The sky is our beloved home...

The popularity of the Russian front-line poet Alexei Ivanovich Fatyанов (1919–1959) for the military generation is comparable to the popularity of Vladimir Vysotsky for the generation of the sixties. But even now, even those who do not know the name of Alexei Fatyанов are familiar with his work. The songs based on his poems, penetrating and sincere, still resonate in the heart and memory: "In the city park, a brass band plays...", "Where are you now, my comrades-in-arms?", "Above Russia, the sky is blue...", "When spring will come, I do not know..." These songs were sung by the whole country along with the heroes of the films "Wedding with a Dowry", "Heavenly Slow Coach", "The House in Which I Live", "Big Life". "I spent my entire childhood among the richest nature of the Middle Russian strip, which I would not trade for any cakes of Crimea and the Caucasus," wrote Alexei Fatyанов. — "Fairy tales, fairy tales, fairy tales of Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Afanasyev — these are my faithful companions on the dirt road from the village of Petriino to the provincial town of Vyazniki, where I entered school and, having studied there for three years, was brought to Moscow to conquer the world. I did not conquer the world, but I learned to read and write well enough that I began to write poetry under the influence of Blok and Yesenin, whom I still love madly to this day." Like many of his peers, Fatyанов faced the hard fate of a soldier. He met the war in an aviation garrison near Bryansk, received his first wound while breaking out of the German encirclement, and the second in December 1944 during the assault on the city of Székesfehérvár in Hungary. His life was full and bright, but, following the sad tradition of Russian poets, it was short. Alexei Fatyанов left this world at the age of forty-one, leaving the country his poems — "folk words".