BRATSKAYA HPP

Poem

PRAYER BEFORE A POEM

A poet in Russia is more than a poet.

It is destined to be born poets

only to those in whom the proud spirit of citizenship roams,

for whom there is no comfort, there is no rest.

The poet in it is the image of his century

and future ghostly prototype.

The poet brings, without falling into timidity,

the end of everything that came before it.

Can I? Culture is missing...

The grasp of prophecies does not promise ...

But the spirit of Russia hovers over me

and boldly try orders.

And, kneeling quietly,

ready for death and victory,

I humbly ask you for help

great Russian poets...

Give me, Pushkin, your melodiousness,

his loose speech

his captivating fate -

as if shalya, burn with a verb.

Give, Lermontov, your bilious look,

its contempt poison

and the cell of a closed soul,

where he breathes, hidden in silence,

unkindness of your sister -

lamp of secret goodness.

Give, Nekrasov, calming my agility,

the pain of your excised muse -

at the front entrances, at the rails

and in the open spaces of forests and fields.

Give your ugliness strength.

Give me your painful feat,

to go, dragging all of Russia,

how barge haulers go towed.

Oh, give me, block, nebula prophesy

and two leaning wings,

so that, melting the eternal riddle,

music flowed through the body.

Give, Pasternak, the shift of days,

branch confusion,

fusion of smells, shadows

with the torment of the century,

so that the word, mumbling with a garden,

blossomed and ripe

so that your candle is forever

burned in me.

Yesenin, give me tenderness for happiness

to birches and meadows, to animals and people

and to everything else on earth,

that you and I love so defenselessly

Give me, Mayakovsky,

lumpiness,

intransigence formidable to the scum,

so that I can

cutting through time,

tell about him

fellow descendants.

PROLOGUE

For thirty me. I'm scared at night.

I will bend the sheet with my knees,

I drown my face in a pillow, I cry in shame,

that I wasted my life on trifles,

and in the morning I use it again in the same way.

If only you knew, my critics,

whose kindness is innocently in question,

how affectionate the odd articles are

in comparison with my own dressing,

it would be easier for you if at a late hour

your conscience is unjustly tormenting you.

Going through all my poems

I see: recklessly squandering,

I've been talking so much nonsense...

but you won’t burn it: it scattered around the world.

my rivals,

let's drop the flattery

and abuse deceitful honor.

Let's think about our destinies.

We all have the same

disease of the soul.

Surface is her name.

Superficiality, you are worse than blindness.

You can see, but you don't want to see.

Perhaps from illiteracy you?

Or maybe from the fear of tearing out the roots

the trees under which it grew,

without putting a stake on the shift ?!

And isn't that why we're in such a hurry

removing the outer layer only half a meter,

that, having forgotten courage, we are afraid of ourselves

the very task - to delve into the essence of the subject?

We hurry ... Giving only a half answer,

we carry superficiality as treasures,

not at the rate of cold, - no, no! -

but from the instinct of self-preservation.

Then comes the fading

and inability to fly, to fight,

and the feathers of our domestic wings

the pillows of the scoundrels are already stuffed ...

I rushed about ... I threw back and forth

me from someone's sobs or moans

then into the inflatable futility of one,

then into the false usefulness of feuilletons.

Someone rubbed his whole life with his shoulder,

and that was myself. I'm in passionate passion

naively trampling, fought with a hairpin,

where the sword should have been used.

My ardor was criminally infantile.

Ruthlessness was not enough

which means full of pity...

as an average of wax and metal

and ruined his youth.

Let everyone enter life under this vow:

help that which should bloom,

and take revenge without forgetting about it,

everything that deserves revenge!

Fear of revenge, we will not take revenge.

The very possibility of revenge diminishes,

and self-preservation instinct

does not save us, but kills us.

Surface is a killer, not a friend

disease pretending to be healthy,

entangled in nets of seduction...

Exchanging the spirit for particulars,

we run away from generalizations.

The globe of the earth is losing strength in an empty one,

Leaving generalizations for later.

Or maybe his insecurity

and there is human destinies non-generalization

in the insight of the century, clear and simple?!

I traveled around Russia with Galya,

somewhere to the sea in "Moskvich" in a hurry

from all sorrows...

Autumn of Russian distances

pooboch golden all tired,

rustling under the tires,

and rested behind the wheel of the soul.

Breathing steppe, birch, pine,

throwing an unthinkable array at me,

at a speed of seventy, with a whistle,

Russia flowed around our Moskvich.

Russia wanted to say something

and understood something like no one else.

She "Moskvich" pressed into her body

and pulled into the very core.

And, apparently, with some idea,

hiding its essence until the time,

I was prompted right behind Tula

on Yasnaya Polyana to turn.

And here in the estate, breathing dilapidated,

we entered, children of the atomic age,

in a hurry, in nylon raincoats,

and froze, suddenly blundered.

And descendants of walkers for the truth,

we suddenly felt in that minute

all the same, the same knapsacks on the shoulders

and the same broken bare feet.

Obedient to the command of the mute,

through the foliage through the sunset,

we entered the shady alley

named "Alley of Silence".

And this golden permeability

without moving away from human nedolki,

removed the fuss, like a leper,

and, without removing, exalted the pain.

Pain, rising, became beautiful,

combining peace and passion,

and the spirit seemed to be an all-powerful force,

but a dispassionate question arose in my soul -

And is this power so omnipotent?

Have there been any changes

all those to whom such honor from us,

whose spirit is vaster than our dimensions?

Have you achieved?

Or is everything running like clockwork?

And meanwhile - the estate of that owner,

invisible, kept us in sight

and wondered around: then slipping

gray-bearded cloud in the pond,

then he heard his large gait

in the nebula of smoking hollows,

then part of the face showed in the rough bark,

carved with gorges of wrinkles.

Cosmato his eyebrows sprouted

in the dense weeds in the meadow,

and the roots on the paths stood out,

like the veins on his mighty forehead.

And, not dilapidated, - royally ancient,

making sorcery with peak noise,

powerful trees rose around,

how unreachable his thoughts are.

They strove into the clouds and bowels,

murmured louder and louder,

and the roots of their peaks grew from the sky,

going deep into the tops of the roots ...

Yes, up and down - and only at the same time!

Yes, genius - height with depth connection! ..

But how many live all the same mortal,

bustling about in the shadow of great thoughts...

So, in vain the geniuses burned

in the name of changing people?

Poem " Bratsk HPP” was written by E. Yevtushenko in the mid-sixties, based on fresh impressions of a grandiose construction site. It sounds proud of the people and the country that carry out such unprecedented projects.
The poem “Bratskaya HPP”, written in the mid-sixties, still sounds relevant today, such is the power of the classics, and the fact that Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a classic is no longer in doubt.

The chapter "The Execution of Stepan Razin" from the poem "Bratskaya HPP" is read by the author

Evtushenko, Evgeny Alexandrovich

Poet, screenwriter, film director; co-chairman of the "April" Writers' Association, Secretary of the Board of the Commonwealth of Writers' Unions; was born on July 18, 1933 at st. Winter in the Irkutsk region; graduated from the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky in 1954; began publishing in 1949; was a member of the editorial board of the magazine "Youth" (1962-1969); member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, author of the poems "Bratskaya HPP", "Kazan University", "Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty", "Fuku", "Mother and neutron bomb", the novel "Berry Places" and many other prose and poetic works.
Yevtushenko wrote that in his youth he was "a product of the Stalin era, a mixed-up mixed being, in which revolutionary romance, and the bestial instinct for survival, and devotion to poetry, and its frivolous betrayal at every step, coexisted." Since the late 50s, numerous performances have contributed to his popularity, sometimes 300-400 times a year. In 1963 Yevtushenko published his Premature Autobiography in the West German magazine Stern and in the French weekly Express. In it, he spoke about the existing anti-Semitism, about the "heirs" of Stalin, wrote about the literary bureaucracy, about the need to open borders, about the artist's right to a variety of styles outside the rigid framework of socialist realism. The publication of such a work abroad and some of its provisions were sharply criticized at the IV Plenum of the Board of the Union of Writers of the USSR in March 1963. Yevtushenko made a penitential speech in which he said that in his autobiography he wanted to show that the ideology of communism was, is and will be the foundation of his whole life. In the future, Yevtushenko often made compromises. Many readers began to be skeptical about his work, which received, in many respects, a journalistic, opportunistic orientation. With the beginning of perestroika, which Yevtushenko ardently supported, his social activity; he spoke a lot in the press and at various meetings; inside the Writers' Union, the confrontation between it and a group of "pochvennik" writers led by S. Kunyaev and Yu. Bondarev intensified. He believes that the economic prosperity of society should be in harmony with the spiritual.

Evgeny Alexandrovich Evtushenko

"Bratskaya HPP"

Prayer in front of the dam

Give me, Pushkin, your melodiousness and your ability, as if shalya, to burn with a verb. Give me, Lermontov, your bilious look. Give me, Nekrasov, the pain of your slashed muse, give me the strength of your inelegance. Give me, Blok, your prophetic nebula. Give, Pasternak, that your candle burns in me forever. Yesenin, give me tenderness for happiness. Give me, Mayakovsky, a formidable intransigence, so that I, hacking through time, can tell my comrades-descendants about him.

Prologue

I'm over thirty. At night I cry that I wasted my life on trifles. We all have one disease of the soul - superficiality. We give half-answers to everything, and the forces fade away ...

Together with Galya, we traveled across Russia to the sea in the fall, and after Tula we turned to Yasnaya Polyana. There we realized that genius is the connection of height with depth. Three ingenious person gave birth to Russia anew and will give birth to it more than once: Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lenin.

We drove again, spent the night in the car, and I thought that in the chain of great insights, perhaps only a link was missing. Well then, it's our turn.

Egyptian pyramid monologue

I beg: people, steal my memory! I see that everything in the world is not new, everything exactly repeats Ancient Egypt. The same meanness, the same prisons, the same oppression, the same thieves, gossips, traders...

And what is the face of the new sphinx called Russia? I see peasants, workers, there are also scribes - there are a lot of them. Is this a pyramid?

I, the pyramid, will tell you something. I saw slaves: they worked, then they rebelled, then they were humbled ... What good is it? Slavery has not been abolished: the slavery of prejudices, money, things still exists. There is no progress. Man is a slave by nature and will never change.

Monologue of the Bratsk HPP

The patience of Russia is the courage of a prophet. She suffered - and then exploded. Here I am lifting Moscow to you with a bucket of an excavator. Look, something happened there.

The execution of Stenka Razin

All the inhabitants of the city - and the thief, and the king, and the noblewoman with the boyarch, and the merchant, and buffoons - rush to the execution of Stenka Razin. Stenka rides on a cart and thinks that he wanted the people to do well, but something let him down, maybe illiteracy?

The executioner raises an ax blue as the Volga, and Stenka sees in its blade how FACES sprout from the faceless crowd. His head rolls, croaking "Not in vain ...", and laughs at the king.

Bratsk HPP continues

And now, pyramid, I'll show you something else.

Decembrists

They were still boys, but the ringing of spurs did not drown out someone's moans for them. And the boys angrily fumbled for their swords. The essence of a patriot is to rise in the name of liberty.

Petrashevtsy

It smells on Semyonovsky parade ground Senate Square: Petrashevists are executed. Pull hoods over eyes. But one of the executed through the hood sees all of Russia: how Rogozhin rampages through it, Myshkin rushes about, Alyosha Karamazov wanders. But the executioners see nothing of the sort.

Chernyshevsky

When Chernyshevsky stood at the pillory, he could see all of Russia from the scaffold, like a huge “What is to be done?” Someone's fragile hand threw him a flower from the crowd. And he thought: the time will come, and this same hand will throw a bomb.

Fair in Simbirsk

Goods flash in the hands of the clerks, the bailiff observes the order. Ikaya, the caviar god rolls. And the woman sold her potatoes, grabbed the pervach and fell, drunk, into the mud. Everyone laughs and points their fingers at her, but some clear-headed schoolboy picks her up and leads her away.

Russia is not a drunken woman, she was not born for slavery, and she will not be trampled into the mud.

The Bratsk hydroelectric power station refers to the pyramid

The fundamental principle of revolutions is kindness. The Provisional Government is still feasting in Zimny. But now the Aurora is already unfolding, now the palace has been taken. Look at history - Lenin is there!

The pyramid replies that Lenin is an idealist. Only cynicism does not deceive. People are slaves. It's alphabetical.

But the Bratsk hydroelectric power station replies that it will show a different alphabet - the alphabet of the revolution. Here is the teacher Elkina at the front in the nineteenth teaches the Red Army to read and write. Here the orphan Sonya, having escaped Zybkov's fist, comes to Magnitogorsk and becomes a red digger. She has a patched padded jacket, tattered supports, but together with their beloved Petka they put

The concrete of socialism

The Bratsk hydroelectric power station roars over eternity: “Communists will never be slaves!” And, thinking, the Egyptian pyramid disappears.

First echelon

Ah, the Trans-Siberian highway! Do you remember how the wagons with bars flew over you? There were a lot of scary things, but don't worry about it. Now there is an inscription on the cars: “The Bratsk hydroelectric power station is coming!” A girl is coming from Sretenka: in the first year, her pigtails will freeze to the cot, but she will stand like everyone else.

The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Plant will be put into operation, and Alyosha Marchuk will be in New York answering questions about it.

Frying

A grandmother is walking through the taiga, and she has flowers in her hands. Previously, prisoners lived in this camp, and now they are the builders of the dam. Neighboring residents bring them some sheets, some shanezhki. But the grandmother carries a bouquet, cries, baptizes excavators and builders ...

Nyushka

I am a concrete worker, Nyushka Burtova. I was raised and brought up by the village of Velikaya Mud, because I was left an orphan, then I was a housekeeper, worked as a dishwasher. The people around lied, stole, but, working in the dining car, I learned real Russia... Finally, I got to the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. She became a concrete worker, received social weight. Fell in love with a proud Muscovite. When I woke up new life, that Muscovite did not acknowledge paternity. An unfinished dam prevented me from committing suicide. A son, Trofim, was born and became a builder's son, just as I was a village daughter. We were together with him at the opening of the dam. So let the grandchildren remember that they got the light from Ilyich and a little from me.

Bolshevik

I am a hydraulic engineer Kartsev. When I was young, I raved about the world fire and cut down the enemies of the commune. Then he went to the labor faculty. He built a dam in Uzbekistan. And he couldn't understand what was going on. The country seemed to have two lives. In one - Magnitka, Chkalov, in the other - arrests. I was arrested in Tashkent, and when they tortured me, I croaked: “I am a Bolshevik!” Remaining an "enemy of the people", I built hydroelectric power stations in the Caucasus and on the Volga, and finally the 20th Congress returned my party card to me. Then I, a Bolshevik, went to build a hydroelectric power station in Bratsk. I will tell our young generation: there is no place in the commune for scoundrels.

Shadows of our loved ones

In Hellas there was a custom: when starting to build a house, the first stone was laid in the shadow of the beloved woman. I do not know in whose shadow the first stone was laid in Bratsk, but when I peer into the dam, I see in it the shadows of your, builders, loved ones. And I put the first line of this poem in the shadow of my beloved, as if in the shadow of conscience.

Mayakovsky

Standing at the foot of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, I immediately thought of Mayakovsky: he seemed to have resurrected in her guise. He stands like a dam across untruth and teaches us to stand for the cause of the revolution.

Night of Poetry

On the Brotherly Sea, we read poetry, sang a song about commissars. And the commissars stood before me. And I heard how in the meaningful grandeur of the hydroelectric power station thunders over the false grandeur of the pyramids. In the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, the maternal image of Russia was revealed to me. There are still many slaves on earth, but if love fights and does not contemplate, then hatred is powerless. There is no fate cleaner and more sublime - to give your whole life so that all people on earth can say: "We are not slaves."

The suffering hero, singing the beauty of the words of the Russian poet, turns to them for help. This kind of prayer is directed to the image of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Blok, Pasternak, Yesenin and Mayakovsky.

The author is over thirty years old. He is dissatisfied with his life. He believes that there is an understatement in his fate, but time takes strength over the years. With his girlfriend Galya, he understands that there is a meaning of genius - this is the connection of height with depth. And he truly considers Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lenin as representatives of high character in Russia.

With a feeling of annoyance and resentment, the hero speaks about his country. He matches historical events past and understands that there is nothing new in the world, that the life of the people repeats itself. And mother Russia repeats mistakes ancient egypt. In his reasoning, he gives her the name of the new sphinx. People, peasants still remained slaves, and this is their cruel fate. The dialogue is between the Bratsk hydroelectric power station and the Egyptian pyramid.

Further events unfold around the execution of Stenka Razin. Everyone rushes to watch the cruel spectacle. And the punished Stenka in his thoughts blames himself for illiteracy, which was the reason for his failure. The last words of the executed were mocking words over the Russian Tsar: "Not in vain ...".

One of the heroes of the story are young Decembrists. These children are already ready to fight the enemy and defend the rights of a free peasant-patriot. Next come the punishment and execution of the Petrashevites. Semyonovsky parade ground becomes the place of massacre. Through the hood, one of the executioners sees the raging Rogozhin, Myshkin, Alyosha Karamazov. All of Russia appears before his eyes. And the executioners do not see this.

Chernyshevsky, standing at the pillory, looked at home country like a defenseless and hopeless land. Someone from the crowd threw him a flower, and he realized that the time would come and the people would rise up against injustice and dishonor.

The story has its continuation at the fair in Simbirsk. For example drunk woman, which fell into the mud, but was raised by a clear-headed schoolboy, reflects the strength of the Russian spirit. The Bratsk hydroelectric power station is engaged in a dialogue and dispute with the pyramid, presented in the image of the tsarist empire. The revolution begins by calling people to kindness and sympathy.

People are not slaves! This is understood even by children who strive for education and literacy. The Egyptian pyramid disappears under the slogan of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station: “Communists will never be slaves!”. The story of Nyushka strikes with the breadth of her soul. In the image of this girl, the features and fates of all Russian women are revealed. Nyushka Burtova is a simple orphan concrete worker. Many difficult trials fell on her: she worked as a dishwasher and a housekeeper. People often offended her. Then she went to the construction site at the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. And here she felt herself necessary for the state.

People are able to build a new life, new Russia. They no longer want to be depressed and humiliated. They are ready to fight for justice and a happy future for their children. Step by step, stone by stone - gradually, but people will prove that they are not free citizens of their state.

We have 1965 in the project "One Hundred Years - One Hundred Books", and we have come to Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem "Bratskaya HPP". I think that there is no work more slandered and more commonplace in Soviet poetry. Suffice it to recall the legendary parody "Panibratskaya HPP", absolutely accurate, this is from the early texts of Alexander Ivanov, then still very poisonous. But one cannot but admit that everything bad that is said about this poem is, in general, true. And there is surprisingly little good in it, but the good, the little good that is, it ultimately outweighs.

Why outweighs? This is the rare case when the work itself, with its flaws, is more eloquent than what the author wanted to say. The author, of course, did not put such a meaning into it, did not look at history from such a height. And in general, Yevtushenko wanted to say something else, but it turned out to be a symptom, a sign of the era.

To begin with, this idea is quite complicated, but nevertheless, after 65 lectures, we got used to each other and easily talk about complex things. And let's start with the fact that a poem is generally a genre of retardation, a genre of retreat, rebuilding, pause. This idea was first expressed by Lev Anninsky, the idea is quite deep, because the lyrics are such small flying units working on the front lines. The poem is, in general, rather a genre of capitulation, because the lyrical effort is exhausted, and that which harms the verse begins - the narration. Here is the Soviet narrative poetry, the Soviet novel in verse - this, brothers, of course, is a nightmare.

It is terrible to imagine the great Antokolsky, who composed his own, which means strained epic poem "In the lane behind the Arbat", which he himself hated. Well, Pasternak struggled with the poem "Glow", with an attempt to write a novel in verse about the end of the war. And, by the way, he got the first chapter, but it didn’t go any further. And how many of these novels were in verse, you don’t remember now. "Volunteers" Dolmatovsky, even Anatoly Safronov had a novel in verse "Into the depths of time", which is impossible to remember without convulsions.

In general, the narrative genre - it greatly harms poetry. In order to write a novel in verse, as Pushkin wrote Onegin, one must still have a thought, or at least a hero, before one's eyes. And Soviet poetry was engaged in such chewing, shifting prose into boring socialist realist cloth verses.

And here in the 60s a fundamentally new concept of the poem appears. "Bratskaya HPP" in in a certain sense was such an attempt to revive the poem of the 20s, the poem, let's say, Mayakovsky's "Good".

It must be said that “Good” is Mayakovsky’s rather serious contribution to genre specifics, an attempt to build a new poem. There is no cross-cutting plot. "Good" is, in essence, a cycle of poems, a cycle of the author's personal memoirs about the decade 1917-1927. An attempt to pull out some of the main episodes of the first Soviet decade, a retrospective. This is not a plot poem, this is precisely a lyrical cycle in which there is a single mood. And this mood is not “good” at all, because “good”, as we know from the same poem, is last words Blok, which Mayakovsky heard from him. And in this “good,” he says, both the burned library and these bonfires in front of the Winter Palace merged. That is, it is a blessing, but the blessing of the dying.

Here is the "Bratskaya HPP" - a set of pictures from Russian life, from Russian history. For Yevtushenko, the pinnacle of this story in 1965 is the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. This means that the main idea of ​​the poem is rather strained, which, of course, by the second half of it, and the poem is huge, there are 150 pages, it starts to fizzle out by about the second half of it and ceases to be any interesting.

This is a dialogue between the Bratsk hydroelectric power station and the Egyptian pyramid, you will not believe it. This means that the Egyptian pyramid is a large-scale construction of the ancients, a monument to ancient greatness, it looks at everything with extreme skepticism, it is outdated, it does not believe that a communist experiment can turn out.

The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Plant is our answer to the Egyptian pyramid. This is our immortal monument, a monument to brotherhood, a monument to freedom. And it is no coincidence that there is just such a chapter about the teacher Elkina, the teacher who came, which means to teach the villagers, then she teaches the Red Army soldiers, tries to hammer something into them, and one of them exhaled painfully before his death: “We are not slaves, teacher we are not slaves." Here is the same monument to freedom - this is the Bratsk hydroelectric power station.

Yevtushenko, I think, of course, it would be fun to talk to him now - this is the first living author whom we are analyzing in this cycle, and he, of course, is also partly a monument of the era. And it would be funny to ask Yevgeny Alexandrovich sometime at his leisure whether he understood how suicidal this metaphor was, how much he, in general, lowered the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, making it such a kind of Egyptian pyramid of mature socialism. It is absolutely clear that the Bratsk hydroelectric power station is just as dead a reinforced concrete structure as the Egyptian pyramid and, in general, the same monument to the dead regime. She, of course, continues to work for herself, continues to give sense, but the brotherhood in whose honor it was placed no longer exists. And the city of Bratsk in its former form is no more. And there is a poor distant Siberian city where people have long been laughing at this poem and this mythology.

But nevertheless, this dialogue, it then somehow leaves the forefront, and those main characters whom Yevtushenko sees in Russian history. What is surprising here is that the first chapter, the beginning of the poem: "I'm over thirty, I'm scared at night" - here there is some kind of certain accuracy.

In general, I love Yevtushenko very much, I must say bitterly. With bitterness - because this person very often deceives this love and writes things that are completely unworthy of this love. But what an interesting thing, you know, came out. Now, it means that this “Mysterious Passion”, when it thundered on the screens, swept, everyone began to read poems of the 60s. Well, it turned out that most of these verses are no good. Voznesensky survived, we just talked about him, he survived to a large extent thanks to this joy of destruction, a very Russian joy at the sight of something burning or collapsing, and a new one begins.

And Yevtushenko survived, this is a strange thing. Yevtushenko, who was so much reproached for vulgarity, lack of taste, but he has two things that no one else has to such an extent: he is absolutely honest, he talks about himself all the time and tells the truth about himself. Yes, he is flirtatious, sometimes he flirts, of course. Yes, he does not tell the last most bitter truth about himself. But at least he is sincere, and he knows how to admit defeat. “How embarrassing to go to the cinema alone” is a phrase that not everyone will say to themselves, such a wonderful symbol of loneliness and love defeat. And he has a lot of love poems dictated by real malice, real jealousy and absolute honesty.

And the second thing that Yevtushenko distinguishes among many is that he thinks. Here is his poetry - it is the poetry of the mind after all. And verses like "The Blue Fox Monologue" which I sincerely think is a genius, incredibly accurate, stronger, more accurate poem about Soviet intelligentsia nobody wrote. “Whoever feeds me will kill me” - these are wonderful words about a polar fox that escaped from a cage and cannot live without a cage.

These are brilliant verses, just about this Kataev told him: “Zhenya, stop writing poems that delight our liberal intelligentsia. Start writing poems that please your bosses, or I won't vouch for your future." But nevertheless, Yevtushenko, we must give him his due, did not follow this path. He continued to write poetry, which in many respects still delights the liberal intelligentsia, because he spoke the truth.

And this thought, the experience of thoughts and sincerity, I must say, is in the Bratskaya HPP. There are several fragments that are surprisingly accurate. There is an attempt to save Leninism, this is the chapter about walkers “Walkers are coming to Lenin”, which, in my opinion, is rather naive even for this thing. There are extremely naive revolutionary heads there, "Zharki", for example. And there are many attempts at false tenderness in front of labor pathos, a description of this wedding, among which suddenly there is an alarm on the dam, and everyone is urgently running to correct it.

But, of course, on the one hand, the most false, and on the other hand, the most breakthrough chapter there is, of course, “Nyurka”, the chapter about the concrete worker Nyurka. Of course, today she looks funny. “I’ll just put the vibrator on for a moment, it’s as if I don’t weigh anything, I’ll push off the ground, I’ll fly.” Well, who would have thought that a vibrator would mean something completely different for a Soviet, post-Soviet person. Then this is such a device with which a concrete structure is built.

But the point is not only in these funny and completely, in general, unimportant episodes. The fact is that "Nyurka" is such a fairly accurate psychological analysis. What's going on there? This Nurka got pregnant. Naturally, she was knocked up by an engineer, an intelligent person, because all the nasty things are done by intelligent people, and only they want sex. And then he, it means, refused to recognize the child. He said: “Of course, I was the first, but after all, someone could be the second,” this thing is written in a poignant anapaest. And this Nyurka, therefore, decided to throw herself from the dam. And when she climbed this dam with the intention of throwing herself from there, she saw a wide panorama of the construction site, and this panorama made such an impression on her that she changed her mind about committing suicide and decided to raise a Soviet citizen.

So, you know, it's really not that stupid. And I'll tell you why. The fact is that, nevertheless, in Soviet mythology and in Soviet culture there was one very important message: if you don’t succeed as a person - in your personal life, in your career, in love, it doesn’t matter, you have consolation - you are participating in a great cause. And in this sense, "Nyurka" is a breakthrough text. Because, look great amount films of this time, starting with "The Irkutsk Story", an adaptation of the Arbuzov play, and ending with comedies like "Dima Gorin's Career" or "Girls", they carry a very simple idea: if in your personal life you are always a loser, because love ends, because all mortals, after all, but you have a business, a big, majestic business. And thanks to this work, you are no longer just “I am a simple Nyurka concrete worker”, but you are already a brick in a huge majestic wall, you are a participant in a great project. It works psychologically, that is, I understand that it is naive, but it works.

Just like that, you understand, take Chulyukinsky, and Chulyukin is a good director, his film "Girls", surprisingly frank, where there is this poor fool, played by Nadya Rumyantseva, and there is Rybnikov in love with her, and she is a stupid girl to the point of purity , she does not understand how people kiss, their noses should interfere. But against the backdrop of these periodically emerging Siberian landscapes, giant clearings, great mountains and snows, there is some kind of feeling of belonging to the great, everything is not so bad, but it turns out that we are building the future here. And therefore, in the Bratskaya HPP, all these episodes dedicated to its construction, they, of course, sound like a big digression for a great lyric poet who suddenly began to sing about socialist construction.

But, on the other hand, this is, in a certain sense, a way out of all lyrical contradictions, because it allows us to overcome the private fear of death, which allows us to overcome this idiocy of our egoism, our fear, our looking back at the authorities, which allows us to outgrow ourselves — just a great common cause. This is Tolstoy's idea, which, by the way, is quite working for Yevtushenko as well. And therefore, the Bratskaya HPP is, on the one hand, as many then joked, a mass grave. Of course, the mass grave of characters, cultural quotes, the great intentions of Yevtushenko himself. On the other hand, it is a very good symbol of the Soviet Union as such.

After all Soviet Union built by people, mostly with a failed, tragic personal life. One can understand why Larisa Reisner, Gumilyov's lover and Trotsky's lover, why she rushes into the communist project with such desperation, this girl of Russian decadence. Yes, because all decadence is built on the idea of ​​insufficiency. privacy. And therefore, the Bratskaya HPP is a rather worthy crown of the eternal dispute about the meaning that this Egyptian pyramid is leading. The pyramid says: "Everything is meaningless, everyone is mortal." No, nothing like that. And the "Bratskaya HPP" with its idiotic pathos common labor, oddly enough, some really fresh look and bears.

There are some very good historical chapters, there are some very decent personal sketches. There is no ending, because there cannot be. There is such a retreat into a general false pathos, but of all the poems of the 60s, here is an amazing thing, the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station is alive. Yevtushenko's two great poems are alive - "Bratsk HPP" and "Kazan University", because then he wrote himself: "As in the Bratsk HPP, Russia opened up to me in you, Kazan University." And now the epilogue of Kazan University sounds very majestic: “I love you, my Fatherland, not only for ditties and nature, but for Pushkin’s secret freedom, for its secret knights, for the eternal Pugachev spirit among the people, for the valiant civil Russian verse, for your Ulyanov Volodya, for your future Ulyanovs.

In 1970, to say “for your future Ulyanovs”, and even write the chapter “Yes, the wall, but poke - rotten, poke - it will fall apart” - these are the words that forced Kaverin to ski trip ask Yevtushenko: “Zhenechka, has our power changed?”. How did he actually manage to write this? Indeed, in 1965, to sing the praises of the Russian revolution in the Bratskaya Hydroelectric Power Station, and in 1970 to sing of Volodya Ulyanov as the destroyer of rotten walls means to feel the era quite accurately.

The rest of the poems of the 60s, say Rozhdestvensky's "Letter to the 30th Century" or the poems of most of the young authors who imitated these, they were, as a rule, categorically unsuccessful. Even Voznesensky's "Wasps" is a rather uneven thing. But the Bratskaya HPP, with all its roughness, vulgarity and stupidity, has retained an important idea - important faith that a common cause can atone for personal drama. Therefore, when I re-read this work today, I think: a lot is destined to return here too, when we again try to build something in Russia, and not just exploit what has been built, the fresh and pure pathos of this work can teach us a lot.

Well, next time we'll talk about the turning point in 1966.

BRATSKAYA HEP CONTINUES

And now, pyramid, I'll show you something else.

DECABRISTS

They were still boys, but the ringing of spurs did not drown out someone's moans for them. And the boys angrily fumbled for their swords. The essence of a patriot is to rise in the name of freedom.

PETRASHEVTS

On the Semyonovsky parade ground, it smells like Senate Square: the Petrashevites are being executed. Pull hoods over eyes. But one of the executed through the hood sees all of Russia: how Rogozhin rampages through it, Myshkin rushes about, Alyosha Karamazov wanders. But the executioners see nothing of the sort.

CHERNYSHEVSKY

When Chernyshevsky stood at the pillory, he could see all of Russia from the scaffold, like a huge “What is to be done?” Someone's fragile hand threw him a flower from the crowd. And he thought: the time will come, and this same hand will throw a bomb.

FAIR IN SIMBIRSK

Goods flash in the hands of the clerks, the bailiff observes the order. Ikaya, the caviar god rolls. And the woman sold her potatoes, grabbed the pervach and fell, drunk, into the mud. Everyone laughs and points their fingers at her, but some clear-headed schoolboy picks her up and leads her away.

Russia is not a drunken woman, she was not born for slavery, and she will not be trampled into the mud.

THE BRATSKAYA HYDRO POWER PLANT APPEALS TO THE PYRAMID

The fundamental principle of revolutions is kindness. The Provisional Government is still feasting in Zimny. But now the Aurora is already unfolding, now the palace has been taken. Look at history - Lenin is there!

The pyramid replies that Lenin is an idealist. Only cynicism does not deceive. People are slaves. It's alphabetical.

But the Bratsk hydroelectric power station replies that it will show a different alphabet - the alphabet of the revolution.

Here is the teacher Elkina at the front in the nineteenth teaches the Red Army to read and write. Here the orphan Sonya, having escaped Zybkov's fist, comes to Magnitogorsk and becomes a red digger. She has a patched padded jacket, tattered buttresses, but together with their beloved Petka they lay the CONCRETE OF SOCIALISM.

The Bratsk hydroelectric power station roars over eternity: “Communists will never be slaves!” And, thinking, the Egyptian pyramid disappears.

FIRST ECHELON

Ah, the trans-Siberian highway! Do you remember how the wagons with bars flew over you? There were a lot of scary things, but don't worry about it. Now there is an inscription on the cars: “The Bratsk hydroelectric power station is coming!” A girl is coming from Sretenka: in the first year her pigtails will freeze to the cot, but she will stand like everyone else.

The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Plant will be put into operation, and Alyosha Marchuk will be in New York answering questions about it.

A grandmother is walking through the taiga, and she has flowers in her hands. Previously, prisoners lived in this camp, and now they are the builders of the dam. Neighboring residents bring them some sheets, some shanezhki. But the grandmother carries a bouquet, cries, baptizes excavators and builders ...

I am a concrete worker, Nyushka Burtova. I was raised and brought up by the village of Velikaya Mud, because I was left an orphan, then I was a housekeeper, worked as a dishwasher. People around me lied and stole, but while working in a car restaurant, I got to know the real Russia... Finally, I got to the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. She became a concrete worker, received social weight. Fell in love with a proud Muscovite. When a new life woke up in me, that Muscovite did not recognize paternity. An unfinished dam prevented me from committing suicide. A son, Trofim, was born and became a builder's son, just as I was a village daughter. We were together with him at the opening of the dam. So let the grandchildren remember that they got the light from Ilyich and a little from me.

BOLSHEVIK

I am a hydraulic engineer Kartsev. When I was young, I raved about the world fire and cut down the enemies of the commune. Then he went to the labor faculty. He built a dam in Uzbekistan. And he couldn't understand what was going on. The country seemed to have two lives. In one - Magnitka, Chkalov, in the other - arrests. I was arrested in Tashkent, and when they tortured me, I croaked: “I am a Bolshevik!” Remaining an "enemy of the people", I built hydroelectric power stations in the Caucasus and on the Volga, and finally the 20th Congress returned my party card to me. Then I, a Bolshevik, went to build a hydroelectric power station in Bratsk, I will tell our young shift: there is no place for scoundrels in the commune.

SHADOWS OF OUR FAVORITES

In Hellas there was a custom: when starting to build a house, the first stone was laid in the shadow of the beloved woman. I do not know in whose shadow the first stone was laid in Bratsk, but when I peer into the dam, I see in it the shadows of your, builders, loved ones. And I put the first line of this poem in the shadow of my beloved, as if in the shadow of conscience.

MAYAKOVSKY

Standing at the foot of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, I immediately thought of Mayakovsky: he seemed to have resurrected in her guise. He stands like a dam across untruth and teaches us to stand for the cause of the revolution.

NIGHT OF POETRY

On the Brotherly Sea, we read poetry, sang a song about commissars. And the commissars stood before me. And I heard how in the meaningful grandeur of the hydroelectric power station thunders over the false grandeur of the pyramids. In the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, the maternal image of Russia was revealed to me. There are still many slaves on earth, but if love fights and does not contemplate, then hatred is powerless. There is no fate cleaner and more sublime - to give your whole life so that all people on earth can say: "We are not slaves."

Evgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko b. 1933