My diamond crown. Kataev V.P.

“Pamphlet memoir romance”, “Autobiographical story”, “White-retained memoirs”, “Diary of memory”, “Roman-mystery”-such is a far from a full series of characteristics of the book by Valentin Kataev “My Diamond Crown” (1978), the genre of which is the genre of which The author himself was difficult to determine. From the very first pages, the reader is on the territory of the “strange Republic of geniuses, prophets, genuine poets and mediocre poems, artisans and losers”, in the colorful atmosphere of the literary life of Moscow, Odessa and Kharkov of the 1920s. , next to Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Yesenin, Bagritsky, Olesh, Zoshchenko, Ilf and Petrov and other writers of the time that are bred under the conditional nicknames-masks and are with the author in a difficult relationship of friendship (because friendship is not between poets is not What is different than enmity, turned inside out ”). This biased, emphasized and even defiantly biased view of his own youth, at the time performed by sharp contrasts, at people who rotated in the “magnetic field of the revolution”, in the release of the book, generated a string of contradictory reviews; He retains considerable interest today - as a manifestation of "free flight of imagination based on true incidents."