Rereading my father. Alexander Beck

Bek Alexander Alfredovich (1902/March 1972), Russian writer. The story of the heroic defense of Moscow in 1941 “Volokolamsk Highway” (1943-44), the novel “The Life of Berezhkov” (1956). The novel “New Assignment” (published in 1986) is about the moral problems generated by the command-administrative management system in the 1930-50s. The novel “The Next Day” (not finished, published in 1989) is about the origins of the phenomenon of Stalinism.

At the age of thirteen, Beck ran away from home from his stepmother and his harsh father, who beat him. He lived with friends, somehow graduated from a real school. At the age of sixteen he went to war and never returned to his father’s roof. He knew ridiculously little about his family and was not at all interested in the Bek genealogy. When the Patriotic War began, Beck believed that he had to be especially brave, braver than others, since German blood flowed in his veins, although thoroughly diluted (the Becks married Russians).

Having won back, Beck then studied at the Sverdlov Communist University, or, simply put, Sverdlovka (the first higher party school in the USSR), together with future people's commissars and future secretaries of regional committees. In the meantime, they are cheerful hungry people who have recently defeated the enemy and are in the most optimistic mood. Beck seemed to be popular among them, made jokes that were then repeated, and was the editor of the newspaper. Gnawing on the granite of science, as they put it then, all these young healthy guys lived from hand to mouth, constantly thinking and talking about food.

Among the listeners of Sverdlovka there was a certain fanatical inventor who constantly sent letters to the government about his ingenious discoveries and inventions. They promised to help with inventions when the industry got better, but in the meantime they began to give him some kind of enhanced ration so that his talent would not die down. And since he was an impractical person, busy with his fantasies, his food accumulated and became stale.

Beck and two other listeners - Kolya and Agasik - convinced the inventor that his letters “to the top” were not successful because he had bad, clumsy handwriting and all the documentation was poorly prepared. Three friends deceived the inventor, saying that they had agreed on everything so that the workers would make good and understandable drawings and diagrams, but at the same time, saying that they, the workers, needed products, not money. Therefore, they lured bags of flour and bottles of vegetable oil from him, baked pancakes, and ate themselves and fed the whole gang. As a result, many people learned about this incident, the inventor was mortally offended and also complained. The case received wide publicity. They considered it extortion and theft, and all three were expelled from the party and from Sverdlovka.

The three expelled were nineteen to twenty years old. Kolya led Komsomol work in Tula before Sverdlovka; the Armenian Agasik managed not only to fight, but also to conduct underground work and served time in prison. Beck was the initiator of the criminal act, he did not hide it. Firstly, his imagination in terms of all sorts of trickster crafts was very developed, his fantasy worked perfectly. Secondly, God did not offend him with his appetite; he is large and bodily. Earthly, he always wanted to eat more than others, and endured hunger worse.

Beck ran away from Moscow, wherever his eyes looked. I decided once and for all that there is no and cannot be any return to my past life. Without a penny of money, he boarded freight cars, traveled first in one direction, then in the other, rushing around the country. In the end, he ended up in the northwest, got lost in the forests, and didn’t notice how he crossed the border. He became convinced that he had been brought to Estonia, then an independent bourgeois state, and fell into despair. Back to the Soviet Union, back at all costs! The border was poorly guarded, he managed (with all sorts of adventures) to cross into Soviet territory, and almost died of starvation in the border forests. They picked him up with two typhus, typhus and abdominal, admitted him to the hospital, and lay unconscious for several weeks. Then he was arrested to clarify all the circumstances, but, however, the arrest was short-lived and he was soon released.

The whole past life seemed to be crossed out. He returned to Moscow and became a loader at the Zemlyachka tannery. Where else should someone expelled from the party go? Beck did not have Moscow Square, had nowhere to live, spent the night in a factory, wandered around among friends, unwashed, unkempt, usually half-starved.

Loader Bek was drawn to the path of a workers' correspondent; his short notes began to appear in Pravda, signed with the pseudonym "Ra-be" (which meant "worker Bek" or "worker Beck"). Under Pravda, a circle of literary and theatrical criticism was created for workers. Beck, a regular at the circle, took an active part in heated debates. Soon he will become a professional literary critic and create a special group (Beck, his first wife, their friend). The group will develop its own position, criticize everything and everyone, even RAPP, for insufficient fidelity to the principles of proletarian art. Later, in the 50s and 60s, Beck liked to say: “I was very lucky twice in my life. When I married Natasha (second wife of N.V. Loiko). And when I was expelled from the party. Sverdlovsk residents are my fellow students, almost all of them became party leaders, and quite a few of them. How many of them died peacefully in their beds?”

On the threshold of his seventieth birthday, Beck is remembered as large, ponderous, with tousled thick hair and sharply flashing small bear eyes, with a sly grin. And all the grips were bearish, and so was the gait. You have to work hard to knock down such a stocky hero. Strongly put together. Well, the era has worked hard, tried.

Unique and indomitable.

When they met, former front-line soldiers greeted Bek: “Great, good soldier Beyk!” That’s what they called him at the front because even in the most terrible days of the retreat he did not lose his peculiar cheerful “Schweik humor.”

Beck was also called in the war - Man - On the contrary. They said: if the army was retreating, and one car still went forward on some business, then the correspondent Beck was already right there, insistently asking to be taken with them.

Beck really likes Dombrowski’s aphorism: “We have a country of unlimited possibilities.”

One of the leaders of the Writers' Union, Markov, during the period of Beck's latest troubles (after some cocky speech about creative freedom at a writers' meeting) exclaimed with irritation: “Unacceptable Beck!” They say Kazakevich corrected him: “The inimitable Bek. Indomitable Beck."

January 3, 2003 marked one hundred years since the birth of the outstanding Russian writer Alexandra Beka, the author of a truthful, talented novel about the defenders of Moscow - “Volokolamsk Highway”. On the pages of our magazine, Tatyana Beck, a famous poet and literary critic, talks about her father.

...His star has shone again, Mountains of success are predicted - Both plays and TV series... But there will be no living Beck. ...I remembered his fate today, I looked for the hidden meaning in it, But the only thing I understood: You need to live in Russia for a long time. V. Kornilov In memory of Alexander Bek

Alexander Beck was born in Saratov, in the family of a general of the medical service, the chief physician of a large military hospital, Alfred Vladimirovich Beck. Beck is one of the Russified Danes: according to the family legend (his father, with his passion for facts and documents, already in the 60s verified its accuracy by delving into the Leningrad archives), his great-grandfather, Christian Beck, was “discharged” from Denmark himself Peter I as an experienced postmaster - to organize Russian mail. Isn’t this where, I think now, Alexander Beck’s persistent and slightly old-fashioned love for epistolary communication comes from? After all, he named his late autobiographical story, with an eye to Pushkin, "Postal Prose".

More milestones of fate: I studied at the Saratov real school, especially doing well in mathematics - the teacher said: “And for Beck I have a special problem - more difficult.” At the age of sixteen, he volunteered for the civil war in the Red Army, was wounded - as a child, this deep, torn dent in my leg seemed terribly scary to me... Then the slightly limping young man Bek ended up in a divisional large-circulation newspaper, where he received his first profession of “newspaper worker”: He wrote the reports himself, he did the editing and proofreading himself, he himself turned the flywheel of the “American” printing press. Then he studied at Sverdlovsk University in the history department. Then he was a simple worker at the Zemlyachka plant, and in the evenings on the outskirts of Zamoskvoretsk he attended the Pravda journalistic circle. He signed his notes and sketches with the outlandish pseudonym “Ra-Be”: I hear here the uniquely sly fatherly humor - both the worker Bek and the rebbe... Then he was a failed literary critic, which he later recalled not without self-irony: “Can you imagine, I was even to the left of RAPP!” RAPP was defeated, which brought a happy end to Beck’s unvictorious career as a critic.

In the early 30s, Beck accidentally (but “the more accidental, the more accurate,” as the poet said) ended up in a literary team, which from the editorial board headed Gorky and bearing the name “History of Factories and Plants”, was sent to Siberia to collectively create the history of Kuznetskstroy. It was here that the writer (and for a long time he considered himself only a “journalist” or also a “worry scribbler”) found his unique method: talking with the heroes of future books, extracting precious details from them, collecting grains and threads from which the fabric of the narrative will then be woven . The participants in this project, which was later called the “Cabinet of Memoirs,” were called the clumsy word “talkers” and, together with a stenographer assigned to each, “spinned” people’s commissars, engineers, business executives, inventors, workers into precious confessions (archive of the “Cabinet” during the years of Stalin’s terror was confiscated and died). Thus, it was intended to create a huge documentary chronicle of the era. “Our job is to listen talentedly, that is, to tune in the interlocutor, to listen to him sensitively and with interest, to evoke eloquent details with questions, in a word, to achieve a sincere, vivid story,” the writer later recalled. Thus, from the very beginning, he defined his creative task, which combined a thorough study of nature and only then a focus on imagination and generalization. Moreover, here, in the depths of the “Cabinet of Memoirs”, Beck’s exceptional and intense interest in talented workers and even, one might say, maniacs of their craft (he would call himself a singer of talents in his declining years) originated. Few of the “talkers” - and even a romantic began in this capacity Paustovsky, – remained faithful to this strict school. Perhaps only he is the one about whom Viktor Shklovsky himself immediately said with amazed sharpness: “Beck opens people like tin cans!”... Before the war, the writer published a documentary-fiction book “Blast Furnace Workers,” which included the story “Kurako” and other essays short stories and monologues. Already here, Bekov’s unique style was clearly evident: concise laconicism, sharp plot drama, impeccable authenticity of the narrative and, as a rule, the author’s withdrawal into the shadow of a character speaking in the first person. All these principles, enriched with sudden inspiration, will form the basis of the Volokolamsk Highway.

Shortly before the war, the writer sat down to write a major work, which he completed only many years later. This is “The Life of Berezhkov” (the final title is “Talent”), which tells about domestic aircraft designers and is rich, let us remember Beck’s favorite word, with ions of gift, pressure and daring. The writer was working on a novel when a neighbor knocked on the window of the dacha where he was working: “You don’t know anything? The war has begun! Beck found some string, tied the materials, notes and drafts of the novel into several bundles, hid these bundles under the porch and left for Moscow on the first train. And two weeks later, as part of a group of volunteer writers, he joined the people’s militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division and again drank the share of a warrior - “the good soldier Beyk,” as he was nicknamed in the battalion... Boris Runin, author of the memoir essay “Writers' Company” ( 1985), testified that the witty, risky, courageous Beck quickly became the soul of the division - as they would say now - an informal leader. And this - despite the most, from the point of view of military norms, unpresentable appearance: “Huge boots, windings that were constantly unwinding and dragging on the ground, gray uniforms, and to top it all off, an absurd cap sitting on his head, not speaking of glasses...” Company comrades immediately paid tribute to the powerful intellect of their half-freak comrade (however, it is unlikely that any of them imagined that this purely civilian essayist would soon write the sharpest and most accurate book about the war) - Boris Runin recalls: “A man of remarkable intelligence and rare worldly insight, Beck, obviously, had long been accustomed to playing such an eccentric simpleton. His innate sociability was reflected in the fact that he could, with the most naive look, sit down with any company comrade and, having tuned him with his deliberate childish spontaneity to complete frankness, take over all the thoughts of his trusting interlocutor... Apparently, in this way he satisfied his insatiable need for human contacts . I think that, despite his apparent innocence, Beck already knew better than any of us in the specific conditions of a militia formation, and in the front-line situation in general. In a word, he was one of the most complex and most interesting characters among us...” And soon after my father’s death, I wrote the poem “Voenkor” - this is how I still see him, plotting the “Volokolamsk Highway” at the end of 1941:

The military spruces are looking, Like a road, alone, In a wide-brimmed overcoat, He votes for Klin. He's been shaking in the back for a long time With a feeling of vague guilt... How difficult it is for him to find the secret of secret wars! (You will see it again With a different, young look. But the more precious word is spoken through the smoke). The military spruce trees are watching, How he, with a frozen hand, Hiding his notebook from the blizzard, Writes about the morning battle, How, warmed up from a rest, A diligent scribe of Truth, He, smiling tiredly, Asks to pour him some soup.

“In this book, I am just a conscientious and diligent scribe,” “Volokolamsk Highway” begins with supposedly emphasized self-deprecation, but in fact with a pointed signal of extreme naturalness (as they say, “exactly like in life”). It is characteristic that Beck never gave a genre definition to his secret book, only once in his diary of 1942 calling it “a chronicle of the battle of Moscow” and only conditionally calling each of the individual parts of the final tetralogy “stories.” A book, it is a book! Beck, apparently, attached the same special meaning to devotion to this word as Tvardovsky, who wrote about “Vasily Terkin” (Beck’s favorite thing): “The genre designation of “Books about a fighter”, which I settled on, was not the result of a desire to simply avoid the designation “poem”, “story”, etc. What was important in this choice was the special sound of the word “book”, familiar to me from childhood, in the mouths of the common people, which seemed to presuppose the existence of a book in a single copy...” It is interesting that this was the only way Beck’s book was perceived at the front, although it was published in light (the first two stories) in double issues of the Znamya magazine. The critic M. Kuznetsov recalled that when he, a young employee of an army newspaper, arrived in 1944 with an editorial assignment to one of the divisions, he was immediately summoned to the general: “Tell me,” the general asked, holding the “Banner” in his hands. , - is it possible to urgently publish this in the printing house of an army newspaper? I would distribute this book to every officer in my division.” The same general asked the journalist for a long time about Beck and concluded: “He, of course, is a professional military man who became a writer, he is either a colonel or older.” We can already imagine the good soldier Bake... The writer’s creative principles originate in “Dialogues” Cicero and “History” of Herodotus, on the one hand, and in “Sevastopol Stories” Lev Tolstoy, with another. He was precisely a historian of our time, he was able to synthesize a philosophical chronicle and a burning report... I will tell you the most dramatic episode from the creative history of the Volokolamsk Highway. The fact is that, having started writing a book and taking a leave of absence from the Znamya magazine, where Beck was listed as a correspondent, he rented a room at the Bykovo station near Moscow, where he worked selflessly. When one day he needed to visit Moscow, out of fear of a fire or any other trouble, he put all the materials for the “Volokolamsk Highway” and the almost completed manuscript into a duffel bag... In the carriage of the country train that carried him from Moscow to Bykovo, Beck absent-mindedly ( and also concentrating on the can of soup that his relatives handed him) left the bag. The loss could not be discovered. The writer’s despair was boundless, but he found the strength and... Let’s quote Beck’s later memoirs: “I had no choice but to write the story again. But now it has lost its purely documentary character - after all, I didn’t have my archive. I had to give free rein to my imagination, the figure of the central character, who retained his true surname, increasingly acquired the character of an artistic image, the truth of fact gave way to the truth of art...” The fate of books can sometimes be so whimsical: a desperate collision, as we see, gave an unexpected creative effect.

In the May-June issues of the magazine "Znamya" for 1943, the first part of the book was published - "Panfilov's Men at the First Frontier (a Tale of Fear and Fearlessness)", and exactly a year later - the next one: "Volokolamsk Highway", with the subtitle - "The Second Tale of Panfilov's men." Reader recognition was incredible and unanimous. The magazines were read to the gills both in the army and in the rear, passed from hand to hand, discussed, studied. The recognition of his fellow writers was no less. Thus, Konstantin Simonov, in the article “About Alexander Bek” (1963), recalled that when he first read “Volokolamsk Highway”, he was shocked precisely by the iron authenticity and invincibly detailed truth of the book (“it was alien to any embellishment, bare, precise, economical” ), written by a civilian who knows war as a matter of fact. Wartime criticism primarily noted the unconditional psychological depth and genre novelty of the “stories.” From my point of view, the most important existential problem of this book was the phenomenon of overcome fear, which is defeated in war by conscience, shame and spiritual discipline. Partly – and laughter (“Laughter is the most serious thing at the front!”): the book contains a lot of playful humor and folk irony – both in lively dialogues and in an abundance of laughing sayings. One of the first chapters is called “Fear”. The hero, who is also the narrator, smashing to smithereens the “corporals of literature” (synonyms are writers and paper scribblers), explains to the writer that heroism is not a gift of nature and not a gift of the captain, who, along with greatcoats, distributes fearlessness - fear is like an “eclipse of reason” and the “instant catastrophe” of the undermined soul is overcome by the will and passion of the collective battle. “When we pushed the Germans back from Moscow, General Fear ran after them.” Bek, at times as if dressing up as a Kazakh hero (through his nationality and, in particular, through numerous folklore allusions, the communal-tribal nature of the army hierarchy is more clearly revealed), shows the cruel truth of the battle: “the burning joy of a warrior who killed someone who inspired fear, who was coming to kill.” This motif is constantly heard in military prose. Andrey Platonov- the only literary phenomenon of those years with which I would compare Beck's book - it is strange that criticism completely ignored this unconditional parallel. Platonov writes about “fierce joy that suppresses fear”, about “a great creation: the killing of evil along with its source - the body of the enemy”, about a state when “battle turns from horror into everyday necessity.” For me, reading these books today, the whole unnatural substance of war lies precisely in the calm with which the laws of righteous murder and the inevitability of death are stated. In the midst of the battle, Baurdzhan is talking in his thoughts to a fellow Kazakh soldier with the intonation of Plato’s heroes: “You and I are military men, people of a high profession. The loss of life is a natural consequence of our craft with you...” The cruel psychology of war dictates that the only way out for a single individual is to subordinate his individuality to the system, but victory is destined only if sublimation is sublimated into voluntary creative will. The commander orders his soldiers, who left civilian clothes, a nice family and a civilian profession in a peaceful past, to put a different opinion in an envelope and, “while we are close to home,” send them home.

Fear, the threat of death, the need for submission manipulated people even before the war, but they were not righteous (Beck will show the blind, paralyzing horror of that “peaceful” tyrannical system, uninspired by justice, by completely different artistic means twenty years later in the novel “New Assignment”), - the spiritual uplift and dramatic major that permeate the first chapters of “Volokolamsk Highway” are associated with the long-awaited justice and expediency of collective, but not weak-willed existence... “Will you be able to convey this in the book: unfreedom for the sake of freedom?” – the hero once asks his chronicler with doubt. In fact - and the book abundantly contains a provocative game between the “scribe” and the “hero” - Beck often puts into Baurdzhan’s mouth the discoveries of his personal philosophy, which he, a paradoxist and Ernik, liked to present not in direct authorial digressions, but as if through the mouth of one’s own antagonist. Isn’t this the mysterious effect and unique charm of “Volokolamsk Highway”? What kind of socialist realism is that... The poet Don Aminado in his book “Smoke without a Fatherland” (1921) has wonderful poems about the valor of the military lot and the falsehood of military rhetoric (I don’t know whether my father read them, but he would certainly have approved!) :

I cannot wish from the generals that every time, in the smoke of gunpowder, they would show the charms of republican ideals. To whom? And why? ...There are critics: they need to die, I say this without laughing, So that even the horse neighs the Marseillaise, rushing into a cavalry attack.

In Bek, neither the generals, nor the officers, nor the soldiers, nor the division horse Lysanka (personally my favorite character in the book), to whom Baurdzhan gives all his rough tenderness, do not sing or neigh "Marseillaise", nor "Holy War". They simply surpass themselves and work for victory. Beck was completely disgusted by the music of the loyalist slogan. Only dry dispassion, only self-critical analysis, only creative doubt. And therefore, the art of war in Beck’s book is revealed with amazing liveliness and even sensuality as the creativity of an unsleeping thought, bypassing the formulaic paragraphs of the regulations, and dead orders, and senselessly despotic directives... It is no coincidence that in 1944, a discussion dedicated to military literature was held at the Union of Writers of the USSR Recently (the debate revolved primarily around K. Simonov’s book “Days and Nights” and around “Volokolamsk Highway”), Beck’s work was rated extremely highly precisely as a work that reveals the sphere of thinking of the commander leading the battle. The most important (and, as we will see, prophetic) consideration was expressed during the discussion by the same Viktor Shklovsky: “I believe that, although Beck has not been written better, Beck’s book has not been completed... It’s good when you have a strong sitter, but find people around, illuminate the people around, contrast soldiers with him not only as objects of the commander’s will.”

Indeed, Beck's book was not completed. He felt it himself. Time passed... “Volokolamsk Highway” was translated into almost all the main languages ​​of the world, in many countries it became mandatory reading for students of military academies (the CIA, using Beck’s book, spent a long time studying the psychology of the Soviet commander and the “mysterious Russian soul” in the context of the war ), Beck was working on new things. The life of the idea (and “Volokolamsk Highway” from the very beginning was conceived as a cycle of four stories, and, as Beck admitted, he assumed that the final part was the main one for the general idea) in the writer’s creative consciousness was not interrupted for a moment: it was latently dormant in him . But only in the spring of 1956 did he come close to implementing his long-standing plan... Work on the continuation of “Volokolamsk Highway” was carried out in this way: the writer brought up what little was left of his military archive - the surviving transcripts of conversations with Momysh-Uly and other participants in the battle ( Thus, the half-decayed notebook “Miscellaneous Conversations” with soldiers’ words, tales and small details of front-line life survived) - and also conducted a number of new conversations. Beck, as usual, records his thoughts as he works in his diary, but now they concern not so much the form as the concept of the book. The continuation of the book democratizes its atmosphere, prescribes the “background”. And yet - the further, the more active (on the verge of absurdism) there is a movement of the author’s vision into the retina of the hero-narrator, the insulation of someone else’s gaze with the writer’s “down” and, moreover, apparently, an unconscious rethinking of military space by the artist, who at the beginning war, he strictly mobilized his energy, narrowing it only to the benefit of the matter, and who, narrating about the same time after the fact, after the victory, allowed himself a life-giving expansion of the existential horizon. In the post-war continuation of “Volokolamsk Highway” - unlike the beginning - the polemic (in other words, the difference) between the hero-storyteller and the author-scribe is constantly forced and exposed. Beck, continuing the experimental game of being a humble scribe under a powerful hero (it is actually the crafty author who rules!), is now clearly distancing himself from Baurdzhan. In general, between the first and second halves of the book there are many mirror-arguing reflections... The main character of the story gradually becomes not the categorical and powerful narrator Baurdzhan, but the wise and sensitive Panfilov, who allowed himself to declare at headquarters that disorder “is the new order,” and who dies in battle near the village of Goryuny (oh, this poetry of Russian names! ) as a humanist and as an innovator... The publication of the third and fourth stories of “Volokolamsk Highway” in Tvardovsky’s “New World”, which took place in 1960, completed the history of the creation of this strange and strong, gentle and cruel, simple and inexhaustible book about military creativity, about fear and fearlessness, about hatred in excess of love, about the universal and the only, about death and life.

To Alexandru Bek, who was constantly frightened by the hero of “Volokolamsk Highway”: “If you lie, put your right hand on the table. Once! Right hand down!”, he still had to write another (as they used to say in the old days, different) chronicle of the century - the novel “New Assignment”, in which he, I repeat, will rethink and overturn his extreme military hymn to discipline and show how destructive subordination is for creative individuality supremely vicious “administrative command system”... This is a special milestone, a collision, a drama for both the hero and the artist. My father died without seeing the new novel published in his homeland (it, like the book “Volokolamsk Highway”, went from hand to hand, but now in Tamizdat itself), but no one would have dared to cut off his right hand... Let me remind you: my father , Alexander Beck, as a young Red Army soldier, found himself in a terrible, paradoxical, insidious, but also heroic, but also inspired period of historical time. He disinterestedly gave him his rare gift, loving this time and place in the Tacitian way, without anger and partiality, he recorded it in his prose as a tragic cartographer, he - at once short-sighted and insightful - passed away without breaking into the ugly corners of a degenerate utopia .

Tatiana Beck

Alexander Alfredovich Beck- Russian writer, prose writer.

Born into the family of a military doctor. His childhood and youth years passed in Saratov, and there he graduated from a real school. At the age of 16, A. Bek joined the Red Army. During the Civil War he served on the Eastern Front near Uralsk and was wounded. The editor-in-chief of the divisional newspaper drew attention to A. Beck and ordered several reports from him. This is where his literary activity began.

A. Beck’s first story “Kurako” (1934) was written based on his impressions from a trip to a new building in the city of Kuznetsk.

Beck's essays and reviews began to appear in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestia. Since 1931, A. Beck collaborated in the editorial offices of “History of Factories and Plants” and “People of Two Five-Year Plans”, in the “Cabinet of Memoirs” created on the initiative of M. Gorky.

During the Great Patriotic War, A. Beck joined the Moscow People's Militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division. He took part in the fighting near Vyazma as a war correspondent. I reached Berlin, where I celebrated Victory Day. Beck's most famous story, “Volokolamsk Highway,” was written in 1943-1944. In it, “the departure from primitive jingoistic idealization and at the same time adaptation to the line required by the party are so skillfully combined that they ensured the story’s enduring recognition in the Soviet Union” (V. Kazak). “Volokolamsk Highway” was one of Comandante Che Guevara’s favorite books. The main character of the story was Hero of the Soviet Union, senior lieutenant battalion commander (later guard colonel, division commander) Bauyrzhan Momysh-Uly.

The continuation of this book were the stories “A Few Days” (1960), “Reserve of General Panfilov” (1960).

The prototype of the main character of the novel “Talent (The Life of Berezhkov)” (1956) was aircraft designer Alexander Alexandrovich Mikulin.

In 1956, A. Beck was a member of the editorial board of the almanac “Literary Moscow”.

After the war, he wrote a series of essays about Manchuria, Harbin and Port Arthur. A number of works are dedicated to metallurgists (the collection “Blast Furnace Workers”, the story “New Profile”, the novel “Young People” - together with N. Loiko). In 1968, Postal Prose was published.

At the center of the novel “New Appointment” (1965) is I. Tevosyan, who held the post of Minister of Metallurgical Industry and Ferrous Metallurgy under Stalin. The novel did not contain dissident views, but it was withdrawn from the issue after it was announced for publication in the New World magazine. Tevosyan’s widow played a certain role in banning the novel; she decided that the novel “New Assignment” revealed unnecessary details of the private life of her late husband. The novel was first published in Germany in 1972, and in the USSR in 1986, during Perestroika.

The novel “The Other Day” (unfinished), first published in 1990, is dedicated to the youth of I.V. Stalin.

In his last years he lived in Moscow at 4 Chernyakhovsky Street. He was buried in Moscow, at the Golovinsky cemetery.

Alexander Alfredovich Beck - Russian writer, prose writer.

Born on December 21, 1902 in Saratov in the family of a military doctor. His childhood and youth years passed in Saratov, and there he graduated from a real school. At the age of 16, Bek joined the Red Army. During the Civil War he served on the Eastern Front near Uralsk and was wounded. The editor-in-chief of the divisional newspaper drew attention to the author and ordered him several reports. This is where his literary activity began. Alexander Alfredovich’s first story “Kurako” (1934) was written based on his impressions from a trip to a new building in the city of Kuznetsk.

During the Great Patriotic War, Beck joined the Moscow People's Militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division. He took part in the fighting near Vyazma as a war correspondent. I reached Berlin, where I celebrated Victory Day. In 1956, the author was a member of the editorial board of the almanac “Literary Moscow”.

In his last years he lived in Moscow at 4 Chernyakhovsky Street. He was buried in Moscow, at the Golovinsky cemetery.

Alexander Alfredovich Beck. Born December 21, 1902 (January 3, 1903) in Saratov - died November 2, 1972 in Moscow. Russian Soviet writer.

Father - Alfred Vladimirovich Beck, general of the medical service, chief physician of a military hospital.

His childhood and youth years passed in Saratov. Graduated from the Saratov 2nd real school.

At the age of 16, Alexander Bek joined the Red Army. During the Civil War he served on the Eastern Front near Uralsk and was wounded. The editor-in-chief of the divisional newspaper drew attention to Beck and ordered him several reports. This is where his literary activity began. At the beginning of his creative career, he was the first editor of the newspaper “Red Black Sea”.

Since 1931, he collaborated in the editorial offices of “History of Factories and Plants” and “People of Two Five-Year Plans”, in the “Cabinet of Memoirs” created on the initiative.

Alexander Bek's first story is “Kurako”. It was written in 1935 based on impressions from a trip to a new building in the city of Kuznetsk.

Beck's essays and reviews began to appear in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestia.

During the Great Patriotic War, Beck joined the Moscow People's Militia, the Krasnopresnenskaya Rifle Division. He took part in the fighting near Vyazma as a war correspondent. I reached Berlin, where I celebrated Victory Day.

Beck's most famous story "Volokolamskoe highway" was written in 1942-1943. First published in 1943 under the title “Panfilov’s Men at the First Frontier” in the magazine “Znamya”. It tells about the feat of Soviet soldiers and officers from the 1st battalion of the 1073rd rifle regiment of the 316th division (later the 8th Guards Rifle Division), who fought and gave their lives in a battle with the German invaders near Moscow in the Volokolamsk direction in the fall - winter of 1941.

On the one hand, the book describes the organization, education of the battalion taking part in battles, life within it, the behavior of the commander, his interaction with the division commander. On the other hand, the tactics of the battles near Moscow and how and on the basis of what the old linear tactics of the Red Army forces were changed and rebuilt in response to the tactics within the framework of the new German strategy.

Structurally, the work consists of four stories of 10-17 chapters, the narrative is told as a story by the senior lieutenant of the battalion of the Panfilov Rifle Division, Hero of the Soviet Union Baurzhan Momysh-Ula. The style of the novel departs from the primitive poster image of war; the author shows the fighters as real people with their own weaknesses, with the fear of death, but at the same time with a full understanding of responsibility for the fate of the country at such a difficult historical moment. The novel raises the theme of internationalism and military brotherhood.

It is worth noting that at the beginning of 1942 he went to the Panfilov division, which had already driven back German troops from the borders near Moscow almost to Staraya Russa. During his stay in the division, the writer accumulated material in long conversations with soldiers of the Red Army. In these conversations, the image of General Panfilov, who died near Moscow, began to take shape, with his Suvorov-like concern for the soldiers and his characteristic expressions: “Don’t rush to die - learn to fight,” “A soldier must fight with his mind,” “A soldier goes into battle not to die, but to live.” , “Victory is forged before the battle.” In the summer of 1942, Beck received leave from the Znamya magazine and sat down to write a story. Initially, the first two stories out of four were published, and later the last two were added. The most important, from the author’s point of view, is the fourth story. In it, Beck describes the formation of new tactics for conducting defensive battles.

“Volokolamsk Highway” was one of the Comandante’s favorite books.

The continuation of the book “Volokolamsk Highway” was the story “A Few Days” (1960) and “General Panfilov’s Reserve” (1960).

The prototype of the main character of the novel “Talent (The Life of Berezhkov)” (1956) was the largest designer of aircraft engines A. A. Mikulin.

In 1956, Alexander Bek was a member of the editorial board of the almanac “Literary Moscow”.

After the war, he wrote a series of essays about Manchuria, Harbin and Port Arthur. A number of works are dedicated to metallurgists (the collection “Blast Furnace Workers”, the story “New Profile”, the novel “Young People” - together with N. Loiko).

At the center of the novel “New Appointment” (1965) is I. Tevosyan, who served as Minister of Metallurgical Industry and Ferrous Metallurgy. The novel did not contain dissident views, but it was withdrawn from the issue after it was announced for publication in the New World magazine. Tevosyan’s widow O. A. Khvalebnova played a certain role in the prohibition of the novel; she decided that the novel “New Assignment” revealed unnecessary details of the private life of her late husband. The novel was first published in Germany in 1972, and in the USSR in 1986.

The novel “The Other Day” (unfinished, 1967-1970), first published in 1989 (Friendship of Peoples magazine, 1989 No. 8, 9), is dedicated to the youth of I.V. Stalin.

Many of the writer's works have been filmed.

In his last years he lived in Moscow at number 4 on Chernyakhovsky Street.

Personal life of Alexander Beck:

Wife - Natalia Vsevolodovna Loiko (1908-1987), writer and architect. Before meeting Beck, she was married to the writer Alexander Sharov.

Daughter - Tatyana Bek, poetess and literary critic.

Tatyana Bek - daughter of Alexander Bek

Bibliography of Alexander Beck:

1927 - Circle of book friends in the working library
1928 - Evening of Maxim Gorky at the club
1939 - The Life of Vlas Lesovik
1939, 1953, 1958 - Kurako
1945 - Volokolamsk highway
1946 - Blast furnace workers
1948 - Timofey - open heart
1950 - Grain of steel
1955 - Timofey Open Heart
1956 - Life of Berezhkov (Talent)
1961 - General Panfilov's Reserve
1961 - A few days
1965 - At the front and in the rear
1967 - My heroes
1968 - Postal prose. Memoirs, articles, letters
1972 - New appointment
1972 - In the last hour
1974-1976 - Collected works in 4 volumes
1975 - In my lifetime
1990 - The Other Day
1991 - Collected works in 4 volumes

Screen adaptations by Alexander Beck:

1967 - Moscow is behind us - film adaptation of the story “Volokolamsk Highway”
1979 - Talent - film adaptation of the novel “Talent (The Life of Berezhkov)”
1983 - Day of the Division Commander - film adaptation of the essay “Day of the Division Commander” from the collection “A Few Days”
1990 - Time has sunk - film adaptation of the novel “New Assignment”