1.2 The history of the creation of the epic "The Sun of the Dead"

A native Muscovite, Shmelev, ended up in the Crimea in 1918, having arrived with his wife to S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. There, in Alushta, the only son of the writer, Sergei, was demobilized from the front. The time was incomprehensible; in all likelihood, the Shmelevs simply decided to wait out the Bolsheviks (then many left for the South of Russia). Crimea was under the Germans; in total, six governments have changed on the peninsula during the years of the civil war. Shmelev could observe the delights of democracy, and the kingdom of white generals, and the comings and goings of Soviet power. The writer's son was mobilized into the White Army, served in Turkestan, then, sick with tuberculosis, in the Alushta commandant's office. The Shmelevs did not want to leave Russia in 1920 together with the Wrangelites. The Soviet authorities promised amnesty to all those who remained; this promise was not kept, and the Crimea entered the history of the civil war as the "All-Russian cemetery" of Russian officers.

Shmelev's son was shot in January 1921, in Feodosia, where he (himself!) Appeared for registration, but his parents remained in obscurity for a long time, tormented and suspecting the worst. Shmelev busied himself, wrote letters, hoping that his son had been sent to the north. Together with his wife, they survived a terrible famine in the Crimea, got out to Moscow, then, in November 1922, to Germany, and two months later to France. It was there that the writer finally became convinced of the death of his son: the doctor, who was sitting with the young man in the cellars of Feodosia and subsequently escaped, found the Shmelevs and told about everything. It was then that Ivan Sergeevich decided not to return to Russia. After everything experienced, Shmelev became unrecognizable. He turned into a bent, gray-haired old man - from a lively, always cheerful, hot, whose voice once hummed low, like that of a disturbed bumblebee. Now he spoke in a barely audible, muffled voice. Deep wrinkles, sunken eyes, reminded me of a medieval martyr or a Shakespearean hero.

The death of his son, his brutal murder turned the mind of Shmelev, he seriously and consistently converted to Orthodoxy. The short story "The Sun of the Dead" can be called the epic of the civil war, or rather, even the epic of the countless atrocities and massacres of the new government. The name is a metaphor for a revolution that brings with it the light of death. The Europeans called this cruel evidence of the Crimean tragedy and the tragedy of Russia reflected in it like in a drop of water -

"The Apocalypse of Our Time" Such a comparison speaks of the understanding by Europeans of how terrible the reality depicted by the author is.

For the first time, "The Sun of the Dead" was published in 1923, in the emigrant collection "Window", and in 1924 it was published as a separate book. Translations into French, German, English, and a number of other languages ​​immediately followed, which was a rarity for a Russian émigré writer, and even unknown in Europe.

Shmelev, depicting the Crimean events, said in the epic "The Sun of the Dead": "I have no God: the blue sky is empty." We will find this terrible emptiness of a man who has lost faith in everything among writers both in Soviet Russia and in exile. Creased, destroyed the former harmonious order of life; she showed her bestial face; and the hero struggles in a boundary situation between life and death, reality and madness, hope and despair. A special poetics distinguishes all these works: the poetics of delirium. With broken, short phrases, the disappearance of logical connections, a shift in time and space.

The heroes of Shmelev are nothing like the "iron stream", but the heroic principle nevertheless wakes up - not in the will, not in mass discipline and new consciousness, but in the souls of some of these destitute, but not internally broken people ...

"The Sun of the Dead" by I. Shmelev and "Untimely Thoughts" by M. Gorky

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Analysis of symbolism in the book by I.S. Shmelev "Sun of the Dead"

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The genre definition chosen by the writer for his work is epic- presupposes the monumentality of the form, the problems of national significance, the depiction of "substantial" (Hegel) events and historical collisions.

"The Sun of the Dead" by I.S. Shmelev is dedicated to the events of the Civil War in the Crimea and, unlike the traditional epic, is devoid of historical distance and monumentality of form. The narration is conducted in the first person, while the name of the narrator, as well as the details of his fate, remain unknown to the reader. The narrative is devoid of epic dispassion: it is permeated with direct assessments of the narrator, includes, for example, emotionally passionate appeals to various addressees, both intratextual and extratextual, see, for example: Then I found you, comrade of my work, an oak stump... Did you hear, old man, how homily and childishly we talked about where to put you... 1 - And you, proud London, keep your Westminster Abbey with a cross and fire! A foggy day will come- and you don't recognize yourself...

The action of the work takes place in the also remaining unnamed "little white town with an ancient, from the Genoese, tower." The space of the epic, it would seem, is extremely limited: ...this tiny town by the sea- it's just a speck on our boundless expanses, a poppy, a grain of sand... The text is built as a series of stories reflecting the specific impressions of the narrator, and does not have a clearly defined plot: There will be no end... Life knows no endings, beginnings...

Only the titles of fairly autonomous chapters single out individual links in the plot, indicate the end, "break", exhaustion of one or another storyline outlined in the narrative, see, for example, such titles as "Playing with Death", "Almond Ripe", "The End of the Peacock ”, “The End of Bubik”, “The End of Tamarka”, “Three! end." The opinion of A. Amfiteatrov is indicative: “I don’t know: Literature whether "Sun of the Dead"? For a more terrible book is not written in Russian. Shmelev ... only tells day after day, step by step, the "epopee" of his Crimean, philistine existence in a famine year under Bolshevik oppression; - and ... scary! It's scary for a man! 2 At first glance, Shmelev's work can be perceived as a series of private documentary or semi-documentary evidence about the life in the Crimea of ​​people caught in the elements of the revolution and the Civil War. Let us turn, however, to the key words of the text.

The most common words in the text of "Suns of the Dead" are the words Sun - 96 uses, die and its synonyms! (to die, die) - 117, kill - 69 and its synonyms (both general language and contextual) - 97 death - 36, stone and its derivatives - 68; desert (emptiness, wasteland)- 53, blood- 49 uses. Already the list of the most frequent words in the text determines the features of the picture of the world depicted in the "epopee": this is a world where death reigns. “What is the book of I.S. Shmelev? - wrote I. Lukash. - ABOUT of death Russian man and Russian land. ABOUT of death Russian herbs and animals, Russian gardens and the Russian sky. ABOUT of death Russian sun. ABOUT of death the whole universe, when Russia died, about the dead sun of the dead” 3 .

The repetition of the most frequent words in the work with the seme "death" (and they are supplemented in the text by the repetition of the word dead,rendered in the title position 4 , and the use of other words also related to the semantic field "death": coffin, grave, funeral, end etc.) determines integrity text, generalizes as much as possible what is depicted in it, correlates its various fragments and various storylines, aesthetically transforms everyday observations.

All the characters in Shmelev's epic are involved in Death. They either “die” (die, perish), or “go to kill”, cf.: Tossed his head, took a deep breath[Kulesh]... and died. Quietly died. This is how an outdated leaf falls. “I don't know how many people get killed in the Chicago massacres. Here the matter was simpler: they killed and buried. And even quite simply: filled up ravines. And even quite: simply, simply: thrown into the sea.

And the verb die, and verb kill are consistently used in the text in the forms of three tenses: present, past and future. Death rules in three time dimensions, and even children are subject to its power, usually symbolizing the future: - We... Koryak... will kill / We will kill with a stone! ..- shouted the jackdaw and shook his fist(chapter "On the Empty Road").

Death is personified in the text (see, for example: Death stands at the door, and will stand stubbornly until it takes everyone away. A pale shadow stands and waits!), and the combinability of verbs die And kill expands, as a result, their semantics becomes more complicated: “kill”, for example, time, thoughts, future, day. The sphere of compatibility of the epithet is also expanding. dead: so, the sea is drawn dead, a corner of the garden appears dead, see, for example: The Dead Sea is here... Eaten, drunk, beaten out - everything. Run out.

The semantic dominant of the text also determines the nature of individual author's neoplasms. mortal And day is death. Expressive-evaluative noun mortal serves as a symbol for the child: I saw a mortal, a native of another world - from the world of the Dead... He stood behind me, looked at me...mortal! It was a boy of ten or eight years old, with a large head on a stick-neck, with sunken cheeks, with eyes of fear. On his gray face, his whitish lips were dried to the gums, and his bluish teeth were exposed -grab. On the one hand, this word is based on a metaphorical motivation (“similar to death”), on the other hand, the neoplasm clearly has the semantics of “death cub”. The man of the future world, appearing in the final chapter of the story with the symbolic title "The End of the End", turns out to be a "mortal". The present of the narrator is estimated by him as a “day-death”: In the silence of the borndeath-day the calls-views are understandable and imperative for me. Compound neoplasm day-death is ambiguous and is characterized by semantic capacity: it is both the day of the reign of Death, and the day (life), turning into its opposite - death, and the day of remembrance of the dead.

The world of death depicted in Shmelev's "epopee" at the same time turns out to be the world of an expanding "emptiness". The keywords of the narrative, in addition to units of the semantic field "death", as already noted, include single-root lexical units wasteland - emptiness - desert, forming text word educational nest. Their connection and semantic similarity are emphasized by the author himself with the help of morphemic repetition, uniting, for example, adjacent paragraphs of one chapter, see the chapter “There, below”:

I'm walking past the Villa Rose. All - desert...

I'm going, I'm going. By the beach empty I'm going wasteland...[ 189 ]

The keywords of this semantic series denote the specific realities of the depicted space and at the same time express conceptual and factual information in the text as a whole. The World of Death becomes the world of the desert and the souls of the "empty".

The artistic space of the "Sun of the Dead" is dynamic: the emptiness intensifies in it gradually. In the first chapters of the narrative, the key words of this series still appear mainly in direct meanings, then they acquire a symbolic meaning. The spread of emptiness is emphasized in the author's characteristics: for example, the chapter "The End of the Peacock" ends with the phrase More and more emptiness in the chapter "There, below" already All - desert.

"Desert" ("emptiness") is connected in the text with the image of time. The past is evaluated by the narrator as a struggle with the "wasteland", with the "stone". See for example: I want to go back in time, when people got along with the sun, created gardens in the desert. The present is depicted as the return of the desert and the rejection of historical progress: I hear the roars of animal lifeancient cave the life that these mountains have known, which has returned again. In the triumphant "ancient" world, the returned world of the "cave ancestors", the expanding desert is adjacent to the "dense" forests, where Baba Yaga rolls and rolls in her iron mortar, drives with a pole, sweeps the trail with a broom ... with an iron broom. Noise-torkaet through the forests, sweeps. Sweeping with an iron broom. The motive of returning to the “cave” pagan times determines the appearance of mythological images, however, these mythological images are projected onto the modern Shmelev era: mythological image Baba Yaga's "iron broom" transforms into a clichéd political metaphor place (enemies) with an iron broom: The black word "iron broom" buzzes in my head? Where does this cursed word come from? Who said it?.. "Place the Crimea with an iron broom"... I'm painfully wanting to understand where it comes from?

The opposition into which the keyword "desert" enters: "desert" (emptiness) - "living life" - is thus supplemented by the opposition "iron (source of death, death) - life". These oppositions interact: "iron force", the enemy of the natural, natural beginning, dooms the world to emptiness, threatens life, the sun.

In the epic, the key word stone, also associated with the expanding desert motif. Word stone, firstly, it regularly appears in the text in its direct meaning as a designation of the details of the Crimean landscape, see, for example: Legs beatabout the stones scratching along the steeps; A lame red-haired horse hobbles along the peacock wasteland, behind a beam ... Smells hotstone, withered tumbleweed. More steps: againstone... Secondly, in the word stone, the semantics of which in the text is gradually expanding, the seme "dispassion" is updated: The sun laughs despite the suffering of people, the stone smiles; compare: The mountains look at him... I see their secret smile - the smile of a stone.

The text also takes into account the general language figurative meaning of words stone, stone in contexts describing torment, hunger and death, they express such meanings as "insensitivity" and "cruelty". Traditional metaphor stone heart supplemented by an individual author's comparison: souls are empty and dry, like weathered stone.

Keyword stone converges in the text with the word desert and serves as a means of deploying the motive to fight against it. The victory of culture over chaos and "cave savagery" is also a victory over "stone", in the world depicted by Shmelev everything "runs wild, year after year leaves into stone." Thus, the stone also appears in the text as a symbol of savagery, decline, and the death of moral principles. This conceptually significant word is opposed to the lexical units "fire", "light".

Keyword stone metaphorized throughout the text. One of the metaphors is connected with the image of the narrator and emphasizes the uselessness and helplessness of a person in the terrible world of death and loss of the soul: I... Who is this - me?! Stone lying under the sun. With eyes, with ears - a stone.

Word stone, as we can see, it is characterized by semantic diffuseness, overlap and interaction of different meanings. Used as a symbol, it reaches a high degree of generalization: Animals, people - all the same, with human faces, fight, laugh, cry. Pull out of the stone - again into the stone(chapter "The Righteous Ascetic"). At the same time, the symbolic word stone is ambivalent: the stone in the text is not only a sign of savagery, loss of compassion, mercy and dignity, but also a sign of salvation. "Stone" can be "clear", "fertile": I gratefully look at the mountains covered in a hot haze.They (highlighted by I.S. Shmelev. - N.N.) is already there now! Blessed stone!.. At least six lives were recaptured!

So the keyword stone has conceptual significance and expresses various opposing meanings in the text of the Sun of the Dead: the hardness and reliability of the stone can serve as an antithesis to destruction, decline, savagery, cruelty and death. However, it is the latter meanings that dominate the semantic composition of the "epopee". In one of its last chapters, a combined image appears dark stone: the combination of just such components actualizes in the first of them the semes "gloom", "destruction", "savagery", while in the next paragraph of the text the keyword-symbol reappears desert:stone scored Fire. Millions of years of trampling! Billions of laborgobbled up in one day / What forces is a miracle? By the forcesstone-darkness. I see it, I know. There is no Blue Kasteli: black night-desert...

The key word, as we see, is a lexical unit, the different meanings of which are simultaneously realized in the text, while its derivational and associative links are necessarily updated in it.

A special place in the semantic structure of the text is occupied by the keyword Sun, placed in the position of the title and included in an oxymoron combination with the word the dead. First of all, it appears in its direct meaning, but for the organization of the text, “meaning increments”, its semantic transformations, are more important. The sun in Shmelev's epic is personified: in metaphors that include this keyword, anthropomorphic characteristics are regularly used (sun deceives, laughs, remembers and etc.). The sun, on the one hand, is a source of light, heat and, accordingly, life, on the other hand, it, like a stone, dispassionately looks at the torment of people (note the parallel laughter sun - smile stone).

The movement of the sun determines the countdown in the "epopee", see image sun clock. The passage of time is perceived by the characters of the "Sun of the Dead" through the change of day and night, through sunsets and sunrises. The return of the "ancient" Chaos is associated with the establishment of cyclic time in the world, the embodiment of which is the "sun".

The sun is depicted in the "epic" and as a divine eye looking at the world, it is a symbol of divine light, ideas about the highest values ​​lost in the "cave" life are associated with it: I can't turn to stone yet! Since childhood, I've been used to looking forSun of Truth (highlighted by I.S. Shmelev. - N.N.). Where are you,Unknown? Which face is yours?(chapter "The Wolf's Lair"). In a decaying world, where the mountains and the sea are only a "screen of hell", the sun remains the only focus of the memory of everything that was on earth: The sun looks closely, remembers: Baba Yaga rushes in her mortar, drives with a pestle, sweeps the trail with a broom ... The sun is all fairy talesremembers... Takes in. The time "will come - read(chapter "About Baba Yaga"). As we see, the plan of the future is connected with the image of the sun.

Keyword Sun, serving as a symbol of light, in Shmelev's "epopee", however, it acquires opposite meanings: the sun can lose its traditional attribute - gold - SCH be characterized by metaphors tin, tin. The source of heat in the world of death turns out to be cold and empty, cf.: Well, show your eyes... The sun! And in them the sun ... only completely different - cold and empty. This is the sun of death. Like tin foil- your eyes, and the sun in them is tin, an empty sun(chapter "What kill- - vat go "); And now the sun will peep out for a moment and splash out with a pale tin ... truly- sun of the dead! The farthest are crying(chapter "Bread with blood"). The image of the "fading" sun, the sun "leaving", "going to sunset", in the last chapters of the narrative is associated with the theme of death, which has taken possession of the wild world.

So, the image of the sun in Shmelev's epic, like the image of a stone, is ambivalent. The opposition of the meanings expressed by it distinguishes between two key phrases used in the text: sun of death And sun of the dead(title of work). "Sun of death" - the sun is "cold", "empty", "tin", the sun, "laughing" at the suffering of people and foreshadowing new deaths with the beginning of the day, finally, this is the sun that "extinguishes", leaving the land returned to Chaos; "The Sun of the Dead" is the divine eye, the source of light and life, preserving pa-. mourn for the departed. It is no coincidence that in the last chapter of the work the narrator refers to the Creed: Spring... With golden springs, warm rains, in thunderstorms, won't it unlock the bowels of the earth, won't it resurrect the Dead?Tea of ​​the Resurrection of the Dead! I believe in miracles! Great Resurrection- yes it will!(chapter "The End"). As the philosopher I. Ilyin noted, “the title "Sun of the Dead" - seemingly everyday, Crimean, historical - is fraught with religious depth: for it points to the Lord, who lives in heaven, sending people both life and death, - and people, who have lost it and become dead all over the world" 1 .

So, the keywords, as we see, express in the text not only meaningful, but also content-conceptual and content-subtext information 2 . They reflect the individual-author's vision of the described realities and phenomena and single out "substantial" categories. In the text of The Sun of the Dead, the key words form a series of “supporting” signs of an axiological (evaluative) nature, connected by conditional relations, transforming the everyday plan of the narrative and serving as the key to the metaphorical plan of the work: the world depicted by Shmelev is a world of death and cruel violence, approaching as a result to “ ancient cave life, disintegrating and turning into “emptiness” and “stone”, while the signs of dying, emptiness and “stoneness” also extend to the souls of people who have fallen away from God. The inevitability of God's judgment is connected in the text with a key image - the symbol of the Sun.

The keywords of a literary text are often characterized by cultural significance: these units are associated with traditional symbols, refer to mythological, biblical images, evoke historical and cultural associations in the reader, and create a wide intertextual “space” in the work. This feature of the key words is clearly manifested in the "Sun of the Dead", where they are symbolically associated with mythologems or actualize their correlation with biblical images. Thus, the use of the keyword in the text Sun relies on its symbolic meanings in the Holy Scriptures, in which the light of the sun, which makes everything clear and open, serves as a symbol of retribution and righteous punishment, while the true sun, “the true light, of which the sun we see serves only a faint reflection, is the Eternal Word, the Lord, Christ. .. he is Sun of Truth(Mal. IV, 2), true light (John, I, 9)» 3 . The “setting” of the sun symbolizes the wrath of God and the punishment for sins, suffering and disasters. The righteous, revived by the word of God, will one day shine, like a sun. All noted meanings associated with the symbolic use of the word Sun in the Holy Scriptures, are significant for the text of the "Sun of the Dead" and are updated in it.

The connection with biblical images is also important for characterizing the image of the author: the sun in Holy Scripture is a stable attribute of the bearer of the Word of God. The narrator, passionately denouncing the power of "iron", violence and mortification of the soul, thereby draws closer to the biblical prophet (see references-predictions, references-invectives that permeate the text).

The use of the keyword stone reflects the interaction of biblical and Slavic mythological symbolism. In the Holy Scriptures, a stone (a wordless stone) is an allegory of the hardening of the heart, and "heaps" of stones are a symbol of punishment for sins. In Slavic mythology, stone, one of the primary elements of the world, is a symbol of "dead" nature, and the appearance of large stones, boulders is also often explained by the "petrification" of people punished for sins. The motif of "petrification", as already noted, varies in the text of Shmelev's epic: the souls of people turn into stone, the stone displaces living space.

Keywords can also refer to the texts of literary works. So, it is possible that Shmelev's image of the sun correlates with the motives and images of Dostoevsky's prose, which had a huge influence on the writer. The image of the sun, associated in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky with the motive of involvement in the universe, simultaneously interacts with the motive of death. In the short story “The Gentle One”, for example, the sun, which “lives the universe”, dispassionately illuminates the hero’s tragedy and is perceived by him as a “dead man” - “the image of the sun expands the framework of the narrative to universal scales” 1: They say the sun is the life of the universe. The sun will rise and - look at him, isn't he a dead man? .. 2 The "reflexes" of this context are noticeable in Shmelev's "epopee". Key words, thus, include the "Sun of the Dead" in a dialogue with other works, actualize allusions and reminiscences.

Key words in the text of "The Sun of the Dead" are highlighted by repetitions of different types: lexical, synonymous, morphemic, syntactic. In a number of chapters, the intensity of repetitions is so high that on their basis particular leitmotifs of individual compositional parts of the work arise (see, for example, the chapters "Desert", "What they go to kill"). The key words in Shmelev's epic are in some cases highlighted by the author graphically. They consistently occupy strong positions of the text (the title of the work, the titles of individual chapters, their beginning or end). Different ways of highlighting key words in the text in their interaction focus the reader's attention on its cross-cutting images and signs that are important for understanding the "epopee".

The "Sun of the Dead" describes the months that Shmelev lived in the Crimea under the "Red Terror" after the defeat of the White Army, and reflects all his hatred towards the Soviet government and the Red Army.

The narrator, an elderly intellectual who remained in the Crimea after the evacuation of the Volunteer Army of General Wrangel, reveals to us the fate of the inhabitants of the peninsula, torn apart by hunger and fear. In this book, which is essentially a diary, the author describes how hunger gradually destroys everything human that is in a person - first feelings, then will. And little by little everything dies under the rays of the "laughing sun".

This novel is a merciless evidence not only of the slow death of people and animals, but also, mainly, of moral loneliness, human misfortune, the destruction of all living and spiritual things in a humiliated, enslaved people. Shmelev exposes in his book all the countless wounds of the Russian people, who became both a victim and an executioner.

Thirty-five chapters of the epic "The Sun of the Dead" - as Shmelev calls his work - are saturated with unquenchable love and heartbreaking pain for torn to pieces by Russia. This amazing book, an autobiographical and historical document, a painful farewell to the whole bygone world, a doomed and destroyed civilization, reflects the horror of the loneliness of this era abandoned by God, worthy of the Greek tragedy and the horrors of Dante. The power of suffering, reminiscent of many literary critics of Dostoevsky, empathy and sympathy for any suffering, wherever it reigns, finds its most complete expression in The Sun of the Dead. The inhumanity of the Red Guards is the main motif of these pages: and, as Marcel Proust said about completely different historical events, that this indifference to suffering is a monstrous and indispensable form of cruelty. The straightforwardness and realism with which the ugliness and perversions of the Soviet regime are described should make even the most callous reader tremble with horror.

Occasionally, a lyrical poet appears in Shmelev, but his lyricism is, if I may say so, the groans of the agonizing homeland written and described in his blood. Shmelev's "Sun of the Dead" is not only, though above all, an indispensable historical document, as Thomas Mann defined it, but also an epic work of the great writer, translated into twelve languages. It is also necessary to understand that this book has become for the newly minted Soviet criticism something like a symbol of all Russian emigre literature, as evidenced, among other things, by the acrimonious article by critic Nikolai Smirnov “The Sun of the Dead. Notes on emigrant literature. For the majority of Russian exiles, this novel became the cry of all tormented humanity and perishing civilization.

It is not surprising that this tragic epic, a real prayer and requiem for Russia, was appreciated not only by Thomas Mann, but also by such diverse writers as Gerhart Hauptmann, Selma Lagerlöf and Rudyard Kipling; and it is also not surprising that in 1931 Thomas Mann nominated Shmelev as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

When you read Shmelev's works written in exile, the first thing that strikes you is the desire of the author, faithful to the memory of his lost homeland, to regain and revive Russia - the best in it, which is hidden behind its so different faces.

"Sun of the Dead" (1923). It's so true that you can't even call it art. In Russian literature, the first real evidence of Bolshevism in time. Who else conveyed the despair and general death of the first Soviet years, war communism? Not Pilnyak! that one is almost easily perceived. And here - such a mentally difficult overcoming, you read a few pages - and it's no longer possible. So - correctly conveyed that burden. Causes keen sympathy for these convulsing and dying. More terrible than this book - is there any in Russian literature? Here the whole perishing world is absorbed, and together with the suffering of animals, birds. You fully feel the scale of the Revolution, how it was reflected both in deeds and in souls. How is the apex image - is there an “underground groan”, “The unfinished moan, the graves are asking”? (and this is the howling of beluga seals).

Ivan Shmelev. Sun of the Dead. Chapters 1-9. audiobook

Before the flow of these events, it is difficult to switch to artistic-critical considerations. (And the most terrible thing is that the current people almost entirely do not know about such a past of ours.)

The "Sun of the Dead" - summer, hot, Crimean - over dying people and animals. “This sun deceives with its brilliance ... it sings that there will be many more wonderful days, the velvet season is coming.” Although the author explains towards the end that the “sun of the dead” refers to the pale, semi-winter Crimean. (And he also sees the "tin sun of the dead" in the indifferent eyes of distant Europeans. By 1923 he already felt it there, abroad.)

Ivan Shmelev. Sun of the Dead. Chapters 10-16. audiobook

This must be re-read in order to refresh the sense of what happened, in order to realize its dimensions.

Especially at first - unbearably condensed. All the time they alternate in a merciless rhythm: signs of a dead life, a dead landscape, a mood of devastated despair - and the memory of red cruelties. Primordial truth.

Ivan Shmelev. Sun of the Dead. Chapters 17-23. audiobook

Then he interrupts with the doctor’s stories: “Memento Mori” (although remarkable in plot, a symbol of the universally connected world revolution, “febris revolutionis”, and the author, as it were, sends a curse to the delusions of his youth) and “Almond Gardens” (at first it seems: he inserted in vain, reduces the general intensity of today; then it gradually opens up that - no, there must also be a broad understanding of everything that has been done, to eternal breathing). And there will be no cross-cutting plot in the story: like this, in the last attempts of people to survive, a gallery of faces should unfold - mostly suffering, but also deceivers, and villains, and who became villains on the verge of universal death. And in keeping with the harsh tone of the times, they are all carved as if from stone. And nothing else - you don't need anything else - and you can't ask the author: that's what it is.

Ivan Shmelev. Sun of the Dead. Chapters 24-34. audiobook

However, some places of conversation, especially the doctor's monologues - with downright frank, irresistible borrowing from Dostoevsky, this is in vain, sorry. And there are many.

In the second half, the severity of the terrible narration, alas, is lost, reduced by a declamation, albeit true in its exposure. Dilution with rhetoric is not a win for the thing. (Although it is so natural that the author became embittered at the indifferent, well-fed, prosperous Western allies. “The sighs of those who once saved you, the transparent Eiffel tower.” And with what bitterness about the intelligentsia!) Towards the end, the number of lofty retreats also grows , this does not decorate, softens the stoneness of the general sculpture.

The narrator himself is a striking idealist: he keeps a turkey with chickens without any benefit, only to the detriment of himself (the hens-interlocutors); often shares the last with the hungry. “I don’t walk on the roads anymore, I don’t talk to anyone. Life burned down... I look into the eyes of animals”; "silent cow's tears." - And the awakening of faith in him is distinct.

All this - he unobtrusively gives and strongly disposes to himself. And a confident spell: "The time will come - it will be read."

But it's strange: throughout the story, the author lives and acts alone, alone. And several times cherished erupts: “we”, “our house”. So is he with his wife? Or is this how the memory of his son, shot by the Reds, is kept, never mentioned by him (also a mystery!), but as if spiritually preserved nearby? ..

Anxious tone is also supported by unusual dreams, from the very first page.

Beginning with a tone of renunciation of life and everything dear, the story and everything rolls in piercing hopelessness: “There is no need for a calendar, an indefinite life is all one. Worse than Robinson: there will be no point on the horizon, and no waiting ... "

“You can’t think about anything, you don’t have to think about anything! Stare greedily at the sun until your eyes become a pewter spoon.

- The sun laughs even in dead eyes.

“Now it’s better in the ground than on the ground.

- I want to cut off the last thing that binds me with life - the words of people.

“Now everything has the stamp of care. And - not scary.

- How after such a garbage can you believe that there is something there?

- What a huge churchyard! and how much sun!

“But now there is no soul, and nothing is sacred. The covers are torn from human souls. Pectoral crosses are torn off and impregnated. The last words of caress are trampled by boots into the night mud.

- They are afraid to speak. And they will soon be afraid to think.

“Only the wild ones will remain, they will be able to snatch the last.”

- The horror is that they do not feel any horror.

- Was it Christmas? It can't be Christmas. Who can be born now?!

There is nothing to talk about, we know everything.

- Let there be stone silence! Here it goes.

Signs of that time:

The general anger of hunger, life is reduced to primitiveness. "Roars of animal life." “A handful of wheat cost more than a person”, “they can kill, now everything is possible.” “Human bones will be boiled into glue, blood will be made into cubes for broth.” Lonely passers-by are killed on the road. The whole area is deserted, there is no obvious movement. People hid, live - do not breathe. All the former abundance of the Crimea - "eaten, drunk, knocked out, dried up." Fear that thieves will come and take the last, or from the Special Department; “Flour is stuffed into the cracks”, at night they will come to rob. Tatar yard, dug up 17 times in night raids. They catch cats in traps, the animals are terrified. Children gnaw the hooves of a long-dead horse. Houses abandoned by the owners are dismantled, pants are sewn from the canvas of country chairs. Some go to rob at night: their faces are smeared with soot. Shoes made of a rope rug pierced with wire, and soles made of roofing iron. The coffin is rented: a ride to the cemetery, then they are thrown out. In Bakhchisarai, a Tatar salted his wife and ate it. Kamsa is wrapped in gospel leaves. What letters now and from where? .. To the hospital? with their grubs and with their medicines. Bitter sour grape pomace, touched with a fermenting fungus, sold at the market in the form of bread. "They're getting limp with hunger, now everyone knows that."

“And in the town - the shop windows are beaten, boarded up. On them, sticky shreds of orders crackle in the wind: execution ... execution ... without trial, on the spot, under pain of a tribunal! .. "

A church house with a basement was turned over to the Special Department.

How the horses of volunteers who went overseas in November 1920 perished.

One by one, as if on a dying show, separate people swim by, often even with each other in no way correlating, not intersecting, they are all alone.

An old lady who sells the last things of the past for the sake of her young grandchildren. And - a nanny with her, who at first believed that "everything will be distributed to the working people" and everyone will live like gentlemen. “We will all sit on the fifth floor and smell the roses.”

The old doctor: how everyone robs him, even the removable jaw was stolen during the search, there was a gold plate on it. Whom he treated, they poisoned his water in the pool. Burned to death in a makeshift hut.

General Sinyavin, famous Crimean gardener. The sailors out of mockery cut down his favorite tree, then shot him himself. And Chinese geese were fried on bayonets.

A wonderful image of the "cultural postman" Drozd, who remained idle and without the meaning of life. Deceived faith in civilization and "Loyd-George".

And the most amazing Ivan Mikhailovich, a historian (a gold medal of the Academy of Sciences for his work on Lomonosov), who got into the first Bolshevik arrests with Drozd, showed his “Vologda” there: he almost strangled the guard - a Vologda citizen; and he, in joy, let his fellow countryman go. Now Ivan Mikhailovich, as a scientist, is given rations: a pound of bread a month. Begging in the bazaar, eyes fester. He went with a bowl to beg for the Soviet kitchen - and the cooks killed him with scoops. Lies in a frock uniform frock coat with general's epaulettes; take off the coat before going into the pit...

Uncle Andrey swept up with the revolution, came from near Sevastopol on horseback. And then a sailor stole a cow from him. And he himself slyly takes the goat from a neighbor, dooms her boys to death, and refuses: it’s not him. She curses him - and the curse comes true: the communists, already for another theft, beat off all his insides.

And types from the common people:

Fedor Lyagun serves both red and white; when the reds took the cow from the professor, when the whites returned it. “I can bring anyone I want under the fly... I can say that at a rally... everyone trembles with horror.”

The nameless old Cossack kept wearing his military overcoat, and they shot him for it.

Koryak-dragal kept hoping for future palaces. He beats his neighbor to death, suspecting that he slaughtered his cow.

Soldier of the German war, heavy captivity and escapes. Nearly shot by the whites. He remained under the Reds - and was shot, with other young people.

The old tinsmith Kulesh, the South Shore did not know the best tinker. Previously, he worked in Livadia, and for the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. For a long time I honestly changed stoves for wheat and potatoes. Dragged with the last of his strength, staggering. “Complain against them, the Cumanists! Complain to the wolf, there is no one else now. Just a word - basement! In the face with a Lebanese. And he believed them, a simpleton ... And now - he died of hunger.

Another simpleton is the fisherman Pashka deceived by the new government. “There is no most important experience - he did not shed his native blood. A fishing gang will come from the sea - nine-tenths of the catch is taken away. The community is called You have to feed the whole city.” The author told him: "They beckoned you to robbery, and you betrayed your brothers."

Resourceful h.hol Maxim, without pity for the dying - this one will not be lost.

And - doomed children with heightened attention. And the child is dead.

And - Tanya the ascetic: for the sake of children - she risks walking through the pass, where she will be raped or robbed: to change wine for food in the steppe.

And a separate story about an abandoned and then dead peacock - the same bright, colored spot on everything, like its plumage.

And - the righteous: "They did not bow to temptation, did not touch someone else's thread - they are beating in a noose."

It is necessary to see all this - through the eyes of an unprepared pre-revolutionary generation. For the Soviets, in subsequent extinctions, nothing was new.

Finally - and red.

Shura-Falcon - a small-toothed vulture on a horse, "it smells of blood."

The freckled sailor Grishka Ragulin is a chicken thief, verbiage. He entered at night to the worker, did not give in, stabbed her with a bayonet in the heart, the children found her in the morning with a bayonet. The women sang a memorial service for her - the women answered with a machine gun. "The wobbling Grishka left the court - the commissar goes on."

A former student of Kreps who robbed a doctor.

A half-drunk Red Army soldier, on horseback, "without a homeland, without a berth, with a crumpled red star -" tyrtsanalnaya "".

They go to select "surplus" - footcloths, eggs, saucepans, towels. They burned the fences, polluted the gardens, broke them.

"To whom is the grave, but the day is bright for them."

“Those who want to kill will not be frightened even by the eyes of a child.”

About the mass executions after the departure of Wrangel. Killed at night. During the day they slept, while others, in the cellars, waited. Entire armies waited in cellars. Recently they fought openly, they defended their Motherland, Motherland and Europe, on the Prussian and Austrian fields, in the Russian steppes. Now, tortured, they ended up in the cellars. "Sweep the Crimea with an iron broom."

Their backs are wide as a slab, their necks are bovine thick; eyes heavy, like lead, in a blood-oil film, well-fed. ... But there are other things: the backs are narrow, fishy, ​​the necks are a cartilaginous tourniquet, the eyes are pointed with a gimlet, the hands are tacky, with a biting vein, they press with ticks.

And somewhere there, close to Bela Kun and Zemlyachka, is the chief Chekist Mikhelson, "red-haired, skinny, green eyes, angry, like a snake's."

Seven "greens" descended from the mountains, believing the "amnesty". Captured to be shot.

“The Inquisition, after all, judged. And here, no one knows why.” In Yalta, an ancient old woman was killed for holding a portrait of her late husband-general on a table. Or: why did you come to the sea after October? did you think of running? Bullet.

"Only in the Crimea alone, in three months, eight thousand wagons were shot without trial of human meat."

After the execution, they share the officer's, breeches.

And they cut out the breasts, and planted stars on the shoulders, and crushed the backs of the heads from revolvers, and smeared the walls in the basements with brains.

And the difference between the Bolshevik waves. The first Bolsheviks, 1918: frenzied hordes of sailors who burst out to take power. They hit the Tatar villages with a cannon, conquered the submissive Crimea ... They roasted rams on fires, tearing out their guts with their hands. The district of lights danced with a boom, hung with machine-gun belts and grenades, slept with the girls in the bushes ... They smashed, killed under a frenzied hand, but were not able to strangle according to plan and indifferently. They would not have had enough "nervous strength" and "class morality" for this. “For this, nerves and principles of people of non-Vologda blood were needed.”

About the next wave of red aliens Kulesh: “you won’t understand what origin he is ... he doesn’t accept our order, he robs the church.”

Let's go look at the cows: "Cows are a national treasure!" "Glorious fishermen! You honorably maintained the discipline of the proletariat. Striking task! Help our heroes of Donbass!”

And also about the intelligentsia:

“The artists danced and sang for them. The women gave themselves up."

According to the agendas “The appearance is obligatory, under pain of being brought to trial by a revolutionary tribunal” - everyone appeared (at the meeting). “They didn’t appear when they were called to fight, but then they came carefully for a flogging. In the eyes, although there is anxious fornication, and, as it were, servility, but also a proud consciousness - service to free art. Comrade Deryabin in a beaver hat: “I demand!!! Open your brains and show the proletariat!” And - revolver. “I put it right in the coffin. Silence..."

Crimea. And in all this hopelessness, rhythmically invading, accurately and sharply conveyed the Crimean landscape, the more sunny Crimea is inscribed - in this horror of death and hunger, then the formidable winter Crimea. Who had such consistent pictures of the Crimea? First - in the shining summer:

- Special Crimean bitterness, infused in forest cracks;

- The Genoese tower with a black cannon stared askance at the sky;

- The bowl of the sea burned with blue fire.

And mountains:

- The little mountain Kostel, a fortress above the vineyards, guards its vineyards from the cold, warms the heat at night ... A thick belly [gorge], smelling of morocco and prunes - and the Crimean sun.

- I know that there will be no grapes under the Church: the earth is saturated with blood, and the wine will come out tart and will not give joyful oblivion.

- The fortress wall - a plumb line, naked Kush-Kaya, a mountain poster, pink in the morning, blue by night. It absorbs everything, sees everything, draws on it an unknown hand. The gray wall of Kush-Kai inscribed the terrible. The time will come - read.

- The sun is setting. Sudak chains are golden in the evening splash. Demerzhi has grown pink, slowed down, melts, goes out. And now it has started to turn blue. The sun is setting behind Babugan, the bristles of the pine forests are burning. Babugan, nocturnal, frowned and moved closer.

September is leaving. And everything is loud - dry-voiced. The wind-blown tumbleweed rattles loudly through the bushes. Day and night the cicadas itch... Strong fragrant bitterness sips from the mountains, autumn mountain wine - wormwood stone.

And the sea got darker. More often, dolphin splashes flash on it, geared black wheels toss and turn.

And here is the winter:

- Winter rains from the densely black Babugan.

“All night the devils rattled the roof, knocked on the walls, broke into my hut, whistled, howled. Chatyr-Dag struck!.. The last gilding flew off the mountains - they turned black with winter death.

- The third day is tearing with an icy wind from Chatyr-Dag, whistling furiously in cypresses. Anxiety in the wind, anxiety all around.

– There is snow on Kush-Kai and Babugan. Winter unrolls its canvases. And here, under the mountains, it is sunny, through gardens, through empty vineyards, brown-green over the hills. During the day, tits ring, the dreary birds of autumn.

- Snow falls and melts. Falls thicker - and melts, and winds, and beats ... Gray, smoky mountains have become, barely visible in the whitish sky. And in this sky there are black dots: eagles fly... Thousands of years ago - here was the same desert, and night, and snow, and the sea. And man lived in the desert, did not know fire. He strangled the animals with his hands, hid in the caves. There is no light anywhere - there was none then.

Primitive - repeated ...

And in comparison - the former ebullient multinational Crimean population: then - "cows trumpeted with fertile satiety."

And here is the new one:

- Yalta, which changed its amber, grape name to ... what! a mockery of a drunken executioner - "Krasnoarmeysk" from now on!

But “Tea of ​​the Resurrection of the Dead! Great Sunday, let it be!” - alas, it sounds too uncertain a spell.

From his words, expressions:

– studno (adverb);

This book is quite hard to read. It is almost impossible to retell it. Shmelev's book contains only depressive moods, emphasizes the hopelessness of what is happening.

The main idea of ​​the work is that the civil war is the most terrible and monstrous event. The author is not a fan of the ideas of the Bolsheviks. He describes with fullness and accuracy what was happening around, namely: despair, pain, tears, hunger, the whole process that turned people into animals, forced them to do unthinkable things. Shmelev does not forget to mention the fate of specific people who were drawn into the maelstrom of these events. For example, he talks about an old man who was shot for going out for a walk in an old overcoat. And his granddaughter was left alone in the country and cried, without waiting for her grandfather.

All participants in the work are obviously doomed to death. During the civil war, the people destroyed everything old, but could not build anything new. This idea can be traced throughout the work, thereby further emphasizing its tragedy.

The novel in all its glory conveys the death of people and animals, the complete destruction of all spiritual and material values. The work is saturated with incredible pain and bitterness about the fate of Russia. Shmelev managed to describe everything so accurately due to the fact that he was an unwitting eyewitness to these events. The civil war also affected his life. The author's own son was killed in this bloody madness. Despite all the horror of what was happening, the author managed not to get angry at the Russian people, but, at the same time, he categorically did not like the new life that now surrounded him.

The book is hard to read, but once you start reading it, you can't stop. It was in it that the author showed what is happening in Russia, the utter inhumanity that was inherent in the fighters of the Red Guard.

A picture or drawing of the Sun of the Dead

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