Prishvin worldly cup. Worldly Cup

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Mikhail Prishvin

Worldly Cup

It happened that during a flight, or in pursuit of his girlfriend, a swamp friend with a long beak would fly towards me; will fly in, make a circle over the table and return to Chistik - our glorious moss swamp, the mother of the great Russian river.

This swamp is not the only one that feeds the high-water river, but all the mosses that feed it are called guillemots.

Our guillemot was once the bottom of a lake, and its shores, hilly, sandy, with tall pine trees, have retained their Primitive look, so it seems that there will be water behind the pines, you go - and no! There are lush thickets for half a mile, in the bushes there are hummocks as high as a man’s chest; if you fall, you will run into the stakes of stunted birch trees. Here you can walk along the cranberry paths, made by the common forces of cranberry women, wolves, foxes, hares; it happens that Misha himself will pass, everyone follows the path and escapes in the thickets. How do you make your way out of these thickets into the guillemot - a clean place, fertile, in the spring every hummock is a bouquet of flowers, in the summer after the mosquito dries out, you will find yourself a hummock the size of a table, and in it it’s like going to bed, you just move your hands, raking cranberries, blueberries into your mouth , lingonberries - godfather to the king!

Such a guillemot should be made a reserve, and the ax and fire should not touch the forests surrounding the swamp - the source, the mother of the glorious waterway from the Varangians to the Greeks, otherwise the river will dry up and the country will turn into a desert.

We had to endure a lot of grief for the forests, beauty and pride of our region. You used to wander through these forests - what a mighty silence, what a rich desert! It’s so good, but it’s scary to think that in a hundred - a hundred! - within a hundred years these silent riches of the Russian land will be revealed, there will be rails, pipes, fences, farms everywhere - fear for a hundred years!

And what happened (...), the forests were so distorted, littered with branches, tops, that the grass and flowers did not grow, and it became impossible to go for mushrooms, for berries, the lakes were empty, all the fish were caught and drowned out by soldiers with bombs, birds somewhere scattered, or were they eaten by foxes? Yes, only predators, foxes, wolves, hawks filled all the clearings littered with branches. Forest, earth, water - the entire earthly robe is trampled into the mud, and only the sky, common to everyone and inaccessible, still shines above this muck.

Will it Last Judgment?

For this Judgment, I prepared one excuse for myself, that I sacredly kept the garments of the earth.

And they are all trampled.

How can I now justify my existence?

In difficult moments, ask yourself: “What do I want?” - and you answer: “I want real tea with sugar.”

“Aren’t you, my friend, afraid that in your mighty desert in a hundred years tea with sugar and coffee with cream will be offered at every turn?”

- Yes, I was afraid, I thought about external nature from children's fairy tales, now I think that nature remains powerful only within us, in the fight against personal goals, but what we usually call nature - forests, lakes, rivers, all this weakly, like a child, and begs kind person about protection from the man-beast.

I think that we have conquered the madness of animals and made them domestic, or harmless, without noticing that their insane will passed into man, was preserved, accumulated in him until time, and that’s why (...) everyone rushed to destroy forests - this is not people, this crazy beast has been released.

Or is that not true? But it is true that Russia was like a desert with oases; The oases were cut down, the springs dried up, and the desert became impassable.

Or is it just a feeling of the past? But what kind of past do we have - the Russian people are unchanged in their everyday life; the history of power over the Russian people and wars? The vast majority of the Russian people do not care at all about the authorities and about who they are fighting with; the history of the suffering of a conscious personality, or is this the history of Russia? Yes, this exists, but when will such a terrible story finally end, and the Crucified One himself asked to pass this cup, and he even wanted to stay.

If only my distant beloved could hear in words the power of my love! I shout, “Walk in the light!” - and the word echoes back to me: “Lie in the dark!” But I know that she exists, beautiful, and I know more, I am the chosen one of her heart and her soul is always with me - why am I sad, isn’t that enough? Few! I am a living person and I want to live with her, see her with simple eyes. And then she cheats on me, gives her pure soul to me, and her body to another, not loving him, despising him, and this harlot, a slave with a holy soul, is my homeland. Why can I talk about my homeland, and if I knew for sure that this is especially necessary, I could sing about it, like Solomon about his lily, but I can’t say anything to her, my address to her is silence and counting the past years?

I stand mute with a cigarette, but still I pray at this hour of the morning, I don’t know how or to whom, I open the window and hear: in the impregnable guillemot the black grouse are still muttering, the crane is calling to the sun, and even here, on the lake, now before our eyes, catfish moved and launched a wave like a ship.

I stand dumb and only then write down:

“On the coming day, Lord, enlighten our past and preserve in the new everything that was good before, our protected forests, the sources of mighty rivers, preserve the birds, multiply the fish, return all the animals to the forests and free our souls from them.” .

I EMPIRE PALACE

The palace of the owners of these vast wooded lands was recognized as a highly artistic monument of art and antiquity, and for some time it stood completely intact, only, of course, the linden trees in the park were gradually peeled off, glass, curtains, nails were dragged from the pavilions and greenhouses, into a large artificial lake the slope began to rot, the water began to recede, grasses appeared in shallow places, herons swooped in to peck at the fish. The eccentric was not in the mood for cold and hunger to nest in the palace and guard it, and they came up with the worst thing that could be done for protection: they settled a children's colony here below, and from this the settlement of the palace began. And so it began!

The colony quickly ruined the entire eastern part and obtained a mandate for the western part, and in its place a school appeared. The colony moves to the second floor, behind it is the school, the Kultkom begins performances and dances below, and also follows the school and moves up. In what form everything was left down here, it’s a shame to even tell, they didn’t even bother to sweep away the husks from the sunflowers, it’s a complete disgrace: it’s lying around white shoe without a heel, a worn-out felt boot, and on the steps of the staircase, mushrooms grow from rubbish and green flies fly - terrible disgusting. They paid attention, cleaned them up, partitioned off the rooms with silk, set up different passages and doors and let in the “indemnity” - that’s what we called the Commission for the Collection of Taxes in Money and Products, Tseitlin’s forestry office, part of the state farm, an old woman with her master’s peacocks, and various other things nestled in here too. persons with mandates. Military and paramilitary soldiers were now darting along the stairs everywhere, looking for something, organizing who was strong - the rook, who missed - the crow, who sings well - the starling, and the sparrow was out of the birdhouse. With us it was the other way around: a crow chases a rook, a sparrow chases a starling. The five rooms on the second floor, however, were untouched, the door handles tied and sealed. They wouldn’t have looked, of course, at the ropes, or at the seal and locks, but it just didn’t come through and slipped from memory. On these rooms it was written: “MUSEUM OF MANOR LIFE” - what business is the life of a landowner in such a devastating time, but the word “Museum” was not touched, and the word “peacock” was also not touched - and two peacocks were not touched, moreover, for protection of these peacocks on a full state farm ration consists of a Peacock, a master's nanny, an old woman, a hostile Soviet power a century of her own life experience.

Early on, a peacock flies from a tall elm tree to the gate to greet the sun, yesterday the guard of the colony poured slop on his tail more than once and the boys spat on it - now it takes a long time to cleanse itself and finally, lifting its tail to the point of impossibility, it becomes all blue and the rainbow of its countless curls and holes towards the sun . The priest's son, Shkrab Vasily Semyonovich, goes down to his garden and recovers right there, under the blue pines, there is nothing to be done, there is nowhere in the whole house. Vasily Semyonovich is always surprised by the peacock, looking at it, smoking. Now Kolya Kudryash, the indemnity clerk, is recovering and approaches the peacock in a good mood.

- Ah ah ah!

- What's happened?

- Tail, tail, beauty! Do you know the origin of the bird, Vasily Semenych?

- Bird of paradise.

– Paradise, I understand, but what countries?

- From heaven, of course.

- There are such heavenly countries. A gloomy guard of the colony goes out carrying slops from morning to evening.

– They also give out grain! - he grumbles, walking past the peacock. “And they keep an old woman with such a bird.”

- Frenchman! - Pavlina answers and: - fallen, fallen, fallen! - calls him out of the way so that he doesn’t pour slop on his tail.

- Beauty!

- What is the benefit?

- Everything is good for you, guard!

The colony wakes up. The boss, the most evil maiden, barefoot, like a red-eyed bird of prey, flies like a slut down the corridor to the kitchen to divide bread, and all the hundred-footed children run, sit under the myrtles and laurels in the arboretum, in the Empire pavilion, in the greenhouses, in the English park under the elms - everywhere ! Everything around the tithe is dirty.

The settlement is falling down - that’s what the men call this whole indemnity business. The men are quiet, timid and polite because each of them has a stone in their tow, a lot of sand in the flour, a sheep skin and bones, a plague chicken, just to hand it in, but if you don’t hand it in and you’ll get caught, then the conversation is short.

- Is there?

- Eat! - the man hastens to answer and drives into the bushes for moonshine.

Tail, tail up! - the men are surprised at the peacock.

- Beauty!

They have an ancient connection with Pavlinika through the owners, and while waiting for weight they have a quiet conversation about the old and the new, that the old is good, but the new is no good.

– Don’t be friends with a friend and don’t be rude to another. Pray to God and don’t forget the devil, turn around like a fried demon in a frying pan.

“Everything is dirty and black.”

- They were dumbfounded!

“The other day the kids started throwing stones at the cross.

- To the cross!

- You can’t move from the spot: into the very cross with a brick. “You damned little devils, where are you, the catechumens, throwing them, or don’t you see the cross!” I shout to them, and they answer me: “This, grandma, is a devil’s horn.”

The peacock talks, and the men stand with their mouths open and swing their beards like brooms. Beard, beard!

- One climbed up to me and poured tar into the lamp for Nikola the Pleasant. “What have you done, bare-bellied?” “I’m his grandmother,” he says, “I wanted to smoke his mustache.”

– The land tolerates demons!

- The earth, mother, endures everything, but somehow the Lord will help, is He a good man?

- How could it not be - this happened to me: I was chopping wood, I put my eye on the turf - the light disappeared! I walk across the field, praying: “Mother of God, Quick to Hear, help me!” Out of nowhere, a woman who gets sick with her tongue. This woman touched her eyebrow, licked her eye and took it off.

“I was at Minaya’s the other day,” Pavlina whispers, “soon, she says, it will all be over, the chains are weakening.”

- They disperse.

- Well, his date was and has passed.

- It’s nothing, he says that it has passed, and so it is said in two, if the number passes, Abbadon, the prince of darkness, will reign for the same amount of time.

– And wait for the date again?

- Wait again.

- Eh, Minai, Minai is crushing you, who is a saint, and I am Kuzka, it happened that I was in his ear, and he was in my ear: he is Kuzka, and I am Biryulka. learned man Vasily Semenych, he’ll tell us better, well, what’s new?

– Did you hear the newcomer that the relics of the Saint were discovered, and it turned out, and it turned out, what do you think turned out to be there? - asked Vasily Semenovich, the priest's son, - yes, what turned out to be there?

- Oh, damn Fomka, look at me! – the hundred-year-old Peacock raised her crutch and threatened. Biryulka grinned:

- Well, what turned out to be?

Everyone looked at Peacock, some with a grin, some out of curiosity wanted to check whether Peacock was standing. But the old woman didn’t even blink an eye, the old woman was thinking something of her own.

“They stripped this doll, gutted it, and there was a bone in it.

“They touched it, and the bone crumbled into ash.” Is Peacock married? Everyone looks at the old woman. Peacock said:

– Why are you looking at me, or don’t you understand?

– We understand: bone.

- Bone is bone, but the priest is gone.

“And they poured this ashes onto the matting, placed it near the church and wrote:

“THIS IS WHAT YOU WORSHIPED.” This is the news...

- It’s necessary! - Biryulka yawned. “I thought you were going to say something internal.”

– I’m talking about the internal one.

– This is external, but this is how life changes, or a new edge... We live on the edge, and you talk about relics. Tell me when the installation will take place.

- Stop?

- Well, yes, the installation, after all, you know.

– Nothing is known.

- Well, at least a little bit? But Pavlinika now doesn’t even care about this internal thing, she says about her own things:

- The father left, left, disappeared and became invisible to the villains, seemed to them like bone and ash.

The peacock consisted.

-Where did he disappear to? – asked the little-faithful Biryulka:

- Right there, right there, father, only he became invisible by God’s permission and for our sin.

The peacock was completely composed.

Those with ears listen, others glance at the office in anticipation of the weight and quietly curse:

- The indemnity, brothers, is full!

- What!

- How crowded is the indemnity!

- Damned power!

- The indemnity crushed!

- Cut her throat!

“And give her everything: give me money, give me bread, give me a horse, give me a cow, give me a pig, and give me chickens.”

- They described the chickens!

Squash her mosquito in the swamp.

The settlement piles up, everything piles up - cart to cart, ram to ram, sack to sack, beard to beard.

- Don't run into me!

- Osloboni!

- Eh, beard, beard!

- What do you need my beard?

- The beard was red and glistening.

You were a black man and became guilty.

In the office, everything is measure and weight. You, beard, don’t even think about putting your breakfast here and gape.

“I,” Kolya Kudryash will say, “thought you gave it to me.”

- Eat, eat, Nikolai Nikolaevich!

A simple fellow, one of his own, he has neither citizens nor comrades here, but simply Vanka and Vaska. Seryozhka and Mishka, all the people matched the match, a sung company, passages and manholes, an outsider can’t understand anything, you just hear something separate: about the new commissar, that a good man, one of his own, is a rogue like us - they often say about prison, that to whom - we need to sit down soon, and it’s as if we can’t sit down ourselves - that they dared such and such a commissar, but he went to the post office, the time will come, they will forget, they will show up.

- He'll take a rest!

And then someone will say:

- My nose itches!

It's time! - answers the other. “And I’m itching.”

They grab their noses, every single one of them has itchy noses. The nose leads correctly: the man is caught in deception. The man's trial is short:

The man soon drives to Chistik, there on the bank of a stream, the beginning of the great Russian river, a light is burning, a cauldron is above the fire, from the cauldron a snake drips into the kettle, from the kettle into the bottle, into its pocket and to the court.

- Well, how did it happen?

- Satisfied.

- What else do you need?

“My own lip was corroded.”

- Eh, beard, beard, the man had a red beard and became a motley beard, he had a bull’s head, but the devil gave it horns: he should think with his head, but he digs the ground with his horns - the bull, the devil and the man are one party. Do you understand, beard, my parable?

By evening there is no longer a single beard in our yard, the peacock, all spat upon and already doused with slop more than once, flies up to the elm to spend the night, in the dance hall of the Kultkom between the empire-style columns the expensive light of a kerosene lamp lights up and the actors get ready to play the French vaudeville “The Mouse under the Table”, the accordion player tests his accordion in the Moscow way, and the choir of village girls learns to diligently sing “our indignant mind is boiling,” especially difficult for them is “with the international the human race will rise again.” Even people from a city twenty miles away come here to dance, because in the city simple dances are strictly prohibited and only plastic dances are allowed.

Woe to the Peacock on these dancing nights, she is killed by worry about the master's goods, lest they steal the last, and the old woman watches the door handles, sealed with a seal, all night long.

Willingly tell you:

“In one village there was an empty hut on the way out, and they noticed, like ours, that there was demonic dancing and music. They called the priest. The priest sprinkled holy water: “May God rise again and his enemies be scattered!” And once, and twice, as he said for the third time: “May God rise again!” - the hut began to settle. So the windows went underground, and the music went on and on. And the roof, and the chimney - everything was hidden, the ground was overgrown with grass, and even to this day, if you put your ear to it, you can still hear the stomping and knock-knock! - hoof knocks on hoof. So we will have such an empty place.

By midnight, Kolya Kudryash, all drunk in alcohol, arrives with his entire company, he will dance here until dawn, squeezing caviar from the girls.

And the dawn can be so red and quiet over the lake: knock-knock-knock! – a cat will run across a wooden bridge.

Then the harmony and clatter in the palace sound separately from the whole world and fade away with the night.

The night falls like a gray blanket in one direction. In the east, great plans have been outlined; young and old, stand at the morning hour facing the east, and still everything will turn out the same in everyone’s soul until the end.

Has a cloud, fog or smoke curled up white and tightly over the blue forests above the lowland? - then the goblin heats the bathhouse, washes himself, and his entire creature, washed, glistens with dew.

The crane tirelessly calls out for the sun, and it is clear from everything that it is rolling, in a hurry to capture all the black power and put an end to it forever.

Now it has appeared, the remnant of the pale moon has disappeared, and the stomping of the ground is barely audible.

All silver in dew, a crane appeared, another, with huge wings covering the entire solar disk, flies towards him, they came together and rejoiced. Then, in all the thickets, in violent force, all big and small, some in time, some guessed, repeat: “Glory, glory.”

Glory to the great sun!

Here, by the grace of the sun, the resurrection of every stale creature begins, every dewdrop receives release to heaven and there, uniting in white, blue and red round dances, it amazes us all beyond words.

II MUSEUM OF MANOR LIFE

In spring you can live with the feeling of autumn, and there are days almost every spring that are just like autumn, only from the green leaves you can guess about spring, but in autumn you cannot see spring in nature, it’s already over, say goodbye.

In the spring of light, in the blue glow of the snow, and you need to have a black dot in your heart, from it will then grow the strength to rush, when the spring pool boils, to the screaming frogs and at least once in your life scream like a fool with all creation - you will never regret that rushed into the pool towards the frogs.

Whoever experienced spring as spring will not crow hopelessly in the fall, and even if you gather up all the madness and throw yourself into the fall... In the fall, everything spreads into the mud - you look, the late blue cornflower is spinning, stuck on the mud of the wheels of a peasant's cart.

In the fall, everything inevitably dissolves into mud.

But whoever has experienced spring well, autumn is a cheerful time, he thinks about the white winter, thickly tars the wheels, and his cart does not creak, bringing goods to the house.

Eh, there is vigor, and just to live, but there is no good!

And the unoiled wheels squeak.

All our rooks, together with the jackdaws, rustled like a dark cloud in the evening dawn along the wind to the south, and, like the women in Parents' Hall from the cemetery, sadly calling to each other, the jackdaws returned: they saw off the rooks, the rooks flew away.

When the rooks flew away, and our peacock already had half a tail left, and everyone had stored something for the winter, the new inhabitant of our house, Alpatov, came to the gate of our estate in worn-out boots and a knapsack over his shoulders, with him was an old woman and two boys, also with knapsacks.

“Aren’t you the new scrub?” - they asked him.

– Yes, I am a school worker, and this is my mandate for the museum.

The family was taken to those sealed rooms that had survived the theft with the inscription “MUSEUM OF MANOR LIFE.”

“You’ll freeze here,” said Pavlinha.

Alpatov replied:

- No, grandma, I won’t freeze.

- Well, what about bread, father?

- Somehow.

- Where can you get it? After all, they won’t bear it for you.

They won't carry it, why? Will they take you for the boss?

The peacock misunderstood:

“They will respect you,” she said, “very simply, they will accept you as the boss and respect you.”

Alpatov immediately began to clean everything, rearrange it, throw away the excess, hang the pictures in his own way, then he would go downstairs with an ax, then he would go up with a bundle of firewood and a bucket of water, after a week everyone took a closer look at him and a man secretly began to live inside the formed opinion.

- Cute, don't you think?

Very black, like a bear.

– And the eyes are clear and attentive.

- The eyes are okay, some Alpatov, have you heard where he’s from?

– Alpatov was a policeman in Yamshchina, isn’t he a relative?

- Hardly. And how will he live here in the refrigerator, no pig, no potatoes, barefoot, undressed, the guys are barefoot.

- Well, they’ll dress up at the museum, there’s still a lot of good stuff there.

Of course, they’ll get dressed, you can’t live without it now.

A month later, the Museum of Manor Life opened. IN great hall it turned out very solemnly, because everything unnecessary was removed and portraits from the Peter the Great era to the present day were hung correctly. A text about each expressive person was selected from poets of estate life, from archival materials of the house, but most of all Alpatov himself composed everything possible, depending on which of the guests was interested in what.

The columned living room is also an Alexander Empire style, a cozy room, all in miniatures, with watercolors, pastels, etchings, there is a precious pad with ivory columns, all sorts of antique wardrobes, a cabinet with French writers XVIII century. If you press one inconspicuous button and pull the ivory column in the blotter, a secret drawer slides out, and there is kept a stack of letters to a girl with a white flower in her hand - her portrait is placed in another living room, from the era of the great reforms. Due to the lack of empire furniture, this living room had to be dedicated to the sixties. Portraits were collected here in memory of Turgenev interesting women, and that girl with a white rose in her hand greets the guests and just doesn’t say: “How beautiful, how fresh the roses were.” Alpatov tells museum visitors that a young man - his portrait was lost - pure, like Ivan Tsarevich, loved this girl, but she considered herself unworthy of him and hinted that he should look more simply. To the young man, on the contrary, it seemed that she was deluded in herself, he created a blue spring out of her and did not want to look at it any simpler. Now they come together, now they separate, they are about to walk down the aisle, and suddenly everything ends horribly: the young man, having chosen the most worthy one for himself, committed suicide. Other visitors are told that he was an artist, he painted this portrait, he seemed to drink all of her in this picture, and she committed suicide, not he. There was also an option that ten years later they met somewhere and, not recognizing each other, chatted all evening, and, finally, that she married him, gave birth to many children, completely drank him as an artist, he did not create anything paintings, no wealth, and now the remnants of the family on starvation rations are busy rinsing clothes in some hospital.

In the hunting room there were ancient weapons, stuffed local animals: elk, bear, lynx, wild goats - killed by the owners right there, in the clearing, this whole room was green: curtains, carpets, wallpaper - everything was green. Alpatov settled down to live in this large office, hoping that a good fireplace would save him from the cold.

The general came here first with famous surname, he serves here as an accountant on a state farm and looks after the clerk Margarita Pavlovna, and has already found Margarita in his old age! Once she ran to the museum and went straight to the storeroom, like a rat in the trash, begging for a ribbon or an old hat. Alpatov forcibly got rid of her, giving her a copper pan for the general to cook potatoes. The old man's life is very bad: it is impossible in his position to steal rations. But he is truly honest and faithful - he believes that Tsar Nicholas is alive, writes all the papers in the old way and swears that he will die with the letter “yat”. Of course, the general really liked the museum, and especially the beautiful girl in the Turgenev room - “How beautiful, how fresh the roses were!” - he always repeats when he sees her with a white flower. It is very useful for the arrival of city guests, when they need to be very occupied so that they think well of the museum, chat about it and strengthen its precarious position in revolutionary times. While Alpatov is telling in the hall, starting from the Peter the Great era, the story of the ancestors of his heroine with a white flower, the general is hiding somewhere on a carnation in the Turgenev room, and when the portraits from the story begin to move in the imagination of the guests, suddenly one of the generals breaks down, comes to life and meets you on the threshold of the living room, making a hand beautiful lady with white flower:

– How beautiful, how fresh the roses were!

Who doesn’t know this poem in prose, it has become as common as an egg in a glass with a slice of bread, and therefore, after the general, someone will certainly sigh and repeat:

- Yes, the roses were good!

Then, to finish, Alpatov says:

– And we also have a peacock here.

Guests come down to look at the peacock.

- The tail is amazing!

-What an amazing tail!

- Bird of paradise! - Pavlinika explains and, complaining of hunger, negotiates for additional rations for the peacock, and Alpatov asks for chalk or alabaster to repair the museum. You look, and you get grain for the museum and alabaster for the peacock. Apparently, guests then think of a peacock as a museum, and the Museum of Manor Life as a peacock’s tail.

There was another room in the museum, now in it, on a giant stump, there is a cast of a Panticopean vase with an image of a Scythian. This room is the plans of a real museum: from everything that now seems like a peacock’s tail, only Ivan the Tsarevich will remain, and the rooms of the entire house will be dedicated to the faceless mysterious Scythia with the sleeping beauty waiting for its Ivan the Tsarevich. It exists, this world, and now you just need to be able to approach it. Therefore, Alpatov gladly welcomes visitors from the simplest people, who remind him of the ancient Scythians.

A cranberry village woman can be pretty in a museum; here, on a shiny parquet floor among mirrors, columns and paintings, a woman from the moss swamps will simply and confidently say:

You don’t need to tell her anything, turn around and she will turn around, she doesn’t see anything anywhere and feels paradise everywhere. Even there, in the hut, every ordinary thing is mysterious, every movement of nature along the solar circle is accompanied by consecration with water from twelve wells and a spell. He, a bearded man, thinks that a cow is simply hurting a heifer from a bull, not knowing that the grandmother had previously whispered all her prayers into the water in a bottle and sprinkled this water on the cow, on the Bright Resurrection of Christ with the first one, she said Christ to her and gave it to her, as person, eat a red, blessed egg. All this seems trivial, but because of this the chick enters human world, as her own, special chick, the woman will call her

Dawn, and the heifer leaves the herd. Yes, if there was a need for housework, the woman would have called an ant out of the anthill. You just need to take a closer look at this world, and then something completely different will appear even in the everyday life of educated people, and you will see that these people, with their words and appearance, seem to deliberately gloss over their interesting, real world.

How much effort is needed to awaken some kind of response in the soul of an educated visitor, and the woman herself will say:

And then to all the village women:

- I was in heaven!

One day the general came face to face with a cranberry woman at the door, made way for her, and apologized:

- How did he say that? – the cranberry woman Alpatova asked as she left.

“In French,” Alpatov answered. The next day she appeared with a piece of bacon and brought her daughter Arisha.

“Teach your daughter French,” she said, serving the lard.

Alpatov began to teach the girl in French, immediately extracting from her fairy tales, songs, and the sacred words of this region, adding leaf by leaf to the Scythian room.

Podoksenov Alexander Modestovich
Yelets State University named after. I.A. Bunina
Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of the Department
historical and cultural heritage

Podoksenov Alexander Modestovich
Elets state university named after I.A. Bunin
PhD, professor of the Chair of Historical and Cultural Heritage
Email: [email protected]

Prishvin's views on the political, economic and social reasons due to which the people's soul fell into revolutionary temptation are analyzed. Not only a historiosophical, but a moral assessment of the October Revolution is shown. The writer sharply criticizes the course of the Bolshevik Party to destroy the entire previous culture of the Russian people, opposes the Marxist ideology of class enmity and primitive equality established by violence.

Mikhail Prishvin: the artist and the time(socio-cultural contexts of the story “Secular bowl”)

The work analyzes Prishvin’s views on the political, economic and social reasons which caused the people’s soul to lapse into revolutionary temptation. Not only historiosophic, but moral estimation of the October overturn is shown. The writer sharply criticizes the course of the Bolshevik party to destruction of the Russian people’s foregoing culture, comes out against Marxist ideology of the class struggle and primitive equality, which is achieved through violence.

“The Chalice of the World” (1922), as a story about the revolution, is not only a work of art, but also an not yet fully appreciated historical document, an eyewitness account of the tragic events of the revolutionary era. Indeed, the plot twists and turns of the novel life of the main character of Alpatov’s story are in many ways a presentation of the life trials of the author himself, an ordinary Russian intellectual who, in the first years after revolutionary years finds himself in the provincial outback, where he fights for the survival of his family. Fleeing from the arrest of the Bolshevik authorities of Petrograd for his active collaboration with the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary newspaper “The Will of the People,” the writer left Petrograd in April 1918 and disappeared from the capital’s literary horizon for four years, going into the “root” of national life, into the life of an ordinary provincial worker - a rural plowman , librarian, teacher. However, Prishvin’s spiritual work does not stop. In a difficult and tragic time of great unrest, the writer seeks to identify those spiritual, socio-economic and historical reasons because of which the people’s soul fell into a terrible revolutionary temptation [see: 9].

Farming on a small estate inherited from his mother near Yelets, where the writer himself, like other rural plowmen, cultivated several acres of land, the amount of which did not differ from the possessions of other peasant farmers, ended in the fall of 1918 with the expulsion and requisition of all property by decree of the local village council. After “dekulakization”, Prishvin worked as a librarian in the village of Ryabinki, and then as a geography teacher in the same native Yelets gymnasium, from which, after the conflict with V.V. Rozanov (also a geography teacher) expelled him in 1889 [see: 10]. In the summer of 1920, the writer moved to his wife’s homeland in the Smolensk province, where, near the city of Dorogobuzh in the village of Sledovo, he worked for two years as a “shkrab” (school teacher) and at the same time in the village of Aleksino - the organizer of the Museum of Manor Life on the former estate of the merchant Baryshnikov. All these details of the writer’s life will become the documentary basis of the story. At the same time, against the backdrop of small details of the autobiographical narrative about the fate of a rural teacher, “The Worldly Cup” also contains deep philosophical reflections on the fate of the entire state, which appears to the reader as a dilapidated, snow-covered and falling into barbarism like ancient Scythia. The years of civil war, general devastation, hunger and cold that followed the revolution plunged the country into a state of almost primeval chaos, when, revealing the inner essence of man, the struggle for existence in the conditions of the apocalyptic end of the world broke through with bestial features.

It must be said that Prishvin wrote about the premonition of impending social cataclysms a year before the uprising of the Bolshevik Party, back in the fall of 1916, with the penetrating gaze of an artist, he saw in the revolutionary movement “the monster that separates me from the Motherland. The monster that devours us..." That is why the writer perceived the October Revolution as a historical catastrophe that destroyed all levels of the economic, cultural and social existence of Russia. At the same time, a revolution for him is not only the destruction of the traditional way of life of people, but also a tectonic shift in the geographical space of the country, when old skies fall to the ground, when the natural foundations of the existence of Russian people are destroyed: “Now it’s as if a dense net has been thrown over all this vast space<…>I would like to return to the house of the prodigal son<…>the windows were broken, the doors were taken away for kindling by neighbors and abandoned; one passer-by stopped on the corner, urinated, and another walked<…>bad place." This painful spiritual and ideological-political atmosphere, caused by revolutionary events that led to the economic and cultural degradation of society, is in itself evidence of the artist’s living conditions, which determined his worldview and worldview.

It is no coincidence that in one of the most terrible and hopeless months of 1919, when the writer’s life was especially difficult and tragic, he had a dream that gave the title of the story: “I dreamed that my soul was formed into a cup - a worldly cup, and everything that was in it, they threw it out and poured cabbage soup into it, and about twenty of the Executive Committee - members and a clerk - eat from it with wooden spoons.” Obviously, this diary entry of February 21, 1919 reveals the author’s interpretation of one of the arguments that initiated him to later change the original versions of the title of the work about the revolution in the form of a continuation of the play “Devil’s Stupa” or as the book “The Monkey Slave.” Nevertheless, as the reader can discover, the intentions and motives that at one time prompted the author to the mentioned titles, in a “removed” form or partially (for example, “The Monkey Slave” - the title of Chapter IV) will be included in the text of the story. Of course, all these variations of titles, as symbolic expressions of the meaning of a work of art and a kind of manifestation of the essence of what the story is about, inevitably give rise to a wide variety of interpretive expectations, questions and guesses in the reader.

One of the few writers of that time, in the first post-October years, he lived by simple peasant labor, Prishvin artistically expresses his immediate impressions and feelings of national life. The direct forerunner of the story was Prishvin’s only play “Bazaar”, and initially “Devil’s Stupa”, which he created in 1916-1920. As a demonic character of the revolutionary era, the “Devil’s Stupa” expressed the spirit of “half-starved embittered bourgeois settlements,” personifying those rebellious sentiments of the people that carried away the stagnant bourgeois life and the age-old way of life of the black-earth Russian province into the abyss. “The people whom I described in the “Devil’s Stupa” exist in reality, and Russian people close to Russian life recognize them.<…>The question is: is there any value in the fact that these people exist,” Prishvin emphasized the documentary-life basis of the play, which tells about the morals of the inhabitants of a small county town Yelets in the spring of 1917. At the same time, the author notes that the very name of the play was inspired by the nickname of a local old bourgeois woman, whom everyone called “Devil’s Stupa” for the evil obsession of her character. However, later, in a letter to R. Ivanov-Razumnik in February 1922, the artist shares not only his plan, but also his doubts: “I was planning to compose a book under the general title “Devil's Stupa” - I would place the scene (play) first ), then I would show everything I’ve experienced (much is written in excerpts), but I’ll work, I’ll work and I’ll break off - it comes out obscene (for example, how they lower a man into an ice hole when collecting an excessive tax).”

The writer’s doubt about the censorship of his work indicates not only the difficult relationship between the creative intelligentsia and the new political regime, but also an understanding of his own moral responsibility for what is happening. The author’s fears - completely justified, as it will become clear later - were caused by the very possibility of telling the truth about the state acting against the people using methods of class violence: “They will say that it is I who am coming out against the existing government, and not against the Monster. Meanwhile, I don’t go against the existing government, because the feeling of my involvement in it bothers me.” Prishvin clearly understands that the Bolsheviks’ coming to power was not an accident, that “this power is already, so to speak, a consequence, a soot, a trifling slag floating to the top (who didn’t fall asleep reading Lenin’s economic feuilletons, who didn’t laugh at Lunacharsky)<…>That’s not the point, of course.” The fall of the Russian monarchy was a natural result of the activities of many generations of intelligentsia, including the generation to which both the artist himself and the addressee of his letter, Ivanov-Razumnik, belonged.

Back in 1915, long before the October Revolution, Prishvin noted the isolation from the working life of the people of a significant part of the educated class, spiritually preparing the revolution: “The lot of the Russian intellectual: behind the Chinese wall of religion, separating the people from communication with them, to eat the crumbs falling from the table of the European learning and unbelief." From the writer’s ideological position, the impending revolution appeared as an ontological belittlement, the destruction of existence, the groundlessness of not only the intelligentsia, but also the general rejection of reality by the population in the name of some kind of chimera. If in all centuries the greatest wealth for the peasant was land - the source of all existence, then now the ideal suddenly becomes non-existence, as evidenced by a diary entry on July 11, 1917: “When I asked one peasant who would live well in Rus' now, he answered: “ Who has nothing to do with the land.” The soldier will answer: “Whoever has nothing to do with war,” the merchant - with trade. And in general - with the present. Who lives with the future, it’s good for him.” In a word, the revolutionary movement for Prishvin acts not only as a line of the Social Democratic intelligentsia to break away from the soil (“Good for the wandering, bad for the settled”) and for lowering traditional Russian culture, but also as a way to undermine the foundations of the socio-historical life of people when their existential finds meaning and dignity only in the world of utopian ideas imposed from outside.

Prishvin's story about the revolution turned out to be so bold for that time that the editor of the magazine "Krasnaya Nov" A. Voronsky categorically refused to publish it, frankly telling the author about the impossibility of passing such a work through censorship. From Prishvin’s Diary of 1922 it is known that, in spite of everything, the writer boldly and decisively sent “The Monkey’s Slave” for review to L. Trotsky himself, who then stood, along with V. Lenin and G. Zinoviev, at the head of the Bolshevik party hierarchy. It should be noted that the very date (August 24) of sending the story to L. Trotsky is documentary evidence of the author’s spiritual state in that time period, which helps to understand the features of the writer’s worldview, since, as L. Vygotsky emphasized, developing Plekhanov’s ideas about the dominant role of psychology above ideology, “the psyche of a social person is considered as the common subsoil of all ideologies of a given era, including art.” M. Bakhtin also wrote about the importance of taking into account the emotional, intonation-value context for understanding the phenomena of art, especially noting that extra-textual deep layers of influence on the author act “as a dialogizing background of his perception. To a certain extent the problem boils down to this social(non-verbal) conditionality of the work)". For modern epistemology, an indispensable condition cognitive process is that “it is no longer only the literal text and its objective meaning that is subject to understanding, but also the individuality of the speaker or writer<…>only turning to the genesis of thoughts allows us to truly understand them,” notes Gadamer, referring to a similar opinion of Schleiermacher.

Of course, for scientific research"The Worldly Cup" is very significant not only the analysis of the text, but also the analysis of extra-textual influences. Therefore, such a detail as the artist’s reaction to the message about the beginning of repressions against the intelligentsia is so significant: “August 24. I read in “Zven”. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, about 200 writers, professors, and engineers were arrested and sent abroad. And all the people's commissars are engaged in literature.<…>The time of the sadistic coupling of power with literature." Behind historical fact the expulsion of the opposition intelligentsia and the outburst of the “sadic” love of the People’s Commissars for literature Prishvin reveals a clear sign of the authorities’ desire to put the spiritual life of Russia under their control ideological control, which leads him to an important ideological conclusion: “It is clear why the dictatorship of the proletariat persecutes religion and strangles art,” the writer concludes, “because socialism (in theory) contains God, beauty, and truth.”

Sending the story to Trotsky for review, in an accompanying letter Prishvin expressed the hope that “the Soviet government should have the courage to give existence to a chaste-aesthetic story, even if it hurts the eyes.” However, the response that soon followed from one of the leaders of the revolution, who, among other things, was actively “involved in literature,” turned out to be similar to a sentence: “I recognize the thing’s great artistic merits, but from a political point of view it is completely counter-revolutionary.” Such a conclusion by the powerful Soviet People's Commissar inevitably gives rise to a whole series of questions: from what criteria for defining artistry Trotsky was guided by when reading the story, to the question of what exactly moments of Prishvin's ideological assessments of the revolution posed an ideological and political danger for the Bolshevik regime. And the very text of the publication of “The Worldly Cup,” delayed for almost 60 years, which is the subject of reader understanding and interpretation, asks the question of the reasons for the censorship’s unacceptability for the authorities of one of Prishvin’s brightest works of art. One of the modern theorists of aesthetics, Yu. Borev, believes that between the class-sociological approach to the art of G. Plekhanov and the postulates of the aesthetics of socialist realism, “the link between pre-revolutionary Marxist art historical thought and the vulgar sociological theories of the second half of the 30s - early 50s ” was Trotsky, that “it was Trotsky who laid the foundation for the Soviet tradition of evaluating artistic phenomena not from an aesthetic, but from a purely political point of view.” In fact, in our opinion, L. Trotsky only concretized and developed the initial principles of the class approach of Marxism to culture, as G. Plekhanov [see: 8] and V. Lenin did.

As Gadamer emphasized, for anyone who wants to understand a work of art, it is necessary to understand the question that the text asks: “To understand the text means to understand this question<…>this occurs by acquiring a hermeneutic horizon. We now understand this last one as issue horizon, within the boundaries of which the semantic orientation of the text is determined.” Indeed, the nature of historical events and ideological motives for the behavior of heroes and characters described by the author in “The Worldly Cup” will become more understandable for us only if we correctly reconstruct the questions to which certain actions of specific historical figures were the answer. After all, it is precisely in the understanding of actions as real personalities, and characters fictitious by the author who answer certain questions, the meaning of both individual episodes and the semantic pattern of the course of events in a work of art are revealed.

It should be noted: the text of Prishvin’s story, in addition to satirical arrows addressed to K. Marx, V. Lenin and L. Trotsky himself, was saturated with many religious and philosophical ideas, political reminiscences and artistic allusions, indicating that the largest and most important people were involved in the circle of the author’s thinking. Domestic and foreign philosophers, artists and thinkers dangerous for Soviet ideology: F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, V. Rozanov, F. Nietzsche, M. Stirner, A. Bergson, W. James. Obviously, Trotsky knew these names, and since he supported Lenin’s position on the expulsion of thinkers opposed to the Soviet regime, it is clear that his attitude towards the author of the story discrediting the revolution could only be negative.

Although in their memoirs, Russian thinkers expelled from Russia in 1922 attributed main role in his exile to L. Trotsky and G. Zinoviev, in fact, the principles, organization and management of the expulsion belonged to V. Lenin, who, in a secret letter to F. Dzerzhinsky dated May 19, 1922, set specific repressive tasks for the GPU against the opposition intelligentsia: “i.e. Dzerzhinsky! On the question of the expulsion abroad of writers and professors who help the counter-revolution. All this needs to be prepared more carefully.<…>Oblige members of the Politburo to devote 2-3 hours a week to viewing a number of publications and books.<…>Collect systematic information about political experience, work and literary activity professors and writers.

Entrust all this to a smart, educated and careful person in the GPU.<…>This matter must be arranged in such a way that these “military spies” are caught and captured constantly and systematically and sent abroad.

Please show this secretly, without duplicating it, to members Politburo, with return to you and me» .

Having received a rebuke from a powerful member of the Politburo of the ruling party, who accused the writer of being “counter-revolutionary,” Prishvin realized that the iron hand of power, which “sadically” wanted to take over literature, was ready to touch him: “The passport, in any case, was given, and then it finally became clear to me with extraordinary clarity that<…>In Russia, with my limited circle of observations, I will never write a legal thing, because I only see the suffering of poor people and even now - the triumph of the rich and powerful, that under the yoke I will never find in my soul a point of view from which our revolution, our suffering will seem like a link in the chain of events that are regenerating the world.” Other facts also speak about Prishvin’s ideological incompatibility with the new government. Literally at the same time, on September 19, 1922, Trotsky published in Pravda an openly mocking feuilleton entitled “Mysticism and canonization of Rozanov,” in which he attacked him with direct abuse, cheekily calling the writer “brilliant” only in quotation marks . Prishvin, apparently directly responding to Trotsky’s newspaper attacks, already on September 25 wrote in his autobiography, requested for publication by the editor of one of the émigré Russian magazines in Germany, that he considers Rozanov not just a great, but a “genius writer.” The editor of the Berlin magazine “New Russian Book” A. Yashchenko approached Prishvin with such a request to write an article or story, accompanied by an autobiography, passing this request through the writer I. Sokolov-Mikitov, who returned from emigration in August 1922.

History itself has already stated that Prishvin, and not one of the main leaders of the October Revolution, was right in his assessment of Rozanov. However, the real irony of fate was not only that the Bolshevik government, in the person of Trotsky, who banned the publication of “The Worldly Cup”, itself forever wrote a shameful assessment of its ideology in the Diary of History, but also that Trotsky himself soon became a “counter-revolutionary”, one acquaintance with which or mention in a positive context inevitably entailed repression. And Prishvin himself could soon turn out to be an “enemy of the people” along with Trotsky simply because, conveying the spirit of the revolutionary times and reflecting on the religious-sectarian essence of Bolshevism, he told in “The Worldly Cup” how the Bolshevik leaders prayerfully hung up in their departments and in the offices there were portraits of revolutionary leaders and they sat surrounded by new “...gods: Lenin, Trotsky and everyone here on postcards,” and every Soviet official “prays to them, despising those around them.” Therefore, Trotsky’s ban on publishing the story unexpectedly turned out to be saving for the writer, and, instead of the inevitable repressions of the 1930s, he escaped with only attacks from Rappov’s criticism precisely because “such phenomena as war and revolution passed, in essence, past Prishvin, touching his creativity is only a side: he failed to give a generalized artistic knowledge of them.”

For Prishvin, this was already the second case of fate’s favor during the years of revolutionary hard times. As you know, in October 1917, the writer was in the thick of the Petrograd events as a member of the editorial board of the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary newspaper “The Will of the People,” in which he actively published from the autumn of 1917 to the spring of 1918, because he believed that for that time it was “the most innocent organ and pure from the seeking of “demons,” by which he meant members of the Leninist party.

To understand the worldview views of a writer in that period, his moral positions and assessments of reality events are extremely important, since the most reliable is, first of all, the knowledge that arises on the basis of the understandability and proximity of the moral world of the individual, since it is as a result of research moral tradition understanding comes. “What is sanctified by tradition and custom has an anonymous authority,” Gadamer noted, “and our entire historical finite existence is determined by the constant dominance of what is inherited from our ancestors - and not just understood on reasonable grounds - over our actions and deeds. All education is based on this.<…>Morals and ethical principles exist to a large extent due to customs and tradition. They are adopted in a free act, but are by no means created and are not justified in their significance by free understanding. Rather, it is precisely the basis of their significance that we call tradition.”

Evidence of the ethical side of Prishvin’s worldview is the articles published in the Petrograd newspaper “Will of the People”, in which everything that is dark, base and unnatural for the Russian revolution: diabolism and devilry - he associated precisely with Bolshevism, imposing on the people the Marxist ideas of class struggle and socialism that were disastrous for Russia. . For example, the very title of the essay about Lenin “Killer!”, published in “The Will of the People” on October 31, 1917, not only spoke for itself, but most importantly - in addition to the moral characteristics of the leader of the Bolshevik party “Killer” and “Thief” - The essay covered two key moments of the coup that had just taken place. Firstly, by citing many negative assessments of different classes, he destroyed the stereotype of supposedly popular support for the revolution. Secondly, it revealed the intellectual-noble, elite nature of the Bolshevik takeover state power as an adventure for which Lenin will be judged by the Constituent Assembly elected by the people, although contemptuously called by the “philistine” leader, but, nevertheless, the writer emphasizes, “his philistine will punish him.” We will find a direct reference to the “punishment of Lenin” mentioned in this article by the people themselves in the “Worldly Cup” in the episode where “the guard of the colony, nicknamed Lenin", for rural townsfolk looks like "really Lenin, only as if punished in the next world and yet unrepentant.”

Prishvin himself testifies to the attitude of Bolshevism in 1917 towards the opposition Socialist Revolutionary newspaper: “October 30.<…>The editorial office said today that one woman was killed because she was selling “The Will of the People,” that the newspaper was taken away and burned on Nevsky.” Moreover, the writer himself, together with the editors of “Will of the People,” was arrested by the Bolsheviks and was in prison from January 2 to January 17, 1918. “We are hostages,” reads the entry in Prishvin’s Diary. “If they kill Lenin, then they will kill us right away.” There is no doubt that Prishvin’s anti-Bolshevik position not only expressed his worldview, but was also evidence of personal civic courage in the conditions of the officially proclaimed “fight against counter-revolution.” After all, by adopting the “Decree on the Court” on November 22, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars abolished all previously existing laws, institutions of the court and the prosecutor's office. In return, extrajudicial bodies of the proletarian dictatorship were established - workers' and peasants' "revolutionary tribunals", which became the prototype of the soon-to-be created punitive Cheka, "Special Meetings", "Military Tribunals" and "Troikas", in which envoys of the ruling party were in charge [see: 6, 124-126].

What saved the artist from further persecution was, most likely, the eternal slowness characteristic of the Russian bureaucracy, which intensified even more in troubled times. He wrote about such general confusion in a newspaper article on January 27, 1918: “And so now everyone, for example, will arrest you in the office or in the editorial office, but you will be taken to an apartment, live in peace, they will not touch you.” However, in April 1918, the writer decides to leave Petrograd and for four years lives the life of a modest provincial intellectual. Later in the Diary, Prishvin will mention that he “fled from the arrest of the Bolsheviks,” and this slip of the tongue indicates his understanding of the real danger of not only a new arrest, but also death, if not as a counter-revolutionary, then as a hostage - without trial.

However, even four years later, the question of the writer’s political unreliability again comes up as soon as Prishvin reappears in the capital’s literary circles. “Some Ustinov wrote an article in Izvestia that little white Prishvin receives rations, but proletarian poets are excluded, and also that various Prishvins who did not have time to change their “milestones” ... - notes Mikhail Mikhailovich in his Diary on September 8, 1922. - These are probably responses to reading a new story. To write about a writer in the newspaper “Bely” means to denounce him, put him under supervision and even exile...” Fortunately, this public denunciation had no consequences, although it was precisely during these months of arrests of the opposition intelligentsia this situation for Prishvin was fraught with the fact that he could well end up among the forced passengers of the “philosophical” ship, especially since Trotsky, one of the most influential leaders of Bolshevism, had already recognized his work on the October Revolution as hostile to Soviet power.

The writer understood perfectly well that the division of society into social groups and layers determines not only differences in lifestyle and everyday life, but also the nature of work, level of education and culture, religious and philosophical and ideological guidelines. According to the artist, it was the intelligentsia, embodying the holistic self-awareness of the era, that simply had to use the entire palette, the entire diversity of the spectrum of philosophical and aesthetic ideas in their work in order to adequately and comprehensively comprehend and reflect the complexity and inconsistency of real life. Therefore, Prishvin considered unacceptable vulgarization, a primitive simplification of human consciousness and culture, the attempts of Bolshevik ideology to reduce the entire spectrum of ideological wealth of society exclusively to the Marxist version of materialism, proclaiming it “the only true one” and persecuting all other ideological views as seditious.

The realization that the course towards the destruction of the entire previous culture of the Russian people is the purposeful policy of the Bolshevik Party appears in the writer in the very first days of the October Revolution. Already on November 7, 1917, “The Will of the People” published Prishvin’s article “Kiss God’s Ponytail,” expressing his indignation at the actions of the Bolsheviks, who not only shot down the Kremlin Assumption Cathedral - this truly living shrine of the Russian people, but also declared the insignificance of the values ​​of religion for the cause revolution. From this fact of inaccessibility to “the little Bolsheviks, a great, incomprehensible shrine,” which they casually exchange for “a black creature with horns and a tail,” Prishvin concludes that an even worse “new autocracy” has reigned in the country, because the very thoughtless cruelty of the attitude towards testifies to the people of Lenin’s party that “we have the old absolute power, with the only difference that the highest bearer of it throughout Rus' is despised and hated much more than the tsar, we again have a democratic intelligentsia, divorced from popular understanding and support, and a prison , and plots, and bribes, everything was the same in all the smallest details and in a new terrifying appearance.”

To understand the moral atmosphere that reigned in society in the first days and weeks after the coup, ideological assessments of the events taking place by the revolutionaries themselves are also indicative. So, on November 3, 1917, the newspaper “ New life"under the heading "Resignation of A.V. Lunacharsky" published a letter from the People's Commissar of Education, in which Lunacharsky stated that, having learned about the bombing of the Kremlin, about the destruction of St. Basil's and Assumption Cathedrals, he admits his powerlessness and decides to leave the Council of People's Commissars. In response to Lunacharsky’s demarche on November 7, there followed an odious article by the Kremlin military commandant, Yem. Yaroslavsky “You feel sorry for stones, but don’t feel sorry for people”, published in the organ of the MK RSDLP (b) “Social Democrat”. Yaroslavsky argued that the artillery shelling was justified, since it was carried out against the cadets entrenched in the Kremlin, and in relation to Lunacharsky he disparagingly stated: “We know the price of such people: they leave us every time when strength is especially needed.<…>They would like to see the revolution dressed in light vestments, they would like to carry it out with gloves, without getting their well-groomed hands dirty.”

But an even more odious response to Lunacharsky’s protest against the bombing of the Kremlin cathedrals was V. Kirillov’s famous poem “We,” in which the proletkult poet declared his readiness to completely destroy all previous culture for the sake of the revolution:

We are in the grip of a rebellious, passionate intoxication,

Let them say: “You are the executioners of beauty!”

In the name of our Tomorrow, we will burn Raphael,

Let's destroy museums, trample flowers of art.

Separating himself from the Marxist revolutionary-socialist intelligentsia was fundamentally important for the writer, who expressed many bitter words about it. “But the Russian intellectuals, Lenin, Chernov, and Kerensky, are themselves deceived by someone and clearly do not know their people and also do not know what they are doing. Who deceived them: the leaders of the proletariat, Karl Marx, Bebel. But someone else probably deceived them. Where is the main deceiver: Abaddon, the prince of darkness?” Prishvin poses a fundamental question and answers himself: the one who “stepped over the sense of community of body, nature, earth and killed is guilty - a criminal, Cain. We can count on our fingers all of our primitive people who will follow Lenin and begin making denunciations about those hiding reserves.” This cause of Cain, the cause of the destruction of the universe, the reduction of society to the barbaric stage of murderous general enmity, according to Prishvin, is carried out by Bolshevism with its Marxist ideology of primitive equality established by violence. And only with the help of biblical images, the artist believes, can the essence of the revolutionary apocalyptic time be expressed.

In the Diary and in the “Worldly Cup” there are many dozens and even hundreds of references to Old Testament and New Testament plots and images, which allows us to talk about religious views as one of the most important aspects of the writer’s worldview, assessing the world from the standpoint of the eternal truths of Christianity. It is no coincidence that Prishvin compares the seizure of state power in Russia by the Bolsheviks with the accession to the throne of the new Abaddon: “December 21.<…>The Russian people destroyed their color, abandoned their cross and swore allegiance to the prince of darkness Abaddon.” The apocalyptic “angel of the abyss” Abaddon, who reigned on the Russian throne, becomes for him one of the tragic symbols of Russia’s fall into the revolutionary abyss. “For the twelfth day now, Abaddon has been sitting on the throne,” “The day has passed, the thirteenth day of Abaddon, sitting on the throne,” the writer uses this biblical image to count the days of the Russian catastrophe. The author subsequently uses the Old Testament image of the prince of darkness Abaddon in “The Chalice of the World” as a way of artistic conveying tragedy October revolution for Russian history, interpreting the Bolsheviks’ rise to power as the reign of the “angel of the abyss.”

Biblical images allow Prishvin to emphasize the dramatic break in the connection between the times of Russian history, when during the revolution, people faced the tragic question of their daily bread as a question of the very possibility of further existence. But back in the summer of 1917, Prishvin foresaw that the small patchwork of peasant plots, the result of the revolutionary “black redistribution,” would inevitably destroy the culture of agriculture and famine would become inevitable. It is not surprising that already in January 1918, hunger rallies of workers and soldiers began in Petrograd, and then throughout the country. And the writer himself knew firsthand what hunger was: “In the evening, probably from hunger, my head suddenly ached, I barely lay down - real hunger,” he noted in early March, and in May 1918, almost doomedly wrote: “We probably “We’ll die of starvation this winter.” And although Prishvin himself managed to survive, in December 1919 his sister Lydia died from hunger and disease.

Hoping to survive the famine and revolutionary turmoil in his native places, the writer in April 1918 left Petrograd, as it seemed to him temporarily, “for sowing,” to a small estate inherited from his mother near Yelets, from where he sent notes to the Moscow newspapers “Early Morning” and “Life” is about a destructive revolutionary tornado sweeping across Russian soil. With the same courage and truthfulness as in the Petrograd “Will of the People,” he writes articles about the revolutionary chaos of the “black redistribution” of land that has occurred in the black soil hinterland, which boils down to the anarchic confiscation of all “surplus” land and the robbery of estates. “It’s all over: my farm is dissolving into the general structure of the primitive economy.<…>Now there are no estates, no purchased or rented land. Now everyone is equal and everyone is poor,” says the artist about the fate of his own estate. But even if all the possessions of landowners and farmers are divided according to living souls, as the hereditary farmer Prishvin concluded, then the peasants “will only get the eight-acre land, and all our agriculture will collapse.” With the plunder of estates as traditional “bread factories,” he warned in his correspondent articles, the state would come to a complete breakdown of agricultural culture, “return agriculture in Russia to the times of deep antiquity,” which inevitably threatens general famine.

In Russia, a predominantly peasant country, the main issue of the revolution was the question of land, and this was clearly understood by Prishvin, who was close to the people by birth, who from childhood, without arrogance, communicated with the peasants of the courtyard and, even acutely aware of his alien position among the peasants, always realized true role villages as a stronghold of statehood. Therefore, the writer perceived the essence of what was happening in the country as a lawless “black redistribution.” His artistic and allegorical explanation of the true meaning of the revolutionary redistribution of land conceived by the Bolsheviks is brilliant: “A fish is caught with a worm, a bird with grain, a wolf with meat, a bear with honey, and a peasant is caught with land. Just think - a multimillion-dollar man, a bear, could not figure it out, but some Trotsky, who looked like a pharmacist, knew in advance that giving land to a peasant meant tying him up.” But the real tragedy was that the “bloodless” revolution of 1917 brought infinitely more harm to the village than the bloody and fiery revolution of 1905, because the worst thing happened: “The peasants divided the land of economic units according to living souls.” As a result, the writer concludes, famine became inevitable, since the small patchwork of peasant plots and socialism as a division of “three fathoms per capita” destroyed the culture of agriculture.

As you know, history often repeats itself: the first time - as a tragedy, the second time - as a farce... In April 1918, Prishvin seemed to be talking about the destruction of the culture of agriculture in the post-Soviet era of the late twentieth century, when a sharp decline in agricultural production began due to the destruction of the system Soviet collective farms, which, like the farms of the landowners at the beginning of the century, were thoughtlessly ruined by splitting the land into small shares and farm plots. The result is food dependence on food imports, for the purchase of which national property and natural resources were sold off. “The culture of our agriculture was based on savings, and allotments only supported the worker - it was like payment in kind. Now all culture has been destroyed, farmers have been brought into the framework of a universal three-field striped pattern, farmers, tenants - all are deprived of theoretical training - as if Prishvin is writing these days about the illusions of the “farmer path of Russia”. -<…>The disruption of agriculture created the conditions for the invasion of capitalists. Now a foreign entrepreneur will encounter in Russia a huge mass of cheap labor, pitiful people sitting on beggarly plots.”

“The Worldly Cup,” a largely documentary story by the author about post-October reality, contains a number of scenes indicating that the entire population, be it workers, peasants or intelligentsia, experienced hunger at that time. The only exceptions were the commissars who collected taxes and taxes from the peasantry and those who knew how to attach themselves to power or were engaged in thieves and bandits. At the same time, although Prishvin’s story contains many everyday details of the revolutionary era, as a classical work of art it does not belong only to the past, but, overcoming the historical distance, is relevant for our time, since it has a timeless semantic present, those moral positions that will be equally valuable for all subsequent generations. Isn’t the writer thinking about our history at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries, talking about criminal methods of governing the country, theft and bribery, the omnipotence of officials, the permanent deception of the population and the eternal problem of drunkenness? Are our days not, in some cases, a kind of historical footnote to the relevance of a narrative almost a century ago? After all, the main point of people’s attitude towards the past, “the attitude that we constantly update, is not at all distancing from what has been historically transmitted and not freedom from it,” Gadamer rightly notes. - Rather, we are always within the legend<…>it is always and immediately something of our own for us, an example or a warning, self-recognition.”

“The Worldly Cup” by Prishvin is a tale of disastrousness for the Russian people and culture of the new power that has reigned, the image of whose representatives is disgusting to the artist: these are embittered revolutionaries-losers, and former criminals, and deserters. The very principles of government that Bolshevism instilled are also indicative: violence, theft, bribery, deception and nepotism. Already from the first pages of the story from the conversation of the men who came to the “indemnity”, as the people called the Tax Collection Commission located in the former manor’s estate, it becomes clear that the newly appointed commissioner is “one of our own, a rogue like us,” and even though the previous one for bribery “was dared, but he was lying in the mail, the time will come, they will forget, he will show up. - He’ll take a rest!” .

This simple homespun truth that the Bolsheviks indulged “their” scoundrels was well known to the peasants. That is why they perceive the power of the Soviets as an alien power, which cannot be deceived, and when handing over the indemnity, “everyone has a stone in the tow, a lot of sand in the flour, a sheep skin and bones, a plague chicken, just to hand over, and not If you give up and get caught, then the conversation will be short.

Eat! “- the man hastens to answer,” realizing in mid-sentence that the commissar was talking about moonshine, popularly called “ liquid bread"and since the revolution, a bribe has become much more common than money. However, the mention of moonshine as a means of universal payment for services or a form of expression of “gratitude” by the writer does not reduce to a banal statement of the fact of the national peculiarity of Russian common life. Prishvin's discourse is aimed at philosophical analysis, revealing behind the superficial everyday phenomenon both the economic background and the dynamics of the spread of this strong drink, depending on the political strength and strength of state power. This indicates that the semantic field of the text contains hidden interpretative meanings that become clear only when considered in context diary entries the author as a historical document reflecting the realities of human existence in the period the story is about.

The fact that in Rus', from time immemorial, vodka and moonshine for the people have been a universal-traditional exchange value, has been written and rewritten many times by Russian writers. But only Prishvin astutely noticed a pattern specific to Russia of a progressive decline in the authority of the authorities as the population transitioned from consuming vodka to moonshine. Thus, at the beginning of the First World War, in the essay “Delighted Russia” (1914), he writes how joyfully the people greeted the ban on state-owned vodka, which ended that corrupting society “the history of taverns, from which came all sorts of rebellious, predatory desires, right down to the last current hooligans.” Even desperate and lost drunkards began to return to human form in two weeks without drinking, and Prishvin idyllically and enthusiastically pictures: “A crowd of people asks me in harsh words to write a petition to the Emperor to close the breech for the entire duration of the war” and patriotically expresses his readiness to lose compensate income with donations of “five rubles per head instead of wine. And when the money runs out, again in fives and more.

Until we kill the enemy..."

But, of course, instead of consuming state-owned vodka, the people soon began to distill moonshine, and this process began to intensify more and more as state anarchy grew: “When a landowner, during haymaking or harvesting grain with his workers, cannot cope and you need to bow to the peasants, and they become masters for a short time, and the landowner seems to lose his power, then this is how the peasant behaves, it seems that the current position of the government is in the power of various councils of workers, soldiers, farm laborers: they are already breaking down, they are already being bullied: we trust insofar as and so on. There may be vodka, but there is no vodka, and the authorities are powerless.

Denatured alcohol, they say, if you give it, we’ll do it.

But the landowner doesn’t even have methylated spirits. This meth power is what the government doesn’t have,” writes Prishvin in the summer of 1917 about the inability of the government to rule the people without vodka. So, for a short time, ordinary men themselves became masters and, under the influence of socialist propaganda of the Bolsheviks, began to destroy the old state, creating the appearance of local power - village committees and peasant councils, the goal of which was the seizure and anarchic redistribution of the landowners' land. The rampant revolutionary lawlessness was largely facilitated by the very atmosphere of continuous drunkenness: “August 7<…>In Morevo, all the rye was converted into moonshine and they even come to us to borrow money,” says the writer in his Diary of 1917 about the reason for the constant fights with shooting in the village near Yelets, adjacent to his estate. In another place, a drunken wedding took the princely winery guarded by the Red Army soldiers by storm, and from the free booze “our whole village lies in the mud, in the swamp, like a beaten army<…>The Orthodox people are dead, they have eaten too much wine, they are lying and stinking in the swamp.”

Therefore, it is quite natural that already in mid-September 1917, as Prishvin notes in one of his essays, moonshine gained unprecedented popularity, thanks to the extremely depressed spiritual state of the majority of peasants, caused both by the collapse of hopes of getting enough land during the spontaneous redistribution, and by for galloping inflation on all goods. In addition, “the frequent change of government has confused the soul of the peasant.” But the main reasons that people started drinking again, according to Prishvin, were the weakness of the economy and state policy. After all, distilling commercial grain into moonshine, if sold locally in the village, was 8 times more profitable, and in the city it was already 20 times more profitable, while the revolutionary village police, recruited from the same men, turned out to be completely powerless against the moonshiners. But the moonshine-stupefied men had no idea that, having destroyed the old monarchy and punished the masters, they themselves would be severely punished: the Bolsheviks would deprive the peasants of both land and legitimate power. In the meantime, in the summer of 1917, many imagined in a drunken stupor that the master’s “estate was paradise. The Bolsheviks are calling you to heaven." And deceived by the socialist dream of land, freedom and peace for all peoples, the men went to plunder. True, there was, of course, not enough land and lordly goods for everyone, and from this arose even greater anger both at the masters and at the more efficient comrades who managed to profit during the pogrom of the landowners' estates.

Having become the rulers of Russia, the Marxist revolutionaries began to remake society and the people by transforming the individual into a unit of the commune. However, Prishvin considers the task of the Bolshevik Party to liberate people from all types of exploitation through the revolutionary reorganization of the world by means of atheization, Sovietization or communization of society to be impossible. Comparing the political regime of the monarchy and Bolshevism, he notes that if in tsarist times the basis of the economic structure was competition and individualism, and the destruction of man as an individual was a matter of nature or misfortune, then “for the Reds, the goal is the collective, and the destruction of the individual is carried out consciously.<…>Of course, even during the monarchy, theft was great, but it was not inevitable (the development of self-government and personal freedom is completely compatible with the monarchy), and the suppression of the individual that we had was an imperfection of the mechanism of that time.”

The true wealth of society and the state, the writer is convinced, lies in the freedom of citizens, which is guaranteed by the presence of their property. Therefore, by destroying private property as the basis of human economic independence, communism gives rise to the unprecedented dominance of the bureaucracy, which arrogates to itself the right to distribute all the benefits of life, based on its ideas of justice: “Their officials turned out to be much worse than the tsarist ones,” states Prishvin, “they climbed to power, like flies to honey, thieves, all sorts of losers, offended by the teacher who kicked them out of the gymnasium, conscious thieves-murderers and proud geniuses, expelled from the 3rd grade of the city school.” As a result, the arbiter of people's destinies turned out to be a Bolshevik official, guided by the Marxist idea of ​​class struggle, which inevitably led to civil war.

In “The Worldly Cup,” the author displays a whole gallery of images of official bureaucrats: this is Commissar Persyuk, half-mad from drunkenness (“you drop a bottle at once and well, read Marx”), and former deacon Yegor Ivanovich, from the height of his position as head of the Food Committee, refuses to rural teachers a ration of sauerkraut , and the boys from the Department of Education and Science, who fundamentally do not want to take into account the interests and personality of the teacher. The bureaucracy of the Soviet official is the brainless desire of the “social louse” to rule over the voiceless population. “Lenin’s revolutionary spirit is akin to the bureaucratic spirit: both are divorced from life.<…>Both the bureaucrats and the Leninist revolution are missing something<…>the personality is missed." At the same time, the writer’s inherent philosophical thinking does not allow him to merely reject reality. Prishvin is characterized by a sense of personal involvement in what is happening in Russia: “This is all our disease, nothing secret that would not become obvious,” he writes in 1918 at the height of the civil war. -<…>Communists are images and likenesses of our own past everyday spirit."

The artist is convinced that in the Russian soul, and therefore in himself, there is a natural kindness: “What saves me is the ability of my soul to expand: suddenly it expands and I love everything and do not remember my enemies,” he notes in his Diary on December 26, 1920 . It is this quality that is inherent in the hero of the story, Alpatov, who realizes that the primitive psychology of bitterness and hostility towards offenders can only be overcome by forgiveness and love. But forgiveness does not mean the loss of the ideological foundations of the individual. The writer himself never compromises with the authorities, his task is to develop the only active life position possible in his conditions, and he is far from passively contemplating the disasters and suffering of the people. That’s why he writes “The Worldly Cup,” which today is perceived by the reader not only as an artistic testimony of an eyewitness to revolutionary events, but also as a historical lesson that initiates analogies with the new socio-economic turn of Russia and the new troubled times, which came again at the end of the long-suffering twentieth century. However, in the story, which has been delayed for many decades, many specific details of the revolutionary time are revealed that require explanation, which is what this article is devoted to.

LITERATURE

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2. Borev Yu. Aesthetics of Trotsky // Trotsky L.D. Literature and revolution. Published according to ed. 1923. M.: Politizdat, 1991. P. 3-20.

3. Vygotsky L. S.. Development of higher mental functions. M.: Giza, 1960. 321 p.

4. Gadamer H. -G. Truth and method: Fundamentals of philosophical hermeneutics. M.: Progress, 1988. 704 p.

5. Grigoriev M. Flight to the Berendey kingdom: About the work of Prishvin // On the literary post. 1930. No. 8. P. 48-61.

6. Decrees of Soviet power. October 25, 1917 - March 16, 1918. M.: GIPL, 1957. T. 1. 626 p.

7. Lenin V. I. F.E. Dzerzhinsky // Complete. collection Op. M.: Politizdat, 1965. T. 54. pp. 265-266.

8. Podoksenov A. M. G.V. Plekhanov in the worldview and creativity of M.M. Prishvina // Russian literature. 2007. No. 1. P. 73-86.

9. Podoksenov A. M. Russian revolt. Version by Mikhail Prishvin // Man. 2012. No. 4. P. 120-133.

10. Podoksenov A. M.Mikhail Prishvin and Vasily Rozanov. Student and teacher from Yelets gymnasium // Kostromsky Bulletin state university them. ON THE. Nekrasova. Series “Humanities”: Entelechy. 2013. T. 19. No. 27.

11. Prishvin M. M. Diaries. 1914-1917. M.: Moscow worker, 1991. 432 p.

12. Prishvin M. M. Diaries. 1918-1919. M.: Moscow worker, 1994. 383 p.

13. Prishvin M. M. Diaries. 1920-1922. M.: Moscow worker, 1995. 334 p.

14. Prishvin M. M. Worldly cup. M.: Life and Thought, 2001. P. 73-145.

15. Prishvin M. M. Bazaar. Play for reading aloud // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2004. pp. 339-357.

16. Prishvin M. M. The Second Adam (Early morning. 1918. No. 88. May 18) // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2004. pp. 206-207.

17. Prishvin M. M. Red Hill (Early morning. 1918. No. 119. June 29) // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg Rostock, 2004. pp. 222-223.

18. Prishvin M. M. Peasant Paradise (Early morning. 1918. No. 79. May 4) // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2004. pp. 195-198.

19. Prishvin M. M. On sowing (Early morning. 1918. No. 83. May 12) // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2004. pp. 198-200.

20. Prishvin M. M. Delighted Russia (Russian Gazette. 1914. No. 187. August 15) // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2004. pp. 461-462.

21. Prishvin M. M. Kiss the little lady's ponytail! (The will of the people. 1917. No. 165. November 7) // Prishvin M.M. Color and cross. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2004. pp. 109-111.

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26. Trotsky L. D. Literature and revolution. Published according to ed. 1923. M.: Politizdat, 1991. 400 p.

Worldly Cup

It happened that during a flight, or in pursuit of his girlfriend, a swamp friend with a long beak would fly towards me; flies in, makes a circle over the table and returns to Chistik - our glorious moss swamp, the mother of the great Russian river.

This swamp is not the only one that feeds the high-water river, but all the mosses that feed it are called guillemots.

Our guillemot was once the bottom of a lake, and its shores, hilly, sandy, with tall pine trees, have retained their Primordial appearance, so it seems that there will be water behind the pine trees, you go - and no! There are lush thickets for half a mile, in the bushes there are hummocks as high as a man’s chest; if you fall, you will run into the stakes of stunted birch trees. Here you can walk along the cranberry paths, made by the common forces of cranberry women, wolves, foxes, hares; it happens that Misha himself will pass, everyone follows the path and escapes in the thickets. How do you make your way out of these thickets into the guillemot - a clean place, fertile, in the spring every hummock is a bouquet of flowers, in the summer after the mosquito dries out, you will find yourself a hummock the size of a table, and in it it’s like going to bed, you just move your hands, raking cranberries, blueberries into your mouth , lingonberries - godfather to the king!

Such a guillemot should be made a reserve, and the ax and fire should not touch the forests surrounding the swamp - the source, the mother of the glorious waterway from the Varangians to the Greeks, otherwise the river will dry up and the country will turn into a desert.

We had to endure a lot of grief for the forests, beauty and pride of our region. You used to wander through these forests - what a mighty silence, what a rich desert! It’s so good, but it’s scary to think that in a hundred - a hundred! - within a hundred years these silent riches of the Russian land will be revealed, there will be rails, pipes, fences, farms everywhere - fear for a hundred years!

And what happened (...), the forests were so distorted, littered with branches, tops, that the grass and flowers did not grow, and it became impossible to go for mushrooms, for berries, the lakes were empty, all the fish were caught and drowned out by soldiers with bombs, birds somewhere scattered, or were they eaten by foxes? Yes, only predators, foxes, wolves, hawks filled all the clearings littered with branches. Forest, earth, water - the entire earthly robe is trampled into the mud, and only the sky, common to everyone and inaccessible, still shines above this muck.

Will there be a Last Judgment?

For this Judgment, I prepared one excuse for myself, that I sacredly kept the garments of the earth.

And they are all trampled.

How can I now justify my existence?

In difficult moments, ask yourself: “What do I want?” - and you answer: “I want real tea with sugar.”

“Aren’t you, my friend, afraid that in your mighty desert in a hundred years tea with sugar and coffee with cream will be offered at every turn?”

- Yes, I was afraid, I thought about external nature from children's fairy tales, now I think that nature remains powerful only within us, in the fight against personal goals, but what we usually call nature - forests, lakes, rivers, all this weakly, like a child, and begs a kind man for protection from the man-beast.

I think that we have conquered the madness of animals and made them domestic, or harmless, without noticing that their insane will passed into man, was preserved, accumulated in him for a long time, and that’s why (...) everyone rushed to destroy forests - this is not people, this crazy beast has been released.

Or is that not true? But it is true that Russia was like a desert with oases; The oases were cut down, the springs dried up, and the desert became impassable.

Or is it just a feeling of the past? But what kind of past do we have? The Russian people are unchanged in their everyday life; the history of power over the Russian people and wars? The vast majority of the Russian people do not care at all about the authorities and about who they are fighting with; the history of the suffering of a conscious personality, or is this the history of Russia? Yes, this exists, but when will such a terrible story finally end, and the Crucified One himself asked to pass this cup, and he even wanted to stay.

If only my distant beloved could hear in words the power of my love! I shout, “Walk in the light!” - and the word echoes back to me: “Lie in the dark!” But I know that she exists, beautiful, and I know more, I am the chosen one of her heart and her soul is always with me - why am I sad, isn’t that enough? Few! I am a living person and I want to live with her, to see her with simple eyes. And then she cheats on me, gives her pure soul to me, and her body to another, not loving him, despising him, and this harlot, a slave with a holy soul, is my homeland. Why can I talk about my homeland, and if I firmly knew that this was especially necessary, I could sing about it, like Solomon about his lily, but I can’t say anything to her, my address to her is silence and counting the past years?

I stand mute with a cigarette, but still I pray at this hour of the morning, I don’t know how or to whom, I open the window and hear: in the impregnable guillemot the black grouse are still muttering, the crane is calling to the sun, and even here, on the lake, now before our eyes, catfish moved and launched a wave like a ship.

I stand dumb and only then write down:

“On the coming day, Lord, enlighten our past and preserve in the new everything that was good before, our protected forests, the sources of mighty rivers, preserve the birds, multiply the fish, return all the animals to the forests and free our souls from them.” .

Mikhail Prishvin

Worldly Cup

It happened that during a flight, or in pursuit of his girlfriend, a swamp friend with a long beak would fly towards me; will fly in, make a circle over the table and return to Chistik - our glorious moss swamp, the mother of the great Russian river.

This swamp is not the only one that feeds the high-water river, but all the mosses that feed it are called guillemots.

Our guillemot was once the bottom of a lake, and its shores, hilly, sandy, with tall pine trees, have retained their Primordial appearance, so it seems that there will be water behind the pine trees, you go - and no! There are lush thickets for half a mile, in the bushes there are hummocks as high as a man’s chest; if you fall, you will run into the stakes of stunted birch trees. Here you can walk along the cranberry paths, made by the common forces of cranberry women, wolves, foxes, hares; it happens that Misha himself will pass, everyone follows the path and escapes in the thickets. How do you make your way out of these thickets into the guillemot - a clean place, fertile, in the spring every hummock is a bouquet of flowers, in the summer after the mosquito dries out, you will find yourself a hummock the size of a table, and in it it’s like going to bed, you just move your hands, raking cranberries, blueberries into your mouth , lingonberries - godfather to the king!

Such a guillemot should be made a reserve, and the ax and fire should not touch the forests surrounding the swamp - the source, the mother of the glorious waterway from the Varangians to the Greeks, otherwise the river will dry up and the country will turn into a desert.

We had to endure a lot of grief for the forests, beauty and pride of our region. You used to wander through these forests - what a mighty silence, what a rich desert! It’s so good, but it’s scary to think that in a hundred - a hundred! - within a hundred years these silent riches of the Russian land will be revealed, there will be rails, pipes, fences, farms everywhere - fear for a hundred years!

And what happened (...), the forests were so distorted, littered with branches, tops, that the grass and flowers did not grow, and it became impossible to go for mushrooms, for berries, the lakes were empty, all the fish were caught and drowned out by soldiers with bombs, birds somewhere scattered, or were they eaten by foxes? Yes, only predators, foxes, wolves, hawks filled all the clearings littered with branches. Forest, earth, water - the entire earthly robe is trampled into the mud, and only the sky, common to everyone and inaccessible, still shines above this muck.

Will there be a Last Judgment?

For this Judgment, I prepared one excuse for myself, that I sacredly kept the garments of the earth.

And they are all trampled.

How can I now justify my existence?

In difficult moments, ask yourself: “What do I want?” - and you answer: “I want real tea with sugar.”

“Aren’t you, my friend, afraid that in your mighty desert in a hundred years tea with sugar and coffee with cream will be offered at every turn?”

- Yes, I was afraid, I thought about external nature from children's fairy tales, now I think that nature remains powerful only within us, in the fight against personal goals, but what we usually call nature - forests, lakes, rivers, all this weakly, like a child, and begs a kind man for protection from the man-beast.

I think that we have conquered the madness of animals and made them domestic, or harmless, without noticing that their insane will passed into man, was preserved, accumulated in him until time, and that’s why (...) everyone rushed to destroy forests - this is not people, this crazy beast has been released.

Or is that not true? But it is true that Russia was like a desert with oases; The oases were cut down, the springs dried up, and the desert became impassable.

Or is it just a feeling of the past? But what kind of past do we have - the Russian people are unchanged in their everyday life; the history of power over the Russian people and wars? The vast majority of the Russian people do not care at all about the authorities and about who they are fighting with; the history of the suffering of a conscious personality, or is this the history of Russia? Yes, this exists, but when will such a terrible story finally end, and the Crucified One himself asked to pass this cup, and he even wanted to stay.

If only my distant beloved could hear in words the power of my love! I shout, “Walk in the light!” - and the word echoes back to me: “Lie in the dark!” But I know that she exists, beautiful, and I know more, I am the chosen one of her heart and her soul is always with me - why am I sad, isn’t that enough? Few! I am a living person and I want to live with her, to see her with simple eyes. And then she cheats on me, gives her pure soul to me, and her body to another, not loving him, despising him, and this harlot, a slave with a holy soul, is my homeland. Why can I talk about my homeland, and if I knew for sure that this is especially necessary, I could sing about it, like Solomon about his lily, but I can’t say anything to her, my address to her is silence and counting the past years?

I stand mute with a cigarette, but still I pray at this hour of the morning, I don’t know how or to whom, I open the window and hear: in the impregnable guillemot the black grouse are still muttering, the crane is calling to the sun, and even here, on the lake, now before our eyes, catfish moved and launched a wave like a ship.

I stand dumb and only then write down:

“On the coming day, Lord, enlighten our past and preserve in the new everything that was good before, our protected forests, the sources of mighty rivers, preserve the birds, multiply the fish, return all the animals to the forests and free our souls from them.” .

I EMPIRE PALACE

The palace of the owners of these vast wooded lands was recognized as a highly artistic monument of art and antiquity, and for some time it stood completely intact, only, of course, the linden trees in the park were gradually peeled off, glass, curtains, nails were dragged from the pavilions and greenhouses, into a large artificial lake the slope began to rot, the water began to recede, grasses appeared in shallow places, herons swooped in to peck at the fish. The eccentric was not in the mood for cold and hunger to nest in the palace and guard it, and they came up with the worst thing that could be done for protection: they settled a children's colony here below, and from this the settlement of the palace began. And so it began!

The colony quickly ruined the entire eastern part and obtained a mandate for the western part, and in its place a school appeared. The colony moves to the second floor, behind it is the school, the Kultkom begins performances and dances below, and also follows the school and moves up. In what form everything was left down here, it’s a shame to tell you, they didn’t even bother to sweep away the husks from the sunflowers, it’s a complete disgrace: there’s a white shoe without a heel lying around, a worn-out felt boot, and on the steps of the staircase, mushrooms are growing out of rubbish and green flies are flying - it’s terrible disgusting. They paid attention, cleaned them up, partitioned off the rooms with silk, set up different passages and doors and let in the “indemnity” - that’s what we called the Commission for the Collection of Taxes in Money and Products, Tseitlin’s forestry office, part of the state farm, an old woman with her master’s peacocks, and various other things nestled in here too. persons with mandates. Military and paramilitary soldiers were now darting along the stairs everywhere, looking for something, organizing who was strong - the rook, who missed - the crow, who sings well - the starling, and the sparrow was out of the birdhouse. With us it was the other way around: a crow chases a rook, a sparrow chases a starling. The five rooms on the second floor, however, were untouched, the door handles tied and sealed. They wouldn’t have looked, of course, at the ropes, or at the seal and locks, but it just didn’t come through and slipped from memory. On these rooms it was written: “MUSEUM OF MANOR LIFE” - what business is the life of a landowner in such a devastating time, but the word “Museum” was not touched, and the word “peacock” was also not touched - and two peacocks were not touched, moreover, for protection These peacocks, on full state farm rations, consist of Pavlinika, the master's nanny, an old woman, hostile to the Soviet regime with a century of her own life experience.

Early on, a peacock flies from a tall elm tree to the gate to greet the sun, yesterday the guard of the colony poured slop on his tail more than once and the boys spat on it - now it takes a long time to cleanse itself and finally, lifting its tail to the point of impossibility, it becomes all blue and the rainbow of its countless curls and holes towards the sun . The priest's son, Shkrab Vasily Semyonovich, goes down to his garden and recovers right there, under the blue pines, there is nothing to be done, there is nowhere in the whole house. Vasily Semyonovich is always surprised by the peacock, looking at it, smoking. Now Kolya Kudryash, the indemnity clerk, is recovering and approaches the peacock in a good mood.

- Ah ah ah!

- What's happened?

- Tail, tail, beauty! Do you know the origin of the bird, Vasily Semenych?

- Bird of paradise.

– Paradise, I understand, but what countries?

- From heaven, of course.

- There are such heavenly countries. A gloomy guard of the colony goes out carrying slops from morning to evening.

– They also give out grain! - he grumbles, walking past the peacock. “And they keep an old woman with such a bird.”

- Frenchman! - Pavlina answers and: - fallen, fallen, fallen! - calls him out of the way so that he doesn’t pour slop on his tail.

- Beauty!

- What is the benefit?

- Everything is good for you, guard!

The colony wakes up. The boss, the most evil maiden, barefoot, like a red-eyed bird of prey, flies like a slut down the corridor to the kitchen to divide bread, and all the hundred-footed children run, sit under the myrtles and laurels in the arboretum, in the Empire pavilion, in the greenhouses, in the English park under the elms - everywhere ! Everything around the tithe is dirty.

I decide to draw the attention of readers to a book that not only does not have high recognition, but is also not widely known, although it was written more than seventy years ago, in 1922. True, “The Worldly Cup” by Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (1873-1954) appeared in print in its complete form only in 1990, and there is reason to believe that after the time necessary for its in-depth development, this story will take its place among the books without which it is impossible to imagine Russian literature of the 20th century.

It would be useful to briefly talk about the long journey of “The Worldly Cup” to print. In the summer of 1922, Prishvin tried to publish it, and ultimately the manuscript went to the court of L. D. Trotsky himself, who actually occupied first place in the ideological hierarchy at that time (V. I. Lenin was out of work from May to October of this year - for severe illness). Trotsky’s verdict was as follows: “I recognize the thing’s great artistic merits, but from a political point of view it is entirely counter-revolutionary.”

“So he gave me a passport,” said Prishvin and wrote in his diary (September 3, 1922): “The passport... was given, and then it finally became clear to me with extraordinary clarity that the NEP is not a real force at all, and the Bolsheviks do not have any decadence... they will remain, despite all their seeming fantasticality, the only real force we have... A terrible question arises: is it not me who is dying?..”

What Prishvin saw after Trotsky’s verdict “with extraordinary clarity,” he was somehow aware of earlier. On August 24, an entry appears in the diary: “In Moscow and St. Petersburg, about 200 writers, professors, and engineers were arrested and sent abroad.” And then about the position of those who, on the contrary, are ready to cooperate with the authorities: “... all people's commissars are engaged in literature. Enormous funds are given for literature. The time of the sadistic (that is, as they say now, sadistic. - V.K.) coupling of power with literature..."

From all this it seems to follow that Prishvin was indeed a “counter-revolutionary.” But the problem is more complex. Yes, the writer met the October revolution with deliberate hostility. In 1917, he found himself closely associated with the right Socialist Revolutionaries, direct enemies of the Bolsheviks (although he did not belong to either the Socialist Revolutionary Party or any other party, considering such affiliation incompatible with the work of the artist). On January 2, 1918, Prishvin was even arrested along with the editors of the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary newspaper “Will of the People,” where he collaborated, and spent some time in a Bolshevik prison...

The “Socialist Revolutionary” label was retained long years. A quarter of a century later, it was proposed to award Prishvin, in connection with his seventieth birthday, the Order of the Badge of Honor (that is, the least “prestigious”), and, as M. B. Khrapchenko (in 1940 - Chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs under the Council of People's Commissars) later said, J.V. Stalin ordered to give Prishvin, “this, as he put it, old Socialist Revolutionary”, the Order of the Banner of Labor, so that there would be no talk that he was “underestimated” as a writer...

However, by 1922 Prishvin could not (contrary to Trotsky’s opinion) be considered a “counter-revolutionary” in the real meaning of the word. And not at all because he became a supporter of the revolution. To put it most briefly, the writer’s worldview was by that time higher or, rather, deeper than this very confrontation “revolutionary - counter-revolutionary.” Therefore, in particular, it is not so easy to comprehend and master his “Worldly Cup”; it is much easier to understand works with a very definite political orientation.

Prishvin himself wrote about his “Worldly Cup” on August 24, 1922, that is, even before the sentence passed by Trotsky: “I don’t want to publish it abroad, since in that situation it will be misunderstood, and the whole meaning of my stubborn, never-ending hard existence will disappear among the Russian people. In a word, an artistically truthful thing will end up in politics and counter-revolution... The Soviet government must have the courage to give existence to a chastely aesthetic story, even if it hurts the eyes.”

But the authorities lacked “courage.” When in the early 1970s, Prishvin’s widow (his invaluable associate and successor of his work), Valeria Dmitrievna, who bestowed her friendship on me, introduced me to the manuscript of “The Worldly Cup,” I was inflamed with the desire to see the story published. Soon preparations began for the publication of the most complete, 8-volume collected works of Mikhail Mikhailovich, and I was introduced to the editorial board. Under the conditions of that time, it was impossible to introduce into the “Goslit” collection of works a work that had never been published, and for this reason alone, a “dubious” work, and to resolve the issue we undertook a kind of adventure: everything that could appear as sedition was removed from the “Worldly Chalice”, and “remains” were published in the magazine “North” (1979, No. 8). In the collected works (volume 2 was published in 1982), the story was included as allegedly already published, although about two dozen phrases or phrases that could scare the censor had to be removed from the text.

Well, let’s say this place (the withdrawn text is given in italics): “A gloomy watchman comes out with slop, carrying water from morning to evening, nicknamed Lenin because when offended, he throws buckets and says: “I’m the same as Lenin.” The old Peacock woman hates him, and he hates her. She believes that this is really Lenin, only already, as it were, punished in the next world and yet unrepentant.”

Someone, without thinking, may even now see in these phrases the “counter-revolutionary” nature of the writer. However, before us are images of episodic characters in “The Worldly Cup”, for whose actions and opinions the author, so to speak, does not bear any responsibility (about Pavlinich in the story, in particular, it is reported that she is “a lordly nanny, an old woman, hostile to Soviet power for a century of her own her experience"). Phrases of this kind can be found, for example, in “The Naked Year” by Boris Pilnyak and “Armored Train 14-69” by Vsevolod Ivanov, published at the same time, in 1921-1922. Nevertheless, Trotsky, soon after the “verdict” of Prishvin, published in Pravda (October 3 and 5, 1922) his sensational article about “literary fellow travelers of the revolution,” in which, criticizing B. Pilnyak and Vs. Ivanova, at the same time, expressed obvious sympathy for them (and, of course, did not claim that their writings were “entirely counter-revolutionary”).

But such a core was embodied in the “Worldly Chalice” artistic meaning, which, as they say, was too tough for Trotsky, and he banned the story. It is possible that the far from stupid Lev Davidovich, among other things, sensed in The Worldly Cup an internal connection with the work of Vasily Rozanov, whom he hated, perhaps, more than anyone; On September 19, 1922 (that is, again at the same time), he published in Pravda a feuilleton filled with downright vulgar abuse entitled “Mysticism and the canonization of Rozanov.”

But we will talk about Rozanov later; Let us turn directly to the “Worldly Chalice.” This work - which is generally inherent in Prishvin’s work - merges together seemingly incompatible qualities: obvious documentary, “sketchy” - and equally undeniable myth-making; on the other hand, “The Worldly Cup” is openly autobiographical (the hero’s name is even “Alpatov”, and this was the second - neighborly, “street” - naming of the Prishvins in their native village) and at the same time contains a vision of the fate of Russia as a whole and even planet Earth in general

The setting of the “Mirskaya Chalice” is the “outback” of the Smolensk province at the headwaters of the Dnieper (where Mikhail Mikhailovich lived in 1920-1922); Before us is a destroyed - previously richest - estate, lost in ancient forests, “surrounding,” as it is said on the very first page of the story, “the source swamp, the mother of the glorious waterway from the Varangians to the Greeks.” And through the smallest details of the story, this “path”, which has become a thousand-year-old legend, constantly glimmers, and the story ends with a truly cosmogonic vision:

“Ivan Petrovich soon disappeared into the drifting snow, like an unfortunate Hellenic lost in Scythia... but above it was clear and sunny, frosty pillars around the sun were arranged in a regular cross, as if the Sun itself had been crucified...” - crucified, like Russia... (however, Prishvin, probably knew the words from the final part of Rozanov’s “Apocalypse of Our Time” (1918):

Try to crucify the sun

And you will see who is God.

As already said, Prishvin’s worldview cannot be understood within the framework of the not so deep opposition “revolution - counter-revolution.” I will cite fragments from the “Mundane Cup” that create a monumental image-myth of the people’s restless existence, an image in the light of which even the most significant political “realities” of that time appear as something not so grandiose:

“It seems that you are being thrown into a huge boiling vat, brewed by the god of the black redistribution of the Russian land. In that vat black people are spinning and spinning with all their stinking and dirty belongings, without taking off their shoes, without undressing, with foot wraps, pants, a bast shoe there, a skirt there, a tail there, horns there, and the devil, and the bull, and the man, and the woman cooks his child in a cast iron, and the boy aims straight at his father’s temple, and all this is called peace.

It seems to be a simple reasoning: there is nothing to boil over in one cauldron, separate into separate lives, and everyone will be fine. To judge - everything seems so simple, but ask the Mother of God herself to be a judge, go down with the Archangel on a rope into the brew - nothing will come of it: the woman, it turns out, did not put the child in the cast iron herself, but the devil advised her to do so; God forbid, isn’t she the mother of her child, and the devil doesn’t refuse, that’s why he’s the devil, and the bull is just roaring, there’s nothing to take from the bull, and the witnesses will all unanimously advise you to distance yourself and not get ahead of the times, God’s hour will come and that’s it will illuminate.

All judgment is withdrawn, everything is spinning and screaming from anger and pain, heat and cold, suddenly for just one minute there is shortness of breath, and all this together - the bull, and the devil, and the man, and the woman crawl out onto the edge of the vat in the sun, hastily dry themselves off, They dry themselves, have a snack, light a cigarette and thank the Creator for His wondrous wisdom on earth, in heaven and on the waters. Show them a trifle, some kind of lighter, and how much surprise there will be, unexpected thoughts, words born right there, the most sincere, sincere fun, until the elder shouts: “Guys, get into the vat!”

What was recreated in this image-myth by Prishvin, in the language of the Bolsheviks was called the “petty-bourgeois anarchist element,” and Lenin in 1921 spoke of this “element” as representing “under the dictatorship of the proletariat a danger, many times over (even so! - In . K.) exceeding all the Denikins, Kolchaks and Yudenichs put together” (vol. 43, p. 18). It should, however, be added that it was precisely this “element” that in less than eight months made the Provisional Government completely powerless, and only thanks to it, this element, the Bolsheviks were able to come - essentially, without any obstacles - to power (see about this my essay “What really happened in 1917?” in the magazine “Our Contemporary”, 1994, No. 11). On October 5, 1922 (all the same time!) Trotsky attacked Yesenin, Klyuev and the poets close to them in Pravda: “... it is bad and criminal (!) that they do not know how to approach the current revolution otherwise, dissolving it... in a blind rebellion, in a spontaneous uprising... But what is our revolution, if not a frantic (! - V.K.) uprising against... the peasant root of old Russian history, against its aimlessness (non-teleological), against its “holy” idiotic Karataevism ... Another tens of years will pass until Karataevism is burned out without a trace. But this process has already begun, and it has begun well.”

It is necessary to realize, first of all, that the current word “Karataevism” with its derogatory meaning has nothing in common with the real image of Platon Karataev in “War and Peace”; read carefully and impartially the pages telling about this - Suvorov and Kutuzov - soldier in the fourth volume of Tolstoy's epic, and you will agree with me.

And, by the way, if the task is to “burn out” Karataev, then it is necessary to “burn out” with him Pierre Bezukhov, and even Natasha Rostova, who ultimately measure their lives by Karataev’s measure (Natasha says to Pierre in the epilogue: “You know , what am I thinking about?.. About Platon Karataev. How would he approve of you now?

It was the Karataevs who won victory not only in 1812-1814, but also in 1941-1945. And Prishvin wrote on November 18, 1941: “...that real total war is approaching us, in which everyone, both living and dead, will truly take up the sacred struggle. Come on, come on, get up, Lev Nikolaevich, you’ve told us a lot..."

Trotsky, thank God, did not manage to burn out what he called “Karataevism” without a trace. Now “dissident” Alexander Zinoviev repents that he supposedly aimed at communism, but shot at Russia. The leaders of 1917 should have brought similar repentance (they aimed at tsarism and capitalism, but shot at Russia); but many of them shot at her deliberately. However, the main thing for Prishvin is not even this. In the fragment of “The Worldly Cup” just quoted, he, in essence, speaks about the guilt of Russia itself, albeit about the guilt of an unconscious existential one, or, using a strict philosophical term, ontological. Nowadays, many Russophobic authors and speakers curse Russia in every possible way for this guilt towards itself, usually keeping silent about the fact that it “punished” itself... The “Worldly Cup” speaks, for example, about what began after the destruction of the State in February 1917 ruthless deforestation:

“And what happened: with one word freedom, millions of Russian people rushed to cut themselves a new cross - they had suffered little before! In a year or two, the forests were so distorted, littered with branches, tops... the lakes were empty, all the fish were caught and drowned out by the soldiers with bombs... The forest, the earth, the water - all the clothing of the earth was trampled into the mud... Will there be a Last Judgment? In its own way, it is remarkable that those words of this passage, which are in italics, were removed from the 1982 edition!.. But the word “freedom” (and, accordingly, the slogan “Down with autocracy!”) sounded not in October, but in February 1917, when the Russian statehood that had been created over centuries was destroyed...

But let us return once again to Vasily Rozanov. His works, thank God, have recently been published in mass editions (which he could hardly have dreamed of), and one of the consequences of this fact - albeit not one of the most important consequences - is the opportunity for readers to fully understand the work of Mikhail Prishvin. For it was a kind of “continuation” of Rozanov’s - although it was by no means a straightforward continuation and even contained a “negation” of its predecessor.

In 1937, Prishvin wrote in his diary: “Rozanov is an afterword to Russian literature, I am a free supplement...”

The fact that Rozanov is the most worthy “last word” of pre-revolutionary Russian literature is indisputable. Prishvin spoke about himself with ironic modesty; his post-revolutionary work, of course, is not an “addition”, but, again, spoken at the most worthy level, the “first word” of Russian literature that has crossed the fatal threshold.

At first, it seemed to Prishvin that it was generally impossible to continue his literary work after the revolution. On March 15, 1918, he wrote: “The flame of the fire of Russia is so great that its light, like the light of the sun covers the morning moon, so the light of all our personal creativity becomes invisible, and now if the author paints a truly brilliant picture, it will be like the pale morning moon, powerless, superfluous."

But time passed, and on May 26, 1920, Prishvin confidently formulated: “We must work at our starting point - this is the only thing that can liberate Russia. And we, writers, need to go back to the people, we need to listen to their groans again, collect blood and tears and new souls raised by suffering, we need to understand the whole past in a new light.”

This is, in essence, the Worldly Cup program. Moreover, soon after its completion, Prishvin began creating “Kashcheev’s Chain” - an autobiographical narrative (starting from his earliest childhood years). And one cannot help but say that in order to truly assimilate the “Mundane Cup”, it should be considered in connection with the “Kashcheev’s Chain”, as if it were an epilogue of which, although written earlier, it is. In “Kashcheev’s Chain” Prishvin sought to “understand the entire past in a new light.”

Vasily Rozanov was constantly present in Prishvin’s thoughts during the revolutionary years. By the way, when on September 19, 1922, Trotsky attacked Rozanov on the pages of Pravda, mocking those who consider him a “brilliant” (Trotsky put this word in ironic quotation marks), Prishvin apparently responded to this attack by reporting On September 25 (that is, a week after Trotsky’s article), one of his acquaintances, as in 1908, “met again with V.V. Rozanov, a brilliant writer.”

“Again” is said because Prishvin first met Rozanov at the age of thirteen - at the Yeletsk gymnasium, where the still unknown Rozanov taught geography. This meeting today may be seen as a surprising coincidence; but then, in 1886, there were not so many gymnasiums - about 180 throughout the Russian Empire, and the likelihood of an outstanding teacher meeting outstanding students was very high (suffice it to say that at the same time as Prishvin - albeit in different classes - in I. A. Bunin and S. N. Bulgakov studied at the Yelets gymnasium).

At first, Prishvin's meeting with Rozanov was beneficial; the teacher discerned “signs of a special higher life in the boy’s soul.” But later, as a fifteen-year-old teenager, “infected” with the free-thinking characteristic of that time, the student entered into an acute conflict with the teacher and eventually threatened him with... murder. Rozanov insisted on the expulsion (and with the so-called “wolf ticket”) of Prishvin, who could not forgive this. Only in 1943 did he write in his diary: “How many years had to pass (60 years!)84 so that I could get rid of the feeling of resentment and injustice for my exclusion from the gymnasium and finally admit that ... I should have been expelled. For this, the entire Russian revolution had to go through...” This result of a personal drama has a deep universal meaning...

The history of the relationship between Prishvin and Rozanov more difficult than any scheme. In 1908 - twenty years after the gymnasium incident - Rozanov, at a meeting of the Religious and Philosophical Society, highly praised the book of Prishvin (who was then essentially a novice writer, with only four years of “experience”). On December 9, Prishvin wrote in his diary: “...isn’t this a victory: the boy, who was expelled from the gymnasium by him, who had suffered wounded pride all his life about this, finds his enemy... hands him his book with the poisonous inscription “To an unforgettable teacher and revered writer” - and listens to compliments from him. Here's a victory! And he doesn’t even know who he’s dealing with...” A year later, on November 28, 1909, Rozanov invited Prishvin to his place, and their conversation went like this: “I had a story with one Prishvin. - I’m the one... - How?!” Then Rozanov, Prishvin recalled, “in front of many witnesses he repented and asked me for forgiveness (“however,” he said, “it did you good, my dear Prishvin”).”

The last judgment is true in relation to truly creative people, in whose fate trials - even cruel ones - often “were beneficial” (remember Pushkin’s exiles and Dostoevsky’s hard labor)…

Prishvin, as we have seen, openly admitted that Rozanov, who punished him, was “right” only in 1943. But, in all likelihood, the hidden confession took place earlier. So, already in 1937 he wrote down: “...one amazing unity in me is Rozanov. With his personality, he unites my whole life, starting from school: then, in the gymnasium, he was my goat (an offensive nickname for Rozanov among gymnasium students. - V.K.), now in old age he is a hero, my favorite, closest person.”

It is characteristic that the “relationship” between these two people seemed to persist not only after the death of Rozanov, but even after the passing of Prishvin, who died on the night of January 16, 1954; daughter Rozanova Tatyana Vasilievna (1895-1975) and widow Prishvina Valeria Dmitrievna (1899-1979) continued a meaningful dialogue in their correspondence. In 1969, V.D. Prishvina wrote: “M. M. made so many amazing (in my opinion) notes about V.V. that I set myself the goal of collecting them and preserving them for the time when every word of V.V. ... will be a treasure for people.” This time has now come, and the mentioned entries were published in the yearbook “Context” for 1990.

Prishvin defined Rozanov’s work as an “afterword,” that is, as the last word, and this is also true in a direct, essentially regrettable, sense: we are talking about the end - that is, about the collapse, about the destruction of literature (as it was before the revolution). Prishvin wrote about this in 1927: “Rozanov, of course, is a terrible destroyer, but his destruction of history, or rather, decomposition, is so deep that his closest neighbor on the same path must inevitably begin creation.” Speaking about the “nearest neighbor,” Prishvin, in all likelihood, meant himself first of all. And all his work is imbued with the desire to create, which is already inherent in the “Worldly Cup”. At the same time, Prishvin in no way idealized the reality of post-revolutionary Russia and did not try to see creation where it does not exist, where it is imaginary. When you read page by page of his diaries of the 1920s-1930s (they are just beginning to be published), you are amazed at the uncompromising and fearless words of the writer about all the ills of the economic, everyday, political, and ideological life of the country; after all, these Prishvin notebooks lay in the drawer of his desk in the most cruel times!

In “The Worldly Cup” we see a dilapidated and continuing to collapse Russia; extremely difficult, gloomy, hopeless scenes follow one after another. And yet, the motive of creation breaks through everything, which, according to the writer, is possible only by relying on the previous centuries-old history; future creativity is conceivable only as a continuation of past creativity, and the whole meaning of the present is to be a link connecting the past with the future.

Here is one of the characteristic scenes of the story. The hero, Alpatov, the creator and director of the “Museum of Estate Life”, greets “common people” visitors with particular joy:

“A cranberry village woman can be good in a museum; here, on the shiny parquet floor among mirrors, columns and paintings, a woman from the moss swamps will simply and confidently say:

You don’t need to tell her anything, turn around and she will turn around, she doesn’t see anything anywhere and feels paradise everywhere. Even there, in the hut, every ordinary thing is mysterious, every movement of nature along the solar circle is accompanied by consecration with water from twelve wells and a spell. He, a bearded man, thinks that a cow simply gives birth to a heifer from a bull, not knowing that the grandmother had previously whispered all her prayers into bottles of water and sprinkled this water on the cow; person, eat a red blessed egg. All this seems like nothing, but because of this, the heifer enters the human world as her own, special heifer, the woman will call her Zorka, and the heifer leaves the herd. Yes, if there was a need for housework, the woman would call an ant from the anthill...”

But not everything goes so well. From the lips of one of the “formers” a woman in the museum heard French speech:

“- Why did he say that? - asked the cranberry woman Alpatova, leaving.

In French,” Alpatov answered. The next day she appeared with a piece of bacon and brought her daughter Arisha.

“Teach your daughter French,” she said, serving lard...

...It is difficult to force a wild girl to conjugate the indecent-sounding French verb to lose in the past tense.

Arisha covers herself with a shawl and dies there.

He will stick his nose out from under his shawl.

I lost.

This is in Russian, and in French?

In French - I don’t know.

Well, let's study in Russian.

The hunt for names begins. There are even now crossroads where Arisha will say, without understanding why, “too bad for me”; she needs to explain that this is how she remembers her distant ancestor Shchur, or ancestor, that she still lives in the interests of her family, scattered across different villages, the names of the villages of her family are fraught with myth, reality and fairy tales... Animals are not just given names, and plants, everything becomes habitable and humanized, even every inhabited stone has its own separate name. You say a name, and the animal leaves the herd, and what comes from the herd has a separate face, because it was called out of the herd by the human power of discriminating love inherent in the name. Let us write down the names of villages, animals, streams, stones, herbs, and under each name we will write a myth, a story or a fairy tale, a song, and above all earthly names we will put the holy name of the Mother of God...

Well, Arisha, isn’t this better than the “French” one? But it is difficult to fight alone against the power of French, and, apparently, it is so ingrained in the soul that you need to break away and wander in French in order to return to your holy homeland ... "

At first glance, it may seem that Prishvin has plunged here into some kind of powerless past that has no living meaning. But in reality this past does not die. Many years later, in March 1944, when victory in the Patriotic War was already undoubted (the troops reached the state border), Prishvin wrote (March 19): “... if there is an unshakable image, something remains and connects eras of experiences, like all the same, the water at the bottom of the sea does not move even in a storm. This is the man I talk about in the “Worldly Cup”…” And he continued this reflection like this: “... April 2. Our strength is now precisely generic, the power of fire. Our history is similar to the history of peat accumulations in forests: the solar power, fire, inherent in the green plants does not act, but sours in water and accumulates for centuries... But as soon as the peat is dried, the accumulated fiery power acts... April 12. The beginning of the liberation of Crimea."

And that “power”, that “fire” that Prishvin spoke about - naturally recalling his old “Worldly Cup” - began to act already in 1941. Although I was a boy then, I still clearly and unmistakably felt that real power was embodied not in Bolshevik slogans, but, say, in Simon’s simple lines about how

Behind every Russian outskirts,

Protecting the living with the cross of your hands,

Having gathered with the whole world, our great-grandfathers pray

For their grandchildren who don’t believe in God...

According to Russian customs, only fires

Scattered across the Russian soil behind,

Comrades are dying before our eyes,

He tore his shirt across his chest in Russian style...

But just recently, praising the successes at Khalkhin Gol, the same author saw the main thing in something completely different:

"Revolution! Our affairs are illuminated by your light, We are ready to sacrifice Life, home, warmth for you... (not to mention our “great-grandfathers”...)”

The Bolshevik hero, “commissar” Persyuk (by the way, Prishvin, by the way, took the real nickname of a commissar he knew) passes through the entire “Mirskaya Chalice” - the imperious master of the whole surroundings:

“Once suddenly the most terrible of all commissars, Persyuk, Fomkin’s brother, flew into the museum; at dusk, on the scorched fields of stumps and snags, sometimes such faces are formed, and then there is a sailor’s cap, from under it a Cossack forelock - a sign of the Russian freemen...

Persyuk swooped in on a denunciation... seized the museum and roared:

And who is going against us here?..

Here he stands, an inflamed ruler, his eyes are like those of Peter the Great during the execution of the archers, his nostrils are flared..."

Alpatov “smiles: he collects folklore, certified by the seal and signature of famous revolutionaries.

Party?

The collector of folklore is always outside the parties...

Who is this “folklore”?

The product is not standardized, here is a room of Russian poets, there is Pushkin, paintings by good masters, and I am with them, a child of my people, we all feed on the national spirit. Folklore is an unregulated product.

For scary people, like fierce dogs, the transition from rage to silence begins with the ears, and it turns out cute for them, like “cuckoo” on a birch tree after thunder and lightning. Something trembled in my ears, and Persyuk said:

And you must be educated?

We all learned a little bit.

Lecturer, maybe?

Who is not a lecturer now?

You know, we also have princes in our party.

And there are graphs.

I know, but we have, look, Cervantes is Spanish, Goethe is German, Shakespeare is English, Dostoevsky is Russian, and I am pleased that the Russian is also a member of the international..."

And after a wild conversation: “Alpatov goes downstairs, fiddles with the wood for a long time, drags up a large linden block and with an ax begins to make a commissar out of it for himself: knock, knock!.. Alpatov works on the linden tree with a round chisel at the window, and little by little they appear tree scary eyes Peter the Great, his clenched lips and shaved chin, carries him swiftly forward, restlessly, uncontrollably forward and forward, as if when he stops he soon soils the ground and he must hurry to new places...”

Arriving with the “Worldly Cup” from the wilderness of Smolensk to Moscow, Prishvin acquired the most famous book about the revolution at that time, “The Naked Year,” and met its author Boris Pilnyak and other writers, to whom he read his story. As one can judge from Prishvin’s diary, Pilnyak strongly criticized “The Worldly Cup” for denigrating the “commissars,” contrasting Persyuk with his commissar Arkhipov from “The Naked Year.” Prishvin objected to Pilnyak as follows:

“My Persyuk is not a bad person at all, he highly respects education (“A lecturer, perhaps?”), he values ​​“humanity” and is a man of duty... in addition, he is a man of will and deed (“he looks like Peter the Great,” which is emphasized ). I take my Persyuk on the scales and put yours (that is, Commissar Arkhipov - V.K.) on the other... objectively, my and your Persyuks are worth each other, but subjectively the hidden author’s attitude is different. This subjective attitude comes out of the correlation of Persyuk with other elements: in your case, Persyuk is opposed to all abomination (Arkhipov - V.K.), in mine he is barely distinguishable from abomination and is contrasted with an ideal personality trying to follow the path of Christ... True, I did not dare bring his hero to Christ, but invested a piece of him...

It turned out, as you say, a dead end for Russia. And I admit this... I will say more, not only Russia is in a dead end for me, but the entire Christian world is, it turns out, in a dead end... And so it is: our socialism, being a negative, destructive force, is breaking into the Christian consciousness of modern humanity...

Here you are composing that Russia will save the world, and at the same time presenting its best in the form of the Persyukov-Arkhipovs with a pocket dictionary of foreign words and algebra...

So, my dear, I, as a wordsmith, am a great connoisseur of the playfulness and ethereality of your talent, in this respect I cannot compare with you, I am an ethnographer, a cart person, but since you touched on dead ends, then let me tell you definitively: in my cart I I come to a dead end and wonder: what to do? and you, on your riding horse, simply turn into a through street - what of this? The deadlock with the cart remains a fact.”

Before us in highest degree significant controversy (explaining, in particular, why Trotsky treated Pilnyak and Prishvin very differently). Many, many post-revolutionary writers - not only convinced Bolsheviks - sought to artistically “prove” that heroes like Persyuk and Arkhipov (though often much more handsome-looking) “save” Russia and even the whole world. Today it becomes clear that many of the efforts of these heroes were fruitless or even disastrous (a highly significant fact: the Patriotic War opened our eyes and forced us to abolish the very institution of military commissars in 1942!). And the current value of such works comes down mainly to the fact that they represent “documents of the era” - after all, evidence of its errors.

Meanwhile, the “Worldly Cup” remains essentially modern today. And it’s worth saying that the same Prishvinsky Persyuk is embodied quite objectively. He did not carry within himself the future that we would like for ourselves today. But here is Prishvin’s significant judgment from this very polemic with Pilnyak. He wrote that when “weighing” Arkhipov and Persyuk, the latter, perhaps, “will outweigh if I share the version of my story (left at home), which directly says that “Persyuk in his drunken hands kept our Rus' from collapse” (I did not place this bold phrase, fearing, on the one hand, its rationality, which is hostile to me, and on the other, from “do not make yourself an idol”).”

In particular, the “commissars” sought and managed to “hold”, as far as possible then, the very space of Russia; in many respects this is precisely why not much fewer tsarist generals and officers served in the Red Army than in the White Army - moreover, these were far from the worst generals and officers (see about this the pioneering study of the historian A. G. Kavtaradze “Military specialists in the service of the Republic of Soviets ", published in 1988).

In 1930, in a diary overflowing with shocked entries about the cruelties and madness of the new revolutionary coup - collectivization, Prishvin nevertheless wrote (July 18): “I want to get to values ​​that stand outside of fascism and communism, from the heights of these values ​​that make up creative life, I try to discern the path of communism and, where possible, point to creativity, because even if communism is an organization of evil, then somewhere, probably, in this evil there is a channel to good: certainly But in the process of creativity, evil turns into good.”

Prishvin did not “point out” imaginary “channels”; he tirelessly searched for a real, authentic “transition” of evil into good. And his “Worldly Chalice” is also imbued with this quest - rooted in the Orthodox worldview.

The fact that Prishvin’s “The Worldly Cup” found full-fledged printed existence almost seventy years after its creation, in a certain sense, “impoverished” this story. I mean that a work of literature, which has become the property of readers, critics, thinkers and exists in interaction with other works, is enriched and even, one might say, developed as time passes. “The Twelve” by Alexander Blok or “Quiet Flows the Don” by Sholokhov are now different than when they appeared; they have been illuminated by countless views and interpreted by many minds.

Meanwhile, we have to discover the “Mundane Cup” as an unknown country. But, as it seems to me, the high dignity of this story can be defined as follows: if today the most insightful artist set himself the goal of recreating exactly what was recreated in the “Worldly Cup” (the same “time and place”), he would do it basically the same as Mikhail Prishvin did seventy-four years ago...

In conclusion, a “commentary” to the title of this chapter (“M. M. Prishvin’s book is not about nature, but about revolution”). After the ban on The Worldly Cup, the writer in many ways really “went into nature,” and this is how the vast majority of readers imagine him. Only now, when “the whole” of Prishvin is gradually being published, does it become clear that his work is multifaceted and even comprehensive. And the “Mundane Cup” is especially important for understanding our great artist.