"There are no happier people than poets"

Live with the truth, like with a child in your arms,
Grigory Pozhenyan

Lonely set of stars…
Humboldt

"There are no happier people than poets". So Grigory Pozhenyan defined the credo of poets in the preface to his book "Masts". We once discovered this one for ourselves, preparing a book review dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Great Victory on the fiction lending library. Later, while working on the library author's virtual project "Trench Star", we again met with the poetry of Grigory Pozhenyan.

“Dignity, courage and honor” is the refrain of one of his poems. These words can serve as an epigraph to all his poetry. It captures life. “The poems of G. Pozhenyan would have lost their value if they had not been provided with fate, with an extraordinary gift to live fully, strongly and uniquely, which is not given to everyone. Did the war bestow this fate on him? I don't know: many went through the war. G. Pozhenyan went to war in the 41, returned in the 45, going through it in the literal sense of the word, for he served in intelligence, in a sabotage detachment, in the marines. On his way were Odessa, Sevastopol, Novorossiysk, Kerch, Belgrade,” noted literary critic Igor Zolotussky.

In 1939, Grigory Pozhenyan, after graduating from Kharkov secondary school No. 6, went to military service in the Black Sea Fleet. He met the war as a foreman of the 1st article on the Molotov cruiser.

“There are no happier people than poets. A huge and seemingly incomprehensible world freely fits in the image. He is always with us, our world. We have only to keep trying to express to the best of our ability what lives inside us, tosses and turns, looking for a way out.

Poems come and go. They leave to come back. Poets are rewarded in the end. They pay for everything also if they make the “wrong sound”. It is generally accepted that the more difficult life is for a poet, the easier it is for his poems. This is not a comfort formula. It's just that the degree of concern of poets is the lot of their talent. The higher the talent, the more tangible the shocks of human commotions, the more irreparable the loss, the more natural the victory over oneself...

“I owe everyone, I am indebted to everyone” – with these lines I tried to express my attitude to life, to people who buried so much, but did not waste their good. We returned from the war as boys, and soon became old men. How it happened, I do not remember – such is the rapid passage of time. But everything must be remembered by our witnesses – poems.

The fate of Grigory Pozhenyan, all his work is rightly called unique. Contemporaries testify that the poet was absolutely unlike anyone: neither in life nor in his work. Truly a wonderful life for a wonderful man!

His poetry is a high tension of thoughts about the fate of a generation, about being.

The poetry of Grigory Pozhenyan is needed by the reader right now, and we are glad that you will discover or remember, as we do, the name of the poet. Get acquainted with an incredible biography, his poetic circle. Find out what his era was like. Get in touch with the topic "Cinema and Pozhenyan". Hear his lyrical songs that the whole country loved, listened to and sang.

We are full of hope that you will leaf through the poet's collections, read the wonderful jubilee material in Literaturnaya Gazeta. We are waiting for you in the fiction lending library!

Text: L. Y. Distanova

Photo collage: O. V. Koshevaya