Alexander Stepanovich Green
Stories included by A.S. Green to the list of works for the collected works of the publishing house "Mysl"
http://publ.lib.ruPravda, 1980;Fate taken by the horns
In December, the moon was surrounded by a double orange halo for two nights in a row, a phenomenon that accompanies severe frosts. Indeed, the frost had become such that blind Ren kept removing thick frost from his frozen eyelashes. Ren saw nothing, but the frost interfered with the habit of blinking - which, being now the only life of the eyes, somewhat dissipated the heavy oppression. “If she didn’t know what happened to you, I would have allowed the first and second weeks to be not entirely pleasant.” In mid-July, while exploring a deserted mountain river, Ren was caught in a thunderstorm. He and his companions hurried to the tent; it was pouring rain; the surroundings, in a dark cloak of thunderous shadow, seemed like a world for which the sun had gone out forever; the heavy firing of thunder exploded the clouds with fiery bushes of lightning; instantaneous, sparkling branches of them fell into the forest. There were almost no pauses between heavenly flashes and thunderclaps. Lightning flashed so often that the trees, constantly snatched out of the darkness by their sharp brilliance, seemed to jump and disappear. When Ren arrived, entered the room where the voice of Anna, who had not yet returned from the store, would soon sound, and there was a silence of lonely reflection, the blind man lost heart. An unprecedented excitement took possession of him. Melancholy, fear, grief were killing him. He did not see Anna for seven months; or rather, last time he saw her seven months ago and could not see her again. From now on, even if he had remained alive, all he had left was the memory of Anna’s facial features, her smile and the expression of her eyes, a memory that was probably becoming more and more vague, changeable, while the same voice, the same words, the same the clarity of the touch of a close being will repeat that the appearance of this being is the same as he forgot it or almost forgot it. He so clearly imagined all this, threatening him if he did not crush his skull and get rid of his blindness, that he did not even want to subject himself to a final interrogation regarding the firmness of his decision. Death smiled at him. But the painful desire to see Anna brought heavy tears to his eyes, the stingy tears of a broken, almost finished man. He asked himself what was preventing him, without waiting for the first, still joyful kiss for her, to use the revolver now? Neither he nor anyone else could answer this. Perhaps the final horror of the shot in front of Anna’s eyes attracted him with the inexplicable but undeniable power of the snake’s gaze., without perspective. It was what he saw that knocked him unconscious, not pain or the imminent death that was expected. But in all this, due to the stunning surprise, there was now neither fear nor joy for him. He only had time to say: “It seems everything turned out okay...” and fell into insensibility.“It was a useful nervous shock,” the doctor said a week later to Ren, who was walking around with a huge scar above his eye. “Perhaps, it was the only thing that could return to you what is dear to everyone—light.”
Tabarin was a very valuable employee for the Air and Light company. His nature happily combined all the qualities necessary for a good tenant: passionate love for the job, resourcefulness, professional courage and great patience. He succeeded in what others considered impossible. He knew how to catch the angle of the light in the worst weather, if he was filming any procession or passage of high-ranking officials on the street. He photographed all orders equally well and clearly and always from an interesting angle, no matter where he happened to be: from roofs, towers, trees, airplanes and boats. At times his craft turned into art. While filming popular science films, he could sit for hours at a bird's nest, waiting for the mother to return to her hungry chicks, or at a bee hive, preparing to capture the departure of a new swarm. He visited all parts of the world, armed with a revolver and a small film camera. Hunts for wild animals, the life of rare animals, battles of natives, majestic landscapes - everything passed before him, first in life, and then on a transparent tape, and hundreds of thousands of people saw what Tabaren alone saw first. Secondly, I need an assistant. It may happen that, wounded, I stop twirling the tape, but I need to continue. Finally, it’s safer and more convenient for two people. Thirdly, you need to get permission and a pass. The first week was spent in intense and restless work, in visiting areas affected by the war, and choosing among the abundance of material the most interesting. Where on horseback, where on foot, where on boats or on a soldier's train, often without sleep and from hand to mouth, spending the night in peasant huts, quarries or in the forest, the renters filled six hundred meters of tape. Everything was here: villages burned by the Prussians; fugitive residents, groves damaged by artillery fire, corpses of soldiers and horses, scenes of camp life, pictures of areas where the most fierce battles took place, captured Germans, detachments of Zouaves and Turkos; in a word - the whole enormity of the struggle, including the transfer of the wounded and photographs of the operating rooms in full swing. The only thing missing was the center of the picture - the battle. Calmly, like a familiar surgeon at the operating table, Tabarin turned the handle of the apparatus, and his eyes flashed with a lively sparkle when the bright sun helped the work or chance provided a picturesque arrangement of living groups. Lanosk, more nervous and active, suffered greatly at first; often, at the sight of the destruction inflicted by the Germans, curses poured from his throat in a tone as expressive as the cry of a woman or the cry of a wounded man. After a few days, his nerves dulled and calmed down, he got involved, got used to it and came to terms with his role - silently reflecting what he saw. - Sun, sun! - he cried impatiently. -- Without the sun, everything will be blurry: there is no time to choose a position and find focus! Forgotten terrible force When Tabaren woke up, he realized from the atmosphere and silence that he was lying in the infirmary. He felt very thirsty and weak. Trying to turn his head, he almost lost consciousness again from terrible pain in his temples. The bandaged, non-fatally shot head demanded rest. The first question he asked the doctor was: “Is my device intact?” They calmed him down. The device was picked up by an orderly; his comrade, Lanosk, was killed. Tabaren was still too weak to react to this news. The anxiety he experienced regarding the fate of the apparatus tired him out. He soon fell asleep. became his illness, his mania. He waited and for some reason was afraid. His feelings were reminiscent of the trepidation of a young man going on his first date. Sitting down on a chair, he was worried like a child.In deep silence, the spectators watched the scenes of war, obtained at the cost of Lanosk's death. The picture was ending. Breathing heavily, Tabarin watched the episodes of the bayonet battle, vaguely beginning to remember something. Suddenly he shouted: “It’s me!” I! Indeed, it was him. The French marksman, exhausted under the blows of the Prussians, was already staggering, barely able to stand on his feet; Surrounded, he cast a hopeless glance around himself, looked to the side, beyond the frame of the screen and, falling, wounded once again, he shouted something inaudible to the audience, but now painfully familiar to Tabarin. This scream rang in his ears again. The soldier shouted: “Help your fellow countryman, photographer!”
Traveling with an album and paints, despite a revolver and a mass of protective documents, in a devastated country occupied by the Prussians is, of course, a bold undertaking. But nowadays, daredevils are a dime a dozen. Three marauders, two men and a woman, were wandering among the ruins at the same time. Their vile craft kept them under threat of execution all the time, so, looking around and listening every minute, the gang caught the faint sounds of voices - a conversation between Shuang and Matia. One marauder - "Lens" - was the lover of a woman; the second - "Trinket" - by her brother; the woman bore the nickname "Fish", given due to her evasiveness and pity. “Frankly speaking,” said Trinket, “we, like healthy people, will force them to stay away from us.” “What are three tramps doing in a deserted place at such a time?” - they will ask themselves. And in the role of harmless madmen, we will take the first opportunity to kill both of them. They must have money, sister, money! We come across a lot of rags, broken lamps and holey paintings, but where, in which trash heap, will we find the money? I undertake to persuade the little girl to stay the night with us... Well, look out now! - Follow me! - Trinket said to the riders. “By the way, you could spend the night in that house... even though you’re crazy, it’s still more fun with people.” Two glances - Lenses and Pisces - secretly crossed on his hand holding the money. Trinket, taking on an agitated, defeated look, wiped his dry eyes with his sleeve. .. He stopped eating, carried away by the plot. It seemed to him that all the disasters, all the sorrow of the war could be expressed here, embodied in these figures by the terrible power of the talent inherent in him... He already saw crowds of people rushing to the exhibition of his painting; he smiled dreamily and mournfully, as if realizing that he owed his glory to misfortune - and so, forgetting about food, he took out the album. He wanted to get to work immediately. Taking a pencil, he drew preliminary considerations of perspective onto blank cardboard and could not stop... While Shuang was drawing the far corner of the room, where bodies were visible in the darkness... The door creaked behind him; he turned around, jumped up, immediately returning to reality, and dropped the album. Matia, leaving Shuang, sought out the stairs leading to the second floor, where the ominous actors, having heard his steps, had already taken the necessary positions. The fish sat down on the chair again, looking at one point, and Lenza ran his finger along the wall, smiling meaninglessly. “Now,” thought Shuang, rushing to the side, “now I will show you.” - He released the revolver and fired three shots at random, in different directions. The reddish glare of the flashes showed him two backs disappearing behind the door. He ran out into the yard, entered the house, and went upstairs. The old woman disappeared when she heard the shots; on the floor by the window, painfully, with difficulty moving, Matia moaned.It was a thoughtful, red dawn in the clear sky - evening when Shuan, accompanied by Matia's servant, a strong, tall man, rode up to the ruined town of N. Both made the journey on horseback.
They passed the charred ruins of the station and went deeper into the dead silence of the streets. Shuang saw the destroyed city for the first time. The spectacle captured and confused him. Distant antiquity, the times of Attila and Genghis Khan, seemed to mark the blind, dead fragments of walls and fences. There wasn't a single whole house. Piles of bricks and rubbish lay beneath them. Everywhere the eye fell, there were huge gaps made by shells, and the artist’s eye, guessing in places from the ruins of picturesque antiquity or the original plan of a modern architect, squinted painfully. , while you can. “Well,” he spoke loudly, “you sing your howls like that, but you haven’t heard real music.” “He said that because he was afraid of the governor.” - Well, now you’ll hear it. Now the famous violinist Yagdin will play the violin for you - he goes to prisons for you murderers, understand? The merciless charm of the music shocked Trumov; his impressionability was also greatly aggravated by the appearance of Olga Vasilievna’s husband. A year and a half passed after that. In the evening, a footman entered Yagdin’s office with a tray; on the tray were letters and a package sealed with a parcel post.The musician began to look at the mail. He printed out one letter with an Australian stamp before the others, recognized the handwriting and, fading, began to read: “Andrei Leonidovich! The time has come to thank you for your wonderful concert that you gave me last year. I love music very much. In your performance, it made miracle: she freed me. Yes, I was shocked, listening to you; the richness of the melodies you told in the courtyard of the Yadrinsky prison made me very deeply feel all the music of my free and active life; I strongly wanted everything again and ran away. Andrei Leonidovich! You used it as an instrument for an unworthy purpose and were deceived. Art-creativity will never bring evil. It is the ideal expression of any freedom, is it any wonder that, in my situation at that time, it is, in contrast, high and powerful. music became a fire in which the past and future years of my imprisonment burned, especially thank you for “Black Diamond,” you know that a favorite melody is more powerful than others.
Pressing his lips tightly together, bending over and resting his hands on the bolsters of the chair on which he was sitting, Bevener watched with a decisive, unwavering gaze the agony of the poisoned Gonazed. Less than five minutes had passed before Gonased drank the deadly wine poured by his cheerful friend. That evening, nothing in Bevener’s appearance indicated his dark intentions. As always, he chuckled excessively, his shifting eyes changed their expression a thousand times, and when you see a person like this all the time, this nervous fussiness can kill suspicion even if it was about the destruction of the whole world. “You’re right,” said Gonased, sitting down. - But how do you know? And - what to do? There’s a little over an hour left, soon the last act... The last!.. “How I found out is still a mystery,” said Bevener. - But I know what to do. We must make sure that Lasource leaves the theater without finishing the part. Write her a note. Write that you committed suicide. -- How?! - Gonased was amazed. - But what are the reasons? Justice in this case remained at peak interest. The authentic note from Gonazed to his mistress, stating that the singer committed suicide, was undeniable. Bevener cried: “Ah!” he said. “I walked to this hotel with a heavy feeling. The deceased invited me, without explaining why. We were so friendly... We began to drink; Gonased was thoughtful. Suddenly he asked me for a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote something and ordered a note to be sent to Lasource. Then he said that he would take the powder for a headache; he poured it into a glass, drank it, and fell down dead.” The most insightful people threw up their hands, not knowing how to explain the suicide of the cheerful, happy Gonazed. LaSource, having cried, left for Australia. A year passed, and the sad death was forgotten. There was silence. There was a subtle, soft hiss of steel on rubber, quick chords of a piano... and a steel, flexible baritone struck out the famous aria. But it was not Bevener’s voice... Clearly, with all the shades of a lively pronunciation so familiar to everyone present, the deceased Gonased sang, and everyone’s eyes turned in amazement to the hero of the day. A terrible pallor covered his face. He laughed, but the laughter was unbearably shrill and false, and everyone shuddered when they saw the owner’s eyes. There were exclamations: “This is a mistake!”“Gonased didn’t sing for the records!”
At noon I received a notification from the Gigant company that my offer had been accepted. The wife was sleeping. The children went to the neighbors. I looked thoughtfully at Felitsata, mournfully listening to her uneven breathing, and decided that I was acting wisely. A husband who cannot provide medicine for his sick wife and milk for his children deserves to be sold and killed. -- No. I sent a letter to the company, informing them that I wanted to shoot myself, and offered to film the moment of suicide with a camera for twenty thousand. They can insert my death into some picture. Why not, Boots? After all, I would have killed myself anyway; I'm tired of living with clenched teeth. He bowed and left so quickly that we did not have time to ask him what was the matter. Felicata tore the envelope. Sitting down on the bed in amazement, she held a stack of thousand-dollar bills in one hand and a note in the other. Its end, sealed with wax, was at the right temple. “Goodbye, dear friend,” said the old man. - “Michelle, start!”, and the operator began to turn the handle of the device. I looked up, brought the muzzle to my temple, and fired a blank charge. The wine immediately flowed down the collar. I leaned back, gasping for air with my hands, and made every grimace of agony I could think of, with my eyes closed. The old man shouted: “Close, Michel, take off your face!” Finally, I conscientiously froze, hanging my head on my chest (only thirty meters away). - “Still, it’s scary!” - said Michel. Then I stood up and yawned demonstratively.- Lowden got it wrong!
-- You hear?! - said Bevener, losing strength as the voice of the murdered man darkly bent his defeated will. - Do you hear?! It is he who sings, the one I killed! There is no salvation for me; he himself came here... Stop the record!
This incident occurred at the very beginning of my practice, when I, a still unknown doctor, spent office hours in sad solitude, pacing around my office and moving the same object from place to place twenty times. For a whole month I had only two patients: the janitor of the house in which I lived, and some visiting person who suffered from nervous tics. On the evening that I am talking about, an event occurred: a new, third patient appeared. Even now, when I close my eyes, I see him in front of me as if alive. He was a man of average height, bald, with an important, slightly absent-minded look, with a curly blond beard and a sharp nose. His build revealed an inclination towards fullness, which made some contrast with his sharp, impetuous movements. I also noticed two features that would not be worth mentioning if they did not indicate a severe degree of nervous disorder: convulsive twitching of the eyelids and continuous movement of the fingers. He sat or walked, spoke or was silent, the fingers of his hands uncontrollably bent and unbent, as if they were entangled in an invisible viscous web. it rose up to his face several times, tugging at his beard; he was all, so to speak, fussing internally, thinking about something. This was especially noticeable by the tense play of the face, which alternately burned with despair and embarrassment. I did not rush him, knowing from experience that in such cases it is better to wait than to push. What he told me apparently contained a whole chain of frightening conclusions for him. I pretended to be completely indifferent to his visit, maintaining a cold, attentive equanimity in my face, which, as it seemed to me then, is inherent in any more or less serious profession. He became embarrassed and sat down, blushing like a girl. his voice stopped with excitement. I listened intently. My patient spun convulsively in his chair, obviously having been pricked. -What are you sick with? - I asked. flashes, memories... Then, I see, the morning girl is walking, followed by the young lady, then the old woman... this whole procession, as if alive, moves... And as soon as, you know, my thought stopped on this old woman, I began to tremble and shouted at the top of his voice: I feel, one turn of thought, and I will understand, you know, I will understand and solve the whole problem of death and life, like two and two are four... And I feel that as soon as I understand this, at the same moment... I'm going to die... I can't stand it.He fell silent, and it seemed to me that the room itself sighed, noisily and convulsively taking in its breath. A frightened man, white as lime, sat in front of me, not taking his glassy, bulging eyes off my face. And suddenly he raised his hand, stretching it upward, with a diligent, clumsy movement - a sign of approaching horror - a hand with a starched cuff and a bronze cufflink.
The sky darkened, the aviators, having finished inspecting the machines they were supposed to use to win the prize, converged on the small Bel-Ami restaurant. In addition to the aviators, there was another audience in the restaurant, but since wine in itself is nothing more than a wonderful flight in place, the presence of air celebrities did not arouse any particular curiosity in anyone, with the exception of one person sitting alone on the side, but not so far from the aviators' table that he could not hear their conversation. He seemed to be half-listening to him, tilting his head slightly towards the brilliant company. , falling from under the hat, a high, strongly developed forehead darkened to the bridge of the nose; The black, long-cut eyes had that peculiarity of expression that seemed to always look into the distance, even if the object of vision was no further than two feet. The straight nose rested on a small dark mustache, the mouth seemed to be cramped, the lips were compressed so tightly. A vertical fold bifurcated the sharp chin from the middle of the mouth to the limit of the facial outline, so that the strand of hair, the nose and this remarkable feature together resembled a longitudinal section of the face. This - which was already strange - corresponded to the difference in profiles: the left profile appeared in a soft, almost feminine expression, the right - frowning in concentration. Then they began to discuss prizes and chances. Those present did not talk about themselves or about others present, but somewhere, in the shadow of the words pronounced by a drunken tongue, the speaker himself was noticeably lurking, with a finger pointing at himself. Only Cartref, frowning, finally said the same thing for everyone. It sounded like an orange in soup. The chair cracked, Cartref turned so sharply. Behind him, others, realizing from which corner the mocking exclamation came, turned around and stared at the unknown person with eyes full of irritated nonsense. You have turned your back to the ground; the sky lies below, beneath you, and you fall towards it, transfixed by the purity, happiness and transparency of the captivating space. But you will never fall on the clouds, they will become fog. His words outpaced the simmering anger of the pilots. Finally, some hit the table with their fists, some jumped up, knocking over bottles. Cartref, bending menacingly, crumpling napkins and frightening eyes, approached the unknown. “The air is good,” Cartreff thought the next day, when, having described a circle above the airfield, he saw below the sunny motley of stands full of spectators. His opponents were buzzing left and right; Seven airplanes took off almost simultaneously. Depending on the position they took in the air, their outline resembled a box, an envelope, or an open umbrella. It seemed that they were all heading in one direction, while they were flying in the other. The engines hummed, in the distance - like thick strings or singing tops, close - with the crackling sound of canvas being torn above the ear. There was a noise like in a factory. Below, near the garages, figures moved across the green grass, as if cut out of white paper; then other airplanes were launched. A brass band was playing. I know the secret of the formation of ball lightning. The artistic pattern of snowflakes was taking shape before my eyes from the shuddering dampness. I fell into abysses full of rotting bones and gold thrown by misfortune from narrow passages. I know all the unknown islands and lands, I eat and sleep in the air, as in a room.His appearance must be described. In a shabby, light coat, a soft hat, with a white scarf around his neck, he had the appearance of an insignificant correspondent, of which there are many in places of all sorts of public competitions. Klok
In one of the French border towns, occupied by the Germans, lived a certain Alvage, a man with a dark past, not in the bad sense of the word, but in such a way that no one knew absolutely nothing about his life. But he was late - half an hour ago the execution of the hostages was canceled (because they threatened to shoot German hostages in a neighboring city). If he hadn’t been late, everything would have been over for thirty people before the execution was cancelled.dark hair
At eight o'clock in the evening, at sunset in the forest sun, sentry Moore replaced sentry Lid at the very post from which they had not returned. Lid stood until eight and was therefore relatively carefree; nevertheless, when Moore took his place, Lead silently crossed himself. Moore also crossed himself: the disastrous hours - eight - twelve - fell on him. The detachment expressed different assumptions. Cherbel found the simplest, most probable explanation: “I suspect,” he said, “a very smart, patient and dexterous savage, attacking unexpectedly and silently.” His steps were almost silent, with the exception of one, when a knot cracked under the support of his foot; This sound, sharp in the ringing silence, riveted Moore to his place. The sound of his heart numbed him; Desperate, wild fear struck my trembling legs with a sudden weakness, heavy as suffocation. He crouched, then lay down, crawled a few feet and froze. This didn't last long; Having caught his breath, the sentry stood up. But he was already in the grip of fear and submissive to it. Having carefully examined the edge and the bank of the stream again, Moore calmed down somewhat. I'm unarmed. Toys Night and day Ren sat comfortably in the bushes that hid him, but he himself could clearly see the clearing, the bank of the stream and Moore, walking in all directions. The lieutenant thought about his plan to destroy the mysterious death. The plan required endurance; the most dangerous part of it was the need to allow an attack, which, in case of delay, threatened the sentry with a quick transfer to heaven. The difficulty of the task was intensified by Ren's vague hunch - one of those obsessive dark thoughts that make the one possessed by them a furious maniac. When Ren tried to admit the irrevocable truth of this guess, or rather, assumption, he felt sick with horror; Hoping that he would be mistaken, he finally allowed events to solve the mystery of the forest and froze in the pose of a hunter watching for sensitive game. Ren ran out of the ambush. The attacker's dull eyes turned to him. Holding the convulsing soldier with one hand, he extended the other to Ren, protecting his face. Ren hit him on the head with the barrel of his revolver. Then, having abandoned the first victim, the killer rushed at the second, trying to overthrow the enemy, and in this struggle showed all the dexterity of ferocity and despair. wet hair , similar to the cry of a bird. Ren hit him in the solar plexus. The terrible face died; the eyes closed, weakened, the hands darted back, and someone fell unconscious. Curiosity and suspicion flashed across his moving face. He didn't understand Ren. The thought of being laughed at made him furious. He jumped up, trying to break the bonds, and Ren immediately jumped up too. Ren thought about a lot of things. The astonishing reality stunned him. He carefully examined his hands and body, with a new curiosity about them, as if unsure that the body was his, Rena, with his eternal, unchanging soul, not knowing hesitation and duality. He was in a forest full of silent whispers, calling to sneak, hide, eavesdrop and hide, step silently, lie in wait and destroy. He was filled with a strange distrust of himself, admitting with a slight sinking heart that there was nothing surprising in the next moment he wanted to rush with a wild cry into the sleepy wilderness, punch trees with his fists, swing a club, howl and dance. Millennia have awakened in him. He saw it clearly and was afraid. His impressionability intensified. It seemed to him that high-hanging corpses were swaying in the moonlit twilight, the bushes were moving, hiding the killers, and the trunks were changing places, moving closer to him. To calm down, Ren put the barrel to his temple; the cold steel, groping the beating vein, returned him to the firmness of his consciousness. Now he just sat and waited for Cherbel to wake up so he could kill him. “Ren,” said the captain, raising his hand, “my slap smells of blood, and you... He didn’t finish.” Ren grabbed Cherbel by the arm and fired.he returned to the lawn, waiting to see what would happen next.
“We may both die,” said Ren, “and you must be prepared for that.” It's eleven now. - He looked at his watch. - In my haste, I almost suffocated in these difficult places, but my strength is with me, and I hope for the best. Stand or walk as before. I'll be nearby. Trust fate, Moore. He didn’t finish speaking, but, being a thrifty man, he felt the second pocket revolver and disappeared among the trees. to his village on foot from the district town, twenty miles away. He did not need a guide, since the road was familiar and did not branch. He walked and wondered whether his village was already in the area of military operations or not yet. Akinf stayed in the city for four days, begging; and he lived in the village with his brother.The blind man did not come across anyone along the way, and this surprised him a lot; usually carts passed here and pedestrians walked.
I walked through terrain that was unfamiliar and difficult in all respects. She was gloomy and dark, like a saddened chimney sweep. Bare autumn trees cut the evening sky with crooked branches. The swampy soil, full of holes and hummocks, wobbled, almost breaking my legs. The open space, furrowed by the wind, was bathed in fine rain. It was getting dark, and with even greater melancholy than before, I was drawn to housing. I must kill you... While the madman was speaking, using the inspiration of nature as the justification for the cruel deed he had planned, the sky slowly opened, and the sun, rare in these places, poured gold from the knife into all corners of the room. The bright light stunned the old man. He staggered and ran away. Having difficulty loosening the rope, I somehow freed myself and jumped out into the swamp through the window.Finally, having determined through fatigue that he would soon approach the village, the blind man smelled burning. Old forested mountain heaths usually smell like this, cooled and, so to speak, cold. Akinf, alarmed, quickened his pace. He really wanted to see the village; it, of course, had not changed at all since when he saw it as a boy, except that the old huts were replaced by new ones and, in turn, also grew old. The smell of burning became stronger.
In the deep jungles of Northern India, near Lake Izamet, there was a hunting village. And near Lake Kinobay there was another hunting village. The inhabitants of both villages had long been at enmity with each other, and almost not a single month passed without one of the hunters on one side or the other being killed, and the killers could not be caught. So Sing and Iret reconciled the warring people.“Isn’t it a fire?” thought Akinf. “Aren’t my brother and I on fire, mother bozka?!”
Yus, the guard of the wood warehouses near the village of Kipa, lying on the banks of the Miletus River, having eaten so tightly that there was pressure in the pit of his stomach, sat in a good mood by the blue water, smoked and thought that, spending thirty kopecks every day on food, he would be able to carry Every Saturday exactly three rubles are deposited into the savings bank, which, if you treat this matter carefully and lovingly, will give in ten years the sum of one thousand five hundred rubles. Yus will take his soul away, rewarding his greedy body for the deprivations of the past with a luxurious feast with women, wine, cigars, songs and flowers, and with the rest he will buy a tavern and marry. Here he is, the winner of life, the rich innkeeper Yus, walking down the street with his wife on holiday... Everyone takes off their hats... The drums are beating... Yus, daydreaming, stood up; he could no longer sit; he wanted to take another look at the main street of Kipa, where the inn would be located. “It’s cold there,” Day said.It was very quiet all around, only gunshots barked in the distance, and Akinf’s heart sank. Meanwhile, he was descending along a hollow to a bridge over a narrow, deep ravine. With his usual foot, Akin stepped on the imaginary beginning of the bridge and, gasping in surprise, flew down, from a height of three fathoms, to the clayey bottom of the ravine. The bridge was destroyed by a stray shell, and Akinf, of course, did not know this.
When he woke up, his whole body ached and ached from hitting the ground. His arms and legs were intact, and there was blood in his mustache and broken lip. But this was not what attracted his attention: with surprise and fear, with a strong heartbeat, he noticed that the former black darkness had been replaced by a foggy and reddish one. Immediately he saw his hands and realized that his vision had returned to him. It returned from a new strong nervous shock at the time of the fall - this is how nervous blindness often passes. Akinf with fear and joy got out of the ravine and approached the village. He saw a row of blackened hedges and piles of black ash among them - all that remained of the once lively village. There was neither a human soul nor a dog in this sad place. The village burned to the ground, perhaps from shells. And then Akinf felt that his vision was blurring again, but this time with tears. Wild Mill Duel of leaders Blind Day Kanet Notes For the first time - "Literary leaflet of the Red Newspaper", 1923, March 29. A brilliant player. For the first time - "Red Newspaper", evening. issue, 1923, March 8. A hundred miles along the river. For the first time - magazine " Modern world", 1916, No. 7-8. Hartman, Eduard(1842-1906) - German idealist philosopher. Schopenhauer, Arthur(1788-1860) - German idealist philosopher. Murder in Kunst-Fisch. For the first time - "Red Newspaper", evening. issue, 1923, January 15. Gladiators. For the first time - Petrograd magazine, 1923, No. 1. Triclinium-- V Ancient Rome- a dining table with boxes on three sides, as well as the room where this table is located. Tympanum-- ancient percussion musical instrument, a type of copper plate. Order for the army. For the first time - the magazine "Red Panorama", 1923, No. 1. Famous namesake-- Joan of Arc (1412-1431), national heroine of France, leader of the army that liberated Orleans and Reims during the Hundred Years' War. Tramp and prison warden. For the first time - Sat. "Heart of the Desert", M.-L., Land and Factory, 1924. Ravachol, Leon- French anarchist and terrorist who in 1892 in Paris detonated bombs in the apartments of court officials participating in the trials of anarchists. Jack the Ripper- the nickname of a London killer who committed a series of brutal murders in 1888-1889. Nat Pinkerton- American detective, hero of a popular series of detective stories written by various authors at the beginning of the 20th century. On the cloudy shore. For the first time - the magazine "Krasnaya Niva", 1924, No. 28. Weight(spoilt English master) - master, master. Rope. For the first time - Sat. "White Fire", Pg., Polar Star, 1922. Comprachicos- in Spain, England and other countries in the 13th-17th centuries - people who kidnapped or bought children and mutilated them for the purpose of selling them to rich houses or booths as jesters. Rene. For the first time - Argus magazine, 1917, NoNo 9-10. Latude, Jean Henri(1725-1805) - French adventurer who spent more than 30 years in prison. Iron mask-- a mysterious prisoner who died in the Bastille in 1703. His face was always under a mask. Cellini, Bienvenuto(1500-1571) - famous Italian sculptor, jeweler and writer. Merry Widow-- here: ironic name for the guillotine. Jack of Hearts-- nickname for rich slackers, here: members of the gang of the same name. Willow. For the first time - Petrograd magazine, 1923, No. 11. Legless. For the first time - Ogonyok magazine, 1924, No. 7 (46). Cheerful travel companion. For the first time - magazine "Leningrad", 1924, No. 4. Cyrano de Bergerac water- here: wine. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) - French writer, known as a brave man, a duelist, and a reveler. Pied Piper. For the first time - in the magazine "Russia" No. 3 (12), 1924. Published based on the book of the same name. M., "Library "Ogonyok" No. 50, 1927. E. Arnoldi in his memoirs "Belletrist Green" talks about the origin of the idea for the story "The Pied Piper." E. Arnoldi shared with Green an interesting story, the participant of which was a person well known to Arnoldi. "I noticed,” writes Arnoldi, “that he attracted Green’s animated attention. And I am amazed at the accuracy of Green’s, this time quite realistic description.” (Collection “Memoirs of A. S. Green.” Manuscript.) Fate taken by the horns. For the first time - the magazine "Fatherland", 1914, No. 7. For publication in the publishing house "Mysl", in 1928, A.S. Greene significantly revised the story. Mysterious record. For the first time - the newspaper "Petrograd leaf", 1916, June 24 (July 6). How I died on the screen. For the first time - the newspaper "Petrograd leaflet", 1916. 9 (22), 10 (23) August. In the magazine "XX-th Century", 1917, No. 26 after the phrase. “I got up and lit a fire” followed: “Aunt Viruda must have brought our children,” said the wife, waking up. “They ate at her place as always... Here we would like something...” Champs Elysees - here: the seat of blessed souls. Checkmate in three moves. For the first time - the magazine "Bodroye Slovo", 1908, No. 4. Competition in Lisse. For the first time - the magazine "Red Policeman", 1921, NoNo 2-3. According to the memoirs of V.P. Kalitskaya - the first wife of A.S. Green - the story was written in 1910. Toys. For the first time - magazine "XX-th century", 1915, No. 9. Night and day. For the first time, under the title "Sick Soul", - the magazine " New life ", 1915, No. 3. Terrible vision. For the first time - magazine "XX-th century", 1915, No. 20. Wild mill. Finally, having determined through fatigue that he would soon approach the village, the blind man smelled burning. Old forested mountain heaths usually smell like this, cooled and, so to speak, cold. Akinf, alarmed, quickened his pace. He really wanted to see the village; it, of course, had not changed at all since when he saw it as a boy, except that the old huts were replaced by new ones and, in turn, also grew old. The smell of burning became stronger. For the first time - magazine "XX-th century", 1915, No. 31. “Isn’t it a fire?” thought Akinf. “Aren’t my brother and I on fire, mother bozka?!”. For the first time, under the pseudonym A. Stepanov - magazine "XX Century", 1915, No. 41. . For the first time - the newspaper "Evening News", Moscow, 1916, March 2 (15).INTRODUCTION
I NOVELS AND STORIES
SCARLET SAILS
RUNNING ON THE WAVES
BRILLIANT WORLD
GOLD CHAIN
II STORIES
III CREATIVE METHOD OF A. GREEN
CONCLUSION
Adventurous in their plots, Greene's books are spiritually rich and sublime, they are charged with dreams of everything high and beautiful and teach readers courage and the joy of life. And in this Green is deeply traditional, despite all the originality of his characters and the whimsicality of his plots. Sometimes it even seems that he deliberately heavily emphasizes this moralistic traditionalism of his works, their kinship with old books and parables. Thus, the writer, of course, not by accident, but quite deliberately, concludes his two stories, “The Pillory” and “One Hundred Miles Along the River,” with the same solemn chord of ancient stories about eternal love: "They lived a long time and died on the same day..."
This colorful mixture of the traditional and the innovative, this bizarre combination of the book element and a powerful, one-of-a-kind artistic invention, probably consists of one of the most original features of Green’s talent. Starting from the books he read in his youth, from a great variety of life observations, Green created his own world, his own country of imagination, which, of course, is not on geographical maps, but which undoubtedly is, which undoubtedly exists - the writer is firmly convinced of this believed - on the maps of youthful imagination, in that special world where dream and reality exist side by side.
The writer created his own country of imagination, as someone happily said, his “Greenland”, created it according to the laws of art, he determined its geographical outlines, gave it shining seas, sent snow-white ships along the steep waves with scarlet sails, tight from the overtaking north-west, marked the shores, set up harbors and filled them with human boiling, boiling passions, meetings, events...
But are his romantic fiction really so far from reality, from life? The heroes of Green's story "Watercolor" - the unemployed steamship fireman Klasson and his laundress wife Betsy - accidentally end up in art gallery, where they discover a sketch in which, to their deep amazement, they recognize their house, their unprepossessing dwelling. The path, the porch, the brick wall overgrown with ivy, the windows, the branches of maple and oak, between which Betsy stretched the ropes - everything was the same in the picture... The artist just threw stripes of light on the foliage, on the path, colored the porch, the windows, brick wall with paints early morning, and the fireman and the washerwoman saw their house with new, enlightened eyes: “They looked around with a proud look, terribly regretting that they would never dare to declare that this home belonged to them. “We’re renting for the second year,” flashed through their minds. Klasson straightened up. Betsy sniffed there is a scarf on the emaciated chest...” The painting by an unknown artist straightened out their souls, crumpled by life, and “straightened” them.
Green’s “Watercolor” evokes Gleb Uspensky’s famous essay “Straightened Up,” in which the statue of the Venus de Milo, once seen by the village teacher Tyapushkin, illuminates his dark and poor life and gives him “the happiness of feeling like a human being.” This feeling of happiness from contact with art and a good book is experienced by many of the heroes of Green’s works. Let us remember that for the boy Gray from “Scarlet Sails,” a picture depicting a raging sea was “that necessary word in the conversation of the soul with life, without which it is difficult to understand oneself.” And a small watercolor - a deserted road among the hills - called “The Road to Nowhere” amazes Tirrey Davenant. The young man, full of bright hopes, resists the impression, although the ominous watercolor “attracts like a well”... Like a spark from a dark stone, a thought is struck: to find a road that would lead not to nowhere, but “here”, fortunately, that in At that moment Tirrei dreamed.
And perhaps it would be more accurate to say this: Green believed that every real person has a romantic flame glimmering in their chest. And it's just a matter of inflating it. When Green's fisherman fishes, he dreams of catching a big fish, such a big one, “like no one has caught before.” A charcoal miner, piling up a basket, suddenly sees that his basket has blossomed, from the branches he has burned, “buds have spread and sprinkled with leaves”... A girl from a fishing village, having heard enough fairy tales, dreams of an extraordinary sailor who will sail for her on a ship with scarlet sails. And her dream is so strong, so passionate that everything comes true. And an extraordinary sailor and scarlet sails.
Green was strange and unusual in the usual circle of realist writers, everyday writers, as they were called then. He was a stranger among the Symbolists, Acmeists, Futurists... "The Tragedy of the Suan Plateau" by Greene, a piece that I left conditionally with the editors, warning that it may or may not work, a beautiful thing, but too exotic... “These are lines from a letter from Valery Bryusov, who edited the literary department of the magazine “Russian Thought” in 1910-1914. They are very revealing, these lines that sound like a sentence. Even if Bryusov, a great poet, sensitive and responsive to literary novelty, is Green’s thing seemed, although beautiful, but too exotic, which may or may not work, then what was the attitude towards the works of a strange writer in other Russian magazines?
Meanwhile, for Greene, his story “The Tragedy of the Suan Plateau” (1911) was an ordinary thing: he wrote like that. Invading the unusual, the “exotic,” into the ordinary, familiar in the everyday life around him, the writer sought to more sharply indicate the splendor of its miracles or the monstrosity of its ugliness. This was his artistic style, his creative style.
Moral monster Bloom, main character The story, dreaming of a time “when a mother does not dare to stroke her children, and whoever wants to smile will first write a will,” was not a particularly literary novelty. The misanthropes, homegrown Nietzscheans at that time, “on the night after the battle” of 1905, became fashionable figures. “A revolutionary by chance,” Blum is related in their inner essence to the terrorist Alexei from Leonid Andreev’s “Darkness,” who wished “for all the lights to go out,” and the notorious cynic Sanin from the novel of the same name by M. Artsybashev, and the obscurantist and sadist Trirodov, whom Fyodor Sologub in his “Navi Charms” passed off as a Social Democrat.
Greene's subjects were defined by time. With all the exoticism and whimsicality of the patterns of the artistic fabric of the writer’s works, in many of them the spirit of modernity, the air of the day in which they were written, is clearly felt. The features of time are sometimes so noticeably, so emphatically written out by Green that for him, a recognized science fiction writer and romantic, they even seem unexpected. At the beginning of the story “Hell Returned” (1915) there is, for example, the following episode: the famous journalist Galien Mark, sitting alone on the deck of a steamship, is approached with clearly hostile intentions by a certain party leader, “a man with a triple chin, black combed hair on his low forehead.” hair, dressed baggy and rudely, but with a claim to panache, expressed by a huge crimson tie...". After this portrait characteristics you can already guess what kind of party this leader represents. But Green considered it necessary to say more precisely about this game (the story is told in the form of notes from Galien Mark).
“I saw that this man wanted a quarrel,” we read, “and I knew why. My article was published in the last issue of Meteor, exposing the activities of the Autumn Month party.”
Green's literary heritage is much wider and more diverse than one might assume, knowing the writer only from his romantic short stories, stories and novels. Not only in his youth, but also at the time of wide fame, Green, along with prose, wrote lyrical poems, poetic feuilletons and even fables. Along with romantic works, he published essays and stories of everyday life in newspapers and magazines. The last book the writer worked on was his “Autobiographical Tale,” where he depicts his life strictly realistically, in all its genre colors, with all its harsh details.
He started his literary path as an “everyday worker”, as the author of stories, the themes and plots of which he took directly from the reality around him. He was overwhelmed with life impressions, accumulated in abundance during the years of wandering around the world. They urgently demanded a way out and lay down on paper, it seems, in their original appearance, not in the least transformed by imagination; as it happened, so it was written. In the "Autobiographical Tale", on those pages where Green describes the days he spent at the Ural iron foundry, the reader will find the same pictures of the unsightly morals of the working barracks as in the story "Brick and Music", even some situations and details coincide. And in the partner of the young man Grinevsky, the gloomy and angry “heavy man”, with whom he sifted coal in sieves from morning until late at night (“75 kopecks per day”), one can easily recognize the prototype of the shaggy and angry, black with soot Evstigney.
The story about Evstigney was included in the writer’s first book, “The Invisible Cap” (1908). It contains ten stories, and about almost each of them we have the right to assume that it was, to one degree or another, copied from life. From his direct experience, Green knew the joyless life of the workers' barracks, sat in prisons, without receiving news from the outside for months ("At Leisure"), he was familiar with the vicissitudes of the "mysterious romantic life" of the underground, as depicted in the stories "Marat" , “Underground”, “To Italy”, “Quarantine”... There is no such work that would be called “The Invisible Cap” in the collection. But this title was, of course, not chosen by chance. Most of the stories depict “illegal immigrants” who, in the author’s opinion, live as if under an invisible cap. Hence the name of the collection. A fairy-tale title on the cover of a book where life is shown in a completely different way from fairy-tale twists... This is a very indicative touch for the early Greene.
Alexander Stepanovich Green
Collected works in six volumes
Volume 1. Stories 1906-1910
V. Vikhrov. Dream knight
The dream is looking for a way -
All roads are closed;
The dream is looking for a way -
Paths have been outlined;
The dream is looking for a way -
ALL paths are open.
A. S. Green “Movement”. 1919.
From Green's first steps in literature, legends began to form around his name. Some of them were harmless. They assured, for example, that Green was an excellent archer; in his youth he got his food by hunting and lived in the forest in the manner of a Cooper ranger... But there were also malicious legends.
His latest book, " Autobiographical story"(1931), completed in Old Crimea, Green intended to preface it with a short preface, which he entitled: “The Legend of Green.” A preface was written, but was not included in the book, and only a fragment of it has survived.
“From 1906 to 1930,” wrote Green, “I heard so many amazing reports about myself from my fellow writers that I began to doubt whether I really lived the way I lived here (in “Autobiographical Tale.” - V.V.) written. Judge for yourself whether there is any reason to call this story “The Legend of Greene.”
I will list what I heard as if I were speaking for myself.
While sailing as a sailor somewhere near Zurbagan, Liss and San Riol, Greene killed an English captain, seizing a box of manuscripts written by this Englishman...
“A man with a plan,” as Peter Pilsky aptly put it, Green pretends that he doesn’t know languages, he knows them well...”
Fellow writers and idle newspapermen, like the tabloid journalist Pyotr Pilsky, tried their best to come up with the most ridiculous inventions about the “mysterious” writer.
Green was irritated by these fables, they interfered with his life, and he tried more than once to fight them off. Back in the tens, in the introduction to one of his stories, the writer ironically retold the version about the English captain and his manuscripts, which was secretly distributed in literary circles by a certain fiction writer. “No one could believe it,” Greene wrote. “He didn’t believe himself, but on one unfortunate day for me, the idea came to him to give this story some credibility, convincing his listeners that between Galich and Kostroma I stabbed to death a respectable old man, using only two kopecks, and in the end I escaped from hard labor...”
The bitter irony of these lines!
It is true that the writer’s life was full of wanderings and adventures, but there is nothing mysterious, nothing legendary in it. One could even say this: Green’s path was ordinary, well-trodden, typical in many of its features. life's path writer "of the people". It is no coincidence that some episodes of his “Autobiographical Tale” so vividly resemble Gorky’s pages from “My Universities” and “In People.”
Green's life was difficult and dramatic; she is all in pokes, all in collisions with the leaden abominations of Tsarist Russia, and when you read the “Autobiographical Tale,” this confession of a suffering soul, with difficulty, only under the pressure of facts, you believe that the same hand wrote stories about sailors and travelers, “Scarlet Sails”, “The Shining World”... After all, life, it seems, has done everything to harden, harden the heart, crush and dispel romantic ideals, kill faith in all that is best and bright.
Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky (Green is his literary pseudonym) was born on August 23, 1880 in Slobodskoye, a district town in the Vyatka province, into the family of an “eternal settler”, a clerk at a brewery. Soon after the birth of their son, the Grinevsky family moved to Vyatka. There the years of childhood and youth of the future writer passed. The city of dense ignorance and classical covetousness, so colorfully described in “The Past and Thoughts,” Vyatka by the nineties had changed little since the time Herzen served his exile there.
“The suffocating emptiness and dumbness” that he wrote about reigned in Vyatka even in those days when a dark-skinned boy in a gray patched blouse wandered through its outlying wastelands, portraying Captain Hatteras and the Noble Heart in solitude. The boy was considered strange. At school they called him “the sorcerer.” He tried to discover the “philosopher’s stone” and performed all sorts of alchemical experiments, and after reading the book “Secrets of the Hand”, he began to predict everyone’s future using the lines of the palm. His family reproached him with books, scolded him for his willfulness, and appealed to common sense. Green said that conversations about “common sense” thrilled him as a child and that from Nekrasov he most firmly remembered “Song to Eremushka” with its angry lines:
- In vulgar laziness, soporific
The vulgar lives of the sages,
Damn him, corrupter
Vulgar experience is the mind of fools!
The “vulgar experience” that Nekrasov’s nanny drums into Eremushka’s head (“You have to bow your head below a thin piece of epic”...) was also drummed into Green. His mother sang a very similar song to him.
“I did not know a normal childhood,” Green wrote in his “Autobiographical Story.” - In moments of irritation, for my willfulness and unsuccessful teaching, they called me “swineherd”, “golden miner”, they predicted for me a life full of groveling among successful, successful people. Already sick, exhausted from homework, my mother teased me with a strange pleasure with a song:
The wind has knocked the coat down,
And not a penny in my pocket,
And in captivity -
Involuntarily -
Let's dance the entrechat!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Philosophize here as you please
Argue as you wish,
And in captivity -
Involuntarily -
Vegetate like a dog!
I was tormented hearing this, because the song related to me, predicting my future ... "
Green was shocked by Chekhov’s “My Life” with its subtitle, “The Story of a Provincial,” which decisively explained everything to him. Green believed that this story best conveys the atmosphere of provincial life in the 90s, the life of a remote city. “When I read this story, it was as if I was completely reading about Vyatka,” said the writer. Much of the biography of the provincial Misail Poloznev, who intended to live “not like everyone else,” was already known and had been suffered through by Green. And this is not surprising. Chekhov captured the signs of the era, and the young man Grinevsky was her son. Interesting in this regard is the writer’s confession about his early literary experiences.
“Sometimes I wrote poems and sent them to Niva and Rodina, never receiving a response from the editors,” Green said. - The poems were about hopelessness, hopelessness, broken dreams and loneliness - exactly the same poems that weekly magazines were full of back then. From the outside, one might think that a forty-year-old was writing Chekhov's hero, not a boy..."
INTRODUCTION
I NOVELS AND STORIES
SCARLET SAILS
RUNNING ON THE WAVES
BRILLIANT WORLD
GOLD CHAIN
II STORIES
III CREATIVE METHOD OF A. GREEN
CONCLUSION
Adventurous in their plots, Greene's books are spiritually rich and sublime, they are charged with dreams of everything high and beautiful and teach readers courage and the joy of life. And in this Green is deeply traditional, despite all the originality of his characters and the whimsicality of his plots. Sometimes it even seems that he deliberately heavily emphasizes this moralistic traditionalism of his works, their kinship with old books and parables. Thus, the writer, of course, not by accident, but quite deliberately concludes his two stories, “The Pillory” and “One Hundred Miles Along the River,” with the same solemn chord of ancient stories about eternal love: “They lived a long time and died in one day.” day..."
This colorful mixture of the traditional and the innovative, this bizarre combination of the book element and a powerful, one-of-a-kind artistic invention, probably consists of one of the most original features of Green’s talent. Starting from the books he read in his youth, from a great variety of life observations, Green created his own world, his own country of imagination, which, of course, is not on geographical maps, but which undoubtedly is, which undoubtedly exists - the writer is firmly convinced of this believed - on the maps of youthful imagination, in that special world where dream and reality exist side by side.
The writer created his own country of imagination, as someone happily said, his “Greenland”, created it according to the laws of art, he determined its geographical outlines, gave it shining seas, sent snow-white ships with scarlet sails, taut from the overtaking north, across the steep waves. Vesta, marked the shores, set up harbors and filled them with human boiling, boiling passions, meetings, events...
But are his romantic fiction really so far from reality, from life? The heroes of Green's story "Watercolor" - the unemployed steamship fireman Klasson and his washerwoman wife Betsy - accidentally end up in an art gallery, where they discover a sketch in which, to their deep amazement, they recognize their house, their unprepossessing dwelling. The path, the porch, the brick wall overgrown with ivy, the windows, the branches of maple and oak, between which Betsy stretched the ropes - everything was the same in the picture... The artist just threw stripes of light on the foliage, on the path, colored the porch, the windows, brick wall with the colors of early morning, and the fireman and washerwoman saw their house with new, enlightened eyes: “They looked around with a proud look, terribly regretting that they would never dare to declare that this housing belonged to them. “We are renting for the second year,” flashed through their minds. Klasson straightened up. Betsy wrapped her scarf around her exhausted chest...” The painting by an unknown artist straightened out their souls, crumpled by life, “straightened” them.
Green’s “Watercolor” evokes Gleb Uspensky’s famous essay “Straightened Up,” in which the statue of the Venus de Milo, once seen by the village teacher Tyapushkin, illuminates his dark and poor life and gives him “the happiness of feeling like a human being.” This feeling of happiness from contact with art and a good book is experienced by many of the heroes of Green’s works. Let us remember that for the boy Gray from “Scarlet Sails,” a picture depicting a raging sea was “that necessary word in the conversation of the soul with life, without which it is difficult to understand oneself.” And a small watercolor - a deserted road among the hills - called “The Road to Nowhere” amazes Tirrey Davenant. The young man, full of bright hopes, resists the impression, although the ominous watercolor “attracts like a well”... Like a spark from a dark stone, a thought is struck: to find a road that would lead not to nowhere, but “here”, fortunately, that in At that moment Tirrei dreamed.
And perhaps it would be more accurate to say this: Green believed that every real person has a romantic flame glimmering in their chest. And it's just a matter of inflating it. When Green's fisherman fishes, he dreams of catching a big fish, such a big one, “like no one has caught before.” A charcoal miner, piling up a basket, suddenly sees that his basket has blossomed, from the branches he has burned, “buds have spread and sprinkled with leaves”... A girl from a fishing village, having heard enough fairy tales, dreams of an extraordinary sailor who will sail for her on a ship with scarlet sails. And her dream is so strong, so passionate that everything comes true. And an extraordinary sailor and scarlet sails.
Green was strange and unusual in the usual circle of realist writers, everyday writers, as they were called then. He was a stranger among the Symbolists, Acmeists, Futurists... "The Tragedy of the Suan Plateau" by Greene, a piece that I left conditionally with the editors, warning that it may or may not work, a beautiful thing, but too exotic... “These are lines from a letter from Valery Bryusov, who edited the literary department of the magazine “Russian Thought” in 1910-1914. They are very revealing, these lines that sound like a sentence. Even if Bryusov, a great poet, sensitive and responsive to literary novelty, is Green’s thing Although it seemed beautiful, it was too exotic, which may or may not work, then what was the attitude towards the works of a strange writer in other Russian magazines?
Meanwhile, for Greene, his story “The Tragedy of the Suan Plateau” (1911) was an ordinary thing: he wrote like that. Invading the unusual, the “exotic,” into the ordinary, familiar in the everyday life around him, the writer sought to more sharply indicate the splendor of its miracles or the monstrosity of its ugliness. This was his artistic style, his creative style.
The moral monster Blum, the main character of the story, who dreams of a time “when a mother does not dare to stroke her children, and whoever wants to smile will first write a will,” was not a special literary novelty. The misanthropes, homegrown Nietzscheans at that time, “on the night after the battle” of 1905, became fashionable figures. “A revolutionary by chance,” Blum is related in their inner essence to the terrorist Alexei from Leonid Andreev’s “Darkness,” who wished “for all the lights to go out,” and the notorious cynic Sanin from the novel of the same name by M. Artsybashev, and the obscurantist and sadist Trirodov, whom Fyodor Sologub in his “Navi Charms” passed off as a Social Democrat.
Greene's subjects were defined by time. With all the exoticism and whimsicality of the patterns of the artistic fabric of the writer’s works, in many of them the spirit of modernity, the air of the day in which they were written, is clearly felt. The features of time are sometimes so noticeably, so emphatically written out by Green that for him, a recognized science fiction writer and romantic, they even seem unexpected. At the beginning of the story “Hell Returned” (1915) there is, for example, the following episode: the famous journalist Galien Mark, sitting alone on the deck of a steamship, is approached with clearly hostile intentions by a certain party leader, “a man with a triple chin, black combed hair on his low forehead.” hair, dressed baggy and rudely, but with a claim to panache, expressed by a huge crimson tie...". After such a portrait description, you can already guess what kind of party this leader represents. But Green considered it necessary to say more precisely about this game (the story is told in the form of notes from Galien Mark).
“I saw that this man wanted a quarrel,” we read, “and I knew why. My article was published in the last issue of Meteor, exposing the activities of the Autumn Month party.”
Green's literary heritage is much wider and more diverse than one might assume, knowing the writer only from his romantic short stories, stories and novels. Not only in his youth, but also at the time of wide fame, Green, along with prose, wrote lyrical poems, poetic feuilletons and even fables. Along with romantic works, he published essays and stories of everyday life in newspapers and magazines. The last book the writer worked on was his “Autobiographical Tale,” where he depicts his life strictly realistically, in all its genre colors, with all its harsh details.
He began his literary career as a “everyday writer”, as the author of stories, the themes and plots of which he took directly from the reality around him. He was overwhelmed with life impressions, accumulated in abundance during the years of wandering around the world. They urgently demanded a way out and lay down on paper, it seems, in their original appearance, not in the least transformed by imagination; as it happened, so it was written. In the "Autobiographical Tale", on those pages where Green describes the days he spent at the Ural iron foundry, the reader will find the same pictures of the unsightly morals of the working barracks as in the story "Brick and Music", even some situations and details coincide. And in the partner of the young man Grinevsky, the gloomy and angry “heavy man”, with whom he sifted coal in sieves from morning until late at night (“75 kopecks per day”), one can easily recognize the prototype of the shaggy and angry, black with soot Evstigney.
The story about Evstigney was included in the writer’s first book, “The Invisible Cap” (1908). It contains ten stories, and about almost each of them we have the right to assume that it was, to one degree or another, copied from life. From his direct experience, Green knew the joyless life of the workers' barracks, sat in prisons, without receiving news from the outside for months ("At Leisure"), he was familiar with the vicissitudes of the "mysterious romantic life" of the underground, as depicted in the stories "Marat" , “Underground”, “To Italy”, “Quarantine”... There is no such work that would be called “The Invisible Cap” in the collection. But this title was, of course, not chosen by chance. Most of the stories depict “illegal immigrants” who, in the author’s opinion, live as if under an invisible cap. Hence the name of the collection. A fairy-tale title on the cover of a book where life is shown in a completely different way from fairy-tale twists... This is a very indicative touch for the early Greene.
Of course, Greene’s impressions of existence were not put on paper in a naturalistic way; of course, they were transformed by his artistic imagination. Already in his first purely “prosaic”, everyday things, the seeds of romance sprout, people with a spark of dreams appear. In the same shaggy, embittered Evstigney, the writer saw this romantic spark. Halakha music ignites his soul. The image of the romantic hero of the story “Marat”, who opens “The Invisible Cap”, was undoubtedly suggested to the writer by the circumstances of the famous “Kalyaev case”. The words of Ivan Kalyaev, who explained to the judges why he did not throw a bomb at the Moscow governor’s carriage the first time (a woman and children were sitting there), are repeated almost verbatim by the hero of Grinov’s story. Green has a lot of works written in a romantic-realistic vein, in which the action takes place in Russian capitals or in some Okurov district, more than one volume. And, had Green followed this already well-trodden path, he would certainly have developed into an excellent writer of everyday life. Only then Green would not have been Green, a writer of the most original type, as we know him now.
The popular formula “Writer N occupies a special place in literature” was invented in time immemorial. But it could have been rediscovered during Green's time. And this would be exactly the case when a standard phrase, a gray stamp is filled with vital juices, finds its original appearance, acquires its true meaning. Because Alexander Greene occupies a truly special place in Russian literature. It is impossible to remember any writer similar to him (neither Russian nor foreign). However, pre-revolutionary critics, and later Rapp’s critics, persistently compared Greene with Edgar Allan Poe, the American romantic of the 19th century, the author of the popular poem “The Raven” during Greene’s youth, each stanza of which ends with the hopeless “Nevermore!” ("Never!").
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