A memorial evening dedicated to the greatest chronographer of the Great Patriotic War was organized by the Scientific Library of S. Toraighyrov PSU at the end of the Great Victory celebrations. The meeting was held at the Inspiration Club (Vdokhnoveniye), where guests were presented with the verbal journal “A Poet, a Writer, a Soldier. Konstantin Simonov”.
Konstantin Simonov was a real word painter, who managed to tell truly and accurately about the Great Patriotic War. One of his most significant prose works is a four-volume book “The Alive and the Dead”, where he presents the war in its true colors with all its burdens, broken lives, joys and sorrows of ordinary people fighting for their Motherland.
But the apotheosis of the poetic mastership of Konstantin Simonov is his work “Wait for me, and I will come back!” It is a short but an amazingly deep poem, which embodies great warm-heartedness and sincerity. It became a real symbol of hope for millions of people, whom the war drove apart for long four years. Some of them were separated forever. A letter folded in a triangle, in which the lines of the poem were written with great love in the pale light of a dugout, brought hope to everyone and to the whole country. Murmuring the lines of the poem, soldiers conquered inaccessible unnumbered peaks. Every wife, mother, sister and thousands of women throughout the country torn up by the war knew the poem by heart.
These lines are a direct demonstration of the talent of Konstantin Simonov, to whom the God put a pen into hands. This person could do more by a single word than a whole division could do. He could make a word stronger than the war. The words “Wait for me, and I will come back!” became a standing point for millions of people, which didn’t let them get scared by the horrors of the war, by Guderian tank armadas and by the blood-curdling howling of Messerschmitt fleet fighters. These lines are the symbol of true love and faithfulness, the symbol of life.
Very few know that Konstantin Simonov saved many people after the war, when human fates were being milled by the wheels of the punitive justice system of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Many of them were rehabilitated by Simonov during their lifetime of posthumously. Among all these people there were poets-heroes Mussa Jalil, Abdul Alish, Fatyh Karim and many other Motherland defenders, who were repressed and undeservedly reckoned among “enemies of the people”.
Tatyana Doroshenko and Roza Bursagova, students of the FIL-302, Gulzhan Ishimova and Rustam Nigmatullin, students of the EE-402, declaimed the thoughtful poems written by Konstantin Simonov during the meeting.
Students, having got acquainted with the works of Konstantin Simonov, agreed that the books written by this chronographer of the Great Patriotic War are a warning to present and future generations. Yelena Likhanova, a librarian of the belles-lettres sector and the People of Kazakhstan Library, expressed the audience’s impression of the memorial evening: “Let the War remain on book pages, as its lessons are exacting a heavy price.”