Ruthless book

Boris Kornilov. I will live to old age, to glory ... M., Azbuka, 2012.

Bookshelf

Such a sick longing for this book. Such a painful introduction to someone else's fate - or rather, to several destinies at once.

The book is divided into several different parts.

Firstly, the actual poems of the wonderful poet Kornilov, whom many know only as the author of the words of the song “The morning meets us with coolness ...” - meanwhile, this is one of the most powerful poets of the last century.

Kornilov is a poet of the same natural, rooted, spiritual, densely soiled alloy that Yesenin and Pavel Vasiliev - the Russian peasantry no longer gives birth to such children. And where is it, the peasantry ...

An essay by the critic Nikita Eliseev precedes Kornilov's poems.

The second part of the book is the diaries of the poetess Olga Bergholz, who was Kornilov's wife in 1929-1931.

The third is the correspondence of his second wife, Lyudmila Basova, with Kornilov's mother.

The final part of the book contains materials from the poet's investigation file.

This is a very ruthless book for Kornilov.

The poet sometimes undresses to the very last nakedness in his poems - and then two more wives talk about him, and the protocols of his interrogations are published, where he signed everything, everything, everything - having slandered himself with his head.

In addition, Eliseev, who is the author of the preface, considers it possible to state that "Kornilov never reflected, did not reflect." The rationale for such an assertion is simple: Kornilov left us no documentary evidence of his doubts about Soviet power. Bergholz, for example, left - and, therefore, says Eliseev, she was thinking.

Well, maybe Kornilov didn’t keep diaries, but what he talked about there with friends, for example, with the poet Yaroslav Smelyakov, Smelyakov, who survived and served twice in prison, did not tell anyone.

Let him be with him, Kornilov did not think, and okay, I would like to approach the issue differently.

Nikita Eliseev, in his essay, tries to figure out how complex and latently tragic Kornilov's poems were. That is, Eliseev himself contradicts his attitude about the absence of reflection in Kornilov: it was simply scattered in verse.

Eliseev, not without diligence, finds in Kornilov's poems signs of a certain discord with the time in which the poet lived.

I must say that from such prefaces sometimes it breathes a slight absurdity. Because the author in such cases faces one task: to prove that this or that Soviet writer, despite his Soviet writings, was secretly not entirely Soviet.

There is no doubt that no serious artist will settle down with all his junk and wealth in one ideology or another - but let's still not turn common sense inside out.

In the section where the materials from the investigation file are placed, there is a disgusting document in its meanness - a literary examination of the critic Nikolai Lesyuchevsky, written by order of the NKVD and, in fact, served as one of the reasons for the poet to be sentenced to death.

In his "expertise" Lesyuchevsky (who lived safely until 1978) seeks out the conclusions that come out of Kornilov "between the lines: one cannot put up with such a gloomy life, with such a regime, changes are needed." “Kornilov,” writes Lesyuchevsky, “is trying to disguise the true counter-revolutionary meaning of his works, resorting to the method of “two meanings” - superficial for deception and internal, deep - genuine.”

Eliseev rightly says that Lesyuchevsky demonstrates "an absolute inability to write in the slightest degree intelligibly or interestingly" (although the NKVD officers understood everything). But - here's the paradox - both Eliseev and Lesyuchevsky write, in fact, about the same thing. It's just that what Lyusechevsky seeks and blames Kornilov, Eliseev puts the poet in merit.

I don't even know what conclusion to draw from this.

Moreover, Kornilov's poems, your truth, sometimes simply enchant with a sense of impending horror.

“ My wife! You see, I can't sleep, / Suspicion worries me. / My wife! / The white midnight is clear, / It cannot hide me, / It freezes, hanging over the world, / And the old shutters sway, / All huge and all unnecessary, / She will not hear anything. / And the last bullet of the arrow will ring, / And pour my blood on the ground; / Whistling, the hand will fall and hang, / Pierced through at the elbow. / Or - you think - / Flashes under the knife / My bluish neck. / And the knife will fall, wriggling like a snake, / From my good blood. / Then it will rust, / On it in a year / Blood spots will come out. / I won't see them, / I'm wasted - / And this is completely incomprehensible.

For some reason he wrote this in the 30th year.

Yes, we see a bunch of nightmarish premonitions. Yes, it would seem difficult to find something like this in a faithful Soviet poet, but…

But if you search, you will surely find any of them.

Besides, are there any orthodox poets who wrote exclusively monarchist poems? Or are there liberal poets who never think of death or the horror of the world? Eliseev himself writes: "A real poet is always a real tragedy."

So to interpret the history of literature as the history of the struggle of writers with the Soviet regime, although an exciting occupation, but at some stage becomes somewhat intrusive.

As for the "general reader", the most interesting section for him will be, to be honest, excerpts from Bergholz's diary.

A young (and judging by the photographs, very beautiful) woman in her twenties describes her life with her husband, whom

sometimes he loves, sometimes he doesn’t love, who drinks, doesn’t sleep at home, corresponds with his first youthful love and, moreover, has an irrepressible potency, which drives Bergholz to fits of almost despair.

Really suffering from the possible - by the way, spiritual, not carnal! - her husband's infidelity, Bergholz describes how she herself flirts first with the poet Nikolai Tikhonov (married), then with the writer Yuri Libedinsky (who "kisses me, I defend myself from kisses and caresses of him, because I want them and I'm afraid"), and then with someone else, and another, and another.

Perhaps this should not have been published? Or is it worth reading about? Or is it still worth it?

Bergholz did not destroy this diary, but she could have. She knew almost certainly what would be published.

In general, nothing surprises us adults anymore.

On the one hand: “Boris, whom I am deceiving, who loves me, whom I love too…”

On the other hand, right there, about Lebedinsky: “Yuri will arrive soon. I’ll probably see him on Friday ... I want him to love me the way he says, the way he knows how to love.

And below, again about Kornilov: “No, I love him… Boris’s expulsion from the Komsomol, his lack of ideas—should have pushed me away from him, not to mention his other qualities… His excessive tenderness and potency irritate me. Do I not love him…”

Roughly speaking, Kornilov's poems now can only make diaries like this reread.

And everything ended, as you might guess, badly: Kornilov and Bergholz divorced, their child, daughter Irina, died of an illness at the age of seven.

Kornilov was arrested on March 20, 1937. The book contains evidence: “When they came to Kornilov, he was reading. All the time of the search, he did not turn around - he sat buried in a book and did not pay attention to the Chekists.

He was kept behind bars for almost a year. He confessed that he subjected the measures of the party and government to counter-revolutionary criticism and expressed regret about the liquidation of the kulaks.

February 13 p.m. early 10th sec. Department IV, Lieutenant of State Security Reznik and Lieutenant Gantman drew up an indictment on the participation of the poet in the "Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist organization", and Captain Karpov endorsed the conclusion.

On February 20, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, consisting of Matulevich, Mazyuk and Zhdan, sentenced Boris Petrovich Kornilov to capital punishment - execution. The meeting took 20 minutes. The sentence was carried out on the same day.

Relatives did not know anything about his death.

Kornilov then already had another wife - another beauty, Lucy Bornstein, who at the age of 16 ran away from her parents to a half-destitute poet. At the time of her arrest, Lucy was three months pregnant. Kornilov managed to ask Lucy: if a girl is born, name Ira, and if a boy, Sasha. In his only letter, which came from prison, the poet asked "to take care of Sasha" - he did not know that a daughter was born.

She really was called Irina.

Her notes are also in the collection, for a long time she did not know who her father was.

And the poet's mother, Taisiya Mikhailovna Kornilova, was still waiting for Boris's return from prison until the mid-1950s.

But what else I want to note in the end.

It seemed surprising to me the idealism, strange in our times, of these, undoubtedly Soviet (congratulate each other in letters on the 40th anniversary of October!) - and people mutilated by the Soviet era.

Here Kornilov is beginning to be published. Poems in those days were paid heavily: for example, for the first collection, published in 1957, 86 thousand rubles were credited. Olga Berggolts, the compiler of this book, immediately stated that the main heiress was the poet's mother, and she had nothing to do with it at all. The poet's mother corresponds with his second wife, Lyudmila, and Lyudmila, tirelessly engaged in various activities to restore the poet's honorable name (although she herself was mortally ill!), also renounces hereditary rights.

But here the mother arbitrarily transfers half of the fee to Kornilov's daughter - that is, to her granddaughter.

In our days, . other wives would gnaw each other's throats, solving inheritance cases

Along with the inhuman time, has humanity gone somewhere?..