Forty-two-year-old Leonid Soshnin, a former criminal investigation operative, returns home from the local publishing house to an empty apartment, in the worst possible mood. . After five years of waiting, the manuscript of his first book, “Life is More Expensive,” has finally been accepted for production, but this news does not make Soshnin happy. A conversation with the editor-in-chief, Oktyabrina Perfi-lyevna Syro-kva-sova, who tried to humiliate the author-mil-tsi-o-ner with lofty remarks, who dared Going to be called a writer, stirred up Soshnin’s already gloomy thoughts and experiences. “How to live in the world? Lonely? - he thinks on the way home, and his thoughts are heavy.

He served his time in the police: after two wounds, Soshnin was sent to retirement due to disability. After another quarrel Lerka's wife leaves him, taking with her his little daughter Svetka.

Soshnin remembers his whole life. He cannot answer his own question: why is there so much room in life for grief and suffering, but always close to love and happiness? Soshnin understands that, among other incomprehensible things and phenomena, he has to comprehend the so-called Russian soul, and he needs to start with the closest people, with the episodes witnessed he was, from the destinies of the people with whom his life became... Why are Russian people ready to pity the bone-breaker and the blood-letter and not notice how nearby, in the neighboring apartment, a helpless war invalid is dying?.. Why does a criminal live so freely and courageously among such kind-hearted people?..

In order to escape from his gloomy thoughts at least for a minute, Leonid imagines how he will come home, cook himself a bachelor’s dinner, read, sleep a little so that he has enough strength for the whole night - sitting at the table, over a blank sheet of paper. Soshnin especially loves this night time, when he lives in some kind of separate world created by his imagination.

Leonid Soshnin’s apartment is located on the outskirts of Veysk, in an old two-story house where he grew up. From this house my father went to war, from which he did not return, and here, towards the end of the war, my mother also died from a severe cold. Leonid stayed with his mother's sister, Aunt Lipa, whom he had become accustomed to calling Lina since childhood. Aunt Lina, after the death of her sister, went to work in the commercial department of Veyskaya railway. This department was “re-judged and re-planted at once.” The aunt tried to poison herself, but she was saved and after the trial she was sent to a colony. By this time, Lenya was already studying at the regional special school of the Internal Affairs Directorate, from where he was almost kicked out because of his convicted aunt. But the neighbors, and mainly Father Lavrya’s fellow Cossack, pleaded for Leonid in front of the regional police authorities, and everything turned out okay.

Aunt Lina was freed by amnesty. Soshnin had already worked as a police officer in the remote Khailovsky district, from where he brought his wife. Before her death, Aunt Lina managed to understand Leonid’s daughter, Sveta, whom she considered her granddaughter. After Lina’s death, Soshnin moved under the protection of another, no less reliable aunt named Granya, a shooter on the maneuvering hill. Aunt Granya spent her whole life taking care of other people’s children, and even little Lenya Soshnin comprehended in his own way kindergarten the first skills of brotherhood and hard work.

Once, after returning from Khailovsk, Soshnin was on duty with a police squad at a mass celebration on the occasion of Railway Day. Four guys, drunk to the point of losing their memory, tormented Aunt Granya, and if not for his patrol partner, Soshnin would have shot these drunken fellows sleeping on the lawn. They were convicted, and after this incident, Aunt Granya began to avoid people. One day she expressed to Soshnin the terrible thought that by convicting the criminals, they had thereby ruined young lives. Soshnin shouted at the old woman for feeling sorry for non-humans, and they began to shun each other...

In the dirty and spittle-stained entrance to the house, three drunks accost Soshnin, demanding to say hello, and then to apologize for their disrespectful behavior. He agrees, trying to cool their ardor with peace-loving remarks, but the main one, the young bull, cannot calm down. Fueled by alcohol, the guys pounce on Soshnin. Having gathered his strength—the wounds and the hospital “rest” had taken their toll—he defeats the hooligans. When one of them falls, he hits his head on the heating radiator. Soshnin picks up a knife on the floor, staggers into the apartment. And he immediately calls the police and reports the fight: “One hero’s head was split on a radiator. If so, don’t look for it. The villain is me."

Coming to his senses after what happened, Soshnin again remembers his life.

He and his partner were chasing a drunk on a motorcycle who had stolen a truck. Like a deadly ram, the truck rushed through the streets of the town, having already ended more than one life. Soshnin, the senior patrol officer, decided to shoot the criminal. His partner fired, but before his death, the truck driver managed to push the motorcycle of the pursuing police officers. On the operating table, Soshnin’s leg was miraculously saved from amputation. But he remained lame; it took him a long time to learn to walk. During his recovery, the investigator long and persistently tormented him with the investigation: was the use of weapons legal?

Leonid also remembers how he met his future wife, saving her from hooligans who tried to take off the girl’s jeans right behind the Soyuz-Print kiosk. At first, life between him and Lerka went in peace and harmony, but gradually mutual reproaches began. His wife especially did not like his literary studies. “Such Leo Tolstoy with a seven-round pistol, with rusty handcuffs in his belt...” she said.

Soshnin recalls how one “took” a stray gastrolist, a recidivist Demon, in a hotel in the town.

And finally, he remembers how Venka Fomin, who was drunk and returned from prison, put a final end to his career as an operative... Soshnin brought his daughter to his wife’s parents to a distant village and was already getting ready to return to the city when his father-in-law told him that in a neighboring village a drunken man had locked old women in a barn and was threatening to set them on fire if they did not give him ten rubles for a hangover. During the detention, when Soshnin slipped on manure and fell, the frightened Venka Fomin plunged a pitchfork into him... Soshnin was barely taken to the hospital - and he barely escaped certain death. But the second group of disability and retirement could not be avoided.

At night, Leonid is awakened from sleep by the terrible scream of the neighbor girl Yulka. He hurries to the apartment on the first floor, where Yulka lives with her grandmother Tuty-shikha. Having drunk a bottle of Riga balm from the gifts brought by Yulka’s father and stepmother from the Baltic health resort, Tuta-shikha’s grandmother is already fast asleep.

At the funeral of grandmother Tuta-shikha, Soshnin meets his wife and daughter. At the wake they sit next to each other.

Lerka and Sveta stay with Soshnin, at night he hears his daughter sniffling behind the partition, and feels his wife sleeping next to him, timidly clinging to him. He gets up, approaches his daughter, straightens her pillow, presses his cheek to her head and forgets himself in some kind of sweet grief, in a resurrecting, aliveness. - burning sadness. Leonid goes to the kitchen, reads “Proverbs of the Russian People” collected by Dahl - the section “Husband and Wife” - and is surprised at the wisdom contained in simple words.

"Dawn is damp, snowball was already rolling into the kitchen window when he had enjoyed the peace among the quietly sleeping family, with a feeling of long-unknown confidence in his capabilities and strength, without irritation or melancholy, Soshnin clung to his heart to the table, placed it in a spot of light Blank sheet paper and froze over it for a long time.”

Victor Astafiev

THE SAD DETECTIVE

Chapter first

Leonid Soshnin returned home in the worst mood. And although it was a long walk, almost to the outskirts of the city, to the railway village, he did not get on the bus - even if his wounded leg ached, but walking would calm him down and he would think about everything that was told to him at the publishing house, he would think about and decide how he should continue to live and what to do.

Actually, there was no publishing house as such in the city of Veisk; a branch of it remained; the publishing house itself was transferred to a larger city, and, as the liquidators probably thought, more cultural, with a powerful printing base. But the “base” was exactly the same as in Veisk - a decrepit legacy of old Russian cities. The printing house was located in a pre-revolutionary building made of strong brown brick, stitched with bars of narrow windows at the bottom and shaped curved windows at the top, also narrow, but already raised up like exclamation point. Half of the building of the Wei printing house, where there were typesetting shops and printing machines, had long since sunk into the bowels of the earth, and although fluorescent lamps were stuck on the ceiling in continuous rows, it was still uncomfortable in the typesetting and printing shops, it was chilly and somehow all the time, as if in clogged ears, creaking or working, buried in a dungeon, a delayed-action explosive mechanism.

The publishing department huddled in two and a half rooms, creakingly allocated by the regional newspaper. In one of them, shrouded in cigarette smoke, a local cultural luminary, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrovasova, twitched, squirmed on a chair, grabbed the phone, littered with ashes, moving forward and further local literature. Syrokvasova considered herself the most knowledgeable person: if not in the whole country, then in Veisk she had no equal in intelligence. She made presentations and reports on current literature, shared plans for the publishing house through the newspaper, sometimes in newspapers, and reviewed books by local authors, inappropriately and inappropriately inserting quotes from Virgil and Dante, from Savonarola, Spinoza, Rabelais, Hegel and Exupery , Kant and Ehrenburg, Yuri Olesha, Tregub and Ermilov, however, she sometimes disturbed the ashes of Einstein and Lunacharsky, and did not ignore the leaders of the world proletariat.

Everything has long been decided with Soshnin’s book. Stories from it were published, albeit in thin, but metropolitan magazines, three times they were condescendingly mentioned in reviews critical articles, he stood “in the back of my head” for five years, got into the plan, established himself in it, all that remained was to edit and design the book.

Having set the time for a business meeting at exactly ten, Syrokvasova arrived at the publishing house at twelve. Having smelled Soshnin of tobacco, out of breath, she rushed past him along the dark corridor - someone had “stole” the light bulbs, and hoarsely said “Sorry!” and crunched the key in the faulty lock for a long time, swearing in a low voice.

Finally, the door creaked angrily, and the old, tightly closed tile let a crack of gray, dull light into the corridor - it had been light rain on the street for the second week, washing away the snow into mush, turning the streets and alleys into coils. Ice drift began on the river - in December!

His leg ached dully and continuously, his shoulder burned and dulled from a recent wound, he was filled with fatigue, he was drawn to sleep - he couldn’t sleep at night, and again he saved himself with pen and paper. “This incurable disease is graphomania,” Soshnin grinned and seemed to doze off, but then the silence was shaken by a knock on the echoing wall.

Galya! - Syrokvasova threw arrogantly into space. - Call this genius to me!

Galya is a typist, accountant and also a secretary. Soshnin looked around: there was no one else in the corridor, so he was the genius.

Hey! Where are you here? - Opening the door with her foot, Galya stuck her short-cropped head out into the corridor. - Go. Name:

Soshnin shrugged his shoulders, straightened the new satin tie around his neck, and smoothed his hair to one side with his palm. In moments of excitement, he always stroked his hair - as a little boy, his neighbors and Aunt Lina stroked him a lot, so he learned to stroke himself. - "Calmly! Calmly!" - Soshnin ordered himself and, coughing well-mannered, asked:

Can I come to you? - With the trained eye of a former operative, he immediately took in everything in Syrokvasova’s office: an antique chiseled bookcase in the corner; put on a turned wooden peak, a wet red fur coat, familiar to everyone in the city, hung humpbacked. The fur coat did not have a hanger. Behind the fur coat, on a planed but unpainted shelf, the literary products of the united publishing house are displayed. In the foreground were several very well designed advertising and gift books in leather bindings.

“Undress,” Syrokvasova nodded at the old yellow wardrobe made of thick wood. - There are no hangers, nails are driven in. “Sit down,” she pointed to the chair opposite her. And when Soshnin took off his cloak, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna irritably threw the folder in front of her, taking it out almost from under the hem.

Soshnin barely recognized the folder with his manuscript - complicated creative path it has passed since he submitted it to the publishing house. With the gaze of the former operative, he noted that a kettle had been placed on it, and a cat was sitting on it; someone had spilled tea on the folder. If it's tea? Sirokvasova's prodigies - she has three sons from different creative producers - drew a dove of peace, a tank with a star and an airplane on the folder. I remember that he deliberately selected and saved the colorful daddy for his first collection of stories, made a little white sticker in the middle, and carefully wrote out the title, although not very original, with a felt-tip pen: “Life is more precious than anything else.” At that time, he had every reason to say this, and he carried a folder to the publishing house with a feeling of yet unknown renewal in his heart, and a thirst to live, create, be useful people- this happens with all people who have been resurrected, who have climbed out of “from there.”

The little white sticker turned gray in five years, someone picked at it with a fingernail, maybe the glue was bad, but the festive mood and lightness in the heart - where is all this? He saw on the table a carelessly stored manuscript with two reviews, written on the fly by the lively local drunken thinkers who worked part-time for Syrokvasova and saw the police, which was reflected in his work in this motley folder, most often in the sobering-up station. Soshnin knew how dearly human negligence costs every life, every society. Well, I got it. Firmly. Forever.

Well, that means life is the most precious thing,” Syrokvasova pursed her lips and took a drag from her cigarette, became enveloped in smoke, quickly flipping through the reviews, repeating and repeating in thoughtful detachment: “More expensive than anything... more expensive than everything...

I thought so five years ago.

What did you say? - Syrokvasova raised her head, and Soshnin saw flabby cheeks, sloppily blue eyelids, eyelashes and eyebrows sloppily lined with dry paint - small black lumps stuck in the already callous, half-peeled eyelashes and eyebrows. Syrokvasova is dressed in comfortable clothes - a kind of modern woman's overalls: a black turtleneck - does not need to be washed often, a denim sundress on top - does not need to be ironed.

I thought so five years ago, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna.

Don’t you think so now? “Sarcasm was evident in the appearance and words of Syrokvasova, rummaging through the manuscript as if through cabbage waste. - Are you disappointed in life?

Not quite yet.

That's how it is! Interesting interesting! Commendable, commendable! Not really, then?..

“But she forgot the manuscript! She is gaining time to at least somehow, on the go, get to know her again. Curious how she will get out? Really curious!" - Soshnin waited without answering the editor’s last half-question.

I don't think we can have a long conversation. And there’s no point in wasting time. Manuscript in plan. I’ll correct something here, bring your work into God’s form, and give it to the artist. This summer, I imagine you'll be holding your first printed creation in your hands. If, of course, they give you the paper, if nothing happens at the printing house, if they don’t cut down on the plan and te-de and te-pe. But this is what I would like to talk to you about for the future. Judging by the press, you continue to work stubbornly, you publish, although not often, but topically, and your topic is topical - mi-li-zeis-kaya!

Human, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna.

What did you say? It's your right to think so. And to be honest, you are still so far away from human, let alone universal, problems! As Goethe said: “Unneraichbar wi der Himmel” - “High and inaccessible, like the sky.”

Somehow Soshnin had never seen such a statement from the great German poet. Apparently, in the vanity of life, Syrokvasova confused Goethe with someone else or quoted him inaccurately.

You haven’t yet really learned what a plot is, and without it, excuse me, your police stories are chaff, chaff from threshed grain. - Syrovasova got into the theory of literature. - And the rhythm of prose, its, so to speak, quintessence is sealed under seven seals. There is also a form, an ever-renewing, moving form...

I know what form is.

What did you say? - Syrokvasova woke up. During an inspired sermon, she closed her eyes, scattered ashes onto the glass, under which were the drawings of her brilliant children, a crumpled photograph of a visiting poet who hanged himself while drunk in a hotel three years ago and for this reason ended up in the fashionable, almost holy ranks of deceased personalities. Ashes littered the hem of the sundress, the chair, the floor, and even the ashen-colored sundress, and the whole of Syrovasova seemed to be covered with ashes or the decay of time.

I said I know the form. Wore it.

I didn't mean the police uniform.

I didn't understand your subtlety. Sorry. - Leonid stood up, feeling that rage was beginning to overwhelm him. - If you no longer need me, I will allow myself to take my leave.

Yes, yes, excuse me,” Syrokvasova became a little confused and switched to a businesslike tone. - The accounting department will issue you an advance. Sixty percent right away. But money is, as always, bad for us.

Thank you. I receive a pension. I have enough.

Pension? At forty years old?!

I’m forty-two, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna.

What age is this for a man? “Like any eternally irritated female creature, Syrokvasova caught herself, wagged her tail, and tried to change her caustic tone to half-joking confidence.

But Soshnin did not accept the change in her tone, bowed, and wandered into the darkened corridor.

“I’ll hold the door open so you don’t get killed,” Syrokvasova shouted after her.

Soshnin did not answer her, but went out onto the porch and stood under the canopy, decorated along the rim with ancient wooden lace. They are crumbled by bored hands, like rye gingerbread. Raising the collar of his insulated police raincoat, Leonid pulled his head into his shoulders and stepped under the silent pillowcase, as if into a sinkhole desert. He walked into a local bar, where regular customers greeted him with an approving roar, took a glass of cognac, drank it in one fell swoop and walked out, feeling his mouth go stale and his chest warm. The burning sensation in his shoulder seemed to be erased by the warmth, but he seemed to have gotten used to the pain in his leg, perhaps he had simply come to terms with it.

“Should I have another drink? No, don’t,” he decided, “I haven’t done this for a long time, I’ll still get drunk…”

He walked along hometown, from under the visor of a wet cap, as the service had taught him, habitually noted what was happening around him, what was standing, walking, driving. Black ice slowed down not only movement, but also life itself. People sat at home, they preferred to work under the roof, it was pouring from above, it was squelching everywhere, it was flowing, the water did not run in streams or rivers, it was somehow colorless, solid, flat, unorganized: it lay, swirled, overflowed from puddle to puddle, from crack to gap. There was rubbish covered up everywhere: paper, cigarette butts, soggy boxes, cellophane flapping in the wind. On black linden trees and on gray poplars, crows and jackdaws clung to each other, they moved, another bird was dropped by the wind, and it immediately blindly and heavily clung to a branch, sleepily, with an old man's grumbling, rested on it and, as if choking on a bone, cackled and fell silent.

And Soshnin’s thoughts, matching the weather, slowly, thickened, barely moved in his head, did not flow, did not run, but they moved sluggishly, and in this movement there was no distant light, no dreams, only anxiety, only concern: how to continue to live?

It was absolutely clear to him: he had served in the police and fought for himself. Forever! The usual line, well-worn, single-track - exterminate evil, fight criminals, provide peace for people - all at once, like a railway dead end, near which he grew up and spent his childhood as a “railroad worker”, broke off. The rails are over, the sleepers that connect them are gone, there is no direction beyond that, there is no path, then all the land is at once, beyond the dead end - go in all directions, or turn around in place, or sit on the last one in the dead end, cracked with time, already not sticky from impregnation, weathered sleeper and, immersed in thought, dozed or shouted at the top of their voice: “I’ll sit at the table and think about how to live alone in the world...”

How can a lonely person live in the world? It is difficult to live in the world without the usual service, without work, even without government-issued ammunition and a canteen; you even have to worry about clothes and food, somewhere to wash, iron, cook, wash dishes.

But this is not this, this is not the main thing, the main thing is how to be and live among the people who shared for a long time on the criminal world and the non-criminal world. Criminal, he is still familiar and one-sided, but this one? What is it like in its diversity, in its crowd, bustle and constant movement? Where? For what? What are his intentions? What is your temper? “Brothers! Take me! Let me in!” - Soshnin wanted to shout at first, seemingly as a joke, to make a habitual joke, but then the game ended. And it was revealed, the everyday life came close, its everyday life, oh, what everyday life they are, everyday life for people.

Soshnin wanted to go to the market to buy apples, but near the market gate with lopsided plywood letters on the arc “Welcome”, a drunken woman nicknamed Urna was squirming and getting attached to passers-by. For her toothless, black and dirty mouth she received a nickname, no longer a woman, some kind of isolated creature, with a blind, half-insane craving for drunkenness and disgrace. She had a family, a husband, children, she sang in an amateur performance at a railway recreation center near Mordasova - she drank it all away, lost everything, and became a shameful landmark in the city of Veisk. They didn’t take her to the police anymore, even in the reception center of the Internal Affairs Directorate, which was popularly called the “scourge”, and in the old days was called a prison for tramps, they didn’t keep her, they drove her out of the sobering-up center, they didn’t take her to the nursing home, because she was only old by the look. She behaved in in public places shamefully, shamefully, with an insolent and vindictive challenge to everyone. It is impossible and there is nothing to fight with Urn; even though she was lying on the street, sleeping in attics and on benches, she did not die or freeze.

A-ah, my vess-olai laughter has always been a success... -

Urn screamed hoarsely, and the drizzle, the frozen spatiality did not absorb her voice, nature seemed to separate and push away its fiend. Soshnin walked past the market and the Urn. Everything just flowed, floated, oozed with brainy emptiness across the earth, across the sky, and there was no end to the gray light, the gray earth, the gray melancholy. And suddenly, in the middle of this hopeless, gray planet, there was a revival, talking and laughter were heard, a car cackled in fear at the intersection.

Viktor Petrovich Astafiev

« Sad detective»

Forty-two-year-old Leonid Soshnin, a former criminal investigation operative, returns home from a local publishing house to an empty apartment, in the worst mood. The manuscript of his first book, “Life is More Precious than Everything,” after five years of waiting, has finally been accepted for production, but this news does not make Soshnin happy. A conversation with the editor, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrovasova, who tried to humiliate the author-policeman who dared to call himself a writer with arrogant remarks, stirred up Soshnin’s already gloomy thoughts and experiences. “How to live in the world? Lonely? - he thinks on the way home, and his thoughts are heavy.

He served his time in the police: after two wounds, Soshnin was sent to a disability pension. After another quarrel, Lerka’s wife leaves him, taking with her his little daughter Svetka.

Soshnin remembers his whole life. He cannot answer his own question: why is there so much room in life for grief and suffering, but always close to love and happiness? Soshnin understands that, among other incomprehensible things and phenomena, he has to comprehend the so-called Russian soul, and he needs to start with the people closest to him, with the episodes he witnessed, with the destinies of the people with whom his life encountered... Why are Russian people ready to regret bonebreaker and bloodletter and not notice how a helpless war invalid is dying nearby, in the next apartment?.. Why does a criminal live so freely and cheerfully among such kind-hearted people?..

In order to escape from his gloomy thoughts at least for a minute, Leonid imagines how he will come home, cook himself a bachelor’s dinner, read, sleep a little so that he has enough strength for the whole night - sitting at the table, over a blank sheet of paper. Soshnin especially loves this night time, when he lives in some isolated world created by his imagination.

Leonid Soshnin's apartment is located on the outskirts of Veysk, in the old two-story house, where he grew up. From this house my father went to war, from which he did not return, and here, towards the end of the war, my mother also died from a severe cold. Leonid stayed with his mother’s sister, Aunt Lipa, whom he used to call Lina since childhood. Aunt Lina, after the death of her sister, went to work in the commercial department of the Wei Railway. This department was “judged and replanted at once.” My aunt tried to poison herself, but she was saved and after the trial she was sent to a colony. By this time, Lenya was already studying at the regional special school of the Internal Affairs Directorate, from where he was almost kicked out because of his convicted aunt. But the neighbors, and mainly Father Lavrya’s fellow Cossack soldier, interceded for Leonid with the regional police authorities, and everything turned out okay.

Aunt Lina was released under an amnesty. Soshnin had already worked as a district police officer in the remote Khailovsky district, from where he brought his wife. Before her death, Aunt Lina managed to nurse Leonid’s daughter, Sveta, whom she considered her granddaughter. After Lina’s death, Soshniny passed under the protection of another, no less reliable aunt named Granya, a switchwoman on the shunting hill. Aunt Granya spent her whole life taking care of other people’s children, and even little Lenya Soshnin learned the first skills of brotherhood and hard work in a kind of kindergarten.

Once, after returning from Khailovsk, Soshnin was on duty with a police squad at a mass celebration on the occasion of Railway Worker's Day. Four guys who were drunk to the point of losing their memory raped Aunt Granya, and if not for his patrol partner, Soshnin would have shot these drunken fellows sleeping on the lawn. They were convicted, and after this incident, Aunt Granya began to avoid people. One day she expressed to Soshnin the terrible thought that by convicting the criminals, they had thereby ruined young lives. Soshnin shouted at the old woman for feeling sorry for non-humans, and they began to avoid each other...

In the dirty and spit-stained entrance of the house, three drunks accost Soshnin, demanding to say hello and then to apologize for their disrespectful behavior. He agrees, trying to cool their ardor with peaceful remarks, but the main one, a young bully, does not calm down. Fueled by alcohol, the guys attack Soshnin. He, having gathered his strength - his wounds and hospital "rest" took their toll - defeats the hooligans. One of them hits his head on the heating radiator when he falls. Soshnin picks up a knife on the floor, staggers into the apartment. And he immediately calls the police and reports the fight: “One hero’s head was split on a radiator. If so, don’t look for it. The villain is me."

Coming to his senses after what happened, Soshnin again remembers his life.

He and his partner were chasing a drunk on a motorcycle who had stolen a truck. The truck rushed like a deadly ram through the streets of the town, having already ended more than one life. Soshnin, the senior patrol officer, decided to shoot the criminal. His partner fired, but before he died, the truck driver managed to hit the motorcycle of the pursuing policemen. On the operating table, Soshnina’s leg was miraculously saved from amputation. But he remained lame; it took him a long time to learn to walk. During his recovery, the investigator tormented him for a long time and persistently with an investigation: was the use of weapons legal?

Leonid also remembers how he met his future wife, saving her from hooligans who were trying to take off the girl’s jeans right behind the Soyuzpechat kiosk. At first, life between him and Lerka went in peace and harmony, but gradually mutual reproaches began. His wife especially did not like his literary studies. “Such Leo Tolstoy with a seven-shooter pistol, with rusty handcuffs in his belt...” she said.

Soshnin recalls how one “took” a stray guest performer, a repeat offender, Demon, in a hotel in the town.

And finally, he remembers how Venka Fomin, who was drunk and returned from prison, put a final end to his career as an operative... Soshnin brought his daughter to his wife’s parents in a distant village and was about to return to the city when his father-in-law told him that a drunk man had locked him up in a neighboring village in the barn of old women and threatens to set them on fire if they do not give him ten rubles for a hangover. During the detention, when Soshnin slipped on manure and fell, the frightened Venka Fomin stuck a pitchfork into him... Soshnin was barely taken to the hospital - and he barely escaped certain death. But the second group of disability and retirement could not be avoided.

At night, Leonid is awakened from sleep by the terrible scream of the neighbor girl Yulka. He hurries to the apartment on the first floor, where Yulka lives with her grandmother Tutyshikha. Having drunk a bottle of Riga balsam from the gifts brought by Yulka’s father and stepmother from the Baltic sanatorium, Grandma Tutyshikha is already fast asleep.

At the funeral of grandmother Tutyshikha, Soshnin meets his wife and daughter. At the wake they sit next to each other.

Lerka and Sveta stay with Soshnin, at night he hears his daughter sniffling behind the partition, and feels his wife sleeping next to him, timidly clinging to him. He gets up, approaches his daughter, adjusts her pillow, presses his cheek to her head and loses himself in some kind of sweet grief, in a resurrecting, life-giving sadness. Leonid goes to the kitchen, reads “Proverbs of the Russian People” collected by Dahl - the section “Husband and Wife” - and is surprised at the wisdom contained in simple words.

“Dawn was already rolling in like a damp snowball through the kitchen window, when, having enjoyed the peace among the quietly sleeping family, with a feeling of long-unknown confidence in his capabilities and strength, without irritation or melancholy in his heart, Soshnin stuck to the table and placed a blank sheet of paper in the spot of light and froze over him for a long time.”

Leonid Soshnin walked home with his head down, immersed in his joyless black thoughts. He recalled his past and tried to understand why, at forty-two, he was left with nothing, and how he deserved such a sad fate. Soshnin felt old to no one unnecessary thing, which served its term. Everything is in the past - both work in the criminal investigation department and a happy family life with his beloved wife and daughter. No one took the former operative’s attempts at self-expression seriously; editor Syrovasova accepted his book “Life Is More Expensive” for production, but showered the author with humiliating ridicule. According to others, the policeman and the writer could not get along in one person; it simply went beyond their perception of reality.

Soshnin could not answer his own questions. He absolutely did not understand why in the lives of most people suffering and grief rule the show, while love and happiness do not play their roles for long and leave the stage forever.

Leonid liked to sit at night over a blank sheet of paper, mentally creating his own imaginary world. He philosophized and created in an old house on the outskirts of Weisk. His childhood passed there, his mother died of a serious illness, his father went to war... Soshnin only had his aunt Lina left, who was unjustly convicted and sent to a colony. She tried to take her own life and took poison, but they pumped her out - it was impossible to avoid imprisonment. Because of this incident, Soshnin almost flew out of the regional special school of the Internal Affairs Directorate, but Father Lavrya’s fellow Cossack soldier saved the situation by putting in a good word for him with the regional police authorities. Aunt Granya, who raised other people's children all her life, took care of the orphan.

Lenya was already working as a district police officer in the Khailovsky district when Lina was released under an amnesty.

Many sad events flashed before the former operative's mind's eye. Evil Rock He didn’t even spare the good old aunt Granya - she was raped by drunken revelers, and Soshnin almost carried out lynching on the guilty guys. Despite everything, Leonid always tried to resolve conflicts peacefully, he wanted justice to prevail, but life did not spare him and presented him with unpleasant surprises. The criminals rushed at him in the gateways, tried to crush him along with the motorcycle in a truck, the operative fought back, but again and again received serious injuries, and “rested” in a hospital bed.

It seemed that fortune finally smiled on Soshnin when he saved his future wife Lera from rapists. They had a wedding, the young people lived in perfect harmony and their daughter Svetlana was born, but joy did not reign in their home for long. The wife could not understand her husband’s passion for literature and jokingly called him “Tolstoy with a seven-shooter pistol.” Gradually, mutual reproaches became more and more poisonous family life and one day Lera took her daughter and left.

Leonid’s police career ended with a sad episode: former prisoner Venka Fomin pierced the operative with a pitchfork and forced him to look death straight in the face. Soshnin miraculously survived, but he could not avoid disability and had to retire.

At his neighbor’s funeral, Lenya met his wife and sat next to her at the wake. Lerka and her daughter stayed overnight in the old apartment, and Soshnin did not sleep a wink, bent over a blank sheet of paper, enjoying the peace of his peacefully sleeping family.

Essays

Leonid Soshnin brought his manuscript to a small provincial publishing house.

“Local cultural luminary Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrovasova,” editor and critic, inappropriately flaunting her erudition and chain-smoking—an unpleasant type of ostentatious intellectual.

The manuscript stood in queue for publication for five years. It seems they gave the go-ahead. However, Syrovasova considers herself an indisputable authority and makes sarcastic jokes about the manuscript. And he makes fun of the author himself: a policeman - and in the same place, become a writer!

Yes, Soshnin served in the police. I honestly wanted to fight - and I fought! - against evil, was wounded, which is why at forty-two he was already retired.

Soshnin lives in the old wooden house, to which, however, both heating and sewerage are connected. From childhood he was left an orphan and lived with his aunt Lina.

All life kind woman she lived with him and for him, and then suddenly decided to establish personal life- and the teenager was angry with her.

Yes, my aunt has gone on a rampage! She also stole. Its “commercial department” was sued and imprisoned at once. Aunt Lina was poisoned. The woman was rescued and after the trial was sent to a correctional labor colony. She felt that she was going downhill and enrolled her nephew in an air traffic police school. The timid, shy aunt returned and quickly went to her grave.

Even before her death, the hero worked as a local police officer, got married, and had a daughter, Svetochka.

Aunt Granya's husband, who worked in the firehouse, died. Trouble, as you know, does not travel alone.

A poorly secured croaker flew out of the maneuvering platform and hit Aunt Granya on the head. The kids were crying and trying to pull the bloodied woman off the rails.

Granya could no longer work, bought herself a small house and acquired livestock: “Varka, a dog cut off on the tracks, a crow with a broken wing - Marfa, a rooster with a broken eye - Under, a tailless cat - Ulka.”

Only the cow was useful - the kind aunt shared her milk with everyone who needed it, especially during the war years.

She was a holy woman - she ended up in a railway hospital, and as soon as she felt better, she immediately began to do laundry, clean up after the sick, and take out bedpans.

And then one day four guys, mad with alcohol, raped her. Soshnin was on duty that day and quickly found the villains. The judge slapped them with eight years of maximum security.

After the trial, Aunt Granya was ashamed to go out into the street.

Leonid found her in the hospital guardhouse. Aunt Granya lamented: “Young lives have been ruined! Why were they sent to prison?

Trying to solve the mystery of the Russian soul, Soshnin turned to pen and paper: “Why are Russian people eternally compassionate towards prisoners and often indifferent to themselves, to their neighbor - a disabled person of war and labor?

We are ready to give the last piece to a convict, a bone crusher and a bloodletter, to take away from the police a malicious hooligan who has just raged, whose arms have been twisted, and to hate his co-tenant because he forgets to turn off the light in the toilet, to reach such a degree of hostility in the battle for light that they can do not give water to the sick..."

Policeman Soshnin faces the horrors of life. So he arrested a twenty-two-year-old scoundrel who had killed three people “out of drunkenness.”

- Why did you kill people, little snake? - they asked him at the police station.

- But they didn’t like the hari! — he smiled carelessly in response.

But there is too much evil around. Returning home after an unpleasant conversation with Syrokvasova, the former policeman encounters three drunkards on the stairs who begin to bully and humiliate him. One threatens with a knife.

After futile attempts at reconciliation, Soshnin scatters the scum, using the skills acquired over the years of work in the police. A bad wave rises in him, he can barely stop himself.

However, one hero had his head split on a radiator, which he immediately reported to the police by phone.

Initially, Soshnin’s encounter with stupid, arrogant evil does not cause embitterment, but bewilderment: “Where does this come from in them? Where? After all, all three seem to be from our village. From working families. All three went to kindergarten and sang: “The river begins with a blue stream, but friendship begins with a smile...”

Leonid is sick of it. He thinks that the force that fights against evil cannot be called good either - “because good power- only creative, creating.”

But is there a place for creative power where, commemorating the deceased in the cemetery, “grieving children threw bottles into the hole, but forgot to lower their parents into the land.”

One day, a scoundrel who arrived from the Far North in a drunken spirit stole a dump truck and began circling around the city: he hit several people at a bus stop, smashed a children's playground to pieces, crushed to death a young mother and child at a crossing, and knocked down two old women walking.

“Like hawthorn butterflies, the decrepit old women flew into the air and folded their light wings on the sidewalk.”

Soshnin, the senior patrol officer, decided to shoot the criminal. Not in the city - people are all around.

“We drove the dump truck out of town, all the time shouting into a megaphone: “Citizens, danger!

Citizens! A criminal is driving! Citizens..."

The criminal taxied to a country cemetery - and there were four funeral processions! A lot of people - and all potential victims.

Soshnin was driving a police motorcycle. On his orders, his subordinate Fedya Lebeda killed the criminal with two shots. He didn’t immediately raise his hand; first he shot at the wheels.

It’s amazing: on the criminal’s jacket there was a badge “For saving people in a fire.” He saved - and now he kills.

Soshnin was seriously injured in the chase (he fell along with the motorcycle); the surgeon wanted to amputate his leg, but still managed to save it.

Leonid was interrogated for a long time by the judicial purist Pesterev: really couldn’t do without blood?

Returning from the hospital on crutches to an empty apartment, Soshnin began to study in depth German, read philosophers. Aunt Granya looked after him.

Madame Pestereva, the daughter of a rich and thieving director of an enterprise, a teacher at the Faculty of Philology, runs a “fashionable salon”: guests, music, intelligent conversations, reproductions of paintings by Salvador Dali - everything is feigned, unreal.

The “learned lady” turned student Pasha Silakova, a large, blooming village girl, into a housekeeper, whom her mother pushed into the city to study. Pasha would like to work in the field, become a mother of many children, but she is trying to delve into science, which is alien to her. So she pays for decent grades by cleaning the apartment and going to the market, and also bringing food from the village to everyone who can help her in some way.

Soshnin persuaded Pasha to transfer to an agricultural vocational school, where Pasha studied well and became an outstanding athlete in the entire region. Then “she worked as a machine operator along with men, got married, gave birth to three sons in a row and was going to give birth to four more, but not those who are taken out of the womb by Caesarean section and jump around: “Oh, allergies! Ah, dystrophy! Ah, early chondrosis..."

From Pasha, the hero’s thoughts spread to his wife Lera - it was she who persuaded him to take up the fate of Silakova.

Now Lenya and Lera live separately - they quarreled over something stupid, Lera took her daughter and moved.

Memories again. How did fate bring them together?

Young police officer in the city with telling name Khailovsk managed to arrest a dangerous bandit. And everyone in the city whispered: “The same one!”

And then Leonid met on the way the arrogant, proud fashionista Lerka, a student at the pharmaceutical college, nicknamed Primadonna. Soshnin fought her off from the hooligans, feelings arose between them... Lera’s mother pronounced the verdict: “It’s time to get married!”

The mother-in-law was a quarrelsome and domineering person - one of those who only knows how to command. The father-in-law is a golden man, hard-working, skilled: He immediately mistook his son-in-law for his son. Together they “cut” the cocky lady for a while.

A daughter, Svetochka, was born, but strife arose over her upbringing. The economicless Lera dreamed of making a child prodigy out of the girl, Leonid took care of moral and physical health.

“The Soshnins increasingly sold Svetka to Polevka, subject to grandma’s poor inspection and inept care. It’s good that in addition to the grandmother, the child had a grandfather, he didn’t let the child torment the child with crops, he taught his granddaughter not to be afraid of bees, to smoke on them from a jar, to distinguish flowers and herbs, to pick up wood chips, to scrape hay with a rake, to herd a calf, to choose eggs from chicken nests, I took my granddaughter to pick mushrooms, pick berries, weed beds, go to the river with a bucket of water, rake snow in winter, sweep the fence, ride on a sled down the mountain, play with the dog, pet the cat, water the geraniums on the window.”

While visiting his daughter in the village, Leonid accomplished another feat - he fought off the village women from the alcoholic, former prisoner, who was terrorizing them. The drunk, Venka Fomin, wounded Leonid, got scared and dragged him to the first aid station.

And this time Soshnin pulled out. We must pay tribute to his wife Lera - she always looked after him when he was hospitalized, although she joked mercilessly.

Evil, evil, evil falls on Soshnin - and his soul hurts. A sad detective - he knows too many everyday incidents that make you want to howl.

“...Mom and Dad are book lovers, not children, not young people, both over thirty, had three children, fed them poorly, looked after them poorly, and suddenly the fourth appeared. They loved each other very passionately, even three children bothered them, but the fourth was of no use at all. And they began to leave the child alone, and the boy was born tenacious, screaming day and night, then he stopped screaming, only squeaked and pecked. The neighbor in the barracks couldn’t stand it, she decided to feed the child porridge, climbed through the window, but there was no one to feed - the child was being eaten by worms. The child's parents are not somewhere, not in a dark attic, in reading room regional library the name of F. M. Dostoevsky was hidden, the name of that very greatest humanist who proclaimed, and what he proclaimed, shouted with a frantic word to the whole world, that he would not accept any revolution if even one child would suffer in it...

More. Mom and dad had a fight, mom ran away from dad, dad left home and went on a spree. And he would have walked, choked on wine, damned, but the parents forgot at home a child who was not even three years old. When they broke down the door a week later, they found a child who had even eaten dirt from the cracks of the floor and learned to catch cockroaches - he ate them. They took out the boy in the Orphanage - they defeated dystrophy, rickets, mental retardation, but they still cannot wean the child from grasping movements - he is still catching someone...”

The image of Grandma Tutyshikha runs like a dotted line through the entire story - she lived wildly, stole, was imprisoned, married a lineman, gave birth to a boy, Igor. She was repeatedly beaten by her husband “for her love for the people”—out of jealousy, that is. I drank. However, she was always ready to babysit the neighbors’ kids, from behind her door she was always heard: “Oh, here, here, here, here...” - nursery rhymes, for which she was nicknamed Tutyshikha. She nursed, as best she could, her granddaughter Yulka, who started “walking” early. Again the same thought: how is good and evil, revelry and humility combined in the Russian soul?

Neighbor Tutyshikha is dying (she drank too much balm, and there was no one to call an ambulance - Yulka went out on a party). Yulka howls - how can she live now without her grandmother? Her father only pays her off with expensive gifts.

“They saw off Grandma Tutyshikha to another world in a rich, almost luxurious and crowded way - my son, Igor Adamovich, did his best for his own mother.”

At the funeral, Soshnin meets his wife Lera and daughter Sveta. There is hope for reconciliation. The wife and daughter return to Leonid’s apartment.

“In a temporary, hasty world, the husband wants to get a ready-made wife, and the wife, again, wants a good, or better yet, a very good, ideal husband...

“Husband and wife are one Satan”—that’s all the wisdom that Leonid knew about this complex subject.”

Without family, without patience, without hard work on what is called harmony and harmony, without raising children together, it is impossible to preserve goodness in the world.

Soshnin decided to write down his thoughts, added wood to the stove, looked at his sleeping wife and daughter, “placed a blank sheet of paper in a spot of light and froze over it for a long time.”

This story (the author called it a novel) is one of Astafiev’s most socially rich works. It vividly depicts to us the moral state of an entire era in the life of the Russian province, as it was towards the end of the Soviet era (there was also a place for the tortured collective farm) - and during the transition to “perestroika”, with its updated signs of distortion. The epithet “sad” in the title is weak for the main character Soshnin and too weak for the entire depressing surrounding situation - in the thick mass of upset, disorganized, twisted life, in many examples of this, picturesque cases and characters.

Already at that time, the “thieves” camp spirit victoriously invaded the existence of the Soviet “will”. The hero, a criminal police officer, was successfully chosen to observe this. The chain of crimes and criminal massacres stretches on and on. City front doors and internal staircases are defenseless from the presence of thieves, drunkenness and robbery. Whole fights on these stairs, types of hooligans and piggishness. The young brat stabbed three innocent people to death - and right there, next to him, he eats ice cream with appetite. Accordingly, the entire city (considerable, with institutions) is kept in debauchery and filth, and all city life is in debauchery. The merry “troops” of youth rape women, even very elderly ones, who turn up drunk. Drunk car thieves, and even dump trucks, knock down and crush dozens of people. And young people who are “advanced” in morals and fashion flaunt their intercepted style along the garbage streets. - But with particular pain, often, and with the greatest attention, Astafiev writes about the destruction of small children, their ugly upbringing, and especially in upset families.

At times (as in his other texts) Astafiev makes a direct moral appeal to the reader, with a question about the nature of human evil, then with a three-page monologue about the meaning of family, ending this story.

Unfortunately, in this story, too, the author allows himself careless liberties in the order of choosing the episodes depicted: in the general structure of the story you do not perceive integrity, even in the temporal order of its occurrence; random jumps and distortions of episodes and characters appear, fleeting, indistinct, the plots are fragmented. This shortcoming is further aggravated by frequent side digressions, anecdotal (here are fishing jokes, of course) distractions (and simply unfunny jokes) or ironic phrases that are in discord with the text. This fragments the feeling of cruel gloominess of the whole situation and violates the integrity of the linguistic flow. (Along with vigorous thieves' jargon, folk sayings - suddenly abundant quotations from literature - and useless, clogged expressions from writing- like: “does not react to anything”, “remove from labor collective", "lead to conflicts", " big drama experienced”, “subtleties of a pedagogical nature”, “waiting for mercy from nature.”) The author’s style is not created, whatever language is picked up.

Soshnin himself is a combat operative who almost lost his leg in one battle, almost died from the rusty pitchforks of a bandit in another and, one against two, unarmedly defeated two large bandits - this is with a gentle character and good feelings, – it is very clearly visible and new in our literature. But Astafiev added to him in a completely unappealing way - beginner writing and reading Nietzsche in German. It’s not that it was impossible, but it wasn’t born organically: Soshnin, supposedly, went into overdrive because of numerous explanatory notes, and then, you see, he entered the correspondence department of the philological department of the Pedagogical Institute. Yes, his soul strives for light, but is too overloaded with the abominations of his current life.

But, truly anecdotally, this involvement of Soshnin in the philology department cost the author dearly. In a passing phrase it is mentioned about Soshnin that he, at the philology department, “toiled along with a dozen local Jewish children, comparing Lermontov’s translations with the primary sources” - the most good-natured thing said! - but the prosperous metropolitan researcher of the Pushkin era, Nathan Eidelman, inventively unscrewed this line and announced it in full Soviet Union(and then it thundered in the West) that Astafiev showed up here as a vile nationalist and anti-Semite! But the professor led skillfully: first, of course, with pain for the insulted Georgians, and the next step - to this terrifying line.

An excerpt from an essay about Viktor Astafiev from the “Literary Collection” written by