Once upon a time at Pirogovka...

Opposite our dacha, two plots were empty for a long time. Then on one of them, which is to the left, the owners appeared. More precisely, the hostesses: one is elderly, the other is middle-aged, about the same age as me. They surrounded the site with bars and built a small, just a toy, dwelling. The most unusual: they painted it in bright yellow. It was unusual, but beautiful. We liked this chicken house, as we called it, and I quickly became friends with the hostesses. The eldest was named Olga Ilinichnaya Belousova, her daughter, like me, was Tatyana. We spent three or four hours a day together at the nearby Pirogovskoe reservoir. The summer turned out to be hot, and half of Moscow, it seems, rushed to the shores of our Pirogovka, which is why it began to resemble the southern coast of Crimea. Water motorcycles were especially annoying, the owners of which strove to rush as close to the shore as possible in order to show off their dexterity. Snow-white sports yachts glided regally under sail in the distance.

Wow, how beautiful, - involuntarily escaped from me. - Just like Green's... Only scarlet sails are missing.

Do you know, Tanechka, - Olga Ilyinichna unexpectedly responded, leaning on her elbow and looking at the yachts, - I once knew the real Assol. The wife of Alexander Grin, to whom he dedicated "Scarlet Sails".

And where did you meet her, in the Crimea?

No, in the North. in the Stalinist camps.

Not much has been written about Green's wife, Nina Nikolaevna Green, and even less is known about her stay in the camps. And I thought that the story of my neighbor in the country might be of interest to all lovers of the work of a wonderful romantic writer.

The sun rises but does not set

The story of how the 20-year-old Muscovite Olenka ended up in the camps is both tragic and banal for those terrible times. She was born and raised in Moscow, in an intelligent family. When the Germans approached the capital, her family was evacuated to the Kuban to relatives. There Olga Vozovik (her maiden name) continued her studies at the local pedagogical institute. She was an excellent student, funny and sharp on the tongue. He let her down.

Once, at a seminar, they analyzed a poem by the Kazakh poet Dzhambul, dedicated to Stalin. The great leader of all times and peoples, of course, was compared with the sun - any other metaphor would be too small for him. And take the laughing Olenka and whisper to her friend: "The sun rises and sets ..." This was enough to find yourself in the regions where the sun did not set for half a year, and then the polar night stood for the same amount.

Then there was an investigation that lasted several months and a transit prison, where all the prisoners - both men and women - were stripped naked and lined up in front of the "buyers" who came from the camps for a new portion of free labor force. "Buyers" walked along the rows of prisoners, feeling them and selecting stronger living goods - physically hardy people were required to work in the logging and mines. It was very similar to the slave market somewhere in distant America, which Olya read about in children's books. Then she could not even imagine that something similar could happen in their beloved Soviet country ...

Most of all, Olya was afraid that none of the "buyers" would want to take her out of prison - she was very weak from being alone and could hardly stand on her feet. Apparently, one of the visitors read the mute prayer in the eyes of a utterly emaciated, naked teenage girl shivering from the cold, and his heart trembled. In the common "Stolypin" car, intended for the transport of livestock, she, along with other selected prisoners, was sent by stage to the North, to a camp near Vorkuta.

In the echelon, for the first time, she came into close contact with criminals, who were an impudent, cruel, ruthless force that took miserable crumbs of bread from other prisoners, including herself. During the journey, Olenka became so exhausted that upon arrival at the place she could no longer get out of the car on her own.

But there was another force in the camps - the political ones. The color of the intelligentsia, disgraced academicians, professors, doctors and teachers who united against criminality and tried to support each other in everything: since the life support of the camps depended on them in many respects, the administration had to reckon with them. It was they who arranged so that Olya Vozovik was first placed in the hospital and helped her get on her feet, and then they were able to get a job as a nanny on duty here.

The prisoner Nina Nikolaevna Grin worked in the same hospital.

Headboard shot

The path to the camps of Green's wife was much more difficult and confusing. After the death of the writer, in 1932, she stayed with her sick mother in Stary Krym. Here they found the occupation. At first they lived by selling old things. When there was nothing to sell, I had to look for a job. And what kind of work could be found for a weak, intelligent woman in the occupied Crimea? Nina Nikolaevna believed that she was still lucky - a position turned up as a proofreader in the printing house of a newspaper opened under the Germans. I would like to know how this "luck" will turn out in the future ...

Naturally, she did not write any notes glorifying the "new order", and could not write. Under any regime, the corrector is the most modest position, on which little depends. But it was cooperation with the Germans that was blamed on her after the war. Plus, being in slave labor in Germany, where Nina Nikolaevna, along with other local residents, was forcibly taken away in 1944.

There she was in a camp near Breslau. Taking advantage of the Allied bombing, she fled in 1945, barely making it back to her beloved Crimea. And soon she landed again in the camp - now Stalin's. Even the testimony of eyewitnesses that during the war years Green's wife personally saved the lives of 13 people taken hostage after the murder of a German officer did not help: Nina Nikolaevna rushed to the council and by some miracle begged the mayor to release them to freedom ...

At that time, when she met the young Olenka Vozovik, Nina Nikolaevna was about fifty years old. Ole - a little over twenty. However, they quickly bonded and became friends.

What attracted Green's wife to this naive, thin, dreamy girl? Perhaps her resemblance to that Assol, whom she herself was in her youth and whose dreams were mercilessly crushed by time?

I was like a daughter to her, ”recalls Olga Ilyinichna. - I remember sitting on duty at night, my eyes stick together, and suddenly she comes: "Go sleep, I'll sit for you." And once Nina Nikolaevna sewed me a skirt out of trousers, which she exchanged with someone for bread rations. She was a great craftswoman and constantly sewed something ...

And did she retain Assol's features in herself?

You know, there was some kind of innate grace and grace in her. Here she will lie down to sleep on the camp bunks, but she will lie down so that you will admire. Everything about her was beautiful. Even the disgusting camp gruel she knew how to eat as if it were a gourmet meal. Looking at her, I thought that it was possible to remain Assol even in the most difficult circumstances. But for this you need to love and believe very strongly.

Even after Green's death, Nina Nikolaevna continued to madly love her husband. At the head of the camp bunks, she placed his photograph, which had miraculously survived after countless searches, and every day she tried to put next to it either a green leaf, or a blade of grass, or a beautiful piece of cloth - flowers did not grow in the camps ...

Next to Nina Nikolaevna, Olya learned to believe in a miracle that must happen. And this miracle happened: in 1952, the gates of the camp swung open in front of them. And then another thing happened, the most incredible: at the gate, Olya, light as a feather, barely standing on her feet from weakness, was picked up by a man who loved and waited for her all these years and who soon became her husband ...

Assol's gift

After Stalin's death, many were amnestied. Our heroines, too. They continued to meet already in Moscow. One day, Green's wife invited Olga Ilyinichna to the branch of the Bolshoi Theater for the ballet Scarlet Sails, in which Lepeshinsky danced. Nina Nikolaevna was already gray-haired, but still a beautiful woman. Suddenly, the whole hall was announced: "Assol herself is present here." Spotlight literally flooded the box in which they sat. The audience stood up and applauded. Huge bouquets were thrown into the box to Nina Nikolaevna. Assol-fairy tale, Assol-byl was still needed by people ...

Unfortunately, this cannot be said about the then authorities of the Old Crimea, who stubbornly did not want to return Green's house to its rightful mistress. After the arrest of Nina Nikolaevna, he passed to the chairman of the local executive committee and was used as a barn. It took Nina Nikolaevna several years to restore justice and create a small Green Museum in this house.

According to Olga Ilyinichna, in the last years of her life, Nina Nikolaevna was very worried about his future and wanted to bequeath the house to her camp friend. But Olga Ilyinichna refused, believing that she was unworthy of such a royal gift. And only in her old age she acquired a chicken house-dacha together with her daughter's family.

Of course, the sea winds do not blow over him, and even from the windows of his attic one will never be able to see the scarlet sails. And yet it seems to me that Assol herself lives invisibly here.

Instead of an afterword

The old slander, alas, did not let go of Green's wife even after her death. When Nina Nikolaevna died, the authorities of Stary Krym did not allow her to be buried in the grave where Alexander Stepanovich Green rested with his mother. A place for an uncomfortable deceased was picked up somewhere on the outskirts of the cemetery.

According to a legend that still exists among fans of Green's work, Nina Nikolaevna's friends did not reconcile themselves to such injustice - on a dead autumn night they dug up her coffin and transferred it to her husband's grave. One of the participants in this secret operation left notes about what happened in his diary, which, alas, fell into the hands of investigators from special agencies.

Green's grave was opened and nothing was found, because the nameless well-wishers guessed to hide the remains of Nina Nikolaevna not nearby, but under her husband's coffin. So in a common grave they still rest.

No, you still have to believe in miracles.

By the way

Alla Alekseevna Nenada, deputy director for science at the Green Museum, tells about what happened to Green's house in Stary Krym.

Nina Nikolaevna opened the Green Museum on a voluntary basis in 1960. Little was left in the house at that time: Nina collected bit by bit, restored everything as it was during the life of the writer. Before her arrest, she distributed many manuscripts and memorabilia among acquaintances, and now these valuables flocked back to the house. Here in the "nest" she finished a book of memoirs about Grin, which she began to write during her exile in Pechora. Friends, writers, book readers, students came here. A semi-legal club was organized - a "nest" of Green lovers. It was the "nest" that laid the foundation for green studies.

When she was informed that it was decided to open the Green Museum in Feodosia, she was skeptical about this. I thought that it would not be possible to recreate that subtle atmosphere, to embody Green himself. She no longer saw the new museum and could not appreciate it, she died.

And so the Green Museum appeared, and the house in Stary Krym became a branch of our museum. Later, it came under the jurisdiction of the Museum of Temirik Culture. It was organized by Maria Sadovskaya - a brilliant museum worker. Literally from scratch in a former two-story merchant's mansion, she organized this museum. Now there are beautiful gardens in which Green's "nest" is lost. It is in excellent condition - clean, beautiful, well-groomed. In the summer, museum employees are on duty there, in the winter - watchmen. You can come at any time of the year and visit this place. Everything was preserved there in exactly the same way as it was under Nina Nikolaevna.

“One morning, in the sea distance, a scarlet sail will sparkle under the sun. The shining bulk of the scarlet sails of the white ship will move, cutting through the waves, straight to you, ”Assol heard from a shabby radio station.

On the radio read "Scarlet Sails". At this time, she was bandaging the old prisoner Polikarpych - and froze, froze. A mass of scarlet sails burst right into the cramped camp hospital. By this time, Assol had spent eight and a half years in the camps. Before freedom, she had a year and a half. She knew she could handle it. He will endure for the sake of his brilliant romantic, his Captain Green.

Smile Assol

... They met in the winter of 1918. Nina, leaving her medicine for a while, worked in the editorial office of the Petrograd Echo. There she saw Green for the first time: very thin, very tall, very gloomy and so distant that it was scary to approach him. But she smiled at him - she smiled at everyone, and he felt warm from her smile.

In the summer of forty-year-old Green, he was mobilized into the ranks of the Red Army. Long, slightly absurd, looking like a Catholic pastor, he carried a change of linen and the manuscript of Scarlet Sails in a soldier's sack. He already knew that he would dedicate it to this strange girl who gives smiles without thinking what she will receive in return. A year later, having fallen off in the hospital with typhus, emaciated to a pulp, homeless, he wandered through the streets of Petrograd. Gorky helped to get a job at the House of Arts, a hostel for poor writers of the Civil War era. Green had his own tiny room with a narrow bed and a meager but daily ration. The writer sat in this icy room, drank carrot tea, warmed his frozen hands and composed his blue Zurbagan. He rarely went out into the street, but once he went out and ran into Nina. Then the writer confessed to her:

“Having parted with you, I went on with a feeling of warmth and light in my soul. Here she is at last, I thought.

Green is not indifferent to you

Every day, Nina ran to Green, and then ran to the hospital - she again worked as a nurse. If the writer was not at home, he left a touching bouquet in a small glass and a note asking him to wait. The whole House of Arts discussed the love of a gloomy, unsociable recluse. One day, Nina received a warning letter:

“Green is not indifferent to you. Beware of him, he is a dangerous man: he was in hard labor for the murder of his wife. And in general, his past is very dark: they say that, being a sailor, he killed an English captain somewhere in Africa and stole a suitcase with manuscripts from him. Knows English, but carefully hides it, and gradually prints the manuscripts as his own.

Green's ex-wife, of course, was, of course, alive, healthy and even happy with her new husband.

poor happiness

For lonely Green, Nina has become a real gift of fate. And she herself did not notice how she also fell in love with him. We moved to Feodosia, bought an apartment with the money from the sold novel and stories. At 44, Greene had his own home for the first time. They lived closed, almost did not communicate with anyone. We bought books all the time and read aloud to each other. But it was a very fragile happiness - Green's romantic works were not in demand by the Soviet government, and he could not write about collective farms and the heroic construction projects of the five-year plan.

It got to the point that they exchanged their things for food, Nina knitted and sold scarves. But - Green wrote "Running on the Waves" and, like "Scarlet Sails", dedicated them to his wife.

“You are my dear, beloved, strong friend, it’s very good for me to live with you. If it weren’t for rubbish from the outside, how bright it would be for us!” Nina wrote to her husband.

Green's health was rapidly deteriorating, people looked at them in surprise on the street - a young, beautiful woman arm in arm with an old man. Poverty clutched his hands at his throat. He gave up, she didn't.

"I'm lonely. Everyone is alone. I will die. Everyone will die.<…>Three things get confused in my head: life, death and love - what to drink for? "I drink to the expectation of death, called life."

The man was dying

They asked their friends for help, but someone just couldn’t help them, like Voloshin, and someone didn’t want to ... In 1930, there was still one more joy in Green’s life: he and Nina moved to Stary Krym, to a tiny wooden house with an apple orchard. Green loved this little house very much, but did not live long in it.

... In the 60s, a Leningrad schoolgirl Tanya Rozhdestvenskaya would see a photograph of the dying Green and write a poignant poem in which

A man was dying, not knowing That to all the shores of the earth Went, like a scarlet flock of birds, The ships invented by Him.

11 years of life with Green were the happiest for Nina in her life. When he died, she temporarily lost her memory and took a long time to recover. She had her sick mother in her arms. And most importantly, she could not leave this house, in which everything reminded of Grin. And when the war began, Nina did not evacuate, and in order to somehow live during the years of occupation, she went to work as a proofreader in a newspaper open under the Nazis. At the same time, it is known for sure that she helped the partisans, and once she saved the lives of 13 people whom the Nazis took hostage after the murder of her officer - Nina managed to persuade the mayor to release innocent people ...

Assol in the camp

In 1944, Nina was among the local residents who were forcibly taken to Germany. In the victorious year, she was able to escape from near Breslau, reached the Crimea and again landed in the camp, but now in Stalin's. And even there she remained Assolya - ardent, romantic, open to people and infinitely decent. And everyone loved her.

Tatyana Tyurina, who worked with Nina in the camp hospital, recalled:

"Nina Nikolaevna had authority among the staff and convicts, the most inveterate ones."

Doctor Vsevolod Korol wrote:

“... At the university we had the subject of “medical ethics”, but you were the first person I met who applied this ethics in life ... because, forgetting how you looked after this sick thief, I would forget one of the most beautiful pictures of philanthropy ... ".

Pile of torn rags

All ten years in the camp, Nina kept a photograph of her husband. Love and memory helped her to hold out, but the elderly Assol was released in a state that she called:

“Everything in the soul is like a pile of torn bloody rags.”

Through force, but she lived, because there was one more important thing to do - to create a small house-museum in her and Girn. But the chairman of the local executive committee took the house under the barn - it took years of exhausting and nasty struggle to return it. And Nina went through this and created this museum. She did everything to preserve the memory of the man who once told her:

“You gave me so much joy, laughter, tenderness and even reasons to treat life differently than I had before, that I stand, as in flowers and waves, and a flock of birds over my head. My heart is cheerful and bright.”

On November 23, 1922, Alexander Grin completed writing the story "Scarlet Sails", dedicating it to his wife Nina, who became the prototype of the main character of the story - Assol.

Nina Nikolaevna Green (nee - Mironova), was the eldest child in the family of a bank employee Nikolai Sergeevich Mironov. After graduating from the gymnasium with a gold medal, in 1914 she entered the Bestuzhev courses. A year later, Nina married law student Sergei Korotkov. The happiness of young people was interrupted by the First World War. Soon Sergei was called up and in 1916 he died. And Nina went to work as a nurse in a hospital.

Nina met Alexander Grin in 1917, when she worked as a typist in the Petrograd Echo newspaper. But at that time, both of them were not up to romantic relationships. In 1918, Nina Nikolaevna's father died, and as a Sami she fell ill with tuberculosis and was forced to move from cold Petrograd to the Moscow region, where she lived with relatives.

When she returned to Petrograd in early 1921, she went to work as a nurse. She lived with her mother in order to somehow survive in this difficult and hungry time, she sold things on the market. It was during this period, on a cold January day, that she met Green again. Already on March 7, 1921, they got married and over the next 11 years, until the death of the writer, they no longer parted.

For Alexander Grin, Nina Nikolaevna became a real muse. It was she who became the prototype of Assol and it was to her that the writer dedicated his most romantic story. " Nina Nikolaevna Green is presented and dedicated by the Author. PBG, November 23, 1922": - these were the last lines in the manuscript of" Scarlet Sails ".

In 1924, Green with Nina and her mother moved to the Crimea: first to Feodosia, and then to the town of Stary Krym. This Crimean period was the most fruitful in his work. It was here from the writer's pen that the novels "The Shining World", "The Golden Chain", "Running on the Waves" and "Jesse and Morgiana" were born. There was a gentle sea and a beloved woman nearby. That was all the writer needed for fruitful work.

In the last years of his life, Alexander Stepanovich was very ill and died in the Crimea in 1932. Two years after his death, Nina Nikolaevna married for the third time: this time to the Feodosia TB doctor Pyotr Ivanovich Nania, who was the attending physician of A. S. Green. This marriage broke up at the beginning of World War II.

Nina Nikolaevna did not have time to evacuate from the Crimea and during the occupation, in order to feed herself and her seriously ill mother, she worked in the occupation newspaper “Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District”, and then headed the district printing house.

The Germans widely used the name of the widow of the famous Soviet writer for their propaganda purposes. Later, Nina Nikolaevna was taken out to work in Germany.

After the end of the war, in 1945, the writer's widow voluntarily returned from the American zone of occupation to the Soviet Union, where she was soon arrested and put on trial for "collaborationism and treason." She was sentenced to ten years in the camps with confiscation of property. She served her sentence in Stalin's camps, first in Pechora, then in Astrakhan.

She was released only in 1955 under an amnesty (fully rehabilitated only in 1997 after her death). After her release, she returned to the Crimea, where she was able to secure the return of her house, in which she lived with Grinov in the last years of his life. Nina Nikolaevna died on September 27, 1970 in Kyiv. In her will, she asked to be buried in the family fence between the graves of her mother and husband. But the authorities forbade the fulfillment of the last will of the deceased, and she was buried in another place in the Starokrymsky cemetery.

Wave Runners

After serving 10 years in Stalin's camps for treason, Nina Nikolaevna, the widow of the writer Alexander Grin, said about herself: "White, like a harrier, bald, like a hundred-year-old reveler"

Exactly 130 years ago, on August 23, 1880, the famous Soviet romantic and dreamer Alexander Stepanovich Grin was born.

He gave us many stories that never happened in reality, but told by him as if there was nothing more real in our lives. "Scarlet Sails", "Jesse and Margiana", "Running on the Waves" Alexander Grin (Grinevsky) dedicated to his third wife Nina. Do you remember his lines: "In Zurbagan, in a mountainous, wild amazing country, you and I, embracing tightly, are happy about the furious spring ..."? After the death of her husband, Nina Nikolaevna admitted: "He strongly idealized me." Separate materials from the criminal case of Nina Green have already been made public. But until now, guesses about the "dark" years of her life range from "cooperating with partisan detachments" to "giving out partisans to the Germans." Therefore, some Crimeans, who were familiar with archival documents on duty, expressed concern: would this publication cast a shadow on the blessed memory of the outstanding writer? Will not destroy the image of the one who was his guiding star? I'm sure not. This story will simply make us think about a terrible time that should never happen again.

ON DOCTORS' WARNING, GREEN ONLY grinned: "IN OUR FAMILY EVERYONE DRINKED AND LIVED LONG"

Nina Nikolaevna Grin, nee Mironova, the daughter of a railway accountant, who graduated from the gymnasium with honors, for 11 years the wife of Alexander Grin, during her lifetime attracted the attention of literary critics, writers and simply lovers of literature. Everyone was looking for in her appearance that "attractive clarity of a being marked by harmonic integrity", which the Author endowed with almost all of his heroines.

In the year of her husband's death, she turned 38 years old, and she passed away at 76. The line of her fate broke exactly in the middle. So:

Arrest warrant.

Grin Nina Nikolaevna, born in 1894, a native of the city of Narva, Estonian SSR, Russian, non-partisan, with a secondary education, a nurse by profession, lives in the city of Stary Krym ... ".

Investigator Senior Lieutenant Rudikov compiled a verbal portrait of the arrested woman: short height, gray eyes, oval face, special features: gray hair. Two years after Green's death, the writer Malyshkin, having met Nina visiting the Paustovskys, knelt before her and exclaimed: "Assol! Well, why are you gray-haired?"

A week after her arrest, she was interrogated.

"I arrived in the city of Stary Krym from the city of Feodosia in November 1930, did not work anywhere, was dependent on my husband, Grin Alexander Stepanovich until 1932."

Dependent is too strong a word. In the hungry years of 1930-1932, it was hardly published because of "inconsistency with the spirit and requirements of the time." Nina Nikolaevna suspected that "in those painful days and years, cancer apparently nestled in him."

Disease certainly contributed to vice - a frequent companion of talent. To the doctors' warnings, Green only grinned: "In our family, everyone drank and lived a long time." His age was short - 52 years.

Nina Nikolaevna was from a breed of women with an innate knowledge of the secrets of the family nest. She was not interested in her husband's past life, in the era of short "Charleston" dresses she wore skirts to the heels: Green kept old-fashioned views. She treated his alcoholism as a family secret and did not let outsiders into it. When Nina's mother, Olga Alekseevna Mironova, reprimanded her son-in-law for drunkenness during her daughter's illness, Nina Nikolaevna moved not her husband, but her mother to another apartment.

She started moving to the Crimea primarily in order to tear him away from the Leningrad and Moscow bohemia. But the southern sun spurred on a dormant disease, which the doctors failed to recognize almost to the very end.

At the end of 1931, Grin became very ill, and Nina Nikolaevna suggested calling a friend of Dr. Nania from Feodosia: “Do you remember how he cured you of an attack of malaria when we returned from Yalta in 1927? your bed, drained a quarter bottle of Massandra madeira!

Peter Naniy was unable to alleviate Grin's suffering, but even after his death he remained a friend of the widow. He and Nina began to work together on the implementation of the method of treatment developed by him with concentrated sunlight.

There is a description of the solar clinic: on the coastal veranda there were glazed boxes with mirrors, where the patients placed their hands or feet, "sunbeams" were sent by reflectors to the affected joints or skin areas (for example, eczema).

Once one of the patients went to the veranda, and his five-year-old daughter was left to play in the coastal waves. And suddenly she began to sink. Without taking off her nurse's gown and scarf, Nina Green jumped into the water and saved the girl.

To be published, Alexander Grin could say, you have to die. In the mid-30s, ideological enemies turned into his admirers. With the royalties from several editions of Green's works, Nina Nikolaevna, together with Naniy, built a spacious house next to the small one where the writer lived and died for only a month. She decided to create the Alexander Grin Museum in this house and even received permission from Moscow to open it on the 10th anniversary of the writer's death. The war thwarted all plans.

IN ST. PETERSKAYA WINTER, GREENE SOLD HIS ONLY COAT TO BRING FLOWERS TO WIFE

"I could not evacuate, because I had an old sick mother, I also had bouts of angina pectoris" (from the minutes of the court session on February 26, 1946).

Subsequently, on May 5, 1958, she supplemented this explanation in a letter to the Prosecutor General of the USSR and the Writers' Union of the USSR:

"... if I had the opportunity to leave with my mother, then there would not have been a terrible 15 years that so heavily overshadowed the end of my life. And this is the first thing I ask you to think about: I did not want the Germans to come."

From the protocol of the search in the home of Nina Green: "Lady's shoes, rubber boots, sundresses, blouses, mattress covers, window curtains (2 pieces), a gold-framed necklace clasp...".

In those rare cases when the writer's work brought fees to Alexander Grin, he quickly lowered them in the company of acquaintances, and even strangers. And he loved to give gifts to his wives. Before her, he was married twice, but Nina's gifts were special.

14 years younger than him, she seemed to him fragile and in need of protection. "No matter how peculiar, no matter how ascetic ... your inner world, you, dear Harvey, want to see the laughing face of happiness." Outwardly gloomy, preoccupied with his thoughts, Alexander Stepanovich wanted so much not to lose a minute of laughing happiness with Nina that one day, in a dank St. Petersburg autumn, when he did not have enough money for a gift for her birthday, he sold his coat and brought home a box in one jacket sweets and flowers.

Nina Nikolaevna remembered all the "gift" dates. When Green presented her with a mirror (he himself did not like mirrors: "My face is like a crumpled ruble bill"). When - a gold watch on a gold bracelet (on which, a month before Green's death, she bought a house from the nuns, albeit adobe and with an earthen floor, but her own and with a view of the mountains). And when - a gold necklace, which so struck her imagination that she described it in detail in her memoirs:

"A narrow golden filigree belt ended with tiny golden balls running along its entire length. And on each ball hung a small river pearl. It captivated the eye with quiet tenderness."

"By November 1941,- Nina Green wrote to the Prosecutor General of the USSR and the Union of Writers of the USSR, - my mother and I were already thoroughly starving ... The mother had the first signs of a mental illness, which progressed rapidly.

Perhaps, then, from the former luxury, there was only one clasp left.

"AS AN ACTIVE GERMAN ASSISTANT, I EDITED A GERMAN REGIONAL NEWSPAPER"

The investigator stated the reason for the arrest as follows:

"Grin N. N., living in the territory temporarily occupied by the German invaders, being an active German accomplice, edited the German regional newspaper."

It seemed to her that if she explained that she had agreed to cooperate with the invaders because of her sick mother, then they would sympathize with her. But the investigator replied: "The state does not care about the reasons that forced the crime to be committed, but the crime itself is important." Let me remind you that, in preparation for the seizure of the Crimea, Hitler said: "Crimea should be rebuilt in such a way that even after a long time no one could force this beautiful corner of German labor to be given away." It so happened that Nina Green also joined the "rebuilding" in the German way.

The city government offered her to work as a proofreader, then she was transferred to the head of the printing house. Then the orkomendatura (civil administration) appointed her to the post of editor of the "Official Bulletin of the Starokrymsky District". And the enemy word was certainly "equal to a bayonet." The difference in responsibility between the printing press and the editor of the newspaper was expressed in the amount of monetary compensation:

“At first, for six months, when I worked as the head of a printing house, I received 600 rubles a month for my work, and later, as an editor, I received 1,100 rubles for this work. "(from the protocol of interrogation of N. Green on December 6, 1945).

In addition to her salary, she was entitled to a bread ration for her and her mother and two meals in a public canteen.

The investigation and the court were not impressed by Nina Nikolaevna's request to take into account that many of the issues, which were signed "editor N. Green", were actually edited by another person. She was operated on at that time.

“When I returned from Simferopol a few months later, a real horror awaited me. A feral, completely crazy mother, hungry and homeless, begged in the soldiers' kitchens "(from a letter from N. Green to the Prosecutor General of the USSR and the Union of Writers of the USSR).

Of the two years she was accused of issuing a fascist bulletin, in fact, she accounted for only a few issues, as the case contains irrefutable evidence. But they didn't interest anyone. On the other hand, the testimony of the witness Chumasov (a non-party, illiterate, supply manager of the Starokrymsk polyclinic) was treated with special attention. He claimed that the Germans arrested him twice: first for being a red partisan in 1920, then - on the basis of a denunciation by Nina Green:

“During the retreat of the Red Army units from the territory of Crimea, I personally took about 20 kg of paper from the Starokrymsk branch of Plodoovoshch, which Green knew about ... Green told me: “Bring the paper to the editorial office, and if you don’t bring it, you will be in the gendarmerie.” .. Arriving home, I cut the paper, and partially burned it. After another 15 days, a member of the gendarmerie came to me."

Nina Nikolaevna held herself during interrogations without hysteria, like a person who surrendered to the will of fate. But because of the testimony, Chumasova burst into tears. She did not deny that she had a conversation with him about paper, but in order to inform the gendarmerie! .. However, a month later, Chumasov no longer remembered the paper that was heroically not handed over to the enemy:

"During the interrogation (in the gendarmerie. - Auth.), I was confronted with Korkin Nazar, who said that I was an old red partisan, I had connections with the partisans, I was a communist. After that, they beat me and demanded confirmation of Korkin's testimony. Thus , I spent 25 days in the gendarmerie under arrest on the application filed against me by Grin Nina Nikolaevna "(from the protocol of the confrontation between Green and Chumasov on December 7, 1945).

But what about Nina Green? One gets the impression that her name was "prompted" to the witness.

“Before being released from custody, I was summoned for interrogation, where the investigator told me: “Russian people filed a statement against you” - and at that time he took a piece of paper from the table and read: “Green, Korkin, Burlakov, Vorobyov ...”(ibid.).

Maybe Nazar Korkin himself could clarify the situation, however, according to his widow, he was killed on April 13, 1944, on the day the Germans retreated from Stary Krym. They shot all the men they came across along the way. Korkin got caught too. But literally at the next interrogation, the widow completely confused the matter:

"My husband Korkin was dragged into their company by Nina Nikolaevna Grin and Burlakov (at one time the mayor of Stary Krym. - Auth.), who lived in her house ... If he had not contacted them, he would have been alive "(from the protocol of interrogation of E. K. Korkina on December 9, 1945).

Nina Green resisted with all her might the accusation of "denouncing an old partisan." "I do not plead guilty to my connection with the gendarmerie, since I had no connection with it" (from the protocol of interrogation by N. Green on November 2, 1945). And the judges passed the verdict without taking into account the contradictory testimony of Korkina and Chumasov, who, in a strange way, was twice released from the fascist dungeons and, for some unknown reason, was privy to secret information about the informers by the German investigator. But Chumasov's testimony was nonetheless mentioned in the indictment, and those who met him, but did not read other documents, had a stamp: Nina Green is a traitor.

"Chumasov Vladimir Gavrilovich committed suicide, hanged himself at his place of work in the Starokrymskaya polyclinic, where he had previously worked as a supply manager ... He said that some man had informed the Germans about him."

WHEN NINA GREENE LEFT FOR GERMANY IN 1944, HER MOTHER WAS CRAZY

“I plead guilty to the fact that I voluntarily entered the service of the occupation authorities as editor of the “Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District” ... Articles from the newspaper “Voice of Crimea” with vile slander against Soviet power and defeatist views on the Red Army in the war against Nazi Germany" (from the protocol of interrogation by N. Green on November 2, 1945).

The investigator referred the case to the Military Tribunal of the NKVD of Crimea, imputing to Nina Grin articles 58.3 of the Criminal Code and 58.10 Part II of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“Assistance to a foreign state that is at war with the Soviet Union” and hostile “propaganda and agitation”). The situation was aggravated by the fact that, according to the prosecutor's office, she "being afraid of responsibility for the crimes committed, fled to Germany in January 1944, thereby betraying her homeland."

In the mouth of the defendant, the same situation looked different:

"In January 1944, I left Stary Krym, frightened by talk that our people shot everyone who worked in the occupied territory"

In January 1944, the Germans gave the employees of the council permission to evacuate to Odessa. There, said Nina Green, she had friends, and she wanted to stay with them until things calmed down. In the 1958 letter already quoted, she insists:

“My further journey to Germany was not voluntary, but compulsory: in Odessa, a detachment of German soldiers took me and others directly from the ship, brought me to a large house where several hundred people were accommodated ... A few days later we were all sent by car to the station ".

In Germany, they were transported from camp to camp. Finally, Russian workers were sent by train to a concentration camp near Berlin. During the bombing, Nina managed to escape, she hid in a pile of garbage, and then wandered along the road and came to a village near Lübeck. There she was taken as a worker by a village clerk. On May 1, 1945, all (she emphasized - "prisoners") were liberated by the Anglo-American troops. Once in a repatriation camp in Rostock (East Germany), Nina asked to go home.

"2.X.45 I returned to Stary Krym. On the same day I myself came to the MGB of the city and told me what I did during the occupation" (from a letter to the Prosecutor General of the USSR and the Union of Writers of the USSR).

In various documents, almost word for word, her story about leaving Stary Krym in January 1944 is repeated, but only one contains the phrase: "I left Stary Krym after the death of my mother ...". It seems that Nina Green - a hostage of tragic circumstances - is even afraid to admit to herself that she left her sick mother.

“As for the mother of Nina Nikolaevna, Olga Alekseevna Mironova, before the occupation and during the occupation she suffered from mental disorders, manifested in some oddities in her behavior ... When her daughter, Grin Nina Nikolaevna, left her at the beginning of 1944, and she herself went to Germany, her mother went crazy"(Olga Alekseevna died on April 1. - Approx. ed.).

Perhaps it was the worries about her mother (left in the dubious care of the already mentioned Korkina) that made her daughter strive home even under the threat of arrest. Realizing that she was late, she gave up.

AFTER THE CAMPS, THE MAIN CHANGE HAPPENED IN NINA'S CHARACTER - SHE STOPPED FEAR

The Military Tribunal of the Crimean NKVD Troops in a closed court session in the city of Feodosiya in the premises of the KGB GON

sentenced

Grin Nina Nikolaevna on the basis

Art. 58.1 "a" of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR subject to deprivation of liberty with serving in labor camps of the NKVD for a period of ten (10) years, with the defeat of political rights for five (5) years, with the confiscation of all property personally belonging to her.

She miraculously served a 10-year term in the icy Pechora and sultry Astrakhan camps. The obsession that appeared in her to serve the memory of the only worthy that was in her life helped to endure, from the moment when she and Green met at the editorial office of the Petrograd Echo newspaper, and then, after a long time, accidentally collided on the street and until his departure from lives were no longer parted. From there, from where, perhaps, everything can be seen, someone directed a concentrated sunbeam into the terrible black hole of her fall, and for almost the entire period of imprisonment, Nina Nikolaevna wrote chapters of her memoirs one after another.

On June 4, 1955, on the camp radio, Nina Green heard a message about the resumption of the Scarlet Sails ballet on the Soviet stage. The magician told the girl Assol: “One morning, in the sea distance, a scarlet sail will sparkle under the sun. The shining bulk of the scarlet sails of a white ship will move, cutting through the waves, straight to you.”

On September 17, 1955, the aged Assol was released from prison under an amnesty. She came out a person who no longer resembled the pretty, shy woman that Green had loved her. In one of the letters, she sketched her portrait - "white as a harrier, bald, like a hundred-year-old reveler." But the main change took place in her character - she stopped being afraid.

Nina Nikolaevna began to restore pre-war acquaintances with writers. Among the first - Ivan Novikov and Nikolai Tikhonov, who helped Green during his lifetime, "heavyweights" Konstantin Fedin, Alexei Surkov and Konstantin Paustovsky. She also became a member of the offices of literary bosses, deputy chairman of the board of the Union of Writers of the USSR A. V. Voronkov and V. N. Ilyin. Aleksey Varlamov, the author of a book about Alexander Grin, published in the ZHZL series, gave the following description to the latter: "A cadre worker of the NKVD since 1933, who monitored the creative intelligentsia, an investigator who interrogated Bukharin, a prisoner in 1937, a KGB general, thrown into the 50s years of the party and the government for literature ... He was directly related to the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel.

When starting to play a negative character, the actor must find something positive in him. Ilyin had a love for Green's work. It was at his request to the Council of Ministers and in circumvention of the copyright law, which the widow lost in 1947, that Nina Nikolaevna was paid a 100,000th fee for Green's Favorites. It was the height of the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinist repression, and Ilyin advised her to try to get on this train. She did just that, sincerely believing that if she was guilty, then it was not treason.

THE HOUSE WHERE THE WRITER DIED WAS TURNED INTO A CHICKEN COOP

But here the first secretary of the Starokrymsky district party committee, L.S. Ivanov, entered the matter. After the confiscation of Green's property, by a court decision in 1946, her plot and buildings were transferred to city party workers. It was Ivanov who lived in a large house built before the war for Green's fees, and the small house where the writer died, exchanged for a gold watch, was turned into a chicken coop, and the first secretary of the district committee did not want to part with it.

In the summer of 1958, the newspaper "Radyanska Ukraina" published an open letter from writers in defense of Green's house. He was supported by Maxim Rylsky. A year later, Leonid Lench's feuilleton "Chicken and Immortality" dealt a powerful blow to the "chicken coop". The unheard-of sharp criticism of the party functionary was sanctioned by the front-line writer Sergei Smirnov, who had just been appointed editor-in-chief of Literaturka (the father of the actor and director Andrei Smirnov, who filmed Belorussky Station, the grandfather of the director, screenwriter and TV presenter Avdotya Smirnova).

After reading the feuilleton, Nina Nikolaevna admired: "This is the most delicious chicken I have ever eaten." They also read "Ivanovtsy", but they suffered from this dish:

"Moscow Kremlin
comrade Khrushchev N. S.

Dear Nikita Sergeevich!

...On the bright name of your son and many friends who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. It is impossible to endure what is happening around a person who, during the period of temporary occupation, being an employee of the fascist commandant's office in the city of Stary Krym, killed many innocent people. We are talking about the ex-wife of the writer Alexander Stepanovich Green - Nina Nikolaevna ... Egorov, chairman of the Starokrymsky City Executive Committee on 12/18/1959.

Through the efforts of the bristling nomenklatura, these and even worse tales crawled around the city (as if they were transfusing the blood of killed babies to wounded Germans). After the writer's widow, they hissed "Fascist!"

Nina Nikolaevna began to have angina attacks, for some time her tongue was paralyzed. She sent a statement to the Union of Writers about slander, which is spread not only in Stary Krym, but already among the writers, and she was mowed down by a stroke.

IN 1943, NINA SAVE 13 HOSTAGES FROM OLD CRIMEA FROM SHOOTING

And suddenly: oh joy! In the same 1960, in the year of Alexander Grin's 80th birthday, Nina Nikolaevna received a warrant and the keys to his house. She came to life, registered and paid the rent. On the writer's birthday, August 23, she arranged the grand opening of the house-museum.

Nina Nikolaevna became a public person and, naturally, dreamed of rehabilitation. And then she remembered how in October 1943 she saved 13 inhabitants of Stary Krym from inevitable death. It was on the eve of the October holiday. The partisans marked him by killing a German officer on one of the outlying streets. On the same night, the Germans arrested 13 hostages. They were threatened with execution. Among those arrested was the same Nazar Korkin, to whom the Germans arranged a confrontation with Chumasov. Ekaterina Korkina ran to the printing house to Nina Green and begged to do something to save Nazar.

“With a list of those arrested, I turned to the mayor Artsishevsky with a request that he vouch for them. Artsishevsky vouched for 10 people, and marked three as suspicious for ties with partisans. He sent the list to the commandant’s office with me. was to reprint the list, but she also included in the list these three people who had been crossed out by the commandant." (from an explanatory note by N. Green on August 23, 1965).

With a changed list, Nina rushed to Simferopol to the head of the prison. Instead of being shot, 13 hostages were sent to labor camps.

Vera Matsuyeva, a former translator of the Ordinance Office, was found in Saratov. Like Nina Green, she fled to Odessa, then ended up in Germany, also served her term for treason. She fully confirmed the testimony of Nina Nikolaevna. A few more people confirmed this partially or from someone's words. Alas, those of the hostages who survived did not hear anything about the participation of the writer's widow in their fate. However, this is understandable: the Germans were not required to tell the hostages who rescued them.

"In 1959, the Green N.N. case was not fully investigated, and therefore important circumstances remained uninvestigated. I ask you to conduct a thorough investigation" (from a letter from the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR to the prosecutor of the Ukrainian SSR Glukh F.K. on April 3, 1967).

But perhaps the most offensive for Nina Nikolaevna was the accusation of treason not even to the Motherland, but to Green.

"Nina Green left her seriously ill husband in Stary Krym, went to Feodosia to her lover-spy Naniy Peter ... During the Patriotic War, Naniy was associated with the fascist punitive organs. During the retreat of the fascists from the Crimea, he fled to Romania, where he was exposed by the security agencies of the Romanian People's Republic, judged and shot ... " (from a letter to the editors of the "Literaturnaya gazeta" guide Russkov V. December 23, 1964).

The investigators were intrigued by the personality of Nania, but the guide, who was interrogated in 1967, could not really say anything. They found a son, Nania, from his first marriage, who worked as a doctor in a sanatorium in the Leningrad Military District in Yalta.

"In 1939, I learned that my father had finally abandoned his mother and began to live together with Grin Nina Nikolaevna ... Since 1939, I have lost all contact with my father Naniy Petr Ivanovich" (from the protocol of interrogation of Nania V. on May 11, 1967).

Relations with the second husband for Nina Nikolaevna were a difficult topic. It seems to me a convincing version that after the death of Green, Nina's mother pushed her to a new marriage. In appeals to the justice authorities, the writer's widow did not mention him. In her memoirs, she called him a good doctor, but "Naniy was not of the breed of philanthropists." The complete opposite of the romantic Green, he was also jealous of her memories.

Having visited Nina Nikolaevna in those years, the adopted daughter of the writer Novikov was horrified by the change in her appearance. She remembered Green's wife blooming, with sparks in her eyes, but she saw the extinct, poorly dressed wife Naniya. “The separation was so painful and disgusting - not my fault - that I lost all my strength in bouts of angina pectoris, and my mother went crazy,” Nina Nikolaevna admitted in one of the camp letters.

"Explain who Naniy P.I. is?" - the investigator demanded of her during the next check of her case. Nina Nikolaevna replied that about three years after the death of her husband, she agreed with Pyotr Ivanovich, that during the occupation he was a member of the city council, had a private medical practice, and in November 1943 they parted.

It was not difficult to prove that she did not part with Green until the last minute of his life. Nina Nikolaevna simply made a request to the TsGALI, and from there came a response signed by the archive's researchers: "According to the documentary materials of the TsGALI, it was established that Nina Nikolaevna Grin, the wife of the writer Grin A.S., lived with A.S. Grin in 1931-1932 being on good terms with him." In confirmation, references are given to the letters of the Greens and responses from acquaintances during this period, her letters about the last hours and minutes of Alexander Stepanovich, which cannot be read without tears, as well as references to Green's poems dedicated to the 11th anniversary of their marriage. Shortly before his illness, he wrote: "I love her, as they love the bright eye of the sky flashing through the window of a dungeon, as they love only once in life, as hunger awaits water and bread."

Nina Nikolaevna died in Kyiv in 1970, unrehabilitated. But she accomplished the main thing - she created the Alexander Grin Museum in Stary Krym and wrote memoirs about him.

“From the factual data available in the case file, it is seen that Grin N.N. during the Great Patriotic War did not take part in punitive actions against the civilian population, did not engage in betrayal and did not assist in this ... Thus, Grin N.N. . did not take actions providing for liability for treason" (from the conclusion of the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea).

The widow of Alexander Grin was rehabilitated in 1997.

P.S. We express our gratitude to the staff of the Main Directorate of the SBU of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea for their help in preparing the material.

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Nina Nikolaevna Mironova became the third and last wife of Alexander Grin. She became the prototype of the heroine of "Scarlet Sails" Assol. He lived with her for eleven years, until his death. She outlived the writer by almost 40 years, and all these years she lived with an active memory of him. Thanks to her efforts, the Alexander Grin Museum appeared in Stary Krym.

Nina Nikolaevna Mironova was born on October 11 (23), 1894 in Gdov (Gdovsky district, St. Petersburg province, now Pskov region) in the family of a bank employee Nikolai Sergeevich Mironov. She was the eldest in the family, her younger brothers were Konstantin (b. 1896), Sergei (b. 1898). The family moved to their father's places of service and in 1914 moved from Narva to St. Petersburg.

Nina Mironova graduated from the gymnasium with a gold medal, in 1914 she entered the Bestuzhev courses. In 1915, she married law student Sergei Korotkov, who was drafted into the army a year later and died at the front of the First World War in 1916. After completing two courses in the biological department, Nina went to work as a nurse in a hospital.

In 1917-1918, Nina Korotkova (Mironova) worked as a typist in the Petrograd Echo newspaper, where she first met and got acquainted with Alexander Grin, who came for a fee. They met at the end of 1917 or at the very beginning of 1918. When they met, she was 23, and he was 37. They met and broke up for several years. She herself spoke about this: “It was necessary for each of us to suffer separately in order to more acutely feel loneliness and fatigue.”

In 1918, Nina's father, Nikolai Sergeevich, died, she herself fell ill with tuberculosis and moved for three years to relatives in the Moscow region. Before leaving in May 1918, at the monument to the Guardian, Green presented her with his poems.

When, alone, I am gloomy and quiet,
Slips a shallow repressed verse,
There is no happiness and joy in it,
Deep night outside the window ...
Who once saw you, he will not forget,
How to love.
And you, darling, appear to me
Like a sunbeam on a dark wall.
Hopes faded. I'm forever alone
But still your paladin.

He promised to come and visit her, but he could not. Thought she was no longer alive. She did not attach much importance to either Green or his poems at that time, and subsequently was very glad about this.

They met again in February 1921 on Nevsky. A lot has changed in his and her life in three years. Nina recalled that day: “Wet snow falls in heavy flakes on her face and clothes. The district council just refused to give me shoes, cold water squishes in my torn shoes, that’s why it’s gray and gloomy in my soul - I have to go on a push again, sell something from my mother’s things in order to buy at least the simplest, but whole shoes and I hate to go push and sell."

She was now a young widow, had suffered from typhus and worked as a nurse in the typhoid barracks in the village of Rybatsky, and lived with her mother in Ligov and went to work through Peter. Green invited her to visit him sometimes at the House of Arts, where it was warm and dry. He behaved very delicately. And he didn't drink at all.

In early March, Green invited Nina to become his wife. After some thought, she agreed. Later, Nina Nikolaevna said that she did not have special feelings for her future husband: "it was not disgusting to think about him." But no more. Yes, and Green himself at that time experienced an unrequited love for Maria Alonkina. “He took a great interest in himself. Understanding with his mind the absurdity of his connection with her, his old age in comparison with her and in his outward appearance, he burned and suffered from passion; suffering brought him to a real physical fever. And she became interested in others. And then I met, knowing nothing about it. And all the feelings and desires he held back turned to me - he asked me to become his wife. I agreed. Not because I loved him at that time, but because I felt immensely tired and lonely, I needed a protector, a support for my soul. Alexander Stepanovich - middle-aged, somewhat old-fashioned, a little stern, as it seemed to me, looking like a pastor in his black coat, corresponded to my idea of ​​\u200b\u200ba defender. In addition, I really liked his stories, and in the depths of my soul lay his simple and tender poems.

Nina became the common-law wife of Alexander Grin in early March 1921, and two months later they were officially married. Almost immediately after the registration of the marriage, the Greens moved, they rented one room in an apartment on Panteleymonovskaya Street at 11. “We soon got married, and from the very first days I saw that he was winning my heart. Graceful tenderness and warmth greeted and surrounded me when I visited him at the House of Arts. Then he did not drink at all. There was no fault. And he told me that he had stopped drinking for two years already ... "

There was a lot of different things in their life - both bad and good, everything is like in people. If you read the original letters and notes of Nina Nikolaevna, you can see that both of them in their manifestations were too extreme, far from the middle. Either very good or very bad. Ekaterina Alexandrovna Bibergal didn’t want to, Vera Pavlovna Abramova couldn’t, Maria Vladislavovna Dolidze probably just didn’t understand anything, Maria Sergeevna Alonkina didn’t take it seriously, Nina Nikolaevna Korotkova wanted it, and she saw it, and she was able, and she accepted it. For Nina, he became a caring husband and from the very beginning set things up so that his wife left the service and did not work anywhere else. The writer's wife is already a profession.

In May 1921, he wrote to her: “I am happy, Ninochka, as soon as you can be happy on earth ... My dear, you so soon managed to plant your pretty garden in my heart, with blue, blue and purple flowers. I love you more than life". She, however, who more than once admitted that she got along with Green “without love and enthusiasm in the accepted meaning of these words, wanting only to find a protector and friend in him,” very soon wrote to him quite differently: “... Thank you, my dear, my good. No, you can’t say the word “thank you” to everything that cannot fit in the soul - for your kindness, tender care and love, which warmed me and gave me great, clear happiness.

In the summer of 1921, Grin and Nina Nikolaevna lived in the suburban town of Toksovo, where for a pood of salt and ten boxes of matches they were let into their house by the village headman, a Finn with a Russian name Ivan Fomich. Every day they got up at dawn, fished in the lake called Crooked Knife and brought home a full basket of perches, roach, bream, picked mushrooms and berries, dried, soaked, pickled, salted. Sometimes their neighbors in the "Disk" Pyast and Shklovskys came to visit them from Petrograd. In Toksovo, Green finished Scarlet Sails and began his first novel, Algol - a Double Star, about the devastation in Petrograd, a novel that was never completed. Nina Nikolaevna called this summer the happiest time in their life together.

In the winter of 1921/22, life was difficult, like everyone else, the apartment was dirty and cold. An academic ration saved him from hunger, and sometimes Green went to the flea market of Aleksandrovsky or Kuznechny markets, where he could exchange part of the food for soap and matches. But sometimes even the rations were not enough to heat the huge hall, and firewood had to be stolen.

Then it got easier. With the beginning of the NEP, private publishing houses began to form, and Green published several stories at once, which were included in his first post-revolutionary book, White Fire. This allowed them to leave the apartment on Panteleymonovskaya, where sewer pipes froze, and move to 2nd Rozhdestvenskaya Street to an intelligent old woman who was related to the House of Writers. “The room was small, sparsely furnished - "student", dirty, on the fifth floor, but bright, with a lantern window to the street. The move was easy. We took a sledge from the janitor, put our property in two plywood boxes, and put a large portrait of Vera Pavlovna on top. Alexander Stepanovich was carrying a sled, I was pushing them from behind. With this segment of life, which brought us closer to the future, difficult in everyday life, but so light-hearted, it was over.

In 1923, Greene's first novel, The Shining World, was published. The received fee Green decided to spend on a trip to the Crimea. After returning from a trip to the south, the Green family moved into a new apartment, which had four rooms. They themselves made repairs, after which they took Nina's mother to live with them. For Green, this was the heyday of his talent. According to the memoirs of his wife Nina, “... the flame of creativity burned evenly, strongly and calmly. Sometimes even as if physically palpable for me. During these years, Alexander Stepanovich was kindly met in the editorial offices and publishing houses. We enjoyed the fruits of this good relationship, lived calmly and well, but Alexander Stepanovich began to get involved in a bohemian company, and this led us to move to the south.

In the summer of 1924, Green with his wife and mother-in-law moved to the Crimea, to Feodosia. Upon arrival, the Greens settled in the Astoria Hotel in a room overlooking the sea, then rented a room - there was not enough money for an apartment. And in the autumn of the same year, the writer's family moved to a four-room apartment on Galereinaya Street, where the well-known museum of A.S. Green. “We lived in this apartment for four good, affectionate years,” Nina Nikolaevna recalled much later. Green had his office there, a small square room with a window on Gallery Street. There is a portrait of my father on the wall. There are no more photos of Vera Pavlovna. Although the Greens still wrote letters to her and often talked about her. But - "my photograph is in a dark red narrow frame."

They lived with the mother of Nina Nikolaevna Olga Alekseevna Mironova. Women did housework, got up very early while Green was still sleeping, went to the market, then put the samovar, and Nina Nikolaevna brought tea to her husband in bed, “strong, fragrant, good, properly and freshly brewed on a samovar, in a thick faceted or very thin glass ". It was not easy to get tea, sometimes Nina Nikolaevna brought it from Moscow, sometimes by hook or by crook she bought it in Feodosia. In the evenings Green played cards with his mother-in-law.

The quiet life ended in 1927. In the summer, the publisher Wolfson came to them, Green signed a contract with him for the release of a 15-volume collected works. Having received a large advance, Alexander Stepanovich and his wife went to rest. Yalta, Kislovodsk, Moscow ... It seemed that there would be no money problems now, Green even gave Nina a gold watch. But those were their last happy days. The publishing house went bankrupt, the courts began, which Green lost. Green drowned his failures in alcohol. Drunken drinking, lack of money, life became unbearable.

In the early 1930s, Greene's health deteriorated greatly. Launched pneumonia, long-standing tuberculosis, and then stomach cancer, aggravated by alcohol abuse, led to the fact that the writer had practically no strength left. They stopped printing it, they didn’t give a pension, there was nowhere to wait for help. The family was forced to move from Feodosia to Stary Krym, where it was much cheaper to live. At first they rented an apartment, and in 1932, a few months before Green's death, Nina Nikolaevna bought a two-room house with an earthen floor for her gold watch, which became their only home. July 8, 1932 Alexander Stepanovich Grin died. Nina Nikolaevna, at the age of 38, again became a widow.

The life of Nina Nikolaevna after the death of Green

Green died in Stary Krym in 1932. Nina Nikolaevna began work on perpetuating the memory of the writer, in 1934 she managed to organize a memorial room, in the same year, having received a fee for the collection of Green's stories "Fantastic Novels", she erected a residential building on a previously acquired plot of land of 20 acres, Green's house became a private museum . The opening of the State Museum was scheduled for 1942, on the 10th anniversary of the death of A.S. Green. Participated in the creation of the Museum of Local History in Stary Krym, traveled to Moscow with instructions from the museum.

In 1934, Nina Nikolaevna married the Feodosia TB doctor Pyotr Ivanovich Nania, an old acquaintance who treated A.S. Green. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the marriage of Nania and Green broke up. Crimea was occupied by the Germans. At that time, Nina Nikolaevna's mother began to show a mental disorder. In order not to die of hunger, they sold the remaining things. When there was nothing to sell, I had to look for a job. And what kind of work could be found for a weak, intelligent woman in the occupied Crimea? Nina Nikolaevna believed that she was still lucky - a place turned up as a proofreader in the printing house of a newspaper opened under the Germans under the loud name "Official Bulletin of the Staro-Krymsky District", after a while she was appointed editor of the publication "Staro-Krymsky Bulletin". The bulletin printed summaries and a chronicle. Nina could not refuse for the same reasons that forced her to go to work. This work did not require a personal assessment of events from her - it was technical. Nina Green helped the partisans and saved 13 people from death.

In January 1944, when Soviet troops were already approaching the Crimea, Nina Green left for Odessa, she feared for her life, because then they said that everyone who collaborated with the Germans was shot indiscriminately. In April 1944, her mother, Olga Alekseevna, died. On the way, she got into a roundup. Nina Nikolaevna was seized and, together with others, was sent to Germany for labor work.

After the end of the war, in 1945, Nina Nikolaevna returned to her homeland, knowing that she would certainly be arrested. She herself turned to the competent authorities, received a term of 10 years, served her sentence in the Stalinist camps on the Pechora, then in Astrakhan. Released in 1956. After her release, she returned to the Crimea, after a long struggle she returned the house - the last dwelling of Green, adapted by the new owners for household needs, achieved the opening of the writer's museum.

Nina Nikolaevna opened the Alexander Grin Museum on a voluntary basis in 1960. Little was left in the house at that time: Nina collected bit by bit, restored everything as it was during the life of the writer. Before her arrest, she distributed many manuscripts and memorabilia among acquaintances, and now these valuables flocked back to the house. Here she finished a book of memoirs about Grin, which she began to write during her exile in Pechora. Friends, writers, book readers, students came here. A semi-legal club was organized - a "nest" of Green lovers. It was the “nest” that laid the foundation for green studies.

Nina Nikolaevna died in Kyiv on September 27, 1970. In her will, she asked to be buried in the family fence between the graves of her mother and husband. But the authorities of Stary Krym did not allow the will of the deceased to be carried out, and the burial took place in another place of the Starokrymsky cemetery. A year later, on the night of October 23, 1971, Kyiv friends N.N. Green - Yu. Pervova and A. Verkhman with assistants secretly reburied her, fulfilling the will mentioned above.

Nina Nikolaevna Green was fully rehabilitated in 1997. From the conclusion of the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea: “From the factual data available in the case file, it is seen that Grin N.N. during the Great Patriotic War, she did not take part in punitive actions against the civilian population, did not engage in betrayal and did not assist in this ... Thus, Green N.N. did not commit actions providing for responsibility for treason.”

The last years of her life, 1967-1970, Nina Nikolaevna Grin spent in Kyiv, in the house of her friend and assistant to the green researcher, dissident Yulia Alexandrovna Pervova. Only for the summer she came to Stary Krym, to the house-museum of Grin - her and Alexander Stepanovich's house, which she, with the help of friends, turned into a museum and donated shortly before her death to the state.

Interview with Nina Nikolaevna Green (1966)

Nina Nikolaevna Mironova (Greene). Kyiv, 1968