Demyan Bedny (1883-1945)
Demyan Bedny (real name - Efim Alexandrovich Pridvorov) was born in the village of Gubovka, Kherson province, into the family of a peasant, a church watchman. In 1890 - 1896 studied at a rural school, after graduation he entered the Kyiv military paramedic school. As the best student, he was introduced to the inspector-trustee of military institutions, who was then Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, also known as the Russian poet K.R. worked for almost three years (from 1900 to 1903). Thanks to the patronage of the Grand Duke (K. R.), as an exception, he was allowed in 1904 to take exams externally for a gymnasium course so that a gifted young man could continue his studies at a higher educational institution. In the same 1904, D. Poor entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. The title of a real student of St. Petersburg University guaranteed him the right to live in the capital (until 1914) and engage in literary activities.
For the first time his poems appeared in the newspaper "Kievskoye Slovo" in 1889, he began to actively engage in literary work in 1909, collaborating with the populist magazine "Russian Wealth". Since 1911, the poet began close cooperation with the Bolshevik press (the newspapers Zvezda and Pravda). In "Star" his poem "About Demyan Bedny, a harmful peasant" was published, where the poet's literary name was first mentioned. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1912. Permanent contributor to Pravda (in the first issue his poem "Our cup is full of suffering ..." was placed). During the years of work in Pravda, the main features of his work are formed, the genres of his poetry, the characteristic features of the verse are determined. The main genre is the satirical fable, its fable verse is largely associated with the traditions of folk satire, popular print. It was a satire primarily political, journalistic. She absorbed the features of a feuilleton, a pamphlet, a proclamation. An enormous political role was played by the poetry of Demyan Bedny during the years of the civil war. Agitational in its orientation, expressed in the form of a ditty, a song, a pathetic, pathetic poem, accessible to the general public, it was distributed in large numbers with colorful caricatures and cartoons. He acted as a propagandist and agitator both in the post-revolutionary years and during the years of the Great Patriotic War. The language of Demyan Bedny's poetry relied primarily on the colloquial traditions of the broad masses. His speech is replete with rudely mocking, biting turns, proverbs, agreements. Demyan Poor also turned to the long narrative form. During the First World War, he wrote a story in verse "About the land, about the will, about the working share."
V. I. Lenin, who “strongly and repeatedly emphasized the propaganda significance of Demyan Bedny”, according to the memoirs of M. Gorky, also complained that the poet-agitator “follows the reader, but one must be a little ahead” . Apparently, for this sluggishness, D. Poor was expelled from the party in 1938. In 1956, D. Poor was reinstated in the party posthumously.
Poor, Demyan (real name and surname - Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov) - a communist poet (13.4 1883, the village of Gubovka, Kherson province. - 25.5.1945, Moscow). Born into the family of a peasant who served as a church watchman in Elizavetgrad (now Kirovograd) and spent his early years not in the village, but in this city. Hatred for his mother, who constantly beat him, early gave rise to anger at life in the boy's soul.
In 1896-1900 he studied at the military paramedic school in Kyiv, and in 1904-08 at the historical and philological faculty of St. establishments). Based on this fact, the vain Demyan later spread rumors that he was the illegitimate son of this member of the imperial family.
Demyan's first poems were published in 1899. In 1912 he entered the RSDLP, from the same time began to be published in the party newspapers Zvezda and Pravda. In 1913 a collection appeared fables. Lenin himself called on the Bolsheviks from abroad to nurture the "talented poet."
"Proletarian poet" Demyan Bedny
Poor wrote pseudo-folk political rhymes, which during the revolution had a sharp propaganda character. Thanks to their primitive content and easily accessible form, they have become widely known among the people. After the revolution, Bedny, among other things, was actively engaged in cynical anti-religious propaganda, the baseness of which was branded by Sergei Yesenin in the poem " Message to the "evangelist" Demyan».
Poor lived in the Kremlin, next to the apartments of the Bolshevik leaders, in verse he constantly extolled Lenin and Trotsky. In response, Trotsky praised Demyan (“this is not a poet who approached the revolution, descended to it, accepted it; this is a Bolshevik of a poetic kind of weapon”). In 1918, Bedny was assigned a special personal carriage for traveling around the country, and later a Ford car. In the first Soviet decade, the circulation of his books exceeded two million. He is said to have been personally present at the execution and burning of the body. Fanny Kaplan.
In 1923, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee awarded Demyan the Order of the Red Banner. This was the first time a writer was awarded a military order. Communist "critics" wrote several laudatory books about Bedny's mediocre poetry, and the People's Commissariat of Education Lunacharsky equated him in talent with Maxim Gorky.
During internal party struggle 1926-1930s Demyan obsequiously supported the line of Stalin, who was the clear favorite in it. In 1929, he personally went to help carry out collectivization in the Tambov province.
Joseph Stalin and Writers. Demyan Bedny, 1 episode
However, at the end of 1930, Bedny's exclusive position in literature was shaken. On December 6, 1930, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks condemned Demyan’s poetic feuilletons “Get off the stove” and “Without mercy”, published in Pravda, by a special resolution, stating “recently, false notes began to appear in Comrade Demyan Bedny’s feuilletons, expressed in indiscriminate slandering of "Russia" and "Russian". The main reason for the criticism, not mentioned in the resolution, apparently consisted in the fact that the last feuilleton mentioned uprisings in the USSR and assassination attempts on Stalin, despite the ban on discussing such topics as “false rumors”.
Demyan immediately complained to Stalin, but received a rather harsh letter from him in response (dated 12/12/1930). In order to earn forgiveness, the fabulist began to write even baser glorifications of the Leader and communism, but he continued to be criticized. In 1934, Poor was still elected to the presidium of the board Union of Writers, but on First congress Union in the same year was accused of political backwardness. Soon the libretto of Poor for a comic opera was sharply attacked. Bogatyrs(1936). On the eve of the impending war with Nazi Germany, Stalin was already flirting with might and main with Russian patriotic feelings. Demyan was again accused of a slanderous interpretation of Russian history and a satirical distortion of events related to the baptism of Russia, and in 1938 he was expelled from the party and the Writers' Union "for moral decay."
During World War II, Bedny wrote anti-German fables and pamphlets; however, he never managed to fully regain his former position. The party resolution of 24.2.1952 (already after Demyan's death) subjected the publications of his books of 1950 and 1951 to an ideological destruction. for "gross political distortions", which arose primarily because these editions included the original versions of Bedny's works instead of later, politically revised ones. Nevertheless, Soviet literary criticism later continued to give Poor a place of honor on its pages.
Autobiography
Pridvorov Efim Alekseevich, a peasant in the village of Gubovka, Kherson province, Aleksandrovsky district - this is my real name and title.
I was born on April 1/13, 1883 in the above-named village.
I remember myself, however, at first as a city boy - up to seven years old. Father then served as a watchman at the church of the Elisavetgrad Theological School. We lived together in a basement closet on our father's ten-ruble salary. Mother lived with us at rare times, and the less often these times happened, the more pleasant it was for me, because my mother's treatment of me was extremely brutal.
From the age of seven until the age of thirteen I had to endure a hard labor life together with my mother in the village with my grandfather Sofron, an amazingly sincere old man who loved and pitied me very much.
As for my mother, then ... if I remained a tenant in this world, she is least of all to blame for this. She kept me in a black body and beat me with mortal combat. In the end, I began to think about running away from home and reveled in the church-monastic book - "The Way to Salvation."
Salvation came from the other side. In 1896, “by the will of inscrutable fates,” I ended up not in the Elisavetgrad wallpaper workshop, where I had already been told, but in the Kyiv military medical school.
Life in a military school after the hell at home seemed like paradise to me. I studied diligently and successfully. I learned official wisdom so thoroughly that it showed even when I was already a university student: for a long time I could not get rid of military bearing and patriotic ferment.
I got into my military uniform when I was thirteen years old, and got out of it when I was twenty-second.
In 1904, having passed the exam as an external student for the full course of the men's classical gymnasium, I entered the Faculty of History and Philology at St. Petersburg University.
After four years of a new life, new meetings and new impressions, after the staggering revolution of 1905-1906 for me and the even more staggering reaction of subsequent years, I lost everything on which my philistine-well-intentioned mood was based.
In 1909, I began to publish in Korolenkov's Russian Wealth and became very close friends with the well-known poet P. Ya. (P. F. Yakubovich-Mel'shin). The influence of P. I on me was enormous. His death - two years later - I suffered as a blow incomparable in my life. However, it was only after his death that I could continue my evolution with greater independence. Having previously given a significant bias towards Marxism, in 1911 I began to publish in the Bolshevik - glorious memory - Zvezda. My crossroads converged to one road. The ideological confusion was over. At the beginning of 1912 I was already Demyan Bedny. (See the article by Comrade M. Olminsky in the book: “From the era of Zvezda and Pravda”.)
From now on, my life is like a string. Telling about it is like commenting on the considerable number of poems of different quality that I have written. What is not directly connected with my agitational and literary work is of no particular interest and significance: everything basic that my life was comprehended and justified is reflected in what I have written from 1909 to this day.
It is unlikely that even one of our writers had a life story more terrible and expressive than Demyan Bedny's childhood. In his early years, he was closely associated with people who, in their souls and on their clothes, wore all the smells of criminality and hard labor. And it took enormous inner strength to so easily shake off this dirty scum of life.
Terrifying cruelty and rudeness surrounded the childhood of Demyan Poor. His ancestors, by the name of Pridvorov, belonged to the military settlers of the Kherson province.
Military settlements - the brainchild of the terrible Arakcheev - represented the worst kind of serfdom, the worst slavery that the world has ever known. With the greatest envy, the military settlers looked at ordinary serfs.
After the fall of serfdom, the spirit of Arakcheevshchina hovered over the entire Kherson region for a long time, supported cruelty, violence, bandit-robber instincts in the local population, which later found their echoes in the Makhnovshchina and Grigorievshchina.
"Golden" childhood
Demyan Bedny was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka, Aleksandrovsky district, Kherson province. This is a large Ukrainian village, cut through by the Ingul River, which separates the left - Ukrainian - part of the village from the right, which has long been occupied by military settlers. The grandfather of Demyan Poor, Sofron Fedorovich Pridvorov, still remembered the times of settlement well.
Mother, Ekaterina Kuzminichna, was a Ukrainian Cossack woman from the village of Kamenki. A woman of exceptional beauty, toughness, cruelty and debauchery, she deeply hated her husband, who lived in the city, and took out all her heavy hatred on her son, whom she gave birth to when she was only seventeen years old. With kicks, beatings and abuse, she instilled in the boy a terrifying fear, which gradually turned into an insurmountable disgust for his mother that remained forever in his soul.
“... An unforgettable time, a golden childhood,” the poet later ironically recalls this time of his life.
Efimka was barely four years old.
It was a holiday - a terrible stuffiness.
Beaten and tearful as usual, Yefimka, trailing after his mother, found himself at the shopkeeper's, Gershka. Crawling into a corner, he became an unwitting witness to the shameless scene played out right there on the sacks, in front of the shocked child. The boy wept bitterly, and his mother beat him furiously with a stick all the way.
Father, Alexei Sofronovich Pridvorov, served in the city, twenty miles from Gubovka. Coming home on leave, he beat his wife with mortal combat, and she returned the beatings to her son a hundredfold.
Returning to his service, his father often took Yefimka with him, who, like a holiday, awaited these happy respite.
Until the age of seven, Yefim lived in the city, where he learned to read and write, and then until the age of thirteen in the countryside, with his mother.
Opposite the mother's house, right across the road, there were a tavern (tavern) and a rural "reprisal".
For whole days Yefimka sat on the mound and looked into the face of village life.
Gubovskaya life
Voiceless, silent, enslaved Russia, having plucked up courage in a tavern, wildly bawled obscene songs, vilely swearing, raged, and then humbly atoned for her tavern heresies by repentance in the “cold”.
Right there, side by side with the "cold" one, where the struggle against the individual vices of the drunk Gubovites was going on, Gubovo life unfolded in all the noisy expanse on the field of social struggle: the village gatherings roared, cursing, staggered downcast non-payers, yelled and demanded dissatisfied complainants and, rattling with all the strings of rural justice, the "reprisal" instilled in the Gubov peasants respect for the foundations of the landlord system. And the boy listened and learned.
More than once among the characters he had to meet his own mother. Ekaterina Kuzminichna was rarely at home and, indulging herself in drunken parties and fights with enthusiasm, contributed in no small way to deviations from the formal and legal order in Gubovka.
Hungry, the boy knocked on the first hut he came across.
“So I grew up,” said Demyan Poor, smiling, “I got used to catering: where you come, there is your house.”
Efimkin grandfather
In the evenings, climbing onto the stove, Yefimka shared with his grandfather a store of worldly observations. And on Sundays, the grandfather took his grandson with him to the tavern, where the boy's worldly education was completed in a drunken child.
At home, tipsy, grandfather liked to reminisce about the old days, about the settler times, about the uhlans and dragoons, who stood camp throughout the Kherson region. And the grandfather's imagination, warmed up by vodka, willingly drew idyllic pictures of serf antiquity.
- As it used to be, for the settlement ... - the grandfather began.
It turned out that it was impossible to wish for a better order than the patriarchal antiquity. Any innovation here is an unnecessary insert.
But when sober, my grandfather said something else.
He told his grandson with hatred about Arakcheevism, about the lordly favors: how settlers were punished with sticks, how men were exiled to Siberia, and women, torn from babies, were turned into dog feeders.
And these stories forever cut into the memory of Efimka:
My grandfather told me a lot.
They were harsh and uncomplicated
His stories are clear
And they were anxious after them
My baby dreams...
For a lively and impressionable boy, the time has come for heavy reflection. He snatched up his grandfather's stories on the fly and struggled in anxious thoughts.
On the one hand, the grandfather, as it were, demanded justification for the serfdom, on the other hand, he sowed an accursed hatred of antiquity with the everyday truth of his stories.
And imperceptibly a vague idea of two truths was born in Yefimka's brain: one unctuous and reconciling, embellished with the dreamy lies of his grandfather, and the other - the harsh, intractable and merciless truth of peasant life.
This duality was supported in the boy by a rural upbringing.
Having learned to read and write early, under the influence of a village priest, he began to read the psalter, the menaion, "The Way to Salvation", "Lives of the Saints" - and this directed the boy's imagination to a false and organically alien path. Gradually, a desire to go to a monastery even developed and affirmed in him. But the grandfather insultingly ridiculed the boy's religious dreams and in his talkative conversations paid much attention to the hypocrisy and trickery of the priests, church deceit, and so on.
Efimka was assigned to a village school. He studied well and willingly. Reading plunged him into a fairy-tale world. He recited Yershov's "Humpbacked Horse" as a memento and almost never parted with "Robber Churkin".
Every penny that fell into his hands, he instantly turned into a book. And the boy had nickels.
The House of the Courtyard, in its strategic position (against the "reprisal" and the tavern and not far from the road) was something like a visiting yard. The camp officer, and the police officer, and the rural authorities, and passing wagon trains, and horse thieves, and the sexton, and the peasants called to "reprisal" looked here.
In the midst of this motley people, the boy's receptive imagination is replenished with images of future "entertainers", "administrators", "streets", "farm laborers", "rebellious hares" and "guardians".
Along with the knowledge of life, Efimka also acquired business skills here, and soon he begins to labor in the role of a rural clerk. For a copper penny, he composes petitions, gives advice, performs various assignments and fights in every possible way against the “reprisal”.
From this struggle with "reprisal" and originates his literary career. And the influx of everyday experience is growing, expanding, and hundreds of new stories are accumulating. For a short time, the literate Yefimka also becomes necessary for her mother.
Keeper of girls' secrets
Whether as a result of constant beatings or some other perversion of nature, apart from Efimka, Ekaterina Kuzminichna had no more children. This gave her a very strong reputation as a progeny insurance specialist. There was no end to this kind of insurance from hunters. Ekaterina Kuzminichna deftly supported the deception. She gave the women all sorts of drugs, gave them infusions of gunpowder and onions.
Gubovsky girls regularly swallowed and regularly gave birth to the due date.
Then Efimka was involved in the case.
As a clerk, he scribbled a laconic note: “The baptized name is Mary, with this a silver ruble,” and “the secret fruit of unhappy love” was forwarded along with the note to the city. The guys knew that Efimka was privy to all the secret operations of his mother, and, catching him in a dark corner, they asked: “Did Pryska go to your mat? Say."
But Efimka kept the girlish secrets tightly. In addition, as a literate boy, the boy earned nickels by reading the psalter for the dead. These nickels were also usually drunk by the mother.
The services rendered by the boy to the mother did not make the latter more affectionate towards the son. She still tyrannized the boy, still left him for whole days without food and indulged in shameless revelry. Once a boy, completely starving, searched all corners of the hut, but did not find a crumb. In desperation, he lay down on the floor and wept.
But, lying down, I suddenly saw a wondrous sight under the bed: two dozen nails were driven into the wooden bottom of the bed, and sausages, fish, bagels, sugar, several bottles of vodka, sour cream, milk - in a word, a whole shop.
Notified about this, grandfather Sofron grunted: “That's why she, the bitch, is always so red!” - but the hungry old man and the boy were afraid to touch the supplies.
Under drunken laughter
By this time, Demyan Bedny relates one of the darkest memories of his childhood. He's twelve. He is dying - probably from diphtheria: his throat is blocked to complete dumbness.
He was communed and laid under the icons. Here is the mother - bare-haired, drunk. She sews a death shirt and yells cheerful tavern songs at the top of her voice.
The boy is in pain. He wants to say something, but only moves his lips soundlessly. Mother bursts into drunken laughter.
The cemetery watchman Bulakh enters - a drunkard and a cheerful cynic. He joins in his mother's singing, then goes up to Yefimka and good-naturedly resonates:
- Well, Efimash, let's give a fuck ... Where are you good? Pedla grandma? It smells like mint there...
Someone let my father know that Yefimka was dying.
Meanwhile, the abscess burst. The boy woke up from terrible screams. It was dark.
Drunk mother lay on the floor and squealed in a frantic voice under the blows of her father's boot. Father waved twenty miles out of the city, found mother in a drunken abyss and dragged her home by the scythes. From this memorable night, a turning point in Yefimka's life begins.
His mother stopped beating him, the boy began to resolutely fight back and began to run to his father more often.
Senka and Sasha
In the city, Efimka made friends with two boys: Senka Sokolov, the son of an Elvort worker, and the son of a gendarmerie wahmister, Sashka Levchuk. The latter was preparing for a medical assistant's school. It was prepared by a real teacher who received three rubles a month. Having visited Sasha's lessons twice, the boy was completely captivated by the desire to follow in the footsteps of his friend.
The father did not object to this. He paid the teacher three rubles for Yefimka's right to be present at the lessons. For three months Efimka went to the teacher. In the autumn of 1896, the boys were taken to Kyiv to be examined.
And here is the victory. The boy was accepted into the military paramedic school as a "state-owned" pupil.
In high and warm rooms with white walls and polished floors, he immediately felt overwhelmed with sublime joy. A fierce mother, beatings, fights, mutilations, obscene conversations, pregnant girls, foundlings, psalters from the dead, the desire to flee to the monastery are far behind.
He eagerly listened to every word of the teachers, imbued with their faith and beliefs. And here for the first time he gave his feelings the forms that were characteristic of his talent: he wrote poetry.
These were patriotic poems dedicated to Tsar Nicholas II on the occasion of his performance as a "peacemaker" with the convening of a conference in The Hague (in 1899):
Sound, my lyre:
I compose songs
Apostle of the world
Tsar Nicholas!
Could it be otherwise...
He refuses to enter the monastery, but, of course, considers his luck as the grace of providence. Sharp by nature, but not yet touched by culture and knowledge, the boy's thought continues to work in the same narrow church-patriotic circle. His whole soul is in the power of unctuous, reconciling truth.
“When I am offered to write about the “horrors” of military education in a military paramedic school,” says Demyan Poor, “I just feel embarrassed. What horrors are there when I first felt free at school. High white walls, parquet floors, daily hot meals - yes, I never dreamed of such a thing. I was in tenth heaven from bliss."
Demyan Bedny graduated from school in 1900.
After that, he served in the military service until 1904 in Elisavetgrad, where he managed to prepare for a matriculation certificate.
Mother's blessing
In the spring of 1904, he passed the exam and entered St. Petersburg University. It was a great triumph for Demyan Bedny, as the preparation for the matriculation cost him incredible efforts. However, this triumph was, as usual, poisoned.
When Demyan Bedny was leaving for St. Petersburg University, he saw a disheveled woman at the station, not quite sober. Shaking her fist in his direction, she shouted wildly to the entire platform:
- A shchob toby not to die there and not to return back.
It was Ekaterina Kuzminichna who sent her maternal blessing to her departing son. Since then, the mother did not make itself felt for many years. Only in 1912, while working in the St. Petersburg public library, did his son accidentally stumble upon a small note in the Elisavetgrad newspaper: “The case of Ekaterina Pridvorova about the torture of minors.”
Soon after this, the mother arrived in Petersburg, looked for her son, and, without looking into his eyes, sullenly threw:
- They got him.
- Whom?
- Father (father).
And, confused, she said that in the bazaar in Elisavetgrad, in a latrine, the corpse of her father was found.
Father's murder
The corpse completely decomposed, a silver ring with the inscription: "Aleksey Pridvorov" was preserved on the finger. From the inquiries it turned out that the mother had a big quarrel with the father because of the house in the village. My father was going somewhere to go and wanted to sell the house.
Mother was against it. At that time she was trading in the market, and her locker was not far from the latrine. Listening to the confused testimony of his mother, the son came to the firm conviction that she was involved in the murder. But Ekaterina Kuzminichna knew how to keep her mouth shut. Already in the years of Soviet power, when her son became known throughout Russia, she found him in the Kremlin, came to him more than once, received money, gifts, but when she left, she invariably robbed, and did not hesitate to shout in Elisavetgrad at the market:
- Here is Demyan Bedny's hat, for three karbovanets.
But when asked about the murdered father, she answered with vicious abuse. And only on her deathbed did she repent and confess that her husband had been killed by her with the assistance of two lovers. On the day of the murder, she called all three to her for dinner, drugged her husband with poisoned vodka, and then those two wrapped him in thin twine, strangled him and threw him into a latrine.
Pharaoh's mustache
The arrival of E. Pridvorov in the capital in the early autumn of 1904 is curious; from the Nikolaevsky railway station came a strong fellow in a rusty coat from his father's shoulder, with a skinny suitcase, but in a brand new student's cap and with a cane in his hand.
At that time there was no monument to Alexander III on Znamenskaya Square near the Nikolaevsky railway station, but there was a wooden fence with the expressive inscription “It is forbidden to stop”, and an impressive policeman was at the post near. Timidly and hesitantly, the student approached the policeman and politely addressed him:
- Mr. policeman, can I walk around St. Petersburg with a cane?
The policeman was puzzled:
- Why not?
- Yes, the king lives here ...
The soldier's mustaches twitched menacingly. In the strange naivety of the visiting student, he sensed a hidden sedition, and something flashed in his rounded eyes that made the frightened student immediately sharpen his skis.
“Later,” Demyan Bedny said, recalling this episode of bad memory, “I atoned for the sin of my youth and justified the conjecture of the policeman.”
This redemption was the inscription of Demyan Bedny, carved on all four sides on the granite pedestal of the monument to Alexander III. With her, this quilting inscription: "Scarecrow" - now revolutionary Leningrad meets everyone leaving the Oktyabrsky (Nikolaevsky) station on the former Znamenskaya Square:
My son and my father were executed during their lifetime,
And I reaped the fate of posthumous infamy:
I'm stuck here like a cast-iron scarecrow for the country,
Forever thrown off the yoke of autocracy.
For a long time and firmly ingrained in the soul of Efimka Pridvorov, the military paramedic drill.
A stubborn struggle against despotism was seething all around. Russia trembled from underground strikes. And the own fate of yesterday's Efimka, and the memories of the ugly Gubov "reprisal" - everything around and behind, it would seem, pushed Efimka Pridvorov into the ranks of revolutionary students.
But this could not happen immediately to a young man who, from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty-one, grew up and was brought up in the requirements of military drill. He tried to study, went to lectures, listened, took notes, avoiding, not without secret horror, the unrest and "riots" of the university.
Awakening
This period of Demyan Bedny's life - the period of youthful maturation and personal growth - was marked by a complex process of external and internal breaking, which found a very accurate and truthful image in the autobiographical poem "Bitter Truth": a purely fabulous external transition from the "teenage shepherd", which the
... rye bread ... took a rug with him
And with bread he carefully put it in a bag
Your favorite read book... -
to the life of the capital in the highest "light", among the "masters", among the "brilliance of honors" and then the "awakening" from the "bitter truth", "deceptions", the return to the lower classes of the people already experienced and knowing everything fighter.
In concise strong verses, here are not free poetic metaphors, but accurate images that correspond to reality, only artistically veiled - the whole story of the passionate falls and rises of this pore-forming life of Demyan Bedny ...
Fate is a freaky game
Abandoned then unexpectedly in a noisy city,
How I sometimes envied
Having overheard the gentlemen argue incomprehensibly clever.
Day after day, year after year.
Mixing "brilliance" with the light, I stubbornly went to "brilliance",
With peasant shyness, looking at the gentlemen,
Bowing obediently.
Every word here is a burning, self-flagellation confession, a confession of a "hot heart", and only by deciphering every word and image of this completely truthful confession, one can read the biography of these years of Demyan Bedny's life.
But some kind of "wormhole" was invisibly eating away at the outwardly brilliant well-being of a young man, cut off from the soil on which he was born.
But a vague soul yearned for the light of day,
The eternal chains crushed the chest more painfully,
And all the more tempting opened before me
Another life, the road to another world
Native writers sublime books.
And now “the awakening has come” (as in Pushkin):
From the brilliance of honors, from the host of princes
As from the sinful I fled the guidance.
In a different environment, different friends
I found it at the time of awakening.
We repeat, here it is very sparingly, but very precisely outlined that difficult path of mental storms, internal cataclysms, incredible efforts and work on oneself, which turned the student Pridvorov into "a harmful man, Demyan Poor".
Somehow, it immediately became clear that the country was stepping on corpses, and from everywhere it was blowing the All-Russian Gubov "reprisal". The hand reached for the pen.
Revenge for the fruitless waste of young forces,
For all the past lies
I with rapture cruel inflicted
Evil wounds to the enemies of the people.
Here is the beginning of this different - literary and political - career of Demyan Poor.
Singer of the proletariat
The first poems of the future satirist are gloomy and imbued with the spirit of strict self-examination. They belong to 1907-1908. For a decade - from 1907 to 1917 - the fable constituted almost the only form of his literary work, and, in fact, during this period, Demyan Bedny deservedly won the reputation of a fabulist of the proletariat. The political formation of Demyan Bedny also belongs to this time. First, he enters into friendship with the populists, there he becomes close to the famous poet Melshin (Yakubovich), and publishes his first poems in the journal Russkoye Bogatstvo. And then irrevocably goes to the Bolsheviks.
His satires, songs and fables are an excellent chronicle of our days. Demyan Bedny himself in the poem "My verse" ... defined his significance as a political writer of the era, the meaning of the ideas inspiring his poetry:
I sing. But do I “sing”?
My voice is hardened in battle
And my verse ... there is no brilliance in his simple outfit.
To such an article and to such a letter, with which you, kindest Pavel Petrovich, pleased me, it is impossible not to respond with heartfelt gratitude. I'm only afraid that you over-praised me. But I am glad that I could evoke just such warm responses from the provinces. Unfortunately, besides your article and Voitolovsky's article in Kievskaya Mysl (No. 103, 13/IV) - an article also extremely laudatory - I have not read other provincial reviews, although I heard from third parties that they came across such reviews, and all good reviews. I may be overrated, but the important thing is that such a meeting inspires me with some confidence in myself and in my humble work. Indeed, I had to listen to friendly advice - to stop fiddling with the fable and move from trifles to "real" literature, for which, they say, I have some data - language, for example ...
Would you like to have my card. I don’t have another one, except for the attached one - from the series “30 kopecks. dozen". A kid - six pounds in weight. Strong black bone. I am not a fan of further autobiographical fabrications, especially on paper. On occasion, if anything, why not talk about the past. But - on occasion. It will come out more true. And so, in general, autobiographies lie.
I would rather talk about what I do not have - about the southern air, which I have not smelled for the seventh year, stuck in the St. Petersburg swamp. I read on your letter: "Novocherkassk", and envy takes. People live somewhere. And how they feel! Try to stir up someone here. Soul etched.
Your cherry blossoms are long gone. Not far off - berries. “And the stakes, and the milk, and the cherry garden,” and - “drinkable, kume, good vodka!” Heaven and nothing else. And here we splurge on vinegar essence and New Time.
In your opinion, I am a tribune who vigilantly watches, etc. And the tribune wants to lie in the grass, get drunk on the steppe air, listen to the chirping of grasshoppers and the snorting of hobbled horses.
Exhausted and tired. I speak frankly. But I will write - and no one will notice this fatigue. You have to be cheerful. I wish you well...
... I comprehend the workers, therefore, in a not very clear way, on the fly, here and there. I think that they loved me as their own, because they are all essentially, by blood - "muzhiks", and there is plenty of muzhik leaven in me. You almost caught this "peasant" in me. I go to the worker "from the peasant."
...Thanks for the issue of "Morning of the South" with an article about me. Admit it - it's your sin? Honey, what are you doing? Not so hot what a talent I am. An honest worker, that's all. We must stubbornly hit one point, one point. The people have long noticed the power of a drop, think - a drop! - which hammers a stone. I am a drop. A mighty stream is ahead.
... I believe that any talent (even if it is such a small thing as mine) should show its strength and self-worth, going "through". Every talent is bold, every talent is a conqueror. I marked off a small, small place. But there is no one higher than me in this place.
Jokingly, I call this my opinion "impudence". But I wish this “impudence” to everyone.
The worst thing is the split personality. Don't you have this? It is necessary to hit one point, and not take on everything. You need to focus on your "imperious synthesis", and then "there will be words." They will find themselves, no need to search. Your "spiritual drama" is the drama of all those who seek and have not yet found themselves. But, damn it, no other person's help is good here ...
... To get to know a peasant, you have to eat a pound of salt with him, and, in any case, do not neglect even the slightest opportunity, a happy chance to get to know him better, to unravel his true face.
I remember the case with V. I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich once in 1918, talking with me about the mood of the front-line soldiers, said semi-questioningly:
- Will they survive? Russian people do not want to fight.
“Don’t want to!” I said and referred to the well-known Russian “weepings of the conquered, recruits and soldiers”, collected in the book by E. V. Barsov “Lamentations of the Northern Territory”:
And listen, my dear mother,
And like a war, when there is, yes, it is composed,
And let's go to war, unfortunate little soldiers,
And we shed bitter tears,
And let's say yes we are unhappy these are the words:
“You, guns, you, military guns,
Twenty pieces, cannons, burst into pieces!”
One should have seen how keenly Vladimir Ilyich became interested in Barsov's book. Taking it from me, he did not return it to me for a long time. And then, at a meeting, he said: “This anti-war, tearful, reluctant mood must and can, I think, be overcome. Oppose the old song to the new song. In its usual, folk form - a new content. In your propaganda appeals, you should constantly, stubbornly, systematically, without fear of repetition, point out that here before there was, they say, “the damned villainous service of the tsar,” and now the service of the workers and peasants of the Soviet state, formerly from under the whip, from - under pressure, and now consciously, fulfilling the revolutionary-people's duty - before they went to fight for the devil knows what, and now for their own, etc.
This is the ideological basis of my front-line agitation.
I think, comrades, that my real meeting with shock workers who are going into proletarian literature is the first meeting, but not the last. Much that will not be said at the first meeting, we will talk about later. I'm not going to make a "speech" now. We will have a simple conversation. Before me is a series of extracts and notes, bound in relative order. In this order, I will speak. It doesn't matter if you have to repeat yourself sometimes. If only it was relevant and helped to clarify the main idea.
The fact that I have to talk with you at a time when our literature is talking about the so-called “clothening” of her, as if obliges me to reveal to you the essence, the “secret”, so to speak, of this matter. But what could be the creative secret of a writer, and even a poet, for more than twenty years - with short breaks - working day after day in full view of everyone? It is difficult to give an exhaustive formula for this work. It is especially difficult for me myself. It is more convenient for our literary critics to do this. I will express my thoughts the way I used to: images, examples, comparisons.
Let's say that I really am such an experienced hunter that young hunters have a lot to learn from. What in such cases, as it seems to me, does an experienced hunter do? He takes newcomers hunting with him and teaches them not so much by story as by show. I'll try to do the same.
By the way: I received several notes. I am asked: what is my opinion about this or that poet, present here or absent? Today, in any case, I will not talk about other contemporary poets. And in general, I used to refrain from expressing my subjective assessments of this or that poet. I remember that the poet Goethe, when he was reproached for why he keeps silent and does not openly express his negative opinion about such and such a poet, he - Goethe - answered: “I am not so reckless as to do this. Everyone, even the worst poet, has his fans and friends. Why should I turn them into my enemies?" Personally, I do not spare - and never will spare - a political enemy, whether he writes in prose or verse. But in a purely poetic sense, I try to avoid intolerance. I think that in such a large garden as the literature of our Soviet Union, all songbirds can sing freely with their voices. If only they sang what we need. If only these were our singers and our songs. If only they were real singers, without falsehood.
You ask me, comrades: what are the virtues that should be most valued in a writer, and even in a revolutionary writer, in a proletarian writer? I cannot give a better answer to such a question than the answer given by K. Marx to his children in the so-called Confession. Actually, there were a number of answers to a number of questions. I will give here those answers that can be directly related to the topic of today's conversation. When asked what dignity he values most in people, Marx replied:
- Simplicity.
- What is your distinguishing feature? asked the children of Marx.
"Unity of purpose," replied Marx.
- What is your idea of happiness?
“Fight,” said Marx.
- Name your favorite activity.
- Digging through books.
- Your favorite poets?
- Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe.
This is what should determine the dignity of a proletarian writer, and even more so of a worker - a shock worker on the literary front: simplicity, unity of purpose, struggle, love of books and the study of the classics.
I will emphasize here two of Marx's attitudes, "unity of purpose" and "struggle", because these attitudes contain revolutionary dynamics. Without such dynamics, there can be no revolutionary (proletarian) writer. Can a proletarian artist, not having a unity of purpose with our revolutionary working class, not participating directly in its heroic struggle to achieve this goal, without including himself wholly and completely in the advanced ranks of the builders of socialism, into the ranks of the fighting class, into its vanguard, into the communist party, without being, more precisely, a purposeful Bolshevik-party member, can, I say, the proletarian writer-artist be in such a case an ardent and artistic agitator for the most advanced ideas of the most revolutionary class? , no and no!
... In order not to be false in this conversation, I must watch myself in every possible way so that unreasonable boasting is not accidentally felt in my words. You have to talk about your work. So, for example, if you asked me which of my works I consider the most successful, I would name a small - in four lines - poem "And there and here." It was written by me in 1914 in those days when cases of mass poisoning of workers occurred in some factories in St. Petersburg. Especially in lead bleach factories. This caused violent workers' demonstrations in the streets. The tsarist government responded to the demonstrations with lead bullets. On this occasion, I wrote an exceptionally impudent quatrain, and the old Pravda was not afraid to publish it, although it actually dealt with an armed rebuff to the tsarist suppressors. However, in order to evade censorship and administrative thunder, the call for a military rebuff should only be felt in the verbal structure of the poem, and the words themselves should not contain any "crime". To do this, I ended the poem with an expression that is always associated with a gesture, a gesture of desperate prowess, when you have to fight, because you still disappear, “one way!” Consequently, outwardly simple verbal design acquired an elusive for censorship nit-picking, but completely clear combat dynamics - a daring gesture.
At the factory - poison,
On the street - violence.
And there is lead, and there is lead ...
One end!
"One end!" Don't give up guys! And the workers didn't give up. As you probably know, in the summer of 1914 workers' barricades began to rise on the streets of St. Petersburg.
Agitation almost slogan, in four lines. Short, clear, to the point, easy to remember. I consider it successful. But it is the fruit not only of luck, not only of revolutionary effort, but also of technical training. I accurately calculated the meaning and place of each word...
... It’s in place to say, so as not to be silent about the fact that “there is a hole even for an old woman,” I just had my own “holes” along the line of satirical pressure on the pre-October “past”, expressed in indiscriminate slandering of “Russia” and “ Russian” and in declaring “laziness” and a tendency to “sitting on the stove” as almost a Russian national distinguishing feature. This is, of course, an overshoot. Here, as they say, and I "shouted". These are some of the places in my feuilletons - "Get off the stove" and "Without mercy." We all must not forget that in the past there were two Russias: a revolutionary Russia and an anti-revolutionary Russia, and what is right about the latter cannot be right about the first. Failure to understand that today's Russia is represented by its ruling class, the working class and, above all, the Russian working class, the most active and most revolutionary detachment of the world class, and the indiscriminate accusation against them of a tendency to "laziness" and "sitting on the stove" gives that false tone, which I have already mentioned. In this case, this tone does not coincide with the tone that sounds in the following words of Lenin: “Is the feeling of national pride alien to us, Great Russian class-conscious proletarians?”
Demyan Bedny gives his firm, clear, democratic verse, folk humor, merciless satire, heroic pathos to the service of his homeland, the Soviet country; he sings of her victories, her struggle, mercilessly smashes her enemies in the period of the civil war, and in the era of socialist construction, and in the Great Patriotic War.
In the most difficult years of the war with the Nazis, he writes:
We will repel the enemies. I believe in my people
Indestructible thousand-year faith.
V. I. Lenin highly appreciated Demyan Bedny. Recalling the last months of Lenin's life, N. K. Krupskaya writes: “On his instructions, I read fiction to him, usually in the evening ... he liked to listen to poetry, especially Demyan Bedny. But he no longer liked Demyan's satirical poems, but pathetic ones.
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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.
The Poor'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
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 fail to 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).
