Father of agnia barto. Unknown facts about famous writers

Agnia Lvovna Barto was born in Moscow on February 17, 1906. According to some reports, at birth the girl's name was Getel Leibovna Volova. Agnia was born into an educated Jewish family. Her father was Lev Nikolaevich Volov, a veterinarian, and Maria Ilyinichna Volova (nee Bloch), who, after the birth of her daughter, took up housekeeping.

The girl's father was very fond of Krylov's fables and from the very childhood of his daughter regularly read them to her at night. He also taught his little daughter to read, from a book. Agnia's father was very fond of the works of the classic of Russian literature, therefore, on his first birthday, he presented his daughter with a book called "How Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Lives and Works."

Even in early childhood, Agnia began to write poetry. As the poetess herself later admitted, in the first grades of the gymnasium she paid tribute love theme: she covered more than one sheet with naive poetic stories about "marquises and pages in love." However, the girl quickly got tired of composing poems about languid beauties and their ardent lovers, and gradually such poems in her notebooks were replaced by bold epigrams for friends and teachers.

Like all children from intelligent families of those times, Barto studied German and French went to a prestigious high school. In addition, she entered the choreographic school, intending to become a ballerina. At the same time, the financial situation of the Jewish family, and even in the conditions October revolution, left much to be desired. Therefore, at the age of 15, Agnia forged documents, increasing her age by a year, and went as a seller to the Clothing store (its employees were given herring heads, from which soup could be cooked).

creative career

Once the choreographic school, in which Agnia Barto studied, was visited by the People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky. He came to the graduation examinations of the pupils of the school and, among other things, heard how the young poetess, to the accompaniment of music, read out a very impressive poem of her own composition “The Funeral March”. Although the work was by no means humorous, Lunacharsky could hardly restrain himself from laughing and confidently declared that the girl would write beautiful, cheerful and joyful poems.

In 1924, Agnia Lvovna completed her studies at the choreographic school and successfully entered the ballet troupe. However, build successful career she still failed on stage: the troupe emigrated, and Agnia's father did not agree to let her go from Moscow.

The poetess brought her first works to the State Publishing House in 1925. The Thief Bear and Chinese Wang Li liked the publishing house, and the poems were published. This was followed by collections of poems "Toys", "Brothers", "Boy on the contrary", "Bullfinch", "Chatterbox" and many others.

The works of the young poetess quickly ensured her great popularity among Soviet readers. She was not a fan of fables, but created humorous and satirical images, ridiculed human shortcomings. Her poems were read not as boring lectures, but as funny teasers, and because of this they were much closer to children than the works of many other children's poets of the early 20th century.

At the same time, Agnia Lvovna always remained a very modest and shy person. So, she was crazy about, but at the first meeting with him she did not even dare to open her mouth. However, subsequently Barto and Mayakovsky still talked about children's poetry, and Agnia learned a lot from him for her future work. And when she listened to one of Agnia's poems, she stated that a five-year-old boy had written it. No less exciting for the writer was the conversation with.

Both in her youth and in her more mature years, Agnia Lvovna was distinguished by a kind of linguistic perfectionism. One day she went to a book convention in Brazil. She was to make a presentation, and translated into English language. Nevertheless, Barto repeatedly changed the text of the Russian version of her speech, which almost drove the translator crazy.

During the war years, Agnia Barto was evacuated to Sverdlovsk with her family. She spoke extensively on the radio, published military articles, essays and poems in newspapers. In the 1940s, she came up with the idea of ​​a work about young teenagers who tirelessly work at numerous machine tools in defense factories. To master the topic, she even mastered the profession of a turner, and in 1943 she wrote the long-awaited work "A student is coming."

post-war period

After the war, the poetess very often visited orphanages, talked with orphans, read her poems, and even patronized some orphanages. In 1947, Agniya Barto published one of her most psychologically difficult works - the poem "Zvenigorod", dedicated to numerous children whose parents were taken away by the war.

After the publication of Zvenigorod, a woman from Karaganda, who had lost her daughter during the war years, wrote to her. She asked Agnia Lvovna to help find her. The poetess took the letter to an organization that searched for people, and a miracle happened: mother and daughter found each other after several years of separation. This case was written in the press, and soon Barto began to receive numerous letters from children and parents eager to find each other.

The poetess took up a job that was beyond the power of anyone. In her radio program Find a Man, children talked about their fragmentary memories from the time when they still lived with their parents. Barto read out excerpts from letters, listeners helped her: as a result, a huge number of people found their relatives precisely thanks to Agnia Lvovna.

Naturally, the poetess did not forget about her work, and continued to write books for the smallest. Her poems for children "Grandfather and granddaughter", "Leshenka, Leshenka", "Bear and Uncle Vova", "First grader", "Vovka kind soul” and many others were published in large numbers and read with pleasure by children throughout the country.

In addition, according to Agnia's scripts, the films "Alyosha Ptitsyn develops character", "Elephant and rope" were shot. A small filmography of the poetess also includes the painting "Foundling", for which Barto helped to write the script.

Personal life

The first husband of Agnia Lvovna is the poet Pavel Barto, whose name the poetess subsequently bore all her life. This marriage, concluded in the youth of both poets, lasted less than ten years.

Pavel and Agnia had a son, Edgar, who died at the age of 18 in an accident.

The second husband of the writer was Andrei Shcheglyaev, with whom she lived in happiness and love until 1970, when Andrei Vladimirovich died due to cancer.

In this marriage, a daughter, Tatyana, was born, who later became a candidate of technical sciences.

Death

Agniya Barto died on April 1, 1981, the cause of death was heart problems. After the autopsy, the doctors were amazed that the poetess lived a long enough life despite the fact that she had extremely weak blood vessels.

Many fans of Agnia's work subsequently recalled her phrase "Almost every person has moments in his life when he does more than he can" - and noted that for Barto such minutes stretched out for whole years.

Agnia Barto was born on February 17, 1906 in Moscow in the family of a veterinarian Lev Nikolaevich Volov.

In February 1906, Maslenitsa balls were held in Moscow, and Great Lent began. Russian empire was on the eve of change - the creation of the first State Duma and the implementation of Stolypin's agrarian reform were to take place soon, hopes for a solution had not yet died out in society " Jewish question". Changes were also expected in the family of the veterinarian Lev Nikolaevich Volov - the parents were waiting for the birth of their daughter. Lev Nikolaevich had every reason to hope that his daughter would live in another, new Russia. These hopes came true, but not in the way one might imagine. A little more than ten years remained before the revolution.

Here is what Barto wrote about her childhood: “I was born in Moscow, in 1906, I studied and grew up here. Perhaps the first impression of my childhood was the high voice of the street organ outside the window. For a long time I dreamed of walking around the yards and turning the handle of the hurdy-gurdy so that people attracted by the music would look out of all the windows. ... Memories of my father are very dear to me. My father, Lev Nikolaevich Volov, was a veterinarian, he was fond of his work, in his youth he worked in Siberia for several years. And now I hear the voice of my father reading to me, a little one, Krylov's fable. He was very fond of Krylov and knew almost all of his fables by heart. I remember how my father showed me the letters, taught me to read from a book by Leo Tolstoy, in large print. My father admired the fat man all his life, re-reading him endlessly. My relatives joked that, as soon as I was one year old, my father gave me a book “How Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Lives and Works”. I started writing poems at an early age, in the first grades of the gymnasium I dedicated them mainly to the “pink marquises” in love. Well, poets are supposed to write about love, and I fully paid tribute to this topic when I was eleven years old. True, already then the marquises and pages in love who inhabited my notebooks were pushed aside by epigrams on teachers and girlfriends.

Agnia's mother Maria Ilyinichna was youngest child in an intelligent large family. Her siblings later became engineers, lawyers and doctors. But Maria Ilyinichna higher education did not strive, although she was a witty and attractive woman.

Agnia was the only child in the family. She studied at the gymnasium, as was customary in intelligent families - she studied French and German. Judging by fragmentary reminiscences, Agnia always loved her father more, she considered him very much. He was the main listener and critic of her poetry.

Agnia graduated from a choreographic school and was going to become a ballerina. She loved to dance very much. In one of her early poems, she has these lines:

“Only dull days are not necessary
A dull tone...
Dance - joy and delight ... "

Agnia Lvovna, being a fifteen-year-old girl, added an extra year to herself in her documents in order to go to work in the Clothing store, since at that time there was not enough food, and the workers received herring heads from which they cooked soup.

The youth of Agnia fell on the years of the revolution and civil war. But somehow she managed to live in her own world, where ballet and poetry coexisted peacefully. Lunacharsky, People's Commissar for Education, came to the final tests of the choreographic school. After the tests, the students spoke. Agnia read her long poem "Funeral March" to the music of Chopin. Lunacharsky could hardly hide his smile. And a few days later he invited the student to the People's Commissariat of Education and said that, while listening to the "Funeral March", he realized that she would definitely write funny poems. He talked to her for a long time and wrote on a piece of paper which books she should read. In 1924 she graduated from the choreographic school and was accepted into the ballet troupe. But the troupe emigrated. Agnia's father was against her departure, and she remained in Moscow.

In 1925, she brought her first poems to the State Publishing House. Glory came to her rather quickly, but did not add her courage - Agnia was very shy. She adored Mayakovsky, but when she met him, she did not dare to speak. Having ventured to read her poem to Chukovsky, Barto attributed authorship to a five-year-old boy. About the conversation with Gorky, she later recalled that she was "terribly worried." Perhaps it was precisely because of her shyness that Agniya Barto had no enemies. She never tried to seem smarter than she was, did not get involved in near-literary squabbles and well understood that she had a lot to learn. " silver Age brought up in her the most important trait for a children's writer: infinite respect for the word. Barto's perfectionism drove more than one person crazy: somehow, going to a book congress in Brazil, she endlessly reworked the Russian text of the report, despite the fact that it was to be read in English. Over and over again receiving new versions of the text, the translator at the end promised that he would never work with Barto again, even if she was at least three times a genius.

A conversation with Mayakovsky about how children need a fundamentally new poetry, what role it can play in educating a future citizen, finally determined the choice of subject matter for Barto's poetry. She regularly published collections of poems - "Brothers" in 1928, "Boy on the contrary" in 1934, "Toys" in 1930 and "Bullfinch" in 1939.

In the mid-thirties, Agnia Lvovna received the love of readers and became the object of criticism. Barto recalled: "Toys" was subjected to harsh verbal criticism for overly complex rhymes. I especially liked the lines:

Dropped Mishka on the floor
They cut off the bear's paw.
I won't throw it away anyway.
Because he's good.

I have the minutes of the meeting at which these verses were discussed. (There were times when children's poems were adopted by a general meeting, by a majority of votes!). The protocol says: "... The rhymes must be changed, they are difficult for a children's poem."

In 1937, Barto was a delegate to the International Congress for the Defense of Culture, which was held in Spain. Congress meetings were held in the besieged burning Madrid, and there she first encountered fascism.

Events also took place in Agnia's personal life. In her early youth, she married the poet Pavel Barto, gave birth to a son, Garik, and at twenty-nine left her husband for a man who became the main love of her life. Perhaps the first marriage did not work out, because she was too hasty with marriage, or maybe it was the professional success of Agnia, which Pavel Barto could not and did not want to survive. Be that as it may, Agnia retained the surname Barto, but spent the rest of her life with the energy scientist Shcheglyaev, from whom she gave birth to a second child - daughter Tatyana. Andrei Vladimirovich was one of the most respected Soviet specialists in steam and gas turbines. He was the dean of the power engineering faculty of the MPEI (Moscow Power Engineering Institute), and he was called "the most beautiful dean of the Soviet Union." Writers, musicians, actors often visited their house with Barto - the non-conflict character of Agnia Lvovna attracted the most different people. She was close friends with Faina Ranevskaya and Rina Zelena, and in 1940, just before the war, she wrote the script for the comedy The Foundling. In addition, Barto as part of the Soviet delegations visited different countries. In 1937 she visited Spain. There was already a war going on, Barto saw the ruins of houses and orphaned children. A conversation with a Spaniard made a particularly gloomy impression on her, who, showing a photograph of her son, covered his face with her finger - explaining that the boy's head had been torn off by a shell. “How to describe the feelings of a mother who outlived her child?” Agnia Lvovna wrote then to one of her friends. A few years later, she received the answer to this terrible question.

Agniya Barto knew that war with Germany was inevitable. In the late 1930s, she traveled to this “neat, clean, almost toy country”, heard Nazi slogans, saw pretty blond girls in dresses “decorated” with a swastika. To her, sincerely believing in the universal brotherhood, if not adults, then at least children, all this was wild and scary.

The popularity of Agnia Barto grew rapidly. And not only in the USSR. One example of her international fame is particularly impressive. In Nazi Germany, when the Nazis staged a terrible auto-da-fe, burning books of objectionable authors, on one of these fires, along with volumes by Heine and Schiller, a thin booklet by Agnia Barto "Brothers" burned down.

During the war, Shcheglyaev, who by that time had become a prominent power engineer, was sent to the Urals, to Krasnogorsk, to one of the power plants to ensure its uninterrupted operation - the factories worked for the war. Agnia Lvovna had friends in those parts who invited her to live with them. So the family - a son, a daughter with a nanny Domna Ivanovna - settled in Sverdlovsk. The son studied at the flight school near Sverdlovsk, the daughter went to school. About herself at this time Agnia Lvovna writes as follows: “During the Great Patriotic War I performed a lot on the radio in Moscow and Sverdlovsk. She published military poems, articles, essays in newspapers. In 1943 she was Western front as a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda. But never stopped thinking about my main young hero. During the war, I really wanted to write about Ural teenagers who worked at machine tools at defense plants, but for a long time I could not master the topic. Pavel Petrovich Bazhov advised me to get to know the interests of artisans and, most importantly, their psychology, to acquire a specialty with them, for example, a turner. Six months later, I got a discharge, really. The lowest. But I got closer to the topic that worried me (“A student is coming”, 1943)”.

In February 1943, Shcheglyaev was recalled from Krasnogorsk to Moscow and allowed to travel with his family. They returned, and Agnia Lvovna again began to seek a trip to the front. Here is what she wrote about it: “It was not easy to get permission from the PUR. I turned to Fadeev for help.

I understand your desire, but how can I explain the purpose of your trip? - he asked. - They will tell me: - she writes for children.

And you say that it is also impossible for children to write about the war without seeing anything with their own eyes. And then ... they send readers to the front with funny stories. Who knows, maybe my poems will come in handy? The soldiers will remember their children, and those who are younger will remember their childhood.”

A travel order was received, but Agnia Lvovna worked in the army for 22 days.

On May 4, 1945 Agnia's son died after being hit by a car. A friend of Agnia Lvovna, Yevgenia Alexandrovna Taratuta, recalled that Agnia Lvovna these days had completely withdrawn into herself. She didn't eat, she didn't sleep, she didn't talk.

After the death of her son, Agnia Lvovna turned all her mother's love to her daughter Tatyana. But she didn't work less. The war ended, but there were many orphans left, and Agnia Lvovna went to orphanages, read poetry there. She communicated with children and educators, patronized some houses. In 1947, she published the poem "Zvenigorod" - a story about children who lost their relatives during the war. This poem was destined for a special fate. Poems for children turned Agniya Barto into the "face of the Soviet children's book", an influential writer, a favorite of the entire Soviet Union. But "Zvenigorod" made her a national heroine and returned some semblance of peace of mind. It can be called an accident or a miracle. After the book was published, she received a letter from a lonely woman from Karaganda, who had lost her eight-year-old daughter during the war. After reading Zvenigorod, she began to hope that her Ninochka was alive and grew up in a good orphanage, and asked Agnia Lvovna to help find her. Agniya Lvovna gave her mother's letter to the search organization, Nina was found, mother and daughter met. Journalists wrote about it. And then Agnia Lvovna began to receive letters from different people with a request to find their children lost during the war.

Agnia Lvovna wrote: “What was to be done? Should I send these letters to special organizations? But for an official search, accurate data is needed. But what if they are not there, if the child was lost when he was little and could not say where and when he was born, he could not even give his last name ?! Such children were given new surnames, the doctor determined their age. How can a mother find a child who has long become an adult if his surname has been changed? And how can an adult find relatives if he does not know who he is and where he comes from? But people do not calm down, they have been looking for parents, sisters, brothers for years, they believe that they will find them. The following thought occurred to me: can not help in the search for children's memory? The child is observant, he sees sharply, accurately and remembers what he saw for life. It is only important to select those main and always in some way unique childhood impressions that would help relatives to recognize the lost child.

Agnia Lvovna's hopes for the power of childhood memories were justified. Radio "Mayak" made it possible for childhood memories to sound throughout the country. Since 1965, after the first radio broadcast "Find a Man", letters have become her main business and concern. Every day she received 70 - 100 detailed letters (after all, people were afraid to miss any detail - what if it turns out to be the key to the search) and in them she tried to find something that both the one who was looking for and the one who was looking for could remember. Sometimes the memories were very scarce: the girl remembered that she lived with her parents near the forest and her father's name was Grisha; the boy remembered how he rode with his brother on the “gate with music” ... Dog Dzhulbars, father’s blue tunic and a bag of apples, like a rooster pecked between the eyebrows - that’s all the military children knew about their former life. For official searches, this was not enough, for Barto it was enough. That's when the huge experience and the "feeling of the child" played a really amazing role.

Such a program as "Find a person" could only be conducted by Barto - "translator from children." She took on what was beyond the power of the police and the Red Cross.

On the air of Mayak, she read out excerpts from letters she had selected, of which she had received more than 40,000 in nine years. Sometimes people who are already desperate for long years searches, found each other after the first transmission. So, out of ten people whose letters Agnia Lvovna once read, seven were immediately found. It was the 13th: Barto, who was neither sentimental nor superstitious, began to consider him lucky. Since then, the programs have been released on the 13th of every month.

- Ordinary listeners, not indifferent, helped a lot. There was such a case: a woman who got lost as a child remembered that she lived in Leningrad on a street that began with the letter “o” and there was a bathhouse and a shop next to the house, says the daughter of the writer Tatyana Shcheglyaeva. - No matter how hard they fought, they could not find such a street! They found an old attendant who knew all the Leningrad baths ... And in the end it turned out that this was Serdobolskaya Street - there are a lot of “o”s in it, which the girl remembered. And one day, relatives found a daughter who was lost at four months old - it is clear that she could not have any memories. The mother told only that on the shoulder of the child there was a mole that looked like a rose. And it helped: the inhabitants of the Ukrainian village remembered that one woman had a mole like a rose, and at the age of four months she was found and adopted by a local resident during the war.

The Barto family voluntarily or involuntarily got involved in the work. “Somehow I come home, I open the door to my husband’s office - a crying woman is sitting opposite him, and he, pushing his drawings aside, painfully tries to understand who was lost, where, under what circumstances,” recalled Agnia Lvovna herself. If she left somewhere, her daughter Tatyana recorded everything that happened during her absence. And even the nanny Domna Ivanovna, when people came to the house, asked: “Do you have suitable memories? And that's not all right." Such people were called "strangers" in the family. They came to Lavrushinsky directly from the railway stations, and many happy meetings happened in front of Agnia Lvovna. In nine years, 927 families have been reunited with her help. Based on the transfer, Barto wrote the book “Find a Man”, which is completely impossible to read without tears.

From the 1940s to the 1950s, her collections "First Grader", "Funny Poems" and "Poems for Children" were published. In the same years, she worked on the scripts for the children's films Foundling, Elephant and Rope, and Alyosha Ptitsyn Develops Character.

In her own life everything went well: the husband worked hard and fruitfully, daughter Tatyana got married and gave birth to a son, Vladimir. It was about him that Barto composed the poems "Vovka is a kind soul." Andrei Vladimirovich Shcheglyaev was never jealous of her fame, and he was pretty amused by the fact that in some circles he was known not as the largest specialist in steam turbines in the USSR, but as the father of "Our Tanya", the one that "dropped a ball into the river ". Barto still traveled a lot around the world, visited the USA, Japan, Iceland, England. As a rule, these were business trips. Agnia Lvovna was the "face" of any delegation: she knew how to keep herself in society, spoke several languages, dressed beautifully and danced beautifully.

In Brazil, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, she participated in the meetings of the international jury to award the Andersen medal to the best children's writer and artist. She was a member of this jury from 1970 to 1974.

In 1958, Barto wrote a large cycle of satirical poems for children "Leshenka, Leshenka", "Grandfather's granddaughter" and other works. In 1969, her documentary book "Find a Man" was published, in 1976 - the book "Notes of a Children's Poet".

In 1970, her husband, Andrei Vladimirovich, died. He spent the last few months in the hospital, Agnia Lvovna stayed with him. After the first heart attack she feared for his heart, but the doctors said he had cancer. It seemed that she returned to the distant forty-fifth: the most precious thing was again taken from her.

She survived her husband by eleven years. All this time she did not stop working: she wrote two books of memoirs, more than a hundred poems. She did not become less energetic, only began to fear loneliness. She still did not like to remember her past. She was silent about the fact that she had helped people for decades: she arranged for hospitals, got scarce medicines, found good doctors. As best she could, she supported the families of repressed friends, found ways to transfer money. She helped with all her heart and with her characteristic energy.

In "Notes of a Children's Poet" in 1976, Agniya Lvovna formulated her poetic and human credo: "Children need the whole gamut of feelings that give birth to humanity." Numerous trips to different countries led her to the idea of ​​wealth inner world child of any nationality. This idea was confirmed by the poetry collection "Translations from Children" in 1977, in which Barto translated from different languages children's poems.

For many years, Barto headed the Association of Writers and Artists for Children. Barto's poems have been translated into many languages ​​of the world. Her name was given to one of the Minor Planets.

She passed away on April 1, 1981. Once Agniya Barto said: “Almost every person has moments in his life when he does more than he can.” In her case, it was not a minute - she lived like that all her life.

In 2011, Agniya Barto was filmed documentary"Agniya Barto. Reading between the lines."

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Text prepared by Andrey Goncharov

Used materials:

A little bit about yourself. Barto A.L. Collected works: In 4 vols. - M .: Khudozh. Lit., 1981 - 1984. V.4. page 396
Agniya Barto. Notes of a children's poet. pp. 152-153 M: "Soviet writer", 1976, 336 p.
Alla Tyukova, "Biography" magazine, February 2006
Interview with the daughter of the poetess in the newspaper "Boulevard", February 14, 2006

Interview with the daughter of Agnia Barto - Tatyana Shcheglyaeva.

- Tatyana Andreevna, were there writers or poets in your family?

No, but there were many doctors, engineers, lawyers... My grandfather, my mother's father, Lev Nikolaevich Volov, was a veterinarian. My mother's uncle owned the Slovati sanatorium in Yalta. He was considered a luminary of medicine, was an outstanding laryngologist. So after the revolution, the new government even allowed him to work in this sanatorium, about which my mother wrote poetry in childhood: "There are white beds in the Slovati sanatorium."

My mother started writing poetry as a child. The main listener and critic of poetry was her father. He wanted her to write "correctly", strictly observing a certain size of the poem, and in her lines, as if on purpose, the size changed every now and then (which his father considered stubbornness on her part). Then it turns out that changing the size is one of distinguishing features poetry of Barto. True, and later it was precisely for this that her poems were criticized.

I have minutes of the meeting at which "Toys" were discussed. Those were the times when even nursery rhymes were accepted at the general meeting! It says: "... The rhymes must be changed, they are difficult for a children's poem." Especially the famous lines:

Dropped Mishka on the floor
Mishka's paw was torn off.
I won't throw it away anyway.
Because he's good.

- When did Agniya Barto become a poetess from a home writer of poems?

Her entry into great literature began with a curiosity: at a graduation party at a choreographic school (my mother was going to become a ballerina), she, to the accompaniment of a pianist, read her poem "Funeral March", while taking tragic poses. And Lunacharsky, People's Commissariat of Education, was sitting in the hall and could hardly restrain himself from laughter. A couple of days later, he invited his mother to his place and advised her to seriously take up literature for children. Her first book was published in 1925: on the cover is "Agniya Barto. Chinese Wan-Li".

- But Agnia Lvovna's maiden name was Volova. "Barto" is a pseudonym?

This is the name of my mother's first husband, Pavel Barto. Mom got married very early, at the age of 18, immediately after the death of her father. Pavel Nikolaevich Barto was a writer; Together with their mother, they wrote three poems: "Girl-Revushka", "Girl Dirty" and "Counting". But it was a very short-term marriage: as soon as my brother Garik was born, my mother and Pavel Nikolaevich separated ... With my father, Andrei Vladimirovich Shcheglyaev, a scientist, a specialist in the field of thermal power engineering (one of the most authoritative Soviet specialists in steam and gas turbines. - Note auth.) Mom lived together until last days his life. They loved each other, it was a very happy marriage.

From time to time she was elected to positions in the Writers' Union, but she did not stay there for a long time, because she was an inconvenient person. If her own position matched the directive from above, everything went smoothly. But when her opinion was different, she defended her own point of view. The main thing for her was to write and be herself. She was a very brave person, for example, when her friend Evgenia Taratuta was repressed, her mother and Lev Abramovich Kassil helped her family.

Agniya Barto was a laureate of the Stalin and Lenin Prizes. Was your family entitled to privileges for these high awards?

I can say that the modern idea that the state used to hand out free cars with drivers and dachas right and left is not entirely correct. Mom and dad went by car after the war. On one! At an exhibition of captured German cars, they bought a Mercedes, one of the first models with a canvas top: by comparison, the "victory" looked much more respectable. Then the parents appeared "Volga".

We had a dacha, but not a state dacha. They built it themselves. My dad was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and he was given a plot in the academic village. The site was chosen the farthest, in the forest, so that nothing would interfere with my mother during work. But there was a problem: moose walked around the dacha all the time! And the question arose: is it dangerous or not? Mom read somewhere, I think, in "Science and Life", how to determine whether an elk is dangerous or not. The magazine recommended looking into the eyes of the moose, and if the eyes are red, the moose is dangerous. We laughed and imagined how we would look into the eyes of a moose!

In the country, we planted lettuce, strawberries. In winter they went skiing. Dad made home movies, often played chess with Rina Zelena's husband (we were family friends). My mother had no such thing as a "vacation in the country". I remember the celebration of their silver wedding: it was fun, there were many guests ... And the next day my mother was already working: it was her need, a state that saved her from all life's hardships.

Whenever a new poem was ready, my mother read it to everyone: my brother and me, friends, writers, artists, and even the plumber who came to fix the plumbing. It was important for her to find out what she did not like, what needed to be redone, polished. She read her poems on the phone to Lev Kassil, Svetlov. Fadeev, being the secretary of the Writers' Union, at any time, if she called and asked: "Can you listen?", He answered: "Poems? Come on!".

Also, Sergey Mikhalkov could call his mother in the middle of the night and in response to her sleepy-anxious: "Something happened?" answer: "It happened: I wrote new poems, now I'll read it to you!" ... Mom was friendly with Mikhalkov, but this did not stop them from discussing the fate of children's literature furiously! By the intensity of passions, we unmistakably determined that my mother was talking to Mikhalkov! The tube was hot!

Mom also talked a lot with Robert Rozhdestvensky. He was a charming man and very talented. Once he came to us with his wife Alla. They drank tea, then called home, and it turned out that Katya was ill. They jumped up and immediately left. And now Katya is a famous photo artist, the same Ekaterina Rozhdestvenskaya.

- Who else was a frequent guest in your house?

There were always many guests, but most came on business, because my mother rarely even celebrated her birthdays. Rina Zelenaya often visited: together with her mother, they wrote scripts for the films "Elephant and Rope" and "Foundling". Remember this famous phrase of the heroine Ranevskaya: "Mulya, don't make me nervous!"? The film "Foundling" was being filmed just then, and this phrase was invented by my mother especially for Ranevskaya.

I remember once Faina Georgievna came to our dacha. Mom was not there, and we began to wait for her. They spread a blanket on the grass, and suddenly a frog jumped out of somewhere. Faina Georgievna jumped up and did not sit down again. And the meeting did not wait. Mom then asked me who came, was the woman young or old? I replied that I didn't know. When my mother told Ranevskaya this story, she exclaimed: "What a lovely child! She doesn't even know if I'm young or old!"

- I heard that Agniya Lvovna was a master of practical jokes, right?

Yes, she often played on colleagues in the literary workshop. All my mother's friends - Samuil Marshak, Lev Kassil, Korney Chukovsky, Rina Zelenaya - were connoisseurs and connoisseurs of practical jokes. Irakli Andronikov suffered most of all: he almost always fell into the net of a prank, although he was a shrewd and far from naive person. Once he was broadcasting from the apartment of Alexei Tolstoy, showing photos of celebrities. Mom called him, introduced herself as an employee of the literary editorial office and asked: “Here you are showing a photograph of Ulanova in Swan Lake upside down - is that necessary? Or maybe my TV is faulty? Although it’s still beautiful - she’s dancing and ballet tutu... However, I'm calling for a different reason: we conceived a program in which Leo Tolstoy's contemporaries took part, we want to invite you to participate... "Do you think that I'm the same age as Tolstoy? Andronikov was perplexed. - Do I really look like this on your TV?! Looks like it really needs to be fixed!" - "Then write in your notebook: draw number one!".

- Is it true that Agniya Barto was a passionate traveler?

Mom traveled a lot and willingly, but, as a rule, all her trips were business trips. On her very first foreign trip to Spain in 1937, my mother traveled as part of a delegation of Soviet writers to an international congress. From this trip, she brought castanets, because of which she even got into history. At that time, a civil war was going on in Spain. And at one of the stops at a gas station in Valencia, my mother saw a shop on the corner where, among other things, castanets were sold. Real Spanish castanets mean something to a person who is fond of dancing! Mom was a great dancer all her life. While she was talking to the owner and her daughter in the shop, a rumble was heard and planes with crosses appeared in the sky - bombing could begin at any moment! And just imagine: a whole bus with Soviet writers stood and waited for Barto, who was buying castanets during the bombing!

In the evening of the same day, Alexei Tolstoy, speaking of the heat in Spain, casually asked his mother if she had bought another fan to fan herself during the next raid.

And in Valencia, for the first time in her life, my mother decided to see with her own eyes a real Spanish bullfight. With difficulty I got a ticket to the upper platform, in the very sun. The bullfight, according to her story, was an unbearable sight: from the heat, the sun and the sight of blood, she became ill. Two men sitting next to him, Spaniards, as she mistakenly believed, said in pure Russian: "This foreigner is sick!" Barely moving her tongue, mother muttered: "No, I'm from the village...". The "Spaniards" turned out to be Soviet pilots, they helped my mother down from the podium and escorted her to the hotel. Since then, whenever bullfighting was mentioned, my mother invariably exclaimed: "A terrible sight! I wish I hadn't gone there."

- Judging by your stories, she was a desperate person!

This desperation, courage was combined in her with amazing natural shyness. She never forgave herself that she once did not dare to speak with Mayakovsky, who was the idol of her youth ...

You know, whenever my mother was asked about the "turning point in her life", she liked to repeat that in her case there was a "turning point" when she found a book of Mayakovsky's poems that someone had forgotten. Mom (she was then a teenager) read them in one gulp, all in a row, and was so inspired by what she read that she immediately wrote her poem “To Vladimir Mayakovsky” on the back of one page:

... I hit you with my forehead,
century,
For what I gave
Vladimir.

Mom first saw Mayakovsky at a dacha in Pushkino, from where she went to Akulova Gora to play tennis. And then one day during the game, having already raised her hand with the ball to serve, she froze with a raised racket: Mayakovsky was standing behind the long fence of the nearest dacha. She immediately recognized him from the photo. It turned out that he lives here. It was the very Rumyantsev's dacha where he wrote the poem "An extraordinary adventure that happened with Vladimir Mayakovsky in the summer at the dacha."

Mom often went to the tennis court on Akulova Gora and more than once saw Mayakovsky there, pacing along the fence and immersed in his thoughts. She desperately wanted to approach him, but she did not dare. She even thought of what she would say to him when they met: “You, Vladimir Vladimirovich, don’t need any crow horses, you have “wings of poetry,” but she never uttered this “terrible tirade.”

A few years later, a children's book festival was held in Moscow for the first time: in Sokolniki, writers were supposed to meet with children. Of the "adult" poets, only Mayakovsky arrived to meet the children. Mom was lucky to ride with him in the same car. Mayakovsky was immersed in himself, did not speak. And while my mother was thinking about how she could smartly start a conversation, the trip came to an end. Mom never overcame her awe of him and did not speak. And she didn’t ask the question that tormented her then: isn’t it too early for her to try writing poetry for adults?

But mother was lucky: after speaking to the children in Sokolniki, descending from the stage, Mayakovsky involuntarily gave an answer to the doubt that tormented her, saying to three young poetesses, among whom was mother: “This is an audience! You need to write for them!”.

- Amazing story!

They often happened with mom! I remember she told me how she was once returning from her friends from her dacha to Moscow in a commuter train. And at one station, Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky entered the car! "I wish I could read my lines to him!" Mom thought. The situation in the carriage seemed unsuitable to her, but the temptation to hear what Chukovsky himself would say about her poetry was great. And as soon as he settled down on the bench nearby, she asked: "Can I read you a poem? Very short ...". - "A short one is good. - And suddenly he said to the whole car: - The poetess Barto wants to read her poems to us!" Mom was confused and began to deny: "These are not my poems, but one boy of five and a half years old ...". The poems were about the Chelyuskinites and Chukovsky liked them so much that he wrote them down in his notebook. A couple of days later, Chukovsky published an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, in which he cited these verses of the "boy" and sincerely praised him.

- Tatyana Andreevna, we all know Agniya Barto - a poetess. What kind of mother was she?

I didn’t bake pies - I was constantly busy. They tried to protect her from the little things of life. But in all large-scale domestic actions, whether it was a family celebration or the construction of a summer house, my mother took an active part - she was at the helm. And if, God forbid, one of the relatives fell ill, she was always there.

I studied well, and my parents were not called to school. Mom never went to parent meetings, sometimes she didn’t even remember what class I was in. She believed that it was wrong to advertise at school the fact that I was the daughter of a famous writer.

- How did your mother react to your decision to become an engineer?

I am not a humanist by nature. Non-engineering options in my case were not even discussed. I graduated from the Energy Institute and worked all my life at the Central Research Institute of Integrated Automation: I am a candidate of technical sciences, I was the head of the laboratory, a leading engineer.

I remember when I was in college, a funny story happened. A home economics professor from Finland came to us to study families Soviet people. She had already been to the dormitory, she was in a worker's family and wanted to visit the professor's family. For example, we chose ours.

Mom made a big cleaning: "to whistle everyone upstairs," as they say. Nanny Domna Ivanovna baked delicious pies, bought caviar and crabs... But during the "interrogation" we began to fall asleep: the questions were difficult. "How much in one season is spent on outfits for a young girl (that is, for me. - T.Sh."). And we wore dresses for years! Fortunately, just before that, my mother bought me two summer dresses, which we immediately began to demonstrate, hardly remembering how much they cost.

The following made a special impression on the professor: the fact is that I loved the institute very much, I studied excitedly, not thinking about dinners at home. Usually I said: "I dined in the dining room, they feed well there." But what did it actually look like? Diaphragm Soup. Can you imagine? From the film that separates the lungs from the rest of the organs! But I was young, and "diaphragm soup" suited me just fine. And when the Finn began to admire our table, the mother says seriously: "And the daughter prefers to eat in the student canteen!". The home economics professor was smitten! She decided that something incredible was waiting for her there in terms of gastronomy. The next day, the professor volunteered to go to the student canteen, where "the food is so excellent." A day later, the director of the dining room was fired ...

- Curiously, did Agnia Lvovna dedicate her poems to someone from her family?

She dedicated a poem about ruffs to her eldest grandson, my son Vladimir. "We did not notice the beetle" - my daughter Natasha. I'm not sure that the cycle of poems "Vovka the Good Soul" is also a dedication to Vladimir, although this name is very common in her poems of that time. Mom often read poetry to Volodya, showed him drawings by artists for her books. They even had serious literary conversations. She also taught Volodya how to dance. He danced very well, felt the rhythm, but did not go to the choreographic school: he became a mathematician and found himself at school, becoming a mathematics teacher.

She saw her great-granddaughter Asya only once: the baby was born in January 1981, and on April 1, 1981, her mother died ... She was very energetic until the end of her life, went on business trips, even in old age she played tennis, danced. I remember her dancing on her 75th birthday... And a month later she was taken to the hospital, as they thought at first, with a slight poisoning. Turned out to be a heart attack. On the last day of March, my mother seemed to feel better, she asked to be transferred to the ward with a telephone: they say, there are so many things to do and worries! But the next morning her heart stopped...

Barto Agnia Lvovna, whose biography will be discussed in detail in this article, is famous throughout the post-Soviet space for her wonderful children's poems. However, few people know that the poetess was also engaged in translations, wrote screenplays and even was a radio host.

Childhood

Barto Agnia was born on February 17, 1906. The biography of the writer says that her childhood years were very joyful. The girl was born into an intelligent family. Her father, Lev Nikolaevich, worked as a veterinarian, and her mother, Maria Ilyinichna, raised her daughter and ran the household.

Agnia (nee Volova) was born in Moscow, where she spent her childhood and youth. She always remembered her father especially warmly. Lev Nikolaevich often went on business trips, but on those rare days when he was at home, he spent a lot of time with his beloved daughter, read Krylov's fables to her, and taught her to read. It was he who instilled in Agnia a love of literature. His first serious gift was a biography book "How L. N. Tolstoy lived and worked."

The poetess had somewhat conflicting feelings for her mother. On the one hand, she loved her, on the other, she admitted that she considered her a capricious and lazy woman who constantly puts off things for tomorrow. The nanny, who came from the village, and the governess, who taught the girl French, took care of the child.

Academic years

Agniya Barto (photo and biography are presented in this article) received an excellent home education, led by her father. Lev Nikolaevich hoped that his daughter would become a ballerina, so she danced for many years, but she did not show talent in this area. But Agnia began to write poetry already in childhood. Akhmatova became the standard for her. Nevertheless, she did not give up ballet and combined these classes with gymnasium classes.

The first critic for Agnia was the father. He was very strict about her poetic tests and did not allow his daughter to neglect the style and poetic sizes. He especially scolded her for the fact that she often changed sizes in the lines of one verse. However, it is precisely this feature of Barto's poetry that will later become distinctive.

The revolutionary events and the Civil War did not particularly affect the fate of the girl, as she lived in the world of ballet and poetry. After the gymnasium, Agnia went to the Choreographic School, which she graduated in 1924. These were hungry years, and the future poetess, despite her fifteen years of age, went to work in a store where they gave out herring heads, from which they cooked soup.

Final exam

The biography of Agnia Barto is replete with happy accidents ( summary the life of a poetess can be made up of many unexpected coincidences). So, at the ballet school, the graduation test was approaching, at which Lunacharsky himself, the people's commissar of education, was supposed to be present. The program included final exam and a concert prepared by alumni. At the concert, Agnia read her poems, it was a humorous sketch "Funeral March". Lunacharsky remembered the young poetess and after some time she was invited to the People's Commissariat for Education. The People's Commissar personally talked with Agnia and said that her vocation was to write humorous poems. This offended the girl very much, since she dreamed of writing about love. Therefore, Barto did not listen to Lunacharsky and entered the ballet troupe, in which she worked for a year.

The path of the poetess

She was forced to give up her career as a ballerina Barto Agnia, the biography of the writer changed dramatically after working in a theater troupe. The girl realized that the dance is not hers. And already in 1925, the first book of the poetess - "Chinese Wang Li" - was published, and then the collection of poems "The Thief Bear". By this time she was only 19 years old.

Barto very quickly gained fame, but this did not save her from her natural shyness. It was she who prevented the girl from meeting Mayakovsky, whose poems she adored. At the same time, books with her poems for children were published one after another: “Toys”, “For Flowers in the Winter Forest”, “Bullfinch”, “Boy on the contrary”, etc.

1947 was marked by the release of the poem "Zvenigorod", the heroes of which were children whose parents died during the war. To write this work, Barto visited several orphanages, talked with their pupils, who told her about their lives and the dead families.

Creation

In her poems, Barto Agnia spoke with children in their language. The biography of the poetess indicates that she had no creative failures. Perhaps the reason for this was her attitude towards the kids, as peers. That is why each of us is familiar with her poems and remember them by heart. It is with the works of Barto that a child first gets acquainted, and then tells them to his children.

Few people know that Agnia was also a screenwriter. In particular, she wrote scripts for the following well-known films:

• "Ten thousand boys".
• Alyosha Ptitsyn develops character.
• "Foundling".
• "Elephant and Rope".

Barto received several government awards for her works. Among them are the Stalin (1950) and Lenin (1972) prizes.

Foreign trips and war

Barto Agnia has been abroad several times (the biography confirms this). It first happened in 1937. The poetess ended up in Spain, where hostilities were taking place. Here she witnessed terrible pictures and heard the stories of mothers who lost their children forever. Already in the late 30s, the writer went to Germany, which seemed like a toy. However, from the slogans and Nazi symbols, I realized that the wars Soviet Union can't be avoided.

During the Great Patriotic War, Barto did not want to evacuate the capital and was going to work on the radio. However, her second husband, a specialist in power plants, was sent to the Urals, and he took his family with him - his wife and two children. Despite this, the poetess found the opportunity to come to Moscow and record programs for the All-Union Radio. In the capital, Barto lived in her apartment and somehow came under bombardment. Her house was not damaged, but she saw the destruction of the neighboring one and remembered it for a long time.

At the same time, she repeatedly asked to be enrolled in the army, and at the end of the war her wish was granted. Agnia was sent to the front, where she read her children's poems to the soldiers for a month.

Personal life

Not so lucky in her personal life as in her work was Agniya Barto. short biography, telling about her family, is full of irreparable losses and grief.

For the first time, the poetess married Pavel Nikolaevich Barto at the age of 18, and it was under his last name that she became famous. He was a writer and initially worked with Agnia. They composed the following works: "Girl-Revushka", "Counting" and "Girl Dirty". In 1927, a boy was born to the couple, who was named Edgar, but Agnia always affectionately called him Garik. The birth of a child did not save the marriage, and after 6 years the couple broke up. Presumably, the reason was the creative success of the poetess, which her husband refused to recognize.

The second marriage was much more successful. Andrey Vladimirovich Shcheglyaev, who was considered one of the best power engineers of the USSR, became the chosen one. Representatives of various creative professions often gathered in their house: directors, writers, musicians, actors. Among Barto's friends were Faina Ranevskaya and Rina Zelenaya. Andrei and Agnia loved each other, their life together went well. Soon they had a daughter, who was named Tatyana.

May 4, 1945 in the family happened terrible tragedy- the car hit Garik, who was riding a bicycle. The seventeen-year-old youth died instantly. In the first months after the funeral, Agnia was cut off from reality, ate almost nothing and did not talk to anyone. The poetess devoted her further life to her husband and the upbringing of her daughter and grandchildren.

In 1970, Barto was waiting for another blow - her husband died of cancer. The poetess survived him for 11 years and left this world on April 1, 1981.

Agnia Barto (biography): interesting facts

Here are some notable events from the life of the poetess:

• All Barto's documents indicate that she was born in 1906. But in fact, Agnia was born a year or two later. The inaccuracy in the dates is not a mistake of bureaucrats; the writer added extra years to herself so that she was hired, since in those years there was a terrible famine in the country.
• The poem "Zvenigorod" is remarkable not only for its popularity and themes. Immediately after its publication, Agnia received a letter written by a woman who had lost her daughter at the beginning of the war. Some parts of the poem seemed familiar to her and she had a hope that the poetess was talking with her child in the orphanage. It soon became clear that this was the case. Mother and daughter reunited after a 10-year separation.
• In her youth, Agnia was in love with Mayakovsky. It was the words of the poet that you need to write only for children that prompted the girl to choose such a poetic fate.

Agnia Barto: biography for children

It is better to start a story about the life of a poetess for kids from her childhood. Tell about parents, ballet classes and dreams. Then you can move on to poetry. It is desirable here to recite a few verses of Barto. It would be useful to mention foreign trips and bring Interesting Facts. You can focus on the communication of the poetess with children. It is better not to touch personal life - it is rarely interesting for schoolchildren.

Finally, you can talk about how you spent last years Agnia Lvovna Barto of her life. A biography for children should not be replete with dates.

Agnia Lvovna Barto (1906-1981) - a famous Soviet poetess, author of many plays, poems, film scripts. She was born in the Russian capital Moscow, in the family of a practicing veterinarian Lev Nikolaevich Volkov, who was an example of kindness and intelligence for the future writer. He instilled in his daughter a love of books and gave the right education.

Barto tried to write her first poems in primary school gymnasium, and then in the choreographic school. In her youth, she loved to dance and dreamed of becoming a famous ballerina. The acting People's Commissar of Education Lukacharsky L.V. drew attention to one of the first poems, he advised writing humorous poems for a children's audience. Agnia enthusiastically set to work. She honed her poetic style, relying on the work of Mayakovsky, Marshak and other famous poets who use satirical techniques in their work.

In 1925, the first book of the writer was published, which includes poems - "Chinese Wang Li" and "Bear Thief". A. Barto's poems are written in a humorous style and are easy to remember. To create them, the poetess sometimes used non-standard rhymes. The author seems to be talking to a child without an edifying tone.

The heyday of Barto's poetic creativity falls on the end of the 30s. In 1936, the most popular collection of poems "Toys" was published. This work won the love of children of several generations. In 1940, Barto took part in creating the script for the film "Foundling", this year the play "Dima and Vava" (a comedy in three acts) came out from under her pen.

In difficult for Soviet people during the war years, Barto was a front-line correspondent, spoke on the radio. After evacuation to the city of Sverdlovsk, she mastered a new profession for herself, and necessary in those years, a profession - turning.

After the war, the poetess continues to work on creating poems for children. In total, about 150 books were published. But creativity in these years is no longer as popular as the early works of the author. The cycle of poems Barto devotes to the problems of growing up adolescents, which was a little-known topic in the poetic world.

Barto also becomes the organizer of the important Find a Man project. Its essence is to help reunite people who were separated by the war. Thanks to the program of the same name on the Mayak radio, it was possible to give the joy of meeting a huge number of people. Some parents were tracked down through childhood memories of a child lost during the war. Later, Barto's story "Find a Man" was published, which was based on cases of searching for people.

Interesting and unusual according to the author's idea is the collection "Translations from children", which includes translations of poems by children of different nationalities. The book called "Notes of a Children's Poet" is of great cultural value. In it, Barto seems to share his vast poetic experience. This book includes the best and most famous works of the author.

Agnia Barto's contribution to the development of Russian culture is invaluable. She always defended the interests of children, emphasized the importance of their problems and respected the individuality of each little person.

Barto Agniya Lvovna. 02/17/1906 - 04/01/1981 Russian Soviet children's poetess, writer, screenwriter Agnia Lvovna Barto was born in Moscow on February 17, 1906 in an educated Jewish family. She received a good home education, which was led by her father. Agnia studied at a choreographic school and was going to become a ballerina. She loved to dance very much. Poems A. Barto began to write in early childhood, in the first grades of the gymnasium. The strictest connoisseur of A. Barto's first poems was her father, Lev Nikolaevich Volokhov, a veterinarian. With the help of serious books, without a primer, my father taught Agniya the alphabet, and she began to read on her own. Her father followed her demandingly, taught her how to write poetry “correctly”. But Agnia Lvovna at that time was attracted by something else - music, ballet. She dreamed of becoming a dancer, she loved to dance very much. Therefore, she entered the choreographic school, but even there she continued to compose poetry. Several years passed, and Agniya Lvovna realized that poetry was more important to her. And in 1925 (she was only 19 years old at the time!) her first book "Chinese Wang Li and the Thief Bear" was published. The readers liked the poems very much. A conversation with Mayakovsky about how children need new poetry, what role it can play in raising children, helped her finally make a choice. The youth of Agnia fell on the years of the revolution and the civil war. But somehow she managed to live in her own world, where ballet and poetry coexisted peacefully. The first husband of Agnia Lvovna was the poet Pavel Barto. Together they wrote three poems - "Girl-roar", "Girl grimy" and "Counting". They had a son, Egar (Garik), and after 6 years they divorced. In the spring of 1945, Garik tragically died at the age of 18 (he was hit by a truck while riding a bicycle). With her second husband, Andrei Shcheglyaev, Agnia lived for almost half a century of great love and understanding. From the memoirs of their daughter Tatyana: “Mom was the main helmsman in the house, everything was done with her knowledge. On the other hand, they took care of her and tried to create working conditions - she didn’t bake pies, she didn’t stand in lines, but she was, of course, the hostess in the house Nanny Domna Ivanovna lived with us all her life, who came to the house back in 1925, when my elder brother Garik was born. having dared to read her poem to Chukovsky, Barto attributed the authorship to a five-year-old boy. Perhaps it was precisely because of her shyness that Agniya Barto had no enemies. She passed away on April 1, 1981. Once Agniya Barto said: “Almost every person has moments in his life when he does more than he can.” In her own case, it wasn't a minute, it was how she lived her whole life. Agniya Barto was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy cemetery.