| The other day in Kursk, at the Memorial to the Fallen, Yevgeny Nosov, a good Russian writer, last year’s Solzhenitsyn Prize laureate, was buried. Nosov complained at the ceremony that today’s publishing houses had “buried” him long ago and that he perceived the award as a sign of “the resurrection of Lazarus.” Fate decreed otherwise - he passed away at the age of 77. Despite the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, membership in the editorial boards of metropolitan magazines, and the State Prize of the RSFSR, by nature he was not a social activist or a tribune. That is why we are publishing in his memory not an official obituary, but the private memories of his acquaintance and colleague, the former editor-in-chief of the Volga magazine, literary critic Sergei BOROVIKOV.
They reported: Evgeny Nosov died.
I only met him a few times, and of course I knew his prose since novels and stories began to appear in “The New World” and “Our Contemporary”, such as “The Fur Coat”, “The Meadow Fescue is Noisy” and others, except many other advantages stand out due to the lack of claims to a special understanding of people’s life, which other “village people” often sinned with. Only “Usvyatsky Helmet Bearers,” which are considered his most significant, seemed to me not quite in the nature of his talent, as if forced by force into epicness. The Old Russian name also sounded pretentious.
In 1986, the next visiting plenum of the SP of the RSFSR was held in Penza, which differed from the rest in one, but very sad circumstance: the Ligachev-Gorbachev decree on combating drunkenness was rampant in the country. Of course, they quietly walked around him, at lunches from a separate office, where they fed the top of the joint venture together with the hospitable host - the well-known secretary of the Penza regional committee Georg Myasnikov in those years - and were clearly sipping wine. The rest were not treated, but alcohol could be bought at the buffet, which few dared to do - everyone knew well how at first every next supreme campaign required sacrifices... And in the evening, at dinner in the restaurant of the Lastochka Hotel, few dared to drink in public. Among the brave souls were we and a wonderful man and a wonderful writer, alas long gone, Georgy Semyonov, as he usually introduced himself - Zhora. Evgeniy Ivanovich also joined us, and we “allowed” him. “Well, you and I sniffed,” Nosov told me then, “I could have been in your place. Bondarev calls me and says: “Zhenya, do you want to be the editor-in-chief of Volga?” “Yura,” I answer, “but I’m not a party member.” - “Ah... Well, be healthy!” Yevgeny Ivanovich also told how censorship, looking for even a hint of alcohol in texts, latched on to the story “Red Wine of Victory.” “I tell them, the bastards,” Evgeniy Ivanovich boomed, “why should I call it “Red Citro of Victory”!”
The restaurant was closing, and I invited Nosov and Semenov to my place. We sat for quite a long time, I kept silent, because soon the meeting took on the character of a rather fierce dispute between Nosov and Semenov about the war. About why we won. Nosov’s point of view boiled down to the fact that the plowman, the “helmet bearer”, driven by a high patriotic spirit, who had defended his homeland since ancient times, won. Semenov maintained that the Germans were overcome by the new regime of severe discipline strengthened by Stalin, when in a matter of weeks the giant factories were evacuated and began to work in a new place. Both were not shy in their expressions, they held their truth tightly. To Nosov’s denigration of the leader and his system of governing the country, Semyonov replied that he had no more reasons to love Stalin than Nosov, but only a dictator and the party system could force a plowman and a God-bearer to work and fight so furiously.
The last time I saw Nosov was at that plenum in the Central House of Writers, where the “patriotic” leadership of the RSFSR SP went on the offensive against reforms, and one of the objects of the offensive, along with “October” and “Ural”, was our independent “Volga”, which had left our grandparents " Evgeniy Ivanovich did not perform. Large, large-faced, with a lopsided “Gertrude” on his lapel, clearly under the weather, he was dozing in a chair. I thought then that in this way he simply isolated himself from the Sabbath, in which he did not want to participate.
Sergey BOROVIKOV
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