Novella Matveev main works. Novella Matveeva: biography. Final years and death

Private bussiness

Novella Nikolaevna Matveeva (80 years old) was born in Detskoye Selo (now - Pushkin) of the Leningrad region. Her father, Nikolai Nikolaevich Matveev-Bodry, was a geographer, local historian of the Far East and a full member of the All-Union Geographical Society. Mother, Malkova Nadezhda Timofeevna, taught literature, wrote poetry, published under the pseudonym Matveeva-Orleneva. Grandfather Nikolai Petrovich Matveev-Amursky was also a writer, the author of the first "History of the City of Vladivostok", lived in Japan for many years.

Novella began to write poems as a child, during the war, and at the end of the war, the first songs appeared. From 1950 to 1957, Matveeva worked in an orphanage in the Shchelkovsky district of the Moscow region.

Since the late 50s, she began to perform in public with her songs to the accompaniment of a seven-string guitar. A girl from the provinces with an unusual "childish" voice and a guitar in her hands was noticed and loved. She began publishing in 1958. Already in 1961, the first collection of her poems "Lyric" was published, in the same year Matveeva was admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR. In 1962 she graduated from the Higher Literary Courses at the A. M. Gorky Literary Institute (in absentia).

The second poetry collection of Novella Matveeva - "The Ship" - was published in 1963. In 1966, the Melodiya company released the first disc with Matveeva's songs. In the 1970s, she published the books “Swallow School”, “River”, in the 1980s - “The Law of Songs”, “Country of the Surf”, etc.

In 1996, a book of memoirs by Novella Matveeva "The Ball Left in the Sky" was published. In 1998 she became the winner of the Pushkin Prize in the field of poetry, in 2002 - the winner of the State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of literature and art.

Novella Nikolaevna lives in Moscow. Lately she has been working on her own translations of Shakespeare's sonnets.

What is famous

In 1964, Novella Matveeva wrote her most famous song - "The Girl from the Tavern" (also called "The Ballad of the Nail"). The words of this song “You were afraid of my love in vain, I don’t love so terribly ...” are known even to those who do not know their author.

Novella was one of the first Soviet songwriters, her popularity was very great - most of the students of our country sang Matveeva's songs, full of light, romance and kindness, the charm of which was enhanced by her unusually thin, almost childish, voice.

The most famous and popular songs of Novella Matveeva were: “Song of the Mule Driver” (“Oh, how long, long we go ...”), “Wind” (“What a big wind ...”), “Drainpipes” (“Rain , evening rain ..."), "Girl from the tavern" ("You were afraid of my love in vain ..."), "Outskirts" ("Summer night was ..."), "Captains without a mustache" ("Here before the sea is blue for me ...”), “Country Delphinia” (“Blue waves are running ...”), “Magician” (“Oh, you magician ...”), “Gypsy” (“Cheerful gypsies walked around Moldova. ..”), “organ grinder” (“Snow fell on the ground ...”).

What you need to know

Novella Matveeva

Despite the fact that Novella Matveeva was usually ranked among the sixties (on purely chronological grounds), she herself never ideologically ranked herself among them, and in general, as journalist Boris Zhukov, a researcher of bard songs, wrote about her, “remained quite loyal to the Soviet subject.” Novella has always been an introvert, trying to limit contacts with the outside world as much as possible, in which her husband, Ivan Kiuru, who took on the lion's share of communication with editorial offices and publishing houses, helped her in many ways.

According to Novella Nikolaevna herself, she developed a desire for solitude in her childhood: “From cowardice, probably from fear. I'm a wild person, I don't know how to behave. It's very easy for me to look funny. Therefore, I try to be somehow separate ... "

She diligently avoided all forms of publicity. Even the photographs of Novella Matveeva from the 60s, when she was at the peak of her fame, can literally be counted on the fingers. She performed infrequently, and over the years - less and less.

Her husband, the poet Ivan Kiuru (1934-1992), was from a family of repressed Soviet Finns. They lived together for 29 years. The few recollections of people who knew Matveeva and Kiura closely testify that this couple inexplicably irritated those around them. Either by neglect of “everyday life”, or by devotion to each other, or by the fact that they were self-sufficient - having created their Universe for two, they did not allow anyone there.

In 1992, Ivan Kiuru died, and three years later Mikhail Nodel, a young journalist and poet who became Novella Matveeva’s secretary and litagent in the 90s, and in fact, as Zhukov writes, “an intermediary between her and the world,” died. For several years, Matveeva was silent. New poems (but not songs) began to appear only at the very end of the 90s. Novella Nikolaevna herself practically “dropped out” of any public life, spending almost all her time in the winter in a city apartment, and in the summer at a dacha in Skhodnya, where neighbors may not notice her presence for months. By her own admission, she closely follows politics, the news and takes everything very close to her heart.

Direct speech

“I never had songs for poetry. I always write just the whole song as a whole. Sometimes not immediately, sometimes at random, but in such a way that everything is sure to be one’s own: both poetry and melody - without loans from outside, ”- Novella Matveeva

“Green's landscapes, nightmares, even Green's names - what is there in the world more hypnotic than the name "The Blue Cascade of Telluri", which alone can replace a novel, but what a novel - an entire country? Perhaps only the poetry of Novella Matveeva, and especially her songs, was such a burn for me. — Dmitry Bykov.

“If Okudzhava is a blessed rain, then Novella Matveeva is an amazing island,” Zinovy ​​Paperny.

“I remember that in the early sixties, when I first heard her sunny, fairy-tale songs, for some reason I decided that only a very happy person could write such songs ... When I first went to Novella Matveeva’s house and saw the monstrous life of her huge, uncomfortable communal apartment on Running Street, I was shocked. What a powerful imagination of the artist, what courage and optimism the author must have, who invented his fairy-tale world in such an environment! .., - Alexander Gorodnitsky.

5 facts about Novella Matveeva

• Matveeva's father was a romantic, so he gave his children such unusual names, naming his daughter Novella, and his son Roald. Novella Matveeva does not have a single namesake in all of Russia.
• Released in 1966 by Melodiya, the disc of Novella Matveeva became the first disc of a bard song in the USSR.
• Novella Matveeva does not like the word "bard" and prefers to call the performers of the author's song "polyhymns".
• In 1984, Matveeva's play "Aigl's Prediction" was staged at the Central Children's Theater in Moscow - a fantasy based on the works of Alexander Grin, containing 33 songs by Novella Nikolaevna.
• The Moscow theater "Studio-69" staged a performance based on the poems of Novella Matveeva. Each poem performed on the stage is a miniature performance.

Materials about Novella Matveeva

Matveeva Novella Nikolaevna is a wonderful Soviet and Russian poetess. She was one of the first to put poems to music and perform them with a guitar, laying the foundation for a whole generation of bard poets. We will talk about the life and work of this amazing woman in this article.

Novella Matveeva: biography. Family

Novella Nikolaevna was born on October 7, 1934 in the city of Pushkin (at that time it was called Tsarskoye Selo), located in the Leningrad Region. Her father, Nikolai Nikolaevich Matveev-Bodry, was a geographer by education and had a professorship in this field, worked as a local historian of the Far East, and was a member of the All-Union Geographical Society. He was a romantic by nature, hence the names of the children - Roald and Novella. The mother of the future poetess Nadezhda Timofeevna taught literature at school, was fond of writing poetry and even published her creations in various newspapers and magazines under the pseudonym Matveeva-Orleneva.

Apparently, Novella Matveeva was not the first writer in the family. The biography of the poetess also indicates that not only the mother was engaged in literature. Her grandfather Matveev-Amursky Nikolai Petrovich, who lived in Japan for many years, was a writer, and it was he who authored the History of the City of Vladivostok. And to top it off, Novella Nikolaevna's cousin and her husband were also writers.

After leaving school, the poetess worked from 1950 to 1957 in an orphanage in the Shchelkovsky district (Moscow region). After that, she entered the higher literary courses in absentia, held at the Literary Institute. Gorky, which she graduated in 1962.

And in 1961, the poetess was accepted into the ranks of the members of the Union of Writers of the USSR.

The beginning of the creative path

For the first time, under the influence of her mother, Novella Matveeva took up writing poetry. The biography of our heroine generally indicates that her mother played a big role in her life. Nadezhda Trofimovna was a very outstanding person, she was interested in culture and had great artistry. The woman had a special passion for poetry and loved to read poetry, in which she was a real master. It was her mother who first introduced Novella to Pushkin, whose works she often recited. The Matveevs always had music in the house, despite the absence of a radio and a tape recorder. Nadezhda Trofimovna, in addition to poetry, adored music and often sang romances, gypsy, Italian and Russian songs.

Therefore, it is not at all surprising that Novella composed her first poems as a child during the war years. It happened in the Moninsky hospital, where the girl got because of beriberi, which caused a complication in her eyes. In the same years, her father worked as a political instructor in that hospital. It was he who first saw the creation of his daughter. Also in her childhood, Novella tried to compose music and put poems by various poets on it, including Fet, Lermontov, Shakespeare, Agnivtsev, Gladkov, etc.

First publication

Novella Matveeva published her poems for the first time in 1957. Songs are the greatest passion of the poetess, so it is not surprising that a work of this particular genre appeared in the newspaper. Unusually, it was a parody of the song "Five Minutes" from the movie "Carnival Night". After that, the writer began to publish constantly. Her poems appeared on the pages of newspapers and magazines, including "Yenisei", "Soviet Chukotka", etc. Later, larger literary publications also drew attention to the poetess.

Printing the first collections of poems by Matveeva was quite difficult, and the poets David Kugultinov and Igor Grudev came to her aid.

Novella Matveeva made many acquaintances among writers. The biography of the poetess indicates that such famous personalities as S. Marshak, M. Atabekyan, K. Chukovsky, V. Chivilikhin, N. Starshinov, Yu. Voronov, etc., helped her on her creative path more than once. Chukovsky especially admired Matveeva’s poems . The writer, hearing her "Sunny Bunny", even jumped with delight.

Popularity

The creative fate of Matveeva was very good - she was noticed very quickly and immediately fell in love. In the early 60s of the 20th century, a simple girl from the provinces with a beautiful voice and an old guitar was able to conquer the capital, and then conquered the country. Her songs quickly fell in love and began to sound from tape recorders throughout the country. Matveeva's works were included in the first bard collection of the Soviet Union - it was a disc called "Songs" and released in 1966. Later, it was published more than once, but it remained a rare edition.

The work of Novella Matveeva has always been distinguished by incredible energy and love of life, which, of course, is a reflection of the personal qualities of the poetess. In 1972 Matveeva began writing music for Ivan Kiuru's poems. The most famous works of this period are: "Song of the Mule Driver", "Drainpipes", "Country Dolphin", "The Organ Grinder".

Features of poetry

Most often, in her works, Novella Matveeva turned to lyric-romantic themes. Poems of the poetess reflect the lofty humanistic impulses of the human soul. Her lyrical hero is a dreamer and visionary, surrounded by a colorful and wonderful world of nature. We can say that the writer fully inherited the romantic passions of her father. Her poetry is very bright and cheerful. There is no cruelty, dirt, base feelings in it.

Novella Matveeva conveys confidence in life and incredible optimism to her works. Songs, however, are not the only thing that the poetess wrote. She also composed a lot for children, and also translated, wrote epigrams, parodies, articles devoted to literature and art. She has published over thirty books, including poetry, prose, and translations. And as a singer-songwriter, Matveeva recorded a considerable number of records, the last one was released in 2000 - it was the collection "Best Songs", released by "Moscow Windows".

Final years and death

Very easily found the way to the heart of the listener Novella Matveeva. Poems and songs of the poetess are still popular and familiar to many.

Among the creative works of the writer there is also a children's play "Egle's Prediction", which was first staged on the stage of the Moscow Central Children's Theater. The work, among other things, included 33 author's songs of the poetess.

Matveeva Novella Nikolaevna in her long life faced adversity, misunderstanding of critics and creative failures, but this did not manage to break her will. Until the last days, she continued to work and perform. The last years she lived in Moscow. Passed away September 4, 2016.

Books

Numerous books by the poetess can still be found on the shelves of bookstores. The most popular are collections of poems. Among which are the following: "Ship", "Sunny Bunny", "Dream Cassette", "Caravan", "Jasmine". In addition, several prose works have also been published, as well as books for children.

Novella Matveeva wrote quite a lot of works in her life. How many years has she been involved in poetry? This question can be answered very easily - all your life, from childhood to the last breath. The poetess literally lived with her creativity.

The life of the laureate of the State Prize of Russia, poetess Novella Matveeva was unusual and full of surprises. An "illiterate" girl - a poet who wrote many extraordinary, almost childishly naive, but at the same time, unusually imaginative and wise poems, was accidentally found in the outback near Moscow. This was followed by a wonderful tale of her ascent to fame, but as an adult, Novella Nikolaevna, somewhere in the depths of her soul, remained the same simple-minded girl. She sang her songs, accompanying herself on the guitar in front of many audiences, and by the age of 82, she wrote a lot of poems that still surprise critics. The cause of death of Novella Matveeva was illness.

She was born in 1934 in Detskoye Selo, Leningrad Oblast. The girl owed her unusual name “Novella” to her father, a geographer and local historian of the Far East, a descendant of a family with literary traditions, a romantic who loved everything unusual. Novella's brother received the name Roald from him. Their mother was a literature teacher who wrote poetry. Why a girl from such a family received only primary school education, and how she turned out to be a housekeeper in a military family, at the age of about 20, history is silent. Probably, the war and the difficult years of restoring the national economy are to blame for this. The correspondent of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Anatoly Gladilin, on behalf of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol Lev Karpinsky, found the young poetess in the cold, uncomfortable barracks where she lived and brought her to the editorial office.

A new life began for Novella. A whole notebook of her poems was edited and published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, creating a suitable biography for the girl. Now she was listed as a former employee of the orphanage in Shchelokovo. The short story was accepted without hesitation as a student at the Higher Courses at the Gorky Literary University. A good head and the memory of childhood helped the girl to catch up very quickly. In 1961, Matveeva became a member of the Writers' Union of the USSR. At the same time, the first collection of her amazing poems was published. She began performing in front of the public with poems and songs, and the success was overwhelming. In 1963, her first collection "Ship" appeared in print, then, after a long break, in 1996 - the collection "The Soul of Things" and several others, as well as the poem "Peter Brueghel the Elder". Further, her poems were published with a frequency of 2-3 collections per decade.

The lyrics of Novella Nikolaevna are metaphorical and full of bright images-associations, reflecting the vision of a restless and mobile world. She is rather cheerful than gloomy, and even not too pleasant images are colored with humor. There is a lot of childish perception in this poetry, so Matveeva's poems are sometimes deceptively simple. In fact, her works tell about the complex world of the poet, who feels its multi-colored content behind the external form of existence. The most famous for the Russian public were the poems “You were afraid of my love in vain”, “There lived a boat, cheerful and slender”, “I sculpt from plasticine”, “Gypsy-Moldavian”, “organ grinder” and many others.

Speaking to the audience, Novella Nikolaevna sometimes sang songs to the verses of her husband Ivan Kiuru, Shakespeare translated by her, Russian poets Lermontov and Fet. In addition to poetry, she wrote the play "Aigle's Prediction" based on the works of Alexander Green and several stories. In 1998, Matveeva was awarded the Pushkin Prize in poetry, and in 2002 she received the State Prize for the collection Jasmine. In 2009, an album of her fifteen songs was released. In 2015, Matveyeva's poems were shortlisted for the Cyril and Meofody Patriarchal Literary Prize. However, the poetess herself began to rarely appear in public and preferred to live in a country cottage.

In the last years of her life, her health deteriorated markedly. In addition, the poetess had unreasonable worries, fears of traveling and communicating with people intensified. She preferred solitude and peace. The exact reason why Novella Matveeva died was not officially reported, but the version of the disease seems, in this case, both truthful and clear. In September 2016, she died in a country house near Khimki and was buried at the Troekurovsky cemetery in Moscow.

Matveeva Novella Nikolaevna [Russia, Moscow region, Moscow]
(b. 07.10.1934, d. 04.09.2016)

Novella Matveeva was born on October 7, 1934 in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) Leningrad region, lives in Moscow .

Among her ancestors were musicians and peasants, poets and sailors, a violin maker and even a ship's paramedic.

She coined the word "sixties" in her article published in the almanac "Poetry" around the second half of the eighties, and since that time all those who lived and acted in the 60s were called "sixties".

She composed the melodies of the first songs as a child, at the end of the war.

Her first publication in 1957 became a parody of the song "Five Minutes" from the movie "Carnival Night". Soon followed the publication of poems in the newspaper "Soviet Chukotka" (1958) and the magazine "Yenisei". Since 1959, her poems have been regularly published in national newspapers and magazines.

Writer, poet. Since 1961 Member of the Writers' Union of the USSR.

In 1962, Novella Matveeva graduated from the Higher Literary Courses at the Literary Institute named after A.M. Gorky.

First record Matveeva's short stories appeared in 1966. It was first in the Soviet Union disc with original songs. There was also "The Girl from the Tavern", a song that went far beyond the limits of the singing intelligentsia, the same one, "about a carnation."

She writes songs mainly on her own verses, since 1972 - also on the verses of Ivan Semenovich Kiuru (1934-1992), her husband.

Her pen belongs more than 30 books of poetry, prose and translations. Among them: "Lyric" (1961), "Ship" (1963), "The Soul of Things" (1966), "Sunny Bunny" (1966), "Swallow School" (1973), "River" (1978), "Law Songs" (1983), "Surf Country" (1983), "Rabbit Village" (1984), "Favorites" (1986), "Praise to Work" (1987), "Inextricable Circle" (1991), "Melody for Guitar" (1998), "Tape of Dreams" (1998), "Sonnets" (1998), "Caravan" (2000), "Jasmine" (2001).

As a songwriter N. Matveeva recorded records: "Songs" (Melody, 1967), "Poems and Songs" (Melody, 1966), "The Road is My Home" (Melody, 1982), "Music of Light" (co-authored with I. Kiuru, Melodiya, 1984), "Ballads" (co-authored with I. Kiuru, Melodiya, 1985), "My little crow" (co-authored with I. Kiuru, Melodiya, 1986), "Red-haired girl" (co-authored with I. Kiuru, Melodiya, 1986) and CDs "What a Big Wind" (ASP, 1997), "A Girl from a Tavern" (ASP, 1997), "Novella Matveeva" (Moroz Records, 1999), "Best Songs" (Moscow Windows, 2000 ), "Desperate Mary", "Tavern" Fours.

The most famous and popular songs Matveeva's short stories became: "The mule driver's song" ("Oh, how long, long we're going ..."), " " (" "), "Drainpipes" ("Rain, evening rain ..."), "Girl from the tavern" ("You were afraid of my love in vain ..."), "Outskirts" ("Summer night was ...") , "Captains without a mustache" ("Here is a blue sea in front of me ..."), "Dolphinia Country" ("Blue waves are running ..."), "Magician" ("Oh, you magician ..."), " Gypsy" ("Cheerful gypsies walked around Moldova ..."), "The organ grinder" ("Snow fell on the ground ..."), etc.

Farewell to Novella Matveeva took place on Tuesday, September 13, 2016 at the Temple of Cosmas and Damian in Shubin and at the Central House of Writers.

Novella Nikolaevna Matveeva was born on October 7, 1934 in the city of Pushkin, Leningrad Region.
From 1950 to 1957, Matveeva worked in an orphanage in the Shchelkovsky district of the Moscow region. In 1962 she graduated from the Higher Literary Courses at the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky (in absentia).
She has been writing poetry since childhood. Published since 1958. The first collection was published in 1961; then followed the second collection - "Ship" (1963).
From the late 1950s, Novella Nikolaevna began to compose songs based on her own poems and perform them to her own accompaniment on a seven-string guitar. Since 1972, Novella Matveeva has also been composing songs based on the poems of her husband, the poet Ivan Kiuru (1934-1992).
Matveeva immediately became unusually popular - she was one of the first bard poets who set her poems to music and performed them with a guitar. Matveeva's songs in the 1960s were sung by literally all the student youth of the country, often without knowing their author.
In 1963, her collection of poems "The Soul of Things" was published, which was in great demand.
In the 1970s, the books "Swallow's School", "River", etc. were published. In the 1980s - "The Law of Songs", "Country of the Surf", etc. Novella Matveeva graduated in absentia from the Literary Institute. M. Gorky.
In recent years, the poems "Waves and Rocks", "Vaulted Sigh", "Night Violets", "Opening", "Drawings for a Tea Set", imbued with subtle lyricism and grace, have been published.
In 1996, a book of memoirs was published - "The Ball Left in the Sky".
In 2002, Novella Matveeva became a laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of literature and art.
N. Matveeva lives and works in Moscow.