Video: How snowdrops bloomed on New Year's Eve during the Second World War: the untold story of the fairy tale "Twelve Months"
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
"Twelve Months" by Samuil Marshak - one of the most magical New Year's fairy tales, which everyone remembers from childhood. Many do not even suspect that she appeared at the height of the Great Patriotic War, when Marshak no longer wrote for children and published military essays and anti-fascist epigrams. But one day he received a letter that made him change his mind about what is really important and needed by readers in wartime.
At the beginning of 1943, in the newspaper Literatura i iskusstvo, the writer published a response to this letter: “My six-year-old correspondent asks me why I, whom the children consider their own writer, cheated on them and in the last year wrote only for the big ones. … I am still faithful to children, for whom all my life I have written fairy tales, songs, funny books. I still think about them a lot. Thinking about children means thinking about the future. And now, thinking about the future, I cannot but give myself entirely to the simple and modest service of a wartime writer."
During the war, Marshak did what he considered really important at the time: he wrote for the newspaper On Guard of the Motherland, published poetry in Pravda, created anti-fascist posters, and helped raise funds for the Defense Fund. Nevertheless, a naive childish question forced the writer to return to fairy tales even in such non-fairytale conditions of life: I wrote "Twelve Months" in harsh, darkened, military Moscow - during the hours of rest from work in the newspaper and "Windows TASS". … It seemed to me that in harsh times children - and, perhaps, adults too - need a cheerful festive performance, a poetic fairy tale … ".
The plot was based on the Slovak fairy tale by Bozena Nemcova, although Marshak claimed that he met the original source much later, and at that time he had heard only a Czech or Bohemian legend about twelve months in an oral retelling. In addition to the play, the writer also created a prosaic version of the legend he had heard and published it with the subtitle "Slavic Tale". In the original, there was no queen and her teacher-professor - only a stepmother, her daughter and stepdaughter.
Marshak explained his plan as follows: “Now a lot is written about labor, but it is somewhat monotonous and sometimes edifying. Meanwhile, one can and should speak about labor in completely different ways. I thought about the ending for a long time. It was impossible to leave the stepdaughter in the kingdom of months and give her in marriage for the month of April. I decided to return her home - from a fairy tale to real life - so that all months I would visit her in turn and bring her as a gift what each of them is rich in. … I tried to avoid obsessive morality in my tale. But I wanted the fairy tale to tell that nature is revealed only to simple-minded and honest people, because only those who come into contact with labor can comprehend its secrets."
"Dramatic Tale", as Marshak called it, was written for staging at the Moscow Art Theater, but during the war it was impossible. Only in 1947 the premiere of the play took place at the Moscow Theater for Young Spectators, and in 1948 - at the Moscow Art Theater. Both the printed version and the performance were very popular, and in 1956 a cartoon was shot based on the fairy tale. In 1980, the Japanese, together with Soyuzmultfilm, released Twelve Months in the anime genre. And the most famous film adaptation was the film by A. Granik, released in 1972.
It is interesting that the actors in real life embodied what remained unfulfilled by Marshak's plan in a fairy tale: the actress who played the Stepdaughter (N. Popova) married the actor who was April in the film (A. Bykov). But Liana Zhvania, who brilliantly embodied the image of the Queen, is said to have been in love with the writer's son, Immanuel Marshak.
M. Aliger wrote about Marshak's play: “This fairy tale instills joy and fun in the soul, makes us again and again, like in childhood, believe that miracles will surely happen in life, that, just wish, just be good, pure, honest, snowdrops will bloom for you in January and you will be happy ….
Probably, this is how real fairy tales are born - in spite of all tragic circumstances, even in spite of the war, and bring miracles to those who believe in them. On the eve of New Year's holidays, it is worth remembering more 15 Soviet films for children that parents will also enjoy watching.
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