The most widely read poem of the Soviet war opens with a drink of water and then talks about soup.
When the dust of war blows bitter, When it's hot or cold as hell, Nothing's nicer, nothing's sweeter— From the spring or from the well, From the faucet or from Nature, From the hoof-track in the dell, From the river, any river, From the pool in winter's spell — Than a drink of pure fresh water; If it's water, then all's well.
Then food, and 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 not an accident of taste. It is the whole method, and Tvardovsky spends the afterword of this volume explaining it.
Progress Publishers, Moscow, first printing 1975, in the Progress Soviet Authors Library. Translated by Alex Miller. Illustrations by Orest Vereisky, People's Artist of the RSFSR — and Vereisky matters here more than an illustrator usually does: he drew Tyorkin for the front-line press while the poem was appearing, and his soldier is the face several million readers first attached to the name.
The copyright line is exact about what is being claimed: "© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1975." Not the poem. The poem is dated, at the end, 1941-1945.
And this volume is built in a way no other book in the series is: it is a facing-page bilingual edition, Russian verso, English recto, all the way through the poem. A reader with any Russian can check Miller against Tvardovsky line by line, which is an unusual amount of confidence for a state publisher to show in a translator, and an unusual amount of exposure. (The afterword, which is prose, runs in English only.)
There is no commissioned foreword. What there is instead is Tvardovsky four times over: the poem carries four sections headed From the Author, in which the poet interrupts himself to talk to the reader, and it closes with a prose essay, How Vassili Tyorkin Was Written, dated 1951-1966. A footnote to its title reads, in its entirety: "Published in abridged form.— Ed."
That footnote is the only editorial voice in the book, and it is there to tell you that something has been cut and not what.
Now the count, which in this case is the argument.
Across the whole of Vassili Tyorkin — four years of the Great Patriotic War, from the retreat to Berlin, in twenty-nine sections — the name Stalin does not appear. The two occurrences of the letters are both Stalingrad. The name Lenin does not appear at all. The word Party occurs once and the word Communist once, and both are in the same place: a translator's footnote on page 175, explaining that the initials in the text stand for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Alex Miller put the Party into this poem in 1975. Tvardovsky did not put it there in 1945.
Against that: Russia and Russian, seventy-seven times. Soviet, seven. Motherland, nine. God, three.
It is worth stating plainly what that means, because it cuts two ways and both ways matter.
It is why the poem is good. Tyorkin is not issued with opinions. He is cold, hungry, frightened, funny, competent and alive, and the poem never once pauses to certify him. Set him beside Polevoi's Meresyev in this same series, whose title is defined for him at a funeral — "It's the funeral of a real man ... a Bolshevik" — and the difference is total. Nobody in Tyorkin tells you what a real man is. The poem simply lets one be one for four hundred pages.
It is also the measure of what had happened to the Soviet Union by 1942. A war poem for a communist state in which the word communist never occurs, written by a party member for a party army, is not a neutral fact. The formation that could not be named was fighting under a name it had not chosen: Russia, the Motherland, the fathers and grandfathers, the soldier-toiler with his flintlock musket. Tvardovsky, in the afterword, resists exactly that reading — and we will come to how he resists it, because it is the most interesting thing in the book.
Read "Crossing Over" first if you read nothing else.
Crossing over! Crossing over! Left bank, right bank of the river, Crusted snow and fringe of ice.... Some found memories, some found glory, Some, the water's dark embrace— Not a vestige, not a trace.
The platoons board the pontoons in the dark, one after another, and most of them do not come back. Before they go, Tvardovsky does the thing he does better than anyone writing at the time: he looks at them.
For the lads now standing near you Aren't the ones you used to know; Each is closer, each is clearer, Each is graver, starker, dearer Than he was an hour ago.
And then, without raising his voice, he sets them in a line that reaches back past the Revolution:
Theirs the road down which the Russian Soldier-toiler had to go, Flintlock musket on his shoulder, Some two hundred years ago.
Two hundred years puts you in the 1740s. The poem is placing the men in the pontoons in a succession that starts with serfs.
The other section to read twice is "Death and the Soldier". Tyorkin lies wounded in the snow after the fighting has moved on, and Death comes and bargains with him. She is female in Russian, and the translator has to tell you so in a footnote — "Death the Squint-Eyed. But female in Russian.— Tr." — which is one of the few places in this edition where you can feel the seam between the two facing pages. What she wants is a signature:
"Just a token of agreement That you're weary of this world, That you pray for Death to free you...." "Sign my name, then, in a word?"
He will not. "Go! I sell my life more dearly." And the line he keeps coming back to, three times in the chapter, is not heroic and not defiant; it is administrative, the answer of a man correcting a clerk: "I am still alive, not dead."
There is no God in that scene and no Party either. There is a man declining to sign a document. It is the most Soviet thing in the poem and the doctrine has nothing to do with it.
The strangest section is "Tyorkin v. Tyorkin", in which our Tyorkin, in a crowded hut, hears a stranger claim his name — "'Because I'm Tyorkin,' / Said the other soldier's voice" — and has to argue for his own identity against a double who is, by every test the poem can apply, equally real. Tvardovsky had written a character who had escaped him into folklore, and he put the fact in the poem while it was still happening.
The rest of the book is built the same way: small, closed episodes, each complete, each about one thing — a wound, an accordion, a medal, a bath-house, an old couple's clock, a soldier who goes home and finds nothing. There is no plot, and Tvardovsky says in the afterword that he removed the one he started to build. Halfway through he was, he writes, "nearly seduced by the temptations of 'plot interest'" and had begun sending Tyorkin behind the German lines; he had published a version of "The General" in which Tyorkin says goodbye to his divisional commander before going. Then he saw that this was "reducing the book to a kind of personal history", cut everything to do with the enemy rear, redrafted the chapter, and went back to the plan. What he wanted was a poem that could be opened anywhere by a man who might be dead before the next instalment.
The essay is organised around three questions Tvardovsky says his post-bag kept asking: did Tyorkin exist, how was the book written, and why was there no post-war sequel. All three answers are more interesting than they need to be.
On the first he is blunt, and against his own interest: "No, Vassili Tyorkin, as he figures in the book, is an invention from start to finish, a product of the imagination, a creation of fantasy." He has just spent several paragraphs describing readers who wrote to Tyorkin rather than to him, and he declines to flatter them. (Polevoi, in this same series, answered the same question the opposite way, and built a doctrine of authenticity on it.)
On the second he tells a story a state publisher might have preferred to leave in the file. Tyorkin began in 1939 as a cartoon. During the Finnish war a team of writers on the Leningrad Military District paper, On Guard for the Homeland — Tikhonov, Sayanov, Shcherbakov, Vashentsev, Solodar and Tvardovsky — wanted "a humorous section, or weekly skit", and needed "a cheerful, happy-go-lucky soldier, a kind of rough-hewn folk figure" with a name carrying "irreverent and satirical undertones". Tvardovsky reproduces one of the resulting strips ("How Vasya Tyorkin took a prisoner", six captioned frames) and gives his own verdict on the whole enterprise: "Quite justifiably, we didn't regard it as literature." The Soviet Union's national war poem began as a comic strip, and its author says so on page 378.
Then comes the sentence that ought to stop the reader. Explaining what he was after in the men he had met on the Karelian Isthmus, Tvardovsky quotes his own notebook:
"It is not this war, whatever it may be like," I wrote in my notebook, "that has made these people, but the greater thing that was before the war. The revolution, collectivisation, the whole way of life. And the war has been revealing these people's qualities, has been bringing them out into the clear light of day. True, the war has done something too."
That is the counter-argument to the count above, and it is Tvardovsky's own. The qualities the poem shows are not Russian and not martial; they were made by a social transformation, and the war only lit them up. It is the same move Polevoi made at Nuremberg, and Tvardovsky makes it in a private notebook rather than a public tribunal, which is why it has the word collectivisation in it.
He does not say more, and that silence is worth marking rather than filling. Collectivisation appears exactly once in six and a half thousand words, in a list, as one of the things that formed a generation — no qualification, no cost, no dead. Tvardovsky was a village poet from the Smolensk country who wrote about the countryside before he wrote about the Army, and who says in this very essay that Army people were as dear to him "as the people of the collective farms in the country; but then, in the main, they are the same people". What the years around 1930 actually did to the villages he came from is not in this volume, and this introduction will not supply from memory what the volume does not print. What is here is the word itself, sitting in a quoted notebook entry, inside an essay the editors have already told you is abridged.
The third question — why no sequel — he answers with a flat refusal, quoting his own closing lines: "Now we need another song; / Wait, and it will come along." A book born of a unique moment cannot be continued with different material, he says. The letters he quotes are wonderful, and the best of them is a complaint:
"Why has our Vassili Tyorkin gone and got himself wounded?" demanded D. Kaliberdy and others in a joint letter. "How did he end up in hospital? After all, he managed to shoot down a fascist plane without getting wounded. Has he landed up in hospital with a cold in the nose? That's not like our Tyorkin."
And one from a reader in the Smolensk Region who versified his demand and apologised for it: "I'm not a poet, but I was driven to it, just to get Tvardovsky working again."
But he had written a sequel, and the volume admits it in the smallest available type. A footnote — marked "Author's note", not editor's — mentions "Tyorkin in the Underworld, which was to be published many years later", and says that Tyorkin, "picked up half-dead on the battlefield, comes back to life from non-existence, from the 'other world', the description of which gives the theme of my 'second Tyorkin' its special contemporary significance." What that special contemporary significance was — a satire on the Soviet bureaucracy, conducted in the afterlife — the footnote does not say, and nothing else in the book says either.
The essay ends somewhere no reader expects: five pages of controlled fury at an émigré writer.
A man named S. Yurasov had published in New York a book called Vassili Tyorkin After the War, subtitled "After A. Tvardovsky", taking Tvardovsky at his word that the poem was a work of collective authorship and rewriting it. Tvardovsky sets the two texts side by side, line by line, showing where his wording has been swapped out, and then quotes the stanza Yurasov inserted:
Been sent off to prison, maybe; Tyorkins these days are oppressed. Yes, in Forty-Five, they say he Made a bid to reach the West.
Progress printed that in 1975, in English, inside a denunciation. Tvardovsky's answer is that equating "a decent Soviet soldier and hero" with a defector's "contemptible history" can evoke "nothing but a revulsion"; he does not answer the factual claim, and the claim sits there on the page doing its work. He is on firmer ground when he objects that Yurasov quotes "stanzas, periods and whole pages of mine; but nowhere does he use inverted commas". And he closes with a flourish that is worth reading twice, given who is printing it:
It is a telling fact that this man, who has gone over to the "service" of the bourgeois world where the supreme deity is private property, should have openly flouted the principle of literary property which, in our socialist society, is actually protected by the law, being essentially an ethical concept.
A Soviet poet, in a Soviet state publisher's edition, defending authorial property rights against the capitalist West. The last shot is the best one: the firm that published the plagiarism, he notes, had "no qualms about naming their firm in New York after one of the greatest and most noble of all Russian writers, Anton Chekhov."
Nothing in this volume tells the reader who Alexander Tvardovsky was by 1975, beyond the author of this poem. He had been dead for four years, and the last decade of his life is the reason his name meant what it meant.
The record is in our own press, written as it happened. In March 1966, on the eve of the 23rd Congress of the CPSU, World Outlook reported a collective letter from twenty-seven prominent intellectuals to the Central Committee asking that Stalin not be rehabilitated at the Congress; among the signatories it named "the writers Nekrassov, Simonov and Tvardovski". Later that year, in the International Socialist Review, Ernest Mandel — as Ernest Germain — recorded what followed: the removal from the Congress and from the Central Committee of "two intellectuals considered to be leaders of the moderate 'liberal' wing, Tvardovski and Polevoi". In the spring of 1967 George Saunders reported in World Outlook on "the battle around Novy Mir", describing Tvardovsky as "editor of the Soviet literary monthly Novy Mir and leading spokesman of the liberal intellectuals", noting that two of his assistant editors had been sacked over an attempt to print Simonov's war memoirs, and that there had been rumours for a year that Tvardovsky himself would go. He was forced out in February 1970 and died in December 1971.
Progress knew how to handle this, and had already shown how. Soviet Literature: Problems and People, which it published in 1970 and which is also in this series, discusses Tvardovsky at length and warmly, twenty times — always as the author of Vasily Terkin and Space Beyond Space, and never once as an editor.
This 1975 volume does the same thing by omission. It gives you the poem entire, in two languages, with the poet's own prose beside it, and it does not say that the man who wrote the afterword between 1951 and 1966 spent those same years publishing Solzhenitsyn and losing the fight.
Tvardovsky's own summary of what the thing had been to him is the best sentence in the essay, and it is a list of jobs rather than an artistic claim: "In the mutual relationship of writer and reader, Tyorkin was my poetry, my journalism, my song, my homily, my humour, my lore, my heart-to-heart talk, and my commentary on events."
Read the poem for itself. It survives the apparatus completely, because there is barely any apparatus to survive: nobody stands between you and it except Alex Miller, and the Russian is on the facing page if you want to argue with him.
Then read the afterword as a second poem, about how the first one got written and what it cost: the cartoon origin its author will not pretend away, the notebook entry with collectivisation in it, the footnote conceding a sequel it will not describe, the five pages of rage at a New York imprint, and the two words at the bottom of the first page that tell you the whole essay has been cut.
And keep one thing in view while you read about the crossing. Tvardovsky's claim in that notebook was that what made these men was not the war but "the greater thing that was before the war". If he was right, the qualities in this poem were produced by a revolution and can be produced again, and the poem is an argument. If he was wrong, they were Russian all along, and the poem is only a monument. The whole quarrel of this series is in that sentence, and the poet put it there himself, in a quotation, in an essay published in abridged form.