Wait for Me (poem)

Wait for Me (Жди меня), written by the Russian poet and playwright turned war correspondent Konstantin Simonov, is one of the best known Russian World War II poems. It was written by Simonov in 1941 after he left his love Valentina Serova behind to take on his new duties of war correspondent on the battlefront.

Simonov and Serova were married in 1943. Their relationship was a troubled one. During the war it was widely rumored that Serova was a mistress of Gen. K.K. Rokossovski. While it's true that Serova, working as a hospital volunteer, met Rokossovski several times while he was recovering from a wound from a shell fragment in early 1942, there is no evidence that they were lovers.[1] Rokossovski already had a mistress at this time, Dr. Lt. Galina Talanova, with whom he had a daughter in 1945.[2]

The poem was notably referenced in "Red Star: The Soviet Union (1941–1943)", the eleventh episode of the ITV documentary series The World at War.[3]

"Wait for Me" is given in its entirety at the List of Russian language poets.

Notes

  1. ↑ Braithwaite, Rodric; Moscow, 1941, Vintage Books, New York, 2006, p 295
  2. ↑ Braithwaite, Rodric; Moscow, 1941, Vintage Books, New York, 2006, p 208
  3. ↑ Excerpt from World at War at youtube.com Retrieved March 18, 2010

External links


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, April 22, 2014. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.