(22.01.1928 – 26.10.2001)
Proskurin Petr Lukich (22.01.1928, Kositsy settlement, Bryansk region – October 26, 2001, Moscow). He grew up in a peasant family. When the fascists took their native places, Proskurin’s father became a village headman. Later, he retreated with the Germans. After the liberation of the Bryansk region, our mother and mother were hurriedly hurrying to the shooting. Saving Proskurin from death accidentally passing by the head of the district. After the war he worked on the collective farm. In 1950 he was drafted into air defense forces. Almost the entire service was held in the Moscow region of Reutovo. Then, under a pseudonym, Pavel Rosin published the first (albeit very weak) poems in the district newspaper Red Warrior. After his demobilization in 1955, he went first to his aunt in Grozny. But in the south, he never got accustomed, so he soon enlisted in Kamchatka, where he turned the steering wheel for three years in the northern logging
enterprises. In 1957, on the way to Bryansk, he stopped in Khabarovsk, where he accidentally got the editorial office of the journal Far East. It is evident that this was a sign from on high. The fact is that Proskurin returned home not with empty hands: in the suitcase lay papers with the texts of several short stories and drafts of the novel. The first reader of manuscripts was Sergei Rosly. According to his patronage, one of the stories – “The Price of Bread” appeared in 1958 on the pages of the newspaper “Pacific Star”. But Rosly considered that Proskurin must abandon everything, first of all, to finish the novel. In Khabarovsk, six months later celebrities from Moscow magazines waited. As Rosly thought, Proskurin’s manuscript will be in the vein. So it turned out. Dementiev, representing in Khabarovsk the interests of the “New World”, admitted that for his journal the proskurinic composition is still not reaching, but local publishers may even be interested in it. And already in 1960 in Khabarovsk readers received the first book of Proskurin. It was called “Deep
Wounds” and told about the partisan movement in the Bryansk region. Naturally, the author in this work omitted a lot of things. He was afraid to tell the whole truth about his father until his death. While the publishers were typing and making the first novel, Proskurin finished the second in black. It was already a book about the life of Kamchatka lumberjacks “Roots are exposed in the storm”. Moscow publishers immediately became interested in it. The novel was released in 1962. But now the writer heard not only praise. G. Brovman began to smash most of all. Nevertheless, in the same year of 1962 the writer was admitted to the Higher Literature in Moscow. Two years later, after completing the courses, he left for Orel, where he lived until 1968. In Orel, Proskurin conceived his main novels about Zakhar Deriugin, which ultimately resulted in the trilogy “Fate” (1972), “Your Name” (1977) and “Renunciation” (1987-1990). In the early 1980s, Proskurin wrote three novels: “In Old Rakits,” “Midday Dreams,” and “Black Birds,” in which the writer vividly demonstrated how the crisis exacerbated the public consciousness. In perestroika, almost every article Proskurina caused a flurry of responses. He was the first to report an abnormal situation with “thick” magazines, which, at some point lost any interest in the current litprocess, were carried away by the republishing of emigrant works and archival publications. Proskurin compared this infatuation with necrophilia. Naturally, liberal criticism immediately rebuked the writer in aggressive ignorance. Although the share of truth in the thoughts of Proskurin, of course, was. Later, at the outset of perestroika, the writer was surprised why suddenly the press began to feel embarrassed by the words “Communist”. It became clear later that the top of the party, foreseeing the collapse of the then dominant ideology, was preparing its own airfields and tried to impose a different vocabulary on society. The wrath of ultraradicals was also prompted by Proskurin’s arguments about Stalin in 1988. Proskurin then said: “In literature and art, it is now fashionable to refer to the figure of Stalin, but my conviction, for such colossal figures as Stalin, should be taken by people of great artistic talent, such as Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, only then can artists in the tragic, destructive personality of Stalin to reveal creative moments for time and to see in parallel all those tendencies, “” Book Review “, 1988, January 22. In 1995, Proskurin published the novel” The Seventh Watch. “According to Nikolai Fed,” in the “Seventh Watchman” closely intertwined, mixed powerful streams of realistic and fantastic, forming phantasmagoria. It is here that the author tries to reveal the deep-seated reasons for the hostility of the rulers of all stripes standing over the Russian people to the word “Russian” and the special, almost zoological hatred of a diverse literary brethren who chose the Russian language to ensure their costly and voracious life, the word “Russian”. The last novel of the writer was the book “The Number of the Beast”. Hero of Socialist Labor (1988). Laureate of the State Prize of Russia (1974) and State Prize of the USSR (1979).
