In the 1930s, the popularity of Yury Tynyanov as a writer reached unprecedented heights

“Lieutenant Kizhe”, “The Wax Persona” and “Young Vitushishnikov” were published. The script for the film “Lieutenant Kizhe” was written. Yury Nikolaevich supervised the work on the “Library of the Poet” founded by Gorky in the early 30s, and prepared a collection of poems by Kuchelbecker for it.

The teaching and scientific activities had to be given up, because there was not enough time to implement all the ideas. A list of completed and only planned artworks by Yury Tynyanov has been preserved

Kukhlya

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar

Lieutenant Kizhe

The Wax Persona

The Hannibals

Pushkin

Young Vitushishnikov

Count Sardinsky

Evdor

Captain Shishkov 2nd

Auvergne Mule

Sandunovsky Baths

Shepherd Siphil

Ivan Barkov

Losses

Of this list, only “Kukhlya”, “The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar”, “Lieutenant Kizhe”, “The Wax Persona” and “Young Vitushishnikov” were completed. At the time, when the novel “Kukhlya” was published, Yury began to notice the first signs of his disease.

The disease seemed to be slow – sometimes the eye did not turn as it should, and the vision began to double, the walk changed, then everything went back to normal.
Viktor Shklovsky, a close friend of Yury

Unfinished

Novel

In 1932, Tynyanov started writing the novel “Pushkin”.

When I sometimes asked him during our meeting: “Well, how old is your Alexander Sergeevich now?” – he answered with a guilty smile: “I swear you: I have written two hundred pages about him, and he is still seven.”
Korney Chukovsky

A cane, once a sign of panache,
has now become a necessary support.

The disease eats me like mice eat bread, and now I’m like an empty barn with mouse tracks.
Yury Tynyanov
In a letter to Viktor Shklovsky, 1937

By 1940, Yury Tynyanov had already almost lost the ability to walk and sat motionless for days in a straw chair in the garden in front of the balcony of his summer cottage.

In moments when Yury was getting better, he continued writing “Pushkin”. In 1943, he wrote to his close friend, Viktor Shklovsky, that the 3rd part of “Pushkin” was finished. On December 20, 1943, Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov died at the age of 49.

And here he wrote an elegy about impossible love, which time denied him. Like a damned man, not daring to mention her name, he swam, full of strength, intoxicated with the memory of everything that was forbidden, that could not come true.
Yury Tynyanov,
The last words of the novel “Pushkin”