Poet Nikolai Dobronravov died

After a long illness, poet Nikolai Dobronravov passed away. The songs he wrote together with Alexandra Pakhmutova over the past sixty-odd years were in the repertoire of Joseph Kobzon, Maya Kristalinskaya, Lev Leshchenko, VIA Pesnyary, Muslim Magomayev and other Soviet pop stars. He was 94 years old.

Nikolai Dobronravov and Alexandra Pakhmutova met in 1956 in the children’s editorial office of the All-Union Radio. They wrote together a song about children’s holidays, “Motor Boat.” By this time, Pakhmutova was already composing songs, and Dobronravov worked as an actor in the Moscow Youth Theater and even managed to star in several films. In his youth, he was exceptionally cinematic; it was not for nothing that his wife said that she literally fell in love with him for his beautiful eyes. They got married three months later and never separated again. In numerous television films for the couple’s various anniversaries, veterans of the stage always noted that no one had seen Pakhmutova and Dobronravov separately. Alexander Gradsky recalled that, despite Pakhmutova’s absolute leadership in the Soviet composer’s workshop, he was by no means henpecked in the Dobronravov family.

In the early 1960s, the married couple actually breathed new life into the genre of Komsomol song. Thanks to Pakhmutova and Dobronravov, in the theme of military exploits and shock post-war construction projects, lyrical, personal intonations appeared that were not there before.

They are clearly heard in one of the first hits that immortalized the names of the authors – “The main thing, guys, is not to grow old in your heart.” The text reconciled the young builders of communism with the harsh everyday life of the taiga. Their village is “not rich yet”, they themselves are “green, young people”, but they walk on the earth “like masters” and will soon take all its wealth from it. 15 years later, the heroes of Ryazanov’s “Irony of Fate” were already singing this song in the bathhouse. The era of Komsomol achievements gave way to Brezhnev’s stagnation, but for some reason I still wanted to sing about the green sea of ​​the taiga while drinking beer, “fastened with sheets.”

In 1965, inspired by their friendship with Yuri Gagarin, Nikolai Dobronravov and Alexandra Pakhmutova wrote their most perfect song, “Tenderness.” Its first performer was Maya Kristalinskaya. Gagarin loved to sing “Tenderness” with friends, tried not to miss concert performances, and probably managed to watch Tatyana Lioznova’s film “Three Poplars on Plyushchikha,” the main melodrama of Soviet cinema with Tatyana Doronina in the central role. It’s hard to believe that the songs of Pakhmutova and Dobronravov were censored, but this happened, and specifically in “Tenderness” Dobronravov was recommended to replace Exupery with the name of the Soviet pilot Bakhchivandzhi. The poet defended his version. And he didn’t spoil the song, and he increased the circulation of the French writer’s books.

By the way, the same Exupery inspired Dobronravov to write the lyrics of the song “The Little Prince,” written together with Mikael Tariverdiev for the film “Passenger from the Equator.” This is one of the most striking examples of his creativity outside of his marital duet with Pakhmutova.

A special lyrical feeling is perhaps the main thing that Nikolai Dobronravov and Alexandra Pakhmutova gave to the Soviet stage. The couple’s own relationship always remained behind the closed doors of their home. It is well known that they did not have children, but the warmth of home was transformed into colors that are in “Nadezhda”, “Melody”, “Belovezhskaya Pushcha”, in “I Can’t Do Otherwise”, in “How Young We Were” and “We not to live without each other.” And of course, in the farewell song of the 1980 Olympics. It is unlikely that the takeoff of the Olympic bear from the Luzhniki stadium would have evoked such sincere emotions if different music and other poems had been played.

The same people operated in their writing with a confidential, comradely intonation, aching tenderness and absolute propagandistic directness.

Alexandra Pakhmutova recalled that the song “And the Battle Continues Again” displeased the censors, saying that the drums were too fatal, and “Young October” could be heard as a harbinger of a new revolution. Something fatal in it, years after its appearance, was discerned by “My Leg Cramped!”, “Leningrad” and even “Civil Defense”. But in the 1970–1980s, this song, like “Love, Komsomol and Spring”, “Lenin, Party, Komsomol” and “I will not part with the Komsomol”, was included in the canon of the official stage and was associated with not just rock, but with tiresome May Day demonstrations and gigantic portraits of Marx-Engels-Lenin in city squares.

All this was written by a man whose father was repressed and killed in 1937. His mother was taken away a year later, and for the next eight years before her return, Dobronravov lived with his grandmother, who protected him from all kinds of adversity. He recalled the war years as “perhaps the happiest of his life.” In 1943, he returned to Moscow from evacuation to Gorky, fell in love with the theater with all his soul, and studied well at school.

Judging by Dobronravov’s later interviews, repressions against parents, like the war, were an inevitable background, a given; there was no desire to reflect on them in his work.

The enthusiasm shining in the lines “If the cause of your fathers becomes your business, that’s the only way we will win” or “We have been handed a map of victories”, in his world in no way contradicted the trials that befell his family. In the Soviet universe, he and his wife were comfortable, and they did not want another.

Nikolai Dobronravov, as reported by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, will be buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Igor Gavrilov