A glass of raw milk, the collapse of the USSR and the killing of honor: From what poetess died

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

According to popular belief, poets drink too much, shoot themselves and commit suicide. But the poetess is another matter. The poet, as it is believed, is not about passions, but about emotions. She is sensitive to hysteria, shocking and noticeable, while she is pretty. How does the fate of poetesses actually develop? The reality is very far from stereotypes.

A sensitive heart and unrelenting destruction from within

They say that poets have a heartache for this whole world. At least two famous Russian poetesses suffered from heart pains. One of the masters of the Silver Age, Anna Akhmatova, and the woman who made the Silver Age possible in general, Mirra Lokhvitskaya, died of angina pectoris. Before they died, they suffered for months.

Bella Akhmadulina, the iconic poetess of the Thaw, one of the main poetesses of the USSR, died of a cardiovascular crisis. When Agnia Barto, the woman on whose poems more than one generation of Soviet children grew up - and the woman who helped thousands of these children regain families after the war, ended her life - the doctors who performed the autopsy were shocked: it was not clear how this heart could still be beat and pump blood. It was so worn out …

The songwriter, performed by Anna German, Alla Pugacheva, Irina Allegrova, Lev Leshchenko - Rimma Kazakova, also died of acute heart failure. But, I must say, Kazakova, Barto, and Akhmadullina lived a long life. But the songwriter of Eduard Khil, Joseph Kobzon, Klavdia Shulzhenko, Maya Kristalinskaya and many others, Inna Kashezheva did not live to be 57 years old. And she also died of acute heart failure. Even younger, forty-eight years old, Sofia Parnok, one of the stars of the Silver Age, died of a heart attack.

Anna Barkova, the legendary political prisoner, was dying hard and painfully. Evgeny Yevtushenko put Barkova on a par with Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, but she is much less known to the general public. If Marina Ivanovna and Anna Andreevna were in sight, then Barkova disappeared from sight, and not of her own free will. She was considered the spokesman for the women's movement in the Russian revolution, her poems attracted the attention of Lunacharsky, Blok, Bryusov, Pasternak.

After the Stalinist turn from “happiness for all, for free” to the world of royal columns and conservative family morals, the revolutionaries turned from companions-in-arms of the government into its oppositionists. In 1934, Barkova was placed in Karlag, from where she left just before the war. In 1947, she is arrested again, and she ends up in a camp in Inta. Only with the death of Stalin does Barkov receive freedom. No twists of fate broke her. But he destroyed, eaten from the inside, in the end, cancer.

Elena Schwartz died of cancer, whose work was banned in the USSR and studied at the Sorbonne, and Cherubina de Gabriac, exiled to Tashkent during the persecution of the Anthroposophists.

Epidemiological situation

Many people would be alive if the concept of hygiene and the level of medicine were at the proper level. For example, the Belarusian poet Aunt (real name - Aloiza Pashkevich) died of typhus. During the First World War, she went to the sisters of mercy, looked after the wounded soldiers and officers in the hospital. There she got infected.

Larisa Reisner, who was not only the poet and beloved of Nikolai Gumilyov, but also the commissar of the reconnaissance detachment of the headquarters of the 5th Army, which took part in the hostilities, also died of typhus. Infected trivially: after drinking a glass of raw milk.

The most revered Azerbaijani poetess Natavan, the daughter of the last Karabakh khan, experienced a tragedy that could have pushed her to suicide: she lost her seventeen-year-old son. Moreover, her life has been difficult since her youth. She was married by an imperial decree, without asking her wishes, for Prince Usmiyev. Fortunately, Usmiev was keenly interested in literature and could appreciate his wife's talent. And yet Natavan could not fall in love with her husband much older than herself. They divorced after living together for several years. Contrary to the custom of those years, the prince left the children to his wife so as not to separate them from their mother.

The death of the eldest son and the sad, disenfranchised lot of the woman were constant motives of Natavan's poems. However, she died not of grief, but of banal pulmonary tuberculosis. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an epidemic of this disease covered the entire Russian Empire.

Murder

The young poetess Nadia Anjuman, a native of Afghanistan, became famous in the zero years of our century. For this, the very first book of poems published while studying in Iran was enough. Nadia herself, despite her citizenship, was of Persian origin, knew and highly appreciated classical poetry in Farsi. Unfortunately, her husband turned out to be not just a strict Muslim, but a real Taliban fanatic. For the “shame” that Nadia brought to the family with her immodesty, he brutally beat her for several hours in front of a small child, until she died from internal injuries.

Raisa Bloch, a prominent poet of the Russian emigration, was not fortunate enough to choose Germany as her new homeland. When the Nazis came to power, she and her family fled to Paris. However, France soon found itself under the Germans, and her husband, the poet Mikhail Gorlin, together with his daughter, were arrested as Jews and placed in a concentration camp. Raisa herself tried to get over to Switzerland, but was captured at the border and sent to Auschwitz. All three died.

Ukrainian poet Veronika Chernyakhovskaya was arrested during anti-spy hysteria in the late thirties. The reason was visits (on the instructions of the Soviet government) to Germany in the twenties and a short marriage to a German. In prison, Chernyakhovskaya went crazy. This did not bother anyone, and she was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out immediately.

The pre-war Japanese poet Misuzu Kaneko was driven to suicide by her husband. Misudzu was given in marriage to this man by force, by the will of her parents. After the wedding, he seemed to do everything so that she could not fall in love with him: he cheated, forbade the publication of poetry, infected her with a venereal disease, caught somewhere in the "fun quarters." She managed to get a divorce, but her husband took their only little daughter for himself. Kaneko was driven to despair and committed suicide. Kaneko is now considered a classic of 20th century Japanese poetry.

Restlessness

Some poetesses killed themselves, seeing no more future. Marina Tsvetaeva did this, not knowing how and not finding an opportunity to fit into a new life upon her return to her homeland - she hanged herself shortly after the start of the Great Patriotic War. This is what Yulia Drunina, a soldier who went through the whole war, acted - upon learning of the end of the existence of the USSR, she was poisoned by the exhaust gases of the car, doing it as quietly as possible and thinking over her departure so that he would cause as little trouble as possible to loved ones. Young Nika Turbina threw herself out of the window, realizing that she could no longer write poetry. At the last moment, she changed her mind, tried to cling to the windowsill, call for help, but fell through.

But one of the worst deaths, perhaps, was that of Margarita Aliger. She fell into a ditch near her own dacha and could not get out of it: a weakness that came with age.