The poet and dramatist Mikhail Sheinkman (who would later change his last name to Svetlov) was born in 1903 in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro, Ukraine), in the family of a Jewish craftsman.
He attended a four-year school, while also working as an "errand boy" at a photo saloon and at the local commodity exchange.
In 1917, swept up in the tide of revolutionary fervor, he volunteered to serve in the nascent Red Army. That year also saw his publishing debut, with his first poems appearing in the Golos Soldata newspaper. In 1919, he joined the Komsomol, quickly becoming head of the media department of the Yekaterinoslav Provincial Committee of that organization. He also edited the Yunyi Proletarii magazine. Mikhail soon discarded his birth name for the pseudonym Svetlov.
In 1921, Svetlov moved to Kharkov, which was then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. Two years later, he published his first book of poems, Railway Tracks. Next year, he moved to Moscow and began to attend the Valery Bryusov Higher Institute of Literature and Arts, which would later become the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.
In the mid-1920s, Svetlov was a member of Pereval, a group of young writers who called for the revolutionary transformation of the world. It was then that he wrote his poem "Grenada", which was greeted warmly by the Soviet literati, and would eventually be set to music by about 20 composers. This poem made Svetlov famous.
In the early 1930s, Svetlov was expelled from the Komsomol for his ties to the Trotskyite opposition (together with other young writers, he had been editing an unofficial dissident magazine). He later gave material aid to the families of arrested Trotskyites. This was enough to make him fall out of favor with the authorities, who were now much more reluctant to publish his works. Nevertheless, his 1935 poem "Kakhovka" became very popular. The NKVD compiled compromising materials on Svetlov for Stalin's personal perusal. This file included some statements by the poet that were deemed blatantly anti-Soviet. Nevertheless, he was untouched by the Great Purge of 1937-1938.
Following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in late June 1941, Mikhail Svetlov was called up to serve as a military correspondent. In those years, he wrote poems and sketches, and gave public readings of his poetry to frontline troops; on one occasion, he took part in battle as a member of a tank crew. During the war, he was an occasional contributor to the chief military newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, which had an immense circulation, and to the newspapers Na Razgrom Vraga and Geroicheskiy Shturm.
In summer 1942, Komsomolskaya Pravda published Svetlov's poem "Liza Chaikina", about an executed partisan girl. It achieved great popularity, becoming one of the icons of Soviet wartime heroism. However, the security organs remained suspicious of Svetlov. According to a counterintelligence report from 1943, Sveltov was troubled by the general changes taking place in the USSR, including the growth of anti-Semitism in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy: "The Revolution ends up just where it began. We now see the return of the Jewish quota, the Table of Ranks, and all the other attributes of the 'good old days'." (Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, eds., State Power and the Literati. Moscow: the International Democracy Foundation, 1999. p. 489).
In late June 1944, during the victorious Red Army battles in the area of Bobruisk, Major Svetlov took part in the capture of a German soldier, who turned out to be a general in disguise.
Svetlov met V-E Day in Berlin. In the course of the war, he had been awarded two Orders of the Red Star and several medals.
After the end of the war, Mikhail Svetlov returned to Moscow. He was now back in the literary wilderness, being virtually unpublishable. He started teaching at the Literary Institute, and wrote plays. Like many other disgraced authors banned from publishing original works, he turned to translation – from Georgian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Turkmen.
As a person of exceptional wit and supreme irony (his aphorisms became part of the popular lexicon), Svetlov dared to poke fun at contemporary political issues. Thus, during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the period of Stalinist anti-Semitism (1948-1953), when the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was denounced as a spy organization in the Soviet press, Svetlov would open his wallet and say:
"Yet again, the Joint has failed to send money to the poet." 1
In 1954, after Stalin's death, the poets Olga Bergholz and Semyon Kirsanov spoke in defense of the disgraced Svetlov at the Second Congress of Soviet Writers, and this changed his fortunes for the better. Mikhail Svetlov regained some of his former fame. 1959 saw the publication of his book of poems The Horizon, which was followed by Hunting Lodge in 1964. Nevertheless, he belonged to that segment of the Soviet intelligentsia that remained "ideologically suspect" in the eyes of the authorities, even during the "Khrushchev Thaw".
Mikhail Svetlov died in Moscow in 1964, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
His final book, Verses of the Last Years, was published posthumously in 1967. That year, Svetlov was also awarded the Lenin Prize.
An excerpt from Mikhail Svetlov's poem "Bread"
…
5.
The express train
Is speeding through the snow;
Samuil Izrailevich is asleep.
He is approached from both sides
By King David
And King Solomon.
"Always a pleasure to see you, friends!
I'm bound for Zhitomir…
What about you?"
The whole car is listening raptly
To the tale of King Solomon.
The two kings
And their loyal subject
Talk of business
And their native land.
The whole car is listening silently,
Liberson is complaining bitterly:
"My son died
In the flower of youth…
So why is he not with you?
My successor,
Beloved son!
Let me dream of you
Only once!.."
With meek tenderness
And grace,
The Kings comfort him until dawn…
Suddenly, the train is braking,
And Samuil is waking…
All the passengers sit around
Very peacefully,
Very pleasantly.
And Ignat Mozhayev is looking
At the bashful Samuil.
(You often think that the enemy
Is very far away;
Yet it turns out that the enemy
Is right in front of you…)
The night of the ruthless pogrom…
Samuil stares down at his feet.
Enemies they may be,
But they're old acquaintances, too…
"Why, hello!" -
"So happy to see you!"
And a smile is shaking guiltily
In Ignat's hoary moustache.
So, clumsily and confusedly,
He stutters, ever so feebly:
"I apologize, Liberson,
Please forgive me for my mistake!
I was young, so young, in those days,
And my mind was clouded with drink.
I was ignorant
And blind,
Just a reckless hooligan…"
And the heart of the old Liberson
Beats in rapid, irregular spurts.
These words have warmed his heart,
Like a kindly token of friendship…
Saying "sorry" is the surest way
To become a Jew's best friend.
"I'm so glad to hear this!
Your words give me much satisfaction!
I am quite prepared to believe
That the pogrom was a misunderstanding;
That my daughters were killed by thunder,
And that you yourself
Are almost a Jew at heart…
Now, hear the dreadful news:
My son is dead!
I sit alone through the night,
All alone!
The dull strokes of the lonely clock…
Oh, Ignaty Petrovich,
Can you empathize with my feelings?"
Outside, all is wind and snow,
And the blue, fiery line of dawn.
And the two old men sit together,
Spending time in cordial chatter…
And the blizzard is sweeping through Russia,
Lashing forests and open grasslands…
And yet, may it never extinguish
The warm babble of human voices!
May the cars speed along the railway,
May the train not be buried in snowdrifts,
May my song flow out in torrents
From Mozhayev
To Liberson.
Let my simple and merry song,
Let my lively and catchy tune,
Ring aloud as it grows ever stronger,
Rumble on as it grows ever weaker…
1927
