“Combat with censorship did not stop”

On September 13, 1923, Russian front-line poet Sergei Vikulov was born in a small village in the Vologda region. Sergei Vasilyevich, unfortunately, who passed away on July 1, 2006, nevertheless, remained in the history of Russian literature as the author of poems and poems and as the editor of Our Contemporary, who introduced the Soviet reader to such immortal classics as The Tsar Fish Viktor Astafiev, “Kalina Krasnaya” by Vasily Shukshin and “Live and Remember” by Rasputin.

It can be said about many poets that their birth in the Russian village predetermined their creative path, and here it is not necessary to quote Ivan Surinov’s “Village”, Yesenin’s lines or Rubtsov’s “It’s light in my upper room / This is from the night star / Mother will take a bucket / Silently bring water” to prove this statement. It is difficult to say at what crazy time to look down on village life, but the poetry of Sergei Vikulov is like that necessary shake-up and reminders of the beauty of rural life and folk culture:

I remember winter evenings.

It’s blowing again from the north today.

Enters in felt boots from the yard

our grandmother, Olekseevna.

Milk from a bowl

pours into dishes, rattling with a bow …

Sleep is still far away.

Grandma will also sit down with a spinning wheel … “

Since 1942, Sergei Vasilyevich participated in the Great Patriotic War, commanded anti-aircraft artillery batteries on the Kalinin and Stalingrad fronts. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree and twice – the Order of the Red Star. In peacetime, he wrote thirty books of poems and poems, and for the collection Plow and Furrow he received the Gorky State Prize of the RSFSR in 1974.

But Vikulov left the most striking mark as an editor who headed the magazine Our Contemporary from 1968 to 1989.

To live and remember…

“Life and literature in the existential relationship for Vikulov were a single entity. Therefore, the management of the magazine became an organic continuation of his military and poetic life, ”Karina Saydametova, head of the NS poetry department, told Moskovsky Komsomolets. The Vikulovsky section of the magazine’s history has truly become legendary. Vikulov, who came to Nash Sovremennik from the Young Guard (where he was Anatoly Nikonov’s first deputy), turned the magazine into one of the leading literary and artistic publications in two or three years. Just at this time, immortal classics were published on its pages. Including “The Last Bow” and “Tsar Fish” by Viktor Astafyev, novels and stories by Fyodor Abramov and Viktor Likhonosov, stories and film story “Kalina Krasnaya” by Vasily Shukshin, prose by Vasily Belov, the main works of Valentin Rasputin – “Live and Remember”, “Farewell to Matyora”, “Fire”, cycles of his best stories. As well as the exemplary poetry of Nikolai Rubtsov, Vladimir Sokolov, Anatoly Peredreev, essays by Leonid Ivanov, Vladimir Sitnikov and Oleg Volkov, dedicated to the fate of the Russian village and the national architectural heritage. At the same time, often literary texts, which today seem canonical and indisputable, had to “break through” the wall of prohibitions.

“Filmed at the last stage of printing…”

– As for censorship, Sergey Vasilyevich’s single combat with it did not stop for a single year. Suffice it to recall the history of the publication of such works as “At the last line” by Valentin Pikul or the novel “Brawlers” by Mikhail Alekseev, where for the first time in the domestic censored press it was said about the famine of 1933 in the Saratov region, – recalls Stanislav Kunyaev, a well-known writer, Vikulov’s literary friend. – It happened that other works were filmed at the last stage of preparation for printing. As it happened with Fyodor Abramov’s memoirs about Tvardovsky or some of Nikolai Rubtsov’s poems.

At the same time, Vikulov advocated the preservation of the so-called “unpromising villages” and organized a campaign against the turning of the northern and Siberian rivers to the south, which threatened a monstrous ecological disaster. Vikulovsky “Our Contemporary” was a staunch and passionate opponent of thoughtless faith in social progress. This caused the natural indignation of both those in power and other press organs, for which faith in this progress was a “life program”.

Vikulov is not the second Tvardovsky

One of the key merits of Alexander Tvardovsky (except, of course, the creation of the poems “Vasily Terkin” and “Country of the Ant”) is considered to be his transformation of the 60s of the journal “New World” into a stronghold of the sixties and the organization of the publication of a number of key authors. Alexander Trifonovich then accomplished the almost impossible by persuading Khrushchev to print Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Day of Ivan Denisovich in the fall of 1962. Inevitably, there is a parallel with Sergei Vikulov. But not everything is so simple. According to Kunyaev, a certain comparison, in fact, suggests itself, given that such authors as Abramov, Bondarev, Likhonosov, Belov, Astafiev, who were published by Tvardovsky, appeared with their main works in Vikulov’s magazine. But it should be remembered that Vikulov never admitted that some kind of “relay race” was adopted by his journal. First of all – because of aesthetic and ideological differences.

Life of Vikulov, who died on July 1, 2006