How poor Demyan turned from a peasant into a classic of the proletarian revolution and how he angered Stalin. Demyan poor Responses in literature
Demyan Bedny(real name Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov; April 1, 1883, Gubovka, Alexandria district, Kherson province - May 25, 1945, Moscow) - Russian Soviet writer, poet, publicist and public figure. Member of the RSDLP(b) since 1912.
Biography
E. A. Pridvorov was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka (now Kompaneevsky district, Kirovograd region of Ukraine) in a peasant family.
Having experienced in childhood the great influence of his uncle, a popular denouncer and an atheist, he took his village nickname as a pseudonym. He first mentioned this pseudonym in his poem “About Demyan Poor, a harmful man” (1911).
In 1896-1900 he studied at the Kyiv military paramedic school, in 1904-08. at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University. The first poems were published in 1899. They were written in the spirit of official monarchist “patriotism” or romance “lyrics”. Member of the RSDLP since 1912, from the same year he published in Pravda. The first book “Fables” was published in 1913, and subsequently he wrote a large number of fables, songs, ditties and poems of other genres.
In 1914 he was mobilized, took part in battles, and was awarded the St. George Medal for bravery. In 1915 he was transferred to the reserve unit, and then decommissioned.
During the Civil War, he conducted propaganda work in the ranks of the Red Army. In his poems of those years he extolled Lenin and Trotsky.
Controversial success (1920-1929)
On the one hand, D. Bedny was seen during this period as a popular and successful author. The total circulation of his books in the 1920s exceeded two million copies. People's Commissar of Culture A.V. Lunacharsky praised him as a great writer equal to Maxim Gorky, and in April 1923 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee awarded Demyan Bedny the Order of the Red Banner. This was the first award of a military order for literary activity in the RSFSR.
On the other hand, despite the calls of the head of RAPP L.L. Averbakh for the “widespread demonization of Soviet literature,” for many proletarians the figure of Demyan as a literary standard was unacceptable. Proletkult members complained about the “false proletarian dominance in the poems” of the poor Demyan. Representatives of LEF and other avant-garde movements were irritated by Bedny’s militant amateurism, “condescension”, the superficiality of his themes and ideas, the stereotyped images and speech, and the general lack of poetic skill. As for the “aphoristic-minted” characteristics formulated by Trotsky (“this is not a poet who approached the revolution, condescended to it, accepted it; he is a Bolshevik of the poetic kind of weapon” and a number of others), then “they subsequently greatly damaged the poet.”
During the internal party struggle of 1926-1930, Demyan Bedny began to actively and consistently defend the line of I.V. Stalin. Thanks to this, the poet enjoyed various signs of favor from the authorities, including an apartment in the Kremlin and regular invitations to meetings with the party leadership. To travel around the country, Demyan Bedny was given a special carriage, in which he, in particular, traveled around the Caucasus. During his trips he exchanged friendly letters with Stalin. They began publishing his collected works (interrupted at volume 19). He collected one of the largest private libraries in the USSR (over 30 thousand volumes). In 1928, due to complications of diabetes, he was sent to Germany for two months of treatment, accompanied by family members and an interpreter. Demyan was given a Ford car for personal use.
A number of publications were dedicated to the work of Demyan Bedny: A. Efremin alone, one of the editors of the collected works, published the books “Demyan Bedny at School” (1926), “Demyan Bedny and the Art of Agitation” (1927), “Demyan Bedny on the Anti-Church Front "(1927) and "Thunder Poetry" (1929).
Opala (1930-1938)
On December 6, 1930, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, by its resolution, condemned Bedny’s poetic feuilletons “Get off the Stove” and “Without Mercy,” published in Pravda. The criticism concerned two topics: “Recently, Comrade Demyan Bedny’s feuilletons have begun to appear false notes, expressed in sweeping denigration of “Russia” and “Russian””; In addition, the latest feuilleton mentioned the uprisings in the USSR and the assassination attempts on Stalin, despite the ban on discussing such topics as “false rumors.”
Demyan complained to Stalin, but received a sharply critical letter in response:
“What is the essence of your mistakes? It consists in the fact that criticism of the shortcomings of life and everyday life of the USSR, mandatory and necessary criticism, developed by you at first quite accurately and skillfully, captivated you beyond measure and, having captivated you, began to develop in your works into slander of the USSR, its past, its present... [You] began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past represented a vessel of abomination and desolation... that “laziness” and the desire to “sit on the stove” is almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers, who, having carried out the October Revolution, of course, they did not cease to be Russian. And you call this Bolshevik criticism! No, dear Comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism, but slander against our people, the debunking of the USSR, the debunking of the proletariat of the USSR, the debunking of the Russian proletariat.”
- Letter from Stalin to Demyan Bedny
After criticizing the leader, Bedny began to write emphatically party poems and fables (“The Marvelous Collective,” “The Hedgehog,” etc.). In his poems of the 1930s, Demyan constantly quotes Stalin, and also uses Stalin's words as epigraphs. He enthusiastically welcomed the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: “Under the crowbars of the workers it turns into rubbish / The ugliest temple, an unbearable shame” (1931, “Epoch”). In the poems “No Mercy!” (1936) and “Truth. Heroic Poem (1937) mercilessly branded Trotsky and the Trotskyists, calling them Judases, bandits and fascists. On his 50th anniversary (1933), the poet was awarded the Order of Lenin.
Nevertheless, party criticism of Demyan continued; at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, he was accused of political backwardness and removed from the list of recipients. In 1932, Demyan was evicted from his Kremlin apartment; Stalin, after another complaint, allowed him only to use his library that remained in the Kremlin. In 1935, a new scandal and great dissatisfaction with Stalin was caused by a notebook found by the NKVD with notes of offensive characteristics that Demyan gave to prominent figures of the party and government.
In 1936, the poet wrote the libretto of the comic opera “Bogatyrs” (about the baptism of Rus'), which outraged Molotov, who visited the performance, and then Stalin. The Arts Committee in a special resolution (November 15, 1936) sharply condemned the performance as anti-patriotic. Stalin, in a letter to the editors of Pravda, regarded Demyan’s next supposedly anti-fascist poem “Fight or Die” (July 1937) as “literary trash”, as a fable containing “stupid and transparent” criticism not of the fascist, but of the Soviet system.
Last years (1938-1945)
In July 1938, Demyan Bedny was expelled from the party and from the Writers' Union with the wording “moral corruption.” They stopped printing him, but the objects that bore his name were not renamed.
Demyan Bedny, who fell into disgrace, was in poverty and was forced to sell his library and furniture. He composed new praises of Lenin-Stalin, but in conversations with relatives he spoke extremely negatively about the leader and the rest of the party leadership. Stalin knew about this, but did not subject the poet to repression this time either.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, publications resumed, first under the pseudonym D. Boevoy, then towards the end of the war, under the original pseudonym. In anti-fascist poems and fables, Bedny, in complete contradiction with his previous works, called on his brothers to “remember the old days,” claimed that he believed “in his people,” and at the same time continued to praise Stalin. Demyan’s new “poems” remained unnoticed. He failed to return both his previous position and the location of the leader.
D. Bedny died on May 25, 1945. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (site No. 2). The last critical party resolution concerning the poet was issued posthumously. On February 24, 1952, two collections of D. Bedny were ideologically destroyed (“Selected”, 1950 and “Native Army”, 1951) for “gross political distortions”: as it turned out, these publications included the original versions of Bedny’s works instead of later, politically recycled. In 1956, Demyan Bedny was posthumously reinstated into the CPSU.
Interesting Facts
Demyan Bedny participated in the persecution of M. A. Bulgakov. There is also an entry in Bulgakov’s diary: “Vasilevsky said that Demyan Bedny, speaking before a meeting of Red Army soldiers, said: “My mother was a b..b...”.”
The execution of F.E. Kaplan took place in the presence of Demyan Bedny, who asked to watch the execution to receive an “impulse” in his work. The victim's corpse was doused with gasoline and burned in an iron barrel in the Alexander Garden.
In 1929, when a mass collective farm movement began in the Tambov province, Demyan Bedny worked as a commissioner for collectivization in what was then Izberdeevsky district (in the villages of Petrovka, Uspenovka, now Petrovsky district).
Responses in literature
Demyan Bedny is present as a character in V. P. Aksenov’s novel “The Moscow Saga”.
Message to the “evangelist” Demyan
In April - May 1925, two Soviet newspapers, Pravda and Bednota, published an anti-religious poem by Demyan Bedny, “The New Testament without the Flaw of the Evangelist Demyan,” written in a mocking and mocking manner. In 1925-1926, a vivid poetic response to this poem entitled “Message to the Evangelist Demyan”, signed with the name of S. A. Yesenin, began to spread in Moscow. Later, in the summer of 1926, the OGPU arrested the poet Nikolai Gorbachev, who confessed to being the author of the poem. However, neither his biographical data nor his literary work gave reason to consider him the actual author of the work.
There is an assumption that the events associated with the “New Testament without Flaw of the Evangelist Demyan” and “The Message ...” served as one of the impetuses for M. A. Bulgakov to write the novel “The Master and Margarita”, and Demyan Bedny became one of the prototypes of Ivan Bezdomny.
Biography
My solid, clear verse -
my feat is daily.
Native people, labor sufferer,
Only your judgment is important to me.
You are my only direct, unhypocritical judge,
You, whose hopes and thoughts I -
true spokesman
You, whose dark corners I -
"Watchdog"!
“Pridvorov, Efim Alekseevich, peasant of the village of Gubovka, Kherson province, Aleksandrovsky district - this is my true name and title,” wrote Demyan Bedny in one of his few biographies. Born in the named village. I remember myself, however, at first as a city boy - until I was seven years old. My father then served as a watchman at the church of the Elisavetgrad Theological School. We lived together in a basement closet on our father’s ten-ruble salary. Mother lived with us for rare times, and the less often these times happened, the more pleasant it was for me, because my mother’s treatment of me was extremely brutal. From the age of seven until I was thirteen, I had to endure a hard life together with my mother in the village with my grandfather Sofron, an amazingly sincere old man who loved and pitied me very much. As for my mother, then... if I remained a tenant in this world, she is least to blame for this. She kept me in a black body and beat me to death. Towards the end, I began to think about running away from home and reveled in the church-monastic book “The Path to Salvation.” Salvation, however, came from the other side. In 1896, “by the will of inscrutable fate,” I ended up not in the Elisavetgrad wallpaper workshop, where I had already been persuaded, but in the Kyiv military paramedic school. Life in a military school - after hell at home - seemed like paradise to me. I studied diligently and successfully. I mastered official wisdom so thoroughly that it was evident even when I was already a university student and could not get rid of the military bearing and patriotic ferment. Having climbed into a military uniform when I was thirteen years old, I got out of it when I was twenty-two years old... In 1904, having passed the exam as an external student for the full course of a men's classical gymnasium, I entered St. Petersburg University to study history and philology faculty. The reason for choosing the Faculty of History and Philology, rather than medicine, as one would expect from me as a paramedic, lies in the fact that my relatives placed me in the Kyiv Military Paramedic School when I was only 13 years old. My relatives, due to their poverty, were glad to have the opportunity to employ me as government support, and although during my 4-year stay at school I was invariably the first student in terms of success in my studies, I, however, managed to be fully convinced that my true vocation was not medical sciences , and humanitarian..."
The first poems of Demyan Bedny, signed with his real name, appeared in the newspaper “Kievskoye Slovo” in 1899, then in the “Collection of Russian Poets and Poetesses” in 1901. However, he was also published in “Russian Pilgrim” (“Tradition. From the Kiev-Pechersk Patericon”), which he did not like to remember later.
“After four years of a new life, new meetings and new impressions, after the stunning revolution of 1905-1906 for me and the even more stunning reaction of subsequent years, I lost everything on which my philistine, well-intentioned mood was based. In 1909, I began to publish in Korolenkov’s “Russian Wealth” and became very close friends with the famous poet-People’s Volunteer P.Ya. Yakubovich-Melshin. Influence of P.Ya. it was huge on me. His death - two years later - I suffered as a blow incomparable to anything in my life. However, only after his death could I continue my evolution with greater independence. Having already given a significant tilt towards Marxism, in 1911 I began to publish in the Bolshevik - of glorious memory - Zvezda. My crossroads converged on one road. The ideological turmoil is over. At the beginning of 1912 I was already Demyan Bedny. From this moment on, my life is like a string...”
By this time, the poet was married and earned money mainly by giving lessons. I tried my best not to drop out of the university, but I was lukewarm about my studies. He actively collaborated in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, from the first issue. Lenin more than once noted the activity of Demyan Bedny, the simplicity and necessity of his poems. Having heard about this, on November 15, 1912, Bedny sent Lenin a letter: “I want to write directly to you. I am waiting for a response indicating this or another reliable address. Address St. Petersburg, Nadezhdinskaya, 33, apt. 5. Editorial board of the magazine “Modern World”, to Demyan Bedny. - But at the same time, I ask for confirmation through the editors of Pravda that you really received this letter and you responded to it. - I am writing to you for the first time and therefore I am careful. I will be glad if you answer this letter more naturally than involuntarily - I am writing to you.” Lenin responded immediately, and soon the most friendly relations were established between the leader and the poet. “Something’s not working well in my head,” Bedny complained in one of his letters. - Write me two warm words about yourself. Send me your “pattern”. If you are also bald, then take off your photo like I do wearing a hat. However, I still have nothing in front, and baldness in the back. “The bald spot will come out on your head because of your iniquities!” Do you know of a good remedy? Lord, at least invent something good for me! At least hair ointment! However, “a bald horse is not a disgrace, a bald horse is not a dishonor.” Stupid hair, that’s all...” Lenin’s true attitude towards the poet can be judged by his letters to Pravda, in which Lenin more than once spoke of Demyan Bedny as a talented humorist, absolutely necessary for the newspaper. “As for Demyan Bedny,” he wrote after some internal editorial misunderstandings, “I continue to be in favor. Don’t find fault, friends, with human weaknesses! Talent is rare. It must be systematically and carefully maintained. There will be a sin on your soul, a great sin (a hundred times more than the various personal “sins”, if there are any) against workers’ democracy, if you don’t attract a talented employee and don’t help him. The conflicts were minor, but the matter was serious. Think about it!"
“So that I would not hit small game, but would hit the bison wandering through the forests, and the fierce royal dogs, Lenin himself often supervised my fabled shooting...”
During the First World War (from 1914 to 1915) Demyan Bedny served in the army. It is quite possible that this saved him from major troubles, just at that time the editorial office of Pravda was destroyed, many of its employees were arrested. In the intervals between shifts in the infirmary, the poet translated Aesop's fables; he always carried the book with him, in the top of his boot, for reliability. Bedny’s literary affairs were managed by his wife in Petrograd, and, it seems, not always successfully. “I was annoyed with you,” Poor wrote to his wife, “having received your letter, where you say that you will go to Alexei Maksimovich to tell him that “Battleists” and “Wolf and Lion” have already been published in “Utra.” But did I really give these things to Alexei Maksimovich? I didn’t even think about it! And I didn’t tell you to hand them over. What will Alexey Maksimovich begin to think about me? That I send my things simultaneously to all places. This is the devil knows what it is! Why are you brewing such a disgusting mess? I asked you not to bother Alexei Maksimovich with your visits without us, he has a lot of things to do. And you will still come to him with things that I did not give him, and you will apologize “they are already printed.” Alexey Maksimovich will then spit and return all the manuscripts to you. Figure it out, go ahead, what you have sent where, and don’t fool me... Oh, Vera, Vera! Today I only dreamed of you. I love you very much, but you are a bad ceiling worker. If you mess up with the manuscripts again, I won’t send you a single thing, and I’ll do it myself somehow...”
And in another letter “Darling, Vera, do not tear your soul with the desire to embrace the immensity. And don't pretend that you understand everything that you often don't understand. It's easy to become funny. Of course, a year, two, three will pass, you and I will work together, and you will learn to understand well what I myself now have great difficulty understanding. I will be saved by my intelligence, my sense of smell and my persistent, unshakable desire for an honest solution to issues that - alas! - many smart people decide dishonestly...”
Twenty days before the uprising, on October 5, 1917, the Pravda newspaper published Demyan Bedny’s poetic story “About the Land, About Freedom, About the Worker’s Share.” The poet himself lived at that time at a dacha in Mustamyaki, but already on November 11 he received a permanent pass to Smolny from Dzerzhinsky.
“I sing. But do I “sing”? My voice has become rough in battle, and my verse... there is no shine in his simple attire. Not on a sparkling stage in front of a “pure audience”, enthusiastically mute, and not under the violins’ enchantingly melodious groans do I raise my voice - dull, cracked, mocking and angry... Carrying a heavy legacy of a cursed load, I am not a servant of the muses. My firm, clear verse is my daily feat. My dear people, the suffering laborer, only your judgment is important to me, you are my only direct, unhypocritical judge, you, whose hopes and thoughts I am a faithful spokesman, you, whose dark corners I am a “watchdog.”
In 1918, Demyan Bedny moved to Moscow with the government. In the Kremlin, in the so-called Cavalry Corps, Lenin, Bonch-Bruevich, Stalin, and Olminsky were housed. Sverdlov lived on the first floor, Kursky, Voroshilov, and Demyan Bedny lived on the third. Countless hordes of crows constantly darted over the Kremlin. There were so many of them that the Latvian riflemen who made up the Kremlin guards began shooting indiscriminately from time to time, greatly unnerving the first commandant of the Kremlin, Malkov. There was practically no everyday life in Demyan Bedny’s apartment - there were stacks of books, a large map hanging, and a Lenin portrait on the table. After the separation of Finland from Russia, the poet’s family found itself cut off from Russia. Soon, however, the wife managed to escape, but the children had to be exchanged later for captured Finnish officers. Only then did the apartment finally have a nursery, an office, and a dining room with a huge buffet. “It turns out,” wrote Bedny’s biographer Irina Brazul, “Sverdlov lifted the strict ban on the use of palace property; in the utility rooms there were unremarkable things, like this buffet.” The food, however, didn’t matter; from time to time Malkov and Demyan Bedny went secretly to the river to kill fish with grenades.
But it really was an emergency: a rebellion broke out in Yaroslavl, then in Rybinsk, then in Murom. The White Czechs marched, the Germans entered the Donbass, Arkhangelsk fell. Never before, and never since, has Demyan Bedny lived such a rich, energetic life. “The airplane is humming and roaring, sheets of paper are flying from the airplane. Read, White Guard camp, the message of Poor Demyan!” Demyan Bedny's poetic leaflets sometimes produced an effect equivalent, perhaps, to the efforts of several military units. Opponents have testified to this more than once.
After front-line affairs, Bedny concentrated his efforts at Windows of ROSTA - the Russian Telegraph Agency. “Mayakovsky and I worked so hard,” he later recalled, “that at times it seemed like there were only two of us.” The poet simply answered questions about himself: “A baby weighing six pounds. Strong, black bone." He lived mainly in Tarasovka, in the “Udelny Les” at the dacha, on the first floor; the second floor was occupied by Dzerzhinsky.
On November 7, 1922, Demyan Bedny’s poem “Main Street” appeared in the anniversary issue of Pravda, perhaps his best work in this genre. “The cloth mug has come out to the Main Main! The mounted gendarmerie poured them in! The Don people also worked well! Have you seen the slogans Yes, poisonous! The mob retreated, mind you, threatening. Is it true that there are murdered Victims among the workers... Without victims, my dear, it’s impossible!..”
In 1923, Demyan Bedny was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. The accompanying letter from the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee emphasized that the poet’s works, “simple and understandable to everyone, and therefore unusually strong, ignited the hearts of the working people with revolutionary fire and strengthened the spirit in the most difficult moments of the struggle.” In 1925, the complete collected works began to be published. The list of topics on which the poet worked for many years, he himself has now supplemented with the following list: “...About grain procurements, about underground anti-party leaflets, about the struggle for culture, about drunkards who drink everything, even polish, about the priest’s dope, about the Nepman pocket, about the trade sector, about the financial inspector, about the state plan, about industrialization, about the Moscow sewer system, about the inertia of the peasant, about the hard sign, about the distortion of the Russian language, about the tongue-twisting "kromekak", about cars and about oxen, about Chinese affairs, about Chamberlain and him similar ones, about the evil Russian White Guards.”
In those years, the popularity of Demyan Bedny was incredible. They brought him mail by the ton. The poet was sent poems, stories about a new life, and endless requests for help. They were written by soldiers, disabled people, collective farmers, students, and teachers. Boris Pasternak, a poet of a completely different type, once remarked: “I’ll probably surprise you if I say that I prefer Demyan Bedny to most Soviet poets. He is not only a historical figure of the revolution in its dramatic periods, the era of fronts and military communism, for me he is the Hans Sachs of our popular movement. He completely dissolves in the naturalness of his calling, which cannot be said, for example, about Mayakovsky, for whom this was only the point of application of part of his strength. Phenomena such as Demyan Bedny must be looked at not from the angle of aesthetic technique, but from the angle of history. I am completely indifferent to the individual components of the whole form, if only this latter is primary and true. If between the author and its expression there are no intermediate links of imitation, false unusualness, bad taste, that is, the taste of mediocrity, the way I understand it, I am deeply indifferent to how passion moves, which is the source of major participation in life, as long as this participation is on the face..."
Times, however, have changed. In 1930, Demyan Bedny, quite unexpectedly, was subjected to very sharp criticism for the feuilletons he published “Pererva”, “Get off the Stove” and “Without Mercy”. Stalin, who had previously been approving of the poet’s work, called these feuilletons “slander against the USSR, slander against our people.” Attempts by Lunacharsky and Serafimovich to soften the criticism that fell upon Bedny led nowhere. Sensitively perceiving the threat of impending disgrace, Demyan Bedny himself tried to remind him of his past merits. “If you asked me which of my works I consider the most successful, I would name the small four-line poem “Both there and here,” he said in one of his speeches. - It was written by me in 1914 in those days when cases of mass poisoning of workers occurred in some factories in St. Petersburg, especially in lead bleaching factories. This sparked violent labor demonstrations in the streets. The tsarist government responded to the demonstrations with lead bullets. On this occasion, I wrote an exceptionally daring quatrain, and the old Pravda was not afraid to publish it, although it actually talked about armed resistance to the tsarist suppressors. The call for military resistance should, however, - in order to evade censorship and administrative thunder - only be felt in the verbal structure of the poem, and the words themselves should not contain any crime. To do this, I ended the poem with an expression with which a gesture is always associated, a gesture of desperate prowess, when you have to fight, because you will disappear anyway, “one end!” Consequently, the outwardly simple verbal design acquired a daring gesture, elusive for censorship, but completely clear combat dynamics. “In the factory there is poison, on the street there is violence. And there’s lead, and there’s lead... One end!” "One end!" Don't give up, guys! And the workers did not give up. As you probably know, in the summer of 1914, workers’ barricades began to grow on the streets of St. Petersburg...”
“Personally, I do not - and will never spare - a political enemy,” Demyan Bedny repeated more than once, “it makes no difference whether he writes in prose or poetry.” And he wrote with I.A. in mind. Krylov “I walked a different path from him, different from him in the ancestral root - the cattle that he drove to watering, I sent to the knackers.” In the discussion about the method of emerging Soviet art, Demyan Bedny supported socialist realism. There were options: Mayakovsky, for example, called for calling the new realism tendentious, Fyodor Gladkov and Yuri Libedinsky - proletarian, Alexei Tolstoy - monumental. But the majority won in 1932, socialist realism began its march across countries and villages.
A passionate book lover, Demyan Bedny spared no time in searching for rare books, which he did not hesitate to take even from the apartments of repressed Soviet writers. Life was getting tougher all the time. Relations with Stalin completely deteriorated. RAPP, in which Demyan Bedny played a prominent role, was dissolved. The printing of complete collected works ceased. Disagreements with his wife ended in a breakup, and the poet was evicted from the Kremlin to Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. Nevertheless, at the Founding Congress of Soviet Writers, held in the summer of 1934, Demyan Bedny was still cheerful: “I belong to the breed of strong-toothed people. I have tusks. And with these tusks I served the revolution for twenty-five years. Surely not young tusks. Old ones. With breaks and honorary notches received in battles. But these tusks, I dare to assure you, are still strong. I have acquired considerable skill in mastering them, and I never cease to sharpen them. They must always be ready. A thunderous moment will come - and the enemy will feel the power of these tusks more than once...”
In 1936, the libretto of Demyan Bedny’s opera “Bogatyrs” was subjected to merciless criticism. The performance was immediately withdrawn from the show and banned. The phone in the apartment went silent, the editors did not ask for more poems or articles, the poet’s name disappeared from the curriculum. Bedny donated his huge personal library (probably keeping in mind the fate of his repressed colleagues) to the Literary Museum, and earned his living by writing texts for circus programs. In the summer of 1938 he was expelled from the party.
Only during the years of the Patriotic War did Bedny’s patriotic poems begin to appear again in Pravda and TASS Windows. However, during these years he undoubtedly worked wider and deeper than his readers thought. At least, the memoirs of the wife of the literary critic Voitolovsky are known, in which she wrote: “One day Demyan stood up from the table and said, “Now I will read to you what I don’t read to anyone and will never let anyone read. Let them print it after my death.” And he took out a thick notebook from the depths of the table. These were purely lyrical poems of extraordinary beauty and sonority, written with such an influx of deep feeling that my husband and I sat spellbound. He read for a long time, and a completely different person appeared before me, turning to a new side of his deep inner world. It was unlike everything that Demyan Bedny wrote..."
These notebooks, unfortunately, were later burned by the author himself. “In vain,” recalled the poet’s son, “I asked not to burn the notebooks. The father growled and turned purple with anger, destroying what he had kept all his life. “You’d have to be a fool like you not to understand that no one needs this!”
D. Bedny died in Moscow.
“Do not cry for me, prostrate in the coffin - I fulfilled my duty, and I faced death cheerfully. I fought against enemies for my native people, I shared his heroic fate with him, working with him both in bad weather and in the bucket.”
(real name and surname - Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov)
(1883-1945) Soviet poet
Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov, the future proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, was born in the Kherson region, in the village of Gubovka, into a peasant family. His childhood was full of adversity and deprivation. The boy spent the first years of his life in the city of Elizavet-grad, where his father served as a church watchman.
Bedny later recalled in his biography: “The two of us lived in a basement closet on our father’s ten-ruble salary. Mother lived with us for rare times, and the less often these times happened, the more pleasant it was for me, because my mother’s treatment of me was extremely brutal. From the age of seven until I was thirteen, I had to endure a hard life together with my mother in the village with my grandfather Sofron, an amazingly sincere old man who loved and pitied me very much.”
After some time, the future poet finds himself in the barracks environment of the Kyiv military paramedic school, graduates from it and serves in his specialty for some time. But the very early awakened passion for books and interest in literature do not leave Efim. He is engaged in self-education a lot and persistently, and already at the age of twenty, having passed an external exam for a gymnasium course, he becomes a student at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University.
This was in 1904, on the eve of the first Russian revolution. During the years of university study, in an environment when gatherings, manifestations, and demonstrations were in full swing within the walls of the “temple of science” on Vasilievsky Island, a complex process of formation and development of the personality of the future poet took place. In the same autobiography, Bedny wrote: “After four years of a new life, new meetings and new impressions, after the stunning reaction of subsequent years for me, I lost everything on which my philistine, well-intentioned mood was based.”
In 1909, a new literary name appeared in the magazine “Russian Wealth” - E. Pridvorov. Then, for the first time, poems signed with this name were published. But these poems and friendship with the veteran populist poetry P.F. Yakubovich-Melshin were only a short episode from the life and creative path of the poet. The name of the character in one of Pridvorov’s first poems, “About Demyan the Poor, a Harmful Man” (1911), becomes his literary pseudonym, popular among millions of readers. Under this pseudonym, from 1912 to 1945, his works appeared on the pages of newspapers and magazines.
Demyan Bedny in his work, at first glance, is traditional, committed to the form, rhythm, and intonation of the verse that has been tried by many. But this is only a superficial and deceptive impression. Just like his predecessor and teacher Nekrasov, Demyan Bedny is a brave and ever-searching innovator. He fills traditional forms with new, ebullient and sharp content of the era. And this new content inevitably updates the old form, allowing poetry to fulfill hitherto unknown tasks of great importance - to be close and accessible to the hearts of contemporaries.
Striving for the main thing - to make the work understandable, intelligible for any reader, Demyan Bedny, in addition to his favorite fable, also used such easily accessible genres as a ditty, folk song, fairy tale, legend (all these genres are masterfully combined, for example, in the story “About the land, about freedom, about the working share”). He also wrote poems based on the comic effect of mixing different styles, such as “The Manifesto of Baron von Wrangel.” Here is an example from the “Manifesto...”:
Ihi fate an. I'm sewing.
Es ist for all Soviet places.
For Russian people from edge to edge
Baronial Unzer Manifesto.
You all know my last name:
Ihy bin von Wrangel, Herr Baron.
I am the best, the sixth
There is a candidate for the royal throne.
Listen, red Soldaten:
Why are you attacking me?
My government is all democratic,
And not some kind of calling...
Extreme clarity and simplicity of form, political relevance and acuteness of the topic made D. Bedny’s poems beloved by the widest audience. Over more than three decades of his creative activity, the poet captured the entire kaleidoscope of events in the country’s socio-political life.
The poetic heritage of Demyan Bedny personifies the continuity of his poetry in relation to his great predecessors. His work bears expressive signs of the fruitful influence of N.A. Nekrasov and T.G. Shevchenko. From them he learned, among other things, the unsurpassed skill of using the richest sources of oral folk art. There is, perhaps, no type and genre in Russian poetry to which, based on the characteristics of the theme and material, Demyan Bedny would not resort.
Of course, his main and favorite genre was the fable. She helped in the pre-revolutionary ode to hide seditious thoughts from censorship. But, besides Demyan Bedny, the fabulist, we know Demyan Bedny, the author of poetic stories, legends, epic and lyrical-journalistic poems, such as, for example, “Main Street” with its amazing laconicism, precise rhythm, patriotic intensity of every image, every words:
Main Street in a frantic panic:
Pale, shaking, as if mad.
Suddenly stung by mortal fear.
He rushes about - a starched club businessman,
A rogue usurer and a swindling banker,
Manufacturer and fashion tailor,
Ace-furrier, patented jeweler,
- Everyone rushes about, anxiously excited
Rumble and screams, audible from afar,
Among the bonds of the money changer...
Demyan Bedny is known as a master of the poetic feuilleton, catchy, striking epigrams, and poems of small form but significant capacity. The poet-tribune, poet-accuser was always ready to go to the farthest corner of the country to meet with his readers. Demyan Bedny once had an interesting conversation with the organizers of his trip to the Far East. He was not interested in the material side. “Is there sun? - he asked. - Eat. - Is there Soviet power? - Eat. “Then I’ll go.”
The years that have passed since the death of the poet are quite a significant period for what he created to be tested by time. Of course, of the huge number of works by Demyan Bedny, not all retain their former significance. Those poems on particular themes of revolutionary reality, in which the poet failed to rise to the heights of broad artistic generalization, remained simply an interesting evidence of the time, valuable material for the history of the era.
But the best works of Demyan Bedny, where his talent was fully revealed, where a strong patriotic thought and a passionate feeling of a contemporary of important events in the history of the country were expressed in artistic form - these works still retain their strength and effectiveness.
Characterizing the features of Russian literature, A.M. Gorky wrote: “In Russia, each writer was truly and sharply individual, but everyone was united by one persistent desire - to understand, feel, guess about the future of the country, about the fate of its people, about its role on earth.” . These words are the best fit for assessing the life and work of Demyan Bedny.
Bedny, Demyan (real name and surname - Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov) - communist poet (13.4.1883, village of Gubovka, Kherson province - 25.5.1945, Moscow). He was born into the family of a peasant who served as a church watchman in Elizavetgrad (now Kirovograd) and spent his early years not in the village, but in this city. Hatred for his mother, who constantly beat him, early gave rise to embitterment towards life in the boy’s soul.
In 1896-1900 he studied at the military paramedic school in Kyiv, and in 1904-08 at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, for admission to which he was personally allowed to take external gymnasium exams by Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (poet and curator of military educational establishments). Based on this fact, the vain Demyan later spread rumors that he was the illegitimate son of this member of the imperial family.
Demyan's first poems were published in 1899. In 1912 he joined RSDLP, from the same time began to publish in the party newspapers Zvezda and Pravda. In 1913 a collection appeared Fables. From abroad, Lenin himself called on the Bolsheviks to nurture the “talented poet.”
"Proletarian Poet" Demyan Bedny
Bedny wrote pseudo-folk political poems that had an acute propaganda character during the revolution. Thanks to their primitive content and easily accessible form, they became widely known among the people. After the revolution, Bedny, among other things, was actively engaged in cynical anti-religious propaganda, the baseness of which was branded by Sergei Yesenin in the poem “ Message to the "evangelist" Demyan».
Poor lived in the Kremlin, next to the apartments of the Bolshevik leaders, and constantly extolled Lenin and Trotsky in poetry. In response, Trotsky praised Demyan (“this is not a poet who approached the revolution, condescended to it, accepted it; this is a Bolshevik of a poetic weapon”). To travel around the country, Bedny was given a special personal carriage in 1918, and later a Ford car. In the first Soviet decade, the circulation of his books exceeded two million. As they say, he was personally present at the execution and burning of the body Fanny Kaplan.
In 1923, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee awarded Demyan the Order of the Red Banner. This was the first time a writer was awarded a military order. Communist “critics” wrote several books of praise about Bedny’s mediocre poetry, and the People’s Commissariat of Education Lunacharsky equated him in talent to Maxim Gorky.
During intra-party struggle 1926-1930s Demyan obsequiously supported the line of Stalin, who was the clear favorite in it. In 1929, he personally went to help carry out collectivization in the Tambov province.
Joseph Stalin and Writers. Demyan Bedny, episode 1
However, at the end of 1930, Bedny’s exceptional position in literature was shaken. On December 6, 1930, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, by a special resolution, condemned Demyan’s poetic feuilletons “Get off the Stove” and “Without Mercy,” published in Pravda, stating “recently, false notes have begun to appear in Comrade Demyan Bedny’s feuilletons, expressed as in an indiscriminate denigration of “Russia” and “Russian”.” The main reason for criticism, not mentioned in the resolution, apparently was that the last feuilleton mentioned the uprisings in the USSR and the assassination attempts on Stalin, despite the ban on discussing such topics as “false rumors.”
Demyan immediately filed a complaint with Stalin, but received a rather harsh letter from him in response (dated December 12, 1930). To earn forgiveness, the fabulist began to write even more base praises of the Leader and communism, but he continued to be criticized. In 1934 Bedny was elected to the presidium of the board Writers' Union, but on First Congress The Union was accused of political backwardness that same year. Bedny's libretto for the comic opera soon came under sharp attack Bogatyrs(1936). On the eve of the approaching war with Nazi Germany, Stalin was already flirting with Russian patriotic feelings with might and main. Demyan was again accused of slanderous interpretation of Russian history and satirical distortion of events related to the baptism of Rus', and in 1938 he was expelled from the party and the Writers' Union “for moral corruption.”
During World War II, Bedny wrote anti-German fables and pamphlets; however, he was never able to fully regain his previous position. The party resolution of February 24, 1952 (after Demyan’s death) ideologically destroyed the publication of his books in 1950 and 1951. for “gross political distortions,” which arose primarily because these editions included the original versions of Bedny’s works instead of later, politically revised ones. Nevertheless, Soviet literary criticism later continued to give Bedny a place of honor on its pages.
Seventy years ago, on May 25, 1945, the first Soviet writer and order bearer, Demyan Bedny, died. He quickly went from the lower classes - the peasants - to the “classic of proletarian poetry.” Poor lived for many years in the Kremlin, his books were published in large editions. He died, leaving a very ambiguous memory of himself, especially among the creative intelligentsia, of which, in fact, he himself never became a part.
Bastard of the Grand Duke
Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov (1883-1945) - that was actually the name of Demyan Bedny - from a young age he searched for the truth and walked into the fire of enlightenment. He walked, trying to establish his literary talent. The son of a peasant, he became not only one of the first poets of Soviet Russia, but also the most temperamental of the many subverters of the old culture.
A peasant in the village of Gubovki, Aleksandrovsky district, Kherson province, until the age of seven, Efim lived in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovograd), where his father served as a church watchman. Later he had a chance to take a sip of the peasant's share in the village - together with the “amazingly sincere old man” grandfather Sofron and his hated mother. Relationships in this triangle are a haven for lovers of psychoanalysis. “Mother kept me in a black body and beat me to death. Towards the end, I began to think about running away from home and reveled in the church-monastic book “The Path to Salvation,” the poet recalled.
Everything in this short memoir is interesting - both the embitterment of an unloved son and his confession of a passion for religious literature. The latter soon passed: atheistic Marxism turned out to be a truly revolutionary teaching for young Efim Pridvorov, for the sake of which it was worth renouncing both the past and everything most cherished that was in him, except, probably, the love for the common people, for “grandfather Sofron.” Efim ended up in the school of military paramedics in Kyiv, and the then fashionable Marxism fit well with the boyish dissatisfaction with army discipline and other manifestations of autocracy.
However, in those years, the future Demyan remained well-intentioned. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich himself (a poet and curator of military educational institutions) allowed the capable young man to take gymnasium exams as an external student for admission to the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. By the way, Bedny later supported the rumor that the Grand Duke gave him the “court” surname... as his bastard.
At the university, Efim Pridvorov finally came to Marxism. At that time, he composed poetry in Nekrasov’s civic spirit.
But over the years, his beliefs became more and more radical. In 1911, he was already published in the Bolshevik Zvezda, and the very first poem was so loved by left-wing youth that its title - “About Demyan the Poor, a Harmful Man” - gave the poet a literary name, a pseudonym under which he was destined to become famous. The nickname, needless to say, is successful: it is remembered right away and evokes the right associations. For Zvezda, Nevskaya Zvezda, and Pravda, this sincere, caustic author from the people was a godsend. And in 1914, an astonishing quatrain flashed through a witty poetic newspaper hack:
There is poison in the factory,
There is violence on the street.
And there’s lead and there’s lead...
One end!
And here the point is not only that the author cleverly linked the death of a worker at the Vulcan plant, who was shot by a policeman at a demonstration, with factory lead poisoning. The laconic text has a poetic substance that sets it apart from other poetic journalism. To Demyan’s credit, many years later, at a meeting with young writers in 1931, he recognized this old miniature as one of his successes.
Fighting with censorship, the poet composed “Aesop’s Fables” and a cycle about the merchant Derunov: from his pen, rhymed swear words addressed to the autocracy and anthems of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party came out almost daily. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) from his “distance” called on his comrades to nurture Demyan’s talent. Joseph Stalin, who headed the party press in 1912, agreed with him. And all his life the poet was proud of the fact that he collaborated with the leaders long before October.
So that I don't hit small game,
And he would hit the bison wandering through the forests,
And by the fierce royal dogs,
My fable shooting
Lenin himself often led.
He was from afar, and Stalin was nearby,
When he forged both “Pravda” and “Star”.
When, having glanced at the strongholds of the enemy,
He pointed out to me: “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to come here.”
Hit with a fabulous projectile!
“The Red Army has bayonets...”
During the Civil War, Demyan Bedny experienced the highest rise in popularity. His talent was perfectly adapted to working under time pressure: “Read, White Guard camp, the message of Poor Demyan!”
The most masterly of the propaganda of those years was called “The Manifesto of Baron von Wrangel” - a reprise on a reprise. Of course, all this had nothing to do with the real Peter Wrangel, who spoke Russian without an accent and received orders for fighting the Germans in World War I, but such is the genre of unfriendly cartoon. The poet dragged in everything he could here, portraying the general of the Russian army as “Wilhelm the Kaiser’s servant.” Well, after the war, anti-German sentiments were still strong - and Demyan decided to play on them.
It is possible that this is the best example of Russian macaroni poetry (a type of comic poetry characterized by a mixture of “French with Nizhny Novgorod”): if only Ivan Myatlev and Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy just as witty and abundantly introduced foreign words into the Russian rhymed text. And the phrase “We will watch” has become a catchphrase.
Definitely, in the white camp there was no satirist equal in enthusiasm and skill! Poor in Civil outplayed all the venerable kings of journalism of the Silver Age. And he won, as we see, not only by “following the reader, and not ahead of him” with ditty democracy: neither Nekrasov, nor Minaev, nor Kurochkin would have refused the “baron’s little thing.” Then, in 1920, perhaps the best lyric poem by the militant leader of the working class, “Sadness,” was born.
But - a provincial stop...
These fortune tellers... lies and darkness...
This Red Army soldier is sad
Everything is going crazy for me! The sun shines dimly through the clouds,
The forest goes into the deep distance.
And so this time it's hard for me
Hide my sadness from everyone!
On November 1, 1919, in a few hours, Demyan wrote the front-line song “Tanka-Vanka.” Then they said: “Tanks are Yudenich’s last bet.” The commanders feared that the soldiers would falter when they saw the steel monsters. And then a slightly obscene but coherent song appeared, at which the Red Army soldiers laughed.
Tanka is a valuable prize for the brave,
She is a scarecrow to a coward.
It’s worth taking the tank from the whites -
White people are worthless.
The panic disappeared as if by hand. It is not surprising that the party valued an inventive and dedicated agitator. He knew how to intercept an opponent's argument, quote it and turn it inside out to benefit the cause. In almost every poem, the poet called for reprisals against enemies: “A fat belly with a bayonet!”
Adherence to the simplest folklore forms forced Demyan Bedny to argue with modernists of all directions and with “academicians.” He consciously adopted a ditty and a patter: here is both a simple charm and an undoubted trump card of mass accessibility.
This is not a legend: his propaganda really inspired ideological Red Army soldiers and turned hesitant peasants into sympathizers. He covered many miles of the Civil War on a cart and an armored train, and it happened that he accurately hit distant front-line “tanks” from Petrograd and Moscow. In any case, the Order of the Red Banner was well deserved by Bedny: the military order was for combat poetry.
Court poet
When the Soviet system was established, Demyan was showered with honors. He - in full accordance with his real name - became a court poet. He lived in the Kremlin and shook hands with the leaders every day. In the first Soviet decade, the total circulation of his books exceeded two million, and there were also leaflets. By the standards of the 1920s–1930s, this was a colossal scale.
The former rebel now belonged to the officialdom, and, to be honest, his fame, not based on talent, was ambiguous. Sergei Yesenin liked to call his “colleague” Efim Lakeevich Pridvorov. However, this did not prevent Demyan from being at the epicenter of historical events. For example, according to the testimony of the then commandant of the Kremlin, Baltic Fleet sailor Pavel Malkov, the proletarian poet was the only person, with the exception of several Latvian riflemen, who saw the execution of Fanny Kaplan on September 3, 1918.
“To my displeasure, I found Demyan Bedny here, running at the sound of the engines. Demyan’s apartment was located just above the Automotive Armored Detachment, and along the stairs of the back door, which I forgot about, he went straight down into the courtyard. Seeing me with Kaplan, Demyan immediately understood what was going on, nervously bit his lip and silently took a step back. However, he had no intention of leaving. Well then! Let him be a witness!
To the car! – I gave a curt command, pointing to a car standing at a dead end. Shrugging her shoulders convulsively, Fanny Kaplan took one step, then another... I raised the pistol...”
When the body of the executed woman was doused with gasoline and set on fire, the poet could not stand it and lost consciousness.
“He approached the altar with mockery...”
From the first days of October, the revolutionary poet conducted propaganda not only on topical issues of the Civil War. He attacked the shrines of the old world, and above all Orthodoxy. Demyan kept putting up caricatures of priests (“Father Ipat had some money…”), but that wasn’t enough for him.
The poor even took Pushkin as an ally in his poetic Preface to the Gabrieliad, unequivocally declaring about the great poet: “He approached the altar with mockery...” Such a militant atheist Demyan - it’s better not to come up with an anti-God agitation, because he’s not an infidel, not a foreigner, but a proletarian of peasant origin, an undoubted representative of the majority.
First - a book of poems “Spiritual Fathers, Their Thoughts are Sinful”, endless rhymed feuilletons against the “church dope”, and later - the ironic “New Testament without the flaw of the Evangelist Demyan”, in which Bedny tried to rethink the Scripture with a ditty.
These attempts caused consternation even against the backdrop of the hysterical anti-religious propaganda of Emelyan Yaroslavsky. It seemed that Demyan had been possessed by a demon: with such frenzy he spat at the already defeated icons.
In Bulgakov's main novel, it is his features that are discerned in the images of Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny. And what is true is true: Poor, with great power of vanity, passionately desired to remain in history as the number one fighter against God. To do this, he rhymed the subjects of Scripture, diligently lowering the style to the “bottom of the body.” The result was an absurd story about alcoholics, swindlers and red tape with biblical names... Demyan had grateful readers who accepted this ocean of mockery, but “A Testament without Flaw” was embarrassed to be republished even during the years of new anti-religious campaigns.
In the obscene poem, Poor appeals to the well-known anti-church plot of the Gospel of Judas. The shocking idea of rehabilitating “the first fighter against Christian obscurantism” was in the air then. Actually, already in the decadent tradition of the early twentieth century, interest in the controversial figure of the fallen apostle appeared (remember Leonid Andreev’s story “Judas Iscariot”). And when in the streets they sang at the top of their voices, “We will climb into heaven, we will disperse all the gods...”, the temptation to exalt Judas was impossible to avoid. Fortunately, the leaders of the revolution turned out to be not so radical (having received power, any politician involuntarily begins to cruise towards the center) and in Lenin’s “plan for monumental propaganda” there was no place for a monument to Judas.
The routine of “literary propaganda work” (this is how Demyan himself defined his work, not without coquetry, but also with communard pride) gave rise to such rough newspaper poetry that sometimes the author could be suspected of conscious self-parody. However, satirists and parodists usually do not see their own shortcomings - and Bedny quite complacently responded in rhyme to topical events in political life.
The poet created volumes of rhymed political information, although they became outdated day by day. The authorities remembered how effective an agitator Demyan was during the Civil War, and his status remained high in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was a real star of Pravda, the main newspaper of “the entire world proletariat,” and wrote widely propagated poetic messages to party congresses. He was published a lot, glorified - after all, he was an influential figure.
At the same time, people were already laughing at the pseudonym Bedny, retelling anecdotes about the lordly habits of the worker and peasant poet, who had collected an invaluable library in the revolutionary turmoil and NEP frenzy. But at the top, the everyday addictions of the non-poor Poor were tolerated.
“In the tail of cultural Americas, Europe...”
The problems started because of something else. The misanthropic attitude towards the Russian people, their history, character and customs, which appeared every now and then in Demyan’s poems, suddenly aroused the indignation of patriotic leaders of the CPSU(b). In 1930, his three poetic feuilletons - “Get Off the Stove”, “Pererva” and “Without Mercy” - gave rise to a harsh political debate. Surely, the poet did not spare derogatory colors, castigating the “birth traumas” of our history.
Russian old grief culture -
Stupid,
Fedura.
The country is immensely great,
Ruined, slavishly lazy, wild,
In the tail of cultural Americas, Europe,
Coffin!
Slave labor - and predatory parasites,
Laziness was a protective tool for the people...
The Rappites, and above all the frantic zealot of revolutionary art Leopold Averbakh, greeted these publications with delight. “The first and tireless drummer - the poet of the proletariat Demyan Bedny - gives his powerful voice, the cry of a fiery heart,” they wrote about them then. “Demyan Bedny embodied the party’s calls in poetic images.” Averbakh generally called for “the widespread desecration of Soviet literature”...
And suddenly, in December 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution condemning Demyanov’s feuilletons. At first, the resolution was associated with the name of Vyacheslav Molotov, and Bedny decided to take the fight: he sent a polemical letter to Joseph Stalin. But very quickly I received a sobering answer:
“When the Central Committee was forced to criticize your mistakes, you suddenly snorted and began shouting about a “noose.” On what basis? Maybe the Central Committee has no right to criticize your mistakes? Maybe the decision of the Central Committee is not binding for you? Maybe your poems are above all criticism? Do you find that you have contracted some unpleasant disease called “arrogance”? More modesty, Comrade Demyan...
The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class and, above all, the Russian working class, the vanguard of the Soviet workers, as their recognized leader, pursuing the most revolutionary and most active policy that the proletarians of other countries have ever dreamed of pursuing. The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries are eagerly studying the most instructive history of the working class of Russia, its past, the past of Russia, knowing that in addition to reactionary Russia there was also a revolutionary Russia, the Russia of the Radishchevs and Chernyshevskys, the Zhelyabovs and Ulyanovs, the Khalturins and Alekseevs. All this instills (cannot help but instill!) in the hearts of Russian workers a feeling of revolutionary national pride, capable of moving mountains, capable of working miracles.
And you? Instead of comprehending this greatest process in the history of the revolution and rising to the height of the tasks of the singer of the advanced proletariat, they went somewhere into the hollow and, confused between the most boring quotes from the works of Karamzin and no less boring sayings from Domostroi, began to proclaim to the whole world , that Russia in the past represented a vessel of abomination and desolation, that today’s Russia represents a continuous “Pererva”, that “laziness” and the desire to “sit on the stove” is almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers, who, having done Russians, of course, did not stop being part of the October Revolution. And you call this Bolshevik criticism! No, dear Comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism, but slander against our people, the debunking of the USSR, the debunking of the proletariat of the USSR, the debunking of the Russian proletariat.”
Already in February 1931, Bedny repented, speaking to young writers: “I had my own “holes” in the line of satirical pressure on the pre-October “past””...
After 1930, Demyan wrote a lot and angrily about Trotsky and the Trotskyists (he began back in 1925: “Trotsky - quickly place a portrait in Ogonyok. Delight everyone with the sight of him! Trotsky prances on an old horse, Shining with crumpled plumage ..."), but the leftist deviation, no, no, and even slipped. The new embarrassment was worse than the previous one, and its consequences for the entire Soviet culture were colossal.
The old scandal had almost been forgotten, when suddenly someone pushed the poet to come up with a farce about the Baptism of Rus', and even to caricature the epic heroes... The comic opera “Bogatyrs” based on Bedny’s libretto was staged at the Moscow Chamber Theater by Alexander Tairov. Left-wing critics were delighted. And many of them disappeared during the next purges...
Molotov left the performance indignant. As a result, the Central Committee’s resolution to ban the play “Bogatyrs” by Demyan Bedny on November 14, 1936 marked the beginning of a large-scale campaign to restore the old foundations of culture and “master the classical heritage.” There, in particular, it was noted that the Baptism of Rus' was a progressive phenomenon and that Soviet patriotism is incompatible with mockery of native history.
"Fight or Die"
For “Bogatyrs,” a year or two later, Demyan, a party member since 1912, was expelled from the CPSU(b) and the Writers’ Union of the USSR. An amazing fact: they were kicked out of the party, essentially, for their disrespectful attitude towards the Baptism of Rus'! “I am being persecuted because I wear the halo of the October Revolution,” the poet used to say among his loved ones, and these words were delivered to Stalin’s table in a printed “wiretap.”
Back in the fall of 1933, Osip Mandelstam created the famous “We live without feeling the country beneath us” - a poem about the “Kremlin highlander”: “His thick fingers, like worms, are fat...”
There was a rumor that it was Bedny who sometimes complained: Stalin took rare books from him, and then returned them with grease stains on the pages. It’s unlikely that the “highlander” needed to find out where Mandelstam learned about “fat fingers,” but in July 1938, the name of Demyan Bedny suddenly seemed to disappear: the famous pseudonym disappeared from the newspaper pages. Of course, work on the collected works of the proletarian classic was interrupted. He prepared for the worst - and at the same time tried to adapt to the new ideology.
Demyan composed a hysterical pamphlet against “hellish” fascism, calling it “Fight or Die,” but Stalin sarcastically threw out: “To the latter-day Dante, that is, Conrad, that is... Demyan the Poor. The fable or poem "Fight or Die" is, in my opinion, an artistically mediocre piece. As a critique of fascism, it is pale and unoriginal. As a criticism of the Soviet system (don't joke!), it is stupid, although transparent. Since we (the Soviet people) already have quite a bit of literary rubbish, it is hardly worth multiplying the deposits of this kind of literature with another fable, so to speak... I, of course, understand that I am obliged to apologize to Demian-Dante for the forced frankness. Respectfully. I. Stalin."
Demyan Bedny was driven out with a filthy broom, and now poets who resembled white-cowed men were in honor. Vladimir Lugovskoy wrote distinctly “old regime” lines: “Rise up, Russian people, for mortal combat, for a formidable battle!” - and together with the music of Sergei Prokofiev and the cinematic skill of Sergei Eisenstein (the film “Alexander Nevsky”), they became key in the pre-war heroics. The rapid rise of the young poet Konstantin Simonov with the tradition of military glory was linked even more tightly.
Demyan was finally excommunicated from the Kremlin, not only figuratively, but also literally. Disgraced, he was forced to move to an apartment on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. He was forced to sell off relics from his very library. The poet tried to return to the literary process, but it did not work. Fantasy seemed to work well, he even came up with the image of a dual, according to the Indian model, deity “Lenin-Stalin”, which he sang - excitedly, fussily. But he was not allowed further than the threshold. And his character was strong: in 1939, at the peak of disgrace, Bedny married actress Lydia Nazarova - Desdemona from the Maly Theater. They had a daughter. Meanwhile, the bullets passed close: Demyan at one time collaborated with many “enemies of the people.” They could well have treated him like Fanny Kaplan.
It's good to smoke it...
Beat the damned fascist
Don't let him breathe!
In the most difficult days of the Great Patriotic War, he wrote: “I believe in my people with an indestructible thousand-year-old faith.” The main publications of the war years were published in Izvestia under the pseudonym D. Boevoy with drawings by Boris Efimov. The poet returned, his poems appeared on poster stands - as captions for posters. He loved calls:
Listen, Uncle Ferapont:
Send your felt boots to the front!
Send urgently, together!
This is what you need!
Ferapont is mentioned here not only for the sake of rhyme: the collective farmer Ferapont Golovaty at that time contributed 100 thousand rubles to the Red Army fund. The keen eye of the journalist could not help but grasp this fact.
Re-educated by party criticism, now Pridvorov-Bedny-Boevoy sang the continuity of the country’s heroic history with the victory on the Kulikovo Field and exclaimed: “Let us remember, brothers, the old days!” He glorified Rus':
Where the word of the Russians was heard,
The friend has risen, and the enemy has fallen!
New poems have already begun to appear in Pravda, signed by the familiar literary name Demyan Bedny: allowed! Together with other poets, he still managed to sing the glory of Victory. And he died two weeks later, on May 25, 1945, having published his last poem in the newspaper Socialist Agriculture.
According to a not entirely reliable legend, on the fateful day he was not allowed into the presidium of a certain ceremonial meeting. Bedny’s evil genius, Vyacheslav Molotov, allegedly interrupted the poet’s movement towards the chair with a question and shout: “Where?!” According to another version, his heart stopped at the Barvikha sanatorium during lunch, where actors Moskvin and Tarkhanov were sitting at the table next to him.
Be that as it may, the next day all newspapers of the USSR reported the death of “the talented Russian poet and fabulist Demyan Bedny, whose fighting word served the cause of the socialist revolution with honor.” He did not live to see the Victory Parade, although in one of his last poems he spoke about “victorious banners on Red Square.” Demyan’s books were again published by the best publishing houses, including the prestigious “Poet’s Library” series. But he was reinstated in the party only in 1956 at the request of Khrushchev as a “victim of the cult of personality.” It turned out that Bedny was the favorite poet of the new first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee.
