What books accompanied our soldiers during the war

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

"Literature in the days of the war becomes a truly popular voice of the heroic soul of the people." The truth of these words of Alexei Tolstoy is found in many facts and documents of the Great Patriotic War.

Send books

“I just asked the foreman: have you sent any books? “Yes,” he replied. Not only the parcel, but also the letter could not be opened. The guys were covered with such mortar fire that it was impossible to lift their heads out of the gap. It was only in the evening, going down into a deep hollow, that they made a blackout cover and read the letter. How much joy and delight! All the soldiers asked me to write to the staff of your library the next day …"

This letter of gratitude, written with the hand of a soldier Mikhail Melnikov, sewn with a splinter and sent from a military hospital, is one of the many testimonies of the invaluable importance of books during the fiery years of the Great Patriotic War. Someone went through the whole war with a volume of their favorite poems, someone - with Nikolai Ostrovsky's novel "How the Steel Was Tempered", and someone served as a front-line comrade in an astronomy textbook.

Books were picked up in the libraries of bombed-out cities, found in destroyed houses, received by front-line mail from division headquarters, taken to the front from short-term vacations … “I missed the books terribly. In one village we found "Eugene Onegin", so we read it out to its holes. Every free minute they read it aloud with rapture,”Ariadna Dobromyslova, a sanitary instructor of the 308th rifle division, told her family in a letter.

The poems copied by hand were hidden in the tops of their boots - and they bravely went into battle. In between battles, they organized collective readings to fellow soldiers. They also used books for the exchange of military information - writing down the information collected by the underground workers between the lines and sending them to the front line.

Legends of book miracles were passed from mouth to mouth. Alexei Tolstoy's novel "Peter the First" saved the life of the soldier Georgy Leonov: a bullet got stuck in a thick tome hidden under his tunic. Senior Lieutenant Pyotr Mishin survived the battle thanks to a collection of Pushkin's poems: having broken through two hundred pages, a shell fragment stopped exactly … before the poem "Talisman"!

The names of the writers were assigned to military units and military equipment: a detachment named after Gorky, named after Lermontov; tank "Vladimir Mayakovsky", "aircraft Dmitry Furmanov" … Pushkin was brought into the crew of one of the patrol ships of the Northern Fleet. In one of the divisions, Maxim Gorky served as an "honorary Red Army soldier", his name was called out every day in practice.

The commander of one of the units of the Ukrainian Front presented the poetry collection "Kobzar" by Taras Shevchenko as a challenge prize to the distinguished soldiers. The young writer Ivan Dmitrochenko, appointed commander of one of the guns on the Leningrad Front, punished his soldiers: “For Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev - fire! For "War and Peace" - Fire! For the great Russian literature - fire!.."

The archives contain numerous letters asking the front line to send books. “Among battles, there is a time when you want to read at least a little … If possible, send something from books of fiction. Old, shabby, better if unbound, so that you can store in a duffel bag or field bag,”wrote the Red Army soldier A. P. Stroinin to librarians.

Doublet copies from libraries were sent to the front. There were regular collections of books from the civilian population. Home-made books were made from newspaper clippings. In the first year of the war, poems were even printed on bags of food concentrates.

Book-military doctor

The role of books in hospitals is invaluable. Readings aloud and literary evenings were organized for the wounded. The greatest demand was for entertainment literature: adventures, detective stories, fairy tales, feuilletons - everything that could distract from pain and cheer up. And the most widely read novels were "War and Peace" by Tolstoy, "The Gadfly" by Voynich, "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Ostrovsky.

Bibliotherapeutic subjects are presented in the front-line drawings of Nikolai Zhukov, People's Artist of the USSR. A talented illustrator and graphic artist, he met Victory in Vienna with the rank of captain, made sketches at the Nuremberg trials - in 40 days he created about 400 images of all its participants.

Chief among the Russian classics who fought heroically along with our soldiers was Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. This is evidenced by non-contrived frontline stories and literary works about the war. Memorial certificates and museum exhibits remind of this.

The story of a Pushkin collection sent to the front by a young Muscovite with the inscription: “From the girls of the plant named after Stalin as a gift. Read, dear comrades, and love Pushkin's poems. This is my favorite poet, but I decided to send this book - you need it more, remember us. We make weapons for you. Warm greetings. Vera Goncharova.

In the summer of 1942, in the destroyed library of the city of Boguchar, Sergeant Stepan Nikolenko discovered a surviving volume of Pushkin's poems and did not part with it until Warsaw, until a Nazi plane dived into the convoy. As soon as he woke up in the hospital, Stepan first of all inquired about the fate of the cherished book.

An echo of this poignant story is in the famous poem by Vera Inber: “… In the hospital for a long time, he lay exhausted, as if dead, on a pillow. And the first thing he asked, Having regained consciousness: "- And Pushkin?" And the voice of a friend, hurrying, answered Him: "Pushkin is alive."

In the harsh winter of the same year, Sergeant Boris Poletaev ended up in a death camp near Shauliai with a one-volume book of Pushkin's lyrics. Reading aloud helped to survive in inhuman conditions. As one of the prisoners said, "Pushkin is here, in the sixth barracks, like a regimental commissar: he raises the spirit of the people." Now this priceless book - already completely dilapidated and having lost its cover - is kept in the gift cabinet of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin.

And the Moscow Defense Museum is justly proud of the "Group portrait of the descendants of Alexander Pushkin - participants in the Great Patriotic War" by Vladimir Pereyaslavets. On one canvas, while reading poetry of their great great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, an aircraft mechanic-mechanic, a militia fighter, a seaman of the Baltic Fleet, a commander of a communications department, a commander of a combat crew of an anti-aircraft regiment and a partisan of a special purpose detachment converged.

The artist who served in the war as a fighter pilot created a fictional plot: the depicted never gathered in such a composition. Their meeting became a symbol of national unity under the auspices of the great national Literature. The same idea is in the wonderful poem of the front-line poet Sergei Smirnov: "… But Pushkin, our great Russian genius, Walked with us into the battle for the honor of his land: We all carried his collected works Not in duffel bags, but in memory!"

May 5, 1945 entered History as an excerpt from Pushkin's "Snowstorm", which was read by the actress of the Moscow Art Theater Nina Mikhailovskaya at the destroyed Reichstag

… “When I came to my company, I learned that some of the books had died with my comrades in arms. Kogan was killed by a shell while reading Goncharov's book. The books of Gorky and Ostrovsky were blown away by a direct mine, and there were no traces of them,”Mikhail Melnikov, a soldier who had returned to service, continued to tell the librarians in a letter to the librarians. “So in the battles for the Carpathians we fought together with books, and those who were destined to die died with them.”