Arkady Golikov (Gaidar) is a children's writer, a participant in the bloody Civil War and a punisher of the anti-Soviet underground. Golikov is one of the most controversial personalities in Soviet history. Who is he: a brutal killer of civilians, an inveterate alcoholic, or a talented children's writer?
Childhood
Arkady Petrovich was born on January 9 (22), 1904 in the town of Lgov, in Kursk province. On the maternal side, the writer was a hereditary nobleman (moreover, mother Natalya was related to), on the paternal side - the grandson of a serf.
Arkady Gaidar with his parents and sisters
Later the family moved to the city of Arzamas. Arkady was the firstborn, and in a new place he had three sisters - Natasha, Katya and Olya. The researchers argue that the talent woke up in the writer in his early years: he learned to compose and speak in rhyme earlier than to write and count.
Kursk library At the age of 10, the boy is assigned to the Arzamas real school. Here, the young schoolboy made an attempt to escape to the front, where his father had been taken earlier, but the boy was returned home under escort. While studying at the school, Arkady amazed the teachers with his excellent memory - he memorized entire books and texts of textbooks.
Military career
After the fall royal family many parties and student committees appeared in Arzamas. In the summer of 1917, Golikov received the position of a messenger, and in 1918 he joined the Bolshevik squad. Initially, the Bolsheviks took the young man to the RCP (b) as a candidate, and the 15-year-old Golikov became a full member of the party on December 15, 1918. At first he served as an adjutant, later he headed the security department railway.
The young man constantly asked to go to the front, but the commander insisted that the guy first undergo specialized training. And so it happened - Golikov went to the Moscow command courses of the Red Army. Later, the institution was relocated to Ukraine, to Kyiv. Once in Kyiv, Arkady fought with the Petliurists and Ukrainian rebels.
Krasnoyarsk library In 1919, Golikov became commander, in 1920 - commissar of headquarters. At the age of 17, he knew more about military affairs than many commanders. In 1921 he received the rank of regiment commander. Golikov fought on different fronts (in Sochi, on the Don, on the Caucasian front), where he contracted typhus, was wounded and twice shell-shocked. In 1922 he was sent to suppress the anti-Soviet uprising in Khakassia. Here the young commander proved himself to be a bloodthirsty tyrant who did not like the Jews and shot the population on suspicion of banditry.
TVNZ According to historians, Gaidar pushed women and children off a cliff and killed anyone he suspected of anti-Soviet activities. In 1922 he was accused of abuse of power. Gaidar was stripped of his post and expelled from the party, sent for a psychiatric examination. The case ended with a diagnosis of "traumatic neurosis".
Creation
Arkady Petrovich returned from the front as an inveterate alcoholic with a fairly undermined psyche.
“From the ship to the ball” - this is how historians characterize literary activity Golikov, which began immediately after the end of his military career. Arkady took his first manuscript "In the days of defeats and victories" and brought it to the popular Leningrad almanac "Kovsh". With the words: “I am Arkady Golikov, and this is my novel and I ask you to print it,” the writer handed over to the editor several written notebooks. And the work was printed.
Kursk Scientific Library Then the writer moved to Perm, where his first work was published in the Zvezda magazine under the pseudonym Gaidar (“Corner House”).
In subsequent years, he published essays and feuilletons. In between nervous breakdowns and moving, he writes his best books: "RVS", "School" and "The Fourth Dugout". Several times Arkady Petrovich was taken away by doctors with bouts of delirium tremens, later he was arrested for drunk shooting.
Kursk Scientific Library This is followed by several suicide attempts - the writer tries to cut his veins. Boris Zaks, a fellow journalist, claimed that his hands were covered with large scars, and Arkady cut his veins more than once. In 1932 Golikov got into mental asylum, where he wrote "Military secret". In total, according to Gaidar himself, he was in psychiatric hospitals 8-10 times.
In 1938, the all-Union fame came to the children's writer - the country was reading books and collections of his stories with might and main, memorizing "Timur and his team", "Chuk and Gek" by heart. The writer took his son Timur and adopted daughter Zhenya to the Crimea and for a while forgot about psychological problems.
Arkady Gaidar at the Artek pioneer camp | Kursk Scientific Library In March 1941, Arkady Petrovich, while relaxing in the Sokolniki sanatorium, met Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. When the war began, Gaidar just received an order to write a screenplay based on the work "Timur and his team." The script was completed within 12 days, after which Arkady wrote a statement to the front.
Personal life
The writer was married three times in his life:
The first wife of the writer was Maria Nikolaevna Plaksina, a 17-year-old nurse. The writer himself at the time of his marriage was 17 years old. The first wife gave Gaidar a son, Zhenya, but the first-born died in infancy.
Arkady Gaidar with his wife Leah and son Timur | Literary newspaper The second wife of Golikov was 17-year-old Liya Lazarevna Solomyanskaya, a supporter of the pioneer movement and organizer of the newspaper "Ant-Wizard". In 1926, the couple had a son, Timur. However, it was difficult to live with the writer, he drank alcohol and suffered from mental disorders. In 1931, his wife Leah took her son and left her husband for Samson Glyazer (a journalist for Komsomolskaya Pravda).
Arkady Gaidar with his wife Dora and children | Kursk Scientific Library For the third time, the writer tied the knot with Dora Chernysheva. It happened in 1938. Being a middle-aged woman, Dora already had a daughter, Eugenia, whom Arkady later adopted.
Last years and death
Despite the prohibitions, the writer nevertheless arrived at the front. He came to Kyiv. Acted as a correspondent, helped with advice. Later he ended up in the rear of the Germans, and then became a member of the partisan detachment.
Having gone on reconnaissance in 1941, the writer, along with several partisans, on October 26, found himself in an ambush near the railway embankment. Finding the enemy, Gaidar managed to warn his own, shouting: "Guys, the Germans!" This phrase saved the lives of the rest of the partisans, but led to the death of Arkady Petrovich.
TVNZ However, there is another version of events, according to which the writer did not die on October 26. Ukrainian journalist Victor Glushchenko, having conducted his own investigation, learned that Gaidar and several partisans were sheltered by a woman, Kristina Kuzmenko. Having lived with Christina until spring, the warriors moved towards the front, but they were captured. The partisans later managed to escape. They hid in the forest, and a certain Ulyana Dobrenko brought them food. These data were not enough to revise the history of Gaidar's death. Another fact is also doubtful - the body of the deceased was wearing an officer's uniform and half-woolen linen, which does not agree with the story of the partisans.
Kursk Scientific Library Today, dozens of streets are named after Arkady Gaidar, his image is used in music and literature, and in Khabarovsk there is a memorial to the writer.
Curious facts
More than 70 years have passed since the death of the writer. However, researchers are still arguing about his life history.
Interesting facts about Arkady Gaidar:
- The writer joined the ranks of the Red Army at the age of 15.
- Historian Andrei Burovsky cites alternative version enrollment Golikov in the ranks of the Red Army. In his opinion, his mother enrolled Arcadia in the army in order to save him from retribution for the murder (or murders) committed by her son. Gaidar, during his fits of insanity, once confessed that in youth committed a murder: “I dreamed of people killed by me in childhood ...”
Kursk Scientific Library - The history of the writer's pseudonym is also interesting. According to one version, "Gaidar" in translation from Turkic is translated as "herald", "advanced rider". Another source claims that the pseudonym comes from the phrase "Golikov Arkady from Arzamas." The third version reports that the pseudonym originates from the Khakass word "Khaidar", which means "where to." During the service in Khakassia, the locals shouted: "Khaidar-Golik is coming!"
- There is an opinion that it is not Arkady Gaidar who lies behind the tombstone in Kanev (a city in the Cherkasy region). In particular, a few years after the burial, the slab cracked. It was replaced with a new one, but it also cracked.
Literary newspaper - There is a version that Timur (the son of Leah Solomyanskaya) is not a native, but an adopted son of the writer. For the first time, the writer saw Timur only at the age of two, and at the time of his alleged conception (April 1926) Gaidar was in Central Asia. Thus, it is possible that the writer does not have blood descendants.
Bibliography
Most famous works Golikova:
- "Blue Cup" (1936);
- "Timur and his team" (1940),
- "The fate of the drummer" (1938),
- "School" (1930);
- "RVS" (1925);
- "The Fourth Dugout".
Continuing the theme : Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Yegor Gaidar carried out his "reforms", completely ignoring the grief and tears of millions of people destitute of his inhuman policy
"A friend of children with kind eyes" and the ancestor of the famous family Arkady Gaidar appears from the pages of Soloukhin's book "Salt Lake
"As one of the most terrible executioners of the times of the" Red Terror ".
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The person of Arkady Gaidar (Golikov) is still one of the most mysterious myths for most Russian citizens. Soviet period. Not only for the older generation, but also for today's youth, he remains a wonderful children's writer, the creator of works of great educational value. And the activities of Golikov-Gaidar during the years of the Civil War are painted in romantic tones for many - they say, he joined the Red Army at the call of his heart at the age of 14 and fought for a well-known idea ardently and disinterestedly.
The fact that Arkady Gaidar was not all right with his head was the first to write widely and openly the historian and literary critic Mikhail Zolotonosov in the Moscow News newspaper (01/23/2004). He reported that Gaidar ended his turbulent "revolutionary activity", commanding the 58th separate regiment, famous for unheard-of cruelty in the suppression of a peasant uprising in the Tambov province, and then fighting at the head of special forces with a detachment of the "white partisan" Ivan Solovyov in Khakassia. “Here he manifests a traumatic neurosis, and as a result, in December 1924, Golikov leaves the army and switches to literature,” notes Zolotonosov.
Analyzing Gaidar's "strange-looking prose", the literary critic notes that the ancestor of the famous family "responded to all the ideological demands of the era", and in his writings "ideological zombies are diluted not only with pathos, but also with a thick layer of sentimentalism." At the same time, Gaidar did not disdain plagiarism. Zolotonosov rightly draws attention to the fact that the death of the boy Alka, who was killed by a stone thrown by a drunken bandit (“Military Secret”), is practically written off from the scene of the death of Ilyusha Snegiryov from The Brothers Karamazov.
The article in Moskovskie Novosti also speaks of Soloukhin's story "Salt Lake" (first publication - "Our Contemporary", 4, 1994), which, according to Zolotonosov, is dedicated not only to the activities of Gaidar-Golikov in Khakassia, but also to the personality of Arkady Gaidar in general.
The author reports that in Soloukhin's book "there is a lot of evidence about the atrocities of the Chonovites in general and Golikov-Gaidar in particular." And that Yegor Gaidar, the author of the inhumane and essentially criminal “liberal reforms”, owes his last name to the Khakass word “Khaidar”, which means “Where to go?”. Wildly shouting this word, Yegor's grandfather and Maria Gaidarov's great-grandfather rushed all over little Khakassia, chasing Solovyov's partisans. And the Khakasses, hearing these cries, fled to different sides, screaming in horror: “Save yourself! Khaidar-Golik is coming! Our death is coming!"
On June 14, 2004, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Vladimir Soloukhin, Komsomolskaya Pravda, where Arkady Gaidar was once listed, published a long interview from the writer's archive. In it, Soloukhin draws an interesting parallel between Yegor Gaidar and his grandfather: “Stalin took power from them (internationalists), pulled Russia out of their hands. And they can never forgive him for that. They themselves do not exist. But new generations have risen. And they will try to take revenge, to return the positions that their fathers and grandfathers occupied. Here specific example. Arkady Gaidar was a punisher, a Chonovite who shot peasants in Khakassia (I wrote the story “Salt Lake” about this). And the grandson almost got into the premiere. I would take the post of Stolypin. From Stolypin to Gaidar! Can you imagine?
The author of these lines happened to do the last interview with V. A. Soloukhin, which was published in “ Russian newspaper in February 1997. During our meeting with the writer in Peredelkino, he, striking me with his conviction that after the war, Stalin was gradually preparing to proclaim himself Russian emperor, also touched upon the theme of his story “Salt Lake”.
Soloukhin complained that very influential forces from the environment of Gaidar and Chubais were doing their best to prevent the release of "Salt Lake" in the form of a separate book and a decent circulation. According to the writer, this is due to the fact that he managed to show Arkady Gaidar not only as a bloody executioner, but also as a mentally ill person, whose pathological cruelty could be inherited by descendants.
Indeed, the facts given in the "Salt Lake" are amazing. While working on the book, Soloukhin got acquainted with unique documents miraculously preserved in the archives of Abakan and Achinsk, and also met with the old-timers of Khakassia. Since Arkady Gaidar's apologists demanded from Soloukhin "documentation of the actions of Golikov-Chonov" in "Salt Lake" there is a lot of information gleaned from the Khakass media. Thus, fragments of the translation of the radio program "Achban Saltachy", aired in Abakan on October 20, 1993, are given. In it, the old-timers of the republic tell terrible things about Arkady Gaidar. So, E. G. Samozhikov testified how his grandfather Yegor Gaidar, mistaking Solovyov for a liaison detachment, hacked his relative, a 12-year-old boy, in a fit of hysteria with a saber.
The well-known Khakassian writer and veteran respected in the republic, Georgy Fyodorovich Topanov, then said: “He not only did not like small, but also old people, he killed. Chopped and ordered to throw into the water, the blood was always red in the lake. And A. N. Mokhov from the Mokhov ulus on Uibat said: “A Russian soldier spent the night with them. In the morning Golikov came in, saw him, said "traitor". And he shot the mother and the soldier with a revolver.
And here is what I. V. Argudaev from the Ot-Kol ulus said: “Golikov had an order, I know from my mother, if even one in the family sympathized with the white partisan Solovyov, then Gaidar-Golikov slaughtered his entire family. For example, Big Lake… Every day in those days Gaidar-Golikov's people shoved the living into the hole. We Khakass still do not catch fish in the lake. They say that on human meat fat worked up. Golikov Khakass of the Sharypovsky district, Uzhursky district slaughtered everyone, even now they don’t live there anymore.”
The article “Roads of life. Gaidar-Khaidar? (two faces of one person), published in the newspaper Lenin Choly on February 12, 1991 and practically unknown to the Russian-speaking reader. When, at the request of Soloukhin, she was transferred, the writer did not learn anything fundamentally new after what local old-timer Mikhail Kilchichakov told him about the fate of 16 hostages who were kept by Golikov’s Chonovites in a cold bath all night on suspicion of supporting Solovyov’s partisans: “In the morning, Golikov let them out on one and shot him in the back of the head. Or as he announced to one village: "If you don't tell me where Solovyov is hiding, I will shoot the whole village." And indeed, he lined up everyone, and women, and old people, and children, in one line, and skewed everyone with a machine gun. According to one version, 86 people, according to another - 134.
Realizing that due to objective reasons it was not possible to legally document the atrocities of Arkady Gaidar in those troubled years, Soloukhin gives striking evidence of the mental problems of the Soviet legend, which manifested themselves already in peaceful, literary and journalistic life. In particular, Soloukhin refers to the works of Boris Kamov, who studied the diaries of Arkady Gaidar. In them, he noted the dreams that tormented him in the 30s as “Dreams according to scheme No. 1” or “Dreams according to scheme No. 2”. And in these records there is a phrase: "I dreamed of people killed by me in childhood." If we recall that Golikov-Gaidar has been engaged in "revolutionary activities" since the age of 14, this recognition is more than remarkable.
In 1988, the fifth edition of the almanac "Past" published by the Parisian publishing house "Atenium" published the memoirs of the writer and journalist Boris Zaks, who was a close friend of Arkady Gaidar for a long time. Zaks comments on Gaidar's well-known letter to the writer R. Fraerman, which the apologists for the creator of "Timur and his team" like to portray as a kind of protest against the atmosphere of lies and fear during the period of Stalin's repressions. In it, Gaidar informs a friend: “Why did I mess up like that? A habit has formed to lie from beginning to end, and the fight against this habit is stubborn and difficult for me.
So, Zaks points out that the publishers of Gaidar's letter do not mention that Arkady wrote it from a psychiatric clinic. According to N. Stakhov, Gaidar suffered from a severe nervous breakdown since the Civil War. “But what is behind this, Stakhov does not disclose,” Boris Zaks notes, “But we are talking about a real mental illness that regularly brought Gaidar to medical institutions. Not so long he stayed in the Far East (he worked in a Khabarovsk newspaper), but during this time he was twice in a psychiatrist.
“I have had to deal with many alcoholics in my long life - drunken, chronic and others,” Zaks writes further. - Gaidar was different, he was often “ready” even before the first glass. He told me that the doctors who examined him in detail made the following conclusion: alcohol is only the key that opens the door to the forces already raging inside.
The same Zaks in "Notes of an Eyewitness" reported that Arkady Gaidar more than once inflicted serious, but deliberately non-fatal wounds on himself with a safety razor: "Gaidar cut himself. The blade of a safety razor. One blade was taken away from him, but as soon as he turned away, he was already cut with another ... Later, already in Moscow, I happened to see him in his shorts. The entire chest and arms below the shoulders were completely covered with huge scars.
Zaks is sure that Arkady Gaidar did not seek to commit suicide. According to a friend of Golikov-Gaidar, the creator of Chuk and Gek, the smell of blood was arousing, and in a peaceful life he had to be content with his own.
Thus, from the book-study of Vladimir Soloukhin and the memoirs of Boris Zaks, a completely different image of Arkady Gaidar arises than the one that many are accustomed to - the image of a man who from childhood had an indomitable thirst for murder and bullying people, who suffered from chronic alcoholism and severe nervous disorders . And those who, due to historical circumstances, have received the opportunity to satisfy their pathological and terrible desires.
In this regard, one involuntarily recalls famous direction in criminal psychology, associated with the name of the famous Italian psychologist of the late nineteenth century, Caesar Lombroso. Its representatives believe that criminal pathology in the psyche can be inherited, and manifest itself not so much in the first as in the second and subsequent generations.
Is it not the influence of the above-described "strangeness" of Arkady Gaidar that explains the fact that his grandson Yegor Gaidar carried out his "reforms", completely ignoring the grief and tears of millions of people destitute of his inhuman policy? And that the great-granddaughter of the creator of the "Blue Cup" Maria Gaidar has publicly said more than once that she is not at all ashamed of any act of her "illustrious" great-grandfather? It seems that there is something to discuss here, and not only for specialists in the field of cultural studies and transpersonal psychology.
For the first time about psychological Veterans' problems were discussed in America after the Vietnam War. After Afghanistan on the the same problems have become relevant for our guys.
Have men really changed so radically in just half a century that it used to be a common thing for them to run under bullets and kill their own kind, but now it is a risk of personality breakdown?
"Envy us, envy us, to the very gray hair. You will never see what we happened to..." - with an expression we read poems by a Soviet poet about civil war .
And then our classmates, with whom we danced the first slow dance under the Beatles, went to fulfill their international duty in Afghanistan.
Many of them we have never seen alive. For those who returned, everything somehow did not work out either. And we weren't jealous that we didn't see what happened to them...
Rehabilitation centers for war veterans operate in the country, where young men are not only fitted with prostheses and wheelchairs, but they also teach them to forget that the country sent them to their deaths and made them murderers, they advise how to live in peace, get along in the family, and work for the good of society. Psychologists explain this phenomenon by the fact that the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya were unfair and political work in the army is not up to par.
Like, the main thing is to arm a person with an idea, and he will gladly go to his death "for the tsar, for the power of the Soviets, for Stalin, for the Motherland." They say that smart consultants are somewhere in the Kremlin offices already engaged in the formulation of the state idea, in the name of which the country will live and for which it will not be a pity to send your sons to the slaughter ...
"The horseman galloping ahead..."
I remembered this translation of Gaidar's pseudonym when I accidentally stumbled upon the volume of Arkady Petrovich, presented to me on the day of the tenth.
In 1972, thirty years after his death, Gaidar was awarded the Lenin Komsomol Prize for children's books. "A military secret", "Timur and his team "They moved with me from city to city, from a hostel to a communal apartment, and then from apartment to apartment.
Romantic works about boys and girls, about their true friendship, about love for the Soviet Motherland, about pests, about a premonition of new wars and unconditional victories, written in the memorable thirties, played a significant role in the formation of our worldview.
Gaidar himself is associated with the simple characters of his heroes. His biography has always seemed impeccable and understandable. Hero civil war, who became a writer and died heroically in the first months of the Great Patriotic War ... [ Arkady Gaidar: the romance of an aimed shot ]
Ships, streets, libraries bear his name. Gaidar's son became a rear admiral, and his grandson became the youngest prime minister. How not to envy. Do you think that a terrible and sad secret is hidden behind the brilliant facade of a heroic biography. More medical than government...
They haven't forgotten about the "Gaidar gang" yet
Arkady's letter to his sister Natasha: "Krasnoyarsk, January 17, 1923, Tuesday
I have to leave for a month to the Physiotherapy (Physiobalneotherapy???) Institute in Tomsk. Recently, on behalf of the provincial committee, a consultation was convened, and the doctors determined: exhaustion nervous system in a severe form due to overwork and former shell shock, with a functional disorder and arrhythmia of cardiac activity.
Exhaustion of the nervous system was not a ploy to avoid punishment. The history of life organically fits into the history of the disease. Here are the lines of Gaidar's autobiography:
"Born on January 9, 1904 in the city of Lgov, Kursk region.
From the fifth grade of Arzamas [D om-museum of A.P. Gaidar] school (real) went to the Red Army as a volunteer, was a member of the RKSM.
Then he was the commander of the 58th separate regiment of the army to suppress the uprising in the Tambov province (Antonovshchina), after the liquidation of which he was appointed head of the second combat region, on the border of Mongolia (Tana-Tuva), where parts of the white colonel Oliferov and the remnants of the officer gang had just passed Solovyov.[Baron Ungern - God of War ]
Then I began to get sick (not immediately, but in jerks, periods). I was diagnosed with traumatic neurosis. He was treated several times. In November 1924, he was dismissed with the issuance of a severance pay due to illness from the Red Army. There were no penalties, except for a few disciplinary ones (no more than 1-3 days in a guardhouse).
Ark. Gaidar-Golikov.
Probably, hundreds of Russian boys, who were born in intelligent families, studied the law of God in gymnasiums and real schools, had the same fate, but never finished their studies. Laws became their law class struggle .
Arkady left to fight when he was not fifteen years old. He had been raving about military exploits ever since his father, Petr Isidorovich, a rural teacher, went to the fronts of the 1st World War. In general, since that time he had no family. Returning from the war, his father married another woman.
“Two and a half years have passed since I broke off all connection, my friend, with you,” the son wrote to his father. “During this time I have not received a single letter, not a single news from you, my glorious and dear dad. .. I went into the army when I was still a boy, when, apart from an impulse, I had nothing solid and definite. your understanding of the world and tried to apply it to life wherever he could..." (Krasnoyarsk, January 23, 1923).
Mother, Natalya Arkadyevna, a midwife, was actively engaged in Bolshevik work and died in 1924 from transient consumption in the position of head of the provincial health department in Kyrgyzstan. She was proud of her son-commander and wrote on her deathbed that she bequeathed to him not to spare his life for the power of the Soviets.
Arkady dreamed that he himself would have perfect family
In Perm, he marries [second marriage] to a seventeen-year-old Komsomol member Ruve-Leah Lazarevna Solomyanskaya, in 1926 in Arkhangelsk their son Timur was born.
When Gaidar's first book came out, the family moved to Moscow.
Gaidar cut himself. Safety razor blade
"... In my long life I had to deal with many alcoholics - drunken, chronic and others. Gaidar was different, he was often "ready" even before the first glass. He said that the doctors who examined him in detail made the following conclusion: alcohol - only the key that opened the door to the forces already raging inside.* Of course, taking Gaidar at his word is a dangerous business, but this story of his corresponds to what I saw with my own eyes.
One day, we (E.I. Titov and I), who lived in the same editorial apartment with Gaidar, began to notice something wrong in his behavior. We knew about his illness and began to persuade him to go to the hospital before it was too late. Finally, after a long struggle, he agreed. The three of us went in search of a mental hospital. Arrived with difficulty. In the vestibule, Gaidar immediately sank down onto the steps, and we began to wait for the doctor... Gaidar looked askance at us and said: "I have good comrades, where have they taken us."
The doctor received us dryly. He listened, looked at Gaidar and refused to take him to the hospital. He, apparently, was not used to being visited voluntarily and without mischief, and therefore did not recognize Gaidar as sick.
The road back was even more difficult. Gaidar could hardly move his feet. I had time, I worked in the night office, but it was time for Titov to hand in the telegrams, and he went ahead, leaving the two of us. As soon as Titov left, Gaidar incoherently, in a slurring tongue, began to accuse Titov of allegedly saying: "It would be better if you died in battle with glory."
Gaidar gave the complete impression of being drunk, although he did not drink a drop. On the way we met several acquaintances and, despite my objections, they took Arkady to their place. He returned to the smoke drunk and announced from the first words that he would kill Titov. "Where is he?" He did not believe that Titov had not yet returned from the editorial office. I went into Titov's room - no one. Then, taking a chair by the back, he began to knock out one pane of glass after another in the windows. Turned upside down the bed, table, chairs. Then he went out into the corridor with a large Borjomi bottle in his hand.
It was getting dark, there was no light. I rushed from Gaidar to the gate to watch and warn Titov
Behind our house, in an outbuilding, lived Zaitsev, secretary of the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU for the Far Eastern Territory. Hearing the noise, he jumped out on the porch of the outbuilding and yelled: "What's going on here?" And at the same moment, the unpredictable Khabarovsk power plant gave electricity and Gaidar, brightly lit with a chair raised up, appeared in front of Zaitsev in the window. Then they sat in the garden and exchanged military memories. Then Gaidar went into the house.
I told Zaitsev that he should not have allowed Gaidar alone: I myself could not leave my post, so as not to miss Titov. "He's a great guy," Zaitsev exclaimed in response. "I vouch for him. We, old Chekists, know how to understand people." Then there was a clang of glass - Gaidar was finishing off the surviving window - and the connoisseur of people quickly ran into the house.
In this case, Gaidar's rage was directed outward - at another person. But I also saw another situation - when the excesses of his anger were directed at himself.
I was young, I had never seen anything like it, and that terrible night made a terrifying impression on me. Gaidar cut himself. The blade of a safety razor. One blade was taken away from him, but as soon as he turned away, he was already cut with another. Asked to go to the restroom, locked himself, did not answer. They broke the door, and he cuts again, wherever he got the blade. They took him away in an unconscious state, all the floors in the apartment were covered with blood coagulated into large clots ... I thought he would not survive.
At the same time, it did not seem that he was striving to commit suicide; he did not try to inflict a mortal wound on himself, he simply arranged a kind of "shahsei-vakhsei". Later, already in Moscow, I happened to see him in his shorts. The entire chest and arms below the shoulders were completely - one to one - covered with huge scars. It was clear that he cut himself more than once ...
In general, the idea of Gaidar as the standard of a prosperous Soviet writer far from the truth
From a young age, he believed in the ideas of the revolution, fought for them, remained faithful to them. And what? He's out of the party, expelled at the end civil war.All his life he was drawn to everything military, he does not have a single book without the Red Army, he even dressed in a military way. And what? Dismissed from the army on a clean note - due to the illness described above ...
And in addition, constant relapses of the disease, accompanied by hard drinking and other excesses that interfered with normal creative work. He never had time to turn in the manuscript on time, he was always in a hurry, grabbed advances, dodged so as not to pay a penalty.
He was capable of diligent work only at times. I started and quit a lot without finishing. To Khabarovsk ke One day he started to dictate an article to a typist, but he fussed, said that he had forgotten his notepad at home, and suddenly jumped out of the window. That was the end of it - Gaidar took to drink ...
Gaidar back in Civil war looked at everyone. After all, discipline in the Red Army rested on executions. And Gaidar, as a boy, served in the CHON[ Special Purpose Part]. I think that even then the category of justice ceased to interest him. Only expediency. After all, he shot the prisoners in the name of expediency - too many convoy soldiers would be required to send the prisoners to the rear. It was easier to shoot...
Gaidar was in his own way a very integral person. I believed in what I wrote. Including the happy "country of Gaidar".
* The above events allow the doctor to accurately classify the writer's mental illness: manic-depressive psychosis on the background of chronic alcoholism, post-traumatic encephalopathy.
"There is no one to take care of me, but I myself do not know how ..."
From the diary of A. Gaidar Khabarovsk August 20, 1931 mental hospital
I really want to shout: "Go to hell!" But you hold back. Otherwise, they would transfer me further down to the third department, and there, in one night, they stole my cigarettes and tore apart a notebook hidden under the mattress.
During my life I have been in hospitals, probably 8 or 10 times - and yet this is the only time when - this Khabarovsk hospital, the worst of hospitals - I will remember without anger, because a story about " Malchish-Kibalchish e ".
I am leaving the hospital today. So, a year has passed. But, in general, nothing special happened, life goes on as usual, and in the end it is clear that my grief is not so irreparable.
I am no longer afraid of Moscow.
Moscow He spoke on the radio - about himself.And in general - hustle and bustle, parties. And because I have nowhere to put myself, there is no one to easily go to, nowhere even to spend the night ... In fact, I have only three pairs of linen, a duffel bag, a field bag, a sheepskin coat, a hat - and nothing else and no one, not at home , no place, no friends.
And this at a time when I am not at all poor, and not at all outcast and not needed by anyone. It just kind of comes out like that. For two months he did not touch the story "Military Secret". Meetings, conversations, acquaintances ... Overnight stays - where necessary. Money, lack of money, again money.
They treat me very well, but there is no one to take care of me, and I myself do not know how. That is why everything turns out somehow not humanly and stupidly. Yesterday they finally sent me to the Ogiz rest house to finalize the story.
Yesterday I was discharged from the Sokolniki hospital - there was brain fog. Today is very warm and sunny.
I am in the hospital until the first of March - they treat me with insulin. This is some kind of very strong medicine, from which faint-hearted people lose consciousness. I never lost.
From a letter to the writer R. Fraerman: “I live in the Sokolniki hospital. My health is good. One problem: the thought worries me why I messed up like that. There seemed to be no reason to justify this constant and painful lie with which I am talking with people ... a habit has formed to lie from beginning to end, and the struggle against this habit is stubborn and difficult for me, but I cannot overcome it ...
Sometimes I walk very close to the truth, sometimes - just about - and cheerful, simple, she is ready to break out of her mouth, but as if some voice sharply warns me - beware! Do not say! And then you'll be lost! And immediately you imperceptibly turn, whirl, crumble, and for a long time then ripples in your own eyes - ek, they say, where have you, the scoundrel, stopped by! ..
I am advised to take the so-called state order for a play for the 25th anniversary of Soviet power. The same order was offered to me through the Cinematography Committee. He did not give an answer to anyone before leaving the hospital. The mood is uneven."
Assault on Literature
We can say that Gaidar's hero is Raskolnikov, who goes to the end without being afraid of anything: because, due to his youth and because of the uniqueness of his life sense, he simply does not know that it is possible to be afraid of something, he simply does not see what torments him so Petersburg student: he frames his clumsy work with a dull and painful self-reflection, and this one begins to cheerfully fire from a Browning after the next internal monologue: "Straighten up, drummer!" - the same voice already warmly and affectionately prompted me. - Get up and don't rot! It's time!
Gaidar created a convincing and just as artistically truthful image of the superman
Seryozha absolutely immoral, and this is not surprising, because any morality or what replaces it, in all cultures, is brought into the child's soul with the help of a special candy made from beauty.
In the place of the vulgar fascist state of "The Fate of the Drummer" by Serezhin, blue eyes see an endless romantic expanse; it is inhabited by exalted giants engaged in mystical struggle, the nature of which is slightly revealed when Serezha asks the senior superman, NKVD Major Gerchakov, what forces the adult killed the other day served. "The man chuckled.
He did not answer anything, took a puff of smoke from his crooked pipe (sic!), spat on the grass and slowly pointed with his hand in the direction where the crimson evening sun was now gently sinking.
So, what Gaidar wrote, we have more or less found out. Now let's think why. Why does a shaven-headed man in a tunic and a hat convince someone on a hundred pages that the world is beautiful, and the murder committed by a child is not a sin at all, because children are sinless by virtue of their nature?
Many entries in his diaries are unreadable, writes one of the researchers. - Gaidar used a specially designed cipher. Sometimes he noted that he was tormented by recurring "pattern 1" or "pattern 2" dreams. And suddenly, in clear text, like a scream:
"I dreamed of people killed by me in childhood..."
Closing The Drummer's Fate, we know what the warm and affectionate voice he described was whispering to the little armed Gaidar. But why is it that this young shooter, whom even the Red Command punished for cruelty, having matured, left us such charming and impeccable descriptions of childhood? Is one related to the other? What is the true fate of a drummer? And who is he really?
Perhaps the time has come to answer this question. Among the countless insects living in the vastness of our vast country, there is one - ant lion.
During the first phase of its life, it is a disgusting creature, similar to a tailless scorpion, which sits at the bottom of a sandy funnel and eats ants that roll down there.
Then something happens, and a monster with terrible claws is covered with a shell, from which, after a week or two, an amazingly beautiful dragonfly with four wide wings and a greenish belly hatches.
And when she flies away towards the crimson evening sun, which in a past life she could only look askance from the bottom of her funnel, she probably does not remember the ants she once ate. So, maybe ... they dream sometimes. Was it with her, too?" Timur and his team ", 1940). Killed in battle behind enemy lines Russian and creator Timur and his team » Arkady Petrovich Golikov in his youth, he adopted the surname-nickname Gaidar, which in Turkic means " rooster". In Khakassia, according to research Vladimir Soloukhin, he stayed for a long time and left a bad memory about himself, to put it mildly. The Khakas consider him a cruel, bloody punisher. Arkady Gaidar really suffered from bouts of uncontrollable rage, rabies even in the 30s. He married a second marriage to Ruva-Liya Lazarovna Solomyanskaya. Solomyanskaya Ruva- Liya Lazarevna. She was born on 05.05.1907, Minsk. Screenwriter. In 1928-1929 she studied at the Leningrad Institute of Communist Education. N.K. Krupskaya (in absentia). Liya Lazarevna Solomyanskaya (1908-1986), was the daughter of a Bolshevik with pre-revolutionary experience, a native of the Minsk province Lazar Grigorievich. She was a journalist, one of the organizers of the pioneer movement in Perm. She was a member of the editorial board of the Perm newspaper "Na Smenu", worked on the radio. In the cinema since 1935 (first at Mosfilm, then - head of the Scenario Department of Soyuzdetfilm). In 1936-1940. she spent in Akmola camps Gulag and, upon leaving which she worked at the Soyuzdetfilm film studio. During the Great Patriotic War, she was a military journalist for the Znamya newspaper. After the war, she contributed to various newspapers and magazines. She already had a child - son [maybe daughter Zhenya?] , whom Arkady Petrovich adopted. Timur Arkadyevich married Ariadna Pavlovna Bazhova, daughter of Valechka Ivanitsa. Gaidar's grandson Egor Timurovich, employee of the central party press of the Central Committee of the CPSU [Deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine "Communist"] . Married with a second marriageon theMarina - the daughter of a science fiction writer Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky . Natan Zalmonovich Strugatsky was a professional Leninist revolutionary. A memorial plaque dedicated to Arkady Gaidar was solemnly opened in Perm. It is fortified on the building of the regional House of Journalists, which once housed the editorial office of the first proletarian, and now the most widely circulated regional newspaper Zvezda. In Zvezda, 22-year-old former regimental commander Arkady Golikov began his work as a journalist. It was in Perm that his literary pseudonym was born - "Gaidar", he signed his first feature story "The Corner House". Here the future writer lived for almost two years, leaving behind the glory of not only a bright journalist, but also, judging by the tales, a dashing guy and a favorite of women. From here he took his wife, beauty and Komsomol member Ruva - Leah Lazarevna Solomyanskaya who gave birth to his son Timur. Timur Gaidar. Golikov Arkady from Arzamas Gaidar died much later than the official date of his death.. So say the inhabitants of the village of Tulintsy, Mironovsky district in the Kiev region. There are many different records in my journalistic archive. Some became the topics of publications, while others lay, as they say, dead weight. And it was not thought that someday they would see the light of day. In particular, a new version Death of Arkady Gaidar G enetics is not pseudoscience . Here is the gene chain for you: grandfather Arkady - son Timur - grandson Yegor ... Timur's wife and Yegor Gaidarov's mother Ariadna Pavlovna Bazhova about three family anniversaries "Shepherd" for young readers . ... And then I accidentally picked up the "Dictionary Ukrainian language”, compiled at the beginning of the century by Boris Grinchenko, opened with the letter “g”. "Gaidar is a shepherd of sheep... This word is used in the Zmeevsky district of the Kharkov province." The circle narrowed. I started looking in the biographical information of Arkady Gaidar for a mention of his visits to the Kharkiv region, namely, the Zmeevsky district .... ... three contacts with the Gaidarov clan was enough for me to think about the fate of this clan, about its main Military Secret. It seems that it is that the Gaidars are a clan of losers ... .... we essentially started with Arkady Gaidar and his wife Leah Solomyanskaya. In the same building. Here, where the whole was tied telephone network Arkhangelsk, opened in 1928 the first radio studio in the region. Radio was city. Gaidar and his wife caught the public interest in the sounding word. Gaidar liked to review the letters of the townspeople - it was a sample of live broadcast. Gaidar commented on the letters sometimes with irony, sometimes benevolently and sympathetically. Gaidar's programs also included information about the life of Arkhangelsk...By the way, this Colonel Solomyansky is the brother of Leah Solomyanskaya, the grandmother of Yegor Gaidar. In general, there were many Jews in the technical staff In Perm, he marries a seventeen-year-old Komsomol member Liya Lazarevna Solomyanskaya, in 1926 their son Timur was born in Arkhangelsk Then Boris Kamov begins to tell about Gaidar in the 1930s and how Arkady Petrovich called People's Commissar Yezhov several times, trying to help out his ex-wife Leah Solomyanskaya. But this is the same as if they began to accuse, say, Budyonny of hacking a lot of people with a saber, and in refutation of this they would say that in the thirties Semyon Mikhailovich "supervised" pedigree horse breeding in the USSR. Well, yes, he did. And in the 20s he chopped people with a saber. The Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary (one-volume) provides such a reference; "Parts of Special Purpose (CHON). Military-party detachments in 1919-25 at factory cells, district committees, city committees, provincial committees of the party to help Soviet bodies in the fight against counter-revolution." Short and not very clear. The ten-volume Small Soviet Encyclopedia is also very brief reference: "CHON. They were created in Soviet Russia during the civil war to fight against the counter-revolution. They were formed from Komsomol members and communists. In 1921, the Central Committee of the RCP (b) approved the regulation on CHON. General leadership was carried out by the Central Committee of the RCP (b), regional committees and provincial committees. CHON played a significant role in defending the gains of the Social Revolution. With the transition to peaceful construction, the CHON was disbanded in 1924."
The famous children's writer was, according to his fellow Red Commissars, not a hero, but a mentally ill person with a manic passion for murder.
Arkady Golikov was born in 1904, and in 1919 he volunteered for the Red Army. The 15-year-old teenager commanded a company, first on the Petliurovsky front, then on the Polish one. In the same year he was ill with scurvy, typhus, was shell-shocked. In 1921, the 17-year-old regiment commander suppressed an uprising in the Tambov province, after which he was appointed head of the second combat area on the Mongolian border. Daily pain, blood, death could not but affect the psyche of the boy, who was put in charge of the fate of many people. Initially, Arkady was diagnosed with a traumatic neurosis caused by contusion, and then serious mental disorders developed. The 20-year-old red commander, who experienced all its horrors during the five years of the war, was dismissed from the army due to illness. A similar fate was probably with many Russian boys born into intelligent families, but with regard to Arkady Gaidar, this seems incredible. Unusually bright and kind books, authored by Gaidar, have been loved by several generations of children. It seems that only a very noble, highly moral person could write them.
Golikov was expelled from the party, removed from his post and sent for a psychiatric examination
In the Republic of Khakassia (South-Eastern Siberia), the name of the revolutionary romantic Arkady Golikov ( real name Gaidar) it is better not to mention. Stories about the atrocities of the "Gaidar gang" are passed down there as family traditions from generation to generation. But for some reason they are not publicly discussed. “My mother told me that Gaidar and his detachment drove more than a hundred people to a cliff near the river and began to shoot. He shot from a revolver in the back of the head. Not White Guards (they were in the taiga), but ordinary peasants. There were many women, teenagers, children. Those who remained alive, Gaidar kicked off a cliff into the river. An animal, not a man. My mother miraculously survived, because she went to a relative in another village that day. And her mother, two brothers and sister were killed, "- - this is how the activist of the Khakassia book lovers society spoke about the future children's writer's stay in Siberia. And she's not alone.About how Arkady Golikov lived in her house in the village of Forpost, Agrafena Alexandrovna Kozhukhovskaya told Timur Gaidar. Apparently, even in the sixties, my grandmother, who lived out her life in a nursing home in Abakan, did not talk too much. Touchingly she recalled how offended, angry and even decided to move out of the apartment of her important guest when he saw that the catch he had brought from the river - several minnows - was not fried, but thrown to the cat. And she also told how during the parties her lodger did not dance with everyone. He stood on the sidelines and only stamped his boot to the beat of the music. "Anything happened. Cheerful, affectionate, otherwise - God forbid! - a cloud of clouds. Ivan Solovyov, the chieftain, is a local. He knew all the moves and exits here. As soon as the new commander arrived, Solovyov began to send him notes : "Arkady Petrovich, come visit. I will meet with honor - I will spend it with honor. "As soon as Arkashka receives a note, he walks around all day not himself. Everywhere he sees Solovyov. He has never seen him in the eye, but all Solovyov before his eyes. There was no other dream.
Little is known about Solovyov. He was in his early thirties. Local native. Former Kolchak constable. He was arrested in 1920, fled, created a gang, which soon joined the Kolchak officer detachment of Colonel Oliferov. Solovyov had political program: ataman sought the separation of Khakassia from Soviet Russia.
Golikov had a constant feeling that Solovyov was there every minute (he never caught him). And the commander began to carry out "prevention" among the local population. People without trial and investigation were shot, chopped with swords, thrown into wells. Golikov knew no mercy either for the elderly or for children. The main object of the bloody hunt of the young commissar was the local residents - the Khakass. Even the commander of the ChON of the province, V. Kakoulin, was forced to admit: "My impression is that Golikov is an ideologically unbalanced boy who, using his official position, has committed a number of crimes." In other words, even for colleagues in restoring revolutionary order, it became obvious that Golikov was not a red hero, but a mentally ill person with a manic passion for murder.
In the Krasnoyarsk archives, documents about the most brutal massacres have not been preserved. There is only a letter from the volost executive committee from the village of Kurbatova to Achinsk, sent by courier: “The detachment that arrived immediately set in motion whips, which, in our opinion, should exist in the field of legends from the time of Kolchak, and not appear now, under the Soviet government, which said: “Down with the death penalty and corporal punishment without trial!” Apparently, there were more reports, because soon a telegram arrived from the headquarters of the CHON troops: “To the commander of the 6th consolidated detachment. I am announcing the resolution of the KomChONguba on Golikov: "Arrest in no case. Recall. Kakoulin."
After arriving in Krasnoyarsk to clarify the "circumstances", Arkady Golikov was not only expelled from the party, removed from his post, but also sent for a psychiatric examination. There is a version according to which Stalin knew about the Gaidar case. At the request of Arkady Petrovich to be reinstated in the party, the Kremlin boss succinctly cut him off: "We might have forgiven him. But will the Khakass forgive? .." From a letter from Arkady to his sister Natasha: "Krasnoyarsk, January 17, 1923, Tuesday. I have to leave for a month for a physiotherapy (physiobalneotherapy?) institute in Tomsk.The other day, on behalf of the provincial committee, a consultation was convened, and the doctors determined: severe exhaustion of the nervous system due to overwork and former concussion, with functional disorder and arrhythmia of cardiac activity ".
The mother bequeathed her life to her son not to spare the power of the Soviets
Exhaustion of the nervous system was not a ploy to avoid punishment. The history of life organically fits into the history of the disease. Arkady left to fight when he was not fifteen years old. He raved about military exploits from the time when his father, Pyotr Isidorovich, a village teacher, went to the fronts of the world. In general, since that time he had no family. Returning from the war, his father married another woman. “Two and a half years have passed since I broke off all connection, my friend, with you,” the son wrote to his father. “During this time I have not received a single letter, not a single news from you, my glorious and dear dad... I went into the army when I was still a boy, when I had nothing solid and definite except for an impulse. (Krasnoyarsk, January 23, 1923).Mother, Natalya Arkadyevna, a midwife, was actively engaged in Bolshevik work and died in 1924 from transient consumption in the position of head of the provincial health department in Kyrgyzstan. She was proud of her son-commander and wrote on her deathbed that she bequeathed to him not to spare his life for the power of the Soviets.
Arkady dreamed that he himself would have an ideal family. In Perm, he marries a seventeen-year-old Komsomol member Lia Lazarevna Solomyanskaya, in 1926 their son Timur was born in Arkhangelsk. When Gaidar's first book came out, the family moved to Moscow. In 1931, Leah Lazarevna and her son went to another. Arkady was left alone, yearned, could not work, and left for Khabarovsk as a correspondent for the Pacific Star newspaper.
In the fifth issue of the almanac "Past", published in Paris in 1988, the memoirs of journalist Boris Zaks about Arkady Gaidar, with whom they worked together and lived in Khabarovsk, were published:
"... In my long life I had to deal with many alcoholics - drunken, chronic and others. Gaidar was different, he was often "ready" even before the first glass. He said that the doctors who examined him in detail made the following conclusion: alcohol is only a key that opens the door to forces already raging within.Of course, taking Gaidar's word for it is a dangerous business, but this story of his corresponds to what I saw with my own eyes.
One day, we (E.I. Titov and I), who lived in the same editorial apartment with Gaidar, began to notice something wrong in his behavior. We knew about his illness and began to persuade him to go to the hospital before it was too late. Finally, after a long struggle, he agreed. The three of us went in search of a mental hospital. Arrived with difficulty. In the vestibule, Gaidar immediately sank down onto the steps, and we began to wait for the doctor... Gaidar looked askance at us and said: "I have good comrades, where have they taken us." The doctor received us dryly. He listened, looked at Gaidar and refused to take him to the hospital. He, apparently, was not used to being visited voluntarily and without mischief, and therefore did not recognize Gaidar as sick.
The road back was even more difficult. Gaidar could hardly move his feet. I had time, I worked in the night office, but it was time for Titov to hand in the telegrams, and he went ahead, leaving the two of us. As soon as Titov left, Gaidar incoherently, in a slurring tongue, began to accuse Titov of allegedly saying: "It would be better if you died in battle with glory." Gaidar gave the complete impression of being drunk, although he did not drink a drop. On the way we met several acquaintances, and, despite my objections, they took Arkady to their place. He returned to the smoke drunk and announced from the first words that he would kill Titov. "Where is he?" He did not believe that Titov had not yet returned from the editorial office. I went into Titov's room - no one. Then, taking a chair by the back, he began to knock out one pane of glass after another in the windows. Turned upside down the bed, table, chairs. Then he went out into the corridor with a large Borjomi bottle in his hand. It was getting dark, there was no light. I rushed from Gaidar to the gates to watch and warn Titov. Behind our house, in an outbuilding, lived Zaitsev, secretary of the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU for the Far Eastern Territory. Hearing the noise, he jumped out on the porch of the outbuilding and yelled: "What's going on here?" And at the same moment, the unpredictable Khabarovsk power plant gave a current, and Gaidar, brightly lit with a chair raised up, appeared in front of Zaitsev in the window. Then they sat in the garden and exchanged military memories. Then Gaidar went into the house. I told Zaitsev that he should not have allowed Gaidar alone: I myself could not leave my post, so as not to miss Titov. "He's a fine fellow," Zaitsev exclaimed in response. "I vouch for him. We, the old Chekists, know how to understand people." Then the clinking of glass was heard - Gaidar was finishing off the surviving window, and the connoisseur of people quickly ran into the house. In this case, Gaidar's rage was directed outward - at another person. But I also saw another situation - when the excesses of his anger were directed at himself.
I was young, I had never seen anything like it, and that terrible night made a terrifying impression on me. Gaidar cut himself. The blade of a safety razor. One blade was taken away from him, but as soon as he turned away, he was already cut with another. Asked to go to the restroom, locked himself, did not answer. They broke the door, and he cuts again, wherever he got the blade. They took him away in an unconscious state, all the floors in the apartment were covered with blood coagulated into large clots ... I thought he would not survive.
At the same time, it did not look like he was trying to commit suicide - he did not try to inflict a mortal wound on himself, he simply arranged a kind of "shahsei-vakhsei". Later, already in Moscow, I happened to see him in his shorts. The entire chest and arms below the shoulders were completely - one to one - covered with huge scars. It was clear that he cut himself more than once ... "
Once a writer began to dictate an article to a typist, but suddenly jumped out the window ...
In general, the idea of Gaidar as a model of a prosperous Soviet writer is far from the truth.From a young age, he believed in the ideas of the revolution, fought for them, remained faithful to them. And what? He is outside the party, expelled at the end of the civil war. All his life he was drawn to everything military, he does not have a single book without the Red Army, he even dressed in a military way. And what? Dismissed from the army clean - because of the disease described above ... And in addition, constant relapses of the disease, accompanied by binges and other excesses that interfered with normal creative work. He never had time to turn in the manuscript on time, he was always in a hurry, grabbed advances, dodged so as not to pay a penalty.
He was capable of diligent work only at times. I started and quit a lot without finishing. In Khabarovsk, one day he began to dictate an article to a typist, but he fussed, said that he had forgotten his notebook at home, and suddenly jumped out of the window. That was the end of it - Gaidar took to drink...
Gaidar had seen enough of everyone during the Civil War. After all, discipline in the Red Army was based on executions. And Gaidar, as a boy, served in the CHON. I think that even then the category of justice ceased to interest him. Only expediency. After all, he shot the prisoners in the name of expediency - too many fighters of the convoy would have been required to send the prisoners to the rear. It was easier to shoot...
Gaidar was in his own way a very integral person. In what he wrote, he believed. Including the happy "country of Gaidar".
The above events allow the doctor to accurately classify the writer's mental illness: manic-depressive psychosis on the background of chronic alcoholism, post-traumatic encephalopathy.From the diary of Arkady Gaidar: "Khabarovsk. August 20, 1931. Psychiatric hospital. In my life I have been in hospitals, probably eight or ten times - and yet this is the only time when this - Khabarovsk, the worst of hospitals - I will remember without anger, because here the story about "Malchish-Kibalchish" will be unexpectedly written.
Creative and personal affairs of Gaidar gradually improved, considerable fees appeared, all-Union glory. The writer married a second time, drove his son Timur and his adopted daughter Zhenya to the south, whose names he gave to the heroes of his story "Timur and his team." Gaidar tried to be a good father.
When the Great Patriotic War began, Arkady Petrovich was finishing the screenplay based on the story "Timur and his team." He writes a statement with a request to send him to the front. He is categorically denied. Then the writer takes a business trip to Komsomolskaya Pravda and travels as a front-line correspondent to Ukraine. The army gets surrounded, dies, but Gaidar remains alive and goes to the partisan detachment. He accepted death on October 26, 1941 on the railroad track in the village of Lepliava, covering the retreat of his comrades. Death in battle. As I dreamed.
Arkady Golikov decided to become a writer, probably unconsciously. Behind his books, he tried to forget his dreams with trains flying down a cliff and the screams of people he had killed. Perhaps the path to salvation was laid genetically. Timur will find an entry in church books that Arkady's great-great-grandfather was Pyotr Lermontov, the brother of Matvey Lermontov, the great-grandfather of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov.
Apparently, in memory of his father, Timur ceased to be Golikov and made the pseudonym Gaidar a surname. When Arkady Petrovich was asked what his pseudonym meant, he said that this is how military commanders are called in Khakassia. When his detachment left the village, the oncoming people threw: "Khaidar Golikov." One of the biographers interpreted the translation of this word from Mongolian as follows: "Gaidar is a rider galloping ahead." Sounds nice. But worth doing simple thing-- look through the dictionaries to make sure: neither in Mongolian, nor in two dozen other oriental languages, there is no such meaning of the word "gaidar".
It turns out that in the Khakass language "haidar" means: "where, in which direction?" That is, when the Khakass saw that the head of the combat area for the fight against banditry was going somewhere at the head of the detachment, they asked each other: "Khaidar Golikov? Where is Golikov going? In which direction?" -- to warn others of impending danger.
But Arkady Petrovich himself never found out about the true meaning of his pseudonym. He went to one war at fourteen and died in another at thirty-seven. Of course, in those wars, he was armed with the most effective Leninist idea, which automatically gave all Red commanders an indulgence from the pangs of conscience.
The writer Soloukhin accused the writer Gaidar of executing dozens of Khakasses, of drowning, and even that his fighters were feasting on the bodies of people who were about to be executed.
Undoubtedly, red banditry existed during the Civil War, and wealthy neighbors in the village, the intelligentsia, became its victims. Under the threat of reprisals, the Reds expropriated food, money from local horses. There were drunkenness and fights. On November 7, 1920, in the Kansk district, the communists shot 42 "counter-revolutionaries" - workers of cooperatives and local intelligentsia. On January 14, 1921, in Novoselovo, policemen killed R. Fangor, an authorized regional food committee, and the family of priest Popov with their children. The bodies were thrown into the hole. In October 1920, soldiers of the Red Army shot dead six employees of the district food committee near Minusinsk. In Kansk, 20 people were killed: peasants, employees of the cooperative, a priest, an agronomist and even a teacher. This continued until 1930 and caused a response from the population.
But Golikov had nothing to do with these murders. According to archival documents cited by historian Alexander Sheksheev, he was in Khakassia from February to September 1922. On March 29, he took command, but already on June 10 he was removed from his post due to "traumatic neurosis" and sent to the ChON headquarters. November 18, he went on vacation.
All this time, Golikov was chasing bandits through the taiga. According to the reports of the commission that checked his activities, the young commander "shot at the squirrels" more. There was no efficiency in his actions, and often no sense. To the remarks of his comrades, he threatened with arrest and execution. No, he was not an angel: it is known that in June 1922, the commander, the young commander, shot the captured bandits, and ordered the bodies to be thrown into the water. A case was even opened against him in the GPU.
With the advent of the seventeen-year-old battalion commander, cases of cruelty, theft and robbery became more frequent among the ChON. Two locals were shot "for links with bandits." The secretary of the village council, Sulekov, was wounded by Arkady during his escape and disappeared in the river. Only in May 1922, Arkady personally took part in the execution of five locals.
After investigating his activities, the GPU battalion commander Golikov was removed from his post. For two years he was banned from holding leadership positions. They gave me a year to restore the nervous system. But Golikov did not want to lead.
Beginning in 1922, he was in hospital at least ten times, suffered from depression and hard drinking. Even "Malchish-Kibalchish" was written in the Khabarovsk hospital.
But he began to write. In 1925, the story "R.V.S." was published. Then “School”, “The Fourth Dugout”, “Far Countries”, “Military Secret”, “The Fate of the Drummer”, “Timur and His Team”, “Hot Stone” were written ...
So Golikov became Gaidar. He was never happy and admitted that he constantly thinks about the people he killed in his youth. Until his death, he remained restless, having no corner, wandering through the houses of creativity, pioneer camps and apartments of friends.
After the start of the war with the Germans, he asked to go to the front. They didn't take it. I had to go to the military. In the German rear, he showed himself to be a hero - he took out the battalion commander Prudnikov from the battle, organized resistance, thanks to him, more than three hundred fighters left the encirclement.
In the fall of 1941, Komsomolskaya Pravda military commander Arkady Gaidar was surrounded and died, covering the retreat of his comrades behind an easel machine gun. He was awarded two orders: the Badge of Honor and the Order of the Patriotic War of the First Class.
He was not good or bad, he was a son of his time, a teenager who found himself in the inhuman conditions of the Civil War. He was also a conscientious person, capable of repentance, and an excellent, talented writer, becoming the founder of children's literature in our country.