The real name of Alexander Stepanovich Green, a Russian Soviet prose writer of Polish origin who created his works in line with romantic realism, is Grinevsky. His name is associated primarily with the story “Scarlet Sails”.

He was born in the Vyatka province, the city of Slobodskaya on August 23 (August 11, O.S.), 1880. A tendency to change places, daydreaming, supported by a love of books about foreign lands and travel, he already had childhood years, he did not I tried to run away from home once. In 1896, his studies at the four-year Vyatka City School ended, and Alexander left for Odessa, where his six-year period of vagrancy began.

Having got a job on a ship, he initially wanted to realize his old dream of becoming a navigator, but soon lost interest in it. Fisherman, loader, digger, lumberjack, gold miner and even sword swallower - Alexander Grinevsky tried all these professions on himself, but he could not get rid of the dire need that in 1902 forced him to enlist in the army as a volunteer.

His service lasted 9 months, a third of which he spent in a punishment cell, and ended with desertion. At this time, he became close to the Socialist Revolutionaries, who involved him in propaganda work. The sailors' agitation in Sevastopol ended with Green's arrest in 1903, and an unsuccessful escape attempt resulted in two years in a maximum security prison. However, he continued to engage in propaganda work, and in 1905 he was supposed to be exiled to Siberia for 10 years, and only an amnesty helped to avoid such an unenviable fate.

In 1906, Alexander Green’s first story, “To Italy,” was published, and the ones that followed in the same year, “The Merit of Private Panteleev” and “Elephant and Pug,” were confiscated directly from the printing house and burned. Their author, who was in St. Petersburg at that time, was arrested and exiled to the Tobolsk province, but the disgraced aspiring writer managed to quickly escape from the place of exile with someone else’s documents. In 1907, the story “The Case” was published, notable for the fact that for the first time in his creative biography the author signed the pseudonym A.S. Green. The following year, the first collection of short stories, “The Invisible Cap,” was published, which did not go unnoticed.

In 1910, Green was sent into exile for the second time - this time for two years in the Arkhangelsk province. Upon returning home, Green actively wrote and published; his stories, novellas, satirical miniatures, poems, and poems were published in 60 publications. Until October 1917, Greene published about 350 works. During this period, the romantic orientation of his writings was formed, which came into conflict with harsh reality.

The February Revolution gave rise to hopes for changes for the better, but they dissipated with the Bolsheviks coming to power. Their actions further disappointed Green in the surrounding reality; he began to create his own world with renewed vigor. Today it is difficult to imagine that the famous story “Scarlet Sails,” beloved by all romantics, was born in Petrograd, engulfed in revolutionary transformations (it was published in 1923). The heroes of Green's works and fictional cities did not fit well into Soviet literature, filled with the pathos of building socialism - along with their author. His works were published less and less and were increasingly criticized.

In 1924, the novel by A.S. was published. Green's "The Shining World", and in the same year he moved to Feodosia. Suffering from tuberculosis and poverty, he continued to write, and new stories came from his pen, the novels “The Golden Chain” (1925), “Running on the Waves” (1928), “Jessie and Morgiana” (1929), in 1930 . The novel “Road to Nowhere” was released, permeated with the tragic attitude of a sick and misunderstood artist. The last place of residence in Green’s biography was the city of Old Crimea, where he moved in 1930 and died on July 8, 1932.

Alexander Green (real name Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky). August 11 (23), 1880, Sloboda, Vyatka province, Russian Empire - July 8, 1932, Old Crimea, USSR. Russian prose writer, poet, representative of neo-romanticism, author of philosophical and psychological works, with elements of symbolic fiction.

Father - Stefan Gryniewski (Polish Stefan Hryniewski, 1843-1914), a Polish nobleman from the Disna district of the Vilna province of the Russian Empire. For participation in the January Uprising of 1863, at the age of 20, he was indefinitely exiled to Kolyvan, Tomsk province. Later he was allowed to move to the Vyatka province, where he arrived in 1868. In Russia they called him “Stepan Evseevich”.

In 1873 he married 16-year-old Russian nurse Anna Stepanovna Lepkova (1857-1895). For the first 7 years they had no children, Alexander became the first-born, later he had a brother Boris and two sisters, Antonina and Ekaterina.

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

In 1889, nine-year-old Sasha was sent to a preparatory class at a local real school. There his fellow practitioners first gave him nickname "Green". The school's report noted that Alexander Grinevsky's behavior was worse than all others, and if not corrected, he could be expelled from the school.

Nevertheless, Alexander was able to graduate from the preparatory class and enter the first class, but in the second class he wrote an offensive poem about the teachers and was nevertheless expelled from the school. At the request of his father, Alexander was admitted to another school in 1892, which had a bad reputation in Vyatka.

At the age of 15, Sasha was left without his mother, who died of tuberculosis. 4 months later (May 1895), my father married the widow Lydia Avenirovna Boretskaya. Alexander's relationship with his stepmother was tense, and he settled separately from his father's new family.

The boy lived alone, enthusiastically reading books and writing poetry. He worked part-time by binding books and copying documents. At the encouragement of his father, he became interested in hunting, but due to his impulsive nature, he rarely returned with prey.

In 1896, after graduating from the four-year Vyatka City School, 16-year-old Alexander went to Odessa, deciding to become a sailor. His father gave him 25 rubles of money and the address of his Odessa friend. For some time, “a sixteen-year-old, mustacheless, frail, narrow-shouldered youth in a straw hat” (as the then Greene ironically described himself in "Autobiographies") wandered around in an unsuccessful search for work and was desperately hungry.

In the end, he turned to his father’s friend, who fed him and got him a job as a sailor on the Platon steamship, which plied the route Odessa - Batum - Odessa. However, Greene once managed to visit abroad, in Alexandria, Egypt.

Green did not make a sailor - he had an aversion to the prosaic work of a sailor. Soon he quarreled with the captain and left the ship.

In 1897, Green went back to Vyatka, spent a year there and again left to seek his fortune - this time to Baku. There he tried many professions - he was a fisherman, a laborer, and worked in railway workshops. In the summer he returned to his father, then went on his travels again. He was a lumberjack, a gold miner in the Urals, a miner in an iron mine, and a theater copyist.

In March 1902, Green interrupted his series of wanderings and became (either under pressure from his father, or tired of hunger ordeals) a soldier in the 213th Orovai Reserve Infantry Battalion, stationed in Penza. The morals of military service significantly strengthened Green's revolutionary sentiments.

Six months later (of which he spent three and a half in a punishment cell) he deserted, was caught in Kamyshin, and fled again. In the army, Green met Socialist Revolutionary propagandists who appreciated the young rebel and helped him hide in Simbirsk.

From that moment on, Greene, having received the party nickname "Lanky", sincerely devotes all his strength to the fight against the social system he hates, although he refused to participate in the execution of terrorist acts, limiting himself to propaganda among workers and soldiers of different cities. Subsequently, he did not like to talk about his “Socialist Revolutionary” activities.

In 1903, Green was once again arrested in Sevastopol for “anti-government speeches” and the dissemination of revolutionary ideas, “which led to undermining the foundations of autocracy and overthrowing the foundations of the existing system.” For attempting to escape, he was transferred to a maximum security prison, where he spent more than a year.

In police documents he is characterized as “a closed, embittered person, capable of anything, even risking his life.” In January 1904, the Minister of Internal Affairs V.K. Pleve, shortly before the Socialist Revolutionary attempt on his life, received a report from the Minister of War A.N. Kuropatkin that “a very important civilian figure who first called himself Grigoriev, and then Grinevsky."

The investigation dragged on for more than a year (November 1903 - February 1905) due to Green's two attempts to escape and his complete denial. Green was tried in February 1905 by the Sevastopol naval court. The prosecutor demanded 20 years of hard labor. Lawyer A. S. Zarudny managed to reduce the penalty to 10 years of exile in Siberia.

In October 1905, Green was released under a general amnesty, but in January 1906 he was arrested again in St. Petersburg.

In May, Green was sent to the city of Turinsk, Tobolsk province, for four years. He stayed there for only 3 days and fled to Vyatka, where, with the help of his father, he got someone else’s passport in the name of Malginov (later this would be one of the writer’s literary pseudonyms), using which he left for St. Petersburg.

In the summer of 1906, Green wrote 2 stories - "The Merit of Private Panteleev" And "Elephant and Moska".

The first story was signed "A. S.G.” and published in the fall of the same year. It was published as a propaganda brochure for punitive soldiers and described the atrocities of the army among the peasants. Green received the fee, but the entire circulation was confiscated at the printing house and destroyed (burned) by the police; by chance, only a few copies were preserved. The second story suffered a similar fate - it was submitted to the printing house, but was not printed.

Only starting on December 5 of that year did Greene's stories begin to reach readers. And the first “legal” work was a story written in the fall of 1906 "To Italy", signed "A. A. M-v"(that is, Malginov).

For the first time (under the title “In Italy”) it was published in the evening edition of the newspaper “Birzhevye Vedomosti” dated December 5 (18), 1906. Pseudonym "A. S. Green" first appeared under story "Happening"(first publication - in the newspaper "Comrade" dated March 25 (April 7), 1907).

At the beginning of 1908, in St. Petersburg, Green published his first collection of books "Invisibility Cap"(subtitled "Tales of Revolutionaries"). Most of the stories in it are about the Social Revolutionaries.

Another event was the final break with the Social Revolutionaries. Green still hated the existing system, but he began to form his own positive ideal, which was not at all similar to the Socialist Revolutionary.

The third important event was his marriage - his imaginary “prison bride,” 24-year-old Vera Abramova, became Green’s wife. Knock and Gelly - the main characters of the story “One Hundred Miles Along the River” (1912) - are Green and Vera themselves.

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

In the early years, he published 25 stories annually.

As a new original and talented Russian writer, he meets Alexei Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Kuzmin and other major writers. He became especially close to.

For the first time in his life, Green began to earn a lot of money, which, however, did not last long, quickly disappearing after carousing and card games.

On July 27, 1910, the police finally discovered that the writer Green was the fugitive exile Grinevsky. He was arrested for the third time and in the fall of 1911 he was exiled to Pinega in the Arkhangelsk province. Vera went with him, they were allowed to officially get married.

In the link Green wrote "The Life of Gnor" And "Blue Cascade Telluri". The period of his exile was reduced to two years, and in May 1912 the Grinevskys returned to St. Petersburg. Other works of the romantic direction soon followed: “The Devil of the Orange Waters”, “The Zurbagan Shooter” (1913). They finally form the features of a fictional country, which literary critic K. Zelinsky will call “Greenland.”

Greene publishes primarily in the small press: newspapers and illustrated magazines. His works are published by “Birzhevye Vedomosti” and the newspaper supplement “Novoe Slovo”, “New Magazine for Everyone”, “Rodina”, “Niva” and its monthly supplements, the newspaper “Vyatskaya Rech” and many others. Occasionally, his prose is published in the reputable “thick” monthly journals “Russian Thought” and “Modern World”. Green published in the latter from 1912 to 1918 thanks to his acquaintance with A.I. Kuprin.

In 1913-1914, his three-volume work was published by the Prometheus publishing house.

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

After the outbreak of the First World War, some of Greene's stories acquired a distinct anti-war character: for example, “Battlelist Shuang”, “The Blue Top” (Niva, 1915) and “The Poisoned Island”. Due to an “inappropriate comment about the reigning monarch” that became known to the police, Green was forced to hide in Finland from the end of 1916, but upon learning about the February Revolution, he returned to Petrograd.

In the spring of 1917 he wrote a short story "Walking to the Revolution", indicating the writer’s hope for renewal.

After the October Revolution, Green’s notes and feuilletons appeared one after another in the magazine “New Satyricon” and in the small small-circulation newspaper “Devil’s Pepper Shaker”, condemning cruelty and outrages. He said: “I just can’t get my head around the idea that violence can be destroyed by violence.”

In the spring of 1918, the magazine, along with all other opposition publications, was banned. Green was arrested for the fourth time and nearly shot.

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

After recovery, Green, with the assistance of Gorky, managed to obtain academic rations and housing - a room in the “House of Arts” on Nevsky Prospekt, 15, where Green lived next to V. A. Rozhdestvensky, O. E. Mandelstam, V. Kaverin.

Neighbors recalled that Greene lived as a hermit and barely communicated with anyone, but it was here that he wrote his most famous, touchingly poetic work - the extravaganza "Scarlet Sails"(published 1923).

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

Green wrote a novel in Feodosia "Golden Chain"(1925, published in the magazine "New World"), intended as "memoirs of the dream of a boy seeking miracles and finding them."

In the fall of 1926, Greene finished his main masterpiece, the novel "Running on the Waves", which I worked on for a year and a half. This novel combines the best features of the writer's talent: a deep mystical idea about the need for a dream and the realization of dreams, subtle poetic psychologism, and a fascinating romantic plot. For two years the author tried to publish the novel in Soviet publishing houses, and only at the end of 1928 the book was published by the publishing house “Land and Factory”.

With great difficulty, in 1929, Greene’s last novels were published: Jesse and Morgiana, The Road to Nowhere.

In 1927, the private publisher L.V. Wolfson began publishing a 15-volume collected works of Green, but only 8 volumes were published, after which Wolfson was arrested by the GPU.

NEP was coming to an end. Green's attempts to insist on fulfilling the contract with the publishing house only led to huge legal costs and ruin. Greene's binges began to recur again. However, in the end, the Green family still managed to win the case, winning seven thousand rubles, which, however, were greatly devalued by inflation.

In 1930, the Grinevskys moved to the city of Old Crimea, where life was cheaper. Since 1930, Soviet censorship, with the motivation “you do not merge with the era,” banned reprints of Greene and introduced a limit on new books: one per year. Green and his wife were desperately hungry and often sick. Green tried to hunt nearby birds with a bow and arrow, but was unsuccessful.

Novel "Touchable", begun by Greene at this time, was never completed, although some critics consider it his best.

In May 1932, after new petitions, a transfer of 250 rubles unexpectedly arrived. from the Writers' Union, sent for some reason to the name of “the widow of the writer Green, Nadezhda Green,” although Green was still alive. There is a legend that the reason was Green’s last mischief - he sent a telegram to Moscow “Green is dead, send two hundred funerals.”

Alexander Green died on the morning of July 8, 1932 at the 52nd year of his life in Old Crimea from stomach cancer. Two days before his death, he asked to invite a priest and confessed. The writer was buried in the city cemetery of Old Crimea. Nina chose a place from where she could see the sea... On Green’s grave, sculptor Tatyana Gagarina erected a monument “Running on the Waves”.

Upon learning of Greene's death, several leading Soviet writers called for the publication of a collection of his works; Even Seifullina joined them.

Collection by A. Green "Fantastic Novels" published in 1934.

Alexander Green. Geniuses and villains

Personal life of Alexander Green:

Since 1903, in prison - due to the absence of friends and relatives - she visited him (under the guise of a bride) Vera Pavlovna Abramova, the daughter of a wealthy official who sympathized with revolutionary ideals.

She became his first wife.

In the fall of 1913, Vera decided to separate from her husband. In her memoirs, she complains about Green's unpredictability and uncontrollability, his constant carousing, and mutual misunderstanding. Green made several attempts at reconciliation, but without success. On his 1915 collection, given to Vera, Green wrote: “To my only friend.”

He never parted with the portrait of Vera until the end of his life.

In 1918 he married a certain Maria Dolidze. Within a few months, the marriage was considered a mistake, and the couple separated.

In the spring of 1921, Greene married a 26-year-old widow, a nurse. Nina Nikolaevna Mironova(after Korotkova’s first husband). They met at the beginning of 1918, when Nina worked at the Petrograd Echo newspaper. Her first husband died in the war. A new meeting took place in January 1921, Nina was in desperate need and was selling things (Green later described a similar episode at the beginning of the story “The Pied Piper”). A month later he proposed to her.

During the eleven subsequent years allotted to Green by fate, they did not part, and both considered their meeting a gift of fate. Green dedicated the extravaganza “Scarlet Sails”, completed this year, to Nina: “The Author offers and dedicates it to Nina Nikolaevna Green. PBG, November 23, 1922."

The couple rented a room on Panteleimonovskaya, transported their meager luggage there: a bunch of manuscripts, some clothes, a photograph of Father Green and the constant portrait of Vera Pavlovna. At first, Green was almost never published, but with the beginning of the NEP, private publishing houses appeared, and he managed to publish a new collection, “White Fire” (1922). The collection included a vivid story, “Ships in Lisse,” which Green himself considered one of the best..

Nina Nikolaevna Green, the writer's widow, continued to live in Old Crimea, in an adobe house, and worked as a nurse. When the Nazi army captured Crimea, Nina remained with her seriously ill mother in Nazi-occupied territory and worked in the occupation newspaper “Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District.” Then she was taken to work in Germany, and in 1945 she voluntarily returned from the American occupation zone to the USSR.

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

Meanwhile, books by the “Soviet romantic” Green continued to be published in the USSR until 1944. In besieged Leningrad, radio broadcasts were broadcast with the reading of “Scarlet Sails” (1943), and the premiere of the ballet “Scarlet Sails” took place at the Bolshoi Theater.

In 1946, L. I. Borisov’s story “The Wizard from Gel-Gyu” about Alexander Green was published, which earned the praise of K. G. Paustovsky and B. S. Grinevsky, but later condemned by N. N. Green.

During the years of the struggle against cosmopolitanism, Alexander Green, like many other cultural figures (A. A. Akhmatova, M. M. Zoshchenko, D. D. Shostakovich), was branded in the Soviet press as a “cosmopolitan”, alien to proletarian literature, “militant” reactionary and spiritual emigrant." For example, V. Vazhdaev’s article “The Preacher of Cosmopolitanism” (New World, No. 1, 1950) was devoted to the “exposure” of Green. Greene's books were confiscated en masse from libraries.

Since 1956, through the efforts of K. Paustovsky, Y. Olesha, I. Novikov and others, Greene was returned to literature. His works were published in millions of copies. Having received a fee for “Selected” (1956) through the efforts of Green’s friends, Nina Nikolaevna came to Old Crimea, found with difficulty her husband’s abandoned grave and found out that the house where Green died had passed to the chairman of the local executive committee and was used as a barn and chicken coop.

In 1960, after several years of struggle to return the house, Nina Nikolaevna opened the Green Museum in Old Crimea on a voluntary basis. There she spent the last ten years of her life, with a pension of 21 rubles (copyright no longer applied).

In July 1970, the Green Museum was also opened in Feodosia, and a year later Green’s house in Old Crimea also received the status of a museum. Its discovery by the Crimean regional committee of the CPSU was linked to the conflict with Nina Nikolaevna: “We are for Green, but against his widow. The museum will only be there when she dies.”

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

Bibliography of Alexander Green:

Novels:

The Shining World (1924)
The Golden Chain (1925)
Running on the Waves (1928)
Jesse and Morgiana (1929)
Road to Nowhere (1930)
Touchy (not finished)

Novels and stories:

1906 - To Italy (the first legally published story by A. S. Green)
1906 - Merit of Private Panteleev
1906 - Elephant and Moska
1907 - Oranges
1907 - Brick and Music
1907 - Beloved
1907 - Marat
1907 - On the stock exchange
1907 - At leisure
1907 - Underground
1907 - Incident
1908 - Hunchback
1908 - Guest
1908 - Eroshka
1908 - Toy
1908 - Captain
1908 - Quarantine
1908 - Swan
1908 - Small Committee
1908 - Checkmate in three moves
1908 - Punishment
1908 - She
1908 - Hand
1908 - Telegraph operator from Medyansky Bor
1908 - Third floor
1908 - Hold and deck
1908 - Assassin
1908 - The Man Who Cries
1909 - Barque on the Green Canal
1909 - Airship
1909 - Big Lake Dacha
1909 - Nightmare
1909 - Little conspiracy
1909 - Maniac
1909 - Overnight
1909 - Window in the Forest
1909 - Reno Island
1909 - According to the marriage announcement
1909 - Incident in Dog Street
1909 - Paradise
1909 - Cyclone in the Plain of Rains
1909 - Navigator of the “Four Winds”
1910 - On tap
1910 - In the snow
1910 - Return of "The Seagull"
1910 - Duel
1910 - Khonsa Estate
1910 - The Story of a Murder
1910 - Lanphier Colony
1910 - Yakobson's raspberry plant
1910 - Marionette
1910 - On the island
1910 - On the Hillside
1910 - Nakhodka
1910 - Easter on a steamboat
1910 - Powder Magazine
1910 - Strait of Storms
1910 - Birk's story
1910 - River
1910 - Death of Romelink
1910 - The Secret of the Forest
1910 - Box of Soap
1911 - Forest Drama
1911 - Moonlight
1911 - Pillory
1911 - Atley's system of mnemonics
1911 - Words
1912 - Hotel of Evening Lights
1912 - Life of Gnor
1912 - A Winter's Tale
1912 - From a detective’s memorial book
1912 - Ksenia Turpanova
1912 - Puddle of the Bearded Pig
1912 - Passenger Pyzhikov
1912 - The Adventures of Ginch
1912 - Passage yard
1912 - A story about a strange fate
1912 - Blue Cascade Telluri
1912 - Tragedy of the Xuan Plateau
1912 - Heavy Air
1912 - Fourth for all
1913 - Adventure
1913 - Balcony
1913 - The Headless Horseman
1913 - Wilderness Path
1913 - Granka and his son
1913 - Long journey
1913 - Devil of the Orange Waters
1913 - Lives of great people
1913 - Zurbagan shooter
1913 - History of Tauren
1913 - On the Hillside
1913 - Naive Tussaletto
1913 - New circus
1913 - Siurg Tribe
1913 - Ryabinin’s last minutes
1913 - Merchant of Happiness
1913 - Sweet poison of the city
1913 - Taboo
1913 - The Mysterious Forest
1913 - Quiet everyday life
1913 - Three Adventures of Ekhma
1913 - Man with man
1914 - Without an audience
1914 - Forgotten
1914 - The Mystery of Foreseen Death
1914 - Earth and Water
1914 - And spring will come for me
1914 - How the strongman Red John fought the king
1914 - Legends of War
1914 - Dead for the Living
1914 - On the Balance
1914 - One of many
1914 - A story completed thanks to a bullet
1914 - Duel
1914 - Penitential manuscript
1914 - Incidents in the apartment of Madame Cerise
1914 - Rare photographic apparatus
1914 - Conscience has spoken
1914 - Sufferer
1914 - Strange incident at a masquerade
1914 - Fate taken by the horns
1914 - Three brothers
1914 - Urban Graz welcomes guests
1914 - Episode during the capture of Fort Cyclops
1915 - Lunatic Aviator
1915 - Shark
1915 - Diamonds
1915 - Armenian Tintos
1915 - Attack
1915 - Battlelist Shuang
1915 - Missing in action
1915 - Battle in the air
1915 - Blonde
1915 - Bullfight
1915 - Fighting with bayonets
1915 - Fighting with a machine gun
1915 - Eternal Bullet
1915 - Alarm clock explosion
1915 - Hell Returned
1915 - Magic Screen
1915 - The Fiction of Epitrim
1915 - Khaki Bey's Harem
1915 - Voice and sounds
1915 - Two brothers
1915 - Double Plerez
1915 - The Case of the White Bird, or The White Bird and the Destroyed Church
1915 - Wild Mill
1915 - Man's Friend
1915 - Iron Bird
1915 - Yellow City
1915 - The Beast of Rochefort
1915 - Golden Pond
1915 - Game
1915 - Toys
1915 - Interesting photo
1915 - Adventurer
1915 - Captain Duke
1915 - Rocking Rock
1915 - Dagger and Mask
1915 - A nightmare incident
1915 - Leal at home
1915 - The Flying Doge
1915 - The Bear and the German
1915 - Bear Hunt
1915 - Sea battle
1915 - On the American Mountains
1915 - Above the Abyss
1915 - Hitman
1915 - The Peek-Mick Legacy
1915 - Impenetrable shell
1915 - Night Walk
1915 - At night
1915 - Night and day
1915 - Dangerous Jump
1915 - The Original Spy
1915 - Island
1915 - Hunting in the air
1915 - The Hunt for Marbrun
1915 - Hunting a hooligan
1915 - Mine Hunter
1915 - Dance of Death
1915 - Duel of leaders
1915 - Suicide note
1915 - Incident with the sentry
1915 - Bird Kam-Boo
1915 - The Path
1915 - Fifteenth of July
1915 - Scout
1915 - Jealousy and the Sword
1915 - Fatal place
1915 - A Woman's Hand
1915 - Knight Malyar
1915 - Masha's wedding
1915 - Serious Prisoner
1915 - The power of words
1915 - Blue Top
1915 - Killer Word
1915 - Death of Alembert
1915 - Calm Soul
1915 - Strange weapons
1915 - Scary package
1915 - The terrible secret of the car
1915 - The fate of the first platoon
1915 - The Mystery of the Moonlit Night
1915 - There or there
1915 - Three meetings
1915 - Three bullets
1915 - Murder at the Fish Shop
1915 - Murder of a Romantic
1915 - Asphyxiating gas
1915 - Terrible Vision
1915 - Host from Lodz
1915 - Black flowers
1915 - Black novel
1915 - Black Farm
1915 - Miraculous failure
1916 - Scarlet Sails (story extravaganza) (published 1923)
1916 - The great happiness of a little fighter
1916 - Cheerful Butterfly
1916 - Around the World
1916 - Resurrection of Pierre
1916 - High technology
1916 - Behind bars
1916 - Capture of the Banner
1916 - Idiot
1916 - How I Die on the Screen
1916 - Labyrinth
1916 - Lion's Strike
1916 - Invincible
1916 - Something from a diary
1916 - Fire and Water
1916 - Poisoned Island
1916 - The Hermit of Grape Peak
1916 - Vocation
1916 - Romantic murder
1916 - Blind Day Canet
1916 - One hundred miles along the river
1916 - Mysterious record
1916 - The Mystery of House 41
1916 - Dance
1916 - Tram sickness
1916 - Dreamers
1916 - Black Diamond
1917 - Bourgeois spirit
1917 - Return
1917 - Uprising
1917 - Enemies
1917 - The main culprit
1917 - Wild Rose
1917 - Everyone is a millionaire
1917 - The bailiff's mistress
1917 - Pendulum of Spring
1917 - Darkness
1917 - Knife and pencil
1917 - Firewater
1917 - Orgy
1917 - On foot to the revolution (essay)
1917 - Peace
1917 - To be continued
1917 - Rene
1917 - Birth of Thunder
1917 - Fatal Circle
1917 - Suicide
1917 - Creation of Asper
1917 - Merchants
1917 - Invisible Corpse
1917 - Prisoner of the Crosses
1917 - The Sorcerer's Apprentice
1917 - Fantastic Providence
1917 - Man from the Durnovo dacha
1917 - Black car
1917 - Masterpiece
1917 - Esperanto
1918 - Hit him!
1918 - Fight against death
1918 - Buka the Ignorant
1918 - Vanya became angry with humanity
1918 - The Jolly Dead
1918 - Forward and Backward
1918 - The Hairdresser's Invention
1918 - How I was a king
1918 - Carnival
1918 - Club Blackamoor
1918 - Ears
1918 - Ships in Lisse (published 1922)
1918 - The footman spat in the food
1918 - It became easier
1918 - Lagging platoon
1918 - The Crime of the Fallen Leaf
1918 - Trifles
1918 - Conversation
1918 - Make a grandmother
1918 - The Power of the Incomprehensible
1918 - The old man walks in circles
1918 - Three Candles
1919 - Magical disgrace
1919 - Fighter
1921 - Vulture
1921 - Competition in Lisse
1922 - White Fire
1922 - Visiting a friend
1922 - Rope
1922 - Monte Cristo
1922 - Tender Romance
1922 - New Year's holiday for father and little daughter
1922 - Saryn on a kitschka
1922 - Typhoid dotted line
1923 - Riot on the ship "Alcest"
1923 - The genius player
1923 - Gladiators
1923 - Voice and Eye
1923 - Willow
1923 - Whatever it is
1923 - Horse's head
1923 - Order for the army
1923 - The Missing Sun
1923 - Traveler Uy-Fyu-Eoi
1923 - Mermaids of the Air
1923 - Heart of the Desert
1923 - Talkative brownie
1923 - Murder at Kunst-Fisch
1924 - Legless
1924 - White Ball
1924 - The Tramp and the Warden
1924 - Cheerful fellow traveler
1924 - Gatt, Witt and Redott
1924 - Voice of a siren
1924 - Boarded up house
1924 - Pied Piper
1924 - On the cloudy shore
1924 - Monkey
1924 - By law
1924 - Casual income
1925 - Gold and miners
1925 - Winner
1925 - Gray car
1925 - Fourteen Feet
1925 - Six matches
1926 - Marriage of August Esborn
1926 - Snake
1926 - Personal reception
1926 - Nanny Glenau
1926 - Someone else's fault
1927 - Two promises
1927 - The Legend of Ferguson
1927 - The Weakness of Daniel Horton
1927 - Strange evening
1927 - Fandango
1927 - Four Guineas
1928 - Watercolor
1928 - Social reflex
1928 - Elda and Angotea
1929 - Mistletoe Branch
1929 - Thief in the Forest
1929 - Father's Wrath
1929 - Treason
1929 - Lock opener
1930 - Barrel of fresh water
1930 - Green lamp
1930 - The Story of a Hawk
1930 - Silence
1932 - Autobiographical story
1933 - Velvet curtain
1933 - Port Commandant
1933 - Pari

Collections of stories:

Cap of Invisibility (1908)
Stories (1910)
Mysterious Stories (1915)
Famous Book (1915)
Incident in Dog Street (1915)
Adventurer (1916)
Tragedy of the Suan Plateau. On the Hillside (1916)
White Fire (1922)
Heart of the Desert (1924)
Gladiators (1925)
On the Cloudy Shore (1925)
Golden Pond (1926)
The Story of a Murder (1926)
Navigator of the Four Winds (1926)
Marriage of August Esborn (1927)
Ships at Lisse (1927)
By Law (1927)
The Cheerful Fellow Traveler (1928)
Around the World (1928)
Black Diamond (1928)
Lanphier Colony (1929)
Window in the Woods (1929)
The Adventures of Ginch (1929)
Fire and Water (1930)

Collected works:

Green A. Collected Works, 1-6 vols. M., Pravda, 1965.

Green A. Collected Works, 1-6 volumes. M., Pravda, 1980. Republished in 1983.
Green A. Collected works, 1-5 volumes. M.: Fiction, 1991.
Green A. From the unpublished and forgotten. - Literary heritage, vol. 74. M.: Nauka, 1965.
Green A. I am writing to you the whole truth. Letters from 1906-1932. - Koktebel, 2012, series: Images of the past.

Screen adaptations by Alexander Green:

1958 - Watercolor
1961 - Scarlet Sails
1967 - Running on the Waves
1968 - Knight of Dreams
1969 - Lanphier Colony
1972 - Morgiana
1976 - Deliverer
1982 - Assol
1983 - Man from Green Country
1984 - Shining World
1984 - Life and books of Alexander Green
1986 - Golden Chain
1988 - Mister Decorator
1990 - One hundred miles along the river
1992 - Road to nowhere
1995 - Gelly and Nok
2003 - Infection
2007 - Running on the waves
2010 - The True Story of Scarlet Sails
2010 - Man from the Unfulfilled
2012 - Green lamp

Type of activity:

Russian writer, prose writer

Direction:

romantic realism, symbolism

in Wikisource.

Alexander Green(real name, patronymic and surname: Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky, August 23 - July 8) - Russian writer, prose writer, representative of the movement of romantic realism. He considered himself a Symbolist.

Family

Alexander Grinevsky was born on August 11 (23), 1880 in the city of Slobodskaya Vyatka province.

Father

Mother

Anna Stepanovna Grinevskaya (nee Lyapkova)(1857-1895) was Russian, the daughter of the collegiate secretary Stepan Fedorovich Lepkov and Agrippina Yakovlevna. She graduated from the Vyatka midwifery school and received a certificate for the title of midwife and smallpox vaccination.

Brothers and sisters

Biography

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

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

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

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

Addresses in Petrograd - Leningrad

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

Addresses in Odessa

• st. Lanzheronovskaya, 2.

Bibliography

Novels and stories

To Italy(1906, the first legally published story by A. S. Green) Merit of Private Panteleev (1906) Elephant and Moska (1906) Marat (1907) Brick and music (1907) Underground (1907) Happening (1907) Oranges (1907) At leisure (1907) Darling (1907) Quarantine (1907) Guest (1908) Checkmate in three moves (1908) Paradise(1908) Reno Island (1909) Navigator of the "Four Winds" (1909) Barka on the Green Channel (1909) The story of a murder (1910) Lanphier Colony (1910) Pillory (1911) Winter's Tale (1912) Life of Gnor (1912) Fourth for all (1912) Passage yard (1912) Zurbagan shooter (1913) Forgotten (1914) Rare photographic camera (1914) Fate taken by the horns (1914) Battalist Shuang (1915) Hell returned (1915) Wild Mill (1915) Toys (1915) Captain Duke (1915) Night and day (1915) Hunting for a bully (1915) Duel of leaders (1915) Murder at the Fish Shop (1915) Terrible vision (1915) Incident on Psa Street (1915) Adventurer (1915) Around the world (1916) How I died on the screen (1916) Fire and water (1916) Pierre and Surine (1916) Blind Day Kanet (1916) One hundred miles along the river (1916) Mysterious record (1916) Black diamond (1916) Scarlet Sails(tale extravaganza) (1916, published 1923) Enemies (1917) On foot to the revolution(1917, essay) Rene (1917) Ships in Lissa(1918, publ. 1922) Forward and backward (1918) Insurrection (1918?) The birth of thunder (1918?) Pendulum of the Soul (1918?) Magical disgrace (1919 Competition in Lissa (1921) Rope (1922) Voice and eye (1923) Brilliant player (1923) (1923) Willow (1923) Horse head (1923) Order for the army (1923) The Missing Sun (1923) Heart of the Desert (1923) Talkative brownie (1923) Murder at Kunst-Fisch (1923) Legless (1924) The Tramp and the Warden (1924) Cheerful fellow traveler (1924) Return (1924) Pied Piper (1924) On the cloudy shore (1924) In law (1924) Winner (1925) Gray car (1925) Fourteen feet (1925) Snake (1926) Marriage of August Esborn (1926) Fandango (1927) Two promises (1927) Daniel Horton's weakness (1927) Watercolor (1928) Father's Wrath (1928) Elda and Antogea (1928) Mistletoe branch (1929) Treason (1929) Green lamp (1930) The Story of a Hawk (1930) Port Commandant (1933)

Memory

Winners of the A. Green Prize

In 2000, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the birth of A. S. Green, the Union of Writers of Russia, the administration of Kirov and Slobodsky established the annual Russian Literary Prize named after Alexander Green. The prize is awarded for works for children and youth, imbued with the spirit of romance and hope. Authors can be nominated for the prize, both for individual works and for creativity as a whole. The laureate is awarded a sign with the image of A.S. Green and the corresponding diploma.

• The first laureate of this prize was the chairman of the Russian Children's Fund, honorary citizen of the city of Kirov, Albert Anatolyevich Likhanov, for his works “Russian Boys” and “Men’s School”.
• 2001 - Vladislav Petrovich Krapivin (Ekaterinburg), author of more than 200 works for children and youth.
• 2002 - Irina Petrovna Tokmakova (Moscow) children's writer, translator.
• 2003 - Valery Nikolaevich Ganichev, Chairman of the Board of the Union of Writers of Russia, for the novel "Admiral Ushakov".
• 2004 - William Fedorovich Kozlov (St. Petersburg), author of fifty books for children and youth.

Memorial plaque on the Green embankment, 21, Kirov

Bust on the Green embankment in Kirov

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

Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addresses

In Petrograd - Leningrad

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

Addresses in Odessa

• St. Lanzheronovskaya, 2.

Bibliography

Memory

Alexander Green Prize

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

Museums

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

Green's readings

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

Streets

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

Libraries

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

Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky(Green is his literary pseudonym) was born on August 23, 1880 in Slobodskoye, a district town in the Vyatka province. And in the city of Vyatka, the years of childhood and youth of the future writer passed. The first word that the first-born Sasha Grinevsky put together from letters, sitting on his father’s lap, was the word “sea”... Sasha was the son of a participant in the Polish uprising of 1863, exiled to provincial Vyatka. An accountant at the zemstvo hospital, my father could barely get by - without joy, hope and dreams. His wife, exhausted and sick, was consoled by the purring of songs - mostly obscene or thieves. So she died at the age of thirty-seven... The widower, Stefan Grinevsky, was left with four half-orphans in his arms: 13-year-old Sasha (the eldest) then had a brother and two sisters. Over time, the father of the future writer remarried, and the stepmother brought her son into the house. And to complete happiness, a common child was born in due time.

...What the family of the Polish exile was lucky with was books. In 1888, Lieutenant Colonel Grinevsky, Sasha’s uncle, died in service. They brought an inheritance from the funeral: three large chests filled with volumes. They were in Polish, French and Russian.

It was then that eight-year-old Alexander first escaped from reality - into the attractive world of Jules Verne and Mine Reid. This fictional life turned out to be much more interesting: the endless expanse of the sea, the impassable thickets of the jungle, the fair power of the heroes captivated the boy forever. I didn't want to go back to reality...

When Sasha turned nine, his father bought him a gun - an old, ramrod one, for a ruble. The gift cut the teenager off from food and drink and took him into the forest for whole days. But it was not only the prey that attracted the boy. He fell in love with the whisper of the trees, the smell of grass, the darkness of the thickets. No one here knocked you out of your thoughts or spoiled your dreams. But shooting is a small science. Gunpowder - from the palm of your hand, a wad - from paper, shot - by eye, without a number. And fluff and feathers flew - jackdaws, woodpeckers, pigeons... Everyone at home ate everything.

That same year, the undergrowth was sent to the Vyatka Zemstvo Real School. Acquiring knowledge is a difficult and uneven task. God's Law and History were noted for excellent success, and Geography received an A+. My father, the bookkeeper, selflessly solved arithmetic. But for the rest of the items in the magazine there were deuces and colas...

So I studied for several years until I was kicked out. Because of his behavior: the devil tried to weave rhymes, and he made up a poem about his favorite teachers. And I paid for the doggerel...

Then there was a city four-year school, where Alexander’s father enrolled him in the penultimate class. Here the new student looked like a lonely encyclopedist, but over time he was expelled twice again - for good deeds...

The disobedient man was restored only by the grace of God. But in recent months, Grinevsky has studied diligently: he learned that a certificate of completion opens the way to nautical classes.

Finally - here it is, the road to a big, alluring, unknown world! Sixteen years behind me, 25 rubles in my pocket. My father gave them to me. The pilgrim also took food, a glass, a teapot and a blanket with a pillow.

The steamer set sail, heading towards the rapids. The sisters howled, the younger brother sniffled. The father squinted against the sun for a long time, following the traveler with his eyes. And he, filled with excited openness to novelty, had already forgotten about the house. All thoughts were occupied by the ocean with sails on the horizon...

Odessa shocked the young resident of Vyatka: the streets, planted with acacias or robins, were bathed in sunlight. Green terrace coffee shops and exotic thrift stores crowded each other. Below was a noisy port, stuffed with the masts of real ships. And behind all this bustle the sea breathed majestically. It separated and united lands, countries, people. And when the next ship headed into the glittering blue embrace of the distant distance, the sea seemed to transfer it to the sky - there, beyond the horizon. This effect only strengthened the impression of the involvement of both elements in the Supreme Providence.

But this is from afar. Up close, bitter prose prevailed. Having walked around the entire port, Alexander could not find a job on a ship anywhere. Only one assistant captain sympathetically suggested:

I can take the cabin boy...

However, the newcomer already knew that the students were not paid - on the contrary, they were charged for food. The acquaintance with the wonderful future ended in a rooming cellar. Loaders and tramps swarmed here, but the accommodation was cheap. The boy began to ask his unemployed sailor neighbors about distant countries, terrible typhoons, daring pirates... But they, as if by agreement, reduced the answers to money, rations and cheap watermelons.

Over time, the young seeker of distant wanderings developed a familiar route: a tramp canteen - a port - a boulevard bench. The boredom was relieved by swimming behind the breakwater five times a day - until one day, having forgotten, the swimmer almost drowned. God knows how the wave cleared up, and he, already exhausted, could not get out to the empty shore. Only the 99th wave mercifully threw the poor fellow onto land, taking payment for his simple clothes. So, what did my mother give birth in, and I had to sneak around the piers! Some loader took pity and lent him some cast-offs...

Two months later, he finally got lucky: Alexander was hired as a cabin boy on the steamer Platon. My father sent me eight and a half rubles for my apprenticeship by telegraph. Science began from the basics: experienced sailors advised swallowing anchor mud - it helps with seasickness. Young readily obeyed everyone, but... He never learned to tie knots, twist lines, or signal with flags. It was not even possible to “beat off the bells” - due to the lack of a sharp double blow on both sides of the bell-rynda.

During the entire voyage, Sashik never went down to the engine room - let alone the names of the sails, tackle, rigging, and spars. The guy was held captive by his own ideas about sea life...

Sailing on the Plato gave way to the previous worthless existence, complicated by the approaching cold weather. Monotonous gray weeks turned into months.

The offer to go to Kherson “as a sailor for everything” seemed like magic music in the deathly silence. The vessel is the sailing boat “St. Nicholas”; crew - the shipowner, who is also the skipper, and his son; cargo - tiles. The fee is six rubles. There was no choice.

The flight was difficult. Green cooked, chopped wood, stood watch and slept on bare boards under wet rags. And the wind whistled around us in a four-degree cold. But the sea was so close, the distance was so clear, and the dolphins, frolicking, looked so sweetly!..

In Kherson, Alexander demanded payment. It turned out he still owed money for the tiles crushed in the rush. As a result, the parties parted, each to their own. Green returned to Odessa as a stowaway on some vessel.

In early spring, he was lucky: he was hired as a sailor on the ship “Tsesarevich,” owned by the Russian Society of Shipping and Trade. The flight to Alexandria turned out to be the only foreign one in his life. Alexander saw neither the Sahara nor lions in Egypt. Having reached the outskirts of the city, he stepped into a ditch with muddy water, sat on the dusty side of the road, daydreamed... And then returned to the port: time was running out. Thus ended his African epic. Green's life palette was replete with dark colors. After Odessa, he returned to his homeland, to Vyatka - again to do odd jobs. But life stubbornly skimped on a place and occupation for the unfortunate...

A year later, Alexander ended up in Baku, where the first thing he did was catch malaria. This illness stuck with the writer for a long time.

Short-term work in the oil fields gave way to long, miserable inactivity; His fishing career lasted only a week: he was overcome by fever. After sailing for a short time as a sailor, Green returned to his father again...

And in the spring he went to the Urals - for gold nuggets. But there, as elsewhere, dreams turned into harsh reality. The mountains, covered with blue forest, protected their gold veins. But we had to suffer a lot in the mines, shafts and depots.

Menial work at the domain, at logging sites and rafting. Rest on barracks bunks, where nearby, instead of the tropical sun, an iron stove glowed red...

Grinevsky decided to voluntarily join the tsarist army - it was an act of despair... In the spring of 1902, the young man found himself in Penza, in the tsar's barracks. One official description of his appearance from that time has survived. Such data, by the way, is given in the description:

Height - 177.4. Eyes - light brown. Hair is light brown.

Special features: on the chest there is a tattoo depicting a schooner with a bowsprit and a foremast carrying two sails...

A seeker of the miraculous, wandering about the sea and sails, ends up in the 213th Orovai Reserve Infantry Battalion, where the most cruel customs reigned, later described by Green in the stories “The Merit of Private Panteleev” and “The Story of a Murder.” Four months later, “Private Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky” escapes from the battalion, hides in the forest for several days, but is caught and sentenced to three weeks of strict arrest “on bread and water.” The obstinate soldier is noticed by a certain volunteer and begins to diligently supply him with Socialist Revolutionary leaflets and brochures. Green was drawn to freedom, and his romantic imagination was captivated by the very life of the “illegal”, full of secrets and dangers.

The Penza Social Revolutionaries helped him escape from the battalion a second time, provided him with a false passport and transported him to Kyiv. From there he moved to Odessa and then to Sevastopol. The second escape, aggravated by his connection with the Social Revolutionaries, cost Grinevsky a two-year prison sentence. And the unsuccessful third attempt to leave captivity ended in indefinite Siberian exile...

In 1905, 25-year-old Alexander escaped and reached Vyatka. There he lived with a stolen passport, under the name Malginov, until the October events.

“I was a sailor, a loader, an actor, rewrote roles for the theater, worked in gold mines, in a blast furnace factory, in peat bogs, in fisheries; was a woodcutter, a tramp, a scribe in the office, a hunter, a revolutionary, an exile, a sailor on a barge, a soldier, a navvy... "

For a long time and painfully, Alexander Stepanovich searched for himself as a writer... He began his literary career as a “everyday writer”, as the author of stories, the themes and plots of which he took directly from the reality around him. He was overwhelmed with life impressions, accumulated in abundance during the years of wandering around the world...

Green recalled with special love the Ural heroic lumberjack Ilya, who taught him the wisdom of felling trees and forced him to tell fairy tales on winter evenings. The two of them lived in a log cabin under an old cedar tree. All around there are dense thickets, impenetrable snow, a wolf howl, the wind hums in the chimney of the stove... In two weeks, Greene exhausted his entire rich stock of fairy tales by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, Afanasyev and began to improvise, compose fairy tales himself, inspired by the admiration of his “regular audience.” " And, who knows, maybe there, in a forest hut, under a century-old cedar tree, by the cheerful fire of the stove, the writer Green was born...

In 1907, his first book, “The Invisible Cap,” was published. In 1909, “Renaud Island” was published. Then there were other works - in more than a hundred periodicals...

The author's pseudonym also crystallized: A. S. Green. (At first there were A. Stepanov, Aleksandrov and Grinevich - a literary pseudonym was necessary for the writer. If his real name had appeared in print, he would have immediately been placed in places not so distant).

In post-revolutionary Petrograd, M. Gorky obtained a room in the House of Arts and academic rations for an illegal writer... And Green was now not alone: ​​he found a girlfriend, faithful and devoted to the end, as in his books. He dedicated to her the immortal extravaganza “Scarlet Sails” - a book that affirms the power of love, the human spirit, “illuminated through and through, like the morning sun,” love for life, for spiritual youth and the belief that a person, in an impulse to happiness, is able to create with his own hands miracles...

In 1924, Green and his wife Nina Nikolaevna (we highly recommend her wonderful memoirs about Green) moved from Petrograd to Feodosia (she uses a “saving trick” to alienate her husband from the addictive bohemia: she feigns a heart attack and receives a doctor’s “conclusion” about the need change place of residence).

He always dreamed of living in a city by the warm sea. The calmest and happiest years of his life passed here; the novels “The Golden Chain” (1925) and “Running on the Waves” (1926) were written here.

The Crimean period of Green’s work became, as it were, the “Boldino autumn” of the writer; at this time he probably created at least half of everything he wrote. His room was occupied only by a table, a chair and a bed.

And on the wall, opposite the headboard, there was a salted wooden sculpture from under the bowsprit of a certain sailing ship. The ship's maid accompanied the writer to bed and met him at dawn. Green plunged into his hard-earned fairy-tale world...

But by the end of the 1920s, publishers who had previously eagerly published Greene's books stopped accepting them altogether. There was no money, and the efforts of friends to place the already ill writer in a sanatorium did not help. Green fell ill, essentially from malnutrition and melancholy, because for the first time life seemed to him “a road to nowhere.” He did not know that his real glory was yet to come...

Green was not only a magnificent landscape painter and master of plot, but also a very subtle psychologist. He wrote about the unknown and power of nature, about self-sacrifice, courage - the heroic traits inherent in the most ordinary people. Finally, very few writers wrote so purely, carefully and emotionally about love for a woman, as Greene did.

Green's literary heritage is much wider and more diverse than one might assume, knowing the writer only from his romantic short stories, stories and novels. Not only in his youth, but also at the time of wide fame, Green, along with prose, wrote lyrical poems, poetic feuilletons and even fables. Along with romantic works, he published essays and stories of everyday life in newspapers and magazines. The last book the writer worked on was his “Autobiographical Tale,” where he depicts his life strictly realistically, in all its genre colors, with all its harsh details.

The writer's last unfinished work was the novel "Touchy" - a novel about delicate, vulnerable and sympathetic natures, incapable of lies, hypocrisy and hypocrisy, about people who affirm goodness on earth. “Until the end of my days,” Greene wrote, “I would like to wander through the bright countries of my imagination.”

In the mountainous Old Crimean cemetery, under the shade of an old wild plum tree, lies a heavy granite slab. There is a bench and flowers near the stove. Writers come to this grave, readers come from distant places...

“When the days begin to gather dust and the colors fade, I take Green. I open it on any page. This is how the windows in the house are cleaned in the spring. Everything becomes light, bright, everything again mysteriously excites, as in childhood.”- D. Granin

“This is a wonderful writer, getting younger with age. It will be read by many generations after us, and its pages will always breathe on the reader with the same freshness as fairy tales breathe.”- M. Shaginyan.

“Alexander Green is a sunny writer and, despite his difficult fate, happy, because through all his works a deep and bright faith in man, in the good principles of the human soul, faith in love, friendship, fidelity and the feasibility of dreams victoriously runs through.”- Vera Ketlinskaya.

In the 1960s, on the wave of a new romantic upsurge in the country, Green turned into one of the most published and revered Russian authors, an idol of young readers (before that, at the height of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” the writer’s books were crossed out from the plans of publishing houses, were not issued in libraries)... Now libraries and schools named after him were opened, Green House Museums were founded in Feodosia, Old Crimea and Vyatka...

And this love does not fade to this day... First in Crimea, and in August 2000 - on the 120th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Green - and in the writer’s homeland, in the city of Kirov (Vyatka), on the embankment bearing his name , a bust of the writer was solemnly unveiled.

Green’s work is a feature of the era, a particle of its literature, and a special, unique particle at that... In 2000, the All-Russian Literary Prize named after Alexander Green was established, it is awarded annually “for works for children and youth, imbued with the spirit of romance and hope,” among The laureates of this prize are Kir Bulychev and Vladislav Krapivin. “The Country of Greenland, invented by the writer, never existing on geographical maps, outwardly realistic and artistically perfect, also permeating almost all the main works of fantasy (in a wide spectrum - from science fiction to fantasy, gothic novel and “horror literature”) and general romantic understatement , - allow us to consider Green one of the founders of modern science fiction literature... underestimated during his lifetime...”- A. Britikov

The works of Alexander Green are loved and have been disturbing the hearts of readers for a hundred years...

“There is neither pure nor mixed fiction. A writer should use the extraordinary only to attract attention and start a conversation about the most ordinary.”- Alexander Green