Last summer World War II. Its outcome is already predetermined. The Nazis are putting up desperate resistance to Soviet troops in a strategically important direction - the right bank of the Dniester. A bridgehead of one and a half square kilometers above the river, held by entrenched infantry, is fired day and night by a German mortar battery from closed positions at a commanding height.
The number one task for our artillery reconnaissance, entrenched literally in a crack in the slope in open space, is to establish the location of this very battery.
Using a stereo tube, Lieutenant Motovilov and two privates maintain vigilant control over the area and report the situation to the other side of the division commander Yatsenko to correct the actions of heavy artillery. It is unknown whether there will be an offensive from this bridgehead. It begins where it is easier to break through the defenses and where there is operational space for tanks. But there is no doubt that a lot depends on their intelligence. No wonder the Germans tried to force the bridgehead twice over the summer.
At night, Motovilov was unexpectedly replaced. Having crossed over to Yatsenko's location, he learns about his promotion - he was a platoon commander and became a battery commander. This is the third year of war in the lieutenant's service record. Immediately from school - to the front, then to the Leningrad Artillery School, upon graduation - to the front, wounded near Zaporozhye, hospital and again to the front.
A short holiday is full of surprises. A formation was ordered to present awards to several subordinates. Meeting medical instructor Rita Timashova gives the inexperienced commander confidence in further development hazing with her.
A continuous roar can be heard from the bridgehead. The impression is that the Germans went on the offensive. Communication with the other shore has been interrupted, artillery is hitting White light" Motovilov, sensing trouble, volunteers to establish contact himself, although Yatsenko offers to send someone else. He takes Private Mezentsev as a signalman. The lieutenant is aware that he has an insurmountable hatred for his subordinate and wants to force him to take the entire “course of science” on the front line. The fact is that Mezentsev, despite his conscription age and the opportunity to evacuate, remained with the Germans in Dnepropetrovsk, playing the horn in the orchestra. The occupation did not stop him from getting married and having two children. And he was released already in Odessa. He is from that breed of people, Motovilov believes, for whom others do everything difficult and dangerous in life. And others have still fought for him, and others have died for him, and he is even confident in this right of his.
There are all signs of retreat on the bridgehead. Several surviving wounded infantrymen talk about the powerful enemy pressure. Mezentsev has a cowardly desire to return while the crossing is intact... Military experience tells Motovilov that this is just panic after mutual firefights.
NP is also abandoned. Motovilov's replacement was killed, and two soldiers ran away. Motovilov restores communication. He begins to have an attack of malaria, which most people here suffer from due to the dampness and mosquitoes. Rita suddenly appears and treats him in the trench.
For the next three days there is silence on the bridgehead. It turns out that infantry battalion commander Babin from the front line, “a calm, stubborn man,” has long-standing, strong ties with Rita. Motovilov has to suppress the feeling of jealousy in himself: “After all, there is something in him that is not in me.”
The distant sound of artillery upstream foreshadows a possible battle. The nearest hundred-kilometer bridgehead is already occupied by German tanks. Relocation of connections is underway. Motovilov sends Mezentsev to lay communications across the swamp for greater security.
Before a tank and infantry attack, the Germans carry out massive artillery preparation. While checking the connection, Shumilin, a widower with three children, dies, only managing to report that Mezentsev did not establish a connection. The situation is becoming significantly more complicated.
Our defenses held out against the first tank attack. Motovilov managed to arrange an OP in a damaged German tank. From here the lieutenant and his partner shoot at enemy tanks. The entire bridgehead is on fire. Already at dusk, ours launched a counterattack. Hand-to-hand combat ensues.
Motovilov loses consciousness from a blow from behind. Having come to his senses, he sees his fellow soldiers retreating. He spends the next night in a field where the Germans are finishing off the wounded. Fortunately, Motovilov is found by an orderly and they move on to their own.
The situation is critical. There are so few people left from our two regiments that everyone is placed under a cliff on the shore, in holes in the slope. There is no crossing. Babin takes command of the last battle. There is only one way out - to escape from under the fire, mix with the Germans, drive without stopping and take the heights!
Motovilov was entrusted with command of the company. At the cost of incredible losses, ours win. Information is received that the offensive was carried out on several fronts, the war moved west and spread to Romania.
Amid general rejoicing at the reclaimed heights, a stray shell kills Babin in front of Rita. Motovilov is acutely worried about both Babin’s death and Rita’s grief.
And the road leads again to the front. A new combat mission has been received. By the way, along the way we meet the regimental trumpeter Mezentsev, proudly sitting on a horse. If Motovilov lives to see victory, he will have something to tell his son, about whom he is already dreaming.
Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov was born in 1923 in Voronezh. In 1941 he went to the front as a private, from where he was sent to an artillery school. Having finished it, he ended up on the South-Western, and then on the 3rd Ukrainian Front. He was seriously wounded, spent six months in hospitals, and underwent several operations. After finishing the war as the chief of intelligence of an artillery division, he entered the Literary Institute. The first story, “Reprimand,” was published in the magazine “Peasant Woman” in 1951. Then in 1954 the story “In the Bullfinches” was published, and in 1955 the essay “The New Engineer” was published. In terms of focus, these works belonged to “ village prose" However, the writer became famous for his stories about the war: “Nine Days (South of the Main Strike)” (1958) and “An Inch of Earth” (1959). G. Baklanov’s first story “South of the Main Strike” was, as Vasil Bykov wrote, “an unusually clear example of how unvarnished military reality under the pen of a real artist visibly turns into high art, full of beauty and truth."
Baklanov belonged to the generation of front-line writers, whose first books were classified as so-called “lieutenant” literature. Indeed, their authors, as Alexander Tvardovsky rightly noted, “did not rise higher than lieutenants and did not go further than the regiment commander” and “saw the blood and sweat of war on their tunic.”
Official criticism greeted these works sharply negatively, regarding them as an example of a supposedly vicious “trench truth.” Such literature was indeed in many ways opposed to the pathetic “military” prose of the first post-war years, to what was created by front-line correspondents. And only at the end of the 50s the events of the Great Patriotic War began to be recreated not only as a great feat of the people, but also as a great misfortune that made millions of people unhappy.
The fate of an individual at the front will be the focus of attention in Baklanov’s subsequent works: in the story “The Dead Have No Shame” (1961), in the story “How Much Is a Pound” (1962), in the novel “July of ’41” (1964). In the 70s, Baklanov wrote several works about peaceful life, including the novel “Friends” (1975) and the story “The Least Among Brothers” (1978). However, the heroes of these books are people who went through the war.
In 1979, after almost fifteen years of “peaceful prose,” Baklanov will publish the story “Forever Nineteen Years,” which will be awarded the State Prize. In it, the writer again turns to military everyday life: “The war was in its third year, and, what is not clear, it became familiar and simple.” The meaning of the title of the story is that the author, having told about one fate, showed the fate of an entire generation, in the spiritual appearance of which lay the highest sense of responsibility. “All of them, together and individually, were each responsible for the country, and for the war, and for everything that exists in the world and will happen after them.” Thus, the title, being a kind of symbol of the era, forms the reader’s pre-understanding of the work.
The story “Forever Nineteen” opens with a dedication: “To those who did not return from the war. And among them - Dima Mansurov, Volodya Khudyakov - nineteen years old.” In addition, the work is preceded by two epigraphs, each of which in its own way relates to the main idea of the text. Thus, an excerpt from F. Tyutchev’s poem “Blessed is he who visited this world / In its fatal moments” helps to reveal the greatness of the immortal heroic feat of the people; while S. Orlov’s quote “And we walked through this life simply, / In savvy heavy boots” marks the difficult everyday life of war.
It should also be noted compositional originality stories. In our opinion, it can be called circular, since the beginning of the work anticipates its end. Members of a film expedition filming a film about the last war accidentally found the remains of a soldier. “The living stood at the edge of the dug trench, and he sat below.” The buckle, green with oxide, was the only way they could determine that he was a Soviet officer. His name and his life remained unknown to anyone. And the author, with his story, seems to be trying to correct this mistake by giving the hero a first name, last name and destiny.
The plot structure of the story is carried out mainly on a novel basis, in the center of the narrative of which is one year in the life of a nineteen-year-old, not yet quite experienced lieutenant Tretyakov. Having led the battery, he felt in difficult, doubtful moments that “it was not someone else, whom you can curse in your soul, who was responsible for him, but he himself commanded the people” and therefore was responsible for them. Tretyakov was afraid to make a mistake, because he knew that war does not forgive mistakes. Thus, this is evidenced by episodes related to the search for the destination, the village of Yasenevka, with the crossing of the battery across a log bridge that was rotten in places. At the same time, he felt a sense of shame for his sometimes boyish actions, for example: “He climbed under the bridge, shouted something... It was easier to sit next to the tractor driver and calmly drive the battery: there was less noise and more sense.” Such complexity and uncertainty arose because Tretyakov at first felt like a stranger among the fighters. And only then will he show skill, courage, strategic thinking, and fortitude.
The work contains many non-fictional details, testifying to the author’s inexhaustible supply of front-line impressions. Avoiding compositional looseness and vagueness, he builds each episode, characterized by completeness and strict selection of details. In this regard, Vasil Bykov noted that “all of Baklanov’s military prose<…>is distinguished by scrupulous attention to the smallest details of a soldier’s life, trench life...” In the story, the reader will also find details that cause horror (“...They were lying in the grass in front of the anti-tank ditch, as if they were still crawling. And below, having rolled there from the explosion, Tretyakov almost stepped on a soldier half-covered with clay. Someone’s green telephone wire ran through across him”), and funny (under fire, two soldiers, an artilleryman and an infantryman, both “crouched down, neither of them let go of the reel”), and sometimes funny and scary at the same time (“They are in the infantry,” he says, not without envy artillery soldier, - they collect the losses the next day. First they will receive vodka, then they will report the losses tomorrow, you know how much vodka they will have”). However, such subtlety and expressiveness of details, adding up to an impeccably truthful picture of the difficult life of a frontline officer, is also characteristic of Baklanov’s previous works. For example, Lieutenant Tretyakov and the hero of the story “An Inch of Earth” Lieutenant Motovilov have a lot in common - and in short biography, and in everyday rules and ideas. The very young heroes acutely feel the value of every day they live, every moment. Thus, Tretyakov will forever remember the random kiss of a stranger, the winter light outside the window, a tree branch under the snow, and the timid handshake of the Ukrainian girl Oksana.
Thus, revealing inner world heroes, the author uses laconic and at the same time artistically succinct details that carry a large semantic load in the works. This achieves psychological authenticity and concreteness of the images of the heroes, who, both during battle, and in moments of calm, and in a hospital bed, everywhere remain people of high deeds.
Nevertheless, in the story “Inches of Earth” the author and the hero are inseparable (the story is written in the first person), while in the story “Forever - Nineteen Years Old” the author needs distance in order to express a new, “fatherly feeling” for the hero. It is no coincidence that Baklanov will say in one of his interviews: “Forever - nineteen years old,” I wrote when I was already over fifty. And the hero of this story, like Motovilov, is now no longer fit to be my son, but almost my grandson. I think about these young men - saints, honest, selflessly fulfilling their duty - I think about them with a fatherly feeling, it hurts me that their lives were cut short so early.” Thus, youth, openness and the bloody mercilessness of the war represent a monstrous contrast that permeates the entire figurative structure of the work. And the death of the hero only enhances the uniqueness and tragedy of life. However, death never drowns out the feelings of life, faith and responsibility in G. Baklanov’s heroes. “Never before has so much depended on each of us,” says Captain Atrakovsky, Tretyakov’s neighbor in the hospital ward. - That's why we'll win. And it won't be forgotten. The star goes out, but the field of attraction remains. That’s how people are.” Hence, the motive of faith is one of the leading motives of G. Baklanov’s prose.
Yuri BEZELYANSKY, Russia
Grigory Baklanov wrote truthfully about war and death. Without embellishment and drum pathos. His “trench truth” was not to the liking of many readers and critics. But Baklanov did not know how to lie and fake. He was a courageous and persistent man...
Many of my heroes are people from bygone years, or even centuries, like Shakespeare or Adam Smith. And some were my contemporaries, for example, the writer Grigory Baklanov. I read his military works with aspiration, and once even sat with him at the same dinner table during some seminar-meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Science during the period of President Yeltsin.
Baklanov was remembered as a very calm, confident person. He behaved with great dignity. He spoke sparingly, weightily, reasonedly, and was interesting to listen to. But this, as they say, is in public. And so, who knew what was going on in his soul, what thoughts burned his heart? All this remained behind the scenes. Front-line writer. He survived the war and published everything that came from his pen. He wrote truthfully about war and death. Without embellishment and drum pathos. His “trench truth” was not to the liking of many readers and critics. But Baklanov did not know how to lie and fake. He was a courageous and persistent man. About people like Baklanov, about his generation that went to the front from school, Tvardovsky wrote that they “did not rise higher than lieutenants and did not go beyond the regiment commander” and “saw the sweat and blood of war on their tunic.”
And now a little biography. Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov (Fridman) was born on September 11, 1923 in Voronezh. He grew up in an intelligent family, but lost his parents early: his father died when the boy was 10 years old, and then his mother died. Baklanov ended up in a family of relatives. He studied at school, then at an aviation technical school. What did you believe in? The writer recalled: “For many years, a huge portrait of Stalin hung on the street in front of our window. And every morning, afternoon and evening I saw him...” Baklanov did not free himself from Stalinism immediately, but as he learned about life and saw what was happening around him.
When the war broke out, his older brother, a student at Moscow University Yuri Fridman, volunteered to go to the front, like another close relative— Yuri Zelkind. Both of them died in battles with the invaders. 18-year-old Gregory was also eager to go to the front, and soon he found himself there. Baklanov was enlisted as a private in a howitzer regiment in the northwestern direction and was considered the youngest in the regiment. A year later, he was sent to an artillery school, after which (accelerated graduation) he was entrusted with commanding a platoon of artillery battery control on the South-Western and 3rd Ukrainian fronts.
In a later interview, Baklanov was asked what his very first day in the war was like. “We were brought in in winter. It was the beginning of 1942, the frosts were terrible, in the forties,” he said. — We unloaded at some station, and we went on foot. Where we are going, we don’t know. They gave us rye crackers and a thin slice of frozen sausage. So I warmed it in my mouth and still remember this meaty taste from the skin. We walked all night. They didn't give me felt boots; they walked in boots. At a rest stop I was drying my footcloths over a fire when suddenly: “Get up! Get out and line up!” and my footcloths weren’t dry yet. I went to the foreman, and he said: “Are war going to await you?!” I wrapped it with the dry end and, thank God, my feet didn’t get frostbitten. This is, in fact, my first day. War is a harsh thing...” Well, and then: “We surrounded the 16th German army, surrounded her, but they couldn’t do anything with her, she kept making a passage, and there were endless battles..."
The correspondent who had not fought asked whether it was scary to fight or not? Baklanov answered: “There was no fear, firstly, because you are young, and secondly, you have no idea what it is. Yulia Drunina has the lines: “I have only seen hand-to-hand combat once, once in reality and hundreds of times in my dreams. Anyone who says that war is not scary knows nothing about war.” It's just that some people know how to overcome fear. Shame stronger than fear. And others cannot get over it...” There were, of course, a few who were protected by G‑d and who did not receive a scratch, mostly death or injury. Baklanov did not escape this either. In 1944, the medical commission at the hospital declared him unfit for combat, that is, disabled. And he, despite the doctors, returned to his regiment, to his battery, to his platoon and continued his military work (the word “feat” is not from the writer’s vocabulary). Finished off the enemy in Romania, Hungary, Austria. “In January 1945,” Baklanov recalled, “we took the Hungarian Székesfehérvár and gave it back, and took it again, and one day I even envied those killed. The snow was chalky, dry snow hit our faces, and we walked hunched over, exhausted to the point of insensibility. And the dead lay in the corn - both those recently killed and those from the last time - everyone was covered with snow, leveled with white earth. As if waking up in the middle of a dream, I thought, looking at everyone: they are lying, and you will still run, and then you will lie like that.”
Only after experiencing something like this can you then, already in peacetime, return to the topic of war and talk about what was in the soul of a young officer dying on the battlefield, “under the winter stars” (Ehrenburg’s expression from his “Chronicle of Courage”).
What, besides courage, bravery and patience, was important in the war? Soldiers' international friendship, when all nationalities Soviet Union were united into a single fist. “In my platoon,” said Baklanov, “there was an international group: most were Russians, two Ukrainians, an Armenian, an Azerbaijani, two Mingrelian Georgians, a Tatar, a Jew. And there were no discords..."
And after the events in Chechnya, Baklanov warned: “If you just stir up national feelings, it will take centuries to get rid of hostility...” The reader himself can build a bridge to current Russian-Ukrainian relations. And we will return to the story of the victorious May 9, 1945. For Baklanov, this day (is it really only for him?!) became the best and happiest day in his life. The telephone operator's call about the end of the war found Baklanov in the Austrian village of Loosdorf near the Danube. “We jumped out of the trenches and started shooting upward for joy. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was nothing to drink. The foreman immediately drove the horses somewhere and brought a barrel of wine. And so we drank and cried. Because those who died in this war were not with us. And for the first time we realized that this was forever.”
It is noteworthy that Baklanov never went to a meeting of front-line veterans in Moscow at the park Bolshoi Theater. He melted all these ah-ahs, sighs and tears into the pages of his military works. This is one reason, but there was another: not all participants in the war saw the light and did not want to escape the captivity of their previous illusions. Baklanov is one of those who first saw the light post-war years. “We were young. And, fortunately, they are blind. There was a lot we didn't know. We volunteered, but we didn’t think that by doing this we were strengthening the power that was no better than the power we fought against...” (“Izvestia”, February 13, 1997).
In the story “Forever - Nineteen Years Old” (1979) main character Lieutenant Motovilov argues: “We are not only fighting fascism, we are fighting to destroy all meanness, so that after the war life on earth will be humane, truthful, pure...” This is what many returning young officers and soldiers, the generation of winners, thought so generation the “leader and father” were afraid: what if they want freedom?! And immediately they began to tighten the nuts. Almost immediately after 1945, political repression and punitive campaigns began again. Victory Day was canceled as a holiday.
And how did Grigory Baklanov react to all this? In one of his interviews, he admitted: “I then believed that life would be different, but I saw that all the evil spirits had climbed to the top and were occupying the highest positions. Campaigns began against cosmopolitans and the rootless, against servility to the West. And also a resolution on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, on Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. We returned after the war as victors, but in our own country we became defeated. The fact is that during the war we learned how much depends on each of us. People straightened up. But these were not needed. I have seen who become the favorite sons of power..."
Baklanov experienced all the delights of life under Stalin on his own skin. In 1946 he entered the Literary Institute. Gorky, who graduated in 1951. And he found himself in the position of a persecuted person: at the end of his studies he was expelled from the party for calling his classmate Vladimir Bushin a fascist. They weren’t allowed to go abroad to Hungary, and instead of the students they sent a security guard from the Kremlin there. After college, Baklanov, according to him, had neither a stake nor a yard. He was filming a corner. I tried to find a job, visited 25 editorial offices of newspapers and magazines, and was always refused by the personnel department. A front-line soldier is wonderful, but a Jew!.. Changing Friedman’s surname to Baklanov didn’t help either...
Baklanov wrote a lot - essays, stories, and traveled around the country. In 1954, his first story “In the Bullfinches” was published. The first one was published in 1957 war book“South of the Main Impact”, in 1959 - the story “An Inch of Earth”, which became an event literary life and at the same time caused a barrage of criticism: “trench truth”, “remarqueism”, “deheroization”, “abstract humanism”, etc. Many were outraged by the truth without embellishment, without the usual victorious varnish, and the manner of narration, the style of presentation - the confessional prose was not to their liking.
But Baklanov did not betray himself one iota and continued to write dramatic pages of the war - “Forever - nineteen years old”, “The dead have no shame”, “July 41”, “Karpukhin”, etc. In these war works, as well as in subsequent ones - “Friends”, “The Least Among Brothers”, “One of Our Own” and others - Baklanov traces the fate of his generation and how it developed in peacetime, who remained true to their front-line ideals, and who are concerned about their career and are eager to climb the stairs.
For his novel “And Then the Marauders Come,” Baklanov was awarded State Prize Russia. This is the writer’s most bitter book, in it he sums up the life of his generation - a difficult, sad conclusion. This is the murdered generation of young men of 1941. According to statistics, only three percent of them remained alive. And among the survivors, how many were disabled! The generation of Lieutenant Baklanov and others like him achieved victory, but the victory was taken advantage of by looters, concerned only with grabbing more money and benefits with the help of ranks and posts.
Baklanov also wrote several books of foreign essays and plays. Eight films have been made based on his scripts and books. Only one of them, “It Was the Month of May,” directed by Marlen Khutsiev, was liked by Baklanov: he was extremely demanding when it came to films and did not recognize falsehood at all. About military literature in general, Baklanov often complained that “general literature” was alien to him, because its authors “lied shamelessly”: in their memoirs they won battles that they lost on the battlefield. “It’s impossible to read!..” According to Baklanov, there are extremely few real works about the war - honest, truthful and sincere. In one of the interviews, the writer was asked: “What is fascism for you?” Baklanov replied: “This is much more than the ideology of aggressive nationalism. This is a complete suffocation of life. Complete suffocation of personality. The delight of slaves. 
They are all ready for the yoke! So that there is a Fuhrer and there is a place for everyone - like a cartridge in a clip. And every slave is given power over his inferiors. And there will always be inferior ones. Fascism has always existed in human society, but it was not always called fascism...” (“Evening Club,” June 24, 1995).
Grigory Yakovlevich served as editor-in-chief of the Znamya magazine from 1986 to 1994. But he did not so much lead the editorial team entrusted to him as he was engaged in the search for what was talented to appear on the pages. He fought for publication, overcame the consequences of prohibitions and taboos. Baklanov fought front-line with censorship and often defeated it. Thanks to Baklanov’s fearlessness and efforts, “ dog's heart"by Mikhail Bulgakov, "New Appointment" by Alexander Bek, the banned poem by Alexander Tvardovsky "By the Right of Memory", the autobiographical story by Anatoly Zhigulin "Black Stones" and other wonderful works.
Baklanov did a great job in his magazine, but he set a milestone for himself: when he turns 70, he must resign from his position. And left. He didn’t cling to the chair, which once again surprised everyone. After retiring, he began writing memoirs, and in 1999 the book “A Life Given Twice” was born. The second gift is that he was not killed in the war and became one of the few who lived many years after the fighting.
Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov passed away in December 2009, at the age of 86...
Yuri BEZELYANSKY, Russia
The last summer of World War II. Its outcome is already predetermined. The Nazis are putting up desperate resistance to Soviet troops in a strategically important direction - the right bank of the Dniester. A bridgehead of one and a half square kilometers above the river, held by entrenched infantry, is fired day and night by a German mortar battery from closed positions at a commanding height.
The number one task for our artillery reconnaissance, entrenched literally in a crack in the slope in open space, is to establish the location of this very battery.
Using a stereo tube, Lieutenant Motovilov and two privates maintain vigilant control over the area and report the situation to the other side of the division commander Yatsenko to correct the actions of heavy artillery. It is unknown whether there will be an offensive from this bridgehead. It begins where it is easier to break through the defenses and where there is operational space for tanks. But there is no doubt that a lot depends on their intelligence. No wonder the Germans tried to force the bridgehead twice over the summer.
At night, Motovilov was unexpectedly replaced. Having crossed over to Yatsenko's location, he learns about his promotion - he was a platoon commander and became a battery commander. This is the third year of war in the lieutenant's service record. Immediately from school - to the front, then to the Leningrad Artillery School, upon graduation - to the front, wounded near Zaporozhye, hospital and again to the front.
A short holiday is full of surprises. A formation was ordered to present awards to several subordinates. Acquaintance with medical instructor Rita Timashova gives the inexperienced commander confidence in the further development of hazing relations with her.
A continuous roar can be heard from the bridgehead. The impression is that the Germans went on the offensive. Communication with the other shore has been interrupted, artillery is firing “into the white light.” Motovilov, sensing trouble, volunteers to establish contact himself, although Yatsenko offers to send someone else. He takes Private Mezentsev as a signalman. The lieutenant is aware that he has an insurmountable hatred for his subordinate and wants to force him to take the entire “course of science” on the front line. The fact is that Mezentsev, despite his conscription age and the opportunity to evacuate, remained with the Germans in Dnepropetrovsk, playing the horn in the orchestra. The occupation did not stop him from getting married and having two children. And he was released already in Odessa. He is from that breed of people, Motovilov believes, for whom others do everything difficult and dangerous in life. And others have still fought for him, and others have died for him, and he is even confident in this right of his.
There are all signs of retreat on the bridgehead. Several surviving wounded infantrymen talk about the powerful enemy pressure. Mezentsev has a cowardly desire to return while the crossing is intact... Military experience tells Motovilov that this is just panic after mutual firefights.
NP is also abandoned. Motovilov's replacement was killed, and two soldiers ran away. Motovilov restores communication. He begins to have an attack of malaria, which most people here suffer from due to the dampness and mosquitoes. Rita suddenly appears and treats him in the trench.
For the next three days there is silence on the bridgehead. It turns out that infantry battalion commander Babin from the front line, “a calm, stubborn man,” has long-standing, strong ties with Rita. Motovilov has to suppress the feeling of jealousy in himself: “After all, there is something in him that is not in me.”
The distant sound of artillery upstream foreshadows a possible battle. The nearest hundred-kilometer bridgehead is already occupied by German tanks. Relocation of connections is underway. Motovilov sends Mezentsev to lay communications across the swamp for greater security.
Before a tank and infantry attack, the Germans carry out massive artillery preparation. While checking the connection, Shumilin, a widower with three children, dies, only managing to report that Mezentsev did not establish a connection. The situation is becoming significantly more complicated.
Our defenses held out against the first tank attack. Motovilov managed to arrange an OP in a damaged German tank. From here the lieutenant and his partner shoot at enemy tanks. The entire bridgehead is on fire. Already at dusk, ours launched a counterattack. Hand-to-hand combat ensues.
Motovilov loses consciousness from a blow from behind. Having come to his senses, he sees his fellow soldiers retreating. He spends the next night in a field where the Germans are finishing off the wounded. Fortunately, Motovilov is found by an orderly and they move on to their own.
The situation is critical. There are so few people left from our two regiments that everyone is placed under a cliff on the shore, in holes in the slope. There is no crossing. Babin takes command of the last battle. There is only one way out - to escape from under the fire, mix with the Germans, drive without stopping and take the heights!
Motovilov was entrusted with command of the company. At the cost of incredible losses, ours win. Information is received that the offensive was carried out on several fronts, the war moved west and spread to Romania.
Amid general rejoicing at the recaptured heights, a stray shell kills Babin in front of Rita. Motovilov is acutely worried about both Babin’s death and Rita’s grief.
And the road leads again to the front. A new combat mission has been received. By the way, along the way we meet the regimental trumpeter Mezentsev, proudly sitting on a horse. If Motovilov lives to see victory, he will have something to tell his son, about whom he is already dreaming.
Valeria PUSTOVAYAPatroclus's Inch
Grigory Baklanov. An inch of land: A story. - " New world", 1959, No. 5-6.
The story was not only written after the war, but also addressed to a time far removed from the narrator. Even - urgently addressed. It is easy to re-read from today’s point of view, from the point of maximum distance from the bridgehead and swamps, from the gaps and the crossing of the Dniester. Baklanov captures the war for the world, and the reader is pleased to be understanding, learning the laws of battle in the silence of reading. It’s nice to delay the moment of battle after the author, who feeds us with anxious anticipation, days of vegetation, when more than once the narrator will enter into the mind: come on, is there war here and will it appear to the observer from across the Dniester, on the other side of the forties that I trampled, crawled over his inch of land in vain?
In the story there is something to switch to, to be drawn to something somewhere more universal, promised to us, in contrast to the war, which is always talked about with a postscript: don’t repeat it. Why war - if everything around the narrator Motovilov flares up, sparkles, shines, breathes steam? Not war and peace, but war and light - the story is filled with glare, reflections, it all plays with small, iridescent edges under the sun.
Yes, that’s right: the story of an inch of land is actually bewitched by the sun.
“A huge problem: individuality in war,” Lev Oborin very cleverly caught Baklanov’s special perspective (“Znamya”, 2010, No. 5). But I would also like to clarify: individuality is everywhere, as in war. The narrator keeps saying: these colleagues of his are bores, penny-pinchers,rakersgood, tyrants - they are like that “in life too”. That is, this trumpeter Mezentsev, who is incredibly unpleasant to the narrator, and the impenetrable division commander Yatsenko It seems like it’s easy to transfer to us, from the springboard to the office, and instead of communicating in the swamps, establish international sales with difficult colleagues.
But the scarred chess player - the bear and the dugout master Babin - cannot be conveyed to us. They don't make men like that now.
Baklanov is trying to bequeath a war to us, he is worried about the distorting lens of time, he is worried about the future carelessness of someone else’s youth, which will forget that its will is paid for by the war. But he himself does not seem to take out the lens - and also tightens the eyepiece.
The war in the story is deceptively transparent, permeable to a peaceful view.
Baklanov writes after the war, the narrator tells it on the eve of victory - both look at the desired world with hope, both want to fit in. Do not remain a lonely springboard of courage there, beyond the memory of contemporaries and descendants. The story works like a zealous reminder. Here is, say, a trench, a line of defense. In peacetime - empty words, a scheme. And the author explains with hasty anguish: this is not just a trench - this is an infantryman who “fell” and “before Total dug up the ground under his heart" - "by morning he was already walking in this place full height..." Baklanov knows how to explain because he tries. And someone else's, separate heart, not known reached whether to victory is easily imagined to us in someone’s body pressed to the ground, digging for hope.
ButDespite the correct installation to hold the bridgehead, both the author and we unclench our hands. We release the earth. The story is too open to the world, to the sound of drops, the smells of the forest, the shine of stars and the warmth of the sun for us to stay on an inch of trench truth. And military necessity itself appears no more , than an inch of land that you hold until the desired heights open, the other bank of the Dniester beckons.
When we took the heights, we realized that the main height was behind us: “Man is still structured strangely. While we were sitting on the bridgehead, we dreamed of one thing: to escape from here. But now all this is behind us, and for some reason it’s sad, and even kind of a pity for something. What? Probably, only in days of great national trials, great danger, people unite like this, forgetting everything small. Will this be preserved in peaceful life? Baklanov bequeaths to us war as a truly experience of “individuality” - the experience of life in abandonment and compulsion, the experience of acting at your own peril and risk, and teaches you to fear your conscience rather than the German, and risk the peace of your soul rather than your life.
“How the dying Shumilin looked at me…” - this pain of a choice that the hero did not have, this height of tragic duty remains with us. Baklanov's story cleanses with compassion, like a tragedy, and Motovilov every now and then appears as tragic hero: By doing the right thing, he drives himself even deeper into the depths of grief. And friend Shumilin is sung as Patroclus, because, although for the sake of his three children left without a mother, he did not want to go to the bridgehead, he still followed his comrade - “he did not transfer his fate to anyone.”
This tension between the completely office, corporate bustle (the division commander of the brigade commander promises to organize an ensemble and thereby saves him from tragic debt cowardly Mezentsev) and the possibility of dizzying human
heights are the main intrigue of the story. And this tension constitutes the entire content of Motovilov’s “individuality,” who himself bites his own injustice and anger by the tail, himself searches for the point of truth between formal insensibility and the weakness of unnecessary feelings that crush in battle.
“They returned bored, we are returning alive...” - the narrator compares the experience of separation in military and peaceful life. Baklanov pulls us into a space of such intensity of experience that it is truly a shame to be bored around him: you want to be alive to the fullest.
But “if we are alive, this will be forgotten,” the narrator is afraid of a continuation that will cover the value of the experience just gained. He wants to take the bridgehead with him, to carry it until the end of the war, just as he once wanted to save his first combat overcoat or a tent pierced by bullets.
“All this passes.” Baklanov teaches us to understand and see war - but what stands before my eyes is not the epic span of a bridgehead, but interworldliness— a wet forest through which heroes temporarily leave the trenches.
A wet forest where nothing happens and everything is forgotten. And two minnows, carried by a wave into a funnel, unaware of the mortal trepidation of a man who almost died and is now looking at them philosophically.
“And in life” it’s like that, because it doesn’t know the end. And, in fact, this is the only way he takes his toll and wins. Because life, as Baklanov’s story shows, is open to the light and endless, unlike war, which is just an inch of life.
