The tragic fate of Yulia Drunina: what led the poet to suicide

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

May 10 could have marked the 95th anniversary of the Soviet the poetess Yulia Drunina, but in 1991 she made the decision to die. Many trials fell to her lot, which she endured with unfeminine fortitude and courage. Julia Drunina went through the war, but could not survive in peacetime and come to terms with the collapse of the USSR.

Julia Drunina was born on May 10, 1924 in Moscow. Her father was a history teacher, and her mother was a librarian, and a love of literature was instilled in her from childhood. She began writing poetry at school, in the late 1930s. Julia took first place in a poetry competition, her poems were published in a newspaper and broadcast on the radio.

On June 21, 1941, Yulia Drunina, together with her classmates, greeted the dawn after graduation. And in the morning they learned that the war had begun. Like many of her peers, 17-year-old Yulia participated in the construction of defensive structures, went to nursing courses, entered the voluntary sanitary squad at the Regional Red Cross Society. Parents did not want to let their daughter go to the front, but against their will she became a nurse in an infantry regiment.

At the front, Drunina met her first love. She never called his name and surname, in the verses of this period he is referred to as "Kombat". This love was very short-lived - the battalion commander soon died. Coming out of the encirclement, Drunina returned to Moscow, and from there with her family went on evacuation to Siberia. She wanted to return to the front, but her father's health was in critical condition - at the beginning of the war he suffered the first stroke, and after the second in 1942 he died. After the funeral, Drunina again went to the front line.

"Trimmed to look like a boy, I looked like everyone else," wrote the poetess. Indeed, there were a lot of people like her in the war. The girls not only carried wounded soldiers from the battlefield, but also knew how to handle grenades and machine guns themselves. Drunina's friend Zinaida Samsonova saved about 50 Russian soldiers and destroyed 10 German soldiers. One of the battles was her last. The poetess dedicated her poem "Zinka", which became one of her most famous military works.

In 1943, Drunina was wounded, which almost became fatal for her: a shell fragment passed 5 mm from the carotid artery. In 1944 she was wounded and her military service ended. After completing her service, the poetess began attending classes at the Literary Institute, where she met her future husband Nikolai Starshinov. He later recalled: “We met at the end of 1944 at the Literary Institute. After the lectures, I went to see her off. She, a newly demobilized battalion medical instructor, wore soldier's tarpaulin boots, a shabby tunic and an overcoat. She had nothing else. We were second year students when our daughter Lena was born. They huddled in a small room, in a shared apartment, lived extremely poorly, from hand to mouth. In everyday life, Julia, like many poetesses, was rather disorganized. She didn’t like to do housework. I didn’t go to the editorial offices, I didn’t even know where many of them were and who was in charge of poetry in them”.

After the war, they started talking about her as one of the most talented poets of the military generation. In 1945, her poems were published in the magazine "Banner", three years later her collection "In a soldier's greatcoat" was published. Until the end of the 1980s. she published several more collections, all the textbooks contained her poems: "Whoever says that the war is not scary, he knows nothing about the war."On her poems, Alexandra Pakhmutova wrote the songs "Marching cavalry" and "You are near."

In 1960, Yulia Drunina separated from her husband - for several years her heart was occupied by another person, director and TV presenter Alexei Kapler. They met in 1954, when Drunina was 30, and Kapler was 50. Together they lived until 1979, when the director died of cancer. After the death of her husband, the poetess could not find new meanings for her existence. In the late 1980s, she defended the rights of front-line soldiers and even ran for the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. But very soon she became disillusioned with deputy activities, and Drunin perceived the collapse of the Union as a personal tragedy and the collapse of the ideals of her entire generation that went through the war.

In August 1991, the poetess came out to defend the White House, and three months later she locked herself in her garage, drank sleeping pills and started the car. The day before her death, Drunina wrote: “Why am I leaving? In my opinion, such an imperfect creature like me can only stay in this terrible, quarreled world created for businessmen with iron elbows, only having a strong personal rear … True, the thought of the sin of suicide torments me, although, alas, I am not a believer. But if God exists, he will understand me. 20.11.91 ". And in her last poem there were the following lines: "How Russia is flying downhill, I can’t, I don’t want to watch."

Her poems do not lose their relevance today: "We lose half of our lives because of haste" - a poem by Drunina about vanity and the main thing in life