Documents of the era

Human rights activist and publicist Irina Yasina - about why she prefers memoirs and diaries - fiction

In recent years, I have not been interested in fiction - I have been reading memoirs, biographies, diaries more likely. Because life is richer and tougher than any romance than any invented work.

Now I read the “living faces” of the poetess, writers, publicist Zinaida Hippius is an absolutely amazing book of memoirs about pre -war, pre -revolutionary, and then about the revolutionary years, about people and circumstances. Hippius is an extremely smart and extremely caustic woman, she analyzes well and is very frank in her records. It is amazing me at how modern the language that it writes is, not to mention the fact that the years that it describes (especially pre -revolutionary), unfortunately, are largely surprisingly similar to what is happening here and now. It is interesting, for example, that Alexander Blok at the beginning of the First World War just behaved like a Black Highway, as Hippius writes, who temporarily stopped communicating with him, and when they later began to communicate again, they avoided this topic: I try not to talk about Ukraine with many of my friends. Sometimes people express such opinions that even if I communicate with them after that, then only on abstract topics.

Portraits of many people who went to cooperate with the Bolsheviks were interesting for me - the same Alexander Blok or Valery Bryusov, who generally worked as the main censor, closed newspapers and publishers.

She had special sources: after the revolution, while Freilin of the Sovereign Anna Vyrubova remained in Russia, she elected Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius with her confidentials and in breaks between interrogations, when she was released, hid their own and tsaritsy letters. Of course, I had an idea of what the tsarist power was, but the details of its baseness, moral fall, passion for idolatry - it simply turns the brains.

I highly advise reading Anton Denikin’s memoirs about the Civil War - the “campaign and death of General Kornilov” , as well as the “Diary of the White Guard” by Baron Alexei Budberg, who was the military minister in the army of Kolchak, and the “icy campaign” - the memories of the simple ensign of the White Army Roman Guly, who returned from the fronts of the First World War and went to Don with his brother to fight for Don To Kornilov. These all memoirs are published by one book and give a very good idea of what a civil war is. And about the same era - Nina Berberova, "Clygage mine." It is difficult to characterize all these books other than a picture from nature: they show what happened before the revolution in Russia and how those people who managed to escape later lived in exile.
Another interesting biography is “Count Karl-Hans von Hardenberg. One of the fate of German resistance. " This man was the head of the “conspiracy of the generals” in order to kill Hitler. It was he who was the organizer of the famous assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, the explosion at the headquarters of the Wolf Lovoy and the unsuccessful attempt of the coup. The book is compiled from the diaries of Hardenberg and the documents that remained after it.

Anton Snzivtsev recorded

Photo: from personal archive