Martynov Leonid Nikolaevich.

Instead of a preface

“Poetry as magic” is the title of one of his poems by Leonid Martynov. The same definition applies to the work of L. Martynov himself. Having created his poetic “Lukomorye”, playing his “magic flute”, the poet himself turned into a wizard-creator, without losing the ground under his feet, without straying into empty daydreaming. “An artist comes into the world to see the world anew...” - this is how Martynov defined the poet’s calling. “In poetry, I value more uniqueness, be it the uniqueness of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” or the poems of Mayakovsky or Akhmatova, in a word, everything that does not so much follow from tradition as gives rise to it; I love creators, not imitators.”
There were and are imitators of Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Brodsky... But there are no imitators of Martynov!

The poet has not been with us for a quarter of a century, but his “magic flute” sounds as modern as ever. His flute has many timbres and registers: topicality, archaism, philosophy, history...
At the same time, L. Martynov’s poetry is not idle reading. Many of his poems require mental work, reading in the full meaning of the word. You can’t say it more precisely than Martynov himself:

There are books -
Take a look at some of them
And you will shudder:
Isn't it us?
Reading
They!

May 22, 2005 marks one hundred years since the birth of Leonid Nikolaevich Martynov. This publication is dedicated to this event.

M. Orlov

Birth of a poet

L.N. Martynov was born on May 9 (22), 1905 in the city of Omsk into a mixed family. Father Nikolai Ivanovich is a communications technician. Mother Maria Grigorievna (nee Zbarskaya) is the daughter of a military engineer, a teacher.
The poet's early childhood was spent in his father's service car. Only before the First World War, Leonid Martynov’s father finally settled in Omsk and went to serve in the Siberian Railway Administration. The Martynovs lived in the former house of the exiled settler Adam Waltz, on Nikolskaya Street (now Krasny Zori Street).
Here is what V. Dementyev, a researcher of his biography and creativity, wrote about Leonid Martynov’s adolescence: “The paths of an avid book reader led him, even before entering the gymnasium, to city libraries. He entered the men's gymnasium of the city of Omsk as a varied and widely prepared young man. The high school student Martynov was easily taught ancient and modern languages, history, geography, and the humanities in general. However, his spiritual and moral formation was influenced to an even greater extent by the atmosphere of city life, home, family... Nikolskaya and nearby streets, as well as the nearby Cossack Bazaar, allowed the teenager to acutely feel
an amazing mixture of languages, customs, morals, and clothes of the inhabitants of these city quarters, inhabited by artisans, small employees, and homeowners like Adam Waltz. Here the bell of a tiny church sounded and the ringing of a tram was heard, the caps of horseshoes of draymen, and in the market square the fox malakhai of the Kyrgyz, the velvet caps of Kazakh women flashed, Cossack hats and the caps of exiled artisans were visible.” Perhaps even then the idea of ​​proximity, simultaneity on the scale of culture of the most distant concepts, phenomena, and eras was ripening in young Martynov.
The First World War began.

So far away, in the wilderness, in Siberia,
The people looked at the people -
In ideas about the world
A revolution was brewing...

(“No matter how much you move there...”)

Martynov's first poems were written under the influence of the poetry of I. Annensky, V. Bryusov, A. Bely, A. Blok, M. Kuzmin, Y. Baltrushaitis, I. Severyanin and other poets.

According to contemporaries, Martynov greeted October with enthusiasm. Being a direct witness to revolutionary events, the poet repeatedly turned to the events of that era in his work. But enthusiasm did not prevent the poet from seeing revolutionary events in all their diversity and inconsistency.

Protruded chins
Knocked fists...
It was in a workers' settlement
Over the granite side of the river.

__
so with V. Dementiev

Pharaoh captured:
“Come on, let’s get here!”
Now is not the time
Over the granite side of the river.

And the conversation is short -
Without saying a word...
It was in a workers' settlement
In the flames of October...

(“Protruded chins…”)

This poem was written by Martynov when he was fifteen years old!
And at sixteen he writes:

Pentagonal stars
Instead of hearts we have.
A dream of prosperity
We operate on evil
We are waiting so that the fires do not burn
The future has bloomed.
And pretend to be stupid -
Life is more painful for smart people...

(“We are involuntary futurists...”, option)

Late at night the city is deserted
With bertholetta outbreaks of winter.
A gentle girl smells like sheepskin,
And she has mittens and pimas on.

Tender girl of the new faith -
Rough blush on the hollows of the cheeks,
And she has revolvers in her pockets,
And on the hat there is a scarlet badge.

Maybe take a grenade just in case?
Will be remembered for thousands of years
Short fur coat fur is hot, prickly
And a cyclopean maiden trail.

(“Late at night the city is deserted…”)

In Omsk, as we know, Kolchak’s headquarters was located. In 1919, Martynov writes:

Kolchak's vassals are fleeing,
Dressed in animal skins,
And a deserter from a tavern
Looks at the death of the dictatorship.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the forest was purple, and the snow became pink,
And it was a pink night
And from the retreating convoys
Dead bodies fell.

Behind the explosion is an explosion over the battlefield
He took off as a rival to the moon,
And this battle covered the past,
And the day has come
In another country.

A little later (in 1924), Martynov wrote the poem “The Admiral’s Hour,” dedicated to the stay of Kolchak’s army in Omsk.
Since the early twenties, Martynov has worked as an operational journalist for various newspapers in Omsk. At one time he worked with the famous writer Sergei Zalygin, who recalled: “My God, what routine essays I wrote and what extraordinary ones he wrote! Already by the material itself, they are extraordinary, peculiar only to him and no one else.
Here he writes about a lifeguard at a water station on the Irtysh, who, not knowing how to swim himself, but managing the boat well and using the gear he himself invented, has already saved several people.
And they scolded him at editorial meetings: what does he write? Where does it dig? “The lifeguard doesn’t know how to swim, these are comrades, it’s a shame, and our correspondent makes such a person almost a positive hero!” ...We needed an essay about what was “typical” and completely understandable for the reader; criticism of his essays boiled down to this: “The reader will not understand!”...

Martynov recalled about these times:

Buddy, you gave away your youth
You are a gift to editorial idleness.
Newspaper guy you think nonpareil, -
I laughed while reading your article.
Should you touch on departmental topics?
After all, our days the cinema is crackling,
After all, Gepeu is our thoughtful biographer -
And he is not able to keep track of everything.

(“Correspondent”, excerpt, 1927)

The line “after all, Gepeu is our thoughtful biographer” turned out to be prophetic for Martynov. On July 2, 1932, he was convicted by a Special Meeting of the Collegium of the former OGPU under Art. 58-10 of the Criminal Code for deportation for three years to Vologda. And although in Vologda Martynov worked as a chronicler in the newspaper “Red North”, he was surrounded by a “thoughtful biographer” until the last days of his life. (The poet was rehabilitated nine years after his death - in 1989.) During this period, Martynov published his poems under the pseudonym Martyn Leonidov. The poet himself called the reason for his exile: “I was persecuted for wearing a fabulous doha.”
In Vologda, L. Martynov met his future wife, Nina Anatolyevna Popova, who at that time worked as a secretary-typist in the editorial office of the newspaper “Red North”.

A host of moths around a household
Fluttered in an impatient round dance,
But, not allowing moths to approach you,
The housekeeper closed the windows,
And to me, the guest bestowed by fate,
He opened the doors also reluctantly.
I realized that night tea
Not organized for me.

I got it.
What was to be done?
I came in.
He sat down at the table without invitation.
Thick blackberry jam
The sugar-coated eye stared;
And the pies puffed, condemning;
And the samovar began to bubble like a Tula one
The police officer, covered in medals for his zeal, -
As if I would drink everything, devour everything!

"She arrived!" - said the artist.
And so I wait: an angel pursing his lips,
Breathing patchouli, rustling cambric,
It will flutter out to the table in an old manner.

But you came in...
I remember clearly
How did you come in - neither an angel nor a devil,
And a warm healthy creature,
An unwitting guest like me.
His wife?
No! This is talk, lies.
Born in the musty darkness of home,
To him, who has dried up like a staff,
Never kiss such a wife!

I got it.
Just one thing only
I couldn’t understand how I knew
Your face, your eyes, and lips,
And the hair falling on your forehead?
I shouted:
"I saw you once,
Although I have never seen you.
But nevertheless I saw you today,
Although I haven’t seen you today!”
And, repeating:
“I saw you somewhere,
Although I haven’t seen...
Tea?
No thanks!"
I got up and left
I went out onto the veranda,
Where moths scurried furiously.

You screamed:
“Come back at once!”
I opened the door to the veranda wide,
And forty thousand burst into the room
Moths dancing in the cool.
Those moths jostled and tumbled,
Knocking pollen off each other's wings,
And they would make you dizzy,
If only I didn't look into your eyes.

(“Sunflower”, excerpt)

In 1935, after the end of their exile, the Martynovs returned to Omsk. I will quote the already mentioned V. Dementyev: “The Martynovs lived, as before, in the same house that once belonged to Adam Waltz, in a room converted from the former hallway. It was here, in this nook, as Leonid Martynov called the room, where there was a bed and a table for work, illuminated even during the day by an electric lamp, that the poem “The True Story of Uvenkai” was written.
In the same years, before the war, Martynov wrote three more poems: “The Tobolsk Chronicler”, “Russian Engineer”, “The Story of Vasily Tyuments”. The main characters of his poems are truth-seekers, ready to make any sacrifices in the name of justice and truth, and the poems themselves are historical chronicles.
By the end of the thirties, Martynov was already known not only in Siberia, but also in both capitals. In 1940, his book “Poems” was published by the Moscow publishing house “Soviet Writer”. A prominent place in Martynov’s work of this period is occupied by the poem “We noticed that a passerby was walking around the city...”.

Noticed -
Is there a passerby walking around the city?
Have you met -
A passerby walks around the city,
Probably a newcomer, not like us?
Sometimes he will appear close, sometimes in the distance,
Either in a cafe or in a post office a department will flash.
He puts a ten-kopeck piece into the slot of the machine,
He twists the shaky circle of the dial with his finger
And he always starts talking about one thing:
“Calm down, take comfort - I’ll be leaving soon!”
It's me!
I turned thirty-three years old.
I entered your apartment from the back door.
I slept on shabby sofas with friends,
Bowing your head on family albums.
In the mornings I left the bathroom.
“This is a guest,” you briefly explained to your neighbor
And along the way they started a conversation with me:
“How long will you be visiting us again?”
- "I will leave soon"
- “Why? Visit. Will you come for dinner?
- "No".
- “There’s no need to rush. Have some tea.
Take a rest and, by the way, play the flute.”
Yes! I had such a magic flute.
I wouldn’t sell that flute for millions of rubles.
I learned only one of the songs on it:
“In the distant Lukomorye there is a wonderful palace!”
This is what I played on the flute in the evenings.
I urged: understand, understand,
Tell your friends, whisper to your neighbor,
But, friends, hurry up, I’ll be leaving soon!
I'll go where the emeralds burn,
Where precious ores lie underground,
Where the balls of amber grow heavy by the sea.
Get ready with me there, to Lukomorye!
ABOUT! You won’t find a more wonderful land anywhere!
And then they appeared, excited by the song,
People. Different people. I've seen a lot of them.
One by one they appeared at the threshold.
I remember a certain builder strictly interrogated:
“Where is the palace? What are the outlines of the palace?
I also remember - a certain history teacher
He kept torturing: “Who was the conqueror of Lukomorye?”
And I couldn’t answer him coherently then...
Another planner appeared, claiming
That the resources of Luckrai are not so great,
To sing songs about them, playing the flute.
And the crested old man flew in the lionfish,
Directly associated with the Book Chamber:
“Lukomorye! Would you like to call me to Lukomorye?
You will find Lukomorye only in folklore!”
And the slacker in his striped pajamas
He laughed: “You are building castles in the air!”
And the neighbors, without participating in the dispute,
Behind the wall they said:
"A?"
- "What?"
- “Lukomorye?”
- “Flour grinder?”
- “What other fly agaric?”
- “What are you talking about? What's the story?
- “Washwash? In good order."
- “Don’t pour it on the floor!”
- “Wait - the neighbors are playing the flute!”
Flute, flute!
I willingly took you in my arms.
The children sat at my feet and made bows,
But, frowning, the mothers took them away:
“Your fairy tales, but the children are still ours!
First of all, you will be able to educate your own people,
And then call me on the flute in Lukomorye!”

(“We noticed a passerby walking around the city...”, excerpt)

This poem is included in all lifetime editions of the poet's poems. How good are the everyday phrases in this romantic poem, which is filled with modern realities. And how great the bureaucracy sounds! “Martynov boldly introduces newspaper and everyday vocabulary and intersperses it with regional sayings and ancient words. How gems sparkle with different facets of words in his poems. This creates such volume, as Gogol would say, “graininess” of the language,” the poet Evg enthusiastically commented on this poem. Vinokurov. The poems “Sunflower” and “We noticed a passer-by walking around the city...” are undisputed pearls of Russian poetry, written by an accomplished master. And the poet himself unambiguously states this, clearly drawing the line between the artist and the layman.
L.N. During this period, Martynov worked as an editor at the Omsk regional book publishing house.

Are you a king? Kings!

In the first and most intense months of the war, L. Martynov wrote a lot, wrote
inspired, he wrote with firm confidence in our final victory. His poems were collected in two books - “For the Motherland!” (1941) and "We'll Come!" (1942).
The most striking speech of the war years was his essay “Forward, for our Lukomorye.”
“Siberia came to win. She will win! - this is how the poet Georgy Suvorov clearly defined the meaning of the essay in his letter, which was attached to a separate edition of the essay.
In 1942, the poet was admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR.
An important milestone for Martynov was the publication of the collection of poems “Lukomorye” (“Soviet Writer”, 1945). The poet Nikolai Starshinov recalled: “...I remember how in 1945 his book “Lukomorye” was passed from hand to hand in the library of the Literary Institute named after A.M. It was impossible for Gorky to take her.
We were captivated by the unusualness of his poems, their free conversational element, wisdom, captivated by the poet’s smile - sometimes kind, sometimes ironic; fabulousness intertwined with the most reliable details of life.”
It was mentioned above that the poet was already “persecuted for wearing a fabulous doha.” When the Omsk publishing house published a book of poems, “The Ertsin Forest,” in 1946, the book was subjected to unbridled and unfair criticism. The circulation has gone under the knife! FOR THE NEXT NINE YEARS MARTYNOV WAS NOT PRINTED.

The world of envious and evil people
More and more viper, more and more dangerous...

Beauty is becoming more and more harmless,
Prettier and more beautiful.

So that they don't dare touch
And kill you from the world,
Show them a sharp claw -

Be sure that this
And it won’t defame you,
And it will puzzle the scoundrels!

And she laughs in response
So sad, it's like she's crying.
("Beauty")

The poet spends a whole decade translating. Hungarians Sándor Petőfi, Attila József, Gyula Iyes, Antal Gidas, Serbian Desanka Maksimovic, Poles Konstanze Galczynski, Adam Mickiewicz, Julian Tuwim, Czechs Jiri Volker and Vitezslav Nezval, Italian Salvatore Quasimodo, Chilean Pablo Neruda - this is not a complete list of poets translated by Martynov . Literary scholars have calculated that in total Martynov translated more than 100,000 poetic lines. This titanic work did not go unnoticed, but... by the government of the Hungarian People's Republic. In 1949 he was awarded the Hungarian Order of the Silver Cross, and in 1970 - the Order of the Golden Star.
The poet is forced to write on the “table”. It should be said that Martynov was neither a dissident nor an anti-Soviet and, of course, could write about “arable lands and construction sites.” The poet-thinker was worried about other, global, universal problems. Responding to his “persecutors,” the poet writes:

I understand!
And clearer and sharper
My life has become clearer
And amazing things
I saw around me.

Saw what he didn't see
Another armed eye
And what he hates to see:
I saw the world without embellishment!

The gaze covered the entire expanse of the earth,
Where it is cramped only for emptiness.
And he penetrated into the thicket of the forest,
Where there is nowhere to hide in the bushes.

I saw how it transformed
Love is a living being.
I saw time running
From those who decided to kill him.

I saw the shape of the wind
I have seen how deceiving calm can be.
I saw the body of a kilometer
Through the path dust.

Oh you who are in a gilded frame
You see the beauty of nature,
To compare meadows with carpets
And dew with diamonds, -

Look at the ground, at the air, at the water
And make sure I'm not lying
And browning nature
I don't want to and I can't.

Not gold - forest opal,
Moss cannot turn into brocade,
You can't put a coat on a poplar tree,
Don’t wrap alder in doha;

Don’t dress up birch trees as duckweeds,
To preserve their maiden honor.
Leave it! No need to worry
See the world as it is!

(“I understand...”, 1947)

Martynov later adds:

Poetry
Desperately complex
And many have struggled with this,
Shouting that only soil is needed,
Meaning only an ear of bread.

But sometimes, rummaging through the verbal rubble,
And where not a grain grows,
We discover it
That is
She's everywhere and it's not her fault
That, hiding equally in the earth and in the sky,
Like Erebus, crowning the South Pole,
Poetry is not a rebus, but it is free
Sound from any white spot,
Like long and medium wave,
And on the wave of short news and story!

(“Poetry is desperately complex…”)

At the end of the forties, Martynov became a resident of Moscow. Together with his wife, he settles in the area of ​​​​old Sokolniki in a dilapidated wooden house dating back to the end of the nineteenth century. V. Dementyev writes about this period of Martynov’s life: “Here, in Moscow, Leonid Martynov, to an immeasurably greater extent than in his youth, began to be occupied with general ideological issues... The appearance of the gigantic city attracted Martynov both with its cosmism and with its special - accelerated - passage of time , and with its miracles and transformations...”
Martynov was allowed to publish in 1955. His new collection was published under the modest title “Poems”, which received a huge public response.
The reader has been waiting for his “strange” lyrical hero, his complex semantic associations, his metaphorical language.

A. Pushkin in the sonnet “To the Poet” instructed his fellow writers: “You are a king!” And Martynov himself exclaimed in the poem “Tsar of Nature”: “O Tsar! I ask you: kings! And the poet reigned. At his desk, Martynov was the autocrat of the creative process:

Poems are not written out of humility.
And you can’t write them at anyone’s discretion.
They say that they can be written out of contempt.
No!
Only insight dictates them.

Of course, the poet was concerned not only with problems of creativity and attitude. He is the author of many lyrical works.

The day is over.
The blacksmith went home -
An acquaintance, even a distant relative of mine.
I finally stayed in the forge
One.
And so, bending over the anvil,
The key for eyes, for lips and for hearts
I forged it.
It shimmered like crystal
Even though it was steel, that steel was clean,
And your name was on the ring.
I opened my mouth to you first.
But immediately they were bound by dumbness -
They became so close to mine!
Here I opened your heart with a key,
To see what would be in it and was.
But the heart didn't say anything
What would I not know? You loved me.
And I decided to open your eyes
So that they could see everything until the grave.
But after a tear a tear fell...
I say: neither joy nor anger,
And tears clouded my eyes,
So that we both don’t miss anything!

("Key")

* * *
Kind woman,
Elderly,
She told me that she had a dream -
As if he had descended from the sky, blazing,
A ray of sunshine, and she caught it
In bare hands, and ticklishly, prickly
Electric current flowed through him...
She threaded the tip of the beam into a needle -
I decided to embroider some kind of flower,
Like silk...
And with that embroidery
The whole world admired it and was amazed.

A woman with sincere misunderstanding,
Timidly asked: “What is this dream for?”

I explained to her that this dream is in hand!
If I went to embroider in the sun -
This does not promise squabbles or boredom
And there will be no troubles here.
This is inspired by the free air!
After all, it is not capable of tearing or rotting
Even in the eye of this tight needle
Gorgeous light thread.
“Be prepared,” I said, “for luck!
Even the best seamstress would never dream of something like this
In a first-class large studio."

The woman said timidly:
"Yes you!"

("A Woman's Dream")

These poems are characteristic of L. Martynov. The juxtaposition of realities and fantasies (my distant relative is the key to hearts; an elderly woman went to embroider in the sun) creates a unique coloring and decoration, characteristic only of Martynov. Martynov was never a photographer of topicality, remaining an impressionist artist without falling into the abyss of abstraction. The poet made no secret of his method:

I was tormented
Difficult questions
Which I undertook to deliver,
And I flew away from everyday prose
Into poetry, as if into heaven.

But I can’t look at you like I’m a stranger
To this Earth, close in the distance,
And now I descend from the heights of heaven
Into poetry, as if into the depths of the Earth.

And don't blame me for being fickle
Oh, the sky of dreams, from whose formidable cliffs I descended
To the limit of the Earth, which is in space
Nothing short of a bundle of heaven!

("Piece of Heaven")

It would seem that L. Martynov lifted the curtain, forgive the cliché, of his “creative laboratory” - study, adopt! But so far no one has managed to do this!

If you read the poems of, say, S. Yesenin in chronological order, then even a non-literary critic will unmistakably feel the difference between the poems of the early Yesenin and the poems of the mature Yesenin. L. Martynov stands apart here too. Martynov's poems are chronologically indistinguishable. Having risen to the grandmaster level at the age of fifteen (using chess terminology), the poet never fell to the level of a first-class player. At that age when youths are just mastering rhymes like “blood - love”, “autumn - blue”, the poet created technically perfect,
“adults” on the topic, poetry. This phenomenon of Martynov is difficult to explain, because he grew up poetically in provincial Omsk, far from the poetic elite (and maybe this is the answer?). Apparently, S. Marshak was right when he wrote either jokingly or seriously:

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

Not without irony, Martynov wrote to those who tried to use algebra to believe his, Martynov’s harmony:

We create something out of something,
but what do we create from what?
It's not your concern, smart guys.
And this is the triumph of art!

(How can one not recall Akhmatova’s: “If only you knew from what kind of rubbish...”)

A few words about L.N.’s technique. Martynov.
A talented composer accurately determines the tonality of his future work, which allows him to reveal a particular musical theme. The same “feeling” was characteristic of Martynov. In his work we find almost all established forms and sizes: from couplets to poems, from iambic to hexameter, from metrical prose to free verse. Achieving perfection of one form or another, Martynov, however, never belonged to the camp of the “Acmeists” with their strictly set task of “poetic mastery.” Often, Martynov’s Muse left the iron cage of dogma and “rules” of versification. In this sense, the poem “Silence” (excerpt) is characteristic:

– Would you like to return to the Silence River?
- I would like to. On the night of freezing.
- But will you find a boat, at least one?
And is it possible to cross?
Through the dark Silence?
In the snowy twilight, on the night of freezing,
Won't you drown?
- I won’t drown!
I know a house in that city.
If I knock on the window, they will come out to meet me.
One acquaintance. She's not pretty.
I never loved her.
- Do not lie!
Did you love her!
- No! We are neither friends nor enemies.
I forgot about it.
So. I will say: although it seems to me,
That the crossing has been disrupted,
But I want to sail along the Silence River once again
In the snowy twilight, on the night of freezing...

Poet Evg. Vinokurov wrote: “Or this is the River Silence.” In a mysterious poem, written in a nervous, somehow breathless rhythm, there is such everyday, modern dialogue included, which gives this poem even more anxiety and mystery. I will express my own opinion: creating such a “nervous and breathless” rhythm is much more difficult than fitting into, say, Onegin’s stanza.
And the poet introduced elements of novelty into traditional forms. Back in 1921, he wrote the sonnet “Alla” (the poet was 16 years old):

You'll be leaving soon. At the station platform
The blizzard will beat into the locomotive chest.
As it flies away, the melted dregs will swirl.
I will return back, stumbling over the sleepers.

Red-eyed girl, white Alla,
Do not forget, when finishing the intended path,
Bend your waist through the carriage window,
Amazing how quickly Siberia ran away.

And, taking off on the black back of the Urals
And descending into the valley of starvation deaths,
Remember how we said goodbye wearily

We are with the sick smiles of smart children,
To meet again in the bustle of the carnival
Under the cheerful masks of old devils.

It is easy to notice that the sonnet is written not in iambic, traditional for a sonnet, but in anapest.
The following poem is typical for Martynov:

When Pompeii was excavated,
A number of voids were discovered in the ashes,
And people were at a loss, unable to
Some method, this or that,
Use it here to solve the riddle.
But they finally figured it out
Prepare a tub with gypsum solution,
Pour plaster into the hole like you would pour lead into a mold.
And this plaster, filling the void,
Frozen and took the shape of a body,
Which has long since decayed
In the arms of ashes, and not beauty
That cast showed, and the death throes
An inexpressibly clear picture -
The unfortunate Pompeii child,
Without taking your hands away from your eyes.

I saw this creepy statue
Reminding me of trouble.

And if I hear an empty sermon,
Anyone, no matter where,
And if I listen to empty stanzas,
And in front of the pointless canvas, -
I only think about one thing:
What is the cause of the disaster?

The first line of the poem is more like prose. Martynov often used a similar “zatak” (so often found in music). But here's a paradox: try to forget the first two lines of this poem. It won't work! Here we come into contact with the real secrets of the creator (“The work smells like art,” Martynov’s line).
The poet is not afraid to insert “non-poetic” words into the poem: tub, hole, mold. The combination of “high calm” and “prose of life” is Martynov’s favorite technique. Later this technique was widely used by I. Brodsky. But Brodsky’s level of “prose of life” sometimes dropped to naturalism, which gave a clearly expressed shade of cynicism and, in some cases, snobbery. Martynov always remained an intellectual and an optimist.
Martynov's language is rich: from folklore to scientific terms. And here Martynov is out of the ordinary. He managed to avoid stylization “like folklore” (which even N. Klyuev could not avoid). On the other hand, the poet never boasted of his learning, did not turn poetry into a rebus or a treatise (and this is already a “sin” of many modern authors). Martynov's poems are read without an encyclopedic dictionary. Verbal balancing act was alien to him: he did not write acrostics, palindromes, or other poems “for sight.” Martynov did not “scalp” word forms, as Khlebnikov did.
In Martynov’s poems there is no moralizing, no instructions, but some kind of unobtrusive moral string is constantly felt. The poet did not hide his opinion about some event or phenomenon and, at times, was categorical:

And the snake casually threw at me:
“Everyone has their own destiny!”
But I knew that this was impossible -
Live twisting and sliding.

The poet had the right to be so categorical - he lived his life exactly like this: without “twisting” or “sliding.”
In his poems, L. Martynov often resorted to extra-long meters with internal rhymes.

It is known that in the steppe region, in one ancient city,
lived Balmont - a justice of the peace.
Balmont had a family.
All people remember this house, which is next to the magistrate's court
stood on the river bank, in an ancient steppe city...

(Beginning of the poem “Poetry as Magic”)

____
– It is known that S. Yesenin wrote some poems in two stages. At the first stage, the poet created a perfect sketch, from the point of view of the “rules” of versification. At the second stage, the poet deliberately “spoilt” the poems: he introduced interruptions in the rhythm and even worsened the rhyme. It seems to me that L. Martynov also used this technique.

In modern poetry, long and extra-long meters are not a rare guest, but authors do not bother looking for internal rhymes, while the rhyming of line endings becomes almost invisible - the length of the lines is large (however, this technique has a right to exist).
Leonid Martynov was distinguished by an amazing sensitivity to the hidden possibilities of language and an unusually active, authoritative attitude towards the word. Martynov could add the most unexpected inflections to one verbal root - and then a miracle of verse arose:

Zhukhni,
Damn Bagryanych,
And one prophecy:
“There will be a moon, a sleigh! Everything else away!”

(“Devil Bagryanych”)

The instrumentation of some verses is amazing:

What I am writing?
Oh, I'm good at understanding what I'm writing,
Again and again transforming into a restless youth,
With students leaning towards the honey-brewed ladle
Much before drinking boiling punch with the Burshas.

("Much Before")

Are there many similar examples in Russian poetry? And again a piece of prose: “What am I writing? Oh, I understand well what I’m writing...”, and again “the beat”, and again these lines are not forgotten...
Prophecy in Martynov’s poetry is a topic for a separate study. Let's limit ourselves to a poem written a quarter of a century before Chernobyl:

Somewhere
The reactor has gone bad
And he released some particles.
One editor informed about this,
But the other one didn’t notify.
And some announcer shouted something,
And the other one doesn’t talk about it.
However, even if no one made a sound,
I still can’t remain silent!

("Somewhere…)

We will return everything back to eternity

In the seventies, several books by L. Martynov were published. He is a recognized poet. In 1971, Martynov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. In 1974, the poet was awarded the USSR State Prize and was awarded another Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and in 1976 - the Bulgarian Order of Cyril and Methodius.
The time has come to reflect on the path traveled and take stock.
At the end of his life, Martynov writes to his wife:

It's patched up
My shaggy sail
But it serves the ship well.
I love you.
What does old age have to do with it?
If I love you!

May be,
Both are left
In fact, this is all we need,
I love you so much that you worry
The sea is quiet at times...

Leonid Martynov in his book “The Knot of Storms” noted that the best poems are those that are written “in spite of everything.” V. Dementyev writes: “This “in spite of everything” was and remained his pathos and his spiritual support until the last days of his life, when adversity befell him one after another: his wife and faithful friend N.A. passed away. Martynova-Popova, illness and loneliness, it would seem, completely overpowered the poet. True, close friends helped Leonid Martynov with everything they could, but he provided incomparably greater help to himself, continuing to write “no matter what”! His life was the life of an ascetic...” A year before his death, the poet writes:

The time has come to assure
That I have no equal in strength,
It's time to moderate
Your mighty efforts.

It's time to clean up
A network of cobwebs in my father's house,
It's time to die
But it also passes, however!

("The Time Comes")

The poet's last prophecy:

We will return everything back to eternity -
Life, borrowed only and for nothing,
But let me, heaven, end with her during the day -
Strike once with sunstroke!

And the heavens heeded the poet’s prayers: L.M. Martynov died of a stroke (stroke) on June 21, 1980, and was buried at the Vostryakovsky cemetery.

A step has been taken.
Hasn't crunched yet
There is trampled dust under the soles,
And during this time the Earth flew by
More than a dozen miles...
Many some ancient stages,
Russian versts, Chinese versts -
All this is left somewhere behind
And you can’t turn the Earth back.
And don’t run ahead,
And you can’t squeeze her in your arms;
Begging or threatening
Still can't stop her -
This Earth
The land on which
The slag crunched under the micropores,
The earth that served as a support
To do
Next
Step!

APPLICATIONS

In a hundred years,
Or even after two hundred,
And even after almost a thousand,
Poets who are not missing
Once again we will be honored.

We will be resurrected, studied, interpreted,
Sometimes I sin with anachronisms...
But something is not particularly rejoicing
From this the immortal soul.

And we will not burst with delight, for
Consider us and take into account our experience
And earlier, of course, they could!
But in general -
Thank you for the honor!

Leonid Martynov

L. Martynov

The window looks out onto white trees.
The professor looks at the trees for a long time
and looks at the trees for a very long time
and the chalk crumbles in his hand for a very long time.
After all, it's simple -
division rules!
Forgot - to think -
division rules.
Error!
Yes!
Error on the board!
We all sit differently today,
and listen and look differently,
Yes, and now it’s impossible not to,
and we don’t need a hint on this.
The professor's wife left home.
We don't know
where did you leave home?
we don't know
why did you leave home?
but we only know that she left.
In a suit, both unfashionable and not new, -
as always, unfashionable and not new,
yes, as always, unfashionable and not new, -
The professor goes down to the wardrobe.
He searches his pockets for a long time for the number:
“Well, what is it?
Where is this number?
Maybe,
Didn't I take your number?
Where did he go? –
He rubs his forehead with his hand. –
Ah, here he is!..
Well,
as you can see, I'm getting old,
Don't argue, Aunt Masha,
I'm getting old.
And what can you do here -
I'm getting old..."
We hear -
the door below creaks behind him.
The window looks out onto white trees,
into big and beautiful trees,
but we are not looking at the trees now,
We look at the professor in silence.
He leaves
stooped,
unskillful,
some defenselessly inept
under the snow,
falling softly into silence.
Already he himself
like trees
white,
Yes,
like trees
completely white,
a bit more -
and so white
what among them
you can't see him.

Evgeniy Yevtushenko

Night conversation

Have you slept in flower beds?
Have you slept in flower beds? –
I'm asking.
L. Martynov

Yesterday I dreamed about Martynov...
I asked him without any fuss:
– How can I fill poetry with meaning?
Should I prefer iambic or trochee?

– The set of questions is exhausted
back in the era of reading huts.
We act very strangely:
when we shake the air,
then we shake all the foundations
with what we shake the air with.
Always rummaging through the verbal rubble,
we find him. Word. That is
the word we need.
No, we are not fooling our heads,
and we trample on falsehood, trample on, trample on.
I repeat: we trample on falsehood.
And we sing the praises of Lukomorye,
and not rotten fly agaric.
We are not dying, but we are soaring on yards,
where the boreas rage
off the coast of Hyperborea.
Or maybe into the Silence River
we dive straight into the rapids.

And you keep saying, they are trochees...

Maxim Orlov

M. ORLOV

LEONID MARTYNOV

(on the centenary of his birth)

BRATSK 2005

M. ORLOV

LEONID MARTYNOV

Born into the family of hydraulic engineer Nikolai Ivanovich Martynov and the daughter of a military engineer, teacher Maria Grigorievna Zbarskaya in Omsk. He made his debut in print in 1921 with notes in the Omsk newspapers Signal, Gudok, and Rabochiy Put. The first poems were published in the collection “Futurists”, published in the traveling printing house of the propaganda ship “III International”. He was a member of the futuristic literary and artistic group “Chervonnaya Troika” (1921–1922), which also included V. Ufimtsev and V. Shebalin. Having become a traveling correspondent for two magazines (Sibirskie Ogni and Sibir) and two newspapers (Omsky Vodnik and Sibirsky Gudok), Martynov traveled all over Siberia. Participated in geological expeditions. In 1927, the editor of Zvezda N. Tikhonov published the poem “Correspondent”. In 1930, Martynov’s first book was published in Moscow - essays about the Irtysh region, Altai and Kazakhstan “Rough food, or an Autumn journey along the Irtysh” (Moscow, “Federation”, 1930). In 1932, he handed over to the editors of the Young Guard a book of “short stories about love and hatred during the years of the beginning of socialist perestroika,” which was never published and which is now considered missing.
In 1932 he was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary propaganda and sentenced in the case of the so-called “Siberian Brigade” under Article 58-10 of the Criminal Code to deportation for three years to the Northern Territory. (Rehabilitated posthumously by the USSR prosecutor's office on April 17, 1989). He spent administrative exile in Vologda, where he lived from 1932 to 1935. He worked for the local newspaper “Red North”, where he met his future wife, Nina Popova. After exile, the two of them returned to Omsk.
The poet calls the beginning of “real literary fame” the publications of “Uvenkaya” and “Tobolsk Chronicler” in V. Itin’s “Siberian Lights” in 1936. According to the poet, Vivian Itin played a big role in his life. (“...We were united by many creative and, I would say, political and state interests”).
In 1939, Martynov gained literary fame: the book “Poems and Poems” was published (Omsk, 1939). Poems with historical Siberian themes were noticed and appreciated by K. Simonov in the review “Three Poems” (“Literary Newspaper”, July 1939). The following year, historical essays about Omsk “Fortress on Om” and the books “Poem” are published (published simultaneously in Moscow and Omsk).
In 1942, thanks to the efforts of A. Kalinchenko, he was admitted to the Writers' Union. In 1943, K. Simonov proposed to replace him with a front-line correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda. However, when L.M. returned to Omsk “to get his things,” he was drafted into the army, to the Omsk Infantry School. For health reasons he was released from military service.
The collection “Lukomorye”, slaughtered by A. Fadeev, through the efforts of the new chairman of the Union of Writers of the USSR N. Tikhonov, was published in 1945. In 1946, the pogromious article by V. Inber “You and I are not on the same path, Martynov!” was published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. (about the book of poems “Ertsin Forest”, Omsk, 1946). After sharp criticism and “working through” in Moscow, Omsk and Novosibirsk, the book’s circulation was destroyed, and access to the press was closed for nine years. All this time, the poet writes “on the table” and earns money through translations.
In 1946 he moved to Moscow.
Translated poems into Russian by English (C. Dibdin, A. Tennyson), Czech (Jan Neruda), Chilean (Pablo Neruda) and Hungarian (E. Adi, A. Gidas, D. Ijes, S. Petőfi, Madacs, J. Attila ), Lithuanian (E. Mezhelaitis), Polish (J. Kokhanovsky, A. Mickiewicz, J. Tuwim, J. Slovacki, J. Przybos, A. Vazhik, C. Norwid, K. Galchinsky), French (A. Rimbaud, V. Hugo, C. Baudelaire), Italian (S. Quasimodo, A. Severini), Yugoslav (O. Zupancic, M. Krleza) and other poets. According to L.M., he translated about one hundred thousand poetic lines. For his translation activities, he was awarded the Order of the Silver Cross (1949) and the Gold Star (1967) by the government of Hungary, and the Order of Cyril and Methodius, 1st degree, by the government of Bulgaria (1976).
The first book after the forced downtime was published in 1955 (the green “Young Guard” book immediately became a rarity). It was republished in 1957. After this, Martynov began to be published so often that Akhmatova grumbled about this that it was harmful for a poet to publish often.
L. Martynov is often remembered in connection with his speech at the all-Moscow meeting of writers in 1958, where they talked about B. Pasternak. Martynov, who had just returned from Italy, was called to the podium to talk about the attitude of Italians towards Pasternak. Martynov expressed irritation at the “sensational chatter” of the foreign press around one name. It is believed that Martynov, who sincerely did not like Pasternak, was forgiven for this speech.
In 1960-1970 writes a book of memoir prose, which he planned to call “Stoglav”. The poet himself wrote that “Stoglav” “concerns not only the origin of this or that poem of mine, but, being truthful and clear, if possible, the entire structure of life” (“A Gift to the Future,” p. 400). However, time and censorship did not allow all the chapters to be published at the same time, so the sequence of the chapters was broken. The first collection of autobiographical short stories, “Air Frigates,” was published in 1974. Judging by the beauty of its style, it can be called an “encyclopedia” of the life of Omsk artists of the 1920-1940s. The second collection of short stories - “Similarity Traits” - was published after the poet’s death (M., Sovremennik, 1982). And finally, a quarter of a century later, in 2008, all the other short stories of the book “Stoglav” were published (M., Veche, 2008).
L. M. was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor three times: in 1964, 1971 and 1975. Laureate of the State Prize of the RSFSR named after. A. M. Gorky for the book of poems “Birthright” (1966). Laureate of the USSR State Prize for the collection of poems “Hyperboles” (1974).
In 1979, his wife Nina died, and less than a year later the poet himself died. Martynov was buried at the Vostryakovsky cemetery. Leonid Martynov was one of the last great Russian poets of the 20th century who maintained traditions and managed to breathe the air of poetic renewal at the beginning of the century. Perhaps with his departure this connection in modern literature was severed forever. (Information taken from Wikipedia).

Martynov Leonid Nikolaevich(05/22/1905, Omsk - 06/27/1980, Moscow) - poet, translator, memoirist.

From the family of N.I. Martynov, a railway construction engineer, a descendant of the “philistine Martynovs, who traced their origins back to their ofeni’s grandfather, the Vladimir peddler-bookseller Martyn Loschilin” (“Air Frigates”). M.G. Zbarskaya, the poet’s mother, instilled in her son a love of reading and art. In his adolescence, M. was fond of reading neo-romantic literature (A. Conan Doyle, J. London, A. Green), seriously studied geography and geology, and was interested in “technology in the broadest sense of the word” and the folklore of Siberia. He studied at the Omsk classical gymnasium, but did not complete the course: his studies were interrupted by the revolution.

In 1920, he joined the group of Omsk futurists, “artists, performers and poets,” which was headed by the local “king of writers” A.S. Sorokin. In 1921 he began publishing notes in the Omsk newspaper “Rabochiy Put” and poems in local magazines, and later in the railway. “Siberian Lights”. Soon he went to Moscow to enter VKHUTEMAS, where he fell into a circle of like-minded young avant-garde artists. However, malaria and hunger forced M. to return home. In Omsk, the poet continued to educate himself, returned to journalism and active participation in the artistic life of the city. Carrying out editorial assignments, he traveled around Siberia. He crossed the southern steppes several times along the route of the future Turksib, explored the economic resources of Kazakhstan, visited the construction of the first giant state farms, made a propaganda flight by plane over Baraba, a steppe region, searched for mammoth tusks between the Ob and Irtysh, and ancient handwritten books in Tobolsk. This period of M.'s life is reflected in his book. essays “Rough food, or Autumn journey along the Irtysh” (M., 1930). The journalist’s experience will further determine some themes and elements of M.’s poetics.

In 1932, M. was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary propaganda. The poet was credited with participating in a mythical group of Siberian writers, in the “case of the Siberian brigade.” An accident saved him from death, but in 1933 M. was sent into administrative exile in Vologda, where he lived until 1935, collaborating in local newspapers. After exile, he returned to Omsk, where he wrote a number of poems with historical Siberian themes and where in 1939 he published a book. “Poems and Poems,” which brought M. fame among readers of Siberia.

In 1945, the second book, “Lukomorye,” was published in Moscow, with which the poet attracted the attention of a wider circle of readers. This book - a milestone in M.’s work. In the 1930s, the poet, in a number of poems and poems, developed, or tried to reconstruct, the Siberian myth about the northern happy land, which appears in M.’s poems in the guise of either a fantastic Hyperborea, or the legendary “gold-boiling Mangazeya,” or almost real - M. looked for historical evidence of this - Lukomorye. The main myth was made up of various legends: about the northern Golden Baba, about the medieval land of Prester John, etc. Both the author’s long-standing passion for the history of Siberia and his youthful passion for neo-romanticism had an impact: in a number of works the poet sang the exoticism of wanderings, revealing the romantic in the everyday and modern. The poems of this period, characterized by the peculiar “romantic realism” of M.’s poetic vision, would later bring the author all-Russian popularity.

At the end of the 1940s, M. was subjected to “acute magazine and newspaper research associated with the publication of the book “Ertsin Forest” (“Air Frigates”). The poet was no longer published. New books M. began to be published only after Stalin’s death (from the beginning of the “thaw” to 1980, more than twenty books of poetry and prose were published).

At the end of the 1950s, the poet truly gained recognition. The peak of M.'s popularity, which strengthened with the publication of his book. “Poems” (M., 1961), coincides with the heightened reader interest in the lyrics of the young “sixties” (Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Rozhdestvensky, etc.). But the paradox of the situation and the misfortune for M. as a poet is that his civic position during the 1960s did not correspond to the mood of his audience, primarily the young creative intelligentsia. M. the man, M. the citizen did not change, but the era changed - and therefore M. the poet: now his social views had to be expressed more clearly. It was during the “thaw” that M.’s first poems about Lenin appeared, and soon after the “thaw” - poems for anniversaries. Their author's interest in improving poetic technique decreases: M. is looking for new topics. The share of historicism in M.'s lyrical plots is decreasing, there is less romance, but more and more attempts to look modern. The poet is fascinated by new technical, and above all, by the linguistic realities that express them: he readily rushes to place transistors, reactors and TU planes in poetry. The consequence is a gradual decline in reader interest, which the poet himself obviously felt:
“There is a fuss, a fuss/ And a terrible squabble/ Behind my back./ They accuse, reproach,/ They find no excuses/ And it’s as if they are calling/ Everyone by my name” (“I feel what’s going on...”, 1964) .

M.'s lyrics of the 1960-1980s are significantly inferior in artistic merit to his poetic work of the 1930-1950s. However, in the last period of his life, M. demonstrates his talent as a memoirist, publishing collections. interesting autobiographical short stories “Air Frigates” (M., 1974). But the poetic genius was not lost either: the last decades of M.’s life introduced Russian readers to his wonderful translations from Lithuanian (translated for the first time by E. Mezhelaitis), Polish (A. Mickiewicz, J. Kokhanovsky, J. Tuvim), Hungarian (A. Gidas , D. Iyesh, S. Petofi, E. Adi) and other languages. However, the duality of M., a gifted Poet - and a censored poet, a Thinker - and a cautious citizen, which also manifested itself in his approach to translations, was once betrayed by him. From his youth he dreamed of translating A. Rimbaud, P. Verlaine, Swinburne and other Western European classics, but more often he was engaged in translating the lyrics of fellow contemporaries from the countries of the socialist camp into verse. “The problem of translation” M. - in his own honest way - admitted, addressing the imaginary Villon, Verlaine, Rimbaud:
“Let other generations take this responsibility, not us! // No, gentlemen, let my hand not translate your treacherous lines. And in general, what kind of translator am I! Let others translate it one more time, smoothing you slightly.”

Like many, M. began his creative activity with imitations. The “futurism” of the young poet and his comrades was nothing more than a game. But the poems of Mayakovsky the futurist helped M. in mastering the classics. M. recalled, for example, that “he was not interested in Lermontov,” but when he “read from Mayakovsky that “combing one’s hair... is not worth the trouble for a while, but it is impossible to be combed forever,” Lermontov came to life, ceasing to be only a compulsory gymnasium student. literature lesson" (“Air Frigates”). Acquaintance with the lyrics of A. Blok helped to better understand the beloved Mayakovsky, and then led to the simultaneous influence of the work of the two poets on M.’s earliest poems with their urban themes (for example, the poem “Provincial Boulevard”, 1921). In these early poems, the intonations of early Gumilyov (“Grey Hour”, 1922), motives and speech patterns of Yesenin (“Laugh”, 1922) are noticeable. The schoolboy M. tries himself in classical forms (sonnets “Alla”, 1921; “Sonnet”, 1923).

M.’s true voice sounded in 1924: “You have faded. I am a wanderer, all brown./ It will be unpleasant for us to meet now./ Only tenderness, once forgotten here,/ Makes me come back” (“Tenderness”). Since the late 1920s, the poet’s lyrics have once and for all included elements of dialogue - with the reader, with his characters, with himself (“The Chronicler” and “River Silence”, 1929; later - “Trees”, 1934). Another characteristic feature of M.’s manner was a romantic view of history, expressed in the ballad plot of many works (“Ermak”, 1936; “The Captive Swede”, 1938). In poetry, M. begins to develop the myth of “gold-boiling Mangazeya” (“Hyper-Borea”, 1938). The theme of the history of Siberia is presented differently in M.'s poems of the 1920-1930s. The real facts of the history of Omsk and Tobolsk are presented without romantic embellishment; M. strives for accuracy in the transmission of local legends (“The True Story of Uvenkai”, 1935-1936; “The Story of a Russian Engineer”, 1936; “The Tobolsk Chronicler”, 1937). At the same time, he freely conjectures a family legend (“Seeker of Paradise,” 1937, about Ofen Loschilin, the poet’s ancestor), and further fantasizes the story of K. Balmont’s actual visit to Omsk in 1911 (“Poetry as Magic,” 1939).

In the 1940s, M. honed his poetic skills. Psychologism, precision of detail, piercingly lyrical intonation, linguistic plasticity - these features are characteristic of many of the poet’s poems (for example, the poem “Ballerina”, 1968). Close attention to detail, but speculativeness when depicting objects and landscape sketches leave a philosophical imprint on M.’s poems (“Water”, 1946; “Leaves”, 1951). Meanwhile, the hero of M. becomes a person in general, even all of humanity, the time of action is modernity, the space is the globe, the action itself is the reorganization of the world (“Something new in the world...”, 1948-1954). And this is in tune with the enthusiastic mood of society.

M. strives to improve technology and reaches the limit at which poetics subordinates the theme without abolishing it. Martynov’s “untimely” poems of this period are extremely easy to recognize: they are unusually musical with their exquisite selection and construction of rhymes, and the graphic division of the text only emphasizes the internal rhyming of the lines (“Water/ Favored/ To pour!// She/ Shined/ So pure,/ Whatever get drunk,/ Or wash.// And it was not without reason” - verse “Water”). The meaning comes from the music of the verse, the association of phenomena comes from the selection of rhymes. In general, rhyme creation becomes the main area in which M. manifests himself during these years. The poet strives to make do with a minimum number of consonances. Two pairs of rhymes are sought out and passed through any length of text (“It seems to me that I am resurrected...”, 1945; “Both mustache and eyebrow are still black...”, 1946). M. complicates the poetic task - and the alternation of male/female clauses throughout the text space presents the reader with almost continuous rhyme (“Atom”, 1948; “What’s the matter with you, blue sky?..”, 1949). Poems often appear with rare series of dissonant groups of rhymes (“Pond,/ Like an emerald,/ Only the shore is steep.// Grotto,/ But the entrance to this grotto/ is walled up.// So/ At each gate/ Many barriers” - verse . “Paradise”, 1957).

Poems from 1960 show that there has been a turning point in M.’s work. From this time on, M.’s attempts to keep up with the times, with literary fashion “for the masses” became more and more clearly visible. On the one hand, he publishes poems on officially welcomed topics (“October”, “Teachers”, “Revolutionary Skies”). M. derived for himself a formula for his personal attitude towards the Bolshevik revolution: October was great for the birth of free art (“October broke many bonds, / And, roughly speaking, / The palaces of the muses were ventilated / With the winds of October” - “October”). Subsequently, he continued to exploit this successfully found idea, with which, however, he truly agreed. So, in the poem composed for the anniversary. “Revolution” (1967) M. claims that this “dreamy” time determined the ideas of Tatlin, Chagall, and Konenkov. The same attitude towards Lenin is the same: under M.’s anniversary pen, he turned into a fighter “for the purity of free speech” (“Purity”, 1970). The poems dedicated to Lenin are formulaic: the hero M. is equal to the hero of Voznesensky (cf.: “But Lenin suddenly looks in the window: / -Are all the questions resolved?” from the poem “Lenin”, 1965, - and “Answers all questions Lenin...” from the poem “Lonjumeau”), then on a planetary scale to the hero of the highly revered Mayakovsky (“The thoughts and feelings of Vladimir Lenin, / Some of his reflections, / And are valuable for neighbors in space” - verse. “Lenin and the Universe”, 1968). Under Stalin, M. did not write such “odes”.

On the other hand, M. also strives for fashion for various kinds of “relevance.” In the pursuit of fashion, he is still ahead of others: for example, in verse. “Tokhu-vo-bokhu” (1960) is an anticipation of many features of Voznesensky’s poetics. M.’s experience as a journalist also came in handy: from now on, poems reminiscent of problematic articles appear more and more often, in which there are elements of an interview, and the position of an analyst, and the journalistic focus of the issue (which, however, is “about nothing”). This is the verse. 1960 “I talked to a doctor...”, “I saw off a secondary school teacher...”, etc.

The poet appears in strange “critical” poems, in which - completely in the spirit of Soviet satire - moralizing banality is intended to camouflage the optionality, even the randomness, of the critical object (“Somewhere there a reactor has gone bad...”, 1960; “My comrades, poets...” .”, 1963; “Radioactive Island”, 1963). And banality leads to nonsense. Yes, in verse. “Leninsky Prospekt” (1960), conceived as anti-war, the meaning melts from line to line: “Good world, / Which I love, / You recently came out of the trenches. / I’ll buy you something / In the isotope store.” Nonsense, in turn, leads to a loss of taste: “Mine girls, chimney girls, / Dark quarry girls” (“Girls”, 1963), sounds the poet’s straightforward, enthusiastic phrase, not equal to Oleinikov’s ironic: “For whom are you lady, for me it’s a factory.”

M. persistently strives to look journalistic and relevant, but also wants to connect relevance with his characteristic search for new means of enriching his poetic technique - but this is what happens: “And the night. And again it’s windy and damp. / And the whirlwinds collide with the foliage, / As if right above your head / It’s not a liner floating in a stormy abyss, / But rushing about like a dark-skinned angel of peace, / Indira Gandhi in a fur coat” (“Newspaper Topic” , 1971). And attempts to return to the path of form-creation, to the use of the previous composition of rhymes (“It smelled of summer, smelled of light...”, 1960; “It was as if thunder had struck in the yard...”, 1967; “Reasonable Connection”, 1970) are almost ineffective. ). Such a verse. the late 1960s, like the alliterative “Among the thinning forest...” and “Devil Bagryanych,” like “The Chronicler’s Cell” with pairs of rhymes ringing each verse (“In the cell, the old man is barely visible./ -Father, what are you dreaming of in bowels of the night?”), “technical” experiments with the transformation of prose into poetry (“Mother Mathematics”, 1964; “Yesenin’s Prose”, 1966) - they are exceptions rather than the rule. The necessary harmonic balance between the music of a verse and the sublime lyricism that is present, for example, in verse, rarely arises. “Languish” (1962). The reason for this is M.’s tossing between purely “problematic” epic lines and “technical” lyrics. One day they lead to an epiphany: it is impossible to keep up with the younger generation of Russian poets (“And everything else / I want to say, from them I hear...” - verse. “I recognize my own poems...”, 1970).

The theme of art appears isolated in M.’s lyrics of the 1960s and 1970s, represented by works that are every bit interesting. Their author’s reflection was evoked both by poetic creativity as such (the sonnet “Poetry”, the poems “Rhyme” and “When a Poem Doesn’t Come Out” of 1967), and by the figures of masters of Russian art (“The Cross of Didelot”, 1968; “ballads” of the end of 1960 -x - early 1970s about the poet's fellow countryman and comrade composer V. Shebalin, about the artists I. Repin, N. Roerich), and the importance of the activities of Russian writers (“The Apparition of Tyutchev”, 1970; “Sighs of Antioch” and “Laws of Taste” ”, 1972).

Such is the unusual creative fate of M., a poet whose best lyrics were written in times that called for heroic epic, and whose worst poems were written during the period of a new poetic boom in Russia.

HIS LUKOMORYE(Poetic Hercules by Leonid Martynov)

He was an amazing poet Leonid Nikolaevich Martynov! Revealing himself each time with an unexpected facet, and seemingly contradicting himself as before, he remained an integral poetic being, erecting a literary edifice that was unique in all respects. Although the owner-builder inside it could not be seen immediately and not by everyone. Probably because Martynov’s best poems are characterized by metaphorical condensation and some kind of special artistic density. In his poetry, the confessional-intimate intonation is almost inaudible. Based on the poems of Leonid Martynov, it is not so easy to imagine the image of the poet himself, much less learn something about him as a real person (this is not the case when the biography of the author is in his poems). Martynov often uses this metaphorical shell as protective armor. But when you finally understand the interconnections of his images and metaphors and truly penetrate and delve into the world of Martynov’s poetry with its multi-layered undercurrents, then the poet’s face will begin to appear, like an image on photographic paper.

But it's not just about fancy imagery. In terms of his inner make-up and the nature of his talent, Leonid Martynov is a poet-researcher, poet-scientist and philosopher. He sometimes wrote in such a way that it was not enough just to read it - one also had to carefully delve into the text, to get to the bottom of the true meaning of what was said. It is no coincidence that many admirers of Martynov’s talent noted that one of the main qualities of his poetics was intelligent, often unexpected subtext. This, however, did not mean at all that he wrote too complicated or abstruse (although such complaints against him were not uncommon). On the contrary, according to Sergei Markov, “he usually took the most prosaic words, but combined them in such a way that they became poetic speech, unique to him alone.” Another thing is that a truly irrepressible passion for knowledge (and Martynov was well versed in history, philosophy, geography and even some exact sciences) voluntarily or involuntarily led to the mental and intellectual richness of the verse, which became its remarkable feature.

Even in his appearance, Leonid Martynov seemed to confirm his poetic individuality and originality, which eluded a superficial glance. As Altai writer Mark Yudalevich recalls, “Without striving for this at all, Leonid Nikolaevich looked most like a poet in appearance. When tall, strong, with his head held high, deep in himself, he walked along the street, it seemed that some kind of mystery surrounded him.”

But Leonid Martynov did not immediately find his true poetic face. There were many amazing metamorphoses in his creative life. Well, the key to understanding Martynov’s poetic biography can be found in the poem about Hercules:

It seems to me that I have been resurrected.

I lived. My name was Hercules.

I weighed three thousand pounds,

I uprooted the forest,

I reached out my hand to the sky,

When I sat down, I broke the backs of the chairs.

And I died... And then I rose again:

Normal height, normal weight -

I became like everyone else. I'm kind and cheerful

I don't break chair backs...

And yet, I am Hercules.

The poetic Hercules of Leonid Martynov began to show the first signs of life in the early 1920s, first declaring himself as a futurist and romantic, which, in general, is not surprising if we recall some facts of his biography.

Leonid Martynov was born on May 22, 1905 in Omsk, and spent his childhood on the Trans-Siberian Railway, in his father’s service car - transport and hydraulic engineering. As a ten-year-old boy, Martynov read poems that largely determined his future. It was Mayakovsky - a futurist in a “yellow jacket”. And as a sixteen-year-old teenager, having barely completed five classes, Leonid Martynov decided to live by literary work.

The young poet’s poetic debut took place in 1921 in the Omsk magazine “Iskusstvo”. In those youthful poems, the aspiring futurist wrote that “the girls of our days smell of earth and sheepskin coats.”

It was a stormy time, calling for the road, into unknown spaces, and heredity probably took its toll, so the young poet spent the 1920s wandering. Their geography is diverse. At first, young Martynov went to Moscow with a dream of education. Only what - literary or artistic (he also had an undoubted talent as a painter) could not immediately decide. I was even planning to enter VKHUTEMAS. But soon, unexpectedly for himself, he found himself in the Balkhash expedition of Uvodstroy. And then - off we go: Altai, the Barabinsk steppe, Turksib under construction, the taiga Urmans of the Irtysh region... And the occupations are very different and unexpected: a collector of medicinal herbs, a seeker of archaeological antiquities, a propagandist on a propaganda plane, a rural bookseller, a hydraulic expedition worker, a journalist...

During these years, Leonid Martynov wrote a lot and chaotically: correspondence, essays and, of course, poems in which the poetic foundation of the future Martynov rose in futuristic leaps. But just as the mature Martynov is not simple, so is his early poetry. On the one hand, fantastic ships sailing high above the city (“Air frigates”), and on the other, extremely, seemingly realistic and specifically accurate - “sugar was sweet and salt was salty” from a poem about longshoremen. But the contradiction here is apparent. The poems, which are different in style, are based, again, on a deep and capacious metaphorical subtext, which reflects the poetic view of Leonid Martynov, characterized precisely by the combination of the fantastic and the real, the fabulous and the ordinary.

This feature was perhaps best and most clearly manifested in Martynov’s favorite theme of Lukomorye. In Leonid Martynov's poetic stories about a magical land, reality is mixed with fiction, and the real outlines of life, as a rule, cannot be separated from the insights and daring fantasies of the poet.

The poem “Lukomorye”, written in 1937 after such wonderful poems as “River Silence” and “Sunflower” and which became the beginning of the cycle of the same name, can to a certain extent be considered a milestone in Martynov’s work. Leonid Nikolaevich was at that time at the age of Christ and at the time of approaching literary and human maturity, his poetic Hercules was firmly on his feet.

Lukomorye and “air frigates” became the cross-cutting images of all Martynov’s poetry.

It is curious that Lukomorye will respond in the future not only in his lyrics, but also in his military journalism. During the Great Patriotic War, the poet devoted a lot of energy to operational newspaper work and actively participated in the TASS Windows published in Omsk. He publishes the essay “Lukomorye”, which caused a great response from readers. Somewhat later, the brochure “Forward, for our Lukomorye!” appears, where the essay is supplemented with responses from front-line soldiers. He did not stop working on poetry, as evidenced by the poetic collections of these years “For the Motherland” (1941), “We will come” (1942), “Fire-color” (1944). As critic Viktor Utkov spoke about them, “in the poems, fairy tales, ballads, tales included in these collections, you can clearly see the poet’s desire for the most vivid, strong and intelligible expression of the thoughts and feelings that possessed people in those difficult years, you can feel the poet’s remarkable temperament " And as Martynov himself wrote in his autobiography, “the theme of the lost and newly found Lukomorye became the main theme of my poems during the days of the Great Patriotic War... I narrated, as best I could, about the people’s struggle for their Lukomorye, for their happiness.” As for the romantic image of “air frigates”, which arose in 1922 (the poem of the same name was published in 1923 in the magazine “Siberian Lights”), it was echoed in the later prose of Leonid Martynov, in his book of short stories “Air Frigates”.

The theme of Lukomorye is closely connected with such a bright page of Leonid Martynov’s poetic work as his famous historical poems, including “The True Story of Uvenkai”, “Seeker of Paradise”, “Homespun Venus”, “Tobolsk Chronicler”, as well as thematically related ones prose works - “The Tale of the Tobolsk Voivodeship” and “Fortress on Om”.

Such a dramatic metamorphosis - from a futurist and a romantic, a singer of modernity into a historian and epic - may seem unexpected. But only at first glance, since much of what overwhelmed the poet no longer fit into the form of small-format poetic genres, and the very atmosphere of the pre-war decade, increasingly filled with thunderous electricity, forced many artists to turn to the heroic past of the country.

The sense of history, which also possessed Leonid Martynov, became extremely acute when he came to the Russian North, where the poet, by his own admission, “especially felt this interconnection of the past, present and future.”

Martynov ended up in the North not of his own free will. In 1932, he was arrested in the so-called “Siberian poets” case. Together with Pavel Vasiliev, Nikolai Anov, Evgeniy Zabelin, Sergei Markov and Lev Chernomortsev, he was accused of anti-Soviet sentiments and expelled. The poet spent several years first in Yaroslavl, then in Arkhangelsk and Vologda. In the editorial office of the Vologda newspaper “Krasny Sever” he met his future wife Nina Anatolyevna, who worked there as a secretary-typist. At the end of 1935, already with her, he returned to Omsk and settled in a wooden house on Krasnykh Zori Street. This is where his famous collection of historical poems was mainly created.

These large, poetic stories, rich in invention, combine the insight of a historian with the insights of a poet. Leonid Martynov showed the past of Siberia in a completely new way. (In general, Martynov’s Siberia is not just one of the main “themes”, but also his very creative basis). For him, Siberia is not only a wild, joyless wilderness. Brave, honest and inquisitive people live here, in whom the spirit of rebellion matures. Such, for example, as the Kazakh young interpreter Uvenkai, who translates the great Pushkin into his native language, the hawker Martyn Loschilin, or the home-grown chronicler coachman Ilya Cherepanov, who writes a true chronicle of Siberia... Depicting them, the author finds deep connections between phenomena that would seem distant. Thus, the power of Martynov’s artistic logic brings together Uvenkai and Pushkin, the bookseller Loschilin and the English poet, author of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Leonid Martynov does not seek to depict major historical events and personalities. But the spirit of the era is present in his poems. And it was not so much the historical events and facts themselves that interested Martynov, but the origins of these events and the psychology of ordinary people - the true creators of history.

In historical poems, Leonid Martynov emerged, among other things, as a brilliant master of poetic storytelling, mastering this rare quality with exceptional ease. It is curious that he printed his poems specifically as prose - from field to field, however, in these long lines the poetic meter was immediately captured.

The historical poems of Leonid Martynov have become a major phenomenon in our literature. Having splashed out into them all at once, swirling like one powerful prominence, Martynov did not return to this genre after 1940, when books with his poems were published one after another in Omsk and Moscow, which once again surprised critics and admirers of his talent.

Leonid Martynov greeted the end of the Great Patriotic War with the release of two poetry collections - “Lukomorye” (Moscow, 1945) and Ertsin Forest (Omsk, 1946). The poems included there were written during the war years and were distinguished by a clear understanding of the processes of history, depth of thought and genuine poetic skill. Nevertheless, they caused a storm of indignation among a number of critics and colleagues. Especially the collection “Ertsin Forest”. Vera Inber, in particular, in a devastating review “Escape from reality,” wrote that Martynov’s “rejection of modernity is already turning into undisguised malice” and that, “apparently, Leonid Martynov is not on the same path with us. And if he does not reconsider his current positions, then our paths may diverge forever...” All this was a direct reaction to the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” published in August 1946, after which a harsh tightening of the “ideological screws” began, which painfully backfired on Leonid Martynov. After 1946, his poems were no longer published.

The poetic Hercules has died...

Immediately after the war, Leonid Martynov moved to Moscow and settled with his wife in Sokolniki. I had to live by something. And one day the Hungarian poet Antal Gidash appeared at the Martynovs’ apartment and offered to translate the poems of the Hungarian classic Sandor Petofi for the upcoming one-volume work. This is how Leonid Martynov’s translation work began, which is also impressive. Thanks to his efforts, poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Desanka Maksimovic, Julian Tuwim, Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Neruda appeared in Russian... But most of all he translated Hungarian poets. For which the Hungarian government awarded him the Order of the Golden Star of the first degree and the Order of the Silver Star in 1950.

Translations are translations, but the sun of the poet Leonid Martynov seemed to be already setting behind the horizon. Fortunately, it didn't roll. It was only temporarily covered by a cloud. Martynov continued to write poetry, until, however, “on the table.” But, as critics later admitted, “these were the heyday of his work.”

The first step in Leonid Martynov’s return from oblivion was Ilya Selvinsky’s article “A Painful Question,” published in 1954, where, speaking about Soviet poets, the author mentioned Martynov as “a man who comprehended the secret of violin magic.” In 1955, when Martynov turned fifty, through the efforts of young poets, his evening took place at the Central House of Writers, and a few months later, the publishing house “Young Guard” published a book by Leonid Martynov after a ten-year break. It was simply called “Poems”, and instantly became popular. They started talking about the half-forgotten poet, and after her, without exaggeration, he “woke up famous.”

“What happened to me? - he himself was surprised. - I’m talking to you alone, // but for some reason my words // are repeated behind the wall, // and they sound at that very moment // in nearby groves and distant forests, // in nearby human dwellings // and in all sorts of in the ashes, // and everywhere among the living. // You know, in essence, this is not bad! // Distance is not a hindrance // neither to laughter nor to sigh. // Amazingly powerful echo! // Obviously, this is the era.”

A favorable era was indeed dawning for poetry. Poetry became the ruler of thoughts and hearts, poured into the spaces of auditoriums, stadiums and squares, into huge book circulations. Martynov’s poetic Hercules, having plunged into the living water of this era, was resurrected...

Leonid Martynov worked a lot and intensely in the post-war decades. And he wrote about modernity. Moreover, he himself considered these poems “more significant in his work than he wrote before.” And not by chance. One after another, his poetry collections come out. In 1966, Leonid Martynov’s book “Birthright” was awarded the State Prize of the RSFSR, and in 1974, the book “Hyperboles” was awarded the State Prize of the USSR.

Yes, modernity occupies the main place in the poetry of Leonid Martynov of the 1950s - 1970s. But this does not mean that the past has disappeared from his work forever. Like the future, it continued to be constantly present in him, since, according to Martynov himself, he wrote “about today, transforming into the day to come.” On the other hand, no matter what Leonid Martynov talks about in his poems - whether it’s about Lukomorye, the excavations of Pompeii, or the 21st century - they are always very modern in spirit, because they constantly involve the reader in the sphere of intense searches for truth.

Although it must be said that Leonid Martynov also understood modernity in a very unique way. Until his last days (he died on June 21, 1980), the poet lived as if on the verge of the past and the future, perceiving the present as a certain moment of transition to the future.

“We all remember the future. // We are calling for a revolution of the spirit,” seventeen-year-old Martynov once wrote, setting off his “Air Frigates” on a long journey in search of the spiritual Lukomorye, to which he had essentially given his entire life. The poet has long been dead, but his majestic poetic ships continue their eternal journey...

A. Gorshenin

Dementiev V. Leonid Martynov: poet and time. - M., 1986.

Memories about L. Martynov. Collection. - M., 1989.

(1905 - 1980)

From the book of destinies. Leonid Nikolaevich was born on May 9 (22), 1905 in Omsk in the family of a railway technician; he spent his childhood on the Great Siberian Railway, in his father’s service car.

In 1921, he left the fifth grade of school and changed many occupations (from a rural bookseller to a member of a geological exploration expedition). In the late 1920s - early 1930s, he traveled extensively throughout Siberia and Kazakhstan as a correspondent for Siberian newspapers and magazines. He has published several books of essays. His first poems were published in the Omsk magazine “Iskusstvo”, in the magazines “Sibirskie Ogni”, “Sibir”, and in the newspapers “Omsk Vodnik”, “Rabochy Put”. Martynov’s early poems (“Zverikha”, 1925; “Gold Rush”, 1926) contrast the audacity of dreams and the sense of “primordial history” associated with the poetic perception of the majestic and ancient expanse of Siberia, with the philistine world of the townspeople of the times of the New Economic Policy. During these same years, Martynov awakened an interest in the past of Siberia in its specific historical and everyday details (poems “Old Omsk”, “Admiralty Hour”, 1924; “Sister”, 1939).

A unique cycle of narrative poems “Patrick” (1935), “The True Story of Uvenkai” (1935-1936), “The Story of a Russian Engineer” (1936), “The Tobolsk Chronicler” is dedicated to the historical past of “Asian” Russia (with a projection into the present). (1937), “Paradise Seeker” (1937), “Magic Gardens” (1938), “Elton’s Confession”, “The Tale of Ataman Vasily Tyumenets”, “Homespun Venus” (all - 1939), ballads “Beads”, “Prisoner Swede", "Ermak" and others. The poems are distinguished by a sophisticated plot, excellent knowledge of folklore and historical-everyday material, and the scale of the historical and philosophical background. “I felt the past in taste, color and smell,” said the poet.

The poems are written in an original poetic manner: the classic meter is conveyed in a long prosaic line, which, along with the natural intonations of the dialogue, brings it closer to the flexible form of the folk raeshnik. Original comments to the poems are the artistic and historical essays in prose “Fortress on the Om” (1939) and “The Tale of the Tobolsk Voivodeship” (1945).

The core motif of Martynov’s lyrical poems of the thirties is the fairy-tale-fantastic theme of Lukomorye, which found its completion in the collection of the same name (1945). The image of Lukomorye (Gulf of Ob), borrowed from Novgorod legends, is symbolically multifaceted. The poet viewed his works as a single poetic story about the legendary land of happiness. Post-war criticism sharply condemned the “Lukomorsky” cycle for being “timeless” and “apolitical,” which led to an almost ten-year break in the publication of the poet’s poems.

From the second half of the 1940s. Martynov’s lyrical creativity is entering its heyday (“The Seventh Sense,” “Earth,” “World”). The hero of his lyrics of those years is characterized by a joyful feeling of inner freedom, a desire to take responsibility for the fate of the world and humanity (“It seems to me that I have been resurrected ...”, “King of Nature”, “Daedalus”, “People”, “Radioactive island", "Europe", "Freedom").

Martynov's poems are allegorical. Many of them are dedicated to the change of seasons, nature in its free-spontaneous and disturbing manifestations. Descriptions of nature allegorically reveal the poet’s thoughts about the inevitability of renewal of existence and human relationships (“Water”, “August”, “Blade”, “Heat Degree”, “Oak”, “December”, “Meadow Slumber”). The extremely generalized form of expression of thoughts and feelings gives Martynov’s poems a truly cosmic scale (“Nature”, “Hymn to the Sun”, “Northern Lights”, 1965). “Pride in our contemporary, who creates, thinks, follows untrodden paths, performs miracles and is worthy of these miracles, is the cornerstone of L. Martynov’s creativity,” wrote V. Lugovskoy.

Primary source: website biography.5litra.ru

Vologda link

When this topic was taboo, Martynov could limit himself to only a hint, counting on his understanding contemporaries. In the autobiographical essay “My Way” (1960), L.N. casually notes that in the early 1930s he “found himself” in the Russian North. And he names the cities: Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Yaroslavl. It is now known: it was an administrative exile for belonging to the literary group “Pamir” (1928 - 1920). Martynov did not like to remember this “case,” as well as the forced action against B. Pasternak in October 1958. Moscow writers * who knew Martynov testify to the overwhelming sense of fear in the poet, who had a hard time surviving the terror of Stalin’s times. Three years of exile in Vologda (1932 - 1935) left an indelible mark on the life of L.N. However, here, in the ancient Russian city, he found his happiness, meeting Nina Anatolyevna Popova, who became his friend and wife.

In a voluminous volume of materials on case No. 122613 about members of the “Siberian Brigade” ** A letter from Martynov to the leadership of the OGPU has been preserved, which is of undoubted interest for future authors of the poet’s biography. But, before presenting it to the reader, it should be said that there is another document in the file, which can be considered as an accompanying explanation to Martynov’s letter of application. On the letterhead of the plenipotentiary representative (PP) of the OGPU for the Northern Territory, No. 18330 (April 1933), a memo from local security officers to the Center was printed. It sets out the essence of the petition of a/ss, that is, an anti-Soviet exile, a writer.

SPO OGPU (4th department)

Moscow

To No. 59452 dated 7/V11-32, we forward for your disposal the application of the a/ss writer Leonid MARTYNOV, who is in exile in Vologda, with his request to be given a place of exile in another city outside the borders of Sevkrai.

We inform you that in the absence of publications in Sevkrai of arts. literature, it is not possible to provide a/ss MARTYNOV with work in his specialty; newspaper earnings in the conditions of Vologda are insufficient.

APPENDIX: Mentioned.

START SPO PP OGPU SK (Stein)

Vr. START 4th department SPO (Babaevsky)

On the document is the resolution of the Moscow boss: “We can send it to Wed. Asia. 24.IV."

Since Konichev’s surname is listed next to the outgoing number on the memo, it is easy to assume that the security officer-writer Konstantin Ivanovich Konichev (1904 - 1971), who at that time occupied a leading position in the OGPU PP of the Northern Territory, contributed to the best of his ability and ability to Martynov’s efforts about changing the location of the link. But L.N. changed his original intention because his personal life had radically changed.

Through the OGPU checkpoint along the northern edge

In the OGPU (Moscow)

From Leonid Nikolaevich Martynov, a writer exiled to the Northern Territory, working in the mountains. Vologda, in the editorial office of the newspaper "Red North".

STATEMENT

I was expelled in 1932 from Moscow to the Northern Territory as a result of your decision in the case of the literary group “Sibiryaki”. The term of exile is three years. It will end in 11 months - March 14, 1935.

At the end of 1932 and at the beginning of 1933, I submitted applications to you with a request to transfer me to Central Asia. These statements were caused by the fact that at the beginning of my stay in the Northern Territory I was homesick for the usual work environment in the Asian part of the USSR, I was sick from the climate change, and I did not get used to the new work environment. I did not receive a response to my petitions at that time. And after this I did not repeat the petitions, since since the summer of 1933 I had become completely accustomed to working in the Northern Territory, became aware of the interests of the region and, together with the party and public organizations of Vologda, which, having checked me, allowed me to work, I am fighting for the transformation of the backward , the remote north to the socialist north.

I consider my work in Vologda to be useful both for the working people of the region and for myself personally as a writer. In addition to daily operational work in the newspaper “Red North”, in addition to publishing articles, essays, etc., I wrote and published in the northern regional magazine “Star of the North” the poem “Trade, Dvina!” and the ballad “Three Brothers”, I’m finishing a long poem about the Northern region “Patrick”, I’m working on a book of artistic essays “In the South of the North”. This is a book about collective farmers, about the socialist restructuring of agriculture, about the competition between Vologda and Yaroslavl in livestock breeding, about the introduction of new southern crops in the fields of the north, about artisanal collective farmers united by industrial cooperation unions (lace makers, shipbuilders, toy makers, woodworkers...)

Several of my articles appeared in the regional newspaper Pravda Severa.

My literary activity has not met with a bad assessment here in Vologda. Through my work, my BUSINESS, I want to finally eliminate those political mistakes, correct those actions that played into the hands of the enemies of the Soviet system, which I once did and for which I paid by being expelled from Moscow.

Today I was summoned to the special sector of the GPU and announced that my place of exile would be changed to Kazakhstan until the end of my term. Now this made me very sad. I see this as a response to my petitions the year before and last year, when I sought to go to Central Asia for the reasons stated above. But now, as you see, circumstances have changed dramatically. I feel useful here, I have studied the local situation, under the leadership of the northern party organization I want to help the workers of the Northern Territory implement the historical decisions of the 17th Party Congress, the absolutely correct policy of the party leader I.V. Stalin.

I ask you to leave me here, in the Northern Territory, in Vologda, until the end of my exile. I believe that transferring me to Kazakhstan will not benefit anyone or anything. In any case, this is not useful to me, but harmful. Moving, getting a job, mastering this work, arranging living conditions will take months. And I need these months to further collect materials and complete the book I mention. So I thought of using those short months (already years!) links that remain. And after this, I will probably continue to work on the Northern Territory, in any case, with pleasure and benefit for myself and others, I will work in the newspaper “Red North”, where, apparently, I am not superfluous.

I think that my petition will be supported by both the head of the newspaper “Krasny Sever” and the writing community of the Northern Territory.

Moving to Kazakhstan, except for a break from work on the book and newspaper work, and besides the loss of precious time, does not promise anything for me this summer.

PLEASE LEAVE ME IN VOLOGDA.

In this statement I take the opportunity to state once again that I have long ago put an end to my political mistakes and delusions. I try to prove this with my work. The only thing that bothers me is the shameful title of an exile. Without raising an official request for early release this time, I still assure you that, having been freed from the shameful title of an exile, I will continue the work I have begun with even greater energy and joy.

Leonid MARTYNOV

So, neither Central Asia, nor especially Kazakhstan, attracted the exiled writer. By that time he was already a married man. And I could write with gratitude about Vologda:

From the statement to the OGPU we also learn that L.N. tried for his early release, but to no avail. In the “brigade” file, these written requests from the poet are missing, as well as the dozen and a half sheets listed on the last page of the plump volume. Knowing the KGB methods of work, there is no doubt that the sheets were confiscated for destruction. Woland was wrong: the manuscripts are burning.

_________________

* Art. and S. Kunyaevs. Torn Shadows. M., 1995, p. 61. V. Ognev. Flashes of memory. - “Banner”, 1997, No. 12, p. 138 - 139.

** After Stalin’s death, another inventory sweep took place in the KGB funds, and the Siberian case received new codes: No. 577559 and the actual archival code: R-35052.