Show a message about the writer Agnia Barto. Unknown facts about famous writers. Agniya Barto
Every child in the USSR knew the poems of Agnia Barto (1906-1981). Her books were printed in millions of copies. This amazing woman devoted her entire life to children. It can be said without exaggeration that the works of Agnia Barto are familiar to all children who have just learned to speak. Many generations have grown up reading poems about crying Tanya and a bear with a torn paw, and the old film “The Foundling” continues to touch the hearts of modern viewers. The style of her poems, written for preschoolers and primary schoolchildren, is very easy; the poems are not difficult for children to read and memorize. Wolfgang Kazak called them "primitively rhymed." The author seems to be talking to the child in simple everyday language, without lyrical digressions or descriptions - but in rhyme. And he conducts a conversation with little readers, as if the author were their age. Barto’s poems are always on a modern theme, she seems to be telling a story that recently happened, and her aesthetics are characterized by calling characters by name: “Tamara and I”, “Who doesn’t know Lyubochka”, “Our Tanya is crying loudly”, “Leshenka, Lyoshenka, do favor” - it seems that we are talking about well-known Lyoshenka and Tanya, who have such shortcomings, and not at all about child readers. Paying tribute to the large number of wonderful children's poets, one cannot but agree that Agnia Barto occupies a special place in the golden fund of literature.
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| with that same bear? |
More than anything else, Hanna loved poetry and dancing. She recalled about her childhood: “The first impression of my childhood was the high voice of a barrel organ outside the window. For a long time I dreamed of walking around the courtyards and turning the handle of the organ, so that people attracted by the music would look out of all the windows.” She studied at the gymnasium, where, as was customary in intelligent families, she studied French and German. Under the influence of Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Mayakovsky, she began to write poetic epigrams and sketches - first in a decadent style, and after meeting the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, which she valued very highly throughout her subsequent life, she imitated his style for some time. But Ganna was best at humorous poems, which she read to her family and friends. At the same time, she studied at a ballet school. Then she entered the Moscow Choreographic School, after graduating from which in 1924 she joined the ballet troupe, where she worked for about a year. But the troupe emigrated. Agnia’s father was against her leaving, and she remained in Moscow...
She became a writer thanks to a curiosity. Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was present at the school’s graduation tests, where the young ballerina read her humorous poem “Funeral March” from the stage. A few days later, he invited her to the People's Commissariat for Education and expressed confidence that Barto was born to write funny poetry. In 1925, Barto was sent to the children's editorial office at Gosizdat. Agnia Lvovna set to work with enthusiasm and soon brought her first poems to Gosizdat. In 1925, her first poems, “Chinese Little Wang Li” and “The Thief Bear,” were published. They were followed by “The First of May” (1926), “Brothers” (1928), after the publication of which Korney Chukovsky noted Barto’s extraordinary talent as a children’s poet. Having dared to read her poem to Chukovsky, Barto attributed the authorship to a five-year-old boy. She later recalled about her conversation with Gorky that she was “terribly worried.” She adored Mayakovsky, but when she met him, she did not dare to speak. Fame came to her quite quickly, but did not add courage to her - Agnia was very shy. Perhaps it was precisely because of her shyness that Agnia Barto had no enemies. She never tried to appear smarter than she was, did not get involved in literary squabbles, and was well aware that she had a lot to learn. The Silver Age instilled in her the most important trait for a children's writer: endless respect for the word. Barto's perfectionism drove more than one person crazy: once, while going to a book congress in Brazil, she endlessly reworked the Russian text of the report, despite the fact that it was to be read in English. Receiving new versions of the text over and over again, the translator finally promised that he would never work with Barto again, even if she were a genius three times over...
However, later, during the Stalin era, when Chukovsky’s children’s poems were subjected to severe persecution, initiated by Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, despite the fact that Stalin himself repeatedly quoted “The Cockroach,” inadequate criticism came from Agnia Barto (and from Sergei Mikhalkov too) . Among party critics and editors, the term “Chukovism” even arose. Although other sources say that she did not completely poison Chukovsky, but simply did not refuse to sign some kind of collective paper. In addition, Barto was also seen harassing Marshak. “Barto came to the editorial office and saw proofs of Marshak’s new poems on the table. And he said: “Yes, I can write such poems every day!” To which the editor replied: “I beg you, write them at least every other day...” Here you go quiet!
By this time, Agnia was already married to the children's poet and ornithologist Pavel Nikolayevich Barto, a distant descendant of Scottish emigrants, and with whom she co-authored three poems - “The Roaring Girl,” “The Dirty Girl,” and “The Counting Table.” In 1927, their son Edgar (Igor) was born. Agnia Barto worked hard and fruitfully, and, despite accusations of primitive rhymes and lack of ideological consistency (especially the beautiful mischievous poem “Grubby Girl”), her poems were very popular with readers, and her books were published in millions of copies. Perhaps this was the reason that the marriage of the two poets lasted only 6 years. Perhaps the first marriage did not work out because she was too hasty in getting married, or maybe it was Agnia’s professional success, which Pavel Barto could not and did not want to survive. At the age of 29, Agnia Barto left her husband for a man who became the main love of her life - one of the most authoritative Soviet specialists in steam and gas turbines, dean of the EMF (power engineering faculty) of MPEI (Moscow Energy Institute), thermal physicist Andrei Vladimirovich Shcheglyaev, later a member -correspondent of the USSR Academy of Sciences and winner of the Stalin Prizes. Regarding the married couple Andrei Vladimirovich, who was called “the most beautiful dean of the USSR,” and Agnia Lvovna at the EMF, they jokingly asked: “What is three laureates in one bed?” The answer was: “Shcheglyaev and Barto” (the first was twice a winner of the Stalin Prize, the second - once, in 1950, for the collection “Poems for Children” (1949)). This talented young scientist purposefully and patiently courted the pretty poetess. At first glance, these were two completely different people: the “lyricist” and the “physicist”. Creative, sublime Agnia and heat energy Andrey. But in reality, an extremely harmonious union of two loving hearts was created. According to family members and close friends of Barto, in the almost 50 years that Agnia and Andrei lived together, they never quarreled. Writers, musicians, and actors often visited their house - Agnia Lvovna’s non-conflict character attracted a variety of people. This marriage produced a daughter, Tatyana (1933), now a candidate of technical sciences, who became the heroine of the famous poem about a girl who dropped a ball into the river.
“Mom was the main helmsman in the house, everything was done with her knowledge,” recalls Barto’s daughter, Tatyana Andreevna. “On the other hand, they took care of her and tried to create working conditions - she didn’t bake pies, didn’t stand in lines, but, of course, she was the mistress of the house. Our nanny Domna Ivanovna lived with us all her life, and she came to the house back in 1925, when my older brother Garik was born. She was a very dear person to us - and a hostess in a different, executive sense. Mom always took her into account. For example, she could ask: “Well, how am I dressed?” And the nanny would say: “Yes, that’s possible” or: “That’s a strange thing to do.”
She was non-confrontational, loved practical jokes and did not tolerate arrogance and snobbery. One day she arranged a dinner, set the table, and attached a sign to each dish: “Black caviar - for academicians”, “Red caviar - for corresponding members”, “Crabs and sprats - for doctors of science”, “Cheese and ham - for candidates ", "Vinaigrette - for laboratory assistants and students." They say that the laboratory assistants and students were sincerely amused by this joke, but the academicians did not have enough of a sense of humor - some of them were then seriously offended by Agnia Lvovna.
After the publication of a series of poetic miniatures for little ones “Toys” (1936), “Bullfinch” (1939) and other children’s poems, Barto became one of the most famous and beloved children’s poets by readers, her works were published in huge editions and were included in anthologies. The rhythm, rhymes, images and plots of these poems turned out to be close and understandable to millions of children. Agnia Lvovna received the love of readers and became the object of criticism. Barto recalled: “Toys” was subjected to harsh verbal criticism for its overly complex rhymes. I especially liked the lines:
They dropped Mishka on the floor,
They tore off the bear's paw.
I still won’t leave him -
Because he's good.
The minutes of the meeting at which these poems were discussed say: “...The rhymes need to be changed, they are difficult for a children’s poem.”
Agnia Barto wrote the scripts for the films “Foundling” (1939, together with actress Rina Zelena), “Alyosha Ptitsyn Develops Character” (1953), “10,000 Boys” (1961, together with I. Okada), as well as for the Ukrainian film “True Comrade” "(1936, dir. L. Bodik, A. Okunchikov) and others. Together with Rina Zelena, Barto also wrote the play “Dima and Vava” (1940). Her poem “The Rope” was taken by director I. Fraz as the basis for the concept of the film “The Elephant and the Rope” (1945).
Agnia Barto knew that war with Germany was inevitable. In the late 1930s, she traveled to this “neat, clean, almost toy-like country,” heard Nazi slogans, and saw pretty blond girls in dresses “decorated” with swastikas. To her, who sincerely believed in the universal brotherhood of, if not adults, then at least children, all this was wild and scary.
In 1937 she visited Spain as a delegate to the International Congress for the Defense of Culture, which was held in Spain, the sessions of which took place in the besieged, burning Madrid. There was a war going on, and Barto saw ruins of houses and orphaned children. She always had a lot of determination: she saw the target - and forward, without swaying or retreating: once, just before the bombing, she went to buy castanets. The sky howls, the walls of the store bounce, and the writer makes a purchase! But the castanets are real, Spanish - for Agnia, who danced beautifully, this was an important souvenir. Alexei Tolstoy later asked Barto sarcastically: had she bought a fan in that store to fan herself during the next raids? But a conversation with a Spanish woman made a particularly gloomy impression on her, who, showing a photograph of her son, covered his face with her finger - explaining that the boy’s head had been torn off by a shell. “How to describe the feelings of a mother who has outlived her child?” - Agnia Lvovna wrote to one of her friends then. A few years later, she received the answer to this terrible question...
During the war, Shcheglyaev, who by that time had become a prominent power engineer, was sent to the Urals, to Krasnogorsk to ensure its uninterrupted operation - the plants worked for the war. Agnia Lvovna had friends in those parts who invited her to stay with them. So the family - son, daughter with nanny Domna Ivanovna - settled in Sverdlovsk. In Sverdlovsk, Agnia Barto was settled on 8 March Street in the so-called House of Old Bolsheviks. It was built in 1932 specifically for the party elite. Some apartments exceeded one hundred square meters in area, and a dining room, laundry, club and kindergarten were available to VIP residents. During the Great Patriotic War, important party workers and celebrities evacuated to the Urals began to move here en masse.
The son studied at a flight school near Sverdlovsk, the daughter went to school. At this time, Agnia Lvovna writes about herself: “During the Great Patriotic War, I spoke a lot on the radio in Moscow and Sverdlovsk. She published war poems, articles, and essays in newspapers. In 1943, she was on the Western Front as a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda. But I never stopped thinking about my main, young hero. During the war, I really wanted to write about Ural teenagers who worked at the machines at defense factories, but for a long time I could not master the topic. Pavel Petrovich Bazhov [famous revolutionary storyteller, "Ural Tales"] advised me, in order to better understand the interests of artisans and, most importantly, their psychology, to acquire a specialty with them, for example, a turner. Six months later I received a discharge, really. The lowest. But I got closer to the topic that worried me (“A student is coming,” 1943).” She mastered turning and even received a second rank, and Agniya Lvovna donated the bonus she received during the war to build a tank. In February 1943, Shcheglyaev was recalled from Krasnogorsk to Moscow and allowed to travel with his family. They returned, and Agniya Lvovna again began to seek a trip to the front. Here's what she wrote about it: “It wasn’t easy to get permission from the PUR. I turned to Fadeev for help.
- I understand your desire, but how can I explain the purpose of your trip? - he asked. - They will tell me: - she writes for children.
- And tell me that you can’t write about war for children without seeing anything with your own eyes. And then... they send readers to the front with funny stories. Who knows, maybe my poems will come in handy? Soldiers will remember their children, and those who are younger will remember their childhood.”
A travel order was received, but Agniya Lvovna worked in the active army for 22 days.
In 1944, the poetess returned to Moscow. 4 days before the long-awaited Victory, on May 5, 1945, a tragedy occurred in the poetess’s family - her son Igor, while riding a bicycle, was hit by a truck in Lavrushinsky Lane (Moscow). Agnia Lvovna’s friend Evgenia Aleksandrovna Taratuta recalled that Agnia Lvovna completely retreated into herself these days. She didn't eat, didn't sleep, didn't talk...
In 1947, an unexpected poem in Barto’s work, “Zvenigorod,” was published, idyllically depicting the life of children in an orphanage. Of course, the content of the poem conveyed the real atmosphere of orphanages in a rather idealized way, but this work had an unexpected response. A woman who spent eight years searching for her daughter Nina, who disappeared during the war, wrote to Barto that she now felt better because she hoped that the girl ended up in a good orphanage. Although the letter did not contain any requests for help, the poetess contacted the appropriate services, and after two years of searching, Nina was found. The magazine "Ogonyok" published an essay about this event, and Agnia Lvovna began to receive many letters from people who had lost relatives during the war, although there was not always enough data for searching. Agnia Lvovna wrote: “What was to be done? Should we transfer these letters to special organizations? But for an official search, accurate data is needed. But what if they are not there, if the child was lost when he was small and couldn’t say where and when he was born, couldn’t even say his last name?! Such children were given new surnames, and the doctor determined their age. How can a mother find a child who has long since become an adult if his last name has been changed? And how can an adult find his family if he doesn’t know who he is and where he comes from? But people do not calm down, they look for parents, sisters, brothers for years, they believe that they will find them. The following thought occurred to me: could childhood memory help in the search? A child is observant, he sees sharply, accurately and remembers what he sees for life. It is only important to select those main and always somewhat unique childhood impressions that would help relatives recognize the lost child.” For example, a woman who was lost during the war as a child remembered that she lived in Leningrad and that the name of the street began with “o”, and next to the house there was a bathhouse and a store. Barto's team searched for such a street without success. They found an old bath attendant who knew all the Leningrad baths. As a result, by method of elimination, they found out that there was a bathhouse on Serdobolskaya Street - the “o” in the name of the girl was remembered... In another case, parents who lost their four-month-old daughter during the war only remembered that the child had a mole on his shoulder that looked like a rose . Naturally, they did not know the name under which their daughter lived after the war. But the only clue worked: residents of a Ukrainian village called the program and reported that one of their neighbors had a mole that looked like a rose...
Agnia Lvovna’s hopes for the power of childhood memories were justified. Through the “Find a Person” program, which she hosted once a month for nine years (1964-1973) on Mayak radio, reading excerpts from letters describing individual signs or fragmentary memories of lost people, she managed to reunite 927 families separated by the war. The first book of prose by the writer is called “Find a Person.” Barto wrote her first book of prose about this work - the story “Find a Person” (published in 1968), and in 1973 director Mikhail Bogin made the film “Looking for a Person” based on this book.
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| the same autograph |
For her writing and social activities, Agnia Barto was repeatedly awarded orders and medals. Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1972) - for the book of poems “For Flowers in the Winter Forest” (1970) (Prize for works for children). For many years, Barto headed the Association of Children's Literature and Art Workers and was a member of the international Andersen jury. Numerous trips to different countries (Bulgaria, England, Japan...) led her to the idea of the richness of the inner world of a child of any nationality. This idea was confirmed by the poetic collection “Translations from Children” (1976), the release of which was timed to coincide with the Sofia Writers’ Forum, dedicated to the role of literary artists in the practical implementation of the Helsinki Agreements. This collection contains free translations of poems written by children from different countries: the main purpose of the collection is to proclaim humanistic values that are important for children all over the world. In 1976 she was awarded the International Prize. Andersen. Her poems have been translated into many languages of the world.
Other awards:
- The order of Lenin
- Order of the October Revolution
- two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor
- Order of the Badge of Honor
- Medal "For rescuing drowning people"
- medal "Miner's Glory" 1st degree (from the miners of Karaganda)
- Order of the Smile
- International Gold Medal named after Leo Tolstoy “For merits in creating works for children and youth” (posthumously).
Agnia Lvovna loved her grandchildren Vladimir and Natalya very much, dedicated poems to them, and taught them to dance. She remained active for a long time, traveled a lot around the country, played tennis and danced on her 75th birthday. Agnia Barto died on April 1, 1981, having not recovered from a heart attack, and barely having time to rejoice at the birth of her great-granddaughter Asya. After the autopsy, the doctors were shocked: the vessels turned out to be so weak that it was not clear how the blood had been flowing into the heart for the last ten years. Agnia Barto once said: “Almost every person has moments in life when he does more than he can.” In her case, it wasn’t just a minute—she lived her whole life this way. The poetess is buried at the Novodevichy cemetery (site No. 3). The name Agnia Barto was given to the small planet (2279) Barto, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as well as to one of the craters on Venus.
Barto's creative heritage is diverse - from propaganda poems written for some Soviet holiday to heartfelt lyrical sketches. Barto’s works are often openly didactic: her passion for aphoristically expressed morality is known, crowning the poem: “But, following fashion,//Don’t mutilate yourself”; “And if you need payment,//Then the action is worthless”; “Remember the simple truth: / /If the girls are friendly. / /“Five girls about the sixth” // You shouldn’t gossip like that,” etc. In many of Barto’s works, child psychology is depicted subtly and with gentle humor. Such is the poem “The Bullfinch” (1938), the hero of which, shocked by the beauty of the bullfinch and trying to become “good” so that his parents would agree to buy him a bird, painfully experiences this need (“And I answered with sadness:!! - I am always like this now”). Having become the happy owner of a bullfinch, the hero sighs with relief: “So, we can fight again. //Tomorrow morning in the yard.” In the poem “I have grown up” (1944), a girl who has become a schoolgirl and asserts her “adulthood” still retains a touching attachment to old toys. All of Barto's work is imbued with the conviction of the right of childhood - as a special world - to a certain independence from the world of adults. Barto's poetry, which always directly responded to the demands of the time, is unequal: reflecting the contradictions of the era, it contains both weak, opportunistic works and genuine masterpieces that retain their charm to this day.
On the Internet, Agnia Barto is credited with the poem “Circus,” allegedly written in 1957. This poem was copied by many bloggers in 2010. In fact, the verse was written in 2009 by the poet Mikhail Yudovsky. Here we can draw parallels with the poem “Volodin Portrait”, actually written by Agnia Barto in 1957.
We're going to the circus today!
In the arena again today
With a trained Bear
Tamer Uncle Vova.
The circus goes numb with delight.
I want to laugh, holding on to my dad,
But the Bear does not dare to growl,
Just sucks a funny paw,
He takes himself by the scruff of the neck,
It is important to bow to the children.
How funny it is at the circus
With Uncle Vova and the Bear!
Volodin portrait
The squad is sitting by the fire.
You didn’t recognize Volodya?
He sat down in the first row.
Runners standing in the photo
With numbers on the chest.
Someone familiar is ahead -
This is Vova in front.
Volodya was filmed weeding,
And at the holiday, on the Christmas tree,
And on a boat by the river,
And at the chessboard.
It was filmed with a hero pilot!
We'll open another magazine
He stands among the swimmers.
Who is he after all?
What does he do?
Because he is filming!
A. Barto, 1957
In our time, the poems of Agnia Barto have received a “second life”, in particular in the illustrations of Vladimir Kamaev:
as well as in “New Russian Parodies” by Evgeniy Borisovich Koryukin:
Ball Our Tanya cries loudly: | Our Tanya howled again: I dropped the hairdryer in the jacuzzi. It hisses strangely underwater - Get into the bath, Tanyusha! |
bear Dropped the teddy bear on the floor | They dropped Mishka on the floor, He was an adult - he didn’t cry. Mikhail lay down specifically: Bros invested in the cops. |
Goby The bull is walking, swaying, | There's a bull coming - a scary face, Trouble struck again. Oh, damn, yesterday's arrow It didn't work out again. |
Elephant Time to sleep! The bull fell asleep | After drinking, the bulls sleep, Their mobile calls stopped. Mishka is also fast asleep, It's just a bummer for me with sleep. I'm a security guard - I don't sleep well... And I always dream about a woman. |
Bunny The owner abandoned the bunny - | The owner kicked out the “bunny”: He did not sleep with the owner "Bunny". You doomed "Bunny", damn it, Be homeless without registration. |
horse I love my horse | I love my chick so much Even if your hair is like a broom... On March 8th, fig. I'll give her a wig. |
Truck No, we shouldn't have decided | No, we shouldn't have decided Lyokh, sleeping in the car, What if I burn you to the ground - The car was cool! |
Kid I have a little goat, | If only a little goat could live with me, Why is my roommate a goat? I'll give him a green buck, - If only he would go to hell! I should sew it in the garden - I want to live with a young man! |
Ship Tarpaulin, | Baseball cap on the tower Bottle in hand I'm sailing on a yacht Along a clear river. And the girls are heard A cry from the shore: - Take it at least for the stolnik We're in bulk, man! |
Airplane We'll build the plane ourselves | We'll buy the plane ourselves We no longer need sleighs, A lot of money in your pocket... We are with you, oligarchs! |
Checkbox Burning in the sun | It was red, I remember checkbox, Yes Borya Yeltsin He was burned! |
Modern non-children's poems
I. Technical progress
Objections to progress have always amounted to accusations of immorality.
Bernard Show
Rubber Zina
Bought in a store
Rubber Zina
They brought it to the apartment.
The purchase was taken out
Inflated with a pump -
This same Zina
There was an inflatable valve.
It was like a real one
Talking toy
And in the sense of belongings
Everything about it was okay:
Like melons were titi
(Sorry for comparisons!),
Elastic also
And they smelled like mignonette;
And in the right place of risk,
Two lunar half-disks
You were clearly promised
Fire and heat of passion.
And, by the way, Zina,
Like a sultry girl
I could, sorry
Depict orgasm:
Moaned and sobbed,
And she turned up the heat,
And even kissed
By God, I'm not lying!
They gave Zina Styopa,
Big Klutz,
Because the beauties
Had no success.
Stepan served in the mentura,
And even an obvious fool
It didn’t come to my head
To please Stepan.
And here there is no market
(Just a “thing” – a couple!)
Will replace the capricious floor
Inflatable sample!
Another thing that was appreciated by the ment:
The doll was never seen
Provide you with a surprise -
Venus, for example;
I didn't ask for gifts
And I didn’t wear fur coats,
Recognized rivals -
At least put them next to each other!
And the main thing is that mothers-in-law
No relics observed:
Zinulenka without mom
They were born.
There was only one thing bad:
Zinulya is incompetent
In terms of culinary
And he had a reputation as a cook;
I didn’t know naval borscht,
But in carnal pleasures
Her, as they say,
At least eat it with a spoon!
And, however, in the technical age
Us soon cute
Some scientist
Ersatz will invent;
It will have everything you need
For a married girl,
In addition, it will also be able
Wash, cook, wash.
Will not give birth to children,
But there won’t be enough of us:
They will clone us
From night to dawn...
Who's interested here?
And time-savvy,
Of course, he will ask for the address -
Where can I buy all this?
I will tell everyone without hiding:
While all this is just stories,
But guys everything will be soon
They will know that address.
II. Metamorphoses
Our Tanya cries loudly:
Lost - no, not the ball -
And a business card to the fellow,
The local mafia to my father.
Godfather assigned her
Arrive at your office by eight
But the devil, damn it,
I thought completely differently.
What’s unfortunate: even more so for her
Don't be in secret rooms,
And in Versace outfits
Don't show off at the table
Don't go to restaurants -
New life to drink wine,
And then, in a drunken stupor,
Fall deeper and deeper to the bottom.
How, beautiful, not ashamed
To shed such tears!..
The boss will find it - it’s so obvious! –
Very soon your address...
III. Prodigies
It was in the evening
There was nothing to do...
And a bunch of kids
About six years old, or maybe five,
Excommunicated from books
I was going to chat
About the various objects there -
At least about ancestors, for example...
It was summer outside
Red like a pioneer:
The sun was going down like a ball,
Nimble swifts in the sky
With the skill of a polygamist
They made turns...
In a word, everything was in place
To revelations for children;
Much has been said or little has been said
But I came to the yard
This babble seems to be childish,
Somewhere even funny,
Only the Soviet spirit was visible
In every story there is a mischievous...
Kolya was the first to speak:
“If it were my will,
First of all, I decided
Twist ropes from veins
Those who deprive us of our childhood,
And without false coquetry
All, with one noose,
Sent to heaven by the unearthly..."
Here Vova seemed to assent:
“I’m putting a noose on everyone – what’s wrong?..
I know a more radical way
I am for the execution of all channels:
Buy a lot of chewing gum
Chew and stuff your mouth
To all the nasty politicians,
Who is half-drunk with zeal
He paints us an earthly paradise...
Whoever dies - to hell with you!..
There’s no point in beating up grandma,
And caulk our brains!..”
Vlad intervened (oh, and the doc!):
“Oh, guys, how cruel
There will be this and that revenge!..
I have another one:
Uncles, aunts of all the bad ones
We will send to the Moon!..”
That's how Vlad is!.. I'm stunned!..
I was puzzled!.. Well, well!..
The guys thought:
Where can I get a ship like this?
So that all the inveterate liars
Send on an unearthly journey?..
Look how many of them have accumulated:
They're all liars - no matter what!
Svetka was fussing here:
“It’s June now,
If we make a fuss,
And don't waste your time,
That dream can come true
On the eve of October...
And now - closer to the body,
As de Maupassant joked,
We will close this topic -
The rocket will be launched!
For this all you need
We have about five billions..."
They unanimously supported Svetka:
“UNESCO can give them!..”
...It was in the evening
There was nothing to do
And childish fantasy
Flooded like a river...
This is not bullshit
My dear bourgeois!..
IV. Goat and vine for Grandson Feda
From one nostril to the nose
I will bring a goat into the world,
I'll milk the goat -
Give milk to relatives.
And in the other nostril, a goat,
The vine grows for you:
You will pluck leaves -
One two three four five…
The goat ate them all -
The vine became bare...
We won’t grieve with a goat -
We'll get new ones tomorrow...
© Copyright: Anatoly Beshentsev, 2014 Certificate of publication No. 214061900739
Of course, Tanya and her ball got the most of it:
* * *
Our Tanya is crying loudly
Days and nights to fly by:
Tanya's husband drowned in the river -
So he howls like a coyote.
Doesn't whine, but moans quietly,
He who does not see - he who does not see:
The husband is shit - shit doesn’t drown,
Hush, Tanya, don't cry...
Taniad
Our Tanya is crying loudly,
She dropped a ball into the river.
Tanya, don’t shed tears,
Dive in and catch up!
Our Tanya is drowning in the river -
Jumped for the ball.
Rings float on the water
A round little ball.
Our Tanya is crying loudly,
She dropped Masha into the river.
Hush, Tanechka, don't cry,
Crying won't help Masha.
Our Tanya at the factory
Spends all holidays.
So, Tanya, would you like a ball?
Have a look at the factory!
Our Tanya early in the morning
I turned two blanks.
- Here, boss, look:
There are three of us dummies!
Our Tanya barks loudly
He often lifts his leg.
Hush, Tanechka, don't bark!
Call the paramedics!
Our Tanya snores loudly
Woke up mom and dad!
Hush, Tanya, don't snore!
Sleep with your head in the pillow!
Our Tanya is very loud
She sent Romka far away.
That's enough, Roma, don't be silly,
If they sent you, then go!
Our Tanya cries loudly:
Tanya was abandoned by a burning macho.
Hush, Tanechka, don't cry,
There are so many of them, these guys.
Our Tanya calls the cat,
Pokes the cat's nose into the pile,
Because this cat
She made us a little naughty.
Our Tanya is torturing the cat,
The cat meows pitifully.
Hush, little kitty, don't cry,
Otherwise you’ll catch the ball!
A Khachik comes to see our Tanya,
Moldovan, Armenian.
Don't be alarmed, this means -
Tanya is doing repairs.
Our Tanya is crying loudly.
Tanya got pregnant, that means.
Don't cry and don't fuss,
Go and have an ultrasound.
Our Tanya timidly hides
The body is fat in the rocks.
Okay, Tanya, don't hide,
Everyone can still see you.
Our Tanya is crying loudly.
The female doctor is puzzled:
- Explain to me, don’t cry:
How did the ball end up here?
Our Tanya at the apartment
Dropped the weights on the floor.
And today our neighbor
Eats lime for lunch.
Our Tanya is waiting for a soldier,
Her candidate for groom.
That's enough, Tanya, don't wait,
Marry your neighbor!
Our Tanya is crying bitterly
Crying, crying, crying, crying.
A stream of tears per meter around
Tanya peels bitter onions.
Our Tanya laughs and jumps.
No, not our Tanya, that is.
Ours should roar,
Apparently this is not her.
© 2007 "Red Burda"
How could famous poets say about this grief?
ANDREY KROTKOV
Horace:
Tatyana sobs loudly, her grief is inconsolable;
Tears stream down from the pink-flamed cheeks;
She indulged in girlish games in the garden carefree -
The mischievous woman could not hold the ball in her thin fingers;
A frisky horse jumped out and rushed down the slope,
Slipping off the edge of the cliff, he fell into a stormy foamy stream.
Dear maiden, do not cry, your loss can be healed;
There is a command for the slaves to bring fresh water;
They are persistent, they are brave, they are accustomed to any kind of work -
They will boldly swim, and the ball will return to you.
Alexander Blok:
Tatyana sobs inconsolably,
And a tear, like blood, is hot;
She got a heartbreak
From a ball falling into a river.
Now he sighs intermittently, now he groans,
Remembering the past game.
Do not worry. Your ball won't sink -
We'll get it tonight.
Vladimir Mayakovsky:
In this world
Nothing
Not forever,
And now
Swear or cry:
Straight from the shore
Fell into the river
Tanya girls
Ball.
Tears are flowing
From Tanya's eyes.
Do not Cry!
Do not be
A whiny maiden!
Let's go get some water -
And we'll get the ball.
Left!
Left!
Left!
Ivan Krylov:
A certain girl named Tatyana,
Fair in mind and without blemish in body,
In the village the days are spent,
I couldn’t imagine spending time without a ball.
Either he will give in with his foot, or he will push with his hand,
And, having played with him, he doesn’t even half hear.
The Lord did not save us, there was a disaster -
The playful ball fell into the abyss of water.
Unhappy Tatyana sobs and sheds tears;
And the water carrier Kuzma is the one who is always half drunk -
Kartuz pulled off
And taco rivers:
“Yes, that’s enough, young lady! This misfortune is not grief.
Here I’ll harness Sivka, and soon I’ll get some water
I'll run at a gallop.
My hook is sharp, my bucket is spacious -
From the river I skillfully and quickly
I'll get the ball."
Moral: simple water carriers are not so simple.
He who knows a lot about water calms tears.
***
NATALIA FEDORENKO
Robert Burns:
Tanya lost her ball..
What will you take from her?
Tanya kissed Johnny..
Is this a lie?
Tanyusha has sadness in her heart:
Can't get the ball...
There will be someone at the river again
Kiss Johnny..
***
ARKADY EIDMAN
Boris Pasternak:
The ball bounced on the wave,
Her ramming.
On the shore, on an old stump
Tanya was sobbing.
Drown the ball? And in a nightmare,
No, I didn't want to!
And therefore on this stump
She roared...
But the ball is not a miss and not a sucker,
There will be no drowning.
Is the parodist good or bad?
The people will judge...
Bulat Okudzhava:
A ball is playing in the river. Plays and frolics.
He is full of thoughts and strength, he is round and he is rosy.
And there, on the shore, the girls burst into tears,
The chorus of grieving Tatianas sobs in unison...
The ball doesn't care, it swims like a fish
Or maybe like a dolphin, or maybe like... a ball.
He shouts to Tatyana: “If only we could add more smiles!”
But a friendly cry comes in response from the shore...
***
IRINA KAMENSKAYA
Yunna Moritz:
Tanya walked along the canal,
Tatyanka has a new ball.
The music played quietly
On Ordynka, on Polyanka.
The ball goes into the water. Didn't catch up.
Tears slide down your cheeks.
The music played quietly
On Polyanka, on Ordynka.
Mom wiped away her tears
Stupid little Tatyanka.
The music played quietly
On Ordynka, on Polyanka
***
ILYA TSEITLIN
Alexander Tvardovsky:
River, far bank right,
The ball floated away from the left.
Where can I find the government, right?
Who would return the ball?
After all, without a ball the girl
On Russian shores
It's no good hanging around
Without a toy, it's a mess!
Tanya whines, drinks vodka,
Look, a fighter with a ball! Not a dream!
It was Andryusha Krotkov,
It was, of course, him!
Poetically hot
And as powerful as a tram!
Tanya forgot her ball,
Give Tanya some lyrics!
Arseny Tarkovsky:
Those were drops of burning tears,
Almost silent, bitter crying.
By chance, cooler
The ball rolled into the abyss of water.
An unhealed wound...
To the sound of the water draining
I often see Tatyana
And there are her traces by the river...
Bulat Okudzhava:
In the yard, where every evening
Tanka was playing with a ball,
The line of grandmas rustled like husks,
Black Angel – Valka Perchik,
She ran the booth
And they called her Baba Yaga!
And wherever I go
(Nowadays, however, I eat more)
On business or otherwise, for a walk.
Everything seems to me that
Valka runs on the trail,
And he tries to take the ball away.
Let him be shabby and bald,
Tired, overly fat,
I will never return to the yard.
Still, brothers, it’s my fault,
Without jokes, I'm terribly bored,
So I’m glad to joke sometimes!
***
TAIL
Afanasy Fet:
In a rush of heating mains, the only one rolled down
Tannin's beloved ball.
Everything was stunned by the not childishly warlike
Cry.
Was this a simple goodbye?
Nobody understood Tanya.
What should the techies get as punishment?
What?
The ball will not sink and the devil will not be baptized,
Walk along the heating main -
The hole in the pipe will soon open again!
Wait!
Igor Severyanin:
In a jaguar cape,
Violet from grief,
Tatiana is crying at sea,
Oh, Tanya, don’t cry!
Our friend the rubber ball
Doesn't see this grief
It's great to be empty inside
And the river is not an executioner.
***
BELKA (guest from Hochmodrom)
Sergey Yesenin:
Tanyusha was good, there was no more beautiful woman in the village,
Red frilly on white sundress at the hem.
Tanya walks behind the fences by the ravine in the evening,
And he kicks the ball with his foot - he loves a strange game.
A guy came out and bowed his curly head:
“Allow me, soul Tatyana, to kick him too?”
She turned pale like a shroud, cold like dew.
Her braid developed like a snake-killer.
"Oh, blue-eyed guy, no offense, I'll say
I kicked him, but now I can’t find him.”
“Don’t be sad, my Tanyusha, apparently the ball has sunk,
If you love me, I will immediately dive for him."
Alexander Pushkin:
Tatiana, dear Tatiana!
With you now I shed tears:
The river is deep and foggy,
Your wonderful toy
I accidentally dropped it from a bridge...
Oh, how you loved this ball!
You cry bitterly and call...
Do not Cry! You will find your ball
He won't drown in a stormy river,
After all, the ball is not a stone, not a log,
He won't sink to the bottom,
Its seething stream drives
Flows through the meadow, through the forest
To the dam of a nearby hydroelectric power station.
Mikhail Lermontov:
The lonely ball turns white
In the fog of a blue river -
Ran away from Tanya, not far away,
Left my native shore...
The waves are playing, the wind is whistling,
And Tanya cries and screams,
She is stubbornly looking for her ball,
He runs after him along the shore.
Below him is a stream of lighter azure,
Above him is a golden ray of sun...
And he, the rebellious one, asks for a storm,
As if there is peace in the storms!
Nikolay Nekrasov:
Tanya cried as she dropped the ball,
She sobbed bitterly, drooping without strength,
She washed her cheeks with burning tears.
A ball on a slope by a playful greyhound
I rolled into the river, and the river is babbling,
He twirls the toy, doesn’t want to put it back
Give the ball to the cute little girl.
There would be trouble. May my mother console me
Poor Tanya: “Well, that’s enough shouting!
We need to rock Arinushka in the unsteady state,
We need to pull carrots in the garden,
Stop prancing around free
Throwing the ball, splashing your hands!”
Women, rinsing clothes on the river,
They saw the ball floating on the waves,
And they stopped rinsing involuntarily.
- Look, the empty toy doesn’t sink!
- Look how it floats. It’s unlikely to stick here,
Will the current wash towards the ferry?
- We must tell the carrier Prov,
What if he catches you... Oh, women, it's time!
I hear the redhead mooing near the yard!
So this is Tanyushin's laughing day
A gloomy shadow hid the losses.
Tannins full of life on the cheeks
Sad faded, covered with tears,
The young soul was burned with sadness.
The ball floated away, which means childhood is over.
Margarita Shulman
In the style of D. Sukharev.
I was a little boy, and in those years more than once
I listened to Tanya’s story about the missing ball,
How he fell and floated down the river for show
Multi-colored rubber ball.
And the soul painted pictures in melancholy:
How I am waiting for Tanya on the river with the ball,
And the rubber friend sleeps with a wave on his cheek,
Well, Tanya is crying loudly in the distance.
Since then I have been realizing my dream:
Tanya's ball floated away, and I sing a song,
I publish poems, I save royalties,
And I’m incredibly happy with fate!
Voluptuous poison - Tannin motley ringing ball -
And the toy, and the feeder, and the loss...
There was a powerful, very mournful cry about you.
Even though I myself don’t believe in this grief (Tanya, darling, forgive me!)...
In the style of R. Rozhdestvensky.
I'll get up before dawn today,
I'll look for Tanya's ball in the closet.
Something happened to my memory:
I can't find it in my hat.
I'll go out to the river with her,
I'll look around the entire shore.
Where is your ball, my otter,
It's worth that kind of money!
And Tatyana roars with bitterness,
Points his finger at the bushes by the river.
Apparently the ball sank and did not surface last night,
Either a thunderstorm or the ball was carried away by strangers.
In the style of V. Korostylev, V. Lifshits.
Ah, Tanya, Tanya, Tanechka,
Her case was like this:
Our Tanya played
Over the fast river.
And the ball is red and blue
Jumped along the shore
Pay attention to Tanya
Nobody paid any attention.
Can't be!
Imagine this!
Nobody paid any attention.
But then the storm frowned,
And ripples all over the river,
Thunderclaps are menacing,
Lightning in the distance.
And Tanya became scared,
And no one around...
And the ball slipped out of my hands
And run on water!
And here again above the river
The crying doesn't stop:
Tanya is sad about the past
And he remembers the ball.
Elastic, blue-red,
There's no trace of him...
Ah, Tanya, Tanya, Tanya
There is no worse loss.
Can't be!
Imagine this!
There is no worse loss.
In the style of S. Yesenin.
You are my obedient ball, you are a playful ball,
Why are you lying, swaying, on a playful wave?
Or what did you see, or are you so bored?
Tanya is crying loudly, you don’t notice.
And you threaten the local hooligans from there,
Like a forbidden buoy, like Tanya’s watchman.
Oh, and I myself looked askance today,
Instead of a fast river, I fell into the reeds.
There I met Tanya, in inconsolable crying,
He consoled me in his arms, I couldn’t do otherwise...
He seemed experienced and strict to himself,
Not drunk at all, not even wretched.
And, having lost modesty, having become stupefied,
I drowned that little blue, striped ball...
Mayakovsky "Proletarian Tears"
A spherical product made of red rubber, cast,
A simple Soviet ball, for children,
In the middle of the river it froze like a monolith.
Above him on the bridge he is sobbing uncontrollably loudly, frantically,
Just eight years old, a simple girl Tanya,
In the future, the mother of a communist.
Daughter of a hero of labor, artist, metallurgist and proletarian
Your own rubber sports equipment
Lost in the river's muddy glow.
Use the sleeve of your quilted jacket to wipe away your nurses,
You are shedding tears in vain, Tatyana.
Spit on the ball that disappeared in the belly of the river.
Soon the scarlet dawn will break out over the world!
Night. Street. River. Fall.
Uncontrollable prolonged crying,
The young creature is shocked,
Suddenly lost not just a ball...
The soul ached and suffered,
While carrying the toy into the distance.
Night. Icy ripples of the channel.
Tatiana. Tears. Bridge. Sadness.
Omar Khayyam
And these days, even laugh, or even cry,
You will see Tanya's ball on the river.
Let them say - I'm blind, I won't judge -
A blind person sees further than those who can see.
Petrarch
There was a day on which, according to the Creator of the universe
Grieving, the sun darkened - a bitter cry
On the river bank. floating ball
And the maiden face - I became their prisoner!
Did I guess that in the dispute between light and shadow
Chance will bring us together - an angel and an executioner,
That the tender arrows of love are hot fire
And cold-hearted at the same time?
Still, Cupid achieved his goal -
Limp next to her and unarmed,
I adore her pleading look.
I’ll get the ball, oh happiness - it’s nearby,
And we, wiping away the tears from our pearly eyes,
Let's go with you, dear, to the altar.
A child's cry is heard near the river:
Half a mile from this event,
Quite a wet, dirty ball
Nailed to the willows. Well-groomed and satisfying
A rook looks at the misadventure from a branch.
If only the Almighty would give me more agility...
What's left for me to do, cry with Tanya too?
Child, I know God will help you!
D. Prigov
If, say, in a local river you see a children's ball
And you will hear a nasty cry, I would even say a howl,
Don't touch him, buddy, he's not money or netsuke -
Just a girl's toy, well, that means it's not yours.
But when no crying is heard and her face is not seen,
And along the river, as before, the poor ball floats,
Don't doubt it anymore, he's completely, completely nobody's,
It might come in handy tomorrow - take it and hide it.
Ya. Smelyakov
Along the small houses beckons
Cool, midsummer, stream.
Good girl Tanya,
Shielding yourself from the sun's rays
With a hand stained with silt,
Drops tears into the grass.
The luminary suffers with her,
Sadness of the blue skies.
Reflecting in the stream water,
The boy is in a hurry to help.
The girl, I guess, is not a stranger -
Factory... Let it not be known,
Reader, but this is a sign
(Anyone in the village will tell you):
To the ball saved by the answer
There will be girlish love.
Folk. Ditty
My darling is hot
Use your brains better:
If you don't get the ball,
There's no way you'll get it at night.
Japanese version. Haiku
Tanya-chan lost her face
Crying about the ball rolling into the pond.
Pull yourself together, daughter of a samurai.
and my favorite:
Our Tanya is crying loudly.
She dropped a ball into the river.
Tanya cry louder -
The damn ball floats away.
Life goes over the edge
At least lie down and die.
In the morning at Tatiana's school
I had a headache or something.
And he and his friend Ira
We drank a little beer.
After the fifth glass
The director found them.
Tanya got angry about something
And since I was
In a state of susceptibility -
Then she sent her off with obscenities.
The headmistress got wound up
In general, the fight began.
Well, somehow drunk there,
Tatyana's nose was broken.
The point is not that the eye is blackened -
Her heart hurts.
Tanya without warning
The guy left on Sunday.
How can you not hang yourself here?
In the fourth month.
Everything would be fine
If only I knew from whom.
Later Tanya walked home
She carried the ball in front of her.
There were few failures.
Dropped a ball into the river...
Agnia Barto is the most famous children's poet, whose works have forever entered the golden classics of Soviet children's literature. And today she is rightfully considered an unsurpassed master of children's poetry; her poems are benchmarks for children's poets. Her works, simple at first glance, are the result of painstaking work and an endless search for new poetic forms that are understandable and accessible to children. But the main work of her life was the radio program “Find a Person,” thanks to which many families separated during the Great Patriotic War were reunited.
Agnia Lvovna Barto was born in Moscow in 1906, into a wealthy Jewish family. The childhood of little Gethel (this is the real name of Agnia Barto) was happy and cloudless; she grew up in the typical atmosphere of the Moscow intelligentsia of those years. A spacious apartment, a housekeeper and a cook in service, frequent dinner parties, obligatory summer moves to the country, admission to a gymnasium and ballet school - everything in Gethel’s life developed like that of an ordinary girl from a bourgeois environment. The father, a veterinarian, brilliantly educated, tried with all his might to pass on his knowledge to his only daughter, and dreamed of a career as a ballerina for her. In addition, she was born in the Silver Age of Russian poetry - an era of fashion for writing and the search for new poetic forms, and the passion for creativity did not escape the future Agnia Barto.
At the age of 18, she married the young poet Pavel Barto, with whom they wrote together and dreamed of poetic fame. In 1925, plucking up courage, Barto brought her poems to Gosizdat, and was very disappointed when she was sent to the children's literature department. Children's poetry was considered “pampering”; real geniuses worked in the field of lyrics. A chance meeting with V. Mayakovsky became fateful; it was he who convinced Agnia of the need for poetry for children, as an important element of pedagogical education. This is probably why Barto’s early poems, written together with her first husband, are more like “teasers”:
What kind of howl? What kind of roar?
Isn't there a herd of cows there?
No, it's not a cow there,
This is Ganya the Revushka.
Family life did not work out, but Barto had already “got a taste”, her own poems were a success and she enjoyed creating for the children. Observant, she accurately noticed the images created by children, listened to the conversations of children on the street, communicated with them in schools and orphanages.
Barto’s second marriage to a prominent scientist and thermal power engineer turned out to be extremely happy, and Agnia plunged headlong into her work. She was criticized a lot, the “pillars” of children’s poetry S. Marshak and K. Chukovsky often scolded her for changing the size of the stanza and using assonant rhymes, but Barto persistently searched for her own style, light and memorable. The undoubted highlight of her work is the ability to reproduce children's speech, with its short sentences and precise images. Her poems are simple for children to understand, and humor and irony give children the opportunity to look at themselves from the outside and notice their shortcomings with a smile.
On May 4, 1945, when the whole country froze in joyful anticipation of victory, a misfortune happened in Barto’s life - the life of her 18-year-old son was absurdly cut short. This tragedy turned her life upside down. But work saved her, pulling her out of the abyss of terrible grief. Barto traveled a lot not only around the country, but also abroad. Knowing several foreign languages, she freely communicated with children from other countries and took on translations of foreign children's poets.
Agnia Barto became the organizer of the country’s first people-search program, the prototype of the “Wait for Me” program. Lost children often remembered only small details of their childhood, and wrote about them to Barto, and she read them out on the radio, choosing the most significant ones - the name of the father, the name of the dog, details of home life. Soon the program became so popular that many people went to Moscow directly to Lavrushinsky Lane, where the poetess lived, and Barto received and listened to everyone, including her household members in this activity. Subsequently, Barto devoted almost 10 years to this, managed to unite more than 927 families and wrote a touching book about the fate of lost children.
She died in 1981 and was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. There is no elaborate epitaph on her grave, it simply says:
Agniya Barto
Writer.
Veterinarian Lev Nikolaevich Volov, enrolling his daughter Agnia in the Moscow choreographic school, probably dreamed of her brilliant artistic career. The school was successfully completed, but Agnia never became a ballerina. By that time she was fascinated by literature.
In 1925, as a nineteen-year-old girl, she first crossed the threshold of the State Publishing House. The editor, having briefly scanned her poems, sent Agnia to the children's literature department. So, one might say, a new children's poet appeared.
Agnia Barto (this is the name of her first husband, Pavel Barto) was immediately noticed. Her books, starting with the very first (Chinese Little Wang Li, 1925), have always found their readers and quite benevolent critics. 
Once upon a time, some of them (critics) even called on S.Ya. Marshak, already a well-known poet at that time, to study with a young aspiring writer. Time passed and everything was put in its place, and Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak and Agnia Lvovna Barto worked together for many years on the creation of Soviet children's literature.
Temperamental, impetuous, bright Agnia Barto was always on time and everywhere. She wrote poetry, plays, and film scripts. She translated. She met with readers in schools, kindergartens, boarding schools, and libraries. She has spoken at a variety of writers' and non-writers' conferences and conventions. She traveled all over Europe (among these trips, the almost legendary one was to the burning Spain of 1937)… 
The popularity of Agnia Barto grew rapidly. And not only here. One example of her international fame is particularly impressive. In Hitler’s Germany, when the Nazis staged terrible auto-da-fe, burning books by unwanted authors, Agnia Barto’s thin book “Brothers” burned on one of these bonfires, along with the volumes of Heine and Schiller.
“Brothers”, like many other poems (to name just a few - 
“Along the path, along the boulevard”, “Redskins”, “Your holiday”) - a vivid example "cordial citizenship", for which Agnia Lvovna so advocated in her time. However, it was not only such works that determined her work.
The poet's talent manifested itself most clearly in his funny poems. Barto understood perfectly well that laughter is the shortest path to a person’s heart, especially a little one. And she never missed an opportunity to take advantage of it. The cheerful simplicity and freshness of her poems makes even the most serious and gloomy readers forget their seriousness at least for a while.
And how can one not smile when reading the confession of the great sufferer, who is ready to endure any torment in order to buy a bullfinch:
...Or listening to Lida, about whom this insufferable Vovka is spreading rumors that she is a chatterbox. But when should she chat?
...Or meeting the adamant Lyoshenka, whom no one can persuade to do a favor: finally learn the multiplication table.
It’s funny - and you laugh, often without noticing that you’re laughing at yourself. This is the property of the prickly lines of Agnia Barto, who, even making fun of her heroes, loves and understands them. In the same way, she always loved and understood her readers. And they reciprocated. You will rarely meet a person among us who, from the cradle, does not remember and love such simple and such familiar lines:
Irina Kazyulkina
WORKS OF A.L.BARTO
COLLECTED WORKS: In 3 volumes - M.: Det. lit., 1994. - (B-ka world lit. for children).
This collection of works is addressed to young readers and includes the works of Agnia Barto, which she wrote specifically for them: poems, poems, songs, comedies.
COLLECTED WORKS: In 4 volumes - M.: Khudozh. lit., 1981-1984.
And this collection of essays is more interesting for adults. Here, along with children's poems, the dramaturgy of A. Barto and her prose are presented. The first volume consisted of “Diaries of a Writer” and the book “Find a Person”.
- Poems for the little ones -
GRANDMOTHER HAD FORTY GRANDCHILDREN / Artist. V. Chizhikov. - M.: Bustard, 2002. - 77 p.: ill. - (Drawing by Viktor Chizhikov).
VOVKA IS A KIND SOUL / Artist. V. Chizhikov. - M.: AST: Astrel, 2005. - 41 p.: ill.
ROAR GIRL: Poems / A. Barto, P. Barto; Artist A. Kanevsky. - M.: Det. lit., 1990. - 17 p.: ill.
TOYS: Poems / Art. B. Trzhemetsky. - M.: ONIX: Center for Universal Human Values, 2006. - 61 p.: ill. - (B-ka children's classics).
One of the latest publications of “Toys”, which attracted us solely by the name of the publishing house - “Center for Universal Human Values”. 
Without further ado, it gives an idea of the true meaning of these poetic miniatures.
Tiny poems for tiny readers were published a lot and often in our country. To find out which editions of Toys you should pay special attention to, take a look.
THE IGNORANT BEAR: Poems / Artist. V. Suteev. - M.: Rosman-Liga, 1996. - 8 p.: ill. - (Funny stories in pictures).
I'M GROWING / Artist. V. Galdyaev. - M.: House, 1998. - 104 p.: ill.
- For older guys -
FOR CHILDREN: Poems / Art. Yu. Molokanov. - M.: Planet of Childhood: Malysh, 1998. - 240 pp.: ill.
SELECTED POEMS / Preface. S. Mikhalkova; Artist Yu. Molokanov. - M.: Planet of Childhood: Premiere, 1999. - 558 pp.: ill. - (World Children's Library).
POEMS FOR CHILDREN / Intro. Art. V. Smirnova; Comment. E. Taratuty; Artist M. Miturich. - M.: Det. lit., 1997. - 560 pp.: ill. - (B-ka world lit. for children).
These three collections are structured in the same way. In them, Agnia Barto’s poems are arranged in cycles: “Vovka is a kind soul,” “Everyone is learning,” “Zvenigorod,” “I am growing,” etc.
LIFE WITH A BOUQUET: Poems / Fig. A. Kanevsky. - M.: Det. lit., 1984. - 95 p.: ill.
Funny poems about schoolchildren.
TRANSLATIONS FROM CHILDREN / Fig. children. - M.: Det. lit., 1985. - 95 p.: ill. - (School library).
From Bulgaria, Iceland, Japan, Greece, in a word, from everywhere A. Barto visited, she brought children's poems. This is how this book was born. Of course, Barto did not know all the languages in which they created "little poets"(that’s what she called the little authors), but she perfectly understood their common language - "language of childhood". And that’s why she became their translator.
YOUR POEMS / Fig. V. Goryaeva. - M.: Det. lit., 1983. - 383 pp.: ill.
“May “Your Poems” accompany you as a child, during your school years, and on the threshold of adolescence. Let them grow with you..."- this is what Agnia Barto wrote when opening this book, which will truly be of interest to anyone, regardless of age. Although the collection was published more than twenty years ago, it was “made” so well and with such love by the artist V. Goryaev that it would be a shame not to mention it.
- Prose -
NOTES OF A CHILDREN'S POET. - M.: Omega, 2006. - 400 p.
The life of a rare person is as rich and varied as that of A. Barto. Therefore, “Notes of a Children's Poet” goes far beyond the scope of children's poetry. The diaries of 1974 served as their outline. And the main content was Agnia Lvovna’s memories of meetings with a variety of people (writers, public figures, casual acquaintances), travel notes (she traveled halfway around the world, including as a member of “IBBY” - the International Council for Children’s Books), reflections on abstract moral and ethical and very specific professional topics.
FIND A PERSON. - M.: Heroes of the Fatherland, 2005. - 298 p.: ill.
In 1964, the call sign of the “Find a Person” program was broadcast for the first time on the Mayak radio station. Its presenter, Agnia Barto, helped relatives separated by the war find each other. Those who wrote letters to Agnia Lvovna for delivery (and up to two hundred such letters arrived daily) could not make official requests to either the police or the Red Cross, because most often they did not know their real names or places of birth. All they had were fragments of childhood memories. It would seem, how could they help in the search? However, it was precisely by these insignificant signs of childhood that relatives began to find each other. Over the nine years of its existence on the radio, the program helped reunite 927 families. She called the book that Barto wrote based on the materials of these nine-year searches - “Find a Person.”
Irina Kazyulkina
LITERATURE ABOUT THE LIFE AND WORK OF A.L. BARTO
Barto A. A little about myself // Barto A. Collection. Op.: In 4 vols. - M.: Khudozh. lit, 1984. - T. 4. - P. 396-410.
This short autobiography of Agnia Lvovna Barto can be found in other publications. For example:
Listen out loud to yourself. - M.: Det. lit., 1975. - pp. 22-33.
Laureates of Russia. - M.: Sovremennik, 1976. - P. 28-42.
Soviet writers: Autobiographies: T. 4. - M.: Khudozh. lit., 1972. - pp. 37-45.
Baruzdin S. About Agnia Barto // Baruzdin S. Notes on children's literature. - M.: Det. lit., 1975. - pp. 128-135.
Begak B. From smile to sarcasm // Begak B. Complex simplicity. - M.: Det. lit., 1980. - pp. 133-142.
The life and work of Agnia Barto: Sat. - M.: Det. lit., 1989. - 336 pp.: ill.
Mikhalkov S. Good calling // Mikhalkov S. My profession. - M.: Sov. Russia, 1974. - pp. 208-211.
Motyashov I. A. L. Barto // Det. encyclopedia: In 12 volumes: T. 11. - M.: Pedagogika, 1976. - P. 279-280.
Motyashov I. Those who came from the year two thousand // Motyashov I. Favorites. - M.: Det. lit., 1988. - pp. 187-216.
Razumnevich V. Smile for happiness: About the books of Agnia Barto // Razumnevich V. All children are the same age. - M.: Det. lit., 1980. - pp. 85-117.
Sivokon S. Heartfelt citizenship // Sivokon S. Lessons of children's classics. - M.: Det. lit., 1990. - pp. 240-257.
Smirnova V. Agnia Barto and her poems for children // Smirnova V. About children and for children. - M.: Det. lit., 1967. - pp. 376-397.
Smirnova V. About the work of Agnia Barto // Barto A. Poems for children. - M.: Det. lit., 1981. - pp. 6-14.
Solovyov B., Motyashov I. Agnia Barto: Essay on creativity. - M.: Det. lit., 1979. - 318 pp.: ill.
Taratuta E. Friend of my harsh days // Taratuta E. Precious autographs. - M.: Sov. writer, 1986. - pp. 136-165.
Shklovsky V. About the game, dreams and poetry // Shklovsky V. Old and new. - M.: Det. lit., 1966. - pp. 90-95.
I.K.
SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF A.L. BARTO’S WORKS
- ART FILMS -
Alyosha Ptitsyn develops character: Film comedy. Scene A.Barto. Dir. A.Granik. Comp. O. Karavaychuk. USSR, 1953. Cast: Vitya Kargopoltsev, O. Pyzhova, V. Sperantova, Natasha Polinkovskaya and others.
10,000 boys. Scene A.Barto. Dir. B. Buneev, I. Okada. USSR, 1961.
I'm looking for a person. Scene A.Barto. Dir. M. Bogin. Comp. E. Krylatov. USSR, 1973. Cast: O. Zhakov, N. Gundareva, L. Akhedzhakova and others.
Foundling: Film Comedy. Scene A. Barto, R. Zelenoy. Dir. T. Lukashevich. Comp. N. Kryukov. USSR, 1940. Cast: Veronika Lebedeva, F. Ranevskaya, P. Repnin, O. Zhizneva, R. Zelenaya, R. Plyatt and others.
Elephant and rope. Scene A.Barto. Dir. I. Fraz. Comp. L. Schwartz. USSR, 1945. Cast: Natasha Zashchipina, F. Ranevskaya, R. Plyatt and others.
Black kitten (from the film almanac “From Seven to Twelve”). Scene A.Barto. Dir. Kh. Bakaev, E. Stashevskaya, Y. Fridman. Comp. G. Firtich. USSR, 1965. Starring: Z. Fedorova, O. Dahl and others.
- CARTOONS -
Magic shovel. Dir. N. Lerner. USSR, 1984.
Two illustrations. Dir. E. Tuganov. USSR, 1962.
One of the two plots of this cartoon is “The Roaring Girl”.
Tamara and I. Dir. D. Vdovichenko, V. Ozhegin. Russia, 2003.
Bullfinch. Dir. I. Kovalevskaya. USSR, 1983.
I.K.
Barto A.L. Toys
The very first children's toys are rattles. The collection of Agnia Lvovna Barto is a rattle, only in poetry. If ordinary toys teach children to distinguish the shape and color of objects, then the “tiny” poems of A. Barto allow them to take their first steps in the world of feelings, images and words.
Lyrical Miniatures for Children, first published in 1936, has sold millions of picture books over the years and decades. The nostalgia of grandparents will be “fed” by the drawings of K. Kuznetsov. Moms and dads will probably remember their beloved V. Chizhikov. And the children?.. What will they prefer?
Barto A.L. Toys: Poems / Art. B. Trzhemetsky. - M.: ONIX, 2007. - 47 p.: ill. - (Baby’s book).
Barto A.L. Toys / Fig. E. Bulatova and O. Vasiliev. - M.: Planet of Childhood: Malysh, 1999. - 8 p.: ill.
Barto A.L. Toys / Art. G. Makaveeva. - M.: Eurasian region, 1996. - 8 p.: ill. - (My favorite book).
Barto A.L. Toys / Art. E. Monin. - M.: Det. lit., 1996. - 14 p.: ill. - (For little ones).
Barto A.L. Toys: Book-toy / Art. Yu. Molokanov. - M.: Malysh, 1992. - 16 p.: ill.
Barto A.L. Toys / Fig. K. Kuznetsova. - M.: Det. lit., 1980. -16 p.: ill.
Barto A.L. A bull walks and sways: Panoramic book / Ill. E. Vasilyeva. - M.: ROSMEN, 2000. - 11 p.: ill.
Barto A.L. A bull walks and sways / Fig. V. Chizhikova. - M.: Samovar: Polygraphresources, 1996. - 79 p.: ill. - (Visiting Viktor Chizhikov).
Barto A.L. Poems for the little ones / Fig. V. Chizhikova. - M.: Astrel: AST, 2007. - 80 p.: ill. - (Planet of Childhood).
Barto A.L. I'm growing: Poems / Fig. A. Eliseeva. - M.: Bustard-plus, 2006. - 64 p.: ill.
Irina Kazyulkina
AGNIYA BARTO: “FINDING A PERSON”
In 1947, Agnia Barto wrote the poem “Zvenigorod” - cheerful verses about a post-war orphanage that gathered "thirty brothers and sisters", "thirty young citizens". One of the adult readers complained that the lines about three-year-old Lelka, who cannot remember, are unfair. He was also three years old. He remembers being lost in a train station during a bombing. Then a letter came from a woman: she expressed the hope that her daughter, lost in the war, grew up among good people, like the children from Zvenigorod. Agnia Lvovna went on the wanted list, and - fortunately - the woman's daughter, already eighteen years old, was found. Press reports appeared: poetry united the family! "Poetry plus police", - said Agnia Lvovna.
One after another, she began to receive letters from those who were difficult, almost impossible to help. And it was impossible to refuse help. Many people who ended up in orphanages very young, confused and frightened, did not know their real name, age, place of birth, and the parents did not know what name and surname their children lived with, if they were alive. The official search was powerless here.
This is how the most correct idea arose - to make a radio broadcast. After all, radio was then the most popular means of mass media. Who, if not parents, brothers and sisters, could recognize their adult sons and daughters, sisters and brothers from their childhood memories?
They remembered the war and the very short life before it.
“We had a large carpet hanging over our bed with scary faces woven on it, and I was very afraid of them.”.
“My mother and I went into the forest through the raspberries and met a bear, and when I ran away, I lost my new shoe.”.
“My father worked as a mason. When he kissed me, he pricked me with his mustache. There was a guinea pig living in our house. One night her father caught her with a net.".
“Father came to say goodbye, I hid under the table, but they took me out of there. My father was dressed in a blue tunic with airplanes... he brought me a huge bag of apples (red, large)... We were driving a truck, I was tightly holding a toy, a cow, in my hands.”.
For nine years, from 1965 to 1974, Agnia Barto hosted the program “Find a Person” on Mayak. The broadcast took place monthly. In twenty-five minutes, Agnia Lvovna talked about thirteen to fifteen destinies. In addition, a Bulletin for tracing relatives was published based on incomplete accurate data. Every day the Radio Committee received one and a half hundred letters. Agnia Lvovna and her assistants, employees and volunteers, read them and put them in folders and large envelopes: "Next in line", "Very few memories", "No data"…
We will not know which stories and for what reasons were not aired. But we can read those selected for the book “Find a Person,” written based on the materials of the program and first published in 1968 in the magazine “Znamya.”
From a letter from Vita Polishchuk: “...I lost my own father, mother, younger sister and brother. According to my passport, I am listed as born in 1939, this is what the doctors at the orphanage determined. But I still don’t know exactly how old I am and where I was born and lived. But I know well that my real name is Bela..."
Nelly Unknown: “...Night, the rumble of airplanes... I remember a woman, she has a baby on one arm, a heavy bag with things in the other... We are running somewhere, making our way through the crowd, I am holding on to her skirt, and two boys are running next to me, one one of them, it seems, is called Roman".
Leonid Ivanov: “...I remember how I found myself in an orphanage in Pskov, how an air raid alert started, and some building exploded next to the orphanage, and we were taken to a bomb shelter... Afterwards we were brought to the village of Dolmatovo, where I was raised and studied. Here they gave me the last name Leonid Aleksandrovich Ivanov. I kindly ask you to establish my surname and that of my parents...”
This man never learned anything about his family. And Nellie the Unknown turned out to be Mary Fershter from Feodosia; the parents confidently recognized their daughter based on her memories and a miraculously preserved childhood photograph. Vita (Bela) Polishchuk found her sister Alla. 
Sometimes the search lasted for years. Sometimes relatives were only a few days away. There were mistakes and doubts. Some people received hope and soon lost it. Others met relatives, but found it difficult to get along with them. Still others (there are, of course, more of them in the book) found a family, a name, a small homeland - for this it was worth working for, delving into the grief of others and pushing poetry aside.
Tamara: “It turned out that I have a lot of relatives, I even have great-grandparents. I have already visited two of my sisters, but I have not yet visited my uncle and my aunt...”
Taisiya Afanasyevna: “Everything suggests that Oktyabrina and Galina Tsarkov are my daughters, whom I have been looking for for so many years.”.
Even this happened. Pyotr Pavlovich Rodionov: “Thanks to your thoughts, after so many years I was able to find my father, three brothers, two sisters and other people close to me - about 50 people.”.
“Find a Person” is a book by a Soviet writer who is indicative and, probably, sincerely advocating "new morality", outraged by the thirst for profit in bourgeois society and the policies of capitalist countries. This book is hardly interesting from a literary point of view: strictly speaking, there is no thoughtful organization of the material, no authorial freedom, no verbal art here. And it is not necessary. During the existence of the radio program, 927 families separated during the Great Patriotic War were united. The book is evidence of many years of searches and experiences, a collection of authentic (selected, abridged, but genuine) letters about children lost in the war, about the post-war ordeals of children and parents.
In 1974, Agnia Barto noted: “I never imagined that the program would live for so long, because it began twenty years after the Victory. I thought: a year or two - and the memories will subside. They began to fade, but not after a year or two, but only in the ninth year of searching.”.
Sixty-five years have passed since the Victory. People still tell their stories, similar to those described in the book “Find a Man,” to each other in our country and in other countries that participated in that war. Even if they no longer remember which hand their sister or brother had a mole on, or whether there was a scar on their knee, they still hope, at least a little, to finally find out something about their blood relatives.
Barto A. L. Find a person. - Moscow: Soviet writer, 1969. - 296 p.
Barto A. L. Find a person // Barto A. L. Collected works: in 4 volumes - Moscow: Fiction, 1981-1984. - T. 1. - P. 23-242.
Barto A. L. Find a person. - Moscow: Heroes of the Fatherland, 2005. - 298 p.
In 1973, director Mikhail Bogin, based on the script by Agnia Barto, shot the feature film “Looking for a Man.”
In A. Barto’s book “Notes of a Children’s Poet” (1979), the chapter “Afterword to nine years of life” is devoted to the program and the book “Find a Person.” Here Agniya Lvovna, in particular, says that she had to delay the layout of the first edition, because one of the searches, described as unsuccessful, unexpectedly ended with the joy of a meeting.
Daughter of Agnia Barto Tatiana SHCHEGLYAEVA:“In Spain, during the bombing, my mother ran to buy castanets. Alexey Tolstoy asked: did she also buy a fan to fan herself during the raid?”
February 17 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famous children's poetess In Soviet times, Barto's books were published in millions of copies, and the wise Rasul Gamzatov once noted with oriental pathos: “The circulation of her books is greater than the population of some continents.”Today, the main custodian of Agnia Barto’s legacy is her daughter Tatyana Andreevna Shcheglyaeva, engineer, candidate of technical sciences, now retired. “In fact, my mother’s 100th anniversary will only be in 2007,” Tatyana Andreevna surprises us with an unexpected confession. “Although in all encyclopedias Barto’s date of birth is indicated as 1906. The fact is that when my mother was 17 years old, in order to receive rations for employees (herring heads), she got a job in a clothing store. But they were accepted into the service only from the age of 18, and she had to add a year to herself "...
We are talking with Tatyana Andreevna in Barto’s office, at the table where the famous poetess once wrote poetry. On the wall is a large portrait of Agnia Lvovna with her son Garik. Nearby there is a cabinet full of her books, published in Soviet times and completely new. The interlocutor takes everything that concerns Barto very seriously: when talking about her mother, she from time to time consults a volume of memoirs and “Notes of a Children's Poet,” one of Agnia Lvovna’s two prose books.
YANINA YOLK
“WHEN MOTHER READ HER POEM “FUNERAL MARCH,” LUNACHARSKY HAD DIFFICULTY CONTAINING LAUGHTER”
- Tatyana Andreevna, were there writers or poets in your family?
No, but there were many doctors, engineers, lawyers... My grandfather - my mother's father Lev Nikolaevich Volov - was a veterinarian. My mother’s uncle owned the Slovati sanatorium in Yalta. He was considered a luminary of medicine and was an outstanding laryngologist. So after the revolution, the new government even allowed him to work in this sanatorium, about which his mother wrote poetic lines in childhood: “In the Slovati sanatorium there are white beds.”
My mother started writing poetry as a child. The main listener and critic of the poems was her father. He wanted her to write “correctly,” strictly observing a certain meter of the poem, and in her lines, as if on purpose, the meter kept changing every now and then (which her father considered stubbornness on her part). Then it turns out that changing meter is one of the distinctive features of Barto's poetry. True, later her poems were criticized for this very reason.
I have the minutes of the meeting at which "Toys" was discussed. Those were the times when even children's poems were accepted at the general meeting! It says: "...The rhymes need to be changed, they are difficult for a children's poem." Particularly appreciated were the famous lines:
They dropped Mishka on the floor,- When did Agnia Barto become a poetess from a home writer of poetry?
They tore off Mishka's paw.
I still won't leave him -
Because he's good.
Her entry into great literature began with a curiosity: at a graduation party at a choreographic school (her mother was going to become a ballerina), she, to the accompaniment of a pianist, read her poem “Funeral March,” while taking tragic poses. And Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education, was sitting in the hall and could hardly restrain himself from laughing. A couple of days later, he invited my mother to his place and advised her to seriously study literature for children. Her first book was published in 1925: on the cover it says “Agniya Barto. Chinese Wang-Li.”
- But Agnia Lvovna’s maiden name was Volova. Is "Barto" a pseudonym?
This is the surname of my mother’s first husband, Pavel Barto. My mother got married very early, at the age of 18, immediately after the death of her father. Pavel Nikolaevich Barto was a writer; Together with their mother, they wrote three poems: “The Roaring Girl,” “The Dirty Girl,” and “The Counting Table.” But it was a very short-term marriage: as soon as my brother Garik was born, my mother and Pavel Nikolaevich separated... With my father, Andrei Vladimirovich Shcheglyaev, a scientist, specialist in the field of thermal power engineering (one of the most authoritative Soviet experts on steam and gas turbines. - Note auto) his mother lived together until the last days of his life. They loved each other, it was a very happy marriage.
For most of her life, Agnia Barto lived in a writer’s house on Lavrushinsky Lane, in the apartment where we are talking now. What was your home routine like?
By the time we moved into this apartment, our family had the following composition: father, mother, grandmother Natalya Gavrilovna (father’s mother), and my brother Garik and I. A nanny, Domna Ivanovna, was also hired for my brother and me: she came from the village to Moscow to work, lived with my mother, and with her moved to a new family, where I was later born. Domna Ivanovna lived with us all her life, she was a member of our family (she didn’t have her own) and died here in the next room...
My grandmother Natalya Gavrilovna Shcheglyaeva taught me to write, read and count. She was very educated, taught French at the gymnasium. So I went to school straight into the second grade. But this happened already during the evacuation in Sverdlovsk.
"AFTER SON'S DEATH, MOM BEGAN TO TRAVEL TO CHILDREN'S HOMES"
- During the war, did Agnia Barto continue to write children's poems?
Yes, and I read them on the radio, in hospitals, schools... Together with other writers' families, we had to be evacuated. But my mother could not even imagine that she would remain in a quiet haven; she wanted to break through to the front, and if that didn’t work out, stay in Moscow and work on the radio. But my father was sent to a power plant in the Urals, and he moved the whole family to Sverdlovsk. From there, my mother often traveled to Moscow to record performances on the All-Union Radio. I always stayed in our Moscow apartment. I was here when a bomb fell on the nearby art school building.
During the war, getting from one city to another was difficult. Trains were traveling along the railway, but no one knew for sure about their final destination. Once my mother was returning from Moscow. A soldier entered the carriage and shouted: “Where is the writer?!” Mom responded and found out that the train was changing direction. “The train will slow down at the turn, so jump,” said the soldier. Mom brought boots to Sverdlovsk for dad and - instead of a suitcase - a hat box brought from Paris. What to do?! We must jump. Mom put on her felt boots, jumped, rolled down the embankment, and the Red Army soldier threw her hat box after her.
Mom was always eager to join the active army. And, in the end, she achieved her goal: she was sent on a business trip for a month. At the front, my mother wrote leaflets and read children's poems to the soldiers. She later recalled that the soldiers cried while listening to the poems, because they reminded them of their children.
The war did not pass us by. During the Victory Day, a misfortune happened - my brother Garik died. It was an accident. Garik was riding a bicycle here, in Lavrushinsky Lane in Moscow. He was hit by a car driven by a woman.
Garik was a kind, sociable and very talented boy: he composed music and studied in a composition class in Sverdlovsk. My brother always accepted me to play his boyish games, although we had a significant age difference - eight years. After the war, Garik entered the Aviation Institute in Moscow. When the tragedy happened, he had just turned 18... Mom was never able to get over the grief...
Do you think the death of her son affected the enthusiasm with which Agnia Barto searched for children lost during the war?
For some time after Garik’s death, my mother withdrew and withdrew into herself. And then I began to travel very actively to orphanages. And in 1947, she wrote the poem “Zvenigorod”: it talked about children left without parents during the war and raised in orphanages. A few years later, a wonderful story happened: “Zvenigorod” fell into the hands of a woman who was looking for her daughter - she was eight years old when she disappeared. And this woman, a cleaning lady from Karaganda, after reading the poems, began to hope that her daughter also grew up in such an orphanage described in the book. She sent her mother a letter, she contacted a special police department that was looking for people, and a few months later the girl, who was already 18 years old, was found!
The Ogonyok magazine and many newspapers told how the family was reunited. And people began to write to my mother in the hope that she could help. Parents were looking for children, children of parents, sisters of brothers. During the war, many children were lost when they were very young; they could not say their first and last names; they were given new names. But the mother, knowing the ability of children to remember the most acute moments of life, decided to base her search on them. This is how the “Find a Person” program was born, which aired for nine years on Mayak radio.
During these nine years, 70-100 letters came to our home every day! Sometimes they had the following address: “Moscow, writer Barto.” In the corridor there was a mountain of suitcases with letters, one on top of the other. Mom read them from morning until late at night. If there was enough data for the organizations doing the searching, she forwarded the letters to them. And she herself took on hopeless cases! She was always looking for “guiding threads” - episodes that both the child and his family could remember. For example, a child was pecked hard by a pigeon in childhood, or a brother pulled out his sister’s tooth by tying it with a thread - the tooth was pulled out, and the boy fell. These stories are bright, very individual, they cannot be forgotten!..
The meetings took place here. Sometimes people came straight to us and told us their stories. Mom listened to them all: she could not refuse. But she never cried. Mom cried very rarely in general... She didn’t cry - she searched.
During the entire time she worked in the program, from 1964 to 1973, my mother managed to connect more than a thousand families. The exact number she mentions in her book Finding the Person is 927 families. For many years, there was a mountain of suitcases with letters in our hallway. Only recently did I transfer them to the archives.
"SERGEY MIKHALKOV COULD CALL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT: "I WROTE NEW POEMS! I WILL READ IT NOW!”
- How did Agnia Lvovna, an adult, manage to write such children's poems? What was her secret?
Mom spent her entire life learning from children and watching them. She often sat down near the playground, watched the children play, and listened to what they were saying. So, “The house has moved,” she wrote after hearing the words of a little girl who watched the house being moved near the Stone Bridge.
Sometimes my mother worked undercover: posing as a district employee, she sat at the last desk in the classroom and listened to what the children were talking about. True, one day a first-grader girl declassified her: “Do you work in the district? And before you worked as a writer, I saw you on TV.”
From time to time she was chosen for positions in the Writers' Union, but she did not stay there for long because she was an inconvenient person. If her own position coincided with the directive from above, everything went smoothly. But when her opinion was different, she defended her own point of view. The main thing for her was to write and remain herself. She was a very brave person, for example, when her friend Evgenia Taratuta was repressed, her mother and Lev Abramovich Kassil helped her family.
Agnia Barto was a laureate of the Stalin and Lenin Prizes. Did your family receive privileges for these high awards?
I can say that the modern idea that the state used to give out free cars with drivers and dachas right and left is not entirely correct. Mom and Dad drove a car after the war. On one! At an exhibition of captured German cars, they bought a Mercedes, one of the first models with a canvas top: in comparison with it, the Pobeda looked much more respectable. Then my parents got a Volga.
We had a dacha, but it was not state-owned. We built it ourselves. My dad was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and he was given a plot of land in the academic village. The site was chosen as far away as possible, in the forest, so that nothing would disturb my mother while she was working. But there was a problem: moose were walking around the dacha all the time! And the question arose: is it dangerous or not? Mom read somewhere, it seems, in Science and Life, how to determine whether an elk is dangerous or not. The magazine recommended looking into the eyes of a moose, and if the eyes are red, the moose is dangerous. We laughed and imagined how we would look into the eyes of a moose!
At the dacha we planted lettuce and strawberries. In winter we went skiing. Dad made home movies and often played chess with Rina Zelena’s husband (we were family friends). My mother had no such concept as a “vacation at the dacha.” I remember the celebration of their silver wedding: it was fun, there were a lot of guests... And the next day my mother was already working: it was her need, a condition that saved her from all the hardships of life.
Whenever a new poem was ready, my mother read it to everyone: my brother and I, friends, writers, artists, and even the plumber who came to fix the plumbing. It was important for her to find out what she didn’t like, what needed to be remade, polished. She read her poems over the phone to Lev Kassil and Svetlov. Fadeev, being the secretary of the Writers' Union, at any time, if she called and asked: “Can you listen?”, he answered: “Poems? Come on!”
Also, Sergei Mikhalkov could call his mother in the middle of the night and in response to her sleepy, anxious: “Did something happen?” reply: “It happened: I wrote new poems, now I’ll read them to you!”... Mom was friends with Mikhalkov, but this did not stop them from furiously discussing the fate of children’s literature! By the intensity of passions, we unmistakably determined that mom was talking to Mikhalkov! The tube was really hot!
Mom also talked a lot with Robert Rozhdestvensky. He was a most charming man and very talented. One day he came to us with his wife Alla. They drank tea, then called home, and it turned out that Katya was sick. They jumped up and left immediately. And now Katya is a famous photographer, the same Ekaterina Rozhdestvenskaya.
-Who else was a frequent guest in your house?
There were always a lot of guests, but most came on business, because my mother rarely celebrated even her own birthdays. Rina Zelenaya often visited: together with her mother they wrote scripts for the films “The Elephant and the Rope” and “The Foundling”. Remember this famous phrase of the heroine Ranevskaya: “Mulya, don’t irritate me!”? The film “Foundling” was being filmed just then, and my mother came up with this phrase especially for Ranevskaya.
I remember one day Faina Georgievna came to our dacha. Mom was not there, and we began to wait for her. They spread a blanket on the grass, and suddenly a frog jumped out from somewhere. Faina Georgievna jumped up and never sat down again. And I didn’t wait for the meeting. Mom then asked me who came, was it a young woman or an elderly one? I replied that I don’t know. When my mother told Ranevskaya this story, she exclaimed: “What a lovely child! She doesn’t even know whether I’m young or old!”
- I heard that Agniya Lvovna was a master of practical jokes, right?
Yes, she often played pranks on her literary colleagues. All my mother’s friends - Samuil Marshak, Lev Kassil, Korney Chukovsky, Rina Zelenaya - were experts and connoisseurs of practical jokes. Irakli Andronikov suffered the most: he almost always fell into the net of a practical joke, although he was an insightful and far from naive person. Once he broadcast a TV show from Alexei Tolstoy’s apartment, showing photographs of celebrities. Mom called him, introduced herself as an employee of the literary editorial office and asked: “Here you are showing a photograph of Ulanova in Swan Lake upside down - is this necessary? Or maybe my TV is faulty? Although it’s still beautiful - she’s dancing and ballet tutu... However, I’m calling for a different reason: we have planned a program in which contemporaries of Leo Tolstoy took part, we would like to invite you to participate... “Do you think that I am the same age as Tolstoy? - Andronikov was perplexed. - Do I really look like this on your TV?! Looks like it really needs fixing!" - "Then write it down in your notebook: prank number one!"
"WHEN MENTIONING THE BULLY FIGHT, MOM EXCLAIMED: 'THE TERRIBLE SPECTACLE!'
- Is it true that Agnia Barto was a passionate traveler?
Mom traveled a lot and willingly, but, as a rule, all her trips were business trips. On her very first foreign trip to Spain in 1937, my mother went as part of a delegation of Soviet writers to an international congress. From this trip she brought castanets, because of which she even ended up in history. At that time, a civil war was going on in Spain. And then, at one of the stops at a gas station in Valencia, my mother saw a shop on the corner where, among other things, castanets were sold. Real Spanish castanets mean something to a person who enjoys dancing! Mom danced beautifully all her life. While she was talking to the owner and her daughter in the store, a rumble was heard and planes with crosses appeared in the sky - the bombing could start at any minute! And just imagine: a whole bus with Soviet writers stood and waited for Barto, who was buying castanets during the bombing!
In the evening of the same day, Alexey Tolstoy, speaking about the heat in Spain, casually asked his mother if she had bought a fan to fan herself during the next raid?
And in Valencia, for the first time in her life, my mother decided to watch a real Spanish bullfight with her own eyes. With difficulty I got a ticket to the upper stand, in the very sun. The bullfight, according to her story, was an unbearable spectacle: the heat, the sun and the sight of blood made her feel sick. Two men sitting nearby, Spaniards, as she mistakenly believed, said in pure Russian: “This foreigner feels ill!” Barely moving her tongue, mom muttered: “No, I’m from the village...”. The “Spaniards” turned out to be Soviet pilots, they helped my mother down from the stands and escorted her to the hotel. Since then, whenever bullfighting was mentioned, my mother invariably exclaimed: “It’s a terrible sight! It would be better if I didn’t go there.”
- Judging by your stories, she was a desperate person!
This despair and courage was combined in her with an amazing natural shyness. She never forgave herself for once not daring to speak to Mayakovsky, who was the idol of her youth...
You know, whenever my mother was asked about a “turning point in life,” she liked to repeat that in her case there was a “turning point” when she found a forgotten book of Mayakovsky’s poems. Mom (she was a teenager then) read them in one gulp, all in a row, and was so inspired by what she read that she immediately wrote her poem “To Vladimir Mayakovsky” on the back of one page:
... I hit you with my forehead,My mother first saw Mayakovsky at the dacha in Pushkino, from where she went to Akulova Gora to play tennis. And then one day during the game, having already raised her hand with the ball to serve, she froze with her racket raised: Mayakovsky was standing behind the long fence of the nearest dacha. She immediately recognized him from the photograph. It turned out that he lives here. This was the same dacha of Rumyantsev where he wrote the poem “An extraordinary adventure that happened to Vladimir Mayakovsky in the summer at the dacha.”
Century,
For what you gave
Vladimir.
Mom often went to the tennis court on Akulova Gora and more than once saw Mayakovsky there, walking along the fence and immersed in his thoughts. She desperately wanted to approach him, but she never dared. She even thought of what she would say to him when they met: “You, Vladimir Vladimirovich, don’t need any crow’s horses, you have “the wings of poetry,” but she never uttered this “terrible tirade.”
A few years later, a children's book festival was organized for the first time in Moscow: in Sokolniki, writers were supposed to meet with children. Of the “adult” poets, only Mayakovsky arrived to meet with the children. Mom was lucky enough to ride in the same car with him. Mayakovsky was absorbed in himself and did not speak. And while my mother was thinking about how she could smarterly start a conversation, the trip came to an end. Mom never got over her fear of him and didn’t speak. And she didn’t ask the question that so tormented her then: is it too early for her to try to write poetry for adults?
But my mother was lucky: after speaking to the children in Sokolniki, coming down from the stage, Mayakovsky involuntarily gave the answer to the doubt that tormented her, telling three young poetesses, among whom was my mother: “This is the audience! You have to write for them!”
- Amazing story!
They often happened to mom! I remember she told me how she once returned from her friends’ dacha to Moscow on a commuter train. And at one station Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky entered the carriage! “I wish I could read my lines to him!” - Mom thought. The situation in the carriage seemed unsuitable for her, but the temptation to hear what Chukovsky himself had to say about her poetry was great. And as soon as he settled down on a bench nearby, she asked: “Can I read you a poem? Very short...”. - “Short is good.” And suddenly he said to the whole carriage: “Poetess Barto wants to read her poems to us!” Mom was confused and began to deny: “These are not my poems, but one of a five and a half year old boy...”. The poems were about the Chelyuskinites and Chukovsky liked them so much that he wrote them down in his notebook. A couple of days later, an article by Chukovsky was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, in which he cited these poems by the “boy” and sincerely praised him.
"MOM SOMETIMES DID NOT EVEN REMEMBER WHAT CLASS I WAS IN"
- Tatyana Andreevna, we all know Agnia Barto, the poetess. What kind of mother was she?
I didn’t bake pies - I was always busy. They tried to protect her from the little things of everyday life. But in all large-scale home events, be it a family celebration or the construction of a summer house, my mother took an active part - she was at the helm. And if, God forbid, one of your loved ones got sick, she was always there.
I studied well, and my parents were not called to school. Mom never went to parent-teacher meetings, sometimes she didn’t even remember what class I was in. She believed that it was wrong to advertise at school the fact that I was the daughter of a famous writer.
- How did your mother react to your decision to become an engineer?
I am not a humanist by nature. Non-engineering options were not even discussed in my case. I graduated from the Energy Institute and worked all my life at the Central Research Institute of Integrated Automation: I am a candidate of technical sciences, I was the head of a laboratory, a leading engineer.
I remember when I was in college, a funny story happened. A professor of home economics from Finland came to us to study the families of Soviet people. She was already in the dormitory, she was in a worker’s family, and she wanted to visit the professor’s family. We chose ours as an example.
Mom did a big cleanup: “whistle everyone upstairs,” as they say. Nanny Domna Ivanovna baked very tasty pies, bought caviar and crabs... But during the “interrogation” we began to fall asleep: the questions were difficult. "How much in one season for a young girl (that is, at me.- T. Shch.) is spent on outfits?" And we wore dresses for years! Luckily, just before that, my mother bought me two summer dresses, which we immediately began to show off, with difficulty remembering how much they cost.
The professor was especially impressed by the following: the fact is that I loved the institute very much, I studied enthusiastically, without thinking about dinners at home. I usually said: “I had lunch in the dining room, the food there is excellent.” What did it actually look like? "Diaphragm Soup" Can you imagine? From the film that separates the lungs from other organs! But I was young, and “diaphragm soup” suited me quite well. And when the Finnish woman began to admire our table, my mother said seriously: “And my daughter prefers to eat in the student canteen!” The home economics professor was smitten! She decided that something incredible in terms of gastronomy awaited her there. The next day, the professor volunteered to go to the student canteen, where “the food is so wonderful.” A day later, the director of the canteen was fired...
- It’s curious, did Agnia Lvovna dedicated her poems to someone at home?
She dedicated a poem about ruffs to her eldest grandson, my son Vladimir. “We didn’t notice the beetle” - to my daughter Natasha. I’m not sure that the cycle of poems “Vovka the Good Soul” is also a dedication to Vladimir, although this name appears very often in her poems of that time. Mom often read poetry to Volodya and showed him artists’ drawings for her books. They even had serious literary conversations. She also taught Volodya to dance. He danced very well, felt the rhythm, but did not go to the choreographic school: he became a mathematician and found himself in school, becoming a mathematics teacher.
She saw her great-granddaughter Asya only once: the baby was born in January 1981, and on April 1, 1981, her mother passed away... She was very energetic until the end of her life, went on business trips, even in old age played tennis and danced. I remember her dancing on her 75th birthday... And a month later she was taken to the hospital, as they initially thought, with mild poisoning. It turned out to be a heart attack. On the last day of March, my mother seemed to feel better, she asked to be transferred to a room with a telephone: they say, there is so much to do and worries! But the next morning her heart stopped...
Agnia Barto, her biography, life and work still arouse sincere interest among readers, regardless of age, education and character.
It would be fair to say that Barto had an absolutely “light” pen.
It was this lightness “in the architecture” of the children’s poems she wrote that contributed to their understanding, clear content and easy memorization.
Children of preschool age, not yet able to write and read independently, playfully memorize the simple rhyming poems of the great poetess. Entire generations of our grandparents, mothers and fathers grew up reading the poems of Agnia Barto at children's matinees.
Agnia Barto - biography for children
Today, our modern children, despite their awareness and total “digitization” with various smart gadgets, just like their grandmothers and mothers once did, worry every day: about a bear whose paw was torn off; they sympathize with the girl Tanya, who dropped the ball into the water.
This means that the lines of poetry written by Barto directly touch the open heart of a child and make him experience a sincere child’s soul.
When and where was Agnia Barto born?
Agree that having fallen in love with the work of the poetess, it is especially interesting to learn and feel the atmosphere in which she was born and lived. After all, as you know, any creativity has its roots in childhood.
Agnia is a native Muscovite. She was born in 1906 into a strong Jewish family.
As a girl, her last name was Volova. The father of the future poetess, Lev Nikolaevich Volov, was a worthy and educated man.
While working as a veterinarian, in his spare time he liked to write poetry and fairy tales. The girl was always proud of her father and patronymic.
Mom, Maria Ilyinichna, having gotten married, devoted her life to her family and daughter. She was a cheerful and kind person.
Childhood and youth of Agnia Lvovna Barto
The childhood and youth of the future poetess were happy and cloudless. Young Agnia, as a high school student, went to classes at a ballet school: her father dreamed of her becoming a ballerina.
Being a purposeful person, after graduating from ballet school, Agnia enters and graduates from a choreographic school.
From 1924 to 1925 she shines on the ballet stage. But, due to her reluctance to emigrate abroad with the entire troupe, she decides to leave the stage.
It is this event - leaving the ballet troupe in 1925 - that can be considered key and considered, to some extent, as the actual creative date of birth. Therefore, this year is the date of birth of a new poet.
The beginning of a creative journey
The beginning is marked by the publication in 1925 of two of her poems, such as: “The Chinese Little Wang Li” and “The Bear is a Thief.”
Korney Chukovsky really liked these poems and was noted by him as bright and talented.
Having received such a blessing from the great children's writer, the aspiring poetess felt inspired and full of creative plans for the future.
The heyday of Barto's literary work
The heyday begins in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century.
While still a high school student, she read the poems of Akhmatova and Mayakovsky. Even then I tried to write timid poems and epigrams.
If we talk briefly about the person who in one way or another influenced the choice of life path of the future poetess, then we cannot ignore Anatoly Lunacharsky. After all, it was he who, having heard the first poems she wrote, noted the author’s talent and strongly advised not to give up creativity.
This fateful meeting happened while still studying at the choreographic school. A passion for Mayakovsky’s civic poetry, and later a personal meeting with him, largely determined the social orientation of Barto’s work.
In short, her children's works teach seemingly simple but very important things: to love the Motherland, take care of the weak, not to betray friends, to be brave and honest.
Famous works of Agnia Barto
The poetess writes a lot, but collections of her poems never gather dust on bookstore shelves: neither then nor now.
Our grandparents probably remember the wonderful children's poems and the most famous works of the poetess. These are poems from the collections: “Brothers”, “Boy on the contrary”, “Toys”, “Bullfinch”.
The poems from the collection “Toys” especially attracted the attention of very young children: about a bunny abandoned by its owner in the rain; about a bull that is about to fall; about Tanya, who cries loudly...
Barto wrote a number of scripts from which well-known and beloved films were made to this day. The list of these films is familiar to many: “The Foundling”, “Alyosha Ptitsyn Develops Character” and “10 Thousand Boys”.
Barto was friends and worked with director Ilya Frez. By the way, the plot of the poem “Rope” was used by Frez during the filming of the film “The Elephant and the Rope.”
At the end of the seventies, a presentation of Barto’s autobiographical book “Notes of a Children’s Poet” took place. Fans and admirers of the poetess’s work will still be interested in reading this book today. It combines diary stories and entries. Everything is compiled in such a way as not to tire the reader or make him bored.
Personal life of the writer
Agnia’s personal life is marriage and the birth of two children. This is the pain of losing my only son.
She happened to be married twice. Both marriages produced children.
The first husband was the young poet Pavel Barto. Young Agnia Volova was young and romantic. Having fallen madly in love with a handsome young man, she saw family life in bright pictures of cloudless happiness.
But, unfortunately, the young spouses were connected only by romance and love of poetry. As a result, the marriage quickly broke up, and Agnia was left with her husband’s last name and a little son in her arms. The boy's name was Garik.
The years of life measured out for a son are only eighteen years. At this young age, he was hit by a truck in Moscow, on Lavrushinsky Lane, not far from his home. Having gone completely into work and being creative, Barto was never able to fully survive this loss.
Her second husband was a promising scientist - thermal power engineer, Andrei Shcheglyaev. He long and very persistently sought the hand of his beloved. They lived in a happy and strong marriage for fifty years, almost without even quarreling.
As a result of the love between the physicist and the lyricist, a daughter was born, who was named Tanya. Perhaps it was she who became the heroine of the famous poem “Our Tanya is crying loudly.”
Barto adored her strong family, her husband and children, and dreamed that everyone would live under one roof, even when the children grew up and started their own families.
When did Agnia Barto die?
At 76 years old, she suddenly became ill with her heart. I had a heart attack. He was the first and the last.
Barto died on April 1, 1981. She found her final refuge at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.
Barto's grave is always buried in flowers from devoted admirers of various nationalities, ages and professions.
Interesting facts from the biography and work of Barto
In the end, I would like to talk a little about interesting facts from her biography and work:
- According to the recollections of the poetess’s friends, she was the main one in her own family. No decision was made without her knowledge and approval. At the same time, the husband and a devoted housekeeper named Domna Ivanovna completely took on all the household chores. Barto was free to travel on creative business trips and write poetry. After the death of her son, she became very worried about her loved ones and always wanted to know if everything was fine with them.
- It is known that at the age of fifteen, the future great children's poetess worked in a children's clothing store, wanting to gain financial independence. To do this, she resorted to a little deception, making herself a year older, since she was hired only from the age of sixteen.
- At the height of the Patriotic War, the poetess received a large state prize, which she immediately donated to the needs of a tank factory.
- Since the mid-sixties, for ten long years, Barto hosted the “Find a Person” program on the radio. This heartbreaking program in terms of intensity of emotions helped in the search and meeting of children and parents, friends and fellow soldiers separated by the war.
- One distant planet in endless space and one huge crater on the planet Venus received her name.
- Her talented pen is responsible for the creation of many bright aphorisms.
- Agnia Barto was the head of the Association of Workers of Literature and Art for Children for many years; was a member of the International Andersen Jury. Her works have been translated into a huge number of languages.
Conclusion
The name of Agnia Barto will be alive for many, many years to come, since the love for her poems is passed on “by inheritance,” from parents to their children. And so - from generation to generation.
Her touching poems: about the bear, about the girl Tanya, about Vovka, about the bull - are not afraid of any modern technology, artificial intelligence and total digitization. The poems of Agnia Lvovna Barto, with their sincerity and sincerity, have long earned the right to eternal love and eternal life.
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