Derzhavin, or the collapse of the empire. Dombrovsky Yu.O.

Yuri Dombrovsky (1909–1978) - a prose writer, a poet who has gone through several arrests, camps, links and not broken. The author of the novels “The Monkey comes for his skull”, “Guardian of antiquities”, “Faculty of unnecessary things”, “Birth of the mouse.”

“Derzhavin, or the collapse of the empire” is the first and unfinished novel published in 1937– 1938, which now seems impossible for those years, in the journal Literary Kazakhstan. The young second lieutenant Gabriel Derzhavin (not yet a famous poet and not important state face) should catch the rebellious convict Pugachev, called the name of the deceased emperor. Derzhavin Dombrovsky does not want to be an executioner, but he is not going to retreat from the existing order, he is “a man of rules” and sees that “treason around”.

“But the rebels,” said Derzhavin, “but the blood that flooded the earth, but fires, gallows?” Did you know what you were doing? You, as an educated person, how could this blinded crowd with him? ”

“ Dombrovsky looked into the abyss of the ratio of fate and the poet, genius and villainy. ” “Derzhavin” is not a novelized biography, but an energetic debut, replete with acute situations and pierced by a current of high tension. ”

Yuri Davydov