Nikolay Tryapkin. I wasn't clouded by fame

, Zubtsovsky Uyezd, Tver Governorate, Russian SFSR

Nikolay Ivanovich Tryapkin(December 19, Sablino, Tver province - February 20, Moscow) - Russian Soviet poet.

Tryapkin's poetry is musical, rich in rhythmic repetitions, and stylistically related to Russian folk song.

The work of Nikolai Tryapkin was highly appreciated by the poet Yuri Kuznetsov:

Nikolai Tryapkin is close to folklore and ethnographic environment, but close as a flying bird. He does not get stuck, but soars. That is why in his poems there is always a feeling of a jubilant flight ... Everyday details echo with a melodious echo. They breathe like they are alive. The poet manages his material mysteriously, without any apparent effort, like Emelya from a fairy tale, whose stove itself walks and the ax cuts itself. But this is no longer life, but a national element. In the line of Koltsov - Yesenin, folk poets, Tryapkin - the last Russian poet. It is difficult and even impossible to expect the appearance of a poet of such a folk element in the future. The Russian language is too muddy and distorted, and the genetic roots of the people have been severely undermined. But if this happens, a miracle will happen indeed. Let's hope so, but I am sure of one thing: in the 21st century, the significance of Nikolai Tryapkin's original word will only increase.

One of the most famous poems is "Somewhere there are spaceports ...".

Many of Tryapkin's poems have been set to music. Among the performers of songs based on his poems are Iosif Kobzon, Valentina Tolkunova, Marina Kapuro, the Seventh Water folk group. One of the poet's most famous songs is "The Loon Flew".

He was the first Russian poet to receive the State Prize of Russia (1992) for his book of poems "Heart-to-Heart Conversation".

With the poem "Because I'm Russian ...", which was included in Nikolai Tryapkin's posthumous book "Burning Aquarius", published by the "Young Guard" in 2003, there was a literary embarrassment. It was written by the head of the poetry department of the Zavtra newspaper Sergei Sokolkin and published in 1994 with a dedication to Alexander Prokhanov, but due to his own oversight, it ended up in a selection of Tryapkin's poems published in the newspaper in April 1995, and in the same form was included in the collection .

Nikolai Tryapkin died on February 20, 1999 and was buried at the Rakitki cemetery in the Moscow region.

Collections of poems

• First furrow, 1953
• White Night, 1956
• Chants, 1958
• Krasnopolie, 1962
• Crossroads, 1962
• Songs of the Great Rains, 1965
• Silver Ponds, 1966
• Loon flew, 1967
• Nest of my fathers, 1967
• Selected lyrics, 1970
• Chrysostom, 1971
• Geese-swans, 1971
• Harvest, 1974
• Evening bells, 1975
• Commandment, 1976
• The creak of my cradle, 1978
• Favorites, 1980
• Poems. M., Sovremennik, 1983
• Fire nursery, 1985
• Izluki, 1987
• Poems, 1989
• Heart to heart talk, 1989
• Already, apparently, that lot fell to us, 2000
• Burning Aquarius, 2003

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Notes

Links

• in the magazine room
• on the Literary map of the Arkhangelsk region
• on Chronos
• in the Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
• in the Red Book of Russian pop music
• in the magazine "Velikoross" No. 39
• at Literary Russia

An excerpt characterizing Tryapkin, Nikolai Ivanovich

- Everyone has their own secrets. We don’t touch you and Berg,” Natasha said, getting excited.
“I think you don’t touch it,” Vera said, “because there can never be anything bad in my actions. But I'll tell my mother how you get along with Boris.
“Natalia Ilyinishna treats me very well,” said Boris. “I can't complain,” he said.
- Leave it, Boris, you are such a diplomat (the word diplomat was in great use among children in the special meaning that they attached to this word); even boring,” said Natasha in an offended, trembling voice. Why is she coming to me? You will never understand this,” she said, turning to Vera, “because you have never loved anyone; you have no heart, you are only madame de Genlis [Madame Genlis] (this nickname, considered very offensive, was given to Vera by Nikolai), and your first pleasure is to make trouble for others. You flirt with Berg as much as you like,” she said quickly.
- Yes, I’m sure I won’t run after a young man in front of the guests ...
“Well, she got her way,” Nikolai intervened, “she told everyone troubles, upset everyone. Let's go to the nursery.
All four, like a flock of frightened birds, got up and left the room.
“They told me trouble, but I didn’t give anything to anyone,” Vera said.
— Madame de Genlis! Madame de Genlis! laughing voices said from behind the door.
The beautiful Vera, who produced such an irritating, unpleasant effect on everyone, smiled and, apparently not affected by what she was told, went to the mirror and straightened her scarf and her hair. Looking at her beautiful face, she seemed to become even colder and calmer.

The conversation continued in the living room.
- Ah! chere, - said the countess, - and in my life tout n "est pas rose. Can't I see that du train, que nous allons, [not all roses. - with our way of life,] our state will not last long! And it's all a club, and its kindness. We live in the countryside, do we rest? Theatres, hunts, and God knows what. But what can I say about me! Well, how did you arrange all this? I often wonder at you, Annette, how it is you, at your age, ride alone in a wagon, to Moscow, to Petersburg, to all the ministers, to all the nobility, you know how to get along with everyone, I'm surprised!
- Ah, my soul! - answered Princess Anna Mikhailovna. “God forbid you find out how hard it is to be a widow without support and with a son whom you love to adoration. You will learn everything,” she continued with a certain pride. “My process taught me. If I need to see one of these aces, I write a note: “princesse une telle [princess such and such] wants to see such and such” and I myself go in a cab at least two, at least three times, at least four, until I achieve what I need. I don't care what they think of me.
- Well, what about, whom did you ask about Borenka? the countess asked. - After all, here is your officer of the guard, and Nikolushka is a cadet. Someone to bother. Whom did you ask?
- Prince Vasily. He was very nice. Now I have agreed to everything, I have reported to the sovereign,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said with delight, completely forgetting all the humiliation through which she went through to achieve her goal.
- Why is he getting old, Prince Vasily? the countess asked. - I didn’t see him from our theaters at the Rumyantsevs. And I think he forgot about me. Il me faisait la cour, [He dragged after me,] - the countess remembered with a smile.
- Still the same, - answered Anna Mikhailovna, - amiable, crumbling. Les grandeurs ne lui ont pas touriene la tete du tout. [The high position did not turn his head at all.] “I regret that I can do too little for you, dear princess,” he tells me, “order.” No, he is a nice person and a wonderful native. But you know, Nathalieie, my love for my son. I don't know what I wouldn't do to make him happy. And my circumstances are so bad,” Anna Mikhaylovna continued sadly and lowering her voice, “so bad that I am now in the most terrible position. My unfortunate process eats up everything I have and does not move. I don't have, you can imagine, a la lettre [literally] no dime of money, and I don't know what to equip Boris with. She took out her handkerchief and wept. - I need five hundred rubles, and I have one twenty-five-ruble note. I am in such a position ... One of my hopes is now on Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov. If he does not want to support his godson - after all, he baptized Borya - and assign him something to support, then all my troubles will be lost: I will have nothing to equip him with.
The Countess shed a tear and silently pondered something.
“I often think, maybe it’s a sin,” said the princess, “but I often think: Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhoy lives alone ... this is a huge fortune ... and what does he live for? Life is a burden for him, and Borya is just starting to live.
“He will probably leave something for Boris,” said the countess.
“God knows, chere amie!” [dear friend!] These rich people and nobles are so selfish. But all the same, I’ll go to him now with Boris and tell him straight out what’s the matter. Let them think what they want about me, it really doesn't matter to me when the fate of my son depends on it. The princess got up. “Now it’s two o’clock, and at four o’clock you have dinner.” I can go.
And with the manners of a Petersburg business lady who knows how to use time, Anna Mikhailovna sent for her son and went out with him into the hall.
“Farewell, my soul,” she said to the countess, who accompanied her to the door, “wish me success,” she added in a whisper from her son.
- Are you visiting Count Kirill Vladimirovich, ma chere? said the count from the dining-room, also going out into the hall. - If he is better, call Pierre to dine with me. After all, he visited me, danced with the children. Call by all means, ma chere. Well, let's see how Taras excels today. He says that Count Orlov never had such a dinner as we will have.

Nikolai Tryapkin (1918 - 1999)- Soviet poet. He was born in the Tver province into a peasant family. All his poetry is permeated with rural motifs. His poems are distinguished by incredible ease and accuracy, even if they are on important topics. In Soviet times, he was even called the best Russian poet. The poet Yuri Kuznetsov wrote about him: “Nikolai Tryapkin is close to folklore and ethnographic environment, but close as a flying bird. He doesn't get stuck, he floats. That is why in his poems there is always a feeling of a jubilant flight ... Everyday details echo with a melodious echo. They breathe like they are alive. The poet manages his material mysteriously, without any apparent effort, like Emelya from a fairy tale, whose stove itself walks and the ax cuts itself. But this is no longer everyday life, but a national element.

Nikolai Tryapkin did not accept perestroika and the collapse of the USSR and spoke sharply, including in verse, about these changes and about the new rulers. But even during the USSR, he did not hesitate to call phenomena by their proper names. As you know, in the 70s and 80s, general pilfering flourished. Here is how Tryapkin wrote:

How did you learn to steal?
They steal everything - recklessly,
Son steals, mother steals -
And they are building a thieves' cottage.

The baker steals from the ovens,
The carver steals from the loaf,
The watchman steals from melons,
Steals a scribe from a ladder.

The doctor steals from powders,
The welder steals from the soldering iron,
And even a jumping coach.
And even a scavenger at the landfill.

They steal soil from under the yard,
They steal the bottom from under the tub,
They steal Peter's conscience,
They steal Marfushka's soul...

Whom to ask? Who to shout?
And to whom should you be accountable?
And what will we steal
When will we tear everything up in the world?

In the 1980s, Tryapkin wrote the poetic cycle "From the Family Chronicle" on an epic scale. Here is one of the poems from this cycle. It is inspired by the poet's childhood memories of the events of the 1930s, when the Tryapkin family fled from dispossession from their native village of Sablino to the Russian north.

Song of the Best Dog

And finally sold the horse. And everything was ready.
I don’t remember anything - how things went there before that.
I only saw through the window: a cow bent its horns,
She rested heavily - and wearily followed someone.

Only somewhere above, a jackdaw screamed in fright,
And an unknown weight fell upon my heart.
And the mother cried, shielding herself with a corner of her half-shawl,
And the parent, returning, launched his cap under the table.

And that morning came, which conceived this legend,
And carts with belongings were already at the porch.
And the people crowded and clamored, as at a general meeting,
Fathers fussed, not forgetting about a glass of wine.

And the hammer pounded, clogging the windows with slabs,
And the shovel in the garden fell asleep at the cellar manhole.
And the native hut, which got wet from mother's tears,
It sounded like a coffin, waiting for us from time immemorial.

It was like a myth. It was in those years
Where a gigantic battering ram hit the earth's limestone.
And the earth rumbled. And the universal vaults thundered.
And the old ferry went to the oceans.

And the cart creaked. And bales and pillows were dangling,
And all the grandmother's tubs were rattling on the go.
And was it not me who sat there on the very last top
And he blew goodbye, and into that shepherd's tune?

For a long time the village has gone beyond the oat hillock,
And the people - they tried everything, keeping near our carts.
And they shoved us donuts and all sorts of milk and cottage cheese,
As if there, in front, a dashing Pecheneg was waiting for us.

Everything was as it should be, and tears, and dancing, and a fight.
Only - what is there for a cry at the last cherished birches?
We turned around, we looked: and behind us there was a dog spitting,
Dear dog is my own righteous dog!

Oh, you red-haired kosmach! Golden my grimy buddy!
Where are you running? For what unknown flea?
Go back and keep your ashes there,
And gnaw your bone under the wing of a new eaves.

Calm down, please. Don't jump on my luggage.
I'm crying myself. And ready to follow you everywhere.
But after all, we handed you over to the collective farm guards, -
Serve, watchman, on a different, unprecedented path.

And forget me. Don't risk your canine courage.
I'm leaving for a place where there are not such yards at all.
I myself, it seems, will live as a seedy mongrel,
And you already, brother, will not find a kennel there ...

And the dog kept rushing, squealing and spinning underfoot,
And these cries pierced me like knitting needles through and through:
This heart of mine squealed like a dog behind us ...
This childhood of mine, like a dog, was chasing me ...

Oh you, my dog! You listen to the moaning of the cuckoos!
Years will fly by and such a noise will rumble!
And no one here will remember whether that funny village,
Where together with you we tumbled through the spring flowers.

Years will pass - and universal poppies will rise here,
And our bones will burn in the crucible of other sunsets...
And if other dogs stick to me,
I will remember you - and I will sing this verse for my grandson.

Poems about fighting religion

Once the father comes - in the evening, from labor,
He twisted my ear and whistled a little "Ermak".
"Did you hear, darling? I received an assignment today -
Tomorrow the temple will be unloaded. Let's dispossess the saints a little."

"What's next?" - “And then the fees are already brief:
With half a ton of explosives - and a whirlwind to the seventh heaven.
Come on in tomorrow. Look into God's chambers there.
Dig into books. I'll make something myself."

And in me already youth rang in all tendons
And she called out to the constellations and to the eternal tablets of the earth.
And beyond the evening field, spreading sunset wings,
The Byzantine miracle shone in the crimson dust.

I loved these chapters, flying up to unknown heights,
And Sunday bells, and the whistle of indefatigable swifts.
This grandfather's temple, which adorned our entire neighborhood
And sanctified our entire vale with his crown!

Let me not honor the saints and, having looked at the church, I was not baptized,
But when the vociferous copper called from the bell tower,
I went into the porch, and humbly stood at the door,
And he looked into the depths, immersed in the dusk by a third.

The soul froze, and the candle flicker trembled,
And the thundering choirs overthrew wave after wave.
And everything seemed to me that I stepped into the limit of the Universe
And that eternity itself kindled fires before me.

No, I was not with God and I did not stand in a village church,
And the soul froze completely under a different voltage.
These prophetic hymns flying to the heights of the universe!
This poor heart, washed by the best rain! ..

And I came there - to look at a different concern!
I can not forget now that sad suffering, -
How paternal hands tore the gilding off the walls,
How the father's ax left traces on the icons.

They broke the altar, crumbled parquet slabs,
And the bitterest dust covered all the windows all around.
And our mournful aunts Julitas stood by the walls,
Wiping a tear with his gumasey shred.

And then I watched my father's hands tremble,
As his partner silently swallowed food ...
I took nothing, not a single hidden thing,
And he looked up, so as not to look people in the eye.

I loved these vaults, flying up to unknown heights,
And Sunday choirs, and hums from all levels ...
This grandfather's temple, erected by a local builder
And collected by a penny in the valleys of my Fatherland!

And I looked to where the swift tribe scurried around,
Flying under the dome, clinging to each ledge.
And I did not know then that the bitterest seed had sunk
In this heart of mine that was sad at the dumped robes.

And the years will fly by, and the twilight of ignorance will dispel,
And everything will be remembered - this temple, and an ax, and swifts, -
And about these walls I will add this legend
And the high Song that will be sung at this boundary.

Let the grandson listen - and don’t look at his grandfather so crookedly:
Although he was timid, the old man still loved the truth! ..
Forgive me, God, for these late impulses
And for this my sorrowful cry.

Describes nature very beautifully.

***
Viburnum laughed, blushing happily,
Braided me in green braids.
And viburnum put on a beautiful ring for me
In glowing gems of dew.

Like owls, all around, with a blue veil,
Lightning fluttered in the meadow.
Here's something true, simple and broad
The accordionist played around.

But it seemed - on the slopes by revelation itself
Flickering ponds and haystacks.
But it seemed - a girl's tear from excitement
A blue drop escapes from the leaf.

And the viburnum whispered: “Take without a trace
All the ripe grapes are mine!
And we laughed with her, and believed sweetly
Into the undivided soul of the earth.

Tryapkin Nikolai Ivanovich was born in 1918 in the family of a peasant carpenter; in 1930, the family moved to the suburban village. Lotoshino. There Tryapkin graduated from high school and in 1939 entered the Moscow Institute of History and Archives.

The outbreak of war dramatically changed the course of his life; not getting to the front for health reasons, Tryapkin, among the evacuees, finds himself in a small village near Solvychegodsk, where, working as an accountant, for the first time he seriously turns to poetry.

The nature and history of the Russian North contributed to the awakening of Tryapkin's talent, gave rich food for feeling and imagination. Since then, the poet's connection with the land, with the rural way of life, with the settled comfort of the hut, farmstead, outskirts has been steadily growing stronger, and even the poet's subsequent move to Moscow does not weaken it.

In autumn 1943 Tryapkin returned home to his parents. He experienced the public upsurge of the post-war "recovery" period as a "holiday of his poetic youth", which was reflected in his poems "Life" (1945), "Sunday", (1946). In 1945 there was a meeting with P. G. Antokolsky, who approved Tryapkin's first experiments and contributed to their publication in the October magazine (1946. No. 11). F.I. Panferov, the then editor of October, treated the beginning poet very favorably, which Tryapkin later recalled with gratitude more than once ( "Poems about Fedor Panferov", 1979).

Tryapkin knows how to poetically settle down different eras, get along with them; even in difficult times to distinguish light tones, sonorous and peppy sounds. This is how the first post-war decade echoed in his poems, this is how he creates “Rooks, streams and wires / Pre-sowing lyrics”, where not only pictures of field work, rural life find their place, but also the language of collective farm reports, newspaper reports - the same “district weekdays”, about which essay prose soon spoke. At the same time, Tryapkin noticeably moderated the “megaphone” loudness of the verse, which was not uncommon in the poetry of those years, and introduced human-warm notes into major themes.

Having discovered the North for himself in the 1940s, the land of the “old man Zimogor”, Tryapkin deeply felt its beauty, as if he conveyed it darkened from antiquity, from the forest dusk, from the oven smoke of the paint in the Tansy cycle (1946). Hence a number of images, lyrical plots diverge in other verses, enriched there with new details and shades (, "Desire",). In such things, a lot goes back to creativity. N. Klyueva, from whom Tryapkin learned to see the indigenous Northern Russia, learned to speak about it in a tightly knitted, multi-colored word. And later, “that secret man from Olonets” remained close to Tryapkin, who lay down, “mossy, like a boulder, near the track of the iron Yegorye” - so allegorically named Klyuev in the poem "Tradition" (1973).

Since 1953, Tryapkin's poetry collections have been published - The First Furrow (1953), White Night (1956), Chantings (1958). In the last book, the most important property of Tryapkin's verse, melodiousness, came out especially clearly. It does not so much reproduce ready-made song and musical forms of folklore (although Tryapkin is skilled in this, knowing, however, the measure), but directly expresses the melodious warehouse of the poet's soul and speech. In this property, Tryapkin inherits, together with M. Isakovsky, A. Prokofiev"song share" of the Russian word, both folk and literary. Song voices, different in timbre, intonations, permeate Tryapkin's work - sometimes sincere, lingering (, 1955;, 1969), then lively, daring ( “Like today over the Donetsk steppe…”, 1966).

With the song word, Tryapkin also gets along well with the skaz, also folk speech in its essence - in the “zabubenny tale” about Stepan (“Stepan”, 1966), in such verses as "The Song of Walking in the Land of Palestine"(1959, 1973). Over time, Tryapkin begins to gravitate towards the convergence of his lyrical narrative with the literary tradition of the poetic story in its version, which is widely represented in Tvardovsky. This is evidenced by a large two-part cycle "From the family chronicle" (1982).

Even in Tansy, Tryapkin's ability to connect distant eras, concepts, feelings in integral images was discovered. The present day is intertwined with "dense antiquity", legendary figures coexist with the poet's relatives, mythological creatures are as tangible as the inhabitants of the forest, like domestic animals. And naturally, in Tryapkin’s verse, the old bookish word (“tablets”) fits into the folk spoken (“young-bed beds”), with the local northern one (“kimarit margasik”), with a new word of Soviet use. It is not for nothing that the word “collective farm”, which seems to be alien here, obeying the general integrity, takes on a form and meaning that does not contradict the “dense dialect”: the collective farm calendar looks here like pagan calendars that “Domovoi reads” “on stucco stoves, the same age as Kashchei”. Tryapkin is fond of foundations, near which, as around the axis of the universe, time slowly rotates, and does not run vainly and without a trace; he cherishes an indestructible life, where “Christ Himself does not argue with novelty” and “where great-grandfather Svyatogor does not grow old in the tablets.”

From an ancestor who worships the forces of nature, almost merging with it, the poet comes to us through "forgotten milestones, the stalled distances of the long lived." In the poem, which begins with the above lines (1965), an excellent image of the legendary historical memory of the people is given: “From new ears, from ancient sorrow / A word will be tied” - and all the links of the past are resurrected: from “my glorious antiquity”, from Grishka Otrepiev and Stepan Razin until that bitter time, when "it was not Rurik who hit on the cheekbones, but his own Kuzka-Overmot" ( "Behind the dust of the Khan's raid...", 1965), to "Vanka-odnolishnik", until the last war.

Sometimes some kind of self-willed element can break into the historical order of events and destinies in Tryapkin - then “ages and dates” mix up, the poet becomes “a tenant of God knows what times”, as if immersed in prehistoric existence. And there, in the primordial darkness of the "invisible well", the subterranean currents of time meet, poetry is born there and is born in the "newborn" word (as V. Kozhinov accurately said in the preface to Tryapkin's "Chosen One", 1980): "The spirit perked up, the poet has risen / From heavy slumbers, from dead mud” (, 1958) - in this breakthrough to being, both the poet’s will to create and the pressure of people’s life, seeking expression for itself, act. Tryapkin realizes himself as the spokesman for the latter; He repeatedly declares his connection with her. Sharply playing on the common formula of democratic origin, he declares: “No, I did not come from the people. / Oh, black-boned breed! / From your cool family / I didn’t go anywhere” (, 1982). In this vein, Tryapkin creates a kind of poetic “philosophy of a common cause”, stemming from the moral ideals of the people, from the traditions of Russian thought and literature, which almost programmatically affected the 1966 poem: / Who is with us? Who is with us and to the clear sun? / Who is with us? /…/ Who is with us for a free song? / Who is with us? / Who is with us for the Russian word? / Who is with us? The whole poem responds to this cheerful, broad cry with a many-voiced response - “We are with you!”, In which communal strength, communal faith in goodness sounds. With the greatest integrity and expression, such a sense of life is conveyed in a poem (1971), where everything is permeated with the freshness of a clear autumn, free and at the same time filled with mature strength, “thick, coppery”, not afraid of bad weather and “stubborn undead”.

V. A. Kotelnikov

Russian literature of the XX century. Prose writers, poets, playwrights. Biobibliographic dictionary. Volume 3. P - Ya. 519-521.

TRYAPKIN, Nikolai Ivanovich (b. December 19, 1918, village of Sablino, Tver province) - Russian Soviet poet. Born into a peasant family. He studied at the Moscow Institute of History and Archives (1939-41) and at the Higher Literary Courses (1956-58). He began to publish in 1945. Author of collections of poems: "The First Furrow" (1953), "White Night" (1956), "Chants" (1958), "Krasnopolye" (1962), "Crossroads" (1962), "Songs of the Great Rains "(1965), "Silver Ponds" (1966), "The Loon Flew" (1967), "The Nest of My Fathers" (1967), etc. In Tryapkin's early poems, traces of various influences are noticeable, from N. Klyueva and S. Yesenina before M. Isakovsky and A. Prokofieva. Mature Tryapkin's poems are distinguished by the sincerity of expressing feelings, a variety of forms, and melodiousness. Much of Tryapkin's poetry comes from Russian folklore and from the carefully studied speech of the modern peasantry.

Op.: Chrysostom. Fav. poems. [Foreword. N. Bannikova], M., 1971; Swan geese. Poems. [Intro. Art. V. Zhuravleva], M., 1971.

Lit .: Lvov S., ... This is everything, as it once was ..., “Lit. newspaper”, 1947, 20 Dec.; Karp P., Poems by Nikolai Tryapkin, "Star", 1954, No. 4; Ermilova E., “I came out from where everything can be done all over again”, “Znamya”, 1963, No. 1; Mikhailov Al., "Among the enchanted herbs ...", "Friendship of Peoples", 1969, No. 2; Kozhinov V., Two layers, “Mol. guard”, 1969, No. 1; Kulikov S., The reality of talent. About the poems of N. Tryapkin, “Lit. newspaper”, 1969, 24 Dec.

L. M. Volpe

Brief literary encyclopedia: In 9 volumes - V. 7. - M .: Soviet encyclopedia, 1972

The erb song

For the great Soviet Union!

For the most holy human brotherhood!

Oh Lord! Almighty Jesus!

Resurrect our earthly happiness.

Sprinkle us with willow water.

Do not hold you supreme evil

For my shameful Babylons, -

That I tore down Your domes,

What shredded I holy icons!

Fence! God forbid! Protect!

Raise from the bloody dungeons!

Oh Lord! Almighty Jesus!

Resurrect my earthly happiness.

Raise you our red Union

To the Cross of his lectern.

outcast poet

Nikolai Ivanovich Tryapkin was born on December 19, 1918 in the village of Sablino, Tver province, in the family of a peasant carpenter, died on February 21, 1999 in Moscow.

In 1930, the family of the future poet moved to the village of Lotoshino near Moscow. There, Nikolai Ivanovich graduated from high school in 1939 and entered the Moscow Institute of History and Archives. The outbreak of the war dramatically changed the course of life. He was not taken to the front, and among the evacuees he ended up in a village near Solvychegodsk, where he first turned to poetry. Tryapkin admitted that the Russian North made him a poet. Since then, his poetry has been dominated by the peasant cosmos with its mysticism and way of life. And moving to Moscow only strengthens it. In the autumn of 1943, Tryapkin returned home to his parents. In 1945, he showed his poems to Pavel Antokolsky, who not only approved his poetic experiments, but also contributed to their publication in the October magazine (1946). Almost until the end of his life, the poet continues to live in the Moscow region, only shortly before his death he receives a Moscow apartment.

On the whole, his poetic philosophy of the "common cause", stemming from the moral quest of the Russian people, was far from the dominant lyrics. His poetry was greatly appreciated by the writers of the circle of "Our Contemporary" - Yuri Kuznetsov, Stanislav Kunyaev and others. Tryapkin, perhaps, turned out to be the last poet of the Russian hinterland, the Russian way, although he was not a purely peasant poet. He was a free keeper of the Russian word. He was not afraid to touch upon the tragic topics of dispossession, collectivization, and the hard life of the peasantry.

In the last period of his work, he sharply opposed perestroika and the destruction of Russia. He joined the editorial board of The Day newspaper, was its regular contributor and, in a sense, a poetic symbol.

A recognized classic of the 20th century.

Nikolai Tryapkin has always been an outcast poet. This is his path, his cross burden, which he meekly carried until the end of his days. In a sense, he cultivated his rejection of the literary elite and was not particularly drawn to the elite, for he understood that there, in their world, he would be deprived of both poetic and mystical freedom. From his youth, first in Tver, then near Moscow, and later in the north, he absorbed the knowledge of his people, of the prophetic supra-temporal Russia. Fate led him. She gave him nourishment with folk life, gave him a sense of folk culture. Even from the general war, he was rejected, they did not take him because of his health, they sent him to the evacuation to the north. For secret knowledge. It was there, in the Russian North, that he became a poet. He was both a plowman and a shepherd, then he became a book people, and the northerners were sincerely proud of their poet. Nikolai Ivanovich himself recognized the mystical significance of the northern years in his poetic destiny. “In this small northern village, my creative biography began ... Indigenous Russian life, indigenous Russian word, indigenous Russian people. I immediately felt myself in something that was especially close and dear to me. For the first time, my eyes were opened to Russia and Russian poetry, for I saw all this with some kind of special, “internal” vision. And somewhere there, very close, the beautiful Vychegda merges with the beautiful Dvina. Wooden Kotlas and its blue pier - so majestic and so visible from afar! And everywhere - great forests, overshadowed by great legends. All this is very good for beginning poets. For the air itself is such that the heart is cleansed and becomes melodious. And for the first time I began to write poems that fascinated me myself. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. It was as if I was reborn, or someone doused me with magical moisture. The godson of the Russian North, Solvychegodsk and Ustyug villages, ancient churchyards, Old Believer legends and tales, later, on the pages of our newspaper Zavtra, he admitted:

Once there, in the forests of Ustyuga,

I circled restlessly.

Spruce creaked, blizzards spread

At the ancient graves.

And on some fix

I found myself a place to sleep

And fell to the milk pot,

Without wiping icy eyelids.

And in the dim light of Compline

I plunged into the ancient life,

In the bear's dusk, in the smoke of beliefs,

In some dream, in some wash.

And I comprehended those centuries

And in that baked corner

And in the trash of the old rope,

And in a homemade ladle ...

…………………………….

And in the dim light of Compline

I close myself in a secret skete.

And the unspeakable smoke of beliefs

In my legends see through.

And on some fix

I will exude the last fervor

And I'll lie down in an old string

At the ancient graves.

(“Once there, in the forests of Ustyug...”, 1995)

His prophetic hidden word came from somewhere from the depths of the depths of mystical Russia, reviving the lost sources, the fundamental principles of the folk word. He was our Russian dervish, understandable to everyone with his jokes, ditties, dancing and at the same time incomprehensible to almost anyone in his magical esoteric insights. He did not immerse himself in folklore, did not study it, he himself was a messenger of the ancient meaning of the word. And therefore he easily violated the laws composed by folklorists. His purest Russian was often the "wrong" language. In this, he is similar, perhaps, only with one such magician of the Russian word, Vladimir Lichutin. What do they care about the “correctness” of the times, the compatibility of certain epic heroes, if they themselves were from the same times. And from the same tribe of heroes.

For folklore, for folklore!

For guitar picking!

For an accordion, for a horn!

Now in a cart, then on foot ...

And with what interest

I walked through the field, I walked through the forest!

And I didn't know until now

That I am my own folklore.

(“For folklore, for folklore...”, 1995)

Perhaps the first to notice this message of his to us from the depths of his own people was Yuri Kuznetsov, who was close to him with mystical immersion in the word: “The crowd is faceless, the people have a face. This folk face emerges in the work of Nikolai Tryapkin ... And the poet himself has magical powers, with one stroke of the pen he is able to hold all times: "Centuries and years are whistling over us - / Have they rushed by?" Nikolai Tryapkin is close to folklore and ethnographic environment, but close as a flying bird. He does not get stuck, but soars. That is why in his poems there is always a feeling of a jubilant flight ... The poet masters his material mysteriously, without making visible efforts, like Emelya from a fairy tale, in which the oven itself walks and the ax cuts itself. But this is no longer everyday life, but a national element ... "And then Yuri Kuznetsov says true, but in essence tragic words for all of us:" In the line of Koltsov - Yesenin, poets of the national way, Tryapkin - the last Russian poet. It is difficult and even impossible in the future to expect the appearance of a poet of such a folk element ... ”I think that in prose after Vladimir Lichutin, at least one more mysterious owner of the deep meanings of the Russian word will hardly appear.

It is amazing that the memory of the word was given to both of them by the same northern Arkhangelsk land. But soon after the war, Nikolai Tryapkin left the north and returned to his native suburbs. Began to be published in Moscow magazines. His talent was recognized. Its mystical depth was even feared. There was something magical, bewitching in his poetry.

I went to the woods,

Which you will not find in reality,

And listened to the witching sighs,

And tore the unearthly grass.

And burrowed into shaggy moss,

In the spirit of darkness, in a smoky dream,

And he was neither a matchmaker nor a brother -

Tenant God knows what times.

And the drowsy pines creaked

And they muttered like magicians.

But where, when, to what extent -

All memory out of my head.

(“I went to the forests like this ...”, 1956)

That is why he seemed to be a stranger to many, and that is why they shunned him as some kind of anomalous phenomenon. He looked obviously strange, obviously rejected in the stormy years of Stalin, when he calmly wrote about Christ and the burden of the cross, about the Zymogors and the revived Nazareth, thereby refuting all the current tales about the taboo of Christian themes and ancient traditions.

And fly over the marching paths

Sun gods from your mittens.

And the songs are free

Over the failures of black dungeons.

(“And they fly over the marching tracks ...”, 1944)

You will not believe that this was written in 1944 and was published in all his collections. It is clear that when he was quite young from his northern Ustyug depths, he wrote willingly and at the behest of his soul about victorious battles, about the steamed ice of the Volga, for "the sun, like the helmet of Stalingrad, rises over the great river", but it is strange and mysterious that at the same time, being as a youngster, while singing about real victories over the Nazis, he wrote about the old churchyard, which can inspire fighters to fight to the death:

Cloudberry overgrown with moss tombstones,

Remained in the depths of great-grandchildren's blood.

("Old churchyard", 1945)

And when “an uninvited stranger came with fire”, the Russian soldiers “in these stones that drowned out the mosses / suddenly became painfully close to everyone. / And everyone remembered: here are the ashes of the dear ones ... "

Then, already in the forties, the beardless, flimsy poet fought with his poems not for the power of the Soviets, and not even for the house left somewhere in the Moscow region under the Germans, but for the ancient national primordial world of Holy Russia. He, like Nikolai Klyuev, could call himself "initiated from the people", but unlike his great predecessor, Nikolai Tryapkin does not lock himself in his underground paradise, as in some kind of ghetto of the past, rather, on the contrary, pulls the past into the light, into freedom, into the future, voices mysticism, surprisingly connecting the ancient world of ancestors, far from Soviet novelties, with a breakthrough into the future, into the Russian boundless space, becoming close to Velimir Khlebnikov, Andrei Platonov, early futurists:

And all-world thunders pass over the world,

And, suddenly uttering hurricane din,

These strange temples are flying away from the earth,

These formidable arrows of smoke and sound,

That someone descends from some kind of bow

And they plunge right into the cap of the universe...

And other legends are born in the heart...

(“Somewhere there are spaceports...”, 1966)

You can, of course, catch stylistic fleas in Tryapkin's early poetry, but another thought strikes me - that such mystical poems were written in the war and the first post-war years.

Here, great-grandfather Svyatogor in the tablets does not age,

But even Christ himself does not argue with novelty.

And on stucco stoves, the same age as Kashchei,

The collective farm calendar is read by Brownie.

("Tansy", 1947)

It is clear that Dmitry Galkovsky would not include such poems in his anthology of typical Soviet poetry Utkorech1. Tryapkin's poems do not fit in all respects into his "quasi-epos of the destroyed era", this is not the poetry of Dolmatovsky or even Simonov. This is some other parallel stream of Russian poetry, which, without interrupting for a moment, lived in those harsh and victorious, tragic and majestic 40s and 50s. The Russian people even then managed to live according to their own internal laws, according to their own way:

Under the low goddess shimmering kimarit

Morgasik with the moon in half.

The old man repeats the commemoration in a melody,

Guesses float on eyebrows.

……………………………………

And the old one is hissing: will you remember soon,

What kind are you, whose rights, -

With obscurity of paths, with the muttering of boron

Have you mixed your thoughts for a long time?

This outlandish poem, written back in the forties and also published in all Tryapkin's Soviet publications, contradicts not only the so-called poetic mainstream of the Stalinist industrial years, but also the norm of liberties of the forties and fifties approved today. But then there were still quite a few such sorcerers in Russia - Mikhail Prishvin, and Boris Shergin, and Alexander Prokofiev, and Nikolai Zabolotsky, from the northern, Siberian, Ural corners, the radiant "obscurantist" Russia pearled on the literary commissar's army. Moreover, they remade the Sovietness in their own way, and later they learned to control rockets in their own way, and even the first in the world flew into space. But the rejection of this Russian parallel flow from the official life of both the country and its culture proceeded systematically, offensively, Dmitry Galkovsky is right about this. The Russian paradise, which had completely different coordinates of time and space, different morality and ethics than that of the progressive cosmopolitan movement of civilization, could not please either the political or literary authorities of the Eurocentric world. Nomenklatura Russia tore Nikolai Tryapkin away from his officialdom, his deep Russianism frightened bureaucratic commissars more than the dissident efforts of the sixties.

That planet is not mediocre

That region has not died yet

If you become a poet

Even Tryapkin Nikolay.

Even Tryapkin Nikolai

Goes straight to God in heaven.

And the Lord for it

Releases the loaf.

Releases the loaf

And shouts: “Poems come on!

And your unfortunate enemies

I'll hide in a coffin-shed.

……………………………..

You, Tryapkin Nikolai,

Come to heaven more often.

Only bad songs

You look do not publish.

And you don't do that

I will say, they say: “Oh, you louse!”

And to Sergei Mikhalkov

You will become a housekeeper."

(“Poems about Nikolai Tryapkin”, 1973)

And this concerned not only one Nikolai Tryapkin. In the same sixties and seventies, the Soviet intelligentsia successfully formed a hierarchy of literary values ​​of the 20th century. The now unshakable clip was put forward in the first row: Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova. No doubt, all strong poets. But even Vladimir Mayakovsky, with some kind of latent national energy, did not fit into this series. He was pushed to the side. Moreover, Velimir Khlebnikov, Nikolai Klyuev, Pavel Vasiliev, Nikolai Zabolotsky were clearly on the sidelines. And behind them are all the secret guides through parallel mystical Russia. Only Sergei Yesenin, by some miracle, through his melodious lyrics, made his way into the heart of every Russian, and it was already impossible to kick him out of there. In Alexander Tvardovsky, both the official and unofficial elites saw only an influential editor of Novy Mir and did not want to see a major national poet in any way. The same thing happened with the young contemporaries of Nikolai Tryapkin. In the same way, an unshakable series was formed from Bella Akhmadulina to Joseph Brodsky, again, of course, talented poets. Their names are now known to every schoolchild. And today the poets of the root national tradition - Anatoly Peredreev, Vladimir Tsybin, Boris Primerov, Tatiana Glushkova - have remained completely unknown. Few people are now familiar with the poetry of Stanislav Kunyaev, they know his name only as the editor of Our Contemporary, even such a lump as Yuri Kuznetsov is consciously not noticed. Only Nikolai Rubtsov, with his simple lyrical lines, like Sergei Yesenin, penetrated the hearts of Russian people back in the seventies and shone in the poetic sky as a star of the first magnitude ...

The struggle against the poets initiated by the people, against the prophets of the mystical innermost Russia went on secretly and openly along the entire front, both from the nomenklatura-Soviet side and from the liberal-dissident side.

But even in this conscious silence of the creators of Russian myths, the total rejection of the poet Nikolai Tryapkin is striking. Especially in the last period of his life. His books have not been on the shelves for more than ten years. He was bypassed with prizes and awards. Until now, years after his death, he has not erected a monument on his grave. The poet was going through his family drama and did not receive help from anywhere. In the last years of his life, he generally lived almost like a homeless person. Having left his home almost like Tolstoy, feeling the rejection of his new relatives, he, with the same untamed Kerzhak spirit, wandered for a long time through other people's houses.

And no fathers to you, no covenant from

No grandfather's graves, no honor, no shame.

The Irony of Fate! To the house of the Russian poet

With a dance, Khitrov's suffering broke in.

("Woe to old Lupa", 1995)

Everyone knew about it and was silent, no one wanted to help find a way out of this impasse. Yes, it seems that we, the newspapers Den Literature and Zavtra, have nothing to be ashamed of, it was we who helped Nikolai Ivanovich financially all the last years, it was Alexander Prokhanov, united with Tryapkin by the same invisible ties of sacred Russia, unrestrained Russian cosmism, faith in the future Russian paradise, got up at the night call of Nikolai Ivanovich and went to his house to deal with the growing family drama. But who could give him his calm corner?

Nor Golitsyn's Postrelkin,

Not a Maleev horsefly.

Even Belkin-Peredelkin

Didn't leave for me.

All in millions and trillions

They started counting the money.

And with my goslingers

And acquaintances did not know.

Rolled away all the droshki youth.

Poissyak my last penny.

And now - no strength, no joy,

Only hearts deaf whining.

And now, from the last station,

I ask other bugs -

Not to America, not to France,

And in a nook for old people.

("Neither Golitsyn's Postrelkin...", 1995)

Which of the writers' unions could provide him with a creative dacha in Peredelkino or Vnukovo in his old age, or at least pay for a room in the House of Creativity on preferential terms, as is done for Mikhail Roshchin, thereby resolving the protracted ideological confrontation, which, like in the twenties, cut years, during the years of perestroika, not only the Tryapkin family, but also hundreds of thousands of other families? The poet breaks out with pain: “You call me a fascist, / And you yourself live in my house ... / I would take you by the peysiki - / Yes, and with a stick on the back ... ". Many times he came to our newspaper office, sitting for a long time in the department of literature, considering our newspaper his native corner, while he still had strength. And the forces were running out. His native - and sovereign, and national, and domestic - the world was collapsing, driving the most unique Russian poet into a dead end, from which there is no way out. This impasse in 1999 was resolved by a deep stroke and ended with the death of the poet.

I do not regret, friends, that it's time to die,

And I regret, friends, that I am unable to punish,

That in my house I have so many different pigs,

And in my hands I have no oak, no stones.

Dear Motherland! Priceless mother!

I'm not afraid to die. It's time for me to die.

Just don't let the old man's rust kill you,

And let me die from lead and a knife.

(“I do not regret, friends, that it is time to die ...”, 1993)

His desperate poems of recent years, calling for rebellion and insurrection, were not wanted to be published anywhere. Only in "The Day of Literature" and "Tomorrow" did we devote entire pages to the furious poetic revelations of Nikolai Tryapkin. Only at our parties did he sing his angry curses against the destroyers of his homeland and his home.

Let's sing.

The timpani rumbles, the drum rumbles,

At the Trinity Lavra - a Jewish shalman,

Let's sing.

Huge nits grow fat in the ground,

And Serut Hasidim in the Moscow Kremlin,

Let's sing.

And all our snouts are a bared mouth,

And the gorilla dances at our gates,

Let's sing.

("Let's sing", 1993)

We have been reproached for publishing such angry verses. They said, even shouted at the top of their voices, that the poet had written himself, that he was becoming dangerous to those around him. And at the same time, Tryapkin's energy of new civic poems, his political satire and prophetic dreams were a support for almost a million of our readers in those hot days of the nineties. From distant America, in response to his curses on the Yeltsin regime, to the curses on the destroyers of his home and his homeland, Alexander Mezhirov published in the liberal press his poem "Drifting", his last direct conversation with a former friend:

I'm sorry to bother you

Don't think that I'm crying.

Just, Kolya, I'm with you

Lastly, I say...

("Drifting", 1995)

And what does he say in the end with the Russian poet, who is only looking for a corner for the elderly in this evil world, another poet who fled from his native fatherland after the most unpleasant story with the actor of the Taganka Theater who was knocked down by him on the road and left to die in the bushes without any help? About how they managed to save him from all legal troubles and urgently sent him to America for permanent residence? About how his famous poetic slogan “Communists, forward!” began to be perceived during the years of perestroika as a call for emigration to Israel and the United States? No, Alexander Mezhirov is already reproaching the entire Russian people, who defeated fascism, that the poison of fascism he defeated has entered the Russian consciousness:

The vanquished won,

Ended and began -

And in the end I had to

I had to say goodbye, Kolya,

Tryapkin, a true poet,

Because it worked out

That which has no name.

It turned out - to blame

Jews-adversaries,

On which there is no cross

In the fact that the Cathedral of Christ was blown up, -

Turned paradise into a tavern

Sober land and drunk and tear,

Peasantized the village

They told the Kuban.

And in the basement in the Urals

Sovereign with the whole family,

It turned out - I was shot,

It turned out - only me.

Alexander Mezhirov, as it were, brings all the accusations, all the furious civil controversy of the first years of perestroika, to Nikolai Tryapkin, regretting that this “poet by the will of God” fell into “senile fury”, and even admitting that “you are our intercessor / In the sky of your tune, / Sounds of heavenly Seraphim. / I’ll take your melody there, / So that on the Holy Land, / And grieving, and rejoicing, / Hear, Kolya, your voice ... "

To be honest, in Mezhirov’s poem I can hear his own repentance, and his longing for Russia, and even some kind of craving for former Russian friends:

Tanya was my favorite.

Couldn't stop loving her

I also loved Vadim

Inflamed talk...

Now Tanya Glushkova, and Vadim Kozhinov, and Nikolai Tryapkin have already crossed over to the other side of Genesis. Alexander Mezhirov unexpectedly sent his voice to the Literature Day in defense of Eduard Limonov, who is languishing in Lefortovo. The passions of the first years of the collapse of our state have also subsided. Now we can already say that in vain Alexander Mezhirov saw in the civil and domestic drama of Nikolai Tryapkin only one anti-Semitic passion. Tryapkin's angry lines are far from being addressed to all Jews, and not only to Jews who have fallen into the sin of destruction. And to the same Russians, the same Georgians, the same Tatars... To the arrogance of America, to the total misunderstanding of Russia by many Western politicians. With his peasant folk logic, the poet seeks to separate evil from holiness, love from hatred, looking for the original ancestral home of all peoples. Like any natural Russian person, close both to the earth and to folklore principles, Tryapkin has no enmity towards any peoples and countries, and his evil is always specific. With the naivety of a prophet, he manages on the pages of the same newspaper The Day to both scold a specific “Jewish shaman” at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and write a mournful message to his friend Mark Sobol:

Buddy Mark! Don't blame me

That I am knocking on your solitude.

Let's sit down by the fire again

What we once called inspiration.

I grieve, old man, that our XX century

It turned out to be so quarrelsome and stinking.

Touched the pus - and now the Secretary General himself

Crawled through the world - a reptile of reptiles.

………………………………………….

And now the hostility viruses are raging,

And now all the apples of discord scurry,

And we aim at each other's asses

Or we fire right in the chest from under the fence ...

Is the smoke of mutual nonsense for us?

Believe the word of a friend and poet:

I'd pawn all my verses

For the first verse from the New Testament...

(“Message to Mark Sobol”, 1993)

It so happened that both the “Message to Mark Sobol” and “Poems about Pavel Antokolsky” became Nikolai Tryapkin’s involuntary response to his former friend, who settled away from both personal and sovereign troubles in prosperous America.

We all fly and run.

And in the end - universal bitterness.

Lonely my skit! My lonely heart!

My dear old man!

My incomparable Pavel Grigorich!

Let me get upset.

And cry in your name.

(“Poems about Pavel Antokolsky”, 1994)

However, Alexander Mezhirov, from his American distance, does not take into account a certain family-home shade of imaginary Tryapkin's anti-Semitism. The bitterness of family discord is transferred to the bitterness of interethnic passions. It just so happened that the poems of the nineties by Nikolai Tryapkin are full of bitterness, and sadness, and trouble, and goodbyes. They are not as comfortable as they used to be in other years and decades.

My universe collapsed

My orbit opened up.

And now she's not the universe

And John Smith's dumpling.

And not a stellar path-path

My amusement flies

And under someone's hungry spoon

Lost dumpling.

("My universe fell apart...", 1994)

Unexpectedly for himself, Nikolai Tryapkin, due to his stuttering, and also due to his creative gift, consciously cultivating melodiousness, festivity, historicity, resurrection, naturalness in poetry, never considering himself a soldier or a rebel, it was in the nineties that he was reborn into a different poet. From lyrical rejection, he moved into offensive fighting rejection. Some of his friends do not accept and do not understand this, they are ready to cross out all the poems of the nineties by Nikolai Tryapkin. They were always closer to another Tryapkin. A sort of "ancient hunter with a quiver on his back", a domestic sorcerer, bewitching with his herbs and conspiracies, a village fool with the eyes of a child, revealing the beauty of the world, the beauty of myth, the beauty of the lyre. Indeed, everyone remembers the poet’s program poem “How are people killed?”, All connoisseurs of Russian poetry of the 20th century remember these lines:

How are people killed?

How are people killed?

I have never seen people get killed

I didn’t spin in gangs, and they didn’t take me to wars,

And the executioners did not throw me into the dungeons,

And before death I did not call the young Eaglet,

And I look at the earth through the eyes of a child.

Only the grasses whisper to me and the ears nod,

……………………………………………

Just by themselves, all friends die ...

And in the fields I still hear the ringing of the lark,

And I look at the earth with the eyes of a child ...

O land of my ancestors! The earth is precious!

What is this? Why do I have such mercy?

………………………………………….

And the flowers answer with nods of participation...

What is it -

Is there true happiness?

("How people are killed...", 1965)

Ready-made manifesto of Russian folk pacifism. Wise silence and humility before the mystery of eternity. Denial of alien official pathos. The unwillingness of the people to fight or rebel. To leave and dissolve in nature, to live a secret natural life...

It was precisely the poets initiated by the people, the singers of the people's paradise and harmony, the poets of the parallel national stream, who in the twentieth century did not rattle in their verses with either weapons or curses. Even animals, their smaller brothers, the poets of the Russian tradition preferred "never to beat on the head." Consciously they did not get into politics, they preferred lyrical, aesthetic opposition to any official regime. In Russia, the people lived for centuries apart from the authorities, from the noble or commissar elite, and only during the years of tragedy, whether it was the war with the French in 1812 or the Germans in 1941-1945, did national unity occur. So folk literature, which appeared in writing in all its grandeur only in the 20th century, went its own parallel way, not interfering in the affairs of power, raising its own people's problems, singing nature, goodness and love. And the lyrics were not by chance - quiet. Christian humility reigned, justifying the destiny of Holy Russia. In the poems of Nikolai Rubtsov, Anatoly Peredreev, Vladimir Sokolov, Boris Primerov, Nikolai Tryapkin and others, one could not find the names of Lenin and Stalin, the anthem of the revolution, curses to American imperialism, greetings to Angela Davis or Fidel Castro. All this is absolutely from another world, from the world of court poetry, glorifying Lenin's Longjumeau and the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, the Cuban revolution and the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline. Parallel Russian literature, one of the poetic leaders of which was undoubtedly Nikolai Tryapkin, has always existed in a consciously apolitical way. Imperialism and that was not expressed directly, but in the word itself, in language, in the scale of the view of the world, in universal naturalness, in lyrical cosmism. Even manifestations of civic feelings were sometimes ashamed of Russian poets. Only storytelling. Lyrical breadth of soul and all-humanity.

You blow and conjure, north wind,

In Russia, in the great, in the north

Let's sail the Lukomorya drunk

Let's roam the islands of Buyans.

("Skaz", 1947)

In order to be such a humble poet, one had to have both in the Stalin and Brezhnev years both courage, and audacity, and courage. Nikolai Tryapkin was not afraid to write like this back in 1947. In the most severe Stalinist time. This was also a challenge to national parallel literature. That is why they did not let her representatives into the presidiums and court salons, another literary elite walked there. Neither Nikolai Klyuev in the twenties, nor Andrei Platonov in the forties, nor Nikolai Tryapkin in the seventies were seen in these salons. Not that they were enemies of the state, no, they understood and appreciated the role of the state, but they considered themselves rather as intercessors of the people in front of any state.

And then the great Soviet state, sung by the progressive court elite, collapsed overnight. Instantly, all the laureates and order bearers not only calmed down, but for the most part became fierce anti-Soviet and victims of the Soviet regime. One of them was not issued a collected works, another was dragged for a long time with the Lenin Prize, the third was given the wrong dacha in Peredelkino. Poor victims of the Soviet regime. From Mikhail Shatrov to Oleg Efremov...

And at the moment when the former laureate literature turned away from the dying Soviet state, Russian national writers, disliked by the authorities, rejected and persecuted, huddled on the sidelines of the official literary process, unexpectedly became its singers and defenders. They have never been servile before the authorities. They should be the first to finish off these crooked nomenklatura authorities ... And they rushed to the barricades, proudly acquired red-brown ...

I remember how Nikolai Tryapkin was not included in the number of delegates to one of the last congresses of Soviet writers, the level of significance of the most talented national poet turned out to be not the same. If you now name those who were preferred to Tryapkin, you can fall out of your chair with laughter, no one knew such writers even then. In protest, Yuri Kuznetsov, who was on that delegate list, refused to participate in the congress in favor of Nikolai Tryapkin. As a result, neither one nor the other got to the congress ... And this Nikolai Tryapkin, persecuted by the authorities, as well as the most apolitical Tatyana Glushkova, as well as the subtle lyricist Boris Primerov, in the most tragic years for the country, the nineties, become the brightest singers of the perishing Soviet system. Either the hatred of the bourgeoisie among the Russian people and its singers outweighed the rejection of the nomenklatura bureaucracy, or it was natural National Bolshevism, or the age-old feeling of contradiction, disagreement with the official setting, broke through, or their poems were fed by the same eternal Russian pity for the fallen, for the defeated, or they simply defended Russian statehood, which had already merged with Soviet power, but mostly poets and writers who were far from official Soviet literature became “red-brown” in literature. Once, at the dawn of the red era, Nikolai Klyuev wrote:

There is a Kerzhen spirit in Lenin,

Abbot's cry in decrees.

As if the origins of devastation

He searches in Pomeranian Answers.

("Lenin", 1918; 1923)

More than seventy years later, already at the sunset of Soviet Atlantis, Nikolai Tryapkin continues the rebellious work of his beloved predecessor:

For the great Soviet Union!

For the most holy human brotherhood!

Oh Lord! Almighty Jesus!

Resurrect our earthly happiness.

Oh Lord! Lean over me.

We got wild in the abyss of pitch.

Sprinkle us with willow water.

Do not hold you supreme evil

For my shameful Babylons, -

That I tore down Your domes,

What shredded I holy icons!

Fence! God forbid! Protect!

Raise from the bloody dungeons!

What is the pus in my old bone

What a stench from demonic harlots!

Oh Lord! Almighty Jesus!

Resurrect my earthly happiness.

Raise you my red union

To the Cross of His lectern.

("Palm Song", 1994)

No, to throw out from the poetry of Nikolai Tryapkin the powerful, most tragic red poems of 1994, written after the complete collapse of the once mighty state, after the October execution of 1993, I personally will not raise my hand, even just out of love for his talent.

I know that some of the eminent monarchist patriots will try to prevent the red cycle, dozens of brilliant poetic masterpieces, from being included in his future books, especially since relatives will not interfere with this cut. But these lines were written with pain in the heart, not by eminent patriots and not cautious relatives, wrote their true Russian national poet Nikolai Tryapkin. And something deep pulled him out of fairy tales and mystical legends, out of pacifism and love pantheism, throwing him into a bloody red-brown barricade fight. And that was his highest dedication. In those years, he was part of our "Den", was our collaborator among the people. Was our barricade poet. And he was proud of this title. Proud of fighting together. He wrote in his "Message to a Friend" dedicated to Alexander Prokhanov:

Do not sleep in the hands of the rope and belt,

And the feet press on the thunder boards.

Your incomparable "Day" is buzzing at the alarm,

And I keep saying: “Russia is still alive!”

("Message to a Friend", 1993)

And I can only be proud of the fact that throughout the last decade of his life and work I constantly met with him both at home, and at the newspaper office, and at our evenings, and in his vagrancy with friends, and after his severe stroke, when he returned already humble to your home to die. I was with my wife and poets Valera Isaev and Slava Lozhko from Crimea on his eightieth birthday. None of the other writers were allowed in, and we got in only because we brought a substantial amount of money from the newspaper for the poet's anniversary. He lay in bed clean and humble, good-natured and at home, but his soul remained the same rebellious outcast: “Human rights, human rights. / The vilest song of the twentieth century.

I met Nikolai Ivanovich Tryapkin as a student, in the dormitory of the Literary Institute, famous in the literary environment of those years. I remember I was there with a group of leftist avant-garde poets and critics. They drank, walked, and suddenly heard somewhere in the next room the bewitching singing of some verses unknown to us and unusual for our ears. Dropped by. My classmate lived there, the talented poet Igor Krokhin from Mtsensk, now deceased. And he sat on his bed and sang his poems about the return of Stenka Razin and "The Loon Flew", about forgotten songs of antiquity and poems about Grishka Otrepyev, about the proletarians of all countries and, of course, the famous "Alas, brother, Churchill Winston" too slightly intoxicated Nikolai Tryapkin. I must say that Yura Mineralov, Adam Adashinsky, and other left-wing poets from our company appreciated both the quality of the poems and the skill of their performance. We did not return to our room until morning. It was a drunken night of the free drunken poetry of Nikolai Tryapkin. Even then I was struck by a different, purely folk, or perhaps Old Believer compassionate attitude towards Grishka Otrepyev. And there was some kind of pride in him for Otrepyev: they say, here, ours, from the very bottom of the people, and he got out to the kings, just like in a Russian fairy tale.

For me, brother, you are not a book at all,

And I remembered you for a reason,

Red-haired rogue, arrogant stripped

And in kings - holy simplicity.

Cape you - one pokosk-shirt.

Tell me like this, without fools:

How much does Monomakh's hat weigh?

And how many whips are you? ..

(“Poems about Grishka Otrepyev”, 1966)

Such an attitude, by the way, to another Grigory - Rasputin. Notice how Nikolai Tryapkin expresses in passing his popular attitude towards the royal servants:

And here you are psycho boyars

Chopped straight to pieces.

This popular attitude, completely different from the official one, whether of tsarist or Soviet times, to many events and to many historical figures broke through in folklore, in the popular print, in the performances of buffoons. Tryapkin also expressed it not as his own, but as something natural, something shouted out from the heart of the people. Maybe that's why in the sixties and seventies his most mischievous and robbery poems were not officially condemned, like, say, Oleg Chukhontsev's poems about Kurbsky. For in those - Chukhon - something personal, individual protest was seen. And in Tryapkin's, folk beliefs and hackneyed language were too strong and obvious. Their alienness to the bureaucratic world was bypassed in silence, as if not noticing.

Only in this way was it possible in the most stagnant years to sing lines about Savely Pizhemsky in the voice of a holy fool, which “would drag on a psalm about places of transit, / About the bars of five camps ...”. Everything came together in the poem about Savely Pizhemsky: the planes flying to the taiga, and the Old Believer “charter”, very formidable, created by Avvakum himself, and the powerful wild old man himself, who killed the Old Believer’s wife for treason, transferred his anger both to the Old Believers and to deputies, and to the whole people. That is why Tryapkin's poetry is strong because it reflects everything that is in the people - both humility, and blasphemy, and holiness, and savagery, and patience, and rebelliousness.

Hey you, u-lo-chki,

Pereuloch-ki!

What has the Lord Christ

In Karau-loch-ke?

He has a decanter of Madeira

And an appetizer of moose.

Come on, Old Believers,

Apply it.

("Savely Pizhemsky", 1966)

Everything creeps on each other, blood and soil, xenophobia and all-humanity, revelry to the point of lawlessness and pity without end ...

In the songs of Nikolai Tryapkin you immerse yourself with your head, as in Russia itself. And you do not find any one-dimensionality. No definition. Who is he - an Orthodox poet or a pagan? Old Believer or Atheist? And what about a firefighter? Even in uniform you get confused, is he a traditionalist or a secret innovator who opens up new paths?

Underground spirits! open the door for me

At their darkness.

I swear I know how to be prophetic, like a beast,

And sensitive as poetry!

What kind of eyes look in the corners

From eternal darkness?

Open to me your reserved Pergamon,

Dear people!

("Conjuring", 1966)

Of course, such poetry was doomed to rejection on the part of those in power, and on the part of liberal dissidence, and even on the part of official populism. For even there, in the canonical Orthodox and patriotic charters, his free poetry did not fit. This is the poetry of the Russian people, which has not yet acquired a religious or ideological community, poetry that even the people themselves did not always dare to take for their own. That is why Nikolai Ivanovich Tryapkin did not rush to the capitals for a long time, staying away from ideological battles. His cell was - in rejection.

I was beaten

In three knives, in four weights,

And I hid in the grave ...

Where? Responding to a request:

In that forest hut,

On the unknown edge

At the backyard of an old woman,

And everyone else - blow in the nose.

……………………………..

I was beaten

Both in the capital and in Tagil.

And now I've been forgotten.

What a delight! Like in paradise!

The paths of the hounds have died out,

The old wounds have dried up

My freaks are dead,

And I sing songs...

(“I was beaten, beaten ...”, 1966)

This is how the outcast poet Nikolai Tryapkin sang his songs in student dormitories, and at writers' meetings, and at poetry festivals. How I regret that I didn’t record it, one might say, the last solo concert, which he seemed to give me for my fiftieth birthday in a cozy company of friends. Since the evening and the banquet, all official and semi-official persons have already dispersed. The musicians are tired. Gathered at one big table Stas Kunyaev, Alexander Prokhanov, Vladimir Lichutin, Alexander Bobrov. And suddenly, Nikolai Ivanovich, who had not performed at the evening itself, broke up, lit up with some kind of inner fire, and for two hours, at least, sang his best poems to us, and then began to dance to the beat of the verses. His singing of poetry is also an art, divination, a spell ... Prokhanov said very well about this art: “He sang his poems like ballads. He moved his hand in front of the face, as if sending verses into the distance, and they, like birds, fell from his ruddy lips, flew away into space. There was a Moscow room, cramped, stuffy, but it seemed that Tryapkin was sitting on a grassy hill, on a windy high mound, strumming his harp, and the young steppe was agitated by his calls and roars.

I was always surprised, admired, sometimes horrified: what kind of key, ancient, rattling, inexhaustible, beats in Tryapkin, as if from under a stone, from under glacial granite, from under an ancient oak log, dazzling, pure, magical. Weary knights, inflamed plowmen, passers-by pilgrims, and forest animals, and mysterious shaggy monsters with forgotten names come to this spring to drink. This key is not of Tryapkin, but of the gods, the poet is only placed at the source as a guardian and keeper ... Tryapkin, like a pipe through which Russia blows ... majestic. But suddenly life is lived. And trouble in Russia. The motherland, devastated, defiled, without a protector, without a king and leader, suffers a terrible shame. And the old poet takes up his ancient craft, calls out the scattered army to the army, wakes up the intoxicated prince, reproaches, thunders, intimidates, prays, calls out thinly and loudly. To the battle, to the last battle for the Fatherland ... ".

When he sang, the stutter disappeared. He was completely transformed, as if connected to an invisible life-giving source, and the beauty of centuries was already singing, his face seemed to be enlivened with colors, his clothes became ancient, then a sword, then a staff, then a scepter were seen in his hands. Singer in the camp of Russian soldiers.

So let's start. Time.

Long live the light of day!

I put my feet in a stirrup.

And you, the hero - on the horse.

…………………….

Thundering through the country of whitia,

Lifting the load high.

Oh Rus! Kupina! Russia!

Great Soviet Union!

State in full force.

Khvalyntsy and tveryaki.

And my songs are on guard

Ready as bayonets.

(“Song of the Great Campaign”, 1993)

He can in no way be called a peasant poet, although many of his poems seem to be devoted to rural topics. The peasantry is its foothold, just as farming is with Faulkner or Robert Frost, as with many of the leading poets of the Western world - from Auden to the Nobel laureate, a native of the West Indian Islands Derek Walcott - poetry is related to the ancestral foundations of its people, its earth.

“The forerunners are not only poetic ancestors, but also part of the history of their own race,” Walcott said bluntly. In this sense, Nikolai Tryapkin is much closer in his poetry to the leading poets of world civilization, who do not forget about their roots, than our pro-Western groundless poets of the sixties. His peasantry is the fulcrum on which he erected his poetic universe. In his peasant poems there is no momentary. And often there is no sociality, they come from the original foundation of humanity in general and our people in particular.

My friends! Yes, what about me?

The seas roar, the smokes sparkle,

Space walks over the hut,

The legends of Rome sing in my soul.

("Birth", 1958)

Or such a simple and at the same time philosophically capacious understanding of poetry as the primary cause of man:

I came from a place where they know the simplest things,

Where they love a chisel, an ax, and a shovel, and tongs,

Where the stretches do not splash without oars, bridges and moorings,

I came out of where everything can be done first.

……………………………………

Prepare your sail there - to the beyond berths,

To go out, if necessary, again with an ax and steel!

(“I got out of there ...”, 1962)

This great simplicity of originality was given to him along with his surname. I am sure that the surname determined his poetics. Such poets do not need a pseudonym. In my opinion, Yevtushenko's poetic cowardice and fickleness began already when, frightened by the "non-poetic" surname Gangnus, he took on a more euphonious pseudonym. Only a truly great and natural national talent makes everything around poetic. And such simple and great Russian surnames appear: Pushkin, Shishkin, Tryapkin...

It is amazing how his "dense antiquity" is connected with the fantasies of the future, with openness to the world and space, and the original Russia sprouts with an empire and global projects.

Black, polar

Somewhere in the night distance

Glowing Rus radar

You're crazy eared! Wrench bat!

I greet you loudly

Or I say a psalter.

May you not be the power of the cross

And not a fiend of evil.

Whole under heaven

I lay down in your paws.

You are my global Russia!..

(“Black, Polar...”, 1978)

Such a global person, such a global poet, was Nikolai Ivanovich Tryapkin, for all his outcast, who was born on December 19, 1918 in the Tver village of Sablino in the family of a peasant carpenter and ended his days in Moscow in the winter of 1999. Who lived all his life in a parallel Russian culture, he remained in it along with his people. “No, I did not come out of the people. / O black-boned breed! / From your cool family / I didn't go out anywhere...»

Tryapkin Nikolai Ivanovich (19.12.1918-20.02.1999), poet. Born in the village of Sablino, Tver province. in the family of a peasant carpenter. In 1930, under the threat of dispossession, the family moved to the village. Lotoshino, where Tryapkin graduated from high school. In 1939 he entered the Moscow Institute of History and Archives. With the outbreak of war, Tryapkin, who did not get to the front for health reasons, was among the evacuees near Solvychegodsk, where he worked as an accountant.
Tryapkin wrote his first poems while still studying at the institute. But it was in the Russian North that his poetic voice gained true power. “Indigenous Russian way of life, indigenous Russian word, indigenous Russian people…” he wrote in his autobiography. - For the first time, my eyes were opened to Russia and Russian poetry, because I saw all this with some special, “internal” vision. And somewhere there, very close, the beautiful Vychegda merges with the beautiful Dvina. Wooden Kotlas and its blue pier - so majestic and so visible from afar! And everywhere - great forests, overshadowed by great legends. All this is very good for beginning poets. For the air itself is such that the heart is cleansed and becomes melodious. And for the first time I began to write poems that fascinated me myself. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. It was as if I was reborn, or someone doused me with magical moisture. Criticism noted the similarity of Tryapkin's early poems with the poems of N. Klyuev, and the poet himself subsequently wrote about this:

Do not bawl you patterned, accordion!
You collective farm troika, stop!
We will be credited with the Klychkov cat,
What purrs about Noah's flood.

The poet developed and grew over decades, slowly, steadily improving his talent. Over time, what only showed itself in separate strokes and made it possible to speak of Tryapkin as the heir of N. Klyuev (who was not published in Russia from 1928 to 1977), acquired a full-fledged sound already at the time when it became clear that Tryapkin did not limit himself to carefully preserved heritage. In his poetry, the free song of the peasant lyre, cut off during the “eves”, found its second wind, found its new sound in the voice of a man who retained in his memory both the tragic 30s and the tragic 40s - the entire terrible era of the “great turning point”:

Wake up, my heart, and listen to the great chant.
Let the eternal Time buzz at the unknown beginnings.
Let the other fly after the Other,
And You and I are only reeds under such a wind.

Over the years, the defining motive of Tryapkin's creativity, the motive of Memory, was revealed. A memory that carries in itself everything heavy, tragic, hysterical that is concentrated in the history of the destruction of the Russian peasantry and its original culture, which has reached its climax in these damned days. This theme did not make itself felt immediately - time had to pass before the experienced, accumulated, began to be embodied in poetry. Tryapkin is by no means hysterical; he paid a generous tribute to the laughter, song and dance element of folk art. There are not so few poems in his legacy in which he is not averse to making fun of himself and others kindly, and sometimes laughing caustically. And yet, if you read his poems in chronological order, the feeling of earthly heaviness and pain for the lost time will grow. The memory of the poet is cut in two by a border, on one side of which one can hear the “ringing of war hooves” and the creak of a baby’s cradle, and on the other side - completely different, disturbing sounds - the crackling of a broken tree and the dreary howl of a snowstorm. The flute singing over the churchyard is not yet a symbol of the end of life, it is only a stage, a terrible segment that several generations go through, so that those to whom God has given survive and are able to convey their bitter story to their descendants, to sing an old, folk, full of reckless revelry and heartfelt anguish, now almost forgotten song ... ("We fell in love with this song, but we rushed through our bones ..."). Slowly, step by step, the poet approached the epic tale of his genealogy. The first chapters of it were written in n. 80s, when Tryapkin gained epic poetic power, when previous separate attempts to combine time layers merged into a single picture of the tragedy, in which the recent past and visions of raids and seizures, migrations of peoples and their disappearance from the face of the earth, separated by millennia, organically merged:

And the hammer pounded, clogging the windows with slabs,
And the shovel in the garden fell asleep at the cellar manhole.
And the native hut, which got wet from mother's tears,
It sounded like a coffin, waiting for us from time immemorial.
It was like a myth. It was in those years
Where a gigantic battering ram hit the earth's limestone.
And the earth rumbled. And the universal vaults thundered.
And the old ferry went to the oceans.

Tryapkin combined in his poetry heterogeneous linguistic layers - three main layers in an inseparable unity: the folklore layer, the layer developed by Russian classical poetry of the 19th century, and the layer of modern living spoken language. Over the years, the song line did not “come to naught”, but the main place in Tryapkin’s work was occupied by verses of a philosophical warehouse. The "peasant" tradition is reflected in them in sharp publicistic pathos, with which the poet emphasizes his belonging to the people, his peasant essence. Publicistic pathos, corresponding to the difficult movement of a poetic note, breaking out of hidden depths, is akin to the “Abvakum” pathos of his great predecessor, N. Klyuev. In Tradition, dedicated to the memory of Habakkuk of the twentieth century, Tryapkin emphasizes the organic connection of the poetic word with nature, with Mother Earth. The word, which has deep roots in folk soil, in the national element, will not disappear and will not perish, even if it exists for a long time under a bushel in other dramatic moments of history, covered by an invisible veil of Mystery that hides from the uninitiated the divine poetic melody:

He threw himself under that heel,
From under which - smoke, and dust, and flames.
Why do we all remember that rage
And we will not forgive that death with relics?
Long ago we forgave those
To whom God himself would not grant forgiveness.
And this old man! This wretched bastard!
Why are more stones flying at him?

The Universal Time in the poet's creative mind shrinks, whole millennia rush by within a few hours. In a single second of being, there are the Birth and Decline of human civilization, the conception of the Universe and the disintegration of the nodal roots of earthly existence. In an indissoluble unity, nationwide, state-national views and universal, cosmic thought are intertwined. The embodiment of universality, the simultaneity of everything that happens on Earth and in infinity is available to the poet. As if in a spiral, he expands his spiritual world, which gives him from time to time the opportunity to push the boundaries of the beautiful aesthetic tradition inherited from Klyuev. Here, on the verge of the Earth and the Cosmos, the poet's eyes open to the past, present and future, here he is the creator of the world. Russia itself becomes a part of the Cosmos, crowns the earth with its luminous crown:

black, polar,
Somewhere in the night distance
Glowing Rus radar
Above the head of the earth...
May you not be the power of the cross
And not a fiend of evil,
Whole under heaven
I lay down in your paws.

The combination of real and historical layers, so characteristic of the poet, was most clearly embodied in his "biblical" cycle, in particular, in one of his best poems - "The Song of Walking in the Land of Palestine." The legend told by the poet about his pilgrim grandfather is perceived as a reality, but at the same time as a distant past, shrouded in an idyllic haze, which has nothing to do with the tragedy that modern “Davids” are doing on the Jordanian shores.
The conviction of inevitable retribution merges in Tryapkin's voice with a tragic note when referring to history and the universe on behalf of the dead, in the voice of the poet, who took on their pain and embodied it in lines that acquired prophetic power, penetrating the earthly circle and cosmic distances:

The earth rumbled. And at night the horizons burned
The seas roared. And the fires of the batteries scurried about ...
Forgive me, mother, who played the quiet flute
And the child was carried away - away from terrible people ...
I curse myself. And I will not accept all my passions.
This is me knocking on your reserved doors.
Forgive me, mother, who sanctified the sinful earth.
For my unfaithfulness. For my great lies.

In the last years of his life, Tryapkin was very upset by the collapse of the country and the reign of foreignness in it: “Both the Fritz, and the Lyakh, and the Tatar, there was enough of another boor. But you, Moscow, have not seen such vomit and shame ... And all our snouts are a bared mouth. And the gorilla is dancing at our gates.<…>Huge nits grow fat in the ground. And serut Hasidim in the Moscow Kremlin.
The song talent of the finest lyricist did not dry out, but in his poetry the note of resistance to the black power that covered Russia sounded more and more clearly. Poems imbued with this feeling were published exclusively on the pages of the Zavtra newspaper and the Our Contemporary magazine.
Taken from the site