Demyan Bedny

Demyan Bedny Poems

Demyan Bedny Biography

Yefim Alekseevich Pridvorov (April 13, 1883 — May 25, 1945), better known by the pen name Demyan Bedny (Damian the Poor), was a Soviet Russian poet, Bolshevik and satirist. Efim Pridvorov was born to a poor family in Hubivka village, in what is now Kirovohrad Oblast in Ukraine. He attended the village school followed by a feldsher training college in Kiev. This was followed by 4 years of military service. In 1904, he entered the philological and historical faculty of Petersburg University. His university years coincided with the heady times of the 1905 Revolution, and Pridvorov, like most students, became an ardent supporter of the revolution. From 1911 he began to be published in Communist newspapers, such as Pravda and in 1912 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). Also in 1911, he published the poem Of Demyan Bedny, which led to him being known by the name, and began a private correspondence with Vladimir Lenin which was said to develop into a long-lasting personal friendship. His first collected works were published in Basni (Fables) in 1913. During World War I, he once again saw service as a feldsher and was decorated. He was a steadfast supporter of the Bolshevik cause throughout the Russian Revolution and Civil War, writing agitprop from the frontlines. For this he was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner in 1923, followed by the Order of Lenin in 1933. In the 1920s and 30s, he was very popular and variously supported by the Soviet regime. The town of Spassk, Penza Oblast was even renamed Bednodemyanovsk in his honour. After the civil war, Bedny became a writer of ardent anti-religious verse. In 1938, Bedny was stripped of membership in the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Writers, but slowly he regained the favour of Stalin through the years of World War II. His poem commemorating the Soviet victory was published in Pravda on May 9, 1945. Bedny died two weeks later, on May 25.)

The Best Poem Of Demyan Bedny

No One Knew

It was a day like any other,
The same dull sky, the same drab street.
There was the usual angry pother
From the policeman on his beat.
Proud of his fine new miter's luster,
The archpriest strutted down the nave;
And the pub rocked with brawl and bluster,
Where scamps gulped down what fortune gave.
The market women buzzed and bickered
Like flies above the honeypots.
The burghers' wives bustled and dickered,
Eyeing the drapers' latest lots.
An awe-struck peasant stared and stuttered,
Regarding an official door
Where yellow rags of paper fluttered:
A dead ukase of months before.
The fireman ranged his tower, surveying
The roofs, like the chained bears one sees;
And soldiers shouldered arms, obeying
The drill sergeant's obscenities.
Slow carts in caravans went winding
Dockward, where floury stevedores moiled;
And, under convoy, in the blinding
Dust of the road, a student toiled,
And won some pity, thus forlorn,
From the drunk hand who poured his scorn
In curses on some pal and brother. . . .
Russia was aching with the thorn
And bearing her old cross, poor mother.
That day, a day like any other,
And not a soul knew that Lenin was born!

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