Vassili Tyorkin

The most widely read poem of the Soviet war opens with a drink of water and then talks about soup. Then the cook, who must know his onions. Twenty-nine sections later the Red Army is on the road to Berlin and the poem has still not made a speech.

That is the whole method. Tyorkin is not issued with opinions. He is cold, hungry, frightened, funny, competent and alive, and the poem never once pauses to certify him.

Across four years of war, from the retreat to Berlin, the name Stalin does not appear. Nor does Lenin. The words Party and Communist occur once each, both in a translator's footnote added in 1975. Against that: Russia and Russian seventy-seven times, Motherland nine. A war poem for a communist state in which the word communist never occurs is not a neutral fact.

Read Crossing Over first if you read nothing else - the platoons boarding the pontoons in the dark, most of them not coming back.

This is a facing-page bilingual edition, Russian verso, English recto, so a reader with any Russian can check the translator line by line. It closes with Tvardovsky's own essay on how the poem was written, carrying a footnote that reads in full: "Published in abridged form.- Ed."

Progress Publishers, Soviet Authors Library, 1975. Translated by Alex Miller, illustrated by Orest Vereisky, who drew Tyorkin for the front-line press as the poem appeared.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.