Tyorkin in the Other World

Tyorkin in the Other World is a satirical sequel to Tvardovsky’s heroic war-time epic Vasiliy Tyorkin: A Book about a Soldier. Written in the early 1950s, when Tvardovsky was temporarily removed from the editorship of Novy Mir, the poem imagines that Private Tyorkin has died and gone to the ‘Other World’. The joke is that Hell turns out to be like the Soviet Union under Stalin, an oppressive, bureaucratic and culturally conservative society of Dead souls. Although the poem circulated among Moscow intellectuals for several years, it was only published after Khrushchev invited Tvardovsky to his dacha to read it (Sartre and de Beauvoir were also there). In the context of the Thaw, the book was an immediate commercial and critical success, and was turned into a hit stage-play. After the fall of Khrushchev, however, it was allowed to fall out of print.

Author Biography

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky (1910-1971) was a Soviet writer and journalist. As chief editor of Novy Mir from1950 to 1970 he was responsible for publishing Ehrenburg’s The Thaw and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He won the Stalin Prize in 1941, 1946 and 1947 and the Lenin Prize in 1961. He was member of the Directorate of the Soviet Writers Union and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. After his death Soviet astronomers named a minor planet after him.