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The history of the creation of Tvardovsky’s work “Vasily Terkin”

Since the autumn of 1939, Tvardovsky participated in the Finnish campaign as a war correspondent. “It seems to me,” he wrote to M.V. Isakovsky, “that the army will be my second theme for the rest of my life.” And the poet was not mistaken. In the edition of the Leningrad Military District “On Guard of the Motherland,” a group of poets had an idea to create a series of entertaining drawings about the exploits of a cheerful soldier-hero. “Someone,” recalls Tvardovsky, “suggested calling our hero Vasya Terkin, namely Vasya, and not Vasily.” In creating a collective work about a resilient, successful fighter, Tvardovsky was instructed to write an introduction: “... I had to give at least the most general “portrait” of Terkin and determine, so to speak, the tone, the manner of our further conversation with the reader.”
This is how the poem “Vasya Terkin” appeared in the newspaper (1940 - January 5). The success of the feuilleton hero prompted the idea to continue the story about the adventures of the resilient Vasya Terkin. As a result, the book “Vasya Terkin at the Front” (1940) was published. During the Great Patriotic War, this image became the main one in Tvardovsky’s work. “Vasily Terkin” walked along with Tvardovsky along the roads of war. The first publication of “Vasily Terkin” took place in the newspaper of the Western Front “Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda”, where on September 4, 1942 the introductory chapter “From the author” and “At a halt” were published. From then until the end of the war, chapters of the poem were published in this newspaper, in the magazines “Red Army Man” and “Znamya”, as well as in other print media.
“...My work ends coincidentally with the end of the war. One more effort of a refreshed soul and body is needed - and it will be possible to put an end to it,” the poet wrote on May 4, 1945. This is how the completed poem “Vasily Terkin. A book about a fighter" (1941-1945). Tvardovsky wrote that working on it gave him a “feeling” of the legitimacy of the artist’s place in the great struggle of the people... a feeling of complete freedom to handle poetry and words.
In 1946, almost one after another, three complete editions of “The Book about a Fighter” were published.

Type, genre, creative method of the analyzed work

In the spring of 1941, the poet worked hard on the chapters of the future poem, but the outbreak of war changed these plans. The revival of the idea and the resumption of work on “Terkin” dates back to the middle of 1942. From this time on, a new stage of work on the work began: “The entire character of the poem, its entire content, its philosophy, its hero, its form - composition, genre, plot - have changed. The nature of the poetic narrative about the war has changed - the homeland and the people, the people in the war, have become the main themes.” Although, when starting to work on it, the poet was not too worried about this, as evidenced by his own words: “I did not long languish with doubts and fears regarding the uncertainty of the genre, the lack of an initial plan that would embrace the entire work in advance, and the weak plot connection of the chapters with each other. Not a poem - well, let it not be a poem, I decided; there is no single plot - let it be, don’t; there is no very beginning of a thing - there is no time to invent it; the climax and completion of the entire narrative is not planned - let it be, we must write about what is burning, not waiting, and then we’ll see, we’ll figure it out.”
In connection with the question of the genre of Tvardovsky’s work, the following judgments of the author seem important: “The genre designation of “The Book about a Fighter”, which I settled on, was not the result of a desire to simply avoid the designation “poem”, “story”, etc. This coincided with the decision to write not a poem, not a story or a novel in verse, that is, not something that has its own legalized and to a certain extent obligatory plot, composition and other features. These signs didn’t come out for me, but something did come out, and I designated this something as “The Book about a Fighter.”
This, as the poet himself called it, “The Book about a Soldier,” recreates a reliable picture of front-line reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person in war. It stands out among other poems of that time for its special completeness and depth of realistic depiction of the people's liberation struggle, disasters and suffering, exploits and military life.
Tvardovsky’s poem is a heroic epic, with objectivity corresponding to the epic genre, but permeated with a living author’s feeling, original in all respects, a unique book, at the same time developing the traditions of realistic literature and folk poetry. And at the same time, this is a free narrative - a chronicle (“A book about a fighter, without beginning, without end...”), which covers the entire history of the war.

Topics

The theme of the Great Patriotic War forever entered into the work of A.T. Tvardovsky. And the poem “Vasily Terkin” became one of his most striking pages. The poem is dedicated to the life of the people during the war; it is rightfully an encyclopedia of front-line life. In the center of the poem is the image of Terkin, an ordinary infantryman from the Smolensk peasants, uniting the composition of the work into a single whole. Vasily Terkin actually personifies the entire people. The Russian national character found artistic embodiment in him. In Tvardovsky’s poem, the symbol of the victorious people became an ordinary person, an ordinary soldier.
In “The Book about a Fighter” the war is depicted as it is - in everyday life and heroism, intertwining the ordinary, sometimes even comic (chapters “At a Rest”, “In the Bath”) with the sublime and tragic. The poem is strong, first of all, with the truth about war as a harsh and tragic - at the limit of possibilities - test of the vital forces of a people, a country, every person.

Idea of ​​the work

Fiction during the Great Patriotic War has a number of characteristic features. Its main features are patriotic pathos and a focus on universal accessibility. The most successful example of such a work of art is rightfully considered the poem “Vasily Terkin” by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. The feat of a soldier in war is shown by Tvardovsky as everyday and hard military labor and battle, and moving to new positions, and spending the night in a trench or right on the ground, “shading himself from black death only with his own back...”. And the hero who accomplishes this feat is an ordinary, simple soldier.
It is in the defense of the Motherland, life on earth that the justice of the people's Patriotic War lies: “The battle is holy and just, mortal combat is not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth.” Poem by A.T. Tvardovsky’s “Vasily Terkin” has become truly popular.

Main characters

An analysis of the work shows that the poem is based on the image of the main character - private Vasily Terkin. It doesn't have a real prototype. This is a collective image that combines the typical features of the spiritual appearance and character of an ordinary Russian soldier. Dozens of people wrote about Terkin’s typicality, drawing the conclusion from the lines “there is always a guy like this in every company, and in every platoon” that this is a collective, generalized image, that one should not look for any individual qualities in him, so everything typical for a Soviet soldier. And since “he was partially scattered and partially exterminated,” this means that he is not a person at all, but a kind of symbol of the entire Soviet Army.
Terkin - who is he? Let's be honest: He's just a guy himself. He's ordinary.
However, the guy is no matter what, a guy like that
There is always one in every company, and in every platoon.
The image of Terkin has folklore roots, it is “a hero, a fathom in the shoulders”, “a merry fellow”, “an experienced man”. Behind the illusion of simplicity, buffoonery, and mischief lie moral sensitivity and a sense of filial duty to the Motherland, the ability to accomplish a feat at any moment without phrases or poses.
The image of Vasily Terkin really captures what is typical for many: “A guy like this / There is always a guy in every company, / And in every platoon.” However, in him the traits and properties inherent in many people were embodied brighter, sharper, more original. Folk wisdom and optimism, perseverance, endurance, patience and dedication, everyday ingenuity and skill of the Russian person - a hard worker and warrior, and finally, inexhaustible humor, behind which something deeper and more serious always appears - all this is fused into a living and integral human character. The main feature of his character is his love for his native country. The hero constantly remembers his native places, which are so sweet and dear to his heart. Terkin cannot help but be attracted by mercy and greatness of soul; he finds himself in war not because of the military instinct, but for the sake of life on earth; the defeated enemy evokes in him only a feeling of pity. He is modest, although he can sometimes boast, telling his friends that he does not need an order, he agrees to a medal. But what attracts most about this person is his love of life, worldly ingenuity, mockery of the enemy and of any difficulties.
Being the embodiment of the Russian national character, Vasily Terkin is inseparable from the people - the mass of soldiers and a number of episodic characters (a soldier grandfather and grandmother, tank crews in battle and on the march, a girl nurse in a hospital, a soldier’s mother returning from enemy captivity, etc.) , it is inseparable from the motherland. And the entire “Book about a Fighter” is a poetic statement of national unity.
Along with the images of Terkin and the people, an important place in the overall structure of the work is occupied by the image of the author-narrator, or, more precisely, the lyrical hero, especially noticeable in the chapters “About myself”, “About war”, “About love”, in the four chapters “From the author” " Thus, in the chapter “About Myself,” the poet directly states, addressing the reader: “And I will tell you: I will not hide, / - In this book, here or there, / What the hero should say, / I say personally myself.”
The author in the poem is an intermediary between the hero and the reader. A confidential conversation is constantly conducted with the reader; the author respects his friend-reader, and therefore strives to convey to him the truth about the war. The author feels his responsibility to his readers; he understands how important it was not only to talk about the war, but also to instill in readers faith in the indestructible spirit of the Russian soldier and optimism. Sometimes the author seems to invite the reader to check the truth of his judgments and observations. Such direct contact with the reader greatly contributes to the fact that the poem becomes understandable to a large circle of people.
The poem constantly permeates the author's subtle humor. The text of the poem is filled with jokes, sayings, sayings, and it is generally impossible to determine who their author is - the author of the poem, the hero of the poem Terkin or the people. At the very beginning of the poem, the author calls a joke the most necessary “thing” in a soldier’s life:
You can live without food for a day, You can do more, but sometimes in a war you can’t live for one minute without a joke, The jokes of the most unwise ones.

The plot and composition of the analyzed work

The originality of the plot and compositional structure of the book is determined by military reality itself. “There is no plot in war,” the author noted in one of the chapters. And in the poem as a whole there really are no such traditional components as plot, climax, denouement. But within chapters with a narrative basis, as a rule, there is a plot of its own, and separate plot connections arise between these chapters. Finally, the general development of events, the revelation of the character of the hero, with all the independence of individual chapters, is clearly determined by the very course of the war, the natural change of its stages: from the bitter days of retreat and the hardest defensive battles - to the hard-fought and won victory. This is how Tvardovsky himself wrote about the compositional structure of his poem:
“And the first thing I accepted as the principle of composition and style was the desire for a certain completeness of each individual part, chapter, and within a chapter - each period and even stanza. I had to keep in mind the reader who, even if he was unfamiliar with the previous chapters, would find in this chapter, published today in the newspaper, something whole, rounded. Besides, this reader might not have waited for my next chapter: he was where the hero is—at war. It was this approximate completion of each chapter that I was most concerned with. I didn’t keep anything to myself until another time, trying to speak out at every opportunity—the next chapter—to the end, to fully express my mood, to convey a fresh impression, a thought, a motive, an image that had arisen. True, this principle was not determined immediately - after the first chapters of Terkin were published one after another, and new ones then appeared as they were written.”
The poem consists of thirty independent and at the same time closely interconnected chapters. The poem is structured as a chain of episodes from the military life of the main character, which do not always have a direct event connection with each other. Terkin humorously tells young soldiers about the everyday life of war; He says that he has been fighting since the very beginning of the war, he was surrounded three times, and was wounded. The fate of an ordinary soldier, one of those who bore the brunt of the war on their shoulders, becomes the personification of the national fortitude and will to live.
The plot outline of the poem is difficult to follow; each chapter tells about a separate event from the life of a soldier, for example: Terkin swims twice across the icy river to restore contact with the advancing units; Terkin alone occupies a German dugout, but comes under fire from his own artillery; on the way to the front, Terkin finds himself in the house of old peasants, helping them with the housework; Terkin enters into hand-to-hand combat with the German and, having difficulty defeating him, takes him prisoner. Or, unexpectedly for himself, Terkin shoots down a German attack aircraft with a rifle. Terkin takes command of the platoon when the commander is killed, and is the first to break into the village; however, the hero is again seriously wounded. Lying wounded in a field, Terkin talks with Death, who persuades him not to cling to life; in the end he is discovered by the soldiers, and he tells them: “Take away this woman, / I am a soldier still alive.”
It is no coincidence that Tvardovsky’s work begins and ends with lyrical digressions. An open conversation with the reader brings him closer to the inner world of the work and creates an atmosphere of shared involvement in events. The poem ends with a dedication to the fallen.
The poem “Vasily Terkin” is distinguished by its peculiar historicism. Conventionally, it can be divided into three parts, coinciding with the beginning, middle and end of the war. Poetic understanding of the stages of the war creates a lyrical chronicle of events from the chronicle. A feeling of bitterness and sorrow fills the first part, faith in victory fills the second, the joy of the liberation of the Fatherland becomes the leitmotif of the third part of the poem. This is explained by the fact that A.T. Tvardovsky created the poem gradually, throughout the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

Artistic originality

Analysis of the work shows that the poem “Vasily Terkin” is distinguished by its extraordinary breadth and freedom of use of means of oral, literary and folk poetic speech. This is truly a vernacular language. It naturally uses proverbs and sayings (“out of boredom I’m a jack of all trades”; “spending time is an hour of fun”; “the river you float along is the one you create a glory ...”), folk songs (about an overcoat, about a river ). Tvardovsky perfectly masters the art of speaking simply but poetically. He himself creates sayings that have come into life as proverbs (“don’t look at what’s on your chest, but look at what’s ahead”; “war has a short path, love has a long one”; “guns go backwards to battle”, etc.) .
Freedom - the main moral and artistic principle of the work - is also realized in the very construction of the verse. And this is a find - a relaxed ten-line, eight-, and five-, and six-, and quatrains - in a word, there will be as many rhyming lines as Tvardovsky needs at this moment in order to speak out in full. The main size of “Vasily Terkin” is trochaic tetrameter.
S.Ya. wrote about the originality of Tvardovsky’s verse. Marshak: “Look at how one of the best chapters of Vasily Terkin, “The Crossing,” is constructed. In this truthful and seemingly artless story about genuine events observed by the author, you will nevertheless find a strict form and a clear structure. You will find here a repeating leitmotif, which sounds in the most crucial places of the narrative, and each time in a new way - sometimes sad and alarming, sometimes solemn and even menacing:
Crossing, crossing! Left bank, right bank. The snow is rough. The edge of the ice... To whom is memory, to whom is glory, To whom is dark water.
You will find here a lively, laconic, impeccably accurate dialogue constructed according to all the laws of a ballad. This is where real poetic culture comes into play, which gives us the means to depict events from the most vibrant modern life.”

Meaning of the work

The poem “Vasily Terkin” is the central work in the work of A.T. Tvardovsky, “the best of everything written about war in war” (K. Simonov), one of the peaks of Russian epic poetry in general. It can be considered one of the truly folk works. Many lines from this work migrated into oral folk speech or became popular poetic aphorisms: “mortal combat is not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth”, “forty souls are one soul”, “crossing, crossing, left bank, right bank” and many other.
The recognition of “The Book about a Soldier” was not only popular, but also national: “...This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, accuracy in everything and what an extraordinary folk soldier’s language - not a hitch, not a hitch, not a single hitch.” a single false, ready-made, that is, literary-vulgar word!” — wrote I.A. Bunin.
The poem "Vasily Terkin" was repeatedly illustrated. The very first were illustrations by O.G. Vereisky, which were created directly after the text of the poem. The works of artists B. Dekhterev, I. Bruni, Yu. Neprintsev are also known. In 1961 at the Moscow Theater named after. Mossovet K. Voronkov staged “Vasily Terkin”. Literary compositions of chapters of the poem performed by D.N. are known. Zhuravlev and D.N. Orlova. Excerpts from the poem are set to music by V.G. Zakharov. Composer N.V. Bogoslovsky wrote the symphonic story “Vasily Terkin”.
In 1995, a monument to Terkin was unveiled in Smolensk (author - People's Artist of the Russian Federation, sculptor A.G. Sergeev). The monument is a two-figure composition depicting a conversation between Vasily Terkin and A.T. Tvardovsky. The monument was erected using publicly collected money.

This is interesting

The painting by Yu.M. became the most famous. Neprintsev “Rest after the battle” (1951).
In the winter of 1942, in a front-line dugout, barely illuminated by a homemade lamp, the artist Yuri Mikhailovich Neprintsev first became acquainted with the poem by A.T. Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin". One of the soldiers read the poem aloud, and Neprintsev saw how the soldiers’ concentrated faces brightened, how, forgetting about fatigue, they laughed while listening to this wonderful work. What is the enormous power of influence of the poem? Why is the image of Vasily Terkin so close and dear to the heart of every warrior? The artist was already thinking about this. Neprintsev rereads the poem several times and becomes convinced that its hero is not some kind of exceptional nature, but an ordinary guy, in whose image the author expressed all the best, pure and bright that is inherent in Soviet people.
A merry fellow and joker who knows how to lift the spirits of his comrades in difficult times, to cheer them up with a joke and a sharp word, Terkin also shows resourcefulness and courage in battle. Such living Terkins could be found everywhere on the roads of war.
The great vitality of the image created by the poet was the secret of his charm. That is why Vasily Terkin immediately became one of the favorite national heroes. Captivated by this wonderful, deeply truthful image, Neprintsev could not part with it for many years. “He lived in my mind,” the artist later wrote, “accumulating new features, enriching himself with new details, in order to become the main character of the picture.” But the idea for the painting was not born right away. The artist went through a long journey, full of work and thought, before he began painting the painting “Rest after the Battle.” “I wanted,” the artist wrote, “to depict the soldiers of the Soviet Army not at the moment of performing any heroic deeds, when all the spiritual forces of a person are strained to the limit, to show them not in the smoke of battle, but in a simple everyday situation, in a moment of short rest.” .
This is how the idea of ​​a painting is born. Memories of the war years help define its plot: a group of soldiers, during a short break between battles, settled down in a snowy clearing and listened to a cheerful narrator. In the first sketches the general nature of the future picture was already outlined. The group was positioned in a semi-circle, facing the viewer, and consisted of only 12-13 people. The figure of Terkin was placed in the center of the composition and highlighted in color. The figures located on each side of him formally balanced the composition. There was a lot of far-fetched and conditional in this decision. The small number of the group gave the whole scene a random character and did not create the impression of a strong, friendly group of people. Therefore, in subsequent sketches, Neprintsev increases the number of people and arranges them most naturally. The main character Terkin is moved by the artist from the center to the right, the group is built diagonally from left to right. Thanks to this, the space increases and its depth is outlined. The viewer ceases to be only a witness to this scene, he becomes, as it were, a participant in it, drawn into the circle of fighters listening to Terkin. To give even more authenticity and vitality to the whole picture,
Neprintsev abandoned solar lighting, since spectacular contrasts of light and shadow could introduce elements of theatrical convention into the picture, which the artist so avoided. The soft, diffused light of a winter day made it possible to more fully and brightly reveal the diversity of faces and their expressions. The artist worked a lot and for a long time on the figures of the fighters, on their poses, changing the latter several times. Thus, the figure of a mustachioed foreman in a sheepskin coat only after a long search turned into a sitting fighter, and an elderly soldier with a bowler hat in his hands only in the last sketches replaced the girl nurse bandaging the soldier. But the most important thing for the artist was to work on depicting the inner world of the characters. “I wanted,” Neprintsev wrote, “for the viewer to fall in love with my heroes, to feel them as living and close people, so that he would find and recognize his own front-line friends in the film.” The artist understood that only then would he be able to create convincing and truthful images of the heroes when they were extremely clear to him. Neprintsev began to carefully study the characters of the fighters, their manner of speaking, laughing, individual gestures, habits, in other words, he began to “get used to” the images of his heroes. In this he was helped by the impressions of the war years, combat encounters, and the memories of his front-line comrades. His front-line sketches and portraits of his fighting friends provided him with an invaluable service.
Many sketches were made from life, but they were not transferred directly to the painting, without preliminary modification. The artist searched for, highlighted the most striking features of this or that person and, on the contrary, removed everything secondary, random, interfering with the identification of the main one. He tried to make each image purely individual and typical. “In my painting I wanted to give a collective portrait of the Soviet people, the soldiers of the great liberating army. The true hero of my picture is the Russian people.” Each hero in the artist’s imagination has his own interesting biography. He can talk about them fascinatingly for hours, conveying the smallest details of their lives and fates.
So, for example, Neprintsev says that he imagined the fighter sitting to the right of Terkin as a guy who had recently joined the army from a collective farm, was still inexperienced, perhaps it was his first time participating in battle, and he was naturally scared. But now, lovingly listening to the stories of the experienced soldier, he forgot about his fear. Behind Terkin stands a young, handsome guy with a hat tilted at a jaunty angle. “He,” the artist wrote, “listens to Terkin somewhat condescendingly. He himself could have told it no worse. Before the war, he was a skilled worker at a large factory, an accordion player, a participant in amateur performances, and a favorite of girls>>. The artist could tell a lot about the mustachioed foreman who laughs at the top of his lungs, and about the elderly soldier with a bowler hat, and about the cheerful soldier sitting to the left of the narrator, and about all the other characters... The most difficult task was the search for the external appearance of Vasily Terkin. The artist wanted to convey the image that had developed among the people; he wanted Terkin to be recognized immediately. Terkin should be a generalized image, it should combine the features of many people. His image is, as it were, a synthesis of all the best, bright, pure that is inherent in Soviet man. The artist worked for a long time on Terkin’s appearance, on his facial expression and hand gestures. In the first drawings, Terkin was depicted as a young soldier with a good-natured, sly face. There was no sense of dexterity or sharp ingenuity in him. In another sketch, Terkin was too serious and balanced, in the third - he lacked everyday experience, life school. From drawing to drawing there was a search, gestures were refined, and the pose was determined. According to the artist, the gesture of Terkin’s right hand was supposed to emphasize some kind of sharp, strong joke addressed to the enemy. Countless drawings have been preserved in which a variety of turns of the figure, tilts of the head, hand movements, individual gestures were tried - until the artist found something that satisfied him. The image of Terkin in the film became a significant, convincing and completely natural center. The artist devoted a lot of time to searching for a landscape for the painting. He imagined that the action was taking place in a sparse forest with clearings and copses. It’s early spring, the snow has not yet melted, but is only loosening a little. He wanted to convey the national Russian landscape.
The painting “Rest after the battle” is the result of the artist’s intense, serious work, excited love for his heroes, and great respect for them. Each image in the picture is a whole biography. And before the gaze of an inquisitive viewer passes a whole series of bright, individually unique images. The deep vitality of the idea determined the clarity and integrity of the composition, the simplicity and naturalness of the pictorial solution. Neprintsev’s painting resurrects the difficult days of the Great Patriotic War, full of heroism and severity, hardships and adversity, and at the same time the joy of victory. That is why she will always be dear to the heart of the Soviet people, loved by the broad masses of the Soviet people.

(Based on the book by V.I. Gapeev, E.V. Kuznetsov. “Conversations about Soviet artists.” - M.-L.: Education, 1964)

Gapeeva V.I. Kuznetsova V.E. “Conversations about Soviet artists. - M.-L.: Enlightenment, 1964.
Grishung AL. “Vasily Terkin” by Alexander Tvardovsky. - M., 1987.
Kondratovich A. Alexander Tvardovsky: Poetry and personality. - M., 1978.
Romanova R.M. Alexander Tvardovsky: Pages of life and creativity: A book for high school students. - M.: Education, 1989-
Tvardovsky A. Vasily Terkin. A book about a fighter. Terkin in the next world. Moscow: Raritet, 2000.