Poet Nikolai Mayorov: biography, creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

They belonged to the generation of the forties and went down in history as aspiring poets whose talent was ruined by a ruthless war: Mikhail Kulchitsky, Pavel Kogan, Vsevolod Bagritsky, Boris Bogatkov … Nikolai Petrovich Mayorov, the author of the famous poems on behalf of a whole generation - "We".

Begin biography

Their fathers are people who were born at the turn of two eras: those who found tsarism and went through the crucible of the First World War, the revolution and the Civil War. They believed in a better future and this belief was passed on to their children. Nikolai Mayorov, whose biography is inseparable from the history of the country, was born into a working class family in May 1919. His homeland is the small village of Durovka, Simbirsk province. There the family ended up passing through on the way to the Vladimir province, the father's homeland. But already at the age of ten, together with his parents and older brothers, he moved to Ivanovo, where Pyotr Maksimovich built a house on 1st Aviation Street.

While studying at school number 9 (now school number 26), Nikolai Petrovich attended a literary circle and was known as the best school poet. ATone of his handwritten notebooks contains illustrations by Nikolai Sheberstov, who later became a famous artist. It was his friends who subsequently collected the poet's poems bit by bit and restored the pages of his biography, because they believed in his undeniable talent.

School poems

According to the recollections of friends, in his school years, Nikolai Mayorov was embarrassed when he was ranked among the poets. And those, on the contrary, joked about this and, going into the bookstore with the whole gang, in his presence they asked the seller if a book of poems by the famous poet Nikolai Mayorov had come out. To understand his destiny, the young man sent his first poetic experience to Moscow, to a reputable publishing house. "Fiction" gave him a rebuke, analyzing the sent material in the most detailed way. Today, no one does such analyzes, but then it was mandatory.

In response, he was reproached for the poverty of his vocabulary and worn-out epithets. I wonder if the editor knew that he was answering a thirteen-year-old boy, and not an adult? In 1960, Mikhail Kulchitsky's sister published the first three handwritten notebooks of Mayorov, where the poet's school work appears before readers. This is the collection "Ukhaby", where a sad prophecy slips to himself, mini-poems and fairy tales that already speak of genre diversity, and lyrics associated with the poet's first love with a girl from the "Moscow street".

Education

The third notebook refers already to the Moscow period, when Nikolai Mayorov became a student at Moscow State University. He entered the Faculty of History in 1937, while Boris Slutsky, Mikhail Lukonin, David Samoilov, well-known in youth circles, who formed the first literary circle, studied at others. The student of the history department, who wrote excitedly, was soon recognized as one of his own and more and more often invited to read poetry in front of a student audience that fell in love with him immediately and unconditionally.

Success inspired the author, and in 1939, in parallel, he began to study at the Literary Institute, attending the poetry seminar of Pavel Antokolsky, a famous Soviet poet. His peer Mikhail Kulchitsky, who studied with him, will leave memories where he will call his friend a “lump”, that landmark that everyone wanted to reach for. His first poems will be printed by the Moscow State University newspaper, and remained the only publication that published Mayorov's works during his lifetime.

Finnish war

Nikolai Mayorov's elder brother Alexei served in aviation. And in 1938, he himself witnessed the death of pilots on the outskirts of Ivanovo. They were buried with honors, putting a screw of a crashed plane on the grave instead of a tombstone. Nikolai called it "the memory of the height they took", writing wonderful poems, in which, along with the pathos of citizenship and the poeticization of war, a note of an early soldier's death appeared.

His friend from Ivanovo Vladimir Zhukov will end up on the Karelian Isthmus, becoming a participant in the Finnish war. World War II had already begun and was showing its true meaning, bringing death and suffering. Zhukov was seriously wounded, and after the hospital, friends thought for a long time about what it was like to conduct aimed fire at the enemy,experience fear in battle and survive the wound, forever remaining disabled. Even then, Nikolai Mayorov, whose poems about the premonition of early death saw the light, understood that he could not escape a machine-gun company in the future.

Love

The poet's muse was his classmate Irina Ptashnikova, whose passion for archeology did not allow the lovers to join their lives. After the first year, they dreamed of getting married, but Irina left for an archaeological expedition to Khorezm. It was difficult for a creative person to understand this, and Nikolai Mayorov will write touching poems “To You”, in which he will also put Irina in second place after poetry. Irina will not forgive her lover's youthful maximalism, and they will begin to move away from each other.

Fellow students understand that it is difficult for two strong personalities defending their independence to build relationships. But they will remain friends to the last, and Nikolai will write letters to her from the front, and at the evening of his memory, a woman will read by heart a huge number of his poems, many of which were dedicated to her.

The Great Patriotic War

From the first days of the war, the expectation of which was felt from the beginning of the forties, student Moscow was sent to dig anti-tank ditches near Yelnya. The entire literary circle is striving for the front, and already in September Nikolai Mayorov, whose biography in the future will not differ much from the biography of his friends, will go to Ivanovo to arrive at the military registration and enlistment office. After going through the formalities in October, he will be drafted into the Red Army.

Designed as an assistant to the political instructor, he will be inas part of a machine-gun company of rifle division No. 331, participating in battles on Smolensk soil.

The death of a poet

About the Rzhev-Vyazemsky operation in the winter of 1942 for a long time tried not to mention. The offensive tactics of the Red Army did not lead to success and choked in the blood of thousands of soldiers and officers who called the places near Rzhev "the valley of death." In forty-degree frost for months, the rifle regiment, in which Nikolai Petrovich Mayorov served, held the village of Barantsevo in the Smolensk region. Here, on February 8, an assistant political officer fell, whose grave could not be found for a long time.

Irina Ptashnikova unsuccessfully searched for the remains of her friend, buried, as it turned out, in a mass grave along with seven comrades. Later, the participants in the battles in the infamous Karmanovsky ledge were reburied in Karmanovo, where a commemorative memorial was created.

Legacy

Nikolai Mayorov is one of the poets whose poems were not known to the general public during his lifetime, but he became the herald of a whole generation. His friend Vladimir Zhukov published some of his poems in local newspapers, and in 1962 he published a collection called "We", bit by bit collecting the memories of friends and colleagues. Nikolai Mayorov, whose work has not been fully studied so far, handed over the suitcases with manuscripts to one of his friends for safekeeping. Unfortunately, they have not been found so far. Already in 2013, early works were found in the archive (RGALI), but this is only a small part of what the author wrote. His poems "Sculptor" and "Family" have survived only in fragments.

PoemsNikolai Mayorov about the war, or rather, about its premonition on behalf of "we are the generation" are included in the top of the best works along with the work of Konstantin Simonov and Alexander Tvardovsky, Anna Akhmatova and Olga Berggolts. Posthumously, he became a member of the Writers' Union, which in itself is a unique fact. A street in Ivanovo is named after him, and by the 70th anniversary of the Victory, the Karmanovskaya school also won the right to bear the name of an outstanding poet. Nikolai Mayorov, as P. Antokolsky said, will forever remain young in people's memory, like his lines:

We were tall, blond hair. You will read in books, like a myth, About people who left without having finished smoking their last cigarette.