Konstantin Sedych: Författare, poet och skildrare av det sibiriska livet

From 1933 to 1950, Sedykh published 8 collections: "Zabaykalskoye: Poems" (1933), "Heart: Selected Poems" (1934), "Poems" (1935-36), "Native Steppe" (1937), "The Holiday of the Spring Sowing" (1940), "First Love" (1948), "Above the Steppe the Sun" (1948), "Sunny Land" (1949-50). The thematic range of his poetry is quite wide: the past of his native land, Siberian hard labor and exile, the Civil War, collectivization in the village, socialist construction, and the Great Patriotic War. In his evolution, Sedykh, a lyric poet who perceived the world in romantic haze, moved toward a perception of the mundane truth of reality. In his poems, the center of gravity shifted from the lyrical monologue, the ecstatic epic declaration, to the narrative, revealing the social and psychological essence of people and events. The poet sought not to depart from his poetic declaration, formulated in the poem "Dream": "Words of high heat are needed, / Of incredibly difficult simplicity, / So that, as in stone, the song carves / Majestic features of the era." The combination of the sublime, the heroic, and the ordinary, everyday was found by Sedykh in the novel "Dauria" (initially titled "Horse Whirlwinds") — his major work dedicated to the fate of the Transbaikalian Cossacks. The novel was conceived in 1934 as a trilogy about the revolutionary movement in Siberia. The first chapters of "Dauria," published in the almanac "New Siberia" (1940), received mixed reviews from critics. A. Drozdov compared "Dauria" to a stagnant pond, "whose water does not flow, does not move" (Literary Newspaper, 1940, February 26). When discussing the novel at a conference of regional writers in Moscow, attention was drawn to "remarkable descriptions of nature, knowledge of everyday life, subtle observation, and a sense of historical perspective." At the same time, speakers noted some inaccuracy and inconsistency in the development of the characters' personalities (Literary Newspaper, 1940, April 26).

The main theme of "Dauria" is the Civil War in Transbaikalia. The heroes of the novel are the inhabitants of the Priargun village Mungalovsky, whose ancestors came from the Yaitskoe Cossacks, participants in the Pugachev rebellion, exiled to hard labor in Nerchinsk. With the conquest of Amur, a Transbaikalian Cossack army was formed from the descendants of these disgraced Cossacks. The events depicted in "Dauria" unfold from 1854, when the Transbaikalians defeated the English landing at De-Kastri Bay, until 1922, when the Civil War in the Far East ended. In the multifaceted narrative, several plot-compositional nodes are present — the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, World War I and the 1917 Revolution, the Civil War. Delving into the history of Transbaikalian Cossacks, Sedykh, using the example of the fate of three generations of the Ulybin family, traces how the seemingly unshakable century-old foundations were shaken under the influence of revolutionary events. The novel features vivid descriptions of Daurian nature, colorfully recreates Cossack life, amusements (scenes of agricultural labor, weddings, hunting wolves and wild goats, horse racing, the siege of a snow town, life