Alexander Grin was an average writer and very unhappy person. The lot that befell him was a short and difficult life filled with misfortune, hard work, and poverty. Beginning in childhood, he tried to protect himself from the banality and squalor that surrounded him, escaping into a world of make-believe. At first he relied on the fantasy worlds of others, but soon he started producing his own.
His father was a Polish nobleman who, as punishment for taking part in his country’s liberation movement, had been exiled to the Russian North, where he eked out a paltry existence. His mother worked as a midwife and administered the smallpox vaccine. The childhood of Alexander Grin (or rather Grinevsky, his original surname) was spent amidst disease, poverty, and animosity. “I did not know a normal childhood,” he recalled. “In moments of irritation, for willfulness or poor schoolwork, they called me ‘swineherd’ and destined me for a life of groveling at the feet of the prosperous and successful.”
Devouring one book after another, the boy dreamed of distant lands, of ships that would take him across the ocean waves. As soon as he was old enough, he tried to break free of his stifling surroundings. For a while he even worked on a ship, but he never managed to make it to distant lands. He claimed to have spent time in Alexandria, but who knows? Perhaps this was one of his tales. As he told it, upon returning to the ship after taking a walk through the city, he thought up a story about a beautiful Arab girl who gave him a flower with the words “salaam alaikum.” He also tried to convince his relatives that he had run off into the forest to join up with bandits.
Later came the hardships of military service, participation in revolutionary propaganda, arrests, escapes, exiles. The revolution probably held the appeal of fantasy for Grin – a dream about a bright, happy life. But when this dream became a reality it brought with it bloodshed, civil war, famine, executions, and devastation. By then Grin had already ceased his own revolutionary activities and turned to creating his own worlds.
The pages of his naïve stories are populated by people with foreign names that fit them like poorly tailored suits, living in far-off lands, cobbled together from the author’s literary explorations rather than first-hand experience. There is something about Grin’s lonely and vulnerable protagonists, always in search of love and usually with surnames beginning with the letter G – Golts, Gray, and even one beauty from the novel She Who Runs the Waves (Бегущая по волнам, 1928) with the rather odd name of Frazey Grant – that reminds one of children playing at princess or pirate. Gradually these distant lands borrowed from the books of others ceased to satisfy Grin and he began to create his own country. The cities of sunny Crimea, so different from the hungry and cold Vyatka [now Kirov], where he spent his childhood, were transformed into the mysterious Zurbagan, Liss, and Gel-Gyu (or perhaps, Gel-Gough), where ships were moored from far-off places and hardy, jovial sailors wandered the harbor.
Grin wrote his best known work, Scarlet Sails (Алые паруса), in the early 1920s, in the hungry and tormented city of Petrograd. It is the story of a lonely girl named Assol who believes a story she was told that one day a handsome prince would sail to her in a boat with scarlet sails. Everyone makes fun of Assol and her naïve faith makes her the target of mockery and humiliation, but of course in the end a young, rich, and handsome captain named Gray (naturally) falls in love with the girl and adorns his ship with sails of scarlet silk. The contrast between this book and the cruel, harsh times is striking. Comparing the text with the year of its publication, 1923, we can understand Grin’s longing to remove himself from the reality that surrounded him. The following year the writer, who was ill with tuberculosis, left for Crimea, where he lived out the few years remaining to him in poverty and obscurity.
After the death of Alexander Grin his books ceased being published and later became the targets of harsh criticism. Obviously they were not the sort of literature the land of the Soviets needed. The Khrushchev era meant not only the rehabilitation of those who had been illegally arrested and the ability to criticize Stalin, but also the return of a literature and art that better reflected the taste of ordinary people. The iron robots who had populated the books, films, and plays of the Stalin era, characters who placed the social above the personal and were only interested in girls or guys who over-fulfilled their work quotas, gave way to pure and naïve dreamers longing for the simple, honest life. The protagonists of the late fifties and sixties were romantics unwilling to compromise, but now not in the struggle to help their factory flourish, but in the fulfillment of their own dreams. It is no accident that this was a time when the profession of geologist took on a poetic coloration, representing a life in the distant North, in the forest – a “genuine” life of hard but honest toil.
For the same reason, this became the epoch of Grin. His fantasies offered escape from real Soviet life, but a permitted escape. Scarlet Sails began to be read again and was even studied in the classroom. The 1961 movie by director Alexander Ptushko, in which the lead roles were played by the attractive, young, and wildly popular Anastasia Vertinskaya and Vasily Lanovoy, completely transformed this naïve story into a cult classic. In truth, it is hard to know what Grin would have made of the appearance of cafes by the name of “Assol” or “Scarlet Sails” in every out-of-the-way little town. How did the dirty tables and beer fit in with his dreams? Would he have liked the countless little boats with scarlet sails produced as souvenirs or the references to Assol or Zurbagan in popular songs? What would he have made of the fact that tourists in Crimea can now walk along “Grin Way,” retracing the path he liked to wander in solitude? It is hard to say.
A few decades on, it appeared that Alexander Grin was all but forgotten. There were probably still a few classrooms where aging teachers assigned their pupils Scarlet Sails to read, and occasionally the 1961 film was shown on television. Visitors to Theodosia who had nothing better to do visited the Grin Museum. It seemed that time had put things in their proper place. Scarlet Sails is a nice, sweet, mediocre book, the sort that could only be loved by those for whom a fairy tale with a happy ending raises the hope of a pure and happy life. And yet there are recent signs that Grin may be making yet another comeback. There is a 2007 film version of She Who Runs the Waves and a Ukrainian remake of Scarlet Sails appears to be currently in production. Since 2000, there has been a literary prize named for Grin (for best children’s and young adult literature) awarded by the Union of Writers and his hometown. Perhaps yet another generation will find refuge from reality with the young dreamer Assol.
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