Writer Vadim Kozhevnikov: biography

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Vadim Kozhevnikov - writer and journalist of the Soviet era. In those days there were a lot of films about the war, this topic was number one in cinema. Writers one after another created their masterpieces and received awards from the state for this. The plots really touched the nerve and brought up courage and patriotism in the younger generation. One of such well-known Soviet writers and journalists is the USSR State Prize laureate and Hero of Socialist Labor Vadim Kozhevnikov (his photo is presented below). In his arsenal there are many wonderful works, which are collected in 9 volumes. In literary circles, this writer is certainly a very talented and famous person.

Vadim Kozhevnikov: biography

He was born in the deaf Russian pre-revolutionary Siberia - in the Tomsk province of the Narym Territory in the village of Togur - April 9, 1909 in a family of exiled social democrats. He spent almost all his childhood and youth in Tomsk with his parents. But the time has come, he fluttered out of his parental nest and in 1925 went to conquerMoscow. There he entered the Moscow State University at the Literary Department of the Faculty of Ethnology, graduating in 1933.

Vadim Kozhevnikov made his first professional steps as an aspiring writer in 1930 by publishing his first story "The Port". In 1933, he got a job as a journalist in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, then worked in the popular socio-political magazines Smena, Ogonyok and Our Achievements. Having gained invaluable experience, six years later, in 1939, he released the collection Night Talk. A year later, Kozhevnikov was already a member of the Writers' Union of the USSR.

War

However, in 1941 peacetime ended after Nazi Germany began bombing the borders of the Soviet Union. The Great Patriotic War began, and people who could fight not only with weapons, but also with a pen, were drafted into the army, so that they would timely and professionally broadcast hot news from the front lines, because people were looking forward to them.

Vadim Kozhevnikov after some time ended up on the battle line as a war correspondent for one of the front-line newspapers. In 1943 he became a correspondent for the Pravda publishing house. But the most important event in his military journalistic life, as for any Soviet person, and even more so a front-line soldier, was the capture of Berlin, when he transmitted many hot reports from the center of events.

After the war, life gradually began to take its course, and Vadim Kozhevnikov from 1947 to 1948 began to work as an editor of the literature and art department in the Pravda newspaper. A with1949 and until his death, Kozhevnikov will hold the position of editor-in-chief of the Znamya magazine.

Since 1967 he is the secretary of the board of the SP of the USSR and the RSFSR, a delegate to the XXVI Congress of the CPSU (1981), a deputy of the USSR Supreme Council.

He passed away on October 20, 1984. His body was buried at the Peredelkino cemetery.

Vadim Kozhevnikov: interesting facts

A lot of hype and gossip was caused by the news that Kozhevnikov, holding the post of editor of Znamya, handed over to the KGB (according to other sources - to the Central Committee of the CPSU) sheets of the manuscript of the novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate". Most likely, the manuscript was requested from the editors by one of these bodies. Kozhevnikov's daughter strongly denies this information. She believes that her father could not hand over the manuscript to the "punitive authorities", because it was filled with quite dangerous insights, where there were parallels Hitler-Stalin, fascism-communism. Most likely, she could be sent to the ideological center of the Central Committee. There were people who supported this point of view, since, after all, there were no evidence or documents in this regard. But Solzhenitsyn wrote in one of his books that he remembered how Grossman's novel was confiscated precisely from the safe of the Novy Mir publishing house.

Kozhevnikov's works

The main work of Vadim Kozhevnikov was occupied by stories and novels, his front-line prose, which he created during the entire period of the Great Patriotic War, was even more successful. However, several novels also came out from under his pen. The most famous among them: "Shield and Sword" and“Meet Baluev” (it was on them that the feature films of the same name were shot), as well as the novels “Toward the Dawn” (1956), “Roots and Crown” (1983), “At Noon on the Sunny Side” (1973.), at one time so adored by millions of Soviet people. The most popular among readers are the stories: “The Great Call” (1940), “Flying Day” (1963), “Special Unit” (1969), “Military Happiness” (1977), “So was" (1980), "Polyushko-field" (1982); stories "Port" (1930), "Night Talk" (1939), "Heavy Hand" (1941), "Stories about the War" (1942), "Roads of War" (1955), "The Tree of Life" (1979), "March - April" (1942), which was also made into a great feature film of the same name.

Novel "Shield and Sword"

To have an idea of what Vadim Kozhevnikov wrote about, let's take a closer look at the work "Shield and Sword", which became a tribute to such a deadly and heroic work as Soviet intelligence during the Second World War. In the story, a young and trained Russian intelligence officer Alexander Belov was abandoned from Riga to Germany in 1940, just before the start of the war, under the guise of a German repatriate, Johann Weiss. He started insecurely and at first worked as an ordinary truck driver, gradually getting used to the Germans and studying their work style and behavior. With him was a friend - Heinrich Schwarzkopf. By 1944, while serving in the intelligence of the Third Reich, Weiss made a dizzying military career and rose to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer. Then he was transferred to Berlin to the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS. From now onhe got access to the most valuable papers and information.

Alexander Belov

There are several hypotheses from whom Kozhevnikov wrote off his legendary hero. One points to the intelligence officer Rudolf Abel, and the other to Alexander Svyatogorov. But be that as it may, the novel is very interesting, although its structure is not at all similar to the usual style of such masters as Yulian Semenov. This work is dominated by deep psychology, based on the experiences of Sasha Belov, who is trying to get used to the skin of a purebred Aryan devoted to the National Socialist cause.

Continued

Belov learned to be absolutely calm, no matter what happened, as well as the ability not to betray himself, not to get annoyed and confidently move towards his goal. And he was able to overcome his first "I".

In the second part, thirty percent is given to the slowly developing near-political situation. Weiss meets a huge number of Nazis and ordinary Germans. And only twenty percent of the plot is given to the action-packed component, which is observed in other well-known authors, in general, what they love this genre for: operations, chases, set-ups, interrogations, etc.

As a result, a romantic idealist will turn into a cold-blooded professional.

There is one more curious moment: according to Stanislav Lyubshin, the leading actor in the film "Shield and Sword", this picture at one time made a very strong impression on Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and influenced his choice of the intelligence profession.

Family

Many readers are interested in Vadim Kozhevnikov. His personal life is also no exception. Nadezhda Kozhevnikova, the daughter of the writer, helped a little to open the curtain on this issue. She recalled that her father had large bright green eyes with long eyelashes. He was not just handsome, but the destroyer of women's hearts. And he conquered a lot of women's hearts, but the last conquest ended with her mother Victoria. Suddenly, the inveterate bachelor gave up. When they got married, he was thirty-six, and his chosen one was twenty-six.

Victoria was already the second marriage, before that her husband was a polar explorer, Hero of the Soviet Union Ilya Mazuruk. With her daughter Irina from her first marriage, she went to Vadim. Although they said about him that he was henpecked, he was not a weak person in this matter, rather a cunning one, everything related to home, life and upbringing lay with Victoria, since this area practically did not interest him.