Who hides the past jealously
He is unlikely to be in harmony with the future …
A. T. Tvardovsky, "By the Right of Memory"
Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky was born on June 21, 1910 on the Zagorye farm, located near the village of Seltso (now the Smolensk region). The surrounding area, according to the poet himself, "was away from the roads and was quite wild." Tvardovsky's father, Trifon Gordeevich, was a complex man with a strong and strong-willed character. The son of a retired landless soldier, from a young age he worked as a blacksmith and had his own distinctive style and style of products. His main dream was to get out of the peasant class and provide a comfortable existence for his family. He had no energy in this - in addition to his main work, Trifon Gordeevich rented forges and took contracts for the supply of hay to the army. Shortly before the birth of Alexander, in 1909, his dream came true - he became a "landowner", acquiring an unsightly plot of thirteen hectares. Tvardovsky himself recalled on this occasion: "We, little children, from a very early age, he inspired respect for this podzolic, sour, unkind and mean, but our land, ours, as he jokingly called," estate "…"
Alexander was born the second child in the family, the eldest son Kostya was born in 1908. Later, Trifon Gordeevich and Maria Mitrofanovna, the daughter of an impoverished nobleman Mitrofan Pleskachevsky, had three more sons and two daughters. In 1912, the parents of Tvardovsky the elder, Gordey Vasilievich and his wife Zinaida Ilinichna, moved to the farm. Despite the simple origin, both Trifon Gordeevich and his father Gordey Vasilievich were literate people. Moreover, the father of the future poet knew Russian literature well, and, according to the memoirs of Alexander Tvardovsky, evenings on the farm were often devoted to reading books by Alexei Tolstoy, Pushkin, Nekrasov, Gogol, Lermontov … Trifon Gordeevich knew many poems by heart. It was he who, in 1920, gave Sasha his first book, a volume of Nekrasov, which he traded in the market for potatoes. Tvardovsky kept this cherished booklet throughout his life.
Trifon Gordeevich passionately wanted to give his children a decent education and in 1918 arranged for the eldest sons, Alexander and Konstantin, to the Smolensk gymnasium, which was soon transformed into the first Soviet school. However, the brothers studied there for only one year - during the Civil War, the school building was requisitioned for the needs of the army. Until 1924, Alexander Tvardovsky changed one rural school for another, and after finishing the sixth grade he returned to the farm - he returned, by the way, as a member of the Komsomol. By that time, he had been writing poetry for four years already - and the further, the more and more they "took" the teenager. Tvardovsky Sr. did not believe in the literary future of his son, laughed at his hobby and frightened him with poverty and hunger. However, it is known that he liked to boast of Alexander's printed speeches after his son took the place of the village correspondent of Smolensk newspapers. This happened in 1925 - at the same time Tvardovsky's first poem "Izba" was published. In 1926, at the provincial congress of village correspondents, the young poet made friends with Mikhail Isakovsky, who for the first time became his "guide" into the world of literature. And in 1927, Alexander Trifonovich went to Moscow, so to speak, "for reconnaissance."The capital stunned him, he wrote in his diary: "I walked on the sidewalks where Utkin and Zharov (popular poets of that time), great scientists and leaders, walk along."
From now on, the native Zagorje seemed to the young man a dull backwater. He suffered, being cut off from the "big life", passionately longing for communication with the same as himself, young writers. And at the beginning of 1928, Alexander Trifonovich decided on a desperate act - he moved to live in Smolensk. The first months of the eighteen-year-old Tvardovsky were very, very difficult in the big city. In his autobiography, the poet notes: "He lived in bunks, corners, wandered around the editorial offices." A native of the village, he could not feel himself a city dweller for a very long time. Here is another later confession of the poet: “In Moscow, in Smolensk, a painful feeling haunted that you were not at home, that you didn’t know something and that you could be funny at any moment, get lost in an unfriendly and indifferent world …”. Despite this, Tvardovsky actively joined the literary life of the city - he became a member of the Smolensk branch of the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), alone and in brigades traveled around collective farms and wrote a lot. His closest friend in those days was the critic, and later the geologist Adrian Makedonov, who was a year older than Tvardovsky.
In 1931 the poet got his own family - he married Maria Gorelova, a student at the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute. In the same year, their daughter Valya was born. And the next year, Alexander Trifonovich himself entered the pedagogical institute. He studied there for a little over two years. The family needed to be fed, and as a student it was difficult to do so. Nevertheless, his position in the city of Smolensk was strengthened - in 1934 Tvardovsky, as a delegate with an advisory voice, attended the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers.
After his departure from the family nest, the poet rarely visited Zagorje - about once a year. And after March 1931, he actually had no one to visit the farm. Back in 1930, Trifon Gordeevich was taxed high. In order to save the situation, Tvardovsky Sr. joined the agricultural artel, but soon, unable to cope with himself, he took his horse from the artel. Fleeing from prison, Tvardovsky Sr. fled to Donbass. In the spring of 1931 his family, who remained on the farm, was "dispossessed" and sent to the Northern Urals. After some time, the head of the family came to them, and in 1933 he led everyone by forest paths to today's Kirov region - to the village of Russian Turek. Here he settled under the name of Demyan Tarasov, this surname was borne by the rest of the family. This "detective" story ended in 1936, after Alexander Trifonovich published the poem "The Country of Ant", which served as his "pass" to the front ranks of Soviet writers and into the world of great literature.
Tvardovsky began working on this work in 1934, being impressed by one of the speeches of Alexander Fadeev. By the fall of 1935, the poem was completed. In December, it was discussed in the capital's House of Writers, and it came out triumphant for Tvardovsky. A fly in the ointment was only a negative review by Maxim Gorky, but Alexander Trifonovich did not lose heart, writing in his diary: “Grandfather! You just sharpened my pen. I will prove that you made a mistake. " In 1936 "Strana Muraviya" was published in the literary magazine Krasnaya Nov '. She was openly admired by Mikhail Svetlov, Korney Chukovsky, Boris Pasternak and other recognized writers and poets. However, the most important connoisseur of the poem was in the Kremlin. It was Joseph Stalin.
After the resounding success of "The Country of Muravia", Tvardovsky arrived in the village of Russkiy Turek and took his relatives to him in Smolensk. He placed them in his own room. In addition, he no longer needed her - the poet decided to move to Moscow. Soon after the move, he entered the third year of the famous IFLI (Moscow Institute of History, Literature and Philosophy), through which many famous writers passed in the late thirties. The level of teaching at the educational institution was, by the standards of that time, unusually high - the most prominent scientists, all the color of the humanities of those years, worked at the IFLI. There were also students to match the teachers - it is worth mentioning at least the later famous poets: Semyon Gudzenko, Yuri Levitansky, Sergei Narovchatov, David Samoilov. Unfortunately, many graduates of the institute died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. Tvardovsky, who came to IFLI, did not get lost against the general, brilliant background. On the contrary, according to Narovchatov's notes, "in the Ifli sky, he stood out for the size of his figure, character, personality." The writer Konstantin Simonov, then a graduate student of IFLI, confirms these words, recalling that "IFLI was proud of Tvardovsky." This was due to the fact that while the poet "humbly" studied, critics extolled him in every way "The Country of Ant". No one dared to call Tvardovsky a "kulak echo", which often happened before. Graduated from IFLI Alexander Trifonovich with honors in 1939.
For the sake of justice, it is worth noting that in these prosperous years, misfortunes did not bypass the writer. In the fall of 1938, he buried his one and a half year old son who had died of diphtheria. And in 1937, his best friend Adrian Makedonov was arrested and sentenced to eight years in hard labor. At the beginning of 1939, a decree was issued on awarding a number of Soviet writers, including Tvardovsky. In February he was awarded the Order of Lenin. By the way, among the awardees, Alexander Trifonovich was almost the youngest. And already in September of the same year, the poet was drafted into the army. He was sent to the west, where, while working in the editorial office of the newspaper "Chasovoy Rodiny", he took part in the annexation of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine to the USSR. Tvardovsky faced a real war at the end of 1939, when he was sent to the Soviet-Finnish front. The death of the fighters horrified him. After the first battle, which Alexander Trifonovich watched from the regimental command post, the poet wrote: "I returned in a grave state of bewilderment and depression … It was very difficult to cope with this internally …". In 1943, when the Great Patriotic War was already thundering around, in the work “Two Lines” Tvardovsky recalled the boy-soldier who had died on the Karelian Isthmus: “As if dead, lonely, / As if I were lying. / Frozen, small, killed / In that unknown war, / Forgotten, small, I'm lying. " By the way, it was during the Soviet-Finnish war that a character named Vasya Terkin first appeared in a number of feuilletons, the introduction to which was invented by Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky himself later said: “Terkin was conceived and invented not by me alone, but by many people - both writers and my correspondents. They took an active part in its creation”.
In March 1940, the war with the Finns ended. The writer Alexander Bek, who often communicated with Alexander Trifonovich at that time, said that the poet was a person "alienated from everyone by some seriousness, as if at a different stage." In April of the same year Tvardovsky was awarded the Order of the Red Star "for valor and courage". In the spring of 1941, another high award followed - for the poem "The Country of Ant" Alexander Trifonovich was awarded the Stalin Prize.
From the first days of the Great Patriotic War, Tvardovsky was at the front. At the end of June 1941, he arrived in Kiev to work in the editorial office of the newspaper "Red Army". And at the end of September, the poet, in his own words, "barely got out of the encirclement." Further milestones of the bitter path: Mirgorod, then Kharkov, Valuyki and Voronezh. At the same time, an addition happened to his family - Maria Illarionovna gave birth to a daughter, Olya, and soon the entire family of the writer went to evacuation to the city of Chistopol. Tvardovsky often wrote to his wife, informing her about editorial everyday life: “I work quite a lot. Slogans, poems, humor, essays … If you omit the days when I travel, then there is material for every day. " However, over time, the editorial turnover began to worry the poet, he was attracted to "great style" and serious literature. Already in the spring of 1942 Tvardovsky made the decision: "I will not write any more bad poetry … The war is going on in earnest, and poetry must be serious …".
In the early summer of 1942, Alexander Trifonovich received a new appointment - to the newspaper Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda on the Western Front. The editorial office was located a hundred kilometers from Moscow, in present-day Obninsk. From here began his journey to the west. And it was here that Tvardovsky had a great idea - to return to the poem "Vasily Terkin" conceived at the end of the Soviet-Finnish war. Of course, now the theme is the Patriotic War. The image of the protagonist also underwent significant changes - an obviously folkloric character who took the enemy with a bayonet, "like sheaves on a pitchfork," turned into an ordinary guy. The genre designation "poem" was also very conditional. The poet himself said that his story about the Russian soldier does not fit any genre definition, and therefore he decided to call it simply "The Book about the Soldier." At the same time, it is noted that in structural terms "Terkin" goes back to the works of Pushkin, adored by Tvardovsky, namely, to "Eugene Onegin", representing a set of private episodes that, like a mosaic, add up to an epic panorama of the great war. The poem is written in the rhythm of a ditty, and in this sense, it seems to naturally grow out of the thickness of the folk language, turning from a "work of art" composed by a specific author into a "self-revelation of life." This is how this work was perceived among the mass of soldiers, where the very first published chapters of Vasily Terkin (in August 1942) gained immense popularity. After its publication and reading on the radio, countless letters from front-line soldiers who recognized themselves in the hero flowed to Tvardovsky. In addition, the messages contained requests, even demands, without fail to continue the poem. Alexander Trifonovich fulfilled these requests. Once again Tvardovsky considered his work completed in 1943, but again numerous demands for a continuation of the "Book of the Fighter" forced him to change his mind. As a result, the work consisted of thirty chapters, and the hero in it reached Germany. He composed the last line of Vasily Terkin on the victorious night of May 10, 1945. However, even after the war, the stream of letters did not dry out for a long time.
An interesting story is the portrait of Vasily Terkin, reproduced in millions of copies of the poem and executed by the artist Orest Vereisky, who worked during the war with Tvardovsky in the newspaper Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda. Not everyone knows that this portrait was made from life, and, therefore, Vasily Terkin had a real prototype. Here is what Vereisky himself told about this: “I wanted to open a book with a poem with a frontispiece with a portrait of Terkin. And that was the hardest part. What is Terkin like? Most of the soldiers, whose portraits I sketched from nature, seemed to me something like Vasily - some with a squint of an eye, some with a smile, some with a face covered with freckles. However, none of them was Terkin … Each time, of course, I shared the search results with Tvardovsky. And every time I heard the answer: "No, not him." I myself understood - not him. And then one day a young poet who came from an army newspaper came to our editorial office … His name was Vasily Glotov, and we all immediately liked him. He had a cheerful disposition, a kind smile … A couple of days later, a joyful feeling suddenly pierced me - I recognized Vasily Terkin in Glotov. With my discovery, I ran to Alexander Trifonovich. At first he raised his eyebrows in surprise … The idea of “trying” the image of Vasily Terkin seemed amusing to Glotov. When I painted him, he broke into a smile, squinted slyly, which made him even more like the hero of the poem, as I imagined him to be. Having drawn his full face and in profile with his head down, I showed the work to Alexander Trifonovich. Tvardovsky said: "Yes." That was all, since then he never made any attempts to portray Vasily Terkin to others."
Until the victorious night, Alexander Trifonovich had to go through all the difficulties of military roads. He lived literally on wheels, taking short sabbaticals to work in Moscow, and also to visit his family in the city of Chistopol. In the summer of 1943, Tvardovsky, together with other soldiers, liberated the Smolensk region. For two years he did not receive any news from his relatives and was terribly worried about them. However, nothing bad, thank God, happened - at the end of September the poet met with them near Smolensk. Then he visited his native farm Zagorje, which literally turned into ashes. Then there was Belarus and Lithuania, Estonia and East Prussia. Twardowski met the victory in Tapiau. Orest Vereisky recalled that evening: “Fireworks thundered from different types of weapons. Everyone was shooting. Alexander Trifonovich also shot. He fired a revolver into the bright sky from the colored trails, standing on the porch of a Prussian house - our last military refuge …”.
After the end of the war, a rain of prizes fell on Tvardovsky. In 1946 he was awarded the Stalin Prize for the poem Vasily Terkin. In 1947 - another for the work "House by the Road", on which Alexander Trifonovich worked simultaneously with "Terkin" from 1942. However, this poem, according to the author's description, "dedicated to the life of a Russian woman who survived the occupation, German slavery and liberation by soldiers of the Red Army”, Was overshadowed by the deafening success of“The Book about the Fighter”, although it was hardly inferior to“Terkin”by its amazing authenticity and artistic merit. Actually, these two poems perfectly complemented each other - one showed the war, and the second - its "wrong side".
Tvardovsky lived very actively in the second half of the forties. He performed many duties in the Writers' Union - he was its secretary, led the poetry section, was a member of all kinds of commissions. During these years, the poet visited Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Albania, East Germany, Norway, traveled to Belarus and Ukraine, visited the Far East for the first time, and visited his native Smolensk region. These travels could not be called "tourism" - he worked everywhere, spoke, talked with writers, and was published. The latter is surprising - it is difficult to imagine when Tvardovsky had time to write. In 1947 the elderly writer Nikolai Teleshov conveyed his regards to the poet, as Tvardovsky himself used to say, "from the other world." It was a review of "Vasily Terkin" by Bunin. Ivan Alekseevich, who spoke very critically about Soviet literature, agreed to look at the poem given to him by Leonid Zurov almost by force. After that, Bunin could not calm down for several days, and soon wrote to a friend of his youth Teleshov: “I read Tvardovsky's book - if you know and meet with him, please convey on occasion that I (as you know, a demanding and picky reader) admired his talent … This is truly a rare book - what freedom, what accuracy, what wonderful daring, precision in everything and an unusually soldier's, folk language - not a single false, literary vulgar word!.. ".
However, not everything went smoothly in Tvardovsky's life, there were both grief and tragedy. In August 1949, Trifon Gordeevich died - the poet was very worried about the death of his father. Alexander Trifonovich did not escape the elaborations, for which the second half of the forties turned out to be generous. In late 1947 - early 1948 his book "Homeland and Foreign Land" was subjected to devastating criticism. The author was accused of "narrowness and pettiness of views on reality", "Russian national narrow-mindedness", the absence of a "state view". The publication of the work was prohibited, but Tvardovsky did not lose heart. By that time, he had a new, significant business that completely captured him.
In February 1950, a reshuffle took place among the leaders of the largest literary bodies. In particular, the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine, Konstantin Simonov, moved to Literaturnaya Gazeta, and Tvardovsky was offered to take the vacant seat. Alexander Trifonovich agreed, because he had long dreamed of such a "social" work, expressed not in the number of speeches and meetings delivered, but in a real "product". In fact, it became the fulfillment of his dream. In four years of editorial work, Tvardovsky, who worked in truly nervous conditions, managed to do a lot. He managed to organize a magazine with an "uncommon expression" and create a close-knit team of like-minded people. His deputies were long-time comrades Anatoly Tarasenkov and Sergei Smirnov, who "opened" the defense of the Brest Fortress for the general reader. Alexander Trifonovich's journal did not immediately become famous for its publications, the editor-in-chief looked closely at the situation, gained experience, and looked for people close to the world. Tvardovsky wrote himself - in January 1954 he drew up a plan for the poem "Terkin in the Next World", and three months later he finished it. However, the lines of fate turned out to be whimsical - in August 1954, Alexander Trifonovich was removed from the post of editor-in-chief with a scandal.
One of the reasons for his dismissal was the work "Terkin in the Next World", just prepared for publication, which was called "a lampoon on Soviet reality" in the Central Committee's memorandum. In some ways, the officials were right, they quite rightly saw in the description of the "next world" a satirical depiction of the methods of work of party bodies. Khrushchev, who replaced Stalin as party leader, described the poem as a "politically harmful and ideologically vicious thing." This became a verdict. Articles criticizing the works that appeared on the pages of the magazine fell upon Novy Mir. An internal letter from the Central Committee of the CPSU summed up: "In the editorial office of the magazine" Novy Mir ", politically compromised writers have entrenched themselves … who had a harmful influence on Tvardovsky." Alexander Trifonovich behaved courageously in this situation. Never - until the very last days of his life - did not show doubts about the truth of Marxism-Leninism, he admitted his own mistakes, and, taking all the blame, said that he personally "supervised" criticized articles, and in some cases even published them contrary to opinion editorial board. Thus, Tvardovsky did not surrender his people.
In subsequent years, Alexander Trifonovich traveled a lot around the country and wrote a new poem "Beyond the Distance - Distance". In July 1957, the head of the department of culture of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Dmitry Polikarpov, arranged for Alexander Trifonovich to meet with Khrushchev. The writer, in his own words, "carried … the same thing that he usually said about literature, about its troubles and needs, about its bureaucratization." Nikita Sergeevich wished to meet again, which happened a few days later. The "two-part" conversation lasted a total of four hours. The result was that in the spring of 1958 Tvardovsky was again offered to head the "New World". On reflection, he agreed.
However, the poet agreed to take the place of the editor-in-chief of the magazine on certain conditions. In his workbook it was written: “First - a new editorial board; the second - six months, or even better a year - not to carry out executions in a closed room …”By the latter, Tvardovsky, first of all, meant the curators from the Central Committee and censorship. If the first condition was met with some creak, then the second was not. Censorship pressure began as soon as the new editorial board of Novy Mir prepared the first issues. All high-profile publications of the magazine were carried out with difficulty, often with censorship exceptions, with reproaches of "political myopia", with discussion in the department of culture. Despite the difficulties, Alexander Trifonovich diligently collected literary forces. During the years of his editorship, the term "Novyirovsky author" began to be perceived as a kind of quality mark, as a kind of honorary title. This applied not only to prose, which made Tvardovsky's magazine famous - essays, literary and critical articles, and economic studies also aroused considerable public resonance. Among the writers who became famous thanks to the "New World", it is worth noting Yuri Bondarev, Konstantin Vorobyov, Vasil Bykov, Fyodor Abramov, Fazil Iskander, Boris Mozhaev, Vladimir Voinovich, Chingiz Aitmatov and Sergei Zalygin. In addition, on the pages of the magazine, the old poet talked about his meetings with popular Western artists and writers, rediscovered forgotten names (Tsvetaeva, Balmont, Voloshin, Mandelstam), and popularized avant-garde art.
Separately, it is necessary to say about Tvardovsky and Solzhenitsyn. It is known that Alexander Trifonovich respected Alexander Isaevich very much - both as a writer and as a person. Solzhenitsyn's attitude to the poet was more complicated. From the very first meeting at the end of 1961, they found themselves in an unequal position: Tvardovsky, who dreamed of a just social construction of society on communist principles, saw Solzhenitsyn as his ally, not suspecting that the writer "open" to him had long ago gathered on a "crusade "Against communism. Collaborating with the magazine "New World", Solzhenitsyn "tactically" used the editor-in-chief, which he did not even know.
The history of the relationship between Alexander Tvardovsky and Nikita Khrushchev is also curious. The all-powerful First Secretary has always treated the poet with great sympathy. Thanks to this, “problematic” compositions were often saved. When Tvardovsky realized that he would not be able to break through the wall of party-censorship like-mindedness on his own, he turned directly to Khrushchev. And he, after listening to Tvardovsky's arguments, almost always helped. Moreover, he "elevated" the poet in every possible way - at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, which adopted a program for the rapid construction of communism in the country, Tvardovsky was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the party. However, it should not be assumed that under Khrushchev, Alexander Trifonovich became a person "inviolable" - quite the contrary, the editor-in-chief was often subjected to devastating criticism, but in hopeless situations he had the opportunity to appeal to the very top, over the heads of those who "held and did not let go." This, for example, happened in the summer of 1963, when the leadership of the Writers 'Union and foreign guests, who had gathered for a session of the European Writers' Community, held in Leningrad, flew to his Pitsunda dacha at the invitation of the Soviet leader who was on vacation. Tvardovsky took with him the previously banned "Terkin in the Next World". Nikita Sergeevich asked him to read the poem and reacted very vividly at the same time, "he laughed loudly, then frowned." Four days later, Izvestia published this work, which lay dormant for a whole decade.
It should be noted that Tvardovsky was always considered an "exit" - such a privilege was given to few in the USSR. Moreover, he was so active “traveling” that he sometimes refused to travel abroad. An interesting story happened in 1960, when Alexander Trifonovich did not want to go to the United States, referring to the fact that he needed to finish work on the poem "Beyond the Distance". The Minister of Culture of the USSR Yekaterina Furtseva understood him and allowed him to stay at home with the words: "Your work, of course, should come first."
In the fall of 1964, Nikita Sergeevich was retired. From that time on, "organizational" and ideological pressure on Tvardovsky's journal began to grow steadily. The issues of Novy Mir began to linger in censorship and came out with a delay in a reduced volume. “Things are nasty, the magazine seems to be in a blockade,” wrote Tvardovsky. In the early autumn of 1965, he visited the city of Novosibirsk - the people poured a shaft on his performances, and the high authorities shied away from the poet as from the plague. When Alexander Trifonovich returned to the capital, there was already a note in the Party Central Committee, in which Tvardovsky's "anti-Soviet" conversations were described in detail. In February 1966 the premiere of the "tortured" performance based on the poem "Terkin in the Next World", staged at the Satire Theater by Valentin Pluchek, took place. Vasily Tyorkin was played by the famous Soviet actor Anatoly Papanov. Alexander Trifonovich liked Pluchek's work. At the shows, sold out houses were sold out, but already in June - after the twenty-first performance - the performance was banned. And at the 23rd Party Congress, held in the spring of 1966, Tvardovsky (a candidate for membership in the Central Committee) was not even elected as a delegate. At the end of the summer of 1969, a new study campaign broke out against the magazine Novy Mir. As a result, in February 1970 the Secretariat of the Writers' Union decided to dismiss half of the members of the editorial board. Alexander Trifonovich tried to appeal to Brezhnev, but he did not want to meet with him. And then the editor-in-chief voluntarily resigned.
The poet has long since said goodbye to life - this is clearly seen in his poems. Back in 1967, he wrote amazing lines: "At the bottom of my life, at the very bottom / I want to sit in the sun, / On a warm foam … / I will overhear my thoughts without interference, / I will bring the line with an old man's wand: / No, still no, nothing that on the occasion / I've been here and ticked off. " In September 1970, several months after the defeat of Novy Mir, Alexander Trifonovich suffered a stroke. He was hospitalized, but in the hospital he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. The last year of his life, Tvardovsky lived semi-paralyzed in the suburban village of Krasnaya Pakhra (Moscow region). On December 18, 1971, the poet died, he was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
The memory of Alexander Tvardovsky lives on to this day. Though rarely, his books are being reprinted. In Moscow there is a school named after him and a cultural center, and in Smolensk the regional library is named after the poet. The monument to Tvardovsky and Vasily Terkin has been standing since May 1995 in the center of Smolensk; in addition, the monument to the famous writer was unveiled in June 2013 in the capital of Russia on Strastnoy Boulevard not far from the house where the Novy Mir editorial office was located in the late sixties. In Zagorje, the poet's homeland, literally out of the blue, the Tvardovsky estate was restored. The poet's brothers, Konstantin and Ivan, rendered great help in the reconstruction of the family farm. Ivan Trifonovich Tvardovsky, an experienced cabinetmaker, made most of the furnishings with his own hand. Now there is a museum in this place.
