Autobiography
I was born in the Smolensk region, in 1910, on the “stolpovo wasteland farm,” as a piece of land was called in the papers, acquired by my father, Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky, through the Land Peasant Bank with payment in installments. This land - a little over ten acres - all in small swamps - "frills", 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.
In the life of our family there were occasional glimmers of prosperity, but in general life was meager and difficult, and perhaps all the more difficult because our surname in everyday life was also accompanied by the playfully benevolent or ironic addition of “pan,” as if obliging our father to stretch with all his might to at least somehow justify it. By the way, he wore a hat, which in our area was strange and even a bit of a challenge, and he did not allow us children to wear bast shoes, although because of this it happened that we ran barefoot until late autumn. In general, many things in our life were “not like people’s.”
My father was a literate man and even well-read in the village style. The book was not a rarity in our household. We often devoted entire winter evenings to reading a book out loud. My first acquaintance with Pushkin's "Poltava" and "Dubrovsky", Gogol's "Taras Bulba", the most popular poems of Lermontov, Nekrasov, A.K. Tolstoy, Nikitin happened in exactly this way. My father knew many poems from memory: “Borodino”, “Prince Kurbsky”, almost all of Ershov’s “The Little Humpbacked Horse”. In addition, he loved and knew how to sing - from a young age he even excelled in church choir. Having discovered that the words of the well-known “Korobushka” are only a small part of Nekrasov’s “Peddlers,” he sang the entire poem on occasion.
My mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, was always very impressionable and sensitive to many things that were outside the practical, everyday interests of the peasant household, the troubles and worries of the housewife in the big large family. She was moved to tears by the sound of a shepherd's trumpet somewhere in the distance behind our farm bushes and swamps, or the echo of a song from distant village fields, or, for example, the smell of the first young hay, the sight of some lonely tree, etc.
I started writing poetry before I mastered basic literacy. I remember well that I tried to write down my first poem, denouncing my peers, destroyers of birds’ nests, not yet knowing all the letters of the alphabet and, of course, not having a clue about the rules of versification. There was no harmony, no series, nothing from the verse, but I clearly remember that there was a passionate, heart-pounding desire for all this - both the mode, and the series, and music, - the desire to give birth to them immediately, - a feeling that accompanies every plan to this day. That you can compose poetry yourself, I realized from the fact that our distant city relative, who was visiting us during a hungry time in the summer, maternal line, a lame high school student, once read, at his father’s request, poems of his own composition “Autumn”:
The leaves have long fallen off,
And bare branches stick out...
These lines, I remember, shocked me then with their expressiveness: “bare branches” - it was so simple, ordinary words that are spoken by everyone, but these were poems that sounded like from a book.
Since then I have been writing. Of the first poems that inspired me with some confidence in my ability to do this, I remember the lines written, apparently, under the influence of Pushkin’s “Ghoul”:
Sometimes I'm late
I was walking home from Voznov.
I was a little cowardly
And the road was terrible:
On the lawn between the willows
Old Shupen was killed...
It was about a lonely grave halfway from the village of Kovalevo, where our relative Mikhailo Voznov lived. A certain Shupen, who was once killed in that place, was buried there. And although there were no willow trees nearby, none of the family reproached me for this inaccuracy: but it was smooth.
My parents reacted in different ways favorably and in different ways with alarm to the fact that I began to write poetry. This was flattering to my father, but he knew from books that writing did not promise great benefits, that some writers were not famous, penniless, living in attics and starving. My mother, seeing my commitment to such unusual activities, sensed in her some sad destiny of my fate and felt sorry for me.
When I was about thirteen, I once showed my poems to someone to a young teacher. Not joking at all, he said that it’s not good to write like that now: everything is clear to me down to the word, but it’s necessary that it’s impossible to understand from any end what is written in the poems and about what, these are modern literary requirements. He showed me magazines with some samples of poetry of that time - early twenties. For some time I persistently strived for incomprehensibility in my poems. I did not succeed for a long time, and then I experienced, perhaps, the first bitter doubt in my abilities. I remember that I finally wrote something so incomprehensible at all that I couldn’t remember a single line from it and didn’t even know what was discussed there. I only remember the fact of writing something like this.
In the summer of 1924, I began sending short notes to the editors of Smolensk newspapers. He wrote about faulty bridges, about Komsomol subbotniks, about abuses of local authorities, etc. Occasionally, notes were published. This made me, an ordinary rural Komsomol member, a significant person in the eyes of my peers and the surrounding residents in general. People approached me with complaints, with proposals to write about this and that, to “promote” such and such in the newspaper... Then I dared to send poetry. My first published poem, “The New Hut,” appeared in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Derevnya.” 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.
After that, having collected about a dozen poems, I went to Smolensk to see M.V. Isakovsky, who worked there in the editorial office of the newspaper “Working Way”. He received me warmly, selected some of the poems, called an artist who sketched me, and soon a newspaper with poems and a portrait of “village poet A. Tvardovsky” arrived in the village.
I owe a lot in my development to M. Isakovsky, a fellow countryman and later a friend. He's the only one Soviet poets, whose direct influence on me I always acknowledge and consider to have been beneficial to me. In the poems of my fellow countryman, I saw that the subject of poetry could and should be the life of the Soviet village around me, our unassuming Smolensk nature, my own world of impressions, feelings, and spiritual attachments. The example of his poetry turned me in my youthful experiences to an essential objective topic, to the desire to tell and speak in poetry about something interesting not only for me, but also for those simple ones who are not experienced in literary respect people among whom I continued to live. To all this, of course, a disclaimer is necessary that I wrote very poorly then, in a helplessly studentish, imitative manner.
In the development and growth of my literary generation, it seems to me that the most difficult thing and for many disastrous was that we, being drawn into literary work, its specific interests, speaking in print and even becoming, very early, professional writers, remained people without any something serious general culture, without education. Superficial erudition and some knowledge of the “small secrets” of the craft fed dangerous illusions in us.
My education was essentially interrupted when I graduated from rural school. The years appointed for normal and consistent study are gone. As an eighteen-year-old boy, I came to Smolensk, where for a long time I could not get a job not only to study, but even to work - at that time it was not easy, especially since I did not have any specialty. Involuntarily, I had to accept a pittance of literary earnings as a source of livelihood and knock on the doors of editorial offices. Even then I understood the unenviability of such a situation, but there was nowhere to retreat - I could not return to the village, and my youth allowed me to see only good things ahead in the near future.
When my poems were published in the Moscow magazine "October" and someone somewhere noted them in criticism, I showed up in Moscow. But it turned out about the same as with Smolensk. I was occasionally published, someone approved of my experiments, supported my childish hopes, but I did not earn much more than in Smolensk, and lived in corners, bunks, wandered around editorial offices, and I was increasingly noticeably carried somewhere away from the direct and the hard way real study, real life. In the winter of 1930, I returned to Smolensk and lived there for six or seven years until the poem “The Country of Ant” appeared in print.
This period is the most decisive and significant in my literary destiny. These were the years of the great reorganization of the village on the basis of collectivization, and this time was the same for me as for the older generation - October Revolution And civil war. Everything that happened then in the village concerned me most closely in the everyday, social, moral and ethical sense. It was to these years that I owe my poetic birth. In Smolensk I finally took up normal teaching. By using good people I entered the Pedagogical Institute without admission tests, but with the obligation to pass all the necessary subjects in the first year. high school, in which I did not study. In the very first year I managed to catch up with my classmates, successfully complete the second year, I left the third due to current circumstances and completed my studies at the Moscow Historical and Philosophical Institute, where I entered in the fall of thirty-six.
These years of study and work in Smolensk are forever marked for me by high spiritual elation. No comparison could exaggerate the joy I experienced then for the first time of being introduced to the world of ideas and images that were revealed to me from the pages of books whose existence I had previously had no idea about. But, perhaps, all this would have been “passing through” the institute program for me, if at the same time I had not been captured by a completely different world - the real, current world of upheavals, struggle, changes that took place in those years in the village. Taking time away from books and studies, I went to collective farms as a correspondent for regional editorial offices, delved into with passion everything that constituted a new system that was emerging for the first time rural life, wrote newspaper articles and kept all sorts of notes, with each trip noting for myself the new things that were revealed to me in the complex and majestic process of rebuilding the village.
Around this time, I completely forgot how to write poetry, as I had written them before, and experienced an extreme aversion to “poetry” - composing lines of a certain size with an obligatory set of epithets, looking for rare rhymes and assonances, falling into a well-known tone, accepted in poetic usage of that time.
My poem “The Path to Socialism,” entitled after the name of the collective farm in question, was a conscious attempt to speak in verse in words common to colloquial, business, and by no means “poetic” use:
In one of the rooms of the former manor house
Oats are poured right up to the windows.
The windows were broken during the pogrom
And hung with shields made of straw,
To prevent oats from sprouting
From the sun and dampness indoors.
The grain for baking is stored in the common area.
The poem, published in 1931 by the publishing house "Young Guard" as a separate book, was received positively in the press, but I could not help but feel that such poems are riding with the reins lowered - a loss of the rhythmic discipline of verse, in other words, prose. But I could no longer return to poetry in the same, familiar spirit. I dreamed of new possibilities in the organization of a verse from its elements included in live speech, - from the phrases and rhythms of proverbs, sayings, sayings. My second poem, “Introduction,” published in Smolensk in 1933, was a tribute to such a one-sided search for the “naturalness” of verse:
Fedot lived in the world,
There was a joke about him:
- Fedot, what is the grind?
- Just like last year.
-What is the harvest?
- Almost a whole cartload.
-What about lard?
- The cat stole...
According to the material, content, even those outlined in general outline In images, both of these poems preceded “The Country of Ant,” written in 1934–1936. But for this new thing of mine I had to on my own difficult experience to lose faith in the possibility of poetry, which loses its basic natural principles: the musical and song basis, the energy of expression, and a special emotional coloring.
A close acquaintance with examples of great domestic and world poetry and prose gave me another “discovery” as the legitimacy of convention in depicting reality by means of art. The conventionality of at least a fantastic plot, the exaggeration and displacement of details of the living world into work of art no longer seemed to me like vestiges of art, contradicting the realism of the image. And what I carried in my soul, what I personally observed and gained from life, drove me to new job, to new searches. What I know about life, it seemed to me then, I know better, more thoroughly and more accurately than anyone living in the world, and I must tell about it. I still consider such a feeling not only legitimate, but also obligatory in the implementation of any serious plan.
With “The Country of Ant,” which met with an approving reception from readers and critics, I begin counting my writings that can characterize me as a writer. The publication of this book caused significant changes in my personal life. I moved to Moscow; in 1938 he joined the ranks of the CPSU (b); in 1939 he graduated from the Moscow Historical and Philosophical Institute (MIFLI) in the department of language and literature.
In the fall of 1939, I was drafted into the Red Army and participated in liberation campaign our troops in Western Belarus. At the end of the campaign, I was transferred to the reserve, but soon called up again and, already in officer rank, but in the same position as a special correspondent for a military newspaper, participated in the war with Finland. Months of front-line work in the harsh winter of 1940 to some extent preceded for me the actual military impressions of the Great Patriotic War. And my participation in the creation of the feuilleton character “Vasi Terkin” in the newspaper “On Guard of the Motherland” (LVO) is essentially the beginning of my main literary work during the Patriotic War of 1941–1945. But the fact is that the depth of the national-historical disaster and the national-historical feat in the Patriotic War from the first days distinguished it from any other wars, and especially military campaigns.
"A book about a fighter", whatever its actual name literary significance, during the war years was true happiness for me: it gave me a feeling of the obvious usefulness of my work, a feeling of complete freedom to handle poetry and words in a naturally occurring, relaxed form of presentation. "Terkin" was for me in the relationship between the poet and his reader - the warrior Soviet man– my lyrics, my journalism, song and teaching, anecdote and saying, heart-to-heart conversation and a remark to the occasion. However, all this, it seems to me, is more successfully expressed in the final chapter of the book itself.
Almost simultaneously with “Terkin,” I began writing during the war, but finished it after the war—the lyrical chronicle “House by the Road.” Its theme is war, but from a different angle than in Terkin. The epigraph of this book could be lines taken from it:
Come on people, never
Let's not forget about this...
Along with poetry, I always wrote prose - correspondence, essays, stories, and even before "Ant" I published something like a short story - "The Diary of a Collective Farm Chairman" - the result of my village notes "for myself." In 1947 he published a book of essays and stories under general title"Homeland and foreign land."
Recent years wrote little, published a dozen poems, several essays and articles. He made a number of trips as part of various cultural delegations abroad - he visited Bulgaria, Albania, Poland, Democratic Germany and Norway. I also traveled around home country on business trips to the Urals, Transbaikalia and Far East. The impressions of these trips should form the material for my new works in poetry and prose.
In 1947 he was elected deputy Supreme Council RSFSR in the Vyaznikovsky district Vladimir region; in 1951 - according to Nizhnedevitsky Voronezh region.
Since the beginning of 1950 I have been working as the editor-in-chief of the magazine " New world".
In front of you short biography of Tvardovsky. From it you will understand why this man was such a popular people's favorite. However, reading any outstanding people, regardless of the time and place of their birth, is extremely interesting.
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky is one of the most iconic writers Soviet era. The immortal poem “Vasily Terkin” belongs to his pen, which, after its appearance, immediately and forever won the love of Soviet citizens.
Brief biography of Tvardovsky
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was born on June 21, 1910 in the Zagorye farmstead, Smolensk province. The boy grew up in a simple working-class family.
The head of the family was a blacksmith, but despite this he was a very educated person. He was fond of Russian literature, which is why works by and other writers were often read in the house.
Childhood
Tvardovsky's childhood took place in post-revolutionary period Russia. IN adolescence he saw and felt the consequences of collectivization with his own eyes, because in the 1930s his father was dispossessed and expelled from the village.
Alexander began writing his first poems as a child. In 1925, he began working as a correspondent for a rural newspaper. Thanks to this, he was able to publish his works there, which were the first in his biography.
On next year, serving high hopes the young man had already collaborated with city publishing houses. Soon, several poems by the 17-year-old poet were published in one Smolensk publication.
In 1927, Alexander Tvardovsky decided to stay in Smolensk. In 1929, he sent his poems to, where they were later published in the magazine "October".
Not counting on such success, he experienced genuine joy that his work did not go unnoticed. As a result, Tvardovsky decided to go and try his luck in Moscow.
However, there, along with financial problems, other difficulties awaited him. And although he periodically managed to publish in some publications, he got a job good job he still couldn't.
Education
Having stayed briefly in the capital, he had to return to his native Smolensk again. There he entered Smolensk pedagogical institute. Into this educational institution They agreed to enroll him without exams, but on the condition that he learn and pass all school subjects in a year.
The diligent and responsible student did not let the teachers down and kept his promise to them.
Tvardovsky's creativity
While studying, he continued to compose poems, and soon such works as “The snow melts, the earth moves away,” “Brothers,” and “Forest in Autumn” came out of his pen.
From the beginning of the 30s he experienced a creative upsurge. One by one his poems and stories were published. In 1936, he published the poem “The Country of Ant,” which reflected all the difficulties and misfortunes of the peasants after the October Revolution.
Following this, several more collections of his poems were published.
Tvardovsky’s work received increasing recognition in the territory Soviet Union. From this time on, he did not have any problems with publishing his works.
In 1939, immediately after graduation, Alexander Trifonovich was drafted into the army.
During his six years of service, he went through several wars, working as a war journalist. Having seen and experienced all the hardships of life at the front, he managed to collect a large amount of material on military topics.
As a result, a collection of poems “In the Snows of Finland” came out from his pen. At the same time, he wrote the immortal poem “Vasily Terkin”, so loved by everyone Soviet citizens. It took about 4 years to write it.
After the end of the war, in his writings he describes people gradually returning to a normal way of life.
Without giving himself time to rest, the writer works long and hard on the poem “By Right of Memory.” In it, he presents the reader with the horrors of collectivization in a direct and truthful manner, without forgetting to mention the example of his father.
However, the Soviet government could not allow this work fell into the hands of ordinary citizens, so it was not printed immediately, but lay on the shelf for several decades.
In 1947 he wrote a book dedicated to past war and called “Motherland and Foreign Land”.
Tvardovsky's works were highly appreciated by writers and awarded various honorary awards. In 1939 he was awarded the Order of Lenin, and in 1941 he was awarded the State Prize.
In 1961 Tvardovsky became a laureate Lenin Prize for the poem “Beyond the Distance - the Distance.”
In 1950-1954. He served as secretary of the board of the USSR Writers' Union. In 1963-1968. was vice-president of the European Writers' Society.
During 1950-1970, he was an editor at the Novy Mir publishing house. Perhaps it was best time his biography.
However, his life cannot be called calm and comfortable, since Tvardovsky did not always adhere to the “correct” views.
For example, when in 1961 he published the story of the disgraced Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the magazine, he immediately came under strong pressure from the authorities.
This led to his dismissal in 1970 and the editorial office being closed.
Tvardovsky suffered his dismissal hard and painfully. Alexander Trifonovich began to complain about his health and soon suffered a stroke.
For this reason, he decided to leave for a while writing activity and relax a little at my dacha in the Moscow region. It was there that he was destined to live the rest of his life.
He was married to Maria Gorelova, who bore him 2 daughters - Olga and Valentina. We can safely say that Tvardovsky had a rich, rich and vibrant biography.
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, USSR
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky(June 8 (21), 1910, Zagorye farmstead, Smolensk province, Russian Empire - December 18, 1971, Vatutinki, Krasnaya Pakhra, Moscow region, USSR) - Soviet writer and poet.
Editor-in-chief of the magazine "New World" (1950-1954; 1958-1970). Winner of various awards, order bearer (see below). Member of the CPSU(b) since 1940. Lieutenant Colonel (1941).
A. T. Tvardovsky was born on June 8 (21), 1910 in the Zagorye farm near the village of Seltso (now in Smolensk region) in the family of the village blacksmith Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky and Maria Mitrofanovna, who came from the same palace.
This farm was dismantled after the dispossession of the Tvardovsky family.
This land - ten and a little dessiatines - all in small swamps 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. From a very young age, he instilled in us, children, love and respect for this sour, stingy, but our land - our “estate,” as he jokingly and not jokingly called his farm.
The poet’s grandfather, Gordey Tvardovsky, was a bombardier (artillery soldier) who served in Poland, from where he brought the nickname “Pan Tvardovsky,” which passed on to his son. This is a nickname (not actually related to noble origin) forced Trifon Gordeevich to perceive himself more as a peasant than as a peasant.
By the way, he wore a hat, which in our area was strange and even a bit of a challenge, and he did not allow us children to wear bast shoes, although because of this it happened that we ran barefoot until late autumn. In general, many things in our life were “not like people’s.”
Tvardovsky’s mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, really came from the same palace. Trifon Gordeevich was a well-read man - and in the evenings in their house they often read aloud Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, N.A. Nekrasov, A.K. Tolstoy, Nikitin, P. Ershov. Alexander began to compose poems early, while still illiterate, and not being able to write them down. The first poem was an angry denunciation of the boys who destroyed birds' nests.
At the age of 14, Tvardovsky began to write small notes for Smolensk newspapers, and then, having collected several poems, brought them to Mikhail Isakovsky, who worked in the editorial office of the Rabochy Put newspaper. Isakovsky greeted the poet warmly, becoming a friend and mentor of the young Tvardovsky. In 1931, his first poem, “The Path to Socialism,” was published.
Collectivization, family repression
In the poems “The Path to Socialism” (1931) and “The Country of Ant” (1934-1936), he depicted collectivization and dreams of a “new” village, as well as Stalin riding a horse as a harbinger of a bright future.
Despite the fact that Tvardovsky’s parents, along with his brothers, were dispossessed and exiled, and his farm was burned by fellow villagers, he himself supported the collectivization of peasant farms.
Finnish War
Member of the CPSU(b) since 1938. Commissioner participated in the annexation of Western Belarus to the USSR and in Soviet-Finnish war. He took part in the war with Finland in 1939-1940 as a war correspondent.
"Vasily Terkin"
In 1941-1942 he worked in Voronezh in the editorial office of a newspaper South Western Front"Red Army". The poem “Vasily Terkin” (1941-1945), “a book about a fighter without beginning and end” is the most famous work Tvardovsky; this is a chain of episodes from the Great Patriotic War. The poem is distinguished by a simple and precise syllable and energetic development of action. The episodes are connected to each other only by the main character - the author proceeded from the fact that both he and his reader could die at any moment. As the chapters were written, they were published in the Western Front newspaper “Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda” - and were incredibly popular on the front line. The poem became one of the attributes of front-line life - as a result of which Tvardovsky became a cult author of the war generation.
Among other things, “Vasily Terkin” stands out among other works of that time complete absence ideological propaganda, references to Stalin and the party. In 1939-1940 As part of a group of writers, he worked in the newspaper of the Leningrad Military District “On Guard of the Motherland.” On November 30, 1939, A. Tvardovsky’s poem “The Hour has Come” was published in the newspaper. One of the poet’s poems of that time is dedicated to a field kitchen. “Efficient - needless to say - There was the same old man who came up with the idea of cooking soup on wheels!” The poem “At a halt” was published in the newspaper “On Guard of the Motherland” on December 11, 1939. In the article “How Vasily Terkin was written” A. Tvardovsky reported that the image of the main character was invented in 1939 for permanent humorous column in the LVO newspaper “On Guard of the Motherland.”
Post-war poems
In 1946, the poem “House by the Road” was written, which mentions the first tragic months Great Patriotic War.
In the poem “Beyond the Distance, the Distance,” written at the peak of Khrushchev’s “thaw,” the writer condemns Stalin and, as in the book “From the Lyrics of These Years. 1959-1968" (1969), reflects on the movement of time, the duty of the artist, life and death. This poem most clearly expressed such ideological side of Tvardovsky’s life and work as “sovereignty.” But, unlike the great-statist Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, the cult strong state, Tvardovsky’s powers - not associated with any cult statesman and in general a specific form of state. This position helped Tvardovsky to belong among Russophiles - admirers of the Russian Empire.
"New World"
During the second period of Tvardovsky’s editorship at Novy Mir, especially after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the magazine became a refuge for anti-Stalinist forces in literature, a symbol of the “sixties,” and an organ of legal opposition. Soviet power.
In the 1960s, Tvardovsky, in the poems “By the Right of Memory” (published in 1987) and “Terkin in the Next World,” revised his attitude towards Stalin and Stalinism. At the same time (early 1960s), Tvardovsky received Khrushchev’s permission to publish the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Solzhenitsyn.
New direction of the magazine (liberalism in art, ideology and economics, hiding behind words about socialism "with human face") caused dissatisfaction not so much with the Khrushchev-Brezhnev party elite and officials of ideological departments, but with the so-called “neo-Stalinist state holders” in Soviet literature. For several years, there was a sharp literary (and, in fact, ideological) polemic between the magazines “New World” and “October” ( editor-in-chief V. A. Kochetov, author of the novel “What Do You Want?”, directed, among other things, against Tvardovsky). The “sovereign” patriots also expressed their persistent ideological rejection of the magazine.
After Khrushchev was removed from senior positions in the press (Ogonyok magazine, newspaper Socialist industry") a campaign was carried out against the magazine "New World". Glavlit waged a fierce fight against the magazine, systematically not allowing the most important materials. Since the leadership of the Writers' Union did not dare to formally dismiss Tvardovsky, the last measure of pressure on the magazine was the removal of Tvardovsky's deputies and the appointment of people hostile to him to these positions. In February 1970, Tvardovsky was forced to resign as editor, and part of the magazine’s staff followed his example. The editorial office was essentially destroyed. The KGB note “Materials on the mood of the poet A. Tvardovsky” on behalf of Andropov was sent on September 7, 1970 to the CPSU Central Committee.
In the "New World" ideological liberalism was combined with aesthetic traditionalism. Tvardovsky had a cold attitude towards modernist prose and poetry, preferring literature developing in the classical forms of realism. Many of the greatest writers of the 1960s were published in the magazine, and the magazine exposed many to the reader. For example, in 1964, a large selection of poems by the Voronezh poet Alexei Prasolov was published in the August issue.
Soon after the defeat of the New World, Tvardovsky was diagnosed with lung cancer. The writer died on December 18, 1971 in the holiday village of Krasnaya Pakhra, Moscow region. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (site No. 7).
Family
He was married and had two daughters - Olga and Valentina.
Perpetuation of memory
- In 1990, an artistic marked envelope was published in honor of the writer.
- In Smolensk, Voronezh, Novosibirsk, Balashikha and Moscow, streets are named after Tvardovsky.
- Moscow school No. 279 was named after Tvardovsky.
- The Aeroflot aircraft Airbus A330-343E VQ-BEK was named in honor of A. Tvardovsky.
- Opened in 1988 memorial estate museum"A. T. Tvardovsky on the Zagorye farm"
- June 22, 2013 in Moscow at Strastnoy Boulevard A monument to Tvardovsky was unveiled next to the editorial office of the New World magazine. Authors - folk artist Russia Vladimir Surovtsev and Honored Architect of Russia Viktor Pasenko. At the same time, there was an incident: on the granite of the monument, “with the participation of the Ministry of Culture,” was engraved with the second letter “t” missing.
Awards and prizes
- Stalin Prize of the second degree (1941) - for the poem “The Country of Ant” (1936)
- Stalin Prize, first degree (1946) - for the poem “Vasily Terkin” (1941-1945)
- Stalin Prize, second degree (1947) - for the poem “House by the Road” (1946)
- Lenin Prize (1961) - for the poem “Beyond the Distance - Distance” (1953-1960)
- State Prize USSR (1971) - for the collection “From the lyrics of these years. 1959-1967" (1967)
- three Orders of Lenin (1939, 1960, 1967)
- Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1970)
- Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree (1945)
- Order of the Patriotic War, II degree (1944)
- Order of the Red Star
1910 , June 8 (21) - born on the Zagorye farm, now Pochinkovsky district of the Smolensk region, in the family of a rural blacksmith.
1920–1924 – years of study in rural school, early interest in poetry. “He loved books very much and surprised us with his knowledge of them” (from the memoirs of the poet’s classmate A. N. Sedakova-Erofeeva).
1924 - becomes a correspondent for local newspapers, publishes poems and essays.
1925 , July 19 – the poem “New Hut” was published in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Village”.
1926 – participates in the work of the congress of rural correspondents.
1927 – first trip to Moscow with poetry.
1930–1931 – is subjected to harsh demagogic criticism, especially after the “dekulakization” and expulsion of the family.
1931 – first publication: the poem “The Path to Socialism” (thanks to the support of E. Bagritsky).
1932 - enters the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute. The essay “Diary of the Chairman of a Collective Farm” is published in Smolensk.
1935 - “Collected Poems 1930-1935” is published, highly praised in the review by V. F. Asmus in Izvestia.
1936 – poem “The Country of Ant” (USSR State Prize, 1941).
1938 – collection “The Road”, cycle “About Grandfather Danila”.
1939 – graduated from the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature. The collection "Rural Chronicle" is published. Poet awarded the order Lenin "for outstanding successes and achievements in the development of Soviet fiction."
1939 - as a war correspondent, he participates in the Red Army’s campaign in Western Belarus, and then in the Finnish campaign (1939–1940). The cycle of poems “In the Snows of Finland” (1939-40) is dedicated to her, the prose notes “With Karelian Isthmus"(published 1969).
1941 – collection “Zagorie”.
1941–1945 - works in front-line newspapers. They publish poems created during the war years, combined into a “Front Chronicle,” essays, and correspondence. During these years, the poem “Vasily Terkin (Book about a fighter)” was written (USSR State Prize, 1946).
1946 - poem "House by the Road".
1947 - Receives the Stalin Prize of the second degree for the poem "House by the Road". His book “Motherland and Foreign Land” is being unfairly attacked in the press. The beginning of trips to Siberia, which continued in the 1940s and 1950s.
1950–1960 – working on the poem “Beyond the Distance.”
1953 – the first chapters of the book “Beyond the Distance - the Distance” are published. "New World" begins to publish sharply critical articles about modern literature, causing indignation from official criticism.
1950–1954 (and 1958-1970) – editor-in-chief of the New World magazine.
1954 – Tvardovsky wrote and wanted to publish a satirical poem “Terkin in the Other World” (it was typed for the fifth issue of Novy Mir). The poem was banned, and he was removed from his post as editor-in-chief.
1956 – in the collection “Literary Moscow” new chapters of the book “Beyond the Distance are Distance” were published, including “Childhood Friend”.
1960 – the final chapters of the book “Beyond the Distance - the Distance” were published thanks to the support of Khrushchev.
1961 - the book “Beyond the Distance - the Distance” receives the Lenin Prize.
1962 – Tvardovsky is seeking publication in Novy Mir (No. 11) of A. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which became important milestone in literary and social life.
1963 – the satirical poem “Terkin in the Next World” is published (published thanks to the support of N.S. Khrushchev).
1965 - Based on the poem, the Moscow Theater of Satire staged a wonderful performance, which was soon removed from the repertoire, allegedly at the request of... the actors themselves.
1966 – Tvardovsky refuses to approve the court verdict of the writers A. Sinyavsky (1925–1997) and Y. Daniel (1925–1988), accused of anti-Soviet activities.
1967 – “From the lyrics of these years. 1959-1967” (USSR State Prize, 1971).
1968 – Tvardovsky refuses to sign a “collective” letter in which writers approve of the invasion of troops Warsaw Pact to Czechoslovakia. (). Attacks on the New World are intensifying. Censorship does not allow the poem “By the Right of Memory” (to be published only 17 years later), which is published in the foreign press without the knowledge of the author (1969).
1969 – cycle “From new poems”.
1970
, February - after many months of critical campaign about the “New World” in the press, the leadership of the Writers’ Union, at the direct prompting of the CPSU Central Committee, removes Tvardovsky’s closest collaborators from the editorial board of the “New World” and replaces them with people alien and hostile to him. An attempt to contact L.I. Brezhnev was unsuccessful. Tvardovsky is forced to resign.
June - stands up for the geneticist and dissident Zhores Medvedev (1925, Tiflis - 2018, London), forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital.
1971 , January 18 - Tvardovsky dies in the Moscow region holiday village Pakhra. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.
The main theme of all the writers’ work was the Great Patriotic War. And the hero-soldier Vasily Terkin created by him received such enormous popularity that, one might say, he surpassed the author himself. About the life and work of the amazing Soviet writer we'll talk about it in this article.
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky: biography
The future poet was born according to the old style on June 8 (June 21 - according to the new one) 1910 in the village of Zagorye, which is located in His father, Trifon Gordeevich, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, came from a family of odnodvortsev (farmers who lived on the outskirts Russia and were supposed to protect its borders).
His father, despite his peasant origins, was a literate man and loved to read. There were even books in the house. The mother of the future writer also knew how to read.
Alexander had younger brother Ivan, born in 1914, who later became a writer.
Childhood years
For the first time, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky became acquainted with the works of Russian classics at home. Brief biography The writer tells that in the Tvardovsky family there was a custom - winter evenings one of the parents read Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin aloud. It was then that Tvardovsky acquired a love for literature and even began to compose his first poems, without even really learning how to write correctly.
Little Alexander studied at a rural school, and at the age of fourteen he began sending small notes to local newspapers for publication, some of them were even published. Soon Tvardovsky dared to send poetry. The editor of the local newspaper “Rabochy Put” supported the young poet’s endeavor and largely helped him overcome his natural timidity and begin to publish.
Smolensk-Moscow
After graduating from school, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky moved to Smolensk (whose biography and work are presented in this article). Here future writer he wanted to either continue studying or find a job, but he couldn’t do either of those things - this required at least some kind of specialty, which he didn’t have.
Tvardovsky lived on pennies, which were brought in by inconsistent literary earnings, to obtain which he had to beat the thresholds of editorial offices. When the poet’s poems were published in the capital’s magazine “October,” he went to Moscow, but luck did not smile on him here either. As a result, in 1930, Tvardovsky was forced to return to Smolensk, where he spent the next 6 years of his life. At this time, he was able to enter a pedagogical institute, which he did not graduate from, and again went to Moscow, where in 1936 he was accepted into MIFLI.
During these years, Tvardovsky already began to actively publish, and in 1936 the poem “The Country of Ant” was published, dedicated to collectivization, which made him famous. In 1939, Tvardovsky’s first collection of poems, Rural Chronicle, was published.
War years
In 1939, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was drafted into the Red Army. The writer's biography changes dramatically at this moment - he finds himself at the center of military operations in Western Belarus. Since 1941, Tvardovsky worked for the Voronezh newspaper “Red Army”.
This period is characterized by the flourishing of the writer’s creativity. Except famous poem“Vasily Terkin”, Tvardovsky creates a cycle of poems “Front-line Chronicle” and begins work on the famous poem “House by the Road”, which was completed in 1946.
"Vasily Terkin"
The biography of Tvardovsky Alexander Trifonovich is replete with various creative achievements, but the greatest of them is the writing of the poem “Vasily Terkin”. The work was written throughout the Second World War, that is, from 1941 to 1945. It was published in small parts in military newspapers, thereby raising the morale of the Soviet army.
The work is accurate, understandable and simple syllable, rapid development of actions. Each episode of the poem is connected to each other only by the image of the main character. Tvardovsky himself said that this was due to the fact that he himself and his reader could die at any minute, so each story should be finished in the same issue of the newspaper in which it was started.
This story made Tvardovsky a cult author of wartime. In addition, the poet was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st and 2nd degrees for his work.
Post-war creativity
Continues active literary activity and after the war, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. The poet’s biography is supplemented by the writing of a new poem, “Beyond the Distance, the Distance,” which was written between 1950 and 1960.
From 1967 to 1969, the writer worked on autobiographical work"By right of memory." The poem tells the truth about the fate of Tvardovsky’s father, who became a victim of collectivization and was repressed. This work was banned for publication by censorship and the reader was able to get acquainted with it only in 1987. The writing of this poem seriously spoiled Tvardovsky’s relations with the Soviet regime.
The biography of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky is also rich in prosaic experiments. All the most important things, of course, were written in poetic form, but several collections of prose stories were also published. For example, in 1947, the book “Motherland and Foreign Land”, dedicated to the Second World War, was published.
"New World"
We should not forget about the writer’s journalistic activities. For many years served as editor-in-chief literary magazine“New World” Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. The biography of this period is full of all sorts of clashes with official censorship - the poet had to defend the right to publish for many talented authors. Thanks to the efforts of Tvardovsky, Zalygina, Akhmatova, Troepolsky, Molsaev, Bunin and others were published.
Gradually the magazine became a serious opposition to Soviet power. Writers of the sixties published here and anti-Stalinist thoughts were openly expressed. The real victory for Tvardovsky was permission to publish Solzhenitsyn’s story.
However, after the removal of Khrushchev, strong pressure began to be exerted on the editorial board of Novy Mir. This ended with Tvardovsky being forced to leave his position as editor-in-chief in 1970.
Last years and death
So the biography comes to an end. Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, whose death was dated December 18, 1971, died of lung cancer. The writer died in a town located in the Moscow region. The writer's body was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
Alexander Tvardovsky lived a rich and vibrant life and left behind a huge literary heritage. Many of his works were included in school curriculum and remain popular to this day.
