The first poems of millions of Soviet and Russian children were short works by Agnia Barto. And at the same time, the first educational motives penetrate into the child's mind: you need to be honest, courageous, modest, help relatives and comrades. The orders and prizes that Agniya Lvovna Barto was awarded are well deserved: such verses as “The hostess threw the bunny ...” or “Two sisters are looking at their brother” can replace thousands of words of educators. Agnia Barto has lived a very interesting and eventful life.
1. During the years of Soviet power, writers often worked under pseudonyms, sometimes hiding their Jewish origin behind them. However, in the case of Barto, who was Jewish (née Volova), this is not a pseudonym, but the surname of her first husband.
2. The father of the future poet was a veterinarian, and his mother was a housewife.
3. The birthday of Agnia Barto is set for sure - it is February 4th, old style. But about the year, there are three versions at once - 1901, 1904 and 1906. In the publication “Literary Encyclopedia”, published during the poet's lifetime, the year 1904 is indicated. The discrepancies are most likely due to the fact that in the hungry revolutionary years, Barto, in order to get a job, attributed to herself a couple of years.
Young Agnia Barto
4. Barto studied at the gymnasium, ballet school and choreographic school. However, her dancing career did not work out - she worked in the ballet troupe for only a year. The ballet emigrated abroad, giving the Soviet Union a wonderful poetess.
5. Barto began to write poetry at school. The poetess herself later characterized the initial stage of her work as “poems about pages in love and marquises.
6. The poems of the poetess were published in separate books when she was not yet 20 years old. The workers of the State Publishing House liked the poems so much that the collections of Agnia Barto began to appear one after another.
7. The popularity of children's poems of the poetess was ensured by her talent and the novelty of the poems themselves - before Barto, simple, but instructive and meaningful children's poems were not written.
8. Having already gained popularity, Agnia remained extremely shy. She was familiar with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Korney Chukovsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky, but treated them not as colleagues, but as celestials.
Lunacharsky and Gorky
9. The Barto family spent the war in Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg. The poetess has successfully mastered the profession of a turner and was awarded several times.
10.Agnia Barto wrote not only poetry. Together with Rina Zelena, she wrote the script for the film The Foundling (1939), and in the post-war years became the author of five more screenplays. Several cartoons have been filmed based on her poems.
Rina Zelyonaya
11. Rina Zelyonaya, Faina Ranevskaya and Agnia Barto were best friends.
Faina Ranevskaya
12. For 10 years, Radio Mayak has been broadcasting Agnia Barto's author's program Find a Man, in which the poetess helped reunite families whose children disappeared during the war.
13. The idea of the program “Find a Person” did not appear out of nowhere. One of the few poems of Agnia Lvovna was dedicated to a trip to an orphanage near Moscow. The poem was read by a mother who lost her daughter in the war. The mother's heart recognized her daughter in one of the heroines of the poem. The mother got in touch with Barto and, with the help of the poetess, found the child again.
14. Barto took an implacable stance towards Soviet dissidents. She supported the expulsion of L. Chukovskaya from the Writers' Union, the condemnation of Sinyavsky and Daniel. At the trial of the latter, she acted as an expert, showing the anti-Soviet essence of Daniel's works.
15. At the same time, the poet treated her repressed acquaintances with great sympathy, helping them and their families.
16. Agnia Barto is a holder of six orders of the USSR and laureate of the Stalin and Lenin prizes.
17. The first husband, Paul, was a poet. The couple lived for six years, they had a son, who died in 1944. After the divorce from Agnia, Pavel Barto was married three more times. He outlived his first wife by five years and died in 1986.
Paul and Agnia Barto
18. For the second time, Agnia Barto married Andrei Shcheglyaev, a famous scientist-heat power engineer, twice winner of the Stalin Prize. A.V.Scheglyaev died in 1970.
19. There is an assumption that Tanya, from perhaps the most famous poem of the poetess, is the only daughter of Barto and Shcheglyaev.
20. The poem “Vovka - a kind soul Agniya Lvovna dedicated to her grandson.
21. Despite the specialty of the second husband, the Barto and Shcheglyaev family was not a union of physicist and lyric poet. Shcheglyaev was very well educated, versed in literature, knew several foreign languages.
Andrey Scheglyaev, daughter of Tatiana and Agnia Barto
22. The poetess was very fond of traveling and visited many countries. In particular, even before the Great Patriotic War, she visited Spain and Germany. After the war, she visited Japan and England.
23. From the pen of A. Barto came out a very interesting book "Notes of a Children's Poet". In it, the poetess recounts episodes from her life and work in a very interesting way, and also talks about meetings with famous people.
24. Agnia Barto died in 1981 from a heart attack, she was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
25. After death, an asteroid and a crater on Venus were named after their beloved children's poet.
