Poet, novelist, journalist, editor of the most interesting “thick” magazine of the twentieth century – the “New world” 50-60 years; a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the only Soviet writer who has fascinated the gall of Russian emigrants of Ivan Bunin; the discoverer of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; army Lieutenant Colonel and literature, General, dismissed for objectionable behavior; through Soviet man, published in the “New world” is not the Soviet prose; winner of three Stalin prizes for the poem “the Country Moravia”, “Vasily Terkin” and “road House”, each of which is a genius; the author of the panegyric poems about Stalin and pronzitelnaya lyrics about the war with a very low-key, noble tone, which, however, makes me want to cry: “I know no fault of mine / that other not have come from the war. / That they – who are older, who are younger / have Stayed there…”
And now, trying to figure out is, where, in any of these incarnations he was an equal, and where did accident, not on their own, still come to the conclusion that to limit Twardowski only one of them would be wrong. Because you can still expand his image to infinity, trying to find in it an internal contradiction. Well, for example, a peasant’s son and Komsomol poet, who wrote enthusiastic poems about the Soviet power (the poem “the Path to socialism”), when his father and brothers were dispossessed and exiled… Because this, too, raised from his biography.
There is only one figure in our literature commensurate to Alexander Tvardovsky and to the power of the lyric-epic talent, and for public importance, and the deep contradictions of fate. Is Nikolay Nekrasov. I think that if a miracle happened and somehow they were able to meet, they would understand each other perfectly. And even without words. The titans, heroes! Atlanta, holding on his shoulders two epochs of Russian journalism – the era of “Contemporary” and “New world”. The authors of two of the greatest in Russian literature of the lyric-epic canvases “to Whom in Russia to live well” and “Vasily Terkin”, which are code the key to the Russian soul. And at the same time, pure water of poetry, but such, whose poetic “I” remains in the shell of a personal ego, and merges with the “I” of millions of other people and talks on their behalf. Only Nekrasov could speak the language of a village woman who lost her son. Only Twardowski could speak on behalf of the deceased in the Finnish war of a teenager.
“From your address books distressed / Two lines about the soldier-lad, That was in the fortieth year / Murdered in Finland on the ice. // Lay somehow clumsy / childish little body. / Overcoat to the ice frost pressed, / Away hat flew off. / It seemed that the boy was not lying, / And still run all the way / Yes the ice is for the floor to hold… // In the great war gestureOka, / why, I’ll never know, / I feel sorry for the distant fate, / As if a dead, lonely, / As I lie / the Frozen little dead / And the war neznamenitoy, / Forgotten, the little, lie.”
This poem is called “Two lines”. It is written in 1943. This is the year of the battle of Stalingrad, the year of the battle of Kursk. Already ended the battle of Moscow and the other great battle. And Twardowski, N1 the great Patriotic poet, whose poem “Vasily Terkin” is read in the trenches soldiers wrote about some boy, whose body was frozen in the ice of Finland. Why?
Why in 1946, after the Victory, he writes one of the most powerful poems, “I was killed near Rzhev…”? In the same year he became a laureate of the Stalin prize of first degree for “terkina”. Why he remembers the Rzhev slaughterhouse, also not very “famous” episode of the war?
In the same year he finished the poem “the road House”, where there is the most terrible of poetry in the Soviet lines of retreat of our troops early in the war.
“All to the East, back / closer beat guns. / A women howling and hanging / On the fence with his chest. / Came, then came the last hour, / And there is no delay. Yes, what is it that you only have / Throw, son?..”
From these lines, and today, after more than half a century, drove to his throat. How did he find them?
Who did?
But as he could do a “translation” simple soldier’s language in chetyrehstolpnyj ferrets of the poem “Vasily Terkin”? So that even Ivan Bunin came in the rapture? “This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, precision in everything and how extraordinary the people’s, soldier’s language – not a hitch, no hitch, not a false ready, that is, literary and vulgar words!”
it Is from his letters in the USSR, a former ally of pre-revolutionary literary “Wednesdays” Nicholas Teleshov. And the emigre Leonid Surowo said, “an Amazing book, and our poets it will not feel, not understand. Do not understand the beauty of the book of Twardowski. And how do they know? Have they experienced something like that! Because they are no people, no soldiers ‘ speech hear. They have a donkey’s ear. About Russian life I don’t know and don’t want closed in their own world, feeding on each other and themselves. Here you’ll hear will say, well, what Twardowski. Yes, it’s a ditty, a sort of soldier’s resnica. But his book is poetry and a rare stroke of luck…”
And today, Twardowski “hear” and understand not all. Not only his poetry, but and all his fate, his entire figure, so big, such a complex and such, without any national pride let’s say, Russian. Yes, in the beginnings of the twentieth century.
a classic… hero…
