Alexander Dovzhenko - Ukrainian screenwriter, director: biography, creativity

Dovzhenko Alexander Petrovich had a huge influence on Soviet cinema. His name is the studio for the production of films. But he was not only a director and a playwright. In his native land, in Ukraine, he is also known as a writer, poet and publicist. Dovzhenko tried his powers in the fine arts. But the greatest success was achieved in the field of film drama. He wrote plays, stories and novels in the style of socialist realism.

Alexander Dovzhenko had a difficult destiny, which we will discuss in this article. Promised by the Soviet authorities, a laureate of two Stalin prizes and a People's Artist of the RSFSR, he had in the past experience of fighting on the other side of the barricades with the Red Guards. A few people knew about this fact. But most educated people in the Ukrainian SSR read his "opus Magnum" - "Enchanted Desna". And his most epic work in the field of cinema was the film "Earth".

Childhood

According to the entry in the metric book of the Soborno-Trinity Church in the town of Sosnitsa (now the district center of the Chernigov Region, Ukraine), Alexander Dovzhenko was born on August 29, 1894 in Vyunischa Farm. According to the new style, this corresponds to 10 September.

Father and mother were illiterate peasants. The father of the future director, Pyotr Semenovich, was a descendant of Poltava chumaks who settled in Sosnica approximately in the middle of the eighteenth century. The genealogical roots of the Dovzhenko family can be traced back to the 1760s. It is known that the great-grandfather of the writer, Taras Grigoryevich, was a great storyteller. This gift was inherited and little Sashko.

The family owned a large plot of land, but lived poorly, because the soil was infertile. Of the fourteen children born before working age, only three survived: Sashko himself, his brother Trifon and Sister Polina. Frequent deaths crashed into the memory of the director. "We always had a funeral and weeping in our house," he later wrote. And about the poetic soul of his mother, he said: "She was born for songs, but she cried all her life, seeing off her children forever."

Training

At the primary school in Sosnica, Alexander Dovzhenko showed excellent results and a desire for knowledge. Because the father decided to continue training his son. He sold the seventh part of his land so that Sashko could get an education in the primary school, and then in 1911 enter the pedagogical institute in Glukhov. This young Dovzhenko school was elected not because he wanted to become a teacher, but because they gave a scholarship of one hundred and twenty rubles a year. At the institute, the future writer got acquainted with Ukrainian literature, which was banned in this Russified part of the empire. After graduation, Dovzhenko was sent to Zhitomir to teach.

Writer and his time

The beginning of the First World War, Alexander Dovzhenko, whose brief biography is described in this article, took as a hurray-patriot. He enthusiastically threw the soldiers who were going to war with flowers and only a few years later began to look at the returnees from the front with "shame and longing". In the same period, Dovzhenko is approaching the Ukrainian national liberation movement.

The February Revolution of 1917, he also takes very enthusiastically. Later disappointment in it he describes succinctly: "I entered the revolution in the wrong door". When the civil war broke out, Dovzhenko volunteered for the army of the UPR, and together with the Third Serdyutsky Regiment stormed the Kiev Arsenal. Eleven years later, the director will depict these events in the film, saying that he himself took part in them from the part of the Black Haidamaks. With the advent of Skoropadsky, Dovzhenko retreats to Zhitomir. Returning to Kiev, he becomes a listener of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts.

"Red" period of biography

Already in the twenties, Alexander Dovzhenko disappointed in national-bourgeois ideas. Acquaintance with the writer Vasily Blakytny led him into the world of Marxism. At least, the director himself wrote this in his 1939 autobiography. He joined the ranks of the Borotbists. Members of this party then joined the CP (b) of Ukraine. This political affiliation allowed Dovzhenko to occupy prominent posts: the secretary of the Kiev department of education, the head of the department of arts. He worked in the Plenipotentiary of the Ukrainian SSR in Poland (1921) and the Trade Mission of the Ukrainian Republic in Germany. His stay in Berlin artist Dovzhenko used to take lessons from the expressionist Willy Haeckel. In Germany, the artist-diplomat married Varvara Krylova. But, as it turned out, being a Borotbist was a black stigma for the new government. Dovzhenko is recalled to Ukraine and deprived of his party membership card.

The world of cinema

Since 1923, Dovzhenko settled in Kharkov, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine. With the help of V. Blakytny he is arranged as a cartoonist in the newspaper "Vesti VUTSVK", and also illustrates books (in particular, "Blue echelons" by Peter Panch). During this period, he closely aligned with the literary circle "Garth", which was focused on cinema.

Alexander Dovzhenko, whose films will find admirers much later, had neither education nor experience in directing. Nevertheless, he begins working at a film factory in Odessa. One of his first works was a frank agitation "The Red Army" and the painting "Behind the Forest".

Dovzhenko is also trying as a screenwriter. In this field, he creates a play for children called "Vasya the Reformer."

On the set of "Berry of Love" Dovzhenko meets Danila Demutsky, and this tandem of the director with the operator is set for many years. Together they create many interesting tapes.

Dovzhenko: Filmography

The first work that received recognition was Zvenigora. In this 1928 painting, the master combined the lyrics and satire with the revolutionary epic. The film "Earth" (1930) almost immediately after the release was withdrawn from the hire.

But the picture "Ivan" (1932) brought him closer to Stalin. They correspond, a little later the director receives an audience with the dictator. In 1939, Dovzhenko, on the direct orders of Stalin, removed the "ordered" film "Shchors." For this tape, the director immediately received the highest award.

Since 1934, Dovzhenko settled in Moscow and paid much attention to literary creativity. During the Second World War, he filmed several documentary films, wrote essays and articles.

Opal

The proximity to power (especially to Stalin) has the opposite side. In 1943, Dovzhenko wrote the script for the film "Ukraine on fire." However, quite unexpectedly at the Politburo meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B) this work was defamed. The script received an extremely negative response from Stalin.

In 1944, director Alexander Dovzhenko conceived a lyrical film "Life in Bloom." As if in vain, the authorities demanded that he remake the picture to suit ideological demands. Dovzhenko tried as best he could. As a result, the screen came out frankly a weak film called "Michurin", full of propaganda templates.

Even more sad fate befell the last work of the director. The state order "Farewell America!" Was conceived on the motives of the work of the defector from the States in the USSR Annabella Bükar. When the shooting approached the final stage, an order came from the Kremlin to stop work on the picture.

Death in a foreign land

The first heart attack was received by Alexander Dovzhenko during the creation of Michurin. At the end of his life he taught at VGIK. He dreamed of returning to Ukraine, but the authorities did not give him permission to do so.

Dovzhenko conceived an epochal work - to write a novel "Golden Gate". Also, in his creative plans, he was to write a screenplay of the poem "The Poem about the Sea." On the first day of the film, he died of a heart attack. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.