The first writer to die in the Northern Military District: a book by the poet Ivan Lukin was published posthumously in Moscow

The editors of MK received a letter from Boris Lukin, the poet’s father, a student at the Literary Institute. Gorky Ivan Lukin (pseudonym Ivan Solovey), who died on March 14, 2022 during the battle in Mariupol. According to our data, the young man became the first Russian writer to fall in the Northern Military District.

Boris Lukin informed us that the Literary Institute has prepared for publication a book of selected poems, prose, diary entries and letters (even WhatsApp messages) of Ivan, called “I AM THE SKY”. “I won’t tell you anything about the book, because there is a preface and my introductory words. Last December, I finally learned the details of the last day of my son’s life, having met his fellow soldiers near Donetsk,” writes Boris Ivanovich.

The name of Ivan Lukin, a Guard sailor of the 810th Separate Guards Order of Zhukov and Ushakov Marine Brigade, has already entered modern history: a street in his native village near Moscow was named in his honor, and a documentary film was made.

“He was a poet, prose writer, screenwriter and became a soldier… At the age of 23, he knew how to love the Fatherland, how to yearn for it and how to sacrifice himself to it without reserve,” this quote is from “A Few Lines about a Student and a Marine Ivan Lukin” by LIT associate professor and poet Sergei Arutyunov completes the collection, but the nature of books is such that they never end anywhere.

If you read Ivan Lukin’s notes, the motive for his future participation in the special operation will become clear.

“For a very long time I could not accept the blatant deception that reigned around me. This deception, like a head of cabbage, began with a small sprout and began to wrap itself in leaves ad infinitum. Wherever you pull, no matter how you tear off a layer, there is a New Deception underneath,” says the entry dated December 31, 2021.

But the main document, evidence of the poet’s life is poetry:

I feel every cell of my body.

I feel a vein pricking in my finger.

I feel that War will begin soon.

Isn’t she mine?

And I keep looking and feeling

like every drop of rain,

folded by the wind into a horizontal river stream,

getting into me

instantly

turns into its whirlpool…

Or this fragment, it seems, from front-line creativity:

The armored personnel carriers plowed the ground with their wheels.

I look up to the sky –

to God, who is not there

for many, but not for me.