And who is this Valery Kosolapov, why should I write about him, and you read? Valery Kosolapov for one night became a righteous man, and if he did not, we would not have known the poem of Yevtushenko "Baby Yar". Kosolapov was then the editor of the "Literary newspaper", which published this poem on September 19, 1961. It was a real civil feat.
After all, Yevtushenko himself admitted that these poems were easier to write than to print at the time. The history of writing is related to the fact that the young poet met with the young writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who told Yevtushenko about Baba Yar. Yevtushenko asked Kuznetsov to take him to the woods, and was completely shocked by what he saw.
“I knew there was no monument there, but I expected to see some memorial or some well-maintained place. And suddenly I saw the most ordinary garbage, which was turned into such a sandwich of stinking garbage. And this is in the place where tens of thousands of innocent people, children, old people, women, lay on the ground. In front of our eyes, trucks came in and dropped to the place where these victims were lying, new and new bunches of garbage,” Yevtushenko said.
He asked Kuznetsov, why a sinister conspiracy of silence around this place? Kuznetsov replied because 70 percent of the people who participated in these atrocities were Ukrainian police officers who cooperated with the Nazis, and the Germans provided them with all the darkest work of killing innocent Jews.
Yevtushenko was simply shocked, as he said, so "shamed" of what was seen, that in one night he composed his Poem, and that night he was definitely a righteous man. In the morning he was visited by several poets headed by Korotych, and he read them new poems, then he called some... someone "stuck" the Kiev authorities, and the concert Yevtushenko wanted to cancel. But he did not give up and threatened a scandal. And that evening, for the first time, “Baby Yar” sounded in the hall.
“There was a minute of silence, and I thought that silence was endless. There, a little old lady came out of the hall, shrinking, relying on a stick, slowly passed through the scene to me. She said that she was in Baba Yar, she was one of the few who managed to scatter through the dead bodies. She worshipped me with earthly worship and kissed my hand. I have never been kissed by anyone in my life,” Yevtushenko said.
Then Yevtushenko went to the “Literary newspaper”. Its editor was Valery Kosolapov, who replaced Twardovsky himself in this post. Kosolapov was heard as a very decent and liberal man, naturally within certain limits. His partner ticket was with him, otherwise he would never have been in the chair of the glove.
Kosolapov read the poems directly under Yevtushenko and with the arrangement immediately said that the poems are very strong and necessary.
What will we do with them? Cossack was thinking out loud.
How what? I pretended I didn’t understand Yushchenko. to print.
Yevtushenko knew very well that when they said “strong poems”, they immediately added, “but you can’t print them now.” But Kosolapov looked at Yevtushenko sadly and even with some tenderness. As if it was not his decision.
and yes. He thought and then said, “Well, you’ll have to wait, sit in the hallway. I have to call my wife. I asked, why should I call this woman? He says it must be a family decision. I wonder why family? I will be fired from this post when it is printed. I need to consult her. Go and wait. In the meantime, we will go to the set.
Kosolapov knew he would be fired. This is not just the loss of a job. This meant loss of status, falling out of the nomenclature. Deprivation of privileges, payments, travel to prestigious sanatoriums.
Yevtushenko was worried. He sat in the corridor and waited. The wait was long, and it was unbearable. The poem immediately broke up in editorial and printing. He was approached by simple working printing, congratulated, shrugged his hand. An old recruiter arrived. “He brought me a slice of vodka, and a salty cucumbers with a piece of blackheads. The old man said, “Hold on, you hold on, they’ll print, you’ll see.”
And then Kosolapov’s wife came and locked up with him in his office for almost an hour. She was a big woman. On the front she was a sanitary, many took on her shoulders from the battlefield. And here this grenader goes out and approaches Yevtushenko: "I't say that she was crying, but a little bit of her eyes were on a wet spot. He looks at me studying and smiles. And he says, “Don’t worry, Zhenya, we decided to be fired.”
Listen, it is just beautiful. It is strong: “We decided to be fired.” It was almost a heroic act. Only the woman who walked on the front under bullets could not be afraid.
Problems started in the morning. They came from the Central Committee and shouted, “Who missed, who drank?” but it was already late – the newspaper was sold in kiosks.
“During the week, thousands and tens of letters, telegrams and radiograms even came from ships. The poem spread like lightning. He was transmitted by phone. There were no faxes. Called, read and recorded. I even got a call from Kamchatka. I asked how you read it, because the newspaper has not reached you yet. No, they say, we were read by phone, we recorded from hearing,” Yevtushenko said.
At the top of course they were avenged. Articles were organized against Yevtushenko. Cosworth was fired.
Yevtushenko saved the reaction in the world. Over the course of a week, the poem was translated into 72 languages and printed on the front lines of all major newspapers, including American. Within a short period of time, Yevtushenko received 10,000 letters from different corners of the world. And of course, not only Jews wrote letters of thanks. Not just the Jews. The poem captured many. There were also a lot of hostile actions. He was scratched the word "J" on the car and threatened.
“Great, basketball-growth guys from the university came to me. They volunteered to protect me, although there were no attacks. But they could be. They were sleeping on the staircase cage, my mother saw them. So people supported me very much, Evtushchenko recalled. And the most important miracle, called Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich. My wife and I didn’t believe it at first, we thought it was a kind of hooligan calling, playing us. He asked me if I would give permission to write music for my poem.”
This story has a good ending. Kosolapov so decently accepted his dismissal that the party conspiracy was frightened. They thought he was so calm that someone was probably behind him. And after some time he was returned and put in charge of the magazine "New World". “And there was only a conscience behind him,” Yevtushenko summed up. It was a man.
by Vadim Malev