Message about Sasha Black. Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg (Sasha Cherny)

Sasha Cherny's biography for children will help you prepare for the lesson and learn about the work of this poet.

Sasha Cherny short biography

Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg, who later became known as Sasha Cherny, was born on October 1, 1880 in the Odessa family of a Jewish pharmacist, where besides him there were four more children.

To give their son the opportunity to enter the gymnasium, his parents baptized him. But Alexander did not study at the gymnasium for long. The boy ran away to St. Petersburg at the age of 15 and became a beggar. His fate was written about in the newspaper, and the Zhytomyr official K.K. Roche, touched by this story, took the boy to his place. Roche, who did a lot of charity work and loved poetry, had a great influence on Alexander.

After serving for two years (1901-1902) as a volunteer in the Russian army, he began working in the customs service in Novoselitsy.

Returning to Zhitomir, the young author begins to collaborate with the local Volynsky Vestnik. But the newspaper soon closed, and in 1905 Alexander Mikhailovich left for St. Petersburg. There he published poems in the magazines “Leshy”, “Almanac”, “Spectator” and many others, earning a living from clerical work.

In 1905, Alexander Glikberg married Marina Vasilyeva. Returning from a honeymoon trip to Italy, he decided to leave his job and study only literature.

After the publication of the poem “Nonsense” under the name “Sasha Cherny”, the writer was welcome at meetings of all satirical magazines of that time.

In 1906-1908 he lived in Germany, where he continued his education at the University of Heidelberg.

Sasha Cherny returned to St. Petersburg in 1908. Through the efforts of the magazine “Satyricon”, collections of his poems “Satires”, “Involuntary Tribute”, “To All Poor in Spirit” were published. Many publications were happy to publish his works. The writer also tried himself as an author of children's works, publishing the books “The Living Alphabet”, “Knock Knock” and others.

In 1914, Cherny was mobilized and began serving in a field hospital.

Sasha Cherny, Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg (1880-1932) - Russian poet and prose writer, his work dates back to the Silver Age, especially famous for his lyrical and satirical feuilletons in poetic form.

Early childhood

Sasha was born in the city of Odessa on October 1, 1880. His parents were of Jewish origin; his father worked as a pharmacist and agent in a chemical laboratory. Later the family moved to the city of Belaya Tserkov, where the future poet spent his childhood.

There were five children in the family, two of them were given the same name by their parents - Sasha. And it so happened among the Glickbergs that the light-haired child (blonde) was called Sasha Bely, and the dark-haired one (brunette) was Sasha Black. Thus, the poet’s future pseudonym emerged from his childhood family nickname.

Sasha Cherny was noticeably different from his sisters and brothers. He had a wild imagination, he was constantly making something, inventing something, and conducting experiments. He either mixed sulfur, tooth powder and petroleum jelly to make waterproof gunpowder, or tried to make ink from the sap of the mulberry tree. In general, the Glickbergs' apartment sometimes resembled a chemical plant. For such experiments, Sasha often had to receive punishment from his father, who was distinguished by his severity and tough disposition.

The Glickburgs were wealthy people, but uncultured. It cannot be said that Sasha had a happy childhood; the boy grew up withdrawn and unsociable.

Education

In those days, it was almost impossible for a child from a Jewish family to receive a decent education. Therefore, at first Sasha was home-schooled.

In order for the boy to enter the Bila Tserkva gymnasium, his parents had to baptize him in the Russian Orthodox Church. The child began studying at the gymnasium at the age of 10, his studies were not easy for him, and the boy was expelled several times for poor performance. To the constant punishment at home was added a new fear of the school yoke.

At the age of 15, he could not stand it and ran away from home, abandoning his studies. By the way, earlier the eldest child of the Glikberg family decided to take the same step, and Sasha Cherny followed his example.

At first, the boy was sheltered by his paternal aunt. She brought Sasha to St. Petersburg, where he entered the gymnasium to continue his studies. But soon the young man was expelled from there, failing to pass the algebra exam.

Sasha’s situation was catastrophic: there was no money to live at all, he wrote to his father and mother, asking for help, but his parents did not answer the letters of his fugitive son. The guy became a beggar and started begging.

In 1898, a young journalist, Alexander Yablonsky, began working for one of the largest St. Petersburg newspapers, Son of the Fatherland. He learned about the unfortunate young man who had been abandoned by his family, and wrote a report about the sad fate of the teenager.

Zhitomir and godfather C. Roche

The article was read by a very wealthy gentleman from Zhitomir, Konstantin Roche, who devoted a lot of time and money to charity. He took the young man to his place, providing him with shelter and education. Zhitomir truly became a second home for Sasha, and he always considered Konstantin Konstantinovich Roche his godfather.

Roche adored poetry, he instilled his love of poetry in Sasha, and soon discovered that the guy himself had a good poetic gift.

Konstantin Konstantinovich helped Sasha get a job as a minor official in the Collection Service. Simultaneously with his work, the young man began to write poetry.

In 1900 he was called up for military service. An infantry regiment was based in Zhitomir, in which Sasha served for 2 years as a volunteer.

After the service, he went to the small town of Novoselitsy, where he got a job as a customs officer on the border with Austria-Hungary.

But he soon returned to Zhitomir, where he began collaborating with the Volynsky Vestnik newspaper. In 1904, his first poetic work, “The Diary of a Reasoner,” was published; the aspiring poet signed “On his own.” The local Zhitomir intelligentsia became interested in the work, and soon Sasha received the nickname “poet.”

Petersburg

Unfortunately, the newspaper “Volynsky Vestnik”, in which Sasha began to regularly publish his poems, closed. But the young man was already very interested in literary activity, and he decided to move to St. Petersburg. Here he first lived with Roche’s relatives, and they helped him get a job in the railway tax service.

He served as a minor official, and his immediate boss was a woman, Maria Ivanovna Vasilyeva. Sasha and Masha were very different from each other - both in position and in education, and besides, the woman was much older than him. Despite these differences, they became close and married in 1905. This gave the young poet a chance to leave his job in the railway office and devote himself entirely to literature.

He began collaborating with the satirical magazine “Spectator”. In issue number 23, the poem “Nonsense” was published, and for the first time the work was signed by Sasha Cherny. It was November 1905. The poem was a success, and Sasha immediately began to be invited to many satirical publications.

Several magazines and newspapers began publishing it:

"Journal";
"Leshy";
"Almanac";
"Masks".

Sasha Cherny's popularity among readers grew. However, this fact was overshadowed by the fact that after his satirical poems the magazine “Spectator” was closed, and the collection of poetry “Different Motives” was generally banned by censorship due to political satire.

All this led to the fact that in 1906 Sasha Cherny left for Germany, where he attended lectures at the University of Heidelberg.

Creativity flourishes

In 1908, Sasha returned to St. Petersburg, where the new magazine “Satyricon” had just opened and he, along with other famous poets, became its regular author. Moreover, from 1908 to 1911 he occupied the position of the undisputed poetic leader of Satyricon, thanks to the magazine Sasha had all-Russian fame. Korney Chukovsky spoke about him:

His poems were really on everyone’s lips at that time. Readers loved them for their sparkling humor, special bile and bitterness, biting satire, simplicity and at the same time audacity, witty remarks and naive childishness. Newspapers and magazines simply fought for the right to publish Sasha’s poetry; he, as before, collaborated with many publishing houses:

“Russian Rumor” and “Modern World”;
“Kiev Thought” and “Sun of Russia”;
"Contemporary" and "Argus";
"Odessa news".

One after another, collections of his poetry were published: “Involuntary Tribute”, “To All the Poor in Spirit”, “Satires”.

But in 1911, without reason or explanation, Sasha Cherny left Satyricon. Perhaps the inner state of his soul affected him; the young poet felt that he had exhausted himself in this direction. In the same year he made his debut in children's literature:

poem "Bonfire";
followed by his first prose work, the story for children “The Red Pebble,” in 1912;
in 1914, the famous “Living ABC” in verse;
in 1915, a collection of children's poems “Knock Knock”.

Over time, works for children took the main place in the work of Sasha Cherny.

Revolution and war

In 1914, when war with Germany was declared, Sasha was called to the front. The horrors of war turned out to be a difficult test for the poet; he fell into a terrible depression and was admitted to a hospital. And then he continued his service in medical units: he was a caretaker of a hospital in Gatchina, then went to the front with the Warsaw consolidated field hospital No. 2, and helped the caretaker at the Pskov field reserve hospital.

At the end of August 1918, when the Red Army entered the city of Pskov, Sasha left it along with other refugees. He did not accept the revolution. The poet made attempts to reconcile with the new government, but nothing worked, despite the fact that the Bolsheviks offered him to head a newspaper in Vilna. Cherny left Russia in 1920.

Emigration

First, he and his wife moved to the Baltic states, to the city of Kovno. Then they moved to Berlin. Here he continued to engage in literary activities. The poet collaborated with the publishing houses “Spolokhi”, “Rul”, “Volya Rossii”, “Segodnya”. Sasha had the opportunity to work as an editor at the magazine “Grani”.

In 1923, a book with his poems, “Thirst,” was published, published at his own expense. All the works were imbued with longing for the homeland; their lines revealed the poet’s sad position “under a foreign sun.”

In 1924, Cherny moved to France. Here he made every effort to make Russian literature popular abroad. He collaborated with several Parisian magazines and newspapers:

"Last news";
"Chimes";
"Satyricon";
"Illustrated Russia";
"Revival".

He organized literary evenings, traveled throughout France and Belgium reading his poems for Russian-speaking listeners, and took part in “days of Russian culture” every year. Sasha Cherny released a children's almanac “Russian Land”, which told about the Russian people, their history and creativity.

During the years of emigration, Cherny worked especially hard on prose. He created many wonderful works for children:

Death

In 1929, in the southern part of France, in the small town of La Favière, Sasha bought a plot of land and built a house. This place has become a truly cultural Russian center abroad. Many musicians, artists, Russian writers gathered here, who often came and stayed with Cherny for a long time.

On July 5, 1932, a fire broke out near Sasha’s house and a neighboring farm caught fire. Without thinking for a second about the consequences for his health, he ran to help his neighbors and participated in putting out the fire. Arriving home, he lay down to rest, but never got out of bed; he died of a heart attack.

He was buried in the French Lavender Cemetery. The closest and dearest person to Sasha Cherny, his wife Maria Ivanovna, died in 1961. From that time on, there was no one to look after or pay for their graves; the couple had no children. Therefore, the actual exact burial place of the poet was lost. In 1978, a memorial plaque was installed at the Lavender cemetery, which says that the poet Sasha Cherny rests in this cemetery.

All that remains is the memory and his immortal poetry. Songs were written based on Sasha Cherny’s poems and performed by such popular Russian singers as the group “Splin”, Zhanna Aguzarova, Arkady Severny, Maxim Pokrovsky, Alexander Novikov.

Based on materials from the collection “Strophes of the Century. Anthology of Russian poetry". Comp. E. Yevtushenko. Minsk-Moscow, 1995.

Central Jewish Resource

Regional website for children's libraries

Odessica. Encyclopedia about Odessa

Dmitry Bykov. Black and white
Sasha Cherny and Nikolai Gumilyov during the First World War: “These two warriors are truly the white and black bones of war, the aristocracy and the people, but both have that knightly understanding of duty, which is extremely rare in Russia (the institution of chivalry, according to Pasternak from a letter 1918, Russia did not know). This is a duty, so to speak, independent of the homeland, completely special: one must fight and, if necessary, die for the homeland, not because it is good, and not for its sake at all, but for the sake of oneself and one’s principles.”

Memoirs of V.A. Dobrovolsky about Sasha Cherny
Readers should not be misled by the title of the article, in which its author did not say a word about personal meetings with the poet. So this work can hardly be classified as memoir literature. In fact, we have before us a story about the life and work of Sasha Cherny, which contains many statements from contemporaries about the poet.

Miron Belsky. In the wake of the hidden biography of Sasha Cherny
The author talks about an article by Anatoly Ivanov, who was researching unknown pages of Sasha Cherny’s biography. Inspired by the fascinating story, Miron Belsky went in search of new information about the poet’s family...

Alexander Ratynya. An inheritance passed down through the centuries (which connected Konstantin Roche with Afanasy Fet and Sasha Cherny)
“Having accidentally read in one of the largest newspapers of that time, Son of the Fatherland, an article about the “sorrowful fate of an unfortunate young man abandoned by his family” (and in fact, who fled from his parents), Roche accepts the “exile” into his Zhytomyr home. And instead of the untimely departed adopted son Sergius, another pupil comes into the life of Constantine Roche, by God’s permission, a bearer of the spirit of the new, revolutionary century, in which Roche vainly sought to find his successor. It was Alexander Glikberg, the same one who would soon become known in literature under the pseudonym “Sasha Cherny”.

Alexey Butorov. Poets on the barricades
About the revolutionary poems of Sasha Cherny, published in 1905.

Russian culture of the 20th century
Excerpts from contemporaries’ reviews of Sasha Cherny’s book “Satires,” published in 1910.

Grimaces and dreams, intertwined, fought in the Rhine
Between 1906 and 1907, Sasha Cherny studied at the University of Heidelberg. This article, prepared by Oleg Chumakov based on materials from the newspaper Die Welt, tells about the poet’s perception of pre-war Germany and the way of life of the Germans of that time.

Roman Gul. Sasha Cherny (chapter from the book “I took away Russia”)
Memories of meeting the poet during the years of emigration.

Andrey Sedykh. Anniversary without speeches
A note from an emigrant newspaper in 1930 on the 25th anniversary of Sasha Cherny’s literary activity.

About the work of Sasha Cherny

A.I. Kuprin. About Sasha Cherny and his books
“Sasha Black alone. And this is the beauty of his original personality and that is why the most respectable “publicum” has not yet had time to praise and love him, and that is why he still has few fans and praisers, but these fans-friends really value free, an apt and beautiful word, putting into bizarre, capricious, charming, compressed forms anger, and sorrow, and thoughtful sadness, and deep tenderness, and a peculiar, some kind of intimate, artless pagan understanding of the wonders of nature: children, animals, flowers.”
(pdf format)

Venedikt Erofeev. Sasha Cherny and others
Venedikt Erofeev, in a short essay, formulates his perception of Sasha Cherny in his characteristic manner: “here is a friendly attitude, instead of distant reverence and adoration. Instead of love there is a bosom feeling. And “closeness and complete coincidence of views,” as they write in the communiqué.”

Anatoly Ivanov. Offended love
“Who knows, maybe immersion in the era of Sasha Cherny, where “people whine, decay, run wild,” will help us understand something about ourselves, in our troubled times, and approach our moral position responsibly.”

Yuri Leving. Vladimir Nabokov and Sasha Cherny
The famous literary critic demonstrates with specific examples how strongly the literary activity of Sasha Cherny had on the work of Vladimir Nabokov.
“Nabokov’s experience of using the creative discoveries of his older friend was limited in some cases to tracing thematic solutions, in others small comedic situations served him as nuclei in constructing future storylines. These borrowings were made with ease and even, apparently, with pleasure.”

V.A. Karpov. Sasha Cherny's prose in children's reading
The author analyzes the children's prose of Sasha Cherny, touching, in particular, on the reasons why the writer's later work, which coincided with his emigration, was devoted mainly to children.
(pdf format)

N.K. Yaroshevskaya. The boundaries of the artistic world of the collection “Children’s Island” by Sasha Cherny
“Sasha Cherny’s works for children, which he himself included in a collection called “Children’s Island,” were published in 1921. The book fulfills his desire to dissociate himself from all political programs and trends and live like Robinson on a quiet desert island"

Verbitskaya Victoria. The “pure” power of Sasha Cherny’s “Soldier’s Tales” about “evil spirits”
In his work, the critic, like many other researchers, expresses the idea that emigration, which led to nostalgia, played a decisive role in the development of Cherny’s creativity. Longing for the Motherland forces the writer to turn in “Soldier’s Tales” to Russian folklore and the pre-revolutionary life of the people. The author of the article, in turn, pays special attention to the use of typical characters of pagan and Christian mythology in Sasha Cherny’s stories.

Linor Goralik. Hang all the dogs!
An extremely lively analysis of Sasha Cherny’s collection of short stories “The Diary of Fox Mickey.” The author talks about the image of the main character of the cycle, i.e. Fox Terrier dogs. The main idea is this: by using this cute pet as the main character, Black gets the opportunity to consider the most ordinary things without fear of being branded a “naive moralist.” In addition, in the image of the dog, the author of the article sees traits traditionally attributed to the Russian intelligentsia - reflection, a keen sense of justice, of course, dissatisfaction with the surrounding reality, naturally, combined with absolute inaction.

E.A. Cousin. The principle of alienation in Russian prose of the late 19th – early 20th centuries: “Kashtanka” by A.P. Chekhov and “The Diary of Fox Mickey” by Sasha Cherny
The author refers to the term “defamiliarization”, introduced by V. Shklovsky to denote the process of removing concepts and phenomena from the area of automatic perception into the area of the knowable. Shklovsky, in turn, relies on the theory of “alienation” formulated by Brecht, according to which, in order to give significance to everyday phenomena and details, it is necessary to show them from a different angle as something surprising and incomprehensible. Both Chekhov in “Kashtanka” and Cherny in “The Diaries of Fox Mickey” realize this task, presenting the human world through the prism of a dog’s perception. Of course, the artistic approaches of the two writers have a lot of differences, the analysis of which is also given in the article.

Konstantin Kedrov. Knight of laughter
“Lermontov exclaimed bitterly that life was such an absurd, stupid joke. Sasha Cherny picked up this joke and, as long as he could, joked in unison with this life. He was joking and not even in unison in resonance. Resonance became the peak of fame"

DOMINO. Sasha Cherny: He laughed when it wasn’t funny at all, and when it was funny he didn’t laugh at all...
“Sasha Cherny lives in his satires, in his children's poems, in his soldiers' stories. He lives as long as he is read, and he will always be read, because his poetry is laughter, it is pure humor without any touch.”

Poetry

Poems 1905–1906 from the book “Different Motives”

"Satires" (1910)
This collection includes poems from the cycles “To all the poor in spirit”, “Life”, “Literary Workshop”, “Involuntary Tribute”, “Messages”, “Province”, “Lyrical Satires”.
"Satires and Lyrics" (1911)
The collection includes the cycles “Weeds”, “Bitter Honey”, “Among the Germans”, “Hop” (“Other Strings”).
Poems 1908–1914, not included in the books

"Thirst" (1923)
Cycles of poems “War”, “In Lithuania”, “Alien Sun”, “Russian Pompeii”.
"Children's Island" (1925)
The cycles “Bonfire”, “Animals”, “Songs” were included.

Sasha Cherny is the pseudonym of the famous satirist Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg. The pseudonym was taken from the very flesh of life. Sasha was born on October 13, 1880 and grew up in Odessa, in a large Jewish family with five children, two of whom were Sasha. The light one was called white, and the dark one was called black. Due to the then existing limit of Jewish students in gymnasiums, it was impossible for Sasha to enter the gymnasium. And when the parents suddenly decided to baptize all their children, in Sasha’s opinion, it was already too late to study. He fled to St. Petersburg, but soon realized that he could not survive there alone. The parents did not answer the letters, letting Sasha understand that he had chosen his own path. Sasha was saved from starvation by a wealthy Zhytomyr official who accepted him into his family. The entire further biography of Sasha Cherny is the biography of a satirist poet. In 1905-1906, he actively collaborated with various satirical magazines: “Almanac”, “Journal”, “Hammer”, “Masks”, “Leshy”. But one of his publications in The Spectator on November 27, 1905 caused such a scandal that the magazine was closed. Cherny's first collection of poems, “Different Motives” (1906), was arrested. To avoid arrest himself, he and his wife went to Germany, where he created a cycle of lyrical satires “At the Germans”, poems “Carnival in Heidelberg”, “Corporants”, etc. The level of his poetic skill increased sharply, his horizons expanded, which allowed him to soon after returning from abroad, take the place of one of the poetic leaders in the St. Petersburg weekly Satyricon, where Sasha Cherny finally found his niche. At that time, his poems were literally memorized, they were so topical. In 1910, the collection “Satires” was published, combining cycles of poems published earlier, which ridiculed the Russian man in the street and the vulgarity of the world around him. Then the second book of poems was published - “Satires and Lyrics” (1911). The poet was also published in other publications - in the newspapers “New Day”, “Kievskaya Mysl”, “Russian Rumor”, “Odessa News”, magazines “Modern World”, “Argus”, “Sun of Russia”, and the almanac “Rose Pig”. He looked for support in art, nature, children, and folk life, creating cycles of lyrical miniatures about the village (“Northern Twilight”, “In the Village”, etc.), wrote prose works - “People in Summer” (1910), “First Acquaintance” ( 1912), etc. Another direction of Cherny’s creativity was poetry for children, which he wrote since 1911, and in 1912 he took part in the “Blue Book” created on the initiative of M. Gorky and in the children’s almanac “Firebird”. He tried himself as a translator from German, preparing for publication “The Book of Songs” by G. Heine (1911), “Selected Stories” by G. Safir (1912), translations by R. Demel, K. Hamsun and others. With the beginning of the First World War “ Private Glickberg" went to serve in a field hospital. His impressionability almost deprived him of his sanity and life. Only a loving wife and the opportunity to pour out impressions on paper saved the poet. The impressions received at the front formed the basis for the cycle of poems “War”. After the October revolution, he left Russia among the first emigrants. This decision greatly extended his life and gave him the opportunity to delight readers with his books for many more years. At first, Cherny lived in Vilna, where he wrote poems about Lithuania, the cycle “Russian Pompeii”, in which the poet admits that for him “there is no turning back”, as well as a book of children’s poems “Children’s Island”. In 1920, the poet moved to Berlin, where he worked for more than two years at the publishing houses “Grani”, “Russkaya Gazeta” and “Rule”, in the magazines “Spolokhi”, “Volya Rossii”, and edited the literary department of the magazine “Firebird”. At the same time, his third book of satires, “Thirst,” was published, which became the completion of the work of the Black poet. Since 1924, Alexander has lived in Paris, and now prose occupies an increasingly important place in his work: numerous books for children (“Biblical Tales”, “The Dream of Professor Patrashkin”, “The Sailor Squirrel”, “The Rusty Book”, “The Diary of Fox Mickey” , “Silver Tree”, etc.), the story “Wonderful Summer”, “Frivolous Stories”, “Soldier’s Tales”, the poem “Who Lives Well in Emigration” and other works. In the summer of 1930, Sasha Cherny and his wife settled in a small house in the south of France (La Favière, near Lavender), where he died on August 5, 1932, at the age of 52 - he overstrained his heart while helping neighbors put out a fire. A line from Pushkin’s poem is carved on his tombstone: “Once upon a time there lived a poor knight.” Alexander Mikhailovich actually looked like that same poor knight. Merciless in his satire, in life he was a very sincere and kind person. He could not stay away from someone else's misfortune.

An article about the Russian poet Sasha Cherny, whose name remains forever in the history of Zhitomir.

The Soviet people were asked to forget about Sasha Cherny, if he remembered him, and censorship protected the poet from the younger generation, and a ban was imposed on his writings. It would seem that he is the most famous master of witty political satire in Tsarist Russia, an apt denouncer of the vulgar man in the street, a henchman of the autocracy, a rotten intellectual - and at the same time also a subtle lyricist who influenced the development of Russian poetry of the early twentieth century. Even the subversive of authority, the young Mayakovsky, when asked which of the poets he liked better: Fet, Maikov or Polonsky, answered with a laugh - Sasha Cherny. The future “tribune of the revolution” openly acknowledged his influence on his work, although Sasha murderously ridiculed his then associates and their shocking manifesto “Donkey’s Tail”, writing his “The Birth of Futurism”:

Artist in canvas pants
One day I accidentally sat down on the palette,
He jumped up and rushed about in a hurry:
“Where is the turpentine?!” Come on, I’ll wipe it quickly!”

But, having examined the rainbow cascade,
He is in a trance of creative intuitive trembling
Cut a square from canvas
And...he founded the “Donkey Skin” salon.

Subsequently, he sealed the “agitator, loudmouth, leader” himself, calling him “the red bard from the pub.” “Innovators” from related fields also got it from Sasha Cherny. This is how he presented them in his hilariously funny poem “Misunderstanding,” the full text of which is given at the end of the article.*

The public appreciated him immediately. According to the testimony of Korney Chukovsky: “Having received the latest magazine (meaning the most popular St. Petersburg “Satyricon,” author’s note), the reader, first of all, looked for the poems of Sasha Cherny in it. There wasn’t a student, a doctor, a lawyer who didn’t know them by heart.”

However, in the eyes of the party “educators” all these merits were worthless, since Sasha Cherny dared to emigrate. And only now his wonderful poems are returning to their homeland.

Those who are meeting this poet for the first time should not be mistaken about the name with which he signed his works. It fits very well into a number of such “talking” pseudonyms as Maxim Gorky, Andrei Bely, Demyan Bedny, Artyom Vesely and even Mikhail Golodny and Emil Krotky. Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg called himself Sasha Cherny almost by accident. He also had other pseudonyms, for example, On his own, Heine from Zhitomir, etc. And this one came to mind when I remembered what his family called him, so as not to be confused with a relative, another Sasha Glikberg, unlike him - blond.

The poet was born in 1880 in Odessa, into a wealthy Jewish family. His grandfather Yakov only owned a hardware store, and his father, Mikhail (Mendel) Glikberg, who is usually mentioned as a pharmacist or traveling salesman, served as a traveling representative of a chemical company. Sasha was the eldest of five children whom the hysterical mother took care of, or rather did not want to take care of. Her own children irritated her greatly. This resulted in constant complaints to her husband, who, due to his harsh disposition, could not find anything better than to inflict severe punishment on the children when returning from another trip.

When the time came to study, little Sasha passed the exam to enter the gymnasium, but was not accepted due to the notorious “percentage norm” and studied at home for a year. At first, the father intended to send the future poet to learn the craft. Then I changed my mind and solved the shoulder problem. In one fell swoop, he gave all his children for baptism. So the next year, 10-year-old Sasha became a high school student. He was not very successful in his studies, the situation in the family was, as always, difficult. Surely there were more serious reasons why he ran away from home after the 5th grade. He always kept silent about them.

Through the care of his paternal aunt, the boy was taken to St. Petersburg and placed in a gymnasium with a boarding school, but was expelled for failing in algebra. The “prodigal son” was not accepted at home, and they stopped responding to his letters asking for help. He wandered around Russia, reaching the most extreme poverty and hopelessness. And then a real miracle intervened. Journalist Yablonovsky, who accidentally learned about the fate of the talented boy, wrote about him in the reputable newspaper “Son of the Fatherland.” The article caught the eye of a prominent Zhytomyr official, Konstantin Rosha, an initiator and participant in many charitable causes, who recently lost his son. He took the boy into his home, enrolled him in the Zhytomyr gymnasium, and surrounded him with care. This happened in 1896.

However, Sasha had no luck with gymnasiums. The heavy sacrifice made for this was in vain. The conflict with the director, which he managed to enter into, was so acute that after the end of the school year the young man was expelled, and without the right to admission. We can only guess about the reasons. It is possible that even then Sasha’s sharp wit and ability to make him laugh out loud showed up.

He was an overaged student, so in 1900 he was drafted into the army. He served for two years as a volunteer in the Galician regiment, and then two more as a customs officer on the border with Austria-Hungary. Returning to Zhitomir, Alexander Glikberg took his first steps in the literary field - he became a full-time feuilletonist for the Volynsky Vestnik. It sounds promising, however, they paid him in countermarks to the local theater. Soon the newspaper closed down completely, and he went to St. Petersburg.

The young man was sheltered by the relatives of the kind Konstantin Roche. Waiting for better times, he got a job as a clerk at the Warsaw Railway. The aspiring poet’s immediate supervisor turned out to be Maria Ivanovna Vasilyeva, who took him under her caring wing. They did not suit each other in age, position or education, but nevertheless they became close and got married in 1905. In Maria Ivanovna he found what he did not receive from his own mother - devoted love, energetic care and a secure rear. Marriage allowed him to leave his hateful office job and devote himself to creative activities. His wife freed him from constant worry about his daily bread, from running around editorial offices, negotiations with publishers (he called them “literary crocodiles”), from the little things of everyday life and business life.

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Italy. Upon his return, the poet was able to work calmly, and the results were not long in coming. The very first poem published in this, let me remind you, 1905, by the way, first signed under the pseudonym Sasha Cherny, produced the effect of a bomb exploding. It was listed all over the country, so that the young provincial, as they say, woke up famous the next morning. The poem was called “Nonsense,” but its content was far from nonsense. In light, like a children's rhyme, easily remembered lines, the poet murderously ridiculed no more or less than the most famous statesmen of Russia, Duma deputies, ministers and even the person of the sovereign, to whom he transparently hinted at the explosion of a bomb near the royal residence:

Orange burst
At the Palace Bridge,
Where is the tall gentleman
Vertically challenged?

The magazine “Spectator”, which dared to publish this sedition, was immediately banned. But the year was 1905, the preliminary censorship had already been abolished, so the bird flew out of the cage. The poems of Sasha Cherny were vying with each other in “Hammer”, “Almanac”, “Masks” - satirical magazines, of which a great many proliferated. By 1908, he dared to publish his first collection. Since it also included political satires, the circulation was immediately arrested. The same fate awaited the author if he had not gone abroad on time.

Two years spent in Germany allowed Sasha Cherny to attend a course of lectures at the University of Heidelberg. Returning to St. Petersburg in 1908, over the next three years he was constantly published in Arkady Averchenko’s Satyricon. Publications in this most famous magazine of satire and humor in Russia at that time brought the poet not just popularity, but all-Russian fame. The best “laughers” of the time united around the magazine. The years of work at Satyricon were the best times for Sasha Cherny the poet. And although he achieved real success, he was least of all like a darling of fate, he always tried to stay away from noisy society, and practically did not communicate with writers. The only exceptions were his friends Leonid Andreev and Kuprin. In public, he was most often silent, behaved proudly and directly, and did not tolerate familiarity towards himself. At that time, his new name was on everyone’s lips, but this only irritated him. “Hello, Sasha!” – one journalist once told him on Nevsky, and Alexander Mikhailovich then wrote in rage to Korney Chukovsky: “The devil dared me to come up with such a pseudonym for myself! Now every idiot calls me Sasha!”

The poems of 1908-1912 - the heyday of Sasha Cherny's brilliant satirical talent - are the best among all that he wrote. Books of his poems were reprinted many times, and critics greeted them with unanimous praise. If at first in his satires he cursed the era, mocked it, then later he began to write, as if putting on a mask - either a hated man in the street, or a kind of pitiful intellectual - always different from Sasha Cherny himself. Speaking on behalf of these disgusting masks required a reduction in traditional poetic themes and “democratization” of poetic language, expressed in a parodic comparison of hackneyed high phraseology with intelligentsia jargon and in the use of reduced vulgar vocabulary. Subsequently, this method was brilliantly used by Mikhail Zoshchenko, applying it to prose. And then it was new.

Unexpectedly, what was the choice of a medical instrument in the hands of a surgeon, Mayakovsky, who called himself his student, perceived it as a new poetic norm. He spoke bluntly about how this stormy subverter of authority understood her: “I was pleased by his anti-aestheticism.” But the true style of Sasha Cherny is best illustrated by his most beloved poems by Mayakovsky, such as, for example, “Situation”:

The wife took the last ruble for her curls,
The husband killed by a bench and gumboil,
Calculates monthly loss.
Measly pennies are grunting on the accounts:

Buying an umbrella and firewood made a hole,
And the pink hood is made of paper
Throws the bent bald spot into the sweat.
Son roars. Beaten for a deuce plus.
A little siskin whistles overhead
(Even though the bird of God hasn’t eaten since morning),
A lonely saffron milk sour on a saucer,
But I drank every drop of vodka in the morning.

The little daughter gives the cat an enema under the bed,
In the influx of happiness, with my mouth half open,
And the cat, indulging in gloomy pessimism,
He screams excitedly in a tragic voice.

Eyebrowless sister in a shabby jacket
Rapes a cold piano.
And behind the wall the neighbor is a seamstress
Sings the romance “Understand my sadness.”

How can you not understand? There are cockroaches in the dining room
Leaving the stale bread, we thought a little,
Glasses rattle sympathetically in the buffet
And dampness drips like tears from the ceiling.

Brand-whips in white trousers
In the excitement of lawn tennis
They wear fat butts.

Around the site, in fashionable things
Steep-thighed Astartes
Like in a shopping mall
Calling for gentlemen (...)

Cheeks, necks, chins,
Falling into the bust like a waterfall,
Disappears in the stomach

They sway like in a boat
And, bulging out like silks,
They cry out for beauty.(…)

Like filled buckets
Splayed busts
They float endlessly -

And again the butts and hips...
But above them - be empty! –
Not a single face!

When the poet spoke not on behalf of the mask, but on his own behalf, completely different notes sounded - it was the voice of a suffering soul. However, at that time his favorite weapon was caustic, merciless ridicule, from the arrows of which there seemed to be no defense. As it was written in the pre-war 1914 in the newspaper “Russkoe Slovo”, Sasha Cherny “... mocks modern life, at vulgarities and nonentities..., at Black Hundreds and liberal balalaikas, at false politicians and false aesthetes.”

He did not ignore the very painful question of his own religion, which was so radically resolved for him in childhood. In which of the listed incarnations he acted, touching on Jewry, what flowed from his striking pen at the same time - bile or tears - should be specially discussed.

Let's start with the fact that he did not avoid this topic at all. Here, for example, is one of his masterpieces - the poetic story “Love is not a potato,” set out almost in hexameter:

Aron Farfurnik caught the heiress's daughter
With the poor student Epstein:
They were kissing! Under the plum tree near the old swing.
Aron, kicking Epstein out, crumpled his shirt terribly,
He locked his daughter in the closet and snorted for a long time over the pool,
Where the red fish swam. “Unhappy bastard!” *)

What happened! Epstein was almost eaten by dogs
Madame blew out four handkerchiefs from grief,
And the stormy Farfurnik broke the family tray.
The next morning I woke up. Smoothed out the beaver's tanks,
I sat down with my wife on the sofa, squeezing my hands into my hips.
And he called his swollen daughter from tears.

They sawed, sawed, sawed, but my daughter stood like an idol,
She looked out the window and creaked like an angry parrot:
“I want for Epstein.” - “Be silent!!!” - “I want for Epstein.”
The farfurnik thought and sighed. I didn’t give a word of decision,
He sent a servant somewhere, and he, like a bull,
He stared hard at the carpet. The daughter was locked in the bedroom.

Epstein the starving man quickly responded to the call:
The scoundrel came, lit a cigarette and sat down like at home.
Madame sadly blows her nose into her fifth handkerchief.
Oh, how many depressing words she spun:
“Siberian! Tramp! Lapatson! Porcine trachoma!
A provocateur of the most innocent girl, pure as a poppy!..”

“Sha...” Farfurnik began. “Tell me if you could
Should I at least buy my daughter an umbrella with your miserable funds?
Could you buy her one galosh?!”
Ominous lions lit up in Epstein’s eyes:
“I would have bought it, but no one left an inheritance.”
Farfurnik’s father looks sternly from the wall.

“Aha, young man! But I don't need it! So be it.
Finish your course, put your diploma on the table and get married
I, too, have in my chest not a frog, but a heart...
Even if he marries for a duck, if only your marriage would be happy.
But before your diploma, let the thunder kill you, don’t date.
Otherwise I will break all your arms and legs!”

“Yes, yes,” said the madame. “In the noble bath on Tuesday
They have already hinted quite transparently about you and Rosa, -
It’s their luck that because of the steam I didn’t see who!”
Epstein vowed to live as a recluse
Farfurnik took into account the evil threat
And he walked out, catching sobs from the bedroom with his agitated ears.
In the evening, in the evening the watchman beat
Hit the mallet with all your strength!
Epstein wandered like a jackal
Under the window of my dear Rose.
The lamp went out, the window sobbed,
There is a white, delicate spot in the frame.
Epstein helped - love is not a potato:
Drive through the door, he will burst through the window.
Locked, locked the doors tightly,
They pushed it back with a closet to make it more accurate.
Epstein leaned towards Farfurnik's daughter
And it hurts my lips more and more painfully...

Should I wait, should I wait three years for a diploma?
The rose is blooming - Epstein is no fool:
Rival Poplavsky has three houses
And he also hopes for marriage.

Behind the door, Farfurnik, buried in a pillow,
He snores in a baritone, his wife in a treble.
The watchman mumbles loudly into his mallet,
And the night silently circles the house.
________________________________
*) kaptsan means beggar

The reflection in the poet’s work of his attitude towards his fellow tribesmen was not at all limited to such a caricatured, hilariously funny picture of Jewish life. Involuntary apostasy (this is how he felt his Christianity) gave this reflection a special coloring, in which sarcasm, bitterness, and anger were mixed. But there was also tenderness in him. It clearly shines through the humor in his parody “Song of Songs” published in 1910. Here are its opening lines:

King Solomon sat under a cypress tree
And he ate turkey with rice.
At your feet, like a myth embodied,
Shulamith lay
And, sticking out the pink tip
The only tongue in the world,
Like a cat when she sees milk,
She whispered: “My Solomon, Solomon!”
"Well? - said the king,
Gnawing a paw. –
Open my chest again?
Buy silks for rags?
Amber bed?
Topaz wrist?
Quickly ask the king,
Ask for chicken right away.”(…)

The poet turned to Old Testament themes more than once. This includes the poem “Noah,” and “Bible Tales” addressed to children, one of which (“Why didn’t Moses laugh?”) was even reprinted by Jabotinsky’s Zionist magazine, and much more. Deep Christian motives were not noticed in his work. If the Russian man in the street got it hard from him, then he was also merciless towards the “true Russian Jews.” But Sasha Cherny is especially merciless towards anti-Semites. Following one of the authors he translated from German, he repeats with pleasure: “When a fool has nothing to do, he becomes an anti-Semite.” He ridiculed their wretched views in the poem “Judephobes”:

Jews and Jews,
Chickens and sidelocks,
Save Russia
Sharpen your knives!

The Black Hundreds from the “Union of the Russian People” were not forgotten either; Sasha Cherny nailed them down with deadly precision:

Four moral monsters -
One spy and three donkeys
Called for the sake of the craft
Union of the Russian People.

But criticism is criticism, and when the First World War broke out, the poet signed up as a volunteer and went to the front. He accepted the February Revolution enthusiastically; it brought him out of the severe depression into which the horrors of the war had plunged him. The Provisional Government appointed him deputy commissioner of the Council of Soldiers' Deputies of the Northern Front.

The meaning of the October Revolution did not mislead Sasha Cherny. And, although he, who found himself in Vilna, was offered by the Bolsheviks to head the local newspaper, he refused and went to Germany, then to Kuprin in Italy, then to Paris. Here he actively participates in emigrant publications, writes satirical poems and stories, and poems for children. But every line reveals the melancholy of a man who realized that what seemed alien to him was real, and now, when someone else’s sun really shines for him and other people’s children are playing around him, he himself is a stranger among all these strangers, an outsider everywhere, or, as he He called himself “the secret spy of life.” Here is a picture he spied in the Bois de Boulogne:

The boy climbed on a sticky stick
Swings, whistling,
Thanks for the smile
French child!

In France, Sasha Cherny composed his only love poem, “My Romance.” In it, he describes a touching, chaste date with a young Parisian woman who secretly comes to his bachelor room. And as always with him, the most striking lines are the last lines:

To be clear, after she left
I still have to say
That Lisa is three and a half years old...
Why should we hide the truth?

Sasha Cherny became a children's writer in Russia. Turning to a genre that seemed unexpected for him, this sharp satirist, who bitterly ridiculed the era, began to write magnificent poems for children, and created a series of ingenuous couplets “The Living Alphabet.” According to Chukovsky: “Even from his first attempts, I could not help but see that he should develop into an extraordinary poet for children. The very style of his work, full of humor, rich in clear, specific images, gravitating towards a plot short story, ensured his success with children. This success was greatly facilitated by his rare talent to become infected with childish feelings, completely detaching himself from the psyche of adults.” It is impossible not to agree with these words; Sasha Cherny’s poems for children are tender pearls. How exactly does he find the right tone of conversation with the little man:

“Who lives under the ceiling?”
- Dwarf.
“Does he have a beard?”
- Yes.
“And a shirtfront and a vest?”
- No.
“How does he get up in the morning?”
- Myself.
“Who drinks coffee with him in the morning?”
- Cat.
“How long has he lived there?”
- Year.
“Who runs along the rooftops with him?”
- Mouse.
“Well, what’s his name?”
- Skrut.
“He’s being naughty, isn’t he?”
- Never!..

In exile, Sasha Cherny writes a lot of prose, it is addressed not only to children, but also to adults. The hero of his book “The Diary of Fox Mickey” is a fox terrier, talking about life, people and poetry, and “Soldier's Tales” in some ways anticipated the prose of Mikhail Zoshchenko. He also creates a series of soldiers' stories, where pictures of the front float before the author's eyes, and memories of the war come to life. As Chukovsky notes, the stories are stylized in the spirit of Leskov and Dahl. Their main motive is admiration for the Russian character. Some of these short stories were included in the book “Frivolous Stories,” about which Kuprin later wrote: “In this area (meaning stories about children and soldiers) he belongs here, he is a comrade, and an instigator, and an inventor, and a storyteller, and an improviser, and a subtle, loving observer.”

As for Jewish issues, in the works of the period of emigration it appears only sporadically, which undoubtedly was a consequence of the then absence of an official policy of anti-Semitism in the West. However, in the satirical poem “Who Lives Well in Emigration,” one of the few “lucky ones” is the tailor Aron Davydovich, and in the article “The Voice of the Everyman” there is the following stylized passage:

I will say, as one elderly Jew,
What is perhaps wisest of all:
Revolution is a very good thing, -
Why not?
But the first seventy years -
Not life, but sheer torment!

Wonderfully accurately said, especially about the first 70 years! And how wonderfully in his “Descendants” he ridiculed the eternal refrain-trick, which invariably catches the patient Russian man in the street: “It’s hard, brothers, apparently, the children will live more freely than us.” To endure and suffer for the sake of future generations - Sasha Cherny did not take the bait:

I want some light
For myself while I'm alive.

And he clarifies his thought:

I'm like an owl on the rubble
Broken gods.
In unborn offspring
I have no brothers or enemies.

So, I think, it is no coincidence that his satires, in particular “The Descendants,” inspired Dmitri Shostakovich to create a vocal cycle. An amusing evidence of the popularity of Sasha Cherny is that the False Sasha Cherny allegedly “toured” in Hollywood. But the poet did not live to see these signs of recognition; he died in 1932 under unexpected circumstances. When there was a fire in the small French town of Lavandou, where he lived, Sasha Cherny rushed to help his neighbors. And then, already at home, he had a heart attack. He lived only 52 years. When the poet died, his dog Mickey, the same one in whose name the children's book was written, lay on his owner's chest and died of a broken heart.

As you know, “it’s either good or nothing about the dead,” at least at first. But years pass and everything is put in its place. In the case of Sasha Cherny, whose sharp, caustic satires that caused uncontrollable laughter were enjoyed by many, one could expect the emergence of overestimations, mixed with hidden vulnerability, professional envy or something else, for example, painful nationalism. This is especially expected when you are dealing with an unusual talent who, in turn, has adopted mocking satire, such as, for example, Venedikt Erofeev, who became famous in Samizdat for his murderously funny shocking masterpiece “Moscow - Petushki”. In notes in the margins of diaries, where non-satirists are usually especially merciless and in no way inclined to sentimentality, Venichka, as he liked to call himself, suddenly melted:

When you read antipodean peers, he argues, “you want to either be prostrate in the dust, or throw dust in the eyes of the peoples of Europe, and then get bogged down in something. I want to fall into something, but it’s not clear what, into childhood, into sin, into radiance or into idiocy. The desire, finally, to be killed with a carved blue frame and your corpse thrown in the thickets of euonymus. And so on. And with Sasha Cherny, “it’s good to sit under the black currants” (“eating up on ice-cold curdled milk”) or under a cypress (“and eating turkey with rice”).”

Even the incomparable Vladimir Nabokov, who is painfully sensitive to the slightest flaws in style and merciless to his fellow writers, uttered unexpectedly touched warm words about Sasha Cherny: “There are only a few books left and a quiet, charming shadow.”

The feeling left behind by this poet, who talentedly mocked the shortcomings of his contemporaries, a reserved man whose smile almost no one saw, turned out to be quite unexpected and difficult to define. It's probably tenderness.