Poetry
Ленинградтық өренім
Not translated into English
Zhambyl Zhabayev · 1941
Synopsis
An address poem, composed in September 1941, just after the encirclement closed around Leningrad. An old aqyn of the Kazakh steppe speaks to the inhabitants of the besieged city, thousands of kilometres from his home: he calls them his children and his pride, salutes their courage and the heroism of those who defend the city, in the tone of a letter a close friend would send, and tells them that the steppe keeps watch with them.
Context
The poem appeared on 5 September 1941 in Sotsialistik Qazaqstan and in Pravda, translated into Russian by Pavel Kuznetsov, then the next day in Leningradskaya Pravda, translated by Mark Tarlovsky; the announcer Mikhail Melaned read it that same evening on the city's radio, and it was printed in large type on posters pasted up to the walls of the Hermitage and on ships. One point must be stated: the poet composed in Kazakh, a team translated him, and the Krugosvet encyclopedia holds that some songs in praise of Stalin may have been written by his translators; his late fame came in 1936 from a proposal by the poet Abdilda Tazhibayev.
Who it is for
In Kazakh, a short text. It is best to know that the siege lasted nearly nine hundred days and that poetry was then, in the Soviet Union, an instrument of the state as much as an art.
Prizes and reception
Its author received the Stalin Prize in 1941; Vsevolod Vishnevsky wrote that for the defenders the poem was worth the arrival of a strong reserve.
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