For forty years I lived near the street named after Olga Bergholz. Since childhood, he visited the library, which is now named after the famous poetess. Frankly, I knew little about the personality of Olga Bergholz, about her work and difficult fate. At school, we read well-known poems, but the author of the memorable lines carved on the granite wall of the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery remained unknown to many.
Recently, I often visit the library named after Olga Berggolts. Memorial evenings are held there, and my mother is invited to perform at the Sobesednik club. As a token of gratitude, I donated my novel-life story The Wanderer to my native library.
Opposite the library is Palevsky Garden. On May 16, the birthday of Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz, a monument to the famous poetess, who was also called the muse of besieged Leningrad, was solemnly opened there.
Olga Fedorovna Berggolts was born on May 16, 1910 in St. Petersburg. The surname Bergholz is German, after his grandfather on his father's side. The poetess's father, Fyodor Khristoforovich Bergholz, is a descendant of a Russified Swede who was taken prisoner under Peter I.
Olga's childhood passed on the outskirts of the Nevskaya Zastava, where I was born and raised.
The love of poetry was instilled in the girl by her mother. The first poem of fourteen-year-old Olga was published by the factory wall newspaper of the Krasny Tkach plant on September 27, 1925. A year later, the poems "Song of the Banner" were published by "Lenin's sparks". The first story, "The Enchanted Path," was published in Red Tie magazine.
While still in her senior year of school, Olga joined the literary youth association "Change" at the Leningrad Association of Proletarian Writers. In 1926, the famous poet Korney Chukovsky praised her work and said that Olga would certainly make a real poet.
In "Change" Olga met the poet Boris Kornilov, who later became her first husband.
Together in 1926 they entered the Higher State Courses of Art Studies at the Institute of Art History, where the famous writers Tynyanov and Shklovsky taught, and Mayakovsky and Bagritsky performed.
Since 1930, Bergholz worked in children's literature, published in the magazine "Chizh". Then she entered the philological faculty of Leningrad University. The practice took place in Vladikavkaz, in the newspaper "Power of Labor".
The verses that Olga wrote in the Caucasus, which she loved, are indicative.
On the Mamison pass
we stopped for an hour.
The immortal snows shone
crown around us.
Not ours, high, transcendent
space seemed to say:
“And I live without you, separately,
for thousands of years, as he lived.
And this wild indifference
the soul was struck.
And like the zenith of earthly happiness
there was silence in my heart...
After graduating from the university, Olga Fedorovna worked in Kazakhstan. Returning to Leningrad, she worked in the newspaper of the Elektrosila plant. In 1933-1935, her first books and the collection "Poems" were published. In 1935, Olga was admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR.
After the assassination of Kirov in 1934, there were constant "purges" in Leningrad. In March 1937, an article was published in Leningradskaya Pravda, in which several writers were called "enemies of the people", including Boris Kornilov.
Bergholz's diary contains an entry about how her husband took her away from the city during the terrible days of waiting for new arrests in the “Leningrad case”: “The feeling of being chased did not leave me. ... So we drove, and even the moon was chasing us, like a GEP officer.
In May 1938, Olga Berggolts was expelled from the candidates of the CPSU (b) and from the Writers' Union - with the wording for "connection with the enemy of the people" (husband - Boris Kornilov). In the fall, she was fired from the newspaper, and the former journalist got a job as a teacher of Russian and literature at school.
But already in December 1938, Olga Berggolts was arrested "as a member of the Trotskyist-Zinoviev organization and a terrorist group." She was charged with participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against Voroshilov and Zhdanov. She was required to confess to terrorist activities. During interrogations, she was beaten, but she survived and did not slander herself. However, the child she was carrying died from beatings.
On July 3, 1939, Bergholz was released and fully rehabilitated. After her release, she recalled: “They took out the soul, dug into it with smelly fingers, spit on it, crap, then put it back and say: live!”
Three months later, in October 1939, she wrote in her diary: “... I have not yet returned from there. Staying alone at home, I talk aloud with the investigator, with the commission, with people - about the prison, about the shameful, concocted "my case." Everything resonates with a prison - poems, events, conversations with people. She stands between me and life ... "
In 1940, Berholz joined the Bolshevik Communist Party.
When the war began, Olga Fedorovna remained in Leningrad and worked on the Leningrad radio. With her performances, she inspired the inhabitants of the besieged city to perseverance and courage.
When I come to the Radio House to participate in radio broadcasts, I always stop for a few moments at the entrance in front of the Olga Berggolts memorial.
In her diary, Olga Berggolts wrote: “The miserable troubles of the government and the party, for which it is painfully ashamed ... How did they bring it to the point that Leningrad was besieged, Kyiv was besieged, Odessa was besieged. After all, the Germans go on and on ... "
In November 1941, a real famine began in Leningrad. First, the first cases of loss of consciousness from hunger on the streets and at work, the first cases of death from exhaustion, were noted. People went somewhere about their business, fell and died instantly. Special funeral services picked up about a hundred corpses daily from the streets. According to official statistics, in February 1942, about 7,000 corpses were picked up on the streets of the city.
In her diaries, Bergholz wrote about the actions of the city authorities during the blockade, that when even excavators could not cope with digging graves, and corpses lay in piles along the streets and embankments, the leaders forbade pronouncing the word "dystrophy". People were dying of hunger, and in the diagnosis they indicated “heart failure”.
In winter, death from starvation became massive. More than 4,000 people died every day. There were days when 6-7 thousand people died. In total, according to recent studies, during the first, most difficult year of the blockade, approximately 780,000 Leningraders died.
In most cases, families did not die out immediately, but one at a time, gradually. While someone could walk, he brought food received on cards. The loss of cards meant death.
From November 20, 1941, Leningraders began to receive the lowest bread rate for the entire time of the blockade - 250 g for a work card and 125 g for an employee and a child. Work cards in November - December 1941 received only a third of the population. In Leningrad bread flour was 40%. The rest is cake, cellulose, malt.
“Our government and the Leningrad leaders were left to the mercy of fate. People are dying like flies, and no one is taking measures against this, ”Olga Berggolts wrote in her diary.
If in the pre-war period up to 3,500 people died in the city on average every month, then in February 1942, 3,200 people per day (!) - 3,400 people died.
My supervisor, Doctor of Law, Professor Yakov Ilyich Gilinsky spent his entire childhood in besieged Leningrad. It is impossible not to believe his memories.
In April 1942, Olga Berggolts wrote in her diary: “Oh, the vile bastard! I hate! I fight for the fact that "They" are omnipresent, these "cadres of the litter of 37-38 years."
During the blockade, Bergholz created her best poems dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: The February Diary (1942), The Leningrad Poem. She was called "the muse of besieged Leningrad." And she confessed:
I've never been a hero
She didn't want fame or reward.
Breathing in one breath with Leningrad,
I didn't act like a hero, I lived.
During the years of the blockade, according to various sources, up to 1.5 million people died. Only 3% of them died from bombing and shelling; the remaining 97% starved to death.
At the largest cemetery in the world, the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, 470,000 Leningraders are buried who died during the blockade and in the battles defending the city.
The world-famous words of Olga Bergholz are carved on the granite wall: “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten”!
Oh friend, I didn't think silence
The worst thing that will leave the war.
So quiet, so quiet that the thought of war
Like a scream, like a sob in silence.
Here people, growling, wriggling, crawled,
Here, blood was foaming an inch from the ground ...
It's quiet here, so quiet that it seems - forever
No one will come here
Neither a plowman, nor a carpenter, nor a gardener -
no one will ever come.
So quiet, so dumb - not death and not life.
Oh, this is more severe than all reproaches.
Not death and not life - dumbness, dumbness -
Despair clenched his lips.
The dead take revenge on the worldless living:
Everyone knows, everyone remembers, but they themselves are silent.
After the war, Olga Bergholz's book "Leningrad Speaks" was published - about working on the radio during the war. But soon the book was withdrawn from the libraries.
In 1946, the famous decree on Leningrad journals was adopted. It also affected Olga Fedorovna. She was blamed for her good attitude towards Anna Akhmatova, and even (!) The continuation of the theme of military suffering in peacetime.
And the fate of Olga Bergholz was not easy. The first husband, Boris Kornilov, was shot in 1938 for anti-Soviet activities. The second husband, literary critic Nikolai Molchanov, died of dystrophy in besieged Leningrad in 1942. From 1949 to 1962, Olga Fedorovna was married to Georgy Makogonenko.
All three children of Olga Bergholz died in different years.
Father, for refusing to become an informant for the NKVD, was exiled to Minusinsk in 1942. After the Victory, he returned to Leningrad, but already in 1948 he died.
It was almost impossible to endure all these life upheavals. In 1952, Olga Berggolts ended up in a psychiatric hospital for alcohol addiction. There she wrote her autobiography.
Olga Fedorovna was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor, the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad", "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945" and even the Stalin Prize of the third degree in 1951.
Olga Bergholz died on November 13, 1975. Her desire to be buried at the Piskarevsky cemetery among her friends who died during the blockade was not fulfilled.
Only in 2005, a monument appeared at the place of her burial at the Literary bridges of the Volkovskoye cemetery.
Since 1994, Olga Fedorovna Bergholz has been an honorary citizen of St. Petersburg.
On January 17, 2013, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the breaking of the blockade of Leningrad in St. Petersburg, the museum of Olga Berggolts was opened at school No. 340 in the Nevsky district.
The diaries that the poetess kept for many years were not published during her lifetime. After the death of Olga Bergholz, her archive was confiscated by the authorities and placed in a special safe. Why - it became clear after excerpts from the diaries were published in 2010.
“I don’t know what is more in me - hatred for the Germans or irritation, furious, aching, mixed with wild pity, for our government,” wrote Olga Berggolts in her diary. - It was called: "We are ready for war." O bastards, adventurers, ruthless bastards!”
Many Leningraders who survived the blockade (like my grandmother, aunt and father) still consider these years the greatest tragedy, and a great victory for them is a holiday with tears in their eyes.
Putin and Medvedev are Leningraders, and therefore they are obliged to do everything so that the tragedy of victory does not happen again!
“I so want to embrace the world,” wrote Olga Berggolts.
And I tell you no
my wasted years,
unnecessarily traveled paths,
wasted news.
There are no unperceived worlds
there are no supposedly distributed gifts,
there is no love in vain,
deceived love, sick, -
her imperishable pure light
always in me
always with me.
And it's never too late again
start a lifetime
start all the way
and so that in the past - not a word,
not a groan would be crossed out.
You need to look at yourself from above,
To understand the purpose of my Self,
To understand feelings, to understand words,
The mood of the soul suddenly embody in verse,
To understand what to do, where to go,
Where and in what can I find the meaning of my life,
Understand doubts, understand fears,
And do not blame the pain and suffering,
See the test in small things
And the temptation of temptation in fame, in money,
To find the answer So why do I live?
And what will I finally bring to people?
How can I live? And who do I love? why?
What is the secret of happiness? And when will I die?
How to live, how to fill the born day,
In order to create joy, I would not be lazy,
To sacrifice everything that I have, I create?
And who do I really love?
What should I do, where should I go, who should I be with?
How can we, despite worries, love? ..
There are many questions at night.
And suddenly my heart said: "Shut up!
Everything you need, you will feel!
You just look at yourself from above
And you realize why you and me!"
(from my novel-truth "The Wanderer" (mystery) on the site New Russian Literature
P.S. These days, May 21-24, the 10th International Book Fair is taking place in St. Petersburg. This year it is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory. On May 21 and 22, I met with writers, publishers and readers, I was interested in the future of new Russian literature. In one of the following posts, I will talk in detail about interesting meetings. In the meantime, I propose to watch a video in which the writer Valery Popov answers my questions.
She was called the Leningrad Madonna. Olga Berggolts became one of the symbols of the blockade, her poems emphasized the resilience of Leningraders and their love for their city.
It is Olga Bergholz who owns the lines “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten”
The war came, and with it the blockade.
She was supposed to be evacuated along with her husband, but in 1941 her husband, Nikolai Molchanov, dies, and Olga Fedorovna decides to stay.
And something amazing happened. From a little-known poetess appeared the Leningrad Madonna, the muse of the besieged city! At this time, Bergholz created her best poems dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: "February Diary" (1942), "Leningrad Poem"
Bergholz could not sit idly by. In the very first days of the blockade, she came to the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union and asked where and how she could be useful. Olga was sent to the disposal of the literary and dramatic editorial office of the Leningrad Radio.
It was on the radio that Bergholz became famous.
Exhausted and hungry, but unconquered Leningraders were waiting for her voice. Her voice became the voice of Leningrad. It is Bergholz who owns the famous words: "No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten."
During the blockade, Bergholz did not have special privileges and additional rations. When the blockade was broken and Olga Fedorovna was sent to Moscow, doctors diagnosed her with dystrophy. But then, according to Bergholz herself, a “well-fed” life began for her.
Unfortunately, this woman was never truly happy. Maybe only ... in the blockade, when she felt like a mother and protector of all Leningrad children.
Poems about the siege of Leningrad
The Nazis failed to take
Leningrad by storm.
They shorted out
around it is a blockade ring.
**** **********
I'm talking to you under the whistle of shells,
illuminated by a gloomy glow.
I'm talking to you from Leningrad
my country, sad country...
Kronstadt evil, indomitable wind
thrown in my face beats.
Children fell asleep in bomb shelters
the night watch stood at the gate.
Over Leningrad - a mortal threat ...
Sleepless nights, every day is hard.
But we forgot what tears are
what was called fear and prayer.
I say: we, the citizens of Leningrad,
the roar of cannonades will not shake,
and if tomorrow there are barricades -
we will not leave our barricades.
And women with fighters will stand side by side,
and the children will bring us cartridges,
and all of us should bloom
old banners of Petrograd.
Hands squeezing a charred heart,
I make such a promise
I, a city dweller, the mother of a Red Army soldier,
who died near Strelna in battle:
We will fight with selfless strength
we will overcome the rabid beasts,
we will win, I swear to you, Russia,
on behalf of Russian mothers.
August 1941
************
... I will talk to you today,comrade and friend my Leningrader,
about the light that burns above us,
about our last consolation.
Comrade, bitter days fell on us,
unforeseen disasters threaten
but we are not forgotten with you, not alone, -
and this is already a victory.
Look - full of maternal longing,
behind the smoky ridge of the siege,
does not reduce the eyes of the inflamed country
from the defenders of Leningrad.
So once, sending a friend on a hike,
for a hard and glorious feat,
sobbing, staring for centuries
from the city walls of Yaroslavl.
Through the flame and the wind they fly and fly,
their lines are blurred with tears.
In a hundred languages they say about one thing:
"We are with you, comrades, with you!"
And how many parcels come in the morning
here, in the Leningrad parts!
How mittens and sweaters smell
forgotten peace and happiness...
And the country sent planes to us, -
Let's be even more relentless! -
their measured, booming song is heard,
and you can see their wings shining.
Comrade, listen, stand up, smile
and with a challenge to the world tell:
- We are not fighting for the city alone, -
and this is already a victory.
Thank you. Thank you home country
for help with love and strength.
Thanks for the letters, for the wings for us,
Thanks for the mittens too.
Thank you for your concern
she is dearer to us than reward.
She will not be forgotten in the siege, in battle
defenders of Leningrad.
We know that bitter days fell on us,
unforeseen disasters.
But the Motherland is with us, and we are not alone,
and our victory will be.
Conversation with a neighbor
Fifth December 1941. It is the fourth month of the blockade.
Until the fifth of December, air
anxiety lasted for
ten to twelve o'clock.
Leningraders received from 125
up to 250 grams of bread.
Daria Vlasyevna, flatmate,
let's sit down and talk together.
You know, let's talk about the world
about the desired world, about his own.
Here we lived for almost six months,
the battle lasts for a hundred and fifty days.
The suffering of the people is heavy -
ours, Daria Vlasyevna, are with you.
Oh howling night sky
trembling of the earth, a collapse not far away,
poor Leningrad slice of bread -
it weighs almost nothing...
In order to live in the ring of blockade,
every day a mortal hears a whistle -
how much power do we, neighbor, need,
so much hate and love...
So much so that for minutes in confusion
you don't recognize yourself
- Will I take it? Is there enough patience?
- You will take it out. You will endure. You will live.
Daria Vlasyevna, a little more,
the day will come - over our head
the last alarm will fly by
and the last sound will end.
And what a distant, long, long time ago
you and I will seem to be at war
at the moment when we push the shutters with our hands,
pull the black curtains from the window.
Let the home glow and breathe
full of peace and spring ...
Cry quietly, laugh quietly, quietly
Let's enjoy the silence.
We will break fresh bread with our hands,
dark golden and rye.
Slow, big sips
Let's drink ruddy wine.
And you - yes
they will put youmonument in the square.
Stainless, immortal steel
your appearance will be imprinted simple.
Here is the same: emaciated, bold,
in a hastily knitted scarf,
like this, when under shelling
you walk with a wallet in your hand.
Daria Vlasyevna, by your strength
the whole earth will be renewed.
This force has a name - Russia.
Stand still and be of good cheer like her!
From the February diary
IIt was like a day.
A friend came to me
without crying, she said that yesterday
buried the only friend
and we were silent with her until the morning.
What words could I find
I, too, am a Leningrad widow.
We ate bread
that was postponed for a day,
wrapped in one scarf together,
and it became quiet and quiet in Leningrad.
One, knocking, worked the metronome...
And the feet got cold, and the candle languished.
Around her blind light
a moon ring formed
slightly rainbow-like.
When the sky brightened a little,
we went out together for water and bread
and heard a distant cannonade
sobbing, heavy, measured rumble:
then the Army tore the blockade ring,
fired at our enemy.
II
And the city was covered in dense frost.
County snowdrifts, silence ...
Do not find tram lines in the snow,
of some runners, a complaint is heard.
Skids creak, creak along the Nevsky.
On children's sleds, narrow, funny,
they carry blue water in saucepans,
firewood and belongings, the dead and the sick ...
So since December, the townspeople have been wandering
for many miles, in a thick foggy haze,
in the wilderness of blind, icy buildings
looking for a warmer corner.
Here is a woman leading her husband somewhere.
Gray half mask on the face,
in the hands of a can - this is soup for dinner.
Shells are whistling, the cold is raging...
— Comrades, we are in the ring of fire.
And a girl with a frosty face,
stubbornly clenching his blackened mouth,
body wrapped in a blanket
lucky to the Okhta cemetery.
Lucky, swaying - by the evening to get to ...
Eyes look impassively into the darkness.
Take off your hat, citizen!
They are transporting a Leningrader,
killed in action.
Skids creak in the city, creak ...
How many we already miss!
But we don't cry: they tell the truth
that the tears of the people of Leningrad were frozen.
No, we don't cry. There are few tears for the heart.
Hate does not let us cry.
For us, hatred has become a guarantee of life:
unites, warms and leads.
About not forgiving, not sparing,
to take revenge, take revenge, take revenge, as I can,
the mass grave calls to me
on the Okhtinsky, on the right bank.
III
How silent we were that night, how silent...
But I must, I must speak
with you, sister in anger and sorrow:
thoughts are transparent and the soul burns.
Our suffering cannot be found
no measure, no name, no comparison.
But we are at the end of a thorny path
and we know that the day of liberation is near.-
It will probably be a terrible day
long-forgotten joy marked:
probably they will give fire everywhere,
in all the houses they will give, for the whole evening.
in the ring, in darkness, in hunger, in sorrow
we breathe tomorrow
free, generous day,
we have already conquered this day.
I've never been a hero
didn't want fame or reward.
Breathing in one breath with Leningrad,
I didn't act like a hero, I lived.
And I do not boast that in the days of the blockade
did not change the joys of the earth,
that this joy shone like dew,
gloomily illuminated by war.
And if there's anything I can be proud of,
then, like all my friends around,
I am proud that I can still work,
without laying down weakened hands.
I am proud that these days, more than ever,
we knew the inspiration of labor.
In the dirt, in the darkness, in hunger, in sadness,
where death, like a shadow, dragged on the heels,
we were so happy
they breathed such stormy freedom,
that grandchildren would envy us.
Oh yes, we discovered a terrible happiness -
worthy not sung yet, -
when the last crust was shared,
the last pinch of tobacco;
when they had midnight conversations
by the poor and smoky fire,
how will we live
when victory comes
all our lives in a new way appreciating.
And you, my friend, you even in the years of peace,
like noon of life, you will remember
house on Red Commanders Avenue,
where the fire smoldered and the wind blew from the window.
You will straighten up again, as now, young.
Rejoicing, crying, the heart will call
and this darkness, and my voice, and cold,
and a barricade near the gate.
Long live, long live
simple human joy
basis of defense and labor,
immortality and strength of Leningrad!
Long live the stern and calm,
staring death in the face,
suffocating ring-bearer
as a man,
like a worker
like a Warrior!
My sister, comrade, friend and brother,
after all, it is we, baptized by the blockade!
We are called together - Leningrad,
and the globe is proud of Leningrad.
We are now living a double life:
in the ring and the cold, in hunger, in sorrow,
we breathe tomorrow
happy, generous day -
we have conquered this day.
And will it be night, morning or evening,
but on this day we'll get up and go
army warrior towards
in his liberated city.
We'll go out without flowers
in crumpled helmets,
in heavy padded jackets, in frozen
half masks
as equals, welcoming the troops.
And spreading sword-shaped wings,
bronze Glory will rise above us,
holding a wreath in charred hands.
January - February 1942
My medal
On June 3, 1943, thousands of Leningraders were
the first medals "For the Defense of Leningrad" were awarded.
... The siege lasts, a heavy siege,
unseen in any war.
Medal for the Defense of Leningrad
today the Motherland gives me.
Not for fame, honors, awards
I lived here and could demolish everything:
Medal "For the Defense of Leningrad"
with me as a memory of my path.
Jealous, pitiless memory!
And if sadness suddenly bends me, -
I will then touch you with my hands,
my medal, soldier's medal.
I will remember everything and straighten up as it should,
to become even more stubborn and stronger ...
Call more often to my memory,
The war is still going on, the siege is still going on.
And, like a new weapon in war,
today the Motherland handed me
Medal "For the Defense of Leningrad"
After the war, on the granite stele of the Piskarevsky memorial cemetery, where 470,000 Leningraders who died during the Leningrad Siege and in the battles defending the city are buried, it was her words that were carved:
“Leningraders lie here.
Here the townspeople are men, women, children.
Next to them are Red Army soldiers.
All my life
They protected you, Leningrad,
The cradle of the revolution.
We cannot list their noble names here,
So there are many of them under the eternal protection of granite.
But know, listening to these stones:
No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten"
After the war, the book "Leningrad Speaks" was published about his work on the radio during the war.
Wrote the play "They lived in Leningrad", staged at the theater A. Tairov.
In 1952 - a cycle of poems about Stalingrad. After a business trip to the liberated Sevastopol, she created the tragedy Loyalty (1954).
A new step in the work of Bergholz was the prose book "Daytime Stars" (1959), which allows you to understand and feel the "biography of the century", the fate of the generation.
Olga Berggolts died in Leningrad on November 13, 1975. She was buried at the Literary bridges of the Volkovsky cemetery.
Bibliography
Selected works in 2 volumes. L., Fiction, 1967.Leningrad diary. - L., GIHL, 1944.
Leningrad speaking. - Lenizdat, 1946.
Favorites. - Young Guard, 1954.
Lyrics. - M., Fiction, 1955.
daytime stars. - L., Soviet writer, 1960.
daytime stars. - Lenizdat, 1964.
daytime stars. - Petrozavodsk, Karelian prince. ed., 1967.
Loyalty. - L., Soviet writer, 1970.
daytime stars. - M. Soviet writer, 1971.
daytime stars. - M., Sovremennik, 1975.
daytime stars. — Lenizdat, 1978—224 p. 100,000 copies
Voice. - M., Book, 1985 - 320 p. 7,000 copies (miniature edition, format 75x98 mm)
Filmography
1962 - Introduction - voice-over, reads his poems1974 - Voice of the Heart (documentary)
2010 — Olga Berggolts. "How impossible we lived..." (documentary)
Screen adaptations
1966 - Daytime Stars (dir. Igor Talankin)1967 - First Russians (dir. Evgeny Schiffers)
Awards and prizes
Stalin Prize of the third degree (1951) - for the poem "Pervorossiysk" (1950)Order of Lenin (1967)
Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1960)
Medal "For the Defense of Leningrad" (1943)
Medal "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945"
Honorary citizen of St. Petersburg (1994)
Addresses in Leningrad
Rubinstein Street, 7 ("tear of socialism").
1932-1943 - the house-commune of engineers and writers, which received the bright nickname "The Tear of Socialism" - Rubinstein Street, 7, apt. thirty.
The last years of his life - house number 20 on the Black River embankment.
Memory
A street in the Nevsky district and a square in the courtyard of house number 20 on the Black River embankment in the Primorsky district in St. Petersburg are named after Olga Bergholz. A street in the center of Uglich is also named after Olga Berggolts.
Memorial plaque on the building of the former school in the Epiphany Monastery of Uglich, where Olga Berggolts studied from 1918 to 1921.
Memorial plaques to Olga Berggolts are installed on the building of the former school in the Epiphany Monastery of Uglich, where she studied from 1918 to 1921. and at 7 Rubinshteina Street, where she lived. Another bronze bas-relief of her memory is installed at the entrance to the Radio House. A monument to Olga Berggolts is also installed in the courtyard of the Leningrad Regional College of Culture and Art on Gorokhovaya, 57-a: where there was a hospital during the Great Patriotic War.
In 1994, Olga Berggolts was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.
On January 17, 2013, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the breaking of the blockade of Leningrad in St. Petersburg, the museum of Olga Berggolts was opened at school No. 340 in the Nevsky district. The exposition consists of four exhibition sections - "Olga Bergholz's Room", "Blockade Room", "Place of Memory" and "History of the Neighborhood and School".
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the poetess, in 2010, the St. Petersburg theater "Baltic House" staged the play "Olga. The Forbidden Diary (directed by Igor Konyaev, starring Era Ziganshina.
May 16 marks 108 years since the birth of the famous Soviet poetess Olga Bergholz. She was called the “besieged Madonna” and the “muse of besieged Leningrad”, since during the Second World War she worked at the Radio House, and her voice instilled hope and faith in salvation in many. It is she who owns the lines carved on the granite of the Piskarevsky memorial: "No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten." The poetess had a chance to survive the death of loved ones, repressions, blockade, war and die in peacetime, completely alone and oblivious.
Olga was born in 1910 in St. Petersburg in the family of a surgeon. She began writing poetry as a child, and from the age of 15 she actively published. When Korney Chukovsky first heard her poems, he said: “Well, what a good girl! Comrades, in time it will be a real poet.”
In the literary association of working youth "Change", Olga met the young poet Boris Kornilov and married him, and soon their daughter Irina was born. After graduating from the Faculty of Philology of the Leningrad University, Olga worked as a correspondent for the Sovetskaya Steppe newspaper in Kazakhstan, where she was sent by assignment. At the same time, her marriage to Kornilov broke up. And another man appeared in Bergholz's life - classmate Nikolai Molchanov. In 1932 they got married and their daughter Maya was born.
And then misfortunes befell the family, which since then seemed to haunt Olga Berggolts. In 1934, Maya's daughter died, and two years later, Irina. In 1937, Boris Kornilov was declared an enemy of the people for a ridiculous reason, and Olga, as his ex-wife "for her connection with an enemy of the people," was expelled from the Writers' Union and fired from the newspaper. Soon Boris Kornilov was shot, only in 1957 it was recognized that his case had been falsified. Lydia Chukovskaya wrote that "trouble followed her."
In 1938, Olga Berggolts was arrested on a false denunciation as "a member of the Trotsky-Zinoviev organization and a terrorist group." In prison, she lost another child - she was constantly beaten, demanding confessions of involvement in terrorist activities. After that, she could no longer become a mother. Only in July 1939 she was released for lack of corpus delicti.
Months later, Olga wrote: “I have not yet returned from there. Staying alone at home, I talk aloud with the investigator, with the commission, with people - about the prison, about the shameful, concocted "my case." Everything resonates with a prison - poems, events, conversations with people. She stands between me and life... They took out the soul, dug into it with smelly fingers, spat on it, crap, then put it back and say: "Live." Her lines were prophetic:
And the path of a generation
That's how simple -
Take a close look:
Behind the crosses.
Around - a churchyard.
And more crosses ahead...
In 1941, the Great Patriotic War began, and in early 1942 her husband died. Olga remained in besieged Leningrad and worked on the radio, becoming the voice of the besieged city. It was then that her poetic talent manifested itself in full force. She gave hope to many people, supported and saved. She was called a poet, personifying the resilience and courage of the people of Leningrad, "the besieged Madonna", "the muse of besieged Leningrad." It was she who became the author of the lines about "one hundred and twenty-five blockade grams, with fire and blood in half."
But after the war, the poetess again fell into disgrace: her books were confiscated from libraries due to the fact that she communicated with Anna Akhmatova, objectionable to the authorities, and because of "the author's obsession with issues of repression already resolved by the party." Olga felt broken and broken, in 1952 she even ended up in a psychiatric hospital due to alcohol addiction that had appeared even before the war.
January 18 marks another anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad. The poetess Olga Berggolts was called the “siege muse”, her hot patriotic poems sounded on the air of the Leningrad radio and helped the inhabitants of the besieged city to fight and survive. But about many things in those days she had to remain silent. She wrote about this in her diaries, which she buried in Leningrad until better times. But even after her death, this "forbidden" diary was published only recently, the personal file of Bergholz herself was declassified in 2006.
She got a German surname thanks to her grandfather, a surgeon. The childhood years of the future poetess passed on the outskirts of the working Nevsky Zastava. From 1918 to 1920, together with her family, she lived in Uglich in the former cells of the Epiphany Monastery. She grew up and studied at a labor school, which she graduated in 1926. Her first poem "To Pioneers" was published in the newspaper "Lenin's sparks" in 1925, and her first story "The Enchanted Path" was published in the magazine "Red Tie". In 1925, she came to the literary association of working youth - "Change". At the age of 16, she married the poet Boris Kornilov, but soon divorced. Later, Kornilov was arrested and then shot on false charges.
Entered the philological faculty of Leningrad University. She remarried - to classmate Nikolai Molchanov, with whom she lived until his death in 1942. After graduating from the university in 1930, she left for Kazakhstan, working as a correspondent for the Soviet Steppe newspaper, which she described in the book Glubinka. Returning to Leningrad, she worked as an editor in the newspaper of the Elektrosila plant. In the 1930s, her books were published: the essays "Years of the Storm", the collection of short stories "Night in the New World", the collection "Poems", from which her poetic fame began.
But severe trials awaited the young poetess. In December 1938, Olga Berggolts, on false charges "in connection with the enemies of the people" and as "participant in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against comrades. Stalin and Zhdanov were arrested.
I know, I know - in a stone house
Judge, judge, speak
About my fiery soul,
They want to sharpen it.
For suffering for the right
For unwritten friends
I will be awarded a rusty window,
Sentry at the door...
Pregnant, she spent six months in prison, where, after being tortured and abused, she gave birth to a dead child (both her daughters died before). About this, when Bergholz was released, she wrote in her diary with bitterness and anger: “The feeling of prison now, after five months of freedom, arises in me more sharply than in the first time after my release. I not only really feel, I smell this heavy smell of the corridor from the prison to the Big House, the smell of fish, dampness, onions, the sound of steps on the stairs, but also that mixed state ... of doom, hopelessness, with which I went to interrogations ... They took out my soul , dug into it with smelly fingers, spit on it, crap, then put it back and say: "live."
After the beginning of the blockade, she and her seriously ill husband were to be evacuated from Leningrad, but Molchanov died, and Olga Fedorovna was left alone in the besieged city. She was sent to the literary and dramatic editorial office of the Leningrad Radio, where her voice became the voice of the besieged Leningrad itself. The young woman suddenly became a poet, personifying the resilience of the defenders of Leningrad. In the House of Radio, she worked all the days of the blockade, almost daily broadcasting radio programs, later included in her book "Leningrad Speaks".
Before your face, War,
I take this oath
like a baton for eternal life,
given to me by friends.
Many of them are my friends,
friends of native Leningrad.
Oh we'd suffocate without them
Like Levitan in Moscow, Olga Berggolts was included by the Germans in the list of persons subject to immediate destruction after the capture of the city. But on January 18, 1943, it was Olga Bergholz who announced on the radio: “Leningraders! Dear comrades-in-arms, friends! The blockade has been broken! We have been waiting for this day for a long time, we always believed that it would come… we have to endure, endure a lot. We will endure everything. We are Leningraders!"
For this work during the war years, Olga Berggolts was awarded the Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner of Labor, medals. Her best poems are dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: "February Diary" and "Leningrad Poem".
Alexander Kron recalled: “Olga Bergholz had a great gift of love ... She loved children and suffered from the fact that, due to a trauma, motherhood was not available to her. She loved friends, not just friends, but loved - demanding and selfless. Giving her books to friends, she most often wrote on the title: "with love" - and this was not an empty phrase, she told a friend "I love you" with the chastity of a four-year-old girl and, on occasion, proved this by deed. She loved Anna Andreevna Akhmatova and rushed to her aid at the most critical moments of her life; loved Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeev, having learned about his death, jumped out of the house in one dress, arrived without a ticket with an "arrow" to the funeral, they brought her back with a cold ... She loved her city, her country, and this was not an abstract love that allowed her to stay indifferent to private destinies. The heightened ability to empathize is one of the most captivating secrets of her work.
After the war, it was her words that were carved on the granite stele of the Piskarevsky Memorial Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of Leningraders who died during the Leningrad Siege and in the battles defending the city are buried:
Here lie the Leningraders.
Here the townspeople - men, women, children.
Next to them are Red Army soldiers.
All my life
They protected you, Leningrad,
The cradle of the revolution.
We cannot list their noble names here,
So there are many of them under the eternal protection of granite.
But know, listening to these stones:
Nobody is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.
After the war, her book “Leningrad Speaks” was published about her work on the radio during the war. The prose book "Daytime Stars" appears, allowing, as critics noted, to understand and feel the "biography of the century", the fate of the generation. But Olga Bergholz was a man of her time. Despite the terrible ordeal in prison, she joined the party. And on the days of farewell to Stalin, the following lines of the poetess were published in the Pravda newspaper:
Heart bleeds...
Our beloved, our dear!
Grabbing your head
The Motherland is crying over You.
... Olga Berggolts kept her diaries throughout the blockade. In them, she wrote about what she could not talk about.
“Today, Kolya will bury these diaries of mine. Still, there is a lot of truth in them ... If I survive, they will come in handy to write the whole truth, ”Olga Berggolts wrote in her diary. And the truth she wrote about the blockade has come down to us.
On June 22, she wrote down only three words: “14 hours. WAR!" And here is an entry from September 2, 1941: “Today my dad was summoned to the NKVD at 12 noon and offered to leave Leningrad at six o’clock in the evening. Dad is a military surgeon, faithfully served Sov. power 24 years old, was in Kr. The entire civilian army, saved thousands of people, a Russian to the marrow of his bones, a man who truly loves Russia, despite his harmless old man's grumbling. Nothing decisively behind him is not and cannot be. Apparently, the NKVD simply did not like his last name - this is without any irony. In old age, a person who honestly treated the people, a person needed for defense, was spat in the face and expelled from the city where he was born, no one knows where. In fact, they are sent to their deaths. "Leave Leningrad!" But how can you leave it when it is surrounded by a circle, when all paths are cut! I got old again this day ... "
Entry dated September 12: “A quarter to nine, the Germans will soon arrive. Oh, how terrible, my God, how terrible. I can't get rid of the sucking, physical feeling of fear even on the fourth day of the bombing. The heart is like rubber, it pulls down, the legs tremble, and the hands freeze. It is very scary, and what a humiliating feeling it is, this physical fear… No, no, how is it? Throw explosive iron at unarmed, defenseless people, so that it whistles even before that - so that everyone would think: "This is for me" - and die in advance. He died - and she flew by, but in a minute she will be again - and again whistles, and again the person dies, and again takes a breath - resurrects to die again and again. How long? All right, kill me, but don't scare me, don't you dare scare me with that damned whistle, don't mock me. Kill quietly! Kill all at once, not a few times a day... Oh, my God!”
September 24: “I went to Akhmatova, she lives with a janitor (killed by an artillery shell on Zhelyabova street) in the basement, in a dark, dark corner of the hallway, smelly like that, completely dostoyevsky, on boards that are on top of each other - a mattress, on the edge - wrapped in scarves, with sunken eyes - Anna Akhmatova, the muse of Lamentation, the pride of Russian poetry - a unique, great radiant Poet. She is almost starving, sick, scared. And Comrade Shumilov is sitting in Smolny in an armored comfortable bomb shelter and is busy with the fact that even now, at such a tragic moment, he does not allow people to utter a living, necessary word like bread ... "
Bergholz's testimonies about a trip to Moscow are also significant, where her friends sent her, exhausted and exhausted, in March 1942. She spent less than two months in the capital, and returned back to the besieged city.
In Moscow, according to her, after the "alpine, rarefied, very clean air" of the Leningrad "biblically formidable" winter, there was nothing to breathe. “They don’t tell the truth about Leningrad here…” “…Nobody had even an approximate idea of what the city was going through… They didn’t know that we were starving, that people were dying of hunger…” “…A conspiracy of silence around Leningrad.” “... I don’t do anything here and don’t want to do it - a suffocating lie, nevertheless!” “Death is raging in the city… Corpses lie in piles… “According to official figures, about two million died…”
“So, the Germans occupied Kyiv. Now they are organizing some stinking government there. My God, my God! I don't know what is more in me - hatred for the Germans or irritation, furious, aching, mixed with wild pity - for our government. So screw up! Almost all of Ukraine belongs to the Germans - our steel, our coal, our people, people, people! Maybe people only did what they kept appearances? In recent years, we have been most of all engaged in observing visibility. Maybe we are fighting so shamefully not only because we do not have enough equipment (but why, why the hell is it not enough, it should have been enough, we sacrificed everything in its name!), not only because disorganization stifles, carrion everywhere… footage of the litter of 1937–38, but also because people were tired long before the war, they stopped believing, they learned that they had nothing to fight for.”
On the 18th, the city was shelled by the Germans from long-range guns, there were many casualties and destruction in the center of the city, not far from our house. They keep silent about it, they don’t write about it, they didn’t even allow me to speak about it (“figuratively”) in verse.
Why do we lie even before death? In general, they write and broadcast about Leningrad only with a system of phrases - “fights are going on on the outskirts”, etc. On the 19th at 15.40 there was the strongest bombing of the city during this time. I was in TASS, and a large bomb fell into a neighboring house. The glass in our room flew out, thick green-yellow clouds of smoke poured into the hole. I was not very frightened - firstly, sitting in this room, I was convinced that it would not hit me, and secondly, I did not have time to be frightened, she blurted out very unexpectedly. The most terrible thing in fear and, obviously, in death is its expectation.
Record dated July 2, 1942: “Shards are falling quietly ... And everything is falling, and people are dying. On our streets, of course, there is no such medieval case as in winter, but almost every day you still see an exhausted or dying person lying somewhere near the wall. Just like yesterday on Nevsky, on the steps near the State Bank, a woman lay in a puddle of her own urine, and then two policemen dragged her by the arms, and her legs, bent at the knees, wet and smelly, dragged along the asphalt after her.
23/III-42 “Now the word "dystrophy" is forbidden - death occurs from other causes, but not from hunger! Oh scoundrels, scoundrels! People are forcibly taken out of the city, people are dying on the road... Death is raging in the city. He's already starting to smell like a corpse. Spring will begin - God, there will be a plague there. Even excavators can't cope with digging graves. Corpses lie in piles, at the end of the Moika there are whole lanes and streets of piles of corpses. Trucks with corpses drive between these piles, they drive right over the dead that have fallen from above, and their bones crunch under the wheels of the trucks.
At the same time, Zhdanov sends a telegram demanding that organizations stop sending individual gifts to Leningrad. This, they say, causes "bad political consequences" ...
2/VII-42 Leningrad
“... And children are children in bakeries... Oh, this couple is a mother and a girl of 3 years old, with a brown, motionless monkey face, with huge, transparent blue eyes, frozen, without any movement, with condemnation, with senile contempt looking past everyone. Her upholstered face was slightly raised and turned to the side, and the inhuman, dirty, brown paw froze in a pleading gesture - the fingers were bent to the palm, and the handle was stretched out so in front of the immobile suffering face ... This, apparently, the mother gave her such a pose, and the girl sitting like this - for hours ... This is such a condemnation of people, their culture, their lives, such a sentence to all of us - which cannot be more ruthless. Everything is a lie - there is only this girl with an exhausted paw frozen in a conditional pose of prayer in front of her motionless face and eyes, petrified from all human suffering.
On the night of January 18, 1943, news came that the Leningrad blockade had been broken. Olga Berggolts was entrusted to be the first to report this on the radio. But in her diary that day, she wrote: "... we know that this breakthrough does not yet decide our fate completely ... the Germans are still on Stachek Street."
January 24th. From a letter to my sister: “Everything was swirling in the Radio Committee, we all sobbed and kissed, kissed and sobbed - it’s true!”
On the same day, Bergholz's book "Leningrad Poem" went on sale. And her Leningraders “... bought for bread, from 200 to 300 grams per book. Above this price for me is not and will not be, ”she admits in her notes.
But even about what she saw after the war, it was impossible to write. Here are her notes about her visit to the collective farm in Stary Rakhlin in 1949. “The first day of my observations brought only superfluous evidence to the same, everything to the same; complete unwillingness of the state to reckon with a person, complete subordination, rolling him out by himself, creating for this a chain, huge, terrible system.
Spring sowing, thus, turns into serving the most difficult, almost hard labor; the state presses on time and area, but there is nothing to plow: there are no horses (14 pieces for a collective farm of 240 yards) and two, in general, tractors ... And now the women manually, with hoes and spades, raise the earth for wheat, not to mention vegetable gardens. There are no spare parts for tractors. There are almost no working male hands. In this village - 400 killed men, before the war there were 450. There is not a single yard that was not orphaned - where is the son, where is the husband and father. They live almost starving.
That's all in this village - the winners, this is the victorious people. As they say, what does he get from this? Well, well, post-war difficulties, a Pyrrhic victory (at least for this village) - but what are the prospects? I was struck by some, clearly felt for me, oppressed-submissive state of people and almost reconciliation with a state of hopelessness.
The icon - "Angel of Good Silence", which was given to her by her mother, and which Olga Berggolts carried with her all her life, was preserved in the family. About this icon she wrote a poem called “Excerpt”:
Having reached a silent despair,
not praying to God for a long time,
Good Silence icon
my mother gave me on the road.
And the angel of Good Silence
guarded me jealously.
He didn't accidentally double me
turned off the path. He knew...
He knew no consonances
what you see is indescribable.
Silence tortures my soul
and the seal of lies will rust...
Olga Fedorovna Berggolts, the muse of besieged Leningrad, who became a truly national poet during the war years, died in November 1975.
She asked to be buried “with her own people” at the Piskarevsky cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of victims of the blockade are buried and where her words are inscribed on the monument: “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.” But the then secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee, G. Romanov, refused her.
The funeral took place on November 18 at the Literary bridges of the Volkovsky cemetery. And the monument on the grave of the besieged muse appeared only in 2005. After her death, her archive was confiscated by the authorities and placed in a special depository. Excerpts from the "forbidden" diaries of Olga Bergholz were published only in 2010, and the full diary was published quite recently.
Special for the Centenary
Today is May 9th and we want to congratulate everyone on Victory Day , with the day of gratitude, the day of warmth, the day of memory of the selfless people who had to go through so much - for the sake of the Motherland, for the sake of us.
Today we decided to talk about famous women - Anna Akhmatova, Yanina Zheimo and Olga Berggolts , which, by the will of fate, ended up in besieged Leningrad during the war years. Yes, it was a long time ago, but it was. Learning the stories of people, the stories of mothers of those distant years, we will probably learn something important both about life and about ourselves ... "No one is forgotten"- I want it to be so. Our story is in two parts, today is the first part.
Several stories of famous women - mothers who survived the siege of Leningrad.
"... no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten"
Every year, when May 9 approaches, I want to repeat the words from R. Rozhdestvensky's Requiem all the time:
Remember! Through the centuries, through the years - remember!
About those who will never come again - remember!
This poem and some of the best, in my opinion, poems dedicated to War and Victory were collected in 2012:. In 2013, we remembered several women's destinies:.
Location: besieged city
Today we will continue the women's theme. In January 2014, the 70th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade was celebrated, and it was celebrated not only in Russia, but everywhere where the fate of those who could survive the blockade brought.
By this date, books were published, memoirs were collected, book of memory created many photos can be found.
The blockade of Leningrad lasted 900 days: from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, two and a half years. Despite the widespread evacuation, in September 1941, 2 million 887 thousand inhabitants found themselves in the surrounded city.
The only transport highway connecting the city with the rear regions of the country was the "Road of Life", laid in winter through Lake Ladoga. During the days of the blockade, 1 million 376 thousand Leningraders, mostly women, children and the elderly, were evacuated along this road. The war scattered them to different parts of the Union, their fates turned out differently, many did not return. During the blockade, according to various sources, from 400 thousand to 1.5 million people died.
When the blockade ring was closed, in addition to the adult population, 400 thousand children remained in Leningrad - from infants to schoolchildren and adolescents. Naturally, they wanted to save them in the first place, they tried to hide them from shelling, from bombing.
The most difficult time for Leningraders was the winter of 1941-42, when frosts reached 40 degrees, and there was neither firewood nor coal. Everything was eaten: both leather belts and soles, there was not a single cat or dog left in the city, not to mention pigeons and crows. There was no electricity, hungry, exhausted people went to the Neva for water, falling and dying along the way. The corpses had already ceased to be removed, they were simply covered with snow. People were dying at home with whole families, whole apartments.
- All the food for a person working in production was 250 grams of bread, baked in half with wood and other impurities, and from that heavy and so small. All the rest, including children, received 125 grams of such bread.
The fate of each of the people who survived the blockade is a story full of tragic moments. But it's impossible to tell everyone. Therefore, in today's review - about the blockade fate of several very famous women, each of which is also a mother.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova
In the summer (just in June) of 1941, she celebrated her 52nd birthday. Since the 1920s, she has already been a recognized classic, one of those with whom the Silver Age of Russian poetry is associated. Already behind are many tragic moments of her fate: her husband N.S. Gumilyov was shot in 1921; the only son, Lev Gumilyov, was arrested briefly in 1935, then sentenced to 5 years in 1938. The first sketches of the poem "Requiem" have already been made, in which Anna Andreevna put both the grief of the widow and the mother of "enemies of the people".
- With the outbreak of war, she became one of the few female firefighters, doing men's work on an equal basis with other residents of the city.
In her memoirs of the first months of the blockade, the poetess Olga Berggolts writes: “With a face closed in severity and anger, with a gas mask over her shoulder, she was on duty as ordinary firefighter . She sewed sandbags, which were lined with shelter trenches in the garden of the same Fountain House, under the maple tree, sung by her in “A Poem without a Hero” ... "
And - Anna Akhmatova does not stop writing. Her poems were read on the Leningrad radio. In July 1941, “The Oath” sounded on the air, one of her most famous poems of the war years.
And the one that today says goodbye to the dear, -
Let her melt her pain into strength.
We swear to children, we swear to graves,
That no one will force us to submit!
From the diary of Olga Bergholz:
“24 / IX-41 ... I went to Akhmatova, she lives with a janitor (killed by an artillery shell on Zhelyabova street) in the basement, in a dark, dark corner of the hallway, smelly, completely dostoyevsky, on boards that are on top of each other - a mattress, on the edge - wrapped in scarves, with sunken eyes - Anna Akhmatova, the muse of Lamentation, the pride of Russian poetry - a unique, great radiant Poet. She is almost starving, sick, scared. ... She sits in pitch darkness, she can’t even read, she sits as if in a death row ... and said: “I hate, I hate Hitler, I hate Stalin, I hate those who throw bombs on Leningrad and Berlin, everyone who waging this war, shameful, terrible ... "
In the autumn of 1941, the seriously ill Anna Andreevna was taken by plane from besieged Leningrad to Moscow, then evacuated to Central Asia at the end of 1941. In 1944, Akhmatova returned to war-ravaged, but already free Leningrad.
Already in 1946, Akhmatova was again tested - “Decree of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad” of August 14, 1946, in which the work of Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko was sharply criticized. On November 6, 1949, the son, L.N., was again arrested. Gumilyov. Sentence - 10 years in the camps. Only in 1956 did he return from prison, rehabilitated after the 20th Congress.
Anna Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966, and was buried in the cemetery in Komarovo near Leningrad. LN Gumilyov, when he was building a monument to his mother together with his students, he collected stones for the wall wherever he could. They laid the wall themselves - this is a symbol of the wall under which his mother stood with the transfers to her son in "Crosses". Where the bas-relief of Akhmatova is now, there was originally a niche that looked like a prison window.
Yanina Boleslavovna Zheymo
Yanina Zheymo is sometimes called an actress of one role. She starred a lot, but in the history of cinema she remained as Cinderella. They write that "there is no more expressive, more" real "heroine in any domestic movie fairy tale." Yanina Zheymo sings the song “Stand up, children, stand in a circle” in Cinderella with a crystal voice. This was in 1947.
And in 1941 she was 32. Yanina Zheymo was the fourth child in a circus family and from the age of three she performed in the arena with her parents and sisters. Her childhood was a mixture of never-ending celebration and never-ending need. When Zheymo's father died, the family suite fell apart. The mother and daughters settled in Petrograd and took up the conquest of the stage, learned to play the xylophones and created the number “Musical Eccentrics”, which was a success with the public.
Many years later, Yanina would write about herself: "It's strange - I grew normally until the age of fourteen, and then the growth stopped, probably because I had to wear heavy xylophones on my head." A small increase in the future will leave an imprint on her entire film career: for directors, she will remain an actress of one role - a travesty.
Yanina went to study at the film school secretly from her relatives, her career began with roles in the films Bears Against Yudenich, Ferris Wheel, Overcoat, S.V.D. - Union of Great Deeds, Brother.
In the film "Bears against Yudenich" she starred with her husband Alexei Kostrichkin, also a student. The young couple soon had a daughter, who, at the insistence of Andrei, was given the name of her mother - Yanina. But the student marriage did not last long.
- In the thirties, Yanina accepted proposals from directors one after another. In the film Wake Lenochka (1934), she played a schoolgirl and looked against the background of performers of other roles - ordinary boys and girls - as if she really was their age. She was even called "Soviet Mary Pickford".
In 1938, a creative crisis came for her. It's like they forgot about her. For the whole year - only one minor role, and the shooting of two more feature films with her participation was suspended for unknown reasons.
But on the other hand, in the same 1938, a new love swept over her and carried her - she met the director Iosif Kheifits, a handsome man, gallant, interesting and, as it was then believed, reliable. The feeling was mutual, they started a family and gave birth to a son, Julius.
Heifitz was a brilliant, bright, witty and intelligent person, one might say - unique, there were few of them even in the world of cinema. Plus, he was by nature soft and delicate. No one could have imagined what a nightmare their married life would end.
When the war began, family members were all over the place: the children were on vacation, from where they were evacuated to Alma-Ata, Kheifits had been filming a picture for a year, first in Mongolia, and then in Tashkent (in 1942, not his most famous film “His name is Sukhe-Bator”, after “Deputy of the Baltic” with N. Cherkasov and “Member of the Government” with V. Maretskaya). An order was received: the Lenfilm film studio should be evacuated to Tashkent. Iosif Kheifits was the leader, but Zheymo could not go, as her sister Elya became seriously ill.
Yanina worked in Leningrad. She starred in "Combat Collections" and propaganda films, and again she played teenagers or very young girls. During the day she was filming, in the evening she was on duty on the roof of the studio, extinguishing incendiary bombs.
- She was constantly offered to leave the city by plane. But for a long time she did not agree - they say, this is not comradely. Her house was open to friends even at that terrible time, and many were saved by these evenings. In a large Leningrad apartment, Yanina accommodated many people who were left without a roof over their heads.
When she once came out with a concert number in front of the fighters and she was asked: “Why did you stay in Leningrad?”, She replied: “But someone has to protect the city!” Laughter broke out - but only the external side of this statement (due to the "fabulous" appearance of the heroine) could seem funny.
I received, like everyone else, a ration of 125 grams of bread per day. It is difficult to imagine a small fragile actress in a padded jacket, sheepskin coat, felt boots, with a rifle. But it was. She was enrolled in a fighter battalion, was a member of the Lenfilm concert brigade, and performed in hospitals and parks. Yanina joked aloud: "Hitler did one good deed - I lost weight." And her thoughts are only about her husband and children - how are they there?
Separation from her husband lasted exactly two years. Finally, a group of Lenfilm employees was assembled, and together they went to the evacuation. Zheymo traveled to Alma-Ata for two months. Her echelon was bombed, he stood for weeks at a standstill. Meanwhile, terrible news came to Alma-Ata that the Tikhvin train, on which the artists were traveling, had been bombed. And for two months she was among the dead. During this time, many managed to come to terms with this loss, including Kheifits, who soon started an affair with one of the actresses.
When Yanina was told about this, she was shocked to the core. The meeting with Heifitz was not joyful. Yanina could not forgive her husband's betrayal, and did not return to Kheifits. At first, she did not show that the break with her husband was a huge tragedy for her, but as a result she fell ill with severe depression. She was helped by the doctor and director Leon Jeannot, her old friend, who had been there all this difficult time. Subsequently, Yanina married him - perhaps it all started here with gratitude.
A special role in Yanina's recovery was played by shooting in the film "Cinderella": when he was filming, Zheymo was 37 years old.
Olga Fyodorovna Berggolts
In 1941 she was 31 years old. The poetess Olga Berggolts during the war years and immediately after was called "besieged muse", "the voice of the besieged Leningrad". Her words:
Nobody is forgotten and nothing is forgotten!
- carved on the granite wall of the Piskaryovskoye memorial cemetery. During the war years, staying in the besieged Leningrad, she worked on the radio, addressing the courage of the inhabitants of the city almost daily. Her voice has become a symbol of hope for thousands of people. And yet - she wrote, wrote poetry ...
The fate of Olga Bergholz, her tragic biography, became known only recently. Only in 2010 was her diary read, which Bergholz wrote in the most difficult years of her life - from 1939 to 1949. Based on the materials of this diary and archival materials, a play was written, it was directed by director Igor Konyaev, who says: “Everyone knows Bergholz as a monument, the Soviet figure that was made of her, who read uplifting poems at parades. But we don’t know a woman with her grief and losses, no one was interested in this.”
- Author of the play “Olga. Forbidden Diary”, Elena Chernaya, tells about her heroine: “This incredibly bright and unyielding character of her, he survived in his work, but often broke down in life.”
Let's start with her personal, maternal tragedy. A native Petersburger, a young journalist and already a poet, Olga Berggolts, at the age of 18, married a colleague and a very talented poet Boris Kornilov. In 1928, they are born daughter Irina, but just two years later, Kornilov and Bergholz, who was terribly jealous of her husband-poet for her fans, divorced.
After working as a journalist, Olga entered the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad University, where she met Nikolai Molchanov, whom she married in 1932. Life seemed wonderful, Olga enthusiastically wrote children's books and gave birth in 1933 second daughter, Maya . Soon Nicholas was drafted into the army.
The trouble, as usual, came suddenly. And not alone. Nikolai served on the border with Turkey, and in the same year he was commissioned - after a skirmish with the Basmachis, he received a severe form of epilepsy.
... he got to the Basmachi, and they buried him up to his shoulders in the ground and threw him like that. Only a few days later fellow soldiers came to his rescue.
Maya, one year old, died in 1934. And two years later - the eldest daughter Irochka, who lived only up to 8 years. Olga was so worried about the loss of children that she was literally on the verge of life and death, absorbed by a terrible depression. And then began - after 1934 and the murder of Kirov - years of repression that affected her ex-husband, Boris Kornilov. He is arrested on suspicion of participation in an anti-Soviet organization.
Soon they came for Bergholz. In July 1937, she was a witness in the Kornilov case. Olga Berggolts was expelled from the candidates of the CPSU (b) and from the Union of Writers - with the wording "connection with the enemy of the people." In the fall, she was fired from the newspaper, and the former journalist got a job as a teacher of Russian and literature at school. In early 1938, after the decision "on the mistakes of party organizations," Olga was reinstated as a candidate member of the CPSU, and in the Writers' Union.
Boris Kornilov was much less fortunate - there were no “mistakes” in his case, in February 1938 Kornilov was shot. However, the matter did not end there - in December, Olga Berggolts was arrested as "a member of the Trotsky-Zinoviev organization and a terrorist group." Olga was pregnant, and testimony was beaten out of her in the literal sense of the word. The third daughter was born in prison stillborn in April 1939 ... The doctors' verdict was very severe - Olga was no longer destined to become a mother. And she so dreamed of children ...
Buried two children
I'm on my own
The third daughter was killed
Before birth - prison ...
In July 1939, Olga Berggolts was released from arrest with the wording "unproven corpus delicti" (writers, including A. Fadeev, stood up for her).
How was life after everything you've been through? Moreover, there was little joy in freedom - her husband Nikolai by that time was seriously ill.
- It was then that she began to keep a diary, to which she entrusted the grief of losses and disappointments. Olga Berggolts went all the way of that era, from romantic faith in revolution and communism to prison, from love for Stalin to the realization of the nightmare into which the whole country was plunged.
But when the war started she became "Climbing" . Above all personal misfortunes and indelible grievances. Over the untimely death of two men she loved (N. Molchanov died of starvation). Over the loss of all their children. Over bullying in prison. Over trampled boots romanticism. Over loneliness.
From the Leningrad branch of the Union of Writers, Olga Berggolts was sent to the disposal of the Leningrad Radio Committee. And I quote: “After a very short time, the quiet voice of Olga Berggolts became the voice of a long-awaited friend in the frozen and dark besieged Leningrad houses, became the voice of Leningrad itself. This transformation seemed almost a miracle: from the author of little-known children's books and poems, about which it was said "it's sweet, nice, pleasant - no more", Olga Berggolts suddenly became a poet, personifying the resilience of Leningrad overnight "(Collection "Remembering Olga Berggolts").
Bergholz was to be evacuated along with her husband, but in January 1942 Nikolai Molchanov died. Olga decides to stay.
When the war began, Molchanov evaded the fate of an invalid and was sent to build fortifications on the Luga line. He returned home with dystrophy in the last, irreversible stage. Died in the hospital. In his combat characteristics was the phrase: "Capable of self-sacrifice." Olga Berggolts dedicated to him the best, in her own account, poetic book "The Knot" (1965). She went to see him in the hospital, and he hardly recognized her anymore. And it so happened that I could not bury him.
No one released her from work on the radio. And no matter what happened to her, she appeared in the studio strictly according to the schedule, and it was heard on the air:
–Attention! Leningrad speaking! Listen to us, dear country. Poetess Olga Berggolts is at the microphone.
Olga Bergholz's voice exuded unprecedented energy. She made reports from the front, read them on the radio. Her voice rang on the air for more than three years. Her voice was known, her speech was expected. Her words, her poems entered the frozen, dead houses, inspired hope, and Life continued to glow:
Comrade, bitter days fell on us,
Unprecedented disasters threaten
But we are not forgotten with you, not alone,
- And this is already a victory!
Every blockade year on December 31, it was Olga Berggolts who spoke on the Leningrad radio with New Year's greetings, instilling confidence in victory. Not by chance The Nazis blacklisted Olga Bergholz for people who would be shot as soon as the city was taken.
And she spoke not only on the radio, but also in the shops of the Kirov Plant, and in hospitals, and at the forefront of defense. One of her readings was interrupted several times by mortar fire. Then one of the fighters took off his helmet and put it on Olga.
- Sometimes it seemed that a person full of strength and health was talking to the townspeople, but Olga Berggolts, like all townspeople, existed on a starvation ration.
During the war years, the already famous poetess had neither special privileges nor additional rations. And when one of the employees of the radio committee lost his cards and, thus, sentenced his family to extinction, Olga gave him a bread card; other employees took care of her and helped make it to the end of the month. When the blockade was broken, Olga Fedorovna was sent to Moscow. Doctors diagnosed her with dystrophy ...
- It was her idea to perform Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony in besieged Leningrad, whose radio performance she prepared in the terrible September 1941. The premiere of this symphony, which received a worldwide response, took place on May 9, 1942 at the Philharmonic. It was broadcast on the radio, and the immortal music of Shostakovich was listened to by the inhabitants of the city and the fighters at the front.
in 1942, Olga's father, Fyodor Berggolts, was expelled from besieged Leningrad by the NKVD to Minusinsk (Krasnoyarsk Territory) for refusing to become an informer.
He was born in St. Petersburg, saved hundreds of people during the blockade. The recruiters did not like his wit when he calmly responded to their offer to become a secret informant with this:
–And why is it secret? Everything I know about, I'm used to speaking out loud. Secret denunciation - this is for the Third Department, and not for the medical department.
And the poetic "star" of besieged Leningrad, which Olga Berggolts represented in the minds of millions of her fans, continued her diary (several excerpts):
2/IX-41
Today my dad was summoned to the NKVD and offered to leave Leningrad. Dad is a military surgeon, faithfully served Sov. power 24 years old, was in Kr. The entire civilian army, saved thousands of people, a Russian to the marrow of his bones, a man who truly loves Russia, despite his harmless old man's grumbling. Nothing decisively behind him is not and cannot be. Apparently, the NKVD simply did not like his last name - this is without any irony. In old age, a person who honestly treated the people, a person needed for defense, was spat in the face and expelled from the city where he was born, no one knows where.In fact, they are sent to their deaths. "Leave Leningrad!" But how can you leave it when it is surrounded by a circle, when all paths are cut! This means that the old man and people like him (and there seem to be a lot of them - according to him) will either sit in our barracks, or they will be dragged around in carts near the city under fire, without protection - nothing!
I got old again that day. I am painfully ashamed to look at my father. Why, why is it so? It's us, it's all our fault .
12/IX-41
It's a quarter to nine, the Germans will be arriving soon. Oh, how terrible, my God, how terrible. I can't get rid of the sucking, physical feeling of fear even on the fourth day of the bombing. The heart is like rubber, it pulls down, the legs tremble, and the hands freeze. Very scary, and what a humiliating feeling it is, this physical fear. ..It helps that I have been writing good (in wartime) poetry lately.No, no, how is it? Throw explosive iron at unarmed, defenseless people, so that it whistles even before that - so that everyone would think: “This is for me” - and die in advance. He died - and she flew by, but in a minute she will again - and again whistles, and again the person dies, and again takes a breath - resurrects to die again and again. How long? All right, kill me, but don't scare me, don't you dare scare me with that accursed whistle, don't mock me. Kill quietly! Kill all at once, not a few times a day... Oh, my God! I feel like something in me is dying...
24/IX-41
... And I have to write for Europe about how Leningrad, the world center of culture, is heroically defending itself. I can't write this essay, my hands are physically shattered. Oh God! Oh, what miserable people we are, where we have gone, what a wild dead end and delirium. Oh, what powerlessness and horror. Nothing, I can't do anything. I should have committed suicide myself - that's the most honest thing. I have already lied so much, made so many mistakes, that nothing can atone for this or fix it. And I only wanted the best. But shouting "brothers" is impossible. So what? We must fight off the Germans. We must destroy fascism, we must end the war, and then change everything in our country. How?…No, no… We have to come up with something. We must stop writing (lying, because everything about the war is a lie) ... We must go to the hospital. Helping a soldier urinate is much more useful than writing Rostopchin posters. They will probably still take the city. Barricades in the streets are nonsense. They are needed to cover the retreat of the Army. Stalin does not pity us, he does not pity the people. Leaders never think about people at all... For Europe I will write tomorrow morning. I will take something close to the truth out of my soul.
12/III-42. Moscow
I live in the Moscow Hotel. Warm, cozy, light, satisfying, hot water. To Leningrad! Only in Leningrad... To Leningrad - towards death … Oh, rather to Leningrad! I'm already planning to leave...2/VII-42 Leningrad
... And children are children in bakeries ... Oh, this couple is a mother and a girl of 3 years old, with a brown, motionless face of a monkey, with huge, transparent blue eyes, frozen, without any movement, with condemnation, with senile contempt, looking past everyone. Her upholstered face was slightly raised and turned to the side, and the inhuman, dirty, brown paw froze in a pleading gesture - the fingers were bent to the palm, and the handle was stretched out in front of the motionless suffering face ... This, apparently, the mother gave her such a pose, and the girl sat like that - for hours... This is such a condemnation of people, their culture, their life, such a sentence to all of us - which cannot be more merciless.Everything is a lie - there is only this girl with an exhausted paw frozen in a conditional pose of prayer in front of her motionless face and eyes, petrified from all human suffering.
Pathetic troubles of the government and the party, for which it is painfully ashamed ... How did they bring it to the point that Leningrad was besieged, Kyiv was besieged, Odessa was besieged. After all, the Germans keep coming and going ... Artillery is landing continuously ... I don’t know what is more in me - hatred for the Germans or irritation, furious, aching, mixed with wild pity - for our government .. . It was called: "We are ready for war." Oh bastards, adventurers, ruthless bastards!”
And at the same time, Bergholz created her best poems dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: The February Diary (1942), The Leningrad Poem.
- In 1946, she was one of those who did not turn away from Anna Akhmatova, who was persecuted, one of those who continued to visit her, take care of her, listen to and keep her poems. O.F. Bergholz, together with his third husband, literary critic G.P. Makogonenko, kept a typewritten copy of Akhmatova's book "Odd" - a book destroyed by order of censorship.
According to the writer herself, after the war, a “well-fed” life began for her. Bergholz was awarded the Stalin Prize, two of her books were made into films.
Olga Fedorovna Bergholz died on November 13, 1975. The desire of the muse of besieged Leningrad to lie after death at the Piskaryovskoye cemetery, among friends who died in the blockade, was not fulfilled - the poetess was buried on Literary bridges (Volkovo cemetery). At any time of the year, you can see fresh flowers on her grave ...
Face of Victory (verses by Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
Victory's face is not girlish,
and it is like a grave com.
Victory's face is not chiseled,
but outlined with a bayonet.Victory has a weeping face.
Her forehead is like a hillock in the trenches.
Victory has a face that has suffered -
Olga Feodorovna Bergholz.
To be continued.
Materials from open sources are used.
Title photo source: