Among Marshak's friends of that period was Gedeon Moiseevich Nemirovsky, a talented chemical engineer. To Samuil Yakovlevich, he somewhat reminded him of his father: short-sighted, short, a small beard, like Yakov Mironovich, an attentive gaze. He was only ten years older than Samuel, but he seemed old. It was he who persistently advised Marshak to learn English: he felt the talent of a translator in Marshak.

In September 1912, Sofya Mikhailovna and Samuil Yakovlevich went to study in London. The Marshaks immediately fell in love with this city. They took long walks along the quiet streets of the suburbs, and on weekends they went to the center, to London parks. More than forty years will pass after the first meeting with London, and in Marshak’s memory he will remain the same as he was at the beginning of the century:

Hyde Park is covered in lush foliage.

But the grass in the park is softer and greener.

And each of the people brings color

In green meadows and alleys.

These people brought with them

Orange and red are very bright.

And those - purple, yellow, blue -

It's as if flowers are walking in the park.

And if it weren't for the wind, that wave

It passes, leaves and trunks swaying,

I would think: this is not a park in front of me,

And the canvas is cheerful Constable.

Even before leaving for England, Samuil Yakovlevich secured the consent of several editors of newspapers and magazines to print his correspondence. This allowed him and Sofya Mikhailovna to pay for their studies at the University of London. Sofya Mikhailovna entered the faculty exact sciences. Samuil Yakovlevich - to the Faculty of Arts. Working for hours in the university library, he literally absorbed the poetry of William Shakespeare, William Blake, Robert Burns, John Keats, and Rudyard Kipling. Perhaps no less than the work of these poets, he was fascinated by English children's folklore, full of subtle, whimsical humor.

At first, the Marshaks rented housing in poor areas of London - in the northern part, then in the eastern part. Later we moved to the center, closer to British Museum, where many foreign students like them lived.

In their free time, usually during the holidays, the Marshaks went on multi-day hikes. In the most difficult and long hikes Samuil Yakovlevich went alone. But this does not mean that he broke up with Sofya Mikhailovna - he wrote letters to her, sometimes several a day.

“Sonechka,

I'm back from a walk now. Went very far in both directions high road. Moonlit and starry night - couples and groups of young men and women are walking along the road. From afar a London car is rushing by. There are still many cyclists today. The night is quite cold. It even looks like there is a slight frost. Footsteps echo loudly.

Strange thing. Epping is only 16 miles from London, and the morals here are completely patriarchal and primitive. Everyone looks at the new person with curiosity. When meeting with strangers they say “good evening!” or “good night!”…

Opposite our hotel is a church. Every half hour there’s a whole concert in the bell tower.”

And here is an excerpt from a letter written the next day: “Epping is a small town, almost a town. The houses are two-story. There are many hotels, publichouses, and inns. A charming road leads to Harlow and into the woods.

There are a great many cyclists, horse riders, and Amazons on the road. The riders wear white vests and trousers and red tuxedos. Ladies wear regular Amazons.

I met a sister of mercy on a bicycle, an old woman on a bicycle...

Now I am writing to you in my room in the public house. The room appears to be clean, quite clean. The towel they provided was immaculate. The bed linen seems to be fresh, but I don’t know. Not very warm, but not colder than Ms. Nadel's. Quite cozy<…>

Tomorrow morning, in all likelihood, I will go to Harlow - 6 miles from here. If the weather is bad, I'll stay here.

In the village, a room will cost me less.

Now I was sitting in Privat Vag’e and reading “Oliver Twist” by the fireplace. I understood quite a lot. But I was interrupted from reading by some fat, bearded farmer, very talkative... But, alas, deaf!..

The village people are much simpler and more accessible than the London English. You can talk to your heart's content with them.

Baby! Now I’ll put down the letter, wander around a little, read “Ol<ивера>Twista“ - and I’ll go to bed by 9 o’clock.<…>

Your S.M.”

From a letter written a day later, at night: “I stayed one more day in Epping to wait for your letter...

The weather was charming for two days. And today there is darkness and bad weather, on this occasion I will have a hot lunch; although my food yesterday had perfectly settled my stomach and made me feel better. I remember with pleasure the mug of milk I drank at Laughton...”

I am writing to you by mail. At 6 o'clock the train from London arrived and brought your letter. Thank you, Sonechka...

I'm leaving for Ongar tomorrow morning. From there I will write to you immediately...

I really want to see you...

I kiss you for now, Sonechka.

Wait for further letters.

Your S.M.”

Marshak's letters of that time are a kind of lyrical report about his stay in England. From a letter to Isaac Vladimirovich Shklovsky, a correspondent for the General Newspaper, dated February 18, 1914: “The area here is charming,” reminiscent of a corner of the Galilee in Palestine.

High hills covered with forest; many streams. Oiler purchased a wild spot on a hillside and hoped to turn it into a Garden of Eden.

Now we are experiencing spring days. I write and translate Blake, but I cannot take up the Rubaiyat. “I read Apuleius willingly, but did not read Cicero (from the first stanza of the eighth chapter of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin)” - for some reason it comes to my mind.”

Marshak called three letters “London Leaflet” or “Sofyushkina’s Newspaper.” Here are excerpts from them: “We went to London on Newport. We arrived in Newport at eight o'clock in the evening. Let's go to the post office to send Mr. Parker's eggs. A city, as far as one could judge at night, like Plymouth. Lights, carriages, crowds on the streets, cinemas and “varaiti”. And then a little black, gloomy city. We visited the docks - colossal ones! In the darkness we only heard the whistles of steamships and the rumble of winches...

At 12 o'clock in the morning we arrived at the station and began to wait. I read<Сусанне>out loud to Marcus Aurelius, but at that time she was dreaming of something interesting. Some old woman in a cap-hat was also dreaming of something, for she, sitting on a chair, alternately bowed to the north, east, south and west.”

And here is a letter addressed to Sophia and Susanna Yakovlevna, the poet’s sister, who lived in England at that time: “One of my postcards (the 3rd in a row) was undertaken to be delivered to you... by the wind. He snatched it from my hands and ran off into the sea.

Now outside the windows is Ireland. In the distance there is a chain of blue hills (clear, sunset sky). On the other side of the train are fields and farmers (real ones!). Huts with thatched roofs.

We came across a city - Waterford with white multi-storey buildings above a wide river. They say there are more and more monasteries there.

People now are simple, warm-hearted, slow and shaggy.”

Reading Marshak’s essays, one cannot help but recognize his talent as a prose writer and remember the perspicacious Stasov, who saw this gift in his young friend.

“After a long and constant stay in England, nothing can refresh the soul so much as a walk through free and deserted Ireland. I had walked about a hundred miles along the banks of the majestic Shannon, and it seemed to me that I had left London a long time ago, ten years ago, and was many thousands of miles away from England.

L. G. LARIONOVA

Rostov-on-Don

Preparing for exams: two-part sentences

I. Read the text and complete the tasks.

Peter comes out. His eyes are shining. His face is terrible. The movements are fast. He is beautiful, He is all like God's thunderstorm. It's coming. They bring him a horse. A faithful horse is zealous and humble. Sensing the fatal fire, Trembling. He looks askance with his eyes And rushes in the dust of battle, Proud of his mighty rider.

1. Which of the characteristics linguistic features Is this text incorrect?

1) The text contains many short adjectives.

2) The text contains simple sentences complicated by isolated circumstances.

3) All sentences in the text are two-part.

4) The text uses series of homogeneous members.

2. In writing short form answer the question: “Which member of the sentence does the subject relate to?” Illustrate your answer with examples from the text.

3. In which sentence is the subject expressed by a proper noun?

1) His face is terrible. 3) They bring him a horse.

2) Movements are fast. 4) Peter comes out.

2. Read the text and complete the tasks.

(I) The thunderstorm has already subsided over our roof. (2) She went partly further, partly ran out of steam... (3) The house was warm and calm. (4) Reflections of lightning flashed outside the windows. It smelled of refreshed greenery. (6) Thunder was still growling somewhere, but quieter and quieter. (7) You could hear the last drops dripping from the roof. (8) And music similar to this drop sounded in the house. (9) It seems that it was one of Chopin’s mazurkas. (10) The one in which the calm joy of life is heard. (According to V. Belov).

Larionova Lyudmila Gennadievna, doctor of pedagogy. Sciences, professor of Southern Federal University. Email: [email protected]

1. Indicate the meaning of the word cut:

1) roof; 3) house;

2) shelter; 4) canopy.

2. Tell in writing what you know about the subject. Illustrate your story with examples from the text and your own examples.

3. In which sentence is the subject expressed by a pronoun?

1) 1 2) 2 3) 4 4) 9

3. Read proverbs and sayings and complete the tasks.

1) A person on foot is not a companion to a horseman. 2) A raven will not peck out a crow’s eye. 3) Hay and fire will never settle down. 4) You can’t fool a shot sparrow on chaff. S) Someone else's soul - darkness. 6) The grave will correct the hunchback. 7) Living with wolves means howling like a wolf. 8) Seven troubles - one answer. 9) Peace and harmony is a great treasure. 10) A drowning man clutches at a straw. 11) Alone in the field is not a warrior. 12) The first swallow does not make the weather. 13) Every bird builds its own nest. 14) Time is the best doctor. The brave do not head before the sword

will incline. 16) To teach is to sharpen the mind.

1. What common theme unites these proverbs and sayings?

1) The matter of man.

2) Advice and teachings.

3) The virtues and vices of a person.

4) Home and life.

2. Answer in writing the question: “What parts of speech can express the subject?” Illustrate your answer with examples from proverbs and sayings.

3. In which proverb is the subject expressed by a syntactically indivisible phrase?

1) 3 2) 8 3) 14 4) 16

4. Read the text and complete the tasks.

(1) When the Nazis surrounded Leningrad, a camouflage cover was pulled over the Admiralty Spire. (2) Shells exploded in the very center of the besieged city. (3) Soon the spire was already sparkling through many gaps and holes. (4) Two soldiers climbed the spire and patched up the holes. When work was over

over, the soldiers suddenly heard the cries of swallows. (6) The cover covered the bird's nests under the cornice of the spire. (7) What was to be done? (8) Nothing else but saving lives. (9) The soldiers ripped open the canvas and sewed it up again, freeing the birds. (10) This took several hours of exhausting work. (11) The steeplejacks sank to the ground, barely alive, but happy. (12) Native swallows flew over their hometown. (According to V. Bakhrevsky).

1. What is the main idea of ​​this text?

1) Hurry to do good!

2) We sing glory to the madness of the brave!

3) There are feats for which no orders or medals are awarded.

4) The main thing is to be in the right place at the right time.

2. Write what questions the subject answers and what it can mean. Illustrate your answer with examples from the text.

3. In which sentence is the subject highlighted incorrectly?

1) 3 2) 4 3)6 4) 11

S. Read the text and complete the tasks.

(1) The hot summer has flown by. (2) September has arrived. (3) After a sultry summer, after warm August days, golden autumn came. (4) Boletus, russula and fragrant saffron milk caps still grow along the edges of the forests.

Thin-legged honey mushrooms huddle on large old stumps. (6) During these autumn days many birds are preparing to fly away. (7) And some, out of cold and hunger, hurried to fly away earlier. (8) The swallows and swift-winged swifts have already flown away. (9) Starlings gather in noisy flocks. (10) Songbirds fly south. (11) The autumn sun does not burn your face. (12) It warms softly and affectionately, as if gently stroking the skin goodbye... (According to I. Sokolov-Mikitov).

1. Which linguistic device connects the last sentences?

1) lexical repetition; 3) synonym;

2) personal pronoun; 4) antonym.

2. From sentences I, 5, 12, write down the grammatical basics. Indicate what forms of verbs express simple verbal predicates in them.

3. In which sentence is the compound used? verbal predicate?

1) 6 2) 7 3) 8 4) 9

6. Read the text and complete the tasks.

(1) Orange is a plant from the Rutaceae family. (2) It was known in Europe as bitter orange or Chinese apple. (3) In China, it was customary to give a friend the fruit of this tree on New Year. (4) This meant a wish for long life, happiness and wealth. In Japan, the orange flower symbolizes pure love.

(6) In Ancient Greece, the fruit of this tree became an attribute of the goddess Diana. (7) In Christianity, the orange was sometimes associated with the biblical Tree of Knowledge. (8) It was an attribute of the Virgin Mary and symbolized purity and chastity. (9) Sometimes this fruit was depicted in the hand of the baby Jesus as a symbol of God's atonement for the sins of mankind. (10) Orange in Europe since the 15th century has become a symbol of fate. (From the Great Encyclopedia of Symbols).

1. The meaning of which word from this text is misinterpreted?

1) fate - inevitable fate;

2) associated - compared;

3) chastity - innocence, moral purity;

4) attribute - permanent affiliation.

2. Copy the first paragraph of the text, explaining the underlined spellings. Underline the predicates and analyze them.

3. Which sentence uses a simple verb predicate?

1) 1 2) 2 3) 7 4) 10

7. Read the text and complete the tasks.

Ant-eater

(1) The large anteater lives in tropical forests and shrub shrouds of America. (2) The Indians call it "Yurumi", which means "small mouth". (3) His mouth is really tiny. (4) But the tongue is long, like a cord, sticky and very mobile.

The main food of the anteater is ants. (6) It also eats termites, worms, their large larvae and berries. (7) The anteater captures all this with its lips. (8) When walking, Yurumi rests on the knuckles of her bent fingers. (9) And two large claws are directed inward. (10) Yurumi uses them to tear apart anthills and comb her fur. (From the “Calendar of Nature”).

1. What word is a synonym for the word termites?

1) mosquitoes; 3) wood-boring beetles;

2) dragonflies; 4) grasshoppers.

2. Write out two-part sentences from the text, in each of which a simple verbal predicate is expressed by a verb in the form of the indicative mood. Underline the grammatical basics in these sentences.

3. In which sentence is the predicate expressed by a participle?

1) 1 2) 3 3) S 4) 9

8. Read the text and complete the tasks.

(1) I had to visit virgin lands several times. (2) The day of the first furrow left many exciting impressions. (3) The weathered faces of tractor drivers, the earth mixed with feather grass, the oblique flight of frightened eagles. (4) But the most vivid memories of virgin lands are associated with the first harvest. Everything was painted in only two colors. (6) Blue sky and yellow wheat. (According to Peskov).

1. What device is used to connect sentences 3 and 4?

1) pronoun; 3) union and particle;

2) lexical repetition; 4) union.

2. Answer the questions in writing: 1) In what part of the composite nominal predicate is the main lexical meaning expressed? 2) What part is its grammatical meaning (mood, tense)? Write out a sentence from this text with a compound nominal predicate.

3. Which sentence does not have a predicate?

1) 1 2) 4 3) S 4) 6 Test

1. In which sentence is the subject expressed by a phrase?

1) Birches on the hill are the pride of the village of Zharki.

2) The chick, named Kuzya, turned out to be very gluttonous and indiscriminate in his food.

3) I looked closely for a long time and suddenly noticed black birds on the trees.

4) My son and I got to the Olkhovka station by passing car.

(From the works of A. Barkov).

2. In which sentence are the subject and predicate expressed by an infinitive?

1) Lack of faith in a person is a misfortune, a fatal disease. (Prishvin).

4) Happiness is being with nature, seeing it, talking to it. (L.N. Tolstoy).

4) To teach is to sharpen the mind. (Proverb).

3. In which sentence are the subject and predicate expressed by nouns?

1) The language of truth is simple. (L.N. Tolstoy).

2) Pride in one’s comrade is one of the most precious feelings in human soul. (Simonov).

3) To serve in the service - do not bend your soul. (Proverb).

4) Music is intelligence embodied in beautiful sounds. (Turgenev).

4. In which sentence is the grammatical basis incorrectly highlighted?

1) I brought a bucket full of dew from the forest.

2) A random bird flew up and landed on the roof again.

3) The cycle of days and years is deceptive.

4) And each of the people brings color to the green meadows and alleys.

(From the poems of S. Marshak).

5. In which sentence is the subject expressed by an adjective used as a noun?

1) A bad example is contagious.

2) Even a strong army will die from disorder.

3) Brave is the master in battle.

4) The brotherhood of soldiers is born in battle.

(Russian proverbs and sayings).

6. Which sentence has a simple verbal predicate?

1) The earth began to thaw.

2) I was now bound by the specific purpose of searching for mushrooms.

3) Everyone began to examine the tree together.

4) Since the evening, under the moon, between the birches

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MARSHAK Samuel

Old Grandpa Kohl
There was a cheerful king
- Hey, pour us some cups,
Fill our pipes,
Yes, call my violinists, trumpeters,
Yes, call my violinists.

There were violins in my hands
His violinists
All the trumpeters had trumpets,
And they sawed
And they trumpeted
Until the morning, without closing my eyes,
Until the morning, without closing your eyes.

Old Grandpa Kohl
There was a cheerful king
He shouted loudly to his retinue:
- Hey, pour us some cups,
Fill our pipes,
Yes, drive away my violinists and trumpeters,
Yes, drive away my violinists.
Samuel Marshak

A poem about a tinker, a cheerful guy,
He melts lead into shiny tin.
He brews medicine in a camp pharmacy
A sick frying pan, a crippled pan.

He will fix the kettle - and the kettle will be healthy.
He is a doctor of frying pans, a professor of boilers.
He treats the coffee pot's spout and bottom,
And the old coffee pot sparkles like the sun.

His hospital is on the pavement stones,
And the sun is burning above his head.
Samuel Marshak

Suvorov-Chapaevites

We fight great
We chop desperately, -
Grandchildren of Suvorov,
Children of Chapaev.
Samuel Marshak

Happiness

How festively the lilac blossomed in the garden
Lilac, white.
Today is a special - lilac - day,
The beginning of a blooming summer.

In a few days the bushes were dressed up,
Newly opened leaves
In large and lush clusters of flowers,
Into thick and wet brushes.

And we remember with what simplicity,
With what hope and passion
We were looking between the stars in the thick bunch
Five-petalled "happiness"

Since then they have bloomed before us so many times
Bushes of this generous lilac.
And if we haven’t found happiness yet,
Maybe it's just out of laziness.
Samuel Marshak

T.G.

People write, but time erases,
It erases everything that can be erased.
But tell me, if the rumor dies,
Should sound also die?

It gets quieter and quieter
He is ready to mingle with the silence.
And not with my ears, but with my heart I hear
This laughter, this chesty voice.
Samuel Marshak

Flowed, wriggled, glittered
A river between green meadows.
And she became motionless and white,
A little bluer than the snow.

She submitted to the shackles.
Don't know if the water is running
Under the white wavy cover
And miles of strong ice.

The coastal willows are turning black,
Reeds stick out from the snow,
Barely outlining the twists
A river lost under the snow.

Only somewhere in the hole it’s unsteady
Water plays and breathes,
And there is a red-finned fish in it
Sometimes it will flash with scales.
Samuel Marshak

Only at night do you see the universe.
Silence and darkness are needed
So that at this secret meeting,
She came without covering her face.
Samuel Marshak

Grinder

Pressing the pedal with your foot,
He turned the wheel with a strap.
He carried the wheel on his back,
And I walked along the roads.
Samuel Marshak

The wind shook the calendar today.
I flipped through the last week,
I reviewed June, then January,
And then he flew to April.

Two or three flashed happy day,
But he didn’t reveal a single date,
Didn't evoke in my heart
Memories of sad loss.
Samuel Marshak

Have you seen many birch trees in the world?
Perhaps only two, -
When the frost hit them for the first time
Or in the first spring foliage.

Or maybe you came home in the summer,
And your house is filled with sunshine,
And the clean birch trunk glows
In the garden outside the open window.

How many sunrises have you seen in the forest?
No more than two or three
When, disturbing the dew on the blades of grass,
I wandered aimlessly until dawn.

How often have you seen your loved ones?
Just a few times -
When your leisure time was spacious and quiet
And the gaze of your eyes.
Samuel Marshak

Pushkin has an impostor in love
The Pole reveals his deception,
And Pushkin’s Spaniard admits,
That he is not Don Diego, but Juan.

One is jealous of his dead lady,
Another to the fake Diego - Donna Anna...
So the poet needs to avoid makeup,
It was not a false mask, but he himself was loved.
Samuel Marshak

Colorful autumn - evening of the year -
He smiles at me brightly.
But between me and nature
A thin glass appeared.

This whole world is at your fingertips,
But I can't go back.
I'm still with you, but in the carriage,
I'm still at home, but on the road.
Samuel Marshak

Value hearing, value vision.
Love greens, blues -
Everything that is given to you in your possession
In two words: I live.

Love life while you're alive.
There is only a moment between her and death.
And there won't be a nettle there,
No stars, no ashtrays, no books.

Any thing in our apartment
He assures us that we
We live in a closed, bright world
Among the empty and poor darkness.

But dead things are not right -
From the windows of temporary apartments
We already see the majestic
An open world for immortality.
Samuel Marshak

Watch

You can't hear the clock behind the noise,
But days and years lead to us.
Summer comes out of spring
And goes into late autumn.
Samuel Marshak

The man walked on four
But his understanding grandchildren
Abandoned front legs
Gradually turning them into hands.

Neither of us would fly
Leaving the Earth, into the skies,
If I didn't want to refuse
From excess reserves of balance.
Samuel Marshak

My special kind of reader:
He can walk under the table.
But I'm glad to know that I know you
Congratulations to the reader of the year two thousand!
Samuel Marshak

Miracles, even though I’ve been living for a long time,
I haven't seen it yet.
However, there is one thing in the world
A real miracle:

Is the world multiplied (or divided?)
To those living worlds,
In which he himself is reflected,
And every time for the first time.

Everything in the world would be dead -
As if the world itself
It never happened at all, -
Whenever Living being
It didn't open.
Samuel Marshak

Hey, old man - “We’ll take old stuff!”
What are you carrying in your bag?

I carry a shoe without a heel,
One sleeve without a jacket,
A bow without a violin and a collar,
Noseless teapot and coffee pot,
Yes, a cast iron pot
Thoroughly rusted, without a bottom.
I carry a minister without a portfolio.
He ruled for a week without a year
And he called the country to war.
He's at my very bottom!
Samuel Marshak

Elegy on the Death of John O'Gray,
The Honorable Hare, Esquire

Between the Tweed River
And the river Spey,
Where is the heather and everything else,
Once upon a time there lived a poor hare, John 0" Gray,
Father of the family and so on.

Even though I was deprived
Our poor John
Ranks, awards, etc.
But he was not without hair,
Tail, ears and so on.

One day, three-four-five,
Having had breakfast and stuff,
He went out for a walk in the grove
And, so to speak, everything else.

He was not dressed in velvet,
Like that slacker Billy, -
Beret with feather
And an old blanket
His clothes were.

For all that,
For all that
With thoughtless courage
He waved his tail cheerfully,
Like a pike or a sword.

But at the fork in three roads,
Where is the spruce forest and everything else,
The hunter waylaid him
And shot
And so on.

He took himself a beret and a blanket,
And O'Gray's rest in peace
To the innkeeper
For six coins
He sold without regret.

And the one from John's bones
Made broth and stuff
And this he treated the guests to
With strong ale and stuff.

But everyone who ate that lunch
Yes, everyone who ate John
Not about the innkeeper, no, no,
Not about the hunter
Oh no -
They sang a song about John.

That's how old mugs ring,
And jokes and everything else
Was resurrected
Our good John,
Father of the family and so on.

And from then on
For how many years
As if resurrected from cutlets,
From soup and everything else,
He lives on earth again
And one-two-three-four-five
Goes out into the grove
Take a walk
And, so to speak, everything else.
Samuel Marshak

Epitaph for the driver

Poor guy in the hospital barracks
He gave his soul to the humble god:
He looked at the road signs
And I didn’t look at the road at all...
Samuel Marshak

I didn't sleep a wink for hours at night
And I could tell you about every hour.
Twelve. This is the ringing hour of hangovers.
Those who are too young and too old are in bed.

Hour. This is the hour of girlfriends, not spouses.
Others are prevented from sleeping by a painful illness,
Long trip, or night shift,
Or a domestic marital scene.

Two. This is the hour for late partings,
And for those who woke up - so empty and early.
Three. This is the hour when people usually sleep.
Who doesn't sleep, who is busy, sick, guilty.

Four. On days when summer is just outside the door, -
Happy hour of a beautiful sunrise.
And if it’s winter outside the window, -
Such a boring, fading darkness.
Samuel Marshak

I translated Shakespeare's sonnets.
Let the poet, having left the old house,
Speaks in a different language
On other days, on the other side of the planet.

We recognize him as a comrade,
Defender of freedom, truth, peace.
No wonder the glorious name of Shakespeare
In Russian it means: “shake the spear.”

Three hundred times and thirty times and three
Since the day of his death I have outlined
The earth has a scheduled path around the luminary.
Thrones were overthrown, kings fell...

And a proud verse in a modest translation
He served and serves truth and freedom.
Samuel Marshak

I remember the day when for the first time -
In the third year of birth -
I heard regimental trumpets
In the autumn city garden.

And everything around, as if by order,
It’s as if it came into operation right away.
The sun flashed through the fog
The pipes are light gold,
Wide neck, twisted
And a round, white drum.

And I remember the holiday on the river,
Almost icy to the bottom,
Where are the musicians all evening?
They played marches on the skating rink.

Their hands were frozen from the cold
And the drops of tears froze.
And hot breathing sounds
We flew into the darkness and frost.

And, warmed up with cheerful copper,
Torn out of the darkness by lights,
Summer burned on the river ice
In the midst of lifeless winter.
Samuel Marshak

I walk through your streets.
Where every stone is a monument to heroes.
Here is the inscription on the facade:
“We’ll defend it!”
And on top of the “p” is added:
“We’ll rebuild it!”
Samuel Marshak

A. Tvardovsky, L. Panteleev, B. Galanov (the poet jokingly called him “my Plutarch”), V. Smirnova wrote about this... Their evidence converged, leaving no room for doubt. And yet it crept in. In 1967, while collecting materials for student work about Bunin’s poetry, I accidentally came across a little-known parody by Marshak in the newspaper “Askhabat” (the old name of the city of Ashgabat) for 1909 (No. 266):

...Sometime before spring
I will live alone - without a wife
Bunin.

I'm sitting on the desk. There's a felucca outside the window.
Liman, bashtan, cormorant... But my head is empty.
Yes, you will have to live a long time without your wife
And with a cigarette in his sleeve.

The author of the parody is twenty-two. A year earlier, he came to Blok with a notebook of his poems. Blok (as one of the memoirists reported), after listening to the poems, said approvingly: “You have your own sun...”
The sun is gentle. The rays do not prick him, but caress him. These are the poems of the mature Marshak, drawing the sun to the earth. In this way they are similar to Bunin’s. Similar to them are the stylistic transparency and concreteness of the images. The abstract concepts encountered are melted so that they can be seen, heard, and touched. “Childhood stands in the distance, like a house with closed shutters.” Time has both a walk and a voice. It is crafty when it “plays in minutes.” As in Bunin’s poems, there are a lot of colors here. But the paints... They are of a different quality than Bunin’s:

Hyde Park is covered in lush foliage.
But the grass in the park is softer and greener.
And each of the people brings color
In green meadows and alleys.

These people brought with them
Orange and red are very bright,
And those - purple, yellow, blue -
It's as if flowers are walking in the park.

And if it weren't for the wind, that wave
It passes, leaves and trunks swaying,
I would think: this is not a park in front of me,
And the canvas is cheerful Constable.

Everything in this poem by Marshak breathes a feeling of gratitude to the wonderful English painter. And behind this gratitude, Marshak’s detachment from the colors of nature is particularly clearly visible. The poet’s gaze glides over the multicolored colors opening before him, grasping the dominant green color, and the variegation of colors itself (orange, red, purple, yellow, blue), brought into the park by people and their clothes, is perceived as a painting, conveyed by Constable’s canvases. This is far from Bunin’s worldview, from his intoxication with the living colors of nature. No, not under the influence of the moment, Marshak parodied “estuary, bashtan, cormorant.”
After hesitating, I decided to meet Marshak’s son, Immanuel Samuilovich. I prepared and went through the words in my head for telephone conversation with him. However, time was already playing “minutes” with me. After the poet's death, radio often broadcast recordings of Shakespeare's sonnets read by their translator. So I heard Marshak’s voice. I heard this voice on the phone...
Immanuel Samuilovich was like his father and external features. And now, when he is no longer among the living, I can say that he was a youthfully passionate, very enthusiastic person and open to good communication. He answered my questions with great enthusiasm:
– Samuil Yakovlevich loved and valued Bunin very much. I read his poems with trepidation. Especially often - “With a monkey”, “Rachel’s Tomb”, “Huge, red, old steamship...”, “The night is warm, light and golden...”
- No. Samuil Yakovlevich was not personally acquainted with Bunin.
– Samuil Yakovlevich told the story of Blok in front of me. I looked through all of Blok's records and found no trace of her. Strange. Blok kept a diary very carefully. In the retelling of others, this story is slightly distorted. The retelling conveys only main meaning Blok's phrase: “You have your own sun.” Samuil Yakovlevich said “my sun” and with a connotation like “you have come to the wrong address.” He said, imitating Blok’s voice. A little sad, detached. The block was the heartiest of all the heartiest. But just as he could not remember God in vain, so he did not know how to “flatter” even young authors. And Samuil Yakovlevich brought Blok not very strong poems. That notebook has not survived. But there are other autographs of early poems. Samuil Yakovlevich spoke some of these poems before Blok’s court.
Here are the autographs. Time began to play in minutes again. Novella Matveeva gently whispered to me a quarter of a century before her birth: “These are not houses, but ships...” Yes, yes. It happens. This is where spiritual kinship comes into play, similarities in experiences that reveal something in common between the poets. But what appears in the handwriting of Bunin and the beginning Marshak is more than “something”.
Now Marshak's early poems are published in his eight-volume Collected Works. In lines young poet mosaic, density of details. The verse sounds dry and tense, like a stretched string ready to burst. In Marshak's collections of the thirties and sixties, I came across only one title sentence. And here they are scattered. And how many living colors! Golden descent, blue specularity, pale sparkle, white gold of the cross... And in a completely Bunin-like way Marshak deduced the motif of the joy of being:

I love spring, when even the afternoon is sleepy
It flies above us, bringing dreams,
When even a beggar is as beautiful as a Madonna,
And so bright under the sun against the wall.
And my sadness is just a sad dream.
I won’t wipe away spring tears from my eyelashes...
They are carrying a cart, an elegant funeral one,
And it’s like a dream – steps and creaking wheels.

You have to greedily, very greedily love living things in order to notice with a saddened gaze that the funeral cart is... elegant. Such an ethically, seemingly incompatible feeling was possible only in the poetics of Bunin, who was delighted by the “green, cheerful, living grass of the grave,” for let “the old crypt, the grave ruin conceal a reproach... But you, earth, are right!.. Earth , Earth! Sweet spring call! Is there really happiness even in loss?”
Under Marshak's poem there is a date. 1909 Parodying “estuary, bashtan, cormorant...”, the student left his teacher and looked for himself. The hour will strike. Marshak will become Marshak. But the school he completed will remain with him. “Old” and “new” are intertwined in his poetry. He will write:

About how life is a struggle between people and fate,
The world heard from the ancient sages,
But with the hour hand of the East
Shakespeare connected the minute.

Shakespeare was dear to Marshak. And yet the East was closer. The “minute hand” - modernity, a moment in history - was interpreted by Marshak in no other way than in relation to the “hour hand” - eternal truths obtained through the centuries-old practice of human existence. Here the hour hand is larger than the minute hand. It will indicate what time it is even without a minute, while a minute without an hour is simply useless. Hence, Marshak, like Bunin with his irresistible craving for the East, has a cult of “eternal” themes. One can speak about the topicality of many poems by Bunin and Marshak only by remembering the minute hand - the events that evoked a poetic response.
And in last years Marshak turned his face to Bunin, to his aesthetic ideal:

Full of hot feelings
The statues are cold.
From the flames of the wall of art
They shouldn't warp.

Like the vaults of an ancient temple -
Soul and matter fusion -
Pushkin's lyrics marble
Slender and stately.

Isn’t this similar to what Bunin once proclaimed in his poem “To the Sculptor”? It ended like this:

Of hot rays and cold white marble
Beauty is rising!
Such a roll call cannot be called accidental. Here is the memory of the heart. Loyalty.

Light forces. From the book of memories

1.

Winter 1962. Marshak is seriously ill. And suddenly he invites Naum Korzhavin and me to his hospital.

We enter the room. Marshak is exhausted and emaciated, but his voice is already cheerful.

- Hello Hello! You look like a surgeon in that white coat. And you are a therapist. You well. Nowhere is human dignity violated more than in a hospital. Such a creature in a white coat (Samuil Yakovlevich points to the nurse) can enter your room at any moment without knocking, lift up your shirt and insert a syringe into an inappropriate place. Terrible!

“Well, Samuil Yakovlevich,” the nurse smiles, “you are no longer sick.” You are already, one might say, on vacation.

“Yes, yes,” echoes Marshak. – I’m taking a break from my health! Why don't people take a break? Take a break from your mind. Taking a break from talent. They rest from honor, from conscience. Does this happen? Strange forms of relaxation...

I read new poems to Marshak. Pause.

“The most difficult thing for a writer,” Marshak begins, “is to tell another writer what you really think about his writings.” It is even more difficult, sitting on the podium, not to applaud what you do not like. To tell the truth... Blok knew how to do this. He was a courageous man.

All clear. But I considered these poems the best of what I wrote. How happy I was with them!

“That’s it,” Samuil Yakovlevich picks up. – Your delight is a sure indicator that the poems were not a success. For many years I dreamed of translating Blake's Mary. And one night the translation worked. I was very happy. I called Zhirmunsky. He loves Blake. He will forgive him for being woken up in the middle of the night. He will understand what it means to translate “Mary” the way I translated it. I'm reading. There is deep silence on the other end of the line. I say: “Hello! Maybe the connection was lost? Alas, the connection was fine. Zhirmunsky gathered his strength. And do you know what he told me? “This is terrible, Samuil Yakovlevich!” I hung up. A month later I realized that Zhirmunsky was absolutely right. No, no, my dear, don’t trust such delight!

- And Pushkin? Do you remember, Samuil Yakovlevich, how he rejoiced when he wrote “Boris Godunov”? I even danced for joy.

- Well, what did he write that day? "Boys have bloody eyes." This is not the best. No, no, don't trust such delight.

Take a book and notebook,
Sit down at the table.
Could you tell me
Where did the table come from?

A table, or rather table, appeared from the kitchen. It was on wheels. He was wheeled into the office by Rosalia Ivanovna, Marshak’s housekeeper. There was lunch on the table.

But it was not so easy for this table to penetrate into Marshak’s office.

Samuil Yakovlevich once told me:

– In order not to be mistaken about people, know that every person has two ages. One is the one in which he is located. And the other is childhood age, corresponding to his character. For example, you are twelve years old. How much will you give me?

– About four years, Samuil Yakovlevich.

- Like that…

And this four-year-old Marshak, as befits four-year-olds, disliked two things more than anything in the world: a) going to bed and b) having dinner on time.

The latter especially outraged Rosalia Ivanovna. She entered the office, inexorable as fate, and resolutely said:

- Samuil Yakovlevich, go to lunch!

- Imperative! – exclaims Samuil Yakovlevich. - Imperative mood. I wonder how many times a day she uses it. We need to count.

Rosalia Ivanovna stood and waited until Marshak said something like:

- The administration can leave!

After some time, Rosalia Ivanovna appeared at the door again:

“Rozalia Ivanovna, you are like the sun,” said Marshak.

Rosalia Ivanovna smiled. And Marshak continued:

– It’s bad if there’s too much sun. We want to sit in the shade and read poetry.

Appearing for the third time, Rosalia Ivanovna was no longer looking at Marshak, but at me.

“Your guest is hungry,” she asserted with an insidious glint in her eyes. – You completely killed him.

The blow was calculated precisely. And Samuil Yakovlevich had no choice but to surrender to the mercy of the winner. That's when the table on wheels appeared.

Sometimes Marshak rested during a serious, intense conversation. He told the lungs funny stories. And he laughed without having time to finish the joke.

– When the First World War began, I was in Kyiv. Some military men were walking around the city. On their shoulder straps they had the Roman numeral XI. The townsfolk rejoiced: “Look! The war has just begun, and already captured Austrians are walking around. What is written on the shoulder straps? Prince Joseph!

We had one publisher. He loved smart conversations. Once we were talking about Voltaire. The publisher added his remark: “Diderot, by the way, also had some good novels!” They tell him that Diderot is a philosopher; it is inconvenient to say “romances.” And he replies: “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Sometimes he writes clearly.” And he treated me like this: “Here’s a herring - freshen up.”

Once we at Dettiz in Leningrad received an instruction to banish swear words from books for children. The young editor got down to work especially passionately. But this sweet creature, unfortunately, did not know which words were swear words and which were not. She calls one writer to her and says: “For mercy, what did you write? "Old bastard"! And this is in a children's book! Horrible! We need to look for a more decent expression. For example, “old horseradish.” Somehow she came across the word “male”. She asks what it is. They tell her: “A dog is an author who doesn’t deliver the manuscript on time.” And then Yuri Nikolaevich Tynyanov comes, exquisitely polite, elegant, wearing white thread gloves. How did he keep them so fresh after two wars, two revolutions and devastation? And she, smiling so coquettishly, tells him: “Yuri Nikolaevich! What a male you are, though!”

“I was in the hospital with one nice, intelligent man. I loved talking to him. He grasped everything on the fly. Somehow we started talking about Pushkin. I say: “Pushkin, like Shakespeare, is white, it contains all the colors of the spectrum. Compared to Pushkin, even Lermontov is a little colorful.” My interlocutor liked my idea. He exclaimed with true fervor: “That’s right, Samuil Yakovlevich! It's right!" But one day I complained to him: “Somehow the flies were scattering today!” And my interlocutor supported me with the same fervor: “That’s right, Samuil Yakovlevich! Oh, how true this is!”

Here are several categories that Marshak constantly used when talking about poetry, about skill, about talented and skillful people, no matter what they did: 1) earnestness, 2) cleverness, 3) sonority.

Earnestness. In Tvardovsky’s poems this word appears: “That mournful earnestness of the gathering...”

He seemed to contrast earnestness, on the one hand, with prudence, cynicism or, say, empty talk, and on the other, with unreasoning fanaticism and insensitive dogma. Sincerity in Marshak’s understanding is complete dissolution in work, in unity with people, in a humane and fruitful idea.

Intelligibility. Marshak used this word in application to the most unexpected things - from a poetic declaration of love to a children's rhyme. Pushkin, Nekrasov, Blok, Shakespeare, Blake, Burns were distinguished, among other things, by their intelligence. Clarity in the most ardent feelings, in the most complex philosophical constructions, in verbal play. Intelligibility, opposing the “stupid”, disorganized, uncollected pressure of feelings, ideas, thoughts, images, words, rhythms. The insight of a craftsman who makes a good, necessary, beautiful thing.

Voicedness. The quality is quite rare. Especially in literature. Sonority is inherent in children in their games and songs. The sonority is Pushkin. Sonority is strength, power combined with grace, lightness, ease, gaiety, and simplicity. “Laughter is better than a smile,” said Marshak.

Sonority resists any tension, stiffness, or excessive tedious seriousness.

“The children’s counting rhyme,” Samuil Yakovlevich often repeated, “is compatible with Shakespeare and incompatible with Potapenko.” He's too serious for her.

I remember how, while reading the play, someone called Marshak. And the excited Marshak, inflamed by reading, quickly agreed on a meeting and shouted into the telephone receiver:

- Darling, believe in your sonority!

Sonority is the enemy of timelessness, and timelessness is the enemy of sonority. Marshak believed that after Pushkin’s death, his friends and companions Yazykov, Vyazemsky and even Gogol began to lose their former sonority. And that Chekhov returned the sonority of Russian prose late XIX century.

IN recent months During his life, Samuil Yakovlevich met the sculptor-anthropologist M.M. Gerasimov. I was present during their conversation. They met like old friends who had not seen each other for a long time and were in a hurry to talk. I remember from this conversation one witty, but at the same time completely serious remark by Marshak. Gerasimov told how his wife helps him with her advice when he, carried away by the details, begins to lose sight of the whole.

“Yes, yes,” said Samuil Yakovlevich. – Women, real women, have an amazing sense of the whole. Maybe it's because they give birth to whole people, not just some part!

One day he had a dream. A dream within a dream. It's like he woke up young. I woke up, jumped out of bed, stood firmly on my feet, straightened up and felt a long-forgotten strength in my muscles. It was an autumn dawn. The room was filled with freshness. The window was open. And into this open window stretched halfway across the room, right under the chandelier, a huge maple branch with large red leaves. “This is a dream,” Marshak thought in his sleep. “And yet there is truth in it.” I need to do something so that my family will believe me when I wake up and tell them what happened to me.” Then he picked some of the most beautiful leaves, put them under his pillow and fell asleep with a calm soul. He woke up old and sick, but remembered the dream and couldn’t resist reaching under his pillow for leaves.

There were no leaves. But it means that all is not lost if a person has such dreams.

I was invited to work in the editorial office, in the poetry department. I came to consult with Marshak.

“Go,” he said. – And instead of advice, I’ll read Pushkin to you:

But I'm afraid: among the battles
You will lose forever
Modesty, timid movements,
The beauty of bliss and shame!

“However,” adds Samuil Yakovlevich, “poetry can help you out.” The poet is the only creature in the world who is capable of restoring innocence.

Autumn 1963. Vasily Subbotin and I are flying to Yalta. Marshak lives there, in the House of Creativity. He had already called home and Subbotin, found out what flight we were arriving on, and demanded that his car take us from the city to Vnukovo. We understand that he craves news from home, from editorial offices, that he needs the latest books and magazines.

The plane is late. And Subbotin, rightly, as it turned out later, fears that Marshak has already called the Simferopol airport several times, that he is worried that he needs us immediately, that same evening, that he does not want to postpone the meeting until the morning.

We find ourselves in Yalta at three o'clock in the morning. Marshak's light is on. The sleepy duty officer, having learned who we are, sighs with relief and reports that Marshak asked to come see him, no matter how late we arrived. But, sparing Samuil Yakovlevich, we still go to bed. In the morning Rosalia Ivanovna wakes us up. She looks at us with triumph, but also with reproach - how much anxiety was associated with us. We take letters, proofs, go to Marshak.

We enter, say hello... But Marshak doesn’t let us say a word. Amazing news. Historians took up Shakespeare studies. A new study on sonnets has been published in England. The crux of the matter is this...

In a word, we had to present precious Moscow news in small portions in short intervals between Marshak’s completely captivated latest news from the life of William Shakespeare.

When I turned 28, Marshak said: “Now it will be difficult for him. We need to move from age to age.” So it was, I even gave up poetry. In youth there is elation, in maturity there is will. And there, as Kipling said in Marshak’s translation, “forces change over the years, and only the will says: “Hold on!”

Will instead of spontaneous spiritual uplift, conscious efforts preceding inspiration - isn’t this a sin against poetry? After all, poetry should be written as if by itself.

- Decadence! - Marshak objects. – Poetry is thought, feeling, will. There is no will, and thought is replaced by a semblance of thought, and feeling by mood.

He felt sorry for me. I tried to help: “It’s not spelled? What could be simpler! Send your friend a humorous letter in verse - let him laugh! And there will be other poems there.”

I'm going to write a series of sonnets.

– Who are they dedicated to? – Marshak inquires.

Poems must have an address. Someone must be waiting for them. Someone really needs them now, although he may not even know it.

This means that one’s own will is not enough for poetry. We also need the will of other people.

Barvikha. Marshak, putting aside Shakespeare's sonnets, which he was then editing, composes a caption for a political cartoon. Something about the Persian Shah. The truth teller Abalkin, who came with this topic, waits until Marshak finishes his work right in front of him, and teaches me: “Learn from the old people, they can do it. But the young people don’t even want to take it.” No, it’s still better not to take it. Otherwise it will turn out, as it sometimes happened with the same Marshak:

Albanians sing freely,
And, echoing growing,
They hear fireworks
Free China.

Satire, if it is poetry and not rhymed politics, does not become obsolete in other historical eras. During the years of perestroika, I will often remember Marshakov’s lines about Laval, an accomplice of the fascists, and what he said before the liberation of France. How similar to the “patriotic” horror of the coming democracy in Russia:

He's like a prime minister and like a Frenchman
Can't help but be sad.
His country from slavery
They want to release.

About his translations of sonnets, Marshak told me that evening that a third of them were lyrics, together with Shakespeare he expressed himself, and two-thirds were translations. I remembered how a wonderful line appeared: “It’s better to be a sinner than to be known as a sinner.” He owes it to a girl from an orphanage, because she responded to some false accusation.

In 1959, at the request of the editor of Literary Newspaper S.S. Smirnova wrote the article “The Fate of the Ninetieth Sonnet.” Marshak, before giving me a draft of the translation, began dictating the article. Shouldn’t he know how he translated the sonnet! And yet I avoided his help and began to study the sonnet myself. Compare the translation with the original. And what? At Shakespeare's keyword“fate”, it was in Marshak’s drafts, but dropped out of the draft, “love” became the key word, Shakespeare doesn’t have it. Both are in subtext. Marshak extracted “love” from the subtext, but drowned “fate” in it. Shakespeare in translation is with a cloak, but instead of a sword there is a lute. I did not dare to include this image in the text. I compared it with other translations, Marshak’s is better, more accurate. And most importantly - beautiful Russian poetry. Sergei Nikitin set them to music and sang them. Alla Pugacheva also sang, but she had “trouble”: not “to lose your love forever,” but “to lose my love forever,” instead of “the dark lady of sonnets,” as Bernard Shaw called her, and Shakespeare himself - some kind of arrogant!

I didn’t dare show the article to Marshak. I took advantage of the quick departure to Vienna for the festival. Benedikt Sarnov came from the editorial office to Samuil Yakovlevich with the article. He said that Marshak was worried while listening to the article, and concluded: “I didn’t know this about myself, but I agree with Valya.” He called me. Larisa, my first wife, came up and decided that for some reason I was pranking her before leaving, impersonating Marshak, and shouted into the phone: “Stop fooling around!” - “What did you say, Larisa, my dear?” – Marshak couldn’t believe his ears. “Oh, sorry, Samuil Yakovlevich,” Larisa caught herself. - It’s me Marinka. He hangs around the phone and interferes with speaking.” And at the station at the last moment I told this story. The carriages started moving. From the footboard of one of them, Sergei Ostrovoy shouted: “Sunny! Remember! I love you!" And from the other’s footboard I screamed: “Remember! I never prank anyone over the phone!”

Yalta. Lyrical epigrams - the pinnacle of Marshak's poetry - were put aside. In Norilsk, a doll named Severok was invented on television. First, she needs to start talking to the children with Marshak’s poems. He came up with a rhyme: Severok is a little animal.

- Yes Yes! It's the "beast"! Remember Pushkin: “And they will come to tease you behind bars, like an animal”? Honey, this is very important! Animal! Isn't it a wonderful old word?

Marshak goes to Crimea. On the table is a travel suitcase, not yet closed. Samuil Yakovlevich receives his colleagues from the St. Petersburg children's editorial office (among them L.K. Chukovskaya and A.I. Lyubarskaya, who came from Leningrad) in the dining room. So as not to disturb, I stay in the office, rummaging through books. Milne! Zakhoder has already translated “Winnie the Pooh”. And Marshak - “The Ballad of the Royal Sandwich.” I see, reading the original, what a miracle he performed. Here are some more excellent poems! And further! It's a shame that they are not in Russian. I quietly slip Milne's volume into Marshak's suitcase under his pajamas. In half a month I will come to Crimea myself. Marshak calls immediately.

- Darling, someone slipped me Milne. I translated three poems right on the train. Listen here:

Here are two drops of rain
On glass. They are alive.
Who will rush down faster?
She will receive first prize.

I listen to poems that I dreamed of reading in Russian. As a child, I myself played with drops on a foggy window.

I come to Marshak in Tesseli. Milne has already been forgotten. The play “Smart Things,” begun before the war and now promised to the Maly Theater, has been postponed. Marshak translates Blake's "Divinations of Innocence". L. Panteleev argued that Marshak was always a secret believer. Blake's prophecies are imbued with this belief:

* * *
Truth spoken maliciously
Similar to outright lies.

* * *
The sun, it knows doubts,
It wouldn't shine for even a moment.

* * *
Cast steel weapons –
Human humiliation.

Blake is Marshak's cherished poet. It's great to have him back! But even here it was necessary to push him:

– Vinokurov asked me to translate more from Blake. He assures me that this is very necessary now.

It’s not for nothing that Marshak communicates so widely with people... He needs an order again. What old words should I revive? What eternal themes and in what twist are now vitally necessary for at least someone?

He himself was also a customer. But he needs too much from you.

1955 " Literary newspaper" Category " Bon Voyage! Mikhalkov's article about my poems. I'm calling Marshak. “Come immediately!” Marshak receives me not in his office, but in the living room, hung with paintings and photographs. Walks back and forth.

- Sergey Vladimirovich - a kind person. I congratulate you. But there are things that you should hear today. Do not stop! We need to change! Antosha Chekhonte is wonderful. But he managed to become Chekhov! You need to set yourself huge tasks. Take better care of your health! Man is a powerful creature! Save up your strength for the long journey! For great plans!

One of the young people to whom Marshak addressed such demands heeded him. However, he himself, back on the Zagorye farm, at the age of 15-16, set these goals for himself: “You see, he dreamed of turning into a new Dante.” Marshak loved him very much.

Winter 1952/53. It's the doctors' business. Rumors about their upcoming execution right on Red Square. About the resettlement of all Jews to Birobidzhan. I call Marshak to somehow distract him and entertain him. There is a ringing, joyful voice on the phone:

– Can you be with me at half past ten? Not tomorrow morning, but tonight! How stupid!

I'm coming. In the hallway is the departing Margarita Aliger. Sad, depressed, looking at Marshak sadly: hasn’t he begun to go crazy from all the hardships? I haven't seen him so cheerful for a long time.

– There was Tvardovsky! Listen, only in great secrecy. Read new chapter"Beyond the distance - the distance." He materialized in the compartment next to him an internal editor who is embedded in each of us. He, lying on the next shelf, listens to how Tvardovsky destroys him. And do you know how their conversation ended?

And from this shelf the smell of sulfur
It slowly flowed into the vent.

Samuil Yakovlevich was rolling with laughter to the point of coughing.

In every friendship, its very beginning always lives. Marshak more than once recalled his first night conversation with young Tvardovsky. And a short sleep on the floor in what was then the poet’s little room. When we woke up, we started again with poetry.

– He has a great sense of humor. Do you know what he told me about myself? Somehow he was left without a car. I gave him mine. I rarely travel anyway. Comes to the garage. Lo and behold, the driver Afanasy is reading a book and crying. What moved him so much? Looks, "Anna Karenina". Tvardovsky was even jealous. The economical, businesslike man retained the ability to cry over a great book. And he, through tears: “Alexander Trifonovich! Trouble! The owner completely tortured me. We go to Kursky, and he says: “Do you remember, Afanasy, how Karenina passed here before throwing herself under the train? How clearly she saw everything!” - “Under the train? - I say. - Karenina? I didn’t carry one like that!” He gets angry: “Stop the car now! I won't sit with you again. You haven't read Anna Karenina! OK. Let’s go home, I’ll give you a book, and until you read it to the end, we don’t know each other!” So I'm suffering. The book is so thick!”

- A real novella! - Marshak rejoices. – Tvardovsky is a wonderful prose writer! Remember his “Pechnikov”? Why haven't you read it?

There is vodka in the refrigerator for Tvardovsky, in case he goes on a drinking binge. Toast to Tvardovsky:

- Let's drink so he doesn't drink!

At one time, Tvardovsky was tormented by insomnia. Marshak sympathized with him. The best advice to Alexander Trifonovich was given by his friend Fatyanov: “Insomnia? I found something to worry about! You take a book and start reading. And you’re already asleep!” - “What if it’s interesting?” – asked Tvardovsky. "Doesn't matter!" – Fatyanov reassured. Then Tvardovsky went to the lecture “Sleep and Insomnia.” “You need to be able to sleep in any conditions,” said the lecturer. “Vasily Terkin was sleeping while walking.” - “I came up with it!” – Tvardovsky got angry.

Many, jealous of their friendship, wanted to set the poets at odds. They told Marshak that Tvardovsky was offended by his instructions: “Maybe I’m Marshak myself!” - “He’s right, that’s how it is!” – Marshak smiled. “Marshak called you a smart janitor,” they reported to Tvardovsky. “He,” Tvardovsky smiled, “is a city dweller. He sees peasants in the role of janitors, etc. This means, in his opinion, I am a smart peasant. Nice to hear!"

“I had a nice man, educated, with good taste. We started talking about Nekrasov. And this old fool... Hello! Call me later, my dear, I have a doctor. So here it is. This old fool claimed that Nekrasov was not a poet, his poetry was not poetry, but prose, as if this was not a victory for poetry, but a defeat.

How one senses Nekrasov’s intonation, Nekrasov’s taste for folk life in Marshak’s unfinished poems about childhood:

The old woman sees off the deacon.
The old woman's face is stained with tears.
Seen off by friends and parents
An officer in a brand new uniform.
Wiping himself with the ends of a handkerchief,
The worker's daughter sees off.

Yalta. House of creativity. They won’t let you get close to small children - it’s not allowed. Marshak arrives from Tesseli: “Take a tax from them for childlessness!” And the kids move towards the house with masterful steps. Among them was my Marinka, who lived in a private apartment on the hill. They enter the room where the poet is waiting. They look as if Marshak is their exclusive property. I feel superfluous and leave. It's a pity! I hardly know this Marshak. What did he talk about with the children? What did you play? I only notice that Marshak looks at them with respect, as equals.

After Marshak’s death, his son Immanuel Samoilovich put amateur films in order. Spring. Marshak is on a bench near the Botkin Hospital. The narrow film apparatus is cracking. Literally, frame by frame, the poet “overgrows” with children. They no longer fit on the bench. They crawl almost on the shoulders of the old poet. OK. These are our children. They know who Marshak is.

London. From the hotel door an old gentleman goes for a walk. Where did the ten-year-old miss come from next to him? And what kind of magnet attracted that boy here?

Scotland. Burns Country. Emrys Hughes, member of the House of Commons, friend and biographer of Bernard Shaw, leads the poet along the path to the Burns farm. A moment, and next to Marshak there is a Scottish boy. He took her by the hand and led her away from the adults. The child understands that he is a poet exclusive rights, and immediately uses them.

All his life he tried not to fuss in the midst of the bustle and crowds, not to lose the main thing, the cherished:

– If you are a lyricist, then don’t fuss. Don't rush to write! Let something most important emerge from the depths of your soul. Otherwise, God knows how much garbage is hanging on the surface!

Remembering Marshak, I see him bent over his desk. And listening to his stories, I see a wanderer, a pedestrian, walking through England and Ireland, through the Crimea and Karelia, or jogging on a donkey through the Middle East. Marshak bought it in Constantinople. All the way the donkey strived for one thing - to get rid of its rider. On the narrow eastern streets he tried to press him against the wall, and on humpbacked bridges over ditches and mountain rivers he tried to throw Marshak into the water.

At the age of 14, Marshak almost sailed from Crimea to Turkey. On Fridays, feluccas with goods sailed to the Yalta market. A merchant in a red fez with a tassel invited the schoolboy to inspect the ship, took him into the cabin, and treated him to oriental sweets.

- Boy! - the merchant suggested to the enthusiastic Marshak. – Do you want to go to sea on a felucca? Do you want to see Turkey? Come tomorrow exactly at five in the morning. Do not tell anybody! You will see Turkey, and on Friday – back to Yalta.

Marshak then lived with Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova. He then honored and adored her all his life. At five o'clock in the morning, the Yalta high school student was already writing a note to Ekaterina Pavlovna. He supposedly knows how he will upset her, but he can’t help himself. And suddenly I felt a sweet fume in my mouth from yesterday’s sweets. I remembered the merchant’s sweet speeches, shifting eyes, and deceitful smile. He undressed and went to bed. I waited until the clock in the house struck five. And he fell asleep in the sleep of the righteous.

“Otherwise I would have been a slave somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula,” Marshak concludes.

After the publication of the book “At the Beginning of Life,” Marshak experienced several unexpected joys. Letters from a high school teacher: “Dear Sam! Thank you for remembering." This means that he, Marshak, is not so old yet if his teacher is alive and well! I went into the Yalta courtyard where I once lived. Not much has changed there since his adolescence. “Are you looking for something?” – asked an elderly woman sitting on an old bench with a book. Dark, thin, strong. The poet said that he has long-standing memories of the courtyard. “So you are Marshak! - said the woman. – Don’t you recognize it? One of the two, as you deigned to write, crazy old women who lived in this yard.”

Stasov brought the boy Marshak to Pushkin’s son, an old honored general. The old people drank the infusion and became emotional. Pushkin’s son pointed to the St. Petersburg sunset outside the window:

- Yes... Lermontov said it well: “Do I wander along noisy streets.”

I listen to this story by Marshak, laugh, and Pushkin approaches me. There is only one person between me and the warm, homely world of Pushkin - Marshak.

The son and daughter-in-law offer to move into one apartment. They would constantly take care of him, and the grandfather would see his adored grandchildren every day. Marshak refuses: “I don’t want to be a foundling father!” He loved his independence and did not want to burden his family with anything.

I used to play with my grandchildren all day long. No guests, no business. I listened eagerly to everything they said.

– They speak Old Russian. Yesterday Sasha said not “key”, but “hook”. I'm sure it's an ancient word. Yasha asked: “Daddy-mama – is this a rhyme?” - “And “aunt-uncle” is also a rhyme?” – added Sasha. Now, I answer, and these are rhymes!

Grandfather's grandchildren were complete masters. Rosalia Ivanovna climbed into the refrigerator for jam, and there was an empty jar. “It says “Jam for S.Ya.” That is, for Samuil Yakovlevich!” – the housekeeper was indignant. - "WITH. I." - the grandchildren corrected, - these are Sasha and Yasha!

One of them learned that man descended from a monkey. It shocked him. They drive past the maternity hospital: “You were born here.” The boy was delighted: “So this is where the monkey who gives birth to everyone lives!”

When Marshak read me the story “At the Beginning of Life,” we discussed one of his thoughts for a long time. A person hardly remembers his early childhood, only fragmentary pictures. “I think,” the story says, “this happens because the child surrenders to all his impressions and experiences directly, without looking back... Without seeing himself from the outside, completely absorbed in the flow of events and impressions, he does not remember himself, just as he “does not remember himself.” “a person in a state of impatience or dizzying enthusiasm.” A dizzying fascination with life – that’s what early childhood is all about!

I was friends with Marshak and Chukovsky, but I knew that both of them were not very friendly with each other. Almost on the same day I asked both of them about the reason.

Marshak: “When we created children's literature, in Leningrad there was such a powerful force as Chukovsky. But he didn’t go to work, to the editorial office, but stayed at home.”

Chukovsky: “I’m sure Marshak hasn’t read “From Two to Five”! It was I who restored his friendship with Gorky. When Marshak returned from Kuban, Gorky did not want to know him. For no apparent reason, he suddenly cooled down to his favorites. He loved young Marshak. And suddenly he sent him an icy letter to London (Marshak studied there). The most kind phrase: “However, I’m glad you’re transferring Blake.” I brought Marshak to Gorky, and they became friends again. He brought Klyachko to the publisher, gave Marshak poems from Kipling’s Fairy Tales for translation, and kept only the prose for himself.”

Korney Ivanovich told how he and Marshak wandered around St. Petersburg until late at night, vying with each other to read their favorite poets and marveling at the similarity of tastes and views. Chukovsky even changed his custom of going to bed at nine. It was obvious how he missed that Marshak and, knowing that Marshak was also in Barvikha, he was worried about what the meeting would be like. At the sanatorium, the two patriarchs became friends again. They spent hours in the hall reading their favorite poems. Klara Lozovskaya, coming to Korney Ivanovich, was afraid to say a word in case they noticed some mistake. We talked a lot about language. Having returned home, they began to call and correspond, calling each other the word Friend with a capital letter.

I listened, Marshak spoke. It was like that for twenty years. But for some reason he knew everything about me. Only now, at his age, I, too, get carried away by my own thoughts and stories, but I manage to casually ask my young friends about themselves. I ask my other visitors about them. Marshak probably did the same, but at that time I did not notice his attention to the details of my own life. Once in Ehrenburg’s memoirs he read: “Marshak remained silent.” And he burst out laughing: “Have you seen Marshak remain silent?”

With whom did he not have conversations about Blake, about Pushkin, about philosophy? Who hasn’t read new poems, translations, and at the same time Nekrasov’s “Philanthropist”, “The Ballad of Chamberlain Delarue” by A.K. Tolstoy, Mandelstam’s funny poems about an aunt who assured:

Here, he says, is a portrait of the late Marat
Works, if I remember, Mirabeau.

And this was when Mandelstam’s poetry seemed to not exist at all. Not to mention the poetry of K.R. - Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov. Marshak admired his song “The Poor Man Died in a Military Hospital” and his romances. But, remembering the romance about how “I opened the window” and “knelt down before him,” he clarified: “K. R. was enormously tall. Only he, kneeling in front of the then country window, could stick his head out from there so that “the spring night could breathe into my face the fragrant breath of lilac.” Another would only reach the window sill with his forehead.”

To whom did Marshak unfold a comparison of biblical verses by Vl. Solovyov and Pushkin, to whom he quoted Khlebnikov, exclaiming: “How good he is after all the sweets!” Byron was called the editorial leader of English poetry (at that time all newspapers, even wall newspapers, opened with pompous and meaningful editorials). The “editorial”, they say, was heard in full force in due time. But how amazing, for example, are Byron’s diaries, which were not intended for publication!

Now I understand that in addition to enlightenment, there was also self-defense. I know it from myself. In those days it was enough for a new visitor to read, say, Tyutchev, and if he was a person who was not trustworthy, then he would no longer appear with you. For such people, poetry is worse than torture. But then Marshak’s phone went bad, so they called a mechanic. Marshak began to talk to him about high poetry. The installer read his poems for the children. And Marshak introduced Georgy Ladonshchikov into literature. With the same conversations, he turned an important dignitary into his ardent admirer. He later even wrote a book about Marshak. But there was such an episode. Our ambassador to Indonesia, Benediktov, through a noble friend of the poet who visited Jakarta, sent Marshak a beautiful staff. But the friend, as it turned out, gave Samuil Yakovlevich a more ordinary product, and took the staff for himself.

Hospital. Having survived the crisis, Marshak is slowly coming to life. “When he wakes up, he immediately begins to think!” – Korzhavin admired. A new translation is being read. We are happy: back to work! "No no! - Marshak objects. “Translation is not my thing yet!” New poems for children: “No, this is not really mine, this is childish!” He recognized only lyrical poems as his own.

And finally, “my own” - poems about a pre-revolutionary student. I don't remember a word. But there was something new, some fresh feature. Marshak insisted that I be stricter with his poems. I squeezed out some remark. How I later regretted it! Poems about the student disappeared forever. They are not left in the poet’s archive.

And here funny incident. The day before Marshak’s last (75 years!) anniversary, he met with Novella Matveeva and Boris Zakhoder. We decided to compose cheerful congratulations three of us. They laughed, rejoicing at every discovery. The zakhoder took me to the coveted entrance. Looking around, I threw the letter into the mailbox on the third floor. Time passed. Marshak - not a word about our creation. After his death, when I.S. Marshak was putting the archive in order, I asked Rosalia Ivanovna: were there any congratulations from the three cheerful poets? “I immediately threw away that piece of paper! - she answered. “I thought some hooligans were playing around!”

Lunacharsky remembered that in the old days there were such writers - Turgenev, Dostoevsky! - played in charity performances. And he assembled a writing troupe. Marshak also played in it: “They staged a funny comedy. We arrive at the same house. The curtain opens. We see that the audience is strange. We do this and that. Ostrim. We're playing the fool. Mournful silence. Deathly silence. The artists are nervous. Suddenly one of the spectators gets up on stage and shakes the artist’s hand. She fainted! Somehow we made it to the end. Nobody laughed. Someone dressed in black, with flowers, all in tears, came onto the stage: “Thank you! You touched us so much! We cried so much!” It turns out we were playing in a hospital for black melancholics. Lunacharsky decided to treat them with laughter.

It doesn’t occur to me to call Marshak a poet Silver Age. But he is only seven years younger than Blok and two years older than Akhmatova. Blok told him: “You have your own sun.” Marshak loved his almost Nekrasov lines:

I opened the window. How gloomy
The capital in October!
Despondent brown horse
Walking in the yard.

And Marshak has a city winter:

The balcony, clogged with snow, turned wild.

No, he is not from the Silver Age, give him the Golden Age! "A pedestrian". Marshak sketched these poems back in the tens. The traveler and the train leave together:

An alarmed silence rings.
The road is in turmoil.
But he is sure: not by much
You'll get ahead.

“I meant, dear, the most fashionable poets of that time: Bryusov, Balmont...” explains Samuil Yakovlevich.

Chukovsky is not counted among the poets of the Silver Age. And he's even older. Also a revival of the Golden Age!

From his stories about himself. Youth. No money left. There is nothing to pay for the apartment. And then the rich man suggests: “You write poetry. I print them under my name. Glory to me, money to you!” Years passed. A former benefactor, now a modest Soviet employee, meets the famous Marshak: “Do you remember how nicely we worked together?”

– Dostoevsky’s women are poetic, Shakespearean. Not Ophelia, but Lady Macbeth. It’s as if thousands of eyes are fixed on them, as if on a stage.

Twenties. With Mayakovsky in Moscow. He recites:

Lady on the Wire
It goes like a telegram.

– Where did you learn to write so well?

Leads to the Briks. The darkness of guests. Lilya Brik sets out a treat - a bowl of hard-boiled eggs.

– This critic writes enthusiastic articles about Mayakovsky. But in the twenties everything was different. The critic sat in the editorial office and was in charge of poetry. He would look out the window: “Mayakovsky is walking again. Again he brings poetry. And why is he walking? And what is he wearing?

Night walk with Bagritsky. He is passionate about Marshak. Respectfully carries his briefcase. Reads his own and other people's poems. Marshak doesn’t like either one or the other. “I should have praised him! – Marshak laments. - At least for other poems that he didn’t read that night. And I listened and was silent..."

Evgeny Vinokurov has a poem about a soldier who almost fell behind the train while running for boiling water. I managed to grab the handrails of the last carriage with a kettle in my hand:

I was hanging, clutching the handle of the kettle painfully
in fingers red from mad boiling water...
And the line flew straight above me
horizon,
distinct and distant.

This happened with Marshak too. He was traveling across the Kazakh steppe from military Moscow to peaceful Alma-Ata to visit his son, who was dying of consumption. Perhaps he gave this story to Vinokurov.

One day I was telling something. Marshak interrupted me: “Darling, this is a wonderful story! Write poetry about it!” Time passed. “Well, how? Did you write about that story?” - “What is the plot?” – I was surprised. And Marshak reminded me of an event from my own life. And two years later again: “Well, how? Has that story been written? No? Give it to me! However, I don’t want to rob you, write it yourself!” He didn’t remind me again, and I forever forgot the plot he loved. I’m still ashamed of that story.

In 1957, Marshak turned seventy years old. And I became afraid for him. This fear also penetrated into the congratulatory sonnet. And yet I went from Peredelkino to the city to drop the sonnet in the mailbox of the hero of the day. Let him see how much I love and understand him. The anniversary took place in the Hall of Columns. All guests of honor. I positioned myself behind the column. I listen to greetings. Mikhalkov called the poet like a marshal: “Marshak Soviet Union! Chukovsky read an essay about the victorious Marshak: when he walked from Detgiz, it seemed that in a collision with a tram it would be the tram, not Marshak, that would suffer. Gevork Emin said that Armenian children consider him one of their own - Uncle Arshak!

Towards the end, Irakli Andronikov read the telegrams. And suddenly he solemnly exclaimed: “Berestov greets Marshak!” And in the same voice with which he read Lermontov on the radio, he read my sonnet. It was as if I was pinned to a column by lightning.

I took the size fourteen lines
And so I want every line
Bringing my greetings to the poet in absentia,
Made Marshak's heart happy.

Poetry's envoy plenipotentiary,
Whose step is so confidently light,
Your wise verse, funny, strong, accurate,
Will survive centuries for sure.

It is strong and well built,
He won't die. I'm calm for him.
But with all my soul I want the poet himself,
Taking from the verse both strength and health,
Lived in the world, surrounded by love,
At least another seven decades!

After all, he was sick so often! Somehow the illness overtook him right at the Writers' Union. The temperature jumped to almost forty. In the corridor, like an absurd metal chest of drawers, stood an oxygen inhalation apparatus. And there is nothing painful either in poetry, or in articles, or in conversations. Shortly before his death, he joked about his condition: “I’m like Johnny from the Irish song “With Guns, with Drums.” Rosalia Ivanovna, put the record on the player!” I will always remember the warlike melody with desperate words (later I.S. Marshak translated the song in memory of his father):

My Johnny returned without arms and legs. Hooray! Hooray!
Stab with a bayonet! Cut with a blade!
Cut with a blade! Stab with a bayonet!
What did the enemy do to my friend?
I barely recognized Johnny.

The record was spinning. Marshak cheerfully sang along with her from bed: “Now she sings that armless, legless Johnny has become like an egg. I haven’t gotten to that point yet!”

He pointed to a photograph of his two sons as children:

- Look. This one is five. There is no death for him yet. He's all shining. And this older one already knows. You can see from his eyes that he knows.

Worked under a load that was sometimes undreamt of healthy people. The poet bent over the table - his appearance seemed correct. But usually there was a guest sitting in the chair next to him. Before the chair had time to cool down, another one appeared. And so all day, until late at night. And if you remember the calls, heaps of proofs, voluminous packages with other people's manuscripts, it is difficult to understand when he composes. And yet, if you haven’t seen each other even for two days, Marshak greets you with new compositions. When does he write? “They save insomniacs, my dear!”

When setting an hour for a meeting, he arranged it so that all this time would be given to you and no one else. And one might think that you are Marshak’s only friend and adviser.

Bad poetry for adults often amused him. He laughed heartily at all sorts of absurdities, at the majestic or thoughtful, but in fact absurd pose of their authors. I didn’t notice anything like that in those cases when bad poems from children’s books and magazines fell into Marshak’s hands.

- What a scoundrel! – Samuil Yakovlevich was indignant.

And if the bad poems belonged to some lady, then ordinary politeness abandoned him.

- What a bastard! - said Marshak.

Young Marshak walked across Ireland. He stopped to admire the ruins of a pagan sanctuary. The contemplation of the mysterious ancient stones captivated Marshak so much that he did not even notice how the Irish woman was watching him. Finally, the woman decided to tear the wanderer away from the enchanted stones.

- Sorry, sir. Are you Catholic?

- Protestant?

Having listed all the religions known to her and received negative answers, the woman concluded:

“Now I understand that you came here because you are a pagan.” Don't look for the source: it will leave you.

One day Marshak got off the passing cart and was left alone among the sunlit green meadows of Ireland. The lark sang. And Marshak thought: “What complete, what cloudless happiness I experience! We need to remember this moment for the rest of our lives.”

So he did.

But Marshak and several other young people are walking around St. Petersburg, knocking down icicles, whistling, and humming. Today is their holiday. It's called Brainstorming of Spring.

And one more walk. Next to Marshak is a young, thin, pale man with a sad, exhausted face. He is only two years older than Samuil Yakovlevich, but he is already famous! This is Sasha Cherny. However, during those hours while they wander around the city aimlessly and read poetry, Marshak’s animation was transmitted to him. Sasha Cherny takes Marshak to his furnished rooms. They drink wine and read again, read... It soon becomes clear that it is most pleasant to read poetry while sitting under the table. But a strict, old-fashioned, learned woman, a real “bluestocking,” comes and drives them out of there.

“Something like a wife,” Sasha Cherny imagines her gloomily.

The first post-war years. Olga Skorokhodova, a deaf-blind mute, author of the book “How I Perceive and Imagine” came to visit Marshak. the world" She came with a translator. The translator conveys Marshak’s words to her, tapping her fingers on her palm. Skorokhodova, who has never heard her own voice in her life, speaks clearly, vividly, with excellent diction. Her face is smart and spiritual. Marshak looks at her like a miracle, with great respect and sympathy.

Marshak speaks of Professor Sokolyansky, who brought this seemingly doomed creature into the world, as if he were a wizard.

Skorokhodova reads her poems. Marshak likes them. I like that there is music in the poems.

– By the way, what is your idea of ​​music? – Marshak asks worriedly.

“I love her,” answers the deaf-blind woman. “I listen to her with my hand on the piano lid.

– Do you have favorite composers, favorite melodies? – Marshak is interested.

“Of course there is,” Skorokhodova answers.

- This is very good! - Marshak rejoices.

He asks Skorokhodova how she imagines colors, how she found out that war had started, how she felt the war, physically, directly felt that there was a war going on in the world.

Parting. Skorokhodova feels Samuil Yakovlevich’s hand.

“You must be a good person,” she thinks out loud. -You have a good hand.

– What could I do for you? – asks Marshak.

“I have everything,” Skorokhodova answers. - Let me just look at you.

And I see Skorokhodova’s fingers quickly and carefully sliding over Samuil Yakovlevich’s face.

- Do something unusual. Study, for example, higher mathematics or ancient Greek.

- Why, Samuil Yakovlevich?

- For self-respect. Self-esteem is the basis of respect. If you don't respect yourself, then they won't respect you either. They will love you, but not respect you. But self-respect requires some basis. Do something difficult and selfless.

– Decadence is lack of will. Debauchery is a lack of temperament, it is not enough for one woman... Do you know why free verse is so common in the West? Because they write poetry directly on a typewriter!

Samuil Yakovlevich celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in bed. He was seriously ill.

Letters, letters, letters... Samuil Yakovlevich goes through them. Most letters are from strangers.

“There’s not much willpower in the world.” – And, pointing to the letters: This is what will means, even if it’s small – people are drawn to it, waiting for something.

– You and I have a common drawback: we are not only talented, but also capable. If we are ordered to write an article, we will distract ourselves from the main thing, from the internal, and write it. Or we will translate poems that might not be translated. And it will turn out pretty decent.

There are people who are capable but not talented. And there are talented, but incapable. For example, Khlebnikov. He looked a bit like Blake. And only poetry, only spiritual life occupied him.

One day he was sheltered in a sanatorium. In the room for the nurses on duty (it was rarely used anyway). Khlebnikov sat and wrote. People came in - he didn’t see them. Eventually, the paramedic began making appointments with the nurse there. Khlebnikov wrote. And when a particularly loud laugh or the sound of a kiss was heard, he, without turning around, annoyedly waved it away. And he wrote again. And then I forgot or lost the drafts...

Samuil Yakovlevich knew many of Khlebnikov’s poems by heart. He especially often read the “Tale of El.”

When snow was stored in winter
Night trapper's paths,
We said - these are skis.
When the wave cherishes the boat
And carries the burden of a man,
We said - this is a boat.
When the weight of the waters falls
On the fins of the ship,
We said - this is a blade.
When the armor is on the warrior's chest
I caught spears on the fly,
We said - this is armor.
When the plant leaves
Stopped the weight of the wind
We said - this is a leaf,
Heaven's blow is transverse.
When the sheets are multiplied,
We said this is a forest,
And the time of leaf growth is summer.

This admiration of simple words and sounds is close to Marshak himself. Compare for example:

You will find the letter “Z” in the star,
And in gold and in rose,
In the earth, in diamond, in turquoise,
At dawn, in winter, in frost.

I don’t remember the exact wording, but Marshak saw in Khlebnikov’s poetry, in its purity and selflessness, a fruitful, refreshing reaction to constrained “academic” verse, and in general to any mannerism, pretentiousness, when the play with words and images, on closer examination, turned out to be a game of ambition.

The book “Selected Lyrics” is being compiled. Samuil Yakovlevich removes a good dozen poems from the manuscript, puts them aside and decisively says:

- You need to be generous!

– Lyrics are the struggle of existence with non-existence... There is too much vanity in life. And in this complexity, in this bustle, simple things, simple feelings turn to stone. Poets need to melt stones... You can break away from life and think that this is what it is real life, full of activity. But this is non-existence if you have not learned to live a spiritual life in any bustle, at any pace, remember your childhood, understand simple words and see the main thing.

Whenever you come to Marshak, he will show things in the most different genres, written during the time we didn’t see each other: here are translations, lyric poems, children’s poems, and articles...

“The British say: “You need to keep a lot of irons on the fire,” says Marshak. “Then one of them will certainly turn out to be hot, and you don’t have to interrupt your work.”

And then it turned out that other “irons” were put on fire decades ago.

Eh, it's gone, it's gone, it's gone
Young guy
In a red shirt
Such a nice one.

This is Marshak singing. According to him, this is what the melody of the English song sounds like: folk ballads: "Gypsy Countess." When Samuil Yakovlevich translated ballads, he was always afraid that they would look bookish. But these are works that the people sang. This means that in translation they must retain their folk, song character.

Samuil Yakovlevich sang quietly, but clearly and with great enthusiasm. He sang, so to speak, without expression, not pressing on individual musical phrases, but trying to convey the melody in all its integrity and, of course, convey every word.

I heard him sing “Mount Athos, holy mountain”, “Glorious sea, sacred Baikal”, “Let us pray to the Lord God, we will proclaim the ancient story” (from “Who lives well in Rus'”), “There is a cliff on the Volga”, English , Scottish and Irish folk songs.

- Well, what's new in Muholatka?

This means that he is very sick. Maybe this game is self-defense, so as not to lose consciousness at a high temperature. And most likely, he continues to create in delirium.

Flycatcher is a kind of imaginary country. Here they don't get married, they get married. National anthem- French song “Pitet Mouche” (“Fly”). Religion is Mohammedan (not to be confused with Mohammedan). Favorite plants are bird cherry and medlar. “The clattering fly” is their “Iliad”. The Academy of Sciences is busy transforming fly agaric mushrooms into equally beautiful, but not at all poisonous mushrooms - mukhamurs. The most affectionate word is “little bitch.” The army is armed with muskets and blunderbusses.

Liya Yakovlevna, Marshak’s sister (writer Elena Ilyina), is alarmed by this game. Should I take the temperature? Marshak looks at his sister with tenderness and mischief - he was joking.

Summer 1963. Yalta. At exactly five in the evening, Marshak leaves the House of Creativity and waits for a taxi. At this time he goes to the beach, towards Massandra. There he sits on a sun lounger, closer to the sea, next to the wet pebbles, smokes, drinks lemonade and looks into the distance. The impact of a wave at your feet, the hiss of foam, the roar of a stone being carried away by the wave, and the impact of the wave again.

I get out of the water and settle down next to Samuil Yakovlevich.

“It’s a strange thing,” says Marshak. – Old age, it would seem, should forget. And she remembers. He remembers things that he didn’t even suspect until recently. I once lived in Finland. And now I remember the Finnish language. Every day I remember more and more. Ask me any word, ask me how to say sea, sky, tree, stars, wave, cardinal points in Finnish, ask me any simple verb, and I will probably answer you.

There is a conversation about the Kalevala, from which Marshak translated three runes.

“For a bad writer,” said Samuil Yakovlevich, “man is God.” A better writer is also a person. A good one also has an excise duty. In a very good one, he is also an animal. The genius and the people also have it physical body, taking its place in space. Like this stone. Or this rock. Or a tree. Or like a wave...

The cliff rose above the sea,
Golden variegated stone.
Aino swam to the cliff,
She climbed up the rock
And sat down on top.
But the motley stone swayed,
He quickly plunged into the water
And he went to the bottom of the sea.
Aino disappeared with him,
Aino - together with the rock.

– Do you feel, dear, how empty the world is because Aino is no longer in it?

– Do you know that pajamas and suitcase are words of the same root? “Pidjoma” is Persian for “home clothes”, and “jomadan” is a container for such clothes. This means that pajamas and a suitcase are related. Now it’s clear why they love to travel together.

– Baba Yaga is, perhaps, the Tatar “babai-aga” (old uncle). This is how in Rus' during the time of Batu they frightened children: “Sleep, otherwise the babay-aga will take you.”

At the restaurant.

– Samuil Yakovlevich, how fortunate it is for you to come to us. Today is a special day for us, the day of Russian cuisine!

- Yes? Is this exotic for you? Are we in Paris or what?

Here is the only conversation (or rather, a summary of the conversation) with Marshak, which I recorded at the same time. I am presenting this entry.

“Yalta. July 13, 1962. Early in the morning I went to see Marshak in Tesseli. All the way the construction workers had fun, teasing the pedantic conductor. She did not allow the windows on the left side to be opened and even stopped the bus to rely on the authority of the oncoming inspector. But for the builders it was all a game: they were whileing away the tedious road.

At Marshak's. “I just can’t get used to being old... A writer is a fish out of water... I can’t get used to the fact that the sea is just a picture that is visible from my balcony.”

Doubts about every new thing.

Reading Pushkin, Sluchevsky, Pasternak (beginning of the chapter “Sea Mutiny” from the poem “Nine Hundred and Fifth” and “Pines”).

About Sluchevsky. “Just look to whom he dedicated his poems! What timelessness! But Sluchevsky retained the poet within himself.”

About the critics of that time who did not understand Sluchevsky and, sitting in their offices, taught Chekhov how to love the people:

– By conviction they are pockmarked, and out of principle they are blind.

About Shakespeare. “Miracles happen. For example, Shakespeare. After all, it is a miracle that his parents met, that he did not die from a childhood illness, etc. It is a miracle that he is not outdated, not forgotten, and that his works are singled out from many similar ones.”

Philosophical conversation. “Scientists measure things by a measure that is lower than a person: physical, physiological, etc. They measure the highest by the lowest. At the same time, there is always a danger of reducing the higher to the lower. I am an enemy of idealistic philosophy. But I think that someday they will come to a different measure. They will measure it by the highest – spirituality, poetry, poetic imagination. Measure the lower by the presence of the higher in it. And a lot will be discovered along the way.”

The look of a researcher (investigator) and a loving look.

“Look at this plum tree. It has glue in it. Among other properties. But man needed only one property - stickiness. He alienates it and gets glue that has nothing to do with the plum. Debauchery is the same glue: one quality of love, alienated from everything else, from spirituality, humanity, poetry. Explosive properties... An explosion is essentially the same glue extracted from the depths of a substance... And a lot of such glue was produced without thinking about the consequences, without seeing the whole..."

A loving view of nature—seeing the whole, caring for the whole.

The world is not very comfortable. Crazy pace. Speed. But there is no turning back. We need to get used to the world that has brought us to modern science, and master it for spiritual, inner life. For the fullness of life. For poetry.

The scientific way of understanding the world is the path from static equilibrium to dynamic, it communicates everything to the surrounding more movement. Balance is achieved in this movement. The principle of a bicycle is: stable as long as it moves. The human ancestor had more stability - he walked on all fours. I had to sacrifice half.

Alone on the bus. Empty night road. Quiet. You can hear roadside springs and fountains babbling. The driver is Viktor Potemkin, a native of Foros who grew up at the lighthouse. I only spent my early childhood in Crimea, but now I’ve returned and remembered everything. Even the best places to catch crabs. And at night you take out a mossy stone from the bottom, rub it, and the stone begins to glow.

The collection “Cybernetics in the Service of Communism” contains thoughts close to Marshak: “The higher is the key to understanding the lower.” Definitely tell Samuil Yakovlevich.”

Yellow, in the old edition,
I see a French novel.
I would even read the title
If it weren't for this fog.

I can clearly hear the voice of Marshak reading these lines of Innokenty Annensky. Marshak is sitting at a table, to his right is a stack of books, then a bookcase against the backdrop of a red wall. But he looks somewhere into the distance, squints, strains his gaze, there is an effort on Marshak’s face, he wants to see something and cannot. “If it weren’t for this fog...” And yet he saw it, remembered it and will tell it now. But I no longer hear his story; my memory has not retained it. “If it weren’t for this fog...”

And I will not forget this meeting. Because she was the last one. Three weeks later, Samuil Yakovlevich passed away.

June 1964. Marshak invited Oleg Chukhontsev, my wife and me to his place. He wants to show us a completely finished book “Lyrical Epigrams”.

Everything is as usual. Samuil Yakovlevich seats me in a leather chair (I have to read), my first wife and Oleg on the sofa. He himself turns towards us in his chair with a very comfortable low semicircular back. His left hand will end up on the desk. A desk... It’s almost impossible to imagine Marshak without it.

Samuil Yakovlevich, as always, is neat, clean-shaven, and looks smart in his loose gray jacket. Everything is as usual.

True, you need to talk to him louder - his hearing has become worse. He writes in the same clear, legible, but no longer rounded handwriting - the letters have become thin and angular. As he works, he almost runs his nose over the paper. And he cannot always read what is written. He has cataracts. The operation will be done when both eyes are almost completely blind. Samuil Yakovlevich does not want blindness and at the same time is angry that it does not occur and the operation is delayed because of this. He had long thought about how he would work while blind and immediately after the operation until the blindfold was removed from his eyes.

He is going to dictate thoughts about art, about poetry, but without the consistency that is inherent in his articles. Thoughts will be scattered freely, naturally, without apparent order. He is preparing not so much for the operation as for this new work for him and gets ahead of himself: some of the preparations have managed to turn into polished stanzas of lyrical epigrams.

There was everything: despair, hatred of old age, and bad premonitions, but now he is in the future. It is not without pleasure that he says goodbye to the new work he has recently conceived and completed.

I'm reading the manuscript. Samuil Yakovlevich smokes and nods with satisfaction. He seems to enjoy my reading. But what is it? Oleg looks at me with surprised eyes, and my wife with frightened eyes. Oh yes, I got carried away and began to read in the voice of Samuil Yakovlevich. I have great difficulty changing my reading style.

But Marshak stops me. The place in the book containing the following quatrain is discussed:

And the hour has come. And death came, as usual,
I didn’t come in romantic dreams,
And somehow I just captured my heart,
It drowned out the suffering and fear.

“After this there should be something life-affirming,” Marshak notes matter-of-factly. – But wouldn’t it be better to put this at the very beginning of the book? Well, let's try it on:

I have published many books.
But they all rushed off like birds.
And I remained the author of one
The last, unfinished page.

Great! This will be the beginning.

Traditional coffee on a small table. We are talking about children who are now five to ten years old.

“I really believe in this generation,” Marshak concludes. – I have seen many children in my life. There have never been any like this before.

These words are pronounced so weightily, almost solemnly, that Marshak immediately wants to “ground” them with some kind of joke. And he talks about modern grandmothers:

– Grandmothers these days are divided into predatory and domestic. The domestic ones stay at home with their grandchildren, and the predatory ones are in the editorial offices.

At parting, as is his custom, he kisses the guests and, despite our protests, wanders into the hall to see us off. He has already agreed to meet with me in Crimea after the operation, when he will write again and see what he has written.

At the hanger itself, after we said goodbye again, Marshak said worriedly:

- I miss scientific education. For example, biological. I really need this now...

1965–1997

2.

These are notes about Marshak’s lyrical epigrams.

– Do you know Marshak? – Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky asked me, a fourteen-year-old poet.

This was in 1942.

Who doesn't know him! I remember the poems I read as a child, satirical lines in newspapers, on posters - we perceived them as encouraging news from the front.

- No, you don’t know Marshak!

And Chukovsky reads:

The sparrow fed the cuckoo -
Homeless chick
And take him and kill him
Adoptive father!

I will always remember the epigram. She inspires hope. This means that even now you can write no worse than the classics. It is difficult to learn from the classics; the classics are an unattainable example. And suddenly such a model is created by a contemporary, a person with whom you can meet and ask how he managed it. True, this is a translation of the Jester's song from King Lear. And yet, how alive today’s poems are!

“That’s true, my dear,” Marshak confirmed when we met. – By translating, I had in mind one of my former students.

For Marshak - and he would not have lived a day without classics, Russian and world - it is important that an example of these classics, original or translated, be given by one of his contemporaries.

“Greek Epigrams” translated by L. V. Blumenau became such a model for Marshak. They were published in 1935 at the insistence of Gorky. Marshak read one of them especially often. And to his guests and writers who listened to his report on satire during the war: “Some two verses of a Greek epigram about a small incident that happened more than two thousand years ago still delight us with their poignancy, an accurate sense of time and place.

Once Antiochus had a chance to see the mattress of Lysimachus,
And from then on Lysimachus did not see his mattress.

In addition to the sense of time and place, besides the poignancy, what is captivating here is the author’s inner freedom, his cheerful superiority over worldly goods, his mischief in stately attire.

And another example that inspired more than one Marshak in the 30s and 40s. “The history of literature,” he writes in the article “The Handwriting of a Century, the Handwriting of a Generation,” “knows of poets who became famous exclusively for their translations. Such, for example, are the translators of Omar Khayyam - the Englishman Edward Fitzgerald and the Russian Ivan Tkhorzhevsky ... "

Both of them masterfully translated miniatures with enormous content. This kind of fame, apparently, initially suited the “adult” Marshak, lyric poet. Express time and yourself, reach the level of classics through translations. He even passed off one of his quatrains as a translation, or as a simple imitation of ancient models:

The burden of love is heavy, even if carried by two.
Nowadays I alone carry our love with you.
I guard my share and yours jealously and sacredly,
But for whom and why, I myself cannot say.

But when the poet experienced the same loss, the quatrain was taken away from the Greeks and Romans and became part of Marshak’s lyrical epigrams.

The Greek word "epigram" simply means inscription. But in our minds it is firmly associated with something stinging, stinging like a mosquito, or striking like an arrow.

What, prose writer, are you bothering about?
Give me any idea you want:
I'll get her hooked from the end
I'll sing a flying rhyme,
I'll put it on a tight string,
I will bend the obedient bow into an arc,
And then I’ll send you away,
And woe to our enemy!

That's how Pushkin's image epigrams. This is how she established herself in Russian poetry. And before the ancient word “epigrams” Marshak had to put the definition “lyrical”. But the most remarkable thing is that for lyrical epigrams, the poet can borrow an idea from a prose writer and sharpen it from the end. The prose writer who gave thoughts to Marshak the lyricist turned out to be Marshak the critic, the author of articles on poetry and children's literature. Pushkin is right: poetry at times actually surpasses prose in what prose is very strong at - in the expression of thought.

- Only in great secret! - Marshak said in 1963 in Yalta, when I read to him, half-blind, the proof of a book of his articles, “Education in Words.” But let's digress a little.

Oh, this is Marshakov’s “big secret!” After the war they sang everywhere:

Migratory birds are flying
To look for the gone summer,
They fly to hot countries...
And I don't want to fly away.

- Only in big secret, my dear! – Marshak was shaking with laughter. - This is the song of a domestic goose.

Marshak really loved the author of the poems and did not want the joke to get to him. But he found it funny that wild geese, cranes, rooks, finches, larks, nightingales were suddenly reproached for a lack of patriotism, although Isakovsky, of course, had something completely different in mind.

But let's return to Yalta. Marshak gives me a proof of the article “On Linear Measures.”

– Read more carefully. Does this place remind you of anything?

And I read: “Deliberate musicality, like deliberate imagery, is most often a sign of the collapse of art.

Music and images come out here, like sugar in candied jam.”

Fathers, a lyrical epigram written almost yesterday:

Parnassus cannot live without music,
But the music is in your poem
So she came out, for show,
Like the sugar from last year's jam.

The article says how not to, but having “sharpened” the thought from the end, the poet also showed how to write. Music also appeared: in these “z-z-s” with which the quatrains are stitched, you can really hear the buzzing of flies and the itching of wasps over a jar of jam.

And here is the article “Free verse and freedom from verse.” So, “what, prose writer, are you bothering about”? Here's what it's about: " The best traditions– these are the mountains above which true innovation should rise like a peak. Otherwise it will turn out to be a small, insignificant mound.”

And above the mountains of poetic tradition another peak appears:

Over the past, like over a mountain range,
Your art rises to the top,
And without a ridge of history, gray
Your art is an ant mound.

By expressing an instruction, the poet at the same time implements it. How many calls have we heard to learn from Pushkin! Including from Marshak. He even pointed out exactly what it was for.

A cloud is moving across the sky
A barrel floats on the sea.

“Here,” writes Marshak, “there are very few words - everything is in cross. But how huge both the sky and the sea seem to us due to the lack of details, occupying an entire line in the verses. And how is it not accidental that the sky is placed in the top line, and the sea in the bottom!”

But if the top line of a couplet can become the sky, and the bottom line the sea, then with the help of four lines you can create an entire universe. And like a child running in the rain with the cry “rain, rain, stop!”, the poet commands both verses and elements at once:

Let the top line be the sky,
And in the second clouds swirl,
The rain is pouring down through the third one on the lower one,
And a child’s hand catches the drops.

In the article, Marshak calls on us to learn from Pushkin, and in a lyrical epigram, under the guise of instruction, he himself shows how this is done. At the same time, he used the rubaiyat form, a tradition of Omar Khayyam, whom he loved so much:

Four lines exude poison,
When an evil epigram lives in them,
But the wounds of the heart are healed by the Rubaiyat -
Quatrains of old Khayyam.

It sounds as if old Khayyam is still alive, as is another great old man:

Old Shakespeare did not immediately become Shakespeare,
It wasn’t long before he stood out from the crowd,
Centuries have passed while he is the whole world
He was elevated to the title of Shakespeare.

According to Marshak, both “old men” did the same job:

That life is a struggle between people and fate,
The world heard from the ancient sages.
But with the hour hand of the East
Shakespeare connected the minute.

The poet of the 20th century in one quatrain made friends between the West and the East, Shakespeare and Khayyam, just as they are friends in our souls. Pushkin did the same. In 1836, he saw a statue of a young man playing pile, sculpted by A.V. Loganovsky:

A young man, full of beauty, tension, alien effort,
Slender, light and powerful, he enjoys playing fast!

And then he made friends between young Rus' and ancient Hellas:

Here's your comrade, discus thrower! He's worthy, I swear
Hugging with you, resting after the game.

More than two millennia are no obstacle to friendship!

The same is true in Pushkin’s “Monument”. Friendship and brotherhood are stronger than time and space, national, religious and other barriers. Pushkin made friends between Horace’s plan and Derzhavin’s lines, ancient mythology (“O Muse”) with the Gospel (“mercy for the fallen”) and the Koran, where, according to Pushkin, “there are many sound thoughts,” and one of them: “don’t argue with a fool.” . A Slav will make friends with a Finn, a Tungus, a Kalmyk, who in Pushkin’s times were respectively Orthodox, Protestant, pagan and Buddhist. They will be united by what is above all partitions - poetry, thirst for knowledge, mercy and aversion to stupidity, cruelty and evil.

“Lyrical Epigrams” is Marshakov’s monument, his testament. And at the same time - fugitive, fleeting thoughts, born in letters, articles, reports, friendly conversations.

January 1961. Response to the teacher’s letter: “I feel sorry for the boy whose teacher forbade him to answer in his own words, and not according to the textbook. Of course, you can’t raise a real person this way.” The idea of ​​this danger resulted in a lyrical epigram:

He pestered the adults with the question “why?”
He was nicknamed "the little philosopher."
But as soon as he grew up, they began to
Present answers without questions.
And from now on he is no one else
I didn’t bother you with the question “why?”

Marshak, almost before all the poets, spoke about the year 2000. In 1936, at the First Meeting on Children’s Literature at the Central Committee of the Komsomol, he said: “Talking with our reader, whose childhood took place in the thirties of our century, we are dealing with a person of the fifties, sixties, seventies.” Here he looked forty years ahead.

And in the middle of the century, visiting a tree nursery, he thought aloud about the third millennium, when tiny future seedlings will become mighty trees:

I saw a miracle of miracles:
In the garden beds
The forest swayed in front of me
Year two thousand.

In the early 60s, looking at the new readers of “Children in a Cage,” “Circus,” “Abstracted,” he suddenly felt how far his, Marshak’s, influence and even physical presence extended through time:

My special kind of reader:
He can walk under the table.
But I'm glad to know that I know you
Congratulations to the reader of the year two thousand!

Looking forward again forty years. And what will they, the readers of 2000, be their favorite, authoritative, wise old poets? Naturally, they will have to be the young poets of the 60s.

In the 20-30s, Marshak was looking for new children's poets. He and the children needed them immediately. I had to look for them anywhere, even in the most adult poetry.

“When the Oberiuts appeared,” said Marshak, “I decided to recruit them into children’s poetry. After all, their play with words and images is much more necessary for children than for adults. I started going to their evenings. The performances began like this: they went on stage, sat down at the table and ate cabbage soup in complete silence. They thought that this would shock the public. But the time was not very satisfying. The people looked at them: let the guys eat up... I didn’t notice how, leaving these evenings, I began to compose something strange:

The trees are drooping from the heat,
Thunder rumbled across the sky,
Imbecile on a motorcycle
I went to a madhouse.
For some reason crazy
This house was called
Distinguished in the past
A wonderful mind.

Well, I think, who recruited whom—me them or they me? Then they all worked in our children's editorial office - Kharms, Vvedensky, and Zabolotsky...

Marshak takes out a photograph: Kharms, elegant, with a pipe in his mouth, against the backdrop of Leningrad roofs.

– Kharms and I became friends. He was an eccentric. One day he was given a table service for twelve people, designed for twenty changes. Separate dishes for fish, for this, for that, all sorts of tureens, milk jugs, gravy boats. On Kharms’s birthday, exactly twelve people were sitting at the table. All twenty changes were served, everything that was required: appetizers, soup, meat, fish, dessert. And it was a hungry time. Where does such luxury come from? But the fact is that the service was a doll's one. Cutlet with a match head. But everything is real! And he was surrounded by eccentrics. Weird people are lucky. No one had a telephone, but Kharms did. One crazy inventor came to call him: “Hello! Academician Komarov? This is so-and-so speaking. What? Is he not there? Oh, what a pity! Hello! Academician Karpinsky? This is so-and-so speaking. What? No? Oh, what a pity!” Once this inventor said to me: “Samuel Yakovlevich, why don’t you rest in a madhouse? Most interesting personalities! Complete freedom of expression!” I say: “Darling, they won’t take me there!” “I’ll teach you, it’s very simple. Enter the doctor’s office and say: “You are a doctor, and I am a rook.” And you are already there!

Here Marshak returned his thoughts to 1937. The children's editorial office was destroyed and some of the editors were arrested. Marshak was very sorry for his children's university, for the little poets, for traveling with them on a ship along the Volga, for going to places where adults worked. In this whole story, he most of all felt sorry not even for himself and his associates, but for the children, the readers...

I don’t remember exactly his stories, I’m careful not to mention his last name. Everything was here. Some have creative differences with Marshak (they found the time and place to resolve them!). Others have long-standing grievances against editors, a desire to distinguish themselves, to expose, to show off their vigilance. “Marshak,” one writer shouted, “crossed out entire pages from my historical-revolutionary story, and tried to write anti-Soviet hints in their place. What was it like for me, young and inexperienced, to fight such a seasoned pest? But I fought, comrades, I fought!” Fortunately, the manuscript with Marshak's edits was in the editorial safe. Marshak took it out, began to compare what was with what had become, captivated the meeting and turned the formidable tribunal almost into a production meeting...

Now, in this sense, he was calm about the fate of the young poets. But something worried him and tormented him. In the early 60s, he was no longer thinking about new children’s poets, but about young lyricists, about those who could captivate and had already captivated young and mature people...

“You have to make fires,” Marshak often repeated, “and the fire falls from the sky.” And so the fire of inspiration fell not only on the poetic thoughts of the old articles, but also on the article about young poets, which Samuil Yakovlevich was preparing for the “New World” for the upcoming meeting of young people.

Lyrical epigrams, and this is one of the most difficult genres, were written easily in 1962, but the article on young poets moved slowly. “It’s very difficult to write about them,” Marshak told one of his correspondents. There were no such complaints regarding lyrical epigrams.

One thing bothered him. What is this – “the desire for the greatest brevity inherent in age” or “the last drops of a drying up stream”? What if this is a young thirst to create something unprecedented? “I’ve been able to translate for a long time,” the letter says, “but I would like to again take on something that I don’t yet know how to do, that I haven’t yet fully mastered.” He had been able to write articles for a long time. And so, from the drafts of articles about young poets, lyrical epigrams began to fly out.

And again, I am happy to show readers how poetry is born from prose. What if this comes in handy for young poets!

So, prose: “The poet, like any artist, has two sources of power. One of them is life, the other is art itself. Without the first there is no second. It is not without reason, as we have seen, that during the fall of the culture of verse, poetry loses not only the style and diversity of its forms and means, but also the ability to see, hear and feel the life around us.”

And now, as they say, listen to the same melody performed by a violin:

Art nourishes life with its key.
Your other key is poetry itself.
One stalled - there was no feeling in the poems,
The other is forgotten - your line is silent.

He had already managed to sort out the poems of Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, submitted an excerpt about Vinokurov to print, and made extracts from many of our books. In essence, he wanted us not to yield to the classics, to write exemplary works, setting ourselves the most high goals. And for this we must become excellent people: “The nurse cares not so much about her milk as about her health. There will be health - and the milk will be good.

So, a writer should first of all take care of his spiritual and moral health.”

Poems about this apply not only to writers:

Spare neither strength nor feelings for your neighbors,
He who gives receives more,
There is no milk in the mother's breast,
When she weans the child.

While working on the article and constantly communicating with young poets, Marshak moved from instructions to action. He himself began to create what he demanded of us. He himself appeared as he would like each of us to see.

It turns out that his mentorship, even his old age, is something like makeup imposed by time and circumstances. He no longer needs this role. And this is what he shared with us:

“In Pushkin’s dramatic works there are two similar episodes.

In the scene at the fountain, Grigory Otrepyev admits to the ambitious Marina Mnishek that he is not a prince, although this confession is both unprofitable and dangerous for him. But he does not want the “proud Pole” to love the imaginary prince in his person, and not himself.

In “The Stone Guest,” Don Juan, having achieved a meeting with Donna Anna, confesses to her that he is not Don Diego, by whose name he named himself, but Don Juan, the murderer of the commander, her husband.

Such a careless, rash confession should push Donna Anna away from him and could destroy him, but he is jealous of the woman he loves for who he claims to be, he needs her to love him, precisely him - Don Juan.”

But Marshak is now not worried about the Impostor or Don Guan, but about our poetic destinies:

“These are the real poets. They appear before readers not as mummers, but with their entire authentic biography, their character and worldview. And if readers love him just like that - without rouge and fancy dress - he will rejoice at his success.”

And now Marshak is no longer a mentor, but one of us. How can he express his cherished thoughts in dry prose if he has a verse that sparkles like a sword in the hands of the same Don Juan! “Give me whatever thought you want...” The thought is given. And this is how it shone, becoming poetry:

Pushkin has an impostor in love
The Pole reveals his deception,
And Pushkin’s Spaniard admits,
That he is not Don Diego, but Juan.
One is jealous of his dead lady,
Another to the fake Diego - Donna Anna...
So the poet needs to avoid makeup,
It was not a false mask, but he himself was loved.

Almost four times fewer words were needed for poetry than for prose! By the way, here, without a mask and without makeup, Marshak himself appears in the role of an amazing interlocutor. How many aphorisms, how many unexpected, such poetic turns of thought, and all this - for one person, drowned in a leather chair at his desk! And how many poems were read, others’ and our own! It seemed that a little more - and his own thoughts, puns, paradoxes, which his conversation was full of, would themselves turn into poetry.

One of these witty puns, which did not even make it onto paper, was preserved in the recordings of the Crimean radio. It was told to me by A.I. Marshak, grandson of the poet:

The one who took the bribe
They took a bribe for this.
But also to the one who gave,
They gave something for this.

But let's return to the article about young people. Lyrical epigrams, one might say, “ruined” her. If they are written, what to do with the prose passages in the article from which they arose? It is impossible, after translating prose into poetry, to leave the “interlinear” ones. What then remains in the article? Detailed analyzes? Marshak is not sure whether they are needed at all:

“You can feel a young poet or not, accept him or not.

And to consider his poems as a student’s notebook, underlining the lines and warning the author with exclamation marks in the margins, is useless and even offensive, unless we are dealing with the first timid attempt of a beginner.”

And Marshak quotes himself:

My friend, why talk about youth
Are you announcing to the reading public?
He who has not yet begun is not a poet,
And whoever has already started is not a beginner.

The conversation went on as equals. The younger one is already “my friend”, the older one is on a first name basis with him. And if so, then the article, in essence, is no longer needed. Instead, a book of lyrical epigrams is written. After all, poetry best arguments in a dispute about poems, they are also models for the master’s young friends. Those who want, those who can, will learn. But there was one more circumstance due to which Marshak stopped working on the article about the young.

- Darling, take care of your sonority!

When I wrote my memoirs in 1965, I was not just embarrassed to say that these words were addressed to me. After all, this call was followed by something that would never have been published in those days.

“Ahead,” continued Marshak, “is literary timelessness.” Thoughts and feelings remain, but the sound fades, the sonority disappears even in best poets, as it was after the death of Pushkin.

He feared timelessness not only literary, but, frankly speaking, he still did not think that the stagnation would last so long.

“They steal, my dear,” Samuil Yakovlevich consoled me. - They steal.

An amazing prediction! In my youth, I believed that there was, so to speak, pure bureaucracy with fanatical service to the circular, disinterested formalism. But Marshak knew that any bureaucracy serves someone’s profit, someone’s petty goals.

Times were changing quickly... “Write about me!” – Marshak heard more and more often from writers who came to him. And even: “Scold me, praise me, I don’t care, just write. “They’ve been talking too little about me lately.”

He saw everything worse, but he read poetry in periodicals with particular greed. Chukovsky in those years established main disease of our language - clerk. Marshak increasingly found signs of clericalism even in the purest lyricism, not to mention poetic journalism. He read such poems, even the most seemingly lame ones, very convincingly with the accent of the St. Petersburg Germans.

– Writes about the village? So what? - he said about some poetess. – The intonations are still not Russian. She probably had a German woman on her estate!

The German accent made the clerical phrases in the poems funny, somehow enlivened and warmed them. Here are someone's lines - what were you thinking? About Hiroshima!

The Japanese man went down the steps
Consider your situation.
Suddenly - a terrible explosion! He immediately evaporated
He became a gas, disappearing into oblivion.

- Bureaucratic intonations! They can be found even in the most exquisite poems about love. Complete indifference to what they write! Apparently, they compose for some of their own practical needs.

He borrowed the accent from his housekeeper Rosalia Ivanovna. At this time, she began to experience unusual things.

- Rosalia Ivanovna! Find out the first name and patronymic of the first secretary of the Pskov regional party committee and connect me with him!

Samuil Yakovlevich shows me a letter from a village boy from the Ostrovsky district of the Pskov region with the address: “Dear grandfather Marshak!” Another and yet unexpected paroxysm of the struggle against private farms after the recent social upsurge. The boy's family was deprived of a cow-nurse.

The cow was returned. But children’s letters from the Pskov region about cows poured into “Grandfather Marshak’s” office.

– I have already returned a whole herd to the Pskov people! – he laughed. - And what a peasant mind: there are not two letters from the same region, all from different ones. There is no collusion, they say. Each child completely accidentally came up with the idea of ​​writing to me. Another letter? Gdovsky district? This means that the cow has already been returned to Porkhovsky! By the way, why didn’t the devastated village rush into children’s literature? The deal is quite profitable!

Strange things happened to literature too.

- Darling Novella! - Marshak rejoiced at the poems of the then very young Novella Matveeva. - Listen!

And these houses are without roofs
As if they were going somewhere
Let's go,
We sailed.
As if they were
Not houses, but ships.

How well she said about the city! And what faith in the future! I also had a line in my youth poems: “These are not houses, but ships.” Various poets in different eras no, no, and they will see the city like this. And Mayakovsky floated in a “boat room”.

Novella Matveeva dedicated her poem for children “Sunny Bunny” to Marshak:

I dance to everyone, I sing to everyone...

How some zealots of Russian literature cackled when, at the infamous meeting of N.S. Khrushchev and the creative intelligentsia, one responsible speaker quoted this statement of the Sunny Bunny as an example: this is, they say, to what abstract humanism and forgiveness individual authors have sunk.

- Some evil envious person slipped it to him! This should not be printed! – Marshak was indignant. - Rosalia Ivanovna! Connect me with the first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee. ...Sergey Pavlovich! Someone slipped today's speaker lines from Novella Matveeva's children's poems and passed them off as sedition. The poems are dedicated Sunny Bunny and to me, I vouch for them. The novella is the discovery of the Komsomol. Remember the strip of her poems in Komsomolskaya Pravda? It was a miracle! Don't let her be offended! Make sure her name is not in the newspapers tomorrow!

“If they again look for sedition in poetry,” said Marshak, “then real criticism loses its meaning.” My comments to young poets may be used for purposes that are not at all creative. In this situation, I am ready to defend even the latest abstractionist. There will be no article about young poets!

The beast in the tamer should not smell meat.
Mighty lion is afraid
Before the unknown, when the living mass
The trainer has it on his shoulders.

The words “before the unknown” belong to me. I don’t remember what stood in their place, but Marshak was dissatisfied with this line and literally demanded advice from everyone on how to improve it. Many epigrams were remembered instantly. Strict instructions, but delivered in such a way that one could not help but enjoy them:

- Only in big secret, my dear! - And Marshak, looking around, reads me the lines in a half-whisper:

All those who breathe on earth,
With all their conceit -
Just reflections in the glass
No more, no less.

What people have I known in the world!
They had so much passion
But they are from the surface of mirrors
It was as if it had been washed away with a rag.

I know we're doomed
To death with birthday.
But why should they suffer?
All these reflections?

A few months later, after the death of Samuil Yakovlevich, the ending of these verses was found:

And is it really just a dream?
All these colors, sounds,
And the roar of millions of tons,
And the groan of death agony?..

But this dying poem by Marshak is surprisingly close to the riddle he composed for young children at the same time.

Even though he didn't leave for a moment
Since your birthday,
You haven't seen his face
But only reflections.

The answer to the riddle is yourself. The sad secret of nature turned into a cheerful children's riddle. And the same Parker pen on Marshak’s table, with which he wrote his last lyrical epigrams in his favorite black ink, turned into the same mystery:

In a snowy field along the road
My one-legged horse is rushing
And for many, many years
Leaves a black mark.

The book “Lyrical Epigrams” was published without him.

Berestov's story about Samuil Marshak: