Soviet poet Alexander Yashin, also known as a prose writer, literary editor and journalist, lived a short, but eventful life full of events and creativity. This article presents the biography of the writer, from which you can find out what kind of person Alexander Yashin was.
Biography
Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin (real name Popov) was born on March 27, 1913 in the village of Bludnovo (the territory of the modern Vologda Oblast). Alexander grew up in a peasant family, and so poor, and after the death of his father in the First World War, and completely poor.
From the age of five, Sasha Popov worked in the field and in the household - in difficult times, every hand was important. His mother remarried, and his stepfather was rude to the boy. After graduating from three classes of a rural school, eight-year-old Sasha asked him to be released in the county to continue his studies. But the stepfather did not want to let him go, losing, albeit a small, but still an employee and an assistant. The boy complained to his beloved school teachers, and they gathered a village council, where by a majority of votes they decided to send Sasha to further study in the neighboring city of Nikolsk.
After graduating from seven classes there, a fifteen-year-old youth entered a pedagogical school.
The beginning of creativity
Even at school, Alexander began to write poetry, for which he received the nickname "Red Pushkin" from classmates. In the first year of school, the novice poet began to send his work to the newspaper. The first publication took place in 1928, in the newspaper Nikolsky Communard. Since that time, Alexander began to use the pseudonym Yashin.
His poems began to appear frequently in various local newspapers, such as Lenin Shift, Northern Lights, Soviet Thought, and later in the collective editions Kolkhoznik and Pionerskaya Pravda. In the same 1928, Alexander Yashin twice made a delegate to the association of proletarian writers - first at the provincial congress, and then at the regional one.
After graduating from college in 1931, Yashin worked for a year as a rural teacher, and then moved to Vologda, where he worked in the newspaper and on the radio. In 1934, the first poetry collection of 21-year-old Alexander Yashin, entitled "Songs to the North", was released in Arkhangelsk. In the same year, the young poet received his first award for the Komsomol hiking song "Four Brothers."
In 1935, Alexander moved to Moscow and entered the Gorky Literary Institute. There, in 1938, the second collection of his poetry, Severyanka, was released. In 1941, after graduating, Yashin voluntarily went to the front, spending three war years in the battalions of the Marine Corps, defending Leningrad and Stalingrad, liberating the Crimea and working as a war correspondent for the magazine "Combat Volley".
In 1943 he received the medal "For Military Merit", and in 1944 he was demobilized due to a serious illness. In 1945 he was awarded the Order of the Red Star and medals for the defense of Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Recognition and best works
The military work of Alexander Yashin, expressed in the collections “On the Baltic was” and “City of Anger”, was highly appreciated by the Union of Soviet Writers, but the poet came to this recognition after the poem “Alena Fomina” written in 1949. For her, Yashin received the Stalin Prize of the second degree.
In the late forties and early fifties, Alexander Yakovlevich traveled to the virgin lands and the construction of hydroelectric power plants, traveled to the North and Altai. A huge number of impressions were described in his collections "Countrymen" and "Soviet Man."
In 1954, the poet took part in the Second Congress of Soviet Writers. In 1958 he wrote his most famous poem - "Hurry up to do good deeds":
My stepfather lived a sad life, All the same, he raised me - And because
Sometimes I regret not having a chance
Anything to please him.
When he lay down and died quietly, -
Tells mother, - Day by day
He increasingly recalled me and waited:
“That Shurka would … He would have saved me!”
Homeless grandmother in a native village
I said: they say, I love her so much
That I’ll grow up and cut down her house myself, I’ll prepare firewood, I’ll buy bread.
I dreamed of a lot, promised a lot …
In the blockade of the Leningrad old man
Saved from death, Yes late for the day, And centuries will not return that day.
Now I have passed thousands of roads -
I could buy a cart for bread.
There is no stepfather, And the grandmother died …
Hurry up to do good deeds!
Since 1956, Alexander Yashin turned to prose, writing several works criticizing the Stalinist regime and describing the life of Soviet workers and collective farmers unvarnished. These include the story "Levers" (1956), the story "Visiting the Son" (1958), "The Vologda Wedding" (1962). All these works were either banned immediately after publication, or were generally released only after the death of the writer.
Personal life
Alexander Yashin was twice married and had seven children: a son and two daughters from his first marriage, two sons and two daughters from the second. After the second marriage, the eldest children of the poet remained to live with him, and not with his mother.
Veronika Tushnova, a Soviet poetess, became the poet's true love. They met in the early 60s and immediately felt fiery feelings for each other, despite Alexander’s marriage and Veronica’s recent second divorce. The poet’s last book, One Hundred Hours of Happiness, is dedicated to her passionate love for Alexander Yakovlevich.
Not daring to leave his large family, Yashin decided to end the relationship. And soon after that Tushnova fell ill with cancer, from which she died in 1965. The poet was seriously worried about the death of his beloved, blaming himself for everything. Most of his lyrics of that period are devoted to the poetess. The article presents a photo of Alexander Yashin with Veronika Tushnova.
