Okoliczności śmierci Jaropołka Aleksandrowicza Siemionowa w świetle autobiograficznego wiersza „Słowo do poległych”

Abstract

The primary goal of the article is to introduce to the Polish audience the figure of Yaropolk Aleksandrovich Semyonov (1906–1950), a Russian-Soviet poet, literary scholar and critic, also widely unknown to his native philologists. In 1948, as a result of Stalin’s repressions, he was sent to a prison camp. After two years he was executed by a firing squad and the family was not notified of the killing. The direct cause for the arrest was his 1942 poem A word to the fallen written during the Great Patriotic War in which the author uncovered the organizational and military weakness of the Red Army and spoke negatively about his superiors – both his direct army generals and more distant ones – from the Kremlin. The poem was regarded as counter-revolutionary propaganda and, despite Semyonov’s military merits and the fact that the poem had been written six years before, the author was sentenced to a five-year stay at a prison camp. A word for the fallen is a powerful testament of ruthlessness, cynicism and bureaucracy of the Soviet system which was firmly intolerant of the truth showing its degeneration and non-humanitarian approach, a system which allowed careers to progress at any cost, even in such radical circumstances as the Great Patriotic War.