Aleksandr Tvardovsky
Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky (Russian: Александр Трифонович Твардовский, IPA: [ɐlʲɪkˈsandr ˈtrʲifənəvʲɪtɕ tvɐrˈdofskʲɪj]; 21 June [O.S.
At the time of his birth, the family lived on a farm that his father had purchased in installments from the Peasant Land Bank.
The farm was situated on poor land, but Tvardovsky's father loved it and was proud of what he had acquired through years of hard labor.
From an early age, Aleksandr became familiar with the works of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov and others.
At age 13, he showed some of his poems to a young teacher who gave him misleading criticism, telling him that poetry should be written as unintelligibly as possible.
[3] Orlando Figes describes Aleksandr's sense of uneasiness at the way his family had been treated while at the same time fearing for himself, his career and growing creative accomplishments if he was to actively help them.
[2] In 1939, he participated in the soviet invasion of Poland, and also in the Winter War, where he was part of a "writers' brigade" composing patriotic verse.
During his editorship, the magazine published Ilya Ehrenburg's Thaw in 1954, The Vologda Wedding by Alexander Yashin in 1962, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1962.
[5] During those years, the Oktyabr' magazine, with the editor in chief Vsevolod Kochetov, was the pro-Soviet, anti-Western and anti-liberal counterpart of Tvardovsky's Novy Mir.
[6] On 18 August 1963, Izvestia published Tvardovsky's poem Tyorkin in the Other World, a satire in which the hero continued to meet bureaucratic obstruction even if the afterlife, with an introduction praising the work, signed by Adzhubey.
[7] A few days before it was finally published, Tvardovsky was accorded the honour of being invited to recite the poem to Khrushchev and a group of foreign writers in Gagra.
"[9] In January 1965, a few month after Khrushchev had been ousted, Tvardovsky wrote an article commemorating 40 years of Novy Mir, in which he singled out several new young writers for praise, including Andrei Sinyavsky.
ON 15 April, Izvestia - under a new chief editor - commissioned a piece accusing Tvardovsky of 'losing his sense of proportion' when he criticised Stalinist literature, and of being too much of an admirer of Solzhenitsyn.
On the day he was released, on 17 June, Tvardovsky was summoned before a communist party official, rebuked for interfering in the case and told "we were going to give you a very different award.
[2] The poem is regarded by critics as a masterpiece, remarkable for "positive good humor, its freedom from dogma, and its closeness to the reality of
Tvardovsky's wife wrote in 1943: "I have the impression that it is getting dangerous here to pronounce your name aloud", but the poem's popularity saved it from the censorship.
[17] Tvardovsky's World War II-themed poem, A House by the Road, was the basis for Valery Gavrilin's 1984 symphonic suite of the same name.
