Bunin damned days. Ivan Bunin

1917–1919. Damned days

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin."Cursed Days":

The last time I was in St. Petersburg was at the beginning of April 17. Something unimaginable had already happened in the world at that time: the greatest country on earth was abandoned to the complete mercy of fate - and not just sometime, but during the greatest world war. The trenches stretched for another three thousand miles in the west, but they had already become simple pits: the matter was over, and it was over with such nonsense that had never happened before, for the power over these three thousand miles, over the armed horde into which the multimillion-strong army was turning, was already passed into the hands of “commissars” of journalists like Sobol and Jordansky. But it was no less scary throughout the rest of Russia, where a huge, centuries-old life suddenly ended and a kind of bewildered existence reigned, causeless idleness and unnatural freedom from everything that lives human society.

I arrived in St. Petersburg, got out of the carriage, walked through the station: here, in St. Petersburg, it was as if it was even more terrible than in Moscow, as if even more people, completely not knowing what to do, and completely meaninglessly wandering around all the station premises. I went out onto the porch to pick up a cab driver: the cab driver also didn’t know what to do - to carry or not to carry, and did not know what price to set.

To the European one,” I said.

He thought and answered at random:

Twenty rubles.

The price was still completely ridiculous at that time. But I agreed, sat down and went - and did not recognize St. Petersburg.

There was no longer any life in Moscow, although on the part of the new rulers there was an imitation of some supposedly new system, a new rank and even a parade of life, which was crazy in its stupidity and fever. The same thing, but to a superlative degree, happened in St. Petersburg. Meetings, sessions, rallies were going on continuously, appeals and decrees were issued one after another, the famous “direct wire” was working frantically - and whoever shouted or commanded along this wire then! - government cars with red flags were constantly rushing along Nevsky, overcrowded trucks rumbled, some detachments with red banners and music were excessively brisk and clearly beating the pace... Nevsky was flooded with a gray crowd, soldiers in saddle-backed overcoats, idle workers, walking servants and all sorts of hawkers selling from stalls and cigarettes, and red bows, and obscene cards, and sweets, and everything you asked for. And on the sidewalks there was rubbish, sunflower husks, and on the pavement there was manure ice, there were humps and potholes. And halfway there, the cab driver suddenly said to me what many men with beards had already said:

Now the people, like cattle without a shepherd, will screw everything up and destroy themselves.

I asked:

So what to do?

Do? - he said. - There is nothing to do now. Now it's a coven. Now there is no government.

I looked around at this Petersburg... “That’s right, a Sabbath.” But deep down in my soul I still hoped for something and still didn’t quite believe in the complete absence of a government.

However, it was impossible not to believe.

In St. Petersburg, I felt this especially vividly: a great death had happened in our thousand-year-old and huge house, and the house was now dissolved, wide open and filled with a countless idle crowd, for which there was no longer anything sacred or forbidden in any of its chambers. And among this crowd the heirs of the deceased rushed about, crazy with worries and orders, which, however, no one listened to. The crowd staggered from room to room, from room to room, never ceasing for a minute to gnaw and chew sunflowers, still only glancing, keeping silent for the time being. And the heirs rushed around and talked incessantly, ingratiated themselves to her in every possible way, assured her and themselves that it was she, the sovereign crowd, who had forever broken the “chains” in her “sacred wrath,” and everyone tried to convince both themselves and her that In fact, they are not heirs at all, but only temporary stewards, as if she herself were authorized to do so.

I saw the Field of Mars, on which they had just performed, as a kind of traditional sacrifice of the revolution, a comedy of funerals for supposedly fallen heroes for freedom. What need is there, that this was, in fact, a mockery of the dead, that they were deprived of an honest Christian burial, nailed into coffins that were for some reason red and unnaturally buried in the very center of the city of the living! They performed the comedy with complete frivolity and, having insulted the humble ashes of the unknown dead with stilted eloquence, they dug up and trampled the magnificent square from end to end, disfigured it with mounds, stuck tall bare poles in it with long and narrow black rags and for some reason fenced it off with planks fences, hastily knocked together and disgusting no less than poles in their savage simplicity. ‹…›

It was Easter, spring, and amazing spring, even in St. Petersburg there were such beautiful days, which you won’t remember. And over all my feelings at that time, immense sadness prevailed. Before leaving, I was in the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Everything was wide open - both the fortress gates and the cathedral doors. And idle people wandered everywhere, looking and spitting seeds. I walked around the cathedral, looked at the royal tombs, bowed to them, and when I went out to the porch, I stood for a long time in a daze: the whole of boundless spring Russia unfolded before my mental gaze. Spring, Easter bells called to joyful, Sunday feelings. But an immense grave yawned in the world. Death was in this spring, the last kiss...

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin.From the diary:

June 11, 1917. ‹…› No laws - and everyone is in power, everyone, except, of course, us. For some reason, the will of “free” Russia is expressed only by soldiers, men, and workers. Why, for example, is there no council of nobles, intellectuals, and philistine deputies?

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin."Cursed Days":

January 1 (old style) 1918. Moscow. This damn year is over. But what next? Maybe something even more terrible. Probably even so.

And there is something amazing all around: almost everyone is unusually cheerful for some reason - no matter who you meet on the street, there’s just a radiance emanating from their face:

That's enough for you, my friend! In two or three weeks he himself will be ashamed...

Cheerfully, with cheerful tenderness (out of pity for me, the stupid one), he squeezes his hand and runs on. ‹…›

7 January. I was at the meeting of the “Writers’ Book Publishing House” - great news: “ Constituent Assembly"Dispersed! ‹…›

February 5th. From the first of February they ordered a new style. So, in their opinion, today is already the eighteenth.

Yesterday I was at the Wednesday meeting. There were a lot of “young people”. Mayakovsky, who, in general, behaved quite decently, although all the time with a kind of boorish independence, flaunting the Stoeros directness of judgment, was in a soft shirt without a tie and for some reason with the collar of his jacket raised, like poorly shaven individuals who live in bad rooms wear , in the morning to the outhouse. ‹…›

We went to Lubyanka. In some places there are “rallies”. A red-haired man, in a coat with an astrakhan round collar, with red curly eyebrows, a freshly shaved, powdered face and gold fillings in his mouth, speaks monotonously, as if reading, about the injustices of the old regime. A snub-nosed gentleman with bulging eyes angrily objects to him. Women ardently and inappropriately interfere, interrupting the argument (a matter of principle, as the red-haired man puts it) with particulars, hasty stories from their personal life, who must prove that the devil knows what is going on. Several soldiers apparently do not understand anything, but, as always, they doubt something (or rather, everything) and shake their heads suspiciously.

A man approached, an old man with pale swollen cheeks and a wedge-shaped gray beard, which he, coming up, curiously thrust into the crowd, stuck between the sleeves of two gentlemen who were silent all the time, only listening: he began to listen carefully to himself, but, apparently, nothing not understanding, not believing anything or anyone. A tall blue-eyed worker and two more soldiers approached with sunflowers in their fists. The soldiers are both short-legged, chew and look incredulous and gloomy. An evil and cheerful smile, disdain plays on the worker’s face, he stood sideways near the crowd, pretending that he paused only for a minute, for fun: they say, I know in advance that everyone is talking nonsense.

The lady hastily complains that she is now without a piece of bread, she used to have a school, but now she has dismissed all the students, since there is nothing to feed them:

Who benefited from the Bolsheviks? It has become worse for everyone, and first of all for us, the people!

Interrupting her, some oiled bitch naively intervened and began to say that the Germans were about to come and everyone would have to pay for what they had done.

“Before the Germans come, we will cut you all off,” the worker said coldly and walked away.

The soldiers confirmed: “That’s right!” - and also left. ‹…›

Crowd on Strastnaya.

He came up and listened. A lady with a muff on her hand, a woman with an upturned nose. The lady speaks hastily, blushes with excitement, and gets confused.

“This is not a stone for me at all,” the lady says hastily, “this monastery is a sacred temple for me, and you are trying to prove...

“I have no need to try,” the woman interrupts impudently, “for you it is consecrated, but for us it is stone and stone!” We know! We saw it in Vladimir! The painter took the board, smeared it on it, and there you have God. Well, pray to him yourself.

After that I don’t want to talk to you.

And do not say!

A yellow-toothed old man with gray stubble on his cheeks argues with a worker:

“You, of course, have nothing left now, neither God nor conscience,” says the old man.

Yes, there are none left.

You shot five civilians over there.

Look! But as You been shot for three hundred years?

On Tverskaya, a pale old general in silver glasses and a black hat is selling something, standing timidly, modestly, like a beggar...

How amazingly quickly everyone gave up and lost heart! ‹…›

February 10.‹…› “The time has not yet come to understand the Russian revolution impartially, objectively...” You hear this now every minute. Impartially! But there will never be real impartiality. And most importantly: our “bias” will be very, very dear to the future historian. Is the “passion” of only the “revolutionary people” important? Well, we’re not people, are we? ‹…›

February 16. At night. Having said goodbye to Chirikov, he met on Povarskaya a soldier’s boy, ragged, skinny, disgusting and completely drunk. He poked his muzzle into my chest and, staggering back, spat on me and said:

Despot, son of a bitch! ‹…›

February 20th.‹…› We met M. He says that he just heard that the Kremlin is being mined and that they want to blow it up when the Germans arrive. At that time I was just looking at the amazing green sky above the Kremlin, at the old gold of its ancient domes... The Grand Dukes, the tower, Spas-on-Boru, the Archangel Cathedral - how everything is dear, blood-borne and only now properly felt and understood! Explode? Anything is possible. Now everything is possible. ‹…›

February 22.‹…› Nikitskaya without lights, grave-dark, black houses rise in the dark green sky, seem very large, stand out somehow in a new way. There are almost no passers-by, and those who walk are almost running.

What the Middle Ages! Then at least everyone was armed, the houses were almost impregnable...

On the corner of Povarskaya and Merzlyakovsky there are two soldiers with guns. Guards or robbers? Both. ‹…›

24 February. The other day I bought a pound of tobacco and, to keep it from drying out, hung it on a string between the frames, between the vents. Window to the courtyard. This morning at six in the morning there was something banging on the glass. I jumped up and saw: there was a stone on the floor, the glass was broken, there was no tobacco, and someone was running away from the window. - Robbery everywhere! ‹…›

2nd of March."The libertine, the drunkard Rasputin, the evil genius of Russia." Of course, the guy was good. Well, what about you, who never left “Bears” and “Stray Dogs”?

A new literary baseness, below which there seems to be nowhere to fall: some kind of “Musical Snuffbox” has opened in the most vile tavern - speculators, sharpers, public girls are sitting and gobbling up pies for a hundred rubles each, hypocrites are drinking from teapots, and poets and fiction writers ( Alyoshka Tolstoy, Bryusov, and so on) read to them their own and other people’s works, choosing the most obscene ones. Bryusov, they say, read the Gabrieliad (a youthful poem by A. S. Pushkin. - Composition.), pronouncing everything replaced by ellipses in full. Alyoshka dared to offer to read for me too - a big fee, he says, we’ll give it.

“Get out of Moscow!” It's a pity. During the day she is now surprisingly disgusting. The weather is wet, everything is wet, dirty, there are potholes on the sidewalks and on the pavement, bumpy ice, and there’s nothing to say about the crowd. And in the evening, at night it is empty, the sky turns dull and gloomy from the rare streetlights. But here you are walking along a quiet alley, completely dark, and suddenly you see an open gate, behind them, in the depths of the yard, a beautiful silhouette of an old house, softly darkening in the night sky, which here is completely different than above the street, and in front of the house is a hundred-year-old tree, black the pattern of his huge spreading tent… ‹…›

I read about corpses standing at the bottom of the sea - killed, drowned officers. And here is “The Musical Snuffbox”. ‹…›

They decided to slaughter everyone, everyone up to the age of seven, so that later not a single soul would remember our time.

I ask the janitor:

Do you think it's true?

Sighs:

Everything can be, everything can be.

And will the people really allow it?

He’ll allow it, dear master, he’ll allow it! And what can you do with them? The Tatars, they say, ruled us for two hundred years, but were there really such a thin people then?

We walked along Tverskoy Boulevard at night: Pushkin bowed his head sadly and low under a cloudy sky with gaps, as if he was saying again: “God, how sad my Russia is!”

And not a soul around, only occasionally soldiers and whores. ‹…›

March 23. The entire Lubyanka Square sparkles in the sun. Liquid mud splashes from under the wheels. And Asia, Asia - soldiers, boys, trading in gingerbread, halva, poppy seeds, cigarettes. Eastern cry, dialect - and how vile everyone is, even in complexion, yellow and mouse-like hair! The soldiers and workers, now and then rumbling on trucks, have triumphant faces. ‹…›

March 24.‹…› I bought a book about the Bolsheviks, published by Zadruga. A terrible gallery of convicts!

April 12 (old style) 1919. Odessa. Twelve years ago, V. and I arrived in Odessa on this day on our way to Palestine. What fabulous changes have happened since then! A dead, empty port, a dead, polluted city... Our children, grandchildren will not be able to even imagine the Russia in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understand - all this power, complexity, richness, happiness… ‹…›

April 15. Opposite our windows stands a tramp with a rifle on a rope over his shoulder - a “red policeman.” And the whole street trembles at him in a way that they would not have trembled before at the sight of a thousand of the most ferocious policemen. Actually, what happened? About six hundred of some “Grigoryevites” came, bandy-legged boys, led by a bunch of convicts and swindlers, who took over the richest city of a million! Everyone was dead with fear and smothered. Where, for example, are all those who so crushed the volunteers a month ago? ‹…›

April 19. Now all the houses are dark, the whole city is in darkness, except for those places where these robber dens are - there are chandeliers glowing, balalaikas are heard, walls are visible, hung with black banners, on which are white skulls with the inscriptions: “Death, death to the bourgeoisie!”

I’m writing under a stinking kitchen lamp, burning off the remaining kerosene. How painful, how insulting. My Capri friends, the Lunacharskys and the Gorkys, the guardians of Russian culture and art, who came into sacred anger at every warning to some “New Life” from the “royal guardsmen”, what would you do with me now, having captured me for this criminal writing at the stinking Kagan, or how I will steal this writing into the cracks of the cornice? ‹…›

April 21.‹…› “From victory to victory - new successes of the valiant Red Army. Execution of 26 Black Hundreds in Odessa...” ‹…›

Just now I read about this execution of twenty-six somehow stupidly.

Now in some kind of tetanus. Yes, twenty-six, and not someday, but yesterday, here, near me. How to forget, how to forgive the Russian people for this? And everything will be forgiven, everything will be forgotten. However, I too - I'm just trying I can’t be horrified, but I really can’t; I still lack real sensitivity. This is the whole hellish secret of the Bolsheviks - to kill receptivity. People live in moderation, their receptivity and imagination are also measured by them - go beyond the limit. This is like the price of bread and beef. "What? Three ruble pounds?!” But assign a thousand - and the end of amazement, screaming, tetanus, insensibility. "How? Seven hanged?! - “No, honey, not seven, but seven hundred!” - And here there is certainly tetanus - you can still imagine seven hanging, but try seven hundred, even seventy! ‹…›

April 22. It's terribly mystical in the evenings. It’s still light, but the clock shows something ridiculous, nighttime. The lanterns are not lit. But in all sorts of “government” institutions, in emergency situations, in theaters and clubs “named after Trotsky”, “named after Sverdlov”, “named after Lenin”, pink glass stars shine transparently, like some kind of jellyfish. And along the strangely empty, still bright streets, in cars, in reckless cars - very often with dressed up girls - all kinds of red aristocracy rush to these clubs and theaters (to look at their serf actors): sailors with huge Brownings on their belts, pickpockets, criminal villains and some shaven dandies in jackets, in the most depraved breeches, in smart boots, certainly with spurs, all with gold teeth and large, dark, cocaine eyes... But it’s creepy even during the day. All large city doesn’t live, stays at home, doesn’t go out much. The city feels conquered, and conquered as if by some special people, who seem much more terrible than, I think, the Pechenegs seemed to our ancestors. And the conqueror staggers around, sells from stalls, spits seeds, “curses.” Either a huge crowd is moving along Deribasovskaya, accompanying for entertainment the coffin of some swindler, who is certainly passed off as a “fallen fighter” (lies in a red coffin, and in front are orchestras and hundreds of red and black banners), or groups of people playing accordions, dancing and screaming are turning black :

Hey apple

Where are you going?

In general, as soon as the city turns “red,” the crowd filling the streets immediately changes dramatically. A certain selection of faces is made, the street is transformed.

How this selection in Moscow shocked me! This is the main reason why I left there.

Now the same thing is happening in Odessa - ever since holiday, when the “revolutionary people’s army” entered the city, and when even on the carriage horses red bows and ribbons burned like heat.

First of all, there is no routine, no simplicity on these faces. All of them are almost entirely sharply repulsive, frightening with evil stupidity, some kind of gloomy servile challenge to everything and everyone.

And now the third the year goes by something monstrous. The third year is only baseness, only dirt, only atrocity. Well, at least for a laugh, for amusement, something that’s not really good, but just ordinary, something just different!

From the diary:

June 27 / July 10, 1919. In the evening on the boulevard, but we don’t meet anyone we know. We walk along the entire boulevard. We stop at the stairs under the Richelieu monument, spared by the Bolsheviks. Not far from us we see two young ladies, very flirtatiously dressed, and a young man. Everyone has a bandage on their arms with the letters “C.” TO.". They stand with animated faces, laughing at something... I look at Ian, he, pale as a sheet, with a distorted face, says:

This is who our fate depends on. And aren’t they ashamed to go out in public with their brand!

I peer into their faces, trying to remember: the young ladies are brunettes, quite pretty, with black eyes, thin, of average height - young ladies like young ladies, typical Odessans. A young man with the most ordinary face in a jacket, with a foppish look, with a stack in his hand.

I try to get Ian away as quickly as possible, although I want to keep an eye on this trio. I give my word not to come here again, since he is very careless and, moreover, I see that such a sight causes him unbearable suffering. ‹…›

All the way Ian cannot calm down. He even somehow immediately became haggard. And he keeps repeating:

No, this is a different tribe. Previously, executioners were ashamed of their craft, lived in solitude, trying not to catch the eye of people, but here they are not embarrassed not only to go out into public places, but even attach a brand to themselves, and this at the age of twenty!

Now you will have to walk along secluded streets.

Valentin Petrovich Kataev:

Almost every day, in any weather, Bunin walked around the city for several hours in a row. He walked, not walked, with a quick, easy step, in a short, knee-length demi-season metropolitan coat, with a cane, wearing a professor's skullcap instead of a hat - impetuous, intensely attentive, lean. ‹…›

I watched Bunin at a soldier's flea market, where he stood in the middle of the crowd with notebook in his hands, calmly and leisurely writing down in his clear cuneiform ditties, which were shouted by two brothers - Black Sea military men, dashingly dancing, putting their hands on each other’s shoulders and shaking their wide “flares” - the fashionable “apple” or “Deribasovskaya”. ‹…›

I remember the fainting, nauseating smell of sesame oil, garlic, acrid human sweat.

But Bunin did not pay any attention to this and worked calmly, covering page after page with his notes.

The most striking thing was that absolutely no one paid attention to him, despite his professorial appearance, which in no way blended in with the market crowd, and perhaps precisely because of this appearance: who knows who they took him for? Even then the thought occurred to me: are they taking him here - this thin, bony gentleman in an eccentric cap, with an automatic pen in his hand - for some kind of market graphologist, magician, magician or fortune teller who sells sheets of “happiness”, which was quite in the spirit of the times.

Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina.From the diary:

June 30 / July 13, 1919. Three more or less enter intelligent people, and behind them, bow-legged, big-faced Red Army soldiers tumble in, knocking their cannons. Ian, wearing glasses, with an unusually fierce look, unexpectedly declares to me:

You have no right to search my place! Here's my passport. I'm old enough to fight.

“Maybe you have supplies,” the young man who was indignant with the owner politely asks.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any supplies,” Ian says abruptly and angrily.

What about weapons? - the leader of the gang asks even more politely.

I do not have. However, it’s up to you, do [the search],” he rushes to turn on the electricity.

In the light I was afraid of his pale, menacing face. Well, it will be a matter of why he annoys them, - flashed through my head.

But the soldiers began to back away, and the young man bowed and said:

I'm sorry.

And everyone left quietly one after another.

We sat in silence for a long time, unable to utter a word.

Valentin Petrovich Kataev:

He was easy-going and loved to wander around different cities and countries. However, he was stuck in Odessa: he did not want to become an emigrant, cut off by a slice; stubbornly hoped for a miracle - for the end of the Bolsheviks ‹…› and for a return to Moscow to the ringing of the Kremlin bells. In which? It is unlikely that he clearly understood this. To the old, familiar Moscow? This is probably why he remained in Odessa when, in the spring of 1919, it was occupied by units of the Red Army and Soviet power was established for several months.

By this time, Bunin had so compromised himself with counter-revolutionary views, which, by the way, he did not hide, that he could have been shot without any discussion, and probably would have been shot if not for his older friend, the Odessa artist Nilus, who lived in the same house where the Bunins lived , in the attic described in “Chang’s Dreams”, not a simple attic, but an attic “warm, fragrant with cigars, covered with carpets, filled with antique furniture, hung with paintings and brocade fabrics...”

So, if this same Nilus had not shown frantic energy - he telegraphed Lunacharsky to Moscow, almost on his knees begged the chairman of the Odessa Revolutionary Committee - then it is still unknown how the matter would have ended.

One way or another, Nilus received a special, so-called “safe conduct letter” for the life, property and personal integrity of Academician Bunin, which was pinned with buttons to the lacquered, rich door of the mansion on Knyazheskaya Street.

‹…› A detachment of armed sailors and soldiers of the special department approached the mansion. Seeing blue collars and open orange short fur coats through the window, Vera Nikolaevna silently slid down along the wall and lost consciousness, and Bunin, sharply knocking his heels on the polished parquet floor, walked up to the doors, stopped on the threshold rooted to the spot, strangely throwing back his outstretched hands with his hands clenched with all his might. forcefully with his fists, and convulsions ran across his whitened face with a shaking beard and terrible eyes.

If anyone dares to cross the threshold of my house... - he did not shout, but somehow terribly gnashed, playing with his jaws and revealing his yellowish, strong, sharp teeth, - then I will gnaw off the throat of the first person with my own teeth, and then let them kill me! I don't want to live anymore! ‹…›

But everything turned out well: the special officers read the safe conduct with the Soviet seal and signature, they were very surprised, even someone quietly cursed at the Revolutionary Committee, but ‹…› silently retreated along a quiet, deserted street.

Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina.From the diary:

I can't see them. I’m disgusted by all their flesh, human flesh, somehow all coming out,” says Ian now almost always when we walk along crowded streets.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

Damned days

Oleg Mikhailov. Unknown Bunin

[text missing]

Damned days

Moscow, 1918

And there is something amazing all around: almost everyone is unusually cheerful for some reason - no matter who you meet on the street, there’s just a radiance emanating from their face:

That's enough for you, my friend! In two or three weeks he himself will be ashamed...

Cheerfully, with cheerful tenderness (out of pity for me, the stupid one), he squeezes his hand and runs on.

Today we have the same meeting again,” Speransky from Russkie Vedomosti. And after that I met an old woman in Merzlyakovsky. She stopped, leaned on the crutch with trembling hands and began to cry:

Father, take me to your education! Where should we go now? Russia has disappeared, for thirteen years, they say, it has disappeared!

I was at a meeting of the “Book Publishing House of Writers” - great news: the “Constituent Assembly” was dispersed!

About Bryusov: everything is moving to the left, “almost already a full-fledged Bolshevik.” Not surprising. In 1904, he extolled autocracy and demanded (quite Tyutchev!) the immediate capture of Constantinople. In 1905 he appeared with “Dagger” in Gorky’s “Struggle”. Since the beginning of the war with the Germans, he became a cheerful patriot. Now a Bolshevik.

From the first of February they ordered a new style. So, in their opinion, today is already the eighteenth.

Read Ehrenburg, Vera Inber. Sasha Koiransky said about them:

Ehrenburg howls, Inber eagerly catches his cry, - Neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg will replace Berdichev.

In the newspapers - about the beginning of the German offensive. Everyone says: “Oh, if only!”

We went to Lubyanka. In some places there are “rallies”. A red-haired man, in a coat with an astrakhan round collar, with red curly eyebrows, a freshly shaved, powdered face and gold fillings in his mouth, speaks monotonously, as if reading, about the injustices of the old regime. A snub-nosed gentleman with bulging eyes angrily objects to him. Women intervene vehemently and inappropriately, interrupting the argument (a matter of principle, as the redhead puts it) with particulars, hasty stories from their personal lives, meant to prove that God knows what is going on. Several soldiers apparently do not understand anything, but, as always, they doubt something (or rather, everything) and shake their heads suspiciously.

The lady hastily complains that she is now without a piece of bread, she used to have a school, but now she has dismissed all the students, since there is nothing to feed them:

Who benefited from the Bolsheviks? It has become worse for everyone, and first of all for us, the people!

Interrupting her, some oiled bitch naively intervened and began to say that the Germans were about to come and everyone would have to pay for what they had done.

“Before the Germans come, we will cut you all off,” the worker said coldly and walked away.

The soldiers confirmed: “That’s right!” - and also left.

The same thing was said in another crowd, where another worker and an ensign were arguing. The ensign tried to speak as softly as possible, choosing the most harmless expressions, trying to influence with logic. He was almost ingratiating himself, and yet the worker shouted at him:

Your brother needs to be silent more, that’s what! There is no point in spreading propaganda among the people!

K. says that R. visited them again yesterday. He sat for four hours and all the time mindlessly read someone’s book about magnetic waves that was lying on the table, then he drank tea and ate all the bread that they were given. He is by nature meek, quiet and certainly not at all impudent, but now he comes and sits without any conscience, eating all the bread with complete inattention to the owners. A man is falling quickly!

Blok openly joined the Bolsheviks. I published an article that Kogan (P.S.) admires. I haven’t read it yet, but I supposedly told its contents to Ehrenburg - and it turned out to be very true. The song is not clever at all, and Blok is a stupid person.

From Gorky’s “New Life”:

“From today, even for the most naive simpleton, it becomes clear that not only about any courage and revolutionary dignity, but even about the most elementary honesty in relation to the policy of the people's commissars. Before us is a company of adventurers who, for the sake of their own interests, for the sake of delaying the agony of their dying autocracy for a few more weeks, are ready for the most shameful betrayal of the interests of their homeland and the revolution, the interests of the Russian proletariat, in whose name they are committing outrages on the vacant throne of the Romanovs.”

From "Power of the People":

“In view of the repeatedly observed and every night repeated cases of beating of those arrested during interrogation in the Council of Workers' Deputies, we ask the Council of People's Commissars to protect them from such hooligan antics and actions...” This is a complaint from Borovichi.

In 1918–1920, Bunin wrote down his direct observations and impressions of events in Russia in the form of diary notes. He called 1918 a “damned” year, and expected something even more terrible from the future.

Bunin writes very ironically about the introduction of a new style. He mentions “the beginning of the German offensive against us,” which everyone welcomes, and describes the incidents that he observed on the streets of Moscow.

A young officer enters the tram car and sheepishly says that he “unfortunately cannot pay for the ticket.”

The critic Derman returns to Moscow - he fled from Simferopol. He says there is “indescribable horror” there, with soldiers and workers “walking knee-deep in blood.” Some old colonel was roasted alive in a locomotive firebox.

“The time has not yet come to understand the Russian revolution impartially, objectively...” This is heard now every minute. But there will never be real impartiality, and our “bias” will be very dear to the future historian. Is the “passion” of only the “revolutionary people” important?

There is hell on the tram, clouds of soldiers with bags - fleeing from Moscow, fearing that they will be sent to defend St. Petersburg from the Germans. The author meets a boy soldier, ragged, skinny and completely drunk. The soldier stumbles upon the author, staggers back, spits on him and says: “Despot, son of a bitch!”

Posters are posted on the walls of houses incriminating Trotsky and Lenin of being bribed by the Germans. The author asks a friend exactly how much these scoundrels received. The friend answers with a grin - decently.

Again some kind of demonstration, banners, posters, singing in hundreds of throats: “Get up, rise up, working people!” The voices are guttural, primitive. The faces of the women are Chuvash, Mordovian, the faces of the men are all customized, criminal, others are straight Sakhalin. The Romans put brands on the faces of their convicts. There is no need to put anything on these faces, and everything is visible without any branding.

The entire Lubyanka Square sparkles in the sun. Liquid mud splashes from under the wheels, soldiers, boys, trading gingerbread, halva, poppy seeds, cigarettes - real Asia. The soldiers and workers passing by on trucks have triumphant faces. There is a fat-faced soldier in a friend's kitchen. He says that socialism is impossible now, but the bourgeoisie must be cut off.

Odessa, April 12, 1919 (old style). Dead, empty port, polluted city. The post office has not worked since the summer of 17, since the “Minister of Posts and Telegraphs” appeared for the first time, in a European manner. At the same time, the first “Minister of Labor” appeared, and all of Russia stopped working. And the Satan of Cain’s malice, bloodthirstiness and the wildest arbitrariness breathed on Russia precisely in those days when brotherhood, equality and freedom were proclaimed.

The author often recalls the indignation with which he was greeted by seemingly entirely black images of the Russian people. People were indignant, fed by the very literature that for a hundred years had disgraced the priest, the layman, the tradesman, the official, the policeman, the landowner, the wealthy peasant - all classes except the horseless “people” and tramps.

Now all the houses are dark. The light is on only in robber dens, where chandeliers glow, balalaikas are heard, and walls are visible, hung with black banners with white skulls and the inscription: “Death to the bourgeoisie!”

The author describes a fiery fighter for the revolution: there is saliva in his mouth, his eyes look furiously through his crookedly hanging pince-nez, his tie has slipped onto his dirty paper collar, his vest is soiled, there is dandruff on the shoulders of his short jacket, his greasy, thin hair is disheveled. And this viper is possessed by the fiery selfless love to man”, “thirst for beauty, goodness and justice”!

There are two types among the people. In one, Rus' predominates, in the other, Chud. But in both there is a terrible changeability of moods and appearances. The people themselves say to themselves: “From us, like from wood, there is both a club and an icon.” It all depends on who processes this tree: Sergius of Radonezh or Emelka Pugachev.

“From victory to victory - new successes of the valiant Red Army. Execution of 26 Black Hundreds in Odessa..."

The author expects that wild robbery, which is already underway in Kyiv, will begin in Odessa - the “collection” of clothes and shoes. Even during the day the city is creepy. Everyone is sitting at home. The city feels conquered by someone who seems worse to the residents than the Pechenegs. And the conqueror sells from stalls, spits seeds, “curses.”

Along Deribasovskaya, either a huge crowd is moving, accompanying the red coffin of some swindler, passing off as a “fallen fighter,” or the peacoats of sailors playing accordions, dancing and screaming: “Oh, apple, where are you going!” are turning black.

The city turns “red” and the crowd filling the streets immediately changes. There is no routine, no simplicity on the new faces. All of them are sharply repulsive, frightening with their evil stupidity, gloomy and servile challenge to everything and everyone.

The author recalls the Field of Mars, where the comedy of the funeral of the “heroes who fell for freedom” was performed as a kind of sacrifice to the revolution. In the author’s opinion, this was a mockery of the dead, who were deprived of an honest Christian burial, nailed into red coffins and unnaturally buried in the very center of the city of the living.

Signature under the poster: “Don’t set your sights, Denikin, on someone else’s land!”

In the Odessa “emergency zone” new style shoot - over a closet cup.

“Warning” in the newspapers: “Due to the complete depletion of fuel, there will soon be no electricity.” In one month, everything was processed - factories, railways, trams. There is no water, no bread, no clothes - nothing!

Late in the evening, together with the “commissar” of the house, the author comes to measure the length, width and height of all the rooms “in order to densify them with the proletariat.”

Why a commissioner, why a tribunal, and not just a court? Because only under the protection of such sacred revolutionary words can one so boldly walk knee-deep in blood.

Main feature Red Army soldiers - licentiousness. There’s a cigarette in his teeth, his eyes are dull and insolent, his cap is on the back of his head, and his hair is falling on his forehead. Dressed in prefabricated rags. The sentries sit at the entrances of requisitioned houses, lounging in armchairs. Sometimes there’s just a tramp sitting, a Browning on his belt, a German cleaver hanging on one side, a dagger on the other.

Calls in a purely Russian spirit: “Forward, dear ones, don’t count the corpses!”

Fifteen more people are shot in Odessa and the list is published. “Two trains with gifts to the defenders of St. Petersburg” were sent from Odessa, that is, with food, and Odessa itself is dying of hunger.

We remember Bunin as the author of " Antonov apples" And " Dark alleys”, but there are also “Cursed Days” in his work - diary entries 1918-1920, in which the writer reflected on what happened to Russia during the years of the revolution and civil war. Published in 1925, Damned Days was published in our country only in the 1980s.

What an old Russian disease this is, this languor, this boredom, this spoilage - eternal hope that some frog will come with a magic ring and do everything for you: you just have to go out onto the porch and throw the ring from hand to hand!

“Revolutions are not made with white gloves...” Why be indignant that counter-revolutions are made with iron fists?

He walked and thought, or rather, felt: even if now I managed to escape somewhere, to Italy, for example, to France, everywhere it would be disgusting - the man was disgusted! Life made him feel so keenly, look at him so keenly and carefully, his soul, his vile body. What our former eyes - how little they saw, even mine!

Didn't many people know that revolution is only bloody game in a change of places, which always ends only in the fact that the people, even if they managed to sit, feast and rage for a while in the master’s place, always end up falling out of the frying pan and into the fire?

There are two types among the people. In one, Rus' predominates, in the other, Chud and Merya. But in both there is a terrible changeability of moods, appearances, “unsteadiness,” as they said in the old days. The people themselves said to themselves: “From us, like from wood, there is both a club and an icon,” depending on the circumstances, on who processes this wood: Sergius of Radonezh or Emelka Pugachev. If I hadn’t loved this “icon”, this Rus', hadn’t seen it, why would I have gone so crazy all these years, why have I suffered so boundlessly, so fiercely?

Again some kind of manifestation, banners, posters, music - and some into the forest, some for firewood, in hundreds of drinks:

- Get up, get up, working people!

The Romans stamped the faces of their convicts: “Cave furem.” There is no need to put anything on these faces - and everything is visible without any branding.

During french revolution also, a whole abyss of new administrative institutions was immediately created, a whole flood of decrees, circulars poured in, the number of commissars - certainly for some reason commissars - and in general all kinds of authorities became countless, committees, unions, parties grew like mushrooms, and everyone “devoured each other”, a completely new one has formed special language, “entirely consisting of the most pompous exclamations mixed with the most vulgar abuse addressed to the dirty remnants of a dying tyranny...” All this is repeated because, first of all, one of the most distinctive features revolutions - a frenzied thirst for games, acting, poses, booths. The monkey awakens in man.

Why a commissioner, why a tribunal, and not just a court? This is because only under the protection of such sacred revolutionary words can one so boldly walk knee-deep in blood...

It’s scary to say, but it’s true: if it weren’t for the people’s disasters, thousands of intellectuals would be downright miserable people. How then to sit, protest, what to shout and write about?

People are saved only by the weakness of their abilities - the weakness of imagination, attention, thought, otherwise it would be impossible to live. Tolstoy once said to himself:

The trouble is that my imagination is a little more vivid than others...

I have this problem too.

The men, who destroyed one landowner's estate near Yelets in the fall of 1917, plucked and tore off feathers from living peacocks for fun and let them, bloodied, fly, rush about, poke around with piercing screams anywhere.

But what a problem! Here Pavel Yushkevich assures that “the revolution cannot be approached with a criminal standard”, that to shudder at these peacocks is “philistinism”. He even remembered Hegel: “It was not for nothing that Hegel spoke about the rationality of everything real: there is reason, there is meaning in the Russian revolution.”

Yes, yes, “they beat you and don’t tell you to cry.” What is it like for a peacock who did not suspect the existence of Hegel? By what standard, other than the criminal one, can those priests, landowners, officers, children, old people, whose skulls are crushed by the victorious demos, “approach the revolution”?

In essence, it’s high time for all of us to hang ourselves - we are so downtrodden, muzzled, deprived of all rights and laws, we live in such vile slavery, amid incessant strangulations and bullying!

Just now I read about this execution of twenty-six somehow stupidly.

Now in some kind of tetanus. Yes, twenty-six, and not someday, but yesterday, here, near me. How to forget, how to forgive the Russian people for this? And everything will be forgiven, everything will be forgotten. However, I too - I’m just trying to be horrified, but I really can’t, I still lack real sensitivity. This is the whole hellish secret of the Bolsheviks - to kill receptivity. People live in moderation, their receptivity and imagination are also measured by them - go beyond the limit. This is like the price of bread and beef. "What? Three ruble pounds!" But assign a thousand - and the end of amazement, screaming, tetanus, insensibility. "What? Seven hanged?!" - “No, honey, not seven, but seven hundred!” - And here there is certainly tetanus - you can still imagine seven hanging, but try seven hundred, even seventy!

Tolstoy said that nine-tenths of bad human actions are explained solely by stupidity.

“In my youth,” he said, “we had a friend, a poor man, who one day suddenly bought a wind-up metal canary with his last pennies. We racked our brains, looking for an explanation for this ridiculous act, until we remembered that our friend was simply terribly stupid.

There was V. Kataev (a young writer). The cynicism of today's young people is simply incredible. He said: “I’ll kill anyone for a hundred thousand.” I want to eat well, I want to have a good hat, great shoes..."

Why live, for what? Why do anything? In this world, in their world, in the world of total boor and beast, I don’t need anything.

However, Russian mail ended a long time ago, back in the summer of 17: ever since we first had a “Minister of Posts and Telegraphs” in European fashion. At the same time, the “Minister of Labor” appeared for the first time - and then all of Russia stopped working. Yes, and the Satan of Cain’s malice, bloodthirstiness and the wildest arbitrariness breathed on Russia precisely in those days when brotherhood, equality and freedom were proclaimed.

-Are you going home? – I once said to the writer Osipovich, saying goodbye to him on the street.

He answers:

- Not at all!

How can I explain to him that they don’t speak Russian like that? Doesn't understand, doesn't feel:

- How should I say it? In your opinion, not at all? But what's the difference?

He doesn't understand the difference. Of course, he can be forgiven; he will live in Odessa. It is also forgivable because in the end he modestly admits this and promises to remember that he must say “not at all.”

“Russian History” by Tatishchev:

“Brother against brother, son against father, slave against master, seeking to kill one another for the sake of greed, lust and power, seeking brother to deprive brother of their property, not knowing, as the wise one says: seeking what belongs to another, in that day he will weep for his own...”

And how many fools are convinced that Russian history a great “shift” took place to something seemingly completely new, hitherto unprecedented!

The trouble (and terrible thing) is that no one had even the slightest genuine idea about “Russian history.”

He said that the Bolsheviks are still amazed that they managed to seize power and that they are still holding on:

“After the coup, Lunacharsky ran around for two weeks with his eyes wide open: no, just think, we only wanted to make a demonstration and suddenly such an unexpected success!

Moscow, 1918

January 1 (old style).

And there is something amazing all around: almost everyone is unusually cheerful for some reason - no matter who you meet on the street, there’s just a radiance emanating from their faces:

- That's enough for you, my friend! In two or three weeks he himself will be ashamed...

Cheerfully, with cheerful tenderness (out of pity for me, stupid), he squeezes his hand and runs on.

Today we have the same meeting again,” Speransky from Russkie Vedomosti. And after that I met an old woman in Merzlyakovsky. She stopped, leaned on the crutch with trembling hands and began to cry:

- Father, take me to your education! Where should we go now? Russia has disappeared, for thirteen years, they say, it has disappeared!

Jan. 7.

I was at a meeting of the “Book Publishing House of Writers” - great news: the “Constituent Assembly” was dispersed!

About Bryusov: everything is moving to the left, “almost already a full-fledged Bolshevik.” Not surprising. In 1904, he extolled autocracy and demanded (quite Tyutchev!) the immediate capture of Constantinople. In 1905 he appeared with “Dagger” in Gorky’s “Struggle”. From the beginning of the war with the Germans he became a jingoist. Now a Bolshevik.

February 5th.

From the first of February they ordered a new style. So, in their opinion, today is already the eighteenth.

Read Ehrenburg, Vera Inber. Sasha Koiransky said about them:

Ehrenburg howls,
Inber eagerly catches his cry, -
Neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg
They will not replace Berdichev.

February 6.

In the newspapers - about the beginning of the German offensive. Everyone says: “Oh, if only!”

We went to Lubyanka. In some places there are “rallies”. A red-haired man, in a coat with an astrakhan round collar, with red curly eyebrows, a freshly shaved, powdered face and gold fillings in his mouth, speaks monotonously, as if reading, about the injustices of the old regime. A snub-nosed gentleman with bulging eyes angrily objects to him. Women intervene vehemently and inappropriately, interrupting the argument (a matter of principle, as the redhead puts it) with particulars, hasty stories from their personal lives, meant to prove that God knows what is going on. Several soldiers apparently do not understand anything, but, as always, they doubt something (or rather, everything) and shake their heads suspiciously.

The lady hastily complains that she is now without a piece of bread, she used to have a school, but now she has dismissed all the students, since there is nothing to feed them:

– Who got better from the Bolsheviks? It has become worse for everyone, and first of all for us, the people!

Interrupting her, some oiled bitch naively intervened and began to say that the Germans were about to come, and everyone would have to pay for what they had done.

“Before the Germans come, we will cut you all off,” the worker said coldly and walked away.

The soldiers confirmed: “That’s right!” - and also left.

– Your brother needs to be silent more, that’s what! There is no need to spread propaganda among the people!

K. says that R. visited them again yesterday. He sat for four hours and all the time mindlessly read someone’s book about magnetic waves that was lying on the table, then he drank tea and ate the bread that they were given. He is by nature meek, quiet and certainly not at all impudent, but now he comes and sits without any conscience, eating all the bread with complete inattention to the owners. A man is falling quickly!

From Gorky’s “New Life”:

“From today on, it becomes clear to even the most naive simpleton that there is no need to talk about not only any kind of courage and revolutionary dignity, but even the most elementary honesty in relation to the policies of the people’s commissars. Before us is a company of adventurers who, for the sake of their own interests, for the sake of prolonging the agony of their dying autocracy for a few more weeks, are ready for the most shameful betrayal of the interests of their homeland and the revolution, the interests of the Russian proletariat, in whose name they are committing outrages on the vacant throne of the Romanovs.”

From "Power of the People":

From the Russian Word:

Tambov men from the village of Pokrovskoye drew up a protocol: “On January 30, we, society, pursued two predators, our citizens Nikita Aleksandrovich Bulkin and Adrian Aleksandrovich Kudinov. By agreement of our society, they were pursued and killed at the same time.”

This “society” immediately developed a unique code of punishment for crimes:

– If someone hits someone, the victim must hit the offender ten times.

- If someone hits someone with injury or a broken bone, then the offender will be deprived of his life.

- If anyone commits theft, or anyone accepts stolen goods, then take his life.

– If someone commits arson and is discovered, then take his life. Soon two thieves were caught red-handed. They were immediately “tried” and sentenced to death. First they killed one: they smashed his head with a steelyard, pierced his side with a pitchfork, and stripped the dead man naked and threw him onto the road. Then they started on another...

You read something like this every day now.

On Petrovka, monks crush ice. Passers-by celebrate and gloat:

- Yeah! Kicked out! Now, brother, they will force you!

In the courtyard of a house on Povarskaya, a soldier in a leather jacket is chopping wood. A passing man stood and looked for a long time, then shook his head and said sadly:

- Oh, so yours! Oh, deserter, so yours! Rossea is missing!

February 7.

In “Power of the People” the editorial: “The terrible hour has come - Russia and the Revolution are perishing. All in defense of the revolution, which so recently shone so radiantly to the world!” - When she was shining, were your eyes shameless?

In the Russian Word: “Killed former boss headquarters General Yanushkevich. He was arrested in Chernigov and, by order of the local revolutionary tribunal, was transported to Petrograd to the Peter and Paul Fortress. On the way, the general was accompanied by two Red Guards. One of them killed him with four shots at night when the train was approaching the Oredezh station.”

The snow is still shiny like winter, but the sky turns bright blue, like spring, through the cloudy shining vapors.

A poster about Yavorskaya’s benefit performance is pasted up on Strastnaya. A fat pink-red woman, angry and impudent, said:

- Look, they’re putting it up! Who will wash the walls? And the bourgeoisie will go to the theaters. We don't go here. Everyone is afraid of the Germans - they will come, they will come, but somehow they don’t come!

A lady is walking along Tverskaya in pince-nez, a soldier's sheepskin hat, a red plush jacket, a torn skirt and absolutely terrible galoshes.

Many ladies, students and officers stand on street corners, selling something.

A young officer entered the tram car and, blushing, said that he “unfortunately cannot pay for the ticket.”

Before evening. On Red Square, the low sun and the mirror-like, beaten snow are blinding. Freezing. We went to the Kremlin. There is a month in the sky and pink clouds. Silence, huge drifts of snow. Near the artillery warehouse, a soldier in a sheepskin coat, with a face as if carved out of wood, creaks with his felt boots. How unnecessary this guard seems now.

They left the Kremlin - they ran and the boys shouted with delight, with unnatural accents:

– Capture of Mogilev by German troops!

February 8.

Andrei (brother Yuli's servant) is becoming more and more crazy, even scary.

He has been serving for almost twenty years and has always been invariably simple, sweet, reasonable, polite, and cordial to us. Now I'm definitely crazy. He still serves carefully, but apparently through force, he cannot look at us, he avoids talking to us, he trembles all inwardly with anger, and when he cannot stand the silence, he abruptly utters some mysterious nonsense.

This morning, when we were with Yuli, N.N. spoke, as always, that everything was lost, that Russia was flying into the abyss. Andrey, who was putting the tea set on the table, suddenly had his hands jumping and his face filled with fire:

- Yes, yes, it’s flying, it’s flying! And who is to blame, who? Bourgeoisie! And you will see how they will cut it, you will see! Remember then your General Alekseev!

Julius asked:

- Yes, you, Andrey, at least once really explain why you hate him most of all?

Andrey, without looking at us, whispered:

– I have nothing to explain... You yourself must understand...

“But a week ago you stood up for him with all his might.” What happened?

- What's happened? But wait, you understand...

D. arrived and fled from Simferopol. There, he says, there is “indescribable horror,” soldiers and workers “walk knee-deep in blood.” Some old colonel was roasted alive in a locomotive firebox.

February 9th.

Yesterday we visited B. A fair number of people gathered - and all with one voice: the Germans, thank God, are advancing, they have taken Smolensk and Bologoe.

I went to the city in the morning.

Crowd on Strastnaya.

He came up and listened. A lady with a muff on her hand, a woman with an upturned nose. The lady speaks hastily, blushes with excitement, and gets confused.

“This is not a stone for me at all,” the lady says hastily, “this monastery is a sacred temple for me, and you are trying to prove...

“After that, I don’t want to talk to you.”

- And do not say!

A yellow-toothed old man with gray stubble on his cheeks argues with a worker:

“Of course, you have nothing left now, neither God nor conscience,” says the old man.

- Yes, there are none left.

“You shot five civilians over there.”

- Look! How have you been shooting for three hundred years?

On Tverskaya, a pale old general in silver glasses and a black hat is selling something, standing timidly, modestly, like a beggar...

How amazingly quickly everyone gave up and lost heart!

Rumors about some Polish legions that are also supposedly coming to save us. By the way, why exactly “legion”? What an abundance of new and increasingly pompous words! Everything is a game, a farce, a “high” style, a pompous lie...

The wives of all these S.S., holed up in the Kremlin, are now talking on different direct wires just like on their home phones.

February 10.

“Peace, peace, but no peace. Among My people are the wicked; They keep watch like bird catchers, crouch to the ground, set traps and catch people. And My people love it. Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring destruction upon this people, the fruit of their thoughts.”

This is from Jeremiah - I've been reading the Bible all morning. Amazing. And especially the breakdown: “And My people love this... behold, I will bring destruction upon this people, the fruit of their thoughts.”

Then I read the proofs of my “Village” for Gorky’s publishing house “Parus”. The devil has connected me with this establishment! But “Village” is still an extraordinary thing. But only available those who know Russia. Who knows?

Then I looked through (also for “Sail”) my poems for the year 16.

The owner died, the house is full,
Vitriol blooms on the glass,
The barn is overgrown with nettles,
The cooker, long empty, is open,
And manure smokes through the barns...
Heat, suffering... Where is it flying?
A stray dog passing through the estate?

I wrote this in the summer of 16, sitting in Vasilyevskoye, anticipating what in those days was probably foreseen by many who lived in the village, close to the people.

Last summer this came true in full:

The rye is burning, the grain is flowing,
And who will reap and knit?
Here the smoke is pouring out, the alarm is ringing,
But who will decide to fill it?
Here comes the demon-possessed army
And, like Mamai, he will pass through all of Rus'...

I still don’t understand how we decided to spend the entire summer of ’17 in the village and how and why our heads survived!

“The time has not yet come to understand the Russian revolution impartially, objectively...” You hear this now every minute. Impartially! But there will never be real impartiality. And most importantly: our “bias” will be very, very dear to the future historian. Is the “passion” of only the “revolutionary people” important? Well, aren’t we people?

In the evening on Wednesday. I read Auslander - something extremely wretched, like Oscar Wilde. All sort of dead, with dried out dark eyes, on which there is a golden reflection, like on dried linden ink.

The Germans allegedly do not go as they usually do in war, fighting, conquering, but “simply ride along railway"- occupy St. Petersburg. And this will happen in 48 hours, no more, no less.

There is an article in Izvestia where the Soviets are compared with Kutuzov. The world has never seen more brazen swindlers.

The 14th of February.

Carries warm snow.

There is hell on the tram, clouds of soldiers with bags - fleeing from Moscow, fearing that they will be sent to defend St. Petersburg from the Germans.

Everyone is sure that the occupation of Russia by the Germans has already begun. The people also talk about this: “Well, the German will come and restore order.”

As always, there are a terrible number of people near the cinemas, eagerly looking at the posters. In the evenings, cinemas are simply jammed. And so on all winter.

U Nikitsky Gate the cab driver collided with a car and crushed its wing. The cab driver, a red-bearded giant, was completely at a loss:

- Forgive me, for God’s sake, I bow at your feet!

The driver, pockmarked, sallow, strict, but merciful:

- Why at your feet? You are a working person like me. Just make sure you don’t get caught by me next time!

He feels like a boss, and for good reason. New gentlemen.

Newspapers with white columns – censorship. Muralov “dropped out” from Moscow.

A cab driver near “Prague” with joy and laughter:

- Well, let him come. He, a German, had fallen in with us before anyway. There, they say, he arrested thirty of the main Jews. What do we need? We are a dark people. Tell one “touch”, and then everyone else follows.

February, 15.

After yesterday evening's news that St. Petersburg has already been taken by the Germans, the newspapers are very disappointed. All the same calls to “stand up as one to fight the German White Guards.”

Lunacharsky calls on even high school students to enroll in the Red Guard, “to fight the Hindenburg.”

So, we are giving the Germans 35 provinces, worth millions of guns, armored cars, trains, shells...

It's blowing with wet snow again. The schoolgirls walk surrounded by it - beauty and joy. One was especially beautiful - lovely blue eyes from behind a fur muff raised to her face... What awaits this youth?

By evening, everything is lit by the sun like spring. In the west the clouds are golden. Puddles and not yet melted white, soft snow.

February 16.

Last night at T. The conversation, of course, was all about the same thing - about what’s going on. Everyone was horrified, only Shmelev did not give up, he kept exclaiming:

– No, I believe in the Russian people!

I've been wandering around the city all morning today. A conversation between two passing soldiers, cheerful and cheerful:

- Moscow, brother, is not worth it now.

- Now the province is not... worth it.

- Well, the German will come and restore order.

- Certainly. We don't use power anyway. Everywhere there are only horned ones.

“If it weren’t for the horned ones, you and I would now be rotting in the trenches...

In Belov's store, a young soldier with a drunken, well-fed face offered fifty pounds butter and said loudly:

“We have nothing to be ashamed of now.” Our current commander-in-chief, Muralov, is a soldier like me, and the other day he drank twenty thousand of the king’s money.

Twenty thousand! Probably an enthusiastic creation of boorish fantasy. Although who knows, maybe it’s true.

At four o'clock in the Art Circle there is a meeting of journalists - “to develop a protest against Bolshevik censorship.” Melgunov presided. Kuskova called for no newspapers to be published at all as a sign of protest. Just think how scary this will be for the Bolsheviks! Then everyone ardently assured each other that the Bolsheviks were living their last hours. They are already taking their families out of Moscow. Fritsche, for example, has already taken it out.

They talked about Salikovsky:

- Yes, just think! And he was a lousy journalist, but this ridiculous Rada, and Salikovsky, the Kiev governor-general!

We returned with Chirikov. He has the most reliable and up-to-date information: General Kamenev shot himself; on Povarskaya - the main German headquarters; it is very dangerous to live on it, because the hottest battle will be here; the Bolsheviks work in contact with monarchists and merchant leaders; in agreement with Mirbakh, it was decided to elect Samarin to the kingdom... With whom, in this case, will there be a hot battle?

At night. Having said goodbye to Chirikov, he met on Povarskaya a soldier’s boy, ragged, skinny, disgusting and completely drunk. He poked his muzzle into my chest and, staggering back, spat on me and said:

- Despot, son of a bitch!

Now I’m sitting and sorting out my manuscripts and notes - it’s time to prepare for the south - and I’m just finding some evidence of my “despotism”. Here is a note from February 22, 15:

– Our maid Tanya apparently loves to read. Taking out a basket with tattered drafts from under my desk, he selects some, folds them, and reads them in his free moment—slowly, with a quiet smile on his face. And he’s afraid to ask me for a book, he’s embarrassed... How cruel, disgusting we live!

Here is the winter of 16 in Vasilievsky:

– Late evening, I’m sitting and reading in the office, in an old calm chair, in warmth and comfort, near a wonderful old lamp. Marya Petrovna enters and hands over a crumpled envelope of dirty gray paper:

- Asks for more. The people have become completely shameless.

As always, on the envelope it was written in a jaunty way in purple ink by the hand of an Izmalkovo telegraph operator: “Pay the messenger 70 kopecks.” And, as always, with a pencil and very roughly, the number seven is corrected to eight, corrected by the boy of this very “special one,” that is, the Izmalkov woman Makhotochka, who brings us telegrams. I get up and walk through the dark living room and dark hall into the hallway. In the hallway, spreading the strong smell of a sheepskin coat, mixed with the smell of a hut, stands a small woman, wrapped in a frosty shawl, with a whip in her hand.

- Makhotochka, did you charge it for delivery again? And are you asking for more?

“Master,” Makhotochka answers, in a wooden voice from the frost, “look at what a road it is.” Bump on the bump. My whole soul was knocked out. Again, shame, it’s freezing, my knees are hurting a couple of times. After all, twenty miles there and back...

I shake my head reproachfully, then hand Makhotochka a ruble. Walking back through the living room, I look out the windows: the icy month-long night is shining on the snowy yard. And immediately a vast bright field appears, a shiny bumpy road, frozen sledges pounding along it, a shallowly running side-sided horse, all overgrown with frost, with large eyelashes gray from frost... What is Makhotochka thinking about, shrinking from the cold and fiery wind, leaning on her side? in the front corner?

In the office I tear up the telegram: “Together with all of Strelna we drink the glory and pride of Russian literature!” This is why Makhotochka bumped into potholes for twenty miles.

February 17.

“I can’t imagine,” said A.A. Yablonovsky, - I can’t imagine Hohenzollern’s signature next to Bronstein’s signature!

Today I was at Zubov’s house (on Povarskaya). There Kolya is sorting out some books. It’s completely spring, very bright from the snow and the sun - in the branches of the birches, blue-blue, the sky is especially good.

At half past five on Arbat Square, bathed in bright sunshine, crowds of people are tearing “Evening News” from the hands of newspapermen: peace has been signed!

I called “Power of the People”: is it true that it’s signed? They answer that they just called Izvestia and that they gave a firm answer: yes, it is signed.

So you have “I can’t imagine.”

18th of Febuary.

In the morning there is a meeting at the Book Publishing House of Writers. Before the start of the meeting, I most last words besieged the Bolsheviks. Klestov-Angarsky - he is already some kind of commissar - not a word.

Someone has put up posters on the walls of houses incriminating Trotsky and Lenin in connection with the Germans, that they were bribed by the Germans. I ask Klestov:

- Well, how much exactly did these scoundrels get?

“Don’t worry,” he answered with a dull grin, “quite a bit…” There was a general voice throughout the city:

– The peace was signed by Russia, the Germans refused to sign... Stupid self-consolation.

By evening, the crosses of the churches glowed with matte pink gold.

February 19.

Kogan told me about Steinberg, the Commissioner of Justice: an Old Testament, devout Jew, does not eat treif, sacredly honors the Sabbath... Then about Blok: he is now in Moscow, a passionate Bolshevik, Lunacharsky’s personal secretary. Kogan's wife with emotion:

– But don’t judge him harshly! After all, he is completely, completely a child!

At five o'clock in the evening I learned that drunken soldiers had thrown a bomb at the Economic Society of Officers on Vozdvizhenka. They say that either sixty or eighty people were killed.

I read the “resolution” just brought from Sevastopol, passed by the crew of the battleship “Free Russia”. Absolutely wonderful piece:

- To everyone, everyone and abroad of Sevastopol, aimlessly shooting in a bad way!

“Comrades, you will end up shooting to your death, soon there will be nothing to shoot at the target, you will shoot everything and sit on beans, and then you, my dears, will be taken away empty-handed.”

– Comrades, the bourgeoisie is swallowing those who are now lying in coffins and graves. You, traitors, shooters, by wasting cartridges, help her and the others to swallow. We call on all comrades to join you and ban everyone with a horse's head.

“Comrades, let’s make sure from now on that every shot tells us: “One bourgeois, one socialist is no longer alive!” Every bullet we fire must fly into the thick belly; it must not foam the water in the bay.

- Comrades, take care of your cartridges better than your eyes. You can still live with one eye, but you can’t live without cartridges.

“If shooting resumes in the city and the bay during the next funeral, remember that we, the sailors of the battleship Free Russia, will fire once, and then don’t blame us if everyone’s eardrums and glass in the windows burst.”

- So, comrades, there will be no more empty, bad shooting in Sevastopol, there will be only business shooting - at the counter-revolution and the bourgeoisie, and not through water and air, without which no one can live for a minute!

February 20th.

I went to Nikolaevsky station.

Very, even too sunny and slightly frosty. From the mountain beyond the Myasnitsky Gate - a bluish distance, piles of houses, golden domes of churches. Ah, Moscow! The square in front of the station is melting, the whole square glitters with gold and mirrors. Heavy and strong type of dray carts with boxes. Is there really an end to all this power and excess? A lot of men, soldiers in different overcoats and with different weapons - some with a saber on their side, some with a rifle, some with a huge revolver at their belts. Now the owners of all this, the heirs of this colossal inheritance - they...

There is, of course, a crush on the tram.

Two old women furiously scold the “government”:

“They give it to you, close their eyes, about an eighth of crackers, I suppose they’ve been lying around for a year, you chew it – the stench, your soul is on fire!”

Next to them is a man, listening stupidly, looking stupidly, smiling strangely, deadly, idiotically. The dirty rags of a white Manchu coat hung over her brown face. The eyes are white.

And among all the others, sitting and standing, towering over everyone by a whole head, stands a military giant in a magnificent gray overcoat, tightly tied with a good belt, in a gray round military cap, like Alexander the Third wore. He is all large, thoroughbred, with a shiny brown beard like a shovel, and holds the Gospel in his gloved hand. A complete stranger to everyone, the last Mohican.

On the way back, the street going straight into the sun is blinding. Suddenly everyone stands up and looks: a scene of ancient Moscow, a painting by Surikov: a crowd of men and women in sheepskin coats, surrounding a man in a rye-bread-colored jacket and a red calfskin cap, who is hastily unharnessing a horse lying and struggling on the pavement; huge sledges filled with straw, the shafts of which she disgracefully twisted as she fell, climbed onto the sidewalk. The man screams with all his guts: “Guys, knock me down!” But no one touches.

We left at six. We met M. He says that he just heard that the Kremlin is being mined and that they want to blow it up when the Germans arrive. At that time I was just looking at the amazing green sky above the Kremlin, at the old gold of its ancient domes... The Grand Dukes, the tower, Spas-on-Boru, the Archangel Cathedral - how everything is dear, blood and only now properly felt and understood! Explode? Anything is possible. Now everything is possible.

Rumors that in two weeks there will be a monarchy and a government of Adrianov, Sandetsky and Mishchenko; all the best hotels are being prepared for the Germans.

The Social Revolutionaries are allegedly preparing an uprising. The soldiers seem to be on their side.

February 21.

There was Kamenskaya. They are being evicted, like hundreds of others. The deadline is only 48 hours, but their apartment cannot be assembled in a week.

Met Speransky. He says that, according to Russkiye Vedomosti, a German commission is going to St. Petersburg to count the losses caused to German citizens, and that there will be German police in St. Petersburg; there will also be German police in Moscow and there is already a German headquarters; Lenin is in Moscow, sitting in the Kremlin, which is why the Kremlin has been declared under a state of siege.

February 22.

In the morning there is a sad job: we select books - what to keep, what to sell (I collect money for departure).

Julia from “Power of the People” was given “the most accurate information”: St. Petersburg was declared a free city; Lunacharsky is appointed mayor. (City Governor Lunacharsky!) Then: tomorrow Moscow banks are handed over to the Germans; The German offensive continues... In general, the devil will break his leg!

In the evening at Bolshoi Theater. The streets, as always now, are in darkness, but in the squares in front of the theater there are several lanterns, which make the darkness of the sky even thicker. The façade of the theater is dark, funereal-sad; the carriages and cars, as before, are no longer in front of it. The inside is empty, only some boxes are occupied. A Jew with a brown bald head, with a gray beard trimmed on his cheeks and wearing gold glasses, kept patting his daughter on the backside, a girl in a blue dress who looked like a black ram, who was sitting on the barrier. They said that this was some kind of “emissary”.

When we left the theater, between the columns there was a black-blue sky, two or three foggy blue spots of stars, and a sharp cold breeze. It's scary to drive. Nikitskaya without lights, grave-dark, black houses rise in the dark green sky, seem very large, stand out somehow in a new way. There are almost no passers-by, and those who walk are almost running.

What the Middle Ages! Then at least everyone was armed, the houses were almost impregnable.

On the corner of Povarskaya and Merzlyakovsky there are two soldiers with guns. Guards or robbers? Both.

February 23.

“Bourgeois newspapers” began to appear again—with large empty spaces.

We met K. “The Germans will be in Moscow in a few days. But it’s scary: they say they will send Russians to the front against the allies.” Yes, everything is the same. And still the same anxious, tedious, unresolved waiting.

We all talk about where to go. I visited Yuli in the evening and came under fire while returning home. They were frantically firing rifles from somewhere above Povarskaya.

P. had polishers. One with black greasy hair, bent, in a burgundy shirt, the other with pockmarks, wildly curly hair. They danced, shook their hair, their faces were shiny, their foreheads were sweaty. We ask:

- Well, what do you say, gentlemen, is it nice?

- What can you say? Everything is bad.

“God knows,” said the curly man. - We are a dark people. What do we know? I can barely read, but he is completely blind. What will happen? That’s what will happen: they let criminals out of prison, so they rule us, but we shouldn’t let them out, but they should have been shot with a filthy gun a long time ago. The king was imprisoned, but nothing like this happened with him. And now you can’t fight these Bolsheviks. The people have weakened. I can’t slaughter chickens, but I could very easily kill them. The people have weakened. There are only a hundred thousand of them, but there are so many millions of us and we can’t do anything. Now if only they would open the breech, they would give us freedom, we would take them all out of their apartments piece by piece.

“They’re all Jews there,” said the black one.

- And the Poles, too. He and Lenin, they say, are not real - they killed him long ago, the real one.

– What do you think about peace with the Germans?

- This world will not exist. This will stop soon. And the Poles will be ours again. The main thing is that there is no bread. Yesterday he bought himself a crumpet for three rubles, and I just slurped the empty soup...

24 February.

The other day I bought a pound of tobacco and, to keep it from drying out, hung it on a string between the frames, between the vents. Window to the courtyard. This morning at six in the morning there was something banging on the glass. I jumped up and saw: there was a stone on the floor, the glass was broken, there was no tobacco, and someone was running away from the window. Robbery everywhere!

Cirrus clouds, sometimes sunshine, blue patches of puddles...

There was a prayer service in the house opposite us, they brought an icon “ Unexpected Joy", the priests sing. It seems very strange now. And very touching. Many were crying.

Again they insist that there are many monarchists among the Bolsheviks and that in general all this Bolshevism is designed to restore the monarchy. Again nonsense, invented, of course, by the Bolsheviks themselves.

Savich and Alekseev are supposedly now in Pskov, “forming a government.”

Calls the “Power of the People” station: give me 60-42. Connect. But the phone turns out to be busy - and “Power of the People” unexpectedly overhears someone’s conversation with the Kremlin:

“I have fifteen officers and adjutant Kaledin.” What to do?

- Shoot immediately.

About anarchists: they seem to be unusually cheerful and kind people; the Bolshevik “Council” is very afraid of them; The head is Barmash, a completely crazy Caucasian.

In Sevastopol, the “chitaman” of the sailors is a certain Rivkin, an arshin tall, with a tufted beard; participated in many robberies and murders; " most tender soul Human".

Many people now always pretend that they have information that no one else has.

Adrianov, the former Moscow mayor, was allegedly seen in Filippov’s coffee shop. He is supposedly one of the most important secret advisers in the “Council of Workers’ Deputies”.