Died Daniil Granin
The writer was 98 years old.
In St. Petersburg died Granin — a classic of domestic literature and the winner of numerous Soviet and Russian state awards, the last of which the writer has received just a month ago.
By and large, all creativity, all life of this man — two big topics.
First, the science.
Science seems to be technical, but at the same time, science in General — just not the same as in today’s news field, when the words “scientists have proven” is usually nothing but incredulous smirk, not the cause, and that light which shines in the eyes of idealized of physicists, chemists and engineers from painting thaw time. On the one hand, the net charge, the almost metaphysical category, on the other — daring, stubbornness and passion.
Second — the war.
Both topics, of course, was for him a reason to talk to the person and address the person — when with amazement and bewilderment.
Scientific and technological progress is the scenery in the background of the researchers and inventors of his early things like “the Searchers” and “Going to storm,” come into human conflict or inert environment and the individual villains, or their own cowardice.
However, in the biographical sense, and these decorations were for him absolutely organic: “I wrote about the engineers, scientists, researchers, scientific creativity, it was my theme, my friends, my environment, — he said.— I didn’t have to learn the material, go to creative business trip”. The son of a Forester who received electrical education and worked after returning from the front as an electrician in the late 40’s he seriously expected to combine their science with literature. At that time already a professional: his first story, brought to the editorial office of magazine “Zvezda”, was blessed by Yuri Herman. And he was advised to take the young writer-the namesake, Daniel Herman nickname “Granin”.
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Since the late 60’s to the modern time (the novel “My Lieutenant” won the prize “the Big book” it was five years ago) the most important is that wrote the public seemed to be thinking about the experience of war. And it was not just the privilege of the writer-veteran and the author (together with Ales Adamovich) “Blockade book”.
From pathetically-is widely accepted “idea people” he always went to the private — to a particular horror, to the specific suffering, specific fear. To a specific lack of understanding of why it is so. Specific hate — both others ‘ and his, the nature of which dedicated many of its pages.
To comprehend all this at the level of persistent, global, and inevitably naive generalizations thus he (maybe fortunately) tried a little.
And yet as a historical and not a legal event, his speech in the Bundestag, more than three years ago, it looks somehow more confident than many official inter-state ceremony, from the festivities on the occasion of the withdrawal from Germany of the domestic troops in 1994.
Oddly enough, these two topics intersect in a single image. Is Faust. In a way it was a surprise to praninskas clear and simple prose, but Goethe’s hero in the works of Granin, starting with the thaw and ending with perestroika, “Bison”, appears here and there many times. Then casually, as if inadvertently, as in “Going to storm”, with painful distinctness, as in “Great form”: “What do I care that “Faust” is already written. I would start it again, the same words, just copied it, and it seemed to me that I was too involved in the essay, I wrote, not completely me, but me too, it’s about me, about my prescription, which came to life with a stirring, disturbing me.” Faust, seen, of course, and wandered through, and after Thomas Mann, is the infinite movement of reason, but it’s the clash though with helpful, but infinite evil. For Russian literature, beginning with the Golden age, Faustian issue was, though not Central, but extremely important subject. So to refer to it, as did Granin — very humbly and very seriously — now, perhaps, no one knows.