In recent years, a story has been circulating on the Internet about how the lyrics of the song “Winter” (“At the edge of the forest”), which became popular performed by Eduard Gil, were borrowed from the Spanish poet Javier Linares. We checked whether this is actually true.

The common text in question looks like this:

“Probably everyone knows the song “Winter” (“ice ceiling, creaky door”) performed by E. Khil. The history of the creation of this song is much less known.

The author of the lyrics of the song “Winter” is usually stated to be Sergei Grigorievich Ostrovoy, and this is true. Without him we would never have heard it. But still, the authorship belongs only half to him - in the case of “Winter,” Sergei Grigorievich acted as a translator. The original was written by the Spaniard Javier Linares.

Little is known about him. Born in 1916 in Andalusia, he was a member of the “Spanish Phalanx” and a follower of Franco, wrote poetry (the only collection “Vine”, including the poem we are interested in, was published in Madrid in 1962), during the war he volunteered for the Blue Division, was wounded near Leningrad, was captured, and returned to Spain from the Soviet camp only in 1954.

The poem "Blue Steam" (in Ostrovoy's translation "Winter") stands out from the collection. The main theme of Javier Linares's poetry was his homeland: the Sierra Nevada mountains, the encierro - the running of the bulls, the beauty of Spanish girls and the taste of local wine. "Blue Steam" is Linares's only work about Russia. It was written in February 1943, during the Soviet military operation "Polar Star", and fully reflects the mood and feelings of the Spanish volunteer that winter.

The image of winter in this poem is an image of death. Sergei Grigorievich Ostrovoy translated almost word for word. “I went hunting, / I cut silver, / I planted a thin moon / in a crystal bucket” - this is how the Spaniard describes the series of endless deaths among his colleagues. And, in fact, in the Russian translation this song is called “Death”.

Javier Linares especially succeeded in portraying the creepy, merciless Russian Valhalla. He managed to convey the deep fear of a southerner before the Russian winter and its inhabitants, before the frightening place where he found himself. S. G. Ostrovoy made these lines with their existential horror and anticipation for the mistress, death, to return to the hut as a chorus. Again, without changing almost anything in them:

"The ceiling is icy, the door is creaky,
Behind the rough wall the darkness is prickly.
As soon as you go beyond the threshold, there is frost everywhere,
And from the windows the park is blue and blue."

The Spanish interlinear look like this:

"Ice hangs from the ceiling.
You listen in horror to the creaking of the door.
Behind rough walls
Prickly darkness awaits.
There is a frozen, deathly desert there,
and escaping blue steam bursts out of the windows."

However, despite the accurate translation, much has changed in the song. Her very mood changed. The musty smell of fear has disappeared from her, she has lost the melancholy and hopelessness that permeates this text in the original. On the contrary, listening to the rollicking Gil, people become happy, and they want to dance, and winter-winter, and blue-blue, and we only live once, and ehma. Which, in general, once again confirms: what is death for the Spaniard is winter for the Russian.”

This text and excerpts from it ended up not only on popular sites ("Belpress", Song Story, "Pearls of Thought", "Omsk-Inform"), but also in printed publications (newspapers "Odessa life", "Minsk Courier", "Communist. Century XX–XXI" and magazine "Telescope". And the authors articles on the information and analytical website “Lev Gumilyov Center” they connected the mood of the song “Winter” with facts from Linares’ biography (“Yes, we felt a manifestation of fascism in the song “Winter”! And we pulled up the archives. And we guessed it!”).

It should be noted that the official author of the words of the song “Winter,” Sergei Grigorievich Ostrovoy, was not an ordinary Soviet poet. Songs based on his poems “On a long journey”, “A platoon dies near the village of Kryukovo...”, “There is a city on the Volga”, “Wait for the soldier”, “The song remains with the man” and many others have become classics of the Soviet stage. It is no coincidence that military themes run like a red thread through Ostrovy’s work - he went to the front in the first months of the Great Patriotic War and graduated with the rank of major. Therefore, the very assumption that Ostrovoy could have been involved in translations of works by, albeit nominal, fascists looks strange. Another oddity is the need to pass off translations of other people’s poems as one’s own, given the prolificacy for which Ostrovoy was distinguished (almost 70 years of creativity, more than 25 collections).

As for the poem “Winter,” it became a song virtually without the consent of the author. How told Ostrovoy, “some person reports that he read my poem in Literary Russia, wrote music and wants to come to me to play it. And since I had a lot of songs and worked with famous composers, I did not accept him under various pretexts. Suddenly one day I sit down to watch the TV, there is a program from Leningrad, Eduard Khil is singing. And how he will tear this “icy ceiling, creaking door” two or three times! And they keep calling him back for an encore. And when composer Eduard Hanok called me again, of course, we met and then worked together.”

The images in “Winter” are very typical of Ostrovoy’s work. Let's compare with a fragment from another one poems:

If March chases spring -
Winter will be buried in the white tower.
And he sits there. Recluse.
Drinks green honey from the branches.
The room is decorated with snow.
The white wind sweeps the floors.

<…>

He'll let off steam like that,
It will give way - only the forest will crack.
From raspberry intoxication
A red shield will rise in the sky."

Agree, if these lines were written by another poet, then one of the two authors could well be accused of borrowing an idea from the other.

Now let's turn to the personality of the mysterious Javier Linares. The Internet does not know about such a poet. He is not in list captured members of the Blue Division, who in 1954 were sent from the USSR to their homeland.

A simple search shows that the story with “Winter” and Linares first appeared on the Internet in the spring of 2015. Earliest publications refer to the post of the famous St. Petersburg LJ blogger ivan_der_yans, and access to this post (as well as the rest of the author’s posts) is currently closed.

But access to Ivan Der Yans’ publications on Facebook is open, and they confirm the guess that the author of the sensational text is the blogger himself. This is evident from Ivan’s remarks such as “in general, to hell with Javier Linares, I will now write St. Petersburg stories like Tatyana May” and “I am still being refuted with all seriousness, but still with a little doubt” in response to the remark of one of the users: “Ivan, this text is being reposted on the most serious grounds :) Here it is, glory!” The latter appeared after the blogger once again shared with his popular publication.

Thus, the Spanish poet Javier Linares, who allegedly created the original text of the hit by Eduard Gil, is the fruit of a hoax by the Russian blogger Ivan Der Yans.