The theme of our article will be the work and biography of Anatoly Rybakov. This very interesting person - a writer and a public figure - lived in a difficult time. We can say that he repeated the fate of the idol of more than one generation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His books have become a symbol of an entire era, and even now, over time, they have not lost their novelty or literary value.
Family and childhood of Anatoly Rybakov
The biography of the future writer began in the village of Derzhanovka, Chernihiv province (now this is the territory of Ukraine). He was born on January 11, 1911 in the family of an engineer. The surname of father Anatoly was Aronov, and mother Rybakov. In his autobiography, he always indicated the city of Chernihiv. Perhaps Rybakov was embarrassed by his village background.
In adulthood, already becoming a writer, Anatoly Naumovich took as a creative pseudonym, and then forever, the name of his mother. Rybakov’s father served in a distillery, and his grandfather was an elder in the synagogue. After the cancellation of the Pale of Settlement, the boy’s parents moved to Moscow. It happened in 1919. They lived on the Arbat, in the very house that will be later described in the writer's works. He studied at the Hvorostovsky gymnasium, and completed his education in a special experimental commune school in Moscow, where the best teachers of the time taught.
Youth
After leaving school, the boy went to work at the Dorogomilovsky Chemical Plant. And in 1930 he entered the Moscow Transport and Economic Institute. But the biography of Anatoly Rybakov three years later suddenly and terribly changed. As a student, he was arrested for counter-revolutionary agitation and propaganda. True, at that time he received a not so long term - three years of exile. Freed up, Anatoly could not work in big cities where there was a passport regime. Therefore, he had to hire a locksmith, a driver, or a loader in the provinces of Russia - Ryazan, Tver, as well as in Tatarstan and Bashkiria. Perhaps that is why he did not expect further arrests. He never filled out questionnaires and seemed to have become invisible to the state security organs.
War and the beginning of creative activity
Biography of Anatoly Rybakov has army pages. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he was called up. He served mainly in automobile units and saw the most famous battles - from the defense of Moscow to the storming of Berlin. He received the rank of guard engineer major, and for military merit he was removed from his conviction.
During the Khrushchev thaw in 1960, Anatoly Rybakov was completely rehabilitated. But back in 1946 after demobilization, he returned to Moscow and began to try himself in the literary genre. The first writing successes were novels written for young people.
Official creativity in the USSR
The biography of the writer Anatoly Rybakov began in 1948. Then was published his first story "Dagger". It was she who he signed with a pseudonym - the name of his mother. Since then, the writer went down in history not as Aronov. From now on, he became Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov. His biography in the field of literature had a double bottom. He can be considered an official writer, because, for example, he received the State Prize of the Soviet Union as far back as 1951 for not very noteworthy artistically, but ideologically correct novel “Drivers”. Although there was something in him from the personal experience of Anatoly.
Interestingly, for the prize, according to rumors, he was recommended by Stalin, who liked the novel. True, the author was either included in the list of applicants, or thrown out as a counter-revolutionary. But in the end, still left. But his adventurous tales, such as the continuation of Dagger, The Bronze Bird, or the series about the adventures and vacations of Krosh, were very popular among the youth of the sixties. Secrets, romance with a pioneer-boyish flavor, ancient artifacts - all this was new and beckoned with freshness.
In 1970, the author’s landmark novel “Unknown Soldier” was published, and in 1978 “Heavy Sand”. He already looked dissonant, because he spoke about the difficult fate of the Jewish family, and even against the background of the then Soviet anti-Semitism.
What was written on the table
But it turned out that the biography of Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov is not so simple. Since the sixties of the twentieth century, he secretly wrote a novel based on memories of the lives of ordinary people in a Moscow communal apartment at the very beginning of the time of Stalin's repressions. Twardowski wanted to publish it as soon as he read it. But censorship did not miss the novel. As soon as perestroika began, in 1987 Rybakov published this book under the already world-famous title “Children of the Arbat”. The work had the effect of an exploding bomb. Together with Abuladze’s film “Repentance, ” it became a symbol of perestroika. The confrontation between Sasha Pankratov, the alter ego of the writer, and Joseph Stalin - the ruler for whom only power matters, but not human lives - was probably the best that is written on this topic.
The novel was continued by the trilogy “Thirty-fifth and Other Years”, which tells about what happened in the future with the children of Arbat - the heroes of the first book. The novel “Fear”, published in 1990, and “Ashes and Ashes”, published in 1994, are part of the trilogy. It is believed that the cycle of novels about the children of Arbat is the peak of Anatoly Rybakov’s work. After that, in 1997, he published only memoirs - an autobiographical novel with documentary memories.
last years of life
With books about the Stalinist repressions and the period of the Great Terror, Anatoly Rybakov, whose brief biography is outlined above, came to worldwide fame. His works began to be translated into other languages and were published in 52 countries. The writer becomes an active public figure and even - until 1991 - leads the Soviet PEN Center. Rybakov’s identity was the feeling of a Russian Soviet Jew. He was a free and independent person.
But at the same time he felt like a part of the Jewish people. In the mid-nineties after the collapse of the USSR, Rybakov became seriously ill. To do the operation, he leaves for the United States. But it's too late. December 23, 1998, Anatoly Rybakov dies in a hospital in New York. He was buried in Moscow at the Kuntsevsky cemetery. According to the novels “Children of the Arbat” and “Heavy Sand”, television series were shot after the death of the writer in the 2000s.
