"Silhouettes" by Boris Polevoy, summary Automatic translate

Boris Polevoy’s memoir, "Silhouettes," written in 1973, conjures up images of the outstanding writers, journalists, artists, and scientists with whom fate brought him together. The most important detail about this book is its devoid of dry biographical writing: the author deliberately avoids detailed monographs, striving to convey only the most vivid, fleeting, and most vivid portraits of his contemporaries that remain etched in his memory. In the final section, the author takes a creative risk by incorporating into the text the autobiographical essays of his British friend, the renowned physicist John Bernal, which he sent as "literary raw material."

Nightingale of the Volga Village

The first chapter is dedicated to the peasant poet Spiridon Dmitrievich Drozhzhin. The author recalls how, in sixth grade, he first saw this iconic elder, who had come to a Tver school to celebrate his literary career. The impression of this meeting inspired Polevoy to write a ten-line article for the provincial newspaper — his first published work.

Years later, as a professional journalist, the author travels to the snow-covered village of Nizovka to write a new essay for the patriarch’s anniversary. Along the way, he rereads the poet’s autobiography, recalling his difficult childhood as a serf, his poverty, and his wanderings in St. Petersburg, where the young man served as a waiter in an inn, sold tickets at the docks, and worked as a clerk, spending all his spare money on buying old books. Locals proudly call Drozhzhin "the nightingale of our village." Polevoy describes the life of a peasant hut, divided into a work area with a workbench and a tidy parlor where books signed by Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky are kept. Over a simple dinner of cabbage soup and porridge, the old man criticizes Polevoy’s own early and dubious book, which had been sent to him earlier, unaware that he is sitting next to its author. As a farewell, the eighty-year-old poet sings songs written to his own verses.

The story of one friendship

This section describes the unique relationship that developed in 1927 between Tver Komsomol members from the editorial board of the young newspaper "Smena" and Maxim Gorky, who was living in Sorrento. At the instigation of the instigator Ivan Ryabov, the editorial board sent the writer the first issue of the newspaper with questions about literature and youth life. Gorky unexpectedly responded with a lengthy reply, sparking a pilgrimage of readers to the editorial board.

Polevoy recalls a daring reporter’s scheme by his editor, Alexei Kapustin, who sent him, disguised by the Cheka, to infiltrate criminal circles for a series of exposés. The essays weren’t published, but friends published them as a book, "Memoirs of a Lousy Man," and sent them to Italy. Gorky sent a detailed six-page critique of the text, pointing out linguistic and technical flaws to the young author, emphasizing that a writer should know his language as masterfully as a lathe operator knows his metal. This advice determined Polevoy’s journalistic destiny. The correspondence became regular; the writer sent articles, shared news about unemployment in the United States, and sent an article on the characteristics of a true proletarian writer.

In the summer of 1928, a Tver delegation, including Polevoy, secretary Samuil Akselrod, and the Pioneer Morkovka, arrived unannounced at Gorky’s Moscow apartment. The writer warmly welcomed his guests, presented each with a pencil, recounted his visit to a GPU colony for juvenile delinquents, and recalled listening to Beethoven with Vladimir Lenin in that very room. Many years later, while in Italy, the author visited Gorky’s former office in Sorrento, where only two Russian landscapes remained.

Not was, but is!

The silhouette of Ivan Afanasyevich Ryabov, a talented essayist, poet, and longtime friend of the author’s from his work at Smena and Pravda. Polevoy recalls their first meeting in the smoke-filled office of the Tver Provincial Komsomol Committee, where the young man with the forelock sang out Yesenin’s and his own poems. Ryabov combined sharp judgment with immense generosity of spirit; he could harshly criticize hack work, but always sought to help others.

His cheerful, tasteful writing style is described, punctuated by pithy recitations of the classics, of whom he was familiar. Ryabov had a deep appreciation for village life, loved precise Russian language, and devoted his entire life to studying Russian journalism, writing a book about Gleb Uspensky. Polevoy recounts amusing incidents of their encounters, ridiculing the displays of arrogance and the polishing of reality that Ryabov fundamentally detested, asserting that true journalism is born only from living contact with reality, not from "bureaucratic canned goods."

Meeting a legend

In November 1955, Polevoy, as part of a delegation of Soviet journalists, visited Ethel Lilian Voynich in New York City. Voynich, the author of The Gadfly, had been her favorite book as a child. The writer had long been presumed dead, but Soviet UN employee Pyotr Borisov accidentally discovered her address through a private detective. The 91-year-old Englishwoman lived on the seventeenth floor of an old building, living off the modest income of her companion, Anne Neel.

In a small apartment, surrounded by old photographs of Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, the writer reminisced about her revolutionary youth, spent in St. Petersburg as a governess, visiting those arrested in the Shpalernaya prison, and attending Saltykov-Shchedrin’s funeral. She recounted how the character of Arthur was inspired by Franciabigio’s portrait in the Louvre, and recalled her meeting in London with her future husband, the Polish Narodnaya Volya member Michael Voynich, who had escaped from exile through Mongolia. She was shocked to learn that her book had been published in the USSR in millions of copies. When the author returned in 1958, Voynich’s apartment was already lined with shelves containing Soviet editions of her novels and posters for the opera "The Gadfly."

Two faces of Samuil Marshak

Polevoy reveals the two personalities of Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak, whom he met during the war years at the Pravda editorial office. In public and surrounded by caring ladies, the poet seemed a frail old man, wrapped in scarves, complaining weakly of his health. He truly opened up to the author in the winter of 1955 during a joint trip to Scotland for the Burns Festival.

As soon as the plane took off, Marshak transformed into an energetic, cheerful man, arranging for a suitcase of Armenian cognac to be retrieved from the luggage compartment to lift the passengers’ spirits. At a festival in Scotland, Marshak became a central figure: miners, poets, and lords admired his translations, and Hugh MacDermitt acknowledged their superiority over the English versions. Later, as one of the organizers of the magazine "Youth," Marshak actively participated in its life, proofreading the layout and sarcastically criticizing its flaws. Polevoy describes a tragic episode when the blind and dying poet telephoned for proofreading of his play "Smart Things," seeking to correct the intonation of the fairytale king, and died that same evening.

Director and extra

The author’s journey to London with film director Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin in 1950. After the British authorities disrupted the peace congress in Sheffield by denying visas to most of the delegates, Pudovkin and Polevoy were granted entry thanks to a secret service error. In Prague, Alexander Fadeyev handed them a shopping bag containing provisions and the coveted vouchers for transporting the delegates to Warsaw.

Pudovkin displayed remarkable artistry at London customs, flippantly telling officials he was carrying an atomic bomb to blow up Buckingham Palace, which amused the officers and spared his luggage a thorough inspection. The author describes their stay under the supervision of two British police agents, whom Pudovkin jokingly referred to as the Noble Father and the Comedian. At a congress in Sheffield, they met Pablo Picasso, who, using crushed flower petals, painted a heartfelt psychological portrait of a sleeping Pudovkin, in the style of the Savior Not Made by Hands, directly on a napkin.

Antey is a good man.

In this section, the author recounts the creation of his first novella, "The Hot Shop," based on essays about a blacksmith at the Tver Carriage Works who, to everyone’s surprise, broke his foreman’s record. The material didn’t fit into newspaper columns, so Polevoy reworked it into a work of fiction.

Fyodor Ivanovich Panferov, the editor of the magazine "October," took an interest in the manuscript and invited the young author to Moscow. Panferov, a broad-boned Volga strongman who loved to sip tea with relish from a saucer, surrounded Polevoy with care and assigned him an experienced external editor. The writer possessed a rare gift for connecting with people; upon arriving in Kalinin, he went to the factory’s resounding forge to personally meet the gypsy-like and daring prototype of the main character. That night, after a "heartfelt conversation over milk mushrooms," Panferov discussed the Russian character at length, recalling his arguments with Gorky over the language of "Bruskov," and gave the author a treasured piece of advice: a writer is strong as long as he has both feet on the ground, like the ancient peasant Antaeus.

Madeleine Riffaud

At a trade union congress in Vienna, the author meets the French journalist and poet Madeleine Riffaud, whose face seemed familiar to him from a portrait by Picasso. She tells the story of her youth. Raised in a family of rural teachers, under the influence of her grandfather, a gardener, she developed a love of poetry and flowers. The war shattered her illusions: the occupation of France and the death of her grandfather led her to the Parisian underground, where she received the German name Rainer, chosen at random from a volume of Rilke.

Madeleine recalls the harsh life of the medical faculty’s underground workers, who collected leaflets with the word "Stalingrad," commandant’s orders, and the Oradour tragedy, which prompted her to execute an SS officer on the Solferino Bridge. This was followed by arrest, brutal beatings in Gestapo dungeons, the torture of a freckled teenager before her eyes, and imprisonment in a death cell, where she found the word "Stalingrad" scratched into the wall. Released in an exchange, Madeleine commanded a partisan platoon until the end of the war. Post-war lung disease nearly broke her, but a book about Alexei Maresyev restored her will to live and fight.

Meeting a friend

While flying over the ocean, the author reads a book of essays by the distinguished Soviet journalist Sergei Krushinsky, compiled by friends after his death. Polevoy recalls their first meeting on the Kalinin Front in the spring of 1942, in a flooded battalion dugout, where, by the light of a captured lamp, Krushinsky hastily wrote front-line reports for Komsomolskaya Pravda on narrow strips of paper.

Krushinsky valued the truth above all else, had a profound aversion to "arapstvo" (blackmail) and the glossing over of reality, preferring always to be on the front lines. Polevoy recalls how, during his party induction in the fall of 1942, Krushinsky confidently declared that he would write a report on the capture of Berlin and the trial of Nazi war criminals, a claim that came true three years later at Nuremberg. He describes his comradely generosity, demonstrated by dividing two biscuits between five people near Rzhev, and his professional zeal, when he secretly flew away on a plane with weapons to be the first to report from Slovakia during the uprising.

Youth without old age

In the fall of 1945, at the Bucharest Philharmonic, author and sculptor Vera Mukhina saw a massive old man with a lion’s head, the only one remaining seated in the box when the king appeared. It was the classic Romanian writer Mihail Sadoveanu.

In his small study room among the vineyards, the writer professed his love for Russian classics — Turgenev and Tolstoy. Sadovyanu showed his guests the parasitic plant vysk, which sucks the sap from healthy trees, metaphorically describing the country’s reactionary political parties. Having become the builder of a new Romania, the writer created the story "Mitrya Kokor" about the transformation of peasant psychology. Polevoy recalls meeting the peasant woman Maria Zidaru in the Transylvanian Alps, who called this literary hero her teacher. Until his last days, Sadovyanu’s work was marked by a fairytale "youth without age."

Lafayette of the Russian Revolution?

A silhouette of American journalist Albert Rhys Williams, dubbed the Lafayette of the Russian Revolution by his contemporaries. Arriving in revolutionary Petrograd in 1917, the young journalist rushed to the workers’ quarters and soldiers’ dugouts, realizing that the Bolsheviks were at the epicenter of events. Together with John Reed, he longed to see Lenin and captured his first historic speech at Smolny on the night of the storming of the Winter Palace.

Williams recalls a rally at the Mikhailovsky Manege, where he volunteered to speak Russian, and Lenin kindly prompted him with forgotten words. Seized by revolutionary fervor, the American enlisted in the Red Army, organizing an international detachment to defend the young republic. His return to the United States resulted in arrest, the confiscation of his suitcase containing his documents, and interrogation before a Senate committee, where Williams passionately defended the Soviet Union’s right to exist. The writer went on a lecture tour of America, publishing a pamphlet, "Seventy-six Questions and Answers about the Bolsheviks." Later, he and his wife, Lucita, lived in the village of Saburovo near Moscow, worked as a mechanic on a farm near Dikanka, and contributed to American magazines during the war, hastening the victory over fascism. In his later years in Gorki, Williams discovered that his book about the leader had been in Lenin’s locker.

Piercing talent

In the early 1930s, the Tver Theater took on the production of the epic drama "The First Cavalry" by the then little-known Vsevolod Vishnevsky. Faced with the complexity of the material, the director invited the author. Vishnevsky, a stocky young man with caterpillar-like eyebrows, trotted swiftly to the music stand and began reading without preamble.

His hoarse, uninflected voice captivated the troupe; the author transformed into characters, imitated machine-gun fire, and wept over tragic scenes, after which he immediately left on a tram, refusing a friendly cup of tea. The actors called his gift "a piercing talent." During the war, Vishnevsky worked in the Baltic Fleet; Fadeyev called him volcanic in nature and a great improviser, capable of believing in his own inventions. At Nuremberg, Vishnevsky demonstrated phenomenal performance skills, keeping detailed diaries. A curious incident is described in which, exhausted from working all night, the playwright fell asleep during a trial wearing special American glasses with open eyes painted on the inside of the lenses, and was awakened only by the sound of a guard’s baton. During the Christmas holidays in Berlin, he performed for tank crews in a bowling alley, bringing the stern soldiers to tears with stories of Dachau.

His name was Korchagin

At a congress in Vienna, Madeleine Riffaud offered the author a bet of a bottle of wine, claiming she would introduce him to Pavka Korchagin. On the veranda of a restaurant, she introduced him to a tall, slender African man whose mandate did indeed bear that name.

A young black man grew up in a reed hut, working for food on a railroad construction project amidst tropical swamps where fever was rampant. A grim English demolition specialist nicknamed the Hermit Crab befriended the bright teenager, taught him a trade, and gave him books from his supply train to read, including pamphlets on strikes and proletarian solidarity. After the death of his boss, the young man organized a workers’ revolt; he was brutally beaten by company guards and thrown onto the road. A mulatto miner sheltered the dying man, and his wife brought him a tattered English book about a Russian youth who overcame illness and remained in the ranks. Reading "How the Steel Was Tempered" restored the young black man’s strength; according to tribal custom, anyone who escaped death must change their name, and he called himself Pavka Korchagin. This young man later led a victorious miners’ strike in Black Africa.

Pilgrim of the World

The chapter is dedicated to Ilya Ehrenburg. Polevoy recalls a frosty night at the front near Rzhev, when Krushinsky recited poems in a hut about tanks crushing grain and bullets fired by the dead. The author turned out to be Ehrenburg, whom journalists later saw in the artillery yard among the soldiers — a short man in a huge overcoat. The writer translated questions from the American correspondent Snow to a young female sniper, who admitted that in war, the only thing she feared was mice.

Ehrenburg combined the talents of a novelist, a savage pamphleteer, and a subtle essayist, publishing over a hundred books. During the Spanish Civil War, he voluntarily built a traveling cinema and showed the film "Chapayev" to Republicans, cutting the final scene of the hero’s death to avoid upsetting the soldiers. Joliot-Curie called him "an indefatigable pilgrim of peace" for his active participation in the international movement. Polevoy describes Ehrenburg’s speech in Athens to a hostile audience, which the writer captivated with a witty allegory about the habit of sitting with one’s feet on someone else’s table. Recognition of his talent was symbolized by gifts — a unique Napoleonic rifle from Soviet soldiers and a sign on a shoe repair shop in Varna.

Latin American Minstrel

Ehrenburg describes the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén as a unique cultural phenomenon. The son of a Cuban publicist murdered by counterrevolutionaries, Guillén devoted his entire poetic gift to the working people, creating rhythmic son-songs sung on plantations and schooners throughout Latin America. He fought alongside Marinello in Spain, writing the poem "Spain in the Heart."

Polevoy recalls meeting the exiled poet at Paris’s Orly Airport, where he was staying under a false name but cheerfully sending greetings to Soviet writers. After the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolution, the author met Guillén in Havana, where the poet held numerous public positions and led the Peace Movement. That night, in a modest backstreet restaurant, accompanied by old guitarists, patrons sang Guillén’s songs in chorus, and pop singer Lyubka, who during the day kept watch with a machine gun at a bank as a militiaman, performed a whirlwind African-American dance for the maestro.

In service forever

The author describes Western Ukrainian writer Yaroslav Galan as a fierce exposer of bourgeois nationalism and clerical obscurantism. They met at Nuremberg, where the stocky, leonine-headed Galan represented Lviv newspapers. Fluent in European languages, he helped his colleagues uncover hidden agendas in the defendants’ testimony.

Galan was deeply concerned about the growing activity of Banderites in internment camps under the care of American authorities. Boldly infiltrating their gatherings, he sent angry exposés to newspapers under his own name. Polevoy recalls urging his friend to be more careful, reminding him of the brutal murder of Bishop Feofan of Transcarpathia. Galan calmly replied that he had a long-standing score to settle with the nationalist rabble, dating back to his childhood, when a priest had struck him on the fingers with a ruler for joking about Pope Pius. The writer continued the struggle, defied the Vatican’s excommunication, and was vilely murdered by a Banderite in his office; his head drooped over the manuscript of an unfinished article, declaring that the battle in the western regions continued.

Range

The silhouette of Konstantin Alexandrovich Fedin. The author recalls the powerful impression he felt from his early novels "Cities and Years," "Brothers," and "The Rape of Europa," which revealed the creative pathos of the Five-Year Plans and the rise of fascism. Fedin truly revealed himself to Polevoy in Nuremberg.

After a difficult day at the trial, where human heads on pedestals and soap made from human fat were on display, Fedin led the author to the ruins of the house from which he had once emerged on his return home. At these gates, the image of the hero of his old book, Oberleutnant von zur Mühlen-Schönau and his racial arrogance, came to life. Fedin prophetically predicted the rise of Nazism long before its rise. Vsevolod Vishnevsky called this literary quality "long-range." In the postwar years, Fedin created the trilogy "First Joys," "An Extraordinary Summer," and "Bonfire." Polevoy recalls their meeting with Martin Andesen-Nexø on the Danube, where the Danish classic thanked Fedin for revealing the signature of the revolution. In his declining years, in a sanatorium near Moscow, the old master continued to tirelessly work on his books.

Reflections at the Tombstone

The chapter is dedicated to the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, whose monument at Novodevichy Cemetery is a granite boulder with the outline of a man walking into a gale. The author recalls how Hikmet’s poems about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and the Panfilov men filtered through the walls of the Turkish prisons where the poet spent most of his life.

Polevoy describes his first fleeting encounter at the airport, when, instead of a frail prisoner, he saw a robust, tanned man with a shock of fawn-colored hair. Hikmet possessed an immense gift for amiability, loved to cook spicy dishes in a woman’s apron, and was distinguished by a comfortable, peasant-like sense of homeliness; in Helsinki, he deftly removed a grease stain from Archbishop Nikolai’s ceremonial vestments. The poet possessed a subtle sense of humor, wept at the premieres of his own plays, "The Eccentric" and "Abandoned by All," and revered Mayakovsky. As an activist for the World Peace Council, Hikmet thwarted a carefully planned provocation by the Chinese delegation at the Stockholm congress, attempting to split the movement, with five furious words: "We are not sheep, we are lions!" He died in the hallway, holding a newspaper announcing the bombing of Hanoi.

The Magnificent Three

A story about the creative collaboration of three artists — Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiry Krylov, and Nikolai Sokolov — working under the collective name Kukryniksy. Polevoy reveals the secret of their forty-year-long partnership, which began during their student years at VKHUTEMAS.

The author first saw them at Nuremberg: three artists with identical folders sat in the front row of the press box, constantly working with pencils and razor blades. They sketched the faces of Nazi leaders even in the dark during the screening of atrocity films; these sketches later gave birth to the monumental painting "Witnesses for the Prosecution." Their graphic work is marked by topicality, determination, and partisanship. During the war, the artists, along with Marshak, Mikhalkov, and Tikhonov, used their own savings to purchase a heavy tank called "Beshposhchadny," painted a caricature of Hitler on its side, and gave the vehicle a front-line life, maintaining friendship with the crew all the way to Berlin.

Voice of America

In this chapter, the author recalls his encounters with the great American singer and dramatic actor Paul Robeson. The son of a runaway slave who became a priest, Robeson impressed with his talents from childhood: he received a government scholarship and was a brilliant orator, boxer, and leading actor. His powerful voice brought African-American spirituals back to life.

Robeson linked his fate with the struggle for African-American equality, fought in Spain, and became a friend of the USSR, declaring after a 1934 visit that the Soviet Union was the first place he felt like a human being. Returning to the United States, he was subjected to vicious persecution by the McCarthyites of the Jim Crow system. The singer was denied a passport, his concert venues were closed, and he was even forbidden to sing in Harlem’s African-American churches under threat of having his insurance cancelled. In 1955, Polevoy visited his poor Harlem apartment and presented him with a Stalingrad ring containing a shell fragment from Mamayev Kurgan. Robeson recounted how Canadian workers flocked to the border to hear his concert without violating the ban, and how Welsh miners organized his "Atlantic Concert" via round-trip telephone. Having won this round of the struggle, Robeson returned to triumphant touring. In his book, "Greetings to You, Little Satellite!" The singer expressed faith in the great Leninist truth and the triumph of human reason.

Comrade Che

Polevoy recalls his encounters with Ernesto Che Guevara. They met at a government reception in Cuba held in honor of Fidel Castro’s presentation of the Lenin Prize. Among the ladies in evening gowns, Che stood out in his military overalls, football boots, and beret with a star. After reading Polevoy’s stories, the Minister of Economy struck up a conversation with the author, reminding him that revolution has its own way of categorizing people: Lenin, after all, was a lawyer by profession, while Che himself joined the Granma expedition as a doctor.

The following evening, they met in an office in the new government building in Havana. Guerrilla "comandante" Che, who retained his ascetic habits, expertly juggled figures, describing the fight against the sabotage of American "gusanos" agents and the construction of new housing, calling Cuba the left flank of the socialist world. In the fall of 1964, Guevara arrived in Moscow; speaking at the anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution, he expressed his dream that the Mausoleum’s stands would accommodate the leaders of the new socialist countries of Latin America. In conversation, Che named Albert Schweitzer, whose example inspired him in his youth while fighting epidemics in Tierra del Fuego, as the greatest man of the century.

Flaming Soul

A silhouette by the sculptor Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina. The author recalls Nesterov’s portrait of Mukhina, depicting her in a clay-stained robe during an inspired moment of creativity. Mukhina was a restless, original explorer, averse to smug venerability. After experiencing Cubism and Constructivism under the French master Bourdelle, she arrived at Socialist Realism.

Her early "Peasant Woman" and her celebrated masterpiece "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman," both at the Paris Exhibition, embodied the pathos of creative labor and the unbreakable alliance of classes. Mukhina designed monuments to Gorky and Tchaikovsky, as well as the sculpture "Peace" in Stalingrad. Her swan song was the monumental group "We Demand Peace," which grew out of a small war work, "Return," depicting a legless soldier embracing his wife’s knees. During her trip to Romania, Mukhina admired the paintings of Grigorescu, but in a lecture in Bucharest, she sharply criticized the local intelligentsia for their adoration of Paris, declaring that it was better to be a great Romanian than a little Frenchman. A muralist, she did not shy away from working for industry, developing elegant forms for faceted glasses and tea sets.

Captured Life

The story behind the creation of a series of novels by Czech writer Antonín Zápotocký. While imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia organized an underground organization and, in the evenings, in a stinking barracks, told young prisoners about their fathers’ struggles, strikes in Kladno, and meetings with Lenin, restoring their will to live.

After being liberated by Soviet tanks, Zapotocki led the revolutionary trade unions, suppressed the counterrevolutionary putsch of 1948, and became president of the republic. While holding high office, he rose at four in the morning to continue working on the novels "Dawn," "New Fighters Will Arise," "Stormy 1905," and "Red Glow over Kladno." The author received Polevoy in his modest four-room apartment in Prague Castle, showing him his manuscripts and the sculptures of his heroes he had made from bread in the concentration camp. With a rich Czech humor, Zapotocki defended the realism of his scenes to Moscow critics and taught young people to love the Soviet Union, a loyalty he carried throughout his life.

The Secret of Eternity

Polevoy recalls his encounter with the tales of Pavel Petrovich Bazhov at the Sandomierz bridgehead near the Vistula in the winter of 1944. The battalion commander, a small Ural native, was engrossed in reading "The Malachite Box" while huddled in a dugout under fire at night. The captain died in the morning, and the tattered, unbound volume found its way into the hands of journalists, sparking debate about new forms of Soviet folk art, where the tales’ heroes were not sorcerers, but Ural artisans.

Later, the author visited Bazhov’s wooden house on the outskirts of Sverdlovsk. A gray-bearded old man with a pipe, resembling Grandpa Slyshko, worked standing due to poor eyesight, tapping out stories on a typewriter. He served as a member of parliament with his entire family, sorting through piles of letters from voters. Bazhov proudly spoke of Uralmash, where workers, with tears of joy, stroked the first giant walking excavator, calling it the Tsar Machine. Seeing off his guests, the writer encouraged them to talk more about the Urals, which the revolution had unchained and brought into the open.

In the far distance

That summer, the author, Orest Vereisky, and Czech journalist Jiří Plachetka flew to Siberia to cover the Angara River near the village of Bratsk. In Bratsk, among a festive crowd of construction workers, they encountered Alexander Tvardovsky, sunburned and wearing a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The poet had arrived early and immediately wrote lines for Pravda about the captivating taming of the Pursey River.

Tvardovsky, a man of difficult character, declined the formal evening, but on the deck of the boat he eagerly read chapters from "Vasily Terkin" and his new poem "Beyond the Distance — Distance" to the sailors. That night, on the Pursey cliff, the poet pensively reflected on how these ancient sites of Yermak and Avvakum would soon be submerged in the Bratsk Sea. They visited an island collective farm, where carpenters were dismantling centuries-old log cabins for resettlement; Tvardovsky chatted with an old beekeeper who had fought in the partisan war against Kolchak and who, in his spare time, was building himself a coffin out of larch. In Irkutsk, at the writer Taurin’s, they met with Andrei Bochkin, the head of the hydroelectric power station’s construction, in whom Polevoy unexpectedly recognized a friend from his Komsomol years in Tver. At night on Lake Baikal, by the fire, Tvardovsky conducted their choir and respectfully kissed the hand of a young female hydrologist who had come from the taiga with a carbine on her back.

A word about the great Chilean

The chapter is dedicated to Pablo Neruda (Neftáli Ricardo Reyes Basualto). During the Spanish Civil War, the Chilean consul in Madrid became involved with the anti-fascist poet, author of the poem "Spain in the Heart." Neruda recited his poems in the trenches of the University City under mortar fire. He became a singer of the grief and struggle of all of Latin America and a staunch friend of the USSR, composing "Song of Love for Stalingrad."

Having become a senator in Chile, Neruda exposed the fatal role of the CIA, found himself in hiding, and wandered in exile, writing the poem "The Siberian Express." Having received the Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize, in his later years he returned to diplomacy, becoming ambassador to France. The author recalls their last meeting in Paris, where Neruda, wearing a jacket, read new poems in a husky, singsong voice. Several months after his death in Bulgaria, the writer Lada Galina showed the author a tape recording of the ailing Neruda’s final speech at a stadium in Santiago and a secret recording of his funeral, where a handful of veteran communists sang the "Internationale" under the guns of the junta.

Visiting the Wizard

Polevoy recalls a childhood fairy tale, "The Crocodile," by Korney Chukovsky. While preparing a report for the Second Writers’ Congress, the author rehabilitated this book, which critics had confiscated for its "anarchism." During a break at the congress, a grateful Chukovsky, tall and big-nosed, shook the author’s hand and recited a poem about children who will one day be seventy years old.

Later, in Peredelkino, Chukovsky, accompanied by children, came to Fadeyev to take Polevoy to the "chukkoster." The old man spoke to the children seriously, without coddling, in their own language. The author describes the fairytale world of his dacha: a striped fish over the door, paper cranes over the lamp, a crocodile mask, and the famous "Chukokkala" album with autographs by Repin, Chaliapin, and Blok. The old master donned the robes of Dr. Oxford, joked about humor as a cure, and admitted to working as a house painter in Odessa. In the country hospital, the blind old man continued to work on three books simultaneously, distributing the manuscripts at three ends of the table. He studied the habits of starlings on a birch tree and admired the commander’s strategic mind, noting that a man truly lives in the works of his hands.

Julius and Petka

On the day of Julius Fučík’s anniversary, a railway worker who had been a street child named Petka Tsiganok as a child approached the author in the Hall of Columns. He recounted how, in the spring of 1930, a cheerful foreigner in barefoot sneakers and a slender girl in a red headscarf (Gusta Fučíkova) arrived at a Kyrgyz orphanage near Frunze.

The foreigner played football with the boys on a trampled vacant lot, deftly catching balls in goal, swimming with them in the river, and singing songs. That evening, on a woodpile, Petka Tsyganok, accustomed to seeing a catch in everything, opened his soul to this man, told him about his deceased father, and confessed his plans to escape. The foreigner replied seriously that he was writing about the Soviet Union and dreamed of its present becoming the future of his homeland in Prague. Seeing the cunning in his guest’s eyes, Petka felt ashamed and remained in the orphanage. The railway worker showed the author an old, faded photograph in which Polevoy confidently recognized Julius Fučík, whose image would forever remain youthful.