Literature of the period of the Great Patriotic War: poetry, prose, dramaturgy. Poetry of the war years
On the pages of prose works, we find a kind of chronicle of the war, authentically conveying all the stages of the great battle of the Soviet people with Hitler's fascism.
Russian literature has become the literature of one theme - the theme of war, the theme of the Motherland. The writers breathed the same breath with the struggling people and felt like “trench poets”, and all literature as a whole, in the words of A. Tolstoy, was “the voice of the heroic soul of the people”.
Soviet wartime literature was multi-problem and multi-genre. Poems, essays, stories, plays, poems, novels were created by our writers during the war years.
Based on the heroic traditions of Russian and Soviet literature, the prose of the Great Patriotic War reached great creative heights.
The prose of the war years is characterized by the strengthening of romantic and lyrical elements, the widespread use by artists of declamatory and song intonations, oratorical turns, and the appeal to such poetic means as allegory, symbol, metaphor.
The traditions of the literature of the Great Patriotic War are the foundation of the creative search for modern Soviet prose. Without these traditions, which are based on a clear understanding of the decisive role of the masses in the war, their heroism and selfless devotion to the Motherland, the successes achieved by Soviet “military” prose today would not have been possible.
The prose about the Great Patriotic War received its further development in the first post-war years. Sholokhov continued to work on the novel “They Fought for the Motherland”. A number of works appeared in the first post-war decade, on which such writers as Simonov, Konovalov, Stadnyuk, Chakovsky, Avizhyus, Shamyakin, Bondarev, Astafiev, Bykov, Vasiliev worked fruitfully.
Military prose has achieved significant success at the present stage of its development.
A great contribution to the development of Soviet military prose was made by the writers of the so-called "second war", front-line writers who entered the great literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These are such prose writers as Bondarev, Bykov, Ananiev, Baklanov, Goncharov, Bogomolov, Kurochkin, Astafiev.
In the work of writers-front-line soldiers, in their works of the 50-60s, in comparison with the books of the previous decade, the tragic accent in the depiction of the war intensified.
The war in the depiction of front-line prose writers is not only and even not so much spectacular heroic deeds, outstanding deeds, but rather tedious everyday work, hard work, bloody, but vital. And it was in this everyday work that the writers of the “second war” saw the Soviet man.
The theme of the Great Patriotic War is generally central in the work of the Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of the Lenin and State Prizes Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (he traveled as a correspondent to the battlefields). A witness and participant in grandiose events, he devoted almost all of his works to wartime events. Simonov himself noted that almost everything that he created is "connected with the Great Patriotic War" and that he "still was and continues to be a military writer."
Simonov created poems that inscribed his name in the history of the poetry of the Great Patriotic War. He wrote plays about the war, he says about himself: “I feel myself a prose writer. All the main things in my work for many years have already been connected with prose...”
Simonov's prose is multifaceted and diverse in genres. Essays and journalism, stories and novels, the novel “Comrades in Arms”, the trilogy “The Living and the Dead” - everything speaks of the key moments of the Great Patriotic War, in which the courage of our people and the vitality of the state were manifested.
The general trend of our military prose towards a broader and more objective depiction of the Great Patriotic War also affected the work of the “second wave” writers, many of whom came to the conclusion that today writing about the war from the position of a platoon or company commander is no longer enough, which it is necessary to cover a wider panorama of events.
The distance of time, helping front-line writers to see the picture of the war much more clearly and in a larger volume, when their first works appeared, was one of the reasons that determined the evolution of their creative approach to the military theme.
Prose writers, on the one hand, used their military experience, and on the other hand, artistic experience, which allowed them to successfully realize their creative ideas.
Summing up what has been said, it can be noted that the development of prose about the Great Patriotic War clearly shows that among its main problems, the main one, which has been and is the problem of heroism for more than forty years at the center of the creative search of our writers. This is especially noticeable in the work of front-line writers, who showed in their works the heroism of our people, the resilience of soldiers in close-up.
The anti-Soviet Nazi propaganda in the temporarily occupied territory demanded even more urgently the restructuring of all Soviet journalism, the strengthening of its cadres with the most qualified workers. In this regard, for the first time in the history of the domestic mass media, hundreds and hundreds of Soviet writers were sent to the editorial offices of newspapers, radio broadcasting, news agencies. Already on June 24, 1941, the first volunteer writers went to the front, including B. Gorbatov - to the Southern Front, A. Tvardovsky - to the South-Western, E. Dolmatovsky - to the newspaper of the 6th Army "Star of the Soviets", K Simonov - in the newspaper of the 3rd Army "Battle Banner".
In accordance with the resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the work of special correspondents at the front” (August 1941) and “On the work of war correspondents at the front” (September 1942), writers honestly performed their military duty, often risking their own lives. There were 943 writers in the staff of the Red Army and the Navy during the Great Patriotic War. Of these, 225 died at the front, 300 were awarded orders and medals of the USSR.
The work of writers as war correspondents, full of dangers, allowed them to be in the thick of hostilities, provided the richest material for vivid fiction and journalistic works. During the period of his activity in the newspaper of the Southern Front "For the Glory of the Motherland", Boris Gorbatov wrote his famous "Letters to a Comrade", in the editorial offices of military newspapers the songs "Treasured Stone" by A. Zharov, "Let's smoke" by Y. Frenkel, which became known to all Soviet people, were born, "Farewell, rocky mountains" N. Bukin.
Publicism during the war is very diverse. She knew no equal in world history and was born from a fusion of the talent of journalists, their personal conviction in the need to fight for the freedom of the Motherland and their connection with real life. The newspapers of that time published many letters from workers, army soldiers, home front workers, this created a feeling of unity among the people in the face of a common enemy. From the very first days of the war, outstanding publicists M. Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy, N. Tikhonov, K. Simonov, B. Gorbatov, L. Leonov, M. Shaginyan and others began to write about the war for newspapers. They created strong works that convinced people of the coming victory, gave rise to patriotic impulses in them, supported faith and confidence in the invincibility of our army. In the first years of the war, these works called people to defend the socialist Fatherland, to overcome obstacles and hardships, to fight the enemy. The works of these authors were published in many front-line newspapers.
The correspondence of war correspondents also played an important role. One of the most famous was K. Simonov. He walked thousands of kilometers along military roads, and described his impressions in numerous essays, stories, novels, poems. His sternly restrained manner of writing pleased readers, inspired confidence, inspired faith and hope. His essays were also heard on the radio, distributed through the channels of the Soviet Information Bureau. His famous poem "Wait for me" became a kind of spell for most people on the eve of the war.
Publicism also used satirical genres. Pamphlets, cartoons, feuilletons were widely used in newspapers and magazines. There were specialized satirical publications "Front Humor", "Draft" and others. The most important place in the journalism of the war years was occupied by photojournalism. Photojournalists captured, conveyed to contemporaries and preserved for posterity the heroism and everyday life of that time. Since 1941, a special magazine "Front-line photo illustration" and "Photo newspaper" have been published.
Articles and essays by A. Tolstoy, M. Sholokhov, I. Ehrenburg, poems by Simonov and Surkov, A. Werth writes in his book Russia in the War 1941–1945, “literally everyone read it.” Even in the hottest battles, the fighters did not part with their favorite volume of poems by K. Simonov "With you and without you", with "Vasily Terkin" by A. Tvardovsky, with M. Isakovsky's poems "In the forest near the front", "Spark", A. Surkov "In the dugout", many others that have become popular songs.
The peculiarity of the journalism of the Great Patriotic War is that the traditional newspaper genres - articles, correspondence, essays - the pen of the master of the word gave the quality of artistic prose. Many surprisingly subtle observations are remembered by M.A. Sholokhov "On the way to the front".
One of the main themes of military journalism is the liberation mission of the Red Army. Without us, wrote A.N. Tolstoy, the Germans cannot cope with Hitler, and you can help them in only one thing - to beat the Nazi army, without giving a day or an hour of respite. Soviet military journalism inspired all the peoples of Europe, over which the black night of fascism fell, to fight for liberation.
Central publications occupied an important place in the military press system. In total, during the Great Patriotic War, 5 central newspapers were published in the Red Army and Navy. They were designed for middle and senior officers. The leading Soviet military press continued to be Krasnaya Zvezda, whose editorial board was strengthened by new forces with the outbreak of hostilities. The largest Soviet writers P. Pavlenko, A. Surkov, V. Grossman, K. Simonov, A. Tolstoy, I. Ehrenburg and many others came to the newspaper and were constantly printed. During the years of the Great Patriotic War, 1200 issues of the newspaper were published. And each of them is a heroic chronicle of the growing combat power and operational art of the Red Army.
In the Navy, the central organ was the newspaper Krasny Fleet. In September 1941, a newspaper for the personnel of the Air Force "Stalin's Falcon" was published, and in October 1942 "Red Falcon" - for the personnel of long-range aviation.
During the Great Patriotic War, 20 magazines were published in the army and navy. The Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army published "Agitator and propagandist of the Red Army", "Notebook of an agitator", literary and artistic magazines "Krasnoarmeyets", "Front illustration". Magazines were published in each branch of the military: "Artillery Journal", "Journal of Armored Forces", "Military Engineering Journal", "Communications of the Red Army", etc.
On the example of works of art, journalism, letters and diary entries, the attitude of the creative intelligentsia to the war in 1916, on the eve of the impending catastrophe, is analyzed. The socio-ethical problems that have arisen in the relations between the government and the press, the civic position of Russian writers are studied. Key words: World War I, Russian literature about the war, revolution, civil position of the writer.
The well-known words of V. Mayakovsky "... in the crown of thorns of revolutions / the sixteenth year is coming" are often cited as one of the examples of artistic providence at the beginning of the twentieth century. A lot was said and written about the coming catastrophe by writers, publicists, public figures during the First World War, especially on the eve of 1917. So, for example, the novel “Petersburg” by A. Bely, published in 1916 as a separate edition (written in 1914), became an occasion for controversy about the path of Russia, about the attitude towards the revolutionary idea. Contemporaries did not see the image of the revolution, but felt the "condensed atmosphere of insoluble disastrous" between the two principles of Russia: "dark, eastern, primordially primitive" and - St. Petersburg, rationalistic" . “For us, not pure politicians,” Z. Gippius wrote, “people not blinded by the complexity of internal threads, for us who have not yet lost human common sense, one thing was clear: war for Russia, in its current political situation, cannot end naturally. Before its end, there will be a revolution.
This foreboding, more, this knowledge, was shared with us by many. How can the war end? When will this revolution take place and what will it be like? These and similar questions, pulsating, with varying intensity, sounded in 1916. But it is not this, the definition of the exact date of the future revolution, its character, that is interesting for the literature of this year. It is interesting, in the words of Z. Gippius, "by the intangible work of thought and spirit." By 1916, the third year of the war, domestic literature had gained significant experience in the artistic depiction of the war of the 20th century. The pages of poetry and prose of the war years captured the patriotic impulse of the first months of the war, the disappointment of 1915-1916. and the beginning of the revision of the value system towards the end of the war.
In the domestic literature of 1916 about the war, attention is drawn to the depth of the artistic understanding of the war, restraint in expressing feelings. So, in response to N. Klyuev’s book of poems “Worldly Thoughts” (1916), it was said that the war forced “eager listening to the voices of the village”, which literature exchanged “for various Western bad taste and crackling cheap stuff of modernism”. I. Shmelev's prose about the military village, or, more precisely, about deep Russia during the war in the cycle of essays and stories "Hard Days" (1916) testified to the interest of Russian literature not only in the perception of the war by the people, but also in their life in the war hard times, his psychology, national characteristics
Significant changes have taken place not only in prose, but also in poetry. Comparing the jingoistic poetry of the beginning of the war with the poetry of the proletarian poets of 1916, the critic wrote, in particular, that the poems of the workers “are not an expression of the pathos of the war as such,” “unlike the poets who deafened us with their drums.” At the beginning of the war, the working intelligentsia spoke of "non-resistance to the war, then, with the successes of the Germans, the "idea of defense against the enemy" was reflected. “The war somewhat interrupted that trend in our fiction, which developed under the direct psychological pressure of a severe hangover of the fifth year (A. Sobol “Dust”, V. Vinnichenko “On the Scales of Life”, G. Chulkov “Seryozha Nestroev”, I. Novikov “ Between two dawns”, R. Grigoriev “Recent”). In all these works, journalism prevails over artistry; they all reveal a "tendency to revise old values." In the perception of the war in 1916, there was some kind of inexplicable paradox: when the war began, it attracted more attention and interest, although it was not defensive.
Having taken on a protracted character, and then becoming defensive, the war ceased to interest society. Hundreds of thousands of compatriots dying in the trenches seemed to be forgotten. No less important than guns and oil was the unity of the front and rear - a natural requirement for every belligerent country. There are reasons to state that, for reasons of a socio-political nature, Russian society did not sufficiently support the spirit of the belligerents. In 1916, in a war-tired country, disputes broke out about its end, which were often distinguished by mutual misunderstanding. The seeming or real unity of the intelligentsia and the government, or the so-called "policy of inner peace" of the first months of the war, was violated. The rapidly growing revolutionary movement exacerbated the political crisis. There were accusations of nationalism and chauvinism, lack of patriotism, etc. Accusations were made against the press and literature that an extremely unhealthy atmosphere had been created in society. So, on February 28, 1916, S. P. Melgunov (an employee of the Russkiye Vedomosti newspaper) read a report in the Society of Periodical Press Workers, which was subsequently published in a brochure under the heading “On Modern Literary Mores”. He said: "Our press, with the smallest exception, is guilty of the grave sin of disseminating tendentious information that unnerves Russian society, cultivating a tense atmosphere of chauvinistic enmity, in which self-control and the ability to critically relate to surrounding phenomena are lost." And further: "The war had a corrupting effect on a significant part of our press - it deprived it of moral authority." Based on these only words of the long-term author of the provincial department of Russkiye Vedomosti S.P. Melgunov, we can conclude that the tasks of the periodicals of this time were seen as promoting calmness, self-control, and the ability to critically relate to what is happening. And it was not easy for an ordinary person to understand what was happening.
“The war stirred up the St. Petersburg intelligentsia,” we read Z. Gippius in the “Diary”, “it sharpened political interests, at the same time sharpening the struggle of the parties within.” And further about the many shades of this struggle: “The liberals sharply became for the war - and thus, to some extent, for support of the autocratic government. The famous "Duma bloc" was an attempt to unite left-wing liberals (ca-de) with more right-wing ones - for the sake of war. Another section of the intelligentsia was against the war, more or less; countless shades were born here. At the end of December 1916, she complained about "how powerless we, Russian conscious people, are at enmity with each other ... not even knowing how to consciously determine our position and find an appropriate name for it."
According to Z. Gippius, “a whole bunch of dissidents” was baptized with the name “defeatists”, “moreover, this word has long changed its original meaning.<…>And in Russia they call a "defeatist" someone who, during a war, dares to talk about anything other than "complete victory." And such a “defeatist” is equal to a “traitor” to the motherland. When analyzing the ideological struggle in warring Russia, domestic historians of literature and journalism assessed the position of a political party, one or another publicist only from a Leninist, narrow-party point of view. » (1975) gives a detailed picture of the domestic periodicals that responded to the war.
As necessary, it gives a description of one or another party, the positions of which were reflected in the printed organ. It is quite natural that Lenin's assessments prevailed in this work. But even in it, albeit tongue twister, briefly, it was said about the positive content necessary for the warring country in the newspapers criticized by the Bolsheviks. It has been said, for example, that the Utro Rossii newspaper (the press organ of the Progressives) advocated the unification of the press, that Russkaya Mysl, which expressed the position of the Cadets, advocated the unity of all political forces in Russia to end the war. The Cadets demanded improvement in both the structure and activities of the government. They saw the way out of the difficulties of the war in drawing greater attention to it from the masses, awakening all their energy and selflessness to meet the needs of the war and put pressure on the government. And no matter how strange the words about common sense may sound during the “crazy war”, but it was in 1916 that they sounded. Another thing is that they were not heard. In the journalism of 1916, the blatant disunity of all the political forces of the country in the face of imminent danger is striking. Far from immediately, and by no means all among the creative intelligentsia, felt the danger of opposition to the government in a warring country.
A vivid example of this is the well-known story of the publication of the Russkaya Volya newspaper, when, at the end of the war, the government realized the need to protect the interests of industry in the fight against the revolutionary movement in the working environment. A. V. Amfiteatrov, a well-known writer and journalist who could hardly be accused of sympathy for the tsarist government, took an active part in organizing the newspaper. Especially after the sensational feuilleton "Lord Obmanova". It is appropriate to recall that on July 15 a meeting of representatives of large banks took place, allocating five million rubles for the publication of a new newspaper. Of the several proposed titles, on the initiative of A. V. Amfiteatrov, the newspaper began to be called "Russian Will". Comrade Chairman of the State Duma A. D. Protopopov (he has not yet become a minister) announced the possible participation of V. G. Korolenko in the new body (Rech, July 21). Korolenko immediately sent an energetic protest to Rech. On July 25, The Day ran "A Conversation with AD Protopopov," which lamented the campaign organized in the press against a new newspaper funded by industry for "correct coverage of economic policy issues."
At the same time, he stipulated that Gorky and Korolenko did not take part in the new case, the latter allegedly because of his illness. On August 1, Korolenko sent a protest to The Day's editorial office and, in particular, wrote: “The Novaya Gazeta is being published at the expense of Messrs. merchants, industrialists and bankers, who, of course, do not dare to spend money on this expensive undertaking in vain. The newspaper is eo ipso (thereby) obliged to consider questions of social justice according to the views of generous publishers. But I am accustomed to work only in independent bodies and do not see the slightest reason to change this habit of mine. On July 24, I. S. Shmelev responded to L. Andreev, who was in charge of three departments at Russkaya Volya, by refusing an invitation to participate in the new newspaper: “to work in Sovremenny Mir, Russkoye Bogatstvo, Kievskaya Mysl, Rech” , in progressive and honest political bodies (I remember Birzhevye Vedomosti with bitterness ...) - and suddenly go with your stories to console and entertain Messrs. bankers, plutocrats, landlords, manufacturers and their children! ... They dared ... But Gorky! I do not understand anything" . L. Andreev answered on August 21: “In conclusion, two words about Korolenko ... You think he is almost a saint, but to me it’s the other way around. The writer, who was silent for two years, was silent during the great confusion of minds and conscience, during such a war as the present one, does not seem to me a person who has fulfilled his duty as a writer and citizen.
The difficulty in defining and defending the writer's political position is evidenced by Gorky's journalism and social activities. “His political and journalistic activities in the pre-revolutionary months suddenly found themselves in the front line between the “defencists” and the “defeatists,” says a special study of Gorky’s activities in creating the Luch newspaper. “With the preparation of the Luch newspaper and active participation in the organization of the “radical-democratic” party, Gorky consciously and voluntarily entered the “neutral zone” between the main political forces. In order to paralyze the corrupting influence of the "evil spirits", i.e., the reactionary and obscurantist court circles on the bourgeois public, he without hesitation entered into an alliance with the "other enemy" of the socialists in the face of a small, but politically self-conscious part of the financial oligarchy. Is Gorky's desire to enlist the most prominent representatives of the opposition bourgeoisie to develop the "intellectual forces of the country", to develop a culture that counteracts violence and ignorance in Russia really so naive? In this case, Gorky’s desire to create an organ of a radical democratic party (meaning the newspaper Luch, which could not be published before the February Revolution), designed to serve the socio-political interests of all groups “to the left of the Cadets and to the right of the socialist parties."
Without dwelling in detail on the position of each of the writers who received proposals from Russkaya Volya, let us pay attention to the statement of S. N. Sergeev-Tsensky, who expressed his agreement on the basis that money is needed only for the foundation of the newspaper and that the “political, narrow capitalist goals" "have nothing to do with pure art" . Thus, in 1916, more and more clearly, the need began to be felt not only in understanding the approaching tragedy, but in the active actions of the creative intelligentsia. Not without irony, S. P. Melgunov recalled how at the beginning of the war “representatives of science and literature, of the artistic and artistic world, following the bad example of the German nationalists, rushed to draw up and sign various appeals and protests without any criticism or analysis, contrived to sign even appeals that contradicted each other with patriotic fervor ... ". But this vigorous activity was when the war was not on the territory of the country, when there were not yet so many victims.
Now, more than ever, the army needed the support of the rear. Did the defeatist intellectuals, the defencists, see any outcome of the war? Let us turn to one more entry in the "Diary" Z. Gippius. “Now I am defeated, Chkhenkeli (deputy of the State Duma, Menshevik. - AI) and Wilson. But the word of Wilson is the first honest, reasonable, earthly holy word about the war (a world without winners and without vanquished, as a single reasonable and desired end to the war). If we do not end the war, the war will end us - this thought-cry of Z. Gippius should be conveyed to everyone, understood by everyone. “Yes, what voice, what mouthpiece is needed to shout: the war will not end like this in Russia anyway! No matter what, it will crash! Will be!" .
In conclusion, let us return to the providence of Russian literature. We see it not in what was said in 1916 about the coming revolution. And what will happen in the event of the defeat of Russia. In the newspaper "Russian Will" L. Andreev, whose cooperation was explained by high fees, expressed his attitude to the war, which he had written about more than once, publishing articles in various publications. Both N. Gumilyov and V. Korolenko and others spoke about why it is necessary to successfully end the war. But probably only L. Andreev spoke about the consequences of a military defeat in the article “Woe to the vanquished!”, Published in No. 1 of Russkaya Volya (1916): “The caustic feeling of shame caused by defeat, the bitterness of trampled dignity, the inevitable need to compensate for a great defeat with at least a small victory - are transformed into cruelty, violence against the weak, into cynicism and contempt, and are only masked by other proud words.<…>Devalued in his own eyes and consciousness, the defeated beaten devalues everything around him: the truth, human life, blood and suffering, the dignity of women, the inviolability of children. Having experienced too much pain, he generously gives it to others in order to drown his muddy, poisonous tear in a sea of tears; and if there were still magnanimous conquerors, then the world has never seen a magnanimous vanquished - woe to the vanquished! . It is hardly possible to predict the essence of post-war totalitarianism more capaciously. * * * “If all of us could clearly see that terrible events were close at hand,” Z. Gippius recalled about 1916, “if we all understood in the same way, were ready to meet them… maybe they were not a collapse, but our salvation ... ". Is it necessary to speak here about the subjunctive mood in the coverage of history?
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Ivanov Anatoly Ivanovich
The most productive genres of prose in the first two war years were articles, essays, and stories. Almost all writers paid tribute to them: A. Tolstoy, A. Platonov, L. Leonov, I. Ehrenburg, M. Sholokhov and others. They asserted the inevitability of victory, brought up a sense of patriotism, exposed fascist ideology.
A.N. Tolstoy owns more than sixty articles and essays created during the period 1941-1944. (“What We Defend”, “Motherland”, “Russian Warriors”, “Blitzkrieg”, “Why Hitler Must Be Defeated”, etc.). Turning to the history of the Motherland, he sought to convince his contemporaries that Russia would cope with a new misfortune, as it had happened more than once in the past. "Nothing, we'll do it!" - such is the leitmotif of A. Tolstoy's journalism.
L.Leonov also constantly turned to national history. With particular poignancy, he spoke about the responsibility of every citizen, because only in this he saw the guarantee of the coming victory (“Glory to Russia”, “Your brother Volodya Kurylenko”, “Fury”, Reprisal”, “To an unknown American friend”, etc.).
The central theme of I. Ehrenburg's military journalism is the protection of universal values. He saw fascism as a threat to world civilization and emphasized that representatives of all nationalities of the USSR were fighting against it (articles “Kazakhs”, “Jews”, “Uzbeks”, “Caucasus”, etc.). The style of Ehrenburg's journalism was distinguished by the sharpness of colors, the suddenness of transitions, and metaphor. At the same time, the writer skillfully combined documentary materials, a verbal poster, a pamphlet, and a caricature in his works. Ehrenburg's essays and journalistic articles were compiled in the collection "War" (1942-1944).
The military essay has become a kind of chronicle of the war. Readers at the front and in the rear eagerly waited for news and received it from writers.
K. Simonov, in hot pursuit, wrote a number of essays about Stalingrad. He owns a description of military operations, portrait travel sketches.
Stalingrad became the main theme of V. Grossman's essay writing. In July 1941, he was enrolled in the staff of the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper and already in August went to the front. Grossman kept records throughout the war. His harsh, devoid of pathos, Stalingrad essays became the pinnacle of the development of this genre during the war years (The Direction of the Main Strike, 1942, etc.).
Journalism also had an impact on artistic prose. Since most of the stories, short stories, and a few novels of those years were built on a documentary basis, the authors most often avoided the psychological characteristics of the characters, described specific episodes, and often retained the names of real people. Thus, in the days of the war, a certain hybrid form of essay-story appeared. This type of works includes the stories “The Honor of the Commander” by K. Simonov, “The Science of Hatred” by M. Sholokhov, the collections “Stories of Ivan Sudarev” by A. Tolstoy and “Sea Soul” by L. Sobolev.
And yet, among the prose writers of the war years, there was a writer who, in this harsh time, created artistic prose so bright and unusual that it is worth special mention about him. This is Andrey Platonov.
He wrote the first story about the war before the front, in evacuation. Refusing to work at the Military Publishing House, Platonov became a front-line correspondent. His notebooks and letters allow us to conclude that any fantasy turns out to be poorer than the terrible truth of life that opens up in war.
It is impossible to understand Platonov's prose, ignoring his understanding of the war and the writer's creative tasks: “Depicting what is, in essence, killed is not just bodies. A great picture of life and lost souls, opportunities. Peace is given, as it would be with the activities of the dead, a better peace than the real one: that's what perishes in war - the possibility of progress is killed.
Tvardovsky. New world.
During the second period of Tvardovsky's editorship in Novy Mir, especially after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the magazine became a refuge for anti-Stalinist forces in literature, a symbol of the "sixties", an organ of legal opposition to Soviet power.
In the 1960s, Tvardovsky in the poems "By the Right of Memory" (published in 1987) and "Torkin in the Other World" reconsiders his attitude towards Stalin
And Stalinism. At the same time (early 1960s), Tvardovsky received Khrushchev's permission to publish the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn.
The new direction of the magazine (liberalism in art, ideology and economics, hiding behind the words about socialism "with a human face") caused discontent not so much of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev party elite and officials of the ideological departments, as the so-called "neo-Stalinists" in Soviet literature. For several years, there was a sharp literary (and actually ideological) controversy between the journals Novy Mir and Oktyabr (chief editor V. A. Kochetov, author of the novel What Do You Want?, directed primarily against Tvardovsky). The persistent ideological rejection of the magazine was also expressed by the patriots-"sovereigns".
After Khrushchev was removed from top positions in the press (the Ogonyok magazine, the Socialist Industry newspaper), a campaign was launched against the New World. Glavlit waged a bitter struggle with the journal, systematically preventing the most important materials from being printed. Since the leadership of the Union of Writers did not dare to formally dismiss Tvardovsky, the last measure of pressure on the journal was the removal of Tvardovsky's deputies and the appointment of people hostile to him to these positions. In February 1970, Tvardovsky was forced to resign his editorial powers, part of the magazine's staff followed his example. The editorial board was essentially destroyed.
In the "New World" ideological liberalism was combined with aesthetic traditionalism. Tvardovsky had a cold attitude towards modernist prose and poetry, preferring literature developing in classical forms of realism. Many of the greatest writers of the 1960s published in the journal, and many were opened to the reader by the journal.
MILITARY THEME IN PROSE OF THE 1940-1990s
Literary terminology, generated by the conditions of ideological censorship of the Soviet period, sometimes surprises with its mysteriousness. In simple terms accessible to common sense, an unexpected shade is suddenly revealed, which determines their content. What is "military prose"? It would seem that the answer is obvious: novels, short stories and stories about the war. However, by the 1970s, in Soviet literary criticism, the term “military prose” had established itself as a synonym for “ideologically acceptable” literary works about the Great Patriotic War. Fictional depiction of the civil war of 1918 - 1920. belonged to the heading "historical-revolutionary prose", where, for example, a novel about the Great French Revolution (we have only one revolution!), Could not be unconditionally included, although about the Paris Commune of 1871 - completely, subject to compliance with the given ideological vector.
For Glavlit (the Soviet censorship department), in the conditions of a permanent “struggle for peace”, there were no wars, except for the Great Patriotic War, so Soviet writers were forbidden to write about “local-scale military operations” in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, etc., in which they participated , performed feats and died Soviet people. The Finnish campaign of 1940 was allowed to be mentioned in passing (as, for example, by A. Tvardovsky in the poem “Two Lines”: “Unfamous in that war”) and in a few words: why talk about unpleasant things? Moreover, ink should not have been wasted on “foreign” wars, the Iran-Iraq war, for example, if only because the “engineers of human souls” under the conditions of the “Iron Curtain” could not get intelligible information about it.
Thus, the multifaceted reality was simplified and represented by the largest phenomenon - the Great Patriotic War, which for ideological reasons was not recommended to be called the Second World War: it was Western European, American and smacked of cosmopolitanism, and besides, it meant recognition of the entry of the USSR into the war since 1939 and obviously not for defensive purposes.
By the 1940s, a fairly strong tradition of reproducing both large and small wars had formed in Soviet literature. Without going back centuries, to the treasures of folklore and ancient Russian literature (epics, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Zadonshchina, etc.), as well as to the literature of the 18th century (military-patriotic odes of M. V. Lomonosov, G R. Derzhavin and others), undoubtedly retaining its significance for subsequent literary development (the concepts of courage, heroism, patriotism, intransigence towards the enemies of the Russian land - hence), let's turn to the classics of the century before last. Of course, the most significant author here is Leo Tolstoy. He wrote about the Crimean War of 1853-1856. (“Sevastopol Tales”), about the Caucasian War of 1817 - 1864. (“Raid”, “Cutting down the forest”, “Cossacks”, “Hadji Murad”, etc.) and, of course, about the Patriotic War of 1812 (“War and Peace”). I wonder what of this impressive creative heritage would have survived and with what losses if it had fallen into the hands of censorship as severe as the Soviet one?
The work of Leo Tolstoy had the strongest influence on Russian "military prose" in the second half of the 20th century. In other historical conditions, Tolstoy's epic traditions were embodied by K. Simonov, Yu. Bondarev, V. Grossman, G. Vladimov, V. Karpov and many other authors. Almost always the influence of the classic was beneficial and never became destructive. Of course, no one has surpassed Tolstoy, but the focus on high examples of his prose had a mobilizing effect on writers.
Another branch of the tradition, which existed imperceptibly for a long time and found its relevance to Soviet "military prose", was nurtured by Vsevolod Garshin. "Cruel realism" (naturalism) of his stories about the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878. (“Four Days”, 1877; “Coward”, 1879; “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov”, 1882) acquired followers among the authors of “trench” (“lieutenant”) and documentary prose (V. Nekrasov, Yu Bondarev, G. Baklanov, V. Bykov, K. Vorobyov, V. Kondratiev, A. Adamovich, D. Granin, Ya. Bryl, V. Kolesnik, etc.).
To a much lesser extent, in our opinion, the impact on Soviet “military prose” of works about the civil war is palpable. Here, the perception of tradition was not of a systemic nature: the wars were too different - between one's own and against foreigners.
The depiction of military conflicts in the work of individual writers (V. Bykov, K. Vorobyov, V. Kondratiev, and others) is marked by the seal of kinship with the philosophy and literature of existentialism, as well as with Remarque's prose, which is close to this tradition.
The ideological authorities of that era could not let the matter of the perception of literary tradition take its creative course. Everything that did not belong to socialist realism, or, in extreme cases, to realism, as a rule, remained outside Soviet literature. Life-affirming and folk humor was allowed, but satire and the grotesque, with their uncomfortable ambivalent nature, were not approved. The danger of discovering the genetic relationship between Soviet and German totalitarianism forced the authors, in order to avoid unwanted associations, to depict enemies either as a faceless anonymous mass, or as schematic caricature characters, as in Sholokhov's "The Fate of a Man" (Müller) or "Seventeen Moments of Spring" by Y. Semenov (again Muller and others).
In the USSR, there was a system of military-patriotic education, and literature about the Great Patriotic War occupied one of the leading places in it. For merits in this area, military writers were encouraged by Stalin (in particular, K. Simonov - seven times), and starting from the Khrushchev "thaw" - Lenin and State Prizes. The laureate works were certainly filmed (the reasons, apparently, are the distrust of the authorities in the reader activity of the “most reading people in the world”, plus the huge propaganda potential of cinema as “the most important of the arts”).
The cornerstone of Soviet propaganda was the constant emphasis on the leading and guiding role of the Communist Party. Characteristic in this respect is the history of the creation of the novel The Young Guard. If in the edition of 1945 A. Fadeev did not dare to write about the existence in Krasnodon of another - non-Komsomol - anti-fascist underground, then in the new version of the novel (1951) ideologically conditioned slyness is added to this default: the author claims that the creators and leaders of the organization Young Guards were communists. Thus, Fadeev denies his favorite heroes an important initiative. This unique book served as the basis for criminal prosecution, often unfounded, of real people who became the prototypes of the novel's negative characters.
And yet, if we treat The Young Guard as a work of Russian literature, then it should be noted that to this day this novel has not lost its relevance, including pedagogical. Heroism on a positive moral basis is an important component of the content of the "Young Guard", is the essence of the characters of Oleg Koshevoy, Ulyana Gromova and their comrades. Fadeev's artistic skill allowed him to portray the Young Guards psychologically authentically: trust me, their spiritual height and purity are undeniable. And one should not shy away from the truth about what country and what ideals the Krasnodon Komsomol members went to death for. They died for the Motherland, and feats - for all time: both because we live in a country that they and others like them defended and saved, and because we have the right to admire them, as people always admire the heroes of past eras. The denial of this book today is absurd: its shortcomings are obvious, but its merits are undeniable. Moreover, the literature of the post-Soviet period has little interest in youth problems, and mass culture dissects them from a commercial angle.
The "military prose" of the Soviet era was tormented by contradictions. The trend of saying "the whole truth" was opposed by the notorious "social order". Here is a curious example of the action of the "social order" (in the "Young Guard" this happened more clearly and simply). During the years of Khrushchev's rule, after the timid exposure of some of the crimes of the Stalinist repressive machine, the image of the "authorities" and the "Chekists" working in them faded considerably, and the literature could not get rid of the urgent task of resuscitating it. The highly experienced Sergei Mikhalkov, who created an unforgettable image of Uncle Styopa, stood up for the police and their honest appearance. The situation with the KGB was more complicated, and here reliance was placed on military material, which guaranteed the purity of the experiment: it was in the conditions of war, in the fight against an external enemy, and not against one's own people, that one could find examples of courage and selfless service to the Fatherland of Dzerzhinsky's heirs. In the novel by V. Kozhevnikov "Shield and Sword" (1965), the main character Alexander Belov (the image is collective, nevertheless, the consonance of A. Belov - Abel, the surname belonging to the legendary intelligence officer, is quite transparent) appears in the guise of a Soviet James Bond: he phenomenally modest, ascetic, selfless, absolutely invincible and vulnerable only after successfully completing the last task. According to the same model, Yu. Semenov created the image of Isaev-Stirlitz a little later.
At the same time, one should not treat the ideological component of the Soviet system exclusively negatively. In the then difficult conditions, literature nevertheless expressed the main truth about the Great Patriotic War, and often this truth coincided with the ideological demands of the authorities. For example, "The Tale of a Real Man" (1946) by B. Polevoy embodied the theme of an individual feat and in this sense fully corresponded to the "social order". However, it would be at least strange to demand from the author some kind of ideological “opposition” or “neutrality”. After all, the description of the feat of Alexei Maresyev (in the story his last name sounds like Meresyev) is not just a hymn to human capabilities. Do not forget about the motivation of the feat. The famous pilot first survived, and then overcame his disability, primarily in the name of patriotic values, which, whatever you say, were Soviet.
In the same 1946, Viktor Nekrasov's book "In the trenches of Stalingrad" was published. The everyday life of the war, transferred to the pages of this story, impressively conveys the tension of everyday feat. With regard to this book, one can seriously raise the question of its correspondence to the truth of the war, not only because the author is a lieutenant from the Stalingrad trenches, but also because the story contains, perhaps, only one significant factual omission: it does not mention Order No. 227, which received official publicity only at the end of the 1980s, and on the creation on its basis of barrage detachments and penal units that were sent to the front line, to the most dangerous battlefields (the first work dedicated to the "penalty box" - "Gu-ha" Maurice Simashko - published in 1987).
And yet there were certain distortions in the approach to the truth about the Great Patriotic War. From the very beginning, military censorship questioned the dialectic of military labor, tacitly canceling the unpleasant aspects of the instinct of self-preservation in relation to the Soviet soldier. As a result, Soviet literature focused on the glorification of a permanent feat. This part of the truth about the war coincided with the postulate of socialist realism "a heroic person in heroic circumstances." Tolstoy's idea that war is murder and the idea of murderers, for Soviet "military prose", if there were no such authors as V. Nekrasov in it, would remain a decaying private opinion of the "mirror of the Russian revolution."
For Russian literature of the 20th century, the story "In the trenches of Stalingrad" is a book that opened a new genre-thematic section: "trench" or "lieutenant" prose. The time of the appearance of the story was fortunate: it came out in the wake of hot events, when the ritual of Soviet “military prose” had not yet had time to form, when many yesterday's comfreys were still alive. And the author is not a professional writer, not even a journalist, but a military officer. The mention of the name of Stalin in the title and in the text of the work played a positive role due to the strange inconsistency of Soviet literary life: protected by the Stalin Prize, the story created a precedent for the publication of books by V. Bykov, K. Vorobyov, Y. Bondarev, G. Baklanov, V. Kondratiev and other "comfrey" writers.
However, at first, a flurry of criticism fell upon the story of Viktor Nekrasov. Negative responses immediately went: “True story<…>, but there is no breadth in it”; "View from the trench"; "The author sees nothing further than his parapet." This criticism is only outwardly fair, its deepest meaning was to divert the reader's attention from the dangerous truth and transfer it to the zone of fanfare optimism, the apogee of which was the "staff" or "general's" prose (for which the ground was being prepared). Both "trench" and "headquarters" tendencies, if these terms are transferred to a classic work, are organically intertwined in "War and Peace". But Soviet writers often limited themselves to one of the tendencies, while those who decided on a synthesis were spurred on by the epic temptation, which will be discussed below.
The forerunner of "staff" prose will legitimately be considered Leonid Leonov. In 1944, he published the story "The Capture of Velikoshumsk", where the war is presented as a large-scale phenomenon, seen through the eyes of a general, and not a comfrey lieutenant. Comparing the style of two writers whose works belong to the polar tendencies of "military prose", we will quickly notice the difference.
V. Nekrasov: “In a war you never know anything, except for what is going on under your very nose. A German does not shoot at you - it seems to you that all over the world is calm and smooth; starts bombing - and you are already sure that the entire front from the Baltic to the Black was moving.
From L. Leonov: “A wave of confusion swept through the live wire of the highway to the front line, and the moment when the phrase: “Russian tanks are on communications” was uttered at the German army headquarters should be considered decisive in the outcome of the Great Noise operation. At the same time, Litovchenko's corps lashed the battlefield from three directions, and the third tank group was moving exactly along the route that Sobolkov had laid out the day before ... The lone sweeping track of the 203rd, occasionally interrupted by pockets of destruction and devastation, now led them to victory. It seemed that not one, but a whole gang of fabulous giants destroyed the German rear camps and moved on, dragging their merciless clubs along the ground.
The difference is also visible in relation to the heroes: V. Nekrasov has soldiers - workers, plowmen of war, L. Leonov - epic heroes.
A conscientious worker of the literary field, Leonid Leonov took up his pen, having thoroughly studied what he was going to tell the world about. Tank battle tactics and military-technical details in "The Capture of Velikoshumsk" are recreated so meticulously that the deputy commander of armored and mechanized troops jokingly offered the writer an "engineering and tank rank". The experience of a subtle and thorough artist was taken into account, supplemented by opportunistic considerations, and the “staff” (“general’s”) prose that arose in the following decades became the avant-garde part of official literature (A. Chakovsky, “Blockade”, 1975 and “Victory”, 1980 .; I. Stadnyuk, "War", 1981; V. Karpov, "Commander" (another name is "Marshal Zhukov"), 1985, etc.).
