Samuil Marshak is a genius poet and translator who was saved by children's literature

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

When the Bolsheviks came to power, he destroyed all his previous works - poems dedicated to Jewish culture and the city of Jerusalem. He chose "a world open to immortality" - he began to write children's poems and fairy tales, on which more than one generation grew up. Who does not know his Robin-Bobin-Barabek, Scattered from Basseinaya Street, a lady with luggage and a little dog, Vaksa-Klyaksa and the alphabet in verse? In November 2017, Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak would have turned 130.

Descendant of a rabbi

In October 1887, a son was born into a Jewish family, Marshak. It was a difficult time, and the head of the family had to hide the fact that he came from a hereditary family of rabbis, adherents of the Talmud. Yakov Mironovich did not receive a special education, but worked as a technologist at a chemical plant, having several inventions in the soap industry. In addition, this naturally gifted person spoke several languages and read Goethe and Heine in the original, was well versed in Russian classics. Father tried to instill love and desire for knowledge in his children. From an early age it was clear to everyone that his son Samuel was a real child prodigy.

The first to notice this was the teachers of the St. Petersburg gymnasium, where Marshak Jr. studied. The literary teacher Syoma also influenced the formation of the literary views of the young talent. Samuel's first poetic experiments brought him unprecedented success, and soon many literary publications began to print his works.

Stasov, one of the famous Petersburg critics of that time, after reading the poem of the young Marshak, declared him a genius. Soon Marshak meets Maxim Gorky, who took an active part in the fate of Samuel and gave him a start in literary life. The young man works a lot: he spends hours in the library, writes poetry and makes wonderful translations from Hebrew and Yiddish.

Labor youth

Having brilliantly coped with the first literary order, a poem to the music of Glazunov, Marshak became very much in demand in the creative environment of St. Petersburg. He began to be attracted to literary societies, and many friends appeared among poets, artists and musicians. Samuel's works were already published not only in St. Petersburg, but also in Moscow and Kiev.

Blok and Akhmatova admired him. But the poet's star fever, fortunately, did not happen, and he continued to work with enthusiasm. As a correspondent for the capital magazine, Marshak traveled almost all over the Middle East, which inspired him to create a cycle of poems "Palestine", which became a very popular collection of lyrics of that time.

During his travels, Samuel met a sweet girl Sophia, educated, educated and close to him in spirit, who became his wife. In 1914, the happy couple had a daughter. But fate gives everyone an equal measure: a handful of joy, a handful of grief. Marshak's daughter was destined to be terrible - she knocked over the samovar with boiling water and died.

Desperate parents did not withdraw into themselves, did not blame fate - they decided to help needy children, and there were plenty of them in those hungry times. It was then that Samuel Yakovlevich began to write children's poetry. The lines themselves came out from under the pen, hurrying to lie on the paper - kind, warm, full of childish spontaneity and tenderness. I so wanted to read them to my daughter before bedtime …

From London to Petrograd

Studying in Great Britain left a special mark on the poet's work. After St. Petersburg University, Marshak was educated at a London technical school, and then at the University of the capital of Great Britain. By that time, England was perhaps the only country where literature for children took shape as an independent genre. Samuel traveled all over Albion, collecting a collection of English folk tales, ballads and songs, which he later translated into Russian.

Among them are the famous "The House That Jack Built" and "Heather Honey". Marshak was especially famous for his translations of works by Shakespeare, Kipling, Burns, Milne, Keats and Wadsworth. Returning to his homeland and plunging into the whirlpool of political events, Marshak faced a choice: life or faith. Remembering the instructions of his teacher Stasov, he chose the first. He collected all his pre-revolutionary works and burned them.

At first, the poet worked in a provincial town, lectured in the Kuban, translated, taught English. There he created the first theater for children. This event did not pass unnoticed, and in 1922 Lunacharsky invited Samuil Yakovlevich to Petrograd. It was then that his book "Children in a Cage" and several scenarios for the Theater of the Young Spectator appeared. That year Marshak created the first Soviet magazine for children, for which he assembled a team of talented poets and writers.

Already after the defeat of Detgiz, when many children's writers were repressed and disappeared in the GULAG, when the so-called thaw came, Samuil Yakovlevich found out that he had already had a pile of denunciations on him in the NKVD. Miraculously, he managed to avoid the millstones of the infernal political machine. He always said that he was saved by children's literature.

Half a century in poetry

After the war, Marshak moved to Moscow, where he continued to engage in translations and became seriously interested in "lyrics for adults." Here he also began writing an autobiographical book and a number of articles on creative excellence. Gradually, the unforgiving time took the poet's relatives and friends, and only a devoted old housekeeper remained by his side, whom he jokingly called either “Shakespeare's tragedy”, then “Hitler in a skirt”. She hid cigarettes from him and called him “an old fool”. Illness and loneliness only gave strength to Marshak - he worked day and night. Even on the last day of his life, Samuil Yakovlevich was in a hurry to finish writing the play, the last in his half a century in poetry …

BONUS

He left a deep trace in Russian poetry and Daniil Kharms - the genius of "black humor" and "literature of the absurd" … He did everything awry, and lived and wrote - with quirks and not according to the rules.