Family dramas by Alexander Tvardovsky. Biography The last years of the poet’s life (Tvardovsky A. T.)

The father of the future poet, Trifon Gordeevich Tvardovsky, was the seventh son in a large peasant family and worked as a blacksmith. Mother, Maria Mitrofanovna, née Pleskachevskaya, was one of the bankrupt nobles. Having married a simple man, the girl found herself in a world completely alien to her. Trifon Gordeevich turned out to be a stern man; he often beat his wife and children.

On June 8 (21 New Style), 1910, the Tvardovskys had a son, who was baptized Alexander. This happened in the village of Zagorye, Smolensk province. The boy turned out to be the eldest child; there were also brothers Vasily, Konstantin, Pavel, Ivan and sisters Anna and Maria.

The Tvardovskys had relatively many books, so Sasha first became acquainted with the works of A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, M. Yu. Lermontov, N. A. Nekrasov at home - they were read aloud on winter evenings. Under the influence of the great Russian classics, the boy began to compose poetry early. The father did not approve of his son’s hobby and regarded it as self-indulgence.

Tvardovsky was sent to study at a rural school. At the age of fourteen, the future poet began sending small notes to Smolensk newspapers, some of which were published. Then he dared to send poetry.

Tvardovsky’s poetic debut took place in 1925 - his poem “New Hut” was published in the newspaper “Smolenskaya Derevnya”.

After graduating from a rural school, Tvardovsky moved to live in Smolensk. At first he lived in complete poverty. The poet was sheltered by the Smolensk writer Efrem Maryenkov. They lived in a tiny walk-through room without furniture, slept on the floor, and covered themselves with newspapers. I had to exist “on a pittance of literary earnings and knock on the doors of editorial offices.”

In the Smolensk Press House, Alexander Trifonovich met his future wife Maria Illarionovna. She acted as a critic and reviewer. But at some point, for the sake of love, she decided to give up her literary career and devoted her life to her husband. Tvardovsky's parents were against the young daughter-in-law, since she finally took their son away from the family. Soon the young couple had two daughters - Valentina and Olga - and a son, Alexander.

Choose: either mom and dad, or revolution.

Tvardov understood the hint and was forced to stop his troubles. He tried in every possible way to help the exiles. The brothers ran away from the settlement every now and then. One day they all appeared at once in front of Tvardovsky in the center of Smolensk near the House of Soviets. Alexander Trifonovich already knew that the NKVD had opened a case against him, he was even expelled from the Writers' Union, and was persecuted in the newspapers. If he had hidden his brothers, he would have gone along the stage himself. And the poet drove the brothers away. For some reason, not his brothers, but zealous Russian journalists could not forgive Tvardovsky for this.

As soon as Tvardovsky had reliable connections in Moscow, the first thing he did was go to the Northern Urals and take out his entire family.

Tvardovsky’s works were published in 1931-1933, but Alexander Trifonovich himself believed that he began as a writer only with the poem about collectivization “The Country of Ant,” which was published in 1936. The poem was a success among readers and critics.

At the beginning of 1937, an arrest warrant for Tvardovsky was issued in Smolensk. The poet's friend Makedonov was taken first. Half an hour later they arrived for Alexander Trifonovich, but he was already rushing away on the Moscow train.

In the capital, Tvardovsky was supported by the head of the Writers' Union, Alexander Aleksandrovich Fadeev, who noted the talent of the young poet in a conversation with Stalin. With his help, Tvardovsky’s relatives were also freed.

On the personal instructions of Joseph Vissarionovich, the persecution of the poet was stopped. In 1939 he was awarded the Order of Lenin. It is curious that on the days of the award, Tvardovsky was a student at IFLI, and the exam papers included questions on his poem “The Country of Ant.”

Immediately after graduating from the institute, Tvardovsky was drafted into the Red Army. Alexander Trifonovich participated in the liberation of Western Belarus from Polish occupation. From the beginning of the war with Finland, already in the rank of officer, he served as a special correspondent for a military newspaper.

During the Great Patriotic War, the great poem “Vasily Terkin. A book about a fighter" is a vivid embodiment of the Russian character and national patriotic feeling. “This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, precision in everything and what an extraordinary soldier’s folk language - not a hitch, not a single false, ready-made, that is, literary-vulgar word!” - this is how an independent reader, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, assessed Tvardovsky’s masterpiece.

Almost simultaneously with “Terkin” and the poems of “Front Chronicle,” the poet created the great poem “I was killed near Rzhev” and began the poem “House by the Road,” completed after the war.

But then Alexander Trifonovich began to have a creative crisis. His poetry didn't work. Tvardovsky began to think about suicide, and then started drinking in the company of Fadeev.

In 1950, Tvardovsky was appointed editor-in-chief of the New World magazine, which he headed for twenty years (1950-1954 and 1958-1970) with a break. The poet attracted such significant masters of the Russian word as Viktor Astafiev, Vasily Belov, Fyodor Abramov, Sergei Zalygin, Vasily Shukshin, Yuri Bondarev to the pages of the New World. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was originally published in the magazine.

Despite strong pressure from the editors, Tvardovsky, who firmly defended the position of high national poetry, categorically refused to publish Joseph Brodsky's poems in Novy Mir. Alexander Trifonovich admitted that all kinds of poetry are needed, but not on the pages of his magazine. However, when Brodsky was arrested and tried, Tvardovsky was outraged and tried to prevent the trial, arguing that poets should not be imprisoned.

In 1970, Alexander Trifonovich was removed from his post as editor-in-chief of Novy Mir. The poet fell into depression, then he had a stroke and lost his hand. Then he was diagnosed with cancer.

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky died in Krasnaya Pakhra near Moscow on December 18, 1971. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in the capital.

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky (1910-1971)

We all remember from our school years: “Crossing, crossing! The left bank, the right bank...” And then, more often in adulthood, we discover the deep wisdom of Tvardovsky’s famous six-line:

I know. It's not my fault

The fact is that others did not come back from the war.

The fact that they - some older, some younger -

We stayed there, and it’s not about the same thing,

That I could, but failed to save them, -

This is not about that, but still, still, still...

And “I was killed near Rzhev” is a ballad for all times.

The poems “Vasily Terkin” and “Beyond the Distance” became phenomena not only of the literary life of the country, but in the literal sense, phenomena of the life of the country, in the state sense. They evoked such a response among the people that people lived by them, as they live by the most significant events of real historical life - such as, for example, the first manned flight into space or victory in a difficult war.

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky realized what his work meant in the fate of the country. And although he was a rather reserved and modest person, his comparisons, at least in this poem, speak volumes:

The whole point is in one single covenant:

What I will say before the time melts,

I know this better than anyone in the world -

Living and dead, only I know.

Say that word to anyone else

There's no way I could ever

Entrust. Even Leo Tolstoy -

It is forbidden. He won’t say, let him be his god.

And I'm only mortal. I am responsible for my own,

During my lifetime I worry about one thing:

About what I know better than anyone in the world,

I want to say. And the way I want.

Tvardovsky said his word about collectivization (the poem “The Country of Ant”), about the Great Patriotic War (his poem “Vasily Terkin” was appreciated even by such an irreconcilable person towards Soviet power and Soviet literature as I. A. Bunin), about the post-war decades ( poem “Beyond the Distance”)... He was called the poet of people's life, because in his work he captured the entire difficult, painful, intense spiritual process that went on among the people throughout the 20th century.

Alexander Trifonovich was born on June 8 (21), 1910 in the village of Zagorye, Smolensk province, into the family of a peasant blacksmith. Until 1928, he lived in the village, studied at school, worked in a forge, and was the secretary of a rural Komsomol cell. Since 1924, he began publishing notes and poems in Smolensk newspapers. Since 1928 he lived in Smolensk and studied at the Pedagogical Institute. Collaborating in Smolensk newspapers and magazines, he traveled a lot around the Smolensk region, as he himself wrote, “he delved with passion into everything that constituted a new, first emerging system of rural life.”

No matter how today they criticize collective farms and all sorts of excesses with collectivization, there is no getting around the true joy with which many, many villagers, including poets, greeted everything new back then.

Along the village, from hut to hut,

Hasty pillars walked...

The wires hummed and began to play,

We've never seen anything like this.

This was written by Mikhail Isakovsky in 1925.

At the end of the 1930s, a critic wrote about the poems of the young Tvardovsky: “Tvardovsky’s poems breathe a young, cheerful, full of goodwill belief that the new will prevail everywhere. But it will overcome without mocking the feelings and ideas of those people who entered this new world from the past...” That’s why Tvardovsky became great because he was not a straightforward, flat singer - he saw the situation in the country in all its complexity, and so imprinted. He never threw anything “from the ship of modernity.”

In 1936, the poet came to study in Moscow - at the philological faculty of the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature, from which he graduated in 1939. They say that during one of the exams, Tvardovsky received a ticket with a question about A. Tvardovsky’s poem “The Country of Ant,” which by that time had become popular and was included in the curriculum.

During the Great Patriotic War, the poet worked in the front-line press. It was at the fronts that his famous “book about a fighter”, the poem “Vasily Terkin”, was born, which received nationwide recognition. Tvardovsky wrote in his autobiography: “This book was my lyrics, my journalism, a song and a lesson, an anecdote and a saying, a heart-to-heart conversation and a remark to the occasion.” Thomas Mann once wrote: “What is a writer? The one whose life is a symbol." Of course, Tvardovsky’s life is a symbol, because his life and work touches many, many Russian people of the 20th century. And not only Russians. “Vasily Terkin” is now inextricably linked for centuries with the feat of our people in the Great Patriotic War. The language of this poem is so lively, folk, organic that many, many lines of it have become popular proverbs, the fabric of popular speech.

The front-line soldier himself, the poet Evgeny Vinokurov, writes about Tvardovsky: “Patriotic, conscientious, kind-hearted poetry teaches him, educates, instructs him, the significance of Tvardovsky’s poetry is great. And here, in his words, “neither subtract nor add”... In Nekrasov’s way, he cares about the country, and this concern for the country is felt in his every word. Great historical cataclysms, the fate of millions of people - that’s what always interested the poet, that’s what his pen was always subordinated to. The theme of the people became his internal lyrical theme..."

That’s right - the theme of the people became Tvardovsky’s internal lyrical theme. He is perhaps the only one in Russian poetry of the 20th century who does not have poems about love - about love for his beloved. There are poems about mother and poems about the Motherland. Such is his talent that all his heroic love was directed towards his country, towards his people. And this is not a deficiency of talent, but its deep originality.

After the war, Tvardovsky published book after book. Poem "House by the Road" - 1946. The poem “Beyond the Distance is Distance” - 1960. The poem “Terkin in the Other World” - 1962. And between these epic things, collections of lyrics, a two-volume, four-volume set of selected works are published. Tvardovsky is awarded state prizes. The head of state N.S. Khrushchev called him nothing less than “our Nekrasov.”

Tvardovsky led the magazine “New World” - he published “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Solzhenitsyn, the first works of the then young Vasily Belov, Fyodor Abramov, Vasily Shukshin, Yuri Kazakov, Boris Mozhaev, Yuri Trifonov...

Editorialism in the “New World” is a whole era with many events, collisions and even tragedies. Apparently, dissertations have already been written or will be written on this topic. Tvardovsky did a lot of good and wise things in the field of editing. There was a lot of struggle, sometimes Tvardovsky argued with the “party line”, sometimes he gave in to it, sometimes he himself gave in to his personal weaknesses... In a word, it’s not for us to judge. But if a meticulous reader wants to know the history of the New World magazine under Tvardovsky, he will discover a lot of interesting things. In the end, the poet was removed from the leadership of the New World. On December 18, 1971, he died.