OF YOUTH – Tomb of the Unknown Warrior
In December 1980, the Editors of Dawn – the Monthly Journal of Umkhonto we Sizwe – published an article titled “Of Youth”, which was largely focused on a poem of the same title by Alexander Tvardovsky. Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky was a Soviet poet and writer and chief editor of Novy Mir, which was a literary magazine from 1950 to 1954 and 1958 to 1970.
During his editorship, the magazine published “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a story set in a Soviet labour camp in the early 1950s and featured the day of prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. The book’s publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history, since never before had an account of Stalinist repressions been openly distributed in the Soviet Union. Tvardovsky was best known for his epic poem “Vasili Tyorkin”, which was a Book About a Soldier and one of the key works in the poet’s oeuvre that gained widespread recognition. The poem described the life and wartime service of the fictional character Vasily Tyorkin, a Soviet soldier during the Second World War.
According to the article, “It is only in the spring time every year, on 9th May, that people stand in a queue to lay flowers on the Grave of the Unknown Warrior at the Kremlin wall in Moscow.” A “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” or “Tomb of the Unknown Warrior” is a monument dedicated to the services of an unknown soldier and the common
