Alexander Alfredovich Beck - Russian writer, prose writer.

Born December 21, 1902 in Saratov in the family of a military doctor. In Saratov, he spent his childhood and youth, and there he graduated from a real school. At the age of 16 Beck joined the Red Army. Served in the Civil War Eastern Front near Uralsk and was wounded. The editor-in-chief of the divisional newspaper drew attention to the author and ordered several reports from him. From this he began literary activity. The first story of Alexander Alfredovich "Kurako" (1934) was written based on impressions from a trip to a new building in the city of Kuznetsk.

To the Great Patriotic War Beck joined the Moscow civil uprising, to the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division. Participated in the fighting near Vyazma as a war correspondent. He reached Berlin, where he met Victory Day. In 1956, the author was a member of the editorial board of the anthology "Literary Moscow".

In their last years he lived in Moscow at 4 Chernyakhovsky Street. He was buried in Moscow, at the Golovinsky cemetery.

Omutninskaya secondary school №1

Alexander Alfredovich Beck

"Volokolamskoe highway"

Omutninsk 2001

Plan

I.Alexander Beck, Writer and Man.

BUT) short biography Alexander Beck.

B) Unique and indomitable.

II.History of creation, problems, composition of the work.

III.Summary of the novel.

A) military education of soldiers.

B) Rescue from the encirclement of the Germans.

C) The death of Panfilov and promotion in military service.

IV.Conclusion.

v.List of used literature.

“The world wants to know who we are. East and West ask who are you, a Soviet person?

Alexander Beck, Writer and Man

Brief biography of Alexander Beck

BEK Alexander Alfredovich (1902/March 1972), Russian writer. The story of the heroic defense of Moscow in 1941 "Volokolamsk Highway" (1943-44), the novel "Berezhkov's Life" (1956). The novel "The New Appointment" (published in 1986) is about the moral problems generated by the command-administrative system of government in the 1930s and 50s. The novel "The Other Day" (unfinished, published in 1989) about the origins of the phenomenon of Stalinism.

Beck ran away from home at the age of thirteen from his stepmother and a harsh father who beat him. He lived with friends, somehow graduated from a real school. At the age of sixteen he left to fight and never returned to his father's shelter. He knew ridiculously little about his family and was not at all interested in the genealogy of the Beks. When the Patriotic War began, Beck believed that he should be especially brave, braver than others, since German blood flows in his veins, albeit thoroughly diluted (Becks married Russians).

Having won, Beck then studied at the Sverdlov Communist University, or, simply speaking, Sverdlovka (the first higher party school in the USSR), along with future people's commissars and future secretaries of regional committees, but for now - cheerful hicks who recently defeated the enemy and are set up in the most optimistic way. Beck, it seems, was popular among them, made jokes that were then repeated, and was the editor of the newspaper. Gnawing on the granite of science, as they said then, all these young healthy guys lived from hand to mouth, constantly thinking and talking about food.

Among the listeners of Sverdlovka, there was a certain fanatic inventor who constantly sent letters to the government about his brilliant discoveries and inventions. They promised to help with inventions when the industry improved, but for now they began to give him some kind of reinforced ration so that his talent would not subside. And since he was an impractical person, preoccupied with his fantasies, his products accumulated, stale.

Beck and two other listeners - Kolya and Agasik - convinced the inventor that his letters "upstairs" were not successful, because he had a bad, clumsy handwriting and all the documentation was poorly formatted. Three friends deceived the inventor, saying that they agreed on everything so that the workers would make good and understandable drawings and diagrams, but at the same time they said that they, the workers, did not need money, but products. Therefore, bags of flour, bottles of vegetable oil were lured from him, they baked pancakes, and they themselves ate and fed all the lads. As a result, many learned about this incident, the inventor was mortally offended, and also complained. The case received wide publicity. Considered extortion, theft, all three were expelled from the party and from Sverdlovka.

The three expelled were nineteen or twenty years old. Kolya led the Komsomol work in Tula until Sverdlovka, the Armenian Agasik managed not only to fight, but also to carry out underground work, he spent time in prison. Beck was the initiator of the criminal act, and he did not hide it. Firstly, he had a very developed imagination in terms of all sorts of picaresque crafts, his fantasy worked perfectly. Secondly, God did not offend him with his appetite, he, being big, bodily, earthly, always wanted to eat more than others, endured hunger worse.

Beck ran away from Moscow, wherever his eyes look. Once and for all I decided that there is no return to a past life and cannot be. Without having a penny of money, he got into freight cars, went first in one direction, then in another, rushed around the country. In the end, he ended up in the northwest, wandering in the forests, he did not notice how he crossed the border. He became convinced that he had been brought to Estonia, then an independent bourgeois state, and fell into despair. Back to the Soviet Union, by all means back! The border was poorly guarded, he managed (with all sorts of adventures) to move to Soviet territory, almost died of starvation in the border forests. They picked him up in two typhus, typhus and typhoid fever, put him in the hospital, lay unconscious for several weeks. Then he was arrested to clarify all the circumstances, but, however, the arrest was short-lived, they were soon released.

The whole past life was like crossed out. He returned to Moscow, got a job as a loader at the tannery named after Zemlyachka. Where else to go, expelled from the party? Beck did not have a Moscow square, there was nowhere to live, he spent the night at a factory, wandered around acquaintances, unwashed, unkempt, usually half-starved.

The loader Beck was drawn to the path of a worker correspondent, his short notes began to appear in Pravda, signed with the pseudonym “Ra-be” (which meant “worker Beck” or “worker correspondent Beck”). Under Pravda, a circle of literary and theatrical criticism was created for the workers. Beck, a frequenter of the circle, took an active part in heated debates. Soon he will become a professional literary critic, create a special group (Beck, his first wife, their friend). The grouping will work out its own position, criticize everything and everyone, even the RAPP, for insufficient fidelity to the principles of proletarian art. Later, in the 50s and 60s, Beck liked to say: “I have been very lucky twice in my life. When I married Natasha (the second wife of N. V. Loiko). And when I was expelled from the party. Sverdlovsk my classmates, almost all became party leaders, and considerable. And how many of them died peacefully in their beds?

On the threshold of his seventieth birthday, Beck is remembered as a large, heavy-weight, with disheveled thick hair and sharply flashing little bear eyes, with a sly grin. Yes, and all the grips were bearish, gait - too. You have to work hard to knock down such a thick-set hero. Strongly nailed. Well, the era worked hard, tried.

Unique and indomitable

At the meeting, former front-line soldiers greeted Beck: “Great, good soldier Beik!” So he was called at the front for the fact that even in the most terrible days of the retreat he did not lose his kind of cheerful "Schweik's humor."

Beck was also called in the war - Man - On the contrary. They said: if the army was retreating, but one car nevertheless went forward on some business, then the correspondent Beck was already right there, insistently asking to be taken with him.

Beck is terribly fond of Dombrowski's aphorism: "We have a country of unlimited possibilities."

One of the leaders of the Union of Writers Markov - during Beck's regular troubles (after some cocky speech about freedom of creativity at a writers' meeting) - exclaimed with irritation: "Inadmissible Beck!" They say Kazakevich corrected him: “The unique Beck. Indomitable Beck.

History of creation, problems, composition of the work.

When the Great Patriotic War began, Alexander Beck, putting aside the novel about the life of the aircraft designer Berezhkov (this novel was completed after the war), became a war correspondent. And he spent the first months of the war in the troops that defended Moscow and its environs.

At the beginning of 1942, Alexander Beck went to the Panfilov division, which had already risen from the borders near Moscow almost to Staraya Russa. In this division, Beck began to make acquaintances, tireless questions, endless hours in the role of "talker", as required by the correspondent. Gradually, the image of Panfilov, who died near Moscow, was formed, who knew how to manage, influence not with a cry, but with his mind, in the past an ordinary soldier who retained soldier's modesty until his death.

For the first time Alexander Beck visited the Panfilov division in January-February 1942. The author visited this division several times, as a result of which the order was given: "do not let this correspondent who does not write anything anymore."

As a result, in the summer of the forty-second year, Alexander Beck sat down to write a story. In addition, he received a leave of absence from the editorial office of the Znamya magazine, where he was a war correspondent. But one day, Beck decided to go to a summer cottage to continue writing the novel there. And when he got on the train, the author forgot to take the bag with him, which he left at the station. But when he ran out, it turned out that the bag was gone.

Alexander Beck had no choice but to write the story again. But now it has lost its purely documentary character, since the author did not have his archive. I had to give free rein to the imagination, the figure of the central hero, who retained his true name, increasingly acquired the character of an artistic image, the truth of the fact sometimes gave way to the truth of art.

The book Volokolamsk Highway was conceived in 1942 as a cycle of four stories. The author considered the most important, the most important for his plan, the last, final story. The days of the December German offensive on Moscow, the birth, crystallization of new military tactics, the battles of the Panfilovites, marked by the history of the war as especially characteristic, classic in their own way - this is what Alexander Beck would like to tell about in his fourth story. Before the next two stories of the novel were published, the work as part of the first two stories gained an independent existence, received recognition from readers and in translations on all continents. For the author high reward and it is an honor that the book was adopted by the young revolutionary armies of the socialist countries.

“The world wants to know who we are. East and West ask: who are you, a Soviet person? It was this question that Alexander Beck wanted to answer with all four stories of Volokolamsk Highway. The work was officially published in 1960.

As for the problematics and composition, the work consists of four stories closely bound friend with a friend. The main idea that the author puts in this work is: the education of the military spirit of soldiers and human behavior in war.

Military education of soldiers

As already mentioned, the main character from whom the narration comes is Baurjan Momysh-Uly. When the author met him, he persuaded him for a long time to tell about the exploits of the Panfilovites. At first he did not agree, did not believe that Beck would write the truth, but nevertheless he persuaded him under such an agreement that if Baurjan found any untruth in the narrative, he would cut off Beck's hand, and then the other. However, the author agreed. And, of course, they joked, although not smiling.

At the beginning of the story, Baurdzhan Momysh-Uly was the commander of the battalion. He was a harsh commander, but not that harsh, but fair and honest. When he and his battalion made a campaign, a terrible event happened: the political instructor of the machine-gun company, Dzhalmukhamed Bozzhanov, reported that Sergeant Barambaev had shot himself in the hand. Then a serious conversation with Barambaev took place. But he begged to be let go back to the war. Then the battalion commander put the "traitor to the Motherland" in front of the entire battalion. And he ordered, several soldiers took rifles and aimed them at Barambaev. But the commander felt very sorry for him, so he let him go. In fact, he never forgave him. He, the commander, the father, killed his son, but hundreds of such sons stood before him. He was obliged to impress with blood in the souls: there is no mercy for the traitor and there will be no mercy! In addition, he wanted every fighter to know: if you chicken out, change, you will not be forgiven, no matter how much you want to forgive. This is one of the features of military education. In addition, Baurjan Momysh-Uly talked with his warriors, subordinates, developed in them a sense of duty, responsibility, and a warrior. He urged them to go to war in order to live, and not die and live, no matter what. In the service they happened to meet General Panfilov himself. He was kind, liked to talk, and therefore the battalion commander was glad to see him. He happened to meet the general three months ago. The general told the commander to take care of his soldiers - warriors, but at the same time he said who would run from the battlefield - to shoot. Another example of the education and training and education of fighters is described in the "tobacco march". For example, when the fighters managed to walk along an asphalt road, the commander ordered them to move a few meters to the right so that they would walk along a dirt road. The commander wanted them to immediately get used to the heavy march, because in the war, on the battlefield, it will be tight and even harder for them, and in the future they will make more difficult transitions. In addition, the commander ordered that everyone cook their own dinner when they stopped to rest. Since in the future, if someone is left alone, then he will not be able to feed himself. And in the beginning, many were very dissatisfied, but they understood the full responsibility. It is necessary to live and study, especially in war.

The first story tells how the Panfilovites made their first campaign against the Germans. In the village of Serida on October 13, Chief of Staff Rakhimov with a cavalry platoon discovered the Germans. The battalion commander could not sleep all night. Since his best fighters moved on foot in the evening to attack this village. But vain expectations were crowned with success. On the morning of the next day, the detachment arrived already on horseback, although they had left on foot the night before. The battalion commander did not see the horses on which they arrived in the regiment, they recaptured them from the Germans in Serida. The battalion commander Baurjan Momysh-Uly awarded those who distinguished themselves with honors. As the commander spoke: after this battle, which they won, General Fear was beaten.

In the first two months, the soldiers of the first battalion of the Talgar regiment took thirty-five battles; at one time they were the reserve battalion of General Panfilov; joined the fight, as befits a reserve, at desperately difficult moments; fought near Volokolamsk, near Istra, near Kryukov; overcame and drove the Germans.

Rescue from the encirclement of the Germans

The second story tells us how the Panfilov battalion got out of the encirclement of the Germans. In their campaigns, the battalion was surrounded by German fortifications. A very clever idea was needed to break through, so the battalion commander explained it. The battalion is built in a row, a rhombus. Bozzhanov's division concludes it, in the side corners - Zaev and Tostunov, in front, in sharp corner Momysh-Uly appointed Rakhimov. The trailers were additionally given grenades so that they, in the end, blew up a couple of cars or tents from the Germans. As a result, the Panfilovites broke through, firing from all sides. According to the battalion commander, one tank with a broken caterpillar was spinning in place like a huge rumbling top. Several times in this story appears volley fire. After the entire battalion got out of the encirclement, at the headquarters of the division, Panfilov asked to gather all the troops and present those who especially distinguished themselves in this battle. But on the other hand, the battalion commander heard a conversation between the general and the lieutenant general, which he should not have heard. The lieutenant general scolded Panfilov that they were advancing very slowly, while on other lines the Germans broke through the lines of the Russians. Since the highest in rank did not want this to happen to them either, that is, for the Germans to break through these lines as well.

The death of Panfilov and promotion in military service

The final story tells how Baurdzhan Momysh-Uly was promoted to military service. And most importantly, Panfilov died! Hearing from eyewitnesses that Panfilov had died, the battalion commander at first did not want to believe it. But when a soldier brought him to read a note about Panfilov's death in the newspaper, Baurdzhan still barely believed this incident. And he died like this: the division left village after village, retreated to the next lines. Panfilov was sitting with his headquarters in Gusenov. The indefatigable general put on his sheepskin coat and went out into the street. Arseniev, who followed him, saw how he took the last steps in his life. Flames and thunder shot up in front of the general, he fell, hit a mine. The last thing he could say was that he would live. For a long time Baurdzhan could not believe that his commander was dead. He read this article several times in the newspaper.

His fighters lined up in a 20-degree frost. He congratulated the fighters on the rank of Soviet guards, and also spoke about the exploits. Private Storozhkin captured the battalion commander; eighty soldiers of Lieutenant Zaev also increased the glory of the Soviet soldier, attacked with such fury that they managed to take three German tanks full of looted rags, smashed, drove the hoarders who had seized our land; Brudny's company, almost without exception, died with its commander and with its political instructor. For two days this company, surrounded by enemies, held a stronghold on the Volokolamsk highway, did not allow the Nazi motor columns to pass along the highway. “Honor and glory to our fallen brothers! The Motherland will never forget them!” In addition, the commander praised the machine gunner Bloch in front of everyone, put him in front of the battalion. His neck, that is, Flea, was bandaged. Wounded, he remained at his post, continued to fight. Did not leave a machine gun and during the march-withdrawal.

After Baurjan praised his fighters, he started talking about Panfilov. Ivan Vasilyevich Panfilov - general of reality; general of truth. He respected the soldier, constantly reminded the commanders that the outcome of the battle, first of all, depended on the soldier himself, and the outcome of the battle was decided by the soldier himself. In addition, he reminded that the most formidable weapon in battle is the soul of a soldier. Baurdzhan told his soldiers that if it were not for Ivan Vasilyevich Panfilov, they would not have kept this road - the Volokolamsk highway. Panfilov was a general of reason, a general of calculation, a general of composure, fortitude, a general of reality.

On the way to the village, where the headquarters of the division arrived, Rakhimov showed up. It turned out that when he met the Germans, he had to get out of the forest alone, before anyone else. Then he was detained by the posts of the barrage detachment. The stern, elderly commander of the detachment, a former sailor, with a deep scar across his forehead, was distrustful of Rakhimov, and therefore he was put in a frozen barn until the circumstances were clarified. The battalion commander told Rakhimov that he had to find his detachment in the forest, no matter what, the battalion commander did not punish him.

Baurdzhan Momysh-Uly met with Zvyagin, an army lieutenant general. Made even stronger friends. When they met, they embraced. When Zvyagin was lighting a cigarette, Baurdzhan recognized Panfilov's lighter from him. And he thought to himself that he was the closest friend of Ivan Vasilyevich Panfilov.

This concludes the story of Baurdzhan Momysh-Ula. But he added that on November 23, 1941, he ceased to be a battalion commander, and was appointed regiment commander. The former battalion commander handed over his battalion to Islamkulov, also his loyal fighter.

Thus, the Panfilovites defended the Volokolamsk Highway, withstood a six-day battle on the Leningradskoye Highway, and, together with other units of the Red Army, drove the enemy away from Moscow. As the narrator of this whole story points out, other books can be written: Leningrad Highway, Under Staraya Russa.

Conclusion: Why did I choose this book?

Since I like to read military books, because they tell the feats of warriors, various battles, battles, and most importantly, they tell us our history. How our ancestors fought, defending our country and defending their descendants, against foreign invaders. Whoever we are, we must know our history. Therefore, I chose for reading and for creating an abstract the work of Alexander Alfredovich Beck "Volokolamsk Highway". This book tells us how Kazakh Baurjan Momysh-Uly led a division, a battalion. There are many different works on a military theme, for example, Kozhevnikov's "Shield and Sword".

List of used literature:

ü Journal of criticism and literary criticism "Questions of Literature" 1995 IssueV. Article: N. Sokolov. Alexander Beck, writer and person"

ü Alexander Beck "Volokolamsk Highway" 1984.

Alexander Alfredovich Beck. Born December 21, 1902 (January 3, 1903) in Saratov - died November 2, 1972 in Moscow. Russian Soviet writer.

Father - Alfred Vladimirovich Beck, general of medical service, chief physician of a military hospital.

His childhood and youth passed in Saratov. He graduated from the Saratov 2nd real school.

At the age of 16 Alexander Beck joined the Red Army. During the Civil War he served on the Eastern Front near Uralsk and was wounded. The editor-in-chief of the divisional newspaper drew attention to Beck and ordered several reports from him. This was the start of his literary career. At the beginning of his creative activity was the first editor of the newspaper "Red Black Sea".

Since 1931, he collaborated in the editorial offices of The History of Factories and Plants and People of Two Five-Year Plans, in the Cabinet of Memoirs created on the initiative.

The first story of Alexander Beck - "Kurako". It was written in 1935 based on impressions from a trip to a new building in the city of Kuznetsk.

Beck's essays and reviews began to appear in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestia.

During the Great Patriotic War, Beck joined the Moscow People's Militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division. Participated in the fighting near Vyazma as a war correspondent. He reached Berlin, where he met Victory Day.

Beck's most famous story "Volokolamskoe highway" was written in 1942-1943. First published in 1943 under the title "Panfilov's men at the first line" in the Znamya magazine. It tells about the feat of Soviet soldiers and officers from the 1st battalion of the 1073th joint venture of the 316th division (later the 8th Guards Rifle Division), who fought and gave their lives in a battle with the German invaders near Moscow in the Volokolamsk direction in the autumn and winter of 1941.

On the one hand, the book describes the organization, education of the battalion taking part in the battles, life inside it, the behavior of the commander, his interaction with the division commander. On the other hand, the tactics of the battles near Moscow and how and on the basis of what the old linear tactics of the Red Army forces were changed and rebuilt in response to tactics within the framework of the new German strategy.

Structurally, the work consists of four stories of 10-17 chapters, the narration is conducted as a story of a senior lieutenant of the battalion of the Panfilov Rifle Division, Hero Soviet Union Baurzhan Momysh-Uly. The style of the novel departs from the primitive poster image of the war, the author shows the fighters as real people with their weaknesses, with the fear of death, but at the same time with a full understanding of the responsibility for the fate of the country at such a difficult historical moment. The theme of internationalism and military brotherhood is raised in the novel.

It is worth noting that at the beginning of 1942 he went to the Panfilov division, which had already thrown back German troops from the borders near Moscow almost to Staraya Russa. During his stay in the division, the writer accumulated material in long conversations with soldiers of the Red Army. In these conversations, the image of General Panfilov, who died near Moscow, began to take shape, with his Suvorov concern for soldiers and his characteristic expressions: “Do not rush to die - learn to fight”, “A soldier must fight with his mind”, “A soldier goes into battle not to die, but to live” , "Victory is forged before the battle." In the summer of 1942, Beck received a leave of absence from the Znamya magazine and sat down to write a story. Initially, the first two stories out of four were printed, and later the last two were added. The most important, from the point of view of the author, is the fourth story. In it, Beck describes the formation of new defensive tactics.

"Volokolamsk Highway" was one of the favorite books and Comandante.

The continuation of the book "Volokolamsk Highway" was the story "A Few Days" (1960) and "General Panfilov's Reserve" (1960).

The prototype of the protagonist of the novel "Talent (Berezhkov's Life)" (1956) was the largest aircraft engine designer A. A. Mikulin.

In 1956, Alexander Beck was a member of the editorial board of the almanac "Literary Moscow".

After the war, he wrote a series of essays on Manchuria, Harbin and Port Arthur. A number of works are dedicated to metallurgists (the collection "Blast Furnace Workers", the novel "New Profile", the novel "Young People" - together with N. Loiko).

In the center of the novel "A New Appointment" (1965) is I. Tevosyan, who served as Minister of the Metallurgical Industry and Ferrous Metallurgy. The novel did not contain dissident views, however, it was withdrawn from the issue after it was announced for publication in the magazine " New world". A certain role in the prohibition of the novel was played by Tevosyan's widow O. A. Khvalebnova, she decided that the novel "New Appointment" reveals unnecessary details of the private life of her late husband. The novel was first published in Germany in 1972, and in the USSR in 1986.

The novel "The Other Day" (unfinished, 1967-1970), first published in 1989 (the magazine "Friendship of Peoples", 1989 No. 8, 9), is dedicated to the youth of I.V. Stalin.

Many of the writer's works have been filmed.

In his last years, he lived in Moscow at number 4 on Chernyakhovsky Street.

Personal life of Alexander Beck:

Wife - Natalia Vsevolodovna Loiko (1908-1987), writer and architect. Before meeting Beck, she was married to the writer Alexander Sharov.

Daughter - Tatyana Beck, poetess and literary critic.

Tatyana Beck - daughter of Alexander Beck

Bibliography of Alexander Beck:

1927 - Circle of book friends in the working library
1928 - Evening of Maxim Gorky in the club
1939 - Life of Vlas Lesovik
1939, 1953, 1958 - Curaco
1945 - Volokolamsk highway
1946 - Blast furnace workers
1948 - Timofey - an open heart
1950 - Grain of steel
1955 - Timofey Open Heart
1956 - Life of Berezhkov (Talent)
1961 - General Panfilov's reserve
1961 - A few days
1965 - At the front and in the rear
1967 - My heroes
1968 - Postal prose. Memories, articles, letters
1972 - New appointment
1972 - At the last hour
1974-1976 - Collected works in 4 volumes
1975 - In his lifetime
1990 - The other day
1991 - Collected works in 4 volumes

Screen versions of Alexander Beck:

1967 - Moscow is behind us - film adaptation of the story "Volokolamsk Highway"
1979 - Talent - film adaptation of the novel "Talent (Berezhkov's Life)"
1983 - Division Commander's Day - adaptation of the essay "Division Commander's Day" from the collection "A Few Days"
1990 - Time passed - film adaptation of the novel "New Appointment"

Alexander Alfredovich Beck- Russian writer, prose writer.

Born in the family of a military doctor. In Saratov, he spent his childhood and youth, and there he graduated from a real school. At the age of 16, A. Beck joined the Red Army. During the Civil War he served on the Eastern Front near Uralsk and was wounded. The editor-in-chief of the divisional newspaper drew attention to A. Beck and ordered several reports from him. This was the start of his literary career.

The first story by A. Beck "Kurako" (1934) was written based on impressions from a trip to a new building in the city of Kuznetsk.

Beck's essays and reviews began to appear in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestia. Since 1931, A. Beck collaborated in the editorial offices of The History of Factories and Plants and People of Two Five-Year Plans, in the Cabinet of Memoirs created on the initiative of M. Gorky.

During the Great Patriotic War, A. Beck joined the Moscow People's Militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division. Participated in the fighting near Vyazma as a war correspondent. He reached Berlin, where he met Victory Day. The most famous story by Beck "Volokolamsk Highway" was written in 1943-1944. In it, “a departure from the primitive jingoistic idealization and at the same time adaptation to the line required by the party are combined so skillfully that they ensured the story’s enduring recognition in the Soviet Union” (V. Kazak). Volokolamsk Highway was one of Che Guevara's favorite books. The main character of the story was the Hero of the Soviet Union senior lieutenant battalion commander (later guards colonel, division commander) Bauyrzhan Momysh-Uly.

The continuation of this book was the story "A Few Days" (1960), "General Panfilov's Reserve" (1960).

The prototype of the protagonist of the novel "Talent (Berezhkov's Life)" (1956) was the aircraft designer Alexander Alexandrovich Mikulin.

In 1956, A. Beck was a member of the editorial board of the anthology "Literary Moscow".

After the war, he wrote a series of essays on Manchuria, Harbin and Port Arthur. A number of works are dedicated to metallurgists (the collection "Blast Furnace Workers", the novel "New Profile", the novel "Young People" - together with N. Loiko). Postal Prose was published in 1968.

In the center of the novel "A New Appointment" (1965) is I. Tevosyan, who under Stalin held the post of Minister of the Metallurgical Industry and Ferrous Metallurgy. The novel did not contain dissident views, but it was withdrawn from the issue after it was announced for publication in the Novy Mir magazine. Tevosyan's widow played a certain role in the prohibition of the novel, she decided that the novel "New Appointment" reveals unnecessary details of the private life of her late husband. The novel was first published in Germany in 1972, and in the USSR in 1986, during Perestroika.

The novel "The Next Day" (unfinished), first published in 1990, is dedicated to the youth of I.V. Stalin.

In his last years, he lived in Moscow at 4 Chernyakhovsky Street. He was buried in Moscow, at the Golovinsky cemetery.

January 3, 2003 marks one hundred years since the birth of the outstanding Russian writer Alexandra Beka, the author of a truthful talented novel about the defenders of Moscow - Volokolamsk Highway. On the pages of our magazine, Tatyana Beck talks about her father, famous poet and literary critic.

... Again his star shone, Mountains of success are predicted - Both performances and serials ... But there will be no living Beck. ... I now remembered his fate, I was looking for a hidden sense in it, But the only thing I understood: You need to live in Russia for a long time. V. Kornilov In memory of Alexander Beck

Alexander Beck was born in Saratov, in the family of a general of medical service, chief physician of a large military hospital, Alfred Vladimirovich Beck. Beck is one of the Russified Danes: according to a family legend (his father, with his passion for facts and documents, already in the 60s made sure of its accuracy by digging in the Leningrad archives), great-grandfather, Christian Beck himself “wrote” from Denmark Peter I as an experienced postmaster - to organize Russian mail. Is it not from here, I think now, that Alexander Beck's stubborn and slightly old-fashioned love for epistolary communication comes from? After all, he also named his late autobiographical story, with an eye on Pushkin, Postal Prose.

More milestones of fate: I studied at the Saratov real school, especially doing well in mathematics, - the teacher said so: “But for Beck I have a special task - more difficult.” At the age of sixteen, he volunteered for civil war to the Red Army, was wounded - as a child, this deep, ragged dent on my leg seemed terribly scary to me ... Then, a slightly limping young man, Beck, got into a divisional circulation newspaper, where he received his first profession as a “newspaper worker”: he wrote reports, he corrected and proofread , he himself turned the flywheel of the "American" printing machine. Then he studied at the Sverdlovsk University in the history department. Then he was a simple worker at the plant named after Zemlyachka, and in the evenings on the outskirts of Moscow, he visited the journalistic circle of Pravda. He signed his notes and sketches with the outlandish pseudonym “Ra-Be”: here I hear the inimitably crafty fatherly humor - both the working Beck and the rebbe ... Then he was a literary critic-loser, which he later recalled not without self-irony: “Imagine, I was even more to the left of RAPP!” RAPP was defeated, on which Beck's invincible career as a critic ended successfully.

In the early 1930s, Beck accidentally (but "the more accidental, the more likely," as the poet said) got into a literary brigade, which, from the editorial board, headed by Gorky and bearing the name "History of factories and plants", was sent to Siberia - to collectively create the history of Kuznetskstroy. It was here that the writer (and for a long time he considered himself only a “journalist” or even “unfortunate scribbler”) found his unique method: to talk with the heroes of future books, extract precious details from them, collect grains and threads, from which the fabric of the narrative will then be woven. . The participants in this project, which was later called the "Cabinet of Memoirs", were called the clumsy word "conversators" and, together with the stenographer attached to each, "spun" people's commissars, engineers, business executives, inventors, workers for precious confessions (archive of the "Cabinet" during the years of Stalinist terror was confiscated and died). Thus, it was supposed to create a huge documentary chronicle of the era. “Our job is to listen with talent, that is, to set up the interlocutor, listen to him sensitively, with interest, evoke eloquent details with questions, in a word, achieve a sincere vivid story,” the writer later recalled. So from the very beginning he defined his creative task, which combined a thorough study of nature and only then an orientation towards imagination and generalization. Not only that: here, in the bowels of the "Memoirs Cabinet", Beck's exceptional and purely interest in talented workers and even, one might say, maniacs in their field (he will call himself a singer of talents in his declining years) takes its source. Few of the "talkers" - and in this capacity even a romantic began Paustovsky, - remained faithful to this strict school. Perhaps only he is the one about whom Viktor Shklovsky himself immediately said with astonished sharpness: “Beck opens people like tin cans!” ... Before the war, the writer published a documentary and fiction book “Blast Furnace Workers”, which included the story “Kurako” and other essays novels and monologues. Already here, Beck's unique style was clearly revealed: concise laconism, sharp plot dramaturgy, impeccable authenticity of the narration and - as a rule - the author's departure into the shadow of a character speaking in the first person. All these principles, enriched by sudden inspiration, will form the basis of the Volokolamsk Highway.

Shortly before the war, the writer sat down for big thing which he completed many years later. This is "Berezhkov's Life" (the final title is "Talent"), which tells about domestic aircraft designers and is saturated, let's remember Beck's favorite word, with ions of gift, onslaught and daring. The writer was working on a novel when a neighbor knocked on the window of the dacha where he worked: “You don’t know anything? The war has begun! Beck found some twine, bundled the materials, notes, and drafts of the novel into several bundles, hid these bundles under the porch, and left for Moscow on the very first train. And two weeks later, as part of a group of volunteer writers, he joined the people's militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division, and again drank the share of the warriors - "the good soldier Bake," as he was nicknamed in the battalion ... Boris Runin, author of the memoir essay "Writer's Company" ( 1985), testified that the witty, adventurous, courageous Beck quickly became the soul of the division - as they would now say - the informal leader. And this is despite the most, from the point of view of the military norm, unpresentable appearance: “Huge boots, windings, which he constantly unwound and dragged along the ground, gray uniforms, and to top it all, the ridiculous, bonneted cap sitting on his head did not speaking of glasses ... "Comrades in the company immediately paid tribute to the powerful intellect of their half-witted comrade (however, it is unlikely that any of them assumed that this purely civilian essayist would soon write the sharpest and most accurate book about the war) - Boris Runin recalls: “A man of remarkable intelligence and rare worldly insight, Beck, obviously, has long been accustomed to playing a kind of eccentric simpleton from himself. His innate sociability was reflected in the fact that he could, with the most naive air, sit down with any company comrade and, setting him up with his intentional childlike spontaneity for complete frankness, take possession of all the thoughts of a gullible interlocutor ... Apparently, in this way he satisfied his insatiable need for human contacts . I think that, contrary to his seeming innocence, Beck was already better than any of us in the specific conditions of the militia formation, and in the front-line situation in general. In a word, he was one of the most complex and most entertaining characters among us...” And shortly after my father’s death, I wrote the poem “Voenkor” – this is how I still see him, plotting “Volokolamskoye Highway” at the end of 1941:

They look at the military spruces, As by the road, alone, In a wide-brimmed overcoat He votes for Klin. He's shaking in the back for a long time With a feeling of vague guilt... How difficult it is for him The secret of secret wars! (It will be seen again With a different, young look. But the word is more precious, Spoken - through the smoke). They watch military spruces, How he with a frozen hand, Hiding a notebook from a blizzard, Writes about the morning battle, How, having grown mad from a halt, Truth is a diligent scribe, He, smiling tiredly, Asks to pour him a cheek.

“In this book, I’m just a conscientious and diligent scribe,” Volokolamsk Highway begins with an underlined alleged self-deprecation, but in fact with a pointed signal about the utmost naturalness (as they say, “exactly like in life”). It is characteristic that Beck never gave a genre definition to his innermost book, only once in his diary of 1942 calling it a "chronicle of the battle near Moscow" and only conditionally calling each of the individual parts of the final tetralogy "tales". A book is a book! In devotion to this word, Beck, apparently, put the same special meaning as Tvardovsky, who wrote about “Vasily Terkin” (Beck’s favorite thing): “The genre designation of“ A Book about a Fighter ”, which I settled on, was not the result of a desire to simply avoid the designation “poem”, “story”, etc. What mattered in this choice was that special, familiar to me from childhood, the sound of the word "book" in the mouths of the common people, which, as it were, suggests the existence of a book in a single copy ... "It is interesting that Beck's book was perceived only in this way at the front, although it was light (the first two stories) in double issues of the Znamya magazine. Critic M. Kuznetsov recalled that when he, a young employee of an army newspaper, arrived in 1944 with an editorial assignment in one of the divisions, he was immediately called to the general: “Tell me,” the general asked, holding the Banner in his hands. , - is it possible to urgently publish this in the printing house of an army newspaper? I would give this book to every officer in my division.” The same general asked the journalist for a long time about Beck and concluded: “He, of course, is a professional military man who has become a writer, he is either a colonel or older.” We already imagine the good soldier Bake ... The creative principles of the writer originate in the "Dialogues" Cicero and "History" of Herodotus, on the one hand, and in " Sevastopol stories» Lev Tolstoy, with another. He was precisely the historian of our time, he managed to synthesize a philosophical chronicle and a burning reportage ... I will tell you the most dramatic episode from the creative history of Volokolamsk Highway. The fact is that, having started writing a book and taking a leave of absence from the Znamya magazine, where Beck was a correspondent, he rented a room at the Bykovo station near Moscow, where he worked selflessly. When one day he needed to visit Moscow, out of fear of a fire or any other trouble, he put all the materials for the Volokolamsk Highway and an almost completed manuscript into a duffel bag ... and also focusing on the can of soup, which his relatives handed him) the bag - left. The loss could not be found. The writer's despair was boundless, but he found the strength in himself and... To quote Beck's later memoirs: “I had no choice but to write the story again. But now it has lost its purely documentary character - after all, I did not have my archive. I had to give free rein to the imagination, the figure of the central character, who retained his true name, increasingly acquired the character of an artistic image, the truth of the fact gave way to the truth of art ... ”The fate of books is sometimes whimsical: a desperate collision, as we see, gave an unexpected creative effect.

In the May-June issue of the Znamya magazine for 1943, the first part of the book was published - "Panfilov's men at the first line (a story about fear and fearlessness)", and exactly a year later - the next one: "Volokolamsk highway", with the subtitle - "The second story about Panfilovites". Reader acceptance was incredible and unanimous. Magazines were read to holes both in the army and in the rear, passed from hand to hand, discussed, studied. No less was the recognition of his comrades in the pen. So, Konstantin Simonov in the article “About Alexander Beck” (1963) recalled that when he first read Volokolamsk Highway, he was shocked precisely by the iron authenticity and invincibly detailed truth of the book (“it was alien to any embellishment, naked, accurate, economical” ), written by a civilian who knows war as a matter of course. Wartime criticism primarily noted the unconditional psychological depth and genre novelty of the "stories". From my point of view, the most important existential problem of this book was the phenomenon of overcome fear, which is defeated in war by conscience, shame and spiritualized discipline. Partly - and laughter (“Laughter is the most serious thing at the front!”): The book has a lot of humorous humor and folk irony - both in lively dialogues and in an abundance of funny sayings. One of the first chapters is called "Fear". The hero, who is also a narrator, smashing the "corporal literature" (synonyms - writers and paper-scribers) to smithereens, explains to the writer that heroism is not a gift of nature and not a gift of a captain, along with overcoats distributing fearlessness, - fear as an "eclipse of reason" and the "instant catastrophe" of the undermined soul is overcome by the will and excitement of collective combat. “When we pushed the Germans back from Moscow, General Fear ran after them.” Bek, sometimes as if dressing up as a Kazakh hero (through his nationality and, in particular, through numerous folklore allusions, the communal and tribal nature of the army hierarchy is more clearly revealed), shows the cruel truth of the battle: “the burning joy of a warrior who killed the one who instilled fear, who went to kill. This motif constantly resounds in military prose. Andrey Platonov- the only literary phenomenon of those years with which I would compare Beck's book - it is strange that criticism completely ignored this unconditional parallel. Platonov writes about "fierce joy that overwhelms fear", about "great creation: the killing of evil along with its source - the body of the enemy", about the state when "combat turns from horror into everyday necessity". For me, who read these books today, all the unnatural substance of war lies precisely in the calmness with which the laws of righteous murder and the inevitability of death are ascertained. In the midst of the battle, Baurdzhan is talking in his thoughts with a Kazakh fellow soldier precisely with the intonation of Plato's heroes: “We are military people, people of a high profession. The loss of life is a natural consequence of our craft with you…”. Cruel psychology war dictates to a single individual the only way out is to subordinate his individuality to the system, but victory is destined only if submission is sublimated into voluntary creative will. A different opinion, the commander orders his fighters, who left civilian clothes, a nice family and a civilian profession in a peaceful past, to put in an envelope and, "while we are close to home," send them home.

Fear, the threat of death, the need for submission manipulated people even before the war, but they were not righteous (the blind, paralyzing horror of that “peaceful” tyrannical system, inspirited by rightness, Beck will show with completely different artistic means twenty years later in the novel “The New Appointment”), – spiritual upsurge and dramatic major, penetrating the first chapters of Volokolamsk Highway, are associated with the long-awaited justice and expediency of collective, but not weak-willed being ... “Can you convey this in the book: lack of freedom for the sake of freedom?” - the hero of his chronicler once asks with doubt. In fact - and in the book there is an abundance of a provocative game between the "scribe" and the "hero" - Beck often puts into the mouth of Baurdzhan the discoveries of his personal philosophy, which he, a paradoxicalist and a yernik, liked to present not in direct authorial digressions, but as if through the mouth of its own antagonist. Isn't this the mysterious effect and the unique charm of the Volokolamsk Highway? What kind of socialist realism is there ... The poet Don Aminado in his book "Smoke without a Fatherland" (1921) has wonderful poems about the valor of the military share and about the falsity of military rhetoric (whether my father read them, I don’t know, but he would have approved for sure!) :

I cannot wish from the generals, That every time, in the powder smoke, They of republican ideals Show charms. To whom? And why? ... There are critics: they need it to the point, I say this without laughing, So that even the horse whinnying at the Marseillaise, Carrying away in a cavalry attack.

Bek has neither generals, nor officers, nor soldiers, nor the divisional horse Lysanka (personally my favorite character in the book), to whom Baurdzhan gives all his rough tenderness - they don’t sing or neigh Marseillaise, nor " holy war". They simply, surpassing themselves, work to win. The music of the loyalist slogan completely disgusted Beck. Only dry dispassion, only self-critical analysis, only creative doubt. And therefore, the art of war in Beck's book with amazing liveliness and even sensuality is revealed as the work of a vigilant thought, bypassing the cliched paragraphs of the charter, and dead orders, and senselessly despotic directives ... It is no coincidence that in 1944 a discussion on military literature was held in the Writers' Union of the USSR Recently (the debate unfolded primarily around the book by K. Simonov “Days and Nights” and around the “Volokolamsk Highway”), Beck’s work was rated extremely highly precisely as a work that reveals the sphere of thinking of the commander leading the battle. The most important (and, as we shall see, prophetic) consideration was expressed at the discussion by the same Viktor Shklovsky: “I believe that although Beck has not been written better, Beck’s book has not been completed ... It’s good when you have a strong sitter, but find people around, illuminate the people around, oppose him with soldiers not only as objects of the will of the commander.

Indeed, Beck's book was not completed. He felt it himself. Time passed... Volokolamsk Highway was translated into almost all major languages ​​of the world, in many countries it was included in the compulsory reading for students of military academies (in the CIA, according to Beck's book, they studied psychology for a long time Soviet commander and the "mysterious Russian soul" in the context of the war), Beck was working on new things. The life of the idea (and "Volokolamsk Highway" from the very beginning was conceived as a cycle of four stories, and, as Beck admitted, he assumed that the final part was the main one for the general idea) in the creative mind of the writer was not interrupted for a moment: she latently dozed in him . But only in the spring of 1956 did he come close to realizing his long-standing plan... The work on the continuation of Volokolamsk Highway was carried out in this way: the writer raised what little was left of his military archive - the surviving transcripts of conversations with Momysh-Ula and other participants in the battle ( so, the half-decayed notebook “Different Conversations” with soldier's words, tales and small details survived front-line life), and also had a number of new conversations. Reflections in the course of work Beck, as usual, fixes in a diary, but now they concern not so much the form as the concept of the book. The continuation of the book democratizes its atmosphere, prescribes the "background". And one more thing - the further, the more actively (on the verge of absurdism) the shift of the author's vision into the retina of the narrator, the warming of someone else's gaze with the writer's "down" and, moreover, apparently, the unconscious rethinking of the military space by the artist, who at the beginning of the war rigidly mobilized his energy, narrowing it only to the benefit of the cause, and who, telling about the same time after the fact, after the victory, allowed himself a life-giving expansion of the existential horizon. In the post-war continuation of Volokolamsk Highway - unlike the beginning - the controversy (in other words, the difference) between the hero-narrator and the author-writer is constantly being forced and is already blazing. Beck, continuing his experimental game of a humble scribe with a domineering hero (it is in fact a cunning author who rules!), is now clearly distancing himself from Baurdzhan. In general, between the first and second halves of the book there are a lot of mirror arguing reflections ... The main character of the story gradually becomes not the categorical and imperious narrator Baurdzhan, but the wise and sensitive Panfilov, who allowed himself to declare at the headquarters that the disorder “this is the new order”, and who dies in battle near the village of Goryuny (oh, this poetry of Russian names!) as a humanist and as an innovator ... The publication of the third and fourth stories of Volokolamsk Highway in Tvardovsky's Novy Mir, which took place in 1960, completed the history of the creation of this strange and a strong, gentle and cruel, simple and inexhaustible book about military creativity, about fear and fearlessness, about hatred in excess of love, about the universal and the only, about death and life.

Alexander Beka, who was constantly frightened by the hero of the Volokolamsk Highway: “Navrete - put your right hand on the table. Once! Right hand off!", had yet to write another (as they used to say, different) chronicle of the century - the novel "The New Appointment", in which he, I repeat, will rethink and overthrow his extreme military hymn to discipline and show how detrimental to the creative individuality is submission supremely vicious "administrative-command system"... This is a special milestone, conflict, drama of both the hero and the artist. Father died without seeing new novel printed at home (he, like the book "Volokolamsk Highway", went from hand to hand, but now he himself - and tamizdat), - but no one would dare to cut off his right hand ... Let me remind you: my father, Alexander Beck, was a young Red Army soldier terrible, paradoxical, insidious, but also heroic, but also an inspired piece of historical time. He disinterestedly gave him his rare gift, loving this time and place in a Tacitian way, without anger and predilection, he fixed it in his prose as a tragic cartographer, he - short-sighted and insightful at the same time - passed away without breaking on the ugly corners of a degenerate utopia .

Tatyana Beck