Feltsman buried me in the globe. Faces of War: “They buried him in the globe.” The hero was found near Zelenograd

№ 2006 / 27, 23.02.2015

Even if Sergei Orlov had left us just this line, his name would have to be included in the history of lyrics. A more simple-minded, clear, piercing and therefore stunning expression of the “earth-ness” that intoxicated the first generation of Soviet children who were preparing to live in a renewed universe cannot be imagined. In Orlov it is not imagined - it is exhaled. It’s so natural that you accept the “decipherment” that follows – a simple story through which you can barely discern fate:

They buried him in the globe,
And he was just a soldier,
In total, friends, a simple soldier,
Without titles and awards...

Tyorkin's sincerity. But without Turkin’s cockiness. It seems simple. And it is supported on both sides, or rather, pierced with symbols of time. On the one hand it is the Planet, on the other it is the Mausoleum. Only children of the Iron Age, who dreamed of universal happiness, could combine this and that in such a way, and only Orlov connected everything with such captivating sincerity:

The earth is like a mausoleum to him -
For a million centuries,
And the Milky Ways are gathering dust
Around him from the sides...

Sincere simplicity is the main, basic feature of his character. To some extent, it is a response to the place of his birth: this is Megra - “away from all the big roads, from the railway a hundred kilometers away, a small green town.” The nearest cultural center is the regional center - “wooden, linen...” Mushroom rains, rural joys, garden miracles. Paper kite in the clouds, front gardens. Belozerie...
If I had not lost my father at the age of three, I could have said about myself, like many poets mobilized by the new government: we are the children of rural teachers.
The father died in 1924. The year was memorable because my mother opened the primer and showed a portrait: “This is Lenin... Lenin died.”
“He looked for me with his eyes... a little red-haired boy...”
Then my stepfather, a party activist, appeared and took the family to Siberia to introduce the collective farm system. Novosibirsk “skyscrapers” for some time obscured Megra and her vegetable gardens. And he returned - and there was no Megra: The Soviet government flooded this place with the waters of the White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Comrade Stalin. The school building where the teacher’s family once lived and where the future poet Sergei Orlov first sat at his desk during lessons taught by his mother also disappeared.
The Siberian socialist novelty aroused interest in literature, but when the muse found its voice, what came from her lips was not a hymn to industrial new buildings and the iron horses of communications, but a hymn to the pumpkin that was sown in the gardens of early childhood. The pumpkin sprouted in the verse, settled in it so touchingly, waved its tail so happily in the sun that it was noticed and praised in the Pravda newspaper by Korney Chukovsky himself, who summed up the results of the All-Union Poetry Competition for schoolchildren.
It was then that the winner of the competition, who became a student at Petrozavodsk University, felt “a strong desire to write poetry and be published.”
School was interrupted and war began. The military commissar offered a choice: aviation or tanks? A twenty-year-old recruit, who had become infected with aircraft modeling back in Siberia, would have to choose airplanes. But I chose tanks.
Maybe he felt his upcoming theme - a dialogue between living flesh and dead armor? No, not iron protection, but precisely the danger of armor, the powerlessness of armor... Great poetry lives in contradictions, you just have to live to realize them. Survive physically.
So far there is no greatness. In the verses there are autumn stacks, rye in the fields, native forests, cranes in the sky... This was written already in 1941, and the verses still say something: “Heavy battles are going on all around.” And something is not said, as if as a talisman: “Someday I will tell about this...” To whom? To the people of the future: “...and so that this notebook of mine can reach along all the paths and roads to distant days...” What’s in the notebook? All that remains is to run to the German trenches, and there is an explosion, a bloody trail on the faded grass... “And in the fallen golden leaves above me in heavy desolation a young birch tree will sprout through the ribs in the decayed chest...” The gold of foliage is also a talisman: poetry and war look closely at each other, listen to the cuckoo counting...
For life and death to unite, war must burn. Directly.
The autobiography describes this episode as follows:
“In 1944, burned, my comrades brought me on a stretcher to the medical battalion. I was demobilized from the hospital due to disability.”
In a biographical essay written by critic Leonard Lavlinsky, this episode is described in a little more detail: Orlov was pulled out of a burning tank and taken to his comrades.
Having read this, Orlov (at that time already a venerable writer, and also the secretary of the RSFSR SP) reacted as follows:
– Actually, it was the other way around. My comrade was wounded more seriously than me, and I had to carry him out to my own people. But for some reason the opposite version was established in the press. And I don't refute it. What difference does it make who saved whom..."
The last phrase reveals a poet.
Why the Secretary of the RSFSR SP does not go into details is understandable: out of a sense of tact, out of a reluctance to seem like a hero.
The details include poetry. From the poems we learn: how “the metal burned... and fire melted the partition in the black tower,” “how the commander searched for the latch with his hands without skin,” how “he jumped out of the hatch, gasping.”
And from the first person, a year later:

A red cabbage over the tower
The flames reared up...
How I crawled through the snowy arable land
To the outlying hut.
Grabbing with a scorched mouth
Snow rusty pieces.
Without releasing the gun
From a smoking hand...

And again - in the third person:

In the morning, according to the fire sign,
Five KB vehicles went on the attack.
The blue sky turned black.
At noon, two people crawled back from the battle.
The skin was hanging off my face in shreds,
Their hands look like brands.
The guys poured vodka into their mouths,
They carried me by hand to the medical battalion.
They stood silently by the stretcher
And they went to where the tanks were waiting.

And again - in that face that is being acquired anew - the lines inscribed in the world's lyrics:

Here is a man - he is crippled,
Scarred face. But look
And a scared look when meeting
Don't take your eyes off his face.
He walked towards victory, out of breath,
I didn't think about myself on the way,
So that it would be like this:
Take a look and don’t take your eyes off!

Victory came to the demobilized man like this: he sat with a fishing rod at the mouth of Kovzha, not a single blade of grass swayed, the river and lake merged with the clear sky, it was quiet. At dawn, a boat appeared from the lake, and a voice flew across the water, clearly audible from afar:
- Hey, why are you sitting! The war is over!
The autobiography contains little information about how they cried and laughed when they heard this news.
In poetry it’s like this:

She prayed for victory, -
Six sons went to the front,
But only when the last one fell,
So that you never get up from the ground,
Victory is on the doorstep
But there is no one to meet her...
- Who's there?.. -
She asked all in alarm
A mother blinded by tears.

This is how poetry finds a voice for dialogue with reality.
Orlov's poetic voice is alien to oratorical power. “The brass of inert monuments is deceitful,” he explains. Neither inventive puzzling, nor song erosion, so valued in both avant-garde and traditional folk movements of poetry - only “iambics”, “squares”, “bricks” of verse. Orlov's muse is “simple-minded, direct, pure.”
But, firstly, this innocence is conscious and even declared as a program. And, secondly, Orlov’s traditional quatrains penetrate the soul and are remembered immediately and forever. Contrary to the recipes and verdicts of critics.
Orlov answered them:

Let the critic go aside
Poetics has nothing to do with it.
I may be some kind of epithet -
And he found it in a crater under fire...

However, the critics not only did not leave, but with obvious pleasure quoted these lines in gloss, which fact in itself speaks of the magic of poetry hidden here.
What is her secret?
The rhymes are elementary, sometimes frankly “underdeveloped”. Meanwhile, the verse is secretly pulled together by a “side” and a “funnel”. The syntax is overly punctual, everything is explained to the point. Meanwhile, the very course of thought is unexpected, sometimes to the point of impudence. The train of thought is unpredictable, but the coloring is predictable: the skies and waters are blue, the fields and forests are green, the snow before the battle is white, during the battle it is black, the banner and blood are red, the cosmic abyss is dark, the globe is light, the light-eyed boy has freckles and red hair.
“A boy with a trusting gaze in a tuft of oatmeal hair...”
Transparency of verse and thought are the qualities that captivate the reader and influence him. The insolubility, irreparability, and mortal doom of Orlov are as clear-cut as in any of his irreparably doomed peers.

And tomorrow we must be drafted,
And the day after tomorrow die.

That's all. And today - to live knowing all this. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And always?
The first knot that should tie the past and the future together is the transition from war to peace.
Transition order: tanks left the battle - tractors went into battle. Battlefield: virgin lands in Altai. I - Rybinsk Sea. I – Vologda farm... 1
Komsomolsk is built - we will build Moscow University on Lengory: it will be opened simultaneously with the Volga-Don locks.
And in the distance - awakening Africa, free Cuba, fighting Vietnam - earthly horizons.
A special love is for his native Belozero, for the Sheksna River, over the surface of which the voice of the dispatcher is heard, allowing and distributing ships.
“The distant echo of the shore echoes with the tugboat, and the Milky Way shines above the world like an unknown river...”
The universe is pulled together by the dispatcher!
The vastness of the open spaces and the urgency of the work prompt the creation of lists, of which Orlov immediately becomes a master: from these lists one can build a chronicle of the country’s works and days.
1945. “Mechanics, tank crews and poets... we will lead the ships of the Union to distant planets... We will ascend to the yellow Moon.” This was written a decade and a half before Gagarin’s flight (not to mention Neil Armstrong). Orlov is simply sick of space! But even on Earth there are too many heroes. 1946: milkmaids, knitters, reapers. 1947: combine operators, mowers. 1949: mechanics and field growers, engineers and agronomists. 1950: “We saw rivers, mountains, valleys, roads in dust, mechanics, tractor drivers, cheerful builders, peaceful residents, good owners of the earth.” 1951: hydrologists and foresters... excavators and dump trucks... concrete workers, bridge workers, carpenters, rammers. 1953: carpenters and plowmen. 1959: plowmen, scientists, miners, “knights of free labor” (a clear influence of the proclaimed scientific and technological revolution), teacher, paramedic, engineer. 1967: “Builders of roads and cities, soldiers and pilots of spaceports...”
Everything is heroic, in the spirit of the faith of that time. With an unusual emphasis for a major poet on lower-level party and social workers: “the predicator’s table in sunny spots” is incomprehensible if you do not explain to the reader of the Twenty-first century that this was the name of the chairman of the regional executive power in Soviet times.
But Orlov doesn’t look up, to where the management ladder is. He is “a simple soldier, without ranks or awards.” One could say: a scout, if it weren’t for the sigh of relief that escaped in the post-war poems, that now no one would send him on reconnaissance, that is, no one would tear him away from his favorite work, from poetry, from his beloved woman...
More precisely, however, another self-characterization: “Everywhere I was Robinson, but not an idle spy.” He was a pioneer, a pioneer, and not a messenger, not a conductor of someone’s will, even if there was a great leader there.
And Lenin?! And the system of Soviet political symbols with which Orlov’s lyrics are replete in his mature years?
And these are signs of that spiritual height, which for him is simply incommensurate with the fluidity of life.
“There is being, and the rest is just fiction...”
That is: all transitory symbols are fictitious and uninteresting if you compare them with eternity (aka earthly nature, of course). They are not there, these ideologies of the Soviet era in Orlov’s early poems. There is White Lake, there is the bird cherry tree of the native town. There is burning armor, blood on the snow, a pistol in a burnt hand. But no cruiser "Aurora", no capture of Winter, no World Revolution, no communism.
Lenin appears in 1949 in the huge poem “Svetlana” - and not himself, but as a detail of reality: during the construction of the Volga-Don Canal, a teacher, as if teaching a lesson, suggests to the workers: “Do you want me to talk about Lenin and the first peasant hydroelectric power station?” - and tells.
Only four years later the name of the leader is included in poetry as a personal property. “And I am forever proud that Lenin personally led me into the attack.” From these lines - a turning point.
The turning point was in 1953. The year itself is a turning point. The name of Stalin was and is not there (neither denunciation nor defense, which is what Slutsky, Mezhirov, Samoilov, Tryapkin, Okudzhava are busy with), but, as if filling the vacuum, Lenin has reigned in Orlov’s poems since 1953. As a sign of Being - as opposed to “fiction”. Like the core of the universe. As a sign of eternal ideas.
“And on the banner in the sky is Lenin.”
And then there is the banner itself, received from the Red Guard hands of the fathers, and the “Aurora” with its salvo, and the Winter Palace, taken by His Majesty by the working class, and the ongoing Revolution, and the “conquering passion of Marxism” (somewhat strange in the mouth of a poet whose passion was never directed towards bookish wisdom), and, finally, the cry: “Follow me, communists!” (not at all strange coming from Orlov).
Interesting: Mezhirov for the poem “Communists, forward!” in the liberal era they were stigmatized, they didn’t believe in sincerity, the poems were turned into a parody.
Nobody ever accused Orlov of writing poems about communists. His sincerity is beyond doubt. His communists are not cogs of the System, but messengers of Being:

They are faithful without fear or betrayal
The party they belong to
And the distance and depth of the Universe are subject to her,
And there are no barriers in the world.

There are a lot of obstacles, there will be even more. But the Universe is the initial and final reference point. Stars, planets, comets, rockets (the rockets signaling the start of an attack echo the rockets of the Gagarin era). Zemshar from the times of ferns and mammoths, zemshar from the times of Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Stars above your head, stars on the streets. There is so much stellar and universal symbolism that a review of it would require a separate work. I will give here only three points in which the cheerful, bright and easy disposition of the poet is adequately expressed, and the context of the time - through a poetic touch - is drawn exhaustively.
From a 1945 poem:

I just wanted to look back
Stand by the bridge, by the water,
Reach the sky with a reed,
Light a cigarette from the star.

“A Light from a Star” is cooler than “The Planet Beyond the Threshold” from the 1975 poems.
From a 1948 poem:

I took a ride
Across the blue sky
Above the black earth
And fell
On a pine post
Plywood star.

The star is good both in space and on the banner... But the most poignant thing is the star torn off by battle from a soldier’s grave. The plywood star is as pure as “the lieutenants’ marble is a plywood monument,” an epitaph for a generation of suicide bombers.
From a poem about Tsiolkovsky, 1962:

And the well-worn cosmodrome,
The silence will blow right through.
“You give the universe!” - like an exhale,
Someone said barely audibly.

The scream is reduced to a whisper. And yet it can be heard. A cry picked up from fathers and frozen on the lips of children before a mortal test.
Orlov's verse is hot, open, simple. All the more striking is the sudden chill that penetrates his soul unexpectedly and inexplicably. This is not the pleasant chill that wafted from the bird cherry trees in the Belozersk and Meghri palisades of childhood - this is precisely the inner cold that overtakes among the “blue chambers of rye” and the forest “amber shooting stars.” This motif has become a constant for Orlov since the early 60s - without in any way canceling the good-natured, cheerful “top” of his soulfulness, he shades it from the depths with some kind of vague premonition.
Another motive arises: betrayal, which was unthinkable for the young Orlov: there he relied on his comrades, like armor, and knew that when he crawled away from the tank, burned, they would cover him with fire.
And now - meanness... no, not even meanness... softer: you are not betrayed, you are “set up”, and not by enemies, from whom you should expect meanness, but by your own, from whom you not only do not expect a trick, but even believe, when did it happen.
“Reasonable, they didn’t make enemies for themselves, and I, as I was, remained their friend, but there’s still something dirty in friendship, and you can’t wash it off with cognac.”
Or, to put it very briefly, with the aphoristic precision that sometimes amazes in Orlov’s “talking”, this is what was summed up:

Christ was crucified, but Judas lives.

A motive of defenselessness arises. Armor, which initially “by definition” covered the soldier from bad weather and misfortune, and if it didn’t save him from the cold, then allowed him to joke: we’ll keep warm, they say, when it starts to burn - the soldiers communicated with it as with a living being: “We are people, but she’s made of steel,” we can handle it, but here she is...
She, initially reliable, is remembered many years later as a symbol of... unreliability. This is the feeling at the turn of the 70s:

There's just a little bit left:
To live out life without unnecessary fuss, -
Just like in the days when she touched
Hourly mad dash
And could burn in an instant,
Maybe a thousand times every day...
Don't be afraid, don't look for salvation,
Don't get your hopes up for armor.

No hope. No reservation. There is no way out of the “vanity” that filled the time, which then, from a frenzied perspective, seemed like a happy future, but now that it has come...

Second millennium
It ends, but what comes after it?
What kind of heroes are coming there?..
We don’t know what we will do.

This was written in 1976, three hundred days before his death.
Placed on the historical background, that is, on the event that was supposed to become the starting point for the generation marked at birth by the flashes of the Revolution (“A generation is not the year of birth, a generation is the year of October,” Orlov formulated), this future is depicted in the next sketch from October 1917:
“When the fathers, having taken out their pouches, still hot from the battle, among the paintings, mirrors, parquet floors, were already thinking in the night what kind of life in this world they would build forever, and envied the children, looking into the coming years...”
What about children?
It’s good if the future appears on a cosmic-planetary scale, then you can say: “I don’t know!” Orlov has a special passion for such thousand-year forecasts. “What in the world will change in a thousand years, you tell me?” They won't say. However, one can say this: “In a thousand years, our old ships will be found, like the shuttles on which we left the Earth beyond the Earth,” - this can be predicted at the height of the Space Program. But there is no answer to the question: “what will happen to you there?” And the question, meanwhile, remains...
Because the question is not essentially about the millennium - it is a question about the fate of those who recently, within living memory, inherited a dream of a happy future, and it was so close.
The path to it turned into a bloody off-road. It was necessary to overcome the distance with a throw.

Life, as the proverb goes, is not a field,
And they were behind the field,
Where is there so much thunder, blood, pain
And the earth rears up...

Let's move on. We overcame it. Can I live?

But again, as if it never happened
Them, equal to life, on the way,
We're doing it all over again
That living is not a field to cross...

Who are we “repeating” after? Poems – 1957. So it’s clear who we follow: we repeat the author of Doctor Zhivago, who said: “I am alone, everything is drowning in pharisaism. Living life is not a field to cross.” Pasternak and Orlov responds in one of his most piercing poems:

There are no machine gun cells here,
There are no mines on the way,
But at least there was an infantry regulation,
But here you don’t know which way to go...

So we have come up against the undecidability that awaits us when comprehending great poetry. Unsolvable: what to do with the inheritance received from the hands of our fathers? Pass it on to the children? Logically, yes. According to the chill of poetry, it won’t work. Some twenty-year-old youth... Vitka - that’s what Orlov calls the driver who dropped them, two veterans, on the “bank of the Neva in 1941.” Two old men wander through the swollen trenches, remember the battles, remember the big-eyed nurse, how she tore her shirt into bandages for the wounded, sing old songs and cry... And Vitka is waiting for them in the car, turning on the radio...
“Oh, why should he, Vitka, suffer for us with our memory? Oh, why, he won’t succeed anyway...”
So, we have to pay. By ourselves. Without counting on anyone, without hoping for anything.

We paid for everything ourselves
We cannot be affected by blasphemy.
Who dares to throw a stone at us,
In our thoughts and deeds?

For such burning pride, you forgive the poet the standard “thoughts and deeds.” The biblical “stone” is fresher. But “khula” is a premonition that can give you chills. There will be heirs in the younger generation who will tell the veterans that they fought in vain, they should have let Hitler in, and, lo and behold, he would treat us all to Bavarian beer, feed us pig’s feet...
It seems that in the 70s our young beer lovers had not yet reached such blasphemy, and it’s good that Orlov did not hear such things. But I tried to catch something in the roar of the future. And he strengthened the soul, returning in memory “to those holy years where “no” was “no” and where “yes” was “yes.”
One of the simplest plots of transition “from there” to “here”, that is, from the tracks of war to the tracks of peace, is a military parade. Orlov has been writing these parades since the Victory itself.
Ten years later: the day of triumph of a regiment or power, parade ground, general, hand to visor, assistants at the banner.
A quarter of a century later: troops are thundering through Moscow at night, preparing for the parade. Passing order: infantrymen, sailors, tankmen...
Thirty years later: memories of the Victory Parade - the banners of enemy armies fly to the foot of the podium.
Perhaps this poetic parade of parades would not have been worth special attention if it had not been crowned with a chilling farewell chord:

When will it be, but I know
In the land of white-legged birches
Victory of the Ninth of May
People will celebrate without tears.

The ancient marches will rise
Army pipes of the country,
And the marshal will go to the army,
Not having seen this war.

And I can't even think of it
What kind of fireworks will strike there,
What tales will they tell?
And what songs will they sing 2.

Again this: “I don’t know” - tactfully covering up anxiety. "No tears"? – we still have to wait a long time for our tears to flow away. “Marshal who did not see this war”? It will be like this. So far we have seen how the last marshal who saw this war was removed, how he, “surrendering his sword,” asked: “Where should I go now?” - before going to the pre-trial detention center in the “coup” case. Indeed, Orlov would not have thought of what tales were told at the same time, how “their own” gloated at the back of the army when it turned out to be powerless in Chechnya, and before that in Afghanistan - Orlov did not live long enough to see Afghanistan, some two years - how would he have endured the collapse of the power, saving which he burned, the end of an era in which he remained in soul? Forever.

I have become old and, like a boy, clear
And trusting. Apparently those years
Gifted with faith, and not fortunately,
And probably forever.

But what about “forever”, if in every note of the last parade there is an expectation of oblivion! If you feel like you are from the future, for which blood has been shed - “not a sound, not an echo, not a shadow”! If not only the mortal flesh disappears without a trace along with death, but also the poems, the imprint of the spirit, the cry to eternity - will inevitably be erased from eternity. Orlov’s most bitter lines are about this.
“I will disappear without a trace, only a drop of rain will fall somewhere on earth. My poets will re-read my poems and forget my name in the same year.”
This was written in 1948, when my peers were approaching thirty, and the finest hour of the generation’s lyrics was ahead.
A quarter of a century passes.
“...My comrades are over fifty, they have nowhere to go from time to time, balding, aging, gray-haired. But it still seems to me that they are twenty.”
A confrontation with myself at twenty years old, with that boy to whom the Revolution promised eternal life, and the Power ordered to die in 1941 - is repeated and repeated - in poems written by a thirty-year-old master, a forty-year-old master, a fifty-year-old veteran...
"And what else? To live in this world, perhaps, to be sixty years old..."
It won't work until you're sixty.
And it’s impossible to get away from that twenty-year-old who once faced bullets. Lasts and lasts the forty-first year. “The boy with a trusting gaze” does not come from memory. And it's you yourself...

The sun is shining on the grass,
The armor is smoking.
You can just cry
How I feel sorry for me.

Do you feel sorry for the boy doomed to death? It's a pity. It’s even more pity for the one who doesn’t remember anything: someday some “descendant, in the garden where the cherries and pears bloom, will dig up a pillbox of an ancient fragment and, shuddering, look into the void.” This is someday. And now? The worst thing is that we are “like dusty relics that really have no price, with the last, called the Great, history of a justified war.”
The last one?.. If so. Justified? History - yes. But how can you justify yourself to a boy who will die? After all, he “there, in the roaring fire, believes in the peaceful, distant me.” And you, who lived another third of a century of peaceful and – in the understanding of that boy – happy life, will you be able to share his faith? We rewarded both you and him with this faith - fortunately? Unfortunately? Who is happier: the one who was “buried in the globe”, or the one who remained to live and received this globe as an inheritance?
And if I were to repeat it - “repeat everything, everything that fate tortured me with”? What then to choose? Here he is walking, a twenty-year-old hero, “cheerful, happy, contented”... happy, although a deadly flash is about to burst into his eyes. And it would be necessary to call out to him from the present happy peaceful time: to warn, to prevent misfortune...

...This was waiting for him ahead,
And I didn't call out to him.

Who is more unhappy?
No answer.
Sergei Orlov wrote three farewell poems in 1977.
In one, he prepares for death, reconciles himself with it, strokes the ground with his burnt hand, and asks the Earth for forgiveness for leaving her.
In another, he reckons with human meanness: he recalls how, following the denunciation of a traitor during the war, punitive forces cut out a partisan hospital; The big-eyed nurse probably told him this incident. The poem is dedicated to Yulia Drunina.
And in the third (apparently written at a Black Sea resort), a lonely star twinkles in the sky, the sea roars, and it seems that it is the era itself that does not allow one to sleep - the Earth calls the soldier into formation.

1 Here it is necessary to name two poems from 1950 related to Alexander Yashin. One - “Resort People” - is about how Yashin at the Black Sea resort is preoccupied with sowing in his native Nikolsky region; another - “At a wedding” - apparently, from Yashin’s words - about how the secretary of the district committee, who came to a village wedding, “forgot his car all night.” The problems of the “Vologda Wedding” overtook Yashin twelve years later; one can only be surprised at Orlov’s instincts, who sent the projectile at this target with such anticipation.

2 The final quatrain: “But we know for certain...” I’ll allow myself to omit as elementary.

Lev ANNINSKY

Composition

Our land is a part of us. This is where we work, study, live. These are blooming gardens, these are rivers, this is a peaceful sky above, this is the joyful and calm life of free people who strive to improve this land and ensure peace.
War is a terrible word. This is horror, this is destruction, this is madness, this is the destruction of all living things. When war comes to earth, all those who hold this land dear rise to its defense.
This was the case in nineteen forty-one, when the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany. The entire Soviet people rose up to fight the enemy. People were ready to fight to the last drop of blood, not sparing themselves and their lives. Many years have already passed since the Great Patriotic War ended, but the memory of the people who defended our land from the Nazis will remain with us forever.
I read B. Vasiliev’s novel “Not on the Lists.” This novel made a huge impression on me. The novel is read with unflagging interest from beginning to end. The thoughts and behavior of the characters are kept in constant tension.
A young lieutenant who had just graduated from military school, Nikolai Pluzhnikov, along with other cadets arrived at the Brest Fortress on the night that separated peace from war. He had not yet been included in the lists, but in the morning there was a battle that lasted nine months for the lieutenant. By the time of the war, Nicholas was barely twenty years old. We see how a hero is born from a lieutenant, and his actions become a feat. He could have left the fortress. This would be neither desertion nor treason. Pluzhnikov was not on the lists; he was a free man. And it was this freedom that gave him a choice. He chose what made him a hero. I want to celebrate his solidarity with other soldiers. He does not think about himself, but helps other soldiers overcome horror and fear. He thinks about the fact that the foreman who saved his life is dying himself. Having met a soldier, Pluzhnikov tells him: “I thought for a long time what to call myself if I ended up among the Germans. Now I know. I am a Russian soldier."
My respect for Nikolai and people like him is limitless. This is not only because they saved our lives and ensured a peaceful existence, but also because they are a living example of strength of character, an example from which we must learn.
The end of the novel is tragic. “At the entrance to the fortress stood an incredibly thin man of unknown age. He looked exhausted, his head held high. When the officer asked who he was, Pluzhnikov proudly replied: “I am a Russian soldier. This is my title, this is my last name.” The lieutenant never identified himself. The will and character of this man amazed the German officers.
Nikolai Pluzhnikov and people like him are the pride of our land. They love their land, their homeland. And if danger looms over her, they are ready to protect her.
A monument to the Unknown Soldier was erected in Brest. There is always a fire burning at his grave. This is a symbol of deep national respect for those who fought for the peaceful life of the people, for the liberation of the land.
We are a peaceful people, but if danger looms over our land, we will rise to fight.

“Sergei Orlov belongs to that heroic tribe of poets,” wrote Nikolai Tikhonov, “who were destined to take an active part in the Great Patriotic War, to witness a nationwide feat, to go through the fire of fierce battles, to burn and not to burn in this fire, to become a winner, say about yourself:

Who talks about unsung songs?

We carried our lives like a song..."

He went to the front from his first year at Petrozavodsk University and until February 1944 commanded a tank platoon. He was seriously wounded; burned in the tank. Sergei Orlov's first book was published immediately after the war, it included poems written in between battles. The book was called "Third Speed". “The third speed,” says the poet, “is combat speed. My fellow soldiers drove the tanks into attack at third speed...” It was in this book that there was a poem “He was buried in the globe of the earth...”, which is the first to be remembered in the name of Sergei Orlov, a poem-monument to a simple soldier who died for the liberation of mankind.”

The poem was written in 1944. This is one of the best works about the feat of a Soviet soldier, created by means of lyrical generalization. S. Orlov’s poetic thought strived for scale and globality of the image, but the image of the soldier remained simple, close and dear to each of us. This image is grandiose and at the same time imbued with kindness and cordiality.

The poem has a ring composition. It begins and ends with the image of the globe. The poet compares the earth to a mausoleum; nature itself becomes the eternal home of the fallen soldier:

The earth is like a mausoleum to him -

For a million centuries,

And the Milky Ways gather dust around him from the sides.

The clouds sleep on the red slopes,

Blizzards are sweeping,

Heavy thunder roars,

The winds are taking off.

This is how the motif of eternity, eternal memory arises in the poem. “The battle ended a long time ago...”, but the significance of the feat is timeless.

The stanza of the poem is free, the rhyme is cross. The poet uses various means of artistic expression: epithets (“on red slopes”), comparison (“The earth is like a mausoleum to him”), metaphor and hyperbole (“He was buried in the globe of the earth…”).

They buried him in the globe,

And he was just a soldier,

In total, friends, a simple soldier,

No titles or awards.

The earth is like a mausoleum to him -

For a million centuries,

And the Milky Ways are gathering dust

Around him from the sides.

The clouds sleep on the red slopes,

Blizzards are sweeping,

Heavy thunder roars,

The winds are taking off.

The battle ended a long time ago...

By the hands of all friends

The guy is placed in the globe,

It's like being in a mausoleum...

This poem was written by front-line poet Sergei Orlov in June 1944, many years before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier appeared in Moscow. However, the poet was able to express the main essence and meaning of what has become one of the greatest shrines of our Fatherland, personifying the memory of those who fell on the path to Victory.

Military cunning of Nikolai Egorychev

The idea of ​​the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier first appeared in France at the end of the First World War, where they decided to honor the memory of all the fallen heroes of the Fatherland. In the Soviet Union, a similar idea appeared 20 years after the Great Patriotic War, when May 9 was declared a day off, and state celebrations in honor of Victory Day became regular.

In December 1966, Moscow was preparing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the battle under the walls of the capital. At the first secretary of the Moscow city party committee Nikolai Egorychev the idea of ​​creating a monument to ordinary soldiers who died in the battle for Moscow appeared. Gradually, the head of the capital came to the conclusion that the monument should be dedicated not only to the heroes of the Battle of Moscow, but also to all those who fell during the Great Patriotic War.

It was then that Yegorychev remembered the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. While he was thinking about the possibility of creating an analogue of this memorial in Moscow, the head of government Alexei Kosygin approached him. As it turned out, Kosygin was worried about the same question. He asked: why is there such a memorial in Poland, but not in the USSR?

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

Having gained support Kosygina, Egorychev turned to the specialists who created the first sketches of the monument.

The final “go-ahead” had to be given by the leader of the country, Leonid Brezhnev. However, he did not like the original project. He considered that the Alexander Garden was not suitable for such a memorial, and suggested finding another place.

The problem was also that where the Eternal Flame is now located, there was an obelisk for the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov, which then became a monument to revolutionary thinkers. To implement the project, the obelisk had to be moved.

Egorychev turned out to be a decisive man - he carried out the transfer of the obelisk with his own authority. Then, seeing that Brezhnev was not making a decision on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he went for a tactical maneuver. Before the ceremonial meeting in the Kremlin on November 6, 1966, dedicated to the anniversary of the October Revolution, he placed all the sketches and models of the monument in the recreation room of the Politburo members. When members of the Politburo got acquainted with the project and approved it, Yegorychev actually put Brezhnev in a position where he could no longer refuse to give the go-ahead. As a result, the project for the Moscow Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was approved.

The hero was found near Zelenograd

But one more important question remained - where to look for the remains of the soldier who was forever destined to become the Unknown Soldier?

Fate decided everything for Yegorychev. At this moment, during construction in Zelenograd, near Moscow, workers came across a mass grave of soldiers who died in battles near Moscow.

Transfer of the ashes of an unknown soldier, Moscow December 3, 1966. Photographer Boris Vdovenko, Commons.wikimedia.org

The requirements were strict, excluding any possibility of accident. The grave chosen to take the ashes from was located in a place where the Germans did not reach, which means that the soldiers certainly did not die in captivity. One of the soldiers was wearing a well-preserved uniform with the insignia of a private - The Unknown Soldier was supposed to be a simple soldier. Another subtle point - the deceased should not have been a deserter or a person who committed another military crime and was shot for it. But before the execution, the criminal’s belt was removed, but the fighter from the grave near Zelenograd had the belt in place.

The chosen soldier had no documents and nothing that could indicate his identity - he fell like an unknown hero. Now he became the Unknown Soldier for the entire large country.

On December 2, 1966, at 2:30 p.m., the soldier’s remains were placed in a coffin, in front of which a military guard was posted every two hours. On December 3 at 11:45 the coffin was placed on a gun carriage, after which the procession headed to Moscow.

The Unknown Soldier was seen off on his final journey by thousands of Muscovites who lined the streets along which the procession moved.

A funeral meeting took place on Manezhnaya Square, after which party leaders and Marshal Rokossovsky carried the coffin in their arms to the burial place. Under artillery salvoes, the Unknown Soldier found peace in the Alexander Garden.

One for all

The architectural ensemble "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", created according to the architects' project Dmitry Burdin, Vladimir Klimov, Yuri Rabaev and sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, was opened on May 8, 1967. The author of the famous epitaph “Your name is unknown, your feat is immortal” was the poet Sergey Mikhalkov.

On the day of the opening of the memorial, the fire lit in Leningrad from the memorial on the Champ de Mars was delivered to Moscow on an armored personnel carrier. The solemn funeral relay of the torch was accepted by the head of the USSR. Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet General Secretary, himself a war veteran, lit the Eternal Flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

On December 12, 1997, by decree of the President of Russia, honor guard post number 1 was established at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was extinguished only once, in 2009, when the memorial was being reconstructed. At this time, the Eternal Flame was moved to Poklonnaya Hill, to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. On February 23, 2010, after the completion of reconstruction, the Eternal Flame returned to its rightful place.

The unknown soldier will never have a first and last name. For all those whose loved ones fell on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, for all those who never knew where their brothers, fathers, and grandfathers laid their heads, the Unknown Soldier will forever remain that same loved one who sacrificed his life for the future of his descendants, for the future of their homeland.

He gave his life, he lost his name, but became dear to everyone who lives and will live in our huge country.

Your name is unknown, your feat is immortal.