The writer Yulia Voznesenskaya is our contemporary, but when studying her biography it becomes unclear how this fragile woman could live such a life full of events and difficulties? Such a question seems completely legitimate, but a believer understands: only with God’s help.
What Voznesenskaya has not experienced: exile, a women's colony, having to be expelled from the country, living in a foreign land, getting cancer and being miraculously cured, working in the Lesninsky monastery, burying her husband and still dying from cancer. She died in 2015, but at the same time she carefully prepared for death. She prepared a place for herself in the cemetery and asked to make a tombstone inscription: “Thank God for everything!”
Childhood
Julia was born in Leningrad on September 14, 1940. At first her parents wanted to name her Albina, but then they saw that the baby was constantly spinning in her cradle, like a spinning top. So the girl received the name Julia.
Her father, Nikolai Tarapovsky, was a hereditary Don Cossack, originally from the city of Rossosh. All the positive and negative qualities of the Cossack character were fully manifested in his daughter. Julia turned out to be a Cossack to the core. Mom, Olga Nikolaevna Lebedeva, was born in Bologoye (a town between Leningrad and Moscow), her parents were zemstvo doctors.
Yulia's father was a military engineer, and when the war ended, he remained to serve in East Germany in a group of Soviet troops. Here, from 1946 to 1948, his wife and two children lived with him (Yulia had a brother). During this time, the kids learned to speak German well. But, when they returned to the Soviet Union, there was one unpleasant incident, after which they quickly forgot their knowledge of foreign languages. The family lived in St. Petersburg, and local children often played hide and seek in the yard. Yulia and her brother told each other in German who was hiding and where. However, the children noticed this and called them fascists. After such an incident, Julia rarely spoke this language, even when she lived in Germany.
The beginning of a creative journey
After school, Yulia became a student at the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema. Then she transferred to medical school, but soon left there too. I started trying myself in journalism.
In the early 1960s, she left for Murmansk, where she got a job as a correspondent for a local newspaper. There, in 1965, her poem “Lapland” was first published. And already from the following 1966, her poems began to appear regularly in Soviet periodicals. Voznesenskaya was considered a promising author; Edita Piekha even sang one song based on her words.
But soon the poetess’s youngest son fell ill, and the family moved to the village of Vazhiny, which was located on the very border of the Leningrad region with Karelia, on the banks of the Svir River. The climate here was healthier, with frosts of forty degrees in winter, and wonderful fishing in summer. Julia got a job teaching music at a local school, and her husband was in charge of the House of Culture. During this time, the poetess did not publish her poems. She returned to publications when her son recovered and the family returned to Leningrad.
Biography
Julia was born on September 14, 1940, in the city of Leningrad. The parents thought of naming the girl Albina, but when they saw how she was spinning in the cradle, they decided to name her Yulia, like a spinning top. The writer’s father was a Don Cossack, in the full sense of the word, and his daughter inherited his fearlessness.
She entered the theater institute, but she didn’t like something, and she transferred to the medical faculty, but left this place too. Then she tried herself as a journalist and in the early sixties worked as a correspondent in Murmansk.
Voznesenskaya Yulia wrote the poem “Lapland” in the North. Then her other poems were published, and the words of one of them were even used as a song, performed by Edita Piekha.
Yulia Voznesenskaya's first marriage turned out to be short; she inherited only a sonorous surname from her husband. Yulia's maiden name was Tarapovskaya. The second husband is Okulov, they had two boys, and due to the illness of their youngest son, they decided to move to live in a village on the border with Karelia. There the couple got a job, the husband began to manage the House of Culture, and Yulia Nikolaevna became a teacher at a music school.
They did not live there for long, as the local authorities began to envy the authority of the newcomers and decided to drive them out of the village. By that time, the youngest son's health had improved and they left.
Oppositional poetry and links
It was 1968, USSR troops invaded Czechoslovakia, and Voznesenskaya dedicated the poem “Invasion” to this event. After such poems, the poetess was no longer published in Soviet magazines and newspapers; from that time on, she was published only in samizdat. She was summoned to the KGB, had a conversation and promised to go to prison if such verses were repeated.
Yulia and her family lived in a St. Petersburg communal apartment on Zhukovsky Street. Here they occupied two rooms, and in one of them the poetess organized a salon called “Second Culture.” In 1974, their first collection, Mite, was published.
In 1975, young artists and poets of the “Second Culture” organized a demonstration to mark the anniversary of the Decembrist uprising. The instigators were summoned to the KGB, followed by searches and arrests. A lot of anti-Soviet literature found at Voznesenskaya became the reason for the sentence - five years of exile for “dissemination of malicious slanderous fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system.”
Voznesenskaya was taken to Vorkuta, from where she escaped. Then the court replaced her five years of exile with two and a half years in a camp near Lake Baikal. When Yulia entered the cell and quickly named her article, the criminals, wise from prison experience, sighed and said: “So, for the truth...” In the criminal camp, Yulia was the only political prisoner. Only when she had served half her sentence was Voznesenskaya allowed to visit her sons.
Yulia Voznesenskaya - poetess
Here a few words need to be said about the creative name. Yulia Voznesenskaya, whose real name is Voznesenskaya-Okulova, received her creative pseudonym from her first husband. This union was very short and subsequently disintegrated. However, after parting, Yulia Nikolaevna decided to leave her euphonious surname.
The first attempts at writing took place under the guidance of Tatyana Gnedich. A widely known poet and translator in the 1960s, she created a literary association in which many aspiring poets and writers developed their talents. It was her who Yulia Nikolaevna Voznesenskaya called her first and only teacher, who discovered the origins of poetic mastery. Early work and the first publication in 1966 were favorably received by Tatyana Grigorievna and later received high praise from readers.
In the late 60s, Yulia Nikolaevna’s works were published in various literary magazines. It was then that she announced herself as a promising poet. A song was written for one of the poems and performed by Edita Piekha. However, in 1968, all publications of Yulia Voznesenskaya in Soviet publications ended. The reason for this turn of events was the poem “Invasion,” in which the poetess described the events that took place in Czechoslovakia.
The poem caused a mixed reaction from the Soviet authorities: Voznesenskaya was summoned to the KGB, where, after long interrogations, without receiving confession or repentance, they threatened to imprison her. There were many such conversations in the writer’s life. After this incident, Yulia Nikolaevna could introduce the reader to her works only thanks to samizdat. Many poetry texts have been published in this way. But it’s difficult to say exactly how many works she had at that time. The archives were kept by like-minded people and admirers of the talent in different places. There were many problems with this too. The places where the manuscripts were kept were constantly searched.
The magazines in which Yulia Voznesenskaya published her poems were dissident. In some of them she acted as a publisher (“Lepta”, “Woman and Russia”).
Expulsion from the country
When her prison term ended, Yulia returned to Leningrad, but was denied registration. The 1980 Summer Olympics were approaching, and law enforcement officers were given the task of clearing large cities of unwanted anti-Soviet elements.
Voznesenskaya was summoned to the KGB and asked to leave the country. She refused, and then they began to put pressure on her through the children. One son was expelled from school, the second was drafted into the army. Fearing for their lives, Julia decided to leave.
In 1980 they emigrated to Germany. At first they lived in Frankfurt, Yulia worked at the Society for the Defense of Human Rights. In 1984 they left for Munich, where Voznesenskaya worked at the Radio Liberty station.
Dissident
Voznesenskaya continued to publish in newspapers and magazines until she wrote the poem “Invasion,” where she described the invasion of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. The KGB authorities summoned the poetess and threatened to imprison her. But Yulia Voznesenskaya was not afraid to tell the truth; in 1973, at the age of 33, she received Holy Baptism, but did not stop her anti-Soviet activities.
In 1975, she participated in demonstrations of nonconformist artists. That same year, she was sentenced to five years of exile for conducting anti-Soviet propaganda. Her friends, who were also exiled, decided to repent at the trial, and then the fearless Voznesenskaya decided to run away, but come to the trial only to shout out from the courtroom: “Don’t repent - it won’t help!” But she was caught before the trial and instead of five years of exile, she was sentenced to two years in a camp.
Yulia Nikolaevna did not like to remember these difficult times, but it is known from her letters that she read poems and told parables from the Gospel to many prisoners.
After serving her sentence, Yulia Voznesenskaya came to her native Leningrad, where they refused to register her. On the eve of the 1980 Olympic Games, all “inconvenient” people were expelled from the capital and the cities in which the games were held. Among them was Yulia Nikolaevna and her family.
Orthodox literature
Voznesenskaya tried herself in different genres until she finally found herself in Orthodox fantasy.
She was a fairly famous poet in Germany, detective stories were also written from her pen, and a play based on the work “The Female Decameron” was staged in Spain, which was later shown on television. Her books “Letters of Love” and “Star of Chernobyl” were especially popular.
The genre of Orthodox fantasy appeared in Voznesenskaya already in the late 1990s. After the death of her husband, Julia went to France, where she lived for three years in the Lesninsky convent. She was a hard worker, working in the garden and kitchen. Here I met Abbess Afanasia, who blessed the writer to write a work of a new genre.
In 2001, Yulia Nikolaevna composed her first story-parable “My Posthumous Adventures” and after that she completely abandoned poetry, they became indifferent to her. She considered Orthodox prose a more important type of creativity.
After reading her books, many readers say that they have never seen anything better in their lives:
- "Cassandra's Way, or Adventures with Pasta";
- "Lancelot's Pilgrimage"
- "Julianna, or Dangerous Games";
- “Once upon a time there was an old lady in green shoes”;
- "Quiet my sorrows";
- “Thank you for the love”;
- “Unexpected joy, or the Servant of God Vladlen and other stories”;
- "One Hundred Days Before the Flood";
- "The Miracle of Edessa"
She created her works and always prayed that they would bring Faith, Hope and Love to people. In 2003, at the “Orthodox Book of Russia” competition, Voznesenskaya was awarded the title of “Best Author of the Year”. In 2013, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate, Father Vladimir, presented the writer with a diploma and a silver medal “For Merit” from the International Charitable Foundation “Family - Unity - Fatherland”.
Voznesenskaya forever remained a true Russian patriot and deeply supported the policies of Vladimir Putin. Sometimes she joked about this: “If they had told me earlier that I would support a KGB officer, I would not have believed it. But Putin is a sovereign leader, and Russia really needs this now.”
She was very worried about the latest events in Ukraine. She always believed that this was part of the Russian Empire, and the main one, because it was from Kyiv that Rus' began. Voznesenskaya was skeptical about German Chancellor Merkel and the entire European Union and called this formation artificial.
Lesninskaya monastery
Having buried her husband, Yulia Voznesenskaya goes to the Lesninskaya Holy Mother of God Monastery, located in France, in the province of Normandy. She wanted solitude and peace; she had not written anything for a long time.
There Voznesenskaya met and became friends with the monastery’s resident Mother Afanasia, who spoke about her experiences during clinical death. These experiences were embodied in the novel. Yulia Voznesenskaya wrote “My Posthumous Adventures” in the nineties, but now, perhaps, there is not a single churchgoer who has not read this book.
Working on the Internet
Despite her advanced age, Yulia Nikolaevna was on friendly terms with the Internet. She worked on many projects, since 2008 she has been a moderator on the forums of the sites “Pobedish.ru”, “Memoriam.ru”, “Survive. RU". People who have experienced grief and loss of loved ones turn to these forums. And psychologists and volunteers find words of support for them and provide assistance. Voznesenskaya had her own nickname “Agniya Lvovna”, under which she left more than two thousand posts. Being terminally ill herself, the writer helped suffering people find lost hope and learn to smile again.
On the sites, Yulia Nikolaevna was respected by everyone; both forum visitors, exhausted by grief, and moderators, who knew where every day they mustered the courage to listen and console people, turned to her. Voznesenskaya had a unique gift, she could discern and understand the situation, and give tactful and competent advice. She knew all the regular visitors to the forum and found patience, compassion and a kind word for everyone.
She devoted a lot of time to these sites. This type of service to people became a manifestation of another facet of her talent. In the last months of her life, when a serious illness and chemotherapy overcame the writer, she was worried that she could not appear on forums often; she simply did not have the strength to do so. An amazing person, she did not feel sorry for herself one bit, but tried with all her might to help others.
Yulia Nikolaevna said that these sites and what happens on the forums are much more important to her than written books and their circulation. She called the help that “grandmother Agnia Lvovna” provided to people the work of her whole life.
Missionary path
Yulia Nikolaevna Voznesenskaya, whose biography is full of such different events, is the image of a person striving to help others.
This man could talk about the most difficult things very simply. In recent years, she has collaborated with psychologists who helped seriously ill people. Gradually, this activity grew into communication through letters. Acting as a moderator on the websites Perezhit.ru and Pobedish.ru, together with Orthodox psychologists, she provided invaluable support to those who especially needed help. Among the people who turned to the site were potential suicides and those who could not cope with the death of loved ones.
Yulia Nikolaevna Voznesenskaya, whose photos always radiate some kind of invisible light and kindness, will remain in the hearts of many people not only as a wonderful writer, a sincere believer, but also as a good friend - helping, compassionate and comforting.
Personal life
Julia married twice. Voznesenskaya is the surname she inherited from her first husband. After the divorce, she did not change it because of its euphony. The surname of her second husband is Okulov. In this marriage, Julia gave birth to two sons - Arthur and Andrei.
She was a strict mother. And how else could a real Cossack woman raise her children? Hard, I could have spanked her with a wet rag. She used different methods when the boys were very small; for mischief and pranks, she sat them on a high cabinet and said: “Sit until you grow wiser.” They were scared to jump from there, so they sat there, thinking about their behavior.
And once, tired of the fact that her sons were constantly fighting among themselves, Yulia drew two rows of small circles in the children's room - one for Arthur, the second for Andrey. She told the children: “After each next scandal, I will cross out the circle of the one who is guilty. Whose row ends first, I will hand him over to an orphanage.” The boys did not know then that their mother was just about to change the wallpaper in their room and two weeks later she tore it off with all the circles, but she achieved her educational goal.
Son Andrei recalled that when he did not yet go to school, he and his family vacationed at the seaside. While walking along the rocks, we came across a very steep cliff. It was necessary to go around it along a narrow path from which a cliff could be seen. The kid stopped in fear, and his mother said: “If you are afraid, you will definitely fall, so look straight and boldly go forward.”
These are the methods of education that the writer Voznesenskaya had.
Life interests and hobbies
Yulia Nikolaevna loved nature very much and was an avid gardener. She could potter around in the ground for hours, planting some new plants, arranging alpine slides, and studying herbal treatment. She could go into the forest for half a day and pick mushrooms; she loved making jam from garden and forest berries.
Voznesenskaya also loved cooking. Her creative nature was also on full display in the kitchen. One day, for her son’s birthday, she bought black grouse and cooked it exquisitely. The boy friends were delighted, and Andryusha’s son later found a use for bird feathers - he attached them to a “knight’s helmet.”
And once she was expecting guests, but it was Lent, and she had to conjure at the stove all day to come up with delicious, luxurious and at the same time Lenten treats. When the guests were full and satisfied, the writer extremely surprised them with the message that all the dishes on the table were without meat and eggs. But Voznesenskaya created such culinary masterpieces only when she was in the mood. The sons remember that if mom had no time, she would say: “Go and look for something in the refrigerator.”
The writer always quickly got along with people and immediately trusted them. But some abused this trust. If Voznesenskaya felt that she had been betrayed, she would forever cross these people out of her social circle. Fortunately, such cases occurred rarely.
As soon as Yulia Nikolaevna had extra money, she spent it on charity. When her books were already published in large print runs, Voznesenskaya’s acquaintances reproached her for not being able to buy a house for herself. And the writer used this money to feed old women. She never had her own home until her death; she lived all the time in rented apartments.
Illness and death
When doctors diagnosed Voznesenskaya with cancer, she wanted to hide it from her family so as not to upset her. But sooner or later the truth is revealed anyway. After three operations were performed and metastases began, it was no longer useful to hide the diagnosis.
The writer knew about her approaching death, and she had the courage to carefully prepare for it. She bought a place for herself at the Berlin Orthodox cemetery in Tegel, made a will, and ordered a tombstone. Her last earthly poetry was an epitaph for herself. On February 20, 2015, Voznesenskaya passed away.
