November 5, 1913: poet and hoaxer Vladimir Lifshitz was born
Born in Kharkov Vladimir LifshitzWriter and poet. Author of the lyrics to the songs "Five Minutes" and "Tanya-Tanechka" and a satire on the totalitarian regime ("Poems by James Clifford").
And yet the order of things is absurd.
People smelting metal,
Weaving fabrics, baking bread,
Someone has shamelessly robbed you.
Not only your work, love, leisure -
They stole the inquisitiveness of open eyes;
Feeding a set of truths from your hands,
The ability to think was stolen from you.
Lifshitz is a children's author
His parents were military doctors, which is why the family moved often. He spent his school years in Moscow и Leningrad.
In 1933 he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Finance and Economics. He was assigned as an economist to Irkutsk. Less than a year later, he quit his job and returned to Leningrad.
He worked for the Leningrad magazine “Zvezda” and began publishing poetry.
He sweated and quacked with a bone breaker.
The reflections of the glow on the walls were fading.
At the wary table
The decree was carried out by the sovereign.
But in a gilded waistcoat,
Into the eyes of the hypocrite and the praying mantis,
She spat blood across the table.
Ineradicable sedition
He became famous as a children's author.
This little miracle is
A baby camel, the son of a camel.
As befits a camel,
He feeds on thorns
Lifshitz is the author of epigrams
At the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, he joined the people's militia. He served as deputy commander of a rifle battalion for political affairs on the Leningrad Front. In 1944, he was wounded in battle and demobilized with the rank of major.
If there are claims against me,
I have only one goal:
We need to instill respect for war.
For boys thinking about war
In 1948, at the height of the campaign against cosmopolitanism in the USSR, he was subjected to harsh official criticism.
Many of his friends and colleagues publicly repented; Lifshitz refused. His publications ceased, and his friends avoided him. Among the few exceptions were: Evgeny Shvarts и Mikhail Zoshchenko.
He moved from Leningrad to Moscow. He collaborated with a puppet theater and the Literary Newspaper. He wrote satirical poems, epigrams, and parodies. He published several dozen poetry books and collections.
Lifshitz is a songwriter
Since the mid-1950s, he wrote lyrics for many famous Soviet films, including "Girl Without an Address," "Carnival Night" ("Song of a Boy in Love," "Five Minutes," "Tanya-Tanechka"), and "The Tale of Lost Time."
Lifshitz is a literary hoaxer.
In 1964, the magazine “Nash Sovremennik” published a series of “Poems by James Clifford” – an English poet James Clifford, who allegedly died in France during World War II. The translator was Vladimir Lifshitz, who was in fact the real author of these poems.
The most famous of them is "Squares":
Each question was answered.
Seeing everything, you see nothing.
Became newspaper matrices
Your submissive brains.
They gave an answer to every question...
Dressed in gray and colorful,
In the morning and in the evening, like a vacuum cleaner,
You are sucked into the metro.
Here you go, thick caviar,
All as one, of the same cut,
People who know how to shoe,
People who know how to mine.
And here they go, row after row -
At —
ат —
ат —
ah, —
For now, it's only for the parade,
People who know how to kill...
Soviet censors passed the poems, considering them to be a sharp criticism of capitalist society and the bourgeoisie.
In 1974, Lifshitz admitted that Clifford was his poetic mask and a fictional character. He added the following to the author's biographical notes for the first time:
This is what the biography of this poet could have been like if he actually existed.
Since then, his poems have been excluded from reprints.
Year after year and day after day,
Without God in the heart or with God,
We all go without complaint
Along designated roads.
And quietly, gradually, not suddenly -
I can't keep track of this -
Everything is already going around in circles.
Dear like-minded people
Last years and memory
In the 2000s, his "Squares" became one of the hits Mikhail Borzykin and the group "Television".
And if you persist:
I won't give in!.. The same thing won't happen again!.. —
They will appear silently from the darkness
People who know how to kill
You will swallow melancholy like quinine,
And into squares, as if in a dream,
A blue patch will be drawn
Black bars on your window
He was married twice; his son is a poet and philologist. Lev Losev.
He died in 1978 in Moscow, at 64.
I once dreamed that I would never die,
And I remember that in my sleep I cursed this mercy.
Like a poor bird that cries in the autumn forest,
My soul was heavily tormented by the consciousness of immortality