Masters of detectives. Weiner Brothers

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

The Weiner brothers are known as popular Soviet writers of the detective genre, as well as the authors of well-known film scripts. In 1990, their popularity reached its peak: the circulation of ten novels written by them exceeded 1 million copies. All-Union fame for the writers was brought by the film “The meeting place cannot be changed”, based on their story “The Era of Mercy” (1976).

Grigory's passion for journalism and the legal speci alty chosen by Arkady became the creative platform from which the Weiner brothers came to literature. (Their biography in this sense resembles the later master of the detective genre Friedrich Neznansky.) The age difference of 7 years did not become an obstacle to the cooperation of Arkady and Grigory.

About childhood

They were very friendly and were even ready to make sacrifices for each other. And it has been that way since childhood. Once, during a famine, when he and his mother were evacuated to Samarkand, Arkasha found a loaf of bread. Mother, believing that she was poisoned and planted by saboteurs, was adamant: throw her away. But the guys were starving … Arkasha, before dividing the bread, tried it onfor themselves… The Weiner brothers carried this brotherhood that was born then through their whole lives.

Returning from the evacuation, the family settled in Sukharevka. They were different from childhood: Arkasha studied well, and Zhora was a loser. Arkady forced his brother to study. He even wrote a receipt in 1956 that in 10 years he would become a great man … It was Arkady who forced Zhora to learn to read. And when this happened, Georgy began to read maniacally, around the clock …

Biography

The Weiner Brothers were unusually friendly… However, each of them did not even think about writing at first.

Indeed, could Arkady Aleksandrovich (b. 1931), who headed the investigative department of the capital’s criminal investigation department, a strong man (master of sports in freestyle wrestling), a graduate of the Faculty of Law of Moscow State University, know that his career would go in a completely different way, and that his weapon would be a writer's pen?

The Weiner brothers were completely different in character. Perhaps that is why the fate of Grigory Alexandrovich (1938) went in a different direction. In his youth, he did not aspire to either become a security official or follow a solid life plan. Grigory began his working biography with working speci alties: electrician, technician. Then he became an engineer. And suddenly (man proposes, but God disposes) he becomes a journalist, and then a TASS correspondent. Grigory, also in 1960, in absentia (an example of an older brother), still receives a higher education. Is it worth mentioning that it is legal? Unlike Arkady, he worked in the media.

To the attentive reader, their further path toliterature no longer seems to be an accident. Perhaps the cornerstone for this was laid something like this: the Weiner brothers gathered with their families, and then Grigory began to talk about his most successful journalistic work. And the investigator Arkady listens and thinks to himself: “Well, isn’t it interesting, brother, last year we investigated the case, so there…”

In short, believe our conjectures, they are not, but the plot of the first joint novel of the brothers "Watch for Mr. Kelly" (1967) had a real prototype in the investigative practice of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department.

The creative path of the Weiner brothers

The first pancake did not come out lumpy! The novel was not left to rest under a cloth. The Russian literary magazine Nash Sovremennik published it in 1967 in Nos. 10 and 12.

The Weiner brothers after that finally decided on their creative path, they worked as a creative tandem. And this is twice as many ideas, twice as much information for rethinking. Publishing houses willingly published their subsequent works: the story “I Feel at Noon” (1968) and the novel “I am an Investigator”. However, the writers themselves will later begin to speak ironically about these works. Why is that? On the one hand, it must be admitted that already in these books one can see a subtle understanding by the writers of the very nature of the detective story. Their plot is dynamic. They masterfully build intrigue. However, there is one “but”, which, years later, caused irony among the authors. The fact is that their first works were written within the framework of classical socialist realism. The Soviet investigative agencies themselves are shown from the ideal side. Those.such highly moral knightly orders, devoid of flaws.

But talent is talent. Having begun to develop among the fellow writers, he does not allow them to stop at Soviet dogmatism (where 80% of their fellow writers have remained forever). The Weiner brothers in their work "move inward", i.e. they look for the causes of the moral and social order that give rise to crime, strengthen the psychologism of their author's vision of the plot. As a result, the story "Two among the people" (1969) and the novel "Race on the vertical" (1971) are gaining popularity. In the film of the same name "Vertical Racing" Soviet stars play: Valentin Gaft, Andrey Myagkov, Galina Polskikh… It is quite obvious that the authors intuitively understood the crisis of the police detective genre and evolved to another genre - the police detective, where there is nothing ideal, where ideology is excluded from definition.

From now on, a multi-million readership and viewership is looking forward to their every new work of writers. In 1972, a new novel, A Visit to the Minotaur, was published. Here, in the brothers' detective narrative, something new appears: a philosophical content. In their view, the investigation process does not look like a quest, but more voluminous: it also affects the souls of the people involved in it. They seem to plunge into the world of their human soul, where, of course, there is evil. (The principle applies: we are all human, and we are all sinners.) As a result, in order to prevent Evil and follow Justice, the investigator must fight the Minotaur living in the labyrinthhis soul. Sergei Shakurov played the role of the investigator in the film adaptation of the Minotaur.

Having traveled the path of the Master, having learned to create not so much with the mind as with the soul, finally, in 1976, the Weiner Brothers create a masterpiece. The photo of the authors of the script for the film "The meeting place cannot be changed" (the novel "The Era of Mercy") becomes recognizable for the whole country. The brothers are literally bombarded with nationwide love and recognition. Monologues are torn into quotes. The film goes mainstream…

The day before, in 1978, on the eve of filming (“The meeting place…” was filmed in 1979), Vladimir Vysotsky literally flew into the Weiners’ house with a request to stake out the role of Zheglov for himself.

In the 70s - 80s, the novel “Do not lose a person” (1978), the novels “Kara Strait” (1981), “Victims have no claims” (1986) were published from their pen. Famous writers are doing well, but….

The time for perestroika is approaching. And here the brothers-writers perform a real civic feat. They go against the flow. In the 1990s, they took out from under the cloth a novel about Stalin's repressions, Stone and a Noose in the Green Grass, written in 1979, and wrote the novel The Gospel of the Executioner.

The brothers began to look like Don Quixotes, trying to change Russia from imperial to democratic. 1999 is a productive year for them. The novels "Multiplying Sorrow" and "The Devil's Garden of Eden" are being written.

Unfortunately they are no longer with us, Arkady left in 2005, Georgy died in exile four years later.

Conclusion

The work of the Weiner brothers really enriched Russian literature of the 80s and 90s. XX century.

It is characteristic that the plots of the masters of detectives have constantly evolved throughout their lives. So in the latest novels, the reader is faced with the corruption of power, the war of compromising evidence, the financial crisis.

In their latest novels, the Weiner brothers, as a warning, show a "new race" of people deformed by the "scoop", in whose minds imperial principles have strangled universal human values. “We are all a mutation of life-long prisoners thrown into the world,” the Weiner character characterizes them very capaciously.