"A Christmas tree was born in the forest": the story of the creation of the most popular New Year song in the USSR

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

There are many famous composers and poet in the world, whose works many will not immediately remember. And by the authors of the popular New Year's children's song, the picture turned out to be diametrically opposite. It was sung by the entire large Soviet country, but at the same time few knew the names of the people thanks to whom this musical masterpiece appeared.

1905 year. Moscow. Strikes. Trams do not run, the sponges of factories and factories roar hysterically, sometimes bullets whistle and some suspicious persons constantly scurry around the city. It was at this time that the candidate of biological sciences Leonid Karlovich Beckman, who lived in Maly Patriarshy Lane, bought his daughter Vera the magazine "Baby" and saw the poem "Yolka" in it:

Beckman immediately sat down at the piano and played a melody. And after a while he sang a newly born song with his daughter.

Beckman immediately sat down at the piano and played a melody. And after a while he sang a newly born song with his daughter.

The scientist himself did not attach much importance to the hastily created melody, but his wife, who at one time received a diploma from the Moscow Conservatory and a gold medal for success in her studies, praised the melody and advised her husband to record the melody. Beckman joked: "It's superfluous, and I don't really know the notes." Then Elena Alexandrovna herself carefully wrote down the melody invented by her husband in a notebook.

And the very next year, Beckman's daughter sang this song at a holiday with family friends. I liked the song so much that the author of the melody was asked for words and notes. That year Leonid Bekman rewrote his "Yolochka" more than a dozen times. Already in 1907, this song was sung all over Moscow. Later, the Beckmans' spouses even published the collection "Verochkin's Songs", which included "Yolochka".

During the years of the revolution, when many songs were called "bourgeois" and banned, it was "Yolochka" that became a children's anthem. But at the same time, for a long time no one knew who wrote the poems of the most popular New Year's song in the Land of the Soviets.

Today it is difficult to say whether it was really so, but there is a legend that when the Writers' Union was created, the first set was the so-called "Gorky", and the most famous personalities in literary circles - Fedin, Fadeev, Paustovsky, Babel, etc.. NS. And literally in the first weeks of the existence of the Union, an elderly woman entered the office of the chairman of the Union, Maxim Gorky, and said that she really wanted to become a member of the writers' organization.

Gorky asked:

The author of the song “A Christmas tree was born in the forest” is Raisa Adamovna Kudasheva. Before the revolution, she was a teacher and governess. For a long time she published her works under a pseudonym, and was first published under her own name in 1941. For a long time, Raisa Adamovna did not even know that her "Yolochka" became a song. And only in 1921 I accidentally heard a girl singing a song to her poems.

The poem was republished just before the war, in 1941 in the collection of children's poems "Yolka". The compiler of that collection, Esther Emden, tracked down the author of the poem and indicated the name of Kudasheva in the book.

Old New Years Eve is a great time to revisit 18 retro photographs of mid-20th century New Year and Christmas holidays.