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Wait for Me (poem)

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was wrapped around, as a sign of their desire to return to their loved ones and to survive the war. Many soldiers seemed to believe that this would somehow help them to survive the war, as if declaring their love by wrapping the poem around a picture of their loved ones, would protect them and ensure
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stood out in the sense though the soldier narrator embraces his duty in the Great Patriotic War, but primarily wants to be with the woman he loves, which helped explained why so many servicemen along with their wives and girlfriends embraced the poem as a sort of an anthem.
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during the war was the sense of longing expressed by the soldier narrator of the poem who promises to return to his woman whose love allows him to endure any suffering along the promise of a return to normality once the war ended. Likewise, much of the appeal of
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would cut out from the newspapers poems that they liked and mail it off to their loved ones on the home front, which allowed the authorities to gauge what poems were popular. The American scholars Richard Stites and James von Geldern wrote about the impact of
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that it was : "...heard on the radio throughout the war, recited by millions as though it were a prayer, repeated by women as tears streamed down their faces, and adopted by men as their own expression of the mystical power of a woman's love".
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During the war, it was common for Soviet newspapers to publish after-poems (poems written in response to another poem) by various women who declared their willingness to wait for the return of their husbands or boyfriends. Most
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was the intimate and tender feelings expressed by the soldier narrator who wants to survive the war as he only wishes to return to the woman he loves once the war is over. At a time when bombastic war poems were common,
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against a German offensive launched from Norway and Finland that aimed to take an end to the "Murmansk run" by capturing the two principle Soviet port cities on the Arctic ocean.
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and mailed it to their girlfriends and wives, who in turn wrote poems declaring that they would wait for their men to return from the war. The popularity of
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became an unofficial poetical anthem that symbolized the willingness to endure sacrifices and pain in the pursuit of victory. The way that
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has no special story. I just went to war, and the woman I loved was in the rear. And I wrote her a letter in verse". Simonov first read
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took the Soviet authorities by surprise, but once aware of the enthusiastic public response as countless demands for the poem came in,
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behind to take on his new duties of war correspondent on the battlefront. In 1969, Simonov wrote in a letter to a friend: "The poem
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in public on October 13, 1941 in Murmansk. Simonov was serving as a war correspondent covering the ordeal of the
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Rothstein, Robert (1995). "Homeland, Home Town, and Battlefield: The Popular Song". In Richard Stites (ed.).
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on 14 January 1942, which first brought the poem to widespread attention. Little was expected of
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in November 1941 to which he had been attached to as a war correspondent. An attempt to publish
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Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953
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to carry a locket with a picture of their wives or girlfriends in it, which a copy of
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The poem was written by Simonov over a few days in July 1941 after he left his love
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composed a symphonic poem for mezzo-soprano and orchestra on the verses of
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did not diminish after the war. Much of the popularity of
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One of the most popular poems ever written in Russia,
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Index


poet
playwright
war correspondent
Konstantin Simonov
World War II
Valentina Serova
14th Army
Arctic
Archangel
Murmansk
44th Army
Aleksandr Lokshin
"70th anniversary of the poem "Wait for me, and I'll be back"








Grant & Barker 2010



Merridale 2005
Rothstein 1995
Geldern & Stites 1995
Ghostarchive

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