"Time of Results" by Sergei Voronin, summary Automatic translate

"Time of Results" was published in 1978 by Lenizdat. By this time, Sergei Voronin had already won the Gorky State Prize of the RSFSR, and the volume itself sums up his personal and literary life: memories of his family, his path to prose, notes on writers, reflections on the written word, and a late-life perspective on Russia all come together in one book.

The first part begins with childhood and the memory of words. Voronin recalls his mother’s lullaby, the old fairy tale "Terem-Teremok" with its unusual animal names, and the first vivid images of his early years. The book then moves on to a trip to Siberia, where his father was sent by the Petrocommunist government to procure food for Petrograd. The author recalls in detail the freight car, the puppy Bum he found, his first white bread, his fear of bridges, and the terrifying scene at the station where a woman was trapped between train cars.

Another event occurs on the journey that changes his life forever: at night, he falls from the top bunk, is frightened by a passing train, and begins to stutter. Then come the Siberian years — Poltavka, village games, birch sulphur, life among people working for food supplies. Murders are particularly etched in his childhood memory: first, his acquaintance Dorofeyev dies, then Poltavka’s first Komsomol member is found hacked to death in the steppe. From then on, the steppe becomes a place of fear for the boy.

His father is ill, occasionally paralyzed, and a local paramedic revives him with an electric shock. When a gang approaches the village, the family is taken away at night across the dark steppe. Later, in Kustanai, the boy sees hungry refugees, recognizes the smell of hunger, and watches as they desperately pounce on the sack of bread his father brought them to help. Here, he witnesses barter, meets the Kyrgyz, becomes increasingly attached to Volodya Poluyarkov, and then experiences his arrest and execution: Volodya gives the girl a silk dress made from confiscated goods, the Cheka declares this a crime, and his father tries to save him, but is too late. It later emerges that the arbitrary actions of the investigators were investigated, and the head of the local Cheka, Averchenko, shot himself in court.

After the Siberian years, the family returns to Petrograd. The city reveals itself to the author as an adult: Nevsky Prospekt, trams, courtyards, a hospital next door. Here, an important family plot emerges in the book: brother Leonid, frightened by a childhood fortune-telling about his short life, fears doctors his entire life and later dies of appendicitis. Alongside this are chapters about life at the Tetyulins’, the Salvation Army, school assignments and early poems, yard games, the circus, wrestling, and boyish pranks.

His school and teenage years are marked by constant humiliation due to his stuttering, the first flashes of pride, and the first lessons in moral responsibility. A teacher exposes his attempt to hide behind his stuttering, and a teacher scolds him for wearing a bunch of bagels around his neck, because it looks like mockery of the poor. In Kresttsy, the author becomes a Young Pioneer, hides a missing lamp, listens to "Kirpichiki," fails a report due to his speech, and experiences profound shame when, under pressure from a Young Pioneer leader, he exposes a friend who was smoking in the restroom.

The Volga and Rybnitsa give the book a different tone — broad, bright, yet also austere. There, the family sees a flood, boats near their houses, warm sandbanks, and the Rybinka River, a river full of fish. The author befriends Kostya Kurpatov, building a homemade fishing frame with him, then steals fish from someone else’s and, unable to bear it, tells the owner the truth. Many years later, he returns to Rybnitsa and sees his childhood impressions blossom into his later prose. Alongside these are beloved chapters: Grandmother Matryona, her story of her lost children, Uncle Kolya, family songs, a closet full of books, her friendship with Volodya Subbotkin, her attempt to hit him with an iron bar, and the sudden impossibility of doing evil. Forty years later, Voronin arrives in Lyubim and meets an elderly Volodya, who has survived both captivity and the front.

The next major plot line in the book is growing up in Leningrad. The author lives in a semi-basement communal apartment on Dekabristov Street, observing his neighbors, listening to the violinist Bushuev, and witnessing the stern party member Andrei Filippov, who reproaches his father for drinking and soon dies. At school, he unexpectedly receives his first recognition: an essay about spring is held up as an example to the senior classes. Then comes classmate Georgy Moshkov, who writes poetry; Voronin writes his first lines about a stream and immediately faces the envy of others.

A failure with German leads him from a regular school to a factory vice-collegium. Here, the book shifts between environments: the factory, lathes, workshops, his first love for Polina, his first attempts at prose, kidney disease, work at the Admiralty Shipyard, his friendship with Lev Vedernikov, his studies at the Mining Institute, and his admission to the Mining Institute. These chapters especially highlight the joy of the craft and the respect for the worker’s labor. Alongside this, comes the decline of his father: a stomach ailment, an operation that can no longer help, a difficult death, and a funeral. Afterward, the author reads his father’s documents and rediscovers him as a man of difficult, dangerous, and honest work during the years of the food tax.

Then comes one of the most dramatic turning points in his life. He’s sent to aviation school through a special recruitment drive, but he can’t accept the alien military fate, twice refuses to continue his studies, spends time in the guardhouse, is excluded from the party candidates, and returns to factory life. Here begins his journey to literature in the truest sense: a club at the Palace of Culture, ridicule of his early poems, an acquaintance with Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, work at the RLU, meetings with Tikhonov and Fedin, classes with Spassky, praise for his story "The Steppe," and the first sense of his own voice.

A huge portion of the book is devoted to expeditions. Voronin spent eight years working in exploration parties, traveling to the Far East, the Urals, the Caucasus, and the Volga. He describes his first Amur expedition in particular detail: a month in a train car to Khabarovsk, the journey along the Amur and Amgun rivers, flatboats, downpours, blockages, marshes, mosquitoes, and camp life. He then attempted to write the novel "Prospectors," but was still unable to grasp the depth of people’s lives. Only much later, when his diaries brought the past to life, would this failure blossom into the novel "Two Lives."

The Caucasian and war chapters give the book a new rhythm. In Bayan and Dashkesan, the author drinks wine with comrades, breaks his leg after a drunken brawl, lies in the hospital, meets his wife Maria and daughter Natasha, and then learns of the outbreak of war. The prospectors are transferred to the Volga railway. They pass through Kamyshin, Olkhovka, the snowy steppe, a sick daughter in their arms, a night journey to the fires, work on the railway to Stalingrad, separation from their family. Then come Buinsk, Gubakha, new stories, their first publication, their return to Leningrad after the war, news of losses in the family and in the besieged city.

After the war, Voronin entered journalism. He was listened to in the literary group, then, through Pavel Zenin, he joined Smena, learned newspaper density and precision, traveled through villages, wrote essays and short stories, founded Mother, returned to the party, attended the All-Union Conference of Young Writers, and gained his first real fame. Then came the publication of Vstrechi and Na Svoi Zemli, and he began working at a publishing house and his long career as an editor.

A significant portion of the book is devoted to the literary scene. Voronin writes in detail about Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, Sergei Spassky, Alexander Reshetov, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Vorobyov, Mikhail Alekseyev, Ivan Stadnyuk, Viktor Kurochkin, Gleb Goryshin, Dmitry Gusarov, Sergei Krutilin, Vladimir Soloukhin, and many others. This is not a list of names, but a series of lively encounters, debates, fishing trips, editorial decisions, letters, and mutual assistance. The chapters on Neva are particularly noteworthy: Voronin becomes editor-in-chief, sets a firm line for the magazine, publishes powerful prose, supports young writers, and himself experiences a resounding blow to his story "In Native Places," which is defended by readers, friends, and Sholokhov.

The second part, "The Music of Prose," no longer moves so directly through the biography. Here, Voronin speaks of the short story as the most condensed and precise form. He needs a story with a new idea, its own character, its own intonation, and a musical structure. He writes about how a story matures over years, how the first sentence sets the tone, how journalism taught him density, why the superfluous must be discarded, and why prose without compassion for humanity is dead. Here, he also recalls his plots, explaining the creation of "Naked Satan," "Night Terrors," "Alone," "The Abandoned Tower," "Taman," and other works.

The "From Notebooks" section now features short, almost aphoristic entries. Voronin discusses the nationality of language, the dangers of literary laziness, the empty, ephemeral books, the duty of criticism to understand life, the distrust of others’ words where Russian is sufficient, and patriotism as a direct connection to one’s native land. He insists on truth in literature, the writer’s responsibility to the people, and literature’s right to intervene in the difficult and unpleasant aspects of life.

The book concludes with the essay "Father’s House." Voronin travels to the village of Velikoye, his father’s birthplace, and to Lyubim, his own birthplace. In Velikoye, he meets a distant relative who remembers his father, goes to the village, searches for his grandfather’s house and grave, and sees young birch trees on the site of an old garden. In Lyubim, he enters his grandmother’s house and hears stories about his grandfather Mikhail, his parents’ matchmaking, the family icon, and the sold house. At the cemetery, he again fails to find the right grave and bitterly realizes how little he knew his own family. Russia, in these final pages, reveals itself to him not through a slogan, but through the village, the cemetery, the kitchen, the old icon, the Obnora River, and the windows of his grandmother’s house.