Biography of Gennady Seyifullin

The poets Mikhail Holodny and Boris Likharev, who were in the literary page of this youth Leningrad newspaper, semi -submissive, were poisoned by my “living clearing”, and I began to patiently wait if it would appear in the press. A month passed, another, on Sundays, works of young authors still appeared in the newspaper; So, in May, the story of G. Gora “Boots” was printed. I have never heard such a surname before, and therefore I read this thing very carefully.

At the end of June, the entire first year of the electrical institute, where I studied, was sent for two months to military training camps under the Red Selo, and at first I was not up to literature. But still, in one of the July Sundays, I looked into the tent with the marching red corner, launched a “shift” and saw my story! In two years, Breedikova wrote about this poem a fierce review, but then I did not notice anything of this.

And the joy of the publication of my own story was overshadowed by the fact that they printed not the second, improved option, which I also presented to the editorial office at one time, and the first, as I thought, Chernova, for some reason, it was he who fell under the arm to the compilers. This was my very first literary grief, which paved the way to all the next nevertheless, since the fall I began to compose again, wrote the story “The Military”, he was accepted in the journal “Young Proletarian”, and I decided to read it in the classroom of the Literary Group “Shifts”, which I had just learned about the existence of.

She was not connected with the newspaper “Smena”, except that there was Boris Likharev, who once studied in Moscow at the Bryusov Literary Institute, where he met Mikhail Hunger. Classes of the "shift" took place in that fall in the Press House, on Fontanka a second house from Nevsky. Arriving there for the first time, I did not read anything, only listened and looked around. Everyone spoke smartly, interestingly, especially the mountains, chubby, cut, but not yet bald.

What did he talk about that time? It seems that with enthusiasm Nikolai Tikhonov praised the “risky man” as I soon understood, he always liked works with an eccentric bias. It’s also good, but a little dignitarous and drooling into the corner of the mouth, Isai Rakhmanov said, not a member of the group. The chairmen, condescendingly grinning, the poet Dmitry Levonovsky, who had begun to be printed in the Star before others.

This was already able to write an epigram of the Poet-Rubfakovets Leonid Ravich on him: Give me, Levonovsky, I have an ear, and I will tell you the secret: Ah, your abdomen is growing, but the poet does not grow in you. Then Ravich sincerely admitted that the best word in the epigram - “Ah! There were two literary groups at that time: the poet Vissarion Sayanov and the critic, once the poet, Valery Druzin.

I met both in the editorial offices and in the Union of Writers for more than a dozen years. I will call those whom I remembered in the first classes, and with some of them became friends. Seventeen -year -old poetess Olga Bergholz with an unusually delicate complexion and two golden braids. Her husband is the poet Boris Kornilov, a small -sized stocky guy with a strand hanging on his forehead.

Their marriage turned out to be short -lived: already in the year, Kornilov suddenly asked me to help him find a separate room, and a year later he had Lucy, silent, very beautiful and in appearance quite a girl. Raisa Messer, Druzin's wife, thick, small, but pretty; Critic and literary critic, she then wrote about Bryusov. The poet Alexander Gitovich, who came to the print house, is always with a racket for table tennis.

In the year, I spent a month with him in the murman and dedicated him the story “Kupchikh Util”, and he was a poem “Lonely existence on the island of Kildin”. Small, witty Julius Berzin, the author of the novel, already published by a separate book of Nepman - Ford. Poet Ilya Avramenko; I remember that I envied his extraordinary ability to move right away with all my skin on my head!

Gradually, he grew a huge mustache and boss. Petrov, a fat blond, the author of the story printed in the same almanac where the first story of Gennady Gora “Pychonkin Pyuconkin Pistols” was placed. Petrov is almost the only "shift" who did not become a professional writer. Prose writer and poet Viktor Vitkovich; The pseudonym is the law. Subsequently, he became a screenwriter, and in the year he wrote with Likharev the parody poem “Count Nulin”, dedicating it for some reason to me.

The Baptists depicted in my story were meant. Tver Yam is a famous peasant writer at that time. Leo Veniaminovich Tsyrlin of this particular age! His wife is Lelia Zlatova, it is still unknown that the writing, but beautiful and mocking, from smiles and laughter on her temples, wrinkles were already running away - she was two years older than me. Her father was once a doctor in Davos.

The scene of Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain”. Ahead of the calendar, I will say that with Tsyrlin and Zlatovoy he soon began to meet especially often. More than once I spent the night on Gogol Street, where two “Kruzoshki” lived in the same apartment, a niece of an elderly Jew named Robinson Crusoe.Tsyrlins owned two rooms-a large three-end hall and a small cabinet, from where Lev Veniaminovich ran uneasily in the evenings if she lingered here for a long time before going to bed.

He treated me perfectly, but still partly worried and showed dissatisfaction, seeing us and Lelia sitting on the "my" sofa and sweetly talking on literary topics. Once I came to them in a joke: I was in the movie “Picadilli” now “Aurora” in the German film “Second Life”, so capturing me that, leaving the last session, left the manuscript of his “Tribal God” on the next empty chair in the only copy!

He remembered, moving beyond the quarter, he rushed back and found the manuscript already with the administrator, but I would return by the year. In the second or third lesson of “Shifts”, I read the story “Milk” to my new comrades. They scolded him excellently, although he was in him, as it seems to me now, and not bad places, with the mood and a love of the hero’s psychology. Basically scolded for style excesses, for an excess of comparisons and metaphors.

After forty -five years, Gennady Mountains recalled this evening in the article “Romantic and Realist” in “Neva” and in the preface to my one -volume, published in the year by the Publishing House “Fiction”. I quickly got closer to Gennady Mountain, who lived, like me, on Vasilyevsky Island: I am on the 4th line, closer to the small, mountains on Middle Avenue, between the 7th and 8th lines, next to the former city school, where in the ninths were inspector Fedor Sologub.

By the way, my future wife was also a vasyleostle and knew the mountain much earlier than me. He studied at a neighboring school, and it often happened that in a change or after the lessons, one of the students loudly announced:-Tomorrow the mountains would come to the meeting! And, indeed, the next day the Komsomol member of the mountains came to their school, in Jungsturmov, with a leather portup and then still lush hair.

They always listened to him with interest, feeling that it was not just eloquent, but also something special, gifted young man, and were not mistaken at the same time, our literary interests and inclinations from the very beginning of their acquaintances were noticeably ranging. For example, only one story was then loved from the whole of the Chekhov, who was adored from childhood - “Black Monk” in Gennady had already affected the future science fiction!

He was indifferent to Bunin, but he loved the German expressionists of the twenties - Meyrinka, Edschmid, and from the French - Jean Zhiono and Deltaeus, especially his “porcelain junka”. It is curious that, almost always diverging in literary attachments, Gennady and I never quarreled because of this, but with Nikolai Chukovsky, as I already recalled in the “son of his father”, the disagreement sometimes reached a complete gap in the fact that the mountains were so kind that he would be angry with him for anything monstrous absurdity: he literally checked everyone its non -malignancy.

Many examples can be given by this, including from the field of purely everyday - I will limit myself to two, three, in the course of memories, I will now say again: the mountains were kindness. In the year, the mountain was called up for military service, and he sent me from under Arkhangelsk complaint letters: he did not know how to walk at all, and even more so, skiing-in the north this was the main occupation and sports.

Soon from his letters I learned that before leaving to the north of the mountains I managed to marry, and now, according to his assignments, I have repeatedly visited Natalia Akimovna, a simple village woman, smart, kind and economic. He also went to the manuscript of the “cow” - he wrote this story shortly before the army and asked to be transferred to the “Publishing House of Writers in Leningrad”.

Of course, I immediately read it: it was very left - both in formal and ideological signs - a story about dispossession. It was written in the then mountain of an abstract manner, fists are depicted satirically, but abstractly. This story interested the consultant of the publishers, criticism and translator David Vygodsky, as well as interested him and my “tribal God”. True, they did not yet conclude agreements with us, but the orders were awarded to receive paper for reprinting manuscripts, and I came with these two orders to the office store on the old Nevsky.

It turned out that the paper was given only for agricultural literature. For the Gorov “cow”, the paper was given out without difficulty, with my “tribal God” I had to cheat a little: I explained that an annoying description crept into the warrant, that in fact the book should be called a “tribal bull”, and they believed me. Despite the difference in liter -executions, tastes, a lot brought us closer to the mountain.

We even published two of our novels under one cover - his “Faculty of Eccentrics” and my “Polnoba” written in the year. Published in the year "Young Guard", this book was called "Student Tales."And here is a typical example of kindness and generosity of the mountain: he insisted that my story go in the book of the first, like my surname, although according to the alphabet, his surname should go ahead not so often the writing fraternity likes to back down, especially in his youth!

Another example, from completely different times. In the sixties, we were ordered with the mountain an article on science for the Almanac “Our Leningrad”. I remember on the April day, when we left the university, having been there in several laboratories, the title of the famous Gorovsky novel in the university embankment! On this day, we collected almost all of the material we need, but wrote on its basis an article, in fact, is one Gennady.

And when the almanac was published, the mountains insisted knowing that I was then tight with finances, so that the fee was divided in half, and convincing me, reminds me of his long-standing “debt”: once he lost one of my favorite books: “Notes of the Pickwick Club” of Dickens. True, lost, but how and when? Under what tragicomic circumstances? In the early xs, the mountains went to Moscow to see his father, a veterinarian who constantly lived in Siberia.

Father gave him, or rather his young daughter -in -law, with all sorts of Siberian skins and Chinese silk, which the mountains laid together with me to read on the road and in Moscow by the Pickwick Club into a large twig basket. Returning to the dark autumn morning to Leningrad, he began to wait for the tram on Ligovka, setting him in front of him so as not to be stolen, this precious treasury.

Suddenly he was very pushed from behind, he fell, stumbling against his basket, and when he rose, the baskets were no longer as visible, the mountain of the loss of my book was most upset if he remembered it in thirty years! What to say, everyone knew and felt his kindness and superiority. In the middle of the X, the mountains settled with a family of five people in one, but a spacious room of a communal apartment on the Fontanka embankment.

Is it necessary to explain what a communal apartment with her customs and customs is? But then people were neighbors who immediately appreciated the mountain to dignity. Suffice it to say what they sold to me, a completely unfamiliar person, rare for those years, the material on the costume, with an installment plan for a year, exclusively under the guarantee of the mountain. True, not a frequent case?

True, in order to inadvertently not to bring the mountain, I did not dare to sew the costume before entering the screen of the “deputy of the Baltic” - solid English material was lying for me for the future, “just in case”: what if I have to return it if the film did not work out on the fountain at the mountains more than once, until they moved to the so -called “writer's superstructure” on the Griboedov channel, where a number of apartments were unexpectedly released.

Even more often, Leonid Ivanovich Prebychin came to them, who loved to talk about how the mountains works: his five -year -old Yura pulls him in one hand, and two -year -old Lida, and he writes everything and writes