Teenage literature: features of the genre. List of interesting books. AZ-Print, Editor's and proofreader's reference book Introductory article to the collection

Kuzmin E

Introductory article to the collection of novels by E. S. Gardner

Evgeny Kuzmin

Introductory article

to the collection of novels by E.S. Gardner

The work of the outstanding American master of the detective genre, Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1971), has not yet been studied as well as, say, the work of Agatha Christie or Georges Simenon. Meanwhile, Gardner's books, translated into more than 30 languages, are very popular in many countries of the world, and in Nicaragua, a postage stamp was even issued in honor of the main character of Perry Mason's novels.

In his work, Gardner explored the principle - to give the described form the appearance of maximum reliability. And this has often paid off. One of the newspapers once published a report on the case when reading the novel by Gardner pushed the prosecutor to the right idea, which subsequently made it possible to complete the complex case of murder and incriminating the criminal.

Self-taught lawyer E. S. Gardner takes up his pen, already having a rich practice in the California court. Under various pseudonyms – Carlton Cainreck, Charles J. Henry, A.A. .

After more than twenty years of practice, Gardner interrupts his career as a lawyer and devotes himself entirely to literature. Thanks to good health and excellent physical endurance - in his youth, he went in for sports a lot, was a good boxer. - Gardner could work 16 hours a day! Most often he dictated the text on tape. He was assisted in his work by six secretaries-stenographers and several typists. Gardner prepared several books a year for publication and edited his own magazine. From his pen came books on archeology, natural history, forensic science, penology (the science of punishment in prisons) and forensic photography. Well versed in poisons and weapons. By the beginning of 1978, 82 Gardner novels had been published - more than 200 million copies of books had been sold. His books about attorney Perry Mason, glamorous secretary Della Street, and lanky detective chief Paul Drake top the author's bestseller list. In total, the popular writer wrote 120 novels and a large number of stories.

Gardner's detective is subject to a strict logical construction and is based not so much on search as on reasoning. Main character lawyer Perry Mason is not a superman, and many other characters are not, but by the will of a talented writer they are drawn into the orbit of exciting events, intricacies of intrigue. Gardner's works are very far from the traditional idea of a Western detective with its countless chases and shootouts. Interest is whipped up not only by the rapid development of events, but also by the brilliant actions of the famous lawyer, his ability to convey the finest nuances of the trial in court - to show the confrontation between the defense and the prosecution, the insight and even cunning of Perry Mason, his game for the public and, if circumstances so required, lightning-fast change of tactics. And it is no coincidence that the protagonist of the works does all this with grace - after all, their author knew the American judiciary very well and often used elements from his rich law practice.

Gardner does not depict the crime itself, does not savor cruelty, does not immerse the reader in an atmosphere of fear and violence, as representatives of the "cool school" of the detective, such as R. Chandler or D. Hammett, do, but allows a person to trace a chain of logical calculations and original conclusions, build their own versions and, as a rule, only in the final, at the trial, lifts the veil of the mystery of the crime.

But in the works of Gardner, it is important not only how Perry Mason comes to unravel the crime, but what ideas he preaches. The general qualities of a famous lawyer are honesty and a desire to help. common man, whose freedom is encroached upon and who often finds himself on the edge of the abyss. Lawyer Perry Mason often has to correct the mistakes of the investigation, which, having strong evidence, is trying not to establish the guilt of the accused, but to prove it at any cost, sometimes even to impute it, and therefore it is typical that the true criminal is found not by the investigating authorities, but by the protagonist of the works.

Mason is very different from the logical detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, born of the imagination of Agatha Christie, he does not overshadow brilliant ideas, like Sherlock Holmes or police inspector Maigret while smoking a pipe. Perry Mason - practical detective, analyst. The efforts of his activities, aimed at protecting the innocent, are crowned by the court, where the talented lawyer has no equal in a dispute of minds.

Gardner also has another hero - Lester Leite, the American modern analogue of Arsene Lupin. Lester Leite is a handsome gentleman-criminal who takes pleasure in deceiving both bandits and... the police. Works with this hero make up a humorous cycle in Gardner's work.

The realism characteristic of Gardner brings him closer in his work to the direction of the "hard school". This is felt in the books published by him under the pseudonym A.A. Fire, Mad Men Die Friday, Trap Needs Live Bait, Cats Hunt at Night. Gardner had 25 such books. Dashing private detective Donald Lam, his no less dashing boss Berta Cool, individualized samples endowed with humor. For your judgment, dear reader, we bring the action-packed detective story "The Secret of the Blonde". The novel was written under the pseudonym A.A. Fire.

Britikov Anatoly Fyodorovich

Introductory article (to the collection of A. Belyaev "Fiction")

The name of Alexander Romanovich Belyaev is a whole era in our science fiction literature. His early works appeared in the mid-1920s, almost simultaneously with Aleksey Tolstoy's "Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin", the last novel was published already during the Great Patriotic War. Belyaev was the first Soviet writer for whom new in Russia literary genre became a matter of life. Sometimes he is called the Soviet Jules Verne. Belyaev is related to the great French science fiction writer by intelligent humanism and the encyclopedic versatility of creativity, the materiality of fiction and the scientific discipline of artistic imagination. Like Jules Verne, he was able to catch on the fly an idea that was born at the forefront of knowledge, long before it received recognition. Even his purely adventure fiction was often saturated with far-sighted scientific and technical foresights. For example, in the novel Fight on the Air (1928), which was reminiscent of Marietta Shaginyan's adventurous fairy tale Mess-Mend (1924), the reader got an idea of the radio compass and radio direction finding, power transmission without wires and volumetric television, radiation sickness and sound weapons, about the artificial cleansing of the body of fatigue toxins and the artificial improvement of memory, about the scientific and experimental development of aesthetic standards, etc. scientific problem, others have not lost their freshness as science fiction hypotheses.

In the 1960s, the famous American physicist L. Szilard published the story “The Mark Gable Foundation”, surprisingly reminiscent of the old Belyaev story “Neither life nor death”. Szilard took the same scientific topic- suspended animation (prolonged inhibition of vital functions) and came to the same paradoxical collision as Belyaev: the capitalist state also freezes the reserve army of the unemployed "until better times". Belyaev physiologically correctly defined the phenomenon: neither life nor death - and correctly guessed the main factor of suspended animation - the cooling of the body. Academician V. Parin, who already in our time studied the problem of suspended animation, had reason to say that initially it was most thoroughly covered not in scientific literature, but in science fiction. It is important, however, that from the very beginning Belyaev approved scientifically substantiated foresight in our science fiction.

He was an enthusiast and a real ascetic: he wrote a whole library of novels, novellas, essays, short stories, screenplays, articles and reviews (some were recently found in old newspaper files) in some fifteen years, often bedridden for months. Some of his ideas developed into a novel only after being tested with an abridged version, in the form of a story, such as, for example, "Professor Dowell's Head." He was amazingly industrious. The few surviving manuscripts testify to how painstakingly Belyaev achieved the ease with which his works are read.

Belyaev was not as gifted as a writer as Alexei Tolstoy. " Images are not always successful, the language is not always rich", he lamented. And yet his skill stands out against the backdrop of science fiction of the time. " The plot - that's what he felt his power over”, - recalled the Leningrad poet Vs. Azarov. This is true. Belyaev skillfully weaves the plot, skillfully interrupts the action "on the most interesting". But his talent is richer than adventure entertainment. Belyaev's strength lies in a meaningful, rich, beautiful fantasy. The mainspring of his novels is the romance of the unknown, the interest of exploration and discovery, the intellectual situation and acute social clash.

Already Jules Verne tried to communicate scientific information in such episodes, where they would easily be linked with the adventures of the heroes. Belyaev took a further step - he included scientific material in a psychological context. For this reason, the sci-fi theme often receives an individual coloring associated with the personality of this or that hero. When in the novel "The Man Who Found His Face" Dr. Sorokin, talking with Tonio Presto, likens the community to hormonal and nervous systems workers' self-management, when he contrasts this view of the organism with the opinion of other scientists who speak of the "autocracy" of the brain, and at the same time ironically remarks: " Monarchs were generally unlucky in the twentieth century”, - all this wittily translates medical concepts into the language of social images and corresponds to the patient’s ironic intonation:

“What are you complaining about, Mr. Presto?

To fate."

The doctor perfectly understands what fate the famous artist can grieve about: the hilarious dwarf Tonio Presto is weighed down by his ugliness. The action takes place in America. In the depths of the likeness of the body to the "Council of Workers' Deputies" lies Dr. Sorokin's belonging to another world, and this figurative political association anticipates Tonio's rebellion against American democracy. Sci-fi theme (Dr. Sorokin turns a dwarf into an attractive young man) develops in several semantic plans at once.

Belyaev always sought to poetically express the rational content of his fantasy. His artistic detail is always very purposefully colored with a fantastic idea, because the essence of the poetry of his novels is in the fantastic ideas themselves. The secret of his literary skill lies in the art with which he mastered science fiction material. Belyaev subtly felt his inner aesthetics, he knew how to extract not only rational, but also all the artistic and emotional potential of a fantastic idea. Belyaev's scientific premise is not just the starting point of an entertaining story, but the grain of the entire artistic structure of the work. His successful novels unfold from this grain in such a way that the fantastic idea "programs", it would seem, artistically the most neutral details. That is why his best novels are solid and complete, that is why they retain their poetic appeal even after their scientific basis has become obsolete.

With a metaphor, sometimes symbolic, often already expressed in the title (“Amphibian Man”, “Jump into Nothing”), Belyaev, as it were, crowned the fantastic transformation of the original scientific premise. One of his stories, buried in old magazines, is entitled "Dead Head" - after the name of a butterfly chased (and lost in the jungle) by an entomologist. But the "dead head" is also a symbol of a person's loss of his mind in the silence of uninhabited forests. The “White Savage” (the title of another story) is not only a white-skinned person, it is also a bright human nature against the gloomy background of capitalist civilization. By the way, in this story Belyaev used the motives of the American writer E. Burroughs, whose novels about the man-ape Tarzan were a resounding success in the 1920s. The Soviet science fiction writer managed to give a banal adventure collision an unexpectedly deep and instructive - scientifically and socially - turn. In 1926, the World Pathfinder magazine began publishing his fantastic film story "The Island of Lost Ships" - a "free translation" of the American action movie, as the preface said. In an ordinary melodrama with chases and shooting, Belyaev invested a lot of information about shipbuilding, about the life of the sea, and translated adventure romance into an educational plan.

Belyaev's indestructible curiosity for the unknown always looked for support in the fact, in the logic of scientific knowledge, while the plot was used mainly as an entertaining form of serious content. However, his fictitious plot was often based on fact. The impetus for the adventure plot of one of the early works The Last Man from Atlantis (1926) could have been a clipping from the French newspaper Le Figaro: A society for the study and exploitation of Atlantis is organized in Paris". Belyaev forces the expedition to search in the depths Atlantic Ocean a description of the life and death of the proposed mainland. The writer drew the material from the book of the French scientist R. Devigne "Atlantis, the disappeared mainland", published in 1926 in Russian translation. The plot developed on its basis served as a frame main idea, also taken from Devigne (Belyaev cites it at the beginning of the novel): “ It is necessary ... to find the sacred land in which the common ancestors of the most ancient nations of Europe, Africa and America sleep". The novel unfolds as a fantastic realization of this truly great and noble scientific task.

It is no secret that literature has a huge influence on the formation of a child who reads a lot and different things, eventually acquires his own view of the world, sees a variety of destinies and opportunities. It is no coincidence that teenage literature has a special place among writers and teachers, since it is at this age that exciting questions are first asked, first love is known, and other events occur that make it possible to understand this diverse world. This is exactly what we will talk about in the article.

Features of literature for teenagers

Teenage literature occupies a special layer in the book market. This is because these books can become the most important in the life of the younger generation, especially in this difficult period, when global questions about life, about human injustice and pain and, of course, about first love take shape in the mind. Reading such creations, a person can get answers to disturbing questions, deal with his inner world.

Teenage literature includes many aspects. For example, some may talk about true friendship, love, inner world different people. Many modern authors write about teenagers themselves, about their problems on the way of growing up and about their still fragile spirit. Such books are designed to show all the diversity of our world in human relations. Other authors tell about the adventures, exploits and other worthy deeds of the main characters. All this allows you to look at the surrounding reality more broadly, strive for excellence and develop your qualities.

What can be offered to boys and what to girls

Teenage literature for girls and boys in the modern world has no clear boundaries. Of course, boys do not like to read tearful stories about love and deep relationships, but otherwise, teenagers of both sexes read almost the same books. But we still note those works that can be recommended for girls to read. This:

"Pollyanna" Eleanor Porter. A very bright book about faith in the best.
A series of works "Chasodei" by Natalia Shcherba. There are adventures in this book, but a lot of thoughts about love, self-sacrifice.
A series of books "Tanya Grotter" by Dmitry Yemets. To some, this series may seem like a parody of the famous Potter (although at first it is). But further developments develop quite differently. The book contains a lot of experiences on the theme of love, a lot of reflections on relationships and how to save them. Teenagers sometimes show wisdom not familiar to adults.

And below will be listed books that can be recommended to boys:

Adventure series about a girl Alice, which tells about space travel, flights into the past, and so on.
Harry Potter books. This is by far the most famous series among teenagers, which even adults read.
For those who are interested in historical books, suggest reading A. Dumas. His works are historical information filled with living experiences of people, their hopes and aspirations.

The most sought-after genre in teen literature today

What can be said about the demand for genres in modern children? Our teenagers read almost everything, as there are much more ways to get the desired book now than our grandparents had. But works in the genre of fantasy or ordinary fiction are especially popular. With their help, you can immerse yourself in a fictional and unreal world, feel the taste of adventure, especially if life is more than monotonous.

Recently, books with a vampire storyline have been no less popular. So, the works of Stephenie Meyer (“Twilight”), Richelle Mead (“Vampire Academy”), Sergey Lukyanenko (“Patrols”), etc. are in great demand. As you can see, such literature for teenagers is very diverse. Perhaps some parents would not want their child to read this, but, as they say, the more you forbid, the more you want. Otherwise, you can read a book about vampires in parallel, and then discuss its plot.

about the life of teenagers

Now the segment of teenage fiction directly about teenagers is gradually being filled. Such books are characterized by deep feelings, global issues and dreams. Some talk about love, some about ordinary life, but they all touch on issues that were not previously considered important. Below is literature about teenagers:

Julian Barn (Metroland)
D. D. Salinger (“The Catcher in the Rye”).
Galina Shcherbakova (“You never dreamed”).
Stephen Chbosky ("It's good to be quiet").

Of course, this is not the whole list of books, but they most clearly show how complex the world of a teenager with an undecided worldview is. If you are a parent and want to add other books to the list, then read them yourself before that, as today so many recommended books talk about scary things - drugs, uncontrolled sex, and so on. Of course, at this age it is difficult to keep track of what the child is reading, but try to at least discuss what you read together (of course, for this you need to study the work together).

Poems for teenagers

Of particular note are poetic works, which occupy not the last place in teenage literature. After all, it is sometimes possible to convey feelings with poems, it is at this age that they most often begin to write. Therefore, teenage literature should also include such works. Here is a list of authors who might be of interest to them:

E. Asadov.
N. Zabolotsky.
Frida Polak.
A. Akhmatova.
M. Tsvetaeva.
S. Yesenin and many others.

All the proposed authors penetrate very deeply into the world of the younger generation, talking about various experiences on the path of growing up. Of course, this is not a definitive list, you can supplement it yourself with your favorite authors and their works.

for teenagers

It is very important to interest teenagers in classical literature. This can include both authors of historical novels and short stories, as well as more modern ones. This is a very good and serious literature that will teach the younger generation to think and delve deeper into human relationships. So, consider interesting books for teenagers from the classics:

"Gone with the Wind" M. Mitchell. A good book about love and war, about different characters and tolerance. Perhaps it is more suitable for girls, since there are still more relationships in the book than military actions.
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. In principle, any of Twain's books can be recommended for reading at this age, as many are aimed at a teenage audience.
The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. It should immediately be noted that if the child is too impressionable, then it is better to read it at a more mature age, since there are moments in the book that describe the horrors of poverty and villains.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. The book tells about one summer in the life of a teenager, which is filled with all sorts of experiences and reflections.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. A book published in the last century is still readable. In childish words, it tells about the events of the thirties in America, about interracial conflicts and violence.

Modern books for teenagers

Modern teenage literature is no less interesting than classical. Now quite a large number good books, which are written as teaching human values or simply fantastic for the development of the imagination. In any case, today you can find completely different books for your teenager. Here is a list of some:

"The Fault in the Stars" (John Green). describes the romantic love of two teenagers with cancer. Yes, the work is rather sentimental, but very catchy, especially when you realize that in this situation, in principle, there is nothing to lose.
"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" (John Boyne). This book tells about the events that happened during the Second World War, namely about the concentration camps. There are no cruel and bloody murders in it, but there is friendship and mutual understanding that does not care about racial prejudice. The end, of course, is sad.
"Metro 2033" (Dmitry Glukhovsky). This novel is suitable for teenagers who prefer science fiction in any of its manifestations. The author has created quite interesting world in the subway of the Moscow metro. Each station has its own laws and regulations that you should be aware of. The protagonist embarks on a journey to save the world, but it turns out he just needed to talk.

However, teenage fiction this list is not limited. Try to look for books yourself or suggest it to your child.

Conclusion

So, now you know what interesting books for teenagers are that you can recommend them to read as a parent or relative. Each book listed in the article can bring something new and interesting to the world of your growing child, whether it be emotions or knowledge. Invite your child to read and read with pleasure!

Introductory article to the collection of short stories by A.P. Chekhov.

"Brevity is the sister of talent ..." This phrase is on everyone's lips. But not many people know that it belongs to the greatest artist of the word Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. This aphorism, which has become winged, can serve as a kind of epigraph to the writer's work.

Undoubtedly, Chekhov's stories are distinguished by laconicism, brevity, lack of beautiful and pompous phrases, but this is one of the many features of his works.

What can so interest the reader that he wants to read the story again and again? What attracts him so much in these often ordinary and vulgar stories? How can the most typical, ordinary heroes differ?

Chekhov himself spoke of his writing style as follows: “You can cry and moan over stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but I think you need to do it in such a way that the reader does not notice.” Chekhov's reticence and restraint affects the reader more than big words. One of the critics of the early twentieth century rightly wrote: "And when he was silent so deeply and meaningfully that he seemed to speak expressively."

Indeed, the author's assessment is not expressed clearly, it is scattered throughout the text. The author avoids straightforward and unambiguous assessments of the characters. His heroes are living people, not schematic carriers of some ideas. Yes, and the main idea of the work is also always hidden, since for the writer the main thing is not the proclamation of any statement, but the search for truth, not the solution of the issue, but its statement. So, the feelings, thoughts of the characters are also guessed, they are not directly mentioned. And in expressive dialogues, we can see the wisdom of the characters, although this is also hidden.

“Truth is born in a dispute” (Socrates) And Chekhov allows the reader to independently draw any conclusions. The story becomes an occasion to think about your life. And in the sometimes banal, ordinary plot, a deep meaning is hidden.

If you like comic novels, satirical stories, jokes, then you will be pleasantly surprised by Chekhov's favorite tricks in his works: humor and irony, satire and sarcasm.

Chekhov's jokes are also based on generalizations. Drawing the image of a shopkeeper in the story "Requiem" we can see how "Andrei Andreevich wore solid galoshes, those huge, clumsy galoshes that only positive, reasonable and religiously convinced people have on their feet." The writer's humor is based on the exponentiation of any trifle and accident. This is Chekhov's poetics of trifles. The author goes from details to a greater generalization.

In his stories, Chekhov focused on what is the most ordinary in everyday life. From the first to the last action, the main event of the work "Ionych" is obscured by the everyday events of life. How to explain this feature of Chekhov's stories? First of all, the writer seeks to understand what motivates the characters to do something. That is why Chekhov addresses emphatically ordinary episodes of everyday life, at first glance quite insignificant, filled with trifles. This helps him reproduce the most character traits modern life, in the conditions in which they think, act, suffer, his heroes. Another characteristic feature of Chekhov's stories is connected with this feature. The source of the conflict is not in the contradiction and clash of passions. In The Man in the Case, for example, there is no one to blame. Who is to blame for the lifestyle of teacher Belikov? No one is subjectively guilty. Life develops outside the will of people, and suffering occurs by itself.

Who is to blame? This question comes up in every story. Thanks to these features, we understand that it is not individual people who are to blame, but the whole life in the endless monotony of its everyday life.

All Chekhov's work is a call for spiritual liberation and emancipation of man. M. Gorky told the writer: "You seem to be the first free and worshiping person I have ever seen." Undoubtedly, this inner freedom, as the main sign of Chekhov's character, is reflected in the stories presented in this collection.

The name of Alexander Romanovich Belyaev is a whole era in our science fiction literature. His early works appeared in the mid-1920s, almost simultaneously with Aleksey Tolstoy's "Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin", the last novel was published already during the Great Patriotic War. Belyaev was the first Soviet writer for whom a new literary genre in Russia became a matter of life. Sometimes he is called the Soviet Jules Verne. Belyaev is related to the great French science fiction writer by intelligent humanism and the encyclopedic versatility of creativity, the materiality of fiction and the scientific discipline of artistic imagination. Like Jules Verne, he was able to catch on the fly an idea that was born at the forefront of knowledge, long before it received recognition. Even his purely adventure fiction was often saturated with far-sighted scientific and technical foresights. For example, in the novel Fight on the Air (1928), which was reminiscent of Marietta Shaginyan's adventurous fairy tale Mess-Mend (1924), the reader got an idea of the radio compass and radio direction finding, power transmission without wires and volumetric television, radiation sickness and sound weapons, about the artificial cleansing of the body from fatigue toxins and the artificial improvement of memory, about the scientific and experimental development of aesthetic standards, etc. Some of these discoveries and inventions were still being carried out in the time of Belyaev, others still remain a scientific problem, and still others have not lost their freshness as science fiction hypotheses.

In the 1960s, the famous American physicist L. Szilard published the story “The Mark Gable Foundation”, surprisingly reminiscent of the old Belyaev story “Neither life nor death”. Szilard took the same scientific topic - suspended animation (prolonged inhibition of vital functions) and came to the same paradoxical collision as Belyaev: the capitalist state also freezes the reserve army of the unemployed "until better times". Belyaev physiologically correctly defined the phenomenon: neither life nor death - and correctly guessed the main factor of suspended animation - the cooling of the body. Academician V. Parin, who already in our time studied the problem of suspended animation, had reason to say that initially it was most thoroughly covered not in scientific literature, but in science fiction. It is important, however, that from the very beginning Belyaev approved scientifically substantiated foresight in our science fiction.

Belyaev was not as gifted as a writer as Alexei Tolstoy. “The images are not always successful, the language is not always rich,” he lamented. And yet his skill stands out against the backdrop of science fiction of the time. “The plot is what he felt his power over,” recalled the Leningrad poet Vs. Azarov. This is true. Belyaev skillfully weaves the plot, skillfully interrupts the action "on the most interesting". But his talent is richer than adventure entertainment. Belyaev's strength lies in a meaningful, rich, beautiful fantasy. The mainspring of his novels is the romance of the unknown, the interest of exploration and discovery, the intellectual situation and acute social clash.

Already Jules Verne tried to communicate scientific information in such episodes, where they would easily be linked with the adventures of the heroes. Belyaev took a further step - he included scientific material in a psychological context. For this reason, the sci-fi theme often receives an individual coloring associated with the personality of this or that hero. When in the novel "The Man Who Found His Face" Dr. Sorokin, talking with Tonio Presto, likens the commonwealth of the hormonal and nervous systems to workers' self-management, when he opposes this view of the body to the opinion of other scientists who speak of the "autocracy" of the brain, and at the same time ironically remarks: “Monarchs were generally unlucky in the twentieth century,” all this wittily translates medical concepts into the language of social images and matches the patient’s ironic intonation:

“What are you complaining about, Mr. Presto?

The doctor perfectly understands what fate the famous artist can grieve about: the hilarious dwarf Tonio Presto is weighed down by his ugliness. The action takes place in America. In the depths of the likeness of the body to the "Council of Workers' Deputies" lies Dr. Sorokin's belonging to another world, and this figurative political association anticipates Tonio's rebellion against American democracy. The sci-fi theme (Dr. Sorokin turns a dwarf into an attractive young man) develops in several semantic planes at once.

Belyaev's indestructible curiosity for the unknown always looked for support in the fact, in the logic of scientific knowledge, while the plot was used mainly as an entertaining form of serious content. However, his fictitious plot was often based on fact. The impetus for the adventure plot of one of the early works The Last Man from Atlantis (1926) could have been a clipping from the French newspaper Le Figaro: "A society for the study and exploitation of Atlantis has been organized in Paris." Belyaev forces the expedition to find in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean a description of the life and death of the proposed continent. The writer drew the material from the book of the French scientist R. Devigne "Atlantis, the disappeared mainland", published in 1926 in Russian translation. The plot developed on its basis served as a frame for the main idea, also taken from Devin (Belyaev cites it at the beginning of the novel): “It is necessary ... to find the sacred land in which the common ancestors of the most ancient nations of Europe, Africa and America sleep.” The novel unfolds as a fantastic realization of this truly great and noble scientific task.

Devin painted the face of Atlantis very vividly. In a certain sense, this was a ready-made sci-fi adaptation of the legend, and Belyaev used fragments of it. He subjected the text to literary editing, and unfolded some details that were invisible to Devigne into whole images. Devin mentioned, for example, that in the language of the ancient tribes of America (the supposed descendants of the Atlanteans), the Moon was called Sel. Under the pen of Belyaev, Sel turned into the beautiful daughter of the ruler of Atlantis.

Belyaev retained the desire of the popularizer scientist not to break away from scientific sources. Devin, for example, relates the legend of the golden temple gardens, which, according to legend, were sheltered from the devastating invasion of the Spaniards in inaccessible mountainous countries. South America, to fragments of the history of the Atlanteans. Belyaev moved these gardens to Atlantis itself. His imagination strictly follows the real possibilities ancient world. Whether or not there was Atlantis, whether or not there were gardens in it, where leaves and birds were minted from gold, but it is reliably known that the high culture of metal processing goes back to the deepest antiquity.

For all that, Belyaev, as the famous Soviet atlantologist N. Zhirov wrote to the author of these lines, “introduced a lot of his own into the novel, especially the use of nature as sculptures mountain ranges. By this, he seemed to anticipate the discovery of my Peruvian friend, Dr. Daniel Ruso, who discovered giant sculptures in Peru, reminiscent of Belyaev’s (of course, on a smaller scale).” At Belyaev, a sculpture of Poseidonis, carved from a single rock, rises above the main city of the Atlanteans.

This, of course, is a particularity, albeit a remarkable one. More significant is that Belyaev, unlike Devigne, found the social spring of the plot. At Devin, convicts are chained to the oars of the armada, which is leaving the dying Atlantis, at Belyaev, slaves. Atlantis in his novel is the heart of a colossal slave empire. All the blood, all the sweat of dozens of kingdoms comes here. Something similar was in the Roman Empire, the empires of Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan. And Belyaev shows how one of these "Towers of Babel" collapsed. In his novel, a geological catastrophe only sets in motion a tangle of contradictions, in the center of which is an uprising of slaves.

One of the leaders of the uprising is the royal slave Adishirna-Guanch. A brilliant mechanic, architect and scientist, he gave his beloved Seli amazing golden gardens. The extraordinary fate of young people is soon pushed aside by an apocalyptic catastrophe. The death of Atlantis is described with great drama. But Belyaev needs this too in order to return the course of the novel to the original thought. He leads the reader to the harsh shores of the Old World - a dilapidated ship with a surviving Atlantean was washed up there. A strange stranger told the fair-haired northern savages "wonderful stories about the Golden Age, when people lived ... without knowing worries and needs ... about Golden orchards with golden apples ...". People kept the tradition. Atlas won deep respect with his knowledge, he taught them to cultivate the land and make fire. This is how, very rationally, the biblical myth about the divine origin of the mind can be explained. The relay race of knowledge circled the world, either fading for millennia, or flaring up again, slowly raising man above nature. Belyaev put this enlightening thought into the fictional adventures of the Atlanteans.

Belyaev studied (he was a lawyer by education), performed on the amateur stage, was fond of music, worked in an orphanage and in the criminal investigation department, studied many things, and most importantly, life in those years when Tsiolkovsky in the provincial Kaluga hatched grandiose plans for space exploration, when Lenin in starving Moscow was talking with his colleague F. Zander (the prototype of the engineer Leo Zander in Belyaev's Leap into Nothing), when Wells observed the first steps of the great "Soviet experiment" with skepticism and sympathy. The passionate journalistic essay "The Fires of Socialism, or Mr. Wells in the Darkness", in which Belyaev argued with the well-known book "Russia in the Darkness" by Wells and defended the Leninist dream, is only one of many evidences of Belyaev's active connection with revolutionary Russia.

It is difficult to name a novel or a story where Belyaev would miss the opportunity to emphasize the superiority of socialism over capitalism, the strength of the communist worldview. And he did it with conviction and unobtrusively. It is well known that "Professor Dowell's Head" and "Amphibian Man" are real social revealing novels, "Leap into Nothing" and "Master of the World" are imbued with anti-fascist motives. But few people know that in the novel "Underwater Farmers" (1930) and in the essay "The Earth is Burning" (1931), Belyaev responded in a peculiar way to the outstanding event of that time - the socialist transformation of the countryside.

Few people remained who personally knew Belyaev in early years. In occupied Pushkin, near the walls of besieged Leningrad, the writer died and his archive perished with him. But the main witnesses remained - books. And is it not yourself among the Russian intellectuals who recognized Soviet power, meant Belyaev, putting a significant recognition into the mouth of Professor Ivan Semenovich Wagner? German militarists have kidnapped a scientist and are tempting him to change Soviet Russia- in the name of "our old European culture", which the Bolsheviks supposedly "destroy".

“Never before,” answered Wagner, “so many scientific expeditions have plowed up and down great country… Never the bravest creative thought I have never met such attention and support ... And you? ..

- Yes, he is a Bolshevik! exclaimed the narrow-minded general.

Yes, Professor Wagner survived doubts. But he also saw the creative role of Bolshevism - and it coincides with the goal of genuine science and culture! Belyaev, like his hero, resolutely took the side of the Soviet government, and the last lines he published were in defense of the Soviet Motherland from the Nazi invasion.

The writer came to the ideas of communism in his own way. Socialism turned out to be in tune with his love for the creative force scientific creativity. As a child, Jules Verne infected him with faith in the omnipotence of the humane mind. And the intransigence of the Bolsheviks in the revival of Russia inspired the confidence that the most daring utopias were being implemented in his homeland. It was this civic and philosophical optimism that determined the direction of Belyaev's romance.

Under other conditions, the plot of "Professor Dowell's Head" or "Amphibian Man" could have turned into an autobiographical drama. The writer was seriously ill and at times experienced, as he recalled in one of his articles, "the feeling of a head without a body." The image of Ichthyander, Belyaev's biographer O. Orlov shrewdly remarked, "was the longing of a man forever bound by a gutta-percha orthopedic corset, a longing for health, for boundless physical and spiritual freedom." But how amazingly the writer melted down his personal tragedy! Belyaev had a bright gift to extract an optimistic dream even from bitter experiences.

Unlike readers, and among them were scientists, literary criticism at the time I did not understand two best novels Belyaev. As for Professor Salvator's dog, with the engrafted torso of a monkey, they shrugged their shoulders in disgust: what are these monsters for? And in the 60s, the world press was bypassed by a photograph that could become an illustration for Belyaev’s novel: the Soviet physician V. Demikhov engrafted the upper part of the puppy’s torso to an adult dog ...

And Belyaev was still reproached for backwardness!

“The story and the novel“ Professor Dowell’s Head ”, - he answered, - were written by me fifteen years ago, when there were no experiments not only by S. S. Bryukhonenko, but also by his predecessors in reviving isolated organs. At first I wrote a story in which only an animated head appears. Only when rewriting the story into a novel did I dare to create dual people (the head of one person, attached to the body of another. - A. B.) ... And the saddest thing I find is not that the book has now been published in the form of a novel, but that it just now published. At one time, she would have played, of course, a big role ... "

Belyaev did not exaggerate. No wonder the novel "Professor Dowell's Head" was discussed in the First Leningrad medical institute. The value of the novel was, of course, not in the surgical prescriptions, there are none, but in the bold task of science contained in this metaphor: a head that continues to live, a brain that does not stop thinking when the body has already collapsed. In the tragic story of Professor Dowell, Belyaev put the optimistic idea of the immortality of human thought. (In one of the stories about Professor Wagner, the professor's assistant's brain is placed in the cranium of an elephant. In this semi-joking plot, it is also not so much the fantastic operation itself that is serious, but, again, a metaphorically expressed task: to prolong the creative age of thought, the work of the mind.)

And the criticism turned the matter in such a way that Belyaev literally proposes “to make one living out of two dead ones,” thus leading the reader “into the realm of idealistic dreams” about mechanical personal immortality. Belyaev was well aware of the difference between the idea of eternal existence and the extension of life. In a review of G. Grebnev's science fiction novel Arctania, he himself noted that it would be a mistake to interpret the hypothesis of the famous Soviet physician S. Bryukhonenko about the resurrection of the "unreasonably dead" in the spirit of a person achieving personal immortality. Many years later, already in our time, in disputes over some fantastic works, the opinion was expressed that immortality for an individual, doubtful biologically, could also lead to a weakening of mankind's concern for descendants and, in general, would most likely be the beginning of degeneration.

Cybernetics gave the idea of a brain transplant a new foundation. In the short story by A. and B. Strugatsky “Candles in front of the remote control” (1960), the genius of the scientist is transferred to an artificial brain. With the last breath of a man, the bio-cybernetic machine will heal with his individuality, his scientific temperament. Unusual, scary and so far - fabulous. But even now cybernetics can help, Academician N. Amosov believes, in a surgical head transplant. As you can see, science at a new level is again returning to the idea of "Professor Dowell's Head".

This novel is valuable not only because it attracted and continues to attract the attention of the general public to an exciting scientific task. Today, perhaps even more important is the fact that Belyaev well developed the social, psychological, moral, and ethical aspects of such an experiment. Academician N. Amosov once said that if a brain transplant were offered to him personally and it would be impossible to attach the head to a new body, in order to preserve the happiness of thinking, he would put up with the eternal immobility of an isolated head. The task of creating a two-pronged organism gives rise to even more complex human problems. Belyaev's novels, as it were, put them on the widest discussion in advance and, as such, continue to be in the field of view of scientists (see, for example, E. Kandel's article "Brain Transplant" in Literaturnaya Gazeta dated January 31, 1968).

The goal of science fiction, said Alexander Belyaev, is to serve humanism in the big, comprehensive sense of the word. Active humanism was the guiding star of his work. It is interesting to compare the plot of "Amphibian Man" with the plot of one novel, retold by the poet Valery Bryusov in the outline of an unpublished article "The Limits of Fantasy", dating back approximately to 1912-1913. Bryusov was a great connoisseur of science fiction and wrote fantastic works himself. The hero of the novel, whose title and author, unfortunately, he does not name (in square brackets we give letters and parts of words unfinished in Bryusov’s draft manuscript), “was a young man, whose one lung was artificially replaced by a gill apasu. He could live underwater. An entire organization was formed to use it to enslave the world. Assistants of the “man[e]-shark” in different parts of the globe sat under water in diving suits connected by telegraph. The submariner, declaring war on the whole world, blew up the island with mines F. and caused panic throughout the world. Thanks to the help of the Japanese, the man-shark was captured; doctors removed shark gills from his body, he became an ordinary person, and the formidable organization disintegrated.

It is possible that only an adventurous skeleton has been preserved in the retelling. In Belyaev's novel, the center of gravity is in the human fate of Ichthyander and the human purpose of Professor Salvator's experiments. The ingenious doctor “crippled” the Indian boy not out of the dubious interests of pure science, as some critics “understood” Belyaev in his time. When asked by the prosecutor how he got the idea to create a man-fish and what goals he pursued, the professor answered:

“- The idea is the same - a person is not perfect. Having received great advantages over his animal ancestors in the process of evolutionary development, man at the same time lost much of what he had at the lower stages of animal development ... The first fish among people and the first man among fish, Ichthyander could not help but feel lonely. But if other people followed him into the ocean, life would be completely different. Then people would easily defeat the powerful element - water. Do you know what this element is, what power it is?

We, thinking about the distant future, when a person will inevitably face the task of improving his own nature, cannot but sympathize with Salvatore, no matter how controversial his ideas are from the point of view of biomedical and no matter how utopian they are in the world of class hatred. True, one should not confuse the author with him. Although, however, Salvator, dreaming of making humanity happy, knows the price of the world in which he lives.

“I was in no hurry to get into the dock,” he explains, why he was in no hurry to publish his experiments, “... I was afraid that my invention in the conditions of our social system would do more harm than good. A struggle has already begun around Ichthyander ... Generals and admirals would have taken away Ichthyander, what good, in order to force the amphibious man to sink warships. No, I could not make Ichthyander and the Ichthyanders common property in a country where struggle and greed turn the highest discoveries into evil, increasing the amount of human suffering.

The novel attracts not only by its socio-critical sharpness, not only by the drama of Salvator and Ichthyander. Salvator is also close to us with his revolutionary thought of the scientist: “Do you seem to ascribe to yourself the qualities of an omnipotent deity?” the prosecutor asked him. Yes, Salvator "assigned" not to himself, to science - the divine power over nature. But he is not a "superman" like Dr. Moreau in HG Wells' famous novel, nor is he a sentimental philanthropist. Probably, a person will entrust the alteration of himself not only to the surgeon's knife, but that's not the point. For us, the very attempt of Salvator, the second father of Ichthyander, on the "divine" nature of his son is important. The merit of Belyaev is that he put forward the idea of intervention in the "holy of holies" - human nature - and ignited it with poetic inspiration. The animal adapts to the environment. Reason begins when it adapts the environment. But higher development reason is the improvement of oneself. social revolution and spiritual perfection will open the door to the biological revolution of man. This is how Amphibian Man is read today.

Belyaev conveys the revolutionary idea of the “man-godness” of science without didactic obsession. It is embedded in the plot outwardly somewhat even adventurous. It is inseparable from the breathtaking, full of poetry paintings, when we follow the free flight of Ichthyander in the silence of the ocean depths. Continuing the Jules Verne romance of the exploration of the sea, Belyaev introduced the reader through this romance to a different, revolutionary worldview. But in itself, this fantastic romance had artistic, emotional and scientific value: how many enthusiasts Belyaev's novel inspired to explore the blue continent!

Today, the problem of deep-sea diving without scuba gear is being developed, using air dissolved in water for breathing. From there, mechanical gills should extract it. Belyaev's other underwater fantasy is also being realized - from the novel "Underwater Farmers" - about Soviet "ichthyanders" harvesting underwater crops in the Far Eastern seas. Belyaev settled his heroes on the seabed, where they built a house. Thirty years after the publication of this novel, a group of the famous sea explorer Cousteau spent several weeks in an underwater house. More complex experiments followed. Man must live and work under water as he does on land. Now this is not only a scientific, but also a national economic task, and the writer Belyaev made his contribution to understanding it by people.

The idea of a person achieving unlimited power over his nature worried Belyaev in other works as well. In the "Lord of the World" the plot function of the "inspiring" machine is not the main one. This fantastic invention of Stirner - Kachinsky was needed by the writer for a more general fantastic idea. The last, third part of the novel is the apotheosis of the peaceful and humane application of suggestion. Former Napoleonic candidate Stirner fell asleep, bowing his head on the lion's mane: "They slept peacefully, not even suspecting the recesses of their subconscious life, where the power of human thought drove everything that was terrible and dangerous for others in them." These lines end the novel. "We don't need prisons now," says Soviet engineer Kaczynski. Its prototype was B. Kazhinsky, who, together with the famous trainer V. Durov (in the novel by Dugov), conducted experiments on changing the psyche of animals. Belyaev developed this idea: at the “prompt” of Kachinsky, Stirner, with the help of his machine, inspired himself with a different, non-aggressive personality and forgot his bad past. Former enemies began to work together on the transmission of thoughts, helping the workers to coordinate their efforts, artists and artists - to directly transmit images to viewers and listeners. Belyaev's thought transmission is an instrument of social pedagogy and organization, the communist transformation of the individual and society.

In 1929, The Man Who Lost His Face was published. Belyaev drew in it an exciting prospect of artificially influencing the endocrine glands: a person will get rid of senile infirmity, free himself from physical deformity. But the talented comedian Tonio Presto brought only misfortune. Beauty - the star of the screen, with whom Tonio was in love and for whom he went to risky treatment, was only interested in the big name of the hilarious dwarf; film companies only needed his talented ugliness. And when Tonio acquired a perfect body, he ceased to be capital. Nobody needs his beautiful soul. The changed appearance even took away his rights legal entity: He is not recognized as Tonio Presto.

So far it has been a collision in the spirit of Wells (recall the novel Food of the Gods). Introducing Soviet ideology and a materialistic worldview into his plots, Belyaev often retained the scheme of old science fiction. Ichthyander was hiding in the ocean from the "justice" of the scammers, Salvator went to jail, Professor Dowell died. Presto, however, managed to take revenge on his persecutors: he became the head of a gang of humiliated and insulted, with the help of Dr. Sorokin's miraculous drugs, he turned an ardent racist into a black man. But such a final did not satisfy Belyaev. Reworking the novel, the writer elevated Tonio to a social struggle. The artist took up directing, staged revealing films, waged war with film companies. Belyaev called the reworked novel: "The Man Who Found His Face" (1940).

In novels, relatively speaking, on a biological theme (because, in essence, they are wider), Belyaev expressed his most daring and original ideas. But here, too, he was bound by the principle of scientific plausibility. And in his head were crowded ideas and images that did not fit into any possibilities of science and technology. Not wanting to compromise the science fiction genre, which he took very seriously, the writer masked his audacity with humorous situations and a joking tone. Headlines like: "Flying Carpet", "Created Legends and Apocrypha", "Devil's Mill" - as if in advance averted the reproach of profanation of science. These were funny stories. In them, Belyaev, as it were, argued with himself - he doubted the science popularized in his novels. It was an open-ended search, not limited either by the possibilities of science or by the traditional form of science fiction. Here began that fantasy without shores, with which the modern reader is probably well acquainted. Small short stories eliminated the need to substantiate certain hypotheses in detail: fairy tale fiction simply could not stand up to serious justification.

But some system was still here. Professor Wagner's inventions are magical. And Wagner among the heroes of Belyaev is a special person. He is endowed with fabulous power over nature. He rebuilt his own body - he learned to remove fatigue toxins in the waking state ("The Man Who Does Not Sleep"). He transplanted the brain of a deceased assistant (Hoyti-Toyti) into the elephant Hoyti-Toyti. He made material bodies permeable, and now he himself passes through walls ("The Man from the Bookcase"). And this Mephistopheles of our time survived the revolution and accepted Soviet power ...

Between fantastic humoresques, an image is drawn no less significant than the humanist Salvator in the novel "The Amphibian Man", or the anti-fascist Leo Zander in the novel "Leap into Nothing". Even a little autobiographical - and at the same time akin to a medieval alchemist. In other episodes, Professor Wagner acts almost like Baron Munchausen, while others are so realistic that they remind of very real enthusiastic scientists of the difficult post-revolutionary years (“The Man Who Does Not Sleep”). It is this that forces us readers to remove, layer by layer, the masking veils of humor and adventure from the Wagnerian miracles. This complex fusion of fairy tale and scientific fantasy gives us a sense of the possible in the impossible. Like, isn’t there also some kind of germ of discovery hidden in such a “scientific fairy tale”? The figure of Wagner arose in Belyaev in order to disguise and at the same time express this idea. It is difficult to understand otherwise why she went through a whole cycle of short stories, it is difficult to find another explanation for the fact that the author of good science fiction works suddenly turned to such fiction.

"Professor Wagner's inventions" were, as it were, strokes of a new image of knowledge, which was still indistinctly visible behind the classical profile of science at the beginning of the 20th century. The figure of Wagner captured the return of fantastic literature, after the Julvernian eccentric scholars and practical scholars in Wells's novels, to some traits of a sorcerer-warlock. Its mysterious omnipotence is akin to the spirit of science of our 20th century, which swung at the "common sense" of the past century. Having discovered the relativity of the axioms of the old natural science, modern science has unleashed truly fabulous forces, equally capable of raising a person to heaven and plunging into hell. Belyaev caught, although he hardly fully realized, the drama of the Wagners, who gained such power.

Belyaev, the author of Leap into Nothing and The Air Seller, The Island of Lost Ships and The Man Who Found His Face, The Lapel Remedy and Mister Laughter, possessed a wide range of humor - from a gentle smile to venomous irony. Many pages of his novels and stories captured the talent of the satirist. It is by nature close to a science fiction writer, and Belyaev had a talent for making people laugh in real life as well. The writer often reinterpreted humorous images and collisions into fantastic ones and, conversely, fantastic ones into satirical and revealing ones.

In Leap into Nothing, the romantic plot of space travel turns into a grotesque metaphor. The capitalists exaltedly speak of their flight to other planets, as of saving the “pure” from a revolutionary flood, calling the rocket an ark ... And the holy father, taking away a limited centner of luggage, pushes spiritual food aside and fills the chest with gastronomic temptations. The attempt of "pure" financial tycoons and secular loafers, a churchman and a reactionary romantic philosopher - to establish a biblical colony on the "promised" planet has suffered a shameful failure. Before us is a bunch of savages ready to grab each other's throats because of a handful of useless gems here on Venus.

In the work of Belyaev, the tradition of satirical fiction of Alexei Tolstoy and, perhaps, Mayakovsky, continued. Some of his images of the capitalists are close to Gorky's pamphlets on the servants of the Yellow Devil. Belyaev contributed to the formation of a fantastic novel-pamphlet on Russian national soil. L. Lagin in the novel "Patent AV" followed in the footsteps of the biological hypothesis used by Belyaev in two novels about Tonio Presto. However, unlike Lagin, for Belyaev, a fantastic idea was of independent value. Even in a satirical novel, he was not satisfied with using her as a simple springboard to the plot. In some of Belyaev's early works, conditional fantastic motivations corresponded to the same conditional, popular print grotesque in the spirit of "Mess Mend" by Marietta Shaginyan and "Trust D. E." Ilya Ehrenburg. In the mature Leap into Nothing and in the novels about Tonio Presto, realistic hyperbolization is already correlated with scientific fantasy.

Finally, Belyaev made the very nature of the funny the object of scientific-fiction research. A cheerful person and a great joker, the writer in his youth was an outstanding amateur comedian. The psychological truth of Tonio Presto's misadventures may have an autobiographical origin. The hero of the story "Mr. Laughter" (1937), Spalding, studying his grimaces in front of the mirror, is partly Belyaev himself, as he is depicted in humorous photographs from the family album, which are published in the eighth volume of his Collected Works.

Spalding scientifically developed the psychology of laughter and achieved world fame, but in the end he became a victim of his art - “I analyzed, machined live laughter. And thus I killed him ... And I, the manufacturer of laughter, myself will never laugh again in my life. However, the matter is more complicated: “Spalding was killed by the spirit of American mechanization,” the doctor noted.

In this story, Belyaev expressed confidence in the possibility of studying the emotional life of a person at its most complex level. Thinking about "an apparatus with which it would be possible to mechanically fabricate melodies, well, at least in the way that the final figure is obtained on an adding machine", the writer to some extent foresaw the possibilities of modern electronic computers (it is known that computers "compose" music ).

artistic method Belyaev, whose work is usually attributed to lightweight, "children's" literature, is actually deeper and more complex. At one extreme, there is a semi-fairytale cycle about the magic of Professor Wagner, and at the other, a series of novels, short stories, sketches and essays that popularized real scientific ideas. It may seem that in this second line of his work, Belyaev was the forerunner of modern "near" science fiction. Its setting: "on the verge of the possible," announced in the 1940s and 1950s as the main and only one, led to the shredding of science fiction literature. But Belyaev, popularizing the real trends in science and technology, did not hide behind recognized science.

He wrote to Tsiolkovsky that in the novel Leap into Nothing he "made an attempt, without going into independent fantasizing, to present modern views on the possibility of interplanetary communications, based mainly on your works." Without going into independent fantasizing... But at one time even such an outstanding engineer as Academician A. N. Krylov declared Tsiolkovsky's projects scientifically untenable.

On this occasion, Tsiolkovsky wrote:

“... Academician Krylov, borrowing his article from O. Eberhard, proves through the lips of this professor that space velocities are impossible, because the amount of explosive will exceed the most reactive device many times.”

So rocket science is a chimera?

“Quite right,” Tsiolkovsky continued, “if we take gunpowder for calculation. But reverse conclusions will be obtained if gunpowder is replaced, for example, by liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Gunpowder was needed by the scientist to refute the truth recognized by all.

Tsiolkovsky was decades ahead of his time - and not so much technical capabilities as narrow ideas about the expediency, about the necessity of this or that invention for mankind. And this second, human face of “the universally recognized truth” was better seen by the science fiction writer Belyaev than other specialists. For example, Tsiolkovsky's all-metal airship - reliable, economical, durable - it still plows the air ocean only in Belyaev's novel.

The novel "Airship" began to be published in the magazine "Around the World" at the end of 1934. Soon the editors received a letter from Kaluga:

“The story is… wittily written and scientific enough for fantasy. Let me express my pleasure to Comrade. Belyaev and the respected editors of the magazine. I ask Comrade. Belyaev to send me cash on delivery his other fantastic story, dedicated to interplanetary wanderings, which I could not get anywhere. I hope to find good things in it…”

It was the novel Leap into Nothing.

“Dear Konstantin Eduardovich! - answered Belyaev. - ... I am very grateful to you for your feedback and attention ... I even had the idea to dedicate this novel to you, but I was afraid that it "would not be worth it." And I was not mistaken: although the novel was warmly received by readers, Yak[ov] Is[idorovich] Perelman gave a rather negative review of it in No. 10 of the Literary Leningrad newspaper (dated February 28) ... But now, since you You ask for this, I willingly fulfill your request and send the novel to your judgment. At present, the novel is being republished in the second edition, and I would very much like to ask you to let me know your comments and corrections ... Both I and the publisher would be very grateful to you if you would also write a preface to the second edition of the novel (unless, of course, you consider that novel deserves your preface).

Sincerely yours A. Belyaev»

The review mentioned by Belyaev of Y. Perelman, a well-known popularizer of science, who greatly contributed to the spread of the idea of space exploration, was biased and contradictory. Perelman either demanded to strictly follow what was practically feasible, then he reproached Belyaev for popularizing the long-known, then he rejected just the new and original.

Perelman, apparently, was dissatisfied with the fact that the “Jump” did not reflect the opportunity that Tsiolkovsky had just discovered to achieve cosmic speeds on conventional industrial fuels. Prior to that, Tsiolkovsky (as can be seen from his objections to Academician Krylov) had pinned his hopes on a very dangerous and expensive pair - liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Tsiolkovsky published his discovery in the Tekhnika newspaper in May 1935. Naturally, in the novel, which was published in 1933, this new idea of Tsiolkovsky could not be taken into account in any way.

The main thing, however, is not in this, but in the fact that Perelman approached a fantastic work from the point of view of his own, purely popularizing task, in which science fiction, of course, does not fit. Here, too, he was not consistent. Perelman contrasted "Jump into Nothing" with the novel by O. V. Gail "Moon Flight" as an example of scientific popularization. Meanwhile, the German author relied on the works of his compatriot G. Oberth, which were not at all last word Sciences. Here are excerpts from a letter from Tsiolkovsky to Perelman dated June 17, 1924:

“Dear Yakov Isidorovich, I am writing to you mainly to express a little about the work of Oberth and Goddard (American pioneer of rocketry. - A. B.) ... Firstly, many important questions about the rocket are not even theoretically touched upon. Oberth's drawing is suitable only for illustrating fantastic stories ... ”That is, rather Oberth should have illustrated Gail, and not vice versa. Tsiolkovsky lists numerous borrowings by Oberth from his works. Therefore, Gail did not even take from second, but from third hands and, in any case, could not serve as an example for Belyaev. Belyaev was thoroughly familiar with the works of Tsiolkovsky. Back in 1930, he dedicated the essay "Citizen of the Ethereal Island" to him.

Tsiolkovsky's preface to the second edition of Leap into Nothing (the reader will find it on page 319 of this book) is in all respects the opposite of Perelman's review. The famous scientist wrote that Belyaev's novel seemed "the most meaningful and scientific" of all the works on space travel known to him at that time. In a letter to Belyaev, Tsiolkovsky added (we quote a sketch of a letter preserved in the archive): “As for dedicating it to me, I consider it your courtesy and an honor for myself.”

Support inspired Belyaev. "Your warm review of my novel," he replied, "encourages me in the difficult struggle to create science fiction works." Tsiolkovsky advised the second edition of Leap into Nothing, went into details.

“I have already corrected the text according to your remarks,” Belyaev wrote in another letter. - In the second edition, the editors only somewhat lighten the "scientific load" - they remove the "Diary of Hans" and some lengths in the text, which, in the opinion of readers, are somewhat difficult for a fiction work.

"I also expanded the third part of the novel - on Venus - by introducing several entertaining adventures, in order to make the novel more interesting for the general reader."

“When correcting according to your remarks, I made only one small digression: you write: “The speed of the nebulae is about 10,000 kilometers per second,” I added this to the text, but then I write that there are nebulae with high speeds ... "

The retreat, however, was not only in this. Belyaev rejected Tsiolkovsky's advice to remove the mention of the theory of relativity and the paradox of time arising from it (when time in a rocket rushing at a speed close to the speed of light slows down relative to the earth).

Popularizing, Belyaev did not rule out the controversial and put forward his own fantastic ideas not borrowed from Tsiolkovsky. Perelman, for example, condemned Belyaev for the fact that in "Jump into Nothing" the rocket is accelerated to subluminal speed with the help of too "problematic for technical use» interatomic energy. But Belyaev looked to the future: without such a powerful power plant as an atomic engine, long-range space flights. modern science persistently looking in this direction. Belyaev was more optimistic than Tsiolkovsky in assessing the timing of man's spacewalk. As he predicted, the first space flights were carried out by younger contemporaries of Tsiolkovsky. The scientist himself, before he found the opportunity to do without hydrogen-oxygen fuel, postponed this event for several centuries. In episodes on Venus, we will find not only adventures, but also a rather logical look at the forms of extraterrestrial life at that time. "Moles", melting passages in the snow mass with their hot bodies, six-armed ape-men in the multi-storey Venusian forests and other curiosities - all this is not a violent uncontrollable fantasy, but images inspired by the scientific ideas of that time. Belyaev knew that Venus is a hotter planet than the Earth, that the natural temperature contrasts on it are sharper, and if life is possible at all under such conditions, it must have developed more active adaptive features. Not necessarily, of course, six hands, but this is, so to speak, a biologically realized metaphor.

Belyaev was interested not only space projects Tsiolkovsky. Regretting the books lost during transportation, he wrote: “Among these books were, among other things, about the“ alteration of the Earth ”, the settlement of equatorial countries, and so on. The general public is less familiar with these ideas of yours, and I would like to popularize these ideas as well.”

In the middle of 1935, the seriously ill Belyaev wrote to Tsiolkovsky that, not being able to work, he was considering " new novel- "Second Moon" - about artificial satellite Earth - a permanent stratospheric station for scientific observations. I hope that you will not refuse me your friendly and valuable instructions and advice.

Forgive me for writing with a pencil - I have been in bed for 4 months.

From the bottom of my heart I wish you a speedy recovery, A. Belyaev sincerely loving and respecting you.”

On the back of the sheet, one can hardly make out the trembling lines written by Tsiolkovsky's weakening hand:

“Dear [Alexander Romanovich].

K. Tsiolkovsky

Thanks for the detailed answer. Your illness, like mine [inaudible], is the result of hard work. We need to work less. Regarding advice - please read my books - everything is scientific there (Goals, Beyond the Earth, etc.).

I can't promise anything because of my weakness.

It was one of the last letters of the dying scientist. The "Second Moon" in memory of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was named the "Star of the KEC".

In the novels KETs Star (1936), Doubleve's Laboratory (1938) and Under the Arctic Sky (1938), the writer wanted to introduce the theme of the communist future into his fantasy at a new level. In his early novel Fighting on the Air, the adventurous plot drowned out the unpretentious utopian sketches. Now Belyaev wanted to create a novel about the future based on a solid sci-fi plot. Soviet social science fiction intersected with science and technology not only in its striving for the future, but also in its method.

“Our technology of the future,” wrote Belyaev, “is only a part of the social future… the social part of Soviet science fiction works should have the same scientific basis as the scientific and technical part.”

The writer understood that with time class antagonism would become a thing of the past, the opposition between physical and mental labor would disappear, etc. character of the man of the future. In a work about the relatively close tomorrow of Soviet society, he reflected, “the struggle against fragments of the class of exploiters, against pests, spies, saboteurs can and should be used for the plot. But a novel that describes the classless society of the communist era must already have some completely new plot bases.

What? “With this question,” Belyaev said, “I turned to dozens of authoritative people, up to the late A.V. Lunacharsky, and at best received an answer in the form of an abstract formula:“ In the struggle between the old and the new. The writer, on the other hand, needed specific collisions and circumstances, this would allow him to give live action. That is, involuntarily Belyaev was drawn to the former form of a fantasy novel, in which, he wrote, “everything rests on the rapid development of the action, on dynamics, on the rapid change of episodes; here the heroes are known mainly not by their descriptive characteristics, not by their experiences, but by their external actions. Here the writer could apply the techniques he had mastered well.

Belyaev understood that a social science fiction novel should include more extensive reflections on morality, descriptions of everyday life, etc., than in an ordinary science fiction novel, and “with an abundance of descriptions, the plot cannot be too sharp, exciting, otherwise the reader will start to miss descriptions." There was a contradiction. That is why, Belyaev said, his novel "Dublve's Laboratory" "turned out to be not very entertaining in terms of plot."

Belyaev thought about something else. He doubted: “Will the hero of the future and his struggle capture the reader of today, who has not yet overcome the remnants of capitalism in his own mind and has been brought up on cruder, even physical, representations of the struggle?” Will such a reader be carried away by other conflicts? Will not the man of the future - "with great self-control, the ability to restrain oneself" - seem to him "insensitive, soulless, cold, unsympathetic"?

Theoretically, Belyaev understood that the author of a social novel about the future should not adapt to the consumer of adventure fiction, but in practice he nevertheless returned to the “plot” standard, although somewhat changed. He replaced the pursuit of spies, on which the contemporary fantasy novel of the 1930s (S. Belyaeva, A. Adamova, A. Kazantsev) was based, with worldly surprises and natural obstacles. There was a compromise. Belyaev's novels about the future are static, expositional, and these qualities remind him of his early utopian essays "The City of the Winner" and "Green Symphony".

In one novel, together with an American worker and a Soviet engineer who accompanies him, we travel through the settled, mechanized North ("Under the Arctic Sky"). In the other, together with the heroes who are looking for and cannot meet each other in any way, we find ourselves in an extraterrestrial orbital laboratory (“KEC Star”). We see amazing technological advances in people busily pushing buttons, fighting nature, doing research. What do they think about, what do they argue about, how do they treat each other? What will human life be like when there are no interplanetary gangster businessmen (“Air Seller”) and newly-minted slave owners (“Amphibian Man”), contenders for world domination (“Lord of the World”) and criminal doctors (“Professor's Head”) Dowell)? Is it really then only left to show the successes of free labor and, by chance, get into adventures?

Asking a question about the peculiarities of human relations under communism, Belyaev could not get a more specific answer than about the struggle between the new and the old, because these relations were just beginning to emerge, they could not be completely predicted - the writer himself had to become their intelligence officer, his the work was "at the junction" of the theory of scientific communism with a lively artistic study of Soviet life. Belyaev hoped to build a model of the social future using the same method of speculative extrapolation (“... the author,” he wrote, “is forced to extrapolate the laws of dialectical development at his own peril and risk”), which he mastered in his technical and natural science utopias. For a social science fiction novel, this path was of little use. Living reality introduces more complex and unexpected corrections into social theory than into natural science. There were too many unknown quantities in the imaginary picture of the social future. The fantast, not having specific new ideas, was forced to return to commonplaces about the "struggle of opposites" and "the negation of negation." Belyaev's task was further complicated by the fact that the writer turned to the relatively near future. There, he rightly noted, people should "more resemble contemporaries than people of the future." Only a comparison with living reality could give a measure of this similarity and difference.

The difficulty, then, was not "decoration" but to raise the social fantasy to a more precise, more scientific level. Belyaev, on the other hand, was inclined somewhat mechanically to transfer his observations of the present into the future. “In one novel about the future,” he wrote, “I set out to show the diversity of tastes of the man of the future. There are no standards in everyday life ... I portray some heroes as lovers of ultra-modernized home furnishings - furniture, etc., others as lovers of antique furniture. It would seem that everything is correct: to each according to his needs. But after all, the flourishing of higher needs will very likely lead to the well-known standardization of the lower ones that Belyaev speaks of. Belyaev mechanically applied the "theory of the future" to modern life, while there is a complex, dialectical connection between them. It was necessary to understand that with the satisfaction of the most urgent everyday needs, spiritual ideals would become more perfect.

Belyaev did not shrink the ideal. This, he said, is "a socialist attitude to work, the state and public property, love for the motherland, readiness for self-sacrifice in its name, heroism." He saw close-up the basis on which the man of the future will develop, and he had interesting thoughts about the psychotype of this man. In the story "Golden Mountain" (1929), an American journalist, observing employees of the Soviet scientific laboratory, “I was more and more surprised by these people. Their psychology seemed unusual to him. Perhaps this is the psychology of the future man? This depth of experience and at the same time the ability to quickly switch your attention to something else, to focus all your mental strength on one subject ... ".

But Belyaev's individual guesses and declarations turned out to be artistically unrealized. Explaining why he did not dare to “characterize people” in the “Dublve Laboratory” and instead shifted his attention “to the description of the cities of the future,” Belyaev admitted that he had “insufficient material.” Probably, the writer knew those of his contemporaries who went to Tomorrow worse. After all, in his previous stories, he was used to a different hero. But the point was not only in his personal capabilities, but also in the small historical experience of Soviet reality at that time. A further step in understanding man and society of the future was taken by Soviet science fiction literature already at that time. But we will remember that Alexander Belyaev was a pioneer on this path.

He believed in a bright future for his Soviet Motherland. When did the Great Patriotic War, Belyaev expressed his ardent conviction in victory in patriotic articles and essays. The enemy invasion caught him near Leningrad, in the city of Pushkin, bedridden by illness. The writer did not live to see his release: he died in January 1942. But his books continued to participate in the struggle and creation. His fantasy novels recited by heart, recalls the French writer and member of the anti-fascist Resistance Jacques Bergier, prisoners of the Mauthausen death camp. They were banned by Francoist censorship. Scientists to this day turn to his science fiction, reflecting on the brewing discoveries. His novels continue to be read like hot cakes and still top the list of the most favorite works of Soviet science fiction by the reader.