Sunstroke is clean Monday. Prose of I. Bunin of the foreign period (“The Life of Arsenyev”, “Mitya’s Love”, “Sunstroke”, “Clean Monday”, the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys”, “The Liberation of Tolstoy” and others). Excerpt from the text

"Sunstroke"

They met in the summer, on one of the Volga ships. He is a lieutenant, She is a lovely little, tanned woman (she said she was coming from Anapa). “...I’m completely drunk,” she laughed. - Actually, I'm completely crazy. Three hours ago I didn’t even know you existed.” The lieutenant kissed her hand, and his heart sank blissfully and terribly...

The steamer approached the pier, the lieutenant muttered pleadingly: “Let's get off...” And a minute later they got off, rode to the hotel on a dusty cab, and went into a large but terribly stuffy room. And as soon as the footman closed the door behind him, both of them suffocated so frantically in the kiss that they remembered this moment for many years later: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives.

And in the morning she left, she, a little nameless woman, jokingly called herself “a beautiful stranger,” “Princess Marya Morevna.” In the morning, despite an almost sleepless night, she was as fresh as she was at seventeen, a little embarrassed, still simple, cheerful, and - already reasonable: “You must stay until the next ship,” she said. - If we go together, everything will be ruined. I give you my word of honor that I am not at all what you might think of me. Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. It was as if an eclipse had come over me... Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke...” And the lieutenant somehow easily agreed with her , took him to the pier, put him on the ship and kissed him on the deck in front of everyone.

He returned to the hotel just as easily and carefree. But something has already changed. The room seemed somehow different. He was still full of her - and empty. And the lieutenant’s heart suddenly squeezed with such tenderness that he hurried to light a cigarette and walked back and forth around the room several times. There was no strength to look at the unmade bed - and he covered it with a screen: “Well, that’s the end of this “road adventure”! - he thought. “And forgive me, and forever, forever... After all, I can’t, for no apparent reason, come to this city, where her husband, her three-year-old girl, and in general her whole ordinary life!” And this thought struck him. He felt such pain and such uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.

“What is this with me? It seems that this is not the first time - and now... What's special about it? In fact, it looks like some kind of sunstroke! How can I spend the whole day without her in this outback?” He still remembered all of her, but now the main thing was this completely new and incomprehensible feeling, which did not exist while they were together, which he could not even imagine when starting a funny acquaintance. A feeling that there was no one to tell about now. And how to live this endless day, with these memories, with this insoluble torment?...

He needed to escape, to occupy himself with something, to go somewhere. He went to the market. But at the market everything was so stupid and absurd that he fled from there. I went into the cathedral, where they sang loudly, with a sense of duty fulfilled, then walked for a long time around the small neglected garden: “How can you live peacefully and generally be simple, careless, indifferent? - he thought. “How wild, how absurd everything is everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck by this terrible “sunstroke,” too much love, too much happiness!”

Returning to the hotel, the lieutenant went into the dining room and ordered lunch. Everything was fine, but he knew that he would die tomorrow without hesitation, if by some miracle he could return her, tell her, prove how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her... Why? He didn’t know why, but it was more necessary than life.

What to do now when it is no longer possible to get rid of this unexpected love? The lieutenant stood up and resolutely went to the post office with the already prepared phrase of the telegram, but stopped at the post office in horror - he did not know her last name or first name! And the city, hot, sunny, joyful, reminded Anapa so unbearably that the lieutenant, with his head bowed, staggered and stumbled, walked back.

He returned to the hotel completely defeated. The room was already tidy, devoid of the last traces of her - only one forgotten hairpin lay on the night table! He lay down on the bed, lay with his hands behind his head and staring intently in front of him, then he clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, feeling tears rolling down his cheeks, and finally fell asleep...

When the lieutenant woke up, the evening sun was already yellowing behind the curtains, and yesterday and this morning were remembered as if they were ten years ago. He got up, washed, drank tea with lemon for a long time, paid the bill, got into the cab and drove to the pier.

When the ship set sail, the summer night was already blue over the Volga. The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.

"The Life of Arsenyev"

Alexey Arsenyev was born in the 70s. XIX century in central Russia, on my father’s estate, on the Kamenka farm. His childhood years were spent in the silence of discreet Russian nature. Endless fields with the aromas of herbs and flowers in the summer, vast expanses of snow in the winter gave rise to a heightened sense of beauty, which shaped his inner world and remained for the rest of his life. For hours he could watch the movement of clouds in the high sky, the work of a beetle entangled in ears of grain, the play of the sun's rays on the parquet floor of the living room. People gradually came into his circle of attention. His mother occupied a special place among them: he felt his “inseparability” with her. My father attracted me with his love of life, cheerful disposition, breadth of nature and also with his glorious past (he participated in the Crimean War). The brothers were older, and in children's fun the younger sister Olya became the boy's friend. Together they explored the secret corners of the garden, the vegetable garden, the manor buildings - everywhere had its own charm.

Then a man named Baskakov appeared in the house, who became Alyosha’s first teacher. He did not have any teaching experience, and, having quickly taught the boy to write, read, and even French, he did not really introduce the student to the sciences. Its influence lay elsewhere - in a romantic attitude towards history and literature, in the worship of Pushkin and Lermontov, who captured Alyosha’s soul forever. Everything acquired in communication with Baskakov gave impetus to the imagination and poetic perception of life. These carefree days ended when it was time to enter the gymnasium. The parents took their son to the city and settled with the tradesman Rostovtsev. The situation was miserable, the environment was completely alien. Lessons in the gymnasium were conducted in a formal manner; among the teachers there were no interesting people. Throughout his high school years, Alyosha lived only with the dream of vacations, of a trip to his relatives - now in Baturino, the estate of his deceased grandmother, since his father, strapped for funds, sold Kamenka.

When Alyosha entered the 4th grade, a misfortune happened: his brother Georgy was arrested for involvement in the “socialists”. He lived for a long time under a false name, hid, and then came to Baturino, where, following a denunciation from the clerk of one of the neighbors, the gendarmes took him. This event was a big shock for Alyosha. A year later, he dropped out of high school and returned to his parents' shelter. The father scolded at first, but then decided that his son’s calling was not service or farming (especially since the farming was in complete decline), but “poetry of the soul and life” and that maybe he would become a new Pushkin or Lermontov. Alyosha himself dreamed of devoting himself to “verbal creativity.” His development was greatly facilitated by long conversations with Georgy, who was released from prison and sent to Baturino under police supervision. From a teenager, Alexey turned into a young man, he matured physically and spiritually, felt the growing strength and joy of being, read a lot, thought about life and death, wandered around the neighborhood, visited neighboring estates.

Soon he experienced his first love, having met at the house of one of his relatives a young girl, Ankhen, who was staying there, and the separation from whom he experienced as true grief, which is why even the St. Petersburg magazine he received on the day of her departure with the publication of his poems did not bring real joy. But then followed light hobbies with young ladies who came to neighboring estates, and then a relationship with a married woman who served as a maid on the estate of Nikolai’s brother. This “madness,” as Alexey called his passion, ended thanks to the fact that Nikolai eventually figured out the culprit of the unseemly story.

In Alexei, the desire to leave his almost ruined home and begin an independent life was maturing more and more palpably. By this time, Georgy had moved to Kharkov, and the younger brother decided to go there. From the first day he was bombarded with many new acquaintances and impressions. George's environment was sharply different from the village. Many of the people who were part of it went through student circles and movements, and were in prison and exile. During the meetings, conversations boiled over about pressing issues of Russian life, the way of government and the rulers themselves were condemned, the need to fight for a constitution and a republic was proclaimed, and the political positions of literary idols - Korolenko, Chekhov, Tolstoy - were discussed. These table conversations and arguments fueled Alexey’s desire to write, but at the same time he was tormented by his inability to put it into practice.

Vague mental disorder prompted some changes. He decided to see new places, went to the Crimea, was in Sevastopol, on the banks of the Donets and, having already decided to return to Baturino, on the way he stopped in Orel to look at the “city of Leskov and Turgenev” . There he found the editorial office of Golos, where he had previously planned to find a job, met editor Nadezhda Avilova and received an offer to collaborate in the publication. After talking about business, Avilova invited him to the dining room, received him at home and introduced her cousin Lika to the guest. Everything was unexpected and pleasant, but he could not even imagine what important role fate had destined for this chance acquaintance.

At first there were just cheerful conversations and walks that brought pleasure, but gradually sympathy for Lika turned into a stronger feeling. Captured by him, Alexey constantly rushed between Baturin and Orel, abandoned his studies and lived only by meetings with the girl, she either brought him closer to her, then pushed him away, then again called him out on a date. Their relationship could not go unnoticed. One fine day, Lika’s father invited Alexei to his place and ended a rather friendly conversation with a decisive disagreement with his daughter’s marriage, explaining that he did not want to see them both wallow in need, because he realized how uncertain the young man’s position was.

Having learned about this, Lika said that she would never go against her father’s will. Nevertheless, nothing has changed. On the contrary, there was a final rapprochement. Alexey moved to Orel under the pretext of working at Golos and lived in a hotel, Lika moved in with Avilova under the pretext of studying music. But little by little the difference in nature began to show itself: he wanted to share his memories of his poetic childhood, observations of life, literary passions, but all this was alien to her. He was jealous of her gentlemen at city balls, of her partners in amateur performances. There was a misunderstanding of each other.

One day, Lika’s father came to Orel, accompanied by a rich young tanner, Bogomolov, whom he introduced as a contender for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Lika spent all her time with them. Alexey stopped talking to her. It ended with her refusing Bogomolov, but still leaving Orel with her father. Alexey was tormented by separation, not knowing how and why to live now. He continued to work at Golos, again began to write and publish what he had written, but he was tormented by the squalor of Oryol life and again decided to embark on wanderings. Having changed several cities, never staying anywhere for long, he finally couldn’t stand it and sent Lika a telegram: “I’ll be there the day after tomorrow.” They met again. Existence apart turned out to be unbearable for both.

Life together began in a small town where Georgy moved. Both worked in the zemstvo statistics department, were constantly together, and visited Baturino. Relatives treated Lika with warmth. Everything seemed to be getting better. But the roles gradually changed: now Lika lived only by her feelings for Alexei, and he could no longer live only by her. He went on business trips, met different people, reveled in the feeling of freedom, even entered into casual relationships with women, although he still couldn’t imagine himself without Lika. She saw the changes, languished in loneliness, was jealous, was offended by his indifference to her dream of a wedding and a normal family, and in response to Alexey’s assurances of the unchangeability of his feelings, she once said that, apparently, she was something like air for him , without which there is no life, but which you don’t notice. Lika was unable to completely abandon herself and live only by what he lived, and, in despair, writing a farewell note, she left Orel.

Alexei's letters and telegrams remained unanswered until Lika's father reported that she had forbidden her to open her shelter to anyone. Alexei almost shot himself, quit his service, and did not show up anywhere. An attempt to see her father was unsuccessful: he was simply not accepted. He returned to Baturino, and a few months later he learned that Lika had come home with pneumonia and died very soon. It was at her request that Alexei was not informed of her death.

He was only twenty years old. There was still a lot to go through, but time did not erase this love from his memory - it remained the most significant event of his life for him.

The story "Dark Alleys"

On a stormy autumn day, along a rutted dirt road to a long hut, in one half of which there was a postal station, and in the other a clean room where you could rest, eat and even spend the night, a mud-covered carriage with a half-raised top drove up. On the box of the tarantass sat a strong, serious man in a tightly belted overcoat, and in the tarantass - “a slender old military man in a large cap and a Nikolaev gray overcoat with a beaver stand-up collar, still black-browed, but with a white mustache that was connected to the same sideburns; his chin was shaved and his whole appearance bore that resemblance to Alexander II, which was so common among the military during his reign; the look was also questioning, stern and at the same time tired.”

When the horses stopped, he got out of the tarantass, ran up to the porch of the hut and turned left, as the coachman told him. The room was warm, dry and tidy, with a sweet smell of cabbage soup coming from behind the stove damper. The newcomer threw his overcoat onto the bench, took off his gloves and cap, and tiredly ran his hand through his slightly curly hair. There was no one in the upper room, he opened the door and called: “Hey, who’s there!” A dark-haired woman, also black-browed and also still beautiful beyond her age, entered... with dark fluff on her upper lip and along her cheeks, light as she walked, but plump, with large breasts under a red blouse, with a triangular belly, like a goose’s, under a black woolen blouse. skirt." She greeted politely.

The visitor glanced briefly at her rounded shoulders and light legs and asked for a samovar. It turned out that this woman was the owner of the inn. The visitor praised her for her cleanliness. The woman, looking at him inquisitively, said: “I love cleanliness. After all, Nikolai Alekseevich, Nikolai Alekseevich, grew up under the gentlemen, but he didn’t know how to behave decently.” "Hope! You? - he said hastily. - My God, my God!.. Who would have thought! How many years have we not seen each other? About thirty-five?” - “Thirty, Nikolai Alekseevich.” He is excited and asks her how she lived all these years. How did she live? The gentlemen gave me freedom. She was not married. Why? Yes, because she loved him very much. “Everything passes, my friend,” he muttered. “Love, youth - everything, everything. The story is vulgar, ordinary. Over the years everything goes away."

For others, maybe, but not for her. She lived it all her life. She knew that his former self had been gone for a long time, that it was as if nothing had happened to him, but she still loved him. It’s too late to reproach her now, but how heartlessly he abandoned her then... How many times did she want to kill herself! “And they deigned to read all the poems to me about all sorts of ‘dark alleys,’” she added with an unkind smile.” Nikolai Alekseevich remembers how beautiful Nadezhda was. He was good too. “And it was I who gave you my beauty, my fever. How can you forget this.” - "A! Everything passes. Everything is forgotten.” - “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.” “Go away,” he said, turning away and going to the window. “Go away, please.” Pressing the handkerchief to his eyes, he added: “If only God would forgive me. And you, apparently, have forgiven.” No, she did not forgive him and could never forgive him. She can't forgive him.

He ordered the horses to be brought, moving away from the window with dry eyes. He, too, had never been happy in his life. He married for great love, and she abandoned him even more insultingly than he abandoned Nadezhda. He placed so many hopes on his son, but he grew up to be a scoundrel, an insolent man, without honor, without conscience. She came up and kissed his hand, and he kissed hers. Already on the road, he remembered this with shame, and he felt ashamed of this shame. The coachman says that she looked after them from the window. She is a woman - a ward. Gives money in interest, but is fair.

“Yes, of course, the best moments... Truly magical! “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were dark linden alleys…” What if I hadn’t abandoned her? What nonsense! This same Nadezhda is not the owner of the inn, but my wife, the mistress of my St. Petersburg house, the mother of my children? And, closing his eyes, he shook his head.

"Mitina's Love"

Katya is Mitya’s beloved (“sweet, pretty face, small figure, freshness, youth, where femininity was still mixed with childishness”). She studies at a private theater school, goes to the studio of the Art Theater, lives with her mother, “an always smoking, always rouged lady with crimson hair,” who left her husband long ago.

Unlike Mitya, Katya is not completely absorbed in love; it is no coincidence that Rilke noted that Mitya could not live with her anyway - she is too immersed in a theatrical, false environment. Her hobby is indulged by the school director, “a smug actor with impassive and sad eyes,” who every summer went on vacation with another student he seduced. “The director began to work with K.,” Bunin points out. As in the stories “Clean Monday”, “Steamboat Saratov”, the most important events in the lives of the heroes correlate with the time of Lent. It is in the sixth week of Great Lent, the last before Holy Lent, that K. takes the exam to the director. During the exam, she is dressed all in white, like a bride, which emphasizes the ambiguity of the situation.

In the spring, important changes occur with Katya - she turns into “a young society lady, [...] always in a hurry to get somewhere.” Dates with Mitya are becoming shorter and shorter, and Katya’s last outburst of feelings coincides with his departure to the village. Contrary to the agreement, Katya writes Mitya only two letters, and in the second she admits that she cheated on him with the director: “I’m bad, I’m disgusting, spoiled […] but I madly love art! […] I’m leaving - you know with whom...” This letter becomes the last straw - Mitya decides to commit suicide. The connection with Alyonka only increases his despair.

Mitya (Mitry Palych) is a student, the main character of the story. He is in a transitional age, when the masculine principle is intertwined with the not yet completely exfoliated childish principle. M. “thin, awkward” (the girls in the village/called him “greyhound”), doing everything with boyish awkwardness. He has a large mouth, black, coarse hair, “he was one of that breed of people with black, seemingly constantly widened eyes, who almost never grow a mustache or beard even in their mature years...” (M.’s beloved, Katya, calls him "Byzantine" eyes).

The story of M.'s life and death covers a period of just over six months: starting from December, when he met Katya, and until mid-summer (late June - early July), when he commits suicide. We learn about M.'s past from his own fragmentary memories, one way or another connected with the main themes of the story - the theme of all-encompassing love and the theme of death.

Love captured M. “even in infancy” as something “inexpressible in human language,” when one day in the garden, next to a young woman (probably a nanny), “something leapt up in him like a hot wave,” and then in various guises: a neighbor -gymnasium student, “the acute joys and sorrows of sudden love at school balls.” A year ago, when M. fell ill in the village, spring became “his first true love.” Immersion in the March nature of “moisture-saturated stubble and black arable land” and similar manifestations of “pointless, ethereal love” accompanied M. until December of his first student winter, when he met Katya and almost immediately fell in love with her.

The time of crazy exciting happiness lasts until the ninth of March (“the last happy day”), when Katya talks about the “price” of her reciprocal love: “I still won’t give up art even for you,” i.e. that is, from her theatrical career, which should begin after she graduates from a private theater school this spring. In general, the depiction of theater in the story is accompanied by an intonation of decadent falsehood - Bunin sharply emphasizes his rejection of modernist art, partly in accordance with the views of L. N. Tolstoy. At the final exam, Katya reads Blok's poem "A Girl Sang in the Church Choir" - perhaps, from Bunin's point of view, a manifesto of decadent art. M. perceives her reading as “vulgar melodiousness... and stupidity in every sound,” and defines the theme of the poem very harshly: “about some seemingly angelically innocent girl.”

January and February are a time of continuous happiness, but against the backdrop of the beginning of a split in a previously integral feeling, “even then it often seemed as if there were two Katyas: one is the one whom [...] Mitya persistently desired, demanded, and the other is genuine, ordinary , painfully did not coincide with the first one.” M. lives in student rooms on Molchanovka, Katya and her mother live on Kislovka. They see each other, their meetings proceed “in a heavy dope of kisses”, becoming more and more passionate. M. is increasingly jealous of Katya: “manifestations of passion, the very thing that was so blissful and sweet […] when applied to them, Mitya and Katya, became unspeakably disgusting and even […] unnatural when Mitya thought about Katya and others to a man."

Winter gives way to spring, jealousy increasingly replaces love, but at the same time (and this is the irrationality of feelings according to Bunin) M.’s passion increases along with jealousy. “You only love my body, not my soul,” Katya tells him. Completely exhausted by the duality and vague sensuality of their relationship, M. at the end of April leaves for a village estate to relax and understand himself. Before leaving, Katya “became tender and passionate again,” even cried for the first time, and M. again felt how close she was to him. They agree that in the summer M. will come to Crimea, where Katya will relax with her mother. In the packing scene on the eve of departure, the motif of death sounds again - the second theme of the story. M.’s only friend, a certain Protasov, comforting M., quotes Kozma Prutkov: “Junker Schmidt! honestly. Summer will return,” but the reader remembers that the poem also contains a motive for suicide: “Junker Schmit wants to shoot himself with a pistol!” This motif returns once again when, in the window opposite Mitya’s room, a certain student sings A. Rubinstein’s romance to the poems of G. Heine: “Having fallen in love, we die.” On the train, everything again speaks of love (the smell of Katya’s glove, which M. fell for at the last second of parting, the men and workers in the carriage), and later, on the way to the village, M. is again full of pure affection, thinking “about all that feminine, which he approached over the winter with Katya.” In the scene of M.'s farewell to Katya, an inconspicuous detail is extremely important - the scent of Katya's glove, recalled several times. According to the laws of melodic composition, leitmotifs opposing each other are intertwined here: the smell of love (except for the glove - Katya’s hair ribbon) and the smell of death (nine years ago, when his father died, Mitya “suddenly felt: there is death in the world!”, and there is still death in the house For a long time there was a “terrible, disgusting, sweetish smell” or “a terrible, disgusting, sweetish smell”). In the village, M. at first seems to be freed from the suspicions tormenting him, but almost immediately a third theme is woven into the fabric of the narrative - love, devoid of a spiritual component. As the hope for a future together with Katya fades, M. becomes increasingly overwhelmed by pure sensuality: lust at the sight of a “charwoman from the village” washing windows, in a conversation with the maid Parasha, in the garden where the village girls Sonya and Glasha flirt with the barchuk. In general, the theme of the village-soil-earth-naturalness (“the saving bosom of Mother Nature”, according to G. Adamovich) is associated with sensuality and longing in Bunin, therefore all the village heroes of the story in one way or another participate in the seduction of M.

The only clue in the fight against carnal temptations is the feeling for Katya. M.'s mother, Olga Petrovna, is busy with housework, sister Anya and brother Kostya have not arrived yet - M. lives with the memory of love, writes passionate letters to Katya, looks at her photograph: the direct, open look of his beloved answers him. Katya's response letters are rare and laconic. Summer comes, but Katya still does not write. M.'s torment intensifies: the more beautiful the world is, the more unnecessary and meaningless it seems to M. He remembers the winter, the concert, Katya’s silk ribbon, which he took with him to the village - now he even thinks about it with a shudder. To speed up receiving news, M. goes to get the letters himself, but all in vain. One day M. decides: “If there’s no letter in a week, I’ll shoot myself!”

It is at this moment of spiritual decline that the village headman offers M. to have some fun for a small reward. At first, M. has the strength to refuse: he sees Katya everywhere - in the surrounding nature, dreams, daydreams - she is not there only in reality. When the headman again hints at “pleasure,” M., unexpectedly for himself, agrees. The headman proposes M. Alenka - “a poisonous young woman, her husband is in the mines […] she’s only been married for two years.” Even before the fateful date, M. finds something in common with Katya: Alenka is not big, she is active - “feminine, mixed with something childish.” On Sunday, M. goes to mass in church and meets Alenka on the way to church: she, “wagging her butt,” passes without paying attention to him. M. feels “that it is impossible to see her in church,” the feeling of sin is still capable of holding him back.

The next evening, the headman takes M. to the forester, Alenka’s father-in-law, with whom she lives. While the headman and the forester are drinking, M. accidentally runs into Alenka in the forest and, no longer able to control himself, agrees to meet tomorrow in a hut. At night M. “saw himself hanging over a huge, dimly lit abyss.” And throughout the next day, the motive of death sounds more and more clearly (while waiting for M.’s date, it seems that the house is “terribly empty”; Antares, a star from the constellation Scorpio, is shining in the evening sky, etc.). M. heads to the hut, and Alenka soon appears. M. gives her a crumpled five-ruble note, he is seized by “a terrible power of bodily desire that does not turn into ... mental.” When what he wanted so much finally happens, M. “rose up completely overwhelmed with disappointment” - the miracle did not happen.

On Saturday of the same week it rains all day. M. wanders around the garden in tears, re-reads yesterday’s letter from Katya: “forget, forget everything that happened!.. I’m leaving - you know with whom...” In the evening, thunder drives M. into the house. He climbs in through his window , locks himself from the inside and, in a semi-conscious state, sees in the corridor a “young nanny” carrying a “child with a big white face” - this is how memories of early childhood return. The nanny turns out to be Katya, in the room she hides the child in a dresser drawer. A gentleman in a tuxedo comes in - this is the director with whom Katya went to Crimea (“I absolutely love art!” from yesterday’s letter).” M. watches as Katya gives herself to him and eventually comes to her senses with a feeling of piercing, unbearable pain. There is no and cannot be a return to what was “like heaven.” M. takes out a revolver from the drawer of his night table and “sighing joyfully […] with pleasure” shoots himself.

R. M. Rilke insightfully points out the main cause of the tragedy: “the young man loses […] the ability to expect the course of events and a way out of an intolerable situation and ceases to believe that this suffering […] should be followed by something […] different , which, due to its otherness, should seem more bearable and bearable.”

“Mitya’s Love” caused many conflicting reviews. Thus, 3. Gippius put the story on a par with Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” but sees in the hero’s feelings only “a grimacing Lust with white eyes.” At the same time, the poetess M. V. Karamzina defined the “sacrament of love” in Bunin’s story as a “miracle of grace.” R. M. Bicilli in the article “Notes on Tolstoy. Bunin and Tolstoy" finds Tolstoy's influence in "Mitya's Love", namely, a echo of L. Tolstoy's unfinished story "The Devil".

Bunin himself indicated that he took advantage of the story of his nephew’s “fall”. V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina names the surname of the prototype: “... the young novel of Nikolai Alekseevich (Pusheshnikov, Bunin’s nephew - Ed.) is touched, but the appearance is taken from […] his brother, Petya.” V. S. Yanovsky, in his memoirs “The Fields of the Champs Elysees,” confirms the reality of the prototype: “In “Mitya’s Love,” the hero ends in a rather banal suicide, while in fact the young man from his story became a monk and soon became an outstanding priest.” V.V. Nabokov in a letter to Z. Shakhovskaya wrote: “Bunin told me that, when starting Mitya’s Love, he saw before him the image of Mitya Shakhovsky,” that is, Z. Shakhovskaya’s brother Dmitry Alekseevich, a poet, twenties, he became a monk under the name of Father John.

Composition

Life without illusions is the recipe for happiness.
A.France

In Bunin's work, several main themes can be identified that especially worried the writer and, one might say, succeeded each other. The first period of Bunin's work was devoted mainly to the depiction of the Russian village, poor and wretched. All the author’s sympathies in the village stories were on the side of the poor, exhausted by hopeless poverty and hunger of the peasants. Bunin's best work about the village is considered to be the story "The Village". The first Russian revolution (1905-1907) deeply shocked the writer and changed his views on life. The second stage of Bunin’s work begins, when the writer moves away from the depiction of modern Russian life, from its topical problems and turns to “eternal” themes - philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, on life and death in the stories “Brothers”, “The Gentleman from San Francisco” , "Chang's Dreams". The third stage of Bunin's work begins with emigration from Russia (1920). Now the writer pays the greatest attention to the depiction of love, which occupies an important place in the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” (1933) and becomes the main theme of the collection “Dark Alleys” (1946). Although “Sunstroke” was written in 1925, in idea and artistic techniques it is very close to the stories from the named collection.

The collection “Dark Alleys” includes 38 love stories. All of them, as has been noted many times in critical literature, are built according to the same plot scheme: a meeting of heroes (men and women), their rapprochement, a passionate scene, separation and comprehension of this love story. Critics even argue that Bunin did not invent new plots at all: “Sunstroke” is reminiscent of “The Lady with the Dog” by A.P. Chekhov, “Clean Monday” is “The Noble Nest” by I.S. Turgenev, etc. The stories in the collection describe mainly situations that are not attached to a specific place and time. From the texts it is only clear that all events take place somewhere in Russia before 1917. Rare exceptions include the story “Clean Monday,” where the action takes place in Moscow in 1912.

In Bunin's stories about love, there is practically no backstory for the characters. The writer is not at all interested in their former, ordinary life. He omits all the usual biographical details: profession, social status, financial situation, age of the heroes - and leaves one or two details to maintain verisimilitude. The hero of “Sunstroke” is a lieutenant, and “Clean Monday” is a Penza gentleman (both without a name). And the heroines of the stories, respectively, are a pretty lady returning home from Anapa, and a student (both again without a name). The appearance of the heroes is described in the most general terms. The lieutenant from “Sunstroke” has the usual gray officer’s face, and the lady is a little “beautiful stranger,” as she called herself. The hero of “Clean Monday” is described briefly: young and handsome with non-Russian beauty, “some kind of Sicilian.” The heroine of “Clean Monday” receives a more detailed portrait, because the loving narrator cannot figure out this strange girl: she has black eyes and hair, bright crimson lips, an amber complexion - “her beauty was somehow Indian, Persian.”

So, for Bunin, in stories about love, the place or signs of the scene, time or signs of time, the appearance of the characters, their social status are not important. The writer’s entire attention is focused on depicting the feeling of love. Consequently, all the stories in the collection “Dark Alleys” are psychological, since they describe the various feelings of a man in love. At the same time, the main characters of all stories are women, watched by male narrators. Thus, Bunin uses two different techniques to depict a person’s feelings - a careful description of the narrator’s feelings and psychological details to describe the heroine’s experiences, which the narrator can only guess.

Love, according to Bunin, is the strongest feeling, so the hero’s experiences are usually very intense, his psychological state is tense. The overwhelming part of “Sunstroke” is a description of the lieutenant’s experiences after the departure of the “beautiful stranger”: at first he carefreely ponders the night’s adventure (obviously not the first in his life) and only then suddenly realizes that such a meeting will never happen again, that it was happiness.

The plot originality of Bunin's stories about love was expressed in the interweaving of psychological images and philosophical ideas: the stories present the writer's view on the “eternal” topic - what is love in a person’s life? Love, which European philosophy for centuries considered the decoration and meaning of life, brings, according to Bunin, only suffering and sadness. “In happiness there is always a taste of bitterness, the fear of losing it, the almost certain knowledge that you will lose it!” - Bunin writes in his diary. This leads to a salutary conclusion: in order to have less suffering in human life, one must not desire anything, not become attached to anything with one’s soul, not love anyone (Buddhism preaches such salvation from suffering). But Bunin's heroes in stories about love do not follow this wisdom; they fall in love and, therefore, suffer, but never agree to give up either this happiness or beautiful sadness.

According to Bunin, beautiful love should be fleeting, otherwise it will degenerate into a boring and vulgar story. After a long thought, the lieutenant from “Sunstroke” agrees with the stranger: their meeting was like a sunstroke, like an eclipse, there was nothing like that in their lives; To preserve this extraordinary impression, you have to leave. For the hero-narrator from “Clean Monday,” the short, unexpectedly ended romance with an incomprehensible student student remains memorable for the rest of his life: on the night of the last day of Maslenitsa on Clean Monday, he received proof of her love and immediately - eternal separation. Thus, love makes the life of Bunin’s heroes not only more significant, but also more tragic due to the brevity of a happy moment that will never be repeated.

Bunin's stories about love reflect the tragedy of the time in which the writer lived. The happiness of love turns out to be very fragile for the heroes; it is destroyed by death, historical cataclysms, and the vulgarity of life. The heroine of “Clean Monday” speaks about this, repeating the words of Platon Karataev: “Our happiness, my friend, is like delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, if you pull it out, there’s nothing.” So the pursuit of happiness is useless? So, we must look for the purpose of life in something else? And what? Bunin's answer to this philosophical question is found in the story “Clean Monday” - in moving away from the bustle of worldly life, in turning to God. The heroine of the story has the contradictory nature of a Russian person; she combines Western rationalism and Eastern instability and inconsistency. This inconsistency of the Russian character, according to the writer, determines the complexity of the historical fate of Russia. In the story, Bunin shows how the heroes, on the eve of the world war and revolutions, determine for themselves the main values ​​in life: the hero-narrator sees the meaning of life in the torment and happiness of earthly love, and the heroine - in the renunciation of earthly passions and in the accomplishment of spiritual feats.

To summarize, it should be noted that Bunin’s philosophical understanding of life is tragic. This view logically follows from the writer’s conviction that human life is initially tragic because of its transience, the elusiveness of goals, and the unsolved mystery of existence. This philosophical view was manifested in Bunin's stories about love.

However, there is a paradox in Bunin's stories about love. The writer, who was interested in Buddhism, knows that for happiness it is necessary to renounce desires, but at the same time, with extraordinary skill, he draws love experiences that shake the souls of the heroes. In other words, Buddhist self-restraints lead to the opposite results: Bunin feels even more keenly the joy of being, the uniqueness and greatness of love in the human soul and masterfully conveys these feelings.

Preview:

QUESTIONS TO BUNIN'S STORIES

"Sunstroke"

Can you convey in a few words what happened to the characters? What is the mood of the story and the state of the characters at the beginning of the story? What do they set up or what questions do the words “and the heart sank blissfully and terribly”; “For many years later they remembered this moment: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives”? Why is the morning of the next day called happy? What word becomes the key word that conveys the state of the lieutenant upon parting? When does the narrative break occur? What “strange, incomprehensible feeling that did not exist at all while they were together” writes I.A. Bunin? Why did it come only when the heroes broke up? What torments the hero the most? What would change if the heroine told the lieutenant her first and last name? Why does the author describe in such detail the day the lieutenant spent in the county town waiting for the ship? Does the hero experience happiness or suffering? Why does he feel ten years older at the end of the story? Why, of the two definitions of what happened given by the heroine (“sunstroke” and “eclipse”), was the first chosen as the title of the story?

"Clean Monday"

Why don't the heroes have names? What is the atmosphere at the beginning of the story and by what means is it created? What feeling is the main one in a story about the relationships between the characters? What words can be called key words? What causes the hero’s happiness and torment? How are episodes related to religion and the life of Moscow bohemia combined in the story? Does the heroine fit into them equally organically? Why, when deciding to be intimate with her beloved, the heroine “ lifeless ordered” him to let the crew go? Why does the hero wait at the bedroom door “with his heart sinking as if over an abyss”? What does a night spent together become for the heroes? Why is it that in the morning, when his passion has found resolution, when he has achieved what he so desired, the hero is close to despair? Why I.A. Bunin does not explain the motives for the heroine’s action? Does the heroine’s act seem paradoxical to you and what is its paradox? What colors are dominant in this story and how does this help reveal the author’s intent of the work? How does their relationship in the depiction of the world and the heroine change throughout the narrative? Clean Monday - Christian symbolism of the concept? Did the heroine go to the monastery and how does the fact that the story is told from the hero’s point of view reveal the author’s intention? What is the heroine's tragic mistake?

"Mr. from San Francisco"

Why does the story completely unexpectedly end with a seemingly inappropriate and yet completely “natural”, and not at all allegorical appearance of the Devil?

(“The devil was huge, like a cliff, but the ship was huge too...”)? What images in the story have symbolic meaning? In what country does the story "The Man from San Francisco" take place? What is hidden behind the description of the life of Atlantis passengers? What is the meaning of the allusion to the Titanic disaster (the name of the ship - "Atlantis" focused two "reminders": about the place of death - in the Atlantic Ocean, the mythical island-state mentioned by Plato, and the real unsinkable "Titanic" in 1912) ? Why does fate (and in its person the author) punish the hero, the gentleman from San Francisco, so cruelly? Why are there so few characters named in the story? What remains beyond the control of the modern New Man, according to the author’s plan of the story? What is the reaction of the Atlantis passengers to the death of the gentleman from San Francisco? What role does the description of the ocean and the dancing couple play in the story? How does the story describe the hero’s state of mind and how does it relate to the motive of the impending disaster? How does the author interpret the problem of death and the meaning of life? How does the world appear through the eyes of a man without a name (= gentleman from S-F)?

"Easy breath" Why is the novella called "Easy Breathing"? What kind of light breathing is being talked about here? Who does it belong to? What “this breath” are we talking about at the end of the story? Who does it belong to? Why did this breath “scatter again into the world”? Has it really disappeared from the world somewhere? If it disappeared, then where and why did it return? Who owns the point of view expressed in the last paragraph? Reproduce (in writing) the sequence of all the main events of the work. You probably noticed that the author violates their chronology. Now try to write down all the highlighted events in chronological order. Compare your reconstruction of events with the author's version of their unfolding. Why do you think (for what purpose) does the author tell the story about the life and death of Olya Meshcherskaya in such an unusual way? Why does he refuse the more natural and seemingly familiar course of the narrative? By the way, what event is the most important for the author, the heroine, and the reader? Carefully re-read the first five paragraphs of the novella. Watch the narrator's position change. Whose point of view is conveyed in his words? Who at the beginning of the story looks at the grave, the cross, the photograph of Olya Meshcherskaya, peers into her eyes? Whose point of view is depicted in the fifth paragraph? Try to substantiate your assumptions by analyzing the text. Why is the story told from this (and not another) point of view? You must have already noticed that it is important for the author not to talk about his heroine in general, but in a special way. It is on the relationship of points of view that he manipulates (i.e., on the features of the composition of the entire work) that the artistic meaning of “Easy Breathing” depends. List all the main points of view that illuminate the heroine’s life. Who do they belong to? Why did the author need to correlate so many different points of view with each other in one small work? What role does time play in the story (calendar, natural, biographical)? Using the list of main events in the story, try to determine the movement of narrative time from the present (at the grave) to the restoration of the past (Oli’s high school life) and beyond. Why does Bunin’s time, on the one hand, seem to be stopped (at the grave), and on the other hand, does it move unevenly and even in different directions (establish which ones)? Is it possible to say that the author in this work speaks of “lightness” as liberation, firstly, from the usual passage of time in general and, secondly, from the traditional reader’s interest, which is usually expressed in questions like “What will happen next? " and "How will it all end?"? Justify your point of view. Why does the author cut off the event connections: he does not tell what the attempted suicide of high school student Shenshin led to, how Olya’s conversation with the boss, interrupted on a dramatic note by the narrator, ended, what happened to Olya’s arrested killer , how did the relationship of Olya and her parents with their friend and her seducer Malyutin develop? What open places of action are the landscapes of the story connected with? How does the life of Olya Meshcherskaya “fit” into these landscapes? What closed places of action form the interiors? How does the life of Olya Meshcherskaya “fit” into these interiors? Name the portraits and portrait details that you encountered in this work. What is their role? Why does the narrator pay so much attention to the portrait characteristics of the heroine? How are these characteristics related to the landscapes of the story? Find air motifs in the landscapes, interiors and portraits of the story / / wind // breathing. What significance does the author attach to them? List all the episodes in the story where the crowd is mentioned. In what cases does the narrator pay attention to the fact that Olya Meshcherskaya blends in with the crowd, and when to the fact that she stands out from the crowd? What is the significance of the motifs of memory/death/book words in the short story (see Olya’s conversation with her friend about “easy breathing”)? How are they related to the motives listed above? How do the images of the world and man in the realistic works you know and Bunin’s “Easy Breathing” differ from each other?

For I. A. Bunin, the feeling of love is always a secret, great, unknowable and miracle beyond the control of human reason. In his stories, no matter what kind of love it is: strong, real, mutual, it never reaches marriage. He stops it at the highest point of pleasure and immortalizes it in prose.

From 1937 to 1945 Ivan Bunin writes an intriguing work, which will later be included in the collection “Dark Alleys”. While writing the book, the author emigrated to France. Thanks to the work on the story, the writer was to some extent distracted from the dark streak that was going on in his life.

Bunin said that “Clean Monday” is the best work that he wrote:

I thank God for giving me the opportunity to write “Clean Monday.”

Genre, direction

“Clean Monday” was written in the direction of realism. But before Bunin they didn’t write about love like that. The writer finds those only words that do not trivialize feelings, but each time rediscover emotions familiar to everyone.

The work “Clean Monday” is a short story, a small everyday work, somewhat similar to a short story. The difference can only be found in the plot and compositional structure. The short story genre, unlike the short story, is characterized by the presence of a certain turn of events. In this book, such a turn is a change in the heroine’s outlook on life and a sharp change in her lifestyle.

Meaning of the name

Ivan Bunin clearly draws a parallel with the title of the work, making the main character a girl who rushes between opposites and does not yet know what she needs in life. She changes for the better on Monday, and not just the first day of the new week, but a religious celebration, that turning point, which is marked by the church itself, where the heroine goes to cleanse herself of the luxury, idleness and bustle of her former life.

Clean Monday is the first holiday of Lent in the calendar, leading to Forgiveness Sunday. The author draws the thread of the turning point in the heroine’s life: from various amusements and unnecessary fun, to the adoption of religion, and leaving for a monastery.

The essence

The story is told in the first person. The main events are as follows: every evening the narrator visits a girl who lives opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, for whom he has strong feelings. He is extremely talkative, she is very silent. There was no intimacy between them, and this keeps him in bewilderment and some kind of expectation.

For some time they continue to go to theaters and spend evenings together. Forgiveness Sunday is approaching, and they go to the Novodevichy Convent. Along the way, the heroine talks about how yesterday she was at the schismatic cemetery, and with admiration describes the burial ceremony of the archbishop. The narrator had not previously noticed any religiosity in her, and therefore listened attentively, with glowing, loving eyes. The heroine notices this and is amazed at how much he loves her.

In the evening they go to a skit party, after which the narrator accompanies her home. The girl asks to let the coachmen go, which she hasn’t done before, and come up to her. It was just their evening.

In the morning, the heroine says that she is leaving for Tver, to the monastery - there is no need to wait or look for her.

The main characters and their characteristics

The image of the main character can be viewed from several angles of the narrator: a young man in love evaluates his chosen one as a participant in the events, and he also sees her in the role of a person who only remembers the past. His views on life after falling in love, after passion, change. By the end of the story, the reader now sees his maturity and depth of thoughts, but at the beginning the hero was blinded by his passion and did not see the character of his beloved behind it, did not feel her soul. This is the reason for his loss and the despair into which he plunged after the disappearance of the lady of his heart.

The girl's name cannot be found in the work. For the storyteller, this is simply the same one - unique. The heroine is an ambiguous nature. She has education, sophistication, intelligence, but at the same time she is withdrawn from the world. She is attracted by an unattainable ideal, to which she can only strive within the walls of the monastery. But at the same time, she fell in love with a man and cannot just leave him. The contrast of feelings leads to an internal conflict, which we can glimpse in her tense silence, in her desire for quiet and secluded corners, for reflection and solitude. The girl still cannot understand what she needs. She is seduced by a luxurious life, but at the same time, she resists it and tries to find something else that will illuminate her path with meaning. And in this honest choice, in this loyalty to oneself lies great strength, there is great happiness, which Bunin described with such pleasure.

Topics and issues

1. The main theme is love. It is she who gives a person meaning in life. For the girl, the guiding star was divine revelation, she found herself, but her chosen one, having lost the woman of his dreams, lost his way.
2. The problem of misunderstanding. The whole essence of the tragedy of heroes lies in misunderstanding each other. The girl, feeling love for the narrator, does not see anything good in this - for her this is a problem, and not a way out of a confusing situation. She is looking for herself not in the family, but in service and spiritual calling. He sincerely does not see this and tries to impose on her his vision of the future - the creation of marriage bonds.
3. Theme of choice also appears in the novella. Every person has a choice, and everyone decides for themselves what to do right. The main character chose her own path - entering a monastery. The hero continued to love her, and could not come to terms with her choice, because of this he could not find inner harmony, find himself.
4. Also I. A. Bunin can be traced theme of human purpose in life. The main character does not know what she wants, but she feels her calling. It is very difficult for her to understand herself, and because of this, the narrator also cannot fully understand her. However, she follows the call of her soul, vaguely guessing her destiny - the destiny of higher powers. And this is very good for both of them. If a woman made a mistake and got married, she would remain unhappy forever and blame the one who led her astray. And the man would suffer from unrequited happiness.
5. The problem of happiness. The hero sees him in love with the lady, but the lady moves along a different coordinate system. She will find harmony only alone with God.

the main idea

The writer writes about true love, which ultimately ends in breakup. The heroes make such decisions themselves; they have complete freedom of choice. And the meaning of their actions is the idea of ​​the entire book. Each of us must choose exactly that love that we can worship without complaint throughout our lives. A person must be true to himself and the passion that lives in his heart. The heroine found the strength to go to the end and, despite all doubts and temptations, to reach her cherished goal.

The main idea of ​​the novel is an ardent call for honest self-determination. There is no need to be afraid that someone will not understand or judge your decision if you are sure that this is your calling. In addition, a person must be able to resist those obstacles and temptations that prevent him from hearing his own voice. Fate depends on whether we are able to hear him, both our own fate and the position of those to whom we are dear.

Interesting? Save it on your wall!

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870 – 1953)

Easy breath

In the cemetery, over a fresh clay mound, there stands a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth.

April, gray days; The monuments of the cemetery, spacious, county, are still visible far away through the bare trees, and the cold wind rings and rings the porcelain wreath at the foot of the cross.

A rather large, convex porcelain medallion is embedded in the cross itself, and in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.

This is Olya Meshcherskaya.

As a girl, she did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown school dresses: what could be said about her, except that she was one of the pretty, rich and happy girls, that she was capable, but playful and very careless about the instructions that the classy lady gave her ? Then she began to blossom and develop by leaps and bounds. At fourteen, with a thin waist and slender legs, her breasts and all those forms, the charm of which had never yet been expressed by human words, were already well outlined: at fifteen she was already known as a beauty. How carefully some of her friends combed their hair, how clean they were, how careful they were about their restrained movements! But she was not afraid of anything - not ink stains on her fingers, not a flushed face, not disheveled hair, not a knee that became bare when falling while running. Without any of her worries or efforts, and somehow imperceptibly, everything that had so distinguished her from the entire gymnasium in the last two years came to her - grace, elegance, dexterity, the clear sparkle of her eyes... No one danced at balls like she, no one at the balls was courted as much as she was, and for some reason no one was loved as much by the lower classes as she was. Imperceptibly she became a girl, and her high school fame was imperceptibly strengthened, and rumors had already spread that she was flighty, could not live without admirers, that the school student Shenshin was madly in love with her, that she supposedly loved him too, but was so changeable in her treatment of him that he attempted suicide...

During her last winter, Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun, as they said in the gymnasium. The winter was snowy, sunny, frosty, the sun set early behind the tall spruce forest of the snowy gymnasium garden, invariably fine, radiant, promising frost and sun for tomorrow, a walk on Sobornaya Street, an ice skating rink in the city garden, a pink evening, music and this in all directions the crowd gliding on the skating rink, in which Olya Meshcherskaya seemed the most carefree, the happiest. And then, one day, during a big break, when she was rushing around the assembly hall like a whirlwind from the first-graders chasing her and squealing blissfully, she was unexpectedly called to the boss. She stopped running, took only one deep breath, straightened her hair with a quick and already familiar feminine movement, pulled the corners of her apron to her shoulders and, her eyes shining, ran upstairs. The boss, young-looking but gray-haired, sat calmly with knitting in her hands at her desk, under the royal portrait.

“Hello, Mademoiselle Meshcherskaya,” she said in French, without raising her eyes from her knitting. “Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have been forced to call you here to talk to you about your behavior.”

After lunch, we walked out of the brightly and hotly lit dining room onto the deck and stopped at the railing. She closed her eyes, put her hand to her cheek with her palm facing outward, laughed a simple, charming laugh - everything was charming about this little woman - and said:

I think I'm drunk... Where did you come from? Three hours ago I didn’t even know you existed. I don't even know where you sat down. In Samara? But still... Is it my head spinning or are we turning somewhere?

There was darkness and lights ahead. From the darkness, a strong, soft wind beat in the face, and the lights rushed somewhere to the side: the steamer, with Volga panache, abruptly described a wide arc, running up to a small pier.

The lieutenant took her hand and raised it to his lips. The hand, small and strong, smelled of tan. And her heart sank blissfully and terribly at the thought of how strong and dark she must be under this light canvas dress after a whole month of lying under the southern sun, on the hot sea sand (she said that she was coming from Anapa). The lieutenant muttered:

Let's go...

Where? - she asked in surprise.

On this pier.

He said nothing. She again put the back of her hand to her hot cheek.

Madness...

Let’s get down,” he repeated stupidly. “I beg you...

“Oh, do as you wish,” she said, turning away.

The runaway steamer hit the dimly lit dock with a soft thud, and they almost fell on top of each other. The end of the rope flew over their heads, then it rushed back, and the water boiled noisily, the gangway rattled... The lieutenant rushed to get his things.

A minute later they passed the sleepy office, came out onto sand deep as deep as the hub, and silently sat down in a dusty cab. The gentle climb uphill, among rare crooked streetlights, along a road soft with dust, seemed endless. But then they got up, drove out and crackled along the pavement, there was some kind of square, public places, a tower, the warmth and smells of a night summer provincial town... The cab driver stopped near the illuminated entrance, behind the open doors of which an old wooden staircase rose steeply, old, unshaven the footman in a pink blouse and frock coat took his things with displeasure and walked forward on his trampled feet. They entered a large, but terribly stuffy room, hotly heated by the sun during the day, with white drawn curtains on the windows and two unburnt candles on the mirror - and as soon as they entered and the footman closed the door, the lieutenant so impulsively rushed to her and both of them suffocated so frantically in a kiss that for many years later they remembered this moment: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives.

At ten o'clock in the morning, sunny, hot, happy, with the ringing of churches, with the bazaar on the square in front of the hotel, with the smell of hay, tar and again all that complex and odorous smell that a Russian district town smells of, she, this little nameless woman, who did not say her name, jokingly calling herself a beautiful stranger, left. We slept little, but in the morning, coming out from behind the screen near the bed, washing and dressing in five minutes, she was as fresh as she was at seventeen. Was she embarrassed? No, very little. She was still simple, cheerful and - already reasonable.

No, no, honey,” she said in response to his request to go further together, “no, you must stay until the next ship.” If we go together, everything will be ruined. This will be very unpleasant for me. I give you my word of honor that I am not at all what you might think of me. Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. The eclipse definitely hit me... Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke...

And the lieutenant somehow easily agreed with her. In a light and happy spirit, he took her to the pier - just in time for the departure of the pink "Airplane", - kissed her on the deck in front of everyone and barely had time to jump onto the gangplank, which had already moved back.

Just as easily, carefree, he returned to the hotel. However, something has changed. The room without her seemed somehow completely different than it was with her. He was still full of her - and empty. It was strange! There was still the smell of her good English cologne, her unfinished cup was still standing on the tray, but she was no longer there... And the lieutenant’s heart suddenly sank with such tenderness that the lieutenant hurried to light a cigarette and walked back and forth around the room several times.

Strange adventure! - he said out loud, laughing and feeling that tears were welling up in his eyes. “I give you my word of honor that I am not at all what you might think...” And she already left...

The screen had been pulled back, the bed had not yet been made. And he felt that he simply had no strength to look at this bed now. He covered it with a screen, closed the windows so as not to hear the market talk and the creaking of wheels, lowered the white bubbling curtains, sat down on the sofa... Yes, that’s the end of this “road adventure”! She left - and now she’s already far away, probably sitting in the glass white salon or on the deck and looking at the huge river glistening in the sun, at the oncoming rafts, at the yellow shallows, at the shining distance of water and sky, at this entire immeasurable Volga expanse. .. And forgive, and forever, forever... Because where can they meet now? “I can’t,” he thought, “I can’t, out of the blue, come to this city, where her husband is, where her three-year-old girl is, in general her whole family and her whole ordinary life!” And this city seemed to him like some kind of special, reserved city, and the thought that she would live her lonely life in it, often, perhaps, remembering him, remembering their chance, such a fleeting meeting, and he would never will not see her, this thought amazed and amazed him. No, this can't be! It would be too wild, unnatural, implausible! And he felt such pain and such uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.

"What the hell! - he thought, getting up, again starting to walk around the room and trying not to look at the bed behind the screen. - What is this with me? And what is special about it and what actually happened? In fact, it looks like some kind of sunstroke! And most importantly, how can I now spend the whole day in this outback without her?”

He still remembered all of her, with all her slightest features, he remembered the smell of her tan and canvas dress, her strong body, the lively, simple and cheerful sound of her voice... The feeling of the pleasures he had just experienced with all her feminine charm was still unusually alive in him , but now the main thing was still this second, completely new feeling - that strange, incomprehensible feeling that he could not even imagine in himself, starting yesterday this, as he thought, only a funny acquaintance, and about which it was no longer possible to tell her Now! “And most importantly,” he thought, “you’ll never be able to tell!” And what to do, how to live this endless day, with these memories, with this insoluble torment, in this God-forsaken town above the very shining Volga along which this pink steamer carried her away!

I needed to save myself, do something, distract myself, go somewhere. He resolutely put on his cap, took the stack, quickly walked, jingling his spurs, along the empty corridor, ran down the steep stairs to the entrance... Yes, but where to go? At the entrance stood a cab driver, young, in a smart suit, and calmly smoking a cigarette. The lieutenant looked at him in confusion and amazement: how can you sit so calmly on the box, smoke and generally be simple, careless, indifferent? “I’m probably the only one so terribly unhappy in this whole city,” he thought, heading towards the bazaar.

The market was already leaving. For some reason he walked through the fresh manure among the carts, among the carts with cucumbers, among the new bowls and pots, and the women sitting on the ground vied with each other to call him, took the pots in their hands and knocked, rang them with their fingers, showing their good quality, men they stunned him, shouted to him: “Here are the first grade cucumbers, your honor!” It was all so stupid and absurd that he fled from the market. He went to the cathedral, where they were singing loudly, cheerfully and decisively, with the consciousness of a fulfilled duty, then he walked for a long time, circling around the small, hot and neglected garden on the cliff of a mountain, above the boundless light steel expanse of the river... Shoulder straps and buttons of his jacket it was so hot that it was impossible to touch them. The inside of his cap was wet from sweat, his face was burning... Returning to the hotel, he entered with pleasure into the large and empty cool dining room on the ground floor, took off his cap with pleasure and sat down at a table near the open window, through which there was a heat, but everything - there was a whiff of air, I ordered a botvinya with ice... Everything was good, there was immeasurable happiness, great joy in everything; even in this heat and in all the smells of the market, in this whole unfamiliar town and in this old county hotel there was it, this joy, and at the same time the heart was simply torn to pieces. He drank several glasses of vodka, snacked on lightly salted cucumbers with dill and felt that he, without a second thought, would die tomorrow, if by some miracle he could return her, spend another, this day, with her - spend only then, only then, to tell her and prove it somehow, to convince her how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her... Why prove it? Why convince? He didn’t know why, but it was more necessary than life.

My nerves were completely gone! - he said, pouring his fifth glass of vodka.

He pushed his shoe away from him, asked for black coffee and began to smoke and think intensely: what should he do now, how to get rid of this sudden, unexpected love? But getting rid of it - he felt it too vividly - was impossible. And he suddenly quickly stood up again, took his cap and riding stack and, asking where the post office was, hurriedly went there with the phrase of the telegram already prepared in his head: “From now on, my whole life is forever, until the grave, yours, in your power.” But, having reached the old thick-walled house where there was a post office and telegraph, he stopped in horror: he knew the city where she lived, he knew that she had a husband and a three-year-old daughter, but he did not know her last name or first name! He asked her about this several times yesterday at dinner and at the hotel, and each time she laughed and said:

Why do you need to know who I am, what my name is?

On the corner, near the post office, there was a photographic showcase. He looked for a long time at a large portrait of some military man in thick epaulets, with bulging eyes, a low forehead, with amazingly magnificent sideburns and a wide chest, completely decorated with orders... How wild, scary is everything everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck, - Yes, he was amazed, he now understood it, by this terrible “sunstroke,” by too much love, by too much happiness! He looked at the newlywed couple - a young man in a long frock coat and white tie, with a crew cut, stretched out in front on the arm of a girl in a wedding gauze - he turned his eyes to the portrait of some pretty and perky young lady in a student’s cap at an askew... Then, languishing with painful envy of all these unknown, non-suffering people, he began to look intently along the street.

Where to go? What to do?

The street was completely empty. The houses were all the same, white, two-story, merchant houses, with large gardens, and it seemed that there was not a soul in them; white thick dust lay on the pavement; and all this was blinding, everything was flooded with hot, fiery and joyful, but here it seemed like an aimless sun. In the distance the street rose, hunched over and rested on a cloudless, grayish sky with a reflection. There was something southern about it, reminiscent of Sevastopol, Kerch... Anapa. This was especially unbearable. And the lieutenant, with his head bowed, squinting from the light, intently looking at his feet, staggering, stumbling, clinging spur to spur, walked back.

He returned to the hotel so overwhelmed with fatigue, as if he had made a huge trek somewhere in Turkestan, in the Sahara. He, gathering his last strength, entered his large and empty room. The room was already tidy, devoid of the last traces of her - only one hairpin, forgotten by her, lay on the night table! He took off his jacket and looked at himself in the mirror: his face - an ordinary officer’s face, gray from the tan, with a whitish mustache, bleached from the sun, and bluish white eyes, which seemed even whiter from the tan - now had an excited, crazy expression, and in There was something youthful and deeply unhappy about the thin white shirt with a standing starched collar. He lay down on the bed on his back and put his dusty boots on the dump. The windows were open, the curtains were drawn, and a light breeze blew them in from time to time, blowing into the room the heat of heated iron roofs and all this luminous and now completely empty, silent Volga world. He lay with his hands under the back of his head and looked intently in front of him. Then he clenched his teeth, closed his eyelids, feeling the tears rolling down his cheeks from under them, and finally fell asleep, and when he opened his eyes again, the evening sun was already turning reddish yellow behind the curtains. The wind died down, the room was stuffy and dry, like in an oven... And yesterday and this morning were remembered as if they had happened ten years ago.

He slowly got up, slowly washed his face, raised the curtains, rang the bell and asked for the samovar and the bill, and drank tea with lemon for a long time. Then he ordered a cab driver to be brought, things to be taken out, and, sitting in the cab, on its red, faded seat, he gave the footman five whole rubles.

And it looks like, your honor, that it was I who brought you at night! - the driver said cheerfully, taking the reins.

When we went down to the pier, the blue summer night was already shining over the Volga, and many colorful lights were already scattered along the river, and the lights were hanging on the masts of the approaching steamship.

Delivered promptly! - the cab driver said ingratiatingly.

The lieutenant gave him five rubles, took a ticket, walked to the pier... Just like yesterday, there was a soft knock on its pier and slight dizziness from the unsteadiness underfoot, then a flying end, the sound of water boiling and running forward under the wheels a little back the steamer pulled up... And the crowd of people on this ship, already everywhere lit and smelling of kitchen, seemed unusually friendly and good.

The dark summer dawn faded far ahead, gloomily, sleepily and multi-coloredly reflected in the river, which in some places still glowed like trembling ripples in the distance beneath it, under this dawn, and the lights floated and floated back, scattered in the darkness around.

The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.

The Moscow gray winter day was darkening, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the store windows were warmly illuminated - and the evening life of Moscow flared up, freed from daytime affairs; The cab sleighs rushed thicker and more vigorously, the crowded, diving trams rattled more heavily - in the dusk one could already see how green stars hissed from the wires, - the dimly blackened passers-by hurried more animatedly along the snowy sidewalks... Every evening rushed me at this hour to the stretching trotter is my coachman - from the Red Gate to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: she lived opposite him; every evening I took her to dinner in Prague, the Hermitage, the Metropol, after dinner to theaters, concerts, and then to Yar in Strelna... How all this should end, I don’t know knew and tried not to think, not to think: it was useless - just like talking to her about it: she once and for all put aside conversations about our future; she was mysterious, incomprehensible to me, and our relationship with her was strange - we were still not very close; and all this endlessly kept me in unresolved tension, in painful anticipation - and at the same time I was incredibly happy with every hour spent near her.

For some reason, she took courses, attended them quite rarely, but attended them. I once asked: “Why?” She shrugged her shoulder: “Why is everything done in the world? Do we understand anything in our actions? In addition, I am interested in history...” She lived alone - her widowed father, an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, lived in retirement in Tver, collecting something, like all such merchants. In the house opposite the Church of the Savior, for the sake of the view of Moscow, she rented a corner apartment on the fifth floor, only two rooms, but spacious and well furnished. In the first, a wide Turkish sofa occupied a lot of space, there was an expensive piano, on which she kept practicing the slow, somnambulistically beautiful beginning of the “Moonlight Sonata” - only one beginning - on the piano and on the mirror-glass, elegant flowers bloomed in cut vases - on my order fresh ones were delivered to her every Saturday - and when I came to see her on Saturday evening, she, lying on the sofa, above which for some reason hung a portrait of a barefoot Tolstoy, slowly extended her hand to me for a kiss and absentmindedly said: “Thank you for the flowers. ..” I brought her boxes of chocolate, new books - Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmeier, Przybyszewski - and received the same “thank you” and an outstretched warm hand, sometimes an order to sit near the sofa without taking off my coat. “It’s not clear why,” she said thoughtfully, stroking my beaver collar, “but it seems that nothing can be better than the smell of winter air with which you enter the room from the yard...” It looked like she didn’t need anything : no flowers, no books, no lunches, no theaters, no dinners out of town, although she still had flowers that she liked and didn’t like, she always read all the books that I brought her, she ate a whole box of chocolate in a day, At lunch and dinner she ate as much as I did, she loved pies with burbot fish soup, pink hazel grouse in deep-fried sour cream, sometimes she said: “I don’t understand how people won’t get tired of this all their lives, having lunch and dinner every day,” but she herself had lunch and dinner with a Moscow understanding of the matter. Her obvious weakness was only good clothes, velvet, silk, expensive fur...

We were both rich, healthy, young and so good-looking that people stared at us in restaurants and at concerts. I, being from the Penza province, was at that time handsome for some reason with a southern, hot beauty, I was even “indecently handsome,” as one famous actor, a monstrously fat man, a great glutton and a clever man once told me. “The devil knows who you are, some Sicilian,” he said sleepily; and my character was southern, lively, always ready for a happy smile, for a good joke. And she had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty: a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous hair in its thick blackness, softly shining like black sable fur, eyebrows, eyes black as velvet coal; the mouth, captivating with velvety crimson lips, was shaded with dark fluff; when going out, she most often put on a garnet velvet dress and the same shoes with gold buckles (and she went to courses as a modest student, ate breakfast for thirty kopecks in a vegetarian canteen on Arbat); and as much as I was inclined to talkativeness, to simple-hearted gaiety, she was most often silent: she was always thinking about something, she seemed to be mentally delving into something: lying on the sofa with a book in her hands, she often lowered it and looked questioningly in front of her. myself: I saw this, sometimes visiting her during the day, because every month she did not leave the house for three or four days at all, she lay and read, forcing me to sit in a chair near the sofa and read silently.

“You are terribly talkative and restless,” she said, “let me finish reading the chapter...

If I hadn’t been talkative and restless, I might never have recognized you,” I answered, reminding her of our acquaintance: one day in December, when I got to the Art Circle for a lecture by Andrei Bely, who sang it while running and dancing on the stage, I spun and laughed so much that she, who happened to be in the chair next to me and at first looked at me with some bewilderment, also finally laughed, and I immediately turned to her cheerfully.

“That’s all right,” she said, “but still be silent for a while, read something, smoke...

I can't remain silent! You can’t imagine the full power of my love for you! You don't love me!

I present. As for my love, you know very well that besides my father and you, I have no one in the world. In any case, you are my first and last. Is this not enough for you? But enough about that. We can’t read in front of you, let’s drink tea...

And I got up, boiled water in an electric kettle on the table behind the sofa, took cups and saucers from the walnut pile that stood in the corner behind the table, saying whatever came to mind:

Have you finished reading “Fire Angel”?

I finished watching it. It’s so pompous that I’m ashamed to read it.

He was too daring. And then I don’t like yellow-haired Rus' at all.

You don't like everything!

Yes, a lot...

"Odd love!" - I thought and, while the water was boiling, I stood and looked out the windows. The room smelled of flowers, and for me she connected with their smell; outside one window, a huge picture of the snow-gray Moscow across the river lay low in the distance; in the other, to the left, part of the Kremlin was visible; on the contrary, somehow too close, the too-new bulk of Christ the Savior loomed white, in the golden dome of which the jackdaws forever hovering around it were reflected with bluish spots... “Strange city! - I said to myself, thinking about Okhotny Ryad, about Iverskaya, about St. Basil. - St. Basil and Spas-on-Boru, Italian cathedrals - and something Kyrgyz in the tips of the towers on the Kremlin walls...”

Arriving at dusk, I sometimes found her on the sofa in only one silk archaluk trimmed with sable - the inheritance of my Astrakhan grandmother, she said - I sat next to her in the semi-darkness, without lighting the fire, and kissed her hands and feet, amazing in their smoothness body... And she did not resist anything, but all in silence. I constantly searched for her hot lips - she gave them, breathing fitfully, but all in silence. When she felt that I was no longer able to control myself, she pushed me away, sat down and, without raising her voice, asked to turn on the light, then went into the bedroom. I lit it, sat on a swivel stool near the piano and gradually came to my senses, cooled down from the hot intoxication. A quarter of an hour later she came out of the bedroom, dressed, ready to leave, calm and simple, as if nothing had happened before:

Where to today? To Metropol, maybe?

And again we spent the whole evening talking about something unrelated.

Soon after we became close, she said to me when I started talking about marriage:

No, I'm not fit to be a wife. I'm not good, I'm not good...

This didn't discourage me. “We’ll see from there!” - I said to myself in the hope that her decision would change over time and no longer talked about marriage. Our incomplete intimacy sometimes seemed unbearable to me, but even here, what was left for me except hope for time? One day, sitting next to her in this evening darkness and silence, I grabbed my head:

No, this is beyond my strength! And why, why do you have to torture me and yourself so cruelly!

She remained silent.

Yes, after all, this is not love, not love...

She evenly responded from the darkness:

May be. Who knows what love is?

I, I know! - I exclaimed. “And I will wait for you to know what love and happiness are!”

Happiness, happiness... “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing.”

What's this?

This is what Platon Karataev told Pierre.

I waved my hand.

Oh, God bless her, with this eastern wisdom!

And again, the whole evening he talked only about strangers - about the new production of the Art Theater, about Andreev's new story... Again, it was enough for me that I was first sitting closely with her in a flying and rolling sleigh, holding her in the smooth fur of a fur coat , then I enter with her into the crowded hall of the restaurant accompanied by a march from “Aida”, eat and drink next to her, hear her slow voice, look at the lips that I kissed an hour ago - yes, I kissed, I told myself, with enthusiastic gratitude looking at them, at the dark fluff above them, at the garnet velvet of the dress, at the slope of the shoulders and the oval of the breasts, smelling some slightly spicy smell of her hair, thinking: “Moscow, Astrakhan, Persia, India!” In restaurants outside the city, towards the end of dinner, when the tobacco smoke all around became noisier, she, also smoking and tipsy, would sometimes take me to a separate office, ask me to call the gypsies, and they would enter deliberately noisily, cheekily: in front of the choir, with a guitar on a blue ribbon over his shoulder, an old gypsy in a Cossack coat with braid, with the gray muzzle of a drowned man, with a head as bare as a cast-iron ball, behind him a gypsy singer with a low forehead under tar bangs... She listened to the songs with a languid, strange smile... At three or four o'clock in the morning I took her home, at the entrance, closing my eyes in happiness, kissing the wet fur of her collar and in some kind of ecstatic despair flew to the Red Gate. And tomorrow and the day after tomorrow everything will be the same, I thought - all the same torment and all the same happiness... Well, still happiness, great happiness!

So January and February passed, Maslenitsa came and went.

On Forgiveness Sunday, she ordered me to come to her at five o’clock in the evening. I arrived, and she met me already dressed, in a short astrakhan fur coat, astrakhan hat, and black felt boots.

All Black! - I said, entering, as always, joyfully.

Her eyes were joyful and quiet.

How do you know this? Ripids, trikiriyas!

It's you who don't know me.

I didn't know you were so religious.

This is not religiosity. I don’t know what... But I, for example, often go out in the mornings or evenings, when you don’t drag me to restaurants, to the Kremlin cathedrals, and you don’t even suspect it... So: deacons - yes what! Peresvet and Oslyabya! And on two choirs there are two choirs, also all Peresvets: tall, powerful, in long black caftans, they sing, calling to each other - first one choir, then the other - and all in unison and not according to notes, but according to “hooks”. And the inside of the grave was lined with shiny spruce branches, and outside it was frosty, sunny, blinding snow... No, you don’t understand this! Let's go...

The evening was peaceful, sunny, with frost on the trees; on the bloody brick walls of the monastery, jackdaws chattered in silence, looking like nuns, and the chimes played subtly and sadly every now and then in the bell tower. Creaking in silence through the snow, we entered the gate, walked along the snowy paths through the cemetery - the sun had just set, it was still quite light, the branches in the frost were marvelously drawn on the golden enamel of the sunset like gray coral, and mysteriously glowed around us with calm, sad lights unquenchable lamps scattered over the graves. I followed her, looking with emotion at her little footprint, at the stars that her new black boots left in the snow - she suddenly turned around, feeling it:

It's true how you love me! - she said, shaking her head in quiet bewilderment.

We stood near the graves of Ertel and Chekhov. Holding her hands in her lowered muff, she looked for a long time at the Chekhov grave monument, then shrugged her shoulder:

What a nasty mixture of Russian leaf style and the Art Theater!

It began to get dark and freezing, we slowly walked out of the gate, near which my Fyodor was obediently sitting on a box.

“We’ll drive a little more,” she said, “then we’ll go eat the last pancakes at Yegorov’s... But it won’t be too much, Fedor, right?”

Somewhere on Ordynka there is a house where Griboyedov lived. Let's go look for him...

And for some reason we went to Ordynka, drove for a long time along some alleys in the gardens, were in Griboyedovsky Lane; but who could tell us which house Griboedov lived in - there wasn’t a soul passing by, and who of them could need Griboyedov? It had long since gotten dark, the frost-lit windows behind the trees were turning pink...

There is also the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent here,” she said.

I laughed:

Back to the monastery again?

No, that's just me...

On the ground floor of Yegorov's tavern in Okhotny Ryad it was full of shaggy, thickly dressed cab drivers cutting up stacks of pancakes, doused in excess with butter and sour cream; it was steamy, like in a bathhouse. In the upper rooms, also very warm, with low ceilings, the Old Testament merchants washed down fiery pancakes with grainy caviar with frozen champagne. We went into the second room, where in the corner, in front of the black board of the icon of the Mother of God of the Three Hands, a lamp was burning, we sat down at a long table on a black leather sofa... The fluff on her upper lip was frosted, the amber of her cheeks turned slightly pink, the blackness of the paradise completely merged with pupil, - I could not take my enthusiastic eyes off her face. And she said, taking a handkerchief from her fragrant muff:

Fine! There are wild men below, and here are pancakes with champagne and the Mother of God of Three Hands. Three hands! After all, this is India!

You are a gentleman, you cannot understand this whole Moscow the way I do.

I can, I can! - I answered. “And let’s order lunch!”

How do you mean “strong”?

This means strong. How come you don't know? “Gyurgi’s speech...”

Yes, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky. “Gyurga’s speech to Svyatoslav, Prince of Seversky: “Come to me, brother, in Moscow” and ordered a strong dinner.”

How good. And now only this Rus' remains in some northern monasteries. Yes, even in church hymns. Recently I went to the Conception Monastery - you can’t imagine how wonderfully the stichera are sung there! And in Chudovoy it’s even better. Last year I kept going there for Strastnaya. Oh, how good it was! There are puddles everywhere, the air is already soft, my soul is somehow tender, sad, and all the time there is this feeling of the homeland, its antiquity... All the doors in the cathedral are open, all day long ordinary people come and go, all day long the service... Oh, I’ll leave I’m going somewhere to a monastery, to some very remote one, in Vologda, Vyatka!

I wanted to say that then I too would leave or kill someone so that they would drive me to Sakhalin, I lit a cigarette, lost in excitement, but a floor guard in white pants and a white shirt, belted with a crimson tourniquet, approached and respectfully reminded:

Sorry, sir, smoking is not allowed here...

And immediately, with special obsequiousness, he began quickly:

What would you like with the pancakes? Homemade herbalist? Caviar, salmon? Our sherry is exceptionally good for ears, but for navazhka...

And to the sherry,” she added, delighting me with her kind talkativeness, which did not leave her all evening. And I was already absent-mindedly listening to what she said next. And she spoke with a quiet light in her eyes:

I love Russian chronicles, I love Russian legends so much that I keep re-reading what I especially like until I know it by heart. “There was a city in the Russian land called Murom, and a noble prince named Paul reigned in it. And the devil introduced a flying serpent to his wife for fornication. And this serpent appeared to her in human nature, extremely beautiful...”

Jokingly, I made scary eyes:

Oh, what a horror!

This is how God tested her. “When the time came for her blessed death, this prince and princess begged God to repose before them on one day. And they agreed to be buried in a single coffin. And they ordered to carve two grave beds in a single stone. And they also put on the monastic robe at the same time...”

And again my absent-mindedness gave way to surprise and even anxiety: what’s wrong with her today?

And so, that evening, when I took her home at a completely different time than usual, at eleven o’clock, she, saying goodbye to me at the entrance, suddenly detained me when I was already getting into the sleigh:

Wait. Come see me tomorrow evening no earlier than ten. Tomorrow is the “cabbage party” of the Art Theater.

So? - I asked. “Do you want to go to this “cabbage party”?

But you said that you don’t know anything more vulgar than these “cabbages”!

And now I don’t know. And still I want to go.

I mentally shook my head - all quirks, Moscow quirks! - and cheerfully responded:

Ol right!

At ten o'clock in the evening the next day, having gone up in the elevator to her door, I opened the door with my key and did not immediately enter from the dark hallway: behind it it was unusually light, everything was lit - chandeliers, candelabra on the sides of the mirror and a tall lamp under the light lampshade behind the head of the sofa, and the piano sounded the beginning of the “Moonlight Sonata” - increasingly rising, sounding the further, the more languid, more inviting, in somnambulist-blissful sadness. I slammed the hallway door - the sounds stopped and the rustling of a dress was heard. I entered - she stood straight and somewhat theatrically near the piano in a black velvet dress, which made her look thinner, shining with its elegance, the festive headdress of her jet-black hair, the dark amber of her bare arms, shoulders, the tender, full beginning of her breasts, the sparkle of diamond earrings along her slightly powdered cheeks, coal velvet eyes and velvety purple lips; At her temples, black, shiny braids curled in half-rings toward her eyes, giving her the look of an oriental beauty from a popular print.

Now, if I were a singer and sang on the stage,” she said, looking at my confused face, “I would respond to applause with a friendly smile and slight bows to the right and left, up and to the stalls, and I would imperceptibly but carefully push away with my foot a train so as not to step on it...

At the "cabbage party" she smoked a lot and kept sipping champagne, looked intently at the actors, with lively cries and choruses portraying something as if Parisian, at the big Stanislavsky with white hair and black eyebrows and the thick-set Moskvin in pince-nez on his trough-shaped face - both with deliberate With seriousness and diligence, falling backwards, they performed a desperate cancan to the laughter of the audience. Kachalov came up to us with a glass in his hand, pale from hops, with heavy sweat on his forehead, on which a tuft of his Belarusian hair hung, raised his glass and, looking at her with feigned gloomy greed, said in his low actor’s voice:

Tsar Maiden, Queen of Shamakhan, your health!

And she smiled slowly and clinked glasses with him. He took her hand, drunkenly fell towards her and almost fell off his feet. He managed and, gritting his teeth, looked at me:

What kind of handsome guy is this? I hate it.

Then the organ wheezed, whistled and thundered, the barrel organ skipped and stomped its polka - and a small Sulerzhitsky, always in a hurry and laughing, flew up to us, gliding, bending over, feigning Gostiny Dvor gallantry, and hastily muttered:

Allow me to invite Tranblanc to the table...

And she, smiling, stood up and, deftly, with a short stamp of her feet, sparkling with her earrings, her blackness and bare shoulders and arms, walked with him among the tables, followed by admiring glances and applause, while he, raising his head, shouted like a goat:

Let's go, let's go quickly
Polka dance with you!

At three o'clock in the morning she stood up, closing her eyes. When we got dressed, she looked at my beaver hat, stroked the beaver collar and went to the exit, saying either jokingly or seriously:

Of course he is beautiful. Kachalov said the truth... “The serpent is in human nature, extremely beautiful...”

On the way she was silent, bowing her head from the bright moonlit snowstorm flying towards her. For a full month he dived in the clouds above the Kremlin - “some kind of glowing skull,” she said. The clock on the Spasskaya Tower struck three, and she also said:

What an ancient sound - something tin and cast iron. And just like that, with the same sound, three o’clock in the morning struck in the fifteenth century.

And in Florence there was exactly the same battle, it reminded me of Moscow...

When Fyodor stopped at the entrance, she lifelessly ordered:

Let him go...

Amazed, - she never allowed her to go up to her at night, - I said in confusion:

Fedor, I'll return on foot...

And we silently reached up in the elevator, entered the night warmth and silence of the apartment with hammers clicking in the heaters. I took off her fur coat, slippery from the snow, she threw a wet down shawl from her hair onto my hands and quickly walked, rustling her silk underskirt, into the bedroom. I undressed, entered the first room and, with my heart sinking as if over an abyss, sat down on the Turkish sofa. Her steps could be heard behind the open doors of the illuminated bedroom, the way she, clinging to the stilettos, pulled her dress over her head... I stood up and went to the doors: she, wearing only swan slippers, stood with her back to me, in front of dressing table, combing with a tortoiseshell comb the black threads of long hair hanging along her face.

“He kept saying that I don’t think much about him,” she said, throwing the comb on the mirror-glass, and, throwing her hair over her back, turned to me: “No, I thought...

At dawn I felt her movement. I opened my eyes and she was staring at me. I rose from the warmth of the bed and her body, she leaned towards me, quietly and evenly saying:

This evening I'm leaving for Tver. For how long, only God knows...

And she pressed her cheek to mine - I felt her wet eyelash blink.

I'll write everything as soon as I arrive. I will write everything about the future. Sorry, leave me now, I'm very tired...

And she lay down on the pillow.

I dressed carefully, timidly kissed her hair and tiptoed out onto the stairs, already brightening with a pale light. I walked on foot through the young sticky snow - there was no longer a blizzard, everything was calm and already visible far along the streets, there was a smell of snow and from the bakeries. I reached Iverskaya, the inside of which was burning hotly and shining with whole bonfires of candles, stood in the crowd of old women and beggars on the trampled snow on my knees, took off my hat... Someone touched me on the shoulder - I looked: some unfortunate old woman was looking at me , wincing with pitiful tears:

Oh, don't kill yourself, don't kill yourself like that! Sin, sin!

The letter I received two weeks after that was brief - an affectionate but firm request not to wait for her any longer, not to try to look for her, to see: “I won’t return to Moscow, I’ll go to obedience for now, then, maybe, I’ll decide to take monastic vows.. May God give me the strength not to answer me - it is useless to prolong and increase our torment...”

I fulfilled her request. And for a long time he disappeared into the dirtiest taverns, became an alcoholic, sinking more and more in every possible way. Then he began to recover little by little - indifferently, hopelessly... Almost two years have passed since that clean Monday...

In the fourteenth year, on New Year’s Eve, there was the same quiet, sunny evening as that unforgettable one. I left the house, took a cab and went to the Kremlin. There he went into the empty Archangel Cathedral, stood for a long time, without praying, in its twilight, looking at the faint shimmer of the old gold iconostasis and the tombstones of the Moscow kings - stood, as if waiting for something, in that special silence of an empty church when you are afraid to breathe in her. Coming out of the cathedral, he ordered the cab driver to go to Ordynka, drove at a pace, as then, along dark alleys in gardens with windows illuminated under them, drove along Griboedovsky Lane - and kept crying and crying...

On Ordynka, I stopped a cab at the gates of the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery: there were black carriages in the courtyard, the open doors of a small illuminated church were visible, and the singing of a girls’ choir flowed sadly and tenderly from the doors. For some reason I definitely wanted to go there. The janitor at the gate blocked my path, asking softly, pleadingly:

You can't, sir, you can't!

How can you not? Can't go to church?

You can, sir, of course you can, I just ask you for God’s sake, don’t go, Grand Duchess Elzavet Fedrovna and Grand Duke Mitriy Palych are there right now...

Arriving in Moscow, I thievishly stayed in inconspicuous rooms in an alley near Arbat and lived painfully, as a recluse, from date to date with her. She visited me only three times these days and each time she entered hastily, saying:

- I’m just for one minute...

She was pale with the beautiful paleness of a loving, excited woman, her voice broke, and the way she, throwing her umbrella anywhere, hurried to lift her veil and hug me, shocked me with pity and delight.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that he suspects something, that he even knows something—maybe he read one of your letters, picked up the key to my desk... I think he’s ready for anything.” capable given his cruel, proud character. Once he directly told me: “I will stop at nothing to defend my honor, the honor of my husband and officer!” Now for some reason he is literally watching my every move, and for our plan to succeed, I have to be terribly careful. He already agrees to let me go, so I inspired him that I would die if I didn’t see the south, the sea, but, for God’s sake, be patient!

Our plan was daring: to leave on the same train to the Caucasian coast and live there in some completely wild place for three or four weeks. I knew this coast, I once lived for some time near Sochi - young, lonely - I remembered those autumn evenings among the black cypress trees, by the cold gray waves for the rest of my life... And she turned pale when I said: “And now I I’ll be there with you, in the mountain jungle, by the tropical sea...” We didn’t believe in the implementation of our plan until the last minute - it seemed to us too much happiness.

It was raining coldly in Moscow, it looked as if summer had already passed and would not return, it was dirty, gloomy, the streets were wet and black, glittering with the open umbrellas of passers-by and the raised tops of cabbies, trembling as they ran. And it was a dark, disgusting evening when I was driving to the station, everything inside me froze from anxiety and cold. I ran through the station and along the platform, pulling my hat over my eyes and burying my face in the collar of my coat.

In the small first class compartment that I had booked in advance, the rain poured noisily on the roof. I immediately lowered the window curtain and, as soon as the porter, wiping his wet hand on his white apron, took the tip and went out, I locked the door. Then he opened the curtain slightly and froze, not taking his eyes off the diverse crowd scurrying back and forth with their things along the carriage in the dark light of the station lamps. We agreed that I would arrive at the station as early as possible, and she as late as possible, so that I would somehow avoid running into her and him on the platform. Now it was time for them to be. I looked more and more tensely - they were all gone. The second bell rang and I was frozen with fear: I was late or he suddenly didn’t let her in at the last minute! But immediately after that I was struck by his tall figure, officer’s cap, narrow overcoat and hand in a suede glove, with which he, striding widely, held her arm. I staggered away from the window and fell into the corner of the sofa. There was a second-class carriage nearby - I mentally saw how he economically entered it with her, looked around to see if the porter had arranged for her well - and took off his glove, took off his cap, kissing her, baptizing her... The third bell deafened me , the moving train plunged me into a daze... The train dispersed, rocking, swaying, then began to move smoothly, at full steam... I thrust a ten-ruble note into the conductor who escorted her to me and carried her things with an icy hand...

When she entered, she didn’t even kiss me, she just smiled pitifully, sitting down on the sofa and taking off her hat, unhooking it from her hair.

“I couldn’t have lunch at all,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand this terrible role to the end.” And I'm terribly thirsty. Give me Narzana,” she said, saying “you” to me for the first time. “I am convinced that he will follow me.” I gave him two addresses, Gelendzhik and Gagra. Well, in three or four days he will be in Gelendzhik... But God be with him, death is better than this torment...

In the morning, when I went out into the corridor, it was sunny, stuffy, the restrooms smelled of soap, cologne and everything that a crowded carriage smells of in the morning. Behind the windows, clouded with dust and heated, there was a flat, scorched steppe, dusty wide roads were visible, carts drawn by oxen, railway booths with canary circles of sunflowers and scarlet hollyhocks in the front gardens flashed... Then went the boundless expanse of naked plains with mounds and burial grounds, an unbearable dry sun, a sky like a dusty cloud, then the ghosts of the first mountains on the horizon...

She sent him a postcard from Gelendzhik and Gagra, writing that she did not yet know where she would stay.

Then we went down along the coast to the south.

We found a primeval place, overgrown with plane tree forests, flowering bushes, mahogany, magnolias, pomegranates, among which rose fan palms and black cypresses...

I woke up early and, while she was sleeping, before tea, which we drank at seven o’clock, I walked through the hills into the forest thickets. The hot sun was already strong, pure and joyful. In the forests, the fragrant fog glowed azurely, dispersed and melted, behind the distant wooded peaks the eternal whiteness of the snowy mountains shone... Back I walked through the sultry bazaar of our village, smelling of burning dung from the chimneys: trade was in full swing there, it was crowded with people, with riding horses and donkeys - in the mornings many different mountaineers gathered there for the market - Circassian women walked smoothly in black clothes long to the ground, in red boots, with their heads wrapped in something black, with quick bird-like glances that sometimes flashed from this mournful wrapping.

Then we went to the shore, which was always completely empty, swam and lay in the sun until breakfast. After breakfast - all the fish fried on a scallop, white wine, nuts and fruits - in the sultry darkness of our hut under the tiled roof, hot, cheerful streaks of light stretched through the through shutters.

When the heat subsided and we opened the window, the part of the sea visible from it between the cypress trees standing on the slope below us was the color of violet and lay so evenly, peacefully that it seemed there would never be an end to this peace, this beauty.

At sunset, amazing clouds often piled up beyond the sea; they glowed so magnificently that she sometimes lay down on the ottoman, covered her face with a gauze scarf and cried: another two, three weeks - and again Moscow!

The nights were warm and impenetrable, fire flies swam, flickered, and shone with topaz light in the black darkness, tree frogs rang like glass bells. When the eye got used to the darkness, stars and mountain ridges appeared above, trees that we had not noticed during the day loomed above the village. And all night long one could hear from there, from the dukhan, the dull knocking of a drum and a guttural, mournful, hopelessly happy cry, as if all of the same endless song.

Not far from us, in a coastal ravine that descended from the forest to the sea, a small, transparent river quickly jumped along a rocky bed. How wonderfully its brilliance shattered and simmered at that mysterious hour when the late moon gazed intently from behind the mountains and forests, like some wondrous creature!

Sometimes at night terrible clouds would roll in from the mountains, a vicious storm would blow, and in the noisy, deathly blackness of the forests magical green abysses would continually open up and antediluvian thunderclaps would crack in the heavenly heights. Then eaglets woke up and meowed in the forests, the leopard roared, the chicks yelped... Once a whole flock of them came running to our illuminated window - they always run to their homes on such nights - we opened the window and looked at them from above, and they stood under a brilliant shower and yapped, asking to come to us... She cried joyfully, looking at them.

He looked for her in Gelendzhik, Gagra, and Sochi. The next day, after arriving in Sochi, he swam in the sea in the morning, then shaved, put on clean underwear, a snow-white jacket, had breakfast at his hotel on the restaurant terrace, drank a bottle of champagne, drank coffee with chartreuse, and slowly smoked a cigar. Returning to his room, he lay down on the sofa and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers.