Sergey Zalygin

Sergey Pavlovich Zalygin (Russian: Серге́й Павлович Залыгин; December 6, 1913 in Durasovka, Ufa Governorate, Russian Empire – April 19, 2000 in Moscow) was a Soviet writer and environmentalist, the first non-Communist Party editor-in-chief of the monthly literary magazine Novy Mir (1986–1998).

He was born on December 6, 1913, in Durasovka village (now Sukharevka).

His father, Pavel Ivanovich Zalygin, came from a peasant family of the Tambov Province, studied at the University of Kiev, from which he was expelled and exiled to the Ufa Province for revolutionary activity.

Zalygin's mother, Lyubov Timofeevna Zalygina (Abkin), was a daughter of a bank employee from the town of Krasny Kholm, Tver Province.

She studied at the Women's Higher Courses in Saint Petersburg.

His childhood was spent in the Ural mountains, at the Satka factory.

In 1920, the family moved to Barnaul (in Western Siberia), where he graduated from a seven-year school, and, later, the Barnaul Agricultural College.

The novel describes the catastrophe of the peasant life at the turn of the 1930s, during the collectivization period.

"For the first time in the Soviet censored press, the truth about collectivization was told, for the first time collectivization was shown not in the canonical Sholokhov interpretation, but as a tragedy of the Russian peasants, and even more – as a national catastrophe".

Official critics accused Zalygin of distorting the "concrete historical truth" and of "ideological and artistic inability".

The artistic significance of the novel was highly esteemed by the public.

The poet Anatoly Naiman described his impressions upon reading On the Irtysh some thirty years after its publishing in these words: "The day when I read the novel was separated from the events, which I had perceived as a living tragedy from my youth, by more than seventy years....The tragedy did not disappear, did not weaken, it simply moved to the special area reserved for tragedies. I read On the Irtysh as if I were reading Sophocles or Aeschylus".

He worked as an agronomist in the Tashtypsky district farm union of Khakassia in 1931, where he witnessed the tragic events of collectivization.

In 1933–1939, Zalygin studied at the Omsk State Agrarian Institute at the Department of Irrigation and Reclamation.

While a student he was influenced by the works of Russian geographer and meteorologist A. I. Voeykov and V. I. Vernadsky.

During World War II, he worked as an engineer-hydrologist at the Salekhard Hydrometeorological Station in the Siberian Military District.

He began to write prose fiction in the 1940s.

His first book was published in 1941 (Short Stories, Omsk).

After his demobilization, Zalygin returned to the Department of Irrigation and Reclamation at the Omsk Agrarian Institute, where in 1948 he defended his thesis on irrigation systems designing and became department chair.

Zalygin began to write while being a school student.

While studying at the Omsk State Agrarian Institute, he worked as a reporter for a local newspaper.

In 1952, he was first published in the Novy Mir monthly (Vtoroye deistvie [The Second Act], 1952, No. 9), for which he later submitted a series of essays, Vesnoi nyneshnego goda (This Spring, 1954, No. 8) about the interference of authorities in the life of a peasant.

This publication brought fame to Zalygin and drew him close to the magazine's editor-in-chief, A. Tvardovsky.

In 1955, Zalygin moved to Novosibirsk and was mainly occupied by his literary work, although not abandoning the science.

In these years, Zalygin, along with short stories, produced works of larger forms – a satirical novel Svideteli (Witnesses, 1956) and Tropy Altaya (Paths in the Altai, 1962), in which he described his impressions of the biological expedition to the Altai mountains.

His biographer Igor Dedkov wrote that Tropy Altaya was "an introduction to the philosophy...on which all the main books of Zalygin were built".

By the end of the 1960s, Zalygin moved to Moscow and switched exclusively to writing.

In 1964, Na Irtyshe (On the Irtysh) was published in Novy Mir.

In 1967, Solyonaya Pad’ (Salt Ravine), a novel about the events of the civil war in Siberia, based on various historical documents, which Zalygin collected for several years working in the archives, was published.

In it, the image of a fanatic-communist is opposed by the main character – the peasant leader Meshcheryakov (his prototype was the partisan commander E. M. Mamontov).

In 1968–1972, he led a prose workshop at the Literary Institute of A. M. Gorky.

In 1969, he became the secretary of the board of the Writers' Union of the RSFSR; in 1986–1990 he entered the secretariat of the Writers' Union of the USSR.

From 1970, after the dispersal of the editorial office of Novy Mir and the resignation of Tvardovsky, and until 1986, Zalygin refused to be published in the magazine out of solidarity.

He signed a letter written by a group of Soviet writers to the editorial of the Pravda newspaper on August 31, 1973, denunciating Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov; he was also one of the people who condemned the Metropol almanach in 1979.

In 1973, two of Zalygin's more experimental works were published: the psychological novel Yuzhno-Amerikanski Variant (The South American Variant) and the science fiction novel Os’ka smeshnoy mal’chik (Oska, the Funny Boy).

In the novel Komissiya (Commission, 1975) Zalygin once again describes the period of the civil war in Siberia.

The following, most ambitious, novel, Posle buri (After the Storm, 2 vol., 1982–1985), is set in the 1920s.

It involves not peasants, but the byvshiye ('used-to-be') – the intellectuals who were exiled or fled from the Soviet authorities to the Siberian hinterland.

Dedkov described the originality of this novel as "not so much a reproduction of characters...but of various individual or group 'philosophies'. This is an attempt to recreate the 'ideological landscape' of the Soviet Russia of the twenties, an attempt to understand the life of human thought during this period".

At the same time, Zalygin was never a member of the Communist Party, and, in 1986, became the first non-party affiliated editor-in-chief of a Soviet literary magazine.