Yuri Nagibin

born April 3, 1920

Yuri Nagibin led an incredibly hard life, although, by Soviet standards, from the outside his life may have looked charmed. He was never sent to the Gulag, he returned from the World War II front in one piece, and, despite having a Jewish patronymic (Markovich), he was never targeted during the late-Stalin-era anti-Semitic “struggle against cosmopolitanism.” Furthermore, later in life, his fiction was both honored by the authorities and genuinely loved and read by ordinary people, a balancing act that few achieved.

On closer inspection, a deep sense of dissatisfaction belied this façade of success.

The tragic string of events that shaped Nagibin’s life extends to before his birth, when his father, a nobleman who took part in a 1920 peasant uprising in Kursk Province, was put to death. His pregnant mother had no desire to bring a child into this cruel and hungry time, not even to continue the family line. According to her own account, “I tried jumping off all sorts of cupboards so that I would miscarry. But my son was born anyway. Only when they brought him to me to be fed did I begin to feel any tenderness for him.”

Nagibin was adopted by Mark Levental, a lawyer, and only found out who his biological father was many years later. One can imagine what sort of emotional turmoil was provoked by learning that his family history was not at all what he had thought. Meanwhile, his relationship with his adoptive father was far from simple. In 1927, Levental was exiled to the Komi Republic in the country’s far north, where he lived until his death in 1952. One year after his father was sent into exile, Nagibin’s mother remarried.

Nagibin made several trips to see Levental in his place of exile and was devastated by his death. His diary contains the following entry:

Now it’s happened, what I’ve always been waiting for as the most awful thing that could happen, but I did wait for it. Maybe in order to know the full extent of my baseness, or not even baseness, but rather egotistical naiveté. Still, I never thought that it would be so hard, and I don’t have what it takes to be a true egotist. In the morning, when the sun burst through the blinds, and the room felt like in childhood, the telegram arrived. “Your father died last night.” Like a blow to the face with a dirty broom in front of everyone – a staggering feeling in its crude nakedness. How dare they use the word “died”?

And again, a feeling awful because of its inescapableness: a mistake was made along the way, and there had still been time to fix it, the dreadful mistake of suddenly letting the life of a loved one go. True, selfless love can keep a loved one, a dear one, on the Earth, no matter how much he might want to die. If I had gone, if he had known that I love him as I now know it, some mysterious forces would have held him in life, despite his sclerotic brain, despite his ailing, weary heart. I betrayed him. He unconsciously sensed that and gave up on life. The rest was formalities; sanatoriums and hospitals can’t save someone who has decided to die.

Nagibin found his calling rather early in life. After briefly studying medicine, he transferred to the film institute and began writing screenplays and, before long, prose fiction. He wrote prolifically all his life and was popular – both widely published and widely read. But in his heart he knew how much of what he wrote was what the authorities expected of him, idiotic articles glorifying the Stalin era and those that followed. As he wrote in his diary: “For me, hackwork has replaced vodka. It is almost as effective an escape from myself, but causes great harm. If my loved ones understood this, they would have waged the same sort of selfless war against my time at the desk as they did against my time at the bottle. Both destroy the person. But hackwork is more lethal.”

Nagibin was able to find more than one safe haven for his talent. His marvelous descriptions of nature were enchanting, and he himself felt that this was honest literature. He wrote about the great writers of the past, and this was also an honorable outlet for his talent. Many of his screenplays were the basis for highly acclaimed films, The Chairman first and foremost, featuring the brilliant acting of Mikhail Ulyanov. He managed to become a famous writer, a member of the Union of Writers’ leadership, someone allowed to make trips abroad, all while enjoying the respect of honest people and the courage to sign a letter defending Solzhenitsyn. But courage or the lack of it was always an issue.

Nagibin kept a diary, which in and of itself was an act of courage during the Soviet era, when everyone knew that, in theory, they could have their apartments raided at any moment and be dragged off under arrest. People were generally reluctant to commit their innermost thoughts to paper, but for many years Nagibin did just that, chronicling the torment caused by the divergence between what he was supposed to do and what he wanted to do.

Right up until 1985, when perestroika began, I lived outside of public, social, and political life as a matter of hygiene. For the same reason I avoided the literary environment as much as I could, although I had many writer friends and acquaintances. I lack the herd instinct, so I avoided crowds, meetings, discussions, and, despite being on the editorial boards of several journals, I could never sit through an entire meeting, which inevitably soured relations with the editor-in-chief and my colleagues. They interpreted my exits as disdain, but it was really claustrophobia; their strident debates gave me a sense of being trapped in a closed space. My diary shows that nature, the small circle of close friends, hunting, fishing, and dogs were more meaningful and important to me than other events of the epoch. These events, with the exception of the brief breathing space of the so-called Thaw, looked to me like sinister buffoonery. My only goal was to come out unscathed, to preserve in myself the fragile moral values that were endowed to me through my genes and upbringing.

He wrote about nature. Today he is credited with being a major influence on the Village Prose school of Soviet literature – Rasputin, Astafyev, and others – but he was never a Village Prose writer himself and never attained their level of popularity. Known for his screenplays and subtle short stories about nature, he was only truly free when alone with his diary, from which it is apparent how much of Soviet life was an irritant for him.

The fact that he was married six times is probably further evidence of his inability to adapt to his environment and settle down. At the very end of his life, when he was already dying, he made the bold decision to publish his diary while he was still alive, despite the fact that he had written harsh things about many of his contemporaries. It was as if he wanted to lay bare his soul. Earlier, he had published a short story about an affair he had with his own mother-in-law, but now he seemed to have decided to pull out all the stops, to tell everyone just what he thought of them and of life and of his own writings. Perhaps he understood that his diary was his crowning literary achievement.

Fate had other plans. On June 2, 1994, he completed the foreword to the diary and submitted it to the publisher. On June 17 he passed away.

The present generation will probably remember him only as the screenwriter of the popular serial Naval Cadets, Charge! – assuming they have the patience to sit still long enough to read the credits.