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Front way and track record of Daniil Granin. Granin: unknown biography

Daniil Alexandrovich Granin - Soviet and Russian writer, screenwriter, public figure.

Granin Daniil Alexandrovich was born on January 1, 1919. The writer's parents are forester German Alexander Danilovich and his wife Anna Bakirovna. Daniel's homeland is the Kursk region, the village of Volyn. Parents lived together in different forest areas of the Novgorod and Pskov regions. My father was twenty years older than my mother. She had a good voice, all her childhood passed under her singing. About where the Russian writer Daniil Alexandrovich Granin was born, however, there is conflicting information. Some sources name a village located in the Kursk region, while others indicate that he was born in Saratov. His real name is German. At the beginning of his literary career, the writer took the pseudonym Daniil Granin.

Childhood and early years

There were snowy winters, shooting, fires, river floods - the first memories interfere with the stories he heard from his mother about those years. In their native places, the Civil War was still burning out, gangs raged, rebellions broke out. Childhood was split in two: at first it was forest, later - urban. Both of these jets, without mixing, flowed for a long time and remained separate in Granin's soul. Forest childhood is a bathhouse with a snowdrift, where a steamy father and men jumped, winter forest roads, wide home-made skis (and city skis are narrow, on which they walked along the Neva to the very bay). I remember best the mountains of odorous yellow sawdust near the sawmills.

Daniel was the eldest child in the family. Shortly after he went to school, his mother moved with him to Leningrad. Mother - a city dweller, a fashionista, young, cheerful - did not sit in the village. Therefore, she perceived this move as a boon. Daniil German graduated from one of the best schools at that time, located on Mokhovaya Street.

The literature teacher had no apparatus, nothing but a love of literature. She organized a literary circle, and most of the class began to compose poetry. One of the best school poets became a well-known geologist, another a mathematician, and a third a specialist in the Russian language. Nobody became a poet.

Despite the interest in literature and history, it was recognized at the family council that the engineering profession was more reliable. Granin entered the electrical engineering faculty of the Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1940. Energy, automation, the construction of hydroelectric power stations were then professions filled with romance, like atomic and nuclear physics later. Many teachers and professors participated in the creation of the GOELRO plan. There were legends about them. They were the initiators of domestic electrical engineering, they were capricious, eccentric, each allowed himself to be a personality, have his own language, communicate his views, they argued with each other, argued with accepted theories, with a five-year plan. It was in the "polytechnic" that he began to try his hand as a writer. In the magazine "Rezets" in 1937, 2 of his debut works appeared.

Students went to practice in the Caucasus, at the Dneproges, worked on installation, repair, were on duty at the consoles. In the fifth year, in the midst of his graduation work, Granin began to write a historical story about Yaroslav Dombrovsky. He wrote not about what he knew, what he was doing, but about what he did not know and did not see. There was also the Polish uprising of 1863, and the Paris Commune. Instead of technical books, he subscribed to the Public Library for albums with views of Paris. Nobody knew about this hobby. Granin was ashamed of writing, and what he wrote seemed ugly and pitiful. But he couldn't stop. In 1941, Daniil Alexandrovich graduated from the Kalinov Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad.

Military service

After graduation, Daniil Granin was sent to the Kirov Plant, where he began to design a device for finding faults in cables.

From the Kirov factory he went to the people's militia, to the war. However, they were not released immediately. I had to work hard to get the booking cancelled. The war passed for Granin, not letting go for a day. In 1942, at the front, he joined the party. He fought on the Leningrad front, then on the Baltic, was an infantryman, a tanker, and ended the war as a commander of a company of heavy tanks in East Prussia. During the war, Granin met love. As soon as they managed to register, they announced an alarm, and they sat, already husband and wife, for several hours in a bomb shelter. Thus began family life. This was interrupted for a long time, until the end of the war.

He spent the entire blockade winter in the trenches near Pushkino. Then they sent me to a tank school and from there as a tank officer to the front. There was a shell shock, there was an encirclement, a tank attack, there was a retreat - all the sorrows of the war, all its joys and its filth, I drank everything. He met the victory in East Prussia, being already the commander of a company of heavy tanks.

Front line Granin

Writer Daniil Alexandrovich Granin fought on the territory that is now part of the Kaliningrad region. After the war began, he went to the people's militia, and then to the army. Granin fought in tank troops and infantry until the end of 1944. The writer, talking about his front-line path, notes that in his biography there were no military marches in Europe. He participated in the liquidation of the Courland grouping, fought in Koenigsberg, in the Baltic. There were fierce battles with heavy losses. At the end of the war, he unsuccessfully tried to find comrades from his company. Granin even went to meetings of veterans of the tank armies, but there was almost no one to gather in his own regiment. In one of the conversations, the writer noted that it was "an incredible accident" for him to survive, especially in the people's militia in 1941. The Russian soldiers then suffered huge losses. Daniil Alexandrovich did not touch on the military theme in his works for a long time - it was difficult to remember. Daniil Granin worked at the research institute, as well as at Lenenergo, since 1945.

The beginning of the literary path and the most famous works

His literary path began in 1937. It was then that Granin's first stories were published - "Fatherland" and "The Return of Rulyak". In 1951, on the basis of these works, the story "The General of the Commune" was created, dedicated to Yaroslav Dombrovsky, the hero of the Paris Commune. Among the most famous creations of the writer are such novels as "Searchers" (1954), "I'm going into a thunderstorm" (1962), as well as "Picture" (1980). Known and written in 1987 "Zubr", a documentary-biographical novel. Its plot is based on the facts that took place in reality. The first print run of the work was 4,000 copies, and a little later it was published in Roman-Gazeta already in 4 million copies. The story, created in 1974, called "This Strange Life" is also popular. Other interesting stories are "The Victory of Engineer Korsakov", "Our Battalion Commander", "Own Opinion", "Rain in a Strange City", etc. The main direction of his work is realism. Technical education affected the fact that almost all of Granin's works are devoted to search, scientific research, the struggle between principled scientists, seeking and untalented people, bureaucrats, careerists.

"Blockade Book"

In the period from 1977 to 1981, the Blockade Book was created (in collaboration with A. Adamovich). After several chapters of the work were published in Novy Mir, the publication of the book as a whole was postponed. Only in 1984 she saw the light. The appearance of this work became a real event in Russian public life. "Blockade Book" is a documentary work that tells about the torments through which the besieged Leningrad went, as well as the heroism of its inhabitants, who were forced to exist in inhuman conditions. The work is based on oral and written testimonies of the inhabitants of the city.

Social activity

Daniil Aleksandrovich was repeatedly elected to the board of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR and the USSR. In 1989 he was the head of the Soviet PEN Center. Granin in 2000 was awarded the officer's Resto - the Order of Germany for his merits in the cause of mutual understanding and reconciliation between Russia and Germany. On December 30, 2008, Dmitry Medvedev presented him with the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, the highest Russian award. Daniil Granin, as an eyewitness to the blockade of Leningrad and a participant in the war, often appears today in various media. He declares that it is necessary to preserve the memory of human suffering and the Victory, which was obtained so hard. In the winter of 2014, Daniil Granin was invited to the Bundestag to read a report on the blockade of Leningrad. Granin, speaking in Russia, connects the memory of the war with the realities of our time: with the abyss between the government and the people, with corruption and others.

last years of life

In 2014, Daniil Aleksandrovich celebrated his 95th birthday. He is already a recognized classic of literature. The novel "I'm going into a thunderstorm", as well as "The blockade book" are already included in textbooks and anthologies on Russian literature of the 20th century. However, having crossed the ninety-year milestone, Daniil Granin still remained an active writer who was not inferior in energy and strength of creativity to new generations of writers. In 2012, he was awarded the "Big Book" award in two categories - for the novel "My Lieutenant", as well as for the honor and dignity shown in literature.

Daniil Alexandrovich's report about rum babas produced in the winter of 1941-42 for the highest party nomenclature in the city of Leningrad caused a particularly powerful response. It appeared in the press in January 2014. All sections of society were outraged by this fact. Some - the egoism of the party apparatus, which he opened. Others accused Daniil Alexandrovich of distorting the facts. Vladimir Medinsky, the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, was among such accusers. He called Granin's words a lie, but was later forced to apologize to the writer.

All of Russia is experiencing a terrible loss these days - the death of an incredibly talented writer, screenwriter and public figure, for whom the Motherland and its people have always come first. Daniil Granin passed away at the age of 99 yesterday, July 4, 2017. The big loss became known today from a source close to the writer. After the information about the death of the writer was confirmed by Andrey Kibitov, who is the press secretary of Georgy Poltavchenko, the St. Petersburg governor.

Daniil Granin - biography:

The world-famous writer was born on New Year's Eve - January 1, 1919. According to some information, the birthplace of Daniil Granin is the village of Volyn, Kursk province (RSFSR). According to other sources, he was born in the Saratov region. His real name is German. His father was Alexander Danilovich German, a forester, and his mother was Anna Bakirovna.

After Granin studied at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, the war began. And here official information and other information differ. According to the first data, he worked at the Kirov plant as an engineer, after which he went to fight as part of a division of the people's militia. His last position during the Second World War was - the commander of a company of heavy tanks. However, this information is refuted by the literary critic Mikhail Zolotonosov. He stated that in fact, official information is lying. According to him, Daniil Granin at the Kirov Plant was deputy secretary of the Komsomol committee, and went to war as a senior political officer. Also, according to this information, the receipt by the writer of the Orders of the Red Banner and the Patriotic War, as well as his service as a commander of a tank company, is not confirmed.

Daniil Granin began to study literature professionally in 1949. At the same time, he was involved in various public affairs:

He was secretary from 1965, second secretary from 1967 to 1971.

First Secretary of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers' Union of the RSFSR. (According to Zolotonosov, by the way, he was personally responsible for the conviction of I. A. Brodsky in 1964).

People's Deputy of the USSR (from 1989 to 1991).

Member of the editorial board of the magazine "Roman-gazeta".

The initiator of the creation of "Mercy", the Leningrad society.

President of the Society of Friends of the Russian National Library.

Chairman of the Board of the International Charitable Foundation. Likhachev.

Member of the World Club of the Residents of St. Petersburg.

Daniil Granin - personal life, family:

As for his personal life and family, Daniil Granin was married. His wife was Rimma Mikhailovna Mayorova. Married to this woman, his daughter, Marina, was born in 1945. After the death of his legal wife in 2004, Daniil Aleksandrovich did not marry again.

Private bussiness

Daniil Alexandrovich Granin (real name Herman, 1919-2017) Born in the village of Volyn, Kursk province, in the family of a forester. When he was seven years old, he moved to Leningrad with his mother.

“A city mother, a fashionista, young, beautiful, did not sit in the countryside,” Granin wrote in his autobiography. - I understand this now, in hindsight, sorting out their nightly whispered disputes. And then everything was taken as a blessing: the move to Leningrad, and the city school, the father's visits with baskets of lingonberries, with flat cakes, with village ghee. And all summer - in his forest, in the timber industry, in winter - in the city. ... Then everything was resolved by other circumstances - my father was sent to Siberia, somewhere near Biysk, and since then we have become Leningraders.

Granin studied at the 15th school on Mokhovaya Street in the center of Leningrad, where "several teachers of the Tenishevsky School, which was here before the revolution, one of the best Russian gymnasiums, remained." In 1935 he graduated from school, worked as a driver for six months, then entered the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute. For the last two years, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (his specialty was abolished at the previous university).

Having received an electrical engineer diploma at hydroelectric stations, in 1940 he went to work at the Kirov Plant, where he became a senior engineer and deputy secretary of the Komsomol committee.

In 1941 he went to the front as a volunteer in the factory militia. He fought on the Leningrad and Baltic fronts, ended the war in East Prussia as a commander of a tank company.

“If you mark, as on a target, all the bullets whistling around, fragments, all mines, bombs, shells, then with what enchanted clarity my surviving figure would appear in the broken air. I considered my existence for a long time after the war a miracle and the post-war life I inherited as an invaluable gift. In the war, I learned to hate, to kill, to take revenge, to be cruel and many other things that a person does not need. But the war taught both brotherhood and love. The guy I went to war after these four years seemed to me like a boy with whom I had little in common. However, I would not like the one who returned from the war today either. Just like I did to him, ”Granin wrote in his autobiography in 1980.

After the war, he worked as the head of the regional cable network in Lenenergo, participated in the restoration of power supply to Leningrad. He studied at the postgraduate course of the Leningrad Polytechnic University, published several articles on electrical engineering.

For the first time, Granin began to publish fiction as early as the 1930s: in 1937, his first stories, The Return of Ruliac and Motherland, dedicated to the Paris Commune, were published in the magazine Rezets. He himself associated the beginning of professional literary work with the publication of a story about graduate students "Variant Two" (Zvezda magazine, 1949).

According to him, this story was “noted by criticism, praised, and I decided that from now on it will go like this, it’s supposed to be: I will write, they will immediately print me, praise, glorify, etc. Fortunately, the next story "Dispute Across the Ocean", published in the same "Zvezda", was severely criticized. Not for artistic imperfection, which would be fair, but for "admiration for the West", which it just did not have.

In the 1950s, the first books of the writer were published - the novels "The Dispute Across the Ocean" and "Yaroslav Dombrovsky", a collection of essays about the builders of the Kuibyshev hydroelectric power station "New Friends" and the novel "Searchers" (1955). The latter brought fame to Granin and formed the basis of the 1956 film of the same name. The main character of the work was a scientist struggling with bureaucracy.

Other works of the writer are also devoted to the fate of scientists, including the novels “After the Wedding” (1958), “I'm Going into a Thunderstorm” (1962); biographies of the biologist Alexander Lyubishchev (“This Strange Life”, 1974), the physicist Igor Kurchatov (“Choice of Purpose”, 1975) and the geneticist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky (“Zubr”, 1987).

“I wrote about engineers, scientists, scientists, about scientific creativity, it was my topic, my friends, my environment,” Granin said in his autobiography. – I didn’t have to study the material, go on creative business trips. I loved these people - my heroes, although their life was not rich in events.

Another important topic for the writer was the war. In 1968, Granin's story "Our Battalion Commander" was published, in 1976 - "Clavdia Vilor" about the life of a prisoner of war. In 1977-1981, Granin, in collaboration with the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, wrote The Blockade Book, a documentary chronicle of the life of Leningrad during the war. It was published with cuts in Novy Mir in 1977, in full in 1984, and has been reprinted more than once since then. The last time Granin presented a new edition of the book was in 2013.

Granin's military prose also includes the novel My Lieutenant (2011), for which the writer received the Big Book Literary Prize.

The works of recent years are written in the genre of memoirs. In addition to "My Lieutenant" these are "Whims of My Memory" (2009), "It Wasn't Quite So" (2010) and "Conspiracy" (2012).

For a long time, Granin was engaged in social activities, was elected a member of the board and secretary of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR and the USSR, in 1989-1991 he was a People's Deputy of the USSR. He stood at the origins of the creation of the Leningrad society "Mercy", headed the board of the D.S. Likhachev Charitable Foundation, was one of the initiators of the creation of the Russian PEN Center.

Daniil Granin

What is famous

A classic of Russian literature, known for his novels about scientists and inventors ("Searchers", "I'm going into a thunderstorm", "Zubr"), memoirs and military prose. The main work of Granin is considered to be the Blockade Book written in collaboration with Ales Adamovich - interviews with 200 Leningraders who survived the blockade, their diary entries, and the authors' reflections. The book has become a kind of monument to all the blockade.

Granin was also a prominent public figure, he was a member of the board of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR and the USSR, he was one of the initiators of the creation of the Russian PEN Center in 1989, at the end of perestroika he was a people's deputy of the USSR. He was one of the initiators of the creation of the Leningrad society "Mercy". He headed the Society of Friends of the Russian National Library and the board of the International Charitable Foundation. D. S. Likhachev.

What you need to know

In 2014, inconsistencies were found in Granin's biography. The writer himself has repeatedly noted that he went to the front as a private with a division of the people's militia.

Literary critic Mikhail Zolotonosov questioned these data. He found documents according to which Granin went to war as a senior political officer, that is, according to the critic, he was an officer with the rank of captain.

Born in 1919. Father - German Alexander Danilovich, was a forester. Mother - Anna Bakirovna. Wife - Mayorova R. M. (born in 1919). Daughter - Marina Daniilovna Chernysheva (born in 1945).

Parents lived together in different forest areas of the Novgorod and Pskov regions. My father was twenty years older than my mother. She had a good voice, all her childhood passed under her singing.

There were snowy winters, shooting, fires, river floods - the first memories interfere with the stories he heard from his mother about those years. In their native places, the Civil War was still burning out, gangs raged, rebellions broke out. Childhood was split in two: at first it was forest, later - urban. Both of these jets, without mixing, flowed for a long time and remained separate in D. Granin's soul. Forest childhood is a bathhouse with a snowdrift, where a steamy father and men jumped, winter forest roads, wide home-made skis (and city skis are narrow, on which they walked along the Neva to the very bay). I remember best mountains of fragrant yellow sawdust near the sawmills, logs, timber exchange passages, tar mills, and sledges, and wolves, the comfort of a kerosene lamp, trolleys on sloping roads.

Mother - a city dweller, a fashionista, young, cheerful - did not sit in the village. Therefore, she took it as a blessing to move to Leningrad. For the boy, city childhood flowed - studying at school, his father's visits with baskets of lingonberries, with cakes, with village ghee. And all summer - in his forest, in the timber industry, in winter - in the city. As the eldest child, everyone pulled him, the first-born, to himself. It was not a quarrel, but there was a different understanding of happiness. Then everything was resolved by a drama - my father was exiled to Siberia, somewhere near Biysk, the family remained in Leningrad. Mother worked as a dressmaker. And she worked the same at home. Ladies appeared - they came to choose a style, try on. Mother loved and did not love this work - she loved because she could show her taste, her artistic nature, she did not love because they lived poorly, she could not dress herself, her youth was spent on other people's outfits.

After the exile, my father became a "disenfranchised", he was forbidden to live in big cities. D. Granin, as the son of a "disenfranchised", was not accepted into the Komsomol. He studied at the school on Mokhovaya. There were still a few teachers of the Tenishevsky School, which was here before the revolution - one of the best Russian gymnasiums. In the physics classroom, the students used devices from the time of Siemens-Halske on thick ebonite panels with massive brass contacts. Each lesson was like a performance. Professor Znamensky taught, then his student, Ksenia Nikolaevna. The long teacher's table was like a stage where an extravaganza was played out with the participation of a beam of light spread out by prisms, electrostatic machines, discharges, vacuum pumps.

Despite the interest in literature and history, it was recognized at the family council that the engineering profession was more reliable. Granin entered the electrical engineering faculty of the Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1940. Energy, automation, the construction of hydroelectric power stations were then professions filled with romance, like atomic and nuclear physics later. Many teachers and professors participated in the creation of the GOELRO plan. There were legends about them. They were the pioneers of domestic electrical engineering, they were capricious, eccentric, each allowed himself to be a personality, to have his own language, to communicate his views, they argued with each other, argued with accepted theories, with a five-year plan.

After graduation, Daniil Granin was sent to the Kirov Plant, where he began to design a device for finding faults in cables.

Granin considered the post-war life he had inherited as a gift. He was lucky: his first comrades in the Writers' Union were front-line poets Anatoly Chivilikhin, Sergei Orlov, Mikhail Dudin. They accepted the young writer into their loud, cheerful fellowship. And besides, there was Dmitry Ostrov, an interesting prose writer, whom Granin met at the front in August 1941, when on the way from the headquarters of the regiment they spent the night together in the hayloft, and when they woke up, they found that the Germans were all around ...

It was to Dmitry Ostrov that Granin brought in 1948 his first completed story about Yaroslav Dombrovsky. Ostrov, it seems, never read the story, but nonetheless he convincingly proved to his friend that if you really want to write, then you need to write about your engineering work, about the fact that you know how you live. Today, Granin advises young people to do this, apparently forgetting how dull such moralizing seemed to him then.

The first post-war years were wonderful. Then Granin did not yet think of becoming a professional writer, literature was for him just a pleasure, a rest, a joy. In addition to it, there was work - in Lenenergo, in the cable network, where it was necessary to restore the city's energy facilities destroyed during the blockade: repair cables, lay new ones, put substations and transformer facilities in order. Every now and then there were accidents, there was not enough capacity. Raised from bed, at night - an accident! It was necessary to throw light from somewhere, to extract energy for the extinguished hospitals, water supply, schools. Switch, repair... In those years - 1945-1948 - cablemen, power engineers, felt themselves the most necessary and influential people in the city. As the energy economy was being restored and improved, Granin's interest in operational work was fading. The normal, accident-free regime that was sought was both satisfying and boring. At that time, experiments on the so-called closed networks began in the cable network - calculations of new types of electrical networks were checked. Daniil Granin took part in the experiment, and his longtime interest in electrical engineering revived.

At the end of 1948, Granin suddenly wrote a story about graduate students. It was called "Second Option". Daniil Alexandrovich brought him to the Zvezda magazine, where he was met by Yuri Pavlovich German, who was in charge of prose in the magazine. His friendliness, simplicity and captivating ease of attitude to literature greatly helped the young writer. The lightness of Yu. P. German was a special property, rare in Russian literary life. It consisted in the fact that he understood literature as a cheerful, happy business with the purest, even holy, attitude towards it. Granny was lucky. Later, he did not meet with anyone such a festively mischievous attitude, such pleasure, pleasure from literary work. The story was published in 1949, almost without amendments. He was noticed by critics, praised, and the author decided that from now on it will go that way, that he will write, he will immediately be published, praised, glorified, etc.

Fortunately, the next story - "Dispute across the ocean", published in the same "Star", was severely criticized. Not for artistic imperfection, which would be fair, but for "admiration for the West", which it just did not have. This injustice surprised, outraged Granin, but did not discourage him. It should be noted that engineering work created a wonderful sense of independence. In addition, he was supported by the honest exactingness of senior writers - Vera Kazimirovna Ketlinskaya, Mikhail Leonidovich Slonimsky, Leonid Nikolaevich Rakhmanov. A wonderful literary environment still survived in Leningrad in those years - Evgeny Lvovich Schwartz, Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, Olga Fedorovna Berggolts, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, Vera Fedorovna Panova, Sergei Lvovich Tsimbal, Alexander Ilyich Gitovich were alive - that diversity of talents and personalities, which is so needed at a young age. But perhaps what helped Granin most of all was a sympathetic interest in everything he did, Tai Grigorievna Lishina, her deep-spoken ruthlessness and absolute taste... She worked in the Propaganda Bureau of the Writers' Union. Many writers are indebted to her. New poems were constantly read in her room, stories, books, magazines were discussed ...

Soon Daniil Granin entered the graduate school of the Polytechnic Institute and at the same time began to write the novel "Searchers". By that time, the long-suffering book "Yaroslav Dombrovsky" had already been published. In parallel, Granin was also engaged in electrical engineering. He published several articles, moved on to the problems of the electric arc. However, these mysterious, interesting activities required time and complete immersion. In my youth, when I had a lot of strength and even more time, it seemed that it was possible to combine science and literature. And I wanted to combine them. Each of them pulled towards itself with greater force and jealousy. Each one was wonderful. The day came when Granin discovered a dangerous crack in his soul. It's time to choose. Or either. The novel "Searchers" was published, it was a success. There was money, it was possible to stop holding on to your postgraduate scholarship. But Granin dragged on for a long time, waited for something, gave lectures, working part-time, did not want to break away from science. I was afraid, I didn't believe in myself... In the end it happened. Not leaving for literature, but leaving the institute. Subsequently, the writer sometimes regretted that he had done it too late, began to write seriously, professionally late, but sometimes he regretted that he had abandoned science. Only now Granin begins to comprehend the meaning of the words of Alexander Benois: "The greatest luxury that a person can afford is to always do as he wants."

Granin wrote about engineers, scientists, scientists, scientific creativity - all this was his theme, his environment, his friends. He did not have to study the material, go on creative business trips. He loved these people - his heroes, although their life was not rich in events. It was not easy to portray her inner tension. It was even more difficult to introduce the reader to the course of their work, so that the reader would understand the essence of their passions and not apply schemes and formulas to the novel.

The 20th Party Congress was the decisive frontier for Granin. He made me see the war, myself, and the past in a different way. In a different way - it meant to see the mistakes of the war, to appreciate the courage of the people, soldiers, themselves ...

In the 1960s, it seemed to Granin that the advances in science, and above all in physics, would transform the world and the destinies of mankind. Physicists seemed to him the main characters of that time. By the 70s, that period was over, and as a sign of farewell, the writer created the story "The Namesake", where he somehow tried to comprehend his new attitude to his former hobbies. This is not a disappointment. This is the release of excessive hopes.

Survived Granin and another hobby - travel. Together with K. G. Paustovsky, L. N. Rakhmanov, Rasul Gamzatov, Sergey Orlov, they went in 1956 on a cruise around Europe on the ship "Russia". For each of them it was the first trip abroad. Yes, not to one country, but to six at once - it was the discovery of Europe. Since then, Granin began to travel a lot, traveled far, across the oceans - to Australia, Cuba, Japan, the USA. For him it was a thirst to see, to understand, to compare. He happened to go down the Mississippi on a barge, wander through the Australian bush, live with a village doctor in Louisiana, sit in English pubs, live on the island of Curaçao, visit many museums, galleries, temples, visit different families - Spanish, Swedish, Italian. The writer managed to write about something in his travel notes.

Gradually, life focused on literary work. Novels, stories, scripts, reviews, essays. The writer tried to master different genres, up to science fiction.

They say that the writer's biography is his books. Among those written by D. A. Granin are the novels: "The Blockade Book" (co-authored with A. Adamovich), "Bison", "This Strange Life". The writer managed to say something about the Leningrad blockade that no one had said, to tell about two great Russian scientists, whose fate was hushed up. Among other works - the novels "Seeker", "I'm going to a thunderstorm", "After the wedding", "Painting", "Escape to Russia", "Namesame", as well as journalistic works, scripts, travel notes.

D. A. Granin - Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of the State Prize, holder of two Orders of Lenin, Orders of the Red Banner, Red Banner of Labor, Red Star, two Orders of the Patriotic War II degree, Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" III degree. He is a laureate of the Heinrich Heine Prize (Germany), a member of the German Academy of Arts, an honorary doctor of the St. Petersburg University for the Humanities, a member of the Academy of Informatics, a member of the Presidential Council, and President of the Menshikov Foundation.

D. Granin created the first Relief Society in the country and contributed to the development of this movement in the country. He was repeatedly elected to the board of the Union of Writers of Leningrad, then Russia, he was a deputy of the Leningrad City Council, a member of the regional committee, in the time of Gorbachev - a people's deputy. The writer saw with his own eyes that political activity was not for him. All that's left is disappointment.

He is fond of sports and travel.

Lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Daniil Granin is a writer whose books are still loved by many fans of literature. And this is not accidental, because the works of Daniil Alexandrovich describe the life of an ordinary person: his little problems and joys, the search for his own path, the struggle with everyday problems and temptations.

For his work, the writer was awarded the State Prize of the USSR, the Prize of the President of the Russian Federation, in addition, Daniil Granin was a participant in the Great Patriotic War and a Hero of Socialist Labor.

Childhood and youth

Daniil Alexandrovich German (this is the real name of the prose writer) was born on January 1, 1917. Information about the place of birth of the writer varies: according to one information, this is the city of Volsk, in the Saratov region, according to other sources, Granin was born in the village of Volyn (Kursk region).

The father of the future prose writer - Alexander German - worked as a forester in various private farms. Granin's mother was a housewife. In his own memoirs, Daniil Granin would write later that mother and father became an example of an ideal loving family. Mother, according to the memoirs of the writer, loved to sing. Granin associated childhood itself with the voice of his mother, her favorite romances.

After some time, the family of little Daniel moved to Leningrad - his father was offered a new job. The boy's mother took this trip with joy - the young woman in the village was bored. Daniel also rejoiced at the move - the new city captured the boy. However, family happiness was soon destroyed: Alexander German was exiled to Siberia, his wife had to start working to support herself and her son.

Daniel went to school on Mokhovaya. In his autobiography, Granin recalls this time with warmth. The boy especially liked physics and literature. The teacher of literature taught the children to compose poetry. Poetry was not given to Daniil Alexandrovich, and since then Granin has become accustomed to treating poetry as the highest art, accessible only to unique people.

When it came time to choose a profession, it was decided at the family council that Daniel would go to study engineering. Before the war, Granin graduated from the Polytechnic Institute, becoming a certified electrical engineer. However, Daniil Alexandrovich did not have to work in his specialty: the Great Patriotic War intervened in the biography of the writer, as in the lives of all citizens of the country.

Daniil Granin at war

The writer went through the war from beginning to end. Granin fought on the Baltic and Leningrad fronts, fought in tank troops and infantry, received several military orders. At the end of the war, Daniil Alexandrovich already had the rank of commander of a tank company. For a long time, Granin did not tell anyone about what he had to endure at the front. Yes, and I decided to write about it far from immediately.

After the war, Granin entered graduate school and got a job at Lenenergo.

Literature

The first attempts at Granin's pen are dated to the second half of the 1930s. For the first time, the works of Daniil Alexandrovich were published in 1937 in a magazine called "Cutter". We are talking about the stories "Motherland" and "The Return of Rulyak". The writer himself considered the publication of the story "Second Option" in 1949 to be the beginning of his professional literary activity. In the same year, Daniil Aleksandrovich began to sign with the surname Granin: an already well-known prose writer and namesake asked the novice writer about this.

Two years later, the writer released two full-fledged novels - "The Dispute Across the Ocean" and "Yaroslav Dombrovsky". However, Daniil Granin was famous for the novel The Searchers, published in 1955. This is a story about the scientist Andrey Lobanov, whose meaning of life was science. However, the genius of thought has to fight bureaucracy and bureaucratic red tape on the way to discoveries and research.

In the future, Daniil Alexandrovich repeatedly returned to the topic of scientists, graduate students, inventors and the attitude towards them from other people and superiors. The novels and stories “I’m going into a thunderstorm”, “An unknown person”, “Own opinion”, “Someone must” are devoted to this. The writer also released several historical works - "Reflections in front of a portrait that does not exist", "The Tale of a Scientist and an Emperor."

Daniil Alexandrovich was also interested in the fate of talented people. The writer conducted research and wrote biographies of the biologist Alexander Lyubishchev (the story "This Strange Life"), the geneticist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky (the work "Bison"), and also the physicist (the novel "Choice of Purpose"). In the novel "Escape to Russia", published in 1994, Daniil Granin revealed a new side to readers. The prose writer returned to the favorite topic of the fate of scientists, but revealed it in the form of an adventure detective story.

It is impossible not to mention the military theme in the works of Daniil Alexandrovich. The most striking works, perhaps, were a collection of short stories entitled “The trace is still noticeable” and “The blockade book”, written by Granin together with Ales Adamovich. This book is dedicated to the siege of Leningrad and is based on documentary sources, notes of the siege survivors and memoirs of front-line soldiers.

This is not the only documentary work of Daniil Granin. Of interest are the essays, stories and excerpts from the writer's diaries dedicated to travels in Japan, Australia and European countries: "The Rock Garden", "An Unexpected Morning" and others. In addition, the prose writer wrote a number of essays and essays about,.

In recent years, Daniil Aleksandrovich preferred to write in the genre of memoirs. Such are the works “My lieutenant”, “Fads of my memory”, “Everything was completely different”, released in the early 2000s.

In 2013, Granin's Blockade Book was republished. The work was supplemented with wartime photographs from the collection of the St. Petersburg Historical Museum and the personal archive of the writer. And a year later, Daniil Granin made a speech in the German Bundestag at an event dedicated to the memory of the victims of the National Socialist regime and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Many listeners could not hold back their tears. The 95-year-old writer received a standing ovation - Granin's speech was so emotional.

Several films have been made based on the works of Daniil Aleksandrovich. In 1957, the novel The Searchers was the first to be filmed. The director of the film is Mikhail Shapiro. Later, the films "Choice of Target", "Rain in a Strange City", "After the Wedding" and others were released.

Personal life

The personal life of Daniil Granin has developed happily. At the beginning of the war, the writer married Rimma Mayorova. In his autobiography, Daniil Alexandrovich wrote that family life began with a few hours spent with his wife in a bomb shelter. A few days later, Granin went to the front.

However, the hardships and hardships of wartime did not diminish the feelings of the spouses - Daniil Alexandrovich and Rimma Mikhailovna lived together for a whole life. In 1945, the writer's daughter Marina was born.

Death

The last years of his life, the health of Daniil Granin became weaker and weaker: the venerable age of the writer affected. In 2017, Daniil Aleksandrovich completely weakened, felt unwell. In early summer, Granin was hospitalized. He could no longer breathe on his own, he had to connect a ventilator. On June 4, 2017, Daniil Granin passed away. He was 99 years old.

The death of the writer, although it did not come as a surprise, shocked fans of the work of the prose writer and simply caring people. The grave of Daniil Granin is located at the Komarovsky cemetery (near St. Petersburg).