of the separated lovers of ‘Wait For Me’ reunited in reality was too good for the regime to resist as a morale boost for the soldiers. But in fact the two were not married until October 1943, and all the evidence suggests that it was only shortly before then that Valentina agreed to marry Simonov. At the time of their wedding, Simonov was still legally married to Zhenia Laskina (there is no record that he ever divorced her), although he had left her three years previously. The wedding itself was hastily arranged. There were only a few guests, among them Stalin’s daughter Svetlana and his son Vasily, who brought a personal blessing from Stalin. After the ceremony, Simonov left immediately for the Briansk Front. Apart from two brief spells, when Valentina came to visit Simonov, once in 1943 on the Briansk Front, and another, when she toured the front near Leningrad with him, the newly married couple did not see each other until the end of the war. Even when the war was over, Valentina and Simonov led quite separate lives: they had their own apartments, each with a maid, on the same floor of the building on the Leningrad Highway. Valentina began to drink a lot. She was often drunk in the middle of the day. According to the memoirs of her friend, the actress Tatiana Okunevskaia, Valentina was unhappy in the marriage, and drinking was her way of getting through the day (for Simonov, by contrast, it was a way to get her into bed). One may question the reliability of Okunevskaia’s memoirs, which are deeply coloured by her intense hatred of her former husband, Boris Gorbatov, a close friend of Simonov, against whom she also bore a grudge.* It may well be that Valentina had at some point been in love with Simonov – possibly when she looked up to him as a figure of importance in the Soviet cultural world – and that her drinking had a different origin. But there is no doubt that their marriage was a stormy one, a long way from the propaganda image of domestic bliss produced by the Soviet authorities to give the public something happy to believe. There were constant arguments, interrupted by passionate exchanges, not least in Simonov’s love letters and poems to Valentina from the front; but there were no children, until Maria, born in 1950, by which time Valentina had betrayed Simonov in numerous affairs.30
Serova and Simonov on tour, Leningrad Front, 1944
Not everybody was so fond of ‘Wait For Me’. Some people thought that it was sentimental, that the intimate emotions of which it spoke were inappropriate for public consumption.31 Simonov’s own mother, Aleksandra, was one such person, though her reservations had as much to do with her personal dislike of Valentina and her disapproval of her son’s behaviour towards his family as with her natural aristocratic reserve about the display of emotion. She took particular exception to the lines ‘Even though my son and mother / Believe I’m already gone’, which she thought showed a lack of respect for her and for every mother in the Soviet Union. After attending a poetry reading in Moscow where Simonov recited ‘Wait For Me’ to Valentina, seated at the front of a packed hall, Aleksandra wrote to her son from Molotov in December 1944:
Kirunia! We talked today on the telephone, which prompted me to finish my letter… because it contains all the thoughts and worries I’ve had in recent times. You’ve arranged your life in such a way that I can’t talk openly with you. I cannot say what is in my heart, what I feel and think, in snatches of conversation while we’re being driven around by your chauffeur, and yet I feel I must keep trying.
And so, my dear, I have to speak the bitter truth and tell you that I am troubled by your private life. I felt this at the reading, and I felt it painfully for a long time afterwards… I understood a lot that evening…
As I see it, K. Simonov has done something great, he has summoned youth to love, he has spoken about love in a clear voice, which is something new in our literature and poetry, where heroes loved and lived their lives in a strictly regimented way… To do so, he drew on his own intimate feelings, and as the rumours circulated, people became curious. The audience in the hall that night was not made up of thinking people who had come to listen and reflect. They were a mob, which had no qualms about standing up and jostling for a better view of ‘that woman’ – a woman they measured and envied but did not like very much, a woman you undressed in front of them. I don’t think she could have enjoyed the experience… These theatrical performances show your character in a bad light; they do not make amends for your mistakes. It is painful to watch you surround yourself with this grubby crowd of hangers-on, as you have done in recent years; you’ve found neither the strength within yourself nor the understanding of life in general to see them for what they are… You and she, she and you, that is all we’ve heard in the past few years… and it seems to me that in this vulgar show there is only egoism and caprice, but no real love for anyone.32
Only a mother could have written such a letter. No one else could have given Simonov such a stern and bitter reprimand. Aleksandra had strict ideas about ‘decency’ and ‘correct behaviour’ and, being something of a pedagogue, did not hesitate to tell people how they should behave. She disapproved of her son’s marriage to Valentina, a ‘selfish, capricious and moody woman, whose behaviour I simply cannot stand’, as she wrote in a letter to her husband, Aleksandr, in May 1944. She did not like the way her son had ‘crawled’ into the Soviet elite, and, judging from the tone of her letters congratulating him, did not put much store by his receipt of the Stalin Prize and various other honours. She accused him of being selfish, of neglecting her, of failing to appreciate the sacrifices she had made to bring him up. Although Aleksandra had a tendency to dramatize events and, like every mother, wanted more attention from her son, there was a moral basis to her reprimands. In one revealing letter, in which Aleksandra reproached her son for not writing to her for two months (‘and then suddenly a two-line note typed out by your secretary arrives… Cela brusque!’ [
The comfort you enjoy, which you have earned, is the sort of comfort that you once knew only from history books and from the stories of my previous life, which I told you when you were growing up – a time when your well-being was my only joy. I was born in another world. The first twenty-five years of my life [1890–1915] were spent in conditions of luxury, I did not even have to undress myself. Then suddenly, that life was destroyed. But I began to live again – through my hopes for you. I washed and cooked and went to the shops and worked all day, and it was all for your sake. I say frankly: I think I have earned the right to live half as well as the son I raised. I have earned the right to live in a comfortable room, with somewhere I can wash.33
But the main reason for her disapproval lay elsewhere. Aleksandra was concerned for Zhenia and her grandson, Aleksei, a sickly little boy, who suffered periodically from TB. Neglected by Simonov, Aleksei was growing up in the shadow of a famous father whom he rarely saw. ‘Wake up, Kirunia, what is wrong with you?’ Aleksandra wrote to Simonov in 1944:
What has happened to the decency that marked you so clearly as a child? You have kept it in your conduct at the front but lost it in your private life, in your behaviour towards the people who should be the closest to your heart!… In the nursery where Alyosha [Aleksei] spends his days there is a boy whose father, who is just a sailor, picks him up every evening. And he’s just an ordinary boy. Alyosha’s spiritual qualities are fast developing… You could learn to be a better person, a richer person spiritually, by staying close to him… The other day he came back from the nursery and declared that he had the best granny in the world, the best mummy, and then he thought, and said: ‘and the best daddy in the world’. Kirunia, your son still believes in you, in his dear childish heart the belief in a papa still exists, he wants to have a papa, a real papa, and there is still time for you to become one. Believe in yourself, my son, as Alyosha believes in you. Return to yourself, to your true and decent self, believe in yourself, in your work, which for you was always the most valuable aspect of your life, and then believe in us, the people close to you, who love you and believe in you. Concentrate your will – you were always proud of it and now you need it more than ever if you are to become your true self again.34
If Simonov’s relations with his mother deteriorated during the war, his relations with his stepfather, Aleksandr, became closer. ‘It appears that Papa and I have exchanged places in your affections,’ Aleksandra wrote to Simonov in 1944, ‘and that you have become more affectionate to him than you are to me. I understand the reason why – you need him now at a time of war – and I value it.’35 Aleksandr was a military man. He had brought up his stepson to be conscientious and obedient, disciplined and orderly – military values which Simonov had placed at the centre of his own identification with the Stalinist regime during the 1930s. But the young Simonov, acutely aware of having the
