Enemies Burnt the Dear House Down

Impressed by the poems' lyrical strength, a distinguished poet and influential public person Aleksandr Tvardovsky advised composer Matvey Blanter to write music.

[2] Listeners confessed in their letter to the broadcasting stations that song told them about their own traumatic returns to their destroyed houses and burnt settlements.

As a contemporary researcher of that period of Soviet culture writes, "That a song so honest about death, grief, loneliness, and shattered hopes could be created, published (in Znamia in 1946), performed, and broadcast at all, in poem form or in song, speaks to the confidence that the wartime public expressions of the emotional costs of war could continue; the state's reaction shows that such confidence was not completely justified".

[3] The song could be perceived also had a hidden but recognizable opposition to the very idea of world revolution promoted by the official state ideology, on behalf of appreciation of private life.

He talks to his wife Praskovya ( an old and typically 'peasant' Russian female name ) confessing in his dreams about how happy they would meet after the war and about their mutual love.

In the last line it is mentioned that the soldier is decorated with Medal "For the Capture of Budapest", which was given for participation in a notoriously fierce fighting during the war.

For a native Russian speaker, this usage unambiguously implied that the events of the song happened in Ukraine, which was totally occupied by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1943.

Alternative translations of the title include "The Nazis burnt his home to ashes"[5] and "Enemies burned the native hut.