Demyan Bedny is one of the founders of Soviet literature, his creative path is inextricably linked with the history of the Russian workers' revolutionary movement. Demyan Bedny devoted all his talent to the people. He gave his verse, humor, merciless satire to the Motherland, the Soviet country, praising its victories and achievements, mercilessly smashing enemies during the civil war, and in the era of socialist construction, and in the Great Patriotic War.

Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov (this is the real name of the poet) was born in 1883 into a poor peasant family in the Kherson region: his childhood passed in an atmosphere of terrible poverty. Earning a living, the boy went to the shepherds, read the psalter for the dead, made petitions to fellow villagers.

In 1886, his father managed to identify him at public expense in a military medical school. Here he got acquainted with the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Krylov. This period includes the first literary experiments of Pridvorov, which testified to his desire to continue the poetic traditions of Russian classical literature. After serving his military service, in 1904 E. Pridvorov enters the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University and immediately finds himself in a new environment for him of a revolutionary-minded student body.

His political self-consciousness was awakened by the revolution of 1905. At this time, the political and creative formation of the poet begins. E. Pridvorov enters the literature as a lyric poet. The poet-Narodnaya Volya P.F. has a great influence on him. Yakubovich-Melshin, who then headed the poetry department of the Russian Wealth magazine, in which E. Pridvorov published his poems in 1909-1910. The first works of the poet ("With creepy anxiety", "On New Year's Eve") developed the characteristic themes and motifs of civil poetry of the 80s. But already in these early poems by E. Pridvorov, one can feel the inner passion, social pathos, which are so characteristic of the subsequent work of D. Poor. He is also looking for new forms of poetic expression, relying on the traditions of Nekrasov's civil lyrics and oral folk art. This period of the poet's ideological and creative quest ends in 1911. “Having previously given a significant bias towards Marxism,” Demyan Bedny wrote in his autobiography, “in 1911 I began to publish in the Bolshevik—of glorious memory—Zvezda. My crossroads converged to one road. The ideological confusion was over. At the beginning of 1912, I was already Demyan Bedny.

In 1911, the Zvezda published a poem “About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant,” in which the poet called the workers to revolt. The poem immediately becomes popularly known, the name of the hero became the pseudonym of the poet. With the advent of Pravda and until the last days of his life, Demyan Poor is printed on its pages. In 1912, his poem was published in the first issue of the newspaper, reflecting the deep faith of the people in the victory of the new revolution:

Our bowl is full of suffering,
Merged into one and blood and sweat.
But our strength has not faded:
She's growing, she's growing!
Nightmare dream - past troubles,
In the rays of dawn - the coming battle.
Fighters in anticipation of victory
Seething with courage young.

In Zvezda and Pravda, Bedny's poetry acquired ideological clarity, revolutionary power of sound, and poetic clarity. Work in the newspaper also determined the originality of the poet's style. Revolutionary lyrics are organically combined in his work with satire. The main poetic genre of D. Poor is the fable.

Having expressed the socialist aspirations of the proletariat, Demyan Bedny reflected in his work the interests of all working people. His poetry becomes truly popular. This determines the internal unity of his work with all the variety of subjects. Addressing the masses, Demyan Bedny widely uses folklore images of the song and fairy-tale folk traditions. The poet responds to all events in the social life of the country. He exposes the liberals, liquidators, Mensheviks, stigmatizes all traitors to the revolutions ("Kashevars", "Fishermen", "Dog" and others). During these years, the aesthetic views of Demyan Poor were formed. Their basis is the Leninist principle of party membership. Demyan Bedny speaks of the great importance of the traditions of revolutionary democrats for the development of advanced Russian social thought, and fights against Vekhi tendencies in art and aesthetics. Standing for the creation of a revolutionary, truly democratic art, he sharply condemns the decadents for being separated from the people, from life, speaks of the reactionary meaning of decadent aesthetic theories.

With Gorky, Mayakovsky and Demyan Bedny, a new stage in the development of Russian revolutionary satire begins. Developing the traditions of Krylov, Nekrasov, Kurochkin, Demyan Bedny innovatively transforms the genre of a fable, a satirical poetic feuilleton. The fable of D. Poor became a political, journalistic fable, incorporating the features of a feuilleton, pamphlet, and revolutionary proclamation. A new meaning and a new purpose in the fables of the poor are acquiring traditional fable techniques. The didactic ending of the fable turns into a revolutionary appeal, an up-to-date political slogan. Of particular importance in his fable are epigraphs borrowed from newspapers, political documents, chronicles of the labor movement. He politically concretized the fable, publicistically sharpened it. Deeply folk in its form, the fable of D. Poor played a huge role in educating the political consciousness of broad sections of the people.

Bedny's poems of 1914-1917 reflected the popular protest against the imperialist war and the policy of the Provisional Government ("Lady", "Ordered, but the truth is not told" and others). Speaking in the fresh wake of political events, the Bolshevik poet caustically ridicules the Mensheviks, the Cadets, and the counter-revolutionary conspirators.

The scope of revolutionary events, the variety of tasks of revolutionary art - all this determined the variety of genres of D. Poor's poetry and the nature of his poetic means. Now the poet writes pamphlets, songs, ditties, and epigrams. He also refers to the long narrative form. In 1917, D. Bedny published a story in verse "About the land, about freedom, about the working share." The story, being a very significant work of proletarian poetry, seemed to sum up the entire pre-October work of the poet. Events from the beginning of the imperialist war to the day of the October Revolution are consistently depicted against a broad historical background. Talking about the fate of the village boy Ivan and his girlfriend, the poet was able to convincingly show how the ideas of Bolshevism penetrate the masses, take possession of them.

The story is a peculiar, heroic-satirical epic of the revolution. The narrative of the revolutionary events of the era is combined in it with a specific topical satire on enemies, a documented political pamphlet.

In an effort to make the story as accessible to the people as possible, D. Bedny focuses on the folk poetic tradition and the traditions of Nekrasov. The element of oral folk poetry is felt here in everything - but included in the story of songs, ditties, sayings, jokes, in the compositional structure of parts of the poem.

The poetry of D. Bedny of these years, which combined the pathos of the revolutionary struggle with sharp political satire, was very close in its orientation to the poetry of V. Mayakovsky.

After the Great October Revolution, all the creative ideas of D. Poor are connected with the fate of the revolution. Passionate interest in the victory of new revolutionary forces distinguishes all the speeches of the poet.

During the civil war, the poet's work gained immense popularity among workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers. His lyric-pathetic poems (the collection In the Ring of Fire, 1918) were of current importance. But the heroic lyrics were again organically combined in D. Poor with satire. Red Army songs (“Seeing Off”) and satire on the White Guards (“Manifesto of Baron von Wrangel”), comic poems (“Tanka-Vanka”), anti-religious poems (“The Promised Land”, “The New Testament without Flaw Evangelist Demyan”), captions to revolutionary posters and satirical epigrams - the poet's talent manifested itself in such a diverse way.

The satire of D. Bedny of these years is very close to Shchedrin's satire in terms of the principles of constructing a satirical image, the nature of the use of the grotesque, hyperbole, and irony. The satirical power of the songs, ditties, epigrams of the Poor, directed against the "Judenichs", "Denik warriors", "Wrangel barons", "generals Shkuro" and other counter-revolutionary "crows", was enormous. His laughter, amplified by a comically degrading rudeness, smashed the enemy.

The basis of the satire of D. Poor was high pathos. Poems "pathetic" occupy a particularly large place in the work of the poet of those years.

The most significant work of D. Poor in the first years of the revolution was his poem "Main Street" (1922), written for the fifth anniversary of October. It created a generalized image of the revolutionary people. The poem is filled with the romantic pathos of the victorious struggle of the proletariat: They move, they move, they move, they move, They go down in chains with iron links, They march menacingly with a booming gait,

They're going terribly
go,
go,
To the last world redoubt!..

This poem is a hymn in honor of the revolution, in honor of the revolutionary people. In 1923, during the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Red Army, D. Bedny, one of the first Soviet writers, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

In the literary struggle of the 1920s and 1930s, D. Bedny defended the principles of partisanship and nationality of art (“Insult”, “On the Nightingale”, “He would beat his forehead”), constantly emphasizing the importance of the traditions of Russian realism for the development of contemporary art. “Only enemies or idiots,” Bedny said in a conversation with young writers in 1931, “can assure us that the study of classical creative techniques is a departure from modernity.”

During the years of restoration and socialist reconstruction of the national economy, D. Bedny writes about the successes and achievements of the builders of the new world. As in the years of the Civil War, his work in this period also combines pathos heroic lyrics and satire, the affirmation of the new and the denial of the old. He sings of the bond between the city and the countryside, the heroic work of ordinary Soviet people ("Labor", "In memory of the village correspondent Grigory Malinovsky"). The focus of the poet is the education of the socialist consciousness of the Soviet people. A significant place in his work is occupied by "diplomatics" - satirical works on themes of international life. The target orientation of these poems very well conveys the title of one of them - "To help Chicherin." The poet, with his poems, helps the people to understand the dark diplomatic game of politicians from the West and America, who organized anti-Soviet conspiracies (“To a Dear Friend”, “A Satirical Dialogue with Chamberlain” and others).

Socialist construction in all areas of economic and cultural life, the birth of a new creative attitude to work and new truly human relationships - this is what becomes the "center of thoughts" of the poet.

During the years of the Great Patriotic War, D. Poor again at a combat post, he again, as in the years of the civil war, "put on a quiver and a sword and buttoned up armor and armor." His poems are published in Pravda, Krasnaya Zvezda, in army newspapers and magazines, appear on mass combat posters, in TASS Windows D. Poor speaks with patriotic lyrics, satirical fables, songs. He also turns to the heroic story ("The Eaglets"). In the most difficult days for the country, when the Nazis were approaching Moscow, he wrote the poem “I believe in my people”, imbued with unshakable optimism: Let the struggle take a dangerous turn. Let the Germans amuse themselves with the fascist chimera, We will repel the enemies. I believe in my people with an unshakable thousand-year faith.

Keywords: Demyan Bedny, criticism of the work of Demyan Bedny, criticism of the poems of Demyan Bedny, analysis of the poems of Demyan Bedny, download criticism, download analysis, free download, Russian literature of the 20th century

A. A. Volkov

Demyan Bedny

Demyan Poor. Collected works in five volumes. Volume one.Poems, epigrams, fables, fairy tales, stories (1908 -- October 1917) Compilation, preparation of the text and introductory article by A. A. Volkov M., GIHL, 1953 Demyan Bedny entered the history of Soviet literature as one of its founders, an outstanding master of the poetic word. His courageous poetry, always saturated with sharp political content - satire and pathetic lyrics, poems, fables and epigrams - was a deep expression of the feelings and thoughts, aspirations and hopes of the people. The poet's work was an artistic chronicle of the struggle, exploits and achievements of the great Russian people. Already in the 1920s, the Soviet government highly appreciated Demyan Bedny's unique and enormous activity. In the appeal of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in connection with the awarding of the poet with the Order of the Red Banner, he was called "the poet of the great revolution." “Your works,” the appeal said, “simple and understandable to everyone, and therefore unusually strong, kindled the hearts of the working people with revolutionary fire and strengthened their courage in the most difficult moments of the struggle.” Inextricable connection with the revolution, clarity, accessibility to the broad working masses - these are the distinguishing features of Bedny's poetry. They manifested themselves even in his pre-October work, they crystallized and deepened as the poet's ideological growth, his active participation in the struggle for the victory of the revolution, for the victory of socialism in our country. The childhood of Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov, the future proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, was difficult and joyless. He was born in 1883, in the village of Gubovka, Kherson province, into a peasant family. He spent the first years of his life in Elizavetograd, where his father, Aleksey Pridvorov, settled, who left the village to work. At the age of seven, the boy again ended up in Gubovka. He had to experience hunger and cold there, beatings of his mother, exhausted and embittered by overwork. The only person close to the boy during these years was his grandfather Sofron, who was distinguished by great worldly wisdom, spiritual kindness and purity. Having already become a poet, Poor remembered him in a number of his poems. After graduating from a rural school, the boy enters the Kyiv military paramedic school. An inquisitive and capable teenager successfully studies, enthusiastically reads the works of Krylov, Griboyedov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov. In the same years, he himself tries to write. In the late 90s and early 900s, the first, very weak, imitative poems of E. Pridvorov appeared in print. Two of them were published in the newspaper "Kievskoye Slovo" for 1899, one - in the "Collection of Russian Poets and Poetesses" of 1901. After graduating from the military paramedic school, E. Pridvorov enters military service, which weighs on him. The cherished dream of the young man was the university. Having successfully passed the external exam for eight classes of the gymnasium, E. Pridvorov received a matriculation certificate and in 1904 entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. The stay at the university coincided with the growth of the liberation movement in the country, which ended with the first Russian revolution. This revolutionary upsurge affected the mood of the students, who ardently sympathized with the struggle of the people against the autocracy. Efim Pridvorov was largely indebted to the advanced youth around him for the radical change in his previously well-intentioned philistine moods, which the tsarist military school and the army instilled in him. “After four years of a new life, new meetings and new impressions,” he later recalled, “after the revolution of 1905-1906, which was stunning for me, and the even more stunning reaction of subsequent years, I lost everything on which my philistine-well-intentioned mood was based. "(D. Poor, Autobiography, collection "Old and New", 1928, ed. ZIF, p. 12.). And during the years of reaction that followed the first Russian revolution, the poet's poems were saturated with the pathos of democratic ideas. Already in these poems, which denounced the brutal reprisals of the autocracy against the people, the hope was expressed for the imminence of changes in the social life of the country, for the "end of the hard times", of reaction. The young poet was animated by a deep faith in the victory of the insurgent people, who would pronounce a harsh sentence on the tsar's executioners ("Son", "About Poor Demyan, Harmful Peasant", "Three Wonderful Songs ...", etc.). It is no coincidence that some of Pridvorov's early poems were either rejected by the editors of the liberal populist Russkoye Bogatstvo or banned by censorship and appeared much later in the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda. However, during the years of the Stolypin reaction, E. Pridvorov did not yet realize the full complexity of the social contradictions of the reality surrounding him, did not go beyond the framework of general democratic ideas in his work. The character and path of the coming revolution are not yet clear to him. Only rapprochement with the Bolshevik press and - through it - with the party and its leaders ideologically educates the poet, shapes his worldview, turns the democratic writer E. Pridvorov into a poet of the advanced revolutionary proletariat - D. Poor. The poet's connections with the Bolshevik press have been established since 1911, from the time of his work in the Zvezda newspaper. The revolutionary upsurge of 1912-1914 contributed to the revival of proletarian literature. On the eve of the first imperialist war, leading proletarian writers, who at the same time were professional revolutionaries, united around legal Bolshevik publications, one of which was the Zvezda newspaper: A. A. Bogdanov, A. Gmyrev-Mikhailov, L. Zilov, and others. Among them is the young poet E. Pridvorov. Recalling the beginning of his collaboration in Zvezda, the Pravdist M. Olminsky wrote: “Demyan Bedny was not a novice in print. His poems signed “E. Courtyards "appeared in populist and cadet publications. He was not a Marxist, but inwardly gravitated towards the most left-wing trends. And when Zvezda, a purely Bolshevik character, began to appear, he felt special sympathy for her; first, his poems began to be received by mail, and then the author himself appeared.Soon he began to visit the night editorial office (in the printing house) almost daily.Here, in friendly conversations, amid the nightly newspaper bustle, E. Pridvorov manifested a need for militant literary performances, and the fabulist Demyan Bedny was born. Comrade Lenin very quickly began to appreciate him highly, while many other comrades looked askance at the stranger for a long time. It is difficult to overestimate the ideological influence of the Bolshevik press on E. Pridvorov. There is no doubt that his communication with the editors and employees of Zvezda, the "friendly conversations" with them that Olminsky speaks of, and reading the works of V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin - all this brought up the young poet, led him into the camp of the advanced proletariat. It was in Zvezda, and then in Pravda, that the talent of the poet of the revolution, D. Bedny, was formed. Later, recalling this period of his life, he said: "My crossroads converged on one road. The ideological confusion ended. At the beginning of 1912, I was already Demyan Bedny" (D. Poor, Autobiography, collection "Old and New", 1928, ed. ZIF, p. 12.). The work of Demyan Bedny on the eve of the First World War acquires new features and qualities. His civic pathetic lyrics lose their usual abstractness. Now in his poems there is a clearer understanding of social contradictions. The poet is becoming more and more clearly aware of the leading role of the proletariat in the liberation struggle against the oppressors and enslavers of the people. D. Poor responded to the shooting of Lena with a passionate, angry poem "Lena", in which he demanded retribution for the executioners of the working people. Significantly published in the first issue of the pre-October Pravda, the poem “Our cup is full of suffering. .. "The old theme of the boundlessness of people's grief, of the already overflowing cup of people's disasters, receives its new solution here. Demyan Bedny calls the proletariat to fight against the autocracy and firmly believes in the final victory of the revolution. It is no coincidence that at that time the leading genre in creativity D. Poor is satire. The fable genre was an effective and sharp weapon in the fight against the numerous enemies of the proletarian revolutionary movement. It is very significant that during these years Gorky created satirical "Russian Tales", in which he mercilessly exposes the many-sided enemies of the working masses of Russia. Like Gorky, Demyan Bedny uses the long-tested weapon of satire. The range of themes and ideas of his works on the eve of the first imperialist war is unusually wide. Not a single significant phenomenon in the socio-political life of the country escaped the attention of the poet. The powerless position of the proletariat and the peasant poor, the brutal exploitation of the working people by the bourgeoisie ("Bari", "Deli", "Milk "," Spoon "), outright robbery of the peasantry by officials, the predatory policy towards him of the tsarist government ("Hashout", "Round dance"), the awakening of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the rural poor ("May", "Lapot and boot", "Hypnotist ", "Narodnik", "Sing"), the struggle of the Bolsheviks for the interests of the working masses against the bourgeois parties and opportunists, the exposure of the Menshevik liquidators ("Cuckoo", "Rebellious Hares", "Ruffs and Loaches", "Kashevary", "Blind and lantern"), the merciless exposure of the autocratic police system ("Guest performer", "Pillar of the Fatherland", "Naturalist", "Tribune") - all this is reflected in the fables of the Poor, evaluated by the poet from the standpoint of the advanced proletariat and his party. In the art of creating a fable, Bedny relied on the rich heritage of Krylov. But he was not a mere imitator of Krylov; he introduced sharp political thought and a revolutionary understanding of social life into the fable. This feature of his fable creativity was later noted by the poet himself in the poem “In Defense of the Fable”: Krylov ... It’s not for me to reduce his huge talent: I am his student, respectful and modest, But not enthusiastically blind. I walked a different path than he did. Different from him by ancestral root, Cattle, which he drove to the watering hole, I sent it to the slaughterhouse. Demyan Bedny, with inexhaustible ingenuity, bypassed the slingshots of censorship and expanded the circle of his readers. To this end, he published his works not only in the leading Bolshevik press, but also in many professional magazines under the influence of the party: Metalist, Textile Worker, Bulletin, etc. One of the characteristic features of the style of Demyan Bedny's fables is Aesopian language, which gave the poet the opportunity to express his revolutionary political views in the censored press. The Aesopian language has a long history in Russian literature; revolutionary democrats led by Chernyshevsky, who defended their political views in the fight against reactionary publicists, resorted to it. Nekrasov and Saltykov-Shchedrin turned to him, providing excellent examples of the Aesopian language. Demyan Bedny continued this tradition of Russian revolutionary literature and journalism. Raising the most topical issues of our time on the pages of legal party newspapers, subjected to continuous persecution of censorship, the poet widely used various forms of Aesopian language. So, he often uses epigraphs, and the most seemingly innocent of them serve the poet to reveal the political meaning of the fable. Bedny often turns to the use of unexpected, catchy endings that clearly reveal the idea of ​​the fable, its political "address". D. Poor, with his natural humor and satirical temperament, found his true calling in the fable. Keen observation, a sense of detail, polemical, aphoristic style - all this takes place in the fables of Demyan Bedny, which give a diverse picture of Russian pre-revolutionary reality. Rhetorical, oratorical techniques are replaced in the fable by the techniques of live colloquial speech, colored with folk color. The poet perfected the skill of dialogue, skillfully using the forms and turns of lively peasant speech with its inherent humor and cunning. The fabulist discovered an excellent knowledge of peasant life, speech, and everyday life. The well-aimed folk phrase turned out to be capacious and effective in the fight against liberal-populist verbiage. Poor's sharp political satire, which incessantly and stubbornly attacked the "masters of life", attacked the "foundations" of the autocracy, aroused furious anger among the representatives of the reaction. The poet was under constant surveillance; newspapers that published his poems and fables were subject to numerous confiscations. In 1913, Poor was arrested, but soon released due to lack of evidence. His poems and fables met with an enthusiastic reception from the readers of Zvezda and Pravda, and were highly appreciated by the leaders of the Bolshevik Party. Closely watched the work of the poet V. I. Lenin. After the publication of the first collection of Poor's fables in 1913, Lenin drew the attention of A. M. Gorky to this book (See V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 35, p. 66.). In one of his letters to the editors of Pravda, Lenin, emphasizing above all the strengths of Bedny's talent, demanded that the poet be protected from petty and captious criticism. "As for Demyan Bedny, I continue be for. Do not find fault, friends, with human weaknesses! Talent is rare. It must be systematically and carefully supported. Sin will be on your soul, a big sin (a hundred times more "sins" of personal different ones, if there are any ...) in front of workers' democracy, if you do not attract a talented employee, n_e p_o_m_o_zh_e_t_e him. The conflicts were small, but the matter was serious. Think about it!" (V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 35, p. 68.) Much later, recalling the help of the party and its leaders who led his "fable shooting", Demyan Bedny wrote with a feeling of warm gratitude: And Is it possible to forget whose genius she was then valued, so that I would not beat the small game, But would beat the bison that roamed the forests, And the ferocious royal dogs, Often guided my fable shooting Lenin myself. He is from afar, and Stalin- he was near, When they were forged by him and "Truth" and "Star", When, glancing at the strongholds of the enemy, He pointed out to me: "It would not be bad to strike here with a fabled projectile!" This interest of the leaders of the revolution in the talented fabulist was caused primarily by the fact that Bedny was one of the most prominent representatives of the new, proletarian literature, that his poetry provided invaluable assistance to the party in the political education of the broad working masses. The "fable shells" of the poet continued to burst in the camp of the enemy even in the most difficult years for the Bolshevik Party of the first imperialist war. During these years, Poor was already a convinced Bolshevik-Leninist. As is known, the war of 1914-1917 was a war of conquest, and the Bolsheviks fought for the development of the imperialist war into a civil war. The Bolshevik Party propagated the ideas of internationalism, the fraternal solidarity of the working people of all the warring countries. The poetry of Bedny in 1914-1917 expresses precisely this Bolshevik view of the nature and essence of the imperialist war. Returning in 1915 from the Western Front, where he served as a military paramedic, Demyan Bedny establishes ties with the leaders of the Bolshevik Party who were underground, draws closer to Gorky, who in those years was the recognized leader of proletarian literature. Together with Gorky and Serafimovich, he attacks the corrupt bourgeois literature, which tried to fool the masses with the slogan of "defence of the fatherland", widely propagandized stale patriotism, the defense of "the tsar and the fatherland." A very sharp and well-aimed poem by Poor "Batalista" is dedicated to the apologists of the war: Everything is skillfully gilded. Peaceful ideas, like a husk, having blown away, Writers of the Russian swamp Transformed into Tirteev. Victoriously joyful, furrowing their brows menacingly, Behind the battle scene they rush to concoct a scene: From the still steaming, hot brotherly blood They remove the foam! It was difficult to say more expressively about the political venality of reactionary writers like Sologub, Merezhkovsky, as well as the former “Znanievites” who defected to the reactionary camp, such as Chirikov and others. During the war years, D. Bedny was working on the translation of Aesop's fables. From the numerous works of the ancient Greek fabulist, he chooses those that could be perceived by the reader as a response to the topic of the day. The Bolshevik press was severely persecuted during the war, and Demyan Bedny continued to use every legal opportunity to circumvent censorship slingshots, placing his poems in the bourgeois magazines Modern World, Life for Everyone, and in special editions (for example, the fable "The Cannon and the Plow" was published in the cooperative journal "Association"). Many of Bedny's works, despite all the poet's attempts to publish them, could not be printed before the revolution ("Difficulty", "Mustache and beard", etc.). The poet mercilessly denounced the "eternal truths" of bourgeois society and bourgeois morality, covered with hypocritical veils, exposed the abomination and desolation reigning in an exploitative society, created a satirical gallery of enemies of the people: hypocrites and hypocrites, rapists and money-grubbers who profited from the misfortunes of the people. During these years of chauvinistic frenzy, D. Poor courageously praises the great strength of the peaceful labor of the people ("Cannon and Plow"), exposes the imperialists, representatives of the tsarist government ("Feak", "Anchutka the Lender", etc.). In the poem "Ordered, but the truth is not told", later included in the story "About the land, about the will, about the working share", the idea is carried out of the irreconcilable opposition of the interests of the people and the interests of the exploiters, the predatory nature of the imperialist war is revealed: We are ordered to go into battle: "Be honest for the land!" For the earth! Whose? Not said. The landowner, you know! We are ordered to go into battle: "Long live freedom!" Freedom! Whose? Not said. But just not the people. We were ordered to go into battle: "Allied for the sake of nations." And the main thing is not said: Whose for the sake of banknotes? To whom the war is patches. To whom - a million profits, How long are we, guys, To endure dashing torture? About this satirical poem, which exposed the hypocritically loud slogans of the Provisional Government, the corrupt bourgeois newspaper Birzhevye Vedomosti wrote that "the sixteen lines of this song contain all the salt, all the poison of that Bolshevik sermon that decomposed so many parts of our army." The provisional government, which came to power after the victory of the February Revolution, continued to pursue the imperialist policy of tsarism, it called on the people to continue the war to a victorious end, preached the legend of the "unity of interests of all classes" of Russian society in the face of "common danger". The provisional government was preparing to abolish all the gains that had been achieved by the people in the course of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution. In this regard, the Bolshevik Party faced the task of explaining to the workers and soldiers that as long as power belongs to the bourgeois government, and the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries rule in the Soviets, the people will receive neither peace, nor land, nor bread, that for complete victory it is necessary to transfer power Soviets. These tasks completely determined the work of Demyan Bedny in the period from February to October 1917. During this period, Demyan Bedny's satire becomes even sharper, its combative offensive spirit sharply intensifies, it also diversifies in terms of genre. D. Poor creates feuilletons in verse, epigrams, pamphlets, songs ("Petelki", "People's Sign", "Liberdan", "Social Stutterers", etc.), inflicting well-aimed blows on the Provisional Government, the Russian bourgeoisie and its henchmen, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Exposing numerous enemies of the people, Demyan Bedny at the same time strives to show the masses of the people the path they have already traveled, to speak about the successes they have achieved in the course of the revolutionary struggle. It was impossible to recreate all the complexity of this path in works of small form, and Demyan Bedny wrote his first major work - a poetic story "About the land, about the will, about the working share." The story recreates the course of historical events in Russia from the First World War to October 1917, reflects the activities of the Bolshevik Party, which politically educated the people, preparing them to fight the oppressors. At the beginning of the story, a seemingly traditional story of two loving young people unfolds before the reader, but the fate of the many millions of masses of the Russian peasantry is embodied in their personal fate. The war separates Vanya and Masha, and accordingly, two parallel storylines develop in the story. Vanya finds himself at the center of events taking place on the fronts of the imperialist war and in revolutionary Petrograd. Masha first lives in the countryside, labors at the fist, and then ends up in a factory in Moscow. Such a composition gives the poet the opportunity to reproduce a broad panorama of Russian reality during the years of the imperialist war, to show the fate of the workers, soldiers and peasants during this period, the growth of their self-awareness, their gradual comprehension of the truth of Bolshevism. The images of the Putilov locksmith Klim Kozlov and the village boy Vanya, although presented somewhat schematically, reflected very significant historical shifts in the life of the people - an ever stronger alliance between the proletariat and the working peasantry. The image of Vanya captures the best features of the Russian national character: honesty, courage, ardent patriotism, love for freedom and justice. Faithful to the truth of life, the poet draws in the story all the complexity and difficulty of the path of a dark peasant guy to realize the truth of Bolshevik ideas. The significance of the ideological content of the story "About the land, about the will ...", its thematic breadth determines the artistic originality of this work. In working on it, Bedny creatively uses the poetic heritage of Russian classics and the wonderful traditions of Russian folklore. Our critics have repeatedly noted the connection between the story "About the Land, About Freedom ..." with Nekrasov's works dedicated to peasant life. This kinship is manifested in the truly popular perception of historical events by Poor, and in the very system of images, and in folk poetic vocabulary, and even in the direct reproduction of the names of Nekrasov's heroes and the names of villages. So, in the story of Poor, the images of the peasants-truth-seekers Tit and Vanya, the brave strong-willed girl Masha resemble the heroes of Nekrasov's works ("Frost, Red Nose", "Who Lives Well in Russia"); individual characters are directly taken from Nekrasov's poem (Yakim Nagoi), the names of the villages are also consonant with some Nekrasov ones (the village of Bosovo). Close to Nekrasov's is the flowing skaz verse of individual fragments of the story ("Letter of Yakim Nagogoi"). Especially clearly manifested in the artistic structure of the story is its connection with oral folk art. The poor introduces into his story a free verse that has long existed among the people - a raeshnik, uses visitation, ditty, peasant and soldier songs, fairy tales, vivid examples of urban folklore, etc. Filled with sharp social content, they are always used in direct proportion to the description of those or other events, from the characteristics of certain classes of society, these poetic forms helped Bedny to reproduce the historical originality of the era with unusual accuracy and expressiveness. Accurate, juicy, figurative language of the story is also directly related to folk art. The story "About the land, about the will, about the working share" was one of the most significant works of the new, socialist literature. The story is notable for its high ideological content, truthful depiction of the political events of its time, simple, accessible and highly artistic form. Singing the revolutionary heroism of the masses, drawing representatives of various classes, political parties, groups, satirically exposing the enemies of the people, under whatever mask they may be hiding, Bedny's story called for active intervention in life, for its radical revolutionary transformation, was an example of an effective, truly martial art . The Great October Socialist Revolution opened up new, broad horizons for D. Poor's poetry. The poet now speaks at the top of his voice. As in previous years, the main direction of his work is inextricably linked with the life of the working people, with the tasks that confronted the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government after the victory over the autocracy and the bourgeoisie. The struggle to strengthen the young Soviet state, to consolidate the victories achieved by the heroic efforts of the proletariat and the working peasantry, becomes the leading theme of Demyan Bedny's poetry of the era of the October Revolution and the Civil War. Much later in the poem "Be brave!" (1933), as if summing up his many years of writing, D. Poor himself determined the main content of his poems of those years: My voice in the war years was often like a trumpet. I wrote battle songs And called on the people to fight. To the fight against the fate of the former, bloody, To the fight against the priest and the fist, To the fight against the landlord mob, With Denikin and Kolchak. Demyan Bedny's poems of the "front-line years" were born as a lively, topical response to the events of the civil war, in which the poet himself was a direct participant. They were clearly agitational in nature, explained the meaning of the civil war, aimed at protecting the interests of the working people, the Soviet state, called on the people to take an active part in the fight against their oppressors. Such, for example, are Bedny's poetic story "About Mitka the Runner and His End", the song "Seeing Off", which won exceptional popularity, and others. With its satirical edge, Bedny's poetry was directed against the external and internal enemies of Soviet Russia. Diverse in genre, extremely well-aimed, sharp poems of the poet exposed the White Guard camp, its slavish dependence on foreign invaders. Drawing satirical portraits of Wrangel, Yudenich, Denikin and others, the poet revealed the true background of the activities of these "liberators of the fatherland", their desire to deprive the people of the freedom they had won, to give them again "a cross, a treasury and a whip, instead of will and land" ("Front-line ditties", "Yudenich's Manifesto", "Baron von Wrangel's Manifesto", "Red Cavalry on the Southern Front", etc.). The poetry of D. Bedny was distinguished by political accuracy and accuracy of satirical arrows. She raised the morale of the Red Army. Many of Bedny's poems were addressed directly to the "deceived brothers" - soldiers of the Russian White Guard or foreign troops. Printed as leaflets, these poems were often dropped from airplanes. There were many cases when, under the influence of these leaflets, soldiers of the White armies went over to the ranks of the Red Army. Along with sharp political satire, the lyrical genre occupies a much larger place in the poetry of the Poor period of the Civil War than in his pre-revolutionary work. His pathetic lyrics are organically connected with political events. It arose as a response to these events, was always agitational, called for a fight against enemies, affirmed faith in the victory of the people. Characteristic examples of the lyrics of these years can serve as "Communist Marseillaise", "In Defense of Red St. Petersburg", "Red Army Star" and many other poems. The satire and lyrics of the Poor period of the Civil War were very popular at the front and in the rear. Many poems, songs, ditties of the poet firmly entered into folk life, caused numerous imitations; the names of individual heroes of the works of the Poor became common nouns (for example, Mitka the runner from the story "About Mitka the runner and his end"). The poet perfectly mastered the melody of the folk song verse, the well-established folk vocabulary, proverbs, sayings. Most often, this folklore material was used by him in poems that exposed the enemies of the Soviet country ("Girl's Song", "Earrings to All Sisters", etc.), but sometimes he also found a place for himself in agitational, pathetic lyrics. Such, in particular, are the songs and conversations of grandfather Sofron, one of the favorite characters in Bedny's poetry of the era of the Civil War, embodying both the typical features of a folk storyteller and the features of a peasant who wholeheartedly accepted the new, revolutionary truth. Most of the poet's poems of the war years were firmly established in his literary heritage, won the recognition and love of the people. This is evidenced by the huge number of editions of Bedny's works at that time: during the period of the civil war, about forty of his books and pamphlets with a total circulation of one and a half million copies went out of print. The revolutionary poet waged a tireless struggle against all and sundry bourgeois currents in the literature of that time. Already in the years of the civil war, D. Bedny sharply opposed the "theoreticians" of Proletkult, who had a nihilistic attitude towards the cultural heritage of the past, tried to fence themselves off from life, and opposed themselves to the party. In the twenties, D. Bedny continued to closely follow the struggle on the literary front, actively advocated the ideology and realism of Soviet literature, exposed the bearers of formalism, aestheticism, lack of ideas, their hostile attacks in art (“Forward and higher!”, “He would beat his forehead ", "Once again about the same", etc.). So, for example, the poem "He would beat his forehead" revealed the dependence of the creativity of "proletarian" poets on bourgeois aesthetic, salon "pure art", urged them to "descend from diabolical heights", move away from "super-world scales" and connect their poetry with living everyday life. the reality of the Soviet country. Poor sharply opposes himself to all literary groups that are hostile to truly folk art, and in the poem "Forward and Above!" (1924) clearly defines the basic principles of his poetic work: My language is simple, and my thoughts too: There is no abstruse novelty in them, - Like a pure key in a flinty bed, They are transparent and clear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Does Truth need gilding? My honest verse, fly like an arrow - Forward and higher! - from the swamp of rotten Literature! In a speech at a meeting of proletarian writers on January 6, 1925, Demyan Bedny demanded that writers respond with their work to the requests of a mass multi-million reader - "speak so that they listen to you ... write so that you are read." The poetic work of D. Bedny of the twenties was characterized, first of all, by a close connection with the life of the Soviet state, exceptional relevance and topicality. The poet's pen served to strengthen the socialist state, fight against its internal and external enemies, and educate a new, Soviet person. One of the first large and most significant works of D. Poor of these years, a kind of link between his work of the era of the civil war and the restoration period, was the poem "Main Street" (1922). This poem, as it were, summed up the achievements of the working masses of Russia and spoke of the significance of their experience for the development of the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries, whose peoples would follow the example of the heroic Russian proletariat and the working peasantry. In the hyperbolically exaggerated images of the characters of "Main Street" - businessmen, usurers, bankers, in the powerful epic image of the rebellious "mob" an epic image of the era unfolds, the majestic scope of revolutionary events is shown. The hyperbolization of the images of "Main Street" serves as a means of their realistic characterization. In the duel of the inhabitants of the Main Street with epic folk heroes, the people win, their indomitable revolutionary energy. Home Street answered with a howl. Became a rich man. His path is blocked. The infamous flock of predatory vultures Claws plunged into the working chest. The poor poetized the true master of the world - the people, whose labor created all the values ​​​​on their native land. This street, palaces and canals, Banks, arcades, shop windows, cellars, Gold, fabrics, and food, and drink - This is mine !!. Libraries, theaters, museums, Squares, boulevards, gardens and avenues, Marble and bronze statues cast - This is mine !!. Loyalty to the best traditions of progressive Russian literature helped Demyan Bedny paint an epic picture of the struggle of the Russian people against their oppressors and their final victory. But the October Revolution is conceived by the poet as the beginning of a series of proletarian revolutions on the "world avenue". In the epilogue of the poem, the "hardened reserves" go to storm the capital, "to the last world redoubt." The poem is an excellent example of Poor's realistic poetry. The depth of the ideological content, the revolutionary pathos that penetrates it, determine the clear form of the work, the strict and severe simplicity and at the same time the solemnity of his verse. A number of poems by Demyan Bedny in the early twenties are directed against the white emigration and the treacherous policy of the Mensheviks. The poet exposes these rabid enemies of the people, who are building fantastic plans for "victory over communism" and returning to Russia as its "saviors" ("Snake's Nest", "Liberal", "Super-Liberal", "From Life to Decay", "After Dinner Mustard ", "At the last line", etc.). The poor ridicules the absurdity of these plans and the pitiful role of henchmen of the foreign bourgeoisie, which was played by Russian white émigrés abroad ("Deceived Madame", "Two Coals", etc.). In the poem "To the Traitors", written in connection with the Kronstadt rebellion, the poet castigates "excellent scoundrels", white officers who tried to seize power in Kronstadt. The poems "Wasp", "That's it", "Everything is clear" were written in connection with the trial of the right SRs who "worked" on the instructions of foreign capitalists. The poet compares these contemptible enemies of the people with "a rabid swarm of wasps", shows the hatred towards them of the working people of the Soviet country, ridicules the attempts of the agents of international imperialism - Russian and foreign social traitors - to protect all this rabble from the just wrath of the people ("Menshevik lamentation", "Not political wrestling, but legal chicanery", "Vandervelde in Moscow", "Wolf Defender", etc.). At the same time, D. Bedny created a large cycle of satirical poems, exposing the international reaction, the machinations of imperialist predators. The victorious end of the civil war, the transition to peaceful construction, the restoration of the destroyed national economy - all this aroused the furious anger of international capital, which was counting on the collapse of Soviet power. The imperialists sought out all sorts of means to strike at the young workers' and peasants' state. The dirty behind-the-scenes conspiratorial policy of foreign capitalist powers was revealed by Demyan Bedny in his satirical poems on international topics. The poet exposed the true goals of "peaceful" international conferences, wrote about the arms race in the West, about provocative attempts to unleash a new war with the Soviet Union ("Washington Disarmament", "Politicians from the High Road", "The Great Monument"), named the names of American, British and French warmongers. Many of these verses resonate with today, seem to be directly directed against those who, behind the ranting about peace treaties, about protecting their borders, are hiding vile plans for expansion, seizure and robbery of foreign territories. In works on international themes, Bedny is a brilliant master of political satire. With sparing, clear strokes, he creates exceptionally sharp, lastingly memorable portraits of imperialist predators, open or disguised enemies of the Soviet Union - Macdonald, Curzon, Briand, Lloyd George and others. The fabulist and satirist skillfully managed to reveal the whole inconsistency of their delusional aggressive plans. A tireless fighter for peace, a true patriot of his homeland, Demyan Bedny passionately sings of the heroic working days of the young Soviet state. The very first year of the peaceful life of our country was marked by the most important decision of the party on the transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was adopted in 1921 by the Tenth Party Congress. Not all Soviet writers immediately understood the essence of the brilliant tactics of the Bolshevik Party in the field of the economy, the significance of the NEP for the restoration of destroyed industry. Some of them were bewildered and regarded the NEP as a surrender of the won positions to capitalism. Demyan Bedny, to a certain extent, also succumbed to these sentiments ("On the Pass", "Posters", etc.). But the instructions of the party and the statements of V. I. Lenin helped him quickly get rid of his mistakes, correctly understand the peculiarities of the internal situation in the country, and appreciate the whole genius of the tactics of the Bolsheviks. In a number of poems, he gives a correct assessment of NEP, based on Lenin's statements, as a temporary retreat for the subsequent conquest of commanding heights by socialism. In the poems "In the Fog", "ABC", "Altyniki" he denounces both Nepmen and whiners of little faith who did not understand the wise policy of the party. One of the central themes of Bedny's work in the 1920s was the theme of labor. Based on the instructions of the party, the poet consistently pursues the idea that it is in the creative creative work of the masses that the guarantee of the coming victory of communism should be seen. Together with Gorky, Mayakovsky, Gladkov and other Soviet writers, Demyan Bedny sang of labor, which in the new conditions of Soviet reality was of particular importance. D. Bedny also creates the image of a hero of our time - the builder of socialism. In the working days of ordinary Soviet people, the poet saw the greatest heroism, the ever-strengthening socialist consciousness of the masses. With great realistic power, the poet draws the image of a new man in the poem "Craving", which I. V. Stalin in a letter to Demyan Bedny of July 15, 1924 called "pearl". This letter pointed out the need to recreate in artistic form the richest panorama of socialist construction, to draw the heroes of emancipated labor: “If you have not yet seen the forests of oil rigs, then you“ have not seen anything, ”I. Stalin wrote. - I am sure that Baku will give you the richest material for such pearls as "Tyaga" (I. V. Stalin, Works, vol. 6, p. spiritual and moral qualities is immeasurably higher than the Western European or American rich, who imagine themselves to be the "salt of the earth." The hero of "Traction" is the railway worker Yemelyan Dimitrenko, whose everyday life is a great example of a labor feat, conscious service to the ideas of communism. Despite the material difficulties that he and his family are experiencing, he is "friendly, cheerful, agile," devoted to his homeland with all his heart. This is a true Soviet patriot, strong in the consciousness of his superiority over "any Rothschild, For house". In the midst of people's life, the poet also finds his other heroes - ordinary builders of socialism. So, for example, in the poem "Comrade Beard" the fate of one of the many millions of ordinary people who have passed a path unprecedented in history is depicted. Hard work in the field, wandering laborers, learning to read and write, revolutionary activity, the battles of the civil war, and, finally, a peaceful creative life, work - such is the biography of the hero of the work of an advanced Soviet man who gives his strength to the construction of socialism. The creative energy of the people, transforming the country and the person himself, becomes the center of Demyan Bedny's poetry. From the revolutionary epic of the era of the civil war, in which the rebellious people acted as the main character, the poet comes to create an individualized image of the hero of our time - the builder of Soviet life. He reveals his new spiritual and moral qualities, formed by the revolution. Life demanded from Demyan Bedny not only the affirmation of positive ideals. She set before him the task of denouncing everything that hindered the development of Soviet society, the growth of people's socialist consciousness. In the 1920s, there was a huge field of activity for the satirical work of the poet. His intervention was demanded by the struggle against the direct enemies of the socialist state, the struggle against the remnants of the past among people who had not yet outlived the heavy legacy of the old system. D. The poor stigmatizes the embezzlers of people's property ("To answer", "Comrades chefs"), denounces slovenliness and irresponsibility in production ("My May Day poster"), demands a resolute struggle against lack of culture, drunkenness ("Swearing is not a pick", "Terry flowers, etc.). A special place in his work is occupied by the theme of the new village and the socialist relations developing in it. The poet passionately opposes the class enemy in the countryside. "Don't waste speeches where you need to use power" - Demyan Bedny titles one of his poems, calling in it to fight against bandits-kulaks who resorted to terror: murders, beatings of collective farm activists, arson, etc. to see how, in a difficult struggle, the new was forging its way and asserting itself in peasant life. The images of the advanced peasant woman Maria Goloshubova in the poem of the same name, the peasant Strugov ("Kostroma"), who was the instigator of the electrification of his village, are organically included in the gallery of images created by the poet of ordinary Soviet people - the builders of socialism. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Demyan Bedny was one of the first in Soviet literature to respond to the country's successes in the field of industrialization. The most significant work of the poet of this period was the poem "Shaitan-Arba", the material for which was the construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. Bedny talks about the difficulties faced by the builders of this grandiose highway, sings of the heroism of the Soviet people, "workers of a hard, steel category," who lay the track "for the mighty locomotive of history." The poeticization of the rise of labor enthusiasm, the tireless creative energy, the readiness of the Soviet person for a feat become the main motives of his poetry. "Fighters for a beautiful life" he devotes passionate and excited poems. Ordinary Russian people, serving their homeland with heroic labor and selfless deeds, are still at the center of Bedny's works. Such are Stepan Zavgorodny and his six sons in the poem "Kolkhoz Krasny Kut" (the title of the later edition of the poem "Stepan Zavgorodny"), the Red Army soldier Ivanov in the story of the same name, and others. But even at this time the poet reminds the Soviet people of the danger of imperialist aggression. He exposes the provocative policy of the imperialists, who again and again tried to disrupt the peaceful, working life of the USSR ("Black Carthage", "About my lords", etc.). A number of Bedny's works from 1926-1929 reveal the true face of American reaction. The poet talks about the notorious American "democracy", about the decline of culture, about racial discrimination, the triumph of the police regime, forced labor ("Slave owners", "Truly black", "Darkness", "Also a record"). Numerous poems by Bedny devoted to China belong to the same period. The poet sharply separates the Chinese people from the reactionary Kuomintang military, which sold the country to Western European capitalists, Bedny writes about the great friendship between the Russian and Chinese peoples: Whoever threatens us and whoever fools us: years ago, exactly!). But with sympathy for the suffocated, We will say: "Bandits! Hands off From indignant China!" In his satirical poems, Demyan Bedny continues to smash both the internal enemies of the Soviet country and the remnants of capitalism in the everyday life and minds of the working people. Fists and saboteurs, political double-dealers, splitters within the party find a worthy rebuke in Bedny's poetry ("The Bared Mouth", "It's Not Scary", "Pests", etc.). The satirical weapon of the Poor overtakes idlers, slobs, people with blunted vigilance, who facilitated their internal enemies of their criminal subversion, hits morally decomposed people ("Thistle", "Nata", "Good!", etc.). But it would be wrong to say that Demyan Bedny's creative path was even and smooth, that all his works met the high requirements that the people and the party placed on Soviet writers. Some of the poems created by Bedny in the early 1930s are not free from serious ideological errors. So, in the verses "Without mercy", "Pererva", "Get off the stove" the poor understanding of the past of Russia, the Russian national character, affected. These feuilletons ran counter to the great traditions of classical and revolutionary-democratic literature, which affirmed the idea of ​​wisdom, talent, diligence, heroism of the Russian people, they contradicted everything that Bedny himself observed in the Soviet reality surrounding him. Criticism of individual shortcomings in the life and work of the Soviet people, contained in a number of works by Bedny at the end of the 1920s, took on a generalizing character in these vicious verses and grew into a slander against the Russian people. The essence of these mistakes of the poet was revealed by the Central Committee of the party in a special decision. Explaining this decision, I. V. Stalin wrote to Demyan Bedny on December 12, 1930: “What is the essence of your mistakes? captivated you beyond measure and, captivating you, began to develop in your works into slander on the USSR, on its past, on its present. These are your "Get off the stove" and "No mercy." Such is your "Pererva", which I read today on the advice of Comrade Molotov "(I. V. Stalin, Works, vol. 13, p. 24.). J. V. Stalin emphasized in his letter that the Soviet Union is an example and “Revolutionaries of all countries look with hope at the USSR as at the center of the liberation struggle of the working people of the whole world, recognizing in it their only fatherland,” wrote Comrade Stalin. “The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class and above all Russian to the working class, the vanguard of the Soviet workers, as their recognized leader, pursuing the most revolutionary and most active policy that the proletarians of other countries have ever dreamed of pursuing. The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries eagerly study the most instructive history of the Russian working class, its past, the past of Russia, knowing that besides reactionary Russia there also existed revolutionary Russia, the Russia of the Radishchevs and the Chernyshevskys, the Zhelyabovs and the Ulyanovs, the Khalturins and Alekseevs. All this instills (cannot but instill!) in the hearts of the Russian workers a feeling of revolutionary national pride, capable of moving mountains, capable of performing miracles" (JV Stalin, Works, vol. 13, pp. 24-25.). And V. Stalin qualified Bedny's delusions as "... slander on our people debunking THE USSR, debunking proletariat of the USSR debunking Russian proletariat" (Ibid., p. 25.). He also pointed out D. Bedny's intolerance towards remarks addressed to him, his "arrogance", unwillingness to listen to the voice of the party and its Central Committee. deeply vicious and anti-Marxist conception of Pokrovsky, which distorted and indiscriminately cursed the entire historical past of Russia. The beginnings of Poor's ideological mistakes were already contained in some of the poet's works of the mid-20s - emphasizing only the negative aspects of village life: drunkenness, hooliganism, laziness ("Men" , "People's House", "Babiy Revolt", etc.), a nihilistic attitude towards the entire past of Russia ("Justified", etc.). Ideological mistakes, Demyan Bedny's inattention to the rapid growth of the reader's cultural demands also led to shortcomings in the artistic form of his poetry. In the early 1920s, V. I. Lenin, evaluating the literary work of Bedny, recognized its great agitational significance, but noted at the same time that Bedny was “rude. He follows the reader, but you have to be a little ahead "(M. Gorky, Sobr. soch., vol. 17, Goslitizdat, 1952, p. 45.). A number of poems and feuilletons of the poor late 20s - early 30s sinned by superficiality, primitive interpretation of the theme. The poet abuses the techniques of installation, overloads his works with unnecessary, insignificant material drawn from a wide variety of, sometimes completely random sources. Strict party criticism helped the poet overcome his ideological and artistic mistakes. In the same thirties, D. Poor creates works about socialist construction, about Soviet people heroically working for the benefit of their homeland ("To live and work!", "My report to the 17th Party Congress", "The flowering of life", "Confident strength", "The country is growing", etc.) The poet draws the image of a positive hero, connects the flourishing of his homeland, the happiness of its people with the heroic deeds of those who, during the years of the revolution and civil war, sacrificed their lives to fight the enemies of the young Soviet state (Pov. there is "Red Army Ivanov"). Despite the creation of these ideologically correct works by Poor, recurrences of previous mistakes still affect his work. In 1936, D. Poor writes the play "Bogatyrs". Here again, the poet's misunderstanding of the essence of the Russian national character, the heroic Russian people, manifested itself. The play "Bogatyrs" caused a fair condemnation of the Soviet public and was removed from the stage. In the resolution of the All-Union Committee for the Arts, published on November 14, 1936, it was qualified as "alien to Soviet art." Poor was very attentive to the voice of the Soviet public and party criticism. The poet reworks a number of his previous works (for example, the story "Men", etc.). In his new works, he sings of the greatness of the country of socialism, the care of the party and its leaders for people, proudly speaks of the path traversed by the Soviet people (the cycles "Motherland", "The country admires", etc.). In the "Heroic Memo" the poet, referring to the glorious past of the people, expresses confidence in victory if the enemies dare to attack our homeland. He writes: And if they are in a furious madness We dare to declare: "War!", We will show them with a counterattack, How strong our homeland is, What kind of heroism It is capable of in the days of the campaign - An indestructible wall of all the Soviet people !! These lines were written by the poet four years before the treacherous attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union. And when the fascist hordes rushed to the Soviet land, D. Poor felt like one of the soldiers of the Soviet Army, repelling the onslaught of the enemy. During the Patriotic War, the poet worked hard and hard. From 1941 to 1945, D. Poor wrote a large number of poems, fables, feuilletons, stories, and was published in many newspapers and magazines. Together with other Soviet poets, he worked on the creation of "TASS windows", which continued the glorious traditions of "ROSTA windows". The satire of Demyan Bedny, his fables and epigrams, as well as the captions for the drawings in the "TASS windows", were directed against the Nazi system and fascist fanatics. The poet ridicules the ravings of Goebbels' propaganda, Hitler's hysterical boasting, shows the collapse of the Nazis' ridiculous claims to world domination, exposes the obscurantism and barbarism of the despicable degenerates of mankind who encroached on the age-old culture of the Russian people ("Snake Nature", "Sharpers", "Signed", "Disguised bandit "," Fascist art critics ", etc.). The unparalleled heroism of the Russian people, their patriotic deeds, becomes the most important theme in the works of Poor during the war years. Soviet patriots, fighters against fascist barbarians (poems "People's Courage", "Motherland", "Odessa", etc.), patriotic girls who perish, but do not surrender to the enemy, refusing to go to fascist hard labor ("Russian Girls"), heroic Ukrainian partisans ("Stepan Zavgorodny") - such are his new heroes. The poet sings of the great friendship of the peoples of the Soviet Union, united even more closely in the face of a common danger ("The Motherland stands behind us"). He also glorifies the heroic home front workers who forged victory far from the front. Having finally overcome his former erroneous views, Demyan Bedny now sees in the heroic deeds of bygone years the guarantee of the current victories of the Soviet people. In the poem "Let's remember, brothers, the old days," the poet recalls the Kulikovo field in order to inspire the fighters fighting the fascist hordes on the Don; in the poem "Our banner flew over Kharkov" - to Berezina, who saw the stampede of Napoleon; he tells the liberators of Pskov about the legends of Lake Peipus. Poor and the traditions of folk art, the heroic Russian epic, comprehend in a new way. Having abandoned the false concept that formed the basis of his "Bogatyrs", he now sees in the images of Russian heroes the embodiment of the invincibility of the people, their love for their homeland. The image of a hero-warrior is now present in a number of the poet's works ("The Bogatyr's Crossing", etc.). As if generalizing Poor's views on the historical past of Russia and its present is one of the poet's best poems - "Rus", written by him at the end of the Patriotic War. Where the word of the Russians sounded, The friend perked up, and the enemy drooped. Russia- the beginning of our virtues And the spring of life-giving forces. Serving as its firm support In cultural construction and in battle, With fiery and proud love We love Motherland my! She is a freedom fighter. She is covered with warmth, The fraternal peoples Find Protection under her wing. In the daily, tireless concern of the Communist Party and the government for the people, D. Poor saw the guarantee of the happiness of the Soviet people. The poet lived to see the joyful moments of victory and dreamed of devoting his work to the tasks of post-war peaceful construction. But death prevented his plans from being realized. D. Poor died on May 25, 1945. Demyan Bedny's great services to the revolution were noted in government reports on the death of the poet. It spoke of the death of "a talented Russian poet-fabulist Demyan Bedny(Pridvorov Efim Alekseevich), whose fighting word served the cause of the socialist revolution with honor. "In the years of the creative creative work of the Soviet people, erecting the bright building of communism, in the years when the free Soviet country leads the peoples' struggle for peace, the fighting word of Demyan Bedny did not lose a single even now it serves the Motherland, and this is the highest award for a poet who gave the people all the strength of his mind and talent.

Poet and social activist. The son of a laborer, he studied at a rural school, then at a military paramedic, after which he served 4 years in military service.

"Demyan Poor died of fear"

POOR Demyan (Pridvorov Efim Alekseevich) (1883-1945). Soviet poet and writer. Born in with. Gubovka Kherson region. He studied at the Kyiv military medical school and St. Petersburg University (1904-1908). Member of the First World War. Member of the RCP(b) since 1912. Published in the Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda1) and Pravda. Author of satirical poems, feuilletons, fables, songs, captions for TASS windows. The most famous epic poems by D. Bedny are “About the Land, About the Will, About the Working Share” (1917), “Main Street” (1922). In the 1920s, the work of D. Poor was popular. “Today, it would not occur to writers to carry out a “demyanization of literature,” at the same time, the issue of reducing the entire variety of literature to one model was seriously discussed: to the poetry of Demyan Poor” (Istoriki argue. M., 1989, p. 430). In 1925 the city of Spassk (now in the Penza region) was renamed Bednodemyanovsk.

According to the memoirs of V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, V.I. Lenin “remarkably sensitive, close and loving ... treated the mighty muse of Demyan Bedny. He characterized his works as very witty, beautifully written, well-aimed, hitting the target.

Demyan Bedny, having arrived in 1918 together with the Soviet government from Petrograd to Moscow, received an apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace, where he moved his wife, children, mother-in-law, nanny for children ... The writer had a very good library, from which, with the permission of the owner, he took Stalin's books They developed excellent, almost friendly relations, but in the future the leader unexpectedly not only evicted Demyan Poor from the Kremlin, but also set him under surveillance.

“After the founding congress of the Union of Writers of the USSR,” I. Gronsky recalled, “the question arose of awarding Demyan Poor with the Order of Lenin, but Stalin suddenly opposed it. It was surprising to me, because the Secretary General always supported Demyan. During a face-to-face conversation, he explained what the matter was. He took out a notebook from the safe. It contained rather unflattering remarks about the inhabitants of the Kremlin. I noticed that the handwriting is not Demyan's. Stalin replied that the statements of the tipsy poet were recorded by a certain journalist ... ”(Gronsky I.M. From the past. M., 1991. P. 155). The case reached the Committee of Party Control, where the poet was given a suggestion.

M. Kanivez writes: “At one time, Stalin brought Demyan Bedny closer to him, and he immediately became everywhere in great honor. At the same time, a certain subject, a red professor by the name of Present, crept into the circle of Demyan's close friends. This person was assigned to spy on Demyan. Present kept a diary where he wrote down all his conversations with Bedny, ruthlessly misrepresenting them... Returning somehow from the Kremlin, Demyan told how wonderful strawberries were served at Stalin's for dessert. The presentation wrote: “Demyan Bedny was indignant that Stalin was eating strawberries when the whole country was starving.” The diary was delivered “to the right place,” and Demyan’s disgrace began with this ”(Kanivez M.V. My life with Raskolnikov // Past. M. , 1992, p. 95).

Stalin repeatedly studied and criticized the writer. In particular, in a letter to him he wrote: “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 his present. Such are your “Get off the stove” and “Without mercy.” Such is your “Pererva”, which I read today on the advice of Comrade Molotov.

You say that Comrade Molotov praised the feuilleton “Get off the stove.” It could very well be. but there is also a fly in the ointment that spoils the whole picture and turns it into a continuous “Interruption.” That is the question and that is what makes the music in these feuilletons.

Judge for yourself.

The whole world now recognizes that the center of the revolutionary movement has shifted from Western Europe to Russia. Revolutionaries of all countries look with hope to the USSR as the center of the liberation struggle of the working people of the whole world, recognizing in it their only fatherland. The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class and, above all, the Russian working class, the vanguard of the Soviet workers, as their acknowledged leader who

the most revolutionary and most active policy that the proletarians of other countries have ever dreamed of pursuing. The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries eagerly study the most instructive history of the working class of Russia, its past, the past of Russia, knowing that besides reactionary Russia there was also revolutionary Russia, the Russia of the Radishchevs and the Chernyshevskys, the Zhelyabovs and the Ulyanovs, the Khalturins and the Alekseevs. All this instills (cannot but instill!) in the hearts of the Russian workers a feeling of revolutionary national pride, capable of moving mountains, capable of performing miracles.

And you? Instead of comprehending this greatest process in the history of the revolution and rising to the height of the tasks of the singer of the advanced proletariat, they went somewhere into the hollow and, entangled between the most boring quotations from the works of Karamzin and no less boring sayings from Domostroy, began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past was a vessel of abomination and desolation, that today's Russia is a continuous "Interruption", 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, 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.

And after this you want the Central Committee to remain silent! Who do you take our Central Committee for?

And you want me to keep quiet because you seem to have a "biographical tenderness" for me! How naive you are and how little you know the Bolsheviks ... ”(Stalin I.V. Sobr. soch. T. 13. S. 23-26).

“Demyan Bedny died of fear,” writes V. Gordeeva. - He had a permanent place in the presidiums, where he went as usual. And suddenly in the forty-fifth something changed. Only, it was, the poet went to his usual place during the next celebration, when Molotov, flashing his pince-nez unkindly, asked him in an icy voice: "Where?" Demyan backed away like a geisha for a long time. Then he made his way home and died. This was told by his own sister ”(Gordeeva V. Execution by hanging. A non-fictional novel in four stories about love, betrayal, death, written “thanks to” the KGB. M., 1995. P. 165).

The writer's library has been preserved. “When in 1938 Poor was forced to sell his wonderful library, I immediately bought it for the State Literary Museum, and it has been almost completely preserved to this day, except for those books that he left with him” (Bonch-Bruevich V D. Memories, Moscow, 1968, p. 184).

Seventy years ago, on May 25, 1945, the first Soviet writer and order bearer, Demyan Bedny, died. He quickly went from the bottom - the peasants - to the "classic of proletarian poetry." The poor man lived in the Kremlin for many years, his books were published in large numbers. He died leaving a very ambiguous memory of himself, especially among the creative intelligentsia, of which, in fact, he never became a part.

Bastard of the Grand Duke

Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov (1883-1945) - that was actually the name of Demyan Poor - from his youth he was looking for the truth-womb and went to the fire of enlightenment. He walked, trying to assert his literary talent. A peasant's son, he became not only one of the first poets of Soviet Russia, but also the most temperamental of the many subversives of the old culture.

A peasant from the village of Gubovki, Aleksandrovsky district, Kherson province, until the age of seven, Yefim lived in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovograd), where his father served as a church watchman. Later, he had a chance to take a sip of the peasant's share in the village - along with the "surprisingly sincere old man" grandfather Sofron and the hated mother. Relationships in this triangle are expanse for lovers of psychoanalysis. “Mother kept me in a black body and beat me with mortal combat. In the end, I began to think about escaping from home and reveled in the church-monastic book "The Way to Salvation",” the poet recalled.

In this short memoir, everything is interesting - both the bitterness of the unloved son, and the recognition of his passion for religious literature. The latter soon passed: atheistic Marxism turned out to be a truly revolutionary doctrine for the young Efim Pridvorov, for the sake of which it was worth renouncing both the past and all the most cherished that was in it, except, probably, love for the common people, for “grandfather Sofron”. Yefim got into the school of military paramedics in Kyiv, and the then fashionable Marxism was well suited to boyish dissatisfaction with army discipline and other manifestations of autocracy.

However, in those years, the future Demyan remained well-intentioned. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich himself (a poet and curator of military educational institutions) allowed a capable young man to pass the gymnasium exams externally for admission to the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. By the way, later Poor supported the rumor that the “court” surname was given to him by the Grand Duke ... as his bastard.

At the university, Yefim Pridvorov finally came to Marxism. At that time, he composed poems in the Nekrasov civic vein.

But over the years, the beliefs became more and more radical. In 1911, he was already published in the Bolshevik Zvezda, and the very first poem fell in love with the left-wing youth so much that its title - "About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant" - gave the poet a literary name, a pseudonym under which he was destined to become famous. The pseudonym, to be sure, is successful: it is remembered on the move and evokes the right associations. For Zvezda, Neva Star, Pravda, this sincere, caustic author from the people was a godsend. And in 1914, in the witty poetic newspaper daily work, a striking quatrain flashed:

At the factory - poison,
On the street - violence.
And there is lead and there is lead ...
One end!

And here the point is not only that the author cleverly linked the death of a worker at the Vulkan plant, who was shot by a policeman at a demonstration, with factory lead poisoning. In a laconic text there is a poetic substance that distinguishes it from other poetic journalism. To Demyan's credit, many years later, at a meeting with young writers in 1931, he recognized this old miniature as one of his successes.

Fighting censorship, the poet composed "Aesop's Fables" and a cycle about the merchant Derunov: from his pen almost daily came out rhyming hairpins addressed to the autocracy and hymns of the workers' and peasants' party. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) from his "far away" urged his comrades to nurture Demyan's talent. Joseph Stalin, who was in charge of the party press in 1912, agreed with him. And all his life the poet was proud of the fact that he collaborated with the leaders long before October.

So that I do not hit small game,
And he would beat the bison, wandering through the forests,
And by the fierce royal dogs,
My fable shooting
Often led by Lenin himself.
He - from afar, and Stalin - he was nearby,
When he forged both Pravda and Zvezda.
When, looking around the strongholds of the enemy,
He pointed out to me: “It would not be bad here
Hit with a fable projectile!

"In the Red Army bayonets ..."

During the Civil War, Demyan Bedny experienced the highest rise in popularity. His talent was superbly adapted to work in a time pressure mode: “Read, white guard camp, the message of Poor Demyan!”

The most virtuoso of the propaganda of those years was called "The Manifesto of Baron von Wrangel" - a reprise on a reprise. Of course, all this had nothing to do with the real Pyotr Wrangel, who spoke Russian without an accent and received orders for battles with the Germans in the First World War, but such is the genre of an unfriendly caricature. The poet dragged in everything he could here, portraying the general of the Russian army "Wilhelm Kaiser as a servant." Well, after the war, anti-German sentiments were still strong - Demyan decided to play on them.

It is possible that this is the best example of Russian pasta poetry (a kind of comic poetry characterized by a mixture of “French with Nizhny Novgorod”): if only Ivan Myatlev and Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy introduced foreign words into the Russian rhymed text just as witty and abundantly. And the phrase “We will see” has become a catchphrase.

Definitely, in the white camp there was no poet-satirist equal in enthusiasm and skill! Poor in Civil outplayed all the venerable kings of journalism of the Silver Age. And he won, as we see, not only by “following the reader, and not ahead of him” ditty democratism: neither Nekrasov, nor Minaev, nor Kurochkin would have refused the “baronial thing”. At the same time, in 1920, perhaps the best lyric poem of the militant leader of the working class, "Sorrow", was born.

But - a provincial half-station ...
These fortune-tellers... lies and darkness...
This sad soldier
Everything is going crazy for me! The sun shines through the clouds,
The forest goes into the distance.
And so this time it's hard for me
Hide my sadness from everyone!

On November 1, 1919, in a few hours, Demyan wrote the front-line song "Tanka-Vanka". Then they said: "Tanks are the last rate of Yudenich." The commanders feared that the fighters would falter when they saw the steel monsters. And then a slightly obscene, but foldable song appeared, over which the Red Army soldiers laughed.

Tanka is a valuable prize for the brave,
Coward - she scared.
It is worth taking a tank from white -
White immediately worthless.

The panic was gone. It is not surprising that the party valued the resourceful and dedicated agitator. He knew how to intercept the opponent's argument, quote it and turn it inside out for the good of the cause. In almost every poem, the poet called for reprisals against enemies: “In the belly with a thick bayonet!”

Adherence to the simplest folklore forms forced Demyan Bedny to argue both with modernists of all directions, and with "academicians". He deliberately adopted a ditty and a tongue twister: here is both a simple charm and an undoubted trump card of mass accessibility.

This is not a legend: his agitation really inspired the ideological Red Army soldiers and turned the vacillating peasants into sympathizers. He fought many miles of the Civil War on a cart and an armored train, and it happened that he accurately hit distant front-line "tanks" from Petrograd and Moscow. In any case, the Order of the Red Banner was well deserved by the poor: the military order - for combat poems.

court poet

When the Soviet system was established, Demyan was showered with honors. He - in full accordance with his real name - became a court poet. He lived in the Kremlin, shook hands with the leaders every day. In the first Soviet decade, the total circulation of his books exceeded two million, and there were also leaflets. By the standards of the 1920s–1930s, it was a colossal scale.

The former rebel now belonged to the officialdom, and, to be honest, not by talent, loud fame was ambiguous. Sergei Yesenin liked to call his "colleague" Efim Lakeevich Pridvorov. However, this did not prevent Demyan from being at the epicenter of historical events. For example, according to the then commandant of the Kremlin, sailor of the Baltic Fleet Pavel Malkov, the proletarian poet was the only person, with the exception of several Latvian shooters, who saw the execution of Fanny Kaplan on September 3, 1918.

“To my displeasure, I found Demyan Bedny here, running to the noise of engines. Demyan's apartment was just above the Armored Detachment, and he went down the back stairs, which I forgot about, straight into the yard. Seeing me with Kaplan, Demyan immediately understood what was happening, nervously bit his lip and silently took a step back. However, he had no intention of leaving. Well then! Let him be a witness!

To the car! - I gave a jerky command, pointing to a car standing at a dead end. Shrugging her shoulders convulsively, Fanny Kaplan took one step, then another ... I raised the gun ... "

When the body of the executed woman was doused with gasoline and set on fire, the poet could not stand it and lost consciousness.

“He approached the altar with mockery…”

From the first days of October, the revolutionary poet carried out propaganda not only on topical issues of the Civil War. He attacked the shrines of the old world, and above all Orthodoxy. Demyan now and then exhibited caricature images of priests (“Father Ipat had some money ...”), but this was not enough for him.

The poor even took Pushkin as allies in his poetic Preface to the Gavriiliada, unambiguously declaring about the great poet: “He approached the altar with mockery ...” a proletarian of peasant origin, the undoubted representative of the majority.

First - a book of poems "The spiritual fathers, their thoughts are sinful", endless rhyming feuilletons against the "church dope", and later - the scurrilous "New Testament without a flaw of Evangelist Demyan", in which Poor tried to rethink Scripture with a ditty.

These attempts were shocking even against the backdrop of Yemelyan Yaroslavsky's hysterical anti-religious propaganda. It seemed that Demyan was possessed by a demon: with such frenzy, he spat on the already fallen icons.

In the main Bulgakov novel, it is precisely his features that are guessed in the images of Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny. And what is true is true: Poor, with great strength of vanity, passionately desired to remain in history the number one theomachist. To do this, he rhymed the plots of Scripture, diligently lowering the style to the "corporal bottom." It turned out to be an absurd story about alcoholics, scammers and red tape with biblical names ... Demyan had grateful readers who accepted this ocean of scurrilousness, but they were embarrassed to republish the "Covenant Without Flaw" even during the years of new anti-religious campaigns.

In the obscene poem, Bedny appeals to the well-known anti-church plot of the Gospel of Judas. The outrageous idea of ​​rehabilitating "the first fighter against Christian obscurantism" was then in the air. Actually, already in the decadent tradition of the beginning of the 20th century, interest was shown in the ambiguous figure of the fallen apostle (recall the story of Leonid Andreev "Judas Iscariot"). And when they sang in the streets at the top of their voices “We will climb into heaven, we will disperse all the gods ...”, the temptation to exalt Judas could not be bypassed. Fortunately, the leaders of the revolution were not so radical (having gained power, any politician involuntarily begins to ply to the center) and in Lenin's "monumental propaganda plan" there was no place for a monument to Judas.

The routine of “literary propaganda work” (Demyan himself defined his work not without coquetry, but with communitarian pride) gave rise to such rough newspaper poetry that sometimes the author could be suspected of conscious self-parody. However, satirists and parodists usually do not see their own flaws - and Bedny quite complacently responded in rhyme to the topical events of political life.

The poet created volumes of rhymed political information, even though they were becoming outdated day by day. The authorities remembered how effective an agitator Demyan had been in Civil War, and his status in the 1920s and early 1930s remained high. He was a real star of Pravda, the main newspaper of "the entire world proletariat", he wrote widely promoted poetic messages to party congresses. He was published a lot, glorified - after all, an influential figure.

At the same time, the people were already laughing at the pseudonym Poor, retelling jokes about the lordly manners of the worker-peasant poet, who collected an invaluable library in revolutionary turmoil and NEP frenzy. But at the top, the household addictions of the non-poor Poor were tolerated.

“Behind the cultural Americas, Europe…”

The problems started from something else. The misanthropic attitude towards the Russian people, its history, character and customs, which was constantly manifested in Demyan's poems, suddenly aroused the indignation of the patriotic leaders of the CPSU (b). In 1930, three of his poetic feuilletons - "Get off the stove", "Pererva" and "Without mercy" - gave rise to a harsh political discussion. Still, the poet did not spare derogatory colors, scourging the "birth trauma" of our history.

Russian old unfortunate culture -
Stupid,
Fedura.
The country is boundlessly great,
Busted, slavishly lazy, wild,
In the tail of the cultural Americas, Europe,
Coffin!
Slave labor - and predatory parasites,
Laziness was a protective agent for the people ...

The Rappovites, and above all Leopold Averbakh, a frantic zealot of revolutionary art, greeted these publications with delight. “The first and tireless drummer, the poet of the proletariat Demyan Bedny, gives his powerful voice, the cry of a fiery heart,” they wrote about them then. - Demyan Bedny embodied the appeals of the party in poetic images. Averbakh generally called for "widespread denigration of Soviet literature" ...

And suddenly, in December 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution condemning Demyanov's feuilletons. At first, the resolution was associated with the name of Vyacheslav Molotov, and Bedny decided to take the fight: he sent a polemical letter to Joseph Stalin. But very quickly I received a sobering answer:

“When the Central Committee found itself forced to criticize your mistakes, you suddenly snorted and began to shout about the “noose”. On what basis? Perhaps the Central Committee has no right to criticize your mistakes? Perhaps the decision of the Central Committee is not binding on you? Maybe your poems are above all criticism? Don't you find that you have contracted some unpleasant disease called "arrogance"? More modesty, Comrade Demyan...

The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class and, above all, the Russian working class, the vanguard of the Soviet workers, as their recognized leader, pursuing the most revolutionary and most active policy that the proletarians of other countries have ever dreamed of pursuing. The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries eagerly study the most instructive history of the working class of Russia, its past, the past of Russia, knowing that besides reactionary Russia there was also revolutionary Russia, the Russia of the Radishchevs and the Chernyshevskys, the Zhelyabovs and the Ulyanovs, the Khalturins and Alekseevs. All this instills (cannot but instill!) in the hearts of the Russian workers a feeling of revolutionary national pride, capable of moving mountains, capable of performing miracles.

And you? Instead of comprehending this greatest process in the history of the revolution and rising to the height of the tasks of the singer of the advanced proletariat, they went somewhere into the hollow and, entangled between the most boring quotations from the works of Karamzin and no less boring sayings from Domostroy, began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past was a vessel of abomination and desolation, that today's Russia is a continuous "Interruption", 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, 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.

Already in February 1931, Bedny repented, speaking to young writers: “I had my own “holes” along the line of satirical pressure on the pre-October “past”” ...

After 1930, Demyan wrote a lot and evilly about Trotsky and the Trotskyists (he began back in 1925: “Trotsky - rather put a portrait in“ Ogonyok ”. the leftist bias no, no, yes, and slipped. The new embarrassment came out worse than the previous one, and its consequences for the entire Soviet culture turned out to be colossal.

The old scandal was almost forgotten, when suddenly someone pushed the poet to come up with a farce about the Baptism of Russia, and even caricature the epic heroes ... Alexander Tairov staged the comic opera "Bogatyrs" based on the libretto of Poor at the Moscow Chamber Theater. Left-wing critics were ecstatic. And many of them perished in the days of the next purges...

Molotov left the performance in indignation. As a result, the decision of the Central Committee on the ban on the play "Bogatyrs" by Demyan Bedny on November 14, 1936 marked the beginning of a large-scale campaign to restore the old foundations of culture and "develop the classical heritage." There, in particular, it was noted that the Baptism of Russia was a progressive phenomenon and that Soviet patriotism is incompatible with mockery of native history.

"Fight or Die"

For the "Bogatyrs" a year or two later, Demyan - a party member since 1912 - was expelled from the CPSU (b) and the Writers' Union of the USSR. An amazing fact: they were expelled from the party, in essence, for their disrespectful attitude towards the Baptism of Russia! “They are persecuting me because I have the halo of the October Revolution on me,” the poet used to say in the circle of his relatives, and these words were delivered to Stalin’s table in a printed “wiretap” ...

Back in the fall of 1933, Osip Mandelstam created the famous “We live without feeling the country under us” - a poem about the “Kremlin mountaineer”: “His thick fingers, like worms, are fat ...”

There was a rumor that it was Bedny who sometimes complained: Stalin takes rare books from him, and then returns them with greasy spots on the pages. It is unlikely that the “highlander” needed to find out how Mandelstam learned about the “fat fingers”, but in July 1938 the name of Demyan Poor suddenly seemed to be gone: the famous pseudonym disappeared from the newspaper pages. Of course, they interrupted work on the collected works of the proletarian classic. He prepared for the worst - and at the same time tried to adapt to the new ideology.

Demyan wrote a hysterical pamphlet against "hellish" fascism, calling it "Fight or die," but Stalin sarcastically threw: "To the new Dante, that is, Conrad, that is ... Demyan Poor. The fable or poem "Fight or Die", in my opinion, is an artistically mediocre piece. As a critique of fascism, it is pale and unoriginal. As a criticism of the Soviet system (don't joke!), it is stupid, although transparent. Since we (the Soviet people) have a lot of literary rubbish anyway, it is hardly worth multiplying the deposits of this kind of literature with one more fable, so to speak ... I, of course, understand that I am obliged to apologize to Demyan-Dante for the forced frankness. Respectfully. I. Stalin.

Demyan Bedny was driven with a filthy broom, and now there were poets in honor, reminiscent of white chauffeurs. Vladimir Lugovskoy wrote distinctly “old-mode” lines: “Get up, Russian people, for a mortal battle, for a formidable battle!” - and, together with the music of Sergei Prokofiev and the cinematic skill of Sergei Eisenstein (the film "Alexander Nevsky"), they became key in pre-war heroics. The rapid high rise of the young poet Konstantin Simonov was even more strongly connected with the tradition of military glory.

Demyan was finally excommunicated from the Kremlin, not only figuratively, but also literally. Disgraced, he was forced to move to an apartment on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. He was forced to sell relics from his very own library. The poet tried to return to the literary process, but failed. Fantasy seemed to work well, he even came up with the image of a dual, according to the Indian model, the deity "Lenin-Stalin", which he sang - excitedly, fussily. But they did not let him go beyond the threshold. And his character was strong: in 1939, at the peak of disgrace, Poor married the actress Lidia Nazarova - Desdemona from the Maly Theater. They had a daughter. Meanwhile, the bullets passed close: Demyan at one time collaborated with many "enemies of the people." He could well have been treated like Fanny Kaplan.

It's good to smoke it...
Beat the damn fascist
Don't let him breathe!

In the most difficult days of the Great Patriotic War, he wrote: "I believe in my people with an indestructible thousand-year faith." The main publications of the war years were published in Izvestia under the pseudonym D. Boeva ​​with drawings by Boris Efimov. The poet returned, his poems appeared on posters - as captions for posters. He loved the call:

Listen, Uncle Ferapont:
Send boots to the front!
Send urgently, together!
This is what you need!

Ferapont is mentioned here not only for the sake of rhyme: the collective farmer Ferapont Golovaty at that time contributed 100 thousand rubles to the Red Army fund. The tenacious eye of the journalist could not fail to grasp this fact.

Re-educated by party criticism, now Pridvorov-Poor-Fighting sang the continuity of the heroic history of the country with the victory at Kulikovo Field and exclaimed: "Remember, brothers, the old days!" He glorified Russia:

Where the word of the Russians sounded,
The friend has risen, and the enemy has drooped!

Already in Pravda, new poems began to appear, signed by the usual literary name Demyan Bedny: allowed! Together with other poets, he still managed to sing the glory of Victory. And he died two weeks later, on May 25, 1945, having published his last poem in the newspaper Socialist Agriculture.

According to a not entirely reliable legend, on the fateful day he was not allowed into the presidium of a certain solemn meeting. The evil genius of the Poor - Vyacheslav Molotov - seemed to interrupt the poet's movement to the chair with a question-shout: "Where to ?!" According to another version, his heart stopped at the Barvikha sanatorium at dinner, where the actors Moskvin and Tarkhanov were sitting at the table next to him.

Be that as it may, the next day all the newspapers of the USSR reported the death of "the talented Russian poet-fabulist Demyan Bedny, whose fighting word served the cause of the socialist revolution with honor." He did not live to see the Victory Parade, although in one of his last poems he spoke of "victorious banners on Red Square." Demyan's books were again published by the best publishers, including the prestigious Poet's Library series. But he was reinstated in the party only in 1956 at the request of Khrushchev as a "victim of the personality cult." It turned out that Bedny was the favorite poet of the new first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee.