Marshak's stories. All books by Samuel Marshak

Old Grandpa Kohl

There was a cheerful king.

He shouted loudly to his retinue:

Hey, pour us some cups,

Fill our pipes,

Yes, call my violinists, trumpeters,

Call my violinists!

There were violins in the hands of his violinists,

All the trumpeters had trumpets,

Between the swamps from a small well

The stream flows without stopping.

An inconspicuous clean stream,

Not wide, not bell, not deep.

You will cross it over the plank,

And look - the stream spilled into a river,

At least ford this river in some places

And the chicken will move on in the summer.

But the springs and streams water it,

And snow and showers of summer thunderstorms,

Works are divided into pages

Since childhood, each of us remembers cute fairy tales for children about the “absent-minded one from Basseynaya Street” or a funny story about a woman who “checked in a sofa, a cardigan, a suitcase as luggage...”. You can ask any person WHO wrote these extraordinary works, and everyone, without thinking for a second, will blurt out: this poems by Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak.

Samuel Yakovlevich Marshak created a huge number of poems for children. Throughout his life he was a good friend to children. All his poems lovingly teach children to enjoy the beauty of the poetic word. With his children's fairy tales, Marshak easily paints colorful pictures of the world around him., tells interesting and educational stories, and also teaches to dream about the distant future. Samuil Yakovlevich tries to write children's poems at a very early age. At the age of 12 he began to write entire poems. The writer’s very first collections of poems for children began to appear more than seventy-five years ago. We get acquainted with Marshak's children's fairy tales quite early. When we were very young children, we listened, watched and read by heart his children’s fairy tales with extraordinary pleasure: “The Mustachioed and Striped One”, “Children in a Cage”. A famous poet and professional translator, playwright and teacher, and, among other things, an editor - this is the enormous creative baggage of Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak, read poetry which is simply necessary.

WORKS FOR CHILDREN.
FAIRY TALES. SONGS. PUZZLES.
A FUN JOURNEY FROM A TO Z.
POEMS OF DIFFERENT YEARS.
STORIES IN VERSE

Preparation of the text and notes by V. I. Leibson

* ABOUT ME *

(Autobiography-preface by S. Ya. Marshak, written by him for a collection of selected poems in the series “Library of Soviet Poetry” (M. 1964).)

I was born in 1887 on October 22 old style (November 3 new) in the city of Voronezh.
I wrote this phrase, usual for life stories, and thought: how can I fit a long life, full of many events, into a few pages of a short autobiography? One list of memorable dates would take up a lot of space.
But this small collection of poems written in different years (from approximately 1908 to 1963) is, in essence, my short autobiography. Here the reader will find poems that reflect different periods of my life, starting with my childhood and adolescence years spent on the outskirts of Voronezh and Ostrogozhsk.
My father, Yakov Mironovich Marshak, worked as a foreman in factories (that’s why we lived on the factory outskirts). But work in small artisanal factories did not satisfy the gifted man, who self-taught himself in the basics of chemistry and was constantly engaged in various experiments. In search of a better use of his strengths and knowledge, the father and his entire family moved from city to city, until he finally settled permanently in St. Petersburg. The memory of these endless and difficult journeys was preserved in poems about my childhood.
In Ostrogozhsk I entered the gymnasium. He passed the exams with straight A's, but was not accepted immediately due to the percentage norm that existed at that time for Jewish students. I started writing poetry even before I learned to write. I owe a lot to one of my gymnasium teachers, Vladimir Ivanovich Teplykh, who strove to instill in his students a love of strict and simple language, devoid of pretentiousness and banality.
So I would have lived in small, quiet Ostrogozhsk until I graduated from high school, if not for an accidental and completely unexpected turn in my fate.
Soon after my father found a job in St. Petersburg, my mother and her younger children also moved there. But even in the capital, our family lived on the outskirts, alternately behind all the outposts - Moscow, Narva and Nevskaya.
Only me and my older brother remained in Ostrogozhsk. It was even more difficult for us to transfer to the St. Petersburg gymnasium than to enter the Ostrogozh one. By chance, during the summer holidays, I met the famous critic Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov in St. Petersburg. He greeted me unusually cordially and warmly, as he greeted many young musicians, artists, writers, and performers.
I remember the words from Chaliapin’s memoirs: “This man seemed to embrace me with his soul.”
Having become acquainted with my poems, Vladimir Vasilyevich gave me a whole library of classics, and during our meetings he talked a lot about his acquaintance with Glinka, Turgenev, Herzen, Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy. Mussorgsky. Stasov was for me like a bridge almost to the Pushkin era. After all, he was born in January 1824, before the Decembrist uprising, in the year of Byron’s death.
In the fall of 1902, I returned to Ostrogozhsk, and soon a letter arrived from Stasov that he had achieved my transfer to the St. Petersburg 3rd gymnasium - one of the few where, after the reform of Minister Vannovsky, the teaching of ancient languages was fully preserved. This gymnasium was more formal and official than my Ostrogozh one. Among the lively and dapper metropolitan high school students, I seemed - to myself and to others - a modest and timid provincial. I felt much freer and more confident in Stasov’s house and in the spacious halls of the Public Library, where Vladimir Vasilyevich was in charge of the art department. I met everyone here - professors and students, composers, artists and writers, famous and unknown. Stasov took me to the Museum of the Academy of Arts to look at the wonderful drawings of Alexander Ivanov, and in the library he showed me a collection of popular popular prints with inscriptions in poetry and prose. It was he who first interested me in Russian fairy tales, songs and epics.
At Stasov’s dacha, in the village of Starozhilovka, in 1904, I met Gorky and Chaliapin, and this meeting led to a new turn in my destiny. Having learned from Stasov that I had been getting sick often since moving to St. Petersburg, Gorky invited me to settle in Yalta. And he immediately turned to Chaliapin: “Shall we arrange this, Fedor?” - “We’ll arrange it, we’ll arrange it!” - Chaliapin answered cheerfully.
And a month later, news came from Gorky from Yalta that I had been accepted into the Yalta gymnasium and would live with his family, with Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova.
I arrived in Yalta when the memory of the recently deceased Chekhov was still fresh there. This collection contains poems in which I remember the orphaned Chekhov’s house I saw for the first time on the edge of the city.
I will never forget how warmly Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova, who was still very young at that time, greeted me. Alexei Maksimovich was no longer in Yalta, but even before his new arrival, the house where the Peshkov family lived was, as it were, electrified by the impending revolution.
In 1905, the resort town was unrecognizable. Here for the first time I saw fiery banners on the streets, heard speeches and songs of the revolution in the open air. I remember how Alexey Maksimovich arrived in Yalta, shortly before being released from the Peter and Paul Fortress. During this time, he became noticeably haggard, paler, and grew a small reddish beard. At Ekaterina Pavlovna's he read aloud the play "Children of the Sun" he wrote in the fortress.
Soon after the stormy months of 1905, widespread arrests and searches began in Yalta. Here at that time the fierce mayor, General Dumbadze, ruled. Many fled the city to avoid arrest. Returning to Yalta from St. Petersburg in August 1906 after the holidays, I did not find the Peshkov family here.
I was left alone in the city. He rented a room somewhere in the Old Bazaar and gave lessons. During these months of loneliness, I voraciously read new literature, previously unknown to me - Ibsen, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, our symbolist poets. It was not easy to understand literary trends that were new to me, but they did not shake the foundation that Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Tyutchev, Fet, Tolstoy and Chekhov, the folk epic, Shakespeare and Cervantes firmly laid in my mind.
In the winter of 1906, the director of the gymnasium called me to his office. Under strict secrecy, he warned me that I was in danger of expulsion from the gymnasium and arrest, and advised me to leave Yalta as quietly and quickly as possible.
And so I found myself in St. Petersburg again. Stasov had died shortly before, Gorky was abroad. Like many other people my age, I had to make my way into literature on my own, without anyone’s help. I began publishing in 1907 in almanacs, and later in the newly emerged magazine "Satyricon" and in other weeklies. Several poems written in early youth, lyrical and satirical, are included in this book.
Among the poets whom I already knew and loved, Alexander Blok occupied a special place in these years. I remember with what excitement I read my poems to him in his modestly furnished office. And the point here was not only that in front of me was a famous poet who already owned the minds of young people. From the first meeting, he struck me with his unusual - open and fearless - truthfulness and some kind of tragic seriousness. So thoughtful were his words, so alien to the vanity of his movements and gestures. Blok could often be found on white nights walking alone along the straight streets and avenues of St. Petersburg, and he seemed to me then as if the embodiment of this sleepless city. Most of all, his image is associated in my memory with the St. Petersburg Islands. In one of my poems I wrote:

Neva has been speaking in poetry for a long time.
Nevsky is like a page from Gogol.
The entire Summer Garden is Onegin's chapter.
The Islands remember Blok,
And Dostoevsky wanders along Razyezzhaya...

At the very beginning of 1912, I secured the consent of several editors of newspapers and magazines to print my correspondence and went to study in England. Soon after our arrival, my young wife, Sofya Mikhailovna, and I entered the University of London: I - to the Faculty of Arts (in our opinion - philological), my wife - to the Faculty of Exact Sciences.
At my faculty, we thoroughly studied the English language, its history, as well as the history of literature. Particularly much time was devoted to Shakespeare. But, perhaps, the university library made me most familiar with English poetry. In the cramped rooms, completely lined with cabinets, overlooking the busy Thames, teeming with barges and steamships, I first learned what I later translated - sonnets by Shakespeare, poems by William Blake, Robert Burns, John Keats, Robert Browning, Kipling. In this library I also came across wonderful English children's folklore, full of whimsical humor. My long-standing acquaintance with our Russian children's folklore helped me to recreate in Russian these classical poems, songs and jokes that are difficult to translate.
Since our literary earnings were barely enough to live on, my wife and I had the opportunity to live in the most democratic areas of London - first in the northern part, then in the poorest and most densely populated - eastern, and only in the end did we get to one of the central areas near The British Museum, where many foreign students like us lived.
And during the holidays, we took walks around the country, walking along two southern counties (regions) - Devonshire and Cornwall. During one of our long walks, we met and became friends with a very interesting forest school in Wales (“School of Simple Life”), with its teachers and children.
All this had an impact on my future destiny and work.
In my early youth, when I loved lyric poetry most of all, and most often submitted satirical poems to print, I could not even imagine that over time translations and children's literature would occupy a large place in my work. One of my first poems, published in "Satyricon" ("Complaint"), was an epigram on translators of that time, when we published many translations from French, Belgian, Scandinavian, Mexican, Peruvian and all sorts of other poetry. The craving for everything foreign was so great at that time that many poets flaunted foreign names and words in their poems, and a certain writer even chose for himself a sonorous pseudonym similar to a royal name - “Oscar of Norway.” Only the best poets of that time cared about the quality of their translations. Bunin translated Longfellow's "Hiawatha" in such a way that this translation could take place next to his original poems. The same can be said about the translations of Bryusov from Verhaeren and Armenian poets, about some translations of Balmont from Shelley and Edgar Poe, Alexander Blok from Heine. We can name several more talented and thoughtful translators. And most poetic translations were the work of literary artisans, who often distorted both the original from which they were translated and the native language.
At that time, the most popular literature for children was made by the hands of artisans. The golden fund of the children's library was the classics, Russian and foreign, folklore and those stories, short stories and essays that were given to children from time to time by the best modern writers, popularizers of science and teachers. Sweet and helpless poems and sentimental stories predominated in pre-revolutionary children's literature (especially in magazines), the heroes of which were, in Gorky's words, “disgustingly charming boys” and the same girls.
It’s not surprising that I had a deep prejudice then towards children’s books with gold-embossed bindings or cheap, colorful covers.
I began translating poetry in England, working in our quiet university library. And I translated not by order, but out of love - just as I wrote my own lyric poems. My attention was first attracted to English and Scottish folk ballads, the poet of the second half of the 18th and the first quarter of the 19th centuries, William Blake, who was famous and included in the classics many years after his death, and his contemporary, who died in the 18th century, the national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns .
I continued to work on translating the poems of both poets after returning to my homeland. My translations of folk ballads and poems by Wordsworth and Blake were published in 1915-1917 in the magazines “Northern Notes”, “Russian Thought”, etc.
And I came to children's literature later - after the revolution,
I returned from England to my homeland a month before the First World War. I was not accepted into the army because of poor eyesight, but I stayed for a long time in Voronezh, where at the beginning of 1915 I went to be drafted. Here I plunged headlong into work, into which life itself gradually and imperceptibly drew me. The fact is that at that time the tsarist government resettled many residents of the front line, mainly from the poorest Jewish towns, to the Voronezh province. The fate of these refugees depended entirely on voluntary public assistance. I remember one of the Voronezh buildings, which housed a whole place. Here the bunks were houses, and the passages between them were streets. It seemed as if an anthill with all its inhabitants had been moved from place to place. My job was to help displaced children.
I developed an interest in children long before I began writing books for them. Without any practical purpose, I visited St. Petersburg primary schools and orphanages, loved to invent fantastic and funny stories for the children, and enthusiastically took part in their games. I became even closer to the children in Voronezh when I had to take care of their shoes, coats and blankets.
And yet, the help we provided to the refugee children had a tinge of charity.
I established a deeper and more permanent connection with children only after the revolution, which opened up wide scope for initiative in matters of education.
In Krasnodar (formerly Yekaterinodar), where my father worked at a factory and where our whole family moved in the summer of 1917, I worked for a local newspaper, and after the restoration of Soviet power, I was in charge of the section of orphanages and colonies of the regional department of public education. Here, with the help of the head of the department M.A. Aleksinsky, I and several other writers, artists and composers organized in 1920 one of the first theaters for children in our country, which soon grew into a whole “Children’s Town” with its own school, children’s a garden, a library, carpentry and metalworking workshops and various clubs.
Remembering these years, you don’t know what to be more surprised at: the fact that in a country depleted by intervention and civil war, a “Children’s Town” could arise and exist for several years, or the dedication of its workers, who were content with meager rations and earnings.
But the theater staff included such workers as Dmitry Orlov (later People's Artist of the RSFSR, actor of the Meyerhold Theater, and then of the Moscow Art Theater), as well as the oldest Soviet composer V. A. Zolotarev and others.
Mostly two people wrote plays for the theater - me and the poetess E. I. Vasilyeva-Dmitrieva. This was the beginning of my poetry for children, which has a significant place in this collection.
Looking back, you see how every year I became more and more fascinated by working with and for children. "Children's Town" (1920-1922), the Leningrad Theater for Young Spectators (1922-1924), the editorial office of the magazine "New Robinson" (1924-1925), the children's and youth department of Lengosizdat, and then the "Young Guard" and, finally, the Leningrad editorial office Detgiza (1924-1937).
The magazine "New Robinson" (which at first bore the modest and unpretentious name "Sparrow") played an important role in the history of our children's literature. It already contained the sprouts of that new and original thing that distinguishes this literature from the previous, pre-revolutionary one. Boris Zhitkov, Vitaly Bianchi, M. Ilyin, and the future playwright Evgeny Schwartz began to appear on its pages for the first time.
Even greater opportunities opened up for the front desk and other magazine employees when we started working at the publishing house. Over the thirteen years of this work, the publishing houses under whose jurisdiction the editors were changed, but mainly the editors themselves did not change, tirelessly searching for new authors, new topics and genres of fiction and educational literature for children. The editorial staff were convinced that a children's book should and can be a work of high art, which does not allow any discounts on the age of the reader.
Arkady Gaidar, M. Ilyin, V. Bianki, L. Panteleev, Evg. presented their first books here. Charushin, T. Bogdanovich, D. Kharms, A. Vvedensky, Elena Danko, Vyach. Lebedev, N. Zabolotsky, L. Budogoskaya and many other writers. Alexei Tolstoy’s book “The Adventures of Pinocchio” was also published here.
We did not know at that time how closely our work was followed by A. M. Gorky, who was then in Italy, who attached paramount importance to children's literature. Even in the very first years of the revolution, he founded the magazine for children “Northern Lights”, and then, with the participation of Korney Chukovsky and Alexander Benois, edited the cheerful and festive children’s almanac “Yelka”.
My communication with Alexei Maksimovich was interrupted since the time of his departure abroad in 1906.
And in 1927, I received a letter from him from Sorrento, in which he spoke with praise about the books of Boris Zhitkov, Vitaly Bianchi and mine, as well as about the drawings of V.V. Lebedev, who worked in our editorial office hand in hand with me. Since then, not a single outstanding book for children has escaped Gorky's attention. He rejoiced at the appearance of the story “The Shkid Republic” by L. Panteleev and G. Belykh, the publication of “The Story of the Great Plan” and the book “Mountains and People” by M. Ilyin. In the almanac published under his editorship, he included the children's book published by us by the famous physicist M. P. Bronstein, “Solar Matter.”
And when in 1929-1930 the combined forces of the most irreconcilable Rappists and dogmatists from pedology took up arms against me and our entire editorial board, Alexey Maksimovich issued an angry rebuke to all the persecutors of fantasy and humor in children's books (articles “The Man Whose Ears Are Plugged with Cotton,” “About irresponsible people and about children’s books of our days”, etc.).
I remember how, after one of the meetings on children’s literature, Gorky asked me in his soft, muffled bass voice:
“Well, did they finally allow the inkwell to talk to the candle?
And he added, coughing, completely seriously:
- Refer to me. I myself heard them talking. By God!"
In 1933, Gorky invited me to his place in Sorrento to outline the program for the future - as we called it then - Detizdat and to work on a letter (memorandum) to the Party Central Committee on the organization of the world's first and unprecedented in scale state publishing house for children's literature .
When the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers met in Moscow in 1934, Alexey Maksimovich proposed that my speech (“On Great Literature for Little Ones”) be heard at the congress immediately after his report, as a co-report. By this he wanted to emphasize the significance and importance of children's books in our time.
My last meeting with Gorky was in Tesseli (in Crimea) about two months before his death. He gave me the lists of books he planned for publication for children of early and middle age, as well as a project for a sliding geographical map and a geological globe.
The following year, 1937, our editorial board, in the same composition as it had worked in the previous years, disbanded. Two editors were arrested for slanderous libel. True, after some time they were released, but in fact the previous editorial office ceased to exist. Soon I moved to Moscow.
The editorial office took a lot of my energy and left little time for my own literary work, and yet I remember it with satisfaction and with a feeling of deep gratitude to my fellow workers, who were so selflessly and selflessly devoted to the work. These comrades were the wonderful artist V.V. Lebedev, talented writers-editors Tamara Grigorievna Gabbe, Evgeny Schwartz, A. Lyubarskaya, Leonid Savelyev, Lidiya Chukovskaya, Z. Zadunayskaya.
Kukryniksy - M.V. Kupriyanov, P.N. Krylov and N.A. Sokolov.
Satirical poems of the post-war years were directed mainly against forces hostile to peace.
The text of the oratorio, which I wrote for the composer Sergei Prokofiev, is also dedicated to the cause of peace. I worked with him on the cantata “Winter Fire”.
And finally, in 1962, my “Selected Lyrics” was published for the first time.
Now I continue to work in the genres in which I worked before. I write lyric poetry, have written new children's books in verse, am translating Burns and Blake, working on new articles on craft, and recently returned to drama - I wrote the comedy-fairy tale "Smart Things."
S. MARSHAK
Yalta, 1963

* FAIRY TALES. SONGS. PUZZLES *

*THE STORY BEGINS*

Once,
Two,
Three,
Four.
The story begins:
In the one hundred and thirteenth apartment
The giant lives with us.

He builds towers on the table,
Builds a city in five minutes.
Faithful horse and home elephant
They live under his table.

He takes it out of the closet
Long-legged giraffe
And from the desk drawer -
Long-eared donkey.

Full of heroic strength,
He is from home to gate
A whole passenger train
Leads on a string.

And when there are big puddles
Spills in the spring
A giant serves in the navy
The youngest sergeant major.

He has a sailor's peacoat,
There are anchors on the peacoat.
Cruisers and destroyers
It leads across the seas.

Steamboat after steamship
It leads out into the ocean.
And it grows every year,
This glorious giant!

Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak. Works for children. Volume 1
BALL
MUSTACHIOED - STRIPED
TWO THRUSHES
VANKA-STANDA
LARGE POCKET
ZOO
ELEPHANT
GIRAFFE
TIGER CUB
ZEBRAS

Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak (1887-1964) - Russian Soviet poet, playwright, translator, literary critic.

Winner of the Lenin Prize (1963) and 4 Stalin Prizes (1942, 1946, 1949, 1951).

Samuel Marshak was born on November 3, 1887 in Voronezh in the Chizhovka settlement, into a Jewish family. His father, Yakov Mironovich Marshak (1855-1924), worked as a foreman at a soap factory; mother - Evgenia Borisovna Gitelson - was a housewife. The surname “Marshak” is an abbreviation (Hebrew: מהרש"ק‏‎‎‎) meaning “Our teacher Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Kaydanover” and belongs to the descendants of this famous rabbi and Talmudist (1624-1676).

Samuel spent his early childhood and school years in the town of Ostrogozhsk near Voronezh. He studied in 1899-1906 at the Ostrogozh, 3rd St. Petersburg and Yalta gymnasiums. At the gymnasium, the literature teacher instilled a love for classical poetry, encouraged the future poet’s first literary experiments and considered him a child prodigy.

One of Marshak’s poetic notebooks fell into the hands of V.V. Stasov, a famous Russian critic and art critic, who took an active part in the fate of the young man. With the help of Stasov, Samuil moves to St. Petersburg and studies at one of the best gymnasiums. He spends whole days in the public library where Stasov worked.

In 1904, at Stasov’s house, Marshak met Maxim Gorky, who showed great interest in him and invited him to his dacha in Yalta, where Marshak lived in 1904-1906. He began publishing in 1907, publishing the collection “The Zionids,” dedicated to Jewish themes; one of the poems was written on the death of Theodor Herzl. At the same time, he translated several poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik from Yiddish and Hebrew.

When Gorky's family was forced to leave Crimea due to repression by the tsarist government after the 1905 revolution, Marshak returned to St. Petersburg, where his father, who worked at a factory behind the Nevskaya Zastava, had by that time moved.

In 1911, Samuel Marshak, together with his friend, the poet Yakov Godin, and a group of Jewish youth made a long journey through the Middle East: from Odessa they sailed by ship, heading to the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean - Turkey, Greece, Syria and Palestine. Marshak went there as a correspondent for the St. Petersburg General Newspaper and the Blue Journal. The lyrical poems inspired by this trip are among the most successful in the work of the young Marshak (“We lived in a camp in a tent…” and others).

On this trip, Marshak met Sofia Mikhailovna Milvidskaya (1889-1953), with whom they married soon after their return. At the end of September 1912, the newlyweds went to England. There Marshak studied first at the Polytechnic, then at the University of London (1912-1914). During the holidays, he traveled a lot on foot around England, listening to English folk songs. Even then he began working on translations of English ballads, which later made him famous.

In 1914, Marshak returned to his homeland, worked in the provinces, and published his translations in the journals “Northern Notes” and “Russian Thought”. During the war years he was involved in helping refugee children.

In 1915, he lived with his family in Finland in the natural sanatorium of Dr. Lübeck.

In 1918, he lived in Petrozavodsk, worked in the Olonets provincial department of public education, then fled to the South - to Yekaterinodar, where he collaborated in the newspaper “Morning of the South” under the pseudonym “Doctor Fricken”. He published poems and anti-Bolshevik feuilletons there.

In 1919 he published (under the pseudonym “Doctor Fricken”) the first collection “Satires and Epigrams”.

In 1920, while living in Yekaterinodar, Marshak organized a complex of cultural institutions for children there, in particular, he created one of the first children's theaters in Russia and wrote plays for it. In 1923, he published his first poetic children's books ("The House That Jack Built", "Children in a Cage", "The Tale of the Stupid Mouse"). He is the founder and first head of the English language department of the Kuban Polytechnic Institute (now Kuban State Technological University).

In 1922, Marshak moved to Petrograd, together with folklorist Olga Kapitsa, he headed the studio of children's writers at the Institute of Preschool Education of the People's Commissariat for Education, organized (1923) the children's magazine "Sparrow" (in 1924-1925 - "New Robinson"), where among Others published were such masters of literature as B. S. Zhitkov, V. V. Bianki, E. L. Schwartz. For several years, Marshak also headed the Leningrad edition of Detgiz, Lengosizdat, and the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house. He was associated with the magazine “Chizh”. He led the “Literary Circle” (at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers). In 1934, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, S. Ya. Marshak made a report on children's literature and was elected a member of the board of the USSR Writers' Union. In 1939-1947 he was a deputy of the Moscow City Council of Workers' Deputies.

In 1937, the children's publishing house created by Marshak in Leningrad was destroyed, its students were repressed at different times - in 1941 A. I. Vvedensky, in 1937 N. M. Oleinikov, in 1938 N. A. Zabolotsky, in 1937 T. G. was arrested . Gabbe, Kharms was arrested in 1942. Many have been fired. In 1938, Marshak moved to Moscow.

During the Soviet-Finnish War (1939-1940) he wrote for the newspaper “On Guard of the Motherland.”

During the Great Patriotic War, the writer actively worked in the genre of satire, publishing poems in Pravda and creating posters in collaboration with the Kukryniksy. Actively contributed to fundraising for the Defense Fund.

In 1960, Marshak published the autobiographical story “At the Beginning of Life,” and in 1961, “Education with Words” (a collection of articles and notes on poetic craft).

Almost throughout his literary career (more than 50 years), Marshak continued to write both poetic feuilletons and serious, “adult” lyrics. In 1962, he published the collection “Selected Lyrics”; He also owns a separately selected cycle “Lyrical Epigrams”.

In addition, Marshak is the author of classic translations of sonnets by William Shakespeare, songs and ballads of Robert Burns, poems by William Blake, W. Wordsworth, J. Keats, R. Kipling, E. Lear, A. A. Milne, J. Austin, Hovhannes Tumanyan, as well as works of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Armenian and other poets. He also translated poems by Mao Zedong.

Marshak's books have been translated into many languages of the world. For his translations from Robert Burns, Marshak was awarded the title of honorary citizen of Scotland.

Marshak stood up for Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn several times. From the first he demanded “to quickly get translations of texts on Lenfilm”; for the second he stood up for Tvardovsky, demanding that his works be published in the magazine “New World”. His last literary secretary was V.V. Pozner.

Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak died on July 4, 1964 in Moscow. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery (site No. 2).

Family
In 1915, the Marshak family suffered a misfortune: in Ostrogozhsk, their daughter Nathanael (born in 1914 in England) died from burns after knocking over a samovar with boiling water.

The eldest son Immanuel (1917-1977), Soviet physicist, winner of the Stalin Prize of the third degree (1947) for developing a method of aerial photography, as well as a translator (in particular, he owns the Russian translation of Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice”).
Grandson - Yakov Immanuelevich Marshak (b. 1946), narcologist.
The youngest son Yakov (1925-1946) died of tuberculosis.
Sister Leah (ps. Elena Ilyina) (1901-1964), writer.
Brother Ilya (ps. M. Ilyin; 1896-1953), writer, one of the founders of Soviet popular science literature.

The name of Marshak Samuil Yakovlevich is known all over the world. More than one generation has grown up on the wonderful work of the writer. Basically everyone knows Marshak as a children's writer, but Samuil Yakovlevich was also a poet, translator and playwright. Let's get acquainted with what works Marshak wrote during his creative life.

The writer's earlier work

What works did Marshak write in childhood? These were poems that the boy began to compose at the age of 4. The first works were written in Hebrew, since Marshak was born into a Jewish family. Little Samuel grew up in the city of Ostrogozhsk, not far from Voronezh. The boy's father was an educated man and encouraged his interests. In search of better work, the family often changed their place of residence. In 1902, the poet's father found a permanent job in St. Petersburg and moved his entire family there. Marshak's first works for children appeared when he was only 12 years old.

After moving to St. Petersburg, Samuil Yakovlevich meets the critic Vladimir Stasov, who favorably accepts the poet’s work. During this period, Marshak created his first serious creations of a political nature. The writer meets Gorky and lives with his family in Yalta for two years. The first collection of Samuil Yakovlevich “Sionids” is published.

Marshak S. Ya. Poems for children

In 1912, the writer went to study in London, where he discovered new talents - translating poetry. Marshak began translating poems by famous writers such as Byron, Milne, Kipling. It is to Samuil Yakovlevich that we are grateful for the poem “The House That Jack Built.” The writer's first book is named after this poem and also contains English songs. The collection was published in 1923.

Returning to the city, he organizes a “Children’s Town”, which includes a theater and libraries. Marshak begins to stage plays based on his creations. This marks the beginning of a new stage in the poet’s work - poems and plays for children. What works did Marshak write for the little ones? These are still popular today: “Children in a Cage”, “Circus”, “Yesterday and Today”, “Poodle”, “So Absent-Minded” and many others. The writer’s fairy tales became especially famous: “Smart Things”, “Cat’s House” and “Twelve Months”.

Lyrics and satire in the writer’s works

What works did Marshak write, besides children's poems? creations that the writer published since 1907 in almanacs and magazines. In the forties, Samuil published the collection “Poems 1941-1946,” which includes 17 poems “From a lyric notebook.” Over the course of his life, new works were added to this cycle. For the collection “Selected Lyrics” Marshak received the Lenin Prize in 1963.

Another style in which the writer worked was satire. Collections of satiristic poems were published in 1959 and 1964. Marshak also published his feuilletons, epigrams and parodies in newspapers and magazines.

The writer's poems, plays and other works have been translated into many languages and are popular all over the world. Marshak's fairy tale "The Twelve Months" is included in the school curriculum. Some of the writer’s works were filmed and fell in love with young viewers.