Повестта на Юрий Кримов Танкер „Дербент“ принадлежи към най-хубавите произведения на съветската литература. Това е вдъхновен разказ за пламенните години на първите петилетки с техния нов патос, нова романтика.
Историята на танкера „Дербент“ е история на процеса, извършил се в съзнанието на хората от екипажа, идейният и морален подем. Този процес преминава и старшият механик, комунистът Басов, който в своите творчески и човешки устреми увлича след себе си целия екипаж и става душата, водачът на танкера.
Скромният, тих Басов успява да увлече и своята любима и да превърне отношенията помежду им — неопределени, колебливи — в голяма, възвишена любов. Муся, жената на Басов, познава и женската гордост — заради това, че нейният любим е истински човек.
Soviet novelist Yury Solomonovich Beklemishev. He Graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1930.
He volunteered for the Red Army and joined the Communist Party in response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. He was a military journalist at the front and was with the Soviet 26th Army on the Southwestern Front when invading German forces encircled almost the entire front in the Battle of Kiev in August – September 1941. Beklemishev was killed near Kiev on 20 September 1941.
Stahanovculuk; kömür madeninde Stahanov isimli madencinin bir vardiyada verimini 14 kat aşması sonucu ortaya çıkıyor. Krimov, gemide çalışırken Stahanovist hareketle karşılaşıyor ve Kızıl Tanker'i yazıyor. Aydınlatıcı bir yazı linkte mevcut.
A great example of a great genre (socialist realism).
This story doesn't have one central character, but centres on the whole crew of a tanker ferrying oil across the Caspian sea. It describes their world vividly, though sometimes a bit too heavily (the author worked on one of these ships himself and unless you want to do a LOT of googling, a lot of the technical scenes won't make sense to landlubbers).
I still found myself having to google a couple of terms to understand what was going on, but this book centres around the Stakhanovite movement, named after the hyper-productive miner Alexei Stakhanov, where workers were encouraged to work harder and streamline productivity at work for the good of the entire people, and replace capitalist competition with a more humanistic socialist emulation.
The characters vary widely and are well fleshed out: hard bitten wharfies, mechanics, captains, radiomen and women are all represented (It's undeniably refreshing to read a novel from the 1930s with this amount of diversity in its protagonists). They all battle their own demons but come together to find a sense of usefulness and self-worth in their work. This work's portrayal of socialism and what can be achieved when workers put their differences aside and work together is well done.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is a book of its time, and that time is 1938 in the Soviet Union. Amidst scenes that feel ripped from everyday life there are frequent episodes of political education at work, workers making collective decisions about what action to take, and other such weird episodes. These hammer home the sincerity of the authors intentions. He lived in this world, he saw this process enter the workplace and revolutionise it and he was inspired to write a novel about it (he went on two years later to join the communist party before being killed by the Nazis in WWII).
Overall, other than the technicality of some scenes on the tanker and the (at times) clunky translation I really enjoyed this book, and I definitely recommend it, especially to people curious about a local perspective of life and work in the USSR under Stalin
Not my favorite book but interesting given its context (socialist realism); story became easier to follow once I familiarized myself with all the characters