Above the fat man on the left - who stands next to Simonov and one from Mikhalkov - Soviet writers constantly made fun of.
Mostly because of his resemblance to Khrushchev. Daniil Granin recalled him in his memoirs (the fat man, by the way, was called Alexander Prokofiev):
“At a meeting of Soviet writers with N. S. Khrushchev, the poet S. V. Smirnov said: “You know, Nikita Sergeevich, we were now in Italy, many took Prokofiev Alexander Andreevich for you.” Khrushchev looked at Prokofiev as if he were his caricature, a caricature; Prokofiev of the same height, with the same rough physiognomy, fat, muzzled, flattened nose ... Khrushchev looked at this caricature, frowned and walked away without saying anything.
In general, the poet Alexander Prokofiev outwardly resembled a noteworthy bureaucrat from a Soviet comedy - very noisy and very harmful, but, by and large, herbivorous and cowardly, becoming at attention at any appearance of the authorities.
With Sholokhov
He was, in fact, that bureaucrat. Prokofiev served as executive secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union, so he constantly either carried some kind of orthodox-communist blizzard from the rostrum, or was engaged in various apparatus intrigues and spread rot on trifles objectionable.
As for creativity, there is nothing unexpected either. Prokofiev wrote rather meaningless patriotic poems, which, due to the large number of references to birch trees and the Motherland, reinforced by the author’s apparatus weight, were published everywhere.
Caricature of A. Prokofiev Joseph Igin.
His poem for children "Dear Country" at one time even entered all school anthologies. Better from this poem, however, did not become:
In a wide area
predawn time
Scarlet dawns rose
over the native country.
Every year it gets better
Dear lands...
Better than our motherland
Not in the world, friends!
It would seem that the client is understandable and of no interest.
But no.
He was not a herbivore.
***
We often forget that all funny old fat women were once young and without baldness. In those years, our fat man looked like this:
Doesn't look good, right? Even to bully such a crowd - you will think ten times. This is how people usually look who have seen a lot in their lives.
Often, too much.
And indeed it is.
He was a northerner - he was born and raised in a fisherman's family on the shores of Lake Ladoga. And the Civil War fell on his youth.
I already said something - the Civil War was a branch of hell on earth. Not in terms of the scale of hostilities - in terms of the fierceness with which it was conducted. It really was some kind of breakthrough of Inferno, an invasion of demons that took possession of the bodies and souls of people. Yesterday's pharmacists and locksmiths cut each other not only with enthusiasm, but with pleasure, happily spitting blood. I recently wrote - this is how people need to turn their brains off in order to arrange what they did with Kornilov's body ?! Moreover, nothing depended on political views - the Reds, and the Whites, and the Greens, and speckled, went on a rampage. And while everything is everything! - did not get drunk with blood - did not calm down.
Alexander Prokofiev drank it to his heart's content.
Together with his father who returned from the front, an 18-year-old failed village teacher (three classes of a teacher's seminary) joins a committee of sympathizers for the Bolshevik communists. In just a couple of months, he leaves for the Red Army. The future officer-bureaucrat served in the guard company in Novaya Ladoga (3rd reserve regiment, 7th army), fought to the death against Yudenich's detachments, fought desperately, was captured by the whites. They did not have time to send him to Dukhonin, the red-bellied one turned out to be nimble - he fled.
Since 1919, he was a member of the RCP (b), after graduating from Citizenship in 1922, he was transferred from the army to the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU, where he served until 1930. In general, how much and what he took on his soul during those years - probably only he himself knew.
And most importantly, this provincial Chekist was incredibly, incredibly talented. That is why he left the Cheka and became a professional poet.
You read his early poems with bulging eyes. Where? Where does all this primitive stuff, masterfully intertwined with the pathos of the revolution, come from an illiterate, in general, person? Read his "Bride" - these are not poems, this is some kind of ancient Russian northern conspiracy. Witchcraft, which he picked up from the local Karelians, and they, as even small children know, are all sorcerers.
Or here is one of my favorites. The poem "Comrade", dedicated to Alexei Kraisky.
I will fill the country with a song, like a wind
About how a comrade went to war.
Not the north wind hit the surf,
In a dry plantain, in the grass St. John's wort,
He passed and cried on the other side,
When my friend said goodbye to me.
And the song took off, and the voice got stronger.
We break old friendship like bread!
And the wind - an avalanche, and the song - an avalanche ...
Half for you and half for me!
The moon is like a turnip, and the stars are beans ...
Thank you, mother, for bread and salt!
I’ll tell you again, mother, again:
It's a good thing to raise sons
Who are sitting at the table in a cloud,
Which can go right through.
And soon your falcon will be far away,
You are cooler than salting his crust.
Salts with Astrakhan salt. She
Suitable for strong blood and for bread.
So that a comrade carries friendship through the waves,
We are a crust of bread - and that in half!
If the wind is an avalanche, and the song is an avalanche,
Half for you and half for me!
From the blue Onega, from the loud seas
The Republic is at our door!
1929
When in the early 70s a song was written to these verses and it became a hit, something in it always did not suit me, despite the magnificent performance of the young Leshchenko.
There was always something in the way, like a pebble in a sandal.
And only as an adult did I realize that it was out of this world.
The words were not from here. Not from the 70s. They were from a different, non-vegetarian time. There was something bestial in them, some kind of primitive power and primitive plasticity, some kind of savage boasting of a man who bled to the enemy. These words are like a photographic plate, which was photographed in the 20s - and cannot be retaken.
And it is no coincidence that Yegor Letov, the most sensitive of all our rockers, blessed them with a guitar: "The moon is like a turnip, and the stars are like beans ...".
The Russian Civil War had one unique feature. Shortly after the Revolution, something permeated the air, water and soil in the territory of the former Russian Empire. I don't know what. Anything. Some phlogiston. Maybe the demons that broke through brought some kind of demonic energy with them - I don’t know.
But there was definitely something.
Nothing else can explain the unprecedented explosion of creative activity, epochal breakthroughs in all kinds of arts, all these Platonov and Olesha, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Dovzhenko and Eisenstein, Zholtovsky and Nikolaev, Grekov, Filonov and Rodchenko, Bagritsky, Mayakovsky, Smelyakov and legions of others.
Moreover, it worked only in the country, this ephemeral something could not be carried away on the soles of boots. Nothing even close to the same happened in emigration, and only the most perspicacious and talented of the departed choked with anguish for long evenings because here is decay, and life is there.
And Arseny Nesmelov, a Russian fascist, a Japanese servant and a poet, who by the grace of God, who was drinking heavily in Harbin, tore paper with a pen.
Almost simultaneously with Prokofiev, another ugly Russian poet, who knows the taste of blood firsthand, on the last crumbs left inside it wrote another poem about his friend. It was called "The Second Meeting":
Vasily Vasilyich Kazantsev.
And fierily I remembered - Usischev protuberances,
Leatherette and zeiss on the belt.
After all, this is irrevocable,
And that image, time, do not touch.
Vasily Vasilievich - company commander:
"Behind me - a dash - fire!"
"Vasily Vasilyevich? Directly,
Here, you see, the table by the window ...
Over the accounts (bent stubbornly,
And bald, like the moon).
Postal Accountant. Powerless
Stepped and instantly cooled down ...
Lieutenant Kazantsev?.. Vasily?..
But where is your Zeiss and mustache?
Some kind of joke, ridicule,
You've all gone crazy!
Kazantsev lingered under the bullets
With me on the Irbit highway.
The daring days have not mowed us - Will the bullets forget the burn! - And suddenly Cheviot, blue,
A bag full of boredom.
The most formidable of all revolutions
We answered with a bullet: no!
And suddenly this stubby, curvy,
Already plump subject.
Years of the revolution, where are you?
To whom is your coming signal? - You in the counting room, so it's to the left ...
He didn't recognize me either!
Funny! Get old and die
In the wilderness of autumn, naked,
But still, office scum - Lenin himself was our enemy!
1930
And in this miserable "Lenin himself" there is more defeat and hopelessness than in the volumes of writings of full-time accusers-propagandists.
However, in Soviet Russia the feast of the spirit also did not rage for good. Ten years later, the demonic phlogiston began to disintegrate, the explosion of talents gradually subsided, and only the coolest - those who had their own power, and not borrowed, did not lower the bar.
But about them some other time.
Source: habr.com