Alexander Fadeyev
Encyclopedia
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, one of the co-founders of the Union of Soviet Writers and its chairman from 1946 to 1954.
Biography
Fadeyev was born in KimryKimry
Kimry , formerly Kimra, is a town in the south of Tver Oblast, Russia, located on the Volga River, at its confluence with the Kimrka River, to the east of Tver...
, Tver Oblast
Tver Oblast
Tver Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . Its administrative center is the city of Tver. From 1935 to 1990, it was named Kalinin Oblast after Mikhail Kalinin. Population: Tver Oblast is an area of lakes, such as Seliger and Brosno...
. From 1908 to 1912, he lived in Chuguyevka
Chuguyevka
Chuguyevka is a military air base in Primorski Krai, Russia. The base's primary objective was to scramble aircraft against SR-71 flights over Vladivostok...
, Primorsky Krai
Primorsky Krai
Primorsky Krai , informally known as Primorye , is a federal subject of Russia . Primorsky means "maritime" in Russian, hence the region is sometimes referred to as Maritime Province or Maritime Territory. Its administrative center is in the city of Vladivostok...
. He took part in the guerrilla movement against the Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese interventionists and the White Army during the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
. In 1927, he published the novel The Rout (also known as The Nineteen), in which he described youthful guerrilla fighters. In 1930, he published the first part of the novel The Last of the Udege, on which he continued working the rest of his life (an edition containing the second volume, all he was able to complete, was published in 1940.) In it, Fadeyev intended to show "that an extremely primitive people may experience a leap from tribal communism to the complex collective organization of the twentieth century, skipping over the intervening historical stages: family, private property, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. [...] Uneven though it is, The Last of the Udegs contains some of Fadeyev's best pages, and the fact that he spent his energies on literary administration rather than on the completion of this novel is a minor tragedy."
In 1945, he wrote the novel, The Young Guard (based upon real events of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
) about the underground anti-fascist Komsomol
Komsomol
The Communist Union of Youth , usually known as Komsomol , was the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban centers in 1918. During the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Communist Union of...
organization named Young Guard
Young Guard (Soviet resistance)
The Young Guard was an underground anti-fascist Komsomol organization, in the German-occupied Soviet city of Krasnodon . They were active during the Great Patriotic War until January 1943. They carried out several acts of sabotage and protest before being betrayed to the Germans...
, which fought against the Nazis in the occupied city Krasnodon
Krasnodon
Krasnodon is a city in the Luhansk Oblast of south-eastern Ukraine. Serving as the administrative center of the Krasnodonskyi Raion , the city itself is also designated as a separate raion within the oblast....
(in the Ukrainian SSR
Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR was a sovereign Soviet Socialist state and one of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union lasting from its inception in 1922 to the breakup in 1991...
). For this novel, Fadeyev was awarded the Stalin Prize (1946). In 1948, a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
film The Young Guard
The Young Guard (film)
The Young Guard is a two-part 1948 Soviet film directed by Sergei Gerasimov based on the novel of the same title by Alexander Fadeyev. In 1949 a Stalin Prize for this film was awarded to Gerasimov, cinematographer Vladimir Rapoport, and the group of leading actors.The Film was also the highest...
, based on the book, was released, and later revised in 1964 to correct inaccuracies in the book.
Fadeyev was a champion of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, proclaiming him "the greatest humanist the world has ever known". During the 1940s, he actively promoted Zhdanovshchina, a campaign of criticism and persecution against many of the Soviet Union's foremost writers and composers. However, he was a friend of Mikhail Sholokhov. Fadeyev married a famous stage actress, Angelina Stepanova (1905–2000).
In the last years of his life, Fadeyev became an alcoholic. Some sources claim that this was mostly due to the denunciation of Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
during the Khrushchev Thaw
Khrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
. He eventually committed suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
at his dacha in Peredelkino
Peredelkino
Peredelkino is a dacha complex situated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russia.-History:The settlement originated as the estate of Peredeltsy, owned by the Leontievs , then by Princes Dolgorukov and by the Samarins. After a railway passed through the village in the 19th century, it was renamed...
, leaving a letter from which one can see his negative attitude to the new leaders of the Party. His death occasioned an epigram by Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
, his neighbor.
Alexander Fadeyev is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery
Novodevichy Cemetery
Novodevichy Cemetery is the most famous cemetery in Moscow, Russia. It is next to the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site. It should not be confused with the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg....
in Moscow.
Legacy
In her memoirs, Nadezhda MandelstamNadezhda Mandelstam
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia...
, after describing Fadeyev's seemingly affectionate farewell to Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...
just before his final arrest, wrote: "Liuba [Ehrenburg] has told me that Fadeyev was a cold and cruel man — something quite compatible with emotionalism and the ability to shed a tear at the right moment. This became very clear, according to Liuba, at the time of the execution of the Yiddish writers. Then also it was a case of tearful farewell embraces after he had signified his formal agreement to their arrest and liquidation — even though the Yiddish writers, unlike Mandelstam, were his friends." And Korney Chukovsky
Korney Chukovsky
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His poems, Doctor Aybolit , The Giant Roach , The Crocodile , and Wash'em'clean have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children...
wrote the following in his diary entry after Fadeyev's suicide:
I feel very sorry for dear Alexander Alexandrovich: one could sense a man of stature, a Russian brand of natural genius under all the layers — but, good lord, what layers there were! All the lies of the Stalinist era, all its idiotic atrocities, all its horrific bureaucracy, all its corruption and red tape found a willing accessory in him. An essentially decent human being who loved literature “to tears” had ended by steering the ship of literature into the most perilous, most shameful of waters and attempting to combine humaneness with the secret-police mentality. Hence the zigzags in his behavior, hence the tortured conscience of his final years. He wasn't born to be a loser; he was so accustomed to being a leader, the arbiter of writers' fates, that having to withdraw from the position of literary marshal was agony for him. None of his friends was willing to tell him that his Metallurgy was worthless, that the articles he had been writing during the past few years — cowardly, turbid, and full of normative pretensions — could only lower him in the eyes of the reading public, that reworking The Young Guard to suit the powers-that-be was shameful. Conscientious, talented, and sensitive as he was, he was floundering in oozy, putrid mud and drowning his conscience in wine.
Fiction
- Protiv techeniia [Against the Current]. Moscow, 1924; reissued as Amgun'skii polk [The Amgunsk Regiment], Moscow, 1934, and as Rozhdenie Amgun'skogo polka [The Birth of the Amgunsk Regiment], Moscow, 1934.
- Razliv [The Flood]. Moscow, 1924.
- Razgrom. Moscow, 1927; as Razgrom/The Rout, edited by Roger Cockrell, London, Bristol Classical Press, 1995; translated as The Nineteen, by R. D. Charques, London, Martin Lawrence, 1929; reprinted Westport, Connecticut, Hyperion Press, 1973; also translated as The Rout, by O. Gorchakov, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, c. 1957.
- Poslednii iz udege [The Last of the Udege]. Moscow, 1930-1941.
- Molodaia gvardiia. Moscow, 1946; translated as The Young Guard, by Violet Dutt, Moscow, Progress, 1958; reprinted Moscow, Raduga, 1987.
- Chernaia metallurgiia [Ferrous Metallurgy]. Moscow, 1951-56.
Memoirs, letters, and literary criticism
- Leningrad v dni blokady: Iz dnevnika. Moscow, 1944; translated as Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, by R. D. Charques, London, Hutchinson, 1946; Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1971.
- Za tridtsat' let: Izbrannye stat'i, rechi i pis'ma o literature i iskusstve [Over Thirty Years: Selected Articles, Speeches and Letters on Literature and Art], edited by S. Preobrazhenskii, 2nd edition, Moscow, 1959.
- Pis'ma 1917-1956 [Letters]. 2nd edition, Moscow, 1959.