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was all for your sake. I say frankly: I think I have earned the right to live half as well as the son I raised. I have earned the right to live in a comfortable room, with somewhere I can wash. 33
    But the main reason for her disapproval lay elsewhere. Aleksandra was concerned for Zhenia and her grandson, Aleksei, a sickly little boy, who suffered periodically from TB. Neglected by Simonov, Aleksei was growing up in the shadow of a famous father whom he rarely saw. ‘Wake up, Kirunia, what is wrong with you?’ Aleksandra wrote to Simonov in 1944:
    What has happened to the decency that marked you so clearly as a child? You have kept it in your conduct at the front but lost it in your private life, in your behaviour towards the people who should be the closest to your heart!… In the nursery where Alyosha [Aleksei] spends his days there is a boy whose father, who is just a sailor, picks him up every evening. And he’s just an ordinary boy. Alyosha’s spiritual qualities are fast developing… You could learn to be a better person, a richer person spiritually, by staying close to him… The other day he came back from the nursery and declared that he had the best granny in the world, the best mummy, and then he thought, and said: ‘and the best daddy in the world’. Kirunia, your son still believes in you, in his dear childish heart the belief in a papa still exists, he wants to have a papa, a real papa, and there is still time for you to become one. Believe in yourself, my son, as Alyosha believes in you. Return to yourself, to your true and decent self, believe in yourself, in your work, which for you was always the most valuable aspect of your life, and then believe in us, the people close to you, who love you and believe in you. Concentrate your will – you were always proud of it and now you need it more than ever if you are to become your true self again. 34

    Aleksei and Simonov, 1944
    If Simonov’s relations with his mother deteriorated during the war, his relations with his stepfather, Aleksandr, became closer. ‘It appears that Papa and I have exchanged places in your affections,’ Aleksandra wrote to Simonov in 1944, ‘and that you have become more affectionate to him than you are to me. I understand the reason why – you need him now at a time of war – and I value it.’ 35 Aleksandr was a military man. He had brought up his stepson to be conscientious and obedient, disciplined and orderly – military values which Simonov had placed at the centre of his own identification with the Stalinist regime during the 1930s. But the young Simonov, acutely aware of having the wrong class background, had always felt uncertain of his position. It was only in the war, when rank was defined less by social class than by the performance of one’s duties to the state, that he found his place in the system.
    Army service itself was thrilling to him. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1942, Simonov wore his new authority with graceful ease and style. The writer Iraklii Andronnikov remembers him as ‘a real Russian

    Simonov in 1941
    officer with fine bearing, calm and self-assured in his uniform, with shiny leather boots and a pistol in his belt. He had white teeth and a sunburned face. He wore his cap tilted slightly to one side.’ The war years were the happiest in his life: they defined it. ‘I have quickly grown accustomed to the military uniform and way of life,’ Simonov wrote in 1942, ‘so much so that I cannot even imagine how I will get on when the war is over and I have no military reports to write, no trips to make to the front, and I have to manage without the thousands of friends I’ve made in dozens of armies.’ Margarita Aliger recalls that he spent the war in a sort of fury of activity. ‘He wrote from all the crucial fronts, rushed back to Moscow, “wrote himself out”, and rushed off again to the places where the fighting was most dangerous. He would never stay in Moscow for more than a day or