Alexey Varlamov
thought wolf
Part one. Hunter
Most of all, Ulya loved the night sky and the strong wind in it. In a windy black space, she ran in a dream, easily pushing off the grass with her feet, tirelessly and without stopping her breath, but not because she was growing in those moments - she was short and fragile in physique - but because she knew how to run - something happened to a thin girlish body, which is why it came off the ground, and Ulya physically felt this half-run-half-half flight and remembered the transition to it with her skin when she didn’t fall from reality into a dream, but accelerated, soared, and the air held her for several moments like water. And she ran until the dream thinned out and she was terrified that she would stumble, fall, and never be able to run again. The secret fear of decapitation tormented the girl, bursting into her nightly dreams, and left only in the summer, when Ulya left for the village of Vysokiye Gorbunki on the Shelomi River and walked along the forest and field roads there, burning to blackness and burning in the hot air the gifts and nightmares that tormented her. And she was not afraid of anything else - no darkness, no lightning, no mysterious night flashes, no large beetles, no noiseless birds, no wasps, no snakes, no mice, no sharp forest sounds, similar to the explosion of a broken bowstring. A townswoman, she was indifferent to the bites of mosquitoes and midges, she never caught a cold, no matter how cold the river water she bathed and no matter how wet under the August rains. The hilly countryside with islands of forests among the swamps - manes, as they were called here - with forest lakes, streams and water meadows calmed and excited her at the same time, and if it depended on Uli, she would live and live here, never returning to the damp , dissected by a short wide river and indented by narrow crooked canals, Petersburg with its dirty houses, cabbies, horse cars, shops and fumes human bodies. But her father, Vasily Khristoforovich Komissarov, went to Vysokie Gorbunki only in the summer, because the rest of the time he worked as a mechanic at the Obukhov plant and in the countryside he missed cars so much that he was almost all the time repairing simple peasant mechanisms. He did not take money from the owners for work, but he always ate breakfast fresh eggs, milk, butter, sour cream and vegetables, which made his sickly, earthy face look younger, shiny, ruddy and even fatter, his strong teeth cleared of yellow plaque, and his Asiatic eyes narrowed and looked contentedly from under swollen eyelids. This cunning swollen look had such an effect on the Gorbunkov peasants mysteriously that they came one by one to the mechanic to consult about land and farms, but Vasily Khristoforovich did not know how to say this, but the peasants still thought that the St. reveal the unknown to them.
Sometimes, to the displeasure of his young wife, Komissarov went hunting with Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov, an arrogant, nervous gentleman who, in his swarthy disheveledness, looked either like a gypsy or a Jew. Legkobytov was an agronomist by profession, but he didn’t grow anything in this field, except for a small book about garlic cultivation, and became a journalist first, and then a little writer, lived in the village all year round, renting hunting grounds from the local landowner Prince Lupa - the mysterious an old man whom he had never seen, because Lupa was allergic to daylight and to people's faces, except for one - his manager. They said bad things about the two of them, but Legkobytov did not delve into these rumors, he was a man of mental and physical health, he hunted with pleasure in transparent pine and dark spruce forests, trained dogs, wrote stories and went to the city only to attach to the editorial offices manuscripts and receive royalties of twenty kopecks per line. The magazines of his works were eagerly taken, the critics either lazily scolded them, or condescendingly praised them, and the mechanic Komissarov loved to listen to his friend and was Pavel Matveevich's first reader and admirer. Once he even brought a bicycle to the writer from Germany as a gift, on which Legkobytov famously rode along local roads, causing the envy of the boys and the fury of the village dogs. He did not pay attention to the first, and fought off the second with a practiced technique: when the dog intended to grab him by the trouser leg, the cyclist braked sharply, and the animal received a blow to the lower jaw with his heel. But Pavel Matveyevich treated so cruelly only other people's dogs, he did not cherish his soul in his own hunting dogs, valued them for their intelligence, endurance and viscosity, and gave marvelous names - Yarik, Karay, Flute, Nightingale, Palma, Nerl, while others had two names: one for hunting, the other for home. Once I bought a hound named Gonchar and renamed it Anchar. In general, he was a poetic person, although he seemed rude and harsh.
When Doctor of Philology, winner of the Big Book Prize and the Solzhenitsyn Prize, regular author of the ZhZL series Alexei Varlamov wrote a novel about the First World War, he did not even think that the book would be released exactly on the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities and that the political atmosphere by that time was again fairly heat up.
The action of the "Thought Wolf" begins exactly one hundred years ago and lasts four years. Aleksey Varlamov takes on the Silver Age - “a muddy, rich, incredibly exciting time”, analyzes the events of the First World War and the 1917 revolution. For him, first of all, it is important not “the military component and how ready or unprepared the Russian army was, but mental state Russian society, what was going on then in the minds and souls.
The Thought Wolf has several love triangles, fatal passion and murder. And a large-scale historical background - the military events of the First World War, the life of the Russian village and revolutionary Petrograd. From the very first pages in the novel, it brews, swells, and then turmoil and inner spiritual corruption breaks out, which creeps up like an invisible ruthless beast. This is the same “mental wolf” that Varlamov’s heroes fight, however, without any success.
The main characters, petty engineer Vasily Komissarov and writer Pavel Legkobytov, try to survive and even hunt the wolf. Vasily's sensitive and tender daughter, teenager Ulya, and his young wife are seized with a fever of anxiety and seek to escape from a predator. But it is impossible to win or hide: the "mental wolf", according to Varlamov, is a mental epidemic and a diagnosis Silver Age. And the writer does not leave a chance to escape to any of the characters in the novel: neither fictional heroes, nor completely historical personalities, well known to Varlamov from his own documentary research. These are Prishvin, Rozanov and Grigory Rasputin, who has long attracted the writer. His role in national history so complex that biographical book about Rasputin in the ZhZL series, Varlamov could not limit himself. The image of Grigory Efimovich, whom Varlamov, following Alexei Tolstoy, considers the last defender of the throne, is most successfully spelled out in the novel.
Alexey Varlamov says that general idea novel arose long ago: he was tired of documentary prose in the framework of "Life wonderful people", and he wanted, according to him own words, "solve the inverse problem". "Thought Wolf" was written gradually. Everything began to take shape in the summer of 2010, in those sweltering, hot months when the sky was clouded with smoke: “The stuffiness that exists in the novel echoes the time when I wrote it, and the summer of 1914, from which the novel begins.”
Aleksey Varlamov at least unravels the historical threads in the novel, but the spiritual premises of the main events of the Silver Age occupy him much more than military conflicts and political struggle. The title metaphor of the novel is the mental wolf, the personification of the thought from which every sin begins. An image from the ancients Orthodox prayers, where there are mysterious words: "from the mental wolf I will be hunted by the beast." And the heroes of Varlamov, fictional and real, are fighting this mental wolf that dominates the whole country. They fight fiercely, but in vain.
Natalia Lomykina
Most of all, Ulya loved the night sky and the strong wind in it. In the windy black space, she ran in a dream, easily pushing off the grass with her feet, tirelessly and without stopping her breath, but not because she was growing in those moments - she was short and fragile in physique - but because she knew how to run - something happened to a thin girlish body, which is why it came off the ground, and Ulya physically felt this half-run-half-half flight and remembered the transition to it with her skin when she didn’t fall from reality into a dream, but accelerated, soared, and the air held her for several moments like water. And she ran until the dream thinned out and she was terrified that she would stumble, fall, and never be able to run again. The secret fear of decapitation tormented the girl, bursting into her nightly dreams, and left only in the summer, when Ulya left for the village of Vysokiye Gorbunki on the Shelomi River and walked along the forest and field roads there, burning to blackness and burning in the hot air the gifts and nightmares that tormented her. And she was not afraid of anything else - neither the darkness, nor lightning, nor mysterious night flashes, nor large beetles, nor silent birds, nor wasps, nor snakes, nor mice, nor sharp forest sounds, similar to the explosion of a broken bowstring. A townswoman, she was indifferent to the bites of mosquitoes and midges, she never caught a cold, no matter how cold the river water she bathed and no matter how wet under the August rains. The rolling countryside with islands of forests among the swamps - manes, as they were called here - with forest lakes, streams and water meadows calmed and excited her at the same time, and if it depended on Uli, she would live here and live, never returning to the damp , dissected by a short wide river and indented by narrow crooked canals, Petersburg with its dirty houses, cabbies, horse cars, shops and the fumes of human bodies. But her father, Vasily Khristoforovich Komissarov, went to Vysokie Gorbunki only in the summer, because the rest of the time he worked as a mechanic at the Obukhov plant and in the countryside he missed cars so much that he was almost all the time repairing simple peasant mechanisms. He did not take money from the owners for work, but for breakfast he always ate fresh eggs, milk, butter, sour cream and vegetables, which made his sickly, earthy face younger, shiny, became ruddy and even thicker, strong teeth were cleaned of yellow plaque, and Asiatic eyes narrowed and looked contentedly from under swollen eyelids. This cunning swollen look had such a mysterious effect on the Gorbunkov peasants that they one by one came to the mechanic to consult about land and farms, but Vasily Khristoforovich did not know how to say this, but it still seemed to the peasants that the St. Petersburg gentleman knew something, but was hiding , and wondered how to win him over and find out the unknown to them.
Sometimes, to the displeasure of his young wife, Komissarov went hunting with Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov, an arrogant, nervous gentleman who, in his swarthy disheveledness, looked either like a gypsy or a Jew. Legkobytov was an agronomist by profession, but he didn’t grow anything in this field, except for a small book about garlic cultivation, and he became a journalist first, and then a little writer, he lived in the village all year round, renting hunting grounds from the local landowner Prince Lupa - the mysterious an old man whom he had never seen, because Lu-pa was allergic to daylight and to people's faces, with the exception of one - his manager. They said bad things about the two of them, but Legkobytov did not delve into these rumors, he was a man of mental and physical health, he hunted with pleasure in transparent pine and dark spruce forests, trained dogs, wrote stories and went to the city only to attach to the editorial offices manuscripts and receive royalties of twenty kopecks per line. The magazines of his works were eagerly taken, the critics either lazily scolded them, or condescendingly praised them, and the mechanic Komissarov loved to listen to his friend and was Pavel Matveevich's first reader and admirer. Once he even brought a bicycle to the writer from Germany as a gift, on which Legkobytov famously rode along local roads, causing the envy of the boys and the fury of the village dogs. He did not pay attention to the first, and fought off the second with a practiced technique: when the dog intended to grab him by the trouser leg, the cyclist braked sharply, and the animal received a blow to the lower jaw with his heel. But Pavel Matveyevich treated so cruelly only other people's dogs, he did not look for souls in his own hunting dogs, valued them for their intelligence, endurance and viscosity, and gave marvelous names - Yarik, Karai, Flute, Nightingale, Palma, Nerl, while others had two names: one for hunting, the other for home. Once I bought a hound named Gonchar and renamed it Anchar. In general, he was a poetic person, although he seemed rude and harsh.
After skirmishes with ill-mannered rural dogs, Legkobytov's pants turned out to be torn and they were sewn up by the beautiful, portly and strict peasant woman Pelageya, who followed Pavel Matveyevich everywhere. In addition to hunting dogs, they had three children: the younger ones were common, as gypsy and dense as their father, and the older one was whitish, thin, blue-eyed, with long girlish eyelashes and puffy lips - Alyosha was Pelagia's son from another person. Pavel Matveyevich did not like his stepson too much, and not because Alyosha was a stranger to him by blood, but because he was indifferent to children and did only what he liked in life. And what I didn’t like, I dismissed and didn’t keep in my head.
Ulya often played with Alyosha and felt sorry for him very much. Because she herself grew up with her stepmother, it always seemed to her that Alyosha was offended in the family, and even her mother, busy with household chores, treats her worse than younger sons. Since childhood, Ulya has been carrying delicacies for her friend from home and, adopting peasant sadness, watched with all her eyes how Alyosha gobbles up the gifts, although cookies and sweets did not suit him for the future and the bones still protruded from the tanned boyish body, and the tender face always remained tragically ready to be offended. One day, Ulya saved up some money and bought him a smart shirt, but Alyosha was embarrassed because he had nowhere to put on a new thing, and he did not know how to explain to his mother where the shirt came from.
- I do not like? Ulya interpreted his embarrassment in her own way.
“Great,” he did not lie, because Ulya really made a mistake with the size, and hid the shirt in the barn away from prying eyes, but the sharp-sighted Pelageya found it.
She listened to Alyosha's confused explanations, but she did not scold her son, but somehow chuckled strangely, and her usually dry, screwed-up eyes grew dim and narrowed, not giving way to that convulsive maternal love, which Pelageya carried in herself, but which neither Pavel Matveevich nor Ulya knew about. Pavel Matveyevich out of arrogance, and if Ulya believed in something, then there was no way to convince her. And Alyosha did not argue with her, but did everything as she ordered - he rocked to dizziness on giant steps arranged by a mechanic, sailed on a punt boat, taught his girlfriend to catch fish and crayfish, which they cooked on a fire, and, goggling his eyes - he wanted to sleep, because it was not light or dawn to get up in the morning, - Ulya listened to tales about three-eyed people who were given a third eye in order not to see the ordinary and see the innermost, and Ulya believed that she had this eye, but also until it opened.
- And in order to open the eye, - Ulya said to Alyosha in a strange voice, - you need to do special exercises. Do you want me to teach you?
“I want to,” Alyosha answered, and Ulya felt a slight chill run down her spine from neck to waist.
She casually touched Alyosha and immediately withdrew her hand:
- Why don't you go to school?
– Why should I? I already know everything that I need, I can and I know. I can read, write, know how to count. Why do I have too much?
Alexei Varlamov is called the most versatile writer - his novels and stories easily get along next to the masterfully written biographies in the ZhZL series. Laureate of the BIG BOOK Prize, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize and the Patriarchal Literary Prize.
The action of the new novel by Alexei Varlamov takes place at one of the most critical moments in Russian history- "the abyss on the edge" - from the summer of 1914 to the winter of 1918. Heroes live and die in it, in which sometimes one can guess famous people: Grigory Rasputin, Vasily Rozanov, Mikhail Prishvin, the scandalous hieromonk Iliodor and the sectarian Shchetinkin; real and fictional events interfere. The characters of the novel love - in a very Russian way, with a fatal passion, they argue and philosophize - about the nature of the Russian person, permissiveness, Nietzsche, the future of the country and about ... the mental wolf - a terrible charming beast that invaded Russia and became the cause of its troubles ...
The work was included in the List of Finalists for the Big Book Award.
The work belongs to the Prose genre. It was published in 2014 by AST. The book is part of the "Prose of Alexei Varlamov" series. On our site you can download the book "The Thought Wolf" in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. The rating of the book is 4.56 out of 5. Here, before reading, you can also refer to the reviews of readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In the online store of our partner you can buy and read the book in paper form.
