Nabokov is greater as a writer or poet. Vladimir Nabokov short biography
On March 27, 1911, Veronika Mikhailovna Tushnova was born - a poetess, whose poems were written like this popular songs, like “One Hundred Hours of Happiness”, “You know, everything will still be!..”, “They don’t renounce, loving.”
Collections of her poems were not on library shelves or bookstore shelves. The fact is that the painful frankness and confessionalism of her poetry were inconsonant with the time of collective enthusiasm.
And even after perestroika, Tushnova’s poems were not very favored by Russian publishing houses. But the girls' diaries were full of them. These poems were rewritten, memorized, they sank into the soul to remain there forever.
A number of biographical articles and autobiographies indicate Tushnova’s birth year as 1915. The dates 1915-1965 are engraved on the monument on the grave of Veronika Mikhailovna on Vagankovskoe cemetery, this is what the poetess herself wished shortly before her death. However, in the materials of Kazansky literary museum them. M. Gorky and Tushnova’s collection “You Can Give Everything for This,” published in 2012 in the “Golden Series of Poetry,” compiled by the daughter of the poetess Natalya Rozinskaya, it is stated that Veronika Mikhailovna was born on March 27, 1911. The poetry lovers club of Veronica Tushnova conducted research and found an extract from the registry register about her baptism in 1911. This date was confirmed by the daughter of the poetess N. Rozinskaya. The year of birth in 1911 is also confirmed by the fact that Tushnova graduated from school in 1928, and in the same year she entered the medical faculty of Kazan University, which at the age of 13 was in no way possible.
Veronica was born into the family of a scientist, professor of medicine at Kazan University, Mikhail Pavlovich Tushnov (d. 1935). Mother - Alexandra Georgievna Postnikova, a graduate of the Higher Women's Bestuzhev Courses in Moscow. 
In Kazan, the family lived in a house on Bolshaya Kazanskaya Street (now Bolshaya Krasnaya), then on Mislavsky Street. In summer - on the Volga, in Shelanga. The memory of her native Volga expanses fueled Veronica’s creativity all her life. The hobbies of her childhood and youth were animals and flowers. 
In 1928 she graduated from one of the best schools city - No. 14 named after. A. N. Radishcheva with in-depth study foreign languages, spoke good English and French. 
The first to notice Tushnova’s literary talent was her school teacher literature Boris Nikolaevich Skvortsov, who often read her works aloud as exemplary. After school, at the insistence of her father, who saw her as a future doctor, she entered the medical faculty of Kazan University. Biographers especially note the domineering and despotic character of Veronica’s father; everything in the family was subject to his wishes and will, right down to the daily routine, serving lunch or dinner. 
In 1931, in connection with her father’s transfer to the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM), the family moved from Kazan to Leningrad, where Tushnova continued to study at the medical institute. Soon the family moves to Moscow, where the father, as a famous scientist, gets an apartment on Novinsky Boulevard. 
She entered graduate school at the Department of Histology at VIEM. In the capital she took up painting, and then a serious passion for poetry began. In 1938 she married psychiatrist Yuri Rozinsky. The first poems were published in the same year. 
In 1938, Veronica got married and gave birth to a daughter. In 1941, on the advice of Vera Inber, who read her poems, she entered the Literary Institute them. A. M. Gorky. But I didn’t have a chance to study there: with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War together with her mother and little daughter Natasha, she was evacuated to Kazan, where she worked as a ward doctor at a neurosurgical hospital for wounded Red Army soldiers. Two years later, in February 1943, he returned to Moscow and worked as a resident doctor in a hospital. The first marriage breaks up. 
All future life Veronica Tushnova was associated with poetry - it is in her poems, in her books, for her poems, extremely sincere, confessional, sometimes resemble diary entries. From them we learn that her husband left her, but a green-eyed daughter, similar to her father, was growing up, and Veronica hoped that he would return: “You will come, of course, you will come, to this house where our child grew up.” 
And he really came. But things didn't happen at all as she imagined. long years, dreaming of his return. He came when he got sick, when he felt really bad. And she did not renounce... She nursed him and his sick mother. “Everyone here condemns me, but I can’t do otherwise... Still, he is the father of my daughter,” she once told E. Olshanskaya. 
In 1944, Novy Mir published her poem “Surgeon,” dedicated to the highly experienced surgical surgeon N. L. Chistyakov, who worked in the same hospital. Also in 1944, Komsomolskaya Pravda published the series “Poems about a Daughter,” which received a wide readership.
The debut collection of poems and poems was “The First Book” (1945), published by the publishing house “Young Guard”. I was fascinated by Tushnova’s work famous actor Vasily Kachalov, who, according to his biographer V.V. Vilenkin, “read out” Veronica’s poems to family and guests. 
In 1947, the poetess became a participant in the First Meeting of Young Writers and returned to the Literary Institute, although no longer a student, but the leader of a creative seminar. 
At the end of the war, Veronica married a second time. Tushnova’s second husband is physicist Yuri Timofeev. Details family life Veronica Tushnova is unknown - much has not been preserved, has been lost, relatives also remain silent.
But her last love, who came to mature age, “I didn’t count the poems.”
Tushnova experienced the separation from her first husband very hard, and it was in those days that she came up with heartfelt lines, which were later written into music by the popular songwriter Mark Minkov.
Not renounce loving,
I'll stop waiting for you
Not renounce loving.
And you'll come when it's dark,
When a blizzard hits the window,
When you remember how long ago
We didn't warm each other
Yes, you will come when it is dark.
And so you want warmth
Once unloved,
That you can't wait
Three people at the machine gun,
This is how you want warmth.
You can give everything for this,
And until then I believe in it,
How hard it is for me not to wait for you
All day, without leaving the door,
You can give everything for this.
Not renounce loving,
After all, life does not end tomorrow,
I'll stop waiting for you
And you will come quite suddenly,
Not renounce loving.
<Вероника Тушнова>
The last years of V. Tushnova were very difficult - a serious illness, a complex, unsettled personal life. 
ALEXANDER YASHIN........ It is not known under what circumstances and when exactly Veronika Tushnova met the poet and writer Alexander Yashin (1913-1968), whom she fell in love with so bitterly and hopelessly and to whom she dedicated her most beautiful poems, included in her latest collection"One hundred hours of happiness." Hopeless - because Yashin, the father of seven children, was already married for the third time. Close friends jokingly called Alexander Yakovlevich’s family the “Yashinsky collective farm.” 
The poetess, with whose poems about Love a whole generation of girls fell asleep under their pillows, herself experienced tragedy and happiness...
Feelings that illuminated her last years on Earth with their Light and gave a powerful flow of energy to her Creativity: This love was divided, but secret, because, as Tushnova herself wrote: “What stands between us is not a great sea - a bitter grief, a strange heart.” Alexander Yashin could not leave his family, and who knows, Veronica Mikhailovna, a person who understands everything and perceives everything acutely and subtly - after all, poets from God have “nerves at their fingertips” - would have been able to decide on such a sharp turn of Fate, more tragic , than happy? Probably not. They were born on the same day - March 27, met secretly, in other cities, in hotels, went to the forest, wandered all day, spent the night in hunting lodges. And when they returned to Moscow by train, Yashin asked Veronica to get off two or three stops so that they would not be seen together. It was not possible to keep the relationship a secret. His friends condemn him, there is a real tragedy in his family. The break with Veronica Tushnova was predetermined and inevitable. 
Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin ( real name- Popov) (1913-1968), poet, prose writer. Born on March 27 in the village of Bludnovo, Vologda region in peasant family. During the Patriotic War, he volunteered for the front and, as a war correspondent and political worker, participated in the defense of Leningrad and Stalingrad and in the liberation of Crimea. He was handsome and strong man. Among those who appreciated and loved him there are very different people.
Prishvin, Chukovsky, Simonov, Tendryakov valued good relations with Yashin... Former orphanage resident NIKOLAI RUBTSOV loved Yashin like his own father.... 
Veronica Tushnova - Alexander Yashin - fate - for great love and for breaking... 
The most beautiful woman Russian poetry of the twentieth century - Veronika Tushnova. 
A beauty with an expressive face and eyes of extraordinary depth. Smart girl. According to the recollections of friends, she was a very bright and warm person. She knew how to make friends. She knew how to LOVE.... A story as old as the world. A love story between two middle-aged people. Happy and tragic. Light and sad. Told in verse. The whole country was reading these verses. Lovers soviet women they copied them by hand in notebooks, because it was impossible to get collections of her poems. They were memorized, they were kept in memory and heart. They were sung. They became lyrical diary love and separation not only of Veronica Tushnova, but also of millions of women in love. 
The last book published during Tushnova’s lifetime, “One Hundred Hours of Happiness,” is all about this huge, burning love......
The gloomy land is frozen,
the sky yearned for the sun.
It's dark in the morning and dark at noon,
but I don’t care, I don’t care!
And I have a beloved, beloved,
with the behavior of an eagle, with the soul of a dove,
with a cheeky grin, with a childish smile,
in the whole wide world there is one and only one.
He is my air, he is my sky,
everything without him is lifeless and dumb...
And he doesn't know anything about it
busy with my own affairs and thoughts,
will pass and not look, and will not look back,
and he won’t think of smiling at me.
Lie between us forever and ever
not distant distances - fleeting years,
It's not the big sea that stands between us
- bitter grief, someone else's heart.
We are not destined to meet forever...
I don't care, I don't care
and I have a favorite, beloved!
<Вероника Тушнова>
It would seem that Yashin had everything before meeting Tushnova, but something was missing:
Something is in the way
Work with passion.
Everything is missing
Something in life.
Can't sit during the day
Can't sleep at night...
Need something
Big decision!
Quarrel with someone?
To part with something?
For a year at the pole
Settle down?
Maybe fall in love?
Oh, if only I could fall in love!
Something must
It will happen in life.
If I fell in love,
Like at school once upon a time,
How did you manage
In the seventh
And in the tenth
- To the point of numbness,
To the point of blindness
To the point of stupidity
Up to inspiration!
Stand again
In the cold for hours,
Write again
Notes in verse.
Maybe in these
Naive notes
What if it turns out
God's spark.
And they will turn
My revelations
In the best Poems......
<Александр Яшин>
And it happened. Love burst into life. He is loved by an amazing woman, talented, beautiful, sensitive... A long, very uneven, stormy relationship loving friend friends of people, and poets at that, splashed out onto the pages of poetry collections. 
“And my revelations will turn into the most best poems"- Yashin wrote in 1961. Truly this is so, because in last years his life literally burst through, and I simply advise you to find, read and compare his early and late poems.
Let it be unrequited
Just to love
Just don't leave a trace
Walk on the ground.
Herbs in thick infusion
Breathe in a hut
Just some downtime
The soul doesn't know.
Sky or land
Following your beloved
- Same as in the future
Get a ticket.
Live secretly, out of favor.
But any moment
Grow from under your feet
At her scream.
No grief for me
The fate of the boby,
It would smell like the sea - the sea,
And earth - earth.
I will live like a bird
Sing like a stream.
Just don't lose
Sleepless nights.
Let it be unrequited
Let it go, let it go!
Somehow with this one
I will reconcile myself with the burden.
I don't complain about anything
Just to love.
Let's go unrequited
- So be it.
However, why willingly
Climb the fire?
We'll see later
There is time!
<Александр Яшин>
Love was a secret. Love was sinful. Veronica, apparently, did not allow herself to destroy his family, because, like a wise woman, she understood: you cannot build happiness on someone else’s misfortune. 
Veronica Mikhailovna did not even think about taking her beloved away from the family. She could never be happy by making others unhappy:
The sky is colored with a yellow dawn,
close to dark...
How alarming, darling, how scary,
I'm so afraid of your dumbness.
You live and breathe somewhere,
smile, eat and drink...
Can't you hear at all?
Won't you call? Won't you call me?
I will be obedient and faithful,
I won’t pay, I won’t reproach.
Both for holidays and for everyday life,
and for everything I thank.
And that’s all there is: a porch,
Yes, there is a through smoke above the chimney,
yes a silver ring,
what you promised.
Yes, there is a cardboard box at the bottom
two stems withered since spring,
and here’s the heart,
which would be dead without you...
..........
I alone know how to love you,
Yes, I don’t have the right to do this,
as if love is right,
as if the truth could become untrue.
Your hearth does not burn, but smokes,
your soul does not bloom - it gathers dust.
Out of breath, languishing in the storm,
prays for rain, fears rain...
You know everything, you understand everything,
What you give, you immediately take away.
I know everything, I understand everything,
I relieve your pain, I take it away...
<Вероника Тушнова>
In 1961, Yashin wrote the poem “The Vertushinka River” (it’s easy to guess that Vertushinka is an affectionate image of Veronica Tushnova):
There is more than one aspen tree above you
Stupefiedly bowed.
By your witchcraft, Vertushinka,
The whole soul is full to the brim.
Spun around, enchanted,
The light made me spin around.
What are you doing, enemy force? -
And in winter there is no escape.
With passion, with bitterness,
Twisting and teasing
You expose my roots,
Like you want to knock me down.
It’s not our business in spring:
No matter how busy you are, how young you are -
I'm not the same, and you're shallow,
So freeze, calm down!
<Александр Яшин>
Veronica answered him no less talentedly, bitingly and tenderly:
Good, you say, beautiful?
Why do you curse her with anguish?
Don't reproach, say thank you
the speed of its witchcraft.
In both weather and bad weather
bowed over the river,
the aspen tree drinks living water,
That's why she's alive.
Shouldn't the pinwheel flow?
She has no other signs...
If the river calms down,
that means there is no river in the world.
It gets shallow, then it arrives, -
nice to look at...
Rivers are never old
they don't need to get younger.
Don't be afraid of its whirlwind,
do not run from intoxicating water,
will calm down after death,
There are no eternal rivers under the moon.....
<Вероника Тушнова>
They didn’t have to be together often. Yashin carefully hid his beloved from friends and acquaintances. Meetings were rare. And the whole life of a woman in love turned into a painful wait for these bitter-happy meetings. He was decent person, Alexander Yakovlevich Yashin. And the sense of duty prevailed. But it is impossible to command the heart. And my heart was torn between duty and love. 
And the beloved either humbly waited, or was jealously tormented, or reproached, but more often she humbly accepted the fate that befell her:
Are you still worried - what will happen?
Nothing. Everything will be as it is.
They'll talk, they'll judge, they'll forget,
everyone has their own worries.
There will be nothing... What do we need?
Are we really not given riches?
now darkness, now light, now green, now blizzard,
We'll go to the forest in the spring, God willing...
No, it won’t settle down, it won’t ferment!
It’s not something that is treated with separations,
not a disease that goes away,
not at our age... That's right, dear friend!
And only at night the pain will sometimes wake you up,
like a knife in the heart...
I’ll bite my pillow and cry and cry, nothing will happen!
And I live, walk, laugh, breathe...
<Вероника Тушнова>
You read her poems and understand: the feeling was real, painful, passionate. Not an easy affair, but love, which becomes the meaning of life, life itself. The love that each of us secretly dreams of. True, one has to pay dearly for such burning feelings. Sometimes, with life. 
Veronica dissolved in her love and burned at her fire. But the poems remained, sincere and emotional....
The wind drives the shaggy tufts of clouds,
It's cold again.
And again we part in silence,
the way they part forever.
You stand and don’t look after him.
I'm crossing the bridge...
You are cruel with the cruelty of a child -
cruel from lack of understanding.
Maybe for a day, maybe for a whole year
this pain will shorten my life.
If only you knew the true price
all your silences and insults!
You would forget about everything else,
you would grab me in your arms,
would lift and carry out of grief,
how people are taken out of the fire.
<Вероника Тушнова>
What to do if love came at the end of youth? What to do if life has already turned out the way it has? What to do if your loved one is not free? Forbid yourself to love? Impossible. Parting is tantamount to death. But they broke up. That's what he decided. And she had no choice but to obey...... 
In 1965, she, a beautiful black-haired woman with sad eyes (for her characteristic and unusual beauty to the Central Russian eye, she was sometimes called an “oriental beauty”), with a gentle character, who loved to give gifts not only to loved ones, but also to just friends, was forced to go to the hospital with diagnosis of cancer. Alexander Yashin, of course, visited her.
Mark Sobol, who had been friends with Tushnova for many years, became an involuntary witness to one of these visits.
From the memoirs of Mark Sobol: “I want to tell you one episode. Maybe it’s risky and too early to tell it, but the main characters are no longer alive, and I’m not immortal either.
Veronica was dying - and she almost knew it. The professor treating her said: “I’ll scratch you out!” I don’t know if she fully believed in it, but there was still a sliver of hope.
When I came to her room, I tried to cheer her up. She begged: don’t! She was given evil antibiotics that tightened her lips and made it painful for her to smile.
She looked extremely thin. Unrecognizable.
And then He came! Veronica ordered us to turn to the wall while she got dressed. Soon she quietly called out: “Boys...”
I turned around and was stunned. Standing in front of us was a beauty! I will not be afraid of this word, because it is said exactly. Smiling, with glowing cheeks, a young beauty who has never known any illness.
How she laughed, how animated she was, how suddenly everything returned to twenty years ago! And then I felt with particular strength that everything she wrote was true. Absolute and irrefutable truth. This is not the poet’s invention, but something that is provided by the golden - and bitter - reserve of life. This is probably what is called poetry, and not our sometimes exercises in combining poorly organized and rhymed lines.”
In the last days before her death, Veronika Mikhailovna forbade Alexander Yakovlevich from entering her room. She wanted her lover to remember her as beautiful and cheerful. And in parting she wrote:
I'm standing at the open door
I say goodbye, I'm leaving.
I won’t believe in anything anymore, -
write anyway, please!
So as not to suffer from late pity,
from which there is no escape,
write me a letter please
forward a thousand years.
Not for the future, but for the past,
for the peace of the soul,
write good things about me.
I'm already dead. Write!
<Вероника Тушнова>
The famous poetess was dying in severe agony. Not only from terrible disease, but also from longing for a loved one. At the 51st year of her life - July 7, 1965 - Veronika Mikhailovna Tushnova passed away. After her, there were manuscripts left on the table: unfinished pages of the poem and the new cycle 
Yashin realized that love had not gone away, had not escaped from the heart as ordered. Love only lay hidden, and after Veronica's death it flared up with new strength, but in a different capacity. It turned into melancholy, painful, bitter, ineradicable. gone soul mate, truly dear, devoted... I remember the prophetic lines of Tushnova:
Only my life is short,
I only firmly and bitterly believe:
you didn’t like your find -
Veronika Mikhailovna Tushnova was born on March 27, 1915 in Kazan in the family of Mikhail Tushnov, a professor of medicine at Kazan University, and his wife, Alexandra, née Postnikova, a graduate of the Higher Women's Bestuzhev Courses in Moscow. Professor Tushnov was several years older than his chosen one, and in the family everything was subject to his wishes and will, right down to serving lunch or dinner.
Veronica, a black-eyed, thoughtful girl who wrote poetry since childhood, but hid them from her father, according to his indisputable desire, immediately after graduating from school she entered the Leningrad Medical Institute (the professor’s family had settled there by that time).
Veronika Mikhailovna studied at the Faculty of Therapy for four years, but could no longer torture her soul. She was seriously interested in painting, and her poetic inspiration never left her.
At the beginning of the summer of 1941, Tushnova entered the Moscow Literary Institute named after M. Gorky. Her desire to professionally and seriously engage in poetry and philology seems to be beginning to come true.
But I didn't have to study. The war has begun. Veronica Mikhailovna's father had died by that time. All that was left was a sick mother and little daughter Natasha.
By the way, the family and personal life of Veronica Tushnova is another mystery for connoisseurs of her work, for literary scholars. Everything is hidden behind seven seals of secrets family archive, much has not been preserved, has been lost, much is kept silent...
Using her medical knowledge, Tushnova worked in hospitals as a doctor for almost all the years of the war, nursing the wounded. The work is hard, often thankless, seemingly leaving no time for “fussing” with capricious rows of poetic lines. But Tushnova, during night shifts, managed, in the light of shaded lamps, listening to the sleepy breathing and groans of the patients, all the time scribbling something in a notebook. They called her affectionately: “doctor with a notebook.”
In 1945, her poetic experiments, which she called “The First Book,” were published. It was a relatively late debut, Veronica Mikhailovna was already 29 years old, and it passed somehow unnoticed, quietly.
Probably, in the year of Victory and general rejoicing, it was necessary to write something fanfare and ceremonial. Tushnova never knew how to do this. She immediately and always had her own note of pure, piercing sadness, elegance, what the dashing “developers” from the Writers’ Union immediately called “the notorious chamber,” “rehash of far-fetched experiences” in the spirit of Akhmatova’s “salon” poems.
It is not surprising that Veronika Mikhailovna’s second book, “Roads and Roads,” will be published only ten years later, in 1954.
She simply did not dare to release it into the world. This book is based on poems, often written on the road and inspired by road meetings and impressions, meeting new people and new places. “Azerbaijani Spring” is the name of one of Tushnova’s poetic cycles.
Veronika Tushnova worked long and hard as a reviewer at the publishing house during her ten years of silence. Fiction", an essayist in the newspaper, translated from Rabindranath Tagore's interlinear versions, and she did it superbly, since she was a lyricist, “by her very lineal essence,” as she herself said.
These ten years were very difficult for Veronica Mikhailovna. She was looking for her own way in poetry. She searched hard, painfully, often losing tact and losing a lot both for her heart and for her talent.
In 1952, Tushnova wrote the poem “The Road to Klukhor”; it was also included in the 1954 book.
This poem was very well received by critics and reviewers, but today’s reader would clearly see in it some deliberateness of themes, tension of tone, rhetorical exaltation alien to the poetess, craving for scale, false pathos. In general, all the features of now almost forgotten “Soviet poetry”.
But she was so afraid of the previous harsh reproaches, ridicule, and simply “the abyss of silence - non-printing,” that she preferred to be an author who, in the words of one of the critics: “Hasn’t acquired her creative person, didn’t find my voice,” (A. Tarasenkov. Review of V. Tushnova’s collection “Roads - Roads”, 1954)
In fact, only on the last twenty pages of the collection, in the section “Poems about Happiness”, the poetess, as if having thrown off a heavy burden, suddenly became herself, sounded in full force. Arose suddenly true face writing, loving, yearning, suffering. At times it was almost portrait-accurate, unique in its living concreteness: “eyelashes molded by a blizzard, a wet wing of hair, a transparent glow of the skin, a changeable oval face” - but at the same time it was a face like thousands of others female faces, it was a soul just like them, suffering and loving, tormented and somewhere tormenting another, albeit passionately loved, person.
Each reader could feel in Tushnova’s lines his own “blizzard”, his happy and bitter moments and only his own, but such a common, understandable for everyone, anxious feeling of the inexorable passing of time and with a stubborn, slightly strange, deceptive and naive belief in happiness:
“...I will stop waiting for you,
And you will come quite suddenly.
And you will come when it is dark,
When a blizzard hits the glass...
When you remember how long ago
We didn’t keep each other warm!”
V. Tushnova “Loving people do not renounce...”
After these lines, learned and copied by hundreds of readers in notebooks, fame came to Veronica Mikhailovna. Her poetic voice gained strength and height.
The book “Memory of the Heart,” published in 1958, was already purely lyrical.
The poetess’s main theme came to the fore, displacing everything else:
There is love in the world!
The only one - in happiness and in sadness,
In sickness and in health - alone,
Same at the end as at the beginning
Which even old age is not scary.
A building not built on sand,
Not an idle invention, she
Lifetime first date
Calm and alternating thunderstorms!
A hundred thousand times rising wave!
V. Tushnova. "Your Enemy"
A beautiful, black-haired woman with sad eyes, for her characteristic and unusual beauty to the Central Russian eye she was called an “eastern beauty”, with a gentle character, who loved to give gifts, not only to relatives, but also to just friends, rushing at the first call for help at any time of the day and nights, infecting everyone with laughter, fun and genuine love for life, this beauty - a poetess, with whose poems about Love a whole generation of girls fell asleep under their pillow - she herself experienced the tragedy of “the happiness of Feeling, which illuminated her last years on Earth with its Light and gave a powerful the flow of energy to her Creativity.” This love was shared, but secret, because, as Tushnova herself wrote:
"Stands between us
Not a big sea -
Bitter grief
Someone else's heart"
V. Tushnova “Gloomy Land”
The man whom Veronika Mikhailovna loved, the poet Alexander Yashin, was married, could not leave his family, and who knows, Veronika Mikhailovna, a person who understands everything, and perceives everything acutely and subtly, - after all, poets from God have “nerves at their fingertips” "- decide on such a sharp turn of Fate, more tragic than happy? Probably not. She called her feeling “a storm that I can’t cope with” and trusted its slightest shades and overflows to her poems, like diary lines. Those who read the poems, published after the death of the poetess, in 1969, inspired by this deep and surprisingly tender feeling, could not get rid of the feeling that in their palm lay “a pulsating and bloody heart, tender, trembling in the hand and trying to warm the palms with its warmth.” Better comparison can't even imagine. Maybe that’s why Tushnova’s poetry is still alive, books are republished, placed on Internet sites and Tushnova’s lines, as light as the wings of a butterfly, by the way, created “in extreme suffering and acute happiness” (I. Snegova), are known more than details of her complex, almost tragic biography. However, such are the Fates of almost all true Poets.
Veronika Mikhailovna was dying in severe agony. Not only from a terrible illness, but also from longing for a loved one, who finally decided to let go of bitterly sinful happiness from his hands. The poetess passed away on July 7, 1965. She was barely 50 years old. There were manuscripts left on the table, unfinished pages of a poem and a new cycle of poems.
Three years after his Beloved, he died, yearning, and tossing about in this cold melancholy until last days, Alexander Yashin. The diagnosis also sounded ominous - “cancer”.
Wonderful collections of poems by Veronica Tushnova were published in the last years of her work: “Memory of the Heart” (1958), “Second Wind” (1961), “One Hundred Hours of Happiness” (1965) and posthumous book"Poems" (1969).
My page is in Izbushka - https://www.site/users/Margosha/
Miliza
Biography of Veronica Tushnova
Veronika Mikhailovna Tushnova (March 14 (27), 1915, Kazan - July 7, 1965, Moscow) - Soviet poetess, translator. Member of the USSR Writers' Union (1946).
Born into the family of a scientist, professor of medicine at Kazan University, Mikhail Tushnov. Mother - Alexandra Georgievna Postnikova, a graduate of the Higher Women's Bestuzhev Courses in Moscow.
She graduated from a school in Kazan with in-depth study of foreign languages, spoke good English and French. After school, at the insistence of her father, who saw her as a future doctor, she entered the medical faculty of Kazan University. Biographers especially note the domineering and despotic character of Veronica’s father; everything in the family was subject to his wishes and will, right down to the daily routine, serving lunch or dinner.
Then the family moved from Kazan to Leningrad, where Tushnova continued to study at the medical institute, but completed only 4 courses and never received a diploma. Soon the family moves to Moscow, where the father, as a famous scientist, gets an apartment on Novinsky Boulevard. She entered graduate school at the Moscow Institute, took up painting in the capital, and then began a serious passion for poetry. In 1938 she married psychiatrist Yuri Rozinsky. The first poems were published at the same time. From this marriage a daughter, Natalya, was born.
In 1941 he entered the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky, but did not have the chance to study there. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, together with her mother and little daughter, she was evacuated to Kazan, where she worked as a doctor in a hospital for wounded Red Army soldiers. Two years later he returns to Moscow, his first marriage breaks up. Tushnova’s second husband (from the early 1950s) was Yuri Pavlovich Timofeev, writer, Chief Editor publishing house " Child's world" They lived together for about 10 years, the separation was very difficult.
Published since 1944. She published collections of poems and poems “The First Book” (1945), published by the publishing house “Young Guard”; “Roads and Roads” (1954). The poetess’s heightened lyrical sense was revealed most fully in the last years of her life in the collections “Memory of the Heart” (1958), “One Hundred Hours of Happiness” (1965) and others, in which she talks about high love, about deep human relationships. Conducted a creative seminar at the Literary Institute named after. A.M. Gorky.
She worked as a reviewer at the publishing house “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura”, as a feature writer in the newspaper, and translated from R. Tagore’s interlinear translations.
Tushnova’s most famous poem, which immortalized her name, is “Loving Do Not Renounce.” The romance to the music of Mark Minkov and performed by Alla Pugacheva has been a constant success among listeners for decades.
In the last years of her life, Veronica was in love with the poet Alexander Yashin, which had a strong influence on her lyrics. According to testimonies, the first readers of these poems could not get rid of the feeling that in their palm lay “a pulsating and bloody heart, tender, trembling in the hand and trying to warm the palms with its warmth.” However, Yashin did not want to leave his family (he had four children). Veronica was dying not only from illness, but also from longing for her loved one, who, after painful hesitation, decided to let go of sinful happiness. In the spring of 1965, Veronica became seriously ill and ended up in the hospital, where their last date took place.
Tushnova’s latest book, “One Hundred Hours of Happiness,” is a diary of this love, written by a now seriously ill poetess.
Tushnova died in Moscow on July 7, 1965 at the age of 50 from cancer. Yashin died exactly three years later, also from cancer. She was buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery along with her parents.
Bibliography
Published collections of poetry
First book. 1945.
Ways and roads. 1954.
Road to Klukhor. 1956.
Memory of the heart. 1958.
Second wind. 1961.
Lyrics. 1963, 1969.
One hundred hours of happiness. 1965.
Poetry. 1969.
Interesting Facts
In 1952, Tushnova wrote the poem "The Road to Klukhor". (It was also included in the 1954 book.)
This poem was very well received by critics and reviewers, but today’s reader would clearly see in it some deliberateness of themes, tension of tone, rhetorical exaltation alien to the poetess, a craving for scale, false pathos: In general, all the features of the now almost forgotten “Soviet poetry” ".
But she was so afraid of the previous harsh reproaches, ridicule, and simply “the abyss of silence - non-printing,” that she preferred to be an author who, in the words of one of the critics: “Hasn’t acquired her creative personality, hasn’t found her voice,” (A. Tarasenkov. Review of V. Tushnova's collection "Roads - Roads" 1954)
It's sad to write all this... and hard.
In fact, only on the last twenty pages of the collection, in the section “Poems about Happiness,” the poetess, as if having thrown off a heavy burden, suddenly became herself and began to sound in full force! Suddenly the true face of the writer appeared—loving, yearning, suffering. At times it was almost portrait-like - precise, unique in its living concreteness: “eyelashes molded by a blizzard, a wet wing of hair, a transparent glow of the skin, a changeable oval face” - but at the same time it was a face similar to thousands of other female faces, it was definitely a soul just like they are suffering and loving, tormented and somewhere tormenting another, albeit passionately loved, person!
Each of the readers could feel in Tushnova’s lines her own “blizzard”, her happy and bitter moments and only her own, but such a common, understandable for everyone, anxious feeling of the inexorable passing of time and with a stubborn, slightly strange, deceptive and naive belief in happiness: Remember this, famous:
"...I'll stop waiting for you,
And you will come quite suddenly.
And you will come when it is dark,
When a blizzard hits the glass...
When you remember how long ago
We didn’t keep each other warm!”
V. Tushnova "They do not renounce loving..."
After these lines, learned and copied by hundreds of readers in notebooks, fame came to Veronica Mikhailovna. Her poetic voice gained strength and height.
The mystery of the year of birth
A number of biographical articles and autobiographies indicate Tushnova’s birth year as 1915. The dates 1915-1965 are engraved on the monument on the grave of Veronica Mikhailovna at the Vagankovsky cemetery, as the poetess herself wished shortly before her death. However, in the materials of the Kazan Literary Museum. M. Gorky and Tushnova’s collection “You Can Give Everything for This,” published in 2012 in the “Golden Series of Poetry,” compiled by the daughter of the poetess Natalya Rozinskaya, it is stated that Veronika Mikhailovna was born on March 27, 1911. The club of poetry lovers of Veronica Tushnova conducted research and found an extract from the registry register about her baptism in 1911. This date was confirmed by the daughter of the poetess N. Rozinskaya. The year of birth in 1911 is also confirmed by the fact that Tushnova graduated from school in 1928, and in the same year she entered the medical faculty of Kazan University, which at the age of 13 was in no way possible.
In 2011, anniversary literary events dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Veronica Tushnova were held in many cities of Russia.
Tushnova Veronika Mikhailovna (March 14 (27), 1915, Kazan - July 7, 1965, Moscow) - Russian poetess.
She was born in Kazan in the family of Mikhail Tushnov, a professor of medicine at Kazan University. She graduated from school there. I have been writing poetry since childhood; I wrote my first poems at the age of 9-10 years. At the insistence of her father, she entered the medical department of Kazan University. Then I studied at medical institute in Leningrad, where the family had moved by that time, but did not graduate from college, although she studied for four years. She took up painting, and then a serious passion for poetry began.
At the beginning of the summer of 1941, Tushnova entered the Moscow Literary Institute named after M. Gorky: Her desire to professionally and seriously engage in poetry and philology seems to be beginning to come true.
But the war began. Veronica Tushnova's father had died by that time, leaving her sick mother and little daughter in her arms. Using her medical knowledge, Tushnova worked in hospitals as a doctor for almost all the years of the war, nursing the wounded. And she continued to write poetry... They called her affectionately: “doctor with a notebook.”
In 1945, the publishing house "Young Guard" published the first poetry collection Tushnova, which she called “The First Book”. It was a relatively late debut - Veronika Mikhailovna was already 29 years old - and it passed somehow unnoticed, quietly... Veronika Tushnova’s second book, “Roads and Roads,” will see the light only ten years later, in 1954. This book is based on poems, often written on the road and inspired by road meetings and impressions, meeting new people and new places. “Azerbaijani Spring” is the name of one of Tushnova’s poetic cycles.
In the interval between two books, Tushnova worked a lot and persistently: as a reviewer at the publishing house “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura”, as a feature writer in a newspaper, she translated from Rabindranath Tagore’s interlinear translations, and she did it superbly, since she was a lyricist, “by her very lineal essence,” as she herself said . She was looking for her own path in poetry. I searched hard, painfully, often losing tact and losing a lot both for my heart and for my talent.
In 1952 Tushnova wrote the poem “The Road to Klukhor”. (It was also included in the 1954 book.) This poem was very well received by critics and reviewers. Tushnova’s talent truly revealed itself only in last period her works: the collections “Memory of the Heart” (1958), “Second Wind” (1961) and “One Hundred Hours of Happiness” (1965). Love is a cross-cutting theme in her poems; grief and joy, loss and hope, present and future are associated with it. She spoke loudly about love and called for truly human relationships between people. On love lyrics Tushnova was strongly influenced by her love for the poet Alexander Yashin, who was married and could not leave his family.
