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The author of the work is a story about a real person. Boris field - a story about a real person

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Boris Polevoy
A story about a real person

Part one

1

The stars were still shining sharply and coldly, but the sky in the east was already beginning to lighten. Trees slowly emerged from the darkness. Suddenly a strong fresh wind passed over their peaks. The forest immediately came to life, rustled loudly and loudly. The century-old pines called to each other in a whistling whisper, and dry frost with a soft rustle poured from the disturbed branches.

The wind died down suddenly, as it had flown. The trees were frozen in a cold stupor again. All the pre-dawn forest sounds immediately became audible: the greedy squabble of wolves in a nearby clearing, the cautious yelping of foxes, and the first, still hesitant blows of an awakened woodpecker, resounding in the silence of the forest so musically, as if it were pecking not a tree trunk, but the hollow body of a violin.

The wind rustled again in the heavy needles of the pine peaks. The last stars quietly faded in the brightened sky. The sky itself thickened and narrowed. The forest, finally shaking off the remnants of the darkness of the night, rose in all its green grandeur. By the way the curly heads of the pines and the sharp spiers of the firs lit up, turning purple, one guessed that the sun had risen and that the day that had begun promised to be clear, frosty, vigorous.

It became quite light. The wolves went into the forest thickets to digest their night prey, the fox got out of the clearing, leaving a lacy, cunningly tangled trail in the snow. The old forest rustled evenly, incessantly. Only the fuss of birds, the sound of a woodpecker, the cheerful chirping of yellow tits shooting between the branches, and the greedy dry quack of jays diversified this viscous, disturbing and sad, rolling noise in soft waves.

A magpie, cleaning its sharp black beak on an alder branch, suddenly turned its head to one side, listened, sat down, ready to break loose and fly away. The branches crunched anxiously. Someone big, strong walked through the forest, not making out the road. The bushes crackled, the tops of small pine trees swept about, the crust creaked, settling. The magpie screamed and, spreading its tail, similar to the plumage of an arrow, flew away in a straight line.

From needles powdered with morning frost, a long brown muzzle poked out, crowned with heavy, branched horns. Frightened eyes scanned the vast clearing. Pink suede nostrils, spitting out a hot steam of anxious breath, convulsively moved.

The old elk froze in a pine forest, like a statue. Only the ragged skin twitched nervously on its back. Alert ears caught every sound, and his hearing was so acute that the beast could hear how the bark beetle was sharpening pine wood. But even these sensitive ears did not hear anything in the forest except the chirping of birds, the sound of a woodpecker and the even ringing of pine tops.

Hearing soothed, but the sense of smell warned of danger. The fresh aroma of melted snow was mixed with sharp, heavy and dangerous smells alien to this dense forest. The black sad eyes of the beast saw dark figures on the dazzling scales of the crust. Without moving, he tensed up, ready to jump into the thicket. But the people didn't move. They lay in the snow thickly, in places on top of each other. There were a lot of them, but not one of them moved and did not break the virgin silence. Nearby towered some monsters grown into the snowdrifts. They exhaled sharp and disturbing odors.

An elk stood on the edge of the forest, frightened, squinting, not understanding what had happened to all this herd of quiet, motionless and not at all dangerous-looking people.

His attention was drawn to a sound from above. The beast shuddered, the skin on its back twitched, its hind legs tightened even more.

However, the sound was also not terrible: as if several may beetles, humming in a bass voice, circled in the foliage of a blooming birch. And their buzz was sometimes mingled with a frequent, short crackle, similar to the evening creak of a jerk in a swamp.

And here are the beetles themselves. Flashing wings, they dance in the blue frosty air. Again and again the dergach creaked in the heights. One of the beetles, without folding its wings, rushed down. The rest danced again in the azure sky. The beast loosened its tense muscles, went out into the clearing, licked the crust, squinting at the sky with its eye. And suddenly another beetle fell off the swarm dancing in the air and, leaving behind a large, magnificent tail, rushed straight to the clearing. It grew so fast that the elk barely had time to jump into the bushes - something huge, more terrible than a sudden gust of an autumn storm, hit the tops of the pines and rattled on the ground so that the whole forest hummed, groaned. The echo rushed over the trees, ahead of the elk, which rushed at full speed into the thicket.

Stuck in the thick of green needles echo. Sparkling and sparkling, frost fell from the tree tops, knocked down by the fall of the plane. Silence, viscous and imperious, took possession of the forest. And it was distinctly heard how a man groaned and how hard the crust crunched under the feet of a bear, which an unusual rumble and crackle drove out of the forest into a clearing.

The bear was big, old and shaggy. Untidy hair stuck out in brown tufts on his sunken sides, hung like icicles from his lean, lean backside. War has been raging in these parts since autumn. It even penetrated here, into the reserved wilderness, where earlier, and even then not often, only foresters and hunters went. The roar of a close battle in the autumn raised the bear from the den, breaking his winter hibernation, and now, hungry and angry, he wandered through the forest, not knowing peace.

The bear stopped at the edge of the forest, where the elk had just stood. He sniffed his fresh, deliciously smelling traces, breathed heavily and greedily, moving his sunken sides, listened. The moose was gone, but a sound was heard nearby, made by some living and probably weak creature. The fur rose on the back of the beast's neck. He stuck out his muzzle. And again this mournful sound was barely audible from the edge of the forest.

Slowly, carefully stepping on soft paws, under which dry and strong crust fell through with a crunch, the beast moved towards the motionless human figure driven into the snow...

2

Pilot Alexei Meresyev got into double pincers. It was the worst thing that could happen in a dogfight. He, who had shot all the ammunition, actually unarmed, was surrounded by four German aircraft and, not allowing him to either turn around or evade the course, they took him to their airfield ...

And it all turned out like this. The link of fighters under the command of Lieutenant Meresyev flew out to accompany the "silt", sent to attack the enemy airfield. The daring outing went well. Attack aircraft, these "flying tanks", as they were called in the infantry, gliding almost over the tops of pine trees, crept right up to the airfield, on which large transport "Junkers" stood in rows. Unexpectedly emerging from behind the battlements of the gray forest ridge, they rushed over the heavy carcasses of the "carriers", pouring lead and steel from cannons and machine guns, showering them with tailed shells. Meresyev, who was guarding the air above the place of attack with his four, could clearly see from above how the dark figures of people swept across the airfield, how the transport workers began to crawl heavily over the rolled snow, how the attack aircraft made new and new approaches, and how the crews of the Junkers who came to their senses began under taxi to the start with fire and lift the cars into the air.

This is where Alex made a mistake. Instead of strictly guarding the air over the attack area, he, as the pilots say, was tempted by easy game. Leaving the car in a dive, he rushed like a stone at the heavy and slow "cart carrier" that had just taken off the ground, with pleasure heated its quadrangular motley body made of corrugated duralumin with several long bursts. Confident in himself, he did not even watch the enemy poke into the ground. On the other side of the airfield, another Junkers took off into the air. Alexei ran after him. Attacked and failed. Its fire trails slid over the slowly climbing machine. He turned sharply, attacked again, missed again, again overtook his victim and dumped him somewhere off to the side above the forest, furiously driving several long bursts from all the onboard weapons into his wide cigar-shaped body. Having laid down the Junkers and given two victorious laps at the place where a black column rose above the green, disheveled sea of an endless forest, Alexei was about to turn the plane back to the German airfield.

But there was no need to fly there. He saw how three fighters of his link were fighting with nine "Messers", called, probably, by the command of the German airfield to repel an attack by attack aircraft. Boldly rushing at the Germans, who were exactly three times their number, the pilots sought to distract the enemy from the attack aircraft. While fighting, they pulled the enemy further and further aside, as a grouse does, pretending to be wounded and distracting the hunters from their chicks.

Alexei felt ashamed that he was carried away by easy prey, ashamed to the point that he felt his cheeks flare under the helmet. He chose his opponent and, gritting his teeth, rushed into battle. His goal was the "Messer", somewhat strayed from the others and, obviously, also looked out for his prey. Squeezing all the speed out of his "donkey", Alexei rushed at the enemy from the flank. He attacked the German according to all the rules. The gray body of the enemy vehicle was clearly visible in the spidery crosshairs of his sights as he pressed the trigger. But he quietly slipped past. There could be no miss. The target was close and could be seen extremely clearly. "Ammunition!" Alexey guessed, feeling that his back was immediately covered with a cold sweat. He pressed the trigger to check and did not feel that trembling rumble that the pilot feels with his whole body, putting the weapon of his machine into action. The charging boxes were empty: chasing the "drawers", he shot all the ammunition.

But the enemy did not know about it! Aleksei decided to meddle unarmed into the turmoil of battle in order to at least numerically improve the balance of power. He made a mistake. On the fighter, which he attacked so unsuccessfully, was an experienced and observant pilot. The German noticed that the car was unarmed and gave the order to his colleagues. Four Messerschmitts, having left the battle, surrounded Alexei from the sides, pinched him from above and below, and, dictating his path with bullet tracks, clearly visible in the blue and transparent air, took him in double “pincers”.

A few days ago, Alexey heard that the famous German air division "Richthofen" flew here from the west to the area of Staraya Russa. It was staffed by the best aces of the fascist empire and was under the auspices of Goering himself. Aleksey realized that he had fallen into the clutches of these air wolves and that they obviously wanted to bring him to their airfield, force him to sit down in order to take him prisoner alive. Such cases happened then. Aleksey himself saw how one day a flight of fighters under the command of his friend Hero Soviet Union Andrei Degtyarenko was brought in and landed on his airfield by a German reconnaissance officer.

The long, greenish-pale face of the captured German, his staggering step, instantly arose in Alexei's memory. "Captivity? Never! This number will not come out!” he decided.

But he couldn't get out. The Germans blocked his path with machine gun bursts as soon as he made the slightest attempt to deviate from the course they dictated. And again the face of a captive pilot flashed before him with distorted features, with a trembling jaw. There was some humiliating animal fear in this face.

Meresyev clenched his teeth tightly, gave full throttle and, putting the car upright, tried to dive under the top German, who was pressing him to the ground. He managed to escape from under the convoy. But the German managed to press the trigger in time. The motor lost its rhythm and earned frequent jerks. The whole plane was trembling in a deadly fever.

Knocked out! Alexei managed to turn the clouds into a white haze, knocking the chase off the trail. But what's next? The pilot felt the trembling of the wounded machine with his whole being, as if it were not the agony of a crippled engine, but a fever pounding his own body.

What's wrong with the motor? How long can a plane stay in the air? Will the tanks explode? Alexey did not think all this, but rather felt it. Feeling himself sitting on a stick of dynamite, to which a flame was already running along the fuse cord, he put the plane on a return course, to the front line, to his own people, so that in which case he would at least be buried with his own hands.

The denouement came immediately. The motor stopped and stopped. The plane, as if sliding down a steep mountain, rapidly rushed down. Under the plane shimmered with green-gray waves, boundless, like the sea, a forest ... "And yet not captured!" - the pilot had time to think when close trees, merging into longitudinal stripes, rushed under the wings of the aircraft. When the forest jumped at him like a beast, he turned off the ignition with an instinctive movement. There was a grinding crack, and everything instantly disappeared, as if he, along with the machine, had sunk into dark, thick water.

Falling, the plane touched the tops of pine trees. It softened the blow. Having broken several trees, the car fell apart, but a moment earlier Alexei was pulled out of the seat, thrown into the air, and, falling on a broad-shouldered century-old spruce, he slid down the branches into a deep snowdrift swept by the wind at its foot. It saved his life...

How long he lay motionless, unconscious, Alexey could not remember. Some indefinite human shadows, the contours of buildings, incredible machines, swiftly flickering, swept in front of him, and from their whirlwind movement, a dull, scraping pain was felt all over his body. Then out of the chaos came something big, hot, indefinite forms and breathed on him a hot stench. He tried to pull away, but his body seemed to be stuck in the snow. Tormented by unaccountable horror, he made a jerk - and suddenly he felt frosty air rushing into his lungs, cold snow on his cheek and a sharp pain no longer in his whole body, but in his legs.

"Alive!" flashed through his mind. He made a movement to get up, and near him heard the crunchy creak of the crust under someone's feet and noisy, hoarse breathing. "Germans! he immediately guessed, suppressing the urge to open his eyes and jump up in defense. - Captivity, then, after all, captivity! .. What to do?

He remembered that his mechanic, Yura, a master of all trades, had taken to sewing a detached strap to the holster yesterday, but never did; I had to put the pistol in the hip pocket of my overalls when flying out. Now, to get it, you had to turn on your side. This cannot, of course, be done unnoticed by the enemy. Alexei lay face down. He could feel the sharp edges of the gun against his thigh. But he lay motionless: perhaps the enemy would take him for dead and leave.

The German hovered beside him, sighed strangely, and went up to Meresyev again; crunched the infusion, bent over. Alexei again felt the stinking breath of his throat. Now he knew that the German was alone, and this was the opportunity to save himself: if you ambush him, suddenly jump up, grab his throat and, without letting the weapon go, start a fight on equal terms ... But this must be done prudently and accurately.

Without changing his posture, slowly, very slowly, Alexei opened his eyes and through lowered eyelashes saw in front of him instead of a German, a brown, shaggy spot. He opened his eyes wider and immediately closed them tightly: in front of him on his hind legs sat a large, skinny, skinned bear.

3

Quietly, as only animals can do, the bear sat next to a motionless human figure, barely visible from a snowdrift that glittered blue in the sun.

His dirty nostrils twitched softly. From the half-open mouth, in which one could see old, yellow, but still powerful fangs, a thin thread of thick saliva hung and swayed in the wind.

Raised by the war from a winter lair, he was hungry and angry. But bears don't eat carrion. Having sniffed the motionless body, which smelled sharply of gasoline, the bear lazily walked away to the clearing, where the same motionless, frozen into the crust, lay in abundance. human bodies. A groan and a rustle brought him back.

And here he was sitting next to Alexei. An aching hunger struggled in him with an aversion to dead meat. Hunger began to win. The beast sighed, got up, turned the man in the snowdrift over with its paw, and ripped the “damn skin” of the overalls with its claws. The overalls didn't fit. The bear growled softly. It cost Alexei great efforts at that moment to suppress the desire to open his eyes, to recoil, to scream, to push away this heavy carcass that had fallen on his chest. While his whole being yearned for a stormy and furious defense, he forced himself with a slow, imperceptible movement to put his hand into his pocket, feel for the ribbed handle of the pistol there, carefully, so as not to click, cock the trigger with his thumb and begin to imperceptibly draw out his already armed hand.

The beast ripped the overalls even harder. Strong matter crackled, but again withstood. The bear roared furiously, grabbed the overalls with his teeth, pinching the body through the fur and cotton wool. With a last effort of will, Alexei suppressed the pain in himself, and at the moment when the beast tore him out of the snowdrift, raised his pistol and pulled the trigger.

The muffled shot cracked loudly and resoundingly.

Fluttering, the magpie quickly flew away. Hoarfrost fell from the disturbed branches. The beast slowly released the prey. Alexey fell into the snow, not taking his eyes off the enemy. He sat on his hind legs, and in his black, overgrown with fine hair, festering eyes, his bewilderment froze. Thick blood trickled between his fangs and fell on the snow in a matte stream. He growled hoarsely and terribly, rose heavily on his hind legs and immediately sank dead in the snow before Alexei had time to shoot again. The blue crust slowly turned red and, thawing, smoked slightly at the head of the beast. The bear was dead.

Alexei's tension subsided. He again felt a sharp, burning pain in his feet and, falling on the snow, lost consciousness ...

He woke up when the sun was already high. The rays that pierced the needles lit up the crust with sparkling glare. In the shade, the snow seemed not even blue, but blue.

“Well, did the bear dream, or what?” was Alexey's first thought.

A brown, shaggy, untidy carcass lay nearby on the blue snow. The forest was noisy. The woodpecker chiseled the bark loudly. The nimble yellow-bellied titmouses chirped loudly, jumping in the bushes.

"Alive, alive, alive!" – mentally repeated Alexei. And all of him, his whole body rejoiced, absorbing the wonderful, powerful, intoxicating sensation of life that comes to a person and captures him every time after he has endured mortal danger.

Obeying this powerful feeling, he jumped to his feet, but immediately, groaning, sat down on the bear carcass. The pain in his feet burned through his entire body. There was a dull, heavy noise in her head, as if rotating in it, rumbling, shaking the brain, old, chipped millstones. His eyes hurt, as if someone had pressed a finger over them over the eyelids. Everything around was either seen clearly and brightly, doused with cold yellow sunbeams, or disappeared, covered with a gray veil shimmering with sparks.

“Bad… It must have been shell-shocked during the fall and something happened to his legs,” thought Alexei.

Rising, he looked with surprise at the wide field, visible beyond the edge of the forest and limited on the horizon by the gray semicircle of the distant forest.

It must have been in the fall, or most likely in early winter, along the edge of the forest through this field, one of the defensive lines passed, on which the Red Army unit held out for a short time, but stubbornly, as they say - to death. Blizzards covered the wounds of the earth with packed snow wool. But even under it one could easily guess the molehills of the trenches, mounds of broken firing points, endless potholes of small and large shell craters, visible right up to the foothills of the beaten, wounded, decapitated or twisted trees of the edge. In the midst of a tormented field, several tanks, painted in the variegated color of pike scales, were frozen into the snow in different places. All of them - especially the last one, which must have been knocked sideways by a grenade or mine explosion, so that the long barrel of its gun hung down to the ground with its tongue hanging out - seemed to be the corpses of unknown monsters. And all over the field - at the parapets of shallow trenches, near the tanks and on the edge of the forest - the corpses of the Red Army and German soldiers lay interspersed. There were so many of them that in places they were piled one on top of the other. They lay in the same positions fixed by frost, in which a few months ago, on the verge of winter, death caught people in battle.

Everything spoke to Alexei about the stubbornness and fury of the battle that raged here, that his comrades-in-arms fought, forgetting about everything except that they needed to stop, not to miss the enemy. Not far away, at the edge, near a thick pine tree decapitated by a shell, whose high, obliquely broken trunk is now leaking yellow transparent resin, Germans are lying around with crushed skulls, with crushed faces. In the center, across one of the enemies, lies the body of a huge, round-faced, large-browed guy without an overcoat, in one tunic without a belt, with a torn collar, and next to him is a rifle with a broken bayonet and a bloodied, beaten butt.

And further, by the road leading to the forest, under a young fir-tree thrown by sand, half in a funnel, also lies on its edge a dark-skinned Uzbek with a thin face, as if carved from old ivory. Behind him, under the branches of a Christmas tree, you can see a neat stack of grenades that have not yet been used up, and he himself holds a grenade in a dead hand thrown back, as if, before throwing it, he decided to look at the sky, and so he froze.

And even farther, along the forest road, near the spotted tank carcasses, at the slopes of large funnels, in the trenches, near the old stumps - everywhere are dead figures in padded jackets and quilted pants, in dirty-green jackets and horned caps, pushed over their ears for warmth; bent knees stick out of the snowdrifts, chins thrown back, wax faces melted out of the crust, gnawed by foxes, pecked by magpies and crows.

Several ravens slowly circled over the clearing, and suddenly she reminded Alexei of the solemn, full of gloomy power picture of the Igor Sich, reproduced in school textbook stories from the canvas of the great Russian artist.

“Here I would lie here!” he thought, and again his whole being was filled with a stormy sensation of life. He shook himself. Jagged millstones were still slowly spinning in his head, his legs were burning and aching more than ever, but Alexei, sitting on the bear carcass, already cold and silvered with dry snow, began to think what to do, where to go, how to get to his advanced units.

He lost the tablet with the map in the fall. But even without a map, Alexey had a clear idea of today's route. The German field airfield, which attack aircraft flew into, lay about sixty kilometers to the west of the front line. Having connected the German fighters in air combat, his pilots managed to pull them away from the airfield to the east for about twenty kilometers, and he, after he escaped from the double "pincers", probably managed to stretch a little more to the east. So, he fell about thirty-five kilometers from the front line, far behind the backs of the advanced German divisions, somewhere in the area of \u200b\u200ba huge, so-called Black Forest, through which he had to fly more than once, escorting bombers and attack aircraft in their short raids on near German rear. This forest always seemed to him from above an endless green sea. In good weather, the forest swirled with caps of pine peaks, and in bad weather, shrouded in gray fog, it resembled a darkened water surface, along which small waves walk.

That he collapsed in the middle of it reserved forest was both good and bad. Well, because it is unlikely that here, in these virgin thickets, one could meet Germans, who usually gravitated towards roads and housing. It was bad, because it was necessary to make, although not very long, but a difficult path through the forest thickets, where one could not hope for the help of a person, for a piece of bread, for a roof, for a sip of boiling water. After all, the legs ... Will they raise their legs? Will they go?

He quietly got up from the bear carcass. The same sharp pain that originated in his feet pierced his body from the bottom up. He screamed. I had to sit down again. Tried to throw off the high boots. Unt did not get off, and each jerk made me moan. Then Aleksei clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, pulled the fur boots with all his strength with both hands - and immediately lost consciousness. Waking up, he carefully unfolded the flannel footcloth. The whole foot was swollen and was a solid bluish bruise. She was burning and aching in every joint. Alexei put his foot on the snow - the pain became weaker. With the same desperate jerk, as if he was pulling out a tooth from himself, he took off the second high boots.

Both legs were useless. Obviously, when the plane's impact on the tops of the pines threw him out of the cockpit, something pinched his feet and crushed the small bones of the metatarsus and fingers. Of course, under normal circumstances, he wouldn't even think of climbing on those broken, swollen legs. But he was alone in the thicket of the forest, behind enemy lines, where a meeting with a man promised not relief, but death. And he decided to go, go east, go through the forest, not trying to find convenient roads and places to live, go, no matter what the cost.

He resolutely jumped up from the bear carcass, gasped, gritted his teeth and took the first step. He stood, tore his other leg out of the snow, took another step. There was a noise in my head, the forest and the clearing swayed, swam to the side.

Alexei felt that he was weakening from tension and pain. Biting his lip, he continued walking, reaching a forest road that led past a wrecked tank, past an Uzbek with a grenade, deep into the forest, to the east. There was still nothing to walk on soft snow, but as soon as he stepped onto the hard, windswept, ice-covered hump of the road, the pain became so unbearable that he stopped, not daring to take another step. So he stood, awkwardly spreading his legs, swaying as if from the wind. And suddenly everything turned gray before my eyes. Gone was the road, the pine tree, the gray needles, the blue oblong gap above it... He was standing at the airfield by the plane, his plane, and his mechanic, or, as he called him, "techie", lanky Yura, shining with teeth and the whites of his eyes, always sparkling on his unshaven and always grimy face, with an inviting gesture, he showed him to the cockpit: they say, it’s ready, let’s fly ... Alexei took a step towards the plane, but the earth burned, burned his legs, as if he were stepping on a red-hot stove. He rushed to jump over this hot land right on the wing, but he bumped into the cold fuselage and was surprised. The fuselage was not smooth, varnished, but rough, lined with pine bark ... No aircraft - he was on the road and fumbled with his hand along the tree trunk.

"Hallucination? I'm going crazy from shell shock, thought Alexei. - Walking on the road is unbearable. Roll to the ground? But this will slow down the path a lot ... ”He sat down on the snow, again with the same decisive, short jerks pulled off the high boots, tore them in the insteps with his nails and teeth so that they would not crowd his broken feet, took off a large downy scarf made of angora wool from his neck, tore it in half , wrapped his feet and put on his shoes again.

Now it's easier to walk. However, to go is incorrectly said: not to go, but to move, move carefully, stepping on your heels and raising your legs high, as you walk in a swamp. Pain and tension after a few steps began to dizzy. I had to stand with my eyes closed, leaning back against a tree trunk, or sit down on a snowdrift and rest, feeling a sharp pulse in the veins.

He went on like this for several hours. But when I looked back, at the end of the clearing I could still see a lighted turn in the road, at which a dead Uzbek stood out as a dark speck in the snow. This made Alex very upset. Disappointed, but not scared. He wanted to go faster. He got up from the snowdrift, firmly clenched his teeth and went forward, setting small goals in front of him, focusing his attention on them - from pine to pine, from stump to stump, from snowdrift to snowdrift. On the virgin snow of a deserted forest road, a sluggish, winding, indistinct trail, which leaves a wounded animal, curled behind him.

"A Tale of a Real Man" piece of art on a documentary basis. Its author, Boris Polevoy, borrowed it directly from the prototype of his own, Soviet fighter pilot Alexei Maresyev.

However, it would not be entirely correct to call Maresyev a prototype, since main character books - a real man. Moreover, he is alive at the time of the story. In the book, Polevoy only changed one letter in his last name.

The history of the idea of the story

It all started with the arrival of Boris Polevoy, a young military correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, to an air regiment based on the Bryansk Front. As usual in such cases, he asked the regimental commander to introduce him to one of the heroes. And he meets Alexei Maresyev, who has just returned from a sortie (in Meresyev's book). Aleksei had just destroyed two enemy planes in a fierce battle. One, what a military journalist of the country's main newspaper needs.

A hero for a journalist in war is like a movie star in peacetime.

Already in the evening, after a detailed conversation about the difficult combat everyday life, Maresyev proposed to the military commissar in the hut, where he himself was temporarily quartered.

Then the endless questions of Polevoy, who was struck to the limit, began. The pilot answered rather dryly, but in detail, his story for a long time crashed into the writer's memory. But until the end of the war, he did not dare to put it on paper. It was only in 1946 that The Tale of a Real Man was born.

The plot of the story is not intricate: in the war, this did not happen. The chain of events taking place is harmonious.

In the winter of 1942, a Soviet pilot was shot down in the Novgorod region. Landed by parachute in the occupied territory. With damaged legs, without food, for 18 days he tries to get through the snowdrifts to his own. Finally, when the forces were already running out, the wounded pilot was picked up by partisans and transported by plane over the front line. The diagnosis that military doctors made to him in the hospital was disappointing. Gangrene of both legs began. An emergency amputation was required to save his life.

Left without legs, Alexei initially falls into despair. But then gradually gains confidence. Overcoming unbearable pain, he learns to walk again. Nurse Olesya even teaches him to dance. He believes he can fly again.

And he achieves his goal. Aleksey returns to his native fighter regiment and already in the first battle he shoots down two enemy aircraft.

The book about the courageous pilot immediately after its first publication became very popular. And not only at home. She was translated into whiter than 2 dozen foreign languages and published abroad in large numbers.

On the basis of its plot, a film was made and an opera by Sergei Prokofiev was written.

By the way, the last and, according to critics, far from the best of all the operas of the great composer.

The main character of the book Alexei Maresyev himself lived long life. He worked a lot in veteran organizations. He was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Passed away in 2001.

Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy

"A Tale of a Real Man"

PART ONE

An elk stood on the edge of the forest, frightened, squinting, not understanding what had happened to all this herd of quiet, motionless and not at all dangerous-looking people.

His attention was drawn to a sound from above. The beast shuddered, the skin on its back twitched, its hind legs tightened even more.

However, the sound was also not terrible: as if several May beetles, humming in a bass voice, were circling in the foliage of a blooming birch. And their buzz was sometimes mingled with a frequent, short crackle, similar to the evening creak of a jerk in a swamp.

And here are the beetles themselves. Flashing wings, they dance in the blue frosty air. Again and again the dergach creaked in the heights. One of the beetles, without folding its wings, rushed down. The rest danced again in the azure sky. The beast loosened its tense muscles, went out into the clearing, licked the crust, squinting at the sky with its eye. And suddenly another beetle fell off the swarm dancing in the air and, leaving behind a large, magnificent tail, rushed straight to the clearing. It grew so fast that the elk barely had time to jump into the bushes - something huge, more terrible than a sudden gust of an autumn storm, hit the tops of the pines and rattled against the ground so that the whole forest hummed, groaned. The echo rushed over the trees, ahead of the elk, which rushed at full speed into the thicket.

Slowly, carefully stepping on soft paws, under which dry and strong crust fell through with a crunch, the beast moved towards the motionless human figure driven into the snow...

And it all turned out like this. A fighter unit under the command of Lieutenant Meresyev flew out to accompany the ILs, who were sent to attack the enemy airfield. The daring outing went well. Attack aircraft, these "flying tanks", as they were called in the infantry, gliding almost over the tops of pine trees, crept right up to the airfield, on which large transport "Junkers" stood in rows. Unexpectedly emerging from behind the battlements of the gray forest ridge, they rushed over the heavy carcasses of the "carriers", pouring lead and steel from cannons and machine guns, showering them with tailed shells. Meresyev, who was guarding the air above the place of attack with his four, could clearly see from above how the dark figures of people swept across the airfield, how the transport workers began to crawl heavily over the rolled snow, how the attack aircraft made new and new approaches, and how the crews of the Junkers who came to their senses began under taxi to the start with fire and lift the cars into the air.

This is where Alex made a mistake. Instead of strictly guarding the air over the attack area, he, as the pilots say, was tempted by easy game. Leaving the car in a dive, he rushed like a stone at the heavy and slow "cart carrier" that had just taken off the ground, with pleasure heated its quadrangular motley body made of corrugated duralumin with several long bursts. Confident in himself, he did not even watch the enemy poke into the ground. On the other side of the airfield, another Junkers took off into the air. Alexei ran after him. Attacked - and unsuccessfully. Its fire trails slid over the slowly climbing machine. He turned sharply, attacked again, missed again, again overtook his victim and dumped him somewhere off to the side above the forest, furiously driving several long bursts from all the onboard weapons into his wide cigar-shaped body. Having laid down the Junkers and given two victorious laps at the place where a black column rose above the green, disheveled sea of an endless forest, Alexei was about to turn the plane back to the German airfield.

Alexei felt ashamed that he was carried away by easy prey, ashamed to the point that he felt his cheeks flare under the helmet. He chose his opponent and, gritting his teeth, rushed into battle. His goal was the "Messer", somewhat strayed from the others and, obviously, also looked out for his prey. Squeezing all the speed out of his "donkey", Alexei rushed at the enemy from the flank. He attacked the German according to all the rules. The gray body of the enemy vehicle was clearly visible in the spidery crosshairs of his sights as he pressed the trigger. But he quietly slipped past. There could be no miss. The target was close and could be seen extremely clearly. "Ammunition!" - Aleksey guessed, feeling that his back was immediately covered with cold sweat. He pressed the trigger to check and did not feel that trembling rumble that the pilot feels with his whole body, putting the weapon of his machine into action. The charging boxes were empty: chasing the "drawers", he shot all the ammunition.

“The Tale of a Real Man” is a work by Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy (real name Kamov, 1908-1981), dedicated to the feat of a military pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union A.P. Maresyev.

During the Great Patriotic War, already recognized Soviet writer BN Polevoy was in the army as a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda. He was the first to write about the feat of the 83-year-old peasant Matvey Kuzmich Kuzmin, who, according to the writer, repeated the feat of Ivan Susanin, published a number of front-line reports. After the war, four books of his war memoirs, These Four Years, were published. Less well known are materials about the presence of B. Polevoy at the Nuremberg trials as a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda - In the End (1969).

True glory to B. Polevoy was brought to him by the Tale of a Real Man published in 1946, in which the author spoke about the pilot Alexei Maresyev (in the story - Meresyev). On April 4, 1942, his plane was shot down in action. Once in a snowy forest, behind enemy lines, the wounded pilot crawled to his own for 18 days. He froze his legs, and they had to be amputated. However, the disabled Alexei Maresyev managed not only to return to normal life- he got into line and continued to beat the enemy as a military fighter pilot, making sorties and destroying enemy aircraft.

The history of the creation of the book

In the "afterword" to "The Tale of a Real Man", its author, writer B. N. Polevoy, reports that everything he told is based on real events.

During the Great Patriotic War, on one of the sectors of the Bryansk Front, Pravda's war correspondent B. Polevoy met fighter pilot Alexei Maresyev, about whom he was told that he was the best pilot of the regiment. He invited the writer to spend the night in his dugout. And here, when they went to bed, something happened that terribly struck the writer:

“Something hit the floor hard. I looked around and saw something that I didn't believe myself. He left his feet on the floor. Legless pilot! Fighter pilot! A pilot who only today made six sorties and shot down two planes! It seemed absolutely incredible."

In response to the astonishment of the writer, the pilot said: “... Do you want me to tell you this whole story with my legs?”

And he began his story. “The amazing story of this man so captivated me,” the author writes, “that I tried to write it down in as much detail as possible ... Alexei Maresyev brought his story to the day when, having shot down three German planes ... he again felt full and complete pilot."

“... An unexpected confession,” says the writer, “shocked me with its simplicity and grandeur ...

Since then, I have not met Alexei Maresyev, but wherever military fate threw me, I carried with me two student notebooks, on which, even near Orel, I wrote down the extraordinary odyssey (history) of this pilot.

The history of the legless pilot could not be written and published by the author during the war. Hitler's propaganda would immediately take this fact into service and disseminate information that things are very bad in the Soviet Army, since disabled people are sent to fight against the aces of the Luftwaffe.

According to Alexei Maresyev himself, for a long time no one believed in him as a full-fledged fighter pilot. After the hospital and the sanatorium, he was sent to the Ibresinsky flight school (Chuvash ASSR) - away from Moscow, so that it would be easier to hide from the high authorities if something happened to the legless pilot. Then, after being assigned to the 63rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, the regiment commander did not release pilot Maresyev on combat missions until he, having risen into the sky as a wingman, made real feat- saved two of his comrades and destroyed two enemy aircraft.

Only after the end of the war, in the spring of 1946, when all military invalids became civilians, did the time come to process what was recorded from the words of Maresyev.

“I didn’t have time to write down a lot in my time,” the author admits in the afterword, “much was lost in memory in four years. Much, in his modesty, did not tell then Alexei Maresyev. I had to think, to add. The portraits of his friends, about which he spoke warmly and vividly that night, were erased from his memory. They had to be recreated. Not being able to strictly adhere to the facts here, I slightly changed the hero's surname and gave new names to those who accompanied him, who helped him on the difficult path of his feat.

I called the book "The Tale of a Real Man" because Alexei Maresyev is the real Soviet man."

A few years after the death of Alexei Maresyev, his son Viktor Maresyev said in an interview with the Russian press:

“Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy told me that after the war, at first he was not going to write a book about his father. But in 1946 he got to the Nuremberg trials. Walking in the evening in the park, suddenly noticed a fox in the bushes. His driver was a German - a former pilot of the Luftwaffe, who somehow reminded him of a legless pilot and a detail from his story: when Maresyev crawled east, a hungry fox followed him for several days, waiting for his death.

And the last impetus that prompted the writer to sit down for The Tale of a Real Man was the recognition at the trial of the Reichsmarschall, Nazi number two Hermann Goering. He stated that the German attack on the Soviet Union was not a crime, but a mistake by the Nazi elite, who knew the size of the Red Army, the number of tanks and aircraft and the power of Soviet military factories, but did not know the Soviet people ... "

The downed pilot Aleksey Maresyev only crawled through the forest for 18 days, making his way to his own, and the writer B. Polevoy took about the same time to create a truly talented work about his feat. "The Tale of a Real Man" was written in 19 days, immediately went to press and was soon awarded the Stalin Prize. Until 1954 alone, the total circulation of its publications amounted to 2.34 million copies. More than eighty times it was published in Russian, forty-nine - in the languages of the peoples of the USSR, thirty-nine - abroad.

After the end of the war, the story of the pilot Alexei Maresyev was picked up by Soviet propagandists. Every schoolboy knew the book of Boris Polevoy, it glorified the only hero in the whole world.

Already in 1948, according to The Tale of a Real Man, directed by A. Stolper, a film of the same name was shot Feature Film with P.P. Kadochnikov in the title role. Stolper offered to play leading role Maresyev himself, but he refused.

In 1960 Sergei Prokofiev's opera The Tale of a Real Man was staged.

Today it is quite obvious that if the journalist B. Polevoy had not met Alexei Maresyev during the war and had not written a book about him, then the front-line pilot would hardly have become so famous. During the Great Patriotic War, there were other pilots who fought without legs, but their names are completely unknown to the general public. Why does the country need so many heroes? To educate the younger generation, one positive example is enough.

It's no secret that immediately after the end of the war, the Soviet leadership quickly divided all military invalids into "real" and "fake" people. The abundance of military cripples on the streets major cities neither the authorities nor the very society that they tried to educate on the heroic example of a downed pilot were satisfied.

In 1949, Moscow, Leningrad, the capitals of the Union republics and other large cities suddenly turned out to be "closed" for the residence of military invalids - those who fought yesterday for their liberation from the German invaders. The streets were cleaned from crippled beggars, they were caught at stations and suburban trains. Those who did not have relatives who would take care of them, could not find the strength in themselves to stand on prostheses, to perform, like Maresyev, a feat of spiritual and physical rehabilitation, they were outlawed. Legless, armless, eyeless cripples were sent to where, according to the authorities, “fake” people should have been: distributed to closed homes for the disabled in a remote province, taken to remote areas of the country.

This was how the Stalinist government treated the true heroes of the war, who sacrificed too much in it. And the people? The people were silent. He saw on the screen the brave pilot Alexei Meresyev in the brilliant performance of his favorite Kadochnikov. The cinematic Meresyev danced the “lady” in front of the medical commission in order to win the right for himself, not to beg on trains, not to go to the 101st kilometer, but to beat the enemy and be called a “real person”. At that moment it seemed the only true and correct.

Here is the report of the Minister of the Interior Kruglov for 1954 (almost ten years after the war), which provides sad statistics about the poor - the disabled of the Great Patriotic War:

Report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU
on measures to prevent and eliminate begging

Secret

TO THE PRESIDIUM OF THE CC CPSU
Comrade MALENKOV G.M.
Comrade Khrushchev N.S.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR reports that, despite the measures taken, such an intolerable phenomenon as begging still continues to take place in large cities and industrial centers of the country.

Among the detained beggars, war and labor invalids make up 70%, persons who have fallen into temporary need - 20%, professional beggars - 10%, and among them able-bodied citizens - 3%.

The data presented do not indicate the actual number of beggars in the country, since many of them were detained by the police several times. So, in the city of Leningrad, 2160 beggars were detained up to 5 times, up to 30 times - more than 100 people, in the mountains. 1060 people were detained over two times in Gorky, 50 people in Stalinabad, and so on.

Social security agencies and local Soviets of Working People's Deputies do not pay due attention to the work of preventing and eliminating begging, they are badly engaged in the placement of the poor in homes for the disabled and the elderly, their employment, as well as the matter of determining their pensions and patronage.

So, from among the detained beggars for y.y. In Moscow, Leningrad and Rostov, no more than 2-3% are employed and placed in homes for the disabled and the elderly.

One of the main reasons for the unsatisfactory accommodation of the poor is the lack of a sufficient number of homes for the disabled and the elderly and boarding schools for the blind disabled, the construction of which, provided for by the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. are not completed annually. Of the 35 houses for the disabled and boarding schools, the construction of which was to be completed in 1952, as of January 1, 1954, only 4 houses were built.

In this regard, the police are forced to release the vast majority of detained beggars.

The fight against begging is also hampered by the fact that some part of the begging invalids and the elderly refuse to send them to homes for invalids, and those who are settled often leave them arbitrarily and continue to beg.

There is no law on the forced detention of such persons in homes for the disabled.

Nevertheless, the complete helplessness and unwillingness of the authorities to solve the problems of the disabled forced yesterday's front-line soldiers to become not only beggars, but also real heroes already in civilian life. Filled with kindness and optimism, Boris Polevoy's book gave hope to those who still had a chance for salvation, gave them faith in themselves. Many military invalids mastered new professions, independently rehabilitated and socially adapted, gradually turning from a burden into the breadwinners of their families.

Not too high literary merits did not prevent "The Tale of a Real Man" on long years enter the compulsory school curriculum in literature. She became a real bestseller for boys and girls, taught to love life and not give in to difficulties.

hero's fate

Almost every schoolchild, after reading B. Polevoy's story, inevitably asked himself the question: what's next? How did the fate of this "real man", practically a superman, a living legend?..

During the war, the pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Petrovich Maresyev made 86 sorties, shot down 11 enemy planes: four before being wounded and seven after being wounded.

In 1944, A. Maresyev agreed with the proposal to become an inspector-pilot and move from a combat regiment to the management of the Air Force Universities. In 1945 he served as an instructor at the headquarters of the Air Force of the Moscow Military District, was under the command of V.I. Stalin. Since 1946 - retired.

In our time, this looks ridiculous and implausible, but the writer Boris Polevoy, as it turned out, did not even receive special consent from Alexei Maresyev to write a book about him.

As already mentioned, before the release of the Tale, the author no longer interviewed his hero. He created the work, guided solely by the materials of the only meeting with the pilot in 1943 and his own imagination. For Maresyev, the appearance of The Tale of a Real Man in print was almost a surprise.

In 1946, the hero and the author met to discuss a newly published book after the fact. In one of recent interviews The former pilot admitted to journalists that he did not like everything in Polevoy's work. For example, Aleksey Petrovich always left on the writer's conscience the episode he completely invented with eating a hedgehog. During his journey through the winter forest, Alexei Maresyev did not eat any hedgehogs and did not even see them. However, the combat pilot was not a great connoisseur in the field of literature, and therefore only slightly scolded the author for his "writer's liberties":

Indeed, "to be offended" by B. Polevoy Alexey Petrovich had nothing to do. Largely thanks to his textbook "Tale", the former pilot after the war became very famous. He was constantly invited to many celebrations, meetings with schoolchildren were organized. Unlike many yesterday's veteran heroes, whose exploits were forgotten already in the 1950s, Alexei Maresyev did not drink, did not sink. On the contrary, he became a public person known throughout the world.

In 1949 he was a member of the First World Peace Congress held in Paris. In 1952 he graduated from the Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the CPSU, in 1956 he completed postgraduate studies at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU, and defended his Ph.D. thesis in history. Since September 1956, Alexei Maresyev became the executive secretary of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, in 1983 - the first deputy chairman of the committee. In this position, he worked until the last day of his life.

Retired Colonel A.P. Maresyev was awarded two orders of Lenin, orders October revolution, the Red Banner, the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor, the Order of Friendship of Peoples, the Red Star, the Badge of Honor, "For Merit to the Fatherland" 3rd degree, medals, foreign orders. He was an honorary soldier of a military unit, an honorary citizen of the cities of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Kamyshin, Orel. A minor planet in the solar system, a public foundation, youth organizations are named after him. patriotic clubs. He was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Author of the book "On Kursk Bulge» (M., 1960).

Interestingly, after the war, a disabled pilot, who showed himself excellently in air battles, did not want to be given the right to drive a car. It was not so much his all-Union fame that helped, but his extraordinary perseverance in achieving the goal. Later, when manual cars appeared (the so-called "invalids"), Maresyev continued to drive a regular car "by special permission".

In 1989 A.P. Maresyev was elected People's Deputy of the USSR.

May 18, 2001 at the Theater Russian army a gala evening was planned on the occasion of Maresyev's 85th birthday, but an hour before the start, Alexei Petrovich had a heart attack. He was taken to the intensive care unit of a Moscow clinic, where he died without regaining consciousness. The gala evening nevertheless took place, but it began with a moment of silence. A.P. was buried. Maresyev in Moscow at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Without a doubt, the ideological dissemination of the feat of Alexei Maresyev in Soviet time and the textbook gloss that covered the pages of The Tale of a Real Man played a cruel joke on the work of B. N. Polevoy.

In the post-perestroika period of “great revelations and renunciations”, the book about the Soviet pilot Maresyev was practically forgotten by the younger generation of readers. In the 1990s, when its hero was still alive, The Tale was no longer reprinted. Many independent state formations that arose in the space former USSR, hastened to immediately throw this work out of school programs, announcing true story Soviet pilot "legacy of the damned past."

Today it would be impossible and even absurd to deny the significance of this work for several generations of readers. And those of today's Russian schoolchildren who have not yet forgotten how to read and perceive anything other than commercials and dosed information in the media will appreciate it. After all, a real feat always remains a feat, no matter what ideological framework it is squeezed into, and the courage and valor of the victors of fascism in our memory has no boundaries or barriers.

A story about a real personBoris Polevoy. TodayMay 20 V BirthdayHero of the Soviet Union, legendary Soviet pilotAlexey Maresyevwe invite the citizens of the USSR to recall the feat of a real Soviet man and introduce him to the great Soviet work children, nephews and grandchildren.

One often hears the just indignation of our compatriots from all fifteen socialist republics of the Soviet Union about the dominance of lack of culture and the decline of education in our society. All this is true. However, it is in our power to instill in young people true guidelines.

A story about a real personthe eighth decade remains one of the favorite books in the country of the Soviets. And not only in ours. Progressive and progressive people all over the world turn to it with constant interest.

was published in 1946, and its first readers were those Soviet people who had just endured all the hardships, misfortunes and horrors of the Great Patriotic War on their shoulders - they endured, survived and came to Victory, because they defended the most vital and dear from fascism: his home, the Soviet Motherland, the socialist gains of the Great October Revolution. The feat of the Soviet pilot Alexei Maresyev, which Boris Polevoy told the world about, was for them one of the clearest expressions of a nationwide feat. In the "unprecedented case", an exceptional case (the pilot, who lost both feet in the first months of the war, returned to service and fought heroically in a fighter), they recognized the typical features of their time, when every Soviet person gave all his strength - to the end! - in the struggle for the freedom and independence of the socialist motherland!

Of particular importance wasA story about a real personin the first years after the war for people who experienced irreparable losses. She taught them courage, helped them endure grief, seek and find their place in a new, post-war life.

It is known that those books that correspond to their time, express the most important thing in it, the most important thing for it, remain to live for a long time, forever. This is what happened with The Tale of a Real Man.

Speaking about the reasons for the strong impact on readers of such books as The Living and the Dead by Konstantin Simonov, The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeev, Star by Emmanuil Kazakevich, Sputnik by Vera Panova, Banner Bearers by Oles Gonchar, House by the Road by Alexander Tvardovsky, "White Birch" by Mikhail Bubennov, "The Tempest" by Vilis Latsis, Boris Polevoy wrote:“Now these are already middle-aged books ... but they have not lost their charm of freshness to this day. They are read, re-read, studied, because they were written “hot on the heels of the war” and, while maintaining the immediacy of perception, the heat of feelings, experiences, they are the most exciting, soul-stirring stories about the biggest war that man has ever waged.

These words should, of course, be applied toA story about a real person. By the way, among his favorite books, Yuri Gagarin named the story of Boris Polevoy about a Soviet pilot.

When a new reader, a representative of the younger generation, opens the book of Boris Polevoy for the first time, he knows that it is based on a real human fate and a genuine military feat, that the prototype of the hero of the story, the Soviet pilot Alexei Maresyev, is the Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Maresyev, with whom Boris Polevoy, a military correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, met on the roads of war. About this meeting and about how, when and why the story was written,said in the afterword to the Tale. If the writer had published after the war only an article and materials for the leading newspaper Pravda, which he prepared during the days of his meeting with a legless pilot in the summer of 1943, then in this case he would have done an important thing: the Soviet people would have learned another heroic page from the history of the Great Patriotic War, got acquainted with one of its heroes, whose courage, courage and devotion to the socialist Fatherland are admired. However, the author understood that such a life required artistic embodiment, and it was no coincidence that he nurtured the idea of his story about the “best pilot of the regiment”, who turned out to be legless, for a long time:“How many times during the war, in the days of calm and after, wandering around the countries of liberated Europe, I took up an essay about him and each time put it off, because everything that I managed to write seemed only a pale shadow of his life!”.

During the Great Patriotic War, literature with particular force felt its main purpose - to help a person to be a Human, to reveal in him truly human properties and capabilities. The most severe test of each working USSR individually and of the entire working multinational Soviet people as a whole, faced with the need to defend themselves, their independence, their socialist way of life in a deadly battle with fascism, has given literature enormous material for the eternally topical question:what is a real person?

During the years of the Great Patriotic War, the opposition of the Soviet soldier, a fighter of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army who entered the struggle "for the sake of life on earth", for the sake of everything truly human, and a fascist who brings death with him arose in literature.

Let us recall the words from Pavel Antokolsky's poem "The Son" (1943):
My son was a member of the Komsomol!
Yours is a fascist...
My boy is human!
And yours is the executioner ...
In all battles, in pillars of continuous fire,
In the sobs of all mankind,
A hundred times dead and born again,
My son calls to your answer!

Alexei Tolstoy pointed to the "powerful theme of man" as the leading theme during the Great Patriotic War. This theme was picked up and developed by Boris Polevoy in his first post-war work of art.A story about a real persondetermined everything: from the significant title, the selection of vital material and purposeful construction - to the final chords of the fourth, last movement.

It is noteworthy that Boris Polevoy begins the story with a contrasting description of the place where the reader first meets the hero: an age-old forest rising towards a clear, frosty, vigorous day “in all its green grandeur” - and motionless “dark figures” of people who “lyed in the snow is thick, in some places on top of each other. And nearby - broken tanks - "monsters", exuding "sharp, heavy; and dangerous smells alien to this dense forest. The unnaturalness of war to the living forces of nature, to man, is shown from the first lines and runs through the entire narrative.

The first message about the hero: "a man groaned." A few lines later the wordHumanwill be filled with a specific meaning: this is the Soviet pilot Alexei Maresyev, whose plane was shot down in an unequal battle. In this battle, the best qualities of a Soviet pilot are manifested: courage and, most importantly, a sense of comradely mutual assistance and support in battle. In the dead Red Army soldiers in the forest, he also, first of all, saw comrades who "fought", forgetting about everything except what needs to be stopped, not to miss the enemy. The unity of purpose, the unity of the spirit of all Red Army soldiers, one of whom is Alexei Maresyev, will become the leitmotif of the story.

It is interesting to pay attention to how gradually this leitmotif is gaining ever deeper sound.

The first part is devoted to revealing the enormous willpower and determination of Alexei Maresyev. Caught in dense forest with broken, swollen legs, experiencing unbearable pain at every step, constantly feeling hunger, cold and mortal danger from all sides, he tirelessly walks towards his own. When reading these pages, an analogy with Jack London's story "The Love of Life" involuntarily suggests itself. The author counts on this analogy and prompts it to the reader himself, ending the first part with the doctor's remark (“Hmmm! Strong personality! Your friends tell about your adventures something absolutely incredible, Jack-London”) and Maresyev’s further thoughts on this topic. If the reader recalls the situation of the Jack London story, he will, on the basis of comparison, become more deeply aware of the spiritual motives of Maresyev's struggle for life. Many years later, Boris Polevoy will say about the hero of the story “Love for Life” and about the difference between him and Maresyev:“Sick, almost without strength, a person still conquers death. But that was the instinct of self-preservation. Maresyev struck me not with his desire to survive at all costs - after all, there is something natural and biological in this, but with a desire, passionate and irresistible, not to be aloof from the fight against fascism, the most important, which we all only breathed. That is why I so wanted to tell not only how, but also in the name of what Maresyev accomplished the feat.

That is why, tracing the path of “a hungry, sick, deadly tired man, the only one in this vast dense forest,” the writer emphasized the good spirits of this man, his joy when he heard the “calling sound” of a cannonade: he, a Soviet man, strove to join the ranks of defenders socialist motherland. After the amputation of his legs, comprehending “the whole burden of the loss,” Alexei Maresyev despaired that he would no longer be able to return “to the regiment, to aviation, to the front in general.” From heavy spiritual crisis, from a state of hopelessness he was helped out by the Soviet people around him at that time, primarily the commissar of the regiment, the Communist Bolshevik Semyon Vorobyov.

It should be noted that Boris Polevoy, showing the relationship of people during the Great Patriotic War, emphasizes that humanity is one of the main qualities Soviet people which helped them endure the ordeal. The reader is deeply moved by the scene of the meeting between Maresyev, who is losing his last strength, and the partisans. It touches the caution with which the old man, Uncle Mikhail, “as the kids called him,” lowered the Soviet pilot, who looked like a “real shkilet”. on the sled; then he thought, pulled off his "armyak, rolled it up and put it under his head." The dispute between rural women is also touching: “Who will live with Alexei?” Each is ready to give Alexei the last of their supplies, although they themselves lived in the forest, “suffered great disasters, fear from the every minute threat that the Germans would open them, starved, froze, but the collective farm,” the author emphasizes, “did not fall apart. On the contrary, the great calamities of the war united the people even more.”

Continuing this theme in the scenes of the life of the hospital, where Maresyev experienced his greatest despair and gained faith in the possibility of returning to duty again, flying again, participating in battles again, the Soviet writer introduces the image of Commissar Semyon Vorobyov into the narrative. This image helped the author to reveal main idea books: the spiritual kindness characteristic of the Bolshevik communists and revealed with special beauty and strength during the years of the Great Patriotic War was inextricably linked with the spiritual strength of the Soviet man, with his high patriotic feeling, consciousness that he was defending the socialist Motherland!

During the war years, the spiritual continuity of generations of Soviet people made itself felt. important night story commissar's sister about how, in the Civil War, in Turkestan, a squadron traveled through the hot sands on foot to the city. “And our commissar was Volodin Yakov Pavlovich. He looked flimsy, an intellectual - he was a historian ... But a strong Bolshevik. He would seem to be the first to fall, but he goes and moves all the people ... ”Commissioner Semyon Vorobyov inherited from Volodin the art of understanding people. He knows how to “pick up his own special key for everyone,” to educate them with his personal example, his love of life, his interest in everything that the Soviet people and country live by, his ideological conviction. Definitionreal manfirst sounded in the story in the description of the Commissar:A real person is buried... A Bolshevik is buried.

And Maresiev remembered this: a real person. It is better, perhaps, not to name the Commissar. And Alexei really wanted to become a real person, the same as the one who was now taken away on the “last journey”.

The pages dedicated to Commissar Semyon Vorobyov represent the ideological and culminating center of the story. They are followed by the image of the difficult path of Alexei Maresyev to his second birth - as a pilot, as a participant in air battles. A detailed demonstration of Maresyev's "painstaking work" in training the mutilated body pursues an important goal for Polevoy: in the fight against physical injury, Alexei's faith in himself, in the ability to accomplish the impossible, grew. And after this, a desire to live for people appeared, trust in the feelings of loved ones strengthened, responsiveness and gentleness arose. Boris Polevoy is not limited to a story about the service of the Soviet pilot Meresyev to the socialist Motherland, about the comradely relations of pilots who value fearlessness and the ability to always come to the rescue in time in air combat in Maresyev. The story ends on a resounding lyrical note: in a surge of joyful energy, Maresyev finally decides to write to his beloved about his misfortune and overcoming it. In the afterword, the beauty of the soul of the girl beloved by Maresyev will be revealed to the end: she had long known about the “catastrophe”, but in order to preserve the peace of mind of her beloved, to give him the opportunity to find himself again, she did not write to him about it ...

So after the war, a book was created, where the military feat of one person was a reflection of the great spiritual potential of the entire Soviet people, their humanity. However, speaking of trueMan- the defender of the socialist motherland, - and hence - about the humanistic essence of his character and deeds. Boris Polevoy could not pass by his antipode - the invader of foreign lands, the rapist, the executioner. A terrible picture of a field hospital, where the wounded soldiers and sister, a small, fragile girl, were slit by an SS man with “dexterous strokes of a knife”, makes us think about the unnatural, anti-human forces that a robber war awakens.

A story about a real personmakes it possible for the younger generation to realize at what cost the Victory was won, with what dedication it is necessary for them to study now in order to be able to liberate and restore the USSR!

For foreign readershelps to understand the Soviet people, that “true military potential of the Soviets”, which no fascist agents could reveal and which, in addition to a large number of guns, aircraft and tanks, ensured the great Victory, contributed to the liberation from the fascist invasion not only of Soviet land, but also of Western Europe .

I've known Maresyev since school.
With the Hero of the sky and war.
His life was taken as a basis -
Union, Motherland sons!

Read Polevoy's story.
The class paused in anticipation.
Lesha wanted to see the living,
And the world Maresyev learned.

I learned both the feat and the Hero.
Alexei fought for peace.
Always ready to fight with scum
He shot down fascist executioners!

Yak knocked him out near Russa,
And the plane crashed into the woods.
Silen Maresiev, Soviet, brave,
From the ashes, the wounded rose again!

All eighteen crawled through the forest,
Hungry, cold, terrible days.
Our pilot could not surrender to the enemy.
Friends and Motherland are the most important!

Thanks to the villagers
Alyosha was helped to reach.
Frozen legs to the knee,
But the doctors saved his life!

Hero Maresiev - on prostheses.
Learn to walk again.
He does not find a place for himself.
Alyosha wants revenge on the enemy!

He was able to walk, fly through the sky
And beat enemy planes.
Our people celebrate the Victory.
To be a hero in a peaceful life!

Worthy of the title of Hero.
And never forget the war.
With victory he left the battle,
He is a real person!

A story about a real person- the prototype of the hero of the story Alexei Meresyev was a really existing person - the Soviet pilot Alexei Maresyev, Hero of the Soviet Union. His plane was shot down in an air battle in the Great Patriotic War, the pilot was seriously injured, both legs were amputated in the hospital, but he, having shown persistence and remarkable strength will, returned to the ranks of active pilots.
Work A story about a real personimbued with humanism, internationalism and Soviet patriotism. Awarded the Stalin Prize.
More than eighty times the book was published in Russian, forty-nine - in the languages of the peoples of the USSR, thirty-nine - abroad.

“A very Soviet story that won, including the whole world, which accepted it enthusiastically. Until 1954 alone, the total circulation of her publications amounted to 2.34 million copies. The story about a real man was published abroad about forty times. And about a hundred times - in Russian. She enjoyed great popularity in the USSR and far beyond its borders. And not only because she talked about the legendary feat of the Soviet pilot. And not only because it has become a textbook of courage. (Boris Polevoy vividly showed how one can live in the most lifeless conditions. Moreover, how one can survive in the most lifeless conditions. And even more so, how to remain a Human in the most inhuman conditions). But, above all, because everyone, every person has a chance to live, even when there is no chance. Especially if you know why you live ... "- Elena Sazanovich wrote in the essay "The Tale of a Real Man Boris Polevoy" ("Youth" No. 03, 2013).

Alexey Maresyev(May 20, 1916, Kamyshin, Saratov province, Russian Empire - May 18, 2001, Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union) - Soviet pilot. Hero of the Soviet Union (1943).
Due to a severe wound during the Great Patriotic War, both legs were amputated. However, despite the disability, the pilotreturned to the sky and flew with prostheses. In total, during the war he made 86 sorties, shot down 10 enemy aircraft: three before being wounded and seven after.
Alexey Maresyev is the prototype of the hero of Boris Polevoy's book "The Tale of a Real Man" by Alexei Meresyev (the writer changed only one letter in his surname).

Boris Polevoy(real name - Kampov; March 17, 1908, Moscow, Russian Empire - July 12, 1981, Moscow, RSFSR,) - Soviet writer, prose writer, screenwriter, journalist, war correspondent.Hero of Socialist Labor. Laureate of two Stalin Prizes of the second degree (1947, 1949). Laureate International Prize Mira (1959). Boris Field communist, in the CPSU since 1940.

The Great Patriotic War(June 22, 1941 - May 9, 1945) - an armed conflict between the USSR and Nazi Germany and its European allies (Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia) that treacherously invaded its territory, which relied on the industrial and human potential of all conquered territories, the support of a large number of collaborators, as well as significant assistance from countries that formally adhered to neutrality. In factwas part of World War II. According to the strategic goals of Nazi Germany, the criteria for the number of units of the Wehrmacht and their allies participating in the war against the Soviet Union, as well as the losses they suffered, the Great Patriotic War is main part World War II: about 80% of all units of the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front - German losses on the Soviet-German front amounted to about 75% of all irretrievable combat losses of Nazi Germany, the Wehrmacht and its allies lost 80% of all combat-ready units, 607 divisions were defeated. Waging Nazi Germany againstThe war of annihilation led to the fact that the losses of the civilian population of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War exceeded the total losses of all countries of the anti-Hitler coalition.

The Great Patriotic Warended completevictory Workers' and Peasants' Red ArmyUSSR and the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany.

Soviet literature- aggregate literary works published on the territory of the RSFSR and other Soviet socialist republics.includes, in addition to Russian, the literature of the peoples of the USSR in 88 languages (according to 1987 data).
Soviet literature includes the obligatory signs of party membership, nationality and socialist realism.
The article “Soviet Literature” from the “Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary” (M., 1987) indicates: “Leninist principles of party and nationality”, “based on the method of socialist realism”, “socialist in content, diverse in national forms, internationalist in spirit” , "the emergence of a qualitatively new social and international community - the Soviet people."