Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko
Collected works in ten volumes
Volume 5. History of my contemporary. Book 1
History of my contemporary. Book 1
In this book, I am trying to recall and revive a number of pictures of the past half century, as they were reflected in the soul, first of a child, then of a young man, then of an adult. Early childhood and the first years of my youth coincided with the time of liberation. The middle of life passed in a period of dark, first governmental, and then social reaction, and among the first movements of the struggle. Now I see much of what my generation dreamed about and fought for bursting into the arena of life anxiously and stormily. I think that many episodes from the time of my exile wanderings, events, meetings, thoughts and feelings of people of that time and that environment have not lost even now the interest of living reality itself. I would like to think that they will still retain their significance for the future. Our life trembles and shudders from sharp clashes between new beginnings and obsolete ones, and I hope to at least partly shed some light on some elements of this struggle.
But earlier I wanted to draw the attention of readers to the first movements of the nascent and growing consciousness. I knew that it would be difficult for me to focus on these distant memories under the rumble of the present, in which the peals of an approaching thunderstorm are heard, but I did not imagine how difficult it would be.
I am not writing the history of my time, but only the history of one life at that time, and I want the reader to first get acquainted with the prism in which it was reflected ... And this is possible only in a consistent story. Childhood and youth constitute the content of this first part.
One more note. These notes are not a biography because I didn't particularly care about completeness. biographical information; not confession, because I do not believe in the possibility or usefulness of public confession; not a portrait, because it is difficult to paint one's own portrait with a guarantee of likeness. Any reflection differs from reality by the very fact that it is a reflection; reflection is obviously incomplete - even more so. It always, so to speak, reflects the chosen motives more densely, and therefore often, with all the truthfulness, more attractive, more interesting and, perhaps, purer than reality.
In my work, I strived to be as complete as possible. historical truth, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or bright features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I have not actually encountered, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen. And yet I repeat: I am not trying to give my own portrait. Here the reader will find only features from the "history of my contemporary", a person known to me better than all other people of my time ...
Part one
Early childhood
I. First Impressions of Being
I remember myself early, but my first impressions are scattered, like brightly lit islands among a colorless emptiness and fog.
The earliest of these memories is a strong visual impression of a fire. I could then be in my second year, but I still clearly see the flames above the roof of the barn in the yard, the walls of a large stone house strangely lit in the middle of the night and its windows reflecting with flame. I remember myself, warmly wrapped up, in someone's arms, among a bunch of people standing on the porch. From this indefinite crowd, the memory distinguishes the presence of the mother, while the father, limping, leaning on a stick, climbs the stairs of a stone house in the courtyard opposite, and it seems to me that he is walking into a fire. But that doesn't scare me. I am very interested in the helmets of firefighters flashing like firebrands around the yard, then one fire barrel at the gate and a schoolboy entering the gate with a shortened leg and a high set heel. I did not seem to feel any fear or anxiety, I did not establish a connection between the phenomena. For the first time in my life so much fire fell into my eyes, fire helmets and a schoolboy with a short leg, and I carefully examined all these objects against a deep background. night darkness. At the same time, I don’t remember the sounds: the whole picture only silently shimmers in my memory with floating reflections of a crimson flame.
I remember, then, several completely insignificant cases when they held me in their arms, appeased my tears or amused me. It seems to me that I remember, but very vaguely, my first steps ... My head was big in childhood, and when I fell, I often hit it on the floor. Once it was on the stairs. I was in a lot of pain and cried loudly until my father comforted me. special reception. He beat the step of the stairs with a stick, and this gave me satisfaction. Probably, I was then in a period of fetishism and assumed an evil and hostile will in a wooden board. And now they beat her for me, and she can’t even leave ... Of course, these words very roughly translate my feelings at that time, but I clearly remember the board and, as it were, the expression of her humility under the blows.
Subsequently, the same feeling was repeated in more complex form. I was already a few more. Was unusually light and warm moonlit evening. This is generally the first evening that I remember in my life. My parents had gone somewhere, the brothers must have been sleeping, the nurse went into the kitchen, and I was left with only one footman who wore dissonant nickname Gandylo. The door from the anteroom to the courtyard was open, and from somewhere, out of the moonlit distance, came the rumble of wheels along the paved street. And for the first time I singled out the rumble of wheels in my mind as a special phenomenon, and for the first time I did not sleep for so long ... I was scared - probably, they were talking about thieves during the day. It seemed to me that our yard at moonlight very strange and what's in open door a "thief" will certainly enter from the yard. It was as if I knew that the thief was a man, but at the same time he seemed to me not quite a man, but some kind of human-like mysterious creature that would do me harm with just its sudden appearance. This made me cry out loud.
I don’t know by what logic, but the footman Gandylo again brought his father’s stick and led me out onto the porch, where, perhaps due to a previous episode of the same kind, I began to beat the stairs hard. And this time it was satisfying again; my cowardice was so gone that a couple more times I fearlessly went out alone, without Gandyla, and again beat the imaginary thief on the stairs, reveling in the peculiar feeling of my courage. The next morning, I enthusiastically told my mother that yesterday, when she was not there, a thief came to us, whom Gandyl and I beat hard. Mother condescendingly agreed. I knew that there was no thief and that my mother knew it. But I loved my mother very much at that moment because she did not contradict me. It would be hard for me to give up that imaginary being whom I first feared, and then positively "felt" at a strange moonlight between my stick and the rung of the ladder. It was not a visual hallucination, but there was some kind of ecstasy from his victory over fear ...
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| site collection
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| Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko
| History of my contemporary
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V. G. Korolenko. Collected works in ten volumes.
Volume five. History of my contemporary M., GIHL, 1954
Preparation of the text and notes by S. V. Korolenko
OCR Lovetskaya T. Yu.
In this book, I am trying to recall and revive a number of pictures of the past half century, as they were reflected in the soul, first of a child, then of a young man, then of an adult. Early childhood and the first years of my youth coincided with the time of liberation. The middle of life passed in a period of dark, first governmental, and then social reaction, and among the first movements of the struggle. Now I see much of what my generation dreamed about and fought for bursting into the arena of life anxiously and stormily. I think that many episodes from the time of my exile wanderings, events, meetings, thoughts and feelings of people of that time and that environment have not lost even now the interest of living reality itself. I would like to think that they will still retain their significance for the future. Our life trembles and shudders from sharp clashes between new beginnings and obsolete ones, and I hope to at least partly shed some light on some elements of this struggle.
But earlier I wanted to draw the attention of readers to the first movements of the nascent and growing consciousness. I knew that it would be difficult for me to focus on these distant memories under the rumble of the present, in which the peals of an approaching thunderstorm are heard, but I did not imagine how difficult it would be.
I am not writing the history of my time, but only the history of one life at that time, and I want the reader to first get acquainted with the prism in which it was reflected ... And this is possible only in a consistent story. Childhood and youth constitute the content of this first part.
One more note. These notes are not a biography, because I did not particularly care about the completeness of biographical information; not confession, because I do not believe in the possibility or usefulness of public confession; not a portrait, because it is difficult to paint one's own portrait with a guarantee of likeness. Any reflection differs from reality by the very fact that it is a reflection; reflection is obviously incomplete - even more so. It always, so to speak, reflects the chosen motives more densely, and therefore often, with all the truthfulness, more attractive, more interesting and, perhaps, purer than reality.
In my work, I strove for the fullest possible historical truth, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or bright features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I have not actually encountered, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen.
And yet I repeat: I am not trying to give my own portrait. Here the reader will find only features from the "history of my contemporary", a person known to me better than all other people of my time ...
I remember myself early, but my first impressions are scattered, like brightly lit islands among a colorless emptiness and fog.
The earliest of these memories is a strong visual impression of a fire. I could then go into my second year, but I still clearly see the flames above the roof of the shed in the yard, the walls of a large stone house strangely lit in the middle of the night and its windows reflecting with flame. I remember myself, warmly wrapped up, in someone's arms, among a bunch of people standing on the porch. From this indefinite crowd, the memory distinguishes the presence of the mother, while the father, limping, leaning on a stick, climbs the stairs of a stone house in the courtyard opposite, and it seems to me that he is walking into a fire. But that doesn't scare me. I am very interested in the helmets of firefighters flashing like firebrands around the yard, then one fire barrel at the gate and a schoolboy entering the gate with a shortened leg and a high set heel. I did not seem to feel any fear or anxiety, I did not establish a connection between the phenomena. For the first time in my life so much fire fell into my eyes, fire helmets and a schoolboy with a short leg, and I carefully examined all these objects against the deep background of night darkness. At the same time, I don’t remember the sounds: the whole picture only silently shimmers in my memory with floating reflections of a crimson flame.
I remember, then, several completely insignificant cases when they held me in their arms, appeased my tears or amused me. It seems to me that I remember, but very vaguely, my first steps ... My head was big in childhood, and when I fell, I often hit it on the floor. Once it was on the stairs. I was in great pain and cried loudly until my father comforted me with a special reception. He beat the step of the stairs with a stick, and this gave me satisfaction. Probably, I was then in a period of fetishism and assumed an evil and hostile will in a wooden board. And now they beat her for me, and she can’t even leave ... Of course, these words very roughly translate my feelings at that time, but I clearly remember the board and, as it were, the expression of her humility under the blows.
Subsequently, the same sensation was repeated in a more complex form. I was already a few more. It was an unusually bright and warm moonlit evening. This is generally the first evening that I remember in my life. My parents had gone somewhere, my brothers must have been sleeping, the nurse went to the kitchen, and I was left with only one lackey, who bore the dissonant nickname Gandylo. The door from the anteroom to the courtyard was open, and from somewhere, out of the moonlit distance, came the rumble of wheels along the paved street. And for the first time I also singled out the rumble of wheels in my mind as a special phenomenon, and for the first time I did not sleep for so long ... I was scared - probably, they were talking about thieves during the day. It seemed to me that our yard in the moonlight was very strange and that a “thief” would certainly enter through the open door from the yard. It was as if I knew that the thief was a man, but at the same time he seemed to me not quite a man, but some kind of human-like mysterious creature that would do me harm with just its sudden appearance. This made me cry out loud.
I don’t know by what logic, but the footman Gandylo again brought his father’s stick and led me out onto the porch, where, perhaps in connection with a previous episode of the same kind, I began to beat the stairs hard. And this time it was satisfying again; my cowardice had subsided so much that a couple more times I fearlessly went out alone, without Gandyl, and again beat the imaginary thief on the stairs, reveling in the peculiar feeling of my courage. The next morning, I enthusiastically told my mother that yesterday, when she was not there, a thief came to us, whom Gandyl and I beat hard. Mother condescendingly agreed. I knew that there was no thief and that my mother knew it. But I loved my mother very much at that moment because she did not contradict me. It would be hard for me to give up that imaginary being, which I first feared, and then positively “felt”, with a strange moonlight, between my stick and the step of the ladder. It was not a visual hallucination, but there was some kind of ecstasy from his victory over fear ...
Another island in my memory is a trip to Chisinau to my paternal grandfather ... From this trip I remember crossing the river (I think Prut), when our carriage was installed on a raft and, smoothly swaying, separated from the shore, or the shore separated from it - I haven't figured it out yet. At the same time, a detachment of soldiers was crossing the river, and, I remember, the soldiers sailed in twos and threes on small square rafts, which, it seems, does not happen when troops cross ... I looked at them with curiosity, and they looked into our carriage and they said something incomprehensible to me ... It seems that this crossing was in connection with Sevastopol war…
On the same evening, shortly after crossing the river, I experienced the first feeling of sharp disappointment and resentment ... It was dark inside the spacious travel carriage. I was sitting in someone's arms in front, and suddenly my attention was attracted by a reddish dot, now flashing, then fading away in the corner, in the place where my father was sitting. I started laughing and reached out to her. Mother said something warning, but I so wanted to get to know her better. interesting subject or the creature that I cried. Then my father moved towards me a small red star, tenderly hiding under the ashes. I reached out to her index finger right hand; for a while it did not come, but then suddenly it flared up brighter, and a sharp bite suddenly burned me. I think that in terms of the strength of the impression now, this could only be equal to a strong and unexpected bite of a poisonous snake, lurking, for example, in a bouquet of flowers. The light seemed to me deliberately cunning and evil. Two or three years later, when I remembered this episode, I ran to my mother, began to talk and began to cry. These were again tears of resentment ...
A similar disappointment caused me the first bath. The river made an enchanting impression on me: I was new, strange and beautiful small greenish waves of swell breaking under the walls of the bath, and the way they played with sparkles, fragments of sky blue and bright pieces of the bath, as if broken. All this seemed to me cheerful, lively, cheerful, attractive and friendly, and I begged my mother to quickly bring me into the water. And suddenly - an unexpected and sharp impression of either cold or burn ... I cried loudly and thrashed so in my mother's arms that she almost dropped me. My bath this time did not take place. While my mother was splashing in the water with an incomprehensible pleasure for me, I sat on the bench, puffed up, looked at the crafty swell, which continued to play just as temptingly with fragments of the sky and the bath, and got angry ... At whom? It looks like a river.
These were the first disappointments: I rushed towards nature with the trust of ignorance, she answered with spontaneous dispassion, which seemed to me deliberately hostile ...
Another one of those primary sensations, when a natural phenomenon for the first time remains in consciousness isolated from the rest of the world, as a special and sharply finished one, with its main properties. This is a memory of the first walk in pine forest. Here I was positively fascinated by the lingering noise of the forest tops, and I stopped in my tracks on the path. No one noticed this, and our entire society moved on. The path, a few sazhens ahead, steeply dipped downwards, and I watched how, at this break, first the legs, then the bodies, then the heads of our company disappeared. I was waiting with a terrible feeling when the last bright white hat of Uncle Heinrich, the tallest of my mother's brothers, would disappear, and, finally, I was left alone ... I seem to have felt that “alone in the forest” is, in fact, scary, but, as if spellbound, he could neither move nor utter a sound, and only listened to now a quiet whistle, now a ringing, now a vague voice and sighs of the forest, merging into a drawn-out, deep, endless and meaningful harmony, in which both the general rumble and the separate voices of living giants, and swaying, and quiet creaking of red trunks ... All this, as it were, penetrated me in an exciting powerful wave ... I ceased to feel separate from this sea of \u200b\u200blife, and it was so strong that when they missed me and my mother's brother returned behind me, then I stood in the same place and did not respond ... Uncle approaching me, in a light suit and a straw hat, I saw like a stranger, stranger in a dream…
Subsequently, this minute often arose in my soul, especially during hours of fatigue, as a prototype of deep, but living peace ... Nature affectionately beckoned the child at the beginning of his life with her endless, incomprehensible mystery, as if promising somewhere in infinity the depth of knowledge and the bliss of unraveling …
How, however, rudely our words express our feelings ... There is also a lot of incomprehensible speech in the soul that cannot be expressed harsh words, like the speeches of nature ... And this is exactly where the soul and nature are one ...
All these are scattered, separate impressions of a semi-conscious existence, as if connected by nothing but a personal sensation. The last one is moving to new apartment... And not even a move (I don’t remember it, just as I don’t remember my previous apartment), but again the first impression of the “new house”, of the “new courtyard and garden”. All this seemed to me a new world, but strange: then this memory falls out of my memory. I remembered it only a few years later, and when I remembered, I was even surprised, because it seemed to me at that time that we had lived in this house forever and that in general there were no major changes in the world. The main background of my impressions over several childhood years is an unconscious confidence in the complete completeness and immutability of everything that surrounded me. If I had a clear understanding of creation, then I would probably say that my father (whom I knew was lame) was created with a stick in his hand, that God created my grandmother precisely as a grandmother, that my mother was always just as beautiful a blue-eyed woman with a blond plait, that even the shed behind the house was born lopsided and with green lichen on the roof. It was a quiet, steady rise vitality, which smoothly carried me along with the surrounding world, and the shores of the third-party immense world, along which one could notice the movement, were not visible to me then ... And I myself, it seemed, was always the same boy with a big head, and my older brother was somewhat taller me, and the younger one below ... And these mutual relations were to remain forever ... We sometimes said: “when we grow up”, or: “when we die”, but it was a stupid phrase, empty, without living content ...
One morning my younger brother, who both fell asleep and got up before me, came up to my bed and said with a special expression in his voice:
- Get up, hurry ... What can I show you!
- What's happened?
- You'll see. Hurry, I won't wait.
And he again went out into the yard with the air of a serious man who does not want to waste time. I hurriedly dressed and followed him out. It turned out that some men unknown to us completely destroyed our front porch. He was left with a bunch of boards and various wooden rot, and the exit door in a strange way hung high above the ground. And most importantly - under the door gaped a deep wound made of peeling plaster, dark logs and piles ... The impression was sharp, partly painful, but even more amazing. The brother stood motionless, deeply interested, and followed with his eyes every movement of the carpenters. I joined in his silent contemplation, and soon my sister joined us both. And so we stood for a long time, saying nothing and not moving. Three or four days later, the new porch was ready in place of the old one, and it seemed to me positively that the physiognomy of our house had completely changed. The new porch was obviously "attached", while the old one seemed to be an organic part of our venerable whole house, like a person's nose or eyebrows.
And most importantly, the first impression of the “inside out” and the fact that under this smoothly planed and painted surface are hidden raw, rotten piles and gaping voids were deposited in the soul ...
By family tradition, our family came from some Mirgorod Cossack colonel, who received the heraldic nobility from the Polish kings. After my grandfather's death, my father, who went to the funeral, brought back an intricate seal, which depicted a boat with two dog heads at the bow and stern, with a crenellated turret in the middle. When one day we, the children, asked what it was, the father replied that it was our “coat of arms” and that we had the right to print our letters to them, while other people did not have this right. This thing is called in Polish rather strangely: “Korabl i Lodzia” (ark and boat), but what this makes sense, the father himself cannot explain to us; perhaps it doesn’t make any sense ... But there is also a coat of arms, so it’s called more simply: “pchła na bęnbenku hopki tnie”, and it makes more sense, because fleas bit the Cossacks and the gentry during campaigns ... And, taking a pencil, he quickly sketched on paper a flea dancing on a drum, surrounding it with a shield, a sword and all heraldic attributes. He drew decently, and we laughed. Thus, to the very first idea of our noble “kleinods”, my father added a hint of mockery, and it seems to me that he had it deliberately. My great-grandfather, according to my father, was a regimental clerk, my grandfather was a Russian official, like my father. It seems that they never owned serf souls and lands ... To restore their hereditary - the rights of the nobility, the father never aspired, and when he died, we turned out to be “sons of a court adviser”, with the rights of an unplaced service nobility, without any real connections with the nobility, yes, it seems, and with any other.
The image of my father remained quite clear in my memory: a man of medium height, with a slight tendency to be overweight. As an official of that time, he carefully shaved; his features were fine and handsome: an aquiline nose, large brown eyes, and lips with strongly curved upper lines. It was said that in his youth he looked like Napoleon the First, especially when he put on a Napoleonic cocked hat. But it was hard for me to imagine Napoleon lame, and my father always walked with a stick and slightly dragged left leg…
On his face there was always an expression of some kind of hidden sadness and concern. Only occasionally did it clear up. Sometimes he would take us to his office, let us play and crawl on our own, draw pictures, tell funny jokes and fairy tales. Probably, in the soul of this man there was a large reserve of complacency and laughter: he even gave his teachings a semi-humorous form, and at that moment we loved him very much. But these glimpses became less and less over the years, natural gaiety was increasingly twitching with melancholy and care. In the end, he was only enough to somehow live up to our upbringing, and in more conscious years we no longer had any inner closeness with my father ... So he went down to the grave, little known to us, his children. And only long later, when the years of youthful carelessness had passed, did I collect feature after feature that I could about his life, and the image of this deeply unhappy man came to life in my soul - both dearer and more familiar than before.
In this book, I am trying to recall and revive a number of pictures of the past half century, as they were reflected in the soul, first of a child, then of a young man, then of an adult. Early childhood and the first years of my youth coincided with the time of liberation. The middle of life passed in a period of dark, first governmental, and then social reaction, and among the first movements of the struggle. Now I see much of what my generation dreamed about and fought for bursting into the arena of life anxiously and stormily. I think that many episodes from the time of my exile wanderings, events, meetings, thoughts and feelings of people of that time and that environment have not lost even now the interest of living reality itself. I would like to think that they will still retain their significance for the future. Our life trembles and shudders from sharp clashes between new beginnings and obsolete ones, and I hope to at least partly shed some light on some elements of this struggle.
But earlier I wanted to draw the attention of readers to the first movements of the nascent and growing consciousness. I knew that it would be difficult for me to focus on these distant memories under the rumble of the present, in which the peals of an approaching thunderstorm are heard, but I did not imagine how difficult it would be.
I am not writing the history of my time, but only the history of one life at that time, and I want the reader to first get acquainted with the prism in which it was reflected ... And this is possible only in a consistent story. Childhood and youth constitute the content of this first part.
One more note. These notes are not a biography, because I did not particularly care about the completeness of biographical information; not confession, because I do not believe in the possibility or usefulness of public confession; not a portrait, because it is difficult to paint one's own portrait with a guarantee of likeness. Any reflection differs from reality by the very fact that it is a reflection; reflection is obviously incomplete - even more so. It always, so to speak, reflects the chosen motives more densely, and therefore often, with all the truthfulness, more attractive, more interesting and, perhaps, purer than reality.
In my work, I strove for the fullest possible historical truth, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or bright features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I have not actually encountered, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen. And yet I repeat: I am not trying to give my own portrait. Here the reader will find only features from the "history of my contemporary", a person known to me better than all other people of my time ...
Part one
Early childhood
I. First Impressions of Being
I remember myself early, but my first impressions are scattered, like brightly lit islands among a colorless emptiness and fog.
The earliest of these memories is a strong visual impression of a fire. I could then be in my second year, but I still clearly see the flames above the roof of the barn in the yard, the walls of a large stone house strangely lit in the middle of the night and its windows reflecting with flame. I remember myself, warmly wrapped up, in someone's arms, among a bunch of people standing on the porch. From this indefinite crowd, the memory distinguishes the presence of the mother, while the father, limping, leaning on a stick, climbs the stairs of a stone house in the courtyard opposite, and it seems to me that he is walking into a fire. But that doesn't scare me. I am very interested in the helmets of firefighters flashing like firebrands around the yard, then one fire barrel at the gate and a schoolboy entering the gate with a shortened leg and a high set heel. I did not seem to feel any fear or anxiety, I did not establish a connection between the phenomena. For the first time in my life so much fire fell into my eyes, fire helmets and a schoolboy with a short leg, and I carefully examined all these objects against the deep background of night darkness. At the same time, I don’t remember the sounds: the whole picture only silently shimmers in my memory with floating reflections of a crimson flame.
I remember, then, several completely insignificant cases when they held me in their arms, appeased my tears or amused me. It seems to me that I remember, but very vaguely, my first steps ... My head was big in childhood, and when I fell, I often hit it on the floor. Once it was on the stairs. I was in great pain and cried loudly until my father comforted me with a special reception. He beat the step of the stairs with a stick, and this gave me satisfaction. Probably, I was then in a period of fetishism and assumed an evil and hostile will in a wooden board. And now they beat her for me, and she can’t even leave ... Of course, these words very roughly translate my feelings at that time, but I clearly remember the board and, as it were, the expression of her humility under the blows.
Subsequently, the same sensation was repeated in a more complex form. I was already a few more. It was an unusually bright and warm moonlit evening. This is generally the first evening that I remember in my life. My parents had gone somewhere, my brothers must have been sleeping, the nurse went to the kitchen, and I was left with only one lackey, who bore the dissonant nickname Gandylo. The door from the anteroom to the courtyard was open, and from somewhere, out of the moonlit distance, came the rumble of wheels along the paved street. And for the first time I singled out the rumble of wheels in my mind as a special phenomenon, and for the first time I did not sleep for so long ... I was scared - probably, they were talking about thieves during the day. It seemed to me that our yard in the moonlight was very strange and that a “thief” would certainly enter through the open door from the yard. It was as if I knew that the thief was a man, but at the same time he seemed to me not quite a man, but some kind of human-like mysterious creature that would do me harm with just its sudden appearance. This made me cry out loud.
I don’t know by what logic, but the footman Gandylo again brought his father’s stick and led me out onto the porch, where, perhaps due to a previous episode of the same kind, I began to beat the stairs hard. And this time it was satisfying again; my cowardice was so gone that a couple more times I fearlessly went out alone, without Gandyla, and again beat the imaginary thief on the stairs, reveling in the peculiar feeling of my courage. The next morning, I enthusiastically told my mother that yesterday, when she was not there, a thief came to us, whom Gandyl and I beat hard. Mother condescendingly agreed. I knew that there was no thief and that my mother knew it. But I loved my mother very much at that moment because she did not contradict me. It would be hard for me to give up that imaginary being, which I first feared, and then positively “felt” with a strange moonlight between my stick and the step of the stairs. It was not a visual hallucination, but there was some kind of ecstasy from his victory over fear ...
Another island in my memory is a trip to Chisinau to visit my paternal grandfather ... From this trip, I remember crossing the river (I think Prut), when our carriage was installed on a raft and, smoothly swaying, separated from the shore or the shore separated from it - I haven't figured it out yet. At the same time, a detachment of soldiers was crossing the river, and, I remember, the soldiers sailed in twos and threes on small square rafts, which, it seems, does not happen when troops cross ... I looked at them with curiosity, and they looked into our carriage and they said something incomprehensible to me ... It seems that this crossing was in connection with the Sevastopol war ...
On the same evening, shortly after crossing the river, I experienced the first feeling of sharp disappointment and resentment ... It was dark inside the spacious travel carriage. I was sitting in someone's arms in front, and suddenly my attention was attracted by a reddish dot, now flashing, then fading away in the corner, in the place where my father was sitting. I started laughing and reached out to her. Mother said something warning, but I was so eager to get to know an interesting object or creature more closely that I began to cry. Then my father moved towards me a small red star, tenderly hiding under the ashes. I reached out to her with the index finger of my right hand; for a while it did not come, but then suddenly it flared up brighter, and a sharp bite suddenly burned me. I think that in terms of the strength of the impression now, this could only be equal to a strong and unexpected bite of a poisonous snake, lurking, for example, in a bouquet of flowers. The light seemed to me deliberately cunning and evil. Two or three years later, when I remembered this episode, I ran to my mother, began to talk and began to cry. These were again tears of resentment ...
Back in the mid-1890s, Korolenko was plotting, together with his closest friend and co-editor of Russian Wealth N. Fannensky, a memoir-journalistic book Ten Years in the Province, which was not yet connected with the history of a whole generation of the 1870s. The epic plan was outlined in the autumn of 1896 in Korolenko's correspondence with P.F. Yakubovich. The latter sent from Kurgan exile to the editors of "Russian wealth" the story "Youth" and expressed his dream of a "novel of our time." Korolenko, in a reply letter, supported the idea of "our novel", which "played out with more or less intensity among a whole generation", when "active populism filled the stage", and whose epilogue is "remote places". He believed, however, that not only insurmountable external obstacles in the form of censorship stood in the way of such a novel: we ourselves “we ourselves cannot yet look back with sufficient calmness and<...>"objectivity". Yakubovich, in turn, expressed the hope that the person who would be able to "cope with all the difficulties" would be Korolenko himself: "You, exactly You write all the same "our novel".
In 1905, when the climate of censorship eased considerably, Korolenko set about writing an artistic chronicle of his generation. “I wanted to pay tribute to the topic of the day and start from exile,” he wrote to his brother, but he overcame the temptation and began from childhood. However, the “first impression of being” was a fire: “reflections of a crimson flame” “against the deep background of the darkness of the night.” A picture that echoes the Russian reality of the "flaming year".
In an effort to define the genre of his work, Korolenko resorted to various formulas: the work is “almost fiction, not dry memories”, “life impressions”, “illuminated by memories”, but not a biography, not a “public confession”, not “his own portrait”, in the same time, the history of one life, where "historical truth" is given preference over "artistic truth". In the end, "The History of My Contemporary" absorbed all the main principles of Korolenko's work - artistic and visual, memoir, lyrical, essay and journalistic. At the same time, the weight of the last two elements gradually increased, which corresponded to general direction writer's path.
Depicting the high spiritual image of his contemporary, Korolenko shares with the reader many anxieties and doubts. In 1916, he called the “young and ardent” period of his Narodism “the crushed ashes of still recent hopes”: “After that old sharp experience, I am skeptical about “ready-made formulas”, whether it be the formula of “popular” or “class” wisdom. He chose for himself a "partisan line" of action "from his own mind."
The generation of the 1860s-1870s, which Korolenko called “his own”, entered the historical arena with “boiling wine of denial” in their heads, with a tendency to act “very radically and very naively”, doing away with all sorts of “junk” using the “Fuck off” method. and to hell!” Korolenko treated all kinds of "nihilists" and "subversers" aloofly, believing that something new could be introduced only if it was based on a higher moral principle.
However, in the life of the “nihilistic generation” Korolenko overheard the motif of the exhaustion of denial, weariness from enmity, caught the young people’s desire for “something that could reconcile with life - if not with reality, then at least with its possibilities.”
The shortest and most capacious review of the "History of my contemporary" belongs to A.V. Amfiteatrov: "A fragrant book!" History has prepared a cruel epilogue for the Korolenko generation: "the dictatorship of the bayonet," as the writer defined in last years life, "immediately pushed us back centuries", surpassing "the wildest dreams of the royal retrogrades."
Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko
History of my contemporary. Book one
V. G. Korolenko. Collected works in ten volumes.
Volume five. History of my contemporary M., GIHL, 1954
Preparation of the text and notes by S. V. Korolenko
In this book, I am trying to recall and revive a number of pictures of the past half century, as they were reflected in the soul, first of a child, then of a young man, then of an adult. Early childhood and the first years of my youth coincided with the time of liberation. The middle of life passed in a period of dark, first governmental, and then social reaction, and among the first movements of the struggle. Now I see much of what my generation dreamed about and fought for bursting into the arena of life anxiously and stormily. I think that many episodes from the time of my exile wanderings, events, meetings, thoughts and feelings of people of that time and that environment have not lost even now the interest of living reality itself. I would like to think that they will still retain their significance for the future. Our life trembles and shudders from sharp clashes between new beginnings and obsolete ones, and I hope to at least partly shed some light on some elements of this struggle.
But earlier I wanted to draw the attention of readers to the first movements of the nascent and growing consciousness. I knew that it would be difficult for me to focus on these distant memories under the rumble of the present, in which the peals of an approaching thunderstorm are heard, but I did not imagine how difficult it would be.
I am not writing the history of my time, but only the history of one life at that time, and I want the reader to first get acquainted with the prism in which it was reflected ... And this is possible only in a consistent story. Childhood and youth constitute the content of this first part.
One more note. These notes are not a biography, because I did not particularly care about the completeness of biographical information; not confession, because I do not believe in the possibility or usefulness of public confession; not a portrait, because it is difficult to paint one's own portrait with a guarantee of likeness. Any reflection differs from reality by the very fact that it is a reflection; reflection is obviously incomplete - even more so. It always, so to speak, reflects the chosen motives more densely, and therefore often, with all the truthfulness, more attractive, more interesting and, perhaps, purer than reality.
In my work, I strove for the fullest possible historical truth, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or bright features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I have not actually encountered, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen. And yet I repeat: I am not trying to give my own portrait. Here the reader will find only features from the "history of my contemporary", a person known to me better than all other people of my time ...
Part one
Early childhood
First impressions of life
I remember myself early, but my first impressions are scattered, like brightly lit islands among a colorless emptiness and fog.
The earliest of these memories is a strong visual impression of a fire. I could then be in my second year, but I still clearly see the flames above the roof of the barn in the yard, the walls of a large stone house strangely lit in the middle of the night and its windows reflecting with flame. I remember myself, warmly wrapped up, in someone's arms, among a bunch of people standing on the porch. From this indefinite crowd, the memory distinguishes the presence of the mother, while the father, limping, leaning on a stick, climbs the stairs of a stone house in the courtyard opposite, and it seems to me that he is walking into a fire. But that doesn't scare me. I am very interested in the helmets of firefighters flashing like firebrands around the yard, then one fire barrel at the gate and a schoolboy entering the gate with a shortened leg and a high set heel. I did not seem to feel any fear or anxiety, I did not establish a connection between the phenomena. For the first time in my life so much fire fell into my eyes, fire helmets and a schoolboy with a short leg, and I carefully examined all these objects against the deep background of night darkness. At the same time, I don’t remember the sounds: the whole picture only silently shimmers in my memory with floating reflections of a crimson flame.
I remember, then, several completely insignificant cases when they held me in their arms, appeased my tears or amused me. It seems to me that I remember, but very vaguely, my first steps ... My head was big in childhood, and when I fell, I often hit it on the floor. Once it was on the stairs. I was in great pain and cried loudly until my father comforted me with a special reception. He beat the step of the stairs with a stick, and this gave me satisfaction. Probably, I was then in a period of fetishism and assumed an evil and hostile will in a wooden board. And now they beat her for me, and she can’t even leave ... Of course, these words very roughly translate my feelings at that time, but I clearly remember the board and, as it were, the expression of her humility under the blows.
Subsequently, the same sensation was repeated in a more complex form. I was already a few more. It was an unusually bright and warm moonlit evening. This is generally the first evening that I remember in my life. My parents had gone somewhere, my brothers must have been sleeping, the nurse went to the kitchen, and I was left with only one lackey, who bore the dissonant nickname Gandylo. The door from the anteroom to the courtyard was open, and from somewhere, out of the moonlit distance, came the rumble of wheels along the paved street. And for the first time I also singled out the rumble of wheels in my mind as a special phenomenon, and for the first time I did not sleep for so long ... I was scared - probably, they were talking about thieves during the day. It seemed to me that our yard in the moonlight was very strange and that a “thief” would certainly enter through the open door from the yard. It was as if I knew that the thief was a man, but at the same time he seemed to me not quite a man, but some kind of human-like mysterious creature that would do me harm with just its sudden appearance. This made me cry out loud.
I don’t know by what logic, but the footman Gandylo again brought his father’s stick and led me out onto the porch, where, perhaps in connection with a previous episode of the same kind, I began to beat the stairs hard. And this time it was satisfying again; my cowardice had subsided so much that a couple more times I fearlessly went out alone, without Gandyl, and again beat the imaginary thief on the stairs, reveling in the peculiar feeling of my courage. The next morning, I enthusiastically told my mother that yesterday, when she was not there, a thief came to us, whom Gandyl and I beat hard. Mother condescendingly agreed. I knew that there was no thief and that my mother knew it. But I loved my mother very much at that moment because she did not contradict me. It would be hard for me to give up that imaginary being, which I first feared, and then positively “felt”, with a strange moonlight, between my stick and the step of the ladder. It was not a visual hallucination, but there was some kind of ecstasy from his victory over fear ...
Another island in my memory is a trip to Chisinau to my paternal grandfather ... From this trip I remember crossing the river (I think Prut), when our carriage was installed on a raft and, smoothly swaying, separated from the shore, or the shore separated from it - I haven't figured it out yet. At the same time, a detachment of soldiers was crossing the river, and, I remember, the soldiers sailed in twos and threes on small square rafts, which, it seems, does not happen when troops cross ... I looked at them with curiosity, and they looked into our carriage and they said something incomprehensible to me ... It seems that this crossing was in connection with the Sevastopol war ...
On the same evening, shortly after crossing the river, I experienced the first feeling of sharp disappointment and resentment ... It was dark inside the spacious travel carriage. I was sitting in someone's arms in front, and suddenly my attention was attracted by a reddish dot, now flashing, then fading away in the corner, in the place where my father was sitting. I started laughing and reached out to her. Mother said something warning, but I was so eager to get to know an interesting object or creature more closely that I began to cry. Then my father moved towards me a small red star, tenderly hiding under the ashes. I reached out to her with the index finger of my right hand; for a while it did not come, but then suddenly it flared up brighter, and a sharp bite suddenly burned me. I think that in terms of the strength of the impression now, this could only be equal to a strong and unexpected bite of a poisonous snake, lurking, for example, in a bouquet of flowers. The light seemed to me deliberately cunning and evil. Two or three years later, when I remembered this episode, I ran to my mother, began to talk and began to cry. These were again tears of resentment ...
A similar disappointment caused me the first bath. The river made an enchanting impression on me: I was new, strange and beautiful small greenish waves of swell breaking under the walls of the bath, and the way they played with sparkles, fragments of sky blue and bright pieces of the bath, as if broken. All this seemed to me cheerful, lively, cheerful, attractive and friendly, and I begged my mother to quickly bring me into the water. And suddenly - an unexpected and sharp impression of either cold or burn ... I cried loudly and thrashed so in my mother's arms that she almost dropped me. My bath this time did not take place. While my mother was splashing in the water with an incomprehensible pleasure for me, I sat on the bench, puffed up, looked at the crafty swell, which continued to play just as temptingly with fragments of the sky and the bath, and got angry ... At whom? It looks like a river.
