The Presidential Library to digitize frontline verses by Tvardovsky, which are part of the poem “Vasily Terkin”

On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory and the 105th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Tvardovsky, celebrated on June 21, the Presidential Library will digitize its collections of poetry written diring the Great Patriotic War. Considering poetic texts we will be able to trace the birth of the main epic hero of Tvardovsky, who appeared in the poem "Vasily Terkin" integrating the military theme.

The poem was based on many of the previously written poems of Tvardovsky. The 1941 collected works "From the front-line poems," an electronic copy of which will join the Presidential Library collections, include, for example, the poem "Accordion" well-known due to the poem "Vasily Terkin." The image of Terkin is also marked in two collections: "Frontline poems" of 1941 and "Frontline chronicle" of 1945, given over to the Presidential Library to be digitized.

The poem was created during the war, combining the relevance of newspaper articles and the depth of Russian realistic poetic writing. The first chapter was published in the summer of 1942, after a hard and long retreat of our troops, when the fighters needed spiritual support more than bread. They appreciated most of all the ability of the author to write in a way to make them smile in spite of the frontline circumstances, which were not very encouraging. Tvardovsky was able to do it like no other owing both to his talent and personal "stuff."

Alexander Tvardovsky was born June 21, 1910 on a farm Zagoriye, Smolensk Province, in the family of a blacksmith of the village. In rural wilderness, in the realities of an uneasy peasant childhood, forged a freedom-loving spirit of the future editor of the "New World", which was the first to publish Solzhenitsyn’s works. Great influence on the future poet had the "training" in his father's blacksmith shop, which for the entire neighborhood was both "the club, the newspaper, and the Academy of Sciences." It was that rooted, deep knowledge of life would, years later, get the talented poet to create a truly national image of defender of the Russian land.

A cheerful soldier Vasya Terkin, beloved by millions, appeared in the frontline press before the Great Patriotic War - during the war with Finland in 1939-1940. He was created by a team of war correspondents, including Tvardovsky. The readers met a charismatic joker, as we would say today, who invariably defeated the enemy. The hero, invented in the editorial sidelines, first looked like the characters of cheap popular images and later like those of the satirical "ROSTA Windows."

At the same time, during the Finnish campaign, Tvardovsky decided to create a "collection of mixed chapters" about everyone's favorite serviceman Vasya Terkin. It was assumed that the poem would be completed in the summer of 1941.

With the outbreak of war Tvardovsky was appointed writer in the newspaper "Red Army" of the Kiev Military District and went to the front. Together with the army, he went through the whole war, broke through the encirclement in 1941. The idea of "Terkin" came back to the poet in June 1942, but it was no longer "Vasya Terkin" but "Vasily Terkin." Not only the name was replaced, but the concept of the hero's image, designed to embody the best features of the epic warrior-liberator. "The war is real, so the poetry should be real as well," the poet wrote in his diary.

Fantastic success of the poem "Vasily Terkin" was largely determined by the degree of Tvardovsky’s understanding of an "ordinary" person, which he originally had. Therefore, the prologue is so organic with the whole content of the poem: “And most of all we cannot live without what? / Without sheer truth, beating right in the heart, / Let it be saturated, / No matter how bitter it is."

We largely owe our great victory in May 1945 to the literary hero Vasily Terkin - collective image of Russian soldier - who was fighting together with the whole country.