Dear friends! The May meeting of our literary salon will be dedicated to the work of the outstanding Russian Soviet poet and translator Veronika Tushnova. Even if you think you are unfamiliar with her name, her lines have surely long lived in your memory.

According to the results of a 2015 sociological survey, the poem “They Do Not Renounce Love” ranked 36th among the 100 most recognizable poetic lines in Russian and world literature.

Tushnova’s creative journey was closely intertwined with the fate of her country. In 1941, following the recommendation of the poet Vera Inber, she entered the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. However, her studies were interrupted by World War II. Together with her mother and young daughter Natasha, Veronika was evacuated to Kazan, where she worked as a doctor in a neurosurgical hospital for wounded Red Army soldiers. In 1943, she returned to Moscow and continued working in a military hospital.

In 1944, her poem “The Surgeon”, dedicated to the renowned physician N. L. Chistyakov, was published in the magazine Novy Mir. That same year, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published her cycle “Poems About My Daughter”, which received a warm response from readers.

The famous actor Vasily Kachalov deeply admired Tushnova’s poetry and, according to contemporaries, often read her poems aloud to family and guests with great emotion.

Language of the event: Russian