“Youth led us on a saber campaign, youth threw us onto the Kronstadt ice …”

On February 16, 1934, the author of these lines, which were known to all citizens of the USSR from childhood (as they were part of the school curriculum), passed away – the 38-year-old poet Eduard Bagritsky.

The lines “Youth led us on a saber campaign, youth threw us on the Kronstadt ice …” are taken from the poem “Death of a Pioneer”, written by Bagritsky in 1932.

Refreshed by the storm

The leaf is shaking.

Ah, green chiffchaff

Double whistle!

Valya, Valentina,

What’s wrong with you now?

white chamber,

Painted door.

Thinner than a web

From under the skin of the cheeks

Smoldering scarlet fever

Death Flame.

This poem was dedicated to the girl Valya Dyko, the daughter of the owner of a wooden house in Kuntsevo on Pionerskaya Street, where Bagritsky and his family temporarily settled after moving from Odessa to Moscow in 1925. Valya Dyko died in the Kuntsevo Children’s Hospital of scarlet fever in 1930 at the age of thirteen. In a conversation with a Pionerskaya Pravda correspondent, Bagritsky later said that the mother really brought the girl a cross before her death, and Valya really gave a salute before she died.

“This case tormented me for two years. And so I wrote “The Death of a Pioneer” in the form of a fairy tale. I clearly imagined that it should be written as simply as possible, to tell why Valya is dear to me, ”said Bagritsky.

As reported in Mikhail Zagrebelny’s book “Eduard Bagritsky” (ed. “Folio Litagent”, 2012, ch. “Last Moscow Years”), while working on the poem, Eduard Bagritsky already lived in a two-room apartment in a house for writers (in Kamergersky lane near the Moscow Art Theater), where he moved in 1931. As Viktor Shklovsky recalled, despite his relatively young age (he was 33 years old), Bagritsky had been very seriously ill since 1929 (chronic asthma worsened):

“The head turned gray early, because death was sitting opposite, at the desk, and counted the remaining lines.”

Yuri Olesha also left memories of this period, who repeatedly visited a colleague in the writing workshop:

“Bronchial asthma is treated with the so-called Abyssinian powder, which is smoked like tobacco. The smell of this smoking was in Bagritsky’s Moscow apartment. He had asthma attacks quite often, and when I came to him, I almost always found him in an unnatural, suffering pose. He sat on the bed, resting his hands on its edges, as if substituting stops under the torso, ready to shake from coughing every second and, it seemed, with all his might, kept from this by a man.

As the book by Mikhail Zagrebelny says, Bagritsky received an apartment on the sixth floor, and if the elevator did not work in the house and you had to walk up the stairs, then the whole entrance heard Bagritsky breathing heavily, stopping on each floor and coughing loudly:

“However, now he had his own room, bright, sunny, with a balcony, although the balcony was still without railings – in those days, houses were put into operation with very strange imperfections. But the room was in the full sense of the word its own, and that was the most important thing. Here Bagritsky finally settled down the way he wanted. He lived calmly and happily to the extent that it could be possible for a seriously ill person, overwhelmed by all the passions and doubts that traditionally put a true poet.

In addition to a hard trestle bed and a square table moved up to it, in this creative laboratory of the poet there was a bookcase and two large metal shelves with aquariums, since Bagritsky was a passionate and highly respected ichthyologist.

“Among fish farmers, he was no less famous and authoritative than among writers. I learned to read German in order to follow the special literature. One writer went with him to a zoological shop and was amazed. Noteworthy experts in these matters, wiry old men with smoky mustaches, with whom it can be scary to talk to a person who is not sufficiently aware of the properties and habits of the inhabitants of aquariums, addressed Bagritsky with the respectfulness of timid students, ”according to Mikhail Zagrebelny’s book.

As the poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky later recalled, then just starting to write poetry and coming to the apartment in Kamergersky to the master for a kind of “master classes”, one day, seeing Bagritsky against the backdrop of outlandish fish scurrying in the glazed water, he, smiling, noted: “ What a cute hostel!” To this Bagritsky responded vividly:

“That’s how we get along. As the responsible commandant of this hostel, I assure you that there are no kitchen squabbles here. <...> In Odessa, my room was full of birds. Voice company. They could easily boo bad poetry. And the fish are the people who are silent. So there is no need to be afraid of them. Yes, me too.”

Farewell to the poet took place in the House of Writers on Vorovsky Street. In the funeral procession heading for the Novodevichy cemetery, the body of Bagritsky was accompanied by a squadron of cavalrymen through the streets of Moscow. This tragic event was even reflected in the foreign media: a German specialized magazine published an obituary on the death of an outstanding Russian ichthyologist.

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo from the site https://www.bibliotemryuk.ru/news/news_1631.html?curPos=9