Alexander Yashin: biography and creativity

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:47

Soviet poet Alexander Yashin, also known as a prose writer, literary editor and journalist, lived a short but eventful life full of events and creativity. This article provides a biography of the writer, from which you can find out what kind of person Alexander Yashin was.

Biography

Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin (real name Popov) was born on March 27, 1913 in the village of Bludnovo (the territory of the modern Vologda region). Alexander grew up in a peasant family, and so poor, and after the death of his father in the First World War, and completely poor.

From the age of five, Sasha Popov worked in the field and around the house - in difficult times, every hand was important. His mother remarried, and his stepfather was rude to the boy. After graduating from three classes of a rural school, eight-year-old Sasha asked to be allowed to go to the county to continue his studies. But his stepfather did not want to let him go, losing, albeit a small one, but still a worker and assistant. The boy complained to his beloved school teachers, and they gathered the village council, where by a majority of votes they decided to send Sasha to further study in the neighboring city of Nikolsk.

Having finished seven classes there,a fifteen-year-old boy entered the teacher's college.

The beginning of creativity

Even at school, Alexander began to write poetry, for which he received the nickname "Red Pushkin" from his classmates. In the first year of college, the novice poet began to send his work to the newspaper. The first publication took place in 1928 in the Nikolsky Kommunar newspaper. Since that time, Alexander began to use the pseudonym Yashin.

His poems began to appear frequently in various local newspapers, such as "Leninskaya Smena", "Northern Lights", "Soviet Thought", and later in the all-Union publications "Kolkhoznik" and "Pionerskaya Pravda". In the same 1928, Alexander Yashin twice acted as a delegate to the association of proletarian writers - first at the provincial congress, and then at the regional one.

After graduating from college in 1931, Yashin worked as a village teacher for a year, and then moved to Vologda, where he worked in a newspaper and on the radio. In 1934, the first collection of poetry by 21-year-old Alexander Yashin, en titled "Songs to the North", was released in Arkhangelsk. In the same year, the young poet received his first award for the Komsomol camping song "Four Brothers".

In 1935, Alexander moved to Moscow and entered the Gorky Literary Institute. There, in 1938, the second collection of his poetry "Severyanka" was published. In 1941, after graduating from his studies, Yashin voluntarily went to the front, having spent three war years in marine battalions, defending Leningrad and Stalingrad,liberating the Crimea and working as a war correspondent for the "Combat Volley" magazine.

In 1943 he received the Military Merit Medal, and in 1944 he was demobilized due to a serious illness. In 1945 he was awarded the Order of the Red Star and medals for the defense of Leningrad and Stalingrad.

Recognition and best works

The military work of Alexander Yashin, expressed in the collections "It Was in the B altic" and "City of Anger", was highly appreciated by the Union of Soviet Writers, but real recognition came to the poet after the poem "Alyona Fomina", written in 1949. For her, Yashin received the Stalin Prize of the second degree.

In the late forties and early fifties, Alexander Yakovlevich traveled to the virgin lands and the construction of hydroelectric power stations, traveled around the North and Altai. A huge number of impressions were described in his collections "Countrymen" and "Soviet Man".

In 1954 the poet took part in the Second Congress of Soviet Writers. In 1958 he wrote his most famous poem - "Hurry to do good deeds":

I had a bad life with my stepfather, He raised me anyway - And that's why

Sometimes I regret not having it

Give him something to please him.

When he fell ill and died quietly, –

Mother says, - Day by day

Remembered me more and more and waited:

"I wish Shurka… He would have saved me!"

To a homeless grandmother in her native village

I said I love her so much

To grow up and cut down her house myself, I will prepare firewood, I will buy some bread.

Dream a lot, Promised a lot…

In the blockade of the Leningrad old man

Saved from death, Yes, a day late, And the days of that age will not return.

Now I have traveled a thousand roads –

Buy a load of bread, I could cut down a house.

No stepfather And grandma died…

Hurry to do good deeds!

Since 1956, Alexander Yashin turned to prose, writing several works criticizing the Stalinist regime and describing the life of Soviet workers and collective farmers without embellishment. These include the story "Levers" (1956), the story "Visiting my son" (1958), "Vologda wedding" (1962). All these works were either banned immediately after publication, or were generally released only after the death of the writer.

Private life

Alexander Yashin was married twice and had seven children: a son and two daughters from his first marriage, two sons and two daughters from his second. After the second marriage, the older children of the poet stayed with him, and not with their mother.

The true love of the poet was Veronika Tushnova, a Soviet poetess. They met in the early 60s and were immediately filled with fiery feelings for each other, despite Alexander's marriage and Veronica's recent second divorce. The last book of the poetess "One Hundred Hours of Happiness" is dedicated to her ardent love for Alexander Yakovlevich.

Not daring to leave his large family, Yashin decided to end the relationship. And soon after thatTushnova developed cancer, from which she died in 1965. The poet was seriously worried about the death of his beloved, blaming himself for everything. Most of his lyrics of that period are devoted to the poetess. The article presents a photo of Alexander Yashin with Veronika Tushnova.

Death and memory

Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin died on July 11, 1968 from cancer. At the request of the poet himself, he was buried at home, in the village of Bludnovo. In memory of him, a memorial complex of Alexander Yashin was erected in Vologda, including his home and grave. One of the Vologda streets also bears the name of the poet.