“The entire “DETGIZ” created by Marshak was already in prison”

November 3 marks the 135th anniversary of the birth of Samuil Marshak, the poet whose poems brought up several generations of Soviet and Russian readers. “A mouse sang in a mink at night …”, “There lived an absent-minded man / On Basseinaya Street”, “What a fool does not do, he does everything wrong”, lines about a lady who handed over a bag and a small dog in her luggage, wonderful transcriptions of an English folk tale about Jack who built the house, stories about Humpty Dumpty and Stevenson’s canonical translation of Heather Honey are all Marshak. Meanwhile, at the height of the repressions, the classic almost fell under the “skating rink” and was forced to leave Leningrad, where the legendary publishing house he had created was smashed.

Samuil Yakovlevich died more than half a century ago, it is impossible to talk with his contemporaries, almost all of them left much earlier than the 20th century burned out. All that remains is to communicate with those who were young in the 60s and found Marshak’s students – Nikolai Grigoriev, Konstantin Zolotovsky and Antonina Grigorieva. Today’s interlocutor of MK is Valery Voskoboynikov, a well-known children’s writer, researcher of Marshak’s biography, and a long-term leader of workshops on detlit.

-Valery Mikhailovich, for Marshak, the path to great literature began in the 1920s in Leningrad, where he founded the legendary DETGIZ?

– Yes, after the revolution, having returned to Leningrad, Marshak, who was still far from being old, began to gather young children’s writers around him.

Starting in 1923, he decided to create a new Soviet children’s literature – there was a new country. Now it may sound ridiculous – but then it was very “stupid”. He defended Korney Chukovsky from the unfair attacks of Krupskaya, but most importantly, he became friends with Vitaly Bianchi and Boris Zhitkov, Daniil Kharms and Evgeny Schwartz. Their circle grew, they decided to publish children’s magazines “New Robinson”, “Chizh”, “Hedgehog”, created a children’s publishing house – the famous DETGIZ. Marshak looked for “experienced people” with an interesting profession and persuaded them to write a book for children. So he brought to literature a diver, an armored train commander, an airship engineer, a nurse, a polar pilot. I was lucky enough to have time to make friends with already elderly children’s writers Nikolai Fedorovich Grigoriev – in the Civil War, the commander of the only armored train “Ganja” at Shchors, with the famous diver Konstantin Dmitrievich Zolotovsky – the author of the book “Underwater Masters”, Antonina Georgievna Golubeva – who wrote a book about Kirov’s childhood.

– How did you meet them? And did you see Marshak himself?

– No, I never saw Marshak, he lived in Moscow, but in Leningrad. The funny thing is that my mother saw him almost every day in the summer, because her pioneer camp was located next to Marshak’s dacha.

As for acquaintances, in the days of my youth there were literary associations, and with them sections of children’s and youth literature. There were discussed works just written, not yet published. Everyone gathered – both old and young. And I met Grigoriev during the voyage from the Writers’ Union to Valaam. I ended up in the cabin with him. He was 72 years old, and I was 27. We became friends, and I wondered why such an elderly writer wants to communicate with young people. Now that I’m in my eighties myself, I understand why connecting with a new generation of writers is so important.

– Did you first learn about what Marshak was from Grigoriev?

– Each of them told me how Marshak urged them to immediately sit down at the table and create a book necessary for children – some about their profession, some about new heroes, how to rule their manuscripts with clumsy phrases.

For example, Grigoriev was an engineer, he built a highway that connected the Central Asian republics of the USSR with Siberia. During a business trip, he came to the city on the Neva. And he made a note about the great construction site – then Marshak saw it. And he literally planted Nikolai Fedorovich somewhere in a hotel room and said: “Write the same thing, only for children.” And Grigoriev, who had never been a children’s writer, wrote.

And when Marshak found out the story about the armored train, he would not let him go anywhere until he finished the book. It was the same with poets. And therefore, in many books of those years, the “spirit of Marshak” is felt.

– But Marshak had to become a Muscovite?

– He was not going to be in Moscow, but in Leningrad there was a defeat of a children’s publishing house. Grigoriev told me (the old man told me with tears) that there was a situation like this: either he would be expelled from the party and he would go to the Gulag – or he would speak at a meeting in the House of Writers and say that Marshak forced everyone to create bourgeois works. By that time, the entire DETGIZ, created by Marshak, was already in prison. It was 1937.

After the meeting, Marshak went down the stairs and turned to face the wall. Everyone bypassed him, they were even afraid to stop. And instead of going home, he went to the station and left for Moscow. Otherwise he would have been arrested. Now it has already been discovered that the investigator (and this was a guy “from the machine”, but inventive) wrote a fictitious report. Those who were forced to confess that they were Japanese spies were slipped denunciations allegedly written by Marshak. Which, of course, was not. I didn’t mention this anywhere, it was a painfully dirty story, but it was exactly like that.

– And what did Marshak do in the capital?

– At first he only translated. And from the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, he began to cooperate with the Kukryniksy. There is a legend that Stalin, when he saw a front-line caricature poster with the lines of the writer, said: “Well, Marshak! Eagle!”. So he returned the respect of all authorities from top to bottom. And kept the attention of the public. When he rushed off to Moscow, he was not as often talked about as before.

I was five or six years old, my father returned wounded from the front and brought Marshak’s books, bought in Moscow. It was all legal, in the post-war years he was one of the most widely read poets recommended to schoolchildren. Perhaps this was given permission from above (Marshak was then just awarded the Stalin Prize). It is also possible that the “team” of 1937 was itself shot, new people destroyed them themselves after some time.

How it all ended, I do not know, everything was complicated and confused. Olga Berggolts was released from prison – after all, she also wrote a children’s story and she was arrested along with all of Detgiz.

Marshak became very interested in translation, he translated world masterpieces that were not known at all in Russia before. And in the actual children’s literature was not very active. But what he created in the 20s and 30s was enough to move into the category of classics along with Chukovsky.