Literary and historical notes of a young technician. Text by K. Simonov, five artillerymen, the problem of courage in war (Unified State Examination in Russian) Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov shows the reader

Through the eyes of a man of my generation: Reflections on J.V. Stalin

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov

Through the eyes of a man of my generation

Reflections on I.V. Stalin

Lazar Ilyich Lazarev

"For future historians of our time"

(the latest work by Konstantin Simonov)

He didn’t like conversations about how he was feeling, and if they did arise, he tried to laugh it off, when they really pestered him with questions and advice - and in such cases, advice is given especially willingly and persistently - he got angry. But he let it slip several times in front of me - it became clear that he was seriously ill, that he felt bad, that he had the darkest thoughts about what awaited him. Somehow I had to say: “And I told the doctors,” I heard from him, “that I must know the truth, how long I have left. If it’s six months, I’ll do one thing, if it’s a year, I’ll do something else, if it’s two months, I’ll do something else...” He didn’t think beyond that, for a longer period, or make any plans. This conversation took place at the end of the seventy-seventh year, he had less than two years to live...

Then, while sorting out the manuscripts left behind by him, I came across this beginning (one of the options) of the planned play “An Evening of Memories”:

“A white wall, a bed, a table, a chair or a medical stool. All.

Maybe the very beginning is a conversation either with the person standing here, or behind the scenes:

Goodbye, doctor. See you Monday, Doctor. And after this farewell to the doctor there is an exposition.

So I was left alone until Monday. I felt generally good. But it was necessary to have surgery. This is, in essence, like a duel, like a duel... Not in six months, but in a year. This is what the doctors told me, or rather, the doctor to whom I asked the question directly - I like to pose such questions directly. And he, in my opinion, was also inclined to this. What should I do? What does this mean for me? We decided to fight. But the situation is not such that it can be put on the table right away. We could have waited a few days. He wanted to do it himself and was leaving for a few days. The matter was not on fire, it was just necessary to decide. It was the decision that burned, not the operation. And that suited me. If so, if it’s either yes or no, or you can withstand it all or you can’t stand it, then you need to do something else. That's what? That was the whole question.

The wife agreed. We talked openly with her, as always. She also believed that this was the only way. And this, of course, made it easier for me. But what? What to do? The state of mind is not such as to start something new. But the biography with which they pestered me has not really been written. This is what should probably be done. Let at least a draft remain - if something happens. If not, there will be enough time to rewrite it completely.”

I read this with a strange feeling, as if Simonov had guessed his end, how everything would be, what choice he would face, what he would decide to do when there was very little strength left. Or prophesied all this to himself. No, of course, the doctors didn’t tell him how much time he had, and it’s unlikely they knew how long he was given. But it just so happened that poor health forced him to choose what was most important, what to do first, what to give preference to, and this choice, as outlined in the play, fell on a work that represented a reckoning with his own past.

Even in the last year of his life, Simonov’s range of planned and started work was very wide. He set about writing a feature film about the journey of one tank crew in the last year of the war - the film was to be directed by Alexey German, who had previously adapted Simonov’s story “Twenty Days Without War.” The USSR State Cinema Committee accepted Simonov's application for a documentary film about Marshal G.K. Zhukov. For his proposed series of television programs “Literary Heritage,” Simonov intended to make a film about A.S. Serafimovich - war correspondent during the Civil War. Based on numerous conversations with holders of three Orders of Glory, which he had during the filming of the documentaries “A Soldier Walked…” and “Soldier’s Memoirs,” he conceived a book about the war - what it was like for the soldier, what it cost him. And a similar kind of book based on conversations with famous commanders. Or maybe - he hasn’t decided yet - we need to make not two, he told me, but one book, connecting and confronting both views on the war - the soldier’s and the marshal’s. He wanted to write a few more memoir essays about prominent people of literature and art with whom his life brought him close - together with those already published, it would ultimately form a solid book of memoirs. In general, there were more than enough plans.

Simonov’s efficiency and perseverance are known; he even took manuscripts, books, and a tape recorder with him to the hospital, but his illnesses made themselves felt more and more, his strength became less and less, and one after another, planned and even started work had to be “mothballed” and postponed until better times. time until recovery. And some of them were promised to someone, included somewhere in the plans, he spoke about these works in interviews, at reader conferences, which for him was tantamount to a commitment.

In addition to those just listed, two more works were conceived, about which Simonov did not elaborate and did not speak publicly. But when he felt completely bad, when he decided that from what he could and wanted to do, the time had come to choose the most important, he began to deal with precisely these two plans, which he had been putting off and putting off for many years, either believing that he was not yet ready to such a complex work, or believing that it could wait, the time was not ripe for it, anyway, it should be written “on the table”, because it does not have the slightest chance of publication in the near foreseeable future.

With this feeling, in February - April 1979, Simonov dictated the manuscript that made up the first part of the book, which the reader now holds in his hands. Its subtitle is “Reflections on I.V. Stalin." However, this is a book not only about Stalin, but also about himself. The manuscript absorbed in a transformed form the idea, pathos and partly the material of the play “An Evening of Memories” conceived by the writer. However, what could come of this - a play, a script or a novel - was unclear to the author. He hasn’t yet chosen a path: “For starters, let’s call it “An Evening of Memories,” and let the subtitle be “A Play to Read.” Or maybe it will turn out to be not a play, but a novel, only a little unusual. Not the one in which I will talk about myself, but the one in which there will be four of my “I” at once. The current self and three others. The one I was in '56, the one I was in '46, shortly after the war, and the one I was before the war, at a time when I had just found out that the civil war had begun in Spain - in the year thirty-six. These four “I”s of mine will talk to each other... Now, when remembering the past, we cannot resist the temptation to imagine that you knew then, in the thirties or forties, something that you did not know then, and felt that that you didn’t feel then, attribute to yourself then your thoughts and feelings today. It is this temptation that I quite consciously want to fight, or at least try to fight this temptation, which is often stronger than us. That is why, and not for any formalistic or mystical reasons, I chose this somewhat strange form of a story about the current generation.”

This was the basis for the technique that was to become a tool of historicism. Simonov wanted to find out, to get to the bottom of why before the war and in the post-war period he acted this way and not otherwise, why he thought this way, what he was striving for then, what and how then changed in his views and feelings. Not in order to marvel at the unexpected whims of memory, its unselfish selection - it tenaciously and willingly preserves the pleasant, elevating us in its own eyes; it tries not to return to what we are ashamed of today, which does not correspond to our current ideas, and considerable mental effort is required to remember what you don’t want to remember. Looking back at the difficult years he had lived through, Simonov wanted to be fair and impartial and to himself - what has happened has happened, the past - mistakes, delusions, cowardice - must be reckoned with. Simonov judged himself strictly - to show this, I will give two excerpts from his notes for the play, they are about what is especially painful to touch. And they are directly related to that manuscript “Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation,” which he finished dictating in the spring of 1979:

“...It seems to the present day that he always considered it a crime what was done in 1944 with the Balkars, or Kalmyks, or Chechens. He needs to check a lot in himself in order to force himself to remember that then, in forty-four or forty-five, or even in forty-six, he thought that this was how it should have been. What if he heard from many that there, in the Caucasus and Kalmykia, many changed and helped the Germans, that this was what had to be done. Evict - and that's it! He doesn’t even want to remember now his thoughts on this matter at that time, and to be honest, he didn’t think much about it then. It’s even strange to think now that he could have thought so little about it then.

And then, in 1946, that’s exactly what I thought, I didn’t really delve into this issue, I thought that everything was right. And only when he himself encountered - and he had such cases - this tragedy, using the example of a man who fought the entire war at the front, and after that, exiled somewhere in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, continued to write poetry in his native language, but not could print them because it was believed that this language no longer existed - only in this case some not fully realized feeling of protest arose in the soul.”

We are talking about Kaisyn Kuliev here, and it’s probably worth mentioning for the sake of fairness how Simonov looked in his eyes. Many years after this, when the difficult, dark times had passed for Kuliev and his people, he wrote to Simonov: “I remember how I came to you on a snowy February day in 1944 at the Red Star.” There was a machine gun hanging on your wall. These were the most tragic days for me. You remember this, of course. You treated me then cordially, nobly, as befits not only a poet, but also a courageous man. I remember this. People don’t forget about such things.”

I cited this letter to emphasize the severity of the account that Simonov presented to himself in his later years; he did not want to minimize the part of responsibility for what happened that fell on him, and did not seek self-justification. He questioned his past, his memory, without any condescension.

Here is another excerpt from the notes:

“Well, what did you do when someone you knew was there and you had to help him?

Differently. It happened that he called, and wrote, and asked.

How did you ask?

Differently. Sometimes he asked to put himself in the person’s position, to ease his fate, and told him how good he was. Sometimes it was like this: he wrote that he didn’t believe that it couldn’t be that this person turned out to be who they think he is, that he did what he was accused of - I know him too well, this can’t be.

Have there been such cases?

Cases? Yes, there was one such case, that’s exactly what I wrote. And he wrote more that, of course, I don’t interfere, I can’t judge, probably everything is correct, but... And then I tried to write everything that I knew good about the person in order to somehow help him.

How else?

How else? Well, it happened that he didn’t answer letters. Didn't answer emails twice. Once because I never loved this person and believed that I had the right not to respond to this letter from a stranger to me, about whom I, in general, know nothing. And another time I knew a person well, I was even with him at the front and loved him, but when he was imprisoned during the war, I believed what the matter was, I believed that it could be connected with the disclosure of some secrets of that time, which were not customary to talk about, could not be spoken about. I believed it. He wrote to me. Didn't answer, didn't help him. I didn’t know what to write to him, I hesitated. Then, when he returned, it was a shame. Moreover, the other, our common friend, who is generally considered to be thinner than me, more cowardly, as it turned out, answered him and helped him in every way he could - he sent parcels and money.”

It's not often that you come across people who can interrogate their memory with such ruthlessness.

Simonov did not finish the play - one can only guess why: apparently, further work on it required overcoming direct autobiography, it was necessary to create characters, build a plot, etc., and, judging by the notes and sketches, the main object of these difficult reflections on the harsh , a contradictory time, about the painful conflicts and deformations it generated, it was about himself, his own life, his involvement in what was happening around him, his personal responsibility for the troubles and injustices of the past. Creating a play, inventing a plot, giving his torment and drama to fictional characters, he seemed to push it all aside, separate it, remove it from himself. And in a book about Stalin, all this was appropriate, even necessary, such a book could not help but become for Simonov a book about himself, about how he perceived what was happening then, how he acted, for what he was responsible to his conscience - otherwise in his eyes the work would lose its moral foundation. The leitmotif of Simonov's book is reckoning with the past, repentance, purification, and this sets it apart and elevates it above many memoirs about the Stalinist era.

It must be borne in mind that this is only the first part of the book conceived by Simonov. Unfortunately, he did not have time to write the second part - “Stalin and the War”. Large folders of various preparatory materials have been preserved, collected over many years: notes, letters, recordings of conversations with military leaders, extracts from books - some of them, of independent value, are included in this book. And in order to correctly understand the first part, you need to know where the author wanted to move in the second, in what direction, what the final assessment of Stalin’s activities and personality should have been. However, in the first part, mainly based on the material of quite “prosperous” (where the leader was not violent) meetings with Stalin, which the author had a chance to attend (these were pharisaical one-man theater performances, staged once a year to teach writers by the dictator who established regime of unlimited personal power), Simonov managed to convincingly reveal his Jesuitism, cruelty, and sadism.

The discussion at these meetings was mainly about literature and art. And although the veil covering the true meaning and inner workings of Stalin’s literary - and more broadly - cultural policy was only slightly lifted there, some features of this policy clearly appear in Simonov’s notes and memoirs. And the extreme vulgarity of Stalin’s original ideological and aesthetic guidelines, and the demand for primitive didactics, and the disrespect for talent as a consequence of the complete disregard for the human person that permeates the Stalinist regime - this is a saying from that time: “We have no irreplaceable people,” and a consumerist attitude towards history - the principle rejected in words, officially condemned: history is politics, overturned into the depths of centuries - was in fact strictly implemented without a shadow of embarrassment. All this was implemented with the help of carrots (prizes, titles, awards) and sticks (a broad system of repression - from the destruction of books in print by command from above to a camp for unwanted authors).

In one of the folders with preparatory materials there is a sheet with questions relating to the Great Patriotic War, which Simonov, starting work, formulated for himself and for conversations with military leaders; they give some - of course, far from complete - idea of ​​​​the range of problems that should be addressed The second part was dedicated to:

"1. Was what happened at the beginning of the war a tragedy or not?

2. Did Stalin bear the greatest responsibility for this compared to other people?

3. Was the repression of military personnel in '37 - '38 one of the main reasons for our failures at the beginning of the war?

4. Was Stalin’s erroneous assessment of the pre-war political situation and his overestimation of the role of the pact one of the main reasons for our failures at the beginning of the war?

5. Were these the only reasons for failure?

6. Was Stalin a major historical figure?

7. Did the strengths of Stalin’s personality appear in the preparation for the war and in its leadership?

8. Did the negative sides of Stalin’s personality appear in the preparation for the war and in its leadership?

9. What other concept in depicting the beginning of the war can exist other than a tragic period in the history of our country, when we were in a desperate situation, from which we emerged at the cost of enormous sacrifices and losses, thanks to the incredible and heroic efforts of the people, the army, the party?”

Almost each of these questions later became the topic of serious historical research for Simonov. For example, in the report “Lessons of History and the Duty of a Writer” included in this book (made in 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the Victory, it was published only in 1987) the severe consequences for the combat capability of the Red Army of the mass repressions of the thirty-seventh - were analyzed in detail and in many ways. thirty-eighth. Here are some brief excerpts from this report that give an idea of ​​the conclusions Simonov came to. Speaking about the rigged trial that took place in June 1937, in which a group of senior Red Army commanders were convicted and executed on false charges of treason and espionage for Nazi Germany: M.N. Tukhachevsky, I.P. Uborevich, A.I. Kork and others, Simonov, emphasized that this monstrous process was the beginning of events that later had an avalanche-like character: “Firstly, they were not the only ones who died. Following them and in connection with their death, hundreds and thousands of other people, who made up a significant part of the color of our army, died. And they not only died, but in the minds of most people they passed away with the stigma of betrayal. This is not just about losses associated with the departed. We must remember what was going on in the souls of the people who remained to serve in the army, about the strength of the spiritual blow inflicted on them. We must remember how much incredible work it took for the army - in this case I’m talking only about the army - to begin to recover from these terrible blows.” But by the beginning of the war this had not happened, the army had not fully recovered, especially since “in both 1940 and 1941 paroxysms of suspicion and accusations still continued. Shortly before the war, when a memorable TASS message was published with its half-reproach, half-threat against those who succumb to rumors about Germany's allegedly hostile intentions, the commander of the Red Army Air Force P.V. was arrested and killed. Rychagov, Chief Inspector of the Air Force Ya.M. Smushkevich and the commander of the country’s air defense G.M. Stern. To complete the picture, it should be added that at the beginning of the war, the former Chief of the General Staff and the People’s Commissar of Armaments were also arrested, and later, fortunately, were released.” It is entirely on Stalin’s conscience that Hitler managed to take us by surprise. “With incomprehensible persistence,” writes Simonov, “he did not want to take into account the most important reports from the intelligence officers. His main guilt before the country is that he created a disastrous atmosphere when dozens of completely competent people, possessing irrefutable documentary data, did not have the opportunity to prove to the head of state the scale of the danger and did not have the rights to take sufficient measures to prevent it.”

The magazine “Knowledge is Power” (1987, No. 11) also published an extensive fragment “On the twenty-first of June I was summoned to the Radio Committee...” from a commentary to the book “One Hundred Days of War”, which was also not published due to circumstances beyond the control of the author. The military-political situation of the pre-war years, the progress of preparations for the impending war and, above all, the role that the Soviet-German pact played in this matter are carefully examined. Simonov comes to an unequivocal conclusion: “...If we talk about surprise and the scale of the first defeats associated with it, then everything here starts from the very bottom - starting with reports from intelligence officers and reports of border guards, through reports and reports from districts, through reports of the People's Commissariat of Defense and the General headquarters, everything ultimately comes down to Stalin personally and rests on him, on his firm belief that it is he and precisely the measures that he considers necessary that will be able to prevent the disaster approaching the country. And in the reverse order - it is from him, through the People's Commissariat of Defense, through the General Staff, through district headquarters and to the very bottom - all that pressure comes, all that administrative and moral pressure, which ultimately made the war much more sudden than it could have been under other circumstances." And further about the extent of Stalin’s responsibility: “Speaking about the beginning of the war, it is impossible to avoid assessing the scale of the enormous personal responsibility that Stalin bore for everything that happened. Different scales cannot exist on the same map. The scale of responsibility corresponds to the scale of power. The vastness of one is directly related to the vastness of the other.”

Simonov’s attitude towards Stalin, which, of course, does not boil down to an answer to the question whether Stalin was a major historical figure, was most importantly determined by what the writer heard at the 20th Party Congress, which was a huge shock for him, and later learned while studying history and the prehistory of the Great Patriotic War (these historical studies were especially important for developing one’s own position). It must be said with all certainty that the more Simonov delved into this material, the more evidence he accumulated from various participants in the events, the more he reflected on what the people had experienced, on the cost of the Victory, the more extensive and rigorous the account became. he presented it to Stalin.

The book “Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation” does not talk about everything that in Simonov’s life was connected with the Stalinist order, with the oppressive atmosphere of that time. The author did not have time to write, as he had intended, about the ominous campaigns of the forty-ninth year to combat the so-called “cosmopolitan anti-patriots”; What remains outside the book is that bad time for him after Stalin’s death, when he suddenly hung his portrait in his office at home as a challenge to the changes emerging in society. It was not easy for Simonov to re-evaluate the past - both the general one and his own. On the day of his fiftieth birthday, he spoke at an anniversary evening in the Central House of Writers: “I just want my comrades present here to know that I don’t like everything in my life, I didn’t do everything well - I understand that - I wasn’t always on high. At the height of citizenship, at the height of humanity. There have been things in life that I remember with displeasure, cases in life when I did not show enough will or enough courage. And I remember it." He not only remembered this, but drew the most serious conclusions from it for himself, learned lessons, tried everything he could to correct it. Let us also remember how difficult and difficult it is for a person to judge himself. And we will respect the courage of those who, like Simonov, dare to undertake such a trial, without which it is impossible to cleanse the moral atmosphere in society.

I will not characterize Simonov’s attitude towards Stalin in my own words; it was expressed in the trilogy “The Living and the Dead”, and in the commentary to the front-line diaries “Different Days of the War”, and in letters to readers. For this I will use one of Simonov’s letters, prepared by him as material for the work “Stalin and War”. It expresses his principled position:

“I think that disputes about the personality of Stalin and his role in the history of our society are natural disputes. They will still happen in the future. In any case, until the whole truth is told, and before that the whole truth, the complete truth about all aspects of Stalin’s activities in all periods of his life is studied.

I believe that our attitude towards Stalin in past years, including during the war years, our admiration for him during the war years - and this admiration was probably approximately the same for you and your head of the political department, Colonel Ratnikov, and for me, this admiration for the past does not give us the right not to take into account what we know now, not to take into account the facts. Yes, now it would be more pleasant for me to think that I don’t have, for example, poems that began with the words “Comrade Stalin, can you hear us?” But these poems were written in 1941, and I am not ashamed that they were written then, because they express what I felt and thought then, they express hope and faith in Stalin. I felt them then, that’s why I wrote. But, on the other hand, the fact that I wrote such poems then, not knowing what I know now, not imagining to the smallest extent the full extent of Stalin’s atrocities against the party and the army, and the entire volume of crimes, committed by him in the thirty-seventh - thirty-eighth years, and the entire scope of his responsibility for the outbreak of the war, which might not have been so unexpected if he had not been so convinced of his infallibility - all this that we now know obliges us to reassess our previous views on Stalin, reconsider them. Life demands this, the truth of history demands this.

Yes, in certain cases, one or another of us may be pricked, may be offended by the mention that what you said or wrote about Stalin in your time is different from what you say and write now. In this sense, it is especially easy to prick and offend a writer. Whose books exist on bookshelves and who can, so to speak, be caught in this discrepancy. But what follows from this? Should it be that, knowing the volume of Stalin’s crimes, the volume of disasters he caused to the country since the thirties, the volume of his actions that ran counter to the interests of communism, knowing all this, we should remain silent about it? I think, on the contrary, it is our duty to write about it, our duty to put things in their place in the consciousness of future generations.

At the same time, of course, you need to weigh everything soberly and you need to see different sides of Stalin’s activities and there is no need to portray him as some insignificant, petty, petty person. And attempts at this sometimes already appear in some literary works. Stalin, of course, was a very, very large man, a man of very large scale. He was a politician, a personality who cannot be thrown out of history. And this man, in particular if we talk about the war, did a lot of things that were necessary, a lot of things that influenced the course of things in a positive sense. It is enough to read his correspondence with Roosevelt and Churchill to understand the magnitude and political talent of this man. And at the same time, it is this person who is responsible for the start of the war, which cost us so many extra millions of lives and millions of square kilometers of devastated territory. This person is responsible for the army's unpreparedness for war. This man bears responsibility for the years thirty-seven and thirty-eight, when he defeated the cadres of our army and when our army began to lag behind the Germans in its preparations for war, because by the thirty-sixth year it was ahead of the Germans. And only the destruction of military personnel carried out by Stalin, an unprecedented defeat in scale, led to the fact that we began to lag behind the Germans both in preparation for the war and in the quality of military personnel.

Of course, Stalin wanted victory. Of course, when the war began, he did everything in his power to win. He made decisions both right and wrong. He also made mistakes, and he also had successes both in the diplomatic struggle and in the military leadership of the war. We must try to portray all this as it was. In one place in my book (we are talking about the novel “Soldiers Are Not Born” - L.L.) one of her heroes - Ivan Alekseevich - says about Stalin that he is a great and terrible man. I think that this is a correct characterization and, if you follow this characterization, you can write the truth about Stalin. Let me add on my own: not only scary - very scary, immensely scary. Just think that Yezhov and that degenerate Beria were all just pawns in his hands, just people with whose hands he committed monstrous crimes! What is the scale of his own atrocities, if we rightfully speak of these pawns in his hands as the last villains?

Yes, the truth about Stalin is truly complex, there are many sides to it, and it cannot be said in a few words. It must be written and explained as a complex truth, only then will it be the true truth.

This, in fact, is the main thing that I wanted to answer you. There is no time, as they say, to look for the most precise formulations for my thoughts - this is not an article, but a letter, but basically, it seems, I told you what I wanted to say.”

Simonov wrote this letter in 1964. And in the next fifteen years, when talking in the press about Stalin’s crimes became impossible, when his guilt for the severe defeats of forty-one and forty-two, for the incalculable losses we suffered, when even the decisions of the 20th Party Congress on the cult of personality and its consequences began to be hushed up in every possible way Simonov, who was under very strong pressure in this direction, was mentioned less and less often - only as a matter of form - and with the help of prohibitions (the “One Hundred Days of War”, notes “On the biography of G.K. Zhukov”, the report “Lessons” history and the duty of a writer"), and with the help of exhausting opportunistic remarks concerning almost everything that he wrote and did at that time (they completely disfigured the film adaptation of the novel “Soldiers Are Not Born” - so much so that Simonov demanded that the title of the novel be removed from the credits and his last name), stood firmly on his ground, did not retreat, did not back down. He hoped that the truth would ultimately triumph, that it could only be hidden for the time being, that the hour would come and the falsifications would be exposed and discarded, and that which had been kept silent and hidden would come to light. Responding to a sad and confused letter from one reader who became disheartened when faced with a shameless distortion of historical truth in literature, Simonov noted: “I am less pessimistic than you are about the future. I think that the truth cannot be hidden and history will remain true history, despite various attempts to falsify it - mainly through omissions.

And as for what they will believe more when we all die, will they believe more, in particular, those memoirs that you write about in your letter, or that novel that you write about, then this is, as they say, Grandma said in two.

I would like to add: we will wait and see, but since we are talking about distant times, we will no longer see. However, I think that they will believe exactly what is closer to the truth. Humanity has never been devoid of common sense. He will not lose it in the future.”

For all his optimism, Simonov still attributed hope for the triumph of “common sense” only to the “distant future”; he could not imagine that within ten years after his death a book about Stalin would be published. It seemed unthinkable then. However, in the spring of 1979, when he dictated “Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation,” he repeated the formula of the hero of his novel, written in 1962: “... I would like to hope that in the future time will allow us to evaluate the figure of Stalin more accurately, dotting all the i's ” and saying everything to the end both about his great merits and about his terrible crimes. And about both. For he was a great and terrible man. That’s what I thought and still think.”

It is hardly possible to accept this formula “great and terrible” today. Perhaps if Simonov had lived to this day, he would have found a more accurate one. But even then it was not unconditional and unconditional for him, especially since he did not have even a shadow of condescension towards Stalin’s atrocities - he believed that there was and could not be any justification for his crimes (that’s why, it seems to me, the fears of some journalists are in vain , that Simonov’s memories can be used by today’s Stalinists). The same Ivan Alekseevich from “Soldiers Are Not Born,” reflecting on Stalin in connection with Tolstoy’s words in “War and Peace”: “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth,” refutes it. One of the leaders of the General Staff, who communicates with Stalin day after day, having the opportunity to observe him quite closely, he knows well within himself that simplicity, goodness and truth are completely alien to Stalin and therefore there can be no talk of any greatness of his.

Among the preparatory materials for the second part of Simonov’s book, the recordings of his conversations with G.K. are of particular interest and value. Zhukov, A.M. Vasilevsky, I.S. Konev and I.S. Isakov. Most of the recordings of conversations with G.K. Zhukov was included in the memoir essay “On the biography of G.K. Zhukov." These “Notes...” and recordings of conversations with other military leaders were included in the second part of the book - “Stalin and the War.”

The frankness and confidential tone of the writer’s interlocutors is noteworthy. They also tell him what, for obvious reasons, they could not then write in their own memoirs. This frankness was explained by their high respect for Simonov’s creativity and personality; talking with the writer, they had no doubt that he would use what was told to him in the best possible way.

As you know, G.K. Zhukov was a man who did not tolerate familiarity and was alien to sentimentality, but, congratulating Simonov on his fiftieth birthday, he addressed him “dear Kostya” and ended his letter with words that are intended only for close people - “I mentally hug you and kiss you.”

About the authority Simonov enjoyed with I.S. Konev, says M.M. in his memoirs. Zotov, who headed the editorial office of Voenizdat’s memoirs in the 60s. When, in preparation for the publication of a book by I.S. Konev’s “The Forty-Fifth,” the publishing house made several critical comments to the author; he, according to M.M. Zotov, “decisively rejected them. And he had only one argument: “Simonov read the manuscript.” By the way, when this book was published, I.S. Konev gave it to Simonov with an inscription confirming M.M.’s story. Zotov, - Simonov not only read the manuscript, but, as they say, put his hand to it:

“Dear Konstantin Mikhailovich!

In memory of the heroic days of the Great Patriotic War. Thank you for your initiative and help in creating this book. With friendly greetings and respect to you

A.M. Vasilevsky once, addressing Simonov, called him the people's writer of the USSR, meaning not a non-existent title, but the people's view of the war, which is expressed in Simonov's works. “It is very important for us,” Marshal wrote to Simonov, “that all your popularly known and unconditionally beloved creative works, touching on almost all the most important events of the war, are presented to the reader in the most thorough manner, and most importantly - strictly truthfully and substantiated, without any attempts to please all sorts of trends of the post-war years and today to move away from the sometimes harsh truth of history, which, unfortunately, many of the writers and especially our brother, memoirists, do so willingly for various reasons.” These words help to understand why our most famous commanders talked with Simonov with such eagerness and openness - they were captivated by his rare knowledge of war, his loyalty to the truth.

I.S. Isakov, a literary gifted man himself - which is essential in this case - who had an excellent command of the pen, wrote to Simonov, recalling the Kerch disaster: “I witnessed something that if I write, they won’t believe it. They would believe Simonov. I carry it with me and dream of telling you someday.” History of conversations with I.S. Isakov was told by Simonov himself in the preface to the admiral’s letters, which he transmitted to the TsGAOR of the Armenian SSR. It's worth reproducing here:

“We are all human - mortal, but I; as you can see, he is closer to this than you are, and I would like, without delay, to tell you what I consider important about Stalin. I think that it will also be useful to you when you continue to work on your novel or novels. I don’t know when I’ll write about this myself or whether I’ll write it at all, but with you it will be written down and, therefore, intact. And this is important." After this preface, Ivan Stepanovich got down to business and began to talk about his meetings with Stalin. The conversation continued for several hours, and I myself finally had to interrupt this conversation, because I felt that my interlocutor was in a dangerous state of extreme fatigue. We agreed on a new meeting, and when I returned home, the next day I dictated everything that Ivan Stepanovich told me into a voice recorder. He dictated, as usual in these cases, in the first person, trying to convey everything exactly as it was preserved in memory.

The next meeting with Ivan Stepanovich, scheduled for the next few days, did not take place due to his state of health, and then because of mine and his departure. We returned to the topic of this conversation again only in September 1962. I no longer remember where this second meeting took place, either again in Barvikha, or at Ivan Stepanovich’s house, but after it, just like the first time, I dictated into the recorder, mainly in the first person, the content of our conversation.”

I also cited this quote because it reveals how Simonov made recordings of conversations, reveals his “technology” that ensured a high level of accuracy.

It remains to be said that the point of view of Simonov, who conscientiously reproduces what was told to him, does not always coincide with the point of view of his interlocutors, and in general, the conversations recorded by Simonov and “Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation,” as befits memoirs, are subjective. It would be imprudent to see in them some kind of historical verdict; these are only testimony, albeit very important ones. Simonov was clearly aware of this and wanted his readers to understand it this way. Among the notes he made in the hospital in the last days of his life is this: “Maybe call the book “To the Best of My Understanding.” He wanted to emphasize that he does not pretend to be the absolute truth, that what he wrote and recorded is only the testimony of a contemporary. But this is unique evidence of enormous historical value. Today they are needed like air to comprehend the past. One of the main tasks facing us, without solving which we will not be able to move forward in understanding history, is to eliminate the acute shortage of accurate facts and truthful, reliable evidence that has created in recent decades.

The manuscripts that compiled this book, which were in the archives of K.M. Simonov, which is kept in his family, was not prepared for publication by the author. Having dictated the first part of the book, Simonov, unfortunately, did not even have time or was no longer able to proofread and correct it. The book contains the dates of the dictations to remind readers that the writer was unable to complete the text. When preparing the manuscript for printing, obvious errors and reservations that were misunderstood when reprinting words and phrases from the recorder onto paper were corrected.

After all, how many of our plans have been ruined when faced with harsh social orders! This had a big impact on Simonov’s fate: after all, he was the “favorite” of the authorities, a young man who made a dizzying literary and literary-command career, a laureate of 6 (!) Stalin Prizes.

It was necessary to have firmness in order to later overcome all this, to reevaluate it in oneself and around...

Vyacheslav Kondratyev

Here Konstantin Mikhailovich confirmed in my eyes his reputation as a historian and researcher. After all, each of his notes, made following meetings with the leader after the war, is an invaluable document that no one else took a chance on.

And his later, 1979, commentary on the transcripts of that time is already an act of the most serious internal intellectual work. Executing, self-purifying work.

Academician A. M. Samsonov

The war and Konstantin Simonov are now inseparable in the memory of people - probably it will be so for future historians of our time.

People's Artist of the USSR M. A. Ulyanov.

It is also very important for us that all of your publicly known and unconditionally beloved creative works, touching on almost all the most important events of the war, are presented to the reader in the most thorough manner, and most importantly - strictly truthfully and justifiably, without any attempts to please any trends of the post-war years and today to move away from the sometimes harsh truth of history, which, unfortunately, many of the writers, and especially our brother, memoirists, do so willingly for various reasons.

Marshal of the Soviet Union A. M. Vasilevsky.

How is courage demonstrated during war years? It is this problem that Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov addresses in his text.

Reflecting on the question posed, the author talks about a group of five artillerymen who heroically withstood the first clash with the Germans on the border, and argues that brave people are distinguished by a special personality. The use of dialogue allows us to show the characters of the soldiers who endured the hardships of the terrible war years: short, abrupt phrases speak of the confidence and determination of the soldiers.

As K. Simonov notes, the soldiers have amazing stamina and endurance: despite physical torment, fatigue and hunger, which are emphasized by expressive details (“five pairs of tired, overworked hands, five worn out, dirty, tunics lashed with branches, five German ones taken in battle machine guns and a cannon"), they continue the fight and drag "on themselves" the only surviving weapon deep into the country. These people are ready to fearlessly overcome any obstacles to protect the Motherland; their whole life is service to the Fatherland and a bold “challenge to fate.” However, the most important quality of a courageous person for the writer is inner strength, respectable fortitude: this quality is visible both in the deceased commander, behind whom “soldiers go through fire and water,” and in the foreman with his “thick and strong” voice.

The author's position can be formulated as follows: a truly courageous person is characterized by perseverance, courage and unbending fortitude. I can agree with the opinion of K. Simonov, because brave warriors really show amazing endurance and selflessly cope with difficulties. In addition, in my opinion, the courage of a fighter is inextricably linked with the awareness of responsibility for the fate of the Motherland and one’s people.

The theme of the brave struggle for the freedom of the Fatherland is heard in A. Tvardovsky’s poem “I was killed near Rzhev...”. In a kind of “testament,” the murdered soldier calls on his compatriots and heirs to always remember their country. The lyrical hero of the poem speaks of the responsibility of every warrior for the future of the Motherland and asks to fight courageously for the last inch of land, so that “if you leave it, then there is nowhere to put the foot that has stepped back.”

Another example is the story by B. Vasiliev “And the dawns here are quiet.” After the death of several girls from a small detachment, Commandant Vaskov begins to doubt the correctness of the decision to fight the Germans on his own. However, Rita Osyanina convinces him that the Motherland begins not with the canals, where the Germans could be dealt with more easily and without losses, but with each of the soldiers: all citizens of the country are responsible for its freedom and must fight the enemy.

Thus, we can conclude that courage is the most important quality of a defender of his native land, which implies endurance, fearlessness, dedication, and understanding of responsibility for the fate of his people.

Updated: 2018-08-07

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Write an essay based on the text you read.

Formulate one of the problems posed by the author of the text.

Comment on the formulated problem. Include in your comment two illustrative examples from the text you read that you think are important for understanding the problem in the source text (avoid excessive quoting). Explain the meaning of each example and indicate the semantic connection between them.

The volume of the essay is at least 150 words.

Work written without reference to the text read (not based on this text) is not graded. If the essay is a retelling or a complete rewrite of the original text without any comments, then such work is graded 0 points.

Write an essay carefully, legible handwriting.

(1) Early in the morning Lopatin and Vanin went to the first company. (2) Saburov stayed: he wanted to take advantage of the calm. (3) First, they sat with Maslennikov for two hours compiling various military reports, some of which were really necessary, and some of which seemed superfluous to Saburov and introduced only due to a long-standing peaceful habit of all kinds of office work. (4) Then, when Maslennikov left, Saburov sat down to the task that had been postponed and was weighing on him - answering the letters that had come to the dead. (5) Somehow it had become his custom almost from the very beginning of the war that he took upon himself the difficult responsibility of answering these letters. (6) He was angry with people who, when someone died in their unit, tried for as long as possible not to inform his loved ones about it. (7) This apparent kindness seemed to him simply as a desire to pass by the grief of others, so as not to cause pain to himself.

(8) “Petenka, dear,” wrote Parfenov’s wife (it turns out his name was Petya), “we all miss you and are waiting for the war to end so that you can return... (9) The tick has become quite big and is already walking on its own, and almost never falls..."

(10) Saburov carefully read the letter to the end. (11) It was not long - greetings from relatives, a few words about work, a wish to defeat the Nazis as quickly as possible, at the end two lines of children’s scribbles written by the eldest son, and then several unsteady sticks made by a child’s hand, which was guided by the mother’s hand, and a note: “And this was written by Galochka herself”...

(12) What to answer? (13) Always in such cases, Saburov knew that there was only one answer: he was killed, he was gone - and yet he always invariably thought about it, as if he was writing the answer for the last time. (14) What to answer? (15) Really, what should I answer?

(16) He remembered the small figure of Parfenov, lying supine on the cement floor, his pale face and field bags placed under his head. (17) This man, who died on the very first day of the fighting and whom he knew very little before, was for him a comrade in arms, one of many, too many who fought next to him and died next to him, then how he himself remained intact. (18) He was used to this, accustomed to war, and it was easy for him to say to himself: here was Parfenov, he fought and was killed. (19) But there, in Penza, on Marx Street, 24, these words - “he was killed” - were a disaster, the loss of all hopes. (20) After these words there, on Karl Marx Street, 24, the wife ceased to be called a wife and became a widow, the children ceased to be called simply children - they were already called orphans. (21) It was not only grief, it was a complete change in life, in the entire future. (22) And always, when he wrote such letters, he was most afraid that the one who read it would think that it was easy for him, the writer. (23) He wanted those who read it to think that it was written by their comrade in grief, a person who was grieving just like them, then it would be easier to read. (24) Maybe not even that: it’s not easier, but it’s not so offensive, it’s not so sad to read...

(25) People sometimes need lies, he knew that. (26) They certainly want the one they loved to die heroically or, as they say, to die the death of the brave... (27) They want him not just to die, but to die having done something important, and they they certainly want him to remember them before his death.

(28) And Saburov, when answering letters, always tried to satisfy this desire, and when necessary, he lied, lied more or less - this was the only lie that did not bother him. (29) He took a pen and, tearing out a piece of paper from the notebook, began to write in his fast, sweeping handwriting. (30) He wrote about how they served together with Parfenov, how Parfenov died heroically here in a night battle, in Stalingrad (which was true), and how he, before falling, himself shot three Germans (which was not true), and how he died in Saburov’s arms, and how before his death he remembered his son Volodya and asked him to tell him to remember his father.

(31) This man, who died on the very first day of the fighting and whom he knew very little before, was for him a comrade in arms, one of many, too many who fought next to him and died next to him, then how he himself remained intact. (32) He was used to this, accustomed to war, and it was easy for him to say to himself: here was Parfenov, he fought and was killed.

(By K. M. Simonov*)

* Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov - Russian Soviet prose writer, poet, film scriptwriter, journalist and public figure.

Explanation.

What is compassion? Are all people capable of manifesting it? The author's text is devoted to finding answers to these questions.

In this text, K. M. Simonov poses the problem of showing compassion towards other people.

Saburov took on enormous responsibility from the very beginning of the war. Notifying the relatives of military personnel about the death was not an easy experience for him. In sentences 5-6 we see that Saburov felt disdain for those people who did not care about the relatives of the deceased. Thus, they showed indifference and indifference, which only increased the emotional pain of their relatives. Saburov himself was a man of a kind heart. Responding to letters, he tried to show the compassion that so helped the relatives of the victims. In 22-23 sentences, the author writes that in this way Saburov could soften the grief of a serious loss.

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov is convinced that compassion is an integral part of all people. In war or in peacetime, each of us is capable of making this world a kinder place. Indifference, in his opinion, only leads to disastrous consequences.

To prove the validity of this position, I will cite as an example the novel “War and Peace” by L. N. Tolstoy. Natasha Rostova is a truly kind and sympathetic person. She saved many of the wounded, providing them with housing, food and proper care. Natasha didn’t have a second to think, because she knew from the very beginning that this was not an obligation for her, but a spiritual urge.

Not only adults, but also children need support from others. In the work “The Fate of Man” by M. A. Sholokhov we see confirmation of this. Having lost his family and relatives, Andrei Sokolov did not lose heart. One day he met an orphaned boy Vanya, and without thinking twice, he firmly decided to replace his father. By showing compassion and helping him, Andrei made the boy a truly happy child.

This text for analysis raises the problem of the manifestation of heroism in war.

To attract the reader's attention to it, Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov shows the dedication of Russian soldiers who bravely fought for every inch of their native land.

I completely agree with K. M. Simonov that brave people are ready to sacrifice themselves to save others.

To prove the validity of my point of view, I will give the following literary example.

Let us remember B. Vasiliev’s story “The Dawns Here Are Quiet.” The action takes place during the Great Patriotic War. The female anti-aircraft gunners died while destroying a detachment of Germans that significantly outnumbered them.

In the story “Sotnikov” by Vasily Bykov, Rybak and Sotnikov go to collect food for the partisans. In the village they were captured by the Germans. In order to save his comrade, the woman who is helping to hide, and her children, Sotnikov decided to take all the blame on himself. He also did not reveal the location of the Russian troops, despite the torture.

In conclusion, I want to say again: a person’s heroism is manifested in his willingness to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.

Updated: 2017-05-08

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In the minds of living people, the name of Konstantin Simonov is firmly associated with works about the Great Patriotic War, with the lines of the poem “Son of an Artilleryman” familiar from school (“Major Deev had a comrade, Major Petrov...”), and even with serial versions about his affair with famous actress Valentina Serova. During the years of Khrushchev’s “thaw”, suddenly “thawed” anti-Stalinists did not want to forgive the Soviet “general” from literature, neither his lightning success, nor high posts in the Union of Writers of the USSR, nor loyal plays, articles and poems written in the late 1940s - early 50s -s. Post-perestroika “scribes” of Russian history even considered K. Simonov, a laureate of the Lenin and six Stalin Prizes, one of the most famous and (I’m not afraid of this word) talented writers of the 20th century, to be an “anti-hero”. His works were clearly placed in line with the “official” works of Fadeev, Gorbatov, Tvardovsky and other Soviet authors, completely lost to the current generation behind the big names of Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Nabokov, etc. Such “unambiguity” in the assessment of historical events, as well as poets, writers and their literary works, has more than once played a cruel joke on those who today seek to preach it from the political platform, in the media or school textbooks.

It is impossible to erase either Stalin’s repressions or the great victory in the Patriotic War from the history of the country. It is impossible to erase or “remove” truly talented works from Russian literature, even if you call their authors unprincipled “Soviet functionaries”, Stalinist sycophants, “custom” socialist realist writers. Looking from the heights of past years, it is much easier to demand displays of civil courage from others than to demonstrate it yourself in real life. Today's critics should not forget about this.

And even if we ignore the above “clichés” formed by public opinion in recent decades, there is simply no one to read the works of K. M. Simonov today. The theme of war has long exhausted itself, and for all the time that has passed in conditions of absolute literary freedom, not a single work truly loved by the people has appeared in the Russian-language literature of the post-Soviet space. The Russian literary market, in the form in which it exists now, is focused exclusively on the needs of lovers of “light reading” - low-grade detective stories, various kinds of fantasy and romance novels.

K.M. Simonov faced a different, harsher era. His poem-spell “Wait for me” was read like a prayer. The plays “The Guy from Our City”, “Russian People”, “So It Will Be” became heroic examples for a whole generation of Soviet people. A far from controversial, too frank cycle of lyrical poems dedicated to V. Serova (“With You and Without You,” 1942) marked a short period of “lyrical thaw” in Soviet military literature and brought its author truly national fame. Reading these lines, it is impossible not to understand that Konstantin Simonov wrote about the Great Patriotic War not out of obligation, but out of a deep inner need, which from a young age until the end of his days determined the main theme of his work. Throughout his life, the poet, playwright, and thinker Simonov continued to think and write about human destinies related to the war. He was a warrior and poet, capable of igniting in the hearts of millions of people not only hatred of the enemy, but also raising the nation to defend their Motherland, instilling hope and faith in the inevitable victory of good over evil, love over hate, life over death. Being a direct eyewitness and participant in many events, Simonov, as a journalist, writer, screenwriter, and literary artist, made a significant contribution of his work to shaping the attitude towards the events of the Great Patriotic War among all subsequent generations. The novel “The Living and the Dead” - the writer’s most ambitious work - is a deep understanding of the past war as a huge, universal tragedy. More than one generation of readers read them: both those who went through and remembered that war, and those who knew about it from the stories of their elders and Soviet films.

Family and early years

Kirill Mikhailovich Simonov was born in Petrograd, into a military family. His real father, Mikhail Agafangelovich Simonov (1871-?) is a nobleman, a graduate of the Imperial Nicholas Military Academy (1897), major general. In his official biographies, K.M. Simonov pointed out that “my father died or went missing” at the front. However, during the First World War, generals did not go missing at the front. From 1914 to 1915 M.A. Simonov commanded the 12th Velikolutsk Infantry Regiment, and from July 1915 to October 1917 he was chief of staff of the 43rd Army Corps. After the revolution, the general emigrated to Poland, from where Kirill’s mother, Alexandra Leonidovna (nee Princess Obolenskaya), received letters from him in the early 1920s. The father called his wife and son to come to him, but Alexandra Leonidovna did not want to emigrate. By that time, another man had already appeared in her life - Alexander Grigorievich Ivanishev, a former colonel of the tsarist army, a teacher at a military school. He adopted and raised Kirill. True, the mother kept her son’s surname and patronymic: after all, everyone considered M.A. Simonov to the dead. She herself took the name Ivanishev.

Kirill's childhood years were spent in Ryazan and Saratov. He was raised by his stepfather, to whom he retained sincere affection and good feelings throughout his life. The family did not live well, so in 1930, after finishing a seven-year school in Saratov, Kirill Simonov went to study to become a turner. In 1931, together with his parents, he moved to Moscow. After graduating from the factory department of precision mechanics, Simonov went to work at an aircraft plant, where he worked until 1935. In his “Autobiography,” Simonov explained his choice for two reasons: “The first and main thing is the five-year tractor factory that was just built not far from us, in Stalingrad, and the general atmosphere of the romance of construction, which captured me already in the sixth grade of school. The second reason is the desire to earn money on your own.” For some time, Simonov also worked as a technician at Mezhrabpomfilm.

During these same years, the young man began to write poetry. Simonov’s first works appeared in print in 1934 (some sources indicate that the first poems were published in 1936 in the magazines “Young Guard” and “October”). From 1934 to 1938 he studied at the Literary Institute. M. Gorky, then entered the graduate school of MIFLI (Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History named after N.G. Chernyshevsky).

In 1938, Simonov’s first poem, “Pavel Cherny,” appeared, glorifying the builders of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. In the “Autobiography” of the writer, the poem is mentioned as the first difficult experience that was crowned with literary success. It was published in the poetry collection “Show of Forces.” At the same time, the historical poem “Battle on the Ice” was written. Turning to historical topics was considered mandatory, even “programmatic,” for a novice author in the 1930s. Simonov, as expected, introduces military-patriotic content into the historical poem. At a meeting in the journal “Literary Studies” dedicated to the analysis of his work, K. Simonov said: “The desire to write this poem came to me in connection with the feeling of an approaching war. I wanted those who read the poem to feel the closeness of war... that behind our shoulders, behind the shoulders of the Russian people there is a centuries-old struggle for their independence..."

War correspondent

In 1939, Simonov, as a promising author on military topics, was sent as a war correspondent to Khalkin-Gol. In a letter to S.Ya. Fradkina dated May 6, 1965, K. Simonov recalled how he first went to the front: “I went to Khalkhin Gol very simply. At first no one was going to send me there, I was, as they say, too young and green, and I should have gone not there, but to Kamchatka to join the troops, but then the editor of the “Heroic Red Army” newspaper, which was published there in Mongolia, in our group of troops, - sent a telegram to the Political Directorate of the Army: “Urgently send a poet.” He needed a poet. Obviously, at that moment in Moscow there was no one more respectable in terms of their poetic baggage than me, I was called to the PUR something like one or two in the afternoon, and at five o’clock I left on the Vladivostok ambulance to Chita, and from there to Mongolia..."

The poet never returned to the institute. Shortly before leaving for Mongolia, he finally changed his name - instead of his native Kirill, he took the pseudonym Konstantin Simonov. Almost all biographers agree that the reason for this change lies in the peculiarities of Simonov’s diction and articulation: he did not pronounce “r” and the hard sound “l”. It was always difficult for him to pronounce his own name.

The war for Simonov began not in forty-one, but in thirty-nine at Khalkhin Gol, and it was from that time that many new accents of his work were determined. In addition to essays and reports, the correspondent brings a cycle of poems from the theater of war, which soon gains all-Union fame. The most poignant poem, “Doll,” in its mood and theme, involuntarily echoes Simonov’s subsequent military lyrics (“Do you remember, Alyosha, the roads of the Smolensk region,” “Nameless Field,” etc.), which raises the problem of a warrior’s duty to the Motherland and his people.

Immediately before World War II, Simonov twice studied at war correspondent courses at the Military Academy named after M.V. Frunze (1939-1940) and the Military-Political Academy (1940-1941). Received the military rank of quartermaster of the second rank.

From the first days of the war, Konstantin Simonov was in the active army: he was his own correspondent for the newspapers “Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda”, “Red Star”, “Pravda”, “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, “Battle Banner”, etc.

As a correspondent, K. Simonov could move in the front-line zone with freedom, fantastic even for any general. Sometimes in his car he literally escaped the pincers of encirclement, remaining almost the only surviving eyewitness to the death of an entire regiment or division.

It is well known, confirmed by eyewitnesses and documented, that in July 1941 K. Simonov was near Mogilev, in units of the 172nd Infantry Division, which fought heavy defensive battles and broke out of encirclement. When Izvestia correspondents Pavel Troshkin and Konstantin Simonov arrived at the CP of the 172nd Infantry Division, they were detained, threatened to be put on the ground and held until dawn, and taken under escort to headquarters. However, correspondent Simonov was even pleased with this. He immediately felt discipline, order, confidence, and understood that the war was not going as planned by the enemy. K. Simonov finds in the courage and firm discipline of the regiments defending the city a certain “fulcrum”, which allows him to write to the newspaper “not a white lie”, not a half-truth, forgivable in those dramatic days, but something that would serve others a fulcrum, would inspire faith.

For his fantastic “efficiency” and creative fertility, correspondent Simonov was compared to a combine harvester even before the war: literary essays and front-line reports poured from his pen as if from a cornucopia. Simonov's favorite genre is the essay. His articles (very few), in essence, also represent a series of sketches, connected by journalistic or lyrical digressions. During the war days, the poet K. Simonov appeared for the first time as a prose writer, but the writer’s desire to expand the genres in which he worked, to find new, brighter and more intelligible forms of presenting the material very soon allowed him to develop his own individual style.

K. Simonov’s essays, as a rule, reflect what he saw with his own eyes, what he himself experienced, or the fate of another specific person with whom the war brought the author together. His essays always have a narrative plot, and often his essays resemble a short story. In them you can find a psychological portrait of a Hero - an ordinary soldier or front-line officer; the life circumstances that shaped the character of this person are necessarily reflected; the battle and, in fact, the feat are described in detail. When K. Simonov’s essays were based on the material of a conversation with participants in the battle, they actually turned into a dialogue between the author and the hero, which is sometimes interrupted by the author’s narration (“Soldier’s Glory,” “The Commander’s Honor,” etc.).

In the first period of the Great Patriotic War - from June 1941 to November 1942 - Simonov sought to cover as many events as possible, visit various sections of the front, depict representatives of various military professions in his essays and works of art, and emphasize the difficulties of a normal front-line situation.

In 1942, Konstantin Simonov was awarded the rank of senior battalion commissar, in 1943 - the rank of lieutenant colonel, and after the war - colonel. As a war correspondent, he visited all fronts. During the battles in Crimea, Konstantin Simonov was directly in the chains of counterattacking infantrymen, went with a reconnaissance group behind the front line, and participated in the combat campaign of a submarine that was mining a Romanian port. He also happened to be among the defenders of Odessa, Stalingrad, among the Yugoslav partisans, in the advanced units: during the Battle of Kursk, the Belarusian operation, in the final operations for the liberation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Simonov was present at the first trial of war criminals in Kharkov, and was also in the newly liberated, unimaginably terrible Auschwitz and in many other places where decisive events took place. In 1945, Simonov witnessed the last battles for Berlin. He was present at the signing of Hitler's surrender in Karlshorst. Awarded four military orders.

The difficult, sometimes heroic work of front-line correspondents, who not only collected material for essays and articles, but also took part in battles, saved others and died themselves, was subsequently reflected in the works of the writer K. Simonov. After the war, his collections of essays appeared: “Letters from Czechoslovakia”, “Slavic Friendship”, “Yugoslav Notebook”, “From the Black to the Barents Sea. Notes of a war correspondent." Simonov is the author of the popularly beloved “Song of War Correspondents,” which for many years became the anthem of journalists working in the “hot spots” of the planet:

“Wait for me”: a novel by an actress and a poet

On July 27, 1941, K. Simonov returned to Moscow, having spent at least a week on the Western Front - in Vyazma, near Yelnya, near the burning Dorogobuzh. He was preparing for a new trip to the front - from the editors of "Red Star", but it took a week to prepare the car for this trip.

“During these seven days,” Simonov recalled, “in addition to front-line ballads for the newspaper, I suddenly wrote in one sitting “Wait for me,” “The major brought the boy on a gun carriage” and “Don’t be angry, for the better.” I spent the night at Lev Kassil’s dacha in Peredelkino and in the morning I stayed there and didn’t go anywhere. I sat alone at the dacha and wrote poetry. There were tall pines all around, a lot of strawberries, green grass. It was a hot summer day. And silence.<...>For a few hours I even wanted to forget that there was a war in the world.<...>Probably, on that day more than on others, I thought not so much about the war, but about my own fate in it ... "

Subsequently, very authoritative critics and literary scholars assured that “Wait for me” is Simonov’s most general poem, that in one lyrical poem the poet was able to convey the features of the time, was able to guess the most important thing, the most necessary for people, and thereby help millions of his compatriots in a difficult time of war . But he succeeded not at all because he tried to “guess” what was most needed now. Simonov never intended anything like this! On that hot summer day at L. Kassil's dacha, he wrote what was vitally necessary for him. Turning his thoughts to the only addressee of his love lyrics - actress Valentina Serova, the poet expressed what was most important and most desirable for him at that moment. And only for this reason, precisely for this reason, poems written by one person and addressed to one single woman in the world became universal, necessary for millions of people in the most difficult time for them.

With the rising star of Russian cinema, the prima of the Moscow Theater. Konstantin Mikhailovich met Lenin Komsomol V.V. Serova (nee Polovikova) in 1940. His first play, “The Story of a Love,” was staged at the theater. Valentina, by that time already the widow of the famous pilot, hero of the Soviet Union Anatoly Serov, played one of the main roles in it. Before that, in the 1939-40 season, she shone in the play “The Zykovs,” and the young, then still aspiring poet and playwright, did not miss a single performance. According to Serova, Simonov, who was in love, prevented her from playing: he always sat with a bouquet of flowers in the front row and watched her every move with a searching gaze.

However, Simonov’s love for Vaska (the poet did not pronounce the letters “l” and “r” and called his muse that way) was not mutual. Valentina accepted his advances, was close to him, but could not forget Serov. She preferred to remain the widow of the hero-pilot rather than become the wife of a still little-known young writer. Moreover, Simonov was already married to E.S. Laskina (cousin of B. Laskin), in 1939 their son Alexei was born.

From his first literary steps, the poet Simonov wrote “for print,” accurately guessing the path that would lead his work to the printed page. This was one of the main secrets of his early and lasting success. His ability to translate the current official point of view and offer it to the reader already in an emotional and lyrical package was forged from his first literary experiments. But “Wait for Me” and other lyrical poems dedicated to relations with Serova were the only works of the poet that were not originally intended for publication. And who in those pre-war, jingoistic, ideologically consistent years would begin to publish love lyrics full of erotic drama and suffering about unrequited love?

The war changed everything. Simonov read the completely personal poem “Wait for Me” more than once among his literary friends; it was necessary only for him; read to artillerymen on the Rybachy Peninsula, cut off from the rest of the front; read to the scouts before a difficult raid behind enemy lines; read to sailors on a submarine. They listened to him equally attentively both in the soldiers' dugouts and in the headquarters dugouts. The characteristics of the Russian Soviet reader, already fully formed, were such that he looked for consolation and direct support in literature - especially in the painful situation of war. Critics saw “one of the tasks of poetry” in providing such support. Simonov’s poem went beyond this function, receiving from the first moment of creation another, special function: “spell”, “prayer”, “cure for melancholy”, “faith” and even, if you like, “superstition”...

Soon the lines of the beloved poem began to be scattered in handwritten copies and learned by heart. The soldiers sent them in letters to their loved ones, conjuring separation and imminent death, glorifying the great power of love:

On December 9, 1941, “Wait for Me” was heard on the radio for the first time. Simonov accidentally ended up in Moscow and read the poem himself, making it in time for the broadcast literally at the last minute. In January 1942, “Wait for Me” was published in Pravda.

According to eyewitnesses, at post-war meetings with readers, Simonov never refused to read “Wait for Me,” but somehow darkened his face. And there was suffering in his eyes. It was as if he was falling again in his forty-first year.

In a conversation with Vasily Peskov, when asked about “Wait for Me,” Simonov wearily replied: “If I hadn’t written it, someone else would have written it.” He believed that it was just a coincidence: love, war, separation, and miraculously a few hours of loneliness. Besides, poetry was his work. So the poems appeared through the paper. This is how blood seeps through the bandages...

In April 1942, Simonov submitted the manuscript of the lyrical collection “With You and Without You” to the publishing house “Young Guard”. All 14 poems in the collection were addressed and dedicated to V. Serova.

In the very first large article about this cycle, the critic V. Alexandrov (V.B. Keller), well-known from the pre-war years, wrote:

The collection “With You and Without You” actually marked the temporary rehabilitation of lyrics in Soviet literature. The best of his poems express the conflict between the two strongest driving forces of the poet's soul: love for Valentina and military duty to Russia.

In the days of the heaviest battles of 1942, the Soviet party leadership considered it necessary to bring precisely such poems to the mass reader, contrasting the horrors of war with something eternal and unshakable, for which it is worth fighting and worth living:

However, Simonov’s muse still did not dream of being called his wife by her longtime admirer. She also did not promise to faithfully and selflessly wait for her admirer from front-line business trips.

There is a version that in the spring of 1942, Valentina Serova became seriously interested in Marshal K. Rokossovsky. This version was presented in the sensational series by Yu. Kara “Star of the Epoch” and is firmly rooted in the minds of not only ordinary television viewers, but also television journalists, authors of various publications about Serova in the press and on Internet resources. All living relatives, both Serova and Simonov, and Rokossovsky, unanimously deny the war romance of the marshal and the actress. The personal life of Rokossovsky, who was perhaps an even more public person than Serov and Simonov, is quite well known. Serova and her love simply had no place in her.

Perhaps Valentina Vasilievna, for some reason during this period, really wanted to break off relations with Simonov. Being a direct and open person, she did not consider it necessary to pretend and lie in real life - acting was enough for her on stage. Rumors spread throughout Moscow. The romance of the poet and actress was in jeopardy.

It is possible that at that moment jealousy, resentment, and a purely male desire to get his beloved at any cost began to speak in the rejected Simonov. Having published love lyrics dedicated to Serova, the poet actually went for broke: he gave his consent to the use of his personal feelings for ideological purposes in order to gain real, national fame and thereby “put the squeeze on” the intractable Valentina.

The script for the propaganda film “Wait for Me,” written in 1942, made the personal relationship between Simonov and Serova the property of the entire country. The actress simply had no choice.

It is possible that it was during this period that their romance, largely invented by Simonov himself and “approved” by the authorities, showed its first serious crack. In 1943, Simonov and Serova entered into an official marriage, but, despite all the favorable circumstances and visible external well-being, the cracks in their relationship only grew:

Over time, the crack of misunderstanding and dislike turned into “glass a thousand miles thick,” behind which “you can’t hear the beat of the heart,” then into a bottomless abyss. Simonov managed to get out of it and find new ground under his feet. Valentina Serova gave up and died. The poet refused to lend a helping hand to his former, already unloved muse:

As their daughter Maria Simonova would later write: “She [V. Serova – E.Sh.] alone, in an empty apartment, robbed by the crooks who soldered it, from which they took out everything that could be carried by hand.”

Simonov did not come to the funeral, sending only a bouquet of 58 blood-red carnations (in some memoirs there is information about a bouquet of pink roses). Shortly before his death, he confessed to his daughter: “... what I had with your mother was the greatest happiness in my life... and the greatest sorrow...”

After the war

At the end of the war, within three years, K.M. Simonov was on numerous foreign business trips: in Japan (1945-1946), USA, China. In 1946-1950, he served as editor of one of the leading literary magazines, New World. In 1950-1954 - editor of the Literary Newspaper. From 1946 to 1959, and then from 1967 to 1979 - Secretary of the Union of Writers of the USSR. During the period from 1942 to 1950, K. Simonov received six Stalin Prizes - for the plays “A Guy from Our City”, “Russian People”, “Russian Question”, “Alien Shadow”, the novel “Days and Nights” and the collection of poems “Friends” and enemies."

Simonov - the son of a tsarist general and a princess from an old Russian family - regularly served not just the Soviet regime. During the war, he gave all his talent to the fighting people, his Motherland, that great and invincible country that he wanted Russia to become. But once he got into the party “clip” (Simonov joined the party only in 1942), he immediately acquired the status of a “needed” poet favored by the authorities. Most likely, he himself believed that he was doing everything right: victory in the war and the position that Russia took in the world after 1945 only convinced Simonov of the correctness of his chosen path.

His ascent up the party ladder was even more rapid than his entry into literature and gaining all-Russian fame. In 1946-1954, K. Simonov was a deputy of the USSR Supreme Council of the 2nd and 3rd convocations, from 1954 to 1956 - a candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee. In 1946-1954 - Deputy General Secretary of the Board of the Union of Writers of the USSR. In 1954-1959 and in 1967-1979 - Secretary of the Board of the Union of Writers of the USSR. Since 1949 - member of the presidium of the Soviet Peace Committee.

Yes, obeying the “general line of the party,” he participated in the campaign of persecution against Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, wrote “custom” plays about cosmopolitans (“Alien Shadow”) and ballad poems, tried to persuade I. Bunin, Teffi and other prominent white emigrant writers to return to Soviet Russia. As editor-in-chief in 1956, Simonov signed a letter from the editorial board of the New World magazine refusing to publish Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, and in 1973, a letter from a group of Soviet writers to the editors of the newspaper Pravda about Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov.

But at the same time, it is impossible not to admit that Simonov’s activities in all his high literary positions were not so clear-cut. The return to the reader of the novels of Ilf and Petrov, the publication of Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” (1966, in an abridged magazine version) and Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, the defense of L.O. Brik, which high-ranking “literary historians” decided to delete from Mayakovsky’s biography, the first complete translation of plays by A. Miller and Eugene O’Neill, the publication of V. Kondratiev’s first story “Sashka” - this is not a complete list of K. Simonov’s services to the Soviet literature. There was also participation in the “punching” of performances at Sovremennik and the Taganka Theater, the first posthumous exhibition of Tatlin, the restoration of the exhibition “XX Years of Work” by Mayakovsky, participation in the cinematic fate of Alexei German and dozens of other filmmakers, artists, and writers. Dozens of volumes of Simonov’s daily efforts, which he called “Everything Done,” stored today in RGALI, contain thousands of his letters, notes, statements, petitions, requests, recommendations, reviews, analyzes and advice, prefaces paving the way for “impenetrable” books and publications. There is not a single unanswered letter in the archives of the writer and the editorial offices of the magazines he heads. Hundreds of people began to write war memoirs after reading Simonov’s “tests of writing” and sympathetically appraising them.

In disgrace

Simonov belonged to that rare breed of people whom the authorities did not spoil. Neither the forced shuffling before his superiors, nor the ideological dogmas within which the path of Soviet literature of the late 1940s - early 1950s ran, killed the genuine, living principle in him, characteristic only of a truly talented artist. Unlike many of his literary colleagues, over the years of his “symphony” with the authorities, K. Simonov has not forgotten how to take actions aimed at defending his views and principles.

Immediately after Stalin's death, he published an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, declaring that the main task of writers was to reflect the great historical role of Stalin. Khrushchev was extremely irritated by this article. According to one version, he called the Writers' Union and demanded the immediate removal of Simonov from the post of editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta.

By and large, editor Simonov did what he considered necessary to do at that moment. His honest nature as a soldier and poet opposed such forms of treatment of the values ​​of the past and present as “spitting and licking.” With his article, Simonov was not afraid to express the opinion of that part of society that truly considered Stalin to be the great leader of the nation and the winner of fascism. They, yesterday’s veterans who went through all the hardships of the last war, were disgusted by the hasty renunciations of the “thaw” changelings from their recent past. It is not surprising that soon after the 20th Party Congress, the poet was subjected to severe reprimand and was released from his high post in the Union of Writers of the USSR. In 1958, Simonov went to live and work in Tashkent as Pravda’s own correspondent for the republics of Central Asia.

However, this forced “business trip”-exile did not break Simonov. On the contrary, liberation from social and administrative work and that share of publicity that accompanied him almost all his life gave new impetus to the writer’s creativity. “When there is Tashkent,” Simonov joked gloomily, but with courageous dignity, “there is no need to leave for seven years in Croisset to write Madame Bovary.”

"The Living and the Dead"

Simonov's first novel, Comrades in Arms, dedicated to the events at Khalkin Gol, was published in 1952. According to the author's original plan, it was supposed to be the first part of the trilogy he planned about the war. However, it turned out differently. To more fully reveal the initial stage of the war, other heroes were needed, a different scale of events depicted. “Comrades in Arms” was destined to remain only a prologue to a monumental work about the war.

In 1955, still in Moscow, Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov began work on the novel “The Living and the Dead,” but political intrigues after the 20th Party Congress, as well as attacks from the new party and literary leadership, prevented the writer from completely devoting himself to creativity. In 1961, Simonov brought a completed novel to Moscow from Tashkent. It became the first part of a large, truthful work about the Great Patriotic War. The author has found heroes with whom the reader will go from the first days of the retreat to the defeat of the German army near Moscow. In 1965, Simonov completed his new book “Soldiers Are Not Born,” which is a new meeting with the heroes of the novel “The Living and the Dead.” Stalingrad, the unvarnished truth of life and war at a new stage - overcoming the science of winning. In the future, the writer intended to bring his heroes until 1945, until the end of the war, but in the process of work it became obvious that the action of the trilogy would end in the places where it began. Belarus in 1944, the offensive operation “Bagration” - these events formed the basis of the third book, which Simonov called “The Last Summer”. All three works are combined by the author into a trilogy under the general title “The Living and the Dead.”

In 1974, for the trilogy “The Living and the Dead,” Simonov was awarded the Lenin Prize and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.

Based on the scripts of K. Simonov, the films “A Guy from Our City” (1942), “Wait for Me” (1943), “Days and Nights” (1943-1944), “Immortal Garrison” (1956), “Normandy-Niemen” were produced (1960, together with S. Spaak and E. Triolet), “The Living and the Dead” (1964), “Twenty Days Without War” (1976).

In 1970, K.M. Simonov visited Vietnam, after which he published the book “Vietnam, winter of the seventieth...” (1970-71). In dramatic poems about the Vietnam War, “Bombing the Squares,” “Above Laos,” “Duty Room,” and others, comparisons with the Great Patriotic War constantly arise:

"I'm not ashamed..."

Simonov’s memoirs “Diaries of the War Years” and his last book, “Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation. Reflections on Stalin" (1979, published in 1988). These are memories and reflections about the time of the 30s - early 50s, about meetings with Stalin, A.M. Vasilevsky, I.S. Konev, Admiral I.S. Isakov.

In the book “Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation” K.M. Simonov partly revises his previous views, but does not renounce them at all. Unlike some fairly well-known publicists and memoirists of the “perestroika” period, Simonov is far from “sprinkling ashes on his head.” While doing painstaking work on the inevitable mistakes and delusions of his generation, the writer does not stoop to unsubstantiated defamation of the historical past of his country. On the contrary, he invites descendants to listen to the facts so as not to repeat previous mistakes:

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov died on August 28, 1979 in Moscow. According to the will, the ashes of K.M. Simonov was scattered over the Buinichi field near Mogilev, where in 1941 he managed to escape from encirclement.

In conclusion, I would like to cite an excerpt from the book of memoirs by philologist, writer and journalist Grigory Okun, “Meetings on a Distant Meridian.” The author knew Konstantin Mikhailovich during his stay in Tashkent and, in our opinion, most accurately described Simonov as one of the most controversial and ambiguous, but bright and interesting people of his time: