Konstantin Simonov

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (1915-1979) was a Soviet novelist, playwright, editor and poet. During the Second World War he was a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and reported on the liberation of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland and Germany; he was present at the fall of Berlin. During the war he wrote two books of poems, War and With You and Without You, which contained a series of love poems addressed to his wife, the actress Valentina Serova. One of these, Жди меня ('Wait for Me') is still one of the most popular Russian poems of all time. First published in Pravda in February 1942, when the Germans were outside Moscow, the poem became immediately popular with Soviet soldiers, many of whom learned it off by heart, or copied it in letters to wives and girlfriends. The composer Aleksandr Lokshin wrote a symphonic poem based on the poem. After the War Simonov worked as a diplomat in Japan, the US and China, then as Pravda reporter in Tashkent. He was chief editor of Novy Mir from 1946-50 and 1954-58 and of Literaturnaya Gazetta from 1950-53. He was secretary of the Union of Writers from 1967-79.

Wait for Me

The Lublin Extermination Camp

The combination of traditional Tolstoyan verbiage with the time-worn universal theme of war has not prevented this Russian author (Days and Nights) and journalist from creating an intense and absorbing World War II documentary of the first months at Russia's Western Front, as the Germans advance relentlessly toward Moscow. More than an accurate, exciting record of the actual battles, retreats, and encirclements, the novel is meaningfully overcast with an aura of war—any war of any nation—not only its horrors, but its rewards, its spirit, and above all, its blind disregard for any ""disparity between the living and the dead"". In microcosm, the hero of the book is Vanya Sintsov, a young military journalist who joins the front ranks to fight, is wounded and captured, and escapes, but without his survival guarantee—the Party Card and Identity Papers. The struggle to redeem his official status as a soldier through his own actions takes him from unit to unit, from comrade to comrade, never doubting his country's victory, but often despairing at human nature. Sinstov, with all his faith and failings, is still only an opitome; it is the Russian Army and all its emergency supporters that is the true epic hero. Aided by Ainsztein's fine translation, Simonov has managed, in a gargantuan complex of characters and events, to capture that elusive dust that inexorably settles on a people at war. Long but rewarding—both for historical accuracy and artful fiction.-Kirkus Reviews

Konstantin Simonov

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