Prominent Russians: Robert Rozhdestvensky

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Robert Rozhdestvensky represents a whole epoch in Soviet poetry.

The 1960s saw an unheard of poetry boom that few of the previous epochs can rival. This was a time of political "thaw" when democratic winds broke through the ice wall of communist ideology and heralded new trends in Soviet literature and art. Thousands of people flooded the halls of the Polytechnical Museum to listen to the young poets such as Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Evgeny Yevtushenko.

Many remember Rozhdestvensky reciting his poems in a soft, yet powerful voice that mesmerized his listeners. This is what he wrote in his autobiography: "In his poems the author always tells about himself, about his thoughts and feelings, even when he writes about space achievements."

Rozhdestvensky was a public man in the true sense of the word. He traveled extensively throughout Russia, meeting with all sorts of people and versifying his life experience in his poetry.

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Robert Rozhdestvensky was born in the village of Kosikha in the Altay Region into the family of the NKVD member Stanislav Nikodimovich Petkevich. Robert didn’t remember much about his father as his parents divorced in 1937. His dad died in the World War II. Robert lived in Omsk until the age of 13 when the family moved to another city, and later to another, often changing places, as his stepfather served in the army. His mother was a doctor. During the Second World War while his parents served in the army Robert was moved from one state to another.

After the war his stepfather was posted to Karelia, in northern Russia, where Robert graduated from the historical-philosophical faculty of Petrozavodsk University. The family then moved to Moscow, where Robert graduated from the military musical college.

In late June 1941, just after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Robert, barely eight, wrote his first poem. This helped him in 1951 to become a student of the Moscow Gorky Literary Institute, where he graduated in 1956. While still a student he became a member of the powerful Union of Soviet Writers, a rare achievement for a man of 22. Membership gave him the opportunity to publish his first verse collection, “Flagi vesny” (“Flags of Spring”) in 1955. He then published two collections of poetry, “The Test” and “My Love,” both in 1956.

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After Khrushchev's overthrow and Brezhnev's taking power, Rozhdestvensky became a senior member of the board of the USSR Union of Writers. In 1971, he was elected a member of the Secretariat of the Union, a powerful group that decided who should be published and who should not. In 1972 he was awarded the Lenin Komsomol prize for young Communists, at the age of 40. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1977 and in 1979 received a Lenin Prize.

In 1970, Rozhdestvensky's “Requiem” appeared in book form and his former teacher at the military musical college, the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky, wrote a score for it. All the while the most important real requiem, written by Anna Akhmatova, in 1935-43, and dedicated to her arrested son, remained unpublished in the Soviet Union (it was published in Munich in 1963).

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Rozhdestvensky's two-volume “Selected Works” was published in 1979 and his three-volume “Complete Works” in 1985. At one time he had his own program, “Documentary Screen,” on Soviet television, in which he presented much official propaganda against the West. He was also accused of anti-Americanism. In 1964, he was part of a group of Soviet artists who visited the United States. While at Yale University, he was criticized by a faculty member as an anti-American writer for a poem that implied that the Americans might have helped the Nazis against Russia during World War II.

Rozhdestvensky played quite a role in official public affairs. He was a senior member of the propagandist Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace, financed by the Soviet government and a member of the World Peace Council, on whose behalf he often traveled abroad. He was also chairman of various literary committees and a deputy of Moscow’s City Council. He lived with his wife, a literary critic, and two daughters in an apartment at 9 Gorky Street, a building that housed much of the Soviet elite.

As a cultural emissary of the Soviet government abroad during Brezhnev's, Andropov's and Chernenko's time, Rozhdestvensky wrote poems for newspapers back home on political events or on space flights of which he had read in Pravda and Izvestia – “a paper which for me is as heroin is for a drug addict,” as he wrote in his poem “Hunger.”

Rozhdestvensky will be remembered as a noteworthy poet of the liberal Soviet 1960s. In later life he was seen in public in the company of leading cultural figures and presented the public persona of an outstanding Russian poet in favor of democracy.

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Many of his poems were set to music and became popular songs, and although he never conceived them as such, one can feel music in every line he wrote.

The famous Russian singer Iosif Kobzon says: "His poetry will survive for centuries. I am not afraid of sounding pathetic. Rozhdestvensky's ‘Requiem’ is immortal. In this poem he curses wars. Had he written nothing more, he would still have immortalized himself in the memory of future generations."

MONUMENT TO SOLDIER ALYOSHA IN PLOVDIV
Translated by Alec Vagapov

The view from here is as wide as the ocean,
The horizon is almost dissolved in haze.
Like a guardian angel
Soldier Alyosha
Over Plovdiv-city
Is raised.
Alyosha, the sculptor has made a mistake.
Your looks must have cramped his style
His knowledge of you must have been quite vague
Or, perhaps, it was absolute null.
You look like a boulder, sleepy and gray,
A sort of a dumb rock.
You're sullen in the stone
While you used to be merry
And were always
Willing to talk...
The haze will fall on the motionless forest
Making it tenderly blue...
Alyosha, now I am almost
Ten years older than you...
I just grew up after the war
But I am courageous enough.
I have seen a lot,
You have seen much more,
You have known the loss of life...
It's no good to disturb the dead.
I'd better give up. Quit. Lay off...
Instead of asking: «Alyosha, how's death?»
I ask: «Alyosha, how is life?»
My question may sound strange, pure fluff,
I just have to clear up this thing:
Do I, in fact, live the kind of life
For which you once ceased living?
Believe me,
it's my constant exam!
I'm taking it all the time.
I look at my own self, with bias
Through your merciless eyes.
And I cannot hide myself from these eyes,
They don't set my mind at rest...
I have to account for two lives!
I've got two hearts in my chest!
No danger will make me fearful or anxious
For a soldier looks into my mind.
Alyosha, I'm leaving for Russia.
What shall I tell your mama?

Written by Tatyana Klevantseva for RT