Truth from the battlefields of Konstantin Simonov — in the electronic sources of the Presidential Library

November 28, 2017, marks the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Simonov (1915—1979), a poet and a front-line soldier, who imprinted the war in newspaper reportages, lyrics and tough military prose. The Presidential Library fund includes the collections of his works of the Great Patriotic Wartime: “Verses of 1941,” the books “From the Black to the Barents Sea,” “The Order of Lenin,” a poem “The son of the artilleryman,” a play “Russian People,” as well as the frontline essays and the short stories about the war.

The army theme already was in the early works of beginning author. This is largely due to the origin: Konstantin (Cyril) Simonov was born in the family of the colonel of the General Staff Mikhail Agafangelovich Simonov; Konstantin’s childhood went down in military camps and commander’s dormitories. After the seventh grade, he went to work on the factory, hired as a metal turner first in Saratov, and then in Moscow, where the family moved in 1931. He needed to gain some experience required for enrolling the Literary Institute named after A. M. Gorky, which he graduated from in 1938.

The war for Simonov began not in 1941, but in 1939, when he was sent as a military correspondent to Khalkhin Gol. From there, he brought a cycle of poems (which later received the all-Union fame), in which a theme of the warrior’s duty to his native land and his people was brought up.

From the first days of the Great Patriotic War, Konstantin Simonov was in the army: he became a war correspondent of the newspapers “Boyevoye Znamya” / “The Battle Flag,” “Krasnoarmeiskaya Pravda” / “Red Army Soldier’s Truth,” “Izvestiya” / “News-bulletin,” “Pravda” / “Truth,” “Komsomolskaya Pravda” / “Komsomol Truth. Then he became a military reporter for the “Krasnaya Zvezda” / “Red Star” newspaper, where he sent his poems, essays, articles from all the fronts on which he had a chance to fight — allegedly, the military correspondent Simonov was on every front. “He voluntary goes to the intelligence operations, in the attacks, here is he on the observation post, there — on the Volga River crossing, under fire, and everywhere he is sincere and easy going. No narcissism, no a shadow of falsehood, no crackling or empty talk… Some Simonov’s poems soldiers and officers bear on their chests,” — a poet Nikolai Tikhonov wrote.

A language, of course, above all in the poem “Wait for me,” which Simonov offered to the front-line soldiers in the most difficult — the first — half-year of the Great Patriotic War. The poem, written in August 1941 and published in Pravda in 1942, became an event in the life of our people. It was manually rewritten numerous times and sent from the front-line to home and from the rear — to the front-line. It clearly went beyond poetry, becoming a kind of soldier’s prayer, a bridge between life and death, which was supported by a belief in the best, separation from the terrible front-line reality: “Wait for me, and I’ll come back! / Dodging every fate!” In this poem, the 26 year-old poet, apart from predicting that the war would be long and brutal, also uttered that the man is stronger than the war, and its outcome is essentially predetermined.

Simonov’s war prose is honest male’s prose, in its stylistic asceticism similar to Hemingway’s front-line novels, but more epically evolved. The writer can be called a pioneer of such themes as “the Russian character,” “the living and the dead,” where he in its true colors describes a collision of people who are thoughtful and honest with the bloodless “cogs” of a military machine. A large-scale truth about the war shown in the “The living and the dead” became a breakthrough in the 1960s of last century. The diary entries and correspondence of the writer show that Simonov’s war is dimensional, he sees it from different points and angles, easily moving in space from the trenches of the front-lines to the army headquarters and deep rear.

Four years of the war have determined all forty years of literary work of Simonov. Best of all he says about this himself:

A sacred hate of the attacks,

A nasty labor of the battles

Will deeply tie a crop of us

Forever in the iron knot.

The war correspondent Simonov in the full sense of the word has managed to equate a pen with a bayonet and, after two wars, to return home alive, which he foretold in his “Soldier’s prayer.”