I would like to present to you the front diaries of Semyon Gudzenko.
If anyone has forgotten or does not know this person, then here is a quick reference from the wiki:
Semyon Petrovich Gudzenko (1922 - 1953) - Russian Soviet poet-war veteran.
Biography:
Born March 5, 1922 in Kiev into a Jewish family. His father, Pyotr Konstantinovich Gudzenko, was an engineer; mother, Olga Isaevna, was a teacher. In 1939 he entered MIFLI and moved to Moscow.
In 1941 he volunteered for the front, served in the units of OMSBON. In 1942 he was seriously wounded. After being wounded, he was a correspondent in the front-line newspaper "Suvorov Onslaught".. He published his first book of poems in 1944. After the end of the Great Patriotic War, he worked as a correspondent for a military newspaper.
Gudzenko's real name is Sario, his mother gave him an Italian name. When he was published together in 1943 by Znamya and Smena, the poet wrote to his mother: “… don't be alarmed if you come across poems signed by Semyon Gudzenko - it's me, since Sario doesn't sound very much in connection with Gudzenko. I hope you will not be very offended …"
… Gudzenko died of old wounds. The consequences of a shell shock received at the front were slowly killing him. According to the memoirs of Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, the last months of the poet's life are “a new feat, which can rightfully be put alongside the feat of Nikolai Ostrovsky, Alexander Boychenko, Alexei Maresyev: the bedridden poet, who knows for sure that his illness is fatal, continued to be a romantic, a soldier and a builder. Friends gathered at his bedside to talk with him not about ailments and medicines, but about the struggle of the Vietnamese people for their independence, about construction on the Volga and the Dnieper, about new inventions and discoveries, and of course, about poetry. In the last months of his life, Semyon Gudzenko, who could no longer write himself, dictated three poems that will undoubtedly enter the golden fund of Soviet poetry.
SP Gudzenko died on February 12, 1953 at the N. N. Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery. Buried in Moscow at the Vagankovskoye cemetery. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in the anthology "In the beginning was the Word": "… there was a Kievite, a Ukrainian Jew, a Russian poet Semyon Gudzenko."
November 1941.
This was the first baptism. The first killed, the first wounded, the first abandoned helmets, horses without riders, cartridges in the ditches by the highway. Soldiers out of the encirclement, diving bastards, automatic shooting.
Ignoshin died. On the highway near Yamuga. The horseman was killed, the shrapnel broke his mouth. The blue tongue fell out.
December 10, 1941.
A letter came from Nina. He writes to Yura, but he only says hello to me. And now the same, so that I would not be arrogant, but I myself would cry when I left. Ridiculously proud. The letter was in my pocket, the address was erased, and then I wanted to write.
She was wounded in the arm. Again at the front. Spoiled hysterical woman. Beautiful girl. Well done.
December 1941
Snow, snow, forests and off-road. Villages are burning.
Odoevo. Papernik and I went into the house. The wife of the arrested man. The Germans put a bandage on him and he worked in the council. This is not to die of hunger … Bastard. The mayor is a lawyer, he fled with the Germans.
There was a battle near Kisheevka. Lazar was hitting from the sniper's room. Great! Aptly. They broke into the village. Then we walked away. When they crawled, the village coughed. Our frosts are not easy for the Hans. Catching colds, you bastards.
They let those walking up to the waist in the snow at 50-60m. The extreme houses are being set on fire. It can be seen as during the day. And they shoot from machine guns, mortars and machine guns. So they hit everywhere.
Battle of Khludnevo.
The first and second platoons went again. The fight was strong. They broke into the village. Sapper Kruglyakov with an anti-tank grenade laid about 12 Germans in one house. Laznyuk himself fought hard in the village. Lazarus says that he shouted: "I died an honest man." What a guy. Will, will! Yegortsev shouted to him: "Don't you dare!" In the morning 6 people came back, this is from 33.
Frightened hostess. The Germans passed. We go in. Warmed up, ate soup. The Germans took everything here. Holes were cut in the tablecloths for the heads, they put on children's white panties. Disguised. We'll find it!
We go to Ryadlovo. I'm exhausted. The skis are gone. Resting.
2nd in the morning in Polyana. Going to school. The bodies of Krasobaev and Smirnov lie. Don't know. Bullets whistle, mines explode. Reptiles shoot five kilometers of the way to the school. We ran … Bullets explode at school.
Our "maxim" beats. Shooting on the highway. The Germans leave for Maklaki. Bullets whistle nearby.
The line was going on. Numb. Quieter, quieter.
Lay in the middle of the village
A school with a burnt roof
Half-burnt bodies.
And it was hard in these corpses
Find out fellow soldiers …
January 2, 1942.
Wounded in the stomach. I lose consciousness for a minute. Fell. Most of all he was afraid of a wound in the stomach. Let it be in the arm, leg, shoulder. I can't walk. He bandaged Babaryk. The wound is already visible from the inside. They are being driven in a sleigh. Then they drove to Kozelsk. There he was lying in straw and lice.
I live in an apartment from the beginning. hospital. Doctors are typical. Cultured, in straps and funny when they speak in the statutory language.
When you are in a hospital bed, you read with pleasure the cheerful wisdom of O. Henry, Zoshchenko, "Conduit and Schwambrania", the gallant soldier Schweik.
And at what stage do you want to read Pasternak? There is none.
And where are the people who sincerely prayed for him, whose blood was parsnip? We went to the rear. The war made them even weaker.
We did not like Lebedev-Kumach, his stilted "On the Great Country". We were and remain right.
We were standing at a crossroads. Winds whipped from all directions. Moscow was very far away.
The railroad tracks are covered with snow. Trains have not been running since summer. People have lost the habit of hum. The silence here seems to be reinforced by these rails.
It was frosty. Can't be measured in Celsius.
Spit - freeze. Such frost.
There was a field with silent rails
forgotten the sound of wheels.
There were arrows completely blind -
no green or red lights.
There were ice cabbage soup.
Were hot contractions
for these five days.
Let it seem like a trifle to someone
but my friend is still
remembers only squirrel patterns
and a forgotten ax in the birch.
Here it is for me: not the villages that burned down, not a hike in someone else's footsteps, but I remember the numb
rails.
Seems like forever …
March 4, 1942.
I left the house yesterday. It smells like spring. Didn't notice its beginning.
Tomorrow I am 20 years old. And what?
Lived for twenty years.
But in a year of war
we saw blood
and saw death -
simply, how they see dreams.
I will keep all this in my memory:
and the first death in the war, and the first night, when in the snow
we slept back to back.
I'm a son
I will teach you how to be friends, -
let it go
he won't have to fight, he will be with a friend
shoulder to shoulder, like us, walk on the ground.
He will know:
last biscuit
is divided into two.
… Moscow autumn, smolensk january.
Many are no longer alive.
By the wind of the hikes, by the wind of spring
April has poured again.
Steel for a while
big war
more courageous than the heart, hands are tighter
more powerful than a word.
And much has become clearer.
…And you
still wrong -
I still became more tender …
Each poet has a province.
She made him mistakes and sins, all minor offenses and offenses
forgives for truthful verses.
And I also have unchanging, not included on the card, alone, my harsh and frank, distant province - War …
April 3, 1942.
Were at Moscow State University. There is nothing student here anymore. Most of these people do not want to work, do not want to fight, do not want to study. They want to survive. Drink. This is the only thing that worries them. They don't know war.
True, there are many honest girls.
They study, work in hospitals, and are sad about the guys who went to the front. But there are not very many of them HERE.
Before the war, I liked people from Julio Jurenito, Cola Brunion, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Schweik's Adventures - they are healthy, cheerful, honest people.
Then I liked the people from the books, and in nine months I saw living brothers - these classic, honest, healthy merry fellows. They are, of course, consonant with the era.
Art student. Two days a blizzard. On Sunday it was necessary to clean the airfield. The art critic said: "I will not work, I have an inflammation of the renal pelvis."
And hawks rose from this airfield, protecting his warm room with Levitan's reproductions.
This is already a scoundrel.
War is a test STONE of all properties and qualities of a person. War is a STONE of stumbling upon which the weak stumble. War is a STONE on which the habits and will of people can be ruled. There are many reborn people who have become heroes.
Lebedev-Kumach. "Wide country", 1941. "We will shed blood for it willingly." What a woolen, dead line about the blood of free, proud people. So to write - it is better to remain silent.
Here, near Moscow, Spanish soldiers live. They take revenge at Volokolamsk for their Lorca, for Madrid. Brave, funny people. Black eyes, black curly hair, polished boots to shine.
Far away Madrid. Spring Russian night. The sound of guitars and the singing of an incomprehensible, but native song rush from the windows.
April 28.
Were in IFLI and GITIS. Serious Iflian scribes kick their feet on stage and sing Neapolitan songs. The faces cannot be made out. All this mass swarmed in the hall, but they did not look directly into the eyes, they hide their faces. Wars do not understand. This, of course, is not about everyone, but there are many of them.
May 12, 1942.
They were all afraid of the front. And so they woke up and went to bed with passionate arguments:
- You sit back. I'd…
- Come on, you are a coward.
- We are needed here.
Stupid people. Cams, pieces.
The girl taught Ovid and Latin verbs. Then she got behind the wheel of a three-ton car. I took everything. Well done.
May 15, 1942.
Came out of the subway. After that, failure. After that, I was hit by a car on Dzerzhinsky Square, and they took me to the waiting room of the metro. I came to my senses. I forgot everything: where, why, what month, war, where my brother lives. Headache, nausea.
May 20.
Ilya Ehrenburg was with us yesterday. He, like almost every poet, is very far from deep social roots. He draws conclusions from meetings and letters. Summarizes without looking at the root. He is a typical and ardent anti-fascist. Smart and very interesting story. "We will win," he said, "and after the war we will return to our former life. I will go to Paris, to Spain. I will write poetry and novels." He is very far from Russia, although he loves and will die for her as an anti-fascist.
December 28, 1944
Rakoczi is a fascist district. An old Magyar from the sixth floor threw a grenade, killed 10 officers.
Our escort alone leads 1000 Romanians. He is drunk. One Romanian takes his machine gun, two lead him by the hands. (Well, no matter what Schweik with the guards))))
January 15, 1945, near Budapest.
Hungry Magyars pull pistachios in sacks, drowning in molasses. The soldiers, our Slavs, wash themselves with cologne and give the horses beer to drink, because there is no water. People are afraid of everything - they sit in bunkers and fearfully walk the streets. But this is only at the beginning, and then they see that we are not shooting in vain, and they begin to scurry and sniff out where they can take away. Apartments are robbed from each other. They go to our political departments with complaints - they have been raped. Yesterday a lad was shot in one artillery regiment, he was awarded. He was shot in front of the formation "for teaching." To be honest. War!.
On the street, the corpses of people and horses. Not everything is cleaned up yet. There are many corpses. For 5 months I lost the habit of this and stopped near the first murdered Magyar: my gloved hands were thrown behind my head, there was a hole on my toe, steam was still coming from the punctured skull.
Our soldier lies against the wall. He is killed. Cookies spilled out of their pockets.
There are thousands of prisoners. They are in the houses. They are sorted and interrogated. Almost all of them have changed into civilian clothes, and therefore it is unpleasant to talk to them.
- We are not soldiers …
And on the bearing, on the face, on the hands - the soldiers.
Aviation does not bomb - humanism and the fear of hitting your own people.
The battles are now underground, not street - the infantry is under the houses.
The Germans are dropping gas tanks by parachute. They fly on pink parachutes. Fire. Light up.
January 29, 1945.
Fierce battles have been going on for the 4th day. Fighters of the Khripko and Lebed subdivision seized a tram with a trailer going to the city.
February 19, 1945.
Taken in Budapest.
And invariably driving a wedge into the defense, divisions go to Vienna and attack Berlin.
Now from Poznan to Prague
All fronts have the same path
Nostalgia. You get used to everything: in Budapest, you no longer care about the fact that the first days did not allow you to fall asleep, about which you only read in books in Russia. All the exoticism of narrow alleys, unexpected encounters with Italian or Swedish subjects, monasteries, cinema and churches bored the soldiers who were somehow interested in this. We want to go home. Even if there is no such comfort. And they already spit on it. Although before they looked enviously at the whiteness of the bathrooms, at the shine of the floors, at the massiveness or lightness of furniture. Everyone wants to go home, even to an unheated room, even without any bathrooms, new Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad. This is homesickness.
February 21, 1945.
In the movie is "She fought for the Motherland" under the title "Comrade P." They have it like a movie action movie, there is applause, crying and animation in the hall all the time. I watched an American cowboy film in Kishpest. Shooting. Murder. Terrible boredom. And the audience is wildly delighted. I didn’t sit out. It can be seen that we were brought up on a smarter and wiser art.
Magyar is young, healthy, wearing a hat, with a cheap ring. Speaks broken Russian. Once jokingly asked: "Is there a restaurant in Budapest?" He replied: "No. But in Moscow there is." - "How do you know?" - "I am from Moscow only the fourth day."
I was completely dumbfounded. Then he said that he was taken near Stary Oskol in 1943, was in a camp 40 km from Moscow, was in Gorky and Shapov. He complains that it is bad in Hungary, that in the camp he received 750 grams of bread, but here for the fourth day he does not eat anything. He came to the army, he wants to fight the Germans.
This is already history. We are already meeting the prisoners who have returned home. Now I am glad when you see a mustachioed Magyar who lived in Omsk in 1914-1916, and now Magyars from 1941-1945 from outside Moscow and from near Gorky.
In Europe, a soldier gets used to cleanliness, good linen, and perfume. This, of course, is about the days when there are battles in big cities. But on the way of every soldier there was or will be one city where he still learns the charms and vileness of Europe. For me, Budapest has become such a city. With obscurity, monks, all-consuming trade, prostitutes, quick recovery, etc., etc.
March 29, 1945.
Dogs of all stripes, but all dwarf ones. The drivers crush them godlessly. "That maybe a dog, then a mouse," - spitting, says the driver.
There are canaries in all apartments. The main work of elderly ladies: looking for females for males from neighbors. With this, with a bird's love, they copy their own, departed and not so beautiful.
My host is a former waiter. He has medals for the last war. He tells me that in 1914 he beat the Italians, and to the Germans, he probably boasted that he beat the Russians.
There are Germans in Buda. Artbattery. Soldiers on the other side are visible from the windows. Ice. Polynyas. Red parachutes. The Germans are dropping their food and grenades.
Downstairs are wide open shops. Take what you want.
I went up to the artilleryman. I see what he took: one bar of soap, a bottle of cologne, cigarettes. He took what he needed, but he didn’t take anything else.
I will never forget
how long will I be in the war, excited I will, drowned in fire.
And the wreckage of the ferry
and the February ice drift, and the right bank of the Danube, torn apart like a bunker.
And crimson on gray -
flames in smoky floors.
And the one who is the very first
was in German dugouts.
Bratislava.
“I was a simple sister in the Odessa sanatorium, here I was received in the best houses,” said one girl who had left Odessa for Bratislava with a Slovak officer. Stupid.
On the morning of April 8 in Bratislava.
Chauvinism. The Germans have done their work. A wounded civilian Czech does not want to go to an Austrian hospital.
Vienna again. In Vienna, red flags are hanging - they are made of German ones, but the swastika has been torn off and the stain is painted over.
On the house in Vienna there is a poster "Long live Moscow!" Competent, but written in Gothic script. The painter is apolitical, he didn't take it into account.
On the street there are old Germans, with them a Ukrainian girl. She's saving them now. My God, how they are now fawning at her.
Brno, 26-28 April 1945.
The killed Germans are lying. Nobody wants to bury them, they are covered with a fence.
The corpses of our soldiers. One can be seen up to the waist from the trench. Nearby is a bunch of grenades. On the chest there is a sign "Guard". Photos and documents in my pocket. Mozgovoy, born in 1924, candidate of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks since 1944, awarded two medals "For Courage" and the Order of the Red Star. I was almost everywhere. In the war since 1942.
There were many Germans. They fled. Langer stayed. He is amazed not to be touched. On the second day, he was already dissatisfied with the fact that the soldier took his empty suitcase. Complains.
May 2, 1945.
There is a notice that Hitler has died. This does not suit anyone. Everyone would like to hang it.
Vienna Zoo. Hungry beasts. Bears, lions, wolves. Our soldiers are walking.
- What, he's not Russian (about a lion). He doesn't understand, says the sergeant.
The Vienna Zoo was taken under the protection of a military unit. The soldiers are feeding the animals.
Night of May 9, 1945.
With difficulty we get to Jelgava. The Germans were here in the morning. On the way we meet many Germans - in columns and groups. There is no convoy. They bow, they are not paid attention to. They say that Prague is protected by the Vlasovites. They say, on the contrary, that they rebelled against the Germans. One thing is known that there are pockets of resistance. I really don't want to die on Victory Day. And the wounded are being taken to meet. Today, until 12 o'clock, ours were still bombing. Debris and carts are smoking.
May 11, 1945.
On May 11, the dead were buried near the parliament on May 10, after the war. Art. l-t Glazkov, captain Semyonov. Greens, flowers, tears of Czech women. We bury Colonel Sakharov. The Czechs took hot casings from a large-caliber machine gun as a souvenir. It is a memory of the brave and of liberation.
In Prague, the major who died after the victory is buried.
The Vltava is quiet, but a gun salute is thundering.
The women are crying. The men are silent at the cathedral.
And when they burn their palms, they take the shells as a keepsake.
The mistress's shells will be cleaned with brick dust.
The first lilies of the valley, lilies of the valley will stand on the window.
The lilies of the valley will turn red! And to the great-grandchildren come true
The tale will come about fireworks, flowers and war.
I saw on the roads how the Germans were taken by drivers. There are a lot of cars. After 50 km, they treat him to him and have a friendly conversation. Russian soul. Everything is immediately forgotten, although he is wearing a German uniform and an order ribbon.
May 21, 1945.
The chauffeur says:
- We'll be back home by autumn. In the summer I don’t want to, let my wife dig potatoes herself (laughs).
The captain says:
- Medal "For the victory over Germany", and will also be for Japan.
They already say that we will also fight in the East.
The soldier returned to Kiev. He had a German in his apartment. Killed his mother. Robbed. I accidentally found an envelope with his Berlin address. This was in 1943. In 1945 he came to Berlin and found the home of this German. Here he saw his suit, sent in a parcel. The German had been killed long ago. His widow, when she found out who this infantryman was, turned deathly pale. The soldier did not take his suit. He only wrote on the door: "Vengeance came here from Kiev, from Chkalov street, from house number 18". The next morning the widow fled to the village. The soldier decided to live here with friends. In the closets he found many familiar things and it reminded him of his mother, home, Kiev.
May 29, 1945.
When we learned about the end of the war, everyone was most afraid of dying. The soldiers cherish life after the war even more.
Now many people want to be demobilized - they find some old diseases, go for x-rays, groan and groan. And even two weeks ago, they were vigorous and fit officers. All this is not scary. Let them be cunning - they won.
I dreamed of Moscow again.
I was an infantry in a clean field, in the mud of the trench and on fire.
I became an army journalist
in the last year in that war.
But if you fight again …
This is already the law:
let me be sent again
to the rifle battalion.
Be under the command of the foremen
at least a third of the way
then I can from those peaks
descend into poetry.
