The first poems of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky were published in Smolensk newspapers in 1925-1926, but fame came to him later, in the mid-30s, when “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. The poet's original talent clearly manifested itself in it.
In his works of the 30-60s. he embodied the complex, turning-point events of the time, shifts and changes in the life of the country and the people, the depth of the national historical disaster and feat in one of the most brutal wars that humanity experienced, rightfully occupying one of the leading places in the literature of the 20th century.
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was born on June 21, 1910 in the “farm of the Stolpovo wasteland”, belonging to the village of Zagorye, Smolensk province, into a large large family of a peasant blacksmith. Note that later, in the 30s, the Tvardovsky family suffered a tragic fate: during collectivization they were dispossessed and exiled to the North.
From a very early age, the future poet imbibed love and respect for the land, for the hard work on it and for blacksmithing, the master of which was his father Trifon Gordeevich - a man of a very original, tough and tough character and at the same time literate, well-read, who knew by heart a lot of poems. The poet's mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, had a sensitive, impressionable soul.
As the poet later recalled in “Autobiography,” long winter evenings in their family were often devoted to reading aloud books by Pushkin and Gogol, Lermontov and Nekrasov, A.K. Tolstoy and Nikitin... It was then that a latent, irresistible craving for poetry arose in the boy’s soul, which was based on rural life itself, close to nature, as well as traits inherited from his parents.
In 1928, after a conflict and then a break with his father, Tvardovsky broke up with Zagorye and moved to Smolensk, where for a long time he could not get a job and survived on a pittance of literary earnings. Later, in 1932, he entered the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute and, while studying, traveled as a correspondent to collective farms, wrote articles and notes about changes in rural life for local newspapers. At this time, in addition to the prose story “The Diary of a Collective Farm Chairman,” he wrote the poems “The Path to Socialism” (1931) and “Introduction” (1933), in which colloquial, prosaic verse predominates, which the poet himself later called “riding with the reins lowered.” They did not become a poetic success, but played a role in the formation and rapid self-determination of his talent.
In 1936, Tvardovsky came to Moscow, entered the philological faculty of the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, Literature (MIFLI) and in 1939 graduated with honors. In the same year he was drafted into the army and in the winter of 1939/40 he participated in the war with Finland as a correspondent for a military newspaper.
From the first to the last days of the Great Patriotic War, Tvardovsky was an active participant - a special correspondent for the front-line press. Together with the active army, having started the war on the Southwestern Front, he walked along its roads from Moscow to Konigsberg.
After the war, in addition to his main literary work, poetry itself, he was for a number of years the editor-in-chief of the New World magazine, consistently defending in this post the principles of truly artistic realistic art. Heading this magazine, he contributed to the entry into literature of a number of talented writers - prose writers and poets: F. Abramov and G. Baklanov, A. Solzhenitsyn and Yu. Trifonov, A. Zhigulin and A. Prasolov, etc.
The formation and development of Tvardovsky as a poet dates back to the mid-20s. While working as a rural correspondent for Smolensk newspapers, where his notes on village life had been published since 1924, he also published his youthful, unpretentious and still imperfect poems there. In the poet’s “Autobiography” we read: “My first published poem “New Hut” appeared in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Village” in the summer of 1925. It started like this:
Smells like fresh pine resin
The yellowish walls shine.
We'll live well in the spring
Here in a new, Soviet way...”
With the appearance of “The Country of Ant” (1934-1936), which testified to the entry of its author into a period of poetic maturity, the name of Tvardovsky became widely known, and the poet himself increasingly asserted himself more and more confidently. At the same time, he wrote cycles of poems “Rural Chronicle” and “About Grandfather Danila”, poems “Mothers”, “Ivushka”, and a number of other notable works. It is around the “Country of Ant” that the emerging contradictory artistic world of Tvardovsky has been grouped since the late 20s. and before the start of the war.
Today we perceive the work of the poet of that time differently. One of the researchers’ remark about the poet’s works of the early 30s should be recognized as fair. (with certain reservations it could be extended to this entire decade): “The acute contradictions of the collectivization period in the poems, in fact, are not touched upon; the problems of the village of those years are only named, and they are solved in a superficially optimistic way.” However, it seems that this can hardly be attributed unconditionally to “The Country of Ant,” with its unique conventional design and construction, and folklore flavor, as well as to the best poems of the pre-war decade.
During the war, Tvardovsky did everything that was required for the front, often spoke in the army and front-line press: “wrote essays, poems, feuilletons, slogans, leaflets, songs, articles, notes...”, but his main work during the war years was the creation lyric-epic poem “Vasily Terkin” (1941-1945).
This, as the poet himself called it, “A Book about a Soldier,” recreates a reliable picture of front-line reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person in war. At the same time, Tvardovsky wrote a cycle of poems “Front-line Chronicle” (1941-1945), and worked on a book of essays “Motherland and Foreign Land” (1942-1946).
At the same time, he wrote such lyrical masterpieces as “Two Lines” (1943), “War - there is no crueler word...” (1944), “In a field dug with streams...” (1945), which were first published after the war, in the January book of the magazine “Znamya” for 1946.
Even in the first year of the war, the lyrical poem “House by the Road” (1942-1946) was started and soon after its end. “Its theme,” as the poet noted, “is war, but from a different side than in Terkin, from the side of home, family, wife and children of a soldier who survived the war. The epigraph of this book could be lines taken from it:
Come on people, never
Let's not forget about this."
In the 50s Tvardovsky created the poem “Beyond the Distance, 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 an extended lyrical monologue of a contemporary, a poetic narrative about the difficult destinies of the homeland and people, about their complex historical path, about internal processes and changes in the spiritual world of man in the 20th century.
In parallel with “Beyond the Distance, the Distance,” the poet is working on a satirical poem-fairy tale “Terkin in the Other World” (1954-1963), depicting the “inertia, bureaucracy, formalism” of our life. According to the author, “the poem “Terkin in the Other World” is not a continuation of “Vasily Terkin”, but only refers to the image of the hero of “The Book about a Fighter” to solve special problems of the satirical and journalistic genre.”
In the last years of his life, Tvardovsky wrote the lyrical poem-cycle “By the Right of Memory” (1966-1969) - a work of tragedy. This is a social and lyrical-philosophical reflection on the painful paths of history, on the fate of an individual, on the dramatic fate of one’s family, father, mother, brothers. Being deeply personal and confessional, “By the Right of Memory” at the same time expresses the people’s point of view on the tragic phenomena of the past.
Along with major lyric-epic works in the 40-60s. Tvardovsky writes poems that poignantly echo the “cruel memory” of the war (“I was killed near Rzhev,” “On the day the war ended,” “To the son of a dead warrior,” etc.), as well as a number of lyrical poems that made up the book “ From the lyrics of these years” (1967). These are concentrated, sincere and original thoughts about nature, man, homeland, history, time, life and death, the poetic word.
Written back in the late 50s. and in his programmatic poem “The whole essence is in one single covenant...” (1958), the poet reflects on the main thing for himself in working on the word. It is about a purely personal beginning in creativity and about complete dedication in the search for a unique and individual artistic embodiment of the truth of life:
The whole point is in one single covenant:
What I will say before the time melts,
I know this better than anyone in the world -
Living and dead, only I know.
Say that word to anyone else
There's no way I could ever
Entrust. Even Leo Tolstoy -
It is forbidden. He won’t say - let him be his own god.
And I'm only mortal. I am responsible for my own,
During my lifetime I worry about one thing:
About what I know better than anyone in the world,
I want to say. And the way I want.
In Tvardovsky’s late poems, in his heartfelt, personal, deeply psychological experiences of the 60s. First of all, the complex, dramatic paths of people's history are revealed, the harsh memory of the Great Patriotic War resounds, the difficult destinies of the pre-war and post-war villages resonate with pain, evoke a heartfelt echo of events in people's life, and find a sad, wise and enlightened solution to the “eternal themes” of the lyrics.
Native nature never leaves the poet indifferent: he vigilantly notices, “how after the March snowstorms, / Fresh, transparent and light, / In April, birch forests suddenly turned pink / Palm-like,” he hears “indistinct talk or hubbub / In the tops of centuries-old pines ” (“That sleepy noise was sweet to me...”, 1964), the lark that heralded spring reminds him of the distant time of childhood.
Often the poet constructs his philosophical thoughts about the life of people and the change of generations, about their connections and blood relationships in such a way that they grow as a natural consequence of the depiction of natural phenomena (“Trees planted by grandfather...”, 1965; “Lawn in the morning from under a typewriter ...”, 1966; “Birch”, 1966). In these poems, the fate and soul of man directly connect with the historical life of the homeland and nature, the memory of the fatherland: they reflect and refract the problems and conflicts of the era in their own way.
The theme and image of the mother occupy a special place in the poet’s work. So, already at the end of the 30s. in the poem “Mothers” (1937, first published in 1958), in the form of blank verse, not quite usual for Tvardovsky, not only childhood memory and a deep filial feeling, but also a heightened poetic ear and vigilance, and most importantly, an increasingly revealing and the growing lyrical talent of the poet. These poems are clearly psychological, as if reflected in them - in the pictures of nature, in the signs of rural life and everyday life inseparable from it - a maternal image so close to the poet’s heart appears:
And the first noise of leaves is still incomplete,
And a green trail on the grainy dew,
And the lonely knock of the roller on the river,
And the sad smell of young hay,
And the echo of a late woman's song,
And just sky, blue sky -
They remind me of you every time.
And the feeling of filial grief sounds completely different, deeply tragic in the cycle “In Memory of the Mother” (1965), colored not only by the acute experience of irreparable personal loss, but also by the pain of nationwide suffering during the years of repression.
In the land where they were taken in droves,
Wherever there is a village nearby, let alone a city,
In the north, locked by the taiga,
All there was was cold and hunger.
But my mother certainly remembered
Let's talk a little about everything that has passed,
How she didn’t want to die there, -
The cemetery was very unpleasant.
Tvardovsky, as always in his lyrics, is extremely specific and precise, right down to the details. But here, in addition, the image itself is deeply psychologized, and literally everything is given in sensations and memories, one might say, through the eyes of the mother:
So-and-so, the dug earth is not in a row
Between centuries-old stumps and snags,
And at least somewhere far from housing,
And then there are graves right behind the barracks.
And she used to see in her dreams
Not so much a house and a yard with everyone on the right,
And that hillock is in the native side
With crosses under curly birch trees.
Such beauty and grace
In the distance is a highway, road pollen smokes.
“I’ll wake up, I’ll wake up,” the mother said, “
And behind the wall is a taiga cemetery...
In the last of the poems of this cycle: “Where are you from, / Mother, did you save this song for old age?..” - a motif and image of “crossing” that is so characteristic of the poet’s work appears, which in “The Country of Ant” was represented as a movement towards the shore.” new life”, in “Vasily Terkin” - as the tragic reality of bloody battles with the enemy; in the poems “In Memory of a Mother,” he absorbs pain and sorrow about the fate of his mother, bitter resignation with the inevitable finitude of human life:
What has been lived is lived through,
And from whom what is the demand?
Yes, it's already nearby
And the last transfer.
Water carrier,
The gray-haired old man
Take me to the other side
Side - home...
In the poet’s later lyrics, the theme of continuity of generations, memory and duty to those who died in the fight against fascism sounds with new, hard-won strength and depth, which enters with a piercing note in the poems “At night all the wounds hurt more painfully...” (1965), “I know no fault of mine...” (1966), “They lie there, deaf and dumb...” (1966).
I know it's not my fault
The fact that others did not come from the war,
The fact that they - some older, some younger -
We stayed there, and it’s not about the same thing,
That I could, but failed to save them, -
That's not what this is about, but still, still, still...
With their tragic understatement, these poems convey a stronger and deeper sense of involuntary personal guilt and responsibility for human lives cut short by the war. And this persistent pain of “cruel memory” and guilt, as one could see, applies to the poet not only to military victims and losses. At the same time, thoughts about man and time, imbued with faith in the omnipotence of human memory, turn into an affirmation of the life that a person carries and keeps within himself until the last moment.
In Tvardovsky's lyrics of the 60s. the essential qualities of his realistic style were revealed with particular completeness and force: democracy, the internal capacity of the poetic word and image, rhythm and intonation, all poetic means with external simplicity and uncomplicatedness. The poet himself saw the important advantages of this style, first of all, in the fact that it gives “reliable pictures of living life in all its imperious impressiveness.” At the same time, his later poems are characterized by psychological depth and philosophical richness.
Tvardovsky owns a number of thorough articles and speeches about poets and poetry containing mature and independent judgments about literature (“The Tale of Pushkin”, “About Bunin”, “The Poetry of Mikhail Isakovsky”, “On the Poetry of Marshak”), reviews and reviews about A. Blok, A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam and others, included in the book “Articles and Notes on Literature”, which went through several editions.
Continuing the traditions of Russian classics - Pushkin and Nekrasov, Tyutchev and Bunin, various traditions of folk poetry, without bypassing the experience of prominent poets of the 20th century, Tvardovsky demonstrated the possibilities of realism in the poetry of our time. His influence on contemporary and subsequent poetic development is undeniable and fruitful.
Tvardovsky's work captures the main milestones in the development of the Soviet country: collectivization, the Great Patriotic War, post-war revival. This is a poet - Soviet in essence, but at the same time, universal human problems also find a place in his poetry. His work is deeply folk, primarily in its ideological basis. The poet widely uses folk colloquial language, folklore forms, and draws his heroes in the spirit of folk poetry.
From Tvardovsky's poems one can trace the history of the country. The first poems “The Path to Socialism” and “The Country of Ant” reflected the period of collectivization. Peasant Nikita Morgunok sets off to look for that promised land, which
...in length and width - all around.
Sow one bobble
And that one is yours.
This is the ideal of peasant happiness. Tvardovsky leads Morgunka throughout the country, and, during the journey, observing the new things that collective farms bring with them, the hero abandons individual farming and comes to the idea that the collective farm is a peasant paradise. Tvardovsky used the travel motif, characteristic of folk art, for the same purpose as Nekrasov in his time in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” The poet sincerely believed that collectivization would bring happiness to the peasants. Later - in the 1960s - in the poem “By Right of Memory,” Tvardovsky, from the height of personal fate and historical experience, will comprehend collectivization, see not only the prospects that have opened up, but also the disastrous measures that were taken to de-peasant Russia.
During the Great Patriotic War, Tvardovsky created a truly folk “book about a fighter” “Vasily Terkin”. Her hero became the personification of the entire Russian nation. The commonality of Terkin's fate with the fate of the entire people is emphasized in the poem repeatedly. The image of the hero reflects the fundamental features of the Russian national character: simplicity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, courage. Perhaps Terkin’s most important quality is hard work. He, accustomed to working on a collective farm, considers war to be military labor. Terkin is capable of playing the accordion, repairing a clock, and organizing a crossing. Terkin does not lose heart even in the most difficult situations; he knows how to cheer up with a joke or a funny story.
Tvardovsky in his individual form embodied the universal inherent in the people. At the same time, the poet emphasizes that “in every company there is such a” Terkin. The Hero acts as a generalized image of a Fighter and a Man:
Sometimes serious, sometimes funny,
No matter what the rain, what the snow, -
Into battle, forward, into utter fire
He goes, holy and sinful,
Russian miracle man.
The image of the hero merges with the image of the entire warring people. In the chapter “Death and the Warrior” Terkin overcomes even death. In such a conventional form, Tvardovsky embodied the idea of invincibility, the immortality of the people: “Terkin is not subject to death, since the war has not expired.”
The poem “Vasily Terkin” is an epic of war, since in diverse combat episodes, in various situations and scenes, an image of the people at war is created, its history is traced from retreat to victory.
In the post-war period, during the Khrushchev Thaw, Tvardovsky continues the biography of Terkin in the poem “Terkin in the Other World.” The poet wanted to cleanse the people's consciousness of totalitarian ideology. It is no coincidence that the poem begins with a dispute between the poet and the ideologically indoctrinated reader, who hears “echoes of illicit ideas” in everything, sees sedition in a literary work, without even reading it, but unconditionally believing the official assessments. Terkin turns from an epic hero into a tragic hero: having preserved his living soul in the “other world,” Terkin enters into a duel with the totalitarian system. “The Other World” is a military-bureaucratic System with a foreign asset, “Grobgazeta”, a Special Department, Organs, a Network, in which there is an excess of complete fools who did not want to resign. Terkin manages to keep his soul alive and get out of the “other world.” He performs a spiritual feat in peacetime. The return of Terkin is the finding of a way out for all living things that the dead System tried to strangle, where the dead command the living, where “the dead are responsible for the living.” If Terkin the fighter exalted his state and did everything for its victory, then the new Terkin destroys the totalitarian system that crushes people.
In the post-war period, Tvardovsky wrote the poem “House by the Road” - a lament for families that the war had scattered and destroyed. Describing the pre-war life and everyday life of the Sivtsov family, the poet shows the conditions for the formation of the heroes’ resilience and love for their Home.
This love helps Andrei, who returned from the war, to rebuild his house in the hope that his wife will return and there will be a strong and kind family again. Hope and love do not leave Anna even in the incredibly difficult conditions of a fascist concentration camp. The name “House by the Road” is symbolic - it is a house by the road of war.
The lyric epic poem “Beyond the Distance, the Distance” expands the time and space of the poet’s contemporary reality of the 1960s.
The poet turns to the past in order to compare it with the present, to see the transformations that have taken place in the country. Turning to the distances of time allows us to reflect on the fate of the Russian people, their character and traditions (chapters “Seven Thousand Rivers”, “Two Forges”, “Lights of Siberia”, “On the Angara”). In the chapter “So it Was,” Tvardovsky talks about the period of Stalin’s personality cult, about the type of person’s personality that was developed at that time:
But which of us is fit to be a judge?
Decide who is right and who is wrong?
We are talking about people, and people
Don't they create gods themselves?
The poet is trying to philosophically comprehend time, to find the origins of what was happening.
In addition to temporal distances, the poet also surveys geographical distances. The poem is a kind of travel diary of a trip on the Moscow - Vladivostok train, passing through the entire country. Huge spaces run past the windows of the carriage. Having traveled across the entire country, the poet remembers his “small” homeland with extraordinary devotion and love:
From the road - across the country -
I see my father's land of Smolensk.
Another distance appears before the poet - the distance of human moral potential, the deep distance of the soul of the lyrical hero.
All three distances merge into a large symphonic work, which reveals the strength and power of the country, the beauty and heroism of the Soviet people. The poet is convinced of the historical correctness and progressiveness of our country’s path:
After a year - a year, after a milestone - a milestone,
Behind the stripe is a stripe.
The path is not easy. But the wind of the century -
He blows our sails.
Tvardovsky’s last poem was “By the Right of Memory.” This is a poem about “sleepless memory”, about everything that happened during the years of Soviet power - great and tragic, about history and eternal values. The poet wrote the poem in 1970, when they had already forgotten about the cult of personality and tried to embellish or silence the negative in the history of the Soviet country:
They tell you to forget and ask with affection
Not remembering is a memory for printing,
So that inadvertently this publicity
The uninitiated should not be confused.
Tvardovsky judges himself and the country by the highest moral standards. He sees the origins of dehumanization and betrayal in Stalin's times, when morality was turned upside down, when perjury, betrayal, and slander were considered valor, if this was done under the sign of love for the leader. The poet is sure that it is impossible to kill memory, that the people will remember their history, since
One lie is to our loss,
And only the truth comes to court!
The poem “By Right of Memory” is a bitter, dramatic work. In it, Tvardovsky tragically realized that he, too, was in error, that historical guilt lay with him:
The children became fathers long ago,
But for everyone's father
We were all responsible
And the trial lasts for decades,
And there is no end in sight.
Thus, the entire history of the country, captured in Tvardovsky’s poems, received its philosophical understanding in his last, final poem.
A. Tvardovsky became a chronicler of the 30-60s of the 20th century, a biographer of a time of severe trials, changes, and experiments. He was not afraid, under difficult conditions, to speak out convincingly about everything that worried the Soviet people, to begin an in-depth conversation about the “memory court”» over the mistakes of the period of collectivization, Stalinism, about conscience and responsibility of the living to the dead.
Within the framework of socialist realism and communist ideology, the writer was able to create works about the life of Soviet people, full of ordinary and unusual worries, joys and sorrows, reveal their psychology, show the process of restructuring society that began during the Thaw, humanity, and faith in the future.
The poet’s sister A. Matveeva wrote in 1980 that her paternal grandfather Gordey Vasilyevich Tvardovsky “was from Belarus, grew up on the banks of the Berezina.” In his “Autobiography,” the poet notes that his father was a literate person. Neighbors called him Pan Tvardovsky, respecting his “Western roots.” I tried to give my children a decent education. The mother was an impressionable and sensitive person; she was “moved to tears by the sound of a shepherd’s trumpet.”
The future poet’s studies began with tutoring: 8th grade high school student N. Arefiev was brought from Smolensk for the children. In 1918, A. Tvardovsky studied in Smolensk at the 1st Soviet school (former gymnasium), and in the fall of 1920 at the Lyakhov school, but it was soon closed. I had to continue my studies at the Yegoryevsk school. In 1923, A. Tvardovsky began to study 8 kilometers from home, at the Belokholmsk school. In 1924, A. Tvardovsky’s studies ended.
The love for literature grew due to a passion for the works of A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, N. Nekrasov, M. Lermontov. In 1925, in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Derevnya”, among other materials about the new peasant life, the first poem by Komsomol correspondent A. Tvardovsky “New Izba” was published, in which the old gods were overthrown and the new gods were glorified; instead of icons, portraits of Marx and Lenin were hung.
In 1928, the Komsomol activist broke up with his father. A. Tvardovsky moves to Smolensk, gets to know M. Isakovsky, an employee of the newspaper “Rabochy Put”, who supported the young author.
The inspired poet goes to Moscow, where M. Svetlov publishes his poems in the magazine “October”, and in the winter of 1930 he returns to Smolensk again. In 1931, A. Tvardovsky married Maria Gorelova. In the same year, the writer’s father was dispossessed and deported with his family to the Trans-Urals, to the North, and was forced to build barracks in the middle of the taiga. Father and 13-year-old brother Pavel fled from exile and asked to intercede for them, to which the poet, devoted to Soviet power, replied: “I can only help you by taking you free of charge to where they were” (from the memoirs of his younger brother Ivan). He will atone for his guilt, both in his early (poem “Brothers”, 1933) and later (poem “By Right of Memory”, triptych about his mother) work. In April 1936, A. Tvardovsky visited his relatives in exile, and in June of the same year he helped them move to the Smolensk region.
The 1930s became the time of the poet’s formation. He writes epic, plot-based poems - pictures from nature, sketches, landscape and everyday sketches, and the poems “The Path to Socialism” (1931) and “Introduction” (1933). However, A. Tvardovsky’s poems, scenes from nature, and landscape sketches were more successful. Among them, a melodious poem entitled “The white birch trees were spinning...” (1936) stands out. The author combines two narrative plans: a specific, special case - there is a round dance on the river bank, “teenage girls” are singing, playing an accordion, and a general one - we are talking about a holiday that was celebrated “all along the river, all over the country.”
The picture of the holiday is recreated as bright, carnival-like: “scarves, accordions and lights are flashing,” “teenage girls are singing,” “a round dance is going around in a circle.” The most successful and bright points in this carnival picture are two - the metaphor “White birch trees were spinning” and the comparison “And along the river in lights, like a city, / A handsome steamer ran.” The writer’s skill is also manifested in the successful selection of original, innovative rhymes: “birch trees are teenagers,” “not at home is different,” “overkill is a city,” “diverse is a holiday.”
The poet's poems about his childhood and his native places turned out to be true. “On the Zagorye Farm” can be called a small lyric-epic poem about childhood, about life. The author raises the well-known to the poetic level:
The sun is on the white hill
Got up in the morning.
Following the path of abandoning rhetoric and reportage, in 1935 the poet wrote the poem “Morning” - light transparent, full of the whiteness of snow, from which “the room is light.” Snow, snowflakes, “flying fluff” are the central images of the work. They move, move in space, like living beings.
Let us pay attention to the personification, complicated by epithets: the snowflake is not just spinning, but spinning “easily and clumsily”, the first snowflake, a still timid creature. Snow is characterized by two epithets - thick and white. The weather, apparently, is quite frosty and windless, and therefore the snow does not lose its thickness and whiteness.
In 1932, A. Tvardovsky, on the recommendation of the Smolensk Union of Writers, entered the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute without exams (as an active author, Komsomol member), and in the fall of 1936 he transferred to the 3rd year of IFLI - the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature. At this time he published the books “The Road” (1938), “About Grandfather Danila” (1939), and the poem “The Country of Ant” (1936), for which he received the Order of Lenin.
During the war years
A. Tvardovsky participated in the war with Finland in 1939-1940 as a war correspondent. By the summer of 1939, he graduated from IFLI, and in the fall he took part in the Red Army’s campaign in Western Belarus. He will forever remember the terrible pictures of the winter of 1940 in Finland. During the Great Patriotic War, the poet was a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper and traveled from Moscow to Koenigsberg. The poem “Vasily Terkin” became an encyclopedia about the war. A series of poems “Front-line Chronicle”, a book of essays and memoirs “Motherland and Foreign Land”, and a poem “House by the Road” were also written.
The battles in the poem “Vasily Terkin” are local in nature, as in the chapter “Duel”, where Vasily Terkin defeats a strong opponent. The style of the poem is conversational: there is a frank, friendly conversation about what happened in the war.
The poem “House by the Road” (1942-1946) is called by the author a “lyrical chronicle.” This is the poet’s confession about an abandoned, unmown meadow near a house near the road, about a family left behind by a soldier, a kind of “cry for the Motherland,” “a song / Of its harsh fate.” The poem does not have a developed plot; it is built on lyrical experiences of events: Sivtsov’s departure to war; the grief of his wife Anyuta, who meets the prisoners and tries to see her Andrei among them; farewell to her husband, making his way from the encirclement to his own people, and then captivity with his children in Germany.
The humanistic position of A. Tvardovsky was especially expressively revealed in his elegies - thoughts of 1941-1945 about life and death, the senseless cruelty of war, which never spares. The poem “Two Lines” talks about the inglorious Finnish War of 1939-1940, when thousands of young soldiers and officers were left lying in the snow. Equally tragic in content are the poems “War - there is no crueler word”, “Before the war”, “As if as a sign of trouble...”.
In the post-war years
After the war, literature developed under conditions of ideological dictate. The “unprincipled” creativity of A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko was criticized. The magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” were subject to a special resolution regarding “ideological mistakes.” The range of phenomena permitted for artistic depiction narrowed, and the “theory of non-conflict” prevailed. A. Tvardovsky tried to avoid a simplified depiction of reality.
From 1958 until the end of his days, the writer was the editor-in-chief of the country’s leading magazine, “New World,” which defended the principles of truthful art, revealing to readers the names of new authors: F. Abramov, A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Bykov, G. Baklanov, E. Vinokurova and others.
At this time, the writer was working on works about his experiences in the pre-war period, about Stalin’s cult of personality, about bureaucracy, and created the poems “Beyond the Distance,” “Terkin in the Next World,” “By the Right of Memory.” The poet's lyrics of the late 1950s and 1960s become monologue, confessional, elements of descriptiveness disappear from it.
The works of A. Tvardovsky correspond to the principles of the communist party and nationality, and are ideologically consistent. They glorify Lenin’s ideals, the builders of communism, but in the spirit of the “sixties” they defend “socialism with a human face.” The poet also addresses eternal issues (“Cruel Memory”, “Moscow Morning”, “About Existence”, “The Path Not Traveled”, etc.).
Poem " Cruel memory"(1951), written during the years of the predominance of journalistic poetry, even today touches our hearts with the sincerity of feelings, the frankness of the author, and the deep drama of his experiences. The philosophical idea of the poem is expressed in the final lines:
And that memory, probably,
My soul will be sick.
For now there is an irrevocable misfortune
There will be no war for the world.
This conclusion does not arise immediately in the poem, but after the author’s talented, detailed description of nature, which he remembered from childhood, its colors and sounds. The heat of a pine forest, a sleepy river, summer and the sun “baking in the back”, “the ringing of gadflies”, a dewy meadow - these are the realities of peaceful life that filled the poet’s childhood years. The picture is designed in light colors. Nature is ringing, pure... The second picture is tragic: instead of the previous pure colors and smells, others appear - gloomy, military ones: the grass smells of “trench camouflage”, the smell of the air is subtle, but mixed “with the smoke of hot craters”. By juxtaposing pictures of peaceful and military life, the poet informs readers that now nature for him is not a source of joy, as in childhood, but of cruel memory of the war.
« Moscow morning"(1957-1958) - an epic plot poem about how the lyrical hero got up early to buy a newspaper in which, according to the editor-in-chief, his poem would be published. But when the newspaper was looked at, the poem was not there - it was removed by censorship due to the unacceptable ending. The last lines of the poem are the conclusion that the editor-in-chief in art is a “great time,” which the poet calls for to teach “a wise lesson—a reproach.” Thanks to such an editor, the lyrical hero becomes “able to do anything”, he can “move mountains.”
A. Tvardovsky conducts a deeper conversation on the topic of the poet and poetry, the poet and time, the poet and truth, conscience in poems of the late 1950s - 1960s. “A Word about Words” (1962), “The whole essence is in one - the only covenant...” (1958), “About Existence” (1958), “The Path Untrodden...” (1959), “I will find out myself, I will find out ... "(1966), "At the bottom of my life..." (1967), "Let's say you've already drowned yours..." (1968), etc.
« The whole point is in one - the only covenant..."(1958) - a philosophical reflection on the individual, independent of circumstances, unique nature of artistic creativity. In the spirit of the times, reassessment of values (Khrushchev’s “thaw”) is a bold conclusion. And the author presents it laconically, convincingly, stringing thesis onto thesis, developing, repeating the original thought, gives the character of evidence to the statement using the means of poetic syntax: repetitions - “in one - the only testament”; “I want to say. / And the way I want,” but first of all - transfers: the second stanza consists of them entirely. A parallel is drawn in the poem: Leo Tolstoy is the author. The poet cannot entrust his word even to the genius Leo Tolstoy.
Poem " About existence"(1957-1958) is written in a different style than the previous one: it contains more emotional images - bricks that make up one whole - life. Refusing fame and power in the first lines (“My glory is decay - without interest / And power is petty passion...”), in the following the poet affirms his involvement in the full life of nature and society, and proves the essentially realistic, truthful mission of artistic creativity. He wants to have a part of the morning forest, “stitches going back to childhood,” “birch catkins,” “the sea washing with foam / Stones of warm shores,” songs of youth, misfortune and human victory. He needs all this in order to “see everything and experience everything, / Learning everything from afar.” In this part of the poem, the emotional impact is achieved both by tropes (epithets - fragrant hemp, warm shores) and repetitions - single beginnings (four sentences begin with the preposition “from”). The energy of the statement is achieved by using a non-union combination of phrases. To the desires of a true artist named at the beginning of the work, the author adds one more word at the end of the work - the desire to be honest.
In the poem " The path not taken..."(1959) the conversation continues about the poet and his mission. The author considers the primary duty of an artist to be a word - to keep up with time, to be ahead, even if the path is unexplored. This idea is expressed already in the first stanza of the dynamic, written in the form of an appeal, an appeal to “big or small,” to any creator. The effect of the action is created by the use of verbs and verb forms, breaking long lines into shorter parts, repetitions (“behind him, behind him”), appeals, questions, exclamations (“Is it scary after all?”; “Not yet!”), additional pauses not provided for by the rules (“Yes - sweet!”). A feeling of excitement and high emotional mood of the author is created.
The poem introduces elements of drama as a type of literature: the monologue-address in the first two lines develops into a dialogue taking place between the author and his imaginary interlocutor. The poem uses vernaculars (“srobel”, “without remainder”, “lid”). The last word expresses active content and therefore appears as a separate line. The image of a “wall of fire” carries a great ideological load; “wall of fire” is an echo of military memory, a symbol of the front line of defense, the front. With its help, the idea is “fixed”: the poet must be in front, in the line of fire.
In the system of works about the essence of creativity, the role of the poet and poetry, the poem “ A word about words"(1962). The philosophical thought contained in it is multifaceted and branched. The word is the primary element of literature, its building material. Without a precise, significant, successful word, without its figurative, figurative meaning, there would be no “fine literature,” as literature was called back in Pushkin’s time. The poet defends the importance of such creativity, in which the word is of great importance, and actively opposes “eloquence” (vain talk). His position is that of a thinker, a master. The poem is a meditation on true and false values, citizenship, honesty and opportunism. The poet divides words into two categories: words and words. The words are always precise, fiery, and “sparingly used” by the authors.
In the poem " At the bottom of my life..."(1967) sounds the motif of an autumn farewell and parting with life. The poet comprehends his life, thinking about the question of whether his path in this world was mortal, and answers it in the negative.
In 1946, during the period of comprehension of the heroic victory, which sharpened the poet’s patriotic feelings, forcing him to take a fresh look at the world as a whole and at his small homeland, the poem “ About the homeland" It is built on the principle of negation (the first five stanzas) and affirmation (the remaining ten). In the first part of the poem, the poet seems to suggest what would have happened if he had been born “near the warm sea in the Crimea,” on the coast of the Caucasus, on the Volga “in the heart of the Urals,” in Siberia, in the Far East. And then this assumption is consistently rejected with the help of a number of arguments, because in this case the author “could not have been born in his native... side.” All further description comes down to characterizing the Motherland as the dearest, most beloved. The poet selects “affectionate” epithets (“the not so famous”, “quiet” side; it does not have the majestic fullness of rivers or mountain ranges; it is unenviable). But this side is a toiler, lived in by fathers and grandfathers, with whom the poet is betrothed “by the sacrament of native speech” to the happiness of truth. Because this unknown region is dear to the lyrical hero, because it is his integral part. The last three stanzas lead to a philosophical conclusion-generalization: it is from the horizons of the small homeland that the scale of the great homeland is visible.
A cycle of poems about mother
The theme of the Motherland for almost every poet is inseparable from the theme of mother, woman. The poet dedicated the poems “I remember the aspen farm...” (1927), “Song” (1936), “Your beauty does not age...” (1937) and others to Mother Maria Mitrofanovna. But the most striking was the cycle of four poems under general name " In memory of mother"(1965), written after her death. This cycle is autobiographical. The first poem is about the author, a poet, who remembers his departure from home to another life, about how this separation ends with a call to his mother for the last meeting-parting. This is a sad elegy about the inability (and even unwillingness) to love one’s mothers, repentance for oneself and one’s mother.
The second poem in the cycle is “ In the region where they were taken in droves..."- a description of the tragic page in the life of the Tvardovsky family in exile, in the Trans-Urals. The image of the mother appears in an internal, spiritual state: she loves her land, cannot imagine herself without it. For her, even her own cemetery is a symbol of the Motherland. Mother could not look at someone else's taiga cemetery with indifference. Its image is the opposite of the centuries-old image of the Belarusian cemetery, which has always stood out for its “airy” features.
The third poem of the cycle “ How slowly the gardeners work...." translates the story into a philosophical plane: comparing the unhurried work of gardeners, filling the rhizomes of apple trees in a hole with soil so, “As if birds were feeding food from their hands, / They are crumbling it for the apple tree,” they measure it out by the handful, and the work of gravediggers is hasty, “in jerks, without respite “, for it is justified by the feeling of guilt of the living before the dead, the severity and magic of such a ritual. Thus, the scene of the mother’s burial develops into the author’s monologue about life and death, their interdependence, the nobility of any work, about eternity and the moment. This is a philosophical elegy, a meditation on eternal truths.
The cycle about the mother ends with the poem “ Where are you from this song...", in which a melody sounds with a repeating epigraph (at the same time a refrain, somewhat modified at the end) from a folk song:
Water carrier,
Young guy
Take me to the other side
Home side...
A. Tvardovsky’s mother once sang it in her youth. She remembered her when moving to the Siberian region, where “the forests are darker,” “the winters are longer and more severe.”
The sad melody then turns tragic. The song of the mother, who expressed the pain of separation both from her family in her youth, and from her parents in adulthood, and from life, ends two stanzas before the end of the poem with an epigraph refrain. In the last two stanzas the song continues to be heard by the author. This poet writes his requiem, prayerfully repeating his mother’s song.
A. Tvardovsky’s requiem poem can be called a response to the death of the first cosmonaut of the Earth - “ In memory of Gagarin"(1968). Before this, the poet wrote the poem “Cosmonaut” (1961), in which he admired the feat of his fellow countryman, accomplished “in the name of our and future days.” But it was a solemn ode, a hymn. The second poem complements the content of the first. The poet writes about the feat, thanks to which the world “became kinder,” shocked by this victory. The moral and ethical significance of Gagarin’s feat is brought to a global scale, and the son of the Smolensk region is shown to be the son of the entire planet, the cosmos. Another idea is stated in the poem: the first cosmonaut is a messenger of peace, because after his flight the Earth seems so small and helpless that the question arises: “... small Earth - why does it need war, / Why does everything that the human race suffers?” . The third idea of the poem is that the author claims that a great feat was accomplished by an ordinary young man, a “breadwinner,” and then by the breadwinner himself, no match for the ancient princely family. And the last thought of the work is a statement of the immortality of the feat, glory, grief that not only the hero has passed away, but also a man, “my own guy, mischievous and sweet, / Dashing and efficient, with a heart that is not stingy.”
Poetic epic by A. Tvardovsky. Poem "By Right of Memory"
At the beginning of his creative career, A. Tvardovsky stated that he was attracted by epic storytelling. His poetic epic of the late 1950s and 1960s becomes more lyrical, journalistic, philosophically in-depth, with elements of fantasy (“Terkin in the Other World”).
Thematically, A. Tvardovsky’s poems are diverse: the heroism of labor, the enthusiasm of the creators of the “construction projects of communism”, memories of the past and dreams of the future (“Beyond the Distance - the Distance”), criticism of the vices of the socialist system - bureaucracy, sycophancy, ignorance of officials (“Terkin in the Other World” "), court of memory, conscience, responsibility for the past, anti-totalitarianism ("By the right of memory").
Poem " Beyond the distance - distance"was written from 1950 to 1960 based on observations from post-war trips around the country - to Siberia, Yakutia, the Urals, and the Far East. It was written in the form of a travel diary, created on a train traveling from Moscow to Vladivostok. In the chapter “So it was,” the poet pronounces a verdict on Stalinism, a dictator protected from the people by the Kremlin wall during his lifetime.
The ideological pathos of the poem “ Terkin in the next world“The author himself defined it as follows: “The pathos of this work... is in the victorious, life-affirming ridicule of all sorts of dead things, the ugliness of bureaucracy, formalism, bureaucracy and routine...” The vices of the Soviet bureaucratic system, which subordinated both officials of all ranks and the people as a whole to its will, which led to the separation of leaders from the masses and the flourishing of servility, cronyism, bribery, nepotism, the poet could not show in an open, journalistic form for censorship reasons. Therefore, he wrote a fairy tale poem, a fantasy poem, and had to resort to a fictitious plot: the hero of the previous poem comes to life, ends up in the next world, where he is mistaken for a dead man. “The Other World” is projected onto the Soviet state system. All the features (enlarged, caricatured) repeat the features of a Stalinist-type bureaucratic state.
Poem " By right of memory"was being prepared for publication in Novy Mir in 1970, but due to the uncompromising truth contained in it, it was published only in 1987. The poet evaluates the tragic events that happened to his friend, to the family evicted to the taiga, and pronounces a verdict on Stalinism, totalitarianism, which turns people into powerless creatures, crippling them spiritually and physically. At the same time, it pronounces a verdict on himself, who is partly to blame for the tragic fate of his loved ones. With pain, “by right of memory,” the poet tells the terrible truth about the tyrant, nicknamed the father of nations:
He said: follow me
Leave your father and mother,
Everything is fleeting, earthly
Leave it and you will be in heaven.
These lines of a tormented, suffering heart are taken from the second, central chapter of the poem. They push into the background the figure of the iron leader - the father of all nations, decipher the phrase thrown at him, included in the title of the chapter - “The son is not responsible for the father.” Answers! And how! That is why the poet suffers, who in his youth experienced the tragedy of renunciation from his father, and then received rehabilitation from the lips of the leader, “The son is not responsible for his father.” Why not answer? How can we forget our father’s hands “in knots of veins and tendons,” which could not immediately grasp the small handle of a spoon because they were covered in calluses (“one calloused fist”)? How can we forget him, who hunched his head “above the ground for years” and was called a fist? The poet, rejecting the Stalinist slogan, recreates the image of his worker father Trifon Gordeevich, penetrates into the psychology of a man who, already in the carriage, leaving for Siberia, “kept himself proudly, aloof / From those whose share he shared.”
The third chapter, “On Memory,” calls on humanity to remember the tragedy of the people. Gulags, prisons, repressions - this needs to be written about, since the younger generation must remember the “marks” and “scars” of tragic history. Poets must complete “all past omissions,” since everyone found themselves responsible for the “universal father.”
A. Tvardovsky states that hiding the truth will lead to tragedy - society will be out of harmony with the future, “the untruth will be at our loss.” The poet considers the reason for the previous silence to be fear, which forced people to “keep silent / Before the rampant evil.”
The chapter “Before Departure,” which opens the poem, is a lyrical memory of youth, bright dreams, new distances, metropolitan life, the world of science and knowledge.
“By Right of Memory” is the final work of a writer who saw the light and called others to see the light, who believed in socialist ideals, in communism and fought for their “purity.” Serving utopian ideals, the poet simultaneously served the people and hoped for a better fate for the Fatherland.
A. Tvardovsky is a classic of Russian literature of the Soviet period. His merit as a chronicler of his difficult times is great. It was he who managed to show not only the heroic, but also the tragic events that took place in the country, to reveal the truth of the Stalin era, to challenge the oblivion of the humanistic principles of life that came in the late 1960s - in the 1970s. The poet revealed additional possibilities of socialist realism, achieved greater truthfulness in the figurative reflection of reality, and expanded the thematic horizons of verbal art.
Alexander Tvardovsky (1910-1971) - Soviet poet, prose writer and journalist, the main theme of his work was the events of the Great Patriotic War. The most famous character of his lyric-epic poem of the same name, known both at home and abroad and telling about the fate, life and personal experiences of an ordinary person in war, is the soldier-hero Vasily Terkin, a simple Russian man who defended his Motherland from conquerors who showed bravery, courage, ingenuity, inexhaustible optimism and healthy humor in the struggle.
Tvardovsky was born in 1910 in a peasant family (farm Zagorye, Smolensk province), the origin of his parents: his father was a blacksmith, his mother was from a family of so-called odnodvortsy (peasants who lived on the outskirts of Russia to protect its borders). Parents, peasants, were literate people; in the house they loved to read the works of Russian classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov). The future poet composed his first poetic lines without even knowing how to write.
Tvardovsky’s studies took place in a regular school in the village; by the age of fourteen, he had already published his short poems several times in local newspapers. The editors spoke positively about his work and strongly supported the young talent in his endeavors and helped publish his poetic opuses.
After graduating from school, Tvardovsky moved to Smolensk, where he planned to study and work, but he had to survive with occasional and unstable literary earnings. When the magazine “October” published a couple of his poems, he decided to move to Moscow in 1930, but the attempt was not very successful and after returning, he lived in Smolensk for another 6 years and entered the Pedagogical University. In 1936, without completing his studies, he left for the capital and entered the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature. In the same year, he began to actively publish, and at the same time the famous poem “The Country of Ant” was published, in which the author supported the collectivization taking place in the country (despite the fact that his father was repressed and his native farm was destroyed by fellow villagers). In 1939, his poetry collection “Rural Chronicle” appeared, at the same time the poet found himself in the ranks of the Red Army on the Western Belarusian Front, then took part in hostilities in Finland as a war correspondent.
1941 - Tvardovsky correspondent of the Red Army newspaper in Voronezh, he begins work on the poem “Vasily Terkin” (one of the poet’s greatest creative achievements, written in a simple and understandable style for ordinary people, which was created over several years and was published in 1945), the poetry collection “Front-line Chronicle”, lays the beginning of the poem “House by the Road”. Each part of the poem “Vasily Terkin” was periodically published in military newspapers to raise the morale and fighting spirit of the Red Army soldiers.
In the post-war period, Tvardovsky actively pursued his literary activities. In 1947, a book of stories dedicated to military events, “Motherland and Foreign Land,” was published; in the period from 1950 to 1960, a new poem “Beyond the Distance” was composed.
The years 1967-1969 were marked by work on the autobiographical poem “By the Right of Memory,” dedicated to the tragic fate of his father, Trifon Tvardovsky, who was subjected to repression by the Soviet regime. This book significantly spoiled the author’s relationship with official censorship, which did not allow the publication of this work (readers could familiarize themselves with it only in the late 80s).
Having been the editor of the literary magazine “New World” for a long time, Tvardovsky more than once fought with representatives of Soviet censorship, fighting for the right to publish in the magazine works belonging to authors disliked by the Soviet regime (Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Bunin, Troepolsky and others). Thus, the magazine “New World,” which introduced readers to the work of writers of the sixties, represented a certain opposition force for the authorities, which expressed obvious anti-Stalinist ideas, which ultimately led to the removal of Tvardovsky from his position.
The poet, prose writer and publicist ended his earthly journey in the small town of Krasnaya Pakhra (Moscow region) in December 1971. He died from a serious and long-term illness, lung cancer, and was buried at the Moscow Novodevichy cemetery.
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Making of a Poet
1.1.Childhood of the poet
1.2. First steps in literature
Chapter 2 Life is one, and death is one
2.1 Creation of the poem “Vasily Terkin”
2.2. Forward behind the next day, like behind a barrage of fire
The name of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, the greatest Soviet poet, laureate of the Lenin and State Prizes, is widely known in our country.
Freedom, humor, truthfulness, daring, the naturalness of immersion in the elements of folk life and folk speech captivated and captivate Tvardovsky’s readers.
His poems enter the consciousness of the reader from childhood: “The Country of Ant”, “Terkin in the Other World”, “House by the Road”, “Beyond the Distance”, lyrics, etc.
Alexander Tvardovsky is one of the most dramatic figures in literature and Soviet reality of the mid-20th century, a great national poet.
Throughout his entire life, Tvardovsky carried with him a grateful memory of those days that he called “the beginning of all beginnings” - his childhood. But it was far from “golden”.
The poet's father, Trifon Gordeevich, for all his merits (which will be discussed below), was strict to the point of severity, ambitious to the point of morbidity, he had highly developed possessive habits, and children - and Alexander in particular, impressionable and sensitive to any injustice - had Sometimes it’s very difficult with him.
And yet, the conditions in which the future poet spent his childhood were such that he could comprehend the essence of peasant work and the beauty of his native nature, absorb the poems of the classics and learn to overcome difficulties, appreciate the fruits of human labor and develop curiosity in himself, become imbued with irreconcilability to greed, cruelty, cowardice, meanness and hypocrisy and give space to one’s unbridled dreams, persistently achieve goals and develop in oneself, even on the threshold of youth, a certain moral code - the high moral code of a Soviet citizen and Russian poet.
Let's give the floor to Tvardovsky himself.
“I was born in the Smolensk region,” he writes, “in 1910, June 21, on the “stolpovo wasteland farm,” as the piece of land acquired by my father Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky was called in the papers, through the Land Peasant Bank with payment in installments. This land - a little over ten acres, all in small swamps, “Ruffles”, as we called them, and all overgrown with willow, spruce, and birch trees - was unenviable in every sense. 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 contribution to the bank, this land was the road to holiness.
And to us, children, from a very young age, he instilled 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 off the land. But every now and then he had to turn to a hammer: rent someone else’s forge and anvil in waste, working half-handedly.
My father was a literate man and even well-read in the countryside. The book was not a rarity in our household. We often devoted whole winter evenings to reading aloud some book. My first acquaintance with “Poltava” and “Dubrovsky” by Pushkin, with “Taras Bulba” by Gogol, the most popular poems of Lermontov, Nekrasov, A.V. Tolstoy, Nikitin happened in exactly this way.
My father knew a lot of poems from memory.” “Borodino”, “Prince Kurbsky”, almost all of Ershov’s “The Little Humpbacked Horse” (“Autobiography”).
It was then that hostility and disgust for the crowned executioner Ivan the Terrible, for the traitor Mazepa, for the tyrant Kirila Petrovich Troekurov must have sunk into the heart of the boy, who was still barely able to read the words. Here are probably the origins of Tvardovsky’s well-known thirst for justice, the beginning of his “childhood vengeful dream.” And perhaps there is nothing surprising or accidental in the fact that his very first poem, composed at an age when the author did not yet know all the letters of the alphabet, denounced the boys of his own age who were destroyers of birds’ nests.
In childhood, his introduction to work, and, above all, “studying” in his father’s forge, which for the entire district was “a club, a newspaper, and an academy of sciences,” had a great influence on the formation of the future poet. “The aesthetics of labor,” which Tvardovsky subsequently spoke about at the teachers’ congress, he did not need to comprehend on purpose - it entered into his life itself, when he “as a small child” saw how under his father’s blacksmith’s hammer “everything was born with which they plow the field, forest and build a house.” And the hours of waiting for the customer were filled with furious stupor of people eager to talk to a competent person.
At the eighteenth year of his life, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky left his native Zagorje. By this time, he had already been to Smolensk more than once, once visited Moscow, personally met M.V. Isakovsky, and became the author of several dozen published poems.
For the first time the name of Tvardovsky saw the light of day on February 15, 1925. His article “How re-elections of cooperatives occur” was published in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Derevnya”. On July 19, the same newspaper published his first poem, “New Hut.”
In the following months, several more notes, correspondence, and poems by Tvardovsky appeared in various newspapers in Smolensk; and at the beginning of 1926, when the poet specially came to this city to meet M.V. Isakovsky, he again published his poems in the newspaper “Working Way”. The artist I. Fomichev draws a pencil portrait of “village correspondent Alexander Tvardovsky,” which is printed on the same newspaper page with his poems. In April 1927, the Smolensk newspaper “Young Comrade” published a note about Alexander Tvardovsky along with a selection of his poems and a photograph - all of this is united under the general heading “The Creative Path of Alexander Tvardovsky.” And Alexander was 17 years old.
According to Isakovsky, “he was a slender young man with very blue eyes and light brown hair. Sasha was wearing a jacket made of sheepskin. He held the hat in his hands.”
The young man moved to Smolensk. But there was no staff position for Tvardovsky in the editorial office of Rabochiy Put. They offered to write notes for the chronicle, which, naturally, did not guarantee constant income. But he agreed, although he perfectly understood that he was dooming himself to a half-starved existence.
In the summer of 1929, when many Rabochiy Put employees went on vacation, Tvardovsky was loaded with work, sending him to the regions on correspondent assignments. Earnings increased, the circle of acquaintances, including literary ones, expanded. The poet dared to send his poems to Moscow, to the editorial office of the magazine “October”. And - oh happiness! Mikhail Svetlov published poems by nineteen-year-old Tvardovsky. After this event, the Smolensk horizons began to seem too narrow to him, and he rushed to the capital. But it turned out about the same as with Smolensk. I was occasionally published, someone approved of my experiments, supporting childish hopes, but I did not earn much more than in Smolensk, and I lived in corners, bunks, wandered around editorial offices, and I was increasingly noticeably carried somewhere away from the direct and difficult the path of real study, real life. In the winter of the thirtieth year, I returned to Smolensk...” - this is how the poet spoke with utmost laconicism about his stay in Moscow many years later.
It is difficult to say how Tvardovsky’s literary fate would have developed if he had remained in Moscow, which was not at all impossible if he had had permanent and reliable housing. But, one must think, the main reason for his return to Smolensk is still different. Tvardovsky's demands on himself as a poet increased, and he himself began to increasingly experience dissatisfaction with his poems. He probably understood that so far the native element that fed his poetry was only the life of the village: its way of life, nature, collectivization and everything connected with it. But all this is left behind. Later he wrote: “There was a period when, having left the village, at one time I was essentially cut off from life, moving in a narrow literary environment.”
During his first year at the institute, he undertook to pass the high school exams in all subjects and successfully completed this. “These years of study and work in Smolensk,” Tvardovsky later wrote, “are forever marked for me by high spiritual elation... Taking a break from books and studies, I went to collective farms as a correspondent for regional newspapers, delving into everything that was new with passion.” , for the first time the system of rural life was taking shape, wrote articles, correspondence and kept all sorts of notes, with each trip noting for myself the new things that were revealed to me in the complex process of the formation of collective farm life” (“Autobiography”).
Beginning in 1929, Tvardovsky began to write in a new way, achieving the utmost prosaicness of the verse. He, as he later said, wanted to write “naturally, simply,” and he expelled “all lyricism, manifestation of feeling.” Poetry immediately took revenge on him for this. In some poems (“Apples”, “Poems about universal education”), along with truly poetic ones, lines such as these began to appear:
And here
Guys big and small
The school team will gather.
Subsequently, Tvardovsky realized that this was a wrong path, because what he put above all else - plot, narrative verse, concreteness - was expressed in practice, as he admitted in 1933, “in saturating poems with prosaisms, “colloquial intonations” to the fact that they stopped sounding like poetry and everything in general merged into dullness, ugliness... later on, these excesses sometimes reached the point of absolute anti-artism”
