What was the genre of Vasily Terkin’s work. “Plot and compositional features of the poem. Essay on literature on the topic: Genre and composition of the poem “Vasily Terkin”

The theme of the poem “Vasily Terkin” was formulated by the author himself in the subtitle: “A book about a fighter,” that is, the work talks about war and a man at war. The hero of the poem is an ordinary infantry soldier, which is extremely important, since, according to Tvardovsky, it is the ordinary soldier who is the main hero and winner in the Patriotic War. This idea will be continued ten years later by M.A. Sholokhov, who in “The Fate of a Man” will portray an ordinary soldier Andrei Sokolov, and then ordinary soldiers and junior officers will become heroes of military stories by Yu.V. Bondarev, V.L. Kondratiev, V.P. .Astafieva. It should be noted by the way that the legendary Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov also dedicated his book “Memories and Reflections” to the Russian soldier.

The idea of the poem is expressed in the image of the title character: the author is interested not so much in the events of the war as in the character of the Russian people (it is not opposed to the Soviet people), which was revealed in difficult military trials. Vasily Terkin represents a generalized image of the people, he is a “Russian miracle man” (“From the author”). Thanks to his courage, perseverance, resourcefulness, and sense of duty, the Soviet Union (with approximate technical parity) defeated Nazi Germany. Tvardovsky expresses this main idea of the Patriotic War and his work at the end of the poem:

Strength has proven to strength:
Strength is no match for strength.
There is metal stronger than metal,
There is fire worse than fire. ("In the bath")

“Vasily Terkin” is a poem, its genre originality is expressed in the combination of epic scenes depicting various military episodes with lyrical digressions and reflections, in which the author, without hiding his feelings, talks about the war, about his hero. In other words, Tvardovsky created a lyric-epic poem.

The author paints various pictures of battles in the chapters: “Crossing”, “Battle in the swamp”, “Who shot?”, “Terkin is wounded” and others. A distinctive feature of these chapters is the depiction of the everyday life of war. Tvardovsky is next to his hero and describes the soldier’s exploits without sublime pathos, but also without missing out on numerous details. For example, in the chapter “Who Shot?” the German bombing of the trenches in which Soviet soldiers hid is depicted. The author conveys the feeling of a person who cannot change anything in a deadly situation, but, frozen, must only wait for a bomb to fly past or hit him directly:

And how submissive you are suddenly
You lie on your earthly chest,
Shielding yourself from black death
Only with your own back.
You're lying on your face, boy
Less than twenty years old.
Now you're finished,
Now you are no longer there.

The poem also describes a short rest in the war, the life of a soldier in the intervals between battles. There seem to be no fewer of these chapters than chapters about military episodes. These include: “Accordion”, “Two Soldiers”, “At a Rest”, “In the Bath” and others. The chapter “About an Orphan Soldier” depicts an episode when a soldier found himself very close to his native village, which he had not been to since the beginning of the war. He asks the commander for two hours off to visit his relatives. The soldier runs through places familiar from childhood, recognizes the road, the river, but in place of the village he sees only tall weeds, and not a single living soul:

Here is the hill, here is the river,
Wilderness, weeds as tall as a soldier,
Yes, there is a plaque on the post:
Like, the village of Red Bridge...
At the plank at the fork,
Taking off his cap, our soldier
I stood there as if at a grave,
And it's time for him to go back.

When he returned to his unit, his comrades guessed everything from his appearance, did not ask anything, but left him dinner:

But, homeless and rootless,
Returning to the battalion,
The soldier ate his cold soup
After all, and he cried.

In several chapters “From the Author” the lyrical content of the poem is directly expressed (the poet expresses his views on poetry, explains his attitude towards Vasily Terkin), and in the epic chapters the author accompanies the story about military events with his excited, emotional commentary. For example, in the chapter “Crossing” the poet painfully depicts soldiers who die in the cold waters of the river:

And I saw you for the first time,
It will not be forgotten:
People are warm and alive
We went to the bottom, to the bottom, to the bottom...

Or in the chapter “Accordion” the author describes how, during a random stop, the soldiers started dancing on the road to warm up. The poet looks with sadness and affection at the soldiers who, having forgotten for a few minutes about death, about the sorrows of war, dance merrily in the bitter cold:

And the accordion is calling somewhere.
It's far away, it leads easily.
No, what are you guys like?
Amazing people.

Who owns this remark - the author or Tyorkin, who plays the harmony and watches the dancing couples? It is impossible to say for sure: the author sometimes intentionally seems to merge with the hero, because he has endowed the hero with his own thoughts and feelings. The poet states this in the chapter “About Myself”:

And I’ll tell you, I won’t hide it, -
In this book, here and there,
What a hero should say
I speak personally myself.
I am responsible for everything around me,
And notice, if you didn’t notice,
Just like Terkin, my hero,

Sometimes it speaks for me. The next plot-compositional feature of the poem is that the book has no beginning or ending: In a word, a book about a fighter. Without beginning, without end. Why is this without a beginning? Because time is not enough. Start it all over again. Why without end? I just feel sorry for the guy. (“From the author”) The poem “Vasily Terkin” was created by Tvardovsky during the Great Patriotic War and consists of separate chapters, separate sketches, which are united by the image of the main character. After the war, the author did not begin to supplement the poem with new episodes, that is, to come up with an exposition (expanding the pre-war history of Tyorkin) and a plot (for example, depicting the hero’s first battle with the Nazis). Tvardovsky simply added in 1945-1946 the introduction “From the author” and the conclusion “From the author”. Thus, the poem turned out to be very original in composition: there is no usual exposition, plot, climax, or denouement in the overall storyline. Because of this, Tvardovsky himself found it difficult to determine the genre of “Vasily Terkin”: after all, the poem involves a plot narrative.

With a free construction of the overall storyline, each chapter has its own complete plot and composition. For example, the chapter “Two Soldiers” describes an episode in which Tyorkin, returning from the hospital to the front, went to rest from the road in a hut where two old men live. The exposition of the chapter is a description of a hut, an old man and an old woman who are listening to mortar fire: after all, the front line is very close. The plot is the author’s mention of Tyorkin. He sits here on the bench, respectfully talks with the old man about various everyday problems and at the same time sets up a saw and repairs a clock. Then the old woman prepares dinner. The climax of the chapter is a conversation at dinner when the old man asks his main question:

Answer: we will beat the German
Or maybe we won’t beat you?

The denouement comes when Terkin, having had dinner and politely thanking the owners, puts on his overcoat and, already standing on the threshold, answers the old man: “We’ll beat you, father...”.

This chapter contains a kind of epilogue that transfers a private everyday episode into a general historical plan. This is the last quatrain:

In the depths of our native Russia,
Against the wind, chest forward,
Vasily walks through the snow
Terkin. He's going to beat the German.

The chapter is structured according to a ring composition, since the first and penultimate quatrains practically coincide:

There is a blizzard in the field,
War is raging three miles away.
There is an old woman on the stove in the hut.
Grandfather-owner at the window.

Thus, the chapter “Two Soldiers” is a complete work with a complete plot and a ring composition that emphasizes the completeness of the entire episode.

So, the poem “Vasily Terkin” has a number of artistic features that are explained, on the one hand, by the history of the creation of the work, and on the other, by the author’s intention. As is known, Tvardovsky wrote chapters of the poem in the period from 1942 to 1945 and designed them as separate completed works, because

There is no plot in war.
- How come it’s not there?
- So, no. (“From the author”)

In other words, a soldier's life lasts from episode to episode as long as he is alive. This feature of front-line life, when every single moment of life is valued, since the next one may not exist, was reflected by Tvardovsky in “The Book about a Soldier.”

The individual small works could be united first by the image of the main character, who is present in one way or another in almost every chapter, and then by the main idea associated with the image of Tyorkin. Having combined individual chapters into a complete poem, Tvardovsky did not change the plot and compositional structure that had developed naturally during the war years:

The same book about a fighter,
Without beginning, without end,
No special plot
However, the truth is not harmful. (“From the author”)

“Vasily Terkin” is distinguished by its striking construction features. Firstly, the poem lacks a general plot and almost all of its elements. Secondly, the poem is characterized by extreme compositional freedom, that is, the sequence of chapters is poorly motivated - the composition only approximately follows the course of the Patriotic War. It was because of this composition that Tvardovsky himself defined the genre of his work with the following phrase: not a poem, but simply a “book,” “a living, moving, free-form book” (“How Vasily Terkin was written”). Thirdly, each chapter is a complete fragment with its own plot and composition. Fourthly, the epic depiction of episodes of the war is intertwined with lyrical digressions, which complicates the composition. However, such an unusual construction allowed the author to achieve the main thing - to create a bright and memorable image of Vasily Terkin, who embodies the best features of a Russian soldier and a Russian person in general.

One of the most famous works of not only domestic but also world literature is Tvardovsky’s work “Vasily Terkin”. The genre of this work is poem. It was extremely popular among readers and is today considered an excellent example of military poetry.

About the writer's work

Alexander Tvardovsky (1910-1971) came from a simple village peasant family. Already at the age of fifteen, he began to write short poems for the local newspaper. The famous poet approved of his writings and became the mentor of the future famous author. In the 1930s, Tvardovsky wrote several poems and published a collection of poems. It is significant that, despite the fact that his family and relatives suffered during collectivization, Alexander Tvardovsky portrayed party politics in the village in a very positive light in several of his writings. Before the start of the war, he worked in a Leningrad newspaper, where he first published his first short poems about Vasily Terkin, who later became famous. When hostilities began, the poet went to the front and throughout the war years gradually created his most famous work, which brought him all-Union fame.

Creation

One of the most famous works on military subjects is “Vasily Terkin”. The genre of this work corresponded to the author’s idea: to create something authentic that would be understandable and accessible to everyone. Therefore, he wrote his essay as a poem about a fighter, a simple soldier who went through the whole war. Despite the fact that it lacks specifics, nevertheless, some battles are guessed in the text: the retreat of Soviet troops at the beginning of the war, the battle on the Volga and Dnieper. The first chapters were published in the newspaper of the Western Front and were extremely popular among readers.

Peculiarities

Tvardovsky’s work “Vasily Terkin,” the genre of which was, in principle, traditional for the poet, despite criticism of party censorship, gained such fame due to the fact that the author chose as his main character not representatives of the command or party leadership, but the most ordinary person, in the form of whom every soldier of the Soviet army could probably recognize himself. Terkin is a collective image of soldiers, and it is not for nothing that the author every time emphasizes the typicality of this hero, his recognizability.

The essay “Vasily Terkin,” the genre of which allowed the poet to express his thoughts on paper relatively easily and simply, is written in accessible language. It was not without reason that Tvardovsky wrote his work as a poem. The fact is that this genre presupposes the presence of lyrical-epic motifs and a serious narrative in poetic form. And the work in question is truly epic in spirit, since it conveys the spirit and mood of not only the soldiers of the Soviet army, but also the entire people during the war.

Folk motives

The genre chosen by the author is not accidental. Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin” is close in its language, sound and spirit to folklore, and, as is known, this poetic form originally arose precisely as a folk epic song, as a kind of legend, a legend about some heroic event. And the author fully follows this principle: he seems to deliberately abandon literary and linguistic tricks and expresses his thoughts extremely simply, in a language similar to the way ancient song poems were written in their time. This form allowed him to borrow a lot from popular colloquial speech. Tvardovsky's poem "Vasily Terkin" follows traditional folklore motifs. It contains many ditties, sayings, proverbs, and some statements and entire expressions from this work, in turn, became phraseological units, which indicates the highest degree of popularity of the hero.

Composition

The poem “Vasily Terkin,” the content of which is essentially a reproduction of military life, has become so dear to the reader precisely because it very warmly and touchingly paints ordinary pictures of difficult wartime. The work consists of thirty chapters, the author's prologue and epilogue; however, the poet immediately stipulates at the very beginning that his book has neither beginning nor end. This idea continues the theme he had previously outlined about the infinity of time, about the long road, about life and death. This gives a special philosophical meaning to the work, forcing the reader to think about fate, about the common misfortune, about the hardships of war. The chapter “Crossing” is rightly recognized by most critics as the main and central part of the entire work.

Each excerpt is dedicated to an episode from the life of a favorite hero. Moreover, the author does not focus on depicting the heroic deeds of his character; on the contrary, he very often shows him in a simple setting, during periods of calm, during transitions, in parking lots, and so on. The theme of the poem “Vasily Terkin” is an image of the life of a simple soldier who, despite the horrors of war, has not lost optimism and believes in victory. Even in the most difficult circumstances, he never loses heart, and this is why the reader fell in love with him.

The most significant parts of the work are the following: a description of Terkin’s feat during the crossing, his battle with Death, a depiction of the character at the pass, an episode with a downed plane, the hero’s lunch with an old soldier. In these scenes, the author strives to show his character from different sides: in each of these chapters, he appears before the readers in recognizable situations, such as those that thousands of Soviet soldiers went through.

Plot

Here Terkin swam across the icy river in order to convey an important message about the location of the enemy and the actions of the Soviet troops. At the same time, the author does not emphasize the heroism of this act; on the contrary, he describes this scene in such a way that the reader understands that any other soldier in Terkin’s place would have done the same. In this description, as indeed in the entire poem, the author’s voice is clearly heard, which, as if invisibly present at the described scene, gives its judgments and comments on what is happening, and this gives the narration authenticity and truthfulness.

In general, the figure of Tvardovsky himself can be discerned in the narrator: he himself periodically enters into dialogue with his character, addresses him with various questions, expresses his sympathy for him or admires him. In the chapter “At a Rest” one can feel the poet’s especially warm attitude towards his hero. The author depicts Terkin in the most ordinary and recognizable setting, on a soldier's rest, with an accordion in his hands. Perhaps, it was this image of the character that readers especially loved, since it goes back to traditional ideas about an ordinary peasant worker who, in a moment of rest, sings and plays the harmonica. It is not for nothing that Vasily is depicted on one of the monuments as an accordion player.

Image

In the chapter dedicated to Terkin’s conversation with the old soldier, Tvardovsky again shows his hero in a simple environment, among the peasants, which once again brings him closer to the common people. Both soldiers are talking about the war and during this conversation they immediately find a common language. This is a distinctive feature of the hero’s character: wherever he goes, he immediately finds a common language with those around him. Of course, the poet could not ignore the military merits of his hero: in addition to the episode with the crossing, he also, for example, shoots down an enemy plane. Noteworthy is the way the author described the last episode: the reader learns that the plane was shot down by Terkin only at the end, when the command began to look for the hero. Thus, the image of the folk hero Vasily Terkin created by Tvardovsky actually personifies the entire people.

Grade

The folk epic justifiably received universal recognition. She was highly appreciated by such prominent writers as Pasternak, Fadeev, Bunin. Readers in their letters to the author asked for a continuation. And only the censorship committee was dissatisfied with the fact that Tvardovsky did not show the role of the Communist Party in his work. However, the author himself admitted that such deviations would have violated the entire concept of the work, and therefore, at his own peril and risk, he continued to write in the direction in which he considered it necessary. According to a recent survey, the poem was among the top most read works on military topics. The work is included in the school curriculum and is deservedly popular today.

The history of the creation of Tvardovsky’s work “Vasily Terkin”

Since the autumn of 1939, Tvardovsky participated in the Finnish campaign as a war correspondent. “It seems to me,” he wrote to M.V. Isakovsky, “that the army will be my second theme for the rest of my life.” And the poet was not mistaken. In the edition of the Leningrad Military District “On Guard of the Motherland,” a group of poets had an idea to create a series of entertaining drawings about the exploits of a cheerful soldier-hero. “Someone,” recalls Tvardovsky, “suggested calling our hero Vasya Terkin, namely Vasya, and not Vasily.” In creating a collective work about a resilient, successful fighter, Tvardovsky was instructed to write an introduction: “... I had to give at least the most general “portrait” of Terkin and determine, so to speak, the tone, the manner of our further conversation with the reader.”
This is how the poem “Vasya Terkin” appeared in the newspaper (1940 - January 5). The success of the feuilleton hero prompted the idea to continue the story about the adventures of the resilient Vasya Terkin. As a result, the book “Vasya Terkin at the Front” (1940) was published. During the Great Patriotic War, this image became the main one in Tvardovsky’s work. “Vasily Terkin” walked along with Tvardovsky along the roads of war. The first publication of “Vasily Terkin” took place in the newspaper of the Western Front “Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda”, where on September 4, 1942 the introductory chapter “From the author” and “At a halt” were published. From then until the end of the war, chapters of the poem were published in this newspaper, in the magazines “Red Army Man” and “Znamya”, as well as in other print media.
“...My work ends coincidentally with the end of the war. One more effort of a refreshed soul and body is needed - and it will be possible to put an end to it,” the poet wrote on May 4, 1945. This is how the completed poem “Vasily Terkin. A book about a fighter" (1941-1945). Tvardovsky wrote that working on it gave him a “feeling” of the legitimacy of the artist’s place in the great struggle of the people... a feeling of complete freedom to handle poetry and words.
In 1946, almost one after another, three complete editions of “The Book about a Fighter” were published.

Type, genre, creative method of the analyzed work

In the spring of 1941, the poet worked hard on the chapters of the future poem, but the outbreak of war changed these plans. The revival of the idea and the resumption of work on “Terkin” dates back to the middle of 1942. From this time on, a new stage of work on the work began: “The entire character of the poem, its entire content, its philosophy, its hero, its form - composition, genre, plot - have changed. The nature of the poetic narrative about the war has changed - the homeland and the people, the people in the war, have become the main themes.” Although, when starting to work on it, the poet was not too worried about this, as evidenced by his own words: “I did not long languish with doubts and fears regarding the uncertainty of the genre, the lack of an initial plan that would embrace the entire work in advance, and the weak plot connection of the chapters with each other. Not a poem - well, let it not be a poem, I decided; there is no single plot - let it be, don’t; there is no very beginning of a thing - there is no time to invent it; the climax and completion of the entire narrative is not planned - let it be, we must write about what is burning, not waiting, and then we’ll see, we’ll figure it out.”
In connection with the question of the genre of Tvardovsky’s work, the following judgments of the author seem important: “The genre designation of “The Book about a Fighter”, which I focused on, was not the result of a desire to simply avoid the designation “poem”, “story”, etc. This coincided with the decision to write not a poem, not a story or a novel in verse, that is, not something that has its own legalized and to a certain extent obligatory plot, composition and other features. These signs didn’t come out for me, but something did come out, and I designated this something as “The Book about a Fighter.”
This, as the poet himself called it, “The Book about a Soldier,” recreates a reliable picture of front-line reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person in war. It stands out among other poems of that time for its special completeness and depth of realistic depiction of the people's liberation struggle, disasters and suffering, exploits and military life.
Tvardovsky’s poem is a heroic epic, with objectivity corresponding to the epic genre, but permeated with a living author’s feeling, original in all respects, a unique book, at the same time developing the traditions of realistic literature and folk poetry. And at the same time, this is a free narrative - a chronicle (“A book about a fighter, without beginning, without end ...”), which covers the entire history of the war.

Subjects

The theme of the Great Patriotic War forever entered into the work of A.T. Tvardovsky. And the poem “Vasily Terkin” became one of his most striking pages. The poem is dedicated to the life of the people during the war; it is rightfully an encyclopedia of front-line life. In the center of the poem is the image of Terkin, an ordinary infantryman from the Smolensk peasants, uniting the composition of the work into a single whole. Vasily Terkin actually personifies the entire people. The Russian national character found artistic embodiment in him. In Tvardovsky’s poem, the symbol of the victorious people became an ordinary person, an ordinary soldier.
In “The Book about a Fighter” the war is depicted as it is - in everyday life and heroism, intertwining the ordinary, sometimes even comic (chapters “At a Rest”, “In the Bath”) with the sublime and tragic. The poem is strong, first of all, in the truth about war as a harsh and tragic - at the limit of possibilities - test of the vital forces of a people, a country, every person.

Idea of the work

Fiction during the Great Patriotic War has a number of characteristic features. Its main features are patriotic pathos and a focus on universal accessibility. The most successful example of such a work of art is rightfully considered the poem “Vasily Terkin” by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. The feat of a soldier in war is shown by Tvardovsky as everyday and hard military labor and battle, and moving to new positions, and spending the night in a trench or right on the ground, “shading himself from black death only with his own back...”. And the hero who accomplishes this feat is an ordinary, simple soldier.
It is in the defense of the Motherland, life on earth that the justice of the people's Patriotic War lies: “The battle is holy and just, mortal combat is not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth.” Poem by A.T. Tvardovsky’s “Vasily Terkin” has become truly popular.

Main characters

An analysis of the work shows that the poem is based on the image of the main character - private Vasily Terkin. It doesn't have a real prototype. This is a collective image that combines the typical features of the spiritual appearance and character of an ordinary Russian soldier. Dozens of people wrote about Terkin’s typicality, drawing the conclusion from the lines “there is always a guy like this in every company, and in every platoon” that this is a collective, generalized image, that one should not look for any individual qualities in him, so everything typical for a Soviet soldier. And since “he was partially scattered and partially exterminated,” this means that he is not a person at all, but a kind of symbol of the entire Soviet Army.
Terkin - who is he? Let's be honest: He's just a guy himself. He's ordinary.
However, the guy is no matter what, a guy like that
There is always one in every company, and in every platoon.
The image of Terkin has folklore roots, it is “a hero, a fathom in the shoulders”, “a merry fellow”, “an experienced man”. Behind the illusion of simplicity, buffoonery, and mischief lie moral sensitivity and a sense of filial duty to the Motherland, the ability to accomplish a feat at any moment without phrases or poses.
The image of Vasily Terkin really captures what is typical for many: “A guy like this / There is always a guy in every company, / And in every platoon.” However, in him the traits and properties inherent in many people were embodied brighter, sharper, more original. Folk wisdom and optimism, perseverance, endurance, patience and dedication, everyday ingenuity and skill of the Russian person - a worker and a warrior, and finally, inexhaustible humor, behind which something deeper and more serious always appears - all this is fused into a living and integral human character. The main feature of his character is his love for his native country. The hero constantly remembers his native places, which are so sweet and dear to his heart. Terkin cannot help but be attracted by mercy and greatness of soul; he finds himself in war not because of the military instinct, but for the sake of life on earth; the defeated enemy evokes in him only a feeling of pity. He is modest, although he can sometimes boast, telling his friends that he does not need an order, he agrees to a medal. But what attracts most about this person is his love of life, worldly ingenuity, mockery of the enemy and of any difficulties.
Being the embodiment of the Russian national character, Vasily Terkin is inseparable from the people - the mass of soldiers and a number of episodic characters (a soldier grandfather and grandmother, tank crews in battle and on the march, a girl nurse in a hospital, a soldier’s mother returning from enemy captivity, etc.) , it is inseparable from the motherland. And the entire “Book about a Fighter” is a poetic statement of national unity.
Along with the images of Terkin and the people, an important place in the overall structure of the work is occupied by the image of the author-narrator, or, more precisely, the lyrical hero, especially noticeable in the chapters “About myself”, “About war”, “About love”, in the four chapters “From the author” " Thus, in the chapter “About Myself,” the poet directly states, addressing the reader: “And I will tell you: I will not hide, / - In this book, here or there, / What the hero should say, / I say personally myself.”
The author in the poem is an intermediary between the hero and the reader. A confidential conversation is constantly conducted with the reader; the author respects his friend-reader, and therefore strives to convey to him the truth about the war. The author feels his responsibility to the readers; he understands how important it was not only to talk about the war, but also to instill in the readers faith in the indestructible spirit of the Russian soldier, optimism. Sometimes the author seems to invite the reader to check the truth of his judgments and observations. Such direct contact with the reader greatly contributes to the fact that the poem becomes understandable to a large circle of people.
The poem constantly permeates the author's subtle humor. The text of the poem is filled with jokes, sayings, sayings, and it is generally impossible to determine who their author is - the author of the poem, the hero of the poem Terkin or the people. At the very beginning of the poem, the author calls a joke the most necessary “thing” in a soldier’s life:
You can live without food for a day, You can do more, but sometimes In a war you can’t live for one minute without a joke, The jokes of the most unwise ones.

The plot and composition of the analyzed work

The originality of the book's plot and composition is determined by military reality itself. “There is no plot in war,” the author noted in one of the chapters. And in the poem as a whole there really are no such traditional components as plot, climax, denouement. But within chapters with a narrative basis, as a rule, there is a plot of its own, and separate plot connections arise between these chapters. Finally, the general development of events, the revelation of the character of the hero, with all the independence of individual chapters, is clearly determined by the very course of the war, the natural change of its stages: from the bitter days of retreat and the hardest defensive battles - to the hard-fought and won victory. This is how Tvardovsky himself wrote about the compositional structure of his poem:
“And the first thing I accepted as the principle of composition and style was the desire for a certain completeness of each individual part, chapter, and within the chapter - of each period and even stanza. I had to keep in mind the reader who, even if he was unfamiliar with the previous chapters, would find in this chapter, published today in the newspaper, something whole, rounded. Besides, this reader might not have waited for my next chapter: he was where the hero is—at war. It was this approximate completion of each chapter that I was most concerned with. I didn’t keep anything to myself until another time, trying to speak out at every opportunity—the next chapter—to the end, to fully express my mood, to convey a fresh impression, a thought, a motive, an image that arose. True, this principle was not determined immediately - after the first chapters of Terkin were published one after another, and new ones then appeared as they were written.”
The poem consists of thirty independent and at the same time closely interconnected chapters. The poem is structured as a chain of episodes from the military life of the main character, which do not always have a direct event connection with each other. Terkin humorously tells young soldiers about the everyday life of war; He says that he has been fighting since the very beginning of the war, he was surrounded three times, and was wounded. The fate of an ordinary soldier, one of those who bore the brunt of the war on their shoulders, becomes the personification of the national fortitude and will to live.
The plot outline of the poem is difficult to follow; each chapter tells about a separate event from the life of a soldier, for example: Terkin swims twice across the icy river to restore contact with the advancing units; Terkin alone occupies a German dugout, but comes under fire from his own artillery; on the way to the front, Terkin finds himself in the house of old peasants, helping them with the housework; Terkin enters into hand-to-hand combat with the German and, having difficulty defeating him, takes him prisoner. Or, unexpectedly for himself, Terkin shoots down a German attack aircraft with a rifle. Terkin takes command of the platoon when the commander is killed, and is the first to break into the village; however, the hero is again seriously wounded. Lying wounded in a field, Terkin talks with Death, who persuades him not to cling to life; in the end he is discovered by the soldiers, and he tells them: “Take away this woman, / I am a soldier still alive.”
It is no coincidence that Tvardovsky’s work begins and ends with lyrical digressions. An open conversation with the reader brings him closer to the inner world of the work and creates an atmosphere of shared involvement in events. The poem ends with a dedication to the fallen.
The poem “Vasily Terkin” is distinguished by its peculiar historicism. Conventionally, it can be divided into three parts, coinciding with the beginning, middle and end of the war. Poetic understanding of the stages of the war creates a lyrical chronicle of events from the chronicle. A feeling of bitterness and sorrow fills the first part, faith in victory fills the second, the joy of the liberation of the Fatherland becomes the leitmotif of the third part of the poem. This is explained by the fact that A.T. Tvardovsky created the poem gradually throughout the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

Artistic originality

An analysis of the work shows that the poem “Vasily Terkin” is distinguished by its extraordinary breadth and freedom of use of means of oral, literary and folk poetic speech. This is truly a vernacular language. It naturally uses proverbs and sayings (“out of boredom I am a jack of all trades”; “spending time is an hour of fun”; “the river you float along is the one you create a glory..."), folk songs (about an overcoat, about a river ). Tvardovsky perfectly masters the art of speaking simply but poetically. He himself creates sayings that have come into life as proverbs (“don’t look at what’s on your chest, but look at what’s ahead”; “war has a short path, love has a long one”; “guns go backwards to battle”, etc.) .
Freedom - the main moral and artistic principle of the work - is also realized in the very construction of the verse. And this is a find - a relaxed ten-line, eight-, and five-, and six-, and quatrain - in a word, there will be as many rhyming lines as Tvardovsky needs at this moment in order to speak out in full. The main size of “Vasily Terkin” is trochaic tetrameter.
S.Ya. wrote about the originality of Tvardovsky’s verse. Marshak: “Look at how one of the best chapters of Vasily Terkin, “The Crossing,” is constructed. In this truthful and seemingly artless story about genuine events observed by the author, you will nevertheless find a strict form and a clear structure. You will find here a repeating leitmotif, which sounds in the most crucial places of the narrative, and each time in a new way - sometimes sad and alarming, sometimes solemn and even menacing:
Crossing, crossing! Left bank, right bank. The snow is rough. The edge of the ice... To whom is memory, to whom is glory, To whom is dark water.
You will find here a lively, laconic, impeccably accurate dialogue constructed according to all the laws of a ballad. This is where real poetic culture comes into play, which gives us the means to depict events from the most vibrant modern life.”

Meaning of the work

The poem “Vasily Terkin” is the central work in the work of A.T. Tvardovsky, “the best of everything written about war in war” (K. Simonov), one of the peaks of Russian epic poetry in general. It can be considered one of the truly folk works. Many lines from this work migrated into oral folk speech or became popular poetic aphorisms: “mortal combat is not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth”, “forty souls are one soul”, “crossing, crossing, left bank, right bank” and many other.
The recognition of “The Book about a Soldier” was not only popular, but also national: “...This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, precision in everything and what an extraordinary folk soldier’s language - not a hitch, not a hitch, not a single hitch.” a single false, ready-made, that is, literary-vulgar word!” — wrote I.A. Bunin.
The poem "Vasily Terkin" was repeatedly illustrated. The very first were illustrations by O.G. Vereisky, which were created directly after the text of the poem. The works of artists B. Dekhterev, I. Bruni, Yu. Neprintsev are also known. In 1961 at the Moscow Theater named after. Mossovet K. Voronkov staged “Vasily Terkin”. Literary compositions of chapters of the poem performed by D.N. are known. Zhuravlev and D.N. Orlova. Excerpts from the poem are set to music by V.G. Zakharov. Composer N.V. Bogoslovsky wrote the symphonic story “Vasily Terkin”.
In 1995, a monument to Terkin was unveiled in Smolensk (author - People's Artist of the Russian Federation, sculptor A.G. Sergeev). The monument is a two-figure composition depicting a conversation between Vasily Terkin and A.T. Tvardovsky. The monument was erected using publicly collected money.

This is interesting

The painting by Yu.M. became the most famous. Neprintsev “Rest after the battle” (1951).
In the winter of 1942, in a front-line dugout, barely illuminated by a homemade lamp, the artist Yuri Mikhailovich Neprintsev first became acquainted with the poem by A.T. Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin". One of the soldiers read the poem aloud, and Neprintsev saw how the soldiers’ concentrated faces brightened, how, forgetting about fatigue, they laughed while listening to this wonderful work. What is the enormous power of influence of the poem? Why is the image of Vasily Terkin so close and dear to the heart of every warrior? The artist was already thinking about this. Neprintsev rereads the poem several times and becomes convinced that its hero is not some kind of exceptional nature, but an ordinary guy, in whose image the author expressed all the best, pure and bright that is inherent in Soviet people.
A merry fellow and joker who knows how to lift the spirits of his comrades in difficult times, to cheer them up with a joke and a sharp word, Terkin also shows resourcefulness and courage in battle. Such living Terkins could be found everywhere on the roads of war.
The great vitality of the image created by the poet was the secret of his charm. That is why Vasily Terkin immediately became one of the favorite national heroes. Captivated by this wonderful, deeply truthful image, Neprintsev could not part with it for many years. “He lived in my mind,” the artist later wrote, “accumulating new features, enriching himself with new details, in order to become the main character of the picture.” But the idea for the painting was not born right away. The artist traveled a long path, full of work and thought, before he began painting the painting “Rest after the Battle.” “I wanted,” the artist wrote, “to depict the soldiers of the Soviet Army not at the moment of performing any heroic deeds, when all the spiritual forces of a person are strained to the limit, to show them not in the smoke of battle, but in a simple everyday situation, in a moment of short rest.” .
This is how the idea of a painting is born. Memories of the war years help define its plot: a group of soldiers, during a short break between battles, settled down in a snowy clearing and listened to a cheerful narrator. In the first sketches the general nature of the future picture was already outlined. The group was located semi-circle, facing the viewer, and consisted of only 12-13 people. The figure of Terkin was placed in the center of the composition and highlighted in color. The figures located on each side of him formally balanced the composition. There was a lot of far-fetched and conditional in this decision. The small number of the group gave the whole scene a random character and did not create the impression of a strong, friendly group of people. Therefore, in subsequent sketches, Neprintsev increases the number of people and arranges them most naturally. The main character Terkin is moved by the artist from the center to the right, the group is built diagonally from left to right. Thanks to this, the space increases and its depth is outlined. The viewer ceases to be only a witness to this scene, he becomes, as it were, a participant in it, drawn into the circle of fighters listening to Terkin. To give even more authenticity and vitality to the whole picture,
Neprintsev abandoned solar lighting, since spectacular contrasts of light and shadow could introduce elements of theatrical convention into the picture, which the artist so avoided. The soft, diffused light of a winter day made it possible to more fully and brightly reveal the diversity of faces and their expressions. The artist worked a lot and for a long time on the figures of the fighters, on their poses, changing the latter several times. Thus, the figure of a mustachioed foreman in a sheepskin coat only after a long search turned into a sitting fighter, and an elderly soldier with a bowler hat in his hands only in the last sketches replaced the girl nurse bandaging the soldier. But the most important thing for the artist was to work on depicting the inner world of the characters. “I wanted,” Neprintsev wrote, “for the viewer to fall in love with my heroes, to feel them as living and close people, so that he would find and recognize his own front-line friends in the film.” The artist understood that only then would he be able to create convincing and truthful images of the heroes when they were extremely clear to him. Neprintsev began to carefully study the characters of the fighters, their manner of speaking, laughing, individual gestures, habits, in other words, he began to “get used to” the images of his heroes. In this he was helped by the impressions of the war years, combat encounters, and the memories of his front-line comrades. His front-line sketches and portraits of his fighting friends provided him with an invaluable service.
Many sketches were made from life, but they were not transferred directly to the painting, without preliminary modification. The artist searched for, highlighted the most striking features of this or that person and, on the contrary, removed everything secondary, random, interfering with the identification of the main one. He tried to make each image purely individual and typical. “In my painting I wanted to give a collective portrait of the Soviet people, the soldiers of the great liberating army. The true hero of my picture is the Russian people.” Each hero in the artist’s imagination has his own interesting biography. He can talk about them fascinatingly for hours, conveying the smallest details of their lives and fates.
So, for example, Neprintsev says that he imagined the fighter sitting to the right of Terkin as a guy who had recently joined the army from a collective farm, was still inexperienced, perhaps it was his first time participating in battle, and he was naturally scared. But now, lovingly listening to the stories of the experienced soldier, he forgot about his fear. Behind Terkin stands a young, handsome guy with a hat tilted at a jaunty angle. “He,” the artist wrote, “listens to Terkin somewhat condescendingly. He himself could have told it no worse. Before the war, he was a skilled worker at a large factory, an accordion player, a participant in amateur performances, and a favorite of girls>>. The artist could tell a lot about the mustachioed foreman who laughs at the top of his lungs, and about the elderly soldier with a bowler hat, and about the cheerful soldier sitting to the left of the narrator, and about all the other characters... The most difficult task was the search for the external appearance of Vasily Terkin. The artist wanted to convey the image that had developed among the people; he wanted Terkin to be recognized immediately. Terkin should be a generalized image, it should combine the features of many people. His image is, as it were, a synthesis of all the best, bright, pure that is inherent in Soviet man. The artist worked for a long time on Terkin’s appearance, on his facial expression and hand gestures. In the first drawings, Terkin was depicted as a young soldier with a good-natured, sly face. There was no sense of dexterity or sharp ingenuity in him. In another sketch, Terkin was too serious and balanced, in the third - he lacked everyday experience, life school. From drawing to drawing there was a search, gestures were refined, and the pose was determined. According to the artist, the gesture of Terkin’s right hand was supposed to emphasize some kind of sharp, strong joke addressed to the enemy. Countless drawings have been preserved in which a variety of turns of the figure, tilts of the head, hand movements, individual gestures were tried - until the artist found something that satisfied him. The image of Terkin in the film became a significant, convincing and completely natural center. The artist devoted a lot of time to searching for a landscape for the painting. He imagined that the action was taking place in a sparse forest with clearings and copses. It’s early spring, the snow has not yet melted, but is only loosening a little. He wanted to convey the national Russian landscape.
The painting “Rest after the battle” is the result of the artist’s intense, serious work, excited love for his heroes, and great respect for them. Each image in the picture is a whole biography. And before the gaze of an inquisitive viewer passes a whole series of bright, individually unique images. The deep vitality of the idea determined the clarity and integrity of the composition, the simplicity and naturalness of the pictorial solution. Neprintsev’s painting resurrects the difficult days of the Great Patriotic War, full of heroism and severity, hardships and adversity, and at the same time the joy of victory. That is why she will always be dear to the heart of the Soviet people, loved by the broad masses of the Soviet people.

(Based on the book by V.I. Gapeev, E.V. Kuznetsov. “Conversations about Soviet artists.” - M.-L.: Education, 1964)

Gapeeva V.I. Kuznetsova V.E. “Conversations about Soviet artists. - M.-L.: Enlightenment, 1964.
Grishung AL. “Vasily Terkin” by Alexander Tvardovsky. - M., 1987.
Kondratovich A. Alexander Tvardovsky: Poetry and personality. - M., 1978.
Romanova R.M. Alexander Tvardovsky: Pages of life and creativity: A book for high school students. - M.: Education, 1989-
Tvardovsky A. Vasily Terkin. A book about a fighter. Terkin in the next world. Moscow: Raritet, 2000.

Category: Analysis of poems, works

History of creation

This is how the poem “Vasya Terkin” appeared in the newspaper (1940 - January 5). The success of the feuilleton hero prompted the idea to continue the story about the adventures of the resilient Vasya Terkin. As a result, the book “Vasya Terkin at the Front” (1940) was published. During the Great Patriotic War, this image became the main one in Tvardovsky’s work. “Vasily Terkin” walked along with Tvardovsky along the roads of war. The first publication of “Vasily Terkin” took place in the newspaper of the Western Front “Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda”, where on September 4, 1942 the introductory chapter “From the author” and “At a halt” were published. From then until the end of the war, chapters of the poem were published in this newspaper, in the magazines “Red Army Man” and “Znamya”, as well as in other print media.

“...My work ends coincidentally with the end of the war. One more effort of a refreshed soul and body is needed - and it will be possible to put an end to it,” the poet wrote on May 4, 1945. This is how the completed poem “Vasily Terkin. A book about a fighter" (1941-1945). Tvardovsky wrote that working on it gave him a “feeling” of the legitimacy of the artist’s place in the great struggle of the people... a feeling of complete freedom to handle poetry and words.

In 1946, almost one after another, three complete editions of “The Book about a Fighter” were published.

Genre, genre, creative method

In connection with the question of the genre of Tvardovsky’s work, the following judgments of the author seem important: “The genre designation of “The Book about a Fighter”, which I focused on, was not the result of a desire to simply avoid the designation “poem”, “story”, etc. This coincided with the decision to write not a poem, not a story or a novel in verse, that is, not something that has its own legalized and to a certain extent obligatory plot, composition and other features. These signs didn’t come out for me, but something did come out, and I designated this something as “The Book about a Fighter.”

This, as the poet himself called it, “The Book about a Soldier,” recreates a reliable picture of front-line reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person in war. It stands out among other poems of that time due to its special completeness and depth of realistic depiction of the people's liberation struggle, disasters and suffering, exploits and military life.

Genre of Tvardovsky's work violated traditional canons: not a “poem,” which would be more common, but a “book”: “A book about a fighter.” The subtitle “poem” appeared only in the first publications of individual chapters in the newspaper “Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda”. Some critics were embarrassed by the vagueness and vagueness of the genre. However, the poet himself did not consider the genre uncertainty of the book to be a disadvantage; he wrote: “A chronicle is not a chronicle, a chronicle is not a chronicle, but a “book,” a living, moving, free-form book, inseparable from the real matter.” The genre definition of “book” is more complex, broader, and more universal than the traditional definition of “poem.” Still, “poem” is associated primarily (the memory of the genre and the laws of reader perception are triggered) with the classics, with literature - with classical literature, but literature, for example, with “Mtsyri” by M.Yu. Lermontov, with “Poltava” A.S. Pushkin... Tvardovsky intuitively sought to get away from the literary genre tradition - “literariness”, to “universalize” the genre of his work, to be closer to life, and not to literature, in other words, to strengthen the effect of the authenticity of literary fiction. The explanations on this score of Tvardovsky himself, who reduce everything to simple efficiency, seem rather crafty (as is often the case with Tvardovsky), and we have no right to elevate them to the rank of a literary absolute, as often happens in some works about Tvardovsky: “I didn’t last long I was tormented by doubts and fears about the uncertainty of the genre, the lack of an initial plan that embraces the entire work in advance, the weak plot connection of the chapters with each other. It’s not a poem - well, let it not be a poem, I decided; the beginning of the thing - there is no time to invent it; the climax and completion of the entire story is not planned - let it be necessary to write about what is burning, not waiting, but we will see, we will figure it out."

It was precisely this genre form - “A Book about a Fighter” - that gave creative freedom to the poet, partially seemed to remove the shade of literary convention in an outwardly artless ("light") work, increased the degree of reader confidence in the work, on the one hand, literary with its conventional reality, and on the other hand, unconditionally vital, reliable, in which conventional reality and reality were so united and seemed natural that this artistic convention was not noticed, the reader did not think about it.

The genre memory of the “book” is different, and it is determined primarily by the books of the Old and New Testaments. See, for example, the New Testament (Exodus 32:32-33), where the prophet Moses asks God for the people who sinned by making a golden calf: “Forgive them their sin. But if not, then blot me out from Your book, in which You wrote down. The Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot out from My book.” The Book of Life is also repeatedly spoken of in the Revelation of John the Theologian.

Tvardovsky's poem is a book of the life of the people in its diverse, free manifestations in new times and in new circumstances. By analogy with Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin", Tvardovsky's poem can be called an encyclopedia - an encyclopedia not only of front-line life, but also of the best traits of a Russian person.

The author also brought his poem closer to chronicle And chronicle- genres that have long traditions in Rus'. Tvardovsky wrote about “Vasily Terkin”: “... a certain chronicle is not a chronicle, a chronicle is not a chronicle,” thereby emphasizing the conscientiousness and accuracy, civic pathos and responsibility characteristic of Russian chroniclers and compilers of chronicles.

Plot and composition. The poem (we will use this traditional genre definition of a work, not forgetting its genre uniqueness) “Vasily Terkin” consists of 29 (including the chapter “About myself” and four chapters “From the author”) independent, internally complete chapters, not connected by a strict sequence of events . That is, there is no strict plot predicament, and this gives the author the opportunity to say a lot about things that are not directly related to the development of the plot, but contribute to creating a complete picture, the completeness of people’s life in the war. There really is no plot in the work. There are only private plots within each chapter, and between chapters there are only some plot connections. However, the event and plot in this work are not so important: “The Book about a Fighter” is valuable to others. The plot of the book develops as the war progresses, and its core is the fate of the entire people, the fate of the Motherland in a bitter time.

The unusual nature of the plot (in fact, its absence) and the composition of the book, which began “from the middle” and ended without resolution, forced the author to introduce humorous clauses into the text (in the chapter “From the Author”):

...a book about a fighter.

The chapter is called “From the Author” and asks questions to the reader, the author conducts a confidential conversation with the reader (however, the author’s voice is sometimes difficult to separate from the hero’s voice, they are so close). The dialogue about the plot in this fragment is indicative: who is he - the author’s hypothetical interlocutor, confident that without a plot the work simply cannot exist? Most likely, this is a dogmatic critic who has firmly mastered literary canons and terms, usually expresses himself in the correct literary language, but here he is so taken aback by the heretical statement about the absence of a plot that in confusion he repeats after the author the colloquially ironic “no”: “How come there is no ?" 1

This statement by the author contains both a disregard for literary dogmas and an explanation of another reason for the lack of plot: the book was created during the war, and in the war “it is impossible to guess ahead” (“From the author”). Any scheme or predetermination caused by the structure of the plot would threaten the loss of confidence in the naturalness of the narrative.

When creating the final version of the book, Tvardovsky left out many fragments and plot twists published during the war. The author's plans included plot distractions (Terkin's youth, crossing the front line to communicate with the partisans, Terkin being captured by the Germans, etc.), which did not materialize. “I saw,” wrote Tvardovsky in the article “How “Vasily Terkin” was written,” “that this reduces the book to some kind of private history, trivializes it, deprives it of that front-line “universality” that had already emerged and was already making Terkin’s name a household name in relation to fighters of this type. I decisively turned away from this path, threw out what related to the enemy rear, reworked the chapter “General” and again began to build the fate of the hero in the previously established plan” (V, 129).

In a word, the book is from the middle and let's start. And it will go there.

The book is structured in such a way that each chapter can be read as an independent work. The poet took into account that the completeness of individual chapters, which are outwardly unrelated to each other by plot, is necessary so that they can be read by those who did not know the previous chapters. “I had to keep in mind the reader who, even if he was unfamiliar with the previous chapters, would find in this chapter, published today in the newspaper, something whole, rounded” (V, 124). However, this does not mean that the book itself is not something whole. The compositional unity of the book is given by the image of the protagonist, who is always at the center of all events and to whom the threads of human destinies stretch; the author-narrator with his lyrical digressions from the author, who sometimes conducts a direct dialogue with his hero and with the reader, talks about himself, etc.; style - living “Russian speech, the great Russian word”, drawn from the people and returned to the people (See A. Akhmatova’s poem “Courage”); a unique fusion of solemn pathos and sly irony, thanks to which the author manages to avoid declarativeness and reproaches of insincerity.

Terkin is an ordinary war worker, his front-line world is a concrete world, visible to the eye, directly perceived by the senses, a world of particulars, quiet events, and this determines the composition, the selection of episodes to reveal the image of the hero. Hence the narrow scope of events, the rapid change of personnel, unknown or insignificant villages and settlements for the course of the war...

All this is the periphery of the war and at the same time its true center of gravity.