The Writers' Union of the USSR was created in 1998. How the Union of Soviet Writers was born

Union of Writers The Union of Writers of the USSR is an organization of professional writers of the USSR. It was created in 1934 at the First Congress of Writers of the USSR, convened in accordance with the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of April 23, 1932. This Union replaced all the organizations that existed before

A great event in the literary life of our country was the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers, in the organization and work of which Gorky took a great part.

So, at the end of April 1932, at the apartment of Gorky, who had just arrived from Sorrento, a meeting of writers takes place. The decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted on April 23 on the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations and the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers is being discussed. Another meeting of writers on Malaya Nikitskaya took place in October.

The creation of a single all-Union writers' organization instead of various literary groups that were at war with each other was an important step in the development of Soviet literature. In the 1920s, in the struggle of literary groups there was not only a fundamental struggle for the party line in art, a difficult search for ways to develop Soviet literature, a struggle against the relapses of bourgeois ideology, the involvement of the broad masses in literary creativity, but also unhealthy tendencies - arrogance, intrigue, squabbles. , settling personal scores, a suspicious attitude towards any criticisms, endless organizational fuss that distracted writers from creative work, from their direct business - to write.

And Gorky did not like group action - a sweeping denial of everything that was created by writers who were not part of one or another literary group, and, on the contrary, the immense praise of any work written by one of the members of the group. Gorky evaluated works regardless of which literary group the author belonged to, and, for example, severely condemned some of the works of his comrades in Knowledge. He was for creative competition in literature of different writers' personalities and trends, he did not recognize the right of some writers (including himself) to dictate their opinions to others, to command them. Gorky rejoiced in the diversity of writers' personalities, in artistic forms other than his. So, he recognized the individual achievements of the writers of the decadent camp, which was generally alien to him. "A good, valuable book" called Gorky's novel "Small Demon" by F. Sologub, a writer about whom he spoke more than once with condemnation. Gorky participated in the literary struggle - approving those works that seemed to him worthy of praise, condemning those that he considered harmful and bad, but he never approved of group struggle, groupism in literature, "harmful isolation in the tight squares of group interests, striving for whatever no matter how it began to break into the "commanders of the heights."

“Kruzhkovism, division into groups, mutual squabbles, hesitations and vacillations, I consider a disaster on the literary front ...” he wrote in 1930, without giving preference to any of the literary groups, without interfering in group strife.

The existence of various literary organizations no longer corresponded to the prevailing situation in the country. The ideological and political unity of the Soviet people, including the artistic intelligentsia, required the creation of a single writers' union.

Elected chairman of the Organizing Committee for the preparation of the congress, Gorky set about creating a single all-Union writers' organization with great energy; he was assisted by A.A. Fadeev, A.A. Surkov, A.S. Shcherbakov.

On August 17, 1934, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers opens. It was attended by about 600 delegates from more than 50 nationalities.

The congress took place during the period of enormous achievements of the Soviet country in the construction of socialism. New plants, factories, towns arose; in the countryside, the collective-farm system won. In all areas of socialist construction, a new man was working, formed by a decade and a half of the Soviet system - a man of new morality, a new worldview.

Soviet literature played an important role in the formation of this new man. The eradication of illiteracy, the cultural revolution in the country, and the unprecedented thirst for knowledge and art among the broad masses have made literature a powerful force in the cause of socialist construction. Unprecedented circulation of books clearly testified to this: by 1934, 8 million copies of Gorky's novel "Mother" were published, about 4 million of "The Quiet Don" by M. Sholokhov, 1 million of "Tsushima" by A.S. Novikov-Priboy.

The Congress of Writers became a great event in the life of the whole country, of the entire Soviet people. And it was not for nothing that the congress was discussed at workers' meetings, in institute auditoriums, in units of the Red Army, and in pioneer camps.

The congress went on for sixteen days, and all these hot August days Gorky, unanimously elected chairman of the congress, sat on the presidium at long meetings, listened attentively to speeches, in breaks and after meetings he talked with guests and delegates, received foreign writers who arrived at the congress and writers from allied republics.

The writer made an introductory speech, made a report.

"The height of the demands that are placed on fiction by rapidly updated reality and the cultural-revolutionary work of Lenin's party - the height of these demands is explained by the height of the appreciation of the importance attached by the party to the art of painting by the word. There was not and is not in the world a state in which science and literature used such comradely help, such concern for raising the professional qualifications of workers in art and science ...

The state of the proletarians must educate thousands of excellent "masters of culture", "engineers of souls". This is necessary in order to return to the entire mass of the working people the right taken away from them everywhere in the world to develop their minds, talents, abilities ... ", Gorky said at the congress.

The congress showed that Soviet literature is true to the Communist Party, to its struggle for an art that serves the people, the art of socialist realism. He played a big role in the history of Soviet literature. In the seven years between the First Congress of Soviet Writers and the Great Patriotic War (1934-1941), M.A. Sholokhov’s “Quiet Flows the Don” and A.N. , "People from the backwoods" by A. Malyshkin, "Country Ant" by A. Tvardovsky, "The tanker "Derbent" by Y. Krymov, "Pushkin" by Y. Tynyanov, "The last of the udege" by A. Fadeev, "The lonely sail is whitening" by V. Kataeva, "Tanya" by A. Arbuzov, "A Man with a Gun" by N. Pogodin and many other works that make up the golden fund of Soviet literature.

The congress resolution noted "the outstanding role ... of the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky" in uniting the country's literary forces. Gorky was elected chairman of the board of the Writers' Union.

Always extremely sensitive and attentive to literary matters (he did not read sent manuscripts if he felt a little unhealthy, fearing that a bad mood would affect the assessment of what he read), Gorky was aware of the enormous responsibility of his post.

In the field of literature and culture in general, Gorky enjoyed great authority, but he always listened to the opinions of others, never considered his judgment "ultimate truth", in his articles and speeches he expressed the concepts developed by Soviet literature of those years as a whole. He considered the matter of literature to be a collective matter; a shout, an order, a command in literature seemed to Gorky unacceptable. "... I am not a quarter warden and not a "boss" at all, but a Russian writer like you," he wrote to B. Lavrenev back in 1927.

The central figure of Soviet literature of those years, an artist of world renown, Gorky did not approve of the hype and endless praise created around him and wrote, for example, that the publication of a memoir about him, "a man still living," was not to his liking: "Would you wait a little! "

On the manuscript of one critic, who, wanting to convince the reader of the correctness of his judgments, often quoted Gorky, Alexei Maksimovich wrote: “I consider it necessary to note that M. Gorky is not an indisputable authority for us, but - like everything from the past - is subject to careful study, the most serious criticism.

Gorky was well aware of the authority his word enjoyed, therefore he was very circumspect in his assessments of the current literary life, generous in praise, but very careful in censures. In his public speeches, newspaper articles of recent years, words condemning a particular writer are not so often found - Gorky preferred to do this in letters and conversations.

“If I praise him, you will praise him; if I scold him, you will bite him,” Gorky told a reporter at an art exhibition, who was annoyingly extorting an opinion from the writer about this or that artist.

“In the manner of speaking, especially in public, from the rostrum or the chairman’s seat at a meeting with Alexei Maksimovich, that shy awkwardness and circumspection was felt, which is felt in the movements and general habit of a very strong person who carefully measures his gestures, afraid to hurt someone,” recalls L. Kassil - Yes, the true hero of the word, Gorky, when speaking in public, tried not to hurt anyone by chance with his powerful word. And to an unobservant listener this might even seem like speech clumsiness. behind every word of Gorky!"

The greatest writer of his time, Gorky did not view art as a personal, individual matter. He considered his work, as well as the work of other writers - old and young, famous and little-known - part of the great cause of all Soviet literature, the entire Soviet people. Gorky was equally kind and equally strict both to the writer, who deserved honor and recognition, and to the author of the first book in his life: “... one should not think that we, writers, received only laudatory letters from him. To evaluate our literary works he had the only firm criterion: the interests of Soviet readers, and if it seemed to him that we were harming these interests, he felt compelled to tell us the most cruel truth," writes K. Chukovsky.

It was surprising that writers were not sufficiently attracted by the theme of labor, the theme of the Soviet working class: "For three thousand writers registered in the Union (Union of Soviet Writers. - I.N.), the intellectual, the son of an intellectual and his dramatic fuss with himself yourself."

Gorky paid great attention to the military theme in literature: "We are on the eve of the war ... - he wrote in March 1935. - Our literature should take an active part in the organization of defense."

Gorky in the thirties spoke a lot on the theory of Soviet literature.

He tirelessly repeats that the writer must understand the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the class nature of literature: “Literature has never been the personal affair of Stendhal or Leo Tolstoy, it has always been the affair of the era, country, class ... The writer is the eyes, ears and voice of the class .. "he is always and inevitably the organ of the class, its sensorium. He perceives, forms, portrays the moods, desires, anxieties, hopes, passions, interests, vices and virtues of his class, his group ... as long as the class state exists, the writer is a man of the environment and era - must serve and serve, whether he wants it or not, with reservations or without reservations, the interests of his era, his environment ... The working class says: literature should be one of the instruments of culture in my hands, it should serve my cause, for my cause is a universal cause."

Gorky emphasized more than once that the principle of communist party membership is the main thing in the work of every Soviet writer - regardless of whether he is a member of the party or not. But this partisanship cannot be expressed otherwise than in a high artistic form. Party spirit in art was for Gorky the artistic expression of the vital interests of the proletariat, the working masses.

Gorky himself pursued the party line both in his works and in his social activities. His work, imbued with a passionate, irreconcilable party spirit, was that part of the general proletarian cause, about which V.I. Lenin wrote in the article "Party Organization and Party Literature."

During these years, Gorky often writes and speaks a lot about socialist realism - the artistic method of Soviet literature. Gorky considered the main task of socialist realism to be "the excitation of a socialist, revolutionary worldview, worldview." He points out that for a correct image and understanding of today, it is necessary to clearly see and imagine tomorrow, the future, based on development prospects, show today's life, because only knowing and correctly imagining the future, you can remake the present.

Socialist realism was not invented by Gorky. No creative method arises in one day, is not created by one person. It develops over many years in the creative practice of many artists, creatively mastering the legacy of the past. A new method in art appears as a response to the new life and artistic demands of mankind. Socialist realism took shape simultaneously with the growth of the political struggle, with the growth of the self-consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat, the development of its aesthetic understanding of the world. The very definition of the creative method of Soviet literature - "socialist realism", which appeared in 1932, determined the already existing literary phenomenon. This artistic method was generated primarily by the very course of the literary process - and not only in Soviet times - and not by theoretical speeches or prescriptions. Of course, one should not underestimate the theoretical understanding of literary phenomena. And here, as in specific artistic practice, the role of M. Gorky was exceptionally great.

The requirement to "look at the present from the future" did not in the least mean embellishment of reality, its idealization: "Socialist realism is the art of the strong! Strong enough to face life fearlessly..."

Gorky demanded the truth, but not a single fact, but a winged truth, illumined by the great ideas of a great tomorrow. Socialist realism for him is a realistically correct depiction of life in its development from the standpoint of a Marxist worldview. "Scientific socialism," Gorky wrote, "created for us the highest intellectual plateau, from which the past is clearly visible and the direct and only path to the future is indicated ...".

He considered socialist realism as a method that was taking shape, being formed, and being in continuous motion. He considered neither his own nor anyone else's formulas and "settings" as directive and final. It is no coincidence that he often spoke of socialist realism in the future tense, for example: "Proud, joyful pathos ... will give our literature a new tone, help it create new forms, create the new direction we need - socialist realism" (italics mine. - I. N.).

In socialist realism, wrote Gorky, realistic and romantic principles merge together. According to him, "the fusion of romanticism and realism" is generally characteristic of "great literature": "in relation to such classical writers as Balzac, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol, Leskov, Chekhov, it is difficult to say with sufficient accuracy who they are, romantics or realists? In great artists, realism and romanticism always seem to be combined. "

Gorky by no means identified his personal writing style with the method of socialist realism, believing that the broad scope of this artistic method contributes to the identification and development of various artistic personalities and styles.

Speaking about the problem of typicality in literature, about the interweaving of class and individual traits in a person and in the artistic image, Gorky pointed out that a person’s class attributes are not external, “an individual”, but are rooted very deeply, intertwined with individual traits, and influence them in to some extent, they themselves transform into one or another "individual version" of stinginess, cruelty, hypocrisy, etc. So, he noted that "the proletariat in social status ... is not always the proletariat in spirit", draws attention to the need for artistic comprehension of social psychology - the character traits of a person, due to his belonging to a particular social group.

The unity of the ideological aspirations of Soviet writers, socialist realism as a method of Soviet literature, Gorky pointed out, in no case requires artistic uniformity from writers, the rejection of creative individuality; he knew very well that the writer always chooses the theme, the characters, the plot, the manner of narration, and to dictate anything to him here is stupid, harmful and absurd.

In this, Gorky was at one with Lenin, who wrote in 1905 that in the literary business "it is absolutely necessary to provide more scope for personal initiative, individual inclinations, scope for thought and fantasy, form and content."

More than once Gorky reminds writers that the decisive force in history is the people, the common man. He opposes works in which all merits in military operations are attributed to commanders (and sometimes even to one person at all) and ordinary soldiers and armed people remain in the shadows. “The main drawback of your story,” he writes P. Pavlenko (we are talking about the novel “In the East.” - I.N.), “is the complete absence of a heroic unit in it - an ordinary red fighter ... You showed only commanders as heroes, but there is not a single page on which you would try to portray the heroism of the masses and the ordinary unit. This is at least strange. "

Gorky, one of the founders of Soviet literary science, does a lot to promote and study Russian classical literature. His articles on literary issues are striking in the breadth of the material involved, contain deep assessments of the work of Russian classic writers. The Marxist analysis of art, according to Gorky, will help to correctly understand the writers of the past, to understand their achievements and errors. "The genius of Dostoevsky is undeniable, in terms of the power of depiction his talent is perhaps equal only to Shakespeare," Gorky wrote, noting the enormous influence of the writer's ideas on Russian social life. This influence needs to be understood, not bypassed.

"... I am against the transformation of legal literature into illegal, which is sold "from under the floor", seduces young people with its "forbiddenness" and makes them expect "inexplicable pleasures" from this literature, "Gorky explained the reasons for which, he believed , it was necessary to publish "Demons", a novel by Dostoevsky, in which the revolutionary movement of the 70s was distorted, atypical extremes were presented as the main, defining, typical.

The general meeting of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on March 24, 1934 unanimously elected Gorky the director of the Pushkin House (Institute of Russian Literature) in Leningrad, a scientific institution engaged in the study of Russian and Soviet literature and the publication of academic (the most complete, scientifically verified and commented) collected works of Russian classics; at the Pushkin House there is a Literary Museum, which displays portraits and editions of works by major Russian writers, their personal belongings; the richest archive of the institute contains the manuscripts of the writers.

Constantly in the field of view of Gorky and modern foreign culture. The social storms of the twentieth century - the First World War, the October Revolution in Russia, the uprisings of the proletariat of Europe and America - greatly undermined the rule of the bourgeoisie, hastened the political decay of the capitalist system. This could not but affect the ideology and culture of the ruling classes, which Gorky correctly and deeply revealed: "The process of the decomposition of the bourgeoisie is a comprehensive process, and literature is not excluded from it."

An important role in the thirties was played by the writer's speeches on the language of fiction. Gorky defended the position that the language is a means of popular culture and "a writer should write in Russian, and not in Vyatka, not in a hoodie", opposed the enthusiasm for dialectisms and jargon, which was characteristic of a number of writers in the 30s ( for example, for F. Panferov), against artistically unjustified word creation.

Back in 1926, Gorky wrote that the language of modern literature is "chaotically" littered with "rubbish of 'local sayings', which, most often, are distortions of simple and precise words."

The cultivation of jargon and dialectisms by literature was contrary to the movement of life itself. The growth of the culture of the broad masses of the people, the liquidation of illiteracy dealt the strongest blows to deviations from the literary language, to its distortions, to jargons and dialects.

For Gorky, the demand for a rich, figurative language was part of the struggle for a high literary culture.

It turned out, the writer noted, that the men of Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Gleb Uspensky spoke brighter and more expressively than the heroes of modern works about the countryside, but the horizons of the peasants who made the revolution, went through the civil war were wider, their understanding of life was deeper.

By excessive, artistically unjustified use of vernacular and dialect words, Gorky himself “sinned” in his first years as a writer, but, having become a mature artist, he eradicated them. Here are examples from Chelkash.

In the first publication, 1895, it was:

"Where's the tackle...? Eh...?" Gavrila suddenly asked suspiciously, darting around in the boat with his eyes.

"Eh, if only the rain fucked! - Chel-Kash whispered."

Later, Gorky rewrote these phrases as follows:

"Where's the tackle?" Gavrila suddenly asked, uneasily looking around the boat.

"Oh, if only it would rain!" Chelkash whispered.

Having understood from his own experience the uselessness of the artistically unjustified use of colloquial and dialect words, Gorky convinced Soviet writers of this as well.

Gorky in the discussion that unfolded before the congress of writers was supported by M. Sholokhov, L. Leonov, A. Tolstoy, S. Marshak, Yu. Libedinsky, M. Slonimsky, N. Tikhonov, O. Forsh, V. Shishkov, Vs. Ivanov, A. Makarenko, L. Seifullina, V. Sayanov, L. Sobolev. In publishing Gorky's article "On Language", Pravda wrote in an editorial note: "The editors of Pravda fully support A. M. Gorky in his struggle for the quality of literary speech, for the further rise of Soviet literature."

Gorky struggles a lot and stubbornly to improve the writing skills of literary youth and their general culture. This work was especially relevant in the years when people from the popular milieu, who did not have a solid educational base, came to literature, and the cultural growth of the readership proceeded at an unusually rapid pace. "We are threatened with a very original, but sad opportunity," Gorky said with irony, "to see readers more literate than writers." Therefore, he writes a lot about literary mastery, founds the journal "Literary Education", on the pages of which experienced authors and critics analyzed the works of beginners, talked about how Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, L. Tolstoy, G. Uspensky wrote, Stendhal, Balzac, Merimee, Zola; K. Fedin, N. Tikhonov, B. Lavrenev, P. Pavlenko, F. Gladkov shared their writing experience; Gorky himself published the articles "How I Studied", "Conversations about the Craft", "On Literary Technique", "On Prose", "On Plays", "On Socialist Realism", "Conversations with the Young", "Literary Amusements" and others .

The magazine met the great interest in literary creativity among the broad masses, talked about the work of literary circles, about the work of Russian classics - Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Chekhov.

A world-famous writer, Gorky studied until his last days - both from recognized masters and from young writers, from those who had just begun to work, whose voices sounded strong and fresh in a new way. "I feel younger than my age because I never tire of learning... Knowledge is an instinct, just like love and hunger," he wrote.

Calling for learning from the classics and developing their traditions, Gorky severely condemned imitation, epigonism, the desire to mechanically follow the stylistic or speech manner of this or that recognized writer.

On the initiative of Gorky, the Literary Institute was created - the only educational institution in the world for the training of writers. The Institute still exists today. From the day of its foundation, it bears the name of Gorky.

Gorky puts high the title of a Soviet writer and calls on writers to remember the responsibility of their work and their behavior, condemns the still unsurmounted moods of groupism, bohemia, individualism, moral licentiousness in the writers' environment. “The epoch imperatively requires the writer to participate in the construction of a new world, in the defense of the country, in the struggle against the bourgeois ... - the epoch requires literature to actively participate in class battles ... The Soviet writer must educate himself as a cultured person, he must look at literature not as a way to satiety and glory, but as a revolutionary cause, he must develop an attentive, honest attitude towards his comrades at work.

When one of the novice authors declared that “it is impossible for a writer to be an encyclopedist,” Gorky replied: “If this is your strong conviction, stop writing, because this conviction says that you are incapable or do not want to learn. A writer should know as much as possible. And You're trying to give yourself the right to be illiterate." He wrote sarcastically about "hardened writers of respectable age, solidly illiterate, incapable of learning"; "they compose fiction from the material of newspaper articles, are very pleased with themselves and jealously guard their face in literature."

Being very demanding of the "writer brothers", Gorky at the same time protects them from petty guardianship, understanding the artist's subtle neuro-psychic organization, and is very sensitive to the writer's personality. So, to the impressionable, easily succumbed to the mood of Vs. Ivanov, he gently, friendly advised: "Do not let yourself be in the power of the devil of despondency, irritation, laziness and other mortal sins ..." Concerned about A.N. Tolstoy's illness, Gorky wrote to him: "It's time I wish you would learn to take care of yourself for that magnificent work that you are doing so skillfully, confidently.

Gorky also helped writers financially. When the aspiring poet Pavel Zheleznov, having received from him an amount equal to his earnings for the year, was embarrassed, Gorky said: "Study, work, and when you go out into the world, help some capable young man - and we will be in the calculation!"

"The artist especially needs a friend," he wrote, and such a friend - sensitive, attentive, demanding, and when necessary, severe, strict, was for many writers - pre-revolutionary and Soviet - Gorky. His exceptional attentiveness, ability to listen and understand the interlocutor were the basis for the fact that he was able to suggest to dozens of writers the themes and images of their books, which became the best achievements of Soviet literature. It was on the initiative of Gorky that F. Gladkov wrote autobiographical stories.

Demanding of writers, severely criticizing them for blunders and mistakes, Gorky was indignant when people who had little knowledge of it were taken to judge the "difficult matter of literature". He was very worried that critical speeches against individual writers were carried out in an unacceptable tone, he felt an incomprehensible desire to defame them, to present their searches (sometimes mistakes) as political attacks against the Soviet system: "I find that we are excessively abusing the concepts of" class enemy", "counter-revolutionary", and that most often this is done by mediocre people, people of dubious value, adventurers and "grabbers". As history has shown, unfortunately, the writer's fears were not unfounded.

None of the outstanding works of literature of those years passed by Gorky. "Thank you for" Peter "(the novel" Peter I. - I.N.), - he writes to A.N. Tolstoy, - I received the book ... I read, I admire, - I envy. How silver the book sounds, what an amazing abundance subtle, wise details and - not a single superfluous!" "Leonov is very talented, talented for life," he notes, referring to the novel "Sot". Gorky praised V.Kin's novel "On the Other Side" (1928).

As before, Gorky pays much attention to national literatures, edits the collections "Creativity of the Peoples of the USSR" and "Armenian Poetry", writes a preface to Adyghe fairy tales. He highly appreciated the story of the Yukaghir writer Tekka Odulok "The Life of Imteurgin the Elder" (1934) - about the tragic life of the Chukchi in pre-revolutionary times.

So, the sixth part of "The Quiet Flows the Don" by M. Sholokhov frightened some literary figures of those years, who saw in it a thickening of gloomy colors.

In "October" they stopped publishing Sholokhov's novel, they demanded that passages that depicted the uprising on the Upper Don as a result of erroneous, and sometimes simply criminal actions of individual representatives of the Soviet government, be excluded. Prejudiced critics - reinsurers even protested against the fact that the author showed Red Army soldiers who rode worse than the Cossacks. “The important thing is not that they rode badly, but that those who rode badly defeated those who rode superbly well,” Sholokhov wrote to Gorky.

Gorky, after reading the sixth part, said to the writer: "The book is well written and it will go without any cuts." This he achieved.

Gorky also contributed to the publication of The Golden Calf, the second satirical novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov, which met with many objections from those who believed that satire was generally superfluous in Soviet literature.

Gorky was the most authoritative figure in Soviet literature of the 1930s. But it would be wrong to hold him responsible for everything that happened in her. Firstly, Gorky, aware of the strength of his authority, was cautious in his assessments, did not impose his opinions, considered the views of others, although he did not always agree with them. Secondly, at the same time as Gorky, other authoritative writers and critics appeared in literature, and there were lively discussions in magazines and newspapers. And not all of what Gorky proposed was implemented.

“I'm not a person, I'm an institution,” Gorky once said jokingly about himself, and there was a lot of truth in this joke. Chairman of the Board of the Union of Writers, in addition to the duties of the head of Soviet writers, he edited magazines, read manuscripts, initiated dozens of publications, wrote articles, works of art ... "Yes, I'm tired, but this is not the fatigue of age, but the result of continuous long-term stress." Samghin "eats me". Gorky was in his seventh decade, but his energy was still irrepressible.

Gorky - the initiator of the publication of magazines: "Our Achievements", "Collective Farmer", "Abroad", "Literary Study", an illustrated monthly "USSR at a Construction Site", literary almanacs, serial publications "History of the Civil War", "History of Factories and Plants" , "Poet's Library", "History of a Young Man of the 19th Century", "Life of Remarkable People"; he conceives the "History of the Village", "History of Cities", "History of the Raznochinets", "History of a Woman" - "the great importance of women in the development of Russian culture in the fields of science, literature, painting, pedagogy, in the development of the art industry." The writer puts forward the idea of ​​the book "History of a Bolshevik" or "The Life of a Bolshevik", seeing in it "the actual, everyday history of the party."

Having edited many books in the "Life of Remarkable People" series, Gorky points out the need to include in the series the biographies of Lomonosov, Dokuchaev, Lassalle, Mendeleev, Byron, Michurin, biographies of "Bolsheviks, starting with Vladimir Ilyich, ending with a typical rank and file of the party" - like a St. Petersburg Bolshevik, Chairman of the District Council of the Petrograd side A.K. Skorokhodov, who was shot by the Petliurists in 1919.

The serial publications begun under Gorky continue to this day: about five hundred books of The Lives of Remarkable People have already been published (including a biography of Gorky himself; a collection of literary portraits has been published three times). The volume "History of the Civil War" that appeared during the life of the writer was supplemented by four more volumes, multi-volume histories of cities - Moscow, Kyiv, Leningrad - were published, books on the history of factories were published.

More than 400 books were published in the "Library of the Poet" founded by Gorky - a fundamental collection of monuments of Russian poetry, from folklore to the present day. The series also includes collections of works by the greatest poets of the peoples of the USSR. The Poet's Library is still being published. It consists of the Big (scientific type) and Small series. Each of the books has an introductory article and comments (explanations).

The series publishes works not only by major poets, luminaries (such as Pushkin, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky), but also by many lesser-known poets who played a role in the development of Russian poetic culture (for example, I. Kozlova, I. Surikov, I. Annensky, B. Kornilov).

The journal Nashi Achievements (1929-1936), founded by Gorky, focused on the successes of the Land of the Soviets (the name of the journal itself clearly speaks of this) - the growth of industry, the construction of roads, irrigation, the introduction of technology into agriculture, etc. "Our Achievements" wrote a lot about the collectivization of agriculture, a number of issues were devoted to the achievements of individual republics - Armenia, Chuvashia, North Ossetia.

Gorky attracted leading workers and scientists to cooperate. A.E. Fersman, V.G. Khlopin, M.F. Ivanov, A.F. Ioffe, N.N. Burdenko spoke in the journal. Thanks to the care and help of Gorky, a galaxy of glorious Soviet writers and journalists grew up in Our Achievements: B. Agapov, P. Luknitsky, L. Nikulin, K. Paustovsky, V. Stavsky, M. Prishvin, L. Kassil, Ya. Ilyin, T. Tess and others.

Figures speak eloquently about how "Our Achievements" met the needs of readers. The circulation of the Gorky magazine reached 75 thousand copies, while the circulation of other monthly publications was much smaller ("Oktyabr" - 15 thousand, "Zvezda" - only 8 thousand).

In four languages ​​- Russian, English, German and French - the magazine "USSR at a Construction Site" (1930-1941) is published, containing photographic documents about the life of the Soviet country, accompanied by brief captions (now a magazine of this type is also published - "Soviet Union").

For the Kolkhoznik magazine (1934-1939), Gorky edited about two hundred manuscripts and rejected about a hundred - while indicating in detail their shortcomings: the difficulty of presenting the material or the excessive simplification of its presentation, the lack of answers to the questions posed, etc. “On the collective farms, the village “muzhik” showed that he was perfectly able to choose a book in the library, he perfectly distinguished literature from waste paper,” he said. The magazine saw the light of Gorky's stories about the old village "Shornik and Fire", "Eagle", "Bull", written in a new artistic manner for the writer, with restrained intonation, sad humor.

The journal Abroad (1930-1938) used rich factual material to tell the reader about life abroad, about the labor movement, showed the moral degradation of the capitalist world, and warned about the preparations by the imperialists for a new world war. Gorky stubbornly sought to make the journal accessible, diverse, and fascinating in terms of material. He advised to involve writers who had been abroad in cooperation, recommended to place cartoons, to talk about the curiosities of bourgeois life. M.Koltsov, L.Nikulin, Em.Yaroslavsky, D.Zaslavsky, as well as foreign writers - A.Barbusse, R.Rolland, Martin-Andersen Nexe, I.Becher, appeared on the pages of the magazine, drawings by F.Mazereel, A. Deineka, D. Moora.

The book The Day of Peace, published on Gorky's initiative, is also associated with the journal. It tells about one day in the life of our planet - from September 27, 1635, the world of socialism and the world of capitalism are compared.

The manuscript was read by Gorky, but he no longer saw the book.

In 1961, a new book "Day of Peace" was published, with a volume of more than 100 printed sheets, reflecting the events of September 27, 1960. At present, the weekly "Abroad" is being published - a review of the foreign press.

Gorky paid special attention to the form of articles and essays published in journals. He demanded the availability of presentation, combined with respect for the public reader, sharply opposed the "cloth language", "verbal indulgence", against a simplified condescending conversation with the reader as a spiritually underdeveloped person. No, Gorky argued passionately, even an illiterate worker has a lot of life experience, the wisdom of generations behind him.

The writer also carefully monitored the appearance of publications - the clarity of the font, the quality of the paper, the brightness and accessibility of the illustrations. So, looking through the materials for the Kolkhoznik magazine, Gorky noticed that the reproductions of the paintings by I.E. Repin "A prisoner is being taken" and V.D. Polenov's "The right of the master" without explanation may be incomprehensible to the reader.

The writer follows the rabkor movement with great attention and shares his rich experience. This is how his pamphlets "Rabselkoram", "Letter to village correspondents", "Workercorrespondents and military commissars. About how I learned to write" (1928) appear.

Appreciating the essays and notes of work correspondents as evidence of direct participants in the great construction of socialism, seeing in them an indicator of the cultural growth of the working class of the Soviet country, Gorky did not exaggerate the creative possibilities of their authors. Unlike some literary figures of those years, who believed that the future of literature belongs to the workers' correspondents, demagogically opposed them to the writers of the older generation, he believed that only a few of the workers' correspondents could become real writers. Gorky understood well what talent is, what high demands real - "big" - literature makes to its creators.

The successes of the Soviet people deeply pleased the writer, and he regretted that he could no longer travel around the country, see with his own eyes the achievements of the Land of Soviets. “Our wish to Aleksey Maksimovich,” Yaroslavl collective farmer N.V. Belousov wrote to Krestyanskaya Gazeta, “to go and see not only economically strong collective farms ... but also weak collective farms that need their material and economic strengthening, and, taking two of them, a strong one and a weak one, to write a book about them showing how to conduct a public economy ... "If my age did not interfere with me," answered the writer, "I would, of course, walk about two years on collective farms" .

Gorky is an active publicist, often appearing in print with articles on various topics. In 1931 Pravda published 40 speeches by the writer, in 1932 - 30, in 1933 - 32, in 1934 - 28, in 1935 - 40.

The thirties were an important and difficult period in the history of the Soviet country. The USSR was the first in the world to build a socialist society on a scientific Marxist basis. The first in the world... It means to follow a path that no one has yet walked, to overcome difficulties that practically no one has yet overcome. There was an intense search for ways of the country's socialist development, the creative practical application of Marxism to the solution of specific everyday problems.

Industry is booming in the USSR, and collective farms are being set up. Turksib connected Siberia with Central Asia, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant was launched, the Dneproges was built, Komsomolsk was growing... From an agrarian country, the USSR was becoming a mighty industrial power. Everyday work, successes in the economic and social construction of socialism are the subject of constant thoughts and reflections of the writer, the topics of his oral and printed speeches.

“Life every day becomes somehow surprisingly interesting ... - said Gorky. - The proletariat of the Union of Soviets proved that there is no such obstacle that it cannot overcome, there is no task that it cannot solve, there is no goal that it unable to achieve ... - the predictions of scientific socialism are being realized more and more widely and deeply by the activities of the party ... "

The writer was worried about the theme of labor, cultivating love for work in a person, the organic need to work: "Everything in the world is created and created by labor - this is known, this is understandable, the worker should feel it especially well ... In the Land of Soviets, the goal of labor is to supply the entire population country with all the products of labor that are necessary for all people to be fed, well-dressed, have comfortable homes, be healthy, enjoy all the blessings of life, in the Land of Soviets the goal of labor is the development of culture, the development of reason and the will to live, the creation of an exemplary state of cultural workers ... every work in the Union of Soviets is state necessary and socially useful, not as labor that creates "conveniences of life" for the "chosen ones", but as labor that builds a "new world" for the entire mass of workers and peasants, for each of the units of this mass. Gorky was worried that not everyone was vitally interested in the successes of the Soviet country, that "the poetry of labor processes is still not deeply felt by the youth", that many still do not realize the fundamentally different nature of labor under socialism.

Gorky emphasized the importance of labor as the basis of culture, exposed the hostility of the exploiting classes to progress, and affirmed the historical role of the working class and the Communist Party in the creation of socialist culture. "The mind, the best, most active and energetic mind of the working people of the Union of Soviets is embodied in the Bolshevik Party," he wrote in October 1932, greeting the Dneprostroyers.

Gorky did not consider the rapid growth of the country's productive forces an end in itself: "The working class of the Union of Soviets does not consider the development of material culture its final goal, does not limit its work to the goals of only enriching its country, that is, self-enrichment. He understood, he knows that material culture is necessary for him as soil and basis for the development of spiritual, intellectual culture".

Gorky rejoices, "seeing and feeling how the small owner-peasant is reborn, becoming a real social activist, a conscious Soviet citizen, a fighter for the universal truth of Lenin and the party of his faithful disciples." The decisive turn of the countryside onto the path of collective farming, onto the path of socialism, the writer regards as "a great victory for the energy of the proletariat."

"It is a great joy to build a beautiful, good life on collective farm land" - such is the result of many years of Gorky's reflections on the difficult fate of the Russian peasant.

Gorky highly appreciates the role of science and its people in the construction of socialism: "Organized by the teachings of Marx and Lenin, the Party of Communist Workers and Peasants, the energetic and in the whole world the only disinterested leader of the working people, deeply understands the significance of science, technology, art as a tool for building a new world."

With pain, he writes about the fruits of mismanagement - the death of fish, forests, calls for learning to respect nature, the rational use of its wealth, recalls that "a socialist man must be a zealous owner, not a predator."

One of Gorky's last speeches in the press is a memoir about Academician I.P. Pavlov, written in connection with the death of the great scientist.

The struggle for a new world, the world of socialism, was not only a struggle against economic backwardness inherited from tsarist Russia, but also a struggle against remnants of the past in the minds of people, views and ideas alien to socialist society. And here Gorky's journalism was a bright and effective weapon. He repeatedly spoke out against the religious-ecclesiastical dope, believed that it was necessary to publish church books with critical notes. "Why not publish the Bible with critical comments... The Bible is a highly inaccurate, incorrect book. And against each of those texts that can be put forward by the enemy, you can find a good dozen contradictory texts. You need to know the Bible," Gorky said. at the opening of the II All-Union Congress of militant atheists in 1929. In religion, the writer saw not only a hostile ideology, but also a reflection of popular ideas, folk experience, elements of artistic creativity: "I consider religious creativity as artistic: the life of Buddha, Christ, Mohammed - like fantastic novels."

Gorky was always worried about the position of a woman in society, her role in life in general, the need for a woman to "raise her role in the world - her sovereignty, cultural - and thus spiritual - remarkableness"; he wrote about it in "Tales of Italy", "Mothers", stories, novels, plays, articles. Gorky rejoiced at the deliverance of a woman from family and social oppression, wrote with anger about the shameful remnants of the past in relation to a woman.

The writer tirelessly called for a fight against philistinism: "The philistinism, blown up economically, is widely scattered by the" blasting "(crushing. - I.N.) effect of the explosion and again very noticeably grows into our reality ... A new layer of people is beginning to take shape in our country. This is - philistine, heroic, capable of attack. He is cunning, he is dangerous, he penetrates all loopholes. This new layer of philistinism is organized from within much more strongly than before, he is now a more formidable enemy than in the days of my youth. "

An important theme of Gorky's journalism of the thirties is humanism, genuine and imaginary humanism. Himself in the first years of the revolution, sometimes departing from the class, proletarian point of view in matters of humanism, the writer now insistently emphasizes the social and historical conditioning of the approach to the individual.

“We stand out ...,” Gorky said in 1934, “as people who affirm true humanism - the revolutionary proletariat, the humanism of a force called by history to liberate the entire world of working people from envy, greed, vulgarity, stupidity - from all deformities that have been centuries have distorted the people of labor."

Gorky's socialist humanism is an active, militant humanism based on scientific knowledge of the laws of social development. Proceeding primarily from the interests of the proletariat, socialist humanism expresses universal aspirations, because, by liberating itself, the working class creates the conditions for the liberation of all people.

Gorky often speaks on international issues.

War can and must be prevented, and this is within the power of the masses of the people, primarily the working class.

The threat to peace, humanism, culture in those years came primarily from German fascism.

The fascist coup in Germany stunned Gorky: “If you are left alone, you imagine the historical disgusting going on, and blinded by the bright flowering of human vulgarity, meanness, arrogance, you begin to dream about how good it would be to smash a few faces belonging to the “creators” of modern reality. And very unkindly you begin to think about the proletarians of Europe ... about the degree of political self-consciousness of the majority of German workers. Gorky understood the social nature of fascism, saw in it the striking force of the bourgeoisie, which resorted to the last resort - frenzied bloody terror, in order to try to delay the offensive movement of history, to delay its death.

“The preaching of medieval ideas,” he writes about Western Europe, “takes on an all the more terrible and insane character that is carried out consistently, stubbornly, and often with talent.” At the same time, reading about the rampant fascism, its persecution of advanced thought, the writer said: "The more a tyrant suppresses freedom of thought and exterminates the recalcitrant, the deeper he digs his grave ... The mind and conscience of mankind will not allow a return to the Middle Ages" .

At a time of growing military danger, Gorky turned to the progressive intelligentsia of the West with a question-call - "Who are you with, masters of culture?": with the world of humanism or with the world of hostility to everything advanced? He calls on the intelligentsia of Western Europe to support the Soviet Union and the international proletariat in the struggle against fascism, against the threat of war.

“... If a war breaks out against the class by whose forces I live and work,” Gorky wrote in 1929, “I will also go as an ordinary soldier in his army. I will go not because I know: it is she who will win, but because, that the great, just cause of the working class of the Union of Soviets is also my legitimate cause, my duty.

The depth of thought, the passion of feeling, the mastery of presentation distinguish Gorky's journalism. We have before us a great citizen of a great country, a staunch fighter for peace and socialism, and an excellent master of the art of journalistic discourse. The writer's speeches were free from the patterns and stencils that developed in journalism in those years, the annoying repetition of "common places", an abundance of quotations.

Publicism more than any other literary genre is a direct response to the topic of the day, more closely than other types of literature is tied to the demands and needs of the current moment. The journalistic articles of any writer reflect the ideas and concepts that existed in the society of that time, the ideas and concepts, some of which undergo changes in the course of history. The "truth of the day" does not always and not in everything coincide with the "truth of the century" and the "truth of history", and this should be known when reading the journalism of past years.

Gorky loved children very much. This love was strong and long-standing.

In his youth, on holidays, having gathered children from all over the street, he went with them for the whole day into the forest, and returning, he often dragged the most tired on his shoulders and back - in a specially made chair.

Gorky penetratingly depicted children in his work - the works "Foma Gordeev", "Three", "Childhood", "Tales of Italy", "Passion-Muzzle", "Spectators".

Pioneers of Irkutsk visited Gorky on Malaya Nikitskaya. Members of a literary circle, they wrote a book about their lives - "The snub-nosed base". A copy was sent to Gorky. He liked the book, and 15 "snub-nosed" were rewarded with a trip to Moscow. They arrived during the days of the Writers' Congress. One of the "snub-nosed" people spoke from the rostrum of the congress, and then the guys were visiting Gorky*.

* They told about the meeting with the writer in the book "Visiting Gorky" (both books were republished in Irkutsk in 1962).

The writer admired the education and talent of Soviet children. He recalled: “At their age, even a tenth of what they know was unknown to me. And once again I remembered the talented children who died before my eyes - this is one of the darkest spots in my memory ... Children grow up as collectivists - this is one of the great achievements of our reality."

But Gorky was attentive to children not only as a father, grandfather, participant in their amusements, just a person. He was always a writer, a public figure, he always thought a lot about the fate of those who would come to replace his generation.

The writer devotes a lot of effort to the organization and creation of literature for children, determines its principles, makes sure that books for children are written by people who love children, understand their inner world, their needs, desires, interests. "An excellent man and a lover of children - he was put at the head of children's literature," Gorky wrote in February 1933 about Marshak, who, on his initiative, was entrusted with leading the publication of children's books.

The children were Gorky's old correspondents, and he answered them in a friendly, often joking, always kindly manner. “I feel great pleasure when I correspond with the children,” the writer admitted. In his treatment of children there was neither sentimentality nor sweetness, but there was interest in them, inner respect, tact, reasonable exactingness, taking into account the age and level of development of children.

“You sent a good letter,” Gorky wrote to the pioneers of distant Igarka, who asked him for advice on how to write a book about their life and studies. “Your cheerfulness and clarity of consciousness of your paths to the highest goal of life shine richly in his simple and clear words,” ways to the goal that your fathers and grandfathers set before you and before all the working people.

The book "We are from Igarka", written according to Gorky's plan, appeared after the death of the writer with a dedication: "We dedicate our work to the memory of the great writer, our teacher and friend Alexei Maksimovich Gorky. Authors."

But, passionately loving children, the writer was demanding of them, did not forgive laziness, illiteracy. Having published in Pravda an illiterate letter he had received from Penza schoolchildren, he wrote: “It is a shame for fourth-grade students to write so illiterately, very shameful! thoughts and your ignorance of grammar. You are no longer small, and it’s time for you to understand that your fathers and mothers heroically work not so that children grow up ignorant ... " At the same time, the writer spared children's pride: "Guys, I publish your letter in the newspapers, but I do not name your names because I do not want your comrades to cruelly ridicule you for your illiteracy.

Children paid the writer reciprocal love. So, the second-grader Kira V., with childlike immediacy, regretted that Gorky did not manage to live in childhood as well as she did: "I would very much like you to live in my place for at least one day when you were little."

From the end of September 1934 (until December) Gorky was again in Tesseli. He continues to work on "The Life of Klim Samgin" and maintains extensive correspondence.

The whole country was shocked by the villainous murder on December 1, 1934, of a prominent figure in the Communist Party, S. M. Kirov. "I am completely depressed by the assassination of Kirov," writes Gorky to Fedin, "I feel shattered to smithereens and generally bad. I loved and respected this man very much."

Summer 1935 Gorky lives in Gorki. R. Rolland is visiting him here. The French writer wrote in his diary: “Gorky completely coincides with the image that you have created. Very tall, taller than me, significant, ugly, kind face, big duck nose, big mustaches, blond, graying eyebrows, gray hair ... kind pale blue eyes, in the depths of which sadness is visible ... "

At Gorky's dacha, Rolland met with writers, scientists, metro builders, actors, and composers. D. Kabalevsky, G. Neuhaus, L. Knipper, B. Shekhter played. Gorky spoke a lot about the nationality of music, drew the attention of composers to the richest musical folklore of the peoples of the USSR.

“The month I spent in the USSR was full of great lessons for me, rich and fruitful impressions and heartfelt memories; the main of them are three weeks of communication with my dear friend Maxim Gorky,” Rolland wrote.

Stalin, Voroshilov and other members of the government, composers and musicians, Soviet and foreign writers (including G. Wells and A. Barbusse, in 1934), Moscow paratroopers, shock workers of the metro construction, pioneers of Armenia, pupils of labor communes , masters of Soviet cinema, whose work Gorky closely followed, speaking approvingly of "Chapaev", "Pyshka", "Thunderstorm".

On August 11, the writer travels to Gorky, from where he travels along the Volga with friends and family (daughter-in-law and granddaughters) (he sailed along the Volga in the summer of 1934).

The writer wanted to admire the Volga for the last time, and those around him felt that he was saying goodbye to the river of childhood and youth. The trip was difficult for Gorky: he was tormented by heat and stuffiness, constant shaking from the too powerful machines of the newly built steamship "Maxim Gorky" ("It would be possible without it," the writer grumbled when he saw his name on the ship).

Gorky talked with the party and Soviet leaders of the cities, past which the steamer sailed, talked about his youth, about the life of the Volga in those years, listened to the latest Chaliapin records, recently brought by Ekaterina Pavlovna from Paris from the great singer.

"Everywhere along the banks of the rivers, in the cities, the tireless work of building a new world is going on, arousing joy and pride," Gorky summed up his impressions of the trip in a letter to R. Rolland.

At the end of September, Gorky left again for Tesseli.

Tesseli is a Greek word and means "silence". The silence here was truly extraordinary. The dacha with a large neglected park, closed on three sides by mountains, was located far from the roads. The one-story, "t"-shaped house was surrounded by boxwood and juniper.

Gorky occupied two rooms - a bedroom and an office, the rest were in common use by all residents of the dacha. There was always plenty of sun in the writer's study, which faced southeast; from the window you can see the sea and the park descending to it. Under the office window on a pine branch is a bird feeder.

From three to five in any weather, at any time of the year, Gorky worked in the garden - he dug flower beds, uprooted stumps, removed stones, uprooted bushes, swept paths, skillfully used natural sources, preventing them from draining into ravines uselessly. Soon the garden was put in order, and Alexei Maksimovich was very proud of this.

“The correct alternation of mental and physical activities will revive humanity, make it healthy, durable, and life joyful ... - he said. - Let parents and the school instill in children a love of work, and they will save them from laziness, disobedience and other vices. They put into their hands the most powerful weapon for life."

In moments of physical work, the writer said, such thoughts come to mind, such images are born that, sitting at the table, you cannot catch for hours.

Vs. Ivanov, A. Tolstoy, Marshak, Pavlenko, Trenev, Babel, the prominent party leader Postyshev, and the French writer A. Malraux came to Gorky in Tesseli. Here the famous portrait of Gorky, the petrel of the revolution, is painted by the artist I.I. Brodsky.

Life in Tesseli was not to the writer's liking. He writes to Rolland that, like Chekhov, he is burdened by imprisonment in the Crimea, but is forced to stay here for the winter in order to maintain his ability to work.

"I love all the flowers and all the colors of the earth, and the man, the best of it, has been for me the most wonderful of mysteries all my days, and I have not tired of admiring him," the hero of the miniature "The Old Man" said in 1906, and this love for life, to the person Gorky kept until the last days.

And health is getting worse and worse.

Due to illness, Gorky could not go to Paris - to the International Congress for the Defense of Culture (his address to the Congress was published in Pravda).

"I'm starting to get decrepit. Working capacity is falling... My heart is working lazily and capriciously," he wrote in May 1935. When Gorky worked in the park, there was a car with an oxygen cushion nearby - just in case. Such a pillow was at hand during conversations with guests*.

* Sometimes about three hundred oxygen bags were prepared for Gorky a day.

Comic verses formed by themselves:

It was necessary to live more modestly, Not to break stones in the garden And not to think at night About retribution for the bastards.

But Gorky could not stop thinking "about retribution for the bastards."

“I am afraid of only one thing: my heart will stop before I have time to finish the novel,” Gorky wrote on March 22, 1936. Alas, he turned out to be right - Gorky did not have time to finish Klim Samgin: the very last pages remained unfinished.

Giving a lot of time and energy to organizational, administrative and editorial work, the most diverse assistance to fellow writers, and conducting extensive correspondence, Gorky always remembered and said that the main business of a writer was to write. And he wrote ... He wrote a lot - "The Life of Klim Samgin", plays, journalistic and critical articles.

Gorky's "farewell" novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" * is an encyclopedia of Russian life in the pre-revolutionary forty years.

* The first volume was completed in 1926, the second - in 1928, the third - in 1930, and the fourth was not finally completed.

The idea of ​​"Samghin" matured for a long time. On the verge of a century, Gorky began "The Life of Mr. Platon Ilyich Penkin", then sketched out an excerpt "My name is Yakov Ivanovich Petrov ...", then worked on "Notes of Dr. Ryakhin", wrote the story "All the Same", conceived "The Diary of a Useless Man" .

But the four-volume history of the "useless" Klim Samgin was not a simple embodiment of a long-standing plan. In stories about people and events of past decades, Gorky invested a great and relevant meaning for modernity: “The past is leaving with fantastic speed ... But it leaves behind poisonous dust, and from this dust souls turn gray, minds grow dim. Knowing the past is necessary, without this knowledge you will get confused in life and you can again fall into that dirty, bloody swamp, from which the wise teaching of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin led us out and set us on a wide straight path to a great happy future.

In The Life of Klim Samgin, Gorky comprehends Russian life for forty pre-revolutionary years from the standpoint of a great artist and deep thinker, enriched by the experience of the socialist revolution. It was not for nothing that Gorky, Samghin's senior contemporary, while working on the novel, delved anew into the Marxist assessments of the historical process, compiled a list of Lenin's statements about imperialism, the party's decisions of 1907-1917.

The writer's library contains the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" of the 1932 edition and Lenin's work "State and Revolution" of the 1931 edition with his notes. Gorky, in the course of his work, asked historians about the prices for hay, oats and meat in Russia in 1915, studied memoirs and documents. "I need the exact dates of deaths, ascensions to the throne, coronations, dissolutions of the Duma, etc., etc.," he wrote in 1926 in the USSR and asked to send a book with "an exact chronology of events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries before the war. 14 years".

The novel masterfully depicts the bloody catastrophe in the days of the coronation of Nicholas II - "Khodynka", the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition, the Ninth of January, the revolution of 1905, the funeral of Bauman, the Stolypin reaction, the First World War.

Along with those directly named Nicholas II, Kerensky, Chaliapin, Rodzianko, the novel shows, "without naming names", Savva Morozov ("a man with the face of a Tatar"), the writer N. Zlatovratsky ("a gray-bearded fiction writer"), E. Chirikov (" fashionable writer, oaky person"), M. Gorky himself ("red-moustached, like a soldier"), etc.

But "Samghin" is not a historical chronicle, not a textbook or anthology on history. The novel does not cover a number of important events, there are not many people who played an important role in Russia in those years. Russia's movement towards a socialist revolution is shown not in historical events, but in spiritual life, philosophical disputes, personal dramas and the fates of heroes. "The Life of Klim Samgin" is, first of all, an ideological novel, showing the country's movement towards revolution through ideological disputes, philosophical currents, books that are read and argued about (hundreds of works of literature, music, painting are mentioned in the work - from the Iliad to Gorky play "At the bottom"). The heroes of the novel think and talk more than they act. In addition, life is shown by Gorky as Samghin sees it, but he does not see much or sees it wrong.

Populists, legal Marxists, idealists, decadents, sectarians, Bolsheviks pass before the reader - in the words of the writer, "all classes", "trends", "directions", all the hellish turmoil of the end of the century and the storms of the beginning of the twentieth. "" The life of Klim Samgin "- a novel about Russian pre-revolutionary society, about the complex interweaving of ideological and social forces in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. The writer draws the collapse of populism, the emergence of legal Marxism and revolutionary Marxism, the emergence and social roots of decadence, its diverse ramifications, the stormy entrepreneurial activity of the bourgeoisie, revolutionary events 1905-1907, rampant mysticism, pornography and cynicism at the time of reaction, the growth of the forces of the proletarian party.

The Gorky novel is directed against bourgeois individualism, embodied in many ways by the writer in the main character, the lawyer Klim Ivanovich Samgin.

“Individualism is a contagious and dangerous disease, its roots in the instinct of property, nurtured over the centuries, and as long as private property exists, this disease will inevitably develop, disfiguring and devouring people like leprosy,” wrote Gorky.

Since childhood, Klim has been convinced of his originality, exclusivity: "I have never seen people bigger than him." This desire to be original, not like everyone else was instilled in him from childhood - by his parents. But soon Klim himself began to "invent himself", turning into a little old man, alien to children's games, fun, pranks.

Klim's childhood and youth bring to mind Pushkin's lines:

Blessed is he who was young from his youth ... or Marshak's wise quatrain: There was once a proverb that children do not live, but are preparing to live. But it is unlikely that one will come in handy in life, Who, while preparing to live, does not live in childhood.

A child should have a childhood with its joys and pranks, and not childish old age - Gorky himself spoke about this more than once. He looked with sadness at the "senilely experienced" young poor people who came to his Nizhny Novgorod Christmas tree, in 1909 he wrote to Baku children that they should be children ("make more pranks"), and not little old people.

Convinced of his exclusivity, Klim Samghin is in fact an "intellectual of average value", an ordinary person, devoid of both a great mind and simply humanity.

Samghin lives in a troubled pre-revolutionary time. No matter how, he wanted, but from the inevitably approaching political upheaval you can not hide. In his heart, Klim is afraid of the coming revolution, he internally understands that he does not need anything from the revolution, but the more he boasts of disinterested service to her, rendering some services to the revolutionaries. Samghin is trusted by the Bolsheviks, Klim carries out their orders - in his heart he does not sympathize with the revolution. During the mighty revolutionary onslaught of the masses, it is more advantageous and safer to be a fellow-traveller of the revolution—thus thinks Samghin. This is prompted by his vanity, the desire to play the role of a prominent public figure.

Klim is a "reluctant rebel", he helped the revolutionaries not from faith in the revolution, but from fear of its inevitability. So he comes to the conclusion: "The revolution is needed in order to destroy the revolutionaries." No wonder the gendarmerie colonel, an intelligent man, having become acquainted with Samghin's notes, is sincerely surprised why he did not turn out to be on the side of the government: after all, his soul is for the existing order.

Exposing Klim Samgin, tracing his life path from the cradle to death in the revolutionary days of 1917, the writer was far from fatalism - the recognition of the inevitability of fate, the impotence of a person to change his life path. Man, Gorky asserted with all his creativity, is not doomed by the circumstances of life, he can and must rise above them. Like Matvey Kozhemyakin, Klim had the opportunity (and more than one!) to go out of his way, to truly enter the "big life" - both personally and publicly. He is fond of a woman - and is afraid of passion, runs away from her. The atmosphere of the revolutionary upsurge in the country also affects Samghin.

In the novel, Gorky explores how the intelligentsia, who talked a lot about the people, that the country and power should belong to them, and only to them, after 1917, when the people actually took power into their own hands, found themselves in a large part of the hostile revolution. The writer sees the reason for this in individualism, in "sluggish, but unsatisfied and insatiable self-conceit".

Gorky's novel is not a novel about the entire Russian intelligentsia. Quite a few intellectuals accepted October - some earlier, some later, some completely, some in large part. Klim Samgin is an artistic generalization by the writer of those features of the intelligentsia, which - taken together - determined the hostility of its part to the socialist revolution.

Samghin completes and summarizes in Gorky's work the gallery of bourgeois intellectuals, shown in "Varenka Olesova" and "Summer Residents", more and more departing from the people, more and more emptying themselves spiritually (no wonder the subtitle of the novel is "The Story of an Empty Soul"). This image also contains the features of many people who met on Gorky's life path, but Samghin is not a portrait of any specific person. The writer himself named among those who gave him material for Samghin, the writers Mirolyubov, Pyatnitsky, Bunin, Posse - people with different characters and destinies.

Samghin is opposed in the novel by the Bolshevik Kutuzov, a man with a broad outlook, who believes in the proletariat. In contrast to the spiritually ill Klima, he is a healthy person in body and spirit, charming, understanding art. All the best is concentrated around him - both in the proletariat and in the intelligentsia. No, Klim Samgin is by no means the entire Russian intelligentsia, although a considerable part of it. There is also Kutuzov - a superbly erudite person, a talented speaker and polemicist, there is also Elizaveta Spivak, and Lyubasha Somova, and Evgeny Yurin and others.

Approaching the camp of Kutuzov and Makarov, Inokov (it has some features of Gorky himself), Tagilsky, Marina Zotova, Lyutov - complex, contradictory, restless people.

Gorky widely shows in the novel the life of the people, the growth of the people's consciousness, the desire of the masses for freedom. Real people - strong mentally and physically, smart - do not like Samghin. But both the reader and the writer himself see the truth of life through the head of the hero of the novel. The people in "Samgin" are in a complex interweaving of the "damned heritage" of the past and revolutionary, spiritual growth. Both faithful servants of the throne and fighters for the people's cause come out of the people's environment.

In "The Life of Klim Samghin", written by an old writer, no decline or weakening of talent is visible. Before us is a new powerful rise of genius. The memory of the writer is unfadingly fresh, the artistic power of his book is enormous.

The original artistic device of "mirroring" runs through the whole novel. All features of Samghin are reflected - more sharply or reduced - in other characters of the novel. This, on the one hand, debunks the "uniqueness" of the protagonist of the novel, and on the other hand, makes him a generalization of an entire social group. Such is the dialectic of the artistic image.

The calm manner of presentation hides in itself a deeply critical, ironic attitude towards the depicted world, admiration for those who are preparing a revolution. Without hiding (in letters) his sharply negative attitude towards Samghin, Gorky tried in every possible way to avoid the author's assessments of the hero in the novel, leaving him to expose himself - in words, thoughts, deeds.

Very complex artistically, the novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" is not easy to read. It requires great erudition, a deep knowledge of the era depicted, a thoughtful attitude to what is read. Not without reason did Gorky think of writing an "abridged" version of the novel.

Samghin is a literary type of world significance, embodying the spiritual impoverishment of a bourgeois individualist intellectual in the era of proletarian revolutions.

How "Manilovism", "Khlestakovism", "Oblomovism", "Belikovism", "Samginism" became an artistic generalization of the system of views and actions characteristic of a certain social type. Samghinism - the ideology and psychology of the bourgeois - is especially dangerous, because it is difficult to catch, it is difficult to punish. Samghins infect others with indifference, imaginary "smartness", prepare the ground for evil deeds, impede the development of life, hate everything bright, unusual, talented, but they themselves remain aloof, not committing legally punishable deeds - moreover, external, visible involvement in the great case quite reliably covers them from reproaches and accusations.

The image of Klim Samgin is not only the result of the great artist's observations and reflections on life. It is closely connected with the Russian and world literary tradition; It was not for nothing that Gorky emphasized that the individualist intellectual, a person "of course of average intellectual abilities, devoid of any bright qualities, was found in literature throughout the entire 19th century." Gorky's contemporaries also wrote about the bourgeois intellectual of the Samghin type, but they gave this figure an unjustified spiritual significance, they could not see, like Gorky, behind the imaginary uniqueness and originality, the inner dullness and emptiness.

A deep and versatile, artistically perfect generalization of human character traits, patterns of social life inherent in more than one historically specific situation, not only one generation of people, makes "The Life of Klim Samgin" an important, instructive and interesting book for future generations. In the novel, Gorky explores such social and psychological issues that are by no means limited either to Russia or to the historical era shown in the novel. The events depicted in "Samghin" are 50-100 years away from us. But the novel is still relevant today. The Samgins, Dronovs, Tomilins, Zotovs, Lyutovs are heroes of today in the capitalist countries. Their doubts, tossings, searches reveal a lot in the searches and tossings of the intelligentsia of the bourgeois countries. Yes, and in our country some features of Samghinism, petty-bourgeois consciousness have not yet completely gone into the past. The critic M. Shcheglov of Gratsiansky, one of the heroes of L. Leonov's novel "The Russian Forest", called "Samginsky seed".

May 1936 in the Crimea was dry and sultry, it was sunny in Moscow, where Gorky left on May 26. The car was stuffy and the windows were often opened. The writer had to breathe from an oxygen bag more than once.

And in Moscow, too stuffy, but also a strong wind with a merciless sun. On June 1, in Gorki, the writer fell seriously ill with influenza, which aggravated the disease of the lungs and heart.

Since June 6, Pravda, Izvestia and other newspapers have been publishing reports on the writer's health every day, but a special issue of Pravda has been printed for him himself - without this bulletin.

“When the writer fell ill,” L. Kassil recalls, “millions of readers grabbed the newspaper in the morning and looked for a bulletin about his health there first of all, as they later looked for a report from the front or before that - a degree of northern latitude, where the ice floe of the Chelyuskinites drifted.

The patient was visited by leaders of the party and government. From all over the country, from all over the world, there were wishes for a speedy recovery. Moscow pioneers brought him flowers.

Shortness of breath did not allow Gorky to lie down, and he sat in an armchair almost all the time. When temporary relief came, Alexey Maksimovich joked, laughed at his helplessness, spoke about literature, about life, and recalled Lenin several times. He endured pain patiently. The last book that Gorky read was a study by the famous Soviet historian E.V. Tarle "Napoleon"; on many of its pages, the writer's notes are preserved, the last of them is on page 316, in the middle of the book.

Gorky was not afraid of death, although he thought about it more than once.

“Several times in my life, willingly and unwillingly, I had to experience the proximity of death, and many good people died before my eyes. This infected me with a feeling of organic disgust for “dying”, for death. I never experienced fear of it, - he confessed in 1926.

But I didn’t want to die: “To live and live. Every new day brings a miracle. And the future is such that no imagination can anticipate ... - he said. - Medical science is cunning, but powerful. hatch out and it will be possible to live like this for a hundred and fifty years. Otherwise, we die early, too early!

Thoughts about death, about the tragic brevity of human life, often worried the writer in recent years. They were reflected in the play "Egor Bulychov and Others"; the writer thought of staging LN Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".

Gorky showed great interest in the problem of longevity, did a lot to create the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, which, among other issues, dealt with the problems of prolonging human life. Once he asked Professor Speransky if immortality was possible. "It is not feasible and cannot be feasible. Biology is biology, and death is its basic law."

“But can we deceive her? She will knock on the door, and we will say, perhaps in a hundred years?

This we can.

And I can hardly demand more from you, and the rest of humanity."

On June 16 came the last temporary relief. Shaking hands with the doctors, Gorky said: "I think I'll jump out." But it was not possible to "jump out" of the diseases, and at 11 o'clock. 10 min. On the morning of June 18, Gorky died at his dacha in Gorki.

When Gorky's hand was still holding the pencil, he wrote on slips of paper:

"Two processes are conjugated: the lethargy of the nervous life - as if the cells of the nerves are going out - are covered with ashes, and all thoughts turn gray, at the same time - a stormy onslaught of the desire to speak, and this also goes up to delirium, I feel that I am speaking incoherently, although the phrases are still meaningful ".

How great personal grief experienced the death of Gorky, the Soviet people.

Mountains are crying, rivers are crying: "Our Gorky has died", Something has become boring everywhere. In the yards, the guys are crying: "Our Gorky has died." He died, I'm sorry to say goodbye! Died, dear. He died, I'm sorry to say goodbye. My Gorky died - this is how eight-year-old Svetlana Kinast from the Gornyak state farm in the Azov-Chernomorsky Territory expressed her feelings in inept, but sincere verse.

And fifteen-year-old Stepan Perevalov wrote in the book "We are from Igarka":

“O brave Falcon, you hovered high above the earth, breathing struggle. From the cruel battles you carried your heart, full of love.

You proudly cast a curse on the greedy, idly living on someone else's blood. You gave a hand to the misfortune of the poor, and the slave saw the way to the light.

For generations coming to life, you will forever be a shining sun.

You lived gloriously ... We will learn from your life and we will forever breathe struggle, like you, beloved, like you, our Falcon!

We will remember and praise forever your cares and we will be strong, like you, beloved, O brave Falcon.

We endure our loss, the loss of a friend, with sobs in our hearts.

Goodbye teacher! Farewell, darling!"

The coffin with the body of the writer, and then the urn with his ashes were installed in the House of the Unions. Thousands of people passed through the Hall of Columns, paying their last respects to the great son of the great people.

On June 20, a mourning meeting was held on Red Square. Artillery volleys thundered, orchestras played the international anthem of the working people of the whole world. The urn with the ashes of the writer was walled up in the Kremlin wall - where the ashes of prominent figures of the Communist Party, the Soviet state and the international labor movement rest.

"Great people do not have two dates of their existence in history - birth and death, but only one date: their birth," said Alexei Tolstoy at the funeral meeting. And he was right. The writer is not with us, but his books "help us build and live", teach the truth, fearlessness, the wisdom of life.

Gorky passed away more than thirty years ago. But all this time - both during the Great Patriotic War and during the years of extensive communist construction - he remained and remains with us. Gorky stories, stories, novels continue to excite the reader today, posing serious and interesting problems for him. Like any truly great artist, new generations see in Gorky not only what their predecessors saw, but also discover something new, little noticed or completely unnoticed, in tune with today.

Gorky's books are our friends, advisers and mentors even today. He is alive, alive with that life whose name is immortality. His great creations are alive - his novels, stories, plays, stories. Soviet literature became the world's first literature, at the cradle of which stood the great, wise mentor and teacher Alexei Maksimovich Gorky.

The centenary of Gorky's birth, celebrated in 1968, has turned in our country into a national celebration of the great writer. This speaks of the vitality of Gorky's legacy, of its role in the struggle for the triumph of communism. Years go by, generations change, but always with us in the struggle for Man, for communism, the fiery word of the Petrel of the Revolution.

Union of Writers

The Union of Writers of the USSR is an organization of professional writers of the USSR. It was created in 1934 at the First Congress of Writers of the USSR, convened in accordance with the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of April 23, 1932. This Union replaced all the organizations of writers that existed before: both united on some ideological or aesthetic platform (RAPP, "Pass"), and performing the function of writers' trade unions (All-Russian Union of Writers, Vseroskomdram).

The Charter of the Writers' Union, as amended in 1934, stated: “The Union of Soviet Writers sets as its general goal the creation of works of high artistic value, saturated with the heroic struggle of the international proletariat, the pathos of the victory of socialism, reflecting the great wisdom and heroism of the Communist Party. The Union of Soviet Writers aims to create works of art worthy of the great era of socialism. The charter was repeatedly edited and changed. As amended in 1971, the Union of Writers of the USSR is "a voluntary public creative organization that unites professional writers of the Soviet Union, participating with their creativity in the struggle for the construction of communism, for social progress, for peace and friendship between peoples."

The charter gave a definition of socialist realism as the main method of Soviet literature and literary criticism, following which was a prerequisite for the membership of the SP.

The highest body of the Writers' Union of the USSR was the congress of writers (between 1934 and 1954, contrary to the Charter, it was not convened).

According to the Charter of 1934, the head of the USSR Writers' Union was the Chairman of the Board. Maxim Gorky was the first chairman in 1934-1936 of the Board of the Writers' Union of the USSR. At the same time, the actual management of the activities of the Union was carried out by the 1st secretary of the joint venture, Alexander Shcherbakov. Then the chairmen were Alexei Tolstoy (1936-1938); Alexander Fadeev (1938-1944 and 1946-1954); Nikolai Tikhonov (1944–1946); Alexey Surkov (1954-1959); Konstantin Fedin (1959-1977). According to the Charter of 1977, the leadership of the Writers' Union was carried out by the First Secretary of the Board. This position was held by: Georgy Markov (1977-1986); Vladimir Karpov (since 1986, resigned in November 1990, but continued to conduct business until August 1991); Timur Pulatov (1991).

Structural subdivisions of the Writers' Union of the USSR were regional writers' organizations with a structure similar to the central organization: the joint ventures of the union and autonomous republics, writers' organizations of regions, territories, and the cities of Moscow and Leningrad.

The press organs of the Writers' Union of the USSR were Literaturnaya Gazeta, the magazines Novy Mir, Znamya, Friendship of Peoples, Questions of Literature, Literary Review, Children's Literature, Foreign Literature, Youth, Soviet Literature” (published in foreign languages), “Theatre”, “Soviet Geimland” (in Yiddish), “Star”, “Bonfire”.

Under the jurisdiction of the Board of the Writers' Union of the USSR was the publishing house "Soviet Writer", the Literary Institute. M. Gorky, Literary consultation for novice authors, All-Union Bureau of Fiction Propaganda, Central House of Writers. A. A. Fadeev in Moscow.

Also in the structure of the joint venture there were various divisions that performed the functions of management and control. Thus, all trips abroad by members of the SP were subject to approval by the foreign commission of the SP of the USSR.

Under the board of the Writers' Union of the USSR, the Literary Fund operated, and regional writers' organizations also had their own literary funds. The task of the literary funds was to provide members of the joint venture with material support (according to the "rank" of the writer) in the form of housing, construction and maintenance of "writers'" summer cottages, medical and sanatorium services, the provision of vouchers to the "houses of creativity of writers", the provision of household services, supplies of scarce commodities and foodstuffs.

Admission to the Writers' Union was made on the basis of an application, to which the recommendations of three members of the Writers' Union were to be attached. A writer wishing to join the Union had to have two published books and submit reviews of them. The application was considered at a meeting of the local branch of the USSR Writers' Union and had to receive at least two-thirds of the votes when voting, then it was considered by the secretariat or the board of the USSR Writers' Union and at least half of their votes were required for admission to membership. In 1934, the Union had 1500 members, in 1989 - 9920.

In 1976, it was reported that out of the total number of members of the Union, 3665 write in Russian.

A writer could be expelled from the Writers' Union. Reasons for exclusion could be:

- Criticism of the writer from the highest party authorities. An example is the exclusion of M. M. Zoshchenko and A. A. Akhmatova, which followed the report of Zhdanov in August 1946 and the party resolution “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad”;

– publication abroad of works not published in the USSR. B. L. Pasternak was the first to be expelled for this reason for the publication in Italy of his novel Doctor Zhivago in 1957;

- publication in "samizdat";

- openly expressed disagreement with the policy of the CPSU and the Soviet state;

– participation in public speeches (signing open letters) protesting against the persecution of dissidents.

Those expelled from the Union of Writers were denied the publication of books and publication in journals subordinate to the joint venture, they were practically deprived of the opportunity to earn money by literary work. With the exception of them, the exclusion from the Literary Fund followed from the Union, which entailed tangible financial difficulties. Exclusion from the joint venture for political reasons, as a rule, was widely publicized, sometimes turning into real persecution. In a number of cases, the exclusion was accompanied by criminal prosecution under the articles “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and “Dissemination of knowingly false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system”, deprivation of citizenship of the USSR, and forced emigration.

For political reasons, A. Sinyavsky, Yu. Daniel, N. Korzhavin, G. Vladimov, L. Chukovskaya, A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Maksimov, V. Nekrasov, A. Galich, E. Etkind, V. Voinovich, I. Dziuba, N. Lukash, Viktor Erofeev, E. Popov, F. Svetov. In protest against the exclusion of Popov and Erofeev from the joint venture, in December 1979 V. Aksenov, I. Lisnyanskaya and S. Lipkin announced their withdrawal from the Writers' Union of the USSR.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Union of Writers of the USSR was divided into many organizations in various countries of the post-Soviet space.

The main successors of the USSR Union of Writers in Russia are the International Commonwealth of Writers' Unions, which for a long time was led by Sergei Mikhalkov, the Union of Writers of Russia and the Union of Russian Writers.

The basis for dividing the united community of writers of the USSR, which consisted of about 11,000 people, into two wings: the Writers' Union of Russia (SPR) and the Union of Russian Writers (SRP) - was the so-called "Letter of the 74s". The first included those who were in solidarity with the authors of the "Letter of the 74", the second - writers, as a rule, of liberal views. It also served as an indicator of the mood that prevailed then among a number of literary figures. The most famous, most talented writers of Russia spoke about the danger of Russophobia, about the unfaithfulness of the chosen "perestroika" path, about the importance of patriotism for the revival of Russia.

The Writers' Union of Russia is an all-Russian public organization uniting a number of Russian and foreign writers. It was formed in 1991 on the basis of the unified Union of Writers of the USSR. The first chairman is Yuri Bondarev. In 2004, the Union consisted of 93 regional organizations and united 6991 people. In 2004, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the death of A.P. Chekhov, the Commemorative Medal of A.P. Chekhov was established. Awarded to persons awarded the A.P. Chekhov Literary Prize "for their contribution to modern Russian literature."

The Union of Russian Writers is an all-Russian public organization that unites Russian and foreign writers. The Union of Russian Writers was formed in 1991 with the collapse of the Union of Writers of the USSR. Dmitry Likhachev, Sergey Zalygin, Viktor Astafiev, Yuri Nagibin, Anatoly Zhigulin, Vladimir Sokolov, Roman Solntsev stood at the origins of its creation. First Secretary of the Union of Russian Writers: Svetlana Vasilenko.

The Union of Russian Writers is a co-founder and organizer of the Voloshin Prize, the Voloshin Competition and the Voloshin Festival in Koktebel, the All-Russian Meetings of Young Writers, is a member of the Organizing Committee for the celebration of the anniversaries of M. A. Sholokhov, N. V. Gogol, A. T. Tvardovsky and other prominent writers , on the jury of the International Literary Prize. Yuri Dolgoruky, holds "Provincial Literary Evenings" in Moscow, was the initiator of the erection of a monument to O. E. Mandelstam in Voronezh in 2008, participates in international and Russian book fairs, together with the Union of Journalists of Russia holds conferences of women writers, creative evenings, literary readings in libraries, schools and universities, round tables on translation problems, regional seminars on prose, poetry and criticism.

Under the Union of Russian Writers, the publishing house "Union of Russian Writers" was opened.