Scarlet Sails: A Phantasmagoria

Alexander Stepanovich Grin 1880–1932 - an outstanding Russian prose writer and poet, a representative of neo-romanticism. Grin is the pseudonym of the writer, his real surname is Grinevsky. He was born in the family of a Polish nobleman and a... Russian nurse, in the Vyatka province. He learned to read at the age of 6, and his first favorite book - Gulliver's Travels by Swift - shaped the consciousness of the future writer: his love for the sea and for fantasy. After studying at the Vyatka school, 16-year-old Grinevsky went to sea as a sailor, to Odessa, but he did not find romance there and began to wander - he was a fisherman, laborer, lumberjack, gold miner, miner, soldier, and even a revolutionary Socialist-Revolutionary. After serving time in prison and escaping from it, in 1906 Grin began to write; in his short life he became the author of four hundred works. Already in his second collection of short stories, the upcoming Grin the storyteller with his unique style is noticeable. He is significantly influenced by acquaintances with A. Tolstoy, L. Andreev, V. Bryusov, A. Kuprin. In 1919, having been recruited into the Red Army, Grin contracts typhus. With the assistance of Maxim Gorky, he manages to get an academic stipend and a room in the House of Arts, where he lives as a gloomy recluse, but it is then that the famous phantasmagoria Scarlet Sails is born - a bright tale of an ordinary miracle, born in a cold and hungry Petrograd in winter. The tale was published in 1923. In the same decade, Grin wrote the novel The Golden Chain, a reminiscence of a boy's dream of seeking wonders and finding them, and a new masterpiece Running on the Waves, which is barely published. Grin does not accept the revolution, its violence and madness, and the new century also poorly accepts Grin. The era rushes past. I am not needed by it - as I am. And I cannot be anyone else. And I do not want to be. Indeed, from 1930 onwards, Soviet censorship, with the explanation that you do not merge with the era, banned the reprints of Grin's works. The writer and his wife, to whom he dedicated Scarlet Sails, led a semi-starved existence until Grin's death at the age of 52. Critics still cannot classify the works of Alexander Grin into any literary tradition: he is neither a fantasist nor a realist, neither a symbolist nor a romantic, but all of this together and in a completely original style.