‘EVERY WORD BREATHES THE WARMTH OF HIS HEART...’ LETTERS OF A. TVARDOVSKY FROM THE WAR

Abstract

The article is devoted to the book Letters from the War, 1941-1945 [Pis’ma s voyny. 1941-1945], which comprises 139 letters written by A. Tvardovsky to his wife while he was on the front lines. The letters offer a sequence of insights into the poet’s soul affected by the violence of yet another whirlwind of history. They reveal a lot about the poet’s personality and creative method. These 139 letters are a testimony of a great love as well as creativity in times of war. The paper has a very straightforward plot: the author examines the letters in chronological order, starting with the first one, written in 1941, all the way to the last one, dated 1945. The research cites other resources, including ancient Indian poetry, Homer’s Odyssey, a story by a contemporary journalist about the life of evacuees (famous writers) in the small town of Chistopol, A. Kondratovich’ book Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Three Soldiers by J. Dos Passos, A. Bek’s reminiscences, and V. Akatkin’s article A. T. Tvardovsky’s Finnish Sketches in the Dialogue of Epochs [Finskie zapisi A. T. Tvardovskogo v dialoge vremen]. What sets this paper apart from other studies is the use of personal observations and insights collected by the author during his service in Afghanistan in the 1980s.