Feathered primer

I did not have this book in childhood. Recently, I received it as a gift from a person who knows my passion for children's books and birds about birds. The collection is called "bird conversations", its author is Pavel Nikolaevich Barto (1904–1986). The book is illustrated by G.E. Nikolsky and published in 1964 by the Publishing House "Baby". It consists of 26 poems dedicated to various species of birds, mainly singing, but also woodpeckers, some waterfowl, predators and other ignoramuses.

The rhythm of poems is bizarre, capricious, and sometimes it seems that the author takes almost the impossible: to reproduce the system of bird songs in poetry, as if competing with the famous composer Olivier Messian, who created musical canvases of bird voices, with the maximum possible accuracy of the orchestra. Listen, here is the perky singing of swamp reeds in poetry about this bird:

Behind the big village of Grushovka,
Along the river Ogary,
Kamyshovka songs get along
From dawn to dawn:
Then they will whistle
Then they are clutching
The nightingale will sing to fit
Will come in to no avail
They cannot stop singing.
Where the water flows in the spring,
Whatever the bush -
That bird.
The bird will sit down
Take a closer look:
- Isn't it here?!
Behind the big village of Grushovka,
Along the river Ogary,
Get along the nests of reeds,
That the Kustari wallets:
Not in a novelty
Kamyshinka
They braid to the basket:
Father will bring a blade of grass -
A mother will advance in the cradle.
Where the water flows in the spring,
Whatever the bush -
That bird
The bird will sit down
Take a closer look:
- Isn't it here?!

At one time, Korney Chukovsky, publishing the book “Moidodyr” with illustrations by Yuri Annenkov, gave her the subtitle “Kinematographer for Children”. The same definition can be given to the collection of Pavel Barto. Read, for example, poems about the black woodpecker. The BBC operator could envy them. It is impossible not to see how a strong echoing bird, as if raised to the crest of an invisible wave, takes off on a dry trunk and immediately, from the dispersal, gives out a sonorous echoing trill, which responds in the distant corners of the spring forest:

Love the jelly
On a pine -out pine
Or storms
Cut off oak
On a high wave
Send spring:
The barrel is elastic
Hit in a tambourine.
Love the jelly
Thunder in the embroidery,
To the generous spruce
Sticking out with a magnet,
He is quite satisfied
What is in forest silence
Fractional trill
In the spring
He says.

Attentive reading of Pavel Barto’s poems reveals their sharp difference from the works of N. A. Kholodkovsky. If in the "Harbarium of my daughter" each flower turns into a bright poetic image, then the birds in the verses of Pavel Barto are only birds and no more. It is not a poetic collection, but the catechism of zoological excursions. What do they contain poems about Big Ship (Chomga)? Of course, they describe her bright appearance with “ears” of red feathers and sharp “horns”, her nest floating on the water, her strange non -nematic screams, the habit of carrying chicks on her back, attachment to water bodies with thick coastal vegetation ... But a bangus, she catches the midges on the banks of the river, at the very water line, but moving not with jumps, but moving not jumping, but moving not jumping, but moving. With a light run, which is why the prints of her legs can be easily distinguished from traces left by other birds flying to a watering water ... For the herpel, a characteristic separation of nesting and fodder land places is mentioned, for the soy - the habit of collecting in the secluded places of the staging, sometimes forgetting them, which makes this bird the main distributor of the oak. Its small size is emphasized for the king, for Varakushki - its tendency to cross -country, for a food - an examination of the tree trunk with a “screw”, in a spiral, and so on.

Ornithologist Vladimir Paevsky reproaches some Russian poets in ignorance of the life of the birds, falling criticizing the “endowment of the hollow” of Sergei Yesenin and the like seeming absurdities. It would be difficult for him to complain about Pavel Barto's poems. But aren't poems, where is the access of imagination forbidden?

And okay, the author would have released one such book, but he all his life wrote about birds, invariably adhering to the poetry of the most strict naturalism, as if Don Quixote, fighting and suffering for ideas that are little understandable to others.

For the first time reading Pavel Barto’s poems, I felt something familiar to them. But the solution came to only when I fell into my hands of the 1942 photographic film, which captured the moments of the Tatyana’s celebration by employees of Moscow University, who at that time stored the collections of the zoological museum from incendiary bombs dumped into the city of the Nazis (now the film is located in the archive of the Zoomuzey of Moscow State University). Zoologists Sergey Ivanovich Ognev and Sergey Sergeyevich Turov (then - director of the Zoological Museum) are easily recognizable on the frames). Pavel Barto is also present there, among other participants in the holiday, contrary to the tragic setting dressed in masquerade costumes: Barto is dressed in an extravagant outfit of the lady with a black veil.

Both S. I. Fires and S. S. Turov belonged to the galaxy of Russian scientists-popuards of field zoology. Their books are marked by intentional simplicity and conciseness, unlike, for example, from the unnecessarily saturated facts of the works of A. E. Bram. They are devoid of imagination and artificial intrigue, which differs from the books of E. Seton-Tompson, who appeared in Russian translations, and the tales of Vitaly Bianchi. It is eliminated from these books and the author as the main character, i.e. The subjectivity is minimized, perhaps to the detriment of fascination. The task that the zoologists of this school set is simple, noble, but also ungrateful - to give readers a kind of primer, the most necessary foundations, without which the ordered knowledge of living nature is impossible. The ingratitude of this work is that the schoolboy who studied the primer casts him and does not return to him, often forgetting about the first, so necessary assistant. This attitude is perfectly described in the memoirs of Andrei Bely, a child, who was passionate about the stories of the birds of D. N. Kaigorodov, but soon outgrown this book, and with it, ornithology, which was then not finding the necessary support in special literature or observations in nature. Alexander Nikolaevich Promptov also belonged to the same galaxy of science popularizers, who created one of the best field determinants of birds -“birds in nature”, first released in the full form in 1937. This is the same book that ended up in my library in my childhood, and it was she who opened the door to the world of birds. Limiting the imagination, Pavel Barto taught young readers to the severity of zoological knowledge, to the accuracy of observations. He did not imitate modernists to modern him, but was co-complied with the common cause of popularization of science. It is no coincidence that Konstantin Nikolaevich Babysklonov asked Pavel Barto to compose epigraphs to the chapters of one of his books about the life of birds. Among the Russian poets, there are a lot of those who, like Vera Pavlova, preferred living Slavka to the book Nightingale, flying in the wilds of a roadside weed. However, only Pavel Barto devoted his work to sincere propaganda of ornithology. As for true poetry, it remained in a virtuoso game the size of the verse, in an unmistakable choice of words and images that allow you to convey, for example, a swift flight of a cut on a sheet of paper:

No, not a sharpener
On a stone grain
The blades sharpen
Ringing knives -
Whirlwind, decreasing
With piercing
Whistle,
Passing by
Strike flock.
Fast
Swear their haircuts
In height,
They play in the sky
Whistle
On the fly,
The air is cut,
And pierce
And cut;
Wind
They are wearing
Elastic
And fresh.

Pavel Kvartalnov,
cand. Biol. sciences, scientific. sore. Department of Zoology
vertebrates of the Moscow State University