Meshcher's work. K. Paustovsky Meshcherskaya side. Four troopers and a dog

Meshcherskaya side

Stories

Ordinary land

There are no special beauties and wealth, except forests, meadows and clear air. But still this region has great attractive power. He is very modest - just like Levitan’s paintings. But in it, as in these paintings, lies all the charm and all the diversity of Russian nature, imperceptible at first glance.

What can you see in the Meshchersky region? Flowering or mown meadows, pine forests, floodplain and forest lakes overgrown with black bushes, haystacks smelling of dry and warm hay. Hay in stacks keeps you warm all winter.

I have had to spend the night in haystacks in October, when the grass at dawn is covered with frost, like salt. I dug a deep hole in the hay, climbed into it and slept all night in a haystack, as if in a locked room. And over the meadows there was cold rain, and the wind came at oblique blows.

In the Meshchersky region you can see pine forests, where it is so solemn and quiet that the bell-“chatterer” of a lost cow can be heard far away, almost a kilometer away. But such silence exists in the forests only on windless days. In the wind, the forests rustle with a great ocean roar and the tops of the pine trees bend after the passing clouds.

In the Meshchersky region you can see forest lakes with dark water, vast swamps covered with alder and aspen, lonely foresters' huts charred from old age, sand, juniper, heather, schools of cranes and stars familiar to us at all latitudes.

What can you hear in the Meshchera region, except for the hum? pine forests? The cries of quails and hawks, the whistle of orioles, the fussy knocking of woodpeckers, the howl of wolves, the rustle of rain in the red needles, the evening cry of an accordion in the village, and at night - the multi-voiced crowing of roosters and the clapper of the village watchman.

But you can see and hear so little only in the first days. Then every day this region becomes richer, more diverse, dearer to the heart. And finally, the time comes when each willow tree above the dead river seems like its own, very familiar, when amazing stories can be told about it.

I broke the custom of geographers. Almost all geographical books begin with the same phrase: “This region lies between such and such degrees of eastern longitude and northern latitude and borders on the south with such and such a region, and on the north with such and such a region.” I will not name the latitudes and longitudes of the Meshchera region. Suffice it to say that it lies between Vladimir and Ryazan, not far from Moscow, and is one of the few surviving forest islands, a remnant of the “great belt” coniferous forests" It once stretched from Polesie to the Urals. It included forests: Chernigov, Bryansk, Kaluga, Meshchersky, Mordovian and Kerzhensky. In these forests she hid out from Tatar raids Ancient Rus'.

First meeting

For the first time I came to the Meshchersky region from the north, from Vladimir.

Behind Gus-Khrustalny, at the quiet Tuma station, I changed to a narrow-gauge train. This was a train from Stephenson's time. The locomotive, similar to a samovar, whistled in a child's falsetto. The locomotive had an offensive nickname: “gelding.” He really looked like an old gelding. At the corners he groaned and stopped. Passengers got out to smoke. Forest silence stood around the gasping gelding. The smell of wild cloves, warmed by the sun, filled the carriages.

Passengers with things sat on the platforms - things did not fit into the carriage. Occasionally, along the way, bags, baskets, and carpenter's saws began to fly out from the platform onto the canvas, and their owner, often a rather ancient old woman, jumped out to get the things. Inexperienced passengers were frightened, but experienced ones, twisting their “goat legs” and spitting, explained that this was the most convenient way to get off the train closer to their village.

The narrow-gauge railway in the Mentor Forests is the slowest Railway in the Union.

The stations are littered with resinous logs and smell of fresh felling and wild forest flowers.

At the Pilevo station, a shaggy grandfather climbed into the carriage. He crossed himself to the corner where the round cast-iron stove was rattling, sighed and complained into space’

“As soon as they grab me by the beard, go to town and tie up your bast shoes.” But there is no consideration that maybe this matter isn’t worth a penny to them. They send me to the museum, where soviet government collects cards, price lists, all that stuff. They send you a statement.

- Why are you lying?

- Look, there!

The grandfather pulled out the crumpled piece of paper, blew the terry off it and showed it to the neighbor woman.

“Manka, read it,” the woman said to the girl, who was rubbing her nose against the window. Manka pulled her dress over her scratched knees, tucked her legs up and began to read in a hoarse voice:

– “It turns out that unfamiliar birds live in the lake, huge striped ones, only three; It’s unknown where they came from, we should take them alive for the museum, so send catchers.”

“This,” said the grandfather sadly, “is why they break the bones of old people now.” And all Leshka is a Komsomol member. Ulcer is a passion! Ugh!

Grandfather spat. Baba wiped her round mouth with the end of her handkerchief and sighed. The locomotive whistled in fear, the forests hummed both to the right and to the left, raging like a lake. The west wind was in charge. The train struggled through its damp streams and was hopelessly late, panting at empty stops.

“This is our existence,” the grandfather repeated. “They drove me to the museum last summer, today is the year again!”

– What did you find this summer? - asked the woman.

- Junkie!

- Something?

- Torchak. Well, the bone is ancient. She was lying in the swamp. Looks like a deer. Horns - from this carriage. Straight passion. They dug it for a whole month. The people were completely exhausted.

– Why did he give in? - asked the woman.

- The guys will be taught it.

The following was reported about this find in “Research and Materials of the Regional Museum”:

“The skeleton went deep into the quagmire, not providing support for the diggers. I had to undress and go down into the quagmire, which was extremely difficult due to the icy temperature of the spring water. The huge horns, like the skull, were intact, but extremely fragile due to complete maceration (soaking) of the bones. The bones were broken right in the hands, but as they dried, the hardness of the bones was restored.”

The skeleton of a gigantic fossil Irish deer with an antlers span of two and a half meters was found.

My acquaintance with Meshchera began with this meeting with the shaggy grandfather. Then I heard many stories about mammoth teeth, and about treasures, and about mushrooms the size of human head. But I remember this first story on the train especially sharply.

Vintage map

With great difficulty I got a map of the Meshchera region. There was a note on it: “The map was compiled from old surveys made before 1870.” I had to fix this map myself. The river beds have changed. Where there were swamps on the map, in some places a young pine forest was already rustling; In place of other lakes there were swamps.

But still, using this map was safer than asking local residents. For a long time, it has been the custom in Rus' that no one makes as many mistakes when explaining the way as a local resident, especially if he is a talkative person.

“You, dear man,” shouts a local resident, “don’t listen to others!” They will tell you things that will make you unhappy with life. Just listen to me, I know these places inside and out. Go to the outskirts, you will see a five-walled hut on your left hand, take from that hut on your right hand along the trail through the sands, you will reach Prorva and go, dear, the edge of Prorva, go, don’t hesitate, all the way to the burnt willow. From there you take a little bit towards the forest, past Muzga, and after Muzga go steeply to the hill, and beyond the hill there is a well-known road - through the mshary to the lake.

- How many kilometers?

- Who knows? Maybe ten, maybe even twenty. There are countless kilometers here, my dear.

I tried to follow these tips, but there were always either several burnt willows, or there was no noticeable hill, and I, giving up on the stories of the natives, relied only on own feeling directions. It almost never deceived me.

The natives always explained the route with passion, with frantic enthusiasm. This amused me at first, but somehow I myself had to explain the way to Lake Segden to the poet Simonov, and I found myself telling him about the signs of this confusing road with the same passion as the natives.

Every time you explain the road, it’s as if you’re walking along it again, through all these free places, along forest paths dotted with immortelle flowers, and again you experience lightness in your soul. This lightness always comes to us when the path is long and there are no worries in our hearts.

A few words about signs

In order not to get lost in the forests, you need to know the signs. Finding signs or creating them yourself is a very exciting activity. The world will be infinitely diverse. It can be very joyful when the same sign remains in the forests year after year - every autumn you encounter the same fiery rowan bush behind Larin Pond or the same notch you made on a pine tree. Every summer the notch becomes increasingly covered with solid golden resin.

Signs on the roads are not the main signs. Real signs are those that determine the weather and time.

There are so many that one could write a whole book about them. We don't need signs in cities. The fiery rowan tree is replaced by an enamel blue sign with the name of the street. Time is recognized not by the height of the sun, not by the position of the constellations, or even by the crow of a cock, but by the clock. Weather forecasts are broadcast by radio. In cities, most of our natural instincts go dormant. But as soon as you spend two or three nights in the forest, your hearing becomes sharper again, your eyes become sharper, your sense of smell becomes more subtle.

Signs are connected with everything: with the color of the sky, with dew and fog, with the calls of birds and the brightness of starlight.

Signs contain a lot of precise knowledge and poetry. There are simple and complex signs. The simplest sign is the smoke of a fire. Either it rises in a column to the sky, calmly flows upward, higher than the tallest willows, then it spreads like fog over the grass, then it rushes around the fire. And so, to the charm of a night fire, to the bitter smell of smoke, the cracking of branches, the running of the fire and the fluffy white ashes, there is also added the knowledge of tomorrow’s weather.

Looking at the smoke, you can definitely tell whether tomorrow there will be rain, wind, or again, like today, the sun will rise in deep silence, in blue cool fogs. Evening dew also predicts calm and warmth. It can be so abundant that it even sparkles at night, reflecting the light of the stars. And the more abundant the dew, the hotter tomorrow will be.

These are all very simple signs. But there are signs that are complex and accurate. Sometimes the sky suddenly seems very high, and the horizon shrinks, it seems close, as if the horizon is no more than a kilometer away. This is a sign of future clear weather.

Sometimes on a cloudless day the fish suddenly stop taking fish. Rivers and lakes are dying, as if the life has gone out of them forever. This is a sure sign of imminent and prolonged bad weather. In a day or two, the sun will rise in a crimson, ominous darkness, and by noon the black clouds will almost touch the ground, a damp wind will blow and languid, sleep-inducing heavy rains will pour.

Return to map

I remembered the signs and took a break from the map of the Meshchera region.

Exploring an unfamiliar region always begins with a map. This activity is no less interesting than studying signs. You can wander on a map in the same way as on land, but then, when you get to this real land, your knowledge of the map immediately affects you - you no longer wander blindly and don’t waste time on trifles.

The map of the Meshchera region below, in the farthest corner, in the south, shows the bend of a large deep river. This is Oka. To the north of the Oka stretches a wooded and swampy lowland, to the south - the long-established, populated lands of Ryazan. The Oka flows along the border of two completely different, very dissimilar spaces.

The Ryazan lands are grainy, yellow from rye fields, curly from apple orchards. The outskirts of Ryazan villages often merge with each other, the villages are scattered densely, and there is no place from where one, or even two or three still surviving bell towers are visible on the horizon. Instead of forests, there is noise on the slopes of the dens birch groves.

Ryazan land is a land of fields. To the south of Ryazan the steppes already begin.

But once you cross the Oka by ferry, behind the wide strip of Oka meadows the Meshchera pine forests already stand as a dark wall. They go to the north and east, round lakes turn blue in them. These forests hide in their depths huge peat bogs.

In the west of the Meshchera region, on the so-called Borovaya side, among pine forests, eight borovaya lakes lie in small forests. There are no roads or trails to them, and you can only get to them through the forest using a map and compass.

These lakes have one very strange property: the smaller the lake, the deeper it is. The large Mitinskoe lake is only four meters deep, and the small Udemnoye is seventeen meters deep.

Mshary

To the east of Borovye Lakes lie huge Meshchera swamps - “mshars” or “omshars”. These are lakes that have been overgrown for thousands of years. They occupy an area of ​​three hundred thousand hectares. When you stand in the middle of such a swamp, the former high shore of the lake - the “mainland” - with its dense pine forest is clearly visible on the horizon. Here and there on the moss you can see sandy mounds overgrown with pine and ferns - former islands. Local residents still call these mounds “islands.” Moose spend the night on the “islands.”

One day at the end of September we walked in mshars to Poganoye Lake. The lake was mysterious. The women said that cranberries the size of nuts and nasty mushrooms “slightly larger than a calf’s head” grew along its banks. The lake got its name from these mushrooms. The women were afraid to go to Poganoye Lake - there were some “green swamps” near it.

“As soon as you step your foot,” the women said, “the whole earth beneath you will groan, hum, sway like a ripple, the alder tree will sway, and water will hit from under your bast shoes and splash in your face.” By God! It’s impossible to say exactly such passions. And the lake itself is bottomless, black. If any young woman looks at him, she will immediately become sad.

- Why does he feel sleepy?

- Out of fear. Fear just hits you on the back, just like that. Like when we come across Poganoe Lake, we run away from it, run to the first island, and there we’ll just catch our breath.

The women got us excited, and we decided to definitely go to Poganoe Lake. Along the way we spent the night at Black Lake. The rain roared through the tent all night. The water quietly grumbled in the roots. In the rain, in the impenetrable darkness, wolves howled.

The black lake was filled flush with the shores. It seemed that as soon as the wind blew or the rain got stronger, the water would flood the mosshars and us along with the tent, and we would never get out of these low, gloomy wastelands.

All night the mshars breathed the smell of wet moss, bark, and black driftwood. By morning the rain had passed. The gray sky hung low overhead. Because the clouds almost touched the tops of the birches, it was quiet and warm on the ground. The layer of clouds was very thin - the sun shone through it.

We rolled up the tent, shouldered our backpacks and set off. It was difficult to walk. Last summer, a ground fire passed through the moshars. The roots of the birch and alder trees were burnt, the trees fell down, and every minute we had to climb over large rubble. We walked along hummocks, and between the hummocks, where the red water was sour, birch roots stuck out, sharp as stakes. In the Meshchera region they are called kolki.

The mosshars are overgrown with sphagnum, lingonberries, gonobobel, and cuckoo flax. The foot was drowning in green and gray mosses up to the knee.

In two hours we walked only two kilometers. An “island” appeared ahead. With the last of our strength, climbing over the rubble, tattered and bloodied, we reached a wooded hillock and fell onto the warm ground, among the thickets of lilies of the valley. The lilies of the valley were already ripe - hard orange berries hung between the wide leaves. The pale sky shone through the branches of the pine trees.

The writer Gaidar was with us. He walked around the entire “island”. The “island” was small, surrounded on all sides by mosshars, only two more “islands” were visible far on the horizon.

Gaidar screamed from a distance and whistled. We reluctantly got up, went to him, and he showed us on the damp ground, where the “island” turned into mosshars, huge fresh tracks of an elk. The moose obviously walked in great leaps.

“This is his path to the watering hole,” said Gaidar...

We followed the moose trail. We didn't have water, we were thirsty. A hundred paces from the “island,” the tracks led us to a small “window” with clean, cold water. The water smelled of iodoform. We got drunk and came back.

Gaidar went to look for Poganoe Lake. It lay somewhere nearby, but, like most lakes in mosshars, it was very difficult to find. The lakes are surrounded by such dense thickets and tall grass that you can walk a few steps and not notice the water.

Gaidar did not take a compass, said that he would find his way back by the sun, and left. We lay on the moss, listening to old pine cones falling from the branches. Some animal sounded a dull trumpet in the distant forests.

An hour has passed. Gaidar did not return. But the sun was still high, and we were not worried - Gaidar could not help but find his way back.

The second hour passed, then the third. The sky above the mshars became colorless; then a gray wall, like smoke, slowly creeped in from the east. Low clouds covered the sky. A few minutes later the sun disappeared. Only dry darkness lay over the mshars.

Without a compass it was impossible to find the way in such darkness. We remembered stories about how on sunless days people circled in mosshars in one place for several days.

I climbed a tall pine tree and started screaming. Nobody responded. Then a voice echoed very far away. I listened, and an unpleasant chill ran down my spine: in the mshars, just in the direction where Gaidar had gone, wolves howled sadly.

What to do? The wind blew in the direction where Gaidar had gone. It was possible to light a fire, the smoke would be drawn into the mshars, and Gaidar could return to the “island” by the smell of smoke. But this could not be done. We did not agree on this with Gaidar. There are often fires in swamps. Gaidar could have taken this smoke for an approaching fire and, instead of coming towards us, would have started to move away from us, fleeing the fire.

Fires in dry swamps are the worst thing you can experience in these parts. It is difficult to escape from them - the fire moves very quickly. And where can you go when mosses dry as gunpowder lie to the horizon, and you can be saved, and even then not for sure, only on the “island” - for some reason the fire sometimes bypasses the wooded “islands”.

We shouted all at once, but only the wolves answered us. Then one of us went with a compass to mshary - to where Gaidar disappeared.

Dusk was falling. Crows flew over the “island” and cawed fearfully and ominously.

We screamed desperately, then we finally lit a fire - it was getting dark quickly - and now Gaidar could go out to the fire.

But in response to our screams, no human voice was heard, and only in the dull twilight, somewhere near the second “island,” the horn of a car suddenly hummed and quacked like a duck. It was absurd and wild - where could a car come from in the swamps, where a person could hardly walk?

The car was clearly approaching. It hummed persistently, and half an hour later we heard a crash in the rubble, the car grunted last time somewhere very close, and a smiling, wet, exhausted Gaidar crawled out of the mshars, and behind him our comrade - the one who left with the compass.

It turns out that Gaidar heard our screams and answered all the time, but the wind blew in his direction and drove away the voice. Then Gaidar got tired of screaming, and he began to quack - imitating a car.

Gaidar did not reach Poganoe Lake. He came across a lonely pine tree, he climbed onto it and saw this lake in the distance. Gaidar looked at him, cursed, got down and went back.

- Why? – we asked him.

“It’s a very scary lake,” he answered. “Well, to hell with it!”

He said that even from afar you can see how black, like tar, the water in Lake Poganoy is. Rare sick pines stand along the banks, leaning over the water, ready to fall at the first gust of wind. Several pine trees have already fallen into the water. There must be impassable swamps around the lake.

It was getting dark quickly, like autumn. We did not stay overnight on the “island”, but walked along the mosshars towards the “mainland” - the wooded shore of the swamp. Walking through the rubble in the dark was unbearably difficult. Every ten minutes we checked the direction on the phosphorus compass and only by midnight we got out onto solid ground, into the forests, came across an abandoned road and late at night we walked along it to Lake Segden, where our mutual friend Kuzma Zotov lived, a meek, sick man, a fisherman and collective farmer

I told this whole story, in which there is nothing special, only to give at least a vague idea of ​​what the Meshchera swamps - mshars - are.

Peat extraction has already begun on some moshars (the Red Swamp and the Pilny Swamp). The peat here is old, powerful, and will last for hundreds of years.

Yes, but we need to finish the story about Poganoe Lake. The next summer we finally reached this lake. Its banks were floating - not the usual solid shores, but a dense plexus of whitefly, wild rosemary, grasses, roots and mosses. The banks swayed underfoot like a hammock. Under the skinny grass there was bottomless water. The pole easily pierced the floating shore and went into the quagmire. With every step, fountains of warm water came out from under my feet. It was impossible to stop: my legs were sucked in and my footprints were filled with water.

The water in the lake was black. Swamp gas bubbled up from the bottom.

We fished for perch on this lake. We tied long fishing lines to wild rosemary bushes or young alder trees, and we ourselves sat on fallen pines and smoked until the wild rosemary bush began to tear and make noise or the alder tree bent and cracked. Then we lazily got up, pulled the line and dragged fat black perches ashore. To keep them from falling asleep, we put them in our tracks, in deep holes filled with water, and the perches beat their tails in the water, splashed, but could not get away.

At noon a thunderstorm gathered over the lake. She grew before our eyes. The small thundercloud turned into an ominous cloud like an anvil. She stood still and did not want to leave.

Lightning lashed into the mshars next to us, and our souls didn’t feel good.

We didn’t go to Poganoye Lake again, but we still earned the reputation among the women as inveterate people, ready for anything.

“These are desperate men,” they said in a sing-song voice, “So desperate, so desperate, there are no words!”

Forest rivers and canals

I looked away from the map again. To put an end to it, we must talk about the mighty tracts of forests (they fill the entire map with dull green paint), about the mysterious white spots in the depths of the forests, and about two rivers - Solotche and Pre, flowing south through forests, swamps and burnt areas.

Solotcha is a winding, shallow river. In its barrels there are flocks of ides under the banks. The water in Solotch is red. Peasants call this water “severe.” Along the entire length of the river, there is only one place where a road leading to an unknown destination approaches it, and along the road there is a lonely inn.

Pra flows from the lakes of northern Meshchera to the Oka. There are very few villages along the banks. In the old days, schismatics settled in the dense forests of Pre.

In the town of Spas-Klepiki, in the upper reaches of the Pra, there is an old cotton factory. She lowers cotton flocks into the river, and the bottom of the Pra near Spas-Klepikov is covered with a thick layer of compacted black cotton wool. This must be the only river in the Soviet Union with a cotton bottom.

In addition to rivers, there are many canals in the Meshchera region.

Even under Alexander II, General Zhilinsky decided to drain the Meshchera swamps and create large lands for colonization near Moscow. An expedition was sent to Meshchera. She worked for twenty years and drained only one and a half thousand hectares of land, but no one wanted to settle on this land - it turned out to be very scarce.

Zhilinsky built many canals in Meshchera. Now these canals have died down and are overgrown with marsh grasses. Ducks nest in them, lazy tenches and nimble loaches live there.

These canals are very picturesque. They go deep into the forests. The thickets hang over the water in dark arches. It seems that every channel leads to mysterious places. You can travel along the canals, especially in the spring, for tens of kilometers in a light boat.

The sweetish smell of water lilies is mixed with the smell of resin. Sometimes tall reeds block the canals with solid dams. Whitewing grows along the banks. Its leaves are a little similar to the leaves of the lily of the valley, but on one leaf a wide white stripe, and from a distance it seems that these are huge blooms snow flowers. Ferns, blackberries, horsetails and moss lean over the banks. If you touch the tufts of moss with your hand or an oar, bright emerald dust—cuckoo flax spores—flies out of it in a thick cloud. Pink fireweed blooms on low walls. Olive swimming beetles dive in the water and attack schools of juveniles. Sometimes you have to drag the canoe through shallow water. Then the swimmers bite their legs until they bleed.

The silence is broken only by the ringing of mosquitoes and the splashing of fish.

Swimming always leads to an unknown goal - to a forest lake or to a forest river carrying clean water over a gristly bottom.

On the banks of these rivers, water rats live in deep burrows. There are rats that are completely gray from old age.

If you quietly monitor the hole, you can see the rat catching fish. She crawls out of the hole, dives very deep and emerges with a terrible noise. Yellow water lilies sway on wide circles of water. The rat holds a silver fish in its mouth and swims with it to the shore. When the fish is larger than the rat, the struggle lasts a long time, and the rat crawls out onto the shore tired, with eyes red from anger.

To make swimming easier, water rats bite off a long stem of the kugi and swim holding it in their teeth. The stem of the kugi is full of air cells. It perfectly holds water even if it is not as heavy as a rat.

Zhilinsky tried to drain the Meshchera swamps. Nothing came of this venture. The soil of Meshchera is peat, podzol and sand. Only potatoes will grow well on the sands. The wealth of Meshchera is not in the soil, but in the forests, peat and water meadows along the left bank of the Oka. Some scientists compare these meadows in terms of fertility to the Nile floodplain. The meadows produce excellent hay.

Forests

Meshchera is a remnant of the forest ocean. Meshchera forests are as majestic as cathedrals. Even an old professor, not at all inclined to poetry, wrote the following words in a study about the Meshchera region: “Here in the mighty pine forests it is so light that a bird flying hundreds of steps into the depths can be seen.”

You walk through dry pine forests as if you were walking on a deep, expensive carpet; for kilometers the ground is covered with dry, soft moss. In the gaps between the pine trees, the sunlight lies with oblique cuts. Flocks of birds scatter to the sides whistling and making light noise. The forests rustle in the wind. The hum passes through the tops of the pines like waves. A lone plane, floating at a dizzying height, seems like a destroyer observed from the bottom of the sea.

Powerful air currents are visible to the naked eye. They rise from the ground to the sky. The clouds melt while standing still. The dry breath of the forests and the smell of juniper must also reach the planes.

In addition to pine forests, mast and ship forests, there are forests of spruce, birch and rare patches of broad-leaved linden, elm and oak. There are no roads in oak copses. They are impassable and dangerous because of ants. On a hot day, it is almost impossible to pass through an oak thicket: in a minute your entire body, from your heels to your head, will be covered with angry red ants. strong jaws. Harmless antbears roam in the oak thickets. They pick up old stumps and lick ant eggs.

The forests in Meshchera are robber-like and deaf. There is no greater relaxation and pleasure than walking all day through these forests, along unfamiliar roads to some distant lake.

The path in the forests is kilometers of silence and windlessness. This is a mushroom prel, the careful flitting of birds. These are sticky butternuts covered with pine needles, coarse grass, cold porcini mushrooms, strawberries, purple bells in the meadows, the trembling of aspen leaves, solemn light and, finally, forest twilight, when dampness emanates from the mosses and fireflies burn in the grass.

The sunset glows heavily on the treetops, gilding them with ancient gilding. Below, at the foot of the pines, it is already dark and dull. Bats fly silently and seem to look into your face. Some incomprehensible ringing is heard in the forests - the sound of the evening, the end of the day.

And in the evening the lake will finally sparkle, like a black, askew mirror. The night is already standing over it and looking into its dark water - a night full of stars. In the west, the dawn is still smoldering, bitterns are screaming in the thickets of wolfberries, and cranes are muttering and fiddling on the moss, disturbed by the smoke of the fire.

All night long the fire flares up and then goes out. The foliage of the birch trees hangs motionless. Dew flows down the white trunks. And you can hear how somewhere very far away - it seems, beyond the ends of the earth - an old rooster crows hoarsely in the forester's hut.

In an extraordinary, never-heard-of silence, dawn arises. The sky in the east is turning green. Venus lights up with blue crystal at dawn. This best time days. Everyone is still asleep. The water is sleeping, the water lilies are sleeping, the fish are sleeping with their noses buried in snags, the birds are sleeping, and only the owls are flying around the fire slowly and silently, like clumps of white fluff.

The pot is angry and mutters on the fire. For some reason we speak in a whisper - we are afraid to scare away the dawn. Heavy ducks rush by with a tin whistle. The fog begins to swirl over the water. We pile mountains of branches into the fire and watch how a huge White sun- the sun of an endless summer day.

So we live in a tent on forest lakes for several days. Our hands smell of smoke and lingonberries - this smell does not disappear for weeks. We sleep two hours a day and hardly feel tired. Two or three hours of sleep in the forests must be worth many hours of sleep in the stuffiness of city houses, in the stale air of asphalt streets.

Once we spent the night on Black Lake, in tall thickets, near a large pile of old brushwood.

We took with us a rubber inflatable boat and at dawn we rode it beyond the edge of the coastal water lilies to fish. Decayed leaves lay in a thick layer at the bottom of the lake, and driftwood floated in the water.

Suddenly, at the very side of the boat, a huge humpbacked black fish with a dorsal fin as sharp as a kitchen knife emerged. The fish dived and passed under the rubber boat. The boat rocked. The fish surfaced again. It must have been a giant pike. She could have hurt rubber boat with a feather and cut it open like a razor.

I hit the water with my oar. In response, the fish lashed its tail with terrible force and again passed right under the boat. We stopped fishing and began rowing towards the shore, towards our bivouac. The fish kept walking next to the boat.

We drove into the coastal thickets of water lilies and were preparing to land, but at that time a shrill yelp and a trembling, heart-grabbing howl were heard from the shore. Where we launched the boat, on the shore, on the trampled grass, a she-wolf with three cubs stood with her tail between her legs and howled, raising her muzzle to the sky. She howled long and boringly; the cubs squealed and hid behind their mother. The black fish again passed right next to the side and hooked its feather on the oar.

I threw a heavy lead sinker at the wolf. She jumped back and trotted away from the shore. And we saw how she crawled with the wolf cubs into a round hole in a pile of brushwood not far from our tent.

We landed, made a fuss, drove the she-wolf out of the brushwood and moved the bivouac to another place.

Black Lake is named after the color of the water. The water there is black and clear.

In Meshchera, almost all lakes have water of different colors. Most lakes have black water. In other lakes (for example, in Chernenkoe) the water resembles shiny mascara. It is difficult to imagine this rich, dense color without seeing it. And at the same time, the water in this lake, as well as in Chernoe, is completely transparent.

This color is especially beautiful in the fall, when yellow and red leaves of birch and aspens fly to the black water. They cover the water so thickly that the boat rustles through the leaves and leaves behind a shiny black road.

But this color is also good in summer, when white lilies lie on the water, as if on extraordinary glass. Black water has an excellent reflection property: it is difficult to distinguish real shores from reflected ones, real thickets from their reflection in the water.

In Lake Urzhenskoe the water is purple, in Segden it is yellowish, in the Great Lake it is pewter in color, and in the lakes beyond Proy it is slightly bluish. In meadow lakes, the water is clear in summer, and in autumn it acquires a greenish sea color and even the smell of sea water.

But most lakes are still black. Old people say that the blackness is caused by the fact that the bottom of the lakes is covered with a thick layer of fallen leaves. Brown foliage produces a dark infusion. But this is not entirely true. The color is explained by the peat bottom of the lakes - the older the peat, the darker the water.

I mentioned the Meshchersky boats. They are similar to Polynesian pies. They are hollowed out from one piece of wood. Only on the bow and stern they are riveted with forged nails with large heads.

The canoe is very narrow, light, agile, and can be used to navigate the smallest channels.

Meadows

Between the forests and the Oka River stretch a wide belt of water meadows,

At dusk, the meadows look like the sea. As if on the sea, the sun sets on the grass, and signal lights burn like beacons on the banks of the Oka. Just as in the sea, fresh winds blow over the meadows, and the high sky has overturned into a pale green bowl.

In the meadows the old riverbed of the Oka stretches for many kilometers. His name is Prorva.

This is a dead, deep and still river with steep banks. The banks are overgrown with tall, old, three-girth sedges, hundred-year-old willows, rose hips, umbrella grasses and blackberries.

We called one reach on this river “Fantastic Prorva”, because nowhere and none of us have seen such huge, twice the height of a man, burrs, blue thorns, such tall lungwort and horse sorrel and such gigantic puffball mushrooms as on this Ples.

The density of the grass in other places on Prorva is such that it is impossible to land from a boat - the grass stands like an impenetrable elastic wall. They push people away. The grasses are intertwined with treacherous blackberry loops and hundreds of dangerous and sharp snares.

There is often a slight haze over Prorva. Its color changes depending on the time of day. In the morning there is a blue fog, in the afternoon there is a whitish haze, and only at dusk the air over Prorva becomes transparent, like spring water. The foliage of the sedges barely trembles, pink from the sunset, and the Prorvina pikes beat loudly in the pools.

In the mornings, when you can’t walk ten steps on the grass without getting completely wet from the dew, the air on Prorva smells of bitter willow bark, grassy freshness, and sedge. It is thick, cool and healing.

Every autumn I spend many days in a tent on Prorva. To get a vague idea of ​​what Prorva is, you should describe at least one Prorva day. I come to Prorva by boat. I have with me a tent, an axe, a lantern, a backpack with food, a sapper's shovel, some dishes, tobacco, matches and fishing equipment: fishing rods, donks, saddles, girders and, most importantly, a jar of underleaf worms. I collect them in the old garden under heaps of fallen leaves.

On Prorva I already have my favorite places, always very remote. One of them is a sharp turn in the river, where it spills into a small lake with very high banks overgrown with vines.

There I pitch a tent. But first of all, I haul hay. Yes, I admit, I drag hay from the nearest stack, but I drag it very deftly, so that even the most experienced eye of an old collective farmer will not notice any flaw in the stack. I put the hay under the canvas floor of the tent. Then when I leave, I take it back.

The tent must be stretched so that it hums like a drum. Then you need to dig it in so that when it rains, water flows into the ditches on the sides of the tent and does not wet the floor.

The tent is set up. It is warm and dry. Flashlight " bat» hanging on a hook. In the evening I light it and even read in the tent, but I usually don’t read for long - there is too much interference on Prorva: either a corncrake will start screaming behind a nearby bush, then a pound of fish will strike with a cannon roar, then a willow twig will shoot deafeningly in the fire and scatter sparks, then over a crimson glow will begin to flare up in the thickets and the gloomy moon will rise over the expanses of the evening earth. And immediately the corncrakes will subside and the bittern will stop buzzing in the swamps - the moon rises in wary silence. She appears as the owner of these dark waters, hundred-year-old willows, mysterious long nights.

Tents of black willows hang overhead. Looking at them, you begin to understand the meaning of old words. Obviously, such tents old times were called "canopy". Under the shadow of willows... And for some reason on such nights you call the constellation Orion Stozhari, and the word “midnight”, which in the city sounds, perhaps, like a literary concept, takes on real meaning here. This darkness under the willows, and the shine of the September stars, and the bitterness of the air, and the distant fire in the meadows, where the boys guard the horses driven into the night - all this is midnight. Somewhere far away, a watchman is chiming the clock on a village bell tower. He hits for a long time, measuredly - twelve blows. Then again dark silence. Only occasionally on the Oka will a tugboat scream in a sleepy voice.

The night drags on slowly: it seems there will be no end to it. Sleeping in the tent on autumn nights is sound and fresh, despite the fact that you wake up every two hours and go out to look at the sky - to find out if Sirius has risen, if the streak of dawn is visible in the east.

The night is getting colder with each passing hour. By dawn, the air already burns your face with a slight frost, the tent flaps, covered with a thick layer of crisp frost, sag slightly, and the grass turns gray from the first matinee.

It's time to get up. In the east, the dawn is already filling with a quiet light, the huge outlines of willows are already visible in the sky, the stars are already dimming. I go down to the river and wash myself from the boat. The water is warm, it even seems slightly heated.

The sun is rising. The frost is melting. The coastal sands become dark with dew.

I'm boiling strong tea in a smoky tin teapot. Hard soot is similar to enamel. Willow leaves, burnt in the fire, float in the kettle.

I've been fishing all morning. From the boat I check the spans that have been placed across the river since the evening. Empty hooks come first - the ruffs have eaten all the bait on them. But then the cord stretches, cuts the water, and a living silver shine appears in the depths - it’s a flat bream walking on a hook. Behind it you can see a fat and stubborn perch, then a small bee with yellow piercing eyes. The pulled out fish seems icy.

Aksakov’s words entirely refer to these days spent on Prorva:

“On a green, flowering bank, above the dark depths of a river or lake, in the shade of bushes, under the tent of a gigantic sedge or curly alder, quietly fluttering its leaves in the bright mirror of the water, imaginary passions will subside, imaginary storms will subside, selfish dreams will crumble, unrealizable hopes will scatter. Nature will assume its eternal rights. Together with the fragrant, free, refreshing air, you will breathe into yourself serenity of thought, meekness of feeling, condescension towards others and even towards yourself.”

A slight digression from the topic

There are many different fishing incidents associated with Prorva. I will tell you about one of them.

The great tribe of fishermen who lived in the village of Solotche, near Prorva, was excited. A tall old man with long silver teeth came to Solotcha from Moscow. He also fished.

The old man was fishing with a spinning rod: an English fishing rod with a spoon - an artificial nickel fish.

We despised spinning. We watched the old man with gloating as he patiently wandered along the shores of the meadow lakes and, swinging his spinning rod like a whip, invariably dragged an empty spoon out of the water.

And right there, Lenka, the shoemaker’s son, was dragging fish not with an English fishing line, which cost a hundred rubles, but with an ordinary rope. The old man sighed and complained:

– Cruel injustice of fate!

He even spoke very politely to the boys, using “you”, and used old-fashioned, long-forgotten words in conversation. The old man was unlucky. We have long known that all fishermen are divided into deep losers and lucky ones. The lucky ones even have fish that bite on a dead worm. In addition, there are fishermen who are envious and cunning. Cunning people think that they can outwit any fish, but never in my life have I seen such an angler outwit even the grayest ruff, not to mention the Roach.

It’s better not to go fishing with an envious person - he won’t bite anyway. In the end, having lost weight from envy, he will begin to throw his fishing rod towards yours, slap the sinker on the water and scare away all the fish.

So the old man was out of luck. In one day, he tore off at least ten expensive lures on snags, walked around covered in blood and blisters from mosquitoes, but did not give up.

Once we took him with us to Lake Segden.

All night the old man dozed by the fire, standing like a horse: sit on damp earth he was afraid. At dawn I fried eggs with lard. The sleepy old man wanted to step over the fire to get bread from his bag, stumbled and stepped on a scrambled egg with his huge foot.

He pulled out his leg, smeared with yolk, shook it in the air and hit the jug of milk. The jug cracked and crumbled into small pieces. And the beautiful baked milk with a slight rustle was sucked into the wet ground before our eyes.

- Guilty! - said the old man, apologizing to the jug.

Then he went to the lake, dipped his foot in the cold water and dangled it for a long time to wash the scrambled eggs off his shoe. We couldn’t utter a word for two minutes, and then we laughed in the bushes until midday.

Everyone knows that if a fisherman is unlucky, sooner or later he will have such good luck that they will talk about it throughout the village for at least ten years. Finally such a failure happened.

The old man and I went to Prorva. The meadows had not yet been mown. A palm-sized chamomile lashed my legs.

The old man walked and, stumbling over the grass, repeated:

– What a aroma, citizens! What an intoxicating aroma!

There was no wind over Prorva. Even the willow leaves did not move and did not show their silvery underside, as happens in a light wind. There are bumblebees in the heated grasses “zundels”.

I sat on a broken raft, smoked and watched the feather float. I waited patiently for the float to quiver and go into the green depths of the river. The old man walked along the sandy shore with a spinning rod. I heard his sighs and exclamations from behind the bushes:

– What a wonderful, enchanting morning!

Then I heard quacking, stomping, sniffling and sounds behind the bushes, very similar to the mooing of a cow with its mouth gagged. Something heavy splashed into the water, and the old man shouted in a thin voice:

- My God, what a beauty!

I jumped off the raft, reached the shore in waist-deep water and ran up to the old man. He stood behind the bushes near the water, and on the sand in front of him an old pike was breathing heavily. At first glance, there was no less than a pound in her.

But the old man hissed at me and with trembling hands took his pince-nez out of his pocket. He put it on, bent over the pike and began to examine it with the same delight with which connoisseurs admire a rare painting in a museum.

The pike did not take its angry narrowed eyes off the old man.

– Looks great like a crocodile! - said Lenka.

The pike glanced sideways at Lenka, and he jumped back. It seemed that the pike croaked: “Well, just wait, you fool, I’ll tear off your ears!”

- Darling! - the old man exclaimed and leaned even lower over the pike.

Then that failure happened, which is still talked about in the village.

The pike took a moment, blinked its eye and hit the old man with its tail on the Cheek with all its might. A deafening crack of a slap was heard over the sleepy water. The pince-nez flew into the river. The pike jumped up and fell heavily into the water.

- Alas! – the old man shouted, but it was already too late.

Lenka danced to the side and shouted in an impudent voice:

- Yeah! Got! Don't catch, don't catch, don't catch when you don't know how!

That same day, the old man wound up his spinning rods and left for Moscow. And no one else disturbed the silence of the channels and rivers, did not pick off the cold river lilies with a spinner, and did not admire out loud what is best to admire without words.

More about meadows

There are a lot of lakes in the meadows. Their names are strange and varied: Tish, Byk, Hotets, Promoina, Kanava, Staritsa, Muzga, Bobrovka, Selyanskoe Lake and, finally, Lombardskoe.

At the bottom of Hotz lie black bog oaks. There is always a lull in Silence. High banks protect the lake from the winds. There were once beavers in Bobrovka, but now they are chasing young shelesper. Gulch – deep lake with such capricious fish that only a person with very good nerves can catch it. Bull is a mysterious, distant lake, stretching for many kilometers. In it, shoals give way to whirlpools, but there is little shade on the banks, and therefore we avoid it. There are amazing golden tench in Kanava: each tench bites for half an hour. By autumn, the banks of the Kanava are covered with purple spots, but not from autumn foliage, but from the abundance of very large rose hips.

On Staritsa, along the banks there are sand dunes overgrown with Chernobyl grass and string. Grass grows on the dunes; it is called grass. These are dense gray-green balls, similar to a tightly closed rose. If you take such a ball out of the sand and place it with its roots up, it begins to slowly toss and turn, like a beetle turned over on its back, straightens its petals on one side, rests on them and turns over again with its roots towards the ground.

In Muzga the depth reaches twenty meters. Flocks of cranes rest on the banks of the Muzga during the autumn migration. Selyanskoye Lake is all overgrown with black kuga. Hundreds of ducks nest in it.

How names stick! In the meadows near Staritsa there is a small nameless lake. We named it Lombard in honor of the bearded watchman - “Langobard”. He lived on the shore of a lake in a hut, guarding cabbage gardens. And a year later, to our surprise, the name stuck, but the collective farmers remade it in their own way and began to call this lake Ambarsky.

The variety of grasses in the meadows is unheard of. The unmown meadows are so fragrant that, out of habit, your head becomes foggy and heavy. Dense, tall thickets of chamomile, chicory, clover, wild dill, cloves, coltsfoot, dandelions, gentian, plantain, bluebells, buttercups and dozens of other flowering herbs stretch for kilometers. Meadow strawberries are ripening in the grass before mowing.

Old men

Talkative old people live in the meadows - in dugouts and huts. These are either watchmen at collective farm gardens, or ferrymen, or basket makers. Basket workers set up huts near the coastal willow thickets.

Acquaintance with these old people usually begins during a thunderstorm or rain, when they have to sit in huts until the thunderstorm falls across the Oka River or into the forests and a rainbow overturns over the meadows.

Acquaintance always takes place according to a once and for all established custom. First we light a cigarette, then there is a polite and cunning conversation aimed at finding out who we are, after which there are a few vague words about the weather (“the rains are fine” or, conversely, “it will finally wash the grass, otherwise everything is dry and dry.” "). And only after this the conversation can freely move on to any topic.

Most of all, old people love to talk about unusual things: about the new Moscow Sea, “water gliders” (gliders) on the Oka, French food (“they make fish soup from frogs and slurp it with silver spoons”), badger races and a collective farmer from near Pronsk, who, They say he earned so many workdays that he bought a car with music with them.

Most often I met with a grumpy old man who was a basket-maker. He lived in a hut on Muzga. His name was Stepan, and his nickname was “Beard on the Poles.”

Grandfather was thin, thin-legged, like an old horse. He spoke indistinctly, his beard stuck into his mouth; the wind ruffled my grandfather's shaggy face.

Once I spent the night in Stepan’s hut. I arrived late. It was a gray, warm twilight, with hesitant rain falling. He rustled through the bushes, died down, then started making noise again, as if he was playing hide and seek with us.

“This rain is fussing about like a child,” said Stepan. “Purely a child, he moves here, there, or even hides, listening to our conversation.”

A girl of about twelve, light-eyed, quiet, and frightened, was sitting by the fire. She spoke only in a whisper.

- Look, the fool from Zaborye has gotten lost! - the grandfather said affectionately. “I searched and searched for the heifer in the meadows, and finally found it until dark. She resorted to the fire to her grandfather. What are you going to do with her?

Stepan pulled out a yellow cucumber from his pocket and gave it to the girl:

- Eat, don’t hesitate.

The girl took the cucumber, nodded her head, but did not eat it. Grandfather put the pot on the fire and began to cook the stew.

“Here, my dears,” said the grandfather, lighting a cigarette, “you wander, as if hired, through the meadows, through the lakes, but you have no idea that there were all these meadows, and lakes, and monastery forests.” From the Oka itself to Pra, for almost a hundred miles, the entire forest was monastic. And now it’s a people’s forest, now it’s a labor forest.

- Why were they given such forests, grandfather? – the girl asked.

- And the dog knows why! The foolish women said - for holiness. They atone for our sins before the Mother of God. What are our sins? We hardly had any sins. Eh, darkness, darkness!

Grandfather sighed.

“I also went to churches, it was a sin,” the grandfather muttered embarrassedly. - What's the point! Lapti was disfigured for nothing.

Grandfather paused and crumbled some black bread into the stew.

“Our life was bad,” he said, lamenting. “Neither the men nor the women were happy enough.” The man went back and forth - the man, at least, would get drunk on vodka, but the woman completely disappeared. Her boys were neither drunk nor well-fed. All her life she trampled around the stove with her hands, until the worms appeared in her eyes. Don't laugh, stop it! I the right word said about worms. Those worms in the women's eyes started from the fire.

- Horrible! – the girl said quietly.

“Don’t be scared,” said the grandfather. – You won’t get worms. Now the girls have found their happiness. Previously, people thought that happiness lives on warm waters, in blue seas, but in reality it turned out that it lives here, in a shard,” the grandfather tapped his forehead with his clumsy finger. – For example, Manka Malyavina. She was a vocal girl, that's all. In the old days, she would have cried out her voice overnight, but now look what happened. Every day, Malyavin has a pure holiday: the accordion plays, pies are baked. And why? Because, my dears, how can he, Vaska Malyavin, not have fun living when Manka sends him, the old devil, two hundred rubles every month!

- Where from? – the girl asked.

- From Moscow. She sings in the theater. Those who have heard it say it is heavenly singing. All the people are crying their eyes out. This is what it’s becoming now, a woman’s lot. She came last summer, Manka. So how will you know? A thin girl brought me a gift. She sang in the reading room. I’m familiar to everything, but I’ll tell you straight, it grabbed me by the heart, but I don’t understand why. Where, I think, was such power given to a person? And how did it disappear from us, men, from our stupidity for thousands of years! Now you’ll trample on the ground, you’ll listen here, you’ll look there, and it seems like it’s all too soon to die—there’s no way, my dear, you can’t choose the time to die.

Grandfather took the stew off the fire and reached into the hut for spoons.

“We should live and live, Yegorych,” he said from the hut. – We were born a little early. You guessed wrong.

The girl looked into the fire with bright, sparkling eyes and thought about something of her own.

Home of Talents

On the edge of the Meshchersky forests, not far from Ryazan, lies the village of Solotcha. Solotcha is famous for its climate, dunes, rivers and pine forests. There is electricity in Solotch.

Peasant horses, herded into the meadows at night, look wildly at the white stars of electric lanterns hanging in the distant forest, and snore with fear.

I lived for the first year in Solotch with a meek old woman, old maid and the village dressmaker, Marya Mikhailovna. She was called the age-old woman - she whiled away her entire life alone, without a husband, without children.

In her cleanly washed toy hut, several clocks were ticking and two ancient paintings by an unknown Italian master hung. I rubbed them with raw onions, and the Italian morning, full of sun and reflections of the water, filled the quiet hut. The painting was left to Marya Mikhailovna’s father as payment for the room by an unknown foreign artist. He came to Solotcha to study the icon-painting skills there. He was an almost beggarly and strange man. When leaving, he promised that the painting would be sent to him in Moscow in exchange for money. The artist did not send any money - he died suddenly in Moscow.

Behind the wall of the hut, the neighbor's garden rustled at night. In the garden stood a two-story house, surrounded by a solid fence. I wandered into this house looking for a room. A beautiful gray-haired old woman spoke to me. She looked at me sternly blue eyes and refused to rent out the room. Over her shoulder, I saw walls hung with paintings.

- Whose is this house? – I asked the age-old woman.

- Yes, of course! Academician Pozhalostin, famous engraver. He died before the revolution, and the old woman was his daughter. There are two old women living there. One is completely decrepit, hunchbacked.

I was perplexed. Engraver Pozhalostin is one of the best Russian engravers, his works are scattered everywhere: here, in France, in England, and suddenly - Solotch! But soon I stopped being perplexed when I heard how the collective farmers, while digging potatoes, argued whether the artist Arkhipov would come to Solotcha this year or not.

Pozhalostin is a former shepherd. The artists Arkhipov and Malyavin, the sculptor Golubkina - all from these places in Ryazan. There is almost no hut in Solotch that does not have paintings. You ask: who wrote? They answer: grandfather, or father, or brother. Solotchintsy were once famous bogomaz.

The name Pozhalostina is still pronounced with respect. He taught Solotsk residents to draw. They went to him secretly, bringing their canvases wrapped in a clean rag for evaluation - for praise or reproach.

For a long time I could not get used to the idea that next to me, behind the wall, in the darkish rooms of the old house, lay rare books on art and copper engraved boards. Late at night I went to the well to drink water. There was frost on the frame, the bucket burned my fingers, icy stars stood over the silent and black edge, and only in Pozhalostin’s house a window glowed dimly: his daughter read until dawn. From time to time she probably raised her glasses to her forehead and listened - she guarded the house.

The next year I settled with the Pozhalostins. I rented an old bathhouse in their garden. The garden was deserted, covered in lilacs, wild rose hips, apple trees and maples covered with lichen.

On the walls in the Pozhalostina house hung beautiful engravings - portraits of people of the last century. I couldn't get rid of their gaze. When I was repairing fishing rods or writing, a crowd of women and men in tightly buttoned frock coats, a crowd of the seventies, looked at me from the walls with deep attention. I raised my head, met the eyes of Turgenev or General Ermolov, and for some reason I felt awkward.

Solotchinsky district - country talented people. Yesenin was born not far from Solotcha.

One day an old woman in a blanket came to my bathhouse and brought me sour cream to sell.

“If you still need sour cream,” she said affectionately, “then come to me, I have it.” Ask the church where Tatyana Yesenina lives. Everyone will show you.

– Yesenin Sergei is not your relative?

- Does he sing? - asked the grandmother.

- Yes, poet.

“My nephew,” the grandmother sighed and wiped her mouth with the end of her handkerchief. “He was a good poet, but he was painfully strange.” So if you need sour cream, come to me, honey.

Kuzma Zotov lives on one of the forest lakes near Solotcha. Before the revolution, Kuzma was an irresponsible poor man. Because of his poverty, he retained the habit of speaking in a low voice, imperceptibly - it was better not to speak, but to remain silent. But from this same poverty, from the “cockroach life,” he retained a stubborn desire to make his children “real people” at any cost.

In the Zotovs' hut there appeared last years a lot of new things - radio, newspapers, books. All that remains from the old days is a decrepit dog - he just doesn’t want to die.

“No matter how you feed him, he still gets thin,” says Kuzma. “He remained such a poor factory for the rest of his life.” Those who are dressed cleaner are afraid of them and are buried under the bench. He thinks - gentlemen!

Kuzma has three sons who are Komsomol members. The fourth son is still just a boy, Vasya.

One of the sons, Misha, is in charge of an experimental ichthyological station on Lake Velikoye, near the town of Spas-Klepiki. One summer Misha brought home an old violin without strings - he bought it from some old woman. The violin was lying in the old woman’s hut, in a chest, left over from the landowners Shcherbatovs. The violin was made in Italy, and Misha decided in the winter, when there would be little work at the experimental station, to go to Moscow and show it to experts. He didn't know how to play the violin.

“If it turns out to be valuable,” he told me, “I’ll give it to one of our best violinists.”

The second son, Vanya, is a teacher of botany and zoology in a large forest village, a hundred kilometers from his native lake. During vacation, he helps his mother with housework, and during free time wanders through the forests or around the lake in waist-deep water, looking for some rare algae. He promised to show them to his students, who were nimble and terribly curious.

Vanya is a shy person. From his father he inherited gentleness, goodwill towards people, and a love of sincere conversations.

Vasya is still in school. There is no school on the lake - there are only four huts - and Vasya has to run to school through the forest, seven kilometers away.

Vasya is an expert in his places. He knows every path in the forest, every badger hole, the plumage of every bird. His gray, narrowed eyes have extraordinary vigilance.

Two years ago an artist came to the lake from Moscow. He took Vasya as his assistant. Vasya transported the artist on a canoe to the other side of the lake, changed his water for paints (the artist painted with Lefranc's French watercolors), and handed him lead tubes from a box.

One day the artist and Vasya were caught on the shore by a thunderstorm. I remember her. It was not a thunderstorm, but a swift, treacherous hurricane. Dust, pink from the shine of lightning, swept across the ground. The forests rustled as if the oceans had broken through the dams and were flooding Meshchera. Thunder shook the earth.

The artist and Vasya barely made it home. In the hut, the artist discovered a missing tin box with watercolors. The colors were lost, the magnificent colors of Lefranc! The artist searched for them for several days, but did not find them and soon left for Moscow.

Two months later in Moscow, the artist received a letter written in large, clumsy letters.

“Hello,” wrote Vasya. – Write down what to do with your crashes and how to send them to you. After you left, I looked for them for two weeks, searched everything until I found them, only I caught a bad cold because it was already raining, I got sick and couldn’t write to you earlier. I almost died, but now I’m walking, although I’m still very weak. So don't be angry. Dad said that I had inflammation in my lungs. Send me, if you have any opportunity, a book about all kinds of trees and colored pencils - I want to draw. The snow was already falling here, but it just melted, and in the forest under the Christmas tree - you look - and there’s a hare sitting! I remain Vasya Zotov.”

My house

The small house where I live in Meshchera deserves a description. This is a former bathhouse, a log hut covered with gray planks. The house is located in a dense garden, but for some reason it is fenced off from the garden by a high palisade. This stockade is a trap for village cats who love fish. Every time I return from fishing, cats of all stripes - red, black, gray and white with tan - lay siege to the house. They scurry around, sit on the fence, on roofs, on old apple trees, howl at each other and wait for the evening. They all stare at the kukan with fish - it is suspended from the branch of an old apple tree in such a way that it is almost impossible to get it.

In the evening, the cats carefully climb over the palisade and gather under the kukan. They rise to hind legs, and with the front ones they make swift and deft swings, trying to catch the kukan. From a distance it looks like the cats are playing volleyball. Then some impudent cat jumps up, grabs the fish with a death grip, hangs on it, swings and tries to tear the fish off. The rest of the cats hit each other's whiskered faces out of frustration. It ends with me leaving the bathhouse with a lantern. The cats, taken by surprise, rush to the stockade, but do not have time to climb over it, but squeeze between the stakes and get stuck. Then they lay back their ears, close their eyes and begin to scream desperately, begging for mercy.

In autumn, the whole house is covered with leaves, and in two small rooms it becomes light, like in a flying garden.

The stoves are crackling, there is a smell of apples and cleanly washed floors. Tits sit on branches, pour glass balls in their throats, ring, crackle and look at the windowsill, where there is a slice of black bread.

I rarely spend the night in the house. I spend most nights at the lakes, and when I stay at home I sleep in an old gazebo at the bottom of the garden. It is overgrown with wild grapes. In the mornings the sun hits it through the purple, lilac, green and lemon foliage, and it always seems to me that I wake up inside a lit tree. The sparrows look into the gazebo with surprise. They are deadly busy for hours. They're ticking on the ground round table. The sparrows approach them, listen to the ticking with one ear or the other, and then peck the clock hard at the dial.

It’s especially good in the gazebo on quiet autumn nights, when the slow, sheer rain is making a low noise in the garden.

The cool air barely moves the candle tongue. Angular shadows from grape leaves lie on the ceiling of the gazebo. Moth, looking like a lump of gray raw silk, sits on an open book and leaves the finest shiny dust on the page.

It smells like rain - a gentle and at the same time pungent smell of moisture, damp garden paths.

At dawn I wake up. The fog rustles in the garden. Leaves are falling in the fog. I pull a bucket of water out of the well. A frog jumps out of the bucket. I douse myself with well water and listen to the shepherd’s horn - he is still singing far away, right at the outskirts.

I go to the empty bathhouse and boil tea. A cricket starts its song on the stove. He sings very loudly and does not pay attention to my steps or the clinking of cups.

It's getting light. I take the oars and go to the river. The chained dog Divny is sleeping at the gate. He hits the ground with his tail, but does not raise his head. Marvelous has long been accustomed to my leaving at dawn. He just yawns after me and sighs noisily.

I'm sailing in the fog. The East is turning pink. The smell of smoke from rural stoves can no longer be heard. All that remains is the silence of the water, thickets, and centuries-old willows.

Ahead is a deserted September day. Ahead - lost in this huge world fragrant foliage, grass, autumn withering, calm waters, clouds, low sky. And I always feel this confusion as happiness.

Unselfishness

You can write a lot more about the Meshchera region. You can write that this region is very rich in forests and peat, hay and potatoes, milk and berries. But I don't write about it on purpose. Should we really love our land just because it is rich, that it produces abundant harvests and that its natural powers can be used for our well-being!

This is not the only reason we love our native places. We also love them because, even if they are not rich, they are beautiful to us. I love the Meshchersky region because it is beautiful, although all its charm is not revealed immediately, but very slowly, gradually.

At first glance, this is a quiet and unwise land under a dim sky. But the more you get to know it, the more, almost to the point of pain in your heart, you begin to love this ordinary land. And if I have to defend my country, then somewhere in the depths of my heart I will know that I am also defending this piece of land, which taught me to see and understand beauty, no matter how inconspicuous in appearance it may be - this thoughtful forest land, love for who will never be forgotten, just as first love is never forgotten.

Routes of Konstantin Paustovsky

Thinking about where to go for the May holidays, on some hunch I took a volume of Paustovsky from the shelf. After reading just a few pages, I took it out of the drawer desk kilometer maps, and by the end of the story the route of the future trip has actually already taken shape. The story was called “The Meshchera Side”, and it captivated my imagination so much that I wanted to immediately pack my things, jump behind the wheel and set off along those amazing places, about which the great Russian writer spoke. Go to see for yourself all these incredible forests, meadows, lakes, swamps and their inhabitants.

Along the Mshar border

I will not name the latitudes and longitudes of the Meshchera region. Suffice it to say that it lies between Vladimir and Ryazan, not far from Moscow, and is one of the few surviving forest islands, a remnant of the “great belt of coniferous forests.” It once stretched from Polesie to the Urals.
K. Paustovsky

Less than two hundred kilometers from the capital to the east - and here it is, the mysterious Meshchera. Nashkaravan dissolves in its endless forests. By the way, when I invited my friends to join this small expedition, some agreed with pleasure, others, on the contrary, began to dissuade us: they say that in the spring you can only drown in Meshchera. But when else, if not at this time, can you see the great Oka flood and entire glades of forest primroses, hear the muttering of galloping black grouse and the morning discord of birds? In addition, at the beginning of May, the traditional season of peat fires and mosquitoes, for which Meshchera is also famous, has not yet arrived.

Like Paustovsky, who first came to this region from the north, through Gus-Khrustalny and the “quiet station of Tuma,” we also began to find our way from the northwest. Using asphalt roads of local importance, lying to the right of the Vladimirsky tract, we reached Cherusti, crossed the railway and went into the forest, towards the abandoned, as it turned out, village of Krasnaya Gora. On the right we have “eight boron lakes”, which have a strange property: the smaller the lake, the deeper it is. Paustovsky went to them on foot; there were no roads there. After the war, their banks were cut into reclamation ditches and peat began to be extracted, and the mined-out areas were given over to dachas. Due to reclamation, the landscape has changed, there are more small lakes, and because of the spring flood, the area has completely turned into one continuous swamp. We drove south along the border of mshars - swamps, which are overgrown lakes. It was decided to leave the passage through the moshars for a drier season, and now to go out to the canals dug by the reclamation expedition of General Zhilinsky in the second half of the 19th century in order to make their way along them to the Nikolo-Radovitsky Monastery.

This is my Venice

Even under Alexander II, General Zhilinsky decided to drain the Meshchera swamps and create large lands for colonization near Moscow. An expedition was sent to Meshchera. She worked for twenty years, but no one wanted to settle on this land - it turned out to be very scarce.
K. Paustovsky

Once in Meshchera, the first thing we saw was the usual “six hundred square meters”, and on them - summer residents in characteristic gardening poses. But as soon as we delved deeper into the network of abandoned and active peat mines, the world around us completely changed. There was water all around, and only narrow elevated strips (old dumps along the banks of the canals) made it possible to move at least somehow, although they also went under water every now and then. The fact that these places were visited by people was reminded only by the occasional boats tied to the shore. Alas, these were not dugout boats “made from one piece of wood” described by Paustovsky, but completely modern wooden punts.

It’s a strange thing - during the time of Paustovsky, the canals dug by the expedition of Joseph Ippolitovich Zhilinsky “stalled and were overgrown with marsh grasses.” Now they looked clean, deep and almost navigable. Of course, it is May, the time of high water, but most likely since then they have been cleaned and renewed more than once in connection with peat mining, which began here in 1949.

The main thing is not to get stuck on the road

For a long time, it has been the custom in Rus' that no one makes as many mistakes when explaining the way as a local resident, especially if he is a talkative person.
K. Paustovsky

Now I know how terrible stories appear about those who disappeared without a trace in the swamps. Having asked the residents of the village of Radovitskiy Mokh about the way to the monastery, we patiently listened to a lengthy explanation that ended with the phrase: “But now you won’t be able to get through there - the canals have overflowed and everything is flooded.” “Okay,” we answered, “we won’t go through the swamps, so we’ll come back.” Didn't return. Two days later we got out opposite side peat bogs...

By the way, for a long time we could not understand whether peat mining was active or abandoned long ago. There is not a soul in the swamps, only animals and birds in huge quantities. And rare “ruins of the empire” in the form of abandoned equipment, rusty metal structures and the skeletons of incomprehensible structures. At some point we came to a branch of a narrow-gauge railway. The rails were shiny and in perfect order. But there was no movement on it either. Having made our way forward a few more kilometers, we came to a very strange point. First, two wooden towers appeared above the forest, then barracks and a house appeared, over which a red flag was flying. Trying to understand where we ended up in our wanderings in space and time, we drove closer. However, instead of fences, barbed wire and sad people in gray robes, a rather large area filled with peat-extracting equipment opened up to our eyes. All this wealth was protected by a red dog of an unknown breed and a friendly watchman named Volodya. On the flag there was an image of a shield with St. George the Victorious, and the towers were needed to monitor the fire situation. In addition, it turned out that the peat mining season opens at the end of May, and the road to the monastery from here is almost straight. “The main thing is that you don’t get stuck on the road. They renovate it every year, but it still fails,” the watchman Volodya admonished us with these words, and off we went...

Feeling of greatness
The narrow-gauge railway in the Meshchersky forests is the slowest railway in the Union.
K. Paustovsky

Everything turned out to be surprisingly normal with the road, and soon, having left the forest, we saw monastery buildings at the far end of the field, and when we saw it, we were forced... to turn around and look for another path. From edge to edge of the field, blocking our way, stretched a wide ditch about two meters deep, filled to the brim with rushing water. The search for a way out began again. It turned out that the flood had washed away many of the bridges between the channels, and we found ourselves almost on the island. Wandering along the canals, we never ceased to be amazed by the construction battalions of General Zhilinsky. The endless labyrinth we found ourselves inside took two decades to dig – with shovels, without any equipment!

After a long search, we reached the “mainland” along a narrow-gauge railway. Uneven rails, holes and an embankment that goes from under the hood to the horizon. The car moves at walking speed, but still shakes out the soul. A minute seems like an eternity, but there are still ten kilometers to go. Two hours... In some places you can drive down the embankment, but there is a risk... of falling through. The fact is that peat fires burned out voids underground.

The Nikolo-Radovitsky Monastery greeted us with ruins, a working well with holy water and a preserved sense of grandeur. The remains of its brick buildings date back to the 18th century, but the monastery itself is three hundred years older. It began with the monastery of the Greek monk Pachomius, who chose a place on an island in a neighboring lake, where, according to legend, there was a pagan temple. Here, at the beginning of the 16th century, the miraculous image of St. Nicholas, by the way, the patron saint of all travelers, was revealed. The image was highly revered by parishioners, but was persecuted by the authorities due to the fact that it was... a wooden sculpture. It was confiscated several times under the pretext of fighting idolatry, but, not daring to destroy it, it was returned. In 1935, after the closure and partial destruction of the monastery, the image was saved, and now it lives in the Paraskeva Pyatnitsa Church near Shatura.

Four troopers and a dog

Between the forests and the Oka River stretch a wide belt of water meadows. At dusk, the meadows look like the sea. As if on the sea, the sun sets on the grass, and signal lights burn like beacons on the banks of the Oka.
K. Paustovsky

Having gone to the Oka shore in Beloomut and looking around, I suddenly understood the meaning of the phrase “flood meadows”. There was no river, no banks, no meadows - there was a real sea. Even asphalt roads went under water. But they sank at different depths, and if in one place even Zhiguli “Zhiguli” dashed through the water, in another the men on the “loaf” unloaded the boat from the trailer, started the engine right “on the asphalt” and sailed away... Several ferries carrying cars across the Oka and pedestrians in the vicinity of Beloomut, did not work - due to the spill, they could not approach the shore in a convenient place. Seeing such a thing, we abandoned the idea of ​​driving along the Oka to look at the meadow lakes described by Paustovsky, and plotted a route to the north. Pine forests stand on sand, so you can always get through them.

Relying equally on intuition and the map, we went to the village of Seltsy, and from there, past military training grounds, marked on the map as pioneer camps, we moved to Shekhmino. Suddenly, a little away from the road, in the middle of the forest, we saw a low but very long concrete monument dedicated to the memory of Polish soldiers who died in the fight against fascism, with the date 1943. Strange... There were definitely no battles here. Upon my return, I found out that behind the monument is hidden the history of the formation of the Polish division named after Tadeusz Kosciuszko. It was formed from Poles captured in 1939 (in the process of annexation Western Ukraine and Belarus). After some time, the bulk of the prisoners were handed over to the British, and the rest were kept near Ryazan. Soon, a hunger riot broke out in the camp near Seltsy, which was immediately suppressed by NKVD units. More than a thousand Polish soldiers and officers were shot. From the Poles remaining in other camps, on May 14, 1943, a division was formed and sent to the Belorussian Front. And then the film “Four Tankmen and a Dog” appeared...

Black Lake

With great difficulty I got a map of the Meshchera region. There was a note on it: “The map was compiled from old surveys made before 1870.” I had to correct this map. The river beds have changed. Where there were swamps, in some places a young pine forest was already rustling; In place of other lakes there were swamps.
K. Paustovsky

We headed north again. On the map, the entire area was riddled with blue streaks of streams, lines of swamps and patches of lakes. Having entered the village of Belskoye, we noticed a black bell tower to the side, above the forest. She stood on the edge, resembling the wooden Leaning Tower of Pisa. The foundation of a church could be seen nearby. Looking at the rickety structure, I assumed that the bell tower was ready to collapse at the slightest wind. But inside the tree looked fresh and strong.

No matter how much we wanted to get to the described Paustovsky lakes with multi-colored water, it was still not the season. We only looked into Lake Urzhenskoe (an asphalt road was laid along its southern shore), where the “water is purple.” But alas, either something changed in the structure of its peat bottom, or there was inappropriate evening light, or I expected more... In general, if I had not read the purple hue of the water, I would hardly have paid attention to it. It is visible if you know about it, otherwise the water here, as in most other lakes, is simply black.

You can write a lot more about the Meshchera region. You can write that this region is very rich in forests and peat, hay and potatoes, milk and berries. But I don't write about it. Should we really love our land just because it is rich, that it produces abundant harvests and that its natural forces can be used for our well-being?
K. Paustovsky

text: Evgeniy KONSTANTINOV
photo: Evgeniy KONSTANTINOV
Irina KOROLEVA

Paustovsky Konstantin

Meshcherskaya side

Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky

MESHCHERSKAYA SIDE

ORDINARY EARTH

In the Meshchera region there are no special beauties and riches, except for forests, meadows and clear air. But still this region has great attractive power. He is very modest - just like Levitan's paintings. But in it, as in these paintings, lies all the charm and all the diversity of Russian nature, imperceptible at first glance.

What can you see in the Meshchera region? Flowering or mown meadows, pine forests, floodplains and forest lakes overgrown with black brush, haystacks smelling of dry and warm hay. Hay in stacks keeps you warm all winter.

I have had to spend the night in haystacks in October, when the grass at dawn is covered with frost, like salt. I dug a deep hole in the hay, climbed into it and slept all night in a haystack, as if in a locked room. And over the meadows there was cold rain and the wind came at oblique blows.

In the Meshchera region you can see pine forests, where it is so solemn and quiet that the bell of a lost cow can be heard far away, almost a kilometer away. But such silence exists in the forests only on windless days. In the wind, the forests rustle with a great ocean roar and the tops of the pine trees bend after the passing clouds.

In the Meshchera region you can see forest lakes with dark water, vast swamps covered with alder and aspen, lonely foresters’ huts charred from old age, sand, juniper, heather, schools of cranes and stars familiar to us at all latitudes.

What can you hear in the Meshchera region except the hum of pine forests? The cries of quails and hawks, the whistle of orioles, the fussy knocking of woodpeckers, the howl of wolves, the rustling of rain in the red needles, the evening cry of an accordion in the village, and at night - the multi-voiced crowing of roosters and the clapper of the village watchman.

But you can see and hear so little only in the first days. Then every day this region becomes richer, more diverse, dearer to the heart. And finally, the time comes when each dead river seems like its own, very familiar, when amazing stories can be told about it.

I broke the custom of geographers. Almost all geographical books begin with the same phrase: “This region lies between such and such degrees of eastern longitude and northern latitude and is bordered in the south by such and such a region, and in the north by such and such.” I will not name the latitudes and longitudes of the Meshchera region. Suffice it to say that it lies between Vladimir and Ryazan, not far from Moscow, and is one of the few surviving forest islands, a remnant of the “great belt of coniferous forests.” It once stretched from Polesie to the Urals. It included forests: Chernigov, Bryansk, Kaluga, Meshchersky, Mordovian and Kerzhensky. Ancient Rus' hid out in these forests from Tatar raids.

FIRST MEETING

For the first time I came to the Meshchera region from the north, from Vladimir.

Behind Gus-Khrustalny, at the quiet Tuma station, I changed to a narrow-gauge train. This was a train from Stephenson's time. The locomotive, similar to a samovar, whistled in a child's falsetto. The locomotive had an offensive nickname: “gelding.” He really looked like an old gelding. At the corners he groaned and stopped. Passengers got out to smoke. The silence of the forest stood around the gasping gelding. The smell of wild cloves, warmed by the sun, filled the carriages.

Passengers with things sat on the platforms - things did not fit into the carriage. Occasionally, along the way, bags, baskets, and carpenter's saws began to fly out from the platform onto the canvas, and their owner, often a rather ancient old woman, jumped out to get the things. Inexperienced passengers were frightened, but experienced ones, twisting goat legs and spitting, explained that this was the most convenient way to disembark the train closer to their village.

The narrow-gauge railway in the Meshchersky forests is the slowest railway in the Union.

The stations are littered with resinous logs and smell of fresh felling and wild forest flowers.

At the Pilevo station, a shaggy grandfather climbed into the carriage. He crossed himself to the corner where the round cast-iron stove was rattling, sighed and complained into space:

As soon as they grab me by the beard, go to town and tie up your bast shoes. But there is no consideration that maybe this matter isn’t worth a penny to them. They send me to the museum, where the Soviet government collects cards, price lists, and so on. They send you a statement.

Why are you lying?

Look - there!

The grandfather pulled out the crumpled piece of paper, blew the terry off it and showed it to the neighbor woman.

Manka, read it,” the woman said to the girl, who was rubbing her nose against the window.

Manka pulled her dress over her scratched knees, tucked her legs up and began to read in a hoarse voice:

- “It turns out that unfamiliar birds live in the lake, huge in stature, striped, only three; it is unknown where they flew from - we should take them alive for the museum, and therefore send catchers.”

“This,” the grandfather said sadly, “is why they break the bones of old people now.” And all Leshka is a Komsomol member, Ulcer is a passion! Ugh!

Grandfather spat. Baba wiped her round mouth with the end of her handkerchief and sighed. The locomotive whistled in fear, the forests hummed both to the right and to the left, raging like lakes. The west wind was in charge. The train struggled through its damp streams and was hopelessly late, panting at empty stops.

This is our existence,” the grandfather repeated. “They drove me to the museum last summer, and today is the year again!”

What did you find in the summer? - asked the woman.

Something?

Torchak. Well, the bone is ancient. She was lying in the swamp. Looks like a deer. Horns - from this carriage. Straight passion. They dug it for a whole month. The people were completely exhausted.

Why did he give in? - asked the woman.

The kids will be taught using it.

The following was reported about this find in “Research and Materials of the Regional Museum”:

“The skeleton went deep into the bog, not providing support for the diggers. We had to undress and go down into the bog, which was extremely difficult due to the icy temperature of the spring water. The huge horns, like the skull, were intact, but extremely fragile due to complete maceration (soaking ) bones. The bones were broken right in the hands, but as they dried, the hardness of the bones was restored."

The skeleton of a gigantic fossil Irish deer with an antlers span of two and a half meters was found.

My acquaintance with Meshchera began with this meeting with the shaggy grandfather. Then I heard many stories about mammoth teeth, and about treasures, and about mushrooms the size of a human head. But I remember this first story on the train especially sharply.

ANTIQUE MAP

With great difficulty I got a map of the Meshchera region. There was a note on it: “The map was compiled from old surveys made before 1870.” I had to fix this map myself. The river beds have changed. Where there were swamps on the map, in some places a young pine forest was already rustling; In place of other lakes there were swamps.

But still, using this map was safer than asking local residents. For a long time, it has been the custom in Rus' that no one makes as many mistakes when explaining the way as a local resident, especially if he is a talkative person.

“You, dear man,” shouts a local resident, “don’t hear from others!” They will tell you things that will make you unhappy with life. Just listen to me, I know these places inside and out. Go to the outskirts, you will see a five-walled hut on your left hand, take from that hut on your right hand along the trail through the sands, you will reach Prorva and go, dear, the edge of Prorva, go, don’t hesitate, all the way to the burnt willow. From there you take a little bit towards the forest, past Muzga, and after Muzga go steeply to the hill, and beyond the hill there is a well-known road - through the mshary to the lake.

How many kilometers?

Who knows? Maybe ten, maybe even twenty. There are countless kilometers here, my dear.

I tried to follow these tips, but there were always either several burnt willows, or there was no noticeable hill, and I, giving up on the stories of the natives, relied only on my own sense of direction. It never deceived me at night.

The natives always explained the route with passion, with frantic enthusiasm.

This amused me at first, but somehow I myself had to explain the way to Lake Segden to the poet Simonov, and I found myself telling him about the signs of this confusing road with the same passion as the natives.

Every time you explain the road, it’s as if you’re walking along it again, through all these free places, along forest paths dotted with immortelle flowers, and again you experience lightness in your soul. This lightness always comes to us when the path is long and there are no worries in our hearts.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT SIGNS

In order not to get lost in the forests, you need to know the signs. Finding signs or creating them yourself is a very exciting activity. The world will be infinitely diverse. It can be very joyful when the same sign remains in the forests year after year - every autumn you encounter the same fiery rowan bush behind Larin Pond or the same notch you made on a pine tree. Every summer the notch becomes increasingly covered with solid golden resin.

Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky
MESHCHERSKAYA SIDE
Tale
ORDINARY EARTH
In the Meshchera region there are no special beauties and riches, except for forests, meadows and clear air. But still this region has great attractive power. He is very modest - just like Levitan's paintings. But in it, as in these paintings, lies all the charm and all the diversity of Russian nature, imperceptible at first glance.
What can you see in the Meshchera region? Flowering or mown meadows, pine forests, floodplains and forest lakes overgrown with black brush, haystacks smelling of dry and warm hay. Hay in stacks keeps you warm all winter.
I have had to spend the night in haystacks in October, when the grass at dawn is covered with frost, like salt. I dug a deep hole in the hay, climbed into it and slept all night in a haystack, as if in a locked room. And over the meadows there was cold rain and the wind came at oblique blows.
In the Meshchera region you can see pine forests, where it is so solemn and quiet that the bell of a lost cow can be heard far away, almost a kilometer away. But such silence exists in the forests only on windless days. In the wind, the forests rustle with a great ocean roar and the tops of the pine trees bend after the passing clouds.
In the Meshchera region you can see forest lakes with dark water, vast swamps covered with alder and aspen, lonely foresters’ huts charred from old age, sand, juniper, heather, schools of cranes and stars familiar to us at all latitudes.
What can you hear in the Meshchera region except the hum of pine forests? The cries of quails and hawks, the whistle of orioles, the fussy knocking of woodpeckers, the howl of wolves, the rustling of rain in the red needles, the evening cry of an accordion in the village, and at night - the multi-voiced crowing of roosters and the clapper of the village watchman.
But you can see and hear so little only in the first days. Then every day this region becomes richer, more diverse, dearer to the heart. And finally, the time comes when each dead river seems like its own, very familiar, when amazing stories can be told about it.
I broke the custom of geographers. Almost all geographical books begin with the same phrase: “This region lies between such and such degrees of eastern longitude and northern latitude and is bordered in the south by such and such a region, and in the north by such and such.” I will not name the latitudes and longitudes of the Meshchera region. Suffice it to say that it lies between Vladimir and Ryazan, not far from Moscow, and is one of the few surviving forest islands, a remnant of the “great belt of coniferous forests.” It once stretched from Polesie to the Urals. It included forests: Chernigov, Bryansk, Kaluga, Meshchersky, Mordovian and Kerzhensky. Ancient Rus' hid out in these forests from Tatar raids.
FIRST MEETING
For the first time I came to the Meshchera region from the north, from Vladimir.
Behind Gus-Khrustalny, at the quiet Tuma station, I changed to a narrow-gauge train. This was a train from Stephenson's time. The locomotive, similar to a samovar, whistled in a child's falsetto. The locomotive had an offensive nickname: “gelding.” He really looked like an old gelding. At the corners he groaned and stopped. Passengers got out to smoke. The silence of the forest stood around the gasping gelding. The smell of wild cloves, warmed by the sun, filled the carriages.
Passengers with things sat on the platforms - things did not fit into the carriage. Occasionally, along the way, bags, baskets, and carpenter's saws began to fly out from the platform onto the canvas, and their owner, often a rather ancient old woman, jumped out to get the things. Inexperienced passengers were frightened, but experienced ones, twisting goat legs and spitting, explained that this was the most convenient way to disembark the train closer to their village.
The narrow-gauge railway in the Meshchersky forests is the slowest railway in the Union.
The stations are littered with resinous logs and smell of fresh felling and wild forest flowers.
At the Pilevo station, a shaggy grandfather climbed into the carriage. He crossed himself to the corner where the round cast-iron stove was rattling, sighed and complained into space:
- As soon as they grab me by the beard, go to town and tie up your bast shoes. But there is no consideration that maybe this matter isn’t worth a penny to them. They send me to the museum, where the Soviet government collects cards, price lists, and so on. They send you a statement.
- Why are you lying?
- Look, there!
The grandfather pulled out the crumpled piece of paper, blew the terry off it and showed it to the neighbor woman.
“Manka, read it,” the woman said to the girl, who was rubbing her nose against the window.
Manka pulled her dress over her scratched knees, tucked her legs up and began to read in a hoarse voice:
- “It turns out that unfamiliar birds live in the lake, huge in stature, striped, only three; it is unknown where they flew from - we should take them alive for the museum, and therefore send catchers.”
“This,” said the grandfather sadly, “is why old people’s bones are broken now.” And all Leshka is a Komsomol member, Ulcer is a passion! Ugh!
Grandfather spat. Baba wiped her round mouth with the end of her handkerchief and sighed. The locomotive whistled in fear, the forests hummed both to the right and to the left, raging like lakes. The west wind was in charge. The train struggled through its damp streams and was hopelessly late, panting at empty stops.
“This is our existence,” repeated the grandfather. “They drove me to the museum last summer, today is the year again!”
- What did you find in the summer year? - asked the woman.
- Torchak!
- What?
- Torchak. Well, the bone is ancient. She was lying in the swamp. Looks like a deer. Horns - from this carriage. Straight passion. They dug it for a whole month. The people were completely exhausted.
- Why did he give up? - asked the woman.
- The guys will be taught by it.
The following was reported about this find in “Research and Materials of the Regional Museum”:
“The skeleton went deep into the bog, not providing support for the diggers. We had to undress and go down into the bog, which was extremely difficult due to the icy temperature of the spring water. The huge horns, like the skull, were intact, but extremely fragile due to complete maceration (soaking ) bones. The bones were broken right in the hands, but as they dried, the hardness of the bones was restored."
The skeleton of a gigantic fossil Irish deer with an antlers span of two and a half meters was found.
My acquaintance with Meshchera began with this meeting with the shaggy grandfather. Then I heard many stories about mammoth teeth, and about treasures, and about mushrooms the size of a human head. But I remember this first story on the train especially sharply.
ANTIQUE MAP
With great difficulty I got a map of the Meshchera region. There was a note on it: “The map was compiled from old surveys made before 1870.” I had to fix this map myself. The river beds have changed. Where there were swamps on the map, in some places a young pine forest was already rustling; In place of other lakes there were swamps.
But still, using this map was safer than asking local residents. For a long time, it has been the custom in Rus' that no one makes as many mistakes when explaining the way as a local resident, especially if he is a talkative person.
“You, dear man,” shouts a local resident, “don’t hear from others!” They will tell you things that will make you unhappy with life. Just listen to me, I know these places inside and out. Go to the outskirts, you will see a five-walled hut on your left hand, take from that hut on your right hand along the trail through the sands, you will reach Prorva and go, dear, the edge of Prorva, go, don’t hesitate, all the way to the burnt willow. From there you take a little bit towards the forest, past Muzga, and after Muzga go steeply to the hill, and beyond the hill there is a well-known road - through the mshary to the lake.
- How many kilometers?
- Who knows? Maybe ten, maybe even twenty. There are countless kilometers here, my dear.
I tried to follow these tips, but there were always either several burnt willows, or there was no noticeable hill, and I, giving up on the stories of the natives, relied only on my own sense of direction. It never deceived me at night.
The natives always explained the route with passion, with frantic enthusiasm.
This amused me at first, but somehow I myself had to explain the way to Lake Segden to the poet Simonov, and I found myself telling him about the signs of this confusing road with the same passion as the natives.
Every time you explain the road, it’s as if you’re walking along it again, through all these free places, along forest paths dotted with immortelle flowers, and again you experience lightness in your soul. This lightness always comes to us when the path is long and there are no worries in our hearts.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT SIGNS
In order not to get lost in the forests, you need to know the signs. Finding signs or creating them yourself is a very exciting activity. The world will be infinitely diverse. It can be very joyful when the same sign remains in the forests year after year - every autumn you encounter the same fiery rowan bush behind Larin Pond or the same notch you made on a pine tree. Every summer the notch becomes increasingly covered with solid golden resin.
Signs on the roads are not the main signs. Real signs are those that determine the weather and time.
There are so many that one could write a whole book about them. We don't need signs in cities. The fiery rowan tree is replaced by an enamel blue sign with the name of the street. Time is recognized not by the height of the sun, not by the position of the constellations, or even by the crow of a cock, but by the clock. Weather forecasts are broadcast by radio. In cities, most of our natural instincts go dormant. But as soon as you spend two or three nights in the forest, your hearing becomes sharper again, your eyes become sharper, your sense of smell becomes more subtle.
Signs are connected with everything: with the color of the sky, with dew and fog, with the cry of birds and the brightness of starlight.
Signs contain a lot of precise knowledge and poetry. There are simple and complex signs. The simplest sign is the smoke of a fire. Either it rises in a column to the sky, calmly flows upward, higher than the tallest willows, then it spreads like fog over the grass, then it rushes around the fire. And so, to the charm of a night fire, to the bitter smell of smoke, the cracking of branches, the running of the fire and the fluffy white ashes, there is also added the knowledge of tomorrow’s weather.
Looking at the smoke, you can definitely tell whether tomorrow there will be rain, wind, or again, like today, the sun will rise in deep silence, in blue cool fogs. Evening dew also predicts calm and warmth. It can be so abundant that it even sparkles at night, reflecting the light of the stars. And the more abundant the dew, the hotter tomorrow will be.
These are all very simple signs. But there are signs that are complex and accurate. Sometimes the sky suddenly seems very high, and the horizon shrinks, it seems close, as if the horizon is no more than a kilometer away. This is a sign of future clear weather.
Sometimes on a cloudless day the fish suddenly stop taking fish. Rivers and lakes are dying, as if the life has gone out of them forever. This is a sure sign of imminent and prolonged bad weather. In a day or two, the sun will emerge in a crimson, ominous darkness, and by noon the black clouds will almost touch the ground, a damp wind will blow and languid, sleep-inducing heavy rains will pour.
RETURN TO THE MAP
I remembered the signs and took a break from the map of the Meshchera region.
Exploring an unfamiliar region always begins with a map. This activity is no less interesting than studying signs. You can wander on the map in the same way as on the ground, but then, when you get to this real land, your knowledge of the map immediately affects you - you no longer wander blindly and don’t waste time on trifles.
The map of the Meshchera region below, in the farthest corner, in the south, shows the bend of a large deep river. This is Oka. To the north of the Oka stretches a wooded and swampy lowland, to the south - the long-established, populated lands of Ryazan. The Oka flows along the border of two completely different, very dissimilar spaces.
The Ryazan lands are grainy, yellow from rye fields, curly from apple orchards. The outskirts of Ryazan villages often merge with each other, the villages are scattered densely, and there is no place from where one, or even two or three still surviving bell towers are not visible on the horizon. Instead of forests, birch groves rustle along the slopes of the logs.
Ryazan land is a land of fields. To the south of Ryazan the steppes already begin.
But once you cross the Oka by ferry, behind the wide strip of Oka meadows the Meshchera pine forests already stand as a dark wall. They go to the north and east, round lakes turn blue in them. These forests hide huge peat bogs in their depths.
In the west of the Meshchera region, on the so-called Borovaya side, among pine forests, eight borovaya lakes lie in small forests. There are no roads or trails to them, and you can only get to them through the forest using a map and compass.

End of free trial.

Konstantin Paustovsky

Meshchora side

Ordinary land

There are no special beauties and riches in the Meshchora region, except for forests, meadows and clear air. But still this region has great attractive power. He is very modest - just like Levitan’s paintings. But in it, as in these paintings, lies all the charm and all the diversity of Russian nature, imperceptible at first glance.

What can you see in the Meshchora region? Flowering or mown meadows, pine forests, floodplains and forest lakes overgrown with black brush, haystacks smelling of dry and warm hay. Hay in stacks keeps you warm all winter.

I have had to spend the night in haystacks in October, when the grass at dawn is covered with frost, like salt. I dug a deep hole in the hay, climbed into it and slept all night in a haystack, as if in a locked room. And over the meadows there was cold rain and the wind came at oblique blows.

In the Meshchora region you can see pine forests, where it is so solemn and quiet that the bell of a lost cow can be heard far away.

almost a kilometer away. But such silence exists in the forests only on windless days. In the wind, the forests rustle with a great ocean roar and the tops of the pine trees bend after the passing clouds.

In the Meshchora region you can see forest lakes with dark water, vast swamps covered with alder and aspen, lonely foresters' huts charred from old age, sand, juniper, heather, schools of cranes and stars familiar to us at all latitudes.

What can you hear in the Meshchora region except the hum of pine forests? The cries of quails and hawks, the whistle of orioles, the fussy knocking of woodpeckers, the howl of wolves, the rustle of rain in the red needles, the evening cry of an accordion in the village, and at night - the multi-voiced crowing of roosters and the clapper of the village watchman.

But you can see and hear so little only in the first days. Then every day this region becomes richer, more diverse, dearer to the heart. And finally, the time comes when each willow tree above the dead river seems like its own, very familiar, when amazing stories can be told about it.

I broke the custom of geographers. Almost all geographical books begin with the same phrase: “This region lies between such and such degrees of eastern longitude and northern latitude and is bordered in the south by such and such a region, and in the north by such and such.” I will not name the latitudes and longitudes of the Meshchora region. Suffice it to say that it lies between Vladimir and Ryazan, not far from Moscow, and is one of the few surviving forest islands, a remnant of the “great belt of coniferous forests.” It once stretched from Polesie to the Urals. It included forests: Chernigov, Bryansk, Kaluga, Meshchora, Mordovian and Kerzhensky. Ancient Rus' hid out in these forests from Tatar raids.

First meeting

For the first time I came to the Meshchora region from the north, from Vladimir.

Behind Gus-Khrustalny, at the quiet Tuma station, I changed to a narrow-gauge train. This was a train from Stephenson's time. The locomotive, similar to a samovar, whistled in a child's falsetto. The locomotive had an offensive nickname: “gelding.” He really looked like an old gelding. At the corners he groaned and stopped. Passengers got out to smoke. Forest silence stood around the gasping gelding. The smell of wild cloves, warmed by the sun, filled the carriages.

Passengers with things sat on the platforms - things did not fit into the carriage. Occasionally, along the way, bags, baskets, and carpenter's saws began to fly out from the platform onto the canvas, and their owner, often a rather ancient old woman, jumped out to get the things. Inexperienced passengers were frightened, but experienced ones, twisting their “goat legs” and spitting, explained that this was the most convenient way to get off the train closer to their village.

The narrow-gauge railway in the Mentor Forests is the slowest railway in the Union.

The stations are littered with resinous logs and smell of fresh felling and wild forest flowers.

At the Pilevo station, a shaggy grandfather climbed into the carriage. He crossed himself to the corner where the round cast-iron stove was rattling, sighed and complained into space."

“As soon as they grab me by the beard, go to town and tie up your bast shoes.” But there is no consideration that maybe this matter isn’t worth a penny to them. They send me to the museum, where the Soviet government collects cards, price lists, all that stuff. They send you a statement.

- Why are you lying?

- Look, there!

The grandfather pulled out the crumpled piece of paper, blew the terry off it and showed it to the neighbor woman.

“Manka, read it,” the woman said to the girl, who was rubbing her nose against the window. Manka pulled her dress over her scratched knees, tucked her legs up and began to read in a hoarse voice:

– “It turns out that unfamiliar birds live in the lake, huge striped ones, only three; It’s unknown where they came from, we should take them alive for the museum, so send catchers.”

“This,” said the grandfather sadly, “is why they break the bones of old people now.” And all Leshka is a Komsomol member. Ulcer is a passion! Ugh!

Grandfather spat. Baba wiped her round mouth with the end of her handkerchief and sighed. The locomotive whistled in fear, the forests hummed both to the right and to the left, raging like a lake. The west wind was in charge. The train struggled through its damp streams and was hopelessly late, panting at empty stops.

“This is our existence,” the grandfather repeated. “They drove me to the museum last summer, today is the year again!”

– What did you find this summer? - asked the woman.

- Junkie!

- Something?

- Torchak. Well, the bone is ancient. She was lying in the swamp. Looks like a deer. Horns - from this carriage. Straight passion. They dug it for a whole month. The people were completely exhausted.

– Why did he give in? - asked the woman.

- The guys will be taught it.

The following was reported about this find in “Research and Materials of the Regional Museum”:

“The skeleton went deep into the quagmire, not providing support for the diggers. I had to undress and go down into the quagmire, which was extremely difficult due to the icy temperature of the spring water. The huge horns, like the skull, were intact, but extremely fragile due to complete maceration (soaking) of the bones. The bones were broken right in the hands, but as they dried, the hardness of the bones was restored.”

The skeleton of a gigantic fossil Irish deer with an antlers span of two and a half meters was found.

My acquaintance with Meshchora began with this meeting with the shaggy grandfather. Then I heard many stories about mammoth teeth, and about treasures, and about mushrooms the size of a human head. But I remember this first story on the train especially sharply.

Vintage map

With great difficulty I got a map of the Meshchora region. There was a note on it: “The map was compiled from old surveys made before 1870.” I had to fix this map myself. The river beds have changed. Where there were swamps on the map, in some places a young pine forest was already rustling; In place of other lakes there were swamps.

But still, using this map was safer than asking local residents. For a long time, it has been the custom in Rus' that no one makes as many mistakes when explaining the way as a local resident, especially if he is a talkative person.

“You, dear man,” shouts a local resident, “don’t listen to others!” They will tell you things that will make you unhappy with life. Just listen to me, I know these places inside and out. Go to the outskirts, you will see a five-walled hut on your left hand, take from that hut on your right hand along the trail through the sands, you will reach Prorva and go, dear, the edge of Prorva, go, don’t hesitate, all the way to the burnt willow. From there you take a little bit towards the forest, past Muzga, and after Muzga go steeply to the hill, and beyond the hill there is a well-known road - through the mshary to the lake.

- How many kilometers?

- Who knows? Maybe ten, maybe even twenty. There are countless kilometers here, my dear.

I tried to follow these tips, but there were always either several burnt willows, or there was no noticeable hill, and I, giving up on the stories of the natives, relied only on my own sense of direction. It almost never deceived me.