The Whisperers

‘Don’t love anybody except me!’

…

Do not worry when you go to war,

I will be true to you,

You will return from victory, my soldier,

And I will hold you firmly in my arms!

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

I shall wait for you, my darling,

I shall wait steadfastly.

I shall wait for the Urals winter,

For the flowers in the spring…

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

I shall wait, you will return, I know.

Let the yellow rains fall,

I shall wait for you, my sweet nightingale,

And believe with all my strength in our happiness…24

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

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

I am obliged to inform you

That the addressee did not receive

The letter which you posted

Without a hint of shame.

Your husband did not get the letter,

He was not wounded by your vulgar words,

He did not wince, or lose his mind,

He did not regret the past.

…

So your former husband has been killed.

All is well. Live with your new one.

The dead cannot hurt you

In a letter with superfluous words.

Live, without fear or guilt,

He cannot write, he won’t reply

He won’t return to your town from the war

And meet you holding another’s hand.27

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

War does not lend itself to odes

And much in it is not suitable for books,

But I believe that the people needs

The spirit of this open diary.

(‘Duty’, 1942)

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

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

As Simonov’s fame and fortune increased, he became more attractive to Valentina. She had always been drawn towards powerful and influential men, who could protect her from the consequences of her spoilt biography. Thanks to Simonov, Valentina was getting leading roles in films and plays. By the spring of 1943, the glamorous, romantic couple were regularly featured in the Soviet press, sometimes appearing together at the front. The image