The Whisperers

This inner conflict surfaced in several of Simonov’s works, especially in his first major play, A Young Man from Our Town (Paren’ iz nashego goroda), which he wrote in the autumn of 1940 on his return from Khalkin Gol. The play tells the story of a brash young Red Army officer, a Komsomol enthusiast called Sergei, who returns to Russia from the Spanish Civil War and volunteers to fight at Khalkin Gol. As a call to arms against Fascism, A Young Man from Our Town at moments seems to invite its audience to feel hostility towards Nazi Germany, but, as Simonov recalled, he could not make these sentiments explicit because of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. When the play was first performed, by the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in March 1941, it was left to the actors to suggest their opposition to the pact by adding more emotion to any lines that had anti-German implications.68

Conflicts of a different, more intimate sort run through the play as well. Its hero was modelled on the poet Mikhail Lukonin (1918–76), a friend of Simonov’s at the Literary Institute who had fought in the war against Finland. Lukonin was only three years younger than Simonov, but he was considered to belong to a different generation of Soviet poets, mainly because he had been born after 1917 and had come from a proletarian family without any trace of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia culture that marked Simonov’s peers. Simonov idealized Lukonin: the younger poet, who had worked in a tractor factory in Stalingrad before joining the Literary Institute in 1937, embodied for him the ideal of the ‘Soviet’ and ‘proletarian writer’ he had tried so hard to become. In 1939, Simonov gave the completed draft of A Young Man from Our Town to the playwright Afinogenov, who liked the play but thought that its hero should have a surname. Simonov was at a loss – he did not know what to call him. Afinogenov asked Simonov what surname he would have chosen for himself, given the choice. Perhaps he recognized that Simonov had given his fictional hero all the qualities that he would have wanted for himself. Without hesitation Simonov replied that he would have liked to be called Lukonin and on that basis he named the hero of his play. The real Lukonin was not pleased: ‘How would you like it if I wrote a play about a football player and called him Simonov?’69

The heroine of A Young Man from Our Town also had personal resonances: Simonov had written the lead female part for Valentina Serova, a star of the Soviet screen and stage, with whom he had fallen hopelessly in love. Simonov had first seen Valentina in a play at the Lenin Komsomol shortly after his return from Khalkin Gol, and although he was a married man and must have known that he had little chance of winning her heart, he brought A Young Man from Our Town to that theatre so that he could get closer to the actress. In that play, the female character is a rendering of Valentina, not as she was in reality, but as Simonov wanted her to be (trusting, loving, patient and forgiving), just as the hero of the play, Sergei Lukonin, is a portrait of Simonov as he would have liked himself to be (more masculine, more courageous, more Soviet than he was in reality). These two literary prototypes, the ideal Valentina and the ideal Simonov, reappear in nearly all his poems, plays and novels during the 1940s.

Valentina Serova, 1940

Valentina was young and beautiful, a famous widow and film star, but she had a secret history that made her vulnerable. Her father, Vasily Polovyk, a hydro-engineer from the Kharkov region of eastern Ukraine, had been arrested in Moscow during the industrial purges of 1930, when Valentina was thirteen, and sent to a labour camp. Released in 1935, Vasily was rearrested in 1937 and sentenced to eight years in the Solovetsky labour camp. All these facts were carefully concealed by Valentina’s mother, a well-known actress at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow, where Valentina spent much of her childhood, playing all the leading parts for girls. Valentina’s mother changed her name from Polovyk, a Ukrainian name, to the Russian Polovikova, and worked hard to erase all trace of her Ukrainian past. Valentina was brought up to deny all knowledge of her father (in later years she claimed she had never seen him as a child). It was not until 1959 (fifteen years after his release from the Solovetsky labour camp) that she summoned up the courage to meet him, and then only after he had got in touch with her.70

In 1935, Valentina joined the Komsomol. She soon attracted the attention of Aleksandr Kosaryov, the leader of the organization, whose well-known fondness for young actresses was easily indulged through his control of the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Moscow. Kosaryov promoted the career of his beautiful young protegee.But in November 1938 he was arrested (and later shot) in a general purge of the Komsomol leadership, which was accused by Stalin of failing to root out the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in its ranks. At a banquet in the Kremlin shortly before Kosaryov’s arrest, Stalin had approached him, clinked glasses, and whispered in his ear: ‘Traitor! I’ll kill you!’ The arrest of her patron placed Valentina in serious danger, particularly when she was denounced as a ‘counter- revolutionary’ by a jealous former boyfriend, whom she had jilted for Kosaryov. Called to account for herself at a purge meeting in the theatre workers’ union, she was questioned about the arrest of her father and made to renounce him to avoid expulsion.71

What saved Valentina in the end was the influence of her new husband, the famous aviator Anatoly Serov, whom she had met at a banquet thrown by Kosaryov. Pilots featured prominently in the pantheon of Soviet heroes. The air force, in particular, symbolized the Soviet Union’s military power and progress, and it was the glamour of the aeroplane that inspired many young men to join the military. With his handsome, clean-cut, healthy ‘Russian’ looks and perfect proletarian origins, Serov was the ideal figure for this propaganda role. His exploits in the Spanish Civil War were legendary, and by the time he met Valentina he had become a national hero and celebrity, one of the most honoured pilots of them all, and a Kremlin favourite. Married ten days after their first meeting, Anatoly and Valentina moved into the sumptuously furnished apartment recently vacated by Marshal Yegorov, who had been arrested in connection with the Tukhachevsky trial. They enjoyed the decadent lifestyle of the Stalinist elite, with late-night parties and receptions at the Kremlin. Disaster struck on their first wedding anniversary. Anatoly was killed in an air crash. The circumstances of the accident remain unclear, but Serov and his fellow pilot Polina Osipenko were flying at low altitude in poor weather. Both pilots were buried in the Kremlin Wall with full state honours. Four months later, in September 1939, Valentina gave birth to Anatoly’s son, whom she named after him. As the widow of a military hero, she enjoyed the protection of the Soviet leadership, which helped to launch her career in the cinema. Her first major part, the title role in the hit film A Girl With Character (1939), was tailor-made for her. Stalin himself became one of her admirers. At his sixtieth birthday banquet in the Kremlin he proposed a toast to the widows of two famous pilots, Anatoly Serov and Valerii Chkalov, who were sitting near the end of one of the far tables. Stalin then invited Valentina to come up to his table to drink the toast with him. Her hand shook so violently that she spilled her wine. According to Valentina, Stalin squeezed her hand and said quietly: ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing. Just hold on, comrade Serova, we’ll stand by you.’72

By the summer of 1940, Simonov was head over heels in love with Valentina, but she remained cool towards him. She was still in mourning for her husband – she had his baby son – and she did not want to encourage Simonov, a married man with a baby son the same age as her own. Simonov, Zhenia and Aleksei were now living in the Laskin apartment on Zubov Square. And though Zhenia did not realize the full extent of her husband’s growing passion for the beautiful actress, she could not fail to notice his frequent absences from the Laskin home.73 For a year their marriage soldiered on, while Simonov pursued his new romantic interest with little effect. Simonov was not the sort of man that Valentina was usually attracted to. He was too arduous in his attentions, too serious and dry, and he lacked the poise and confidence of her previous suitors, who were more successful and more powerful than Simonov. At the first rehearsal of A Young Man from Our Town, Simonov asked Serova what she thought about the play. In front of everyone, she said she thought it was ‘a shitty play’. But even this did not deter him. He showered her with gifts. He wrote plays with parts for her. But most of all he sent her poetry, some of it recycled:

I did not bring any photographs on my travels.

Instead I wrote poems about you.

I wrote them from sorrow

I missed you

And carried you with me…

Gradually, by the power of his pen, he wore her down, but it was not until 1943, when his love poem ‘Wait For Me’ had made Simonov the country’s favourite poet and a figure of real influence in the Kremlin, that Serova succumbed to his eager passions and agreed to marry him. Simonov and Serova would become celebrities through