On November 28 (November 15, old style), 1915, the future famous Russian writer, poet, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, public figure Konstantin (Kirill) Mikhailovich Simonov was born in Petrograd. The main directions of his work were: military prose, socialist realism, lyrics. As a military journalist, he took part in the battles at Khalkhin Gol (1939) and the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), rose to the rank of colonel in the Soviet Army, also served as deputy general secretary of the USSR Writers' Union, was the owner of numerous state awards and prizes.
As a legacy to his descendants, this writer left his memory of the war, which he passed on through numerous poems, essays, plays and novels. One of the most famous major works of the writer is the novel in three parts "The Living and the Dead". In the literary field, Konstantin Simonov had few competitors, because it is one thing to invent and fantasize, and quite another to write about what he saw with his own eyes. In the minds of living people, Konstantin Simonov is associated precisely with his works dedicated to the Great Patriotic War, with the poems "Wait for me" and "Son of an artilleryman" familiar from school.
Konstantin Simonov was born in 1915 in Petrograd into a real aristocratic family. His father was a military man, and his mother belonged to a princely family. The writer's father, Mikhail Agafangelovich Simonov, was a graduate of the Imperial Nicholas Academy, he was awarded the St. George's weapon. He participated in the First World War, managed to rise to the rank of Major General (assigned on December 6, 1915). Apparently, during the revolution, he emigrated from Russia, the latest data about him date back to 1920-1922 and speak of his emigration to Poland. Simonov himself, in his official biography, indicated that his father went missing during the First World War. The mother of the Soviet writer was the real Princess Alexandra Leonidovna Obolenskaya. The Obolenskys are an old Russian princely family, related to Rurik. The ancestor of this surname was Prince Obolensky Ivan Mikhailovich.
In 1919, the mother, together with the boy, moved to Ryazan, where she married a military expert, a military teacher, a former colonel of the Russian Imperial Army, Alexander Grigorievich Ivanishev. The upbringing of the boy was taken up by his stepfather, who first taught tactics at military schools, and then became the commander of the Red Army. The entire childhood of the future writer was spent traveling around military camps and commander's hostels. After finishing 7th grade, he entered the FZU - a factory school, after which he worked as a turner in Saratov, and then in Moscow, where his family moved in 1931. In Moscow, earning seniority, he continues to work for another two years, after which he enters the A. M. Gorky Literary Institute. His interest and love for literature was conveyed to him by his mother, who read a lot and wrote poetry herself.
Simonov wrote his first poems at the age of 7. In them, he described the study and life of cadets of military schools, which passed before his eyes. In 1934, in the second collection of young writers, which was called "The Review of Forces", after adding and rewriting, according to the comments of a number of literary critics, the poem by Konstantin Simonov, which was called "Belomorskiy", she told about the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. And Simonov's impressions from his trip to the construction site of the White Sea Canal will then be included in his cycle of poems in 1935 entitled "The White Sea Poems". Beginning in 1936, Simonov's poems began to be published in newspapers and magazines, at first rarely, but then more and more often.
In 1938, Konstantin Simonov graduated from the A. M. Gorky Literary Institute. By that time, the writer had already managed to prepare and publish several major works. His poems were published by the magazines "October" and "Young Guard". Also in 1938 he was admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR and entered the graduate school of IFLI, published his poem "Pavel Cherny". At the same time, Simonov never completed his postgraduate studies.
In 1939, Simonov, as a promising author of military topics, was sent as a war correspondent to Khalkhin Gol and did not return to his studies after that. Shortly before he was sent to the front, the writer finally changed his name. Instead of his native Cyril, as he was named at birth, he took the pseudonym Konstantin Simonov. The reason for the name change was problems with diction. The writer simply did not pronounce the letter "r" and the hard "l", for this reason it was difficult for him to pronounce the name Cyril. The pseudonym of the writer very quickly became a literary fact, and he himself very quickly gained all-Union fame precisely as Konstantin Simonov.
The war for the famous Soviet writer began not in 1941, but earlier, back in Khalkhin-Gol, and it was this trip that set many of the accents of his subsequent work. In addition to reports and essays from the theater of military operations, Konstantin Simonov brought a whole cycle of his poems, which became very popular in the USSR. One of the most poignant poems of that time was his "Doll", in which the author raised the problem of a soldier's duty to his people and homeland. Immediately before the start of the Great Patriotic War, Konstantin Simonov managed to graduate from the courses of war correspondents at the Frunze Military Academy (1939-1940) and the Military-Political Academy (1940-1941). By the time the war began, he managed to get a military rank - quartermaster of the second rank.
Konstantin Simonov was in the active army from the first days of the war. During the Great Patriotic War, he was his own correspondent for many army newspapers. At the beginning of the war, the writer was sent to the Western Front. On July 13, 1941, Simonov found himself near Mogilev in the location of the 338th Infantry Regiment of the 172nd Infantry Division, parts of which stubbornly defended the city, chaining significant German forces for a long time. These first, most difficult days of the war and the defense of Mogilev for a long time remained in the memory of Simonov, who, most likely, also witnessed the famous battle on the Buinichi field, in which German troops lost 39 tanks.
In the novel "The Living and the Dead", which Konstantin Simonov will write after the war, the action will unfold just on the Western Front and near Mogilev. It is on the Buinichi field that his literary heroes Serpilin and Sintsov will meet, and it is in this field that the writer bequeaths to scatter his ashes after death. After the war, he tried to find participants in the famous battle on the outskirts of Mogilev, as well as the commander of the Kutepov regiment defending the Buinichsky field, but he failed to find participants in those events, many of them never got out of the encirclement under the city, giving their lives in the name of the future victory. Konstantin Simonov himself wrote after the war: “I was not a soldier, I was just a war correspondent, but I also have a piece of land that I will never forget - this is a field near Mogilev, where I first witnessed in July 1941 how our troops burned and knocked out 39 German tanks in one day."
In the summer of 1941, as a special correspondent for the "Red Star" Simonov managed to visit besieged Odessa. In 1942 he was promoted to the rank of senior battalion commissar. In 1943 - a lieutenant colonel, and after the end of the war - a colonel. The writer published most of his war correspondence in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. At the same time, he was justly considered one of the best military correspondents in the country and had a very large working capacity. Simonov courageously set out on a campaign in a submarine, went to an infantry attack, and tried himself as a scout. During the war years, he managed to visit both the Black and the Barents Sea, saw the Norwegian fjords. The writer finished his front line in Berlin. He was personally present at the signing of the act of surrender of Hitlerite Germany. The war shaped the main character traits of the writer, which helped him in his work and everyday life. Konstantin Simonov has always been distinguished by his soldier composure, very high efficiency and dedication.
During the four years of the war, five books with stories and stories came out from under his pen. He also worked on the story "Days and Nights", plays "Russian people", "So it will be", "Under the chestnuts of Prague". So many poems written during the war years have accumulated in Simonov's field diaries that they then compiled several volumes of his works at once. In 1941, the newspaper Pravda published one of his most famous poems - the famous Wait for Me. This poem has often been referred to as "the prayer of the atheist," a thin bridge between life and death. In "Wait for Me" the poet addressed a certain woman who was waiting for him, having managed to very successfully convey in words the aspirations of all front-line soldiers who wrote letters home to their loved ones, parents and close friends.
After the war, the writer managed to visit several business trips abroad at once. For three years he visited the USA, Japan and China. From 1958 to 1960 he lived in Tashkent, working as a correspondent for Pravda in the republics of Central Asia, it was then that he worked on his famous trilogy The Living and the Dead. It was created following the 1952 novel Comrades in Arms. His trilogy "The Living and the Dead" was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1974. The first novel with the same name was published in 1959 (the film of the same name was based on it), the second novel, Soldiers are Not Born in 1962 (the film Retribution, 1969), and the third novel, The Last Summer, was published in 1971. This trilogy was an epic wide artistic study of the path of the entire Soviet people to victory in a very terrible and bloody war. In this work, Simonov tried to combine a reliable "chronicle" of the main events of the war, which he observed with his own eyes, and an analysis of these events from the point of view of their modern assessments and understanding.
Konstantin Simonov deliberately created male prose, but he was also able to reveal female images. Most often, these were images of women endowed with masculine consistency in actions and thoughts, enviable fidelity and the ability to wait. In the works of Simonov, war has always been many-sided and multifaceted. The author knew how to present it from different angles, moving through the pages of his works from the trenches to the army headquarters and deep rear. He knew how to show the war through the prism of his own memories and remained faithful to this principle to the end, deliberately abandoning the writer's fantasies.
It is worth noting that Simonov was a rather loving person, women definitely liked him. The handsome man had great success in women's society, he was married four times. Konstantin Simonov had four children - a son and three daughters.
Memorial stone dedicated to the memory of Konstantin Simonov, installed on the Buinichi field
The famous writer died on August 28, 1979 in Moscow at the age of 63. To some extent, the writer was ruined by the craving for smoking. He smoked cigarettes throughout the war, and then switched to a pipe. He quit smoking only three years before his death. According to the son of the writer Alexei Simonov, his father liked to smoke special English tobacco with a cherry flavor. After the death of the writer, according to the will left, relatives scattered his ashes on the Buinichi field. It was in this field, after the terrible shocks and fear of the first weeks of the war, that Konstantin Simonov, most likely, for the first time felt that the country would not surrender to the mercy of the enemy, and would be able to get out. After the war, he very often returned to this field, eventually returning to it forever.
