Alexander trifonovich tvardovsky short biography is the most important thing. Tvardovsky Alexander Trifonovich short biography

Alexander was born on June 8 (21), 1910 in the Smolensk province of the Russian Empire. It is surprising that in the biography of Tvardovsky the first poem was written so early that the boy could not even write it down, because he was not literate. The love for literature appeared in childhood: Alexander's father liked to read aloud at home the works of famous writers Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Nikitin.

Already at the age of 14 he wrote several poems and poems on topical topics. When collectivization and dispossession took place in the country, the poet supported the process (he expressed utopian ideas in the poems "Country of the Ant" (1934-36), "The Path to Socialism" (1931)). In 1939, when the war with Finland began, A.T. Tvardovsky, as a member of the Communist Party, participated in the unification of the USSR and Belarus. Then he settled in Voronezh, continued to compose, worked in the newspaper "Red Army".

Creativity of the writer

The most famous work of Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was the poem "Vasily Terkin". The poem brought great success to the author, because it was very relevant in wartime. The subsequent creative period in Tvardovsky's life was filled with philosophical thoughts, which can be traced in the lyrics of the 1960s. Tvardovsky began working in the Novy Mir magazine, completely revised his views on Stalin's policy.

In 1961, under the impression of Alexander Tvardovsky's speech at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave him his story "Sch-854" (later called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"). Tvardovsky, being at that time the editor of the magazine, rated the story extremely highly, invited the author to Moscow and began to seek Khrushchev's permission to publish this work.

At the end of the 60s, a significant event took place in the biography of Alexander Tvardovsky - the campaign of Glavlit against the Novy Mir magazine began. When the author was forced to leave the editorial office in 1970, part of the team left with him. The magazine was, in short, destroyed.

Death and legacy

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky died of lung cancer on December 18, 1971, and was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Streets in Moscow, Voronezh, Novosibirsk, Smolensk are named after the famous writer. A school was named in his honor and a monument was erected in Moscow.

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1910 - 1971 Russian poet, editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine (1950 - 54, 1958 - 70). The poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-45) is a vivid embodiment of the Russian character and popular feelings of the era of the Great Patriotic War. In the poem "For the distance - the distance" (1953 - 60, Lenin Prize, 1961) and lyrics (book "From the lyrics of these years. 1959 - 67)", 1967) - reflections on the movement of time, the duty of the artist, about life and death . In the poem "Terkin in the Other World" (1963) - a satirical image of the bureaucratic deadening of being. In the final poem-confession "By the Right of Memory" (published in 1987) - the pathos of the uncompromising truth about the time of Stalinism, about the tragic inconsistency of the spiritual world of a person of this time. The poems "Country Ant" (1936), "House by the road" (1946); prose, critical articles. Tvardovsky's lyrical epic enriched and actualized the traditions of Russian classical poetry. State Prizes of the USSR (1941, 1946, 1947, 1971).

Biography

Born on June 8 (21 n.s.) in the village of Zagorye, Smolensk province, in the family of a blacksmith, a literate and even well-read man, in whose house a book was not uncommon. The first acquaintance with Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Nekrasov took place at home, when these books were read aloud on winter evenings. Poems began to write very early. He studied at a rural school. At the age of fourteen, the future poet began to send small notes to the Smolensk newspapers, some of them were printed. Then he ventured to send poetry as well. Isakovsky, who worked in the editorial office of the Rabochy Put newspaper, received the young poet, helped him not only to be published, but also to form as a poet, and influenced him with his poetry.

After graduating from a rural school, the young poet came to Smolensk, but could not get a job, not only to study, but also to work, because he had no specialty. I had to exist "on a penny literary earnings and beat the thresholds of editorial offices." When Svetlov published Tvardovsky's poems in the Moscow magazine Oktyabr, he came to Moscow, but "it turned out to be about the same as with Smolensk."

In the winter of 1930, he again returned to Smolensk, where he spent six years. "It is to these years that I owe my poetic birth," Tvardovsky later said. At this time, he entered the Pedagogical Institute, but left the third year and completed his studies at the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature (MIFLI), where he entered in the fall of 1936.

Tvardovsky's works were published in 1931 - 1933, but he himself believed that only with the poem about collectivization "Country Ant" (1936) did he begin as a writer. The poem was a success with readers and critics. The release of this book changed the life of the poet: he moved to Moscow, graduated from MIFLI in 1939, and published a book of poems, Rural Chronicle.

In 1939 the poet was drafted into the Red Army and participated in the liberation of Western Belarus. With the beginning of the war with Finland, already in the rank of officer, he was in the position of a special correspondent for a military newspaper.

During the Great Patriotic War, the poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-45) was written - a vivid embodiment of the Russian character and the nationwide patriotic feeling. According to Tvardovsky, "Terkin was ... my lyrics, my journalism, a song and a lesson, an anecdote and a saying, a heart-to-heart talk and a remark to the occasion."

Almost simultaneously with "Terkin" and the poems of the "Frontline Chronicle", the poet began the poem "House by the Road" (1946), completed after the war.

In 1950-60, the poem "Beyond the Distance - the Distance" was written, and in 1967 - 1969 - the poem "By the Right of Memory", which tells the truth about the fate of the poet's father, who became a victim of collectivization, forbidden by censorship, published only in 1987.

Along with poetry, Tvardovsky always wrote prose. In 1947 a book about the past war was published under the general title Motherland and Abroad.

He also showed himself as a deep, insightful critic: the books "Articles and Notes on Literature" (1961), "The Poetry of Mikhail Isakovsky" (1969), articles on the work of S. Marshak, I. Bunin (1965).

For many years, Tvardovsky was the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine, courageously defending the right to publish every talented work that came to the editorial office. His help and support affected the creative biographies of such writers as Abramov, Bykov, Aitmatov, Zalygin, Troepolsktsy, Molsaev, Solzhenitsyn and others.

, THE USSR

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky(June 8 (21), 1910, Zagorye farm, Smolensk province, Russian Empire - December 18, 1971, Vatutinki, Krasnaya Pakhra, Moscow region, USSR) - Soviet writer and poet.

Editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine (1950-1954; 1958-1970). Laureate 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 on the Zagorye farm near the village of Seltso (now in the 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 few acres - all in small swamps and all overgrown with willow, spruce, birch, was in every sense unenviable. 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 installment in the bank, this land was a road to holiness. From a very young age, he inspired us, children, with 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 to his son. This nickname (in reality, not associated with a noble origin) made Trifon Gordeevich perceive himself more as a one-palace than a peasant.

By the way, he wore a hat, which in our area was strange and even somewhat of a challenge, and he did not allow us children to wear bast shoes, although because of this it happened to run barefoot until late autumn. In general, many things in our life were “not like people”.

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. Poems Alexander began to compose early, while still being illiterate, and not being able to write them down. The first poem was an angry denunciation of the boys, the destroyers of bird nests.

At the age of 14, Tvardovsky began to write small notes in Smolensk newspapers, and then, having collected several poems, he brought them to Mikhail Isakovsky, who worked in the editorial office of the Rabochy Put newspaper. Isakovsky met the poet cordially, 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 "Country Ant" (1934-1936) he depicted collectivization and dreams of a "new" village, as well as Stalin riding a horse as a harbinger of a brighter future.

Despite the fact that Tvardovsky's parents, along with his brothers, were dispossessed and exiled, and his farm was burned down by his fellow villagers, he himself supported the collectivization of peasant farms.

Finnish war

Member of the CPSU (b) since 1938. He participated as a commissar in the annexation of Western Belarus to the USSR and in the Soviet-Finnish war. Participated 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 the newspaper of the South-Western Front "Red Army". The poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-1945), "a book about a fighter without beginning or end" is Tvardovsky's most famous work; This is a chain of episodes from the Great Patriotic War. The poem is notable for its simple and precise style, energetic development of the action. Episodes are connected with each other only by the main character - the author proceeded from the fact that both he and his reader can 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 lines. The poem became one of the attributes of front-line life - as a result of which Tvardovsky became a cult author of the military generation.

Among other things, "Vasily Terkin" stands out among other works of that time by the complete absence of 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 poems "The Hour Has Come" were published in the newspaper. One of the poems of the poet of that time is dedicated to the field kitchen. "Effective - what to say - There was the same old man who came up with the idea of ​​​​cooking soup On wheels right!" The poem "At rest" 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 protagonist was invented in 1939 for a 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 of the Great Patriotic War.

In the poem “For the distance - the distance”, written at the peak of the Khrushchev “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 artist's duty, life and death. In this poem, such an ideological side of the life and work of Tvardovsky as "sovereignty" was most clearly expressed. But, in contrast to the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, the cult of a strong state, power in Tvardovsky's work is not associated with the cult of any statesman and, in general, a specific form of the state. This position helped Tvardovsky to be his own among the Russophiles - admirers of the Russian Empire.

"New world"

During the second period of Tvardovsky's editorship in Novy Mir, especially after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the journal became a haven for anti-Stalinist forces in literature, a symbol of the Sixties, an organ of legal opposition to Soviet power.

In the 1960s, Tvardovsky, in the poems “By the Right of Memory” (published in 1987) and “Torkin in the Other 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.

The new direction of the magazine (liberalism in art, ideology and economics, hiding behind the words about socialism "with a human face") caused dissatisfaction not so much with the Khrushchev-Brezhnev party elite and officials of the ideological departments, as with the so-called "neo-Stalinist-statesmen" in Soviet literature. For several years, there was a sharp literary (and actually ideological) controversy between the magazines Novy Mir and Oktyabr (chief editor V. A. Kochetov, author of the novel What Do You Want?, which was also directed against Tvardovsky). The persistent ideological rejection of the magazine was also expressed by the patriots-"sovereigns".

After Khrushchev was removed from top positions in the press (the Ogonyok magazine, the Socialist Industry newspaper), a campaign was launched against the Novy Mir magazine. Glavlit waged a bitter struggle with the journal, systematically preventing the most important materials from being printed. Since the leadership of the Union of Writers did not dare to formally dismiss Tvardovsky, the last measure of pressure on the journal 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 his editorial powers, part of the magazine's staff followed his example. The editorial board was essentially destroyed. The KGB note “Materials about the moods of the poet A. Tvardovsky” on behalf of Andropov was sent on September 7, 1970 to the Central Committee of the CPSU.

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 classical forms of realism. Many of the greatest writers of the 1960s published in the journal, and many were opened to the reader by the journal. For example, in 1964, a large selection of poems by the Voronezh poet Alexei Prasolov was published in the August issue.

Shortly after the defeat of Novy Mir, Tvardovsky was diagnosed with lung cancer. The writer died on December 18, 1971 in the dacha 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 stamped envelope was published in honor of the writer.
• In Smolensk, Voronezh, Novosibirsk, Balashikha and Moscow streets are named after Tvardovsky.
• The name of Tvardovsky was given to the Moscow school number 279.
• Aeroflot aircraft Airbus A330-343E VQ-BEK was named in honor of A. Tvardovsky.
• In 1988, the memorial estate museum "A. T. Tvardovsky on the farm Zagorye»
• On June 22, 2013, a monument to Tvardovsky was unveiled in Moscow on Strastnoy Boulevard next to the editorial office of the Novy Mir magazine. The authors are People's Artist of Russia Vladimir Surovtsev and Honored Architect of Russia Viktor Pasenko. At the same time, there was an incident: \"with the participation of the Ministry of Culture \" was engraved on the granite of the monument with the second letter "t" missing.

Awards and prizes

• Stalin Prize of the second degree (1941) - for the poem "Country Ant" (1936)
• Stalin Prize of the first degree (1946) - for the poem "Vasily Terkin" (1941-1945)
• Stalin Prize of the second degree (1947) - for the poem "The House by the Road" (1946)
• Lenin Prize (1961) - for the poem "For the distance - distance" (1953-1960)
• USSR State Prize (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 class (1945)
• Order of the Patriotic War II degree (1944)
• Order of the Red Star

Autobiography

I was born in the Smolensk region, in 1910, on the "farm of the wasteland of Stolpovo," as the papers called the piece of land acquired by my father, Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky, through the Land Peasant Bank with payment in installments. This land - ten and a few acres - all in small swamps - "frills", as we called them - and all overgrown with willow, spruce, birch, was in every sense unenviable. 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 installment in the bank, this land was a road to holiness. And to us, children, from a very young age, he inspired 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 from the land. But every now and then he had to turn to the hammer: to rent someone else's forge and anvil in the waste, working half-heartedly.

In the life of our family there were occasional gaps in terms of prosperity, but in general life was poor and difficult, and perhaps even more difficult because our surname in ordinary everyday life was also supplied with a jokingly benevolent or ironic addition "pan", as if obliging the father to stretch with all his might to somehow justify it. By the way, he wore a hat, which in our area was strange and even somewhat of a challenge, and he did not allow us children to wear bast shoes, although because of this it happened to run barefoot until late autumn. In general, much in our life was "not like people."

My father was a literate man and even well-read in a village way. The book was not uncommon in our household. We often spent whole winter evenings reading a book aloud. My first acquaintance with "Poltava" and "Dubrovsky" by Pushkin, "Taras Bulba" by Gogol, the most popular poems by Lermontov, Nekrasov, A. K. Tolstoy, Nikitin happened in this way. My father knew many poems by heart: "Borodino", "Prince Kurbsky", almost all of Ershov's "Humpbacked Horse". In addition, he loved and knew how to sing - from a young age he even excelled in the church choir. Finding out that the words of the well-known "Korobushka" were 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 hostess in a large large family. She was touched to tears by the sound of a shepherd's trumpet somewhere far away 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 mastering the initial reading and writing. I remember well that I tried to write down my first poem, denouncing my peers, the destroyers of bird nests, not yet knowing all the letters of the alphabet and, of course, having no idea about the rules of versification. There was no fret, no row - nothing from the verse, but I clearly remember that there was a passionate, heart-beating desire for all this - and fret, and row, and music - the desire to give birth to them into the world and immediately - a feeling that accompanies every thought to this day. That you can compose poetry yourself, I understood from the fact that our distant city relative on the maternal side, a lame schoolboy, who was staying with us during the famine in the summer, somehow read, at the request of his father, poems of his own composition "Autumn":

Leaves have long since fallen
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 verses that sounded like from a book.

Since then I have been writing. Of the first verses 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
Went home from Voznov.
I was a little cowardly
And the road was terrible.
On the lawn between the willows
Shupen old was killed...

It was about a lonely grave in the middle of the road from the village of Kovalevo, where our relative Mikhailo Voznov lived. Buried in it was a certain Shupen, who was once killed in that place. And although there were no willows 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 anxiety to the fact that I began to compose poetry. This was flattering to my father, but he knew from books that writing does not promise great benefits, that there are writers who are not famous, penniless, living in attics and starving. Mother, seeing my commitment to such unusual pursuits, sensed in her a certain sad predestination of my fate and pitied me.

At the age of thirteen, I once showed my poems to a young teacher. Not joking at all, he said that it was no good to write like that now: everything is clear to the word, but it is necessary that it be impossible to understand from any end what and about what is written in verse, such are modern literary requirements. He showed me magazines with some samples of the then - early twenties - poetry. For some time I stubbornly sought incomprehensibility in my poems. For a long time I did not succeed, and then I experienced, perhaps, the first bitter doubt in my time about my abilities. I remember that I finally wrote something so incomprehensible from any end that I can’t remember a single line from it and I don’t even know what it was about. I only remember the fact of writing something like that.

In the summer of 1924, I began to send small notes to the editors of the Smolensk newspapers. He wrote about faulty bridges, about Komsomol subbotniks, about abuses by local authorities, etc. Occasionally, notes were printed. This made me, an ordinary rural Komsomol member, a significant person in the eyes of my peers and, in general, the surrounding residents. I was approached with complaints, with proposals to write about this and that, to “stretch” such and such in the newspaper ... Then I ventured to send poetry. My first printed poem "New Hut" appeared in the newspaper "Smolensk Village". It started like this:

Smells like fresh pine resin
The yellowish walls are shining.
We will live well with spring
Here in a new, Soviet way.

After that, having collected about a dozen poems, I went to Smolensk to M. V. Isakovsky, who worked there in the editorial office of the Rabochy Put newspaper. He received me cordially, selected some of the poems, called an artist who sketched me, and soon a newspaper came to the village with poems and a portrait of the "village poet A. Tvardovsky."

M. Isakovsky, a fellow countryman, and later a friend, I owe a lot in my development. He is the only one of the Soviet poets whose direct influence on me I always recognize and consider that it was beneficial for me. In the poems of my fellow countryman, I saw that the subject of poetry can and should be the life of the Soviet village surrounding me, our unpretentious Smolensk nature, my own world of impressions, feelings, spiritual attachments. The example of his poetry turned me in my youthful experiences to an essential objective theme, to the desire to tell and speak in verse about something interesting not only for me, but also for those simple people, not experienced in the literary sense, among whom I continued to live. To all this, of course, a reservation is necessary that I wrote then very badly, helplessly studently, imitatively.

In the development and growth of my literary generation, it seems to me that the most difficult and for many disastrous thing was that we, being drawn into literary work, its specific interests, appearing in the press and even becoming, very early, professional writers, remained people without any any serious general culture, no education. Superficial erudition, a certain awareness of the "little secrets" of the trade, nurtured dangerous illusions in us.

My education was interrupted in essence with the end of a rural school. The years assigned for normal and consistent study are gone. When I was eighteen years old, I came to Smolensk, where I could not get a job for a long time, not only to study, but even to work - at that time it was still not easy, especially since I had no specialty. Involuntarily, I had to take a penny literary income as a source of existence and beat the thresholds 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 childish hopes, but I did not earn much more than in Smolensk, and I lived in corners, beds, loitered around the editorial offices, and I was more and more noticeably carried somewhere away from direct and difficult path of real study, real life. In the winter of 1930, I returned to Smolensk and lived there for six or seven years until the poem "Country of the Ant" appeared in print.

This period is the most decisive and significant in my literary destiny. These were the years of the great reconstruction of the countryside on the basis of collectivization, and this time was for me the same as for the older generation - the October Revolution and the Civil War. Everything that happened then in the village concerned me in the most intimate way in the everyday, social, moral and ethical sense. It is to these years that I owe my poetic birth. In Smolensk, I finally set to work on a normal study. With the help of kind people, I entered the Pedagogical Institute without admission tests, but with the obligation to pass in the first year all the necessary subjects for a secondary school in which I did not study. In the very first year I managed to equalize with my classmates, successfully complete the second year, I left the third year due to circumstances and finished my studies already at the Moscow Historical and Philosophical Institute, where I entered in the fall of the thirty-sixth year.

These years of study and work in Smolensk have forever marked a high spiritual uplift for me. By no comparison could I exaggerate the joy I experienced then for the first time in joining the world of ideas and images that opened up to me from the pages of books about the existence of which I had no idea before. But, perhaps, all this would have been for me "passing through" the institute program, 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 countryside. Breaking away from books and studies, I traveled to collective farms as a correspondent for regional editorial offices, delved with passion into everything that constituted the new system of rural life that was taking shape for the first time, wrote newspaper articles and kept all sorts of notes, marking for myself something new with each trip, what was revealed to me in the complex and majestic process of the reconstruction of the village.

Around this time, I completely forgot how to write poetry, as I wrote them before, I experienced an extreme disgust for "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 the then poetic everyday life.

My poem "The Path to Socialism", titled after the name of the collective farm in question, was a conscious attempt to speak in verse with the usual words for colloquial, business, by no means "poetic" use:

In one of the rooms of the former manor house
Oats are poured up to the very windows.
The windows were smashed during the pogrom
And shields hung with straw,
So that the oats do not germinate
From the sun and damp indoors.
On the common grain of the cookie is stored.

The poem, published in 1931 by the Young Guard publishing house as a separate book, was received positively in the press, but I could not help but feel for myself that such poems - riding with the reins lowered - are the loss of the rhythmic discipline of verse, in other words, prose. But I could no longer return to poetry in the former, familiar spirit. I dreamed of new possibilities in the organization of verse from its elements included in living speech - from turns and rhythms of proverbs, sayings, sayings. My second poem "Introduction", published in Smolensk in 1933, was a tribute to just such a one-sided search for the "naturalness" of the verse:

Fedot lived in the world,
There was a joke about him:
- Fedot, what is the threshing?
- Just like last year.
- What is the slope?
- Almost a whole cart.
- What about salo?
The cat stole...

In terms of material, content, even outlined images, both of these poems preceded "The Land of the Ant", written in 1934-1936. But for this new piece of mine, I had to, through my own difficult experience, lose faith in the possibility of a verse that loses its basic natural principles: a musical-song basis, energy of expression, a special emotional coloring.

A close acquaintance with examples of great domestic and world poetry and prose gave me such a "discovery" as the legitimacy of conventionality in the depiction of reality by means of art. The conventions of at least a fantastic plot, the exaggeration and displacement of the details of the living world in a work of art, ceased to seem to me relic moments of art, contrary to the realism of the image. And the fact that I carried in my soul what I personally observed and obtained from life drove me to new work, to new searches. What I know about life - it seemed to me then - I know better, more detailed and more reliable than all those 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.

From the "Country of the Ant", which met with an approving reception from the reader and critics, I begin to count my writings, which can characterize me as a writer. The publication of this book was the cause of 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 autumn of 1939, I was drafted into the ranks of the Red Army and participated in the liberation campaign of 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 the rank of officer, 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 the fortieth year to some extent foreshadowed for me the actual military impressions of the Great Patriotic War. And my participation in the creation of the feuilleton character "Vasya Terkin" in the newspaper "On Guard of the Motherland" (LVO) is essentially the beginning of my main literary work during the years of 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 even more so military campaigns.

"A book about a fighter", whatever its actual literary significance, during the war years was a true happiness for me: it gave me a sense of the obvious usefulness of my work, a feeling of complete freedom to deal with verse and word in a naturally formed, unconstrained form of presentation. "Terkin" was for me in the relationship of the poet with his reader - a warring Soviet man - my lyrics, my journalism, a song and a lesson, an anecdote and a saying, a heart-to-heart talk 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 to write during the war, but finished 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 the lines taken from it:

Come on people never
Let's not forget this...

Along with poetry, I always wrote prose - correspondence, essays, stories, even before the "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 short stories under the general title "Motherland and Abroad".

In recent years, he wrote little, published about 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. He also traveled around his native country on business trips to the Urals, Transbaikalia and the Far East. The impressions of these trips should form the material of my new works in verse and prose.

In 1947 he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in the Vyaznikovsky district of the Vladimir region; in 1951 - in Nizhnedevitsky, Voronezh region.

Since the beginning of 1950, I have been working as the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine.

Brief biography of Alexander Tvardovsky

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky - Soviet writer and poet, winner of many awards, editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine. Tvardovsky was born on June 8 (21), 1910 in the Smolensk province on the Zagorye farm. The writer's family, although peasant, always had a lot of books. Therefore, Alexander quite early became addicted to them and began to write poetry. At the age of 14, he already left his notes in newspapers. M. V. Isakovsky liked his works, who became a good friend and mentor of the young poet.

In 1931, his first poem appeared in print, entitled "The Path to Socialism." By that time, the entire family of the writer was dispossessed, and his native farm was burned down. Despite this, he supported collectivization and Stalin's ideas. Since 1938 he became a member of the CPSU (b). A year later, he was drafted into the Red Army, and also participated in the Finnish War as a war correspondent. During the Great Patriotic War, the most famous poem of the writer, Vasily Terkin, was published. This poem became the embodiment of the Russian character and national patriotism.

In 1946, Tvardovsky finished work on the poem "House by the Road". In the 1960s, the writer wrote the poem "By the Right of Memory", where he told the whole truth about the life of his father and the consequences of collectivization. This poem until 1987 was banned for publication by censors. Along with poetry, the writer was also fond of prose. So, in 1947, his book about the past war "Motherland and Foreign Land" was published. In the 1960s, the poet showed himself as a professional critic and wrote articles about the work of S. Marshak, M. Isakovsky, I. Bunin.

For many years, Tvardovsky was the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine. He boldly defended the rights of talented writers and their works. With his help, the works of such writers as Aitmatov, Solzhenitsyn, Abramov and others were allowed to print. In 1970, the writer was forced to leave the post of editor. Most of the team left with him. A. T. Tvardovsky died on December 18, 1971 from lung cancer. The poet was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.