(by Paolo Petroni) (ANSA) – ROME, DECEMBER 16 – Poet much loved in Russia at the time for his veristic poems rich in humors and popular notes Aleksandr Trifonovic Tvardovskij, whose fifty years since his death in 1971 fall on 18 December , today perhaps he is remembered in the West above all as the editor in the fifties and then again in the sixties of the magazine “ Novi mir ” (New World) who fought for artistic freedom in the Soviet Union before and after the XXII Congress of the Communist Party of 1960, the one in which Khrushchev carried out his attack on Stalinism, going so far as to rename Stalingrad to Volgograd or to remove Stalin’s body from Lenin’s mausoleum.
Tvardovskij was thus the one who was responsible for the publication in 1962 in the magazine, which suddenly became internationally famous, of the novel “ A day of Ivan Denisovič ” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn inspired by the imprisonment in the gulags. Born in a village near Smolensk in 1910 and the son of a blacksmith, at the age of twenty-one he published a collection of verses entitled “ The Way to Socialism ” which sang about the success of the revolution in the Russian countryside, but immediately became famous five years later. , in 1931, with the poem “ The village of Muravija ”, a story of social rebellion of freshness and popular taste of a peasant who, in order to escape the organization of the kolkhoz (Soviet collective farms), sets out in search of an illusory country of good luck. This, in the years after 1941, was followed by the release and then in 1945 the publication in volume of the poem ” Vasilij Terkin ” on a poor ordinary soldier, a typical ironic and slacker mugik but capable of heroism struggling with the gears and the horrors of war which, thanks to its simple and immediate style, had a great popular diffusion.
It is to this character that the events of Tvardovskij are linked, who became director of ” Novi mir ” in 1950 and forced to resign in 1954 after a series of official attacks by Solochov and the Writers’ Union which led to the condemnation of the Committee central of the Communist Party, which defined the magazine’s position as harmful and contrary to socialist realism. In reality all this came after the poet had in 1953 circulated the satirical “ Terkin to the other world ” in the nascent circuit of samizdat, following the adventures of the famous characters lost in the maze of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus and narrated with immediate , irreverent and genuine popular taste. Tvardovskij, having passed the buriana and changed the directives, returned to direct the magazine in 1958 (when Khrushchev became prime minister), remaining there until 1970, when he was again forced to resign due to heavy political pressure and ” Novi mir ” returned to the ranks until the 1980s with the beginning of perestroika and cultural liberalization.
After all, to this writer whom Ripellino says he never managed to love ” despite a convincing lyricism, a solid and honest poetic profession … because he does not rise from a gray verbose descriptivism, from a ‘local’ tone, from a popular rhetoric that often mimics that of Nekrasov ”, it must be acknowledged that he tried to work for the freedom of literature. In 1953, in the magazine, he wrote that ” sincerity is the fundamental basis of the sum of the gifts that we define talent … Its lack is not necessarily a lie; the absence of sincerity is affectation, commonplace, it is writing on command and not according to an inner impulse ”. And the year before, the magazine had published Grossman’s “For the Right Cause”, which, when rewritten, would later become the scandalous “Life and Destiny”. Later, from the stand of the XXII Congress of 1960, he always intervened denouncing “ the lack of depth and truth ” because ” not always and not in all our literature has followed the example of audacity, sincerity and truthfulness shown from the party ”. It is then that Solzhenitsyn brings his ‘burning’ manuscript to ” Novi mir ”.
” Terkin to the other world ” was officially published only in 1963 and in those years and the following years saw Tvardovskij write verses in which the changes in the country transpired. He will die in Moscow in 1971, the year after his second resignation from “Novi mir”. (HANDLE).
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