Alexander Stepanovich Green (real name - Grinevsky) is a Soviet prose writer from Russia, whose name is always remembered along with the extravaganza story “Scarlet Sails”. His real name is Grinevsky, which helped him create the fictional country “Greenland”.

The poet was born in the Vyatka province, the city of Slobotskaya on August 23 (11), 1880. Even as a child, he loved to read books about different places in the world and the travels of people, he wanted to get to know the world so much that there were even cases when he tried to escape from home . When in 1896 Grinevsky completed his studies at the four-year Vyatka educational institution, he moves to Odessa, and after which he becomes a tramp for 6 years.

At that moment, when Alexander was working on the ship, he wanted to become a navigator, but over time he resigned himself and forgot about this dream. Green managed to immerse himself in many professions, he was a loader and a lumberjack, he tried his hand at fishing, but all these activities did not help him cope with the desire that forced him to go into service. He had to survive exactly 9 months in order to return home. A third of this time he spent in a punishment cell, and the rest of the time he ended up as a deserter.

During his service, he became close to the socialist revolutionaries, who lured him into activities with a propaganda bent. Support for the interests of sailors in Sevastopol ended for Alexander in 1903 with prison for 2 years, but this did not stop him from his propaganda activities. They wanted to send Green into exile in Siberia for ten years, but with the help of an amnesty he avoided this punishment.

Grinevsky’s first story, “To Italy,” was published in 1906, followed by the story “The Case,” the peculiarity of which was that for the first time the author wrote his pseudonym “Alexander Stepanovich Green.” Being poor and suffering from tuberculosis, in 1924 the writer moved to Feodosia, continuing to write various novels and stories.

The writer died of stomach cancer (July 8, 1932), in Old Crimea, where he came to live in 1930. In the city, he was buried in the cemetery in the exact place where his beloved sea was visible.

6th grade about his life for children

Biography of Green Alexander Stepanovich about the main thing

Alexander Stepanovich Green (Grinevsky) is a prose poet, philosopher, and also one of the representatives of Russian neo-romanticism. Author of popular romantic books such as “Running on the Waves” and “Scarlet Sails”.

On August 23, 1880 he was born in Slobodskaya Vyatka province. His father was Stepan Evseevich Grinevsky, who was a participant in the Polish uprising, as a result of which, at the age of twenty, he was sent into exile indefinitely. His mother is Anna Stepanovna Grinevskaya, a Russian woman who worked as a doctor. In 1889, Alexander was already in the preparatory class of the district school, and that’s where the nickname “Green” came from. His actions, according to the teachers, were the worst of all, for which they wanted to expel him, but still he entered the first grade. When he entered the second grade, he wrote a poem disgracing the teachers and still found himself expelled.

At the age of fifteen, he was left without his mother, who died of tuberculosis. After this, his father had a wedding with Lydia Boretskaya. Due to the fact that Alexander had a very tense relationship with his father’s wife, he decided to live separately and began to earn extra money, for example, by copying documents.

Alexander Stepanovich wrote quite a lot of famous romantic works, which were mentioned at the very beginning of this article. He began his work in 1906, writing the stories “The Merit of Private Panteleev” and “Elephant and Moska”. At the age of 28 (1908), he created his first publication - “The Invisible Cap”.

In connection with his marriage to twenty-four-year-old Vera Abramova, he wrote “One Hundred Miles Along the River,” where the key characters in the story personify this couple.

In 1914, Green began collaborating with the New Satyricon. The same magazine published his well-known collection “An Incident on Dog Street.”

In 1920, Alexander Stepanovich continued his own literary movement, taking up the novel “The Shining World,” which was released in Leningrad 4 years later. He also showed his talent in the works: “The Pied Piper”, “Fandango”, “The Loquacious Brownie”.

In 1926 he completed probably his most famous and basic novel, “Running on the Waves,” which was released in 1928.
In 1932, the poet’s last edition, “Fantastic Novels,” was published.

In 1932, on July 8, the poet left this world in Old Crimea due to stomach cancer; they decided to bury him in a local cemetery on the sea coast, which Green loved very much.

Interesting Facts and dates from life

You become an artist
when you create something yourself
what you want to see or hear.

Green didn't like to talk about himself. Having already become famous, he answered questions from curious people and magazine questionnaires extremely dryly and briefly. He was generally silent, reserved, even prim and could not stand those who got into his soul. Only in the last years of his life, in “Autobiographical Tale”, did he talk about his difficult and not at all romantic fate.
“Is it because the first book I read as a five-year-old boy was Gulliver’s Travels to the Land of the Lilliputians... or because the desire to travel to distant lands was innate, but I only began to dream of a life of adventure from the age of eight.”.
If we add to this that the first word that Sasha Grinevsky put together from letters, sitting on his father’s lap, was the word “sea,” then everything else is self-explanatory. Like all boys in those years, he voraciously read the novels of F. Cooper, J. Verne, R. Stevenson, G. Aimard; he loved to wander with a gun through the forests surrounding the city, imagining himself as a wild hunter. And of course, he tried to escape to America.
He had nothing to lose: for his daring poems and many pranks, the student Grinevsky was expelled from the real school. It was also sad at home: poverty, eternal reproaches and beatings from his father.
At the age of sixteen, having graduated from the city school with a sin, Alexander finally decided to become a sailor. He put on over-the-knee waders, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and set off from Vyatka to Odessa. His many years of wanderings and ordeals began, about which we can briefly say this: the Russian land is not kind to dreamers and inventors.
“I was a sailor, a loader, an actor, rewrote roles for the theater, worked in gold mines, in a blast furnace, in peat bogs, in fisheries; was a woodcutter, a tramp, a scribe in the office, a hunter, a revolutionary, an exile, a sailor on a barge, a soldier, a navvy... "
What Green so calmly lists was, in fact, pure hell. And he was able to break out of it only when he realized that the stories he composed for his random companions and for himself could be written down.
For a long time he did not believe that he could stand on a par with real writers, those who so admired him in his youth. The first story (“The Merit of Private Panteleev,” 1906) and the first book (“The Invisible Cap,” 1908) are still an attempt to write “like everyone else.” Only in the story “Reno Island” are the coordinates of that land found, which it would be in vain to look for on a map and which belonged only to him. Since then, despite any twists of fate and historical upheavals, every year Alexander Green has been creating his own world more and more confidently, closed to outsiders, but visible "inner eyes of the soul".
Three most terrible years- 1918, 1919, 1920 - amid death, hunger and typhoid, Green thought about and wrote “Scarlet Sails” - his response to the revolution. A tiny stove-stove warmed Alexander Stepanovich when his first novel, “The Shining World” (1923), was born. He believed that people once flew and would fly again like birds. Green was no longer alone. He found a girlfriend, faithful and devoted to the end, as in his books.
In 1924, Green and his wife Nina Nikolaevna moved from Petrograd to Feodosia. He always dreamed of living in a city warm sea. The calmest and happiest years of his life passed here; the novels “The Golden Chain” (1925) and “Running on the Waves” (1926) were written here.
But by the end of the 1920s, publishers who had previously eagerly published Greene's books stopped accepting them altogether. There was no money, and the efforts of friends to place the already ill writer in a sanatorium did not help. Green fell ill, essentially from malnutrition and melancholy, because for the first time life seemed to him "dear nowhere". He did not know that his real glory was yet to come.
The era passed "my iron way", and Green wrote “about storms, ships, love, recognized and rejected, about fate, the secret ways of the soul and the meaning of chance”. The features of his heroes combined firmness and tenderness, and the names of the heroines sounded like music.
How did he do it? And it's very simple. He knew that “our suburban nature is a serious world no less than the shores of the Orinoco...” that a person who contains the whole world within himself is wonderful. He simply looked more closely than others, and therefore could see in the Siberian taiga an equatorial forest, and on a Petrograd street with dark houses - pagodas surrounded by palm trees.
"Everything is open to everyone", - he says through the lips of his hero. Another writer in another country said at about the same time: “Where our magical imagination could create a new world, it stops”(G. Meyrink).
Green didn't stop. Don't stop either. And then, sooner or later, in old age or in the prime of life, on the embankment of the old city on a warm summer night or just in the silence of an apartment, you may hear silent words: « Good evening, Friends! Isn't it boring on a dark road? I'm in a hurry, I'm running..."

Margarita Pereslegina

WORKS OF A.S. GREEN

COLLECTED WORKS: 6 volumes / Intro. Art. V. Vikhrova; Afterword Vl. Rosselsa; Il. S. Brodsky. - M.: Pravda, 1965.

COLLECTED WORKS: 6 volumes / Preface. V. Vikhrova; Artist S. Brodsky. - M.: Pravda, 1980.
The first collected works include mainly best stories and the novels of Greene and his " Autobiographical story».
In the second, one of the latest novels, Jessie and Morgiana, and many stories (not always of equal value) from magazines of the early 20th century and the 1920s-30s were added.

COLLECTED WORKS: 5 volumes / Intro. art., comp. V. Kovsky. - M.: Artist. lit., 1991-1997.

Compiled at the turn of the century, the collection, in addition to all of Green’s known works, also included the novel “Treasure of the African Mountains,” poems and the poem “Lee.”

SCARLET SAILS: Extravaganza / Art. A. Dudin. - M.: Sovremennik, 1986. - 47 p.: ill. - (Adolescence).
The light and quiet power of this book defy words except those chosen by Greene himself. Suffice it to say that this is a story about a miracle that two people performed for each other. And the writer is for all of us.

SCARLET SAILS: Extravaganza / Art. M. Bychkov. - Kaliningrad: Amber Tale, 2000. - 150 pp.: ill.
Greene's books live on, and each new generation reads them in its own way. Time paints the sea, heroes and sails in a new way - for example, as the artist Mikhail Bychkov saw them.

SCARLET SAILS; RUNNING ON THE WAVES; STORIES // Green A.S. Selected works; Paustovsky K.G. Selected works. - M.: Det. lit., 1999. - P. 23-356.

SCARLET SAILS; BRILLIANT WORLD; GOLD CHAIN; STORIES. - M.: Artist. lit., 1986. - 512 p. - (Classics and contemporaries).
"Shining World"
The thought that people flew, as they fly now only in their dreams, haunted Green for many years. The clumsy flights of the first aviators, which he saw near St. Petersburg, only strengthened this idea. Years later, the hero of the novel “The Shining World” flew freely, like a bird.

"Gold chain"
“Mystery” and “Adventure” - these are the magic words that can spin a person, transport him to an extraordinary house, like a labyrinth, and make him the center of events that he will remember later all his life...

THE WAVE RUNNER: A Novel; Stories. - M.: Artist. lit., 1988. - 287 pp.: ill. - (Classics and contemporaries).
"Running on the waves"
The sea knows many legends. Green added one more to them: about a girl gliding through the waves as if through a ballroom, and about a ship named after her. A special fate awaited whoever stepped onto the deck of this ship.

JESSIE AND MORGIANA: A novel. - M.: ROSMEN, 2001. - 252 p. - (Confusion of feelings).
A novel about two sisters, one of whom is kind and beautiful, and the other is ugly and cruel, probably not best book A. Green. The shadow of approaching sickness and darkness lies upon her. But this piece also contains very interesting reflections on the nature of evil and the psychology of the killer.

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE: A Novel // Green A.S. Favorites / Illustration A.P.Melik-Sarkisyan. - M.: Pravda, 1989. - P. 299-492.
One day at an exhibition Green was struck by an engraving English artist. It depicted a road disappearing behind a deserted hill and was called “The Road to Nowhere.” This is how the idea of ​​the writer’s last and saddest novel arose.

ADVENTURER: Stories. - M.: Pravda, 1988. - 480 p.
ABOUT "secret paths of the soul", leading either to happiness or death; about the right of everyone to be different from others; about the extraordinary strength of a person who is capable, if necessary, of walking on water or defeating death - you will read about all this in the stories of this collection. And in the end, having met a sunny morning in the attic of an abandoned house, you will understand Green’s main idea: "Miracles are within us".

SHIPS IN LISS / [Afterword. I. Sabinina]. - M.: OLMA-PRESS, 2000. - 351 p.
Contents: Scarlet Sails; Stories.

TOUCHABLE: The first complete publication of an unfinished novel / [Pub., preface. and note. L. Varlamova] // Crimean album: History and local history. and literary-art. almanac. - Feodosia - M.: Publishing house. house "Koktebel", 1996. - pp. 150-179.
Ferrol and his daughter, forced to leave the city, found shelter within the walls of a dilapidated fort on seashore. The fort became their home, and the girl even grew a small garden.
Extraordinary flowers bloomed in the garden, and word of their beauty spread far and wide. But the flower petals closed and began to fade when an unkind person entered the garden.
Green managed to write about half of his last novel, which was so difficult for him. How the events and fates of the heroes might have developed can be imagined from the surviving sketches and fragments of the book.

NOVELS / Preface. V. Amlinsky. - M.: Moscow. worker, 1984. - 416 p.
The book contains the best of what A. Green wrote in this genre. “Captain Duke”, “The Pied Piper”, “Ships in Liss”, “Watercolor”, “The Wrath of the Father”, “The Velvet Curtain” and other short stories have long become classics.

STORIES; SCARLET SAILS; RUNNING ON THE WAVES. - M.: AST: Olympus, 1998. - 560 p. - (School of Classics).

TREASURE OF THE AFRICAN MOUNTAINS: Novels. - M.: ROSMEN, 2001. - 511 p. - (Golden Triangle).
"Treasure of the African Mountains"
“Ghent, like Stanley, kept a diary. But in this diary the reader would find a very small number of geographical notes, even fewer events... Entire pages were filled with descriptions of unknown flowers, their smell and comparisons with northern flowers. Elsewhere there was talk about the expression in the eyes of animals. The third was painting the landscape, noticing unexpected transitions of colors and lines. Sometimes Ghent began to talk about the advantage of a quick sight over careful aiming, or talked about how the sunlight wanders in the tops of the forest, illuminating the foliage.”. If Greene had had a chance to travel through Central Africa along with the expedition of the American journalist Henry Stanley, looking for traces of the missing explorer D. Livingston, he would most likely have behaved in the same way as the hero Ghent he created.

FANDANGO: Novels / Intro. Art. E.B. Skorospelova. - M.: Det. lit., 2002. - 334 pp.: ill. - (School library).

Margarita Pereslegina

LITERATURE ABOUT THE LIFE AND WORK OF A.S. GREEN

Green A.S. Autobiographical story // Green A.S. Favorites. - M.: Pravda, 1987. - P. 3-142.

Amlinsky Vl. In the Shadow of the Sails: Rereading Alexander Green // Green A.S. Novels. - M.: Moscow. worker, 1984. - P. 5-22.
Andreev K. Flying over the waves // Andreev K. Adventure seekers. - M.: Det. lit., 1966. - pp. 238-286.
Antonov S. A. Green. “Hell Returned” // Antonov S. First person: Stories about writers, books and words. - M.: Sov. writer, 1973. - pp. 90-130.
To help students and teachers: [Comments; Krat. chronicle of the life and work of A.S. Green; Materials for the biography; Criticism about the work of A.S. Green; A.S. Green in art, etc.] // Green A.S. Stories; Scarlet Sails; Running on the waves. - M.: AST: Olympus, 2000. - P. 369-545.
Vikhrov V. Knight of Dreams // Green A.S. Collection cit.: In 6 volumes. - M.: Pravda, 1965. - T. 1. - P. 3-36.
Memories of Alexander Green / Comp., introduction, notes. Vl.Sandlera. - L.: Lenizdat, 1972. - 607 pp.: photo.
Galanov B. Taking the waves and a ship with a scarlet sail... // Galanov B. A book about books. - M.: Det. lit., 1985. - pp. 114-122.
Green N. Memories of Alexander Green. - Feodosia - M.: Koktebel, 2005. - 399 p.
Dmitrenko S. Dream, Unfulfilled and Reality in the Prose of Alexander Green // Green A.S. Stories; Scarlet Sails; Running on the waves. - M.: AST: Olympus, 2000. - P. 5-16.
Kaverin V. Green and his “Pied Piper” // Kaverin V. The happiness of talent. - M.: Sovremennik, 1989. - P. 32-39.
Kovsky V. The brilliant world of Alexander Green // Green A.S. Collection Op.: In 5 volumes - M.: Khudozh. lit., 1991. - T. 1. - P. 5-36.
Kovsky V. “Real inner life": (Psychological romanticism of Alexander Green) // Kovsky V. Realists and romantics. - M.: Artist. lit., 1990. - pp. 239-328.
Paustovsky K. Alexander Green // Paustovsky K. Golden Rose: A Tale. - L.: Det. lit., 1987. - pp. 212-214.
Paustovsky K. The Life of Alexander Green // Paustovsky K. Laurel wreath. - M.: Mol. Guard, 1985. - P. 386-402.
Paustovsky K. Black Sea // Paustovsky K. Laurel wreath. - M.: Mol. Guard, 1985. - P. 18-185.
In this story, A.S. Green is depicted under the name of the writer Garth.
Polonsky V. Alexander Stepanovich Green (1880-1932) // Encyclopedia for children: T. 9: Rus. literature: Part 2: XX century. - M.: Avanta+, 1999. - P. 219-231.
Rossels Vl. Green's pre-revolutionary prose // Green A.S. Collection cit.: In 6 vols. - M.: Pravda, 1965. - T. 1. - P. 445-453.
Sabinina I. Paladin of Dreams // Green A.S. Ships in Lisse. - M.: OLMA-PRESS, 2000. - P. 346-350.
Skorospelova E. Country of Alexander Green // Green A.S. Fandango. - M.: Det. lit., 2002. - P. 5-20.
Tarasenko N. Green's House: Essay-guide to the A.S. Green Museum in Feodosia and the branch of the museum in Old Crimea. - Simferopol: Tavria, 1979. - 95 p.: ill.
Shcheglov M. Ships of Alexander Green // Shcheglov M. Literary critical articles. - M., 1965. - P. 223-230.

M.P.

SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF A.S. GREEN'S WORKS

- ART FILMS -

Scarlet Sails. Dir. A. Ptushko. Comp. I.Morozov. USSR, 1961. Cast: A. Vertinskaya, V. Lanovoy, I. Pereverzev, S. Martinson, O. Anofriev, Z. Fedorova, E. Morgunov, P. Massalsky and others.
Assol. TV movie. Based on the story "Scarlet Sails". Dir. B. Stepantsev. Comp. V. Babushkin, A. Goldstein. USSR, 1982. Cast: E. Zaitseva, A. Kharitonov, L. Ulfsak and others.
Running on the waves. Scene A. Galich, S. Tsanev. Dir. P. Lyubimov. Comp. Ya.Frenkel. USSR-Bulgaria, 1967. Cast: S. Khashimov, M. Terekhova, R. Bykov, O. Zhakov and others.
Brilliant world. Dir. B. Mansurov. Comp. A. Lunacharsky. USSR, 1984. Cast: T. Härm, I. Liepa, P. Kadochnikov, L. Prygunov, A. Vokach, G. Strizhenov, Y. Katin-Yartsev and others.
Mister decorator. Based on the story "The Gray Car". Scene Yu.Arabova. Dir. O. Teptsov. Comp. S. Kuryokhin. USSR, 1988. Cast: V. Avilov, A. Demyanenko, M. Kozakov and others.
Gold chain. Dir. A. Muratov. Comp. I. Wigner. USSR, 1986. Cast: V. Sukhachev-Galkin, B. Khimichev, V. Masalskis and others.
Lanphier Colony. Scene and post. J. Schmidt. Comp. I. Shust. USSR-Czechoslovakia, 1969. Starring: J. Budraitis, Z. Kotsurikova, B. Beishenaliev, A. Veit and others.
There are quite a few film adaptations of A.S. Green’s works, but, alas, there are no truly successful ones among them...

• Father - Stefan (Stepan) Evseevich Grinevsky (1843-1914), Belarusian, hereditary nobleman of the Disnensky district of the Vilna province of the North-Western Territory Russian Empire, for participation in the Belarusian-Polish uprising of 1863, he was exiled to Kolyvan, Tomsk province. Later he was allowed to move to the Vyatka province, where he arrived in 1868.
• Mother - Anna Stepanovna Grinevskaya (nee Lepkova; 1857-1895) was Russian, the daughter of the collegiate secretary Stepan Fedorovich Lepkov and Agrippina Yakovlevna. She graduated from the Vyatka midwifery school and received a certificate for the title of midwife and smallpox vaccination.
• Natalia (1878-?) - stepdaughter Grinevsky.
• Alexander (1879-1879). Died in infancy.
• Antonina (1887-1969) - lived in Warsaw.
• Ekaterina (1889-1968) - in the fall of 1910, attended the wedding of Alexander Green and Vera Abramova.
• Boris (1894-1949) - lived in Leningrad. In 1947-48. came to the city of Stary Krym and tried to open the first museum of the writer in Green’s house. Then he failed.
• Pavel Dmitrievich Boretsky (1884-?) - step-brother Alexandra Green. Son of Lydia Avenirovna Grinevskaya and her first husband.
• Nikolai (1896-1960) - son of Stepan Evseevich and Lydia Avenirovna (stepmother of Alexander Green).
• Varvara (1898-?) - daughter of Stepan Evseevich and Lydia Avenirovna. Teacher.
• Angelina (1902-1971) - daughter of Stepan Evseevich and Lydia Avenirovna. Teacher.

Biography

Since childhood, Green loved books about sailors and travel. He dreamed of going to sea as a sailor and, driven by this dream, made attempts to run away from home.

A significant influence on Green was exerted by his father, the Belarusian nobleman Stefan Grinevsky, who allowed his son to buy a gun and encouraged him to take long excursions into nature, which influenced both the development of the young man’s character and his future original style Green's prose.

In 1896, after graduating from the four-year Vyatka City School, he left for Odessa. For some time he wandered in search of work. He got a job as a sailor on a ship plying the route Odessa - Batumi - Odessa. Soon he decided to leave his sailor career. He tried many professions - he was a fisherman, a laborer, a lumberjack, and a gold miner in the Urals.

He served as a soldier in the 213th Orovai Reserve Infantry Battalion, stationed in Penza. In the summer of 1902 he deserted, but was caught in Kamyshin. After escaping, he met the Social Revolutionaries. In the winter of 1902, they arranged for Green to escape again, after which he went underground and began to conduct revolutionary activities. In 1903 he was arrested for propaganda work among sailors in Sevastopol. For attempting to escape, he was transferred to a maximum security prison, where he spent about two years. In 1905 he was released under an amnesty.

In 1906, in St. Petersburg, Green was again arrested and exiled for four years to the city of Turinsk, Tobolsk province. Green stayed in Turinsk for only 3 days: in the book “ Best travel in the Middle Urals: facts, legends, traditions” tells a funny story about how he, having drunk the police officer and the police, who could not resist the free vodka, escaped. He fled to Vyatka, got hold of someone else’s passport, and used it to go to Moscow. Here his first politically engaged story, “The Merit of Private Panteleev,” was born, signed by A. S. G. The circulation was confiscated from the printing house and burned. The pseudonym A. S. Green first appeared under the story “The Case” (1907). In 1908, Green published his first collection, “The Invisible Cap,” with the subtitle “Stories about Revolutionaries.”

Due to a conflict with the authorities, Green was forced to hide in Finland from the end of 1916, but, having learned about February Revolution, returned to Petrograd. In the spring of 1917, he wrote a story-essay, “Walking to the Revolution,” testifying to the writer’s hope for renewal. However, reality soon disappoints the writer.

In 1919, Green served in the Red Army as a signalman and fell ill with typhus. The seriously ill writer was brought to Petrograd in 1920, where, with the assistance of M. Gorky, he managed to get academic rations and housing - a room in the “House of Arts”, where Green lived next to V. Piast, V. A. Rozhdestvensky, N. S. Tikhonov, M. Shaginyan.

In 1921, the Greens went to the Finnish village of Toksovo for the whole summer. During his stay in Toksovo, Alexander Green lived in Rogiyainen's house (Sanatornaya St. 19).

During civil war he publishes his works in the magazine "Flame". During the revolutionary years in Petrograd, Green began writing the “extravaganza story” “Scarlet Sails” (published in 1923). This story is his most famous work. It is believed that the prototype of Assol is Green’s wife, Nina Nikolaevna.

In 1924, Green’s novel “The Shining World” was published in Leningrad. That same year, Green moved to Feodosia. In 1927, he took part in the collective novel “Big Fires,” published in the magazine “Ogonyok.”

In 1929, he spent the entire summer in Old Crimea, working on the novel “The Road to Nowhere,” and in 1930 he completely moved to the city of Old Crimea. At the end of April 1931, already seriously ill, Green went to Koktebel to visit Voloshin. This route is still known and popular among tourists as the Greene's Trail.

The novel “Touchable,” which he began at this time, was never completed.

Green died on July 8, 1932 in the city of Stary Krym. He was buried there in the city cemetery. On his grave, sculptor Tatyana Gagarina erected a monument “Running on the Waves”.

Since 1945, his books have not been published; in 1950, Greene was posthumously accused of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism.” Through the efforts of K. Paustovsky, Yu. Olesha and others, he was returned to literature in 1956; his works were published in millions of copies.

Addresses

In Petrograd - Leningrad

• 1920 - 05.1921 - DISK - 25th October Avenue, 15;
• 05.1921 - 02.1922 - Zaremba apartment building - Panteleimonovskaya street, 11;
• 1923-1924 - apartment building - Dekabristov Street, 11.

Addresses in Odessa

• St. Lanzheronovskaya, 2.

Bibliography

Memory

Alexander Green Prize

In 2000, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the birth of A. S. Green, the Union of Writers of Russia, the administration of Kirov and Slobodsky established the annual Russian literary prize named after Alexander Green for works for children and youth, imbued with the spirit of romance and hope.

Museums

• In 1960, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, the writer’s wife opened the Writer’s House-Museum in Old Crimea.
• In 1970, the Greene Literary and Memorial Museum was also created in Feodosia.
• On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, in 1980, the Alexander Green House-Museum was opened in the city of Kirov.
• In 2010, the Alexander Greene Romance Museum was created in the city of Slobodskaya.

Green's readings

• International scientific conference “Grinov Readings” - has been held in even years in Feodosia since 1988 (the first half of September).
• Green's readings in Old Crimea are an annual festival on the writer's birthday (August 23).
• Green's readings in Kirov are held once every 5 years since 1975 on the writer's birthday.

Streets

• In Kirov there is an embankment named after him.
• In Moscow in 1986, a street was named after the writer (Green Street).
• In Old Crimea there is a street named after him.
• In Slobodskoye, the street on which A. Green was born is named in his honor.
• In the city of Naberezhnye Chelny there is a street named after the writer (Alexander Green Street).
• In Gelendzhik there is a street named after him (Green Street).

Libraries

• The Kirov Regional Children's Library named after A. S. Green is located in Kirov.
• In Slobodskoye city ​​Library bears the name of A. Green.
• In Moscow Youth Library No. 16 named after. A. Green.
• Library named after A. Green

Alexander Green (08/23/1880 – 07/08/1932) – Russian writer and poet. His works belong to the neo-romanticism movement; they are distinguished by their philosophical and psychological orientation, and often contain elements of fantasy.

early years

Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky is a native of the city of Slobodskaya. His father was a Polish nobleman, after the uprising of 1863 he was exiled to the village of Kolyvan. Five years later he moved to the Vyatka province, where in 1873 he married a young nurse. Alexander was their first son, and his brother and two sisters were born later. From an early age the boy was interested in literature. At the age of six he read Gulliver's Adventures. Adventures became his favorite genre; in his dreams of sailing, he once even ran away from home.

In 1889, Alexander entered a real school, where he received the nickname “Green”. At school, he was not distinguished by exemplary behavior, for which he constantly received criticism. In second grade, he composed a poem that insulted the teachers and was expelled. The father enrolled his son in another school, which did not have a very good reputation.

In 1895, tuberculosis claimed the life of Green's mother, and his father got a new wife. Not finding a common language with his stepmother, Alexander began to live separately. He devoted most of his time to reading and writing. He took on small part-time jobs: binding books, copying documents. Dreams of the sea did not leave him, and in 1896 Green went to Odessa, hoping to become a sailor.

Finding myself

Arriving in Odessa, the teenager could not find a job and experienced serious financial difficulties. His father’s friend finally got him a job as a sailor on a ship sailing from Odessa to Batumi. Alexander did not like working on the ship, and he quickly abandoned it. In 1897, he decided to return to his homeland, where he lived for a year, and then went on a new journey - to Baku.

On Azerbaijani soil, he worked on the railway tracks, was a laborer and a fisherman. He came to his father for the summer, and then went on his journey again. For some time he lived in the Urals, cut down forests, was a miner, and served in the theater. And each time he was forced to return to the place he hated motherland.

A. Green with his friend E. Vensky

Revolutionary activities

In 1902, Green enlisted in an infantry battalion in Penza. Army life strengthened in young man revolutionary spirit. He spent six months in the service, half of the time in a punishment cell. Then he deserted, but was caught, but soon escaped again. The Socialist Revolutionaries helped him escape, and in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) Alexander begins to engage in revolutionary activities. “Long” - this nickname was given to him by fellow party members - worked in the field of propaganda among workers and military personnel, but did not welcome terrorist attacks and refused to take part in them.

In 1903, in Sevastopol, Alexander was arrested for his propaganda activities. He attempted to escape, for which he was placed in a special security prison. He spent more than a year in prison, during which time he tried to escape again. In 1905, Green was granted an amnesty and released, but a few months later in St. Petersburg he again found himself under arrest. After this, he was exiled to the Tobolsk province, from there Alexander immediately fled to Vyatka. At home, with the help of a friend, he took a new name for himself and, becoming Magilnov, returned to St. Petersburg.

Green becomes a writer

Since 1906, Greene's life has undergone a major turn: he begins to study literature. He published his first work, “The Merit of Private Panteleev,” signing “A.S.G.” The story described the unrest taking place in the army. Subsequently, almost all copies were destroyed by the police. The second work, “Elephant and Pug,” was sent to the printing house, but was not published.

Alexander’s first story to reach readers was “To Italy.” It was published in the Exchange Gazette. In 1908, Green published a collection of stories about the Social Revolutionaries, The Invisible Cap. At the same time, the writer begins to form his own view of the social system, and he breaks off relations with the party. Another thing happens significant event: Alexander marries Vera Abramova.

Photo of Greene after his arrest, 1910

Published in 1910 new collection Green's stories. In the writer’s work there is a transition from realistic works to fairy-tale-romantic ones. From that time on, the writer earned good money, joined the circle of famous writers, and became close to A. Kuprin. The calm life is disrupted by a new arrest and exile to the Arkhangelsk province. The return to St. Petersburg took place in 1912.

The actions of the works written by Green in exile and after it take place in an imaginary country, which K. Zelinsky would later call Greenland. Basically, the publication of Green's works took place in small newspapers and magazines, including Novoe Slovo, Niva, and Rodina. Since 1912, Alexander has been published in the more reputable publication “Modern World”.

In 1913, his wife left the writer, and later his beloved father died. In 1914, Green began working at the New Satyricon and continued to develop as a writer. In 1916, he hid in Finland from the police, who were pursuing him for an inappropriate comment about the monarch, and returned to St. Petersburg with the beginning of the revolution.

After the revolution, the New Satyricon was closed, and Green was arrested for notes expressing rejection of the new government. In 1919, the writer joined the army as a signalman, but was soon struck down by typhus. After recovery, Alexander is given a room in St. Petersburg, and a quiet period begins in his life, during which the famous “Scarlet Sails” comes from his pen. He dedicated this work to his wife Nina Mironova, whom he met in 1918. Three years later they became husband and wife and spent eleven years together. happy years.

Green with his pet hawk Gul, 1929

In 1924, the writer’s first novel, “The Shining World,” was published. Some time later, Green and his wife moved to Feodosia. A new novel, “The Golden Chain,” is published here. In 1926, a work recognized as a literary masterpiece appeared - “Running on the Waves.” At the same time, the writer begins to have difficulties publishing his works.

In 1930, Green moved to Crimea. Due to government restrictions on publications, his family goes hungry and his spouses begin to get sick. At this time he is working on the novel “Touchy”, which he will not have time to finish. The writer finds himself in a hopeless situation when his work becomes of no use to anyone, and he is denied a pension and any support. At the age of 51, Greene dies of stomach cancer. He was buried in Old Crimea. Only after his death was it decided to publish a collection of the writer’s works: in 1934, “Fantastic Novels” was released.

Alexander Green a few days before his death, 1932

Recognition of creativity

Greene's works were actively published after his death until 1944. “Scarlet Sails” was especially popular: it was read on the radio, and the ballet of the same name was shown at the Bolshoi Theater. During the struggle against cosmopolitanism, Greene, like many writers, was banned. In 1956, his works returned to literature. The writer's wife opens the Greene Museum in their home. In 1970, a museum was opened in Feodosia, in 1980 - in Kirov, in 2010 - in Slobodskoye.

Green's work is considered special; the writer was not influenced by his predecessors, had no successors, and the genre of his works defies classification. Sometimes they tried to compare him with foreign authors, but the comparison turned out to be too superficial. Some are named after Greene Russian libraries, streets of several cities. His works have been filmed several times.

Alexander Green(real name: Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky; August 11, 1880, city of Sloboda, Vyatka province, Russian Empire - July 8, 1932, city of Old Crimea, USSR) - Russian prose writer, representative of neo-romanticism, author of philosophical and psychological works, with elements of symbolic fiction. He began publishing in 1906 and published about 400 works in total.

The creator of a fictional country, which, thanks to the critic K. Zelinsky, received the name “Greenland”. Many of his works take place in this country, including his most famous books - “Running on the Waves” and “Scarlet Sails”.

Biography

early years

Alexander Grinevsky was born on August 11 (23), 1880 in the city of Slobodskaya Vyatka province. Father - Stefan Grinevsky (1843-1914), a Polish nobleman from the Disna district of the Vilna province of the North-Western region of the Russian Empire, for participation in the January uprising of 1863, at the age of 20, he was exiled indefinitely to Kolyvan, Tomsk province. Later he was allowed to move to the Vyatka province, where he arrived in 1868. In Russia they called him " Stepan Evseevich" In 1873 he married 16-year-old Russian nurse Anna Stepanovna Lepkova (1857-1895). For the first 7 years they had no children, Alexander became the first-born, later he had a brother Boris and two sisters, Antonina and Ekaterina.

Anna Stepanovna Grinevskaya, mother of the writer

Stepan Evseevich Grinevsky, Green's father

Alexander learned to read at the age of 6; his first book was Gulliver's Travels. Since childhood, Green loved books about sailors and travel. He dreamed of going to sea as a sailor and, driven by this dream, made attempts to run away from home. The boy's upbringing was inconsistent - he was either pampered, severely punished, or abandoned unattended.

In 1889, nine-year-old Alexander was sent to a preparatory class at a local real school. His classmates first gave Alexander the nickname “Green.” The school's report noted that Alexander Grinevsky's behavior was worse than all others, and if not corrected, he could be expelled from the school. Nevertheless, Alexander was able to finish the preparatory class and enter the first grade of the school, but in the second grade he wrote an offensive poem about the teachers and was expelled from the school. At the request of his father, Alexander was admitted to another school in 1892, which had a bad reputation in Vyatka.

At the age of 15, he was left without his mother, who died of tuberculosis. 4 months later (May 1895), my father married the widow Lydia Avenirovna Boretskaya. Alexander's relationship with his stepmother was tense, and he settled separately from his father's new family. Subsequently, Green described the atmosphere of provincial Vyatka as “a swamp of prejudices, lies, hypocrisy and falsehood.” The boy lived alone, enthusiastically reading books and writing poetry. He worked part-time by binding books and copying documents. At the encouragement of his father, he became interested in hunting, but due to his impulsive nature, he rarely returned with prey.

Wanderings and revolutionary activity (1896-1906)

Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Slobodskoye, where Sasha was baptized. View of the temple after its reconstruction in 1894 by architect I. A. Charushin

Memorial plaque on the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, where the future writer was baptized

In 1896, after graduating from the four-year Vyatka City School, 16-year-old Alexander left for Odessa, deciding to become a sailor. His father gave him 25 rubles of money and the address of his Odessa friend. For some time, “a sixteen-year-old, mustacheless, frail, narrow-shouldered youth in a straw hat” (as Greene ironically described himself at that time in his “Autobiography”) wandered around in an unsuccessful search for work and was desperately hungry. In the end, he turned to his father’s friend, who fed him and got him a job as a sailor on the Platon steamship, which plied the Odessa-Batum-Odessa route. However, Greene managed to travel abroad once, to Alexandria.

Green did not make a sailor; he was disgusted with the prosaic work of a sailor, soon quarreled with the captain and left the ship. In 1897, he went back to Vyatka, spent a year there and again left to seek his fortune, this time to Baku. There he tried many professions - he was a fisherman, a laborer, and worked in railway workshops. In the summer he returned to his father, then went on his travels again. He was a lumberjack, a gold miner in the Urals, a miner in an iron mine, and a theater copyist. “For several years he tried to enter life as into a stormy sea, and each time he, beaten against the stones, was thrown ashore - into the hated, philistine Vyatka, a dull, prim, remote city.”

In March 1902, Green interrupted his series of wanderings and became (either under pressure from his father, or tired of hunger ordeals) a soldier in the 213th Orovai Reserve Infantry Battalion, stationed in Penza. The morals of military service significantly strengthened Green's revolutionary sentiments. After six months, of which he spent three and a half in a punishment cell, he deserted, was caught in Kamyshin, and fled again. In the army, Green met Socialist Revolutionary propagandists who appreciated the young rebel and helped him hide in Simbirsk.

From that moment on, Green, having received the party nickname “Lanky,” sincerely devoted all his strength to the fight against the social system he hated, although he refused to participate in the execution of terrorist acts, limiting himself to propaganda among workers and soldiers of different cities. Subsequently, he did not like to talk about his Socialist Revolutionary activities. The Social Revolutionaries themselves appreciated his bright, enthusiastic speeches. Here is an excerpt from the memoirs of party Central Committee member N. Ya. Bykhovsky:

“Lanky” turned out to be an invaluable underground worker. Having once been a sailor himself and having once completed a long voyage, he was excellent at approaching sailors. He had an excellent knowledge of the life and psychology of the sailor masses and knew how to speak to them in their language. In his work among the sailors of the Black Sea squadron, he used all this with great success and immediately gained considerable popularity here. For the sailors, he was a completely different person, and this is extremely important. In this regard, none of us could compete with him.

Green later recalled that Bykhovsky once told him: “You would make a writer.” Greene probably already thought about this himself.

In 1903 Green was in Once again arrested in Sevastopol for “anti-government speeches” and distribution revolutionary ideas, “which led to undermining the foundations of autocracy and overthrowing the foundations of the existing system.” For attempting to escape, he was transferred to a maximum security prison, where he spent more than a year. In police documents he is characterized as “a closed, embittered person, capable of anything, even risking his life.” In January 1904, the Minister of Internal Affairs V.K. Pleve, shortly before the Socialist Revolutionary attempt on his life, received a report from the Minister of War A.N. Kuropatkin that “very important figure from civilians, who called himself first Grigoriev, and then Grinevsky.”

The investigation dragged on for more than a year (November 1903 - February 1905) due to Green's two attempts to escape and his complete denial. Green was tried in February 1905 by the Sevastopol Naval Court, the prosecutor demanded 20 years of hard labor. Lawyer A. S. Zarudny managed to reduce the penalty to 10 years of exile in Siberia. In October 1905, Green was released under a general amnesty, but in January 1906 he was arrested again in St. Petersburg. In prison, in the absence of friends and relatives, he was visited (under the guise of a bride) by Vera Pavlovna Abramova, the daughter of a wealthy official who sympathized with revolutionary ideals. In May, Green was sent to the city of Turinsk, Tobolsk province, for four years. Green stayed in Turinsk for only 3 days and fled to Vyatka, where, with the help of his father, he got someone else’s passport in the name of Malginov, using which he left for St. Petersburg.

The beginning of creativity (1906-1917)

Alexander Green with his first wife Vera in the village of Velikiy Bor near Pinega, 1911.

The years 1906-1908 became a turning point in Green's life. First of all, he became a writer. In 1906, Green's first story, “The Merit of Private Panteleev,” was published, signed A.S.G. The story described the army's outrages among the peasants. Green received the fee, but the entire circulation was confiscated at the printing house and destroyed; by chance only a few copies were preserved; A similar fate befell the next story, “The Elephant and the Pug.” Only starting on December 5, 1906, Greene's stories began to reach readers; The first was the story “To Italy”, signed “A. A. M-v" (that is Malginov).

Nickname A. S. Green first appeared under the story “Case” (1907). In 1908, Greene published his first collection of short stories, The Invisible Cap, with the subtitle “Stories about Revolutionaries.” Another event was the final break with the Social Revolutionaries. Green still hated the existing system, but he began to form his own positive ideal, and this ideal was not at all similar to the Socialist Revolutionary. Third important event marriage began - his imaginary “prison bride” 24-year-old Vera Abramova became Green’s wife. Nok and Gelly from the story “One Hundred Miles Along the River” are Green and Vera.

In 1910, his second collection “Stories” was published. Most of the stories included there are written in a realistic manner, but in two - “Reno Island” and “Lanphier Colony” - the future Greene storyteller can already be guessed. The action of these stories takes place in a conventional country; in style they are close to his later work. Greene himself believed that starting with these stories he could be considered a writer. In the early years, he published 25 stories annually.

In St. Petersburg, 1910

As a new original and talented Russian writer, he meets Alexei Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Kuzmin and other major writers. He became especially close to A.I. Kuprin. For the first time in his life, Green became the owner big money, which, however, did not linger with him, quickly disappearing after carousing and card games.

On July 27, 1910, the police finally discovered that the writer Green was the fugitive exile Grinevsky. He was arrested for the third time and in the fall of 1911 he was exiled to Pinega in the Arkhangelsk province. Vera went with him, they were allowed to officially get married. In exile, Greene wrote "The Life of Gnor" and "The Blue Cascade of Telluri". The period of his exile was reduced to two years, and in May 1912 the Grinevskys returned to St. Petersburg. Other works of a romantic direction soon followed: “Devil of Orange Waters”, “Zurbagan Shooter” (1913). They finally form the features of a fictional country, which literary critic K. Zelinsky will call “Greenland.”

Greene publishes primarily in the small press: newspapers and illustrated magazines. His works are published in “Birzhevye Vedomosti” and in the newspaper supplement “Novoye Slovo” magazine, “ New magazine for everyone", "Rodina", "Niva" and its monthly supplements, the newspaper "Vyatskaya Rech" and many others. Occasionally, his prose is published in the reputable “thick” monthly journals “Russian Thought” and “Modern World”; Green was published in the latter from 1912 to 1918 thanks to his acquaintance with A.I. Kuprin. In 1913-1914, his three-volume work was published by the Prometheus publishing house.

In the fall of 1913, Vera decided to separate from her husband. In her memoirs, she complains about Green's unpredictability and uncontrollability, his constant carousing, and mutual misunderstanding. Green made several attempts at reconciliation, but without success. On his 1915 collection, donated to Vera, Green wrote: “To my only friend,” and he never parted with Vera’s portrait until the end of his life. Almost simultaneously (1914), Green suffered another loss: his father died in Vyatka.

As a teenager, Green sent poems to the magazines Niva and Rodina, which did not publish them. "Captain Duke" in "Niva" in October 1916

In 1914, Green became an employee of the popular magazine “New Satyricon” and published his collection “An Incident on Dog Street” as a supplement to the magazine. Green worked extremely productively during this period. He had not yet decided to start writing a big story or novel, but his best stories of this time show the profound progress of Green the writer. The themes of his works are expanding, the style is becoming more and more professional - just compare the funny story “Captain Duke” and the sophisticated psychologically accurate short story “Hell Restored” (1915).

In the memoirs of Nina Nikolaevna Green, Green’s own words are cited about how he spent the bohemian pre-war years.

They called me “Mustang”, so I was charged with a thirst for life, full of fire, images, plots. He wrote on a grand scale, and did not exhaust himself. I got to life by accumulating greed for it in a hungry, vagabond, compressed youth, in prison. He greedily grabbed and devoured it. Couldn't get enough. I spent and burned myself from all ends. I forgave myself everything, I had not yet found myself.

Due to an “inappropriate comment about the reigning monarch” that became known to the police, Green was forced to hide in Finland from the end of 1916, but, having learned about the February Revolution, he returned to Petrograd. In the spring of 1917, he wrote a short story, “Walking to the Revolution,” testifying to the writer’s hope for renewal. However, reality soon disappointed the writer.

IN Soviet Russia (1917-1929)

After October revolution in the New Satyricon, Greene's notes and feuilletons appear one after another, condemning cruelty and outrages. He said: “I just can’t get my head around the idea that violence can be destroyed by violence.” In the spring of 1918, the magazine, along with all other opposition publications, was banned. Green was arrested for the fourth time and nearly shot. “He did not accept Soviet life... even more fiercely than pre-revolutionary life: he did not speak at meetings, did not join any literary groups, did not sign collective letters, platforms and appeals to the Central Committee of the party, wrote his manuscripts and letters according to pre-revolutionary spelling, and counted the days according to the old calendar... this dreamer and inventor - in the words of a writer from the near future - did not live by a lie.” The only good news was the resolution of divorces, which Green immediately took advantage of and married a certain Maria Dolidze. Within a few months, the marriage was considered a mistake, and the couple separated.

In the summer of 1919, Green was drafted into the Red Army as a signalman, but he soon fell ill with typhus and ended up in the Botkin barracks for almost a month. Maxim Gorky sent the seriously ill Green honey, coffee and bread.

Cover of the first edition (1923)

After recovery, Green, with the assistance of Gorky, managed to obtain academic rations and housing - a room in the “House of Arts” on Nevsky Prospekt, 15, where Green lived next to N. S. Gumilyov, V. A. Rozhdestvensky, O. E. Mandelstam, V. Kaverin. Neighbors recalled that Greene lived as a hermit and barely communicated with anyone, but it was here that he wrote his most famous, touchingly poetic work - the extravaganza “Scarlet Sails” (published in 1923). “It was difficult to imagine that such a bright flower, warmed by love for people, could be born here, in gloomy, cold and half-starved Petrograd in the winter twilight of the harsh year 1920, and that it was grown by a man outwardly gloomy, unfriendly and seemingly closed in a special world, where he didn’t want to let anyone in,” Vs recalled. Christmas. Among the first to appreciate this masterpiece was Maxim Gorky, who often read to guests the episode of the appearance of a fairy-tale ship in front of Assol.

Nina Nikolaevna Green

In the spring of 1921, Green married a 26-year-old widow, nurse Nina Nikolaevna Mironova (after Korotkova’s first husband). They met at the beginning of 1918, when Nina worked at the Petrograd Echo newspaper. Her first husband died in the war. New meeting occurred in February 1921, Nina was desperately in need and was selling things (Green described this episode at the beginning of the story “The Pied Piper”). A month later he proposed to her. During the eleven subsequent years allotted to Green by fate, they did not part and both considered their meeting a gift of fate. Green dedicated the Scarlet Sails extravaganza, completed this year, to Nina.

The couple rented a room on Panteleimonovskaya, transported their meager luggage there: a bunch of manuscripts, some clothes and the constant portrait of Vera Pavlovna. There was no furniture; we slept on the floor on straw mattresses. At first, Green was almost never published, but with the beginning of the NEP, private publishing houses appeared, and he managed to publish a new collection, “White Fire” (1922). The collection included the vivid story “Ships in Lisse,” which Green himself considered one of the best.

In the early 1920s, Greene decided to begin his first novel, which he called “The Shining World.” Main character of this complex symbolist work is the flying superman Drood, convincing people to choose instead of the values ​​of “this world” highest values Brilliant world. In 1924, the novel was published in Leningrad. He continued to write stories, the pinnacles of which were “The Wordy Brownie,” “The Pied Piper,” and “Fandango.”

Using the fees, Green threw a feast, went with Nina to his beloved Crimea and bought an apartment in Leningrad, then sold this apartment and moved to Feodosia. The initiator of the move was Nina, who wanted to save Green from drunken Petrograd revelry and pretended to be sick. In the fall of 1924, Green bought an apartment on Galereynaya Street (now there is the Alexander Green Museum). Occasionally we went to Koktebel to see Maximilian Voloshin.

In Feodosia, Green wrote the novel “The Golden Chain” (1925, published in “New World”), and the following year he completed his main masterpiece, “Running on the Waves.” This novel combines the best features of Green's talent: a deep mystical idea about the need for a dream and the realization of dreams, subtle poetic psychologism, and a fascinating romantic plot. For two years the author tried to publish the novel in Soviet publishing houses, and only at the end of 1928 the book was published by the publishing house “Land and Factory”. With great difficulty it was possible to publish (1929) latest novels Green: “Jesse and Morgiana” and “The Road to Nowhere.”

Green noted sadly: “The era is rushing by. She doesn't need me the way I am. And I cannot be anyone else. And I don’t want to.” “Even though during all my writing nothing was said about me as a person who did not lick the heels of modernity, never, but I know my own worth.”

Prohibited. Last years (1929-1932)

Ghoul, Greene's favorite hawk (1929). The story “The Story of a Hawk” is dedicated to him.

In 1927, the private publisher L.V. Wolfson began publishing a 15-volume collected works of Green, but only 8 volumes were published, after which Wolfson was arrested by the GPU. NEP was coming to an end. Green's attempts to insist on fulfilling the contract with the publishing house only led to huge legal costs and ruin. Greene's binges began to recur again. However, in the end, the Green family still managed to win the case, winning seven thousand rubles, which, however, were greatly devalued by inflation.

The apartment in Feodosia had to be sold. In 1930, the Grinevskys moved to the city of Old Crimea, where life was cheaper. Since 1930, Soviet censorship has banned reprints of Greene and imposed a limit on new books: one per year. Both Green and Nina were desperately hungry and often sick. The novel Touchable, begun by Greene at this time, was never completed, although some critics consider it the best in his work. Green mentally thought through the whole plot to the end and said to Nina: “Some scenes are so good that, remembering them, I myself smile.” At the end of April 1931, already seriously ill, Green went for the last time (through the mountains) to Koktebel to visit Voloshin. This route is still known and popular among tourists as the Greene's Trail.

In the summer, Green went to Moscow, but not a single publishing house showed interest in his new novel. Upon his return, Green wearily said to Nina: “Amba to us. They will no longer print." There was no response to the request for a pension from the Writers' Union. As historians have found out, at a board meeting, Lydia Seifullina said: “Green is our ideological enemy. The Union should not help such writers! Not a single penny at all!” Green sent another request for help to Gorky; it is unknown whether it reached its destination, but there was no answer either. In May 1932, after new petitions, a transfer of 250 rubles unexpectedly arrived. from the Writers' Union, sent for some reason to the name of “the widow of the writer Green, Nadezhda Green,” although Green was still alive.

Green died on July 8, 1932 in Stary Crimea from stomach cancer. Two days before his death, he asked to invite a priest and confessed. He was buried there in the city cemetery, Nina chose a place from where he could see the sea. At Green’s grave, sculptor Tatyana Gagarina erected a monument “Running on the Waves.”

Upon learning of Greene's death, several leading Soviet writers called for the publication of a collection of his works; Even Seifullina joined them. The collection “Fantastic Novels” was published in 1934.

Green's return to Soviet readers

Nina Nikolaevna Green, the writer's widow, continued to live in Old Crimea, in an adobe house, and worked as a nurse. When Hitler's army captured Crimea, Nina was left with her seriously ill mother in Nazi-occupied territory and worked as a proofreader for a local newspaper. Then she was taken to work in Germany, and in 1945 she voluntarily returned from American zone occupation in the USSR.

After the trial, Nina received ten years in the camps for “collaboration and treason,” with confiscation of property. She served her sentence in Stalin's camps on Pechora. Green's first wife, Vera Pavlovna, provided her with great support, including things and food. Nina served almost her entire sentence and was released in 1955 under an amnesty (rehabilitated in 1997). Vera Pavlovna died earlier, in 1951.

Meanwhile, books by the “Soviet romantic” Green continued to be published in the USSR until 1944. In besieged Leningrad, radio broadcasts were broadcast with the reading of “Scarlet Sails” (1943), and the premiere of the ballet “Scarlet Sails” took place at the Bolshoi Theater. In 1946, L. I. Borisov’s story “The Wizard from Gel-Gyu” about Alexander Green was published, which earned the praise of K. G. Paustovsky and B. S. Grinevsky, and later condemnation from N. N. Green. However, during the years of the struggle against cosmopolitanism in the Soviet press, the label of “cosmopolitan”, alien to proletarian literature, “militant reactionary and spiritual emigrant”, like many other cultural figures (A. A. Akhmatova, M. M. Zoshchenko, D. D. Shostakovich ) was glued to Green as well. V. Vazhdaev’s article “The Preacher of Cosmopolitanism,” 1950, was devoted to the topic of Green’s “cosmopolitanism.” His books were removed from libraries.

After Stalin's death (1953), the ban on some writers was lifted. Since 1956, through the efforts of K. Paustovsky, Y. Olesha, I. Novikov and others, Greene was returned to literature; his works were published in millions of copies. Having received a fee for “Selected” (1956) through the efforts of Green’s friends, Nina Nikolaevna came to Old Crimea, found with difficulty her husband’s abandoned grave and found out that the house where Green died had passed to the chairman of the local executive committee and was used as a barn and chicken coop. In 1960, after several years of struggle to return the house, Nina Nikolaevna opened public principles Green Museum in Old Crimea. Nina Nikolaevna spent the last ten years of her life there, with a pension of 21 rubles (copyright was no longer valid). In July 1970, the Green Museum was also opened in Feodosia, and a year later Green’s house in Old Crimea also received the status of a museum. Its discovery by the Crimean regional committee of the CPSU was linked to the conflict with Nina Nikolaevna: “We are for Green, but against his widow. There will be a museum only when she dies.”

Nina Nikolaevna died on September 27, 1970 in a Kyiv hospital; she bequeathed to be buried next to her husband. The local party leadership, irritated by the loss of the chicken coop, imposed a ban, and Nina was buried at the other end of the cemetery. On October 23 of the same year, Nina’s birthday, six of Nina’s friends reburied the coffin at night in its designated place.

Creativity and personal position

Artistic and ideological features of Green's prose

Still from the film " True story about Scarlet Sails"

Greene is openly didactic, that is, his works are based on a clear system of values ​​and invite the reader to accept and share these ideals with the author.

It is generally accepted that Green is a romantic, a “knight of dreams.” Green understands the dream as the desire of a spiritually rich person for higher, truly human values, contrasting them with callousness, greed and animal pleasures. The difficult choice between these two paths and the consequences of the choice made is one of important topics at Greene's. Its goal is to show how organic goodness and dreams, love and compassion are for a person, and how destructive evil, cruelty, and alienation are. Existing simultaneously in the real world and in the world of dreams, Green felt like a “translator between these two worlds.” In “Scarlet Sails,” the author, through the mouth of Gray, calls for “working a miracle” for another person; “He will have a new soul and you will have a new one.” In “The Shining World” there is a similar call: “Bring into your life that world whose sparkles have already been given to you by a generous, secret hand.”

Among Green's instrumental means are excellent taste, alien to naturalism, the ability by simple means to elevate a story to the level of a deep parable, and a bright, exciting plot. Critics note that Greene is incredibly “cinematic.” Transferring the action to a fictional country is also a thoughtful technique: “By and large, what is important to Green is the person and only the person outside of his connection with history, nationality, wealth or poverty, religion and political beliefs. Green, as it were, abstracts, cleanses his heroes of these layers and sterilizes his world, because this way he can see a person better.”

The writer focuses on the struggle in the human soul and portrays the finest psychological nuances with amazing skill. “The volume of Greene’s knowledge in this area, the accuracy of the depiction of the most complex mental processes, sometimes exceeding the level of ideas and capabilities of his time, amaze specialists today.” Green was close to the symbolists who tried to expand the possibilities of prose, to give it more dimensions - hence the frequent use of metaphors, paradoxical combinations of words, etc.

An example of Green’s style using an example from “Scarlet Sails”:

She knew how and loved to read, but even in a book she read mainly between the lines, as she lived. Unconsciously, through a kind of inspiration, she made at every step many ethereal-subtle discoveries, inexpressible, but important, like purity and warmth. Sometimes - and this continued for a number of days - she was even reborn; the physical confrontation of life fell away, like silence in the blow of a bow, and everything she saw, what she lived, what was around, became a lace of secrets in the image of everyday life.

Alexander Green's place in literature

Alexander Green occupies a very special place in Russian and world literature. He had neither predecessors nor direct successors. Critics tried to compare him with those close in style to Edgar Allan Poe, Ernst Hoffmann, Robert Stevenson, Bret Harte and others - but each time it turned out that the similarity was superficial and limited. “He seems to be a classic of Soviet literature, but at the same time not quite: he is alone, outside the frame, outside the series, outside literary continuity.”

Even the genre of his works is difficult to determine. Sometimes Greene's books are classified as science fiction (or fantasy), but he himself protested against this. Yuri Olesha recalled that he once expressed his admiration to Green for the wonderful fantastic idea of ​​a flying man (“The Shining World”), but Green was even offended: “This is a symbolic novel, not a fantastic one! It’s not a person flying at all, it’s the soaring of the spirit!” A significant part of Greene’s works do not contain any fantastic techniques (for example, “Scarlet Sails”).

However, with all the originality of Green’s work, his main value guidelines are in line with the traditions of Russian classics. From what has been said above about the ideological motives of Green’s prose, we can formulate brief conclusions: Green is a moralist, a talented defender of humanistic moral ideals traditional for Russian literature. “For the most part, A. Green’s works are poetically and psychologically sophisticated fairy tales, short stories and sketches, which talk about the joy of dreams coming true, about the human right to more than just “living” on earth, and about the fact that land and sea full of miracles - miracles of love, thought and nature, - joyful meetings, deeds and legends... In the romance of Green’s type “there is no peace, no comfort,” it comes from an unbearable thirst to see the world more perfect, more sublime, and therefore the artist’s soul reacts so painfully to everything gloomy, mournful, humiliating, offending humanity.”

The poet Leonid Martynov, who revered the work of Alexander Green, drew the attention of his contemporaries in the late 1960s to the fact that “Green was not only a wonderful romantic, but one of the brilliant critical realists.” Due to the re-release of the same works, Greene is known “far from entirely, presenting him still somehow one-sidedly, often in a leaf-romantic way.”

Religious views

Young Green. Bust on the Green embankment in Kirov

Alexander Green was baptized Orthodox rite, although his father was still a Catholic at that moment (he converted to Orthodoxy when Alexander was 11 years old). Some episodes of it early life, described in the “Autobiographical Tale”, are interpreted as an indicator that in his youth Greene was far from religion.

Later religious views Green began to change. The novel The Glittering World (1921) contains an extensive and vivid scene, which was subsequently requested Soviet censorship cut out: Runa enters the village church, kneels before the painted “holy girl from Nazareth”, next to whom “the pensive eyes of little Christ looked at the distant fate of the world.” Runa asks God to strengthen her faith, and in response she sees Drood appear in the picture and join Christ and the Madonna. This scene and Drood's numerous appeals in the novel show that Greene viewed his ideals as close to Christian ones, as one of the paths to the Shining World, “where it is quiet and dazzling.”

Nina Nikolaevna recalled that in Crimea they often attended church; Green’s favorite holiday was Easter. In a letter to Vera shortly before his death (1930), Green explained: “Nina and I believe without trying to understand anything, since it is impossible to understand. We are given only signs of the participation of the Higher Will in life.” Greene refused to give an interview to Atheist magazine, saying, "I believe in God." Before his death, Green called a local priest, confessed and received communion.

Green's creativity in the mirror of criticism

Pre-revolutionary criticism

Attitude literary critics to Green's work was heterogeneous and changed over time. Greene's early realistic stories were well received by readers, although some critics, in particular the Menshevik critic N.V. Volsky, criticized him for excessive depiction of violence. The new romantic stage of the writer’s work that followed the realistic one, manifested in the choice of exotic names and subjects, was not liked by critics; Greene was not taken seriously and was accused of epigonism, imitation of Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffman, Jack London, Haggard. L. N. Voitolovsky and A. G. Gornfeld came to the writer’s defense, believing that Green’s likening to popular Western romantic writers essentially explains nothing in Alexander Green’s creative method.

Thus, the critic Gornfeld wrote in 1910: “Strangers are his own people, distant countries are close to him, because these are people, because all countries are our land... Therefore, Bret Harte or Kipling, or Poe, who really gave a lot Green's stories are only a shell... Green is primarily a poet of intense life. He wants to talk only about the important, about the main thing, about the fatal: and not in everyday life, but in the human soul. L. N. Voitolovsky supported Gornfeld, speaking about the story “The Island.” Reno”: “Perhaps this air is not entirely tropical, but it is a new special air that all modernity breathes - anxious, stuffy, tense and powerless”... “Romanticism is different from romance. And decadents are called romantics... Green has a different kind of romanticism. akin to Gorky’s romanticism... He breathes faith in life, a thirst for healthy and strong sensations.” Other critics, for example, V. E. Kovsky, noted the similarity between the romantic works of Gorky and Green.

Arkady Gornfeld returned once again to Greene’s allusions to Edgar Poe in 1917 in a review of the story “The Adventurer.” “At first impression, the story of Mr. Alexander Greene can easily be mistaken for the story of Edgar Allan Poe... It is not difficult to reveal and show everything that is external, conventional, mechanical in this imitation... Russian imitation is infinitely weaker than the English original. It is really weaker...” “This... would not be worth talking about if Greene were a powerless imitator, if he wrote only worthless parodies of Edgar Allan Poe, if only the comparison of his works with the work of his remarkable prototype would be an unnecessary insult... "Green is an extraordinary figure in our fiction; the fact that he is little appreciated is rooted to a certain extent in his shortcomings, but his merits play a much more significant role... Green is still not an imitator of Edgar Allan Poe, not an adopter of the stencil, not even a stylizer ; he is more independent than many who write mediocre stories... Greene has no template at his core;... Greene would have been Greene if there had not been Edgar Allan Poe.”

Gradually, in the criticism of the 1910s, an opinion was formed about the writer as a “master of plot,” a stylizer and a romantic. Therefore, in subsequent decades, the leitmotif of Green’s research was the study of the writer’s psychologism and the principles of his plotting.

Criticism of the 1920s-1930s

In the 1920s, after Greene wrote his most significant works, interest in his prose reached its peak. Eduard Bagritsky wrote that “few Russian writers have so perfectly mastered the word in all its fullness.” Maxim Gorky spoke of Greene this way: “a useful storyteller, a necessary visionary.”

In the 1930s-1940s, attention to the work of A. Greene was complicated by the general ideologization of literary criticism. However, in the 1930s, articles about Greene by Marietta Shaginyan, Cornelius Zelinsky, Konstantin Paustovsky, Caesar Volpe, Mikhail Levidov, Mikhail Slonimsky, Ivan Sergievsky were published , Alexandra Roskina. According to Shaginyan, “Green’s misfortune and misfortune is that he developed and embodied his theme not on the material of living reality - then we would have before us the true romance of socialism - but on the material of the conventional world of a fairy tale, entirely included in the “associative system” capitalist relations."

Cornelius Zelinsky’s approach was different. Like Gornfeld, he compares creative method Greene and Edgar Allan Poe. According to Zelinsky, A. Green is not just a dreamer, but a “militant dreamer.” Discussing the writer’s style, he comes to the following conclusion: “In the eternal hunt for the melody of poetic fantasy, Greene learned to weave such verbal networks, to operate with words so freely, elastically and subtly that his skill cannot fail to attract our working interest.” “Green, in his fantastic short stories, creates such a play of artistic forms, where the content is also conveyed by the movement of verbal parts, the properties of a difficult style.” “In Green’s stories one can trace a curious and gradual transformation of his style, in connection with the evolution from realist to science fiction writer, from Kuprin to ... Edgar Allan Poe.”

Literary critic Ivan Sergievsky did not avoid the traditional comparison of Green with the classics of the adventure genre in the West: “Green’s novels and stories echo the works of the classic adventure-fantasy short story Edgar Poe and the best works of Joseph Conrad. However, Green does not have the power of thought, nor realistic features these writers. It is much closer to the adventure-fantastic novella of artists of modern decadence such as, say, McOrlan.” In the end, I.V. Sergievsky still comes to the conclusion that Alexander Green has overcome the “adventurous canon of literature of bourgeois decadence.”

But not all pre-war critics could fit Green into the usual scheme of socialist creativity. The ideologized approach to the writer in pre-war journalism was revealed with all its force in Vera Smirnova’s article “A Ship without a Flag.” In her opinion, writers like Greene deserve to have their anti-Soviet nature made clear, and that “the ship on which Greene and his crew of outcasts sailed from the shores of their fatherland has no flag, it is heading “to nowhere."

Post-war criticism

Free discussion of Green's work was interrupted in the late forties during the ideological struggle with representatives of so-called cosmopolitanism. Carrying out the guidelines of the new program of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to tighten the country’s ideological course and for the approval of a new “Soviet patriotism”, Soviet writer V. M. Vazhdaev in the article “Preacher of Cosmopolitanism” in the magazine “ New world"(1950) turned to the work of Alexander Green. Vazhdaev’s entire article is an open and unambiguous call to fight against cosmopolitanism, which, according to Vazhdaev, was embodied by A. S. Green: “In this regard, it is worth taking a closer look at the peculiar cult of Alexander Green, a third-rate writer, author of “fantastic” novels and short stories , a writer whom aesthetic criticism has persistently praised for many years.”

V. Vazhdaev further argued that numerous fans of A. Green - Konstantin Paustovsky, Sergei Bobrov, Boris Annibal, Mikh. Slonimsky, L. Borisov and others - exaggerated Green's work beyond all measure into a major literary phenomenon. Moreover, the Stalinist publicist saw some political motives in the creation of Greenland. The apotheosis of Vazhdaev was expressed in the following statement: “A. Green was never a harmless “dreamer.” He was a militant reactionary and a cosmopolitan." “The artist’s skill is inextricably linked with his worldview and is determined by it; innovation is possible only where there is a bold revolutionary thought, deep ideological commitment and the artist’s devotion to his homeland and people.” And the work of A. Green, according to Vazhdaev, did not meet the requirements of revolutionary innovation, since Green did not love his homeland, but painted and poeticized the alien bourgeois world.

Vazhdaev’s rhetoric was repeated word for word in A. Tarasenkov’s article “On National Traditions and Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism” in the Znamya magazine, published simultaneously with Vazhdaev’s article. After Stalin's death, Green's books were again in demand among readers. The ideological approach to Greene gradually began to give way to a literary one. In 1955, in the book “Golden Rose,” Konstantin Paustovsky assessed the significance of the story “Scarlet Sails” as follows: “If Green had died, leaving us only one of his prose poems, “Scarlet Sails,” then that would have been enough to stage it join the ranks of wonderful writers who disturb human heart a call to excellence."

Writer and literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, reflecting on Greene the romantic, wrote that Greene “led people, leading them away from the desire for ordinary bourgeois well-being. He taught them to be brave, to be truthful, to believe in themselves, to believe in Man.”

Late Soviet and post-Soviet criticism

Memorial plaque on Grina embankment, 21, Kirov

Writer and critic Vladimir Amlinsky drew attention to Green's peculiar loneliness in literary world Soviet Union. “In today’s literary process he is noticeable, less than any of the Masters of his caliber; in today’s criticism (...) his name is mentioned in passing.” Analyzing Green’s work in comparison with the work of M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov, K. Paustovsky, who are somewhat similar to Green, Amlinsky makes the following conclusion: “Green’s failure lies in the extraordinary concentration of romanticism, which had the opposite effect, especially in the early stories.” .

Vadim Kovsky believes that “Green’s prose often provokes “superficial enthusiasm” (...) However, more often than not, Greene simply deceives us, hiding a high artistic thought, a complex concept of personality, an extensive system of connections with surrounding reality" “Green has a highly poetic vision of the world, characterized by pervasive lyricism. “The ‘cognitive part’, the material specification of the description are contraindicated for such a vision,” he writes in the book “The Romantic World of Alexander Greene.”

Contemporary writer Natalya Meteleva published her own analysis of Green’s work. The basis of Green’s worldview is, in her opinion, a child’s attitude towards the world (infantility). The writer is distinguished by “naivety<…>an eternal teenager with complete inability to exist in the world, which he retained until the end of his life.” “When they talk about the “romantic maximalism” of A. S. Green, for some reason they always forget that maximalism in adulthood is a sign of infantile personality development.” Meteleva reproaches Green for his unkind attitude towards technical progress, calls the writer a “hippie petrel”, and in his books he sees “the eternal dreams of a dependent about equalization” (““do good”: have you noticed at whose expense this good is done?”).

Green scholar Natalya Orishchuk points out that the term is more applicable to Green neo-romanticism than the usual romanticism. She dwells in detail on the process of “Sovietization” of Green’s work in the 1960s - the posthumous inscription of the writer’s initially apolitical work into the context of art socialist realism. In her opinion, Greene's works became the object of very intense indoctrination. The resulting Soviet stereotype of Greene's perception became unique cultural phenomenon- "Green's sign". “The products of Soviet ideological myth-making,” according to Orishchuk, are four myths: 1. Green’s devotion to the October Revolution and the state political regime; 2. Green's transition to the fold of socialist realism; 3. Interpretation of Greene's early prose as a political declaration of the writer; 4. Green as an author of works for children. As a result, the phenomenon of a mass Soviet cult of Greene emerged in the 1960s.

Memory

Named after Alexander Greene

In 1985, the name “Grinevia” was assigned to the small planet 2786, discovered on September 6, 1978 by Soviet astronomer N. S. Chernykh.

Alexander Green on postage stamp Ukraine, 2005

In 2000, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the birth of A. S. Green, the Union of Writers of Russia, the administration of the cities of Kirov and Slobodsky established the annual Russian Literary Prize named after Alexander Green for works for children and youth, imbued with the spirit of romance and hope.

In 2012, the three-deck river passenger ship received the name “Alexander Green”.

• In 1960, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, the writer’s wife opened the Writer’s House-Museum in Old Crimea.
• In 1970, the Greene Literary and Memorial Museum was also created in Feodosia.
• On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, in 1980, the Alexander Green House-Museum was opened in the city of Kirov.
• In 2010, the Museum of Romance of Alexander Green was created in the city of Slobodskaya.

Green's readings and festivals

• International scientific conference “Grinov Readings” - has been held in even years in Feodosia since 1988 (the first half of September).
• Green's readings in Kirov have been held once every 5 years (sometimes more often) since 1975, on the writer's birthday (August 23).
• Since 1987, the Greenland art song festival has been held in the village of Basharovo near Kirov.
• “Bereg Grina” - a Far Eastern festival of art songs and poetry near Nakhodka; has been held since 1994.
• The annual Greenland festival in Old Crimea, held since 2005 on the writer’s birthday.

Alexander Green Street exists in many Russian and Ukrainian cities: Arkhangelsk, Gelendzhik, Moscow (since 1986), Naberezhnye Chelny, Slobodskoy, Stary Krym, Feodosia. In Kirov there is an embankment named after the writer.

Libraries

Several large libraries are named after Greene.

• Kirovskaya regional library for children and youth.
• Youth Library No. 16 in Moscow.
• City library in Slobodskoye.
• Library in Nizhny Novgorod.
• Central city library in Feodosia, Crimea, Ukraine.

Scarlet Sails festival in St. Petersburg

• In Kirov there is a Gymnasium named after Alexander Green.
• In 2000, a bronze bust of the writer was installed on the embankment in Kirov. (Sculptors Kotsienko K.I. and Bondarev V.A.)
• There is a tradition in St. Petersburg when on the night of prom Russian schoolchildren enters the mouth of the Neva sailing ship with scarlet sails. See Scarlet Sails (graduates holiday).

Residence addresses Petrograd-Leningrad

• 1920 - May 1921 - House of Arts (DISK) - 25th October Avenue, 15.
• May 1921 - February 1922 - Zaremba apartment building - Panteleimonovskaya street, 11.
• 1923-1924 - apartment building - Dekabristov Street, 11.

• St. Lanzheronovskaya, 2.

Film adaptations

• 1958 - Watercolor
• 1961 - Scarlet Sails
• 1967 - Running on the Waves
• 1969 - Lanphier Colony
• 1972 - Morgiana
• 1976 - The Deliverer (film by Yugoslav-Croatian director Krsto Papic, based on the story “The Pied Piper”)
• 1978 - Assol, cartoon directed by B. P. Stepantsev
• 1983 - The Man from Green Country (teleplay)
• 1984 - Shining World
• 1984 - Life and books of Alexander Green (television play)
• 1986 - Golden Chain
• 1988 - Mister Decorator
• 1990 - One hundred miles along the river
• 1992 - Road to nowhere
• 1995 - Gelly and Nok
• 2003 - Infection (film)
• 2007 - Running on the waves
• 2010 - Man from the Unfulfilled ( documentary V. Nedoshivina about A. Green)
• 2012 - Green lamp