Tvardovsky, “Vasily Terkin”: analysis of the poem. Phraseological phrases in the poem by A.T.

To understand and appreciate the true scale of the artist’s talent, his contribution to literature, one must proceed from what he said new about life and man, how his vision of the world relates to the moral and aesthetic ideals, ideas and tastes of the people. Tvardovsky never sought to be original. Any pose, any artificiality is alien to him:
Here are the poems, and everything is clear.
Everything is in Russian.
The brilliant craftsmanship and nationality of Alexander Trifonovich’s creativity are visible in the principles artistic comprehension our lives, and in creation national characters era, renewal of poetic genres. V. Soloukhin said very correctly: “Tvardovsky is the largest Russian Soviet poet of the thirties, forties and fifties because the most important, most decisive events in the life of the country and people were best reflected in his poetry.”
Throughout the war, while at the front, Tvardovsky worked on the poem “Vasily Terkin” - a work that was at the same time a truthful chronicle of the war, and an inspiring propaganda word, and a deep understanding heroic feat people. The poem reflects the main stages of the Great Patriotic War, from its first days to complete victory over the enemy. This is how the poem develops, this is how it is constructed:
These lines and pages -
There is a special count of days and miles,
How from western border
To your home capital,
And from that native capital
Back to the western border
And from the western border
All the way to the enemy capital
We did our own hike.
Depicting war presented considerable difficulties for writers. Here one could fall into embellished reports in the spirit of superficial jingoistic optimism or fall into despair and present the war as a complete hopeless horror. In the introduction to Vasily Terkin, Tvardovsky defined his approach to the theme of war as the desire to show “the real truth,” “no matter how bitter it may be.” The poet depicts the war without any embellishment. The melancholy of retreat, painful anxiety for the fate of the Motherland, the pain of separation from loved ones, hard military labor and sacrifices, the ruin of the country, bitter cold- all this is shown in “Terkin” as the truth demands, no matter how much it hits the soul. But the poem does not leave a depressing impression at all, does not plunge one into despondency. The poem is dominated by faith in the victory of good over evil, light over darkness. And in war, as Tvardovsky shows it, in the respites between battles, people rejoice and laugh, sing and dream, happily take a steam bath and dance in the cold. The author of the poem and its hero are helped to overcome the difficult trials of the war by their boundless love for the Motherland and understanding of the just nature of the fight against fascism. The refrain runs through the entire poem:
The battle is holy and right,
Mortal combat is not for glory,
For the sake of life on earth.
« Vasily Terkin" is a "book about a fighter." Terkin appears on the first pages of the work as an unpretentious soldier-buffoon, who knows how to amuse and amuse the soldiers on a campaign and at a rest stop, innocently laughing at the mistakes of his comrades. But his joke always contains a deep and serious thought: the hero reflects on cowardice and courage, loyalty and generosity, great love and hatred. However, the poet saw his task not only in truthfully drawing the image of one of the millions of people who took on their shoulders the entire burden of the fight against the enemy. Gradually, Terkin’s image increasingly acquires generalized, almost symbolic features. The hero personifies the people:
Into battle, forward, into utter fire
He goes, holy and sinful,
Russian miracle man.
High craftsmanship the poet was manifested in the fact that he was able, without embellishing, but also without “grounding” the hero, to embody in him the fundamental moral qualities of the Russian people: patriotism, consciousness of responsibility for the fate of the Motherland, readiness for selfless feats, love of work. The image of the folk hero Vasily Terkin created by Tvardovsky personifies unbending character soldier, his courage and fortitude, humor and resourcefulness.
Tvardovsky's poem is an outstanding work, truly innovative. Both its content and form are truly folk. Therefore, it became the most significant poetic work about the Great Patriotic War, fell in love with millions of readers and, in turn, gave rise to hundreds of imitations and “sequels” among the people.

"Vasily Terkin" - a miracle of complete dissolution
poet in the element of the folk language.
B. Pasternak 1

It was no coincidence that A. Akhmatova at one time called Tvardovsky’s poem “light soldier’s rhymes.” They are truly amazingly easy, easy to remember, easy to read, seemingly easy, understood right down to the very bottom (“is there even one,” one can often hear) understood... Well... Tvardovsky is not Mandelstam, but he is no better and no worse - he is a different poet, no less significant and talented in his sense of language, albeit of its other layers. Tvardovsky’s verse only creates the impression of extraordinary and seemingly not at all poetic naturalness and expressiveness colloquial speech. Tvardovsky himself says about his poem:

The most high topics are revealed in the poem in ordinary, not “sublime” words, not “poeticism”. Moreover, simple, everyday words not only do not reduce the pathos, but give the verse a special warmth and naturalness. In this, Tvardovsky is akin to A.P. Chekhov. The simplicity of Tvardovsky’s verse is apparent, it is not primitive, it is smart and crafty, it allows one to naturally speak about very complex phenomena, the subtlest emotional experiences, very faithfully and deeply convey various psychological states: from humor to tragic pathos. Tvardovsky does not resort to word creation; he turns the word around for the reader with new facets, revealing new meanings and connections. Tvardovsky has no florid style, there are even few comparisons.

Tvardovsky’s poem is written in trochaic tetrameter, traditional in Russian literature, known since the time of A.S. Pushkin. In "Vasily Terkin" this meter varies, otherwise the poem would sound monotonous. The rhyme varies - sometimes female, sometimes masculine; stanzas often consist of four lines, but the number of verse-lines in them also varies throughout the poem. For example, in the chapter “Crossing” there are stanzas of two, and three, and four, and five, and more:

Tvardovsky's rhyme is simple and ingenuous. Such rhymes are usually considered inexpressive, but in Tvardovsky’s poems they look unexpected and impressive. A rhyme within one chapter can also be adjacent (when adjacent lines rhyme: aabb):

and cross (when the first and third, second and fourth lines rhyme: abab):

Covering (or encircling, when the first and fourth, second and third stanzas rhyme) are practically not used by Tvardovsky as they are less characteristic of living, “natural” speech.

Sometimes (rather rarely) in four-line stanzas with adjacent rhyme, Tvardovsky does not rhyme the first and third lines, skipping the rhyme:

This technique, common in folk versification, achieves even greater variety in the “simple” verse about the “simple,” ordinary, ordinary soldier Vasily Terkin.

Sometimes the meaning of the quatrain is reinforced and strengthened by the fifth verse (line):

The difficult roads of war are depicted by an even more complex stanza construction:

A “moving”, “fluid” stanza appears (A.V. Makedonov) and the syntax corresponding to it. Tvardovsky himself considered achievements in the field of poetic syntax to be among his most interesting innovations 2 .

Rhythmically, Tvardovsky’s “simple” verse is also varied. For example, in the transfer of a soldier’s dance to the accordion (chapter “Accordion”):

The book merges various speech streams: literary speech and vernacular, folk poetic and oratorical vocabulary. Tvardovsky varies the size of stanzas from one to sixteen verses, often uses hyphenation, subordinating the movement of the verse to conversational intonations. The text includes numerous lively dialogues. Basic poetic meter poems - tetrameter trochee.

Choice artistic means in the poem is determined by what it depicts folk hero at war. Hence its popular, mostly colloquial language:

• the language of the poem indicates its closeness to works of oral folk art. Elements of ditties, proverbs, sayings and jokes, often paraphrased, are extremely numerous in the poem: “We will live - we will not die”; “Time for business is an hour for fun”; “Here you can’t say: I’m not me, I don’t know anything, you can’t prove that your house is on edge now”; “Nothing, they won’t drive you off the ground, they won’t send you further than the front”; “War has a short journey, love has a long way”; “Soldiers surrender cities, generals take them”;

• in the poem there are many diminutive words characteristic of oral folk poetry ("darling", "son", "buddy", "falcon", etc.), constant epithets(“damp land”, “bitter time”, “hateful road”, “foreign land”, etc.), words and expressions from oral folk art (“alive and well”, “started up” clear falcon"; "grab-grab"; "in the same way, in the same way, only with a different stitch" etc.);

• the poet masterfully imitates folk song: The dashing gray beard will lead and blow: Where are you going, my beautiful, Where are you going, where.
• the poem is characterized by idiomatic expressions and untranslatable figures of speech (“to tell the truth”, “will make you sweat and tremble”, “the guy is anywhere”, “it’s clear to the point”, “I’m joking with you”);

• the poem is dominated by short ones, simple sentences, with the absence of ligaments. The author preserves this structure of colloquial speech in dialogues, of which there are many in the poem. The dialogues give the poem a lively dramatic character, they depict military life and give portrait characteristics;

• For poetic language Tvardovsky is characterized by laconicism, which is achieved by paraphrasing or truncation of such phrases that exist as sayings or established cliches: Like nothing - Vasily Terkin, Like nothing - an old soldier.

Monument literary hero- This is actually a rare thing, but in our country such a monument was erected to Vasily Terkin, and, it seems to me, Tvardovsky’s hero rightfully deserved this honor. This monument can be considered erected to all those who did not spare their blood during the Great Patriotic War, who always found a way out of a difficult situation and knew how to brighten up everyday life at the front with a joke, who loved to play the accordion and listen to music at a halt, who at the cost of their lives brought closer Great Victory.

Tvardovsky's poem was truly a folk - or rather a soldier's - poem. According to Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, the soldiers of his battery preferred “Vasily Terkin” and “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy out of many books.

I really like the language of Tvardovsky’s poem - light, figurative, folk. His poems are remembered by themselves. Each chapter of the poem is complete, a separate work. The author himself said about it this way: “This book is about a fighter, without beginning or end.”

I like Vasily Terkin’s love for life. Every day he looks into the eyes of death at the front, where no one is “bewitched from a fool’s fragment, from any fool’s bullet.” Sometimes he is cold, sometimes he is hungry, and has no news from his relatives. But Vasily never loses heart. Lives and enjoys life:

Smokes, eats and drinks with gusto

Any position.

He can swim across an icy river, dragging, straining, his tongue. But here is a forced stop, “and it’s frosty - you can’t stand or sit down.” And Terkin played the accordion:

And from that old accordion,

That I was left an orphan

Somehow it suddenly became warmer

On the front road.

Terkin is the soul of the soldier's company. No wonder his comrades love to listen to his sometimes humorous and sometimes serious stories. Here they lie in the swamps, where the wet infantry even dreams of “at least death, but on dry land.” It's raining. And you can’t even smoke: the matches are wet. The soldiers curse everything in the world, and it seems to them that “there is no worse trouble.” And Terkin grins and begins a long argument. He says that as long as a soldier feels the elbow of a comrade, he is strong. Behind him is a battalion, a regiment, a division. Or even the front. What is it: all of Russia! Last year, when the German was rushing to Moscow and sang “Moscow is mine,” then it was necessary to freak out. But today the enemy is not at all the same, “the German is not a singer with this song from last year.” Vasily in difficult moments always found the right words, which could comfort his comrades. He has such talent.

However, the most poignant chapter, in my opinion, is the chapter “Death and the Warrior,” in which the hero, wounded, lies in the snow and freezes. And it seems to him that death has come.

The snow under him, covered in blood,

I picked it up in a pile of ice.

Death bowed to the head:

Well, soldier, come with me.

And it became difficult for Terkin to argue with death, because he was bleeding and wanted peace.

Death, laughing, bent down lower:

Come on, come on, well done, I know, I see:

You are alive, but not a tenant.

And why, it seemed, was there any need to hold on to this life, where all the joy is in either freezing, or digging trenches, or being afraid that they will kill you... But Vasily is not the type to easily surrender to Kosoy:

I will cry, howl in pain,

Die in the field without a trace.

But of your own free will

I will never give up. And the warrior conquers death:

And I thought for the first time

Death, watching from the side: --

“How alive are they?

They are friendly among themselves.

That's why with a loner

You have to be able to cope.

Reluctantly you give a reprieve.”

And, sighing, Death fell behind.

“The Book about a Soldier” was very necessary at the front; it raised the spirit of the soldiers and led them to victory.

A monument to a literary hero is actually a rare thing, but in our country such a monument was erected to Vasily Terkin, and, it seems to me, Tvardovsky’s hero rightfully deserved this honor. This monument can be considered erected to all those who did not spare their blood during the Great Patriotic War, who always found a way out of a difficult situation and knew how to brighten up everyday life at the front with a joke, who loved to play the accordion and listen to music at a halt, who at the cost of their lives brought closer Great Victory.
Tvardovsky's poem was truly a folk - or rather a soldier's - poem. According to Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, the soldiers of his battery preferred “Vasily Terkin” and “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy out of many books.
I really like the language of Alexander Trifonovich’s poem - easy, figurative, folk. His poems are remembered by themselves. Each chapter of the poem is a complete, separate work. The author himself said about it this way: “This book is about a fighter, without beginning or end.”
The author does not force his hero to perform any outstanding feats. Although, who knows... One crossing, a downed plane, and a captured enemy tongue are worth something...
I like Vasily Terkin’s love for life. Every day he looks into the eyes of death at the front, where no one is “bewitched from a fool’s fragment, from any fool’s bullet.” Sometimes he is cold, sometimes he is hungry, and has no news from his relatives. But Vasily never loses heart. Lives and enjoys life:
Smokes, eats and drinks with gusto
Any position.
He can swim across an icy river, dragging, straining, his tongue. But here is a forced stop, “and it’s frosty - you can’t stand or sit down.” And Terkin played the accordion:
And from that old accordion,
That I was left an orphan
Somehow it suddenly became warmer
On the front road.
Terkin is the soul of the soldier's company. No wonder his comrades love to listen to his sometimes humorous and sometimes serious stories. Here they lie in the swamps, where the wet infantry even dreams of “at least death, but on dry land.” It's raining. And you can’t even smoke: the matches are wet. The soldiers curse everything in the world, and it seems to them that “there is no worse trouble.” And Terkin grins and begins a long argument. He says that as long as a soldier feels the elbow of a comrade, he is strong. Behind him is a battalion, a regiment, a division. Or even the front. What is it: all of Russia! Last year, when the German was rushing to Moscow and sang “Moscow is mine,” then it was necessary to freak out. But today the enemy is not at all the same, “the German is not a singer with this song from last year.” In difficult moments, Vasily always found the right words that could console his comrades. He has such talent.
However, the most poignant chapter, in my opinion, is the chapter “Death and the Warrior,” in which the hero, wounded, lies in the snow and freezes. And it seems to him that death has come.
The snow under him, covered in blood,
I picked it up in a pile of ice.
Death bowed to the head:
Well, soldier, come with me.

And it became difficult for Terkin to argue with death, because he was bleeding and wanted peace.
Death, laughing, bent down lower:
- Come on, come on, well done, I know, I see:
You are alive, but not a tenant.
And why, it seemed, was there any need to hold on to this life, where all the joy is in either freezing, or digging trenches, or being afraid that they will kill you... But Vasily is not the type to easily surrender to Kosoy:
I will cry, howl in pain,
Die in the field without a trace.
But of your own free will
I will never give up. And the warrior conquers death:
And I thought for the first time
Death, watching from the side: --
“How alive are they?
They are friendly among themselves.
That's why with a loner
You have to be able to cope.
Reluctantly you give a reprieve.”
And, sighing, Death fell behind.
“The Book about a Soldier” was very necessary at the front; it raised the spirit of the soldiers and led them to victory. The image of the author in A. T. Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin”

Great Patriotic War refers to those events in the history of the country that remain in the memory of the people for a long time. Such events greatly change people's ideas about life and art. The war caused an unprecedented surge in literature, music, painting, and cinema. But, perhaps, there was not and there will be no more popular work about the war than the poem by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky “Vasily Terkin”.
A. T. Tvardovsky wrote about the war firsthand. At the very beginning of the war, he, like many other writers and poets, went to the front. And walking along the roads of war, the poet creates amazing monument to the Russian soldier, his feat. The hero of “The Book about a Fighter,” as the author himself defined the genre of his work, becomes Vasily Terkin, who is collective image Russian soldier. But there is another hero in the book - the author himself. We cannot even say that it is always Tvardovsky himself. Quicker, we're talking about about that generalized image of the author-narrator, which is present in “Eugene Onegin”, “Hero of Our Time” and other works that form the basis of Russian literary tradition. Although some facts from the poem coincide with real biography A. T. Tvardovsky, the author is clearly endowed with many of Terkin’s traits, they are constantly together (“Terkin - further. The author follows”). This allows us to say that the author in the poem is also a man of the people, a Russian soldier, who differs from Terkin, in fact, only in that “he completed his course in the capital.” A. T. Tvardovsky makes Terkin his fellow countryman. And therefore the words

I'm trembling from acute pain,
Bitter and holy malice.
Mother, father, sisters
Behind that line I have -

They become the words of both the author and his hero. Amazing lyricism colors those lines of the poem that talk about “ small homeland”, which each of the soldiers who took part in the war had. The author loves his hero and admires his actions. They are always unanimous:

And I’ll tell you, I won’t hide it, -
In this book, here and there,
What a hero should say
I speak personally myself.
I am responsible for everything around me,
And notice, if you didn’t notice,
Like Terkin, my hero,
Sometimes it speaks for me.

The author in the poem is an intermediary between the hero and the reader. A confidential conversation is constantly conducted with the reader; the author respects the “friend-reader”, and therefore strives to convey to him the “real truth” about the war. The author feels his responsibility to his readers; he understands how important it was not only to tell about the war, but also to instill in the readers (and we remember that “Vasily Terkin” was published separate chapters during the war, and the idea dates back to the time Finnish war) faith in the indestructible spirit of the Russian soldier, optimism. Sometimes the author seems to invite the reader to check the truth of his judgments and observations. Such direct contact with the reader greatly contributes to the poem becoming understandable big circle of people.
The poem constantly permeates the author's subtle humor. At the very beginning of the poem, the author calls a joke the most necessary thing in a soldier’s life:

You can live without food for a day,
More is possible, but sometimes
In a one-minute war
Can't live without a joke
Jokes of the most unwise.

The text of the poem is filled with jokes, sayings, and sayings, and it is impossible to determine who their author is: the author of the poem, the hero of the poem Terkin, or the people in general.
The author’s observational skills, the vigilance of his gaze and the skill of conveying the details of front-line life are striking. The book becomes a kind of “encyclopedia” of war, written “from nature”, in a field setting. The author is faithful not only to details. He felt the psychology of a person in war, felt the same fear, hunger, cold, was just as happy and sad... And most importantly, “The Book about a Soldier” was not written to order, there is nothing ostentatious or deliberate in it, it was an organic expression of need author to tell his contemporaries and descendants about the war in which “ the battle is on holy and right. Mortal combat is not for the sake of glory, for the sake of life on earth.”

“Vasily Terkin” by Tvardovsky is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful daring... and what an extraordinary folk soldier’s language” (I. A. Bunin) 1. Features of the creation of “Vasily Terkin”. 2. The nationality of the language of the poem. 3. Features of the composition of the poem. 4. The ideological orientation of the poem, its main character.