He lacked heresy,
to become a genius.
F. Abramov
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was born in the Smolensk region in nineteen hundred and ten. On long winter evenings, the family loved to read Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and Tolstoy aloud. Interest in literature and familiarity with the classics gave rise to the boy’s desire to write himself. In 1925
the first poems of the aspiring poet appear. Since nineteen twenty-eight, Tvardovsky has been working as a correspondent in Smolensk, and he is becoming a poet. It has become characteristic of the poet’s style to speak simply, accessiblely, emotionally and figuratively. Already in 1931, in Moscow, the publishing house “Young Guard” published the poem “The Path to Socialism,” Tvardovsky’s first major work.
The years 1929-1933 were the most difficult for the poet. The internal problems of the artist’s own development collided with external circumstances. The fate of his family, dispossessed during one of the typical “excesses,” was difficult. The emotional experiences of this period will result much later in the poem “By Right of Memory” (1966-1969). In the meantime, the young poet defends the “testament of the early days,” his response to life’s trials was the poem “The Country of Ant.” It tells about the era of collectivization in the countryside, about the “great turning point” when, overcoming painful doubts, the middle peasants joined the collective farms.
Whatever Tvardovsky writes about, the poet’s focus is on the image of a simple working man.
During the harsh years of the Great Patriotic War Tvardovsky’s lyrics are in tune with the poetry of most authors: feat of arms soldiers and the heroism of the rear, when even children did not remain aloof from these events. The pinnacle of creativity of this period is the poem “Vasily Terkin” - a kind of monument to the spirit of the Russian man in the war:
Platoon on the right bank
Alive and well in spite of the enemy!
The lieutenant is just asking
Throw some light there.
And after the fire
Let's get up and stretch our legs.
What is there, we will transform it,
We will provide the crossing...
Soon after the war, Tvardovsky wrote a memoir poem, “House by the Road.” This is the poet’s excited story, addressed to all living people, not to forget the past and its lessons. This poem is about the strength, stamina and endurance of the Russian man, about love that has undergone severe trials, about the holiness and purity of a soldier’s military duty. In the next poem, “Beyond the Distance, the Distance,” the poet travels not only in space from Moscow to Vladivostok, but also in time, reflecting on the path traversed by the country and its people, recalling his troubled youth. The organic connection between the past and the present helps to better understand modernity. The poet will say: “Whoever hides the past jealously is unlikely to be in harmony with the future.” The poet notes three stages in the modern history of Russia: collectivization, war, post-war construction. And at each of these stages, the muse of “anxiety and shock” with special poetic power and sincerity embodied the most important, hidden in the consciousness and feelings of millions of the masses.
Tvardovsky’s poems, with their apparent “simplicity and lightness,” require intense attention. The lyrical hero often merges with the image of the author, their voices sound like a harmonious duet:
On new buildings these years
The main suffering was in full swing:
The factories rose in the glow,
Cities grew under the sky.
And in the dull distance
Behind that great suffering the village
No matter how much you mutter to yourself,
I couldn't keep up anymore.
Tvardovsky's poetry is a kind of poetic encyclopedia of time, its lyrical, epic, and at times dramatic history. Great events were reflected in his work in the form of their direct depiction and as separate experiences and reflections.
Dear land, what happened?
What a strange fate:
Not only youth, but also old age -
There, to the city, for bread,
I strove to go there on vacation
Far from grandfather's graves...
Let's say it was a long time ago,
But when were you there yourself?
The originality of Tvardovsky’s path reflected the life of the country and its people during the most dramatic periods of its history.
In the face of bygone eras
You have no right to bend your heart, -
After all, these were paid
We pay the biggest price...
What is already striking in Tvardovsky’s early poems is their complete originality, lack of imitation and literary quality. The poetry of the rise and difficulties of the formation of the state, the spiritual quest and experiences of the individual, the cultural and spiritual growth of a simple worker - all this is reflected in the multifaceted poetry of Tvardovsky.
To forget, to forget silently.
They want to drown you in oblivion
Living pain. And so that the waves
They closed over her. True story - forget!
Composition
Tvardovsky’s work captures the main milestones in the development of the Soviet country: collectivization, the Great Patriotic War, post-war revival. This is a poet - Soviet in essence, but at the same time, universal human problems also find a place in his poetry. His work is deeply folk, primarily in its ideological basis. The poet widely uses folk colloquial language, folklore forms, and draws his heroes in the spirit of folk poetry.
From Tvardovsky's poems one can trace the history of the country. The first poems “The Path to Socialism” and “The Country of Ant” reflected the period of collectivization. Peasant Nikita Morgunok sets off to look for that promised land, which
...in length and width - all around.
Sow one bobble
And that one is yours.
This is the ideal of peasant happiness. Tvardovsky leads Morgunka throughout the country, and, during the journey, observing the new things that collective farms bring with them, the hero abandons individual farming and comes to the idea that the collective farm is a peasant paradise. Tvardovsky used the travel motif, characteristic of folk art, for the same purpose as Nekrasov in his time in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” The poet sincerely believed that collectivization would bring happiness to the peasants. Later - in the 1960s - in the poem “By Right of Memory,” Tvardovsky, from the height of personal fate and historical experience, will comprehend collectivization, see not only the prospects that have opened up, but also the disastrous measures that were taken to de-peasant Russia.
During the Great Patriotic War, Tvardovsky created a truly folk “book about a fighter” “Vasily Terkin”. Her hero became the personification of the entire Russian nation. The commonality of Terkin's fate with the fate of the entire people is emphasized in the poem repeatedly. The image of the hero reflects the fundamental features of the Russian national character: simplicity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, courage. Perhaps Terkin’s most important quality is hard work. He, accustomed to working on a collective farm, considers war to be military labor. Terkin is capable of playing the accordion, repairing a clock, and organizing a crossing. Terkin does not lose heart even in the most difficult situations; he knows how to cheer up with a joke or a funny story.
Tvardovsky in his individual form embodied the universal inherent in the people. At the same time, the poet emphasizes that “in every company there is such a” Terkin. The Hero acts as a generalized image of a Fighter and a Man:
Sometimes serious, sometimes funny,
No matter what the rain, what the snow, -
Into battle, forward, into utter fire
He goes, holy and sinful,
Russian miracle man.
The image of the hero merges with the image of the entire warring people. In the chapter “Death and the Warrior” Terkin overcomes even death. In such a conventional form, Tvardovsky embodied the idea of invincibility, the immortality of the people: “Terkin is not subject to death, since the war has not expired.”
The poem “Vasily Terkin” is an epic of war, since in the diverse combat episodes, in different situations and scenes, an image of the people at war is created, its history is traced from retreat to victory.
IN post-war period during Khrushchev's thaw Tvardovsky continues the biography of Terkin in the poem “Terkin in the Next World.” The poet wanted to cleanse the people's consciousness of totalitarian ideology. It is no coincidence that the poem begins with a dispute between the poet and the ideologically indoctrinated reader, who hears “echoes of illicit ideas” in everything, sees sedition in a literary work, without even reading it, but unconditionally believing the official assessments. Terkin turns from an epic hero into a tragic hero: having preserved his living soul in the “other world,” Terkin enters into a duel with the totalitarian system. “The Other World” is a military-bureaucratic System with a foreign asset, “Grobgazeta”, a Special Department, Organs, a Network, in which there is an excess of complete fools who did not want to resign. Terkin manages to keep his soul alive and get out of the “other world.” He performs a spiritual feat in peacetime. The return of Terkin is the finding of a way out for all living things that the dead System tried to strangle, where the dead command the living, where “the dead are responsible for the living.” If Terkin the fighter exalted his state and did everything for its victory, then the new Terkin destroys the totalitarian system that crushes people.
In the post-war period, Tvardovsky wrote the poem “House by the Road” - a lament for families that the war had scattered and destroyed. Describing the pre-war life and everyday life of the Sivtsov family, the poet shows the conditions for the formation of the heroes’ resilience and love for their Home.
This love helps Andrei, who returned from the war, to rebuild his house in the hope that his wife will return and there will be a strong and kind family again. Hope and love do not leave Anna even in the incredibly difficult conditions of a fascist concentration camp. The name “House by the Road” is symbolic - it is a house by the road of war.
The lyric epic poem “Beyond the Distance, the Distance” expands the time and space of the poet’s contemporary reality of the 1960s.
The poet turns to the past in order to compare it with the present, to see the transformations that have taken place in the country. Turning to the distances of time allows us to reflect on the fate of the Russian people, their character and traditions (chapters “Seven Thousand Rivers”, “Two Forges”, “Lights of Siberia”, “On the Angara”). In the chapter “So it Was,” Tvardovsky talks about the period of Stalin’s personality cult, about the type of person’s personality that was developed at that time:
But which of us is fit to be a judge?
Decide who is right and who is wrong?
We are talking about people, and people
Don't they create gods themselves?
The poet is trying to philosophically comprehend time, to find the origins of what was happening.
In addition to temporal distances, the poet also surveys geographical distances. The poem is a kind of travel diary of a trip on the Moscow - Vladivostok train, passing through the entire country. Huge spaces run past the windows of the carriage. Having traveled across the entire country, the poet remembers his “small” homeland with extraordinary devotion and love:
From the road - across the country -
I see my father's land of Smolensk.
Another distance appears before the poet - the distance of human moral potential, the deep distance of the soul of the lyrical hero.
All three distances merge into a large symphonic work, which reveals the strength and power of the country, the beauty and heroism of the Soviet people. The poet is convinced of the historical correctness and progressiveness of our country’s path:
After a year - a year, after a milestone - a milestone,
Behind the stripe is a stripe.
The path is not easy. But the wind of the century -
He blows our sails.
Tvardovsky’s last poem was “By the Right of Memory.” This is a poem about “sleepless memory”, about everything that happened during the years of Soviet power - great and tragic, about history and eternal values. The poet wrote the poem in 1970, when they had already forgotten about the cult of personality and tried to embellish or silence the negative in the history of the Soviet country:
They tell you to forget and ask with affection
Not remembering is a memory for printing,
So that inadvertently that publicity
The uninitiated should not be confused.
Tvardovsky judges himself and the country by the highest moral standards. He sees the origins of dehumanization and betrayal in Stalin's times, when morality was turned upside down, when perjury, betrayal, and slander were considered valor, if this was done under the sign of love for the leader. The poet is sure that it is impossible to kill memory, that the people will remember their history, since
One lie is to our loss,
And only the truth comes to court!
The poem “By Right of Memory” is a bitter, dramatic work. In it, Tvardovsky tragically realized that he, too, was in error, that historical guilt lay with him:
Children have long since become fathers,
But for everyone's father
We were all responsible
And the trial lasts for decades,
And there is no end in sight.
Thus, the entire history of the country, captured in Tvardovsky’s poems, received its philosophical understanding in his last, final poem.
2. Tvardovsky’s creative path
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky– originally from the Smolensk region, b. and grew up on a farm near the village. Zagorje. Father is one. son is landless. Kr-nina, blacksmith, earned money for many years. money for the 1st payment for the land. The poet recalled in his autobiography that this land (10 small dessiatines, purchased in installments) “was the road to holiness.” In his youth, T. begins to audition. yourself in poetry. Impulse and central. “Small Motherland” became the theme of the poet’s early poems. "Rural Chronicle"- this is the name of the cycle of early poems by T. Here, as befits a chronicle, it is captured. specific examples of village life in the 20-30s. Many poems by T. 30s. built on opposition. pictures of life past and present (in the sense of the collective farm), for example, “Guest” (a guest comes to the collective farm, but he himself is not a member of the collective farm, listens to how the owner praises his life, and still waits for him to talk about bad things; but he doesn’t he says, showing the household, then takes the guest to the mowing, everyone there is sweating, but they work joyfully, and the guest is sad: probably people will really live richly, as he dreamed of living). He captures in the verses of this cycle thoughts about hard times. female share, and, on the contrary, awarding a simple collective farmer with the highest order (“Meeting”). In the same 30s, T. left. first to Smolensk, and then to Moscow, discovers a big world. Hence the image of the homeland, that “from edge to edge, // To all ends. To all lands...", new heroes - drivers, pilots, military men. The motives of parents’ pride in their children’s successes and the sadness of parting form the basis for a number of T. poems of the 30s. (“Mother and Son”, “Farewell”, “Son”). Occasionally, in the poems of those years, there was a direct mention of the tragedy of the family, which was dispossessed and deported: “What are you doing, brother? // How are you brother? // Where are you, brother? // On which White Sea Canal?..” (“Brothers”, 1933; these motifs sounded much later with renewed vigor, in the late 60s, in the cycle “In Memory of the Mother”, the poem “By the Right of Memory”). T. was formed as an epic poet, which did not deprive his creativity of either lyricism or, later, philosophy. 1st large production that brought T. success and fame - "Ant Country"(1936). T. himself believed that it was with this poem that he began as a poet. The basis is plot, taking beginning in vernacular fairy tales, in Nekrasov’s poem “To whom in Rus'...” - a journey in search of happiness. The hero of the poem, Nikita Morgunok, left home and went to look for a country of peasants. happiness - Ant. T. wrote: “The word “Ant”, generally speaking, is not made up. It is taken from the cross. mythology and meaning, most likely, some concretization of the eternal. peasant dreams and legendary rumors about “free lands”, about blessed. and far away. the edges where milk flows. rivers in Kiseln. shores." But the image of Nikita Morgunk, for all its generality, contains reality. features of the 30s Nikita is a kr-nin-individual, defeating him. doubts about the need for collective farms, Muravia seemed to him like a land that “in length and breadth - // Its own all around. // You sow one bobblehead, // And that one is yours.” The plot of the poem is structured in such a way as to convince Nikita of the triumph of the collective farm ideal, revealing itself in the picture of collective sowing (chapter 4). It wasn’t only Nikita who was overcome by doubts in those years. The narrator himself speaks about this: “No, never like this year // In anxiety and struggle, // People did not wait, people did not think so // About life. about myself..." Narisov. without revealing the pictures in the poem. the entire depth of contradictions, connections. with collectivization. Many episodes remained outside the scope of the poem: “houses are rotting, courtyards are rotting, // Jackdaws are making nests through the pipes, // The owner’s trail is overgrown. // He escaped on his own, // He was taken, // as they say, to the ends of the earth, // Where there is no land.” T. in “The Country of Ant” showed life rather as it should be and should be. will be, and not as it actually was. But this does not negate T.’s poem. The poet defended it. the ideal of a hard worker, masterfully draws poetic. pictures of his native land, knows how to hear and convey folklore. dialect (“to steal is like smoking a chimney”), based on oral vernacular. TV creates its own style. The All-Union began with the poem “The Country of Ant”. fame T. After writing “The Countries of Ant”, received. Stalin Prize and Order of Lenin (1936). I entered the 3rd year of IFLI (institutional philosophy, literature and art). Leonov told the story as in a modern exam. Literary T. pulled out a ticket: “Tvardovsky. “The Country of Ant” (T. - the beginning of a realistic branch in Russian Soviet poetry.
Bonus: cr. content poems. Chapter 1. Nikita Morgunok leaves his native place on a faithful gray horse. Chapter 2. Morgunok enters the village where he was baptized, and is hit. for the celebration - “the last wedding and wake”: the kulaks are walking, remembering those sent to Solovki, and the villagers remember how they poured bread into the water from the surplus appropriation system. Chapter 3. Nikita arrives. to my brother-in-law. They drink and talk: “Should I decide or what?” Apparently - about the collective farm. We learn from this chapter that Nikita lives on a farm and does not want to go to the collective farm. The author asks, where are you going, Nikita? Chapter 4. We find out that Nikita is looking for Ant. He's going to unfamiliar places. And he sees: collective farmers sow together, beautifully, with a tractor. A sight for sore eyes. Chapter 5. Nikita meets the wandering priest Mitrofan (He complains that there are no more parishes, the priests live as best they can. And he himself goes from village to village: where they believe in God and there is no priest, he is welcome there. His only complaint is , that there is no horse. He invites Nikita to ride with him on a cart, to earn money. Nikita proudly refuses. Chapter 6. Nikita spends the night in the forest with two other such wanderers by the fire. 1 of them is a story. A tale that did not want to go to the collective farm: they say, as I lived in my hut, so I will live. Then the river flooded, lifted the hut and brought it to the collective farm. Grandfather then agreed to live in a new way. Chapter 7. “Stalin's” chapter. There is a rumor among the people that Stalin is riding across the country on a black horse. horse. Nikita thinks that he should ask Stalin so that before Nikita turns 40 (at the time of the poem he is 38), he would not be dragged to the collective farm, but would be allowed to live separately. And then he will come to the collective farm ( Chapter 8. Nikita meets a beggar with a boy and recognizes in the beggar the former kulak Ilya Kuzmich Bugrov: he is coming from Solovki, begging, dreams of returning everything back (in the sense of ringing the alarm bell, and the khan to the Soviets). When Nikita falls asleep, Bugrov pokes the horse and leaves the boy with Nikita. Nikita climbs into the shafts, pulls the cart on himself, the boy follows. Chapter 9. Morgunok trudges with a cart, asks the people if they have seen his horse. In one village they stop him and take him to the council. There they check his papers, everything is in order, only the chairman reproaches him: why are you driving around doing nothing? Nikita decides to look for a horse from the gypsies. He asks where to find them, he is told - on the collective farm. Chapter 10. Nikita is surprised that the gypsies are on the collective farm. Nikita story them about their misfortune. They bring out different horses for him to identify, but Nikita doesn’t lie and doesn’t recognize a single horse. But staying overnight with the gypsies, he thinks about it. Why not steal their horse? They always stole horses before. The watchman scares him off, and Nikita crawls on. Chapter 11. Nikita meets along the way. the former priest on his horse: either he bought it from Bugrov, or stole it. But while Nikita is untangling himself from the shaft, the priest is running away. Nikita runs after him, but it’s too late. Then he goes with his cart. Chapter 12. Nikita arrives at the market and sees Ilya Bugrov there, begging for alms. He begins to beat the thief, he promises to say something about the horse, and gives his hat as a guarantee that he will not run away. But he runs away. Chapter 13. A young tractor driver is driving along the road, sees Nikita, takes him in tow and takes him to the collective farm. Nikita asks him where he can buy a horse, he sends him. him to the village of Ostrov. Nikita entrusts the cart and the boy to the tractor driver for a while, and he invites him to the wedding. Chapter 14. The village of Ostrov on the Tsar River, there is a church and a sexton there. which is quite surprising. Desolation, people don’t work, whittling pipes. They are not collective farmers. One and only grandfather agrees to sell Nikita a horse. Blind. When Nikita says that they live poorly, the old man responds with words from Nikitina’s dream about Ant: “The earth is in length and breadth - // All around us. // You sow one bobblehead, // And that one is yours.” Having slurped unsalted, Nikita leaves the village. Chapter 15. Returning to the collective farm to the tractor driver. There, threshing was in full swing, and Nikita joined the collective farmers. Then he has a cigarette break with Chairman Frolov. That show. to him, the collective farm is the opposite of the village of Ostrov, such a deliberate antithesis. Nikita asked, how many years does such a life last? Chapter 16. Chairman story. Nikita about his family: there is a pilot Frolov, a machinist, an agronomist, a professor, and even a writer. Then I told. about the opposition with his fist Grachev, about how he was almost killed, how he, thinking that he was dying, bequeathed to his son: “Go forward, son!” and therefore such a life is first for 5, then for 10 years, and then forever. Chapter 17. Conversation with the collective farm watchman. Nothing special, just a story. about a grandfather from a collective farm who decided to go to the Lavra. Chapter 18. Wedding on a collective farm. Chatushki, transformed folk. traditions. In the midst of the wedding, a priest arrives and offers to officiate. Nikita jumped out. over the threshold, and there is his horse. Chapter 19. Nikita goes home and meets that pilgrim who went to the Lavra. He asks what is God there? Bogomolets replies: “What about God? It’s not that he doesn’t exist, // But he’s not in power.” Then Nikita asked which direction Muravia was on. The grandfather answers him: you are an eccentric, it has long been overgrown with grass and ants. And Nikita understands that he needs to go to the collective farm, because it’s cool there!
Poetry of the war years. In 1939, the poet was drafted into the Red Army and participated in the liberation of Western Belarus. With the outbreak of the war with Finland, already in the rank of officer, he was in the position of special correspondent for a military newspaper. In June 1941, Alexander Tvardovsky began working in the editorial office of the newspaper of the Southwestern Front “Red Army”. He writes poems, essays, feuilletons, articles, songs, notes. Unfortunately, the notebook with Tvardovsky’s notes about the first months of work disappeared. But there were lines that captured the first days of the war, the most terrible and sorrowful period of the Great Patriotic War: “It was a great sadness, // As we wandered to the east. // They walked thin, they walked barefoot // To unknown lands, // What is it, where is it, Russia, // What is our own border?”
Each person, fighting for the freedom of his homeland, also fought for that small piece of land on which he himself grew up. In Tvardovsky’s lyrics there is an image of his small homeland, “native side” - the Smolensk region, which was captured by the enemy: The wind, or something, blew // From those sad fields - // What’s wrong with it, as I think about it, // My side!”
In Tvardovsky’s lyrics there is an image of a tank, which means much more to the poet than just a tracked vehicle. His poem is known, which is called - "Tank": “And, as if the first route // Opening behind itself, // Clad and shod in steel, // The tank goes with the original one into battle.”
And yet, not all of Tvardovsky’s war lyrics consist of generalized images and lengthy reflections. The poet also wrote several front-line sketches in which specific people talk about their military life. Similar verses include, for example, "The Tankman's Tale." At the center of this poem is the figure of a boy who helped discover a camouflaged enemy artillery crew. This work talks about childhood at the front, and, most importantly, emphasizes the need for everyone to participate in the military everyday life of the country. The reader’s mind’s eye sees the following picture: “Well, no battle awaits. - Get in here, buddy!// - The boy is standing there - mines, bullets whistling, // And only the shirt with a bubble..." This picture is imprinted in the tanker’s memory forever, and although he does not know the boy’s name, he is sure that he will recognize him among thousands persons The poet emphasizes the unity of the people - everyone remembers well their comrade in arms, with whom they fought together against a common enemy. And, in fact, all the people themselves want to help the soldiers during everyday war. The above can be characterized as follows: a strong connection between the front and the rear. In fact, this theme runs like a red thread through all the poet’s war lyrics. Among his poems there is an appeal to a distant bride (“Song”), a message to Ukraine with its “golden land” and memories of a “fragile foal” humorous story from the words of a certain old woman about a rooster that was not given into the hands of the enemy.
The feeling of obligation of the living to the fallen, the impossibility of forgetting everything that happened - the main motives military lyrics A. Tvardovsky. “I’m alive, I came back from the war alive and well. But how many I am missing... how many people managed to read me and, perhaps, love me, but they are no longer alive. It was part of me,” the poet wrote. “I was killed near Rzhev”(1946) - a poem written in the first person. This form seemed to Tvardovsky most consistent with the idea of the poem - the unity of the living and the fallen. The deceased soldier sees himself as only “a part of the national whole,” and he is concerned, like everyone whose “eyes have grown dark,” about everything that happened later, after him. “I was killed near Rzhev...” - this is the most striking of the poems, a real masterpiece of the poet’s creativity. The unusual form of the work is a monologue of a dead soldier. In his words one can feel the tragedy, the desire to live and see a time of peace: “I am where the blind roots are // Looking for food in the darkness. // I am where with a cloud of dust // Rye is walking on the hill.” But the dead soldier is not only sad about himself. He is worried about what will happen to the new generation, whether it will be able to preserve all the great wartime gains. Despite own death, he says: “I bequeath you to be happy in that life.” Tvardovsky was the first of the poets to touch upon the theme of the responsibility of the living to the fallen, that high responsibility without which life generally loses its meaning, for what is it like for a person to endure all the hardships of life if he knows that his descendants will in no way appreciate what he and his generation have done and will not only consign them to oblivion , but they can even trample all their conquests, as, alas, has happened more than once in the centuries-old history of mankind... No, the dying person must at least a moment before death see, albeit mentally, those “who picked up the banner from our hands on the run ”, as the poet put it back in 1946 (“I was killed near Rzhev”). “What else is it like even for a dead person?”
Poem "Vasily Terkin". Article by A. Tvardovsky “How “Terkin” was written.”
The poem "Vasily Terkin" in terms of genre is a free chronicle narrative ("A book about a fighter, without beginning, without end..."), which covers the entire history of the war - from the tragic retreat to Victory. The chapters of the poem are related to various events of the war: “At a halt”, “Before the battle”, “Crossing”, “Accordion”, “On the offensive”, “On the Dnieper”. The poem is based on the image of the main character - private Vasily Terkin. It doesn't have a real prototype. This is a collective image that combines the typical features of the spiritual appearance and character of an ordinary Russian soldier: “Terkin - who is he? // Let’s be honest: // He’s just a guy himself // He’s ordinary.” The image of Terkin has folklore roots, it is “a hero, a fathom in the shoulders”, “a merry fellow”, “an experienced man”. Behind the illusion of simplicity, buffoonery, and mischief lie moral sensitivity and a sense of filial duty to the Motherland, the ability to accomplish a feat at any moment without phrases or poses. The feat of a soldier in war is shown by Tvardovsky as everyday and hard military labor and battle, and moving to new positions, and spending the night in a trench or right on the ground, “shielding from black death only with his own back...” And the hero who accomplishes this feat is an ordinary, simple soldier: “A man of simple origin, // That in battle is not a stranger to danger... // Sometimes serious, sometimes funny, // He goes - a saint and a sinner...”. In the image of Terkin, Tvardovsky depicts the best features of the Russian character - courage, perseverance, resourcefulness, optimism and great devotion to his native land: “Our dear Mother Earth, // In days of trouble and in days of victory // You are not brighter and more beautiful, // And there is nothing more desirable to the heart...” It is in the defense of the Motherland, life on earth that the justice of the people’s Patriotic War lies: “The battle is holy and just, the battle to the death is not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth.”
Article. TV says that since 1942. (time of publication of 1st chapters of “Terkin”) received. letters. In the article he answered. to questions from readers: 1. Fiction. or the real person Vasily Terkin? (letters were sometimes written not to TV, but to Terkin!) 2. How it was written. book? 3. Why is there no continued book about Terkin in the post-war period? time? Answers: 1. Terkin is a fictitious person, a combination of individual features. real individuals and individuals fictional military characters chronicles written by various by the authors. 2. “Vasya Terkin” has been known since 1939-1940. - from the period of the Finnish campaign. TV worked at the Leningr newspaper. military district “Guardian of the Motherland” + also N. Tikhonov, V. Sayanov, A. Shcherbakov, S. Vashantsev, Ts. Solodar. They came up with a hero for a satirical story. pictures and came up with Vasya Terkin (the coincidence of the hero’s name with the name of the merchant from Boborykin’s novel “Vasily Terkin” is an accident). But according to TV. The 1st Terkin was based on old traditions, when the word was simplified as much as possible. Therefore, when creating. poem (it was conceived back in 1940) TV. refusal of the size of the 1st Terkin: the sizes in the poem will be varied, but one - the trochaic tetrameter - will predominate, as if “flowing around” the entire work. TV stories about the work that was carried out before the start of the war, about how it was created. some episodes of the poem (“Crossing”, “Terkin is wounded”). TV beginning work on the Southwestern Front, in the newspaper “Red Army”, there is their own character like the 1st Terkin - Ivan Gvozdev. Wrote TV. many feuilletons, essays, notes in poetry and prose. But he felt dissatisfied with working “on the topic of the day.” before the beginning of spring 1942 it was finalized. sketches of "Terkin". At first he is concerned about the form, but then decides to write a poem “without beginning or end” (end = death of the hero). The main thing is the shape of each part separately: “so that it can be read from any open page.” The popularity of “Terkin”, “continuations” sent by readers. Some were even published in printed form. TV says that as a poem, “Terkin” is complete. and cannot be continued in peacetime. TV I don't mind sequels. He is indignant at only one thing: A. Yurasov’s New York remake, where Terkin is depicted as a defector and rowdy. In general, the article is interesting as a description of creativity. process.
Along with this work, Tvardovsky creates others in which war appears in its terrible guise. WITH 1942 to 1946 he's writing poem "House by the Road", in the center of which is the fate of the “ascetic fighter” Andrei Sivtsov and his wife, Anna, who was taken to Germany with her children. It contains folk motifs close to the genre of lamentation. The poem is a hymn to human courage, perseverance and selflessness.
Being in the thick of things and daily observing everyday life at the front, the poet creates a whole series of poems about the war, in which he glorifies the courage and heroism of the soldiers. Probably the most famous of them is: “I was killed near Rzhev, // In a nameless swamp, // In the fifth company, on the left, // During a brutal raid.”
After the war, Tvardovsky turned to life in his work ordinary people- how they are reborn to a peaceful life, restoring what was destroyed by the war. Created poem “Beyond the Distance - Distance” (1953 – 1960), which is like a diary of a trip to Siberia and the Far East. The book was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1961. Important milestones in the life of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky were his work as editor-in-chief of the magazine New world» . He first headed the magazine in 1950-1954 years. The time was difficult then - the process of restoring the national economy was underway. Tvardovsky, whose soul was rooting for the village, himself sharply criticized socio-economic transformations and published articles on this topic, called “vicious”, the authors of which were V. Pomerantsev, M. Livshits, F. Abramov, M. Shcheglov and others. Also, he tried to post there poem "Terkin in the Other World", where in an allegorical form he criticized the then dominant bureaucratic system. The result was his release from his duties as editor-in-chief on July 23, 1954. Only after the famous 20th Party Congress did he have the opportunity to return to the magazine.
Under him, the “New World” became a truly new world - a world of democracy and freedom. The works of F. Abramov, Ch. Aitmatov, G. Baklanov, V. Belov, V. Bykov, V. Voinovich, K. Vorobyov, V. Dorosh, Yu. Dombrovsky, S. Zalygin, F. Iskander, B. Mozhaev were published there , V. Ovechkin, Y. Trifonov, V. Shukshina, A. Yashin and others. The editor’s greatest merit was the publication of the work of the then unknown Ryazan teacher Alexander Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962). At this time, the term “New World prose” came into literary use - that is, acutely social and artistically significant.
However, the end of the Khrushchev thaw came, and difficult times came again for Tvardovsky. The magazine began to be criticized for “denigration,” “distortion of history,” and “criticism of the collective farm system.” Tvardovsky was deprived of his closest employees. He, a former deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of several convocations, a member of the Central Audit Commission of the CPSU, a candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee, was no longer elected to such bodies. In February 1970, working conditions became unbearable, and he was forced to leave the magazine shortly before his sixtieth birthday. A.I. Isaevich Solzhenitsyn spoke about this event as follows: “There are many ways to kill a poet. For Tvardovsky, it was chosen: to take away his brainchild - his passion - his magazine.”
After leaving the magazine, the illness began to make itself felt more and more, the poet went to his dacha near Moscow, where he spent his last days. Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky died on December 18, 1971. In the final confessional poem "By Right of Memory" (published 1987)- the pathos of the uncompromising truth about the time of Stalinism, about the tragic inconsistency of the spiritual world of man of this time.
The first poems of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky were published in Smolensk newspapers in 1925-1926, but fame came to him later, in the mid-30s, when “The Country of Ant” (1934-1936) was written and published - a poem about the fate of a peasant - individual farmer, about his difficult and difficult path to the collective farm. The poet's original talent clearly manifested itself in it.
In his works of the 30-60s. he embodied the complex, turning-point events of the time, shifts and changes in the life of the country and the people, the depth of the national historical disaster and feat in one of the most brutal wars that humanity experienced, rightfully occupying one of the leading places in the literature of the 20th century.
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was born on June 21, 1910 in the “farm of the Stolpovo wasteland”, belonging to the village of Zagorye, Smolensk province, into a large large family of a peasant blacksmith. Note that later, in the 30s, the Tvardovsky family suffered a tragic fate: during collectivization they were dispossessed and exiled to the North.
From the early age the future poet imbibed love and respect for the land, for the hard work on it and for the blacksmith's craft, the master of which was his father Trifon Gordeevich - a man of a very original, tough and tough character and at the same time literate, well-read, who knew a lot of poems from memory. The poet's mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, had a sensitive, impressionable soul.
As the poet later recalled in “Autobiography,” long winter evenings in their family were often devoted to reading aloud books by Pushkin and Gogol, Lermontov and Nekrasov, A.K. Tolstoy and Nikitin... It was then that a latent, irresistible craving for poetry arose in the boy’s soul, which was based on rural life itself, close to nature, as well as traits inherited from his parents.
In 1928, after a conflict and then a break with his father, Tvardovsky broke up with Zagorye and moved to Smolensk, where for a long time he could not get a job and survived on a pittance of literary earnings. Later, in 1932, he entered Smolensk pedagogical institute and at the same time as studying, he traveled as a correspondent to collective farms, wrote articles and notes about changes in rural life for local newspapers. At this time, in addition to the prose story “The Diary of a Collective Farm Chairman,” he wrote the poems “The Path to Socialism” (1931) and “Introduction” (1933), in which colloquial, prosaic verse predominates, which the poet himself later called “riding with the reins lowered.” They did not become a poetic success, but played a role in the formation and rapid self-determination of his talent.
In 1936, Tvardovsky came to Moscow, entered the philological faculty of the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, Literature (MIFLI) and in 1939 graduated with honors. In the same year he was drafted into the army and in the winter of 1939/40 he participated in the war with Finland as a correspondent for a military newspaper.
From the first to the last days of the Great Patriotic War, Tvardovsky was an active participant - a special correspondent for the front-line press. Together with the active army, having started the war on the Southwestern Front, he walked along its roads from Moscow to Konigsberg.
After the war, in addition to his main literary work, poetry itself, he was for a number of years the editor-in-chief of the New World magazine, consistently defending in this post the principles of truly artistic realistic art. Heading this magazine, he contributed to the entry into literature of a number of talented writers - prose writers and poets: F. Abramov and G. Baklanov, A. Solzhenitsyn and Yu. Trifonov, A. Zhigulin and A. Prasolov, etc.
The formation and development of Tvardovsky as a poet dates back to the mid-20s. While working as a rural correspondent for Smolensk newspapers, where his notes on village life had been published since 1924, he also published his youthful, unpretentious and still imperfect poems there. In the poet’s “Autobiography” we read: “My first published poem “New Hut” appeared in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Village” in the summer of 1925. It started like this:
Smells like fresh pine resin
The yellowish walls shine.
We'll live well in the spring
Here in a new, Soviet way...”
With the appearance of “The Country of Ant” (1934-1936), which testified to the entry of its author into a period of poetic maturity, the name of Tvardovsky became widely known, and the poet himself asserted himself more and more confidently. At the same time, he wrote cycles of poems “Rural Chronicle” and “About Grandfather Danila”, poems “Mothers”, “Ivushka”, and a number of other notable works. It is around the “Country of Ant” that the emerging contradictory artistic world of Tvardovsky has been grouped since the late 20s. and before the start of the war.
Today we perceive the work of the poet of that time differently. One of the researchers’ remark about the poet’s works of the early 30s should be recognized as fair. (with certain reservations it could be extended to this entire decade): “The acute contradictions of the collectivization period in the poems, in fact, are not touched upon; the problems of the village of those years are only named, and they are solved in a superficially optimistic way.” However, it seems that this can hardly be attributed unconditionally to “The Country of Ant,” with its peculiar conventional design and construction, and folklore flavor, as well as to the best poems of the pre-war decade.
During the war years, Tvardovsky did everything that was required for the front, often spoke in the army and front-line press: “wrote essays, poems, feuilletons, slogans, leaflets, songs, articles, notes...”, but his main work during the war years was the creation lyric-epic poem “Vasily Terkin” (1941-1945).
This, as the poet himself called it, “A Book about a Soldier,” recreates a reliable picture of front-line reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person in war. At the same time, Tvardovsky wrote a cycle of poems “Front-line Chronicle” (1941-1945), and worked on a book of essays “Motherland and Foreign Land” (1942-1946).
At the same time, he wrote such lyrical masterpieces as “Two Lines” (1943), “War - there is no crueler word...” (1944), “In a field dug with streams...” (1945), which were first published after the war, in the January book of the magazine “Znamya” for 1946.
Even in the first year of the war, the lyrical poem “House by the Road” (1942-1946) was started and soon after its end. “Its theme,” as the poet noted, “is war, but from a different side than in “Terkin” - from the side of home, family, wife and children of a soldier who survived the war. The epigraph of this book could be lines taken from it:
Come on people, never
Let's not forget about this."
In the 50s Tvardovsky created the poem “Beyond the Distance - Distance” (1950-1960) - a kind of lyrical epic about modernity and history, about a turning point in the lives of millions of people. This is a detailed lyrical monologue of a contemporary, a poetic narrative about the difficult destinies of the homeland and people, about their complex historical path, about internal processes and changes in spiritual world person of the 20th century.
In parallel with “Beyond the Distance, the Distance,” the poet is working on a satirical poem-fairy tale “Terkin in the Other World” (1954-1963), depicting the “inertia, bureaucracy, formalism” of our life. According to the author, “the poem “Terkin in the Other World” is not a continuation of “Vasily Terkin”, but only refers to the image of the hero of “The Book about a Fighter” to solve special problems of the satirical and journalistic genre.”
IN last years life, Tvardovsky writes a lyrical poem-cycle “By the right of memory” (1966-1969) - a work of tragic sound. This is a social and lyrical-philosophical reflection on the painful paths of history, on the fate of an individual, on the dramatic fate of one’s family, father, mother, brothers. Being deeply personal and confessional, “By the Right of Memory” at the same time expresses the people’s point of view on the tragic phenomena of the past.
Along with major lyric-epic works in the 40s and 60s. Tvardovsky writes poems that poignantly echo the “cruel memory” of the war (“I was killed near Rzhev,” “On the day the war ended,” “To the son of a dead warrior,” etc.), as well as a number of lyrical poems that made up the book “ From the lyrics of these years” (1967). These are concentrated, sincere and original thoughts about nature, man, homeland, history, time, life and death, the poetic word.
Written back in the late 50s. and in his programmatic poem “The whole essence is in one single covenant...” (1958), the poet reflects on the main thing for himself in working on the word. It is about a purely personal beginning in creativity and about complete dedication in the search for a unique and individual artistic embodiment of the truth of life:
The whole point is in one single covenant:
What I will say before the time melts,
I know this better than anyone in the world -
Living and dead, only I know.
Say that word to anyone else
There's no way I could ever
Entrust. Even Leo Tolstoy -
It is forbidden. He won’t say - let him be his own god.
And I'm only mortal. I am responsible for my own,
During my lifetime I worry about one thing:
About what I know better than anyone in the world,
I want to say. And the way I want.
In Tvardovsky’s late poems, in his heartfelt, personal, deeply psychological experiences of the 60s. First of all, the complex, dramatic paths of people's history are revealed, the harsh memory of the Great Patriotic War resounds, the difficult destinies of the pre-war and post-war villages resonate with pain, and evoke a heartfelt echo of the event folk life, find a sad, wise and enlightened solution to the “eternal themes” of the lyrics.
Native nature never leaves the poet indifferent: he vigilantly notices, “how after the March snowstorms, / Fresh, transparent and light, / In April, the birch forests suddenly turned pink / Palm-like,” he hears “indistinct talk or hubbub / In the tops of centuries-old pines ” (“That sleepy noise was sweet to me...”, 1964), the lark that heralded spring reminds him of the distant time of childhood.
Often the poet constructs his philosophical thoughts about the life of people and the change of generations, about their connections and blood relationships in such a way that they grow as a natural consequence of the depiction of natural phenomena (“Trees planted by grandfather...”, 1965; “Lawn in the morning from under a typewriter ...”, 1966; “Birch”, 1966). In these poems, the fate and soul of man directly connect with the historical life of the homeland and nature, the memory of the fatherland: they reflect and refract the problems and conflicts of the era in their own way.
The theme and image of the mother occupy a special place in the poet’s work. So, already at the end of the 30s. in the poem “Mothers” (1937, first published in 1958), in the form of blank verse, which is not quite usual for Tvardovsky, not only childhood memory and a deep filial feeling, but also a heightened poetic ear and vigilance, and most importantly - an increasingly revealing and the growing lyrical talent of the poet. These poems are clearly psychological, as if reflected in them - in the pictures of nature, in the signs of rural life and everyday life inseparable from it - a maternal image so close to the poet’s heart appears:
And the first noise of leaves is still incomplete,
And a green trail on the grainy dew,
And the lonely knock of the roller on the river,
And the sad smell of young hay,
And the echo of a late woman's song,
And just sky, blue sky -
They remind me of you every time.
And the feeling of filial grief sounds completely different, deeply tragic in the cycle “In Memory of the Mother” (1965), colored not only by the acute experience of irreparable personal loss, but also by the pain of nationwide suffering during the years of repression.
In the land where they were taken in droves,
Wherever there is a village nearby, let alone a city,
In the north, locked by the taiga,
All there was was cold and hunger.
But my mother certainly remembered
Let's talk a little about everything that has passed,
How she didn’t want to die there, -
The cemetery was very unpleasant.
Tvardovsky, as always in his lyrics, is extremely specific and precise, right down to the details. But here, in addition, the image itself is deeply psychologized, and literally everything is given in sensations and memories, one might say, through the eyes of the mother:
So-and-so, the dug earth is not in a row
Between centuries-old stumps and snags,
And at least somewhere far from housing,
And then there are the graves right behind the barracks.
And she used to see in her dreams
Not so much a house and a yard with everyone on the right,
And that hillock is in the native side
With crosses under curly birch trees.
Such beauty and grace
In the distance is a highway, road pollen smokes.
“I’ll wake up, I’ll wake up,” the mother said, “
And behind the wall is a taiga cemetery...
In the last of the poems of this cycle: “Where are you from, / Mother, did you save this song for old age?..” - a motif and image of “crossing” that is so characteristic of the poet’s work appears, which in “The Country of Ant” was represented as a movement towards the shore.” new life”, in “Vasily Terkin” - as the tragic reality of bloody battles with the enemy; in the poems “In Memory of a Mother,” he absorbs pain and sorrow about the fate of his mother, bitter resignation with the inevitable finitude of human life:
What has been lived is lived through,
And from whom what is the demand?
Yes, it's already nearby
And the last transfer.
Water carrier,
Gray old man
Take me to the other side
Side - home...
In the poet’s later lyrics, the theme of continuity of generations, memory and duty to those who died in the fight against fascism sounds with new, hard-won strength and depth, which enters with a piercing note in the poems “At night all the wounds hurt more painfully...” (1965), “I know no fault of mine...” (1966), “They lie there, deaf and dumb...” (1966).
I know it's not my fault
The fact that others did not come from the war,
The fact that they - some older, some younger -
We stayed there, and it’s not about the same thing,
That I could, but failed to save them, -
That's not what this is about, but still, still, still...
With their tragic understatement, these poems convey a stronger and deeper sense of involuntary personal guilt and responsibility for those cut short by the war. human lives. And this persistent pain of “cruel memory” and guilt, as one could see, applies to the poet not only to military victims and losses. At the same time, thoughts about man and time, imbued with faith in the omnipotence of human memory, turn into an affirmation of the life that a person carries and keeps within himself until the last moment.
In Tvardovsky's lyrics of the 60s. the essential qualities of his realistic style were revealed with particular completeness and force: democracy, the internal capacity of the poetic word and image, rhythm and intonation, all poetic means with external simplicity and uncomplicatedness. The poet himself saw the important advantages of this style, first of all, in the fact that it gives “reliable pictures of living life in all its imperious impressiveness.” At the same time, his later poems are characterized by psychological depth and philosophical richness.
Tvardovsky owns a number of thorough articles and speeches about poets and poetry containing mature and independent judgments about literature (“The Tale of Pushkin”, “About Bunin”, “The Poetry of Mikhail Isakovsky”, “On the Poetry of Marshak”), reviews and reviews about A. Blok, A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam and others, included in the book “Articles and Notes on Literature”, which went through several editions.
Continuing the traditions of Russian classics - Pushkin and Nekrasov, Tyutchev and Bunin, various traditions of folk poetry, without bypassing the experience of prominent poets of the 20th century, Tvardovsky demonstrated the possibilities of realism in the poetry of our time. Its impact on contemporary and subsequent poetic development undoubtedly and fruitfully.
Alexander was born on June 8 (21), 1910 in the Smolensk province Russian Empire. It is surprising that in Tvardovsky’s biography the first poem was written so early that the boy could not even write it down, because he was not taught to read and write. The love for literature appeared in childhood: Alexander’s father loved to read works aloud at home famous writers Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Nikitin.
Already at the age of 14, he wrote several poems and poems on topical topics. When collectivization and dispossession took place in the country, the poet supported the process (he expressed utopian ideas in the poems “The Country of Ant” (1934-36), “The Path to Socialism” (1931)). In 1939, when the war with Finland began, A.T. Tvardovsky, as a member of the Communist Party, participated in the unification of the USSR and Belarus. Then he settled in Voronezh, continued to write, and worked for the newspaper “Red Army”.
Writer's creativity
The most famous work of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was the poem “Vasily Terkin”. The poem brought great success to the author, since it was very relevant in war time. The further creative period in Tvardovsky’s life was filled with philosophical thoughts, which can be traced in the lyrics of the 1960s. Tvardovsky began working for the magazine “New World” and completely revised his views on Stalin’s policies.
In 1961, impressed by Alexander Tvardovsky’s speech at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave him his story “Shch-854” (later called “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”). Tvardovsky, being the editor of the magazine at that time, rated the story extremely highly, invited the author to Moscow and began to seek Khrushchev’s permission to publish this work.
At the end of the 60s, a significant event occurred in the biography of Alexander Tvardovsky - the Glavlit campaign against the magazine “New World” began. When the author was forced to leave the editorial office in 1970, part of the team left with him. The magazine was, in short, destroyed.
Death and legacy
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky died of lung cancer on December 18, 1971, and was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Streets in Moscow, Voronezh, Novosibirsk, and Smolensk are named after the famous writer. A school was named in his honor and a monument was erected in Moscow.
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