What did Yaroslav Smelyakov sit for? Yaroslav Smelyakov - biography, information, personal life. Return to literary activity

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"Once Yulik and I we went into the booth to the contractor Yurka Saburov. Julius took a stack of cards, according to which the convicts were called out at the divorce - they are small, the size of a business card.
Out of the habit of a preference, Yulik began to shuffle them. Shall, cut and see what has fallen. On the second or third time he read:
"Smelyakov Yaroslav Vasilyevich, born in 1913, art. 58.1b, 10 h.p., 25 years old, second conviction." We knew the poet Smelyakov by hearsay. From his poems
they remembered only "Lyubka Feigelman", which in childhood was irreverently sung to the tune of "Murka":
Goodbye, Lyubka, goodbye, Lyubka!
Do you hear? Goodbye, Lyubka Feigelman!
We heard that he was in prison before the war. Is it that one? The second conviction, the name and surname sound like a pseudonym ... We decided to find out.

Yurka said that Smelyakov goes with a team to build a road, and after work we came to his barracks, They explained that we were Muscovites, students,
here are old-timers, and they asked if we could be of some help. “No, you don’t need anything,” he muttered. He was unsmiling, even sullen.
We realized that he didn’t like him and said goodbye: you won’t be forced to be nice. But two days later, a guy from the road brigade came running to us, said,
that Smelyakov is interested in why we do not appear. “He liked you very much,” the messenger explained. We got together right away
went to renew the acquaintance.

It was just that unpleasant period when Borodulin forbade walking around the zone. Therefore, Smelyakov and I went behind the barracks, sat on a bench
near the toilet, and he began to read poetry to us. The shooter from the tower saw us, but until we climbed into the restricted area, what was happening did not touch him much.
Yaroslav Vasilyevich - until the end of his life he remained Yaroslav Vasilyevich for us, despite a very tender relationship - he knew what to read:
"The Graveyard of Locomotives", "Good Girl Lida", "My Generation", then unpublished "I dreamed that I became cast iron" and "If I
I’ll get sick. "(This beautiful poem was subsequently so mutilated, remade into a song! They say Vizbor. It's a pity if he is).
We liked the verses, and we also liked Smelyakov's manner of reading - a gloomy, chased muttering. I didn’t want to part, and we tried to drag
him to our column. Not so long ago I read - in my opinion, in Literaturka - an article by one of the Moscow poets. Paying tribute to talent and civil
Smelyakov's courage, he informed readers that in the camp Smelyakov was offered an easy job, in a bread cutter, but he proudly refused and went to cut coal ... It was not quite like that.
About us and ourselves, in a poem dedicated to Dunsky and Frid, Volodya Vysotsky created a micro-legend:
Two five-year plans of northern latitudes,
Where offsets were not put into practice -
Not a day in two, not a five-year plan in a year,
And ten years of physical work.

Flattering, but not true: of the ten years of the term, Julius and I spent not so much time at "physical work".
And no one offered Yaroslav a job in a bread slicer, and he never went down into the mine on Inta. The situation was as follows: I went to the head of the column
Ryabchevsky, who treated Yulik and me with respect. He called us "vertfoller yuden" - useful Jews. This category exists in
Hitler's Reich - scientists, designers, especially valuable specialists. “Kostya,” I said. - Spring is coming, repair work will begin, you
Definitely need nails. I'll bring you four kilograms, and you transfer Smelyakov to mine 13/14.

The deal went through. I ordered the nails through the free head of the section, and the next day Yaroslav Vasilyevich went to work with us.
Already at liberty, in Moscow, the drunken Smelyakov buzzed with emotion when he met us:
“They saved my life!”
This is also not true. Firstly, nothing directly threatened his life - the camp was still not the same. And secondly, the main role in his
employment was played by the senior rater s/k Mikhailov.

Yaroslav Vasilyevich also called him a colonel. They liked each other right away. To begin with, Light determined Smelyakov to harvest wads. Work do not hit
recumbent: take a mixture of clay with horse manure with a shovel and throw it into the bell of the pyzhedelka. This is a cunning device for which the imprisoned innovators
even received an award, upon closer examination it turned out to be something like a large meat grinder. The electric motor turned the worm shaft and through two holes,
clay sausages crawled out like minced meat - wads for explosives.

With road construction the new duties of Yaroslav Vasilyevich cannot be compared, but even they seemed to the Colonel too difficult for such
a man like Smelyakov. He transferred him to the boiler room. Now, coming to work, Yaroslav had to press the start button and sit, looking
from time to time on the pressure gauge needle - so as not to climb over the red line. When leaving, it was necessary to turn off the pump.
The conscientious Smelyakov began sweeping the already clean cement floor several times a day. Having obtained paints from the artist Saulov, he painted
the starter box in blue, and the button itself in red. And still there was a lot of free time. Yulik and I - and sometimes with Svet -
ran over to chat with him. By this time, we already knew his sad story.

He himself was not a fan of high calm and would never call his fate a tragedy. I don't like pathos either - but how else can I say that
what did the Soviet authorities, who sincerely loved by him, do with Smelyakov?

In 1934, a young working poet, favored by Babel himself, remarked about the assassination of Kirov:
“Now there will be arrests and, probably, many innocent people will suffer.
This turned out to be enough. Yaroslav was given three years. And they immediately spread a rumor that he was imprisoned for shooting at the portrait of Kirov. Why
shot, from what he shot - it is not clear. Clearly a bastard. Chekists often used this technique. One very famous actress
- I don’t remember which one, but in the rank of Tamara Makarova - she turned up at the Kremlin banquet next to Beria and dared to ask: what happened to Kapler?
Why are you interested in this anti-Soviet and pederast? answered Lavrenty Pavlovich.
Is this Kapler a pederast? The actress wondered to herself. She must have had reason to be surprised. But she didn’t ask any more questions: she can’t
a decent woman to worry about the fate of a pederast! .. But this is so, by the way.

And Smelyakov was released in the 37th, not the best year. He returned to Moscow, continued to write, but then the war began. Other writers went to
army as captains and majors - some as correspondents, some as political officers. And Yaroslav, with his spoiled biography, was assigned to the construction battalion. In the very first
for months, some of them were surrounded. Yaroslav Vasilievich told how they rushed about in search of their own, and no one could show them the direction. pushed
to the headquarters of some foreign unit. The door was opened by a half-dressed special officer who, according to Smelyakov, smelled of cognac and semen. Cursed and returned to
to his grandmother...

The entire construction battalion was captured by the Finns. There Yaroslav behaved impeccably. Was, in the language of official papers, "the organizer of groups
resistance". Therefore, in his second camp (the second - this is not counting the Finnish one), in the so-called "filtration camp", Smelyakov was not kept for long
- he had no sins.

It was in the Moscow region coal basin. There he met a lovely woman who worked in an office; released, married her and
I took him to Moscow with my already quite big daughter.
He wrote poetry again, even published one or two collections. And one day, drinking with Dusya and some friend, he said:
-- Strange affair! I can write poetry about Lenin, but I can't write about Stalin. I respect him, of course, but I don't like him.
When my friend left - I knew his last name, I knew it, but unfortunately I forgot - Dusya began to cry.
"If only you could see the look in his eyes when you said that!"
- What did I say? I said respect.
But it turned out that this was not enough for Stalin. The friend fully justified Dusina's expectations, and Smelyakov was imprisoned for the third time, not counting the Finnish time.
They remembered captivity and soldered, in addition to anti-Soviet agitation, treason to the Motherland.

I have already mentioned: disliking Stalin, Yaroslav Smelyakov has always been and remained in the camp a Soviet poet - perhaps the most sincerely Soviet of
of all. After listening to our camp verses, he reservedly praised certain passages in the Review and in The Enemy of the People, but with great displeasure.
referred to the "History of the Russian State". Evil and unfair,” he said. From what we wrote, he liked only the story "The Best of Them".
Smelyakov was the second person who said about us: writers. Kapler was the first. And it so happened that many years later they both wrote to us
recommendations to the Union of Writers.xx)

In the poems of Smelyakov himself, written in prison and in the camp - there are not many of them - there was no malice. Only sadness and bewilderment; especially one of them
-- I don't know if it was printed anywhere but my memoirs. I'll give it as I remember it:

In childhood, on the eve of a formidable fate,
sitting at a school desk, freckled and small,
I am in the primer our commandment "WE ARE NOT SLAVES"
I read with childlike faith and childish pride.
Then a steep path led me for centuries,
the march of five-year plans thundered over the blizzard country.
"We are not slaves and will not be slaves, friends!" --
I sang with the Komsomol members in the club of the head teacher.
............... (I don’t remember the line).............
I spent years and I was ready to spend my life,
so that not only with us, but on the whole earth
there were no whites and there were no black slaves...
Boldly step on the shattered ladder of years!
Go ahead to the kingdom of the coming brotherhood!
How did it happen that I, a poet, sang,
became - look at me - a dumb slave?
Not on distant plantations, but in my father's land,
not in foreign lands, but in our country
I stand in the dirty clothes of a slave at a divorce,
the number of the slave on my bent back.
I go to work like a murderer on trial -
chisel frozen ground and load dolomite ...

And that's all. Not written further. Most likely, the poet was afraid to find the answer to his own question: "How did it happen? .." This would be the collapse of his faith,
would break the straw that Smelyakov clung to until the last days of his life. Even in Moscow - or rather, in his voluntary Peredelkino
in prison - he asked Yulik and me: well, how is it now at the meetings? Are young people arguing? Or like before?
We had nothing to say to comfort him.

Yaroslav Vasilievich did not become a slave in the camp, slave in it was not a single gram. One day the three of us were basking in the sun near the barracks. Passed by
senior contractor, threw on the go:
-- Great.
- Great, great, fuck your mother! said Smelyakov with unexpected fury. We reproached him: well, why so? This guy hasn't done anything bad to him - yet.
- Valerik, he has the eyes of a traitor. What, don't you see?!
By the way, his poem - or rather, the place where he, freckled and small, reads
primer - knocked out Yulik and me for an additional two lines for our, also unfinished, "Enemy of the People":
"We are not slaves." Yes, we are s / c s / c
"We are not slaves." Mute, mute - yet!

Dusya's wife sent Yaroslav a letter: my daughter's birthday is coming soon, how we would like you to be with us! ..
Yaroslav Vasilyevich wrote an answer, but he didn't send it, the camp censor wouldn't have let it through.
Your letter arrived without delay.
And immediately - not in a dream, but in reality -
as a junior lieutenant on a special assignment,
I dropped everything and flew to Moscow.
And at the table, as it was on these dates
we have a long time ago
women and children were already making noise,
tea sparkled and wine gurgled.
The ladies have already crumpled the silks,
girls didn't follow manners
and your glass straight ahead
tired of keeping a visiting officer.
Cigarette smoke swirled under the chandelier,
the faces of the brides shone with happiness -
This is where I just showed up.
like some angel of distant places.
In a prison cap, in a camp coat,
received in the Indian side --
without buttons, but with a black seal,
put on the back by the Chekist ...
Your guests were confused by my anguish.
The conversation is silent, the feasting ardor has faded ...
But my God, because you yourself asked
May I be with you on this day!

The seal put by the Chekist on the back is the number L-222. By the way, Smelyakov managed to lose it somewhere, and I drew it myself
in ink on a white patch, three deuces as beautiful as swans. Therefore, I remembered.
After the death of Yaroslav, his second wife, Tatyana Streshneva, published this poem in one of the Moscow magazines, forgetting to indicate to whom it was
addressed to. It turned out that she.

It is unpleasant for me to talk about this, because Tanya made it very easy with her care. last years life of Yaroslav Vasilyevich, was an exemplary wife,
able to adapt to his difficult nature. "Plato is my friend, but..."

About the funny circumstances of their acquaintance I can still tell. And now I hasten to make a reservation that I mentioned the difficult character of Smelyakov,
relying on other people's evidence. They talked about him - rude, unbearable ... But in our memory with Dunsky, he remained subtle, tactful, and even more
-- a gentle person.
Once, in the middle of the barracks, Yaroslav came up to Yulik, wrapped his arms around him, put his head on his shoulder and said:
- Yulik, let's sleep standing up, like horses in the night ...
Many years later, we put this remark into the mouth of one of our most beloved heroes - the old veterinarian.

In the camp, Yaroslav Vasilievich did not drink for technical reasons, but he recalled episodes from his not very sober past not without pleasure.
He told how once, having received a large fee, he decided to hide three thousand from his wife Dusi - for singing. Shared this idea with a friend; they are together
were returning from the publishing house by taxi and had already managed to succumb. Comrade approved. The next day, having sobered up, Smelyakov began to recalculate the pay and found
that lacks just three thousand. I called my yesterday's companion. He immediately remembered:
- I told you that I always pinch a thousand or two. And so that my woman does not find it, I hide it in the gap between the seat and the back of the sofa.
Then Yaroslav also remembered: he also hid the stash between the back and the seat. In taxi...

Steam locomotive cemetery.
Rusty hulls.
Pipes are full of oblivion
twisted voices.

Like the collapse of consciousness -
stripes and circles.
Terrible furnaces of death.
Dead levers.

The thermometers are broken:
figures and glass -
the dead don't need to be measured,
do they have heat.

The dead do not need sight -
gouged out eyes.
Time has given you
permanent brakes.

In your wagons long
doors won't knock
woman won't laugh
the soldier will not sing.

Whirlwind of night sand
will not bring the booth.
Young man with a soft cloth
pistons will not wipe.

No more hot
your grates.
Five-Year Mammoths
knocked off their fangs.

These palaces of metal
built a union of labor:
locksmiths and miners,
villages and cities.

Take off your hat, friend.
Here they are, the days of the war.
Rust on iron
your cheeks are pale.

No need to pronounce
none of the words.
Hate silently grows
silent love blossoms.

It's just iron.
Let it teach everyone.
Slow and calm
the first snow falls.

That spring, the water did not last long and left, taking with it garbage and sewage. The fact is that we didn’t have a restroom - we ran around in great need
to the edge of the ravine. And the role of the sewer was performed by spring waters. We still had to build a restroom: to Smelyakov on a date
Dusya was going to come. It was known in advance that she would stop with us. That's why we started building. They built in a hurry, not even the boards
cut off - so from the standard six-meter ones they built a booth. The guys laughed: you could at least make it two-story! ..
Before Dusin's arrival, we visited Yaroslav Vasilyevich in the boiler room. A pass to the mine was arranged for us by the sculptor Kolya Saulov: he was just finishing
of his "Flagship of Communism" and lied to his superiors that Dunsky and Fried were great connoisseurs of fine art, and he needed advice.
We went to Smelyakov. This was the first meeting after our departure from the OLP, and Yaroslav Vasilyevich wanted to celebrate it in all the right ways. for
this one of the freemen brought him half a liter of vodka.
His hands trembling with impatience, he took a bottle from the stash and dropped it on the cement floor. It was not Kolya Saulov who was needed here, but Rodin - so that
capture Yaroslav's despair in marble. This tragic figure still stands before my eyes.
We consoled him: the regime has softened, the prisoners are released outside the zone for the weekend - let's have a drink with us, on Coal 14 ...
Dusya arrived - blue-eyed, cheerful, affectionate. She was allowed a personal visit with her husband, and they spent three days together. Then she left. Yaroslav
was happy. Cheerfully said:
- Dusya is very left. During a break between sexual acts, she suddenly said:
Yara, and Molotov has a very angry face...

Now he often visited us in the house. He spoke respectfully and tenderly to Minna Solomonovna, read new passages from Strict Love.
True, the first visit almost ended in major troubles. We - as promised - prepared refreshments and drinks, two bottles of red wine.
Smelyakov was upset, said that he did not drink red. They ran for white, that is, for vodka. Listened to poetry, drank. When the vodka ran out, it went
and red: it turned out that in exceptional cases he drinks. All three were exhausted and we dozed off.
We woke up, looked at the clock - and saw with horror that it was already a quarter to eight. And exactly at eight Yaroslav had to come to the watch, otherwise
he would be considered on the run. And we, supporting him, drunk, from both sides, rushed to the third OLP. Arrived literally at the last minute.
Eldar Ryazanov wrote somewhere that our story about this incident suggested to him and Braginsky a tragicomic scene in "Station for Two".

Time passed, and Yaroslav Vasilyevich married Tatyana Streshneva, a poetess and translator.
She was in the house of creativity "Peredelkino" on the day when the friend who had laid him down came there to explain himself to Smelyakov. Asked to forget the old, not
be angry. He hinted: if you are with us, all publishing houses are open for you! Yaroslav did not begin to find out what it means "with us", but gave the informer a
muzzle. He fell from surprise and crawled to his car on all fours, and Smelyakov urged him on with kicks. This was seen by Tatyana Valeryevna, by chance
out into the corridor. The scene made such an impression on her that soon after that she left her quite prosperous husband and son Lesha left
to Smelyakov. So she told herself.

After the death of Yaroslav Vasilyevich, we gave Tanya his letters to us and a notebook with rough sketches of "Strict Love". Sometimes I regret it...
but if you think about it: Smelyakov died, Tatyana died, Yulik is no more. Soon I won't be around either - and who, besides us, cherishes this shabby notebook?

Ilza, a free girl from the accounting department, brought Yaroslav Vasilyevich a thin school notebook. On checkered pages, Smelyakov began to write
himself in the boiler room, perhaps his main poem - "Strict Love". He wrote and reworked, discussed options with us - and we rejoiced at every line:
However, here the conversation is different.
Time moves on and trams
alone near Moscow,
like mammoths are dying out...
About his Komsomol youth, about his friends and girlfriends, he wrote with tenderness, with humor, with sadness. The fate of this poem turned out to be happy -
much happier than its author.

However, now, when, as my late friend Vitechka Sheinberg put it, “the garbage dump has turned over,” all Soviet poetry is being reassessed: already
and Mayakovsky is a corrupt poet, and Tvardovsky was guilty of sins ... What can we say about Smelyakov! I would like to ask the furious subversives:
remember how people like you blew up the Cathedral of Christ the Savior? Now they're rebuilding...
It is unlikely that anyone will suspect me of sympathy for the communist past. Yes, the idea turned out to be wrong. Yes, there were scoundrels speculating on her - including
including poets. But always - both in the revolution, and in the civil war, and after - there were people disinterestedly devoted to it. And devoted to her. They are heroes to me
great tragedy."

Valery Fried. 58 and a half or notes from a camp jerk

If I get sick
I won't go to the doctors
I turn to friends
(do not think that this is delirious):
lay the steppe for me,
curtain my windows with mist,
put at the head
night star.

I walked through.
I didn't sound unapproachable.
If they wound me in fair fights,
wrap my head
mountain road
and cover me
blanket
in autumn colors.

Powders or drops - no need.
Let the rays shine in the glass.
The hot wind of the deserts, the silver of the waterfall -
Here's what to treat.
From the seas and from the mountains
so it blows for centuries,
as you look, you will feel:
we live forever.

Not white wafers
my path is strewn, but with clouds.
I’m not leaving you on sick leave by the corridor,
and the Milky Way.

From the memoirs of Chuev:
At one discussion, Smelyakov said:
- I'm tired of these Eugene Onegins with party tickets!

Spontaneous rally
“At the American embassy they are preparing a platform and pulling the police,” he said, “now there will be a spontaneous protest rally ...

I was told that on the day of Yevtushenko's wedding with Akhmadulina, Pravda published a devastating article about Yevtushenko. It meant a lot at the time.
The newlyweds decided to go to Smelyakov to congratulate them. They appeared before him, and young Bella said:
- Yaroslav Vasilyevich, Zhenya and I signed today and now we have come to you ...
“It reminds me of the wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun,” Smelyakov said gloomily. He read the article...

Movie novella "Delusion" from "The Adventures of Shurik"
Shurik reads Smelyakov's poem, 3.47

Yaroslav Smelyakov was born on December 26, 1912 (January 8, 1913 n.s.) in Lutsk in the family of a railway worker. He spent his early childhood in the village, where he received his primary education, then continued his studies in the Moscow seven-year plan. Early began to write poetry.
In 1931 he graduated from the printing factory school, where he published his poems in the workshop wall newspaper, wrote reviews for the propaganda team. At the same time he was engaged in literary circles at Komsomolskaya Pravda and Ogonyok, was noticed by Svetlov and Bagritsky.

In 1932, Smelyakov's first book of poems, Work and Love, was published, which he himself typed in a printing house as a professional typesetter.
In 1934, on unfounded charges, Y. Smelyakov was repressed, having been released in 1937. For several years he worked in the editorial offices of newspapers, was a reporter, wrote notes and feuilletons.
In the first months Patriotic War he fought as an ordinary soldier in Karelia, was surrounded, until 1944 he was in Finnish captivity.
In the post-war years, the book "Kremlin Fir" (1948) was published, which included the best poems by Smelyakov, written before and after the war.
In 1956, the story in verse "Strict Love" was published, which received wide recognition.
In 1959, a collection of poetry entitled "Talk about the main thing" appeared; a phenomenon in Soviet poetry was the book of poems "The Day of Russia" (1967).
In 1968, a poem about the Komsomol "Young people" was written.
In recent years, the poet has increasingly turned to the days, people and events of his youth. He traveled a lot around the country (the cycle "Long Trip"), visited abroad, which he told about in the book "December", in the section "The Muse of Far Wanderings".
He translated poems from Ukrainian, Belarusian and other languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR. Ya. Smelyakov died in 1972.
After the death of the poet, his books My Generation (1973) and Service of Time (1975) were published.

Stanislav Rassadin

Yaroslav Smelyakov was born 85 years ago
"If I get sick, I won't go to the doctors..." These are the most famous Smelyakov's lines - as usual, thanks to a melody composed, it seems, by Yuri Vizbor. This is the 40s. Here are the 60s: "I declared to all honest Russia / boldly / that I would not go to the doctors / if I fell ill /. / So, I foolishly lied / or it's a dream / that I ended up here, / in a cramped hospital ?"... Metaphor after metaphor of that old poem is rejected and refuted: "Medical water / and the Health magazine. / And a night light, not a star / at the very head."
The first poem belongs to a man who has behind him early fame, arrest, war, captivity, a new address (there is another one ahead), but while there is spiritual strength to perceive death itself as a merger with the world, with nature: / a Milky Way". In a late poem - to horror a real man alone, not with the world, but with myself, in confusion and anguish: "I mumble in the night delirium / paramedic Valya: /" I'll leave here, / I was caught in vain. / Steal me - what kind of work?! - / a rusty, guarded key. / If the poets lie, / one can no longer live.
Smelyakov was not one of those lying. That is, I’m far from sure that he sincerely denounced, along with many, the “Vlasovite” Solzhenitsyn (after all, not only a great writer, but a convict who, in addition, told the truth about the camp, whom Smelyakov had to sip more than once. And his own poems about which he deafly kept in his desk - they were published only posthumously). But the drama of his piercing lyrical gift was born not only by a terrible fate.
... It is unlikely that intentionally - even probably not - two poems of very old, 30s, again contrastingly backfired already with their titles: "Love" and "Lyubka". In one, a young typographic worker (the profession of Smelyakov himself, who typed his first book with his own hand) hates his rival, mature, strong, who knows "business and money", and claims his right of the hegemonic proletarian to the love of his wife. But in another - not up to the Young Bolshevik claims: "We have not lived yet, and we are already being bred, / and they told us: "We have lived. It's time!" / They told me that they were walking with you, / smiling impudently, our fraers. / They told me that you were on a spree - / patent leather shoes, a brooch, a permanent. / That a pink, experienced, / twenty-three-year-old transport student was walking with you. .. Twenty-three years old! What, right, motherhood!
This stylization of the thieves Odessa "Lyubka", also known as "Murka", is natural because there is a fun game of feeling, but it is a game that frees one from the gloomy need to follow the ideological canon.
It may seem strange to compare this masterpiece of the young man Smelyakov with the masterpiece of his mature time, the harshly titled poem "Zhidovka" (at the first, also posthumous, publication in the "New World" renamed "Cursist" - probably in order to avoid suspicion of anti-Semitism). "A proclamation and a strike, / Transfers of a huge country. / In the nineteenth, she became a Jewess / Commissar of the civil war. / She could neither wash nor give birth, / No mother, no wife - / Only one revolution was a matter / She understood and knew. / Splashes blots of a KGB pen, / The moon shines in a frosty window, / And the gunshot thing is silent / On a belt pulled to the side. The horror of a normal person (who suddenly showed the most precious normality) at the sight of a fanatic, whom neither the blood of those she sent to execution, nor her own Gulag fate can change, is what is so clear here: "In that area, spacious and new, / Having received housing as a writer, / In our post office / I stand behind her. / And I watch, not too surprised - / Life is not poor with impressions, / Like her pension book / She pushes through the window.
"Pushes" - what a most expressive verb that expressed precisely invariability, that is, incorrigibility! ..
So, where is the light "Lyubka" and where is the painful "Zhidovka"? Meanwhile, they are akin to their freedom - even if youthful poems are free, as it were, initially, not yet wanting, not having time to give in to independence to the attitudes of the era, and in a late poem, brutally harsh, liberation broke through. The release from the power of what Smelyakov swore to serve, perhaps more out of fear than out of true conviction. And in their freedom - so different - both poems are integral. Holistic.
More often, however, wholeness and wholeness were not presented in such a charming embodiment. "We have not forgotten your murderers / on a winter day, under the glow of heaven, / we returned to the Tsar of Russia / the bullet that Dantes sent at you" - in this inhuman way, he expressed love for Pushkin. And undertaking to write about his widow, about "Madonna", he also showed extreme tactlessness: "Vain work, Madame Lanskaya, / you can't run away from us!"
"We returned the Tsar of Russia ... You can't run away from us!" Own lyrical "I" finds itself in a hopeless role of a hostage for "us", marching only in formation. And, perhaps even worse, the hostage syndrome, the object of research by modern psychologists, enters into force: the hostage, mortally afraid of those who captured him, begins to love them. Identifies with them.
For the sake of self-affirmation, I will remember how three co-authors, L. Lazarev, St. Rassadin and B. Sarnov, once composed a parody that ended: "Let the cute kanka / seem to have achieved his goal. / Pushkin had a blunder, / but we corrected him." And one of the authors, me, had to explain himself to the offended Smelyakov. "I wanted to protect him from her!" - was his argument, to which I answered with a question: "Did he ask you about this?" And he could not resist, so as not to simulate the situation: how would Pushkin, if he lived now, react to such a tone in relation to Natalia Nikolaevna? So, who then could be in the place of Dantes?
It ended with a break in our non-close relationship, we stopped greeting each other, which was somewhat piquant: at that time I was writing a book about Smelyakov. However, when she, mercilessly emasculated by the editors, came out, he met her with hostility. A.P. Mezhirov told me: allegedly Yaroslav Vasilyevich, having read it, burst into tears, hit the table with his fist and exclaimed: "He settles scores with my generation!"
There were no accounts. There was an attempt to reveal in Smelyakov what elevated him above the generational mass; that at least partly belonged to that poetry, where the countdown came from Akhmatova and Pasternak. And it would be fair to attribute to this part not only that where there was a breakthrough to complete freedom, but also that which is marked by duality. Or, if you like, duality.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko subtly noted that in Smelyakov, dearly beloved by him, "Soviet" and "anti-Soviet", the sovereignty of Tsar Peter and the weakness, trembling of Tsarevich Alexei were combined - it is clear that the strongest poem "Peter and Alexei" was meant, where it turned out whose truth is higher . The verdict was not predetermined, in the Soviet way, Smelyakovsky Peter himself was tormented by doubts, deciding the fate of his son: "It's all the same ..." Still! "... In it to the point of torment / through the loins of my wife / and my smile, and my hands / are clumsily repeated." Here it is "unskillful" itself - either reproached his wife and son, or an attempt to excuse him: what, they say, to take from incompetence? "But..." That's it - "but"! "But, yearning to the pain of the soul, / sending you to prison, / I won’t kiss you like a father, / I won’t hug you goodbye. / Your mouth is weak and your forehead is white / you will have to forget it soon. / Oh, this is not an easy task - / an autocrat to be Russian!.." And in the finale - not only the author's ritual gesture: "...respectfully I bow / before your monument", but the main thing is that it is more piercing, more expressive, more sensual than any ritual: "The dull aureole of his torment. / Imperial your crown."
The very brightness of these two lines asserts that the broken, fearful of power, Smelyakov did not voluntarily say, but nevertheless, with his mind and soul, he chose her side, forgiving her the "dull whisk" of his own torment. Moreover, humiliating him with an epithet. The presence of poems that could not be published for reasons of censorship at that time did not change things too much, such as, for example, a poem about Masha, who, after joking here and there, walks around in a pub: “And she doesn’t know that, fool, / rinsing underwear, / that in Russia the dictatorship / is not someone else's, but hers!"
Of course, one cannot fail to hear the irony over the fact that the dictatorship turned out to be intercepted from people like Mashka, and, consequently, it seems to be over the dictatorship itself. And, of course, if these verses at the time of their writing (1966) fell into the eyes of those from whom Smelyakov hid them, they would be considered anti-Soviet. But, whatever one may say, it was precisely the dictatorship that was for the tired, exhausted, surrendered poet ... Desired? Rather, the reality that he agreed to accept.
Yes, from a political point of view. And with poetry? Does all this reduce the aesthetic level of at least the magnificent poems about Peter and Alexei? Yes and no. Having accepted his time, Smelyakov embodied it - sometimes with amazing force; Well, this is already a virtue, already a praise. Did he win over time and over his own destiny (in the sense in which Akhmatova called the persecuted and murdered Mandelstam the winner)? In many poems - no, by no means. In a few - yes, definitely. In others, such as about Peter and Alexei or about the woman who went on a spree, to a relative, however, noticeable degree: precisely because the painful split did not completely give way to the stupefying, leveling force. Pain, fear, torment of the hostage made their way even through the self-inspired - almost sincerely - love for those who took away freedom.

My Cast-Iron, Gentle Voice...: The First Post-Camp Years of the Poet Yaroslav Smelyakov

Alexander Mesitov, Tula

The first post-war years in the literary life of Stalinogorsk (now the city of Novomoskovsk, Tula region) were special, since Yaroslav Smelyakov lived there.
He arrived in this city at the source of the Don not of his own free will, he arrived by stage. In the Finnish campaign he was captured, in the Great Patriotic War - again captured. He fully got for these two captivity both from enemies and from his own.
By this time, he was no longer just an underground poet, but a recognized literary master, his poems were known and loved in all corners of the USSR. By the way, few people knew that he published his first poetry collection at the age of 18. He then worked as a compositor in a printing house and typed his innermost poetic lines himself, with his own hands.
In Stalinogorsk, he had two people who helped him a lot: the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, Konstantin Razin, and the poet Stepan Pozdnyakov. I know a lot about Smelyakov of that time from their stories.
The first to see him was Konstantin Razin. He spoke about it this way:
- He came into my office terribly thin, in an army padded jacket, girded with a soldier's belt, on his head a military cap, but without an asterisk and somehow very worn. Eyes, very intense eyes. But he said calmly, with dignity: "I am the poet Yaroslav Smelyakov. I can write poetry, correspondence, reports ... I think that I could be useful for your newspaper ..."
I couldn't refuse him.
There was nothing surprising in the fact that Konstantin Ivanovich took a great Russian poet. But there could be those who would say: "Why, he warmed up the camper ..." And Razin went to the main local party chief, fortunately, the district committee of the party was located in the same building. So, they say, and so. I took Smelyakov to the editorial staff. He was only able to utter: "But is he sitting somewhere with us?" - then he rolled the pencil on the table and made his decision: "Kostya, you have a family, and I'm alone. If anything, say that I ordered and ordered him to be enrolled in the state."
They say that it was a time of universal cowardice and denunciation. In vain they say.
Work is work, but somewhere you have to live, sleep and eat. Stepan Pozdnyakov, who had just returned from the front, seriously wounded, mourned by his relatives (a funeral came, an obituary was printed in the newspaper), waved his hands at all Smelyakova's protests: "No! Come on, let's go, you'll live with me, we'll find a corner."
Yaroslav Smelyakov was then 33 years old.
Having warmed up with Stepan Pozdnyakov in his communal apartment, he sometimes told some episodes of his recent life, told in his muffled voice, occasionally taking deep puffs (he smoked cigarettes then).
They, the prisoners, were escorted by the Germans with fierce black shepherd dogs. Smelyakov walked last in the four and from time to time took his eyes off the road, from his feet and gloomily, heavily looked at the escort. He immediately jumped up to Yaroslav and hit him in the teeth several times with the back of his machine gun. Smelyakov wiped the blood from his broken lips and a minute later he looked up at the fascist again. He immediately began to beat with an iron butt again. And so several times. Until Smelyakov’s neighbor whispered with fervor and despair: “Don’t look at him like that, for Christ’s sake, because he’ll beat him to death ...”
Imagine what a look it was, just one look, for which half of his teeth were knocked out and almost killed. He got it later from our escorts.
But Solzhenitsyn writes that in the same situation, the guard behaved differently, even the suitcase helped with things to convey.
In Stalinogorsk, Smelyakov wrote a lot of what became Smelyakov's poetic classics: "Good girl Lida", "Someone came up with it happily", "Here you are again remembered to me, mother", "Monument", "Our coat of arms" ...
About two last poems worth mentioning in particular.
Smelyakov's bunk was separated from the whole room of the Pozdnyakov family by a large home-made chiffonier. That night he could not sleep, and he blindly scratched with a pencil on a pack of cigarettes. Then he lit a match several times and, holding it in his palms, shone it for himself, rereading what he had written. And in the morning Stepan Yakovlevich was the first to hear:
And you will hear in the parks near Moscow Cast-iron voice, my gentle voice.

Somewhat later, the editorial staff secured a separate room for Smelyakov, and he moved to a neighboring street. (This house was demolished 20 years ago, but the author of these lines managed to photograph it.)
When he decided to write the poem "Our Coat of Arms", he closed himself in that very room of his, and gave the key to the window to Pozdnyakov.
Once a day, Stepan Yakovlevich brought the poet an iron cup wrapped in a clean rag (potatoes, sauerkraut, anchovy), passed it through the window, asked: "Well, how?"
Smelyakov, unshaven and somehow pathetic, absently ate the parcel right there on the windowsill, complained that nothing was working out for him, handed over the cup and said: "Well, Stepan, you go ... thank you ..."
He spent exactly three days in seclusion, torturing himself and his imagination, but he achieved his goal, he fulfilled the social order at the highest level:
And with frozen heels knocking,

The weaver brought in a roll of kumach ...

Stanislav Kunyaev

If the poets are lying, you can no longer live. Ya. Smelyakov

Exactly a quarter of a century ago, on November 27, 1972, the poet died, devoted to the era of socialism to the last breath, devoutly believing in it. historical grandeur who never doubted one iota that she was right...
His name was Yaroslav Vasilyevich Smelyakov. No, he was not simple, this Belarusian, who was first arrested "for moral decay" at the end of 1934. Then, during a search in his apartment, Hitler's book "My Struggle" was found. And then - Finnish captivity, and after being rescued from captivity, forced labor in the Tula mines, and in 1951 another arrest and three more years of camp life in Inta. But he was more fortunate than his friends - Boris Kornilov and Pavel Vasiliev: no one knows where they are buried. It seems that the poet should have cursed this time, but I remember how his wife Tatyana Streshneva, at Smelyakov's dacha in Peredelkino, shortly before the poet's death, told me with horror and delight:
- I sometimes hear him raving in his sleep, talking. So you won’t believe it: once I listened and realized that he was arguing with someone, he was defending everything Soviet power!
However, I understood this much earlier, when I read his once famous and seditious for the present time poems of 1947:
I built trenches and pillboxes,

He hewed iron and stone, and from this work I myself became iron and stone. I became not big, but huge - try to compete with me! Like Towers of Patience, blast furnaces stand behind me.

The poems are not about the fulfillment of some economic plans, not about achieving success in personal destiny, it is about building a civilization unprecedented in the history of mankind.
Of course, Smelyakov understood that its creation required exorbitant sacrifices, and the main question that tormented him all his life was this: what determined these sacrifices - coercion or good will? If coercion, then a great civilization is built on sand, and sooner or later its blast furnaces and the Towers of Patience will shake. If the victims are voluntary and a halo of a sacred, religious, in the full sense of the word, flame flickers over them, then they will never sink into oblivion and oblivion...
Men's shoes were worn,

The army linen came out, but the red flame of the scarf always illuminated it. She loved, as courage, as a remedy for all failures, a piece of the October flag - an autumn whirlwind of kumach. There was something immortal about him: the corner of the handkerchief would remain, like a red sans-culotte cap and a sailor's black wreath. When business carried her into the silence of the offices, the revolution itself walked along the stone stairs. ......................... In our years, direct features of delegates, silent faces of labor were printed on sharp posters like this. 1940s

But were they, these faces, really like that? After all, Andrei Platonov writes his "Pit" about the same time and about the same people, where these faces are "erased by the revolution" and look completely different. But I believe Smelyakov more. There is not a single false sound in his poem, no literary trickery, it is perfect and self-sufficient, and if we recall two more of his stanzas that were not included in the canonical text, then the poet’s depth of understanding of people’s self-sacrifice in the era of the first five-year plan will seem simply prophetic. Where did the delegate in the halo of the red scarf come from? Of course, from a peasant hut.
Just kind of resentful

And the weakened vague pity, the kindness of a peasant's hut, melted in the mouth area. But this gentle spring of hers was, as if in the ledges of a rock, clamped by a small chin and a convex brilliance of her cheekbone.

And again, not a single false word. Everything is true. The truth of self-sacrifice...
When the hired lackeys of the current ideological perestroika shout about tens of millions of peasants who allegedly became camp dust, I reread Smelyakov and believe him, who says that the peasant class in the 30s did not lie down in permafrost, but became, in its numerical basis, pilots, workers, Iteer workers, doctors, students, machinists, workers of the Faculty of Labor, party workers, poets, soldiers of a new civilization.
My Kaluga grandmother, a peasant woman, had four children. The son became a pilot of the first draft, one daughter - a doctor, another - a railway dispatcher, a third - a seamstress and then the director of a garment factory. You used to read obituaries of the 70-80s - they bury an academician, a military leader, a secretary of a regional committee, a people's artist, a famous writer - and you see that all of them are yesterday's peasant children ... About this difficult, but inevitable transformation of the peasantry for the people's future to other classes Smelyakov thought all his life. All his life he longed to determine exactly what material the sacrificial nimbus was made of, edging the faces of the "delegates" and "delegates", the faces of the laborers of the socialist civilization.
So that she will be irresistible ahead,

Peasant Russia was preparing to lay a big wreath of heavy industry on the linen head.

Lines from the dying poem of 1972, defiantly titled "Employees of the Central Statistical Office" - that is, the Central Statistical Office. One of the abbreviations for the terrible time...
I recognized them as a boy,

When, not at all saddened by life, they communicated enthusiastically with my older sister like a girl.

The female fates of yesterday's peasant daughters especially touched the soul of a teenager who was in awe of their naive, almost monastic asceticism.
Walking back from school in the evening

I looked forward with blissful joy to the rustling of my goddesses' miserable outfits in our little room. But I secretly watched myself, I watched how imperiously and tiredly involvement in state affairs on their faces involuntarily showed through.

The future poet, schoolboy was happy that
what he shared with these women

High civic concerns and that in steel statistics cabinets for formidable construction, among the millions of others, his fate and life are one unit.

And again, for the umpteenth time, the poet, on the slope of his life, demanded an answer from fate: what was more in the "terrible construction" - forced sacrifice or voluntary self-sacrifice? No, he did not indulge himself in the rhetoric of slogans and social illusions; he soberly, like an employee of the Central Statistical Administration, knew how to count all the victories and all the losses, he knew the incredible price paid by the people for the realization of an unprecedented dream, he saw how slogans, people, machines lie in its foundation ...
Steam locomotive cemetery.

Rusty hulls. Pipes are full of oblivion. Screwed voices. As if the disintegration of consciousness - stripes and circles. Terrible furnaces of death. Dead levers. The thermometers are broken: numbers and glass - the dead do not need to measure whether they have heat. The dead do not need sight - the eyes are gouged out. Time has given you eternal brakes. In your long cars, the doors will not knock, the woman will not laugh, the soldiers will not sing. A whirlwind of sand will not bring the night booth. The young man will not wipe the pistons with a soft rag. Your grates will no longer heat up. Five-year-old mammoths knocked off their fangs...

The great poem of the era!.. The era gave birth to several remarkable poets: Zabolotsky, Tvardovsky, Martynov, Slutsky, Pavel Vasiliev. But Yaroslav Smelyakov differed from all of them in some special, completely earnest, almost religious faith in the righteousness of a new life emerging before our eyes. His poetic pathos was, by its nature and integrity, akin to the pathos of the ancient Greek poets, who laid the foundations for the heroic and tragic sense of human history, with its pre-Christian concepts of fate, personal destiny and the ancient choir. In his view of life there was neither Mayakovsky's split, nor Tvardovsky's repentant throwings, nor Zabolotsky's irony, nor Boris Slutsky's ideological breakdown. Next to them - already in the sixties and seventies - whether they were older or younger, he seemed somehow unwilling to doubt, evolve and revise his views as a "five-year-old mammoth." But what an amazing thing! At the same time, when Tvardovsky, and Akhmatova, and Zabolotsky, and Mandelstam, and Pasternak, who out of "fear of the Jews", who sincerely, created praises of cosmic scope for Stalin, Yaroslav Smelyakov, admiring the heroism of the Stalin era, dedicated only one poem to the leader , and even then after the death of Stalin, and even then without even naming him by name. And the poem is special, Smelyakov's, where the leader is humanized in a special way.
On the main square of the country,

Not far from the Spasskaya Tower, under the shadow of a stone wall, yesterday’s leader lies in the grave. Above the place where he was buried without rituals and sobs, there are no leaning banners and no mourning statues, no obelisk, no cross. not a guard soldier - just a bare slab and two decisive dates, and someone's female hand, with languishing tenderness and strength, placed two nameless flowers on his tombstone. 1964

This is how Smelyakov said goodbye to Stalin.
Like no one else, he touched the Russian heroic tragedy of the 20th century with care and chastity. That is why he will remain in our memory the only and therefore amazing poet, a true Russian Don Quixote of popular socialism, however, who knew well the price that time demanded from people for the realization of their ideals. Smelyakov cannot be called a poet "not of this world".
The construction of a new life according to tension, according to the involvement of tens of millions of people in it, according to the degree of risk, at the price of historical stakes, was an act that is akin only to a great war. And who, what historian will say about the war of the scale of 1812 or 1941: are millions of human destinies forcedly sacrificed in such events, or do they live in the element of voluntary self-restraint and self-sacrifice? Naturally, in such times, both forces, and the coercive power of the state, and what is called altruism, heroism, asceticism dominate over people's choice.
And yet, in the end, it is free will that decides the outcome of great wars and constructions. Not the thought of a penal battalion and not the fear of foreign detachments forced the soldier to cling to every scrap of the Stalingrad coast, no matter how hard Viktor Astafyev tried to prove the opposite. My father died of starvation in Leningrad, but now, rereading his last letters, I understand that he was a man of free will. Smelyakov knew about the mysterious law of voluntary self-sacrifice when he thought about the fate of his generation, leaving for the war:
How long do you want to live,

How the wind of life pulls and disturbs! How it snows! But no one can, nothing can stop them...

The line between the sacrifice of the state of their sons and daughters and voluntary self-sacrifice is unsteady and mobile. Yes, millions of those who disagreed with the cruel discipline and speed of the "terrible construction" languished in the camps of a great country, but tens of millions built it, not sparing their lives, understanding the harsh truth of the leader's words: "We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must run that distance in ten years. Either we do it or we are crushed." And almost got crushed.
A few months before his death in the poem "Banquet in the Urals" Yaroslav Smelyakov last time unconditionally put an end to and blessed the voluntary nationwide sacrifice, remembering that the first banquet in his life happened in the mid-thirties - "in the snows of the industrial Urals."
I knew that I had to live bolder,

But he himself did not sit like at home, among the gray-haired heroes of the victorious blast furnaces of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry. Overshadowing their beauty, on strong foreheads, shining heavily, a semi-military cap left its line. And intentionality alone existed invisibly in them, as if a brand of cast iron in the structure of ferrous metal. Drink a glass of muddy to the bottom, press goulash with merciless force, since the era itself approved the norms of fame and wine.

The bas-reliefs of these heroes, cast as if from Kasli iron, are no less majestic than the marble statues of the gods and heroes of Hellas. And whether they performed feats of their own or by the will of the state, the poet does not want to distinguish, for he understands that both forces - both external and internal - moved them ... No wonder he, who fell into the circles of the camp hell three times, did not In his poem, he never once cursed either the era, or his fate, or Stalin, who skillfully used both powerful levers of history for construction: inspiration and coercion. But in the sixties, Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Dombrovsky, and Varlam Shalamov were already writing next to Smelyakov, already published. But no matter how hard Smelyakov's poetic entourage tried - Yevtushenko, Mezhirov, Korzhavin and other sincere and false singers of revolution and socialism - to get Yaroslav to condemn the era of the first five-year plans, the old prisoner did not take a suicidal step and did not betray either his vocation or his destiny.
And Smelyakov treated Yevtushenkov-Mezhirov's cries about totalitarianism and the cult of personality with poorly concealed disgust. To all those who impatiently expected from him after the 20th Party Congress a masochistic condemnation of history, curses on the totalitarian regime, Solzhenitsyn's, in the words of Blok "publicistic slovenliness", he unexpectedly responded with the publication of the poem "Peter and Alexei".
Peter, Peter, the time has come

The winter sky is half-dark. The cheeks turn white motionless, and the hand lies on the table.

How similar is his "miraculous builder" to the heroes from the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry, to Taras Bulba, who sentenced to death the traitor - the son of Andrei, to Joseph Stalin, who minted: "I don’t exchange soldiers for generals" when he was offered to exchange his captured son Yakov for a field marshal Paulus.
A day in the halls, and a year on the road,

In a peasant way, the imperial hand is wide in kisses, rings, burns. Not knowing how to utter a word, horrified by his fate, mournfully stretching out before her, the weak Alexei froze.

No, it's not about Peter's pride, it's not about superhuman vanity. More and more seriously: Alexei is a threat to the cause of Peter, created by his will of a new life, the future of Russia.
Not swindlers and hysterics,

Howling in the night - I need young souls, scorers and trumpeters.

What is happening in this scene? Who is donating and what? Who goes to self-sacrifice? Both are happening at the same time. For Alexei is the flesh of the sovereign’s flesh, he is his heir, his continuation, and, sending his son to execution, Peter, as it were, sacrifices a blood particle of himself ... At this moment, Smelyakov’s talent soars to the heights of world poetry, where the heroic souls of Archpriest Avvakum, Aeschylus Antigone, Gogol's Taras, Pushkin's Bronze Horseman:
It's still in him to the point of flour,

Through my wife's loins, and my smile, and my hands are clumsily repeated. Your mouth is weak and your white forehead will have to be forgotten as soon as possible. Oh, this is not an easy task - to be a Russian autocrat.

But the main tragic paradox of the poem is that the poet does not pity his son, not the victim, but Peter the priest for his terrible father's decision and for his father's torment.
Winter evening returning

On the smoking pavements, respectfully, I bow before your monument. Silently, the sovereign genius gallops across the earth from end to end. A dull aureole of his torment. Your imperial crown.

Again and again, for the umpteenth time, Smelyakov cannot get rid of the temptation to unravel what kind of crown borders the heads of his heroes, and whether there is a glimmer of holiness in the halos that overshadow the faces ... That is why the image of a wreath appears so obsessively and constantly in his poetry: " your imperial crown", "dull", almost thorny "wreath of his torment", "red flame of the scarf", a wreath of flowering flax on the head of a peasant woman, "red sans-culotte cap", a depressed wrinkle from a "semi-military cap" on the strong forehead of a hero from the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry , "black wreath of a sailor", "large wreath of heavy industry"...
It was not in vain that Smelyakov's entourage of the 1950s and 1960s treated him with subservience and carefully concealed distrust. He also understood who he was dealing with, he knew the united strength of these people, he remembered how his idol Mayakovsky was bound by their fetters in the atmosphere of the Chekist-Jewish Brikov salon, he remembered that the spiritual fathers of those who are now spinning around him, hunted Pavel Vasiliev for the so-called anti-Semitism and Russian chauvinism, but for the time being he was silent or was cautious in talking on this topic, but as an honest chronicler of the era he could not help but write two poems necessary for him, which were published in full only after his death.
ZHIDOVKA

Proclamation and strike. Shipments of a huge country. In the nineteenth, a Jewess became a Commissar of the Civil War. She couldn’t wash, she couldn’t give birth, No mother, no wife - Only one revolution she understood and knew the matter ...

In 1987, the New World Democrats published this poem for the first time. But all their lives, from the time of Tvardovsky, they fought against censorship, they could not "swallow" the title and the first stanza: the poem was called "The student student", and someone's cowardly hand altered the first stanza in this way:
Casemates of the gendarme detective,

Shipments of a huge country. In the nineteenth, she became a student Commissar of the Civil War.

Of course, you can understand the Novomirovsky "coursers" ... "Well, at least the poet called his heroine a Jew. After all, he wrote friendly poems to Antokolsky: "Hello, Pavel Grigoryevich, an ancient Russian Jew!" unacceptable, in this form it is impossible to print!"
Splashing blots Chekist pen,

The moon shines in the frosty window, And the gunshot thing is silent On the belt pulled to the side. Untidy, like a true genius, And pale, like a prophet locked up. No indulgence for anyone Never can be found in her. .......................... We are all worth what we are worth, Judgment will be made soon, And you are the most under escort On Soviet soil they'll take you...

Two women. One is a Russian worker (“the direct features of the delegates, the silent faces of labor”), a mother and wife who can do everything, shod in men's boots, dressed in army underwear, and the other is a professional revolutionary, a fanatical Chekist in a leather jacket with a revolver on her side, who cannot "neither erase nor give birth", but only interrogate and shoot ... Two faces of one revolution hostile to each other ... Which of them was dearer and dearer to Smelyakov - it is unnecessary to say. After the death of Smelyakov, this, one of his best poems, by the will of the compilers and publishers, was not included even in his most complete book - a one-volume edition published in 1979 by the "Big Library of the Poet". It was so terrible for its hysterical truth to the so-called "children of the 20th Party Congress."
Time broke and overturned many foundations of Smelyakov's worldview. He believed that the Union of Peoples had already been created forever, that "a matter is strong when blood flows under it," the blood of self-sacrifice. He loved to travel to the Caucasus and Central Asia, he loved Kaisyn Kuliev and David Kugultinov both for their talent and for the hardships that they endured together with their peoples. He believed that all these bloody contradictions were in the past.
We can't forget

Neither the elder brother, nor the younger brother, about the fact that here in large graves, on the slopes of the mountains of strangers and dear Russian sons lie. On April mornings, the soul-searing smell of hay invariably reaches them on the slope through the red light of Tajik roses.

I wandered along these paths of Gissar and Karategin, not realizing that only thirty years ago the Budyonnovsk horsemen converged here chest to chest with Basmachis-dushmans. One day, returning from a geological route along a rocky path winding over a boiling blue stream, I saw a mound of stones under a mulberry tree, over which multi-colored rag awnings hung from green branches.
- What is it? I asked the local Tajik accompanying me. He looked into my eyes, and not immediately, but answered:
- A famous basmach is buried here. From our kind.
So "on the slopes of the mountains of strangers and dear" both were buried. And yet, with natural calmness, during the geological routes, I wandered into the most remote villages, where in Russian I could somehow explain myself only to the teahouse owner, sat down at the shepherd's fire to drink tea with shepherds - descendants of the Basmachi-Dushmans. We smiled at each other, in the eyes of my interlocutors there was no hidden malice, no deceit, only curiosity and cordiality.
I said goodbye to these dark-faced white-toothed people, we shook hands, not suspecting that in thirty years their fellow tribesmen would cut off the heads of Russian soldiers on the defeated outposts of a dismembered country. But in those days the world Central Asia still lived in a common way, so dear to the heart of Yaroslav Smelyakov.
True, he had a premonition that after his death history might be rewritten, some fears lived in his soul.
I don't need that future historian

Who would never understand how sweet he was and how bitter real, not archival honey.

Smelyakov seemed to foresee the appearance of various Volkogonovs, Antonov-Ovseenks, Aleksandrs Yakovlevs, but he could not foresee such a quantity of dirt, lies and slander that would pour out on his generation and on the history of the fatherland. Although he warned them against impudent frivolity and conceited amicostonism, when he created a scene in his imagination, how he allegedly once approached the chair of Ivan the Terrible in the Kremlin in his royal bedroom:
And then I, like all poets,

Instantly recklessly dared, out of hooliganism, it was as if effortlessly sat down in an armchair. But right away, the dust of time, dry as a cloud, went out of it, and the lightning of centuries, shining, burned me contemptuously. I immediately died and woke up in this bedchamber there, as if I had foolishly touched high-voltage wires. The lesson was enough for me, not to describe, not to explain. Where are you going to go, boy? Who did you decide to play a joke on?

And the current ones - not just playfully, not just joking, not out of reckless courage, but out of mocking calculation, for a lot of money, for a career and benefits, with faces tense with fear and renegade hatred, grab hold of the high-voltage wires of history, writhe, grimace, lie to foam on the lips. They will never understand the soul of a true poet of Russian socialism; they yearn to silence his voice - "cast-iron voice, my gentle voice", to wipe out his "factories and blast furnaces", to close his mines, to destroy his monuments, to turn the sleepers of his railways off the embankment, to desecrate his mausoleum. Marauders of history ... However, let them not forget about the fate of another marauder - Isaac Babel, who after October 1917 arrived at the Winter Palace, went into the royal chambers, tried on Alexander III's robe, found the bedroom and collapsed into the bed of the Dowager Empress . Everything was real, and retribution overtook him 20 years later - in 1937 ... Yes, apparently, it is possible to destroy the material part of the civilization of Yaroslav Smelyakov. But the spiritual world, the world of memory, the world of its heroes and heroines with halos, wreaths, kerchiefs, "torment whisks" lives according to its own laws, beyond the control of destroyers. "There was something immortal in him..."
And he also felt and bequeathed to us the heavy burden of memory of the entire Russian Way of the Cross, and he knew that through all the veil of the coming gloom, his words, which he left on the Solovyov history of Russia, would still appear, as if inscribed with a dull flame:
History does not tolerate verbosity,

Her national path is difficult. Its pages, covered in blood, cannot be loved with thoughtless love, and it is impossible not to love without memory.

He firmly believed in work. Now it will never be published with us.

Wrong. "They" will not publish, "they" will not publish. They will publish "we", they will publish "we". A small book, thirty or forty poems, but those that have eternal life.

Printed in abbreviation. Published in full in N 12 of Nashe Sovremennik, 1997.

Yaroslav Vasilyevich Smelyakov. Born December 26, 1912 (January 8, 1913) in Lutsk, Volyn province - died November 27, 1972 in Moscow. Russian Soviet poet and translator, literary critic. Laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1967).

Yaroslav Smelyakov was born on December 26, 1912 (January 8, 1913 according to the new style) in Lutsk, Volyn province (now Ukraine).

Father - Vasily Eremeevich Smelyakov, served on railway.

Mother - Olga Vasilievna, a housewife, came from a family of Kritsky philistines who had merchant roots.

The elder sister is Zinaida (born 1899).

The elder brother is Vladimir (born 1901).

Yaroslav was the third and youngest child in the family. About the city of his birth - Lutsk - he later wrote in verse:

I was born in a county town
and still fondly remember
wretched house built on the edge
lane leading to the river.

I remember evening backwaters
noble belly pans,
shining wings of phaetons
and officers red pants.

This is where I grew up. Under this frail roof
I stumbled and began to walk
heard here for the first time in my life! - word,
and here I learned to speak.

He was only 1 year and 7 months old when the Russian-German front approached Lutsk and the Smelyakov family left for Voronezh, their mother's homeland. He spent his childhood in the countryside.

In Voronezh, Yaroslav went to the 1st Soviet Labor School. Acquaintance with the masterpieces of Russian poetry, especially the poems "Mtsyri" and "The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov", shocked Yaroslav's imagination. The book of poems made a great impression on the young poet.

From the age of 10 he began to write poetry. Eleven-year-old Yaroslav was sent by his mother to older children in Moscow to continue his studies at a seven-year school, and soon she herself moved to the capital. They lived in a house at Bolshaya Molchanovka, 31 (now the Oktyabr cinema is on this site).

In 1931 he graduated from the printing factory school. “Within the walls of this school, located in Sokolniki, we all enthusiastically breathed the Komsomol atmosphere of the beginning of the five-year plans,” the poet wrote in his autobiography “A Few Words About Myself”. Worked in a printing house.

At the insistence of a friend, journalist Vsevolod Iordansky, he brought his poems to the editorial office of the youth magazine Rost, but mixed up the doors and ended up in the October magazine, where he was received by his idol, the poet Mikhail Svetlov, who gave the young poet a green light. Ironically, on one of the very first working days at the printing house, he was entrusted with typing his own poems - the collection Work and Love (1932).

While still studying at the FZU (being a “fabzaite”), he published poems in the workshop wall newspaper. He also wrote reviews for the propaganda team. He made his debut in print in 1931. Smelyakov sang of a new way of life, hard work.

He was engaged in literary circles at the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper and the Ogonyok magazine. Together with him, the then beginners, and later eminent poets Sergei Mikhalkov, Margarita Aliger and others visited the literary association.

Member of the SP of the USSR since 1934.

In 1934-1937 he was repressed. During the years of terror, two close friends of Ya. V. Smelyakov - the poets Pavel Vasiliev and Boris Kornilov - were shot. Later, in the poem "Three Knights", Smelyakov wrote about this friendship:

We lived together, like an artel,
but it seems, perhaps, that is not so -
poems were written differently and separately,
and the fee was carried to one tavern.

Since 1937 - executive secretary of the newspaper "Dzerzhinets" of the labor commune named after Dzerzhinsky (Lyubertsy).

In 1939 he was reinstated in the USSR Writers' Union as a responsible instructor in the prose section.

Member of the Great Patriotic War. From June to November 1941 he was a private on the Northern and Karelian fronts. He was surrounded, was in Finnish captivity until 1944. Returned from captivity.

In 1945, Smelyakov was again repressed and ended up near Stalinogorsk (now the city of Novomoskovsk, Tula Region) in a special check-filtration camp No. 283 (PFL No. 283), where he was “filtered” for several years.

Special (filtration) camps were created by the decision of the State Defense Committee in last days 1941 in order to check the soldiers of the Red Army who were in captivity, encircled or living in the territory occupied by the enemy. The procedure for passing the state inspection (“filtering”) was determined by the Order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 001735 of December 28, 1941, according to which military personnel were sent to special camps, where they temporarily received the status of “former” military personnel or “special contingent”.

He served his term in the camp department No. 22 PFL No. 283 at mine No. 19 of the Krasnoarmeyskugol trust. The mine was located between the modern cities of Donskoy and Severo-Zadonsk (since 2005, a microdistrict of the city of Donskoy). At the mine he worked as a bath attendant, then as an accountant. Through the efforts of journalists P. V. Poddubny and S. Ya. Pozdnyakov, the poet was released and worked as an executive secretary of the Stalinogorskaya Pravda newspaper, led the literary association under it. His brother, Ivan, was with him in the camp. After the camp, Smelyakov was banned from entering Moscow. He went to Moscow furtively, in no case did he spend the night. Thanks to the one who put in a word for Smelyakov, he managed to return to writing again. In 1948, the book "Kremlin Fir" was published.

In 1951, on the denunciation of two poets, he was again arrested and sent to the polar Inta. Smelyakov sat until 1955, returning home under an amnesty, not yet rehabilitated. Rehabilitated in 1956.

In poetry, he used colloquial rhythms and intonations, resorted to a peculiar combination of lyrics and humor. In the collections of the post-war years ("Kremlin Fir", 1948; "Selected Poems", 1957) and the poem "Strict Love" (1956), dedicated to the youth of the 1920s, there is a tendency to the simplicity and clarity of the verse, the monumentality of the image and the socio-historical comprehension of life. The poem, partly written back in the camp, received wide recognition.

In the works of the later period, these tendencies were most fully developed. One of the main topics was the theme of the continuity of generations, Komsomol traditions: collections "Conversation about the main thing" (1959), "Day of Russia" (1967); "Comrade Komsomol" (1968), "December" (1970), a poem about the Komsomol "Young people" (1968) and others. Posthumously published My Generation (1973) and Time Service (1975).

Among the most famous works - "If I get sick...", "Good girl Lida" (an excerpt from this poem is read by the main characters in the film "Operation" Y "and other adventures of Shurik"), "Cemetery of locomotives", "Lyubka", "Lovely beauties of Russia". The song on the verses “If I Get Sick” was performed by others (a fragment of this song is also performed by the main characters in the film “Beware of the Car”).

The quality of Smelyakov's poems varies greatly both in terms of their depth and form of expression; there is a genuine talent (which is confirmed by such experts as E. Vinokurov, N. Korzhavin, Z. Paperny), as well as the weakness of the general position of this poet, who experienced blows of fate and fell into alcoholism. Smelyakov's good poems are distinguished by their strength and convex imagery of language, the bad ones by cheap rhymed declamation.

Member of the Board of the Writers' Union of the USSR since 1967, of the Board of the Writers' Union of the RSFSR since 1970. Chairman of the poetic section of the Writers' Union of the USSR.

In the last 15 years of his life, Smelyakov is a recognized, venerable poet, beloved by readers. He speaks on the radio, in television programs, travels around the country much more than other Soviet writers, goes on business trips abroad, meets with young poets of Russia and other republics. Many who started their creative way the authors recalled with gratitude his strict, but always benevolent and fair criticism. He helps young writers to publish, paternally takes care of them. Yaroslav Vasilyevich was respected for his stoic character, adherence to principles, kindness, humor.

Yaroslav Smelyakov died on November 27, 1972. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (site No. 7).

The Novomoskovsk Historical and Art Museum has an exposition dedicated to the poet. A large photographic and documentary material is presented, including drafts of poems from the Stalinogorsk period of Smelyakov's life, personal belongings (transferred by the poet's widow), as well as books by the poet's students and friends with dedicatory inscriptions.

There is Smelyakova street in Lutsk.

Yaroslav Smelyakov. If I get sick...

Personal life of Yaroslav Smelyakov:

In the early 1930s, he had tender feelings for a poetess. Young people were in love, met, walked around Moscow, read poetry to each other. However, the idyll turned out to be short-lived, they began to quarrel more and more often and soon parted, maintaining friendly relations. During one of the last dates, Yaroslav gave Margarita a massive silver ring with Masonic symbols: a skull and two crossbones. At the same time, he half-jokingly, half-seriously said: "As long as you wear the ring, everything will be fine with me."

In the spring of 1934, Margarita Aliger found out that Yaroslav Smelyakov was in prison and began to feverishly look for the ring he had given, which she removed from her finger and put away somewhere when she married the composer Konstantin Makarov-Rakitin. However, the search was in vain. Two years later, she accidentally discovered the ring in a desk drawer among the papers and immediately put it on. In old age, she told friends mysterious story with this Masonic ring, which disappeared when Yaroslav was in trouble, and was unexpectedly found when his business was going uphill. Before the last arrest of Smelyakov in 1951, the ring broke and then lay unrepaired in the table among the papers for 20 years, but on the day of the poet's funeral, Margarita found it whole, although she herself did not hand it over for repairs.

Was married twice.

The first time he married immediately after the war, when he lived in Stalinogorsk. His wife was a simple woman - Evdokia Vasilievna Kurbatova, who in close circle name was Dusey. He divorced her in absentia after his arrest, so as not to expose her to the danger of reprisals (she remarried the famous jockey of the Moscow Hippodrome Alexander Bondarevsky). It is to his first wife that his famous poem "Monument" is dedicated:

Like late light from a dark window
I look at you from cast iron.
Not without reason, after all, solemn metal
repeated my face and hands.
No wonder the sculptor invested in the statue
everything that I meant and why I lived.
And I will descend from a shining height
to the land where you live.
I'll get closer to my happiness
with a cast-iron hand I will quietly embrace.
On bulging menacing eyes
suddenly a cast-iron tear will come running.
And you will hear in the park near Moscow
cast-iron voice, my gentle voice.

The second wife is Tatyana Valerievna Smelyakova-Streshneva, a poetess and translator.

The second marriage was strong and happy. Smelyakov helped his wife raise Volodya, the son from her first marriage. Tatyana adapted to his difficult character, forgave bad habits and fleeting hobbies, she knew how to resolve conflicts that arose due to the poet's tactless behavior at feasts.

Spouses were brought together by love for poetry, art, nature, people and animals. Two mongrel dogs lived in their two-room apartment at No. 19 on Lomonosovsky Prospekt and in the dacha in Peredelkino, which once belonged to Alexander Fadeev, and in the last year of his life, the poet picked up a mongrel puppy on the street.

The poet dedicated several poems to his wife Tatyana. The most beautiful of them is "Winter Night". It talks about the return of the guests through the snowy night streets of Leningrad with her beloved, who in the snow "sequins looks like a Russian winter-winter." The poem ends with the words:

And I shoot snowflakes from you
how Pushkin photographed sables.

Bibliography of Yaroslav Smelyakov:

1932 - Work and love
1932 - Poems
1934 - Road
1934 - Poems
1934 - Happiness
1948 - Kremlin firs
1949 - Miner's Lamp
1950 - Poems
1956 - Strict love
1957 - Selected Poems
1959 - Talk about the main thing
1959 - Strict love
1960 - Work and love
1961 - Poems
1962 - Gold Reserve
1963 - Work and love
1963 - Good girl Lida
1964 - Book of Poems
1965 - Alyonushka
1965 - Rose of Tajikistan
1966 - Day of Russia
1966 - Lovely beauties of Russia
1967 - Day of Russia
1967 - Poems
1967 - Strict love
1968 - Day of Russia
1968 - Young people
1968 - Comrade Komsomol
1970 - Selected works in two volumes
1970 - Svyazny Lenin
1970 - December
1972 - My generation
1975 - Time service. Poetry
1977-1978 - Collected works in three volumes
1979 - Poems and poems

Smelyakov Yaroslav Vasilyevich was born on January 8, 1913 (December 26, 1912 according to the old style) in the city of Lutsk, Ukraine.

His father worked as a weigher on the railroad. The mother was a housewife and was engaged in raising children (there were three of them in the family).

Childhood and youth

When Yaroslav was about a year old, the First World War began. In this regard, the family was forced to move to relatives in the village. There they did not stay long. Some time later, the family settled in Voronezh, where they remained until the beginning of the next decade.

Smelyakov's father passed away early, when Yaroslav was only eleven years old.

At the same time, the future poet entered a seven-year school in Moscow, where he settled with his older brother and sister.

By the beginning of the thirties, Yaroslav graduated from school and, through the labor exchange, received a referral to the PFZSH ("Printing Factory School") named after Lenin.

It was she who played a huge role in shaping the future talent. Smelyakova was fascinated by the bustling life of the printing house.

Being a compositor, the poet was very proud that his favorite activities - work and creativity - are related to each other.

The beginning of the creative path

The publication of the first work took place thanks to his friend - Vsevolod Iordansky. It was he who motivated Smelyakov to submit his works to the Rost magazine.

However, having entered the building of the publishing house, Yaroslav Smelyakov confused the doors of the offices and mistakenly submitted the poems for consideration to the more respected and serious "October", which at that time was popular among young people.

The fruits of his work were approved by the editorial committee and published in the journal.

In 1932-1933, Yaroslav Smelyakov released his first collections: "Work and Love" and "Poems"

However, after some time, he, as well as a number of other poets Boris Kornilov), become a victim of which, as is typical for that time, became the reason for immediate arrest without trial or investigation. Yaroslav Smelyakov was able to throw off the charges from his shoulders only in 1937. Then he was released early.

Until the war, the poet worked in the editorial offices of various publishing houses, was engaged in reporting activities, wrote feuilletons and notes.

During this period, he wrote the Crimean Poems cycle, was repeatedly published in well-known publications: Litgazeta, Young Guard, Krasnaya Nov, etc.

The Great Patriotic War

Yaroslav Smelyakov met the beginning of the war as a private of the Second Light Infantry Brigade in the Northern and

In November 1941, being surrounded, he, like many soldiers of his unit, was taken prisoner in Finland, where for the next three years he worked hard for a merciless master.

It is noteworthy that, being in a similar position, Smelyakov skillfully concealed the creative status of an already famous Russian poet at that time.

The poet was able to return to his homeland only in 1944, when, as a result of a truce with Finland, an exchange of prisoners of war was made.

Smelyakova was expected by the fate of almost all liberated Soviet prisoners of war - he was sent to the camp for "filtration".

There are several versions about where Smelyakov was during this period. It is known for sure that he worked in a coal mine near Moscow, but there is information about his arrival in the industrial town of Stalinogorsk (now Novomoskovsk) in the Tula region.

Postwar years

After several years of imprisonment, the poet comes to the rescue of his good friend Konstantin Simonov, who literally pulls his brother out of oblivion.

In 1948, Smelyakov's first post-war collection "Kremlin Fir" was published, which included poems from the war years.

However, the poet does not stay at large for a long time. Already in 1951, an unknown person wrote a denunciation about a table conversation that took place in Smelyakov's house.

The stigma of the 58th article of the Criminal Code of the USSR was imposed on the poet, according to which he had to be punished in the form of twenty-five years in the camps.

Thus, Smelyakov was able to get acquainted with the Arctic. Camp life adversely affects the health of the poet.

In 1956, the “exposure of the cult of Stalin” took place, according to which amnesty was granted to many prisoners. Yaroslav Smelyakov was also released. The poet until the end of his life will remember the days "in a government cap, in a camp jacket."

He devoted all subsequent years of his life to literary creativity.

During this time, the poet was awarded three orders, as well as the State Prize of the USSR in 1967 and 1968.

Personal life

The first novel of the poet happened in the 30s. It is associated with the name of the poetess Margarita Aliger (her photograph, provided below, was taken in the mid-70s), who, together with Smelyakov, attended a literary club.

An interesting place in this novel is occupied by the ring donated by Smelyakov to the poetess.

According to Aliger, when something bad happened to the poet, the ring was lost. So, for example, it happened when Smelyakov was captured by the Finnish.

He met Evdokia Vasilievna in the post-war years. She became the first woman with whom Yaroslav Smelyakov was married. The poet and Evdokia lived together for only two years: Smelyakov divorced his wife in order to protect her from the repressions that consumed him. From this marriage, the poet had a son.

The second family created by Smelyakov turned out to be happier. This time the poet's chosen one was the translator Tatyana Streshneva.

The poet Yaroslav Smelyakov, whose biography was presented in this article, is a truly talented poet, a “master of symbolic lists”, who has experienced truly difficult and terrible episodes in the history of our country.

The Soviet era gave us some good lyrics. Let us recall at least the names of Nikolai Zabolotsky, Leonid Martynov, Alexander Mezhirov, David Samoilov, Nikolai Rubtsov ... But official criticism for a long time believed that the name of Alexander Trifonov should have been the first in this row. If you believe the rumors, such a statement was very infuriating Yaroslav Smelyakov. It seemed to him that he could compete with Tvardovsky on an equal footing.

Yaroslav Vasilyevich Smelyakov was born on December 26, 1912 (according to the new style on January 8, 1913) in Ukraine, in Lutsk. My father worked as a railroad weigher for many years. His son spent his early childhood in the countryside. Later the family moved to Moscow. After graduating from seven classes of the 48th metropolitan school on Herzen Street, Smelyakov tried a dozen professions. He tried himself as a janitor, and as a stoker, and as an assistant supply agent for industrial cooperation. However, he could not stay anywhere for a long time. Finally, at the beginning of 1930, the metropolitan youth labor exchange sent him to Sokolniki, to the printing factory school named after Ilyich. However, an intelligent compositor from Smelyakov did not work out either. This profession has always required special attention. And Smelyakov had only girls and rhymes on his mind very early. The only thing he remembers from the fashion era is how he typed lines of his own poems for the October magazine with his own hands. In 1932, Smelyakov published two books at once: "Poems" and "Work and Love", which suddenly caused a sharp skirmish in the capital's writers' circles. So, Alexey Surkov resolutely denied the poet a clear proletarian worldview. Thanks Alexander Zharov, who immediately gave Surkov an equally furious rebuke. Smelyakov himself then flaunted that he was allegedly a drummer who was called into literature straight from the workshop, and therefore he had to forgive a lot, if not all. In this regard, the memoirs Maria Belkina, who met the poet in the early 1930s. She said: “It was at the rink. A guy came up to me, he looked like a worker. When I fell several times, he picked me up and said: “Listen, I like you, let's get married with you. They will give me a room in a hostel, a card. I am a drummer, called to literature, I was chosen at a meeting, my novel is led by Stavsky himself. Are you literate?" I said that I had finished ten classes, he was terribly happy and said that I would help him correct his mistakes. And already in 1937, at the Literary Institute, I was sitting at a meeting, a guy was standing behind me, he put his foot on a chair, pressing my thick braid with his knee. I turned around in displeasure, said something to him, and pulled out my braid. The guy's face looked like that drummer called into literature. He said to me: "Look how gentle we are." And someone said to him: “Hey, Smelyakov, take your foot off the chair!” I was surprised that it was Smelyakov. I really liked his poem about Lyubka Feigelman. After a while, I either read or told me Margarita Aliger that he was indeed "called into literature", but he was very talented. Therefore, anyway, sooner or later I would have got there ”(I quote from the book by N. Gromova“ Knot ”, M., 2006). A poem about Lyubka Feigelman, which Belkina liked so much, Smelyakov wrote in 1933. For a poet, he was still relatively serene. Thunder struck in the summer of 1934, after the publication of an extremely angry article in Pravda, Izvestia and Litgazeta M. Gorky"Literary Amusements". The great proletarian writer stated: “On the characterization young poet Yar. Smelyakov's personal qualities are more and more reflected Pavel Vasiliev. There is nothing dirtier than this fragment of bourgeois-literary bohemia. Politically (this is not new to those who know the work of Pavel Vasiliev) this is the enemy. Immediately after the publication of Gorky's article, literary functionaries gathered a meeting to arrange another scolding for young talents. The tone was set by the poet Nikolai Sidorenko, who stated that the main blame for the creative and everyday decay of young poets should be borne by Pavel Vasiliev, who tried to make both Smelyakov and Dolmatovsky and almost all of their friends. Further, the mood of Sidorenko was supported by the head of Glavlit Volin, who reproached Smelyakov for the abundance of Yeseninism in his poems. Judging by the transcript of the meeting, preserved in the archive of criticism Valeria Kirpotina, Smelyakov first rushed to the attack. When he was given the floor, he did not deny the accusations of drunkenness. “All this is true and honest - I drink,” said Smelyakov. But why? The poet claimed that he was tired of living in "an atmosphere of gossip, squabbles, theft of lines - it is impossible to understand: either you stole, or someone stole from you." However, in the course of the meeting, Smelyakov's mood changed dramatically. And already at the end of the meeting, he actually completely renounced Vasiliev. Smelyakov agreed that Vasilyev was the enemy. According to him, it turned out that Vasilyev was “a terrible, brutal person who could betray me too. Our friendship has gone through quarrels. He almost hit me in the ear, and I gave him a glass. I was offended at how they were messing with Vasiliev. He, for example, attached himself to the deceased Lunacharsky. He exaggerated a lot, but still many of the big people were interested in him. And I didn't belong to those people. This made me angry” (I quote from the book of memoirs by V. Kirpotin “A Coeval of the Iron Age”, M., 2006). At the end of his speech, Smelyakov recalled that he had eight dependents. He thought that this fact would cause indulgence from the literary authorities. But nothing like that. Senior comrades thirsted for blood. A new act of drama played out at the first congress of Soviet writers. Alexander Bezymensky, enraged by the report Nikolai Bukharin(of course! The favorite of the party called him a poet par excellence of the "light cavalry" in struggle and labor), he decided to hit the characters in Gorky's article once again. He recalled: “Smelyakov is a serious poetic phenomenon, expressing the generation that did not know the oppression of tsarism. He is not only influenced by the bohemian-hooligan lifestyle,<…>but also harmful creative influences. The Congress of Writers was held at the end of August 1934, and exactly six months later Smelyakov was on the bunk. He was arrested on December 22 along with Leonid Lavrov and Isaac Bely. During a search, the Chekists found in the poet a copy of Hitler's book Mein Kampf, which was published in a very limited edition and which was given out in the Kremlin for a short acquaintance only to specially verified people according to the list approved by the Central Committee of the CPSU (b). In addition to keeping a banned book, Smelyakov was also charged with anti-Soviet conversations and antisocial behavior. Moreover, during the investigation, he did not particularly deny these accusations. He said: “I took Gorky’s article, which was also directed against me, and the subsequent disclosure of my mistakes by the public, the reprimand from the Moscow Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, I took as a personal insult and became embittered. In the Writers' Union, even the people who direct literature are untalented, toadying people, driving everything into a scheme, ruining true writers and preventing creativity from flourishing. Gorky does not like Soviet poetry, his work has fizzled out, he is a scarecrow for talents - these are my words. I also said that ... a person cannot always adjust his creativity to joy, a person has the right to reflect in his creativity not only the scheme imposed on him, but has the right to create tears, and we are forced to write about cars, gas tanks, when we want to write about tears…” According to the memoirs of the poet Leonid Vysheslavsky, already in prison, fate again pushed Smelyakov and Pavel Vasilyev. Vysheslavsky already in 1998 told the Kyiv newspaper The Day: “A young man of eighteen, at the very beginning of the 30s, I arrived in Moscow, met the already famous young Pavel Vasiliev. On summer evenings, we often sat at the Prague restaurant, on the roof lined with tables. Pavel is a bright, stormy Siberian, who, by his gift, was compared with Yesenin, talks about literary events in Moscow. And then another famous poet appears in the restaurant, Sergei Vasiliev. And Pavel and Sergey have long been “on knives”. Paul's nostrils flare. He calls the waiter and orders ten yolks of scrambled eggs. Then he imperceptibly approaches Sergey from behind and with the words: “Do not disgrace the name of the Vasilyevs!” - knocks over the contents of the pan on the head. Scandal, fight, dishes to smithereens. The police appear and take away Pavel, Sergei and me - as a witness and accomplice. We were squeezed into a dark cell. And there was already sitting Yaroslav Smelyakov, who had gone wide in another place. I must say that the songs of the young Smelyakov, for example, about Lyubka Feigelman, then, in the 30s, were sung by all of Moscow. And what did the three poets do, locked in a cell in a police station? Of course, poetry was read all night. Sergei and Pavel forgot about their feuds. None of them has dishonored the name of Vasiliev. And Smelyakov also sang his famous songs. I, eighteen years old, was shocked by this flurry of poetry. Although it is possible that in some details the memory of the 84-year-old memoirist could change. On March 4, 1935, Bely, Lavrov, and Smelyakov were sentenced by a special meeting "for participating in a counter-revolutionary group" to three years in labor camps. Upon his release, Smelyakov tried to return to his former way of life. True, in poetry he had another idol. At some point, he clearly began to imitate Mayakovsky. But then, it seems, he came to his senses and continued to search for his own intonation. Apparently, in 1939, Smelyakov had an affair with Margarita Aliger. Together they undertook to write a play and a story. But their romantic relationship was short-lived. By the way, I do not exclude that the poet wrote one of his best poems “The Good Girl Lida” then under the influence of his feelings specifically for Aliger. When the war began, Smelyakov was taken into the army and sent to Karelia. But a few months later he was captured by the Finns. Naturally, after the arrival of the Soviet troops, the poet was sent to a test camp. But at that time, no terrible sedition was found against him. The check ended for him by being sent to the Tula mines. Once again at large, Smelyakov was confused. He wanted to write primarily about love and romance. Back in 1946, these wonderful lines were born to him: In a storm electric light young Juliet dies. Festive tiers and lodges Ophelia's voice disturbs. In gold and dark blue sequins, Cinderella dances on the stage. Our sisters are in the dim hall, we haven't written about you yet. In underground dugouts, and not in a fairy tale, our wives tried on helmets. Not in the gardens of Perrault, but in the Urals, you fertilized the earth with ash. Russian princesses died on long stretchers under a canopy. Nearby, in state sadness, machine gunners stood quietly. You took off your pea jackets and overcoats, put on old shoes. We will dress you in silks, we will warm your shoulders with sables. We will build you big palaces, dear beauties of Russia. We will write essays about you, full of love and surprise. But Smelyakov understood that only "Lovely Beauties of Russia" would not save him. They expected him civil lyrics, but one that could please the leaders. And he forcefully squeezed out these lyrics. In 1948, the poet published a small collection of "Kremlin firs", consisting entirely of loyal poems. It seemed to him that by singing the revolution, it would be easier to avert a new misfortune from himself. Turns out it didn't get any easier. The third time Smelyakov was taken away in 1951. At one time it was believed that he thundered in Inta allegedly as a "repeater". But according to another version, the poet was let down not just by his bad profile. By 1951, some details of Smelyakov's behavior in Finnish captivity became known. As it turned out, he then mercilessly found fault with the Soviet government. Now Smelyakov was able to return to Moscow only in 1955. And a year later he published, perhaps, his best thing - the poem "Strict Love". Over the years, a legend arose about Smelyakov that the poet, after serving three times in the camps, remained a fanatic to the end. Soviet power. An ardent supporter of this myth - Stanislav Kunyaev. In his opinion, Smelyakov was always distinguished by “some special, completely earnest, almost religious faith in the rightness of a new life emerging before our eyes. His poetic pathos was, by its nature and integrity, akin to the pathos of the ancient Greek poets, who laid the foundations for the heroic and tragic sense of human history, with its pre-Christian concepts of fate, personal fate and the ancient choir. In his outlook on life there was neither Mayakovsky's split, nor repentant throwing Tvardovsky, no irony Zabolotsky, no worldview breakdown Boris Slutsky. Next to them - already in the sixties and seventies - whether they were older or younger, he seemed somehow unwilling to doubt, evolve and revise his views as a “five-year-old mammoth” (S. Kunyaev. Poetry. Fate. Russia. Book 2, M., 2001). But personally, I think that real life things were somewhat different. Fanaticism was more like a mask. In his heart, he understood everything perfectly. It is no coincidence that in December 1967, the poem “Three Knights” escaped from him, inspired by reflections on Pavel Vasiliev and Boris Kornilov and about their own destiny. From youth or from a hangover - foolishly, observing the reserved time all the time, we brought sufficient dues to our Russian literature. But Vasiliev and Kornilov were quickly ruined, they were not allowed to finish. And I returned to the winter capital and now became a member of the presidiums. The same evil, the same sharp-faced, but hidden for defense - a knife. If you analyze this poem from an artistic point of view, everything is terrible. And if you look at it in the context of time?.. What kind of fanaticism or faith in the idea can we talk about? In the last years of his life, Smelyakov as a poet, it seems to me, broke down. Yes, it has received official recognition. In 1967, for the book "Day of Russia", he received the State Prize, which, ironically, bore the name of one of his first persecutors - Maxim Gorky. A year later, in pursuit of a very weak poem "Young People", he was also sent the Lenin Komsomol Prize. The poet began to be invited as a wedding general to almost all government events. But the hail of awards did not affect the level of skill. Probably was right David Samoilov, who believed that "Smelyakov is a talent killed by fear and falsehood" (D. Samoilov. Day records. Volume 2. M., 2002). Smelyakov died on November 27, 1972. He was buried at the government Novodevichy cemetery. Already in perestroika, a new discussion broke out around Smelyakov's poems. " New world"I then decided to publish some of his poems from the poet's legacy. And one of the poems was given the name "Cursist". In the "Novomir" edition, this poem began like this: Casemates of the gendarme detective, Transfers of a huge country. In the nineteenth, she became a student Commissar of the Civil War. But connoisseurs knew that Smelyakov called this poem in a completely different way - “Zhidovka”, and it began a little differently. What happened? Was the magazine afraid to be accused of non-existent sins? Or did the editors not want to evoke some other dangerous associations in the reader? As a result, the controversy about poetry grew into a heated political discussion. Stanislav Kunyaev, quoting Smelyakov abundantly, of course, went to generalizations of a political plan. First, he repeated Smelyakov's lines: The Chekist's pen splatters in blots, The moon shines in the frosty window, And the gunshot thing is silent On the belt pulled to the side. Untidy, like a true genius, And pale, like a prophet locked up. Nobody has any indulgence Never to be found with her. …………………………………… We are all worth what we are worth, Judgment will be made soon, And you yourself will be taken under escort On Soviet soil ... And then Kunyaev's reasoning began. "Two women. One is a Russian worker (“the direct features of the delegates, the silent faces of labor”), a mother and wife who can do everything, shod in men's boots, dressed in army underwear, and the other is a professional revolutionary, a fanatical security officer in a leather jacket with a revolver on her side, who cannot “neither erase nor give birth”, but only interrogate and shoot ... Two faces of one revolution hostile to each other ... Which of them was dearer and dearer to Smelyakov - it is unnecessary to say. After the death of Smelyakov, this one of his best poems, at the behest of the compilers and publishers, was not even included in his most complete book - a one-volume edition published in 1979 by the "Big Library of the Poet". It was so terrible for its historical truth to the so-called "children of the 20th Party Congress." However, like the poem about the death of Mayakovsky - about Jewish ladies of the demi-monde, about "lily" and "axes", about "brehobriks", about "prostitutes with a wasp camp", who, "gathering at night, drank the golden blood of the poet." What a coven rose after its publication! How! Smelyakov swung at the holy of holies - at our caste! Simonov ran to the Central Committee and demanded the punishment of those responsible, argued that the poems were written by Yaroslav Smelyakov in an insane state, that the author himself was against their publication, that they were published against his will. Boris Slutsky called the poet's widow Tatyana Streshneva and threatened that she would not receive another line of transfers, that all “decent people would recoil from her”, that she would not earn a penny anywhere else ... It’s good that Vadim Kuznetsova, who published the poem in the almanac "Poetry", the layout of the poem, endorsed by Smelyakov, has been preserved. And the poet himself by that time was already inaccessible to the anger of the admirers of the Brikov salon who had not forgotten anything and had not learned anything - he was already sleeping an eternal sleep under the stone slab of the Novodevichy cemetery. But the antipode of Kunyaev perceived Smelyakov’s poem “Zhidovka” in a completely different way - Stanislav Rassadin. At one time, Kunyaev and Rassadin "did not share" Vladimir Vysotsky. Kunyaev believed that Rassadin deliberately distorted his thoughts and for this he publicly slapped the offender in the face. And then they diverged in their views on Smelyakov. Rassadin, when he studied the biography of Smelyakov and analyzed his work, came to the conclusion that the drama of the poet's rare lyrical gift was determined not only by a terrible fate. The critic wrote: “It is unlikely that two of Smelyakov’s poems of the 1930s deliberately backfired with their titles: "Love" and "Lyubka". In one, a young typographical worker (the profession of the poet himself, who typed his first book with his own hand) hates his rival, mature, strong, who knows “business and money”, and claims his right of the hegemonic proletarian to the love of his wife. But in the other, there is no time for the Young Bolshevik claims: “We have not lived yet, and we are already being bred, / and they told us: “We have lived. It's time!" / They told me that they were walking with you, / smiling impudently, our fraera. / I was told that you were on a spree - / patent leather shoes, a brooch, a permanent, / that a pink, experienced, / twenty-three-year-old transport student is walking with you ”... A twenty-three-year-old! What an idea of ​​maturity! This fake Odessa Lyubka, she is Murka, is natural because there is a game of the tragedy of outraged love, when the soul, which has not yet experienced suffering, really wants to suffer. A game that liberates from the gloomy need to follow the moral and ideological canon. Wouldn’t it seem strange to compare the charming poems of young Smelyakov with a poem of his mature pores, rigidly titled “Zhidovka” (at the first, posthumous publication, shamefully renamed “Cursist” - apparently, then, in order to avoid suspicion of anti-Semitism)? “Proclamation and strike, / transfers of a vast country. / In the nineteenth, she became a Jew / commissar of the civil war. / She didn’t know how to wash, nor to give birth, / neither mother nor wife - / she understood and knew the matter of only one revolution. / A Chekist pen splashes with blots, / the moon shines in a frosty window, / and the gunshot thing is silent / on a belt pulled to the side. The horror of a normal person at the thought of a fanatic, whom neither the blood of those she sent to execution, nor her own Gulag fate are able to change, is what is poignantly clear here: “In that area, spacious and new, / having received housing as a writer, / in our department postal / I'm standing behind her. / And I watch, not too surprised - / life is not poor with impressions, / like her pension book / she pushes through the window. "Pushes" - a verb expressing incorrigibility! Where is the light Lyubka and where is the painful Zhidovka! Meanwhile, they are akin to their freedom - let youthful poems be free, ingenuously, initially, not yet wanting, not having time to give in to independence to the installations of the Iron Age, and in a later poem, a release from the power of that which Smelyakov, a man of the generation from which they equally went to executioners and victims, swore to serve ”(S. Rassadin. Soviet literature: Defeated winners. St. Petersburg, 2006). Now I'm not going to talk about who is right: Kunyaev or Rassadin. I want to emphasize something else: Smelyakov was very complex figure, and do not try to fit it into the Procrustean bed. I am sure that both the "right" and the "left" will return to the poet's best poems for many years to come. Smelyakov is interesting to everyone.