Alexander Romanovich Belyaev is a Russian writer, one of the founders of the genre of science fiction literature in the USSR.

Alexander Belyaev was born on March 4, 1884 in Smolensk in the family of an Orthodox priest. From childhood, the boy was fond of music, photography, foreign languages ​​and adventure novels. The father wanted to see his son as a clergyman, but after graduating from the seminary in 1901, Alexander decided to choose a different path for himself. The young man entered the Demidov Law Lyceum in Yaroslavl, after which he began law practice and quickly gained a reputation as a good specialist. He got regular customers and money that was spent on art, books and travel.

As a lyceum student, Alexander Belyaev was seriously interested in theater, tried himself as an actor, director, playwright. The fascination with literature did not leave the young man: in 1914, the author made his debut in the Moscow magazine for children Protalinka, where his fairy-tale play Grandmother Moira was published.

The plans of the novice writer were interrupted by illness: in 1919, tuberculous pleurisy bedridden him for six long years. The illness bothered the author for the rest of his life, but there was no time to despair: he devoted all his time to studying foreign languages, medicine, history, technology, and literature.

The year 1922 was successful for Alexander: the disease temporarily receded and, most importantly, the writer married the woman of his life, Margarita, who gave him a daughter, Lyudmila, three years later. From Yalta, where the treatment took place, the Belyaev family moved to Moscow. In 1925 Rabochaya Gazeta published Alexander Belyaev's story "Professor Dowell's Head". From that moment on, science fiction stories and short stories by the prose writer began to appear in the magazines Around the World, World Pathfinder, and Knowledge is Power. For several years he lived in Moscow, the science fiction writer created many famous works: "The Island of Lost Ships", "Amphibian Man", "Struggle on the Air", "The Last Man from Atlantis".

In 1928, the prose writer moved to Leningrad with his family. At this time, the books "Lord of the World", "Underwater Farmers", "The Miraculous Eye", stories from the series "Professor Wagner's Inventions" were written. In 1930, grief befell the family: six-year-old Lyudmila died of meningitis. From the strongest mental trauma, Alexander's poor health worsened even more.

The writer found consolation in his work: in the thirties he actively collaborated with the magazine "Around the World", where Belyaev's famous novel "The Earth is on fire" was first published. However, the fantasy genre was becoming less and less popular, and after eleven years of fruitful work, the author decided to leave the magazine.

With the outbreak of the war, the city of Pushkin - a suburb of Leningrad, where the writer lived with his relatives - was occupied. Due to the surgery, Alexander was unable to evacuate, the family decided to stay with him. In January 1942, the writer Alexander Belyaev died of starvation. The prose writer's wife and daughter were later deported to Poland.

The exact burial place of the prose writer is still unknown. A memorial stele in honor of Alexander Belyaev at the Kazan cemetery in the city of Pushkin was installed only on the alleged grave. The last work of the author was the novel "Ariel", published by the publishing house "Modern Writer" a year before his death.

Despite the fact that more than a century has passed since the birth of a talented science fiction writer, his works continue to be published, films are made based on novels: since 1961, eight adaptations of the works of Alexander Belyaev have been released. Adventure films "Amphibian Man", "Professor Dowell's Testament", "The Air Seller", "The Island of Lost Ships" became classics of Soviet cinema. Limited by illness all his life, the author endowed his heroes with superpowers: the ability to swim like a fish, fly like a bird, communicate without words. Belyaev's books teach kindness and courage, infect with their all-encompassing thirst for knowledge.

Alexander Romanovich Belyaev(March 4 (16), 1884 - January 6, 1942) - Soviet science fiction writer, one of the founders of Soviet science fiction literature. Among the most famous of his novels: "Professor Dowell's Head", "Amphibian Man", "Ariel", "Star of the CEC" and many others. Sometimes he is called the Russian "Jules Verne".

Born on March 4 (16 n.s.) in Smolensk in the family of a priest. Since childhood, he read a lot, was fond of adventure literature, especially Jules Verne. Subsequently, he flew on airplanes of one of the first designs, he made gliders himself.

In 1901 he graduated from the seminary, but did not become a priest; on the contrary, he came out of there a convinced atheist. He loved painting, music, theater, played in amateur performances, took photographs, and studied technology.

He entered the legal lyceum in Yaroslavl and at the same time studied at the conservatory in the violin class. To earn money for his studies, he played in a circus orchestra, painted theatrical scenery, and was engaged in journalism. In 1906, after graduating from the Lyceum, he returned to Smolensk, worked as a barrister. He acted as a music critic, theater reviewer in the newspaper "Smolensky Vestnik".

He did not stop dreaming about distant lands and, having saved up money, in 1913 traveled to Italy, France, and Switzerland. He kept the memories of this trip for the rest of his life. Returning to Smolensk, he worked in the Smolensky Vestnik, a year later he became the editor of this publication. A serious illness - bone tuberculosis - for six years, three of which he was in a cast, chained him to bed. Not giving in to despair, he is engaged in self-education: he studies foreign languages, medicine, biology, history, technology, and reads a lot. Having defeated the disease, in 1922 he returned to a full life, serving as a juvenile inspector. On the advice of doctors, he lives in Yalta, works as a teacher in an orphanage.

In 1923 he moved to Moscow, began a serious literary activity. He publishes science fiction stories, novels in the magazines Vokrug Sveta, Znanie-Sila, Vsemirnyi sledopyt, earning the title of "Soviet Jules Verne". In 1925 he published the story "Professor Dowell's Head", which Belyaev himself called an autobiographical story: he wanted to tell "what a head without a body can experience."

In the 1920s, such well-known works as The Island of Lost Ships, Amphibian Man, Above the Abyss, and Struggle on the Air were published. He writes essays about the great Russian scientists - Lomonosov, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Tsiolkovsky.

In 1931 he moved to Leningrad, continuing to work hard. He was especially interested in the problems of space exploration and ocean depths. In 1934, after reading Belyaev's novel The Airship, Tsiolkovsky wrote: “... wittily written and scientific enough for fantasy. Let me express my pleasure to Comrade Belyaev.”

In 1933 the book Leap into Nothing was published, 1935 - The Second Moon. In the 1930s, “Star of the KETs”, “Wonderful Eye”, “Under the Sky of the Arctic” were written.

He spent the last years of his life near Leningrad, in the city of Pushkin. War met in the hospital.

Alexander Belyaev was called the "Russian Jules Verne" for his ability to predict many events. In his books, Alexander predicted not only the invention of scuba gear, the orbital station, but also his own death ...

Amphibian and scuba

When Alexander Belyaev, contrary to the will of his parents, chose the profession of a lawyer, a woman who called herself a clairvoyant came to look for his defense. “I warned two women about the possible imminent death of their husbands,” she said. "And now the inconsolable widows accuse me of their willful death." Alexander only chuckled: “Tell me then,” said the writer.

“Your life will be hard, but very bright. And you yourself will be able to look into the future, ”she said. After that, Alexander agreed to take the case of the woman, she was acquitted at the trial. But the prediction was not long in coming. Belyaev was not a prophet, but he knew how to notice what ideas modern society has grown to, on the verge of what new discoveries and achievements it is.

One of his first prediction novels was the famous Amphibian Man, where the writer foresaw the invention of an artificial lung and a scuba with an open breathing system in compressed air, invented in 1943 by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. By the way, the novel itself was largely biographical.

Frame from the film "Amphibian Man" (1961)

As a child, Alexander had a dream in which he and his brother Vasily were crawling along a long dark tunnel. Somewhere ahead, a light shone, but the brother could no longer move on. Overcoming himself, Alexander was able to get out, but already without Vasily. Soon, his brother drowned while riding a boat.

In the novel, Belyaev describes how Ichthyander, getting out into the vast expanses of the ocean, had to swim through a tunnel. He swam along it, “overcoming the cold oncoming current. It repels from the bottom, floats up... The end of the tunnel is near. Now Ichthyander can again give himself to the current - it will carry him far into the open ocean.

Air pollution

When Alexander Belyaev was forced to go to the Crimea for treatment due to poor health, he met people on the train who had suffered as a result of a technological accident at a Kuzbass enterprise. This is how the idea of ​​the Air Seller was born.

In his work, Belyaev warns of an impending ecological catastrophe, where the environment will be so polluted with gases and industrial emissions that clean air will turn into a commodity that will not be available to everyone.

Needless to say, today, due to poor ecology, there is a constant danger of oncology walking around the world, and life expectancy in large cities is rapidly declining. Under these conditions, states are even forced to agree to international agreements, an example of which is the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

Orbital station

The KETs Star was written in 1936 under the influence of the writer's correspondence with Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Strictly speaking, CEC is the initials of the Soviet scientist. The whole novel is built on the ideas of Tsiolkovsky - the possibility of launching an orbital station, the exit of people into outer space, a trip to the moon.

After the release of the book, which was published by the magazine "Around the World", Tsiolkovsky wrote an enthusiastic review on it. The two dreamers were far ahead of their time - after all, the first real Salyut orbital station appeared in space only in 1973.

Drones

In the book “Lord of the World” (1926), Belyaev “invented” an apparatus for transmitting thoughts over a distance according to the principle of radio waves, which made it possible to inspire an outsider with a thought at a distance - in essence, a psychotropic weapon. In addition, in his book, he predicted the emergence of unmanned aircraft; the first successful tests took place in the UK only in the 30s of the XX century.

Plastic

In his novel The Man Who Lost Face (1929), the author presents the reader with the problem of changing the human body and the subsequent problems associated with it. As a matter of fact, the novel predicts the modern successes of plastic surgery, and the ethical problems that invariably follow.

According to the plot, the governor of the state turns into a black man and as a result experiences all the features of racial discrimination. It is somewhat reminiscent of the fate of the king of pop music Michael Jackson, who changed his skin color to escape prejudice against black people.

Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle

After the triumph of the novel "Professor Dowell's Head" at one of the meetings, journalists bombarded the writer with questions: "Who lives at the bottom of the ocean? Is there life on other planets? Do "Flying Dutchmen" really exist? Not finding an answer to this question for himself, Belyaev delves into his study, begins to figure out ...

Suppose somewhere, for example, in the Bermuda region, there is a certain special zone. The nearby Sargasso Sea, with its many algae, has always hampered local navigation, and ships left here after shipwrecks could easily accumulate in its waters. This is how the plot of the novel "The Island of Lost Ships" is born.

In his new work, Belyaev was the first to point out the mystery of the now famous Bermuda Triangle, the anomaly of which was first publicly announced by the Associated Press, calling the area "the devil's sea."

Last prediction

The year 1940 is coming. Many in the country have gloomy forebodings - a terrible war is coming. And Belyaev has special feelings - old illnesses make themselves felt, the writer has a presentiment - he will not survive this war. And he recalls a childhood dream, writes a novel about Ariel, a man who could fly. He himself would like to fly above the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Ariel, like Amphibian Man, is biographical. This work is a prediction of one's own death. He wanted to fly away from this world like Ariel.

And so it happened. The writer died in 1943 from starvation in besieged Leningrad. The writer Belyaev was buried in a common grave along with many others. After that, Belyaev's wife and daughter were captured by the Germans, and then in exile in Altai.

Upon returning from there, they found the writer's glasses, to which was attached a note addressed to Belyaev's wife:

“Do not look for my footprints on this earth,” her husband wrote. - I'm waiting for you in heaven. Your Ariel...

Alexander Belyaev

Alexander Belyaev

Birthday: 16.03.1884. Place of Birth: Smolensk, Russia
Date of death: 01/06/1942 (57 years old)
A place of death: Pushkin, Russia
Citizenship: Russia

Biography

Alexander Romanovich Belyaev- Soviet science fiction writer, one of the founders of Soviet science fiction literature. His books are devoted to the problems of science and technology of the future. Among the famous works: "Professor Dowell's Head", "Amphibian Man", "Ariel", "KETs Star" (KETs - the initials of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky) and many others (more than 70 science fiction works in total, including 13 novels) .

He was born in Smolensk, in the family of an Orthodox priest. There were two more children in the family: sister Nina died in childhood from sarcoma; brother Vasily, a student at a veterinary institute, drowned while riding a boat.

The father wanted to see in his son the successor of his work and sent him in 1895 to the theological seminary. In 1901, Alexander graduated from the seminary, but did not become a priest; on the contrary, he came out of there a convinced atheist. In defiance of his father, he entered the Demidov Juridical Lyceum in Yaroslavl. Soon after the death of his father, he had to earn extra money: Alexander gave lessons, painted scenery for the theater, played the violin in the circus orchestra.

After graduating (in 1906) from the Demidov Lyceum, A. Belyaev received the position of a private attorney in Smolensk and soon became known as a good lawyer. He has a regular clientele. His material resources also grew: he was able to rent and furnish a good apartment, acquire a good collection of paintings, and collect a large library. Having finished any business, he went to travel abroad; traveled to France, Italy, visited Venice.

In 1914 he left law for the sake of literature and theater.

At the age of thirty-five, A. Belyaev fell ill with tuberculous pleurisy. The treatment turned out to be unsuccessful - tuberculosis of the spine developed, which was complicated by paralysis of the legs. A serious illness for 6 years, three of which he was in a cast, chained him to bed. The young wife left him, saying that she did not get married to take care of her sick husband. In search of specialists who could help him, A. Belyaev, with his mother and old nanny, ended up in Yalta. There, in the hospital, he began to write poetry. Not giving in to despair, he is engaged in self-education: he studies foreign languages, medicine, biology, history, technology, reads a lot (Jules Verne, HG Wells, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky). Having defeated the disease, in 1922 he returns to a full life, begins to work. First, A. Belyaev became a teacher in an orphanage, then he got a job as an inspector of the criminal investigation department - he organized a photo laboratory there, later he had to go to the library. Life in Yalta was very difficult, and A. Belyaev, with the help of acquaintances, moved with his family to Moscow (1923), got a job as a legal adviser. There begins a serious literary activity. He publishes science fiction stories, novels in the magazines Vokrug Sveta, Znanie-Sila, Vsemirnyi sledopyt, earning the title of "Soviet Jules Verne". In 1925 he published the story "Professor Dowell's Head", which Belyaev himself called an autobiographical story: he wanted to tell "what a head without a body can experience."

A. Belyaev lived in Moscow until 1928; during this time, he wrote "The Island of Lost Ships", "The Last Man from Atlantis", "Amphibian Man", "Struggle on the Air", a collection of stories was published. The author wrote not only under his own name, but also under the pseudonyms A. Rom and Arbel.

In 1928, A. Belyaev and his family moved to Leningrad, and since then he has been exclusively engaged in literature, professionally. This is how "Lord of the World", "Underwater Farmers", "Wonderful Eye", stories from the series "Professor Wagner's Inventions" appeared. They were printed mainly in Moscow publishing houses. However, soon the disease again made itself felt, and I had to move from rainy Leningrad to sunny Kyiv.

The year 1930 turned out to be very difficult for the writer: his six-year-old daughter died of meningitis, the second one fell ill with rickets, and his own illness (spondylitis) soon worsened. As a result, in 1931 the family returned to Leningrad.

In September 1931, A. Belyaev handed over the manuscript of his novel "The Earth is Burning" to the editors of the Leningrad magazine "Around the World"

In 1934, he meets with Herbert Wells, who arrived in Leningrad.

In 1935, Belyaev became a permanent contributor to the Vokrug Sveta magazine.

At the beginning of 1938, after eleven years of intense collaboration, Belyaev left the Vokrug Sveta magazine.

Shortly before the war, the writer underwent another operation, so he refused the offer to evacuate when the war began. The city of Pushkin (a suburb of Leningrad), where A. Belyaev and his family lived in recent years, was occupied. In January 1942, the writer died of starvation. The surviving wife and daughter of the writer were deported by the Germans to Poland.

The place of his burial is not known for certain. A memorial stele at the Kazan cemetery in the city of Pushkin is installed only on the alleged grave.

Creation

A. Belyaev was fond of nature. From an early age, he was attracted to music: he independently learned to play the violin, piano, loved to play music for hours. Another "fun" was photography (there was a picture he took of "a human head on a platter in blue tones"). Since childhood, he read a lot, was fond of adventure literature, especially Jules Verne. Alexander grew up a fidget, loved all kinds of practical jokes, jokes; the consequence of one of his pranks was an eye injury with further damage to vision. The young man also dreamed of flying: he tried to take off, tying brooms to his hands, jumped from the roof with an umbrella, and finally took to the air in a small airplane. However, in an attempt to take off, he received an injury that affected the rest of his life. Once he fell off the roof of a barn and seriously injured his back. In the mid-20s, Belyaev suffered from constant pain in an injured back and was even paralyzed for months.

Even while studying at the Lyceum, A. Belyaev proved himself a theatergoer. Under his leadership, in 1913, students of the male and female gymnasiums played out the fairy tale "Three Years, Three Days, Three Minutes" with mass scenes, choral and ballet numbers. In the same year, A. R. Belyaev and cellist Yu. N. Saburova staged Grigoriev’s fairy tale opera The Sleeping Princess. He himself could act as a playwright, and a director, and an actor. The home theater of the Belyaevs in Smolensk was widely known, touring not only around the city, but also in its environs. Once, during the arrival in Smolensk of the capital's troupe under the direction of Stanislavsky, A. Belyaev managed to replace the sick artist - instead of playing in several performances.

The writer was keenly interested in the question of the human psyche: the functioning of the brain, its connection with the body, with the life of the soul, spirit. Can the brain think outside the body? Is a brain transplant possible? What consequences can anabiosis and its widespread use entail? Are there limits to the possibility of suggestion? What about genetic engineering? An attempt to solve these problems is devoted to the novels "Professor Dowell's Head", "Lord of the World", "The Man Who Lost Face", the story "The Man Who Doesn't Sleep", "Hoyti-Toyti".

In his science fiction novels Alexander Belyaev anticipated the emergence of a huge number of inventions and scientific ideas: in the "Star of KEC" the prototype of modern orbital stations is depicted, in "Amphibian Man" and "Professor Dowell's Head" the miracles of transplantology are shown, in "Eternal Bread" - the achievements of modern biochemistry and genetics. A kind of continuation of these reflections were novels-hypotheses that place a person in different environments of existence: the ocean (“Amphibian Man”), the air (“Ariel”).

His last novel in 1941 - "Ariel" - echoes the well-known novel by A. Green "The Shining World". The heroes of both novels are endowed with the ability to fly without additional devices. The image of Ariel is the achievement of the writer, in which the author's faith in a person who overcomes "earthly gravity" was objectively realized.

Memory

In 1990, the section of science fiction and science fiction literature of the Leningrad Writers' Organization of the Union of Writers of the USSR established the Alexander Belyaev Literary Prize, awarded for science fiction and popular science works.

Alexander Belyaev was called the "Russian Jules Verne" for his ability to predict many events. In his books, Alexander predicted not only the invention of scuba gear, the orbital station, but also his own death ...

Amphibian and scuba

When Alexander Belyaev, contrary to the will of his parents, chose the profession of a lawyer, a woman who called herself a clairvoyant came to look for his defense. “I warned two women about the possible imminent death of their husbands,” she said. "And now the inconsolable widows accuse me of their willful death." Alexander only chuckled: “Tell me then,” said the writer.

“Your life will be hard, but very bright. And you yourself will be able to look into the future, ”she said. After that, Alexander agreed to take the case of the woman, she was acquitted at the trial. But the prediction was not long in coming. Belyaev was not a prophet, but he knew how to notice what ideas modern society has grown to, on the verge of what new discoveries and achievements it is.

One of his first prediction novels was the famous Amphibian Man, where the writer foresaw the invention of an artificial lung and a scuba with an open breathing system in compressed air, invented in 1943 by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. By the way, the novel itself was largely biographical.

Frame from the film "Amphibian Man" (1961)

As a child, Alexander had a dream in which he and his brother Vasily were crawling along a long dark tunnel. Somewhere ahead, a light shone, but the brother could no longer move on. Overcoming himself, Alexander was able to get out, but already without Vasily. Soon, his brother drowned while riding a boat.

In the novel, Belyaev describes how Ichthyander, getting out into the vast expanses of the ocean, had to swim through a tunnel. He swam along it, “overcoming the cold oncoming current. It repels from the bottom, floats up... The end of the tunnel is near. Now Ichthyander can again give himself to the current - it will carry him far into the open ocean.

Air pollution

When Alexander Belyaev was forced to go to the Crimea for treatment due to poor health, he met people on the train who had suffered as a result of a technological accident at a Kuzbass enterprise. This is how the idea of ​​the Air Seller was born.

In his work, Belyaev warns of an impending ecological catastrophe, where the environment will be so polluted with gases and industrial emissions that clean air will turn into a commodity that will not be available to everyone.

Needless to say, today, due to poor ecology, there is a constant danger of oncology walking around the world, and life expectancy in large cities is rapidly declining. Under these conditions, states are even forced to agree to international agreements, an example of which is the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

Orbital station

The KETs Star was written in 1936 under the influence of the writer's correspondence with Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Strictly speaking, CEC is the initials of the Soviet scientist. The whole novel is built on the ideas of Tsiolkovsky - the possibility of launching an orbital station, the exit of people into outer space, a trip to the moon.

After the release of the book, which was published by the magazine "Around the World", Tsiolkovsky wrote an enthusiastic review on it. The two dreamers were far ahead of their time - after all, the first real Salyut orbital station appeared in space only in 1973.

Drones

In the book “Lord of the World” (1926), Belyaev “invented” an apparatus for transmitting thoughts over a distance according to the principle of radio waves, which made it possible to inspire an outsider with a thought at a distance - in essence, a psychotropic weapon. In addition, in his book, he predicted the emergence of unmanned aircraft; the first successful tests took place in the UK only in the 30s of the XX century.

Plastic

In his novel The Man Who Lost Face (1929), the author presents the reader with the problem of changing the human body and the subsequent problems associated with it. As a matter of fact, the novel predicts the modern successes of plastic surgery, and the ethical problems that invariably follow.

According to the plot, the governor of the state turns into a black man and as a result experiences all the features of racial discrimination. It is somewhat reminiscent of the fate of the king of pop music Michael Jackson, who changed his skin color to escape prejudice against black people.

Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle

After the triumph of the novel "Professor Dowell's Head" at one of the meetings, journalists bombarded the writer with questions: "Who lives at the bottom of the ocean? Is there life on other planets? Do "Flying Dutchmen" really exist? Not finding an answer to this question for himself, Belyaev delves into his study, begins to figure out ...

Suppose somewhere, for example, in the Bermuda region, there is a certain special zone. The nearby Sargasso Sea, with its many algae, has always hampered local navigation, and ships left here after shipwrecks could easily accumulate in its waters. This is how the plot of the novel "The Island of Lost Ships" is born.

In his new work, Belyaev was the first to point out the mystery of the now famous Bermuda Triangle, the anomaly of which was first publicly announced by the Associated Press, calling the area "the devil's sea."

Last prediction

The year 1940 is coming. Many in the country have gloomy forebodings - a terrible war is coming. And Belyaev has special feelings - old illnesses make themselves felt, the writer has a presentiment - he will not survive this war. And he recalls a childhood dream, writes a novel about Ariel, a man who could fly. He himself would like to fly above the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Ariel, like Amphibian Man, is biographical. This work is a prediction of one's own death. He wanted to fly away from this world like Ariel.

And so it happened. The writer died in 1943 from starvation in besieged Leningrad. The writer Belyaev was buried in a common grave along with many others. After that, Belyaev's wife and daughter were captured by the Germans, and then in exile in Altai.

Upon returning from there, they found the writer's glasses, to which was attached a note addressed to Belyaev's wife:

“Do not look for my footprints on this earth,” her husband wrote. - I'm waiting for you in heaven. Your Ariel...

Alexander Belyaev

Alexander Belyaev

Birthday: 16.03.1884. Place of Birth: Smolensk, Russia
Date of death: 01/06/1942 (57 years old)
A place of death: Pushkin, Russia
Citizenship: Russia

Biography

Alexander Romanovich Belyaev- Soviet science fiction writer, one of the founders of Soviet science fiction literature. His books are devoted to the problems of science and technology of the future. Among the famous works: "Professor Dowell's Head", "Amphibian Man", "Ariel", "KETs Star" (KETs - the initials of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky) and many others (more than 70 science fiction works in total, including 13 novels) .

He was born in Smolensk, in the family of an Orthodox priest. There were two more children in the family: sister Nina died in childhood from sarcoma; brother Vasily, a student at a veterinary institute, drowned while riding a boat.

The father wanted to see in his son the successor of his work and sent him in 1895 to the theological seminary. In 1901, Alexander graduated from the seminary, but did not become a priest; on the contrary, he came out of there a convinced atheist. In defiance of his father, he entered the Demidov Juridical Lyceum in Yaroslavl. Soon after the death of his father, he had to earn extra money: Alexander gave lessons, painted scenery for the theater, played the violin in the circus orchestra.

After graduating (in 1906) from the Demidov Lyceum, A. Belyaev received the position of a private attorney in Smolensk and soon became known as a good lawyer. He has a regular clientele. His material resources also grew: he was able to rent and furnish a good apartment, acquire a good collection of paintings, and collect a large library. Having finished any business, he went to travel abroad; traveled to France, Italy, visited Venice.

In 1914 he left law for the sake of literature and theater.

At the age of thirty-five, A. Belyaev fell ill with tuberculous pleurisy. The treatment turned out to be unsuccessful - tuberculosis of the spine developed, which was complicated by paralysis of the legs. A serious illness for 6 years, three of which he was in a cast, chained him to bed. The young wife left him, saying that she did not get married to take care of her sick husband. In search of specialists who could help him, A. Belyaev, with his mother and old nanny, ended up in Yalta. There, in the hospital, he began to write poetry. Not giving in to despair, he is engaged in self-education: he studies foreign languages, medicine, biology, history, technology, reads a lot (Jules Verne, HG Wells, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky). Having defeated the disease, in 1922 he returns to a full life, begins to work. First, A. Belyaev became a teacher in an orphanage, then he got a job as an inspector of the criminal investigation department - he organized a photo laboratory there, later he had to go to the library. Life in Yalta was very difficult, and A. Belyaev, with the help of acquaintances, moved with his family to Moscow (1923), got a job as a legal adviser. There begins a serious literary activity. He publishes science fiction stories, novels in the magazines Vokrug Sveta, Znanie-Sila, Vsemirnyi sledopyt, earning the title of "Soviet Jules Verne". In 1925 he published the story "Professor Dowell's Head", which Belyaev himself called an autobiographical story: he wanted to tell "what a head without a body can experience."

A. Belyaev lived in Moscow until 1928; during this time, he wrote "The Island of Lost Ships", "The Last Man from Atlantis", "Amphibian Man", "Struggle on the Air", a collection of stories was published. The author wrote not only under his own name, but also under the pseudonyms A. Rom and Arbel.

In 1928, A. Belyaev and his family moved to Leningrad, and since then he has been exclusively engaged in literature, professionally. This is how "Lord of the World", "Underwater Farmers", "Wonderful Eye", stories from the series "Professor Wagner's Inventions" appeared. They were printed mainly in Moscow publishing houses. However, soon the disease again made itself felt, and I had to move from rainy Leningrad to sunny Kyiv.

The year 1930 turned out to be very difficult for the writer: his six-year-old daughter died of meningitis, the second one fell ill with rickets, and his own illness (spondylitis) soon worsened. As a result, in 1931 the family returned to Leningrad.

In September 1931, A. Belyaev handed over the manuscript of his novel "The Earth is Burning" to the editors of the Leningrad magazine "Around the World"

In 1934, he meets with Herbert Wells, who arrived in Leningrad.

In 1935, Belyaev became a permanent contributor to the Vokrug Sveta magazine.

At the beginning of 1938, after eleven years of intense collaboration, Belyaev left the Vokrug Sveta magazine.

Shortly before the war, the writer underwent another operation, so he refused the offer to evacuate when the war began. The city of Pushkin (a suburb of Leningrad), where A. Belyaev and his family lived in recent years, was occupied. In January 1942, the writer died of starvation. The surviving wife and daughter of the writer were deported by the Germans to Poland.

The place of his burial is not known for certain. A memorial stele at the Kazan cemetery in the city of Pushkin is installed only on the alleged grave.

Creation

A. Belyaev was fond of nature. From an early age, he was attracted to music: he independently learned to play the violin, piano, loved to play music for hours. Another "fun" was photography (there was a picture he took of "a human head on a platter in blue tones"). Since childhood, he read a lot, was fond of adventure literature, especially Jules Verne. Alexander grew up a fidget, loved all kinds of practical jokes, jokes; the consequence of one of his pranks was an eye injury with further damage to vision. The young man also dreamed of flying: he tried to take off, tying brooms to his hands, jumped from the roof with an umbrella, and finally took to the air in a small airplane. However, in an attempt to take off, he received an injury that affected the rest of his life. Once he fell off the roof of a barn and seriously injured his back. In the mid-20s, Belyaev suffered from constant pain in an injured back and was even paralyzed for months.

Even while studying at the Lyceum, A. Belyaev proved himself a theatergoer. Under his leadership, in 1913, students of the male and female gymnasiums played out the fairy tale "Three Years, Three Days, Three Minutes" with mass scenes, choral and ballet numbers. In the same year, A. R. Belyaev and cellist Yu. N. Saburova staged Grigoriev’s fairy tale opera The Sleeping Princess. He himself could act as a playwright, and a director, and an actor. The home theater of the Belyaevs in Smolensk was widely known, touring not only around the city, but also in its environs. Once, during the arrival in Smolensk of the capital's troupe under the direction of Stanislavsky, A. Belyaev managed to replace the sick artist - instead of playing in several performances.

The writer was keenly interested in the question of the human psyche: the functioning of the brain, its connection with the body, with the life of the soul, spirit. Can the brain think outside the body? Is a brain transplant possible? What consequences can anabiosis and its widespread use entail? Are there limits to the possibility of suggestion? What about genetic engineering? An attempt to solve these problems is devoted to the novels "Professor Dowell's Head", "Lord of the World", "The Man Who Lost Face", the story "The Man Who Doesn't Sleep", "Hoyti-Toyti".

In his science fiction novels Alexander Belyaev anticipated the emergence of a huge number of inventions and scientific ideas: in the "Star of KEC" the prototype of modern orbital stations is depicted, in "Amphibian Man" and "Professor Dowell's Head" the miracles of transplantology are shown, in "Eternal Bread" - the achievements of modern biochemistry and genetics. A kind of continuation of these reflections were novels-hypotheses that place a person in different environments of existence: the ocean (“Amphibian Man”), the air (“Ariel”).

His last novel in 1941 - "Ariel" - echoes the well-known novel by A. Green "The Shining World". The heroes of both novels are endowed with the ability to fly without additional devices. The image of Ariel is the achievement of the writer, in which the author's faith in a person who overcomes "earthly gravity" was objectively realized.

Memory

In 1990, the section of science fiction and science fiction literature of the Leningrad Writers' Organization of the Union of Writers of the USSR established the Alexander Belyaev Literary Prize, awarded for science fiction and popular science works.

The circumstances of the death of the "Soviet Jules Verne" - Alexander Belyaev still remain a mystery. The writer died in the occupied city of Pushkin in 1942, but it is not very clear how and why this happened. Some argue that Alexander Romanovich died of starvation, others believe that he could not bear the horrors of the occupation, others believe that the cause of the writer's death should be sought in his last novel.

Dying - so together

We started our conversation with the daughter of the “Soviet Jules Verne” from the “pre-occupation” period.

- Svetlana Aleksandrovna, why wasn't your family evacuated from Pushkin before the Germans entered the city?

My father had spinal tuberculosis for many years. He could move independently only in a special corset. He was so weak that leaving was out of the question. There was a special commission in the city, which at that time was engaged in the evacuation of children. He offered to take me out too, but my parents refused this offer. In 1940, I developed tuberculosis of the knee joint, and I met the war in a cast. Mom often repeated then: “To die is so together!”.

- There are still quite a few versions about the death of your father:

Dad died of starvation. In our family, it was not customary to make some kind of stock for the winter. When the Germans entered the city, we had several bags of cereal, some potatoes and a barrel of sauerkraut. And when these supplies ran out, my grandmother had to go to work for the Germans. Every day she was given a pot of soup and some potato skins, from which we baked cakes. We had enough of such meager food, but this was not enough for my father.

- Some researchers believe that Alexander Romanovich simply could not bear the horrors of the fascist occupation ...

I don’t know how my father experienced all this, but I was very scared. At that time, anyone could be executed without trial or investigation. Just for violating curfew or being charged with theft. Most of all we were worried about my mother. She often went to our old apartment to pick up some things from there. She could easily be hanged like a burglar. The gallows stood right under our windows.

Is it true that the Germans did not even let you and your mother bury Alexander Romanovich?

The Pope died on January 6, 1942. Mom went to the city government, and there it turned out that there was only one horse left in the city, and we had to wait in line. The coffin with the father's body was placed in an empty apartment next door. At that time, many people were simply covered with earth in common ditches, but one had to pay for a separate grave. Mom took some things to the gravedigger, and he swore that he would bury his father like a human. The coffin with the body was placed in a crypt at the Kazan cemetery and had to be buried with the onset of the first warm weather. Alas, on February 5, my mother, my grandmother and I were taken prisoner, so they buried my father without us.

Death next to the "Amber Room"

The monument to the science fiction writer at the Kazan cemetery of Tsarskoye Selo does not stand at all on the grave of the writer, but at the place of his alleged burial. The details of this story were unearthed by the former chairman of the local history section of the city of Pushkin, Evgeny Golovchiner. He once managed to find a witness who was present at the funeral of Belyaev. Tatyana Ivanova was disabled since childhood and lived all her life at the Kazan cemetery.

It was she who said that at the beginning of March 1942, when the earth had already begun to thaw a little, they began to bury people who had been lying in the local crypt since winter in the cemetery. It was at this time that the writer Belyaev was buried along with others. Why did she remember it? Yes, because Alexander Romanovich was buried in a coffin, of which there were only two left in Pushkin by that time. Professor Chernov was buried in another. Tatyana Ivanova also pointed out the place where both of these coffins were buried. True, from her words it appeared that the gravedigger still did not keep his promise to bury Belyaev like a human being, he buried the writer's coffin in a common ditch instead of a separate grave.

The question seems much more interesting, why did Alexander Belyaev die. The publicist Fyodor Morozov believes that the death of the writer could well be connected with the mystery of the Amber Room. The fact is that the last thing Belyaev worked on was devoted to this particular topic. Nobody knows what he was going to write about the famous mosaic. It is only known that even before the war, Belyaev told many people about his new novel and even quoted some passages to his acquaintances. With the arrival of the Germans in Pushkin, the Gestapo specialists also became actively interested in the Amber Room. By the way, they could not fully believe that a genuine mosaic fell into their hands. Therefore, they were actively looking for people who would have information on this matter. It is no coincidence that two Gestapo officers also went to Alexander Romanovich, trying to find out what he knew about this story. Whether the writer told them anything or not is not known. In any case, no documents have yet been found in the Gestapo archives. But the answer to the question whether Belyaev could have been killed because of his interest in the Amber Room does not seem so difficult. Suffice it to recall what fate befell many researchers who tried to find a wonderful mosaic.

P.S. Alexander Belyaev was born on March 4 (16), 1884 in Smolensk, in the family of an Orthodox priest. As a child, he was fond of the novels of Jules Verne and HG Wells, played travels in unknown countries. After graduating from the Demidov Juridical Lyceum in Yaroslavl in 1906, he took up advocacy. In 1914 he left law for the sake of literature and theater. He was married three times, the last time he married in 1923 with Margarita Magnushevskaya, with whom he lived until the end of his days. Author of over 70 science fiction and adventure books. The most famous of them: "The Head of Professor Dowell", "Amphibian Man", "Lord of the World", "Air Seller", "CEC Star".