"Get up, the country is huge"
The report made by Stanislav Kunyaev at the Conference of diplomats, historians, archivists and politicians in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, September 3 - on the day of the end of the Second World War.
In all its thousand years history Russia survived about two hundred large and small wars, of which several were called "invasions." Tatar-Mongol invasion and the subsequent century and a half yoke. The invasion of Mamaia with his mixed tribe and the Battle of Kulikovo. Polish-Swedish-Lithuanian invasion of the beginning of the XVII century, reflected by the militia of Minin and Pozharsky. The invasion of the Napoleonic armada of two languages. The invasion of the Entente in the era of civil war. And finally, the Great Patriotic War of 1941 — 1945.
The people called “invasions” those wars in which several states and nations united against Russia. Therefore, the reflection of such invasions demanded from the people and the authorities the utmost or even unlimited pressure of all spiritual, military, state and economic forces. In any European language in relation to the concept of "war" there is no word "invasion". It lives, unfortunately, only in Russian. Therefore, from the Russian literature, from its poets, prose writers, publicists, songwriters, there was a need for the ultimate ideological and spiritual support of this struggle for “the freedom and independence of our Motherland,” and the ancient Roman dictum “when weapon, muses are silent ”in no way refers to the history of our Fatherland. A blessing in disguise: the era of invasions enriched our literature.
The heroic sound in written Russian poetry first rang in The Lay of Igor's Works. Two centuries later, it was repeated in the “Zadonshchina”. The 1812 World War II was reflected in the poems of Zhukovsky, Denis Davydov and Ryleev, in the ode of young Pushkin “Memories in Tsarskoe Selo” and in his poetic message to European “Slanderers of Russia”:
So send us to us, Vitia,
His angry sons:
They have a place in the fields of Russia,
Among the coffins that are not theirs.
From Pushkin, the heroic echo of the Battle of Borodino reached Lermontov, who glorified the duel of the mercenaries of Napoleon’s armada with the suicide bombers Mikhail Kutuzov:
And he said, with his eyes sparkling:
"Guys! Isn't Moscow for us?
Well die near Moscow ... "
The tragic Soviet era, naturally, continued this heroic tradition. However, in the 30-ies, the nature of the future war, the closeness of which was evident to all the world's major politicians, was not completely clear to both the Soviet leadership and the creative intelligentsia.
In 1939, I was 7 for years, but I remember the songs and poems of that time that dealt with the approaching war. Some poets by inertia sang it as a continuation of the world revolution: "I left the hut, went to war, / To give the land to the peasants in Grenada ...". Or: “But we still reach the Ganges, / But we still die in battles, / To from Japan to England / Shine my Motherland!” Others asserted a “defense” consciousness. The ideology of the world revolution by this time gave way to a new goal - “building socialism in one single country”. Upon learning of this change in political course, Leon Trotsky accused Stalin and the Bolshevik Party of betraying the cause of the world proletariat. But the Soviet poets have already parted with this chimera, realizing that a single “world proletariat” does not exist.
"We are peaceful people, but our armored train is on the siding"; “If tomorrow is war, if tomorrow is a campaign, if dark force descends as one person, the whole Soviet people will stand up for a free Motherland”; "But with a stern eyebrow we frown if the enemy wants to break us"; “We don’t want another inch of land, but we don’t give up our top”. In these poetic aphorisms of the era reflected its defensive ideology. You read them and understand that the Soviet leadership not only did not want war, but tried by all means to avoid it, realizing that we were not ready for it yet. True, other poets still composed songs about “dashing carriages”, that “along the roads we will lead combat horses for our favorite people's commissar,” but this belching of the civil war was a thing of the past. The country's leadership already understood that the future war is a war of motors, and therefore the song “Three Tankmen, three funny friends - the crew of a combat vehicle” became the main song of the pre-war years, like the song to the words of Yuri German “Higher and higher and higher / We strive for the flight of our birds, / And in each propeller breathes / The serenity of our borders. "
And nevertheless 22 June has burst out, as a bolt from the blue.
There are two points of view on why the first months of the war became catastrophic for us. One of them says that the leadership of the country led by Stalin was lost, released the reins from the hands, missed the start date of the war, that it managed to mobilize only 1941 millions of soldiers and officers against 5 millions standing under the banner of Reich by 8.
Another point of view was stated by Georgy Zhukov in 1972: “Germany in all respects was better prepared for war then than we were. We studied at the military academies of Clausewitz, Moltke, Schlieffen. The Prussian officer is a whole caste, a German soldier conquered Europe. German technology was better than ours. In the spring of 1941, we just launched the production of the T-34 tank, the Il-2 attack aircraft, the Katyusha mortar. We were trained by the war. But, ”added Zhukov,“ we won because we had a brave, patriotic young soldier, politically trained, mentally prepared to fight for the Motherland. ”
To these words of Zhukov, one can add that this soldier was prepared for war by the Soviet school, Soviet history, Soviet cinema, Soviet poetry, Soviet song.
The idea of the racial superiority of the Aryans over the "Slavs" and other peoples of the USSR could be defeated only by the other, understandable for all people, idea of the Motherland, the idea of the historical and socialist brotherhood of the peoples of the USSR, the idea of the Orthodox Christian community. And it was not for nothing that 22 June immediately after Molotov’s speech in agreement with the former seminarist and poet Joseph Stalin, with a heartfelt word, made a speech to the people, Patriarchal locum tenens Sergius.
“They repeat,” he said, “the times of Batu, the German knights, Karl of Sweden, Napoleon. The descendants of the enemies of Orthodox Christianity want to try again to put our people on their knees. Let us recall the holy leaders of the Russian people, Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, who put their souls for the people and their homeland, let us recall countless thousands of ordinary Orthodox soldiers. ”
And on November 7, 1941, Stalin, speaking before the parade participants on Red Square, added the names of Suvorov, Kutuzov, Minin and Pozharsky to the names of Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, and he understood that in order to win over such a mighty enemy requires the unity of "Russian" and "Soviet".
The war powerfully brought together the church with the highest state elite, exposed for power and for writers the orthodox essence of the Russian common people, who did not obey the ideology of state atheism spread by the middle of the 30s by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky (Mine Gubelman) and his oprichniki; Stalin's favorite, and therefore the poet of the Soviet Russian officers Konstantin Simonov was one of the first who captured the support of the Orthodox faith at the very beginning of the war.
Do you remember, Alyosha, the roads of Smolensk,
As there were endless, evil rains,
As the krinks brought us tired women,
Crouching like children from the rain to their chest.
Like tears they wipe away by stealth,
As they whispered to us: “Lord, save you!” -
And again they called themselves soldiers,
As it happened, the time was ripe in the great Russia.
Tears measured more often than by
Walked tract, on the hills hidden from view:
Villages, villages, villages with graveyards,
As if on them all of Russia has come together,
As if for every Russian suburb,
With the cross of their hands guarding the living,
With all the world converging, our great-grandparents pray
For in God not believing their grandchildren.
You know, probably, after all the birthplace -
Not the city house, where I lived festively,
And these lanes that grandfathers passed,
With simple crosses of their Russian graves ...
In this poem, all the phenomena of nature, all the deeds of people, all the signs of life - the roads of Smolensk, evil rains, milk shakes, women's tears, road miles, villages with graveyards, crosses on the graves, Russian outskirts, everything that was born, past and living in the present, - everything is preparing, together with our retreating soldiers, to stand, return and win. That is what a popular war is. Europe has never known such wars. And it’s not by chance that the words “on great Russia”, “all Russia came together”, “behind every Russian outskirts”, “with simple crosses of their Russian graves”, which filled the poem, predicted that the main fastened struggle for “freedom” and the independence of our homeland "will be Russian bondage. From the first days of the war, our poets felt that such a powerful enemy could be defeated only by following the ancient truth - “death was killed by death”, and after that their speech naturally acquired the features of fearless tragic dignity: “get up to mortal combat”, “death is not terrible, we met with it more than once in battle ”,“ and if you have to lie down in the ground, it’s just once ... ”.
In the very first days of the war, hundreds of writers volunteered for the front and the people's militia. The true feat was the creation by the poet Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and the composer Aleksandrov of the song “Holy War” written on the night of 22 on 23 of June 1941 of the year.
Get up, the country is huge,
Get up on a mortal battle
With dark fascist power,
With the cursed horde.
Let the rage be noble
Boils like a wave, -
There is a people's war,
Sacred War!
In the history of mankind there was only one case like this. During the Great French Revolution, the poet Rouget de Lisle composed Marseilles in Marseilles for one night, which became the anthem of France for all time: “Come on, sons of the Fatherland! The day of glory has come ... ". But then our people had no time for glory ... And what cynical lies are filled with the cries of the current falsifiers of history that our war was just a war of two totalitarian systems, a war of Stalin and Hitler, therefore, it is not “domestic”, and not "Sacred". These anti-Soviet Russophobic mongrelians can not even understand that our war was not just the Soviet-German, but the war of the entire attacking continental Europe with the defending Russian Eurasia. At the end of the war, there were about four million soldiers of the Third Reich in our POW camps. Of these, two and a half million Germans, one million prisoners were soldiers of countries that officially declared war on us - Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Finns, Norwegians, Slovaks, and half a million were volunteers from countries that did not officially fight with us - Spaniards, Czechs , French, Croats, Belgians, Poles, Dutch, Danes. All continental Europe - and this is 350 of millions of people! - was a powerful rear, who worked on Hitler's military machine, supplying the multimillion army of the Third Reich with weapons, food, uniforms, and transport.
All german Tanks manufactured in the Czech Republic, and the crews of the Tigers were manned by Czechs. Volunteers from the Hitlerite European Union entered the Wehrmacht because they knew: after the victory, all the spaces of the Soviet Union would become a colony for a united brown Europe and, of course, for their own countries. In Hitler's Ost plan, agricultural policy was defined as follows: "Food production in Russia will be included in the European system, as Western and Northern Europe are starving ... Germany and England need to import food." (The British for Hitler, despite the fact that England was at war with Germany, were Aryans, in contrast to the "Unterman" Slavs.) All the talk that our prisoners were brutally destroyed in German camps only because the USSR did not sign before the war, some kind of agreement with the International Red Cross is the lie of our liberals. What is the Red Cross, if the higher race has come to grips with the "subhuman"! The destruction of our whole life, culture, history, entire civilization — these were the plans of fascist Europe, and Russian poetry felt this mortal threat from the first days of the war. Poets of the older generation and the so-called Silver Age, even those who hated the October Revolution and the Soviets, suddenly felt like Russian patriots. February 23, 1942 Anna Akhmatova, who had been silent for many years before the war, composed the “anti-Stalinist” “Requiem”, responded with the poem “Courage”:
We know that now lies on the scales
And what is happening now.
An hour of courage struck on our watch,
And courage will not leave us.
Not scared to lie down under the bullets of the dead,
Not sad to be homeless, -
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will carry you free and clean
And give the grandchildren, and save from captivity.
Forever!
Poems were immediately published in the newspaper Pravda. Alexander Vertinsky, an iconic figure of the Silver Age, who also emigrated from the USSR, glorified the great feat of the people, who stirred his Russian soul, and wrote a poem about Stalin, seemingly unthinkable for his emigre entourage:
A little gray, like a silver poplar,
He stands, taking the parade,
How much did Sevastopol cost him!
How much did Stalingrad cost him! ..
............................................................
And when the vandals approached
To our ancient capital of fathers,
Where did he find such generals
And such legendary fighters?
He raised them. Over their education
Long thought he nights and days
Oh what storm tests
They were prepared! ..
...............................................................
... the same look, the same speeches are simple,
The words are also mean and wise ...
Over a torn map of Russia
His head turned gray.
Boris Pasternak is also a refined child of the Silver Age. In 1944, he visited the liberated Orlov region after the Battle of Kursk and wrote a series of poems about the heroism of soldiers and the torment of the people in the occupation, and added in comments to the verses: “All the people won from top to bottom, from Marshal Stalin to ordinary workers.”
And another famous emigrant - Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin - made an entry in the 1943 diary of the year, when Stalin left for Tehran to meet with Churchill and Roosevelt:
“Did I think that now, when Stalin is on his way to Tehran, I will experience with bated breath that nothing will happen to him.”
After the war, in 1946, Bunin said to Konstantin Simonov: “On June 22 of 1941, I, who wrote everything that I had written before, including“ Cursed Days ”, I in relation to Russia and to those who now rule it, invested forever the sword to the sheath. " And during another meeting with Simonov after the war, Bunin offered a toast: “Let's drink to the great Russian people - the victorious people - and to Stalin’s commanding talent!” Having lived in emigration in the West for more than 20 years, the true patriot of Russia Bunin perfectly understood that this war there is an invasion, there is still an unprecedented on the purposes and scale of the next attack on Russia by the predatory West, which cannot tolerate the existence of an alien and hated world next to it. He, unlike the Vlasovites, understood that the goal of the war was not just the seizure of Moscow or a change of regime, but the destruction or transformation of the Russian world into a passive nutrient medium for the West. (The situation is somewhat similar to today's.) Without complete dedication, without a sacred feeling of hatred, it was impossible to defeat such a powerful enemy. That is why Sholokhov writes the essay “The Science of Hate”, which is why Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov both urge the army and all the people in their poems and articles: “Kill the German!”.
The well-known German historian and Russian scholar Eberhard Dickman, who was at the end of the war on the Hitler Youth, said the main reason for our victory: “The German inhabitants had nothing against the creation of the great German Empire. And when this path became real, in Germany there was almost no one who would not be ready to follow it. But from the moment when the intentions of Hitler became clear to the Russian people, the strength of the Russian people was opposed to the German force. From that moment on, the outcome of the war became clear: the Russians were stronger, primarily because the question of life and death was decided for them. ” This is how the participant of the war, the amazing mystical poet Daniel Andreev, the son of the famous writer of the Silver Age L. Andreev, wrote about this nationwide feeling:
From the hills of Moscow, from the fields of Saratov,
Where the waves shake rye,
From the taiga bowels, where the age-old
Cedars give birth to coniferous hum,
For the sorrowful cause of war
The law soldered us together
And through the drifts, sudra, ice
A live chain stretched out.
Daniel Andreev paints a truly apocalyptic picture of the nationwide overstrain, mobilized and pulled out of the national womb, not just by “law” or the will of the leader, but also by the will of the whole people:
Front breath here personally
We caught in terms of nature:
We are engineers, accountants,
Lawyers, urki, foresters,
Collective farmers, doctors, workers -
We, the evil dogs of the folk kennel,
Naughty boys, boys,
Strong-minded old men.
Only such a “super-people”, as Daniel Andreev called him, could defeat the brutal horde of “supermen”. The poet, at that time defending an endangered, but not surrendering Leningrad, passed back and forth through Ladoga several times, along the icy Road of Life, and he, of course, understood that we had resisted not only thanks to Stalin or frost:
Night winds! High black
Over the snow coffin of Leningrad!
You are the test; in you is the reward;
And vigorously keep orders
That night, when the steps are hard
I leaked in the darkness of the Ice Route
With the sullen step of the Russian race,
Up eyes encased in armor.
After all, this armor had to be invented, manufactured, tested ... "Days and nights at open-hearth furnaces / Our homeland did not close off our eyes ..." And the words "Russian race" are not accidental here.
After the war, Daniel Andreev was arrested under the 58 article, he spent several years in a Vladimir prison, after which his books were not published for a long time and his poetry, his prophecies and insights did not reach the general reader, although they were undoubtedly worthy of it.
Here is what he wrote about the civil strife of 30's, which must be forgotten before the onset of common and deadly for the red and white, for party and non-party, for all Russians and all non-Russian misfortunes: "The country is burning, it's time, o God, / Forget who is right, who is wrong ... ”. Reflecting on the role in the history of Russia of all her princes, kings, emperors, general secretaries - from Vladimir the Baptist to Stalin - he draws such a generalized image of the leader:
He is better than the death of the people
Better he;
But its nature is dark,
Lut the law ...
...........................................
His nature is cruel.
Lut the law
But not him - so the death of the people ...
Better - he!
The only way to save the country was the unity of the three forces: the authorities, the army and, most importantly, the people. And therefore all the most significant poets of the epoch, giving Stalin its due, glorifying the army, first of all tried to understand how every single person from the people is resisting the invasion - a soldier, a peasant, a worker. And it is quite clear that, first of all, the poets of the military era had in mind the Russian people and the Russian people. Yes, of course, the victory was mined by all the peoples of the Soviet Union. But it’s not for nothing that Marshal Baghramyan, an Armenian by birth, wrote in his memoirs that any large-scale military operation could be carried out only if the troops were more than half equipped with Russian soldiers and officers. And not without reason, the Georgian Joseph Stalin 24 on July 1945 of the year made a famous toast to the health of the Russian people.
And here, first of all, we must recall Alexander Tvardovsky, his great soldier's epos “Vasily Turkin”, that the monument to the Russian soldier stands on Smolensk land, in the homeland of Tvardovsky on the farm Zagorje.
I remember how I, a fifth-grader, in 1945 or in 1946, got into the hands of a paperback book printed on yellow newsprint, “Vasily Turkin”. One chapter of the poem, read passionately, in one sitting, especially struck me:
Crossing, crossing!
Left bank, right bank.
Rough snow, ice edge ...
To whom is the memory, to whom is glory,
To dark water, -
No sign, no trace.
..........................................
And I saw for the first time
It will not be forgotten:
People are warm, alive
They went to the bottom, to the bottom, to the bottom ...
...............................................
Crossing, crossing ...
Darkness, cold. Night like a year ...
But he clung to the right bank,
There remained the first platoon.
.............................................
Crossing, crossing!
Cannons beat in pitch darkness.
The battle goes holy and right.
Mortal combat is not for glory,
For the sake of life on earth.
It was not for nothing that Ivan Bunin, who had read the Türkin in France, came to a complete delight, as he wrote to Moscow to his friend, the writer Teleshov.
And if you remember the no less great poem “House by the Road” or the stunning requiem “I am killed under Rzhev”, then, of course, Twardowski should be considered a true chronicler of the war as popular and sacred, which was won by an ordinary soldier:
I'm killed near Rzhev
In an unchanged swamp,
In the fifth company, on the left,
With a cruel raid.
..............................................
And the dead, the voiceless,
There is only one joy:
We have fallen for the Motherland,
But she is saved ...
Next to Tvardovsky, the most diverse poets of his generation, who had matured in 30, created quite a few poems written not just about “war”, but, as Vadim Kozhinov wrote, “with war”. They are Mikhail Isakovsky and Olga Bergolts, Alexander Prokofiev and Mikhail Svetlov, and, of course, Konstantin Simonov.
Summer 1942 of the year. The Germans are eager to take revenge for the defeat near Moscow, rush to Stalingrad and to the Baku oil. Our troops are retreating, sometimes in a panic and randomly. And here comes the famous Stalinist order number 227, called "Not one step back."
In a formidable order there were words with mystical power: “The population loses faith in the Red Army,” “retreat further - destroy the Motherland”, “many curse the Red Army”, “covering their banners with shame ...”, “not one step back!” . Simonov immediately responded to the Stalinist order with a poem that had flown around the whole country, - “Nameless Field”. In essence, this poem was a transcription of the legendary order to the poetic language: “The bloody sun of shame,” “Our ancestors swear for it,” “To take another step back.” And in 1944, he wrote the poem, where each stanza ended with the words “ my friends "- this refrain was taken from Stalin's speech, sounded on July 3 1941 of the year, beginning with the words:" Brothers and sisters! I appeal to you, my friends! "
Mikhail Svetlov, a poet of the same generation as Simonov, Mikhalkov, Alexander Prokofiev, was fond of the ideas of the world revolution in 20, dreamed of “giving land to peasants in Grenada,” for which he acquired the dangerous reputation of “Trotskyist” in Soviet literary scholarship ". At the beginning of World War II, he parted with these illusions and began to write poetry as a Russian patriot and as a poet of the Stalin era. Here is his famous poem of the war years:
Black Cross on the chest of the Italian
No thread, no pattern, no gloss, -
A poor family stored
And the only son wears ...
A young native of Naples!
What did you leave on the field in Russia?
Why couldn't you be happy
Over native famous bay?
.............................................................
I will not let my country take out
For the vastness of the foreign seas!
I shoot - and there is no justice
More fair than my bullet! ..
We can recall many more poets who wrote about the war, whose work was formed in the pre-war 30-s: Victor Bokov, Sergei Mikhalkov, Alexey Surkov, but first of all we recall Olga Berggolts, a heroic woman who survived the Leningrad blockade. Over Piskarevsky cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of Leningradians lie, where my father lies, posthumously awarded the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad", carved her words: "Nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten."
And what a constellation of brilliant poets during the war years gave the generation of those born in the early 20s!
This is Mikhail Lukonin: “It is better to come with an empty sleeve than with an empty soul”; Boris Slutsky: “I accept the nineteenth year of birth twenty-two in forty-one without objection as a plan and as a star”; David Samoilov, who entered the history of the famous poem: "Forties, fatal ..."; Alexander Mezhirov with a catch phrase: "The Communists, forward! .."; Mikhail Kulchitsky with the words: “Not up to the order. There would be a Motherland with daily Borodino. ”
I listed the names and poems of poets who came out of the city, moreover - from the metropolitan intelligentsia. But, perhaps, deeper poems about the war came from the pen of peasant children, children of the class, who had undergone all the collectivization several years before the war, which in many respects suffered during the "great turning point", which left for the war not from the Arbat sidewalks, but from his native villages, as the hero of the poem of the Nizhny Novgorod peasant Fyodor Sukhov, who had fought for all four years of the war with the gunner of an anti-tank gun, was leaving.
Accompanied me to the war,
Before the road was great.
I looked at the village with a farewell
And suddenly my lips quivered.
Nothing happened to me
If I accidentally burst into tears, -
I said goodbye to my native side,
Himself with himself, perhaps, said goodbye.
And what a time it was!
Summer in full bloom of honeycomb.
Were going to mow clover,
Rye from the hot sun melted.
Ripened high rye
Thick wheat poured
And oats that grew so fast,
Straight at his feet in a hurry to bow.
Played, sang harmonium,
All said their frets
And a scarf with a blue border
I have already given goodbye.
In the distance, thunder rumbled,
The whole sunset was in an ominous fire ...
Accompanied me to the war,
Before the road was great.
“What is the secret of this poem? - wrote Vadim Kozhinov. - It is that before us is not a “picture”, but a whole great experience. Homeland, the people accompany their son to the war. And individuals are already indistinguishable. There are elements of the motherland, in which everything has merged. But if you look closely, you guess all the components of this element: “My lips trembled” and “Nothing would have happened to me, if I had accidentally burst into tears ...” You can see the crying mother and father’s mournful face going along. And here is the voice of a friend - the accordion, which “said everything with its frets”. And the girl, because, of course, it was she who presented the “handkerchief with the blue border”. And, finally, rye, wheat is either wealth, then goodness and beauty, in which both labor and love of fellow villagers fit into centuries, so these are already living beings, bowing at the feet of the departing young owner.
The boy - and the age of the hero is clearly expressed in these “suddenly trembling lips” - says goodbye to the Motherland, goes into the ominous fire of war. Well, maybe he is weak and fearful, if he is ready to burst into tears by chance? The face of the hero does not shine good-bye with a shy white-toothed smile. He is frank and open in Russian, and does not observe the “form” ... But it is absolutely clear: neither his lips, nor his hand are anymore twitching. Here, on the threshold of his home, he had already experienced, as it were, survived and overcame the fear of death, “he said goodbye to himself” ... ”.
And a peasant from the Saratov village, Viktor Kochetkov, who was captured after the first months of the war, fled from captivity and again took the rifle in his hands, recalled how at the beginning of the war it was hard, through force, the people's soul was tuned, overcoming fear, to a mortal combat, like peasants kolkhoz workers burn bread so that they do not go to the enemy.
... breaks rare min. Gun firing.
Haughty crying children. Wistful roar of cattle.
For hundreds of miles ripe bread burns -
I did not see the pictures more bitterly, nor worse.
............................................................................
Closed by the hot darkness of the last hut,
And the sun in this gloom barely flashes.
For hundreds of miles ripe bread burns -
The last fear in itself is burning Russia.
Thinking over this pleiad of poets born of war, you recall the words of Alexander Blok: “The people collect vital juices drop by drop in order to produce from their midst every kind of medium-sized writer.”
The fourth generation of poets, reflected in the poetry of the war years, were the children of war - the sixties. Each of them - Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Nikolai Rubtsov, Vladimir Vysotsky, Gleb Gorbovsky, Yuri Kuznetsov, Vladimir Sokolov, Anatoly Peredreev and many others - has poems worthy of entering the poetic anthology of war with the most stringent selection.
But in the work of the poets of the Sixties there is a special and extremely important understanding of the war, which was not, and could not be, of its direct participants and which shone with sparks of Christian mercy towards the enemy, and which the army and the people began to feel as the Germans were driven out. from his native land.
Alexey Prasolov, who, although he did not fight, but saw the war, survived the humiliation of occupation and the joy of liberation from the yoke, wrote about this feeling as follows:
There is still a blizzard in me
Whipping death bed
And ranks a corpse as a corpse, -
That howling burnt pipes,
That rustling bloodless lips
That, a long, blizzard.
Germans were taken in the morning.
Supine system - as on the look,
And so that everyone could see,
How many lands are covered
The nails of their boots sparkle,
Rested in a dead blizzard.
And you, hostile to them, looked
On hands thawed along tel.
And in that already evil moment
Do not repent quiet,
But dead roll them
Did not want to break.
What pain, what revenge
You carried in yourself those days! But here
Thought about something you
In the harsh pride of his,
As if she were few
One victorious righteousness.
Brilliant poem! How many rich shades of the spontaneous popular understanding of the struggle, retribution, and justice glow in it! On the one hand, the anger has not cooled: “And you, who were hostile to them, looked ...”, but “a momentless moment” is also present. It seems that you have nothing to repent of, you are right - “not repenting to repent,” but at the same time there is a growing feeling that the dead enemy is no longer terrible, and he was also a man. You killed him defending yourself and your homeland, but you cannot believe in the human heart that victory must necessarily be connected with murder: incomplete victory is with bitterness overshadowing the triumph. The proverb "The corpse of the enemy smells good" was not born in our language. Because you do not want to violate their "dead roll" - let yourself even call out, if you do not have time to understand. That is why you are “little”, in your “harsh pride”, despite the “pain” and “revenge”, “one victorious righteousness”. You regret that the need to kill the enemy deprived you of the opportunity to explain to him that he was wrong, to defeat his evil with spiritual strength, to wait for a kind of resurrection of his soul. The fact that you can win only by force makes your victory incomplete and testifies to the imperfection of the world and man. This is not a knightly, but a different, higher and deeper relation to the enemy as a person, as an image and likeness of a higher power, distorted by evil. But this is not pity for the enemy, but sadness about the imperfection of the world, a fragment of the people's world perception spontaneously living in the depths of the spirit.
In connection with the prasolovsky poem, we need to remember this. When in 1945 our troops invaded Germany and moved to Berlin, with each kilometer the thirst for revenge, which helped us so much in the first years of the war, gradually cooled down. Apparently, Stalin sensed this, and according to his order, Pravda newspaper in March 45-st strongly condemned Ehrenburg, who called for revenge on the Germans, not sparing the civilian population. It was then that the Generalissimo uttered the historical words: "The Hitlers come and go, but the German people remain."
My childhood was spent in evacuation, in the forest Kostroma village Pyshug, where I wrote the first poem in my life for a school wall newspaper. In the third and fourth grades in 1942, in the village hut, by the light of a smoker and a kerosene lamp, I read Tolstoy's War and Peace, which I later wrote these verses about:
Reading Tolstoy
Oil lamp is burning
in the northern night.
In the chimney
protractedly howling blizzard ...
The sister and mother fell asleep on the stove,
and the boy is in the bonds of sweet affliction.
He is a refugee. He miraculously survived
among the bombing, hunger, devastation,
and the tornado of war, its hot squall
he was brought to the shores of Vetluga.
But at this hour in the heated house
he forgot all fears, all orphanhood -
there is no better food than heart and mind
than pure air of sorrow and heroism.
"War and Peace". What are the names!
Borodino! Smolensk road!
And finally, the Berezina River ...
Cooled the stove, and far in the morning.
A summary of the Soviet Information Bureau says,
that the dark Volga retreated ours.
Oil lamp is on. The book rustles ...
So, it is destined from the same bowl.
drink the enemy!
No wonder this night
so lustful and blissfully lasts!
He can also help the Motherland
eyes and mouth of the witness.
Let it crystallize in the blood.
breath of the words "immortality", "glory", "trehzna".
Flame, smoke lamp, and, soul, burn,
When your motherland is in complete fire!
The invaluable role in our victory was played by the songs that the people sang during the war. “Get up, great country” was written by Lebedev-Kumach overnight from 22 on 23 June, 24 June text was already published in the newspapers. In essence, this is not a song, but a military hymn or a formidable majestic prayer for victory. Marshal Zhukov himself answered the question about the war songs most valued by him: "Get up, great country", "Oh, the roads" and "Nightingales, nightingales, do not disturb the soldiers." He added: "The soul of the people was reflected in them."
The lyrical songs of the war laid so much vitality that they still live. Alive "Blue Scarf", live Surkovskaya "Fire beating in a close stove", Fatyanovskie songs "On a sunny glade" and "Burning candle stumps", "May short nights". Alive songs to the words of Isakovsky: "From birch, inaudible, weightless, a yellow leaf flies", "The girl was escorted to the position of a fighter." Alive is the song of Eugene Dolmatovsky "The night is short, the clouds are sleeping" ... The words of these songs originated from the war. But in the foreground is not war, but peace, which must be saved in this war.
Our German friend Eberhard Dickman, an expert in Russian literature, once told Kozhinov and us that in Germany during the war there was not a single lyric song born of war. The Germans played only pre-war marches on their harmonicas and accordions, such as “Today we own Germany, and tomorrow the whole world.” And our lyrical songs reflected the life of the people in its entirety - from singing nightingales to autumn yellow leaves, from a pine forest where the sun rises, to a native porch, where "the mother waits for her son."
Many war songs that became nationwide were written by poets who had neither fame nor considerable talent. For example, the now forgotten poet Yakov Shvedov wrote the words of a hitherto famous song about a dark-skinned Moldavian. The words of the immortal song "Dark Night" were written by the forgotten poet Vladimir Agatov, the words of the song "Goodbye, Rocky Mountains" - an ordinary poet Nikolai Bukin. However, the people kept in their memory these songs. Apparently, because the very atmosphere of the great war elevated the humble writers of poetry to such lyrical heights that they could not reach in peacetime - before the war or after it. To explain the power of the song, I will recall one episode from my life, from childhood, which passed in the forest village of Pishchug, where we were evacuated from Leningrad in 1941. In the ancient village church, reworked as a club, Soviet films were constantly being made, preceded by documentary movie receivers about the course of the war. In one of the film collectors it was once shown how a young soldier walks through his native village, just liberated by ours. The footage was accompanied by a song on the motif “Spinning, spinning a blue ball,” under which a soldier strides, eager to see his house and his bride. But, alas ...
The guy is suitable - nowhere,
Bitter grief meets him
Bitter grief is a cruel lot
Only a birdhouse survived.
Just hanging a tub under the well ...
Where are you, my native village?
Where is this street, where is this house,
Where is this young lady all in blue?
And the voice-over voice, like the voice of fate, answers him that his family was killed by the German occupiers, that the house was burned and that these monsters "Nastya, the bride, were taken away with them." And what remains to the soldier? Revenge, revenge and avenge again!
... But what is the power of a simple propaganda song with words written on someone else's motive! More than seventy years have passed since I heard them in a crowded wall of women, old people, old women and children of the village chapel, from whose peeling walls the gospel faces were looking at us! But I remember these words for life and still they excite me ...
Information