Konstantin Michailowitsch Simonow

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Simonov 1943 - as a lieutenant colonel in the Kharkov war crimes trial

Konstantin (Kirill) Mikhailovich Simonov ( Russian Константин (Кирилл) Михайлович Симонов ., Scientific transliteration Konstantin Michajlovič Simonov * November 15 . Jul / 28. November  1915 greg. In Petrograd , † 28 August 1979 in Moscow ) was a Soviet writer , Poet and war correspondent .

Life

Interwar period

Kirill Simonow was the son of the major general of the Russian Imperial Army Mikhail Simonow and his wife Alexandra, who came from the Obolensky Princely House and was a Smolny graduate. After his father was lost in the Russian Civil War , Simonov grew up with his mother and stepfather, a lecturer in warfare for the Red Army who had been a colonel in the Tsarist Army. The latter withheld the stepson's aristocratic origin and stated that he was of proletarian origin. Simonov spent his childhood and youth in barracks at changing locations, where his stepfather was deployed. In Saratow he attended the company school as a Komsomolze and completed an apprenticeship as a lathe operator. In 1931 the family moved to Moscow.

From 1934 on, Simonov attended the Moscow Literary Institute . The first poems appeared in the magazines "Molodaja Gwardija" (Young Guard) and "Oktjabr" (October). In 1939, when the border conflict with Japan broke out , he was sent to the Far East as a war correspondent. At that time he called himself Konstantin - allegedly because he had difficulties with the sounds "r" and "l" due to a speech error, following his baptismal name Kirill.

In January 1939 Simonov married Shenja Laskina, who had been his fellow student at the Literature Institute since 1936. Their son Alexei was born in August 1939.

Second World War

The first plays were written in 1940 and 1941. Simonov was seconded to a course as war correspondent at the Lenin Academy . In the course of the war, Simonov rose to the rank of colonel as an officer in the propaganda units of the Red Army . He was one of the best known and most widely read war correspondents, he traveled all the fronts of Eastern Europe up to the battle for Berlin . His reports appeared mostly in the newspapers " Red Star " and " Pravda ". In 1943 he married the popular actress Valentina Serova . The marriage failed, however, Serova entered into a relationship with the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossowski and also showed himself publicly with him, which was considered a scandal in Soviet society at the time.

post war period

After the war, Simonov made numerous trips. So he traveled to Paris in the summer of 1945. He was tasked with persuading Nobel Prize winner Iwan Bunin , who had emigrated from Russia after the civil war , to return home, but failed. In 1946 he traveled to the USA with Ilja Ehrenburg . He wrote reports from New York , Detroit and Hollywood . At the end of the trip, he bought a new Cadillac and received an import permit from the Soviet authorities.

From 1946 to 1954 he was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and, as a candidate for the Central Committee , was a member of the expanded leadership of the CPSU . As a loyal and popular writer, he took over the editor-in-chief of the magazine “ Nowy Mir ” (1946–1950) and “ Literaturnaja Gazeta ” (1950–1953) in the late Stalin era . From 1946 to 1954 he was deputy of the Stalinist Alexander Fadeev at the head of the Union of Writers of the USSR .

At the 2nd Congress of the Writers' Union, which in 1954, a year after Stalin's death , was the prelude to the political thaw , Simonov was sharply attacked for his unyielding attitude in pushing through the party line. Among his critics were well-known authors such as Margarita Aliger , Olga Bergholz , Ilja Ehrenburg , Wenjamin Kawerin , Marietta Schaginjan and Michail Scholochow . Simonov was voted out of the leadership of the Writers' Union, but the party leadership put him to the side of the editor-in-chief of "Nowy Mir" Alexander Twardowski , after he had also spoken out in favor of reforms.

In 1958 Simonov was one of the founders of the Russian Writers 'Union, which limited itself to the RSFSR and saw itself as a counterweight to the reform-oriented Soviet Writers' Union at the time. He then had to resign from the management of "Nowy Mir". For two years he was posted to Tashkent as a correspondent for the Pravda party organ .

In the course of the replacement of reform-oriented cultural functionaries under Leonid Brezhnev , Simonov returned in 1967 to the leadership of the Writers' Union of the USSR. In 1973 he signed a letter of abuse initiated by the party against Alexander Solzhenitsyn , and repeatedly criticized other dissidents .

plant

The main part of Simonov's work is about war. In addition to his front reports, he wrote novels and a total of ten plays. Several of his works have been filmed. During the Second World War, he received the Stalin Prize three times . During the Stalin era, Simonov wrote several praises of Stalin. His main work is the trilogy of novels “The Living and the Dead” ( Žyvye i mertvye , 1960), the protagonists of which are officers and soldiers of the Red Army in the war against the Wehrmacht . In it he ruthlessly described for the first time the mistakes of the Soviet leadership around Stalin in 1941, which led to a series of devastating defeats against the advancing Germans.

His emotional poems about love, friendship and home made him extremely popular. The poem “Wait for me” ( Жди меня ) about a soldier's longing for his companion, which was dedicated to Valentina Serova , became a classic that was often set to music. According to literary critics, his works were aimed at broad mass tastes.

Others

He is the father of Russian writer, director and politician Alexei Simonov .

The river cruise ship Konstantin Simonov and the asteroid (2426) Simonov are named after the writer . He is also the namesake for the Konstantin-Simonow-Nunatakker in the Antarctic.

Fonts

Books

  • War diary (also war diary )
  • Heimatlicher Rauch: Tale (1957)
  • The Living and the Dead (1959)
  • You Are Not Born A Soldier (1964)
  • Companions in Arms ( Товарищи по оружию , Culture and Progress, Berlin 1967; German translation by Otto Braun )
  • The Last Summer (1972)
  • 20 Days Without War (1973)
  • The so-called private life (1978)
  • From the perspective of my generation - Thoughts on Stalin, 1st edition, Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-353-00623-0
  • I saw the extermination camp , publishing house of the Soviet military administration, Berlin, German editions 1945, 1946, 1947 (The Majdanek death factory, Russian orig., Moscow 1944)
  • Days and Nights , Publishing House of the Soviet Military Administration, Berlin, German issues 1947, Russian original 1946.

Radio plays

  • Secrets of PE-3 . Director: Carl Nagel . Prod .: Broadcasting of the GDR, 1950.
  • From Lopatin's notes . Director: Helmut Hellstorff . Prod .: Broadcasting of the GDR, 1987.

Film adaptations

Literary template

script

  • 1943: wait for me ( Shdi menja )
  • 1944: Days and Nights ( Dni i noči )
  • 1956: The immortal garrison ( Bessmertnyj garnizon )
  • 1959: Normandy - Nyemen ( Normadija - Nyemen )
  • 1966: If you love your house ( Jesli dorog tebje twoj dom )
  • 1971: The event with Polynin ( Slutschaj s Poliniym ) - based on his novel "The Separation"
  • 1976: 20 days without war ( Dwazat dnje bes woinu )

literature

  • Günter Warm: Konstantin Simonow. In: Urania Universe . Vol. 19, 1973, pp. 415-422, with illustration.

Web links

Commons : Konstantin Simonow  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Simonov, Konstantin (Kirill) Miachailovič Ėnciklopedija Krugosvet
  2. a b "Zdi menja": 100 let Konstantinu Simonovu , tass.ru, November 28, 2015.
  3. Orlando Figes: The Whisperers. Life in Stalin's Russia. Berlin 2008, p. 567.
  4. Arkady Vaksberg / Rene Gerra: Sem 'dnej v marte. Besedy ob ėmigracii. St.Peterburg 2010, p. 291.
  5. a b Simonov, Konstantin Mikhailovich sovlit.net Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers
  6. a b c d Vol'fgang Kazak : Leksikon russkoj literatury XX veka. Moscow 1996, p. 380.
  7. Jürgen Rühle: Literature and Revolution. Cologne / Berlin 1960, p. 139.