Essays. Time to collect stones

Someone Ivlev was driving one day at the beginning of June to the far end of his county. A tarantass with a crooked, dusty top was given to him by his brother-in-law, on whose estate he spent the summer. He hired a trio of horses, small but well-built, with thick, knocked-down manes, in the village, from a rich peasant. They were ruled by the son of this peasant, a young man of eighteen, stupid, economic. He kept thinking dissatisfied about something, seemed to be offended by something, did not understand jokes. And, making sure that you would not talk to him, Ivlev gave himself up to that calm and aimless observation that goes so well to the tune of hooves and the rumble of bells. At first it was pleasant to drive: a warm, dull day, a well-trodden road, a lot of flowers and larks in the fields; from the loaves, from the low gray rye, which stretched as far as the eye could see, a sweet breeze blew, carrying flower dust along their jambs, in places it smoked, and far from it it was even foggy. The fellow, in a new cap and clumsy luster jacket, sat straight up; the fact that the horses were completely entrusted to him and that he was dressed up made him especially serious. And the horses coughed and ran unhurriedly, the left tie-down at times scratched the wheel, at times tightened, and all the time a worn horseshoe flashed under it like white steel. - Shall we visit the Count? asked the fellow, without turning around, when a village appeared ahead, closing the horizon with its vines and garden. - What for? Ivlev said. The little one was silent for a while, and, knocking down a large gadfly stuck to the horse with a whip, answered gloomily:- Yes, drink tea ... - Don't have tea in your head, - said Ivlev, - You feel sorry for all the horses. “A horse is not afraid of riding, it is afraid of the stern,” the fellow answered instructively. Ivlev looked around: the weather had become dull, molting clouds were pulling in from all sides and it was already dripping - these modest days always end in regular rains ... An old man who plowed near the village said that there was only one young countess at home, but still stopped by. The little one pulled on a coat over his shoulders and, satisfied that the horses were resting, calmly soaked in the rain on the goats of the tarantass, which stopped in the middle of a dirty yard, near a stone trough, rooted into the ground, pierced by the hooves of cattle. He looked at his boots, straightened the harness on the root with a whip; and Ivlev sat in the drawing-room darkened by the rain, chatting with the countess and waiting for tea; there was already the smell of a burning torch, the green smoke of the samovar was thickly floating past the open windows, which the barefoot girl stuffed on the porch with bundles of chips of brightly blazing red-brown fire, dousing them with kerosene. The countess was in a wide pink bonnet, with an open powdered chest; she smoked, inhaling deeply, often straightening her hair, exposing her tight and round arms to her shoulders; inhaling and laughing, she kept talking about love and, among other things, talked about her close neighbor, the landowner Khvoshchinsky, who, as Ivlev knew from childhood, was obsessed with love for his maid Lushka, who died in early youth. “Ah, this legendary Lushka! Ivlev remarked jokingly, slightly embarrassed by his confession. “Because this eccentric idolized her, devoted his whole life to crazy dreams about her, I was almost in love with her in my youth, imagined, thinking about her, God knows what, although she, they say, was not at all good herself.” - "Yes? said the Countess, not listening. He died this winter. And Pisarev, the only one whom he sometimes allowed to see him out of old friendship, claims that in everything else he was not at all crazy, and I fully believe this - he was simply not the present couple ... ”Finally, the barefoot girl with unusual caution filed on an old silver tray a glass of strong blue tea from a pond and a basket of cookies infested with flies. When we went further, the rain broke up for real. I had to raise the top, cover myself with a red-hot, shriveled apron, and sit bent over. Horses rumbled like capercaillie, trickles ran down their dark and shiny haunches, grasses rustled under the wheels of some border among the bread, where the kid rode in the hope of shortening the path, a warm rye spirit gathered under the horseback, interfering with the smell of an old tarantass ... "So Is it true, Khvoshchinsky is dead, thought Ivlev. - We must definitely stop by, at least to look at this deserted sanctuary of the mysterious Lushka ... But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some kind of stunned, all focused soul? According to the stories of old landowners, Khvoshchinsky's peers, he was once known in the county as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then her unexpected death, and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and spent more than twenty years sitting on her bed - not only did not go anywhere. he went out, and even at his estate he didn’t show himself to anyone, he sat through the mattress on Lushka’s bed and attributed to Lushka’s influence literally everything that happened in the world: a thunderstorm sets - it’s Lushka that sends a thunderstorm, war is declared - that means Lushka decided so, crop failure happened - the men did not please Lushka ... - Are you going to Khvoshchinskoe, or something? shouted Ivlev, leaning out into the rain. "To Khvoshchinskoye," the fellow, with water flowing from his drooping cap, said indistinctly through the sound of the rain. - On Pisarev top ... Ivlev did not know such a path. Places became poorer and more deaf. The frontier was over, the horses walked at a pace and lowered the rickety tarantass with a blurred pothole down the hill; into some as yet unmowed meadows, the green slopes of which stood out sadly against the low clouds. Then the road, now disappearing, then resuming, began to move from one side to another along the bottoms of ravines, along gullies in alder bushes and willows ... There was someone's small apiary, several stocks standing on a slope in tall grass, reddening with strawberries. .. We drove around some old dam, drowned in nettles, and a long-dry pond - a deep yaruga, overgrown with weeds taller than human height ... A pair of black little sandpipers rushed out of them with a cry into the rainy sky ... and on the dam, among the nettles, small pale pink flowers bloomed a large old bush, that sweet tree, which is called "God's tree" - and suddenly Ivlev remembered the places, remembered that he had ridden here more than once in his youth ... “They say she drowned herself here,” the fellow said unexpectedly. Are you talking about Khvoshchinsky's mistress, or what? Ivlev asked. “That’s not true, she didn’t even think of drowning herself. “No, she drowned herself,” said the fellow. - Well, I just think that he most likely went crazy from poverty from his own, and not from her ... And, after a pause, he added rudely: “But we have to stop by again… to this, to Khvoshchino… Look how tired the horses are!” "Do me a favor," said Ivlev. On a hillock, where a road made of tin from rainwater led, in the place of a reduced forest, among wet, rotting wood chips and leaves, among stumps and young aspen shoots, smelling bitter and fresh, a hut stood alone. Not a soul was around, only buntings, sitting in the rain on tall flowers, rang to the whole rare forest that rose behind the hut, but when the troika, splashing through the mud, caught up with its threshold, a whole horde of huge dogs escaped from somewhere, black, chocolate, smoky, and boiled around the horses with a furious bark, soaring up to their very muzzles, turning over in flight and spinning even under the top of the tarantass. At the same time, and just as unexpectedly, the sky above the tarantass was split by a deafening clap of thunder, the fellow rushed furiously to beat the dogs with a whip, and the horses galloped among the aspen trunks that flashed before their eyes ... Khvoshchinskoye was already visible behind the forest. The dogs fell behind and immediately became silent, busily ran back, the forest parted, and the fields opened again in front. It was evening, and the clouds were either parting or now coming in from three sides: on the left - almost black, with blue gaps, on the right - gray-haired, rumbling with continuous thunder, and from the west, because of the Khvoshchinsky estate, because of the slopes above the river valley , — dull blue, in dusty stripes of rain, through which mountains of distant clouds rose pink. But over the tarantass the rain thinned, and, rising, Ivlev, all covered with mud, with pleasure heaped back the heavy top and breathed freely in the fragrant dampness of the field. He looked at the approaching estate, saw at last what he had heard so much about, but as before it seemed that Lushka lived and died not twenty years ago, but almost in time immemorial. Along the valley, the trace of a small river was lost in the kug, white fishing flew over it. Farther on, on a semimountain, lay rows of hay, darkened by the rain; among them, far apart, were scattered old silvery poplars. The house, quite large, was once whitewashed, with a shiny wet roof, stood on a completely bare spot. There was no garden around, no buildings, only two brick pillars in place of the gate and burdock along the ditches. When the horses forded the river and climbed the mountain, a woman in a man's summer coat, with drooping pockets, was driving turkeys over the mugs. The facade of the house was unusually dull: there were few windows in it, and all of them were small, sitting in thick walls. But the gloomy porches were huge. From one of them, a young man in a gray gymnasium blouse, belted with a wide belt, black, with beautiful eyes and very pretty, looked in surprise at the approaching, although his face was pale and mottled with freckles, like a bird's egg. I needed to explain my arrival somehow. Climbing up the porch and identifying himself, Ivlev said that he wanted to look and, perhaps, buy a library, which, as the countess said, was left over from the deceased, and the young man, blushing deeply, immediately led him into the house. “So this is the son of the famous Lushka!” Ivlev thought, looking around at everything that was on the way, and often looking around and saying whatever he could, just to look once more at the owner, who seemed too young for his age. He answered hastily, but in monosyllables, confused, apparently, both from shyness and from greed; that he was terribly delighted at the opportunity to sell the books and imagined that he would sell them dearly, was evident in his first words, in the awkward haste with which he declared that books like his could not be obtained for any money. Through a semi-dark passage, where straw red from dampness was laid, he led Ivlev into a large hall. Is this where your father lived? asked Ivlev, entering and taking off his hat. “Yes, yes, here,” the young man hastened to answer. - That is, of course, not here ... after all, they mostly sat in the bedroom ... but, of course, they were here too ... “Yes, I know, he was ill,” said Ivlev. The young man flushed. - That is, what is sick? he said, and there was a more masculine note in his voice. “It’s all gossip, they weren’t mentally ill at all ... They just read everything and didn’t go out anywhere, that’s all ... No, please don’t take off your cap, it’s cold here, we don’t live in this half ... True, it was much colder in the house than outside. In the inhospitable entrance hall, covered with newspapers, on the windowsill of the window, sad from the clouds, stood a bast quail cage. A gray bag jumped on the floor by itself. Bending down, the young man caught him and laid him on a bench, and Ivlev realized that a quail was sitting in the bag; then they entered the hall. This room, with windows to the west and north, occupied almost half of the entire house. Through one window, on the gold clearing behind the clouds of dawn, one could see a hundred-year-old, all black weeping birch. The front corner was entirely occupied by a goddess without glasses, lined and hung with images; among them stood out both in size and antiquity an image in a silver robe, and on it, turning yellow with wax, as if with a dead body, lay wedding candles in pale green bows. “Forgive me, please,” Ivlev began, overcoming shame, “is your father ... “No, it is,” muttered the young man, instantly understanding him. - They bought these candles after her death ... and they even always wore a wedding ring ... The furniture in the hall was clumsy. But in the piers there were beautiful slides full of tea utensils and narrow, tall glasses in gold rims. And the floor was all covered with dry bees that clicked underfoot. The living room was also strewn with bees, completely empty. Passing through it and another gloomy room with a couch, the young man stopped near a low door and took a large key from his trousers pocket. Turning it with difficulty in the rusty keyhole, he opened the door, muttered something, and Ivlev saw a closet with two windows; against one wall of it stood a bare iron bunk, against the other two bookcases made of Karelian birch. - Is this the library? Ivlev asked, approaching one of them. And the young man, hastening to answer in the affirmative, helped him open the cupboard, and greedily began to follow his hands. Strange books made up this library! Ivlev opened the thick bindings, turned away the rough gray page and read: "The accursed tract" ... "The morning star and the night demons" ... "Reflections on the mysteries of the universe" ... "A wonderful journey to a magical land" ... "The newest dream book "... But the hands still trembled slightly. So this is what that lonely soul fed on, that forever closed itself from the world in this closet and left it so recently ... But, perhaps, this soul was really not completely insane? “There is being,” Ivlev recalled Baratynsky’s poems, “there is being, but what name should we call it? It is neither a dream nor a vigil, it is between them, and in a person it borders on madness with understanding ... ”It cleared in the west, gold looked from there from behind beautiful purple clouds and strangely lit up this poor shelter of love, love incomprehensible into what -some kind of ecstatic life that turned a whole human life, which, perhaps, should have been the most ordinary life, had it not been for some mysterious Lushka in her charm ... Taking a bench from under the bed, Ivlev sat down in front of the closet and took out cigarettes, imperceptibly looking around and memorizing the room. - Do you smoke? - he asked young man standing over him. He blushed again. “I smoke,” he muttered, and tried to smile. - That is, not that I smoke, rather I indulge ... But, by the way, allow me, I am very grateful to you ... And, awkwardly taking a cigarette, he lit a cigarette with trembling hands, went to the windowsill and sat down on it, blocking out the yellow light of dawn. - And what's that? Ivlev asked, leaning towards the middle shelf, on which lay only one very small book, resembling a prayer book, and there was a casket, the corners of which were trimmed in silver, darkened with time. “That's right... In this box is the necklace of the deceased mother,” the young man stammered, but trying to speak casually. - Can I have a look? “Please… although it’s very simple… you can’t be interested…” And, opening the casket, Ivlev saw a frayed lace, a bunch of cheap blue balls that looked like stone ones. And such excitement seized him at the sight of these balls, which once lay on the neck of the one who was destined to be so loved and whose vague image could no longer but be beautiful, which sparkled in the eyes from the heartbeat. Having seen enough, Ivlev carefully put the box back in its place; then took up the book. It was a tiny, charmingly published almost a hundred years ago, "The Grammar of Love, or the Art of Loving and Being Mutually Loved." “Unfortunately, I cannot sell this book,” the young man said with difficulty. - She is very expensive ... they even put her under their pillow ... "But maybe you'll let me see it at least?" Ivlev said. “Please,” the young man whispered. And, overcoming awkwardness, vaguely languishing with his gaze, Ivlev began to slowly leaf through the Grammar of Love. It was all divided into small chapters: “On beauty, on the heart, on the mind, on signs of love, on attack and defense, on disagreement and reconciliation, on Platonic love” ... Each chapter consisted of short, elegant, sometimes very subtle maxims , and some of them were delicately marked with pen, red ink. “Love is not a simple episode in our life,” Ivlev read. Our reason contradicts the heart and does not convince it. “Women are never as strong as when they arm themselves with weakness. We adore a woman because she rules over our ideal dream. Vanity chooses, true love does not choose. - A beautiful woman should occupy the second step; the first belongs to a lovely woman. This becomes the mistress of our heart: before we give an account of it to ourselves, our heart becomes a slave of love forever ... "Then there was an" explanation of the language of flowers ", and again something was noted:" Wild poppy - sadness. Heather-ice - your charm is imprinted in my heart. Graveyard - sweet memories. Sad geranium - melancholy. Wormwood is an eternal sorrow... And on a clean page at the very end was a quatrain written in the same red ink in small, beaded form. The young man craned his neck, looking into the Grammar of Love, and said with a mock grin: They made it up themselves... Half an hour later, Ivlev said goodbye to him with relief. Of all the books, he bought only this little book for a high price. The cloudy golden dawn faded in the clouds beyond the fields, shone in the puddles, it was wet and green in the fields. The fellow was in no hurry, but Ivlev did not urge him. Maly told me that the woman who had been chasing turkeys through the burdocks the other day was the deacon's wife, and that young Khvoshchinsky lived with her. Ivlev did not listen. He kept thinking about Lushka, about her necklace, which left him with a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of a saint. “She entered my life forever!” he thought. And, taking the Grammar of Love out of his pocket, he slowly reread in the light of dawn the verses written on its last page.

The answers to tasks 1–24 are a word, a phrase, a number or a sequence of words, numbers. Write your answer to the right of the task number without spaces, commas or other additional characters.

Read the text and do tasks 1-3.

(1) When we are sad, the lacrimal glands above the eyeball produce a salty fluid, and tears flow from our eyes. (2) (...) tears do not only come when we are sad. (H) While we are awake, tears are produced continuously: they perform a very important function - they make sure that the sensitive cornea on the surface of the eyeball is constantly moistened and never dries out.

Which of the following sentences correctly conveys the MAIN information contained in the text?

1. When we are sad and sad, tears flow from our eyes, this is necessary so that the cornea of the eyeball is moistened and never dries out.

2. Tears appear not when we are sad, but when the cornea of the eyeball dries up, which must be constantly moistened.

3. The lacrimal glands above the eyeball produce a brackish fluid during the entire time a person is sad.

4. To moisten the cornea of the eyeball so that it does not dry out, the human lacrimal glands continuously produce a brackish fluid.

5. Tears arise not only when we are sad, but also when we are not sad, as they are needed so that the cornea of the eyeball is constantly moistened and does not dry out.

Which of the following words (combinations of words) should be in place of the gap in the second (2) sentence of the text? Write down this word (combination of words).

1. Therefore

2. In other words,

5. That's why

Read the fragment of the dictionary entry, which gives the meaning of the word FOLLOW. Determine the meaning in which this word is used in the third (3) sentence of the text. Write down the number corresponding to this value in the given fragment of the dictionary entry.

FOLLOW, follow, follow; imperfect view, behind someone.

1. Watch while watching. Follow the flight of birds.

2. Observe, delving into the development of something, the course of something. Follow the progress of science. Follow someone's thought. Follow literature.

3. Watching, taking care. Follow the kids. Take care of yourself (take care of your appearance and health).

4. Observe someone's actions in order to collect some information, expose, catch. Watch out for border trespassers.

5. Protect, protect. Follow the herd.

In one of the words below, a mistake was made in setting the stress: the letter denoting the stressed vowel is highlighted INCORRECTLY. Write out this word.

dispensary

more beautiful

exhaust

deepen

In one of the sentences below, the underlined word is WRONGLY used. Correct the mistake and write the word correctly.

1. A modern SOUND film cannot replace all the charm of the old silent cinema for us.

2. When applying for a job, carefully FILL in the application form.

3. A MANUFACTURING defect is a product that contains defects.

4. Lightning is a CENTURY source of recharging the Earth's electric field.

5. Pastukhov was MEMORY for intelligible tunes and from the first bars of the song recognized it as new, never heard.

In one of the words highlighted below, a mistake was made in the formation of the word form. Correct the mistake and write the word correctly.

about three kilos

EIGHTY PERCENTAGE

all plant directors

THE HARDEST CHALLENGE

AT THE END OF THE PERFORMANCE

Establish a correspondence between the sentences and the grammatical errors made in them: for each position of the first column, select the corresponding position from the second column.

GRAMMATICAL ERRORS	OFFERS
A) violation of the construction of a sentence with participial turnover	1) A woman walking with a dog stopped at a shop window.
B) violation of the construction of a sentence with a participial turnover	2) Psychologists believe that the speaker should not appear before the public before the start of his speech.
B) loss of control	3) Bad weather hinders or delays harvesting.
D) violation in the construction of a sentence with an inconsistent application	4) The author contrasts true friendship with betrayal.
E) violation of the species-temporal correlation of verb forms	5) Mitrofanushka was brought up by his parents in love, and later he becomes an egoist.
	6) Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, we went to Palace Square.
	7) Climbing the stairs, the old man had to stop to rest.
	8) Turgenev was a writer, unusually sensitive to the beauty of the word.
	9) Grandmother did not miss a single heading "Cooking Together" in the magazine "Telenedele".

Write your answer in numbers without spaces or other characters.

Determine the word in which the unstressed alternating vowel of the root is missing. Write out this word by inserting the missing letter.

dial...

d...documentary

happy...stealthy

b...blue

Determine the row in which the same letter is missing in both words in the prefix. Write these words out with the missing letter.

to...falter, not...talkative

pr... old, pr... swear

pr...follow, pr...quirky

not ... bright, s ... rooted

oh...to cut, to...piss

Write down the word in which the letter E is written in place of the gap.

endure

entered..out

weighty..shy

fastidious..out

calm down..l

Write down the word in which the letter Yu is written at the place of the gap.

spending...

remembering

creeping

Identify the sentence in which NOT with the word is spelled CONTINUOUSLY. Open the brackets and write out this word.

1. Toys (NOT) SOLD OUT during the month were discounted.

2. This talented artist (NOT) IMMEDIATELY managed to achieve public recognition.

3. While the sun (NOT) HIDDEN by clouds illuminates the city with amazingly bright light.

4. Past Pelageya (NOT) HURRY passed the master of the carpentry shop.

5. (NOT) DESPITE the colossal workload, he still found time to meet us in a cafe.

Determine the sentence in which both underlined words are written APART. Open the brackets and write out these two words.

1. BECAUSE, as the coast curved, Nastya realized that the high wooded cape remained (C) LEV.

2. When we walked around the palace, I kept thinking, WHAT (WOULD) take this and take it away from here (FOR) MEMORY.

3. WHERE (THAT) smoke was drawn, and Peter, who had just arrived (FROM) THERE, where the smoke had not left the earth for more than a month, involuntarily stopped.

4. You are going WHERE (ANYWHERE), (IN) THE ROAD would be all right, and suddenly - an unplanned stop.

5. How (IN)COUNTS TO (WOULD) become a great football player?

Indicate all the numbers in the place of which HN is written.

When he showed up in the dining room, furnished (1) expensively and wonderfully: paintings in heavy gilded (2) frames, some tables in the corners, silver (3) candelabra on them, an antique clock with rearing (4) horses and many small random gizmos - everyone has already gathered.

Set up punctuation marks. Indicate the numbers of sentences in which you need to put ONE comma.

1. You can’t hear knocking and screaming and bells.

2. He went to bed and forgot himself in a leaden and bleak sleep.

3. This business has its advantages and disadvantages.

4. You will also meet blooming chamomile on forest edges and in the fields and along the roads and along the banks of the rivers.

5. With the first frost, bushes and trees, even reeds and tall grasses, were covered with shiny hoarfrost.

In a wide pink dress (1) especially suited to her (2) with hair (3) shimmering in gold (4) and with a hand (5) raised to her eyes (6) Anna reminded me of Flora.

Place punctuation marks: indicate all the numbers in the place of which commas should be in the sentences.

To us (1) however (2) already (3) it seemed (4) that the forest would stretch indefinitely.

Place punctuation marks: indicate all the numbers in the place of which commas should be in the sentence.

The book by the French artist Jean Effel "The Creation of the World" (1) funny drawings (2) in which (3) I loved to look at it as a child (4) is still on the shelf in my father's room.

Place punctuation marks: indicate all the numbers in the place of which commas should be in the sentence.

When we don’t like a person (1) we will find any reason to refuse to help him (2) and (3) if we like him (4) then we will always convince ourselves (5) that he needs help.

Edit the sentence: correct the lexical error by replacing the incorrectly used word. Write down the chosen word, observing the norms of the modern Russian literary language.

Good students always do their homework.

Read the text and complete tasks 21-26.

(1) Darkness and silence reigned inside the palace. (2) And inside the procurator, as he told Aphranius, did not want to leave. (3) He ordered the bed to be prepared on the balcony, in the same place where he dined, and in the morning he conducted an interrogation. (4) The procurator lay down on the prepared bed, but sleep did not want to come to him. (5) The bare moon hung high in the clear sky, and the procurator did not take his eyes off her for several hours.

(6) At about midnight, the dream finally took pity on the hegemon. (7) Yawning convulsively, the procurator unbuttoned and threw off his cloak, took off the belt around his shirt with a wide steel knife in the sheath, put it in an armchair by the bed, took off his sandals and stretched out. (8) Banga climbed onto his bed and lay down beside him, head to head, and the procurator, putting his hand on the dog's neck, closed his eyes at last. (9) Only then did the dog fall asleep.

(10) The bed was in semi-darkness, closed from the moon by a column, but a moon ribbon stretched from the steps of the porch to the bed. (11) And as soon as the procurator lost touch with what was around him in reality, he immediately set off along the luminous road and went up it straight to the moon. (12) He even laughed in a dream with happiness, before that everything turned out perfectly and uniquely on a transparent blue road. (13) He walked accompanied by Bunga, and next to him was a wandering philosopher. (14) They argued about something very difficult and important, and neither of them could defeat the other. (15) They did not agree with each other in anything, and from this their dispute was especially interesting and endless. (16) It goes without saying that today's execution turned out to be a pure misunderstanding - after all, the philosopher who invented such an incredibly ridiculous thing like the fact that all people are kind walked nearby, therefore, he was alive. (17) And, of course, it would be absolutely terrible even to think that such a person could be executed. (18) There was no execution! (19) It wasn't! (20) That's the beauty of this journey up the stairs of the moon. (21) There was as much free time as needed, and the thunderstorm would only come in the evening, and cowardice is undoubtedly one of the worst vices. (22) So said Yeshua Ha-Nozri. (23) No, philosopher, I object to you: this is the most terrible vice.

(24) For example, the current procurator of Judea did not chicken out, but the former tribune in the legion, then, in the valley of virgins, when the furious Germans almost killed the giant Ratslayer. (25) But, have mercy on me, philosopher! (26) Do you, with your mind, admit the idea that because of a person who committed a crime against Caesar, the procurator of Judea will ruin his career?

(27) - Yes, yes, - Pilate groaned and sobbed in his sleep.

(28) Of course, it will destroy. (29) In the morning I would not have destroyed, but now, at night, having weighed everything, I agree to destroy. (Z0) He will do anything to save a decidedly innocent crazy dreamer and doctor from execution!

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Further, Maria Andreevna has the phrase: “All this, alas, perished along with everything that was in the Chess House.” But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. I think if in the years when the Family Chronicle was being written, Shakhmatovo had been intact, Maria Andreevna would not have described it in such detail. The lost is remembered especially vividly and painfully.

“Sister Katya always cleaned her dressing table under a mirror with white muslin with two frills along the upper and lower edges, beautifully arranged various little things like perfumes, powder boxes, vases, etc.

... (Storage room) did not take up much space, approximately 3 square meters. arshin. There were shelves along the walls, on which boxes of provisions were placed: with various heaps, spices ... all had inscriptions. In the spring they were dried in the sun, placed on the balcony. Special boxes were ordered for white flour and granulated sugar. Coarse flour was bought in whole bags of 5 poods, granulated sugar in poods, since in addition to sweet dishes it was also needed for jam. Sugar for tea and coffee was bought in whole heads, and the mother mostly chopped it with her own hands using a special device with a heavy knife that went on a hinge and attached to a low box. Tea and coffee were always brought from St. Petersburg, the rest of the provisions were taken at the station ... The best Provencal oil for salad was also brought from St. Petersburg ... Steelyards hung on nails ... the pantry was locked with a padlock ... During meals, the conversation was general and very lively. We talked about different things, about household chores, about politics, about literature... The chess day was distributed in the same way as in the city: morning tea, breakfast at one in the afternoon, lunch at 6 and evening tea around 10, there was no dinner... At the tea table covered with white tablecloth, sat ... mother, dressed in a wide hood of light cotton, with a black lace headdress, and poured tea from a large yellow copper samovar ... On the table were homemade rolls, fresh butter and cream ... Father drank tea from a special cup, very strong and sweet with a spoonful of homemade blackcurrant jam, which was served in a small painted bowl brought from the Trinity Sergius Lavra… Great importance was attached to gravy, especially sauces. Boiled chicken with rice, cooked from the best variety to the pulp, but certainly crumbly, and not lumpy, was served with white butter sauce (no other way it was written in the twenties! - V.S.), with lemon, lightly toasted flour; fried meat was often served with a sauce with pickled mushrooms (probably even in the early twenties! - V.S.) ... such dishes were in use, such as soufflé from fish, game, always with special sauces ... the bird was cut into long thin slices (not was it all written in the nineteenth year? - V. S.), and not chopped across the bones ... The meat was cut thinly, certainly across the fibers ... Cooks were always taken good and with great discrimination, but it is characteristic that despite the great humanity and even kindness of the owners , it never occurred to anyone that a late dinner in the summer time makes the cook on hot days spend the whole day steaming in the kitchen, and generally having little free time. True, she always had a dishwasher with her, so she was spared from washing a whole pile of dishes, but no one thought to save the dishwasher either. The servants were well fed and treated very well, but the cook was swamped with work. Sometimes there were three pastry meals a day, such as dumplings for breakfast, pies for dinner, and muffins for evening tea. It was much easier for the maid, especially since a separate laundress was hired. And yet it must be said that on chess bread and country air the servants always got better and were usually cheerful. The cook in our family was considered a very important person, as good food was given great importance ...

...Let's turn to the house. It was one-story, with a mezzanine - in the style of middle landowner estates of the 20s or 30s of the nineteenth century. Cozy and well located, it was built on a brick foundation of magnificent pine wood, with plank sheathing. gray color and iron green roof. A kitchen was attached to the house, connected to it by a covered vestibule ... The house consisted of seven living rooms - five below, and two on the mezzanine ... "

Should detailed description rooms, their sizes, stairs, platforms, stoves, walkways, hangers, windows, as well as the views that opened from them, the color of the wallpaper in different rooms, furniture and its location, up to chairs, the purpose of the rooms and their names. Coal, Blue, Red, White hall, Doorway…

“In the dining room, the mother placed in the eastern corner a large ancient image of the Mother of God in a gilded frame, in other rooms small icons or crosses were hung. Mother took to her taste the most shady room, which was shaded by two large silvery poplars standing by the fence, now behind the gate that went from the yard to the garden. Everyone who walked from there passed under mother’s window ... Mother had a simple rustic wash table covered with oilcloth, opposite the bed stood a mirror in a mahogany frame with a mirror holder ... A beautiful walnut table of polished wood with a drawer and a figured footstool served as a writing desk and stood sideways to the window, on which hung an old cotton curtain with bouquets of white flowers scattered over a light gray background. In the corner on a square of mahogany stood the image of the Kaluga Mother of God, in front of which a green lamp burned all night ... "

Of course, all those ash cabinets, chintz sofas, sideboards, pianos, beds, curtains, lamps, chairs, divans, dressing tables, ottomans, wash-jugs, chests of drawers, mirrors, round tables, colored glass, wallpaper—all these details of the chess everyday life would be unnecessary and even superfluous if Maria Andreevna wrote simply a biography of her nephew (they are not in the “Biography of Blok” written by her), but Maria Andreevna, apparently, understood that Shakhmatovo remained and exists only in her memory, but nowhere else. The realization of this sharpened her memory to the point of painfulness. In addition, she understood, perhaps, that she was writing not an entertaining fiction, but a document. And it's good that this document now exists! It is one thing that we get a complete picture of the chess house from him, another thing is that he will be invaluable if it comes to the restoration of Shakhmatov.

And only if the house! The whole estate, fences, gates, services, outskirts, flower beds, garden plants, a barnyard, a glacier, a carriage house ... And how everything is arranged, located, and what it looks like - everything, everything was described by Maria Andreevna in her chronicle. For example: “I will begin the description of outbuildings with a barn. It was a very regular symmetrical shape with a steep red plank roof and a semicircular arch above the front door. On both sides of the barn there were exactly the same low sheds with sloping roofs that merged with the roof of the barn: various tools and boards were stored in one of them, firewood was stacked in the other and a chain dog lived. Inside the barn there were strong oak bins ... "

When you read the chess chronicle of M.A. Beketova, which is kept in the museum fund in the form of a manuscript, and you realize that few people can read it yet, the temptation is born to write out as much as possible from it. But a sense of proportion has been brought up in you for decades, and it dictates its own laws. Let's confine ourselves to a few more strokes, which no longer concern wallpaper and dinner dishes, not cupboards and barns, but the green decoration of the estate, its earthly beauty.

“The entire space of the courtyard, not occupied by buildings and flower beds, was covered with grass ... two young silvery poplars grew, and under them there were two long benches on which we sat waiting for guests, since the sunflower road was visible from there and bells were still heard from afar troikas approaching ... Shakhmatovo was generally distinguished by a cheerful and cozy character, which is explained by the fact that it is located on a hill, and the garden is facing southeast ... Two huge jasmine bushes grew on both sides of the balcony under the windows, they stood out beautifully with dark green against the gray color of the house, and at the time of flowering, they shone white and fragrant under the buzz of fluffy bumblebees ... A whole thicket of pink rose hips approached the left edge of the site ... a wall of acacias rose ... Father planted beautiful irises, white daffodils and curtains of Provence roses in the garden ... At the crossroads of paths, and sometimes in the middle of the lawns came across flowerbeds of white and pink meadowsweet ... Berry bushes, cherry bushes and apple trees were scattered here and there on the lawns, indescribably decorating our garden during flowering ... One of the main decorations of the garden was three varieties of lilac ... On the lawn was the best weeping birch in the whole garden ... The mountain ash grew alone and therefore spread its branches especially wide, which began so low; that it was comfortable to sit on them ... We loved our garden very much and found a thousand joys in it. It was good just to walk in the garden, it was fun to pick flowers, making countless bouquets of garden and wild flowers. With passion we hunted for porcini mushrooms, which were especially numerous under the trees ... There were many songbirds in the garden. The nightingales were flooding near the house in the bushes of rose hips and lilacs, and whole choirs of them rang out from beyond the pond. Orioles liked to fly to lindens on sunny summer days. They filled the garden with their sonorous whistle and flashed bright yellow, flying from one tree to another. Thrushes of all varieties were found in abundance ... Squirrels were found in the garden itself and came to visit us from the surrounding forests, attracted by fir cones and nuts ... Owls flew in at dusk and at night ... you could see them only in flight or sitting motionless on the roof of some buildings ... And what views opened from the windows and from different parts of the garden ... It was not for nothing that Blok called our estate "a fragrant wilderness." We lived very secluded. Even the nearest village turned out to be far beyond usual, more than a verst away, and those who approached from different parties the forests further strengthened the impression of the wilderness and isolation of our summer shelter.

Blok found himself in such a paradise as soon as he was born. Starting at the age of six months, every year for thirty-five years, excluding only the last five years of his life (from 1916 to 1921), Blok came to Shakhmatovo for the summer months.

Many consider Blok a purely Petersburg poet, or a Petersburg poet in the first place. In fact, the motives of the city are the first to catch the eye when reading this poet. Starting with the famous (and I would even say - the notorious) "Night, street, lamp, pharmacy ...", from "The Stranger", "One hope remained for me, to look into the well of the yard ...", "I am nailed to the tavern counter ...", “Eternity threw a tin sunset into the city ...”, “In taverns, in lanes, in windings, in an electric dream, in reality ...”, “Newly snow-covered columns, Elagin bridge and two fires ...”, “I sent you a black rose in a glass, as golden as the sky ai…”, starting with all these urban Petersburg motifs (and you don’t even have to look for them in Blok’s books, you just need to open them) and ending with the Petersburg poem “The Twelve” itself, everywhere, the city, the image of the city, in something beautiful, fascinating, in something hostile to man, always disturbing, concealing in itself, if not death, then the corruption of the human soul, but also the sweetness of this death.

However, with the same ease, I undertake to write out for you the same variety and the same brightness of the motives of the earth, forest, water, flowers, grass, cliffs, hills, bumblebees, sunsets (not urban), horizons and free wind, clouds and foggy distances, clayey slopes and deaf roads, dewy between and sad haystacks.

It is believed that if the city is in Blok's verses, then it is definitely Petersburg, and if it is nature, then certainly Shakhmatovo. With all the fairness of this view, there is a noticeable stretch. Block himself said:

We remember everything - Parisian streets hell
And the Venetian coolness,
Lemon groves distant aroma,
And the smoky masses of Cologne...

Of course, Petersburg and Shakhmatovo are the two wings of Blok's poetry, but he soared on them easily, widely, at such heights that he could see beyond two purely geographical points, to which we sometimes want to limit him. There is an attempt even to close the poem "On the Kulikovo Field" to the chess landscape.

The river spread out. Flowing, sad lazily
And washes the shore.

Over the meager clay of the yellow cliff
Haystacks are sad in the steppe.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams
Through blood and dust...
Flying, flying steppe mare
And crushes the feather grass ...

It is true that in Shakhmatovo there is a river (Lutosnya), meadows are possible on the banks of this river and haystacks in these meadows, and it’s not the point that you can’t find feather grass in the Klin district and you can’t call a horse near Moscow a steppe mare. The fact is that the landscape in the poem, the very image of Rus' is so far from the chess lilies of the valley, not only in appearance, but also in spirit, that it would be just a stretch to say that the forest shaded, blackish Lutosnya served as a prototype of Nepryadva, even though the poem was actually written in Chess. It is as if one cannot live among the wooded hills, but keep a generalized image of the Russian land in front of one's mind's eye.

In the same way, it seems untenable to me to try (and this happens sometimes) to identify the chess garden (in which there were definitely many nightingales) with the nightingale garden from Blok's poem of the same name.

The harsh South French sun, white-hot stones, layered rocks, and as a contrast to this - the blue dusk of a shady garden behind a stone fence, in which, if not mentioned, then murmuring fountains are conjectured, imagined, and streams along the paths are even mentioned - all this even when The obvious symbolism of the poem is images and symbols from a different series, from a different world than the real Blok garden, which from its lindens and poplars imperceptibly passes into a dark spruce forest and is fenced off from the rest of the clover, meadow, soft-cool world with almost a spinner of two poles and in which every sound from Osinok and Gudin is heard in the quiet evening dew, and these sounds are the beating of a scythe, the clinking of a well chain and even the coughing of an old woman, as mentioned in the poem "Autumn Day":

We go through the stubble, slowly,
With you, my humble friend,
And the soul pours out
Like in a dark rural church.

This is definitely Shakhmatovo, and the church is undoubtedly the Tarakanovskaya Church, a photograph of which was recently sent to me.

St. Petersburg (now Leningrad, of course) block experts seem to oppose the Moscow, if I may say so, school, headed by the meticulous, subtle and indefatigable researcher of the Block Stanislav Lesnevsky. His two-volume study "Moscow Land in the Life of Alexander Blok" will undoubtedly be of great interest, and we are looking forward to its publication.

However, we ourselves do not divide Blok into its component parts, although we are aware that Shakhmatovo was the Russian earthly font of the poet, so perhaps here, under the influence of beautiful nature, that shift took place in his soul, as a result of which (from under the shifted layer) and scored the purest and most abundant spring of poetry.

But calm down, it was not at all the Shakhmatovo, as it appears before us in the description of the most conscientious Maria Andreevna Beketova. Although she has a chapter in the Family Chronicle called “Chess Walks,” it still turns out to be a small closed world: a manor, a house and a garden, services, and the Sunflower Road as a necessity, and the surrounding villages as a given in a fortunate remoteness from the estate.

Least of all for Blok Shakhmatovo is limited to the estate. In the house he lived in the narrow sense of the word: he ate, slept, wrote poems, letters, planted trees, roses, mowed, knocked with a hammer, sawed, cut down trees. The abode of his soul was - let's call it that - Bolshoye Shakhmatovo, that is, Shakhmatovo with all its surrounding landscape from the village of Podsolnechny to Rogachev, from Boblov to Tarakanov, from the Runovka stone to the Aladin height, from horizon to horizon.

Maria Andreevna could live in a world of one weeping birch and spreading mountain ash, old lindens and wild rose curtains; Blok lived in the world of Lutosnya, forest swamps, roads and paths, slopes and steeps, weeds, thickets of willow tea, distant night lights on a riding path, the bright gaze of a peasant woman from under a patterned scarf on a day road.

After all, when white plentiful fogs rose from Lutosnya in the evening, they spread, filling with themselves, like a lake, all the lowlands between the wooded hills, and the reddish moon floated above these fogs, when it would be strange for Blok’s aunts to be outside the cozy house, and even more so the estate, namely then the young, strong, handsome Blok, returning simply from a walk, and later from Boblov, could find himself alone in the misty forest jungle.

In the damp night fog
All forest, yes forest, yes forest ...
In the dull damp weeds
The fire flashed - disappeared ...
Glittered again in the mist
And it seemed to me:
Hut, window, geraniums
Aley on the window ...
In the damp night fog
At the red glow of fire,
On scarlet geraniums
I sent the horse...

Maria Andreevna would never dream of such a thing. Walking to the Praslov forest between the oat fields in a summer wide dress under a bright umbrella, slowly picking a bouquet of wild flowers - this is part of the aunts. But so that in the night fog and weeds, in a damp forest, trusting only the instinct of a horse among swampy places ...

For the first time, the boundaries of the estate were moved apart for Blok with the help of his grandfather, Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov. An excellent botanist, he dragged the boy through forests and swamps, over hills and streams. They collected flowers, plants, but not for a bouquet, but for the knowledge of the world. The Russian and Latin names of the plant immediately followed, its belonging to a species, family, class. The element of the game was to find a plant that has not yet been found in these places near Moscow. Whether succumbing to the rules of the game, or actually discovering rare species, Blok himself testifies:

“We spent hours wandering with him through meadows, swamps and wilds; sometimes they traveled dozens of versts, getting lost in the forest; they dug up herbs and cereals with roots for the botanical collection, while he named the plants and, identifying them, taught me the rudiments of botany, so that I still remember many botanical names. I remember how we rejoiced when we found a special flower of an early pear, a species unknown to the Moscow flora, and the smallest undersized fern; I am still looking for this fern on that very mountain, but I never find it - obviously, it was sown by accident and then degenerated.

In a very short autobiography, to give so many words to these early trips with my grandfather is to attach great importance to them. It is known that an uninterested gaze glides through nature and its beauties superficially, as if not penetrating beyond a certain shell, deep into, inside. With a specific interest, albeit a trifle (collecting a herbarium, collecting butterflies, bird eggs, searching for medicinal herbs, fishing), the sliding glance becomes penetrating and a hitherto unknown world opens before the person. This can be compared with a simple admiration of the sea, when the swimmer's gaze glides over its surface, and with an amazing transformation of the sea, when at the same second the same swimmer through the glass of the mask looks into the abyss illuminated by the sun, shimmering blue, turning into the darkness of the depths, where every seaweed , each fish, each pebble at the bottom create together a fantastic and charming landscape.

In circles, more and more moving away from the house and garden, Blok mastered the surrounding fields and forests. Numerous hills made it possible to look at the earth from various multiple angles, so that more and more new views opened up before the admiring soul.

There was a certain point (on a mountain opposite the village of Novaya?), from which at the same time a person could see twenty white little churches and bell towers, placed in the dark greenery of hills and valleys. Can you imagine the late afternoon when they all called? Can you imagine them in the gold of autumn? In the early emerald green of spring?

The planes of the hills at different angles are substituted for the light. Some are brightly lit, others are semi-shaded, others are completely in the shade. All this complicates the landscape, makes it symphonically complex (with the participation of clouds, clouds, gaps in the sky, sword-shaped rays beating from these gaps, the wind ruffling the foliage), disturbing and powerful, almost like music. Or almost like Blok's poems.

I go out on the road, open to the eyes,
The wind bends the elastic bushes,
The broken stone lay down on the slopes,
Yellow clay meager layers.
Autumn roamed in the wet valleys,
The earth laid bare the cemeteries,
But thick mountain ash in passing villages
The red color will dawn from afar.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
There are many of us, free, young, stately -
Dies without love
Shelter you in the vast expanses!
How can I live and cry without you?
When the foliage is damp and rusty
A bunch of rowan will turn red, -
When the executioner has a bony hand
Drives the last nail into the palm, -
When over the ripples of lead rivers,
In the damp and gray height,
Before the face of the harsh homeland
I will swing on the cross...

* * *

Such is Chess of the poet Blok.

An interesting look at Shakhmatovo and at Blok in it is another Russian poet and friend of Blok - Andrei Bely. In the summer of 1904 he came to Shakhmatovo; it must be said, however, that he did not perceive this place originally, but under the undoubted influence of Blok's poems, he perceived it, I would not be afraid to say, - literary.

“The mystical mood of the surroundings of Shakhmatov is such that one feels here, as it were, a struggle, exclusivity, tension, one feels that different dawns loom here among the jagged peaks of forest mountains, one feels that the forests themselves, full of swamps and marsh windows, where you can fall and die forever , inhabited by all sorts of evil spirits (“marsh pops and imps”). In the evenings, the Invisible One “looms”, but the dawn shines, and it reflects the forest swamp duality with a beam of clear color. I am describing the style of the surroundings of Shakhmatov, because they are so clearly, clearly, realistically reflected by the work of A. A. The landscapes of most of his poems (“Poems about the Beautiful Lady” and “Unexpected Joy”) are chess-like…

... I only remember that, approaching Shakhmatov and noting the connection between the landscapes and the landscapes of A. A.'s poems, A. S. Petrovsky and I fell into a romantic mood ...

... In this mood, we came close to Shakhmatov, whose estate, buildings and services grow almost imperceptibly, as if from a forest, covered with trees ... The cart drove into the courtyard, and we found ourselves at the porch of a wooden, gray, one-story house with a mezzanine superstructure in the form two rooms on the second floor, in which A.A. and I lived later.

I remember that the impression from the rooms where we ended up was cozy and bright. The furnishings of the rooms were conducive to comfort; the atmosphere of the small houses so well known to me and so much loved by me, where everything exuded both the modesty of the old noble culture and life, and at the same time the imperishability: it was felt in everything that from these walls, quite "walls", i.e., the verges of class and temporal , there are also boundaries in the "golden impassability" of the new time - there was nothing specifically old, portraits of ancestors, furniture, etc., creating stuffiness and dullness of many landowners' estates, but there was nothing from the "raznochinets" - intellectuality in everything and brilliant clean...

... We went out onto the terrace to the garden, located on a mountain with covered paths, turning almost into forest paths (the forest surrounded the estate), walked through the garden and went out into the field, where from a distance we saw A. A. and L. D. returning from a walk I remember that their image was vividly imprinted on me: on a sunny day, among the flowers, L.D. gold, and with her hand raised to her eyes (obviously trying to see us), she reminded me of Flora, or the pink Atmosphere - there was something in her appearance from the lines of A. A. "Blossoming dream" and "Golden strands on the forehead" ... and from the poem "Evening dusk, believe me." A. A., walking next to her, tall, stately, broad-shouldered, tanned, it seems, without a hat, recovered in the village, in boots, in a well-tailored spacious Russian white shirt, embroidered by his mother’s hands (the pattern, it seems, is white swans on red border), reminiscent of that fabulous prince, about whom fairy tales were broadcast. "The Tsarevich with the Tsarevna" - that's what broke involuntarily from the soul. This sunny couple among the flowers of the field is so memorable to me.

... In A.A., here again (as I felt more than once under different circumstances) it was not romanticism, but a connection with the Earth, with the penates of these places. It was immediately clear that he grew up in this field, garden, forest and that the natural landscape was just an extension of his rooms, that the chess fields and sunsets were the real walls of his study, and the magnificent bushes of a bright crimson wild rose with a golden core that I had never seen before , against which this young and strong couple now loomed - this is the true stylistic frame of his fragrant lines - the spicy smells of chess flowers and the rays of the warm July sun now rushed into the rose-gold air of the spiritual atmosphere, which I overheard back in Moscow, - “singing, burning, she ascended the porch, ”this written by him here, it seemed to me, always rises here ...

... I looked out the window above the trees of the garden rolling down at an angle, at the horizon of already a gently blue sky with slightly golden ash clouds - lightning flashed there in the "Golden feathers of the clouds, the dance of gentle evenings." In a word, the first day of our stay in chess passed as if it were reading "Poems about the Beautiful Lady", and the whole string of days in Shakhmatov was a cycle of Blok's poems.

Yes, Andrey Bely's perception of Shakhmatov, judging by these memoirs, is literary, secondary through Blok's poetry. But Blok himself, that is, his poetry, of course, Andrei Bely perceived one-sidedly from his symbolic bell tower. Is it really the pathos of Blok's poetry in these "blooming dreams", "evening twilight", "golden strands on the forehead"? Bely Blok turns out to be a kind of singer of roses and dreams, of manor comfort, fragrant lines, rose-gold air of a spiritual atmosphere, into which the spicy smells of chess flowers seem to break in.

True, this is still 1904. “Autumn Will”, “Dead Old Age Wanders Around…”, “The Girl Sang in the Church Choir…”, “In the Paws of Shaggy and Terrible…” have not yet been written - all this will be written a year later, in the summer of 1905. Moreover, the entire cycle “Motherland” has not been written, “Kulikovo Field” with Nepryadva has not yet entered Blok’s poetry, therefore, perhaps Andrei Bely is not so wrong. Now we perceive Blok as a whole, as a phenomenon, with its height, with its "ceiling", as the aviators say, the whole breadth of his work, and then he was just beginning and did not even approximately say his main word.

But still it was possible even then, if not to see, then to feel that Blok was not at all a singer of rose-gold air, but that he, on the contrary, was a poet of incomfort, of the wind whistling in bare twigs, of heavy impending clouds, of autumn cemeteries, clay slopes, bloody sunsets, the alarming cry of swans - that he, in short, is a poet and a prophet of imminent death.

At the same time, he is also a poet of zest for life, but by no means according to A. Bely, but a zest for life bright, active, energetic, zest for life with an ax in his hand, with a scythe, on horseback, zest for life with a dazzling smile, with a face turned towards the wind. "I hear a bell. Spring in the field. You opened the cheerful windows…”, “I’ll get up in a foggy morning, The sun will hit my face, Are you, my beloved friend, Coming up to my porch? Open the heavy gates! The wind blew through the window! The songs are so funny They haven’t been heard for a long time! ”,“ Scattering across the sky, a fiery cloud is coming ...”, “He is brought - this iron rod - above our head. And we…”, “Jumped the wild steppe on a foamy horse”, “How long will you clang the chain? Come dance to me!”... Where, one wonders, is there a rose-gold atmosphere with spicy smells?

And what is Shakhmatovo as a cycle of poems by Alexander Blok? Chess, as we were taught at school, is nothing more than an objective reality. One will write such verses on the basis of this reality, and the other such. Moreover, we have an example for comparison - you can’t come up with it on purpose. Ekaterina Andreevna Beketova (Krasnova), as you know, wrote poetry and even published them in a collection, which was awarded the honorary prize of the Academy of Sciences. So, all the poems of Ekaterina Andreevna are inspired by Shakhmatov.

And what, in her poems, is the “mystical mood of the surroundings” felt? Do you feel “like a struggle, exclusivity, tension”? That “other dawns loom here among the jagged peaks of the forest mountains”, that “in the evenings the Invisible One “looms”, but the dawn shines ...” And so on?

Oh no! These are ordinary sweet poems of a cultured woman of the nineteenth century, an intellectual, a young lady, I would say, So, one of two things: either mystical moods existed in Blok’s soul and they then painted the landscapes in verses with special colors, illuminated with a special light, or these moods lived in Andrey Bely, who, under their influence, read Blok's poems in a special way, seeing there something that was not there.

It is worth looking at Ekaterina Andreevna’s poems again and then to see how the fingers of an amateur evoke simply sweet sounds from the same strings and how these same strings rumble and rattle under the mighty hand of an inspired and brilliant master.

The most famous poem by Ekaterina Andreevna is already known because Rachmaninoff wrote music for it and it now exists in the form of a romance called Lilac. This lilac, it turns out, is chess.

In the morning, at dawn,
On the dewy grass
I'll go fresh in the morning to breathe,
And in the fragrant shade
Where the lilac crowds
I'm going to look for my happiness...
There is only one happiness in life
I am destined to find
And that happiness lives in lilacs;
On green branches
On fragrant brushes
My poor happiness blooms.

Isn't it nice? There are poems about chess nightingales. We give an excerpt:

Evenings, flowery spring
The nightingale flies into our garden,
Where, merging with the coolness of the night,
From the lilac stands the aroma.
In the warm air, fragrant and clear,
Quietly open the window into the garden, -
You will hear how he, sweet-voiced,
Sing from dawn to dusk.
And you will see how in the clear sky
New month, shining, burning,
And like apple trees in a fragrant dress
Whitened with color stands ...

Poetry of quiet, secluded noble estates. “Open the gate slowly ...”, “The chrysanthemums in the garden have faded a long time ago ...”, “Autumn. Our entire poor garden is crumbling…”, “Looking at a ray of purple sunset…” All these are poems of the same order – a little better, a little worse than Ekaterina Andreevna Beketova’s.

Yesterday the forest was empty
Sadly said goodbye to me
Dropping your yellowed leaf
Until a joyful meeting with spring.
Leaves covered me all the way
Soundless golden rain
And quietly the trees whispered
For me to return to them.
It was so hard for us to part
Suddenly from the sky, from distant fields
So sonorous, so sad, so wonderful
The call of the cranes rang out...

I agree that the reader's attention is a little abused, but after all - Blok's own aunt! The same genetic code, through this stage, the relay-race light of poetic talent made its way from the darkness of previous generations, as a light makes its way along a Fickford cord, and ran and lit up with a dazzling explosion not only the chess neighborhood, but all domestic borders.

E. class and temporal boundaries, there are also boundaries in the “golden impassability” of the new time - there was nothing specifically old, portraits of ancestors, furniture, etc., creating stuffiness and dullness of many landowners’ estates, but there was nothing from the "- intellectuality in everything and brilliant purity ...

The most famous poem by Ekaterina Andreevna is already known because Rachmaninoff wrote music for it and it now exists in the form of a romance called Lilac. This lilac, it turns out, is chess.

In the morning, at dawn,

On the dewy grass

I'll go fresh in the morning to breathe,

And in the fragrant shade

Where the lilac crowds

I'm going to look for my happiness...

There is only one happiness in life

I am destined to find

And that happiness lives in lilacs;

On green branches

On fragrant brushes

My poor happiness blooms.

Isn't it nice? There are poems about chess nightingales. We give an excerpt:

Evenings, flowery spring

The nightingale flies into our garden,

Where, merging with the coolness of the night,

From the lilac stands the aroma.

In the warm air, fragrant and clear,

Quietly open the window into the garden, -

You will hear how he, sweet-voiced,

Sing from dawn to dusk.

And you will see how in the clear sky

New month, shining, burning,

And like apple trees in a fragrant dress

Whitened with color stands ...

Yesterday the forest was empty

Sadly said goodbye to me

Dropping your yellowed leaf

Until a joyful meeting with spring.

Leaves covered me all the way

Soundless golden rain

And quietly the trees whispered

For me to return to them.

It was so hard for us to part

Suddenly from the sky, from distant fields

So sonorous, so sad, so wonderful

The call of the cranes rang out...

However, in fairness, it must be said that one poem by Ekaterina Andreevna (I leafed through her entire collection, a bibliographic rarity that is not threatened with reprinting in the foreseeable future) is built on a genuine poetic thought, so that if one did not know in advance, it could pass for an unknown , a poem miraculously found in the archives by, say, Tyutchev. I think it would fit just fine.

On the pale gold of the sunset

A blackened jagged forest.

And, covered in blue haze,

Merging with the dome of heaven,

The sea flowed in all directions

already ripening fields,

And worried in the open

In the glow of fading rays.

The sunset went out ... But the light is imperishable

Already on the ground now shone

And, sealed in the margins,

The evening twilight lit up.

And from above the sky looked

Dressed in a mantle of the night,

Like waves of golden bread

They brought light into the darkness of the earth.

God knows that I wrote out this poem for the sake of justice and to the detriment of the presentation of the material. After all, for me now - the sharper the contrast between the poems of Ekaterina Andreevna and her nephew, the more profitable, because this part of the essay is built on the contrast. But let's hope that the reader has not yet forgotten either the nightingale of Ekaterina Andreevna, or her lilac, or the main tone and level of her poetry.

And now - the same source of inspiration, the same strings, the same clover even, but the sound is different:

I plunged into the sea of clover

Surrounded by fairy tales of bees,

But the wind that calls from the north

Found my baby heart...

The whole riddle of poetry consists in this (and its whole meaning, its meaning) that the same words and about the same thing are suddenly regrouped, rearranged in different rows and turn into a different quality. So identical bricks, being regrouped, instead of an idyllic house in greenery, turn into a gloomy tower on a rock or a chord of a Gothic cathedral.

Is in the melodies of your innermost

Fatal news of death.

There is a curse of sacred covenants,

There is a desecration of happiness.

And such an attractive force

What am I ready to repeat after rumor.

Like you brought down angels

Seductive with its beauty...

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I wanted us to be enemies

So why did you give me

Meadow with flowers and firmament with stars -

All the curse of your beauty?

OK. Let's say that a generalizing moment is too powerful here and the whole poem is written, in general, on an abstract topic, about the Muse. Let's take a specific chess poem and think about whether it is possible to measure the distance from it to ordinary landscape lines inhabited by carnations, strawberries and multi-colored lights.

Dead old age wanders around

The path drowned in greenery,

I saw at the top of the semicircle -

I'm sawing a dormer window.

I feel far - and drops of resin

Seep into the pine veins

The squeals of the saw break through,

And gold filings fly.

Here is the last whistling split -

And the plank flies into the unknown...

In the sharp smell of melting resins

The area opened up before me...

It was only through a misunderstanding that at first Blok was considered a symbolist poet, only the symbolists themselves, with their sluggish and, in general, - I'm not afraid to say - boring poetics, would like to consider him theirs. Blok was just a master, able to build words into melodious (as soon as Blok could sing them) lines, and these lines into melodious, but also into iron stanzas in their organization and purposefulness.

I don’t remember who, having been in Blok’s apartment, in his office, and expecting to see some kind of bohemian, symbolic chaos there, or at least disorder, was struck by the exemplary pedantry order both on the desktop and around it, scrupulous cleanliness and almost private ascetic rigor.

Blok was excellent at reciting poems, the first lines, which, by the way, was taken over from him by his first student Sergei Yesenin, whose connection with Blok's poetry has not been studied and is much deeper than a superficial glance might suggest. With the singing of this or that Blok's poem, you can walk all day - repeating, enjoying and rejoicing.

May is cruel with white nights!

Eternal knock on the gate: come out!

You moved away and I deserted

Stick to the hot sand.

Going from execution to execution

Wide streak of fire.

I am a trembling creature. Rays

Illuminated, stagnant dreams.

What are you looking down, in embarrassment,

Look at me like before

No one will say: I'm crazy

My bow is low, my face is strict.

I met the wrong one at the entrance:

Dropped a handkerchief - and one.

Everything that is momentary, everything that is perishable,

You buried for centuries.

Oh, spring without end and without edge -

Endless and endless dream!

We leave readers to look at Blok's poems from this point of view. Of course, after a cursory scrolling, not everyone, perhaps, will be at the mercy of music, not everyone will be picked up by a light wave, but even then, after a few days, suddenly and unexpectedly, as if for no reason, it will suddenly sound in the soul among the bustling daytime worries:

The sound is coming.

And, obedient to the aching sound,

The soul is young.

But we got carried away. It is not Blok's poetry, not his creative work that we now have on the subject, but first of all Shakhmatovo.

Blok wrote about three hundred poems in Shakhmatovo, not counting letters, diaries, notes in notebooks, and articles. But it was simplistic and somehow even unprofessional to divide the poet's poems into chess and non-chess in essence. Only very ignorant, very far from the literary craft (as it has become fashionable to say now among writers, but still - art, art!) People tend to think that if a writer came to Ryazan and settled there for the summer somewhere in the Ryazan village, which means that he will certainly begin to write about Ryazan now, while the writer, meanwhile, writes about last year's impressions from a trip to Siberia. Or even about the Cologne Cathedral. For example, Blok's poem "To the Muse", from which several stanzas were cited, is chess-like in spirit (a meadow with flowers), but is marked by the end of December 1912, when Blok could not have been in Shakhmatovo. It has already been said that the poem "On the Kulikovo Field", although written in Shakhmatov, is by no means inspired by the chess landscape. All of it is steppe, feather grass, wormwood, Slovoopolkuigorevsky. In the Tarakanovskaya church, “the girl sang in the church choir”? Marked August 1905. Most likely, in Tarakanovskaya. Stanislav Lesnevsky, in my presence, persistently asked local residents if there was a wooden sculptural angel, a cherub, above the iconostasis in the Tarakanovskaya church, referring to the last lines of the poem (“... and only high, at the royal gates, involved in secrets, - the child cried about that no one will come back”), but could it not be that this was written from the memory of an experienced experience? Or from the merging of two impressions: old and fresh? Of course, Blok is very often realistic in his poems, very often his poems are a poetic diary, continuous, detailed, sometimes two or three poems a day. But still, the poet fixed not so much an external event as the movement of the soul, albeit generated by an external event, and an external event cannot always be guessed and deciphered when reading a poem. They say that "The girl sang in the church choir ..." was written in those days when Blok experienced the sad news of the death of Russian sailors in the Tsushima Strait. What of that? The poem, with its breadth and depth, with its generalizing moment, goes far beyond the scope of a specific event, even if it is a great national tragedy.

On a stone near the village of Runova (there is no village now, but the stone remains, it lies on high place, it is far from it, and Blok liked to sit on it), the poem "Retribution" was begun. And when, in the introduction to the poem, Blok brings down his mighty iambs on us:

But the final judgment is not yours,

Don't you close my mouth!..

Let the dark church be empty

Let the shepherd sleep; me before noon

I will pass the dewy border,

I'll turn the rusty key in the gate

And in the scarlet porch until dawn

I will serve my dinner...

when we read this, we understand that more than once, apparently, Blok walked, walking in the morning, along the dewy boundary from Shakhmatov to Tarakanov, to the church, although he did not go into it, because how could he enter the locked church? And if they let him in, he would no longer be alone in it. But mentally he could enter it at any hour, in any case, in the poem "Retribution" he entered.

However, in “Confessions of a Gentile” Blok testifies: “I also went to church once. True, I chose the time when the church was empty ... In an empty church, I sometimes managed to find what I was looking for in vain in the world.

Here is an example, by the way, of how one and the same feeling, one and the same thought is expressed in prose and as in poetry.

The Tarakanovskaya church (I am writing all about it in the discussion of its possible restoration) entered the biography of Blok as a more serious event, one of the main events in the life of the poet. And Shakhmatovo itself, no matter how great its importance in shaping the soul and way of thinking of Blok, would have lost most of its memorial charm if seven miles from it did not stand on a high hill dominating the area (as military topographers would say) a village Boblovo, where Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev lived.

The great scientist bought this estate in 1865, bought, they say, because of the grandiose views from the hill. He came only to look, but as he stood on a hill facing the Russian land stretched out in front of him with hills, valleys, forests, many villages and churches at the same time, with lush clouds, he did not want to leave this place. Somewhere out there, far below, seven versts (and all in a forest), the Shakhmatovo estate, invisible from here, which only nine years later Mendeleev would advise his friend Professor Beketov to acquire, is a botanist.

In Boblov, Mendeleev had a spacious house, an equipped laboratory, where Dmitry Ivanovich conducted experiments in meteorology, agricultural chemistry and just chemistry. Yes, and all the Boblov fields were a kind of laboratory for the scientist, if we mean the fields related to the estate, and not those owned by the peasants of the village of Boblov, located not far from the Mendeleev park and the house, but still on the same high hill.

Meanwhile, time passed. In neighboring Shakhmatovo, surrounded by loving and educated aunts, as well as nephews of their peers (they played Indians and Americans), a fair-haired handsome young man was growing up. Running in the garden, short walks with my aunts and long walks with my botanist grandfather, and then lonely walks on foot and on horseback. In circles, circles, farther and farther from the house and the garden, the surroundings with swamps, ravines, forest paths, open meadows, streams, glades were being developed. Aksakov would have these places - he would have walked around them all with a gun and fishing rods, would have studied all the whirlpools on Lutosna, would have known where the perches peck, where the roach, where the hazel grouse nest, where the black grouse lek, where the woodcocks pull. Turgenev, as a hunter, and Chekhov, as a float fisherman, would appreciate these places. But Blok is difficult, impossible even to imagine with a gun or a fishing rod. The spirit is restless, restless, prophetic, foreseeing the impending cataclysms through visible prosperity and flowering, and, as it were, even impatiently awaiting them.

Path sad, night

I trampled to the graveyard.

So, unknown even to the inhabitants of the chess house, there were regular night walks to some nearby village, to the cemetery and lonely standing, silence there. The proximity of the graves and crosses of the cemetery church contributed to the mood of these nightly walks. Let's try to imagine in this place the same Turgenev with Chekhov, Nekrasov, Fet - it will not work, it will not be imagined. Blok, with his arms crossed in the shadow of the cemetery church, is visible as in the picture.

I'm on the ledge. Above me is a grave

From dark granite; Below me -

Walkway whitening at dusk

And who will look down at me,

He will be frightened: I am so motionless,

In a wide hat, among the night graves,

Arms crossed, slender and in love with the world.

This is in the verses "Above the Lake". Somewhere in Finland. But didn't it just melt over the Chessovskaya valley, which is also famous for its night fogs, which overflowed no worse than any lake.

Impressions from walks fill the lines of poetry.

There is in a wild grove near the ravine

Green hill, there is always a shadow.

I went to bliss. The path was shining

Evening dew in red light...

The white horse steps with a tired foot,

Where the endless swell lay down,

Silence of dying cereals

This bright time in the world

The sky is glowing. The dead of night is dead

A mass of forest trees crowds around me.

I climbed all the peaks

Looked into other skies

My torch was an owl's eye,

And the dew of God in the morning.

Looking for lights - passing lights

In your black, witch's limit.

Between dark backwaters and muddy

The huge moon blushed...

His doppelgänger floats over the forest

And soon it will be gold.

Then - space for swamp demons,

Both water and forest ...

And the stars fade in silver.

And the roofs lit up quietly

In the night village, on the mountain.

I go, and the dews get cold,

And silver about you

All about you, unplaited braids

For a secret friend in the hut.

In the damp night fog

At the red glow of fire,

On scarlet geraniums

I sent a horse.

We don’t know whether it’s only dreamed or already real in these verses about secret love unweaving braids in a hut, and about a hut with geraniums in a damp night forest (and why not), but the circles of chess walks are expanding and expanding, until one day they bring a young poet, a handsome and romantic youth, a slender rider, a kind of prince and knight of the chess hills, to a high mountain in the direction where the chess sun usually set, where the evening dawns usually burned over a dark jagged forest. Block in prose described this momentous moment to us.

“We sank to the bottom of the ravine, Gray jumped over a stream that ran among the stones along the yellow sand, and jumped onto a steep slope on the other side; there was a road that I had never traveled before. Gray also did not know where to turn - left or right, and stopped. I let him step in the direction that, in my opinion, led further away from the house ...

... I immediately felt something loved and forgotten on this road and began to think about what high cereals would be here in summer, yellow-blue carpets of Ivan and Mary and pink clouds of Ivan tea ... I was already completely at the mercy of new places ... I saw that what seemed to me a grove was an abandoned park, obviously belonging to some kind of estate. I wanted to go around it, and I trotted along the fence of cut fir trees.

Suddenly, to the right of the road, behind several logs thrown over a ditch, a path appeared that went uphill between the tall trunks of fir trees and birches. I set off along it and, having reached its highest point, found myself in front of a new vast distance, which opened before me new plains, new villages and churches.

The park broke off, rows of non-peasant buildings and a large orchard, all in bloom, began to appear. Among apple trees, cherries and plums stood logs for bees, the fence was low, taken away by old clefts that had come off in places. Silence reigned here, not a sound came from either the village or the estate.

Suddenly an unexpected wind blew up and showered the apple and cherry blossoms. Behind a blizzard of white petals that flew onto the road, I saw a stately girl sitting on a bench in a pink dress, with a heavy golden scythe. She was evidently startled by the sudden thump of a horse, for she stood up quickly and flushed her cheeks; she ran into the depths of the garden, leaving me to watch her pink dress flicker behind a blizzard of petals.

Everything here is a little romanticized. About the park, for example. Now the park is really abandoned, and Mendeleev was good host and kept the household in order. He was enough for this, and for his science, and for rising from Klin in a balloon to observe a solar eclipse (he landed in the places of Saltykov Shchedrin in the Spas Corner of the Tver province), and for doing agricultural experiments.

Probably, the young rider could assume that he was approximately near Boblov, and not guess - where did he end up and drive into, what kind of abandoned estate? Still, seven miles is not God knows what a distance, and lives there, in Boblovo, a friend of grandfather Beketov, and a high hill is visible from Shakhmatov, and there were talks about Boblov, and Lyubochka Mendeleev and Sashura Blok, as children, walked together in St. Petersburg in the university garden under the care of nannies. Mendeleev will still meet with Beketov and ask: “Well, how is your prince doing? And our princess... Block. "Autobiography".

But the meeting is beautiful and romantic. As if a foreshadowing spirit flew through the quiet garden, raised a blizzard of petals, and now, as if materializing from this blizzard, from these petals, a girl appeared in a pink dress with a heavy golden braid.

Mendeleev's house was like a house, and Lyuba was like Lyuba - a healthy, ruddy, fair-haired girl. But everything now takes on a different color, a different illumination. Fairy jagged forest on the mountain, high tower, beautiful lady, Ofelia...

In general, it must be said that that part of the blood in Blok, which was German, Mecklenburg, conveyed to a distant descendant vague knightly memories, a kind of indelible watermark, which became distinguishable and distinct, being raised to the light of poetry.

On the other hand, the heredity of the Russian nobleman (and after all, initially, in princely times, all noblemen were warriors, combatants, and it was for military service received allotments of land, became family landowners) spoke out through the dark times. Gradually, the motifs of medieval European chivalry, the motifs of battles, swords, and shields acquire more and more Russian (we repeat the word - Igor's word-police once again) coloring, until the heroic cycle "Motherland" and the poems "On the Kulikovo Field" burst out in an organ. Here it is, this poetic evolution:

I'm just a knight and a poet

Descendant of the northern skald.

About valor, about exploits, about glory

I forgot on the woeful earth...

Around the castle there will be an eternal rustle,

There is clear water in the moat.

Here is the sword. He was. But he is not needed.

Who weakened my hand?

I died. I fell from the wound

And friends covered with a shield.

We are few. All in smoky cloaks

Sparks splatter, and chain mail gleams.

Will heavy armor creak...

The battle makes my heart glad,

I feel the freshness of military bliss ...

Dear knight, snow-blooded

I was faithful to you.

You can be beautiful too

The Dark Knight, you.

I run free into the air

Tired of the heat of battle.

Oh love! You are worse than fate!

More commanding than the ancient laws of the fathers.

Sweeter than the sound of a military trumpet.

It's time to return to the old battle,

Resurrect the spirit, and sleep the flesh!

I am a sword sharpened on both sides.

In my shield, a green stone is lit.

He called for the battle of the plains ...

Cleansing wind blows

From the sky blue.

The son throws down the sword of destruction,

The helmet is removed from the head.

Yes, I'm ready for a late meeting

I will stretch out my hand,

To you, carrying from the battle

On the tip of the spear - spring.

And again in wreaths and dews

The dream will sing

Glittering on the slope

Shield gold.

Shield of a blushing hero

There is a huge moon in the grass ....

Elastic armor rang out behind the hill,

And the spear was lost in the mist.

The helmet does not shine - golden and feathered -

All that was with me on earth.

The son is overshadowed by the cross.

The son leaves his father's house.

So elated, so melodious

The princess sang about spring,

And I said: look, princess,

You will cry for me.

But my hands were on my shoulders

And it sounded: no, I'm sorry.

Take your sword. Get ready for the cut