The first poems of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky were published in the Smolensk newspapers in 1925-1926, but fame came to him later, in the mid-30s, when “Country 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. She clearly showed original talent poet.
In his works of the 30-60s. he embodied the complex, critical events of the time, the shifts and changes in the life of the country and the people, the depth of the nationwide 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 on the “farm of the Stolpovo wasteland”, belonging to the village of Zagorye, Smolensk province, in a large large family peasant blacksmith. Note that later, in the 30s, the Tvardovsky family suffered tragic fate: during collectivization they were dispossessed and exiled to the North.
From the early age the future poet absorbed love and respect for the land, for hard work on it and for blacksmithing, the master of which was his father Trifon Gordeevich - a man of a very peculiar, tough and tough character, and at the same time literate, well-read, who knew many poems by heart. The mother of the poet Maria Mitrofanovna possessed a sensitive, impressionable soul.
As the poet later recalled in his Autobiography, long winter evenings often devoted in their family 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 village life itself close to nature, as well as traits inherited from parents.
In 1928, after a conflict and then a break with his father, Tvardovsky broke up with Zagorye and moved to Smolensk, where he could not get a job for a long time and survived on a penny literary income. Later, in 1932, he entered the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute and, simultaneously with his studies, traveled as a correspondent to collective farms, wrote articles and notes about changes in rural life in local newspapers. At this time, in addition to the prose story “The Diary of a Collective Farm Chairman”, he wrote the poems “The Road to Socialism” (1931) and “Introduction” (1933), in which a colloquial, prosaic verse prevails, later called by the poet himself “riding with the reins down”. 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, as a correspondent for a military newspaper, he participated in the war with Finland.
From the first to last days Great Patriotic War Tvardovsky was an active participant in it - a special correspondent for the front-line press. Together with the active army, having started the war on the Southwestern Front, he marched along its roads from Moscow to Koenigsberg.
After the war, in addition to his main literary work, actually poetic creativity, for a number of years he was the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine, consistently defending the principles of truly artistic realistic art in this post. As head of this journal, 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, and others.
The formation and formation of Tvardovsky the poet dates back to the mid-20s. While working as a rural correspondent for the Smolensk newspapers, where his notes on village life were published already from 1924, he also published his youthful, unpretentious and still imperfect poems there. In the “Autobiography” of the poet we read: “In the newspaper “Smolensk Village” in the summer of 1925 my first printed poem “New Hut” appeared. It started like this:
Smells like fresh pine resin
The yellowish walls are shining.
We will live well with spring
Here in a new, Soviet way ... "
With the advent of The Country of Ants (1934-1936), which testified to the entry of its author into the time of poetic maturity, the name of Tvardovsky becomes widely known, and the poet himself asserts 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 the Ant" that Tvardovsky's emerging controversial artistic world has been grouped since the late 1920s. and before the start of the war.
Today we perceive the work of the poet of that time differently. It should be recognized as fair the remark of one of the researchers about the works of the poet in the early 30s. (with certain reservations, it could be extended to the entire decade): “The sharp contradictions of the period of collectivization in the poems, in fact, are not touched upon, the problems of the village of those years are only named, and they are solved superficially optimistically.” However, it seems that this can hardly be unconditionally attributed to the "Country of the Ant" with its peculiar conventional design and construction, folklore color, 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 appeared in the army and front-line press: “he wrote essays, poems, feuilletons, slogans, leaflets, songs, articles, notes ...”, but his main work of the war years was the creation lyric-epic poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-1945).
This, as the poet himself called it, “The book about a fighter” recreates a reliable picture of front-line reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, experiences of a person in a war. In parallel, Tvardovsky writes a cycle of poems "Frontline Chronicle" (1941-1945), working on a book of essays "Motherland and Foreign Land" (1942-1946).
At the same time, he wrote such masterpieces of lyrics as “Two lines” (1943), “War - there is no more cruel word ...” (1944), “In a field dug by streams ...” (1945), which were first published already after the war, in the January issue of the Znamya magazine for 1946.
In the first year of the war, it was launched and soon after it ended lyric poem"House by the road" (1942-1946). “Its theme,” as the poet noted, “is war, but from a different side than in Terkin, from the side of the home, family, wife and children of a soldier who survived the war. The epigraph of this book could be the lines taken from it:
Come on people never
Let's not forget this."
In the 50s. Tvardovsky created the poem "Beyond the Distance - the 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 fate of the motherland and people, about their difficult historical path, about internal processes and changes in spiritual world man of the 20th century.
In parallel with “Beyond the Distance, the Distance”, the poet is working on the satirical fairy tale poem “Terkin in the Other World” (1954-1963), depicting the “inertness, bureaucracy, formalism” of our life. According to the author, “the poem “Terkin in the next 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 meditation on the painful paths of history, on the fate of an individual, on the dramatic fate of his family, father, mother, brothers. Being deeply personal, 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 40-60s. Tvardovsky writes poems in which the “cruel memory” of the war piercingly echoed (“I was killed near Rzhev”, “On the day the war ended”, “To the son dead warrior”, etc.), as well as a series lyric poems who compiled 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 in the late 50s. and in his own programmatic poem “The whole essence is in a single testament ...” (1958), the poet reflects on the main thing for himself in his work on the word. It is about a purely personal beginning in creativity and about complete dedication in search of a uniquely individual artistic embodiment of life's truth:
The whole point is in one single covenant:
What I will say is melting until the time
I know this better than anyone in the world -
The living and the dead, only I know.
Say that word to no one else
I never could ever
Reassign. Even Leo Tolstoy
It is forbidden. He will say - let him be a god.
And I'm just a mortal. For your own in the answer,
I'm worried about one thing in life:
About what I know best in the world,
I want to say. And the way I want.
In the later poems of Tvardovsky, in his penetrating personal, in-depth psychological experiences of the 60s. first of all, the complex, dramatic paths of folk history are revealed, the harsh memory of the Great Patriotic War sounds, the difficult fate of the pre-war and post-war villages respond with pain, the events of people's life evoke a heartfelt echo, and a sorrowful, wise and enlightened solution is found " eternal themes” lyrics.
Native nature never leaves the poet indifferent: he keenly notices, “as after the March snowstorms, / Fresh, transparent and light, / In April, they suddenly turned pink / In a verbal birch forest”, he hears “an indistinct conversation or hubbub / In the tops of centuries-old pines “(“ That sleepy noise was sweet to me ...”, 1964), the lark, heralding spring, reminds him of a distant childhood.
Often the poet builds his philosophical thoughts about the life of people and the change of generations, about their connection and blood relationship in such a way that they grow as a natural consequence of the image natural phenomena(“Trees planted by grandfather ...”, 1965; “Lawn in the morning from under the typewriter ...”, 1966; “Birch”, 1966). In these verses, fate and the human soul are directly connected with historical life motherland and nature, the memory of the fatherland: they reflect and refract the problems and conflicts of the era in their own way.
A special place in the poet's work is occupied by the theme and image of the mother. Yes, in the late 1930s. in the poem “Mothers” (1937, first published in 1958), in the form of blank verse, which is not quite usual for Tvardovsky, not only the memory of childhood and a deep filial feeling, but also a heightened poetic ear and vigilance, and most importantly, an ever more revealing and the growing lyrical talent of the poet. These verses are distinctly psychological, as if reflected in them - in the pictures of nature, in the signs of rural life and life inseparable from it - there is a maternal image so close to the poet's heart:
And the first noise of the foliage is still incomplete,
And the trail is green on the granular dew,
And the lonely sound of a roll on the river,
And the sad smell of young hay,
And the echo of a late woman's song,
And just the sky blue sky —
I am reminded of you every time.
And the feeling of filial grief sounds completely different, deeply tragic in the cycle “In Memory of a Mother” (1965), colored not only by the most acute experience of irretrievable personal loss, but also by the pain of nationwide suffering during the years of repression.
In the land where they were taken in a herd,
Wherever a village is near, not like a city,
In the north, locked in the taiga,
All there was - cold and hunger.
Ho certainly remembered the mother,
A little speech will come about everything about what has passed,
How she did not want to die there, -
The cemetery was very ugly.
Tvardovsky, as always in his lyrics, is extremely specific and precise, right down to the details. But here, moreover, the image itself is deeply psychologized, and literally everything is given in sensations and memories, one might say, through the eyes of a mother:
So-and-so, dug earth not in a row
Between centuries-old stumps and snags,
And at least somewhere far away from housing,
And then - the graves right behind the barracks.
And she used to see in a dream
He is not so much a house and a yard with all the right,
And that hillock in the native side
With crosses under curly birches.
Such beauty and grace
In the distance there is a highway, road pollen smokes.
“Wake up, wake up,” my mother said, “
And behind the wall is the taiga cemetery...
In the last of the poems of this cycle: “- Where did you save this song from, / Mother, for old age? ..” - there is a motif and image of the “crossing” so characteristic of the poet’s work, which in the “Country of Ant” appeared as a movement to the shore “ new life”, in “Vasily Terkin” - as a tragic reality of bloody battles with the enemy; in the verses of "In Memory of a Mother" he absorbs pain and sorrow about the fate of his mother, bitter resignation to the inevitable finiteness of human life:
Outlived - experienced
And from whom what is the demand?
Yes already nearby
And the last transfer.
water carrier,
gray old man,
Take me to the other side
Side - home ...
In the later lyrics of the poet, with new, hard-won strength and depth, the theme of the continuity of generations, memory and duty to those who died in the fight against fascism sounds, which enters with a piercing note in the poems “At night, all wounds hurt more painfully ...” (1965), “I know no fault of mine...” (1966), “They lie, 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 - who is older, who is younger -
Stayed there, and it's not about the same thing,
That I could, but could not save, -
It's not about that, but still, still, still...
With their tragic understatement, these verses convey the stronger and deeper the feeling of involuntary personal guilt and responsibility for those cut short by the war. human lives. And this unrelenting pain of “cruel memory” and guilt, as one could see, applies by the poet not only to military casualties and losses. At the same time, thoughts about man and time, permeated with faith in the omnipotence of human memory, turn into an affirmation of the life that a person carries and keeps in himself until the last moment.
In the lyrics of Tvardovsky of the 60s. the essential qualities of his realistic style were revealed with special fullness and force: democracy, the inner 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 imperious impressiveness.” At the same time, his later poems are characterized by psychological depth and philosophical richness.
Tvardovsky owns a number of solid articles and speeches about poets and poetry containing mature and independent judgments about literature (“The Word about 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, not bypassing the experience of prominent poets of the 20th century, Tvardovsky demonstrated the possibilities of realism in the poetry of our time. His influence on contemporary and subsequent poetic development is undoubtedly and fruitful.
Alexander was born on June 8 (21), 1910 in the Smolensk province Russian Empire. It is surprising that in the biography of Tvardovsky the first poem was written so early that the boy could not even write it down, because he was not literate. 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 "Country of the 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 compose, worked in the newspaper "Red Army".
Creativity of the writer
by the most famous work Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was the poem "Vasily Terkin". The poem brought great success to the author, because it was very relevant in wartime. The subsequent creative period in Tvardovsky's life was filled with philosophical thoughts, which can be traced in the lyrics of the 1960s. Tvardovsky began working in the Novy Mir magazine, completely revised his views on Stalin's policy.
In 1961, under the impression of Alexander Tvardovsky's speech at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave him his story "Sch-854" (later called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"). Tvardovsky, being at that time the editor of the magazine, 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 took place in the biography of Alexander Tvardovsky - the campaign of Glavlit against the Novy Mir magazine 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.
Name famous writer named streets in Moscow, Voronezh, Novosibirsk, Smolensk. A school was named in his honor and a monument was erected in Moscow.
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Childhood
Born on June 8, 1910 on the Zagorye farm near the village of Seltso (now in the Smolensk region) in the family of a village blacksmith Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky (1880-1957) and Maria Mitrofanovna (1888-1972), nee - Pleskachevskaya, who came from the same palace.
The poet's younger brother is Ivan Trifonovich Tvardovsky (1914-2003), later a Russian writer and writer, cabinet maker, wood and bone carver, dissident.
The poet's grandfather, Gordey Tvardovsky, was a bombardier (artillery soldier) who served in Poland, from where he brought the nickname "Pan Tvardovsky", which passed to his son. This nickname (in reality, not associated with a noble origin) made Trifon Gordeevich perceive himself more as a one-palace than a peasant.
The mother, whom Tvardovsky loved very much, Maria Mitrofanovna, really came from the same palace. Trifon Gordeevich was a well-read man - and in the evenings Nekrasov, Nikitin, Ershov were often read aloud in their house. Poems Alexander began to compose early, while still being illiterate.
The beginning of literary activity
At the age of 15, Tvardovsky began to write small notes for the Smolensk newspapers. In 1925, Tvardovsky's first poem, The New Hut, was published in the Smolenskaya Derevnya newspaper. Then Tvardovsky, having collected several poems, brought them to Mikhail Isakovsky, who worked in the editorial office of the Rabochy Put newspaper. Isakovsky met the poet cordially, becoming a friend and mentor of the young Tvardovsky.
In 1928, Tvardovsky left the family and moved to Smolensk.
In 1931 his first poem "The Path to Socialism" was published. In 1935 in Smolensk, in the Western Regional State Publishing House, the first book "Collection of Poems" (1930-1936) was published. In total for 1925-35. Tvardovsky wrote and published, mainly on the pages of Smolensk newspapers and other regional publications, more than 130 poems.
In 1932, Tvardovsky entered the first year of the Smolensk State Pedagogical Institute. In 1936, Tvardovsky moved to Moscow and entered the third year of MIFLI. In 1939, Tvardovsky graduated from MIFLI.
In 1939-1940, as part of a group of writers, Tvardovsky worked in the newspaper of the Leningrad Military District "On Guard for the Motherland". As a war correspondent, Tvardovsky participated in the campaign of the Red Army in Western Belarus and in the war with Finland.
The poem "At rest" was published in the newspaper "On Guard of the Motherland" on December 11, 1939. In the article “How Was Vasily Terkin Written,” A. Tvardovsky said that the image of the main character was invented in 1939 for a permanent humorous column in the newspaper “On Guard of the Motherland”.
Collectivization, family repression
In the poems "The Path to Socialism" (1931) and "Country Ant" (1934-1936) he depicted collectivization and dreams of a "new" village, as well as Stalin riding a horse as a harbinger of a brighter future. Despite the fact that Tvardovsky's parents, along with his brothers, were dispossessed and exiled, and his farm was burned down by his fellow villagers, he himself supported the collectivization of peasant farms.
"Vasily Terkin"
In 1941-1942 he worked in Voronezh in the editorial office of the newspaper of the South-Western Front "Red Army". The poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-1945), "A book about a fighter without beginning and end" is Tvardovsky's most famous work; This is a chain of episodes from the Great Patriotic War. The poem is notable for its simple and precise style, energetic development of the action. Episodes are connected with each other only by the main character - the author proceeded from the fact that both he and his reader can die at any moment. As the chapters were written, they were published in the Western Front newspaper Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda and were incredibly popular on the front lines. The poem became one of the attributes of front-line life, as a result of which Tvardovsky became a cult author of the military generation.
Among other things, "Vasily Terkin" stands out among other works of that time by the complete absence of ideological propaganda, references to Stalin and the party.
By order of the Armed Forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front No.: 505 dated: 07/31/1944, the poet of the editorial office of the newspaper of the 3rd BF "Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda", Lieutenant Colonel Tvardovsky A.T. was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree for writing 2 poems (one of them - "Vasily Terkin", the second - "The House by the Road") and numerous essays on the liberation of the Belarusian land, as well as performances in front-line units in front of soldiers and officers.
By order of the Armed Forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front No.: 480 dated: 04/30/1945, the special correspondent of the newspaper of the 3rd BF "Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda", Lieutenant Colonel Tvardovsky A.T. was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree for improving the content of the newspaper (writing essays on battles in East Prussia) and enhancing its educational role.
Post-war poems
In 1946, the poem "House by the Road" was written, which mentions the first tragic months of the Great Patriotic War.
On the days of Stalin's death and funeral, A. T. Tvardovsky wrote the following lines:
“In this hour of greatest sorrow
I can't find those words
So that they fully express
Our nationwide misfortune…”
In the poem “For the distance - the distance”, written at the peak of the Khrushchev “thaw”, the writer condemns Stalin and, as in the book “From the lyrics of these years. 1959-1968" (1969), reflects on the movement of time, the artist's duty, life and death. In this poem, Stalin's personality cult and its consequences are discussed in the chapter "So it was", the rehabilitation of those illegally repressed under Stalin is discussed in the chapter "Childhood Friend".
In this poem, such an ideological side of the life and work of Tvardovsky as "sovereignty" was most clearly expressed. But, in contrast to the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, the cult of a strong state, power in Tvardovsky’s mind is not associated with the cult of any statesman and in general a concrete form of the state. This position helped Tvardovsky to be his own among the Russophiles - admirers of the Russian Empire.
"New world"
Tvardovsky was the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine twice: in 1950-54. and 1958-70.
In the autumn of 1954, Tvardovsky, by a decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU, was removed from his post as editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine for attempting to print the poem Terkin in the Other World and publishing journalistic articles in Novy Mir by V. Pomerantsev, F. Abramov, M. Lifshits, M. Shcheglova.
During both periods of Tvardovsky's editorship in Novy Mir, especially after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the journal became a haven for anti-Stalinist forces in literature, a symbol of the Sixties, an organ of the legal opposition Soviet power. The Novy Mir published the works of F. Abramov, V. Bykov, B. Mozhaev, Yu. Trifonov, Yu. Dombrovsky.
In the 1960s, Tvardovsky, in the poems “By the Right of Memory” (published in 1987) and “Torkin in the Other World,” revised his attitude towards Stalin and Stalinism. At the same time (early 1960s), Tvardovsky received Khrushchev's permission to publish the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn.
The new direction of the magazine (liberalism in art, ideology and economics, hiding behind the words about socialism "with a human face") caused dissatisfaction not so much with the Khrushchev-Brezhnev party elite and officials of the ideological departments, as with the so-called "neo-Stalinist-statesmen" in Soviet literature. For several years, there was a sharp literary (and actually ideological) controversy between the journals Novy Mir and Oktyabr ( Chief Editor V. A. Kochetov, author of the novel “What do you want?”, directed, among other things, against Tvardovsky). The staunch ideological rejection of the journal was also expressed by the “patriotic sovereigns”.
After Khrushchev was removed from top positions in the press (the Ogonyok magazine, the Socialist Industry newspaper), a campaign was launched against the Novy Mir magazine. Glavlit waged a bitter struggle with the journal, systematically preventing the most important materials from being printed. Since the leadership of the Union of Writers did not dare to formally dismiss Tvardovsky, the last measure of pressure on the journal was the removal of Tvardovsky's deputies and the appointment of people hostile to him to these positions. In February 1970, Tvardovsky was forced to resign his editorial powers, part of the magazine's staff followed his example. The editorial board was essentially destroyed. The KGB note “Materials about the moods of the poet A. Tvardovsky” on behalf of Yu. V. Andropov was sent on September 7, 1970 to the Central Committee of the CPSU.
In the "New World" ideological liberalism was combined with aesthetic traditionalism. Tvardovsky had a cold attitude towards modernist prose and poetry, preferring literature developing in classical forms of realism. Many of the greatest writers of the 1960s published in the journal, and many were opened to the reader by the journal. For example, in 1964, a large selection of poems by the Voronezh poet Alexei Prasolov was published in the August issue.
In 1966, Tvardovsky refused to approve the court verdict for the writers Y. Daniel and A. Sinyavsky.
Shortly after the defeat of Novy Mir, Tvardovsky was diagnosed with lung cancer. The writer died on December 18, 1971 in the dacha village of Krasnaya Pakhra, Moscow Region. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (site No. 7).
Family
- Grandfather - Gordey Tvardovsky (1841-1905), was a bombardier (artillery soldier), served in Poland.
- Father - Trifon Gordeevich (1880-1949) - was a well-read man, and in the evenings in his house they often read aloud Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Nikitin, Ershov.
- Mother - Maria Mitrofanovna (1888-1965), came from the same palace.
- Brothers: Konstantin (1908-2002), Ivan (1914-2003), Pavel (1917-1983), Vasily (1925-1954)
- Sisters: Anna (1912-2000) and Maria (1922-1984)
- Wife - Maria Illarionovna Gorelova (1908-1991)
- two daughters: Olga and Valentina
perpetuation of memory
- In 1990, an artistic stamped envelope was published in honor of the writer.
- In Smolensk, Voronezh, Novosibirsk, Balashikha and Moscow streets are named after Tvardovsky.
- The name of Tvardovsky was given to the Moscow school number 279.
- Aeroflot aircraft Airbus A330-343E VQ-BEK was named in honor of A. Tvardovsky.
- In 1988, the memorial estate museum "A. T. Tvardovsky on the farm Zagorye»
- On June 22, 2013, a monument to Tvardovsky was unveiled in Moscow on Strastnoy Boulevard next to the editorial office of the Novy Mir magazine. The authors are People's Artist of Russia Vladimir Surovtsev and Honored Architect of Russia Viktor Pasenko. At the same time, an incident took place: on the granite of the monument, “with the participation of the Ministry of Culture” was engraved with the second letter “t” missing.
- In 2015, a memorial plaque was opened in Russian Turek in honor of Tvardovsky's visit to the village.
Other information
In collaboration with M. Isakovsky, A. Surkov and N. Gribachev, he wrote the poem “The Word of Soviet Writers to Comrade Stalin”, read at a solemn meeting on the occasion of the seventieth birthday of I. V. Stalin at the Bolshoi Theater on December 21, 1949.
Awards and prizes
- Stalin Prize of the second degree (1941) - for the poem "Country Ant" (1936)
- Stalin Prize of the first degree (1946) - for the poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-1945)
- Stalin Prize of the second degree (1947) - for the poem "The House by the Road" (1946)
- Lenin Prize (1961) - for the poem "For the distance - distance" (1953-1960)
- USSR State Prize (1971) - for the collection “From the lyrics of these years. 1959-1967" (1967)
- three orders of Lenin (01/31/1939; 06/20/1960; 10/28/1967)
- Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class (04/30/1945)
- Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class (07/31/1944)
- Order of the Red Banner of Labor (20.06.1970)
- Order of the Red Star (1940) - for participation in the Soviet-Finnish war (1939-1940)
The main theme of all the writer's work was the Great Patriotic War. And the soldier hero Vasily Terkin created by him received such huge popularity that, one might say, surpassed the author himself. About the life and work of the amazing Soviet writer we will talk in this article.
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky: biography
The future poet was born according to the old style on June 8 (June 21 - according to the new one), 1910, in the village of Zagorye, which is located in His father, Trifon Gordeevich, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, looked like from a family of odnodvortsev (farmers who lived on the outskirts of Russia and were supposed to protect its borders).
His father, despite his peasant origins, was a literate man and loved to read. There were even books in the house. The mother of the future writer also knew how to read.
Alexander had a younger brother Ivan, born in 1914, who later became a writer.
Childhood
For the first time Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky got acquainted with the works of Russian classics at home. short biography The writer tells that there was a custom in the Tvardovsky family - on winter evenings, one of the parents read aloud Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin. It was then that Tvardovsky acquired a love for literature, and even began to compose his first poems, having not yet really learned how to write correctly.
Little Alexander studied at a rural school, and at the age of fourteen he began sending small notes to local newspapers for publication, some of them were even printed. Soon Tvardovsky ventured to send poetry as well. The editor of the local newspaper "Working Way" supported the young poet's undertaking and helped him in many ways to overcome his natural timidity and start publishing.
Smolensk-Moscow
After graduation, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky moved to Smolensk (whose biography and work are presented in this article). Here, the future writer wanted to either continue his studies or find a job, but he failed to do either - this required at least some specialty that he did not have.
Tvardovsky lived on the pennies that brought intermittent literary earnings, for which he had to fight off the thresholds of the editorial offices. When the poet's poems were published in the capital's magazine "October", he went to Moscow, but even here luck did not smile at him. As a result, in 1930 Tvardovsky was forced to return to Smolensk, where he spent the next 6 years of his life. At this time, he was able to enter the Pedagogical Institute, which he did not graduate from, and again went to Moscow, where in 1936 he was admitted to the MIFLI.
During these years, Tvardovsky began to actively publish, and in 1936 the poem “Country of the Ant” was published, dedicated to collectivization, which glorified him. In 1939, Tvardovsky's first poetry collection, Rural Chronicle, was published.
War years
In 1939, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was drafted into the Red Army. The biography of the writer at this moment changes dramatically - he finds himself in the center of hostilities in Western Belarus. Since 1941, Tvardovsky worked in the Voronezh newspaper "Red Army".
This period is characterized by the flourishing of the writer's work. In addition to the famous poem "Vasily Terkin", Tvardovsky creates a cycle of poems "Frontline Chronicle" and begins work on the famous poem "House by the Road", which was completed in 1946.
"Vasily Terkin"
The biography of Tvardovsky Alexander Trifonovich is replete with various creative achievements, but the greatest of them is the writing of the poem "Vasily Terkin". The work was written throughout the Second World War, that is, from 1941 to 1945. It was published in small parts in military newspapers, thereby raising the morale of the Soviet army.
The work is distinguished by its precise, understandable and simple style, the rapid development of actions. Each episode of the poem is connected with each other only by the image of the main character. Tvardovsky himself said that such a peculiar construction of the poem was chosen by him, because he himself and his reader could die at any moment, so each story should be ended in the same issue of the newspaper in which it was started.
This story made Tvardovsky a cult wartime author. In addition, the poet was awarded the orders of the Patriotic War of the 1st and 2nd degrees for the work.
Post-war creativity
Continues active literary activity and after the war Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. The biography of the poet is supplemented by the writing of a new poem "For the distance - the distance", which was written in the period from 1950 to 1960.
From 1967 to 1969, the writer worked on the autobiographical work "By the Right of Memory". The poem tells the truth about the fate of Tvardovsky's father, who became a victim of collectivization and was repressed. This work was banned for publication by censorship and the reader was able to get acquainted with it only in 1987. The writing of this poem seriously spoiled Tvardovsky's relations with the Soviet authorities.
The biography of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky is also rich in prosaic experiences. All the most important, of course, was written in poetic form, but several collections of prose stories were also published. For example, in 1947, the book "Motherland and Foreign Land", dedicated to the Second World War, was published.
"New world"
Do not forget about the journalistic activities of the writer. Long years served as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine "New World" Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. The biography of this period is full of all sorts of clashes with official censorship - the poet had to defend the right to publish for many talented authors. Thanks to the efforts of Tvardovsky, Zalygin, Akhmatova, Troepolsky, Molsaev, Bunin and others were published.
Gradually, the magazine became a serious opposition to the Soviet regime. Writers of the sixties were published here and anti-Stalinist thoughts were openly expressed. The real victory for Tvardovsky was the permission to publish Solzhenitsyn's story.
However, after the removal of Khrushchev, the editors of Novy Mir began to exert strong pressure. This ended with the fact that Tvardovsky was forced in 1970 to leave the post of editor-in-chief.
Final years and death
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, whose biography was interrupted on December 18, 1971, died of lung cancer. The writer died in a place that is located in the Moscow region. The body of the writer was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
Alexander Tvardovsky lived a rich and vibrant life and left behind a huge literary heritage. Many of his works have been included in school curriculum and remain popular to this day.
Laureate of the State Prize (1941, for the poem "Country Ant")
Laureate of the State Prize (1946, for the poem "Vasily Terkin")
Laureate of the State Prize (1947, for the poem "Road House")
Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1961, for the poem "For the distance - distance")
Laureate of the State Prize (1971, for the collection "From the lyrics of these years. 1959-1967")
Cavalier of three Orders of Lenin (1939, 1960, 1967)
Cavalier of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1970)
Cavalier of the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class (1945)
Cavalier of the Order of the Patriotic War II degree (1944)
Knight of the Order of the Red Star
Alexander Tvardovsky was born on June 21, 1910 in the Zagorye farm, Smolensk province, in the family of a village blacksmith.
Tvardovsky called his difficult peasant childhood, which took place in the harsh war and revolutionary years, "the beginning of all beginnings." His father Trifon Gordeevich was strict to the point of severity, ambitious to the point of morbidity, possessive manners were highly developed in him, and for children, moreover, Alexander, who was impressionable and sensitive to any injustice, in particular, sometimes it was very difficult with him. “I was born in the Smolensk region,” Tvardovsky wrote about himself, “in 1910, on June 21, on the “farm of the Stolpovo wasteland,” as the papers called the piece of land acquired by my father Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky through the Land Peasant Bank with payment in installments. This land - ten and a few acres, all in small swamps, "Ruffles", as we called them, and all overgrown with willow, spruce, birch - was in every sense unenviable. But for the father, who was the only son of a landless soldier and who, through many years of hard work as a blacksmith, earned the amount necessary for the first installment in the bank, this land was a road to holiness. And to us, children, from a very young age, he inspired love and respect for this sour, podzolic, stingy and unkind, but our land - our “estate”, as he jokingly and not jokingly called his farm ... This area was quite wild, away from the roads, and the father, a wonderful blacksmith, soon closed the forge, deciding to live from the earth. But every now and then he had to turn to a hammer: to rent someone else's forge and anvil in the waste, working half-heartedly ... Father was a literate man and even well-read in a village way. The book was not uncommon in our household. We often spent entire winter evenings reading a book aloud. My first acquaintance with "Poltava" and "Dubrovsky" by Pushkin, with "Taras Bulba" by Gogol, the most popular poems by Lermontov, Nekrasov, A.V. Tolstoy, Nikitin happened in this way. My father knew a lot of poems by heart - "Borodino", "Prince Kurbsky", almost all of Ershovsky's "Humpbacked Horse".
A great influence in childhood on the formation of the future poet was "study" in his father's forge, which for the whole district was "a club, a newspaper, and an academy of sciences." There is nothing surprising or accidental in the fact that Tvardovsky's first poem, composed at an age when the author did not yet know all the letters of the alphabet, denounced peer boys, destroyers of bird nests, and sounded piercingly loud and rhythmic. The "aesthetics of labor", which Tvardovsky later spoke about at the teacher's congress, he did not need to comprehend specially - she entered his life herself, when he "small child" saw how under the blacksmith's hammer of his father "everything was born with which they plow the field, uproot forest and build a house. And the hours of waiting for the customer were filled with furious disputes of people who were eager to talk with a literate person. Therefore, in a rural school, Tvardovsky studied with pleasure, continuing under the guidance school teacher literature, to write poetry in accordance with the trends of the then poetic fashion, although, as he later admitted, it turned out bad for him in the struggle with himself.
Soon Alexander Tvardovsky left his native Zagorye. By this time, he had been to Smolensk more than once, once visited Moscow, met Mikhail Isakovsky, and became the author of several dozen published poems. For the first time, the name of Alexander Tvardovsky saw the light of day on February 15, 1925, when his article “How re-elections of cooperatives take place” was published in the newspaper “Smolensk Village”. On July 19, the same newspaper published his first poem "The New Hut". In the following months, several more notes appeared, the publication of Tvardovsky's poems in various newspapers in Smolensk, and at the beginning of 1926, when the poet specially came to this city to get acquainted with Isakovsky, he again published his poems in the newspaper "Working Way". The artist I. Fomichev drew a pencil portrait of "selkor Alexander Tvardovsky", which was printed on a newspaper page with his poems. In April 1927, the Smolensk newspaper "Young Comrade" published an article about Alexander Tvardovsky, along with a selection of his poems and a photograph - all this was united by the general heading " creative way Alexander Tvardovsky. At that time, Alexander Tvardovsky was only 17 years old. According to Isakovsky, “he was a slender young man with very blue eyes and light blond hair. Sasha was dressed in a jacket made of sheepskin. He was holding a hat."
Tvardovsky moved to Smolensk, but the editorial office of Rabochey Put did not find any full-time position for Tvardovsky, and he was offered to write notes in the chronicle, which did not guarantee a permanent income. Tvardovsky agreed, although he was well aware that he was dooming himself to a half-starved existence. In the summer of 1929, when many of Rabochy Put's employees went on vacation, Tvardovsky was loaded with work, sending him with correspondent assignments to the regions. Earnings increased, the circle of his acquaintances expanded, including literary ones. The poet dared to send his poems to Moscow, to the editors of the magazine "October", where Mikhail Svetlov liked the poems of the young poet, and he published them in the magazine "October". After this event, the horizons of Smolensk began to seem too narrow to Tvardovsky, and he moved to the capital. But it turned out to be about the same as with Smolensk: “I was occasionally published,” Tvardovsky recalled, “someone approved of my experiments, supporting childish hopes, but I earned not much more than in Smolensk, and lived in corners, beds, I wandered around the editorial offices, and I was more and more noticeably taken somewhere away from the direct and difficult path of real study, real life. In the winter of 1930, I returned to Smolensk.
It is difficult to say how the further literary fate of Tvardovsky would have developed if he had remained in Moscow. The main reason for his return to Smolensk was that Tvardovsky's demands on himself as a poet increased, and he began to feel more and more dissatisfied with his poems. Later he wrote: "There was a period when, having left the village, at one time I was, in essence, cut off from life, revolving in a narrow literary environment."
After returning to Smolensk, Alexander Tvardovsky entered the Pedagogical Institute. During the first year of study at the institute, he undertook to pass exams for high school in all subjects and successfully coped with it. “These years of study and work in Smolensk,” Tvardovsky later wrote, “are forever marked for me by a high spiritual uplift ... Breaking away from books and studies, I went to collective farms as a correspondent for regional newspapers, delved with passion into everything that constituted a new , for the first time the emerging system of rural life, wrote articles, correspondence and kept all sorts of records, after each trip, noting for himself the new that was revealed to me in the complex process of the formation of collective farm life.
Beginning in 1929, Tvardovsky began to write in a new way, achieving the utmost prosaic verse. He, as he later said, wanted to write "naturally, simply", and he expelled "any lyricism, a manifestation of feeling." Poetry immediately took revenge on him for this. In some poems (“Apples”, “Poems about universal education”), along with truly poetic works, such lines began to appear, for example:
And here
Guys big and small
The school team will come together.
Subsequently, Tvardovsky realized that he had chosen the wrong path, because what he put above all - plot, narrative verse, concreteness - was expressed in practice, as he admitted in 1933, "in saturation of poetry with prosaisms," colloquial intonations "to the fact that they ceased to sound like poetry and everything in general merged into grayness, ugliness ... in the future, these excesses sometimes reach absolute anti-artism. The poet had to go through a long and hard way searches before he finally lost faith in the vitality of semi-prose verse. For a whole decade he struggled with the solution of the painful task - "to find himself in himself." Tvardovsky passed in his youth thorny path apprenticeship, imitation, temporary successes and bitter disappointments up to disgust for their own writings, joyless and humiliating walking through the editorial offices. Dissatisfaction with oneself also affected education in pedagogical institute, which he left in the third year, and completed his studies at the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature, where he entered in the fall of 1936. Tvardovsky's works were published in the period from 1931 to 1933, but he himself believed that only after he wrote a poem about collectivization "Country Ant" in 1936, he took place as a writer. This poem was a success with readers and critics. The release of this book changed the life of the poet: he finally moved to Moscow, graduated from MIFLI in 1939, and published a book of poems, Rural Chronicle.
In 1939, Tvardovsky was drafted into the Red Army and participated in the liberation of Western Belarus. During the outbreak of war with Finland, Tvardovsky received officer rank, and served as a special correspondent for a military newspaper.
During the armed conflict with Finland, the first publications appeared with the main actor- Vasily Terkin. On April 20, 1940, the day he was accepted as a member of the CPSU (b), Tvardovsky made an entry in his diary: “Last night or this morning a hero was found, and now I see that only he is what I need, it is he, Vasya Terkin ! It is like a folkloric image. He is a proven case. It is only necessary to raise it, raise it imperceptibly, in essence, and in form it is almost the same as it was on the pages of "On Guard of the Motherland". No, and the form will probably not be the same. And how necessary is his gaiety, his luck, energy and resilient soul to overcome the harsh material of this war! And how much he can absorb from what needs to be touched! It will be a cheerful army joke, but at the same time there will be lyricism in it. That's when Vasya crawls, wounded, to the point and his deeds are bad, but he does not give in - all this should be truly touching ... "
Already in 1940, the name of Terkin was known to many outside of Leningrad and the Karelian Isthmus, and the authors of feuilleton verses about him themselves looked at their offspring somewhat condescendingly, condescendingly, as something frivolous. “In fairness, we did not consider it literature,” Tvardovsky later remarked.
The authorship of the creation of this hero did not belong to Tvardovsky alone, who later said: “But the fact is that he was conceived and invented not only by me, but by many people, including writers, and most of all not by writers and largely by my correspondents themselves . They actively participated in the creation of Terkin, from its first chapter to the completion of the book, and still continue to develop in various types and directions this image. I explain this in order to consider the second question, which is posed in an even larger part of the letters - the question: how was Vasily Terkin written? Where did such a book come from? What served as material for it and what was the starting point? Was the author himself one of the Terkins? This is asked not only by ordinary readers, but also by people who are specially involved in the subject of literature: graduate students who have taken Vasily Terkin as the theme of their works, teachers of literature, literary critics and critics, librarians, lecturers, etc. I will try to tell you about how "formed" "Terkin". "Vasily Terkin", I repeat, has been known to the reader, primarily to the army, since 1942. But "Vasya Terkin" has been known since 1939-1940 - from the period of the Finnish campaign. At that time, a group of writers and poets worked in the newspaper of the Leningrad Military District "On Guard of the Motherland": N. Tikhonov, V. Sayanov, A. Shcherbakov, S. Vashentsev, Ts. Solodar and the writer of these lines. Somehow, discussing with the editorial staff the tasks and nature of our work in a military newspaper, we decided that we needed to start something like a “humor corner” or a weekly collective feuilleton, where there would be poems and pictures. This idea was not an innovation in the army press. Following the model of the propaganda work of D. Bedny and V. Mayakovsky in the post-revolutionary years, newspapers had a tradition of printing satirical pictures with poetic captions, ditties, feuilletons with continuations with the usual heading - “At leisure”, “Under the Red Army accordion”, etc. There there were sometimes conditional characters, passing from one feuilleton to another, like some kind of merry cook, and characteristic pseudonyms, like Uncle Sysoy, Grandfather Yegor, Machine Gunner Vanya, Sniper and others. In my youth, in Smolensk, I had something to do with such literary work in the district "Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda" and other newspapers.
Thus, an amazing hero was born - Vasya Terkin from the village, but working somewhere in the city or in a new building. A merry fellow, a wit and a joker. He can lie, but not only does he not exaggerate his exploits, but, on the contrary, invariably presents them in a funny, random, real form. The poem "Vasily Terkin" was written by Tvardovsky throughout the war and became his most famous work. Being by nature a stranger to any vanity, Tvardovsky was indeed rather indifferent to how many articles, studies, dissertations and readers' conferences would be devoted to him in the future. But it was very important for him that his book, which brought so much joy to “living people in the war”, continued to live in the public consciousness after the war. Tvardovsky said: “And somewhere in 1944, the feeling firmly ripened in me that“ Vasily Terkin ”is the best of everything written about the war in the war. And what to write the way it is written is not given to any of us. For Tvardovsky, "The Book of a Fighter" was the most serious personal contribution to the common cause - to the Victory over the mortal danger of fascism: "Whatever her own literary significance, for me it was true happiness. She gave me a sense of the legitimacy of the artist's place in the great struggle of the people, a sense of the obvious usefulness of my work, a sense of complete freedom in dealing with verse and words in a naturally formed, unconstrained form of presentation. "Terkin" was for me in the relationship of the writer with his reader my lyrics, my journalism, song and teaching, anecdote and saying, a heart-to-heart talk and a remark to the occasion.
The first morning of the Great Patriotic War found Tvardovsky in the Moscow region, in the village of Gryazi, Zvenigorod district, at the very beginning of his vacation. In the evening of the same day, he was in Moscow, and a day later he was sent to the headquarters of the South-Western Front, where he was to work in the front-line newspaper Red Army. Some light on the life of the poet during the war was shed by his prose essays "Motherland and Foreign Land", as well as the memoirs of E. Dolmatovsky, V. Muradyan, E. Vorobyov, 0. Vereisky, who knew Tvardovsky in those years, V. Lakshin and V. Dementiev , to whom Alexander Trifonovich later told a lot about his life. So, he told V. Lakshin: “In 1941 near Kiev ... he barely got out of the encirclement. The editorial office of the newspaper of the South-Western Front, in which he worked, was located in Kyiv. It was ordered not to leave the city until the last hour ... The army units had already retreated beyond the Dnieper, and the editorial office was still working ... Tvardovsky escaped by a miracle: the regimental commissar took him into his car, and they barely jumped out of the closing ring of German encirclement.
In the spring of 1942, Tvardovsky was encircled for the second time - this time near Kanev, from which, according to I.S. Marshak, he emerged again by a “miracle”. In mid-1942, Tvardovsky was moved from the Southwestern Front to the Western Front, and until the very end of the war, the editorial office of the front-line newspaper Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda became his home. It became the home of the legendary Terkin. According to the memoirs of the artist O. Vereisky, who painted portraits of Tvardovsky and illustrated his works, “he was surprisingly good-looking. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a thin waist and narrow hips. He held himself straight, walked with his shoulders straight, stepping softly, moving his elbows as he walked, as wrestlers often do. Military uniform suited him very well. His head sat proudly on a slender neck, soft blond hair, combed back, fell apart to the sides, framing a high forehead, His very bright eyes looked attentively and sternly. The movable eyebrows sometimes raised in surprise, sometimes frowned, converging to the bridge of the nose and giving severity to the facial expression. But in the outlines of the lips and the rounded lines of the cheeks there was some kind of feminine softness.
Almost simultaneously with Terkin and the poems of the Front Chronicle, Tvardovsky wrote the poem House by the Road. The author himself did not see the war “from the other side” with his own eyes, however, purely personal circumstances played a significant role in everything that prompted Tvardovsky to write “House by the Road”: his native Smolensk region was occupied for more than two years. His parents and sisters lived there, and he didn’t change his mind about them during this time. True, he can be said to be lucky: Smolensk region in 1943, the troops of the Western Front, with which his army fate was connected, were liberated, and in the first days after liberation from the invaders he was able to see his native places. Tvardovsky described this event as follows: “Native Zagorye. Only a few residents here managed to escape execution or burning. The area is so wild and looks so unusual that I did not even recognize the ashes of my father's house.
Alexander Tvardovsky native village Zagorye. 1943
In the 1950s and 60s, he wrote the poem "For the distance - the distance." Along with poetry, Tvardovsky always wrote prose. In 1947, he published a book about the past war under the general title "Motherland and Foreign Land". He also showed himself as a deep, insightful critic in the books "Articles and Notes on Literature" in 1961, "The Poetry of Mikhail Isakovsky" in 1969, and also wrote articles about the work of Samuil Marshak and Ivan Bunin in 1965.
Tvardovsky actively worked on completing the poetic story about Vasily Terkin. Its final part was called "Terkin in the Other World", and he also tried to most fully express his thoughts about what became the work of his whole life - about poetry. Perhaps the most important of all the poems on this topic was "The Word about Words" in 1962, the creation of which was dictated by acute anxiety for the fate of domestic literature and an appeal to the reader to fight for the value and effectiveness of the word.
Years passed, the war moved further and further into the past, but Tvardovsky's pain from the feeling of loss did not go away. The better life got, the more he felt the need to remember those who paid for it with their lives. Significant dates and events often served as an excuse for Tvardovsky to once again make the reader remember those who died defending the future of their people. In 1957, the country celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the revolution, and among the many works written for the anniversary was Tvardovsky's poem "That blood that was shed for good reason."
Knocks on the hearts, owns us,
Not letting go for an hour
So that our victims are sacred
She didn't leave us on the way.
So that we, listening to praise,
And on the holiday of present victories
Don't forget that this blood
Our yesterday's trail is smoking.
Gagarin's flight into space evoked special and rather unexpected associations in Tvardovsky. In the February book of Novy Mir for 1962, his poem “To Cosmonaut” was published, in which Gagarin was not a hero among heroes, and Tvardovsky urged him not to forget about those guys who died in their “plywood jalopies” in 1941 “under Yelney, Vyazma and Moscow itself":
They are proud, they are involved in their
Special glory obtained in battle,
And that one, harsh and mute,
Wouldn't trade for yours.
The poet was very worried about the death of his mother. “My mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, was always very impressionable and sensitive, even not without sentimentality, to much that was outside the practical, everyday interests of the peasant household, the troubles and worries of the hostess in a large large family. She was touched to tears by the sound of a shepherd's trumpet somewhere far away behind our farm bushes and swamps, or the echo of a song from distant village fields, or, for example, the smell of the first young hay, the sight of some lonely tree, etc. - so even during the life of his mother, Alexander Trifonovich wrote about her in his "Autobiography". In 1965, he accompanied her on her last journey. In the same year, he created the cycle "In Memory of the Mother", which consisted of four poems.
When we need handkerchiefs, socks
Good hands will lay them down,
And we, fearing a delay,
We are rushing to the appointed separation ...
The end of the "fairy tale" folk hero Vasya Terkina demanded the utmost effort from Tvardovsky. In total, she was given nine years of his life. It was in this work that Tvardovsky showed himself as a satirist, and it was clear to readers that he was the strongest satirist, merciless and completely original, even able to combine satire with lyrics. The publication and completion of Terkin in the Other World gave Tvardovsky new strength, evidence of which was all his subsequent lyrics, about which Konstantin Simonov, who commented together with Mikhail Ulyanov documentary about Tvardovsky, he said: “It seemed that in his poem “For the distance - the distance”, Tvardovsky rose to such a peak of poetry that it was already impossible to rise higher. And he did. And this last, highest peak of his is his lyrics of recent years.
The last poem of Tvardovsky published during his lifetime was called "To the bitter insults of his own person", and was dated 1968. This does not mean that Tvardovsky did not write a single line at all, although, according to A. Kondratovich, “he wrote every year more and more painfully and more difficultly.” In one of the poems, written already in the sixtieth year of his life and published posthumously, Tvardovsky said goodbye to life:
What does it take to live wisely?
Understand your plan:
Find yourself in yourself
And don't lose sight of it.
And loving your work intently, -
He is the foundation of all foundations, -
It's hard to ask yourself
Others are not so harsh.
At least about now, at least in reserve,
But to do so work
To live and live
But every hour
Ready to take off.
And do not be tormented - oh yes oh -
What, near or far, -
He still takes you by surprise
Catch, lethal hour.
Amen! Feel free to stamp
That contrary to looking back:
If there is only sadness in it, -
So, it means everything is in order.
For many years Tvardovsky was the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine, courageously defending the right to publish every talented work that came to the editorial office. He twice became the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, but it was during the second period of Tvardovsky's editorship in Novy Mir, especially after the XXII Congress of the CPSU, that the journal became a refuge for anti-Stalinist forces in literature, a symbol of the Sixties, and an organ of legal opposition to Soviet power. In the 1960s, Tvardovsky, in the poems “By the Right of Memory” in 1987 and “Torkin in the Other World,” revised his attitude towards Stalin and Stalinism. In the early 1960s, Tvardovsky received Khrushchev's permission to publish Solzhenitsyn's story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But the new direction of the magazine (liberalism in art, ideology and economics, hiding behind the words about socialism "with a human face") caused discontent not so much among the Khrushchev-Brezhnev party elite and officials of the ideological departments, as the so-called "neo-Stalinist-statesmen" in Soviet literature. In the "New World" ideological liberalism was combined with aesthetic traditionalism. Tvardovsky had a cold attitude towards modernist prose and poetry, preferring literature developing in classical forms of realism. Many of the largest writers of the 1960s published in the journal, many of them were opened to the reader by the journal - F.Abramov, V.Bykov, Ch.Aitmatov, S.Zalygin, G.Troepolsky, B.Mozhaev and A.Solzhenitsyn.
For several years, there was a sharp literary (and actually ideological) controversy between the journals Novy Mir and Oktyabr, headed by editor V. Kochetov. The persistent ideological rejection of the magazine was also expressed by the patriots-"sovereigns". After Khrushchev was removed from top posts, a campaign was launched against Novy Mir in the Ogonyok magazine and the Socialist Industry newspaper. Glavlit waged a bitter struggle with the journal, systematically preventing the most important materials from being printed. Since the leadership of the Writers' Union did not decide to formally dismiss Tvardovsky, the last measure of pressure on the journal was the removal of Tvardovsky's deputies and the appointment of people hostile to Tvardovsky to these positions. In February 1970, Tvardovsky was forced to step down as editor, and part of the magazine's staff followed suit. The editorial board was essentially destroyed.
Shortly after the defeat of Novy Mir, Tvardovsky was diagnosed with lung cancer. During this period of life, next to the poet were his closest people - his wife Maria Illarionovna and daughters Valentina and Olga. Alexander Tvardovsky lived with his wife Maria Illarionovna for more than 40 years. She became for him not only a wife, but also a true friend and comrade-in-arms, who devoted her whole life to him. Maria Illarionovna reprinted his works many times, went to the editorial offices, supported him in moments of despair and depression. In the letters published by Maria Illarionovna after the death of the poet, one can see how often he resorts to her advice, how much he needs her support. “You are my only hope and support,” Alexander Trifonovich wrote to her from the front. There were few love poems in Tvardovsky's work. Maria Illarionovna Tvardovskaya wrote in her memoirs about her husband: “What seemed to him only personal, what constituted a deep part of the soul, was not often brought out. This is the law of the people's life. He kept it to the end." After the death of Tvardovsky, Maria Illarionovna, already an elderly woman, published several books of memoirs about Alexander Trifonovich, published his early works, participated in the creation of museums of the poet, the publication of records, keeping the memory of him until her death. Maria Illarionovna died in 1991. One of the daughters of the poet Valentina was born in 1931, graduated from Moscow State University in 1954, and became a doctor historical sciences. Another daughter - Olga was born in 1941, in 1963 she graduated from the Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov, and became a theater and film artist.
Alexander Tvardovsky died after a long illness on December 18, 1971 in the dacha village of Krasnaya Pakhra, Moscow Region, and was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Many people who knew Alexander Tvardovsky closely noted his extraordinary thirst for justice. Sincerely believing in the communist idea, he often acted contrary to the established party line. He refused to sign a letter in support of the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia, and openly condemned him. He stood up for the disgraced scientist Zhores Medvedev, who was first fired for the book "Biological Science and the Cult of Personality", and in 1970 was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Tvardovsky not only stood up - he personally went to the hospital to rescue Medvedev. And to the warnings of people experienced in court intrigues: “You have an anniversary on your nose - 60 years. They won’t give you the Hero of Socialist Labor!” - answered: "For the first time I hear that we give the Hero for cowardice."
Only thanks to Alexander Tvardovsky in the magazine " New world”Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published. Alexander Dementiev tried to dissuade him: "If we print this thing with you, then we will lose the magazine." To which Tvardovsky replied: “If I can’t print it, then why do I need a magazine?”
Despite this, relations between both Solzhenitsyn and Tvardovsky were complicated. He did not fully know all the convictions and views of the writer he defended. Once, in a conversation with his literary "godson", Tvardovsky exclaimed offendedly: "I turn my head for you, and you!" And Solzhenitsyn himself admitted, talking about this outbreak: “Yes, and you can understand him: after all, I didn’t open up to him, the whole network of my plans, calculations, moves was hidden from him and appeared unexpectedly.”
Nevertheless, when at the end of 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded Nobel Prize, the terminally ill Tvardovsky was glad about this, and said to his wife: “But they will also remember us, how we stood for him.”
Army General A. Gorbatov, in his memoirs about Tvardovsky, wrote that he considers him "... a real hero ... As a communist, as a person, as a poet, he took everything upon himself and fearlessly answered for his honest party views."
Many famous writers of that time noted the extraordinary sincerity of Tvardovsky's works. Ivan Bunin wrote in a letter to N. Teleshov: “I just read A. Tvardovsky (“Vasily Terkin”) and I can’t resist - I ask you, if you know him and meet him, tell him on occasion that I (reader, as you know, picky, demanding) completely admired his talent - this is truly a rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, accuracy in everything and what an extraordinary folk, soldier's language - not a hitch, not a hitch, not a single false, ready-made, that is, a literary vulgar word. “Poems of unheard-of sincerity and frankness” - this is how Fyodor Abramov perceived the late lyrics of Alexander Tvardovsky. “It is impossible to understand and appreciate the poetry of Tvardovsky without feeling the extent to which all of it, to its very depths, is lyrical. And at the same time, it is wide, wide open to the world around and everything that this world is rich in - feelings, thoughts, nature, life, politics, ”wrote S.Ya. Marshak in his book “Education with a Word”.
A documentary film "Ambush Regiment" was filmed about Alexander Tvardovsky.
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The text was prepared by Tatyana Khalina
Used materials:
A.T. Tvardovsky, "Autobiography"
Kondratovich A. I. “Alexander Tvardovsky. Poetry and Personality»
A.T. Tvardovsky, "Encyclopedia: Working materials"
Akatkin V.M. "Alexander Tvardovsky. Verse and prose»
Akatkin V.M. "Early Tvardovsky. Problems of formation»
Site materials www.shalamov.ru
