Группа по работе с архивными документами

Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center — Archival Documents Working Group
17 December 2014

Archival Documents Working Group

The group prepares scholarly publications based on newly discovered documentary evidence. Vladimir N. Gelfand's diary for 1941–1946 (he served as a mortar man, first as a private and later as a lieutenant) has been prepared for publication. Work is also under way on the collection “The Second World War: Jews at War.”

Head of the group: Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor at the Higher School of Economics, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences.

Below are excerpts from V. N. Gelfand's diary.

26 April 1941

[...]

But I will return to Beba.1 I began to like her at the very end of the school year, in the fifth grade. I do not remember exactly how it happened. I only know that before then there had not even been a hint of any feelings for her; more than that, I do not even remember anything about her, and until the moment I became infatuated with her she had never once appeared on the horizon of my heart.

27 April 1941

Sunday literary gathering.

My head aches. After the Sunday gathering. So many impressions. Much has to be thought over, much recalled, and only then put down on paper. The best source of recollections is bed. So — to bed, to memories, to sleep. Until tomorrow...

1 May 1941

Neither the next day nor the day after did I manage to tell about the latest literary Sunday gathering, held on 27 April. And now it is already the first of May, new events again, and once again I have no opportunity to write about them this evening. Well then, it will probably have to be postponed again until... tomorrow. Until which tomorrow?...

2 May 1941

No. Today. Today at last! So, about the Sunday gathering? Well then, listen, my diary, take into yourself, my only friend, the secrets of my soul.

Looking through the latest issue of Dneprovskaya Pravda, I found the long-awaited announcement of the Sunday gathering — and, I think, a very belated one.2

A Sunday gathering had not been convened for a very long time, longer than ever before, and therefore the program of the forthcoming literary gathering promised to be interesting. Cherishing this hope, I went to Lena Malkina, with whom I had arranged to go there. She had been waiting for me for some time, and I met her as she was coming down the stairs of her house.

It was already 12:20 in the afternoon and I was in a hurry. But Lena wanted to invite another girl, an eighth-grade pupil, to the gathering. “You absolutely must meet her,” she said. I did not object. But when I saw the girl I remembered that I had already met her more than once at the lecture hall, at lectures devoted to writers and literature. Her name was also Lena.

Another ten minutes passed while she got ready. Finally she came out and we set off. From our conversation on the way I learned that Lena No. 2 was very well read, highly developed intellectually and a sensible girl. I learned even more about her after the gathering.

But about the gathering itself. We arrived by tram, at approximately [illegible]. I entered first, my companions after me; I went farther in and sat down, but for some time they remained standing by the door. Therefore I did not hear what the man with handsome, apparently black eyes, a low forehead and a self-satisfied face said at the beginning — I was occupied with the two Lenas. Only when they finally sat down and Lena Malkina told me that this was the very Utkin3 whom she had once heard at some institute and had already told me about did I begin listening to his words.

He spoke a great deal, spoke beautifully, and in every phrase deliberately emphasized his own popularity in Moscow as a poet. A poet, he said, must be original and unlike others. Yet in the poems of young beginning poets one often cannot determine not only their personal creative motives, experiences and observations, but even their sex and age. This happens because many beginners imagine the literary profession to be easy and therefore fail to understand the full complexity of a writer's work. But, he said, things were already moving toward a stricter standard for writers, one that would severely clip the wings of seekers of easy fame and force them to return to their proper occupations.

“We know that everywhere in industry staffs are now being reduced at the expense of workers unable to cope with their jobs. We writers must also reduce our staffs and send incapable poets down into the mines. I already spoke about this at the latest meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers4 under my chairmanship. Bear in mind: I spoke after S. Kirsanov.5 I can read you an excerpt from my speech.”

And he began reading about his own appearance in Moscow from Literaturnaya Gazeta,6 obligingly handed to him by the local writers sitting on the presidium. “‘Utkin said,’” he read, choking with self-satisfaction, “‘Utkin proposed,’” and so on and so forth.7

At last, apparently realizing that he had gone too far in praising himself, he abandoned the praise for a short pause, only to return to it again and never part with it until the end. He moved on to songs, though here too he remained true to himself.

“People often ask me how I regard Lebedev-Kumach.8 I want to answer that question here. How can Lebedev-Kumach's popularity be explained? By the love of the Russian and other Soviet peoples for song.” From Lebedev-Kumach he moved on to pre-revolutionary songwriters — Sumarokov,9 Merzlyakov10 and many others — quoting passages from their songs.

“But all of them,” Utkin continued, “have long been forgotten, and many are known only to literary scholars. And these were once popular songs. Alongside them stood poets such as Pushkin and Lermontov, who were not songwriters, and not only have they not been forgotten, the entire Soviet people still knows and loves them. Mayakovsky, moreover, never wrote a single song.” On this basis Utkin allowed himself to classify song as a genre not purely literary but an appendage to the main body of artistic poetry.

He explained Lebedev-Kumach's popularity by the same popular love for song. Lebedev-Kumach was a songwriter; that was his strength and distinguishing feature. His merits had been recognized by the government, which took account of the tastes of a people singing Lebedev-Kumach's songs from one end of the country to the other. Yet Lebedev-Kumach's poems themselves were weak. Utkin had said this more than once to his poet friends, including Aseyev.11 Once, when Vasily Ivanovich Lebedev-Kumach sent him a collection of poems to edit, Utkin wrote to him directly that the poems were no good and should not be published. But Lebedev-Kumach did not listen to Utkin himself and published the collection anyway. Since then the two poets had not spoken.

Several times Utkin repeated that Moscow was the center and Dnepropetrovsk the provinces: “In Moscow we have already eliminated such a state of affairs [in creative work — ? illegible]. Perhaps it has not yet reached you in the provinces? At the center everyone knows this already, while in Dnepropetrovsk it is probably still unknown. In Moscow we have long since created conditions under which just any scribbler cannot become a poet. We do not have at the center the ‘common pot’ theory that is widespread everywhere. Mayakovsky writes, for example; I write — we write with blood — and then some poet writing with filth from a drainpipe proposes that his poems be combined with ours. And together it is to be called the work of Utkin, Mayakovsky and some other poet not even worth attention? I do not even wish to know such a person. A poet is a flower. I am a flower. And am I supposed to fuss about with just anybody? I once had such a case: some poet wanted to meet me, but I would not even let him approach. A poet must be original to the end. Is it originality to shake hands with every Tom, Dick and Harry?”

And the farther he went, the more there was. He said that thanks to him a phrase by the poet Baratynsky12 had spread throughout Moscow: “I had the modesty not to follow Pushkin.” He said... but one cannot remember everything.

At last he finished and the “debate” began.

Ortenberg, a critic,13 spoke first. He is a man of respectable age, with a face typical of most critics, a head crowned by an honorable bald patch, and a predatory, fault-finding gaze. All his speeches are unsuccessful: shallow, empty and unbearably captious. He is often and heavily criticized by those whom he attacks in turn; people laugh at him and throw offensive insults in his direction. But he does not lose heart or become confused, as they say. He speaks again, accuses again, and again is himself accused and insulted.

Today he spoke too. I could never stand this Ortenberg and usually could barely conceal my annoyance when he spoke. But today... I was ready to applaud him — and did applaud — when he defended Dnepropetrovsk's right to more tactful treatment of its inhabitants. “Well, we are the provinces,” Ortenberg said with bitter irony. During his speech Utkin, sprawled insolently in his chair, interrupted him with questions such as: “Do you know what lyric poetry is?” Ortenberg answered.

2 July 1941

The war changed all my plans for the summer vacation. I had already passed almost all my examinations and only mathematics remained, the most difficult subject and the one I liked least. I had promised myself to study tirelessly every day so that I would be free during the summer and able to spend the vacation well.

On the 22nd of last month, together with Olya14 and her friends Valya Iashkova [? — ed.] and Maya Belokopytova, I attended a performance by the Maly Theatre, then touring Dnepropetrovsk.15 They performed A. N. Ostrovsky's comedy “Truth Is Good, but Happiness Is Better.”16 The comedy was performed by famous People's and Honored Artists of the Union and the republic and was a great success despite the weakness of the plot characteristic of Ostrovsky's early works.

Cheerful and excited by the performance, we left the auditorium of the Gorky Drama Theatre.17 The streets and trams were crowded with people hurrying about. People were hanging from the tram steps, and it was only with difficulty that we managed to get aboard and then get off at the stop we needed.

At Olya's house we learned that Germany had declared war on us. It was terrible and unexpected.

Olya was summoned to school, and because her mother was not at home I went with her. All the pupils had already assembled. Komsomol members and non-members alike were pasting paper over windows, digging pits, bustling about, making noise, and generally behaving in an extraordinary manner; this shook my disbelief in what had happened.

Then the pupils began gathering around the radio loudspeaker. I approached too and heard Comrade Molotov's speech.18 There was no longer any basis for disbelief; I had to accept the fact that it had happened.

The next day I went to the workers' faculty19 and from then until my departure for the countryside worked there without interruption.20

Notes

1. Berta Davydovna Koifman (1924–2007), a school friend of Vladimir Gelfand with whom he corresponded throughout the war. In 1949 she became his wife.

2. Dneprovskaya Pravda was a weekly newspaper published in Dnepropetrovsk from 1938. The issue of 26 April 1941 (No. 98, p. 4) carried an announcement entitled “The Next Literary and Artistic Sunday Gathering,” signed by the editors of the newspaper Bilshovytska zmina and the regional branch of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine: “The next literary and artistic Sunday gathering will take place on 27 April in the meeting hall of the editorial office of the newspaper Zorya (88 Karl Marx Avenue). It begins at exactly one o'clock in the afternoon.” No report about the event could be found in subsequent issues of the newspaper.

3. Iosif Pavlovich Utkin (1903–1944), poet and journalist, participant in the Civil War. He began his literary career in Irkutsk. In the mid-1920s he was sent by the Komsomol to study at the Institute of Journalism in Moscow. In 1925 he published the poem “The Tale of Red-Haired Motel...” about changes brought by the revolution to the life of a Jewish shtetl; it was highly praised by Maxim Gorky. In 1927 his First Book of Poems appeared, and the same year he was sent abroad with the poets A. Zharov and A. Bezymensky, visiting Gorky in Sorrento. The poem “Sweet Childhood,” written “with Gorky's blessing,” received negative reviews. Until the end of the 1930s critics accused Utkin of philistinism and pandering to ordinary tastes. Nevertheless, in the second half of the 1930s he published several collections, including Selected Poems (1935), Poems (1937) and Lyrics (1939), becoming one of the most popular lyric poets of the period. He was published in Ogonyok, Prozhektor and Smena and in Pravda, Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda and other newspapers. In the summer of 1941 Utkin toured cities in the southern USSR and therefore happened to be in Dnepropetrovsk. After the war began he went to the front. In September 1941, in fighting near Yelnya, a mine fragment tore off four fingers of his right hand. In the summer of 1942 he returned to the front as a special Sovinformburo correspondent for Pravda and Izvestia and took part in combat. In the summer of 1944 his final collection, About the Motherland, Friendship and Love, appeared. He died on 13 November 1944 near Moscow in an air crash while returning from partisan territory.

4. The Union of Soviet Writers, established in 1934, of which I. Utkin was a member.

5. Semyon Isaakovich Kirsanov (1906–1972), poet. He was close to V. V. Mayakovsky and published in the journal LEF. In the 1920s he published actively, bringing out six books in four years: Experiments, Winter Pictures (1927), My Birthday Poem (1928), Conversation with Furmanov (1928), The Last Contemporary and The Floor Is Given to Kirsanov (1930). From the early 1930s he worked in the genre of verse journalism: Lines of Construction (1930), Poems in the Ranks (1932), the poem Five-Year Plan (1932), and others. He joined the USSR Writers' Union in 1934. From the mid-1930s he achieved nationwide fame. In 1936 he took part in a tour by Soviet poets through European countries. At the end of the 1930s he returned to lyric poetry, publishing Your Poem (1937), Cape of Desire (1938), Poem of Poets (1939), and others.

6. A weekly literary and socio-political newspaper. It began publication in April 1929 on Maxim Gorky's initiative as the organ of the Federation of Associations of Soviet Writers. In 1932–1934 it was the organ of the organizing committees of the Unions of Soviet Writers of the USSR and RSFSR; after the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 it became the organ of the board of the USSR Writers' Union.

7. This refers to the article “High Demands: At the Conference of Writers from the Territories and Regions” (Literaturnaya Gazeta, 20 April 1941, No. 16, p. 6), which quoted statements by I. Utkin during discussion of works by Soviet poets. Among other things the report quoted Utkin criticizing N. Rylenkov for being dominated by literary tradition and rhythm and described a sharp, almost unanimous criticism of poems by Ivan Molchanov of Irkutsk. Utkin warned Molchanov against complacency arising from his position as the region's “leading” poet, saying that his work over the preceding fifteen years had followed “the calendar of literary fashion” and lost creative resistance to cliché. Criticism of Molchanov's composition and form also led Utkin to raise the broader disputed question of rhyme. According to the newspaper report, S. Kirsanov did not speak at that writers' meeting; Gelfand may have confused him with Ilya Ehrenburg, after whose mention the newspaper moved on to Utkin's speech.

8. Vasily Ivanovich Lebedev-Kumach (1898–1949), poet and lyricist, author of the words to many popular Soviet songs, including “March of the Merry Fellows” (“My heart is light from a merry song...,” 1934, from the film Jolly Fellows, music by I. O. Dunayevsky), “Wide Is My Native Land” (1936, from the film Circus, music by Dunayevsky), “Merry Wind” (1936, from The Children of Captain Grant, music by Dunayevsky), and “The Sacred War” (1941, music by A. V. Alexandrov). Winner of the Stalin Prize in 1941.

9. Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov (1717–1777), poet, writer and dramatist, author of popular love songs circulated in manuscript copies.

10. Alexei Fyodorovich Merzlyakov (1778–1830), literary critic, translator, poet and professor at Moscow University, author of popular songs and romances including “Solitude” (“Amid the Level Valley”), “I Never Thought I Would Grieve for Anything in the World,” “Dark-Browed, Dark-Eyed Bold Young Man,” and “Waiting” (“It Is Painful for a Maiden to Wait for Her Beloved”), among others.

11. Nikolai Nikolayevich Aseyev (1889–1963), poet. From 1914 he belonged to the futurist group Centrifuge, which also included Boris Pasternak; from 1923 he belonged to LEF and was part of Mayakovsky's closest circle of friends; from 1934 he was a member of the USSR Writers' Union.

12. Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (Boratynsky) (1800–1844), poet and friend of Alexander Pushkin.

13. This probably refers to Samuil Petrovich Ortenberg, who in the 1930s and 1940s headed academic affairs at the Jewish Industrial Technical School — the only educational institution in the USSR where teaching was conducted in Yiddish. In addition to teaching he engaged in literary work, including an article “Pushkin in the Light of Russian Criticism” published in the poet's jubilee year of 1937; he wrote for journals and newspapers and participated in Jewish public and cultural life. Ortenberg's diary entries were published by his son under the title The Fabric of Life (Jerusalem, 2004). A journal version appeared in the collection A Time to Seek (2006, No. 11).

14. A first cousin of V. N. Gelfand, daughter of Eva (née Gorodynskaya) and Anatoly Shtul.

15. In June 1941 the Maly Theatre went on tour in Ukraine, splitting into two groups. One part of the troupe began the tour in Dnepropetrovsk; the other went to Western Ukraine. The theatre's previous tour in Dnepropetrovsk had been in 1936. This time it brought productions of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Gogol's The Government Inspector, Ostrovsky's Wolves and Sheep and Truth Is Good, but Happiness Is Better, Sukhovo-Kobylin's Krechinsky's Wedding, Eugène Scribe's A Glass of Water, and V. Gusev's Glory. The tour was covered extensively in the local press. An article entitled “The Great Success of the Maly Theatre Tour” in Dneprovskaya Pravda of 24 June 1941 reported that over the preceding nineteen days the theatre had given twenty-two performances attended by about thirty-five thousand spectators and that the tour would continue until 28 June.

16. Ostrovsky's comedy Truth Is Good, but Happiness Is Better had been staged at the Maly Theatre branch in the 1940/41 season, only a few months before the tour, directed by B. I. Nikolsky with designs by B. G. Knoblok. A review by Al. Beilinov, “Truth Is Good, but Happiness Is Better (A Production of the Moscow Maly Theatre),” appeared in Dneprovskaya Pravda on 22 June 1941.

17. The Russian Drama Theatre of Dnepropetrovsk was founded in 1927 on the basis of the Moscow Maly Theatre troupe then touring the city. It occupied the former Winter Theatre, built in 1906–1907. In the late 1920s and early 1930s almost all of Maxim Gorky's plays were staged there; in 1934 the theatre was named after him.

18. At noon on 22 June 1941, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs V. M. Molotov made a radio address officially announcing for the first time Germany's attack on the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Patriotic War. The next day the address was published in all newspapers with a portrait of Stalin beside the text. The appeal to “citizens of the Soviet Union, men and women,” ended with the words: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be defeated. Victory will be ours.”

19. The rabfak, or workers' faculty, was a general educational institution operating from 1919 to 1940 to prepare young workers and peasants without a secondary education for admission to higher educational institutions.

20. The family archive preserves a testimonial issued to V. N. Gelfand in connection with his work on a state farm. The documents here and below are quoted from V. V. Gelfand's archive in Berlin.

TESTIMONIAL
This is to certify that Comrade Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand, during his stay with the Komsomol organization of the Dnepropetrovsk Industrial Workers' Faculty on the harvest campaign at the Nansen State Farm, showed himself to be an active and politically steadfast Komsomol member.
Comrade Gelfand worked well, trying in every way to help the Motherland.
Senior agronomist of the state farm [signature illegible]
Secretary of the Komsomol committee of the Dnepropetrovsk Industrial Workers' Faculty /Kushner/
23 July 1941

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