of Captain Tatarinov, about the fate of whose expedition no one knows anything for many years, Kaverin borrowed from Jules Verne’s famous novel “The Children of Captain Grant.” Like the French writer, the text of the captain’s letters has not been fully preserved and the last stop of his expedition becomes a mystery that the heroes have been guessing for a long time. Kaverin, however, strengthens this documentary line. Now we are talking not about one letter, the traces of which are being searched, but about a whole series of documents that are gradually falling into the hands of Sana Grigoriev In early childhood, he reads the letters of the captain and navigator of the “St. Mary” washed ashore in 1913 many times and literally learns them by heart, not yet knowing that the letters found on the shore in the bag of a drowned postman tell about the same expedition. Then Sanya meets the family of Captain Tatarinov, gets access to his books and sorts out notes in the margins about the prospects for polar research in Russia and the world. While studying in Leningrad, Grigoriev carefully studied the press of 1912 to find out what was written at that time about the expedition of “St. Mary”. The next stage is the discovery and painstaking deciphering of the diary of the same stormtrooper who owned one of the En letters. Finally, in the very last chapters, the main character becomes the owner of the captain’s suicide letters and the ship’s logbook..
“The Children of Captain Grant” is a novel about the search for the crew of a sea vessel, the story of a rescue expedition. In “Two Captains,” Sanya and Tatarinov’s daughter, Katya, are looking for evidence of Tatarinov’s death in order to restore the good memory of this man, once not appreciated by his contemporaries, and then completely forgotten. Having taken on the task of reconstructing the history of Tatarinov’s expedition, Grigoriev takes upon himself the obligation to publicly expose Nikolai Antonovich, the captain’s cousin, and subsequently Katya’s stepfather. Sanya manages to prove his detrimental role in equipping the expedition. So Grigoriev becomes, as it were, a living deputy of the deceased Tatarinov (not without allusions to the story of Prince Hamlet). Another unexpected conclusion follows from Alexander Grigoriev’s investigation: letters and diaries need to be written and kept, since this is a way not only to collect and save information, but also to tell later people what your contemporaries are not yet ready to hear from you . It is characteristic that in the last stages of the search Grigoriev himself begins to keep a diary - or, more precisely, to create and store a series of unsent letters to Katya Tatarinova.
This is where the deep “subversive” meaning of “Two Captains” lies. The novel asserted the importance of old personal documents in an era when personal archives were either confiscated during searches or were destroyed by the owners themselves, fearing that their diaries and letters would fall into the hands of the NKVD.
American Slavicist Katherine Clark titled her book about the socialist realist novel “History as Ritual.” At a time when history appeared on the pages of countless novels as ritual and myth, Kaverin portrayed in his book a romantic hero who restores history as an ever-elusive secret that needs to be deciphered and endowed with personal meaning. Probably, this double perspective was another reason why Kaverin’s novel maintained its popularity throughout the twentieth century.
Novel of education
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
The second genre model used in The Two Captains is the educational novel, a genre that emerged in the second half of the 18th century and developed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries. The focus of an educational novel is always the story of the hero's growing up, the formation of his character and worldview. “The Two Captains” belongs to that type of genre that tells about the biography of an orphan hero: the examples were clearly “The History of Tom Jones, Foundling” by Henry Fielding and, of course, the novels of Charles Dickens, especially “The Adventures of Oli-ve-ra Twist" and "The Life of David Copperfield".
Apparently, the last novel was of decisive importance for “The Two Captains”: seeing Sanya’s classmate Mikhail Romashov for the first time, Katya Tatarinova, as if anticipating his ominous role in her and Sanya’s fate, says that he is terrible and looks like Uriah Heep, the main villain from The Life of David Copperfield. Other plot parallels lead to Dickens's novel: a despotic stepfather; an independent long journey to another city, towards a better life; exposing the “paper” machinations of the villain.
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
However, in the story of Grigoriev’s growing up, motifs appear that are not characteristic of the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. Sanya’s personal development is a process of gradual accumulation and concentration of will. It all starts with overcoming muteness Due to an illness suffered in early childhood, Sanya lost the ability to speak. Silence actually becomes the cause of the death of Sanya’s father: the boy cannot tell who actually killed the watchman and why his father’s knife ended up at the crime scene. Sanya gains speech thanks to the wonderful doctor - escaped convict Ivan Ivanovich: in just a few sessions, he shows his patient the first and most important exercises for training the pronunciation of vowels and short words. Then Ivan Ivanovich disappears, and Sanya makes the further path to gaining speech himself., and after this first impressive act of will, Grigoriev undertakes others. While still at school, he decides to become a pilot and begins to systematically harden himself and play sports, as well as read books that are directly or indirectly related to aviation and aircraft construction. At the same time, he trains his abilities for self-control, since he is too impulsive and impressionable, and this is very difficult in public speaking and when communicating with officials and bosses.
Grigoriev’s aviation biography demonstrates even greater determination and concentration of will. First, training at a flight school - in the early 1930s, with a shortage of equipment, instructors, flight hours and simply money for living and food. Then a long and patient wait for an appointment to the North. Then work in civil aviation in the Arctic Circle. Finally, in the final parts of the novel, the young captain struggles with external enemies (fascists), and with the traitor Romashov, and with illness and death, and with the anguish of separation. In the end, he emerges victorious from all the trials: he returns to his profession, finds the last resting place of Captain Tatarinov, and then Katya, lost in the evacuation upheavals. Romashov is exposed and arrested, and his best friends - Doctor Ivan Ivanovich, teacher Korab-Lev, friend Petka - are close again.
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
Behind this entire epic of the formation of human will one can read the serious influence of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, assimilated by Kaverin from the original and from indirect sources - the works of authors who had previously experienced the influence of Nietzsche, for example Jack London and Maxim Gorky. In the same strong-willed Nietzschean vein, the main motto of the novel, borrowed from the poem “Ulysses” by the English poet Alfred Tennyson, is reinterpreted. If Tennyson has the lines “struggle and seek, find and not give up” In the original - “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” describe an eternal wanderer, a romantic traveler, then in Kaverin they turn into the credo of an unbending warrior who constantly educates himself.
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
The action of “Two Captains” begins on the eve of the 1917 revolution, and ends in the same days and months when the last chapters of the novel are written (1944). Thus, before us is not only the life story of Sanya Grigoryev, but also the history of a country going through the same stages of formation as the hero. Kaverin is trying to show how, after the downtrodden and “mute” chaos of the early 1920s and the heroic labor impulses of the early 1930s, by the end of the war, she begins to confidently move towards a bright future, which Grigoryev, Katya, to their close friends and other nameless heroes with the same reserve of will and patience.
There was nothing surprising or particularly innovative in Kaverin’s experiment: the revolution and the Civil War quite early became the subject of historicizing descriptions in complex synthetic genres that combined, on the one hand, the features of a historical chronicle, and on the other, a family saga or even quasi-folklore epic. The process of including events of the late 1910s and early 1920s into historical fiction began already in the second half of the 1920s For example, “Russia, washed in blood” by Artem Vesely (1927-1928), “Walking through the torments” by Alexei Tolstoy (1921-1941) or “Quiet Don” by Sholokhov (1926-1932).. From the genre of historical family saga of the late 1920s, Kaverin borrows, for example, the motif of family separation for ideological (or ethical) reasons.
But the most interesting historical layer in “Two Captains” is perhaps not connected with the description of revolutionary Ensk (under this name Kaverin depicted his native Pskov) or Moscow during the Civil War. Of interest here are the later fragments describing Moscow and Leningrad in the late 1920s and 1930s. And in these fragments the features of another prose genre appear - the so-called novel with a key.
Romance with the key
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
This ancient genre, which arose in France in the 16th century to ridicule court clans and factions, suddenly found itself in demand in Soviet literature of the 1920s and 30s. Main principle roman a clef consists in the fact that real persons and events are encoded in it and displayed under other (but often recognizable) names, which makes it possible to make the prose both chronicle and pamphlet, but at the same time attract the reader’s attention to what transformations he is experiencing “real life” in the writer’s imagination. As a rule, very few people can unravel the prototypes of a novel with a key - those who are familiar with these real persons in person or in absentia.
“The Goat Song” by Konstantin Vaginov (1928), “The Crazy Ship” by Olga Forsh (1930), “Theatrical Romance” by Mikhail Bulgakov (1936), and finally, Kaverin’s own early novel “The Scandalist, or Evenings on Vasilyevsky Island” (1928) - all these works presented modern events and real persons acting in fictional literary worlds. It is no coincidence that most of these novels are dedicated to people of art and their collegiate and friendly communication. In “Two Captains,” the basic principles of a novel with a key are not consistently followed—however, when depicting the life of writers, artists, or actors, Kaverin boldly uses techniques from the arsenal of a genre familiar to him.
Remember the scene of the wedding of Petya and Sasha (Grigoriev’s sister) in Leningrad, where the artist Filippov is mentioned, who “drew [the cow] into small squares and writes each square separately”? In Filippov we can easily recognize his “analytical method”. Sasha takes orders from the Leningrad branch of Detgiz - this means that she collaborates with the legendary Marshakov editorial office, which was tragically destroyed in 1937 Kaverin clearly took a risk: he began writing his novel in 1938, after the editorial office was dissolved and some of its employees were arrested.. The subtexts of the theatrical scenes are also interesting - with visits to various (real and semi-fictional) performances.
One can speak very conditionally about the novel with a key in relation to “Two Captains”: this is not a full-scale use of the genre model, but a re-translation of only some techniques; Most of the characters in "Two Captains" are not encrypted historical figures. Nevertheless, answering the question of why such heroes and fragments were needed in “Two Captains” is very important. The genre of a novel with a key presupposes the division of the readership into those who are capable and those who are not able to pick up the necessary key, that is, into those initiated and perceiving the narrative as such, without restoring the real background . In the "artistic" episodes of "Two Captains" we can observe something similar.
Industrial romance
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
In “Two Captains” there is a hero whose last name is encrypted only with an initial, but any Soviet reader could easily unravel it, and no key was required for this. The pilot Ch., whose successes Grigoriev watches with bated breath, and then with some timidity turns to him for help, is, of course, Valery Chkalov. Other “aviation” initials were easily deciphered: L. - Sigismund Levanevsky, A. - Alexander Anisimov, S. - Mavriky Slepnev. Begun in 1938, the novel was intended to provide a preliminary summary of the turbulent Soviet Arctic epic of the 1930s, which featured polar explorers (land and sea) and pilots alike.
Let's briefly restore the chronology:
1932 - icebreaker "Alexander Sibiryakov", the first voyage along the Northern Sea Route from the White Sea to the Bering Sea in one navigation.
1933-1934 - the famous Chelyuskin epic, an attempt to sail from Murmansk to Vladivostok in one navigation, with the death of the ship, landing on an ice floe, and then the rescue of the entire crew and passengers with the help of the best pilots of the country: many years later I could list the names of these pilots by heart any Soviet schoolchild.
1937 - Ivan Papanin's first drifting polar station and Valery Chkalov's first non-stop flight to the North American continent.
Polar explorers and pilots were the main heroes of our time in the 1930s, and the fact that Sanya Grigoriev not only chose an aviation profession, but wanted to connect his fate with the Arctic, immediately gave his image a romantic aura and great attractiveness.
Meanwhile, if we separately consider the professional biography of Grigoriev and his steady attempts to achieve the sending of an expedition to search for the crew of Captain Tatarinov, it will become clear that “Two Captains” contains the features of another type of novel - a production novel, which has received wide recognition. - some spread of socialist realism in literature at the end of the 1920s, with the beginning of industrialization. In one of the varieties of such a novel, the center was a young enthusiastic hero who loved his work and country more than himself, was ready for self-sacrifice and obsessed with the idea of a “breakthrough.” In his quest to make a “breakthrough” (to introduce some kind of technical innovation or simply work tirelessly), he will definitely be hindered by a sabotaging hero The role of such a pest can be played by a bureaucratic leader (of course, a conservative by nature) or several such leaders.. There comes a moment when the main character is defeated and his cause, it seems, is almost lost, but still the forces of reason and goodness win, the state, represented by its most reasonable representatives, intervenes in the conflict, encourages the innovator and punishes the conservative.
“Two Captains” is close to this model of the production novel, most memorable to Soviet readers from Dudintsev’s famous book “Not by Bread Alone” (1956). Romashov, an antagonist and envious of Grigoriev, sends letters to all authorities and spreads false rumors - the result of his activities is the sudden cancellation of the search operation in 1935 and the expulsion of Grigoriev from his beloved North.
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
Perhaps the most interesting line in the novel today is the transformation of the civilian pilot Grigoriev into a military pilot, and peaceful research interests in the Arctic into military and strategic interests. For the first time, such a development of events was predicted by an unnamed sailor who visited Sanya in a Leningrad hotel in 1935. Then, after a long “exile” to the Volga reclamation aviation, Grigoriev decides to change his destiny on his own and volunteers to fight in the Spanish War. From there he returns as a military pilot, and then his entire biography, like the history of the development of the North, is shown as military, closely connected with the security and strategic interests of the country. It is no coincidence that Romashov turns out to be not just a saboteur and a traitor, but also a war criminal: the events of the Patriotic War become the last and ultimate test for both heroes and antiheroes.
War melodrama
A still from the serial film “Two Captains”, directed by Evgeny Karelov. 1976 Film studio "Mosfilm"
The last genre that was embodied in “Two Captains” is the genre of military melodrama, which during the war years could be realized both on the theater stage and in cinema. Perhaps the closest analogue of the novel is Konstantin Simonov’s play “Wait for Me” and the film of the same name based on it (1943). The action of the last parts of the novel unfolds as if following the plot outline of this melodrama.
In the very first days of the war, the plane of an experienced pilot is shot down, he ends up in occupied territory, and then, under unclear circumstances, disappears for a long time. His wife does not want to believe that he is dead. She exchanges her old civilian profession associated with intellectual activity for a simple rear one and refuses to evacuate. Bombings, digging trenches on the outskirts of the city - she endures all these trials with dignity, never ceasing to hope that her husband is alive, and in the end waits for him. This description is quite applicable to both the film “Wait for Me” and the novel “Two Captains” Of course, there are differences: Katya Tatarinova in June 1941 lives not in Moscow, like Simonov’s Liza, but in Leningrad; she has to go through all the trials of the blockade, and after her evacuation to the mainland, Grigoriev cannot get on her trail..
The last parts of Kaverin’s novel, written alternately from the perspective of Katya and then from the perspective of Sanya, successfully use all the techniques of military melodrama. And since this genre continued to be exploited in post-war literature, theater and cinema, “Two Captains” for a long time fell precisely within the horizon of reader and spectator expectations Expectation horizon(German: Erwartungs-horizont) - a term by the German historian and literary theorist Hans-Robert Jauss, a complex of aesthetic, socio-political, psychological and other ideas that determine the author’s attitude to society, and also the reader’s attitude towards the production.. Youthful love, born in the trials and conflicts of the 1920s and 30s, passed the last and most serious test of the war.
I have already answered your letters about my novel “Two Captains,” but many of you must not have heard my answer (I spoke on the radio), because the letters keep coming. It is impolite to leave letters unanswered, and I take this opportunity to apologize to all my correspondents, young and old.
The questions my correspondents ask relate primarily to the two main characters of my novel - Sanya Grigoriev and Captain Tatarinov. Many guys ask: did I tell my own life in “Two Captains”? Others are interested: did I make up the story of Captain Tatarinov? Still others look for this surname in geographical books, in encyclopedic dictionaries - and are perplexed when they are convinced that the activities of Captain Tatarinov did not leave noticeable traces in the history of the conquest of the Arctic. Still others want to know where Sanya and Katya Tatarinova currently live and what military rank Sanya was given after the war. A fifth share with me their impressions of the novel, adding that they closed the book with a feeling of cheerfulness, energy, thinking about the benefits and happiness of the Fatherland. These are the most precious letters that I could not read without joyful excitement. Finally, the sixth consult with the author what business to devote their lives to.
The mother of the most mischievous boy in the city, whose jokes sometimes bordered on hooliganism, wrote to me that after reading my novel, her son had completely changed. The director of the Belarusian theater writes to me that the youthful oath of my heroes helped his troupe with their own hands restore the theater destroyed by the Germans. An Indonesian young man, who was going to his homeland to defend it from the attack of the Dutch imperialists, wrote to me that “Two Captains” put sharp weapons in his hands and this weapon is called “Fight and seek, find and not give up.”
I wrote the novel for about five years. When the first volume was completed, the war began, and only at the beginning of 1944 I was able to return to my work. The first thought about the novel arose in 1937, when I met the man who appears under the name Sanya Grigoriev in “Two Captains.” This man told me his life, full of work, inspiration and love for his homeland and his business.
From the first pages I made it a rule not to invent anything or almost nothing. And indeed, even such extraordinary details as the muteness of little Sanya were not invented by me. His mother and father, sister and comrades are written exactly as they first appeared to me in the story of my casual acquaintance, who later became my friend. I learned very little from him about some of the heroes of the future book; for example, Korablev was depicted in this story with only two or three features: a sharp, attentive gaze that invariably forced schoolchildren to tell the truth, a mustache, a cane, and the ability to sit up over a book until late at night. The rest had to be completed by the imagination of the author, who sought to write the figure of a Soviet teacher.
In essence, the story I heard was very simple. This was the story of a boy who had a difficult childhood and who was raised by Soviet society - people who became family to him and supported the dream that burned in his ardent and fair heart from an early age.
Almost all the circumstances of the life of this boy, then a youth and an adult, are preserved in “Two Captains.” But he spent his childhood in the Middle Volga, his school years in Tashkent - places that I know relatively poorly. Therefore, I moved the scene to my hometown, calling it Enskom. It’s not for nothing that my fellow countrymen can easily guess the true name of the city in which Sanya Grigoriev was born and raised! My school years (last grades) passed in Moscow, and in my book I could draw the Moscow school of the early twenties with greater fidelity than the Tashkent school, which I did not have the opportunity to write from life.
Here, by the way, it would be appropriate to recall another question that my correspondents ask me: to what extent is the novel “Two Captains” autobiographical? To a large extent, everything that Sanya Grigoriev saw from the first to the last page was seen with his own eyes by the author, whose life ran parallel to the life of the hero. But when the plot of the book included the profession of Sanya Grigoriev, I had to leave the “personal” materials and begin studying the life of a pilot, about which I previously knew very little. That’s why, dear guys, you can easily understand my pride when, from aboard a plane headed in 1940 under the command of Cherevichny to explore high latitudes, I received a radiogram in which navigator Akkuratov, on behalf of the team, welcomed my novel.
I must note that senior lieutenant Samuil Yakovlevich Klebanov, who died a hero’s death in 1943, provided me with enormous, invaluable assistance in studying flying. He was a talented pilot, a dedicated officer and a wonderful, pure person. I was proud of his friendship.
It is difficult or even impossible to answer with exhaustive completeness the question of how this or that figure of the hero of a literary work is created, especially if the story is told in the first person. In addition to those observations, memories, impressions that I wrote about, my book included thousands of others that were not directly related to the story told to me and which served as the basis for “Two Captains.” You, of course, know what a huge role imagination plays in the work of a writer. It is about him that I need to say first of all, moving on to the story of my second main character - Captain Tatarinov.
Do not look for this name, dear guys, in encyclopedic dictionaries! Don’t try to prove, as one boy did in a geography lesson, that Severnaya Zemlya was discovered by Tatarinov, and not Vilkitsky. For my “senior captain” I used the story of two brave conquerors of the Far North. From one I took a courageous and clear character, purity of thought, clarity of purpose - everything that distinguishes a man of great soul. It was Sedov. The other has the actual story of his journey. It was Brusilov. The drift of my "St. Mary" absolutely accurately repeats the drift of Brusilov's "St. Anna." The diary of navigator Klimov, given in my novel, is completely based on the diary of the navigator “St. Anna”, Albanov – one of the two surviving participants of this tragic expedition. However, historical materials alone seemed insufficient to me. I knew that the artist and writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Pinegin, a friend of Sedov, one of those who, after his death, brought the schooner “St. Foka" to the mainland. We met - and Pinegin not only told me a lot of new things about Sedov, not only drew his appearance with extraordinary clarity, but explained the tragedy of his life - the life of a great explorer and traveler who was not recognized and slandered by the reactionary layers of society in Tsarist Russia.
In the summer of 1941, I worked hard on the second volume, in which I wanted to widely use the story of the famous pilot Levanevsky. The plan had already been finally thought out, the materials had been studied, the first chapters had been written. The famous polar scientist Wiese approved the content of the future “Arctic” chapters and told me a lot of interesting things about the work of the search parties. But the war began, and I had to abandon the very thought of ending the novel for a long time. I wrote front-line correspondence, military essays, and stories. However, the hope of returning to “Two Captains” must not have completely abandoned me, otherwise I would not have turned to the editor of Izvestia with a request to send me to the Northern Fleet. It was there, among the pilots and submariners of the Northern Fleet, that I understood in which direction I needed to work on the second volume of the novel. I realized that the appearance of the heroes of my book would be vague and unclear if I did not talk about how they, together with the entire Soviet people, endured the difficult trials of the war and won.
From books, from stories, from personal impressions, I knew what the life of those who, sparing no effort, selflessly worked to transform the Far North into a cheerful, hospitable region was like in peacetime: discovered its innumerable riches beyond the Arctic Circle, built cities, piers, mines, factories. Now, during the war, I saw how all this mighty energy was thrown into the defense of their native lands, how the peaceful conquerors of the North became indomitable defenders of their conquests. It may be objected that the same thing happened in every corner of our country. Of course, yes, but the harsh environment of the Far North gave this turn a special, deeply expressive character.
The unforgettable impressions of those years only entered into my novel to a small extent, and when I leaf through my old notebooks, I want to begin a long-planned book dedicated to the history of the Soviet sailor.
I re-read my letter and became convinced that I was unable to answer the vast, overwhelming majority of your questions: who served as the prototype for Nikolai Antonovich? Where did I get Nina Kapitonovna from? To what extent is the love story of Sanya and Katya told truthfully?
To answer these questions, I would have to at least roughly weigh to what extent real life participated in the creation of this or that figure. But in relation to Nikolai Antonovich, for example, you won’t have to weigh anything: only some features of his appearance are changed in my portrait, which depicts exactly the director of the Moscow school from which I graduated in 1919. This also applies to Nina Kapitonovna, who until recently could be met on Sivtsev Vrazhek, wearing the same green sleeveless vest and with the same wallet in her hand. As for the love of Sanya and Katya, I was told only the youthful period of this story. Taking advantage of the right of a novelist, I drew my own conclusions from this story - natural, as it seemed to me, for the heroes of my book.
Here is a case that, although indirectly, still answers the question of whether the love story of Sanya and Katya is true.
One day I received a letter from Ordzhonikidze. “After reading your novel,” a certain Irina N. wrote to me, “I became convinced that you are the person I have been looking for for eighteen years now. I am convinced of this not only by the details of my life mentioned in the novel, which could only be known to you, but by the places and even dates of our meetings - on Triumphal Square, near the Bolshoi Theater...” I replied that I had never met my correspondent nor in Triumphal Square, nor at the Bolshoi Theater and that all I can do is make inquiries with that polar pilot who served as the prototype for my hero. The war began, and this strange correspondence was cut short.
Another incident came to mind in connection with a letter from Irina N., who involuntarily equated literature with life. During the Leningrad blockade, in the harsh, forever memorable days of late autumn 1941, the Leningrad Radio Committee asked me to speak on behalf of Sanya Grigoriev with an appeal to the Baltic Komsomol members. I objected that although a certain person was depicted in the person of Sanya Grigoriev, a bomber pilot who was operating at that time on the Central Front, nevertheless, he is still a literary hero.
“We know that,” was the answer. – But this does not interfere with anything. Speak as if your literary hero's name could be found in a phone book.
I agreed. On behalf of Sanya Grigoriev, I wrote an appeal to Komsomol members of Leningrad and the Baltic - and in response to the name of the “literary hero” letters poured in, containing a promise to fight to the last drop of blood and breathing confidence in victory.
I would like to end my letter with the words with which, at the request of Moscow schoolchildren, I tried to determine the main idea of my novel: “Where did my captains go? Look closely at the tracks of their sleighs in the dazzling white snow! This is the rail track of science that looks forward. Remember that there is nothing more beautiful than this difficult path. Remember that the most powerful forces of the soul are patience, courage and love for your country, for your business.”