B. N. Polevoy: «Повесть о настоящем человеке»

Boris Nikolayevich Polevoy (1908–1981) – his real surname was Kampov; he was born on 17 March 1908 in Moscow into a lawyer’s family, and from 1913 the family lived in Tver. In childhood he read Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Nikitin and Chekhov; his favourite writer was M. Gorky. After finishing an industrial technical school in 1926 he worked at a textile factory. He published his first article in the sixth grade and took up professional journalism in 1928. Soon after the war, in 1946, «Повесть о настоящем человеке» appeared (the book says “in the war years”): the main hero is fighter pilot Alexey Meresyev, who lost both legs, returned to the ranks and became a war hero. In the extract Alexey faints from pain in the snow, boys find him in a forest clearing and help him to a village, and he is sent to a Moscow hospital. The professor tells him “don’t hang your nose”. Reading an article about the pilot Karpovich, Alexey sets a goal: to fly again. He trains through pain, studies for five months and returns to the ranks. In the second extract he fights a German ace head-on, with almost no fuel left flies on over the forest and lands the plane at the airfield, and the colonel praises him.