Traditional medicine

D poor biography. Demyan Bedny

Demyan Bedny

(1883-1945;autobiography). - It is unlikely that any of our writers has had to share a life story more terrible and expressive than D.B.’s childhood. In his early years, he was closely connected with people who, in their souls and on their clothes, wore all the smells of criminality and hard labor. And it took enormous inner strength to so easily shake off this dirty scum of life. Horrifying cruelty and rudeness surrounded D.B.’s childhood. His ancestors, by the name of the Pridvorovs, belonged to the military settlers of the Kherson province. Military settlements - the brainchild of the terrible Arakcheev - represented the worst kind of serfdom, the worst slavery that the world has ever known. The military settlers looked at the ordinary serfs with the greatest envy. After the fall of serfdom, the spirit of Arakcheevism hovered over the entire Kherson region for a long time, supporting cruelty, riotousness, and bandit-robber instincts in the local population, which found their echoes later in the Makhnovshchina and Grigorievshchina.

“...An unforgettable time, a golden childhood...” the poet later ironically recalls this time of his life.

Efimka was barely 4 years old. It was a holiday and it was terribly stuffy. As usual, beaten and tearful, Efimka, trailing behind his mother, found himself at the shopkeeper Gershka. Huddled in a corner, he became an involuntary witness to the shameless scene that took place right there on the bags, in front of the shocked child’s eyes. The boy cried bitterly, and his mother frantically beat him with a stick all the way. Father, Alexey Safronovich Pridvorov, served in the city, 20 versts from Gubovka. Coming home on leave, he beat his wife to death, and she returned the beating to her son a hundredfold. Returning to his service, his father often took Efimka with him, who, like a holiday, waited for these happy respites. Until the age of 7, Efim lived in the city, where he learned to read and write, and then until the age of 13 in the village with his mother. Opposite the mother's house, right across the road, there was a shinok (tavern) and a village "massacre". For whole days Efimka sat on the rubble and looked village life in the face. Voiceless, silent, enslaved Rus', plucking up courage in a tavern, wildly bawled obscene songs, used disgusting foul language, raged, brawled, and then humbly atoned for its tavern heresies by repenting in a “cold one.” Right there, side by side with the “cold” one, where there was a struggle against the individual vices of the drunken Gubs, Guba life unfolded in all its noisy breadth on the field of social struggle: village gatherings were noisy, dejected defaulters were staggering, dissatisfied complainers were shouting and demanding, and, rattling with all the strings village justice, “retribution” instilled in the Guba peasants respect for the foundations of the landowner system. And the boy listened and learned.

More than once among the characters he had to meet his own mother. Ekaterina Kuzminichna was rarely at home and, enthusiastically indulging in drinking and fighting, contributed greatly to deviations from the formal and legal order in Gubovka. Hungry, the boy knocked on the first hut he came across. “So from a young age,” said D.B, smiling, “I got accustomed to public catering: wherever you come, there is your home.” In the evenings, climbing onto the stove, Efimka shared his stock of everyday observations with his grandfather. And on Sundays, the grandfather took his grandson with him to a tavern, where the boy’s worldly education was completed in a drunken haze. At home, when he was tipsy, the grandfather loved to reminisce about the old days, about the times of settlement, about the lancers and dragoons who stood post throughout the Kherson region. And my grandfather’s imagination, fueled by vodka, eagerly painted idyllic pictures of serfdom.

“As it happened, for the settlement...” - the grandfather began.

It turned out that one could not wish for a better order than the patriarchal antiquity. Any innovation here is an unnecessary insertion. But when he was sober, my grandfather said something different. With hatred, he told his grandson about Arakcheevism, about the favors of the lords: how settlers were punished with sticks, how men were exiled to Siberia, and women, torn from their babies, were turned into dog feeders. And these stories are forever etched in Efimka’s memory.

“My grandfather told me a lot.

They were harsh and uncomplicated

His stories are clear

And they were worried after them

My baby dreams..."

For the lively and impressionable boy, the time had come for difficult reflections. He grabbed his grandfather’s stories on the fly and struggled in anxious thoughts. On the one hand, the grandfather seemed to demand justification for the serfdom, on the other, he instilled a sworn hatred of antiquity with the everyday truth of his stories. And imperceptibly in Efimka’s brain a vague idea of two truths was born: one - the unctuous and reconciling, embellished with the dreamy lies of her grandfather, and the other - the harsh, intractable and merciless truth of peasant life. This duality was supported in the boy by his rural upbringing. Having learned to read and write early, under the influence of the village priest, he began to read the psalter, “Cheti-Minea”, “The Path to Salvation”, “The Lives of the Saints” - and this directed the boy’s imagination onto a false and organically alien path. Gradually, a desire to go to a monastery even developed and became established in him, but his grandfather insultingly ridiculed the boy’s religious dreams and in his garrulous conversations he paid a lot of attention to the hypocrisy and tricks of the priests, church deception, and so on.

Efimka was sent to a rural school. He studied well and willingly. Reading plunged him into a fairy-tale world. He memorized Ershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse and almost never parted with Churkin the Robber. He instantly turned every nickel that fell into his hands into a book. And the boy had nickels. The Pridvorovs' house, due to its strategic position (against the "massacre" and the tavern and not far from the road) was something like a visiting yard. The policeman, the constable, the village authorities, the passing carts, the horse thieves, the sexton, and the peasants summoned for “retribution” came here. In the midst of this motley crowd, the boy’s receptive imagination is replenished with images of future “entertainers”, “administrators”, “streets”, “farmers”, “rebellious hares” and “guardians”. Along with the knowledge of life, Efimka acquired business skills here, and soon he began to work as a village clerk. For a copper nickel, he writes petitions, gives advice, carries out various assignments and fights in every possible way against “retribution.” His literary career began from this fight against “retribution.” And the influx of everyday experience is growing and expanding, and hundreds of new stories are accumulating. For a short time, the literate Efimka becomes necessary for his mother. Whether as a result of constant beatings or other perversion of nature, but, except for Efimka, Ekaterina Kuzminichna had no more children. This has given her a strong reputation as a progeny insurance specialist. There was no end to this type of insurance from hunters. Ekaterina Kuzminichna deftly maintained the deception. She gave the women all sorts of medicines and gave them infusions of gunpowder and onions to drink. The Gubov girls swallowed regularly and gave birth regularly by the due date. Then Efimka was involved in the case. As a literate man, he wrote a laconic note: “baptized name Maria, with this ruble in silver,” and “the secret fruit of unhappy love” was forwarded along with the note to the city. The guys knew that Efimka was privy to all of his mother’s secret operations and, catching him in a dark corner, asked: “Did Pryska go to your mat? But Efimka tightly kept the girl’s secrets. In addition, as a literate boy, he earned nickels by reading the psalter for the dead. These nickels were usually also drunk by the mother.

The services provided by the boy to his mother did not make the latter more affectionate towards her son. She still tyrannized the boy, still left him for whole days without food and indulged in shameless revelry. One day a boy, completely hungry, searched every corner of the hut, but did not find a single crumb. In despair, he lay down on the floor and cried. But, lying down, I unexpectedly saw a wondrous sight under the bed: about two dozen nails were driven into the wooden bottom of the bed, and hanging from the nails on strings were: sausage, fish, bagels, sugar, several bottles of vodka, sour cream, milk - in a word, a whole shop. Notified of this, grandfather Sofron grunted: “That’s why she, the bitch, is always so red!” - but the hungry old man and the boy were afraid to touch the supplies. D.B. attributes one of the darkest memories of his childhood to this time. He is 12 years old. He is dying - probably from diphtheria: his throat is clogged to the point of complete muteness. They gave him communion and laid him under the icons. The mother is right there - bare-haired, drunk. She sews a mortal shirt and screams merry tavern songs at the top of her voice. It is painfully difficult for the boy. He wants to say something, but he just moves his lips silently. The mother bursts into drunken laughter. The cemetery watchman Bulakh enters - a drunkard and a cheerful cynic. He joins his mother in singing. Then he comes up to Efimka and good-naturedly reasons: “Well, Efimasha, let’s give a damn... Why do you want it? For a grandma. The mint smells so good there...” Someone let my father know that Efimka was dying.

Meanwhile, the abscess burst. The boy woke up from terrible screams. It was dark. A drunken mother was lying on the floor, screaming in a frantic voice under the blows of her father's boot. The father drove 20 miles from the city, found his mother drunkenly and dragged her home by her braids. From this memorable night, a turning point in Efimka’s life begins. The mother stopped beating him, the boy began to resolutely fight back and began to run to his father more often. In the city, Efimka became friends with two boys - Senka Sokolov, the son of an Elvort worker, and the son of a gendarmerie sergeant - Sashka Levchuk. The latter was preparing for paramedic school. It was prepared by a real teacher, who received 3 rubles a month. Having attended Sashka’s lessons a couple of times, the boy was completely captivated by the desire to follow in the footsteps of his friend. The father did not oppose this. He paid the teacher 3 rubles for Efimka’s right to attend lessons. For about 3 months Efimka went to see the teacher. In the fall of 1896, the boys were taken to Kyiv to take an exam.

And now the victory is won. The boy was accepted into a military paramedic school as a “officially paid” student. In the tall, warm rooms with white walls and polished floors, he immediately felt overwhelmed with sublime joy. Far behind were a fierce mother, beatings, fights, mutilations, obscene conversations, pregnant girls, foundlings, psalters for the dead, the desire to flee to a monastery. He eagerly listened to every word of the teachers, imbued with their faith and convictions. And here for the first time he gave his feelings the forms that were characteristic of his talent: he wrote poetry.

These were patriotic poems dedicated to Tsar Nicholas II on the occasion of his performance as a “peacemaker” with the convening of a conference in The Hague (in 1899):

"Sound my lyre:

I compose songs

Apostle of Peace

Tsar Nicholas!"

Could it have been different? He refuses to enter the monastery, but, of course, considers his luck as the grace of providence. Sharp by nature, but not yet touched by culture and knowledge, the boy’s thought continues to work in the same narrow church-patriotic circle. His whole soul is in the power of unctuous, reconciling truth.

“When I am asked to write about the “horrors” of military education in a military paramedic school,” says D.B., “then I just feel embarrassed. What horrors there were when I first felt free at school. High white walls, parquet floors, hot lunches every day - I never even dreamed of this. I was in tenth heaven.”

D.B. graduated from school in 1900. After that, he served in military service until 1904 in Elisavetgrad, where D.B. managed to prepare for a matriculation certificate. In the spring of 1904, he passed the exam and entered St. Petersburg University. This was a great triumph for D.B., since preparing for the matriculation certificate cost him incredible efforts. However, this triumph was, as usual, poisoned. When D.B. was leaving for St. Petersburg University, he saw a disheveled woman at the station, not entirely sober. Shaking her fist in his direction, she screamed wildly at the entire platform: “Oh, so that we get there and don’t come back...” It was Ekaterina Kuzminichna who sent her maternal blessing to her departing son. Since then, the mother has not made herself known for many years. Only in 1912, while working in the St. Petersburg public library, my son accidentally came across a small article in the Elisavetgrad newspaper: “The case of Ekaterina Pridvorova about the torture of minors.” Soon after this, the mother arrived in St. Petersburg, found her son and, without looking him in the eyes, gloomily said: “He’s gone.” - "Whom?" - "Old Man (father)." And getting confused, she said that at the bazaar in Elisavetgrad, in a latrine, they found her father’s corpse. The corpse was completely decomposed; on the finger there was a silver ring with the inscription: Alexey Pridvorov. From questioning, it turned out that she had a major quarrel with her father over a house in the village. My father was going to leave somewhere and wanted to sell the house. Mother was against it. At that time she was selling at the market, and her locker was located not far from the latrine. Listening to his mother's confused testimony, the son came to the firm conviction that she was involved in the murder. But Ekaterina Kuzminichna knew how to keep her mouth shut.

Already during the years of Soviet power, when her son became known throughout Russia, she found him in the Kremlin, came to him more than once, received money and gifts, but when leaving, she invariably stole, and did not hesitate to shout in Elisavetgrad at the bazaar: “Here is hat D . B., for three karbovanets." But when asked about her murdered father, she answered with vicious abuse. And only on her deathbed did she repent and confess that her husband was killed by her with the assistance of two lovers. On the day of the murder, she invited all three of them to her place for dinner, gave her husband poisoned vodka, and then the two wrapped him in thin string, strangled him and threw him into a latrine.

The arrival of E. Pridvorov in the capital in the early autumn of 1904 is curious: a strong fellow came out of the Nikolaev station in a red coat from his father’s shoulder, with a skinny suitcase, but in a brand new student cap and with a cane in his hand. On Znamenskaya Square. at the Nikolaevsky station there was no monument to Alexander III then, but there was a wooden fence with an expressive inscription: “it is forbidden to stop,” and near an impressive policeman on duty. Timidly and hesitantly, the student approached the policeman and politely addressed him: “Mr. Policeman, can you walk around St. Petersburg with a cane?” The policeman was puzzled: “Why not?” - “But the king lives here...” The campaigner’s mustache moved menacingly. In the strange naivety of the visiting student, he sensed hidden sedition, and something flashed in his rounded eyes that made the frightened student immediately sharpen his skis. “Subsequently,” said D.B., recalling this episode of bad memory, “I atoned for the sin of my youth and justified the policeman’s guess.” This redemption was the inscription D.B., carved on all four sides on the granite pedestal of the monument to Alexander III. With it - this quilting inscription "Scarecrow" - the now revolutionary Leningrad greets everyone leaving the Oktyabrsky (Nikolaevsky) station on the former Znamenskaya Square:

"My son and my father were executed during their lifetime,

And I reaped the fate of posthumous infamy:

I’m hanging here as a cast-iron scarecrow for the country,

Forever throwing off the yoke of autocracy.

The military paramedic drill was ingrained into E. Pridvorova’s soul for a long time and firmly. A stubborn struggle against despotism was boiling all around, Russia was trembling from underground blows. And the own fate of yesterday’s Efimka, and the memories of the ugly Guba “retribution” - everything both around and behind, it would seem, pushed E. Pridvorov into the ranks of revolutionary students. But this could not happen right away for a young man who, from the age of 13 to 21, grew up and was brought up in the requirements of military drill. He tried to study, went to lectures, listened, took notes, not without secret horror, avoiding university unrest and “riots.” This period of D.B.’s life - the period of youthful maturity and personal growth - was marked by a complex process of external and internal breakdown, which found a very accurate and truthful image in the autobiographical poem “The Bitter Truth”: here the purely fabulous external transition from the “teenage shepherdess” is striking ", which

"... Rye bread... took a rug with me

And carefully put it in a bag with bread

Your favorite, well-read book"

To the life of the capital in the highest “society”, among the “gentlemen”, among the “brilliance of honors”, and then the “awakening” from the “bitter truth”, “deceptions”, a return to the lower classes of the people as an already experienced and knowledgeable fighter, in concise, strong verses here are not free poetic metaphors, but accurate images that correspond to reality, only artistically veiled - the whole history of the passionate falls and rises of this formative period of D.B.'s life - his period of Sturm und Drang.

Fate is a bizarre game

Then suddenly thrown into a noisy city,

How I was jealous at times

Having overheard an incomprehensibly clever argument among the gentlemen.

They walked - day after day, year after year.

Having mixed “shine” with light, I stubbornly pursued “shine”,

Looking at the gentlemen with peasant timidity,

Kowtow obediently.

Here, every word is a burning, self-flagellating confession, “a confession of a warm heart,” and only by deciphering every word and image of this completely truthful confession can one read the biography of these years of D.B.’s life.

But some kind of “wormhole” was invisibly eating away at the seemingly brilliant well-being of the young man, cut off from the soil on which he was born.

"...But the vague soul was yearning for the light of day,

The eternal chains pressed on my chest more painfully,

And more and more temptingly they opened before me

Another life, a road to another world,

Sublime books from native writers."

And now “the awakening has come” (as in Pushkin):

From the splendor of honors, from the host of princes,

How I fled from a sinful obsession.

In a different environment, different friends

I found it at the time of awakening."

We repeat, here very sparingly, but very accurately, the complex path of mental storms, internal cataclysms, incredible efforts and work on oneself is outlined, which turned the student Pridvorov into “the harmful man Demyan Bedny.” Somehow it immediately became clear that the country was treading on corpses and the all-Russian Guba “retribution” was wafting from everywhere. The hand reached for the pen.

"Avenging the fruitless waste of youthful strength,

For all the past deceptions,

I inflicted cruel gusto

Evil wounds for the enemies of the people.

This is the beginning of this different - literary and political career of D.B.

The first poems of the future satirist are of a gloomy nature and imbued with the spirit of strict self-examination. They date back to 1901-1908. Over the course of the decade from 1907 to 1917, the fable constituted almost the only form of his literary work, and it was during this period that D.B. deservedly gained the reputation of a fabulist of the proletariat. The political formation of D.B. also dates back to this time. First, he entered into friendship with the populists, there he became close to the famous poet Melshin (Yakubovich), and published his first poems in the magazine “Russian Wealth”. And then he irrevocably goes to the Bolsheviks. Since 1910, he has been a regular contributor to Zvezda and Pravda. From this moment on, D.B. no longer belongs to himself. He is completely at the mercy of the struggle. With a thousand threads it is connected with the buildings of factories, factories and workshops. The moral teachings of his fables are thoroughly saturated with rebellion and filled with dynamite of class hatred. From the first days of the revolution, D.B.’s fable naturally degenerates into a revolutionary poster, a rallying call and a “communist Marseillaise.” Their organizing influence on the working masses is enormous. All paths of the revolution are illuminated by the work of D.B. Monument after monument arises in his writings: February days, Bolshevik October, the Red Army, deserters, bagmen, kulaks, new economic policy, White Guard manifestos, priestly tricks. His satires, songs and fables are an excellent chronicle of our days. D.B. himself in the poem “My Verse”, written by. in response to M. Gorky and Nov. Zhizn, he clearly defined his significance as a political writer of the era, the meaning of the ideas inspiring his poetry-feat:

And my verse... there is no shine in his simple attire..."

The purpose of this poetry is not pure aesthetics, and this voice of the modern “muse of revenge and anger” sounds differently:

"...Deaf, cracked, mocking and angry.

Carrying a damned burden of a heavy legacy,

I am not a minister of muses:

My solid, clear verse is my daily feat.

Native people, labor sufferer,

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!

And this feat was appreciated: by resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on April 22, 1923, D.B. was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

L. Voitolovsky.

Large biographical encyclopedia. 2009 .

Pseudonym of the proletarian poet Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov.

D. B. was born in 1883 in the village of Gubovka, Alexandria district. Kherson province, in a peasant family (from military settlers), until the age of 7 he lived in Elizavetgrad with his father (the guardian of the church of a religious school), then until the age of 13 with his mother in the village, in an atmosphere of terrible poverty, debauchery and atrocities.

These difficult years gave D.B. a good acquaintance with the life of the village, especially with its shadow sides.

When D.B. was 14 years old, his father enrolled him at a government expense in a closed military paramedic school. Here the boy became addicted to reading: he met Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Nikitin.

It was here that D.B.’s first literary experiments took place (satirical poems on school topics). After graduating from school, D.B. served his military service, then passed the matriculation exam and in 1904 entered St. Petersburg University.

The school and the soldiery raised D.B. in a strictly monarchical, national and religious spirit. The student unrest and the events of the first revolution stunned D.B., but only with the beginning of the reaction did he gradually begin to understand what was happening around him and become imbued with a revolutionary mood.

D. B. became close to the poet P. F. Yakubovich and, through him, to the editorial group of the magazine “Russian Wealth”, that is, to revolutionary-democratic and populist circles.

In January 1909, D.B. made his debut in “Russian Wealth” with a poem signed by E. Pridvorov.

In December 1910, with the founding of the legal Bolshevik newspaper "Zvezda", D.B. began to collaborate in it - first under his own name, and then under the pseudonym of Demyan Bedny, became close to the Bolshevik vanguard of the labor movement and joined the Bolshevik Party.

In 1912, he participated in the founding of the newspaper Pravda and actively collaborated in it, and attracted the sympathetic attention of V.I. Lenin.

In 1913 D.B. was arrested.

During the years of the imperialist war, D.B. was mobilized and went to the front. Occasionally his things appeared in magazines. "Modern World" and in various provincial publications.

After the February Revolution, D.B. collaborated with Pravda and other Bolshevik newspapers.

After the October Revolution, he visited all fronts of the civil war, performed in factories and factories.

In April 1923, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee awarded D.B. the Order of the Red Banner for his revolutionary military services.

Since January 1925 he has been a member of the board of the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP). The ideology of D.B. is the ideology of a peasant who has switched to the point of view of the proletariat.

D.B.'s poems from the period of "Russian Wealth" in content and form are typical revolutionary-democratic poems for that time. But participation in the Bolshevik press, the influence of party circles and the labor movement turned D.B. into a “Bolshevik of the poetic weapon” (Trotsky), into a pioneer of proletarian poetry.

D.B.'s topics cover all aspects of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and peasantry over the past 15 years. The extraordinary ability to quickly and strongly respond to social events gave D.B.’s works the significance of a kind of artistic chronicle of the revolution.

D. B.’s pre-revolutionary poems talk about strikes, the struggle for the workers’ press, the events of Duma life, the life and morals of entrepreneurs, the struggle of classes in the countryside, etc. During the period of the Provisional Government, D. B. fights defencism, exposes the war, and promotes the power of the councils.

The Red Army finds its artist-agitator in D.B.

He responded with military calls to all major front-line events, castigated deserters and cowards, and addressed “the deceived brothers in the White Guard trenches.” At the same time, B. noted the shortcomings of Soviet construction.

A special place in his work is occupied by the theme: the hesitation of the peasantry in the revolution (poems “Red Army Men”, “Men”, “Tsar Andron”, etc.). D. B.’s anti-religious work is very extensive: in most of the works of this cycle the author speaks about the deception and hypocrisy of the clergy (“Spiritual Fathers, their thoughts are sinful”), but in the poem “The New Testament without Flaw” D. B. goes further by parodying The Gospel exposes its internal contradictions. NEP challenged D.B. to fight both the panicky rejection of NEP and capitulation to the new bourgeoisie.

D.B. also has numerous responses to events in intra-party life (party discussions, etc.). The genres that D.B. uses are extremely diverse.

Purely propaganda poems predominate, often turning into pathetic lyrics (“In the Ring of Fire”, etc.). Less common are intimate lyrics ("Sadness", "Snowflakes"), also socially oriented.

D.B. also resorts to the epic: chronicle (“About the land, about freedom, about the working share”), abstract plot epic (“Main Street”) and concrete plot epic (“About Mitka the Runner and about his end,” “Oath Zainet" etc.). D.B. especially often uses genres of folklore: song, ditty, epic, fairy tale, skaz.

In the era of “Star” and “Pravda” and the imperialist war, D.B.’s main genre was the fable, which he turned into a sharp weapon of political struggle (in addition to the original fables, D.B. translated Aesop’s fables). The variety of genres corresponds to the variety of stylistic techniques: D. B. uses classical meters, free verse, and folklore techniques.

It is characterized by a reduction in plot and style, a technique closely related to targeting a wide mass audience.

D.B. loves to parody “high style” (it should be noted the everyday interpretation of the gospel in the “New Testament”). The main source of technical innovations in D. B.’s poetry is folklore, images and rhythms of proverbs, jokes, ditties, etc. D. B.’s popularity is extremely high: his works sold millions of copies and had a wide and effective response among the masses.

According to the Red Army libraries.

D.B. is the most widely read author. Some of D.B.’s poems became popular folk songs (“Seeing Off”, etc.). Despite sympathetic press reviews of D.B.’s first works, official criticism after the revolution only turned to studying his work late.

The beginning of serious critical literature about D.B. began only in the 20s. K. Radek (1921) and L. Sosnovsky (1923). Individual works of D.B. were repeatedly published as brochures and books.

In 1923, the Krokodil publishing house published the Collected Works of D.B. in one volume, with articles by K. Eremeev and L. Voitolovsky.

GIZ publishes "Collected Works" by D.B. in 10 volumes, edited and with notes by L. Sosnovsky and G. Lelevich.

The publishing house of the Peoples of the USSR published a book of selected poems by D. B. on it. language translated by I. Russ. Ukr. ed. "Knigospilka" published "The New Testament Without Flaw" translated by O. Barabbas.

Biographical information is available in the brochure by L. Voitolovsky “Demyan Bedny”, M., 1925, and in the article by K. Eremeev (in a one-volume collected works).

Lit. The critical literature on D.B. is extensive.

In addition to the mentioned brochure by L. Voitolovsky, see Fatov, N., Demyan Bedny, M., 1922 (2nd additional ed., M., 1926); Efremin, A., Demyan Poor at school, M., 1926; Medvedev, P., Demyan Bedny, L., 1925; see also articles: L. Trotsky in the book “Literature and Revolution”, M., 1923; P. Kogan in the book “Literature of These Years”, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1924; A. Voronsky in the book “Literary Types”, M., 1925; L. Sosnovsky in the journal. "On duty", No. 1, 1923; G. Lelevich in the journal. "Young Guard", No. 9, 1925. Bibliography in the book by I. Vladislavlev "Russian Writers", Leningrad, 1924, pp. 346-347, and in the index by V. Lvov-Rogachevsky and R. Mandelstam, "Workers' and Peasants' Writers ", L., 1926, pp. 13-14. G. Lelevich.

Poor, Demyan is the pseudonym of the modern poet Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov.

Genus. in the family of a peasant from Kherson province, who served as a church watchman in Elizavetgrad.

B. described his childhood in vivid colors in his autobiography: “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. As for my mother, if I remained a tenant in this world, she is least to blame for this.

She held 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.” At the age of thirteen, B. was sent to the Kyiv military paramedic school. At the age of twenty-one, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. “After four years of 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 Korolenkovsky’s “Russian Wealth” and became very close friends with the famous poet-People’s Willer P.F. Yakubovich-Melshin... Having previously given a significant bias towards Marxism, in 1911 I began to publish in the Bolshevik - glorious memory - "To the star." My crossroads converged on one road.

The ideological turmoil was over... Since 1912, my life has been a breeze... What is not directly related to my propaganda and literary work has no special interest or significance,” first appeared on May 7/20, 1911 on the pages of Zvezda. Having begun his collaboration in the "Modern World" (see) the following year, Bedny turns into a sworn feuilletonist of the Bolshevik press.

The vast majority of his works first appear on the pages of Zvezda, Pravda, Bednota, and Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In 1913, the first collection of his “Fables” was published. The era of civil wars of 1918-1920 created exceptional popularity of bourgeoisie among the broad masses of workers and poor peasants.

In particular, his work enjoyed great success in the Red Army. A tireless agitator, a “valiant cavalryman of the word,” B. was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1923.

In its accompanying letter, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee noted the “particularly outstanding and exceptional merits” of B., whose works, “simple and understandable to everyone, and therefore unusually strong, ignited the hearts of the working people with revolutionary fire and strengthened the courage of the spirit in the most difficult moments of the struggle.” On what social basis did B.’s creativity grow, in other words, what is the class genesis of his poetry? The peasantry must be considered such a base.

We are convinced of this not so much by the facts of his biography (in themselves quite eloquent), but by the whole aspiration of his work of the early period.

With his themes, images, expressive and figurative means of poetic speech, the young poet is closely connected with the village, with the life and attitude of the Great Russian peasantry.

This definition, of course, needs immediate sociological clarification.

Poets such as Klyuev (q.v.) or Klychkov (q.v.) with great artistic force consolidated in their work the system of experiences of the wealthy, peasant elite.

B. represents a diametrically opposite group of the peasantry - insufficient, poor, proletarianized.

The central image of B.'s early works should be considered a farm laborer, energetically fighting against kulak dominance. “The constable writes a report: “So the Neelovsky villagers, your brood, were tormented by Demyan at the gathering on Sunday...” (“About Demyan the Poor - a harmful man,” 1909). The path of the Demyanovsky revolutionary is common: “grabbing the primer, and then the leaflets, a prison course for strikes.” But it is noteworthy that this “Comrade Beard” - by his origin - is a man, “raised by a village field, who has migrated to all the big cities”, that in his past he has “dozens of years of farm labor wandering around the economies of former landowners.” The poet repeatedly develops the image of a young peasant who went to the city, entered a factory there, participated in the labor movement and returned to the village for a new and persistent struggle.

This character goes through all of B.’s work, finding a complete expression in the poem “Men.” Pyotr Kostrov returned from St. Petersburg to his native village, “switched, forgetting the factory, to peasant life.” The plant was not forgotten by him, of course: the lessons of the proletarian struggle were remembered by Peter forever, but Kostrov uses this weapon in his native environment against the “rich people” who are confusing the village people. The theme of young Demyan reflects the psychological mood of these poor strata of the pre-revolutionary village.

The satirical display of the rural “world-eaters” (the foreman, the constable, the shopkeeper, the kulak in general, the landowner and the priest), the irreconcilable discord between them and the exploited “people”, the darkness of the village, its material poverty and social humiliation - all these motives undeniably establish the farm laborer genesis of Demyanovskaya poetry.

Before us is the artist of the “rural proletariat, and if Pyotr Kostrov embodies the features of a rural revolutionary, fighting with the weapons that the factory city taught him to wield, then B.’s other hero is no less allegorical - a village grandfather, dressed in thin rags - “in wet, holey onuchas." This wanderer ends up in the Pugachev Committee of the Poor: "A red flag flutters over the roof of the last hut." In the committee, the grandfather is dressed in what was taken away from the village "guzzlers" yesterday. "Having put on a sheepskin coat without a patch, the teary grandfather sighed : - “I walked to this place, guys, for exactly seventy years.” The fact that B. entered the consciousness of readers as a working poet in no way contradicts everything said above. B. freely throws himself into working motives in his work and yet remains a poet of the rural poor.

The farm laborer, entering the arena of broad social struggle, perceives the ideology of the worker, behind whom the political leadership still remains.

It is also necessary to take into account the fact that the working class relentlessly replenished its cadres precisely in these years and precisely from this immense reservoir of rural farm labor (1912-1914 - the era of the highest flowering of Russian capitalism).

B.'s creativity, which grew from farm labor roots, then absorbed “congenial” working motives; this was predetermined by the entire orientation of the advanced strata of his class group.

It is characteristic that in the song of grandfather Sofron: “How I will burst into all forty forty, yes forty, how I will shout in Moscow all the farm laborers, all the farm laborers” - the motives of the workers’ revolution are given the features of a farm laborer’s uprising.

Over the years, the range of B.'s creativity expanded, but the farmhand basis of his style remained unchanged.

The poet himself admitted this. Having chosen for himself at the dawn of his work the pseudonym “Demyan Bedny - a harmful peasant,” he repeatedly emphasized his organic connection with the rural proletariat: “I have all-Soviet relatives, men...”, “No, brothers, I don’t have such a day that I don’t think about peasants...", "In sad wanderings, in wanderings around the world, I preserved myself as a natural peasant...", "To you, the blood brothers of the peasants, distant to the eyes, close to the heart, to you, unfortunate poor people, I bow low.

Here, brothers, I am what I am - a man both above and below" (the story "Red Army Men"), etc. There is a deep sociological truth in these confessions.

B. came to literature from the village, and the farmhand sentiments that his class group endowed him with determined his literary style. B. begins his path with civic poetry.

The first experiments were marked by obvious imitations of Nekrasov and Yakubovich (see). But soon the poet finds himself. From pessimistic self-accusations he turns to satire.

Its objects are the stranglers of the workers' press ("Star"), various shades of conciliatory Menshevism ("Fly"), liberalism ("Cuckoo"), the Third June Duma ("Priton"), the Black Hundreds ("Allies"), etc. But the main and most characteristic The theme of this period is the class struggle in the countryside.

The reader is confronted with exploiters of all kinds and stripes, presented in a deliberately primitive and naked perspective.

Here is the “populist” landowner, looking for popularity with the peasants, but wincing when they start talking about “land”. Here is the shopkeeper Mokei, who, having donated 50 rubles for the burnt victims, then began to repair the “day robbery” (“Mokeev’s gift”) in his shop. Here Sysoy Sysoich, the “ace of the meadows”, who “was afraid to lose a big profit from his hands, in front of the throne icon on a bright holiday, grieved his soul” (“In the Church”). They are opposed by the exploited rural poor.

Guard Thaddeus provokes the arson. “All the wealth of the unfortunate farm laborers was lost in the fire,” and to top it all off, they were accused of arson and “thrown into prison.” But when depicting the oppressed, B. focuses with special attention and sympathy on Protestants and rebels.

This is poor Foka: “Is our memory short? Have the men from the bar ever seen anything good? Get out of here, son of a dog, before they break off your sides.” The poet notes the strengthening in the countryside of precisely those forms of class struggle in which the capitalist city is so rich. “The peasant, Eremey, the first rich man in the village, suffered a misfortune: the farmhand got away from his hands, the farmhand Thomas, whom Eremey always boasted of” (“The Master and the Farmhand”). The genres of this period are fairy tale, feuilleton and epigram, and most often - fable (see). The poet uses this satirical form, which provides convenient opportunities for disguised denunciation.

Behind Eremey or Phocas, the censor cannot see the classes they represent; on the other hand, the indispensable appendage of a fable - its “moral” - makes it possible to adjust the reader’s perception in the right direction, to suggest to him the solution to the author’s allegory.

Like all masters of fables, B. willingly resorted to the use of animal masks. It was not difficult to guess the kulak in the predatory glutton-mole; the images of the fly and the spider were quite clear in their class affiliation.

Continuing Shchedrin’s contrast between pikes and ruffs, Bedny exclaimed at the end of the fable: “The pike has strength (why self-deception?). Having come to its senses, it will start a new plan. Ruffs, you have to wait for a great scrape, Unite, dear fellows.” Having adopted this genre from Krylov (q.v.), B. imbues it with that revolutionary theme that was absent from his predecessor.

The moral of Krylov's fables, even in the most revealing places, is frankly bourgeois; B.'s fables serve the cause of social revolution. “Once upon a time there was a bug in the world. And there lived a man Pankrat.

Somehow they happened to meet by chance.

Klop was extremely happy to meet him.

Pankrat is not too happy... Having deftly climbed up the wallpaper onto Pankrat’s sleeve, the bug, like a hero, sat on his hand and fumbled with his proboscis.

Out of anger, our Pankrat even turned green all over: “Oh, the devil, and you’re there too, to feed on the peasant.” And with all his might the uncle slaps the bug with his free hand" (fable "The Bedbug"). The allegory is clear; but considering that an inexperienced reader may not understand it, B. hastens to dot the i's: "I'm sitting, shocked by a terrible guess: well, "How is this bug official?" The October Revolution puts a limit to the further development of Demyanov's fable. This allegorical genre loses its right to exist in an era of intense civil wars. The center of gravity of B.'s poetry moves to open, unambiguous satire.

Demyan Bedny gives his attention to “Denika the Warrior”, “Kulak Kulakovich”, “Judenik”, “merchant Shkuroderov and Oryol landowner Zubodrobilov”. However, its object is not only the White Guard, although in this area B. creates a number of interesting works (the parody “Manifesto of Baron Wrangel” is especially successful). The poet's attention is attracted by: emigrants, knights "Era" and "Yati" (the cycle "Swept Dirty"), Western European socialists (the cycle "On Reptiles"), imperialists united against the Soviet country ("Grabintern"). But anti-religious satire is spreading most widely.

Early fables almost bypassed the church: censorship would not have let them through.

Since 1918, B. has devoted all his attention to this genre.

At first, the selfish and voluptuous ministers of the cult are ridiculed (the reader will find one of the most characteristic satires, “Spiders and Flies,” on page 50 of this volume in the article “Propaganda Literature”). Around 1920, when the military storms subsided, B. moved on to a systematic attack on religion itself.

Let us especially note here “The Promised Land” (March 1920), in which the traditional episode of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt is conveyed in terms of a reduction in style and a parodic “Russification” of the plot. “I will tell the whole of Russia in my own way about Aaron and Moses.

These were the men: real Bolsheviks." B. uses techniques of travesty (see): Russian reality is hidden behind the Jewish shell.

In the poem there are Jewish Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, Eldad and Modad, anarchists, speculators in semolina ("manna from heaven"), gendarmes and even armored chariots! All this is introduced into the story not only for satirical, but also for didactic purposes. “But we will still draw a lesson from the Bible: let past mistakes serve us for future use.” “If you falter, as the Jews once did, discovering the same weakness of spirit in trouble, your end will be much worse.” In “The New Testament Without Flaw of the Evangelist Demyan,” written later, B. tried, strictly adhering to the canonical texts of the Gospel, “to show that Jesus looks completely different from what is usually portrayed... For greater vital convincing, I brought in numerous Russian Christians and Christ-bearers." Here, as in “The Promised Land,” the poet reduces and parodies the high evangelical style: “John the Baptist” turns into “Ivan Zakharyich of Jordan,” “Osip” leads “Marya” to Bethlehem “for registration,” etc. Not only gospel images are parodied, but also pompous vocabulary: “If someone hits you on the cheek, that is, in today’s language, a star will hit you on the cheek...”. These Demyanov poems certainly played a very significant role in the development of anti-religious propaganda. The next object of his satire of that time is the village.

The poet depicts the forces hostile to the revolution that survived in it. “The kulak has guests in the evening, his butt is split open from fish soup... - Father, another glass, or what? Kumyshka is really not bad - for the death of all the farm laborers! -Ha!" In a number of works, B. develops the same plot scheme: the village is dissatisfied with the Soviet regime, but the whites come, introduce tsarist orders there, and the peasants enthusiastically greet the returning Red Army. This is how they are structured: “General Shkura”, “Conversation of Uncle Sofron”, the bitter deserter story “About Mitka the Runaway and His End” and especially the “apocalyptic poem” “Tsar Andron”. No matter how widely B.’s satire spreads at this time, it does not exhaust his work.

The Civil War, the fight against the White Guard, required the revolution to the utmost mobilization of its moral and physical resources.

From the poet who wanted to accelerate these processes, not only a fierce denial of obsolete forms of life was required, but also deep revolutionary pathos. That B. embarked on this path is quite eloquently evidenced by the titles of his poems: “To the deceived brothers in the White Guard trenches,” “It’s time,” “Defend the Soviets,” “Hurray, let’s finish off Yudenich,” “To the defense of Red Peter,” etc. This pathos takes on various poetic forms. In the foreground are high lyrics: “The enemy is intoxicated with insane courage, An unresolved dispute is coming to an end, For the last time we crossed our battle ax with a thin noble sword. Will the enemy pierce our hearts with sharp steel, Or will our heads fly off the noble shoulders? Cut off from brotherly forces We are far away, And the enemy does not have the strength for new cuts. In desperation, he puts everything at stake, The way back is taken away from him.

Forward, fighters, and let the snake be crushed by the iron heel of the workers!" ("Alarm", 1919) With similar agitation, the poet addresses the peasants: the outcome of the revolution and the future of the village "plowman" depend on who they go with. "Poor plowmen, Frols, Afonkas, get up! Your fate is being decided: Cossack horses, Cossack peasant horses are trampling the grain" ("For Freedom and Bread", 1919). And when victory finally comes, the poet greets the "Soviet sentry" - the peasant standing guard over our borders. "The hero who brought death to the snake, your names cannot be counted.

To you, - Vavila, Falaley, Kuzma, Semyon, Yeremey, I compose a verse as best I can, and give honor in form." The genres of the Civil War era are unusually heterogeneous.

Here we encounter both a pathetic appeal and primitive, deliberately rude “agitation”. Marches and songs coexist side by side with caustic epigrams.

Pathetic lyrics are inseparable from the satirical epic. All these forms of B. are imbued with a single and holistic aspiration.

The variety of genres only indicates the difference in attitudes, the complexity of the tasks facing the poet of a revolutionary country in rebellion and fighting for its existence.

The end of the civil war determines the onset of a new, third, period in B.'s work, a period that continues to this day. The changed situation requires new topics. The lines of Demyanov's satires are devoted to the emergence and development of NEP ("Ep", "In Speculation"). In the political arena there is a new enemy - the NEPman, who diverges from the party only... in the land program: “you would willingly bury me in the ground, and I would bury you!” ("Trivial difference"). The masterful poem "Nepgrad", written in the form of Dante's terzas, especially deserves to be noted here.

The rapid development of the feuilleton (see), a small form, the distinctive feature of which must be considered its topicality, begins.

B. responds to all events of the day, no matter what area they belong to.

He writes feuilletons about pavements without snow, about alarm clocks ringing out royal anthems, about a dog show, about hooliganism, about factory absenteeism and about “firebrands” “smoking” during party discussions.

Having completed work on large canvases of the civil war, B. began the everyday, everyday production of feuilletons, which, of necessity, should become impromptu. “I fit the line to the line so that it comes out on time and to the point. Our time is fast! - Be able to respond to the call “be ready” immediately: “always ready” (“There is no Olympus”, “On the literary craft”). One should not think, however, that feuilletons of this period are exclusively satirical.

The old pathos often flares up in them. Whether the poet talks about stopping the import of foreign coal, whether he reminds of the English squadron that appeared in the Baltic, that we have “a Soviet military commissar behind every plow and machine tool,” whether he greets the celebrants of the day, or whether he mourns the death of a revolutionary figure - this Demyanovsky pathos is present Always.

The village still occupies a special place here.

The popular popular poem "Chiefs" (inscriptions for the anniversary poster) depicts old acquaintances - the village priest and kulak in a new environment, retreating and demoralized.

The poem "Chicken Ford" tells the story of how Komsomol members (the poem is dedicated to them) put an end to the mutual hostility of two neighboring villages.

It is necessary to dwell here on two forms: epigram and raeshnik (see), so characteristic of this period.

B.'s epigrams are characterized not only by their usual conciseness and sharpness, but also by an unexpected change of intonation.

These are eg. an epigram on the “whip for women” - Chamberlain or on Curzon, vilifying the Comintern: “The bourgeoisie, seemingly so victorious, has a very formidable adversary.

So the gloomy Lord Curzon gave a flattering certificate to the evil Organization.

Do harm, my dear, do harm! There is a lot of work ahead!” No less interesting is his raeshnik - a rhymed verse, free in the number of syllables, the number of which varies from fifteen to one.

Most of B.'s feuilletons are written in this form, in particular all the diplomatic messages of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Raeshnik corresponds to the content of the feuilleton and facilitates the spoken language. author.

In this fairly free form, B. throws in prosaic quotations in abundance - protocols, newspaper reports, quotes from old books published a hundred years ago, etc. Sometimes a quote is the epigraph of a feuilleton, and then the raeshnik himself unfolds the scheme outlined in it. But more often it is introduced into the text itself, which acquires an outward disheveled appearance.

In essence, here is the same change of intonation as in the epigram, but much more complicated.

A feuilleton built on this principle acquires all the features of a “conversation,” no matter how large it is in size.

We have restored the main milestones along which B.'s poetry developed. The stages of its evolution are inseparable from the Russian revolutionary movement.

In the pre-October period, the fable dominated, in the era of the civil war it gives way to a satirical poem and pathetic lyricism.

The last period of creativity was marked by the flourishing of the feuilleton.

The change of genres is due to the originality of the tasks that reality consistently set before B., and, conversely, according to the evolution of his work, one can restore the dynamics of the last twenty years.

In his work, the poet used various forms of classical poetry.

Here he reaped a bountiful harvest in order to use it for new social purposes. B.'s satirical popular print is basically in the form of a historical song and epic (see). “Three mighty heroes were leaving, Woodrow Wilson, an overseas miracle, Clemenceau, a Parisian banker’s henchman, and Lloyd George, a merchant’s clerk.” But the plot scheme of the epic has been overcome: the heroes are defeated by an unknown force: “Use thee, great power, our people’s protector, our brave Red Army!” ("Old epic in a new way"). Pushkin's Monsieur Triquet turns from B. into a French speculator under the Samara government.

The poem is written in the dimensions of the “Onegin stanza”, but new class content is inserted into this form: “Triquet waits in vain for Jeannette: We will give an answer for her to the vile Czecho-Slovak gang In French blinkers and bridles, The entire White Guard horde, The entire black Dutov team.

We will give our answer to Monsieur Triquet - with a rifle in hand." B.'s style is unique.

It is characterized by the deliberate primitivism of images (social “masks” of a priest, bourgeois or farm laborer); the almost complete elimination of landscapes from the narrative (there is no place for them in either satirical or pathetic poetry); the poster-like sharpness of compositional techniques (the favorite of them is the opposition of “old” and “new”; hence the later additions to the early fables).

Finally, B.’s style is characterized by a special language, “bold and caustic,” “without frills, without tricks, without pretentious embellishments,” a language that borrowed strong words and a sharp image from peasant speech. The question of how artistic this poetry is is an idle question.

Each class has its own aesthetic.

The class that spoke through Demyan’s mouth has not yet produced a greater artist than Demyan.

Thus, his work acquires special significance.

Demyan's path is the path of a poet of the rural poor in the era of the proletarian revolution.

Bibliography: I. First collection. composition B. published in 1923, in the publishing house. "Crocodile", in one volume, with introductory articles by K. Epemeyev and L. Voitoyaovsky.

Currently, Gosizdat is finishing a 13-volume collection. composition 12 volumes were published. (M. - L., 1926-1928) ed. L. Sosnovsky, G. Lelevich and A. Efremin, with an introduction, articles by editors (vols. I, II and XI) and comments.

This publication is not very satisfactory: it does not include B.’s prose, the chronological principle of placing material is constantly interrupted by the thematic one; The comments are clearly insufficient. II. From individual articles about B. we note: Voroneniy A. “Red Nov”, book. 6, 1924; Voitolovsky L., "Ovens Rev.", book. 4, 1925; Lelevich G., "Young Guard" book. 9, 1925, etc. Separate. books: Fatov N.N., D.B., M. 1922, 2nd supplement. ed., M., 1926; Speransky V., D. B. M., 1925; Voitolovsky L., D. B., M., 1925; Medvedev P.N., D.B., Leningrad, 1925; Efremin A., D.B. on the anti-church front, M., 1927, etc. Separately. chapters are devoted to B. in the books: Trotsky, L. D., Literature and revolution, several. publications;

Kogan P.S., Literature of these years, several. publications;

Lvov-Rogachevsky V.L., Newest Russian literature and others. Bibliography of individual publications of B. and all critical literature about him - in the bibliographic indexes: Vladislavlev I.V., Russian writers, L., 1924; Russian poetry of the 20th century. (Anthology), ed. Ezhova and Shamurina, M., 1925; Vitman, Ettinger and Khaimovich, Russian literature of the revolutionary decade, M., 1926; Lvov-Rogachevsky V. and Mandelstam R., Workers' and Peasants' Writers, L., 1926. A. G. Tseitlin. (Lit. enc.) Poor, Demyan (Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov).

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
Career
E. A. Pridvorov born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka (now Alexandria district, Kirovograd region of Ukraine) in a peasant family.
Having experienced in childhood the great influence of his uncle, a national accuser and an atheist, he took his village nickname as a pseudonym. He first mentioned this pseudonym in his poem “About Demyan Poor, a harmful peasant” (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 monarchical “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.
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. Trotsky praised Demyan Bedny as a “Bolshevik of the poetic weapon” and in April 1923 awarded him the Order of the Red Banner (the first award for literary activity in the USSR).
Total circulation of books D. Bedny in the 1920s there were over two million copies. The poet was declared a classic during his lifetime, People's Commissar A.V. Lunacharsky praised him as a great writer equal to Maxim Gorky, and the head of RAPP L.L. Averbakh called for “the widespread deconception of Soviet literature.”
During the internal party struggle of 1926-1930, he began to actively and consistently defend the line of I.V. Stalin, for which he received various benefits in life, including an apartment in the Kremlin and regular invitations to meetings with the party leadership. The collection of his works began to be published (interrupted at volume 19). Creativity Demyan Bedny a number of publications were dedicated to: 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).
Demyan Bedny was a major bibliophile, well versed in the history of books, collected one of the largest private libraries in the USSR (over 30 thousand volumes).
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, for anti-Russian attacks. 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 the leader's criticism Poor began to write emphatically party poems and fables (“The Wonderful 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.
However, party criticism Demyana continued, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers he was accused of political backwardness and removed from the list of those awarded orders. 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 the performance as “literary trash” 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. Poor died 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.
Awards
Order of the Red Banner, 1923
Order of Lenin, 1933
Memory
Bednodemyanovsk is the name of the city of Spassk, Penza region in 1925-2005.
Demyan Bedny village of Demyanovsky rural settlement, Zherdevsky district, Tambov region.
Islands of Demyan Bedny (discovered in 1931).
Motor ship "Demyan Bedny"
The name of Demyan Bedny was given to streets in many cities of the former USSR, including:
Russia: Belgorod, Vladimir, Volgograd, Donetsk (Rostov region), Ivanovo, Izhevsk, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow (Khoroshevo-Mnevniki), Novosibirsk, Omsk, St. Petersburg, Torzhok, Tomilino, Tomsk, Tyumen, Ufa, Khabarovsk , Chernyakhovsk, Kaliningrad region, Yaroslavl.
Ukraine: Kyiv, Genichesk, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kirovograd, Korosten, Kremenchug, Kharkov.
Belarus: Minsk, Gomel.
Kazakhstan: Almaty, Aktobe, Karaganda.
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.
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 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 the authorship of the poem. However, neither his biographical data nor his literary work gave reason to consider him the actual author of the work.
Here are a few lines from the “Message to the Evangelist Demyan”:
I often wonder why he was executed
Why did He sacrifice his head?
Because, the enemy of the Sabbath, He is against all rottenness
Did you bravely raise your voice?
Is it because Pilate is the proconsul in the country,
Where both light and shadow are filled with the cult of Caesar,
He's with a bunch of fishermen from poor villages
Did you recognize only the power of gold as Caesar?
...
No, you, Demyan, did not insult Christ,
You didn't hurt him with your pen at all.
There was a robber, there was Judas.
You were just missing.
You are blood clots at the Cross
He dug with his nostril like a fat hog.
You just grunted at Christ,
Efim Lakeevich Pridvorov.
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.

Demyan Bedny is one of the founders of Soviet literature; his creative path is inextricably linked with the history of the Russian workers' revolutionary movement. Demyan Bedny dedicated all his talent to the people. He gave his verse, humor, and merciless satire to the Motherland, the Soviet country, chanting its victories and achievements, mercilessly defeating enemies during the civil war, during the era of socialist construction, and during the Great Patriotic War.

Efim Alekseevich Pridvorov (this is the poet’s real name) was born in 1883 into a poor peasant family in the Kherson region: his childhood was spent in an atmosphere of terrible poverty. To earn a living, the boy walked in shepherd's kiosks, read the psalter for the dead, and wrote petitions to his fellow villagers.

In 1886, his father managed to enroll him in a military paramedic school at public expense. Here he became acquainted with the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Krylov. Pridvorov’s first literary experiments date back to this period, which testified to his desire to continue the poetic traditions of Russian classical literature. After serving his military service, in 1904 E. Pridvorov entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University and immediately found himself in a new environment for him of revolutionary-minded students.

His political self-awareness was awakened by the 1905 revolution. At this time, the political and creative formation of the poet begins. E. Pridvorov enters literature as a lyric poet. He is greatly influenced by the popular poet P.F. Yakubovich-Melshin, who then headed the poetry department of the magazine “Russian Wealth”, in which E. Pridvorov published his poems in 1909-1910. The poet’s first works (“With terrible anxiety,” “On New Year’s Eve”) developed characteristic themes and motifs of civic poetry of the 80s. But already in these early poems of E. Pridvorov one can feel the inner passion and social pathos that are so characteristic of the subsequent work of D. Bedny. He is also looking for new forms of poetic expression, relying on the traditions of Nekrasov’s civil lyrics and oral folk art. This period of the poet’s ideological and creative quest ends in 1911. “Having previously given a significant bias towards Marxism,” Demyan Bedny wrote in his autobiography, “in 1911 I began to publish in the Bolshevik Zvezda, of glorious memory.” My crossroads converged on one road. The ideological turmoil was over. At the beginning of 1912 I was already Demyan Bedny.”

In 1911, the Zvezda published the poem “About Demyan Poor, a harmful man,” in which the poet called on workers to revolt. The poem immediately becomes popularly known, the name of the hero became the poet's pseudonym. From the emergence of Pravda until the last days of his life, Demyan Bedny was published on its pages. In 1912, his poem was published in the first issue of the newspaper, reflecting the deep faith of the people in the victory of the new revolution:

The cup of our suffering is full,
Blood and sweat merged into one.
But our strength has not faded:
She's growing, she's growing!
A nightmare - past troubles,
In the rays of dawn - the coming battle.
Fighters in anticipation of victory
They are boiling with young courage.

In “Star” and “Pravda” Bedny’s poetry acquired ideological clarity, revolutionary power of sound, and poetic clarity. Working for the newspaper also determined the uniqueness of the poet’s style. Revolutionary lyrics are organically combined in his work with satire. The main poetic genre of D. Bedny becomes the fable.

Expressing the socialist aspirations of the proletariat, Demyan Bedny reflected the interests of all working people in his work. His poetry becomes truly folk. This determines the internal unity of his work despite the diversity of themes. Addressing the masses, Demyan Bedny widely uses folklore images of song and fairy tale traditions. The poet responds to all events in the country's social life. He exposes liberals, liquidators, Mensheviks, and brands all traitors to revolutions (“Cooks”, “Fishermen”, “Dog” and others). During these years, the aesthetic views of Demyan Bedny were formed. Their basis is the Leninist principle of party membership. Demyan Bedny speaks about the great importance of the traditions of revolutionary democrats for the development of advanced Russian social thought, and fights the milestone trends in art and aesthetics. Advocating for the creation of revolutionary, truly democratic art, he sharply condemns the decadents for their separation from the people, from life, and speaks of the reactionary meaning of decadent aesthetic theories.

With Gorky, Mayakovsky and Demyan Bedny, a new stage in the development of Russian revolutionary satire begins. Developing the traditions of Krylov, Nekrasov, Kurochkin, Demyan Bedny innovatively transforms the genre of fable, satirical poetic feuilleton. D. Bedny's fable became a political, journalistic fable, incorporating the features of a feuilleton, pamphlet, and revolutionary proclamation. In the fables of the poor man, traditional fable techniques acquire a new meaning and a new purpose. The fable's didactic ending turns into a revolutionary call, a relevant political slogan. Epigraphs borrowed from newspapers, political documents, and chronicles of the labor movement acquired particular significance in his fable. He politically concretized the fable and sharpened it journalistically. Deeply folk in its form, D. Bedny’s fable played a huge role in educating the political consciousness of broad sections of the people.

Bedny’s poems of 1914-1917 reflected the popular protest against the imperialist war and the policies of the Provisional Government (“Barynya”, “Ordered, but the truth is not told” and others). Speaking on the fresh trail of political events, the Bolshevik poet caustically ridicules the Mensheviks, Cadets, and counter-revolutionary conspirators.

The scope of revolutionary events, the variety of tasks of revolutionary art - all this determined the variety of genres of D. Bedny's poetry and the nature of his poetic means. Now the poet writes pamphlets, songs, ditties, and epigrams. He also turns to the large narrative form. In 1917, D. Bedny published a story in verse “About the land, about freedom, about the working share.” The story, being a very significant work of proletarian poetry, seemed to sum up the entire pre-October work of the poet. Against a broad historical background, the events from the beginning of the imperialist war to the day of the October Revolution are consistently depicted. Talking about the fate of the village boy Ivan and his girlfriend, the poet was able to convincingly show how the ideas of Bolshevism penetrate the masses and take possession of them.

The story is a unique, heroic-satirical epic of the revolution. The narrative of the revolutionary events of the era is combined with specific topical satire on enemies, documented by a political pamphlet.

In an effort to make the story as accessible as possible to the people, D. Bedny focuses on the folk poetic tradition and the traditions of Nekrasov. The element of oral folk poetry is felt here in everything - including the songs, ditties, sayings, jokes included in the story, and in the compositional structure of parts of the poem.

The poetry of D. Bedny of these years, combining the pathos of the revolutionary struggle with sharp political satire, was very close in its orientation to the poetry of V. Mayakovsky.

After the Great October Revolution, all the creative plans of D. Bedny are connected with the fate of the revolution. A passionate interest in the victory of new revolutionary forces distinguishes all the poet's speeches.

During the civil war, the poet's work gained enormous popularity among workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers. His lyrical and pathetic poems (collection “In the Ring of Fire”, 1918) were of current importance. But D. Bedny’s heroic lyrics were again organically combined with satire. Red Army songs (“Seeing Off”) and satire on the White Guards (“Manifesto of Baron von Wrangel”), comic poems (“Tanka-Vanka”), anti-religious poems (“Promised Land”, “New Testament without the flaw of the Evangelist Demyan”), signatures for revolutionary posters and satirical epigrams - this is how the poet’s talent was manifested in such a variety of ways.

D. Bedny's satire of these years is very close to Shchedrin's satire in terms of the principles of constructing a satirical image, the nature of the use of the grotesque, hyperbole, and irony. The satirical power of Bedny’s songs, ditties, and epigrams directed against the “Judenics,” “Denik warriors,” “Wrangel barons,” “Generals Shkuro” and other counter-revolutionary “crows” was enormous. His laughter, enhanced by a comically reducing rudeness, struck the enemy.

The basis of D. Bedny’s satire was high pathos. Poems of “pathos” occupy a particularly large place in the poet’s work of those years.

The most significant work of D. Bedny in the first years of the revolution was his poem “Main Street” (1922), written for the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. It created a generalized image of the revolutionary people. The poem is filled with the romantic pathos of the victorious struggle of the proletariat: They move, move, move, move, They are lowered into chains with iron links, They walk menacingly with a booming step,

They're coming menacingly
They're coming
They're coming
To the last global redoubt!..

This poem is a hymn in honor of the revolution, in honor of the revolutionary people. In 1923, during the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Red Army, D. Bedny was one of the first Soviet writers to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

In the literary struggle of the 20-30s, D. Bedny defended the principles of partisanship and nationality of art (“The Resentment”, “About the Nightingale”, “I Would Beat with My Forehead”), constantly emphasizing the importance of the traditions of Russian realism for the development of modern art. “Only enemies or idiots,” Bedny said in a conversation with young writers in 1931, “can assure us that the study of classical creative techniques is a departure from modernity.”

During the years of restoration and socialist reconstruction of the national economy, D. Bedny writes about the successes and achievements of the builders of the new world. As during the Civil War, his work during this period combines pathetic heroic lyrics and satire, the affirmation of the new and the denial of the old. He glorifies the connection between city and countryside, the heroic work of ordinary Soviet people (“Labor”, “In Memory of Village Correspondent Grigory Malinovsky”). The poet’s focus is on educating the socialist consciousness of Soviet people. “Diplomatics” - satirical works on topics of international life - also occupy a significant place in his work. The target orientation of these poems is very well conveyed by the title of one of them - “To the aid of Chicherin.” The poet, with his poems, helps the people understand the dark diplomatic game of Western and American politicians who organized anti-Soviet conspiracies (“Dear Friend”, “Satirical Dialogue with Chamberlain” and others).

Socialist construction in all areas of economic and cultural life, the birth of a new creative attitude to work and new truly human relationships - this is what becomes the “focus of thoughts” of the poet.

During the Great Patriotic War, D. Bedny was again at a combat post, he again, as during the Civil War, “put on his quiver and sword and fastened his armor and armor.” His poems are published in Pravda, Krasnaya Zvezda, in army newspapers and magazines, appear on mass combat posters, in TASS Windows. D. Bedny appears with patriotic lyrics, satirical fables, and songs. He also turns to the heroic story (“Eaglets”). In the most difficult days for the country, when the Nazis were approaching Moscow, he wrote the poem “I Believe in My People,” imbued with unshakable optimism: Let the struggle take a dangerous turn. Let the Germans amuse themselves with the fascist chimera, We will repel the enemies. I believe in my people with an unshakable thousand-year-old faith.

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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.

E. A. Pridvorov was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village of Gubovka (now Alexandria 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 also mentioned this pseudonym in his poem “About Demyan Poor, a harmful man.”

In 1896-1900 he studied at the military paramedic school, in 1904-08 - at the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University. The first poems were published in 1899. They were written in the spirit of official monarchical “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. During the Civil War, he conducted propaganda work in the ranks of the Red Army, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1923 (the first award for literary activity in the USSR). In his poems of those years he extolled Lenin and Trotsky.

During the internal party struggle of 1926-1930, he began to actively and consistently defend the line of I.V. Stalin, for which he received various benefits in life, including an apartment in the Kremlin and regular invitations to meetings with the party leadership. Demyan Bedny was a major bibliophile, well versed in the history of books, and collected one of the largest private libraries in the USSR (over 30 thousand volumes). The complete collection of his works began to be published (interrupted at volume 19). In the 1920s a large number of brochures with his propaganda poems were published in large quantities in the capitals and provinces.

In 1930, Demyan Bedny increasingly came under criticism for his anti-Russian sentiments (expressed in his feuilletons “Get Off the Stove,” “Without Mercy,” etc.).

After criticizing the leader, Bedny began to write emphatically party poems and fables (“The Marvelous Collective,” “The Hedgehog,” etc.). In his poems from the 1930s, Demyan constantly quotes Stalin, and also uses Stalin’s words as epigraphs. A new scandal and great dissatisfaction with Stalin was caused by a notebook found by the NKVD containing notes of insulting characteristics that a drunken 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, sharply condemned the performance as anti-patriotic. In 1938, Demyan Bedny was expelled from the party and from the Writers' Union with the wording “moral corruption.” They stopped printing him, but nevertheless, the objects that bore his name (the city of Bednodemyanovsk) were not renamed. Demyan Bedny, who fell into disgrace, was in poverty and was forced to sell his library. 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 his “war” poems and fables, Bedny completely contradicted his works written in the 1930s, 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.

The last critical party resolution concerning the poet was issued posthumously: on February 24, 1952, D. Bedny’s 1950 and 1951 editions were ideologically crushed for “gross political distortions”: these editions included the original versions of Bedny’s works instead of later, politically revised ones. In 1956, Demyan Bedny was posthumously reinstated into the CPSU.

D.B. was born on April 1 (13), 1883 in the village. Gubovka, Alexandria district, Kherson province. This is a large Ukrainian village, cut through by the Ingul River, separating the left - Ukrainian part of the village from the right, which has long been occupied by military settlers. D.B.’s grandfather, Sofron Fedorovich Pridvorov, still remembered the times of settlement well. Mother, Ekaterina Kuzminichna, was a Ukrainian Cossack from the village of Kamenki. An exceptionally beautiful woman, tough, cruel and dissolute, she deeply hated her husband, who lived in the city, and took out all her severe hatred on the son whom she gave birth to when she was only 17 years old. With kicks, beatings and abuse, she instilled in the boy a terrible fear, which gradually turned into an insurmountable disgust for his mother that remained forever in his soul. “...An unforgettable time, a golden childhood...” the poet later ironically recalls this time of his life. Efimka was barely 4 years old. It was a holiday and it was terribly stuffy. As usual, beaten and tearful, Efimka, trailing behind his mother, found himself at the shopkeeper Gershka. Huddled in a corner, he became an involuntary witness to the shameless scene that took place right there on the bags, in front of the shocked child’s eyes. The boy cried bitterly, and his mother frantically beat him with a stick all the way. Father, Alexey Safronovich Pridvorov, served in the city, 20 versts from Gubovka. Coming home on leave, he beat his wife to death, and she returned the beating to her son a hundredfold. Returning to his service, his father often took Efimka with him, who, like a holiday, waited for these happy respites. Until the age of 7, Efim lived in the city, where he learned to read and write, and then until the age of 13 in the village with his mother. Opposite the mother's house, right across the road, there was a shinok (tavern) and a village "massacre". For whole days Efimka sat on the rubble and looked village life in the face. Voiceless, silent, enslaved Rus', plucking up courage in a tavern, wildly bawled obscene songs, used disgusting foul language, raged, brawled, and then humbly atoned for its tavern heresies by repenting in a “cold one.” Right there, side by side with the “cold” one, where there was a struggle against the individual vices of the drunken Gubs, Guba life unfolded in all its noisy breadth on the field of social struggle: village gatherings were noisy, dejected defaulters were staggering, dissatisfied complainers were shouting and demanding, and, rattling with all the strings village justice, “retribution” instilled in the Guba peasants respect for the foundations of the landowner system. And the boy listened and learned. More than once among the characters he had to meet his own mother. Ekaterina Kuzminichna was rarely at home and, enthusiastically indulging in drinking and fighting, contributed greatly to deviations from the formal and legal order in Gubovka. Hungry, the boy knocked on the first hut he came across. “So from a young age,” said D.B, smiling, “I got accustomed to public catering: wherever you come, there is your home.” In the evenings, climbing onto the stove, Efimka shared his stock of everyday observations with his grandfather. And on Sundays, the grandfather took his grandson with him to a tavern, where the boy’s worldly education was completed in a drunken haze. At home, when he was tipsy, the grandfather loved to reminisce about the old days, about the times of settlement, about the lancers and dragoons who stood post throughout the Kherson region. And my grandfather’s imagination, fueled by vodka, eagerly painted idyllic pictures of serfdom. “As it happened, for the settlement...” - the grandfather began. It turned out that one could not wish for a better order than the patriarchal antiquity. Any innovation here is an unnecessary insertion. But when he was sober, my grandfather said something different. With hatred, he told his grandson about Arakcheevism, about the favors of the lords: how settlers were punished with sticks, how men were exiled to Siberia, and women, torn from their babies, were turned into dog feeders. And these stories are forever etched in Efimka’s memory. “My grandfather told me a lot. His stories were harsh and simple and clear, And after them My infant dreams were disturbing...” For the lively and impressionable boy, the time of heavy reflection had come. He grabbed his grandfather’s stories on the fly and struggled in anxious thoughts. On the one hand, the grandfather seemed to demand justification for the serfdom, on the other, he instilled a sworn hatred of antiquity with the everyday truth of his stories. And imperceptibly in Efimka’s brain a vague idea of two truths was born: one - the unctuous and reconciling, embellished with the dreamy lies of her grandfather, and the other - the harsh, intractable and merciless truth of peasant life. This duality was supported in the boy by his rural upbringing. Having learned to read and write early, under the influence of the village priest, he began to read the psalter, “Cheti-Minea”, “The Path to Salvation”, “The Lives of the Saints” - and this directed the boy’s imagination onto a false and organically alien path. Gradually, a desire to go to a monastery even developed and became established in him, but his grandfather insultingly ridiculed the boy’s religious dreams and in his garrulous conversations he paid a lot of attention to the hypocrisy and tricks of the priests, church deception, and so on. Efimka was sent to a rural school. He studied well and willingly. Reading plunged him into a fairy-tale world. He memorized Ershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse and almost never parted with Churkin the Robber. He instantly turned every nickel that fell into his hands into a book. And the boy had nickels. The Pridvorovs' house, due to its strategic position (against the "massacre" and the tavern and not far from the road) was something like a visiting yard. The policeman, the constable, the village authorities, the passing carts, the horse thieves, the sexton, and the peasants summoned for “retribution” came here. In the midst of this motley crowd, the boy’s receptive imagination is replenished with images of future “entertainers”, “administrators”, “streets”, “farmers”, “rebellious hares” and “guardians”. Along with the knowledge of life, Efimka acquired business skills here, and soon he began to work as a village clerk. For a copper nickel, he writes petitions, gives advice, carries out various assignments and fights in every possible way against “retribution.” His literary career began from this fight against “retribution.” And the influx of everyday experience is growing and expanding, and hundreds of new stories are accumulating. For a short time, the literate Efimka becomes necessary for his mother. Whether as a result of constant beatings or other perversion of nature, but, except for Efimka, Ekaterina Kuzminichna had no more children. This has given her a strong reputation as a progeny insurance specialist. There was no end to this type of insurance from hunters. Ekaterina Kuzminichna deftly maintained the deception. She gave the women all sorts of medicines and gave them infusions of gunpowder and onions to drink. The Gubov girls swallowed regularly and gave birth regularly by the due date. Then Efimka was involved in the case. As a literate man, he wrote a laconic note: “baptized name Maria, with this ruble in silver,” and “the secret fruit of unhappy love” was forwarded along with the note to the city. The guys knew that Efimka was privy to all of his mother’s secret operations and, catching him in a dark corner, asked: “Did Pryska go to your mat? But Efimka tightly kept the girl’s secrets. In addition, as a literate boy, he earned nickels by reading the psalter for the dead. These nickels were usually also drunk by the mother. The services provided by the boy to his mother did not make the latter more affectionate towards her son. She still tyrannized the boy, still left him for whole days without food and indulged in shameless revelry. One day a boy, completely hungry, searched every corner of the hut, but did not find a single crumb. In despair, he lay down on the floor and cried. But, lying down, I unexpectedly saw a wondrous sight under the bed: about two dozen nails were driven into the wooden bottom of the bed, and hanging from the nails on strings were: sausage, fish, bagels, sugar, several bottles of vodka, sour cream, milk - in a word, a whole shop. Notified of this, grandfather Sofron grunted: “That’s why she, the bitch, is always so red!” - but the hungry old man and the boy were afraid to touch the supplies. D.B. attributes one of the darkest memories of his childhood to this time. He is 12 years old. He is dying - probably from diphtheria: his throat is clogged to the point of complete muteness. They gave him communion and laid him under the icons. The mother is right there - bare-haired, drunk. She sews a mortal shirt and screams merry tavern songs at the top of her voice. It is painfully difficult for the boy. He wants to say something, but he just moves his lips silently. The mother bursts into drunken laughter. The cemetery watchman Bulakh enters - a drunkard and a cheerful cynic. He joins his mother in singing. Then he comes up to Efimka and good-naturedly reasons: “Well, Efimasha, let’s give a damn... Why do you want it? For a grandma. The mint smells so good there...” Someone let my father know that Efimka was dying. Meanwhile, the abscess burst. The boy woke up from terrible screams. It was dark. A drunken mother was lying on the floor, screaming in a frantic voice under the blows of her father's boot. The father drove 20 miles from the city, found his mother drunkenly and dragged her home by her braids. From this memorable night, a turning point in Efimka’s life begins. The mother stopped beating him, the boy began to resolutely fight back and began to run to his father more often.

sings Dem’yan Bedny (Efim Oleksiyovich Pridvorov, 1883-1945), author of anti-religious verses, including “The Gospel from Dem’yan.”

1896 Ivan Ogienko graduated from the cohabitation school in Brusilov. Then we started at the Kiev Military Paramedic School. With his comrade in learning Yukhim Pridvorov (Mayday Russian singer Dem "yan Bedniy) edited the handwritten monthly book “My Library”.

Vadim Alekseevich’s cousin, Vera Pridvorova, Demyan Bedny’s daughter-in-law, now deceased, lived in Moscow and asked him before, and when I arrived, she asked me too: “Persuade Vadim, persuade him!” I have two apartments paired. I’ll transfer one apartment to you, and we’ll live together.”

In the 1980s, Demyan Bedny’s daughter-in-law (son’s wife), Tamara Pavlovna Pridvorova, worked at the Institute of USSR History of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

“One day Demyan got up from the table and said: “Now I will read to you something that 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 anything that Demyan Bedny wrote. When he had finished, he stood up and said, “Now forget about it.”

All these notebooks - and there were many of them - ten years later were burned in a moment of despair in front of the eldest son. “In vain,” the son recalls, “I asked him not to burn the notebooks... The father growled and, turning purple with anger, destroyed what he had kept all his life. “You’d have to be a fool like you not to understand that no one needs this!” And of all the wealth of Demyanova’s lyrics, nothing remained. This loss, of course, cannot be compensated for by a random impromptu reflection preserved in the son’s memory. On a walk in the spring of 1935, he asked his father a question: where does the belief come from that the cuckoo counts down the years of its life? And I received an answer so different from the verses we know that it is worth quoting:

Spring blissful peace... The willows bent over the river, Counting the years to come. How long do I have to live? I listen in sensitive silence to the Cuckoo, which has gone out of fashion. One... two... Believe it? Should I tighten it? I don't have long to live... I'll play the last scene And retire into the crowd of shadows... And life - The closer you get to the end of your days, The more you know its value.