Veronika Tushnova: You can give anything for this! (life, creativity and love). “Why is it possible without millions? An amazing love story between two poets
The relationship between Veronica Tushnova, who gave us amazing lyrics, including the poem “Loving Do Not Renounce,” and the poet and prose writer Alexander Yashin has long been a secret. Then they began to write about them, but, alas, one-sidedly. We decided to tell you in detail...
Quiet... They sat in silence, looking at the river. It's an hour to the train, but there's still a walk to get there. The day next to him burns out quickly, like a match. She pulled a blade of grass from his hair. She poked her face into her shoulder. It's time.
They almost ran to the station. The train is empty, but after a couple of stations it will be packed. Veronica will leave earlier. Previously, Sasha asked her about this, now she comes out on her own, without waiting for requests. They shouldn't be seen together. She will have time to see him in the window of the departing train. He waves his hand. He follows the train with his eyes. Now you just have to somehow live a week without him. To live somehow.
She used to imagine Sasha coming home. He takes off his jacket. Goes to the kitchen. Pouring tea. Or is he waiting for his wife to give in? She didn’t know the details, but she pictured them so vividly that it was as if she really saw his return. The return is not to her.
FIRST BOOK
When dad returns home, Veronica will hide from his sharp gaze. She is afraid of doing something wrong.
And mom is afraid. Dad is very smart, he is a professor of medicine. He is angry that Veronica is doing stupid things, copying poems into a notebook. And she hears them and seems to fly away somewhere. Poems are the music of the heart. Maybe they can heal too? Dad wants Veronica to become a doctor.
She was not used to contradicting her and entered first the Kazan University, and then the Leningrad Medical University. And soon the family moved again - to Moscow. My father was given an apartment on Novinsky Boulevard. Veronica entered graduate school at the department of the Institute of Experimental Medicine. A good place. There was just something missing all the time. She tried to draw. But even when I was drawing, lines were forming in my head.
In 1938 she met Yura Rozinsky. A wonderful, intelligent psychiatrist. When they walked down the street together, there are such beautiful couples! And daughter Natasha was proud of her parents. They will part with Yura.
Nobody knows why and why people break up. But years later he will come to her to die. Sick, torn. She leaves him. As a friend. But that will happen later...
Her sizzling, East Asian beauty took men's breath away. Painted in bright colors, with velvet skin and whirlpool eyes, Veronika Tushnova smiled - and captivated forever. But it wasn't just beauty.
She was an angel - soft, affectionate. With a sunny soul. Friends said that there are no people like Veronica. Indeed, she was even somehow overly bright. She loved giving gifts, tried to help everyone and everyone, forgetting about herself. Life, as a rule, teaches such blessed people, but not right away. And not everyone believes in their sincerity...
In 1941, Tushnova’s poems fell into the hands of Vera Inber. She told Veronica - you need to write. Inspired by the praise, Veronica entered the Gorky Literary Institute and wrote and wrote... Realizing that truly good poetry is born in a soul that has experienced pain and real joy, a deep feeling.
But none of this happened. Life just “got on somehow.” And then the war came. And again Kazan, evacuation.
Tushnova works in a hospital. There is a smell of blood, pus, and in the air there are groans, swearing, pain. In the midst of this hell, only love did not die. Including her: the wounded fell in love with her, calling her the doctor with the notebook: in between shifts, she wrote poetry. Critics will later say that, alas, they are rather weak. And for wounded soldiers - “just right.” She read them, embarrassed, and they nodded their heads.
In 1943, Tushnova returned to Moscow. She now saw the same effect of the indestructibility of love in the capital’s hospital. She was amazed that love managed to survive in mutilated bodies, did not drown in blood, and was not afraid of death.
“If it’s worth loving, it’s like this...” she thought.
But is it possible to love like that? In 1944, her poem “Surgeon” was accepted in the “New World”. And then her cycle “Poems about my daughter” was published by Komsomolskaya Pravda...
A year later, a collection of poems entitled “The First Book” landed on Veronica Tushnova’s desk. She couldn’t believe that it was hers... But the feeling of flying quickly passed: critics accused her of being “intimate” and “salon.”
She was worried. Therefore, her second collection, “Roads and Roads,” was published only nine years later.
When she first saw Alexander Yashin, whose poems she knew and loved, something immediately broke off and fell, and then flew up to her throat. She wanted to touch his cheek with her hand, and at this thought she flushed.
They made eye contact. Yashin was dumbfounded.
-Who is this beauty? - he asked his friend.
— Veronica Tushnova. Young poetess. Gifted.
He repeated the name “Veronica” until the evening and woke up in the morning with it on his lips. They started communicating. Neither he nor she could resist this wild craving for each other. Yashin will write:
Like sunlight, like living water,
Your love is for me...
SEPARATE, BUT TOGETHER
Yashin was amorous, and he had many passionate stories and a serious background behind him: marriages, two, or even three, according to rumors.
One is with the seriously ill Galya, the second is with Zlata. Three children from his first marriage, four from his second. Alexander Popov (the pseudonym Yashin would “stick” to him later) met his future wife Zlata, whom he called Zlata Konstantinovna, at the Literary Institute. She was gifted, wrote poetry, then completely subordinated herself to serving her husband, considering him a poet with a capital P. Yashin understood this.
My wife! Everything is with you -
Work, family, leisure...
All my life I've been from the battlefield
You can bear it, my friend
Describing the relationship that eventually developed between Tushnova and Yashin, they usually say that this love was unearthly. And it is true. But the truth is that he also loved Zlata deeply. She was his rear, his pier, his endless “point of return.” As soon as things went wrong on some trip, Yashin sent Zlata a telegram: “Leave, I can’t live without you!” And she dropped everything and flew. To the south or north, to virgin lands and to the taiga. To Sasha.
He was the first to sign and give his books to her. He signed it importantly: “To Zlata Konstantinovna, with great love and gratitude for all the bright, good things that she brought into my life, the first copy. Alexander Yashin, July 6 - 46.” And on the collection “Poems” he will write: “My beloved, my kind Zlata Konstantinovna! We are both in crisis, and we need to help each other, get out of trouble. And I am always with you, your Alexander. 20/10-58. Moscow". And to his youngest daughter, also Zlata, in a letter he will indicate: “...Dear Zainka, tell your mother a secret that I love her very, very much, I have loved her all my life, and I will love her all my life without end...” But what was this a crisis? Veronica... Pure, bright, sincere. She fell in love with him madly, giving him all her passion and tenderness without regret. He loved her, of course he did! He ran to her on weekends, and they went together out of town - to where they could walk through forests and fields, or even stay overnight in haystacks or at a hunting lodge.
It was undivided, crazy happiness - to see Veronica laughing, to bathe in her arms.
They hid their relationship for a long time. They hid light and passion deep inside. But Stalin's laureate Yashin was still visible. He occupied decent positions, and the couple was still noticed... Hissing began in the corners: Tushnova was accused of careerism.
His is an attack on the sacred, the family. He suffered, realizing that, loving two women, he made them both unhappy.
I'm not asking you for anything. And I don't promise. Just love me. I love it. Imagine how great it would be to go somewhere together. That would be great, honey...
He would disappear, and she would come home and fall face down on the bed. Everything was torn inside. She was to blame for the one he was returning to. But what can you show love?!
And together it is not possible, and separately it is impossible. Seeing a gray strand in her hair, she peered into the reflection. Life flies quickly... But I'm not even fifty yet! The pain sawed her in half. She fell to her knees. Tushnova was a doctor...
For what?! Why does she need such torture? For sinful love? She screamed out loud. Both from pain and from love.
Yashin put an end to the relationship shortly before her illness. Made a choice. Probably correct. Now he came home, took off his jacket, and went into the kitchen. Only the light in his life seemed to go out.
LOST, WE CRY...
Having learned that Veronica had cancer, Yashin went to see her at the hospital. He didn't know that it hurt her even to smile. After he left, she screamed in pain, tore the pillow with her teeth, and ate her lips. And moaned: “What a misfortune happened to me - I lived my life without you”.
The book “One Hundred Hours of Happiness” was brought to her room. She stroked the pages. Fine. Part of the circulation was stolen from the printing house - this is how her poems sank into the souls of the printers.
One hundred hours of happiness...
Is this not enough?
I washed it like golden sand,
Yashin’s wife responded with her own poems - bitterly:
“Only a hundred hours - she took it and stole it...”
Veronica clutched her heart. From pain and the impossibility of not loving someone who did not belong to her.
Yashin did not immediately realize that she was no longer there. In recent days, she did not allow him to be allowed into the ward. I didn’t want him to see her like that... He had something else left - real, reliable.
He went to a house in Bobrishny Ugor and licked his wounds there, howling like a wild animal. I re-read her poems, her “Loving does not renounce...” He instantly grew older, shriveled up, his eyes went dark. He only now realized what he had lost.
The disease crept into him quietly, meanly, evilly. Three years later he was dying of cancer. The one who killed his Veronica. Zlata was nearby. She also did not renounce, loving...
INSTEAD OF AN AFTERWORD
Tushnova and Yashin were born in different years, but on the same day - March 27. And both left in July, she on the 7th, 1965, he on the 11th, but in 1968. They left parting, but not falling out of love. Eduard Asadov dedicated a wonderful poem to them. And Zlata Konstantinovna, having drunk her cup of pain, years later published a collection of poems. They are like a diary written by a yearning soul...
I was in a hurry to do good deeds
On the eve of an operation in an oncology clinic on Kashirka in 1968, anticipating and even knowing in advance that there was very little chance of survival, Alexander Yashin, a recognized classic of Soviet poetry, agreed to answer one of the numerous questionnaires in a voraciously reading country about the nationality of poetry, national and classical traditions He answered in a rather unique way - he wrote a will to his brothers “Instead of an answer”: “...You need to write, my friends! Write about what you want and how you want, and only write as fully as possible. Express yourself. Your idea of life , your understanding of it and, of course, as truthfully as possible - as truthfully as your own character and respect for your human dignity allow."
Then this was the most important covenant: the people read the books, believed the writer, waited for his truthful and worthy word. Nowadays, for the sake of dubious readership and market success, the heirs to the glory of Russian literature are ready to write an enormous amount, often forgetting about dignity. And even more so about national traditions, the organic bearer of which was Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin (Popov) himself, who was born in March 1913 in the remote village of Bludnovo, Nikolsky district, Vologda province.
“My life’s path is not easy,” Yashin wrote in 1963, on his 50th birthday. “I knew from childhood that I would be a poet.” While still a seven-year student, he began publishing notes in Pionerskaya Pravda and received a fee that was then fabulous for him - 30 rubles. Now you read his story “The First Fee” as if it were fiction, about how a village boy in 1927 receives money from the capital in a remote village.
At the age of 19, Yashin began working as a literary assistant in the Vologda newspaper "Red North", and in 1934, the author of the first book of poetry was elected as a delegate to the First Congress of Writers. In Moscow, Alexey Surkov, marveling at the youth of the Vologda resident, introduced him to the circle of famous Soviet poets. Soon Yashin will move to the capital to study at the Literary Institute and create in the midst of public life. In his diary on June 22, 1941, he wrote: “I decided to be in the war, to see everything, to participate in everything. Now a new history of the world will be made, and here it’s a shame to be afraid for your life.” On July 12, the poet joined the party, and on the 15th he left at the disposal of the Political Directorate of the Baltic Fleet, fighting on the Leningrad and Stalingrad fronts in the decisive and terrible days of the pivotal battles, captured in three books of his poems and diaries.
In peaceful days, at the call of his soul (to be in the center of events!), the recognized poet, laureate of the Stalin Prize for the poem "Alena Fomina" left for virgin lands. After Yashin’s death, I had the opportunity to prepare for publication his virgin diaries, donated to “Literary Russia” by the widow Zlata Konstantinovna. Then for the first time I visited an orphaned apartment in a house on Lavrushensky Lane, recalling the impressions of Yashin’s student - the wonderful Vologda lyricist Alexander Romanov, my friend who passed away not so long ago. Sasha said that he brought his poems to the court on the eighth floor of the house. Yashin met him in a fur coat, because he worked in the cool autumn at the open window, began to read gloomily, then suddenly asked the timid author: “Do you read your poems to your mother?” Romanov embarrassedly admitted that he did not read. He shook his head reproachfully: “You should read it - after all, the poems are about the village.” He paused and again looked into his soul. “Mother would have sensed where the real truth is and where your pretense is...”
Alexander Yashin was simply consumed by this thirst for truth, tormented by the discrepancy between the instilled or assumed duty and a sick conscience. Therefore, he, the author of the folklorically bright book “Northern Woman”, the varnished “Soviet Man”, the soulful “Barefoot on the Ground”, turns to honest prose, creates the polemical journalism “Levers” and, finally, the story “Vologda Wedding”, which Alexander Tvardovsky wrote in 1962 year immediately published in Novy Mir. For her, the author is subjected to scathing party criticism, while receiving praise from country writers. “It’s great, by God!” Gabriel Troepolsky writes to Yashin. “Well, there are simply no words for how great it is! Only someone who loves a person very much can write this.” The author goes to his homeland and, among the miraculously preserved fragments of the wedding ceremony, the beauty of nature and emotional movements, only indicates the tragedy of the passing northern village. He only hinted at the real problems of the village, but caused a barrage of retaliation and accusations of slander...
Unfortunately, no songs have been written based on Yashin’s own poems. But the best songs from Alla Pugacheva’s repertoire - “They Don’t Renounce Loving” and “You see, everything will still be” - are set to the piercing poems of Veronica Tushnova. She dedicated these lines, like all the love lyrics of recent years, in particular the unfading book “One Hundred Hours of Happiness,” to Alexander Yakovlevich.
During Tushnova’s life, only five poems of Yashin’s best cycle were written, and after her death in 1965, during his remaining three years on earth, he began to see what love fate had given him (“Called him forever beloved, / When he lost her”), and wrote the main your poems. They contain the poet’s deep repentance and a testament to us, who sometimes think down to earth, that nowadays courage and recklessness in love, openness in relationships with people and the world bring only misfortunes. Books of Yashin’s lyrical prose “I Treat You to Rowan” or the lofty lyricism “The Day of Creation” return us to an understanding of undiminished values and eternal truths.
Alexander Yashin had many students and younger brothers - from Vasily Belov to the departed Nikolai Rubtsov and Viktor Korotaev. The aforementioned Alexander Romanov made the following call on both frontispieces of his dying book of memoirs and reflections: “Sparks of memory! They fly from the past years and burn us either with shame for what we have done, or with repentance for our sins, or with the impulse to finally do good. As a living testament to us , the anxious and passionate voice of Alexander Yashin: “Hurry to do good deeds!”
I THOUGHT AND IT SEEMED...
I thought everything would last forever
Like air, water, light:
Her careless faith,
The strength of her heart
Enough for a hundred years.
Here I will order -
And will appear
Night or day doesn't count
It will appear from underground,
Anyone can cope with grief,
The sea will cross.
Necessary -
Will go up to the waist
In the starry dry snow,
Through the taiga
To the pole
Into the ice
Through "I can't".
Will be on duty
If necessary
A month on my feet without sleep,
If only it were nearby,
Near,
Glad to be needed.
I thought
Yes it seemed...
How you let me down!
Suddenly gone forever -
I didn’t take the authorities into account,
What she herself gave me.
This is how I live.
Am I alive?
SPELL.
Resurrect!
Resurrect!
Beat your heart in your chest!
Let it be a miracle:
Not a song -
Come yourself, in the flesh!
Even in the morning
Even at night, -
I live in a house alone, -
Show up whenever you want
But if only in reality.
Even in a white shroud,
Even in a dress -
It's not winter anymore,
I won’t be timid and I won’t go crazy.
Even with noise and thunder
Or come in quietly,
From the porch
But just a friend:
No need to change faces.
Resurrect!
Arise!
My destiny has broken.
Have faded
Drooped
All the joys without you.
I bow to everyone
What I didn’t value before.
Resurrect!
I repent
That he timidly loved and lived.
And we will recognize each other there too.
I'm only afraid that she
Without live fire
My hut will no longer seem like paradise,
And looking intently through me,
Out of long-standing habit, she’s still obedient,
Kind and trusting
There she is
I won't be so in love anymore
So patiently generous.
AT THE TOMBSTONE
Now you are nowhere from me, And no one has power over my soul. Happiness is so stable that any trouble is not a problem. I don’t expect any changes, Whatever happens to me in the future, everything will be like in the first year, like it was in the last year, - Our time has stopped. And there will be no more disagreements, Now our meetings are calm, Only the linden trees and maples make noise.... Now that’s what I love.
On his deathbed, after the third operation, having already understood everything, with the last of his strength keeping the always “Yashin’s” smile on his cheekbones, he repeated: “I won’t give in! I won’t give in!” - and prayed to fate: just one more year... to hold out until spring... I’ll get out there... I didn’t have time, I didn’t finish, I didn’t finish writing, I just realized what I wanted to say, and then the end: the hospital on Kashirka... at fifty-five years old...
Fifty-five years. The period is considerable. Especially when we consider that we have before us a poet who tormented his soul in the vicissitudes of both his fate and the fate of the country during the interwar respite.
And yet - a bitter realization: I didn’t have time! Didn't say!
This is Yashin with his dozens of publications! Never banned! With a dizzying rise - from the wilderness of the village in a straight line - to the first publications at fifteen, to the first book at twenty-one, and with the same book - to a delegate mandate to the First Congress of Writers... With the Stalin Prize at twenty-seven. If you look for a figure in the generation of “children of October” in whose fate the trajectory “from zero” to zenith is especially pure, it is Yashin.
Alexander Popov. The year of birth is the last before the imperialist war, when by all indicators the Russian Empire reached, in Yashin’s terms, the Upper Dead Point - before the start of the fall, defeat and disaster.
Place of birth - bearish corner. "Village in the wilderness." "In the lowlands, in the dark dense spruce forests - neither give nor take, I got lost."
If there is a magical meaning in the names, then the name of the village: Bludnovo - suggests the lordly fornication of the serf era, or perhaps the wanderings of messengers at a time when the princely people of the Novgorod and Moscow tables divided the taiga space. The poet himself preferred a rather romantic version: about how a hunter was spun into a thicket by a goblin and led to a forest princess...
The Soviet government redirected these places from the North Dvina province to the Vologda region, but never brought them closer to civilization. At the Sharya station, before reaching Kirov two hundred or so kilometers, change to the local line and, like a rocking crawler, shake to the district, and now district, Nikolsk, and from there another twenty-something kilometers jump by car through fields and spruce forests “- this path was described by Yashin’s guest Fyodor Abramov, and a special path from Bludnov to Yashin’s individual house on Bobrishny Ugor was described by his favorite student Vasily Belov: this is pure walking along gullies.
When the Bludovites learned that Yashin had died and bequeathed to be buried on Bobrishny Ugor, they built a bridge in one night... therefore, in 1968, that is, in the fifty-first year of Soviet power, they were still living without a road.
And in pre-revolutionary times it was a complete wilderness. And - the pedigree circumstances familiar to the Russian poet: mother - illiterate, grandmother - storyteller, grandfather - barge hauler, father - soldier...
The father’s departure to war in 1914 is painted in the poet’s subsequent imagination in heroic tones: “the blacksmith and hunter said to the neighbors: either your chest is in crosses, or your head is in the bushes.” The second one fell out. In fact, the son did not remember his father at all - due to his youth. He grew up in the family of a stepfather, with whom he did not get along, and it’s clear why: in her second marriage, her mother gave birth to five more children, they had to be raised, peasant-like, which is what the stepfather counted on when raising his stepson...
And the stepson hoped to write poetry.
Meta of time. In the generation that grew up already under Soviet power, psychological constants are significant: envy of the elders who managed to deal with enemies during the Civil War, and the expectation of a new war, also civil, revolutionary, earthly, “the last” (they did not know that the war would come - Patriotic , and is it the last one...).
And another feature of the generation, unknown in past eras: a general obsession with poetry. It was they who made up the army of shock workers who laid siege to literature at the turn of the 20s and 30s. Graphomaniacs and professional writers sense the call of time, which has soared to the limit of a dream. For some (for example, Pavel Vasiliev), devotion to poetry reaches the point of suicidal mania. Alexander Yakovlevich Popov (who took the pseudonym “Yashin” in memory of his father, which he did not give up until his last, dying lines), seems to be of the same type. At school they call him “Red Pushkin”. In the attic of the hut there are deposits of scratched-out drafts. Poetry is calling, he is eager. "Study, study, study."
The mother echoes the stepfather: “I lived unlearned, and you will too.” The son did not submit. According to Yashin’s recollections, he simply ran away from the village. According to other evidence, the village assembly released him. In 1928.
Children's center in Nikolsk. Pedagogical school. Brigade training method. Subsidiary farm. Basics of journalism. Business trips to the countryside to agitate for collective farms. Livenewspapers. Balalaika gatherings. A ditty whirlwind...
There is no God, there is no need for a king,
We don't recognize anyone.
The earth and sky have collapsed -
We will live on a hummock!
As for the hummock, that’s slyness. Zemshar shone for them, no less. Bring on the revolution!
After the pedagogical technical school in Nikolsk - the pedagogical institute in Vologda. Literary Faculty In between, he taught at a rural school. This is an important point. Self-certification of Boris Kornilov: “We are all... children of rural teachers” - an axiom of the first Soviet generation, rushing from earth to the stars. Yashin did not avoid communion: he himself was a village teacher. Although he realized (and everyone around him felt) that his path was not pedagogy, but literature. With an unbreakable connection with the soil that gave birth to him as a poet.
The first manifestation of this connection is not without its originality. With the first fee (“something like thirty rubles: sent from Pionerskaya Pravda”; according to another testimony, “three rubles from Lenin’s Shift”), the young author buys sweets and cigarettes and goes to his native Bludnovo. "I'm treating you!" The girls take the treats for granted, and the guys don’t even care where the cigarettes come from: they snatch them up and start tarring them.
Then mother appears with a rod in her hand:
- Tell me where you got the money! Don't talk to me about it! If you tell the truth, nothing will happen: I’ll forgive you!
Whether everything happened exactly like that, or whether Yashin added something to the episode, the overall tone is important. And further meaning.
Mother lived to a ripe old age and outlived her son. Yevgeny Yevtushenko saw her at his grave: “Yashin’s mother was sitting at the monument to Yashin in a white speckled scarf, a little dumbfounded by her speeches, bent over, with her hand on her arm. She was well over eighty, but can one say that she was lucky? Her son’s books they are imported from Moscow, but no one will bring her a son...”
She finally figured out the truth about who her son had become.
Now we are at the beginning of his journey.
The path begins with the fact that the technical school refuses to accept Yashin into the Komsomol. Because of love for Yesenin. Everything is clear here: both about the Komsomol and about Yesenin. Less clear is another name that emerges from Yashin's early preferences: Jack Altausen. The same Jack Altauzen who called for Rasey’s hem to be lifted (for which and similar obscenities he was publicly beaten by Pavel Vasiliev).
However, here is a more complete Yashin “synodik”: Surkov, Prokofiev, Selvinsky. The general poetic basis is not palpable, but taken separately everything is explainable.
From the diary (at a writers' congress, 1934): “I talked to Surkov in the dining room. He greeted my name with a smile. He said that he expected to meet me not so young.” “I met Prokofiev... I gave away my book with the inscription: “To the master from the apprentice (although I’m not sure that I can even be called an apprentice). Take me into your arms."
Surkov is a generally recognized young leader, the hero of the congress, who clashed with Bukharin himself. Prokofiev - in addition to ideological similarities - is also a Onega baeshnik, a singer of the North. Next to him, the Vologda-Arkhangelsk fibers tremble in Yashin’s soul (after Vologda, Yashin settled in Arkhangelsk, was elected to a congress there, and there he published his first book, “Songs of the North”) - these songs sound in unison with Prokofiev’s.
However, Selvinsky is a completely different region! True, Yashin soon moves to Moscow, where he publishes his next book, “Severyanka,” and, having entered the Literary Institute, he enrolls in a seminar with Selvinsky!
The North interbreeds with the South?!
But correspondence arises, friendship begins, and lasts until death. “Isn’t this how we read our favorite poets: we find everything we want to find.” What does Yashin find in Selvinsky? “The shoulders of a loader, the chest of a fighter”... A verse bursting with excess strength. In some way, then, the singer of Sivash with his hakhat-scream is useful to the singer of the North. With his notes: accompany the reading with whistling, stomping... Yashin directs in his own way: read, okay! Emphasize "v" like "u". “You can’t just chew a hot potato.” “You will pass a portage, another portage, and another portage, and there will be the city of Vologda.” "Where does Ovdotya Olekseevna live"…
The northern color does not interfere with the standard ideology. It smells like gunpowder, boron, blood. Our grandfathers finished off the enemy... beat the white Herods... took cities... The young heirs are getting ready: there is so much work, so many victories ahead...
We must pay tribute to the poet’s instincts: he shifts direct slogans into a special song section, there are fighting guys, party sons, every brother is a drummer of the young country... In the purely poetic section, everything is fluffed up in a special, northern way: if Comrade Stalin says that we are not we won’t give up an inch of our land to anyone, then Yashin varies: “we won’t even give up a handful of snow to the enemy.”
Northern lights, northern singing, northern talk. The humor is appropriate. A Moscow professor is interested in sundresses and beads. “An interesting relic,” he says. And Olena directly and angrily said to him: “Stop being such a fuss, citizen! In the old days, I wouldn’t even be able to walk around at a wedding in that outfit.”
There seems to be nothing special about the kick to the old regime time, if not for one circumstance: the verse describes a Vologda wedding.
However, the best poems in the book are not these. The best is “Letters to Elena” (apparently, the very one to whom this second book is dedicated). Elena Perventseva - the love of the Vologda era. Helped compile the first book. “We parted on December 17, 1934... We cried for a long time...” He returned. “Sit down at the table and dilute the ink and write, and shed tears about how she breathed, how she loved...”
This is no longer Selvinsky, not Prokofiev, and certainly not Surkov, this is Pasternak. But what is important is not even who the master mentors are. It is important what the soul reveals itself on. Something is modeled in this first love. The fate of renunciation, the temptation of loss? “She was bullied and idolized. She cried, but left the house...”
A little more - and he leaves the house himself. In the first days of the war - two applications: to the active army and to the party. Having received a party card on July 12, 1941, he already had an order in hand - to the Leningrad Front. More precisely: at the disposal of the Political Directorate of the Baltic Fleet. This is not exactly what the “boys of the State” of the next generation get: they go into the trenches straight from school, and it is they who are destined to write the soldier’s page in Russian lyrics with their blood. Those who are older, and if they have managed to establish themselves as writers, are already included in the political composition.
Yashin was ready to fight as a private; At first, he got it too: a Marine battle near the village of Yamskovitsy on August 14, 1941. The most vivid memory of the war years. And even the blockade Leningrad rations. “They took me out half-dead” - that was something to remember when ten years later I met and became friends with Olga Berggolts.
And yet, for Yashin, war means working in newspapers. "Combat salvo", "Attack!" “For the Motherland!”, “Red Fleet”, “Stalin’s Banner”, “On Guard”…
In 1944 he was demobilized for health reasons.
He submits a report and asks to remain in the ranks - with the “load of a poet,” because he intends to continue to write for the army and navy. He reports that since the beginning of the war he has published five books of poetry...
Five books! All the more surprising is the sharp line with which Yashin immediately marks out wartime after demobilization. Front-line poems were collected by the heirs and published almost half a century later (and a quarter of a century after Yashin’s death), together with three poems and front-line diaries, a chronicle of the war was obtained (Baltic 1941-42, Stalingrad 1942-43, Black Sea 1943-44). And yet, he himself, it seems, never felt like a front-line poet, unlike Tvardovsky or Simonov. It was noted about Yashin in criticism: “the war entered life and poetry as a temporary disaster,” “in subsequent years he almost did not turn to the military theme.”
How can we explain this?
Firstly, the war did not turn out as expected. "Things weren't going as expected." It was imagined: “The whole world - strong, friendly, the whole world - into fire and smoke... The enemy will not escape from this last war alive.” The point is not only that the enemy was at the walls of Leningrad, on the Volga and on the Black Sea, but then the poet of the young Soviet generation could whisper whether this is the “last” war...
Secondly, he sees the war - through a peaceful, happy life, which was interrupted for a while: through the gaps - “my dear little pole”, the soldiers - all “farmers”, the misfortune - that “the rye did not bloom on time”, the dream - so that “not forget how to mow the grass" and so that "weddings and feasts" resume.
Now “the war will die down like an earthquake,” and then...
My people will pass through blood and tears,
Without lowering his golden head,
The burned birch trees will straighten,
Honeydew will glisten from the grass,
The earth will be filled with fertile juice,
The flowers will spread their petals,
Water in wells will become clearer
And cleaner rivers and springs.
From wounds, from ruins, from the filth of the enemy
There will be no trace in the fields and gardens.
Villages filled with smoke and soot,
Auls and villages and cities
They will rise from the ashes after the war,
Illuminated with a new radiance.
This radiance is fully consistent with the style of the late Stalin era and, more broadly, with the all-Soviet readiness of the individual “to enter even as a drop into the vastness of the stream, a grain of sand, a snowflake into the whirlwinds from the east, a ray into the radiance, a spark into a flame, a line into a song, a pattern into a banner.” Snowflake - Bludnovskaya, Vologda-Arkhangelsk, banner - all-Soviet.
Europe and Asia in power and glory
United in one power.
Soviet Power!
There is no
Another land so great
Another land with so many faces.
I don’t know the meadows of flooded flowers,
The fields are more vast, the gardens are more fertile,
The dams are more majestic, the whistles are louder,
The people are more inquisitive and noble...
Both the Power and the People remain at the center of thought. Here are the stages: 1950 - the poem "Alena Fomina", Yashin - a positive hero of criticism, the youngest winner of the Stalin Prize. 1954 - virgin lands, Yashin in Altai travels to brigades reading poetry, and then enrolls in tractor driving courses at mechanization school No. 10, receives certificate No. 25 and reports to himself (in his diary) that he himself started NATI ASTZ and cultivated a circle around 5.5 km, i.e. cultivated 13 hectares. If we take into account that before us is a Moscow literary celebrity, a resident of a house (in Lavrushinsky?) and a dacha (in Peredelkino?), and I would take into account something else: that before us is a person who, ten years before, was discharged as disabled due to a diagnosis of bronchial asthma - then such actions may seem extravagant... so you need to know your character.
The memoirists left a collection of portraits of the golden-haired youth, but fortunately for us, among them was such an insightful artist as Fyodor Abramov, who left a much more interesting sketch. It was made ten years after the Altai certificate, in the first half of the 60s:
“I was quite surprised by Yashin’s appearance, which seemed to me not very rustic, and perhaps not very Russian. A large, proudly set aquiline nose (you won’t find anything like that in all of Pinega), thin sarcastic lips under a red, well-groomed mustache and a very the tenacious, piercing, slightly wild eye of a forest man, but with a tired, cheerless squint..."
Is this the person who wrote “Alain Fomin”?
He reworked his most laurel-bearing poem ten times, still hoping to save it in the changing situation, removing the “alluvial”, but in the end he gave up and did not re-publish it. Meanwhile, in this cumbersome, poorly coordinated thing (“a story in verse”!) now almost everything seems artificial - precisely because of the lack of coherence, lack of consistency. Commentators explained: the original idea: the story of the return of a crippled front-line soldier to his native collective farm was stalled due to the appearance at the same time and on the same topic of Alexei Nedogonov’s poem “The Flag over the Village Council”, after which it was supported by a new story: about how “the woman "In the absence of the men, she took power on the collective farm during the war years. This new story emerged as a result of Yashin's trip as a Pravda correspondent to Altai in 1946. At the same time, Altai prosperity (“undefiled streams, birds in the rowan trees, unruined houses, unobscured land”), attributed by Yashin to the impoverished northern land, turned out to be false.
All this is true, but it’s not just a matter of “geographical forgery.” The fact is that the heap of scenes is not collected by a single thought, it is artificially supported not only by violent disputes about who will now take power on the collective farm: men or women, but also by the attacks of fools, fantastic in their stupidity, on power in general, from which, as from “mangy foreigners”, the positive heroes have to defend themselves, citing the fact that it is better to die in war than to deal with slanderers...
The secretary of the district party committee acts as a god ex machina, resolving all these unsolvability.
It was not in vain that Alexander Fadeev rushed Yashin to write the poem (and it was not in vain that it was dedicated to Fadeev): in the finale it is said: “Isn’t it time to call all the writers of the country to order?” Yashin here hits the target of that model of socialist realism, with the help of which the party is going from top to bottom (from national celebrations to regional everyday life) to raise the life lying in post-war ruins.
Yashin is involved in this work selflessly. He paints new and new pictures, flies from the Altai and Vologda fields to the great construction sites of communism, shovels in verse “piles of excavated earth, logs, beams, boards, shavings, crane booms in the distance, Lada cars in the colorful expanse, steamships on the river where soon there will be a sea..."
Poetically, the best thing in this cycle - just like twenty years ago - is the piercing pain of an amorous heart. It is written in the family: it does not know how to love calmly and evenly, love weighs heavily on the heart, its reckless strength is fatal.
I don't want to meet you.
I don't want to love you.
It's easier to pump water all your life,
Crushing stones on the road.
It's better to live in the wilderness, in a hut,
At least you know for sure
Why is my heart so heavy?
Why does melancholy occur...
Melancholy, a vague premonition of trouble, fear of falsehood can also be detected in “Alena Fomina”. “There is no hunting and there is no point... What light looms in the distance?” “The premonition of what misfortune, like jealousy, burns the soul?” In specific circumstances, this could be jealousy, or even a lack of hunting (I mean hunting an animal, the joy of which Yashin has been delirious with since childhood), but a vague, inexplicable premonition of falsehood and misfortune runs like a shadow through all the flashes of Yashin’s lyrics of the first post-war decade.
In 1956, he wrote a stunning poem “Eagle” about how a bird struck by a hunter takes off “beyond the clouds” to fall “among the distant rocks, so that the enemy does not see and does not triumph.”
What is this? A prophetic premonition - over several decades - of the death of the power to which he swore allegiance and was faithful all his life? A premonition of a personal drama (the eagle is a favorite bird, and there is something eagle-like in Yashin’s appearance)? The disastrous devastation of the soul from the conjecture of the falsity of everything that one believed and wrote?
By the nature of the gift and the type of mental makeup, Yashin does not want to renounce anything. Neither from the power in whose coat of arms there are ears of corn, nor from the party that he joined when he went to the front, nor from those “district committee members” who kept Soviet everyday life on their backbone.
“So that the enemy can see her...” According to Soviet habit, he is looking for the enemy. But what if you see the enemy in the “district committee members”? What force can force him to pull this rod out of reality?
And here Yashin the poet is put under attack by Yashin the prose writer. Actually, the prose writer has been brewing in him for a long time: his nature is too active, there are too many impressions, they overflow through the verse...
The plot with which Yashin makes his debut as a prose writer is dedicated to everyday life on the collective farm; to a sober look, this plot fits well into the canon of socialist realism, according to which rural workers struggle with continuous difficulties and heroically solve problems associated with the incessant change of seasons. Yashin has the best intentions: to encourage the heroes to work proactively and creatively, and not to be thoughtless performers.
But it's 1956.
The story appears in the almanac "Literary Moscow". The almanac falls into an ideological raid.
The title of the story is remarkably succinct and concise: “Levers” - an excellent brand to designate the author’s slanderous attack against the Soviet people, portrayed as thoughtless conductors of decisions imposed from above.
There is an attack on witches all around. Yashin is placed in the line of “revisionists” next to Dudintsev, Ehrenburg, Granin (Pasternak is waiting for his turn).
Yashin, of course, was never any kind of “revisionist” and did not become one during the execution. Although he refused to repent. But, having found himself in a raid, he had to feel how fragile that original frame, that foundation, that soil on which he had built his house was.
He looks anew at his former heroes. And, in particular, to those district committee members who saved, like God from a machine, Alena Fomina’s household. What now? So “they entered and sat down in three rows in a pre-planned order. A table under a cloth. A platform. And water. Along the edge of the stage there was greenery, like in a garden bed.” “Nashensky guys”, sitting on the podium, become funny.
This, one must think, is a plenum. Or a holiday. And here is the everyday life of the district: secretaries change one after another. One is a shameless emergency worker, one is an impractical scribe, and one is a complete drunkard... It’s funny again. Yashin has enough humor to try this collar on himself: that one would have broken the woods - “all the iambs or all the trochees, it would probably have been knocked out of my head.”
What is true is true: iambs and trochees are the last salvation, the only meaning of life. Continuously talk about what is happening to you. “Just yesterday there was God in my soul, I could live and believe. Now there is no faith, no love: live as you want.” And he lives. “False jingles and boastful writings” will not warm hearts. Warms up - talking about how he warms up. “I don’t renounce either my own or anyone else’s guilt, but the debts are still the same...”
And yet a profound shift is emerging. The soil shift is towards the “small homeland”, native, northern. From the bridgehead, the vulnerability of which was revealed when the ideologists walked along it with “Levers” at the ready, Yashin’s muse is retreating to the reserve positions planned in his youth.
I can not anymore!
We have to run
To the northern taiga...
Just to breathe.
It is Yashin, as literary historians subsequently established, who becomes the signalman of the general turn of Soviet prose towards a rural mood. He blesses his best student, Vasily Belov, on this path. And the student answers the teacher with a heartfelt confession:
“I’m learning from you to stand, not to bend. As long as you are there, it’s easier for me to live. And you? Who are you learning from, who or what is your support? I know: being honest is a luxury that only a strong person can afford, but "After all, this strength does not come from nothing, it needs to be nourished by something. It’s easier for me, I feed on your living example, the example of people of your type. You don’t have such living support. And I know how hard it is for you to live."
Belov feels support - in his same Ivan Afrikanovich, in the centuries-old "Lada" of peasant life. But with the intuition of a soul-knower, Yashin senses a lack of support! The sensitivity is amazing, because Yashin himself does not seem to sense this. Doesn't want to admit it. His soul soars.
“Here the snow dries up - it doesn’t melt, and the earth knows no dirt. An eagle flies in the clouds without moving its wings.” Let's go down to the ground. The head of everything is bread! The one that's already on the table. “Scented loaves, pancakes, and shangi, and pies”... “Eat for your health, good people!” "I'm treating you!" And here Yashin the prose writer again substitutes Yashin the poet.
He wrote “The Vologda Wedding” in 1962 - no longer the prose debutant he was seven years ago. And Tvardovsky publishes it in the patented magazine of the intelligentsia of the Thaw period - in Novy Mir. An essay about the holiday, full of folk humor, healthy mischief and loving northern ethnography, is a hit with the advanced reading public.
And then comes from the hinterland:
- Wedding - with tar!
Vologda "district committee members" at the head of the masses are indignant, accusing the author of slander. There is a flow of letters to the local and also to the central press. The Soviet village is not like that! It would be better if the author took care of the radio installation of his native village, thought about electrification, than to revel in such a wedding...
Again: only with a big hangover can one discern denigration in Yashin’s essay. Yes, by the way, he wrote about radio and electricity in Bludnov in poetry, and in essays, and in business papers for his superiors. He “extracted” funds from letters from fellow countrymen calling for help. And they, fellow countrymen, went on the attack against him! Yes, if only the “district committee members”, party levers! No, ordinary men repeat from a piece of paper at meetings about a wedding with tar! The same hard workers from the flax mill who invited Yashin to that wedding are now offended by his “slander.”
He can't stand it:
- Damn people! You are everything to him, and you are ready to give your life, but he is the first to lay his hoof on you! Is it really like this among other nations?
Yashin is not particularly interested in the sacramental question about other peoples, although he managed to communicate with Georgians, Yugoslavs and other brothers in the Union and the socialist camp when there was a world power. He needs to realize his people. Your support.
Does the soil, seemingly groped, begin to creep under your feet?
A house was built on Bobrishny Ugor. Either a house museum, or a tombstone project.
I am tormented by the thought that everything that has been done is false, that “my day yesterday was filled with garbage,” that life passed under the motto “not a day without a line, without a page,” but will anyone cry over these lines?
Piercing lines:
I need to believe
into someone
Into something
To live without looking back,
Live without calculation...
I'm just a bird
On a thin branch
At least in the menagerie
And also in a cage...
An eagle, soaring in weightlessness, turns into a bird. The house is a cage. The world is a menagerie. Hunting is a farce (hunting is a symbol of real work).
In fact, Yashin is such a hunter that he has never brought anything larger than a hare. And he didn’t try to - not a drop of bloodthirsty passion. But he writes - willingly: how they surrounded a large animal, surrounded the den... And then he writes about how he writes about it...
“In the magazine I was praised for the truth, for my skill... We didn’t kill the bear, we didn’t even see him. And what’s more typical: now try to say that the facts are not reliable, and you will be accused of lying.”
This charming humoresque also benefits from the fact that it is dedicated to one of the recognized arbiters of life’s truth in literary texts - the critic Felix Kuznetsov (with his introductory article, the posthumous collected works of Yashin were published). But deeply hidden anxiety is also captured in this humor. Doubt about what you've been doing all your life. And in the way he lived.
“Yes, I just lived!” - Yashin answers (casually quoting the Abbé Sieyès, at whose wit “all of Europe” laughed in the 18th century, when to the question: what did you do during the years of the Revolution? - he answered: “I lived”).
Yashin did not just live. He confessed continuously. He was afraid of “running into the enemy with confession.” Although the enemy was obvious only in those years “when the Nazis were knocking on our houses with iron boots.” What about friends, friends? “And others simply look, what does it matter to them whether I am baptized with three fingers or another cross.” Therefore, friends and enemies - ghosts - change places. And God and the Devil: “And I don’t believe in God, and I don’t get along with the devil.”
Still, one can feel the hardening of the generation. “We were young and not thrifty: in hunger, in the cold, we were still happy,” Yashin turns back to his early Nikolsky years, when girls wore hammers and sickles instead of earrings, and badges instead of brooches. The first Soviet generation was preparing to live in castles in the air, although they were born in huts and barracks. And they seemed to have survived - in the slack between the massacres: they did not have time for the Civil War, they saw the Patriotic War not from the trenches, but from the command posts - from an eagle's flight.
“History does what it should,” the poet, who “has matured along with his generation,” soothes his soul with Marxist-Hegelian confidence, but just in case, he also remembers Tolstoy-Karataev’s “patience”: “everything will work out, the pain will pass.”
Will it pass?
As in previous years, pain, inseparable from love, will make its way into the poems.
Again - as in previous years - readiness for a break, excitement: “if only the soul does not know downtime.”
And again - “reckless force”, a mixture of love with “night fish” (fishing is the same constant pleasure of the soul and body as hunting), and also the magic of mysterious codes (as in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”?):
On the crankshaft flywheel
Three letters are stamped:
V.M.T.
They know about this meta
mechanics and mechanics
drivers of all cars.
When the piston reaches
to the Upper Dead Center,
His movement seems to freeze for a moment,
Explosion of a compressed flammable mixture
Pushes him back
and to TDC
strives for another piston
under a new explosion,
like being hit by a guillotine...
In the fate of every person
There is its own Upper Dead Center...
Mechanics and mechanics, as well as drivers of all cars, know theirs, and inquisitive readers know theirs: V.M.T. - an abbreviation of the first, patronymic and last name of the heroine of this lyrical cycle. Open secret? Now yes. At that time: from the late 50s to the mid 60s - something like a rebus - for the initiated.
But despite all the codes, the specific history of the relationship is spelled out quite clearly in the “Night Ear” cycle. This is significant - not because you can reconstruct how and what happened there (this is possible, but not necessary), but because it allows you to understand - psychologically - the lyrical plot. That is: what he was to her. Even more precisely: what he thought he was to her.
Empirics are not very romantic: neighborly acquaintance. It seems to be happening either two blocks away from each other, or in a large apartment building, so to visit you just need to run up to the desired floor. They are still “on you”, but the signals of interest (her interest in him) are caught instantly.
His answer: “How could you even think that I’m running away from my family? Your lane is not the end of the earth, I’m not a needle in a haystack... There’s a thaw or a frost in the world - it’s hard to pull your cart. I was looking for friendship, I didn’t know that bore so many unnecessary tears."
Her tears are in vain. Her soul is broken. She is dying of cancer - a disease of broken souls.
And then his heart finally breaks:
Resurrect!
Arise!
My destiny has broken.
Faded, drooped
All the joys without you.
I bow to everyone
What I didn’t value before.
Resurrect!
I repent
That he timidly loved and lived.
Timid? No, it was she who thought he was timid. Or rather, he thinks she thought so.
What follows is a debriefing.
She:
- Don’t you see that you are my god?
Answer (in the style of an unrepentant atheist):
- And what kind of god am I if I don’t believe in anything?!
She jokes sadly:
- I'm building for the day.
He (sad about what he missed):
- Oh, if only I had known earlier that life is so fleeting.
She is serious:
- Order something.
He is serious ("seriously!"):
- Okay, go get some cigarettes.
How generously she endured everything! How he generously consoled himself rather than her:
- After all, if there was always agreement in everything, we wouldn’t know happiness, we’d be in trouble again...
Top Dead Center?
And then the combustible mixture explodes from the phrase etched in the memory: “They do not renounce, loving.” That's when it hit him. And he shouted to her on the other side of existence:
I do not renounce -
Be as before.
It's better to suffer
How life has set...
He waited another three years. He died almost to the same day with her: she in 1965, he in 1968. Sensing the end, he asked: “Give me, God, another piece of shagreen leather!” “I don’t want to leave! God, let me live a little longer.” “And women, women’s gaze in love, a little crazy and detached, selfless, unprotected”... Then he plucked up courage and exhaled:
So what should I wish for?
Together with everyone?
You just have to die
Once the time has come.
Svirsky Grigory Tsesarevich
Our contemporary Saltykov-Shchedrin PUBLISHING:
Alexander Yashin, having mourned his native Vologda, rushed into battle for her. Yashin's alarm story "LEVERS" (December 1956) became the basis of "village prose". The story is simple, like the truth. The men are sitting on the board of the collective farm, smoking thick smoke from samosada, and the atmosphere is clear, despite the smoke. “They said, plan from below, and then they didn’t even leave scraps of the plan.” "Whatever the heart aches about, that's what we're talking about... Then a commissioner arrived from the district committee, opened a closed party meeting. And as if people had flown into another world, no one else mentioned the truth: - SO IT'S NECESSARY! People are quiet, just now there were people, but they are no longer people. LEVERS...
Naturally, this was the last issue of LITERARY MOSCOW. The party banned sedition right away... But, fortunately, it did not yet have time to ban Tvardovsky’s “NEW WORLD”. And his brainchild is FEDOR ABRAMOV - a scalpel-sharp surgeon, writer, sociologist, and people's defender. The obscurantists of the Stalinist batch, crowding around Sholokhov, were called the “Rostov company of literature.” About the Vologda people - with joyful surprise: “Just as there is a shortage of bread for them, so there is a harvest for the writers.” Yashin has a soft, homely face. Fyodor Abramov has the unsmiling face of a direct, persistent and harsh man. Such are his novels about village misfortune. "BARYA AND SISTERS", "TWO WINTERS AND THREE SUMMERS". In the village of Pekashino, on the Pinega River, in the forest peasant world, the elder brother brought gifts from the city - they were greeted with restraint. But when he pulled out a loaf from the basket - a whole hefty brick of rye bread - everyone became seriously worried. For a long time, how many years has there not been such wealth in their collective farm house..." A neighbor who worked on timber rafting fell ill, without waiting for the paramedic's direction, he went to the hospital. They informed the district. “I see,” answered the district secretary. “We will cure the deserter - we will hand him over.” to the prosecutor. And three days later, the man died. During an operation. From cancer. Hunger and brutal cruelty, generated by poverty and arbitrariness of the authorities, are all that the village of Pekashino sees all its life... The Pekashino guys dream of government-issued soldier rations as salvation from hunger... The story "PELAGEYA" is generally akin to a discovery. Pelageya, in order to feed her family, got a job in a bakery. The work is hellish. At home, she collapsed on the bare painted floor - "to chill out." There was no strength to get up on her feet. And she was called to her boss for her birthday - she trudged along. Otherwise, you won’t survive... Pelageya is more terrible than the calculating heroes of Dudintsev, where at Drozdov’s family celebrations the city nobility gathers entirely. It is not genuine feelings, but the same calculation, callousness that has penetrated to the very bottom, who earn their bread with hellish labor. State immorality destroys everything and everyone...
Next came Vasily Belov onto the literary highway with his “carpenter’s stories.” But he didn't go far. Lubyanka lecturers, who rushed to the talented villagers seeking the truth, convinced him that the Jews were to blame for everything...
Varlam Shalamov, a martyr of the Stalin years, could not be deceived by any state lies. I saw him for the first time when he stood on the podium in the joint venture, without touching it, as if it were covered in mud. The very appearance of the writer is also unusual. As if a person had just been dug out of the permafrost. The face was motionless, dry and somehow frozen. His words are also unusual: “Man is worse than the beast, more merciless than the beast, more terrible than the beast.” Ehrenburg, who in those days had difficulty getting through the censorship of his “PEOPLE, YEARS, LIFE,” tried to get up and quietly leave, but the man, who had not touched the podium, suddenly exclaimed imperiously: “And you are sitting, Ilya Grigorievich!”, and Erenburg pressed himself into his chair, as if crushed by a heavy frosty voice. Shalamov leisurely narrated the reprisal against the writers of his generation. About myself - sparingly, but - voluminously: - I was born and spent my childhood in Vologda. Here, over the course of centuries, the royal exile peeled off - Protestants, rebels, various critics and... created here a special moral climate at a level higher than any city in Russia... Only Vologda never rebelled against Soviet power. The head of the Northern Front, Kedrov, shot two hundred hostages, including our chemistry teacher. Kedrov was the same Shigalev predicted by Dostoevsky. In justification, he presented a letter from Lenin: “Please do not show weakness.”
They showed no weakness towards Shalamov: they condemned him to hard labor for saying: “Bunin is a Russian classic.” In his story “BUKINIST,” two people roll in the back of a truck, shaking along the Kolyma road, like logs of wood. They hit each other. Two prisoners are being taken to paramedic courses. They took Shalamov too: the prison professor did not believe that there could be a person who did not know the formula of water. Shalamov christened his neighbor Fleming, since he knew who Fleming, who discovered penicillin, was. Fleming, a former investigator of the Cheka-NKVD, recalls the trials of the thirties. About the suppression of the will of famous defendants by chemistry. “The secret of the process was the secret of pharmacology..” To save Shalamov’s prose means to save the majority of the truth; although the truth is cruel, sometimes unbearably cruel. A teacher from Mordovia, in the Sakharov Museum, told us that when in 1937 the entire intelligentsia of the city of Saransk was shot on one day, peasant Mordovia was immediately thrown back into the Middle Ages. To a certain extent, this happened to Vologda, poor, hungry, desperate. The concept “VOLOGDA CONVOY”, brought from the Gulag, with its scary sayings: “A STEP TO THE LEFT, A STEP TO THE RIGHT IS CONSIDERED AN ESCAPE, THE CONVOY SHOOTS WITHOUT WARNING,” has been forever embedded in the history of Russia. AND “THE VOLOGDA CONVOY DOESN’T LIKE TO JOKE” “The VOLOGDA CONVOY”, first of all, dealt with its writers - the pride of Russia in those years. Figuratively speaking, of course. “Party criticism”, like the GB, the main guardian of the Soviet system, hounded Alexander Yashin for “LEVERS”. Essentially, they killed him. After his early death, his sixteen-year-old son shot himself with a hunting rifle. 0:3 0:12
On July 7, 1965, exactly fifty years ago, one of the best lyrical poets, Veronika Tushnova, died (from cancer). In 2011, the hundredth anniversary of her birth was celebrated, although she insisted that the year of her birth was 1915, which is indicated on her monument at the Vagankovskoye cemetery, where she is buried.
Veronika Tushnova was born in Kazan, Almost my countrywoman, and in Kazan in 2011, the celebrations in honor of her centenary were the most widespread. Although 1915, which she considered the year of her birth, should also be remembered. And these double round dates - one hundred years old and one fifty years old - ring the memory of the wonderful poetess.
0:1222
1:8
Veronica is 14 years old.
1:38Veronica Mikhailovna was not confident in her literary gift, although the literature teacher set the works of the modest student as an example to others, reading them in front of the class as exemplary. The girl was from a prosperous, intelligent family: her father was a professor, her mother was a graduate of the Bestuzhev courses,
famous for their education and teaching. And they lived like all professorial families in pre-revolutionary Russia. It was then that everything changed.
We lived on daddy's modest salary,
Which did not ruin our happiness at all.
I remember all my mother's new dresses,
And I understand how few of them there were.
I remember in a dried out old buffet
A set of assorted plates and cups,
These venerable things and life are dear to me,
Not tolerant of lordly manners.
I am proud that we were not afraid of worries,
That we didn’t try to live in peace for the sake of it,
That a prominent professor was walking to work
Three kilometers in any weather...
2:8
After graduating from school, she went not for philology, but for medicine, yielding to the demands of her father, who was the unquestioned authority in the family. At first Veronica entered the medical faculty in her native Kazan,
and when her father, already an academician, was transferred to Leningrad, she was transferred too - to Leningrad Medical Institute.
Then - Moscow, graduate school at the Department of Psychology, dissertation, first marriage, unsuccessful, birth of a daughter and first poems, successful, noticed by Vera Inber.
4:8
With daughter Natasha. With my daughter 1953
4:414
At the age of thirty, in 1941, on the advice of the poetess, she decided to enter the Literary Institute.
But the war interfered with my studies:
evacuation to Kazan, work in a hospital, again Moscow and again work as a doctor and it would seem that there was no time for poetry, but four years later her poetry collection “The First Book” was published, edited by Pavel Antokolsky himself. It was during the war that she became a poet, and everything that she saw, experienced and felt then finally shaped her verse and her style: soft, lyrical and very feminine.
Distributing tea and sorting mail,
4:1478And the dawn that takes you by surprise,
And the warmth in my heart because
That one, new, well-fed, sheltered and warmed
Veronika Mikhailovna Tushnova, 1962 (three years before death)
4:130 4:139Only then did Veronica Tushnova finally make her choice in favor of literature: literary consultant, newspaper correspondent with endless business trips and travels, translations, poetry and an unfulfilling personal life: a new unsuccessful marriage.
4:633 4:642
In 1944 she wrote poem “Loving does not renounce”,
which became famous only thirty-three years later after the performance of the song of the same name by Alla Pugacheva. And even now, few people know that the song was written based on the poems of Veronica Tushnova and that they are connected with the tragic story of her relationship with her first husband, who left, and she waited for him and prayed for him to return. He returned, mortally ill, and she nursed him...
And in the hospitals where she worked,
Veronica Tushnova was adored by both patients and colleagues. She was a stunningly beautiful woman, with huge dark eyes and thick black hair, and there was something of a burning oriental beauty about her. When she entered the room, it became warmer and more beautiful.
Not renounce loving.
After all, life does not end tomorrow.
I'll stop waiting for you
and you will come quite suddenly.
And you will come when it is dark,
when a blizzard hits the glass,
when you remember how long ago
We didn’t warm each other.
And so you want warmth,
never loved,
that you can't wait
three people at the machine.
And, as luck would have it, it will crawl
tram, metro, I don’t know what’s there.
And the blizzard will cover the paths
on the far approaches to the gate...
And the house will be sad and quiet,
the wheeze of a meter and the rustle of a book,
when you knock on the door,
running up without a break.
You can give everything for this,
and before that I believe in it,
that it’s hard for me not to wait for you,
all day without leaving the door.
6:8 6:13
Hundreds of human destinies from different parts of the country, who were admitted to the hospital with serious injuries, passed through her hands. And she talked to them, consoled them, helped them, confessed her love, when even on the verge of death they wanted to hear a quiet and gentle “I love you.”
Veronica Mikhailovna had a natural need to share with others - softness, tenderness and give her love.
After the war, Tushnova’s poetic fate was successful. She published new books, led a creative seminar at the Literary Institute, and was engaged in poetic translations. Enthusiastic readers copied her poems by hand and learned them by heart. But somehow things didn’t work out in my personal life. Veronica felt deprived - she had no love, and without love she could not imagine life.
6:1536 6:10And suddenly fate gave her an unexpected gift - gave her a second youth, gave her a feeling, boundless and immeasurable, which completely overwhelmed her and brought to life an entire avalanche of her most beautiful poems. It was love for the poet and prose writer Alexander Yashin , who was born with Veronica on the same day - March 27, but two years earlier. “He is the air to me, he is the sky to me, everything is lifeless and dumb without him...” the poetess wrote about her beloved, and she called her feeling for him “a storm that I can’t cope with” and trusted its slightest shades and overflows with hers. poems.
6:1095 6:1104
Yashin and Tushnova
7:34 7:43Alexander Yashin made an indelible impression on everyone wherever he appeared. He was a handsome, strong man, very charming and very bright, “with the demeanor of an eagle, with the soul of a dove, with a daring smile, with a childish smile,” as Tushnova wrote about him.
7:529 7:538By the time he became close to Veronica, he was going through difficult times - real persecution that befell him after the publication of the story “Levers,” in which he told the truth about the Russian village. Veronica, one of the few, supported him, warmed him up and revived his “cloudy soul” with her love.
7:1095 7:1104It was mutual love, but hidden from prying eyes - Yashin was a husband and father. He raised seven children from different marriages, and the poet’s family was jokingly called the “Yashin collective farm.” His third wife, whom he met at the Literary Institute, Zlata Konstantinovna, also wrote poetry.
7:16577:8
Yashin could not leave his wife and children, because he was very attached to them, and, probably, Tushnova would not have agreed to such a step. Subtle, forgiving, with a sensitive, kind, compassionate soul, she would not feel happy if she made others unhappy. Veronica did not demand anything from her beloved, agreeing to everything, understanding and accepting everything, although it was not easy for her to live in a lie, with her open heart and pure soul.
7:755 7:766“And over the years, I think more and more often that stolen happiness is also happiness,” Veronica wrote about her lover, poet Alexander YASHIN
7:1015 7:1026Days with you
Months apart...
From the beginning
That's how it happened.
How rare were their meetings, secret, away from prying eyes! And she so wanted to be with him all the time. But he could not promise her anything, preferring silence.
7:1486 7:1495There was no future for this relationship but Veronica thanked fate for every hour spent with her beloved. And if she could count only a hundred hours of happiness in her life, that was a lot for her... They loved to travel to the Moscow region, wander through the forest, and made dates in hotels in other cities. Veronica lived through these meetings; her whole life consisted of them. She asked herself the question: “Why is it possible without millions? Why is it impossible without one?” and couldn’t find an answer to it...
7:2395When the lovers returned to Moscow by train, Veronica, at Yashin’s request, got off several stops earlier so that they would not be seen together... But, despite all the precautions, it was not possible to keep the relationship a secret. How could such passion be hidden?
7:499 7:508Of course, rumors and gossip immediately began to spread. Friends condemned the lovers, and drama was brewing in Alexander’s family. Their love was doomed.
7:763Alexander made a difficult decision for himself - to break up with Veronica.
7:902 7:911How painfully Tushnova experienced her loneliness! It was as if a noose was squeezing my throat, my heart was being crushed by “a ton-sized block.” She often wandered around the places where they visited together. Not being able to see her beloved, she spoke to him in poems that revealed the whole emotional universe of a person, poems so sincere and confessional that they were perceived as lyrical diaries. Her pain was in full view. Perhaps it was from unbearable grief, melancholy and anxiety that she fell ill with a fatal disease.
7:18857:8
When Veronica was in the hospital in the oncology department, Alexander Yashin visited her . The poet Mark Sobol, who had been friends with Veronica for many years, recalled: “When I came to her room, I tried to cheer her up. She was indignant: no need!
7:440She was given evil antibiotics that tightened her lips and made it painful for her to smile. She looked extremely thin. Unrecognizable. And then he came! Veronica ordered us to turn to the wall while she got dressed. Soon she quietly called out: “Boys...” I turned around and was stunned.
7:947 7:956A beauty stood before us! I will not be afraid of this word, because it is said exactly. Smiling, with glowing cheeks, a young beauty who has never known any illness. And then I felt with particular strength that everything she wrote was true. Absolute and irrefutable truth. Perhaps this is what is called poetry..."
7:1524 7:10And in recent days, being in severe suffering that had become unbearable, Veronica forbade Alexander to be allowed into her room. She wanted to remain in his memory as she was during the flowering period of their love - beautiful, happy, cheerful...
7:459"One Hundred Hours of Happiness" — that’s what the poetess called her latest book of poems, dedicated to Alexander Yashin. The printing house was in a hurry; they knew that Veronica was dying. She managed to hold in her hands a signal copy of the book, where she said goodbye to life in poetry.
7:939Only my life is short, I only firmly and bitterly believe:
If you didn’t love your find, you will love your loss.
A year after her death, Alexander Yakovlevich will write:
But you must be somewhere?
And not someone else's - Mine... But which one?
Beautiful? Good? Maybe evil?..
We wouldn't miss you...
They didn't miss each other: Yashin outlived his beloved by only three years and also died of cancer.
That’s the truth: they don’t renounce when they love.
No, and that doesn't seem true at all.
7:300— The pollen flies around, and friends leave.
You can live without a butterfly
without gold
- Same,
without a loved one
- Same,
7:525- no song
7:557- it is forbidden.
7:585 7:594But her happiness was always inseparable from misfortune... and she did not understand any other happiness and would hardly have accepted it. In recent years, when she was already fifty, she met her last and, as it turned out, fatal love.
Love for a man who had already been married three times, had seven children and could not decide on a fourth marriage and could not refuse it either. Her happiness was again mixed with unhappiness. So she collected her happiness bit by bit:
One hundred hours of happiness...
Is this not enough?
I love him like golden sand,
washed,
collected lovingly, tirelessly,
bit by bit, drop by drop,
by spark, by sparkle,
created it from fog and smoke,
accepted as a gift
from every star and birch tree...
How many days did you spend
in pursuit of happiness
on the chilled platform,
in a thundering carriage,
at the hour of departure it overtook him
at the airport,
hugged him, warmed him
in an unheated house.
She cast a spell over him, cast a spell...
It happened, it happened
what of bitter grief
I got my happiness.
This is said in vain
that you need to be born happy.
It is only necessary that the heart
I was not ashamed to work for happiness,
so that there is no heart
lazy, arrogant,
so that for a small amount
it said "thank you."
One hundred hours of happiness
pure, without deception.
One hundred hours of happiness!
Is this not enough?
***
The beating of my heart,
the warmth of a trusting body...
How little did you take from it?
what I wanted to give you.
And there is melancholy, like honey is sweet,
and the bitterness of withering bird cherries,
and the rejoicing of bird gatherings,
and melting clouds..
There is a tireless rustle of grass,
and the talk of pebbles by the river,
burry,
not translatable
in no languages.
There's a coppery slow sunset
and a light shower of leaves...
How rich you must be
that you don't need anything.
But this bitterness of misfortune, which accompanied her happiness, imbued the poetry of Veronica Tushnova with poignancy, astringency and sincerity, which were embodied in the stunning love lyrics that made up the last volume of her poems.
7:1247 7:1256And when the first edition of the collection came out,
Then in the morning the printing house was short of a quarter of the circulation - at night five thousand books simply went from hand to hand, or rather, they were stolen.
Then the printing house, bringing a signal copy to the hospital for the poetess dying of cancer
of her last book, she was forced to apologize to Veronica Tushnova that they had not saved the circulation and would continue to print it. The second edition of this stunning book about a woman’s love, love that became the tragic point of her life, hit the shelves.
I don't know if I'm right
I don’t know if I’m honest
I don't remember the beginning
I don't see the end...
I'm glad,
that there were no meetings under the clock,
that they didn't kiss you
at the porch.
I'm glad it was so dumb and direct,
so simple and difficult
so tender and evil
what did it smell like in autumn?
alarming and spicy
that the smoky sky was creeping onto the slopes.
What a gossip jay
screamed until she was hoarse,
calling all over the coast about us.
that I am nothing to you
didn't promise
and you didn't ask for anything
I have.
And this doesn’t sadden me at all, -
beautiful at that first time of discomfort...
They don't ask for gifts
and they don't promise
they bring gifts
and give it away.
Yes, it is rightly said that the love of ordinary people leaves children, and the love of a poet leaves poems that make poets immortal.
We never quarreled
I tried to make the most of everything.
No insomnia for you
Didn't have to spend it on me.
not prey
Not a reward, -
was a godsend,
That's probably why I'm not happy
That's why I'm not worth anything.
Only my life is short,
I only firmly and bitterly believe:
you didn’t like your find -
love loss...
Long winters and summers will never merge: they have different habits and a completely different appearance... (B. Okudzhava)
| The gloomy earth was frozen, the sky yearned for the sun. It's dark in the morning and dark at noon, but I don't care, I don't care! And I have a beloved, beloved, with the behavior of an eagle, with the soul of a dove, with a cheeky grin, with a childish smile, the only one in the whole wide world. He is my air, he is my sky, everything without him is lifeless and dumb... But he knows nothing about it, he is busy with his own affairs and thoughts, he will pass by and not look, and will not look back, and will not think of smiling at me. Between us lies forever and ever, not distant distances - fleeting years, it is not the great sea that stands between us - bitter grief, a strange heart. We are not destined to meet forever... But I don’t care, I don’t care, but I have a beloved, beloved! | 
It was thought that everything would last forever, Like air, water, light: Her carefree faith, Her heart’s strength would be enough for a hundred years. Here I will order - And it will appear, Night or day does not count, It will appear from underground, It will cope with any grief, It will swim across the sea. It is necessary - It will walk waist-deep In the starry dry snow, Through the taiga To the pole, Into the ice, Through “I can’t.” He will be on duty, If necessary, A month on his feet without sleep, If only he is nearby, Nearby, Rejoicing that he is needed. I thought Yes, it seemed... How you let me down! Suddenly she left forever - She didn’t take into account the power that she herself gave to me. Unable to cope with grief, I roar loudly and call. No, nothing will get better: It won’t appear from underground, Unless in reality. This is how I live. Am I alive?
|
Having moved to Leningrad, she completed her studies at a medical institute, which she began in Kazan, married the famous doctor Yuri Rozinsky and gave birth to a daughter, Natalya, in 1939. Tushnova’s second husband is physicist Yuri Timofeev.
The details of Veronica Tushnova’s family life are unknown - much has not been preserved, has been lost, and relatives also remain silent.
She began writing poetry early and after the end of the war, during which she had to work in hospitals, she forever connected her life with poetry.
It is not known under what circumstances and when exactly Veronika Tushnova met the poet and writer Alexander Yashin (1913–1968), whom she fell in love with so bitterly and hopelessly and to whom she dedicated her most beautiful poems, included in her last collection “One Hundred Hours of Happiness.” Hopeless - because Yashin, the father of seven children, was already married for the third time. Close friends jokingly called Alexander Yakovlevich’s family the “Yashinsky collective farm.”
“The insoluble cannot be resolved, the incurable cannot be healed...” And judging by her poems, Veronica Tushnova could only be healed of her love by her own death.
Lev Anninsky in his article “Veronica Tushnova: “They do not renounce, loving ...” connects the main events in the life of my heroes with 1961:
In 1961 - a passionate, indomitable, almost insane, sometimes deliberately tongue-tied priestess of love, who does not recognize laws and knows no barriers...
They met secretly, in other cities, in hotels, went to the forest, wandered all day, spent the night in hunting lodges. And when they returned to Moscow by train, Yashin asked Veronica to get off two or three stops so that they would not be seen together.
It was not possible to keep the relationship a secret. His friends condemn him, there is a real tragedy in his family. The break with Veronica Tushnova was predetermined and inevitable.
The life of Alexander Yashin - both literary and personal - is not easy. And he had reason to despair (more on that below). I don’t know what events caused the poem “Despair,” dated 1958. Literary persecution for the truth about the Russian village (the story “Levers”)? Fear for the fate of the family associated with this? Love?
Mother of God, don’t blame me, I don’t glorify you in churches, And now, having prayed, I’m not being a fool at all, I’m not lying. It’s just that my strength is no longer there, All the losses and troubles cannot be measured, If the light in the heart fades, At least you have to believe in something. For a long time there has been no peace, no sleep, I live as if in smoke, as if in fog... My wife is dying, and I myself am on the same brink. Do I sin more than others? Why is there grief behind grief? I’m not asking you for a loan, I’m not asking for a ticket to a sanatorium. Let me get out of this mess. From the crossroads, from the impassability, Since no one has helped yet, At least help you, Mother of God. When I think about Alexander Yashin, all the vicissitudes of his life, his bright Russian character, about his heart, trying to contain all the troubles and sorrows, equally rooting for the fate of the Fatherland and a specific person, one statement by F. M. Dostoevsky comes to mind . In my free interpretation, it sounds like this: the Russian man is broad, but it could be narrowed down. This phrase is not a reproach, it is a statement. It just seems to me that Fyodor Mikhailovich casually, in a few words, explained where he gets the plots for his novels, inexplicable and often incomprehensible to people far from Russia.
This is the background to the appearance of Veronica Tushnova’s last poems - poignant and confessional - the brightest example of female love poetry.
And this is how my heroes appear in the descriptions of people who knew them:
“Veronica has a scorching southern, Asian (more Persian than Tatar type) beauty” (Lev Anninsky)
“Stunningly beautiful” (Mark Sobol)
“A beautiful, black-haired woman with sad eyes (for her characteristic and unusual beauty to the Central Russian eye, she was laughingly called an “oriental beauty”)”
“Veronica was stunningly beautiful! Everyone instantly fell in love with her... I don’t know if she was happy in her life for at least an hour... You need to write about Veronica from the perspective of her shining light of love for everything. She made happiness out of everything...” (Nadezhda Ivanovna Kataeva-Lytkina)
“Veronica Tushnova sat down at my table. She smelled temptingly of good perfume, and like a revived Galatea, she lowered her sculpted eyelids...” (O. V. Ivinskaya, “The Years with Boris Pasternak: Captivated by Time”)
“...Since childhood, she developed a pagan enthusiastic attitude towards nature. She loved to run barefoot in the dew, lie in the grass on a slope strewn with daisies, watch the clouds hurrying somewhere and catch the rays of the sun in her palms.
She doesn’t like winter, she associates winter with death” (“Russian Life”)
When Veronica was in the hospital in the oncology department, Alexander Yashin visited her. Mark Sobol, who had been friends with Veronica for many years, became an involuntary witness to one of these visits:
When I came to her room, I tried to cheer her up. She was indignant: no need! She was given evil antibiotics that tightened her lips and made it painful for her to smile. She looked extremely thin. Unrecognizable. And then he came! Veronica ordered us to turn to the wall while she got dressed. Soon she quietly called out: “Boys...”. I turned around and was stunned. A beauty stood before us! I will not be afraid of this word, because it is said exactly. Smiling, with glowing cheeks, a young beauty who has never known any illness. And then I felt with particular strength that everything she wrote was true. Absolute and irrefutable truth. Perhaps this is what is called poetry...
In the last days before her death, she forbade Alexander Yashin from entering her room - she wanted him to remember her as beautiful, cheerful, and lively.
“What a huge impression Alexander Yakovlevich made everywhere he appeared. He was a handsome, strong man, very charming, very bright."
“I was quite surprised by Yashin’s appearance, which seemed to me not very rustic, and perhaps not very Russian. A large, proudly set aquiline nose (you won’t find anything like that in all of Pinega), thin sarcastic lips under a red, well-groomed mustache and a very tenacious, piercing, slightly wild eye of a forest man, but with a tired, sad squint...” (Fyodor Abramov)
“... A Vologda peasant, he looked like a peasant, tall, broad-boned, shovel-shaped face, kind and strong... Eyes with a cunning peasant squint, piercingly intelligent” (Grigory Svirsky)
“Why is it possible without millions? Why can’t you do without one?”
Even if you crash, even if you die, you won’t find a truer answer, and wherever our passions lead you and me, there are always two roads ahead - this one and this one, without which it is impossible, like without heaven and earth. (B. Okudzhava) They say that it was Alexander Yashin who recommended Bulatu Okudzhava to the Writers' Union.
So who is he, the “one and only” who became air and sky for Veronica Tushnova?
Yashin (real name Popov) Alexander Yakovlevich (1913–1968), poet, prose writer. Born on March 14 (27 n.s.) in the village of Bludnovo, Vologda region, into a peasant family. During the Patriotic War, he volunteered for the front and, as a war correspondent and political worker, participated in the defense of Leningrad and Stalingrad and in the liberation of Crimea.
It is to Yashin that the poet Nikolai Rubtsov and the prose writer Vasily Belov owe much of their rise in Russian literature.
After the release of the stories “Levers” and “Vologda Wedding,” the doors of publishing houses and editorial offices were closed for the Stalin Prize laureate. Many of his works remained unfinished.
He is loved by an amazing woman, talented, beautiful, sensitive... “But he doesn’t know anything about it, he’s busy with his own affairs and thoughts... he’ll pass by and not look, and won’t look back, and won’t think of smiling at me.”
“It is not accidental that there are two roads on earth - this one and this one, this one strains the legs, this one stirs the soul,” Bulat Okudzhava wrote in his poem.
“A lot of things strained Alexander Yashin’s legs - his civic position, when he, as best he could, asserted in his stories and poems his right to the truth, and his huge family, in which not everything was easy either, and the image of a guardian of folk traditions to whom he owed was followed by a father of seven children, a loving and caring husband, a moral guide for aspiring writers
From diary entries from 1966:
“For a long time now I have had a desire for creative solitude - this explains the construction of a house on Bobrishny Ugor... My life has become very difficult, joyless in social terms. I began to understand and see too much and I can’t come to terms with anything...
Relocation to Bobrishny Ugor... I laid out my notebooks and looked out the window, I couldn’t see enough. Mother and sister went home in the rain.
I stayed and I'm glad. An amazing feeling of peace. Perhaps, now I understand the hermits, the old Russian cell attendants, their thirst for loneliness... Because of this one moonlit quiet, though still cold, night it was worth building my hut... To me such confinement in the wilderness of forests and snow is more valuable than fame and awards - neither humiliation nor insults, no persecution. I’m always here in my house, in my forest. This is my homeland...” (“First of September”)
And here is the very image that was supposed to establish itself in the minds of readers. V. N. Barakov in the article “The Living Word of Yashin” writes:
Alexander Yashin was a believer; in his apartment he kept icons, a folding bag, and a Bible, which he never parted with; he observed Orthodox fasts, lived ascetically, not allowing himself anything unnecessary. In his house on Bobrishny Ugor there is only a hard trestle bed, a desk, and a homemade coffee table - a gift from Vasily Belov.
On Bobrishny Ugor... his soul burned in solitary prayer, because the closest thing to prayer is lyrical poetry.
“In the last days of a severe illness,” says his daughter, “he, raising his hand high, turned over the pages of an invisible book in the air, said that he now knew how to write... And then, when he woke up, he addressed directly many times a day: “Lord, I am coming with You to connect!..”
“People like Yashin,” concludes the poet’s daughter, “led their generation, raised and supported them with their creativity, feeding the moral spiritual foundation in a person...”
But there was another way. On this road, many complications awaited a bright, passionately loving life in all its manifestations, an amorous person.
Alexander Yashin has a poem dated 1959 - “You forgave such things...”.
You forgave such things, You were so able to love, You forgot so easily, What others couldn’t forget... ...Only you couldn’t stand a lie, You couldn’t bear one lie, You couldn’t justify it, And you couldn’t understand. This is probably about his wife, Zlata Konstantinovna, the mother of his youngest children.
And further. A loved one, grieving at the grave of a woman who became his bitter, predicted loss (Tushnova died in 1965), writes in 1966:
But you must be somewhere? And not someone else’s - Mine... But which one? Beautiful? Good? Maybe she’s evil?.. We couldn’t miss you. Waiting for new love again? And then there was the realization: “I didn’t save anyone’s love before the deadline...” (“Otkhodnaya”, 1966).
“And my revelations will turn into the best poems,” Yashin wrote in 1961. Truly this is so, because in the last years of his life he literally burst through, and I simply advise you to find, read and compare his early and late poems.
And no matter what posthumous monuments are erected to him, no matter what white clothes he is dressed in, the best, miraculous monument to myself, I consider these truthful, frank, life-suffering lines of the poem of the same 1966 “Transitional Issues,” dedicated to Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky :
By what measure is My absurdity measured? And I don’t believe in God, And I don’t get along with the devil. This is how fate brought together “the woman in the window in a pink dress”, who chose a “beautiful, but in vain” road, and a man for whom “there are always two roads ahead - this one and this one, without which it is impossible, like without heaven and earth”... Fairy tales say that they lived happily and died on the same day.
My heroes were born on the same day - March 27th.
“This woman in the window in a pink dress
asserts that it is impossible to live without tears in separation.”
(B. Okudzhava)
...And they tell me: there is no such love. They tell me: live like everyone else! And I won’t let anyone put out their souls. And I live like everyone else will someday live!
But if it were in my power, I would continue the journey forever, because the minutes of approaching happiness are much better than happiness itself.
***
I was afraid of you, I had difficulty taming myself to you, I didn’t know that you were my spring, my daily bread, my home!
But you are in another, distant house and even in another city. Someone else's powerful palms lie on a dear heart.
Don’t think, I’m brave, I’m not afraid of offense or grief, whatever you want, I’ll do anything, do you hear, my dear heart?
I only have a few springs left, so give me a choice of what I want: blue-winged fir trees, pine trees, and a birch tree - a white candle.
Don’t blame me for wanting little, don’t judge that I’m timid at heart. It just so happened - I was late... Give me your hand! Where is your hand?
I don’t need flattering smiles, I don’t need beautiful words, the only gift I want is your dear heart.
I won’t bother you and I’ll pass by like your shadow... Life is so short, and there’s only one spring a year. There the forest birds sing, there the soul sings in the chest... A hundred sins will be forgiven you if you say:
- Come!
I haven’t told you everything yet - do you know how I walk around train stations? How do I study the schedules? How do I meet trains at night?
I speak to you in poetry, I can’t stop. They are like tears, like breathing, and that means I am not lying about anything...
Everything is unusual this summer, strange: the fact that these spruce trees are so straight, and the fact that we feel the forest as a temple, and the fact that we are the gods in this temple!
I light fires and stoke damp stoves, and I admire how you straighten your drooping shoulders, and I watch how the icy crust melts in your eyes, how your cloudy soul dawns and blossoms.
You taught me the patience of a bird preparing for a long flight, the patience of everyone who knows what will happen and silently awaits the inevitable.
Sometimes prickly, sometimes soft beyond measure, sometimes too cheerful, you clumsily hide me from the gaze of sorrowful eyes...
Maybe it will still come true? I won’t lie—your eyes always seem to me, sometimes pleading, pitiful, sometimes cheerful, hot, happy, amazed, reddish-green.
You live and breathe somewhere, smile, eat and drink... Can’t you really hear at all? Won't you call? Won't you call me? I will be submissive and faithful, I will not cry, I will not reproach. And for the holidays, and for everyday life, and for everything, I thank you.
Don’t be angry with your vagrant bird, I myself understand that this is bad.
It’s just in vain that you drive me away, you often hurt me with unkind words: I won’t be with you for long - just until my last hour.
Days with you, months apart... At first it was like this. You leave, you come, and again and again you say goodbye, then you turn into tears, then into dreams.
And the dreams become more and more sad, and your eyes become more and more dear, and it becomes more and more unthinkable to remain without you! It's getting harder!
She was always the way she wanted: she wanted - she laughed, but she wanted - she was silent... But there is a limit to mental flexibility, and there is an end to every beginning.
You don't like counting clouds in the blue. You don't like walking barefoot on the grass. You don’t like fiber in the fields of cobwebs, you don’t like having the window wide open in your room, your eyes wide open, your soul wide open, so you can wander around slowly and sin slowly.
A falcon swam majestically over the rocky gray cliff; in the rusty and prickly thicket something squealed sleepily. Under the ruddy rowan tree you did not call me beloved, you kissed me without looking me in the eyes, without stroking my tangled strands.
Around me it’s as if there is a fence of other people’s hopes, love, other people’s happiness... How strange - everything without my participation. How strange - no one needs me...
They say: “You know, he left her...”. And without you I am like a boat without oars.
Do you know what grief is? Do you know what happiness is?
I stand like a defendant... And you cry about the past, and you pay for your purity with my life.
Well, you can leave me, you can part with me - nothing from my wealth will be given to anyone else. It is not in your power, as it was, so everything will be. My misfortune will not bring her happiness.
Blaming me alone for all your sins, having discussed everything and thought it over soberly, you wish that I would not exist... Don’t worry - I have already disappeared.
Don't grieve for me, don't grieve - you, and not me, should live in a lie, no one will order me: - Be silent! Smile! - when you even scream. I don’t need to think until the end of my life - yes, say - no. I live without hiding anything, all my pain is in the palm of my hand, my whole life is in the palm of my hand, whatever it is - here I am!
I’m not swimming, I’m going to the bottom, I can’t see three steps ahead, I blame myself, I curse you, I rebel, I cry, I hate... Everyone has a difficult time, torn apart by evil little things. Forgive me this time, and the next, and the tenth, - you gave me such happiness, you cannot subtract it or add it up, and no matter how much you take away, you cannot take anything away. Don’t listen to what I say, being jealous, tormented, grieving... Thank you! Thank you I will never repay you!
Not a prey, not a reward - it was a simple find. That’s probably why I don’t make you happy, because I’m not worth anything. Only my life is short, but I firmly and bitterly believe: if you didn’t love your find, you will love your loss...
I'm standing at the open door, I say goodbye, I'm leaving. I won’t believe anything anymore, write anyway, please! In order not to be tormented by late pity, from which there is no escape, please write me a letter a thousand years in advance. Not for the future, but for the past, for the peace of my soul, write good things about me. I'm already dead. Write!
I say goodbye to you at the last line. Maybe you will meet true love.
One hundred hours of happiness, pure, without deception. One hundred hours of happiness! Is this not enough?
Not renounce loving…
I do not renounce -
Be as before.
It's better to suffer
How life has set...
***
How could you even think that I was running away from my family? Your lane is not the end of the earth, I am not a needle in a haystack... The world is either thawed or frosty - it’s hard to pull your cart. I was looking for friendship, I didn’t know that I was carrying so many unnecessary tears.
I don't want to meet you. I don't want to love you. It’s easier to pump water all your life and crush stones on the road. It’s better to live in the wilderness, in a hut, where you at least know for sure why your soul is heavy, why you feel melancholy...
Resurrect! Arise! My destiny has broken. All the joys have faded and faded without you. I bow to everything that I didn’t value before. Resurrect! I repent that I loved and lived timidly.
And we will recognize each other there too. I’m only afraid that without a living fire, my hut will no longer seem like paradise, and, looking intently through me, out of a long-standing habit, she is still obedient, kind and trusting, there she will no longer be so in love, so patiently generous.
Give me, God, another piece of shagreen leather! I do not want to leave! God give me some more time to live. And women, women look in love, a little crazy and detached, selfless, unprotected...
So what do I want along with everyone else? You just have to die, since the time has come...
Veronika Mikhailovna was dying in severe agony. The poetess passed away on July 7, 1965. Yashin, shocked by Tushnova’s death, published an obituary in Literaturnaya Gazeta and dedicated poetry to her - his belated insight, filled with the pain of loss.
In the early 60s, on Bobrishny Ugor, near his native village of Bludnovo (Vologda region), Alexander Yashin built himself a house, where he came to work and experienced difficult moments.
Three years after Veronica's death, on June 11, 1968, he also died. And also from cancer.
In Ugor, according to the will, he was buried. Yashin was only fifty-five years old.
About what was not included in the official biographies.
In my essay “Who is Olga Vaksel, we don’t know...” I already wrote about selective memory and posthumous monuments to poets.In most publications dedicated to A. Yashin, I again see a vague, contextual mention of Yashin’s wives and children from his first marriages. Natalya, the fifth child out of seven, is for some reason called the poet’s eldest daughter, meaning that the seventh, Mikhail, is her younger brother. In essence, it seems like a trifle, but in fact such selectivity makes you distrust any memories and comments from “interested parties.” I understand that Alexander Yashin represents a movement in literature that presupposes a mythologized, cleansed image of the author. But still... still... I would like to go beyond the canonized image and learn more about the real person whom this amazing woman, sublime and earthly at the same time, loved so boundlessly and hopelessly - Veronika Tushnova.
We learn some facts from the diary of Alexander Yashin (Electronic version of the newspaper “Literary Diary”):
“Yesterday at the Literary Fund I signed up my children for evacuation with the second batch. All unnecessary people are leaving Moscow" (July 8, 1941)
“From my wife yesterday - a postcard. Moved to Nikolsk. This is unpleasant and restless for me. I don’t trust women” (October 11, 1941)
“For the third day now, I have been tormented by some kind of anxiety, a premonition of something bad. As they say, cats scratch my soul. Probably everything is connected with thoughts about his wife, about Gala... She hasn’t left yet. We need to return to our children, live for them... There was no need to get married again” (June 30, 1942)
“Slava (secretary of the party bureau of the Literary Institute, friend of A. Ya. Yashin) introduced him to the architect, student of the Literary Institute Zlata Konstantinovna Rostkovskaya” (May 8, 1943)
“It was Zlata Konstantinovna again. And every time I bring her to tears. Not good. I’m ashamed myself that I’m so wild and evil” (June 28, 1943)
“Zlata gave birth to a daughter at night” (January 5, 1945)
Zlata Konstantinovna was born (14) on May 27, 1914 in the family of the senior doctor of the infirmary of the headquarters of the Vladivostok fortress, nobleman Konstantin Pavlovich and architect Ekaterina Georgievna Rostkovsky. From a young age she wrote poetry and entered the Literary Institute in Moscow, where she met Vologda resident Alexander Yashin. They had two children - Natalya and Mikhail. In 1999, a collection of poems by Zlata Popova-Yashina was published, which she wrote throughout her life as a diary.
From the memories of Natalya’s daughter:
Nikolai Rubtsov, perhaps, visited us less than others - he was probably shy. He lived with us in 1966 at a very bitter time for our family. All our thoughts were about something else: we wanted to see only one person - brother Sasha. Rubtsov came to the house with compassion and words of consolation. In order to somehow warm him up, his mother then gave away the coat of her deceased son, which was especially dear to her...
Mikhail Yashin:
“I am the youngest son of Alexander Yashin. Pianist, graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Professor Vera Gornostaeva. In 1981, having married the daughter of a Russian emigrant, I moved to Paris, where I live to this day” (Vologda regional newspaper “Krasny Sever”, March 25, 2006)
Alexander Yashin, “Together with Prishvin” (1962):
I will tell you how Mikhail Mikhailovich (Prishvin - author's note) gave a name to a person.
In 1953, my son was born, and for a long time we could not find a suitable name for him. He was seventh...
I decided to call Prishvin.
- Mikhail Mikhailovich, a son was born... - We can’t find a name.
- You need to think! “Mikhail Mikhailovich was clearly stalling and thinking. “There are two good names,” he finally said... “The first is Dmitry.”
- So! And the second?..
- Then here’s the second one - Mikhail...
- Oh, my Misha Maly! - I say...
So how many children were there in the family of Alexander Yakovlevich and Zlata Konstantinovna?
the poet’s daughter, Tatyana, is mentioned, and his grandson, Kostya Smirnitsky, is mentioned in connection with the half-forgotten Moscow Popular Front.
Grigory Svirsky’s book “Heroes of the Execution Years” talks about “Literary Moscow,” which was banned in 1956 after the release of its first two volumes.
In the second volume, Alexander Yashin’s story “Levers” was published, after which many years of persecution of the writer, winner of the Stalin Prize, began.
G. Svirsky mentions Yashin’s six children in connection with the beginning of devastating criticism of the story. According to him, the writer’s sixteen-year-old son shot himself in his father’s empty office:
This shocked Alexander Yashin so much that he himself fell ill and never left the hospital... In his last hours, he held Zlata Konstantinovna’s hand, cried and was executed...
And, according to the former Kremlin surgeon Praskovya Nikolaevna Moshentseva, the son of Alexander Yashin committed suicide because of love.
From the memoirs of A. Yashin by Capitolina Kozhevnikova:
He had a difficult life as a writer, a man - a large family, a mentally ill wife... There was plenty of gossip and various conversations around him” (www.vestnik.com, December 25, 2002)
Apparently, the “mentally ill wife” is the second wife of the poet Galya (“You shouldn’t have gotten married again…”), in his third marriage he had three children, not two. And it is possible that the child from his second marriage (son? daughter?) was raised in the poet’s family, since Veronica Tushnova did not want to destroy a family in which there were FOUR children.
Zlata Konstantinovna Popova-Yashina and Natalya Aleksandrovna Yashina preserve the legacy of their husband and father, taking part in the preparation and publication of his books.
I found no information about the fate of her husbands. The first, Yuri Rozinsky, the father of Natalya, Tushnova’s daughter, was a psychiatrist. Olga Ivinskaya in her book “The Years with Boris Pasternak: Captivated by Time” wrote that he “saved my two-year-old son from meningitis.”
I don’t know whether Veronika Tushnova was married or whether her second marriage had already broken up when she met Alexander Yashin.
Natalya Savelyeva wrote in her essay “Two Stops to Happiness” (Novaya Gazeta, February 14, 2002):
The only documentary evidence of this love is the memoirs of Fyodor Abramov. Because of Soviet hypocrisy, they were removed from his collected works and the only time they saw the light of day was in 1996 in the Arkhangelsk newspaper Pravda Severa: “I understand, I understand well how risky it is to touch upon such a delicate area of human relations as the love of two people, and even middle-aged ones.” , family, living out their last years. To make wounds of loved ones that may not yet have healed bleed again, to revive again the flame of passions that once caused so much gossip and rumors...
Is it the only thing? In 1973, Eduard Asadov wrote a poem “To Veronica Tushnova and Alexander Yashin” (“I really won’t reveal the secret...”). You can read it in the book: Eduard Arkadyevich Asadov, “Favorites”, Smolensk: Rusich, 2003. - 624 p.
Veronica Tushnova's daughter, Natalya Yuryevna Rozinskaya, is mentioned in various editions of her mother's books as a compiler, and takes part in various literary events.
Paloma, August 2006
A story as old as time. A love story between two middle-aged people. Happy and tragic. Light and sad. Told in verse. The whole country was reading these verses. Soviet women in love copied them by hand in notebooks, because it was impossible to get collections of her poems. They were memorized, they were kept in memory and heart. They were sung. They became a lyrical diary of love and separation not only of Veronica Tushnova, but also of millions of women in love. The last book published during Tushnova’s lifetime, “One Hundred Hours of Happiness,” is all about this huge, burning love.
gloomy land
the cold has bound me,
sky by sun
I felt sad.
It's dark in the morning
and it's dark at noon,
but I don't care
I don't care!
And I have a favorite
Darling, with the demeanor of an eagle,
with a dove soul,
with a cheeky grin,
with a childish smile,
all over the world
one-one.
He is my air
he is heaven to me
everything is lifeless without him
and dumb...
And he doesn't know anything about it
busy with my own affairs and thoughts,
will pass by and not look,
and won't look back
and smile for me
won't guess.
Lie between us
forever and ever
not far away -years are fleeting,
stands between us
not a big sea - bitter grief, someone else's heart.
We will meet forever not destined…
I don't care, I don't care
and I have a favorite, Darling! 
It is unknown under what circumstances and when exactly Veronika Tushnova met the poet and writer Alexander Yashin, whom she fell in love with so bitterly and hopelessly and to whom she dedicated her most beautiful poems. Hopeless - because Yashin, the father of seven children, was already married for the third time. Close friends jokingly called Alexander Yakovlevich’s family the “Yashinsky collective farm.” It would seem that Yashin had everything before meeting Tushnova, but something was missing:
Something's in the way
Work with passion.
Everything is missing
Something in life.
Can't sit during the day
Can't sleep at night...
Need something
Big decision!
Quarrel with someone?
To part with something?
For a year at the pole
Settle down?
Maybe fall in love?
Oh, if only I could fall in love!
Something must
It will happen in life.
If I fell in love,
Like at school once upon a time,
How did you manage
In the seventh
And in the tenth -
To the point of numbness
To the point of blindness
To the point of stupidity
Up to inspiration!
Stand again
In the cold for hours,
Write again
Notes in verse.
Maybe in these
Naive notes
What if it turns out
God's spark.
And they will turn
My revelations
To the very best
Poems.
And it happened. Love burst into life. He is loved by an amazing woman, talented, beautiful, sensitive... The long, very uneven, stormy relationship of people who love each other, who are also poets, spilled out onto the pages of poetry collections. “And my revelations will turn into the best poems,” Yashin wrote in 1961. Truly this is so, because in the last years of his life he literally burst through, and I simply advise you to find, read and compare his early and late poems.Let it be unrequitedJust to loveJust don't leave a trace Walk on the ground. Herbs in thick infusion Breathe in a hut Just some downtime The soul doesn't know. Sky or land Following your beloved -The same as in the future Get a ticket. Live secretly, out of favor. But any moment Grow from under your feet At her scream. For me, the fate of the boby is not a sorrow, It would smell like the sea - the sea, And earth - earth. I will live like a bird Sing like a stream. Just don't loseSleepless nights.Let it be unrequited Let it go, let it go! Somehow with this oneI will reconcile myself with the burden.I don't complain about anythingJust to love.Give me unrequited - So be it. However, why willingly Climb the fire? We'll see later There is time! Love was a secret. Love was sinful. Veronica, apparently, did not allow herself to destroy his family, because, like a wise woman, she understood: you cannot build happiness on someone else’s misfortune. Veronica Mikhailovna did not even think about taking her beloved away from the family. She could never be happy by making others unhappy:The sky is colored with yellow dawn,close to dark...How worrying, darling, how scary, I'm so afraid of your dumbness.You live and breathe somewhere,smile, eat and drink...Can't you hear at all?Won't you call? Won't you call me?I will be obedient and faithful,I won’t pay, I won’t reproach. Both for holidays and for everyday life, and for everything I thank.And that's all there is: porch, Yes, there is a through smoke above the chimney,yes a silver ring,what you promised.Yes, there is a cardboard box at the bottomtwo stems withered since spring,and here's the heart, which would be dead without you. They met secretly, in other cities, in hotels, went to the forest, wandered all day, spent the night in hunting lodges. And when they returned to Moscow by train, Yashin asked Veronica to get off two or three stops so that they would not be seen together.I alone know how to love you,Yes, I don’t have the right to do this,as if love is right,as if it might be true become untrue. Your hearth does not burn, but smokes,your soul does not bloom - it gathers dust.Out of breath, languishing in the storm,prays for rain, fears rain...You know everything, you understand everything,What you give, you immediately take away.I know everything, I understand everything,I relieve your pain, I take it away...In 1961, Yashin wrote the poem “The Vertushinka River” (it’s easy to guess that Vertushinka is an affectionate image of Veronika Tushnova):There is more than one aspen tree above youStupefiedly bowed.By your witchcraft, Vertushinka,The whole soul is full to the brim.Spun around, enchanted,The light made me spin around.What are you doing, enemy force? -And in winter there is no escape.With passion, with bitterness,Twisting and teasingYou expose my roots,Like you want to knock me down.It’s not our business in spring:No matter how busy you are, how young you are -I'm not the same, and you're shallow,So freeze, calm down!Veronica answered him no less talentedly, bitingly and tenderly:Good, you say, beautiful?Why do you curse her with anguish?Don't reproach, say thank youthe speed of its witchcraft.In both weather and bad weatherbowed over the river,the aspen tree drinks living water,That's why she's alive.Shouldn't the pinwheel flow?She has no other signs...If the river calms down,that means there is no river in the world.It gets shallow, then it arrives, -nice to look at...Rivers are never oldthey don't need to get younger.Don't be afraid of its whirlwind,do not run from intoxicating water,will calm down after death,there are no eternal rivers under the moon!The two of them didn't have to be together often. Yashin carefully hid his beloved from friends and acquaintances. Meetings were rare. And the whole life of a woman in love turned into a painful wait for these bitter-happy meetings. He was a decent man, Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin. And the sense of duty prevailed. But it is impossible to command the heart. And my heart was torn between duty and love. And the beloved either humbly waited, or was jealously tormented, or reproached, but more often she humbly accepted the fate that befell her:Are you still worried - what will happen?Nothing. Everything will be as it is.They will talk, judge, forget, -everyone has their own worries.Nothing will happen... What do we need? Are we really not given riches?now darkness, now light, now green, now blizzard,We'll go to the forest in the spring, God willing...No, it won't calm down will not ferment! It’s not something that is treated with separations,not a disease that goes away, not in our age... That's right, dear friend!And only at night the pain will sometimes wake you up,like a knife in the heart... I’ll bite my pillow and cry and cry, nothing will happen! And I live, walk, laugh, breathe...You read her poems and understand: the feeling was real, painful, passionate. Not an easy affair, but love, which becomes the meaning of life, life itself. The love that each of us secretly dreams of. True, one has to pay dearly for such burning feelings. Sometimes, with life. Veronica dissolved in her love and burned at her fire. But the poems remained, sincere and emotional.The wind drives shaggy tufts of clouds,It's cold again.And again we part in silence,the way they part forever.You stand and don’t look after him.I'm crossing the bridge...You are cruel with the cruelty of a child -cruel from lack of understanding.Maybe for a day, maybe for a whole yearthis pain will shorten my life.If only you knew the true priceall your silences and insults!You would forget about everything else,you would grab me in your arms,would lift and carry out of grief,how people are taken out of the fire.It was not possible to keep the relationship a secret. His friends condemn him, there is a real tragedy in his family. The break with Veronica Tushnova was predetermined and inevitable. What to do if love came at the end of youth? What to do if life has already turned out the way it has? What to do if your loved one is not free? Forbid yourself to love? Impossible. Parting is tantamount to death. But they broke up. That's what he decided. And she had no choice but to obey.What did I refuse you, tell me?You asked to kiss - I kissed.You asked to lie, as you remember, and in liesI have never refused you.Always was the way I wanted:I wanted to - I laughed, but I wanted to - I was silent...But there is a limit to mental flexibility,and there is an end to every beginning.Blaming me alone for all my sins,having discussed everything and thought it all over soberly,Do you wish that I didn’t exist...Don't worry - I've already disappeared.Do you remember how a tit flew into the window,What a commotion did you cause? Do not be angry on your migratory bird,I understand that this is bad.It's just in vain that you're chasing me away,You often hurt with unkind words:I won't be with you for long - only until my last hour.Then you close the doors tighter,cover the frames with white paper...Someday you'll remember not believing myself: was she really flying, interfering, singing? A dark streak began in her life, a streak of despair and pain. Probably, at first she was still waiting and hoping. How someone sentenced to death waits and hopes for a miracle. It was then that these piercing lines were born in her suffering soul: loving does not renounce... And he, handsome, strong, passionately loved, renounced. He tossed between a sense of duty and love. The sense of duty won. But why is this victory so sad?The beating of my heart,the warmth of a trusting body...How little did you take from it?what I wanted to give you.And there is melancholy, like honey is sweet,and the bitterness of withering bird cherries,and the rejoicing of bird gatherings,and melting clouds...There is a tireless rustle of grass,and the talk of pebbles by the river, burry, untranslatable in no languages.There's a coppery slow sunsetand a light shower of leaves...How rich you must bethat you don't need anything.In 1965, she, a beautiful black-haired woman with sad eyes (for her characteristic and unusual beauty to the Central Russian eye, she was sometimes called an “oriental beauty”), with a gentle character, who loved to give gifts not only to loved ones, but also to just friends, was forced to go to the hospital with diagnosis of cancer. Alexander Yashin, of course, visited her. Mark Sobol, who had been friends with Tushnova for many years, became an involuntary witness to one of these visits.“When I came to her room, I tried to cheer her up. She was indignant: no need! She was given antibiotics, which made her lips tighten and made it painful for her to smile. She looked extremely thin. Unrecognizable. And then he came! Veronica ordered us to turn to the wall while she got dressed. Soon she quietly called out: “Boys...” I turned around and was stunned. A beauty stood before us! I will not be afraid of this word, because it is said exactly. Smiling, with glowing cheeks, a young beauty who has never known any illness. And then I felt with particular strength that everything she wrote was true. Absolute and irrefutable truth. Perhaps this is what is called poetry...”In the last days before her death, Veronika Mikhailovna forbade Alexander Yakovlevich from entering her room. She wanted her lover to remember her as beautiful and cheerful. And in parting she wrote:I'm standing at the open doorI say goodbye, I'm leaving.I won’t believe in anything anymore, write anyway, please! So as not to suffer from late pity,from which there is no escape,write me a letter pleaseforward a thousand years. Not for the future, but for the past, for the repose of the soul, write good things about me.I'm already dead. Write!The famous poetess was dying in severe agony. Not only from a terrible illness, but also from longing for a loved one. At the age of 51, on July 7, 1965, Veronika Mikhailovna Tushnova passed away. After her, there were manuscripts left on the table: unfinished pages of a poem and a new cycle of poems.Alexander Yashin was shocked by the death of his beloved woman. He published an obituary in Literaturnaya Gazeta - he wasn’t afraid - and wrote poetry:Now I can love You are nowhere from me now,And no one has power over the soul,Happiness is so stableThat any trouble is not a problem.I don't expect any changesNo matter what happens to me from now on:Everything will be like in the first year,How it was last year, -Our time has stopped.And there will be no more disagreements:Today our meetings are calm,Only the linden trees and maples make noise...Now I can love!You and I are no longer subject to jurisdiction You and I are no longer subject to jurisdiction,Our case is closed Crossed, Forgiven. It’s not difficult for anyone because of us,And we don’t care anymore.Late in the evening, Early in the morning I don’t bother to confuse the trail,I'm not holding my breath -I'm coming to you on a dateIn the twilight of the leaves, Whenever I want. Yashin realized that love had not gone away, had not escaped from the heart as ordered. Love only lay low, and after Veronica’s death it flared up with renewed vigor, but in a different capacity. It turned into melancholy, painful, bitter, ineradicable. There is no dear soul, truly dear, devoted... I remember the prophetic lines of Tushnova:Only my life is short,I only firmly and bitterly believe:you didn’t like your find -you will love the loss.You'll fill it with red clay,I'll drink to your peace...You return home - it’s empty,you leave the house - it’s empty,you look into the heart - it’s empty,forever and ever - empty!Probably, these days he fully, with frightening clarity, understood the sad meaning of age-old folk wisdom: what we have, we do not value, and having lost, we cry bitterly.I thought and it seemed... I thought everything would last foreverLike air, water, light:Her careless faith,The strength of her heartEnough for a hundred years. Here I will order - And he will appear, Night or day doesn't countIt will appear from underground,Anyone can cope with grief,The sea will cross. It is necessary - It will go up to the waist In the starry dry snow, Through the taiga To the pole, Into the ice, Through “I can’t.” He will be on duty, if necessary, A month on my feet without sleep,If only it were nearby, Near, Glad to be needed. I thought yes it seemed... How you let me down!Suddenly gone forever -I didn’t take the authorities into account,What she herself gave me.I can't cope with grief, I roar loudly, I call. No, nothing will get better:It will not appear from underground,Unless not in reality. This is how I live. Am I alive? After her death, Alexander Yakovlevich, during his remaining three years on earth, seemed to understand what kind of love fate had given him. (“I repent that I loved and lived timidly...”) He composed his main poems, in which the poet’s deep repentance and a testament to readers who sometimes think that courage and recklessness in love, openness in relationships with people and the world alone bring misfortune. Books of lyrical prose by A. Ya. Yashin from the 1960s, “I Treat You to Rowan,” or high lyricism, “The Day of Creation,” return readers to an understanding of undiminished values and eternal truths. As a testament to everyone, the lively, anxious and passionate voice of the recognized classic of Soviet poetry can be heard: “Love and hasten to do good deeds!” Mourning at the grave of a woman who became his bitter, predicted loss (Tushnova died in 1965), in 1966 he writes:But you must be somewhere? And not someone else’s - Mine... But which one? Beautiful? Good? Maybe evil?..We wouldn't miss you.Yashin's friends recalled that after Veronica's death he walked around as if lost. A big, strong, handsome man, he somehow immediately gave up, as if the light inside that had illuminated his path had gone out. He died three years later from the same incurable disease as Veronica. Shortly before his death, Yashin wrote his “Otkhodnaya”:Oh, how difficult it will be for me to die,When you take a full breath, stop breathing!I regret not leaving - Leave, I'm afraid of no possible meetings - Partings. Life lies like an uncompressed wedge at your feet.I will never rest in peace:I didn’t save anyone’s love before the deadlineAnd he responded deafly to suffering. Did anything come true? What to do with yourselfFrom the bile of regrets and reproaches?Oh, how difficult it will be for me to die! And no lessons can be learned. They say you don't die of love. Well, maybe at the age of 14, like Romeo and Juliet. It is not true. They die. And at fifty they die. If the love is real. Millions of people mindlessly repeat the formula of love, not realizing its great tragic power: I love you, I can’t live without you... And they continue to live peacefully. But Veronica Tushnova couldn’t. I couldn't live. And she died. From cancer? Or maybe out of love? Shortly before her death, she wrote these lines:I say goodbye to youat the last line.With true love,maybe you'll meet.May it be different, dear,the one with whom it’s heaven,I still conjure:remember! remember!Remember me ifthe morning ice will crunch,if suddenly in the skythe plane will thunder,if the whirlwind starts to swirla veil of stuffy clouds,if the dog gets bored,whine at the moon, if red flocks the falling leaves will swirl,if it's past midnightthey will knock at random,if it's white in the morningthe roosters will crow,remember my tearslips, hands, poetry...Don't try to forgetdriving away from my heart, don't try, don't bother - too much of me!
And he also could not live without her. Three years after the death of his beloved, on June 11, 1968, at the 56th year of his life, in Moscow, the poet, who missed Veronica, died. He was buried in his homeland in the Vologda region, in the village of Bludnovo. The diagnosis of A. Ya. Yashin’s death sounded just as ominous - “cancer.”
