“Sergey Orlov belongs to that heroic tribe of poets,” wrote Nikolai Tikhonov, “who was destined to take the most Active participation in the Great Patriotic War, to be a witness to a nationwide feat, to go through the fire of the most fierce battles, to burn and not burn out in this fire, to become a winner, to say about yourself:
Who talks about the songs of the unfinished?
We carried our life like a song ... "
He went to the front from the first year of Petrozavodsk University and until February 1944 he commanded a tank platoon. Was badly wounded; burned in the tank. The first book by Sergei Orlov was published immediately after the war, it included poems written in between battles. The book was called The Third Speed. “Third speed,” says the poet, “combat speed. At the third speed, my brother-soldiers drove the tanks into the attack ... ". It was in this book that there was a poem “He was buried in the globe of the earth ...”, which is first remembered with the name of Sergei Orlov, a poem-monument to a simple soldier who died for the liberation of mankind.”
The poem was written in 1944. This is one of the best works about a feat Soviet soldier, created by means of lyrical generalization. The poetic thought of S. Orlov strove for the scale, globality of the image, but the image of a soldier remained simple, close and dear to each of us. This image is grandiose and at the same time imbued with kindness and cordiality.
The poem has a ring composition. It begins and ends with the image of the globe. The earth is compared by the poet to a mausoleum, nature itself becomes the eternal home of the deceased soldier:
He is like a mausoleum earth -
For a million centuries
AND Milky Ways dust around him from the sides.
Clouds sleep on the red slopes,
Snowstorms are sweeping,
Heavy thunder rumbles
The winds are taking off.
So in the poem there is a motif of eternity, eternal memory. “A long time ago the battle was over…”, but the meaning of the feat is timeless.
The stanza of the poem is free, the rhyme is cross. The poet uses various means of artistic expression: epithets (“on red slopes”), comparison (“The earth is like a mausoleum to him”), metaphor and hyperbole (“He was buried in the globe of the earth ...”).
№ 2006 / 27, 23.02.2015
Even if Sergei Orlov had left us this line alone, his name would have to be inscribed in the history of lyrics. A more simple-hearted, clear, poignant and therefore amazing expression of the “earthlyness” that intoxicated the first generation of Soviet children who were preparing to live in a renewed universe cannot be imagined. In Orlov it is not imagined - it is exhaled. It is so natural that you accept the “decoding” that follows - a simple story through which one can hardly see fate:
He was buried in the globe of the earth,
And he was just a soldier
In total, friends, a simple soldier,
Without titles and awards ...
Turkinian sincerity. But without Turkin's cockiness. It seems to be simple. And propped up on both sides, more precisely, pierced with the symbols of time. On the one hand it is the Planet, on the other - the Mausoleum. Only the children of the Iron Age, who dreamed of world happiness, could combine this and that in such a way, and only Orlov connected everything with such captivating sincerity:
The earth is like a mausoleum to him -
For a million centuries
And the Milky Ways are dusty
Around him from the sides ...
Sincere simplicity is the main, basic feature of his character. To some extent, it is a response to the place of his birth: this is Megra - "away from all major roads, from the railway one hundred kilometers away, a small green town." The nearest center of culture is the regional center - “wooden, linen ...” Mushroom rains, rural joys, garden miracles. Kite in the clouds, front gardens. Belozerye…
If I had not lost my father at the age of three, I could have said about myself, like many poets mobilized by the new government: we are the children of rural teachers.
Father died in 1924. The year was remembered, because the mother opened the primer, showed a portrait: "This is Lenin ... Lenin died."
“He looked for me with his eyes ... a little red-haired boy ...”
Then my stepfather, a party activist, appeared, took his family to Siberia to introduce the collective farm system. Novosibirsk "skyscrapers" for some time obscured Megra with her gardens. And he returned - and there is no Megra: Soviet authority flooded this place with the waters of the White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Comrade Stalin. The building of the school, where the teacher's family once had housing and where the future poet Sergei Orlov first sat at a desk in the lessons taught by his mother, also disappeared.
The Siberian socialist new aroused interest in literature, but when the muse found a voice, it was not an anthem to industrial new buildings and iron horses of communications, but an anthem to the pumpkin that was sown in the gardens of early childhood. The pumpkin rose in verse, but settled down in it so touchingly, so happily waved its tail in the sun, that it was noticed and praised in the Pravda newspaper by Korney Chukovsky himself, summing up the results of the All-Union poetry competition schoolchildren.
It was then that the winner of the competition, who became a student at Petrozavodsk University, felt "a strong desire to write poetry and be published."
School was interrupted, the war began. The military commissar offered a choice: aviation or tanks? A twenty-year-old recruit, who had been infected with aircraft modeling while still in Siberia, should have chosen aircraft. But I chose tanks.
Maybe he felt his upcoming topic - the dialogue of living flesh and dead armor? No, not iron protection, but precisely the danger of armor, the impotence of armor ... Great poetry lives in contradictions, you just need to live to understand them. Live physically.
So far, no greatness. In verses - autumn stacks, rye in the fields, native forests, cranes in the sky ... This was already written in 1941, and something still says in the verses: "Heavy battles are going on around." And something is not said, as if in a talisman: "Someday I will tell about this ..." To whom? To the people of the future: “... and so that I can reach the distant days along all the paths and roads, this is my notebook ...” What is in the notebook? All that was left was to run to the German trenches, and there - an explosion, a bloody trail on the faded grass ... "And in the fallen golden leaves above me in heavy desertedness a young birch forest will sprout through the ribs in the decayed chest..." The gold of the foliage is also a talisman: poetry and the war look at each other, listen to the cuckoo's score ...
In order for life and death to unite, war must burn. Directly.
The episode is described in his autobiography as follows:
“In 1944, my comrades brought me, burnt, on a stretcher to the medical battalion. I was discharged from the hospital due to disability.
In a biographical essay written by critic Leonard Lavlinsky, this episode is described in a little more detail: Orlov was pulled out of a burning tank and delivered to his comrades.
After reading this, Orlov (at that time already a venerable writer, besides the secretary of the RSFSR SP) reacted as follows:
- Actually, it was the other way around. The comrade was wounded more severely than I, and I had to carry him to my own. But for some reason, the opposite version was confirmed in the press. And I do not refute. What difference does it make who rescued whom…”
In the last phrase peeps - the poet.
Why the secretary of the RSFSR SP does not go into details is understandable: out of a sense of tact, out of unwillingness to seem like a hero.
The details include poetry. From the poems we learn: how “metal burned ... and fire melted in the black tower of the partition”, “how the commander looked for the latch with his hands without skin”, how “jumped out of the hatch, choking”.
And already in the first person, a year later:
Red kochet above the tower
The flame rose up...
As I crawled through the snowy arable land
To the outskirts of the hut.
Grasping with a scorched mouth
Snow rusty pieces.
Gun not releasing
From a smoking hand...
And again in the third person:
In the morning, by a fiery sign,
Five KB vehicles went on the attack.
The sky turned black and blue.
At noon, two crawled from the battle.
The skin hung from the face in tatters,
Their hands are like bunts.
The guys poured vodka into their mouths,
They took it down to the medical battalion.
Silently stood by the stretcher
And they went to where the tanks were waiting.
And again - in the face that is acquired anew - the lines inscribed in the world's lyrics:
Here is a man - he is crippled,
Scarred face. But you look
And look frightened at the meeting
Don't take it off his face.
He went to victory, out of breath,
I did not think about myself on the way,
To make it look like this:
Take a look - and do not take your eyes off!
The victory came to the demobilized as follows: he sat with a fishing rod at the mouth of the Kovzha, not a single blade of grass swayed, the river and the lake merged with the clear sky, it was quiet. At dawn, a boat appeared from the lake, and a voice flew over the water, clearly audible from afar:
- Hey, why are you sitting! The war is over!
About how, having heard this news, they cried and laughed, sparingly in the autobiography.
In poetry, like this:
She prayed for victory
Six sons went to the front
But only when the last one fell
To never get up off the ground
Victory is on the doorstep
But there is no one to meet her ...
- Who's there?.. -
Asked all in alarm
Blinded mother from tears.
This is how poetry finds a voice for dialogue with reality.
Orlov's poetic voice is alien to oratorical power. “The copper of the inert monuments is false,” he explains. Neither inventive puzzling, nor song undermining, so valued both in the avant-garde and in the traditionally folk currents of poetry, - only "iambics", "squares", "bricks" of verse. Orlov's muse is "simple, direct, pure."
But, firstly, this innocence is consciously and even declared as a program. And, secondly, Orlov's traditional quatrains penetrate the soul and are remembered immediately and forever. Contrary to recipes and verdicts of critics.
Orlov answered them:
Let the critic retire to the side
Poetics has nothing to do with it.
I, perhaps, some epithet -
And he found in a funnel under fire ...
However, not only did the critics not retire, but they quoted these lines in gloss with obvious pleasure, which fact in itself speaks of the magic of poetry hidden here.
What is her secret?
The rhymes are elementary, sometimes frankly “not enough”. Meanwhile, the verse is secretly pulled together by a “side” and a “funnel”. The syntax is overly punctual, everything is explained to the point. Meanwhile, the very course of thought is unexpected, sometimes to the point of insolence. The course of thought is unpredictable, and the coloring is predictable: the skies and waters are blue, the fields and forests are green, the snow is white before the battle, black during the battle, the banner and blood are red, the cosmic abyss is dark, the globe is bright, the light-eyed boy is freckled and red.
"A boy with a trusting look in a bun of oatmeal hair ..."
The transparency of verse and thought are the qualities that riveting the reader and acting on him. Orlov's insolubility, irreparability, mortal doom are so enlightened as none of his irreparably doomed peers.
And tomorrow you have to call
And die the day after tomorrow.
That's all. And today - to live, knowing all this. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And always?
The first knot that should bind the past and the future together is the transition from war to peace.
Transition order: tanks left the battle - tractors went into battle. Battlefield: virgin lands in Altai. And - the Rybinsk Sea. I - Vologda economy ... 1
Komsomolsk has been built - we will build the Moscow University on Lengory: it will be opened simultaneously with the Volga-Don locks.
And in the distance - awakening Africa, free Cuba, fighting Vietnam - terrestrial horizons.
Special love - for the native Belozerye, for the Sheksna River, over the smooth surface of which the dispatcher's voice is heard, letting the ships through and clearing.
“They call to the tugboat with the distant echo of the shore, and the Milky Way shines over the world like an unknown river…”
The universe is pulled together by the dispatcher!
The infinity of space and the urgency of the work induces lists, the master of which Orlov immediately becomes: these lists can be used to build a chronicle of the labors and days of the country.
1945. “Locksmiths, tank crews and poets… we will lead ships of the Union to distant planets… We will ascend the yellow moon.” This was written a decade and a half before Gagarin's flight (not to mention Neil Armstrong). Orlov is just sick of space! But even on Earth it is crowded with heroes. 1946: milkmaids, knitters, reapers. 1947: combine harvesters, mowers. 1949: mechanics and field growers, engineers and agronomists. 1950: "We saw rivers, mountains, valleys, dusty roads, mechanics, tractor drivers, cheerful builders, civilians, good owners of the land." 1951: hydrologists and foresters… pits and dump trucks… concrete workers, paving workers, carpenters, rammers. 1953: carpenters and plowmen. 1959: plowmen, scientists, miners, "heroes of free labor" (obvious influence of the proclaimed scientific and technological revolution), teacher, paramedic, engineer. 1967: "Builders of roads and cities, soldiers and pilots of spaceports..."
Everything is heroic, in the spirit of the then faith. With an emphasis, unusual for a major poet, on the party and co-workers of the grassroots level: “the table of the predrick in sunny specks” is incomprehensible, unless you explain to the reader of the Twenty-first century what it was called in Soviet time chairman of the district executive power.
And up, where the commanding staircase, Orlov does not look. He is "a simple soldier, without titles and awards." One could say: a scout, if a sigh of relief had not escaped in post-war verses, that now no one will send him to intelligence, that is, he will not be torn away from his beloved work, from poetry, from his beloved woman ...
More precisely, however, another self-characterization: "Everywhere I was Robinson, but not an idle spy." He was a pioneer, a pioneer, and not a messenger, not a conductor of someone's will, be there even a great leader.
And Lenin?! And the system of Soviet political symbols that Orlov's lyrics are full of in his mature years?
And these are signs of that spiritual height, which for him is simply incommensurable with the fluid life.
“There is being, and the rest is just fiction…”
That is: all transient symbols are invented and uninteresting, if we compare them with eternity (it is earthly, of course). They are not there, these ideologemes of the Soviet era in Orlov's early poems. There is White Lake, there is bird cherry from his native town. There is burning armor, blood on the snow, a gun in a burned hand. But neither the cruiser "Aurora", nor the capture of the Winter Palace, nor the World Revolution, nor communism.
Lenin appears in 1949 in the huge poem “Svetlana” - and not himself, but as a detail of reality: at the construction of the Volga-Don Canal, the teacher, as if teaching a lesson, suggests to the workers: “Do you want me to tell you about Lenin and the first peasant hydroelectric power station?” - and tells.
Only four years later the name of the leader is included in the poems as a personal property. “And I am forever proud that Lenin personally led me into the attack.” From these lines - a turning point.
Fracture - in 1953. The year itself is a turning point. The name of Stalin did not exist, and still does not exist (no denunciation, no defense, which is what Slutsky, Mezhirov, Samoilov, Tryapkin, Okudzhava are busy with), but, as if filling a vacuum, Lenin has been reigning in Orlov’s poems since 1953. As a sign of Genesis - as opposed to "fiction". Like the core of the universe. As a sign of eternal ideas.
"And on the banner in the sky - Lenin."
And there, too, the banner itself, received from the hands of the Red Guards of the fathers, and the Aurora with its volley, and the Winter, taken by His Majesty the working class, and the ongoing Revolution, and the "victorious passion of Marxism" (somewhat strange in the mouth of the poet, whose passion was never directed at bookish wisdom), and, finally, the cry: “Follow me, communists!” (by no means strange in the mouth of Orlov).
Interesting: Mezhirov for the poem "Communists, forward!" in the liberal era they branded them, they did not believe in sincerity, they turned poetry into a parody.
No one has ever blamed Orlov for poems about communists. His sincerity is beyond doubt. His communists are not the cogs of the System, but the heralds of Genesis:
They are faithful without fear or betrayal
The party in which they are
And she is subject to the distance and depth of the Universe,
And there are no barriers in the world.
There are many obstacles, there will be more. But the Universe is the initial and final reference point. Stars, planets, comets, rockets (rockets signaling the start of an attack echo those of the Gagarin era). Zemshar of the time of ferns and mammoths, zemshar of the times of Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Stars overhead, stars on Budyonnovka. There are so many stellar and universal symbolism that a review of it would require separate work. I will give here only three points in which the cheerful, bright and light disposition of the poet is adequately expressed, and the context of time - through a poetic touch - is drawn exhaustively.
From a 1945 poem:
I just wanted to look back
Stand by the bridge, by the water,
Reach for the sky with a reed,
Light a cigarette from a star. 
“Smoke from a Star” is cooler than “Planet Beyond the Threshold” from 1975 poetry.
From a 1948 poem:
swept
across the blue sky
Above the black earth
And fell
On a pine pole
Plywood star.
The star is good both in space and on the banner ... But the most poignant is the star torn off by battle from a soldier's grave. A plywood star is as pure as “the marble of lieutenants is a plywood monument”, an epitaph to a generation of suicide bombers.
From a poem about Tsiolkovsky, 1962:
And the cosmodrome, battered,
The whole silence is blown through.
"Give the universe!" - like a breath
It was barely audible that someone spoke.
The scream is reduced to a whisper. And yet it is heard. A cry picked up from the fathers and died on the lips of the children before the mortal ordeal.
Orlov's verse is hot, open, simple. All the more striking is the sudden chill that pierces his soul unexpectedly and inexplicably. This is not the pleasant chill that wafted from bird cherry in the Belozersk and Megrin palisades of childhood - this is precisely the inner cold that overtakes among the “blue chambers of rye” and forest “amber starfalls”. From the beginning of the 60s, this motive has become constant with Orlov - without canceling the good-natured cheerful "top" of his sincerity, he sets it off from the depths with some kind of obscure foreboding.
Another motive arises: betrayal, which was unthinkable for the young Orlov: there, like armor, he hoped for his comrades, he knew that when he crawled from the tank, burnt, they would cover him with fire.
And now - meanness ... no, not even meanness ... softer: they don’t betray you, they “set you up”, and not enemies, from whom you should expect meanness, but your own, from whom you not only don’t expect a dirty trick, but even believe, when did it happen.
“Reasonable, they didn’t make enemies for themselves, and I, as I was, remained their friend, but in friendship something is still dirty, and you can’t wash it off with cognac.”
Or, to put it quite briefly, with the aphoristic accuracy that sometimes strikes in Orlov's "talk", so this is what is brought out in the end:
Christ was crucified, but Judas lives.
There is a motive of defenselessness. The armor, which initially “by definition” covered the soldier from bad weather and misfortune, and if it didn’t save him from the cold, then allowed him to joke: we’ll warm up, they say, when it starts to burn, and the soldiers communicated with it as with a living being: “We are people, and it is made of steel”, we will survive, but here it is…
She, initially reliable, is remembered many years later as a symbol of ... insecurity. Here is the feeling at the turn of the 70s:
There is little left:
Live life without too much fuss -
Just like the days she touched
Hourly frenzied traits
And could burn in an instant
Maybe a thousand times every day...
Do not be afraid, do not seek salvation,
Don't rely on armor.
No hope. No armor. There is no way out of the “vanity” that filled the time, which then, from a furious line, seemed like a happy future, but now that it has come ...
second millennium
It's over, what's next?
What heroes are coming?
We don't know what we'll do.
This was written in 1976, three hundred days before his death.
Placed on a historical background, that is, on the event that should have become the starting point for the generation marked at birth with flashes of the Revolution (“A generation is not a year of birth, a generation is the year of October,” Orlov formulated), this future is drawn in the following sketch from October 1917:
“When the fathers, having taken out the pouches, are still hot from the battle, among the paintings, mirrors, parquet, they already thought in the night what kind of life in this world they would build forever, and envied the children, looking into the coming years ...”
What about children?
Well, if the future appears on a cosmic-planetary scale, then you can say: “I don’t know!” Orlov has a particular fondness for such thousand-year-old predictions. “What will change in the world in a thousand years, you tell me?” They won't say. However, one can say this: “In a thousand years, our old ships will be found, like boats on which we left the Earth beyond the Earth,” - this can be quite predicted in the midst of the Space Program. But to the question: “what will happen to you” - there is no answer. And the question, meanwhile, is persistent ...
Because the question is essentially not about the millennium - the question is about the fate of those who recently, in the memory of the living, inherited a dream of a happy future, and it was so close.
The path to it turned into a bloody impassability. It was necessary to overcome the distance with a throw.
Life, according to the proverb, is not a field,
And were behind the field,
Where so much thunder, blood, pain
And the earth rears up...
Have passed. Overcome. Can you live?
But again, as if it had not happened
They, equal to life, on the way,
We repeat everything from the beginning
What to live is not a field to cross ...
Who are we repeating after? Poems - 1957. So it is clear who it is: we repeat after the author of Doctor Zhivago, who said: “I am alone, everything is drowning in hypocrisy. To live life is not to cross a field. Pasternak and answers Orlov in one of his most poignant poems:
There are no machine gun cells here,
Mines do not burst on the way,
But at least there was an infantry charter,
And here you do not know how to go ...
So we ran into the insolubility that lies in wait for us when comprehending great poetry. Insoluble: what to do with the heritage received from the hands of the fathers? Give to children? Logically, yes. According to the chill of poetry - it will not work. Some twenty-year-old youth ... Vitka - this is what Orlov calls the driver who threw them, two veterans, on the "shore of the Neva forty-first year." Two old men wander through the swollen trenches, remember the battles, remember the big-eyed nurse, how she tore her shirt for bandages for the wounded, sing old songs and cry ... And Vitka is waiting for them in the car, turning on the radio ...
“Ah, why should he, Vitka, suffer for us with our memory? Oh, why, anyway, he will not succeed ... "
So, you have to pay. Himself. Not counting on anyone, not hoping for anything.
We paid for everything ourselves
We cannot be hurt by blasphemy.
Who dares to throw a stone at us,
Into our thoughts and deeds?
For such burning pride, you forgive the poet for the standard "thoughts and deeds." The biblical "stone" is fresher. But “hula” is a premonition, from which chills can pass. After all, there will be such heirs in the younger generation who will tell the veterans that they fought in vain, it was necessary to let Hitler in, and he, you see, would have treated us all with Bavarian beer, fed pork legs ...
It seems that in the 70s our young beer lovers did not yet reach such blasphemy, and it is good that Orlov did not hear such things. But he tried to catch something in the hums of the future. And he strengthened the soul, returning by memory “to those holy years, where “no” was “no” and where “yes” was “yes”.
One of the simplest plots of the transition “from there” to “here”, that is, from the tracks of war to the tracks of peace, is a military parade. Orlov has been writing these parades since the Victory itself.
Ten years later: the day of the triumph of the regiment or state, parade ground, general, hand to the visor, assistants at the banner.
A quarter of a century later: troops rumble through Moscow at night, preparing for the parade. The order of passage: foot soldiers, sailors, tankers ...
Thirty years later: the memory of the Victory Parade - the banners of the enemy armies fly to the foot of the podium.
Perhaps this poetic parade of parades would not have been worth special attention if it had not been crowned with a chilling farewell chord:
When it will be, but I know
In the edge of white-legged birches
May Ninth Victory
People will celebrate without tears.
Raise the old marches
army pipes of the country,
And the marshal will go to the army,
not seen this war.
And I don't even think
What kind of fireworks will hit there,
What tales will they tell
And what songs they will sing 2 .
Again this: “I don’t know” - tactfully covering up anxiety. "No tears"? - a long time to wait for our tears to shed. "Marshal who did not see this war"? There will be. So far, we have seen how the last marshal, who saw this war, was removed, how he, having “surrendered his sword”, asked: “Where do I go now?” - before going to the pre-trial detention center in the "putsch" case. Indeed, Orlov would not have thought about what tales were told at the same time, how “their own” gloated in the back of the army when it was powerless in Chechnya, and before that in Afghanistan - Orlov did not live quite a bit before Afghanistan, some two years - how would he endure the collapse of the state, saving which, he burned, the end of the era in which he remained a soul? Forever.
I became old and, like a boy, clear
And trusting. Apparently those years
Gifted with faith, and not fortunately
And, probably, forever.
But what about “forever”, if in every note of the last parade there is an expectation of oblivion! If you feel like from the future for which blood has been shed, “no sound, no echo, no shadow”! If not only mortal flesh disappears without a trace along with death, but also poetry, the imprint of the spirit, a cry to eternity - will inevitably be erased from eternity. Orlov's most bitter lines are about this.
“I will disappear without a trace, only somewhere on earth a rain will fall. My poets will reread my poems, but they will forget the name in the same year.
This was written in 1948, when peers are under thirty, and the high point of the generation's lyrics is ahead.
A quarter of a century has passed.
“... For fifty of my comrades, they have nowhere to go from time to time, balding, aging, gray-haired. And it still seems to me that they are twenty.
A face-to-face confrontation with a twenty-year-old boy, to whom the Revolution promised eternal life, and the State ordered him to die in 1941, is repeated and repeated in poems written by a thirty-year-old master, a forty-year-old master, a fifty-year-old veteran ...
"And what else? Live in this world, perhaps, up to sixty years ... "
You won't get to sixty.
And it’s impossible to get away from that twenty-year-old who once got under the bullets. Lasts and lasts the forty-first year. "The boy with the trusting eye" does not come from memory. And it's you...
The sun shines on the grass
The armor smokes.
You can just cry
How sorry I am.
Feel sorry for the boy doomed to death? It's a pity. It’s even more pitiful for someone who doesn’t remember anything: someday some “descendant, in a garden where cherries and pears bloom, will break open a pillbox of an ancient fragment and, shuddering, look into the void.” This is sometime. And now? It’s a pity that we are “as if dusty relics, really worthless, with the last, called the Great, history of a justified war.”
The last?.. If so. Justified? History - yes. But how can you justify yourself to a boy who will die? After all, he is “there, in the roaring fire, he believes in the peaceful, distant me.” And you, who lived another third of a century of peace and - in the understanding of that boy - happy life Can you share his faith? Have you been rewarded with this faith and you, and him - fortunately? Unfortunately? Who is happier: the one who was “buried in the globe of the earth”, or the one who remained alive and received this ball as an inheritance?
And if you repeat - "repeat everything, everything that fate tortured me with"? What then to choose? Here he is walking, a twenty-year-old hero, “cheerful, happy, contented” ... happy, although a deadly flash is about to burst into his eyes. And it would be necessary to call out to him from the present happy peaceful time: to warn, to prevent misfortune ...
... It was waiting for him ahead,
And I didn't call him.
Who is more unhappy?
No answer.
Three farewell poems are written by Sergey Orlov in 1977.
In one, he prepares for death, reconciles with it, strokes the earth with a burned hand, asks the Earth for forgiveness for leaving her.
In another, he pays off with human meanness: he recalls how, at the denunciation of a traitor, during the war, punishers cut out a partisan infirmary; probably, the big-eyed nurse told him this case. The poem is dedicated to Yulia Drunina.
And in the third (apparently written in a Black Sea resort), a lone star twinkles in the sky, the sea roars, and it seems that this era itself does not let you sleep - the Earth calls the soldier into service.
1 Here it is necessary to name two poems of 1950 associated with Alexander Yashin. One - "Kurortniki" - about how Yashin in the Black Sea resort is preoccupied with sowing in his native Nikolsky district; another - "At the wedding" - apparently, according to Yashin - about how the secretary of the district committee who arrived at the village wedding "forgot the car all night." The problems of the "Vologda wedding" overtook Yashin twelve years later; one can only be surprised at the instinct of Orlov, who sent the projectile into this target with such preemption.
2 The final quatrain: "But we know for sure ..." let me omit it as elementary.
Lev ANNINSKY
Composition
Our land is a part of us. This is where we work, study and live. These are blooming gardens, these are rivers, this is a peaceful sky above your head, this is the joyful and calm life of free people who strive to improve this land and ensure peace.
War is scary word. This is horror, this is destruction, this is madness, this is the destruction of all life. When war comes to the earth, all those who cherish this earth stand up to defend it.
So it was in 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The entire Soviet people rose up to fight the enemy. People were ready to fight to the last drop of blood, not sparing themselves and their lives. Many years have passed since the end of the Great Patriotic War, but the memory of the people who defended our land from the Nazis will remain with us forever.
I have read B. Vasiliev's novel “I wasn't on the lists”. This novel made a huge impression on me. The novel is read with unflagging interest from beginning to end. The thoughts and behavior of the characters are kept in constant tension.
A young lieutenant just graduated from military school, Nikolai Pluzhnikov, along with other cadets, arrived at the location Brest Fortress on the night that separated peace from war. They had not yet managed to put him on the lists, but in the morning the battle, which lasted nine months for the lieutenant. By the time of the war, Nicholas was hardly twenty years old. We see how a hero is born from a lieutenant, and his actions become a feat. He could leave the fortress. That would be neither desertion nor treason. Pluzhnikov was not on the lists, he was a free man. And it was this freedom that gave him a choice. He chose what made him a hero. I want to celebrate his solidarity with other soldiers. He does not think about himself, but helps to overcome the horror, fear of other soldiers. He thinks about the fact that the foreman, who saved his life, is dying himself. Having met a soldier, Pluzhnikov tells him: “For a long time I thought about how to call myself if I get to the Germans. Now I know. I am a Russian soldier."
My respect for Nicholas and for people like him is boundless. This is not only because they saved our lives and ensured a peaceful existence, but also because they are a living example of strength of character, an example from which we must learn.
The end of the novel is tragic. “At the entrance to the fortress stood an incredibly thin man of indeterminate age. He looked haggard, his head held high. When the officer asked who he was, Pluzhnikov proudly replied: “I am a Russian soldier. Here is my rank, here is my name.” The lieutenant never identified himself. The German officers were amazed at the will and character of this man.
Nikolai Pluzhnikov and people like him are the pride of our land. They love their land, their homeland. And if danger looms over her, they are ready to protect her.
A monument to the Unknown Soldier was erected in Brest. A fire always burns at his grave. This is a symbol of deep people's respect for those who fought for the peaceful life of the people, for the liberation of the land.
We are a peaceful people, but if danger hangs over our land, we will rise to fight.
On December 12, 1997, a guard of honor (Post number 1) was installed at the Eternal Flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow.
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Alexander Garden.
He was buried in the globe of the earth,
And he was just a soldier
In total, friends, a simple soldier,
Without titles and awards.
He is like a mausoleum earth -
For a million centuries
And the Milky Ways are dusty
Around him from the sides.
Clouds sleep on the red slopes,
Snowstorms are sweeping,
Heavy thunder rumbles
The winds are taking off.
The battle is long over...
By the hands of all friends
The guy is put in the globe of the earth,
It's like being in a mausoleum...
This poem was written by front-line poet Sergei Orlov in June 1944, many years before the tomb of the Unknown Soldier appeared in Moscow. However, the poet was able to express main point and the meaning of what has become one of the greatest shrines of our Fatherland, personifying the memory of the fallen on the path to Victory.
Military trick of Nikolai Egorychev
The idea of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier first appeared in France after the end of the First World War, where they decided to honor the memory of all the fallen heroes of the Fatherland in this way. In the Soviet Union, a similar idea appeared 20 years after the Great Patriotic War, when May 9 was declared a day off, and state celebrations in honor of Victory Day became regular.
In December 1966, Moscow was preparing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the battle under the walls of the capital. The first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, Nikolai Yegorychev, had the idea of creating a monument to ordinary soldiers who fell in the battle for Moscow. Gradually, the head of the capital came to the conclusion that the monument should be dedicated not only to the heroes of the battle for Moscow, but also to all those who fell during the Great Patriotic War.
It was then that Yegorychev remembered the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. While he was thinking about the possibility of creating an analogue of this memorial in Moscow, he was approached by the head of the government, Alexei Kosygin. As it turned out, Kosygin was worried about the same question. He asked why there is a similar memorial in Poland, but not in the USSR? 
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.
Enlisting the support of Kosygin, Yegorychev turned to the specialists who created the first sketches of the monument.
The final "go-ahead" was to be given by the leader of the country, Leonid Brezhnev. However, he did not like the original project. He considered that the Alexander Garden was not suitable for such a memorial, and suggested finding another place.
The problem was also that where it is now located Eternal flame, there was an obelisk dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, which then became a monument to revolutionary thinkers. To carry out the project, the obelisk had to be moved.
Egorychev turned out to be a decisive person - he carried out the transfer of the obelisk with his own power. Then, seeing that Brezhnev was not making a decision on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he went for a tactical maneuver. Before the solemn meeting in the Kremlin on November 6, 1966, dedicated to the anniversary of October revolution, he placed all the sketches and models of the monument in the rest room of the Politburo members. When the members of the Politburo got acquainted with the project and approved it, Yegorychev actually put Brezhnev in a position where he could no longer refuse to give the go-ahead. As a result, the project of the Moscow tomb of the Unknown Soldier was approved.
The hero was found near Zelenograd
But there was one more the most important question- where to look for the remains of a fighter who was forever destined to become the Unknown Soldier?
Fate decided everything for Yegorychev. At that moment, during construction in Zelenograd near Moscow, workers stumbled upon a mass grave of soldiers who died in battles near Moscow. 
Transfer of the ashes of the unknown soldier, Moscow, December 3, 1966.
The requirements were strict, excluding any possibility of chance. The grave, chosen in order to take the ashes from it, was in a place where the Germans did not reach, which means that the soldiers definitely did not die in captivity. On one of the fighters, a uniform with insignia of a private was well preserved - Unknown Soldier should have been a simple fighter. Another subtle point - the deceased should not have been a deserter or a person who committed another military crime, and was shot for him. But before the execution, the belt was removed from the criminal, and on the fighter from the grave near Zelenograd the belt was in place.
The chosen soldier had no documents and nothing that could indicate his identity - he fell like an unknown hero. Now he became the Unknown Soldier for the whole big country.
On December 2, 1966, at 2:30 p.m., the remains of a soldier were placed in a coffin, which had a military guard that changed every two hours. On December 3, at 11:45 a.m., the coffin was placed on a gun carriage, after which the procession headed for Moscow.
Thousands of Muscovites, who lined up along the streets along which the procession moved, saw off the Unknown Soldier on his last journey.
A funeral meeting was held on Manezhnaya Square, after which party leaders and Marshal Rokossovsky carried the coffin in their arms to the burial place. Under artillery salvos, the Unknown Soldier found peace in the Alexander Garden.
One for all
The architectural ensemble "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", designed by architects Dmitry Burdin, Vladimir Klimov, Yuri Rabaev and sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, was opened on May 8, 1967. The author of the famous epitaph "Your name is unknown, your feat is immortal" was the poet Sergei Mikhalkov.
On the opening day of the memorial, a fire was delivered to Moscow on an armored personnel carrier, lit in Leningrad from the memorial on the Field of Mars. The solemn and mourning relay race of the torch was taken by the Hero Soviet Union pilot Alexei Maresyev, who handed it over to the head of the USSR Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet General Secretary, himself a veteran of the war, lit the Eternal Flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
On December 12, 1997, by decree of the President of Russia, the guard of honor number 1 was installed at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The eternal flame at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier was extinguished only once, in 2009, when the memorial was being reconstructed. At this time, the Eternal Flame was moved to Poklonnaya Hill, to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. On February 23, 2010, after the reconstruction was completed, the Eternal Flame returned to its rightful place.
An unknown soldier will never have a first and last name. For all those whose loved ones fell on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, for all those who never found out where their brothers, fathers, grandfathers laid down their lives, the Unknown Soldier will forever remain that very dear person who sacrificed his life for the future of his descendants, for the future of their homeland.
He gave his life, he lost his name, but became native to everyone who lives and will live in our vast country.
Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal.
