The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  The main reason for the poem’s huge success was its ability to voice the private thoughts and emotions of millions of soldiers and civilians, who linked their hopes of survival to the idea of reunion with somebody they loved. One group of soldiers wrote to Simonov in May 1942:

  Whenever your poems appear in the newspapers, there is huge excitement in our regiment. We cut the poems out and copy them and pass these copies round by hand, because there are not enough copies of the newspapers, and we all want to read the poems and discuss them. We all know ‘Wait For Me’ by heart. It says exactly what we feel. For all of us have wives, fiancées or girlfriends back home, and we all hope that they will wait for us, until we return with victory.23

  Everybody was involved in his own private version of the universal romance encapsulated by the poem – a tale of ‘You’ and ‘I’ against the background of the war. But romantic yearning was only half of it. The poem also voiced the soldiers’ deep anxiety about the fidelity of wives and girlfriends left behind. Many soldiers’ songs expressed that worry. One of the most popular had its origins in a song sung by women after the departure of their menfolk, but it had a resonance among the troops, who sang it as they went into battle:

  I wanted to say so much to you,

  But did not say a word.

  Quietly but firmly you whispered in my ear:

  ‘Don’t love anybody except me!’

  …

  Do not worry when you go to war,

  I will be true to you,

  You will return from victory, my soldier,

  And I will hold you firmly in my arms!

  Variations on ‘Wait For Me’ also stressed fidelity. One group of soldiers from the Urals sang:

  I shall wait for you, my darling,

  I shall wait steadfastly.

  I shall wait for the Urals winter,

  For the flowers in the spring…

  Another version added motifs, like the nightingale, from traditional Russian folk songs:

  I shall wait, you will return, I know.

  Let the yellow rains fall,

  I shall wait for you, my sweet nightingale,

  And believe with all my strength in our happiness…24

  Soldiers passed harsh judgement on wives who were unfaithful to their husbands at the front. As the war went on, the suspicion of infidelity placed a growing strain on many families, not least because the majority of women (who had to live in the real conditions of the war) could not hope to match the ideal image of Soviet womanhood (the waiting girlfriend, the loyal and faithful wife) portrayed in propaganda films, plays and poems such as ‘Wait For Me’.25

  Simonov himself became involved in a case of soldiers’ outrage against an unfaithful wife. In September 1943, he was attached to the Third Army on the Briansk Front. A few days after one of the commanders had been killed in action, a letter for him arrived from his wife in Vichuga, northeast of Moscow, in which she told her husband that she was leaving him for another man. Having opened the letter, the soldiers felt that they should answer it. They asked Simonov to write on their behalf, and told him what they wanted to say. But Simonov was called away to a different sector of the front before he had time to pen the text. Two months later, when he was in Kharkov to report for Krasnaia zvezda on the Nazi murders of the Jews there, he suddenly recalled his unfulfilled promise to the soldiers. Simonov still had the woman’s name and address, but instead of writing directly to her, he wrote the poem ‘An Open Letter to the Woman of Vichuga’ to give public voice to the sentiments of the soldiers. As he explained to the Party Secretary of Vichuga, in the poem he ‘cited many of the exact phrases and expressions the troops had used themselves’ when telling him what he should write to the unfaithful wife.26

  I am obliged to inform you

  That the addressee did not receive

  The letter which you posted

  Without a hint of shame.

  Your husband did not get the letter,

  He was not wounded by your vulgar words,

  He did not wince, or lose his mind,

  He did not regret the past.

  …

  So your former husband has been killed.

  All is well. Live with your new one.

  The dead cannot hurt you

  In a letter with superfluous words.

  Live, without fear or guilt,

  He cannot write, he won’t reply

  He won’t return to your town from the war

  And meet you holding another’s hand.27

  According to the poet Margarita Aliger, the key to the appeal of ‘Wait For Me’ and the other poems in the collection With You and Without You (1941–5) was the way they managed to express universal feelings in such an intensely personal voice. Soviet readers had rarely encountered such emotional and erotic poetry as they found in Simonov’s wartime verse. Before the war, the public and the private had been counterposed as cultural and political opposites. During the 1920s and 1930s there was no room for intimate or private themes in the public-oriented poetry of the Soviet Union. Couched in terms of ‘We’ (or ‘He’ in poems that portrayed Stalin as the voice of every Soviet citizen), poetry was dominated by the grand collective themes of the Revolution (even Mandelshtam declared that lyric verse was inappropriate for Soviet art, because the historical epoch no longer had ‘any interest in the human fate of the individual’). But wartime Soviet culture saw the gradual merging of the private and public. Poetry became more intimate. It took on personal themes. It talked about emotions and relationships, which gave it a new status and authority. In the words of the poet Semyon Kirsanov:

  War does not lend itself to odes

  And much in it is not suitable for books,

  But I believe that the people needs

  The spirit of this open diary.

  (‘Duty’, 1942)

  ‘Wait For Me’ was the first major sign of this aesthetic shift. It conjured up a private world of intimate relationships independent of the state. Because it was written from the feelings of one person, it became necessary to millions. With the noise of battle everywhere, with shouting officers and barking commissars, people needed poetry to speak to their muted emotions; they yearned for words to express the sorrow and anger, hatred, fear and hope that agitated them. ‘Your poems live in our feelings,’ a group of soldiers wrote to Simonov in 1945. ‘They teach us how to act with other people, especially with women, and for that reason they are loved by all of us. You alone have managed to express our deepest thoughts and hopes.’28

  For all the private impact of this poetry, its propaganda uses were clear for all to see. Poems such as ‘Wait For Me’ were powerful weapons in the Soviet campaign to maintain morale. The emotions they expressed helped to foster a kind of primary-level patriotism, centred on the family, comradeship and love, which, in turn, provided a foundation for the broader Soviet concept of national solidarity. Although Stalin was rumoured to have said that only two copies of ‘Wait For Me’ should have been printed (‘one for him and one for her’), the regime was in fact very quick to exploit the poem’s popularity. According to Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the head of the Main Political Department of the Red Army, the Kremlin even considered moving Simonov away from the danger of the front because of his value as a poet. The Party leadership had become alarmed by a stanza in one of his poems that hinted at martyrdom (it was a romantic gesture to Valentina) and Shcherbakov was ordered to advise him to be careful. After the success of ‘Wait For Me’, Simonov quickly rose to the top of the Soviet cultural establishment. He won the Stalin Prize in 1942 and again in 1943. He was rewarded with a luxury flat in a new building on the Leningrad Highway in Moscow (until then, when he had been in Moscow, he had lived in the editorial offices of Krasnaia zvezda). For the first time in his life he had a maid. Well paid for his journalism and his poetry, he became rich, all the more so since there was nowhere to spend his earnings at the front and most of his personal expenses were picked up by the authorities. He only had to d
raw on his royalties when he wanted to send money to his parents, or to Zhenia for his son.29

  As Simonov’s fame and fortune increased, he became more attractive to Valentina. She had always been drawn towards powerful and influential men, who could protect her from the consequences of her spoilt biography. Thanks to Simonov, Valentina was getting leading roles in films and plays. By the spring of 1943, the glamorous, romantic couple were regularly featured in the Soviet press, sometimes appearing together at the front. The image of the separated lovers of ‘Wait For Me’ reunited in reality was too good for the regime to resist as a morale boost for the soldiers. But in fact the two were not married until October 1943, and all the evidence suggests that it was only shortly before then that Valentina agreed to marry Simonov. At the time of their wedding, Simonov was still legally married to Zhenia Laskina (there is no record that he ever divorced her), although he had left her three years previously. The wedding itself was hastily arranged. There were only a few guests, among them Stalin’s daughter Svetlana and his son Vasily, who brought a personal blessing from Stalin. After the ceremony, Simonov left immediately for the Briansk Front. Apart from two brief spells, when Valentina came to visit Simonov, once in 1943 on the Briansk Front, and another, when she toured the front near Leningrad with him, the newly married couple did not see each other until the end of the war. Even when the war was over, Valentina and Simonov led quite separate lives: they had their own apartments, each with a maid, on the same floor of the building on the Leningrad Highway. Valentina began to drink a lot. She was often drunk in the middle of the day. According to the memoirs of her friend, the actress Tatiana Okunevskaia, Valentina was unhappy in the marriage, and drinking was her way of getting through the day (for Simonov, by contrast, it was a way to get her into bed). One may question the reliability of Okunevskaia’s memoirs, which are deeply coloured by her intense hatred of her former husband, Boris Gorbatov, a close friend of Simonov, against whom she also bore a grudge.* It may well be that Valentina had at some point been in love with Simonov – possibly when she looked up to him as a figure of importance in the Soviet cultural world – and that her drinking had a different origin. But there is no doubt that their marriage was a stormy one, a long way from the propaganda image of domestic bliss produced by the Soviet authorities to give the public something happy to believe. There were constant arguments, interrupted by passionate exchanges, not least in Simonov’s love letters and poems to Valentina from the front; but there were no children, until Maria, born in 1950, by which time Valentina had betrayed Simonov in numerous affairs.30

  Serova and Simonov on tour, Leningrad Front, 1944

  Not everybody was so fond of ‘Wait For Me’. Some people thought that it was sentimental, that the intimate emotions of which it spoke were inappropriate for public consumption.31 Simonov’s own mother, Aleksandra, was one such person, though her reservations had as much to do with her personal dislike of Valentina and her disapproval of her son’s behaviour towards his family as with her natural aristocratic reserve about the display of emotion. She took particular exception to the lines ‘Even though my son and mother / Believe I’m already gone’, which she thought showed a lack of respect for her and for every mother in the Soviet Union. After attending a poetry reading in Moscow where Simonov recited ‘Wait For Me’ to Valentina, seated at the front of a packed hall, Aleksandra wrote to her son from Molotov in December 1944:

  Kirunia! We talked today on the telephone, which prompted me to finish my letter… because it contains all the thoughts and worries I’ve had in recent times. You’ve arranged your life in such a way that I can’t talk openly with you. I cannot say what is in my heart, what I feel and think, in snatches of conversation while we’re being driven around by your chauffeur, and yet I feel I must keep trying.

  And so, my dear, I have to speak the bitter truth and tell you that I am troubled by your private life. I felt this at the reading, and I felt it painfully for a long time afterwards… I understood a lot that evening…

  As I see it, K. Simonov has done something great, he has summoned youth to love, he has spoken about love in a clear voice, which is something new in our literature and poetry, where heroes loved and lived their lives in a strictly regimented way… To do so, he drew on his own intimate feelings, and as the rumours circulated, people became curious. The audience in the hall that night was not made up of thinking people who had come to listen and reflect. They were a mob, which had no qualms about standing up and jostling for a better view of ‘that woman’ – a woman they measured and envied but did not like very much, a woman you undressed in front of them. I don’t think she could have enjoyed the experience… These theatrical performances show your character in a bad light; they do not make amends for your mistakes. It is painful to watch you surround yourself with this grubby crowd of hangers-on, as you have done in recent years; you’ve found neither the strength within yourself nor the understanding of life in general to see them for what they are… You and she, she and you, that is all we’ve heard in the past few years… and it seems to me that in this vulgar show there is only egoism and caprice, but no real love for anyone.32

  Only a mother could have written such a letter. No one else could have given Simonov such a stern and bitter reprimand. Aleksandra had strict ideas about ‘decency’ and ‘correct behaviour’ and, being something of a pedagogue, did not hesitate to tell people how they should behave. She disapproved of her son’s marriage to Valentina, a ‘selfish, capricious and moody woman, whose behaviour I simply cannot stand’, as she wrote in a letter to her husband, Aleksandr, in May 1944. She did not like the way her son had ‘crawled’ into the Soviet elite, and, judging from the tone of her letters congratulating him, did not put much store by his receipt of the Stalin Prize and various other honours. She accused him of being selfish, of neglecting her, of failing to appreciate the sacrifices she had made to bring him up. Although Aleksandra had a tendency to dramatize events and, like every mother, wanted more attention from her son, there was a moral basis to her reprimands. In one revealing letter, in which Aleksandra reproached her son for not writing to her for two months (‘and then suddenly a two-line note typed out by your secretary arrives… Cela brusque!’ [sic]), she berated him for thinking only of his own ease and happiness with Valentina, whilst she and Aleksandr lived in poverty, ‘as do all of us in Cheliabinsk’:

  The comfort you enjoy, which you have earned, is the sort of comfort that you once knew only from history books and from the stories of my previous life, which I told you when you were growing up – a time when your well-being was my only joy. I was born in another world. The first twenty-five years of my life [1890–1915] were spent in conditions of luxury, I did not even have to undress myself. Then suddenly, that life was destroyed. But I began to live again – through my hopes for you. I washed and cooked and went to the shops and worked all day, and it was all for your sake. I say frankly: I think I have earned the right to live half as well as the son I raised. I have earned the right to live in a comfortable room, with somewhere I can wash.33

  But the main reason for her disapproval lay elsewhere. Aleksandra was concerned for Zhenia and her grandson, Aleksei, a sickly little boy, who suffered periodically from TB. Neglected by Simonov, Aleksei was growing up in the shadow of a famous father whom he rarely saw. ‘Wake up, Kirunia, what is wrong with you?’ Aleksandra wrote to Simonov in 1944:

  What has happened to the decency that marked you so clearly as a child? You have kept it in your conduct at the front but lost it in your private life, in your behaviour towards the people who should be the closest to your heart!… In the nursery where Alyosha [Aleksei] spends his days there is a boy whose father, who is just a sailor, picks him up every evening. And he’s just an ordinary boy. Alyosha’s spiritual qualities are fast developing… You could learn to be a better person, a richer person spiritually, by staying close to him… The other day he came back from the nursery and declared that he had the best granny in the
world, the best mummy, and then he thought, and said: ‘and the best daddy in the world’. Kirunia, your son still believes in you, in his dear childish heart the belief in a papa still exists, he wants to have a papa, a real papa, and there is still time for you to become one. Believe in yourself, my son, as Alyosha believes in you. Return to yourself, to your true and decent self, believe in yourself, in your work, which for you was always the most valuable aspect of your life, and then believe in us, the people close to you, who love you and believe in you. Concentrate your will – you were always proud of it and now you need it more than ever if you are to become your true self again.34

  Aleksei and Simonov, 1944

  If Simonov’s relations with his mother deteriorated during the war, his relations with his stepfather, Aleksandr, became closer. ‘It appears that Papa and I have exchanged places in your affections,’ Aleksandra wrote to Simonov in 1944, ‘and that you have become more affectionate to him than you are to me. I understand the reason why – you need him now at a time of war – and I value it.’35 Aleksandr was a military man. He had brought up his stepson to be conscientious and obedient, disciplined and orderly – military values which Simonov had placed at the centre of his own identification with the Stalinist regime during the 1930s. But the young Simonov, acutely aware of having the wrong class background, had always felt uncertain of his position. It was only in the war, when rank was defined less by social class than by the performance of one’s duties to the state, that he found his place in the system.

  Army service itself was thrilling to him. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1942, Simonov wore his new authority with graceful ease and style. The writer Iraklii Andronnikov remembers him as ‘a real Russian

  Simonov in 1941

  officer with fine bearing, calm and self-assured in his uniform, with shiny leather boots and a pistol in his belt. He had white teeth and a sunburned face. He wore his cap tilted slightly to one side.’ The war years were the happiest in his life: they defined it. ‘I have quickly grown accustomed to the military uniform and way of life,’ Simonov wrote in 1942, ‘so much so that I cannot even imagine how I will get on when the war is over and I have no military reports to write, no trips to make to the front, and I have to manage without the thousands of friends I’ve made in dozens of armies.’ Margarita Aliger recalls that he spent the war in a sort of fury of activity. ‘He wrote from all the crucial fronts, rushed back to Moscow, “wrote himself out”, and rushed off again to the places where the fighting was most dangerous. He would never stay in Moscow for more than a day or so, and often only for a few hours, enough to go drinking with some friends.’ Through the war Simonov gained in self-possession and proved his courage to himself. Sexually, too, he grew in confidence. He had many lovers, including Marina Chechneva, the ace bomber pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union. According to one of his later lovers, Simonov had a special attraction to women dressed in military uniforms. He liked to have sex on a Nazi flag, which he had recovered from the front.36