Demyan Bedny (1883-1945)

Demyan Bedny (real name - Efim Aleksandrovich Pridvorov) was born in the village of Gubovka, Kherson province, into the family of a peasant, a church watchman. In 1890 - 1896. studied at a rural school, after graduation he entered the Kyiv military paramedic school. As the best student, he was introduced to the inspector-trustee of military institutions, who was then the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, also known as the Russian poet K.R. After graduating from college, E. Pri-dvorov was appointed to serve in the military infirmary in Elizavetgrad, where he worked for almost three years (from 1900 to 1903). Thanks to the patronage of the Grand Duke ( K. R.) as an exception, he was allowed in 1904 to take exams externally for a gymnasium course so that a gifted young man could continue his studies at a higher educational institution. In the same 1904, D. Poor entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. The title of a real student of St. Petersburg University guaranteed him the right to live in the capital (until 1914) and engage in literary activities.

For the first time his poems appeared in the newspaper "Kievskoye Slovo" in 1889, he began to actively engage in literary work in 1909, collaborating with the populist magazine "Russian Wealth". Since 1911, the poet began close cooperation with the Bolshevik press (the newspapers Zvezda and Pravda). In the "Star" was published his poem " About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant”, where the literary name of the poet was first heard. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1912. Permanent contributor to Pravda (in the first issue his poem "Our cup is full of suffering ..." was placed). During the years of work in Pravda, the main features of his work are formed, the genres of his poetry, the characteristic features of the verse are determined. The satirical fable becomes the main genre, its fable verse is largely associated with the traditions of folk satire, the popular print. It was a satire primarily political, journalistic. She absorbed the features of a feuilleton, a pamphlet, a proclamation. An enormous political role was played by the poetry of Demyan Bedny during the years of the civil war. Agitational in its orientation, expressed in the form of a ditty, a song, a pathetic, pathetic poem, accessible to the general public, it was distributed in large numbers with colorful caricatures and cartoons. He acted as a propagandist and agitator both in the post-revolutionary years and during the years of the Great Patriotic War. The language of Demyan Bedny's poetry relied primarily on the colloquial traditions of the broad masses. His speech is replete with rudely mocking, biting turns, proverbs, agreements. Demyan Poor also turned to the long narrative form. During the First World War, he wrote a story in verse " About the land, about the will, about the working share».

V. I. Lenin, who “strongly and repeatedly emphasized the propaganda significance of Demyan Bedny”, according to the memoirs of M. Gorky, also complained that the poet-agitator “follows the reader, but one must be a little ahead” . Apparently, for this sluggishness, D. Poor was expelled from the party in 1938. In 1956, D. Poor was reinstated in the party posthumously.

Demyan Bedny(real name Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov; April 1, 1883, Gubovka, Alexandria district, Kherson province - May 25, 1945, Moscow) - Russian Soviet writer, poet, publicist and public figure. Member of the RSDLP(b) since 1912.

Biography
Career
E. A. Pridvorov was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka (now the Alexandria district of the Kirovograd region of Ukraine) in a peasant family.
Having experienced in childhood the great influence of his uncle, a popular accuser and an atheist, he took his village nickname as a pseudonym. This pseudonym was first mentioned in his poem “About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant” (1911).
In 1896-1900 he studied at the Kyiv military medical school, in 1904-08. at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University. The first poems were published in 1899. They were written in the spirit of official monarchist "patriotism" or romance "lyrics". Member of the RSDLP since 1912, from the same year he published in Pravda. The first book "Fables" was published in 1913, later he wrote a large number of fables, songs, ditties and poems of other genres.
During the Civil War, he conducted propaganda work in the ranks of the Red Army. In his poems of those years, he extolled Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky praised Demyan Bedny as "a Bolshevik of a poetic kind of weapon" and in April 1923 awarded him the Order of the Red Banner (the first award for literary activity in the USSR).
Total circulation of books D. Poor in the 1920s amounted to over two million copies. The poet was declared a classic during his lifetime, People's Commissar A. V. Lunacharsky praised him as a great writer, equal to Maxim Gorky, and the head of the RAPP L. L. Averbakh called for "widespread denigration of Soviet literature."
During the inner-party struggle of 1926-1930, he began to actively and consistently defend the line of I.V. Stalin, for which he received various blessings in life, including an apartment in the Kremlin and regular invitations to meetings with the party leadership. A collection of his works began to be published (interrupted at volume 19). Creativity Demyan Bedny A number of publications were devoted to it: only A. Efremin, one of the editors of the collected works, published the books “Demyan Poor at School” (1926), “Demyan Poor and the Art of Agitation” (1927), “Demyan Poor on the Anti-Church Front” (1927 ) and Thunder Poetry (1929).
Demyan Bedny was a major bibliophile, well versed in the history of the book, collected one of the largest private libraries in the USSR (over 30 thousand volumes).
Opala (1930-1938)
On December 6, 1930, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, by its decree, condemned Poor's poetic feuilletons "Get off the stove" and "Without mercy", published in Pravda, for anti-Russian attacks. Demyan complained to Stalin, but received a sharply critical letter in response:
What is the essence of your mistakes? It consists in the fact that criticism of the shortcomings of the life and life of the USSR, criticism that is obligatory and necessary, developed by you at first quite aptly and skillfully, carried you away beyond measure and, having carried you away, began to develop in your works into slander on the USSR, on its past, on its present ... [You] began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past was a vessel of abomination and desolation ... that "laziness" and the desire to "sit on the stove" is almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers who, having done the October Revolution, of course, they did not cease to be Russian. And this is what you call Bolshevik criticism! No, highly esteemed Comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism, but slander against our people, debunking the USSR, debunking the proletariat of the USSR, debunking the Russian proletariat.
- Stalin's letter to Demyan Bedny
After criticism of the leader Poor began to write emphatically party poems and fables (“Wonderful Collective”, “Hedgehog”, etc.). In the poems of the 1930s, Demyan constantly quotes Stalin, and also uses Stalin's words as epigraphs. He enthusiastically welcomed the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: “Under the crowbars of the workers it turns into rubbish / The ugliest temple, an unbearable shame” (1931, Epoch). In the poems "No Mercy!" (1936) and Truth. The Heroic Poem (1937) mercilessly branded Trotsky and the Trotskyists, calling them Jews, bandits and fascists. By the 50th anniversary (1933), the poet was awarded the Order of Lenin.
However, party criticism Demyan continued, at the 1st Congress of Soviet Writers he was accused of political backwardness and struck off the list of those awarded orders. In 1935, a new scandal and great dissatisfaction with Stalin was caused by a notebook found by the NKVD with records of insulting characteristics that Demyan gave to prominent figures of the party and government. In 1936, the poet wrote the libretto for the comic opera Bogatyrs (about the baptism of Russia), which outraged Molotov, who attended the performance, and then Stalin. The Arts Committee in a special resolution (November 15, 1936) sharply condemned the performance as unpatriotic. Stalin, in a letter to the editors of Pravda, regarded the performance as "literary rubbish" containing "stupid and transparent" criticism not of the fascist, but of the Soviet system.
Last years (1938-1945)
In July 1938 Demyan Bedny was expelled from the party and from the Writers' Union with the wording "moral decay". He was no longer printed, but the objects that bore his name were not renamed.
Demyan Poor, who fell into disgrace, was in poverty, was forced to sell his library and furniture. He composed new praises of Lenin-Stalin, but in a conversation with relatives he spoke extremely negatively about the leader and the rest of the party elite. Stalin knew about this, but did not subject the poet to repression this time either.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, publications resumed, first under the pseudonym D. Fighting, then towards the end of the war, under the original pseudonym. In anti-fascist poems and fables, Bedny, in complete contradiction with his previous works, urged the brothers to "remember the old days", claimed that he believed "in his people" and at the same time continued to praise Stalin. Demyan's new "poems" remained unnoticed. He did not manage to return both the former position and the location of the leader.
D. Poor died May 25, 1945. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (plot No. 2). The last critical party resolution concerning the poet was issued posthumously. On February 24, 1952, two collections by D. Bednoy (“Selected”, 1950 and “Native Army”, 1951) were subjected to an ideological defeat for “gross political distortions”: as it turned out, these editions included the original versions of Bedny’s works instead of later ones, politically recycled. In 1956, Demyan Bedny was posthumously reinstated in the CPSU.
Awards
Order of the Red Banner, 1923
Order of Lenin, 1933
Memory
Bednodemyanovsk was the name of the city of Spassk in the Penza region in 1925-2005.
Demyan Bedny, Demyanovsky rural settlement, Zherdevsky district, Tambov region.
Demyan Bedny Islands (discovered in 1931).
Motor ship "Demyan Poor"
The name of Demyan Bedny was given to the streets in many cities of the former USSR, including:
Russia: Belgorod, Vladimir, Volgograd, Donetsk (Rostov region), Ivanovo, Izhevsk, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow (Khoroshevo-Mnevniki), Novosibirsk, Omsk, St. Petersburg, Torzhok, Tomilino, Tomsk, Tyumen, Ufa, Khabarovsk , Chernyakhovsk, Kaliningrad region, Yaroslavl
Ukraine: Kyiv, Genichesk, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kirovograd, Korosten, Kremenchug, Kharkiv.
Belarus: Minsk, Gomel.
Kazakhstan: Almaty, Aktobe, Karaganda.
Interesting Facts
Demyan Bedny participated in the persecution of M. A. Bulgakov. There is also an entry in Bulgakov’s diary: “Vasilevsky said that Demyan Bedny, speaking to a meeting of Red Army soldiers, said:“ My mother was bl..b ... ””.
The execution of F. E. Kaplan took place in the presence of Demyan Bedny, who asked to see the execution in order to get an “impulse” in his work. The victim's corpse was doused with gasoline and burned in an iron barrel in the Alexander Garden.
Responses in literature
Demyan Bedny is present as a character in V.P. Aksenov's novel "The Moscow Saga".
Message to the "evangelist" Demyan
In April - May 1925, two Soviet newspapers, Pravda and Bednota, published an anti-religious poem Demyan Bedny"The New Testament without a Defect by the Evangelist Demyan", written in a mocking and mocking manner. In 1925-1926, a vivid poetic response to this poem called “Message to the Evangelist Demyan”, signed by the name of S. A. Yesenin, began to spread in Moscow. Later, in the summer of 1926, the OGPU arrested the poet Nikolai Gorbachev, who confessed to the authorship of the poem. However, neither his biographical data nor literary work gave grounds to consider him the real author of the work.
Here are a few lines from the "Message to the Evangelist Demyan":
I often think why he was executed,
Why did he sacrifice his head
For the fact that, the enemy of Saturdays, He is against all rot
Have you raised your voice boldly?
Is it because the proconsul Pilate is in the country,
Where the cult of Caesar is full of both light and shadow,
He is with a bunch of fishermen from poor villages
For Caesar recognized only the power of gold?
...
No, you, Demyan, did not offend Christ,
You didn't touch him with your pen in the least.
There was a thief, Judas was.
You just weren't enough.
You are blood clots at the Cross
He dug his nostril like a fat boar.
You only grunted at Christ,
Efim Lakeevich Pridvorov.
There is an assumption that the events associated with the "New Testament without a flaw of Evangelist Demyan" and "Message ..." served as one of the impetuses for M. A. Bulgakov to write the novel "The Master and Margarita", and Demyan Bedny became one of the prototypes of Ivan Bezdomny.

Demyan Bedny (real name Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov; April 1, 1883, Gubovka, Alexandria district, Kherson province - May 25, 1945, Moscow) - Russian Soviet writer, poet, essayist and public figure. Member of the RSDLP(b) since 1912.

E. A. Pridvorov was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka (now the Alexandria district of the Kirovograd region of Ukraine) into a peasant family.

Having experienced in childhood the great influence of his uncle, a popular accuser and an atheist, he took his village nickname as a pseudonym.

This pseudonym was also mentioned in his poem "About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant."

In 1896-1900 he studied at the military paramedic school, in 1904-08 - at the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University. The first poems were published in 1899. They were written in the spirit of official monarchist "patriotism" or romance "lyrics". Member of the RSDLP since 1912, from the same year he published in Pravda. The first book "Fables" was published in 1913. During the Civil War, he conducted propaganda work in the ranks of the Red Army, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1923 (the first award for literary activity in the USSR). In his poems of those years, he extolled Lenin and Trotsky.

During the inner-party struggle of 1926-1930, he began to actively and consistently defend the line of I.V. Stalin, for which he received various blessings in life, including an apartment in the Kremlin and regular invitations to meetings with the party leadership. Demyan Bedny was a major bibliophile, well versed in the history of the book, collected one of the largest private libraries in the USSR (over 30 thousand volumes). The complete collection of his works began to be published (interrupted at volume 19). In the 1920s a large number of brochures with his agitation poems were published in mass circulation in the capitals and provinces.

In 1930, Demyan Bedny was increasingly criticized for anti-Russian sentiments (expressed in his feuilletons “Get off the stove”, “Without mercy”, etc.).

After criticizing the leader, Bedny began to write emphatically party poems and fables (“Wonderful Collective Wonder”, “Hedgehog”, etc.). In the poems of the 1930s, Demyan constantly quotes Stalin, and also uses Stalin's words as epigraphs. A new scandal and great dissatisfaction with Stalin was caused by a notebook found by the NKVD with records of insulting characteristics that the drunken Demyan gave to prominent figures of the party and government.

In 1936, the poet wrote the libretto for the comic opera Bogatyrs (about the baptism of Russia), which outraged Molotov, who attended the performance, and then Stalin. The Arts Committee, in a special resolution, sharply condemned the performance as unpatriotic. In 1938, Demyan Bedny was expelled from the party and from the Writers' Union with the wording "moral decay". He was no longer printed, but nevertheless, the objects that bore his name (the city of Bednodemyanovsk) were not renamed. Demyan Poor, who fell into disgrace, was in poverty and was forced to sell his library. He composed new praises of Lenin-Stalin, but in a conversation with relatives he spoke extremely negatively about the leader and the rest of the party elite. Stalin knew about this, but did not subject the poet to repression this time either.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, publications resumed, first under the pseudonym D. Fighting, then towards the end of the war, under the original pseudonym. In "military" poems and fables, Bedny completely contradicted his works written in the 1930s, urged the brothers to "remember the old days", claimed that he believed "in his people" and at the same time continued to praise Stalin. Demyan's new "poems" remained unnoticed. He did not manage to return both the former position and the location of the leader.

The last critical party resolution concerning the poet was issued posthumously: on February 24, 1952, the 1950 and 1951 editions of D. Bedny were subjected to an ideological destruction for "gross political distortions": these editions included the original versions of Bedny's works instead of later, politically revised ones. In 1956, Demyan Bedny was posthumously reinstated in the CPSU.

D. B. was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village. Gubovka, Alexandria Uyezd, Kherson Province. This is a large Ukrainian village, cut through by the Ingul River, which separates the left - Ukrainian part of the village from the right, which has long been occupied by military settlers. Grandfather D. B., Sofron Fedorovich Pridvorov, still remembered the times of settlement well. Mother, Ekaterina Kuzminichna, was a Ukrainian Cossack woman from the village of Kamenki. An exceptionally beautiful, tough, cruel and promiscuous woman, she deeply hated her husband, who lived in the city, and took out all her heavy hatred on her son, whom she gave birth to when she was only 17 years old. With kicks, beatings and abuse, she instilled in the boy a terrifying fear, which gradually turned into an insurmountable disgust for his mother that remained forever in his soul. "... An unforgettable time, a golden childhood ..." - the poet later ironically recalls this time of his life. Efimka is barely 4 years old. It was a holiday - a terrible stuffiness. Beaten and tearful as usual, Yefimka, trailing after his mother, found himself at the shopkeeper's, Gershka. Crawling into a corner, he became an unwitting witness to the shameless scene played out right there on the sacks, in front of the shocked child. The boy wept bitterly, and his mother beat him furiously with a stick all the way. Father, Alexei Safronovich Pridvorov, served in the city, 20 miles from Gubovka. Coming home on a visit, he beat his wife with a mortal battle, and she returned the beatings to her son a hundredfold. Returning to his service, his father often took Yefimka with him, who, like a holiday, was waiting for these happy respite. Until the age of 7, Yefim lived in the city, where he learned to read and write, and then until the age of 13 in the village with his mother. Opposite the mother's house, right across the road, there was a tavern (tavern) and a rural "reprisal". For whole days Yefimka sat on the mound and looked into the face of village life. Voiceless, silent, enslaved Russia, having plucked up courage in a tavern, wildly bawled obscene songs, vilely used foul language, raged, raged, and then humbly atoned for her tavern heresies by repentance in the "cold". Right there, side by side with the "cold" one, where there was a struggle with the individual vices of drunken Gubovites, the Gubov life unfolded in all the noisy expanse on the field of social struggle: village gatherings roared, dejected non-payers staggered, dissatisfied complainants yelled and demanded, and, rattling with all the strings rural justice, "punishment" instilled in the Gubov peasants respect for the foundations of the landlord system. And the boy listened and learned. More than once among the characters he had to meet his own mother. Ekaterina Kuzminichna was rarely at home and, indulging in drinking bouts and fights with enthusiasm, contributed a lot to deviations from the formal and legal order in Gubovka. Hungry, the boy knocked on the first hut he came across. “So I grew up,” D. B said smiling, “I got used to catering: where you come, there is your house.” In the evenings, climbing onto the stove, Yefimka shared with his grandfather a store of worldly observations. And on Sundays, the grandfather took his grandson with him to the tavern, where the boy's worldly education was completed in a drunken child. At home, tipsy, grandfather liked to reminisce about the old days, about the settler times, about the lancers and dragoons, who were fasting throughout the Kherson region. And the grandfather's imagination, warmed up by vodka, willingly drew idyllic pictures of serf antiquity. "As it used to be, for the settlement ..." - began the grandfather. It turned out that it was impossible to wish for a better order than the patriarchal antiquity. Any innovation here is an unnecessary insert. But when sober, my grandfather said something else. With hatred he told his grandson about Arakcheevism, about the lordly favors: how the settlers were punished with sticks, how the men were exiled to Siberia, and the women, torn from their babies, were turned into dog feeders. And these stories forever cut into the memory of Efimka. "Grandfather told me a lot about things. His stories were harsh and simple and clear, And after them My infant dreams were disturbing ..." For a lively and impressionable boy, the time of heavy reflections came. He snatched up his grandfather's stories on the fly and struggled in anxious thoughts. On the one hand, the grandfather, as it were, demanded justification for the serfdom, on the other hand, he planted a sworn hatred of antiquity with the everyday truth of his stories. And imperceptibly, a vague idea of ​​two truths was born in Yefimka's brain: one - unctuous and reconciling, embellished with the dreamy lie of his grandfather, and the other - the harsh, intractable and merciless truth of peasant life. This duality was supported in the boy by a rural upbringing. Having learned to read and write early, under the influence of a village priest, he began to read the psalter, "Cheti-Minei", "The Way to Salvation", "Lives of the Saints" - and this directed the boy's imagination to a false and organically alien path. Gradually, a desire to enter a monastery even formed and became firmly established in him, but the grandfather insultingly ridiculed the boy’s religious dreams and in his talkative conversations paid a lot of attention to the hypocrisy and trickery of the priests, church deceit, and so on. Efimka was assigned to a village school. He studied well and willingly. Reading plunged him into a fairy-tale world. He recited Yershov's "Humpbacked Horse" as a memento and almost never parted with "Robber Churkin". Every penny that fell into his hands, he instantly turned into a book. And the boy had nickels. In its strategic position (against the "reprisal" and the tavern and not far from the road) the House of the Courtyard was something like a visiting yard. The camp officer, and the police officer, and the rural authorities, and passing wagon trains, and horse thieves, and the sexton, and the peasants called in "reprisal" looked here. In the midst of this motley crowd, the boy's receptive imagination is replenished with images of future "entertainers", "administrators", "street", "farm laborers", "rebellious hares" and "guardians". Along with the knowledge of life, Efimka also acquired business skills here, and soon he begins to labor in the role of a rural clerk. For a copper penny, he composes petitions, gives advice, performs various assignments and fights in every possible way against "reprisal". From this struggle with "reprisal" and originates his literary career. And the influx of everyday experience is growing, expanding, and hundreds of new stories are accumulating. For a short time, the literate Yefimka also becomes necessary for her mother. Whether as a result of constant beatings or some other perversion of nature, apart from Efimka, Ekaterina Kuzminichna had no more children. This gave her a strong reputation as a progeny insurance specialist. There was no end to this kind of insurance from hunters. Ekaterina Kuzminichna deftly supported the deception. She gave the women all sorts of drugs, gave them infusions of gunpowder and onions. Gubovsky girls regularly swallowed and regularly gave birth to the due date. Then Efimka was involved in the case. As a clerk, he scribbled a laconic note: "the baptized name is Maria, with this a silver ruble," and "the secret fruit of unhappy love" was forwarded along with the note to the city. The guys knew that Efimka was privy to all the secret operations of his mother and, catching him in a dark corner, they asked: "Did Pryska go to your mat? Tell me." But Efimka kept the girlish secrets tightly. In addition, as a literate boy, the boy earned nickels by reading the psalter for the dead. These nickels were also usually drunk by the mother. The services rendered by the boy to the mother did not make the latter more affectionate towards the son. She still tyrannized the boy, still left him for whole days without food and indulged in shameless revelry. Once a boy, completely starving, searched all corners of the hut, but did not find a crumb. In desperation, he lay down on the floor and wept. But, lying down, I suddenly saw a wondrous sight under the bed: a dozen or two nails were driven into the wooden bottom of the bed, and the following were suspended from the nails on strings: sausage, fish, bagels, sugar, several bottles of vodka, sour cream, milk - in a word, a whole shop. Informed about this, grandfather Sofron grunted: "That's why she, the bitch, is always so red!" - But the hungry old man and the boy were afraid to touch the supplies. D. B. relates one of the darkest memories of his childhood to this time. He is 12 years old. He is dying - probably from diphtheria: his throat is blocked to complete dumbness. He was communed and laid under the icons. Here is the mother - bare-haired, drunk. She sews a death shirt and yells cheerful tavern songs at the top of her voice. The boy is in pain. He wants to say something, but only moves his lips soundlessly. Mother bursts into drunken laughter. The cemetery watchman Bulakh enters - a drunkard and a cheerful cynic. He joins in the singing of his mother. Then he comes up to Efimka and good-naturedly resonates: "Well, Yefimash, let's give a fuck ... Where are you good? Fuck granny. There is a smell of mint too garno ...". Someone let my father know that Yefimka was dying. Meanwhile, the abscess burst. The boy woke up from terrible screams. It was dark. Drunk mother lay on the floor and squealed in a frantic voice under the blows of her father's boot. Father waved 20 versts out of the city, found mother in a drunken abyss, and dragged her home by her scythes. From this memorable night, a turning point in Yefimka's life begins. His mother stopped beating him, the boy began to resolutely fight back and began to run to his father more often.

sings Dem'yan Bedniy (Efim Oleksiyovich Pridvorov, 1883-1945), author of anti-religious verses, including "The Gospel of Dem'yan".

1896 Ivan Ogіenko graduated from the Pochatkov school in Brusilov. Dali started at the Kiev military paramedic school. My comrade-in-training Yukhim Pridvorovim (the future Russian poet Dem "Jan Bedniy") edited the manuscripts of the monthly "My Library".

Vadim Alekseevich's cousin, Vera Pridvorova, Demyan Bedny's daughter-in-law, now deceased, lived in Moscow and asked him before, and when I arrived, she asked me: “Persuade Vadim, persuade! I have two separate apartments. I will transfer one apartment to you, and we will live together.”

In the 1980s, Tamara Pridvorova, the daughter-in-law (son's wife) of Demyan Bedny, worked at the Institute of History of the USSR of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

“Once Demyan got up from the table and said: “Now I will read to you what I don’t read to anyone and will never let you read. Let them print after my death.” And he took out a thick notebook from the depth of the table. These were purely lyrical poems of extraordinary beauty and sonority, written with such an influx of deep feeling that my husband and I sat spellbound. He read for a long time, and a completely different person appeared before me, turning a new side of his deep inner world. It was unlike anything that Demyan Bedny wrote. When he finished, he stood up and said, "Now forget about it."

All these notebooks - and there were many of them - after ten years were burned in a moment of despair in front of the eldest son. “In vain,” recalls the son, “I asked him not to burn notebooks ... The father growled and, turning purple with anger, destroyed what he had kept all his life. “You have to be such a blockhead as you not to understand that nobody needs it!”. And nothing remained of all the wealth of Demyanova's lyrics. This loss, of course, cannot be made up for by a random impromptu thought preserved in the son's memory. On a walk in the spring of 1935, he asked his father a question: where does the belief come from, as if the cuckoo counts the years of life? And he received an answer so different from the verses known to us that it is worth quoting it:

Spring blissful peace... The willows leaned over the river, Counting the years to come. How much longer do I have to live? I listen in sensitive silence to the Cuckoo, out of fashion. One... two... Believe? Make it hard? I don't have long to live... I'll play the last scene And retire into the crowd of shadows... And life - The closer to the slope of days, The more you know its price.

Demyan Bedny(real name Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov; April 1, 1883, Gubovka, Alexandria district, Kherson province - May 25, 1945, Moscow) - Russian Soviet writer, poet, essayist and public figure. Member of the RSDLP(b) since 1912.

Biography

E. A. Pridvorov was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka (now the Kompaneevsky district of the Kirovograd region of Ukraine) into a peasant family.

Having experienced in childhood the great influence of his uncle, a popular accuser and an atheist, he took his village nickname as a pseudonym. This pseudonym was first mentioned in his poem "About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant" (1911).

In 1896-1900 he studied at the Kyiv military medical school, in 1904-08. at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University. The first poems were published in 1899. They were written in the spirit of official monarchist "patriotism" or romance "lyrics". Member of the RSDLP since 1912, from the same year he published in Pravda. The first book "Fables" was published in 1913, later he wrote a large number of fables, songs, ditties and poems of other genres.

In 1914 he was mobilized, participated in battles, was awarded the St. George medal for bravery. In 1915 he was transferred to the reserve unit, and then written off to the reserve.

During the Civil War, he conducted propaganda work in the ranks of the Red Army. In his poems of those years, he extolled Lenin and Trotsky.

Controversial success (1920-1929)

On the one hand, D. Poor was seen during this period as a popular and successful author. The total circulation of his books in the 1920s exceeded two million copies. People's Commissar of Culture A.V. Lunacharsky praised him as a great writer, equal to Maxim Gorky, and in April 1923 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee awarded Demyan Bedny with the Order of the Red Banner. This was the first award of a military order for literary activity in the RSFSR.

On the other hand, despite the calls of the head of the RAPP, L. L. Averbakh, for the "widespread denigration of Soviet literature," for many proletarians, the figure of Demyan as a literary standard was unacceptable. The proletarians complained about the “false proletarian dominance in verse” of the poor demyans. Representatives of the LEF and other avant-garde movements were irritated by the militant dilettantism, Bedny's "condoness", the superficiality of his themes and ideas, the stereotyped images and speech, and the general lack of poetic skill. As for the “aphoristically minted” characteristics formulated by Trotsky (“this is not a poet who approached the revolution, descended to it, accepted it; this is a Bolshevik of a poetic kind of weapon” and a number of others), then “later they greatly damaged the poet.”

During the intra-party struggle of 1926-1930, Demyan Bedny began to actively and consistently defend the line of I.V. Stalin. Thanks to this, the poet enjoyed various signs of favor from the authorities, including an apartment in the Kremlin and regular invitations to meetings with the party leadership. For traveling around the country, Demyan Bedny was allocated a special carriage in which, in particular, he traveled around the Caucasus. During his trips, he exchanged friendly letters with Stalin. They began to publish a collection of his works (interrupted on the 19th volume). He collected one of the largest private libraries in the USSR (over 30,000 volumes). In 1928, due to a complication of diabetes, he was sent to Germany for two months of treatment, accompanied by family members and an interpreter. Demyan was given a Ford car for personal use.

A number of publications were devoted to the work of Demyan Bedny: only A. Efremin, one of the editors of the collected works, published the books Demyan Bedny at School (1926), Demyan Bedny and the Art of Agitation (1927), Demyan Bedny on the Anti-Church Front " (1927) and "Thunder Poetry" (1929).

Opala (1930-1938)

On December 6, 1930, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, by its decree, condemned Bedny's poetic feuilletons “Get off the stove” and “Without mercy”, published in Pravda. false notes expressed in indiscriminate slandering of “Russia” and “Russian””; in addition, the last feuilleton mentioned the uprisings in the USSR and the assassination attempt on Stalin, despite the ban on discussing such topics as “false rumors”.

Demyan complained to Stalin, but received a sharply critical letter in response:

“What is the essence of your mistakes? It consists in the fact that criticism of the shortcomings of the life and life of the USSR, criticism that is obligatory and necessary, developed by you at first quite aptly and skillfully, carried you away beyond measure and, having carried you away, began to develop in your works into slander on the USSR, on its past, on its present ... [You] began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past was a vessel of abomination and desolation ... that "laziness" and the desire to "sit on the stove" is almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers who, having done the October Revolution, of course, they did not cease to be Russian. And this is what you call Bolshevik criticism! No, highly esteemed Comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism, but slander against our people, the debunking of the USSR, the debunking of the proletariat of the USSR, the debunking of the Russian proletariat.

- Stalin's letter to Demyan Bedny

After criticizing the leader, Bedny began to write emphatically party poems and fables (“Wonderful Collective Wonder”, “Hedgehog”, etc.). In the poems of the 1930s, Demyan constantly quotes Stalin, and also uses Stalin's words as epigraphs. He enthusiastically welcomed the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: “Under the crowbars of the workers it turns into rubbish / The ugliest temple, an unbearable shame” (1931, Epoch). In the poems "No Mercy!" (1936) and Truth. A Heroic Poem" (1937) mercilessly branded Trotsky and the Trotskyists, calling them Judas, bandits and fascists. By the 50th anniversary (1933), the poet was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Nevertheless, Demyan's party criticism continued; at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, he was accused of political backwardness and struck off the list of awardees. In 1932, Demyan was evicted from the Kremlin apartment; Stalin, after another complaint, allowed him only the use of his library remaining in the Kremlin. In 1935, a new scandal and great dissatisfaction with Stalin was caused by a notebook found by the NKVD with records of insulting characteristics that Demyan gave to prominent figures of the party and government.

In 1936, the poet wrote the libretto for the comic opera Bogatyrs (about the baptism of Russia), which outraged Molotov, who attended the performance, and then Stalin. The Arts Committee in a special resolution (November 15, 1936) sharply condemned the performance as unpatriotic. Another, allegedly anti-fascist, poem by Demyan “Fight or Die” (July 1937), Stalin, in a letter to the editors of Pravda, regarded it as “literary rubbish”, as a fable containing “stupid and transparent” criticism not of the fascist, but of the Soviet system.

Last years (1938-1945)

In July 1938, Demyan Bedny was expelled from the party and from the Writers' Union with the wording "moral decay". He was no longer printed, but the objects that bore his name were not renamed.

Demyan Poor, who fell into disgrace, was in poverty, was forced to sell his library and furniture. He composed new praises of Lenin-Stalin, but in a conversation with relatives he spoke extremely negatively about the leader and the rest of the party elite. Stalin knew about this, but did not subject the poet to repression this time either.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, publications resumed, first under the pseudonym D. Fighting, then towards the end of the war, under the original pseudonym. In anti-fascist poems and fables, Bedny, in complete contradiction with his previous works, urged the brothers to "remember the old days", claimed that he believed "in his people" and at the same time continued to praise Stalin. Demyan's new "poems" remained unnoticed. He did not manage to return both the former position and the location of the leader.

D. Poor died on May 25, 1945. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (plot No. 2). The last critical party resolution concerning the poet was issued posthumously. On February 24, 1952, two collections by D. Bednoy (“Selected”, 1950 and “Native Army”, 1951) were subjected to an ideological defeat for “gross political distortions”: as it turned out, these editions included the original versions of Bedny’s works instead of later ones, politically recycled. In 1956, Demyan Bedny was posthumously reinstated in the CPSU.

Interesting Facts

Demyan Bedny participated in the persecution of M. A. Bulgakov. There is also an entry in Bulgakov’s diary: “Vasilevsky said that Demyan Bedny, speaking to a meeting of Red Army soldiers, said:“ My mother was bl..b ... ””.

The execution of F. E. Kaplan took place in the presence of Demyan Bedny, who asked to see the execution in order to get an “impulse” in his work. The victim's corpse was doused with gasoline and burned in an iron barrel in the Alexander Garden.

In 1929, when a mass collective farm movement began in the Tambov province, Demyan Bedny worked as a commissioner for collectivization in the then Izberdeevsky district (in the villages of Petrovka, Uspenovka, now the Petrovsky district).

Responses in literature

Demyan Bedny is present as a character in V.P. Aksenov's novel "The Moscow Saga".

Message to the "evangelist" Demyan

In April-May 1925, two Soviet newspapers, Pravda and Bednota, published Demyan Bedny's anti-religious poem The Evangelist Demyan's New Testament Without Flaw, written in a mocking and mocking manner. In 1925-1926, a vivid poetic response to this poem called “Message to the Evangelist Demyan”, signed by the name of S. A. Yesenin, began to spread in Moscow. Later, in the summer of 1926, the OGPU arrested the poet Nikolai Gorbachev, who confessed to the authorship of the poem. However, neither his biographical data nor literary work gave grounds to consider him the real author of the work.

There is an assumption that the events associated with the "New Testament without a flaw of Evangelist Demyan" and "Message ..." served as one of the impetuses for M. A. Bulgakov to write the novel "The Master and Margarita", and Demyan Bedny became one of the prototypes of Ivan Bezdomny.

(real name and surname - Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov)

(1883-1945) Soviet poet

Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov, the future proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, was born in the Kherson region, in the village of Gubovka, into a peasant family. His childhood was full of adversity and deprivation. The boy spent the first years of his life in the city of Elizabeth City, where his father served as a church watchman.

Later, Bedny recalled in his biography: “We lived together in a basement closet on our father’s ten-ruble salary. Mother lived with us at rare times, and the less often these times happened, the more pleasant it was for me, because my mother's treatment of me was extremely brutal. From the age of seven to thirteen, I had to endure a hard labor life together with my mother in the village with my grandfather Sofron, an amazingly sincere old man who loved and pitied me very much.

After some time, the future poet finds himself in the barracks environment of the Kyiv military paramedic school, graduates from it and serves in his specialty for some time. But a very early awakened passion for books, interest in literature does not leave Yefim. He is engaged in self-education a lot and persistently, and already at the age of twenty, having passed an external examination for a gymnasium course, he becomes a student of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University.

It was in 1904, on the eve of the first Russian revolution. During the years of university studies, in an environment where gatherings, manifestations, demonstrations were in full swing within the walls of the “temple of science” on Vasilevsky Island, a complex process of formation and formation of the personality of the future poet took place. In the same autobiography, Bedny wrote: “After four years of a new life, new meetings and new impressions, after a stunning reaction for me in subsequent years, I lost everything on which my philistine-well-intentioned mood was based.”

In 1909, a new literary name appeared in the journal "Russian Wealth" - E. Pridvorov. Then, for the first time, poems signed by this name were printed. But these poems and friendship with veteran populist poetry P.F. Yakubovich-Melshin were only a brief episode from the life and creative path of the poet. The name of a character in one of Pridvorov's first poems, "About Demyan Bedny, a Harmful Peasant" (1911), becomes his literary pseudonym, popular among millions of readers. Under this pseudonym, from 1912 to 1945, his works appear on the pages of newspapers and magazines.

Demyan Bedny in his work, at first glance, is traditional, committed to the form, rhythm, and intonation of the verse that have been tested by many. But this is only a superficial and deceptive impression. Just like his predecessor and teacher Nekrasov, Demyan Bedny is a bold and always looking innovator. He fills traditional forms with new, ebullient and sharp content of the era. And this new content inevitably renews the old form, allows poetry to perform hitherto unknown tasks of great importance - to be close and accessible to the hearts of contemporaries.

Striving for the main thing - to make the work understandable, intelligible to any reader, Demyan Bedny, in addition to his favorite fable, also used such easily accessible genres as ditty, folk song, fairy tale, legend (all these genres are masterfully combined, for example, in the story "About the land, about the will, about the working share"). He also wrote poems built on the comic effect of mixing different styles, such as, for example, "The Manifesto of Baron von Wrangel." Here is an example from the "Manifesto...":

Ikh fate an. I'm sewing.

Es ist for all Soviet places.

For Russian people from edge to edge

Baronial Unzer Manifesto.

You know my surname to everyone:

Ich bin von Wrangel, Herr Baron.

I am the best, the sixth

There is a candidate for the royal throne.

Listen, red zoldaten:

Why are you fighting me?

My government is all democratic,

Not some call...

The utmost clarity and simplicity of form, political relevance and acuteness of the subject matter made D. Poor's poems beloved by the widest possible audience. For more than three decades of his creative activity, the poet captured the entire kaleidoscope of events in the socio-political life of the country.

The poetic heritage of Demyan Bedny embodies the continuity of his poetry in relation to the great predecessors. His work bears expressive signs of the fruitful influence of N.A. Nekrasov and T.G. Shevchenko. From them, he learned, among other things, the unsurpassed skill of using the richest sources of oral folk art. There is, perhaps, no such type and genre in Russian poetry that Demyan Bedny would not resort to, based on the characteristics of the topic and material.

Of course, his main and most favorite genre was the fable. She helped in the pre-revolutionary ode to hide seditious thoughts from censorship. But, besides Demyan Bedny, a fabulist, we know Demyan Bedny, the author of poetic stories, legends, epic and lyrical-journalistic poems, such as, for example, "Main Street" with its amazing laconicism, chased rhythm, patriotic intensity of each image, each the words:

Main Street in a frenzied panic:

Pale, shaking, like a lunatic.

Suddenly stung by fear of death.

Rushing about - starched club businessman,

Rogue usurer and banker purge,

Manufacturer and fashion tailor,

Ace furrier, patented jeweler,

- Everyone rushes about, anxiously excited

With a rumble and screams, audible from afar,

Among the bonds of the exchange office...

Demyan Bedny is known as a master of poetic feuilleton, catchy, striking epigrams, poems of small form, but of considerable capacity. The poet-tribune, the poet-denunciator was always ready to go to the farthest corner of the country in order to meet his readers. An interesting conversation once took place between Demyan Bedny and the organizers of his trip to the Far East. He was not interested in the material side. “Is there a sun? - he asked. - There is. Is there Soviet power? - There is. "Then I'm going."

The years that have passed since the death of the poet are a sufficiently significant period for time to test what he created. Of course, of the huge number of works by Demyan Bedny, not all of them retain their former significance. Those poems on particular themes of revolutionary reality, in which the poet failed to rise to the height of a broad artistic generalization, remained simply an interesting testimony of the times, valuable material for the history of the era.

But the best works of Demyan Bedny, where his talent was fully revealed, where the strong patriotic thought and the ardent feeling of a contemporary of important events in the history of the country found expression in artistic form, these works still retain their strength and effectiveness.

Describing the features of Russian literature, A.M. Gorky wrote: “In Russia, each writer was truly and sharply individual, but all were united by one stubborn desire - to understand, feel, guess about the future of the country, about the fate of its people, about its role on earth” . These words are the best suited to assess the life and work of Demyan Poor.