Konstantin Simonov about “those last thirty meters where life is on a par with death!”

November 28, 2019 marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Simonov (1915 - 1979), a front-line poet who captured the war first in newspaper reports and poems, and later in harsh military prose. In the most difficult first winter of the front, he presented his people with the poem "Wait for me", which later will be called "soldier's prayer".

The Presidential Library’s collections contain his collected works of the time of World War II: “Poems of 1941”, notes by the war correspondent “From the Black to the Barents Sea”, prose work “Order of Lenin” (1945), poem “The Son of the Gunner”, play “Russian People”, as well as frontline essays and stories about the war.

The theme of the army is already present in the early works of a novice author. This is largely due to its origin: Konstantin Simonov (Kirill - name given at birth) was born in the family of Colonel General Staff Mikhail Simonov and Princess Alexandra Obolenskaya. Father went missing during the Civil War. In 1919, mother and son moved to Ryazan, where she married a professor of military affairs, the former colonel of the tsarist army, Alexander Ivanishev. According to Simonov’s own admission, the stepfather, having a strong influence on his principles and habits, instilled a love for the army, about which Konstantin wrote not of duty, but of deep inner need. He wanted to understand and explain all the dramatic vicissitudes associated with war, military service and service to the Motherland.

The war for Simonov did not begin in 1941, but in 1939, when he was sent as a war correspondent to Khalkhin Gol. He brought a series of poems from there, which later received all-Union fame, which raised the theme of the duty of a warrior to his homeland and his people.

Already on June 24, 1941, on the second day after the start of World War II, Simonov left for the 3rd Army in Grodno Region to work in the Boyevoye Znamya newspaper. Then he was appointed war correspondent to the editorial office of the Western Front newspaper Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda, while at the same time sending military correspondence to Izvestia as a non-staff correspondent. Then, until the end of the war, he worked as a war correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, where he sent poems, essays, and articles from all fronts on which he had the chance to fight.

“Wait for me” - this is a poem, written in August 1941 and published in Pravda in 1942, became an event in the life of our people. It was rewritten by hand and sent from the front home and from the rear to the front. It clearly went beyond poetry, becoming a kind of amulet, a bridge between life and death, which was supported by the belief in the best. In this poem, the 26-year-old poet predicted that the war would be long and fierce and that man was stronger than war.

Simonov’s military fiction is honest male prose, similar to Hemingway’s frontline novels. The writer can be called the pioneer of such topics as the “Russian character”, “the living and the dead”, where the collision of deep and conscientious people with the cold “cogs” of a military machine is shown without embellishment.

The major truth in The Living and the Dead trilogy about the war was a revelation for the 60s of the last century. Based on accurate knowledge of front-line realities, the author of the novel questioned the legality of certain military operations of the 41st and 42nd years. He was one of the first to unveil the irreparable consequences of pre-war repression in the fate of the army. He showed how hard the drunkenness of the authorities responded to the soldiers, the absence in the consciousness of the higher army ranks of humanistic concepts of the price of victory. Simonov’s war is voluminous, he sees it from different points and angles - from the trenches of the front line to the army headquarters and the deep rear.

Four years of the war determined forty years of literary activity of Simonov. He himself will say this best of all in one of the frontline poems of 1942.

All the following years, Konstantin Simonov recalled the war episodes in his memory, in which he participated, and, of course, more than once passed in his dreams “those last thirty meters where life is on a par with death!”.