Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin
Black Lightning
The text is verified with the publication: A. I. Kuprin. Collected works in 9 volumes. Volume 5. M .: Hood. literature, 1972. S. 363 -- 387 . Now I won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks say briefly: “County I now can’t even remember what business or what whim of fate threw me on a whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: "county town such and such", without giving any further information about it. Very recently a railway was built near it from St. You can get from the station to the city only in the dead of winter, when impassable swamps freeze, and even then you have to travel ninety miles through potholes and snowstorms, often hearing a wild wolf howl and not seeing a sign of human habitation for hours. there is nothing to bring to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.So the town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without import and export, without mining and manufacturing industry, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand inhabitants, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with the inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, non-navigable and fishless river Vorozha - lives in winter littered with snowdrifts, in summer drowning in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and undersized forest. There is nothing here for the mind and heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no living pictures, no concerts, no lectures from magic lantern . The worst traveling circuses and carnival booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which the inhabitants still remember with tenderness. Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a bazaar in the town. A dozen and a half peasants come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but stick around all day near the treasury, patting themselves on the shoulders with their hands, dressed in leather yellow mittens about one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor. The local philistines are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and what they live is incomprehensible to the mind. In summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream with rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and all day long they stare out of the windows at the street, imprinting flattened noses and smudged lips on the panes with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after dinner they sleep. And at seven o'clock in the evening, all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally unleashes an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until morning in hot, dirty featherbeds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, waking up, itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie. About themselves, the townsfolk say this: in our city, houses are made of stone, and hearts are made of iron. Old-timers from the literate, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wrote off his "Inspector General". "The late father of Prokhor Sergeyich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they drove through the city." Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first names and patronymics. If you tell the driver: "To Churbanov (local Muir-Merillis), a dime," he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, will ask: "What?" - "To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks." - "Ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down." There are city rows here - a long wooden shed on Cathedral Square, with a lot of unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, calico, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all those cruel Modesty Nikanorichs and Doremidonts Nikiforichi, are sitting outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaway. They look at the occasional customer like a sworn enemy: "Hey boy, let that one go." They don’t serve the purchase to him, but throw it on the counter without wrapping it, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tried for so long by touch, by light, by ringing, and even by a tooth, and, moreover, they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: "But now he will call the scoundrel the police." In winter, on holidays, in the afternoon, that way, in the late afternoon, merchants ride on the main Dvoryanskaya Street. In a row, one after another, huge gingerbread stallions, gray in apples, are swimming, shaking their fat meats, spitting their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in small sledges they sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats the merchant and the merchant's wife are so voluminous that their behinds hang halfway from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, breaking this decorous movement, the merchant’s son Nozdrunov, in an elegant coachman’s coat, with a boyar hat on one side, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girlish hearts, will suddenly gallop down the street, whistling and whooping. A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after their arrival in the city, they all descend amazingly quickly, drink a lot, play cards, not leaving the toil for two days, gossip, live with other people's wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes does not arrive at all, because they carry it in a long circuitous way, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, on a steamboat, and in winter on "horses and, finally, they drag her again to the north, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and holey bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged frozen coachmen. In the city several newspapers are obtained in a pool: "New time", "Svet", " Petersburg newspaper" and one "Birzhevye Vedomosti", or, as they are called here, "Birzhevik". Previously, "Birzhevik" was issued in two copies, but one day the head of the city school very sharply told the geography teacher and historian Kipaytulov that "one of the two - either serve in the school entrusted to me, or indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else "... Here in this town, at the end of January, on a bad snowy evening, I was sitting at a desk in the Orel Hotel, or -the local "Cockroach Gap", where I was the only guest. There was a breeze from the windows, in the night chimney the wind was howling, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A dull, wavering flame shone with a thin candle, swollen from one side. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls contemplated me, importantly moving their mustaches, red, serious, motionless cockroaches. Cursed, dead, green boredom cobwebbed my brain and paralyzed my body. What was to be done before nightfall? There were no books with me, and those numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped, I read so many times that I memorized them. And I pondered sadly what I should do: whether to go to a club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical order to the city doctor, or for a charter on imposing punishments to a justice of the peace, or to a forester for guide to dendrology. But who does not know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civil meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs infested with flies, the spit on the floor; all the rooms smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited house, and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied with preference, and right next to it, on small tables, vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players keep the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help either, because exclamations are heard every minute: "I beg you, Sysoy Petrovich, please don't start staring, sir." In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge, jagged by time, rumbling balls on the go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. Two excise wardens, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist, are reveling in Caucasian cognac in the buffet, drinking on "you", hugging, kissing with wet furry mouths, pouring wine on each other's necks and coats, singing "Not a small autumn rain" at random, and at the same time each conducts, and by eleven o'clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other's heads. "No, - I decided, - I'd better send to the city doctor for a book." But just at that moment the barefoot lad Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his house for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a small home screw, assuring that there would be only his own, that in general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats can not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from her mother from Belozersk of remarkable merits salmon, from which the pie will be built. "Sic! - exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, - and the mother-in-law is useful for something!" I quickly washed up, changed clothes and went to the dearest Pyotr Vlasovich. Now it was no longer the wind, but a ferocious hurricane rushed from terrible force through the streets, driving in front of him clouds of snow pellets, painfully whipping in the face and blinding the eyes. I'm human like most modern people, almost an unbeliever, but I had to travel a lot along winter country roads, and therefore on such evenings and in such weather I mentally pray: "Lord, save and save the one who has now lost his way and is circling in a field or in a forest with mortal fear in soul." The evening at the doctor's was exactly what these family parties are all over the world. provincial Russia , from Obdorsk to Kryzhopol and from Lodeynoye Pole to Temryuk. At first they gave us warm tea with homemade cookies, smelly rum and raspberry jam, small bones from which stick in the teeth so annoyingly. The ladies sat at one end of the table and with false animation, coquettishly singing the ends of phrases through their noses, talked about the high cost of food and firewood, about the depravity of servants, about dresses and embroideries, about the methods of salting cucumbers and shredding cabbage. When they sipped tea from their cups, each of them invariably stuck out the little finger of her right hand in the most unnatural way, which, as you know, is considered a sign of a secular tone and graceful effeminacy. The men huddled at the other end. Here the conversation was about the service, about the governor, who was stern and disrespectful to the nobility, about politics, but mainly they recounted to each other the contents of today's newspapers, which all of them had already read. And it was funny and touching to listen to how they spoke penetratingly and shrewdly about the events that had taken place a month and a half ago, and how excited they were about news that had long been forgotten by everyone in the world. Indeed, it turned out as if we all live not on earth, but on Mars, on Venus, or on some other planet, where visible earthly affairs reach through huge intervals of whole weeks, months and years. Then, according to the ancient custom, the owner said: - Do you know what, gentlemen? Let's leave this labyrinth and sit in the screw. Alexey Nikolaevich, Evgeny Evgenievich, would you like a card? And immediately someone responded with a thousand-year-old phrase: - Indeed, why waste precious time? There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, myself and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the Zemstvo chief. The owner persuaded for a long time. There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, I and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner tried to persuade us for a long time to get settled as going out, and finally, with an air of hypocritical condolence, decided to leave us alone. True, several times, in those moments when it was not his turn to turn in, he hurriedly ran to us and, rubbing his hands, asked: “Well, what? How are you here? ".. Not good. Whoever doesn't drink, doesn't gamble, and doesn't smoke is that suspicious element in society. Why aren't you interested in your lady?" "We tried to keep her busy. First we talked about the weather and the sleigh ride. The fat lady smiled meekly at us and answered that, it's true, when she was younger, she played fly, or, in today's fashion, rams, but now she also forgot she doesn't even understand figures very well. Then I bellowed something in her ear about the health of her grandchildren, she affectionately nodded her head and said sympathetically: "Yes, yes, yes, it happens, it happens, my lower back hurts when it rains," and took out some knitting from the bag. We did not dare to pester the good old woman anymore. The doctor had a beautiful, huge sofa, upholstered in delicate yellow leather, in which it was so convenient to fall apart. Turchenko and I never got bored, staying together. We were crowded three things connected: the forest, hunting and a love of literature. I have already had to be with him fifteen times on bear, fox and wolf rounds and hunting with hounds. He was an excellent shooter and once in my presence he knocked a lynx from the top of a tree with a more than three hundred paces away, but he only hunted the beast, and even hares, on which he even set traps, because he hated these pests of young forest plantations from the bottom of his heart. Hidden and, of course, his unattainable dream was hunting for a tiger. He even collected a whole library about this noble sport. He never hunted a bird and severely forbade any kind of bird in his forest. spring hunting. “A bird is my first assistant in my household,” he said seriously. For such excessive severity, he was disliked. He was a strong, small, dark-faced, bilious bachelor, with hot and mocking black eyes, with a strong gray in his black disheveled hair. He was completely alone, a real bean who had long lost all his relatives and childhood friends, and he still retained a lot of those careless and beautiful, rude and comradely qualities by which it is so easy to recognize a former student of the forest, now abolished, faculty of the famous once the Petrovsky Academy, which flourished in the village of Petrovsko-Razumovsky near Moscow. He very rarely appeared in the county society, because he spent three-quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, the only passionate attachment to life. In the city above him, He very rarely appeared in the district society, because he spent three-quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, his only passionate attachment to life. In the city, they laughed at him behind his back and considered him an eccentric. Having a complete and uncontrolled opportunity to trade in his favor with forest plots allotted to the log house, he lived only on his one and a half ruble salary, a salary - truly beggarly, if we take into account the cultural, responsible and deeply important work that selflessly carried on his shoulders as many as twenty yo this amazing Ivan Ivanovich. Indeed, only among the ranks of the forestry corps, in this forgotten of all forgotten departments, and even among the zemstvo doctors, driven out like postal nags, one did not have to meet these eccentrics, fanatics of the cause and unmercenaries. Many years ago, Turchenko submitted a memorandum to the War Ministry stating that in the event of a defensive war, the foresters, thanks to their excellent knowledge of the terrain, could be very useful to the army as scouts and as guides for partisan detachments, and therefore proposed that the local guards be recruited from people who had completed special six-month courses. He, of course, as usual, did not answer anything. Then, at his own risk and conscience, he trained almost all of his foresters in compass and eye surveys, reconnaissance service, the device of notches and wolf pits, the system of military reports, signaling with flags and fire, and many other basics of guerrilla warfare. Every year he arranged shooting competitions for his subordinates and gave out prizes from his meager pocket. In the service, he introduced a discipline more severe than that of the sea, although at the same time he was a godfather and planted father of all the foresters. Under his supervision and protection were twenty-seven thousand acres of state-owned forests, and besides, at the request of the millionaire brothers Solodaev, he looked after their huge, perfectly preserved forests in the southern part of the county. But even this was not enough for him: he arbitrarily took under his protection all the surrounding, adjacent and striped peasant forests . Performing for the peasants for pennies, and more often free of charge, various boundary works and forest surveys, he collected gatherings, spoke passionately and simply about the great importance of large forest areas in agriculture, and conjured the peasants to take care of the forest more than their eyes. The peasants listened to him attentively, sympathetically nodded their beards, sighed as if at the sermon of a village priest, and agreed: “You’re right .... what can I say ... your truth, Mr. Lesnitsyn ... What are we? We are peasants, dark people ... "But it has long been known that the most beautiful and useful truths coming from the lips of Mr. Lesnitsyn, Mr. Agronomist and other intelligent guardians, ... represent for the village only a simple shaking of the air. The next day, the good villagers let livestock into the forest, which had eaten the young cleanly, tore the bast from tender, fragile trees, felled drill spruces for some kind of fence or window, drilled birch trunks to extract spring sap for kvass, smoked in a dry forest and threw matches on dry gray moss, flashing like gunpowder, were left unextinguished bonfires, and shepherd boys, they senselessly set fire to hollows and cracks full of resin in pine trees, only to see what a cheerful, turbulent flame amber resin burns., He begged rural teachers to inculcate in their students respect and love for the forest, incited them, together with the village priests - and, of course, to no avail - to organize afforestation holidays, pestered police officers, zemstvo chiefs and magistrates about predatory logging, and at zemstvo meetings tired everyone with his ardent speeches about the protection of forests, that they stopped listening to him. "Well, the philosopher has taken his usual nonsense," said the Zemstvo and went off to smoke, leaving Turchenko to rant, like the preacher Bede, in front of empty chairs. But nothing could break the energy of this stubborn Ukrainian, who came against the wool of a sleepy town. He, on his own initiative, strengthened the river banks with bushes, planted coniferous trees on sandy wastelands and afforested ravines. It was on this subject that we talked with him, curled up on the vast doctor's sofa. - In the ravines I have now caused so much snow that the horse will leave with an arc. And I rejoice like a child. At the age of seven, I raised the spring height of the water in our filthy Vorozha by four and a half feet. Ah, if only I had working hands! If I were given great unlimited power over the local forests. In a few years I would have made Mologa navigable to the very source and would have raised the grain yield everywhere in the region by fifty per cent. I swear by God, in twenty years you can make the Dnieper and Volga the most full-flowing rivers in the world - and it will cost a penny! It is possible to moisten with forest plantings and irrigate the most waterless provinces with ditches. Just plant a forest. Take care of the forest. Drain the swamps, but really... - And what is your ministry looking at? I asked slyly. “Our ministry is the ministry of non-resistance to evil,” Turchenko replied bitterly. - Nobody cares. When I go by rail and see hundreds of trains loaded with timber, I see boundless stacks of firewood at the stations, I just want to cry. And if I now make our forest rivers accessible to rafts - all these Zvani, Izhiny, Kholmenki, Vorozhi - do you know what will happen? In two years the county will be a barren place. The landowners will immediately float all the timber to St. Petersburg and abroad. Honestly, sometimes my hands drop and my head cracks. The most vital, the most beautiful, the most fruitful work is in my power, and I am bound, I dare not do anything, I am not understood by anyone, I am ridiculous, I am a restless person. Tired. Hard. See what interests them all: eat, sleep, drink, play screwball. They love nothing: neither the homeland, nor the service, nor the people - they love only their snotty children. You won't wake anyone up, you won't be interested. Vulgarity all around. You know in advance who will say what under any circumstances. Everyone was impoverished in minds, feelings, even simple human words ... We fell silent. From the living room, from four tables, we could hear the cries of the players playing: “I’ll say, perhaps, small-u-small clubs.” "Details by letter, Evgraf Platonych." "Five no trumps?" "Are you screwing?" "Our business, sir." "Let's take a chance ... Baby, wearing a helmet." "Your game. We're in the bushes." "Yes, it's bought. Not a single human face. So it will be as bought.” “The game of high pressure.” “What? Has she begun to think of herself?" "Vasil Lvovich, you are not supposed to think for more than a quarter of an hour. Come in." "Your Excellency, the maps are closer to the orders. I see your jack of tambourine." "Don't you look..." said: - Now someone will say: "Don't go alone, go with your mother," and another will remark: "That's right, like in a pharmacy." "What kind of worms did you show me? Jack of thirds with fosks? Is this support, in your opinion?" "I thought ..." "I thought the Indian rooster, and he died from thought." "And why did you pickle your ace? Are you thinking of marinating it?" "No reason, so with a tambourine!" "What do you think about this beautiful lady"And we are her trump cards." "That's right," the cathedral priest approved in a thick baritone voice, "don't go alone, go with an escort." .. Send the child, we won’t cheat ... We are right, as in the chamber of measures and weights. "Listen, Ivan Ivanovich," I turned to the forester, "shouldn't we run away? You know, in English, without saying goodbye. - What are you, what are you, my dear. To leave without supper, and even without saying goodbye. It is hard to think of a worse insult for the host. You will never be forgotten. seats and happy game , already got up from the cards and said, bypassing the players: - Gentlemen, gentlemen ... The pie is getting cold, and the wife is angry. Gentlemen, the last batch. The guests left the tables and, in a cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all the doors. Card conversations have not subsided yet: “How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? I seem to you, the guests left the tables and, in a cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all doors. The card conversations did not subside yet: "How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? It seems to you that it is clear as a finger, I said tambourines by the first hand. You have a lady, a dozen - a quarter itself. "-" You, my charm, were obliged to support me. And climb on without trump cards! Do you think I didn't know your aces?" - "Yes, let me, they didn't let me talk, that's how they screwed up." - "And you - tear from them. That's what the screw is for. Cowards don't play cards"... Finally, the hostess said: "Gentlemen, I beg you to have a bite to eat, Everyone rushed into the dining room, with a laugh, with jokes, rubbing their hands excitedly. They began to sit down. - Husbands and wives apart," the merry host commanded. They got tired of each other at home too, and with the help of his wife he shuffled the guests around so that couples, inclined to flirt, or united by a long-standing relationship known to the whole city, found themselves together. with a napkin, a lone observer will see entwined legs under the table, as well as hands lying on other people's knees.Drank a lot - men "simple", "tear", "state", ladies - mountain ash; drank for a snack, for a pie, a hare and veal "From the very beginning of dinner they lit up, and after the pie it became noisy and smoky, and hands with knives and forks flashed in the air. They talked about appetizers and various amazing dishes with the air of well-deserved gourmets. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about protodeacons, about singers, about the theater and, finally, about appetizers and various amazing dishes with the air of well-deserved gastronomes. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about theater and, finally, about modern literature. Theater and literature are the inevitable strong points of all Russian lunches, dinners, zhurfiks and fifokloks. After all, every inhabitant has ever played in an amateur performance, and in the golden days of his student life he raged in the gallery in the capital's theater. In the same way, everyone at one time wrote an essay in the gymnasium on the topic “A Comparative Essay on Education According to Domostroy” and “Eugene Onegin”, and who did not write poetry in childhood and did not contribute to student newspapers? What lady does not say with a charming smile: "Imagine, last night I wrote a huge letter to my cousin - sixteen postage sheets all around and small, small, like beads. And this, imagine, at some hour, without a single blot! Remarkably interesting letter "I will purposely ask Nadya to send it to me and read it to you. I seemed to be inspired. My head burned in a strange way, my hands trembled, and the pen seemed to run across the paper by itself." And which of the provincial ladies and girls did not trust you to read aloud, together, their class diaries, constantly tearing out your notebook and exclaiming that you can’t read here? Talking, walking around the stage and writing - everyone seems to be such an easy, trifling matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently, in their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of speaking, walking around the stage and writing - it seems to everyone such an easy, trifling matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently, in their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of the arts - theater and fiction- they find everywhere the most severe and captious judges, the most obstinate and dismissive critics, the most vicious and impudent detractors. Turchenko and I sat at the end of the table and only listened with boredom and irritation to this disorderly, self-confident, noisy conversation, which every minute strayed into slander and gossip, into peeping into other people's bedrooms. Turchenko's face was tired and turned yellow and brown. - Unwell? I asked quietly. He grimaced. - No ... so ... very tired ... All the same hammering ... woodpeckers. The magistrate, who was placed on the right hand of the hostess, was very different long legs and unusually short body. Therefore, when he sat, only his head and half of his chest towered above the table, like museum busts, and the ends of his magnificent forked beard were often dipped in sauce. Chewing a piece of hare in sour cream sauce, he spoke with weighty pauses, like a person accustomed to general attention, and convincingly emphasized the words with the movements of a fork clenched in a fist: - I don’t understand modern writers ... Sorry. I want to understand, but I can't... I refuse. Either a farce, or pornography ... Some kind of mockery of the public ... You, they say, pay me a ruble-ruble of your hard-earned money, and for this I will show you shameful nonsense. - Horror, horror, what they write! groaned, clutching her whiskey, the wife of the excise officer, the county Messalina, who did not ignore even her coachmen. cologne after their books. And to think that such literature falls into the hands of our children! - Quite right! - exclaimed the judge and drowned his sideburns in red cabbage. - And most importantly, what does creativity have to do with it? inspiration? well, this one, how is it ... a flight of thought? So after all, I will write ... so each of us will write ... so my clerk will concoct, what a complete idiot. Take shuffle all near and distant relatives like a deck of cards, and throw them away in pairs. A brother falls in love with his sister, a grandson seduces his own grandfather... Or suddenly a crazy love for an Angora cat, or a janitor's boot... Nonsense and nonsense! “And it’s all the fault of the lousy revolution,” said the Zemstvo chief, a man with an unusually narrow forehead and long face, who, for his appearance, was still called the mare’s head in the regiment. - Students do not want to study, workers rebel, depravity is everywhere. Marriage is not recognized. "Love must be free." That's free love for you. - And most importantly - the Jews! - grey-whiskered, choking from asthma, landowner Dudukin croaked with difficulty. “And the Freemasons,” added firmly the police officer, who had curried out of the police, a peace-loving bribe-taker, a gambler and a hospitable person, who handed the governor galoshes with his own hand as he passed. “I don’t know the Masons, but I know the Jews,” Dudukin angrily rested. - They have a kagal. They have: one climbed - dragged the other. They invariably sign themselves with Russian surnames, and deliberately write abominations about Russia in order to decri... decri... decriti... well, how it is!.. in a word, to sully the honor of the Russian people. And the judge continued to peck his own, spreading his arms with a fork and knife clamped in them and knocking over a glass with his beard: - I don’t understand and I don’t understand. Some quirks ... Suddenly, for no apparent reason, "Oh, close your pale legs." What is this, I ask you? What does this dream mean? Well, okay, and I'll take it and write: "Ah, hide your red nose!" and dot. And that's it. What's worse, I ask you? - . Or else: he launched a pineapple into the sky, - someone supported. “Yes, sir, just pineapple,” the judge got angry. - But the other day I read from their most fashionable: "A petrel flies, similar to black lightning." How? Why? Where, let me ask you, is black lightning? Who among us has seen black lightning? Nonsense! I noticed that at last words Turchenko quickly raised his head. I looked back at him. His face lit up with a strange smile - ironic and defiant. He seemed to want to say something. But he said nothing, quivered his dry cheekbones, and lowered his eyes. - And most importantly, what do they write about? - suddenly became agitated, like instantly boiled milk, a silent insurance agent. - There - a symbol is a symbol, that's their business, but I'm not at all interested in reading about drunken tramps, about thieves, about ... excuse me, ladies, about various prostitutes and so on ... - About the hanged too, - prompted the excise officer, - and about anarchists, and also about executioners. “Yes,” the judge agreed. They definitely don't have any other topics. They wrote before ... Pushkin wrote, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Lermontov. Beauty! What language! "Quiet Ukrainian night, the sky is transparent, the stars are shining ... "Oh, damn, what a language, what a style! .. - Amazing!" said the inspector of public schools, shining with tender eyes from under golden glasses and shaking his sharp red beard. - Amazing! Gogol! Divine Gogol! Remember with him.... And suddenly he boomed in a deaf, grave, howling voice, and after him the zemstvo chief also chanted in a singsong voice: freely and smoothly..." Well, where else can you find such beauty and music of words! there were also venerable writers: Levitov, Leskov, Pomyalovsky, especially the last one, denounced, but with love... ho-ho-ho... universal grease... in the air... But he wrote about spiritual singing in such a way that even before now, reading, you will involuntarily shed a tear. "Yes, our Russian literature," the inspector sighed, "has fallen! And earlier? And Turgenev? Huh? "How good, how fresh the roses were." Now they don't write like that. - Where! croaked nobleman Dudukin. - Before the nobles wrote, and now the commoner has gone. The timid head of the post office suddenly lisped: - But now they are making some money! Ai-ai-ai ... it's scary to say ... My nephew, a student, told me in the summer. A ruble per line, he says. As a new line - the ruble. For example: "The count entered the room" - ruble. Or simply with a new line "yes" - and the ruble. Fifty dollars a letter. Or even more. Let's say the hero of the novel is asked: "Who is the father of this lovely child?" And he briefly answers with pride "I" - And please: a ruble in your pocket. The postmaster's insertion seemed to open the floodgate to a stinking swamp of gossip. The most reliable information about the life and earnings of writers rained down from all sides. So-and-so bought on the Volga an old princely estate of four thousand acres with a manor and a palace. Another married the daughter of an oilman and took a dowry of four million. The third always writes drunk and drinks a quarter of vodka a day, and eats only marshmallow. The fourth beat off his wife best friend, and two decadents, they simply exchanged wives by mutual agreement. A handful of modernists made up a close circle of Sodoms, known throughout Petersburg, and one famous poet wanders around Asia and America with a whole harem, consisting of women of all nations and colors. Now they were all talking at once, and it was impossible to make out anything. Dinner was coming to an end. There were cigarette butts sticking out of half-finished glasses and bowls of half-eaten lemon jelly. Guests poured beer and wine. The priest poured red wine on the tablecloth and tried to fill the puddle with salt so that there would be no stain, and the hostess persuaded him with a sweet smile that curved the right half of her mouth up and the left down: - Leave it, father, why do you bother yourself? It will wash off. The inevitable hairpins and allusions have already flickered several times between the ladies who have drunk rowan and liquor. The police officer praised the insurance agent's wife for having refreshed her last year's dress with great taste - "it's impossible to recognize at all." Strakhovikha replied with a gentle smile that, unfortunately, she could not order new dresses from Novgorod twice a year, that she and her husband were honest people, although poor, and that they had no place to take bribes. “Ah, bribes are a terrible vulgarity!” the police officer readily agreed. “In general, there is a lot of filth in the world, but it also happens that some married ladies are supported by strange men.” This remark was interrupted by the excise matron, and she started talking about governor's galoshes. A storm was brewing in the air, and the usual tragic exclamation was already hanging over their heads: "My foot will no longer be in this house!" - but the resourceful hostess quickly averted disaster, getting up from the table with the words: - I beg your pardon, gentlemen. There is nothing more. There was a commotion. The ladies kissed the hostess with ardent impetuosity, the men kissed her hand with greasy lips and squeezed the doctor's hand. Most of guests went into the living room to the cards, but a few people remained in the dining room to finish their cognac and beer. In a few minutes they sang out of tune and in unison "Not an autumnal drizzle," each leading the choir with both hands. The forester and I took advantage of this interval and left, no matter how kindly Pyotr Vlasovich detained us. The wind died down completely by night, and the clear, moonless, blue sky played with silver eyelashes. bright stars . It was ghostly light from that bluish phosphorescent radiance that fresh, freshly settled snow always radiates from itself. The forester walked beside me and muttered something to himself. I had long known behind him this habit of talking to himself, which is characteristic of many people who live in silence - fishermen, foresters, night guards, and also those who have endured long years of solitary confinement - and I stopped paying attention to this habit. “Yes, yes, yes ...” he would throw abruptly from the collar of his fur coat. - Stupid... Yes... Hm... Stupid, stupid... And rude... Hm... A lantern was burning on the bridge across Vorozha. With the usual strange feeling of a little exciting, pleasant care, I stepped on the even, beautiful, unspotted snow, which softly, elastically and creakingly moved under my foot. Suddenly Turchenko stopped near the lantern and turned to me, - Stupid! he said loudly and decisively. “Believe me, my dear,” he continued, lightly touching my sleeve, “believe me, it’s not the government regime, not the poverty of the land, not our poverty and darkness that we Russians are trailing behind the whole world. And all this is a sleepy, lazy, indifferent to everything, loving nothing, knowing nothing province, it doesn’t matter whether it is an employee, noble, merchant or petty-bourgeois. Look at them today. How much aplomb, how much contempt for everything that is outside their chicken horizons! So, in passing, they hang labels: "Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, fool ..." Parrots! And the main thing is that, you see, he does not understand this and this, and, therefore, this is already bad and ridiculous. So he doesn't understand differential calculus - so it's nonsense? And Pushkin was not understood. And Chekhov has recently been misunderstood. They talked about his "Steppe": what nonsense - sheep's thoughts! Do sheep think? "Flowers smiled at me in silence, half asleep..." Nonsense! Do flowers ever laugh! And now, too. "I, he says, will write it myself..." - And what about the black lightning? I asked. - Yes, yes ... "Where is this black lightning?" This judge is a nice person, but what did he see in his life? He is a school and office product... And I'll tell you that I myself, with my own eyes, saw black lightning and even ten times in a row. It was scary. “Like this,” I said incredulously. - Exactly. Since childhood, I have been in the forest, on the river, in the field. I have seen and heard amazing things that I don’t like to talk about because they won’t believe anyway. For example, I watched not only the love round dances of cranes, where they all dance and sing in a huge circle, and a couple dances in the middle - I saw their trial of the weak before the autumn departure. As a realist boy, living in Polissya, I saw hailstones the size of a large man's fist, smooth icicles, but not round in shape, but in the form of a kind of cap of a young porcini mushroom, and the flat side is layered. In five minutes this hail broke all the windows in the large landowner's house, laid bare all the poplars and lindens in the garden, and in the field killed many small livestock and two fallows to death. In the dead of winter, on the day of the terrible Messinian earthquake, in the morning, I was with the hounds in my Bildina. And at about ten or eleven o'clock, a rainbow suddenly blossomed in a completely cloudless sky. It touched the horizon with both ends, was unusually bright and had a width of forty-five degrees, and a height of twenty-twenty-five. Beneath it, just as bright, another rainbow curved, but somewhat weaker in color, and then a third, fourth, fifth, and paler and paler - some kind of fabulous seven-color corridor. This went on for fifteen minutes. Then the rainbows melted, came running instantly, God knows where the clouds came from and tumbled down a solid snowfield. I have seen forest fires. I saw how the hurricane brought down five yards of dead wood. Yes, I was then in the forest with a ranger, foresters and workers, and before my eyes hundreds of huge trees fell down like matches. Then the guard Nelidkin knelt down and took off his hat. And everyone did the same. And I. He read "Our Father", and we were baptized, but we did not hear his voice because of the crackling of falling trees and breaking branches. Here is what I have seen in my life. But I also saw black lightning, and that was the worst of all. Wait, - Turchenko interrupted himself, - we are at my house. Come to me. Mikheevna will swear, but nothing. For this I will treat you to the third-day kvass. Today, blessing, let's start. Mikheevna, the forester's stern old maid, and his wonderful apple kvass were known throughout the city. The old woman received us sternly and grumbled for a long time, wandering around the rooms with a candle and climbing through the cabinets: "Naughty, night owls, the day is not enough for them, they wander at night, do not let good people sleep." But kvass was above all praise. He wandered for a long time first in an oak barrel on hops and yeast, with raisins, cognac and some kind of liquor, then he settled for three years in bottles and now he was strong, played like champagne, and cheerfully "and coldly dried in his mouth, a little intoxicated and at the same time refreshing. - That's how it was, - said Turchenko, walking in a hare jacket around his office, hung with paintings depicting tigers. - As a student, I came for a vacation in the very wilderness of the Tver province to my cousin Nikolai - to Koke - that's what we called it. He was once a brilliant young man, with a lyceum education, with great connections and a great career ahead of him, and he danced beautifully at real society balls, adored actresses from the French operetta and New Village gypsies, drank champagne, in his words, like a crocodile, and was soul of society. But in an instant, literally in an instant, all Kokino's well-being collapsed. One morning he woke up and was horrified to find that the entire right side of his body was paralyzed. Out of pride and pride, he doomed himself to voluntary exile and settled in the countryside. But he did not at all lose his clarity and good spirits, and with light irony called himself a cyclist, because he was forced to move, sitting in a three-wheeled chair, which was rolled from behind by his servant Yakov. He ate and drank a lot, slept a lot, wrote ridiculous obscene letters in verse on a typewriter, and often changed village mistresses, to whom he gave big names of royal favorites, like La Vallière, Montespan and Pompadour. Once, loading or unloading a Browning, with which Koka never parted, he shot his Yakov in the leg. Fortunately, the bullet hit very well, passing through the flesh of the thigh and breaking through, in addition, two doors right through. For some reason, this event became close friends between the master and the servant. They positively could not live without each other, although they often quarreled: Koka, getting angry, aptly poked Yakov in the stomach with a crutch, and Yakov then ran away from home for several hours and did not appear at the call, leaving Koka in a helpless state. Yakov was an excellent hunter at heart: tireless, despite his lameness, with a good memory of the area, with great knowledge of those elusive reasons why you guess the quality and quantity of game. He and I often went on a simple peasant, very difficult hunt, that is, without a dog, but with a sneak, requiring great attention and patience. I must say that Koka was reluctant to let Yakov go with me - without him he was, as without his only arms and legs. Therefore, in order to beg Jacob, one had to resort to tricks. Nothing disposed Koku, generosity, like inquiries about his former happy life when he was considered the lion of living rooms and a sweet regular in chic restaurants. And so one day, winding up this Kokina hurdy-gurdy and flattering him without any measure, I managed to kidnap Yakov for a whole week. We went with him to the distant village of Burtsevo, where Koka had forest plots and glorious swamps. The Burtsev peasant Ivan, who is also Kokin the forester, said that so many capercaillie, black grouse, hazel grouse, snipe, great snipe and ducks were divorced on Vysokoe, in Ramenye and on Blinovo, which is simply invisible. "Though beat with a stick, at least cover with a hat." We got ready for a long time, left late and arrived in Burtsevo by the evening dawn. Ivan was not there, he, it turns out, went to his brother-in-law in Okunevo, where they celebrated the throne. We were received by his wife Avdotya, a thin, goggle-eyed woman, similar face on a fish, and so freckled that the white skin only in some places showed through the brown mask with rare glimpses on her cheeks. It was stuffy in the hut, a lot of flies were buzzing and it smelled of something disgustingly sour. In the unsteadiness, a child squealed incessantly. Avdotya got busy. - Mine is still, I don't know - it will come back, will it come back. Painfully good beer is brewed in Okunev. And where there is beer, there is Ivan. Wait a minute, breadwinners, I'll give you my beer to drink. I brewed it for the rescue ... Not much thick beer, we topped it up, but it was tasty and sweet. She lifted the heavy lid of the cellar by the ring, went down there and a minute later got out with a large ladle of homemade beer. While she poured it out for us, I asked, pointing to the screaming baby: - How many months old is the baby? - Me-sya-tsev? - the woman was surprised. - What are you, the breadwinner, the Lord is with you. Only last night O dila. What months are there? Yesterday exactly at this time O dila. Eat, breadwinners, I don’t know what to call you ... Yesterday only p O dila. Here's how. I involuntarily said: - That's a pound. But Yakov remarked indifferently and contemptuously: - It's nothing to them. They are habitual. They - how to sneeze. Ivan did not come, he must have gone on a spree. The beer was warm and there were flies in it. On the walls, for the sake of unseen guests, cockroaches crawled from all corners. We looked around, sat down and went to sleep in the hay shed. I do not like to sleep on marsh hay. Some kind of knots and thick stems stick in the back, the head is numb, it twists in the nose from fine hay dust, you can’t smoke. For a long time I could not fall asleep and kept listening to the sounds of the night: somewhere cows and horses sighed heavily and heavily, shifted their feet, tossed and turned and from time to time slapped hard and thickly, quails screamed in the distant dewy oats, an indefatigable twig creaked with its wooden creak. I fell asleep before dawn, and we got up very late, at nine o'clock. It was already hot. The day promised to be hot. The sky stretched out pale, languid, exhausted, similar in color to blue, faded and faded silk. Ivan was still missing. We went alone. The village - or rather, settlements - Burtsevo consisted of only three courtyards and was located on the top of a large hill, along the slopes of which arable land and fields descended. And the foot of the hill ran into a swamp, stretching God knows how many hundreds, maybe even thousands, acres. About three versts away one could see a wavy blue ridge - a pine forest on Vysoky Island, where a narrow winding impassable path led. The rest of the neighborhood was completely covered with small shrubs, among which here and there glittered in the sun, like drops of scattered mercury, the bends of local swampy rivers: Tristenka, Kholmenki and Zvani. It's been a tough day for us. The steam was unbearable, and an hour later we were so wet with sweat that you could even squeeze it out. Annoying microscopic midges hovered in heaps over your head, climbed into your eyes, nose, ears and drove you to impotent fury when you furiously slap your cheeks, smearing insects on your face like porridge. Many times Yakov and I lost each other in the thick, impenetrable shrubs in places. Once a twig touched the dog of my gun, and it suddenly fired. From instant fright and from a loud shot, my head immediately ached and did not stop hurting all day, until evening. The boots were wet, water sloshed in them, and heavy, tired legs stumbled over bumps every second. Blood beat heavily under the skull, which seemed to me huge, as if swollen, and I felt pain every heartbeat. Every now and then we had to wade rivers or along lavas, which are nothing more than two or three thin trees tied with bast or rods, thrown across the river and fastened with several pairs of shaky stakes driven into the bottom. But most unpleasant of all were the crossings through open places, completely blue with countless forget-me-nots, from which there was such a sharp, grassy and sugary smell. Here the soil moved and rippled underfoot, and from under the feet, squelching, fountains of black stinking water spouted. We got lost and only far after noon reached the High. The sky was now full of heavy, motionless, puffy clouds. We ate cold meat with bread, drank water that smelled of rust and swamp gas, then made a fragrant fire from mosquitoes from juniper and - I don’t know how it happened - fell into a sudden heavy sleep. I woke up first. Everything around was terribly, menacingly and terribly darkened, and the greenery of the swamp bushes swayed and shimmered with gray steel. The whole sky was covered with bulky purple and violet clouds with torn gray edges. Thunder began to growl in the distance. I was in a hurry. - Well, Jacob, go home. God bless you get there. Go! But, leaving the island, which towered among the swamp, we immediately lost our way and began to wander aimlessly in zigzags through the bushes, stepping aside from the rivers, bypassing bogs and dense thickets, losing each other, hurrying, getting confused and angry. It was already completely dark, and the thunder rumbled still far away, but not ceasing for a moment, when Yakov, walking in front and seeming to me from afar, a dark, long, obscure, staggering pillar, my friend shouted: - There is a road! Yes, it was a narrow, swampy road, in some places fortified across with brushwood, with traces of horse droppings. And to our joy, we immediately heard the sound of a cart in the distance. Quickly, quickly, quite noticeable to the eye, darkness was approaching. Only in the west, low above the ground, glowed a narrow long bloody strip, trimmed at the top with a braid of molten gold. The cart has arrived. There were two people sitting in it: a woman ruled, twitching her elbows and stretching her legs straight in front of her, as only village women know how to sit, and an old man, a little tipsy, dozed behind. He woke up when the horse, frightened of us, began to snore, balk and crawl sideways into the swamp. We began to ask the old man about the road to Burtsevo. But he pulled and mumbled: - On Burtsevo you, dear? And whose will you be? - Draws. From Demtsyn. From Nikolai Vsevolodych. - We know, we know. Only you, dear, are not going there. You need to go now to where it is, right at sunrise. Right on the shot. Are you going to be renters in Demtsyn? - No, I'm a traveler, a relative of the Demtsyn gentleman. - Ah, so, so, so ... Relative, then? Before Burtsev, Evona is right where you are. So right on shooting and hit. With pleasure, so they went? .. But we did not have time to answer. From the bushes came a timid croaking, the flapping of powerful wings, and ten paces from us a large brood of grouse rose noisily, blackening on the scarlet strip of dawn. Yakov and I fired almost simultaneously, without aiming, time after time from both barrels and, of course, missed. And the cart was already racing away from us, jumping and mowing its sides on potholes. In vain we ran after her, shouting to the old man to stop. He was without a hat, standing whipping a horse with a whip, long, thin, awkward, and, turning back with fear, shouted something in an angry mumbling voice. Again we were alone. I suggested not to leave the road, but Yakov convinced me that there were only two steps to Burtsev, and that the old man's road led to Chentsovo, which was still a good fifteen miles away, and I agreed with him. And again we climbed into the black, damp swamp. As I left the road, I turned around. The red streak was no longer in the sky, as if it had been pulled over by a curtain; and I suddenly felt sad and melancholy. Nothing was visible anymore: no clouds, no bushes, no Yakov walking beside me - there was only wet, thick darkness. The first lightning flashed - it rumbled upstairs and broke off with a dry crack, followed by another, third. Then it went on and on without a break. It was one of those terrible thunderstorms that sometimes break out over great lowlands. The sky did not flash from lightning, but as if everything shone with their quivering blue, blue and. bright white luster. And the thunder did not stop for a moment. It seemed that some kind of demonic game of skittles was going on up there, reaching the height of the sky. With a dull roar, balls of incredible size rolled there, getting closer, louder, and suddenly - trrah-ta-ta-trap - gigantic skittles fell at once. And then I saw black lightning. I saw how lightning swayed the sky in the east, not dying out, but constantly expanding, then shrinking, and suddenly in this blue sky oscillating with lights I saw with extraordinary clarity an instantaneous and dazzling black lightning. And immediately, along with it, a terrible clap of thunder as if tore heaven and earth in half and threw me down on the bumps. Waking up, I heard Yakov's trembling, weak voice behind me. - Master, what is this, Lord ... We will perish, Queen of Heaven ... Lightning ... black ... Lord, Lord ... I ordered him severely, gathering all my last willpower: - Get up. Let's go. Don't spend the night here. Oh what a terrible night it was! These black lightnings inspired in me an inexplicable animal fear. I still cannot understand the reasons for this phenomenon: was there an error in our vision, strained by the incessant play of lightning throughout the sky, was it special meaning the accidental arrangement of the clouds, or I still cannot understand the reasons for this phenomenon: was there an error in our vision, strained by the incessant play of lightning throughout the sky, was the accidental arrangement of the clouds of particular importance, or the properties of this accursed swamp basin? But sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind and self-control every second. I remember I kept wanting to scream in a wild, piercing voice, like a hare. And I kept walking forward, babbling to God, like a frightened child, incoherent, absurd prayers: "Dear little God, kind, good God, save me, forgive me. I'll never be." And then, clinging to a bump, he flew with his elbow into the liquid mud and cursed furiously with the most nasty words. Suddenly I heard Yakov's voice not far away, a terrible, choking voice, which made me tremble: "Sir, I'm drowning... Save me, for Christ's sake... I'm drowning... Ah-ah-ah!... I rushed to his ear and in the unbearable blinding light of black lightning, I saw not him, but only his head and torso sticking out of the bog. I will never forget those bulging eyes, dead with insane horror. I would never have believed that a person's eyes can become so white, huge and terribly scary. I handed him the barrel of the gun, holding on to the stock with one hand, and with the other on several branches of a nearby bush squeezed together. I was unable to pull it out. "Lie down! Crawl!" I cried out in despair. And he, too, answered me with a high-pitched animal screech, which I will remember with horror until my death. He couldn't get out. I heard how he slapped his hands in the mud, in the flash of lightning I saw his head lower and lower at my feet and those eyes ... eyes ... I could not tear myself away from them ... In the end, he had already stopped screaming and only breathed frequently. And when the black lightning opened up the sky again, nothing could be seen on the surface of the swamp. How I walked through the wavering, gurgling, stinking bogs, how I climbed waist-deep into the rivers, how, finally, I reached the haystack, and how Burtsevsky Ivan, who heard my shots, found me in the morning, it’s not worth talking about ... Turchenko was silent for several minutes, low bending over his glass and ruffling his hair. Then suddenly he quickly raised his head and straightened up. His wide eyes were angry. - What I just told, - he shouted, - was not a random anecdote about the stupid word of the layman. You yourself saw today a swamp, a stinking human quagmire! But black lightning! Black Lightning! Where is she? Oh! When will she shine? He slowly closed his eyes, and after a minute, in a tired voice, he said affectionately: - Sorry, my dear, for verbosity. Well, let's have a bottle of my cider.<1912 >Black Lightning
Now I won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks say briefly: “Now I won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me on the whole winter to this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “county town such and such”, without giving any further information about it. Very recently, a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. One can get from the station to the city only in the dead of winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then one has to travel ninety miles through potholes and snowstorms, often hearing a wild wolf howl and not seeing a sign of human habitation for hours. And most importantly, there is nothing to carry from the city to the capital, and. there is no reason for anyone to go there.
And so the town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without import and export, without extractive and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand inhabitants, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with the inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, non-navigable and fishless river Vorozha - lives in winter littered with snowdrifts, drowning in mud in summer, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and undersized forest.
There is nothing here for the mind and for the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no living pictures, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and carnival booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which the inhabitants still remember with tenderness.
Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a bazaar in the town. A dozen and a half peasants come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but stick around all day near the treasury, patting themselves on the shoulders with their hands, dressed in leather yellow mittens about one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.
The local philistines are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and what they live is incomprehensible to the mind. In summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream with rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and all day long they stare out of the windows at the street, imprinting flattened noses and smudged lips on the panes with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after dinner they sleep. And at seven o'clock in the evening, all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally unleashes an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until morning in hot, dirty featherbeds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, waking up, itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.
About themselves, the townsfolk say this: in our city, houses are made of stone, and hearts are made of iron. Old-timers from the literate, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wrote off his "Inspector General". "The late dad Prokhor Sergeyich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they drove through the city." Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first names and patronymics. If you tell the driver: “To Churbanov (local Mur-Merillis), a dime”, he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, will ask: “What?” - "To Churbanov, to the shop, dime." - “Ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.
There are city rows here - a long wooden shed on Cathedral Square, with a lot of unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, calico, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all those cruel Modesty Nikanorichs and Doremidonts Nikiforichi, are sitting outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaway. They look at the occasional customer like a sworn enemy: "Hey boy, let that one go." They don’t serve the purchase to him, but throw it on the counter without wrapping it, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tried for so long by touch, by light, by ringing, and even by a tooth, and, moreover, they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: "But now he will call the scoundrel the police."
In winter, on holidays, in the afternoon, that way, in the late afternoon, merchants ride on the main Dvoryanskaya Street. In a row, one after another, huge gingerbread stallions, gray in apples, are swimming, shaking their fat meats, spitting their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in small sledges sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their backsides hang halfway from the seat and on the left and on the right side. Sometimes, breaking this decorous movement, the merchant’s son Nozdrunov, in an elegant coachman’s coat, with a boyar hat on one side, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girlish hearts, will suddenly gallop down the street, whistling and whooping.
A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after their arrival in the city, they all descend amazingly quickly, drink a lot, play cards, not leaving the toil for two days, gossip, live with other people's wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes does not arrive at all, because they carry it in a long circuitous way, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamer, and in winter on "horses and, finally, they drag her again to the north, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and holey bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged frozen coachmen.
Several newspapers are pooled in the city: Novoye Vremya, Svet, Peterburgskaya Gazeta, and only Birzhevye Vedomosti, or, as they are called here, Birzhevik. Previously, Birzhevik was also issued in two copies, but once the head of the city school very sharply told the geography teacher and historian Kipaytulov that “one of the two is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else” ...
Here in this town, at the end of January, on a bad, snowy evening, I was sitting at a desk in the hotel "Eagle", or in the local "Cockroach Gap", where I was the only guest. There was a breeze from the windows, in the night chimney the wind was howling, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A dull, wavering flame shone with a thin candle, swollen from one side. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls contemplated me, importantly moving their mustaches, red, serious, motionless cockroaches. Cursed, dead, green boredom cobwebbed my brain and paralyzed my body. What was to be done before nightfall? There were no books with me, and those numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped, I read so many times that I memorized them.
And I pondered sadly what I should do: whether to go to a club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical order to the city doctor, or for a charter on imposing punishments to a justice of the peace, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.
But who does not know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civil meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs infested with flies, the spit on the floor; all the rooms smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited house, and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied with preference, and right next to it, on small tables, vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players keep the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help either, because exclamations are heard every minute: “I beg you, Sysoi Petrovich, please don’t start your eyes, sir.”
In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge, jagged by time, rumbling balls on the go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise wardens, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist are drinking Caucasian cognac, drinking on “you”, hugging, kissing with wet furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and coats, singing “Not small autumn. rain, and at the same time each conducts, and by eleven o'clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other's heads.
“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”
But just at that moment the barefoot lad Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his house for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a small home screw, assuring that there would be only his own, that in general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats can not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from her mother from Belozersk of remarkable merits salmon, from which the pie will be built. "Sic! - exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, - and the mother-in-law is useful for something!
I quickly washed up, changed clothes and went to the dearest Pyotr Vlasovich. Now it was no longer the wind, but a ferocious hurricane rushing through the streets with terrible force, driving clouds of snow pellets in front of it, painfully whipping in the face and blinding the eyes. I am a person, like most modern people, almost an unbeliever, but I had to travel a lot along winter country roads, and therefore on such evenings and in such weather I mentally pray: “Lord, save and save the one who has now lost his way and is circling in field or in the forest with mortal fear in the soul.
The doctor's evening was exactly the same as these family parties are everywhere in provincial Russia, from Obdorsk to Kryzhopol and from Lodeynoye Pole to Temryuk. At first they gave us warm tea with homemade cookies, smelly rum and raspberry jam, small bones from which stick in the teeth so annoyingly. The ladies sat at one end of the table and with false animation, coquettishly singing the ends of phrases through their noses, talked about the high cost of food and firewood, about the depravity of servants, about dresses and embroideries, about the methods of salting cucumbers and shredding cabbage. When they sipped tea from their cups, each of them invariably stuck out the little finger of her right hand in the most unnatural way, which, as you know, is considered a sign of a secular tone and graceful effeminacy.
The men huddled at the other end. Here the conversation was about the service, about the governor, who was stern and disrespectful to the nobility, about politics, but mainly they recounted to each other the contents of today's newspapers, which all of them had already read. And it was funny and touching to listen to how they spoke penetratingly and shrewdly about the events that had taken place a month and a half ago, and how excited they were about news that had long been forgotten by everyone in the world. Indeed, it turned out as if we all live not on earth, but on Mars, on Venus, or on some other planet, where visible earthly affairs reach through huge intervals of whole weeks, months and years.
Then, according to the ancient custom, the owner said:
Do you know what, gentlemen? Let's leave this labyrinth and sit in the screw. Alexey Nikolaevich, Evgeny Evgenievich, would you like a card?
And immediately someone responded with a thousand-year-old phrase:
Indeed, why waste precious time?
There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, myself and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the Zemstvo chief. The owner persuaded for a long time. There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, I and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner tried to persuade us for a long time to get settled as going out, and finally, with an air of hypocritical condolence, decided to leave us alone. True, several times, in those moments when it was not his turn to hand over, he hurriedly ran to us and, rubbing his hands, asked: “Well, what? How are you here? Not very bored? Maybe you should send some wine or beer here?.. Not good. Who does not drink, does not play and does not smoke - that suspicious element in society. Why aren't you interested in your lady?"
We tried to take her. First we talked about the weather and the sleigh ride. The fat lady smiled meekly at us and answered that, it is true, when she was younger she used to play fly, or, as it is now, rams, but now she has forgotten and even knows little about figures. Then I roared something in her ear about the health of her grandchildren, she affectionately nodded her head and said sympathetically: “Yes, yes, yes, it happens, it happens, my lower back hurts when it rains,” and she took out some kind of then knitting. We did not dare to pester the good old woman anymore.
The doctor had a beautiful, huge sofa, upholstered in soft yellow leather, in which it was so comfortable to lie down. Turchenko and I never got bored, staying together. We were closely connected by three things: the forest, hunting and love of literature. I already had to be with him fifteen times on bear, fox and wolf rounds and hunting with hounds. He was an excellent shooter, and one day, in my presence, he knocked a lynx off the top of a tree with a shot from a fitting at a distance of more than three hundred paces. But he hunted only for the beast, and even for hares, on which he even set traps, because he hated these pests of young forest plantations from the bottom of his heart. Hidden and, of course, his unattainable dream was hunting for a tiger. He even collected a whole library about this noble sport. He never hunted a bird and severely forbade any spring hunting in his forest. “A bird is my first assistant in my household,” he said seriously. For such excessive severity, he was disliked.
He was a strong, small, dark-faced, bilious bachelor, with hot and mocking black eyes, with a strong gray in his black disheveled hair. He was completely alone, a real bean who had long lost all his relatives and childhood friends, and he still retained a lot of those careless and beautiful, rude and comradely qualities by which it is so easy to recognize a former student of the forest, now abolished, faculty of the famous once the Petrovsky Academy, which flourished in the village of Petrovsko-Razumovsky near Moscow.
He very rarely appeared in the county society, because he spent three-quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, his only passionate attachment to life. In the city above him, He very rarely appeared in the district society, because he spent three-quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, his only passionate attachment to life. In the city, they laughed at him behind his back and considered him an eccentric. Having a complete and uncontrolled opportunity to trade in his favor with forest plots allotted to the log house, he lived only on his one and a half ruble salary, a salary - truly beggarly, if we take into account the cultural, responsible and deeply important work that selflessly carried on his shoulders as many as twenty years this amazing Ivan Ivanovich. Indeed, only among the ranks of the forestry corps, in this forgotten of all forgotten departments, and even among the zemstvo doctors, driven out like postal nags, one did not have to meet these eccentrics, fanatics of the cause and unmercenaries.
Many years ago, Turchenko submitted a memorandum to the War Ministry stating that in the event of a defensive war, the foresters, thanks to their excellent knowledge of the terrain, could be very useful to the army as scouts and as guides for partisan detachments, and therefore proposed that the local guards be recruited from people who had completed special six-month courses. He, of course, as usual, did not answer anything. Then, at his own risk and conscience, he trained almost all of his foresters in compass and eye surveys, reconnaissance service, the device of notches and wolf pits, the system of military reports, signaling with flags and fire, and many other basics of guerrilla warfare. Every year he arranged shooting competitions for his subordinates and gave out prizes from his meager pocket. In the service, he introduced a discipline more severe than that of the sea, although at the same time he was a godfather and planted father of all the foresters.
Under his supervision and protection were twenty-seven thousand acres of state-owned forests, and besides, at the request of the millionaire brothers Solodaev, he looked after their huge, perfectly preserved forests in the southern part of the county. But even this was not enough for him: he arbitrarily took under his protection all the surrounding, adjacent and interspersed peasant forests. Performing for the peasants for pennies, and more often free of charge, various boundary works and forest surveys, he collected gatherings, spoke passionately and simply about the great importance of large forest areas in agriculture, and conjured the peasants to take care of the forest more than their eyes. The peasants listened to him attentively, sympathetically nodded their beards, sighed, as if at the sermon of a village priest, and agreed: “You are right .... what can I say ... your truth, Mr. Lesnitsyn ... What are we? We are men, dark people ... "
But it has long been known that the most beautiful and useful truths coming from the lips of Mr. Lesnitsyn, Mr. Agronomist and other intelligent guardians, represent for the village only a simple shaking of the air.
The next day, the good villagers let livestock into the forest, which had eaten the young cleanly, tore the bast from tender, fragile trees, felled drill spruces for some kind of fence or window, drilled birch trunks to extract spring sap for kvass, smoked in a dry forest and threw matches on dry gray moss, flashing like gunpowder, were left unextinguished bonfires, and shepherd boys, they senselessly set fire to hollows and cracks full of resin in pine trees, only to see what a cheerful, turbulent flame amber resin burns.,
He begged rural teachers to inculcate in their students respect and love for the forest, incited them, together with the village priests - and, of course, to no avail - to organize afforestation holidays, pestered police officers, zemstvo chiefs and magistrates about predatory logging, and at zemstvo meetings so tired everyone with his ardent speeches about the protection of forests, that they stopped listening to him. “Well, the philosopher has taken his usual nonsense,” said the Zemstvo and went off to smoke, leaving Turchenko to rant, like the preacher Bede, in front of empty chairs. But nothing could break the energy of this stubborn Ukrainian, who came against the wool of a sleepy town. He, on his own initiative, strengthened the river banks with bushes, planted coniferous trees on sandy wastelands and afforested ravines. It was on this subject that we talked with him, curled up on the vast doctor's sofa.
In the ravines I now have so much snow that the horse will leave with an arc. And I rejoice like a child. At the age of seven, I raised the spring height of the water in our filthy Vorozha by four and a half feet. Ah, if only I had working hands! If I were given great unlimited power over the local forests. In a few years I would have made Mologa navigable to the very source and would have raised the grain yield everywhere in the region by fifty per cent. I swear by God, in twenty years you can make the Dnieper and Volga the most full-flowing rivers in the world - and it will cost a penny! It is possible to moisten with forest plantings and irrigate the most waterless provinces with ditches. Just plant a forest. Take care of the forest. Drain the swamps, but really ...
What is your ministry looking at? I asked slyly.
Our ministry is the ministry of non-resistance to evil,” Turchenko answered bitterly. - Nobody cares. When I go by rail and see hundreds of trains loaded with timber, I see boundless stacks of firewood at the stations, I just want to cry. And if I now make our forest rivers accessible to rafts - all these Zvani, Izhiny, Kholmenki, Vorozhi - do you know what will happen? In two years the county will be a barren place. The landowners will immediately float all the timber to St. Petersburg and abroad. Honestly, sometimes my hands drop and my head cracks. The most vital, the most beautiful, the most fruitful work is in my power, and I am bound, I dare not do anything, I am not understood by anyone, I am ridiculous, I am a restless person. Tired. Hard. See what interests them all: eat, sleep, drink, play screwball. They love nothing: neither the homeland, nor the service, nor the people - they love only their snotty children. You won't wake anyone up, you won't be interested. Vulgarity all around. You know in advance who will say what under any circumstances. Everyone was impoverished in minds, feelings, even simple human words ...
We fell silent. From the living room, from four tables, we heard the cries of the players playing:
“I’ll say, perhaps, small-u-small trifles.”
"Details by letter, Evgraf Platonych."
"Five no trumps?"
"Are you screwing?"
"Our business, sir."
"Let's take a chance ... Baby, wearing a helmet."
"Your game. We are in the bushes."
"Yeah, bought it. Not a single human face. So it will be as bought.
"The High Pressure Game".
"What? Has she begun to think of herself?
“Vasil Lvovich, you are not supposed to think for more than a quarter of an hour. Come in."
“Your Excellency, the cards are closer to the orders. I see your jack of tambourine."
"Don't you look..."
“I can’t, since childhood, such a habit, if someone holds cards like a fan.”
“Would you like to bite this date?”
Turchenko bent down to me, smiling, and said:
Now someone will say: "Don't go alone, go with your mother," and another will remark: "That's right, like in a pharmacy."
“What kind of worms did you show me? Jack of thirds with fosks? Is this support, in your opinion?
"I thought…"
“I thought the Indian rooster, and he died from thought.”
“And why did you pickle your ace? Are you thinking of marinating it?
“Not from what, so with a tambourine!”
"What do you think of this beautiful lady?"
"And we are her trump card."
“That's right,” the cathedral priest approved in a thick baritone voice, “don't go alone, go with an escort.”
“Excuse me, excuse me, but it seems you didn’t give a trump card just now?”
“Leave it, my friend ... Send the child, we won’t cheat ... We have it right, as in the Chamber of Weights and Measures.”
Listen, Ivan Ivanovich, - I turned to the forester, - shouldn't we run away? You know, in English, without saying goodbye.
What are you, what are you, my dear. Leave without dinner, and even without saying goodbye. It's hard to think of a worse insult to a host. You will never be forgotten. Be known as ignorant and arrogant.
But fat Pyotr Vlasovich, even more swollen and bluish-purple from the heat, the long sitting and the happy game, had already got up from the cards and was saying, walking around the players:
Gentlemen, gentlemen ... The pie is getting cold, and the wife is angry. Gentlemen, the last batch.
The guests left the tables and, in a cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all the doors. Card conversations have not subsided yet: “How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? It seems to you that the guests left the tables and, in a cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all the doors. Card conversations have not subsided yet: “How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? It seems to you that it is clear as a finger, I said tambourines by the first hand. You have a queen, a ten - a quarter itself. - “You, my charm, were obliged to support me. And climb on without trump cards! You think I didn't know your aces?" - “Yes, excuse me, they didn’t let me talk, that’s how they screwed up.” - “And you - tear from them. That's what the screw is for. Cowards don't play cards...
Finally the hostess said:
Lord, please have a bite,
Everyone rushed into the dining room, laughing, joking, rubbing their hands excitedly. They began to sit down.
Husbands and wives apart, the merry master commanded. - They are tired of each other at home.
And with the help of his wife, he shuffled the guests around in such a way that the couples, inclined to flirt, or united by a long-standing connection known throughout the city, found themselves together. This sweet courtesy is always accepted at family gatherings, and therefore often, bending over a fallen napkin, a lone observer will see intertwined legs under the table, as well as hands lying on other people's knees.
They drank a lot - men "simple", "tear", "state", ladies - rowanberry; they drank at appetizers, pie, hare and veal. From the very beginning of supper they lit up, and after the pie it became noisy and smoky, and hands with knives and forks flashed in the air.
We talked about appetizers and various amazing dishes with the air of well-deserved gourmets. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about the theater and, finally, about snacks and various amazing dishes with the air of well-deserved gastronomes. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about theater and, finally, about modern literature.
Theater and literature are the inevitable strong points of all Russian lunches, dinners, zhurfiks and fifokloks. After all, every inhabitant has ever played in an amateur performance, and in the golden days of his student life he raged in the gallery in the capital's theater. In the same way, everyone at one time wrote an essay in the gymnasium on the topic “A Comparative Essay on Education According to Domostroy” and “Eugene Onegin”, and who did not write poetry in childhood and did not contribute to student newspapers? What lady does not say with a charming smile: “Imagine, last night I wrote a huge letter to my cousin - sixteen postal sheets around and small, small, like beads. And this, imagine, at some hour, without a single blot! A wonderfully interesting letter. I will purposely ask Nadia to send it to me and read it to you. It was like I was inspired. My head was burning in a strange way, my hands were trembling, and the pen seemed to run across the paper by itself. And which of the provincial ladies and girls did not trust you to read aloud, together, their class diaries, constantly tearing out your notebook and exclaiming that you can’t read here?
Talking, walking around the stage and writing - everyone seems to be such an easy, trifling matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently, in their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of speaking, walking around the stage and writing - it seems to everyone such an easy, trifling matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently, in their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of the arts - theater and fiction - everywhere find the most severe and captious judges, the most obstinate and dismissive critics , the most vicious and arrogant detractors.
Turchenko and I sat at the end of the table and only listened with boredom and irritation to this disorderly, self-confident, noisy conversation, which every minute strayed into slander and gossip, into peeping into other people's bedrooms. Turchenko's face was tired and turned yellow and brown.
Not well? I asked quietly.
He grimaced.
No ... so ... very tired ... All the same hammering ... woodpeckers.
The magistrate, who was placed on the right hand of the hostess, was distinguished by very long legs and an unusually short torso. Therefore, when he sat, only his head and half of his chest towered above the table, like museum busts, and the ends of his magnificent forked beard were often dipped in sauce. Chewing a piece of hare in sour cream sauce, he spoke with weighty pauses, like a man accustomed to general attention, and convincingly emphasized the words with the movements of a fork clenched in a fist:
I don't understand today's writers... Sorry. I want to understand and I can’t… I refuse. Either a farce, or pornography... Some kind of mockery of the public... You, they say, pay me a ruble-ruble of your hard-earned money, and for that I will show you shameful nonsense.
Horror, horror, what they write! groaned, clutching her whiskey, the wife of the excise inspector, the county Messalina, who did not ignore even her coachmen. - I always wash my hands with cologne after their books. And to think that such literature falls into the hands of our children!
Quite right! - exclaimed the judge and drowned his sideburns in red cabbage. - And most importantly, what does creativity have to do with it? inspiration? well, this one, how is it ... a flight of thought? So after all, I will write ... so each of us will write ... so my clerk will concoct, what a complete idiot. Take shuffle all near and distant relatives like a deck of cards, and throw them away in pairs. A brother falls in love with his sister, a grandson seduces his own grandfather... Or suddenly a crazy love for an Angora cat, or a janitor's boot... Nonsense and nonsense!
And all this lousy revolution is to blame, - said the Zemstvo chief, a man with an unusually narrow forehead and long face, who, for his appearance, was still called the mare's head in the regiment. - Students do not want to study, workers rebel, depravity is everywhere. Marriage is not recognized. "Love must be free." That's free love for you.
And most importantly - the Jews! - grey-whiskered, choking from asthma, landowner Dudukin croaked with difficulty.
I don't know the Masons, but I know the Jews, - Dudukin angrily balked. - They have a kagal. They have: one climbed - dragged the other. By all means they sign with Russian surnames, and on purpose they write abominations about Russia in order to decri ... decri ... decriti ... well, how it is! .. in a word, to sully the honor of the Russian people.
And the judge continued to peck his own, spreading his arms with a fork and knife clamped in them and knocking over a glass with his beard:
I don't understand and I don't understand. Some quirks ... Suddenly, for no apparent reason, "Oh, close your pale legs." What is this, I ask you? What does this dream mean? Well, okay, and I'll take it and write: "Ah, hide your red nose!" and dot. And that's it. What's worse, I ask you?
Or else: he launched a pineapple into the sky, - someone supported.
Yes, sir, just pineapple, - the judge got angry. - But the other day I read from their most fashionable: "A petrel flies, similar to black lightning." How? Why? Where, let me ask you, is black lightning? Who among us has seen black lightning? Nonsense!
I noticed that at the last words Turchenko quickly raised his head. I looked back at him. His face lit up with a strange smile - ironic and defiant. He seemed to want to say something. But he said nothing, quivered his dry cheekbones, and lowered his eyes.
And most importantly, what do they write about? - suddenly became agitated, like instantly boiled milk, a silent insurance agent. - There - a symbol is a symbol, that's their business, but I'm not at all interested in reading about drunken tramps, about thieves, about ... excuse me, ladies, about various prostitutes and so on ...
About the hanged too, - prompted the excise supervisor, - and about the anarchists, and also about the executioners.
Yes, the judge approved. They definitely don't have any other topics. They wrote before ... Pushkin wrote, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Lermontov. Beauty! What language! “The Ukrainian night is quiet, the sky is transparent, the stars are shining…” Oh, hell, what a language, what a syllable!..
Marvelous! said the Inspector of Public Schools, twinkling with tender eyes from under his golden spectacles and shaking his sharp red beard. - Amazing! And Gogol! Divine Gogol! Remember he has...
And suddenly he hummed in a deaf, sepulchral, howling voice, and after him the zemstvo chief also chanted in a singsong voice:
- “Chu-uden Day-epr in calm weather, when it’s free and fluffy ...” Well, where else can you find such beauty and music of words! ..
The cathedral priest clenched his bushy gray beard into a fist, walked along it to the very end and said, resting on the "o".
There were also venerable writers from the spiritual: Levitov, Leskov, Pomyalovsky. Especially the last one. He denounced, but with love… ho-ho-ho… the universal lubrication… in the air… But he wrote about spiritual singing in such a way that even to this day, while reading, you will involuntarily shed a tear.
Yes, our Russian literature, - the inspector sighed, - has fallen! What about before? And Turgenev? A? "How good, how fresh the roses were." Now they don't write like that.
Where! croaked nobleman Dudukin. - Before the nobles wrote, and now the commoner has gone.
The timid head of the post office suddenly lisped:
But now they are making some money! Ai-ai-ai ... it's scary to say ... My nephew, a student, told me in the summer. A ruble per line, he says. As a new line - the ruble. For example: “The count entered the room” - ruble. Or just from a new line "yes" - and the ruble. Fifty dollars a letter. Or even more. Let's say the hero of the novel is asked: "Who is the father of this lovely child?" And he briefly answers with pride “I” - And please: a ruble in your pocket.
The postmaster's insertion seemed to open the floodgate to a stinking swamp of gossip. The most reliable information about the life and earnings of writers rained down from all sides. So-and-so bought on the Volga an old princely estate of four thousand acres with a manor and a palace. Another married the daughter of an oilman and took a dowry of four million. The third always writes drunk and drinks a quarter of vodka a day, and eats only marshmallow. The fourth beat off the wife of his best friend, and two decadents, they simply exchanged wives by mutual agreement. A handful of modernists made up a close circle of Sodoms, known throughout Petersburg, and one famous poet wanders around Asia and America with a whole harem, consisting of women of all nations and colors.
Now they were all talking at once, and it was impossible to make out anything. Dinner was coming to an end. There were cigarette butts sticking out of half-finished glasses and bowls of half-eaten lemon jelly. Guests poured beer and wine. The priest poured red wine on the tablecloth and tried to fill the puddle with salt so that there would be no stain, and the hostess persuaded him with a sweet smile that curved the right half of her mouth up and the left down:
Yes, leave it, father, why should you trouble yourself? It will wash off.
The inevitable hairpins and allusions have already flickered several times between the ladies who have drunk rowan and liquor. The police officer praised the wife of the insurance agent for the fact that she refreshed her last year's dress with great taste - "it's impossible to recognize at all." Strakhovikha replied with a gentle smile that, unfortunately, she could not order new dresses from Novgorod twice a year, that she and her husband were honest people, although poor, and that they had no place to take bribes. “Ah, bribes are a terrible vulgarity! - the police officer readily agreed. “In general, there is a lot of filth in the world, but it also happens that some married ladies are supported by other men.” This remark was interrupted by the excise matron, and she started talking about governor's galoshes. A storm was brewing in the air, and the usual tragic exclamation was already hanging over their heads: “My foot will not be in this house anymore!” - but the resourceful hostess quickly averted disaster by getting up from the table with the words:
I beg your pardon, gentlemen. There is nothing more.
There was a commotion. The ladies kissed the hostess with ardent impetuosity, the men kissed her hand with greasy lips and squeezed the doctor's hand. Most of the guests went into the living room to the cards, but a few people remained in the dining room to finish their cognac and beer. In a few minutes they sang out of tune and in unison, "Not a drizzle of autumn," each leading the choir with both hands. The forester and I took advantage of this interval and left, no matter how kindly Pyotr Vlasovich detained us.
The wind died down completely by night, and the clear, moonless, blue sky played with silver eyelashes of bright stars. It was ghostly light from that bluish phosphorescent radiance that fresh, freshly settled snow always radiates from itself.
The forester walked beside me and muttered something to himself. I had long known behind him this habit of talking to himself, which is characteristic of many people who live in silence - fishermen, foresters, night guards, and also those who have endured long years of solitary confinement - and I stopped paying attention to this habit.
Yes, yes, yes ... - he threw abruptly from the collar of his fur coat. - Stupid... Yes... Hm... Stupid, stupid... And rude... Hm...
A lantern was burning on the bridge over Vorozha. With the usual strange feeling of a little exciting, pleasant care, I stepped on the even, beautiful, unspotted snow, which softly, elastically and creakingly moved under my foot. Suddenly Turchenko stopped near the lantern and turned to me,
Silly! he said loudly and decisively. “Believe me, my dear,” he continued, lightly touching my sleeve, “believe me, it’s not the government regime, not the poverty of the land, not our poverty and darkness that we Russians are trailing behind the whole world. And all this is a sleepy, lazy, indifferent to everything, loving nothing, knowing nothing province, it doesn’t matter whether it is an employee, noble, merchant or petty-bourgeois. Look at them today. How much aplomb, how much contempt for everything that is outside their chicken horizons! So, in passing, they hang labels: “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, fool ...” Parrots! And the main thing is that, you see, he does not understand this and this, and, therefore, this is already bad and ridiculous. So he doesn't understand differential calculus - so it's nonsense? And Pushkin was not understood. And Chekhov has recently been misunderstood. They talked about his "Steppe": what nonsense - sheep's thoughts! Do sheep think? “Flowers smiled at me in silence, half asleep…” Nonsense! Do flowers ever laugh! And now, too. “I, he says, will write it myself ...”
What about black lightning? I asked.
Yes, yes… “Where is this black lightning?” This judge is a nice person, but what did he see in his life? He is a school and office product ... And I'll tell you that I myself, with my own eyes, saw black lightning and even ten times in a row. It was scary.
That's how, - I said incredulously.
Exactly. Since childhood, I have been in the forest, on the river, in the field. I have seen and heard amazing things that I don’t like to talk about because they won’t believe anyway. For example, I watched not only the love round dances of cranes, where they all dance and sing in a huge circle, and a couple dances in the middle - I saw their trial of the weak before the autumn departure. As a realist boy, living in Polissya, I saw hailstones the size of a large man's fist, smooth icicles, but not round in shape, but in the form of a kind of cap of a young porcini mushroom, and the flat side is layered. In five minutes this hail broke all the windows in the large landowner's house, laid bare all the poplars and lindens in the garden, and in the field killed many small livestock and two fallows to death. In the dead of winter, on the day of the terrible Messinian earthquake, in the morning, I was with the hounds in my Bildina. And at about ten or eleven o'clock, a rainbow suddenly blossomed in a completely cloudless sky. It touched the horizon with both ends, was unusually bright and had a width of forty-five degrees, and a height of twenty-twenty-five. Beneath it, just as bright, another rainbow curved, but somewhat weaker in color, and then a third, fourth, fifth, and paler and paler - some kind of fabulous seven-color corridor. This went on for fifteen minutes. Then the rainbows melted, came running instantly, God knows where the clouds came from and tumbled down a solid snowfield.
I have seen forest fires. I saw how the hurricane brought down five yards of dead wood. Yes, I was then in the forest with a ranger, foresters and workers, and before my eyes hundreds of huge trees fell down like matches. Then the guard Nelidkin knelt down and took off his hat. And everyone did the same. And I. He read "Our Father", and we were baptized, but we did not hear his voice because of the crackling of falling trees and breaking branches. Here is what I have seen in my life. But I also saw black lightning, and that was the worst of all. Wait, - Turchenko interrupted himself, - we are at my house. Come to me. Mikheevna will swear, but nothing. For this I will treat you to the third-day kvass. Today, blessing, let's start.
Mikheevna, the forester's stern old maid, and his wonderful apple kvass were known throughout the city. The old woman received us sternly and grumbled for a long time, wandering around the rooms with a candle and climbing through the cabinets: “Naughty, night owls, the day is not enough for them, they wander at night, they don’t let good people sleep.” But kvass was above all praise. He wandered for a long time, first in an oak barrel on hops and yeast, with raisins, cognac and some kind of liquor, then he settled for three years in bottles and now he was strong, played like champagne, and cheerfully ”and coldly dried in his mouth, a little intoxicated and refreshing at the same time.
That's how it was, - said Turchenko, walking in a hare jacket around his office, hung with paintings of tigers. - As a student, I came for a vacation in the very wilderness of the Tver province to my cousin Nikolai - to Koke - that's what we called him. He was once a brilliant young man, with a lyceum education, with great connections and a great career ahead of him, and he danced beautifully at real society balls, adored actresses from the French operetta and New Village gypsies, drank champagne, in his words, like a crocodile, and was soul of society. But in an instant, literally in an instant, all Kokino's well-being collapsed. One morning he woke up and was horrified to find that the entire right side of his body was paralyzed. Out of pride and pride, he doomed himself to voluntary exile and settled in the countryside.
But he did not at all lose his clarity and good spirits and, with slight irony, called himself a cyclist, because he was forced to move around sitting in a three-wheeled chair, which was rolled from behind by his servant Yakov. He ate and drank a lot, slept a lot, wrote ridiculous obscene letters in verse on a typewriter, and often changed village mistresses, to whom he gave big names of royal favorites, like La Vallière, Montespan and Pompadour.
Once, loading or unloading a Browning, with which Koka never parted, he shot his Yakov in the leg. Fortunately, the bullet hit very well, passing through the flesh of the thigh and breaking through, in addition, two doors right through. For some reason, this event became close friends between the master and the servant. They positively could not live without each other, although they often quarreled: Koka, getting angry, aptly poked Yakov in the stomach with a crutch, and Yakov then ran away from home for several hours and did not appear at the call, leaving Koka in a helpless state.
Yakov was an excellent hunter at heart: tireless, despite his lameness, with a good memory of the area, with great knowledge of those elusive reasons why you guess the quality and quantity of game. He and I often went on a simple, peasant, very difficult hunt, that is, without a dog, but with a sneak, requiring great attention and patience. I must say that Koka was reluctant to let Yakov go with me - without him he was, as without his only arms and legs. Therefore, in order to beg Jacob, one had to resort to tricks. Nothing endeared Coca, his generosity, more than inquiries about his former cheerful life, when he was considered the lion of drawing rooms and a sweet frequenter of chic restaurants.
And so one day, winding up this Kokina hurdy-gurdy and flattering him without any measure, I managed to kidnap Yakov for a whole week. We went with him to the distant village of Burtsevo, where Koka had forest plots and glorious swamps. The Burtsev peasant Ivan, who is also Kokin the forester, said that so many capercaillie, black grouse, hazel grouse, snipe, great snipe and ducks were divorced on Vysokoe, in Ramenye and on Blinovo, which is simply invisible. "Though beat with a stick, at least cover with a hat."
We got ready for a long time, left late and arrived in Burtsevo by the evening dawn. Ivan was not there, he, it turns out, went to his brother-in-law in Okunevo, where they celebrated the throne. We were received by his wife Avdotya, a thin, goggle-eyed woman with a face like a fish, and so freckled that white skin only in some places showed through her brown mask with rare glimpses on her cheeks.
It was stuffy in the hut, a lot of flies were buzzing and it smelled of something disgustingly sour. In the unsteadiness, a child squealed incessantly. Avdotya got busy.
Mine is still, I don't know if it will come back or not. Painfully good beer is brewed in Okunev. And where there is beer, there is Ivan. Wait a minute, breadwinners, I'll give you my beer to drink. I brewed it for the rescue ... Not much thick beer, we topped it up, but it was tasty and sweet.
She lifted the heavy lid of the cellar by the ring, went down there and a minute later got out with a large ladle of homemade beer. While she poured it for us, I asked, pointing to the crying baby:
How many months old is the child?
Me-sya-tsev? - the woman was surprised. - What are you, the breadwinner, the Lord is with you. She just gave birth last night. What months are there? She gave birth at exactly this time yesterday. Eat, breadwinners, I don’t know what to call you ... Yesterday I just gave birth. Here's how.
I involuntarily said:
That's the pound.
But Yakov remarked indifferently and contemptuously:
It doesn't matter to them. They are habitual. They - how to sneeze.
Ivan did not come, he must have gone on a spree. The beer was warm and there were flies in it. On the walls, for the sake of unseen guests, cockroaches crawled from all corners. We looked around, sat down and went to sleep in the hay shed. I do not like to sleep on marsh hay. Some kind of knots and thick stems stick in the back, the head is numb, it twists in the nose from fine hay dust, you can’t smoke. For a long time I could not fall asleep and kept listening to the sounds of the night: somewhere cows and horses sighed heavily and heavily, shifted their feet, tossed and turned and from time to time slapped hard and thickly, quails screamed in the distant dewy oats, an indefatigable twig creaked with its wooden creak.
I fell asleep before dawn, and we got up very late, at nine o'clock. It was already hot. The day promised to be hot. The sky stretched out pale, languid, exhausted, similar in color to blue, faded and faded silk.
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin
Black Lightning
Now I can’t even remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks say briefly: “county town such and such”, without giving any further information about it. Very recently, a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. One can get from the station to the city only in the dead of winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then one has to travel ninety miles through potholes and snowstorms, often hearing a wild wolf howl and not seeing a sign of human habitation for hours. And most importantly, there is nothing to carry from the city to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.
And so the town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without import and export, without extractive and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand inhabitants, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with the inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, non-navigable and fishless river Vorozha - lives in winter littered with snowdrifts, in summer drowning in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and undersized forest.
There is nothing here for the mind and for the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no living pictures, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and carnival booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which the inhabitants still remember with tenderness.
Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a bazaar in the town. A dozen and a half peasants come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but stick around all day near the treasury, patting themselves on the shoulders with their hands, dressed in leather yellow mittens about one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.
The local philistines are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and what they live is incomprehensible to the mind. In summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream with rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and all day long they stare out of the windows at the street, imprinting flattened noses and smudged lips on the panes with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after dinner they sleep. And at seven o'clock in the evening, all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally unleashes an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until morning in hot, dirty featherbeds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, waking up, itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.
About themselves, the townsfolk say this: in our city, houses are made of stone, and hearts are made of iron. Old-timers from the literate, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wrote off his "Inspector General". "The late dad Prokhor Sergeyich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they drove through the city." Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first names and patronymics. If you tell the driver: “To Churbanov (local Mur-Merillis), a dime”, he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, will ask: “What?” - "To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks." - “Ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.
There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with a lot of unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, kumach, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all those cruel Modesty Nikanorichs and Doremidonts Nikiforichi, are sitting outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaway. They look at the occasional customer like a sworn enemy: "Hey boy, let that one go." They don’t serve the purchase to him, but throw it on the counter without wrapping it, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tried for so long by touch, by light, by ringing, and even by a tooth, and, moreover, they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: "But now he will call the scoundrel the police."
In winter, on holidays, in the afternoon, that way, in the late afternoon, merchants ride on the main Dvoryanskaya Street. In a row, one after another, huge gingerbread stallions, gray in apples, are swimming, shaking their fat meats, spitting their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in small sledges sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their backsides hang halfway from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, breaking this decorous movement, the merchant’s son Nozdrunov, in an elegant coachman’s coat, with a boyar hat on one side, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girlish hearts, will suddenly gallop down the street, whistling and whooping.
A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after their arrival in the city, they all descend amazingly quickly, drink a lot, play cards, not leaving the toil for two days, gossip, live with other people's wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes does not arrive at all, because they carry it in a long circuitous way, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamer, and in winter on horses and Finally, they drag her again to the north, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and holey bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged frozen coachmen.
Several newspapers are pooled in the city: Novoye Vremya, Svet, Peterburgskaya Gazeta, and only Birzhevye Vedomosti, or, as they are called here, Birzhevik. Previously, Birzhevik was also issued in two copies, but once the head of the city school very sharply told the geography teacher and historian Kipaytulov that “one of the two is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else” ...
Here in this town, at the end of January, on a bad, snowy evening, I was sitting at a desk in the hotel "Eagle", or in the local "Cockroach Gap", where I was the only guest. There was a breeze from the windows, in the night chimney the wind was howling, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A dull, wavering flame shone with a thin candle, swollen from one side. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls contemplated me, importantly moving their mustaches, red, serious, motionless cockroaches. Cursed, dead, green boredom cobwebbed my brain and paralyzed my body. What was to be done before nightfall? There were no books with me, and those numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped, I read so many times that I memorized them.
And I pondered sadly what I should do: whether to go to a club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical order to the city doctor, or for a charter on imposing punishments to a justice of the peace, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.
But who does not know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civil meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs infested with flies, the spit on the floor; all the rooms smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited house, and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied with preference, and right next to it, on small tables, vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players keep the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help either, because exclamations are heard every minute: “I beg you, Sysoi Petrovich, please don’t start your eyes, sir.”
In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge, jagged by time, rumbling balls on the go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise wardens, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist, are reveling in Caucasian cognac, drinking on “you”, hugging, kissing with wet furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and coats, singing “Not a fine autumn rain” at random, and at the same time each conducts , and by eleven o'clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other's head.
“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”
But just at that moment the barefoot lad Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his house for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a small home screw, assuring that there would be only his own, that in general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats can not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from her mother from Belozersk of remarkable merits salmon, from which the pie will be built. "Sic! - exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, - and the mother-in-law is useful for something!
Current page: 1 (total book has 2 pages)
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin
Black Lightning
Now I can’t even remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks say briefly: “county town such and such”, without giving any further information about it. Very recently, a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. One can get from the station to the city only in the dead of winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then one has to travel ninety miles through potholes and snowstorms, often hearing a wild wolf howl and not seeing a sign of human habitation for hours. And most importantly, there is nothing to carry from the city to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.
And so the town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without import and export, without extractive and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand inhabitants, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with the inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, non-navigable and fishless river Vorozha - lives in winter littered with snowdrifts, in summer drowning in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and undersized forest.
There is nothing here for the mind and for the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no living pictures, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and carnival booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which the inhabitants still remember with tenderness.
Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a bazaar in the town. A dozen and a half peasants come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but stick around all day near the treasury, patting themselves on the shoulders with their hands, dressed in leather yellow mittens about one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.
The local philistines are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and what they live is incomprehensible to the mind. In summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream with rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and all day long they stare out of the windows at the street, imprinting flattened noses and smudged lips on the panes with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after dinner they sleep. And at seven o'clock in the evening, all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally unleashes an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until morning in hot, dirty featherbeds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, waking up, itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.
About themselves, the townsfolk say this: in our city, houses are made of stone, and hearts are made of iron. Old-timers from the literate, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wrote off his "Inspector General". "The late dad Prokhor Sergeyich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they drove through the city." Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first names and patronymics. If you tell the driver: “To Churbanov (local Mur-Merillis), a dime”, he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, will ask: “What?” - "To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks." - “Ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.
There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with a lot of unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, kumach, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all those cruel Modesty Nikanorichs and Doremidonts Nikiforichi, are sitting outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaway. They look at the occasional customer like a sworn enemy: "Hey boy, let that one go." They don’t serve the purchase to him, but throw it on the counter without wrapping it, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tried for so long by touch, by light, by ringing, and even by a tooth, and, moreover, they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: "But now he will call the scoundrel the police."
In winter, on holidays, in the afternoon, that way, in the late afternoon, merchants ride on the main Dvoryanskaya Street. In a row, one after another, huge gingerbread stallions, gray in apples, are swimming, shaking their fat meats, spitting their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in small sledges sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their backsides hang halfway from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, breaking this decorous movement, the merchant’s son Nozdrunov, in an elegant coachman’s coat, with a boyar hat on one side, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girlish hearts, will suddenly gallop down the street, whistling and whooping.
A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after their arrival in the city, they all descend amazingly quickly, drink a lot, play cards, not leaving the toil for two days, gossip, live with other people's wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes does not arrive at all, because they carry it in a long circuitous way, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamer, and in winter on horses and Finally, they drag her again to the north, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and holey bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged frozen coachmen.
Several newspapers are pooled in the city: Novoye Vremya, Svet, Peterburgskaya Gazeta, and only Birzhevye Vedomosti, or, as they are called here, Birzhevik. Previously, Birzhevik was also issued in two copies, but once the head of the city school very sharply told the geography teacher and historian Kipaytulov that “one of the two is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else” ...
Here in this town, at the end of January, on a bad, snowy evening, I was sitting at a desk in the hotel "Eagle", or in the local "Cockroach Gap", where I was the only guest. There was a breeze from the windows, in the night chimney the wind was howling, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A dull, wavering flame shone with a thin candle, swollen from one side. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls contemplated me, importantly moving their mustaches, red, serious, motionless cockroaches. Cursed, dead, green boredom cobwebbed my brain and paralyzed my body. What was to be done before nightfall? There were no books with me, and those numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped, I read so many times that I memorized them.
And I pondered sadly what I should do: whether to go to a club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical order to the city doctor, or for a charter on imposing punishments to a justice of the peace, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.
But who does not know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civil meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs infested with flies, the spit on the floor; all the rooms smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited house, and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied with preference, and right next to it, on small tables, vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players keep the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help either, because exclamations are heard every minute: “I beg you, Sysoi Petrovich, please don’t start your eyes, sir.”
In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge, jagged by time, rumbling balls on the go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise wardens, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist, are reveling in Caucasian cognac, drinking on “you”, hugging, kissing with wet furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and coats, singing “Not a fine autumn rain” at random, and at the same time each conducts , and by eleven o'clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other's head.
“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”
But just at that moment the barefoot lad Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his house for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a small home screw, assuring that there would be only his own, that in general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats can not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from her mother from Belozersk of remarkable merits salmon, from which the pie will be built. "Sic! - exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, - and the mother-in-law is useful for something!
I quickly washed up, changed clothes and went to the dearest Pyotr Vlasovich. Now it was no longer the wind, but a ferocious hurricane rushing through the streets with terrible force, driving clouds of snow pellets in front of it, painfully whipping in the face and blinding the eyes. I am a person, like most modern people, almost an unbeliever, but I had to travel a lot along winter country roads, and therefore on such evenings and in such weather I mentally pray: “Lord, save and save the one who has now lost his way and is circling in field or in the forest with mortal fear in the soul.
The doctor's evening was exactly the same as these family parties are everywhere in provincial Russia, from Obdorsk to Kryzhopol and from Lodeynoye Pole to Temryuk. At first they gave us warm tea with homemade cookies, smelly rum and raspberry jam, small bones from which stick in the teeth so annoyingly. The ladies sat at one end of the table and with false animation, coquettishly singing the ends of phrases through their noses, talked about the high cost of food and firewood, about the depravity of the servants, about dresses and embroideries, about the methods of salting cucumbers and shredding cabbage. When they sipped tea from their cups, each of them invariably stuck out the little finger of her right hand in the most unnatural way, which, as you know, is considered a sign of a secular tone and graceful effeminacy.
The men huddled at the other end. Here the conversation was about the service, about the governor, who was stern and disrespectful to the nobility, about politics, but mainly they recounted to each other the contents of today's newspapers, which all of them had already read. And it was funny and touching to listen to how they spoke penetratingly and shrewdly about the events that had taken place a month and a half ago, and how excited they were about news that had long been forgotten by everyone in the world. Indeed, it turned out as if we all live not on earth, but on Mars, on Venus, or on some other planet, where visible earthly affairs reach through huge intervals of whole weeks, months and years.
Then, according to the ancient custom, the owner said:
“Do you know what, gentlemen? Let's leave this labyrinth and sit in the screw. Alexey Nikolaevich, Evgeny Evgenievich, would you like a card?
And immediately someone responded with a thousand-year-old phrase:
“Really, why waste precious time?
There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, myself and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner persuaded for a long time. There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, myself and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner tried to persuade us for a long time to get settled as going out, and finally, with an air of hypocritical condolence, decided to leave us alone. True, several times, in those moments when it was not his turn to hand over, he hurriedly ran to us and, rubbing his hands, asked: “Well, what? How are you here? Not very bored? Maybe you should send some wine or beer here?.. Not good. Who does not drink, does not play and does not smoke is that suspicious element in society. Why aren't you interested in your lady?"
We tried to take her. First we talked about the weather and the sleigh ride. The fat lady smiled meekly at us and answered that, it is true, when she was younger she used to play fly, or, as it is now, rams, but now she has forgotten and even knows little about figures. Then I roared something in her ear about the health of her grandchildren, she affectionately nodded her head and said sympathetically: “Yes, yes, yes, it happens, it happens, my lower back hurts when it rains,” and she took out some kind of then knitting. We did not dare to pester the good old woman anymore.
The doctor had a beautiful, huge sofa, upholstered in soft yellow leather, in which it was so comfortable to lie down. Turchenko and I never got bored, staying together. We were closely connected by three things: the forest, hunting and love of literature. I already had to be with him fifteen times on bear, fox and wolf rounds and hunting with hounds. He was an excellent shooter, and one day, in my presence, he knocked a lynx off the top of a tree with a shot from a fitting at a distance of more than three hundred paces. But he hunted only for the beast, and even for hares, on which he even set traps, because he hated these pests of young forest plantations from the bottom of his heart. Hidden and, of course, his unattainable dream was hunting for a tiger. He even collected a whole library about this noble sport. He never hunted a bird and severely forbade any spring hunting in his forest. “A bird is my first assistant in my household,” he said seriously. For such excessive severity, he was disliked.
He was a strong, small, dark-faced, bilious bachelor, with hot and mocking black eyes, with a strong gray in his black disheveled hair. He was completely alone, a real bean who had long lost all his relatives and childhood friends, and he still retained a lot of those careless and beautiful, rude and comradely qualities by which it is so easy to recognize a former student of the forest, now abolished, faculty of the famous once the Petrovsky Academy, which flourished in the village of Petrovsko-Razumovsky near Moscow.
He very rarely appeared in the county society, because he spent three-quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, his only passionate attachment to life. In the city above him, He very rarely appeared in the district society, because he spent three-quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, his only passionate attachment to life. In the city, they laughed at him behind his back and considered him an eccentric. Having a complete and uncontrolled opportunity to trade for his own benefit in forest plots allotted for felling, he lived only on his one and a half ruble salary, a salary - truly beggarly, if we take into account the cultural, responsible and deeply important work that selflessly carried on his shoulders as many as twenty years this amazing Ivan Ivanovich. Indeed, only among the ranks of the forestry corps, in this forgotten of all forgotten departments, and even among the zemstvo doctors, driven out like postal nags, one did not have to meet these eccentrics, fanatics of the cause and unmercenaries.
Many years ago, Turchenko submitted a memorandum to the War Ministry stating that in the event of a defensive war, the foresters, thanks to their excellent knowledge of the terrain, could be very useful to the army as scouts and as guides for partisan detachments, and therefore proposed that the local guards be recruited from people who had completed special six-month courses. He, of course, as usual, did not answer anything. Then, at his own risk and conscience, he trained almost all of his foresters in compass and eye surveys, reconnaissance service, the device of notches and wolf pits, the system of military reports, signaling with flags and fire, and many other basics of guerrilla warfare. Every year he arranged shooting competitions for his subordinates and gave out prizes from his meager pocket. In the service, he introduced a discipline more severe than that of the sea, although at the same time he was a godfather and planted father of all the foresters.
Under his supervision and protection were twenty-seven thousand acres of state-owned forests, and besides, at the request of the millionaire brothers Solodaev, he looked after their huge, perfectly preserved forests in the southern part of the county. But even this was not enough for him: he arbitrarily took under his protection all the surrounding, adjacent and interspersed peasant forests. Performing for the peasants for pennies, and more often free of charge, various boundary works and forest surveys, he collected gatherings, spoke passionately and simply about the great importance of large forest areas in agriculture, and conjured the peasants to take care of the forest more than their eyes. The peasants listened to him attentively, sympathetically nodded their beards, sighed as if at the sermon of a village priest, and agreed: “You are right ... what can I say ... your truth, Mr. Lesnitsyn ... What are we? We are men, dark people ... "
But it has long been known that the most beautiful and useful truths coming from the lips of Mr. Lesnitsyn, Mr. Agronomist and other intelligent guardians, represent for the village only a simple shaking of the air.
The next day, the good villagers let livestock into the forest, which had eaten the young cleanly, tore the bast from tender, fragile trees, felled drill spruces for some kind of fence or window, drilled birch trunks to extract spring sap for kvass, smoked in a dry forest and threw matches on dry gray moss, flaring like gunpowder, were left unextinguished fires, and the shepherd boys, they senselessly set fire to hollows and cracks full of resin in pines, set fire only to see what a cheerful, turbulent flame burns amber resin.
He begged village teachers to inculcate in their students respect and love for the forest, urged them along with the village priests—and, of course, to no avail—to organize afforestation holidays, molested police officers, zemstvo chiefs, and justices of the peace about predatory logging, and at zemstvo meetings tired everyone with his ardent speeches about the protection of forests, that they stopped listening to him. “Well, the philosopher has taken his usual nonsense,” the Zemstvo said and went off to smoke, leaving Turchenko to rant, like the preacher Bede, in front of empty chairs. But nothing could break the energy of this stubborn Ukrainian, who came against the wool of a sleepy town. He, on his own initiative, strengthened the river banks with bushes, planted coniferous trees on sandy wastelands and afforested ravines. It was on this subject that we talked with him, curled up on the vast doctor's sofa.
- In the ravines I have now caused so much snow that the horse will leave with an arc. And I rejoice like a child. At the age of seven, I raised the spring height of the water in our filthy Vorozha by four and a half feet. Ah, if only I had working hands! If I were given great unlimited power over the local forests. In a few years I would have made Mologa navigable to the very source and would have raised the grain yield everywhere in the region by fifty per cent. I swear by God, in twenty years you can make the Dnieper and Volga the most full-flowing rivers in the world - and it will cost a penny! It is possible to moisten with forest plantings and irrigate the most waterless provinces with ditches. Just plant a forest. Take care of the forest. Drain the swamps, but really ...
What is your ministry looking at? I asked slyly.
“Our ministry is the ministry of non-resistance to evil,” Turchenko replied bitterly. - Nobody cares. When I go by rail and see hundreds of trains loaded with timber, I see boundless stacks of firewood at the stations, I just want to cry. And if I now make our forest rivers accessible to rafts - all these Zvans, Izhins, Kholmenki, Vorozhi - do you know what will happen? In two years the county will be a barren place. The landowners will immediately float all the timber to St. Petersburg and abroad. Honestly, sometimes my hands drop and my head cracks. The most vital, the most beautiful, the most fruitful work is in my power, and I am bound, I dare not do anything, I am not understood by anyone, I am ridiculous, I am a restless person. Tired. Hard. See what interests them all: eat, sleep, drink, play screwball. They love nothing: neither the homeland, nor the service, nor the people, they love only their snotty children. You won't wake anyone up, you won't be interested. Vulgarity all around. You know in advance who will say what under any circumstances. Everyone was impoverished in minds, feelings, even simple human words ...
We fell silent. From the living room, from four tables, we heard the cries of the players playing:
“I’ll say, perhaps, small-u-small trifles.”
"Details by letter, Evgraf Platonych."
"Five no trumps?"
"Are you screwing?"
"Our business, sir."
"Let's take a chance ... Baby, wearing a helmet."
"Your game. We are in the bushes."
"Yeah, bought it. Not a single human face. So it will be as bought.
"The High Pressure Game".
"What? Has she begun to think of herself?
“Vasil Lvovich, you are not supposed to think for more than a quarter of an hour. Come in."
“Your Excellency, the cards are closer to the orders. I see your jack of tambourine."
"Don't you look..."
“I can’t, since childhood, such a habit, if someone holds cards like a fan.”
“Would you like to bite this date?”
Turchenko bent down to me, smiling, and said:
- Now someone will say: "Don't go alone, go with your mother," and another will notice: "That's right, like in a pharmacy."
“What kind of worms did you show me? Jack of thirds with fosks? Is this support, in your opinion?
"I thought…"
“I thought the Indian rooster, and he died from thought.”
“And why did you pickle your ace? Are you thinking of marinating it?
“Not from what, so with a tambourine!”
"What do you think of this beautiful lady?"
"And we are her trump card."
“That’s right,” the cathedral priest approved in a thick baritone voice, “don’t go alone, go with an escort.”
“Excuse me, excuse me, but it seems you didn’t give a trump card just now?”
“Leave it, my friend ... Send the child, we won’t cheat ... We have it right, as in the Chamber of Weights and Measures.”
“Listen, Ivan Ivanovich,” I turned to the forester, “shouldn’t we get away? You know, in English, without saying goodbye.
“What are you, what are you, my dear. Leave without dinner, and even without saying goodbye. It's hard to think of a worse insult to a host. You will never be forgotten. Be known as ignorant and arrogant.
But fat Pyotr Vlasovich, even more swollen and bluish-purple from the heat, the long sitting and the happy game, had already got up from the cards and was saying, walking around the players:
- Gentlemen, gentlemen ... The pie is getting cold, and the wife is angry. Gentlemen, the last batch.
The guests left the tables and, in a cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all the doors. Card conversations have not subsided yet: “How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? It seems to you that it is clear as a finger, I said tambourines by the first hand. You have a queen, a ten - a quarter itself. - “You, my charm, were obliged to support me. And climb on without trump cards! You think I didn't know your aces?" - “Yes, excuse me, they didn’t let me talk, that’s how they screwed up.” - “And you - tear from them. That's what the screw is for. Cowards don't play cards...
Finally the hostess said:
- Lord, please have a bite.
Everyone rushed into the dining room, laughing, joking, rubbing their hands excitedly. They began to sit down.
“Husbands and wives apart,” commanded the merry master. “They are tired of each other at home.
And with the help of his wife, he shuffled the guests around in such a way that the couples, inclined to flirt, or united by a long-standing connection known throughout the city, found themselves together. This sweet courtesy is always accepted at family gatherings, and therefore often, bending over a fallen napkin, a lone observer will see intertwined legs under the table, as well as hands lying on other people's knees.
They drank a lot - men "simple", "tear", "state", ladies - rowanberry; they drank at appetizers, pie, hare and veal. From the very beginning of supper they lit up, and after the pie it became noisy and smoky, and hands with knives and forks flashed in the air.
We talked about appetizers and various amazing dishes with the air of well-deserved gourmets. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about the theater and, finally, about snacks and various amazing dishes with the air of well-deserved gastronomes. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about theater and, finally, about modern literature.
Theater and literature are the inevitable strong points of all Russian lunches, dinners, zhurfiks and fifokloks. After all, every inhabitant has ever played in an amateur performance, and in the golden days of his student life he raged in the gallery in the capital's theater. In the same way, everyone at one time wrote an essay in the gymnasium on the topic “A Comparative Essay on Education According to Domostroy and Eugene Onegin,” and who did not write poetry in childhood and did not contribute to student newspapers? What lady does not say with a charming smile: “Imagine, last night I wrote a huge letter to my cousin - sixteen postal sheets around and small, small, like beads. And this, imagine, at some hour, without a single blot! A wonderfully interesting letter. I will purposely ask Nadia to send it to me and read it to you. It was like I was inspired. My head was burning in a strange way, my hands were trembling, and the pen seemed to run across the paper by itself. And which of the provincial ladies and girls did not trust you to read aloud, together, their class diaries, constantly tearing out your notebook and exclaiming that you can’t read here?
Talking, walking around the stage and writing - it seems to everyone such an easy, trifling matter that these two, apparently the most accessible, apparently, in their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of speaking, walking on the stage and writing - it seems to everyone such an easy, trifling matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently, in their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of the arts - theater and fiction - everywhere find the most severe and captious judges, the most obstinate and dismissive critics , the most vicious and arrogant detractors.
Turchenko and I sat at the end of the table and only listened with boredom and irritation to this disorderly, self-confident, noisy conversation, which every minute strayed into slander and gossip, into peeping into other people's bedrooms. Turchenko's face was tired and turned yellow and brown.
- Unwell? I asked quietly.
He grimaced.
- No ... so ... very tired ... All the same hammering ... woodpeckers.
The magistrate, who was placed on the right hand of the hostess, was distinguished by very long legs and an unusually short torso. Therefore, when he sat, only his head and half of his chest towered above the table, like museum busts, and the ends of his magnificent forked beard were often dipped in sauce. Chewing a piece of hare in sour cream sauce, he spoke with weighty pauses, like a man accustomed to general attention, and convincingly emphasized the words with the movements of a fork clenched in a fist:
– I don’t understand the current writers… Sorry. I want to understand and I can’t… I refuse. Either a farce, or pornography... Some kind of mockery of the public... You, they say, pay me a ruble-ruble of your hard-earned money, and for that I will show you shameful nonsense.
- Horror, horror, what they write! groaned, clutching her whiskey, the excise inspector's wife, the county Messalina, who did not ignore even her coachmen. - I always wash my hands with cologne after their books. And to think that such literature falls into the hands of our children!
– Quite right! - exclaimed the judge and drowned his sideburns in red cabbage. - And most importantly, what does creativity have to do with it? inspiration? well, this one, how is it ... a flight of thought? So after all, I will write ... so each of us will write ... so my clerk will concoct, what a complete idiot. Take shuffle all near and distant relatives like a deck of cards, and throw them away in pairs. A brother falls in love with his sister, a grandson seduces his own grandfather... Or suddenly a crazy love for an Angora cat, or a janitor's boot... Nonsense and nonsense!
“And it’s all the fault of the lousy revolution,” said the Zemstvo chief, a man with an unusually narrow forehead and long face, who, for his appearance, was still called the mare’s head in the regiment. “Students don’t want to study, workers are rioting, depravity is everywhere. Marriage is not recognized. "Love must be free." That's free love for you.
- And most importantly - the Jews! grey-whiskered, choking from asthma, landowner Dudukin croaked with difficulty.
“I don’t know the Masons, but I know the Jews,” Dudukin angrily balked. - They have a kagal. They have: one climbed - dragged the other. By all means they sign with Russian surnames, and on purpose they write abominations about Russia in order to decri ... decri ... decriti ... well, how it is! .. in a word, to sully the honor of the Russian people.
And the judge continued to peck his own, spreading his arms with a fork and knife clamped in them and knocking over a glass with his beard:
I don't understand and I don't understand. Some quirks ... Suddenly, for no apparent reason, "Oh, close your pale legs." What is this, I ask you? What does this dream mean? Well, okay, and I'll take it and write: "Ah, hide your red nose!" and dot. And that's it. What's worse, I ask you?
–. Or else: he launched a pineapple into the sky, - someone supported.
“Yes, sir, just pineapple,” the judge got angry. - But the other day I read from their most fashionable: "A petrel flies, similar to black lightning." How? Why? Where, let me ask you, is black lightning? Who among us has seen black lightning? Nonsense!
I noticed that at the last words Turchenko quickly raised his head. I looked back at him. His face lit up with a strange smile, ironic and defiant. He seemed to want to say something. But he said nothing, quivered his dry cheekbones, and lowered his eyes.
- And most importantly, what do they write about? - suddenly became agitated, like instantaneously boiled milk, a silent insurance agent. - There - a symbol is a symbol, that's their business, but I'm not at all interested in reading about drunken tramps, about thieves, about ... excuse me, ladies, about various prostitutes and so on ...
“About the hanged, too,” the excise officer prompted, “and about the anarchists, and also about the executioners.
“Yes,” the judge agreed. They definitely don't have any other topics. They wrote before ... Pushkin wrote, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Lermontov. Beauty! What language! “The Ukrainian night is quiet, the sky is transparent, the stars are shining…” Oh, hell, what a language, what a syllable!..
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin
Black Lightning
Now I can’t even remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks say briefly: “county town such and such”, without giving any further information about it. Very recently, a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. One can get from the station to the city only in the dead of winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then one has to travel ninety miles through potholes and snowstorms, often hearing a wild wolf howl and not seeing a sign of human habitation for hours. And most importantly, there is nothing to carry from the city to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.
And so the town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without import and export, without extractive and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand inhabitants, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with the inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, non-navigable and fishless river Vorozha - lives in winter littered with snowdrifts, in summer drowning in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and undersized forest.
There is nothing here for the mind and for the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no living pictures, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and carnival booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which the inhabitants still remember with tenderness.
Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a bazaar in the town. A dozen and a half peasants come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but stick around all day near the treasury, patting themselves on the shoulders with their hands, dressed in leather yellow mittens about one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.
The local philistines are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and what they live is incomprehensible to the mind. In summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream with rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and all day long they stare out of the windows at the street, imprinting flattened noses and smudged lips on the panes with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after dinner they sleep. And at seven o'clock in the evening, all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally unleashes an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until morning in hot, dirty featherbeds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, waking up, itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.
About themselves, the townsfolk say this: in our city, houses are made of stone, and hearts are made of iron. Old-timers from the literate, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wrote off his "Inspector General". "The late dad Prokhor Sergeyich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they drove through the city." Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first names and patronymics. If you tell the driver: “To Churbanov (local Mur-Merillis), a dime”, he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, will ask: “What?” - "To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks." - “Ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.
There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with a lot of unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, kumach, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all those cruel Modesty Nikanorichs and Doremidonts Nikiforichi, are sitting outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaway. They look at the occasional customer like a sworn enemy: "Hey boy, let that one go." They don’t serve the purchase to him, but throw it on the counter without wrapping it, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tried for so long by touch, by light, by ringing, and even by a tooth, and, moreover, they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: "But now he will call the scoundrel the police."
In winter, on holidays, in the afternoon, that way, in the late afternoon, merchants ride on the main Dvoryanskaya Street. In a row, one after another, huge gingerbread stallions, gray in apples, are swimming, shaking their fat meats, spitting their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in small sledges sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their backsides hang halfway from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, breaking this decorous movement, the merchant’s son Nozdrunov, in an elegant coachman’s coat, with a boyar hat on one side, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girlish hearts, will suddenly gallop down the street, whistling and whooping.
End of free trial.
