In "The Immortal Barrack", the story of the writer Yury Dombrovsky, forty years after his death:
After the Gulag he wrote the novel "The Monkey Comes for Its Skull" (1959), the collection of novellas "The Dark Lady. Three Novellas about Shakespeare" (1969), his finest poems, and, finally, the largely autobiographical novels "The Keeper of Antiquities" (1964) and its sequel, "The Faculty of Useless Knowledge", first published in 1978 in France. It was this novel above all that the KGB could not forgive the rehabilitated Dombrovsky. The writer was followed, threatened over the telephone, beaten. And in fact he was killed, brutally beaten, after the appearance of this novel, in May 1978, forty years ago.
His widow, Klara Turumova-Dombrovskaya, tells the story:
"In the spring of 1978, after the Russian edition of 'The Faculty…' came out in Paris, Yury Osipovich expected nothing good for himself from his homeland. Until then the publication of a manuscript in the West had been punished quite severely: people were expelled from the Writers' Union, exiled.
I remember a heated argument with a friend from Leningrad: 'Who needs me over there?! I can only work here! Even in Kolyma!'
The threats and night-time telephone calls began from the day the date was put under the novel: 5 March 1975. 'Handle, Leg, Little Cucumber', Yury Dombrovsky's last story, gives a full idea of the tense atmosphere of that time. The story proved prophetic.
In the film that Olga Vasilyevna Kozanova made from it, a shot rings out at the end. The writer was killed.
This is what happened to Yury Osipovich over almost two years:
— he was struck on a bus, and his arm was smashed with an iron rod;
— he was thrown out of a bus;
— he was beaten up at the House of Writers.
Yury Osipovich had not gone there for a long time, but this time he went to share his joy: to show the copies of the published 'Faculty…'.
I was at my mother's in Alma-Ata and did not yet know that the novel had come out. I returned after two weeks, and it was as if he had been replaced by someone else. His reserve of vital strength had run out. In all the 18 years I had known him he had hardly changed; we used to joke that this was the special 'camp breed'.
He said nothing to me about what had happened at the House of Writers. Only a year later did Sofya Naumovna, the wife of Lev Slavin, tell me about this last beating.
In the restaurant foyer she saw some thugs kicking a man in the stomach as he lay fallen on his back. She rushed over and suddenly recognised him: 'It's Yura! Yurochka Dombrovsky!' The thugs, inhuman creatures ("there were a great many of them!"), ran off.
He died a month and a half later.
From the death certificate:
Date: 29 May 1978.
Cause: acute blood loss.
Varicose dilatation of the veins of the oesophagus and stomach…"
