The front-line writer Boris Vasiliev died. Vasiliev Boris Lvovich Boris Vasiliev biography by date

Soviet and Russian writer, playwright, and screenwriter, laureate of the State Prize of the USSR Boris Lvovich Vasiliev was born on May 21, 1924 in the city of Smolensk in the family of a regular officer of the tsarist, later the Red and Soviet army. Mother, Elena Alekseeva, came from an old noble family.

In 1943, after graduating from the ninth grade, he volunteered for the front. Participated in the battles near Smolensk, was shell-shocked.

The writer's work was marked by numerous awards of the USSR and Russia. In 1975 he was awarded the State Prize of the USSR. Boris Vasiliev was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship (1994), "For Merit to the Fatherland" III degree (1999), "For Merit to the Fatherland" II degree (2004). In 1997, the writer was awarded the Prize. HELL. Sakharov "For Civil Courage". He was also awarded international literary prizes "Moscow Penne", "Venets", "Nika" and others.

Writer on Zora Polyak, whom he met while studying at the Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Troops.

The material was prepared on the basis of open sources.

“Honor with a uniform is not issued. Honor is a moral stuffing.” Boris Vasiliev.

Cavalier of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, III degree (1999, for outstanding contribution to the development of Russian literature)
Cavalier of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, II degree (2004, and outstanding services in the development of domestic literature and many years of creative activity)
Cavalier of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor
Cavalier of the Order of Friendship of Peoples
Knight of the Order of Friendship (1994, for his great personal contribution to the development of modern literature and national culture)
Laureate of the Prize of the President of the Russian Federation in the field of literature and art in 1999
Winner of a commemorative prize at the Venice Film Festival (1972, for the film “The Dawns Here Are Quiet…”)
Winner of the main prize of the All-Union Film Festival (1973, for the film “The Dawns Here Are Quiet…”)
Laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1975, for the film “The Dawns Here Are Quiet…”)
Laureate of the Lenin Komsomol Prize (1974, for the film “The Dawns Here Are Quiet…”)
Laureate of the A.D. Sakharov Prize "For Civil Courage" (1997)
Nick Award Winner (2002)

His father Vasiliev Lev Aleksandrovich was a career officer of the tsarist, and later - the commander of the Red and Soviet armies. "Miraculously survived three army purges, which hit the former officers of the tsarist army the most .." - Boris Vasilyevich wrote about him. Mom Elena Alekseeva was from a well-known old noble family, associated with the names of Pushkin and Tolstoy, with the social movement of the 19th century. Her father and uncle were the organizers of the populist circle of the Chaikovites, went through the “trial of the 193s” and participated in the creation of communes of the Fourierist type in America.

The generation of Boris Vasiliev is the first generation born after the bloodshed of the Civil War. It grew up in the midst of an ongoing secret civil war. “Of course, we did not feel the full horror of permanent terror,” Vasiliev wrote later, “but our parents, relatives, older brothers and sisters experienced it to the fullest. We inherited a completely destroyed legal space, and our grandchildren - a destroyed ideological one... Neither father nor mother ever told me anything about themselves. Not about my childhood, not about my youth. They proceeded from the main principle of the time when I was a child: the less I know about the past, the calmer my life will be.

A profound question: “Where does the Motherland begin?” - implied the simplest answer: with respect for the history of his people in general and for his parents in particular. That is why the influence of family moral and philosophical traditions on the formation of his worldview Boris Vasiliev considered decisive: “I was brought up in the old fashioned way, as was customary in the provincial families of the Russian intelligentsia, which is why I am, of course, a person of the late 19th century. And for love of literature, and for respect for history, and for faith in man, and for the absolute inability to lie ... ".

It was a creative upbringing. Unlike the destructive upbringing of the Soviet era with its slogans, ideology, its hostility to any dissent, show trials of "enemies of the people" and mass repressions and executions. Vasiliev wrote: “The Soviet government very thoroughly destroyed families, both in the city and in the countryside, never tired of asserting that the upbringing of the younger generation is in the strong hands of the state. God, who just didn’t offer us in the role of educators! The school and the pioneer organization, the Komsomol and the great construction sites of communism, the army and the work collective... We grew up in an atmosphere of teams... We marched, shouting slogans, towards the goal designated by the leaders. The leaders enthusiastically shouted "Hurrah!". They shouted "Death!" not only long before the trial, but also before the investigation, since the newspapers set us on fire immediately after the arrests of the next enemies ... We were children of the Civil War, and it continued until the Great Patriotic War ... And in this civil war - quiet, creeping – our generation took the most active part. But the retribution of this generation for forced blindness was exorbitantly cruel - it was on his bodies that the tanks of Kleist and Guderian stalled.

Boris Vasiliev's early passion for history and love for literature since childhood intertwined in his mind. While studying at a Voronezh school, he played in amateur performances, published a handwritten magazine with his friend. And when Vasiliev graduated from the 9th grade, the war began.

Boris Vasiliev went to the front as a volunteer in the Komsomol fighter battalion and on July 3, 1941 was sent to Smolensk. He was surrounded, left it in October 1941, then ended up in a camp for displaced persons, from where, at his personal request, he was sent first to a cavalry regimental school, and then to a machine-gun regimental school, after which he served in the 8th Guards Air Force. Airborne Regiment of the 3rd Guards Airborne Division. During a combat reset on March 16, 1943, he was hit by a mine stretching and was taken to the hospital with a severe concussion. The boys born in the year of Lenin's death were destined to almost all lay down their lives in the Great Patriotic War. Only 3 percent of them survived, and Boris Vasilyev miraculously turned out to be among them. “... I really got a lucky ticket. I didn’t die of typhus in 1934, I didn’t die in encirclement in 1941, my parachute opened on all my seven landing jumps, and in the last - combat, near Vyazma, in March 43 - I ran into a mine stretching, but there was not even a scratch on the body.

In the autumn of 1943, he entered the Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Troops named after I.V. Stalin (later named after R.Ya. Malinovsky), where he met his future wife Zorya Albertovna Polyak, who studied at the same academy. The dramatic episode at the beginning of their joint journey became, according to Boris Vasiliev, an epigraph to the whole subsequent life: “... I had already picked up a bouquet when I suddenly saw a mine stretch. He followed his eyes and noticed the mine to which she led. And I realized that I was brought to an uncleared area of ​​\u200b\u200bdefense. I carefully turned to my young wife, and she was in front of me. Face to face.

- I know. I was afraid to scream so that you would not rush to me. Now we will change places carefully, and you will follow me. Step by step.

- I'll go first. I know how and where to look.

No, you will follow me. I see better than you.

For some reason, we spoke very quietly, but Lieutenant Vasilyeva spoke in such a way that it was pointless to argue. And we went. Step by step. And they got out. Since then, I have often found myself in minefields ... For more than six decades, I have been walking through the minefield of our life behind Zorina's back. And I am happy. I am immensely happy because I follow my love. Step by step." So this family began, and so it remained until the end of days. Boris Lvovich believed that Zorya Albertovna saved him. She became the prototype of the heroine Iskra Polyakova in the story "Tomorrow there was a war." And in general, in the features of many of his favorite female heroines were the features of his wife. She guarded him all his life, she was his shore. They were people of the utmost modesty, despite the enormous popularity of his books and films based on his works. Therefore, few people knew about the inner life of this family. On his part, it was an extremely chivalrous attitude towards his wife - tender and reverent. She also tried to do everything possible for him.

After graduating from the Faculty of Engineering in 1946, he worked as a tester for wheeled and tracked vehicles in the Urals. He retired from the army in 1954 with the rank of engineer-captain. In the report, he called the reason for his decision the desire to engage in literature, despite the fact that the beginning of literary activity turned out to be full of unforeseen complications for the writer. The first work that came out from under his pen was the play "Tankers", written in 1954. The play was about how difficult the change of generations was in the post-war army in the human and professional terms. This play, entitled "Officer", was accepted for production at the Central Theater of the Soviet Army, but after two public screenings in December 1955, shortly before the premiere, the performance was banned by the Main Political Directorate of the Army. Later, Boris Vasilyev wrote about this episode in the following way: “Maybe it’s good that it was banned without any explanation? If they had given comments, I would have wasted a lot of time, the play would have been ruined anyway (in this department they don’t change their opinions), and I would get used to finishing and redoing according to instructions, rumors, opinions ... I only listen to editors, eliminate their comments or I take note, but I never redo anything in the name of, so to speak, the momentary moment. Following the ban on the performance, by order "from above" the set of "Officer" was scattered in the magazine "Theatre", led by playwright N.F. Pogodin. But despite the failures, Boris Vasiliev did not give up drama - his next play, Knock and Open, was staged in 1955 by the theaters of the Black Sea Fleet and the Group of Forces in Germany. At the same time, at the invitation of N.F. Pogodin, he visited the screenwriting studio at Glavkino, as a result of which the films “The Next Flight” in 1958, “Long Day” in 1960 and other films were staged according to Vasiliev's scripts. And yet his cinematic fate was far from cloudless. For the sake of earning money, he had to write scripts for the TV show "Club of the Cheerful and Resourceful", compose subtexts for the newsreels "News of the Day" and "Foreign Chronicle". The first book of the writer was a collection of scripts "Club of cheerful and resourceful". It was printed in 1958.

The fate of Vasiliev's first prose work, Ivanov's Boat, written in 1967, was not easy either. Tvardovsky accepted the story for publication in Novy Mir, but after his death it lay in the editorial portfolio for almost 3 years and was published only in 1970. By this time, in the magazine "Youth" in 1969, another story of the author had already been printed - "The dawns here are quiet ...". It was from her, which received a huge reader response, that the writer's fate of Boris Vasiliev began to steadily gain height.

Shot from the movie "The Dawns Here Are Quiet..."

"Dawns ..." have been reprinted and reprinted many times up to the present day, have undergone multiple musical and stage interpretations, they were made into a film of the same name in 1972, awarded many awards, including the USSR State Prize. The idea of ​​the story arose from Vasiliev as a result of internal disagreement with the way certain military events and problems are covered in the literature. Serious enthusiasm for "lieutenant's prose" was replaced over the years by the conviction that he sees the war with completely different eyes. Vasiliev suddenly realized that this was not “his” war. He was attracted by the fate of those who found themselves separated from their own during the war, deprived of communication, support, medical care, who, defending their homeland to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, had to rely only on their own strength. Here the military experience of the writer could not but affect. Quiet dawns at the 171st junction, on a tiny piece of land numbering only 12 yards, surrounded on all sides by war, became silent witnesses of the amazing confrontation of anti-aircraft gunner girls against hardened enemy paratroopers. But in reality - women's opposition to war, violence, murder, everything that the very essence of a woman is incompatible with. One by one, 5 destinies break off, and with each one, the dawns above the earth become quieter and quieter almost tangibly. And the quiet dawns of those who came years after the end of the war and read its pages anew were also struck by the quiet dawns. The story absorbed the characteristic features of Vasiliev's prose. Its philosophical and moral, with a melodramatic tinge, component bore the stamp of the author's personality - romantically addicted, sensitive and slightly sentimental, prone to irony and perspicacious. It was the prose of a courageous and honest writer, organically not accepting a compromise between truth and falsehood. Boris Vasiliev did not spare the reader: the endings of his works are mostly tragic, since he is convinced that art should not act as a comforter, its function is to expose people to life's dangers in any of their manifestations, to awaken conscience and teach sympathy and kindness. Boris Vasiliev himself spoke about the film adaptation of the work in China in one of his last interviews: “I found out about the film adaptation and the copyright was paid to me after the film was finished. I looked at it. The heroines and foreman Fedot Evgrafovich Vaskov were played by Russian actors. Well, what can I say? The Chinese director changed the ending, and at the same time the meaning. The story contained an exact explanation of why the foreman and the platoon of girls went after the saboteurs. They had to be caught and brought to the headquarters in order to be interrogated about the purpose of the landing. And the foreman, already wounded, with the last of his strength, but fulfills the order: he brings the prisoners to his own. The girls didn't die in vain. And in the Chinese version, Vaskov shot all the saboteurs! It turned out such a mini-war in the forest. And that's all. But I couldn't interfere - the movie had already been filmed. On the other hand, I am pleased that it is Dawns that are constantly being reprinted in China, that the story is studied at school, that it has brought up more than one generation of a large country.

On the set of the film "The Dawns Here Are Quiet..."

The theme of war and the fate of the generation, for which the war became the main event in life, Vasiliev continued in the stories “I was not on the lists” in 1974, “Tomorrow there was a war” in 1984, in the stories “Veteran” in 1976, “The Magnificent Six " in 1980, "Whose are you, old man?" in 1982, The Burning Bush in 1986 and other works.

Based on documentary material, the story “He was not on the lists” can be attributed to the genre of a romantic parable. The difficult front-line path of the protagonist Lieutenant Pluzhnikov, to whom the author gave the name of his deceased school friend, the path of overcoming hardships, fear of death, hunger and fatigue led to the strengthening of a sense of dignity in the young man, drew him to the values ​​that were laid down in him by family traditions, involvement in national history and culture: duty, honor and patriotism - a feeling, according to Vasiliev, intimate and secret.

In the early 1980s, Vasiliev published two works that were very similar in terms of internal issues. This is an autobiographical story "My Horses Are Flying" in 1982, deeply sincere and full of warmth in relation to everything that made up his youth, and the story "Tomorrow there was a war" is probably one of the writer's most harsh works. On its pages, the pre-war era reigned ominously, in the collision with the pressure of which the souls and characters of both teenagers and adults were broken, slumped, devastated or, conversely, tempered. There was a process of breaking the old culture and creating a new one, and hence changing the system of moral coordinates: “... This was the case in all families, inertially striving to convey to us the morality of yesterday, while the street - in the broadest sense - already victoriously carried the morality of the day tomorrow. But this did not tear us apart, did not sow disharmony, did not give rise to conflicts: this double impact ultimately created the alloy that Krupp steel could never break through. “True,” the writer remarked, “now it seems to me that then we were naively and drunkenly playing hide and seek, catching something very necessary blindfolded.”

Vasiliev's stories about the post-war fate of front-line soldiers were invariably imbued with bitterness - too many of the recent soldiers were lost in civilian life - and a sense of guilt before them for the indifference and heartlessness of society. The writer saw in this the natural consequences of the war, neither the millions of victims of which, nor the resounding victories were able to prevent the monstrous decline in the morals of the belligerents. War legitimizes murder and corrupts souls with permissiveness, returning devastated people to peaceful life, which has a dangerous effect on subsequent generations and on the course of history.

The novel “Don't Shoot the White Swans” (author's title “Don't Shoot the White Swans” - Youth, 1973), which has something in common in moral orientation with many of Vasilyevsky's works, occupied a special place in the writer's work. In a duel with cynical and cruel poachers, the protagonist, beaten to death by them, perishes, perceived in the village as "God's poor bearer", Yegor Polushkin, who stood up for the nature entrusted to his protection. Believing in his righteousness and human justice, he became a victim of evil, evoking an angry reaction in the reader towards the killers. Shooting at swans and kicking their defender, they killed everything human in themselves. Acute pity and boundless compassion among readers was caused by the absurdly cut short fate of the forester. Goodness is vulnerable, like any moral principle, and requires protection from us not alone, but by the whole world. A heated controversy unfolded around the novel, a number of critics reproached the writer for excessive sentimentalism and, in part, for self-repetition.

The history of the Russian intelligentsia, intertwined with the history of Russia, found its artistic embodiment in the novel “There were and weren’t” in 1977, which tells about the history of the Alekseev family (in the novel and in other books - the Oleksins), namely, the participation of the author’s two great-grandfathers in Russian Turkish war. Having chosen the genre of the family novel, which most fully met his ideas, Vasiliev traced the birth of the Russian intelligentsia on the example of the family, tried to determine its essence. The chronicle of events in the novel is multifaceted. Over time, he combined 6 works, the action in which takes place from Pushkin's times to the middle of the twentieth century: “Gambler and Breter, Player and Duellist: Notes of Great-Great-Grandfather”, “There were and weren’t”, “Assuage my sorrows”, “And there was an evening, and it was morning”, “The house that grandfather built” and “Hello from Baba Lera”. In them, Vasiliev presented to readers the heroic, sublime and tragic fate of the intelligentsia, its deeds and delusions, trying, on the one hand, to determine that deep spiritual and moral constant that gave it strength and the ability to remain itself in any situation, on the other hand, to realize the measure its historical and moral responsibility. She took the side of violence, destroyed the centuries-old monarchy, brought left-wing extremist forces to power and herself was subjected to the most severe repressions, but due to the fact that her traditions were not completely destroyed, she managed to informally lead the people during the Patriotic War, which led to victory. “I lived a long enough life,” wrote Boris Vasiliev, “in order to internally feel, and not just logically comprehend all three stages, three generations of the Russian intelligentsia from its inception to death through the stages of confrontation, humiliation, physical destruction, painful conformism of those who survived until the revival of faith into civil rights and the bitter understanding that the intelligentsia remained unclaimed. ... After all, the necessity and strength of the Russian intelligentsia was in its understanding of its civic duty to the motherland, and not just in the performance of those official functions that are so characteristic of Western intellectuals and which the Soviet government imposed by force. The Russian intelligentsia was in demand by history for a sacred purpose: to reveal the personality in every person, to glorify it, to strengthen it morally, to equip it not with the servility of Orthodoxy, but with the courage of individuality. ... The Russian people cannot exist without their own intelligentsia in the historical sense of it, not because of some kind of God's chosen people, but only because without it they lose the meaning of their own existence, as a result of which they are in no way able to grow up.

Vasiliev's historical novels contain many analogies, telling about the fierce struggle for power in "Prophetic Oleg", about the prerequisites of the Time of Troubles and its consequences in "Prince Yaroslav and His Sons", about the deceit and cruelty of princely power, about the first conversion of the Rus to Christianity in " Olga - Queen of the Russians.

To the complex realities of today, implicated in acute conflicts between entrepreneurship and criminals, on a frightening decline in culture, and with it the standard of living, on the hidden and obvious threat of the growth of moral deafness in the souls of people, the story "Wilderness" was addressed in 2001. "No! It was necessary to put an end to the main evil - the Soviet regime. - said Vasiliev in an interview, - One party - an absolutely Jesuit persuasion - held power in its hands. Words could not be spoken against. Thanks to Mikhail Sergeevich for giving Russia publicity. It was the first breath of fresh air. If perestroika hadn't happened, I don't know where we would have ended up. In addition, the arms race, which both Khrushchev and Brezhnev foolishly fomented, reached a critical point. For some reason, all our general secretaries were eager to fight. They were not at all sorry for the lives of the Russian people. So that power was very thin ... Two things came together. Russia has never had a single culture. From time immemorial, there were two cultural continents here - the rural Christian and the urban, noble. The village culture was based on the community and the church. The community was in charge of all economic affairs, and the church was engaged in spiritual life. Noble culture was based on other values, but also did not teach bad things. What did the Bolsheviks do when they came to power? First of all, Lenin launched an attack on the bearers of noble culture - the intelligentsia, which he called with all sorts of vile words. Then it was the turn of other classes. Lenin, not Hitler, as we used to think, was the first in the world to organize concentration camps. He introduced the institution of hostages. And the beginning of collectivization finally ruined the village-Christian culture. Sticks, workdays. The guys who were drafted into the army did not return home, trying at all costs to cling to the city. The girls were also there. There are no grooms left in the village. As a result, we lost the old peasant and urban culture, we did not create a new one - it turned out to be too tough for the Soviet government. And after all the procedures that we went through, the layman won. He is jubilant today. The mentality of the people is determined precisely by the intelligentsia. A people by itself cannot develop a national idea, nothing! I have great respect for Putin. I understand what country he got. A country where the favorite pastime is to speculate. I understand how difficult it is for him to stay on the edge and not fall back into dictatorship. True, I have a faint hope that something will come of the generation that is now growing up. This will already be the intelligentsia of the European batch. And this is a little different. Because in Rus' the word intellectual meant a person of high morals, with a high spiritual culture, and not professional skills. The young intelligentsia will promote their values. But let it be at least…”

Boris Vasilyev owns many journalistic works, thematically covering various aspects of life. This is concern about the loss of historical memory by society and the erosion of the moral and cultural layer accumulated by Russia over the centuries-old period of its existence, and as a result, the disappearance of the thinking layer of society and the mentality of the people. Turning to history, he argued: “Yes, history - not in the record, of course - cannot be corrected, but it is possible - and necessary! - try to smooth out the consequences of the deeds of the past, if these deeds affect the present day. The writer constantly reminded of the need to establish and maintain the priority of culture, which he defines as a traditional system of survival of the Russian people developed over thousands of years, bitterly recognizing that “the revolution and the Civil War that followed it, and in particular the Stalinist repressions, practically destroyed the cultural power of Russia. Civilized countries have ceased to perceive us as their integral cultural part: such, alas, is the reality of today ... ". Reflecting on the nature of patriotism, Vasiliev said with pain: “Now this great concept is tattered, tarnished and worn out by impassive communist leaders who do not possess at least a grain of charisma in the State Duma. ... Is it really not clear that love is proved only by deeds, only by deeds, and absolutely nothing else? Just as uncompromisingly, he reflected on the prevailing, often pejorative attitude of the authorities towards the people, the relationship between territory and living standards in Russia, spoke with alarm about the absence of civil society in our state. Vasiliev persistently, step by step, bit by bit, studied history in order to understand the reasons that led to the disenfranchised state in which we live and which we tolerate for the sake of the illusory ideas thrown up by our leaders. Whatever Boris Vasiliev wrote about, the scale of the writer's personality, the level of his thinking and talent gave his works a broad universal sound, evoking a grateful response and a sense of pride in readers.

In the late 1980s, Boris Vasilyev actively participated in public and political life: he was a deputy of the First Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, a member of the Commission of the Congress to investigate the events of 1989 in Tbilisi. In the same year, he left the CPSU, in which he had been a member since 1952. However, he soon left politics, believing that the writer should do his own thing. But in 2002, he again turned out to be in public demand and became a member of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation on Human Rights.

The writer lived for many years in the suburbs of Solnechnogorsk, in the village, in his own house. Vasiliev worked well there, despite the poor country road, along which it was a long time for an ambulance to travel if necessary. His last books on the history of the Russian state were written there. He wanted to show that the Russian authorities had their own true heroes.

Vasiliev with his wife Zorya Albertovna.

In January 2013, his wife Zorya Albertovna died. The long illness and death of his wife undermined the strength of the writer. He never recovered from this loss. Tatyana Kuzovleva, secretary of the Writers' Union of Moscow, explained the writer's death in this way: “All his life he followed his wife Zorya Albertovna, who once led him out of a minefield. He got out of it, following her trail after trail. Zorya Albertovna Vasilyeva died almost two months ago, he could not live without her and left so as not to be separated from her.

Boris Vasiliev died at the age of 89 on March 11, 2013 in Moscow. He was buried with military honors at the Vagankovsky cemetery, next to his wife.

In 2004, a documentary film “An Extraordinary Man. Boris Vasiliev.

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The text was prepared by Tatyana Khalina

Used materials:

B.Vasiliev "An extraordinary age", "Ring A", 2002, No. 20–23
B. Vasiliev "My horses are flying." M., 1984
Site materials www.izvestia.ru
Site materials www.newizv.ru

"EVERYONE SAW THE WAR FROM THEIR TRENCH"

– Boris Lvovich, it seems that over the past 60 years the Great Patriotic War has completely gone down in history, turned into a myth. Do you think today's schoolchildren are able to understand your characters?

- Well, it depends on who teaches them literature. Recently I was invited to perform in Zelenograd, so the children did not let me go for two hours. So the youth have an interest in that war.

- If you were not favored by the previous authorities, then, in any case, you were not blacklisted. You were awarded practically all existing Soviet prizes. And in your books you still showed the fig of Soviet power ...

- I have always been an opponent of socialist realism and did not hide it.

- But at the same time, you are happy to tell that Brezhnev was crying while reading your "The dawns here are quiet ...".

- Brezhnev was just very sentimental.

“Maybe that’s why they didn’t touch you?”

- Who could touch me? And for what? But all my books were a challenge to the party style. Socialist realist works ended with the triumph of the hero. But such heroes are not residents in the country. Therefore, I continue to write the way I wrote. All my life I dreamed of becoming a historian. If not for the war, then I would have become one. We lived in Smolensk, and I did not know then that there was such a Historical and Archival Institute in Moscow. My works are connected with the history of my family, especially from my mother's side. It was a very ancient noble family. In the Hermitage, in the gallery of heroes of 1812, there is a portrait of my great-great-grandfather, Lieutenant-General Ilya Ivanovich Alekseev. His son Alexander Alekseev was a friend of Pushkin. It was to him that Pushkin gave Andre Chenier's poems for safekeeping. When they were found, Alexander spent four months in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Benckendorff personally interrogated him and wanted him to confess that Chenier's poems had been given to him by Pushkin. But he did not confess: “What kind of Pushkin? I don't know any Pushkin. Some officer paid me with these verses, I never read them. Benckendorff was forced to send him to the officer's court of honor for possession of forbidden poetry. The court demoted him to the soldiers, and he was sent to the Caucasus. A year later he returned to St. Petersburg with the St. George Cross with the rank of lieutenant. I have written four books about my ancestors.

- Do you find more interesting personalities in the past than in the present?

- May be. In addition, history weeds out random upstarts. However, not everyone is interested in history now. Russian peasant psychology does not perceive history at all. The history of the peasants dies in their great-grandfathers - few people know where the graves of their ancestors are. Now the psychology of the victorious inhabitant dominates - he needs only today.

– Could you explain?

- Look at what's happening on TV. Continuous songs and dances. In my opinion, no serious person can watch this, and we are shown a hall dying of laughter. Why are they laughing? Because someone walked across the stage like a goose? It's not funny. It's disgusting. After all, this is a cheap market Petrushka. Can you imagine what we have come to? Lenin kept his word - they ruined Russia.

– Is this your final diagnosis or assumption?

- Of course, Russia will not rise, there are no forces. What do we trade? raw material. That is, the well-being of their great-grandchildren. Japanese televisions, American computers, German cars. We have practically nothing of our own.

- In your opinion, history, like a tape, should be rewound a hundred years ago and return to the monarchy?

– I believe that the only true way of government in Russia is a monarchy. I think Yeltsin thought so too. Let me remind you what he did for this. He solemnly buried the remains of the members of the royal family shot by the Bolsheviks with an unprecedented solemnity. He invited the only legitimate heir to the throne, George, to Russia. Yeltsin understood that the monarch was the only one who could save the country.

- You wrote a lot about officer honor. Don't you think that today for the military this concept is not always in the first place?

- Honor with a uniform is not issued. Honor is a moral filling. Previously, they were taught not to lie, not to steal, not to be a coward, to lead soldiers into battle. Now it is difficult even to imagine what kind of attitude the Russian army had towards the soldiers. Let's start with the fact that the soldier never served 25 years, all this was invented under the Soviet regime. The longest service life was during the Napoleonic Wars. In addition, as soon as a soldier received the St. George Cross, his service life was immediately reduced, and if he left the army as a serf, he returned free.

- How do you feel about the fact that the generals are involved in politics?

“They shouldn't be doing it. The army should not get involved in politics at all. The Russian army never did this.

- And what about Kornilov then?

- Kornilov was the first to go to defend Russia, then there were Denikin and Kolchak. By the way, a monument to Kolchak was recently erected, everything must be done so that a monument to Denikin is also erected. This is what a person needs to be in order to grow from a soldier's son to the Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces of Russia!

– Is it true that you learned to write by copying by hand Chekhov?

- Is it true. No one told me this, I figured it out myself. I love Chekhov very much, and I think that no one can write as carefully as he did. He doesn't have a single extra word. I learned from him to build phrases. I did not have any training - I am a test engineer by education.

- What about screenwriting courses then?

- I got into filmmakers for the following reason. My first play was called The Officer. I knew well the world of the army, which was going through a very serious conflict - young officers who graduated from academies, who had not fought and had no military orders, began to take the place of old military officers. They met with rejection, they tried to push them out ... My play about this conflict was staged in the theater of the Soviet Army, but after the second performance it was banned by the Main Political Directorate without explanation. Then Nikolai Pogodin, a very famous playwright at that time, called me, he headed the Theater magazine and taught screenwriting courses. He told me: "Come, we need to talk." He said that he wanted to print my play, but he was forced to scatter the set. Pogodin offered to come to his courses and promised to take them without any exams. I finished them in six months, wrote the script, and became a screenwriter. So the Union of Cinematographers became my first union. Later I became a member of the Writers' Union and saw the difference between them.

– What is the difference?

- Everyone in the Union of Cinematographers rejoices at success. In the Writers' Union you see only a terrible envy of success. Filmmakers have collective work and collective joy. Writers have individual work, and envy is also individual.

– Sorry, I didn’t know and was surprised that the film “The Dawns Here Are Quiet...” was nominated for an Oscar.

- I remember how Stas Rostotsky returned from America very cheerful, we were sitting in a Moscow apartment, and he told me: “I don’t regret at all that Cabaret received the Oscar.” This film is much more serious than ours. We have a special case, and the era is shown there. They did the right thing not to give an Oscar to our film.

- Follow what they write today about the war?

- Rarely. Unfortunately, there cannot yet be a serious novel about the war. Each of us saw the war from our own trench. Why was the novel "War and Peace" written 50 years after the Patriotic War of 1812? Because everything unnecessary was sifted out, these trenches were sifted out, and only then Tolstoy painted a beautiful canvas. I do not expect that in my lifetime there will be something about the last war.

– How do you feel about the fact that young authors are now writing about the Great Patriotic War? For example, in Sovremennik they staged the play Naked Pioneer about a girl who sexually serviced almost an entire company between battles.

- It's all fiction. Nobody touched the girls at the front, it was not before. Yes, and all this is done for sale. Who will buy, for example, such a book? Woman. We now have a lot of ladies' novels. This has never happened in Russia. A lot of detective stories appeared, and this is not a Russian genre. We will never outdo the Americans in detective stories.

What about Crime and Punishment then? Isn't it a detective?

What a detective! The criminal falls to his knees and shouts: “I killed! Execute me!" This is a Russian detective! In this sense, Dead Souls can also be called a detective story.

- Why did you move to live from Moscow to Solnechnogorsk?

- If I had not left Moscow, I would probably have died long ago. You know what the air is like here and what silence! Here no one bothers me and I don’t have to go to some kind of meeting-talking room, and my friends know the way to me. In summer, my dog ​​and I walk for hours in the woods. I love the forest very much, because I am from Smolensk. This is happiness.

– Is it true that you learned to work on a computer at the age of 72?

- Yes. I mastered it in a month, now I don’t write by hand anymore. There is an advantage to this, but there are also disadvantages. To be honest, when I wrote with a pen, there was a feeling that the thought flowed from him. And here in front of me is a cold car! But it has an advantage: it is very convenient to clean the text. Previously, typists struggled with my edits, sometimes I had to retype everything myself. Do you know how long it takes to retype a novel on a typewriter with one finger!

Do you think writing is a profession? After all, many literary classics did something else besides writing poetry - Pushkin served in the ministry, Goethe was a minister, Byron fought. Yes, and your favorite Chekhov was a doctor.

Isn't writing enough? That's a lot! I do not think that a writer is obliged to serve someone somewhere. Writing is a respected work in Russia.

- Brodsky said that only in Russia do writers live off their writings...

- So that's why we are - Russia! We are a very special country, there is no other like it. Do you know what is special about her? Russia never had colonies. All the states that joined it entered it voluntarily, and this was not only formal.

There were governor-generals in Tbilisi and Alma-Ata, but there were also the Georgian king and the emir. But the main feature of Russia is that it is an eternal border guard. Have you ever thought about it? We have borderline consciousness. All our life we ​​lived on the border between East and West, between North and South, between Islam and Christianity, we met the first blows of the nomads. The border guard has one strange feeling embedded in him. If an ordinary soldier is waiting for a command to act, then the border guard is always looking for the enemy. We also have this search, but we are always looking for enemies around us. It is no coincidence that the main Russian question is: who is to blame?

- Boris Lvovich, why does the current intelligentsia cling to power, but no one demands fidelity to ideology from them?

- And it will stick around, because it does not have its own economic base. Without it, the intelligentsia cannot exist.

– In addition, it is customary to call it a spiritual guide. What kind of landmark is this, which hangs around now with the communists, now with the democrats?

- You got it all wrong. This is not intelligence. We don't have intelligence. The first thing Lenin did was destroy it. Remember, the first camps in Solovki were created specifically for the intelligentsia.

“Wait a second, then who are you?”

- I am an old intellectual, hereditary. There are still such - it is impossible to destroy them all. I am from the nobility, my ancestors are the heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812. I can think freely, they didn’t litter my head with the devil knows what. When I was being prepared for school, they prepared me as for the 1st grade of a gymnasium, and this was equal to the 6th grade of our school. Then for four years I had nothing to do at school.

– In Soviet times, children dreamed of becoming not only cosmonauts, but also artists, ballerinas, writers, actors. Now, according to polls, children dream of becoming bankers, managers and even prostitutes. Why? Maybe because there are no examples among the intelligentsia?

- Not only. The Russian fate in this sense is tragic. In almost all countries of the world, it was possible to combine several cultures and form a single culture of a bourgeois character for all. In our country, this combination of cultures was prevented by the Soviet authorities. They were almost united, patrons from the peasants who were engaged in charity had already appeared. They gave money to churches. They understood that it was not worth feeding the priests, but sought to educate the people. But then a revolution happened, the village was destroyed, and a Soviet man appeared.

- But it's not only the intelligentsia, Boris Lvovich, that unites the nation. The church also played a significant role in the life of Russian society.

– I treat her with respect, because she is the consolidating force of the Russian state. Russia cannot exist without the Church. She proves this even now - all the temples are open. The Russian peasantry had two forces. The first is the church. She was everything for the peasant - and the first universities, and an educator, she taught how to live. The second is the community. If the church was in charge of morality, then the community was in charge of morality. The community could drive the drunkard out of the village, bring the thief to justice. Where did Lenin start? He destroyed churches.

What is your relationship with the church?

- I am an atheist by upbringing, but I respect the church. No, I am not against her, Russia needs her, especially now, at a moment of confusion. Right now, this is the moment - no one believes in anything. Money has become the most important thing. In Russia, money has never been the main thing.

- And what was the main thing?

- Conscience. If my conscience is calm, then everything is fine.

Years of life: from 05/21/1924 to 04/11/2013

Soviet and Russian writer and screenwriter, the main theme of whose works is the war and pre-war time.

Father - Vasiliev Lev Aleksandrovich (born in 1892), a regular officer of the tsarist, later - the Red and Soviet armies.

Mother - Alekseeva Elena Nikolaevna (born in 1892), from a well-known old noble family associated with the names of Pushkin and Tolstoy, with the social movement of populists who participated in organizing the circle of "Tchaikovsky" and "Fourierist" communes in America.

Boris Vasiliev's early fascination with history and love for literature "were intertwined in his mind from childhood." While studying at a Voronezh school, he played in amateur performances, published a handwritten magazine with his friend. When I graduated from the 9th grade, the war began.

Boris Vasiliev went to the front as a volunteer in the Komsomol fighter battalion and on July 3, 1941 was sent to Smolensk. He was surrounded, left it in October 1941; then there was a camp for displaced persons, from where, at his personal request, he was sent first to the cavalry regimental school, and then to the machine-gun regimental school, from which he graduated. He served in the 8th Guards Airborne Regiment of the 3rd Guards Airborne Division. During a combat reset on March 16, 1943, he fell on a mine stretch and was taken to the hospital with a severe concussion.

In the autumn of 1943, he entered the Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Troops named after I.V. Stalin (later named after R.Ya. Malinovsky), where he met his future wife Zorya Albertovna Polyak, who studied at the same academy, who became his constant companion.

After graduating from the Faculty of Engineering in 1946, he worked as a tester for wheeled and tracked vehicles in the Urals. He retired from the army in 1954 with the rank of engineer-captain. In the report, he named the desire to engage in literature as the reason for his decision.

It has been printed since 1954 (a play about the post-war army "Tankmen"; a play based on it, which was being prepared in 1955 under the name "Officers", was filmed for censorship reasons). Passion for the stage, characteristic of Vasiliev from childhood, was also manifested in the creation of plays, scripts for a number of films and television programs. True success came to Vasiliev after the publication of the story "The Dawns Here Are Quiet ..." (1969), staged (1971) and filmed (1972), which determined the main theme and tone of the writer's work. Other works of Vasiliev, thematically addressed primarily to the war and pre-war years, also lie in the designated vein.

But the post-war reality also gave Boris Lvovich reason for reflection. The famous story "Don't shoot the white swans" raises rather complex moral issues.

Boris Vasilyev also paid tribute to historical issues. The problems of the "Time of Troubles" are central in Vasiliev's historical novels "Prophetic Oleg" (1996) and "Prince Yaroslav and His Sons" (1997).

The history of the Russian intelligentsia, intertwined with the history of Russia, found its artistic embodiment in the novel "There were and weren't", which tells about the history of the Alekseev family (in the novel and in other books - the Oleksins), about the participation of the author's two great-grandfathers in the Russian-Turkish war. Having chosen the genre of the family novel, which most fully corresponds to his ideas, Vasilyev traces the birth of the Russian intelligentsia on the example of the family, trying to determine its essence.

One of his latest novels, Denial of Denial, was one of the top ten best-selling books of 2005. In it, starting from the revolution of 1917 and up to the Great Patriotic War, the life of the Vereskovskys is shown: the tragic fate of this family is the fate of Russia itself, the “strange country”, “the daughter of the Denial of Life” ...

From the pen of the writer came out a lot of journalistic works, thematically covering the most diverse aspects of our life.

Boris Vasiliev is a laureate of the USSR State Prize in 1975. With the beginning of perestroika, he engaged in social activities, was a deputy of the first congress of people's deputies. He is a member of the Commission on Human Rights under the President of the Russian Federation. In 1997 he was awarded the Sakharov Prize "For Civil Courage", the Order of Friendship of Peoples, the Dovzhenko Gold Medal, the winner of the Konstantin Simonov Prize and the Nika Prize "For Honor and Dignity". In 2004 he was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 2nd class.

The film “The Dawns Here Are Quiet”, based on the book by Boris Vasiliev, was nominated for an Oscar in 1973, but lost to “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”.

Favorite writer Vasiliev -.

Writer's Awards

2009 - Literary award "" - special prize "For honor and dignity"

2004 - Order of Merit for the Fatherland, II degree - for outstanding services in the development of domestic literature and many years of creative activity

2003 - Nick Award - for Honor and Dignity

somewhere between 1998 and 2005 (the exact year could not be found) - Prize of the Union of Writers of Moscow "Venets"

1999 - Order of Merit for the Fatherland, III degree - for outstanding contribution to the development of Russian literature; Prize of the President of the Russian Federation in the field of literature and art

1998 - International literary award "Moscow-Penne" - as the most popular and read writer for the novel "Satisfy my sorrows ..."

1997 - Prize to them. A. D. Sakharova "April" - "For civil courage"

1994 - Order of Friendship of Peoples - for his great personal contribution to the development of modern literature and national culture

1987 - Gold medal named after A. Dovzhenko for the script for the film "Tomorrow there was a war"

1975 - - for the film "The Dawns Here Are Quiet"

1974 - Lenin Komsomol Prize

Bibliography

Tankers [Officers] (1954) Play
Knock and Open (1955) Play
(1957) Tale
Another flight (1958) Screenplay
Long Day (1960) Screenplay
(1969) Tale
(1970)
It seems that they will go on reconnaissance with me (1970)
(1970) Film screenplay
(1973) Novel
(1974) Novel
Old Olympia (1975)
(1976) Film screenplay
Veteran (1976) Story
Encounter (1979)
The Magnificent Six (1980) Story
Whose are you, old man? (1982) Story
(1982)
Short Castling (1983)
(1984) Tale
Roslik is gone (1984)
(1984)
Carnival (1985)
Once upon a time Klavochka (1986) Tale
(1986) Story
(1986)
Exhibit No... (1987)
Exclamation Mark World (1990)
(1991)
Live Queue (1993) Story
(2001) Novel
(2002) Memoirs
(2004)
(2006) Publicism

series: "Novels about Ancient Rus'"
(1996) East. novel
(1997) East. the novel - the novel "" (1997) reprinted under a different name is out of the general chronology of the series, perhaps the author plans to fill the time period between Vladimir and Alexander with new next books.

In Moscow, on March 11, at the age of 89, the famous Russian writer-front-line soldier Boris Vasiliev died.
I almost made it to my 90s. Atrial fibrillation ... He did not live to see his jubilee, but the writer was very lucky in life - the boys of his generation almost all laid down their lives in the Great Patriotic War, "Kleist and Guderian's tanks stalled" on their bodies. Only 3% survived, and Boris Vasilyev miraculously turned out to be among them: he escaped from the encirclement three times, jumped with a parachute seven times, survived the Vyazma landing, ran into a mine trip, received a severe concussion, but survived ...
And he lived "for himself and for that guy." Many of his books are a tribute to those who did not return from the war.

The most successful work of Vasiliev was the famous story "The dawns here are quiet ...". Written in 1969, it has not lost its popularity today. In 1972, a legendary film was made based on the work. Among the other works of Boris Vasilyev are the novel “I wasn’t on the lists”, the stories “Tomorrow there was a war”, “Ivanov’s boat”, “Do not shoot white swans” ...
Famous films were shot according to his scripts, including “Officers.

Boris Lvovich Vasiliev in recent years lived in solitude and very modestly with his wife Zorya Albertovna in Krasnogorsk. He almost did not communicate with the press, but worked hard until the end of his days, writing historical novels.

Boris Vasilyev could not survive the death of his wife Zorya Albertovna, who died two months earlier. This opinion was voiced today by Tatyana Kuzovleva, a close friend of the Vasiliev family, secretary of the Moscow Union of Writers.
“All his life he followed his wife Zorya Albertovna, who once led him out of the minefield. He got out of it, following her trail after trail. Zorya Albertovna Vasilyeva died almost two months ago, he could not live without her and left so as not to be separated from her.

Like a pair of white swans...

Writer Boris Vasilyev will be buried on March 14 at the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow, next to his wife Zorya Polyak.

Biography and interview with Boris Vasiliev:

Boris Lvovich Vasiliev was born on May 21, 1924 in Smolensk. Father - Vasiliev Lev Alexandrovich (born in 1892), a career officer in the tsarist, later - the Red and Soviet army, "miraculously survived three army purges, which hit the former officers of the tsarist army the most ..."
Mother - Alekseeva Elena Nikolaevna (born in 1892), from a well-known old noble family, associated with the names of Pushkin and Tolstoy, with the social movement of the 19th century; her father and uncle were the organizers of the populist circle of the Chaikovites, went through the "trial of the 193s", and participated in the creation of Fourierist-type communes in America. In the "Hermitage", in the gallery of the 12th year, you can see a portrait of Lieutenant-General Ilya Alekseev, the great-great-grandfather of the writer on his mother's side.

Boris Vasiliev:
"I am an old intellectual, hereditary. There are still such - it is impossible to destroy everyone. I am from the nobility, my ancestors are heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812. I can think freely, they didn’t litter my head with the devil knows what. to the 1st grade of the gymnasium, and this was equal to the 6th grade of our school. Then for four years I had nothing to do at school ... "

Vasiliev's generation - the first generation born after the bloodshed of the Civil War - grew up in the context of an ongoing secret civil war. “Of course, we did not feel the full horror of permanent terror,- he will write later - but our parents, relatives, older brothers and sisters experienced it to the fullest. We inherited a completely destroyed legal space, and our grandchildren - a destroyed ideological space ... Neither father nor mother ever told me anything about themselves. Not about my childhood, not about my youth. They proceeded from the main principle of the time when I was a child: the less I know about the past, the calmer my life will be.

“A profound question: “where does the Motherland begin?” - implies the simplest answer: with respect for the history of your people in general and for your parents in particular. That is why the influence of family moral and philosophical traditions on the formation of his worldview Boris Vasiliev considers decisive: “I was brought up in the old fashioned way, as was customary in the provincial families of the Russian intelligentsia, which is why I am definitely a man of the late 19th century. And for love of literature, and for respect for history, and for faith in man, and for the absolute inability to lie ... "

It was a creative upbringing. Unlike the destructive upbringing of the Soviet era with its slogans, ideology, its hostility to any dissent, show trials of "enemies of the people" and mass repressions and executions.
“The Soviet government very thoroughly destroyed families - both in the city and in the countryside, while never getting tired of asserting that the upbringing of the younger generation is in the strong hands of the state. God, who just didn’t offer us in the role of educators! The school and the pioneer organization, the Komsomol and the great construction sites of communism, the army and the work collective... We grew up in an atmosphere of teams... We marched, shouting slogans, towards the goal designated by the leaders. The leaders enthusiastically shouted "Hurrah!". They shouted “Death!” to the enemies. not only long before the trial, but also before the investigation, since the newspapers set us on fire immediately after the arrests of the next enemies ... We were children of the Civil War, and it continued until the Great Patriotic War ... And in this civil war - quiet, creeping - our generation took the most active part. But the retribution of this generation for forced blindness was exorbitantly cruel - it was on his bodies that the tanks of Kleist and Guderian stalled.

While studying at a Voronezh school, Boris Vasiliev played in amateur performances, published a handwritten magazine with his friend. When I graduated from the 9th grade, the war began. Boris Vasiliev, at the age of 17, went to the front as a volunteer and on July 3, 1941 was sent near Smolensk. He was surrounded, left it in October 1941; then there was a camp for displaced persons, from where, at his personal request, he was sent first to the cavalry regimental school, and then to the machine-gun regimental school, from which he graduated. He served in the 8th Guards Airborne Regiment of the 3rd Guards Airborne Division. During a combat reset on March 16, 1943, he fell on a mine stretch and was taken to the hospital with a severe concussion.

The generation of boys in the early 1920s was destined to lay down their lives in the Great Patriotic War. Only 3 percent of them survived, and Boris Vasilyev miraculously turned out to be among them:
“... I really got a lucky ticket. I didn’t die of typhus in 1934, I didn’t die in encirclement in 1941, my parachute opened on all my seven landing jumps, and in the last - combat, near Vyazma, in March 43 - I ran into a mine stretching, but there was not even a scratch on the body.

In 1943, after a shell shock, he entered the Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Troops named after I.V. Stalin (later named after R.Ya. Malinovsky). At the academy he met Zorya Albertovna Polyak, who became his wife.

“... I had already picked up a bouquet when I suddenly saw a mine stretch. He followed his eyes and noticed the mine to which she led. And I realized that I was brought to an uncleared area of ​​\u200b\u200bdefense. I carefully turned to my young wife, and she was in front of me. Face to face.
- Mines.
- I know. I was afraid to scream so that you would not rush to me. Now we will change places carefully, and you will follow me. Step by step.
- I'll go first. I know how and where to look.
- No, you follow me. I see better than you.
For some reason, we spoke very quietly, but Lieutenant Vasilyeva spoke in such a way that it was pointless to argue. And we went. Step by step. And they got out. Since then, I have often found myself in minefields ... For more than six decades, I have been walking through the minefield of our life behind Zorina's back. And I am happy. I am immensely happy because I follow my love. Step by step."

After graduating from the academy in 1948, he worked as a test engineer for combat vehicles. In 1954 he left the army and took up professional literary activity. Printed since 1954.

The fate of Vasiliev's first prose work "Ivanov's boat" was not easy - A.T. Tvardovsky accepted the story for publication in the "New World". But after his death, she lay in the editorial portfolio for almost three years and saw the light only in 1970. By this time, another story by the author had already been published in the journal Yunost in 1969 - “The dawns here are quiet ...”. It was from this story, which received a huge response from the reader, that the writer's fate of Boris Vasiliev began to steadily gain height. “The Dawns Here Are Quiet...” have been reprinted and republished many times up to the present day, they were made into a film of the same name in 1972, which was awarded many awards, including the USSR State Prize.

Quiet dawns at the 171st junction, on a tiny piece of land numbering only 12 yards, surrounded on all sides by war, become silent witnesses of the amazing confrontation of anti-aircraft gunner girls against hardened enemy paratroopers. But in reality - women's opposition to war, violence, murder, everything with which the very essence of a woman is incompatible. One by one, 5 destinies break off, and with each one, the dawns above the earth become quieter and quieter almost tangibly. And they, quiet dawns, will also amaze those who will come here years after the end of the war and read its pages again.

In 1973, Vasiliev's story "Do not shoot white swans" about a good forester was published. The main character Vasiliev gives the name Yegor, comparing him with George the Victorious, personifying the struggle between good and evil. The hero dies defending nature.
As in the story “Whose are you, old man?”, The main thing in these works is a feeling of deep and personal compassion for the weak and defenseless. Swans are defenseless before poachers and old pensioners before the cruelty of society and relatives. There is no collective protest against this defenselessness, no common reaction to silent pain. This seems to be the writer's biggest concern...

Vasiliev wrote a lot about the war, about the fate of the generation for which the war became the main event in life: “He was not on the lists” (1974); "The Magnificent Six" (1980), "Whose are you, old man?" (1982), The Burning Bush (1986), There Was War Tomorrow (1986), and others.
According to his story “He was not on the lists”, Mark Zakharov staged a play at the Moscow theater of the Lenin Komsomol. Together with the then-famous Oleg Yankovsky, a very young Alexander Abdulov appeared on the stage in the role of Lieutenant Nikolai Pluzhnikov. They were equally brilliant and young - and Zakharovsky performance based on Boris Vasiliev, and Abdulov in the role of Pluzhnikov - and remained immortal ...

One of the best works of the era of "perestroika" was the story "Tomorrow was a war" published in 1984, which takes place on the eve of the Patriotic War. Based on this story, in 1987, director Yuri Kara made a film of the same name. about the fate of pre-war schoolchildren and their relationship with the Soviet system.
“... So it was in all families, inertially striving to convey to us the morality of yesterday, while the street - in the broadest sense - already victoriously carried the morality of tomorrow. But this did not tear us apart, did not sow disharmony, did not give rise to conflicts: this double effect ultimately created the alloy that Krupp steel could never break through ”(“ My horses are flying).

The picture received many awards: IFF in Koszalin (Poland) - Grand Prix "Big Amber" (1987), IFF in Mannheim - Special Jury Prize, IFF in Valladolid (Spain) - Grand Prix "Golden Ear" (1987), IFF " Movie Meetings in Dunkirk "(France) - Grand Prix (1988), Gold Medal named after A. Dovzhenko to Yuri Kare, Boris Vasiliev, actors Sergei Nikonenko, Nina Ruslanova (1988), Prize of the Nika Film Academy - actress Nina Ruslanova (for the films " There Was War Tomorrow”, “Sign of Trouble”, “Short Encounters”), 1987.

By the way, about films. Boris Vasiliev began working in cinema in 1958, making his debut as a screenwriter with the film The Next Flight. The writer took part in the creation of such well-known feature films as "Officers" directed by Vladimir Rogovoi (with Georgy Yumatov and Vasily Lanov in the lead roles), "Aty-bats, there were soldiers" staged by Leonid Bykov. In addition, on the basis of his own story, Boris Vasiliev created the script for the film "The Dawns Here Are Quiet ...", filmed by Stanislav Rostotsky. For this picture, its creators were awarded the State Prize of the USSR, and in 1973 it was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Luis Bunuel's film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Academicians liked the intricate story of a beautiful life more than a front-line drama, completely devoid of a happy ending.

The members of the jury did not sniff the goryushka, they did not know the real pain, so they could not appreciate it ... Well, who will remember this "charm of the bourgeoisie" now? But "Dawns..."...

In total, more than 15 films have been made based on books and scripts by Boris Vasiliev.

Boris Vasiliev is a laureate of the State Prize of the USSR, the Prize of the President of Russia, the Independent Prize of the Movement named after Academician A. D. Sakharov "April", the international literary prize "Moscow-Penne", the Prize of the Union of Writers of Moscow "Venets", the Russian Academy of Cinematographic Arts "Nika" - "For Honor and Dignity". Member of the Writers' Union of Moscow and the Union of Cinematographers of Russia, academician of the Nika Russian Academy of Cinematographic Arts.
He was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, II degree, the Red Banner of Labor, two Orders of Friendship of Peoples, and many medals.

Excerpts from an interview with Boris Vasiliev

- In 1992 you published an article "Russia. Four Books of Genesis". There you compared Russians with Chekhov's Darling, who is constantly passionate about something sincerely and with zeal. What are we passionate about today?
- Today we do not have any special hobbies, except for one that frightens me very much. We are a country of very poor people who have grown out of poverty, and having now received some opportunity to earn money (I mean not only crime), our man has made money an end in itself. And money is not an end in itself, it is a means. Example - for Schliemann it was a means to find Troy. He became a specially rich man in order to dig up Troy. We don't have that now.
....
And I was very afraid of prose. In our family, there was an attitude towards literature that there was simply nothing higher than it. Well, no, that's all. And I was afraid: what is it like to write prose? It's impossible to even get close to her. Moreover, I have an engineering education. And I taught myself. Studied the phrases of Turgenev, Chekhov. Wrote "And the dawns here are quiet." I sealed it in an envelope and sent it to "Youth". I was awakened by a call at half past six in the morning. So I am a happy person.

- It seems that you deliberately avoid happy endings in your books by killing the characters. What is it connected with?
- Firstly, I am the son of European culture. European culture is so deep that it does not need happy endings. Everyman needs happy endings. Here is America - a country with a very low culture, there you know in advance that no matter what happens to the one who rushes around the screen, he will be alive and kiss his bride. In 99 percent out of a hundred. Our Soviet literature was also built for the layman. And our potential Soviet reader and viewer managed to acquire a huge rhinoceros skin. All sorts of small experiences did not affect him. It needed to be punched. And how should you break through? So that he really came to his senses and shuddered: honest mother, they really killed in the war!
So death is not an end in itself. It's a way or something. method. I don't really like to kill my heroes.

- Still, when you wrote "The Dawns Here Are Quiet", did you admit the possibility that someone else would be saved?
- You see, at the beginning I had no plot. There was a situation. The rear, everything seems to be calm, the soldiers quickly begin to drink, the commandant rushed about, asked the non-drinking soldiers. And they sent him anti-aircraft gunners. Situation. Funny. But the case takes place in the forty-second year, and I know the Germans of the forty-second model well, my main clashes with them took place. Now such can be spetsnaz. At least eighty meters, well-armed, knowing all the techniques of close combat. You can't get away from them. And when I pushed them against the girls, I thought with anguish that the girls were doomed. Because if I write that at least one survived, it will be a terrible lie. Only Vaskov can survive there. Which is fighting in native places. He smells, he grew up here. They cannot win against this country when we are protected by landscape, swamps, boulders.

- Do you like the adaptation of this book?
- Stanislav Rostotsky made a good picture. But all the same, Yury Petrovich Lyubimov staged Zorya best of all on the Taganka. He made a tragedy in the open. Rostotsky himself is a front-line soldier, he lost his leg at the front. When he mounted the picture, he cried because he felt sorry for the girls. There is, however, an element of sentimentality. And Lyubimov had an absolutely terrible performance. After that, they left in silence. They spoke in whispers in the foyer, as if at a funeral. He made pure tragedy.

- When "Officers" was being written, could you imagine that this film would become so significant, obligatory for the program of all military holidays?
- No. I had the feeling that the film, in general, is durable, spectator's. At the heart of the same melodrama! For me personally, this is an expensive thing, because I myself am a garrison boy, there are pieces from my biography. But I did not expect that the "Officers" would have such a resounding fate. Here it was lucky that the actors were chosen very precisely. It was they who made the picture.

- Do you remember how "revolutionary red bloomers" appeared in the film?
- You see, the script was designed for two episodes. And there was the defeat of our army in the thirty-seventh year. My heroes were both sitting. We were told that this would not work, and director Vladimir Rogovoi then decided to build the film with short stories. The film tells about three generations, and he thought: it would be good if everyone got something like that. And here is part one, the Civil War. The director says - let's reward him with an order. I say - no, you can not award him with an order, at that time it was equal to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and even higher in value. There must have been incredible merit. He asked - what were the rewards then? - Yes, whatever you want, up to red trousers. He says - here! Let's reward him with red revolutionary trousers. In addition, "Officers" was conceived as a color film. And they didn't give him a color one. The red trousers remained gray. That is the tragedy of this picture!

- On the Internet, in one of the electronic libraries, the most demanded book of yours was “Tomorrow there was a war”. Why do you think?
- It's hard to say. Maybe because the issues of human morality as such are raised there. Do I have the right to betray my father - no, I don't.

***
Why are we getting into Caucasian wars?
- Boris Lvovich, what can drive you crazy?
- News. I hear about what is happening in Chechnya and get angry. We must live in peace with the Caucasus.
Few people know that in 1828 General Yermolov came to Tsar Nicholas I with a report on the state of affairs in the Caucasus. “You know,” he said to Nikolai, “in Chechnya there is a low-lying part that I am ready to occupy, and a mountainous part, called Ichkeria, which my “plain” soldiers will never capture. The emperor ordered to leave Ichkeria alone, adding: "And offer noble Chechens to join my personal guard." Since then, the Chechen guards have been guarding Nikolai. That's what a smart strategic decision means!

- Now it's hard to imagine!
We just got in too much. It should not be forgotten that the Chechens are magnificent warriors. Dudayev, Maskhadov graduated from the Academy of the General Staff! So they had to negotiate...

Boris Lvovich, really angry, resolutely puts out his cigarette, immediately lights up a second one and says that disgusting propaganda has become the culprit for the fact that we "got stuck".

Television is full of militant boys and girls who are not responsible for words. Our people have long been carrying not Gogol and Belinsky from the market, but televisions. And then he listens to nonsense about how evil and bloody Chechens are. It is not necessary to tell nonsense, but to think what to do!

- You once said that the Russians resemble Chekhov's Darling, who is constantly sincerely fond of something ...
- Yes, but we have a painful hobby - a national issue. Why? Because for many years we were led by poorly educated people. Look: the first Soviet government consisted of solid convicts! The state apparatus began to be formed according to the party principle, but there was only one party! And people were allowed into power not because of their abilities, but because of their commitment to the party. And now, instead of party membership, the fraternity plays a decisive role.

Why don't girls want the military?
- You wrote a lot about our army during the Great Patriotic War. Wouldn't you like to dedicate a book to the modern one?
- My beloved Red Army has changed before our eyes. Most of the people from the tsarist army died in 1941-1942. And then the officers began to prepare from the peasants. As a result, the moral qualification instantly decreased. Yes, they are heroes, they won, honor and praise be to them! But they could no longer build a peaceful army.
It is very indicative of the representatives of what profession the girls look at. When I was young, everyone dreamed of marrying a red commander. And now the girls need physicists, lyricists, biologists, geologists, but not officers. Everything has shifted. Result? Russian army officer Budanov shot a Chechen woman who refused to satisfy his natural needs.

- But after all, the trial of him is not yet completed, the verdict has not been passed.
- Yes, he should have been shot before the formation without trial. But the officers protect him, because they themselves are like that!

For Vasiliev, the topic of officers and officer honor is a painful one. He has the moral right to judge this, if only because the film "Officers" shot according to his script in Soviet times, in modern terms, has become a cult.

It seems to me that this picture is popular because "Officers" is a romantic melodrama. Her characters are irreproachable. Just imagine: Ivan Barabbas was in love with his friend's wife, and therefore he himself never married. There is no such love! That's why women cry.

***
From the end of the 80s. Vasiliev actively participated in political life.

B.Vasiliev:
“It was necessary to put an end to the main evil - the Soviet power. One party - of an absolutely Jesuit wing - held power in its hands. Words could not be spoken against. Thanks to Mikhail Sergeevich for giving Russia publicity. It was the first breath of fresh air. If perestroika hadn't happened, I don't know where we would have ended up. In addition, the arms race, which both Khrushchev and Brezhnev foolishly fomented, reached a critical point. For some reason, all our general secretaries were eager to fight. They were not at all sorry for the lives of the Russian people. So that power was very thin ...
Russia has never had a single culture. From time immemorial, there were two cultural continents here - rural Christian and urban, noble. The village culture was based on the community and the church. The community was in charge of all economic affairs, and the church was engaged in spiritual life. Noble culture was based on other values, but also did not teach bad things.
What did the Bolsheviks do when they came to power? First of all, Lenin launched an attack on the bearers of noble culture - the intelligentsia, which he called with all sorts of vile words. Then it was the turn of other classes. Lenin, not Hitler, as we used to think, was the first in the world to organize concentration camps. He introduced the institution of hostages.
And the beginning of collectivization finally ruined the village-Christian culture. Sticks, workdays. The guys who were drafted into the army did not return home, trying at all costs to cling to the city. The girls were also there. There are no grooms left in the village. As a result, we lost the old peasant and urban culture, we did not create a new one - it turned out to be too tough for the Soviet government. And after all the procedures that we went through, the layman won. He triumphs today ... ".

And yet, the writer did not give up, expressing his civic position, including in journalism (for example, in the series of articles “Love Russia in bad weather”, “And yet I am sure that Russia is committed to Good”, “Finding Meaning”).

Boris Vasiliev continued his creative activity in the last years of his life, writing mainly historical prose, including about Russian princes. Among the historical works written by him there is also a book about our countryman, the outstanding Russian commander M. Skobelev...

Winner of many Russian and foreign literary awards, Academician of the Russian Academy of Cinematography Boris Vasiliev. "RG" publishes a biography of the great writer.

Boris Vasiliev was born on May 21, 1924 in Smolensk. Originally from the nobility, father Vasiliev Lev Alexandrovich - a career officer of the tsarist, Red and Soviet armies, “miraculously survived three army purges, which hit the former officers of the tsarist army the most ...” (“The Extraordinary Century”, M., 2003). Mother, nee Alekseeva - Elena Nikolaevna Tikhonova - from a well-known old noble family, associated with the names of Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy.

The Vasiliev generation, the first generation born after the end of an open civil war, turned out to be a generation that grew up in a state of ongoing hidden civil war. “Of course, we did not feel the full horror of permanent terror,” he writes later, “but our parents, relatives, older brothers and sisters experienced it to the fullest. We inherited a completely destroyed legal space, and our grandchildren - a destroyed ideological one.. "Neither my father nor my mother ever told me anything about themselves. Neither about their childhood, nor about their youth. They proceeded from the main principle of the time when I was a child: the less I know about the past, the calmer my life will be." ".

Boris Vasiliev considers the influence of family moral and philosophical traditions on the formation of his worldview to be decisive: "I was brought up in the old way, as was customary in the provincial families of the Russian intelligentsia, which is why I am definitely a man of the late 19th century. And for love of literature, and for respect for history, and for faith in man, and for the absolute inability to lie ...”.

It was a creative upbringing. Unlike the destructive upbringing of the Soviet era with its slogans, ideology, its hostility to any dissent, show trials of "enemies of the people" and mass repressions and executions. "The Soviet government very thoroughly destroyed families, both in the city and in the countryside, while not getting tired of asserting that the upbringing of the younger generation is in the strong hands of the state. God, whoever they offered us in the role of educators! The school and the pioneer organization, the Komsomol and the great construction sites of Communism, the army and the work collective… We grew up in an atmosphere of teams… We marched, shouting slogans towards the goal designated by the leaders.” The leaders were enthusiastically shouting “Hurray!”. The enemies were shouting “Death!” not only long before the trial, but also long before the investigation, since the newspapers set us on fire immediately after the arrests of the next enemies ... We were children of the civil war, and it continued until the Great Patriotic War ... And in this civil war - quiet, creeping - our generation took an active part. But the retribution of this generation for forced blindness was exorbitantly cruel - It was on his bodies that the tanks of Kleist and Guderian stalled.

Boris Vasiliev's early passion for history and love for literature since childhood intertwined in his mind. While studying at a Voronezh school, he played in amateur performances, published a handwritten magazine with his friend. When I finished the 9th grade, the Great Patriotic War began.

Boris Vasiliev went to the front as a volunteer in the Komsomol fighter battalion, and on July 3, 1941 was sent to Smolensk. He was surrounded, left it in October 1941, then there was a camp for displaced persons, from where, at his personal request, he was sent, first to the cavalry, and then to the machine-gun regimental school, which he graduated from. He served in the 8th Airborne Guards Regiment of the 3rd Guards Airborne Division. During the airborne landing on March 16, 1943, he fell on a mine stretch and was taken to the hospital with a severe concussion.

The generation of boys in the early 1920s was destined to lay down their lives in the Great Patriotic War. Only 3 percent of them survived, and Boris Vasilyev miraculously turned out to be among them: "... I really got a lucky ticket. I did not die of typhus in the 34th, did not die surrounded in the 41st, my parachute opened on all my seven landing jumps, and in the last - combat, near Vyazma, in March 1943 - I ran into a mine trip, but there was not even a scratch on my body ”(“ Extraordinary Century ”, M., 2003).

In the autumn of 1943, he entered the Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Forces, where he met his future wife, Zorya Albertovna Polyak, who studied at the same academy and became his constant companion. After graduating from the engineering faculty of the academy in 1946, he worked as a tester of wheeled and tracked vehicles in the Urals. Demobilized in 1954 with the rank of engineer-captain. In the report on demobilization, he named the desire to engage in literature as the reason for his decision.

The beginning of literary activity turned out to be full of unforeseen complications for the writer. The first work that came out from under his pen was the play "Tankers" (1954) - about how difficult it was in human and professional terms to change generations in the post-war army. This play, entitled "Officer", was accepted for production at the Central Theater Soviet army, but after two public screenings in December 1955, shortly before the premiere, the performance was banned by GLAVPUROM (Main Political Directorate of the Army). Boris Vasilyev would later write about this episode: “Maybe it’s a good thing that they banned it without any explanation? If they had given comments, I would have wasted a lot of time, the play would have been ruined anyway (they don’t change their opinions in this department), but I would get used to finishing and redoing according to instructions, rumors, opinions ... I only listen to editors, eliminate their comments or take note, but I never redo anything in the name of, so to speak, a momentary moment. Following the ban on the performance, the typographical set "Officer" was scattered by order "from above" in the magazine "Theatre", directed by the famous playwright N.F. Pogodin.

Despite the failures, Boris Vasiliev does not give up dramaturgy: his play “Knock and it will open” was staged by the theaters of the Black Sea Fleet and the Group of Forces in Germany in 1955. At the same time, at the invitation of N.F. the films "The Next Flight" (1958), "Long Day" (1960) and others were staged. And yet, his cinematic fate was far from cloudless. He had to write scripts for the KVN television program ("Club of cheerful and resourceful") compose subtexts for the newsreels "News of the Day" and "Foreign Chronicle" ...

The fate of Vasiliev's first prose work "Ivanov the boat" (M., 1967) was not easy - A.T. Tvardovsky accepted the story for publication in the "New World". But after his death, she spent almost three years in the editorial portfolio and saw the light only in 1970 ("New World", No. 8, 9). By this time, in the magazine "Youth" (1969, No. 8), another story by the author had already been printed - "The Dawns Here Are Quiet...". It was from her, which received a huge reader response, that the writer's fate of Boris Vasiliev began to steadily gain height. "Dawns ..." have been reprinted and reprinted many times up to the present day, have undergone multiple musical and stage interpretations, they were made into a film of the same name in 1972, awarded many awards, including the USSR State Prize.

The idea of ​​the story arose from Vasiliev as a result of internal disagreement with the way certain military events and problems are covered in the literature. Serious enthusiasm for "lieutenant prose" was replaced over the years by the conviction that he sees the war with completely different eyes. Vasiliev suddenly realized that this was not "his" war. He is attracted by the fate of those who found themselves cut off from their own during the war, deprived of communication, support, medical care, who, defending their homeland to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, had to rely only on their own strengths and decisions. Here the military experience of the writer could not but affect. The motif of patriotism sounds lofty and tragic in the story, and, at the same time, this prose is directed towards the eternally continuing life.

Quiet dawns at the 171st junction, on a tiny piece of land, numbering only twelve courtyards, surrounded on all sides by war, become silent witnesses of the amazing confrontation of five anti-aircraft gunner girls against hardened enemy paratroopers. But in reality - women's opposition to war, violence, murder, everything with which the very essence of a woman is incompatible. One by one, five destinies break off, and with each, almost tangibly, the dawns above the earth become quieter and quieter. And they, quiet dawns, will also amaze those who will come here years after the end of the war and read its pages again.

The story absorbed the characteristic features of Vasiliev's prose. Its philosophical and moral, with a melodramatic tinge, component bears the stamp of the author's personality - romantically carried away, sensitive and slightly sentimental, prone to irony and perspicacious. This is the prose of a courageous and honest writer who organically does not accept a compromise between truth and falsehood.

Boris Vasiliev does not spare the reader: the endings of his works are mostly tragic, for he is convinced that art should not act as a comforter, its function is to expose people to life's dangers in any of their manifestations, to awaken conscience and teach sympathy and kindness.

The theme of war and the fate of the generation, for which the war became the main event in life, Vasiliev continued in the stories “I was not on the lists” (1974); “The Magnificent Six” (1980), “Whose are you, old man?” (1982), "Burning Bush" (1986), "Tomorrow was the war" (1986), and others.

Based on documentary material, the story “I Wasn’t on the Lists” can be attributed to the genre of a romantic parable. strengthening a sense of dignity in a young man, turns him to those values ​​that were laid down in him by family traditions, involvement in national history and culture: duty, honor, and finally, patriotism - a feeling, in Vasiliev's way, intimate and secret.

In the early 80s. Vasiliev publishes two works that are very close in terms of internal issues. This is an autobiographical story "My horses are flying" (1984), deeply sincere and full of warmth in relation to everything that made up his youth, and the story "Tomorrow there was a war" is probably one of the most harsh works of the writer. On its pages, the pre-war era reigns ominously, in the collision with the pressure of which the souls and characters of both teenagers and adults break down, succumb, devastate or, conversely, harden. There is a process of breaking the old culture and creating a new one, and, therefore, changing the system of moral coordinates: "... this was the case in all families, inertially striving to convey to us the morality of yesterday, while the street - in the broadest sense - already victoriously carried the morality of tomorrow. But this did not tear us apart, did not sow disharmony, did not give rise to conflicts: this double impact ultimately created the alloy that Krupp steel could never break through”("My horses are flying") .

Vasiliev's stories about the post-war fate of front-line soldiers are invariably imbued with bitterness - too many of the recent soldiers were lost in civilian life - and a sense of guilt before them for the indifference and heartlessness of society. The writer sees in this the natural consequences of the war, neither the millions of victims of which, nor the resounding victories are able to prevent the monstrous decline in the morals of the belligerents. War legitimizes murder and corrupts souls with permissiveness; it returns devastated people to peaceful life. And this has a dangerous effect on subsequent generations, and on the course of history.

The story "Don't Shoot White Swans" (1973), which has something in common with many of Vasiliev's works in moral direction, still occupies a special place in the writer's work. village as "God's poor-bearer", Yegor Polushkin, who stood up for the nature entrusted to his protection. Believing in his rightness and human justice, he becomes a victim of evil, causing an angry reaction in the reader towards the killers. Shooting at swans and kicking their defender, they, first of all, kill everything human in themselves. Acute pity and immense compassion is evoked by the absurdly cut short fate of the forester. Goodness is vulnerable, like any moral principle, and requires protection from us not alone, but by the whole world. A heated controversy unfolded around the novel, a number of critics reproached the writer for excessive sentimentalism and - in part - for self-repetition ("Literary Review", 1973, Nos. 11,12).

The history of the Russian intelligentsia, intertwined with the history of Russia, found its artistic embodiment in the novel "There were and weren't" (1977), which tells about the history of the Alekseev family (in the novel and in other books - the Oleksins), namely, the participation of the author's two great-grandfathers in Russian Turkish war. Having chosen the genre of a family novel that most fully corresponds to his ideas, Vasiliev traces the birth of the Russian intelligentsia on the example of the family, tries to determine its essence. XX century: "Gambler and Breter, player and duelist: Notes of great-great-grandfather" (1998), "There were and weren't", "Satisfy my sorrows" (1997); “And there was evening, and there was morning” (1989), “The house that grandfather built” (1993), “Greetings to you from Baba Lera” (1988). In them, Vasiliev presents to readers the heroic, sublime and tragic fate of the intelligentsia, its deeds and delusions, trying, on the one hand, to determine that deep spiritual and moral constant that gave her strength and ability to remain herself in any situation, on the other hand, to realize the measure of her historical and moral responsibility. violence, destroyed the centuries-old monarchy and brought left-wing extremist forces to power.She herself was subjected to the most severe repressions, but due to the fact that her traditions were not completely destroyed, she managed to informally lead the people during the Patriotic War, which led to victory.

Photo report

“I have lived a long enough life,” writes Boris Vasilyev, “in order to internally feel, and not just logically comprehend all three stages, three generations of the Russian intelligentsia from its inception to death through the stages of confrontation, humiliation, physical destruction, painful conformism of those who survived until the revival of faith in civil rights and the bitter understanding that the intelligentsia remained unclaimed... After all, the necessity and strength of the Russian intelligentsia was in its understanding of its civic duty to the motherland, and not just in the performance of those service functions that are so characteristic of Western intellectuals and which The Russian intelligentsia was demanded by history for the sacred purpose: to reveal the personality in every person, glorify it, strengthen it morally, equip it not with the servility of Orthodoxy, but with the courage of individuality... The Russian people cannot exist without their own intelligentsia in the historically established its understanding, not because of some kind of God's chosenness, but only because without it he loses the meaning of his own existence, as a result of which he is in no way able to grow up” (“The Extraordinary Age”, 2003).

Vasiliev's historical novels contain many analogies, telling about a fierce struggle for power ("Prophetic Oleg", 1993), about the prerequisites for the "Time of Troubles" and its consequences ("Prince Yaroslav and His Sons", 1997), about the deceit and cruelty of princely power, about the first conversions of the Rus to Christianity ("Olga - the Queen of the Rus", 2002).

To the complex realities of today, implicated in acute conflicts between entrepreneurship and criminals, in a frightening decline in culture, and with it the standard of living, in the hidden and obvious threat of the growth of moral deafness in the souls of people, the story "Deafness" (2001) is addressed.

Boris Vasilyev owns many journalistic works, thematically covering the most diverse aspects of our life. This is concern about the loss of historical memory by society and the erosion of the moral and cultural layer accumulated by Russia over the centuries of its existence, and as a result, the disappearance of the thinking layer of society and the mentality of the people. Referring to history, he states: "Yes, history - not in the record, of course - is impossible to correct, but it is possible - and necessary! - to try to smooth out the consequences of the deeds of the past, if these deeds affect the present day"("My horses are flying").

The writer constantly reminds of the need to establish and maintain the priority of culture, which he defines as a traditional system of survival of the Russian people developed over millennia, bitterly recognizing that “The revolution and the civil war that followed it, and in particular the Stalinist repressions, practically destroyed the cultural power of Russia. Civilized countries have ceased to perceive us as their integral cultural part: such, alas, is the reality of today ...”.

Reflecting on the nature of patriotism, Vasiliev says with pain: “Now this great concept is disheveled, tarnished and worn out by impassive communist leaders in the State Duma who do not possess at least a grain of charisma. ... Is it really not clear that love is proved only by deeds, only by deeds and absolutely nothing else?”.

Just as uncompromisingly, he reflects on the prevailing, often pejorative attitude of the authorities towards the people, the relationship between territory and living standards in Russia, and speaks with concern about the absence of civil society in our state.

Vasilyev persistently, step by step, bit by bit, studies history in order to understand the reasons that led to the disenfranchised state in which we live and which we tolerate for the sake of the illusory ideas thrown up by our leaders, and comes to the following important conclusion: "Western Europe inherited from the Catholic Church Roman law, in which the rights of the individual were a priority. Ancient Russia, having adopted Byzantine Christianity, also adopted Byzantine law, in which the priority was not the rights of the individual, but the unconditional right of a despot, sovereign, tsar - then Russia existed right up to the Judicial Reform of Alexander II, on this notion of the priority of state rights over individual rights. The Bolsheviks showed up, resolutely turning to the Byzantine understanding of the priority right of the state". As a result, society was formed "in disregard for the presumption of innocence, which the majority of the population does not suspect at all. It is on the difference in the initial principles that our disagreements with Europe are based, as soon as the conversation about the infringement of human rights comes up.

Whatever Boris Vasiliev writes about, the scale of the writer's personality, the level of his thinking and talent give each line a broad universal sound, evoking a grateful response from readers.

In the 80-90s. Boris Vasilyev actively participates in social and political life: deputy of the 1st Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, member of the Commission of the Congress to investigate the events of 1989. in Tbilisi. In the same year, he left the CPSU, in which he had been a member since 1952. However, pretty soon he leaves politics, believing that the writer should do his own thing. But in 2002, he again turned out to be in public demand - he became a member of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation on Human Rights.
Honorary citizen of Smolensk (1994). Member of the Writers' Union of Moscow and the Union of Cinematographers of Russia.

Boris Vasiliev - laureate of the State Prize of the USSR, the Prize of the President of Russia, the Independent Prize of the Movement named after Academician A.D. Sakharov "April", the international literary prize "Moscow-Penne", the Prize of the Union of Writers of Moscow "Venets", the National Film Prize "Nika" - "For Honor and Dignity, National Literary Award "Big Book" in the nomination "Honor and Dignity".

He was awarded the Orders of the "Patriotic War" 2nd degree, "For Merit to the Fatherland" 2nd degree, the "Red Banner of Labor", "Friendship of Peoples", medals, including "For the Defense of Moscow", "For the Victory over Germany" .

The International United Biographical Center honored him with the title "Outstanding figure of our time."

... He suddenly died on the morning of March 11 at 89 in a house near Solnechnogorsk, where he lived and worked for many years. His stories, novels, journalism, combining an open civic position and an honest attitude to the era, made the reader think about honor and dignity, about the past and the present, about decency, about romanticism, which always lives in human souls.

He left after his faithful friend and long-term companion of life - Zorya Albertovna, whose life was cut short two months ago. He left so as not to be separated from her.