In October 1931, a remarkable poet and prose writer Gleb Gorbovsky was born in the family of Soviet teachers in Leningrad. His father was a native of peasants, and his mother was from the family of a famous writer. Apparently, Gleb Gorbovsky inherited his talent. The poet did not really like to be frank about his life, but he wrote an autobiography witty, where a huge vital responsibility is clearly heard and understood in a humorous tone.
Autobiography
Much was unbearable already in childhood. As a boy, Gleb Gorbovsky survived the occupation away from home, wandered for four years. He suffered much in his youth: problems in educational institutions, a colony. But already at an early age it turned out to go headlong into poetry. Gleb Gorbovsky began to write them at the age of sixteen, fugitive hiding far in the wilderness of the wilderness. Where his disenfranchised father taught while in the settlement. All this, probably, cannot be seriously told seriously without a trace, and a man, even a poet, should not cry.
Therefore, the adult and great poet Gleb Gorbovsky covered his childhood experiences in his autobiography. He immediately warned that he did not intend to bare even verbally in public. “The most decent thing,” he says, “is to unfasten two buttons on the shirt to show personal data.” Despite the writer's stripping breed, he remained true to himself: he was frank, even treasured, but without the slightest sign of emotional nakedness.
Biography
The autobiography that the poet offers us is not just read excitedly. The reader experiences each described event as if it was happening to him at the moment. And this is still Gleb Gorbovsky did not read his poems, where in such simple words an incredible depth of feeling is hidden. The poet does not philosophize slyly, does not overflow from empty to empty, ambitious casuistry. He honestly and bluntly states in his autobiography: "I am bad."
And then he explains why these two words formed the basis of the whole long and full of turning events in the biography. The poet Gleb Gorbovsky is not drawn in front of the reader. He speaks of the suffering, of the reserved. He considers himself bad not because he drank, smoked, played cards, loved women, was in occupation, and was in a penal colony. Although, as the poet admits, not without it. But the reason is not at all. She is in insufficient faith in God. It is clearly impossible to make out clearly, and because of the vagueness of the unsteadiness underfoot, the foundation of being.
Way to god
In fact, when studying the poet’s autobiography, the reader understands that Gleb Yakovlevich Gorbovsky went all the way in this direction - to God. Even before he began to travel to monasteries and to learn to believe in God with his old father. Even before he was baptized. The biography of Gleb Gorbovsky developed in the same way as most people who grew up in the war.
He was born near St. Petersburg University, but he also had to study in school in fits and starts. And the best place for him was this university. Father Yakov Alekseevich is a literature teacher at school, mother Galina Ivanovna is the daughter of the first children’s writer of the Komi people Agnia Danshchikova. But Gleb Gorbovsky did not study at the university. Children's poems were written by him about it (which is especially true for poetry for schoolchildren). In his fifteen years, he managed to finish only two classes of school, and those before the war.
Loneliness
He had to spend most of his childhood fatherless, and, despite being born in the center of a glorious city, he spent many years on wanderings far from civilization. My father was imprisoned back in the day. For eight years. And in June 1941, the boy went to his aunt, his father’s sister, to the cottage in Porkhov, a town in the Pskov region. He was not even ten years old. Mom put him in a carriage and saw his son only after the blockade she had endured.
It was so hard in the occupation that the poet Gleb Gorbovsky wrote about it in verses for children only in shorts, hints, and kept the children's psyche. He quickly fought off his aunt, and therefore had to wander, hobble, even steal. After his release, he was sought after by his mother, who, fortunately, was alive. Much later, everything experienced by the child gradually began to spill over into poetry. But here, in verses for schoolchildren, Gleb Gorbovsky does not allow any bloated pathos, or squeezing a tear. How simple it is written about refugees under shelling, about a child who eats from a garbage dump.
School of Life
Returning to the liberated Leningrad, the future poet could not stay in school. Apparently, many years of wandering finally violated his ability to adopt a certain order. I had to go to a vocational school, where I also could not get accustomed. Gleb Gorbovsky wrote poetry for children about Petersburg not then. He was sent to a penal colony in the city of Marx, on the Volga. In the colony, his freemen at school and college were remembered as a blessing.
For a long time he could not bear it - he escaped. Oddly enough, it turned out successfully. I arrived in Leningrad, where I almost got caught again, but were not caught. Then he went to his father, who had already served his time. The wilderness, a tiny village near Kineshma with a school for twelve students in all four classes, the father is the only teacher. Then the verses began, from the age of sixteen.
Search for a home
He understood what is worst in the world. It is only one thing to be left alone. Knocking on the window. And never get home. It was simply impossible not to write about this. When, having escaped from the colony, you miraculously get to your home, but it turns out that mom and stepfather are already far away - they live in Novorossiysk. And father does not know where. Gleb Gorbovsky still returned to Leningrad and entered immediately into the eighth grade of the school. Father prepared. But it did not work out, then there were three years of the army - a construction battalion.
A little over a thousand days. Of these, he spent almost three hundred days at the guardhouse. That was the poet’s craving for freedom. After demobilization, he studied at the Polygraphic College for about two years, from where he was also expelled. I was clearly unlucky with my studies. But Gleb Gorbovsky wrote poetry for children in grade 4 so that the schoolchildren were imbued with a great love of science, learned the richness of the Russian language, and became infected with curiosity about the nature of their native land.
Poems and Songs
Being in the army, Gleb Gorbovsky did not write poetry for children about autumn, it happened much later. And he wrote other poems and songs there, many of which he later burned with whole notebooks. But some remained, and probably forever. "Sitting on the bunk, like a king on name day" - this is from there. And even the famous “Vladimir Central” next to such a high-class chanson clearly turns pale. Returning to Leningrad, the poet was engaged in various literary associations, and worked where necessary.
In the literary association of the Mining Institute, he met his first wife (there were three in all, four are mentioned in some sources). She also wrote poems, with many dissident subjects, for which she was expelled from the Mining Institute, after which Gleb Gorbovsky and went with her to Sakhalin on a geological expedition with an explosive. He traveled all over the Far East, Yakutia, Kamchatka at work. There were a lot of impressions.
Literature
His poems were first published in 1955. It was the regional newspaper "Stalin's Truth" in Volkhov. And the first book - “The Search for Heat” - was published in 1960. According to the results of publications in 1963, Gleb Gorbovsky becomes a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR. Since 1974, he began to write prose, and it turned out to him no worse than poetry.
In 1978, he wrote the operetta libretto "Burn, Burn, My Star" (music by Pozhlakov). The operetta was a great success. And still, much more of his poems passed from hand to hand on the lists, and his songs sounded nameless everywhere. Gleb Gorbovsky always always felt himself to be a poet in the first place, regardless of where he worked - whether he worked as a carpenter in a piano factory, as a mechanic in the gas industry of Leningrad, as an explosive in Sakhalin, or as an assistant volcanologist in Kamchatka.
Personal life
But the poet he was considered dissident, moreover, drinking heavily. The latter, admittedly, was true. Only the third marriage temporarily stopped the poet, and he did not take any alcohol in his mouth for almost twenty years. With the beginning of Perestroika, he was upset and unleashed again. Well, and what is Gleb Gorbovsky dissident after that? He, who wrote a great many absolutely Soviet poems - pure, soulful, deep, loves his own country with all his poetic soul and suffers from every pain of it. The country celebrated his work by the fact that both in the largest cities and in the smallest villages he sang his songs, often without even knowing him as an author. Only in 1981, Gorbovsky received the Order of the Badge of Honor, and in 1984 became the winner of the State Prize.
In Perestroika, despite the fact that he not only did not welcome her, but was horrified by the acts that were taking place, the poet was treated much more favorably: the PEN Club, the Academy of Russian Literature (academician!). In his native city, already in the fifties, Gleb Gorbovsky became literally a cult poet, remaining completely unofficial. Poems that were not published in books were transferred from hand to hand by rewritten leaflets. His songs were sung literally in every restaurant: “At the pavilion of Beer-Water there was a Soviet guard” or even more famous: “I’m coming from the beer hall, I’m not waiting for anyone” (“Lanterns”). Indeed, even if Gorbovsky composed only one song and wrote no more lines, he would still be no less famous than now.
Publications
Gorbovsky’s books of prose were published nine times, mostly in the novels “Station”, “Rosehip Branch”, “Flute in the Wind” and others. The last in 1994 was Confession of an Alcoholic. Books of poetry, starting in 1964, appeared frequently, with interruptions in a year or two. In 2000, "Rasputitsa" was released. Gleb Gorbovsky published his first poems for children in 1965, and the Leningrad book really liked the book “Who rides what?”. In 1972, the second children's book of poems "Different Stories" was published. And adults read the verses of the poet from the books “Thank you, earth” (1963) and “Slanting branches” (1966), from the beautiful collections “Silence” (1968) and “New Summer” (1971), the touching book “Return to Home” ( 1974).
Gleb Gorbovsky’s poems are exceptionally musical, they themselves are music, and therefore they didn’t really need a melody. However, composers - and the very best - they inspired quite often. Pozhlakov, Kolker, Morozov, Solovyov-Sedoy wrote music to his poems. On the stages of the highest level, applause was ripped off after performing songs on his poems by such performers as Shufutinsky, Dolsky, Pakhomenko, Tolkunov, Zakharov, Gil, Piekha, Kikabidze and many others. Everyone knows these songs: "Come to me to sleep," "Autumn," "Dad, give me a doll." Their list is very long.
Depth
Exceptional musicality is present in the verses of Gleb Gorbovsky, and this is achieved by the poet with the simplest selection of words and the most accurate rhyme. But beneath this simplicity lies the enormous depths that each of his poems shows gradually. These simple words provide the reader with a surprisingly broad overview through associations appearing one after another. It seems that the poet needs a search for the original meanings, behind which he forces the reader to dive deeper and deeper, revealing the omen after omen and phenomenon after phenomenon.
He is alone, like any real artist, but his soul seeks warmth, and the poet understands this, but still does not want comfort from the reader. He firmly linked in his lines his own era and eternity, the details of real life and the desire for a fairy tale. Gleb Gorbovsky found not just new images. He is the creator of a whole system of images, a system of truly universal proportions.
Creation
Gleb Gorbovsky lived always reclusively, despite various acquaintances, for the most part bohemian. Having known all the charms of life in communal apartments, he knows how to abstract from circumstances. That is how he always wrote poetry: a room on the castle, knocking and shouting is useless. Now he is not here, not with us, his poems have taken away. Like his father, Gleb Yakovlevich becomes a long-liver, he turned eighty-six this October. He is the author of forty-two books, the winner of many competitions, the State Prize, the New Pushkin Prize, and many, many more can be listed. However, this is not the main thing.
The main thing is that the interest in a person’s creativity of an amazing fate and no less amazing gift is not dying away at all. There are so many impressions for childhood alone that you can write poetry for several hundred years, without stopping this process for a single day. And youth! And the army! And the Far East! And I must say that Gleb Gorbovsky still writes - constantly, almost every day. By the eightieth birthday, “Favorites” had been published - poems created after 2000. It turned out more than two thousand poems.
Destination
The poet must live on earth in order to remind people of the main values. Without it, no one will see these particles of truth and droplets of beauty that only a poetic soul can extract from itself and from the surrounding life. But the main thing is not even to find this beauty, this truth. The main thing is to share with other people, and this poet has no equal. It is poetry that reveals to man the meaning of his existence on earth, which initially contains only one desire for heaven. Gleb Gorbovsky - from the best guides to beauty and truth.
Troubles from childhood, the terrifying events that had to endure, for the poet are usually fatal. Gleb Gorbovsky also could overtake the fate of his friend Nikolai Rubtsov or his idol Sergei Yesenin. And the fact that the unique, original, insightful poet is still with us is a wonderful miracle and unspeakable happiness. How many were there, wounded animals, cursed little heads, orphans and half orphans, orphans, colonists with poetic talents? Rubtsov, Shklyarevsky, Rusakov, Ustinov - this series of names of children of the merciless era can go on and on.