About two hundred years ago, the wind-sower brought two seeds to the Fornication swamp: a pine seed and a spruce seed. Both seeds fell into one hole near a large flat stone ... Since then, for perhaps two hundred years, these spruce and pine have been growing together. Their roots have been intertwined since childhood, their trunks stretched up close to the light, trying to overtake each other. Trees of different species terribly fought among themselves with roots for food, with branches for air and light. Rising higher, thickening their trunks, they dug dry branches into living trunks and in places pierced each other through and through. An evil wind, having arranged such an unhappy life for the trees, sometimes flew here to shake them. And then the trees groaned and howled at the whole Fornication swamp, like living beings. Before that, it looked like the groan and howl of living beings that the fox, curled up on a moss tussock into a ball, raised its sharp muzzle up. This groan and howl of pine and spruce was so close to living beings that a feral dog in the Fornication swamp, hearing it, howled from longing for a person, and a wolf howled from inescapable malice towards him.
Here, to the Lying Stone, the children came at the very time when the first rays of the sun, flying over the low, gnarled swamp fir-trees and birch trees, illuminated the Ringing Borin and the mighty trunks of the pine forest became like lit candles of the great temple of nature. From there, here, to this flat stone, where the children sat down to rest, faintly came the singing of birds, dedicated to the rising of the great sun. And the bright rays flying over the heads of the children did not yet warm. The swampy land was all in a chill, small puddles were covered with white ice.
It was quite quiet in nature, and the children, who were cold, were so quiet that the black grouse Kosach paid no attention to them. He sat down at the very top, where the boughs of pine and boughs of spruce formed like a bridge between two trees. Having settled down on this bridge, which was rather wide for him, closer to the spruce, Kosach seemed to begin to bloom in the rays of the rising sun. On his head, the comb caught fire like a fiery flower. His chest, blue in the depths of black, began to pour from blue to green. And his rainbow-colored, lyre-spread tail became especially beautiful. Seeing the sun over the miserable swamp fir-trees, he suddenly jumped up on his high bridge, showed his purest white linen of undertails, underwings and shouted:
- Chuf! Shi!
In grouse, “chuf” most likely meant “sun”, and “shi” probably had our “hello”.
In response to this first chirping of Kosach-tokovik, the same chirping with flapping wings was heard far across the swamp, and soon dozens of large birds began to fly in and land near the Lying Stone from all sides, like two drops of water similar to Kosach.
The children sat with bated breath on the cold stone, waiting for the rays of the sun to come to them and warm them at least a little. And now the first ray, gliding over the tops of the nearest, very small Christmas trees, finally played on the children's cheeks. Then the upper Kosach, greeting the sun, stopped jumping up and down. He squatted low on the bridge at the top of the tree, stretched his long neck along the bough, and began a long, brook-like song. In response to him, somewhere nearby, dozens of the same birds sitting on the ground, each rooster, too, stretched out its neck, began to sing the same song. And then, as if already quite a large stream, muttering, ran over invisible pebbles.
How many times have we, the hunters, after waiting for the dark morning, at the chilly dawn listened with trepidation to this singing, trying in our own way to understand what the roosters are singing about. And when we repeated their mutterings in our own way, we got:
cool feathers,
Ur-gur-gu,
cool feathers,
Obor-woo, I will break off.
So the black grouse muttered in unison, intending to fight at the same time. And while they were muttering like that, a small event happened in the depths of the dense spruce crown. There a crow sat on a nest and hid there all the time from Kosach, who was swimming almost near the nest itself. The crow would very much like to drive Kosach away, but she was afraid to leave the nest and cool the eggs in the morning frost. The male crow guarding the nest at that time was making its flight and, having probably met something suspicious, lingered. The crow, waiting for the male, lay in the nest, was quieter than water, lower than grass. And suddenly, seeing the male flying back, she shouted her own:
This meant for her:
"Rescue!"
— Kra! - answered the male in the direction of the current, in the sense that it is still unknown who will cut off the twisted feathers for whom.
The male, immediately realizing what was the matter, went down and sat down on the same bridge, near the fir tree, at the very nest where Kosach was lekking, only closer to the pine tree, and began to wait.
Kosach at this time, not paying any attention to the male crow, called out his own, known to all hunters:
— Kar-ker-cupcake!
And this was the signal for a general fight of all the current roosters. Well, the cool feathers flew in all directions! And then, as if on the same signal, the male crow, with small steps along the bridge, imperceptibly began to approach Kosach.
Motionless as statues, hunters for sweet cranberries sat on a stone. The sun, so hot and clear, came out against them over the swamp fir trees. But there was one cloud in the sky at that time. It appeared like a cold blue arrow and crossed the rising sun in half. At the same time, suddenly the wind jerked, the tree pressed against the pine tree, and the pine tree groaned. The wind blew once more, and then the pine pressed, and the spruce roared.
At this time, having rested on a stone and warmed up in the rays of the sun, Nastya and Mitrasha got up to continue on their way. But at the very stone, a rather wide swamp path forked: one, good, dense, the path went to the right, the other, weak, went straight.
Having checked the direction of the paths on the compass, Mitrasha, pointing to a weak path, said:
“We need to follow this one to the north.
- It's not a trail! - answered Nastya.
- Here's another! Mitrasha got angry. - People were walking, which means the path. We need to go north. Let's go and don't talk anymore.
Nastya was offended to obey the younger Mitrasha.
— Kra! - shouted at this time the crow in the nest.
And her male with small steps ran closer to Kosach for half a bridge.
The second sharp blue arrow crossed the sun, and a gray cloud began to approach from above. The Golden Hen gathered her strength and tried to persuade her friend.
“Look,” she said, “how dense my path is, all people walk here. Are we smarter than everyone?
“Let all the people go,” the stubborn Man in the pouch answered decisively. - We must follow the arrow, as our father taught us, to the north, to the Palestinian.
“Father told us fairy tales, he joked with us,” said Nastya, “and, probably, there is no Palestinian at all in the north. It would be very stupid for us to follow the arrow - just not to the Palestinian, but to the very Blind Elan we will please.
“Well, all right,” Mitrasha turned sharply, “I won’t argue with you anymore: you go along your path, where all the women go for cranberries, but I’ll go on my own, along my path, to the north.
And he actually went there without thinking about the cranberry basket or the food.
But first, Prishvin talks about what the Chernigov and Gethsemane sketes had turned into by the end of the twenties, on the territory of which the philosophers were buried. The former cells of the monks were moved into a correctional house named after the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Ivan Kalyaev.
“Everyone who can be seized by the net of the Moscow night raid lives in the correctional house: vagrants, prostitutes, all sorts of businesslike things, ranging from the smallest who go to the ban to big business people who plant raspberries and even go on a wet business” .
These "spiritual cripples" occupied the territory of the Chernihiv skete, there were also workshops in which they tried to re-educate criminals, turn them into workers. The Getismansky skete was occupied by "physical cripples" living on small pensions.
The writer in his poem objectively notes that the efforts of the authorities to guide those who have gone from it on the true path did not lead to success. Criminals terrorized a peaceful city, killing and raping local residents, and disabled people ... Here is one of the sketches of the Ninth Spruce: “They say that most of the houses on the most beautiful Sergiyev Street were built by monks for their mistresses. And last spring, on this same Krasyukovka street, two blind men from Kalyaevka - he with a bouquet of lilacs in his hand, she with a rose - lay down right on the street, drunk, and in the mud, as if on a soft bed, surrendered themselves to the feeling of so-called animal love.
As for the skete cemetery, it was turned into an amusement park, and therefore it was not an easy task for Prishvin to find the graves of Russian thinkers.
“Most of the monuments lay on their sides; among them, with great difficulty, I found a monument to Konstantin Leontiev, and from him already - on the instructions of the relatives of the late Rozanov who were with me - counting a few meters, I established the place of another grave that had completely disappeared from the face of the earth.
And then Mikhail Prishvin gives an indicative detail. When the old woman accompanying the writer laid a red testicle on the grave of one of the philosophers, the inhabitants of Kolyaevka who surrounded them "gathered to jump and take possession of it." And before that, they looked with mockery and amazement at how the old woman was baptized.
By the way, only thanks to Prishvin, who not only in The Ninth Spruce, but also in his Diaries, described in detail his trip to the former sketes, it was possible to find the graves of Rozanov and Leontiev already at the end of Soviet power, in 1990. At the same time, after a decade of devastation, the burials were finally restored.
Composition
M. M. Prishvin was called the "Old Man-forester" of Russian literature. He sits, they say, on his stump, looks around and what he sees - tells. His work is quiet, it does not contain flashy propaganda, socio-political statements. Prishvin never shocked society, did not revolt the authorities and did not shock the reader like other writers. But this does not detract from the artistic value of his works. His theme is nature, animals and humans living in it, a quiet, uncomplicated life.
Prishvin has a lot of stories, novels,\"geographical sketches \" about nature. Everything in them is united by a person - a restless, thinking person with an open and courageous soul. The writer's great love for nature was born out of his love for man. \"After all, my friends, I write about nature, but I myself only think about people\" - Prishvin admitted. This theme can be traced in the fairy tale-there were M. M. Prishvin\"Pantry of the sun\".
\"In one village, near the Bludov swamp, near the city of Pereyaslavl-Zalessky, two children were orphaned\", - this is how a wonderful work begins. This beginning is reminiscent of a fairy tale, where the reader enters a wonderful world where all life is interconnected. Against this background, two images appear - Nastya and Mitrasha. \"Nastya was like a golden hen on high legs. Her hair shone with gold, freckles all over her face were large, like golden coins\". Mitrasha was small, but thick, "a little man in a bag" - smiling, teachers at school called him among themselves.
After the death of their parents, all their peasant farming went to the children: a five-walled hut, a cow Dawn, a heifer Daughter, a golden rooster Petya and a piglet Horseradish. Children took care of all living beings. Nastya was engaged in women's household chores, \"with a twig in her hand, she drove out her beloved herd, melted the stove, peeled potatoes, seasoned dinner, and so busied herself with the housework until night\". Mitrash was in charge of all the men's household and public affairs. \"He goes to all meetings, tries to understand public concerns\".
So the children lived together, not knowing sorrows and troubles. One day they decided to go to the forest for cranberries. \"The sour and very healthy cranberry grows in swamps in summer and is harvested in late autumn\". Remembering that there is a place called Palestinian, \"all red as blood, from only one cranberry\", Nastya and Mitrasha go to the forest. They took with them the essentials. Nastya put bread, potatoes, a bottle of milk into the basket. Mitrasha took an ax, a double-barreled "tulka", a bag with a compass.
Why does he take a compass? After all, in the forest you can navigate by the sun, as the village old-timers did. \"A man in a bag \" remembers his father's words well:\"In the forest, this arrow is kinder to you than your mother:... the sky will close with clouds and you won't be able to navigate by the sun in the forest, you will go at random - you will make a mistake, you will get lost...\".
Who knew that children would face the elements of nature and see the Fornication swamp with their own eyes? Having gone halfway, Nastya and Mitrasha sat down to rest. \"It was quite quiet in nature, and the children were so quiet that black grouse Kosach did not pay any attention to them\".
There was a legend about the Fornication Swamp that \"two hundred years ago, the wind-sower brought two seeds: a pine seed and a spruce seed. Both seeds lay in one hole near a large flat stone ...\" Since then, spruce and pine have been growing together. And the wind sometimes shakes these trees. And then the spruce and pine groan over the entire Fornication swamp, like living beings.
After resting, the children decided to move on. But it was not there,\"a fairly wide marsh path diverged like a fork \". What to do? Having shown his stubborn nature, Mitrasha follows a weak path, and Nastenka follows a dense one. Suddenly the wind blew, and the pine and spruce, pressing against each other, groaned in turn, as if supporting the dispute between brother and sister. \"Among the sounds of moaning, growling, grumbling, howling in the trees this morning, sometimes it turned out as if somewhere in the forest a lost or abandoned child was crying bitterly. \" Even the wolf crawled out of his lair at that time, \"stood over the rubble, raised his head, put his only ear to the wind, straightened half of his tail and howled \".
Like any fairy tale, M. M. Prishvin's fairy tale has a happy ending. Mitrasha ended up in the Fornication Swamp because of his stubbornness. And in the struggle for life, the dog Grass helped him. But what about Nastya? She, carried away by picking berries, for some time forgot about her brother, \"hardly moves the basket behind her, all wet and dirty, the former golden hen on high legs\". In the evening, hungry Mitrasha and tired Nastya met. They were destined to meet again in the forest and continue their journey together, as for two hundred years "live" in the Prodigal swamp spruce and pine.
As pine and spruce are intertwined, so are the fates of children intertwined, so are nature and man intertwined in this world. And no matter how much a person tries to fence himself off, he still remains a person - a natural being. In cities, this kinship is less felt, but not lost at all. Prishvin lived in a difficult, ambiguous time, and I think that without feeling like a fighter, he thus sought harmony and hope - the hope that a person is not that ugly that the Soviet government tried to make of him.
About two hundred years ago, the wind-sower brought two seeds to the Fornication swamp: a pine seed and a spruce seed. Both seeds fell into one hole near a large flat stone ... Since then, for perhaps two hundred years, these spruce and pine have been growing together. Their roots have been intertwined since childhood, their trunks stretched up close to the light, trying to overtake each other. Trees of different species fought terribly among themselves with roots for food, with branches for air and light. Rising higher, thickening their trunks, they dug dry branches into living trunks and in places pierced each other through and through. An evil wind, having arranged such an unhappy life for the trees, sometimes flew here to shake them. And then the trees groaned and howled at the whole Fornication swamp, like living creatures. Before that, it looked like the groan and howl of living beings that the fox, curled up on a moss tussock into a ball, raised its sharp muzzle up. This groan and howl of pine and spruce was so close to living beings that a feral dog in the Fornication swamp, hearing it, howled from longing for a person, and a wolf howled from inescapable malice towards him. The children came here, to the Lying Stone, at the very time when the first rays of the sun, flying over the low, gnarled swamp fir-trees and birch trees, illuminated the Ringing Borina, and the mighty trunks of the pine forest became like lit candles of the great temple of nature. From there, here, to this flat stone, where the children sat down to rest, faintly came the singing of birds, dedicated to the rising of the great sun. And the bright rays flying over the heads of the children did not yet warm. The swampy land was all in a chill, small puddles were covered with white ice. It was quite quiet in nature, and the children, who were cold, were so quiet that the black grouse Kosach paid no attention to them. He sat down at the very top, where the boughs of pine and boughs of spruce formed like a bridge between two trees. Having settled down on this bridge, which was rather wide for him, closer to the spruce, Kosach seemed to begin to bloom in the rays of the rising sun. On his head, the comb caught fire like a fiery flower. His chest, blue in the depths of black, began to pour from blue to green. And his rainbow-colored, lyre-spread tail became especially beautiful. Seeing the sun over the miserable swamp fir-trees, he suddenly jumped up on his high bridge, showed his white, purest linen of undertail, underwings and shouted:— Chuf, shi! In grouse, “chuf” most likely meant the sun, and “shi” probably had our “hello”. In response to this first chirping of Kosach-tokovik, the same chirping with flapping wings was heard far across the swamp, and soon dozens of large birds began to fly in and land near the Lying Stone from all sides, like two drops of water similar to Kosach. With bated breath, the children sat on the cold stone, waiting for the rays of the sun to come to them and warm them at least a little. And now the first ray, gliding over the tops of the nearest, very small Christmas trees, finally played on the children's cheeks. Then the upper Kosach, greeting the sun, stopped jumping up and down. He squatted low on the bridge at the top of the tree, stretched his long neck along the bough, and began a long, brook-like song. In response to him, somewhere nearby, dozens of the same birds sitting on the ground, each rooster, too, stretched out its neck, began to sing the same song. And then, as if already quite a large stream, muttering, ran over invisible pebbles. How many times have we, the hunters, after waiting for the dark morning, at the chilly dawn listened with trepidation to this singing, trying in our own way to understand what the roosters are singing about. And when we repeated their mutterings in our own way, we got:cool feathers,
Ur-gur-gu,
Cool feathers
Obor-woo, I will break off.
