Scarlet Sails

Alexander Stepanovich Grin (1880-1932) was an outstanding Russian prose writer and poet, a representative of neo-romanticism. Grin is a pseudonym of the writer, his real surname is Grinevsky. He was born in a 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 beloved book - "Gulliver's Travels" by Swift - shaped the consciousness of the future writer: his love for the sea and for fantasy. After studying at a Vyatka school, 16-year-old Grinevsky became a sailor in Odessa, but did not find romance there and began to wander - he was a fisherman, a laborer, a lumberjack, a gold miner, a miner, a soldier, and even a revolutionary Socialist-Revolutionary. After serving time in prison and escaping from it, Grin began to write in 1906; during his short life, he became the author of four hundred works. In his second collection of stories, the forthcoming Grin-the-fairy-tale writer with his unique style is already noticeable. His acquaintances with A. Tolstoy, L. Andreyev, V. Bryusov, and A. Kuprin have a significant influence on him. In 1919, drafted into the Red Army, Grin fell ill with typhus. With the assistance of Maxim Gorky, he managed to obtain an academic stipend and a room in the "House of Arts", where he lived as a gloomy recluse, but it was then that the famous fairy tale "Scarlet Sails" was born - a bright story about an ordinary miracle, born in the cold and hungry Petrograd. The story was published in 1923. In this same decade, Grin wrote the novel "Golden Chain" ("memories of a boy's dream, seeking wonders and finding them") and a new masterpiece "Running on Waves", which was barely published. Grin did not accept the revolution, its violence and madness, and the new century also poorly accepted Grin. "The era rushes past. I am not needed by it - as I am. And I cannot be someone else. And I do not want to be." And indeed, since 1930, Soviet censorship, with the explanation "you do not merge with the era", prohibited 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 творчество 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.