Valentin Yakovlevich Kurbatov Biography

Do not even know how to comprehend this loss. In the year of life, a critic, art critic, permanent member of the jury "Yasnaya Polyana" Valentin Yakovlevich Kurbatov died in Pskov. From the personal archive of Valentin Kurbatov, a man of extraordinary brightness, talent, not only literary, but also human, he was a real decoration of all our Yaspolensk meetings. He was a regular participant in poetic festivals in Mikhailovsky.

And he himself was as if illuminated by the inner light of Pushkin and Tolstoy. He was born on September 29 in the city of Salavan of the Kuibyshev region now Novochermishansk of the Ulyanovsk region in the family of travel workers. At the beginning of the war, the father was drafted into the work army to the Urals, and the mother, left alone, became a waybill on the railway.

After the war, the family moved to the Urals, to the city of Chusova. After graduation in the year, Kurbatov worked as a joiner at the production plant. In the year he was called up for service in the fleet. During the naval service in the north, he was a radio telegraph, a typographic typewriter, a librarian of the ship's library. In the year he arrived in Pskov, where he lived until the last day.

He worked as a loader at the hood factory, then the proofreader of the district newspaper Leninsk Iskra, a literary employee of the newspaper "Young Leninets". He entered the Faculty of Tying of VGIK, which graduated with honors of the year. He was a member of the jury of the Apollo Grigoryeva Prize, a large jury of the National Bestseller Prize, a permanent member of the jury of the Yasnaya Polyana Prize.

Vladimir Tolstoy: Yes, we can say that he has been the conscience of our literature recently every day and hour of communication with him, we are all, members of the jury of the Yasnaya Polyana and, I am sure that all participants in the Yasnaya Polish meetings were accepted as the patriarch of Russian literature. At the same time, he was always ironic, witty, he never taught, but conducted a conversation as if all of us, people of very different generations, his close friends.

But he was friends with the great - Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Astafyev. And not just friends, but was the closest attorney in their creative affairs. And they perceived him not as criticism, but as a close friend. He will be very missing in our already scarce in the bright figures of literary life.

Without it, it was as if orphaned a clear meadow. Direct speech Vladimir Tolstoy, adviser to the President of the Russian Federation on culture issues, chairman of the jury of the Yasnaya Polyana Prize: - For me, this is a huge personal loss. A native person who has long been the closest interlocutor for many years. The man with whom we joked and cried together and laughed.

I can’t believe that all this was so suddenly broken. He died amazingly! With a bouquet of flowers for his wife, who simply did not bring home. He had heart failure, but I always said that he had heart excess. He had a huge heart in which the whole world was placed. He was anxious to everything, he was worried, nervous for us all. And this is a huge public loss.

He continued to connect us with Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Astafyev, many other Mogicans of Russian literature, who passed away before him. He corresponded with everyone, wrote wonderful articles and books about them. Yes, we can say that he was the conscience of our literature lately. That's who combined the past with the most lively modernity! How carefully and intently he read, for example, foreign literature, which was included in the long list of "Yasnaya Polyana".

He sometimes struck me with accurate, deep judgments about the most difficult foreign texts. Two Valentine. Photo: From the personal archive of Valentin Kurbatov, I still can’t fully understand this news. I also felt when my father left my life, and also suddenly. And as I continue to talk with my father, I will continue to talk with Valentin Yakovlevich. Here are her fragments.

Pavel Basinsky: Valentin Yakovlevich, congratulations on a well -deserved award! We have known each other for a long time, and the place that introduced us is a clear meadow, where we meet every year on Tolstoy's birthday. And you are constantly with Pushkin, in Mikhailovsky. What do these places mean to you? In oatmeal with Viktor Astafyev. He will automatically answer: Pushkin.

Ask: writer? Also automatically - fat. Poetry is a matter of youth, and prose is the support of adults and advanced years. Pushkin was complained to me immediately with Pskov, with the great wizard, keeper and brownie - Semen Stepanovich Gamichenko, who taught everyone to be a contemporary of Pushkin, his peer in mischief and a printer in the mountain, who could feel the living Pushkin gene in his spiritual composition.It is already difficult to believe that I was a member of the fifty Pushkin holidays of poetry and more than once as a leading in the clearing, in the scientific and cultural center and the Pskov Theater, so if you fill me with straw and put me in the center of the Pushkin Polyana, it will be a good installation, and if the children can be sewn on the belly so that they could press it, I could still speak the voices of Iraqal.

Andronikova or Mikhail Dudin, Kaysyna Kuliev or Carlo Kaladze, Rygora Borodulin or Mycols Bazhan, because then we were another people. And the clear one appeared in fate at the hour when the Union broke up, the writer's unions went to share, and Lev Nikolaevich called us to shame and remind us of the collective role of the Russian word. And now, when I watch the “Yasnaya Polish collections” accumulated over a quarter century, I again hear the living voices of Dmitry Balashov and Vladimir Makanin, Valentin Rasputin and Leonid Borodin, Leo Anninsky and Grant Matevosyan, who naturally and lively with those who are now gathering every autumn, like birds, like birds to their relatives.

nests. This is a good laboratory and a school of responsibility and love. Probably, they, Mikhailovskoye and Yasnaya, were the state that awarded you with you, Pavel Valerievich, their highest prize, so now only hold on and correspond. Pavel Basinsky: Do you remember the "thaw"? What did this time mean to you? Valentin Kurbatov: What was a “thaw” for me when I cringed when I saw these words about the “cult” in Pravda.

Not yourself, go, but for someone's adult conversations. There was no television for the first time I saw him in the fleet, the radio was silent then I find out that the report of Khrushchev was printed only in the year. On the day of Stalin’s death, I returned from school lessons and, buried in old coats and raincoats on a hanger in the corridor, cried with horror, because mourning music flowed out from under the door with cold ...

Then everything began to heal, and already stuck in the memory of the chistushka, “Beria, Beria came out of confidence, and comrades Malenkov picked him. But time seemed to live and lived in adolescents a different chronology. It was uneasy only because I heard, as we heard, amnesty and, apparently, the first of the prisons were released with the political ones to get out again!

Well, yes, after all, the region is native, Ural, in camps and prisons, and then they are somehow natural. Probably, the “thaw” was a thaw for Ilya Ehrenburg, who put this word into circulation, and for those who knew the “cold” of time. And in my small environment, not a word about the "enemies of the people" and "black funnels." Lived as they lived. It was very conveniently convenient to look out with the guys on the roof of the house of young specialists on Lenin’s house to look out the first companion of the radio informed what hour he would fly over the country, of course, it seemed that they saw: “There was a rejoicing of Gagarin’s flight.

At that time I was a cruising printing house and was folding a manual, some next message about the new successes of our ship, when a radio was radio when radio The voice of Levitan informed that in space the first Soviet man. The workbench itself flew out of the hands, the letters sprayed the scatter. I darted on the upper deck. Other guys were already bewildered there, not knowing where to put enthusiasm: the ship went to the new earth, and there was one sea around, even bend!

Photo: from the personal archive of Valentin Kurbatov and to read - they read the Bondarevsky “silence”, not yet knowing that she was “thaw”, Aksenov’s “oranges from Morocco”, Solzhenitsynsky “one day ...” - different, like the “thaw” itself. It was then that we learned that we lived with tyranny, with his mouth clamped and even under the "heirs of Stalin", who did not want to calm down in any way.

And I bravely read these "heirs" from the naval scene, obscuring the clipping from "Pravda". Just smile with these "heirs". Comrade Malenkov, after all, “picked the kicks” with more than one Beria, but after the twentieth congress it was only heard that Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov were going to “reset Khrushchev”. And the “shepils who joined them”, as he would later call him in all party documents, even flashed with imagery, because he graduated from the Red Professor Institute before the war, saying that Khrushchev “put on the boots of Stalin and began to“ stomp ”in them.

Whoever remembers Nikita Sergeyevich knows that he really knew how to "stomp". Soon the group was called "anti -Party" and dispersed. It will pass for many years. Once I will lead the evening of Viktor Petrovich Astafyev in Lenin. And at the end of a thoroughbred person, he will ask me to introduce Astafyev and introduce: "Dmitry Trofimovich." And I will respond: "Valentin Yakovlevich." He will continue: "Shepilov." And I will add: "Kurbatov".

Seeing my unreasonable, he deciphers: "Closing to them." We will smile both, and I will lead him to introduce Viktor Petrovich. I wrote about this in my book Plantain and here I will only repeat that when I handed it to him already a book of autographs and gave him a clean page, he smiled: “No, I'm in my genre,” and signed up directly under the autograph of Viktor Petrovich.